I hated traveling as a Muggle. Sure, I knew that we couldn't Apparate in the middle of America, and forget about traveling on a broomstick across the Atlantic ocean. But did we really have to dress like them too? Sure, Harry Potter said 'travel as a Muggle', but that doesn't mean we have to be them.

Feeling the plane hum beneath me, I eyed my Muggle clothes with a touch of disgust. I couldn't understand how anyone would want to wear a tight, revealing shirt and a short skirt with virtually no other clothes. Not even a cloak. I sighed, knowing that my being melancholy was not due to the clothes the Aurors had to force me to wear— it was about my brother. And my best friend. Then jumped slightly as a warm hand touched my shoulder. I looked to my neighbor.

"Are you all right, Ms. Malfoy?" Brennan asked, his black eyes concerned. "You're looking very pale."

Despite my deep hurt with both Scorpius and Albus, I smiled and looked at the handsome Obliviator through a stray blond white curl passing over my face. "My name's Hazel, Brennan. And I'm fine." I breathed a breath of laughter. "And pale is what Malfoys are."

Glancing at my grey eyes, white blond hair, and porcelain skin Brennan nodded. "I can see that." Gently he reached out and took the stray curl and tucked it behind my ear. Shyly he said, "Now we can see your pretty face."

"Thanks." Looking away from Brennan's handsome, chiseled face I saw Albus staring at me with agony in his eyes as I flirted so easily with the man I had only met yesterday. When he saw I had caught him, he swallowed hard and faced the front of the plane, hands gripped tight over the seats so they turned white.

I watched him with a mixture of both guilt and sadness for a long time. Sadness that I knew we could never be the same friends we used to be; Guilt because I could never have loved him the same way he did. Albus was too brash, too much like me so that we never could be together for more than ten minutes before trying to take each other's head off. There should've been no guilt in my decision— I had done the thing that would make both of us happy— even if he didn't see that.

But I had loved him like a brother for nearly twenty years, and knew him well enough to know when he was hurting. His hurt surrounded him like a cloud, and I could feel it's grip tightening on my every time Brennan or I spoke. It was enough to fill me with shame and want to never see the handsome Obliviator again.

But something that I had never felt before, something I had the feeling I had locked away deep inside me had been unlocked. It rose like a Slytherin serpent every time Brennan's dark eyes caught mine, or every time his sweet, innocent smile awoke one upon my face.

Suddenly, staring out at the endless ocean beneath the plane I remembered something that Narcissa had told me something a long, long time. Probably before I got to Hogwarts and found what true family was.

Feelings are nothing, she had told me. I could almost see my younger self with two braids sticking out from my skull like twigs, clothed in a white shirt and black skirt, hands behind my back, and listening intently. There is only power and only status that should concern you. If you let feelings choke your soul and mind, you get careless. You get killed. Her once beautiful hands, now cracked and bent with age forced my chin closer to her. Promise me, Hazel, that you will never let yourself become so weak that you will let emotions rule you. No one will ever rule you but your mind, promise me that.

Earnestly I nodded my head. Of course, grandmother.

I must have been only seven years old. That was the last year that I had ever called Narcissa my grandmother.

Abruptly I stood and faced Brennan, who blocked my way to the airplane's restroom. "Excuse me," I said, trying to mask the intense amount of pressure threatening to bend my voice.

Drawing his legs in, I slid myself through the tight aisle offered between our seats and the backs of the other Aurors' seats. A jolt ran through the plane, and I felt my sandaled feet slip on the carpet lining the plane. I was falling, until two strong caught me by the arms and held me still above the cutest man I had ever laid my eyes on.

For a moment we made eye contact— his eyes as dark as could be and mine as light. A shared thought flashed between us, much like how Scorpius and I used to be able to tell what the other was thinking.

Then it was nothing but his soft lips pressing onto mine, and me pressing just as passionately. It was nothing but Brennan and myself, until I felt my worries about Scorpius and Albus, the Ministry and Narcissa drop off like bricks.

For a moment of complete, utter bliss I forgot about Albus's pain, which was growing in force every second that he watched Brennan and I.