smoke signals - blue_keyboard - Harry Potter (2024)

Chapter 1: The Heat Wave

Chapter Text

Cover Art: @goodmorningbuffalo

Part I

It was dead summer in Hampstead Garden and Hermione had never wished for the ability to do magic outside of school more.

August had brought a thick heat wave that swallowed Greater London, leaving its citizens laid out in front of fans in as little clothing as possible. She was getting to the point where breaking the Statute of Secrecy seemed reasonable, so long as it allowed her to perform a cooling charm.

Honestly, she would turn seventeen in almost a month. Couldn’t the Ministry forgive her for casting a little glacius?

She rested prone at the window of her childhood bedroom, turning her face to the box fan propped on the sill and marveling at how the temperature seemed to magnify in the face of boredom.

More and more Hermione found she had few activities and fewer acquaintances to occupy herself with in Muggle London.It was like the months away at school were unraveling her tenuous connections to the place from which she came, leaving behind a mess of tangled threads. As isolated as she found that the Wizarding World could be, coming home could be just as lonely.

Here,her interactions hinged on mistruths and carefully skirted details. She could only reveal a shadow of herself, and was never entirelyup to date of pop culture or news, which stilted her conversations. It gave her the same prickly feeling as her first weeks at Hogwarts, where every missed reference was met with derision.

Perhaps being a muggleborn witch meant that she’d never belong in one place or the other. She had one foot on either side of a divide that was growing every year, threatening a spectacular fall onto the rocks below.

Lately, the crack between worlds felt more like a chasm.

Hermione was hot and terribly bored, a combined state that felt like existing within the ninth circle of Hell. She’d already puttered around the house, reorganizing her books, and painted her nails an awful shade of mauve from a polish she found under her mother’s sink.She was listlessly checking the mail when Melissa called over from the footpath in front of her house, greeting her with a wave.

She was dressed in a sleeveless crocheted dress that was sheer enough to reveal the bright pink of her bikini. There was a dab of unblended sun cream on her nose and her fringe was damp with sweat.

“Oh hiya, Hermione!” Her neighbor called cheerfully. “I was just off for a dip at the community pond, care to join?” She fanned herself, giving Hermione a look of commiseration. “I‘m melting in this heat.”

“Don’t be silly. Go on and get changed then,” Melissa said, offering a surprised grin to her response, as she nodded towards the Grangers’ house. “I’ll wait.”

“It’ll only be a minute,” Hermione promised, then hesitated. “My bathing costume is from when I was thirteen. I’ll look like a split sausage.”

“It’ll scandalize the old codgers a bit,” Melissa called through her grin. “Good for them to get their heart rates up.”

Hermione took the stairs two at a time, not wanting to keep Melissa waiting.This isn’t a pity invitation, she told herself sternly. This is what normal girls do during summer.Ah yes, normalcy. A mask Hermione had never worn with any confidence.

She pulled on a faded blue one piece that was once rather practical, if not conservative for a young girl. Now it bordered on inappropriate, but it wasn’t like Rita Skeeter would be afoot at the Hampstead Garden community pond, ready for a closeup of Hermione’s arse.

After throwing on one of her father’s T-shirts, she grabbed some sun cream, snagged her copy ofEncountering Counterjinxes, and— just in case, you know, constant vigilance— her wand off her nightstand, before setting off.Melissa chattered on animatedly abouther failed romantic endeavors the whole walk to the pond, punctuating her sentences with the smack of her flip-flops against the pavement.

“— so, after I caught him with Krista, I resolved myself to be free of the tosser once and for all.”

“That seems sensible,” Hermione said, uncertainly. She didn’t exactly have these conversations with Harry and Ron, and it was the kind of thing Lavender and Parvati would draw the four poster curtains to discuss.

“If only I were a sensible girl,” Melissa replied, wry.

“You took him back?”

“Not yet.” Melissa said. “So if we see him having a swim, remind me that it doesn’t matter how fit he looks with his shirt off.”

She held the pond gate for Hermione, leading her towards a patch of empty grass. The pond was occupied with what felt like half of Hampstead Garden; splashing children, boys tossing a ball, girls rolling up their already small bathing suits in order to improve their tan.

“He’s a lad’s lad, Hermione.” Melissa continued darkly, laying out her towel on a bit of flattened grass. “That’s what we’re dealing with here. Are the blokes like this at your boarding school?”

Hermione contemplated this with a smirk, drawing up memories of Ron shouting that she was fraternizing with the enemy after a dance with Viktor Krum. “I imagine boys are the same everywhere.”

She spread out her towel next to Melissa, who began to page through a glossy magazine advertising different hair styles using butterfly clips. She considered cracking open her book, but if Melissa saw the title, what would her explanation be? She was studying Wicca? Amateur magician? Dabbling in occultism?

“Shall we swim?” She suggested instead.

“Give us a minute,” Melissa responded, smoothing tanning oil on her stomach. “I want to get a bit of color.”

Hermione tried not to look too longingly at the water.

“You’re dying, aren’t you?” Melissa waved her forward, gesturing at the pond. "Go on, I’ll join in a bit."

Hermione stripped bare of her clothing— too drenched from the perspiration of their walk over to feel self conscious — and waded in.

Finally, relief.

She submerged herself to her shoulders, tipping her head back so the water could soak her curls. Sighing in pleasure at the cooler temperature against her scalp, she kicked up her feet and floated on her back so she could study the clouds.Even though the pond was crowded— teenagers chatting, some elderly women flapping paper fans, children splashing and giggling— it felt like the first time that summer Hermione had been at peace.

She hadn’t been sleeping well, since the night at the Department of Mysteries.

Dolohov’s curse had left a jagged purple scar down her chest, high enough that it peeked out from the neckline of her swimsuit. It didn’t bother her out of vanity; she wasn’t as concerned about the aesthetic effect as she was with the possibility of residual Dark magic. The stuttering unease that she hadn't been able to shake, a sharpness that seemed to originate somewhere behind her ribs.

She’d read everything she could find on cursed scars, but since Doholov’s spell had been wordless, the point of origin was based on light and wand movement alone, it was exceedingly difficult to pinpoint. If she had a remnant of dark magic stuck inside like a piece of shrapnel, could it effect her? She only knew of one other person with a cursed scar, and if last year was any indication, Harry had a terrible time with it.

A soft splash behind her interrupted her thoughts.

“Oh, this is lovely,” Melissa groaned, swimming circles around Hermione. “I’ve decided. I’m going to spend the rest of this bloody heat wave underwater. They can drag me out when courses start.”

Hermione righted herself, turning to face the bank. She meant to be polite, inquirewhat Melissa was interested in studying at university the following year, but her voice caught in her throat when she saw a flash of platinum blonde in her peripheral vision, bright as a honing beacon.

There was only one person she’d ever met with hair that light, a complete absence of color. But that hair didn’t belong here. In this world, her world. Its place was firmly enmeshed amongst castle hallways and cauldron steam.

She blinked and shook her head, wondering if she’d finally cracked.

“Oi,” Melissa asked, picking up on Hermione’s spike in anxiety. “You all right? What’s got your knickers in a twist?”

Hermione opened her mouth and closed it again.

“Hermione?”

“Do you see that boy,” Hermione asked, softly, and Melissa whipped her head around. “No, don’t turn. Just look over towards the gate where all those shrubs are. Subtly.”

“Well, he’s fit, but he’s not my type,” Melissa smirked. “I’m not one for blondes. Dressed rather oddly, isn’t he? It’s a bit hot for all that.”

“You see him too?”

“Hermione, are you alright? Do you know him?”

Hermione's heart tightened like a fist. She was not alright, because Draco bloody Malfoy was standing in the muggle suburb of Hampstead Garden, staring at her with an awful expression on his face. A terror so stark, it made him almost unrecognizable.

The scar on her chest began to throb: a dull, violent pain that echoed into her extremities.

“Yes,” she told Melissa grimly, already pulling herself from the water. Whatever separation of selves she’d previously managed crumbled. Now, she was just Hermione, childlike and whole in her dread. “I know him.”

Chapter 2: An Unwelcome Visitor

Chapter Text

“What are you doing here?”

Hermione was still dripping wet. She had fled the pond—making excuses so ridiculous and hasty that Melissa would probably never invite her anywhere ever again—and made a beeline straight for Malfoy. She shook her head in an implicit not here as he opened his mouth to speak, and before he could question her, she grabbed a fistful of his cloak and yanked him limply behind her.

To her surprise, Malfoy barely reacted as she marched them around the corner of the car park and shoved him up against a station wagon. Careful of muggle bystanders, she looked both ways before brandishing her wand at his throat.

Up clase, he looked very different than the last time she’d seen him, getting off the train a few months prior. His typical perfectly combed hair now hung lankly into his eyes, which were shadowed and sunken. His tailored robes were notably loose, a sign he’d lost weight. Malfoy had always been lean, but the boy in front of her looked terribly slight. His thinness only accentuated the razor sharp quality of his annoyingly symmetrical features; she could cut herself on his clenched jaw.

“I'll say it again. What are you doing here?” Hermione asked. Her voice sounded like it belonged to someone else, someone dangerous. "How do you even know where I live? And for God’s sake, what are you wearing?”

“Well I obviously didn’t have any muggle clothes,” Malfoy finally managed, emerging from whatever fugue state he’d entered upon spotting her.

Even his voice sounded different than she remembered. It wasn’t the jeering inflection she remembered from her childhood. It was still posh, but much deeper and a great deal more solemn, with a roughness to it that made her neck prickle.

“You couldn’t have left off the traveling cloak?”

“Granger.”

“Really,” she looked around, hoping they weren’t attracting attention. “The muggles must think you’ve escaped from some sort of theater troupe—”

“Granger.” The way he said her name gave her pause. Like a plea.

Hermione stepped back from him, attempting to meet his gaze and found he couldn’t look at her directly. His evasion sent a bolt of fear down her spine. This wasn’t a prank. Something was very, very wrong. There were only a few earnest reasons Draco Malfoy would show up in muggle London to seek her out. She cycled through them in her head, each possibility more distressing than the previous option.

“Why are you here, Malfoy?” Hermione asked a third time, sounding terribly afraid.

“We haven’t much time,” Malfoy whispered feverishly, still avoiding her gaze. His eyes glazed over, fixed on something far away. “The Dark Lord sent me to do it, to prove myself, but I can’t.”

“Do what? What are you talking about?” Hermione asked, although her heart picked up, like it already knew what the boy in front of her meant.

Malfoy finally looked up, eyes bright with anguish. Hermione had watched him sneer and jest and taunt, but she’d never seen him like this, in such a plainly vulnerable state. It terrified her more than his presence itself; for Malfoy to be looking at her like this, something had to be terribly, terribly wrong.

“I’ve tried," Malfoy mumbled with a pained expression, as if remembering something excruciating. "He made me try. But no matter what he does to me, no matter who he threatens, I can’t cast the curse successfully.”

“Can’t do what?” She asked frantically. “You’re not making any sense, Malfoy!"

“The Dark Lord sent me for you parents.” Malfoy's face turned ghostly pale, eyes drowning in horror. "And he wants me to kill you too, Granger."

Hermione’s world fell apart.

On instinct, she shoved Malfoy hard and began to run in the direction of her childhood home. Don’t curse him, she reminded herself, squashing her first instinct immediately. She would have only one opportunity to do magic before the Ministry was alerted, and she would have to use it strategically. She’d be of no use to anyone if she was being held at the Ministry questioned for illegal spell usage.

Think,Hermione instructed herself, fencing off thoughts of panic. Her parents wouldn’t be home until late afternoon. She had a limited amount of time to come up with an escape plan— maybe hours, maybe seconds. She cycled through options quickly: she could take them on the run, vanish with them. But where would that leave Harry and Ron? And how could she just abandon the wizarding world—her other home, her true home—and just sever her magic as if it were a gangrenous limb?

Dumbledore, she thought. She had to contact Dumbledore. He would send the Order, surely. They could protect the Grangers, set up a rotating guard. Dumbledore could set up a Fidelius charm just like he had with...

Harry’s parents? A new voice in her head offered, dripping with chilling doubt, as she ran. What protection did Dumbledore offer them, again?

She rounded the corner, only to see Malfoy at the end of her driveway, wand peeking out from his sleeve. He must have beat her home by apparating—when had he learned apparition?More importantly, he knew where she lived. Her exact address. Which meant Voldemort knew, and could send his followers after her at any time.

Hermione tasted blood and dread, acrid on her tongue.

She’d get Malfoy out of the way quickly and then send an emergencypatronus, she decided. To Moody? Tonks? She had a muggleborn father, of course she would help…but would reinforcements even arrive fast enough?

And if they did— Hermione knew that any member of the Order would insist on doing the right thing. They would go down fighting on behalf of innocent lives, like those of her parents. But they would not cross the moral lines Hermione was willing to cross, or break the laws she was ready to break in order to save her family. They would do what was right; she would do what was necessary.

“Stop running.” Malfoy’s order crashedthrough her thoughts, his voice like a brick through a window. He was still there. Why was he still there? To warn her? To help her? To kill her? “I don’t have much time. I shouldn’t have—I wasn’t supposed to warn you. When the Dark Lord finds out I did, he’ll probably—” He ran his fingers through his hair roughly, tugging at the place where it met with his skull. “You have to go, quickly. They’re sending reinforcements to make sure it gets done— Rodolphus and Rabastan, they were supposed to be here by now, but I confunded them—”

“You said you can’t cast the Killing Curse,” Hermione remembered, cutting him off. Sweat from the exertion of her sprint trickled down her chest and back. One of her sandals had torn, and the side of her heel was bleeding. “Not that you won’t, but that you can’t.”

“My magic won’t cooperate,” Malfoy muttered, almost ashamed, although Hermione would wager for the wrong reasons. “I can’t manage anything larger than a rabbit.”

She raised her eyebrows in disbelief. He couldn’t manage it?

“There are plenty of ways to kill someone,” Hermione said, calling his bluff. She pinned him with her stare, like a butterfly to a corkboard. He nearly squirmed under the weight of her accusation. “You could use the Cruciatus and torture them to death, cast a diffindo to the throat, you could use a hanging spell, or—”

“I get it,” Malfoy cut her off, irritated. Even as harried as he was, he still managed to summon some annoyance towards her. “It's not that I haven't thought of my options…of course I could find an alternative kill you if I wanted to, but…” He trailed off miserably.

"But what?" Hermione cried, fighting the urge to shove him to the ground once more. "After all this time, all your little threats and petty cruelties, you're having second thoughts about shedding dirty blood? Find it difficult now that it's not just an idea, now that it's you holding the wand?"

“Yes, I find it bloody difficult! I know you,” Malfoy spat, sounding horrified by his own admission. He shut his eyes tightly, as if he could no longer bear the sight of her. “I’ve never f*cking liked you. In fact, I’ve usually found you repugnant. But…but we’ve had potions together for the past five years! Twice on Fridays! I've known you since we were children. You're not just some stupid muggle. You're real.And f*ck, I’m not supposed to be thinking of that detention in the forest our first year or the creakyPotions bench you always choose. I’m supposed to be able to put that all aside, just close my eyes and stamp your kind out, you know, like killing spiders—” He grew frustrated, voice nearing hysterics. “But I can’t do it.”

“Can’t murder my family?” She cried, seconds from punching him in the face. Again. “Like killing spiders?”

Malfoy glared, as if somehow she was the one willfully missing the point.

“It’s not a great metaphor, okay? You’re supposed to be clever,” he spat. “So,do something. You can…you can hide, can’t you? I’ll just say I’ve killed you, I’ll say—”

“You want me to fake my own death?” Hermione almost laughed at the ridiculousness of the idea. “How exactly should I manage that? And why should I trust anything you're saying at all? For all I know this is your idea of a particularly cruel prank. You’ve done nothing but torment me, ever since the first day we met on the train—”

“I don’t know!” Malfoy roared, sending Hermione’s pulse rocketing. “You shouldn't trust me, by all f*cking accounts! But you have to if you want to bloody live."

They stared at each other, both heaving with exertion. Hermione saw it in his eyes, twisting like hot metal: he was telling the truth.

"What will happen if you don't?" She asked, in a tremulous voice. "What will V-Voldemort do?"

“He’d kill me,” Malfoy muttered flatly,like his potential death was a side effect, an inevitability. “I’d be dead for even hesitating, but if I fail, he’ll kill my family too."He began twisting at his knuckles with shaking fingers, releasing them back into their sockets with a violent pop.

“He’d have Father taken out while locked in Azkaban. Fatal accidents happen with the prisoners all the time. No one would bat an eye. Mother, he’d take his time with. He likes to break the stubborn ones, reduce them to nothing before finishing them off.”

Malfoy looked up at her, desperate eyes rimmed with red.

“He’d kill me last. Make an example of me to the new recruits. The older Death Eaters, the ones who fought in the first war, they say our generation is wet behind the ears, that we need to come of age by spilling blood.” His voice began to tremble, tripping unsteadily over each word. “It would be public. It wouldn’t be quick. Maybe hours until he’d grow bored, then he’d let Greyback have at me. I’ve seen him do it before.”

Hermione made a small, horrified sound. If she wasn’t in such dire circ*mstances, she’d dwell more on Malfoy’s admission. He’d seen Voldemort, in the flesh? He’d seen him murder someone? It seemed absurd; Malfoy was sixteen, he surely couldn’t be accepted into the inner circle of Death Eaters as a school boy. And to be given a task like this, a triple murder, as his first mission?Surely Voldemort would have sent someone more capable, a trusted lieutenant like Bellatrix Lestrange, not sniveling, spoiled Draco Malfoy, who couldn’t kill anything larger than a rabbit.

He couldn’t even be expected to succeed.

“Figured it out, have you Granger?” Malfoy's voice rang hollow. "Have you realized why the Dark Lord asked this of me?"

“Voldemort doesn’t think you can do it,” Hermione said, and he clicked his tongue in affirmative response. “He’s expecting you to fail, isn't he?”

“Five points to Gryffindor,” Malfoy confirmed, his usual sarcasm overridden by pure bitterness. “The Dark Lord can’t kill me outright. I’m the heir to Houses Black and Malfoy; he’d be wiping out two wizarding dynasties in one blow. It would be a wholly unpopular decision with the other Pureblood lines. No, the Dark Lord needs for me to give him a reason, so that he can use me to send a message, the consequences of my father’s failure."

Hermione narrowed her eyes. Malfoy was being used as a pawn, a slap on the wrist for Lucius' catastrophic attempt to obtain the prophecy in the Department of Mysteries. A disaster of a mission, which ended ina mass imprisonment of the involved Death Eaters and a public revelation of Voldemort’s resurgence.

"Failures that I believe you and your little gang of imbeciles are intimately familiar with, aren't you Granger?” Malfoy laughed, a strangled sound, void of any mirth. “Thanks for that.”

“What exactly would you like me to say?" She asked, biting down her fury. "I feel terribly that your father ended up in Azkaban while trying to slaughter me and my friends? Sorry it turned out that way, I should have made it easier for him?”

“I don’t need your pity,” Malfoy spat.

“I’m not offering it.”

“Hide, Granger.” Malfoy straightened his robes, glancing around for bystanders, as if preparing to apparate. “All I can offer you is a warning. Take your family and disappear.”

In that moment, under the lingering touches of late summer sun, she finally realized what Malfoy reminded her of. It was the fear she'd recognized in his eyes, like those World War II documentaries that played on the BBC of shell shocked soldiers with blown off limbs, recounting scenes of inhumanity for a news camera. Plain faced and resigned to violence.

Malfoy could have run. He could have tried to hurt her. But he hadn't even so much as tried to raise a wand against her. He warned her, knowing he would be walking to his death.

“Wait!” Hermione called after him desperately.

He stilled mid-turn, ruining the attempt at apparition.

“What exactly,” Hermione finally asked, noting the importance of her wording. “Did Voldemort instruct you to do?”

“Need me to lay it out for you?" Malfoy asked, now openly incredulous at her wasting of precious time. "Want me to walk you through how I was supposed to take the Lestrange brothers to murder your mother and father, and you too if I could manage it? Set the mark over your home, just so everyone would know who killed Potter’s famous mudblood?”

“Malfoy, we can both get out if we play this exactly right, but you’re going to need to help me. We need Voldemort to think you succeeded,” Hermione explained, using some extreme compartmentalization so that she could speak to him with a steady calm that she hoped communicated authority. “Are you Marked? Can you call the Death Eaters, show them proof?”

He nodded in confirmation, raising his sleeve, and Hermione prepared herself to see the horribly familiar skull and snake.

It was all black ink and blistered skin, freshly burned into his forearm like a cattle brand, edges raised and angry.

“You can’t outrun him, Granger. Your best bet is to hide wisely and hope you aren’tfound.” Malfoy gestured at the Mark on his arm, a self explanatory warning. “And even that has a poor success rate. The Dark Lord is stronger than you could ever believe. He’ll break your mind into pieces like it’s fine china, find the worst of you and make you relieve it. And if he doesn’t find anything sufficient, he’ll make some new memories to trap you in.”

Standing in her garden, she regarded her childhood bully, his grey eyes bright with fear. Could she trust Draco Malfoy? The boy who couldn’t cast the Killing Curse. Who hated her for her dirty blood. Who warned her at great personal risk. Who had resigned himself to die.

They'd just been children a moment ago, hadn't they? Trading jabs in corridors and rude gestures under desks, competing for top marks in Potions. Now what were they? Machinations of war. A soldier and a target.

“I’m not going to hide from Voldemort,” Hermione told him grimly. “I’m going to give him exactly what he wants—”

She made her decision, casting her lot with the boy in front of her.

“—and you’re going to help me save us both.”

Chapter 3: The Fire

Chapter Text

In the moments that followed, Hermione felt suspended fromher body, disassociated of its movements. She hovered somewhere above herself, watching as a girl with half-dried curls who looked an awful lot like her and a pale boy with sharp, aristocratic features shot harried words at each other like steel tipped arrows whiling standing in the entrance of her childhood home.

They'd only made in a few feet inside before disagreeing extensively on a plan of action, writing off a number of ideas ranging from camouflage to Confundus charms. Malfoy insisted it would be most prudent for him to perform the Imperius on her parents—which was apparently the only Unforgivable curse he had any aptitude for— in orderto force them into hiding.

“I don’t trust you to hold the door for a muggle, much less cast an Unforgivable.” Hermione gave him a look so poisonous, he’d wilted under it. “Been practicing those, have you?”

“What would you like to do then,” Malfoy spat, crossing his arms. “Politely inform them there’s a dark wizard set on spilling their dirty blood?”

“If someone's going to hold a wand on my parents, it'll be me.”

Malfoy snorted inelegantly.

“Yes, and send a signal flare to the ministry with your underage magic. Remind me why they call you the brains of the operation, Granger?”

“They don’t call me the—” Hermione stopped, narrowing her eyes. “Hang on, how have you been able to use magic? You’re still sixteen.”

After some more violent pressing on her end, Malfoy reluctantly explained by pulling a thin gold chain from around his neck. An amulet cast in oxidized bronze, inscribed with runes. Some that Hermione recognized: auja for containment, laþu for privacy, laukaʀ for obscurement. Others that she didn’t: runes that looked ancient and jagged, like they’d come from a time before language.

“Malfoy family heirloom, from the 15th century”he explained, “Brought back from the New World by explorers and embedded with concealment charms. It completely obscuresthe magical signature left by the caster. Even if it’s found that magic was used, this makes it impossible to trace it.”

“Any spell? Any caster?”

“Supposedly, yes.”

“Regardless of blood status?”

Malfoy had narrowed his eyes.

“It’s not cursed against mudbloods, if that’s what you’re asking. My ancestors from that far back would never even dream of it around the neck of a— well, someone like you.”

In order to test his assertion, Hermione reached out to where it hung around his neck, breath suspended, and brought her hand to the juncture of Malfoy’s throat. He made a little noise of disgust.

“Hang on, Granger,” he said, cheeks blooming poppy-red. “Don’t maul me.”

She ignored him, gingerly pressing a fingertip to the amulet. Nothing happened: no boils, or blood, or resistance to her touch. The bronze hummed under her fingertip, a little pulse.

"It's the real thing," Malfoy confirmed. "There was heightened demand for them after the Statute of Secrecy passed. People didn't fancy being monitored by the Ministry. Most the ones you see these days are fakes; that fool Lockhart used to have one the size of Neptune hanging around his neck, an obvious forgery."

Lockhart.

Hit by a pang of unpleasant realization, Hermione suddenly knew exactly what she had to do, flying out the stairs into her parents room before Malfoy could manage a word of protest.

He waited uncomfortably in the foyer as Hermione went through preparations at warp speed, packing her parents’ essential belongings, birth certificates and passports.

Upon mention of Lockhart, a plan bloomed within her mind effortlessly, as if her subconscious had been long suspecting the possibility of such danger.

Hermione’s parents would never leave her behind. The only way to convince them to flee would require her to remove their very impetus to protect her.

She had to obliviate her mother and father.

Once she removed herself from their memories, she’d send them as far from London as possible. Somewhere warm, where they spoke English. Australia, maybe. As a young man, her father had loved to surf. Her mother would appreciate the sunshine.

Hermione had learned the theory surrounding memory charms when she was thirteen, after Gilderoy Lockhart’s failed attempt to wipe her friends’ recollections in the Chamber of Secrets. She was intrigued and horrified by how someone, especially an inept fraud like their former Defense Professor, could specialize in a subsection of such complex cognitive charms, that which could unravel the essence of humanity itself: memory. She'd read extensively about obliviation: memory charms could vary in strength, depending on the cleanness of the cuts in the subject’s conscious and subconscious recollection, similar to how muggle surgeons sought to leave clean margins with their scalpels.The trick lay in the caster’s ability to compartmentalize; Lockhart must have had innate sense to separate conflicting emotions and experiences in his subjects, likely born from his aptitude for avoiding the discomfort of his own contradictions.

Hermione had never performed the charm before, but she’d always approached magic with logic. She had always been startlingly good at compartmentalization, delineating her life neatly into muggle and magic at a young age. She could separate the parts of herself that ached and heaved at the thought of an impossible loss from the part of herself that knew this pain was necessarily for preservation. She could envision herself holding the scalpel.

She willed her hands not to shake.

When she heard her parents' car pull into the driveway, she stood in the entryway, side by side with Malfoy. She could hear their voices, her mother’s tinkling laughter, and she dug her nails into Malfoy’s wrist. She didn’t even realize she’d done it until he yelped.

“Don’t touch m—” he started to snarl, but trailed off into silence at the sight of her. She could feel wetness on her cheeks, but couldn’t pinpoint when she had started crying.

“Why them?” She managed. “Why me?”

Malfoy swallowed, looking deeply uncomfortable.

“I don’t know. Probably because you’re so well known as Potter’s friend. You’re not just a muggleborn, you’re the muggleborn. You were there last June, and your survival put a target on your back. Your parents are the first, but they won’t be the last. It’s just starting, Granger. It'll only get worse.”

She heard the slam of a car door.

“I can’t do this,” Hermione whispered. "I can't loose them."

She wished, not for the first time that day, she was with anyone besides Draco Malfoy.He looked down at her, gray eyes darkened with desperation. There was no pity in his expression, only resignation. She wondered what had driven such grim acceptance into his eyes, what he’d been forced to do since taking the Mark.

“You have to,” Malfoy said. “You don’t have another choice.” He sounded haunted, as if this was something he’d repeated to himself countless times before.

He took the chain from under his collar and draped it around her neck. It was still warm from where it had rested on his skin, buzzing with the sort of magic that old wizarding artifacts seemed to emit. It’s energy felt unsettlingly like Malfoy, like the sensation that accompanied his flourish-forward charm work or the way his potions were always slightly more opaque than hers. Like his personal brand of magic.

“If you plan to apparate off with this,” he warned, hand hovering over the clasp. “I’d reconsider. It’s quite easy for a Malfoy to locate an heirloom that’s been…misplaced. The consequences are often quite bloody.”

“I don’t want your stupid—”

Hermione’s father stepped through the front door with his keys still in his hand, footsteps stuttering upon sighting the tall, severe looking boy standing next to his daughter.

“Hermione? What's going on?”

“I’m so sorry, Dad.”

Her father frowned at her apology, forehead creasing in confusion.

“Hermione, who is this?”

“Do it, Granger.” Malfoy’s voice was thick with an emotion she couldn’t place. “Make it quick.”

She wanted to tell her father how much she loved him. Even as she removed herself from his mind, she was careful to preserve every moment they shared, every push on the swings, every lump of homemade pizza dough, every refrigerator magnet. She wanted to curl up under his arm, breathe in his cinnamon toothpaste and the scent of cedar that clung to his sweaters. She wanted him to comb the conditioner through her tangled curls, the ones she inherited from him. She wanted to listen to him tell a terrible joke and laugh until he choked.

Instead, she raised her wand.

*

To the chagrin of her roommates at Hogwarts, Hermione had never been tidy. It was a common occurrence, to see her space adorned with piles of clothing in various states of use (clean, dirty, and somewhere in between). Stacks of dog eared novels, partially filled notebooks and unfinished rolls of parchment. Records and cassettes in mismatched sleeves and cases. Abandoned hair products and half-used lotions.

She wasn’t dirty; there was never any strange smelling trash or candy wrappers askew, like in the boys’ dormitory. She just wasn’t particularly organized. Often, her mind moved so quickly that she’d get distracted by a new train of thought, put down one of her possessions, and promptly forget its existence until she tripped over it in the dark.

This was not a fatal flaw by any means. It was; however, something no one seemed to expect from her.

“Merlin, Granger,” Malfoy commented from where he leaned on her doorframe, watching with distaste as she haphazardly emptied a drawer full of woolen jumpers into her illegally charmed trunk (she’d mastered an extension charm in preparation for her O.W.L.s, and it hadn’t been that big of a leap to learn how to make the spell undetectable). “I always figured you'd be rather anal-retentive. Is this how all Muggles live, with their things flung all over?”

Although Malfoy appeared badly shaken by the entire ordeal, he seemed unable to fully shed his signature sense of superiority. Her skin crawled as he examined the parlor with a cold disinterest, taking in the television, the mahogany furniture, the Japanese art that her father collected. He regarded her room as if it was a particularly exotic installation at the zoo.

She abhorred the thought of allowing him into her home, to judge her parents’ decor choices and condemn their muggle technologies. But what choice did she have?

“Oh yes,” she spat, while stacking the majority of the contents of her library within the trunk’s depths. “Without magic everyone lives in complete squalor. How superior you must feel, what with your castles and your slaves.”

”As a matter of fact, I do.”

She paused her packing to glare in his direction.

“You know, this would go a lot faster if you lent me your bloody necklace again. Or, god forbid, helped me.”

He looked at her as if she’d grown an erumpant horn. He was so out of place in her childhood bedroom, with her Beatrix Potter wallpaper and sunflower pillowcases. The tension between the two sights would have been funny, in any other context.

“Help you…pack your things?” He said things in the manner one typically used to refer to excrement.

“Just use your wand, Malfoy.”

He gave her a look of pure loathing, before levitating the remainder of her belongings.

As much as she despised needing his assistance, she knew they had to move quickly. She’d spent too much time on the spell, meticulous as she strained her parents’ memories through a sieve. She’d sent them off with no memory of a daughter, amenable to leaving their house in the hands of a notably young blonde realtor with a pinched countenance. By Malfoy’s assertion, someone would come looking if he wasn’t back before sunset, and the sky had already taken on a pink tinge, giving the clouds a pastel effect that Hermione normally would have stopped to take in.

With her trunk pulled behind her, she led Malfoy outside her house. She did not look back.

“Well?” Malfoy asked once they were outside, irritation poorly covering the tremulous not of uncertainty in his voice. “What now? Aren’t you going to order me about some more?”

“Voldemort will go through your memories,” she answered grimly, ignoring his commentary. He winced at her use if the name. Given the mark on his arm, she found it atrociously hypocritical.

“He won’t find anything. My aunt taught me how to keep him out.” Malfoy spoke with the sort of ghostly recollection with which one would explain a particularly haunting nightmare. "Granted, I don't think this is exactly what she wanted me to use occlumency for."

Malfoy was an occlumens? Hermione buried away that tidbit of information for when her life was slightly less at risk.

“You're just going to shut him out of your head?” She questioned, a single brow raised. “You don’t think he’ll find that, I dunno, incredibly suspicious?”

“What would you like me to do about that, Granger? Give you a crucio or two, so that the Dark Lord can corroborate my murder spree?”

Hermione raised an eyebrow, contemplating. The look on Malfoy’s face quickly grew horrified.

"What's that saying?" She asked slowly. "The best lies are grown from the seeds of truth?"

“Malfoy” Hermione explained, in the most even voice she could manage. “I know you're scared. I know you are no Gryffindor. But it’s your turn to be brave now.”

She approached him where he stood half-obscured by the neighbor’s begonias, keeping her movements slow and even, as if he were a skittish owl, not a burgeoning Dark wizard.

Malfoy's breathing stuttered and he pinched the bridge of his nose as if she'd caused him tremendous head pain.

“You’re mad,” he said, shaking his head. “Stark raving mad. You want me totorture you as some sort of f*cked up alibi? Do you hear yourself?”

“I’m not scared of being hurt,” Hermione maintained stubbornly. If you’d told her a month ago that she’d be asking Malfoy to use an Unforgivable curse on her, she’d have laughed until she wept. "I won't hold it against you."

“Spoken like someone who has never felt the Cruciatus before.” Malfoy rubbed the back of his neck, as if smoothing away phantom spasms. The side of her mouth twitched in pity, and he scoffed when he caught it directed his way.

”Feeling bad for me, Granger? Bet you’re just itching to be the one to stitch me up. You get off on that sort of thing, don’t you? The savior to Potter’s martyr.”

“Focus. You need to offer Voldemort up some convincing evidence, Malfoy. I’m sure they’ll check your wand, for starters,” Hermione replied, ignoring his rude quips and filing away his grim admission of the sensation of the Cruciatus Curse to examine at a later moment. “And you need to create a memory, for when he goes looking in your head.”

“What do you know about how occlumency works?” Malfoy sneered.

”Snape gave Harry lessons all last year,” she shot back. “He’s got a fair bit of experience with Voldemort trying to get in his head.”

Malfoy stared at her, disbelieving. She met his gaze right back, insistent. He must have seen her blazing determination, because he raised his wand unsteadily in her direction. His blonde hair caught the last of the daylight, closer to gold than its usual platinum. He cast his eyes upwards, like ge was waiting for the sky to open up and swallow him.

“Go on,” Hermione said gently. She almost reached out to lay a hand on his wand arm, but thought better of it. “I’m not afraid.”

“Then you’re a fool,” Malfoy said quietly. He raised his wand and whispered the curse in a voice like cracked glass. “Crucio. ”

Hermione expected to scream, expected pain worse that what she’d felt under Dolohov’s curse. But all that came from Malfoy’s wand was a sharp zap, akin to sticking her finger in an electrical socket. The sensation ricocheted in her chest, stinging her scar. She raised her hand to collarbone and pressed hard, until it dissipated.

Malfoy looked like he was about to be sick.

“Are you…did it…?”

“You weren’t kidding,” Hermione breathed. “You really can’t manage it.”

“Oh, piss off, Granger,” he spat. "Only you would mock my form after I tried to torture you. Want me to try it again, with aplomb this time?" His mouth twisted in an expression of derision, but he blinked rapidly, eyes brimming with relief.

“You’re going to want proof you killed them,” she informed him. He blinked, her demand wiping the sneer from his mouth.

“You want me to try and cast a killing curse too, you lunatic?”

“No,” Hermione said. She gave a long look at the place where she was raised, feeling oddly numb. She’d razed home when she stole her parents’ memories. It was just a house, she reminded herself. It was just walls and wood. “I want you to burn my house down.”

*

The flames had just begun to roar when Hermione’s neighbors started screaming. She figured the sounds would add a believable effect to Malfoy’s memory of the arson. They crouched across the street in some bushes, ensuring the structure burned down completely.

“What about when no one finds the bodies?” Malfoy asked. He’d been twisting his amulet absently, fingers quivering. She absently realized that he had been shaking since she’d seen him across the pond. It felt like a lifetime ago. She wondered what Melissa would think when she saw the wreckage.

“I transfigured my baby teeth into bones," Hermione revealed, showing the last of her cards. "Take them back with you, if your Death Eaters requirea trophy. I doubt Voldemort will bother to authenticate them. They’re only Muggles, after all.”

She hoped that Monica and Wendell Wilkins were getting out of a cab at Heathrow, full of excitement for white sand beaches and frothy espresso. She hoped that they’d never feel it, the emptiness that now filled her, hoped they’d never puzzle over where the sensation came from. She hoped they’d never realize that something had been lost.

“Rabastan and Rodolphus will be here any minute,” Malfoy said, startling her out of her reverie. “It’s time.”

He raised his sleeve, the ugly ink of the Dark Mark cutting against the pale skin of his delicate wrist. If she hadn’t already known, Hermione would have never guessed that he was a Quidditch player. He could play piano, with hands like that.

“Wait,” she said, wrapping her hand around his forearm, palm flush against the wound. He hissed in pain, attempting to jerk his arm away, but she held fast.

“f*ck, that burns— what are you playing at?!”

“I didn’t mean to hurt you.” She loosened her grip. “I just had to say—”

“Don’t you dare thank me, Granger.” Malfoy’s face burned with something akin to loathing, although for once, it didn’t seem directed specifically at her. “Don’t you dare thank me for not killing your family.”

“You didn’t have to come here,” she insisted. “You could have paid someone else to see it through, or enlistedthe Lestranges to do the dirty work. I'm sure you could have asked Dolohov, or your mad aunt for help.”

“The Dark Lord would have killed me if I didn’t hold the wand myself. And as I said, that wasn’t an option. This” — he gestured between them— “Is purely out of self preservation.”

“Maybe,” Hermione said, thoughtfully. “But your first instinct was to warn me. To help me hide my parents, who I’m sure you see as barely above livestock—”

“I don’t—I mean, I do— but it’s not that—”

“Simple?" Hermione asked, wryly. "Isn’t it?”

She released his arm. He pulled away weakly, cradling it against his chest.

“The next time you are ordered to hurt someone,” Hermione said with a steadiness she drew from the most logical part of her mind, the part she kept warded away from panic. “To kill innocent people—people who don’t even understand what they’ve done wrong, who don’t even believe in your existence, much less threaten it— I want you to remember that it is. Simple, I mean.”

Hermione drew her wand, but did not drop his gaze. He looked at her as if she was reciting a prayer he’d long forgotten the words to.

“You should know by now that I’m no martyr," he whispered. "Don’t put that on me.”

“I’m sure you are many things, Malfoy. But today, you weren’t a coward.”

“Granger, I—”

But Hermione was already thinking of hand-knit sweaters and the scent of mutton stew and the silvery marks left in the sky by lingering fireworks. She pictured the only other place she’d ever considered a home.

The Burrow, she thought, and turned on the spot.

The last thing she saw was Draco Malfoy, savagely pressing the brand on his arm.

Chapter 4: In the Broom Shed

Chapter Text

The fields surrounding the Weasley family home were exactly as Hermione remembered: loamy English soil dappled with lavender and barley, the air hinting faintly of livestock, and in the distance, a towering, albeit haphazard, country home.

She ran her hands over her body checking for any splinching; she’d overshot her apparition point by half a kilometer, and was missing the fingernail on her pinky, but she considered it a reasonably good result given that it was her first attempt outside of theoretical practice, and that she’d executed it while under a great deal of duress.

She closed her eyes for a moment, trying to block out the image of the flames consuming her childhood home. The smoky burn of Draco Malfoy’s fear, so palpable she could almost taste its acridity. She couldn’t help but wonder whether he’d made it back to his manor, whether he was in front of Voldemort that very instant, lying to the face of the most dangerous wizard in history. Lying on her behalf, on the behalf of two Muggles he’d never met. It was both surreal and utterly terrifying to imagine.

Would he be able to pull it off? Even if he was as well versed in occlumency as he’d hinted, what match would he be for Lord Voldemort?

“Ah, Miss Granger!” A familiar voice broke though her reverie, calling across the moor. Hermionespun around, heart catching in her throat, to encounter a willowy figure clad in silvery robes and half-moon spectacles. She drew her wand. “I was under the assumption you’d be arriving soon.”

“Professor Dumbledore?”

“Are you unharmed?” The headmaster asked, face wiped of its usual soft mirth. “I commend you for managing such a lengthy apparition while both untrained and underage. Although if the Ministry inquires, let it be stated for the record that I gave you a hearty scolding.”

“How did you know I was here?” Hermione tightened her grip on her wand. She remembered the lesson the false Moody had instilled in them on the importance of vigilantly checking for Polyjuice Potion, one that hit even harder given that he’d been an imposter himself. Even so, she felt a bit silly with her wand pointed at the serene headmaster; she knew better to assume she could duel with one of the most prominent wizards of the last century, but given the chance that he was an imposter, maybe she’d have slightly more favorable odds.

“I received a rather strongly worded owl from the Ministry mere moments ago,” Dumbledore explained. “Relating that one of my students had broken the ban on underage magic and violated the law against unlicensed apparition. Another followed it, raising alarm bells about a potential violent scene in the London suburbs. I made an educated guess on your whereabouts, Miss Granger. No need for that.” He gesturedfor her to lower her wand.

Hermione grimaced, the part of her that longed to obey authority screaming at her resistance.

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Professor. Not until—”

“Of course, you’ll need verification of my identity. Precautions are important, now more than ever.” The headmaster co*cked his head, considering. “What did I give to you at the beginning of your third year of Hogwarts, with the express instruction to keep it a secret?”

“A time-turner, Professor.”

“You’ll remember what I said when I bestowed it upon you?”

Hermione nodded cautiously.

“I find it still applies: time is like smoke, Miss Granger. We’ll never be able to control or even grasp it, only watch as it provides us evidence of continued combustion.”

It was what he’d told her, although then, she’d dismissed it as one of his eccentric musings. Now, it carried a heaviness that could only have been imbedded with experience.

“I take it you’ve had a very difficult evening,” he said gently, taking in her tear-stained face and disheveled state. “Shall we find a place to discuss the events that led you here?”

Dumbledore strode a few paces towards the house, robes dragging on the bracken. Hermione lowered her wand, but stayed glued to her apparition point as if paralyzed.

“If I recall correctly, there’s a broom shed just over— ah, there it is— good to know my memory isn’t failing me just yet. After you, Miss Granger?”

Hermione legs finally began to cooperate, and she followed the headmaster mutely, her head spinning. Surely if Dumbledore was here, it meant she wasn’t going to Azkaban for performing underage magic. It had, after all, been a life threatening circ*mstance. And Dumbledore had stepped in for Harry last year, when he’d been attacked by dementors. Legally, there was precedent not to arrest her, wasn’t there?

Dumbledore latched the door to the broom shed behind him, and Hermione watched as he vanished a great deal of the dust and cobwebs, using his wand to delicately brush a large spider from his hat. His wand hand appeared warped and blackened, although Hermione told herself it could have been an effect of the shadows.

Her teeth began to clatter, even though it wasn’t cold. Shock, she realized.

“I find discomfort does an awful job at alleviating fear,” Dumbledore told her, noting her shivers. With a swish of his wand, he conjured a cloak from thin air, something soft and reminiscent of the expensive garments made of never-tangle-wool in Madam Malkin's.

She wrapped herself in it gratefully, conscious of her dried swimming costume for the first time in hours.

“I imagine this evening has been quite traumatic. But I must request that you tell me exactly what occurred, Miss Granger.”

Hermione hesitated, worrying her lower lip between her teeth, unsure of how much to reveal.

While Dumbledore was the head of the Order, she never held the same blind trust in him that Ron or Harry seemed to exhibit. There was a part of her, a part that often got her into trouble, that couldn’t help but question things: the laws regulating each and every use of magic, the backwards and often cruel customs of wizarding society, the decisions of the headmaster that sometimes seemed neglectful at best.

She felt sure that Dumbledore always acted in the best interests of the wizarding world; however, his true motivations often eluded her.

Her own were exactingly clear: she would protect her parents at any cost. But where did she fall on revealing the involvement of Draco Malfoy? How much of that very sensitive information would she entrust to the headmaster?

Although Malfoy was cowardly and loathsome and probably thought she wasn’t fit to wipe dirt from his shoes, she felt an uncomfortable debt to him, one that she feared would rear its head in the ugliest of ways. He’d all but saved the lives of her parents at great personal risk, an unexpected kindness she felt motivated to repay.

“The ministry has obtained several eyewitness accounts from Muggles in the area,” Dumbledore prodded. “They say that the fire started early this evening and that the fumes created a strangely shapedcloud over your family’s home. I think we both know this is a rather simplistic version of events.”

“Eyewitness accounts?”

“The casting of the Dark Mark is not only a symbol, Hermione. It’s a breach of the Statue of Secrecy. Naturally their memories have been wiped. There was one account that troubled me, from your young neighbor.”

“Melissa,” Hermione breathed, remembering. The events of the afternoon felt foreign, as if they’d been a story told to her long ago. “Is she all right?”

“Most fortunately, our dear Hestia Jones was the mediwitch on the scene. She took your friend Melissa’s memories and sent them directly to me before obliviating her and I destroyed them promptly. I’m afraid your re-engaging in contact with her would put her in tremendous danger.”

Hermione closed her eyes momentarily, strangely crushed. Melissa had waited, sun cream on her nose, as she got ready that afternoon. She had invited her even when she didn’t have to, and this was that thanks she would get for her kindness.

The world felt impossible and unfair and Hermione’s eyes filled with everything she’d held back since casting the memory charm.

“Is she safe?” Hermione blinked rapidly, reminding herself to be logical. It didn’t matter if Melissa forgot the pond, forgot her. She’d probably be better off, get to attend university and flirt with lads’ lads and never question what happened to the girl from next door. “Does she…remember?”

“She’s been obliviated, but will be quite alright, if not a bit foggy. But my viewing of her memory revealed something very peculiar about the events of today. Or rather, someone.”

Hermione tried not to fidget.

“Hermione, would you like to tell me what Draco Malfoy was doing in Hampstead Garden?”

Hermione ran through her options. Therefore were memories and Dumbledore had seen them. He had protected her from the authorities. To lie to a gifted legilimens felt like a foolish recourse.

Above all, Hermione wanted to tell someone about the fevered dash to save her parents, the choice that left her effectively orphaned. As she became more removed from the scene, doubt had started to creep in. She needed someone to tell her that her choice to curse her mother and father, although terrible, was the correct one.

“Whatever you say in this shed will be kept in the utmost secrecy, Miss Granger.”

“He saved them,” Hermione whispered. It sounded even stranger when she conjured it aloud, even less believable. “Voldemort sent Malfoy to kill them, but…he couldn’t do it.”

Hermione relayed the rest of the story as Dumbledore listened attentively, from the moments in the bathing pond to Malfoy’s anguished expression when he pressed his fingers to the mark. Her tearful obliviation of her father and mother using Malfoy’s amulet. His sneers at her home, his comments on the squalor of Muggles. She explained how, to his credit, Malfoy had balked at the thought of performing an unforgivable on her and had produced the weakest crucio she’d seen.

She was careful to leave out the fact she relocated her parents to Australia, only admitting to sending them off somewhere she wouldn’t be able to follow. She didn’t trust even Dumbledore with that information.

But you trusted Malfoy, a little voice reminded her snidely. Evidence that these were indeed desperate times.

“So, Mr. Malfoy was marked. Younger than Tom usually goes,” Dumbledore mused, although she wasn’t sure if he was exactly speaking to her. “How did the Mark look?”

“Bad,” Hermione supplied, curious about his line of questioning. “Like it was infected. Why does that matter, Professor?”

“Simply an interesting phenomenon, one I’ve long considered worthy of research.” Dumbledore waved her question off, and Hermione made a mental note to look for answers on the topic on her own. “Tell me, Miss Granger. What do you think of Draco Malfoy?”

“I’m sorry?” She stammered, thinking she’d misheard. “What do I think of him?”

Dumbledore nodded patiently. Hermione cast her eyes around the shed, as if searching for an answer.

“I’m not quite sure, Professor. Before today, I would have told you that I think Draco Malfoy is a bigot, that he’s spoiled and selfish and far more prone to vengeance than compassion. And maybe that’s all still true.”

Hermione took a deep breath, bracing herself before plunging forward.

”But I also think he’s sixteen and was sent to become a murderer against his will.” She remembered Malfoy’s feverish stare, his unwilling receipt of her thanks. She felt the weight of her debt to him curled around her shoulders like a particularly stifling stole. “I think his instincts told him to prioritize self-preservation, to leave me and my parents to our own devices. And I think he went against them in order to do the right thing.”

Dumbledore smiled while thanking her for her candid answer, but his gaze seemed troubled and distant. Hermione couldn’t shake the feeling that he was listening to her words, but lingering in a memory, pulled from a long sealed vault that she would never be privy to.

“Do you trust him, Miss Granger?”

Hermione raised her chin, meeting piercing blue eyes. She considered her answer carefully before opening her mouth.

“No,” she said softly. “I don’t trust anyone.”

“Trust is a dangerous thing,” Dumbledore mused, expression more grave than she’d ever seen it. “Once given, it’s exceedingly easy to destroy and almost impossible to restore. And yet, we give it anyway.”

“What about my parents, Professor? Will they be—” Hermione trailed off, unsure if she was going to finish her sentence with safe, or found, or killed.

“You’ve done a very difficult thing today, Hermione. You made a sacrifice, in the name of love. There is no greater protection.” He smiled gently, a twist of the lips that didn’t quite echo the sadness in his gaze. “If what you told me comes to pass, the Death Eaters will undoubtedly consider your parents dead and Draco Malfoy’s task complete, a presumption we’d do very well not to challenge. I suggest you don’t reveal the accounts of today to anyone— no, not even your friends. Consider the version of events you want to share very carefully. More one life hangs in the balance.”

“I understand, Professor.”

She did. Harry and Ron couldn’t know about what really transpired, nor could they learn of Malfoy's involvement. She loved them both dearly, but they were hot headed and prone to rash decisions and hasty reactions. Additionally, Harry’s subconscious seemed connected to Voldemort’s in a way no one could truly fathom. It was too dangerous, to confide in them.

It was better to remain quiet, to cry on their shoulders and mourn her family. A sorrow that would be rooted in truth, despite the falsity of her story.

“You’ll stay the remainder of the summer at the Burrow, of course. I’ll send Molly a Patronus momentarily with the essential details of the situation. Mr. Potter will be joining you shortly. For all effective purposes, your parents perished in the fire. I’m sure your friends will offer their condolences for your loss. While they may not have lost their lives, it is still a terrible thing to lose a parent.” He laid a hand on her shoulder. “Trust that you have my utmost sympathies.”

“What about Malfoy?”

Dumbledore seemed surprised by the question, or at least, that she had offered it.

“I will certainly have a conversation with Mr. Malfoy at the start of the term. Any contact before then would only put him in immense danger. Any contact, Miss Granger.”

Despite herself, Hermione felt a pang of worry on Malfoy’s behalf. She knew that one good deed did not erase a lifetime of bigotry, of hurled slurs and curses shot across corridors. But no matter what had transpired between them, Hermione didn’t want Malfoy to face the wrath of the Dark Lord. She didn’t want him to be hurt or killed. She thought for the first time of his parents, Lucius and Narcissa, imagining them facing down a wand because of his decision. She could hardly fathom that he had resisted Voldemort, but she was impossibly grateful that he did.

She’d resisted too. Ran when she should have been caught. Engineered an escape when she should have cowered,

“Voldemort does not take kindly to those who have slipped from his grasp, does he Professor?” She asked, sadly. Not for the first time that night, she thought of James and Lily Potter.

“You have found yourself in a perilous predicament, Miss Granger.” Dumbledore looked at her and in that moment, she felt the remaining wisps of her childhood dissipate. He looked at her like she was an adult, like she held the same burden on her shoulders that he did. “You would be wise to remember you are not alone in this danger. To consider the merits of trust.”

Hermione blinked, unsure what Dumbledore meant by this statement. But before she could ask, he was sweeping the shed door open and raising his wand. A silvery phoenix sprang to life, circling her once, before soaring towards the Burrow.

“Professor, I have to— there’s so much more to do, I can always— what about the others, the families of other muggleborns? Surely, I can—”

“You’ve been through a terrible shock tonight, Hermione. One that few could have survived, much less handled so deftly. The best thing you can do— for yourself and for those who will soon undoubtable require your skills— is rest. Mourn what you have lost. Tomorrow’s battles will remain unfought.”

“But—”

“In my many years, I have learned that grief, albeit extraordinarily painful, is often a harbinger of resistance. You must feel it in its entirety, in order to receive its strange, terrible gifts.”

Dumbledore gestured to the Burrow, where the lights all flickered on at once. The outline of a short woman in a dressing robe appeared in the lamp-filled doorway.

Hermione looked back at Dumbledore, but only his phoenix remained. It opened its beak as if to sing, only to release Dumbledore's parting words, resonating like an echo.

“Goodbye, Miss Granger. I imagine I’ll be seeing you quite soon.”

Chapter 5: Diagon Alley

Chapter Text

Hermione’s final days of summer passed in the way that honey dripped from a spoon: slow and sticky, with a cloying, almost unbearable sweetness.

No one at the Burrow knew how to talk to her about what happened. She’d slept for nearly a full day after Dumbledore’s departure, thanks to a double vial of Dreamless Sleep potion. The dosage was typically frowned upon, but she thought the situation warranted a reason to dismiss Healer directions.

When she finally woke, she was greeted by something she’d never heard in the Burrow: silence.

At first, Hermione wondered if everyone was out, but upon descending the stairs from Ginny’s room, she discovered the whole family— including a newly reinstated Percy and the inexplicable addition of Fleur Delacour— around the kitchen table, grimly staring at their breakfasts. Ron lept to attention upon sighting her, jostling the entire family into action, bustling with silverware and plates as if they hadn’t all been sitting silently, waiting for her arrival.

As soon as she stepped through the kitchen threshold, Ron wrapped her in a hug so nervous and gentle, that tears started streamingdown Hermione’s cheeks. This kickstarted Molly, who promptly buried her face in Arthur’s shoulder and began to weep.

“Mum,” Ginny scolded sharply. “Stop crying.”

“It’s all right,” Hermione croaked, extricating herself from Ron’s limp arms. “It’s nice to give someone else a turn.”

“Sorry, dear,” Molly sniffed. She busied herself by buttering a large stack of toast that Hermione feared was intended for her. “I’m being silly. You’ve been through a terrible trauma, you don’t need an old woman blubbering about it.”

“It’s fine,” Hermione mumbled to her audience of redheads, expressions all brimming with pity. She didn’t know how she’d talk about the loss of her parents without giving away the complexities of their disappearance, and simultaneously felt tremendously guilty for all the compassion she was receiving under the guise of their deaths.

I did this to them, she wanted to scream. I cast the spell.

Instead she sat and reached for a piece from the toddering stack of toast.

“Allow me,” Percy said, with an pained sort of dignity, wielding the jam jar and a knife. He seemed awkward, back at the family’s table after a year estrangement, and was handling his discomfort as stiffly as ever. “And may I offer my sincerest condolences for your loss, Hermione.”

“Full on? I’m being perfectly sensitive!” Percy protested, scraping the toast into oblivion.

“What that awkward bastard is trying to say,” George continued, cutting his brother off. “Is that we’re here for you, Hermione.”

“Thank you,” Hermione said into her lap, suddenly unable to make eye contact with any of the Weasleys. She busied herself with picking at her cuticles, an awful habit her mother was always trying to get her to quit. Don’t tear at yourself like that, she used to scold. “If it’s alright with you, I’d rather…I’d rather not talk about it.”

“Of course,” Ginny declared, eyeing each of her family members fiercely, as if daring them to insist otherwise. “We’ll be here whenever you’re ready. Percy, put the sodding toast down!”

*

Despite Hermione’s request for normalcy, the Weasleys seemed set on attempting to provide her comfort, even if they didn’t quite seem to know how.

Ron attempted to initiate several stilted conversations about her feelings, before finally giving up and simply spending his time standing silently next to her like a gangly bodyguard. She suspected it was him who slid a copy of Grappling with Grief: A Wizard’s Guide to Bereavement under Ginny’s door. Ginny had taken to reading chapters of it aloud in a horrendous impression of Fleur’s accent, the only thing that could reliably make Hermione crack a smile since the day at the pond.

She’d taken to dodging Percy at mealtimes, in order to avoid a well-meaning sermon about the necessity of proper mourning. Fred and George gave her a generous amount of space, something so unlike them that she almost felt insulted, until she noticed they’d begun surreptitiously confunding Percy every time he looked like he was going to attempt a pontification on the peaks and valleys of grief. Percy, eager to make up for a year of tense familial separation, had to be confunded so often, that he’d begun running face-first into closed doors.

Molly mothered Hermione even more intensely than before. Worried that she was becoming too thin from her grief induced lack of appetite, the Weasley matriarch took every opportunity to shovel impossible amounts of roast potatoes and sausages onto her plate.

Molly also started pushing Hermione to go walking in the Burrow’s surrounding countryside with Fleur, insisting some sun and fresh air would be restorative.Hermione suspected that while this suggestion undoubtedly came from good intentions, it also came from Molly’s evident desire to get her eldest son’s fiancé out of her house, even for a temporary reprieve.

While Hermione had been hesitant of Fleur’s presence at first, she found she didn’t mind her as much as she once had. She was loathe to admit that much of her hesitancy came from the fact that Fleur intimidated her: the French witch was just as beautiful as she’d been during Triwizard Tournament, but now she carriedherself in with the dignified grace of a fully-realized woman. Fleur was also had a tendency to loudly voice offer her copious, very blunt opinions, resulting in tense stand-offs at mealtimes over everything from baking bread to the inefficiency of the British Wizengamot.

“In France, the system is much better,” Fleur insisted over a Sunday lunch, a spread of roast turkey and Yorkshire puddings. The other Weasleys studiously avoided engagement; only Bill nodded rapturously between bites, fully engrossed in his fiancé’s treatise. “There is an elected parliament, not these lifetime appointment of seats. We believe in a republic, not a pseudo-oligarchy.”

“Don’t you lot believe in beheading your ministers too?” Ginny scowled. Before Fleur could respond in offense, Mrs. Weasley interrupted.

“Hermione, you’re looking a bit peaky,” Molly insisted, in a transparent attempt to get Fleur and her political commentary out from under her roof. She gave her eldest son a long suffering look that failed to secure Bill’s notice. “Why don’t you take Fleur and get some fresh air.”

The pair of witches descended the grassy steps cut into the bottle green hills with the laundry in tow, and walked along the banks of the glittering creek where Molly usually did the washing. The stones of the riverbed were warm from the sun, perfect for basking. Hermione perched on one, the heat blooming against her skin as she watched Fleur’s charm work, a flick of her wand conjuring suds and bubbles before submerging the laundry in the stream. After sufficient washing, Fleur levitated the linens onto a glittering line suspended by magic, the wind billowing the damp bedding like ship’s sails.

After the first few Molly mandated strolls, their conversations shifted from terse to tentative. Hermione started out with stagnant queries regarding the Beauxbaton’s curriculum, cursing herself for how pedantic she sounded. Fleur, seemingly the only one astute enough to realize Hermione had no desire to discuss her parents, filled the silence by explaining how Bill’s courtship had left her in the Weasley family care. Only love, Fleur posited darkly, could convince her to spend her summer in the company of her future mother-in-law and her chickens.

Once the ice had been broken, Hermione began asking questions about France, a countryshe’d only visited a handful of times before, but that had made a notable impression. Fleur regaled her with wistful, airy stories of enchanted seashells and fields of lavender that surrounded her home in the Côte d'Azur. There was something baroque to the delicate lilt of her voice, her dropped h’s and throaty vowels. Something that blurred the lines between familiar and ancient magic.

If Hermione closed her eyes, she could almost breathe the seaside air, the perfume her mother wore on their trip to the south of France, the rustle of the dried purple flowers hanging from doorways and vendor stalls. When she voiced this phenomenon, Fleur grinned, an expression that tinged her lovely face with something far more devious.

“Veela magic,” Fleur told her conspiratorially. “It is not only driven by desire. It recreates memory, sensation. A touch or taste or scent. That is the sort of magic that drives men mad.”

“Could you…” Hermione fidgeted, filled with longing. To hear her mother’s voice…a hint of her father's cologne… “Use it to conjureanything sensory?”

“It is not a conjuring,” Fleur said gently, her clear blue eyes flooded with understanding. “I can not wield natural magic as a tool or weapon, as a wizard would a wand. I just remember, and the part of me that is Veela responds.”

Hermione’s hope crested and fell. There must have been something tragic about her expression, because Fleur looked at her with an utter softness.

“Even if I were full Veela, I couldn’t control it. Natural magic doesn’t work that way. It does not respond to human insistence.”

Hermione inhaled again, but to her disappointment, could only smell laundry soap and cut grass.

Hermione didn’t begrudge any of the Weasley’s for the uncomfortable and futile nature of their efforts; they were simply trying their hardest to alleviate a fraction of an impossible grief. This only exacerbated her growing sense of shame; she’d never enjoyed keeping secrets from the people she loved, even if she was finding herself surprisingly adept at it.

When Harry arrived, she felt so guilty that she almost evaporated on the spot. She threw her arms around him and wept a few handkerchiefs worth of tears over the fact that were both effectively orphans now.

“You’ll probably be angry soon,” Harry warned her gravely, sitting across from her on Ginny’s bed with Ron. Hermione was beginning to suspect they’d drawn up some sort of schedule, ensuring that she was never without company. “That’s what happened to me when Pad—” he stopped, half-choked and corrected himself. “When Sirius died, I was so goddamn angry. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t feel anything else. It was like this parasite took over my brain, insisting that I needed to hurt the people responsible for his death, needed to make their families have to feel that ache. But Hermione— no matter what, promise me you won’t go after whoever did this.”

She closed her eyes, picturing Harry’s face when Sirius went through the veil, the way he’d sprang at Bellatrix Lestrange like a mad dog.

“I won’t,” she said, as the lump in her throat made a reappearance.

“Who was it?” Ron asked her, somewhat strangled, voicing the questions no one had yet broached out of courtesy. “How did they find your house? Did you recognize—”

“You don’t have to talk about it yet, Hermione,” Harry said, giving Ron a look that would have frozen the equator.

“No, it’s all right. I didn’t see. They were masked and there was so much smoke, I was barely—”

“It’s alright.” Harry stood and reseated himself on her mattress, slinging an arm around her shoulders. “Well, it’s not, but one day youwill be. You’re a Gryffindor. We’re a surprisingly resilient bunch.”

He grasped her shoulder firmly, squeezing.

“Hermione, listen to me. We’re going to make Voldemort pay. I swear it.”

Ron twitched involuntarily at the name. Hermione shivered, struck by the gravity of her friend’s statement.

“What does that mean?” She shifted from under Harry’s arm, turning to look at his solemn face.

There was an intensity to his expression that constricted her throat, as if he were about to attempt a particularly dangerous dive on his broom. A look that had caused Hermione to turn from the Quidditch pitch and hide her face in her hands.

“Dumbledore’s giving me lessons,” Harry’s eyes shone with the weight of his promise. “I think he’s going to teach me how to defeat him, once and for all.”

“Mate,” Ron shook his head in disbelief. “Why didn’t you tell us earlier?”

“Lessons?” Hermione questioned, possibilities flooding her brain. Would the Headmaster be able to teach Harry how to duel a Dark Lord? Or impart some kind of rare ancient magic capable of subduing him? Would it be a continuation of Snape’s hostile occlumency tutoring?“What will they consist of?”

“I’m not sure,” Harry answered. “He didn’t tell me much. It’s got something to do with memories though, Voldemort’s memories.”

Memories. Hermione willed herself not to fidget. She remembered the gossamer web of her parents’ minds, the way she had picked through strands, searching for her presence, crushing it to dust…

“Classic Dumbledore,” Ron snorted. “Something to do with memories. Very descriptive, he is.”

*

The following morning over porridge, owls carrying fat envelopes arrived to the Burrow for everyoneof school age. Ron and Hermione’s once again contained their prefect badges, something Ron seemed comically disgruntled with, now that the shine had worn off — I’m just not built for chasing blokes out of broom closets with their pants half down, Hermione — and Harry grinned widely as he pulled a Captain’s badge from his envelope.

“Look! I’ll officially be able to use that poncy bath!” He exclaimed as Percy looked on disapprovingly, scandalized by the dishonoring of prefect privileges. Hermione laughed at his visible offense, causing a half dozen red-haired heads to swivel towards her in surprise.

“What?” She asked, self-consciously.

“It’s just good to hear you laugh, dear,” Molly responded in a rather watery voice, her mouth quivering. Hermione fidgeted, uncomfortable with the attention.

“Stop looking at her like she’s sprouted a pair of bicorn horns,” Ginny intervened, from where she’d discarded her letter in favor of leafing through a Quidditch magazine. “Hermione’s been laughing plenty with me.”

“What has she been laughing at?” Fleur asked, unaware of Ginny’s accented performances of the book of grief, and Ginny avoided the question by busying herself with her booklist, suddenly deeply concerned about the edition of Advanced Transfiguration that Ron had used the previous year.

“We’ll send in some mail orders,” Molly insisted, scanning Ron’s list. “I think Bill’s extra cauldron is in the attic— one of you will have to convince the ghoul to give it up, it’s taken to using it as some sort of nest—”

“Oi, why aren’t we going to Diagon?”

“Ronald Weasley, if you want to keep your tongue attached,you will not address your mother with oi,”Molly chastised. “Hermione has had far too much disruption to her life lately. She should be resting, not traipsing about the Leaky Cauldron. Maybe another walk—”

“I’m fine,” Hermione said hastily, making panicked eye contact with a disgruntled Fleur. “I think it would be good to regain a sense of normalcy.”

“I quite agree,” Ginny piped in, a mischievous flint to her gaze. “We could pop in to see Fred and George’s shop. Just a peek— in and out, home before you know it. You don’t even have to come Mum, you can have a bit of a respite. Maybe finally show Fleur that gardening spell you’ve been talking about.”

“Well, I don’t—” Molly protested, alarmed.

“Zat won’t be necessary—” Fleur sounded equally unenthused, her perfect mouth twisted into a little frown at the idea of combining two particularly unsavory pastimes: gardening and forced time spent with her mother in law.

“Hear, hear,” Ron agreed loudly, exchanging a meaningful glance with his sister. “Wasn’t I just moaning about the state of the garden, Harry?”

“Huh?” Harry asked, eyes wide. Ron gave him an surreptitious elbow to the ribs.

“Oh right,” Harry offered weakly, massaging his side. “I thought I saw a gnome.”

”See?” Ron concurred, too much glee in his voice at the prospect to be considered believable. “We’ll just pop to the shops while you handle it—”

“If you think you’ll be going to Diagon Alley unsupervised you have another thing coming, Ronald Weasley! And after what’s just happened to Hermione’s parents?! Are you all mad?”

The room fell into a hushed silence, everyone making a concerted effort to not look Hermione's way. This only seemed to spur Molly to continue her voracious scolding.

“Danger won’t simply disappear because of back to school shopping! I remember what it was like before. The First War started with the attacks on Wizarding London. God forbid it should happen again. I’d like to think my children aren’t so hairbrained as to think that visiting a ludicrous joke shop should supersede their lives.”

“Of course it doesn’t, Mum,” Ginny said, sufficiently chastised. “We weren’t thinking.”

Molly looked beseechingly at Hermione, who stared back. She’d never heard Molly talk about the first war, but knew vaguely that she’d lost her twin brothers, Gideon and Fabian Prewett, in the fight. There was a stark terror on the Weasley matriarch's face that looked startlingly familiar. Hermione realized where she’d seen it before: in the mirror after a shower, while she tried to think of anything but her family.

“I’m sorry, Molly,” Hermione said quietly. “We can mail in our orders.”

“I didn’t mean to frighten you, dear.” Molly shook out her red hair, its handful of silver strands catching in the window light. “You’ll be safe, of course. The Order has been standing guard, Aurors too. They’re prepared. It won’t be like that again.” It sounded as if she was trying to convince herself.

“If you truly feel up to it,” Molly conceded, coming back to herself after the moment of panic, “I’ll floo Nymphadora—”

Ron and Ginny attempted to swallow the satisfied grins that were creeping into their expressions; Tonks was both the most entertaining and lenient of the Auror guard, sure to allow them to blow off a little unsupervised steam.

“— and Mad-Eye, of course,” Molly finished.

Her children’s faces fell instantly.

*

Diagon Alley looked the same as the first time Hermione had visited to obtain her textbooks and supplies nearly six years ago, but the warm bustle of the city center had been replaced bya sense of invasive distrust that permeated the air surrounding shoppers.

There was an uncharacteristic briskness to the crowd, with families being especially quick to conduct their business and promptly return to their homes. To the chagrin of shop owners, the usual socializing was moved from the streets into shops, causing a bottleneck effect in entrances and exits.

Hermione saw a few of their schoolmates, but was mercifully prodded along by a gruff Mad-Eye Moody— irritated with having been put on Diagon Alley duty, or babysitting the entire brood, as the gruff, old Auror called it— before she could greet them. She wasn’t sure what people outside of her immediate circle knew about what had happened to her he parents. There had been no funerary announcement, but the attack had been reported in the Prophet. Buried on the eleventh page in a set of blurbs featuring other Muggle-related incidents.

Hermione had bitterly noted that there was no mention of their names, as was typical with Wizarding reporting of muggle casualties. More uncharacteristically, their muggleborn daughter and her escape were also omitted from the article, which Hermione suspected came from either the Order, in an effort to protect Hermione’s privacy, or the Death Eaters, in an attempt to conceal a botched job. Both organizations had contacts in the press, although if last year was any indication, her money was on the Death Eaters.

After taking in the colorful spectacle that was Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes (and, despite her protests, having several love and beauty potions slipped slyly into her bag by Fred and George), Ron and Harry, who had both shot up about five inches this summer, went to Madam Malkin’s with Hermione in tow.

Moody followed them in and standing guard as Harry and Ron squirmed through their fittings, until a silvery wolf appeared with a message. It was a Patronus that Hermione couldn’t place, but based on Moody’s whizzing eye, its message was clearly urgent.

“I’ve got to take care of this,” he growled, glass eye swirling in distrust. It lingered on Hermione’s beaded bag. “At this point, I’ll have to name my bloody ulcer Mundungus. I’ll be right outside, no funny business. If I find out you three managed a way to put yourselves in danger in a bleeding robes shop, you won’t have to worry about Death Eaters— I’ll gut you lot myself.”

Privately, Hermione considered all the other unconventional places where they’d managed to put themselves in danger, but thought it best to pipe down.

Mad-Eye shouldn’t have worried about external factors, because there was no torment like that of shopping with Ron and Harry for robes. As the boys finished their transactions, Hermione absently flipped through racks of cloaks.

When she heard a rush from the shop’s floo, she looked up from the garments, only to see the face that had appeared several times in her recent, fiery nightmares.

Draco Malfoy reeled back at the sight of her, as if he’d been struck. And by the looks of it, he had: Malfoy’s face was sporting a series of tender looking bruises and an angry scar that reached from his ear down to his jaw, as if— Hermione suddenly felt faint with the realization— as if someone had tried to sever it.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Malfoy hissed, giving her a furious once over.

She wasn’t sure what she should have expected, seeing him again. In an effort to bridge the cognitive dissonance, it was like she’d separated him into two Malfoys: the boy from school, all sneers and sleek brooms andPotter Stinks! badges. Then, the other, a slim characterization drawn from the singular interaction they’d had: a pale, sickly Malfoy, radiating desperation, all flashes of gold amulet and black tattoo ink, eyes full of scorn and terror.

She struggled to unite them; separately, they were crude character sketches. Together, they were entirely too human.

There were a number of questions she wanted to ask him: What happened to your face? What happened with the Lestranges? Did you manage to keep your head straight while Voldemort tore through it? Anything I should know about, like, is anyone else being sent to kill me?

“I have every right to be here,” Hermione responded instead. She tossed her hair in a way she knew gave her an awful air of superiority. “Regardless if it offends you to share oxygen with a mudblood.”

There was an almost imperceptible tightening of his eyes, and then Malfoy sighed, raggedly.

“That’s not— don’t be difficult. I meant you shouldn't be out in the open. Are you—” He fell silent, eyes fixed on someone behind her.

“Christ,” Harry muttered, sidling up to Hermione protectively while Ron finished, oblivious, at the till. He took in the Slytherin’s bruised face. “Did you offend another Hippogriff, Malfoy?”

“Harry,” she hissed, reproachful.

Malfoy swept past them imperiously, ignoring the remark in an uncharacteristic show of self control. Before he could get far, the Floo ignited once more, and another blonde figure emerged. Narcissa Malfoy, paler and thinner than ever before, searched for her son with blatant desperation, as if he’d be ripped from her grasp at any minute. She was seemingly unaware of any other presence in the shop, gaze fixed intently on the subject of her distressed focus.

“Draco,” Narcissa whispered, so quietly Hermione had to strain to hear it. “You weren’t to leave the Manor—”

“Go home, Mother,” Malfoy muttered back, trying to speak quickly enough to ensure he wouldn’t be overheard.

“You can send a mail order for robes, darling. Come back with me, and we’ll owl Twilfits—”

“I have business to attend to in Diagon, as you very well know. You should be resting. Father would be much displeased.”

Narcissa recoiled in a manner that almost broke Hermione’s heart, but Draco remained firm,steering his mother gently by the shoulders until she stood in the fireplace once more. He ignored her whispered protests, opening her fist for her and spilling a fistful of Floo powder into her cupped palm. Hermione felt the need to look away, to pretend she wasn’t present for such desperate tenderness between mother and son. By the time she turned back, Narcissa was gone.

Although, she considered, it seemed the Narcissa of Hemione’s memory had been gone for a while. Where was the snobbish woman with an ever lifted chin, who’d eyed Hermione as if she were vermin? The coiffed blonde with glass skin and meticulously fitted robes? Something terrible had happened to the Malfoys in Lucius’s absence, something that had dulled even Narcissa’s seemingly impenetrable shine.

“What’s he doing here?” Ron said, rejoining them before Hermione could shush him. “You alright, Hermione?”

“I’m fine,” she hissed, attempting to steer the two boys towards the door.

“Corralling your livestock, Granger?” For all that had changed in his appearance, Draco Malfoy’s low drawl remained intact. He flipped his wand casually between his long fingers like one would with a percussion mallet, making dexterous figure eights. Show off, Hermione thought ungenerously.

“Leave her alone, Malfoy,” Harry said, wand already drawn.

“Stop it.” Hermione pulled at his arm furiously. “Don’t let him goad you, Harry.”

“Listen to your girlfriend, Potter. It’s not advisable to be drawing a wand on me these days.”

“What do you mean, these days?” Harry asked, and Hermione saw the calculating look on his face, the look that had cost her every house point she’d ever lost.

“What are you going to do Malfoy, tell your father on us?” Ron piped up. “Oh, wait. He’s a bit preoccupied right now, isn't he?”

She expected Malfoy to be baited into reaction, but anger only thrummed quietly across his face, before his expression settled into an unsettling blankness. One wouldn’t be able to note the shift unless you were looking closely, which Hermione realized she was.

“My father is disappointed to have missed the excitement of this summer,” Malfoy lingered on the consonants of excitement in a way that left no confusion to what event he was referring to. “Having a good one, Granger? You look positively dreadful.” He co*cked his head, as if pretending to consider. “Although I suppose that’s nothing new.”

“I’ll kill you, you bastard,” Ron insisted, temper igniting like a signal flare, and raised his arm in preparation to cast. Before Hermione could stop him, Malfoy wordlessly sent Ron’s wand sailing into the window display.

“Look in a mirror, Malfoy,” Hermione spat, summoning Ron’s wand and pocketing it despite the his noise of disapproval. “Fix your face before you start giving out beauty tips.”

With her heart racing, she strode out of the robes shop before Malfoy could retort, giving Harry and Ron no choice but to follow. They muttered as they followed Moody back to the Leaky, voices hushed as to not alert the retired Auror of their altercation.

“Hermione, I swear—”

“That arrogant little—”

“Harry was right,” Hermione said sharply, cutting them both off.

“He’s an arsehole, Hermione, he— wait, I was?”

“We can’t go looking for revenge. And certainly not with Draco Malfoy. What, you think a sixteen year old school boy has infiltrated Voldemort’s inner circle?” Ron winced at her use of the name and Hermione scoffed. “Did you want Moody to find us wands drawn? Funnily enough, I’d like to keep my organs internal, thanks.”

“But—”

“His mother still takes him shopping, for Christ's sake. Whoever did what they did to my family will pay, just like you said. But it wasn’t Malfoy,” she lied.

“We have to be strategic.” She turned to Harry, beseechingly. “If you fly off the handle every time the ponce of Slytherin decides to run his mouth, how will you be of any use to Dumbledore?”

“How do you do that?” Ron muttered, looking at her with something more skeptical than awe. Disbelief, maybe. “Even after everything he said, you’re so…logical. Should have been a bloody Ravenclaw.”

“Everyone says that,” Hermione responded, pressing his wand back into his hand. “But I think the hat got it right.”

“He looked awful, didn’t he?” Harry wondered thoughtfully, once his temper had abated. “Narcissa too. And what did he mean when he said I shouldn’t draw a wand on him these days ?”

“It probably didn’t mean anything,” she assured in an attempt to stem his line of questioning. Once Harry got something into his head, it was full steam ahead, no brakes. “It’s just Malfoy being a complete git, per usual.”

It was only once they had returned to the Burrow, after she had packed her trunk and inhaled a plate of corned beef and boiled potatoes, when she crawled into the spare bed in Ginny’s room and lay staring at the ceiling, that Hermione suspected that before everything had gone to hell in the robes shop, Draco Malfoy had been trying to ask her if she was all right.

Chapter 6: The Hogwarts Express

Chapter Text

Hermione had always loved the train ride to Hogwarts: the gilded compartments with their sliding glass doors, the dumpy older witch who sold marked up sweets. A symbol of transition between seasons and school years, from who she was to who she would be.

Her love for the journey made this year’s trip all the more bittersweet. Instead of waving to her parents and the Weasleys, she left a grim faced Tonks and Moody standing on the platform in their official capacity as Order escorts. The corridors of the train were uncharacteristically quiet; the once frantic gathering and exclamatory greetings had been replaced by neatly closed compartments, hushed voices and heads bent together. It was as if a communal piece of advice had been passed from parent to child on the platform before disembarking: don’t draw any unnecessary attention.

But as Hermione and Ron entered the prefect’s carriage for the customary start of term meeting, she realized that despite the change in the public mood, there were some things that remained ever-so-irritatingly the same.

“Does anyone smell that?” Pansy Parkinson looked up from examining her fingernails to comment on their entrance. She sniffed exaggeratedly in Hermione’s direction. “A bit like a barnyard, isn’t it? Have you been staying on a farm, Granger?”

Ron colored at the insult, opening his mouth to defend the Burrow and likely take Pansy's bait. Hermione beat him to the punch.

“Yes, I’ve been mucking out the trough for your boyfriends. You like a real pig, don’t you Parkinson?”

Ron snorted gratefully, and Pansy scowled, looking around the compartment to see if others had heard her insult be turned back on her. They had.

“Watch yourself, mudbl—” Pansy started to retort, until she saw Hermione’s hand twitch towards her pocketed wand. Wisely, Pansy shut her mouth (word of Marietta Edgecombe’s still prevalent acne was legend, even in Slytherin. And there was no question who would best the other, wand to wand).Unable to fully subdue her pettiness, Hermione waited for Pansy to turn away before sliding her hand into her pocket and jerking her wand ever so slightly up. An almost imperceptible tuft of hair from the back of Pansy’s head fell into her collar, leaving her with a cowlick at the back of her previously perfect bob.

The meeting commenced with the new Head Girl and Boy— Florence Vaisley, a severe looking Slytherin girl with very fair skin, and Roger Davies, a handsome Ravenclaw, whose presence used to cause Hermione to blush embarrassingly when she passed him in the halls— drawing the compartment to attention by taking attendance on a hovering clipboard that marked itself.

There were a few familiar others already seated; she noticed the wide, eager face of Ernie MacMillan and saw Padma Patil’s silky plait swing as she turned to speak with Terry Boot. It’s not that she was actively looking for him, but she couldn’t help but notice—

“Oi, where’s the blonde wanker?” Ron asked loudly, causing a few heads to swivel his way.

Roger frowned at being interrupted and then co*cked his head in consideration.

“Parkinson,” he asked, and immediately regretted it once he caught Pansy’s simpering smile in response. “Where’s Malfoy?”

“Draco had to attend to a family matter,” she responded, blinking coquettishly at the Head Boy. “But I’m sure I’ll be able to attend to anything you may require, Davies.”

“Er, that won’t be necessary,” Roger took a step away, the backs of his knees colliding with the compartment seating. “Please remind your partner that promptness is one of the characteristics required of prefects. I don’t want any missed meetings unless you have a very good reason. Do not forget that being a prefect is a privilege...”

“Being a prefect is a privilege,” Ron mocked as they made their way out of the corridor after discussing patrol schedules. “If they inflated Davies’ head any more, it’d float clean off his body.”

“Oh come off it. You’re just jealous,” Padma, who had never quite forgiven Ron for their disastrous date at the Yule Ball, butted in. “Word is that Roger’s being scouted for the Kestrels.”

“Come off it,” Ron gaped. This, apparently, was significant gossip. “The Kenmore Kestrels want Davies? Goody-two-bollocks?”

As Hermione tuned out Padma’s noises of displeasure, she noticed something in her pocket that had most certainly not been there before. She reached in, only to close her hand around a neatly folded note. When she peeked at it, she could barely make out her surname, written in a penmanship she recognized from years of passing back essays.

“You coming?” Ron gestured at her from ten paces ahead. She hadn’t noticed she’d stopped walking.

“In a bit,” Hermione called, voice higher than normal. “Just need— er— the loo.”

Ron wrinkled his nose, as if they hadn’t all shared a bathroom in the Burrow for weeks. She’d gotten remarkably good at wandless reinforced locking charms.

She waited until Ron was halfway down the corridor and then unfolded the paper surreptitiously. On it were three familiar runes etched in ink. She’d know them anywhere; after all, the last time she’d seen these inscriptions, they'd been hanging on an amulet around her neck.

Hermione made her way towards the emptier compartments at the end of the train where the Slytherins sat, wondering where Malfoy was hiding and what he wanted with her. What was it Pansy had said? A family matter? Was it his mo—

An invisible force shot out from one of the seemingly empty compartments, dragging her inside. On instinct, Hermione kicked backwards.

“Ow, Granger, you twit! You almost kneecapped me!”

Malfoy’s disillusionment charm flickered, before he canceled it all together. He bent down to rub his shin, scowling at her. With him partially doubled over, they were the same height, forcing her to look him squarely in the face.

The scarring she’d seen on his face at Madam Malkin’s had all but disappeared, the work of a competent— and expensive— healer. Unlike Hermione, he’d already mostly changed into his school robes. In contrast to her jumper and denims, he was wearing a starched white shirt and his Slytherin tie, slung half-undone around his neck.

With his scar and his overall casual affect, he looked quite…handsome. She felt a surge of irritation at the thought.

“Are you mad?” Hermione hissed, checking the glass entrance to the compartment for nosy students. “I don’t want to be seen alone with you!”

“Worried your boyfriends, Dim and Dimmer will see? Or will it ruin your precious reputation as holder of the largest stick ever to enter anyone’s arse—”

“What do you want, Malfoy?” She cut him off, unwilling to entertain the end of his sentence.

Their eyes met, a storm hitting the sun, and Hermione came to the uncomfortable realization it was the first time they’d been alone since that day. This factseemed to affect Malfoy as well, his gaze quickly darting away from her own.

“I put a repelling spell on the compartment,” he finally said, after several stilted moments. He brought a hand to his temple as if to smooth away a nonexistent wrinkle. “And an obscurement charm on the glass for good measure. Did you get my note?”

“Yes," Hermione grumped. "How’d you manage that? Disillusion an owl, too?”

“Charmed the parchment to float out of Pansy’s bag once you were close enough.”

Malfoy kicked his feet up so that they bridged the space in the small compartment, resting them on the seat next to her. He appeared to be waiting for her to speak, an obnoxious strategy for someone who wanted to meet in the first place. But Hermione had never been one particularly well versed in silent detentes or holding her tongue. She had so many questions that the sheer quantity tied her tongue, and somehow the least pressing was the only one to slip out.

“Why weren’t you at the prefect meeting?”

Malfoy pursed his lips in poorly managed irritation.

“What, going to scold me as well? I already got a written reprimand from that poncy Ravenclaw tosser. Keen, that one. Term’s not even started yet and he’s already throwing his weight around.”

“Who, Roger?”

“Roger?” Malfoy mimicked in a high, girlish tone. “Not you too, Granger. Half the girls in our year are always going on abouthow his hair falls into his eyes or some sh*te. Did you cream your knickers when he read from the prefect's manual?”

“Ugh,” Hermione exclaimed at his crudeness, but Malfoy continued undeterred, unable to he help himself from goading her.

"Do you fantasize about him supervising your rounds?" He co*cked his head, leering at her figure. Her cheeks heated from the discomfort of his scrutiny. "You come off as a massive prude, but from the way you're blushing, I reckon you'd let him f*ck you. C'mon Granger, would you give it up for Roger 'Two-Pump' Davies?"

“I’m not staying if you’re just going to be crass,” Hermione said dismissively, trying to hide how flustered he'd made her. She stood and moved to push past him, but he reacted with the reflexes of a Seeker, shooting up and holding the compartment door shut to block her exit.

“Wait,” Malfoy barked, effectively blocking escape plan. “You owe me,” he added, looking rather desperate.

Hermione did owe Draco Malfoy, perhaps more than she'd ever owed anyone over anything. With the weight of her debt hanging around her like an albatross, she glared at him, but resumed their seating arrangement. They sat facing each other in silence, Malfoy suddenly refusing to meet her eyes, for several excruciating moments. The light filtering through the compartment window sent shadows splaying across his features as the train sped through the countryside.

"Well?" She prompted, drawing out the single syllable in a manner that made it evident she thought he was wasting her time.

The pale ribbon of his throat bobbed several times as she waited. He clenched and unclenched his jaw.

“Pansy mentioned you were dealing with family issues,” she said, taking in the way his expression fell, a house of cards.

“That’s one way of putting it,” he muttered. He examined the windowsill, dragging a finger across the frame as if checking for dust, ever the posh wanker.“I barely made the train. The Dark Lord suggested that my talents would be put to better use outside of Hogwarts this year.”

Hermione dug her nails into her knee to keep herself from interjecting with a barrage of questions. She was beginning to realize that you needed a very specific strategy, when speaking with Malfoy. He spooked easily, like a deer. He had a tendency to kick off when he wasn’t in control of the conversation. If she wanted him to tell her the truth about why he pulled her into the compartment, she had to allow him to steer. This did not come naturally to Hermione, not at all.

She gave a restrained little incline of her chin, as if to say,yes, I'm listening. Malfoy, clearly expecting her to interrupt, regarded her with suspicion before continuing.

“He said that I needed to learn my place as an acolyte. That my family owed him my servitude.” He shook his blonde head, as if trying to dislodge a particularly nasty thought. “It goes against everything I’ve ever been taught, you know? That the Noble and Ancient House Malfoy could owe him something as precious as their scion. All my life I was told my duty was to be the heir, their guarantee of continued dynasty. Then suddenly, I was being put in soldiers' robes and sent off to do his bidding. As if I were just another disposable pawn.”His disgust was so scalding, it could have powered the train's engine.

Hermione fought a smirk at his use of precious in regards to himself, more intrigued by Malfoy’s bitterness, the questions that seemed to rise from him. She wanted to push: if he, the heir, could be considered replaceable, wasn't everything he’d been taught equally flimsy? Perhaps, Hermione wanted to scream, Malfoy should consider that Voldemort's motivations weren't about maintaining pureblood culture, that they were actually a strategic weaponization of a long history of existing prejudices? A transparent grasp for power?

Strategy, she reminded herself. Don’t startle the wildlife.

“Mother insisted I complete my education," he continued. "She fed the idea to Aunt Bella that I’d be more useful to the cause at school. I’d be able to roam Hogwarts at will: keep an eye on Potter, ensure that the Dark Lord's machinations within the castle are realized. My aunt was rather taken with the idea of advancing our family's position in his ranks, and she proposed it to the Dark Lord. Mother’s always been more clever than father, you see,” he said, with a surprising viciousness. “She wanted me out of the bloody house, and if I know one thing for certain, it's that Malfoy women always get their way.”

His lips twisted into a wry smile at the thought, and Hermione considered how much softer he looked, when he smiled. For a moment, she simply stared: thiswas the most he'd ever explained to her about his situation—about himself— without her prodding. He seemed just as surprised by it, like he’d never planned to reveal this to her, but couldn’t bring himself to stop. As if it had been an eternity since he’d spoken to another person.

Hermione felt an unexpected ache in her throat, like she’d gone hoarse without speaking.She realized she felt sorry for him, a sensation so foreign and unanticipated in regards to Malfoy, that she quickly shoved it back into a closet at the back of her mind.

"Your mother...sounds quite clever."

“She is. She knew I couldn’t be there, with a great big target on my back. Or should I say,” — he grimaced, undoing his sleek silver cufflinks, monogrammed with the letter M — “On my arm.”Malfoy rolled up his sleeve gingerly, avoiding a place of great tenderness, and revealed a charmed bandaged on his inner left forearm.

"Is that—" Hermione remembered the angry look of the Dark Mark, branded into his skin.

“At first, I thought maybe you’d cursed me,” he admitted, unwrapping the gauze. He took in her affronted expression and sneered in return. “Come off it, Saint Granger, I know it wasn’t you. Even a swot like you couldn’t manage this.”

He exposed his inner forearm and Hermione gasped.

The skin surrounding the tattoo looked red and angry. But that wasn’t what caused her to gasp; Malfoy’s Dark Mark, once tattooed in scarlet ink and cleanly delineated, had turned the color of molten tar. The lines of the skull and snake blurred, and a dark sludge-like substance was sliding into the angry, raised veins up Malfoy’s arm. Poised for a trajectory towards his heart. Her stomach turned, threatening to evict her breakfast.

Malfoy waited for her response, the only evidence of his nerves relayed by the tremble of his hand and the tight set of his eyes. From a distance, he'd simply look annoyed, but up close...

“It’s black,” Hermione finally said, scared that any other observation would reveal her true horror regarding the infection.

“Very good, you know your colors.”

“I thought…it's only supposed to burn black like that when you’re called?”

Malfoy shot her a look of pure derision.

“Obviously. Why would I have come to you— to you— if it was doing what it's supposed to?”

Hermione, who despite popular belief was not an expert on everything, rarely had a complete lack of reference for magical phenomena, no doubt born of her secret fear of seeming naive regarding the wizarding world. But she had never seen anything like this before: the darkness of the Mark's magic had turned on its host, and was now poisoning him slowly via his bloodstream. Dark magic left traces—Dolohov's scar on her chest was proof enough of that— but this was different. It was as if the Mark had an understanding that Malfoy had betrayed his master, and was ensuring that now he'd be made to reap the consequences of his treason.

“It looks like blood poisoning.” She interrupted herself to clarify, remembering how woefully inept most wizards were at basic medical terminology. “That’s a Muggle disease, brought on by infection; left untreated it will kill—”

“I know what blood poisoning is,” Malfoy sneered. "I'm cursed, not incompetent."

“Well most wizards don’t so—”

“It’s not blood poisoning.”

“Well, obviously! I was just comparing; there are a lot of wizarding illnesses that mirror Muggle ones. Don’t get shirty with me.”

Malfoy looked out the compartment window as she examined his arm from every angle, casting a basic diagnostic charm that revealed signs of medical distress. Malfoy's immune system had gone haywire, body working futilely to overcome the threat.

“It’s almost funny, isn’t it?" Malfoy said, and Hermione looked up. They had entered Scotland, the green of the Highlands shimmering in greeting. Hills rippling, more sea than meadow. "Blood poisoning," he clarified, smiling without humor. "I’d been talking sh*te about the filth in your veins for years now. What’s that saying, about turning tables?”

She reached out carefully to touch the flesh surrounding the infection, but drew her hand back once she caught the icy warning in Malfoy’s eyes. He did not want her to touch him, but whether it was because of her own blood designation or the pain he was experiencing was anyone’s guess.

“The Mark didn't look like this before.” When we burned my house down, left unsaid.

“No, this is recent. I think that’s what sped it up though. I think,” Malfoy’s voice lowered with misplaced shame. “I think it knows I helped you.”

“The tattoo? Like it has a sentient mind?” Her eyebrows raised of her own accord in a look of disbelief that Ron always said made her look like McGonagall. “Even dark magic has limits, Malfoy.”

“Always so condescending,” he spat in her direction. “You know everything there is to know about dark magic, do you? Sorry, was it you who grew up in a family where ancient, dangerous knowledge was passed around at dinner like table bread? Oh no, that was me, wasn't it.”

“Enlighten me, then.” Frustrated, she tucked her a curl behind her ear, only for it to spring free. Malfoy’s eyes followed the movement and Hermione fought the urge to smooth her hair flat before he could say something rude about her appearance.

“Your kind would never be privy to this sort of information,” he started, fully ignoring the mocking way she mouthed your kind. “The basis lies in an obscure branch of the Dark Arts that remained restricted to families with a lineage pure enough to merit its preservation. Everyone knows Demonology went out of fashion thousands of years ago, but its remnants still linger in several branches of magic today. They still teach the subject at Durmstrang, their old headmaster Karkaroff was considered a specialist until his… untimely end. Certainly even you have heard of the Mark of the Beast?”

“Certainly,” she responded, unwilling to reveal that most of her knowledge on that term in particular came from a muggle religious text and several years of being dragged to Sunday school.

“I believe that to be the Dark Lord’s inspiration— many see the Dark Mark as a sort of Protean Charm, so his followers will come when called, but in my opinion that’s a very single-minded way to look at things. It’s not a way to send a message; it’s a mark of conjuring. Evidence of a promise, a trade. In the oldest texts, it’s written that magic was traded by demons during summonings. Dark magic in exchange for human energy, parts of our magical cores. The evidence of such trades was permanent. A wizard who accepted power from the demon always bore the evidence: the Mark of the Beast.”

“How do you know all this?” Hermione asked, reluctantly impressed at the depth of his analysis. She had a begrudging understanding that Malfoy had always been bright, intelligent on the occasions that he’d made an effort, even surpassing her marks in Potions once or twice. But it always seemed that he considered his studies below him, as if making an effort in school was too plebeian. If anything, his disinterest was evidence of his status: he didn’t have to try hard, did he? Trying was gauche.Malfoy was a title in itself.

“I spent a lot of time in the manor library this summer,” Malfoy admitted. “It was a convenient hiding place.”

Hermione pulse skipped over the words manor library. Christ, how rich was he?

“If what you’re saying is true— don’t look at me like that, Malfoy, I’m not basing my understanding of an entire branch of magic on whatever your ancestor, Pompous Git the Third, wrote in his bloody journal— if it’s true, it means dark magic is rooted in the act of trade? Why didn’t humans try to trade magic with goblins or elves? Did wizards attempt to barter their magic? How does one separate a part of the magical core without killing the individual?” She rattled off questions at rapid fire pace, her mind whirring with the possibilities.

“Ask Pompous Git the Third,” Malfoy sniffed, unhelpful as ever.

“If Demonology is still a part of the Dark Arts, where are the remnants of the practice in contemporary magic?”

“Granger," Malfoy drawled her name in a long suffering tone, as if she were acting obtuse on purpose. "Where do you think Ancient Runes come from?”

“Voldemort’s mark was inspired by runes?” Runes were an ancient branch of magic, so old that their popularity had been usurped by charms and wandwork. They were a specialty for wardmasters and the historically inclined, not the average wizard.

“In theory," Malfoy considered. "Yes.”

Although she’d never tell him, she found his connection quite brilliant, and it struck Hermione as incredibly un-Malfoy-like to downplay it.

“Malfoy, what you’re saying has extraordinary implications. The Mark was always regarded as a form of communication, or as proof of affiliation. But as a physical manifestation of an oath, it would have to be approached completely differently. It’s more like an Unbreakable Vow, isn’t it? Is that why it’s infected, because you broke your oath to Voldemort when you helped me?”

"Aces, Granger," he answered bitterly, offering a little jerk of his chin at her in confirmation. “It looks as if I’ve made a rather bad deal with a demon.”

“Why are you telling me this?” She asked, although she’d already realized the answer. In fact, she’d had a suspicion since their forced reunion in Hampstead Garden. Since Dumbledore asked her about Malfoy’s Dark Mark and his emotional state in the broom shed. Maybe she hadn’t known about the tattoo (although she now had a sneaking suspicion Dumbledore had), but in her heart of hearts, Hermione knew that whatever business she had with Draco Malfoy was far from being over.

“Why, I’m appealing to your Gryffindor sensibilities. Isn’t it you lot, who’s always going on about the sense of duty? Doing the right thing and all that tosh?” He began rewrapping his bandages, before rolling down his sleeve.

“I’m not a healer, or even particularly versed in cursed wounds. You should go to Dumbledore, or Madam Pomfrey—”

“I don’t trust bloody Dumbledore, much less the school matron. If anyone else finds out, if he finds out, I’m a dead man. I’ve got the literal evidence of a betrayal written on me. Do you know what happens to Death Eaters who betray the Dark Lord, Granger?”

“I’m not qualified—”

“I saved your life.” He cut her off. Voice like a dull blade, requiring excessive force. “Now it’s your turn to save mine.”

“You didn’t save me,” she responded weakly. “You warned me. Gave me a sporting chance, if anything.”

Malfoy leaned in, his hands on his knees and brought his face so close to Hermione that she could feel him exhale, his proximity creating gooseflesh up and down her arms.

“I saved you," he said with precise intonation, and although it was a statement it sounded remarkably like a threat. "I saved you and your poor, helpless Muggle parents, and we both know it. It was probably the stupidest thing I’ve done, which is saying something.”

“You know, you’re terrible at asking for help,” Hermione bristled. "Have you ever considered the wordplease?"

"Malfoy's do not beg." He raised his chin with a dignity that made him seem older and much more encumbered by the world.In the late afternoon sun filtering through the train’s windows, he appeared marginally less pinched and pale as he had in the robes shop. The light caught on the lingering evidence of his treason, a silvery line running from his temple to his jaw. Yes, it had been expertly healed, but even the most accomplished of healers wouldn’t be able to draw out every sign of a cursed wound. She would know; the mark Dolohov had left on her chest hadn’t shown any sign of improvement despite potions and poultices. The angle also revealed a rosy blush staining the high points of his severe cheekbones, although that could have been anger or— should the infection have progressed to such a point— fever.

“Are you running a temperature?” She asked, an abrupt change of subject. He had an infection, she realized, and his body was responding as a human body would, regardless if he were wizard or muggle. This information would surely devastate him, something she'd certainly deploy as a weapon, had he not been in such dire straits.

“A what?” Malfoy seemed bemused. "I don't know, I suppose it's twenty degrees out. What's this got to do with the weather?"

“Not the temperature,” she explained disparagingly, as she dug around in her shoulder bag. After the events of this summer, she’d taken to carrying a first aid kit with her, consisting of both wizarding and muggle supplies. Was it an active manifestation of her unresolved trauma? Yes. Would it come in handy? Almost definitely. “You bloody purebloods don’t even know enough to take a few paracetamol when you're ill—”

“What’s parasomethingtol?”

“Muggle fever reliever,” she explained. "It comes in a little capsule that you swallow, like a potion but more compact. It's very efficient."

“Muggle medicine? That is positively medieval,” Malfoy said, wrinkling his nose. “Don’t they chop off their limbs when they've got cuts and scrapes? I’ve got a fever relieving potion in my trunk, I'll just— Granger?”

Hermione had stopped her search, going suddenly shock still. She was forming a suspicion about the Dark Mark— about wounds inflicted by dark magic in general— that was tied to what she considered the wizarding world’s largest and most blatant blind spot. Of course Voldemort wouldn’t think twice about the failsafes involved in poisoning any disloyal followers, not if they were Muggle in nature.

“Oh, we’re so dirty,” Hermione muttered, mind spinning. “So inferior, that no one would even dream—”

“What are you blithering on about?” Malfoy questioned, snapping his fingers in front of her face rudely.

“I’m not sure yet." She chewed her bottom lip in consideration. Voldemort had ensured that if the Mark's dark magic didn't kill Malfoy, the infection would. She was almost positive the infection would be resistant to magical treatments; while Malfoy's fever potion may manage his symptoms, any curative tonics would undoubtedly do him no good. Could she treat the wound as first human, and then magical? Attack the dilemma from two diametrically opposed points? "I’d have to experiment a bit. But I have a rather, er, unusual potential solution.”

“Well?” Malfoy asked, expectant. Even his questions had a tendency to sound like demands, an aftereffect of his posh way of speaking.

“Give me some time,” she cautioned. “I have to do a bit of research. Speaking of this library refuge of yours— would you be able to have some of those volumes sent to school? I highly doubt that Hogwarts stocks instructions for demonic summoningsin the Restricted Section.”

*

The Hogwarts welcome feast was always a spectacle to behold, but the current year's efforts jockeyed for the best spread Hermione had seen yet. The Gryffindor table was filled with silver serving platters carrying a number of opulent dishes: foie gras terrines garnished with edible flowers and served with crusty brioche; vichyssoise served in delicate porcelain tureens; roast saddle of venison in a rich red wine reduction; whole roasted pheasant stuffed with chestnuts and served with a velvety game sauce; duch*ess potatoes piped into elegant rosettes and baked until golden brown; and buttered asparagus spears, accompanied by a boat of hollandaise sauce. A feast for the eyes and palate alike.

“Hermione, where were you on the train?” Ron asked once the sorting had finished and the students were free to tuck in, his voice muffled by his efforts to consume every edible option at once.

By the time Hermione finally shaken off Draco Malfoy with a promise to help and returned to their compartment, she’d only had a few minutes before the train pulled in to throw on her robes. She gazed forlornly at her appearance; hair escaping her elastic, circles under her eyes nearly the color of plums. She pinched her cheeks for a bit of color and charmed her hair as smooth as it would go, before abandoning her efforts and hurrying into the carriages. She’d been the last to sit at the Gryffindor table, pointedly looking anywhere but the Slytherin table across the hall.

"You seemed to have forgotten the order of things: chew, then swallow, then speak, Ronald."

Ron rolled his eyes at her, but did not drop his line of questioning. “Got another Time-Turner this year?”

“Not bloody likely,” Harry interrupted. “We smashed the lot in the Department of Mysteries, didn’t we?”He dished Hermione a plentiful serving of potatoes, adding a large carving of venison and some freshly baked bread before she could protest.At the Burrow, Harry had started a habit of scooping large quantities of supper onto Hermione’s plate before he served his own, something that had apparently not ceased upon their arrival to school. It caused her heart to ache sweetly; she knew that after a childhood of near starvation, this was how Harry expressed concern. Because of this, she made an effort to choke down some of the potatoes; she didn’t think she’d be able to manage any meat after spending an afternoon looking at Malfoy’s horrible arm.

“A shame for Hippogriff refugees everywhere,” Hermione said, referencing their time travel induced midnight flight with Buckbeak. Eager to pivot the conversation, she turned the question back to the boys. “What about you two? Good train ride, then?”

Ron shrugged. “Put on my robes and chatted with Dean and Seamus after the meeting." He smirked, adding, "Harry was busy at an audience with his fan club.”

“They’re not my fan club!" Harry protested hotly. "It was the new Potions Master, Slughorn. He caught me leaving the compartment and forced me into to this demented Slug Club luncheon. He’s a nightmare! I was stuck between McLaggen and Zabini for hours!”

Hermione allowed herself to be lost in their laughter, poking at Harry alongside Ron, and falling over in a fit of giggles when he started up a solemn rendition of “O Chosen One” to the approximate tune of "O Canada." Ginny promptly joined her brother in jest, from where she was sitting a few spaces down with Dean, who was staring at his girlfriend, seemingly in awe of his good luck.

After the closeness that accompanied sharing Ginny's bedroom, it felt odd, sitting separately from the youngest Weasley. Hermione had almost forgotten that at Hogwarts, they ran in very different social circles: while Hermione was bookish and practical, Ginny was sporty and brightly funny. Never the top of the class, but often the center of an adoring crowd, usually composed of more wizards than witches. Besides her demeanor, Ginny was also terribly pretty, with a sheet of flame-colored hair and wicked grin, like a little sprite. Hermione couldn’t help but notice the way Harry’s eyes had started lingering her way, catching like a broken zipper on movement of Dean’s hand, reaching for hers.

“It’s nice to see you laughing, Hermione.” Ron’s painful earnestness caught her off guard.

She’d forgotten, for a lovely second, about her parents. About her lies, and her involvement with the Death Eater sitting across the way. The weight of keeping secrets, which seemed to only magnify, left a heaviness in her chest. She looked up at the head table where Dumbledore sat with his hands clasped, wondering how he bore it all. Surely, no one held more secrets than the Headmaster himself.

“It’s nice to laugh,” she admitted, spearing some asparagus off Ron's plate with her fork. “I’ve a terrible feeling laughter is going to be sparse this year.”

Chapter 7: Liquid Luck

Chapter Text

On her first day of classes, Hermione was woken from a fitful, partial dream state by a muggle alarm clock, blaring the Spice Girls. She had slept incredibly poorly, having recently fallen victim of a series of nightmares where she lost her magic and was forced to watch her parents' increasingly violent deaths. So the very limited store of patience Hermione had for the owner of the device was depleted by the alarm's first chorus, insisting that if the proverbial you wanted to be the singer's lover, they'd have to get with her friends.

“Lavender!”

“Huh?” Lavender’s voice, muddled with sleep, emitted from drawn curtains. "Five more minutes, Mum!"

“Turn this bloody thing off!”

Lavender Brown's blonde ringlets, wrapped around a dozen velcro rollers, emerged from the burgundy velvet. The girls' beds were always chosen by drawing licorice wands, and Lavender had gotten first pick, the four-poster in the coveted space closest to the tower window. So I can watch quidditch practice, she had explained coyly, with an inflection that assured Hermione that she wasn’t spectating from sheer love of the game.

“Keep your pants on, I can’t find the button!”

“You're a witch,” Hermione cried in exasperation. "Use your wand!"You daft bint, she thought ungraciously.

The alarm clock was a new addition to their shared room on the second highest level of the Gryffindor tower: a small plastic monstrosity with a face containing the figures of five modelesque women, and the word “SPICE!” emblazoned in bold print. Hermione had shared a room with Lavender for five years and had put up with a great deal of histrionics, but this was the first year that she was genuinely contemplating sleeping in the greenhouses.

“Why did you bring that thing,” Hermione muttered. “And why does it have to play the bloody Spice Girls?”

“Leave it,” Parvati responded, peeking around the doorway from the bathroom the three of them shared. Her hair was wrapped in a towel and her voice was edged with warning. Parvati had placed herself squarely in the crossfire between Lavender and Hermione ever since fourth year, after what was now referred to as The Borrowed Jumper Incident.“We’ve not even had twenty-four hours of peace. I’m not having you two squabbling the first week.”

“My mum packed it with my things before I left for school,” Lavender said thickly, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. “We were listening to this song, like, all summer. Mum is obsessed with Posh.”

Hermione felt something low and swooping in her gut at the thought of Lavender’s muggle mother, folding the clock in with her daughter’s socks. It created an ugly clench in her abdomen.What would her own mother have packed for her as a token of remembrance, had Hermione not robbed her of the opportunity?

You did what you had to do, she reminded herself. This had become somewhat of a mantra for her as of late, but the repetitions did little to dull the aching guilt, or cull the loneliness that had consumed her ever since she cast the memory charm. What you had to do. Her last connections to the muggle world— the world that had shown her so many wonders, that had raised her for eleven years— severed. She hadn’t belonged there in a long time. But she’d never really belonged here, either.

“Just keep it away from me,” she said to Lavender, trying to soften her tone. Failing, if Lavender’s expression was any indication.

“Yes, your highness,” Lavender stuck her nose into the air. “Apologies for not submitting my clock for your approval.”

Parvati let out a giggle, quickly schooling her face into apathy.

Hermione sighed, internally. It would always be the two of them. Whatever impartiality Parvati attempted to provide, drafted as peacekeeper in the ongoing fight of Granger v. Brown, it was overshadowed by her kinship with the blonde. Hermione didn’t blame her, but sometimes, it wounded the tender part of her that just wanted to be chosen .

The SPICE! alarm must have been a harbinger of bad fortune, because the rest of her day progressed in a similar fashion.She had a shower that seemed to mitigate between too hot and too cold. Forgot to brush some Sleekeazy’s through her hair before her drying charm, leaving her with the volume of a small nimbus cloud atop her head. She got caught in the trick stair, and at breakfast, her first sip of tea scalded her. Distracted by the bloody paper, which thankfully had no news of attacks, she dragged her sleeve though Ron’s syrupy plate.

Oh yes, the day had all the markings of a downward spiral, and if Hermione were wise, she'd have given up and gone back to bed. But she was obstinate to the point of masochism, and so she continued towards further suffering.

Defense, normally one of the lessons she looked forward to—well, when the subject’s teachers were competent and not bloodthirsty lunatics— was spoiled by the presence of Snape in his newly found post. And even worse, it was one of two lessons she shared with the Slytherins in back to back blocks. Defense and Double Potions, one after the other.

About half the Slytherins had elected to continue with Defense after O.W.L.S; she suspected the other half, more interested in the Dark Arts portion of the course, were seeking private instruction. But because the gods had frowned upon her, Malfoy was among those practicing nonverbal spells in the classroom, lazily disarming Zabini and tossing him his wand back, all with his mouth sealed into a grim line. Wanker.

Hermione had a good grasp on nonverbal spells and had long practiced the theory of turning her magic inward instead of out. After all, she’d repressed her magic for eleven years. She’d had a solid, if not traumatizing, understanding of what it was like to channel emotion and intention without having the words to express herself.

Meanwhile, Ron’s face had grown nearly purple as they practiced, as if screwing up his eyes and looking a bit constipated would suffice in place of a summoning charm.Somehow this was still better than Harry’s attempt, in which he—bless him—managed a very verbal shield charm, strong enough to fling Snape backwards, landing him his first detention of the term. A record; he hadn’t even made it to lunch.

The Gryffindor table was bursting with life: friends catching up after a summer apart, classmates going over schedules and swapping stories of their first lessons. In an effort to avoid the inevitable— how was your summer, Hermione? —and the answering — complete sh*t, I cursed my parents and now everyone thinks they're dead; also Draco Malfoy is cashing in on a favor — she kept her gaze disassociated, in the vague direction of the tomato soup.

Ron leaned over, breaking her concentration to dunk a piece of sourdough in her bowl.

“Ugh, Ron! Can’t you just get your own?”

“Nah, stolen from yours always tastes better."

“Ooh,” Seamus crowed, “Did you hear that, Hermione? If yours tastes better, can I have a try?” Upon hearing the double entendre, Ron immediately went as red as the offending soup in question.

“Oh come off it—”

“I’m going to Potions,” Hermione announced, pulling herself upright. She was certain her cheeks were blazing. She pointedly looked only at Harry, ignoring Ron’s flush and Seamus’ sh*t eating grin. “I’m not getting stuck with the wonky cauldron this year.”

“Oi, wait for us,” Harry said, attempting to cram half a baguette into his mouth in one fell swoop. The result was a small avalanche of crumbs, falling down the front of his robe.“Didn’t I tell you?” Harry grinned around a mouthful of bread. “Since it’s Slughorn, not Snape, we can skirt through with an Acceptable. That keeps us eligible for the Aurors!”

“Yeah,” Ron added, less excited. “Lucky us. Two more years of Potions.”

Two more years of Potions, indeed. And at the N.E.W.T. level, which meant double blocks, ensuring that she got the gift of seeing Malfoy not only for an hour and a half that morning, but also for her entire afternoon.

The Potions classroom was just as dark and damp as she remembered, but it had been the victim of a clear attempt at sprucing up: a thick Persian style rug lay by the desk, accompanied by an overstuffed velvet armchair wide enough to comfortably situate a walrus. Oil paintings of various Potioneers in hung on the dungeon walls in gilded frames. Even Snape’s classic pewter cauldron had been replaced.In its place stood a series of much finer, silver and gold cauldrons, filled with different brews. They were all engraved around the rim, personalized with some sort of Runic marking—

“Careful there! We wouldn’t want any students falling in!” Slughorn’s gregarious voice cut through her train of thought and she stepped back from the cauldrons immediately.

“Sorry, sir. I was just curious about the engravings on your cauldrons, are they—”

“Already groveling for extra credit, are you?” A familiar drawl cut in and she turned towards the offending voice’s owner.Malfoy brushed by her without excusing himself, shooting a nasty look over his shoulder. He was one of four Slytherins in their year that had elected to continue with the subject: Blaise Zabini and Theodore Nott were already hunched together muttering in the back of the classroom, as Daphne Greengress took out a hairbrush and ran it through her glossy, wheat colored hair.

“Hermione doesn’t need extra credit,” Harry piped up, loyal as ever. “Snape never gave her a single extra point, and she still managed to beat your scores, what was it? Oh yeah, every single term.”

Don’t blush, Hermione willed herself. Don’t you dare blush. Malfoy glowered, unable to retort as nastily as he'd like to while in the presence of a teacher.

“Oh-ho!” Slughorn exclaimed, eyes glinting excitedly in a way that let Hermione know he’d misjudged the entire situation. “Do we have a bit of a rivalry here? We’ll have plenty of time for that, in fact...” He trailed off, theatrically building suspense as he pulled a bottle of something golden from the drawer of his desk. “Today, we’ll be having a little friendly competition.”

Hermione settled into a seat at the station closest to the solid gold cauldron, which was emitting a captivating scent she couldn't quite place. The four Ravenclaws took another table, and so Ernie Macmillian, along with Harry and Ron, evened out her workstation, the latter seeming suddenly disgruntled.

"Did you see Malfoy's face," Harry crowed, nudging Hermione with his elbow as he slid in to the seat beside her. "He couldn't even say anything back because everyone knows it's true."

“Everyone knows Hermione don’t need extra credit,” Ron added tersely, frowning at the floor. “I mean, Iknow that she's brilliant, too.”

She exchanged a what on earth is going on look with Harry, who shrugged helplessly in response.

“Er,” she responded. “Alright then. Thanks, I guess.”

Ron, uncheered by her response, dragged his feet as he followed Harry to ask Slughorn for extra textbooks. She set up her station in their absence, lighting a flame to preheat the cauldron with a flick of her wand. flipped open her copy of Libatius Borage’s Advanced Potion Making, enjoying the sound of a fresh textbook’s crisp pages, the cracking of the spine, the—

“What are you two fighting about? Stop, you’ll break something!”

Harry and Ron looked up from where they were squabbling over the workbench, sufficiently chastised. Ron darted to the other side of the station with a slightly less banged up edition of the textbook Harry was holding.

“Hermione,” Harry said, in a tone he only used when he needed her to check over one of his assignments. “Please switch textbooks with me.”

“What? No! I actually prepared to take Potions this year, unlike some people.”

“I’m sh*t at Potions and I can't see the instructions under all this scribbling,” he wheedled, flipping open the textbook to demonstrate. The pages had indeed been vandalized, by lines and lines of tight script. Some instructions had been violently crossed out, as if the previous owner had been personally offended by the textbook's author.

"Absolutely not."

“I need to do well if I want to be an Auror, McGonagall just gave me the world's longest lecture about it. Come on, I bet you already know how to brew these blindfolded.”

Hermione pursed her lips, trying not to consider his obvious attempts at baiting her with a challenge, something she'd never been adept at backing down from. This was, of course, incredibly Gryffindor of her; she meant it when she said the Sorting Hat had chosen her house correctly.

“Please, Hermione. I’ll do your butchering for a week!”

She pinched the bridge of her nose in exasperation. On one hand, Hermione hated the butchering aspect of potions, still squeamish when beheading newts and de-spleening lizards. On the other hand, the book looked like it had a full manifesto in its margins.

“Fine,” she acquiesced and Harry cheered, handing her the offending copy. “But I want two weeks of newt duty. And you’re ordering yourself your own copy as soon as we get back to the tower.”

“Cheers,” Harry responded, shooting her a grin. She cracked open the second hand book with a long suffering sigh.

“I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about this group of students!” Slughorn drew the class' attention with a sharp clap. He sent a wink to their table, undoubtedly meant for Harry. “Let’s see those talents in action! I’ve prepared a few rare brews for you to identify; you’ll have to make these sorts of potions on your N.E.W.T.s, so best to get well acquainted early. Can anyone tell me what this one is?”He pointed at a colorless substance in the cauldron farthest from her table.

She felt her hand hit the air before she’d given it permission. Bugger. She wouldn’t be losing the designation of swot anytime soon. Slughorn called on her, his eyes twinkling.

“Veritaserum, sir,” Hermione answered. “The truth potion.” The potion Snape had administered to the impostor Moody two years ago.

“Very good! Now this one, a bit more obscure, you’ll see the viscosity is a bit muddy—”

“That's Polyjuice Potion.” She did not add how closely she’d been acquainted with that particular brew. Harry grinned at her madly, as if he knew exactly what disastrous encounter she was picturing. It had taken Pomfrey two days to get rid of her tail…

“Excellent, excellent. And this—”

Hermione did not bother to raise her hand.

“Amortentia,” she said, gesturing to the gold cauldron closest to her. “The most powerful love potion in the world.” It was rather irresponsible of Slughorn to have it sitting out, in Hermione’s opinion.

“Probably the most deadly of the lot,” Slughorn declared to Malfoy’s smirk. “Oh yes, if you’d seen the things I have seen, you’d agree, there is nothing more dangerous.”

“It’s supposed to smell like whatever is most attractive to you,” Hermione continued. “For example, I smell freshly mown grass and new parchment and—”

She cut herself off before she could finish her sentence, cheeks heating in a way that ensured she was blushing all the way to her shoulders. She also smelled pine and cashmere and something numbing— peppercorn, maybe. As delicately fresh as a summer night's breeze, and warmly spiced, like mulled wine at the Christmas markets.

“May I ask your name, Miss—”

“Hermione Granger,” she answered, suddenly fascinated by the buckles on her shoes. This was the interaction she went to whenever she introduced herself to any person of prominence in the magical world, the one that ultimately ended with: where is your family from? No, really from? She willed herself to ignore the snigg*ring coming from the Slytherin table.

“Of the Dagworth-Grangers? Why, I believe it was Hector, who started the society of remarkable potioneers—”

“I don’t think so, sir.” She swallowed, throat suddenly coated with sand. “I’m, er, a Muggleborn.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Malfoy lean over and mutter something to Zabini. She didn’t have to be a clairvoyant to know what kind of comment it was. Slughorn; however, beamed.

“Ah! My best friend is a muggleborn! Harry’s mentioned you, haven’t you m’boy?” Harry looked nauseous as Slughorn fixed his attention upon them. “He said you were the top of the class.”

Hermione’s stomach flipped with pride, and she was sure any modicum of faux-aloofness had evaporated from her expression.

“Did you really tell him that?” she whispered to Harry, grinning.

“Er, might have.”

"Well, what’s so impressive about that?” Ron whispered. “You are the best in our year, I would have told him so if he’d asked me.”

Honestly, why had he gotten so surly? She shushed him, turning back to the lecture.

The room seemed to collectively lean in as Slughorn explained the final potion, Felix Felicis, which if taken properly, gave the drinker extraordinary luck. She wasn’t sure of the legality of offering up a vial as a prize for the best Draught of Living Death, but Slughorn seemed to have a don’t ask don’t tell, old boys club mentality, which seemingly provided him the abilities to skirt the rules.

The potential of the prize sharpened the focus in the room, whispers suddenly abated in favor of rifling feverishly though textbooks. Although she’d done everything in her power to ignore him since their altercation on the train, she couldn’t help but notice how he sat up straighter, suddenly pinning Slughorn with his full attention. She figured if anyone needed a bit of luck, it was probably Draco Malfoy.

To her annoyance, the page with the instructions she needed had been almost entirely obstructed by annotations. She could barely make out the script, and had to squint as she struggled with cutting sopophorous beans, tricky. Half of the line was crossed out in ink, handwritten directions in its place.

Crush using the flat side of a silver dagger.

She worried her lip between her teeth. At the other end of her table, Ron was cursing the tar-like substance that had thickened in his cauldron. The sopophorous beans that Ernie had been attempting to chop rolled under their seats.

She looked around to find other students in a similar state of desperation, with the notable exception of Malfoy. He was clearly favoring his left arm and winced when Zabini brushed his right side, where she knew his infected Dark Mark must be plaguing him. Besides that he appeared as cool as ever, only given away by the tightness of the skin around his eyes and the speed at which he was crushing his beans and draining the liquid into a vial. Crushing them, just as her scribbled directions had ordered, with the side of a knife.

As if he had a sixth sense for being watched, he looked up, meeting her gaze. His eyes narrowed into the universal expression for, what are you looking at?

She dropped her stare quickly down to her cauldron, and retrieved her silver knife from her potions kit. The effect was immediate and the beans started releasing juice.

“Crush them, don’t dice them,” she told Harry, who was a step behind, still cutting up his valerian root. He barely seemed to register her instruction.

Her potion had turned a deep eggplant, and she consulted the second hand textbook once more.

Counterclockwise for maximum clarity.

The technique had worked for the sopophorous beans, hadn’t it? Dare she break with what the newer edition was dictating? The knife technique was advanced enough for Malfoy to know about it. She squared her shoulders and began to stir.

“Counterclockwise,” she informed Harry and Ron. “Ignore the book.”

“Ignore the book?” Ron squawked incredulously. “Who are you and what have you done with Hermione?”

Despite her assistance, each member of her table bungled the recipe. Harry’s attempt remained a shade of purple bordering on puce, a telltale sign he’d not been counting his stirs. Ron seemed to have given up halfway and Ernie was vigorously mixing something with the consistency of pancake batter.

Twenty minutes later, her potion had turned a pale lilac, just as it should. She wiped a bead of sweat from her neck, flushed from the heat of the classroom but pleased at the outcome of her potion. Slughorn passed over each cauldron, exclaiming in delight at Malfoy’s.

“Must have learned something from your godfather, isn’t that right? I’ll be happy to report your progress back to Severus!”

Malfoy glared, as if the very idea of Slughorn praising him to Snape was poisonous.

“But I think Miss Granger might have you beat!” Slughorn beamed at her, buttons of his waistcoat straining as he rocked his stance back and forth. “The brightest witch of your year, indeed.”

Perhaps this day hadn’t been the worst, after all.

He pressed a vial of golden liquid into her awaiting palm. Her peers let out a few half-hearted claps. Ron’s potion emitted an awful bubbling sound that could only be described as flatulence.

Ron and Harry packed up at warp speed, assisted by the fact they didn’t have potions kits with them.

“Gotta avoid Slughorn,” Harry muttered. The portly professor was indeed making his way over towards Harry, a hopeful glint in his eyes. “Meet you outside?”

“Go,” Hermione advised. “He’s making a beeline your way.”

“That should have been mine, Granger,” Malfoy called as she packed her scales, nodding towards the vial in her hand with a gaze so intense she was surprised her robes didn’t catch fire. He was just as flushed as she was, with sweat-dampened roots darkening his platinum hair.

“Maybe I’m just better at potions than you,” she responded, with a false sweetness. “Slughorn will have to tell Snape that, too.”He pushed past her into the corridor, jostling her school bag obnoxiously.Arse.

Hermionemet Ron and Harry from where they were loitering outside the classroom and followed them up to the Gryffindor tower. She reached into her back, thumbing the vial absently. Alongside the potion, a folded note had appeared. She took it out surreptitiously and unfolded it.

Headmaster's Office, it read, written in Malfoy’s elegant penmanship. Sunday at eight.

A bolt of simmering dread consumed her momentarily. Nothing good ever came from a directive to the Headmaster’s office, and nothing good ever came from an altercation with Malfoy, which set Hermione’s weekend up for the world’s sh*ttiest double feature.

Back in her room, a silencing charm cast around her curtains, she cracked the old Potions textbook open once more. She ran her fingers over the pages, annotated with a number of spells and suggestions, edits for recipes and apparent inventions. Counter-curses for various states of disembowelment, spells marked for enemies. Whoever had owned it previously had a marked interest in violent spells, but excellent advice when it came to potions.

She examined the inner cover carefully, where there was an inscription written in the same slanted handwriting as the annotations.

This Book is the Property of the Half-Blood Prince.

Chapter 8: The Unbreakable Vow

Chapter Text

Hermione was used to receiving mail at Hogwarts: letters from her parents, orders for new course materials, and lately, the occasional missive exchange with Order members. Even as she resigned herself to owl post— why didn’t wizards just use a magical postal service? — she’d never truly get used to the fanfare of a parcel careening into her morning tea.

Her package was attached to a great-horned owl, larger than the other birds delivering mail at the Gryffindor table and twice as fierce looking. The owl, while intimidating, was rather handsome, with tawny plumage and twin protruding tufts over its brows, giving it a devilish air. It nipped her finger while she attempted to extricate a package from its talons.

“Ouch— give me a second, you vulture!”

“Careful, or it’s going to take your fingers off.” Ginny sat diagonal from Hermione, deftly weaving her fiery hair into a braid. She had her broom propped against the table and wore athletic clothing: a jersey that looked like it was once Bill or Charlie’s based on its sheer size, track pants, and trainers.Even dressed down, she was noticeably pretty.“Whose owl even is that?”

“I’m not sure,” she replied. Finally, she freed the package. The owl swooped off without an acknowledgement, leaving her bleeding.

This, Hermione thought, is why she had a cat.

The package was secured by twine and neatly wrapped in nondescript brown parchment paper. She muttered a diffindo, slicing through the wrappings, to reveal an ancient looking book, bound in red leather that once must have been crimson, but now had faded to the color of rust. It was embossed with peeling gold lettering.

The Lost Art of Demonology.

No doubt a volume from the Malfoy library, delivered after their conversation on the train. She hadn’t forgotten her promise to help Malfoy; it had, in fact, remained a buzzing pestilence at the back of her head, an albatross she wished desperately from which to free herself. She cast her gaze to the Slytherin table, where Pansy Parkinson was holding court, a dispassionate Malfoy by her side, staring into his tea as if it contained the answers to the universe.

Look up, Hermione urged. Look up. But Malfoy didn’t even twitch her way. She gave up on her unsubtle attempts at catching his eye and fixed herself a new cup of tea: splash of milk, two spoonfuls of sugar.

“That’s a bit…obscure,” Ginny leaned over, noting the title with curiosity. “Demonology?”

“Research project,” Hermione invented. “Doing a bit of extra credit for Runes, on, er, unbinding rituals.” This, albeit based partially in truth, was apparently dry enough to erase the last of Ginny’s interest.

“Are you flying today?” Hermione pivoted the conversation away from her incriminating delivery, tucking it into her school bag.

“Quidditch trials,” Ginny confirmed, answering around a slice of toast. “The only thing that would get me up this early on a bloody Saturday. Are you coming?”

“Ron’s trying out, isn’t he? I promised him I’d go watch.”

Ginny put her hand to her temple, as if warding off an oncoming headache.

“The only thing I need more than my brother on the team is a swift kick in the—”

“Morning,” the brother in question grunted, as he flopped into the seat next to Hermione. Harry was close on his heels, flinging his Quidditch bag next to Ginny, who offered him a cheeky salute.

“Morning, Captain,” she grinned. “Ready for trials?”

“Christ,” Harry muttered, pouring himself a cup of tea. He ruffled his hair self-consciously. “By the looks of the sign up list, we’ll be there all day. Dunno why the team’s so popular this year.”

Hermione and Ginny swapped knowing looks, the latter slightly irate.

“Oh come off it, Harry,” Hermione said lightly. “It’s not Quidditch that’s popular, it’s you. You’ve never been more interesting, what with everyone calling you the ‘Chosen One.” She paused, considering, before adding, “it doesn’t hurt that you grew about a foot this summer.”

A loud choking sound interrupted her. Ron had gagged on a kipper.

“I’m tall,” Ron announced, after he’d cleared his airway.

An incoming owl interrupted the conversation, making a bee-line for Harry’s breakfast. He caught its package deftly, avoiding the mishap that Hermione had encountered with her first cuppa.

“See, Hermione?” Harry called, unwrapping the parcel. He looked relieved to have received a new topic of conversation, the pink tinge still high on his cheeks. “Brand new, nine galleons. Now you can give Slughorn back the dodgy one.”

“Hmm,” Hermione hummed, noncommittal. She would not be returning the textbook in question. At least, not until she figured out who it had once belonged to. If only to know who’d give themselves a moniker as irritatingly lofty as the Half-Blood Prince. “You’re still on the hook for extracting my newt spleens.”

Across the hall, Malfoy stood up suddenly, leaving Pansy calling his name. His departure turned heads throughout the hall, conjuring whispers at every table.

“What’s that about?” Hermione wondered.

Ginny let out a low whistle, shaking her head.

“Didn’t you hear what happened? Malfoy got detention from Snape.”

“From Snape? ” she exclaimed. This was rare enough to grab Harry and Ron’s attention as well. Snape was known for giving preferential— nearly deferential— treatment to the members of his house, particularly his godson. “What on earth for?”

“He cursed Nott in the seventh floor corridor between classes.” Ginny leaned in, voice low. “Nott’s been in the hospital wing ever since. People are saying it was something really violent, because he’s stuck scrubbing cauldrons, no magic. I guess he thought Snape wouldn’t do anything, the fool.”

“I’d bet he learned the curse from his father’s friends over the summer,” Harry said, darkly. “You know, like the ones we had the pleasure of meeting last June? He was probably itching to try it out on some muggleborn first year.”

“But it wasn’t a first year,” Ginny insisted. “That’s the really strange thing. I thought he and Nott were friends, since, you know, they come from the same pureblood mania crowd. Sacred Twenty-Eight and all that tosh.”

“Maybe they’re fighting over Parkinson,” Ron said, pulling a face. Hermione laughed and Ron looked pleased with himself.

“Maybe it's a lover’s quarrel,” Ginny added, the corner of her mouth curling.

Harry grinned at her before remembering himself, and clapping Ron on the back. They both rose from their seats and shouldered brooms.

“C’mon then you two,” Harry said, with a put-on sort of gruffness that suited him terribly. “Less speculating about Malfoy’s love life, more blocking Quaffles, eh?”

*

Hermione planned to begin studying Malfoy’s book while in the Quidditch stands, and so she was doubling back from picking up a runic dictionary in the library, when she felt a cool hand on her wrist. The barest of pressure, a reluctant touch.

Reaching for her wand, she turned to find Draco Malfoy.

She jerked from his grasp as if recoiling from a hot stove.

“Oh, calm yourself, Granger.”

Hermione didn’t know how he managed that aristocratic tone, so disaffected and bored. A leisurely cadence pricked by sharpened consonants.

“What do you want?” she asked, glancing down the hallway. Thankfully, the majority of the student body had slept in, and it was only populated by a few stragglers on their way to breakfast.

Malfoy gave a little inclination of his head. She frowned in response, but followed him into a partially obscured alcove behind the tapestry of Morgan le Fay. He held the heavy fabric for her, his pureblood manners impeccably ingrained.

“What do you think I want, Granger?” He rounded on her, voice significantly more emotive than it had been in the hall. Whatever mask he used to obscure his tone had dropped. He shook his sleeve up to his elbow and gestured at his forearm. The wound was preserved with a stasis charm instead of bandages, a clever healer’s trick. She wondered where Malfoy had learned it.

“Take the stasis charm off,” she answered.

He did, exposing his Dark Mark. It was just as inflamed as before. Large patches of skin had sloughed off to reveal angry new skin. Like his body was rejecting the tattoo, exiling the cells it touched. The sight made her breakfast threaten a reappearance.

She hesitated, and then asked, “May I?” in her most prim, buttoned-up voice.

Malfoy’s lips twitched twice, almost succeeding in concealing a smirk.

“You may,” he offered in an imitation of her formal tone. She lifted his forearm with her fingertips, lighting her wand so she could examine the skin.

“You know if you need my help,” she said, in an attempt to refocus. Nothing cleared her head like an argument. “It’s common sense that you shouldn’t mock me.”

“I wasn’t mocking you.”

“You smirked.”

“You did a very realistic Pomfrey. Forgive me, for finding humor in the minutia.”

“Oh, speaking of Pomfrey,” Hermione interrupted sharply. “What on earth did you do to Nott?”

Malfoy’s expression shuttered, the modicum of lightness between them snuffed out like a candle’s flame. He snatched his arm away, leaving her fingertips tingling at the sudden change in sensation.

“That’s none of your business.”

“I heard you really hurt him,” she said, examining his face. It was still terrifyingly blank. Sociopath, she thought ungenerously.

“Is that what you heard?” Malfoy’s cold mask split when he barked a laugh, bitter as dandelion greens. “Ungrateful sod.”

“Ungrateful? Malfoy, you cursed—”

“I’m not actually here to speak with you about the many sins of Theodore Nott. As discussed, I sent away for a volume from the Malfoy library. Did you receive it?”

She raised an eyebrow at his uncoordinated attempt to swerve her train of thought onto new tracks. Whatever happened with Nott, Malfoy didn’t want to dwell on it.

“You’ve got an absolutely vicious owl,” Hermione confirmed. “Murderous beast.”

“Noctua,” he sniffed, “Is of the highest breeding.”

“ Noctua? ”

“It’s Latin.”

"I know it's Latin. You named your owl, owl? ” The glee must have bled into her expression, because Malfoy scowled. “Very creative.”

He ignored her jab, making an insistent motion with his outstretched hand.

“Alright, here’s the bloody book.” She handed him the red leather tome gingerly, in an attempt to keep their fingers from brushing. Malfoy seemed to have no such hesitation, hand swallowing hers as he pulled the book from her grasp.

“Didn’t try to open it yet, then?” He asked smugly, clearly knowing the answer.

“Well, I only got it this morning!”

“You wouldn’t be able to,” he continued. He held the book in the crook of his elbow as he unsheathed his wand. “Diffindo .”

“A little warning before you butcher yourself would be nice,” she exclaimed, horrified at his casual blood letting.

He allowed his blood to drip from the cut in his left hand onto the spine. The book seemed to shudder in acceptance, falling open in his waiting hands. Hermione shivered, suddenly overcome with a chill.

“Do you have to bleed over all of your books?”

Malfoy shrugged, healing himself. She watched as the skin knit itself back together.

“Purebloods,” she said, with plainly bared disgust. “You never just use a locking charm, do you? A cipher? God forbid.”

“This book is older than all that,” Malfoy said. “It’s pretty much ancient.”

It felt ancient. Hermione didn’t quite know how to describe it, the sensation that filled her when holding the volume. Like remembering something from when she was very young. Something so dreamlike and hazy, she wasn’t even sure it could be real.

“Now be a good little swot,” Malfoy said. “And help me heal this blasted thing.”

“Did you ever hear the saying about catching more flies with honey?” she responded, crossly. She returned the book to her bag, struggling momentarily with the buckle. “Must you always use vinegar?”

She turned, only to find Malfoy gone. He’d slipped away without making a sound.

“Bloody ghost,” she muttered to herself, and then made her way to the Quidditch pitch.

*

The weekend went by in a blur, with Hermione balancing her piles of homework and the growing research she’d undertaken on Malfoy’s behalf. The book that he had sent to her was as disturbing as it was fascinating; between reading that and her ratty copy of Advanced Potion Making, she started to have increasingly violent nightmares. She woke from them clutching at the scar on her chest, pain rippling through her until she could hardly catch a breath.

She knew this was unsustainable; eventually she’d have to see Madam Pomfrey about it, but she dreaded the consultation. An irrational part of her— a part she usually kept buried six feet deep— never wanted to find out what spell Dolohov used, as if her ignorance would somehow stem the physical consequences of the spell.

The scar seemed to heighten in sensation whenever she felt strong fear-based emotions. It was particularly active after nightmares, pulsing whenever she felt adrenaline or anxiety.

In the hours before her meeting with Dumbledore, it burned so insistently she could hardly manage a bite of dinner. She hoped that no one would notice her change in behavior. A futile wish.

“Why aren’t you eating?” Harry asked, frowning.

Noticing her change in appetite, he’d taken to spooning portions of his dinner on her plate from his own, a gesture no doubt born from the scarcity mentality of sustenance in his childhood. At the Weasley’s, he was always careful and measured about how much he consumed, as if one bite too many would expel him from the table. The thought made her heart ache, and so she made an effort to eat a forkful of shepherd's pie directly off his plate. He pushed it towards her, insistent.

“I’m just nervous,” she admitted. “I’m meeting with Dumbledore tonight.”

“What!” Ron exclaimed, silverware clattering. The noise drew curious glances from the rest of the table, and he lowered his voice pointedly. “You never told us that.”

“Er,” Hermione answered, eating more of Harry’s pie to buy herself time. “Must have slipped my mind.”

“Right, because it’s so casual to be called to meet with Dumbledore,” Ron said, sounding slightly put out.

She noted that he'd been testy since tryouts. Thanks to Malfoy, she had been very late, missing most of the flying. While he had gotten the position of Keeper, it had apparently been only by a hair.McLaggen, the self-important brute, had scored just as well in trials, but Harry had chosen the Ron, using the rationale he worked more cohesively with the team. This had led to some unkind whisperings of favoritism, depleting Ron's achievement and thus, his morale.

She also realized, somewhat uncomfortably, that Ron was the only one of the three that hadn’t been asked for a private meeting with the headmaster.

“Suppose he’s taking you on for private lessons as well,” Ron said.

“Is he?” Harry asked, curious.

“I don’t think it’s lessons,” Hermione evaded, unwilling to tell her friends she would be accompanied by Draco Malfoy. She was getting startlingly good at lying to her loved ones. She left them with a fragment of truth: “I expect he’s going to want to talk about August.”

The words lingered on her tongue like too-sweet berries, conjuring a hazy recollection of smoke and flames and Malfoy’s shaking wand hand. She hoped the Gold Coast, or wherever her parents had settled, was warm and lovely.

“sh*te,” Ron said, rubbing his hand over his face in contrition. “I’m sorry, Hermione. I’m a complete arse. I mean, I should have known it would be about that. I should have been more, er, delicate.”

Ron, for all his flaws, had a good heart. Hermione couldn’t help but manage a little smile.

“Delicate? Like flower petals?”

“Or fairy wings,” Harry added.

“Or candy floss.” She was grinning properly now, and Harry had begun to snicker. “Or—”

“Come off it!” Ron whined, but he was smiling too, all thoughts of comparison seemingly washed away. “I was trying to be sensitive!”

“Don’t worry Ron,” Ginny chimed in, “We all know you’re sensitive .”

A spoonful of mashed potatoes sailed through the air in response. Ginny artfully dodged it, swinging her braid.

“Throwing food? But Ron,” Harry said with false incredulity, a hand on his heart. “You’re a prefect .”

She slipped away as the Gryffindor table descended into its usual chaos— “ I’ll show you prefect, you specky git” — following the staircases to the headmaster’s office. She’d only been there twice before, but both times had been eventful enough to sear the path into her memory.

The entrance was guarded by the same ugly stone gargoyle, which stood imobile as Hermione attempted to enter.

“Um, sherbert drops? Fudge flies? co*ckroach clusters?” The statute remained unflinchingly in place. “Oh budge up, you brute—”

“Temper, Granger.” A posh voice she was beginning to know all too well interrupted her frustrations. “Acid pops.”

At Malfoy's words, the gargoyle began to shift, revealing the winding stone staircase that led to the headmaster’s quarters. He gave her a cold smirk before ascending.

“How’d you know?” she demanded, following him up the spiral stairs.

“Dumbledore told me.” He co*cked his head, in mock uncertainty. “Did I forget to pass it on?”

“Hmph,” she answered. “Given that you’re part-gargoyle yourself, it probably just sensed a fellow brethren.”

“Given that you’re full—”

She interrupted his would-be illustrious insult by rapping smartly with the brass door knocker.

“Enter,” a calm voice called.

Both Malfoy and Hermione attempted to pass through the doorway at the same time, jockeying shoulders. She grit her teeth and pushed past; she could swear she saw a hint of a smile on Dumbledore’s perpetually serene face.

Dumbledore’s office had always fascinated Hermione, with its collection of unusual artifacts. Delicate silver instruments sat on most surfaces, whirring as they measured different celestial phenomena. The majority of the portraits of former headmasters dozed behind Dumbledore’s desk, with the exception of a pair of wizened witches in gilded frames carrying on a hushed argument.

Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Malfoy staring at Dumbledore’s phoenix with poorly-veiled interest. The bird in question co*cked his head, meeting his gaze in an apparent evaluation of character.

“His name is Fawkes,” Hermione whispered. Malfoy twitched, clearly caught staring. He schooled his expression into its typical disinterest, and the phoenix ruffled its magnificent plumage in dismissal.

“Miss Granger,” Dumbledore greeted, inclining his head. His eyes twinkled in a manner she found slightly nerve-inducing. “Mister Malfoy. Thank you for joining me. Please, sit. May I offer you some tea? A biscuit?”

“No thank you, sir,” Malfoy said with polite air that bordered on frostiness. He even sat formally, with his spine ramrod straight. Hermione declined with a shake of her head, taking her seat.

“I am certain you’re wondering why I’ve asked you here today,” Dumbledore said. “As you may have guessed, this visit concerns the events that occurred in Hampstead Garden on the afternoon of August the tenth.” He inclined his bearded chin towards Malfoy, whose face had gone as blank as a freshly wiped slate. “I’ve received accounts from you both and have found myself troubled by certain…outstanding factors.”

Dumbledore folded his hands, interlacing his fingers. Some were blackened and shriveled in a way that made Hermione’s stomach turn.

“When discussing with Mister Malfoy, he insisted— prudently, I may add—that his role in these events be kept with the utmost secrecy. Any breach of this information could result in egregious harm not only to Draco, but to his family.”

“That means, no writing it down in your dream diary,” Malfoy inserted. “No consultations with your merry gang of Gryffindors.”

“I haven’t told anyone,” Hermione answered. Malfoy seemed unimpressed by this assurance.

“Forgive me,” he drawled. “If I take your word at face value, Granger. Which is to say: it’s worth very little to me.

Hermione bit the side of her cheek until she tasted blood. She would not curse him in front of the headmaster. She would not curse him in front of the headmaster. She would not curse him in front of the headmaster.

“I, however,” Dumbledore continued, with an added sharpness. “Have the utmost trust in Miss Granger’s judgment and capabilities. If that were the whole of the matter, I’d have no reservations, but unfortunately, there are other factors at play.”

Dumbledore turned towards Hermione, directing his question at her.

“I take it you are familiar with the art of legilimancy?”

She nodded, once. Yes, she’d heard accounts of Harry’s lessons with Professor Snape. She saw the outcome of Voldemort’s intrusions into Harry’s psyche. The scar on her chest burned painfully as she struggled to shut out her memories of the Department of Mysteries.

“Lord Voldemort, while accomplished in the art himself, has a knack for collecting gifted legilimens. For you to encounter one while unprepared could have disastrous consequences, both for Mister Malfoy and for the Order of the Phoenix.”

Hermione whipped her head sideways, curls flying, but Malfoy had no evidence of a startled reaction. Whatever he discussed privately with Dumbledore must have included at least a partial revelation of the Order.

“Forgive me, sir,” Hermione interrupted. “How would I find myself encountering such legilimens?”

Malfoy shifted, seemingly uncomfortable, in his armchair. Dumbledore smiled at her in a way that didn’t reach his bright eyes, a terrible sadness to the turn of his mouth.

“Miss Granger,” he answered. “I will not insult you by obscuring information that you very well know to be true. I’m sure you have noticed that the Prophet is catching on, however slowly, to the increase in acts of violence and terror. It would be no revelation to you that Wizarding Britain is balancing precariously on the cusp of a war.”

He sighed and Fawkes cried once, a mournful, vibrating sound, in response.

“I can offer my protection as long as you are students in this castle. But there will come a time where the walls of Hogwarts will no longer serve as a barricade between witches and wizards like you, Miss Granger, and those who would wish to harm you.”

He paused, as if searching for a delicate manner in which to continue. When there apparently was none, he looked Hermione directly in the eye.

“Mister Malfoy has informed me that your escape from the events of August tenth has incurred a…reaction, in certain members of Voldemort’s inner circle who are irate over your escape. In particular, Bellatrix Lestrange. She perceives it as Mister Malfoy's failure, a failure that must be rectified.”

Hermione’s insides seized. Fear rattled, cold and queasy, in her stomach.

“Mister Malfoy,” Dumbledore continued, soliciting a twitch from beside her, “was very brave to impart such essential information. The Order will not forget his actions.”

He turned to Malfoy, who was staring impertinently back, an eyebrow raised.

“I didn't warn you out of the goodness of my heart. And don't act like it wasn't mutually beneficial,” Malfoy intoned with a boredom that barely concealed the anger creeping into his tone. “Going to ask something else of me, then?”

“It pains me to ask anything of my students,” Dumbledore confirmed. “Especially ones who have already sacrificed so much at the threat of personal harm. However, Miss Granger finds herself in a perilous position, without the tools to protect both herself and those who have offered her aid.”

“You want me to learn Occlumency,” she surmised, and Dumbledore inclined his head approvingly, like she’d solved a puzzle. “And you’re asking Malfoy to teach me? He can’t stand me!”

“And yet,” Dumbledore replied in a tone that disallowed all potential pettiness. “He tried to save your life.”

“I thought I made this clear to you, Headmaster.” Malfoy piped up, clearly furious at being thought of as moral in any regard. “I didn’t save a life, I just didn’t actively kill anyone. There’s a difference.”

“I am well aware of the line between altruism and inaction, but thank you for your clarification, Mr. Malfoy.” Dumbledore’s eyes fluttered shut, as if the conversation was taking an enormous toll. “Your motivations do not alter the fact that, should we ask a seer, we’d find that what you did or didn’t do changed a great number of outcomes.”

“I want an addition,” Malfoy insisted. “To our previous agreement. If I show her…If I teach her Occlumency.” He stood, towering over the desk in an apparent attempt at intimidation. Although— like Harry and Ron— he’d also shot up at least a foot in the past year, Dumbledore remained placid. “I want a guarantee.”

“What agreement?” Hermione asked, to no answer.

“What would you ask of me?” Dumbledore replied softly. “That I have not already assured you of? What could I give that I have not already offered?”

“I’m not asking you,” Malfoy spat. He rounded on Hermione, looming over her chair. “I want it from her .”

“I’ll ask Professor Snape for lessons,” Hermione told Dumbledore, ignoring Malfoy entirely. "Not him."

“Severus,” he answered. “Is unfortunately otherwise occupied this year. His duties to the Order are of the utmost importance and cannot be compromised.”

“Why can’t you teach me?” The words flew out before she could school her voice into something resembling politeness.

Dumbledore ignored her accusatory tone.

“Unlike Professor Snape and Mister Malfoy,” he answered gently. “I am not a natural occlumens. Despite my best efforts, my mental predilections are firmly within the realm of legilimency. Always doomed to attack, rather than standing guard. You will find that while legilimens can often perform occlumency, instruction of the art is a far different endeavor.”

“I want a vow of secrecy,” Malfoy demanded. “I want her to swear she won’t disclose what happened this summer. Or anything that’s happened since, in regards to my role in this,” he gestured wildly between them. “This disaster.”

“I’ve already said, I won’t tell anyone!”

“Well, forgive me if I don’t trust you!”

“Miss Granger, Mister Malfoy,” Dumbledore interrupted with an authority that Hermione couldn’t ignore. “I’ll ask that you lower your voices when speaking in my office. ”

“I want an Unbreakable Vow,” Malfoy said. His chest rose and fell quickly, like he was trying to catch a breath. “If I’m going to teach her, if I’m going to help your precious Order, I demand security. This is my mother’s life you’re gambling with.”

Hermione’s brows flew to her hairline, and then when it became apparent Malfoy was serious, she sprung to her feet. Even with her posture at its utmost capabilities, she was still at a disadvantage in terms of height.

“I’m not making any promises— under penalty of death, I might add, a barbaric practice— to you.”

“And I will not,” Dumbledore stated severely enough to cause Malfoy to blanch. “In good conscience, act as binder for a vow that Miss Granger has not consented to.”

She examined the headmaster: electric gaze, velvet robes, rotted fingers. He had successfully put the impetus of Draco Malfoy’s assistance on her. Clever old man , she thought ungenerously.

She wouldn’t be forced into anything, but of course, by de facto affect, she would. Refuse, and she could be vulnerable to one of the most dangerous witches in modern history. Refuse, and Malfoy would withdraw whatever support he had promised the Order. Although she wasn’t sure how it had been maneuvered as such, Malfoy’s conscription in the fight seemed hinged, however delicately, on her consent to the vow.

My mother’s life, Malfoy had said. What had Malfoy done when it was Hermione’s mother?

“I’ll do it,” she said. Malfoy looked at her like she was mad. “I’ll make the vow.”

“Are you aware—”

“I know the consequences of an Unbreakable Vow,” she interrupted Dumbledore rudely. “Sir.” She added, in some flimsy semblance of propriety.

Dumbledore delicately lifted his wand from where it lay on the mahogany desk. Malfoy looked torn, as if he’d never truly thought she’d agree. Hermione outstretched her wrist, calling his bluff. After some hesitation, he took her hand in his. It was surprisingly warm, and she felt the freshly healed mark where he'd sliced into his palm brush roughly against her fingers, sending an involuntary shiver into her spine.

“Will you,” Malfoy began quietly. “Hermione Granger, swear to conceal the full nature of my involvement on the night of August tenth, in Hampstead Garden? In addition to any information you may have pertaining to my involvement with the Order of the Phoenix?”

“I will,” she whispered. A slip of hot-white light shot from Dumbldore’s wand, snaking its way around their joined hands as if binding them. She expected it to burn, but it simply fluttered delicately against her magic. “I don’t even know your involvement—” she started, but swallowed her argument.

“If faced with a situation of mortal peril, will you swear your assistance in ensuring the Order secures the refuge and safety of Narcissa Malfoy?”

She thought of her own mother, lovely and pink faced. She thought of Lady Malfoy, skeletal and drawn in the robes shop.

“I will.”

A second thread of light wove its way around their union. Malfoy gave a nod of grim satisfaction, ready to withdraw his hand, but she dug her fingers in until he yelped.

“Will you, Draco Malfoy,” she called in a surprisingly clear voice. “Fulfill your promise to impart the art of occlumency to the best of your abilities, providing means of self-protection from the forces of the Dark Lord?”

He hesitated, longer than she had, mouth moving imperceptibly as if he was running his tongue carefully over her phrasing.

“I will,” he finally said through his teeth. The final thread shot from Dumbledore’s wand jubilantly, surrounding their joined hands, before suddenly blazing out.

Malfoy dropped her hand as if it were a hot poker. Dumbledore’s eyes lingered over the place they had been joined, before regaining his seat behind his desk.

“Thank you,” he said, directing his words at them both. “What you have done today is a step towards the unity required for—”

“Save it,” Malfoy spat. He folded his arms.

Dumbledore turned towards Fawkes, who cried solemnly in response. The bird fluttered from his perch onto the post of the headmaster’s chair. Dumbledore raised his good hand, and Fawkes nipped at his finger affectionately.

“Thank you, Mister Malfoy, Miss Granger. I’ll allow you to return to your respective common rooms. Unless,” he added, with the false placidity of a frozen lake, “you have anything else you wish to tell me?”

Malfoy’s hand spasmed from where it rested on his forearm. She looked pointedly at the place she knew the Dark Mark to be and gave him a tiny, nearly imperceptible shake of her head.

“No, sir,” she answered for them both, head inclined demurely.

“Then you may go,” Dumbledore said. She knew he was too clever to miss the twitch of Malfoy’s arm, but he did not press further. “I’ll bid you goodnight”

Malfoy pushed forward, although he held the door for her with apparent bitterness. He didn’t speak on the stairs, and she resolved herself not to be the first to break the silence. The vow between them hummed, not entirely unpleasantly, like some invisible thread had wound them together.

When they passed the stone gargoyle and made their way through the corridor that would lead them in their respective directions, he finally broke.

“You don’t trust him, do you?”

Hermione examined Malfoy’s expression. Distress was radiating from the tightness of his mouth, the way his brow was ever so slightly pinched. His eyes, the moment before a downpour.

“No,” she answered honestly, echoing what she’d said to the headmaster several lifetimes ago. “I don’t trust anyone.”

Malfoy considered her answer, eyes boring into her. She fought the urge to straighten her uniform tie. After a moment, he sighed, coming to some sort of invisible decision. His hand flew to his neck, rubbing away a phantom ache.

“Fine. We'll start the blasted lessons this week. And come up with something believable as to why you're following me around like a newly weaned crup.”

“But I have—”

“Surely, this is more important than twelve inches of parchment on the ethics of cheering charms?”

God, she hated when he was right. Malfoy turned to leave and despite her better judgment, she stopped him.

“Malfoy. I read the book. It's going to be rather experimental, but I have some ideas about how to heal your—well.” She took a quick breath. “But I’m going to have to use Muggle medicine.”

Malfoy stood shock still, something complicated flashing across his features, before answering.

“Honestly, Granger?” he said, sounding a bit strangled. “I don’t care what tosh you use, so long as you keep me alive.”

They stared at each other, only breaking eye contact when the clock chimed, indicating curfew.

Hermione bit her lip, unsure whether to ask the question she wanted to. Malfoy raised an eyebrow.

“What is it?” He asked, resigned. “Just spit it out.”

She looked up at him, craning her neck.

“What did you promise Dumbledore?” she asked, voice practically a whisper. "What did you promise to do for the Order?"

“You’re a clever sort,” he replied. His snide tone did not match the solemnity he wore on his features. “Figure it out.”

Chapter 9: Detention

Chapter Text

The morning of Hermione’s birthday was a melancholic continuation of the previous night's storm, which had lessened into a steady drizzle of rain and unforgiving slate gray skies. September in Scotland, at its finest. She woke bleary-eyed, having stayed up listening to the rain pummel the window panes. Ultimately giving up on sleep, she’d drawn the curtains on her four poster bed and spent the night cross-referencing nasty spells and potions from the Prince’s textbook, searching for the origins of seemingly untraceable curses that even she’d never heard of. Between that and the Demonology volume, her bedtime reading had gotten incredibly dark, all blood curses and runic circles and hexes marked for use on enemies. It was no wonder she was having trouble sleeping.

At the foot of her bed, she could make out the sounds that had woken her: her roommates' poorly obscured whisperings.

“Just sign my name, Parvati. Your penmanship is better.”

“C’mon, just add a sentence. It’ll look bad if you don’t personalize it, Lav—”

“ —I’ll have you know she didn’t even remember my birthday last year—”

Hermione drew her curtains with a sharp flick of her wand, revealing Parvati and Lavender, squabbling over a garishly coloured card.

Oh, she realized, somewhat unceremoniously. Right. She was seventeen today, officially of age. There was little fanfare for her newfound ability to use magic without the trace— after all, she was allowed to conjure as she wished while within the castle walls — but she felt a bitter sense of freedom all the same. Like reaching out to catch something, only to have it jerked from your grasp. Too little, too late.

“Happy birthday!” Her roommates chorused, as Parvati deposited the card in question at the side of her bed. With her wand behind her back, Lavender conjured a single carnation, deposited on top like a cherry. The hasty spellwork revealed some wonky petals, and it was a last minute and mostly unwilling addition (as indicated by the mutterings she’d overheard), but it made Hermione’s heart clench in gratitude. Damned birthday sentimentality.

After effusively thanking Parvati and Lavender once more, she floated a heap of parcels from the foot of her bed and into the privacy of her velvet curtains; she’d always thought it loathsome to open presents in front of others, especially if one of them happened to be the ever-nosy Lavender Brown.

Conspicuously missing were the usual gifts from her parents: her mother’s sugar-free homemade fudge (that, despite her best efforts, usually ended up in the bin), her father’s yearly tradition of a handsome leather-bound journal and an engraved fountain pen (oh, how it pained him, that Hogwarts had them using quills). He’d been giving her them ever since she had been able to hold a writing utensil, each engraving signifying the year of bestowal. The last one she received was marked, With love, on your sixteenth birthday .

Fighting the urge to sob, she closed her eyes and breathed in until her lungs threatened to burst. After a heavy exhale, she opened the lumpy parcel closest to her, wrapped in newspaper and yarn, undoubtedly Hagrid’s doing. Inside was a gnarled bouquet of thorny looking tangles and a note.

Happy Birthday Hermione!it read. Put the flowers in water for a neat surprise. Love, Hagrid.

Hermione considered flowers to be a rather strong word for the presentation of twigs and snarls enclosed, but she still conjured and filled a vase with a whispered aguamenti . Upon contact with the water, the bouquet grew green and vibrant, thorns receding into new leaves and cascades of periwinkle teardrop blossoms. Everblooms, she recognized. It was an extraordinary bit of magic.

Ron’s gift came next, a deluxe pack of sugar quills, the type she sucked on while studying. Harry had gotten her an expensive looking addition to her potions kit: a set of unbreakable glass phials, made of magically imbued limestone from the battlements of the Blarney Castle. The case was inscribed: to the best chemist I know — HP. She traced her fingers over the tribute to their shared muggle heritage and clutched it to her chest roughly, worrying about the glass before remembering it was unbreakable.

Her final gift was unexpected: a handsome men’s watch, made of goblin wrought silver, its face patterned with a subtle filigree design of vines and leaves.

Dear Hermione, the note accompanying it read. I know this birthday will be a bittersweet coming of age, too close to such tremendous loss to enjoy as you should. Nevertheless, I wanted you to be able to commemorate this moment in the traditional way. This was my father’s —hence the Prewett crest on the clasp— before it was mine. It's rather clunky on a young girl, but well made nonetheless. Before you protest, know that Ron would rather die than wear his mother’s old watch and Ginny has already requested Muriel’s timepiece. Wear it well and know that I am always a letter away.

Love,

Molly Weasley

P.S. Perhaps with some silver drop earrings? That would look rather fetching with your complexion.

It was the postscript that broke the levees of Hermione’s heart, freeing the tears that had been held back for too long. She gasped for air, sobbing with such intensity that she felt uncertain she would survive long enough for her next garbled breath. Why was everyone being so kind to her? If only they knew what Hermione had done, the agency she’d robbed her parents of, the collusion she’d covered up, the cold and certain way she’d raised her wand. Would they love her with such wretched openness and generosity then?

It took a while for her grief to subside, never receding completely. But after a good long weep, it sank to a manageable level, a slow burn that blistered in the peripheral of her heart. With a final shudder, she clasped the watch around her left wrist. The metal was warm instead of cool, the telltale sign of an embedded protection charm, or maybe just the kindness of Molly Weasley.

After splashing her face with cool water— her best effort to reduce the redness in her eyes— she dressed quickly and headed to breakfast, where she thanked Harry and Ron effusively for their gifts. She was reaching over the redhead for the bowl of sugar when he caught her wrist in his hand.

“Is this Mum’s?” Ron asked, and then cleared his throat. “I mean, the Prewett family watch?”

“Yes, she sent it to me as a coming of age present,” Hermione confirmed, before adding worriedly, “but it’s too much, surely you or Ginny should have it. Or your mother should keep it really, it was her father’s after all—”

“Are you kidding? If you don’t take it, it’ll go to me. You’re doing me a huge favor, see?” Ron grinned with unmistakable satisfaction, dropping her hand. “They’ll have to get me something new.” He co*cked his head in consideration, adding, “and it wasn't her father's. I reckon it belonged to Gideon or Fabian, one of her brothers.”

Hermione inhaled sharply. The fact that the watch had belonged to one of the twins, who had died fighting for the Order in the first war, made the gift both more painful and more touching; Molly had seen Hermione's grief and been drawn back into her own. The Weasley matriarch had given her what was more than likely her source of comfort regarding her own loss, from almost two decades ago. The thought returned the lump to her throat, threatening the reemergence of tears.

“Oi—” Ginny called, interrupting Hermione’s morose thoughts by sliding over from her seat amongst the fifth years. “Happy bi—”

“Don’t you dare sing.”

Ginny looked put out, but after taking in Hermione’s red rimmed eyes, she put a comforting hand on her shoulder. Harry and Ron look at each other, alarmed, like— should we have considered that?

“Er, Hermione,” Ron tried, twisting the hem of his sleeve. “Today’s a bit of a tough day, innit?”

Harry groaned. Ginny covered her face in dismay. Even Neville grimaced from where he sat, a stone’s throw away.

“Honestly,” Hermione said, spooning sugar into her tea. “I don’t want to think about it. In fact, if someone would change the subject, I'd be ever so grateful.”

“Alright,” Harry considered, before narrowing his eyes. “Have any of you noticed there’s something strange going on with Malfoy?”

“Mate,” Ron warned. “Not this again.”

“What?” Hermione stammered. What had Harry noticed? He wasn’t always the most perceptive when it came to interpersonal relationships, but he had a real nose for suspicious behavior. “Draco Malfoy?”

“No, his third cousin Druisella— ow, don’t hit me!”

Hermione withdrew her elbow from where she’d jabbed Harry in his side.

“What of him?” She asked. How would she respond if he had caught on to their rendezvous on the train, or worse, their meeting with Dumbledore? As a result of the vow, she wouldn’t be able to explain herself even if she wanted to. She imagined herself tongue-tied — you see Harry, Malfoy saved my parents — before bursting into flame.

“He’s been twitchier than usual,” Harry continued, holding up fingers as he went. “He keeps getting in trouble for dueling. Do you know it took Nott a full week to get out of the hospital wing? Snape must have given him ten detentions by now…Snape! And did you see those scars he has?”

“All right, Auror Potter,” Ron snorted. “Been keeping a keen eye, have you?”

“I hardly think Malfoy getting detention for dueling is a bad thing,” Hermione added. “You’re probably just noticing the extent of it now that he’s off that insipid Inquisitorial Squad and actually held to the same standard as the rest of the school.”

“More like now that Daddy Dearest is in Azkaban,” Ron said darkly. “Hard for him to weasel out of trouble with that axe hanging over his head.”

“I dunno,” Harry muttered, clearly unconvinced. “It’s just not typical Malfoy— he’s usually mouthing off, or threatening third-years. Cowardly git. He’s not exactly the reckless sort, is he?”

“If you thought about your studies half as much as you think about Malfoy, you’d be top of the class,” Hermione said lightly, attempting to pivot away from the conversation.

Harry didn’t know anything, yet. But he was dogged and persistent, and once he grew suspicious, it wasn’t in his character to back down. She’d have to keep her eye on this.

*

There was no mention of Malfoy for the rest of her birthday, until the double block of Potions that afternoon. Armed with the Half-Blood Prince’s textbook, Hermione had quickly become what Slughorn referred to as a singular talent. The Slytherin contingent had begun muttering mutinously whenever Slughorn praised her, unfounded accusations of favoritism and political correctness.

“Once in a generation,” Slughorn beamed down at Hermione from his armchair, where he observed the class’ attempts at brewing Dreamless Sleep. “You could have given Lily Evans a run for her money, my dear.”

Harry’s head whipped up, meeting Hermione’s puzzled eyes.

“My mother?” he blurted, then blushed. “Er, sorry to interrupt, sir.”

Slughorn looked faintly uncomfortable, avoiding Harry’s eyes.

“Ah, yes, Potter. Lily was a dab hand at Potions…cheeky, too. She was always inventing new brews, making little edits to my recipes. Part of a very gifted pair, always she partnered with— watch that flame, Mister Zabini!” Slughorn called, interrupting himself. “Don’t you dare waste those knarl quills, they cost eight sickles a case!”

Harry redirected his attention back at his cauldron, looking haunted, and Hermione offered him a comforting smile. For many years, she sympathized with Harry’s loss, his hunger to know his parents, but now, she recognized the feeling intimately. She didn’t know much about James and Lily Potter, besides the fact that Harry’s father was a Quidditch Captain and a war hero (and according to Remus, a bit of a prat).

There was something unnerving about being compared to Harry’s mother. Another clever Muggleborn girl. Murdered for daring to exist so brightly in a world that abhorred her. She morbidly wondered if Slughorn would sigh over Hermione once day, bemoaning the waste of talent the way he did Lily, a brilliant potioneer, an inventor— hold on, an inventor?

She flipped to the cover of her ratty Potions textbook eagerly, tracing the inscription.

Property of the Half-Blood Prince. Her face fell. Half-Blood. Once her mind caught up to the impulse, she scoffed at herself. This couldn’t have been Lily Evans' textbook. But a freshly unearthed part of her wished it had been, because the textbook’s margins were full of magic that, while not entirely dark, could definitely be constituted as gray. Secretly, she liked the idea of a muggleborn like her, taking what she wanted for once. Using magic indiscriminately. Powerfully.

Then again, maybe this was Hermione convincing herself, bending her own morals so she could continue using the book without consequence. I’llbe discerning with it, she swore to herself. Iwill never use it to hurt anyone.

Lost in thought, she reached for her wand from where it rested on the bench behind her, only to come up with nothing. A bolt of fear shot through her.

“Harry,” she whispered, not wanting to call attention her way. God knew the Slytherins would have a field day if the muggleborn misplaced her wand, the literal, definitive extension of the wizard. “Have you seen my—”

A voice interrupted her, posh enunciation indicating its origin.

“Hey Granger,” Malfoy said from behind her seat. “Catch.”

Without thinking, she shot her hand out, scrambling for her wand as it went arcing towards her table. She’d not even gotten a finger on it, when Malfoy’s cauldron exploded magnificently. The sixth years sprung to life, screaming and shoving each other out of the way. Covered in half-completed potion, Zabini swore so violently she was surprised his tongue wasn’t smoking from the heat of his vitriol. Drops of the cauldron’s contents landed on her robes, faintly sizzling through the fabric.

Slughorn started from his armchair, eyes the size of saucers, crying, “Oh my! Class dismissed! Miss Perkins, I’d shed that cloak quickly if I were you—”

Leaning back from the stream of students hurrying to put as much space between them and the disaster as possible, Malfoy—engineer of the unfolding chaos— looked her way and winked . She’d moved towards him, wand raised in retaliation, when he called out.

“Professor,” he drawled. “Granger exploded my cauldron.”

Slughorn looked up from where he was vanishing bits of potion, confused— “Miss Granger?”

Before she could explain herself and begin her tirade against the walking warning against inbreeding that was Draco Malfoy, the door swung open.

Severus Snape swept into the dungeons like he’d never left.

“Horace,” Snape said silkily, unsheathing his wand With a sharp jerk, the fallen cauldrons snapped into position, right side up. “I was replenishing my boomslang stores when I heard a…commotion.” Snape’s eyes drifted to Harry and Ron, who had hung back with her, narrowing with disdain. “Am I right to assume Mister Potter is involved?”

Slughorn squinted at Snape, confused. “Potter?”

“It was Granger, sir,” Malfoy piped up. “She sabotaged my potion.”

Hermione wasn’t sure if it was the way his eyebrows pushed together in false earnestness, or the curve of his lips as he tossed the blame her way, but something about the smugness of Malfoy’s face was what finally broke her.

“I’ll kill you,” Hermione said, moving towards him. “You bastard—” She’d managed a fistful of his collar before Ron hauled her back.

“I didn’t do anything—”

“You can check her wand,” Malfoy added, rubbing his neck from where she’d grabbed him, a put on show of soreness. “Check her wand, and you’ll see. She’s mad, everyone knows it.”

“I’ll show you mad, you ferrety f*ck—” Harry started, raising his voice, but Snape was not in any mood to indulge his interruptions.

“Twenty points from Gryffindor for uncouth vocabulary,” Snape barked. “Take Weasley and get out, before I make it fifty.”

The two boys stayed rooted to the spot, looking very much as if they wanted to argue.

“We’ll meet you in the common room,” Ron called to her.

“Now, Potter!” Snape spat, and with a look of pure hatred, Harry and Ron slunk out of the room.

Snape swept over to where she stood, still shaking from the exertion it took to keep herself from strangling Malfoy.

“Forgive me my intrusion, Horace,” Snape said. “And forgive me for suggesting that in my experience, where Granger goes, destruction generally follows.”

“Another twenty points for language,” Snape tutted and Hermione fought the urge to scream. “One would expect a little contrition, Miss Granger. I’d thought you’d have better control of your students, Horace. Perhaps during your early retirement, you went a bit…soft.”

Malfoy’s lips twitched, as if he were trying desperately not to laugh. It made Hermione feel positively homicidal.

“I certainly don’t condone—” Slughorn started, offended at the accusation from another professor, and a former student at that.

“Check her wand, Professor,” Malfoy repeated. “I swear on my house, the last spell will be a bombarda.”

Slughorn and Snape both looked her way.

“I— I didn’t have—” she tried explaining, wincing at how guilty she sounded. “Malfoy took my wand!”

“Why would Mister Malfoy take your wand to destroy his own cauldron,” Snape asked slowly, as if tempering the speed of his speech to cater to her immense stupidity.

“I don’t know!” Hermione cried, throwing her hand sup in frustration, the last vestiges of her temper sent crumbling in the wind. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you!”

“I recommend a severe punishment fitting for such dangerous misbehavior, Horace. Maybe—”

“Both students will be disciplined as I see fit, Professor Snape.” Slughorn puffed himself, clearly rankled by Snape’s questioning of his authority.

Snape inclined his head, offering approval. “It’s your classroom, Horace,” he said snidely. “I can only offer my recommendation.”

“Indeed it is. Weekly detention, until the end of term, for the both of you. Starting in the dungeons tonight.”

“Tonight?!” Hermione cried. “But sir, it’s my birthday.”

“Well, perhaps—”

“Perhaps,” Snape interjected, sharp as a silver blade. “You should have remembered that before your outburst.”

“You won’t, Professor,” Malfoy said with false sincerity, shouldering his bag neatly as Hermione struggled with hers. She was on her way out of the classroom when she felt Snape’s eyes, trailing from the distant figure of Malfoy and lingering on her.

“I very much doubt that,” Snape replied, although Malfoy was out of earshot. His eyes were narrowed into near slits, something uncertain glinting in his dark stare.

*

Word of the exploding cauldron event spread quickly, each depiction of the event adding a degree of mythic absurdity. By evening, a scuffle in potions had become a duel to first blood. When Hermione sat down to dinner, a group of third year boys scooted deferentially down the table, making abundant room for her. One of them even gave her a sharp little salute. Bemused, she raised her eyebrows, until the boy flushed and turned back towards his companions.

“I heard she siphoned acid and shot it directly into Malfoy’s eyes,” she heard him whisper. “His eyes! A dragon’s point of weakness!”

Hermione moodily stirred her leek soup until Ron and Harry arrived, attempting pacification.

“Malfoy clearly started it—”

“You were framed, honest. Sniveling little—

“Of course, Snape had to insert his beak—”

“Slughorn will forget all about it by next class, he bloody loves you—”

“I doubt it,” Hermione cut in bleakly. “As I’ll be having detention with him every week until the end of term.”

“Every week!?” Ron yelped.

“Until the end of term?!” Harry added, enraged. “That’s—that’s— it’s fascist!”

“What’s a fascist?” Ron queried, confused at the muggle term.

“Snape,” Harry offered darkly, deeming that sufficient explanation.

“Apparently I should be taking safety in the potions classroom far more seriously.” Hermione’s voice was bitter enough to neutralize a lemon. “At least Malfoy got the same.”

“At least?” Ron exclaimed, horrified. “You’ll be shut in the dungeons with him every week? Cripes, Slughorn should have just sentenced you to a jaunt in Azkaban. At least the dementors don’t spend the whole time blathering on about how much better than you they are. If it came to detention with Malfoy or The Kiss, I’d choose oblivion every time.”

“Well, I wasn’t offered the option, but thank you for your valuable input, Ronald.” She stood, causing the rest of her soup to slosh miserably in her bowl. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m off to polish cauldrons with the castle’s resident ferret.”

“He’s making you start tonight!? But it’s your—”

“Yes,” Hermione hissed. “Happy Birthday to me.”

**

The dungeon was empty when she arrived, with only a note left on the blackboard in Slughorn’s looping hand.

Miss Granger and Mister Malfoy, it read. There are assorted ingredients selected for you to prepare. I trust that in your efforts to behave as responsible potioneers, you will not require supervision. Please do not prove an old man erroneous in his trust! Wear gloves.

On the wooden preparation table, there lay a brimming basket of Billywigs, waiting for their stingers to be extracted. The kind of mindless work Hermione hated most, and if she were to sting herself, she’d surely find a way to hate it even more. Wear gloves, indeed.

She’d just pulled her dragonhide pair on when Malfoy finally sauntered in, halfway through eating an apple. For a moment, they appraised each other: he was still wearing his robes, although his tie was undone and hung loosely around his collar, and she had changed into denims and a soft blue sweater that was so over-worn that its stretched neckline nearly dipped off her shoulders.

At the sight of her, Malfoy swallowed and smirked, looking for all intents and purposes like a satisfied kneazle.

“What a sight,” he said, letting out a low, nearly suggestive whistle. “Saint Granger, in detention.”

Hermione didn’t respond beyond raising her wand. She was quick, but Malfoy must have been expecting retaliation, because her Bat-Bogey Hex bounced off his waiting shield charm, shimmering pearlescent in the dungeon’s dim light.

“One day,” Hermione said darkly, more of a threat than a promise. “Someone is going to snap and you are going to be horribly maimed as a result of that smartmouth of yours.” She smiled at him, falsely saccharine. “I can only hope that if it’s not me at the other end of the wand, at least I’ll be able to watch.”

“Yes, one day I’ll get mine, Granger,” Malfoy agreed, dismissing her with a good natured wave. “But until then…” He tossed the core of the apple into the waste bin, a gesture that struck her as so strangely muggle that she raised a brow.

“Oh, don’t make that face.” He straddled a chair across from her, tipping it forward, into her personal space. “It makes you look like McGonagall.”

She would not kill Draco Malfoy, she ordered herself. She could not kill Draco Malfoy.

“Aren’t you going to ask why I did it?” He continued, eyes brightening in amusem*nt, a gray that nearly bordered on blue. Of course he was enjoying this. sad*st.

“I don’t need to ask,” she snapped. “I’ve had the answer for nearly six years: it’s because you’re a prat.”

“You know what your problem is, Granger?”

“Lately, you.”

He ignored her. “You’re so uninspired. Everything by the book. Step by step. No strategy, with you Gryffindor types.”

“No soul, with you Slytherins.”

Malfoy laughed. She dropped the billywig she was holding in shock. Had she ever heard him laugh at something that wasn’t at her expense before? It raised her suspicions.

“Why,” she asked, slowly. “Are you in such a bloody good mood?”

“Well,” Malfoy started, resting an elbow on the back of his unbalanced chair. She fought the urge to kick the chair legs out from under him. Couldn’t he even sit correctly? “I found a way to conduct our little Headmaster required meetings without drawing suspicion from Bumbling and Bungler.” She took this to mean Harry and Ron. “I’ve secured us a practice space where we’re certain to not be disturbed. God forbid Slughorn supervise a detention,” he snorted. “Hell would freeze over.”

“You exploded your own potion. With my wand. In an effort to find a practice space?Are you out of your mind?”

“Do you want to know the last reason I’m so pleased, Granger?” His voice oozed satisfaction.

“Enlighten me, Malfoy.”

“It’s because I get to do this.” He whipped his wand up before she could react. “Legimens. ”

It was like the floor fell out from under her. Suddenly, there was an enormous pressure at the base of her skull, and she felt Malfoy’s magic, bursting through her mind, an onslaught of intent. She panicked as horrifyingly private moments shot to the surface—Ron’s voice echoing, she’s a nightmare honestly; primary school children pointing and laughing; Lavender Brown’s meanest vocalizations, maybe Weasley should look for his rat on Granger’s head, her hair is practically a nest. Shame rushed through her, conjuring the way she’d traced the darker spells in the Prince’s textbook in guilty fascination, flashing to images of her tears from that morning, her chest heaving sobs. Excruciating thoughts of her parents: the last morning she hadn’t know was the last, when she’d waved her mum off as she’d stooped to kiss Hermione’s temple.

From somewhere distant, she heard herself gasp. Malfoy didn’t get to see that.

As a result of a curse Hermione hadn’t uttered, Malfoy shot across the room. He lay, twisted awkwardly on the floor in front of the blackboard. Slughorn’s chalk inscription, smeared by the projectile of his body. Oops.

“f*ck!” He groaned from the floor. “Granger, you lunatic. You can’t use magic while under legilimency, you’ll have no control of it.”

“Serves you right,” Hermione scoffed, wand clenched n her shaking hand. “That was pure instinct. You’re lucky I didn’t sever a limb.”

Malfoy gingerly rolled into a seated position. He blinked like a bright light had been directed his way.

“I was right,” he muttered, brushing chalk from his robes. “Your mind is a truly miserable place.”

“Maybe if you had warned me, I could have come up with some of my more pleasant memories. For example, your transfiguration into a ferret, your repeated failures to catch the snitch, when you nearly pissed yourself during detention in the forest…”

Malfoy stood, dusting off his trouser and shaking his head mockingly. “Of course, you wanted preparation. Probably would be up to your nose in books on mind magic if I’d told you. Well unfortunately for you, books aren’t going to do sh*t. That’s not how occlumency works, Granger.”

“I know how occlumency works, thanks.”

“You know if the failed attempts of Potter, The Boy Who Lived Mediocrely. Not the way I was taught, the correct way. I needed to see your mental defenses, unprepared first.”

“And?”

“You have none. Unsurprising, given your—”

“Yes, my dirty, dirty blood.” Hermione rolled her eyes magnificently. Fleur would have been proud. “My inferior, muddy genetics—”

“I was going to say your face,” Malfoy corrected, mildly. “Which informs everyone in viewing radius of exactly how you’re feeling. What you’re thinking.” He moved towards her, wand held by only his thumb, flat to his palm. A wizard’s version of holding his hands up to show no intent of harm. “What are genetics?”

Hermione blinked owlishly. What was happening?Draco Malfoy had forced his way into her mind, watched her cry over her birthday, and now, he was asking about genetics?

“A branch of muggle science,” she explained warily. He wrinkled his nose at her response, as if she’d said dirty old shoes, but otherwise allowed her to continue uninterrupted. “Science is an academic field dedicated to discovery, sort of like potions and healing combined. Genetics is a subfield, focused on tracing medical conditions and inherited physical traits and— oh, why am I bloody bothering!?”

“Sounds like a lot of rot,” Malfoy offered unbidden, and Hermione clenched her teeth hard.

“Are you going to teach me like you promised, or just waffle on about your close-minded opinions?” She huffed, already scraping the dregs of her patience.

He looked up, noting her devious expression with mild alarm. “What are you—”

“Always be prepared, Malfoy,” Hermione mocked, casting before he could finish his sentence, much less pick up his wand. “Legimens,” she enunciated, smooth and firm like he had.

There was a quick jumble of faces— she could pick out Narcissa, Lucius, Nott, Snape— and then she felt the unpleasant sensation of slamming headfirst into a brick wall. Her ears were still ringing as he looked down at her, annoyed.

“Second lesson: don’t underestimate your opponent. I’m a trained occlumens, you fool,” Malfoy mocked. “You think you could barge into my head on your first try? Do you really think you’re that exceptional, Granger?”

Hermione looked down into her lap. Mortifyingly, her eyes began to sting. She wouldn’t cry in front of Malfoy. She wouldn’t.

“I figured it would be like…like memory charms,” she said, still avoiding his gaze. She cleared her throat in an effort to hide the hitch in her breath. “Mind magic, right?”

Malfoy was silent. She could hear some dampness dripping onto the stone floor. The candles flickered morosely in their sconces, threatening to succumb to darkness.

“You will have to learn to protect yourself,” he finally said, with a briskness that didn’t match his softened tone. “You have to imagine that your memories are being kept behind a mental wall, so that intruders can’t access them. There are varying methods for visualization— you could consider them bricks in a wall, or ships in a marina, or chests in an attic.”

“What do you use?” She asked, once she was certain her voice wouldn’t waver.

He rubbed a hand over his face, the gesture of a much older, more exhausted man. She half expected him to refuse an answer, but then—

“A garden,” Malfoy admitted. He looked at her for a long moment, as if daring her to laugh. “I visualize a garden.”

“Oh,” she said, unable to break his stare. There were bits of silver in his irises that seemed to catch what little light the room allowed and hold it, precious, in his gaze.

“Legilimency,” he said, voice suddenly much lower. Still unblinking. “Is conducted through eye contact. You need to develop a steady gaze; no fidgeting or blinking.” He ran his eyes down her face like fingertips, and she shuddered, finally looking away. “Consider that lesson three.”

Somewhere in the castle, a clock boomed the hour. Jumpy with adrenaline, Hermione realized it was very late.

“I should…” She tilted her head towards the door in indication. She began to pack up her potions equipment. “I finished at least half of the stingers.”

Malfoy frowned at the basket of billywigs, like he’d forgotten the terms of their detention. Strsngely flustered, she dropped her vials, sending the clattering onto the stone floor. Shestooped to pick them up, grateful for the resiliency of Harry’s clever gift. To her utter shock, Malfoy crouched alongside her, joining her efforts, perhaps out of instinctive manners. They touched the same vial and she yanked it from his grip, the movement drawing his gaze to her wrist. He looked curiously at the timepiece before reaching out and placing a finger on the metal.

“Very traditional,” he murmured, brushing at the soft parts of her skin as he examined her watch. “That’s the Prewett seal, isn’t it?”

She desperately wanted to slip her hand into her pocket, but knew he’d take it as a symbol of embarrassment and have a field day. Besides, she wasn’t ashamed of the watch. It was a lovely piece.

“Seventeen?” He asked, and she nodded. “I suppose Weasley had to get in his intent of courtship quickly. A bit desperate, if you ask me, but I figure he didn’t want to risk it—”

“Sorry,” she interrupted. “Intent of courtship? Is this another pureblood thing?”

“No,” Malfoy scoffed, finally retracted his hand. “It’s the pureblood thing. Father gave mother a watch encrusted with emeralds when she came of age. Great-Great Grandmother’s.” He frowned, as if realizing something. “It will probably be bestowed upon me for my intended as well. You know, as something romantic.” He said romantic in the way one might say dementor.

“Your…intended?”

“Are you slow?” He snapped, mood darkening faster than a horizon at sunset. “My intended. Like you are to Weasley.” He made a crude sexual gesture that would have gotten him another term in detention. “Intended. ”

“Weasley—Ron— is not my intended .”

“Poor Weasley,” Malfoy said with relish. “You probably shouldn’t wear his family watch, then. It sends mixed signals. People might think you’re…" Malfoy trailed off as if looking for the correct word, and leered when he found it. "Intimate.”

Blood rushed into Hermione’s face and Malfoy’s grin deepened.

“We are not intimate, we’ve never even—” Malfoy raised his eyebrows with glee and she stuttered over her words. “It’s not like— he’s my friend, all right, Malfoy? I suppose that’s a difficult concept for you, but do try and get your overinflated head around it.”

“Don’t protest like that, it only makes you look guilty.”

“His mother gave it to me, okay? Mrs. Weasley . Which is not, and will never be, me.”

“His mother?” Malfoy sounded even more smug. “He didn’t even procure his own betrothal gift? Had to grift it from poor mummy? Goodness, he always finds a new low.”

“Shefelt bad that my supposedly dead parents wouldn’t be here to watch their daughter come of age,” Hermione said bluntly. “It's not like there is anyone else to give me a watch.”

Malfoy’s smile slipped off his face and he grew stony once more. He picked through the insects, his thin fingers deftly de-stinging them. He didn’t even need to look down.

She hoisted up her bag and made to leave. This whole evening had been mad, absolutely mad. It was also the longest stretch she’d gone without thinking of her parents. Until Malfoy ruined that, too, with his stupid occlumency and his smart f*cking mouth .

She was nearly gone, when he called out to her.

“Granger.” He pretending to focus on removing a stinger. “Happy Birthday.”

She slammed the dungeon door on her way out.

Chapter 10: Remedial Instruction

Chapter Text

The dregs of fall spilled into early winter without Hermione noticing. Her days had become filled with coursework and research on Malfoy’s behalf, hours spent paging through tombs on ancient healing practices that often left her with a turned stomach and no appetite. Exsanguination and fresh sheep's livers, indeed.

When she wasn’t drowning in parchment in the library, she was in “detention” with Malfoy, a weekly occurrence with no reprieve in sight. Slughorn, clearly feeling guilty about chastising his star pupil, left her with minimal prep, and so for the first hour they would complete Slughorn’s list: skinning boomslangs and stirring potions in a moody silence, only speaking to each other when directly addressed.

Although she’d never admit it to Malfoy, it had proved a decent plan: they had five hours a week to practice Occlumency unbothered, with a built in alibi. If Harry were to check the map, nothing would seem remiss about Hermione and Malfoy out until curfew, always on opposite ends of the dungeon. In an additional stroke of luck, the detentions had provided Hermione access to a brewing space, where she was able to begin her experimental brew for Malfoy’s infected mark: sanitatem, a healing potion often used on cursed scars.

The only detriment to the arrangement was Malfoy himself, who, once finished with his menial task of the day, watched Hermione brew with the intensity of a hawk tracking prey. Despite her assurances that she was not attempting to poison him, he loudly questioned every minor edit to the recipe, arguing with her over every small detail, from the way she crushed sophorus beans, to her switch to counterclockwise stirs.

Always one to take the bait, she’d argue right back, often resulting in screaming matches that reverberated on the dungeon walls. Once, a fifth year prefect stepped in, chastising them for their volume levels, which apparently could be heard echoing all the way into the Slytherin dormitories.

It was in this combative atmosphere that they would attempt Hermione’s occlumency lessons, which had progressed dismally, mostly consisting of Malfoy insisting she “clear her mind” and “learn to compartmentalize,” without offering up any instruction on how to do so.

“It’s a feeling, Granger,” he said after one particularly poor attempt where instead of constructing mental barriers, she accidentally conjured a fully-formed brick wall. “Don’t tell me I have to show you how to feel.”

“Because you’re an expert on emotional intelligence? Stick to what you know, Malfoy. I’ll let you know if I require assistance ruining people’s lives.”

She would leave their sessions seething and ashamed; Hermione Granger was not accustomed to failing, much less handling her failures with grace. She tried an assortment of organizational methods, each more useless than the last: she tried to sort her mind into a fish tank, a filing cabinet, a corridor with endless rooms. But all she had managed to accomplish during the lessons was to share a progressively embarrassing stream of memories with the person most likely to use them as ammunition.

Malfoy, ever the professional instructor, commented on them with relish.

“Who owled you bubotuber pus?” He asked snidely after a particularly embarrassing recollection of fourth year. “Rather entrepreneurial idea.”

“Well, he wasn’t wrong was he?” after seeing Snape call Hermione an insufferable know it.

“You cry an awful lot, don’t you Granger,” after a memory of weeping while rowing with Ron over the disappearance of Scabbers. “No wonder you’re sh*t at occlumency.”

Malfoy seemed to have little to no sense of self-preservation, constantly prodding at Hermione, despite his reliance on her. He needed her to help heal his arm, and the more he was reminded of this, the more his distaste for her deepended, encouraging him to be nastier than ever.

She asked herself why she’d even bother to help him, ungrateful brat that he was. And her conscience would rear its head like a serpent, reminding her. He saved her parents' lives. He spared her. He was teaching her occlumency— no matter how poorly— in an effort to provide her defenses. Didn’t she want to break even?

*

With the majority of her mind occupied with not killing Malfoy (either by potion or wandpoint), Hermione’s defenses were down. She was lost in thought, contemplating the merits of heating the syrup of hellebore before adding it to the sanitatum. That’s when Slughorn struck, catching her without a prepared excuse.

“You must attend our Christmas festivities, Miss Granger! There will be some excellent opportunities for networking, you know! I’ll have a few top notch potioneers present: Gertrude Killick, Alton Loxias, even Cyrillis Templeton may attend— you know, he trained under Aesop Sharp himself! You can never start thinking about your career too early.”

“Er—”

“Extend my invitation to Mr. Potter as well, and please remind him I won’t hear any excuses about team practices! Despite what young wizards may think, Quidditch isn’t everything!”

“I—”

“And don’t forget to bring a date!”

That’s how she got roped into not only attending Slughorn’s Christmas Party, but dragging Harry into the breach with her.

“There’s no way you’re getting out of this one,” she told him over dinner. “He specifically mentioned he won’t hear anything about your sodding practice schedules. And he wants you to bring a date.”

“A date?” Harry turned an unflattering shade of puce. “Like, a girl?”

“It doesn’t have to be,” Hermione added. “I suppose you could bring a bloke. Slughorn strikes me as fairly progressive.”

“That’s not what I meant—”

“How exclusive,” Ron interrupted, a sneer twisting on his face. “With how often he’s swooning over the Chosen One and the Cauldron Whisperer, I suppose he’ll crown you King and Queen Slug.”

Harry exchanged a look with her that meant, are you going to take this or should I. Hermione hoped her eyes communicated: please, not me.

The thing was, Hermione understood Ron’s jealousy. It made sense: the youngest son of a poor wizarding family, having to simultaneously live up to his brothers and carve out his own space for accomplishments. Not to mention being best friends with the savior of the wizarding world. She could empathize; she knew what it was to be overlooked for the circ*mstances of one’s birth. But comparison was the thief of joy, and Ron had a nasty tendency to allow it to steal every bit of his usual buoyancy, leaving behind a cruel shell of her friend. When he got like that, any kindness Hermione might has brokered on his behalf quickly evaporated.

“Hermione or I can bring you,” Harry offered mildly, and Hermione tried to look occupied with her soup. “If you want to come.”

“How generous,” Ron sneered. “The charity case gets to tag along.”

“It’s not charity. Slughorn told us to bring dates,” Hermione commented, rolling her eyes at Ron’s behavior. “Not the orphans of London.”

“Dates?” Ron turned towards Hermione, mouth pressed into an ugly little line. “Suppose you’ll be writing to Viktor, then. I’m sure Slughorn will piss himself in joy.”

“Are you still writing to Viktor?” Ginny interrupted from where she sat next to Dean, obviously eavesdropping. Hermione willed herself not to blush. She did still write to Viktor; in fact, she owed him a response letter to the note he sent her at the beginning of term. While things between them had not always been exactly platonic— they had a fumbling, but heated summer dalliance after fourth year, when she visited Bulgaria— the distance had allowed the tone of their letters to cool significantly. She certainly wouldn’t encourage any old romantic notions to flare up by inviting him as her date.

“We correspond,” she answered Ginny, who grinned as if Hermione had said something far more salacious. “Believe it or not, Ron , it’s normal for two friends to write letters. I don’t appreciate the insinuation.”

“Oh, come off it,” Ron snorted, rolling his eyes as if Hermione was being willfully ignorant. “An international Quidditch star wouldn’t be writing to you for friendship.”

“Why not?” Hermione asked quietly. Harry, more attuned to Hermione’s anger than Ron, began chewing on his thumbnail nervously.

“Mate,” Harry interrupted. “Leave it—”

“Ron, don’t be a pig—” Ginny started, but her brother was well and angry, on his way to furious.

“He’d want to get something out of it,” Ron plowed on. “Why else would he be writing to a sixth year student, when he could have any witch he wanted? Easy pickings, isn’t it?”

By the end of his tirade, the entire Gryffindor table had fallen into a quiet. They’d seen Ron and Hermione row enough times to know the warning signs: the heat under Ron’s collar, the slight raise of Hermione’s eyebrows. Some of the younger students started shoveling spaghetti into their mouths at top speed, trying to finish eating before the inevitable explosion.

“You mean,” she began, eyes narrowed. “Why would a famous, handsome, wealthy Quidditch player be talking to a muggleborn, if he wasn’t trying to— to—” she scrambled for a more dignified word, but fell short “— to shag me?”

A shadow fell over her plate. A tall shadow.

“My, my, Granger,” Draco Malfoy grinned like Christmas had come early. “Who exactly are you shagging?”

Hermione groaned, burying her face in her hands so that she could blush from embarrassment in peace. Of course that’s what he’d overhear.

“Oh, piss off Malfoy,” Harry spat, voice raised. “Why are you everywhere this bloody term?”

“This has nothing to do with you,” Ron added, his complexion passing red and heading directly towards purple.

“Professor Snape asked to see Granger,” Malfoy answered silkily. “How fortunate that I should pass the message on during this riveting conversation. Please Weasley, continue with your rebuttal. Although between you and me, if you’re begging a witch to take you to an invitation-only party, you probably shouldn’t infer she’s a slag.”

Hermione lifted her head from her hands to regard Malfoy suspiciously. She knew he was taking the piss out of Ron, a favorite hobby of his, but it sounded bizarrely like Malfoy was defending her. A ludicrous idea.

“What’s Snape want with Hermione?” Harry asked, but was universally ignored.

“I wasn’t asking her to go with her,” Ron said loudly.

“That’s what you take issue with?” Hermione’s voice was equally raised. Malfoy seemed delighted with this, leaned on one of the hall’s pillars with the casual poise of someone taking in a show. “The assumption that we’d go together? Not the part where you inferred a man would only speak to me if I were spreading my legs?”

“Let’s not—” Harry started, gesturing with his hands for both parties to simmer down, but Hermione had had enough.

“I didn’t ask Slughorn to invite me,” Hermione stood, raising her chin in a superior manner that she knew Ron hated. “I’m not famous, or well-connected, or obscenely wealthy. I’ve got no pedigree. And before you accuse me of sleeping with him, too, because apparently that’s all I’m good for, let me inform you: I was going to ask you to accompany me to the party, but now I’d rather ask the Giant Squid.” She started towards Snape’s office, pausing to offer a final jab. “It would look better in dress robes, anyway.”

“You’re going to need some ice for that, Weasley!” Malfoy called, after letting out a mocking whistle. “Maybe you can ask Potter to take you, I’m sure you won’t have to put out...much!”

Before Ron could swing at Malfoy, the blond Slytherin was already off, striding quickly to catch up with her. To Hermione’s horror, angry tears had sprung into her eyes.

“Your tongue is quite sharp, Granger,” he sounded slightly impressed, as he fell into step with her. “I’d hate to be Weasley right now. His pride will never recover. Not that he had much to be proud of in the first place.”

“Harry was right,” she spat, rounding on him. “Why are you everywhere!? The detentions are bad enough. Why don’t you just piss off and torture someone else?”

“But I’ve gotten quite good at torturing you,” he said, and she could hear his grin before she saw it. “Besides, Snape didn’t just want to see you. He’s got an idea about—” Malfoy made a gesture, touching his wand to his temple to indicate occlumency.

Hermione groaned. The only thing worse than failing at occlumency with Malfoy, would be failing at it in front of Snape.

“Why is Snape in on this? Should we just announce it to the rest of the castle? Hermione can’t occlude, so we’re crowdsourcing advice—”

“You know we’re not making progress. I needed advice on how to demonstrate — oh, don’t look at me like that, Granger. Even your precious Dumbledore trusts him.”

“I suppose,” she frowned, unconvinced.

They fell quiet, walking through the empty hallways with only the sound of their footsteps echoing against the stone castle walls. After a few minutes, Malfoy burst out with a question he was clearly attempting to contain:

“Are you really seeing Krum?” Malfoy’s voice dripped with a surprising distaste. “That burly oaf? I remember him tossing you around like a sack of potatoes at the ball.”

“I thought you were a fan of his,” Hermione answered coolly, making a mental note of Malfoy’s comment. So he’d noticed her with Viktor, at the Yule Ball. Curious.“Switch it up after you saw him interested in a mudblood?”

“It’s more the fact that he’s built like a door, with the brains to match,” Malfoy sniffed. He wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Never meet your heroes.”

Snape sat behind his desk, hands folded under his chin. His office, that had once bustled with Lupin’s rare creatures and imposter Moody’s defensive gadgets, was decorated sparsely. The only adornment on the walls was a yellowed instructional poster on wand grip that looked about two hundred years old.

Snape was waiting, plausibly for them, with a bored expression on his face, one that darkened upon Hermione and Malfoy’s arrival.

“Sit,” he instructed simply. They sat. Next to Malfoy’s ramrod posture, she tried her absolute best not to slouch.

“Sir,” Hermione started, “I don’t know what you heard about our lessons, but—” A glare from the Defense professor stopped her in her tracks.

“Let me be frank, Miss Granger. I do notrelish in aiding students with extracurricular work during my personal, uncompensated hours. In the interest of time, I will speak and you will listen. Shut your mouth, Draco, before you catch flies.”

“Yes sir,” Malfoy said, chastised. Hermione smirked, until Snape turned his attention back to her, his gaze effectively evaporating her mirth.

“Mister Malfoy has kept me abreast of your situation,” Snape continued. “I hear, unsurprisingly, that your progress has been dismal at best, Miss Granger? That you require… remedial instruction?”

“That’s not fair,” she protested, bristling at the word remedial. “Malfoy doesn’t teach me anything tangible—”

“A no or a yes will suffice. I will not hesitate to silence you.”

“Yes, sir,” she gritted, looking anywhere but the smirking blond beside her.

“I’ve instructed very few wizards on this topic,” Snape said, his eyes glittering like beetles in a jar. “Even fewer have been able to sufficiently grasp the theory, much less the practice of occlumency. It is quite possible your mind is simply unfit for this branch of magic, Miss Granger.”

“Respectfully, sir—” Hermione started, in her most disrespectful tone.

“She has to learn.” Malfoy piped up, and both Snape and Hermione swiveled their gazes to him in surprise. “She has to. Otherwise my aunt will…” He shuddered horribly, going pale as he trailed off. “Unfortunately, Granger knows things, Sir. Things that will get her killed. That will get both of us killed.”

Snape sat silently, taking in Malfoy’s surprisingly earnest plea. He looked between the two of them with a vague, unplaceable dismay, as if they were an apparition of something he thought was long dead.

After a long moment, his eyes shuttered, flattening into their usual black. He was using occlumency now, Hermione realized, intrigued. But why? What dangerous thoughts could her and Malfoy have brought to the surface?

When he spoke again, it was so quiet and measured, both Hermione and Draco had to lean forward to listen.

“Many years ago, I attempted to teach occlumency to a…peer of mine. I believed it was imperative she learn to protect her mind. It was a dangerous time for witches like her.” Snape continued with a muted sort of horror, like he was remembering a fear that had been long realized. “I tried to teach this witch to defend herself mentally, but she was stubborn and resisted my help.”

For a moment, Snape closed his eyes. When he opened them, they were completely unaffected again.

“I begged her to learn. Maybe if she had…” Snape trailed off bitterly. “My point is that occlumency isn’t about resistance.” He eyed her and Malfoy. “It’s about allowing your mind to go slack. Occlumency is how the intelligent wizard plays dead. It’s how he survives.”

“You,” he pointed sharply at Draco, who straightened immediately. “Stop forcing your way in. Your path of entry is part of the problem. Unsurprising, given who trained you.”

Snape turned on Hermione, who found herself copying Malfoy’s movement and sitting up sternly. “And you— stop resisting him. You are only shredding your own defenses and exhausting yourself in the process. You Gryffindors never seem to learn that you cannot master occlumency through brute force.”

Hermione bristled internally, but bowed her head in assent.

“Are we understood?”

“Yes sir,” Malfoy said. He had regained a modicum of color, but still looked rather peaky.

“Dismissed,” Snape waved a hand and his office door swung open, unceremoniously. “And remember, I offer my advisem*nt as a favor, Draco. Do not bother me with inconsequential matters again. Do know your place.” Snape spat the final statement, heavy with inference.

Malfoy seemed rattled by the phrase, and stood immediately, moving towards the door.

Hermione stood, following Malfoy to the hall. Before she could stop herself, she’d turned around.

“What happened to her?” She blurted. “The witch you tried to teach?”

Snape’s black eyes snapped to hers, as cold and dark as a winter night.

“She died,” Snape finally answered lowly, dangerously. “Does that satisfy your curiosity?”

Before she could answer, he raised a hand and the door slammed in her face.

Hermione strode quickly to catch up with Malfoy, curious. The corridor was empty, with only a portrait holding a few tittering noble ladies, clad in silks and drinking liberally from an amphora.

“What’s he mean by know your place?” Hermione asked Malfoy, once she’d caught up. “Rather ominous, isn’t it?”

“My place, Granger,” Malfoy sighed. He seemed more reserved than usual. Tired, maybe. Up close, she could tell there were smears of blue under his eyes. She wasn’t the only one having trouble sleeping. “Scion. Pureblood. Death Eater. I can’t just act right— I have to think it, believe it.”

“Are you not?” Hermione asked quietly. He looked down at her, puzzled.

“What?”

“Not believing it?”

Malfoy looked temporarily stunned at the notion. Like he hadn’t considered it seriously, or maybe, hadn’t been prepared to hear it spoken aloud.

“Don’t talk like that,” he warned. “Don’t ever talk like that. Not where we could be heard.”

“Malfoy, if you’re questioning—”

“I’m not the only one who needs to know my place, Granger,” he said coldly, picking up his stride until his cloak whisked down the corridor to the dungeons.

*

Back in the Gryffindor common room, the fire crackled uproariously, warming Hermione’s numb hands.

The room had almost emptied, only inhabited by a few students lingering, pushing bedtime. A few third years played a quiet game of chess, pausing for long stretches to share packs of bonbons.Ginny Weasley was draped over the squashy orange sofa, half in Dean’s lap. Every so often she’d angle her face towards his, her curtain of red hair obstructing what Hermione thought was some particularly explicit snogging. She hoped fervently they wouldn’t reach for a blanket. Lavender Brown and Parvati held the corner armchairs, periodically scowling at the obscured sky as they checked over each other’s Astronomy assignments.

She looked into the flames as she pondered the evening’s unexpected conversation. Snape had looked at her and Malfoy so strangely, as if he was recognizing an old, horrid friend. What was his problem with Hermione?

“What did Snape want?” Harry snapped her out of her reverie and perched on the arm of her sofa.

“Slughorn has us working with fertilized doxy eggs in detention,” she invented. “Snape’s invested in making sure we don’t ruin his supply.”

“You’d think he’d butt out of potions now that he’s got the post he’s always wanted,” Harry responded uncharitably. Hermione hummed, resting her head on his denim clad legs. Outside, it was beginning to snow— the first of the season.

“Look,” Hermione whispered and Harry turned to the window. “First snow.”

“You’ve gotten awfully sentimental, Hermione,” Harry jibed good-naturedly, ghosting his fingers through her hair. She relaxed into his efforts— it felt good to be touched so gently.

Sometimes, she wondered why she didn’t feel any romantic inclinations towards Harry. She should, shouldn’t she? He was handsome and kind and brave and most of all, her friend. But his touch didn’t ignite any sort of longing within her. It just felt like a home that no longer existed.

The golden thread of shared loss glinted between them: it was the first winter that they’d both be orphans. This, she imagined wistfully, was probably what having a brother felt like.

“Yes,” she agreed with him. “That’ll happen.”

“Ron’s acting a twat,” Harry added, unknowingly treading into painful territory. “But you know how he gets.”

“Don’t make excuses for him.”

“I’m not—”

“You are,” she stated, sitting upright, his hand trailing from her hair. “You always do, Harry. Every horrible thing he says when he’s angry is excused because, well, it’s Ron, and he’s feeling badly about money, or Quidditch, or how he measures up to everyone else.”

“Well, isn’t this cozy.”

Ron’s voice carried from the stairs, seeped in brittle accusation. His expression looked horribly snide. It didn’t suit him. In the shadow cast by the firelight, it made him look a bit like Percy.

Harry scooted away from Hermione, quickly putting space between them as if he’d been caught by a stray ember, an annoyingly guilty expression on his face.

“Don't fight,” Harry started, holding up his hands in a gesture of peace. “I’m so tired of listening to fighting.”

“Please,” Ron continued, voice notching up, “don’t stop fondling each other on my account.”

“Oi,” Harry said, properly affronted now. “No one was fondling.”

“Just do it,” Ron turned to Hermione, his face creased in misery. “Go to Slughorn’s together. I’ve been convincing myself otherwise, you know. That it was all in my head. That even next to Harry, next to Krum, you might—” He shook his head like a waterlogged dog. “Forget it. You were always going to leave me behind. No room in the broom cupboard for three.”

“Ron,” Hermione said, startled. Her face heated as blood rushed to her cheeks. He honestly couldn’t think… “Harry and I aren’t— it’s not— our relationship isn’t that. Not even approaching that.”

“The worst part is,” Ron said, in a devastated way Hermione was unfamiliar with. “I actually thought I had a chance. At getting Keeper. At getting with— it doesn’t matter. It’s pathetic.”

“Hermione’s like my sister,” Harry added. “I don’t know what's got you like this, but you’re making this something it isn’t.”

“Some sister,” Ron spat, derisively. “You’re always looking after her, touching her—”

Hermione’s temper, which had been simmering for days, finally reached a boil.

“HE’S COMFORTING ME, YOU COLOSSAL PRAT. I LOST MY PARENTS. ” Her voice cracked. “My parents,” she repeated, and the words broke again. “And you. You’re thinking about Quidditch and snogging and going to parties. You disgust me.”

Those remaining in the common room were suddenly transfixed by bits of wallpaper. Ron looked like he’d been clubbed over the head. Good, Hermione thought savagely, Ron had acted a fool. He’d gotten everything so, so wrong.

Embarrassed tears gathered, and threatened to fall from his glassy eyes.

“Hermione,” he said, suddenly heartbreakingly serious. “I—”

“That’s enough, ” Ginny sat up from Dean’s lap, expression uncommonly stern. Hermione was struck by how much she resembled her mother. “Ron, go upstairs.”

“I’m sor—”

“Upstairs,” Harry agreed, firm. He stood, nodding towards the boy’s dormitories. “Not now, okay? You can apologize tomorrow.” Harry swept him towards the staircase, face grave. A wound had been inflicted that even he —ever the peacemaker— could sense wouldn’t be mended tonight. The common room was quiet enough to hear a quill drop.

“Ron,” Hermione called after him, and Ron winced, but did not turn around. Coward.

“The sad thing is…” Her eyes were clear, but her voice was ragged. If Malfoy were to cast an occlumens on her now, she’d probably fall to pieces. “If you stopped measuring yourself against your friends for a moment…you’d notice that no one else is making any comparisons.”

Chapter 11: A Collective Madness

Chapter Text

The early winter days brought towering evergreens in the Great Hall and conjured snowflakes drifting from the enchanted ceiling. To Hermione’s chagrin, the bracing cold had also brought with it a collective madness for which there was seemingly no cure.

Suddenly, everywhere she turned there were students wrapped in amorous embraces, couples squabbling in the hallway, moony-eyed girls whispering in bathrooms. Lavender Brown had started parading around with love bites on her neck and a coy, wouldn’t you like to know? prepared for those brave or stupid enough to ask after their origin.

There was a strange, needy buzz amongst the older students: who was taking who to Hogsmeade? To the broom closet after dinner? Parvati had asked no fewer than six times if she was bringing a date to Slughorn’s party, until Hermione had threatened to jinx her in response.

Most ridiculously, the seventh year Slytherins had started receiving formal intentions of courtship in the morning mail, something Ginny warned her was the first step towards marriage contracts.

The youngest Weasley had been accompanying her during meals more and more, after an argument with her menace of a brother over her relationship with Dean Thomas. This was ostensibly to keep Hermione company in her refusal to sit near Ron, but also to avoid increasing rows with an irritated Dean, who’d been shirty with her ever since the encounter.

“Marriage contracts?” Hermione had a passing understanding of pureblood culture: the debutante-style balls, the elbow rubbing, the semi-incestuous arranged coupling of third-cousins. Each new detail cemented her belief that they were all lunatics, willfully chained to archaic tradition.

“Did your mum and dad do that?” Hermione asked. “The pureblood courting rituals?”

Ginny smirked indecently, looking very much like a cat with a canary in its jaws.

“Didn’t you know? Despite her insistence on dodgy math, anyone who can count knows that Mum was quite pregnant with Bill at their wedding. Rather quick affair on all fronts. Ron can’t mention it without gagging.”

“I think it's antiquated,” Hermione frowned, thinking of Malfoy’s assumption at the sight of the Prewett watch. “Not to mention rather sexist. Can you imagine going through all that?”

“If Dean had sent me a bloody scroll of intention, I’d have cursed him into smithereens,” Ginny had asserted testily. “Granted, if he keeps up this mood, I still might.”

“Are you bringing him to Slughorn’s party?” Even if she ended things with Dean, Ginny was still popular and quite pretty. She’d grown out her hair nearly to her waist, and more than a few heads tended to swivel her way in the hallways, following a flash of copper. She'd have no trouble finding a plethora of potential dates.

“You sound like Parvati,” Ginny rolled her eyes. “Why bring anyone? I’m only going to drill Gwenog Jones on how to get a shot at trials for the Harpies. It’s not very romantic, is it?”

“A serious business,” Hermione agreed, lips twitching. “No place for a date.”

“Have you asked someone? Oi— what about McLaggen?" Ginny said, masking an evil grin with blatantly false sincerity. "Yes, he’s handsy and obnoxious and has a mouth like a toilet plunger, but have you considered the fact his uncle is famous?”

“I think I’ve heard him say that once or twice—” Hermione paused to stave off her giggles “—a day, every day. Maybe I should cut out the middleman and just write to his ancient uncle.”

“Now that’s a man in his prime—” Ginny started, the the final straw, sending them both shrieking with laughter before the redhead could finish. Hermione made loud shushing sounds.

“Don’t draw attention, or he’ll come over— oh, hello Plunger, I mean, Cormac! Late for potions, have to dash—”

The overallfestive mood was also making prefect rounds particularly excruciating. If Hermione had a galleon for every point she’d taken after stumbling upon partially undressed pairs behind tapestries, she’d own half of Gringotts. But it wasn’t only because of the increase in public displays of affection. In addition, a stony silence had developed between her and Ron since their blow up in the Gryffindor common room.

Ron had attempted a gruff public apology the next morning, one that Hermione had coldly rebuffed. The combination of her snub and a recent loss at a Quidditch match Hermione had not attended seemed to only fuel his bad mood. Embarrassed, he’d taken to making snide comments to whoever would listen and doing a rude impersonation of her raising her hand in class.

Harry had taken up the reluctant role of go-between with a constant refrain of yes, Iknow he’s a prat, Hermione and do shut up, Ron. The only time Harry couldn’t keep the peace was during prefect rounds, so Hermione had begged for a partner swap. Roger Davies, pompous as ever, said Hermione would have to wait until her request was formally processed, likely not until after Christmas.

In the meantime, with no interest to have any contact with the red-headed menace himself, Hermione split their patrols neatly in two and completed her portion in solitude. She sometimes thought it would be nice to have company walking down the chilly hallways in the evenings, but then again, would she really want to find couples fondling each other with Ron by her side? Ron, who turned red at the sight of a quick kiss between Bill and Fleur. Who’d blown up at Dean and Ginny for snogging in a corridor?

No, Ron would be particularly poorly suited to this; Hermione would bet he did his rounds with his eyes shut.

That’s why it was such a nasty shock, to find him in an empty classroom down the Charms corridor, with his tongue down Lavender Brown’s throat.

Hermione stood in the partially open doorway, startled into stillness. Her feet felt heavy, shoes suddenly filled with lead.

Ron’s hand was groping somewhere under Lavender’s partially unbuttoned shirt, as she made noises of encouragement. Even though her mind was urging her to flee, she remained frozen, listening to the eager sounds accompanying what could only be described as a sloppy embrace.

For a vindictive moment, she debated taking points, even if it was from her own house, just for the satisfaction of seeing Ron shrivel with embarrassment. But then, Lavender moved his hand down her stomach, guiding his fingers under her skirt.

Suddenly breathless with horror, Hermione shot down the hall as if she’d apparated, not stopping until she was two floors removed, halfway to the dungeons.

She wasn’t sure what to do with the tight feeling in her chest. Was she jealous? She leaned against the castle wall and tried to imagine herself as Lavender, with Ron’s lips pressed to hers— no, she thought, suddenly queasy. She most definitely didn’t want that, but...

Hermione couldn’t quite explain the sense of betrayal: she didn’t want to take her place, but she also didn’t want it to be Ron that Lavender was snogging. She felt something bitter, something lonely and possessive. Ron was her friend, despite his many, many flaws. What would happen when he and Harry became like all the other sixth year boys, obsessed with whoever they could wrap themselves around in the nearest alcove? Where would that leave Hermione?

She wanted things. Was that so horrible to admit? She wanted to be touched. She wanted someone desperate for her.

She wanted what came after the sound Viktor had made, with his lips on her throat the last night of her visit to Bulgaria. The nearly-pained groan he’d let out, breath hot on her skin, that she sometimes thought about when she couldn’t sleep. The rough way he’d asked, may I? before undoing her with his fingers. They’d been half-drunk on fireflies and salt from the Black Sea and she’d felt soft and pretty under his serious gaze. It had only happened once, but it had taught her that despite her tremendous grasp on logic, she too was predisposed to the delirium of desire.

“Excuse me,” a clipped voice asked. “Are you lost?”

Her eyes flew open, cheeks burning. A slim, dark-haired boy in a Slytherin tie leaned dispassionately in the hall.

He was one of the boys who orbited Malfoy. Quieter and less consequential than Crabbe and Goyle, he’d always slid into the background. Hermione couldn’t think of a time she’d heard him speak in class, but there was something familiar to his voice, something she recognized in the set of his jaw. There was a long pause where she struggled to place him and he regarded her with a cool disinterest.

“Nott,” She snapped, her memory finally catching on his name. “Theodore Nott, isn’t it?”

“Hermione Granger, isn’t it?” He mimicked. “I’ll repeat myself. Are you lost? ”

“I’m a prefect ,” she sniffed, straightening in order to appear taller. She hoped she didn’t look as flustered as she felt.

“Merlin,” Nott muttered. “ I’m a prefect. You sound just like him.”

“Like who? And I’m on duty, so you better have a good reason for wandering the corridors after curfew.”

“Curfew isn’t for another thirty minutes,” Nott answered, not bothering to check his watch. “And I was trying to catch Sluggy, but he went down for the night. Not that it’s any of your business.”

Despite the dim corridor light, she could make out a series of mottled bruises on his face and folded arms. Strange, that he wouldn’t have had them healed.

“Are you all right?” She asked, eyes lingering on the marks. Yes, he was a Slytherin and probably hated her for simply existing. But Hermione couldn’t help herself. “Did someone hurt you?”

“Someone,” Nott muttered, lips twisted. “Or something. I'm terribly clumsy.” He had a wavering, unsure way of speaking, a mannerism that didn’t seem aligned with the distasteful little frown on his lips.

“Do you want me to—?” She offered, raising her wand. “I’m not bad at healing charms, really.”

“Don’t you dare,” he responded, genuinely perturbed by her offer. Slytherins. They’d cut off their own hand if they thought it had offended their sense of capability.

“Suit yourself. Oh, I can—it’s somewhere in this pocket, give me a second—” Hermione dug into the secret, extendable pocket she’d sewn into her robes. The events of the summer had taught her that she could never be too prepared.

“Here.” She pulled out a small container of bruise cream and after a moment of hesitation, extended a palm in offering. Nott looked at her as if she’d grown a second head.

“What?” Hermione snapped. “Oh, just take it, don’t be stupid. I won’t tell anyone, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

After an excruciating silence, the boy reached out and quickly pocketed the salve.

“How much do I owe you,” he said, with terrible dignity.

“You don’t owe me anything,” she answered, rolling her eyes. “I’m not an apothecary. It’s just cream.”

Nott stared at her, unblinking. She thought, somewhat unkindly, that he looked a bit like an owl. She looked back, unable to shake the feeling they were sizing each other up. After a long pause, they burst out simultaneously.

“What are you doing in detention with—”

“Why were you looking for Slughorn—”

“Answer me,” Nott insisted. She raised her brows and he softened his iron tone.“I mean, tell me first.” She raised them even higher. “Fine, and then I’ll answer your bloody question, just— ” He paused to collect himself, before asking. “What are you doing in detention with Draco?”

“Why don’t you ask Malfoy? He’s the one who landed us there with his little cauldron prank.”

“I did,” Nott said simply. “I’d like to hear it from you.”

“We’re fertilizing doxy eggs,” Hermione lied, a cover story nearly too disgusting to question.“To replenish Slughorn’s stores.”

“Funny, that’s exactly what Draco said,” Nott replied, without a hint of a smile. He tapped his chin, like he was thinking. “Word for word.”

“What are you bothering Slughorn for?” She asked, crossing her arms. For a second, Nott frowned at her question, eyes darting to the floor, but he recovered quickly.

“I’m looking to attend the Christmas gathering, of course,” he offered smoothly. What a practiced liar, Hermione thought.

“Right,” she scoffed. “You’re wandering the corridors at curfew for a party invitation .”

“Well yes, Granger. I’m just desperate to attend and Zabini won’t take me.”

“Why?”

“Well, he used a lot of expletives, but the gist was—”

“Not Zabini,” Hermione corrected. “Why are you supposedly desperate to go?”

“I value my career prospects,” he intoned, like he was reciting from the driest chapter in a History of Magic textbook. “Networking is an important part of ensuring my future.”

“Right, because you need to network. Aren’t you heir to whatever?”

He let out a bark of a laugh: a sharp, mirthless thing. She suddenly remembered how he seemed familiar— she’d seen his father, Nott Sr., roaring in cruel glee, while running for her life at the Department of Mysteries.

“When your father is in Azkaban for services rendered to the Dark Lord, it puts a bit of a damper on the family name. I haven't received many invitations lately. ”

“Poor thing,” Hermione said, unsympathetic. “How difficult that must be.”

“It’s dreadful.” He clicked his tongue in mock horror. “I imagine this is what it must be like to be poor.”

Hermione had prepared a rebuttal, acidic on her tongue, when their exchange was interrupted by a familiar figure striding towards them, pale hair like a beacon of irritation. Of all the Slytherins in the dungeons, it had to be him.

“Nott!” Malfoy called into the corridor looking peeved. “I told you, don’t you dare—” He stopped short at the sight of her.

“Granger?” Malfoy said, genuinely bewildered, eyes lingering on her face. She fervently hoped that she was no longer blushing from the incident in the Charms corridor. “Why are you all…pink?”

Oh, blast.

“From the cold,” she snapped.“What’s it to you?”

Malfoy twisted his expression into his usual sneer. He’d shed his robes in favor of a thick green sweater and plain trousers. The sight of him dressed so casually had her startled, like seeing a dog walk on its hind legs.

“Shouldn’t you be up in your tower?” He asked mockingly. “Sewing bonnets for elves?”

Was it finally late enough for her to take points? Could she even take points from another prefect if they were out past curfew without being on duty? She glanced at her watch. Eight minutes to ten. Drat.

“Actually,” Nott cut through her internal dilemma. “I was just asking Granger here to Slughorn’s Christmas Party.”

Both her and Malfoy swiveled towards him. She was sure her jaw had unhinged with shock. Whatever interaction they had been having earlier, it had certainly not contained even the slightest romantic undertone. What was he playing at?

“No, you weren’t,” Malfoy blurted.

“Yes, I was.” Nott turned to her and offered her the world’s most insincere smile. “You’ve got an invitation to Slughorn’s, don’t you? Would you like an escort?”

“Very funny, Nott,” she answered flatly. “You should really both be off to bed.” Neither boy seemed to be listening. “I’m supposed to finish rounds in ten minutes.”

“Have you gone mad? Have you been around Granger long enough to sustain brain damage?” Malfoy demanded, voice swelling. His words echoed, lingering in the empty hallway.

Hermione was under no assumption that anything Theodore Nott was saying had even an iota of truth to it. But Malfoy’s tone of disgust stung. Was it so shocking that someone would ask her to a party? Forget that she had no interest in Nott. Forget blood status and house rivalry and the fact his father tried to murder her in a government building. There was a part of Hermione that took deep offense to Malfoy’s apparent consideration that as a person— as a girl— she was somehow repellant to romantic attention.

“Why not?” Nott asked, shrugging his bony shoulders.

“Would you like my treatise on the subject? She’s not exactly Sacred Twenty-Eight, is she? And you’re— and she’s — she’s Granger! ”

“Yes,” Nott replied, turning in dismissal. “I’ve noted that. Thank you for your thorough input, Draco.” He co*cked his head, eyeing her. “Well, Granger?”

She stared back at him, perplexed. She couldn’t help but note that some of his bruises were fresh and some were yellowed. So, whatever had happened to Nott was still happening. Something that made him desperate enough to speak to her, to accompany her. She didn’t buy a single word he’d utter about preparing for his future. In fact, she suspected him to be on track for the same career path as his friend Malfoy, Dark Mark and all.

Maybe it was pity. Maybe it was suspicion, keeping friends close and enemies closer. Maybe it was because Nott asked like he was issuing a challenge and she was stubborn to a fault. Maybe seeing Ron and Lavender writhing together like snakes around a caduceus had traumatized her into lunacy.

“Fine,” Hermione said. “Don’t wear anything ridiculous.”

“I won’t if you don’t.” Nott grinned, a cold little gesture that didn’t reach his eyes. Hermione had a feeling her definition of ridiculous was very different from his.

“This is madness,” Malfoy insisted, gesturing between them. “I don’t know what asinine point about inclusivity or mending bridges you’re trying to prove, Granger, but this is foolish, even for you.”

She checked her watch. 10:03. Perfect.

“Twenty points from Slytherin for being out after curfew.” She glanced between the two. “Ten for each. Shall we make it forty?”

Malfoy— more irritated than usual—made a rude gesture before turning on his heel and storming off in the direction of the Slytherin common room.

“I’ll receive you outside your common room Friday,” Nott offered with a distant sort of politeness.

“Don’t bother,” Hermione sniped. “I’ll meet you there.”

It was only when her pride had cooled that she considered maybe, she’d made a terrible mistake.

Chapter 12: The Woes of Pansy Parkinson

Chapter Text

The announcement— if you could call snogging at breakfast an announcement— that Ron Weasley and Lavender Brown were an item was largely overshadowed by something far more salacious and unexpected:

Hermione Granger and Theodore Nott were going to Slughorn’s Christmas party. Together.

Hermione didn’t realize people were staring until halfway through her first cup of tea. It was a bit like when Skeeter had been inventing slanderous stories about her dosing wizards with love potions, except this time, everyone was looking at Hermione like she was the one who’d been dosed. All four house tables seemed to be united in one thing: gossip. Pansy Parkinson was glaring in her direction, eyes like a sharpened blade. Well, at least one good thing would come of this: getting under the Slytherin girl’s skin.

“That skinny git?” Ginny exclaimed, once she’d heard. “Hermione, I had to hear this from Parvati.”

“How’d Parvati know?”

“She’s partnered with Greengrass in Herbology— nevermind that. Do you secretly love him or something?” Ginny asked, aghast. Hermione rounded on her.

“No, I don’t love him,” Hermione hissed. “Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t even know him really, he just said he wanted to go to the party and would I take him as my date? God knows what possessed me to say yes.”

“I know what possessed you,” Ginny replied, a scandalized look on her face that Hermione didn’t appreciate. “It certainly wasn’t god.”

“It’s not like that. Honestly, I just figured it would annoy Ron,” she insisted, but her protests were interrupted by a mop of messy black hair and a pair of accusatory green eyes.

“Hermione,” Harry said, plonking down next to Ginny. “What’s my favorite muggle candy called?”

“For the love of all— I’m not under the Imperius Curse!”

Harry and Ginny looked at her expectantly until she relented with a muttered, “Mars Bars.”

“It’s really not the Imperius? Did you hit your head? I’m sorry, but what other reason is there to go out with a bloody Death Eater?”

“He’s technically only the son of a Death Eater,” she offered, in the face of Harry’s abundant scoffing. “Sins of the father and all that.”

“There are plenty of, er, good looking blokes out there. How about Neville?” Harry began to gesture wildly, pointing at Neville, who looked up fearfully from a plate of eggs. “Neville is, um, tall. Or Seamus? You get on great with Seamus, and he probably isn’t, you know, evil.”

“A high bar, you’ve set,” Hermione replied.

“Hermione,” Harry said, leaning across the table to look seriously into her eyes. “You could always take McLaggen.”

Ginny, who had been amusing herself watching Harry’s antics with a tinge of pink on her cheeks, snorted a laugh. Harry glanced over at her, looking terribly pleased with himself. Hermione watched him as he ruffled his hair unconsciously, like he did when he was nervous. So that was happening?

“Why don’t you take Hermione,” Ginny offered, falsely nonchalant. “You two would look nice together.”

“I’m, er,” Harry looked momentarily nervous. “I’m taking Luna.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful,” Ginny gave him a genuine smile, a hint of relief in the smoothing of her brow. “She’ll be so happy to go.”

“Are you going? With anyone?”

“I’m going to stalk Gwenog Jones.”

“Cool,” Harry breathed reverently. “That’s so…yeah. Cool.”

“See, Harry is going with Luna and no one is assuming they’re indecently involved,” Hermione. “What’s the big deal?”

“Luna’s our friend, Hermione. She’s a far cry from going out with Theodore Nott!”

There was a wet, suction-like noise from a few feet down the table. Ron had surfaced.

“Sorry, what?” Ron said, too loud. Lavender grimaced beside him, draping her legs over his lap in an overt show of ownership. Hermione resisted rolling her eyes. “Did you just say Hermione is going out with Theodore Nott?”

“Theodore Nott?” Lavender sniffed. “He’s not even that fit.” She tried tugging on Ron’s arm to reinitiate exploring each other's tonsils, but went largely ignored.

“Yes, Theodore Nott,” Hermione confirmed. She looked Ron up and down derisively. There was a bit of spittle on his chin. “Honestly, can we stop saying his name?”

“Have you gone mad?” Ron cried.

“Frankly,” Hermione said, with obvious relish. “I don’t see how it’s any of your business.”

She smiled sweetly, standing in dismissal.

“Harry, Ginny, I’ll see you at the party. You know, since you were both invited.”

*

The regret only began to truly sink in the night of the party, as Hermione steeled herself to step out of the portrait hole. Harry and Ginny had already departed to meet Luna in the entrance hall, begging Hermione to heed a reminder that she could “always change her mind about her date” as they left.

Everything was fine. She looked fine. Nott would act fine. She’d have a cup of punch, figure out what on earth he was up to, and be in bed before midnight. This wasn’t an elaborate ruse to embarrass her or murder her. Probably.

Armed with an assortment of muggle and magical cosmetics, Hermione had done her best. She smoothed her hair with Sleakeasy’s until it fell into controlled ringlets, swept up off her neck. On a whim, she wore the dress robes that Fleur had gifted to her in the final days of summer, claiming to have put on weight from eating “like ‘ze heavy English.” She said they would better suit Hermione, a mischievous look in her eye.

They were very much Fleur’s taste, not hers. In them, she didn’t look like Hermione, not really. Hanging from her shoulders from delicate straps, the dress was made of acromantula silk in a muted shade of gold, the fabric flickering like candlelight when she moved. Her uncovered back felt strangely vulnerable, exposing her shoulder blades and upper spine. Hermione looked…

She smiled to herself. Bless Fleur.

After a bit of unpracticed wobbling in her heels, she steeled herself for the walk to Slughorn’s office. The portrait hall swung open and she stepped through. Despite her protests otherwise, Theodore Nott was waiting for her.

“Took you long enough, Potter and She-Weasel almost snapped off my neck,” Nott said in greeting. He looked at her in sly appreciation. “My, my. You look quite nice, Granger.”

Nott had obviously made an effort: he’d brushed his dark curls off his forehead with some sort of gel, and wore a very formal set of jet-black robes embellished with black satin lapels. At least he had left off a dress cape.

“Er, you too, Nott.”

“Shall we?” He held out his arm, like an old English gentleman. Because she was unsteady in heels, she took it.

Nott filled the walk over with strangely dignified questions, as if he was reading from a script. Things like “How are your studies faring?” or “The weather has been congenial for broom travel this winter, hardly any snow,” or “Do you care for a shall?” He even offered to transfigure one for her from his handkerchief. It was all very pinched and Victorian.

“Nott,” Hermione asked him, cutting through his frigid small talk. “Why are you speaking like you’re in the previous century?”

“You may call me Theodore, if you wish,” he offered, frowning at her question. “These are the appropriate topics of conversation for escorting a lady. At least, that’s what Tutor said.”

“Nott is fine, thanks. What do you mean, tutor?”

“My tutor,” Theo puzzled, like he couldn’t comprehend why she was asking. “Before Hogwarts. You know, for etiquette and dancing and such. Society things.”

“Ah yes, society things,” Hermione couldn’t help but laugh, bright as bells. “You know, that’s a bit antiquated. Just because we’re going to a party together doesn’t mean you can’t talk to me normally. You don’t have to perform…all that.” She eyed him, considering her next statement carefully. “You know, for muggles, dates are quite casual. They just go to the pub or the movies. Almost like being with a friend.”

“How…” She could tell he was searching for the least offensive word in his arsenal. “Different.”

After that, Nott relaxed a bit, but not much. There was still a wildly nervous sort of energy buzzing around him, something she couldn’t merely attribute to a date or a school function.

Slughorn’s party was held in his office, which had been magically enlarged from the typical size of a teacher’s study. The expansion held a number of witches and warlocks of various ages, chatting over the gentle sounds of a string quartet. Hermione immediately recognized some of them from photos in the Prophet. The Slug Club’s more famous alumni were Quidditch players and minor politicians, celebrated musicians and academics. If Hermione were really there to network, she’d feel a bit intimidated. Although not everyone felt that way; Hermione caught a peek of Ginny’s red hair swinging determinedly towards an athletic looking woman in Harpies’ purple.

Unsurprisingly, Slughorn had gone very full-on with the decorations. The walls were draped with dark red velvets and green satins, and little gilded lanterns were scattered around the ceiling, surrounded by fluttering specs of light. The overall effect was warm and lovely.

“Those are real faeries,” Nott said quietly, indicating towards the ceiling with his sharp chin. “The lights.”

“Are they trapped in the lanterns?” Hermione wondered, perturbed by the thought. “Is that ethical?”

Nott’s lips twitched.

“Going to sew some bonnets to free them too?”

“For your information, I don’t sew bonnets.” Hermione corrected irritably, reminded of Malfoy’s quip. “I knit articles of clothing for elves—should they choose to wear them— as symbols of personal autonomy.”

“How very creative,” Nott replied politely, but his eyes told Hermione that he thought she was barmy.

To her horror, she noticed another of Slughorn’s festive decorations: sprigs of mistletoe bound with little golden bells jingled over the partygoers, cheerfully demanding a kiss. Eager to avoid them, Hermione pivoted directions towards a slightly less uncomfortable option.

Slughorn was beaming in the center of the crowd, fielding introductions with jolly laughs and wagging fingers.

“Shall we say hello?” She offered, already pulling them away.

“Miss Granger!” Slughorn exclaimed jovially upon sighting her. He seemed drunk on attention and a fair amount of brandy, if the smell was any indication. “If it isn’t my prodigal sixth year potioneer! And Mister…” He trailed off, cheery words dissipating like dew.

“Nott,” the boy at her side offered, in a cold manner that made it clear he was unused to having to introduce himself. “Theodore Nott.”

“Yes,” Slughorn said faintly. He looked between them and Hermione fought the urge to drop Nott’s arm and assure him, it’s not what you think, Professor. “What a…display of inter-house unity.”

“Indeed,” Nott said smoothly. “I was just telling Hermione that I’m a big proponent of cultural exchanges. Were you aware Professor, that courting muggles go to something called the movies ?”

Slughorn stared at them as if they were an apparition, squinting to confirm their solidness, seemingly lost for words for the first time in his life.

“Harry!” Hermione cried, spotting his spectacles from the corner of her eye at the most opportune moment. She let go of Nott to lurch towards his sleeve, yanking him and a sparkly looking Luna into Slughorn’s view. “Thank goodness. Come greet Professor Slughorn!”

“Thanks a lot,” Harry muttered out of the corner of his mouth, sparing only a glare towards Nott. “Hello, Professor…” He was quickly steered away from Luna and towards whoever Slughorn was attempting to show him off to. Poor sod.

“Masterfully done,” Nott muttered, moving away from Slughorn’s booming voice. “Shall we find a drink? Preferably something strong.”

“You look lovely, Hermione,” Luna said, floating alongside them. She had donned a violently spangled dress that made Hermione blink hard. “Like a unicorn foal.”

“What?”

“Unicorns are born golden,” Luna explained. “They only turn white once they’re fully matured.”

“Oh, right. Thank you, Luna. You look wonderful, too. Very, er, festive.”

Although Luna seemed perfectly at ease, it was Hermione’s first time encountering a magical bar, charmed to float tumblers of firewhiskey and goblets of festive flavor-changing punch from a crystal bowl into the waiting hands of wizards. She watched curiously as other guests approached. No one seemed to ask for anything. Instead, drinks simply floated into the recipient's waiting hand.

“How do we..?” She turned to ask Nott, but found he’d disappeared.

“Theodore seemed like he had to attend to something urgently,” Luna replied kindly.

Hermione whipped her head around, eying the crowd for Nott, as if he could be hiding in a bystander’s skirts.

“Poor thing is positively infested with nargles. I’ll talk to him about treatments later in the evening.” Luna reached forward and the bar produced a snifter of Dragon Barrel Brandy. She seemed bemused and delighted by the selection.

“It’s not what I’d normally choose,” she said serenely. “But isn’t it nice to be surprised?”

“That’s because it’s my drink.” Pansy Parkinson elbowed Hermione out of the way, wearing a set of pretty blue robes and a red lacquered sneer. She reached for Luna’s glass and downed the amber liquid in a large gulp.

“Why are you here, Parkinson?” Hermione rounded on the Slytherin girl. “I thought mistletoe warded off evil spirits.”

“I’m here with Zabini.” Pansy rolled her kohl lined eyes, as if Hermione had said something inordinately stupid. “Are you on the invitation committee or something? Looking for a new and exciting way to be a stick in the mud?”

“I never thought I’d feel pity for Zabini,” Hermione responded. “But apparently Christmas miracles do exist.”

“Loony,” Pansy snapped, a bit of a slur in her tone. She seemed fairly drunk. “Why don’t you go bother someone else about Glimping Pimples—”

“Gulping Plimpies,” Luna corrected, clearly flattered that Pansy had gotten close. “They’re hibernating now, of course, but spring is their breeding season.”

“Whatever. I need a word with Granger.” The holiday spirit clearly had not cured Pansy of her defining flaw: a terrible personality.

Hermione reached out for a drink and Pansy—apparently cut off by the bar— tried to intercept it, slopping some of it on her own blue skirts.

“Oh for f*ck’s sake,” she moaned, glaring at Hermione like she’d spilled the drink. “This is pure lotus silk.”

Hermione brought the glass to her lips before Pansy could snatch it and sipped. The enchanted bar had provided her something similar to mulled wine, sweet, with a touch of cinnamon that smoldered on her tongue. It was dangerously good.

“Having fun yet, mudblood?” The word didn’t sting because Pansy seemed so very pathetic as she delivered it: dress stained with wine, eyes glassy. From a distance, she seemed like the put together Pureblood princess she’d always tried to portray. Up close, she looked like a mess.

Pansy hiccoughed loudly, adding to the effect.

“Slow down Parkinson,” Hermione said. “Before you finish the barrel."

“What the f*ck are you doing?” Pansy spit, all brattiness suddenly gone from her tone. Her words tumbled out, uncontrolled. “Did you decide Nott was your new pet project? Got bored with the elves and the half-breeds?”

“For your information, he asked me.”

Pansy winced, as if Hermione had said something far more cruel. She felt a little badly; clearly Pansy was unaware of that detail and it had affected her more than she wanted Hermione to see.

“Do you know how dangerous it is for him to be seen with you?” Pansy said, her sleek dark bob shaking in emphasis. “Do you know what they could do to him?”

“What who could do?” Hermione asked, knowing the answer. Pansy’s words all but cemented her previously held suspicions that Nott was involved with the Death Eaters. Drinking her own weight in brandy certainly hadn’t made her subtle.

“Don’t play stupid.” Pansy’s voice cracked. For a moment, it was like she wasn’t speaking to Hermione anymore. There was a gravity to her tone that made the air between them prickle with unease. “You’re going to get them killed. Both of them.”

“Both? ”

“Oh, don’t play dumb. Do you really think I haven’t noticed?” Pansy continued, ignoring Hermione’s question. “I’m probably the only person at this school who always looks for Draco first in a crowded room. And he’s always looking at you.”

“You’re drunk.” Hermione said, moving to leave. Pansy grabbed her wrist desperately, digging in with manicured nails. As she turned to set herself free with a well-aimed stinging jinx, she noticed the door to Slughorn’s private quarters open, ever so slightly. Only wide enough for someone very thin to slip through.

Before she could blink, Nott appeared and obstructed her view, like he’d stepped out from the shadows themselves.

“Pansy!” Nott seemed slightly harried. He looked between them, like their proximity was a bomb he needed to diffuse. “Oh, good, you found Granger. I’ve been looking everywhere.”

“Have you?” Hermione asked cooly, not one to have wool pulled over her eyes. “Where have you been looking, exactly?”

“Is she drunk?” Nott nodded in Pansy’s direction, ignoring Hermione’s question.

“Not enough,” Pansy confirmed, swaying a bit on her feet as she turned towards Nott.“Did you do it yet?”

Pansy, tongue loosened by a liter of brandy, had said too much.Nott’s face took on a dangerous expression, one that urged Hermione to step back. He’d never looked more like his father.

“Pansy is incapacitated and must retire to her quarters,” he announced, in his clipped way of speaking. He took Pansy by the shoulders firmly, ignoring her protests. “I profusely apologize, Granger.”

“But I don’t want to—”

With a flick of his wand, Nott did what Hermione had wanted to do for nearly six years: he silenced Pansy Parkinson. By the look on her face, this was an unforgivable act.

“Nott,” Hermione said with a lowered voice, so Pansy wouldn’t overhear. “I know something is up. I don’t know what you did tonight, but I can help you undo it, we can help—”

He interrupted her. She thought there was a hint of regret in his gaze, but it might have been the fairies, casting their whispers of light.

“Thank you for your company tonight, Granger,” Nott said quietly. “At some other time, I owe you a dance.”

“Nott, it really doesn’t have to—”

Her protests went ignored. With a sharp little nod of his head, Nott was gone.

For a moment, Hermione contemplated going after him. Before she could weigh her options further, a commotion amongst the dancing drew her attention: Draco Malfoy, complaining loudly, being dragged by the ear towards Slughorn by a disgruntled Filch.

Filch pointed an accusatory finger at Malfoy, who in turn seemed to plead his case. Slughorn, moderately drunk and deeply uncomfortable, patted Malfoy gingerly on the back, apparently allowing the boy to stay.

Malfoy yanked himself away from Filch and smoothed his robes before making a beeline directly towards her. Hermione frantically considered an escape route, but found only a morose looking vampire as a potential conversation partner. For a second, she considered it. She could handle a little blood loss, surely.

“Granger,” Malfoy greeted sharply. He stopped short a few paces from her, startled and then blurted, “What are you wearing?”

“Dress robes,” Hermione snapped, suddenly self-conscious under his scrutiny. She knew she looked nice, so why was she desperately fighting the urge to make herself smaller by slouching?

“Obviously, they’re dress robes,” he responded, like she was the idiot.

“Why are you here, Malfoy? Besides to comment on my choice of formalwear.”

He ignored the question, instead thrusting a hand out over the bar expectantly, until it provided him with a tumbler of clear, shimmering liquid. Fairy gin, if the botanical aroma was any indication.

“Is there an enchantment on the fabric?”

“An enchantment?” Hermione asked, genuinely bewildered. Why was he going on about her robes?

“Yes, did you charm it to look…” He seemed to struggle temporarily for words, making a vague gesture. “...Like that.”

“It’s acromantula silk, if that’s what you mean.” She frowned. The wine had created a warm, tingling effect in her chest that migrated into her cheeks. “They were a gift.”

“Didn’t you come with Nott?” Malfoy looked around, his sneer pasted on his face. “Where is the prat, anyway?”

“He took Parkinson back to the dormitory. She’d been overserved.”

“How chivalrous,” Malfoy said, in a tone that indicated chivalrous was not the adjective he’d prefer to use. He drained his glass, wincing at the taste, before reaching for another. “Trust Slughorn to never spring for the top shelf.”

“Malfoy,” Hermione asked seriously. “What business did Nott have in Slughorn’s office?”

Malfoy blanched, going even paler than usual. He didn’t look angry. She knew what anger looked like, on Malfoy’s face. She also knew what he looked like when he was afraid, and wasn’t sure which realization made her more uneasy.

“Would you like to dance, Granger?” He asked suddenly, expression smoothing into something far more placid.

It was her turn to appear startled.

“With you?” She spluttered. “No, not particularly.”

“I think,” He finished his drink and stepped closer. “We should have a dance. The music is very loud over there, isn’t it?”

She finally clued in— he didn’t want to be overheard. With great trepidation, she took his arm. He hissed quietly, moving her hand closer to his elbow. Right, his Dark Mark; she wouldn’t have what she needed to complete her experimental sanitatum until after the holiday. She hoped the delay wasn’t causing him too much pain.

Malfoy led her towards the string quartet, carefully to stay close to the edges of the room, aware of how it would be in both of their best interests to stay in the shadows.

He extended his hands, offering one for her to hold and resting the other on her waist. Almost hovering, the barest of touches.

“Spit it out, no one can hear us here.”

“Take my hand, Granger. Are you certain even you know how to dance?”

She glared at him, privately thinking that any bystanders would consider it even stranger to see them in a dance than a conversation, but followed the direction.

Malfoy’s hand was soft and cool. She was surprised by how much larger than hers it was, practically eclipsing her fingers. The sight made her strangely dizzy. Maybe she shouldn’t have had any wine.

Clearly practiced, he began to rotate them smoothly to the tempo of the music, something low and moody from the cello. Drawing her slightly closer, he leaned into her hair and began to speak.

“I’m only saying this because I know how bloody obstinate you are and I don’t want you going after Nott. You have no idea how dangerous your association with him is.”

“I’m quite tired of others deciding what’s too dangerous for me,” Hermione responded fiercely. “Mostly because I end up in danger regardless. And if for some bizarre reason my safety is of concern, I’d wager I’d have a far better shot at protecting myself if I knew what the hell was going on.”

“Let me remind you how poorly your efforts to close your mind have been going.” His grip tightened incrementally on her fingers. “I don’t even know the specifics.”

“But you know something.”

“Think about what was asked of me,” he hissed. “Think about who else was apprehended alongside my father. How do you think the Dark Lord handled those debts, hm?”

They spun, dipping slightly to a low sumptuous note, as Hermione reeled internally.

There were two things she was sure of: first, that Malfoy was trusting her with this information in the most devious way possible, by offering her blanks and allowing her to fill in the absences. And second, that Theodore Nott had also been sacrificed for the sins of his father at the altar of the Dark Lord.

“You didn’t do it,” she muttered into his collarbone, blatantly naming the debt that had burned between them for nearly half a year. “You found a way out. Maybe he can too.”

Malfoy was silent for a moment, long enough that she looked up. His eyes weren’t gray so much as they were molten silver. There was a sort of grief to his expression that she couldn’t place. A haunting, mist hovering over a graveyard.

“I found a bird on the manor grounds, once.” Malfoy spoke almost absently, like he’d suddenly gone very far away. “When I was young. It was half-dead, fallen from the nest and I carried it in. I wanted to help it fly. Mother says it was my first accidental magic, the healing. I think she’s just being sentimental.”

The tune switched to something brighter, dancers around them recoupling for the new song. But Malfoy held onto her, keeping his slow, smooth movements unchanged. He wasn’t done speaking.

“Father killed it. He waited until it could fly, and then he wrung its neck, right in front of me. I couldn’t understand why. I wouldn’t look at him for nearly a month. Now I know why he did it, what the lesson was.” His voice dropped lower, nearly gravel. “Pity made me weak.”

There was something very precarious about the moment. Maybe it was the wine, but Hermione swore she could feel a strange, prophetic sort of certainty that how she responded to his vulnerability would matter. As if whatevershe said in this moment could somehow change how Draco Malfoy moved through the world.

“Once,” Hermione said in a near whisper. They had gotten very close while dancing,so that the front of her dress pressed against his chest. “You went against the most powerful wizard in history for a girl you didn’t even know. Someone you don’t like or hold in any sort of regard. You went against him, simply because you saw her humanity. Because you honored your own.”

She tilted her chin up in order to meet his eyes directly. Her gaze was strong and blazing, like bronze forged over a flame.

“Empathy doesn’t make you weak, Malfoy. It makes you human. It makes you strong.”

For once, Hermione knew she’d said the right thing. She could feel it, strong and certain, humming around them.

He looked at her hard, mouth parting incrementally. There was a jarring focus to his silver gaze, like the world as he saw it had narrowed into a single pinpoint: her. No one had ever looked at Hermione like that before, examined her so thoroughly and shamelessly, as if she were something hung in a museum. It sent a bolt of mortification through her chest, left her feeling both eager and terrified to be seen by him.

“You’re half-wrong, Granger.”

Crestfallen, she tried to pull away, but he held fast. His fingers flexed against her exposed back, brushing at bare skin.

“I don’t like you.” Malfoy said quietly, an unfamiliar gravity to his tone. “But I do hold you in high regard. Very much so.”

Hermione stared. She knew she was staring, and yet, she couldn’t get herself to blink. Perhaps she was the truly shameless one amongst them.

The room was all at once too loud, uncomfortably warm, overperfumed. The wine lingered, too sweet on her tongue. His unexpected declaration hung like petrichor between them, embedding the air with a heaviness that promised a coming storm.

She stepped back and his hands quickly fell away. The unnamable force conjured between them vanished, first in wisps and then all at once.

With newfound distance between them, Hermione felt a bit like she’d just happened into complete darkness after a long moment standing in the blinding sun.

Malfoy opened his mouth, as if ready to retract his statement, and then closed it. For a moment, they stood uncomfortably, unsure of how to part.

”I suppose I should—“

”Right.”

“Merry Christmas, Malfoy.”

The words escaped her without her permission. Somewhere, a violin sang out brightly. She walked away, only the slightest bit unsteady.

Chapter 13: Merry and Bright

Chapter Text

Despite her protests otherwise, Hermione spent Christmas at the Burrow. With no home of her own to return to— just a pile of ash, thanks to her and Malfoy—she’d told Harry to tell Ron she’d be staying at Hogwarts for the holidays, wanting to avoid the uncomfortable situation of having to explain to Arthur and Molly Weasley that she was giving their son the silent treatment.

Harry, refusing to allow Hermione spend her first Christmas without her parents alone in the castle, kicked up a fuss.

“I know you think you want to be alone,” Harry said, a little haunted. “But what if you change your mind? What about Christmas morning?”

“I’ll be fine,” she insisted.

He looked at her like she was a child; not in a condescending manner, but with a devastating tenderness.

“But what if you’re not?”

When she further refused, he turned traitor by employing the forces of the collective Weasley siblings. Hermione received a flurry of letters— some sweet, some threatening— making it clear that she would be spending her holidays with family, thank you very much.

Fred and George wrote her a vaguely threatening missive, stating the side effects of non-attendance: it will make U-NO-POO look like a walk in the park. Fleur sent her a letter entirely in French, charmed to translate loudly into English upon receipt. It followed her around for two days, accent getting heavier as the charm wore off. At the end of the day, it was Molly who delivered the final blow to her resolve.

My dear, you simply cannot remain in that drafty castle at Christmas. I’ve already made up your bed in Ginny’s room. Grief shouldn’t be taken on alone, Hermione.

That’s how she ended up bundled off the train alongside Harry and Ginny as Ron and Lavender said—or rather, demonstrated— their goodbyes.

Neither Harry or Ginny had mentioned any of the going ons between her and Malfoy at Slughorn’s party, the whispers and dance they had shared in the shadows. It seemed out of character for Harry not to press, until she realized that whenever the party was brought up in casual conversation, he’d blush and look anywhere but Ginny. Similarly, Ginny's voice would ricochet up in volume whenever the topic was broached, until she was nearly shouting her response. It was apparent that something had happened between them that night, a blessing on Hermione’s part.

“Aren’t you going to say bye to Dean?” She asked Ginny, who in turn, looked vaguely embarrassed. Harry, apparently trying not to listen in, suddenly began admiring the station’s marble flooring. It was one of the least subtle attempts of eavesdropping Hermione had every seen; she fought the urge to laugh.

“I ended things,” Ginny admitted. “I know, it’s lousy for me to do right before Christmas, but—”

“You don’t have to explain yourself,” Hermione offered gently. “If it wasn’t right, it wasn’t right.”

“It wasn’t right,” Ginny confirmed, as Harry smiled conspicuously at the ground. She turned to Hermione, slightly wary. “Are you saying goodbye to Nott?”

“Christ, no. It really was just a one-time outing,” She did not say: I took him to spy on him and he went with me to sneak around Slughorn’s office. Then I had a strange dance with Malfoy that ended in the world’s most uncomfortable heart to heart.

“You know, we haven't even talked about it yet...did the skinny bastard try for a cheeky kiss?”

“Thankfully not,” Hermione confirmed, pulling a face at the thought. “But if I have a secret romance with any poncy, repressed Slytherins, you’ll be the first to know.”

*

She hated to admit it, but Harry was right: the constant thrum of activity at the Burrow prevented her from lingering too long on painful thoughts of her parents, offering her a buoyancy she hadn't realize she needed.

Christmas at the Weasleys' was a crowded affair, noisy and bright. Strings of glittering paper snowflakes and tinsel streamers draped almost every surface. The air was always scented with roast chicken or sugared plums, and the wafting of soft rolls fresh from the ovens kept Hermione constantly hungry.

The Burrow seemed ready to burst at the seams: Ron and Harry were bunked with the twins, while Hermione and Ginny were relegated to Ginny’s room in the attic. For propriety’s sake, Fleur was supposed to be staying with them as well, something Hermione found was more realistic in theory than in practice.

“Why are we going through the motions,” Ginny muttered under her breath. “Have you seen the two of them? Bill’s basically always a hair-flip away from ripping off his clothes. I don’t exactly think they’re taking it slow.”

Privately, Hermione agreed. If the way Fleur looked at Bill— with a sly, heated sort of interest— was any indication, she would not be sleeping in their room this holiday.

The only uncomfortable aspect of the situation was her standing with Ron. They had reached a sort of frosty, unspoken truce: Hermione greeted him stiffly over pancakes, Ron passed the milk jug without protest.

The inevitable confrontation between Hermione and Ron brewed up until Christmas Day— when their simmering mutual animosity finally hit a boiling point.

After presents, while Molly bustled around the kitchen preparing Christmas dinner, the Weasley siblings plus their respective guests gathered over cocoa and cards.

Hermione idly flipped through Malfoy’s demonology book. Harry had gotten her a clever little page marker that could identify phrases in the text on command, and she was enjoying testing its capabilities. It wasn't the only gift in the spotlight: upon receiving an owl with a large pink package in the shape of a heart, Ron mentioned Lavender’s standing as his girlfriend, an error that proved near-fatal.

“Girlfriend! But Fred, Ickle-Ronnie is barely out of diapers!”

“Oh George, don’t tease. I’m sure she’s got something really wrong with her, like tentacles for arms or permanent spell damage.”

“You were asking for it, mate,” Harry warned a disgruntled Ron. “Why would you give them ammunition?”

“I thought they were mature enough to handle the information,” Ron sniped. “I forgot they’re about as romantic as a pair pickled toads.”

Hermione snorted at this.

“What?” Ron turned to look at her, eyes narrowing.

“Nothing,” Hermione said, not raising her gaze. “I just find it funny that you’re dishing out romantic advice.”

“Yeah?” He said, too loud. Harry’s eyes widened, preparing for impact. “Swapped out Krum for Nott and suddenly you’re the expert?”

“I didn’t swap out anyone,” Hermione said pointedly. “I don’t see people as interchangeable. I don’t just stick my tongue into whatever will have me. ”

Fred and George let out a low ooh.

“At least I don’t trip over myself for a Slytherin.” Ron glowered, heat rising into his cheeks and clashing horribly with his hair. “At least I’m trotting along after someone who's called me a— ”

“Oi,” Ginny barked, standing for effect. “That’s enough. It’s Christmas.”

“So?” Hermione asked, irritated. "Your brother acts like a prick year round."

Ginny strode to the back door, yanking it open so that a cold rush of wind flooded the cozy room. Fred and George protested loudly, gesturing for her to shut it.

“Out,” she insisted, and although Hermione would never dare tell her, she sounded a lot like Molly. She pointed an accusatory finger towards the yard. “Go outside and don’t come back until this is put to bed.”

Both Ron and Hermione opened their mouths to protest, but Ginny had unsheathed her wand in an implicit threat of her signature Bat-Bogey Hex.

“Fine,” Ron grunted, stomping into the cold air. “Have it your way.”

Hermione gave a long suffering sigh before following him.

Outside the Burrow, the grassy fields had been coated with a blanket of snow, creating the impression of a blinding stretch of infinite countryside. The unforgiving wind nipped at her ankles until she conjured a warming charm to envelop her. After a moment of hesitation, she begrudgingly expanded the charm to include Ron.

There, she thought, and the meanness in her chest purred, satisfied. Now I’m the magnanimous one and he’s the rude twat.

They stood in silence for longer than Hermione could bear. It was clear that the initial anger of their fight in the common room has mostly dissipated. What remained was a stubborn sort of pride, an unwillingness to let go of the knife.

Hermione had a greater capacity for obstinance than awkward silences, so it was Ron who finally broke first.

“I didn’t mean what I said,” he said, so quietly that the whistle of the wind almost eclipsed his words. He grit his teeth, bracing himself for his admission. “I was jealous.”

“It’s alright,” Hermione said, and she found that she meant it. She wasn't sure she was ready to bury their hatchet, but a significant part of her did long for peace in the Gryffindor common room. “I wasn’t very kind to you either.”

Ron sighed, looking out at the bereft fields. Only a few months ago, they'd walked the garden path together. After what happened to her parents, Ron hadn't left her side.

“I don’t actually think you and Harry are— I mean, I know you’re not—” He interrupted himself, horrified at the possibility he could be mistaken. “You’re not, right?”

“We’re not,” she confirmed, adamant. Even the thought felt fundamentally wrong. “It’ll never be like that with us. He’s like my brother. Or at least, what I imagine having a brother feels like.”

Ron contemplated this stonily, before taking a breath and summoning the courage to add:

“And us? Could we ever be…like that?”

Hermione closed her eyes. In third year, when she was desperate to be chosen by anyone for anything, she’d have died of happiness to hear his question. But now, she didn’t know how to say he was dear to her in a way different from the familial love she felt for Harry. She struggled to articulate that while there was a sort of romance to their relationship, there wasn't no insistent drive of desire. Not in the way she'd felt with Victor groaning into her neck.

Her relationship with Ron was intimate and comforting, but not...

There was a part of her that considered giving Ron hope. It would make him happy, would make him feel secure and chosen. It would allow her to bask in the warmth of being wanted.

If she was unsure, she could even offer the limp promise of maybe someday, as a way to keep them tethered together, as if the vague possibility would keep her from losing him. They could linger on the outskirts of love, carefully cupping their hands around a lit match of desire in an effort to keep it from burning out.

But Hermione didn’t want a flicker. She wanted a forest fire. She wanted a love that scorched the earth, that would leave its mark on everything it touched. She was sure of it.

She opened her eyes and blinked hard to prevent the tears that had gathered from falling.

“I know,” Ron said softly. In this way, he’d always be braver than her, more ready to face harshness and reality. “I know we couldn’t.”

She felt ashamed at how grateful she was that she didn’t have to say it.

“I do love you, Ron,” Hermione whispered. “I love your family. You’re one of my dearest, best—”

“Don’t do that.” Ron scuffed his slipper onto the ground. “You don’t have to do that.”

He looked vaguely embarrassed and so she trained her gaze on the garden gate, allowing him a semblance of privacy.

“It’s okay, Hermione. I’m not going to get mad at you for not feeling the same. I don’t want to be that bloke anymore. I just thought—”

“I did too,” she confirmed, not wanting him to question the delicate interactions they'd shared the previous year. “For a while, I hoped that maybe....but then everything happened with my parents and …” She shivered. “Everything feels different now. Like I’ve gone rotten.”

“C’mon Hermione,” Ron stalwartly put an arm around her. “You haven’t gone rotten.”

“I’m so angry,” she confessed, her voice breaking. The cold braced her, pulling honesty from hidden places and into her throat. “I’m so angry all the time.”

Ron, never one to mince words, drew her into a death grip of a hug. She allowed the air to be squeezed out of her, temporarily going limp in his arms.

“I’m sorry,” He muttered into the crown of her head. When had all the boys gotten so tall? Just yesterday they were first years. Now when she stood pressed to Ron, she fit neatly under his chin.

“I am too. Really.”

For a moment they help fast in their embrace, lingering sweetly.

“Sorry I didn’t get you a present,” he said, over her hair.

Hermione smiled into his chest before responding.

“Sorry I got you a pair of socks. I chose the ugliest ones." She laughed, a sound mostly borne of relief. He cracked a little smile in response, reluctant but honest.“Shall we go in?”

“Please,” Ron pleaded. “I’ve nearly frozen my bollocks off.”

As they returned to the sitting room, she finally felt the magnitude of animosity lifting from where it had weighed, heavy on her shoulders.

Christmas, she thought, was such a strangely restorative time.She felt lighter than she had since the beginning of the term, like a gust of December air could carry her up into the low hanging branches of the bare fruit trees.

*

In the absence of their tension, the rest of Hermione's break was filled with games of exploding snap and pranks courtesy of the twins. Too cold to recreate the long walks they'd taken over the summer, Hermione and Fleur spent the afternoon hours knitting and sewing companionably in front of the fire, while the others played pickup games of Quidditch.

"Would you like to go outside at watch?" Hermione offered, silently dreading having to leave the fire's side.

"I would rather die," Fleur said throatily and Hermione had to pretend to cough in order to hide her grin, pleased to have anexcuse to avoid "watching" as Ginny and the boys split the grey skies with their brooms.

When Hermione thanked her effusively for her dress robes, Fleur's perfect lips turned up in response. Her half-lowered lids and crafty smile made her look a bit fox-like.

“You wore the robes?”

“Yes, to a Christmas party.”

“And were there any wizards at that Christmas party?” Fleur asked, with false innocence.

“Of course,” Hermione frowned, unsure of where she was going with this.

“And how many of them professed their love for you before the night was through?”

To her chagrin, Malfoy’s irritated questioning regarding her dress' enchantment skirted to the front of her mind.

“None, if you can believe it.”

“They were all blind then,” Fleur noted wisely. “That is the only explanation.”

They listened to the crackling of the fire for a few, golden moments, before Hermione blurted a question that had been plaguing her since her conversation with Ron on Christmas Day.

“Fleur,” she said softly. “How did you know about Bill?”

“What about Bill?” Fleur teased and Hermione shot her a warning glare in response.

“How did I know?” She tossed her silver mane over her shoulder, leaning in conspiratorially. “I believe he knew before I did. For a while, I knew nothing. I didn’t like Bill Weasley. He walked around Gringotts with his leather coat and his earring, acting like he was in charge of the entire curse breaking department. So arrogant, even for an Englishman.”

She rolled her eyes magnificently at that, and Hermione bit back a grin.

“But Bill was the only man who didn’t act a fool when I walked in a room. He would make a point to correct all my mistakes. He wrote me pages of feedback on all my reports: 'could improve this' and 'shows promise but lacks execution that.' I didn’t realize he was desperate to be noticed. I just thought, who is this connard,with fire for hair?”

Fleur smiled softly, remembering. The flames of the hearth seemed to swell with her emotions, cracking at her outrage and leaping delightedly at her contentment.

“One day I had enough. I went to his office and said, do you know who I am? I was ready to—what is the expression — tear him to shreds?”

“Poor Bill.” Hermione said, thinking of the more brutal instances of spellwork Fleur had exhibited during the Triwizard Tournament.

“He said, of course I know who you are. You’re the witch I’m going to marry.”

Hermione groaned at this, although she was partially delighted. That was the line that had hooked Fleur Delacour, infamous beauty? It made her feel strangely affectionate towards the older girl. Even she was not immune to the cursed charms of a rakishly handsome man.

“That worked?”

“Not at first,” Fleur admitted, mouth curling around her words as if she was fighting back a smile. “But I liked how willing he was to grovel.”

*

The day before the break came to a close, Hermione made her excuses and walked alone to the nearest muggle village under a warming charm.

Everyone had been reticent to allow her to go alone, but she’d begged off with some transfiguration of her features, giving herself terrible yellow-blond hair and a rather beaky nose. Ginny had almost pissed herself laughing.

She bore the indignity of the disguise in order to complete her most pressing errand: Hermione had to make good on a promise.

The town was very small: one church, a market, and— thank heavens— a clinic. She only felt a little guilty for confunding the girl popping gum at the till, who, under her charm, happily handed over the required supplies.

Before packing her trunk that night, she penned a quick note, hoping desperately it would arrive at Hogwarts and not Malfoy Manor.

I’ve got what I need. She wrote, hoping that if it was intercepted or discovered, the note would come across as coy and flirtatious, the kind of message Pansy would surely send. Let’s play hospital wing in the dungeons. — xx G

As she sent it off with Fleur’s owl, so that the bird wouldn’t be recognized as affiliated with the Weasleys, Hermione felt her old friend— a overwhelming sense of trepidation — return to her chest.The familiar tension signified to her that the holidays were over. Her work with Malfoy had just begun.

Chapter 14: The Ritual

Chapter Text

Hermione returned to Hogwarts in the days after the New Year, when everyone was still riding the highs of the holidays and reveling in post-break reunions. She spent the train ride home scribbling notes on binding rituals, occasionally looking up as acquaintances dipped in and out to pass on their greetings.

To Ginny’s palpable annoyance, most of these visitors seemed to be a series of girls, who blushed in Harry’s direction as they asked after his Christmas, steadily ignoring the other occupants of the compartment. Romilda Vane lingered for a full twenty minutes, leaving Harry with a box of truffles as a "Christmas present."

“I wouldn’t eat those,” Ginny advised, as he went to open the box. “I heard her talking about love potions before Slughorn's party. You dodged a real bullet with that one.”

A quarter of the way through the journey, they were joined by Ron and Lavender. Despite Hermione’s initial trepidation, Lavender remained frosty by polite, clearly pleased with whatever Ron had told her in regards to the conversation they’d had over break. Claiming she had extra Christmas sweets, she even made a point to offer Hermione some muggle Cadbury chocolates. They dissolved on her tongue with nostalgia, reminding her bittersweetly of home. It wasn’t exactly a white flag, but a minor thawing in the ice that had steadily developed between the two girls.

Maybe it was the promise of a new year, or the absence of the mountains of homework they would undoubtedly have in a few weeks, but there was a general sense of good spirits as they returned to the castle, a peace that Hermione desperately hoped would hold.

As classes were reinstated, her bubble of hope was popped almost instantly by Draco Malfoy.

Malfoy was in one of the foulest moods Hermione had ever witnessed. Snapping at anyone stupid enough to approach, he had started using his prefect position to take swaths of points for infractions as small as untucked shirts and walking too slowly in the hallways. He’d also begun casting permanent sticking charms on the robes of those unfortunate enough to get in his way, pinning them helplessly to the nearest surface. It had taken Hermione fifteen minutes to get Justin Finch-Fletchley down from the library arch after he’d unknowingly checked out a book Malfoy had apparently been waiting for.

There were no jabs or sticking charms sent her way. In fact, Malfoy gave zero indication that he had received her note, made no effort to catch her eye or pass her a response. He even stopped using an overly-loud voice to make his signature snide comments in her direction.It was something she’d be grateful for, if it weren’t a clear indication of a coming storm.

In the courses they shared, Malfoy was strangely quiet and reserved, planting himself at the rear of every classroom and taking studious notes with his head down. In Potions, even Nott nodded a polite hello, until Malfoy jabbed his wand into the boy’s ribs, putting a stop to the greeting immediately.

Hermione couldn’t help but wonder if it had something to do with their uncomfortably earnest, wine-tinged conversation at the Christmas party. What else could have caused a complete transformation in which suddenly, the preferred target for his vitriol ceased to exist?

Malfoy’s reign of terror only intensified her dread for their next detention. She’d have to deal with him as she pitched the use of muggle medicine to heal his Dark Mark, and if Justin checking out a book had been a breaking point, Hermione could only imagine how badly her endeavor would be received.

She lingered in the entrance, hesitant to enter the dungeons the first Friday of term, bag laden with some pumpkin pasties and a strategic thermos of tea, along with her notes on Demonology and the supplies she’d plundered from the muggle clinic. After their lesson on poison antidotes, she'd thrown in a bezoar for good measure. Briefly, she considered what would happen if she accidentally poisoned Malfoy, and shuddered.

It would be fine, she told herself. She’d set boundaries by being perfectly cordial, and he’d be forced to respond with professionalism.

This sounded delusional, even in her own head.

The room was even draftier than usual, as if the January cold had embedded itself in the castle's stones. Malfoy was already settled when she arrived, lounging with his feet up on a desk.

“You have a tendency to dawdle in doorways.” He looked up, a grimace already pasted on his face. “You’d make a terrible spy.”

She rolled her eyes, double-locking the door behind her, so that there was no chance they’d be disturbed.

“Malfoy,” she greeted, offering him a sharp nod of her head. “Good break?”

He ignored her. Okay, maybe her fantasies of civility had been overly ambitious. Maybe she should have armored up, prepared herself for their usual sniping. Stubbornly, she plodded on.

“Did you, er, go home?”

“No,” he replied. “Mother wouldn’t allow it.”

“Allow it?”

“Yes, Granger. When your husband is in prison and the Dark Lord is swooping in and out of your home, it’s advisable for your son to spend his holidays elsewhere.”

Hermione felt a pang of pity for him as she contemplated that he’d spent the holidays alone. Why did she even care? Malfoy certainly wouldn’t give two knuts, even if she’d spent Christmas under a bridge.

“Well, some peace and quiet must have been…restful.”

“I was drunk the whole time," Malfoy snorted in disbelief, eyeing her with derision. "Don’t you have a discovery to crow over? Let’s play hospital wing? ”

Hermione flushed. So he had gotten her note. She began unpacking her bag on the prep table, pulling out the pasties and pouring a cup of tea. Feigning nonchalance, she transfigured the lid of her thermos into two cups, filling both with steaming hot earl gray.

“Milk?” She asked politely. Malfoy seemed taken aback by her question.

“Sorry?”

“Would you like milk?” She over-enunciated each word very slowly, speaking to him like he was very stupid. Old habits died hard. “In. Your. Tea?”

He pursed his lips suspiciously, as if she’d offered him a cup of frog spawn. He searched her face for ill intent and she looked back placidly, refusing to blink.

“Just sugar,” he sniffed. “Unless there’s lemon. And if it’s swill, I’ll take milk, but then, no sugar.”

Christ, even the way he took his tea was obnoxious.

“It’s swill,” she replied dryly, adding a stream of milk from the little jug she’d charmed to stay cool.

He took the cup and sipped, making a face that confirmed he was a complete snob. Despite himself, he watched curiously as she removed the tea bags from the charmed thermos, vanishing them.

“What are those? The soggy little sachets. Were those in the tea?” He seemed bewildered. It occurred to her that wizards didn’t use tea bags, just steel strainers.

“They’re called tea bags,” she informed him. “They’re little pouches made of natural fibers that come pre-packed with loose tea leaves. It’s a muggle invention.”

At the word muggle , Malfoy looked as if he were contemplating spitting out his mouthful. His sense of propriety won, but he still seemed incredibly reluctant as he swallowed.

This was a part of her plan: see, Muggle tea wasn’t so bad, was it? Gradual conditioning. Maybe then, the possibility of muggle medicine would go down with begrudgement, but not overt refusal. It also helped that she’d slipped an analgesic into the tea, subtle enough that the taste wouldn’t betray her. Like hiding crushed aspirin in an animal's feed. And alongside that...

A vial of sparkling golden potion burned in the pocket of her robes. She'd only added two drops. They would need all the luck they could get.

Hermione got right down to business, downing her tea. She didn't feel the liquid luck exactly, just the slow ebbing of her nerves. She felt clearheaded. Ready.

“If I’ve timed it right, the sanitatum should have reached maturity at dawn on the first day of the new year.”

"It did." He held up a stopper of the clear, sky blue liquid. "I took the liberty of bottling it."

"Shall we take a look at your arm, then?" she asked, eying his perfectly done up cuffs. Harry and Ron's sleeves never even approached that level of neatness.

Malfoy had already shed his robes already in favor of their uniform shirt and a soft looking gray sweater emblazoned with the Slytherin crest. His white blond hair brushed his collar, a little longer than usual. Not shaggy but certainly approaching it, a few strands falling onto his forehead. She thought absently that he was in need of a haircut.

“Will you—” She gestured at him to roll up his sleeves and expose his forearm.

He turned from her and pulled off his sweater, untucking his shirt in the process. It rode up as he lifted his arms, exploding a sliver of his lower back, pale and smooth.

She busied herself with arranging her supplies, not looking up again until he cleared his throat. He took a seat in front of her, almost like an official medical exam. His sleeve was rolled up nearly to his shoulder, exposing a swath of porcelain skin that led to his Dark Mark.

It was worse than the last time. The flesh around the mark was approaching purple and hot to the touch. The tar-like blackness had spread further up his arm, encroaching on essential veins and arteries. She cast a diagnostic spell, lighting up his arm with a series of angry indicators, evidence of his worsening infection.

“You should have said something,” she told him reproachfully, as he gritted his teeth at her examinations. She tried to poke and prod as gently as possible. “If I’d have known that it had gotten this bad…”

“What could you have done,” Malfoy scoffed. “I knew the sanitatum took two months to brew. What would complaining have done to speed up the process?”

“Well, that’s never stopped you before,” Hermione snapped. She arranged the items she’d plundered from the clinic: antiseptics, an assortment of pills and vials, and an intravenous kit.

“What is that?” Malfoy blanched at the needles. “What’s the sharp bit for?”

“Most of this is theoretical,” Hermione defended, as she filled a syringe. She was very nervous, but hoped it didn’t show. It's not like she was unfamiliar with the act; she’d seen her parents prepare these syringes for countless oral surgeries, listened to their nurse explain how she went about finding a vein. Trained monkeys could manage it, the nurse had said. Somehow, that didn't comfort Hermione now, as it would still be the first time she’d endeavored to place an intravenous needle on her own.

“I’ve messed around with Muggle medicine before, adding dittany to scar cream and what not, but I’m not trained as a proficient healer by any means. Ideally I’d be able to get you on a hemodialysis machine, but I don’t know how I’d get one into a ritual circle…”

“Top marks in Potions, Herbology, and Charms, aren’t you?” Malfoy asked, making a face. “St. Mungo’s would take you in a heartbeat. Don’t look at me like that, I’m not complimenting you. Just stating the facts.”

“From what I understand,” Hermione continued, cheeks slightly pink despite Malfoy’s assurances that his words were not, in fact, praise. “Muggle antibiotics work by killing and stopping the spread of bacteria, which they identify through differing cell structures. Bacteria is what’s causing your infection.”

“The Dark Lord is what’s causing this,” Malfoy sniped, thrusting his arm forward to make a point. “Don’t try to use muggle solutions for wizarding problems.”

“The mark—the binding, I should say—is part of it. We’ll need a ritual as well. It’s not one or the other, Malfoy.” She sanitized the surfaces with a flick of her wand. “You should know better than anyone about operating within shades of gray.”

She oversimplified the information for his wizarding consumption, but her theory was based on what she’d read about ancient binding rituals in The Lost Art of Demonology. One of the very few ways to release a wizard who took the mark of a demon willingly was to exsanguinate their blood, casting purifying charms as it exited the body, before channeling back into empty veins. Usually, this ended up killing the wizard before the ritual was through.

But Malfoy had taken Voldemort’s mark under duress. This changed things, weakened what was owed. The bond had already begun dissolving at his initial sins against the will of his master. She just had to find a way to sever it completely, while simultaneously treating him for the consequences (potential magical corrosion, death).

She’d gotten the idea from the Prince’s textbook: a scribbled instruction under a deconstructed healing potion that simply read: divide to conquer.

The edited recipe for a healing potion used ingredients that were usually at odds— wormwood and fresh dew, powdered dragon’s claw and fairy moss—in order to treat congruent symptoms both individually and simultaneously. It made sense: purification magic treated the physical and the metaphysical. It cleansed not only the illness of the body, but also of the soul.

Hermione didn’t know who the Half-Blood Prince was, but she suspected they were a genius.If the Prince's theory held, she’d be able to accomplish the same with the far more powerful sanitatum, a potion that took months to prepare depending on how close you were to a new year.

After endless arithmetic calculations to configure the dosage, she hoped that intravenous administration would fulfill the spirit of exsanguination for the ritual, without the danger of total blood loss. If she were right, the injectedsanitatum would sanctify the cursed blood and the antibiotic would fight the infection. If being the operative word.

“Honestly,” Hermione continued aloud. “It’s criminal that we don’t study basic science and anatomy here. It’s not like wizards are a different species, this all applies to them. To us.”

Malfoy was quiet and his lack of interference gave her pause.

“What, you think we’re a different species ?” She put down her supplies, rounding on him. She felt her pulse in her ears, a clear indication that she was gearing up for an argument.

“Magical blood is kept separate for a reason, Granger,” Malfoy defended. “We’re not…compatible with muggles in that way. It would be like comparing a hippogriff and a hydra.”

“How would that account for muggleborns? Two hydras can’t make a hippogriff. If anything, magic has to be a recessive gene that's propagated in muggle families by carriers.”

“Muggleborns are unnatural.” Malfoy couldn’t meet her eyes. “They’re the exception, not the rule.”

“That’s not exactly a well-reasoned scientific explanation, is it? Something is bad because I said it is.Has no one really ever questioned that methodology?”

Malfoy looked pale and uncertain, seated before her. He was picking at a non-existent thread on his sleeve and shaking his leg furiously, a nervous tic that he’d never previously displayed in her presence.

“Of course I’ve asked questions,” he muttered, resentfully. "I know you're not different from me. Well, not magically. Well—"

"Oh, shut up."

A stony silence fell as she worked, placing four coloured candles around Malfoy’s chair to mark the cardinal points: evergreen for north, rich gold for east, bloody scarlet for south and deep indigo for west. She connected them with sweeping crescents of salt, a ritual precaution, and sprinkled marigold petals into the salt, hoping to harness their antipyretic effects.

Malfoy had no questions about these preparations, sitting in the center of the circle with aquiet acceptance.

Hermione carefully flipped open both the Prince’s textbook and The Lost Art of Demonology. Before she started, she took a deep breath, bracing herself.

“You don’t have to believe in what I believe.” She looked Malfoy in the eye. His were flat and worried, a sheet of gray slate. Their proximity had the strange effect of making her feel the phantom touch of his hands on her waist, as they’d been the last time they were this close. She shivered at the memory, before continuing. “But if you won't go to Madam Pompfrey or seek a healer, you just have to trust that I know what I'm doing.”

“What happens if this doesn’t work?” His desperation splintered at her heart

“I want to help you,” she said, gently. "This is me trying. If it doesn't work, we'll try something else."

Malfoy lowered his eyes in apparent affirmation, signifying that she should go on.

Hermione walked slowly around the circle’s perimeter in the fashion the ritual had indicated, endeavoring to charge it with her words: for healing, for sanctification, for release, for freedom. She imagined stretching her magic out, visualizing it as a shimmering sphere that enveloped them, half above the ground, half below.

When she stepped into the point that signified due north, she held her wand aloft and a sage-coloured mist rose and writhed from the candle’s flame. She cast all thoughts of the green flash of the killing curse from her mind: in this circle, green would signify rebirth.

The other candles followed suit: red for life-giving blood, yellow for healing sunlight, blue for cleansing waters. The circle took on a breath of its own, rising and falling until it became opaque. She could only see Malfoy, and he could only see her.

“I’m going to restrain you now,” she said, hoping she didn’t sound as nervous as she felt. “So that you don’t move too much.”

He flinched as she flicked her wand, conjuring neat ties to hold him in place in his chair.

Hermione wiped his exposed inner arm with antiseptic, and Malfoy hissed in pain. She offered him the same soothing sounds her mother once offered her in a doctor’s office, forever ago.

“This is going to hurt a little bit.”

“Just do it, Granger.”

He screwed his eyes shut tightly as she found a vein, pressing down on the syringe's plunger until the combination ofsanitatum and vancomycin flooded his veins.

At first, there was nothing. Then, Malfoy cried out, sharp and terrible.

“Something's wrong," Malfoy's bravado fell away in favor of pain. “It's burning. My blood feels like fire.”

“Everything is all right,” she soothed, trying not to appear as worried as she felt. "It's all right."

“Please!” Malfoy's face screwed up in agony. “Make it stop.”

“Shh,” Hermione hushed, worried he would disrupt the ritual. She hesitated before reaching out her left hand, smoothing Malfoy’s forehead comfortingly.

Instead of shying away as she’d anticipated, he leaned into her touch, pressing desperately into her palm. He exhaled sharply and she willed him comfort, a release from the pain.For healing, for sanctification, for release, for freedom.

“Is it over?” He turned his head, so that she could feel his lips moving against the delicate skin of her wrist.

The back of her neck prickled at the sensation, so strangely vulnerable.It was as if once she’d touched him, a dam had broken. He surrendered to it, hungrier for contact that she’d anticipated. His eyes remained firmly shut.

“Not just yet,” Hermione hummed, using her thumb to stroke along his cheekbones softly. “That was for the infection.” She took a deep, grounding breath. “Now, we’re going to undo your vow of servitude.”

She removed her hand gently from Malfoy's face, and he leaned forward in an attempt to follow, chasing her touch. Using a wrought silver knife from her potions kit, she opened a small cut in his hand and another in her own.

His eyes flew open, surprised by the sudden prick of unexpected pain.

“Did you…is this blood magic? ”

“What did you think it was,” she hissed in response, momentarily forgetting herself. “Cheering charms?”

The circle shimmered, resistant to the change of emotional tone. This was old ritual magic: it required honestly, intent, and above all, sacrifice. She collected herself.

“It’s all right,” she whispered to him, remembering the words her mother used to soothe her. They filled her with a sort of solidity, a strength. “I’ve got you.”

She held her bleeding hand aloft, until droplets of her blood fell directly into his wound.

“Blood taken forcefully, mark of your master's bindings,” she whispered, reciting the words from the ancient tome. “Blood willingly given, release that which is bound.”

Malfoy’s mouth parted in shock. Their magic brushed, twining together in a way that was far more sensual than she expected. More intense than her experiences with shared magic or even the unbreakable vow they'd sealed together. This felt like she was pressed flush against Malfoy's beating heart.

A light flared from each point of the circle, brighter than any ray of sun, before sputtering out, leaving them in complete darkness.

Hermione scrambled to cast a lumos. Did she mess it up? Had she somehow ruined the ritual? Was Malfoy—

“f*ck, this hurts. ”

Ah, he’d lived.

Instead of the slate gray from before, Malfoy’s eyes burned silver in the dimmed wandlight, blinking to adjust to the sudden changes of brightness. He looked violently alive: blood filled his cheeks and he breathed heavy, exerted breaths as if he'd just finished running several miles at breakneck speed.

She undid his bindings quickly, and he raised his arm, offering it without her having to ask. He refused to look down, keeping his gaze steadfast on her face.

When she cast a diagnostic charm, she found there had been slight improvements to his infection. This was excellent news, although Malfoy seemed to be of the opposite opinion.

“It didn’t work, did it?”

“Muggle antibiotics take a few days to kick in fully,” Hermione explained. “It may be faster for you, due to the sanitatum. But they start taking effect as soon as they’re administered, especially intravenously. The fact that there is any improvement at all is a sign that this is working. But Malfoy, look—”

Very gently, she raised his arm, so that he was forced to look at the marred skin. Although the infection hadn’t subsided, the pitch black trail of dark magic had begun to recede from the veins of his arm. The Mark's onyx ink had grown faint, leaving a vicious reddened scar in the familiar shape of the skull swallowing a snake. It was raised and raw, but it was proof that the hold that Voldemort’s brand had once maintained was dissipating.

“Granger,” Malfoy breathed, staring at his arm in disbelief. “I think you were…right.”

“Say that again, Malfoy.” She couldn’t help her grin, dizzy with delight. "I don't think I'll get enough of hearing it."

"You twit," he replied, still fixed on the mark. She doubt he'd intended the insult to sound so reverent.

To her great surprise, he used his good hand to reach out and cup the back of her neck, drawing her close. When their eyes met, his gaze was blazing and clear. Something in her sang out in warm recognition; her magic remembering the feel of his.

Her heart almost stopped as Malfoy shocked her by pulling her into a tight embrace and burying his face in her hair. It took her a minute to realize what he was muttering. Over and over, not in an effort to speak or be heard, but to savor the feel of the words passing his lips.

“I’m free,” he whispered into her neck. “I’m free.”

Chapter 15: Seating Arrangements

Chapter Text

After the unbinding ritual, Hermione dreamt of a clinic.

In her dream, she found herself searching the empty rooms and deserted corridors of a facility that looked similar to where she’d gotten her appendix out many years ago. Behind a door at the end of a long hallway, she found Malfoy, writhing in pain on a surgical table. She looked for a doctor or nurse, only to realize she was the one clad in seafoam green scrubs and latex gloves, the kind her parents had used for oral surgeries.

When she tried to soothe him, Malfoy screamed, clutching at an unsourced wound near his heart. Hermione tried to find the source of the bleeding and shove gauze into the cavity of his chest, only to realize each time that she was holding a scalpel, making clumsy new incisions. Somewhere, someone familiar was screaming her name.

Hermione!

It couldn’t be Malfoy, she thought hazily, still half asleep. He only ever called her Granger.

Hermione, wake up!

She shot awake to find the tear-streaked face of Ginny Weasley, leaning over her sleeping form. The youngest Weasley was still clad in flannel pajamas, flaming hair piled in a wild tumble atop her head. It wasn’t yet light out, maybe six in the morning. She shook Hermione, desperately.

“Christ!” Hermione scooted backwards, banging her skull into the headboard. Hot dread filled her throat at the fear in her friend’s expression. “What’s wrong?”

“Get dressed.” Ginny threw her a sweater from the pile on the floor. “Hurry. It’s Ron.” The dread in Hermione’s throat sank suddenly to her stomach, like the swooping sensation of an unexpected fall. “He’s in the hospital wing.”

Ginny’s eyes shone with an infectious worry that began to root itself in Hermione’s heart.

“He’s been poisoned.”

*

Hermione and Ginny dashed through the corridors without a second thought, slippers thumping against the castle floors as paintings squawked with disapproval— young ladies should still be in bed at this hour! — until Ginny silenced them with a selection of language so foul, it would have made even Moody blush.

When they arrived, the hospital wing doors were locked. Ginny rattled them loudly, and when they didn’t open, attempted to rip them from their hinges. Hermione nudged her aside to try unlocking charms.

“Oh, come on,” she muttered, as another variation failed. Pomfrey’s spellwork was apparently impermeable.

Finally, the doors creaked open. Hermione blinked for a second, uncertain, until Ginny held up her hairpin in explanation.

“Since when can you pick a lock the muggle way?”

“Since I was twelve. How else do you think I broke into my brothers’ broom shed?”

At the far end of a row of beds, the silhouette of two boys stood out against the dim, early morning light. One lying prone and the other, sitting with his head in his hands.

As they approached, Hermione saw that Ron was deathly pale and unconscious. Harry looked up from where he was tearing his hair at Ron’s bedside, and launched into an apology.

“Ginny, I’m so sorry—”

Ginny let out a broken sound and moved towards Harry, throwing herself into his arms. He pressed his lips to her temple and she shuddered beneath him, crying in earnest.

“It’s my fault—” Harry continued desperately, but Hermione cut him off.

“What happened to him?” Hermione whispered furiously, aware it was the middle of the night, but unwilling to reduce the sheer amount of rage in her voice. When would the routine, devastating injuries at Hogwarts stop? Weren’t they always told they were supposed to be safe here? Hermione had seen little evidence of such safety, growing more and more disavowed with every accident and regrown set of bones.

“He ate those chocolates, the ones Romilda Vane got me. He thought they were a birthday present. They were laced with some sort of love potion.”

“This is the result of a love potion?” Hermione asked with no small degree of disbelief. “He looks as if he’s in a coma, Harry.”

“No,” Harry scrambled to explain. “I took him to Slughorn for an antidote. Slughorn set him right, but then he gave him a glass of mead he’d gotten as a Christmas gift to settle his nerves and—”

“Slughorn poisoned Ron?” Ginny cried, shocked.

“I don’t think it was on purpose! Slughorn shoved a bezoar down his throat. Bloody lucky we were studying antidotes last week.”

Hermione filed the information about the bezoar away for later. The poison had clearly not been intended for Ron, but who would be stupid enough to attempt to spike the drink of a potion’s master, someone who literally specialized in poisons and antidotes?

“You didn’t see him, Hermione.” Harry continued grimly, shaking his head. “He was foaming at the mouth, he looked…” He trailed off, miserably.

Before Harry could clarify, the door to Madam Pomfrey’s office flew open.

“Why are there students in my hospital wing?!”

Their admittedly noisy entrance had summoned Pomfrey, who somehow looked even more menacing than usual while wearing a quilted dressing gown with a floral pattern reminiscent of upholstery and silk sleeping cap.

“The hospital wing opens for visiting hours at eight! And what time is it?”

“But I’m his sister!”Ginny shouted, her formidable expression clashing ridiculously with her pajamas, which were patterned with whizzing bludgers, charmed to fly around the fabric. The words HIT THIS were emblazoned across the back of her flannel pants suggestively.

“What time, Miss Weasley?”

“Seven,” Ginny answered sullenly, looking like she might stomp on Pomfrey’s foot. Hermione checked her watch. It was nearly forty past six.

“My patients need rest. Girls, take Mister Potter and—” The school matron suspiciously eyed Harry, who had promptly stuffed his invisibility cloak behind him and put on his best dismal orphan expression. “When did you get here, Mister Potter?”

“Er—” Harry started, but his predictably flimsy excuse was spared by the opening of the double doors. The headmaster had arrived.

“Poppy,” Dumbledore greeted warmly. “I see Mr. Weasley’s loved ones have come to check on his state.” He gestured widely, keeping his terrible hand shrugged into his sleeve. “As have I.”

“Headmaster, I must insist—”

“I believe it’s in everyone’s best interest to make an exception to visitation hours, just this once. Mr. and Mrs. Weasley are on their way, as are their sons.”

“Sir, what has he been poisoned with?” Hermione asked, drawing Dumbledore’s attention. The headmaster regarded her gravely, meeting her eyes for a little too long. Right, occlumency, Hermione remembered frantically. What had Malfoy said he did? Picture a garden? She envisioned tomato plants, feeling rather stupid about it. The thin line of Dumbledore’s mouth twitched slightly.

“That is a conversation I wish to have with Mr. Weasley’s parents present. Rest assured that we are treating his condition aggressively, using a curative regiment with precedent for good results.”

When Ginny seemed ready to protest, Dumbldore continued gently. “Miss Weasley, might I suggest it would be best for you to wait here for your family’s arrival? And Mister Potter, I’m afraid I’ll require a viewing of your memory, as you were a witness to these events. Madam Pomfrey, I may require use of your office, should you be so accommodating?”

“Of course, Professor,” the matron responded, still a bit churlish. “It would be my honor.”

“It’ll be okay, Gin.” Harry gave Ginny a warm look and squeezed her arm reassuringly. The redhead leaned into his touch momentarily before moving to perch at Ron’s bedside. Over her shoulder, Hermione could see Ron’s chest rising and falling incrementally.

“Miss Granger,” Dumbledore turned his attention to her. “Perhaps it would be best if you collected some of Mister Weasley’s belongings and returned during visiting hours? We are unsure of when he will wake exactly; he’s been given a restorative potion compounded with a single drop of Draught of Living Death. If my own experience with infirmities is any basis, I’m sure that when he does, he would prefer the comfort brought by familiarity.”

Hermione regarded Dumbledore with narrowed eyes. She was certain that in this instant, it was not imperative to fetch Ron’s pajamas. But what was the headmaster trying to signal to her?

“Sir, if I may—” she started, but Dumbledore breezed past her, a guiding hand on Harry’s shoulder.

*

When she exited the hospital wing, it became immediately clear why Dumbledore had sent her away: Draco Malfoy was lingering in the staircase, feigning a casual lean on the banister.

Hermione hadn’t encountered Malfoy in the days since the ritual. Despite her insistence, he had failed to provide her hourly updates on his condition, forcing her to jot down two notes of varying degrees of concern before bed. The first, a worried check-in:

Malfoy, I looked into potential antibiotic allergy side effects— go straight to Madam Pomfrey if you start experiencing any hives or blurred vision. And whatever you do, don’t drink any Dreamless Sleep. I warned you about potential interactions before, but it bears repeating, since you have such a phenomenally thick skull.

The second note was far more direct:

If you don’t send me proof of life, the next one will be a Howler.

She’d only received a single directive in response: stop stalking me. After that, Hermione decided she no longer cared what happened to the ungrateful tosser anyway.

He looked fine, she supposed. A tinge of brightness has resurfaced in his previously dulled gaze and his countenance seemed markedly less clammy and feverish. He wasn’t having any sort of obvious reaction to the ritual or the antibiotics, which drew the question: why on earth was he loitering outside the hospital wing at nearly seven in the morning?

“What are you doing here?” She crossed her arms in a way she knew made her look particularly severe. Ginny called it her McGonagall impression. “Are you ill?”

“I’m fine, Granger,” Malfoy said, still leaning, although markedly less casually. “Gods, you worry worse than the old bat.” He nodded in the direction of the hospital wing, indicating his distaste for the matron in question.

“Malfoy,” Hermione pinched the bridge of her nose. The sun had begun to peak out properly, sending rays of soft light into the staircase. “Not now, okay?”

“Who is it?” Malfoy said tightly. He ran a hand through his hair, smoothing the strands that had fallen haphazardly onto his forehead. “Who was poisoned?”

Hermione regarded him with a raised brow. She stood a few steps above him, bringing her to stand at his height for once. Close enough that she could see the slightly raised line of the healed scar along his jaw. Face to face, she gave him a measured look before asking:

“Who said anything about poison?”

Malfoy’s expression didn’t change in the slightest. He was such a good liar, she mused, and she was preparing to accuse him of as much, when two pairs of footsteps echoed from the top of the stairs.

“This isn’t the place for this conversation,” he hissed, gesturing down the stairs. “Come on.”

“I’m not going anywhere until you answer me.”

Dumbledore’s melodic voice drifted down towards where they stood precariously on the steps below.

“Harry, I do ask that you…”

“We should do this elsewhere, Granger,” he growled, exasperated. She was about to agree—unsure of how to explain their familiar interaction to Harry— when his hand reached out and encircled her wrist. When he came into contact with her skin, she felt a little pulse, almost like brushing up against a loose wire. Malfoy, apparently not the cause of the sensation, seemed just as startled as she was.

They shared an accusatorial glare, both unsure of the sensation they’d experienced.

“Static,” Hermione finally offered, making a show of rubbing her hands together. “It’s winter.”

He frowned in the direction of his own hands, seemingly unconvinced she hadn’t intended to shock him, before striding down the stairs and into the first closet he came upon. He hit his head clumsily on the dangling lantern.

She lit her wand to avoid tripping on Filch’s litany of maintenance supplies, gingerly stepping over a case of self-wringing mop heads. Malfoy, still rubbing his temple, closed the door behind them.

“Explain,” she prompted and he looked up at her, flushing. There was a charged, nervous energy about him that she wasn’t used to seeing. He shook his head angrily, as if he were trying to rid himself of a swarm of hornets.

“I told him not to do it!” The words burst from his lips, seemingly without permission. He touched his mouth, affronted by his body’s betrayal, but couldn’t seem to stop disclosing information. “I warned him that he couldn’t control who might get hurt.”

“Poison,” he scoffed. “Might as well throw a dragon in a crowded room and ask it to only eat your preferred target.”

“Who are you talking about?” Hermione asked, exasperated. “Who did you warn?”

“Who do you think?” He said, like come on Granger, you’re supposed to be clever.

All at once, Hermione realized where the pieces fit. Slughorn’s mead. A supposed Christmas gift, never intended to be shared. Harry had taken Ron to Slughorn’s office. The Christmas Party, when her date slipped away.

“Nott,” she breathed. “He poisoned Ron. He’s trying to poison Slughorn for the Dark Lord.”

Hermione was a logical person, often to a fault. She could sympathize with Nott’s plight— after all it had been the same as Malfoy’s— and the part of her that believed in redemption and forgiveness ached upon realizing that another teenage boy was being driven to desperate attempts at murder because of the extremist political ties of his maniac father.

But there was another side of her that was first and foremost Ron’s friend— Ron, who had stood by her after the loss of her parents, who had blundered through years of admittedly rocky friendship but remained loyal, always at her side— and that part of her wanted blood.

“I’m going to kill him.” Hermione moved to fling open the door. Malfoy went to restrain her, but she raised her wand quickly, backing him into a stack of buckets. She closed some of the proximity between them, until she was near enough that the tip of her wand brushed his chest.

“Use your head, Granger. What will going after Nott right now actually accomplish?” Malfoy said in a low, charged voice, sandpaper rough. He was being peculiarly cool-headed. “How does an animal act, when it’s backed into a corner?”

“Yes, it lashes out. Congratulations, you used an analogy.”

“He was already desperate enough to do something this stupid,” Malfoy urged. “And there’s nothing more dangerous than a desperate wizard, flying by the handle of his broom. Imagine what he’d do if he felt like he’d been found out?”

“All right, so I won’t confront him. I’m not a moron. But that’s no reason not to ensure that he won’t find it easy to try again,” Hermione considered, pursing her lips into a grim line. She was certainly no advocate of violence; in many regards, she considered herself a political pacifist. But she also believed that occasionally the best defense was a preemptive strike.

“What do you think I did, the first time?” Malfoy responded, frustrated. “I put the wanker in the hospital wing for a week. Fat lot of good that did.”

“The first time?” Hermione cried. “He’s tried before?” She wasn’t sure what surprised her more: that she and Malfoy had the same initial instinct towards using force or that Nott had attempted multiple murder plots on behalf of the Dark Lord under Dumbledore’s nose.

“He tried to buy a cursed necklace from Borgin and Burkes,” Malfoy explained, expression pained.

“What, was he assuming Slughorn would wear it ?” Hermione scoffed. “I thought Nott was supposed to be clever.”

Malfoy’s lips twitched at this. The more time they spent in each other's proximity, the more she got the sense that he enjoyed her vitriol. After all, how could he judge her?

“Does he still have it?” She asked, concerned by the possibility. Leaving Nott in possession of a dark artifact could be a potential fatal error.

“I snooped through his mail and cursed him so he couldn’t hold a quill for a week, much less receive a package.”

“Oh great, you confiscated it. That’ll stop him.”

“Unlike your two blundering sidekicks, I’m not an amateur, Granger.” He smirked in a way that disconcertingly resembled his younger self. “I took care of it.”

”Good," Hermione said, darkly. "Now I'll do the same with Nott.”

“Cursing him out of the way will only result in being expelled for maiming a student.” Malfoy grew serious again. “Tell me, how long do you think you’d last outside Hogwarts with your shifty occlumency? A week? Two?”

“You’ve thought all this out, haven’t you? What are you planning on doing, standing by while he kills someone? Going to help him cast the curse? Oh wait, you can't.”

At her accusation, Malfoy scowled, a line appearing between his fair brows.

“I obviously haven’t thought out all of it,” he admitted, annoyed. “I’ve been a bit concerned with keeping myself alive. And yes, I’m trying to help him, but not to commit murder, Granger. Must you always think the worst of me?”

“Why didn’t you tell me? Before I took him with me to the party.”

“He would have found another way in.”

“But if I had known, maybe…” she trailed off, stricken with guilt.

Malfoy traced her face with his gaze

“Your mind is an open book, Granger. Forgive me for my hesitancy.”

It all led back to occlumency, didn’t it? The one skill she couldn’t seem to master. She didn’t have the luxury of a blind spot. She rubbed her face in frustration.

Malfoy, mistaking the gesture as wiping away tears of grief, hesitated before resting a hand delicately on her shoulder.

“Weasley will be fine. Nott is no genius when it comes to brewing poisons and Pomfrey is…adequate, I suppose.”

His hand burned over her sweater and suddenly, the air in the supply closet felt thick and cloying.

“How did you know?” She looked at him from under her lashes. “Why were you waiting outside the hospital wing?”

“I didn’t know it was Weasley,” he defended, mistaking her curiosity for accusation. “I overheard whispers of an incident with Slughorn in the dungeons. And I…” He frowned as if considering something for the first time. “I had a feeling.”

“A feeling? Are you having me on?”

“Honest,” he responded, a little hoarse. “I just knew.”

His hand had slid from her shoulder to loosely cup her elbow. She realized that they hadn’t been this close since the healing, when he’d pulled her into his chest and held her there. He still smelled like wood chips and pine soap. Clean and masculine in a way she hadn’t anticipated.

She blinked, cutting through her thoughts.

What was she even on about?! And what kind of game was this, dragging her into closets and crowding her space and touching her?

“What are you playing at?” She drew back from his hand, quickly putting space between them. “Why are you being so…”

“I’m fine.” Malfoy looked just as off put as she felt, making his assertion of normalcy particularly unconvincing. “You’re the one constantly on the verge of a fit.”

Hermione checked her watch so she wouldn’t have to look at him, still rather warm around her face. It was almost time for visiting hours. She moved to leave and Malfoy instinctively responded by standing in her way, blocking the exit. After a charged moment and a dirty look shot his way, he opened the door for her, looking twice to check the hallway for onlookers, before gesturing that she pass.

“Don’t be late to detention,” Malfoy called to her.

“I never am.” Hermione shot her response over her shoulder. She was careful not to brush against him on her way out.

*

Ron didn’t rouse until hours later, remaining in a medically-induced slumber, while a visiting Molly Weasley spent the morning terrorizing Madam Pomfrey within an inch of her life. When he’d finally blinked awake, he mumbled blearily about these girls being the death of him, before drifting back under.

Hermione managed a watery laugh. Harry—who’d posted himself at Ron’s bedside like a wiry, bespectacled sentry— put an arm around her and squeezed in relief.

“Should we get Lavender?” She whispered. She didn’t want to be the one to tell her overzealous roommate— unwilling to disrupt the tenuous armistice between them—but surely someone should.

“Er, I guess.” Harry looked at her with surprise, like he didn’t expect her to be the source of the suggestion. “Didn’t think they were that serious to be honest.”

“Well, no one’s told her that. Last week, she was selecting the colors for their wedding.” She tore a page from a journal and wrote a sparse note, before folding it into a clumsy paper airplane. With a tap of her wand, it sprung to life, launching itself in the air and zipping out of the hospital wing.

For a moment, she watched Ron sleep, breath deep and even, before rising to follow her paper plane.

“I should go.” She grimaced, looking skyward for strength. “Detention.”

“Slughorn will write you an excuse,” Harry insisted, waving her off. “He's probably three sheets to the wind right now, he had such a fright.”

The reality was that Slughorn hadn’t continued their detentions for the spring term, but she’d not alerted anyone of this, preferring to continue Malfoy’s ruse for their meetings. She’d been approved to continue using the classroom for her supposed extra-curricular brewing of Pepper-Up Potion. It was the least she could do to assist Madam Pomfrey, she’d said innocently, and Slughorn gave his permission without a second thought. At least she was no longer de-spleening newts.

“Will you fetch me if anything changes? And let him know I was here, if he wakes up again.”

Harry regarded her carefully and she avoided his eyes. Although Harry Potter was no legilimens, he had an uncanny habit of intuiting when he was being lied to.

“Sure,” he finally said, and Hermione’s gut unclenched with relief. “Give Malfoy my worst.”

The long and terrible day culminated with one of her least favorite ongoing commitments: occlumency lessons in the dungeons.

She was bone tired. After the terrifying events of the early morning, she’d been operating on pure adrenaline, which meant that by the evening, she was running on fumes. Although she was loath to admit it, she didn’t quite know how to be around Malfoy at the moment. Post-healing, everything felt heightened. When they’d spoken that morning, she’d completely lost her head, and she walked away from him feeling dazed and tender, as if she’d had a run-in with a rogue bludger.

She arrived in the potions room to find he had already cleared their practice space and cast a warming charm, taking away some of the dungeon’s usual chill. She shrugged off her jacket, hanging it on the back of a chair.

“I take it Weasley lives?” Malfoy asked, too cavalier for her liking. Why did he always sound like he was mocking her, even when asking a simple question?

“He’s going to be fine. Laid up for about a week though, thanks to your friend.”

Malfoy ignored her quip in favor of rolling up his sleeves, a sign that he was ready to start their lesson. Despite her exhaustion, Hermione was committed to getting somewhere today. The need for her to use occlumency was becoming more and more urgent and so far, her efforts to push back at Malfoy’s invasions had only managed to produce a series of splitting headaches.

“After our encounter with my godfather,” Malfoy drawled, in the irritatingly superior fashion she’d come to know well. “I’ve considered a different approach to your inaptitude.”

“The student is only as inept as the teacher.” Her voice was imbued with false sweetness. “Snape tried to teach Harry, you know. He ended up in the Department of Mysteries with Voldemort in his head.”

”Sorry— in his head?”

”Yes. So you’ll forgive me, if I doubt his pedagogical prowess on this topic.”

“You’re much smarter than Potter,” Malfoy answered, before realizing he’d slipped up and said something nice. He scrambled to return to rudeness, pasting an artificial sneer on his face. “Not that that’s saying much.”

“Careful, you might accidentally compliment me.”

He glared before continuing.

“After the fruitlessness of our initial sessions, I’ve come to the conclusion that certain teaching methods are not conducive to your tendency towards sheer obstinance. As we’ve established, you’d rather break every bone than even consider bending.”

She smirked at this, taking his insult as a point of pride. After all, she’d be sorted into Gryffindor for a reason. Tenacious, the hat had said. Iron-willed. It had been the deciding factor.

“Don’t look so pleased. If I’d tried it the way I was taught, your brains would be leaking out of your ears.”

“How were you taught?” Hermione asked, her curiosity getting the best of her. “I’ve wondered— is this common? Are there formal schools of instruction? How widespread would you say occlumency usage is amongst the average wizard?”

Malfoy’s face grew pinched at her questions.

“My Aunt Bellatrix taught me,” he said shortly, ignoring the other inquiries. “I believe you’ve been acquainted?”

Hermione had been acquainted with Bellatrix Lestrange, if ever so briefly, in the Department of Mysteries. She’d killed Sirius, her own flesh and blood, with a smile on her face.

“I have a passing familiarity,” she muttered, considering. “Although, I was taken out pretty quickly once the fighting started.”

“Taken out?” Malfoy tilted his head slightly, like he was unsure at her use of the muggle phrase.

“Dolohov hit me with a dark curse. Luckily he was silenced, so it didn’t kill me.” She tilted her head in contemplation. “But that also means I don’t know if there will be lasting spell damage.”

“Spell damage?”

Apparently, Malfoy had been reduced to repeating her phrases as questions. Had no one told him of the previous year’s events at the ministry? At least, beyond his father’s involvement?

“It left a cursed scar,” Hermione admitted, and her chest twinged, right on cue. She held back a wince. “I still feel it, sometimes.”

Strangely affected, Malfoy’s eyes flicked to her feet and back up again, undoubtedly searching for the mark that was buried under the layers of her sweater, shirt, and silk camisole. After some consideration, he spoke.

“My aunt used the cruciatus curse,” he admitted, his expression as guarded as a padlocked gate. “To motivate my learning.”

Hermione fought the urge to exclaim in horror; she knew, from their multitude of forced interactions, that Malfoy seemed to equate worry with pity.

“That’s awful.”

He rubbed the back of his neck. “Pain proved an effective teacher.”

Hermione got the sense that a peculiar detente had formed between them: each time she revealed a personal experience, he seemed more inclined to match it. It was a very Slytherin way of operating, tied up in an ever hostile battle for balance. An eye for an eye, a weakness for a weakness.

“The Black family has a…predilection towards mind magic,” Malfoy continued, voice mediating between pride and bitterness. “It’s in our blood. As you may have noticed, there are some wizards who are particularly powerful in this regard. Wizards like Snape and Dumbledore and,” — Malfoy stopped and shuddered incrementally— “the Dark Lord. Any wizard of decent talent can practice it, but for those of a certain lineage, it's as second nature as breathing.”

Hermione very much doubted lineage was the defining factor in wizards with such prowess, but it made for a very convenient narrative for those touting pureblood supremacy. They did logical backbends in order to fit this within their ideology: after all, if power were tied to strength and aptitude, it had to come from blood.

“Those are the really powerful occlumens,” Malfoy continued, unaware of Hermione’s internal critiques of his society. “The wizards and witches who can plant false truths and turn memories into rolling fog. The few who have the kind of mind that intruders get caught in, like a fly in a web.”

Hermione leaned forward, interested despite herself.

“Did it come naturally to you?”

“Eventually.” His clipped tone revealed that he wouldn’t be sharing more of his own experience. “But others of my line have had difficulty mastering it. My mother, for example.”

When Malfoy spoke of his mother, he grew slightly unfocused. Without fully realizing he crossed his arms, like he was holding himself up. Hermione could commiserate.

“She’s an occlumens?” Hermione asked, gentler than she would have been regarding other subjects. She understood how it felt, to have an open wound in the place of your heart that your parents occupied.

“Not exactly. She tried to help me, so that Aunt Bella wouldn’t be so…rough. She told me that back when she was learning, occlumency felt unnatural to her. Cold.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Hermione insisted. “It doesn’t feel right.” She wasn’t sure how to properly articulate that the act of protecting her mind felt distant and ill fitting.

“I have,” Malfoy said, stilted, like he was reluctant to tell her the following information. “A few theories about that.”

“Well,” Hermione gestured, sweeping her hand at the empty tables. “Do share with the class.”

“My mother said that her first attempts were like trying to break ice on a pond that had completely frozen over. She thought that perhaps, the gift had skipped her, that she was some sort of exception to the Black rule. She didn’t realize what she was until she attempted the exercise…reflexively.”

He gestured to the practice space he’d cleared for them. Instead of his usual stance— wand raised, arm ready—he left his arms hanging casually, leaving him unprotected. Would she be expected to cast first this time?

“Reflexively?” Hermione questioned, mind spinning.

“As you may have guessed, my mother is a natural born legilimens. A rare trait for a Black daughter, something found more often to be present in male descendents.”

“Maybe it’s just more expected of men,” Hermione pushed back, moving to stand a few paces away from him. “I doubt your ancestors engaged in gender-blind studies on the matter.”

“You recall the headmaster's reasoning, for why he’d be unfit to impart your lessons? While most wizards can be equally competent in both regards— my aunt, for example— those who specialize tend to struggle with the opposing talent. Like my mother. And if my hunch is right…” Malfoy gestured at her to raise her wand. “Like you.”

She stared. She’d expected the usual barrage of insults towards her capabilities. Instead, Malfoy stood expectantly, waiting for her to catch on.

“Do you really think I’ll be inclined towards legilimency, just through the anecdotal evidence of the heralded Black family line?” She said heralded in the same tone she’d use for dung beetle.

“I have my doubts, of course. Legilimens tend to be usually observant, perceptive, and inclined towards restraint.” Malfoy ticked off his fingers as he named traits. “They usually exercise incredible control over the self.” At this, he flicked his eyes to the run in her stocking, the strands of hair that had come loose from her bun. “They are rarely brash, headstrong Gryffindors, who have a hopeless tendency to verbally shoot themselves in the foot.”

She scowled at his description of her. She wasn’t brash.

“Go on then,” Malfoy goaded, wand loose and relaxed in his hand. “You know you want to.”

Actually, she didn’t know that she did. What if she wasn’t a natural and had finally found the one branch of magic walled off to her? She had butchered the spell the first time she’d attempted it, during their very first detention. Despite the fact that she was now far more prepared, there was a strand of dread that had woven itself around her heart, one that feared failure over almost anything else. After all, what would she have—who would even she be— if she wasn’t good ?

And if she succeeded, would that mean that she was only suited to destroy and take, like Dumbledore had said of himself? For an awful moment, she remembered the sensation of the memory charm that had sent her parents away, the prickle of undiluted power as she sorted through their minds.

“Instead of trying to stop me, visualize trying to get through,” Malfoy explained, noting her unease. “Look for the cracks, the places my magic feels most brittle. Think about what you want to find.”

She steeled herself before calling out the spell.

“Legilimens!”

It felt very different from her clumsy attempts at occlumency. Instead of her usual panic upon facing the force of Malfoy’s magic, she was the force itself. It was a heady sensation, pushing her magic like light through tree branches, filtering through gaps in the leaves.

It wasn’t about putting up a wall, she realized. It was as if she was water and Malfoy’s occlumency was a sieve.

When she pushed further, undoing the fine mesh he’d constructed, she was rewarded with snippets of image and sensation: the coolness of bare feet in dew stained grass, the swooping sensation of kicking off a broomstick, a fragrant hint of roses. Too fleeting to place, they carried all the sensation of a memory with none of the configuration, the where and when she was accustomed to searching for.

Each moment— experience, really if she were to be specific, as she could feel it all as he had— carried the uncanny feeling that it was undoubtedly his. Seen through his eyes, felt through his skin, lingering on his tongue.

She considered: what did she want to find? Finally she decided on a safe topic: herself.

In search of cracks, she willed her magic to flatten itself into a force precise enough to push through the finest of mesh.

In the part of his mind where he stored her, there was anger and relief and a swooping sensation she couldn’t quite place. Anxiety, maybe? She caught some sensory flashes: dripping snarls of dark hair against a flushed neck, blood-tinged water running into a porcelain sink, the slippery texture of golden silk—

That’s when he threw her out, sending her magic snapping back like a rubber band. The force ricocheted into her, sending her pulse skyrocketing. She pressed a hand to her chest, feeling for her heart.

“Was that—?” Hermione gasped, still recuperating. Her senses still felt strange and foreign, like they weren’t hers at all. “That felt—”

While she gulped down air, he wasn’t even panting. He was good at this, she realized. Very good.

“Congratulations Granger.” Malfoy conjured her a glass of water. “You’ve shown a moderate talent for legilimency. Thank Merlin, I was beginning to fear you were hopeless and that I’d have to throw myself off the astronomy tower rather than fulfill my vow.”

She ignored his complaining and took the drink, gulping it down. The coolness against her throat was calming, a sensation she could place. It grounded her: she was Hermione Granger, in the Potions room, standing across from Draco Malfoy.

“What did you look for?” He asked, casual in a way that made her suspect he was already in possession of answer.

“Well, I was trying to avoid anything too private. Out of courtesy, although I doubt you’re familiar with the concept.”

“And?” Malfoy pushed. Bit twitchy, wasn’t he?

“I saw…not memories, exactly. Not like you’ve gotten from me.” She blushed, remembering the series of embarrassing events Malfoy had witnessed during their initial lessons.

“No, I should think not.” He smirked, obviously thinking of the same interactions as she was. “This is how you throw off powerful legilimens without using brute strength. That’s what Snape meant, when he told you to play dead. Instead of offering the legilimens nothing, you offer unconnected bits and bobs. Sensations, close ups. You don’t linger for long.”

“Like a ballerina,” Hermione considered. “You stay light on your feet, try to touch the ground as little as possible.”

“Sure,” he shrugged, amused. “I never took you as a patron of the arts, Granger.”

He hadn’t said the word unsophisticated, but it hung in the air nonetheless.

“I used to go with my parents.” She touched the rim of the water glass he’d conjured her, circling it delicately with an almost hovering touch. It made a sound like a note breathed from a flute, high and fleeting. “They had season tickets to the Royal Ballet.”

“Muggles have a ballet?” Malfoy looked gobsmacked by this, and Hermione waited for him to finish the punchline of his joke. When nothing came, she blinked in realization.

“Are you serious?” She asked and he looked away, unwilling to admit his lapse in knowledge. “Did you really not know?”

The little ways Malfoy revealed the ignorance of pureblood culture never ceased to shock Hermione. What did he think, that muggles still lived in unlit huts and defecated in the streets? Surely he’d seen bits of muggle London before, at King’s Cross or while navigating towards Diagon Alley.

Had he really been that sheltered, as to not even consider that muggles might have a culture of their own, one that had complementary wizarding equivalents like ballet? She opened her mouth to tell him as much, but he was faster.

“I looked into your muggle healing,” he blurted, catching her completely off guard. “The antibiotics. They're made in laboratories?”

“Bit like potions, isn’t it,” Hermione said snidely. “How’s the arm then, still attached?”

Malfoy’s other hand flew to where the Dark Mark was etched into his forearm.

“Fine..” He looked like he was searching for words, parting his lips before pressing them together tightly. “It’s…fine.”

“Good,” Hermione found that she meant it. “Any strange after effects?”

“No,” Malfoy looked off over her shoulder, apparently fascinated by the grain of the wooden door. “Nothing noticeable.”

*

The next morning, Hermione woke to realize she was the sole person remaining in her dormitory, a clear sign she had overslept. In her exhausted state, she’d collapsed after lessons with Malfoy and forgotten to set an alarm.

“Bugger,” she muttered to herself, dressing without half noticing what she was throwing on. What day was it? Where was her scarf? She took the stairs to breakfast two at a time, digging through her bag as she went. She’d slept too well; the kind of borderline comatose state that left one feeling bleary, rather than refreshed.

She plopped down at the mostly empty Gryffindor table to snag the last of breakfast: only the rye toast was left, of course. Gulping down a cup of tea as quickly as possible without burning her mouth, she didn’t bother looking up when Harry sat down in his usual seat next to her. He must have been late too, she reasoned, after staying at Ron’s side.

“Pass the milk, Pansy,” the voice next to her said, groggily. “Ugh, is it really nine?”

She passed the jug to her right, still caught on the toast dilemma: rye and orange marmalade, would that clash? Beggars couldn’t be choosers—

Wait.

Pansy?

She turned, filled with a trepidation that had nothing to do with her rushed start to the day.

Draco Malfoy was sitting next to her at the Gryffindor table, looking glazed with sleep while seeping his tea. A cursory glance showed the smattering of students lingering at breakfast had also noticed, the remainder of the table paralyzed into stunned silence.

Noting the quiet, he glanced at her briefly, before beginning to pour his tea. He looked up again, only to do a farcical looking double take. The tea overflowed from his cup, pouring into the saucer. He didn’t seem to notice.

“Why in Merlin’s saggy bollocks are you sitting here, Granger? Are you trying to get a jinx in the back?”

“Malfoy. This is the Gryffindor table.”

Flummoxed, he looked around to confirm her assertion, face growing more and more horrified with each passing second. He seemed completely unaware that he hadn’t chosen his normal seat at his house table. As if his body had pulled him to the otherside of the hall without thinking.

“Oh, f*ck.” He said, suddenly awake. They stared at each other, eyes wide and dire. “This can’t be good.”

Chapter 16: The Prefect's Bath

Chapter Text

After their exchange at the Gryffindor table, Hermione did a series of unprecedented logical backflips in order to convince herself that Malfoy’s odd behavior was, in fact, a fluke. They’d stayed up late practicing occlumency, she reasoned. It would make perfect sense for her to be subconsciously on his mind. If she added in sleep deprivation and the stress of Theodore Nott’s plotting, she had a convincing argument for her accidental misstep theory.

It wouldn’t happen again, she thought, so long as she didn’t afford him the opportunity. And so, Hermione started studiously avoiding Draco Malfoy.

As it turned out, hiding from someone was rather difficult when they suddenly seem to have an innate sense of where to find you. If he hadn’t reacted with shock each time, she’d have thought he was pulling some scheme in order to make her life even more hellish. But when they came into contact, he seemed just as surprised as she, and doubly irritated.

In the week that followed, he’d gravitated towards her on various occasions, from wandering into the stack she’d been perusing in the library, to lingering in the greenhouse while she repotted a Venomous Tentacula.Even when Zabini nudged him to depart for their next class, Malfoy waved him off with the excuse that he was “enjoying watching Granger struggle.” Blaise regarded him with thinly veiled contempt, more aware than Hermione would like about the fact that, whether consciously or not, Malfoy couldn’t seem to stop himself from seeking her proximity.

Her friends had also begun to notice his behavior starting with his table mix up, clearly not buying her excuse that he’d come over “just to be a prat.”

Harry— who’d become irritatingly perceptive of Malfoy’s every move— raised his concerns to her directly.

“You should go to Dumbledore,” her friend urged during Potions, as they peeled gurdyroots side by side. “He’s singling you out.”

“Why would he single me out?”

“Maybe he thinks hurting you in some way would put his family back in Voldemort’s good graces.” Harry frowned, contemplating. If only Harry knew, she thought, as her friend accidentally skirted too close to the truth. “Maybe I should ask Kreacher to tail him... ”

“Harry, don't you’re think you're being a bit overly paranoid?”

Like he’d been summoned by a malignant higher power, Malfoy chose that moment to go the long way to the supply cupboard, taking a detour in order to brush by their table. When she leaned back from his approach, it was as if his body responded instinctively, lurching towards her. At the last minute, he regained control, attempting to pull himself back, only to jockey her shoulder.

“Watch it, Granger.”

“You’re the one who bumped into me!”

Harry raised his eyebrows like, see?

Ginny, whose fifth year class had come upon Malfoy dawdling outside the Charms classroom as Hermione spoke with Flitwick, had a different theory.

“Hermione,” the redhead ventured, while they were delivering missed assignments to Ron’s sleeping form in the Hospital Wing. “I think Malfoy likes you.”

Hermione missed a step, catching herself on the banister.

“That’s not funny, Ginny.”

“I wasn’t joking,” Ginny replied. Frustratingly athletic, she took the stairs to the hospital wing two at a time, pausing every few flights, so that Hermione could catch up. “Did Harry tell you that he thinks he’s plotting something?”

“Harry always thinks Malfoy is plotting something.”

“He’s been lurking around you an awful lot though, hasn’t he? Maybe during all those late night detentions, he developed a bit of a crush.”

“Sorry, let me get this straight— you think Draco Malfoy is bothering me incessantly because he likes me? The Draco Malfoy who called me a mudblood in second year? The one whose father tried to kill us last June? That Draco Malfoy?”

The Draco Malfoy that warned her outside the pond. The Draco Malfoy who was punished for failing to kill her, and still bore the scar. The Draco Malfoy who made an unbreakable vow to teach her occlumency. The Draco Malfoy who’d danced with her, who had told her the story about the dead bird. The Draco Malfoy that had held her flush to his body after the ritual, whispering his relief.

It was disconcerting to realize that when she put these two versions of Malfoy together, the latter had begun to win out. Malfoy wasn’t just the boy who’d sneered at her on the Quidditch Pitch anymore; he’d become something far more complicated.

“Listen,” Ginny said, from the top of the stairs as she waited for Hermione to catch up, unaware of her inner turmoil. “The way I see it is that he’s either a Death Eater, plotting the world’s least subtle attack. Or, he’s a teenage boy, who’s realized the girl he liked to torment is rather pretty.” Ginny grinned, flashing her teeth. “What’s that saying again? When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not hippogriffs.”

“It’s zebras. Think horses, not zebras.”

“Either way, you’ve got a target on your back.” Ginny waved her correction off, offering her a final warning before they greeted Ron. “Unrequited interest can be just as dangerous as hate.”

In an attempt to have a long, solitary think about the situation, Hermione sequestered herself in the prefect’s bath. After turning the taps as hot as they could go, she added a liberal amount of thick, lavender scented foam and golden bubbles that shimmered opaquely on the surface of the pool-sized bath.

She shook out her hair, transfiguring her camisole into a simple black swimsuit, before submerging herself up to her neck. The steam and heat quickened her pulse and flushing her skin, overwhelming her senses in a way that strangely, offered her some relief.

With her eyes closed, she tried to banish her invasive thoughts and practice clearing her mind in hopes that she’d improve with her occlumency. Malfoy had been right: the only time she’d seen any progress in her technique was after she watched the ways he moved evasively under her legilimency. Like a flipped photo, it showed her how to orient herself as a mirror’s image of him.

She’d never been very good at meditating, or any practice designed to impede active thinking, so it wasn’t a surprise that she found herself zeroing in on the little sounds of the bath: the trickling drip of a leaky tap, the fizzing evaporation of the bubbles, the light, padding sound of footsteps against tile—

Her eyes flew open to a robe-clad Malfoy at the foot of the prefect bath, an expression of dismal realization on his face.

Hermione shrieked, sound ricocheting off smooth tile and porcelain to create a resounding echo. She sunk up to her shoulders in bubbles, shielding herself from his view.

She told herself there was no reason to be embarrassed: she was wearing relatively appropriate swimwear and the bath was technically open to all prefects and Quidditch captains regardless of gender, even if it was common courtesy to wait for your turn. Then again, Malfoy had never been particularly courteous.

“Of course.” His gaze had a heated, dangerous quality that made him look particularly dragon-like. She half-expected him to spit fire with his next breath. “I thought I’d just suddenly fancied a bath, but of course, I can’t even have that.”

“God.” She swept her wet hair up off her neck, where her pulse hammered insistently, still startled by his presence. “Again?”

“Yes, Granger,” he gritted, pinching the bridge of his nose like she’d personally given him a terrible headache. “Again.”

“Did you try—”

“Distracting myself? Meditating? Occluding into oblivion? Locking myself in my dormitory?” He scoffed, not waiting for her response. “Do you think I’d be here, if any of that worked?”

“Malfoy, I—”

“Please don’t insult me with one of your overly earnest, self-aggrandizing soliloquies. I don’t think I can stand it right now, not when I’m being made to follow you around like a lost crup. If I stop concentrating on what I’m doing, even for a second, do you know where I find myself, Granger? One minute, I’m solving arithmancy problems, and the next I feel this…” He flushed, blood rushing to his face. Even the bare skin at the opening of his robe burned pink. He opened and closed his mouth several times, clearly at war with himself, before blurting. “I felt like you needed me.”

Hermione’s jaw fell open.

“Like I needed you ? Sorry, why would I need you while taking a bath?”

“You tell me.” His eyes grew shadowed in a way that reminded Hermione of a forest canopy, blocking the light. She felt a bolt of something nervous—almost anticipatory—that caused her breath to catch in her lungs.

He stepped into the shallow end of the pool, shedding his robe to reveal strong shoulders and a wiry frame. He wore the same sort of swimming shorts she’d seen Harry and Ron don during the summers. Somehow, seeing him in a state of partial undress was very different.

“What are you doing? ” She could hear the shrillness in her voice, high and panicked.

“What does it look like I’m doing?” he said. He submerged himself to his waist, hissing at the sudden rush of heat. “You’ve been avoiding me. So now, we’re going to talk about my little problem here.”

“In the bath?” She taunted, trying desperately to rile him enough to leave. “Aren’t you afraid I’ll contaminate you?”

“If I were,” he said, dryly. “I wouldn’t have allowed you to bleed all over me. I think we’re a bit past that.”

For a moment, they observed each other warily. It was all so warped: the thought that Malfoy was unbothered enough with her blood status to get in a bath. The thought that maybe, the events of the year had begun to undo some of the baseless, malignant thinking he’d always ascribed to.

She wondered if she should be on guard, if maybe this was a ploy to manipulate her when she was at her most vulnerable. But this isn’t your most vulnerable , a reasonable voice in her head reminded her. He’s in your head once a week. If he wanted to hurt you, what better opportunity?

The doubtful, realistic side of her still had reservations: just because he doesn’t think you’re scum specifically, doesn’t mean he’s changed his whole worldview. People are always willing to make exceptions to hate when it suits them.

“Alright then,” she said, steadier than she felt. “Talk.”

“I don’t always notice it coming on before it’s too late, but it’s like this itch I have to scratch.” He leaned back, partially submerging his head. The bathwater darkened his hair at the roots, adding dimension to the wave of platinum blond. “This feeling like I’m supposed to be near you. Like sometimes, if I’m not, I can’t breathe.”

His admission caused her pulse to quicken, her heart sprinting ahead of her body. Why did he have to say it like that? Why did his voice have to get low and serious? Why did he have to stare at her like she was a burning building he couldn’t bring himself to look away from?

“You’re sure that it started after the ritual?” She questioned, voicing her doubt. “There’s no chance this is some sort of...prank? Something one of your friends would pull, to have a laugh?”

Malfoy scoffed at this, a rough sound that made the back of Hermione’s neck prickle.

“No one I know would consider this remotely comedic.”

“Right,” she responded. “As if their prime idea of a joke wouldn’t be forcing you to follow a mudblood around?”

“Why do you have to make it about that?” The strangest part was that he looked like he was seriously asking, unsure of her answer.

The question was a lit match on a heap of kindling that Hermione had been collecting for the past six years. She felt the little flame of anger that burned consistently within her swell into a great, roaring thing, demanding to be heard.

“Are you serious?” Her voice was like a steel blade. He didn't want to talk about blood supremacy now that it made him uncomfortable? He deserved to feel discomfort.“You’re the one who has made it about this—about my blood— since we first met. You made me think like this. You made me expect this. Do you know you were the first person to call me a mudblood?”

He didn’t respond. Suddenly, the dripping tap was the loudest thing in the room.

“Yes,” he finally said, when the silence became too much to bear. “I could tell by the look on your face. I laughed about it afterwards, how confused you seemed. I couldn’t stand how you were better than me in nearly everything. It made me an embarrassment to the Malfoy name.”

She hated hollowness with which he admitted it, the lack of emotion in his voice always a good indication that he was occluding. She wanted him to feel what she had felt, the uncertainty that had sunk its claws into her and never let up.

“You made it so that I’d always have some doubt about how people saw me. About whether I was good. Or just good for a muggleborn.”

Hermione hadn't meant to reveal so much, but it was all true. After he had called her the slur on the Quidditch pitch, something in her shifted. She felt a delirious pressure that pushed her to take extra classes, miss precious sleep, all while soaring to top marks in every exam. She couldn't simply be the best. She had to be extraordinary. She had to prove them all wrong.

“Well you’re certainly getting yours now, aren’t you?" Malfoy scowled performatively, but she couldn't shake the feeling he was uncomfortably affected by what she'd said. "Have you enjoyed the irony of me being compelled to follow you around? I’ve got half a mind to say that you’ve done this on purpose, to teach me some sort of lesson.”

“Oh, you’ve certainly only got half a mind,” she snarked back. They had gotten gradually closer, shouting at each other over the steaming surface of the water. “Why would I want to be near you? Why would that possibly be advantageous for me? ”

“For you?” Malfoy barked a laugh, devoid of humor. “You don’t do anything for yourself. You get off on sacrifice, on anything you can do for Potter or Weasel or your damned Order. I’m sure they’d consider me being tied to you inextricably as a very helpful tool. A pet Death Eater on a tight little leash.”

Something was rising in her, demanding that she attend to all the splintering tensions, the ragged seams between them.

“I’m not at fault for this.” She could feel it— her temper, getting the best of her— but she couldn’t grasp control of the reins. “I did my best to save your life , because for some bloody reason, you saved mine. But I didn’t swear my allegiance to Voldemort. I didn’t make you take the mark. I’ll bet you thought it was an honor, wasn’t it?”

Malfoy responded with a cold fury she hadn’t seen from him before. She’d seen him wounded and nasty, aiming to injure with his sharp tongue. But she’d never seen him like this. He had a menacing intensity to him. Like a placid lake, frozen over. Ready to crack open under her weight.

“I meant inheriting the Malfoy family seat, not sworn servitude to the most dangerous wizard of the century. Would you like to hear the story of the night I was marked?”

Hermione had a growing certainty she did not, but Malfoy was so close, so dangerously focused on her, that she thought it would be best to treat the situation as one would with any large predator, by avoiding sounds of distress and any sudden movements.

“When I came home from school after you and Potter had pulled your little stunt, I knew my father had been incarcerated, but I didn’t know that my mother was entertaining guests. I should have understood the gravity of the situation when no one met me at the station."

He held himself to his full height— a foot taller than Hermione— every muscle of his bare back pulled taught. A soldier’s posture, alert and overly formal.

“I hear that even when receiving the mark willingly, the pain is astonishing. But when you’re forced…" He shuddered with the memory and Hermione's stomach twisted. "Do you know who held me down while I screamed, Granger?”

Hermione shook her head mutely, regretting her flippant comments. She’d been quick to anger and now, she feared that was learning something she had never wanted to know.

“My mother was given that honor.” Malfoy’s voice was no more than a ragged breath. “She tried her best to keep me still.”

Hermione closed her eyes, but that didn’t help shield her from imagining Malfoy, screaming in pain, or Narcissa’s fingers digging into him desperately. She knew innately that the scene would find its way into her nightmares.

His eyes unfocused, weighed down by the memory.

“It broke her,” he finally said. She couldn’t do anything without getting herself killed, but she knew she couldn’t save me either.”

Hermione remembered how stricken his mother had looked when she'd seen her in the robes shop, skin sallow and expression drawn. How her eyes had seemed notably unfocused, her hands unsteady. The way Malfoy had gently chastised her and sent her back home through the floo, as if she was too delicate to even leave the Manor.

“In the end, marking me was the best punishment for Lucius Malfoy that anyone could have devised. The Dark Lord took his heir and his wife in one fell swoop.”

“I didn't know.” Hermione finally answered, voice small. She looked down to where her fingers had begun to prune. “I thought…”

“It’s fine.” All the fight had slipped away from him, relinquished in favor of something much more raw. “I gave you no reason to think otherwise.”

The heat of the bath had grown dizzying. She could see hints of white flickering in the corner of her eyes.

She pulled herself up to perch on the edge of the pool. The air was bracingly cold against her wet swimsuit, and she hoped that the jarring sensation would ground her.

Instinctively, Malfoy moved to fill the space she once occupied, as if it were natural to react to her. He bracketed the place she sat with his hands, causing her to become excruciatingly aware of the heat-flushed skin around his collar bones. He head was slightly bowed, staring at the goosebumps on her completely exposed legs, far more skin that was shown under even the shortest of uniform skirts.

She felt his hand brush against her knee, right at the scar she’d obtained while dodging the Whomping Willow in third year.He was too close. She could see his eyelashes, a dark-gold dusting. If he kept this up, she was never going to get a full breath again.

Hermione cleared her throat.

Malfoy started, realizing how he’d positioned herself around her and swiftly pulled away. Hermione felt his absence, like the sun had been suddenly shaded behind clouds.

“That’s the magic,” she said, half to convince herself that Malfoy would have never gotten so close to her on his own accord.

“You know what's happening, don’t you?” Malfoy said, and she knew he was talking about the pulling sensation he’d described, the urge to be close to her. “That’s why you’ve been avoiding me. ”

“I think that during the ritual, you were accidentally tied to me in some way," she confessed. "Blood magic is emotional. It looks for balance. An eye for an eye. That kind of magic never completely disappears, it leaves residues.”

“I’d guessed as much.” Malfoy sounded pained. "So what, now I'm bound to you? Like I was to him?"

She remembered with a pang how elated he’d been at the perspective of freedom. If she were Malfoy, she wouldn’t want to be bound to anyone, especially after what she’d heard about how he was marked.

“If you are, we’ll undo it,” she said. “I would never…” Try and control you, she thought. Force your loyalty. Use you against your will.

“I know, Granger.” He spoke with a quiet authority, as if he believed what he was saying. "I know you wouldn't."

She didn't forgive him for the cruel things he'd said and done. But she could recognize that Malfoy was more than his cruelty.

Hermione was no believer in divination, but in that moment, she couldn't help but feel premonitory sensation that ritual magic aside, there was something binding the two of them together, some red string of fate that had pulled at her since he showed up outside her parent's house. That his choice to spare them had changed a thousand trajectories.

There was a war on the horizon, Hermione thought. She wondered what side Malfoy would find himself on.

The water had gone cold.

She stood and summoned her robe, wrapping it tightly around her. Malfoy's eyes tightened as she left, a certain tenseness returning to him, as if her distance was something he could feel.

Chapter 17: The Prince's Design

Chapter Text

In the days following their interaction in the prefect’s bath, Hermione didn’t have much time to dedicate to her new Malfoy problem, mostly because she couldn’t manage to shake Harry’s constant presence. With Ron out of commission, it had just been the two of them, and while she enjoyed spending time with Harry, she also had a far harder time sneaking off when he always seemed to be looking for her.

In her younger years, she’d felt resentful of Harry and Ron’s inherent closeness, seeing it as just another indication of how she would always be seen as a friend of convenience, or worse, obligation. They’d never excluded her purposely, but their tight knit bond and innate understanding of each other had felt like a cruel reminder that she’d never, ever be chosen first.

But after a week without Ron, her old insecurity shifted into a different feeling: annoyance. Without having his best mate around to burn off his more boisterous energy, Harry had grown increasingly bored, and thus, increasingly on her nerves.

He’d started tagging along with Hermione to the library, where he’d taken to amusing himself by paging the books Hermione was always carting around in search of interesting spells, something she considered a sign of total desperation. She couldn’t even tell Harry off for being loud or disruptive: when he finished his own homework and his interest in her books had waned, he would quietly pace around the shelves and look longingly out the large windows.

It was funny how as soon as someone wasn’t around, Hermione could clearly see all those attributes they contributed to her life. With Ron in the hospital wing, she felt the absence of his comforting presence, his sure laugh and colorful swearing. He brought a certain lightness to their trio, an up-for-anything sort of energy. You could always count on him to join Harry for an impromptu jaunt around the castle or a trip to the Quidditch pitch; Hermione, on the other hand, scheduled her time with a near surgical precision. Ron also had a knack for diffusing tense situations that Hermione had never been able to replicate. Given what her mother would have called her “high-strung nature” and Harry’s signature hotheadedness, the two of them had certainly developed a tendency to wind each other up.

Thankfully, after a regiment of curative potions and a week of Ponfrey’s eagle-eyed supervision, Ron was released from the Hospital Wing. Given the events that had led to his hospitalization, he seemed strangely cheerful about the whole ordeal, and was relishing in the attention he received post-poisoning. She was glad he was enjoying his flirtation with celebrity, but also thought that Ron’s spirited reenactments (mostly consisting of him dramatically clutching his throat) rather downplayed the severity of the situation.

The timing couldn't have been better. To his great chagrin, Ron was given the all clear to resume classes and prefect duties on Friday, which meant he had to join her on Saturday morning in supervising the busiest and most combustible Hogsmeade weekend of the year: Valentine’s Day.

“Pomfrey couldn’t have kept me for a few extra days?” Ron moaned, as they herded a group of giggling third years exclaimed over enchanted Valentine’s cards along in the entrance hall. Under the tutelage of Professor Flitwick, some eager fourth year Ravenclawes had been in charge of the hall’s decorations, resulting in a flock of ugly, squashed looking cherubs fluttering about the ceiling. They were charmed to sing classic love songs—mostly Celestina Warbeck— but whoever had performed the charm hadn’t thought to ensure that the cherubs weren’t completely tone deaf, and so many students were covering their ears in order to drown out the off pitch warbling.

The spirit of the holiday was making the student body act a bit strangely: a curly haired Hufflepuff boy that Hermione didn’t recognize had bumped into her while stammering unintelligibly, before handing her a little metal bookmark in the shape of a heart and promptly running off. One pink-faced girl with two plaits approached her with a homemade ribbon monstrosity, which she shyly asked Hermione to give to Harry on her behalf. Not wanting to encourage other admirers, Hermione gently informed her that given recent events, she wasn’t allowed to deliver packages that hadn’t been inspected by the post.

It was lucky Harry hadn’t joined them; she had a feeling the girl wasn’t the only one attempting to bestow unreciprocated affections on The Boy Who Lived. Eager to avoid the commotion (and another mishap with love potion laced chocolates), Harry had prudently chosen to use his invisibility cloak and meet up with them once the crowds had dissipated in Hogsmeade.

“Pomfrey should have just let me die,” Ron moaned, once they’d gotten everyone out the main gates and along the snowy path. In the cheerful sea of red and pink, he looked comically like a man headed towards the gallows. “Lavender is going to kill me anyway.”

“Are you two rowing?”

“Not yet,” Ron replied, darkly. “She wanted me to take her to that horrible tea room, Miss Puddletoes or whatever—”

“Oh, Madam Puddifoot’s isn't so bad,” Hermione replied, lips twitching in amusem*nt. “At least the cherubs sing on key?”

“It’s where lads go to die.” He paused and shrugged, like he was unsure if he should continue before plowing forward. “I keep trying to end things with her, but she distracts me into an argument. Maybe it’ll happen today, if we row badly enough…”

“It’s Valentine’s Day!” Hermione said reproachfully. They were admittedly a terrible couple, but no one—even Lavender— deserved to be dumped on a holiday that celebrated love. “You don’t split up with a girl on Valentine’s Day.”

“Why not?” Ron countered. “Worst case scenario, it’ll be so awful that she’ll have to dump me. I’ve been trying to find a way out anyway— this way I don’t even have to be the one to do it!”

“It’s a relationship, Ronald, not a torture dungeon. You don’t have to find an escape. Just be upfront and honest with her. Say, Lavender, I think it’d be best if we go our separate ways, no hard feelings —”

“Oh, she’d show me separate ways, all right. She’d separate my bollocks all the way from my body.”

Hermione snorted at the lewd joke and Ron grinned, encouraged by his success.

“I’d have no hard feelings for the rest of my life.”

Hermione exploded into giggles, and after catching her attempt at a scandalized expression, Ron joined in. They laughed so hard they had to momentarily stop walking and lean on each other in order to catch their breath.

The delay caused a few younger students to look back and begin whispering conspiratorially among themselves. One of the younger girls even shot Hermione a wink and a thumbs up.

“Oh, just what I need,” Hermione groaned. “Another conspiracy about my love life.”

“Another?” Ron asked, slightly clipped. His gait took on the jaunty effect of false casualness.

Hermione hesitated, unsure if she should share Ginny’s theory with him. They were still toeing the line of respectful friendship since their altercation at Christmas and she was reluctant to set him off again; she could only imagine his reaction to Malfoy being…well, Malfoy.

“You can tell me stuff,” Ron said gruffly, as if reading her thoughts. “I won’t be a prat. Or at least, I’ll try not to be.”

“I know.” She gave his arm a grateful squeeze. “I will.”

“Well, don’t tell me everything.” He took on a queasy expression. “Er, maybe just talk to Gin about, er, attempts at getting better acquainted —”

“Please stop talking,” Hermione entreated, and Ron snapped his mouth shut with relief.

They rounded the bend towards the village, the snow capped clay roofs peeking out merrily from beyond the path, and some students started a merry race towards the shops. Hermione didn’t have it in her to spoil their excitement, so she just called reminders to mind the icy bits on the path.

“It’s something Ginny said,” she told Ron, as they half-heartedly patrolled the village streets, paying far more attention to the sparkling displays in the shop windows than the students bustling around them. She didn’t feel badly about her negligence; they hardly needed two prefects to patrol when Hogsmeade was already crawling with undercover aurors, Scrimageour’s attempt at placating a growingly fearful public. “About Malfoy. She thinks that he has a certain, er, fixation with me.”

She willed herself not to think of the way he’d cornered her in the bath or his recent, heated proximity and hoped that her pink cheeks could be explained away by the cold.

“Hermione,” Ron asked seriously, a bracing hand on her shoulder. “If that blonde muppet is bothering you, I swear I’ll—”

“Ron,” she said, removing his hand with a shrug. “If I’m going to tell you things, it means you can’t charge off wand-first to avenge my honor, before I’ve even finished.”

Ron rolled his eyes, but made a dramatic zipped-lips gesture in acquiescence.

“It’s nothing dangerous. Ginny’s just got this mad theory that Malfoy’s got a bit of a crush on me,” Hermione scoffed. “That’s all.”

“ Malfoy? And you? ” Ron wheezed. At first Hermione worried she’d upset him to the point of asphyxiation, but quickly realized the breathless gasping was a result of hysterical laughter. He wiped at his eyes breathlessly. “Merlin, I’ve got to tell Gin she’s reached her limit of bludgers to the head. You really had me going for a moment there.”

Ron shoved lightly at Hermione’s arm in teasing. Hermione shoved him in return, and the back and forth continued until they were bumping shoulders companionably. They paused at the top of a hill overlooking greater Hogsmeade, and Ron sighed deeply as they took in the little shop in the distance that had charmed its chimney smoke peony pink.

“Go on,” Hermione said, inclining her head in the direction of the village. “Have it out with Lav.”

“Really?” Ron moved in the direction of the shops, before remembering himself and sheepishly offering to stay. “I don’t mind finishing patrol.”

Hermione waved him off. It was really only a fifteen minute walk around the Shrieking Shack, and she’d always been a dab hand at warming charms.

“I’ll meet you back at the Broomsticks for a butterbeer and a mope,” she offered, “and medical attention, if necessary.”

“Wish me luck escaping the dungeons!” Ron gave a little salute before striding down the path. She secretly thought he’d need more than luck if he was going to try dumping Lavender on Valentine’s Day, but that was something Ron would have to figure out on his own.

“Find Harry too while you’re at it!” She called after him, and he waved in acknowledgement.

She absently kicked at some pebbles as she wound through the outer pathways, where the edges of the forest crept up on the village. Forget rogue acromantulas and armed centaurs, what she truly dreaded was stumbling into amorous couples who’d chosen a more secluded place to become —as Ron so deftly put it— better acquainted .

With this in mind, she cut her patrol a bit short, blasting through the snow with a heating charm to form a neat path through the grounds of the Shrieking Shack and back towards the pub.

As she approached the Gothic architecture of the dilapidated house, Hermione quickened her stride. Even though it was only early afternoon, the winter sun was dwindling in a testament to Scotland’s short February days, and she had to repress a shiver.

The Shrieking Shack had lost most of its eeriness after she had learned that its famed haunting had actually been their Defense Against the Dark Arts professor, transforming into a Class XXXX Magical Creature. But Hermione could concede that, even without a credible haunting, there was an unnerving stillness to this place, as if the abandoned house and its surrounding grounds had absorbed the violence from sheer proximity. She still remembered the stale scent of fear and the prickle of dark magic on the night that she’d crept down the tunnel that connected the shack to the Whomping Willow. The night she’d met Sirius, the night Peter Pettigrew’s treachery had been unveiled.

As she rounded the shack’s rickety gate, Hermione saw a flash of red, the tail end of a velvet cloak. Her eyes followed it instinctually, leading her to its owner: Pansy Parkinson, lurking on the outskirts of the run-down property.

“You, ” Pansy snarled, face ruddy with cold, like she’d been out in the elements for a while.

“Me,” Hermione confirmed, tapping her silver badge. “Prefect rounds. Why are you lurking about?”

“Are you looking for a date, Granger?” Pansy mocked, avoiding her question. She tossed her shiny black bob, a gesture of contempt.“Hoping maybe a poltergeist will have you?”

Hermione couldn’t help but note the way Pansy was positioned herself, angling her body so that she blocked the entryway.

“What are you hiding, Parkinson?” On a hunch, Hermione took a step forward, approaching the shack.

Pansy immediately raised her wand, a curse on her lips. “ Stu —”

“Expelliarmus! ”

After a year of practicing dueling with Harry, Hermione was much faster, and the Slytherin girl’s wand flew into her hand in a neat arc.

Pansy looked murderous, mouth hanging open in outrage, as if nothing could have enraged her more than having her source of magic removed by a mudblood. A vindictive part of Hermione—a part that had been growing louder and more insistent as the year progressed— relished in the sweetness of Pansy’s outrage. It was the part of her that, worryingly, insisted force was the only way to deal with someone like Pansy. The part of her that demanded an eye for an eye.

“You bitch!” Pansy shrieked, lunging for her wand. Hermione jerked away, but came close enough to notice that Pansy’s kohl rimmed eyes had a hunted quality to them, making her look all the more deranged. “You filthy, ill-bred—”

“Maybe you’ll get it back once you learn some manners, Parkinson.” Hermione cut off the rude tirade, clicking her tongue in mock consideration. “Or maybe McGonagall can return it, after you explain to her why you’ve been skulking around private property unsupervised.”

Hermione should have realized that Pansy—who didn’t have an impressive quantity of self control on a good day, and this was a very bad one, indeed—had been pushed too far. But she hadn’t, and was caught completely off guard when Pansy launched herself, tackling her into the snow.

“Ow! Gerroff me, you lunatic!”

“I’ll kill you, mudblood!”

They tussled momentarily, as Hermione scrambled desperately for her wand. Pansy managed to get in a hard slap that left Hermione’s ears ringing, and Hermione kicked out hard, connecting with Pansy's shin.

There was a burst of white hot magic, and they were thrown apart and into the snow.

“What the f*ck?!” A boy’s voice cried, and a hand extended down towards Hermione. She took it, pulling herself to her feet, ignoring the twinges of protest from her body.One side of her face was on fire, no doubt reddened by the impact of Pansy’s slap, and her knee throbbed angrily from her collision with the ground.

She shook snow from her hair and face, wiping her eyes to find a furious Theo Nott admonishing Pansy, as the girl struggled to her hands and knees in the snow.

“Have you lost your mind, Parkinson?” Nott barked. “Fighting like a muggle?”

Pansy wobbled into a standing position, still looking very much like she’d like to hit Hermione.

“She took my wand!”

“Only after you tried to curse me,” Hermione spit back. “That’ll be twenty-five points from Slytherin for fighting, don’t make it fifty!”

“Oh, who cares about the f*cking House Cup, you insipid—”

Nott wedged himself between them before Pansy could smack her again, catching the brunt of her long, lacquered nails on his cheek. Tiny scarlet droplets bloomed from the wound, like poppies.

“sh*t! Teddy, I’m sorry—”

Nott gave Pansy a look so vicious it cut her off mid sentence, as if he’d silenced her with a charm. He turned to Hermione with a blank, careful expression that seemed strangely familiar.

Nott looked much worse than when he’d escorted her to the Christmas party. He was peaky and drawn, notably thinner than ever before. It made his clothes hang off him, ill-fitting, as if they were cast offs from someone much larger. Exposed to the wind, billowed away from his body.

The pale slices of skin at his collar and wrists seemed fuzzy and unfocused, catching strangely on the dregs of winter sun. The mysterious bruises she'd seen him with were nowhere to be found; he’d obviously glamoured them.

“You’d better go, Granger.” Nott dismissed her with a stiff nod. “Take the points and I’ll sort her out.”

He looked like Malfoy, she realized, when she saw him last summer.

“Nott…you look dreadful.”

“Show me a Gryffindor without any tact, and I’ll show you any Gryffindor,” Nott muttered in response, crossing his arms protectively. Although it was a defensive gesture, it made him appear as if he was holding himself up.

“Are you all right?”

“Spare me your concern, Saint Granger.” Nott’s voice had turned bitter. “I don’t want you involved—you already made a mess by getting into it with Draco, and look where that’s gotten the poor bastard.”

Hermione blanched, taking an uncertain step backwards.

“What do you mean?” Hermione asked him. The bare tree branches rustled, as ominous as any warning.

“What does he mean?” Pansy had regained her voice. She let out a laugh as cold and as clear as a mountain stream. “Don’t you know? I suppose not, given the pathetic way you’ve been following Draco around. We’ve all noticed.”

“I haven’t been following him!” Hermione protested, at the same time as Nott barked, “Pansy, stop,”in a manner that told Hermione he was accustomed to giving such orders.

“I doubt you’d be so interested in Draco if you knew—”

“I’m serious!” Nott warned in a raised voice, trying to drown the other girl out. But Pansy forged brutally ahead. Her lips, smeared with either blood or cherry red lipstick, twisted into a snarl.

“—if you knew just how your filthy muggle parents met their end!”

For a moment, Hermione couldn’t breathe. All she could hear with the pounding fear of she knows, she knows, she knows.

“That’s right,” Pansy taunted, unaware of Hermione's internal spiral. “The Dark Lord gave Draco the honor of putting your parents down, like the dogs they were.”

Later, Hermione would wonder if maybe she could have stopped what happened next, had she not been so distracted worrying over what Pansy did or didn't know. Maybe she would have caught Malfoy in the corner of her eyes, running towards them with a blazing look on his face. Maybe, she would have noticed a second set of footprints, following him in the snow.

In actuality, all she could do was watch in horror as Nott swung around and drew his wand on Pansy in warning. With his back turned, Nott wasn’t able to see Malfoy’s approach.

He couldn’t react in time, when Malfoy called, “f*ck, are you hurt Granger!? I felt—”

But before Hermione could find out what Malfoy had felt, Harry Potter ripped off his invisibility cloak, his wand raised in his hand. She knew immediately that he had heard Pansy’s revelation based on the furious tears in his eyes. Before Hermione could yell for him to stop, Harry roared a spell at Malfoy that Hermione had only ever seen written down, neatly labeled for enemies .

“Sectumsempra!”

Chapter 18: Vulnera Sanentur

Chapter Text

When Hermione was young, her father used to watch horror films on the television set, late at night when he thought she was already in bed. He’d catch her peeking from around the doorway and relent, allowing her to scramble onto his lap and stare, utterly transfixed, at the age-inappropriate scenes of men with chainsaws and the girls who ran from them.

At the crescendo of promised violence, right before the masked killer descended with his knife, her father would cover her eyes to shield her from the gore. She’d squeal and wiggle and try to peek out from between his fingers, but he’d hold fast. Sorry, sweetheart. If you have nightmares about this, your mother will kill me.

This was all Hermione could think of, when Harry’s curse hit Malfoy squarely in the chest and his slate grey eyes went wide with surprise. As his knees buckled under him and something dark and wet began to bloom from wicked looking lacerations on his chest. Heavy droplets of blood hitting the ground before his body.

All she could think was that she wished someone was there, to cover her eyes.

“I didn’t— I didn’t know, I swear—” Harry babbled from shock, voice gone high and shaky. “I wouldn’t have—”

“Draco!”

It was his name that snapped Hermione out of her horrified reverie.

She wasn’t sure who shouted it, Pansy or Theo, because her body had propelled itself to where Draco Malfoy was bleeding out on the shack’s blanketed grounds, faster and more instinctual than her sluggish mind. The snow, which had looked so soft and charming moments before, only made the blood more stark. It looked like the scene of a massacre.

“Teddy, do something !” Hermione heard the girl shriek, the sound distorted, like she was underwater.

“Go get Pomfrey!” A boy’s responding order, in Nott’s voice. “Pansy, go!” Her footsteps rapidly faded in the direction of the castle grounds.

“Okay,” Hermione said out loud, attempting to ground herself. She knelt next to Malfoy, careful not to disturb his body. “It’s okay, Draco— can you hear me?”

His eyelids fluttered, revealing a slip of silver. By some miracle, he was conscious. Oh god, she thought, realizing the amount of pain he must be in. He was conscious .

“Episkey! ” She tried. She could see his wounds through his mangled sweater, shimmering with a thick maroon substance. “Episkey! ”

Malfoy continued to bleed, growing paler by the second.He was hemorrhaging, Hermione realized, feeling faint. The Prince’s spell was keeping his blood from clotting and regular healing charms wouldn’t stick. Without a countercurse, he’d bleed to death.

She tried a third time, voice nearly a sob. “Episkey!”

“ That’s not f*cking working!” Nott’s voice came from somewhere above her, raw and desperate. “Take this—press hard.”

A white cotton shirt was shoved into her hands and she dutifully obeyed, using it to apply pressure to the wounds. She could taste blood in the air, iron-tinged and rusty all down her throat. She closed her eyes and fought the urge to vomit.

If he died, it would be like— like—

She could not make death into a metaphor; if he died, it would be her fault. Harry had cast the spell, but it was her who had kept that cursed book even while knowing its danger. In her hunger for instruction, she'd allowed the Half-Blood Prince the benefit of her doubt.

Malfoy groaned something from under her, the words stuck agonizingly in his throat.

“Don’t talk,” she begged, one hand on his chest in an attempt to staunch the flow, the other gripping her wand so hard she feared it may snap. The shirt Nott had handed her was already soaked through. She could feel his heartbeat, thrumming erratically.

“Granger,” Malfoy panted, gritting out her name. He struggled to lift his head. “Just let me…”

He could not die, Hermione decided. There were a few things she knew as absolute truths: the sun would rise at dawn, the tides would swell and wane with the moon, and Draco Malfoy would be a perpetual thorn in her side.

He wasn't allowed to die; he couldn’t leave her to bear all of their secrets, alone.

“I’m not letting you go towards the bloody light, okay?” She leaned in, close enough to see each of his labored breaths dissipating into the cold air. “Not after all the work I’ve done to save you.”

“Not…trying…to die.” Malfoy’s lips tightened in pain, the column of his throat flexing tightly as he fought for breath. “Look… at me.”

“Wh—what?”

Her gaze snapped to his, and she suddenly understood what he wanted. Hadn’t they looked at eachother like this across the potions’ classroom, every week? He wasn’t trying to die. He was trying to communicate.

With her eyes boring into his, she whispered the spell very quietly, hoping the sound would be swept up by the winter wind.

“Legilimens.”

In the absence of his occlumency, she realized how much Malfoy had managed to keep from her during their lessons. Without his walls up, his memories were loud and overly bright, marked with excruciating bolts of emotion that seemed violently at odds with the placid, uncaring expression he kept perpetually pasted on his face.

Faces and sensations moved quickly before her, like swapping out slides on a microscope, until he settled on the memory he needed her to see.

A younger Draco—maybe thirteen or fourteen based—lounged in a stately library, framed by floor to ceiling windows with opulent velvet drapes. Hermione looks around, disconcerted. Was this the Malfoy family home?

Their sallow-faced Potions professor was lecturing him from behind a mahogany desk, as a piece of self-writing chalk transcribed notes on a conjured blackboard. The younger Malfoy was barely listening. She could feel his disinterest; in this memory, he wanted desperately to go flying, to escape the dark opulence of the library and step into the sun.

“Are you paying attention, Draco?” Severus Snape’s silky voice rang out, echoing in Hermione’s head. “Your parents pay a small fortune for a summer tutor, in order to ensure you are the top of your class. And you repay them by wasting their efforts daydreaming like a simpering fool— is it any wonder you’ve been consistently bested by a muggleborn? Now, what did I just say?”

Snape was talking about her, Hermione realized. She’d bested Draco in all of their classes in third year, except Divination.

“A countercurse is the most important weapon you’ll ever wield,” Malfoy parroted back. She could feel his irritation, and under that, shame from his godfather’s scolding. “It can be the difference between life and death.”

She squinted at the board, where the enchanted chalk was writing out a spell: Vulnera San—

“GRANGER, IF YOU DON’T STOP STARING AND GET OUT OF MY BLOODY WAY—” Theodore Nott’s bellow broke into her thoughts and she ripped out of Malfoy’s mind with a ragged gasp.

Under her, Malfoy’s breaths grew worryingly weak, their warmth fading quickly against her cheek.

Organize your mind , she heard in his voice, like he’d instructed in their very first occlumency lesson.She hadn’t finished viewing Malfoy’s memory, but it had been enough to trigger one of her own: sitting in her four poster bed, poring over Advanced Potion Making. She focused until she could see the countercurse, written in the Prince’s spiky sprawl.

She felt for her magic, willing it to well up inside her like it did when she was elated or furious. Like it did when she healed him the first time, during the unbinding ritual.

“Vulnera Sanentur. ”

After six years seeped in the fascinations of the wizarding world, Hermione sometimes found herself growing immune to the sheer awe of magic. It was in moments like this, while watching Draco Malfoy’s skin knit itself back together and his shuddering breaths grow smooth, that she remembered: magic was the power to stand tall against death.

She cast the spell again and again, moving up his torso. When her eyes finally reached his face, he was watching her through his golden eyelashes with a burning, half-delirious sort of focus.

“Knew you’d get it,” he whispered, like the words were only for her. “Clever girl.”

She met his molten gaze for the second time that day, and something in her sung.

Nott fell to Hermione’s side, batting her hands aside so as to desperately press his own to the spaces that had been wounded only a few moments prior. His bare chest was wrapped in a heavy winter cloak; it was his shirt that she had used.

As her adrenaline declined, the world around her came back in snippets, sounds skipping like an untuned radio.

“Is he all right?” Nott was asking Hermione wildly. He jerked away from Malfoy, who had seemingly passed out cold. Nott’s movements were tight and terrified as he grabbed her shoulders and shook, rattling her. “Is he going to be alright? ”

“I think so,” Hermione replied, still dizzy with adrenaline. She was going to burst into tears or throw up or both. “But I’m not a healer. He’s unconscious, thank god. Where is Pomfrey?”

“I sent Pansy to fetch her, but there’s no way they could have gotten here fast enough. I just didn’t want her to have to see…” He trailed off, the implication of his sentence filling the air between them.

“Where’s Harry?” Hermione breathed.

It was the wrong thing to say. Nott’s head snapped up, as if suddenly remembering who cast the spell in the first place. He’d been entirely focused of Draco’s bleeding, but now that it had stopped—

“Potter, ” Nott snarled, pulling himself up in one fluid movement. Harry stood a few paces away seemingly paralyzed, his still figure standing out against the winter landscape like a gravestone. “Dabbling in Dark Magic, are you? Allow me to give you a proper demonstration.”

“I didn’t know that’s what the spell did.” Harry was looking at Hermione pleadingly. His hand scraped through his hair, gripping at the scalp. “I found it in a book, I swear. I heard Pansy say that Malfoy killed Hermione’s parents and—"

When Malfoy dueled, he would try and play with his food. He liked to talk, always preempting his hexes with taunts. Nott was no Malfoy. He raised his wand at Harry without preamble, and Hermione realized what he was going to do a split second too late.

“Nott, don’t! ” She cried.

“ Cruci —”

A series of loud cracks cut off Nott’s spell, as half a dozen figures materialized around them. Their scarlet robes stood out starkly against the snow, bronze badges winking on their chests. They moved with a practiced, collective efficiency: appraising the scene, securing a perimeter. Two red cloaks swooped down on Malfoy, casting a complicated diagnostic spell as Hermione scooted out of their way.

As if innately aware of her absence, Malfoy’s hand twitched, reaching in her direction. She stared at it, dumbfounded. Did he want her to —?

“Don’t move!” One of the newly apparated figures called, wand trained on Nott. “Stay where you are!” They knocked back their hood, revealing a familiar, heart-shaped face. The normally-pink haired Auror looked drawn and pale, a mousy-brown ponytail blowing in the wind.

“Tonks!?” Hermione cried, flooded with something stronger than relief.

The Aurors had arrived.

Chapter 19: Pain Relief

Chapter Text

The return to the castle was a blur. Tonks steered, a firm hand on her shoulder; ahead of them, a burly man in a red cloak led Nott and Harry in the direction of the Headmaster’s office.

“Why are they staring at me like that?” She whispered to Tonks, as a group of first years gasped and pointed at her, whispering to each other behind cupped hands.

“Hermione,” Tonks said, gently. “You look like you’ve crawled out of a slaughterhouse.”

She noted her appearance for the first time since Malfoy was cursed. She was coated from her hands to her elbows in his blood. It had seeped all down the front of her robes, and even gotten into her untied hair, matting her curls. If she were the sort of person who delighted in life’s ironies, she’d surely appreciate this more: a muggleborn, drenched in several pints of one of the oldest and most esteemed Wizarding dynasty’s precious blood. Malfoy, at least, would certainly find it amusing. That is, if he survived her amateur attempt at healing.

She felt dizzy at the thought, and tried to focus on Tonks’ face instead. The Auror's usual elfin features were subdued, the sheer lack of color to her appearance making her look particularly morose.

“How did you find us?” Hermione asked, the question slipping off her tongue before she’d fully realized what she was asking.

“I’m sure you know that Scrimgeour assigned a team to monitor potential Death Eater activity in Hogsmeade.” Tonks chewed the inside of her cheek in indecision, unsure of how much she should share, before replying in a low tone. “And Scrimgeour is no Fudge; he authorized us to use a trace of sorts, for Dark Magic. Anything stronger than a defensive spell will trigger an alarm, and the Nott boy’s butchering curse was certainly dark enough—”

“Tonks,” Hermione interrupted. She’d find out as soon as their wands were inspected, anyway. “It wasn’t him. It was Harry.”

Tonks stopped walking mid-step, causing Hermione to trip on air. The Auror ahead threw a cursory glance backwards, before continuing.

“Dumbledore will sort this out,” Tonks mumbled, partially to herself, shaking her head in disbelief. “Best wait to tell him what happened.”

The Headmaster was waiting for them in his office, flanked by their respective heads of house: a white-faced McGonagall and a murderous looking Snape. Between the three students, two Aurors, and three teachers, the usually airy room was cramped, approaching stifling.

“Professor, it’s my fault!” Harry cried immediately, looking stricken. “I cast the curse, but I didn’t mean for — ”

Snape’s hand twitched towards his wand, itching to silence the flow of contrition.

“Be quiet, Potter,” McGonagall said in condemnation. “You’ve done more than enough.”

Harry wilted under her stare, falling silent.

“Auror Tonks, Auror Dawlish,” Dumbledore addressed the pair formally, his usually serene demeanor replaced by something far more stern. “Thank you for your timely assistance. Professor Snape, Professor McGonagall and I are more than equipped to handle the matter from here.”

Dawlish grunted something that sounded suspiciously like, keep these bloody kids on a tighter leash, nodding for Tonks to follow him. She hesitated in the doorway, offering Harry and Hermione a miserable little wave, before ducking out of the office.

Dumbledore gestured with his withered hand and three armchairs with royal purple upholstery appeared wordlessly, each hitting a pair of their knees from behind, forcing the three sixth years to sit. With the three authority figures standing over her, she felt less like this was a disciplinary meeting, and more like she was attending a tribunal.

Dumbledore nodded at each of them in grave acknowledgement.

“I fear that among the many responsibilities that lie with the role of headmaster, I find this to be the most unpleasant. It brings no joy to pass judgment on a student's acts of violence against their own peers, but as there are no undoings of curses that have already been cast, I will require your accounts of the events of this afternoon. You have all been through a shock, but please endeavor to include everything you remember.” Dumbledore fixed his gaze, the bright blue of a cloudless summer sky, on her. “Miss Granger, will you begin?”

Hermione cleared her throat, nervously, starting her explanation with the prefect's patrol, Ron’s departure and her use of the shortcut. She spoke more quickly as she relayed the fight with Pansy, stopping to catch her breath when she landed on the girl’s cruel accusation, before barrelling through Malfoy’s sudden appearance and Harry’s use of the curse.

“It all happened so quickly,” Hermione said, of the aftermath. “I tried episkey, but he kept bleeding and…” She shuddered with resurgent fear, remembering how he'd looked under her, when she thought that he'd been asking her to allow him to die.

“Albus, surely the girl has been through enough?” McGonagall interrupted, beseeching. “She should be in the hospital wing being treated for shock, not giving a formal statement!”

Snape, on the other hand, had no such qualms at her questioning.

“What I struggle to grasp,” her former potions master drawled. “Is that if Miss Granger failed at rudimentary healing spells, how exactly did she manage to close cursed wounds?”

Hermione knew that she lied terribly. Her explanations were overly detailed and far-fetched, invented in sheer panic. Carefully, she based her answer in as much honesty as she could manage.

“Vulnera sanenteur, ” she explained, making contact with Snape’s dark gaze, his black irises offering nothing besides suspicion. “I’d never heard of it before, but Malfoy knew. He managed to tell me before he passed out.”

She didn’t disclose her use of legilimency, nor Malfoy’s reasoning for bolting to the Shack in the first place, although she had the sense that Dumbledore suspected there was more to the story. But she wasn’t the one in trouble, so her explanation went down smoothly, raising no eyebrows.

She slumped in her armchair drifting in and out of listening as Nott followed, relaying the story from his perspective. Someone had blessedly conjured him a shirt, the sleeves hiding any blood that may have transferred onto his bare skin. Irritatingly, he looked more presentable than either of them.

She only perked up in alertness when Nott admitted that he’d been about to curse Harry in retaliation, when the Aurors arrived. He phrased his explanation of his actions carefully, lingering on his rush of emotion at seeing his housemate in a state of mortal peril, and leaving out the fact that he’d been about to use an Unforgivable.

Clever, Hermione thought. After all, no one could prove the intent of a spell that wasn’t cast. If she or Harry accused him of trying to use the Cruciatus, it would be their word against his, hardly an acceptable admission according to the standards of any court of law.

“What were you and Miss Parkinson doing out of the bounds of the village?” McGonagall asked sharply, causing Nott to flush convincingly from his neck to his hairline.

“Er, we were looking for somewhere a bit more private.” He tugged at his collar, a gesture of nervousness. “It’s Valentine’s Day and we’re...involved. Romantically.”

McGonagall tutted at Nott’s implication of what exactly somewhere more private might constitute; Snape just rolled his eyes in mild disgust.

It reminded Hermione that Nott was an excellent liar. She’d never seen him and Pansy so much as hold hands, and it had been established that whenever Pansy was dating someone, she favored public displays of affection heavy enough to ensure the entire castle would know. And they hadn’t even been near each other when Hermione found them at the Shack; Pansy had been stationed at the dilapidated house’s gate, as if standing guard.

When Dumbeldore nodded encouragingly at Harry, her friend took on a bloodless pallor.

“Well, I was supposed to meet Ron and Hermione at the Broomsticks, so I took the long way to the village. The path by the forest? Needed a bit of, er, fresh air—”

“I'm familiar enough with your essays to know you struggle with being succinct, Potter,” Snape cut in. “But I’d like to return to my chambers before midnight.”

“Well, when I got there, I saw Malfoy running from the village," Harry continued. "He looked nervous, and I figured that was a bit suspicious, wasn’t it? He's been acting weird all term, everyone's noticed. And then when I followed him to the Shack, I heard Pansy say…” Hermione could tell he was looking at her, but chose not to meet his eyes. She wouldn’t be helping Harry out of this scrape, not when it was borne entirely out of his dangerous reactivity.

“She said Malfoy murdered Hermione’s parents. That Voldemort ordered him to kill them. I didn't think, I just saw him and cast sectumsempra.”

The office was quiet besides a collective wince at Harry's use of the name. Hermione held her breath. One wrong step, and her biggest secret would be discovered. A single misstep could result in catastrophic consequences, for both her and Malfoy.

“But why did you immediately believe Miss Parkinson?” McGonagall blessedly gave Hermione a plausible explanation, scolding Harry, who shrank into his chair in an attempt to make himself smaller. “A girl who—and surely all will forgive me for casting aspersions— has a reputation throughout the castle as a malicious gossip?”

McGonagall turned to Hermione, far softer, a hint of sympathy playing on her severe lips.

“Miss Granger, do you believe that Draco Malfoy had any hand in the tragic passing of your parents?”

“No,” she replied, truthfully. She kept her eyes on her stained hands, folded in her lap. “I don’t.”

“Forgive me my interruption, Minerva, but I am more concerned about the use of a dark curse by a Hogwarts student,” Snape spat, dark eyes glinting like a pair of scarab beetles. “Where did you learn that spell, Potter?”

“I found it,” Harry stammered. “I was in the library with—”

With her, Hermione realized. Harry had been in the library with her all week, looking through her books out of boredom as she worked. He’d known of the textbook's existence; he’d had it in his possession ever before she did. He must have looked through the Prince’s edits when she was unaware, noting the spell without doing any sort of research into its origins or capacities.

“Turn out your bookbag,” Snape interrupted, savagely. He looked to Dumbledore, insistent. “I want to see Potter’s potions textbook.”

Harry looked confused, eyes darting to Dumbledore, and then to her, questioning. She tried her best not to react, knowing Snape would pounce upon any hint of an admission.

“His potions textbook?” McGonagall questioned, bemused. “Certainly it is more likely this was discovered in one of the volumes from the restricted section, Severus?”

“Now, Potter!” Snape insisted and Harry dumped out his bag, sending scrap parchment and used quills flying, before pulling out his barely used copy of Advanced Potion Making.

Snape flipped through the pages furiously, searching for some unknown evidence, before prodding it with his wand.

“Revelio!” He cried, jabbing at the spine. But nothing happened; after all, Harry's copy was simply a textbook.

But how did he know to look in Advanced Potion Making ? Hermione wondered. He wasn’t even teaching the subject this year, how could he possibly—

Hermione, infinitely glad that she was sitting down, realized several, dizzying things at once.

It had been Snape, in Malfoy’s memory, inscribing the countercurse on the chalkboard. It had been Snape, who’d tutored Malfoy during the summers, teaching him the modified brewing instructions that had been written in the margins— that’s how Malfoy always seemed to know to crush not slice, to stir in the opposite direction. It was Snape, who’d invented the spell.

Severus Snape was the Half-Blood Prince.

The occupants of the office continued speaking, unaware of Hermione’s revelation. She looked at Snape through new, furious eyes. The spell he had invented had almost killed someone— worse, it wasintended to be used for that very purpose. She'd always known of his rumored fascination with the Dark Arts, but this...

“Severus,” Hermione heard McGonagall say. “I know Draco is your godson, but this is past inquisition—”

“Don’t tell me what is past inquisition, Minerva! Potter has proven time and time again that, like his father before him, he is a foolish and arrogant boy, prone to dangerous reactions and violent outbursts—”

“Silence. ” Dumbledore’s voice rang out, quieting them both. “This has been an emotionally taxing afternoon for all, but I must insist that my faculty keep their composure.”

McGonagall stiffened at the rebuke; Snape looked very much like he wanted to hit the Headmaster.

“Where is Pansy?” Nott asked, suddenly. “And Draco?”

“Mister Malfoy is resting, but I’ve been assured that he will make a complete recovery. I believe Miss Parkinson was given a calming draught,” McGonagall explained. “Understandably, she arrived in a high state of distress.”

“Thank you for your actions, Miss Granger,” Dumbledore addressed her seriously, and her stomach turned in discomfort. She didn’t want to be seen as remotely heroic; she felt far too guilty for that. “Your impressive response to a crisis is evidence of a gifted future healer. I award your house fifty points, on your behalf.”

Hermione nodded at the compliment in an attempt to be gracious; privately, she hoped to never see blood again. She’d have felt guilty over receiving house points, if she wasn’t absolutely certain that Harry was about to lose at least triple of whatever she’d been awarded.

“You may go,” Dumbledore dismissed. "Please report straight to the Hospital Wing, so that Madam Pomfrey can assess any injuries and if necessary, treat you for shock.”

Nott and Harry stood with her, but Dumbledore raised a hand in warning, gesturing for them to remain seated. “Mister Nott, Mister Potter. I will need to have additional words with you both. Individually.”

Hermione fled the office, needing no further prompting. She understood her friend was being kept behind to receive his punishment. But why, she wondered as she made her way to the Hospital Wing, did Dumbledore need to speak privately with Nott?

*

Hermione entered the Hospital Wing to the matron’s exclamations of disapproval, and was immediately sequestered to one of the examining bays, where a number of complicated diagnostic charms hovered over her until it was decided that, despite the evidence that might indicate otherwise, Hermione was almost entirely uninjured. Pomfrey cleared the stinging in her cheek—the lingering effects of Pansy’s slap—with an immediate wave of her wand, a pleasant cooling sensation taking its place.

Once Pomfrey had fussed over her, siphoning away dried blood from her clothes until she was sure that none of it was Hermione’s, she was finally allowed to see Malfoy.

His was the only cot in use, right in the middle of the empty room. Hermione moved to stand awkwardly at his bedside, unsure of what her position should be.

To her surprise, Malfoy was awake. At least, mostly.He lay propped up on a number of pillows. Shirtless, although one could barely tell, with his torso wrapped so fully in bandages. The only true exposure was his arms, the smooth expanse of pale skin rippling over taught muscle.

Hermione looked away. A bottle sat half-drained at his bedside, with a peeling gold label that read,Merlin’s Miraculous Medeorée. She picked up the potion, giving its contents a tentative sniff to find the not entirely unpleasant aroma of sharp pine sap. The label was dotted with poppies, indicating that like most muggle painkillers, it was derived from opiates.

That explained the absence of the ever-present worry line between Malfoy’s brows. His glassy eyes, looking up at her under dangerously hooded lids.

Hermione was surprised at how warm she felt, seeing him like that.

It’s a trauma response, she told herself in explanation. You're just relieved he's alive.

Malfoy blinked at her heavily, as if making sure she was real, before speaking.

“You always get to be the hero, don’t you?” He said, unappreciative as ever.

Hermione snorted. Clearly, the potion hadn’t tempered his arrogance.

“That was all you,” she responded. “You remembered the countercurse.”

“You retrieved the memory.”

“You taught me how to use legilimency.”

“You swore the vow.”

“You saved my parents.”

Malfoy fell silent, but his face was more expressive than she’d ever seen it. It was like being in his memories again; she could see every emotion, flitting across his face, more blatant than he’d ever allow if he weren't under the influence of mood-altering potions. It made Hermione want to press harder, see more.

“No,” he said, so softly she barely heard it. “You did that, too. You’re rather good at it, aren’t you? Saving people.”

He looked at her like he had when she was healing him. She feared if he kept looking at her like that, she’d never want him to stop.

“I could be better, evidently.” She looked pointedly at his wounds, busying herself with examining his bandages. She knew from her experience with Dolohov how difficult it was for cursed wounds to heal completely. Malfoy would undoubtedly carry these marks for the rest of his life, an unpleasant thought that turned her stomach. She didn’t like the idea of his skin, marred on her behalf. “These will scar, won’t they?”

“What’s another one?” Malfoy seemed unbothered. He caught her arm, pulling her to sit on the edge of his hospital bed. She huffed with feigned annoyance at his manhandling, but he ignored it, more interested in examining her from up close.

He reached up and touched the ends of her curls, still coated in the remnants of his blood. Catching a strand, he watched in fascination as the rust color transferred onto his fingers.

“They didn’t let you have a bath, first?”

“I came straight here.” To see if you were all right , she thought, but did not add.

He seemed to hear it anyway. His silver gaze melted into something so soft and delicate she didn’t dare name it, not even in her own thoughts. To name it would be to pour water over spun sugar, dissolving its sweetness.

“We had to give statements to the Headmaster,” she blurted, desperate to derail her treacherous train of thought.“Dumbledore said I’d make a good healer.”

Malfoy snorted in response, releasing the lock of her hair.

“Oh please, you’re far too useful for that,” he said. “Dumbledore never saw a weapon he wouldn’t use, no matter the cost, and you've proven yourself to be a whole artillery.” He gestured at himself, grimacing. “I’m proof enough of that.”

“What does that mean?”

“What do you think it means?” Malfoy answered, adjusting his blankets so that he could better sit up. “He’s already had me barter my mother’s safety for my allegiance. It’s like I said in the bath.” His cheeks took on a tinge of pink, evidence that at least he still had some blood left in him. “You don’t think that what has happened with us isn’t the least bit convenient?A death eater who is uniquely attuned to Potter's right hand?"

He swept his gaze over the other beds, ensuring they were alone, before lowering his voice.

"When I was in the village, I felt you. This…insistence that you were in trouble. That you were hurt.”

There was a question of her well being buried in his statement, and she answered it instinctively.

“Pansy hit me,” Hermione confessed, touching her cheek where she’d been slapped. “I caught her and Nott outside of the Shrieking Shack. We had a fight.”

“I nearly died...because of a muggle brawl between you and Parkinson?”

“She slapped me,” Hermione related, unsure of how much he had seen or remembered. “And announced that you killed my parents... that's what Harry overheard. That's why he cursed you.”

Malfoy swept his hair back, rubbing at his forehead as her words had given him a headache.

“f*cking Pansy,” he sighed. "Just what I needed, to have to do more damage control."

"No one believed it," she offered. "They think she was lying, to hurt me.Small miracles, and all that."

The torches between beds flickered on as the light filtering in through the windows of the Hospital Wing grew weaker, dusk sliding seamlessly into night. The other students would be at dinner now, surely spreading word of their absence. She wondered just how many of them had witnessed her blood-soaked march to the headmaster’s office, trepidation swelling in her gut.

“Do you really think Dumbledore knows? About this—” Hermione gestured between them weakly, struggling to find a word that would fully encompass their situation. "That he'd...use it?"

“Do you really think Dumbledore doesn’t know?” Malfoy snorted, disbelieving. “I’d bet my last bloody Galleon that he at least suspects .”

“He couldn’t know,” she maintained, although Malfoy’s word had struck a match of doubt, igniting an uncertainty in her. “About your mark, and the ritual…”

But hadn’t Dumbledore asked her about his Dark Mark all those months ago in the Weasley’s broom shed? Hadn’t he asked her then, how she felt about Malfoy? If she thought him redeemable?

“Listen,” Malfoy asserted, unaware of her spiraling thoughts. “I was raised to size up my enemy accordingly, and that includes assuming the worst of anyone in a position of power over me. Including our saintly headmaster, who has proven himself perfectly comfortable using children to fight his wars. Dumbledore is far too involved in this, as you so eloquently put it, to chalk up his interest as just concern for students’ well being.”

His words reignited familiar doubts; was there no one she could trust? Hermione rubbed her face, overwhelmed.

“I’m sorry.” And she was; she’d been so careless with the ritual, so trusting of an ancient tomb of dark magic and the writings of a budding sociopath in a textbook. She has tried to help him, only to further tangle them together. “This is all my fault.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Malfoy replied. “I'd take this over having that Mark slowly poison me to death any day."

"It's my fault you were cursed too," she maintained miserably. "Harry only knew about the curse because—"

"Oh, don’t martyr yourself on Potter’s behalf. He cast the spell; he'll reap the consequences.” Some of his usual bitterness flickered back into his expression, a warning. She wanted it gone. She wanted—god help her—she wanted him to touch her hair again, to use his nails against her scalp, to wrap her curls around his fist.

She wondered if she was going insane. If the events of the day—the year, really—had caused her final thread of sanity to snap. If it had been too much blood, too much loss, too much f*cking proximity to Malfoy and his…his…

“I should go,” Hermione finally said, before she did something dangerous. She needed a wash and a private cry in her four poster bed, in that order. “As you mentioned, I’m in desperate need of a bath.”

“You should,” Malfoy agreed, his voice dropping in temperature. He sounded like himself again, something that cause a little pang of disappointment to echo through her. “I’ve got half a pain potion left and would prefer to enjoy its effects in peace.”

He reached for the bottle of Medeorée on his bedside table, downing its remnants in a single gulp. She watched as the stiffness slipped from his shoulders and his lips parted in an audible exhale of relief. He melted into the hospital bed with a luxurious stretch, exposing a sliver of unwrapped stomach.

“Better?” she asked, mouth suddenly bone-dry.

“f*ck.” He shuddered a little, lashes fluttering. His voice relaxed back into his prior lowered cadence, words like dripping wax. “Much better.”

She stood from her perch on the edge of his bed, giving him a much needed berth.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” she admitted, feeling a bit silly. It was just well wishes, she told herself. It wasn’t anything she wouldn’t say to an acquaintance. Then why did it feel so different, admitting that she cared about his general wellbeing?

“Yeah.” One side of his mouth turned up, the barest ghost of a smile. “Me too, Granger.”

“I don’t even know if I’ll make it back to the tower,” she admitted lightly, stifling a yawn. “Healing spells take an awful lot out of you.”

“Maybe you should stay.”

Both Hermione and Malfoy looked surprised, as if his words had slipped out without his permission. She expected him to retract the statement immediately, but Malfoy only swallowed, the pale column of his throat constricting. His pupils were dilated, darkening his eyes to the point of distraction.

To her shock, he furthered his efforts, drawing back the blankets and moving gingerly to the edge of the bed— making room for her.

“Malfoy, we’re in the hospital wing.”

“Who cares?” Malfoy dug his teeth into his bottom lip, like he was attempting to stop himself before adding: “it would feel good.”

“You’re on a lot of potions.” Hermione’s voice sounded far too high. “Go to sleep,” she insisted.

“Sure Granger,” he mumbled sleepily. “But you know it would be…” He trailed off, fully succumbing to the lull of exhaustion and analgesics, leaving her unsure of what exactly he thought her lying down with him would be.

She drew the curtain around his bay, so that she didn’t have to look at him anymore.

The strangest thing was that she didn’t want to leave. She could blame Stockholm Syndrome, or pure exhaustion, or the tenuous connection they created during the ritual— it didn’t negate that she wanted nothing more than to pretend she wasn’t Hermione Granger and he wasn’t Draco Malfoy. That she wanted to press too close in the hospital cot and have him run his fingers through her hair until she fell asleep.

Don’t you want to feel good? A traitorous part of her asked coyly, the whole way back to the Gryffindor tower.Already knowing the answer.

What washappening to her?

Chapter 20: The Room of Requirement

Chapter Text

For the following month, all anyone in the castle seemed to be discussing was the incident.The faculty had kept the details hushed, which combined with Malfoy’s conspicuous absence from classes, sent the Hogwarts rumor mill into overdrive.

There were a number of theories. Nott and Malfoy were violently competing for a betrothal agreement with Pansy. Nott declared his love for Hermione after their auspicious Christmas Party debut, and Malfoy cursed him in an attempt to preserve the reputation of an ancient pureblood house. Malfoy and Harry attempted a wizard's duel with Hermione and Nott as their respective seconds. Blessedly, none of the rumors came remotely close to the truth, and so Hermione had encouraged the confirmation of every single one.

Only a select few knew what had actually occurred on Valentine's Day in Hogsmeade. After near-constant hedging, Harry and Hermione finally explained the situation to Ginny and Ron out by the Black Lake, where they could avoid being overheard. Anyone watching would assume the four Gryffindors were simple out for a stroll, enjoying an unseasonably temperate day.

Winter was slipping away, loosening its grasp on the castle’s grounds. Suddenly there were shoots peeking timidly out of the muddy slush, the final remnants of a once robust blanket of snow. Small pockets of green promised spring at the lakeside, with eager wild primroses and snowdrops dappling the grass like wisps of cotton. But the scenery wasn’t the reason for the visit; more importantly, the isolation of the lake would ensure total privacy.

Hermione watched as Ron and Ginny listened to Harry’s account, anxious to hear what exactly he’d concluded of her and Malfoy’s damning behavior. But to her surprise, he glossed over the healing, focusing more on the arrival of the Aurors and the standoff that followed in Dumbledore’s office.

“...anyway,” Harry finished explaining, with a heavy sigh. “I’m banned from Quidditch for the rest of the year. And I’ve got detentions until the end of term with Snape, organizing Filch’s disciplinary records.”

“Does this mean you can’t play in the final?” Ron gaped, clearly stuck on the only aspect that affected him directly. “But it’s against Ravenclaw! We don’t stand a chance without you, mate!”

“Banned,” Harry confirmed. He pinched the bridge of his nose in dismay, jostling his glasses. “Gin, you’ll have to fly Seeker…f*ck, I’ll need to apologize to the team…”

“I can do it," Ginny confirmed determinedly. "We’ll have to move our Chasers around, but—”

“Could you lot think about something other than Quidditch for once?” Hermione snapped, louder than she'd anticipated. Three heads swiveled towards her, expressions guilty. “A student almost died!Harry cast a Dark spell, completely unprovoked!” Her condemnation echoed across the water, ringing in her own ears.

“Well, to be fair, it sounds like Parkinson provoked him,” Ron added, ever Harry’s advocate. She knew Ron’s loyalty was one of his best qualities, but sometimes it prevented him from regarding his best friend’s actions with any degree of impartiality. "Harry only reacted to what she said."

“She was lying,” Hermione cried, exasperated. “She made up a stupid lie implicating Malfoy to provoke me. That’s not exactly an invitation to respond with lethal force, Ron!”

“Hermione’s right,” Harry admitted, as he looked down. He scuffed his shoe absently, sending pebbles scattering into the lake. When he raised his head again, he was blinking rapidly, as if fending off tears. “Malfoy didn’t deserve it. I just…listen, I’m not making excuses. I know it was f*cking horrible. But as it turns out, I go a bit spare over taunts about someone’s parents being murdered on Voldemort’s orders."

Something in Hermione softened when she realized: Harry’s reaction hadn’t been just a fit of his volatile temper. Pansy’s words had triggered his first and deepest emotional wound. It didn’t make it okay. But at least, it made sense.

"I remember how you were, after it happened last summer. It killed me to watch you hurt like that, knowing I couldn't do anything to help." Harry directed this at Hermione, pleading. “And I lost my head at the thought that Malfoy was the cause of that.”

“You nearly killed him, Harry." She responded softly. "You should apologize.”

“What?” Ron raised his eyebrows incredulously. “You want Harry to apologize to Malfoy? ”

“You weren’t there,” Hermione spat. She knew it looked incriminating, her reacting so violently in the Slytherin’s defense, but she couldn’t help herself. Her sense of justice was too insistent. “You weren’t covered to your elbows in blood, trying your hardest to keep someone breathing, so that your best friend didn’t accidentally become a murderer.”

“Alright, alright,” Ron raised his hands defensively. “I’m just saying, I don’t think Malfoy is going to be particularly receptive to a bouquet of daisies from his long standing nemesis. Why was he even there, anyway? Why were any of them skulking around the Shack?”

“Probably to catch Nott and Parkinson,” Hermione shrugged. “Maybe they were fighting over a betrothal agreement.”

Ron let out a snort of amusem*nt, placated, but Harry shot her a look that said: I know you’re lying.

She shook her head infinitesimally: we’ll talk about it later.

“Where’d you learn that spell?” Ginny asked Harry, who looked directly at Hermione in response, guilt written plainly on his face.

“It was written in the margins of my Potions textbook,” Hermione admitted. “But there’s loads of helpful stuff written in there, I even—”

“Hang on,” Ginny questioned, a fire in her eyes that fiercely resembled her mother. She turned to Harry, disapproval on her sharp tongue. “You’re meant to tell me you found a dark curse written in a dodgy book, and you just used it? Hadn’t we learned our lesson about taking handwritten instructions from questionable sources? Or should we wait for another Basilisk to show up?”

Harry hung his head, chastened.

“Promise me you’ll get rid of it,” Ginny said quietly, turning to Hermione. There was a haunted look to her expression, as if she'd gone far away, remembering the violent events of her first year. "Burn it. Shred it. I don't care, so long as no other idiotic, unsuspecting student can get to it."

“Of course,” Hermione said. “I’ll make sure no one else ever gets their hands on it.”

Hermione wasn’t lying. She was just…carefully omitting information. Ginny didn’t need to know that yes, she planned to keep Snape’s book under lock and key, but Hermione wouldn’t be destroying it any time soon. After all, the book had provided her with the sanitatum recipe that had helped heal Malfoy’s arm. And now that she had deduced that it once belonged to Snape, it seemed all the more essential to understand their slippery Professor’s motivations for his espionage on behalf of the Order. What other spells had he invented using Dark magic? Why did Dumbledore trust him, if he was capable of such violence?

The four of them walked back to the castle together until they reached the entrance hall, where Ron and Ginny headed off to call an emergency meeting of the Gryffindor Quidditch team. Hermione quickly made an excuse about needing some books for an Arithmancy project, eager to evade Harry’s prying gaze, but the git was faster, pulling her into a secluded alcove with bay windows before she could even say library.

“Harry, what are you doing? I really do have to check on—”

“Sit,” Harry said, pointing at the window ledge. He seemed serious enough that Hermione obeyed. “Malfoy wasn’t there for Parkinson.” Harry crossed his arms, eyeing her sternly. “He was calling your name.”

“What?”

She knew this confrontation would happen eventually; Harry was bound to have questions about what he saw. Her heart began to pick up speed, kicking insistently behind her ribs. Christ, her and Malfoy should have gotten their story straight right away, pain potions be damned. How was she going to explain?

“I saw Malfoy in Hogsmeade, when I was under the cloak,” Harry said. “Before everything happened at the Shack. One moment he was fine and the next, it was like he could hear this screaming that no one else could, and he took off running. And when he got to there, before I cursed him, he asked if you were hurt.”

“You’re being paranoid,” she insisted. “Maybe he just saw Parkinson take a swing at me, and didn’t want her to get in trouble?”

“But how did he know you were there?” Harry countered. “Why did he run to find you? And the way you were with him…you were staring. Like you were in some sort of trance.”

“I told you, I’d help anyone in his situation.”

“I think you’d try to heal anyone,” Harry confirmed, folding his arms in irritation. “I don’t doubt that. I just don’t think you’d go about it like you did with Malfoy. It was like you really knew him, Hermione. Like you cared.”

“I was in shock,” Hermione defended. “I was panicking.”

“I know what I saw. There’s something between the two of you and I can’t for the life of me understand why you’re lying about it. Is it blackmail? Is he threatening you?”

“Don’t create this narrative that I’ve been carrying on some sort of criminal association with the crown prince of Slytherin. You sound like bloody Rita Skeeter.”

“Then what is it?” Harry cried. “What’s going on with you?”

Maybe it was the persistence in his inquisition, or the exhaustion she felt at having to conceal everything regarding Draco Malfoy from everyone she cared about, but something broke through the last of her defenses, and the truth slipped from her lips before she could stop it.

“I can’t tell you!”

Hermione slapped a hand over her mouth. She could feel the Unbreakable Vow they’d taken in Dumbledore’s office like a jolt of electricity humming through her. A warning: tread carefully.

“Why not?” Harry asked, placing his hands on her shoulders bracingly. “Hermione, what’s wrong? You can tell me—”

“Harry,” she interrupted. “I can’t say anything.” She stressed the word, hoping he’d clue in without her stretching the bindings of the Vow too far.

“Yes, you can,” Harry insisted, missing her emphasis. “Just trust me. I won’t tell anyone, I swear.”

Hermione racked her thoughts. What was it exactly that Malfoy had made her promise? She’d sworn never to speak of the full nature of his involvement with her parents and any of his participation with the Order of the Phoenix, the extent to which she was still unsure of herself. This meant she couldn’t tell Harry about the occlumency lessons, as they’d been at Dumbledore’s bequest, or her healing of his Mark, as that would undoubtedly lead to explaining Malfoy’s mission from Voldemort. What did that leave?

Like steam from a cauldron, Ginny’s words from weeks prior rose to the forefront of her mind. He’s either a Death Eater, plotting the world’s least subtle attack. Or, he’s a teenage boy, who’s realized the girl he liked to torment is rather pretty.

Hermione suddenly had a very bad idea. Maybe there was one thing that would distract Harry enough to drop his entire line of questioning. That would wipe any suspicion from his mind, and replace it with unfettered disgust. She was desperate enough to use the only weapon in her arsenal.

“Okay. Something happened during our shared detention,” she admitted with false reluctance, eyes downcast. She wasn’t as smooth a liar as Nott, and Harry would surely see the dishonesty in her words if she met his gaze.

“Did he hurt you?” Harry pressed. He cast his eyes wildly over Hermione, like he might have missed an injury. "Curse you?"

“No,” Hermione lied. “Malfoy kissed me.”

“What the f*ck? ” Harry exclaimed, eyes bugging out of his head. Whatever he had been expecting her to confess, it certainly wasn’t this. “Are you serious?! Is this why you wanted me to apologize to him!?”

“It’s not a big deal! I think that’s why he was trying to find me in Hogsmeade, to stop me from telling people, or—”

“Not a big deal ? Hermione, his father is a Death Eater. He’s called you the foulest, most repulsive…I shouldn’t have to remind you what he’s called you!”

“I remember, thanks,” she answered testily. “It was a mistake, Harry. He had some sort of mental break or maybe he was taking a stab at teenage rebellion, I don’t know. Don’t tell Ron, we’ve just barely started to get back to normal.”

“I won’t tell Ron —I won’t tell anyone — because I don’t want to be responsible for a nuclear meltdown. Which is exactly how any sane person would react to this, by the way. Kissing Malfoy ?” He screwed up his face, gagging.

“It’s still better than almost murdering him,” Hermione responded coldly.

“Stay away from him, Hermione,” Harry warned. He looked at her warily, protectiveness and uncertainty warring in his eyes. “I know you like saving…well, I know you are prone to taking up lost causes.”

“You’re one to talk about martyr complexes, Harry Potter.”

“Very funny. I’m serious, Hermione." Harry's final works on the subject echoed around the alcove ominously. "Malfoy isn’t a defenseless House-Elf. He’s a bloody parasite.”

*

Malfoy was released from the Hospital Wing after several weeks of supervision, and his behavior was the complete opposite of his usual circus post-injury. Merlin, he used to play up a mere paper cut for attention; now, he was like a ghost. Hermione only caught glimpses of him in class, where he was taciturn and reserved, only speaking when called upon. As soon as the bells chimed indicating it was time to move to the next lesson, he bolted for the door. She couldn’t catch him in the corridors either; he was somehow making his way to classes while managing to evade hallways all together.

He refused to look at Hermione. Not a sideways glance, or a backhanded taunt, a nod of acknowledgement— nothing. At mealtimes, he moved from his usual seat facing the other House tables to one on the opposite side, so that Hermione could only see the back of his head.

She told herself she was overthinking it. That now that Harry knew about their supposed moment, it was probably better that he was refusing to acknowledge her presence. She didn’t care. She didn’t.

She had more important things to attend to anyway. Revenge, for one, which came to sweet fruition during Defense class with the Slytherins, when Snape finally called on Pansy Parkinson during their lesson.

“The six telltale signs of the Imperius, if you please, Miss Parkinson.”

“Of course, sir.” Pansy straightened and cleared her throat, scanning her notes. She opened her mouth, ready to recite the answer. “First, I am a liar.” She made a little noise of dismay and touched her throat, as if shocked the words had exited her mouth.

A few surrounding students exchanged bemused looks. Lavender tittered, going silent at Snape’s severe look in her direction. Pansy blanched and tried again.

“I tell dangerous, venomous lies.”

The class swiveled their heads in her direction, interested. Hermione kept her eyes on her own parchment innocently.

“I’m not looking for an evaluation of your truthfulness, Miss Parkinson.” Snape said, sounding profoundly irritated. “Please relegate your answers to course material.”

“I’m trying, Professor!” Pansy grit her teeth, before attempting the answer for a third time. “The first sign is that I— I lie for attention, because I was never given any at home!”

She gaped, opening and closing her mouth several times.

The class began to react in earnest. Crabbe and Goyle had their jaws hanging open in confusion, substantially increasing their resemblance to mountain trolls. Lavender and Parvati dissolved into full on giggles, setting each other off.Only Nott turned to Hermione, a small frown on his face. She shrugged, like, what could I have to do with it?

“Hospital Wing, Parkinson,” Snape grimaced, catching on that someone had hexed the girl. “Quickly, before you further derail my lesson.”

“I spread baseless gossip!” Pansy gasped, trying to cover her mouth with her hands as she fled. “I have no credibility!”

As Pansy commanded the attention of the class, Hermione allowed herself a peek at Malfoy. He was staring straight ahead, as if Snape had never stopped the lecture. How very curious.

“That was brilliant, Hermione,” Ron said to her, after lessons were over. “How’d you get it so that she said all that stuff?”

“It’s a modified Question and Answer Jinx,” Hermione admitted, biting her lip. “I crossed it with a tongue-tie hex so that anytime she’s called on to give an answer, it triggers the response. It wasn’t too cruel, was it?”

“Are you kidding?" Ron exclaimed. "It made my week. And it serves her right, for what she said about your parents. Now, everyone knows Parkinson talks pure thestral sh*t.”

“Yes,” Hermione grinned. “That was the idea.”

*

On Friday, she hurried to the dungeons to meet Malfoy for their first occlumency lesson since his injury. Harry was with Dumbledore, searching for confirmation that Voldemort had split his soul into something called a horcrux. Ginny and Ron were spending every spare moment in emergency Quidditch practice, training their reserve Chaser. It was the first time she’d be alone with the Slytherin since their charged interaction in the Hospital Wing, and her stomach was attempting a strange flipping action at the idea.

A posh voice interrupted her thoughts, emanating from the space beside her in the hallway.

“Psst…Granger!”

She screamed, a hand flying to her heart.

“Merlin, it’s just me! I’m disillusioned, you twit,” Malfoy’s voice hissed. “Don’t bloody blow out my eardrums.”

“Maybe don’t sneak up on people when you’re invisible, then,” Hermione sniped back. If she focused her eyes she could see a bit of shimmer, the tell tale sign of a Disillusionment Charm. It probably looked to any bystanders like she was talking to the wall.

“Come on. We can’t use the dungeons anymore. Too dangerous.” A hand she could not see grasped at the sleeve of her robes, yanking her in the opposite direction. “Hurry up,” the voice insisted and she scowled at the approximate place she thought him to be.

He dragged her through the corridors, earning her a few strange looks at her jerky movements, until they reached the fifth floor.

“Make it open,” his voice urged, and she realized where Malfoy was leading her: The Room of Requirement.

“You make it open, you’re the one who dragged me here.”

There was a beat of silence, when Hermione began to wonder if he’d simply slipped away under the cover of invisibility.

“I don’t know how to get more than one room. Whenever I try, it shows me a bloody hoarder’s den.” His voice finally revealed, heavy with irritation.

”A hoarder’s den?” Her lips twitched in amusem*nt.

“Just do it, Granger, I know this is where you ran your little defense club.” Great, Malfoy was in a mood. What else was new.

“Okay, fine.” She closed her eyes and focused. I need a place to study occlumency with Draco Malfoy, she thought, and on the third time, an oak door appeared. She felt a pull at her wrist, and the door slammed shut behind her.

“Must you always yank me into rooms?” She wriggled free from Malfoy’s surprisingly powerful grip. It was funny, she’d always pegged him as weak wristed, with an aristocrat’s piano fingers. But the way he’d grabbed her was anything but feeble, and she had to rub her wrist after he let it free.

The room had organized itself to resemble a cozy study, complete with a plush red-velvet sofa and a crackling fire. A thick Persion style rug lined the wooden floor, and Hermione fought the urge to remove her shoes and step, barefoot, into the carpet. The room was smaller than she’d ever seen it before, barely half the size of the Gryffindor common room, but capable of the same comforting warmth.

She was suddenly aware that she’d never been in such a soft, domestic setting with him. When they’d come together it was to argue in broom closets and bleed out in the snow and burn down houses. Not…sit on the couch.

Malfoy finally undid his charm, sliding into her line of vision. He was dressed neatly, as always: starched shirt topped with a cashmere sweater, green tie knotted right up against his throat, school slacks ironed with precision. It made her self-conscious: the top buttons of her oxford had come undone, and one of her socks sagged slightly under her knee.

There was a deep frown on his face, etched into his cheeks like he’d been making the expression for hours. What was his problem?

“Is this where Dumbledore’s Army practiced? It’s a bit small.” He grimaced at the couch, as if the piece of furniture had personally offended him. “What, are there no chairs in the secret room? Seems like an oversight.”

“I don’t control it,” Hermione said, cross. She’d have thought a recent brush with death would have humbled Malfoy. Apparently not. “I just asked for a place to practice occlumency, and this is what the room chose to provide.”

“Will it really shift into anything you need?” Malfoy asked, as he skeptically settled on one end of the sofa, putting as much space between them as possible.

“I’m sure there are limitations. Gamp’s Law would mandate that—”

“I shouldn’t have asked,” Malfoy grumbled, before she could explain her hypothesis of exactly how the Laws of Matter translated into Magical Theory. His loss, Hermione thought petulantly.

She sat opposite him on the sofa, adjusting her school skirt when it rode up as she tucked her legs under her. She could feel the heat of his gaze, but when she looked up at him, Malfoy had fixated on the floor, like there was something fascinating written in the carpet fibers.

“How are you feeling?” She tried, attempting a softer tactic. “How are your scars?”

His eyes snapped to her in surprise. She had the strange feeling that maybe, she was the first person to ask him that.

“I hope you’ve been practicing,” Malfoy said, ignoring her question. He directed his wand across the couch, aiming at her temple. “Shall we?”

The spell was cast before Hermione could brace herself.

“Legilimens! ”

She was more prepared this time, having indeed practiced sorting her memories every night before she fell asleep. She’d gotten fairly decent at it, so she thought. She didn’t have Malfoy’s sprawling occlumency garden, but she’d found a system she thought suited her even better: she’d started organizing her memories like books in a library. Paperbacks for the harmless ones, the mundane thoughts. For the more dangerous—Malfoy apparating at the pond, the four blazing candles of the ritual— she chose heavy, leather-covered tombs, equipped with key-locks.

Malfoy was vicious in his onslaught, shredding her primary defenses as if they were paper thin. Before she could so much as quiet her mind, he was tearing through her shelves.

— her mother, singing her to sleep after a nightmare, stroking her hand through her curls —

She attempted to redirect him like he’d taught her to, throw him something that would ruin his concentration, so that she could exile him from her mind.

— watching a ferret fly upwards, at the mercy of Moody’s wand —-

He bristled, exuding annoyance even through his legilimency, and moved to a different shelf.

— looking down at his bloodied chest, horror rising in her throat as he made pained noises beneath her —

She could feel his curiosity in the way he lingered on her concern, watching the scene of his maiming through her, a new perspective. She used it to her advantage, throwing him a different memory before he could react.

— standing at his bedside in the Hospital Wing, his heavily lidded eyes trained on her with an intensity that almost resembled hunger, his lips moving around an offer for her to stay, to lay down and —

He withdrew from her mind sharply. She would have felt satisfied over finally expelling him, but the disturbed look on his face ruined her triumph.

For once, Malfoy said nothing. He angled his body away from her on his side of the couch and raked his hand through his hair, something she was beginning to identify as a nervous tick for him.

“Aren’t you going to congratulate me?” She prodded, looking for a response. Wanting him to fly off the handle, to sneer and jab, anything besides this horrid ambivalence. She needed him to react; if he reacted, she'd know that they were back to normal, that the lingering strangeness from the Hospital Wing had resolved itself.

“Congratulations.”

They sat in silence for several excruciating minutes. She fought down the urge to say something terrible and revealing like: why won’t you look at me? Or worse, why do I want you to look so badly? She was afraid to answer those questions, even tentatively, even for herself. Hermione had built many walls over the years, necessary to protect herself from a world that sought to expel her. She knew the danger in being seen, being vulnerable. So why did she want him to look, even when she knew his gaze made her feel raw and unarmoured? Even when she knew it was dangerous?

“You’ve been ignoring me,” Hermione finally said, when she couldn’t bear it any longer. “Again.”

“Do you really require so much attention that when I simply go about my life without centering you, it's considered shunning?” He scoffed, but his expression was tight with something Hermione couldn’t place.

“I thought we’d have some pertinent things to discuss,” she responded hotly. Gone were the days that she’d allow Malfoy to skirt important conversations because he couldn’t be bothered. “And it’s rather difficult to have those discussions when someone is pretending you don’t exist.”

“Go on then, Granger.” He gestured, carelessly. “Stop whining and discuss.”

“Why aren’t we in the Potions classroom?”

Malfoy sighed, sweeping through his hair once more.

“Nott is suspicious,” he admitted. “He saw you heal me. He knows that something is going on, and if he figures out I’m teaching you occlumency, he’ll know it’s because we have something to hide, and at that point I might as well carve ‘blood traitor’ on my forehead and leap from the astronomy tower.”

“Harry asked me about it, too,” she admitted. She wasn’t sure if she should tell Malfoy how she’d haphazardly gotten out of that,certain she couldn't relay the information without blushing.“He said we seemed far too familiar to not suspect something. I just told him…well, I lied.”

“You fibbed to The Boy Who’s Never Had An Original Thought? I didn’t think you had it in you.”

She had the urge to destabilize him, to knock the condescending smirk straight from his stupid, angular face. Who cared if she blushed— she wanted to see him squirm.

“I told him you were acting weird because we kissed.”

Malfoy made a choking noise, eyes going wide and horrified. Her lips curled up with satisfaction. It served him right

“Well, actually, I told him you kissed me .”

“What?! ”

“Funny, that’s exactly what he said.”

Malfoy glared at her, and his hand flexed, opening and closing into a fist.

“Are you mad, Granger? I know you’re not stupid, which means you must be certifiably insane to say something so…so…” A rebellious lock of blonde hair fell onto his forehead and he blew upwards, attempting to remove it. “I might as well compose my last will and testament now. We’re trying not to draw attention to the fact that I’m associating with you, not scream it from the rooftops.”

“It’s actually rather clever, when you think about it,” Hermione defended. “No one would ever label you a traitor for…that sort of thing. What, you think your Pureblooded forefathers never had a fool around in the broom closet with a mudblood?”

“They did not,” Malfoy insisted, but the heat crept up his neck told Hermione a different story. “They’d never sully themselves with—”

“Oh please, I’ll even bet your father had his fair share of dirty—”

Malfoy was across the couch before she could finish. She drew her wand on instinct, and he took hold of her wrist just as quickly, forcing her to lower it.

“Don’t put your wand in my face,” he whispered, deadly. “And don’t say another f*cking word about my father.” He pressed until her pulse hammered under his touch, before finally letting her go.

Perhaps Hermione had a death wish. Perhaps, two weeks of being ignored had rankled her a little bit more than she thought it would, reminding her of far too many instances of Ron’s and Harry’s weaponizing of the silent treatment.

“Are you scared Malfoy?” She said softly, meeting his eyes. His gaze held an entire thunderstorm, just waiting for the first crack of lightning in order to be unleashed. “Are you scared it will get back to your precious father that you've sullied yourself with someone like me? Does he still have that much power over you, all the way from Azkaban?”

His Adam's apple bobbed in his throat. She could feel his rage building, threatening to wrest from his control.

“You’re a terrible liar, Granger. Let me give you some advice for the next time you have something to hide: don’t make your lie so far-fetched.”

Hermione’s bravado suddenly fell away, replaced by a wave of anger that knocked all of her good sense aside mercilessly. She wanted him to admit it for once. She knew how he looked at her— in Fleur’s gold dress, in the Prefect’s bath, in the Hospital Wing— an expression no one would ever confuse with disgust.

She closed the distance between them until their noses were almost touching. His lips parted, a pained look sliding onto his face. She could see him swallow, his throat bobbing invitingly. She wanted to sink her teeth into it.

“It didn’t seem so far-fetched when you were inviting me into your bed. Telling me how good it would feel.”

Malfoy winced as if she’d hit him. He pushed himself off the couch, and strode across the room, putting as much space between them as the small room would allow. The fire crackled, as if reflecting his mood.

“What the f*ck is your problem? ” He spat, both hands in his hair. There was a fury building in him that threatened to crack the final remnants of his controlled, uncaring veneer. “You can’t leave anything alone can you? It's like you pathologically have to have the last word. You just push and push, until—”

She was on her feet before he could finish.

“My problem?” She shrieked, moving towards him. He backed up as she approached, until he was nearly in the doorway. “You’re the one who couldn’t even look at me, you pathetic, hypocritical—”

“Do you really want to know why I was avoiding you, Granger?” His eyes slipped from overcast slate to something even darker. The final moment of dusk, before it was swallowed by night. Blonde hair fell into his eyes, his tie gone askew during their argument.

“So now you admit it! You were ignoring me!”

He crowded her against the oak door, placing his hands on either side. Bracketing her, like he had done in the Prefect’s bath. She couldn’t identify the feeling that curled, hot and insistent, in her gut: was it fear? Tenser than anticipation, more perilous than affection…

“I couldn’t f*cking stand it anymore,” he said in a low, rough tone that made her entire body go taut, tightening like a instrument's string. “I couldn’t take another second of your voice and your face and your stupid hair getting everywhere—”

“You seemed to stand me just fine when I healed you,” she breathed, craning her neck so that she could meet his eyes. “Both times, I should add. You seemed to want me around then.”

“Don't be stupid.” Malfoy’s jaw tightened, muscles of his cheeks twitching. “No one would even believe I’d want you .”

She grabbed his collar and pulled him down hard, until his face was level with hers. He froze as her fingers brushed the nape of his neck, before pressing her lips firmly to his.

It was barely a kiss— stiff and unyielding and closed mouthed, only lasting a mere moment. She pulled away.

“Was that believable enough?” Hermione spat, having proved her point.

Malfoy looked down at her in ragged disbelief.

“Was that supposed to be a kiss, Granger? That’s your big move?”

She dropped his collar. The horror of what she had done began to settle around her like dust in an attic. He’d not moved away. Why hadn’t he moved away? She could feel his stomach muscles expanding and contracting against hers as she took labored breaths. She felt like her brain wasn’t getting enough oxygen, like she was drowning, like—

She moved to put some space between them, only for his hands to grip her shoulders, forcing her to go still. He wedged a thigh between her own, effectively trapping her in place.

She felt like a butterfly, pinned to a museum corkboard.

His fingers dragged up her shoulders to her neck, slowly, oh so very slowly, until they scraped her jaw, framing her face in a firm hold. She fluttered her eyes shut, overwhelmed, certain she was pulled too tightly, that any second her body would snap.

Every spinning axis of Hermione Granger’s mind came to a sudden halt as Draco Malfoy pressed his lips to hers. Not firm and brief, like she’d attempted. When he kissed her, it was furious and hungry. Hard enough to bruise. His lips were deft and unyielding and he kissed her like she was his.

Greedy, henipped at her lips until she parted them, so that his wicked, clever tongue could taste her.He groaned at the slide of her tongue against his, the reverberations acting as a new torment. She gasped at the sensation, and could feel his responding smile, his rush of satisfaction at her response.

He tasted like honey, floral and smokey and intoxicatingly sweet. She chased the sweetness into his mouth, tilted her head for better access as she surged up towards him.

He took this as an invitation to touch her, anywhere and everywhere he could access. With shaking hands, he wove his fingers into her hair, pulling her as close to him as he could manage. His lips fell to her jaw and neck, doing things that left her panting. They moved against her throat in what she thought was a senseless pattern until she realize he was murmuring: f*ck, barely a rasp, over and over again. f*ck, f*ck, f*ck.

He nosed aside her shirt collar, before dragging his tongue reverently down her collarbone. Grasping blindly at her waist, he hitched her up against the door so that they were level, so that she could take whatever she wanted from him. His thigh pressed between her skirts, supporting her, and her hips flexed against it unconsciously. The movement dragged a broken sound from him, so she did it again.

She felt as if she finally understood what her body—always so cumbersome and awkward— was for. Like it had been waiting for this, for him, to spark a current of pure want, a live wire that ran directly through her core.

He made an impatient noise, and then his hands were touching the back of her thighs, lifting her. Wrapping her around him. The movement closed any space between them, pressing their hips flush. She could feel him, thick and hard, and she felt delirious as she realized— he wanted her. Oh, how he wanted her.

Her teeth dug into her bottom lip so that she wouldn’t moan. He bucked his hips uncontrollably against her center and it was too much for her oversensitive body, causing her to lean back in reaction, shifting slightly away from him.

He winced as she drew back from him, and then froze.

No, she thought deliriously, not yet.

For a moment, neither of them moved. The hearth crackled merrily, unaware of the discomfort of the room’s inhabitants.And then, all too gently, he lifted her by the waist, touching her for only as long as it took to return her to her feet.

“No,” she tried to correct, still breathless. “I didn’t mean for you to…” At the look on his face, she trailed off before she could manage the word stop.

Draco Malfoy looked ruined, his blond hair ravaged. Eyes wild, pupils blown wide. Lips swollen and wet. She did that to him, Hermione realized, and her heart clenched in vicious pride.

He blushed furiously as she watched him straighten his clothes, taking special care to adjust his notably tented trousers. She’d felt him, hard and ready against her, but to see it sent a bolt of indecently smug satisfaction all the way to her toes.

He opened his mouth and then shut it again. It was the first time she’d ever seen him so horrified that he was incapable of speech. It shattered the delirium that had overwhelmed her, and doubt—certain, all encompassing doubt—took over.

She stepped away from the door, pulse thudding uncertainty. She felt the chill of reality brush against her skin, before settling, cold, into her bones. God, what had they done?

Malfoy summoned his things, his bag zooming across the room into his waiting hands. The hands that had just been…Hermione’s stomach clenched at the thought, fighting off a full body shiver.

He looked at her—too heated, too charged, to everything— and clenched his jaw furiously, before reaching for the door.

“Malfoy—” she started, but her voice was sandpaper, so unfamiliar that it startled her, chasing away whatever she’d wanted to say. His hands tightened at the sound, knuckles paling on the door’s handle.

“Just so you know.” He said, clipped and quiet. “That?That was akiss.”

Chapter 21: Collateral Damage

Chapter Text

After Malfoy’s hasty exit, Hermione went straight from the Room of Requirement to the Gryffindor tower as if she were in a trance.Had she really kissed Malfoy ? Had he really kissed her in return? Was she entirely sure the events of the night actually took place and weren't just a side effect of hitting her head very hard?

Back in the girls’ dormitory, Lavender and Parvati were sitting cross-legged on Lavender’s bed, attempting to complete a complicated looking star chart. Parvati was periodically gesturing out the window, explaining the properties of some planet or another, as Lavender sketched out its placement on the parchment. Distantly, Hermione hoped that her entrance would go unnoticed, and she could simply draw the curtains of her four poster bed and down a vial of Dreamless Sleep.

Her plan was foiled immediately when Lavender looked directly at her and gasped.

“What?” Parvati asked, gazing at the chart worriedly. “Is his Venus in Gemini?”

“Hermione Granger,” Lavender breathed, a look crossing her face that could only be described as deranged joy. “Have you just come from meeting someone? Broom closet meeting someone? Alcove on the fourth floor behind the barmy witch tapestry meeting someone?”

“Of course not.” Hermione attempted to scoff at the implication that she was occupying the best known spots in the castle for a fool around. “I was just—”

“Then what’s that on your neck?”

“Huh?” Hermione made a noise of utter confusion, abandoning all eloquence. She touched her throat, concerned. “What are you talking about?”

Lavender scrambled from her bed, leaving Parvati gaping in her wake. She took Hermione by the shoulders and for a wild moment, Hermione thought Lavender might hit her. But then her roommate marched her directly in front of the full-length mirror in the corner, the one that liked to scold Hermione about her hair.

Hermione’s jaw fell open at the sight of her reflection.She looked wrecked. A distinctive flush lingered on the slopes of her cheeks, and her hair was half out of its elastic, curls hanging into her unbuttoned collar. Her lips were swollen and dusky pink.

Worst of all, there were bruises blooming like wildflowers all up and down her neck. Had she walked through the castle looking like this?

“Thoroughly debauched!” The mirror exclaimed, sounding scandalized.

“Oh,” Hermione managed. “Oh no.”

Lavender squealed, leaping back onto her bed. She kicked her feet eagerly, as if she’d been waiting for this moment her whole life.

“Calm down,” Parvati told her friend, but her eyes were also lit up, intrigued by Hermione’s state of disarray. "Get into a tiff, Granger?"

“I fell?” Hermione offered, unconvincingly.

Parvati laughed and inclined her head, patting the foot of the bed in invitation.

“Come sit. You can tell us all about your fall. ”

Hermione was so out of sorts that if Parvati had told her to jump off a cliff, she’d probably have leaped over the precipice unquestioningly.Gingerly, she sat at the end of the bed. She didn’t normally have these sort of chats with her roommates, although she’d watched them share the experience many times over many different boys. Embarrassingly, she’d once thought herself too serious for such things. Oh, how the universe loved proving her wrong.

“Okay, okay.” Lavender fluttered her hands in an attempt to calm herself. “When did this happen? And with who?” She narrowed her eyes. “Not, Ron, right?”

“No,” Hermione confirmed, lucid enough to pull a face at the thought. Lavender visibly relaxed. “No offense. Are you two still…?”

“They broke up for a little while, but got back together last weekend,” Parvati said dryly, relating the latest in the Ron-and-Lavender saga that had half of Gryffindor regularly dosing headache potions.

“Who cares about Ron!” Lavender insisted, obviously caring very much. “I need to know who got into your knickers. Is he older? Younger? Is it Seamus? Is it Neville—oh my God Hermione, is it Neville?” She took in Hermione’s exasperated expression. “No, no you’re right, you two don’t have that kind of chemistry.”

“None of the above,” Hermione insisted weakly, overwhelmed by the velocity of Lavender’s questions. She bit her lip, unsure of how much to reveal to the two infamous gossips, before remembering its current tender state, post-kiss. “I can’t say who.”

“I’ll swear an Unbreakable Vow!” Lavender offered dramatically, blissfully unaware of the fact that such a vow was exactly what had gotten Hermione into this mess in the first place. “I won’t tell a soul!”

“You don’t know how to make an Unbreakable Vow,” Parvati corrected, rolling her eyes.

“Did he ask you not to say anything?” Lavender asked, ignoring her friend. “Classic bloke move. You can bet he’s telling all his mates.”

Hermione thought of Draco Malfoy sitting down Crabbe and Goyle to tell them he’d swapped saliva with their sworn enemy and bit back a grin.

“He didn’t say not to tell anyone,” she considered. “But it was certainly, er, implied. I don’t think I have to worry about him saying anything.”

“Did you just have a snog?” Parvati asked, grinning suggestively. “Or did you…” She wiggled her eyebrows in implication.

Lavender perked up at the possibility. She put her hands closely together, slowly widening them. “Okay stop me when it’s his size…really? Bigger?”

“No!” Hermione insisted, flushing at the thought of Malfoy’s endowment. “It didn’t go that far. Honestly, it was an accident.”

“So, his tongue fell into your mouth?” Parvati asked, coyly. “How does that work exactly?”

“Parvati,” Hermione groaned. “Please. Have mercy.”

“Was it good?” Lavender asked. "Was he sloppy? Was there tongue, and if so, how much?"

Hermione felt the blood rush to her cheeks at the thought.Was it good? Good didn’t seem like the sort of word one could associate with Malfoy’s lips on her neck, the sounds he made, like she was causing him physical pain just by existing in his proximity.

“I know that look.” Lavender leaned in, clasping her hands. “Did he give you fanny flutters?”

“What in God’s name,” Hermione asked. “Are fanny flutters?”

“You know,” Parvati explained conspiratorially. “When you get properly kissed and your body just goes all…” She clenched her fist in demonstration.

Hermione covered her face with her hands. She wanted a lobotomy. She wanted to die. She wanted a black hole to open beneath her feet and send her flying into oblivion.

“That means yes!” Lavender squealed. “Wow, he must have done some really good work to get you like this. You’re practically nonverbal. I’m jealous.”

Hermione muttered something ungracious from behind her palms which sounded a lot like, I wish you were practically nonverbal.

“Play nice,” the blonde girl warned, wagging a finger at the marks on Hermione’s neck. “Or I won’t teach you how to glamor those love bites.”

“You know how to get rid of them?” Hermione breathed, hands dropping to reveal wide, desperate eyes. She hadn’t even thought of how she’d camouflage the bruises Malfoy had sucked down her throat, but she knew no one else could see them, especially not Harry. Why had she gone and told him that stupid lie about kissing Malfoy? And when did she gain the divinatory powers to manifest it into fruition?

“It’s easy,” Lavender said, taking out her wand. Her mouth twisted into a devious little grin. “I’ve had the spell down since, like, third year."

"She can also do a nasty little one on a bloke's belt buckle," Parvati added with a wicked grin. "It's a metal-based tracking charm that burns when anyone besides her tries to touch it.”

"Is that legal?" Hermione asked, faintly.

"No," Lavender laughed,casting the glamor charm in smooth, circular motions that began to camouflage each bruise. Hermione felt a sudden coolness, but after the sensation dissipated, her skin was left completely unblemished.

Once the marks were gone and Hermione had taken a long, punishingly hot shower, she sat in her bed with the curtains closed and silenced, replaying the events of the evening.

Okay, yes. She’d started it. She’d kissed him first. But only because he’d wound her up past the point of rationality. She hadn’t even been thinking when she’d forced their lips together, her brief and brutal attempt to teach him a lesson. There was no way she could have known that he’d rise to her challenge.

She couldn’t stop thinking about the sensation of his body pressed flush against hers, his hands seemingly everywhere. His tongue, hot and slick and filthy against her skin. The way he looked at her. She’d never seen him so undone.

After some internal debate, she slipped a hand under the waistband of her pajamas.

It was normal to fantasize, she assured herself, picturing the look on his face when he’d grabbed fistfuls of her hair. The way his eyes had gone dark and wild as she’d wantonly rubbed herself against his leg. She brushed the pads of her fingers against her own breast, wishing they were his. It was very normal, she thought as her breath hitched, to desire things you know you shouldn’t.

She came with two fingers buried inside herself and his name on her lips. She told herself it was just this once. It didn’t mean anything.

*

Hermione didn’t know exactly how she expected from Malfoy to react. Maybe she thought that he would revert back into his recent avoidance, or his signature icy disdain. She could even imagine him growing cruel towards her, punishing her for their shared mistake.She could not have predicted that he would choose a different, far more nefarious, route: Malfoy was being nice to her.

It started during their next potions lesson, when he sauntered up to her desk like he’d done it a million times before.

“Tosser incoming,” Ron alerted, eyeing the Slytherin with undisguised hatred. Hermionekept her gaze firmly over Malfoy’s shoulder, not daring to look him in the eye. Certain that if she did, he’d instantly know what she’d done under the cover of her bed’s curtains and a silencing charm.

“Afternoon, Granger,” Malfoy greeted breezily. “You look well.”

Hermione almost fell into her cauldron in shock. Ron startled, regarding Malfoy like he’d grown a second head. Around them, other students continued their chopping and stirring, not cognizant that the world had tilted on its axis, because Draco Malfoy was speaking to Hermione Granger politely.

“What do you want?” Hermione asked. She finally looked at him properly and fought the urge to gasp. Where she’d wiped herself clean of any evidence of their encounter, courtesy of Lavender’s skilled hand at glamor charms, he had decidedly not.

Malfoy looked like he’d just emerged from a few, acrobatic hours in a broom cupboard, and he was completely unabashed about it. A noticeable smudge of purple stood out against the porcelain skin under his jaw. His lower lip was still slightly swollen.

She’d done that to him. Some fierce and terrible thing purred in her chest, warmed by the thought.

“Such a spitfire,” Malfoy responded, flashing his canines. Unbidden, she remembered the feel of them capturing her lip. She swallowed, mouth suddenly parched. “I do wonder if that feral attitude of yours would translate to…other activities.”

“Ah yes, sexual innuendos. Very creative of you, Malfoy.” She rolled her eyes, as if nothing could have bored her more, ignoring the clench of her insides. “Go bother someone else.”

“Whatever you want,” Malfoy said, mercifully returning to his own station before she could burst into flames. On their worktable, he’d left a pile of neatly extracted lionfish spines, a required ingredient in the day’s potion. She put off her own extractions, something she tended to do whenever an assignment required extensive butchering, her least favorite aspect of brewing. It wasn’t that she was squeamish. She was just reluctant to divy up the remnants of what had once been a living, breathing thing. But Malfoy had absolutely no way of knowing that.

“You forgot your ingredients,” Hermione called to him, pointing to the pile. He waved her off, like he'd intended for her to have them all along.

She stared at the lionfish spines as if they’d personally offended her. Was this supposed to be some sort of gift?

“What’s that pointy bastard playing at,” Ron muttered, voicing her exact thoughts. “Don’t touch those, Hermione. They’re probably cursed or something.” He prodded the lionfish spines with the tip of his wand as if they could explode at any moment.

“I doubt he’s executing a terrorist attack via potions ingredients, Ron,” Hermione said, trying to project an air of indifference. “Maybe he’s got it in his head he owes me a life debt for not letting him bleed out.”

“Bit of a sh*t way to get even, innit? A pile of fish bones?” Ron said. “And why do you think he looks like he wrestled the wrong end of the giant squid?”

“What do you reckon is the right end of the giant squid then?” She responded, laughing. As they devolved into friendly bickering, she noticed Harry’s hands out of the corner of her eye, clenched into fists.

Harry had been especially prickly since their conversation, prone to sending her pinched, worried looks when he thought she couldn’t see. His dilemma was that no matter how furious he became, he couldn’t confront Malfoy about the supposed kiss. After casting sectumsempra, Harry was on ice so thin that even a nasty look in Malfoy’s direction could practically get him expelled. He was forced to silently tolerate the Slytherin’s questionable actions, including his new baffling behavior towards Hermione. Malfoy, ever the tosser, seemed to both know and relish in this.

Malfoy’s change in behavior continued all week. Sometimes, it was obnoxious: like in Transfiguration, when he sent Harry and Ron into a tizzy by launching paper cranes her way when McGonagall’s back was turned.

“Could you maybe not set a flock of origami on me?” She hissed in his direction, while they packed up after class. “Believe it or not, there are simpler ways to get my attention.”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Granger. You’re the one who decided to inform Potter of your ridiculous ruse,” he muttered back. “I’m just making sure Scarhead believes it.”

Other times, it was peculiarly subtle and seemingly not about Harry at all. During Herbology, she’d been blowing curls out of her face while attempting to prune a particularly vicious Venomous Tentacula, internally cursing her lack of a hair elastic. She’d resigned herself to the discomfort, when an emerald green hair ribbon appeared from thin air, looping itself around her wrist. Startled, she looked around for the source, only to catch eyes with Malfoy, who sneered and immediately busied himself with his own plant.

Things between them came to a head in Defense with the Slytherins, when Snape had them practicing nonverbal stunners in pairs. Hermione moved automatically to work with Neville, assuming Harry and Ron would partner up as usual.

Neville was a good partner, but not a challenging one. She found herself offering him instruction more than practicing her own abilities, but she didn't mind it entirely. He was a grateful and humble learner. He never got never upset with her for besting him. Unlike some people, she thought uncharitably; Ron had never quite gotten over how badly she’d beat him in their practice duel during a D.A. meeting, and refused to partner with her for dueling practice ever since.

“I just barely got a hang of the nonverbal shields.” Neville offered her a sheepish smile. “And half the time I was just whispering the spell so Snape wouldn’t hear.”

“We’ll take it slow,” Hermione said reassuringly, privately resigning herself to another class period of glorified tutoring.

Within a few minutes of practicing, there was already a disruption: Goyle hadn’t been fast enough with his shield and was hit by one of Malfoy’s stunners, gashing open his head on a desk in the process. Snape sent him to the Hospital Wing without a second glance.

“Sir,” Malfoy had his hand raised lazily, as if he hadn’t just injured one of his supposed friends. “Now that Goyle’s knocked himself out, I don’t have a partner.”

“Miss Greengrass, Mr. Zabini — take turns practicing with Mr. Malfoy.”

That should have been the end of it, but Malfoy continued, looking like a fox in a chicken coop.

“Sorry Professor, I was just hoping for a bit more of a challenge. No offense to Blaise or Daphne.” He cast his eyes around the room, until they fell on her. She quickly turned back to Neville, but it was too late. “May I work with Granger?”

Snape regarded Malfoy carefully, eyes like shards of onyx.

“I’ll work with Malfoy,” Harry blurted, no doubt a result of his pathological savior complex. She shot him a look that she hoped would communicate her desire for him to shut up.

“Mr. Potter has proven himself prone to uncontrolled violent outbursts,” Snape drawled, speaking as if Harry wasn’t there. “Since I’ve no wish to see Draco disemboweled in my classroom, please switch partners.”

"Longbottom!” Snape barked, and Neville jumped at the sound of his surname. “Practice with Weasley. Given his complete incompetence, you can at least be certain you’ll avoid injury.”

Neville mouthed a silent apology to her, scurrying towards Ron and Harry, who were both respectively glaring at Malfoy. She steeled herself before walking across the room to where Malfoy was smirking, pleased to have gotten his way. She wanted to slap his arrogance straight off his face— on second thought, maybe a duel with the perpetual thorn in her side would be just what she needed.

Malfoy took her in with a lazy sweep of his eyes. They were pale gray today, like the feathers of a dove.

The feathers of a dove? She begged herself to get a grip.

“All right, Granger?” Malfoy asked, a cheeky lilt to his voice that she convinced herself she did not enjoy.

“Better, now that I get to do this.” She swished her wand in a jagged motion, shooting a nonverbal stunner his way. His shield was faster, sending her spell ricocheting into the rafters.

“Bit slow on the uptake,” he teased, but his voice was missing its usual cruelty, evidence that the mental game he’d been playing all week was still on. "But your form is immaculate, isn't it."

Fine, she thought. She could play dirty too.

They shot and parried spells so quickly that Hermione’s mind went entirely blank, an empty slate punctuated only by cast, deflect, cast, deflect. Malfoy was more instinctual and nimble than she was, wielding his quick reflexes as a complement to his fluid dueling style. What Hermione lost in agility, she gained in brute force: her stunners, even when deflected, bludgeoned Malfoy’s shields, forcing him to grit his teeth in determination in order to maintain them.

She felt him, pressing lightly with his legilimency, and shuttered her occlumency walls instinctively. The sensation was incredibly strange, like he was knocking his clenched fist against her mind’s door. A battle on multiple fronts. She felt a prickle of sweat bead at the nape of her neck, evidence of her own exertion.

Soon, they abandoned stunners completely, fighting with every nonverbal weapon in their arsenal. She parried his impedimenta by silently conjuring a mirror, shooting the burst of red light back and forcing him to duck out of the way. It shattered the window behind him, and like a lunatic, he grinned.

At his command, the shards of the window condensed into glass marbles, hurtling at her with bullet-like velocity. She caught them in a conjured net woven of gilded light, silently casting an avis in order to transfigure them into a dozen yellow canaries. Because the spell took tremendous focus, her occlumency walls slipped. Just enough for her to hear his voice, light and amused, in her head.

Songbirds? Going to serenade me to death, Granger?

Oppugo, she thought, shooting the canaries at Malfoy in vicious succession, forcing him to duck and roll towards her in order to avoid being pierced by their sharp beaks. Taking advantage of his distraction, she summoned the hair pins from her curls and sent them flying. The force of her spell drove them through his robes and into the wooden floor, like little metal stakes.

Pinned in place, she placed a foot on his chest, her wand pointed down at his head.

“Any last words?” Hermione asked mockingly, her voice rough from disuse.

She watched his eyes darken as they traced the seam of her socks up past her knee. From his vantage point, he could probably see right up her skirt.

She quickly stepped off him, flustered.

It was all the advantage he needed. Quicker than she thought possible, he slipped out of his school robes, leaving them pinned to the floor, and disarmed her. His wand dug under her chin, forcing her head to tilt up.

“Last words?” He prodded harder. “Hmm, how about— don’t discount your enemy until he’s unconscious.”

She swallowed and he watched in dark fascination as her throat moved against his wand. Her traitorous body lit up at the proximity, mind unconsciously flashing to the last time they’d been in such a position. She struggled for breath and he made a low, pleased noise in the back of his throat, like he knew exactly what she was remembering.

“Let me go, before I—”

Before Hermione could finish her rather crude train of thought, she was interrupted.

“Mr. Malfoy, lower your wand.” Snape’s voice sliced through the moment, cleaving them apart. “Now.”

Both her and Malfoy slowly turned to their professor, an expression on his sallow face that could only be described as a murderous disbelief. She realized to her horror that their endof the practice space was half-destroyed, collateral damage from their duel.The rest of the class stared at them with a mixture of interest and horror, having completely abandoned their own practice duels in favor of their spectacle.

Malfoy took several steps away from her. Someone tittered, letting loose some poorly muffled nervous giggles. It snapped the tension in the room, sending the other students’ gazes skittering elsewhere. Hermione could tell they were all still listening, eager to hear how they’d be admonished for such a display.

She felt herself turning pink, then red, certain all the blood in her body had rushed to her cheeks. She’d gotten so carried away that she’d forgotten they were even in a classroom.

“Draco, I believe I instructed you to use stunning spells.” Snape's silky voice held a vicious reprimand.Malfoy stared at his shoes, seemingly chastened. She watched him carefully, noting how the corner of his mouth twitched slightly up. Did he think this was bloody funny?

“Did you having trouble comprehending the parameters of this exercise, Miss Granger?” Snape snapped at her, drawing her attention from Malfoy. “Were my directions too complex for you, or did you simply deem yourself above instruction?”

“He started it!” Hermione protested, a wave of anger towards Snape annihilating any lingering shreds of her good sense. At that moment she didn’t care that he was her professor— how dare he lecture her on dueling safety? At least her choice of spells wouldn’t leave anyone dismembered.

“Oh please,” Malfoy piped up, rolling his eyes. “You tried to murder me, twice. ”

“What, death by canary? Hair accessory?” She scoffed. “You’re so overdramatic—”

“Fifty points from Gryffindor for willful ignorance,” Snape interrupted, a dangerous lilt to his words. “Open your mouth again, Miss Granger, and I’ll make it a hundred.

From a few paces away, Harry let out a strangled sound, like it physically pained him to not protest. Ron muttered something in his ear, shaking his head fervently.

“Class dismissed,” Snape announced. “And Mr. Malfoy? A word.”

*

“You should have seen it, Gin,” Ron said, over a game of gobstones in the common room that evening. Talk of her and Mafloy’s duel had only fueled the rumors surrounding her involvement in his injury, circulating a new narrative regarding a secret blood feud between them. The younger Gryffindors kept staring at her, offering little nods of respect when she caught them. It was incredibly unsettling.

“Hermione was ruthless,” Ron continued. “And it was all nonverbal, just bursts of light and things exploding around them. She had the ferret yielding, flat on his back. Malfoy only got the upper hand at the end because he cheated.”

Ron had easily accepted Hermione’s explanation of getting “carried away” in Defense, patting her on the back understandingly, as if he too had aspirations of one day cursing Malfoy in front of a professor. Harry, who was stuck in detention filing Filch’s stash of disciplinary records, hadn’t been as easily persuaded, and Hermione highly suspected she was in for an interrogation once he returned.

Lavender and Parvati joined them on the red velvet sofas, the latter giving her a small wave, while the former preoccupied herself with greeting Ron’s tongue.

“I told you so, Hermione,” Ginny said with quiet glee, once her brother was sufficiently distracted. “Malfoy’s flirting. This is his twisted version of foreplay.”

“It was not foreplay,” she whispered furiously. “It was in class, for God’s sake.”

“Exactly,” Ginny smirked. “What better place for two swots to get their blood pumping?”

“Malfoy’s not a swot,” Hermione muttered. "He’s a menace."

“Whatever you have to tell yourself. Maybe he’s decided he’d like to compete for the highest marks on a different sort of test…”

“Ginny,” Hermione warned, but the redhead was already cackling.

“A full body exam!”

“Keep it up and I’ll practice some of my dueling spells on you,” Hermione threatened. Ginny remained unphased, clutching her stomach as she laughed.Disgruntled, Hermione stood and offered up her favorite excuse.

“If you’re quite done having fun at my expense, I’m going to the library.”

“Oi,” Ginny called after her. “Isn’t it nearly curfew?” butHermione was already climbing out the portrait hole.

The library had been her safe place ever since she’d started Hogwarts as a lonely first year. Back when she was terrified of breaking the rules, lest she be sent back to the muggle world with her wand confiscated. The library was the only place where she didn’t have to worry about how she was being perceived or judged. Where she didn’t have to carefully modulate her flaws or push down her outrage until she became the most palatable version of herself.

She favored a table by the window overlooking the courtyard, behind the least frequented stacks in the school’s vast collection: the Muggle literature section. The books—mostly classic novels, with a respectable smattering of poetry— remained untouched, covered with a thick layer of undisturbed dust.

She’d never seen anyone else take her spot, which is why it was such an unpleasant surprise to see it already occupied by aslim, dark haired figure with his feet carelessly kicked up on the desk, sucking on a sugar quill.

“Granger,” Theodore Nott greeted. “Finally. I’ve been waiting ages.”

“What do you want, Nott?” Already on edge, she was not in the mood to converse in Slytherin riddles. “A repeat performance of today’s Defense lesson?”

“Heavens, no,” Nott grinned, a twist of his lips that didn’t quite reach his perpetually cool gaze. “I’d like to keep my limbs attached. Sugar quill?”

He fished around the Honeydukes packaging, holding out another sweet in offering. Hermione's stomach growled. She'd skipped dinner, so as to avoid the whisperings surrounding her and Malfoy's duel. As if charmed by her uncertainty, Nott smiled, opening the sealing wrapper with a flourish, so that she could see it hadn't been tampered with. Still, she shook her head.

"You're out of bed awfully late." She looked around skeptically. "Do you know this is the Muggle fiction section?"

She realized that they were quite far from Madam Pince’s reference desk and any of the other study nooks. It was why she usually preferred this spot, but now, the isolation was making her nervous. She hadn’t seen any students lingering when she stomped in; in fact, the library was notably empty.

“I just thought we were a bit overdue for a conversation,” Nott said, picking up on her discomfort. He leaned back, tilting his chair. “After all, I owe you my thanks for saving my best mate’s life, don’t I?”

“Gratitude received.” She kicked the chair legs from under him. “Goodbye.”

“Oh, Granger,” he laughed mirthlessly, catching himself on the desk. He flicked dust from his otherwise impeccable robes. “What a treat you are. I nearly understand his…fascination.”

Hermione’s blood ran cold. She knew exactly who the he in question was. Granted, she should have expected this after Nott saw her heal Malfoy, an act too intense to write off as simply a good deed from a concerned bystander. She’d thought Malfoy would handle it as she’d handled Harry, but clearly whatever crock of sh*t he’d fed Nott hadn’t been convincing enough.

Subtly, she tried to slip her hand into her back pocket to grab her wand.

“Oh no, that won’t do. Expelliarmus!”

Her wand slipped from her jeans and flew into Nott’s waiting hand.She narrowed her eyes at him, hoping her anger covered the insistent pulse of fear.

“Give me my wand, Nott.”

“And hand you the opportunity to curse me into next Tuesday?” Nott shook his head, nearly apologetic. “I’m not Draco. He’s been acting quite besotted, hasn’t he? I’ve heard all his flimsy excuses to be near you, to touch you, to talk to you. It’s almost like...he can’t help it.”

Malfoy, she thought as intently as possible. She wasn’t sure how the connection between them worked, but he’d felt her pain and fear at the Shrieking Shack, hadn’t he? Malfoy!

“It’s not like that,” Hermione scrambled to invent, once she realized she’d been silent a moment too long. “I genuinely don’t know what his problem is. He’s probably trying to rile me up, thinks it’s a funny new way to torment me—”

“I've been asking myself why Draco Malfoy would be openly showing interest in someone like you,” Nott interrupted, steepling his fingers together. "Golden girl of Gryffindor, Potter's favorite mudblood."

"And what have you come up with?"

“Let's see," Nott mused. "We both know Draco is pathologically selfish. He wouldn’t do this to put a target on your back, not if it meant endangering his own reputation and safety in the process. He also wouldn’t attempt to woo you as a ploy or trick, not with your history of animosity, and you’re too intelligent to fall for pretty falsities anyway.”

“Such fascinating theories,” Hermione said, trying to sound disaffected. “Clearly you spend every spare second thinking about either me or Malfoy. Have you considered picking up a hobby?”

“Shall we entertain the idea that maybe he is being genuine in his attentions?” Nott continued, ignoring her jibes. “If he cared for you or even just wanted you, he wouldn’t be stupid enough to show such an obvious weakness in public. He’s not bloodysuicidal. So why is he leaving you hair ribbons where everyone can see? If engaging with you is the safer option, one could deduce things have gotten quite bad, haven’t they?”

“Maybe he's more dimwitted than you thought,” Hermione managed. “He certainly manages to surpass my expectations regarding his lack of intelligence.”

One by one, the library lamps extinguished themselves. Curfew, she realized miserably. The only light that lingered was from the moon streaming through the window, and the glow of the lumos emanating from the dark haired boy's wand.

“Do you know?” Nott asked, voice low enough to scrape the floor. “What would happen, should a Death Eater be caught…indulging with a mudblood? What do you think the Dark Lord would do to someone so foolish in their defiance?”

“Are you asking me if Malfoy is a Death Eater?” Hermione feigned obliviousness. “Surely you’d be able to confirm that better than I would.”

“Oh, Granger. I wasn’t talking about him. I was talking about what would happen to you.” Nott’s eyes hardened as he tapped his chin in false contemplation. “You see, I have a bit of a theory, regarding you and Draco. Would you like to hear it?”

“I have a feeling I’m going to regardless,” Hermione replied. Distantly, she thought she heard footsteps approaching from the dark rows of bookcases, although it could just be her heart, pounding in her ears.

“On second thought, I’m more of a visual learner.” His voice sliced through her attempts. “I'll just show you.”

He raised his wand, and she cast around wildly around for something, anything—

The last thing she saw before her vision went black was a flash of satisfaction across Theodore Nott’s face as he looked somewhere beyond her, wearing the expression of a man who’d been proven right.

Chapter 22: The Many Misfortunes of Theodore Nott

Chapter Text

The world came back to Hermione gradually. She felt the solid sensation of wood under her spine. When she breathed in, she was filled with warm, dusty smell, reminiscent of mothballs or old firewood. Pain spliced through her skull, like she’d attempted to ram herself head first through a brick wall.

Voices, low and urgent, threw bits of sound around her. She could only hear some of what they were saying as she drifted:

“—Planning a late night meet up in the stacks, Draco? Your attentions are attracting unwanted attention—” This sounded like Nott, his thin voice wild and uncontrolled.

“—Focus on your own problem, or have you forgotten the Dark Lord’s deadline—” She recognized Malfoy’s posh accent, dripping with fury.

“—my mission has been handled. You’re the one putting yourself in danger, chasing the mudblood’s skirt—”

Blinking heavily, Hermione was just able to make out the two figures standing in the shadow of a nearby bookshelf, their body language radiating a palpable animosity. She allowed herself another peek at her surroundings: she was still in the library, surrounded by familiar shelves filled with weathered scrolls and ancient looking books. When she tried to lift her head to get a better look, she was met with resistance, her limbs frozen stiff, like she’d been hit by a Body-Bind Jinx—

The night’s earlier events returned to her as she tried to shake off the haze: Nott in the library, his dangerous theories, his raised wand. She exhaled, fighting for clarity as a new sense of trepidation trickled in. What had the bastard said before he knocked her out? I have a bit of a theory, regarding you and Draco.

Hermione closed her eyes tightly, terrified to be caught conscious without a concrete plan of escape in place. She forced her breaths to fall deep and even, ignoring how every fiber in her being insisted that she run. But with no wand and the lingering effects of Nott’s spell clouding her mind and immobilizing her body, she knew the smartest thing to do would be to stay very, very still and hope he didn't realize that she was awake.

“What were you thinking?” This was Malfoy, sounding furious as he scolded Nott. “Going to throw down a gauntlet in the bloody library?”

“Oh please,” Nott responded, sounding not the slightest bit apologetic. Hermione could hear the rustling of fabric, as if he’d crossed his arms. “I cast so many Notice-Me-Not charms that Pince couldn’t find us even if we were right in front of her pointy beak. I knew you were coming to meet her.”

So, Nott had planned this ambush. The thought brought forth a prickle of fear in Hermione’s heart. What did he know? What was he playing at?

She heard the distinctive sound of a wand being unsheathed from its holster.

“Going to curse me?” There was palpable bitterness in Nott's accusation. “Over a mudblood? What would your father say?”

“I’d refrain from speaking about fathers if I were you,” Malfoy answered. If she chanced another look, she knew she’d see his eyes like bits of flint, preempting combustion. “Does yours finally want something to do with you, now that you can be of use to him?”

“Shut your mouth.” Nott spat. Hermione had only the briefest interactions with Nott Sr., when he’d haphazardly thrown a Killing Curse at her that missed her by a foot. It was not a glowing first impression.

“Do you think he’ll be proud of you? If you succeed?” Draco taunted. “Poor little Theodore Nott, so desperate for approval after growing up in that cold, empty manor with the cruel father and the poor, dead mother—”

Nott swore violently. Hermione knew nothing of the fate of Nott’s mother, but she suspected from the vicious string of curses the boy unleashed upon Malfoy’s entire family line, that whatever had happened was something truly unspeakable.

“Sensitive topic?” Malfoy mocked.

“What do you think is going to happen to your mother, if you’re found consorting with the wrong people? If you’re suspected of having doubts?" Nott snarled in return, laying his cards on the proverbial table. "You were told to kill her, not moon over her. Do you think the Dark Lord will allow you contrition, when you fail him again? Does he truly strike you as merciful?”

"Stay out of it. I told you, I'd handle Granger."

“Oh, I'm sure you've handled her. Do you really think I haven’t realized that something is going on between you two?” Nott continued, audibly scoffing. “You’re always staring at her. Then, there’s the convenient detentions. The way she healed you in the f*cking snow. How you two always seem to know exactly where the other is. You’re f*cking her, aren’t you?”

“My methods are none of your business, Theo,” Malfoy responded, shockingly not denying the accusation. “You should be concentrating on your own mission. Going to try to gift a grown man another necklace? Or have you simply given up after your halfhearted attempt at poisoning? ”

“Oh, I know there’s no giving up. The Dark Lord made that impossible for us, didn’t he?” Nott revealed. “You helped me with my…situation. Now I’m trying to help you, you stubborn bastard,” Nott urged. “But I'm starting to think that maybe you want to get caught. Do you want out, Draco? Is that what this is?”

“Help me?” Malfoy barked out a cruel laugh. “You've only lured me here to test my loyalties. Should I prove myself to you by murdering Granger in the middle of the f*cking poetry section?”

“Do you really think you can return to face him if she’s still breathing? You failed to kill her once, and got that scar as a souvenir. What do you think will happen when you fail a second time?”

The puzzle pieces fell together at once: Malfoy must have been ordered by Voldemort to finish the job he’d started last summer.

“Do you know your problem, Theo?” Malfoy said, his voice rising with every word. “You think so little of everyone around you. You’ve done it since we were children, always assuming someone was cheating or lying or trying to take advantage.”

“They usually were,” Nott spat. “You most of all.”

Malfoy laughed, a mirthless sound.

“After all these years, you’ve never stopped to consider that even the worst of us have a line we will not cross.” Malfoy lowered his voice so that she could hardly hear. “You don’t want to be there when I reach mine.”

“You don’t get to just walk away, Draco,” Nott said bitterly. “We swore when we were marked. Loyalty, protection, absolute obedience. From this day until our last.”

Hermione reeled, hoping she hadn’t twitched in shock and alerted the two boys of her eavesdropping. These were the vows they’d taken in support of Voldemort. The vows she’d undone with the ritual, freeing Malfoy of his servitude. Were these the same terms of the binding that had blossomed between them? Was Malfoy now bound to her, in loyalty and obedience, until he died? The thought sent a bolt of dread curling through her stomach.

“That’s why you’re so worked up about this, isn’t it?” Malfoy questioned the other boy. “You hate the thought that maybe, I’ll make the choice you never could. That maybe, I’m willing to die for my freedom.”

“You know what they call wizards who who die for their principles?” Nott asked, and he sounded bitter. “Corpses.”

Hermione got the sense that Theodore Nott had been nursing a seed of resentment for Malfoy. She also felt as though a part of Nott—the part that urged Malfoy to ensure his own survival—truly cared for his childhood friend. God, the Slytherins were twisted.

“Make the right choice, Draco” Nott’s voice sounded further away now, like he was moving away. “If you don’t, it’s your head.”

There were footsteps, fading against the library’s oak floors. And then, a sinister silence filled the library. She tried to force her breathing from the hagged little gasps she'd begun emitting into something even.

“I know you’re awake, Granger,” Malfoy said. “Finite.”

The body-bind curse dissipated instantly, and Hermione snapped her eyes open to see Malfoy's face much closer than she expected, blocking her view. His mouth was a tight line and his skin had taken on a rather ghostly pallor. He crouched next to her, a hand on her shoulder, warning her not to get up too quickly. It was a good call on his part, as any small motion made her feel stunningly lightheaded.

“Are you all right?”

“I think so.” She swallowed, her voice hoarse from disuse. “How long have I been unconscious?”

“It depends,” Malfoy explained. “You’d just passed out when I got here.” He offered her a hand and pulled her up to sit. Her vision swam from the change of position.

“I didn’t pass out,” Hermione said bitterly, rubbing her face. “I was cursed by a spineless coward who’d taken my wand. In mysections of the library, no less.”

Her muscles were stiff, murmuring protests as she pulled her arms over her head and arched her back into a long stretch. When she looked at him expectantly, waiting for a response, she caught his eyes lingering on the hem of her shirt.

“How much did you hear?” Malfoy finally asked, tearing his gaze away from her to focus randomly on the bookshelves.

“All of it,” Hermione admitted. “We should talk.”

Malfoy sighed, but nodded in agreement, jerking his head towards the library’s entrance. “Not here. Let’s go to the uh—” He flushed, blood rushing to his cheeks, as if remembering something particularly humiliating. “The Come and Go Room.”

Malfoy started off before Hermione could so much as protest, her stiff legs struggling to keep up with his hurried strides.

“Nott took my wand.”

In response, Malfoy pulled her vinewood wand from his pocket and slid it into her hand, closing his fingers around it.

“I took it back,” he said. “You’re welcome.”

Something in her sparked to life, a pleased flicker in her chest that followed her as she crept through the corridors and all the way to the fifth floor, Malfoy by her side.

The Come and Go room, as Malfoy had taken to calling it, appeared much the same as the last time they’d entered: the velvet couch and plush rug and yes, the very close quarters. Given that it was the middle of the night, there was a smattering of charmed lanterns floating below the ceiling, instead of a roaring fire. The lanterns gave the room a diffused sort of warmth, lovely and familiar.

Hermione collapsed on the couch, rubbing her sore neck in irritation, but Malfoy stayed standing. She scooted over, making room, patting the cushion beside her.

“You can sit, you know,” she told him, arching an eyebrow.

“I’d rather stand while being interrogated,” he responded, taking in the lanterns instead of meeting her gaze.

"How do I know you'll tell me the truth?"

They were momentarily quiet at her question, watching as soft shadows cast themselves around the room. She hesitated, before digging through her bag until she found her emergency potions kit and closed her hands around the vial she’d been looking for, that she’d swiped without a clear occasion in mind, only a certainty that one day she would need it.

In her hand, she held up a clear potion. Odorless if one were to smell it. Tasteless if one were to imbibe it.

“Is that…?” Malfoy breathed, instantly defensive. “No. Absolutely not.”

“Veritaserum,” she confirmed, and before she could talk herself out of it, she opened her mouth and tipped a drop onto her tongue. “I stole a vial from Slughorn during our first lesson.” She held it out to him insistently. “After what I've just overheard, I don't think it's ridiculous to require some assurance. I think it's high time we’re properly honest with each other.”

“I won’t take truth serum just to prove myself to you—”

“Please,” Hermione asked plainly. She held out the vial. “I'm not asking you to do anything I'm not willing to do as well. Please, Draco.”

Upon hearing his name on her lips, Malfoy hesitated, eyeing her outstretched hand with trepidation. He examined her face, searching for any trace of trickery. Having apparently found whatever he’d been looking for, he tipped the vial onto his tongue.

“Ask me then, Granger.” Draco told her quietly. His eyes were clear and insistent. “Ask me what you want to know.”

“Voldemort’s ordered you to kill me?” It wasn’t quite a full question; Hermione winced at the sound of her own voice, imbedded with a vulnerability she wished wasn’t audible.

Malfoy let out a heavy exhale. He tangled a hand in his hair, pulling at the roots. Fighting the effect of the potion. He didn’t last long before he was compelled to answer.

“Yes,” he admitted. “I’m expected to complete my task.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Malfoy pursed his lips, fighting back the truth, but the potion was stronger. “I didn’t want to scare you.”

“Would you do it?”

Malfoy’s head snapped around, whip-like, to focus on her. There was something like disappointment in his gaze. He approached slowly, sinking onto the couch beside her, every move tightly controlled so as not to spook her.

“Granger,” He said her surname as if it were both a curse and a blessing. Like it was the sweetest, ripest fruit he’d ever tasted, and simultaneously, pure bitterness, acrid on his tongue. “How can you ask me that?”

“That’s not an answer.”

“I didn’t think you needed one," Malfoy replied. It sent guilt twisting through her, tendrils off a terrible vine. "I thought you knew the second I showed up at your house last summer, when you were wandless and wet and half-naked in that ridiculous Muggle swimming costume. If I couldn’t kill you then, how could I possibly do it now, after— after—” He clamped his mouth shut, but the words tore out anyway. “After what you’ve done for me. To me.”

She felt it, the thing between them. Coiling like a serpent around its prey, tightening and tightening until she could hardly breathe. She didn't dare name it, too terrified of how it could leave her raw and exposed.

“Why did Nott ambush me tonight?” Hermione asked, moving away from such perilous waters.

“To test me,” Malfoy admitted, lacing his fingers behind his neck. “To show me that he knows about my loyalties, or lack thereof. To remind me of what the Dark Lord will do if I desert his cause.” He rubbed his thumbs deep into the base of his skull, relieving some invisible pressure. “I don’t know if this is his way of warning me or having something to hold over my head.”

“Nott said the Mark would compel you to obey Voldemort. You took vows of servitude— why didn’t you tell me that before the ritual?”

“I was a little preoccupied.” Malfoy rolled his eyes, resembling the prat of her youth. “I’m not sure you remember, but I was actively trying not to die of dark magic poisoning.”

“If I had known the exact wording, maybe I could have kept our, um, connection from manifesting.”

“You really didn’t know that a bond could result from that ritual? It wasn't purposeful?"

“Of course not,” Hermione assured, and some of the rigidity left his frame, as if he’d released a weight from his shoulders. She’d answered this question before, when they spoke in the Prefect’s bath several moons prior, but the assurance of veritaserum was apparently needed on his end as much as it was hers.

“And for what it’s worth,” she continued gently. “This bond, or whatever is happening between, us doesn’t seem reflective of the vows you made to Voldemort at all. Merlin knows you don’t obey me. I'm not even sure those were enacted— I wouldn't have been able to cure the infection, much less remove the vow, if the Mark had fully taken.”

She thought back to their ritual’s after effects: Malfoy’s urge for proximity, his sensitivity to her pain or fear. It didn’t sound like the vow of absolute obedience he’d made to Voldemort. It was something else, something older and more primal, born of their blood.

“You've not been forced into obedience or to assume absolute loyalty. This magic only seems to want you to— er— protect me.”

“I suppose that's good to know,” Malfoy answered, a flush creeping up his neck. “At least without the Mark, I won’t croak on the spot for disobeying the Dark Lord.”

“But what will you do when the school year is up and I’m still alive? Nott said Voldemort would kill you if you failed again, and your family.”

Malfoy trained his eyes on her fingers, which were twisted in her lap, picking mercilessly at her cuticles. He considered for a moment, before answering.

“I made a deal with Dumbledore,” Malfoy confessed. “He approached me at the beginning of the year and told me he knew what happened with you and your parents last summer. He said that I was on a precipice, that whatever I did next would either preserve my soul or destroy it. Dramatic as always. He knew the Dark Lord wouldn’t let me off with a slap on the wrist, so Dumbledore offered me an out. I’d act as a spy for the Order of the Phoenix for a year, and in return, he promised amnesty and offered to hide my mother himself.” He twisted his lips up, the unhappy semblance of a wry smile. “The bastard knewI didn’t have any other options.”

“You can’t be a spy!” Hermione protested, outrage rising in her like a swollen tide. “You’re a student. What does he even expect you to have access to?”

“Being a student gives me access to the sons of other Death Eaters, who’ve been recruited to take their fathers’ places.” Malfoy raised his eyebrows expectantly. “Ring any bells?”

”Nott,” Hermione breathed, immediately realizing the implication. “You’re spying on Nott.”

“After the stunts he’s pulled in the castle this year, Dumbledore needs eyes on him,” Malfoy explained bitterly. “I’m to keep him from hurting any other students in his inane attempts at completing his mission.”

“You’re not even a proper adult! How can he expect you to risk your life? What if you get caught? If Voldemort finds out you’ve turned traitor, that’s no deal, it’s a death sentence.”

“I know," Malfoy answered bitterly. He avoided her gaze, focusing instead on the flickering lanterns suspended above them. In the soft light, he looked younger. More afraid. "The Headmaster said I reminded him of himself at this age, and that wizards like us had to earn our redemption."

“Why does he need you to spy on Theo?” Hermione wondered aloud, dread gathering at the severity of his expression. “I know about the necklace and the mead. But what exactly has the Dark Lord instructed him to do?”

Malfoy worked his jaw, bracing himself, before continuing.

“Theo’s been tasked by the Dark Lord to murder Dumbledore before the year is through.”

Hermione gasped, a million loose threads coming together to weave a disturbing portrait: it was Dumbledore, who Nott was after. The necklace, the poisoned mead. Theo hadn’t been trying to assassinate Slughorn— he’d been trying to get at the Headmaster.

Like with his orders to Malfoy last summer, Voldemort couldn't expect Nott to succeed. A seventeen year old pitted against one of the most powerful wizards in modern history? It was a punishment for the failures of his father, just as Malfoy's mission had been. Voldemort was taking what was most precious to them: their sons. The continuations of their precious bloodlines.

“We have to warn him,” Hermione realized, mind spinning. “I know Dumbledore has done some questionablethings, but we need him, Malfoy. The Order won’t survive the war without him— we won’t survive without him.”

Malfoy laughed, a rich, lacquered sound. Like silk, dragging against her skin.

“How many times do I have to tell you? There is nothing in this castle that Dumbledore doesn’t know about. What do you think the first thing I told him was? How else was I to gain his trust? He knows, Granger, and he seems strangely unpreoccupied with the threat.” Malfoy shook his head, displacing strands of silvery blond. Hermione’s hand twitched, as if it wanted to smooth them away on its own accord.

“You should have told me sooner.” Hermione pressed her palms into her eyelids, thinking hard. “Maybe I could have— if I had some more time, I could have helped Theo, too—”

”Not every problem is yours alone to fix, Granger.” Malfoy sounded uncharacteristically gentle.His tone startled her out of her worry and she removed her hands from her face, a warm anticipation roiling in her stomach as she met his softened gaze. There was something flickering in the silver of his eyes, catching the lamplight. A slight but resilient flame.

If Hermione hadn’t lowered her inhibitions by dosing herself with truth serum, the question would have never left her lips. But as she was severely lacking in foresight, it did.

“Why are you being nice to me?” Her face grew embarrassingly warm. “Not just now, but when we’re in class. Ever since we, er—”

“Kissed?” Draco asked, allowing her the small mercy of finishing her sentence. He seemed slightly amused by it, the bastard. “You heard Theo’s suspicions, didn’t you? it’s all about playing every side. Good spies— that is, spies that stay alive— find the angle most likely to suit every interest.” He ticked off names with his fingers in explanation.“Theo doesn’t know anything about my little arrangement with Dumbledore, so it’s best he thinks I’m hesitating in my task because I’m infatuated with you. I’m betting that he’ll be more likely to confide in me about what he’s planning if he thinks I’m in deep sh*t with the Dark Lord myself. Potter won’t get in my way if he thinks he’ll hurt you in the process. And Weasley, well.” A savage delight overtook his face. "I just like making Weasley squirm."

“Oh.” Hermione wasn’t foolish enough to think Malfoy was actually courting her. She knew it was a strategic choice; at least this was a strategy she could be on board with. She'd worried his reasons were farworse.

“Oh?”

“Actually, I’d figured it was something more nefarious.”

“Why do you always think the worst of me?” Malfoy asked. His fingers gripped the back of the couch, like he’d wanted to reach out, but thought better of the action. Even if he meant the question rhetorically, Hermione was compelled to answer.

“I have a terrible aptitude for assuming everyone around me wants to be good, if only given the opportunity.” Hermione blinked hard. She knew this was a deep flaw of hers, potentially a fatal one. It was not that she foolishly believed in inherent goodness, but what she did believe in was free will. She believed in the radical power of choice, and the importance of circ*mstance in makes those choices. People weren't inherently good or evil, but reflections of their society, and those reflections could be changed— couldn't they? “I’m scared that if I allow myself to think of you like that, you’ll prove me wrong.”

The confession was so delicate it would have dissolved immediately upon contact. She felt terribly exposed, looking to him in hope that he’d refute her claim.

He didn’t.

“I'll prove you wrong every time,” Malfoy admitted quietly. “I’m not like you. I don’t care about being good. I've no interest in righting the world’s many wrongs."

"Then what do you care about?" She asked, irritation dutifully sparking to life. "Anything besides yourself?"

Malfoy leaned in, close enough that she could count his golden eyelashes. He pulled his lower lip between his teeth and she watched, fully entranced, as he pressed down, leaving little indents where his incisors had been.

A sense of inevitability heightened between them, just as it had the previous time they'd occupied this room. It was as if any time they were alone with the other in close proximity, an invisible thread pulled them closer, chafing them together.

"Oh, I care. I care about getting what I want.”Malfoy reached for her chin, holding it firmly between his long pale fingers. Her eyes widened, stunned by his firm grip, the juxtaposition of his plush lips and harsh words.“And, gods help me— I don't think I've ever wanted anything as badly as I want you.”

Chapter 23: The Puller of Strings

Chapter Text

“I don’t care about being good, Granger. I care about getting what I want.” Malfoy leaned in, close enough that she could count his golden eyelashes. She pulled his lower lip between his teeth and she watched entranced as he pressed down, leaving little indents where his incisors had been. “And, Merlin, help me— lately, I don’t want anything as badly as I want you.”

“W-what?”

Hermione’s heart stuttered over Malfoy’s confession, lungs contracting so that she felt like she’d been winded. The Room of Requirement dropped in oxygen. His face was inches from hers.

“You can’t just say things like that, Malfoy.” She wrested herself from his grip, standing from the couch. “It’s not funny.”

Hermione put as much space as she could between them, striding to the opposite wall, where the drapes were drawn around a magically conjured window. Granted, it was only a stone’s throw from where Malfoy still sat. Was the room getting smaller? Trying to force her and Malfoy closer? Or was she just losing her mind?

“Do I look like I’m laughing?” Malfoy grit out, wincing as every word escaped him. He opened and closed his mouth several times, looking vexed. After a fair bit of resisting the pull of the veritaserum, he threw his hands up, abandoning all hope of self-control.

“You want the truth?”

She wasn’t entirely sure that she did.

“Here’s the truth, Granger. Somewhere between burning down your house and weekly delves into the terrifying chasm of your mind, I started to want things with you that I know I'm not supposed to and it’s f*cking killing me.”

Her lungs stopped working for a moment. Malfoy wanted things he shouldn't? From her? With her?

Malfoy continues and his tone grew flat, as if he were repeating orders. “As my father's Heir, I’m supposed to uphold the Malfoy name by marrying a respectably pedigreed pureblood witch, whose parents have offered mine the highest priced dowry during contract negotiations. Have at least two children, an heir and a spare. Bribe and threaten my way into political prominence, add to the already obscene amounts in the Malfoy coffers, and support whoever preaches a return to conservative Wizarding values.”

He leaned forward on the sofa, resting his forearms on his knees. She had the strangest feeling that she was watching Malfoy’s world crumble, brick by brick. When he raked his hands through his hair, she swore she could feel his nails scraping against his scalp.

“I am not supposed to turn against my traditions,” he continued, head still in his hands. “Or make questionable allegiances with muggle loving headmasters. I shouldn’t even think of you as a witch, much less…” He trailed off miserably, before scowling, drawing upon his bitterness to refocus himself. “But then you go around tossing your ridiculous curls and smelling like rain and looking at me like I’m not the Malfoy heir, like I’m someone who can do whatever he fancies, and it makes me want you.”

She felt an unpleasant swooping sensation, like she was falling from a great height.

“I want you in every sordid way that I shouldn’t,” Malfoy added in a low voice, looking across the room at her with dangerously hooded eyes. “In ways that would send you scurrying back to your tower, pink and scandalized.”

Oh. The events of the night had already been dramatic enough to rattle her, but this last bit made Hermione think she genuinely might faint. Like the heroine from one of the old black and white films her mother loved to watch when she was sick, with a beautiful film star draped ridiculously over a chaise lounge.She leaned against the wall for purchase, trying to calm her racing heart. He slouched where he sat,his relaxed posture at odds with the tension of his body: shouldered tightened, jaw clenched. Like he was trying to hold still, lest any movement spur an unfavorable reaction.

Maybe he expected her to curse him. Maybe he had no idea that Hermione understood. She knew what it was like to be aware that someone was so very wrong for you. To hold deep resentments for them and nurse unhealed wounds they were responsible for. To know all that, and to want them anyway.

“Sometimes I think you want it too,” Malfoy mused, as if he'd pulled the thought straight from her mind. He touched his fingers to his lips. A gesture born of memory. “Sometimes I think you’re doing it on purpose. Trying to break me into pieces, until I’m ready to be built back in your image. That’s what you want, isn’t it Granger?” There was something dark and sumptuous about his words, like wine spilled on velvet. “You want me to be good?”

She didn’t respond. For once in her life, Hermione was completely speechless. She fought for words, but her overactive brain was stunned into submission, and for a long few minutes, all she could do was stare.

“Malfoy, I—” She tried. “I don’t think you mean—” She shook her head, attempting to refocus. “Er, it’s natural that with proximity, one might think they've developed—”

“Don’t.” Malfoy cut her off with a bitter laugh. “Don’t try to rationalize this. I’m not sure I could bear it.” He blessedly stood from the couch and crossed the room.“I’ll handle Nott,” he promised from the doorway with an uncharacteristic gravity, not meeting her eyes. “He won’t touch you again.”

She felt the veritaserum, insisting that she answer his question from before: yes, please be good for me. And also: no, I like you as you are. Vindictive. Dangerous. Sharp. Everything that I am not. That was the funny thing about honesty— it was never simple. It could exist as a contradiction.

“I don’t know what I want,” she finally whispered, although he was already gone. The veritaserum hummed pleasantly in her veins, content with her answer. It must have been the truth.

*

Hermione obsessed over Malfoy's words in the Room of Requirement almost constantly in the days and weeks that followed. That’s what you want, isn’t it Granger? lingered on the edges of her consciousness as she stirred Calming Droughts and transfigured whistles into watches and avoided Pansy Parkinson’s pointed glares. It was in the background of her mind, while celebrating with the Gryffindor team’s Quidditch victory, whooping as Ginny finally kissed Harry and giggling at the look on Ron’s face — honestly, how did he not see that coming? Even as she studied for their looming end of term exams at her favorite table in the library (where funnily enough, Theodore Nott had been found shortly after the night he'd ambushed her, frozen stiff under an invisibility cloak with his nose broken, as if someone had stomped on it).

Ironically, the only time she actively wasn’t thinking of Malfoy was during their occlumency lessons. Her embarrassing, obsessive thoughts were excellent motivation for keeping him out of her head and she found herself improving substantially, adding gates to her mental library and fortifying the shelves that dealt with him particularly with locks and grates. Honestly, a snarky voice in her head said, if this is the incentive you needed, maybe you should have kissed him earlier.

Only begrudgingly acknowledging her improvement, Malfoy claimed she required more practice, insisting that she not get comfortable— he was not nearly as brutal in his approach as a Dark wizard would be. He refused to allow her to practice her own fledgling legilimency on him— even when she begged, insisting it felt more natural— deftly shutting her firmly out of his mind at every attempt. It killed her that he was a better occlumens than she was a legilimens, even if she knew it was because he simply had more practice.

There were no more admissions. In fact, Malfoy had withdrawn, limiting his argumentative responses and eyerolls in favor of an atypically controlled reservation. He wasn’t ignoring her, nor giving her excessive attention. He was simply polite to her. It was incredibly eerie.

That’s what you want, isn’t it Granger?

Privately, she could be honest enough with herself to admit that yes, she wanted Malfoy in the same way he wanted her. An attraction born of low-simmering tension and bluntly forged intimacy. Dreams of him, some slow and sweet and some of being bent over a classroom desk. The body usurping the mind.

It was nothing like the soft, uncertain affection she’d held for Ron last year, or the delicate fondness that had blossomed between her and Viktor. With Malfoy, she didn’t envision a cozy domestic partnership. She had no delusions of romance.

No, when she had kissed Malfoy, she didn’t feel the affection or sweetness that she'd always expected would accompany attraction. She felt desperation. Under his touch, the gears of her mind slowed to a halt, plans and anxieties replaced by her body’s insistence for more. She’d never been so aware of herself physically, the nerve endings on every square inch of her skin burning bright. It was like she finally understood why her body should be allowed the reigns, her mind sent to the backseat.

Their collision had been seismic: an unstoppable force meets an immovable object.

She wasn’t sure why she’d reacted to him in that way, or why her traitorous subconscious replayed their kiss whenever she allowed her thoughts to wander. She didn’t fully want to understand, certain it spoke to a crossing of wires within her: what did it mean that instead of wanting gentleness and safety, she found herself coveting the exact opposite?

Harry was right about one thing: Malfoy was neither convert nor saint. He’d been horrible to her for years and never once apologized for it. He’d forsaken Voldemort’s cause, but that was as self-serving an act as it was righteous. He showed signs of shedding some of his bigotry, even allowing her to treat him with Muggle medicine, but who was to say he didn’t still support the less extreme factions of his family’s ideology? There were plenty of less radical wizards, who didn’t call for the extermination of muggleborns, but still maintained the importance of keeping them separate from those with pure Wizarding blood. Perhaps he was no longer the evil demagogue of school years past, but that didn’t mean that Hermione’s pesky consciousness would simply allow her to jump into bed with him because she was feeling a bit randy.

There was also another issue to consider. Despite her attempts at research and scouring of the restricted section, Hermione was painfully uncertain of the ramifications of the unbinding ritual. Did he mean it when he said he wanted her, or was it simply an effect of the bond? What if his newly founded desires for her were simply a product of an ancient magic, one she should have never dabbled with so carelessly in the first place?

Each factor made Hermione all the more certain that whatever had happened between them could never, ever happen again.

By Easter, she'd tamped down her feelings, made easier by Malfoy's temporary absence from the castle along with the majority of students boarding the Hogwarts Express, eager to return home for the short break and see their families amidst budding social unrest.Hermione was in the minority who'd stayed behind. Ron had dutifully invited her to the Burrow alongside Harry, but she’d insisted she required use of the school library to study for exams. He brushed her off, fondly calling her a swot. But for once, exams were not her most pressing concern. She sought answers from a source other than mere textbooks.

The climb to the Headmaster’s office was steep as ever. She had tried the names of sixteen different Honeydukes sweets — the winning confection wasIce Mice —before the stone griffin guarding the staircase allowed her past. She knocked softly on the door and heard Dumbledore’s melodic voice in response, softer and frailer than she remembered it to be.

“Come in, Miss Granger.” Despite her lack of appointment, he seemed unbothered by her sudden presence. "I've been expecting you."

Hermione entered cautiously. Dumbledore was at his desk, looking drawn and infirm. Fawkes perched protectively on his chair back, offering her a soft croak in greeting. There was a slight stoop to the Headmaster’s posture, as if keeping himself upright required tremendous effort. The curse that marred his hand had spread up his wrist and into his robe sleeve. Nevertheless, there was a shrewdness to his expression, glinting up at her from under his spectacles, that put Hermione on edge.

“Professor,” she said in greeting, perching on the edge of a squashy purple armchair and affording the Headmaster no preamble. “Theodore Nott is trying to kill you.”

His serene composure did not shift, an indication that this news came as no surprise. Wordlessly, he waved the door shut, ensuring that they would not be overheard.

“Ah,” Dumbledore responded knowingly. “I see you’ve been in discussion with Mr. Malfoy.”

Hermione felt her temper spark to life: how dare the Headmaster bring up Malfoy, after showing such clear disregard for his safety? After he’d used the information she gave him at the Burrow in good faith. It was a good thing that she was so angry. Anger made her brave.

“Yes,” Hermione confirmed tersely, leaning forward. She placed her clasped hands on the far side of the desk, boldly presenting herself as his equal. “Mr. Malfoy has told me quite a few interesting things as of late.”

“Are you angry with me, Hermione?” His voice was devastatingly gentle. It made her want to throw something.

“Did you withhold assistance from a student in order to gain intelligence, Professor?”

They locked gazes across the mahogany desk, clear blue meeting dappled shades of brown. She felt the slight pressure of legilimency— less discernible than Malfoy’s own efforts when they practiced—like an ache behind her eyes. A clear test of her abilities. Willing herself not to blink, she felt for her occlumency walls and found them firmly in place, library gates bolted shut. She felt Dumbledore's efforts recede.

“You’ve improved greatly,” Dumbledore noted, a small smile gracing his face. “My congratulations to your teacher.” There was a hint of approval in his gaze that under different conditions, would have made her beam with pride.

“Miss Granger, I know you have questions.” Dumbledore reached back to stroke his phoenix with his unblemished fingers. “I believe it is time that I provide you some answers.”

“Yes,” Hermione agreed, her tone ice cold. “I believe it is.” She took a fortifying breath and then voiced the uncertainty that had been plaguing her since the start of the school year.

“Did you know that Voldemort planned to target my parents? Did you know it would be Malfoy?” She couldn’t bring herself to make her true accusation: did you know this would happen to me, and do nothing?

“If you’re asking whether I suspected that there would be retaliation for Lucius’ failure at the Ministry, then yes,” the Headmaster admitted. “I did. I was made aware that Draco would be instructed to take his father’s place, whether he was willing or not. I feared that attacks on muggleborn students and their families would increase once Voldemort’s return was made public. But I was not aware that your parents would be targeted specifically, nor that it would be Draco who was tasked with carrying out the order.”

Hermione regarded him carefully. She was not Harry. She would not underestimate this man, nor attribute his machinations to vague good intentions that she was merely too young to understand.

“After you spoke to me at the Burrow, you went to Malfoy with an offer.” She said the word offer with the same disgusted inflection one would afford to horse dung. “He wassixteen, and you wanted him to spy in exchange for your help. You told him he had to earn it.”

“I must say, I’m surprised to hear you come to Mr. Malfoy’s defense,” Dumbledore responded, ignoring the fact that this was a set of accurations and not a question.

“Are you?” Hermione scoffed, not caring that she sounded unforgivably rude. “Not a part of your plan, then?” She was past politeness.

“Once, I offered another young man the same offer,” Dumbledore cleared his throat, a hazy distance entering his gaze. “A young servant of Lord Voldemort, who came to me concerned over the safety and wellbeing of his beloved, a muggleborn witch. This wizard had been instructed by his master to spy on the Order and he had done so dutifully, until his efforts implicated the very woman he sought to protect. I had no assurance that Draco Malfoy had not been told by the Dark Lord to do the very same. There is no danger quite like a spy without loyalties— unfortunately, to safeguard the lives of many innocents, I had to ensure Mr. Malfoy’s cooperation in a less than compassionate manner.” Dumbledore finished with a faint note of regret, bowing his silver head. “For that, I beg your forgiveness.”

“It’s not for me to forgive,” Hermione responded tersely. Even if Dumbledore’s actions were out of caution, or for the greater good, it did not absolve him. “Why did you ask Malfoy to teach me occlumency, if you already had secured his allegiance? And please don’t insult my intelligence by telling me it was because Professor Snape was too busy.”

Never had she ever been so candid in her disrespect of an authority figure— apparently, she could give Harry a run for his money. Dumbledore seemed to know this, eyes glinting at her cheek, and he chuckled good naturedly before answering.

“I would never insult your intelligence, Hermione. I fear you see an entrapment plot where there was simply a small, quiet hope. I thought that perhaps, it would do Draco some good to interact civilly with the very sort of witch he’d been taught to hate. You two had already cooperated beautifully together. Perhaps it was foolish of me, an old man’s folly, but I hoped that you’d become someone he could trust.” He smiled at her gently. “Someone he could ask for help. Was I correct?”

“You knew about the Dark Mark,” she accused. “I told you it was infected in the broom shed and you knew that I’d help him, if he asked. That I was the only one he could ask. You knew what would happen between us if I succeeded in undoing his vow, didn’t you?” She voiced Malfoy’s own suspicions, testing their veracity. “What I can’t discern is if you already have an agreement in place with Malfoy, why did you need him to be tied to me?”

“I knew Lord Voldemort cursed his Mark so as to ensure a vow of obedience, promising death to the disloyalty,” Dumbledore agreed, a hint of warning in his voice. “I knew Draco Malfoy was suffering from the results of disobeying his vow. But do you really think me so cruel as to withhold care to the injured?”

Yes, Hermione thought uncharitably, fighting the urge to curl her lip.

“Mr. Malfoy refused my help,” Dumbledore continued. “He was unwilling to risk the dangers that can accompany unraveling a mark of servitude. He planned, rather foolishly, to remove the Mark on his own or to die trying. He didn’t trust me, Miss Granger. But as I had hoped when pairing you together, he began to trust you .”

“Respectfully Professor, I’m a sixth-year student, not an accredited healer. He could have died. ” Hermione said, a tremulous note to her voice. “Or worse.”

“As I’m sure you know by now, Mr. Malfoy is quite stubborn. He refused to see any healer, no matter how discreet. In another life, he’d have made a tremendous Gryffindor,” the Headmaster responded, lips twitching upward at the thought.

Hermione stared. Malfoy, a Gryffindor?

“And in regard to your healing efforts,” Dumblefore continued. “I ensured you would have the materials you needed and was quite ready to step in should it be necessary. Professor Snape was also quite adamant about standing by. Although Severus struggles to articulate such things, I suspect him to be quite fond of Draco.”

“The materials…you sent The Lost Art of Demonology ?” She wondered aloud, and he poured himself a cup of tea in response, eyes twinkling.

“I pointed Draco in its direction,” the Headmaster admitted. He offered her a cup with a tilt of his tea pot. She shook her head in response.

“Did you know about the ritual?” She asked. “That it would create a bond between us?”

“Vows are unpredictable, Miss Granger. I had my suspicions, but could not have known with any certainty how Draco’s would respond. It often pains me how little we attend to oath magic in the Hogwarts curriculum,” Dumbledore expressed regretfully. His half-moon spectacles had grown foggy from the vapors of the steaming cup. “The school’s Board of Governors has rightfully deemed such subjects too dangerous for instruction."

"As you know, in the Wizarding World, certain vows are not simply undone. They become a part of us, intertwining with our magic and thus, our life force. The older the vow, the more permanent it is. A mere century ago, divorce amongst wizards was exceedingly rare, because of how difficult marriage vows were to undo. Even if one was successful in severing the vow through ritual or blood magic—as you were with Mr. Malfoy— the vow itself could independently seek a new anchor, imprinting on the closest magical core. Magical vows are highly resistant to tampering— any attempt with spells or potions could result in the accidental strengthening of the bonds, instead of the intended dissolution.”

Spells or…potions. Oh no. Potions.

“I won a vial of Felix Felicis in Potions,” Hermione confessed, thinking back at her rash decision. She’d only dosed them with a single drop each, but from what Dumbledore was saying, it sounded as if this could have unintended consequences. “I was terrified I was going to kill him, and so I used it for luck. I didn’t tell Malfoy.” She considered a moment, before adding: “I used Muggle antibiotics as well, although I can’t imagine that would have any negative interactions.”

“An innovative combination,” Dumbledore mused. “I’d have expected no less from a student of your caliber. A drop of Liquid Luck could certainly have an effect on such a ritual—”

“Did I—” Hermione interrupted, stumbling over her question, a sudden lump in her throat as she doubted herself. “Did I do this to him? Is this my fault?”

“Your fault ?” Dumbledore shook his head gently, as if she were missing an obvious point. “My dear girl, when you successfully released Draco Malfoy of his bindings to Lord Voldemort, you most certainly saved his life. Every breath he takes is because of you.”

“But now, he’s tied to me. He has this sense for when I’m upset or in peril and feels compelled to come help me,” Hermione explained, before she could stop herself. “I can tell how much it kills him to not be able to make his own decisions. After what he went through, I can’t exactly fault him for that.”

“Do you hold him in indenturement? Seek his unmitigated loyalty? Demand his sacrifice?” Dumbledore prodded. She shook her head tentatively. “No, what has transpired between you and Mr. Malfoy is not a bond of servitude. It is nothing like his connection to Lord Voldemort. From your own description of Draco’s experience, it sounds as if the vow has bound itself to you not through force, but through some sense of devotion."

Devotion? Hermione flushed at the thought, hoping Dumbledore wouldn't notice her change in aura.

"Draco Malfoy's magic seeks to protect you, Hermione. I am not a betting man, but I would wager that it chose you because you freed him from a forced oath and for that, it is grateful.”

“He’s not forced to protect me, is he?” Hermione frowned at the thought.

“Draco retains the entirety of his free will," Dumbledore explained, nodding approvingly at her concerns. "Although he may feel the urge to go to you when your magic calls, he will not be required to act on it. His will to do so anyway is what strengthens your bond. In an attempt to sever his follower’s autonomy, Lord Voldemort created the Dark Mark, a vow that could be forced on another wizard, and thus, a vow that was inherently unstable. This instability—combined with Draco’s disobedience of orders— is why the Dark Mark was rejected and why you were able to release him without killing him.”

“Could the same be done for other Death Eaters, should they defect?” Hermione wondered aloud. How many others had been forced by Voldemort? Young sons and daughters, all terrified at the prospect. If they had the opportunity to reject the Mark— would they?

“I assume you are referring to young Master Nott,” Dumbledore said with a heavy sigh. “I’m afraid Draco’s case was unique— he disobeyed Voldemort’s very first order. The vow fought its placement from the beginning, never fully binding him to the Dark Lord. Theodore Nott may have been unwilling when the Mark was created, but he has already cemented his place in the Dark Lord’s ranks. Where Draco faltered, Theodore has obeyed, diligently working all year to ensure my death, no matter how half-hearted his efforts seem.”

“There must be something you can do,” Hermione urged, bothered by the Headmaster’s passivity. “Nott wasn’t given a choice, if he had one, maybe—”

“We are all given choices, Miss Granger. I do not fault those who choose out of fear, in order to ensure their own survival. Even if I disagree with their methods.”

“So that’s it? You’ll just write him off as too far gone?” Hermione asked, worriedly. “What will you do when he raises a wand against you? Have him sent to Azkaban?”

“That is a question I cannot answer,” Dumbledore responded, infuriatingly mysterious. “Both for your safety and for Theodore’s.” She thought perhaps he’d say more on the subject, but instead, he drained his cup and leaned back in his chair, seemingly exhausted by the conversation.

“It is a rare trait, Hermione,” Dumbledore said, regarding her intently. “To seek freedom where others would consider using chains. An honorable trait. It is why I thought that out of all people Draco Malfoy could be bound to — myself included— you'd be the one to never use him as a weapon. But you must remember— not all who touch darkness wish to be free of it.”

*

On the day that students were due to return from break, the sparsely populated Great Hall was filled with the sounds of rustling newspapers, followed by mutterings and gasps. Hermione had to steel herself in preparation when her copy of the Prophet dropped in front of her isolated spot at the breakfast table. She wasn’t sure what she expected to see: death, uprising, destruction? An overthrow at the ministry? An act of terror on the Muggle population?

Whatever she had expected, it certainly hadn’t been the headline:

LUCIUS MALFOY LEADS MASS BREAKOUT FROM AZKABAN: “EXPECT SWIFT RETRIBUTION,” SAYS MINISTER

Chapter 24: The Elegy of Aragog

Chapter Text

When Hermione was young, she used to idolize her father. Maybe a part of it was that he looked like her. Warm brown eyes and skin like burnt honey. Hair, a bird’s nest of dark curls. Her mother had always maintained that her daughter was an old chip off of her husband’s block. Hermione was always secretly pleased when her mother would make the comparison, unable to consider it as anything but a compliment— after all, her father was quick-witted and kind-hearted, known as a good man to friends and strangers alike.

It made her wonder what Draco Malfoy must have felt, after the news of Lucius’ escape was released.

He was compared to his father in every whisper and comment— and physically, the resemblance was undeniable. Ice blond hair, severe cheekbones running parallel to a sharpened jaw. He even had his father’s eyes, overcast gray until they hit the right light, which could turn them molten silver.

And the comparisons didn’t stop with his looks: growing up, Draco had been a perfect miniature of Lucius, down to the expert sneer and casual tossing around of his family name. Unquestionably his father’s son.

But the Malfoy who returned after the break was different. There was no pompousness. Instead, a darkness seemed to radiate off him in waves, sending students scuttling and sealing curious onlookers’ lips. For someone who’d idolized his father his entire life, he seemed far from celebrating the Malfoy patriarch’s new freedom.

Naturally, the Aurors were brought in to question Draco on Lucius’ whereabouts. Scrimegeour was desperate to seem like a real authority, a law and order type leader, and the public outcry of such a public breakout was too pressing for the Department of Magical Law Enforcement to ignore.

But because they couldn’t actually find and punish Lucius, they zeroed in on the next best thing: his teenage son. And so, Aurors in scarlet robes interrupted classes, pulling Malfoy the Younger into the hallway for questioning under the guise of due diligence. Hermione could hear snippets of Malfoy’s exasperated shouting, his voice floating into the classroom.

How many times do I have to say that I don’t know where he is?

After the third time it happened, during a particularly tricky Transfiguration lecture, McGonagall pursed her lips, clearly having had enough disruption to her students’ learning.

“Is Mr. Malfoy under arrest?” The Transfiguration professor asked, her tone cold and clipped.

“Er, no ma’am,” one of the Aurors responded gruffly, his eyes darting between McGonagall and his apparent superior, as if unsure of whose authority to obey.

“This is an ongoing investigation, Minerva—” the other Auror started, but McGonagall cut him off as if his protests hadn’t even been audible.

“Then I’d kindly ask you to stop treating my students like criminals, before they miss important information that will most certainly be on their N.E.W.T.s. Baker, is it? Gryffindor, class of ‘84?” She peered over her rounded spectacles, inspecting the second Auror with an unimpressed glare. “I suppose this wouldn’t be of any importance to someone who barely received three O.W.L.s”

Hermione looked at McGonagall with admiration: somehow the Transfiguration professor always knew how to question authority while still maintaining plausible diplomacy. She could have sworn she saw McGonagall give Malfoy the smallest dip of her chin as the class snigg*red and the Auror reddened in embarrassment, gruffly leading the smirking Slytherin in question out the door.

She wanted to speak to him. About the newest developments with his father, about her conversation with Dumbledore. It didn’t matter what they spoke about, a terribly honest part of her insisted, so long as she heard his posh accent and his low, ever-charged voice.

But after their shared moment in the Room of Requirement, she felt strangely embarrassed by the concept of pulling him into a broom closet for a chat. Things were different, now that they’d kissed; Hermione was more aware, more afraid of what any small moment could mean.

While on her way to her next class with Harry and Ron, she was delivered a note by an eager to please third year, who was marked with the telltale scorch marks of a rowdy Care of Magical Creatures lesson. The envelope was marked with her name, written in a familiar messy scrawl, and covered in water stains.

“Who's that from?” Ron looked over her shoulder, nosy as ever. “Secret admirer?”

“Hagrid,” she responded, frowning.

Hermione scanned the note, her face falling in response to its contents. She realized the water stains must be from fallen tears.

“He’s written that Aragog has…passed away. He wants us to attend the, er, funeral.”

“A funeral?For that bloody thing?” Ron winced, having clearly never quite gotten over his fear of spiders. “Bit much, given that it threatened to feed Harry and I to its spawn, isn’t it?”

“We have to go, don’t we?” She looked between Ron and Harry, who flanked her as they walked.

“I’ve got detention with Filch,” Harry reminded her, a little too quickly. “And I’m not allowed on the grounds after dark as part of my punishment, remember?”

“How convenient.” Hermione sniffed, turning to Ron, who didn’t even bother with an excuse.

“No way,” he said, catching her beseeching look and shaking his head furiously, like a wet dog.“No offense, but I’d rather clean the barnacles off the Giant Squid.”

“Be nice,” Hermione chastised, privately agreeing with Ron’s sentiment. Honestly, did she want to perform burial rights for a creature that would have sucked her brain out without a second thought? No. But did she love Hagrid enough to support him through such lunacy? Of course she did.

Hagrid had been there for Hermione through everything. He’d comforted her after Malfoy called her that word in second year, and when Harry and Ron had iced her out in third. He’d made her endless pots of watery tea and listened to her cry after Rita Skeeter had printed libelous trash about her and Viktor. It was the least she could do, to help him send the giant arachnid into whatever afterlife existed for venomous, eight-legged beasts.

That evening, she dressed hastily in order to go down to Hagrid’s hut before the sun set, donning a black skirt that was shorter than she remembered—had she grown or had bloody Lavender borrowed her clothes again and forgotten to put them right?—and a dark gray sweater. She pulled her black school cloak over her clothing, so as to look a bit more like she was in mourning.

While crossing the Entrance Hall, her pulse jumped upon sighting a lone figure, lingering at the hall’s oak doors. Draco Malfoy, tall and lean and scowl inch. Checking his watch, almost as if he’d been kept waiting by her.

How had he known where she— oh, right. The bond.

The possibility delighted and disturbed her in equal measure: there was a part of her, hidden in the shadows of her pride, that liked that when her magic called to him, he’d come running. It was a heady sensation: almost like power, but darker and sweeter, the bitterest of chocolate.

“Granger,” Malfoy greeted, the first words he’d spoken to her since his return from break. “Fancy a walk?”

“A…walk?” Hermione asked, as if this was the first time she’d heard these two words used together. “Why?”

“Don’t you want to interrogate me yourself? Ask me if I’ve stashed my escaped convict father in my school trunk?” Malfoy drawled, his voice charged with anticipatory animosity. “They’ve already had half the D.M.L.E do it, but I’m sure your methods would be far more effective.”

Hermione flushed, and his lips drew up into a lazy smirk, as if pleased to pull such a reaction from her. She spent a second too long lingering them.

“Well?” He shook his head at her expectantly, like are you slow?

“I’m going to a funeral,” she answered instead, shouldering past him in order to haul one of the oak doors open.

A cool breeze escaped, lifting her hair from her shoulders momentarily, and she sighed at the sensation. Malfoy made a little noise behind her, and she looked over her shoulder to find him wincing in her direction.

“What?” She asked, raising her eyebrows.

“Nothing,” he gritted out, looking perturbed, before redirecting her with a question. “Who died?”

How should one explain the death of a giant, sentient arachnid? She imagined Malfoy’s look of disgust, and chose a more diplomatic avenue. Finally, she decided that a dead, massive acromantula was something he had to see to understand; he’d be better behaved, if he were reeling with shock.

“It’s better that I show you.” Hermione set out on the footpath, not bothering to look over her shoulder to see if he would follow.

Would it be insane to bring Malfoy, who'd always derided Hagrid at best and undermined him at worst? Yes.

Would he react the way he would have in third year, which was to say: even though things had admittedly changed between them, was he still his father’s son at heart? She didn’t know.

You love to test people, don’t you Hermione? A subconscious voice, not unlike her mother’s, slipped into her head. Maybe you’re more like me after all.

He caught up to her quickly. His shadow stretched out alongside hers, lengthening under the last of the day’s sun.

“A mystery funeral?” Malfoy snorted. “Is everything you do always so ominous?”

“You’re one to talk. Have a good break, then?” She tried to keep her voice clipped, but a hint of worry slipped through— despite herself, she wanted to really ask if he was all right. He stiffened, ready to bark out a harsh response, before catching the softness on her face.

“I’m not even dressed in mourning robes,” he responded, ignoring her question. “But I suppose if you’re wearing that—”

“What’s wrong with this?” Hermione bristled, turning to him as they walked. His side profile was striking in the last of the light, the shadows exaggerating his refined bone structure and strong chin. “My skirt and cloak are black, isn’t that the color wizards wear to funerals?”

“You’re calling that a skirt?”

“What would you call it?” Hermione asked, fighting the urge to pull down the fabric as she walked. As if this was an invitation to look, Malfoy gave her a long once over, eyes warm and unfocused, lingering on the line where her skirt ended, the generous inches above her knee covered only by the sheer material of her tights.

“A testament to my self control,” he murmured.

Hermione flushed, but otherwise ignored his insinuation, convincing herself it was only an attempt to get under her skin, not necessarily her robes.

In the near distance, Hagrid’s hut emitted a steady wafting of smoke, stained glass windows sparkling merrily against stone exterior walls. Malfoy seemed to catch sight of it at the same time as her, emitting a groan of displeasure.

“Please tell me it’s the big oaf who kicked it and that we’re not going to bless a mass grave of flobberworms—”

Hermione whirred on him.

“If you want to speak with me tonight, you will consider yourself my guest. You will be polite and cordial. You will refrain from using derogatory language and you will treat Hagrid with the respect deserving of a Hogwarts professor.”

He emitted a little sound of disbelief at being ordered about by her, and the burning look of disgust on his face was so obnoxious that she reached up to grab his chin, holding him delicately in place so that she could look him directly in the eyes.

“Do you understand?” She watched as his gaze darkened, darting momentarily to her lips and back up again.

Well, that wouldn’t do.

She dug her fingers in harder, flexing her hold in an effort to keep his attention and maintain her authority. It sparked something to life in his eyes. Dazed and soft and unmistakably, desperately hungry.

“f*ck,” he muttered, frozen in place. She knew he was stronger than her—larger, with the lean body of a Quidditch player—and yet, she had the uncanny sensation of being the one who was physically in control. “Fine, I’ll play nicely with the half-breed— ouch! ”

She had dug her nails into his jaw. He pulled away, rubbing at the skin.

“What did I just say?” Hermione warned. “Don't do it again. You don't want to see me angry with you, not tonight.”

He turned, flushing, and muttered something into the wind that sounded a lot like, want to bet?

They passed the paddock and approached the pumpkin patch where Hagrid was waiting, dressed in dark robes that were visibly covered in what looked like moss and lichen.

“Thanks fer coming, Hermione,” Hagrid sniffed, looking up with watery eyes. He rubbed his face on his sleeve, wiping away tear tracks. “And Malfoy, it’s really—” He stopped abruptly, the shock momentarily staunching his grief. “Malfoy? What’re you— ?” His befuddlement shifted into admonishment, and he narrowed his eyes at the Slytherin beside her. “Now, don’t you be bothering her, you ruddy—”

“I invited Malfoy to join me in paying Aragog my respects,” Hermione explained, interrupting before Malfoy could respond with vitriol of her own. She gave him a look that said, please be good. He rolled his eyes, but gave Hagrid a slight, pained nod.

"My condolences," he drawled, not sounding particularly sorry. Close enough, Hermione thought.

Hagrid gaped as he looked back and forth between them.

“But—it’s Malfoy, innit?" Hagrid attempted to lower his booming voice, turning to her with marginal discretion. "You alright, Hermione? He’s not made you do this, has he?”

"He is standing right here,” Malfoy drawled, still haughty. After some hesitation, he addressed Hagrid directly. “Professor.”

Hermione and Hagrid both swiveled their heads in his direction, stunned. She didn’t think Malfoy had ever used the designation of professor in relation to Hagrid, who squinted his reddened eyes suspiciously in the Slytherin's direction.

“I don’t like this. I don’t want no trouble,” Hagrid insisted roughly, still unconvinced. “None of your usual—” He gestured widely, in reference to Malfoy’s signature antics. “And no running to your father, trying to get me or Hermione here in trouble.”

“Respectfully, sir,” Malfoy responded, his tone bitter. “I doubt anyone could possibly be in more trouble than my father himself.”

The two men locked gazes and Hermione nibbled at her lower lip uncertainty, until something seemed to ease in Hagrid’s face, as if he were too tired—and given the fumes coming off of him, likely drunk— to continue his animosity. After a long moment, Hagrid gave a little jerk of his head to Malfoy, like, if you must.

Hagrid led them to where he’d dug a pit large enough to bury about twenty wizards and change. Next to it, in the thick grass, was the body— exoskeleton? — covered in an enormous white shroud, roughly the size of an event tent.

“What’s an aragog?” Malfoy craned his neck, muttering his question into her hair, as Hagrid lifted the enormous cloth. Hermione gasped.

Harry and Ron had explained their encounter with the creature to her, but even Ron’s traumatized description couldn’t have done the sight in front of her justice. Eight spindly legs, bigger than oars, curled in from where the deceased spider lay on its back, its countless eyes now unseeing. It was the size of a small car, formidable pincers flashing in the final light of dusk.

“Is that—?” Malfoy started, disbelief radiating from his expression. Hagrid sniffled into a handkerchief, seemingly overcome with the sight of the corpse.

“An acromantula,” Hermione finished for him. "It—he—was Hagrid's, er, friend."

“My oldest friend,” Hagrid cried, before breaking down completely. Hermione moved to place a comforting hand on his forearm, patting gentle. Malfoy looked at her as if she’d sprouted a second head, mouthingwhat the f*ck? She couldn’t help but delight in his shock— finally, it was her throwing him into the deep end, daring him to swim.

“He’s gone on to a better place, Hagrid,” she reassured him, wandlessly casting a tergeo on the hanky. Hagrid blew his nose into it, and Malfoy grimaced at the sound.

“I was going to say a few words,” Hagrid managed. “But every time I look at him, I jus' remember when he was a baby, back when he could fit righ’ there in my hand—” He mopped under his eyes. “Could you do it, Hermione? You're good with words, aren’t you.”

Hermione nodded, unable to refuse her friend in this situation, while also wondering how one was supposed to give a eulogy for a sentient, Class XXXX Dangerous Creature.

Malfoy, still wearing a look of complete disbelief, was kneeling by Aragog’s head.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Malfoy murmured, correcting himself when Hermione cleared her throat pointedly. “Er, anything likehim.”

"Magnificent, wasn't he?" Hagrid agreed sadly, taking the comment as the utmost compliment.

Malfoy ignored him, leaning in to examine the beast’s pincers. A subtle note of interest sparked in his gaze. “Acromantula venom is virtually priceless,” he mused, seemingly to himself. “Generally impossible to harvest while alive.”

“Don’t get any ideas,” Hermione muttered out of the corner of her mouth. Malfoy glared in her direction, but moved back from the giant spider, so that Hagrid could gently lower the creature into the pit. Hermione cleared her throat.

“Um,” she started awkwardly, refusing to meet Malfoy’s eyes, which were guaranteed to be reflecting pure, undiluted mockery. She racked her brain for the words used at the few muggle funerals she’d attended while in primary school, commemorations for distant family members. “Today, we gather to commemorate Hagrid’s dear friend, Aragog. A loyal companion and an exemplary… arachnid. We commit his spirit to the afterlife, where he will rejoin his predecessors in peace and harmony.”

Hermione chanced a glance up. Hagrid’s head was bowed, teardrops the size of marbles splashing onto his robes, seemingly touched by her words.

She looked in Malfoy’s direction, unsure of what to say next— should they bury him? Was there anything she was glaringly omitting? Granted, she’d never been to an acromantula funeral before— she was surely in the majority on that front— but maybe there were wizarding burial customs that Hagrid would appreciate.Malfoy only shook his head, inclining his chin for her to continue. She shrugged helplessly, uncertain of what to do next.

Finally, he released a long-suffering exhale, before raising his wand and lighting it, a soft white flame dancing at the tip. He gestured at her to lift her own, to join him in casting.

Right, she thought, feeling rather embarrassed at not remembering sooner. Wizarding funerary customs required magically sourced fire.

“Hagrid,” Hermione asked gently. “Did you want to cremate him?”

“Got to,” Hagrid responded gruffly in explanation. “Otherwise his kind will dig ‘im up and eat ‘im. It’s their way o’ saying goodbye, see?”

“Charming,” Malfoy muttered, and Hermione shot him another warning look.

She lit her wand, and after some consideration, conjured a torch so that Hagrid could cast a flame into the pit himself. He reached for it gratefully, ignoring the errant sparks that brushed his skin.

“I’m not ready,” Hagrid admitted, his voice splintering. “We been together since the beginning, really. For a long time, I didn’t have nobody but Aragog.”

“I know,” Hermione soothed, and she did. She knew. “That’s why he’d want it to be you, who helps him move forward, shepherd him into the next life. You’re not just saying goodbye. You’re setting him free.”

She looked over at Malfoy, the only other person who knew exactly how she’d set her own parents free. Across the pit, he regarded her with an unreadable expression, his brow furrowed as if she’d said something he couldn’t fathom. Like there were several fundamentally uncertain questions central to understanding existence, and she was the answer to at least one of them.

What? She mouthed at him, growing self-conscious under his gaze. Still wearing the strange look, Malfoy cast an arc of cleansing white fire into the pit, and Hermione followed, sending a stream of her bluebell flames to join his. Hagrid, hands shaking, tossed in the torch.

“We return your magic to the earth, restore its power to your brethren and progeny,” Malfoy said automatically, as if he had delivered such rites countless times before. “From the first of your line to the last. May they carry your magic. May they carry your name.”

Aragog’s body was consumed by the fire, the smoke swirling ethereally into familiar forms and shapes. Birds and bark and whispering leaves. The air filled with the smell of damp wood, reminiscent of the forest after it rained.

When the flames finally burned out and the smoke lifted, the earth was smoothed flat over the grave, patted firmly into a neat mound.

“Those are wizarding rites, ain’t they?” Hagrid considered Malfoy as if he were a particularly disconcerting stranger. “That you just gave ‘im?”

Hermione swallowed her shock at the revelation, disbelieving that Malfoy would afford such dignity to a species that he and his like-minded ilk undoubtedly deemed subhuman.

Malfoy squirmed under their scrutiny.“So?” He answered defensively, his hands clenched visibly in his pockets.

“That was very kind,” Hermione said, moving to lay a reassuring hand on his arm. He stilled under her touch. “Thank you, Draco.”

Malfoy eyes darkened upon hearing his first name, and there it was again, flecked in his irises. Hunger.

Hermione had suspected that it didn’t matter if she scolded him or complimented him, as both ensured him the sort of attention he’d come to expect from her. But here, as he behaved at her insistence, as he reacted so palpably to her smile, preened under her thanks— she considered that perhaps, she'd been completely wrong. Perhaps, a demented part of Malfoy enjoyed pleasing her. Perhaps, he’d even begun to favor her praise, preferring it over her ire.

“Well come on then,” Hagrid said, resolutely gesturing for them both to follow him. “Suppose I can offer you a drink fer your trouble? Some tea or, er—”

“We're of age,” Malfoy swept past him, shedding his cloak as he prepared to enter the hut. “I don’t speak for Granger, but I for one would appreciate something stronger.”

*

By the time night truly fell and most of the other students were long in bed, Malfoy and Hermionesat on the steps outside the back door of the hut, listening to Hagrid’s earth-shaking snores.

He had passed out after several flagons of mead and a tipple of firewhiskey, a bottle of which he offered rather irresponsibly to Hermione “just the once, just for yeh to taste.”

More eager to curb the grieving man’s drinking than to try to beverage herself, Hermione accepted it. Now, the bottle sat between her and Malfoy, who took periodic drinks from it, grimacing with every swallow.

A strange placidity had settled over the night, both of them hardly speaking lest they disturb the rare moment of peace. If they were caught breaking curfew on the grounds, they’d be given eternal detention, probably scrubbing toilets, but Hermione couldn’t bring herself to care.

She wasn’t sure why Malfoy had stayed. As she gave up on levitating Hagrid into bed from his armchair, conjuring him a pillow and blanket instead, she kept expecting to look up and find him poking fun at Hagrid’s humble quarters, or whining about returning to the castle in time for dinner, of which he did neither.

It was incredibly disconcerting to see him, here. Sitting on the ground with his head tilted back as he swigged whiskey. Maybe she should have confiscated it from him as well.

She reached for the bottle, but he dangled it out of her reach, forcing her to lean into his chest, close enough to smell the intoxicating combination of smoke and cedar and musk radiating from his skin.

“Feeling a little rebellious, are we?” Malfoy rasped, his voice rough from disuse. The effect did something terrible and exhilarating to Hermione’s poor, stupid heart.

“Something like that,” she managed weakly, pulling the liquor from his grasp and drinking before she could think too much about what she was doing, or the fact that his lips had just been where hers were now.

The whiskey was much stronger than any muggle alcohol she’d tried, scorching her as it slid down her esophagus. She gasped through the feeling, and Malfoy laughed, clearly delighted at her reaction. She so rarely heard him laugh— and never so freely, without a hint of his usual cruelty.

“First time, Saint Granger?”

“Oh, piss off,” Hermione croaked, but there was no heat behind her words. The liquor’s burn had settled into something warm and sumptuous, a heat that flooded her chest and throat and cheeks. She took another sip, this time more prepared for the sensation.

“Muggle liquor isn’t nearly this intense,” she explained. “Same general effects, though.”

"And what are those?" Malfoy asked.

"Foolishness.” She grinned, drinking again. "Headaches. Nausea. A sense of general regret."

“You should have tried something good first. Father keeps his fairywine aged at three hundred years at a minimum in our cellars and—” Malfoy’s voice cut up abruptly, mouth snapping shut at mention of Lucius.

He looked terribly lost.

Hermione’s head swam from the whiskey, which is what she blamed for her inclination to reach for his hand. Just barely, a quick clasp and release, before he could react.

Malfoy stared at the place she’d touched him for a long time, before turning to her. Unguarded. She could see it now, the heaviness he’d been hiding. The despondency he’d been emitting ever since Easter. Ever since his father’s escape.

“Tell me what to do.” Her words were instinctive, flowing from her tongue without her usual second guessing. “Tell me how to help you.”

“You can’t always help, Granger.” He rubbed his face with both hands, a gesture of clear exhaustion. “Not with this, not with my family. It’s my burden to carry.”

“I took a vow,” Hermione reminded him quietly. Somewhere, an owl hooted, the sound reverberating sweetly in the dark. “I swore, amongst other things, to protect your mother.” She swallowed her mouth suddenly bone dry. “Like you protected mine.”

It was explicit now, the thing that had only been understood between them. The reason she’d agreed to the Unbreakable Vow, all those months ago. A mercy for a mercy.

“Say what you like about Gryffindors, but we always settle our debts.”

“That’s what they say about Slytherins. You lot always run out on your tabs,” Malfoy quipped flatly, his voice losing its previous lightness. Any teasing having dissipated into the night air. He hesitated, before continuing in a much more somber tone.

“We were supposed to get her out, over break. That's why I went home, risked being caught by the Dark Lord.”

“Your mother.”

“Yes. I’d set up blood wards on a safe house that would keep out even family. Dumbledore cast the Fidelius Charm on it, made himself the Secret Keeper in order to uphold his end of our bargain. I was going to fake her death, set it up as a suicide. She’s on so many potions, she hardly realized when I had her write the note in her own hand."

"Potions?"

"Exposure to the cruciatus has weakened her magic," Malfoy explained miserably. "It's caused her to flinch away from using it. She tampers it down now, so that she doesn't have any accidental outbursts. Some of the potions help with that. She was getting better, starting to be able to use little spells again. But then, my father showed up. They say a month in Azkaban makes you stark, raving mad. My aunt’s like that, you know. Certifiable. But Father—it was past madness, the way he was acting. Like nothing had ever happened. Like we could regain the Dark Lord’s favor, like I was the key to do so, if only I could buck up and cast a Killing Curse. Like as soon as we regained our rightful place in society, my mother would be just fine, no mind healers needed. Like nothing he’d done to us had any bloody effect at all.”

Hermione was quiet, eyes fixed on her knees, reeling with the new information. Lucius was back, and in Malfoy Manor. Hiding, biding his time.

“The funny thing is, I think I could cast it now.” His voice was so soft she could barely make it out. “I’ve felt that kind of hate. I understand it, thanks to him.”

They were quiet for a long time, sitting with his admission and it rose over them, like a plume of acrid smoke.

“I don’t,” Malfoy started, his voice wavering. He cleared his throat and began again. “I don’t think I could actually kill my own—”

“The rites you recited, earlier,” Hermione prompted, attempting rather transparently to change the subject. Malfoy raised the bottle to her in a mock toast, clearly relieved to be talking about anything other than his ability to commit patricide. “Those are typical, for wizards?”

“Variations of them,” he answered, scrambling uncoordinatedly from the steps—the effects of the whiskey robbing him of his usual grace— until he landed and sprawled out on the ground behind the hut. “That’s how I learned to do it.”

“Learned?”

“Yes,” he sighed. “Father taught me." It became clear that no matter where she brought their conversation, there was no avoiding it: the signet ring on his finger, the Malfoy of it all.

She slid herself off the steps, so that the two of them were side by side in the grass. Draco turned his head towards her, and she was certain he was going to tell her to f*ck off and mind her own business, but then he began to speak.

"He was the one who gave the final rites for any Malfoy relatives," he continued. "What with being the head of the family and all. It was going to be my duty one day. Another role I was supposed to fill.”

“I reckon you’re better off deciding your own role in life.” Hermione’s voice blazed with certainty, and she lifted her head so that she could meet his eyes as she said it, knowing it was something he needed to hear. “I reckon you’ve earned that choice.”

“You would say that,” Malfoy responded, with a palpable bitterness. “But it's not just something I can walk away from. It’s like the funeral rites, isn’t it? My magic isn’t just mine. It’s theirs, too. From my first ancestor until my last. There’s no choice in that.”

“By that reasoning,” Hermione countered. “I shouldn’t have any magic at all. Maybe it does return to the earth, but the earth certainly doesn’t discriminate on where magic is redeposited. There is more than one kind of ancestor, Malfoy. You can be descended from a tradition as much as you can a family line.”

He rolled onto his stomach beside her, pulling himself up onto his elbows. She wondered if he minded the dirt, the grass stains. If he’d regret this shared moment tomorrow, when the day cast its light onto the detritus that remained on his clothing. When whatever spell that had been cast to allow this calm between them would undoubtedly be broken.

“Merlin,” Malfoy said. Absently, he reached up to pick some debris out of her hair, as if this was something he just did— touch her, casually and without objection. “You really do have a way with words. You could talk me off a tower. Sometimes I almost believe you.”

“If only you listened more often.”

Malfoy shook the bottle about in response, as if gauging how much whiskey was left. It made a weak swishing sound, mostly empty. Had they really finished the whole thing? The heady lilt to her thoughts and the pleasant buzz under her skin, seemed evidence that yes, they had.

“Last sip.” He held the bottle to her, a question in the gesture. Pushing away her uncertainty, she closed her eyes and parted her lips. With a sharp inhale, he poured the remaining trickle of firewhiskey into her mouth, igniting as it travelled down her throat.

She felt a touch—not the glass of the bottle, but something softer—catching a drop that had dribbled to her chin. Her eyes flew open to see him, drawing his thumb away from her face, before bringing it to his own tongue.

“Last drink always goes to the witch.” His eyes were like tar, like pitch. In their fathomless opacity, they put the night sky to shame. “But the last drop goes to the wizard.”

“Rather sexist, isn’t it?” She breathed, hardly aware of what she was saying. There was a whiskey-induced coyness to her tone, she’d never heard herself use before. “What if the witch wants the last drop?”

Oh, he was so close, leaning over her. Her body arched up towards him almost instinctively, like a flower in search of the sun. Inches away, he stopped himself, wetting his lips.

“Take it back then,” he whispered.

It was all she needed to close the distance, and all he needed to abandon all hesitation. Her lips parted against his, pliant and soft. When he tasted her, he made a low noise in his throat. Deeper than a whine, but no different in its desperation.

She smiled at the sound, unable to help repress it.

“Stop doing that,” Draco muttered against her mouth. “It drives me half mad—” He kissed her hard and hungry, as if to demonstrate.

“What,” she panted, breaths labored as he stole her oxygen. “When Ismile?”

There it was again, the coyness, lifting its magnificent head. Causing her to trail her fingers down his clothed stomach, brush at his belt buckle and come away stinging, like she'd touched an electrical socket.

“As it turns out,” Malfoy lifted his lips from the skin of her throat, pausing every so often to nip at just the right spots. “I rather enjoy when you're angry. Annoyed. Peeved.” He punctuated each descriptor with his teeth. “But…” He drew back to trace the edges of her lips as they pulled up into a grin, an automatic reaction. “I like this too. I like when I can feel it. How pleased you are with me.”

Then it was frantic, all fingers and tongue and unyielding heat. She climbed onto his lap, straddling him. Trying to get closer, and even closer after that. He kissed her until her lips were slick and red, swore roughly into her clavicle as she tugged at his hair, harsh words she’d never considered in combination with need you and so good, their pairing both jarring and intoxicating. He ducked his head and ran his tongue down her scar, the remnants the dark curse she’s been hit with in the Department of Mysteries. Didn't ask where she'd gotten it, just laved attention on the sensitive area until she swore and he smirked into her skin.

She grasped at his collar, loosening and pulling, desperate for access to more skin. His fingers skimmed the edge of her sweater, and when she whimpered in approval, his hands spanned her rib cage, digging into the softness of her stomach. Impatient, she lifted the knitted wool up and up over her head herself.

He looked at her as if she were the sun. She did not shrink under his gaze; she blossomed.

"Please,"he growled, rapturous. "Please, let me—"

It occurred to her then, that he could take whatever he wanted from her and she would give it freely, but here he was asking her, begging her.

"Touch me," she whispered, pulling down the straps of her camisole. Impatient, he knocked her hands out of the way and tugged the offending garment off, baring her to him.

“f*cking Circe, look at you,” he breathed, and he wasn’t sure if he was swearing or calling upon the sorceress for mercy.

Entranced, he traced her breasts lightly with his long, clever fingers. She arced into his hands until he circled a dusky pink nipple, pinching it suddenly and eliciting a moan. The sensation yanked at a cord deep within her, winding her tighter.The pressure in her only heightened as he sucked her nipple into the delicious wet heat of his mouth, laving it with his tongue.It felt better than she’d ever thought possible, hot and wet and sloppy. He alternated sucking and teasing little hints of his teeth, driving her mad.

When she pulled at his hair insistently, he supplicated, switching his attentions to her other breast. He allowed her to maneuver him however she saw fit, encouraged her as she ground down into his lap, seeking friction. He gripped her hips, bucking up so she could feel his hard length through his trousers.

“That’s it,” he encouraged, speaking into her skin. “Take what you want.”

His hands were as greedy as his mouth: touching her stomach, pulling her hips closer in a slow, torturous grind, squeezing around her thighs, inching up her skirt to trace at the seam of her tights. She radiated desperate pleasure as he rolled her nipples between his fingers, cupping her breasts as he kissed her forcefully, all teeth and tongue. Even their magic hummed effervescently around them, insisted that this was natural, this was what they were supposed to be doing all along—

And then the world came to a startling halt.

“I f*cking knew it! I told Theo, but he wouldn’t listen! Oh Draco, how could you?!”

Hermione drew back, hoping it was the whiskey, or a boggart. Anything but that voice, high and mean and undoubtedly —

Pansy Parkinson. Fully dressed despite being out on the grounds long past curfew. Pointing at them in accusation, her face screwed up in horror. Standing, unbeknownst to her, on a freshly tilled grave.

Chapter 25: At the Edge of the Forest

Chapter Text

Hermione had experienced many terrifying places in her short life. Pits of Devil’s Snare. An assuredly haunted Pureblood townhouse. The bottom of the Black Lake. The Veil Room in the Department of Mysteries. But nothing, she thought, was more terrifying than being inside of Pansy Parkinson’s head.

*

Moments earlier:

“Pansy?” Malfoy cried, stepping in front of Hermione as she scrambled to pull her clothing back on. “What are you doing here, you nutter!?”

Hermione's head swam as she tugged on her sweater, a sensation that suggested the ground had switched places with the sky. She was dizzy from the whiskey, but also from the sudden loss of his body against hers, unceremoniously yanked away without warning.

Pansy Parkinson stood with her arms crossed in Hagrid’s pumpkin patch, her eyes like a pair of onyx daggers. Her cheeks were pink from exertion, as if she’d run to them, and her aura swirled with such a palpable darkness that Hermione was nearly unsure where the Slytherin girl ended and the night began.

She would have rather been caught by anyone else, Hermione thought darkly, even Snape. Pansy shouldhave been in the castle, fast asleep like the other students. How had she found them? What was she doing, already out on the grounds at night?

“Giving it up in the dirt, Granger?” Pansy taunted, from around Malfoy’s barrier. “How predictably muddy of you. ”

The dark-haired girl’s lips twisted into an ugly sneer as Hermione stood with a blush on her cheeks, something vicious on her tongue.

“Able to speak in full sentences again, Parkinson?” She asked cooly in response, and Pansy coloured in rage, clearly recollecting the tongue-tie spell Hermione had most recently used on the girl in Defense class to enact vengeance. “Maybe I should have sealed your mouth permanently.”

“How did you know where we—where I was?” Malfoy spat at Pansy. He loomed over her, which may have had a more ominous effect, had he not looked an absolute sight: mussed and marked by Hermione's lips, his collar rumpled, top buttons undone. His eyes, which were just liquid mercury, had turned flat and cold as they trained on Pansy.

As an answer, the Slytherin girl simply smirked back, as if to say isn’t it obvious. The two had a silent conversation made up purely of microexpressions and raised brows, the sort of unspoken communication that only two people that had known each other their whole lives could manage, speaking entirely through everything that wasn’t said. The intimacy of it made Hermione feel a bit sick, or maybe that was just the lingering effects of the firewhiskey.

With a sinking in her stomach, she remembered seeing them together, while dating on and off throughout fourth and fifth year. Even when fighting—which was public and often— the pair of Slytherins had a magnetism that made their eventual union seem almost inevitable. Hermione couldn’t remember why they ended things—who had stepped out on who—nor if they’d ever rekindled.The recollections made her wonder: were Malfoy and Pansy still involved? And was Pansy right— would Hermione have let it go that far and slept with Malfoy? Right there in the grass on the edge of the forest, as the stars burned coldly above them, questioning her decisions from universes away? It wasn’t like her to act so recklessly, to rationalize dangerous behavior after the fact, or not at all. It wasn’t like her, to ask herself a question, and come up empty with an answer.

Hermione—caught in her own inner turmoil— barely noticed the break in the Slytherin’s déntente, as Pansy twitched her gaze down to below Malfoy’s waist and back up again, but Draco seemed to find an answer in the movement, his eyes narrowing in accusation.

“Again?” Malfoy fumed, nearly vibrating with outrage, his tensely set on shoulders framed menacingly by the shadowed forest. Pansy, sensing the escalation in his ire, took several steps back, preemptively. “Merlin, Pansy. I told you last term to stop cursing my clothing—”

To Hermione’s confusion, he began unbuckling his belt, yanking it from his trousers in a whiplike motion, before hurling it furiously into the distance. Although it was too dark to see it, she heard the metal of the buckle, as it smashed into a tree.

A memory floated to the surface of her occlumency library, a delirious late night in the dormitory, not so long ago. Lavender, giggling as she adeptly glamoured the love bites on Hermione’s neck; Parvati, leaning over conspiratorially— she can also do a nasty tracking charmon a bloke's belt buckle…burns when anyone besides her tries to touch it.

And Hermione had felt a shock when she’d brushed the belt, hadn’t she? While running her fingers down Malfoy’s…. Christ. She hadn’t thought twice about it, so caught up in him. Granted, there could have been an earthquake, and she and Malfoy might not have even noticed, just rolled into a tectonic fissure and fallen to the molten center of the earth, still intertwined.

“We’re not dating anymore, you lunatic—” Malfoy started furiously, but Pansy cut him off.

“Don’t flatter yourself, Draco.” Pansy crossed her arms across her chest in a manner that made her look incredibly bossy. With her high, defiant chin, and slightly upturned nose, she looked almost inherently haughty, an imperious affect that simply couldn’t be taught. “It’s not because I care about who or what you stick your prick into. I’ve moved on from that, several times over. But did you really think after the disappearing acts you’ve pulled this year—all the questionable company you’ve so obviously been keeping—that I wouldn’t make sure to know exactly where you were, should you get into trouble?”

Behind her sneering veneer, Pansy looked genuinely worried. Like if she let Malfoy out of her sight for a moment, gave him an inch of slack on his lead, something awful would happen to him. Like Pansy had seen the same change in him that Hermione had this year, and she was bloody terrified of it. Hermione would have felt for her, if she weren’t so awful.

“And what kind of trouble would require me to undress?” Malfoy replied, voice dripping with sarcasm. “What protection would I require from you, against the female population of Hogwarts? Or are you saving me from the elves in the laundry?”

“I think that mark on Granger’s neck speaks to exactly what kind,” she sniped back.

Hermione slapped a hand to the offending spot, and Malfoy bristled in indignation.

”It’s not your place, Pansy. I’ve told you to stay out of my way this year, for your own safety.” Malfoy ran his hand through his hair, his telltale sign of exasperation. “Why can’t you ever manage to do what you’re told?”

The girl took another step back, this time in irritation. It occurred to Hermione that Malfoy was subtly moving Pansy further from Hagrid’s hut as they spoke, her back to the forest as they edged closer and closer to the woods. It was exactly the approach she would have taken, that she had taken last year with Umbridge: move the threat to the treeline, where it can be neutralized under the cover of the forest.

“You’ve spent your whole life doing what you’re told,” Pansy shot back, unimpressed by the dig. “And look where that’s gotten you. You and Theodore, running around like you don’t have nooses around your necks.You boys are terribly predictable. And yet, when I caught you watching her, I thought— surely Draco wouldn’t do anything so stupid. Surely he’s just playing with his food."

She ignored the dangerous expression on Malfoy’s face, evidence that the damn containing his rage was threatening to break.

"Theo insisted it was some sort of ploy, that you'd hatched a little plot to serve the Dark Lord, and that I should be grateful that I didn’t know the particulars of your servitude. But then…” Pansy trailed off in recollection, refocusing her gaze around Malfoy and squarely on Hermione before continuing, “then, she healed you after that awful curse, and I saw you look at her like she was—like she was someone to you. And I realized. Tonight was just confirmation. The charm wouldn’t have gone off if you weren’t shagging the mudbl—”

“Shut your mouth,” Malfoy snarled, at the same time that Hermione cried, “we weren’t shagging.”

Malfoy whipped his head around at her, meeting her eyes as their simultaneous outbursts rang out. Both of them seemedvisibly caught off guard by which of Pansy’s insults the other had taken issue with. In the moment of eye contact, Hermione felt his familiar presence requesting entrance to her mind. She gave it, swinging open her library’s gates.

She can’t remember seeing this, his voice spilled across her occlumency shields.Hermione’s mouth went drywith the realization of what he was asking.

“Don’t look at each other like that in my presence, it’s disgusting,” Pansy interjected, snapping the connection. She rolled her perfectly kohl rimmed eyes—still unsmudged despite the late hour and emotive conversation— in abject distaste. “Merlin, Draco. You look like you want to mount her here and now. You’re lucky I decided to keep an eye on you, not someone more discerning.”

“Keep an eye on me — is that what you think you’re doing? Please, we both know you’re checking to make sure that my chains are still fastened. Going to report that the Malfoy heir has gone rogue to your father, so he can tell the Dark Lord and gain some marginal favor?” Malfoy said, his voice dipping into a bottomless foreboding. “That would put me in a very difficult position, Pansy. I don’t do well when I’m backed into corners.”

Pansy shrunk slightly from him, her sleek black hair ruffling in the wind. Hermione wondered, not for the first time that year, how involved Pansy was with the Death Eaters. Her father had been at the graveyard, when Voldemort rose for the second time, but would she be forced to take the mark, like Draco had been? Would she take it willingly?

“I wouldn’t tell Father—” Pansy attempted, withering under the glittering contempt of Malfoy’s gaze. “I was trying to help you, but you’re as stubborn as a Gryffindor, and just as stupid when it comes to wetting your co*ck—”

“You’d be wise to hold your tongue, Parkinson.”

Here, backlit by the moon and surrounded by shadowed foliage, Malfoy struck a vicious figure. He looked down at Pansy with the icy authority of an officer pulling rank. Everything from his menacingly formal posture to his tightened jaw screamed that despite the many dangers that lurked in the Forbidden Forest, Draco was the real threat.

It occurred to Hermione in that moment that perhaps Malfoy was more dangerous than she gave him credit for. That despite his inability to cast a Killing Curse, there had to have been other ways he’d managed to demonstrate his strength in order to survive the murderous political cesspool that was the Death Eaters without the threat of his father's protection.

Regrettably, the thought disturbed and thrilled her in equal measure.

“What are you going to do, Draco? Threaten me? Curse me?” Pansy looked genuinely wounded at the prospect, but quickly replaced any hurt she may have been feeling with a feral looking sneer. “Me? All over a mudblood?”

“Would you like to find out?” Malfoy asked Pansy softly, a gentleness to his tone that contradicted the tightly wound promise of volatility in his stance, threatening to burst forth at any moment. “You know everything, don’t you Pansy? Are you quite certain about what I’d do, when pushed?”

Pansy laughed in cold mockery, as if this was the most ridiculous question he could have asked. As if it were the wrong question all together.

“Maybe not. But I do know that when your father finds out you’ve sullied your family name with her, he’ll make sure she’s six feet deep before you can say—”

Before she could finish her suggestion, there was a bolt of red light. Pansy's expression blazed with betrayal as she lost consciousness and toppled over, evidently having misjudged Malfoy’s tolerance for threats.Hermione’s breath caught as Pansy hit the forest floor softly, evidence of a cushioning charm. Malfoy extended his pale hand at her in explanation, gripped around the wand he’d kept hidden in his sleeve. He’d cast non-verbally.

They stood together in the forest for a moment, their silence punctuated by the sharp sounds of insects, brushing wings against each other in the dark. She looked down at the look of accusation frozen on Pansy’s face, and felt a twinge of something— recognition, she thought uncomfortably. After all, wouldn’t she have done the same, if it were Harry? If it were Ron? Perhaps she’d have gone about it differently—probably with a heated lecture, if she were being honest—but concern for one’s loved ones was not rational, nor was it stagnant. It was hot and urgent and insisted to be acted upon, in a manner that often got the best of her.

“You said she can’t remember,” Hermione whispered. “Does that mean…?” She trailed off, allowing the implication to hover between them.

“I would obliviate her myself,” Malfoy said hoarsely, jerking his head towards Pansy. “But given my inexperience, she’d probably wake up permanently affected, and we’d have to explain why Pansy’s forgotten the past six years after a late night stroll.”

Hermione’s hands were unsteady as she drew her wand. To her embarrassment, Malfoy noticed and his mouth tightened into a sharp line. Maybe he didn’t think she could do it.

“Suppose it’s lucky I’ve had practice,” Hermione said quietly, remembering the traumatic circ*mstances under which she’d cast the spell in question for the first time. She closed her eyes, hoping her occlumency was enough to keep memories of her parents under her wand at bay, shelved carefully in the furthest shelf of her mental library.

Above them, the wind rustled through the trees, whispering into the outskirts of the forest.

“Obliviate.” Her hands might have shaken, but her words were soft and certain.

It should have, for all intents and purposes, been simple this time. Casting the charm wasn’t foreign feeling, like the first time with her parents. Hermione knew that she was a natural legilimens now, and had practiced enough that using any offensive mind magic felt like stretching in the sun, after having spent ages huddled in the cold. There were no occlumency barriers to get through in Pansy’s head.

But Hermione had not accounted for the difference in obliviating a magical mind as opposed to a muggle one. Even without occlumency, Pansy’s magic was inherently resistant to the intrusion, and her memories seemed more intense because of it. They had a horrible searing quality to them, like they were too hot to touch. Her thoughts were jumbled and viciously intense, ruled by one emotion over all others: fear.

Some of it was commonplace: fear of rejection, of what others thought of her. Fear of her parents—her mother’s judgment, in particular—and of failing her family name. But also: fear of the changing political climate that threatened both her way of life and the certainty of loss. Of pain and death and the possibility of even worse punishments.

The sheer veracity of Pansy’s emotions made it difficult for Hermione not to get caught in her current, and she struggled, losing grip on the memory she should be extracting, of herself and Malfoy.

When she tried to grasp for it by focusing her efforts on thoughts of him, she was overcome with Pansy’s worry, leaching into each benign memory. Malfoy, hair catching the sun from classroom windows, leaning over to borrow a quill. Spilling a cup of tea in the Slytherin common room, a string of curses falling from his lips as their friends laughed. Grinning while hanging aloft from his broom, as Pansy hollered half-heartedly for him to stop showing off.

Draco at all ages: four, ten, sixteen. Draco with all manner of company: squabbling over homework with Blaise and Theodore, teasing Crabbe and Goyle with merciless glee. Draco in all states: smirking and stony, head thrown back with laughter or pleasure or dismay. Pansy had cataloged them all and kept them close to her heart, so close that she’d unintentionally caught Hermione in them like a fly in a web.

Pansy’s memories of Draco were so closely tied to Theodore Nott that it was impossible for Hermione to ignore the blazing affection and murderous frustration Pansy simultaneously felt towards the pair of boys. She saw that it had always been the three of them, even at Hogwarts, when they’d broken off into more heavily gendered groups of classmates. Pansy maintained troves of dizzying memories of zipping through pink-stained summer skies on Nimbus 2001’s. Elaborate afternoon teas taken on sprawling veradas, served to them by eager, chattering house elves.

Children, Hermione thought, more than slightly unsettled by the realization.

In an effort to stem her discomfort, Hermione pushed away from thoughts of Pansy’s childhood, fighting towards the present. Pansy’s memories of the night in question were wrapped up tightly in thoughts of Theodore: embedded with an inexplicable sensation of dampness, as if underground. Hermione saw fuzzy flashes of a decrepit room, littered from the remnants of half-rotted furniture. There was something reminiscent about the location, an old melody from a song Hermione couldn’t quite remember, but she couldn’t place it before the memory shifted and she was whisked away—

And there it was: Pansy, running through the grounds towards Hagrid’s cabin. Draco’s hair, like a signal flare in the grass. A witch—her—in his lap, her bare skin catching the moonlight. The sensation of being winded with dismay, a stone hurled into a once placid lake. Draco, taking in the offering before him, with a stark hunger on his face. Touching her with the urgency of a dead man, served a final meal. Fear, fear, fear—

No, Hermione thought forcefully, snatching the silver threads that trailed from the memory, pulling them taught. That’s not what you did tonight. She gritted her teeth as she reknit Pansy’s thoughts, an effort like slogging through a river upstream, until finally she had it—

A memory of a stomach ache, drawing green velvet curtains. Gone to bed early. Uneventful. Any other night.

With the last of her mental fortitude, Hermione ripped herself free.

She was no longer suffocating under the opaque smother of the other girl’s memories. She was back in the forest, sucking in night air, trying to desperately staunch the vertigo and nausea that accompanied the transition back into her own consciousness.

“Granger. Granger." A rather attractive voice insisted, grounding her in the present."Did you get it?”

Malfoy’s face bisected her vision as he touched her shoulder, concern marring his sharp features. She turned away, busying herself with replenishing her oxygen levels. Even if she could eventually catch her breath, a look like that might make her loose it again.

“God, her mind is a nightmare,” Hermione gasped in response, extending her fist.

In it, she held a silver strand: Pansy’s memory, curled neatly in her palm. Draco siphoned the strand into a conjured vial, moving to pocket it as Hermione gave a little noise of protest. He glanced at her curiously, a single brow raised.

“Don’t watch it,” Hermione blurted. She felt herself coloring, her cheeks going warm in the cool night. If Malfoy watched the memory as she had, would he be disgusted? Horrified? He wanted her, he’d admitted that much. But he’d never seemed particularly accepting of that admission. In fact, he’d usually been horrified by the fact, acting like it caused him great pain. In the cold light of a sober morning, would he wince at the sight of them together?

“Believe it or not, I didn’t bring a pensieve to Hogwarts in my trunk,” Malfoy assured with an exaggerated dryness, before she could spiral further. “They’re a bit inconvenient for travel.”

He pocketed the memory, slipping the vial into his robes. He wasn’t visibly frazzled like she was; instead, he infuriatingly exuded a rakish sort of confidence, cool and bemused, like he spent all his nights traipsing through the forest with witches he'd seen in states of undress.

She found it a bit difficult to look at him again.

The reality of what they had done hadn’t fully set in yet, leaving her swimming in a palpable uncertainty, still slightly drunk. She didn’t want to think about what it meant. She didn’t know if she could stand to, without entertaining the possibility of having him again. It would force her to wade into the syrupy, fathomless depths of what if.Hermione didn’t have the luxury of being a fool. She knew how anything between them, even a stolen moment like this, would end.

There was something so very doomed about them. It was evident in the urgency of both times they’d come together—first in the Room of Requirement, and then again, in the memory she’d seen in Pansy’s head. The desperation in their touches and caresses, born of the understanding that they were stealing bits of something that could never be theirs. The Slytherin prince and the Gryffindor prefect. The Death Eater and the muggleborn. Friction itself, immovable object meeting unstoppable force.

“I’ll go first,” Hermione finally said, breaking the spell as she nodded up towards the castle, eager to remove himself from the debris of their disastrous— lovely,the traitorous part of her insisted— night. She turned to leave him in the clearing before she could do or say anything stupid.

“I’m sorry,” Malfoy blurted, interrupting her exit, chagrin burning across his cheeks. “About Pansy. I won’t make that mistake again. No one else will ever find out— I mean, not to presume it'll happen again—”

“It’s alright,” Hermione interrupted. She didn’t want to hear Malfoy’s regrets. She was sure to fill in those blanks herself later, while lying awake in solitude, trying not to think of him.

He looked as if he wanted to say more, but sealed his soft lips into a tight line, before carefully levitated the unconscious girl before him and cloaking her body in a disillusionment charm. She couldn’t help but notice how he regarded Pansy with an irritated sort of tenderness, a look that she’d undoubtably given Ron on numerous occasions. A look bred of familiarity, of loyalty. It compelled Hermione to assuage Malfoy’s concerns regarding Pansy’s motivations.

“She didn’t want to inform on you,” Hermione told him. “Not to her father or anyone. She just wanted to keep you alive.” She gave him the barest of smilesin parting. “There are worse things than being worried about.”

She turned and made her way out of the forest, and despite the fact that she couldn’t be seen under her own disillusionment charm, she felt Malfoy’s eyes on her as she made her way quietly towards the stone path, leaving the forest and its many dangers behind her.

It was only once she was slipping silently through the castle's corridors, that she allowed herself to run the events of the night over the hot coals of her mind. The burial, the firewhiskey. Her mouth opening for Malfoy’s frantic, heated kisses. Pansy’s intrusion and the excruciating disarray of her mind, so caught up in Draco and Theodore and—

Hermione stopped midstep, tripping on air. A dimly illuminated portrait of a pair of lambs in a field looked on curiously for the source of the sound, of which they could find none. But Hermione wasn’t paying attention to her surroundings, because the location that had been blurred into Pansy’s memory of this night had suddenly become abundantly clear. She hadn't noticed in the moment, so focused on her task. But the memory had felt familiar for a reason: the dampness of a tunnel, the ruins of a sitting room. A room she’d once trembled in alongside Harry and Ron, while the latter nursed a broken leg. As Peter Pettigrew revealed his deception under the threat of Sirius Black’s wand.

Pansy had not been in bed as she was supposed to have been. She’d found Hermione and Malfoy so quickly because she’d been out after curfew, lurking in the crumbling innards of the Shrieking Shack.

And Theodore Nott had been with her.

Chapter 26: Breached Defenses

Chapter Text

There came a time at the end of the school year, when the library’s population suddenly tripled, filling with hoards of students hounding Madam Pince for reference texts. Claims on the desks and tables, packed by territorial study groups deep in their revising, became worth their weight in galleons. Students with dark smudges under their eyes started to publicly unravel, prone to fits of nerves that often exploded under the merest of pressures: precocious fifth-years preparing for their O.W.L.s burst into stress-induced tears left and right, only rivaled by the near-feral seventh years, who had begun cursing anyone who interrupted N.E.W.T. revision by so much as whispering.

In other words, exams were upon them.

A part of Hermione had—while admittedly not always keeping her head regarding exam stress—at least, always welcomed the pressure: she was not immune to the intoxication of the praise that followed a good performance.

But this year was different because ever since the disastrous night with Malfoy in the woods, Hermione couldn’t focus on anything besides the bloody Slytherins.

She’d taken to studying in empty classrooms, claiming it was to avoid the crowded library; in actuality, she wanted to avoid running into a recently obliviated Pansy and lest she shake loose buried memories. Harry and Ron—and depending on their relationship status any given day, occasionally Lavender—had been accompanying her; that afternoon, Harry was absent, meaning that Hermione was stuck playing third broomstick with Ron and Lavender, who at the moment, were very much on.

Hermione sat at a long desk with her study materials laid out, her glazed stare focusing on her stacks of class notes, which Ron had already descended on like an academically unprepared vulture.For once, even he seemed to be more focused on exams than she was; perhaps because the silence that accompanied revision took her worries and exacerbated them, the lack of distractions proving very distracting indeed.

Instead of preparing for Snape’s indubitably nasty Defense exam— which the slippery Professor had threatened could contain a practical section, where they’d have to silently deflect Unforgivables—all she could do was run the facts of the current predicament over and over in her head:

Theodore Nott had been tasked by Voldemort to kill the Headmaster, who seemed not only aware of this but bizarrely calm regarding the situation. Dumbledore likely had a reason for his complacency that she was not privy to, but how could Hermione simply ignore the fact that Nott was lurking around the Shrieking Shack during Hogsmeade visits and in the dead of night, with Pansy as his accomplice? And then there was Malfoy…

Where did Malfoy fall? Dumbledore’s spy. Voldemort’s failed assassin. Desperate to remove his mother from the Dark Lord’s reach. Free of the servitude of the Dark Mark. Bound to her out of some misplaced sense of —she blushed at the thought—devotion.

And then, there was the other concern: the way she had twice now succumbed to the part of herself that insisted it breathed best when sharing air with Draco Malfoy. He made her feel so wretchedly out of control, took her good sense and put a stake through its heart. Turned her body to kindling, and then set it alight. She hated him for it, and she inexplicably wanted him anyway: under her hands, and on her lips, and in her bed.

“—Hermione? Are you listening?” Ron had packed up his materials, and he and Lavender were standing over the desk where she sat, watching her with faint concern. She’d been staring off into the distance with her chin in her palm, a grave look in her eyes and an incriminating flush on her face. “We’re heading to dinner, you coming?”

“In a moment,” Hermione responded, sounding a bit strained. She cleared her throat, reaching to organize her parchment before returning it to her bag. “Go on ahead, I’ll catch up.”

“Are you alright?” Ron asked, co*cking his head to one side. “You seem a bit off.”

“It’s probably just exam stress,” she offered, voice pitched slightly higher than normal. “I’m fine.”

“If you’re sure,” Ron hesitated, and Lavender cleared her throat, nudging him along.

“She’s sure, Ronald,” her roommate shot her a commiserating eye roll as if to say, boys. “Weren’t you going to show me that thing on the way to dinner anyway?”

“Huh?” Ron said in a demonstration of unparalled eloquence, turning to his girlfriend in confusion. “What are you on about?”

Lavender lifted her brows pointedly.

“That thing, behind the celestial tapestry in the West Tower?” Lavender insinuated heavily, and Hermione rolled her eyes, picking up what she was so obviously putting down. “You were dying to show me it last night, remember? ”

Understanding dawned on Ron’s face and he flushed at the thought of whatever he and Lavender had been up to the previous evening, knowledge that Hermione would pay good galleons to never, ever be privy to.

“Oh, right—yeah, last night. The tapestry.” He grabbed Lavender’s hand, nearly yanking her out of the classroom in his eagerness. “Ta, Hermione!”

“Eugh,” Hermione offered in response, waving them off. “Animals, the both of you.”As she packed up her belongings, Hermione couldn’t help but imagine what it would feel like, to have Malfoy someone to yank into alcoves, to dishevel as often and freely as she wanted.What did Malfoy even want from her? She wondered. He looked at Hermione like he hated her (and had told her as much, on multiple occasions). But also, like he wanted to swallow her whole. Like she was a salvation that he would never deserve.

Would he come, if she beckoned? Would she claim him, if he offered himself to her?And if they acted on it, would they only be guaranteeing certain pain, the cost for a brief taste of pleasure? There was a plethora of cautionary tales noting the dangers of caving to such desires. She’d be a fool to ignore their warnings: look at Paris and Helen, willing to doom entire nations for the uncertain promise of something that, in the right light, looked like love?

Her esoteric preoccupations were no match to the realistic ones: should they ever attempt to be together, in whatever capacity that could entail, in what world would they ever be accepted by both his echelons of society and hers?How could they ever be anything but a temporary secret, a loss she might quietly lament years down the road, but never dare vocalize?

The classroom door swung on its hinges, banging into the castle wall with tremendous force. Immediately, all thoughts of Malfoy dissipated in favor of sheer adrenaline; she had her wand in her hand, pointed to cast before she realized it was just Harry.

“Hello you," she greeted. "Where have you been?”

Harry looked highly distressed, his usually messy hair notably askew. His brow and mouth were drawn tight in fury, and there was a light in his eyes she recognized from seeing him duel.

“It was Snape,” Harry spat, his eyes narrowed into slivers of bright green. He was panting for breath, clearly having run there.“He’s the one who overheard the prophecy. He’s the one who told Voldemort. He’s the one who led him to them, who killed my parents.”

“What?” Hermione asked, gaping. “How do you—”

“Trelawney told me,” Harry paced the length of the room, his fists balled up. “I bumped into her out on the grounds. She kept talking about how she heard the ghosts in the Shrieking laughing, and that she went down to offer them their ascent or something, but it seemed like an excuse to get pissed at the Three Broomsticks to me. I reckon she didn’t mean to tell me about Snape, she just mentioned that he was listening at the door when she interviewed for the job with Dumbledore in the inn above the Broomsticks.The night she made the prophecy."

All roads, Hermione thought, led back to Severus Snape. She remembered with sudden clarity about the figure that Dumbledore had mentioned in his office when explaining his motivations regarding Draco: a young servant of Lord Voldemort…concerned over the safety and wellbeing of his beloved, a muggleborn witch…instructed by his master to spy… until his efforts implicated the very woman he sought to protect.

It had been Snape, who was sent to spy by Voldemort, and the muggleborn witch he’d cared for… that was Harry’s mum, Lily Evans. She was the potions prodigy that Slughorn had referenced in those first class sessions, and Snape—the Half-Blood Prince himself— had to have been her unknown partner. She was the witch he’d attempted to teach occlumency to, the witch whose fate Snape had used as a warning for Hermione. How surreal it must have been for him, watching herself and Draco, like a pair of ghosts animated just to recreate Severus Snape’s biggest regret.

“—and then Dumbledore bloody hired him to teach here. He let Snape teach children after he SENT VOLDEMORT TO KILL MY MUM AND DAD—” Harry ranted, his broken voice ricocheting up to the classroom ceilings. He shook his head wildly, like a wet dog. “He’s going to have to look me in the eye and admit to it. I don’t care if he’s the bloody Headmaster or not.”

“Harry, please slow down. You can’t just go barrelling into Dumbledore’s office,” Hermione pleaded, well aware that she’d recently done that very thing.

“Good f*cking thing that I have a standing appointment then,” Harry snorted, removing a note from his pocket and shoving it her way to read. It was in Dumbledore’s hand, asking Harry to accompany him off the Hogwarts grounds that evening to handle a matter of utmost secrecy. Accompany him off the grounds…Hermione didn’t like the sound of that. Not one bit.

“Do you think he’s found one?” Hermione whispered. “A horcrux?”

“Yeah,” Harry admitted. He looked ashen at the thought, his anger momentarily put on hold. “I do. And he’s letting me come help destroy it.”

“Harry— ”

“Don’t look at me like that, Hermione. Dumbledore’s a right git, but there’s a reason that he’s the only wizard Voldemort ever feared. I’ll be back.” He gave her a wry smile that didn’t quite reach his bottle green eyes. “I always come back.”

Hermione felt her heart fill with foreboding, the uncanny sense that she was sending a boy off to war. She watched her friend leave, beseeching any higher power that would listen to deliver him safely back to the castle.

"Give him hell, then," she said, offering him a weak smile of her own. Afterwaiting until he’d departed, she hastily gathered her school bag, setting off in the opposite direction as quickly as she could manage.

Harry learned that Snape was at least in part responsible for the deaths of his parents, and while that information was shocking, something else that he’d said stood out to Hermione, made her gut clench with an urgent suspicion, demanding that she look.

Trelawney had heard laughter in the Shrieking Shack and assumed it was the work of obstreperous ghosts. But what if the noise hadn’t been otherworldly? What if the laughter had been celebratory and whatever Theodore Nott was doing in the Shrieking Shack on Voldemort’s behalf was succeeding? The last time Nott had attempted a plan, it had almost killed Ron. Who else would be caught in Nott’s crossfire, if Hermione did not stop him, and who else would know how to stop him but Malfoy?

She knew that if she called through the bond, if she focused on her feeling of distress—on needing him—Malfoy would come. She didn’t know if it would work the other way.

Where are you? She thought, as she screwed her eyes shut, trying to trace her magic back to some faintly glowing pinpoint. She thought of him as vividly as she could, picturing the lilt of his lips, as his mouth twisted into a smirk. His long fingers and slender wrists peeking out from shirtsleeves, which were always neatly done up with cufflinks. The way he said her surname with his lovelyobnoxiously posh enunciations. His quick mind and sharp tongue, which impressed her as much as he annoyed her. The way his eyes went from slate gray to something brighter, nearly metallic, when he was intrigued.

There was something. A quiet presence, rejoicing in her attentions. Here, it seemed to call, like it had been waiting for her to reach towards it. Come here.

Where? She asked, and she could feel the answering tug, pulling her mind and body towards an unknown destination. Here, Malfoy'smagic insisted.

The feeling led Hermione out of the castle, onto the grounds in the direction of the Whomping Willow. It was that strange time of day that bordered dusk, when she could see both the last rays of sunlight and the pale hint of the waning crescent moon against the darkening sky. She hoped that she wasn’t too late and Malfoy wasn’t already inside, facing off with Nott, or worse, helping him.

She was just rounding the Quidditch Pitch when she felt him. Close, his magic hummed, intertwining itself with hers. She closed her eyes in focus, trying to envision the feeling correctly: two bits of silver thread, twisting together until they were inextricably tangled. Come closer.

“You’re going to get yourself killed, you daft witch.”

She opened her eyes.

Malfoy stood tall in front of her, wearing his typical cloak and sneer. It seemed artificially pasted on: if she looked closer, she could see the tightness around his eyes, the barely notable tremor of his left hand from where it hung at his side. Telling her that he knew something was occurring tonight, and that he was dreading it.

“Malfoy,” Hermione called, and that was all she managed before he had a hand wrapped around her wrist and a finger to his lips, steering her behind the small stone structure that held the pitch’s locker rooms, constructed of concentric, dry-stone walls that had been overtaken by lichen and moss.

“You can’t be out here, Granger,” he scolded, releasing her arm once they were sufficiently tucked into the shadows. “Go back up to your tower and stay there.”

“I know about Nott,” Hermione replied bluntly, the admission severe enough to strike the annoyance off Malfoy’s sharp features. “I know that whatever he’s been planning in the Shrieking Shack is happening. Tonight.”

“Of course you do.” Malfoy lifted his hands pressing his palms into his eyes, as if trying to sink them past his sockets and further into his skull. “Why would I ever think that you could avoid seeking out impending danger?”

“What’s he going to do?” Hermione demanded, urgent. “Dumbledore’s away from the castle—” She cut herself off, unsure of how much she should share. This was Malfoy, who was bound to her by blood and magic, old and new. Then again, this was Malfoy.

“Nott’s planned a distraction,” Malfoy admitted, voice pitched low. He spoke very quickly, as if time was of the essence. “He’s found a way to get reinforcements into the castle to put on a bit of a show, draw out any defenses.”

“The Shack,” Hermione confirmed, wondering how he’d done it. “He’s smuggling in Death Eaters using the tunnel under the Whomping Willow.” The Willow had acted as a protection over that entrance to the grounds ever since the Shack had housed Remus Lupin on full moons, all those decades ago. She highly doubted Theodore Nott had become an animagus like the Marauders, as he’d never had more than average marks in Transfiguration. Then how had he stumbled upon the entrance without being beaten to a pulp by the tree?

“Yes,” Malfoy confirmed darkly. “But that’s just the diversion. Nott is going to be lying in wait for Dumbledore.”

Hermione’s heart almost stopped when she took in the stark look in Malfoy’s eyes. The resigned way he spoke of Nott’s plan.

“You knew,” Hermione realized, her voice brimming with accusation. “You knew what he was planning for tonight. You’re helping him, aren’t you?”

Malfoy said nothing, confirming her suspicions.

“After all that." She shook her head in disbelief, gesturing to his left forearm. "You’ll still go crawling back to them?”

“I’m warning you, aren’t I?” He snapped. “Risking my neck, mind you—”

“Yes, warning me. That’s about all you’re good for, isn’t it?” Hermione cried, her voice carrying across the grounds before Malfoy could shush her. “You warned me about my parents last summer. You warned me at the Christmas party, about Nott. When will you do something about it?”

“I am doing something!” Malfoy roared, a fury emanating from him that could level houses. “I’m doing everything I can to keep this all from going up in flames!”

“What about Dumbledore?” Hermione accused. “Are you just going to step out of Nott’s way, and let him try and kill the Headmaster?”

“Dumbledore is dying anyway,” Malfoy said. “I told you— that’s a blood curse, Granger. He’s going to kick the bucket either way. If Theo’s the one to do it, at least one of them stays alive.”

“So you think that if Dumbledore kicks the bucket, as you so respectfully put it, you’ll be free of your end of the bargain? Won’t have to spy on your friends for the Order anymore?”

Malfoy looked stricken by this; they had never addressed what she’d discussed weeks ago with the Headmaster in his office.

“You didn’t realize I knew that you agreed to be Dumbledore’s inside man, did you?” She continued, harshly mocking. “He told me you took the plea deal, but now I’m thinking that maybe you never intended to honor it in the first place. You conveniently didn’t request an unbreakable vow for that.”

“The Headmaster failed to uphold his end of our agreement,” Malfoy argued, regaining some of his ire. “My mother is still in the Manor, and her magic is still eating her alive from within. Why should I uphold mine?”

“You can’t just pick and choose who deserves to live and die based on the way the wind blows regarding your own interests, Malfoy. That’shorrible. ”

“Then I’m horrible,” Malfoy spit back. “I won’t apologize for trying to survive this, and making sure the very few people who actually give a sh*t about me survive it, too. I could give two troll pricks about Dumbledore. He’d certainly offer my life for the greater good— he basically already did, when he asked me to play spy.” He grimaced at the thought, mouth twisting into a bitter frown. “Dumbledore knew that I’d hang for it if I was caught, and that was a risk he was more than willing to take.”

Hermione could not defend this. The Headmaster had so much as told her that any consequence would be shouldered, in favor of the greater good. It was the rationale he offered for all those sacrificed before Malfoy, and all who would be sacrificed after.

“What about me? ” Hermione asked. Her voice didn’t waver, but she felt her pulse skip uncertainly, as if her body wasn’t sure why her heart was beating in the first place. Malfoy winced at her phrasing, but she continued speaking as if he hadn’t. “I still have a vow in place to help you and your mother. Haven’t you realized? I’m Dumbledore’s contingency plan. He didn’t fall through on his promise. He gave you me as your own personal guarantee.”

“Granger, I—”

“I’m not like you, Malfoy. I’m always going to fight. I can’t just sit this war out, and the thing you haven’t realized is, you can’t either. You’re not exempt from Voldemort anymore, not after we severed your connection to the Dark Mark. And if you do this, if you help Nott kill Dumbledore, you won’t be safe from the Order, and instead of fighting one war, you’ll be fighting two. There’s no more riding the fence. It’s time to choose a bloody side already and get on with it.”

Having finished her impassioned speech, she crossed her arms, as if to say,well? Malfoy had a very strange expression on his face, as if she’d missed something glaringly obvious.

“You don’t think I’ve chosen?” Malfoy asked, moving quickly enough to cage her in against the mossy wall with his shoulders. Her pulse jumped from fear or anticipation or a demented combination of the two. He rested his forearms on either side of her body, pressing himself right up against her before she could protest. Forehead to forehead, his chest nearly brushing against hers.

“I suppose it didn’t feel like much of a choice at all,” he murmured, words delicate against her cheek. “More like something that happened to me. The bond between us made me sick at first. You and your magic, all good and golden, infiltrating every part of me like some sort of disease. You have no idea how jarring it felt, not just when you were afraid, but when you wanted something and I could sense how badly. You were so insistent. Needy. You didn’t even realize how you were yanking me around.” His mouth quirked. “Maybe that’s why I didn’t mind, because you clearly didn’t mean to. It made me feel powerful to be the one your magic called for when you felt fear or disappointment or pain—not Potter, not Weasley. Me. When I realized I could do something about it—crush the source of your misery, give you what you wanted— it was intoxicating. Before I knew it, you had me dizzy and drunk and in the palm of your hand.”

Malfoy didn’t give her a chance to digest this confession, just pushed closer, and she shivered under the pressure of his solid form. To her delight horror, she could feel him hard against her stomach.

“You have no idea, the effect you have on me,” he said raggedly, punctuating his statement with a brush of his hips. She gasped at the contact. He removed his hands from either side of her on wall in order to cradle her face, a gesture that felt far more territorial than it did gentle. “You could ask me to slit my own throat, and I’d do it. It’s too late to even entertain the possibility of choice.”

“What are you saying, Malfoy?” Hermione whispered, terrified of his answer. He made a noise of distaste at the sound of his surname.

“I don’t know when I started hating it when you called me that,” he admitted, tracing her cheekbones with his thumbs. She wet her lips and his eyes followed the dart of her pink tongue with an overt hunger.

“Draco,” Hermione said instead. His name sounded like begging.

A dam broke. He kissed her.

It wasn’t the time or place for it. Her world was on the precipice of destruction, but for a moment, Hermione didn’t care, because Draco Malfoy had his tongue in her mouth and his hands in his hair. She went soft under him, letting him have her, and he seemed to sense her supplication and delight in it: touching her more roughly than he had before, kissing her past breathless. His hands were urgent and everywhere—fingers trailing her neck, brushing the underside of her breast, hitching around the side of her thigh to pull her flush against him— trying to take as much of her as he could, while he could, as if he thought she’d push him away. She didn’t.

It was only when she felt dangerously light headed that he finally drew back, giving her only enough room to gasp over his shoulder for air. He was muttering something unintelligible. It took her a minute to be able to make out the words.

“Just wanted to,” he was saying into her hair. “One more time. Couldn’t not let myself. Won’t apologize.”

Hermione inhaled sharply, sliding her hands between them, placing them on his chest. Thinking she was pushing him away, Draco went to step back, but she reached up and caught his collar, pulling him down to her eye level.

“You’ve made your choice?” She asked, needing to hear it again. “You’re sure?”

His eyes went dark, golden lashes fluttering from strain, as if it were taking an enormous amount of strength to keep himself from touching her as he’d like to again.

“Of course I have, Granger. Use your head— where do you think I’ll be more useful? Playing soldiers with Potter? Why would I add protection to the defenses of your left, if it left your right vulnerable?”

She’d misjudged him. Draco Malfoy wasn’t throwing his lot in with the Death Eaters, in defiance of Dumbledore. He wasn’t leaving Dumbledore to die out of apathy, and he wasn’t trying to save himself. He was being terribly, life-threateningly clever. Positioning himself strategically, just as the Headmaster had wanted.

Somehow, even while being aware of the chessboard, they’d both played right into his strategy.

“I can protect myself,” Hermione replied angrily, releasing him with a little shove. “As you pointed out— spies get killed, Draco.”

He braced one hand on the wall so he could lean towards her. “Say it again,” he murmured. “Just once more.”

“Spies get killed,” she offered obstinately, stopping his advances with a single finger to the chest. He scowled, opening his mouth to retort, when they heard it: the unmistakable sound of a howl. Too human to be wolflife, too wolflike to be human.

Hermione blanched, hot bursts of fear flooding her veins. Draco looked at her with wild eyes, and she knew he could feel it too. Her terror, manifest.

“f*ck,” Draco said, voice cracking open. He laced his hands behind his head, yanking the hair at his scalp. “f*ck, I was supposed to have at least two hours. They shouldn't be here yet.”

His panic ricocheted up, palpable between them, and he glanced back and forth between her and the castle, doing some internal calculations. Appraising her, his expression smoothing from terror into something cold and blank. A natural occlumens at work.

“Have you ever been in a duel with Death Eaters, Granger?” Draco asked. Sizing her up, as if he could instruct her at the last minute.

“Yes,” Hermione answered shakily. “The Department of Mysteries.”

“And did you hold your own?”

She thought of Dolohov’s curse, how it knocked her clean from her own consciousness. She'd woke disoriented days later, in the hospital with her chest radiating near-unbearable pain.

“Erm,” she contemplated honestly. “Nearly died.”

“f*ck!” He said for the third time, wincing like he’d been punched in the stomach. “I don’t know how many…at least six, and they have Greyback…”

Greyback? Hermione thought, realizing the source of the howls with no small degree of horror. Theo had brought Greyback onto the castle grounds as a diversion? If Nott wasn’t killed tonight, Hermione would insist on doing the honors herself.

“I won’t be able to keep any sort of cover up, not if it’s just the two of us. I'm not going to just watch you get cursed. You could run and hide, but what are the chances they won’t find you? There’s not enough luck in the world…” He trailed off again. “We’re completely and utterly f*cked.”

Think, she urged herself, closing her eyes and slamming her occlumency gates shut. The Death Eaters were already here, but what were the problems that she could actually solve? It was just the two of them and there wasn’t enough luck…

With shaking hands, she reached for her discarded bookbag and dumped out the contents, digging around for her D.A. galleon. She tapped her wand on the coin, spelling out the message Death Eaters on the grounds, hoping desperately that reinforcements would come when called. In an inner pocket, there was a vial of golden liquid, three-quarters full. She reached out in order to hand it to Malfoy, who looked at her dumbfounded.

“It’s Felix Felicis,” she explained. “Drink it. Now. ”

“Don’t waste this on me, Granger,” he insisted, swatting her hand away. “Drink it yourself.”

They didn't have time to argue, and so she huffed, "fine" in false acquiescence, swigged from the vial, then pulled him down by the collar, pressing her lips to his. Instinctually, he opened his mouth against her, and she spit what she hoped to be half of the mouthful down his throat, reaching up to pinch his nose in order to make him swallow.

“You….you treacherous littlegoblin!” Draco spluttered, and Hermione ignored his pejorative objection to wipe an errant drop from the side of his lips with her finger, sucking it into her mouth. Witches got the last drop, she thought, in tribute to the last night they’d spent together on the grounds.

In the distance, there was another howl, and a terribly familiar screeching laugh, the sound carried by the wind.

She met his eyes and promised herself that it wouldn’t be the last time she looked at him like this. It couldn’t be. She’d not allow it. In turn,Draco slid a hand up her neck and into her hair, pulling her into a brief, bruising kiss. He tasted of liquid luck and preemptive farewells.

When she drew back, he tapped the crown of her head with his wand, the cool sensation of a disillusionment charm trickling down her spine. He was awfully clever, her Slytherin.

"Don't be a hero, alright Granger?"

Even though he could no longer see her, he afforded himself one last glance backwards, before running towards the fight.

Chapter 27: In Cold Blood

Chapter Text

The Whomping Willow stood eerily frozen, the barrage of its vicious branches temporarily halted. The stillness as ominous as any warning.

The gentle, nighttime quiet that once hovered over Hogwarts had been torn to shreds by a dozen Death Eaters, reigning destruction, fighting their way ferociously across the grounds. Their faces were covered by dark hoods and chilling silver masks, wrought to resemble bone. Although she couldn't tell them apart, Hermione could hear Bellatrix Lestrange's cackle, a sound like nails on slate.The only other figure she recognized was an enormous man with a markedly predatory gait. He wasn’t in Death Eater regalia, but clad in shabby clothing: an old overcoat and a torn and stained shirt, unbuttoned to show an impossibly broad chest covered in wiry black hair. Under a flash of wandlight, Hermione caught a glimpse of his face: savage eyes and a cruel mouth, his teeth bared in an expression that was more fitting for a beast than a man.

She clenched her fist until her nails drew blood from her palm. Nott had let Fenrir Greyback into Hogwarts.How had he done it? How had he known about the secret tunnel that led from the Shrieking Shack, led the Death Eaters onto the grounds?

The Death Eaters had been unprepared for any resistance. It had been their one advantage, the element of surprise allowing for the former members of Dumbledore’s Army that had answered Herminoe’s call to keep the threat momentarily at bay. Hermione caught glimpses of Ginny and Neville, fighting back to back. Luna, looking terribly young, her blond hair swinging as she covered Ron, who was spewing a stream of filthy swearing as he fought. It was a nightmare snatched directly from her nightly reenactments of the Department of Mysteries. They were being quickly overpowered, barely dodging injury or worse: there could only be so many missed killing curses, before one found its mark.

Hopped up on fear and adrenaline, Hermione had jumped into a fight without a sure plan, just Felix Felicis’ influence, insisting she act. The potion had a strange, invigorating effect: Felix made her fight like herself, but better. Her thoughts were clear and certain, missing her usual hint of self-doubt. The part of her that questioned her own decision making, that caused her hesitation, was restrained, duct taped in the closet of her mind. Every spell she cast seemed brighter, more powerful, streaming from her wand with the voracity of a locomotive. If Hermione weren’t in such a dangerous situation, she would have found the power of it all completely intoxicating. But she was, in fact, in danger. They all were.

Split them up, the golden voice of liquid luck urged, pulling strategy effortlessly from her potion-sharpened memory: a passage from a book on the Napoleonic Wars that she’d read eons ago. Divide and conquer .

Hermione, eager to get a pair of cloaked figures away from a panting Neville, flung a round of seemingly origin-less stunners that purposefully missed their marks, sending a pair of cloaked figures roaring in surprise.She thanked any and every higher power, and Felix twice, for the fact Malfoy had the foresight to disillusion her.

“Someone else’s here,” the shorter of them cried, looking around for the source of the spell, and the pair gave chase just as she hoped they would.

The taller one rounded off a killing curse that missed Hermione by a breath. Keep moving, the voice ordered, and Hermione skidded in the opposite direction, sending another round of red jets over her shoulder in an attempt to create the illusion of multiple points of attack, and thus multiple invisible opponents. The back and forth went on for minutes or eternities—time distorted, while dueling— before one of them finally caught on, casting a finite that shattered the disillusionment charm, revealing Hermione’s solitary existence to her opponents.

Make yourself big, the voice advised. A threat. She squared her shoulders, drew herself up to her full height—which admittedly wasn’t much—and flung her mane of curls behind her, bracing herself for a fight.

“It’s the mudblood,” the shorter man who’d spoken first called excitedly. “Get Bella—”

Stop him, the voice instructed, and the Death Eatercut off in a garbled scream, unable to finish his instruction as Hermione’s hyper-precise severing charm sent blood streaming from his mouth. His tongue fell silently into the grass. Hermione’s stomach lurched, as the Death Eater fell, clawing at the ground in search of his severed flesh, choking horribly on blood as he went. She thought she might be sick.

There can be no mercy for the merciless, the liquid luck reminded her, now, move.

The other Death Eater was both more competent and more vicious in his dueling: his curses only barely missed her, shot a little too high or wide out of sheer luck. Based on the color of the spells and the scorch marks left in their path, she gathered that this was dark complex magic, not the introductory dueling spells they were taught at school. On the defensive, she shot spells back until she wasn’t Hermione anymore: she was pure instinct personified, a pattern woven entirely of duck, roll, cast, run. Two Unforgivables flew in rapid succession under her chin and by her ear; she deflected one and dove to avoid the other, landing in a painful roll.

Hermione was on her knees, struggling to get back on her feet, as her opponent advanced through the blanket of fog, only stopping once he stood over her. His cloaked silhouette was framed by the mist and the cold night sky, giving off the effect that she was being approached by a spectre of death, itself.

“Hello, mudblood,” the second Death Eater said, pronouncing the slur with perfect, sharp elocution. It was terribly familiar. “It’s been—well, almost a year, hasn’t it? How coincidental that the Dark Lord has orchestrated this little reunion.” The man pulled off his silver mask, revealing sharp features and familiar gray eyes, more haunted than she’d seen them last.

“You,” Hermione croaked, as Lucius Malfoy looked down on her with icy fury, his thin lips pulled up in a cruel smile.

Lucius looked like a thin ghost of his former ostentatious self. A year in Azkaban had taken the vestiges of youth from his face, creating pronounced worry lines between his brows and in the corners of his mouth. He’d lost weight, creating a hollow effect around his eyes and sharpening his cheekbones into a razor’s edge. His skin had the sallow, waxen quality of a corpse.

“Yes,” Lucius agreed amicably, as if they were taking tea together. “Me.” He raised his wand. “The Dark Lord thought I wouldn't be a useful addition to this effort, so soon after my imprisonment, but I insisted. You see,I’ve been rather looking forward to this. Don’t scream too loudly, now. I wouldn’t want to wake the rest of the castle.”

Left, Felix insisted, and she rolled in that direction without thinking. Lucius’ Cruciatus curse only brushed her, but even an indirect hit was excruciating: she felt her teeth in her skull as every bone on the right side of her body exploded with pain, her nervous system short circuiting. She understood all at once how prolonged exposure to this curse could drive a wizard to madness: there was no sharper blade than direct, unbearable pain.

The sensation subsided, but not quickly enough.Fighting through the aftershocks, Hermione tried futilely to disarm Lucius, but he only laughed and swiped the spell away, as if waving off a pest. He bent to her level, his profile backlit by screams and bursts of light as the fight carried on a short distance from them, close enough to hear but too far away for anyone to see her in danger and come to her aid. He co*cked his head, watching in amusem*nt as she scrambled back from him, desperately trying to get away.

“Nowhere to run.” Lucius strode forward and kicked her in the chest, sending her body crumpling to the ground. He placed a polished dragonhide boot directly on her windpipe and pressed until she stilled. “If you’d been raised in polite society, you’d know it is terribly impolite to attempt escape while your betters are addressing you. Did your filthy muggle parents not teach you that in the sty?” He clucked in false dismay, removing his foot and pinning her in a wordless body-bind with a flick of his wrist. Her limbs froze in response, leaving her paralyzed from the neck down, effectively powerless before him.

Anger reared its head, coiling around her heart and constricting at the mention of her parents. How dare he mention them. Every cell in her body fought the paralysis, pushing for her to spring up and attack, to cause the cold light to fetter out behind his bloodshot eyes.

"I'm going to kill you." Her words were hoarse, each syllable creating a horrible tearing sensation in her throat.

“Oh, are you?" Lucius asked dryly, nudging her frozen form with the tip of his boot. "You’ve caused me quite the headache. Haven’t you, dear?” Somehow his use of the endearment was even more terrifying than when he called her slurs. “First with your mad dash in the Department of Mysteries, then again with your daring little escape from my son last summer. He was punished terribly for it. Luckily for Draco, that wasn’t a complete loss— your parents weren’t quite as lucky, were they? Did Draco kill them first, or did he let them burn alive?”

“If your son was going to be punished on anyone’s behalf,” Hermione rasped, the strain of the words tearing at her crushed trachea. “I’d imagine it would be yours.”

Rage flashed across Lucius’ pale face; she’d clearly salted a wound. She’d be more satisfied by this, if it didn’t all but guarantee the Malfoy patriarch’s wrath.

“There’s that mudblood disrespect, again.” Lucius tutted, shaking his head. “I’ve come to believe poor breeding can’t even be beaten out of your kind, but I’m always eager to test the theory. Would you like to be the one to prove me wrong?” He cracked his knuckles in preparation, before lifting his wand once more. “ Crucio! ”

At close range, the Cruciatus curse felt like all the worst things that had ever happened to Hermione at once: every broken bone, ever singe of a hot pan or burn of an iron, every splitting headache, every hex to the chest. It was Dolohov's curse times a hundred, dark magic lighting her her body up with agony at ever pulse point. The heart pang of every rejection, every death, every goodbye. And on top, a pain she didn’t recognize, but would never forget, burning through her nerves like wildfire. All of it at once and everywhere.

Breathe, Felix insisted, and her chest contracted instinctually. Survive.

Somewhere, someone was screaming. It was only when the curse subsided and she felt the ache in her damaged throat that she realized it was her.

Lucius was crouched next to her, radiating satisfaction. He reached out and grasped her jaw, tilting her limp head to level her line of sight directly at him. Making it so that she was powerless to look away, a final cruelty.

“Once again, I have to clean up Draco’s mess." Lucius sighed. "Regretfully, you escaped because I raised my son to be foolish enough to demonstrate either weakness or mercy, admittedly a mishap on my part, allowing Cissa to soften him so. But I suppose there’s always room for a corrective learning opportunity—and you’ll be a lesson he won’t soon forget.” Lucius stared at Hermione. His eyes darkened, glinting like scarab beetles. “Goodbye, mudblood.”

She still couldn’t move, the body-bind trapping her, the Cruciatus weakening her magic. Lucius’ gray eyes glinted, like sea-dampened stones.

He looks like Draco, Hermione thought, and the association hurt more than she’d expected it to. She fluttered her eyes shut.

“Avada —” Lucius snarled, the curse half off his tongue.

Survive, the golden voice insisted. If you can’t use your wand, use your mind.

She snapped her eyes open.

Legilimens, Hermione thought, and even though she was wandless and trembling with aftershocks, she felt her magic respond, a strong and faithful presence. The remaining liquid luck in her veins fortified her, as if strengthening her efforts with gilded support beams. She felt herself cutting through the flimsy wards of Lucius Malfoy's mind; he did not have the impenetrable mental occlumency fortress Draco did, evidence that his son's talent for mind magic was definitively inherited from the Black side of his lineage. With no firm defenses in her path,Hermione’s natural inclination for legilimency sparked to life, eager for the opportunity to stretch its legs. It felt like unbridling a horse that had been itching to run, her mind clearing fences and bolting into new pastures. Lucius’ defenses crumbled like chalk against the voracity of her assault, as she cut into his memories with searing precision.

What a demonstration of hubris, to insist she watch as he killed her. Not even entertaining the possibility someone as pedestrian as her could have this weapon in their arsenal.

With no clear objective in mind, Hermione was greeted by flashes of a dismally gray prison cell, an opulent office filled with dark wood, a manor proudly jutting from the misty English countryside. This mind was nothing like Pansy’s crazed, feeling-forward hellscape. No, Lucius had the emotional sensibility of a bloodthirsty autocrat, his thoughts and feelings just as cold and controlled as his demeanor.

The primary sensation of his memories was a very specific kind of anger: Lucius was enraged, Hermione realized, because as of recently, he had not received what he thought he was owed: complete and utter control. The memories that were tinged with glimpses of humanity—emotions like fear, or uncertainty— were overpowered by the stubborn insistence that he should be too powerful to fear and too influential to be uncertain. It was a ghastly, selfish, tyrannical way of thinking.

The Malfoy patriarch struggled weakly against her magic, twisting away from the intrusion, and Hermione flexed her legilimency instinctually, throwing him from his own head into the unconscious, a pit of nothingness. She imprisoned him there as she entered his more precious memories: a scene of Narcissa, trembling in a mirror as she brushed her hair with a brush rather than using a wand. The memory was impregnated with Lucius’ longing for his wife, which was at war with his disgust at the state of Narcissa's uncooperative magic, his horror that the Lady of Malfoy Manor had been practically reduced to a Squib.

The memory shifted: they were in an opulent entrance hall, all cold marble and gilded frames. Lucius Malfoy was towering over a child version of Draco, dried tear tracks on his face.I won’t raise a weak heir, a younger, more handsome Lucius in his late twenties or early thirties, quietly insisted. He flicked his wand and a jet of green light was directed to where a twitching bird lay on the marble floor between them.

Outrage coursed through her, the emotion her own this time, at the sight of the younger blond boy, kneeling before his father, forcibly stopping himself from interfering as the bird stilled. Look what he’s done to his son, Hermione thought, his son, and she didn’t feel bad for pushing his consciousness into the pit, for drowning him in the dark emptiness. He deserved worse than suffering, for what he'd done to Draco. He deserved nothingness.

Could she trap Lucius there permanently? Leave his ego submerged, his eyes rolled into his head, as if he’d been kissed by a dementor. She tried forcing his conscious down, kicking him further into the abyss—

“Hermione! ” A familiar voice, disorienting her, impeded her efforts. She felt as if she were underwater, hearing cloudy and muffled. “Hang on!”

She felt something touch her body: a hand around her wrist, dragging her up to the surface. At the contact, her legilimency faltered and she was ripped free.

The air was heavy with moisture, carrying the scent of damp earth and decaying leaves. She gasped for breath, bewildered by her sudden return to the castle grounds. Ron was shaking her shoulder desperately, a terrified look on his freckled face. Stars exploded behind him, bits of light blurring her vision.

Sight impaired, she could only identify the blurry movement of a threat as Lucius Malfoy came to, immediately attempting retaliation from his crumpled position.

“Behind—” She tried to warn, but nothing came out as her lips moved.

Wandlessly, Lucius sent a slicing jinx Ron’s way, only narrowly missing his throat. It whistled past his face, catching Hermione on her upper arm, soaking her sleeve with blood.That is going to scar, Hermione thought absently, still hovering slightly outside of herself. Ron turned to where his attacker was struggling upwards, and spat directly into his face.

"Here you go, you mangy old git," Ron said and delivered a swift kick to Lucius Malfoy's head, knocking the wizard out cold, before returning his attentions to her.

“Hermione,” Ron said again, cupping her cheeks. His hands were damp and warm. Noting her wound, he released her face in order to staunch the flow with his sleeve. “What did that bastard do to you? You were just twitching on the floor and I thought…” He trailed off, complexion ashen from worry.

“Cru—” she tried explaining, but coughed painfully until she caught her breath, her ribs screaming for reprieve. “It’s okay,” she finally managed, wheezing. “I’m okay.”

With Ron’s help, she struggled to her knees. There was still fighting going on around them, but she noticed new figures on the battlefield, taking over fights for her bloodied, haggard looking friends. The Order had arrived, Hermione realized with some relief, her shoulders slumping.

She staggered to her feet, leaning heavily on Ron, who had tucked her into his side protectively, half-turned in order to intercept approaching threats. He looked incredibly shaken, like something terrible had occurred while she'd been pillaging Lucius Malfoy's mind.

“What is it?" She asked, dread acrid on her tongue.

“A few of them blew through our defenses before the Order got here and got into the castle,” Ron relayed worriedly, nodding his head upwards. "Then, that appeared."

Hermione looked up, the sky surrounding Hogwarts awash with an eerie green light. The Dark Mark pulsed, as if embedded with a life force of its own, a snake twisting into a skull above the castle’s embankments. It was a larger, livelier version of the Mark she'd helped remove from Draco's arm; she understood now, how the Mark had struck terror in the hearts of those fighting in the first war. The gaping skull, a symbol of death. The snake, a reminder of its harbinger.

“Usually they cast that over homes where they kill...” Ron trailed off, stopping when Hermione gave him a grim look of understanding; Malfoy had cast the Mark over her house, that fateful evening in August, as a part of their cover. "We don't know who."

“Dumbledore,” Hermione managed, her larynx still somewhat uncooperative. “Trying to kill…Dumbledore.”

“But Dumbledore is with Harry,” Ron croaked, his face turning ashen with fear. “I thought they left the grounds tonight, I thought—”

There was an animalistic roar from amongst the melee, immediately redirecting their attention. Hermione could only barely make out a flash of red hair as a tall leather clad figure went down, and the hulking shadow of Fenrir Greyback looming over his fallen prey.There was no full moon, and yet, Greyback had his wand stowed, seemingly preferring to finish off his victims the lupine way: with claws and teeth. With a snarl of triumph, he tore into the slumped figure of Bill Weasley, blood splattering the grass from the strike.

“Bill!” Ron cried desperately, breaking free to tear across the lawn. Hermione’s limbs were unsteady from the Cruciatus, quivering like a fawns when she tried to follow. Ron was too far, Hermione realized, as he tried to fight his way over to his brother. He wouldn’t make it in time, his desperate efforts falling short.

Those positioned closer to the attack shot defensive spells in an attempt to ward off Greyback, which all bounced off his shabby overcoat, as if it were impervious. In her mind, the golden voice was silent, offering her no solution. Greyback was going to tear the eldest Weasley to shreds and there was nothing anyone could do to save him.

Greyback raised a hand, dripping with Bill’s blood, to his mouth, and licked a scarlet trail from his wrist. The enormous man let our a guttural laugh, nearly a howl, and drew back to deliver a killing blow, when unexpectedly, his bloodshot eyes widened and he stopped short, as if scenting something alarming.

There was a terrible ripping noise and a sudden geyser of scarlet, as Greyback’s head separated from his neck and fell into the grass beside his would-be victim, a bewildered expression permanently frozen on his scarred face.

Hermione held her breath as she watched the werewolf’s decapitated body topple, first to his knees and then completely, revealing the willowy figure in stained robes that stood behind him.

It was Fleur Delacour, her pretty face splattered in blood. Wand brandished aloft in the manner one would hold a sword

A set of enormous feathered wings unfurled behind her, framing the scene like some sort of biblical nightmare, a seraphim vanquishing a demon. Resplendent in gore, Fleur stood like a Valkyrie over Bill’s crumpled form, so beautiful and terrifying that Hermione could barely stand to look, as if she were staring directly into the sun.

“Il est à moi,” Fleur growled, her voice echoing, embedded with a magic so ancient, it sent a shiver down Hermione’s spine.

Hermione was not the only one who gasped, struck dumb by the sight. Ron stopped mid-stride as he fought to reach his brother; curses missed their intended targets; Death Eaters screeched in shock at the sight of Fenrir’s severed head, rolling in the ruined grass.

“Kill the half-breed!” Bellatrix Lestrange screamed a general's order from where she was locked in a vicious standoff with Ginny and Tonks,jarring the others into action once more. But the wave of fresh fighters took advantage of the temporary distraction to form an organized defensive front. These were not school children— these were seasoned soldiers and aurors, and apparently, a quarter-Veela that had been fatally underestimated.

The remaining Death Eaters, sensing possible defeat, began to retreat towards the Whomping Willow, the combined forces of the Order and Dumbledore’s Army driving them back. Hermione was preparing to join the final push, when she felt a gut inclination to look up, the kind Felix had been sending her all night long.

Hermione caught a movement in the top corner of her eye and raised her lit wand aloft. It was enough illumination to show a figure, falling from the battlements of the Astronomy tower and plummeting all the way to the grounds. She looked around; no one else had seen, too caught up in the dregs of the fight or chasing fleeing Death Eaters. Go, the voice in her head insisted, and having not been led astray thus far, she dashed away from the battle, rounding the exterior walls of the castle until she reached the fallen form.

Time stopped when she reached the figure: she knew from the moment she spotted velvet robes, although her mind insisted it wasn’t, it couldn’t be the body of Albus Dumbledore. Nott couldn’t have succeeded, couldn’t have killed the greatest wizard of her time.

Holding back sobs, Hermione turned the body face up to reveal half-moon spectacles, lenses crushed by the fall. Knowing it was futile, she still pressed two shaking fingers to the headmaster’s throat, long forgotten first aid training resurfacing. There was no pulse.

What came next? No one could survive such a fall, the voice told her gently, and for the first time that night, she shoved it away.Chest compressions? She began counting as she administered them, eyes blurred with tears and shock-induced dissociation: if Dumbledore was dead, did that mean Harry…? She couldn't allow herself to even consider the possibility. Her hands were shaking violently as she pressed down, both from fear and the aftermath of the Cruciatus.She felt the moment the Felix Felicis wore off; the second it dissipated from her consciousness, when she could finally feel the destruction of her body, far more injured than she'd realized during the heat of the fight.When she got to thirty compressions, she was interrupted.

“The Headmaster is dead,” Severus Snape said from where he towered over her, his tone practically subarctic. “Move aside.”

Hermione’s head swiveled over her shoulder, half-dazed. Snape was still snarling for her to get out of his way, his face screwed up with urgency. From behind Snape, she saw three figures, all boys, dashing towards them. The first was a lithe dark haired blur, followed hotly by another boy, screaming accusations in a familiar voice, one she associated with a crackling common room fire and the smell of broom polish, howling, “Murderer!” That was Harry, she realized with a clench of her heart, mercifully alive and giving chase. A silver-blond streak in the distance brought up the rear, chasing the others.

“I said, move aside.” Having reached the end of his patience, Snape sliced his wand down, sending Hermione blasting back from the body. She landed painfully on her side, and although her shoulder absorbing the majority of the blow, her bruised ribs screamed in protest, the wind completely knocked from her chest. As she fought for air, she saw Snape frantically searching the headmaster’s body, his back to Hermione, until he pocketed something she could not see.

“You killed him!” Harry shouted from much closer, closing in, and flung a curse in the direction of the thin, dark haired boy he’d been chasing, who she could now make out as Theodore Nott. “Heoffered to help you, and you killed him in cold blood!”

“f*ck off, Potter!” Nott snarled, sending a retaliatory hex over his shoulder as he reached them. He was as white as a sheet and had a crazed look on his face that Hermione knew to be deadly. This was Theodore Nott at his most dangerous; a bear with its leg caught in a trap. “Let's see how you like being on the other side of this! Sectumsempr—”

Before Hermione could scream in warning, Snape interfered, a glittering nonverbal shield erupting from his wand.

“Potter belongs to the Dark Lord,” Snape snarled at Nott, deflecting Harry’s litany of curses towards Nott effortlessly. “Lower your wand, you idiot boy.”

Harry turned on their professor with all encompassing hatred, blinding him to anyone else in the vicinity. There was no one Harry hated more than Snape, not even Draco, and now he'd been given another reason for his virulent dislike, one that confirmed years of suspicions.

“You’re a traitor!” Harry howled, redirecting his fury at Snape and increasing his barrage of spells, this time against the unruffled former Potions master. “He trusted you! You helped Nott, you stood by, you did nothing —”

With a flick of his wand, Snape knocked Harry unconscious with a stunning spell, his accusations cutting off abruptly.

“Theodore, your work is done here,” Snape barked. “Go. ”

The blond figure—Malfoy, her Malfoy, not his bloodthirsty father—had finally reached her, blocking her view as he knelt in the grass, his hands frantically ghosting over her throat and ribs. He let out a little sound of distress when he prodded gently at her shoulder, which was more than likely dislocated.

“f*ck,” Draco muttered, as she gasped in pain at the contact. He had dirt and blood streaking his hair. She hoped it wasn’t his. “Your magic was screaming for me, Granger. Don’t move, okay?”Malfoy drew his wand over her, pointing it directly at her chest. In her peripheral, she could see Snape watching them with that indecipherable, haunted expression on his face.

“Draco, come on,” Theodore called, and Malfoy twitched in irritation, but did not look away from her. “Leave her. We both know you can’t finish it, and he won't care about whether or not you kill some mudblood, not when we tell him about that.” He nodded towards Dumbledore's body without looking at it, as if unable to face the Headmaster, even in death.

Nott thought Draco was trying—and apparently, failing— to finish her off, she realized, grasping at her cloudy thoughts as they solidified. He thought they would both attempt accomplish their missions from the Dark Lord that night; Theodore had chosen, had killed someone at Voldemort's order, and he expected Malfoy to do the same. To cross the line that could never be uncrossed, to accept his fate and kneel before Voldemort. Draco certainly looked the part: wild-eyed and desperate, with his wand pointed at her chest. It was so convincing that even she momentarily doubted his intentions, a whisper of uncertainty in her heart.

You could ask me to slit my own throat, and I’d do it, Draco had said before he kissed her, just hours earlier. It’s too late to even entertain the possibility of choice.

"Draco?" Nott questioned, a thread of doubt weaving its way into his voice. Doubt was a dangerous game; if Theodore were to second guess his friend's loyalty in Voldemort's presence, even the thought could get Malfoy killed. Hermione couldn't allow that.

"Go," Hermione managed, as quietly as she could in hopes that Nott wouldn't hear. Malfoy only let out a noise of displeasure in response. It was as if he hadn't heard her, as if the rational, strategic Malfoy wasn't really there anymore, his body taken over by some strange instinct that had narrowed his universe into a single pinpoint: her.

"No," Malfoy snarled, sending a nasty looking acid jinx over his shoulder at Nott, not even looking to see if it reached its target. Theoyelped, dodging the curse and barely managing to shoot Malfoy a look of betrayal before Snape descended, hauling Nott up by the scruff of the neck like a poorly behaved mutt. Nott winced, as if preparing himself for a blow to the face. As if such punishments were something he was used to.

Snape cast a charged look at his godson, who returned it, a conversation passing silently between the two.

Will you leave her? Snape seemed to ask, a single dark eyebrow twitching up.

No, Draco's face said. I can't.

"What the f*ck is he playing at?" Nott asked Snape, wildly taking in the scene before him as if he were watching the very fabric of the universe unravel. "The Dark Lord—"

“It would do you well to worry yourself with your own concerns, Theodore,” Snape spat at Nott, whose protests halted at the cold admonishment. “If you remain on these grounds you will be caught and thrown into Azkaban without a second thought. Do you think they'd show you mercy? They won't.”

”But he’s got my—”

”I said, leave him,"Snape insisted, and forcibly shoved Nott in the direction of the Whomping Willow. With one last furtive glance, Nott took off running, Snape closely on his tail.

Draco didn’t so much as twitch in their direction, still entirely focused on touching her wrist, counting heartbeats. He was being foolish, by staying behind. (She didn't think she could bear it, if he left her). What would they say, if they were found like this? How would they explain it, to both her side and his?

"I'm not leaving," he assured, as if he'd heard her. "f*ck, I don't know how you're still conscious."

There was blood on his hands. Why was there blood on his hands?

“Draco, you can't be found with me," Hermione attempted. With the adrenaline fading, she could feel the dull murmur of her injuries ricochet up into a scream. "The Order will— If you don't, Voldemort will know—”

"Shut up and hold still,” Draco cut her off, casting something over her that had him swearing under his breath. His voice was doing strange things to her. She wanted to wrap herself in it like a shawl.

"Are you hurt?" She breathed, her eyes going unfocused. He snapped in front of her face, trying to keep her attention.

"No. I got lucky tonight," Malfoy replied flatly. He shook his head, setting blond strands loose from where they were plastered to his sweat covered forehead."I could feel it, Hermione. It was so bad I thought you bloody died."

He examined the diagnostic charm, furious and worried and covered in grime. Lovely.

She felt it all hit her: the Cruciatus, the fall, the injuries, the blood. She struggled to remain conscious, wanting to linger under his hands, his magic.It wouldn't be terrible to die here, like this, she considered. There were worse ways one could go than with his warm hand, possessively circling her wrist. Counting her heartbeats.

Then, there was a jet of red light, and Draco's fingers slackened their hold. Someone repeatedly yelled her name in concern, but a starry white was flooding the corners of her eyes and she was already too far away to reply.

Chapter 28: Confrontations

Chapter Text

Hermione opened her eyes to a blurry, softened world. She couldn’t feel her body beyond a distant thrum, hovering just out of her reach. The last thing she could recall was Dumbledore’s crumpled figure and Malfoy’s face above her, bloodstained and furious and lovely.

Where was he?

She had other questions: she was unsure who had tucked her into a starched white cot, or why the table at her bedside held a water pitcher, an ominous bottle of Skele-Gro, and a little amber tincture she recognized as Merlin’s Miraculous Medeorée. At that explained why she felt the dulling haze of a pain potion, coating her thoughts.

The Hospital Wing smelled like sweat and salt and rust, the redolence of battle lingering like a bad dream. Early morning light filtered through stained glass windows, sending bits of dawn flickering against the walls. The room was abreast with sound and movement: the wounded were being patched up on cots, as members of the Order stood guard, or hurried to give reports to Moody, who had seemingly turned a corner of the Hospital Wing into a makeshift war room.

Across from Hermione, the entirety of the Weasley clan was crowded around Bill’s bed. Fleur was unconscious, wrapped protectively around her fiancé's sleeping form in a way that was nearly indecent, her wings nowhere to be found. Mrs. Weasley had her face pressed into her husband’s shoulder; Ron was pacing the length of the room restlessly, his arm wrapped in a sling; Ginny, looking a bit scraped up but otherwise all right, was sitting on the floor next to the bed with her head between her knees, Harry’s arm wrapped around her huddled form. Percy and the twins were hovering, still in pajamas, clearly having floo’d into to the castle in the middle of the night.

They were all there, surrounding the eldest Weasley, looking harried on his behalf. Their love and concern so palpable she could practically see it, floating like dust particles in the air.

The sight triggered a miserable feeling, hot black tar pouring from her skewered heart. There was no one keeping vigil at Hermione’s bedside, no family weeping over her cot. No one to feed her sips of broth and fuss over her temperature. Even Harry and Ron weren’t hers, not really; Ron put his family above all and Harry belonged to the Weasley’s in a way that she didn’t. Hermione had sent her parents away, ripped herself from their minds without a second thought. She was the source of her own hurt. Perhaps she deserved it, after what she’d done. Perhaps solitude was a fitting punishment. At least that way, she couldn’t hurt anyone else she loved. At least that way, no one else could be taken from her.

A loud bang rang through the Hospital Wing, the sound of oak doors slamming into unrelenting castle walls, followed by several shrieks of surprise and the communal rustle of several people drawing their wands at once.

“Where is she?” Draco Malfoy snarled, a wand in his hand, bursting into the room with all the subtlety of a wrecking ball.

Oh Christ, Hermione thought. At least that answered one of her questions.

He stood in the doorway, the uncontrolled force of a summer storm thrumming from under his skin. Instead of the cultivated wealth he usually exuded, Draco looked wildly undone. He was missing the buttons on his collar and had torn his cashmere sweater in several places. There was blood on his hands and in his hair, probably from running the former through the latter.

For reasons she didn’t care to interrogate, she preferred this to his customary manicured propriety. A part of her whispered that if she liked him rumpled and desperate, she’d enjoy it even more if it were as a result of her. She decided to blame the unwanted thought firmly on the pain potion.

“What’s he doing here?” Ron called, a familiar hatred plastered on his face almost instinctively as he loudly expressed the thoughts of the entirety of the Hospital Wing’s occupants. The fact that Mrs. Weasley didn’t immediately chide him for his language alerted Hermione to the severity of her shock.

Malfoy’s eyes narrowed at Ron’s voice, or perhaps the scrutiny of the room, his free hand clenching in a way that informed her he was about thirty seconds away from breaking something.

Shouldn’t he have run with Nott and Snape? Laying low amongst the Death Eaters until he could find a way to get his mother out? Not present himself on a silver platter to the Order of the Phoenix. What exactly did he hope to accomplish by facing down their leadership at wand point, besides fulfilling a death wish?

“I thought I told you to lock him in,” Moody growled to Tonks, adjusting his weight on his prosthesis without lowering his wand from where it was fixed on a point between Draco’s eyes.

“I did,” Tonks insisted. Her pixie cut had turned an unnatural iridescent black in frustration, the color of spilled petrol.

“Why in Merlin’s name did you leave him his wand?”

“I’m not an idiot, Mad-Eye,” Tonks protested. “Of course, I took his wand. Sealed him in Poppy’s office myself, did the whole protocol. Dunno how the little sh*te wormed his way out.”

“The little sh*te,” Malfoy drawled, exaggerating his enunciation. “Is done asking politely. You know, there’s this clever little thing called due process, that keeps wizards who’ve witnessed crimes from getting locked in offices by lunatics. I take it you’re unfamiliar? Perhaps I should have our family solicitor educate you on the finer points.” He smirked right in Moody's face, seemed unconcerned by the wands trained on him.

"Arrogant little sh*te," Moody amended.

Hermione braced herself; Draco’s default reaction to being challenged was apparently a mixture of threats and insults. She couldn’t tell which his threats were an attempt at posturing and which were a real promise, and something told her that he knew and relied on that, the thrill of being underestimated. The cruel satisfaction of making good on his warnings.

“Draco, let’s discuss this reasonably,” Lupin offered, in the softened tone he’d often used as a professor. He was clearly aiming to be the sensible adult in the room. “Who are you looking for? Maybe we can—”

Malfoy wasn’t listening; he looked past Lupin as if he were a window pane, single-minded in his objective. With sharp eyes, he scanned the rows of beds that held a concussed Neville and a severely mangled Bill until he found what he was looking for: her.

Hermione’s breath caught as he met her glassy stare, the sudden lack of oxygen momentarily triggering the diagnostic charm that hovered over her head, monitoring her vital signs. Several spectators let out little noises of alarm as his body jerked towards her, as if to remind him of what it wanted.

She tried to say his name, her lips moving around the two sharp syllabus, but no noise came out. At this, several unnameable emotions passed over his face, his irises slipping from slate to charcoal. His eyes flicked up to the diagnostic and back down to her face again, his expression settled into a controlled, muted anger, somehow more sinister than if he’d sworn and cursed and raged.

“If I’m not in arm’s length of Granger in the next f*cking minute,” Malfoy threatened, his tone leaving very little room for argument. “You’ll have to siphon what’s left of whoever stands in my way from the baseboards.”

The room collectively recoiled in shock; this was apparently not what anyone expected him to say. Several of the Weasleys’ were looking at Draco as if he’d sprouted horns on the spot and declared himself Satan. Tonks’ raised eyebrows turned white with shock. Even Lupin pursed his lips in dismay. They all looked to her for answers, but she had none; what was left of Hermione’s good sense screamed that Malfoy wasn't in his right mind, because even his presence in the same room as her and the Order had put him in unthinkable danger. And yet, here he was, threatening people in her name, in front of the Weasleys and Harry and god.

Heads swiveled from Malfoy to her and back, and she felt herself flushing under the scrutiny—because honestly, how would she explain this— and Malfoy flashed her a razor sharp grin in response, as if some demented part of him was pleased to lay a public claim.

He was such an idiot.

“I’d like to see you try, sonny,” Mad-Eye scoffed, his false eye whizzing in agitation. “I’d jump for an excuse to put you in your Pa’s old cell, I would. You won’t lay a finger on anyone in this room, not while I’m still standing.”

“I’m not going to hurt her,” Malfoy scoffed, rolling his eyes in a manner that made it clear he thought everyone standing before him a complete moron. “What sort of plan would that be? Storm in without a modicum of backup, shouting my intentions to the high heavens? I’m not Potter.”

This elicited a minor uproar: Harry sprang up and surged towards Malfoy, Ron hot on his heels. Moody barked for them to stay put, and Fred grabbed Ron, who twisted furiously in an attempt to get loose, while George took hold of Harry by the armpits.

“Let me go,” Harry panted, struggling in George's grip. “He deserves it.”

“No can do, mate,” George clucked with a fair bit of sympathy. “Orders are orders.”

“Since when do you two follow orders?” Ron protested hotly.

“Since Mad-Eye’s the one giving them,” Fred replied wryly. “You see, I’ve got this strange little hang-up, about keeping both my bollocks attached to my body.”

Their restraints hadn’t silenced Harry, who, having recently watched his childhood hero die violently at the hands of a different Slytherin classmate, was positively itching for a fight.

“Murdering Dumbledore wasn’t enough for you, then?” Harry spat, the flush on his face a telltale sign that he was rapidly losing his temper.

“I didn’t murder anyone,” Draco drawled, his cold composure only adding to Harry's quickly purpling face. “Although you’re certainly making me reconsider.”

“You’ve had it out for Hermione all year,” Harry continued furiously. “Following her about, messing with her head. You might have convinced her of some bullsh*t redemption angle, but I know what you are. I watched as you did nothing while your friend Nott killed Dumbledore. You’re a coward and a Death Eater, just like your father.”

“You’re out of your mind if you think you’re getting within a mile of her, you ferrety f*ck,” Ron added, shaking free of the twins. “We won’t let you.”

“Here’s a novel idea— why don’t you ask her? Granger can defend herself with no wand and her hands behind her back, I highly doubt she requires you two dickhe*ds to play at being the world’s most incompetent bodyguards.” Malfoy smirked, apparently unable to stop antagonizing them, too accustomed to playing with his food. “Go on, then. Ask her if she wants to speak to me.”

Harry—who’d been suspicious of her interactions with Malfoy ever since she’d healed him— turned towards her, eyes begging her to rebuke the Slytherin, to swear at him and hex him and send him packing, as was expected. For all anyone knew, she hated Draco Malfoy with brute enthusiasm, and the fact that she wasn’t reacting as such was heightening the already noxious levels of tension in the room. The strategic choice would have probably been to play into that assumption, to snipe at each other until one of them grew too cruel, and then go off and sulk separately. They’d done it a hundred times before. But in that moment, lulled into submission by the pain potion, she was too tired of fighting to put on their usual show.

“It’s fine,” Hermione said roughly, her throat still sore from where Lucius had crushed it. She struggled up to her elbows, Malfoy’s gaze sharpening at her discomfort. “Dra— Malfoy’s not—” She stumbled over her words. “He’s harmless. Really.”

“I resent that,” Draco said, looking very much like a cat with a canary in its jaws as he strode through the Hospital Wing to reach her. At least ten wands remained trained on him, prepared for the slightest hint of bad intention, and several spectators made noises of concern as Malfoy pulled a stool to her bedside. “Tell them I’m dangerous, Granger.”

“I’m not sure that’s prudent,” Hermione responded, giving him a look of extreme disapproval. “Given that you’re one minor provocation away from being stunned. Again.”

He leaned forward resting his forearms on his thighs, some of the tension in his shoulders fading as he got closer to her. Hermione could feel it too: a loosening in her chest, as the erratic spikes of her magic, undoubtedly caused by excess adrenaline, soothed into a low, steady burn. He smelled of pine and soil and copper, simultaneously earthy and sharp.

“I’d like to see them try.” There was a cautionary look in his eyes— the look he’d had with Pansy, in the woods, when pulling rank— that warned her: if pushed too hard, he would rise to the opportunity to take the night's events out on someone, anyone. Malfoy and Harry were obnoxiously alike in that way. Her chest panged as she worried about it, Dolohov’s purple scar pulsing angrily, irritated by her recent exposure to dark magic. It set off a chain reaction in her body: echoes of the Cruciatus burst up and down her spine.

She grit her teeth to stop from crying out.The irrational part of her who desperately didn’t want him to see her as weak insisted that it wouldn’t do for her to start weeping and convulsing in front of him. She bit the side of her cheek until she tasted blood. Malfoy’s hand clenched into fists where they rested on his knees, knuckles whitening.

“When was the last time they dosed you?” he asked, gesturing at the tincture of the pain reliever. He reached up and rubbed a spot on his own chest, in the exact location of where Dolohov’s scar was burned into her, as if chasing away a phantom ache. Her ache, she realized, darkly fascinated to see the bond between them manifest so tangibly. When Hermione reached inward and felt for the telltale flicker of brightness, the bond answered back almost immediately. Good,it hummed, relieved at the familiarity of his magic. Safe. The pain faded slightly, softening into a thrum of soreness.

“Would someone like to tell me what in the ever loving f*ck is going on?” Ron’s voice punctured whatever bubble Malfoy had formed around them. He was staring at Hermione as if she were a stranger, his copper eyebrows furrowed in dismay.

This was, unfortunately, how most of the room’s occupants were regarding her, with a combination of abject shock and growing suspicion. She shrunk at their scrutiny, overwhelmed by so many eyes on them; it panicked her that Draco was interacting with her so openly, in front of so many people, after months of keeping their association as secret as possible. She could feel them drawing unflattering conclusions about why Malfoy would possibly be showing interest, much less concern, in relation to her: book-smart, reliable, muggleborn Hermione, who should be too sensible to entertain such an obvious trap.

“I’ll tell you what’s happening,” Harry growled, his glasses slightly askew. “Malfoy’s a Death Eater, and he’s been hounding Hermione for months. Trying to get information.” He looked pointedly to where Malfoy leaned close. “Or worse.” Harry turned to Hermione, his outrage mingling with bitter disappointment.

Harry didn’t know any of it, she reminded herself, trying to reign in her temper. He didn’t know the heartbreak she and Malfoy had watched each other endure. He didn’t know they’d saved each other's lives numerous times. He certainly didn’t know about Draco’s true loyalties.

He did, however, know that they'd kissed, which didn't help at all.

“I never thought you of all people would fall for this sh*te,” Harry said, his words laced with betrayal. "A few niceties, a little attention, and you suddenly believe he’s not the same prat who thinks you’re below him because of your blood? It’s…it’s pathetic.”

“Watch your mouth,” Malfoy spat, standing. He drew back his shoulders so that he stood at his full height, a good four inches over Harry. Harry’s hand twitched towards his wand; Draco’s eyes glinted with savage encouragement, goading him.

“Oh, please,” Hermione snapped at Draco, annoyed by the male posturing. “As if you haven’t said far worse to me.”

Draco’s jaw twitched at her rebuke, and Hermione felt a flicker of regret. It was too much. Having to explain herself to her friends, knowing that she couldn’t tell the truth. Draco had made sure of that, hadn’t he? Forcing her to make an Unbreakable Vow, and then picking and choosing what he would divulge, the messes he’d leave for her to clean up.

“Harry,” Ginny piped up, looking drained. She gently reached out and touched his shoulder in pacification. The redhead’s gaze drifted towards Hermione and Malfoy with a tired sort of understanding. “Not everything is a plot. Maybe Malfoy just—”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Harry interrupted hotly. “He’s a manipulative little prick! He obviously wanted to throw her off his trail, so the bastard messed with her head, kissed her—”

“Harry,” Hermione groaned, begging him with her eyes to shut his mouth for once, but the damage was already done. His words echoed, snapping the tension in the wing.

“What? ” Ron roared, and Fred and George slackened their grip in shock; he went careening forward, unbandaged fist co*cked, but the wand in Draco’s hand was already raised. Up close, she could see it wasn’t his sleek hawthorn wand; it was slightly lighter, with antique looking carvings she couldn’t parse out around the handle. He brandished it between himself and Ron, an explicit threat.

“Give me a reason, Weasley,” he snarled. “I’m not picky.”

The Order would hurt him, if he started up another duel. They’d throw him in Azkaban without a second thought, because his last name was Malfoy, because he’d witnessed Dumbledore’s murder, because this was simply how wars were fought. Even worse: Voldemort would find out about their association, realize why he’d failed to kill her last summer and then again this year, and all of it —her parents, the ritual, even Dumbledore’s death— would be for naught. Her heart picked up speed. She’d lose him too, all because Harry was right, she was stupid and she was selfish and she had messed with blood magic and —

“You’re stressing her,” Malfoy said without having to look at the flashing diagnostic, his tone low and dangerous. “Where’s the matron?” When he wasn’t given a response, he checked the hovering charm critically, frowning at the results. “Why’s it showing nerve damage?”

“Ask your precious father,” Ron snarled. “How many Crucios did he get in, before I pulled him off her?”

Malfoy’s head whipped down, searching her face for confirmation. As if he needed to; she had no doubt he could feel , in the hitch of her breath, the clench of her stomach. This was not how she wanted to explain what had happened with Lucius, not how she wanted to tell him that it had been his own father who’d done this to her. Draco had told her he’d chosen the side of the Order, but how could he choose them— her— over his own House, his flesh and blood? She remembered what she’d seen in Lucius’ memory: the boy crouched on the marble with his head obediently bowed, the dead bird before him. Draco had said he’d made his choice, but choices were easier to make when one’s father was not standing over them, insisting there was no place in this world for mercy.

Doomed, the familiar voice of doubt informed her. They’d always been doomed .

“Granger?” Malfoy prompted, sounding strangled. He had a hand through his hair, already tugging at the roots. The two syllables of her surname, a plea for disavowal. A request, tell me it isn’t true,hanging unspoken between them.Hermione gave a small tilt of her chin in confirmation, barely a nod.

Every bedside water pitcher exploded simultaneously.

She shrieked, not the only one in the room to have such a reaction: someone dropped a potion, spilling acid green liquid all over the floor. Tonks swore, loud and colorful. Percy had jumped about a foot in the air.Accidental magic at their age was rare; a sign of sickness or extreme losses of control. Surrounded by shattered glass, Malfoy looked…angry wasn’t the right word. There weren't any words.

“It’s alright,” she said softly, swallowing down her shock. Safe, she tried to emulate through the bond. Calm.

“None of this is alright, Granger,” Malfoy snapped. “Don’t placate me like you would them .” He nodded towards Ron and Harry with disgust. “For Merlin’s sake, you shouldn’t be comforting me. ” There was so much loathing in his tone that Hermione flinched, unsure of where it was directed.

“Malfoy!” Moody barked, approaching down the aisle of bed with a furtive glint in his good eye, mending the pitchers with a flick of his wand. “That’s enough. You’ve spoken to her. Now you’re coming with me.”

Moody put a firm hand on his shoulder, and shockingly, Malfoy didn’t resist, just let himself be steered from her bedside. He didn’t look back, not even a glance over his shoulder, as he was led away. Hermione pretended it didn’t hurt.

*

It was night before Hermione saw Malfoy again. She’d been heavily dosed with both pain potion and Dreamless Sleep, only waking once briefly to the sounds of a hushed row. She’d blinked, confused as she scanned the room, far emptier than when she’d nodded off. Harry and Ron had been nowhere to be found; Hermione thanked the universe for small mercies, knowing their next conversation would be a borderline interrogation.

She’d watched through heavily lidded eyes as Fleur, now awake and looking rather offended, whisper-fought with Molly.

“— all I’m saying dear, is that Remus told us he’ll be different when he wakes, and I don’t want to see him heartbroken because it’s too much for you—”

“You think I’d leave him, when he needs me most? You have no idea, what I’d do for him—”

“No,” Molly interrupted softly. “I do. You saved his life, and for that, I’ll never be able to repay you.” She reached out to clasp Fleur’s hands, and the younger witch’s fierce expression wavered marginally. "But a mother always protects her children, and I worry—"

“I chose Bill,” Fleur said, her accent emerging as she grew more emotional. “No scars could change that. He could transform once a month and I’d love him still, as my grand-père loved my grand-mère, even when your human laws forbid it. Besides,” She smirked, her pink lips twisting attractively. “Who better to love your werewolf son than a veela daughter-in-law?”

Hermione had smiled, listening to Molly extend a peace offering by switching the topic to betrothal jewelry. Madam Pomfrey returned, administering another dose of the pain potion, its sickly-sweet taste on her tongue as she went under once more.

The next time she woke, the sun had set. The Hospital Wing’s other beds were empty and remade with freshly laundered linens. Two figures were stationed at the door, presumably on guard. One slender and pixie-like, sporting a head of mousy brown hair. The other, slightly stooped, as if nursing an old injury. Tonks and Lupin, poised in mid-argument.

“Don’t bullsh*t me, Remus,” Tonks whispered loudly, annoyance flooding her tone. “You’ve given me every excuse besides telling me you don’t want me. You’re punishing yourself for something out of your control.”

“Dora, please,” Lupin replied, rubbing his temples. “I’ve told you a hundred times. I can’t give you what you want. You deserve more than me.”

“You don’t get to decide what I deserve. I’m not your student, you don’t get to unilaterally choose what’s best for me.”

“I’m too old, too poor, too damaged—”

“You weren’t too damaged to f*ck me,” Tonks’ voice sharpened, a blade’s edge. Her hair color flared, the tips turning scarlet. “You weren’t too old then, were you?”

Oh, Hermione thought, wishing she were still unconscious. Remus and Tonks were… Her whole body suddenly felt hot and prickly, discomfort buzzing under her skin. Tonks was vivacious and pretty and funny; Remus was serious and hardened and guarded. She could see how her old Defense professor could be considered handsome, if one liked their men gray and grieving. Tonks seemed so bright in contrast, a live wire. Hermione supposed she was in no position to pass judgment on unlikely pairings.

“That,” Lupin responded harshly, after a long pause. “Was a mistake.”

“Whatever you have to tell yourself,” Tonks replied, frozen over. “But don’t expect me to sit around pining, waiting for the next time you drink a pint of firewhiskey and show up at my door. I’m more than satisfied with making my mistakes elsewhere.”

“Good,” Lupin said savagely. “f*ck whomever you like.”

Hermione, unable to listen any longer, made a show of waking up with a performative yawn. Lupin and Tonks sprang apart guiltily, as if remembering the room had another occupant.

“Hermione!” Lupin called, with unconvincingly false cheer. “I’ll just go check on—” he offered weakly, already halfway out the door.

“Do that,” Tonks spat, glaring at his back. The older witch made her way to Hermione’s bed, her hair fading back to the mousy color from before. She seemed terribly sad.

“How much of that did you hear?” Tonks asked, as she busied herself pouring Hermione a glass of water. She gratefully accepted, her mouth dry and fuzzy, downing the whole thing in a few gulps.

“Hear what?” She asked after drinking her fill, and Tonks gave her a knowing half-smile.

“Let’s make a little deal,” the young Auror proposed. “We won’t talk about that—” she nodded at the doors Lupin had disappeared through, “—and I won’t ask about why the blond menace has been hovering outside the doors like a bloody dementor for the better part of the evening.”

“He has?” Hermione shot up, dizzied by her sudden attempt at becoming vertical. “I mean— you’re talking about Malfoy, right?”

“No,” Tonks grinned cheekily, screwing up her button nose in mirth. “The other poncy pureblood heir who’s distressingly interested in your whereabouts.”

"He's been out there waiting?" The for me, stayed silent.

"Moody questioned him for a bit. He came out alive, which is saying something." Tonksmoved to the doors, peeking out, before turning back towards Hermione. “You’ve got about an hour before Pomfrey returns from switching over Bill’s care plan at St. Mungo’s. She says she won’t discharge you until tomorrow morning, so don’t bother begging.” Tonks winked, surreptitiously. “But don’t worry, these hospital cots fit two.”

Hermione blushed furiously, and Tonks offered her a little salute in parting, moving to leave.

“Tonks,” Hermione called, wanting to add, I understand what it’s like, to want someone you shouldn’t, but the pain potion was still muddling her words and some things were better left unsaid . “Thank you,” she finished rather lamely.

“I’ll be right outside,” Tonks answered, casting a muffliato charm with a cheeky grin. "Enjoy yourself.”

"I don't—" Hermione protested, covering her face with her hands with a groan. Was this what everyone thought she was doing with Malfoy? Activities that required a silencing charm?

Malfoy emerged a few seconds later, crossing the distance to her bed in a dozen long strides. He wore a fresh set clothes, his skin washed clean of residual blood. His hair was still slightly damp from his bath, a strangely intimate sight.

She took in his face: his expression placid and closed off, his gaze clouded in an indication that he was occluding. He was in control of himself again, no longer vicious and needy, and the realization was more distressing than she expected it to be.

Hermione swallowed, unsure of where to begin. Did she thank him, for trying to heal her on the grounds? Scold him for putting them both in danger? Berate him for his little performance earlier? Yank him down by the collar and enforce more creative punishments?

“How’s your—” Malfoy stood several arms lengths from her, maintaining his distance as he pointed to her throat and ribs in succession.

“Fine,” she said, lowering her eyes. If she looked at him too much, she’d blush or yell or god forbid, cry. “Better.”

“Good.”

Apparently, they’d regressed to only speaking in single word utterances. Malfoy cast around, for once seemingly at a loss for what to say. They’d never gone so long without snarking or arguing or fighting or—

Kissing, her mind supplied unhelpfully. She willed it to shut up; less than twenty-four hours ago, they’d watched as a war started in earnest, and she was thinking about his mouth? Ridiculous.

“You owe me an explanation,” Hermione finally addressed him, considering the many, many answers she required. What had Theodore Nott done on the ramparts of the Astronomy Tower? How was Snape involved? Why had Draco stayed, instead of joining them as they fled? Why had he openly insisted on seeing her?

Malfoy grimaced as if he was expecting as much, crossing his arms over his chest in a preemptively defensive gesture. "Spit it out then."

“Whose wand is that?” Hermione blurted, settling on the simplest question in her arsenal. “Moody said they took yours.”

“That’s what you want to ask me?” Malfoy responded, rubbing his jaw with disbelief. “Really?”

“I’ve got other questions if you prefer,” she quipped back. “Such as, where do you get off, antagonizing half the Order by bursting in here like a mad man?”

“I disarmed Nott,” Malfoy answered, ignoring her jab. He still had that flat look in his eyes: Hermione wanted to push and prod until he came back to life under her attentions. “This is his.”

“Did he really…?” The question’s end was implicit.

Malfoy sighed heavily, suddenly looking much older than his years, and sat at the very edge of her bed, far more aware about keeping a distance between them than he’d sought earlier.

“I told you Dumbledore was dying. With a blood curse like that, he never stood a chance,” Malfoy started, touching his tongue to the tips of his teeth as he carefully considered his explanation. “He knew what Nott was up to, knew the Dark Lord wanted him dead. He and Snape had a plan: Snape was going to do it— a mercy killing, really— and use Dumbledore's death to prove his loyalty, so he could go deep undercover by re-ingratiating himself with the Dark Lord's inner circle. No one expected Theo to actually follow through. But obviously…”

“Nott killed him,” Hermione surmised, considering how she’d underestimated the lanky dark-haired Slytherin. Dumbledore had known that he was going to die. Snape had arranged a merciful end, but before he could fulfill their plan, Nott had surprised them all. “I didn’t think he could, when it came down to it.” She frowned, considering. “Did you?”

“I don’t know,” Draco considered, his eyes going distant as they clouded with memory. “I don’t even remember the first time I met Theo,” Draco considered “Or Crabbe and Goyle, or Pansy, for that matter. They were just always there after my lessons, while their mothers would take tea with mine. We had the elves build us forts and we’d practice flying on toy broomsticks until we tired each other out. I expect that’s why our mothers brought us together in the first place. I liked Crabbe and Goyle because they’d do whatever I said, and I fought with Theo constantly, because he wouldn’t.” He grimaced at the recollection. “It carried into adulthood.”

“How long have you known?” Hermione pressed. “About Snape? How could you be sure that he was truly Dumbledore’s man, and not just secretly doubling down on Voldemort?”

“Not many can say they truly know my godfather,” Malfoy admitted. “Being pathologically unapproachable is what’s kept him safe as a spy for so many years. No one could read him, if they didn’t know him. But I knew him. And when he helped you with your occlumency, he spoke of that witch, the muggleborn one who died. I think that’s when I realized. No true servant of the Dark Lord would speak that way.”

Lily Potter, Hermione considered, once again conjuring the ghost of the muggleborn martyr she was so often compared to. Snape’s achilles heel. A disturbing, presumptuous thought came to her: did that make her Draco’s?

“Why didn’t you run? After the battle?” Hermione chanced a peek up through her lashes; he was regarding her diagnostic charm, now a pleasant blue-green, with a critical eye. “You said you’d chosen…that you decided to spy. But then you stayed on the grounds.”With me, she thought, but did not dare say. To say those would mean exposing her soft underbelly: how much she liked it, that he stayed. That Draco Malfoy—self-preservationist extraordinaire— had thrown caution to the wind for her.

“Why are you here, Draco?” She asked, the tremble in her voice evident as the sound echoed around the empty wing. “You shouldn’t be here.”

He closed his eyes at the sound of his name, golden eyelashes fluttering, undoubtably remembering the last time she’d addressed him as such, wound around him while pressed up against a wall. When he opened them, there was a steely sort of resignation in his gaze.

“I haven’t been entirely truthful with you, Granger,” Malfoy admitted, rubbing a hand over his face. “You were right, when you accused me of knowing what would happen last night, but not because I was helping Nott. There were other machinations in place.When Snape killed the Headmaster, it was understood that his position as a spy within the Order would be compromised. Without Dumbledore to vouch for him, it’s not like any of your lot would trust him with anything more important than a broom manual. He was prepared to ingratiate himself with the Dark Lord completely— although what he hopes to accomplish is anyone’s guess. Around Easter, Dumbledore approached me with a proposition: I’d done well, keeping my eye on Nott. I had a foot in both camps. I was a natural occlumens. He advised me about the plan for Snape’s defection, and said I’d be the obvious choice to replace him passing information to the Order. I had…stipulations. We renegotiated our original terms, and I accepted.”

Hermione’s pain potion-addled mind spun, recalling all the conversations they’d had where Malfoy skirted around his involvement, cloaked his motivations.

I made a deal with Dumbledore. It’s all about playing every side, Granger. I'll prove you wrong every time. I’m not like you. I don’t care about being good. The Headmaster failed to uphold his end of our agreement. Why should I uphold mine?

She didn't like the sound of stipulations nor renegotiations. What had Draco given up? What leverage had he gained?

“This seems an awfully dangerous arrangement for someone who says he doesn’t care about who wins the war, so long as he comes out alive on the other side,” Hermione managed, suspicion creeping into her tone. It was all very neat, wasn’t it? The infamously self-absorbed Malfoy, suddenly ready to martyr himself for a cause he didn’t even believe in.

“I didn’t care,” Draco gritted. “When I made my deal with the Headmaster in September, I’d agreed to a year under his thumb, no more: once Mother was well enough we would vanish to the safe house. No one was ever supposed to be able to find us. But then Father escaped and returned to the manor and Mother got worse and there was no way I was getting her out, not under his watch.” Draco’s cheeks took on a dusting of pink, and he looked down, examining the thread count of the hospital blankets. “Malfoy men are infamously quite territorial, about their spouses. Father is no exception. There are ways for husbands to find their wives written into their marriage vows, magic that not even the Fidelius can supercede. As long as he was locked up, I could manage it. But once he was free…”

Hermione remembered what she’d experienced in Lucius Malfoy’s head, the focus he’d had on Narcissa, the warring feelings of longing and disgust at her condition. His values go against his desire to keep his wife. He refused to let her go, even as he watched the repercussions of his actions destroy her from the inside out. Draco had just wanted to save his mother and disappear, so he’d made a deal with Dumbledore, but Lucius had thrown a wrench in his plans. Now—once again at the mercy of his father’s failings and the schemes of more powerful men— Draco was being forced into a far more dangerous role.

“I realized that with my father at large, I’d only be able to take Mother and run if the Dark Lord was dead and my father was locked in a cell. The only way out is if Potter wins this war, so I made the strategic choice: it’s like you said before, I can’t sit and just wait for others to win fights that decide my fate. I’m no soldier, Granger.” Draco tapped his temple ruefully. “This is my best weapon. So I followed Snape's approach of convincing the Dark Lord that I was actually spying on his behalf, still loyal to the cause. I needed him to believe that I could be a weapon of counterintelligence, and that my information could be trusted because I had ingratiated myself with one of Potter’s closest.”

“Me,” Hermione realized. Draco nodded, his eyes flickering like lit candles in the dim clinic.

“It couldn’t come out of the blue, of course. It would be too convenient if I returned home at the end of term announcing I was using the very witch he’d ordered me to kill for reconnaissance. Nott was a convenient mole, reporting my movements back to his own father. That's why I encouraged him in the library: I was dropping crumbs, made sure I was quite obvious with my interest regarding you. Even Potter noticed, and we all know he’s about as perceptive as a troll. I proposed the whole thing over Easter, when I went back to the manor, told the Dark Lord that I’d found something far better than simply killing you— I’d use you, to infiltrate the Order. I made you important, too important to kill. It was two snidgets with one stone.”

Hermione opened her mouth and closed it again, uncertain. Did this mean…all the attention he’d bestowed on her, the flirting, the proximity, was that all part of his act? Was it just to create the illusion that he’d seduced her into trusting him— and had he seduced her into trusting him? No, that didn’t account for all the times it had been just them, when they’d fallen into each other foolishly, unable to stop themselves. Could it really all be written off as a strategy when it felt so terribly, insistently real? Didn’t he feel it too?

The doubt sent her stomach clenching in discomfort, and Malfoy looked at her strangely, bringing a hand to his own abdomen in response.

“I wish you’d told me,” she finally managed, drawing her knees up to her chest. “I thought—”

“I was always going to tell you. But I couldn’t, not until you mastered occlumency. Your mind was wide open— anyone who went looking would have found it.”

“That doesn’t explain why you stayed with me out on the grounds and let yourself get caught,” she protested. “Or why you waltzed in here this morning in front of half the Order, acting like you’d raze the castle to the ground if you didn’t get to see me. What asinine reason could you have for that?”

Malfoy took his bottom lip between his teeth, pressing down until he left sharp little indentations. How dare he look like that, she thought in annoyance, when she was this angry with him. It made her want to take his lip between her teeth instead, bite down until he bled

“Ah,” Draco said, refusing to meet her eyes. “That wasn’t exactly premeditated. You’re right, I was supposed to return with Snape and Nott. But then…” He balled his fingers up in her blankets savagely. “Then I felt you. In pain.” He finally looked up, shaking his head slowly as he explained. “And I just lost my head. I couldn’t leave, not when you were so hurt, bleeding and losing consciousness. Even if I wanted to, my magic wouldn’t let me. Then one of those buffoons stunned me, and I woke up with no clue where you were. The only thing I could think was that I had to be as close as possible, just in case…” He inhaled sharply, as he hesitated. “Just in case you needed me.”

Hermione’s heart stuttered at his admission, her eyes as wide as an owl’s. Malfoy cast a bitter glance her way in response, frowning at the reaction for reasons she didn’t understand.

“I know you didn’t want any of this, Granger,” he murmured, eyes flicking to where her heart quickened under her bruised ribs. “I know when you removed my Mark that you were just trying to even the scales, and because the universe is phenomenally cruel, you ended up stuck with me. Bonded. And unfortunately for you, I think it’s getting stronger.” He ducked his head, reticent where he was usually arrogant. “This morning, I couldn’t stand being locked in that office without knowing if you were all right. Kicking off in front of all those people wasn’t planned. I just lost control.” He sighed, leaning back from where he’d approached her. “I…regret putting you in that position.”

“How do I know you’re being honest with me?” Hermione asked, doubt clouding her thoughts. “How do I know you’re not using me the same way Dumbledore used you? You said you chose, and that I made it so it was hardly a choice.” Her face was alight as she remembered his declaration before the fight, and she willed herself to finish her sentiment before she burst into flames. “How do I know you’re not just telling me what I want to hear?”

“As if that’s what you’d want to hear,” Malfoy shot back scornfully, as if there was no way she could possibly be serious. His voice took on a mocking tone. “I ruined your life by tying our magical cores together and now I rather fancy you.” He shook his head, as if that admission were nothing, as if he’d said something obvious, something he knew she’d dislike. “Don’t be stupid”

“Do you?” She asked, her mouth suddenly dry. “Fancy me?” She blinked up at him from under her lashes. He scoffed, muttering something rude about how she was taking the piss. “I have not been…subtle about what I want. Regarding you.”

“You just said you wanted to use me as an information source in the Order,” she argued. “That’s why you were giving me so much attention.”

Draco blinked once, and then twice.

“No,” he said slowly. “That’s not what I said.” He turned from where he sat so he hovered over her, bracing an arm on either side of her body. “I didn’t kiss you because I wanted to convince anyone of anything. I kissed you because I wanted to, and I’m terrible at restraining myself from doing whatever I want. I kissed you because I’ve thought about f*cking you ever since I saw you in that bloody dress at Christmas. Maybe before.” Her breath hitched and he let out a low, pleased sound, almost a purr. “After the Dark Lord sent me to you last summer, I thought about how you’d gotten terribly pretty. Even then, when I thought I was marching to my death, I couldn’t help but notice you. I doubt anyone could.”

“Oh,” Hermione managed faintly, I thought about f*cking you echoing in her mind like a skipping record. “I—Oh.”

Her pulse took off, a hummingbird in her chest. Instinctively, she arced up towards him, so that her lips were inches from the soft, exposed skin of his neck. Without thinking, she pressed her lips to it, dragging a whine from his throat that she could feel against her mouth. It sounded terribly promising, but before she could continue, he’d removed himself from her, gently pushing her back down onto her pillows.

Had she done something wrong? A doubt filled voice in her head considered. Did he not want her like this: in borrowed, ill-fitting pajamas, with dark circles under her eyes and a bird’s nest of knotted hair piled messily on her head?

“I am a selfish man with very few scruples,” Draco interrupted her thoughts, his pupils blown with arousal. He looked like he wanted her. “But not when you’re injured and double dosed on pain potion.” His face took on a far darker look, and for a moment she wondered if he was going to explode something else. “Especially if the injuries were sustained because of my f*cking father.”

“I’m not,” Hermione protested, almost offended. She wasn’t dying. “I feel fine, it’s just—”

“Don’t you dare downplay it,” Malfoy cut her off. “I know what the Cruciatus curse does to a body. I know how long you were under his wand, because I felt it, the whole f*cking thing.”

With a huff, he unstoppered the pain potion, handing it to her insistently. She administered the suggested three drops under her tongue and immediately relaxed, her body going slack.

“What I don’t know,” he continued. “Is how you managed to get away. Father usually makes sure his opponents don’t leave, at least not in one piece.”

She felt warm and slightly suspended as she watched him speak. Had he asked her something? He’d asked her something.

“Legilimency,” Hermione explained after a long pause, her voice slowed and softened from the effects of the potion. “Looks like your lessons ended up being rather handy.”

Draco’s grim mouth parted in surprise. His eyes were liquid mercury. There was an expression on his face she’d never seen before, under all the guilt and misery. He looked…pleased with her. It reignited the flames in her belly, the ones that insisted that she needed him closer, closer.

With delicate movements, Draco reached over Hermione’s relaxed body and placed Theo’s stolen wand on the side table, before stretching out beside her on the cot. He reached for her wrist and drew it to his face; her hand instinctively cupped his jaw, and he rotated it, so that his lips were moving against her palm. He was saying something, pressing words into her skin.

“Please,” he was whispering, his voice muffled. “Forgive me.”

Oh. The look on his face was contrition. He was blaming himself.

“Draco,” Hermione whispered. His throat bobbed; even now he could fully keep himself from reacting, when she said his name. “You’re not him. You're not your father. You’re good.”

He released her hand in order to pulled her closer by the waist, positioning her back against his chest, and she repeated the words—you’re good, Draco, you’re good— until they lost meaning, trailing into delirious mumbles. Until he hushed her and stroked her hair and made it impossible not to feel like perhaps here, wrapped in his possessive grip, she was the safest she’d been all year.

Chapter 29: The Last Summer

Chapter Text

The English countryside in summer was a tapestry of vibrant greens and soothing blues. The grassy hills surrounding the small village of Ottery St. Catchpole rippled like undulating waves beneath a boundless sky, dotted with wildflowers and interwoven hedgerows. Hermione would have thought it peaceful, before. Now, she could hardly feel anything besides the growing wave of apprehension that heralded the inevitable war ahead.

She’d cried for the entirety of Dumbledore's funeral service. She knew of Dumbledore’s questionable motivations better than most, his devious manipulations and maneuverings of those who trusted him. But that didn’t negate his good: despite his methods, he’d given his life in service to what he thought was right and just, and for that, Hermione wept, because she knew he would not be the last to make such a sacrifice.

Dumbledore’s death had felt like a line in the sand, a marker of what came before and what would undoubtedly follow after. Classes had been cut short, exams canceled. The wizarding world was preparing for conflict; after the Headmaster’s funeral, students had been sent home in droves, and for the first time since she attended Hogwarts, Hermione was uncertain if any of them would ever return.

While her peers returned to their families, Hermione followed Ron and Harry back to the only thing resembling home that she had left: the Burrow. The Weasleys had graciously offered to house her, taking in another stray orphan without a second thought, as they were wont to do. She’d attempted to refuse, insisting they were already stretched to their limits with preparations for the upcoming wedding, noting that she was of age and could get a flat in London, but was wholeheartedly rebuffed.

There’d been much debate about Harry: the decision over where he was to live for the remaining months before he turned seventeen was the topic of more than one closed door discussion. Gone were the days he could run off on the Night Bus without a word; his safety was now a matter of national security. Even Scrimengeour had been brought in, alongside a number of Aurors who specialized in defensive protocols, for a tense meeting in the former Headmaster’s office before they left school grounds.

Lupin and McGonagall were of the mind that Harry should follow Dumbledore’s directive and stay at the Dursleys' where he’d be protected by his mother’s blood until coming of age. The Ministry contingent, Tonks and Moody included, heartily disagreed. Hermione and Ron observed the argument at a reticent Harry’s side, having reluctantly been given the privilege to sit in on the meeting, mostly because it was understood at this point that the three of them were a package deal, and Harry had threatened to run back and tell them everything that had been discussed anyway.

“The wean would be a sitting duck on the thirty-first!” Moody roared, once the debate had escalated to raised voices. “You-Know-Who expects him to return to that place, Minerva, and I don’t doubt that traitorous bastard Snape told him the plan to move Potter on his birthday in detail. Albus couldn’t have accounted for that. We have to pivot strategies!”

“Dumbledore had provisions in place for the boy—” McGonagall countered, her Scottish brogue thickening with frustration, a tone almost anyone would have shirked away from— anyone besides Alastor Moody.

“Dumbledore would agree those provisions have to be reassessed. Any protection that house might afford isn’t worth the danger of extracting him from it. If you’re asking me, the boy’s better off protected by wards than by some blood magic that none of us can monitor!”

“Wards can fail, Alastor,” Lupin interjected. He seemed more tired and wan than usual, his eyes crinkling at the corners as he spoke. “Dumbledore made it abundantly clear—”

“Dumbledore’s dead,” Tonks piped up, sporting her usual pink hair and a frosty expression directed unilaterally at Remus, who wilted slightly under her gaze. Clearly, they had not resolved their row from the Hospital Wing. “There’s no point arguing about what he’d want. We have to focus on what would keep Harry safe.”

After significant pressure from the Minister, it was decided that Harry would not return to Surrey; a team of Aurors were dispatched to evacuate his relatives, working alongside officials from the Muggle Protected Persons Service, a suggestion of Hermione’s so as to ease their transition into hiding. Harry’s few remaining belongings were packed in a leather trunk and delivered to the Burrow, where he’d presumably be staying for the summer.

Harry, ever the martyr, disavowed the new plan.

“I’m not putting your family in danger!” He insisted, as Ron put him in a sturdy headlock and dragged him into the Floo. "I can go into hiding on my own." Harry kicked out, his reflexes quick, but Ron subdued him, too accustomed to fighting off five older brothers to be phased.

“Mate,” Ron sighed, giving Hermione a look that said, can you believe this idiot? Hermione fought a smile; when they weren’t frustrating her to the point of murder, the two of them could be so very endearing. “We already are in danger. What, do you think if you got a flat in London, the Death Eaters would just wash their hands of us? We’re blood traitors, you loon. Now stop whinging and get your arse in the fireplace.”

June at the Burrow was filled to the brim with evacuation plans, strategy meetings—some of which Hermione was privy to, some of which she was not— and preparations for Fleur and Bill’s nuptials in early August. It felt markedly different than other summers: the constant preparation only increased Hermione’s sense of trepidation that their days of peace were growing numbered. The Burrow had become the unofficial headquarters for the Order of the Phoenix, so it became more and more common to see both Order members and trusted Aurors filtering in and out through the newly reinforced wards.

Hermione had taken special notice in their installation, following Bill around the Burrow’s perimeter as he drew runes in the dirt, muttering incantations.

“Wouldn’t the wards be stronger, if you used your blood?” She asked the scarred cursebreaker, worrying her lip as she considered her research on the matter. She’d been interested in warding magic ever since Malfoy had spoken to her of the defenses he had enacted on his safe house. “I know that some purebloods use theirs in order to reinforce existing protections and strengthen the ley lines under family homes, couldn’t the Burrow use that?”

“That’s only applicable for old family homes, Hermione,” Bill corrected patiently. “Purebloods, mostly, although that isn’t a prerequisite. That sort of ancestral magic takes generations to cultivate. We’ve only lived at the Burrow since Mum and Dad were married. A blood ward here would be just about as useful as a wooden fence.”

Besides Bill, Hermione most frequently saw Moody and Remus, who’d more or less taken up the shared mantle of senior leadership. Having been present for the dramatic events of the hospital wing, both wizards took the opportunity to address her regarding the issue of Draco Malfoy. To her mortification, Lupin cornered her in the hall after an Order meeting, imploring her to consider that even the people they loved couldn’t always be trusted, and sermonizing about how he was young and in love once, and how it was imperative she use her head, not her heart.

“I know it sounds bizarre,” Hermione countered, feeling strange about defending Malfoy to an adult she once held in such high esteem. “But I’ve developed…an understanding with Malfoy. He’s not the person he used to be. War changes people, Remus. I thought you of all people could understand that.”

“You have to remember Hermione, that I knew Draco during my brief tenure as your Defense professor,” he warned her, exhaling heavily at the memory. “During that time, he was a bigoted, selfish boy, prone to acts of cruelty when threatened. I’m afraid that colors my opinion of him, perhaps more than I would like.”

Hermione studied Lupin, noting the bitter twist of his lips and slump of his shoulders. Remus had already fought in one war, and now, he was watching history repeat itself, bracing himself for more loss. In a way, Hermione couldn’t help but begrudge him his concern, while simultaneously wishing he’d piss off and focus on his own love life.

“I happen to know for a fact that cruel boys can become unlikely heroes,” she said, the ice in her tone taking Lupin by surprise. “James Potter managed it, didn’t he?”

“I understand your point,” he sighed. “But James came from a very progressive family; his father disavowed the Dark Arts for many years before—”

“Sirius Black, then,” Hermione countered. “Imagine, if he’d been trusted instead of thrown into Azkaban because of his family name.”

Remus looked stricken, as if she’d punched him directly in the gut. He’d left soon after, visibly bothered by her statement.

Surprisingly, the only person who’d taken her at her word regarding the whole affair was Moody.

“Had a talk with the Malfoy whelp,” Moody said gruffly, sitting down at the kitchen table as Hermione peeled a mountain of potatoes for Molly. She could hear distant hammering and swearing as the boys and Ginny repaired the roof. “He said he’d be sending yousome findings I might find interesting. Told me that he and Albus had an understanding. He seemed quite interested in you, Granger. Want to explain?”

“No,” Hermione said bluntly, before remembering who she was speaking to. Moody seemed unbothered by her terseness, baring his teeth in what could possibly be considered a grin.

“Humor me.”

Hermione considered the grizzled old Auror’s question over a pile of discarded peels, wondering what he could have said or done to extract that information from Malfoy, and hesitated as she considered how to answer. She couldn’t sound too sure, then he’d treat her like a lovelorn idiot like Lupin had. But she couldn’t doubt Malfoy openly, for fear it would ruin his already delicate position as an informant. The Order had to trust Malfoy enough to give him minor information to pass along to Voldemort, and to believe and employ whatever intelligence he provided in turn.

“I can’t. It would put us both in immense danger, should that information be...extracted from anyone.”

Moody, sensing her hesitance, grunted in consideration.“You don’t spend forty years in the Auror department without picking up a few tricks,” he said, tapping his temple with a scarred finger, a dangerous twinkle in his good eye. “Go on then. Try to get in.”

Hermione had narrowed her gaze, wondering if he meant what she thought he did. Maintaining eye contact, she pulled from her legilimency, attempting to breach his mental defenses only to come up against a wall of solid granite. She pushed harder and he wheezed a bit— at first she thought it was from the strain, but promptly realized he was laughing.

“Don’t give yourself an aneurysm, lass,” Moody barked in amusem*nt. She huffed as she abandoned her efforts, sweat trickling into her collar from the mental exertion. He stood, but before he could leave, Hermione interjected.

“In regards to Malfoy,” she had finally answered, meeting Moody’s unnerving gaze. “Yes, I trust him. Or at least, I trust his motivations.”

That, apparently, was good enough for the Auror. It was not good enough for Harry and Ron, who she’d gotten into a screaming match with after Harry accused her of sleeping with the enemy in rather explicit terms, resulting in the a frosty silent from both sides that subsisted for several, increasingly awkward days, until Mrs. Weasley had enough and locked the three of them outside until they could resolve things.

Hermione, bound by her vow, insisted that they’d simply have to trust her that Malfoy was not the prejudiced wizard of years past, and if they couldn’t, why was she even there?

“Honestly, you’ve known me since I was eleven,” she insisted, frustrated by their lack of understanding.“Have I ever once seemed like the kind of witch to fall at the feet of someone like Malfoy? He's always been a nightmare, but he's not exactly an evil genius is he?"

"We thought the same of Nott," Harry shot back, crossing his arms. "And look what he proved himself capable of."

"Nott is nothing like Malfoy. Do you really think so little of my judgment? Because if you do, you shouldn’t be trusting me with anything, especially the—” she lowered her voice, nervous about sound carrying over the moors— “horcruxes.”

“That’s the issue,” Ron said darkly. “We’ve known him since he was eleven too.”

Finally, unable to come to a true understanding, it was decided that Malfoy would be a taboo topic between the trio: Ron and Harry wouldn’t rankle her with snide remarks, and Hermione wouldn’t defend Malfoy in their presence. A tenuous peace, in which Hermione could already see the cracks forming.

Her association with Malfoy wasn’t the only secret she had to keep: the Order’s senior leadership had also interrogated her, Ron and Harry several times about their role in the war and the task Dumbledore had bequeathed them, but they’d remained tightlipped regarding their mission to obtain the horcruxes. During a rare moment of solitude in the attic the boys shared with the resident ghoul, Harry had tried to shake them off, stubbornly determined to take on the quest by himself.

“I’m going to go off on my own,” Harry informed them. “Dumbledore told me about the horcruxes, i should be the one trying to find them. I know the Order leadership won’t support it, so I’m going to give them the slip after the wedding. I’m only telling you this because you two need to promise me you won’t come after me.”

Hermione and Ron looked at each other and snorted in disbelief.

“That’s the worst plan I’ve ever heard,” Ron said, shaking his head in refusal. “Sorry, you’re going to give famed dark wizard catcher Mad-Eye Moody the slip? How exactly have you figured that?”

“Where would you even go?” Hermione insisted, just as cross. “Nowhere else is nearly as well warded. There’s a reason you didn’t return to the Dursleys’ Harry, and you can’t exactly rent a flat in the wizarding world!”

“I could camp out,” Harry stubbornly insisted. “Stay off the grid.”

“And how are you going to find some of history’s darkest magical objects while living in the bloody woods? You don’t even know how to destroy them!”

“It’s me who’s got to kill him,” Harry stewed, his hair sticking up every which way. He mussed it when agitated, a habit that reminded Hermione painfully of Draco. “You’ve heard the prophecy. Me and me alone.”

“Mate,” Ron shook his head slowly, using a voice reserved for when Harry was being particularly thick. “We knew what we were signing up for when we went with you to save the stone in first year. I think it’s a bit late to ditch us now.”

“Since the troll,” Hermione added in a soft, wistful voice, remembering how the two had fearlessly, stupidly confronted the creature in the bathroom in her defense. They’d been children—brave, stupid children. She wished she could go back in time and warn them.

“You don’t understand,” Harry continued furiously, throwing up his hands in frustration. “He’ll come after your families, he’ll kill—”

“Actually,” Hermione interrupted coldly. “I do understand what that’s like, thanks.”

Harry finally quieted, looking at her with a terrible sadness on his face: his mouth turned downwards, bottle-green eyes radiating distress behind his spectacles.

“What you seem to forget is that while yes, I’d take a curse for you regardless of whether you're the Chosen One or just my friend, that’s not the only reason I’m here.” Hermione said, her voice only shaking slightly. She hoped she sounded stronger than she felt. “What kind of life is left for me, if Voldemort wins this war? What do you think will happen to the muggleborns and blood traitors, they’ll just let us continue on existing? Look at Grindelwald or Barnabas Deverill— every aspiring Dark Lord has attempted to wipe out whichever marginalized group that they’ve blamed all societal issues on, pretty much since the beginning of time, and Voldemort and his followers are no exception. I’m not just fighting for you, Harry. I’m refuse to become another statistic.”

Ron whistled low, nodding in agreement.“Bloody hell,” he added. “What she said.”

Harry—overwhelmed and affected by her little speech— slumped onto Ron’s mattress. His eyes began to fill.

“Oh,” Hermione panicked, throwing her arms around him. Over his head, she mouthed do something to Ron, who awkwardly patted Harry’s shoulder in response.

“I’m afraid,” Harry admitted, as a few tears escaped and slid down his face. He was silent and stoic when he cried, like someone who had been told often and from a very young age that he wasn’t to make any noise. “Everyone who tries to help me…everyone dies. I don’t want anyone else to die for me, Hermione.”

Watching him broke her heart, because she couldn’t in good conscience assure him that no one else would. All she could do was rub circles on his back until his lungs stopped stuttering and his face was wiped clean of tears.

After that, Harry didn’t argue with her and Ron’s involvement, but they came upon another issue: there was simply no space nor solitude to secretly plan the hunt for Voldemort’s horcruxes. The Weasley family home was far past capacity, although a harried Molly insisted there was always room for anyone who would require it. As the political climate worsened, Bill, Percy, and the twins all moved home, unwilling to leave their parents as the sole defenders of the family, should the Death Eaters come calling.

Hermione was sharing Ginny’s bedroom with both Ginny and Fleur, offering her limited to no privacy on any given day. She couldn’t even count the number of times one of them had walked in on her changing. Fleur— being French and thus, immune to nudity induced embarrassment—was unphased by this, openly changing into pretty lingerie sets and gauzy summer robes without any of Hermione’s decidedly English shame.

“Lingerie is not for the wizard’s benefit, Hermione,” Fleur informed her slyly on one such occasion. “It is for the witch, to use as a weapon of absolute control.” She was sitting at the vanity—a repurposed writing desk with a looking glass attached— brushing out her long silver hair, resplendent in a delicate lace negligee and a lilac silk dressing gown.

Ginny, having overcome her aversion to her brother’s fiance after she’d sprouted a pair of wings and decapitated the wizarding world's most infamous werewolf, listened to Fleur with the rapt dedication of a soldier attending to their general. For a moment, Hermione imagined mercurial gray eyes, darkening at the sight of her in nothing but ribbon and lace. She wondered if he’d try and remove them with his teeth. But you don’t look like Fleur, the part of her that harbored years of insecurities chided. You’d look ridiculous. Hermione knew she was pretty in the right light, but she wasn't exactly the type of beauty people launched ships for.

“Well, given that I don’t have a wizard,” Hermione responded, flushing at the topic.“My knickers really aren’t an issue.”

“Don’t you?” Ginny interjected, a wicked smile curling her lips upwards. “Someone ought to tell Malfoy.”

“I’m not— Malfoy isn’t—” Hermione sputtered. She wanted to hex the Slytherin in question— it was due to his tantrum in the Hospital Wing that she had to rationalize a situation she didn’t even fully understand herself to everyone from her former professors to Ginny Weasley. How was she to explain the fact that somewhere between clawing at each other's throats and saving each other's lives, she and Malfoy had become… something? What kind of clarification was that?

“The ill-tempered blond one, yes?” Fleur asked, meeting Ginny’s grin in the mirror. “That is her Malfoy?”

“He’s not my Malfoy,” Hermione protested, her disagreement falling upon deaf ears.

“Sure, Hermione,” Ginny sing-songed, closing her magazine entirely. “I’m sure he’d threaten a room full of Aurors for anyone.”

The last time Hermione had seen Malfoy was when he’d slid into her bed in the hospital wing, solid and warm and flush to her back. When she woke, he was gone and there was a raven’s feather quill and a leatherbound, two-way journal on the bedside with a note already written on the first page. It hadn’t exactly been a declaration of love. For emergencies, it said in his meticulous hand. Don’t owl me. She checked the blank pages frequently, but hadn’t received another missive since. To her great irritation, the quill didn’t even hold ink.

From her hazy, half-drugged memory of the Hospital Wing, she knew Malfoy had admitted he fancied her, that he’d thought about what it would be like to sleep with her. She’d be lying if she said she hadn’t thought about it too, hadn’t woken up flustered from dreams of him bending her over the common room sofa with an ache between her legs. But Hermione wasn’t foolish enough to believe that sexual interest automatically meant he considered her romantically; she was not blind to their shared attraction, but she also wasn’t sure what it meant to kiss someone you once professed to hate

Her confusion was justified: they’d missed all the steps Hermione typically associated with romantic relationships, and jumped into deeper, more nebulous waters without ever fully learning how to swim. Every time they’d messily collided had been either while drunk or mid-argument. Draco had never courted her, as the pureblooded Slytherins often did to declare their intentions; instead, he’d burst into the Hospital Wing and threatened half the people she loved. Malfoy may have abandoned his father’s ideology politically, but that didn’t mean he’d abandon everything he was raised to believe—his very family motto was Sanctimonia Vincet Semper, for god’s sake — and consider a muggleborn as a serious prospect.

And even if they had romantic intentions towards each other, what good would it do to vocalize it? She and Malfoy did not have the luxury of indulging in flights of fancy without considering the consequences. They’d been conscripted into opposing sides of a war, the reality of which discouraged star-crossed relationships that would undoubtedly get both of them killed. No, Hermione thought. It was best to leave some desires buried.

“Fleur,” Ginny said conspiratorially, her tone wrenching Hermione from her internal debate. She wasn’t the only one with such dilemmas; Harry had ended things with Ginny out of a misplaced desire to protect her, and Ginny hadn’t taken his decision sitting down. “If one were interested in exercising absolute control, how would they go about procuring such weaponry?”

Fleur summoned a glossy catalog from her trunk and tossed it to Ginny with a wink. Hermione got a glimpse of its cover, where a supple young witch pranced around clad in knickers so small they were practically nonexistent. Ginny grinned savagely, flipping through the pages with interest. Privately, Hermione believed that Harry’s self-control regarding their relationship was not long for this world

*

Hermione’s already crowded living situation became even more untenable one day in late June, when Lavender Brown appeared unexpectedly at the ward line of the Burrow, a pink duffle bag slung over one shoulder.

“Ron,” Ginny called wickedly, leaning out her bedroom window to summon her brother from where he and Harry were de-gnoming the garden. Hermione looked up from her book, sitting cross-legged in the grass nearby. “Delivery for you!”

“Huh?” The ginger in question mumbled, wiping his dirty hands on his trousers as he stood, only to be leveled once again by a flurry of limbs and blond curls, knocking him prompt into the dirt.

“Won-Won!”

Hermione and Harry exchanged a look of poorly hidden amusem*nt as Ron was bowled over by Lavender’s embrace. When they’d had their fill of reunion snogging, he staggered to his feet, letting out a winded noise, as Lavender promptly deposited her visibly heavy bag on his shoulder. She turned to where Hermione sat on the grass with a wide smile.

“Hermione!” Lavender cried eagerly, before barreling her over as well.

“Ow, Lav— gerroff me!”

“Oh, I’m so glad to see you! I wasn’t sure when Ron invited me to stay with his family for the wedding— it’s a rather bit of a big step, isn't it?” Lavender prattled, as she released a gasping Hermione from her surprisingly strong grip. “But then he said you’d be here, and I thought it would be nice to have a friend around, to take a bit of the pressure off, you know? Now we'll get to be roommates again! These pureblood types are a bit old school, don’t you think, what with girls sleeping separately from boys and what not? Oh, we’re going to have such fun!”

Hermione glared at Ron surreptitiously, before patting her old dormitory companion gingerly on the arm. After a month of sitting in on grim Order meetings and planning for future disasters, Lavender, clad in a sunny yellow romper and oversized sunglasses shaped like daisies, seemed like a relic from a past lifetime.

“Lavender,” Hermione asked, not wanting to dampen the girl’s infectious spirit too much. “You do know there’s a war on, right?”

Lavender’s smile faltered, her glossy lips pursing into a serious expression.“Of course,” she said, more subdued, fluffing her golden ringlets out of nervous habit. “That’s the other reason I’m here. See, my parents are muggles, and I wasn’t about to put a great big target on their backs—” She cut off, looking stricken, as if just realizing what she’d said and to whom. “Oh, Hermione, I didn’t mean— It wasn’t your fault, what happened—”

“It’s fine,” Hermione said softly, because Lavender had no idea how right she was. “I understand.”

Hermione had worried about the other muggleborns ever since that fateful day last August— if they’d be targeted, if there were systems in place to protect their families should an outright war ever break out—but she’d been afraid to learn the extent of how very little the world she’d chosen to fight for cared to protect those of her origins. This, of course, was a deeply selfish choice, but one she’d hidden behind like a shroud.

“I didn’t tell them about You-Know-Who,” Lavender confessed, and Hermione felt a kinship bloom with the girl she’d shared a dormitory with for the past six years. Although the two of them hadn’t ever been close, in that moment they understood each other in a way no one else could fathom. “They’ve no idea about the war. I’ve told them I ran off with my boyfriend on a Eurotour—god, I’d never seen mum go spare like that. But at the end of the day, I’m of age and they couldn’t stop me, could they? I’d rather she be upset than dead. I even went and bought a bunch of postcards from different countries and pre-dated them, so they’ll get one in the post every so often. Even if I’m…” Her voice cracked under the weight of dread. Even if I’m killed, Hermione heard clearly.

Ron put an arm around her, tucking Lavender into his side. It was a sweeter gesture than Hermione had thought him capable.“It’ll be okay, Lav,” he muttered into the crown of her head. “You did the right thing.”

“Although it always pains me to say this, Ron’s right,” Hermione added. “Did you put up any security measures around your house? I know it’s awful to consider, but I reckon you can never be too safe.”

Lavender visibly brightened at this, wearing a rather devious expression. “You know how there are muggle-repelling charms? I wanted to take my parents to the World Cup a few years back, but they made it so awfully tricky to get nonwizards in that I eventually just gave up. Well, it got me thinking: what if that could be inverted somehow? Like if the charm was reverse so as to repel—”

“Wizards,” Hermione realized, gaping at Lavender as if she were a total stranger. Her ditzy, overly romantic, astrology-obsessed roommate had figured out how to invert a muggle-repelling charm? That was difficult, theory-based magic, the kind that required months and months of trial and error. Hermione hadn’t even attempted it; in fact, such a thing had never even occurred to her before.

“Yeah. If anyone with magic tries to approach, they remember some urgent pending they’ve forgotten and get distracted. Not even I can get in,” she finished sadly, a small smile on her lips as triumph and regret warred for dominance in her expression. “So, yeah. Now I’m here.”

“That’s…” Hermione searched for the correct words, hoping not to offend the girl. “Lavender, that’s seriously impressive magic. I'm sorry I didn't know you were so adept at charms theory.”

“Well, the hat tried to put me in Ravenclaw, but I didn’t want the stuffy old boffin house, did I?” Lavender mused, ignorant to the fact Hermione’s eyebrows were raised to her hairline. “It wasn’t just me or anything, Padma and Parvati helped out a lot. We started practicing right when…” Lavender looked at her with uncharacteristic gentleness. “Well, right when everything happened to you, last summer.”

Hermione stared at Lavender, her guilt over underestimating the girl overshadowed by a newfound respect. Hermione may have been too afraid to consider certain realities about how the world they’d chosen was an active threat to their families, but Lavender had faced them head on. She’d bravely made the same difficult decision Hermione had, putting her parents’ safety above her relationship with them.

After a long pause, Hermione gave Lavender a brisk nod. “Come on then,” she called, heading for the house. “I’ll show you to our room. Mind you, it’s a bit of a squeeze, but you’ll get on with Fleur like a bloody house on fire. Oh, and don’t touch Ginny's Quidditch kit if you want to keep your fingers.”

She turned to find Ron and Harry still standing in the garden, regarding her as if she’d gone mad. Ron opened his mouth, only to promptly reconsider and close it again.

“Ronald,” she chided, sounding terribly bossy, “Stop gaping. Make yourself useful and bring up Lavender’s bag.”Ron, somewhat stunned by the turn of events, followed them obediently.

“Now to get in good with Molly,” Hermione continued, lowering her voice as Lavender bounced on the balls of her feet. “You’re going to want to offer to do the washing up right away, don’t wait until she asks someone else. Compliment her baking and she’ll basically never let you leave.”

Hermione continued dispelling six years of Weasley related advice as they took the rickety staircase up towards Ginny’s bedroom, the boys in tow.

“I prepared for them to row, but I didn’t consider that they'd actually get on,” Ron whispered agitatedly from behind her. “What if they gang up on me?”

“What if is a bit optimistic, mate,” Harry finally managed, after catching his breath. “I reckon at this point, it’s a guarantee.”

*

Shortly after Lavender’s arrival, Hermione dealt with two anxiety-inducing situations in rapid succession. The first was a message from Malfoy, appearing in the journal he’d given her. A time and date, written in his graceful hand.

Portkey activates July 29th, it read. 9:00 pm.

Portkey? She’d responded, just as tersely.

When she checked the journal again hours later, there was only a single word written in response to her query: Quill.

Hermione dug in her school things for the raven’s feather quill, the one she’d contemplated disposing of given its uselessness as a writing instrument, now infinitely glad that she hadn’t. A flutter of nerves turned her stomach: how could she know this was truly Malfoy, and not a ploy to lure her out using his handwriting? How could she confirm he hadn’t been compromised? Ink dripped from her quill as she hovered over the page uncertain of her response, the droplets staining the creamy paper before disappearing altogether. As if he’d her mind, she watched as new words bloomed below his instructions on the page, imprinting themself onto her treacherous heart.

Stop worrying. I’d never let anything happen to you.

It was all she could think of as she completed endless pre-wedding chores, trimming rose bushes and cleaning shutters and hanging fairy lights in the low branches of the trees. I’d never let anything happen to you.Draco had no authority to be making such promises, but for some reason, she still believed him.

Perhaps Lupin was right— perhaps she was letting her emotions lead her to certain destruction. She couldn’t quite bring herself to care; she felt summer winding down around her, threatening her fragile sense of peace, and knew that her days of safety. She’d been stockpiling emergency supplies in her magically extended bag; she knew there was a possibility that the Order’s protections could fail, that she’d be forced to take Harry and run.

She couldn’t help but begrudge herself the chance to see Malfoy one more time.

Somehow, the second event was far more discomforting: after catching Lavender and Ron in incriminating states of undress in the broom shed, Molly Weasley shooed the boys out of the Burrow and sat Hermione, Ginny, and Lavender down at the kitchen table for what was the most excruciating twenty minutes of Hermione’s young life.

“There comes a time for every young witch,” Molly said, pink blooming in twin spots on her cheeks. “When you begin to consider physical intimacy with a wizard. Now, I know you may already have some experience with sex—”

“Mum,” Ginny sputtered, horrified. “Not this again.”Lavender had turned an unflattering shade of scarlet, her eyes fixed determinedly over Molly’s shoulder.

Hermione shrank in her seat, unsure of why this conversation even applied to her; she wasn’t currently living in close quarters with her boyfriend. She was nearly eighteen and still a virgin,not that she put much stock in the social construct of virginity or equated it with any sort of worth. She'd just never gotten that far with Viktor, and he hadn't pressed the issue, satisfied to wait until she was ready. No one else had ever pursued her with that in mind, never flirted with the sort of cloaked implication of more that they attempted with Ginny or Lavender.

Would Malfoy want that with her? Her subconscious considered. If she offered? Would he mind that she hadn't ever before?

“Be quiet, Ginevra,” Molly snapped, before turning back to them with her palms clasped. “Girls, I only wish to speak with you about such a tender subject because you’re both in my care, and as a mother, I owe it to your parents to have this conversation with you.”

“There’s really no need, Mrs. Weasley,” Lavender said, in a higher pitch than usual, a weak smile on her face. “My mum already told me about, er, all that. Birds and bees, birth control. The whole thing.”

“Be that as it may, I’d feel far better if you’d allow me to demonstrate the contraceptive charm for my own peace of mind.”

"Not that it historically worked out well for you, what with the seven children and all," Ginny grumbled, earning herself a cuff over the head.

Despite their protests, Molly showed them the incantation and wand movement, how to point the glowing pink spell at one’s lower abdomen. Ginny stood when it was over, eager to flee the kitchen, but Molly stopped her, a grave expression on her usually cheerful face.

“These are dangerous times,” Mrs. Weasley said, a haunted look in her eyes that gave Hermione pause, her heart started beating faster as she sensed the conversation taking a darker turn. “I’ve lived through a war before. I know of the violences that can befall young witches, violences that wizards have the privilege to never have to consider. I saw it happen, with girls your age who were taken prisoner. There were...unspeakable horrors that occurred in those Death Eater camps.” Molly’s eyes were brimming with unshed tears. “Unspeakable, and yet, I must speak of them with you.”

Ginny and Lavender had been shocked into a morose silence, their eyes wide with fear. This was not the conversation any of them had expected. Hermione felt sick to her stomach as they sat frozen in the kitchen, Molly’s warning floating around them: girls your age. For some reason, the threat of sexual violence had not occurred to her: somehow she’d considered such acts firmly ensconced in the muggle world. But why would they be? Wizards were still men and men could be so very dangerous, whether they wielded magic or not.

“I hate that I have to warn you of such things. I hate that we live in a world where I have to fear for the safety and well-being of my daughter. I wish so desperately that I had built something better for you girls.” Molly’s voice broke, but instead of giving into rapidly brimming tears, she straightened, something determined in the hard set of her mouth. “No matter what happens, I'll be here for whatever you need—”

“Nothing like that is going to happen, Mum,” Ginny soothed, skirting around the table to wrap her arms around her mother. Molly stroked her daughter’s cheek, as if she were memorizing her pretty, freckled face.

“I don’t know that, love,” she said sadly. “War offers no such guarantees.”

*

On the evening of July 29th, Hermione crept out of her shared room with a raven’s feather in her pocket. The night was balmy, the heat of dead summer brushing at her neck like an old friend. The trees were lush and resplendent in the evening breeze, slackening their limbs in hushed harmony. A pretty night, she thought indulgently, trying to quell the nervousness pricking insistently in her throat.

In a few moments, she was going to see Malfoy.

“I’m just going out for a bit of fresh air,” she insisted to an inquisitive Ginny. “A walk, maybe. To clear my head.”

“You are such a liar,” Ginny gasped, sounding strangely excited by the prospect of Hermione's dishonestly. “A walk? In a sundress? Please, I wasn't born yesterday.” The redhead gave her a once over, noting how her hair was a little more tamed, smoothed into glossy curls courtesy of one of Fleur’s hair potions. How her cheeks were a few shades pinker, her eyelashes tinted slightly darker.“Merlin and Morgana,” she breathed, her eyes sparking with realization. “Are you going to meet someone?”

“What?” Hermione's heart rate picked up, incriminating her with every thud. “No!”

“Is it Malfoy?”

“Ginny,” Hermione admonished through clenched teeth. “Please shut up before your brother and Harry hear. Or worse, Lavender.”

Ginny squealed, only quieting down once hushed. Hermione checked the Prewett watch on her wrist. She had four minutes before the quill would activate. Somehow, she wasn't sure if she was more nervous about the prospect of seeing Malfoy or the possibility of walking into a Death Eater trap, the conundrum certain evidence of her complete and total descent into madness.

“I’ll be back…well, I don’t know. Before morning.”

“Take your time.” Ginny assured. “Send a patronus if you need me, seriously. Don't feel pressured to do anything you don't want to."

"I'm not planningon doinganything," Hermione lied.

"Dressed like that? Sure you aren't. Remember, if that posh git tries anything untoward—”

“—you’ll dismember him and feed the pieces to Charlie’s dragons, I know the drill.”

Ginny leaned over and gave her a quick, bruising hug before Hermione pulled away, grabbing her beaded bag. She flew out the kitchen door with barely enough time to skirt behind the broom shed before the quill activated. At precisely nine, she felt the familiar, unpleasant sensation of portkey travel pulling at her gut, whisking her into the unknown.

When Hermione touched down, dizzy and vaguely nauseous, she looked around to find that she was on the grounds of an impressive white stone cottage with glass windows that seemed to suck the darkness from the sky, making it impossible to see inside. The cottage’s outer walls were accented with climbing ivy, and pink hydrangeas peeked out sweetly from immaculately manicured bushes.The chimney was intermittently emitting furls of delicate smoke, alerting her that there was someone inside.

Hermione fingered her wand nervously as the door was flung open to reveal the sharp figure of Draco Malfoy, his sleeves rolled up to his forearms, looking like sin personified.

“Granger,” he called as she approached. “You came.”

There was a hint of stubble on his jaw, and his hair was slightly longer than she'd seen it last, its platinum sheen catching on the cottage's light. She'd feel bad for ogling him, but his eyes were running over her figure like a starved man taking in a banquet, lingering on the delicate straps on her shoulders, her exposed clavicles, her tanned legs. She watched as his throat bobbed noticeably, something hot and insistent unfurling inside her at the sight.

She stood on the first stone step below the doorframe, exacerbating their height difference, and nervously twisted the hem of her skirt. She had a plan for tonight, a plan Malfoy was unaware of, a plan that involved liquid courage and more than a little delusion. A plan that, should she have misread his intentions, could go mortifyingly awry.

“Aren’t you going to invite me in?” Hermione asked, peeking up at him through her lashes. His eyes were dark and overcast; their shadows sent a thrill ghosting across her skin.

“I’d prefer to do this first,” Malfoy admitted, his voice devastatingly rough, as he yanked her firmly against him and pressed his lips to hers.

Chapter 30: That Which Cannot Be Undone

Chapter Text

The world fell out from under Hermione as Draco kissed her on the steps of the cottage, his lips hard and certain like he’d resolved himself to do it the moment he’d set eyes on her. His hands were insistent on her waist, pulling her against him until her hips met his. She shuddered at the sensation, and he responded with a low, pleased sound, emanating from his throat.

Then, she came to her senses, drew her wand, and pressed it directly to his neck.

Malfoy all but ignored the weapon against his neck, looking at her with intrigue in his nebulous gray eyes. Despite the clear threat between them, his hands still lingered, fingers flexing at her waist.

“Granger,” he greeted with an irreverent smirk. “Is this any way to say hello to your wizard?”

She racked her mind for a question only he would know the answer to.

“We went to a burial, before the term ended,” Hermione asked, searching his face for any hint of deception. His skin was still fair, but with a healthy glow that suggested time spent outdoors. He looked slightly more tousled than usual, but that could have been her doing. “Who died?”

“Seriously?” Malfoy raised his eyebrows in disbelief. Wearing such anincredulous look, he certainly looked like the Malfoy she knew, but it would be remiss of her not to make sure of it. “I hate to break it to you, but if I were a Death Eater, you’d be dead already.”

In response, she just pressed harder with her wand, forcing him to increase the space between them.

“Fine, I’ll play,” he allowed, like he was humoring her. Prat. “Hagrid’s enormous eight-legged friend kicked it. We got lashed, did a bit of snogging before Pansy showed up and ruined things, as she is wont to do. I recently wanked over the memory, it was quite stimulating.”

She gaped at his cheek and he smirked, obscenely satisfied.

“Does that satisfy your inquiry? Certain that it’s really me?”

“Ask me something, you prick,” Hermione insisted, ignoring his casual reference to the ‘bit of snogging’they’d done in Hagrid’s pumpkin patch, and the self gratification he’d recently used it for.

She was sure her face was on fire. Herembarrassment delighting him.

“I forgot how aggressive you are when you’re in a strop,” he noted, his voice lowering into a near purr. “Not that I don’t enjoy it.”

Hermione clenched her hands into fasts at her side. Why did he always have to be so bloody difficult? Why did it always feel like she was running a fever whenever she was within a foot of him?

“Malfoy,” she gritted. “You’re supposed to make sure it's really me.”

“Let it be said that if you were someone else impersonating the walking headache known as Hermione Granger, I would have known fairly quickly.” Malfoy’s lips curled up at the thought. “I doubt an imposter would react so enthusiastically to being greeted like that.”

“What a foolproof plan,” she quipped back with an exaggerated roll of her eyes. “Tell me, do you go around kissing everyone to confirm their identity?”

“Why?” He questioned mockingly in response, his infuriating expression deepening into something she desperately wanted to slap off his face. “Are you jealous?”

“Ugh,” Hermione huffed, shouldering past him through the doorway. “I know it’s you. No one else is this obnoxious.”

The interior of the cottage was far more splendid than the exterior. This was no mere country house: the entrance hall opened to a stately room, with floor to ceiling windows and a gilded fireplace surrounded by plush settees. Below intricately designed crown molding, the walls were painted a muted seafoam green and dotted with framed paintings, some turned to face the wall.

“Don’t turn them back around,” Malfoy cautioned darkly as Hermione examined the inverted frames. “Some of them are rather mouthier than others,”

“Where are we?” Hermione questioned as she examined the room. “What is this place?” Upon closer look, the designs in the crown molding were actually linked script, made up of names— Artemion, son of Oberon; Demetrius, son of Aster, and so on— covering the ceiling.

“It’s where I was going to hide my mother. I had to portkey you here, didn’t dare to write down the address now that the secret keeper’s dead,” Malfoy admitted from where he leaned casually on the mantle, a fiber of anger in his voice. Against the background of the opulent country house, he looked every bit the young, bitter aristocrat, ripped straight from the pages of a Bronte novel. “This is the Black family’s Second Son’s Estate.”

“Second son?” Hermione wondered, a million questions on the tip of her tongue.

“Traditionally, the Black Manor is passed along to the family’s heir— the first son, barring complications— but to keep second sons from squabbling, or murdering the elder brothers for their inheritance, provisions had to be made. Second sons were traditionally willed country homes, far enough from the family seat to ensure they couldn’t cause too much trouble. It was a convenient way of shipping off the spare without discounting them completely, in case the first son died before providing the family line with an heir.”

He conjured a silver tea service as he spoke, nodding at her to sit. She did so, perching on the edge of one of the settees, wholly out of place in her simple cotton sundress and leather sandals. Compared to Malfoy’s linen suit jacket and dragonhide loafers, she felt more than a bit underdressed. At least he wasn’t wearing a tie.

“Technically,” Malfoy continued as he sprawled beside her on the small seat, taking up an unnecessary amount of space. She felt a prickling heat stem from the place his clothed knee nudged at her side. “This house was supposed to go to my cousin. Regulus Black, younger brother to Sirius Black, both sons of Orion and Walburga.” He parrotted off the genealogy instinctually, as if it had been drilled into him at a young age. Given the state of the crown molding, it probably had.

“Sirius had a brother?”

“You knew him, didn’t you? I had heard he was Potter’s godfather,” Malfoy’s face turned grim. “Regulus was a few years younger. He was made the Black heir once his elder brother was disowned. He joined the Death Eaters when he was sixteen, right before the first war. His body was never recovered.”

He went a bit distant as he spoke, a telltale hint of occlusion in his gaze. Hermione got the impression Regulus’ death was something he thought about often, probably in relation to the possibility of his own predicament.

“Because Sirius was disinherited, and neither brother had a son to pass the name to, the inheritance passed to Cygnus’ descendents, Orion’s brother’s line. Cygnus was my grandfather, and because he had no sons himself and Bellatrix is blessedly uninterested in children, I became the Black heir by default. Since I don’t have any siblings…”

He gestured around the great room in a self-explanatory fashion.

“The Second Son’s Estate goes to you,” Hermione surmised. “Until there’s a second son to bequeath it to.”

“Precisely,” he responded. “It was an ideal choice for a Fidelius charm. It’s already warded to the high heavens so that even blood relatives can’t get through— not even Bellatrix. If I had a younger brother, it would be his and I’d only be allowed in unarmed and by his express invitation. Sibling rivalry used to be a bit of an issue for the Blacks.”

Hermione thought a bit of an issue was a generous understatement. “You purebloods certainly contemplate fratricide more often than most.”

“Pity the wards don’t negate marriage bonds,” Malfoy said darkly, reminding her of how Lucius had foiled his escape plan. “As soon as they exchange rings, bonded spouses always have a way of finding each other, inheritance wards be damned,” He gestured at where the silver pot sat forgotten on the tray. “Tea?”

“Erm,” Hermione hesitated, chewing on her bottom lip. She’d lost some of her nerve while surrounded by the grandeur of a dead boy’s hereditament. “Actually, I brought something a bit stronger.”

She fished around in the endless depths of her beaded bag, finally giving up and summoning the bottle of cheap scotch she’d picked up at a market in Ottery St. Catchpole.

Malfoy let out a low whistle, examining the bottle. “Didn’t take you for a lush, Granger. What is this?”

“I’m not a lush. Certain scenarios simply require a drink,” she countered weakly. “And you wouldn’t be familiar with it, it’s muggle scotch.”

“Certain…scenarios,” he repeated, and she could practically see the mental calculations behind his flattened eyes. “Is my company really so tiresome that you require inebriation?”

“No,” Hermione protested. “Well, I’m sure you’ve driven more than one person to the bottle. But that’s not what—not why I—oh, just pour us a drink, will you? Why do you have to make everything so hard?”

Malfoy raised his eyebrows at her outburst and she looked down at her ravaged cuticles in embarrassment. He expertly conjured two crystal tumblers and filled them with amber liquid, giving his own a delicate sniff.

“Dare I ask,” he drawled, taking a sip and immediately screwing up his face at the taste. “Why you’ve brought abominably cheap liquor to an intelligence drop?”

“An…intelligence drop?”

He summoned a tightly wound scroll and tossed it to her. Miraculously, she caught it, examining the extensive privacy charms on the parchment.

Oh, Hermione realized, flooded by dismay. This was why he’d summoned her. He had information for the Order, information that could only go through her.

“Granger?”

This was fine. Hermione could be professional. He kissed her on the cottage steps, and she’d thought that maybe he'd asked her to come in because…It didn’t matter.

“Sorry.” She shook out her curls, hoping to knock the intrusive thoughts from her head. “I…I don’t know actually. I’m staying with the Weasleys, and there’s just so many people around all the time, poking around in your business and walking in on you in the bath. Suppose I just needed to blow off a bit of steam.”

He pulled a face, unable to hide his evident distaste at her living situation. It rankled her; not everyone was bequeathed a bloody manor.

“It’s lovely most of the time,” she added, defending the Burrow valiantly. “But after a while it can be a bit much. It might just be because I’m not used to having siblings to squabble over everything with.”

“I can confirm that being the only child certainly makes one awful at sharing,” he mused, examiningher with the same heat from when he kissed her on the cottage steps. She got the impression he wasn’t talking about sharing bathroom space.

Hermione busied herself with taking a drink, coughing as the beverage burned at her esophagus. It was sh*te; she supposed that was what she should have expected from a bottle that only cost her less than ten pounds.

“Sorry,” she offered, once she’d finished spluttering. Malfoy looked terribly amused by her reaction. “I guess there was a reason it was marked off.”

“Oh, it’s discounted liquor. You shouldn’t have.”

“Go have some of your two hundred-year-old slave made wine if you’re so bothered,” she sniped, contemplating finishing the contents of her glass out of pure malice. It really was undrinkable, but she didn’t want him to think that he was right.

He vanished both tumblers before she could spite him by tormenting herself.

“First of all, everyone knows the doñas de fuera are the best vintners, not elves,” Malfoy countered imperiously, standing and beckoning her to follow. “No one makes a vintage Montepulciano like an Italian sprite.”

He led her to another room, this one much smaller. She was greeted by the rich scent of polished wood and old books. Dark, gleaming mahogany paneling covered the walls, some equipped with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves filled with leather-bound volumes. Attached was a rolling library ladder, made of the same mahogany. It was furnished with several high backed leather chairs and a large, sturdy oak desk. There was a well stocked wine rack—the apparent reason for their relocation— and what looked like a cigar humidor in the corner. A thick Persian rug covered the hardwood floors, its intricate patterns and rich colors complementing the room’s opulence.

A crackling fire roared to life, enchanted to light itself as soon as they crossed the threshold. Malfoy strode in like he owned the place—which of course, he did— and opened an expensive looking bottle of red wine, pouring her a glass. She took a conservative sip, savoring the flavor, a harmonious blend of forest fruits, spice, and earthiness.

“Told you so.” He looked obnoxiously self-congratulatory as he watched her swallow. “Much better than your muggle swill, isn’t it.”

Her temper spiked instantly, as if he’d called for it by name. “Of course you’d think anything made by muggles is swill.”

“It’s swill because it’s cheap, Granger,” Malfoy answered mildly. “I’m sure wealthy muggles drink liquor that’s far more palatable than whatever that was.”

Hermione examined his expression, looking for traces of mockery, but only saw a calculated interest as he stared back, curious as to what she was still doing in his home.

If she was honest, she wasn’t sure herself.

“What’s in the scroll, then?” She asked in a transparent attempt to skirt his absolute focus. “Bit of Death Eater gossip?”

He grimaced, momentarily having forgotten where they were and why.

“I’m sure you know the ministry is hanging by a thread,” Malfoy said, and to her surprise, he ignored the wingback chairs in favor of settling down on the rug covered floor, positioning his spine against the desk’s leg. “Get down here. I don’t like you towering over me, it’s off putting.”

He beckoned her with an incline of his head and her heart quickened. There was something strangely intimate about sitting on the rug together, the hearth crackling nearby. Despite her better judgment, she kicked off her sandals and sank to the floor alongside him.

“Scrimgeour is on borrowed time,” Malfoy continued, looking into the fire pensively as he spoke. “Any affiliated Aurors will need out before they wipe the department clean of sympathizers. Ministry approved wards will be effectively useless; Fidelius charms are your best bet, if you can find someone able to cast them. I don’t know when it’ll happen—they don’t tell me much, mostly just stick me in the potions lab with Snape— but they do seem to forget it’s my manor, and the elves overhear everything.”

“The Death Eaters are staging a coup d’etat?” Hermione questioned as she settled, tucking her skirt around her knees. Malfoy tracked the movement with unabashed interest. “Does Vol—”

“Stop,” Malfoy barked, shooting out a hand to cover her mouth. Alarm flared momentarily in his gaze, an urgent flame that countered the heat of even the fireplace. She squirmed against him but he held fast, pressing his palm firmly against her lips.

“There’s a taboo on his name,” Malfoy explained. “A tracking charm triggers every time it’s uttered aloud. To round up all potential insurgents — the only ones dumb enough to use it are those who dare defy the Dark Lord anyway. So don’t run your mouth in order to win any bravery points, and make sure Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-dickhe*d don’t either.”

She ignored the jab at Harry and Ron to consider this new, dangerous information: Voldemort was using a taboo on his own moniker. It combined several oppression tactics that Hermione knew were historically used by authoritarian regimes: both the censorship and tracking of opposition and the encouragement of Voldemort’s cult of personality. The Dark Lord was taking pages right out of the modern dictator’s handbook.

“Thanks,” Hermione offered weakly, once he removed his hand.

“Don’t mention it,” he muttered.

The wine was smooth and velvety on her tongue, heralding a warm languid feeling that traveled all the way down her limbs. She stretched luxuriously, her skirt riding up an inch or two.

Malfoy cleared his throat.

“Is this a social call, Granger?”

“W-what?” Hermione’s lungs contracted sharply in distress. Was she really so transparent? “What makes you say that?”

“You’re wearing a dress. You’ve brought what could be loosely categorized as liquor. One could draw certain conclusions.” He paused and scowled, like he was considering something distasteful. “Did you have an engagement before this?”

"Hmm." His eyes glinted curiously at her response, allowing himself a long once over of her dress, her bare legs, her exposed shoulders. "I like it."

Hermione contemplated. She wanted him to touch her. To look at her in that way he sometimes did, like she had him leashed and bound. She wanted to feel like she was young and uninhibited, like she was a real person, not just a soldier in a war or an emblem of an ideology. His presence had a way of unconsciously making her into herself again, more intoxicating than any sprite-made wine.

She wanted him, but…she wasn’t sure exactly how to go about it. She should have asked Ginny.

“I don’t want to overstep,” Hermione finally said. “You’re already doing so much. But I— could I ask a favor?”

“It depends.” He ran a finger absently around the rim of his glass. “What would I get out of it?”

“Christ, that’s such a Malfoy response.”

“Go on then,” he allowed, waving his hand magnanimously. “Ask.”

“Can you…” Hermione bit her lip, shoving her roaring pride to the side. “Can you pretend with me that there’s not a war on? Just for tonight?”

She moved to rise, but Draco was faster. He shot out a hand, steadying it on her bare knee, and dragged his thumb across it in a manner that could be described as soothing, if it weren’t so proprietary. Hermione started, looking between his hand and his face, which had suddenly gone very serious.

“Yes,” he said simply. “Yes, I can pretend.” He leaned over into his side, sprawling out on the rug, and propped himself up with his elbow, his movements slightly too casual. “Stay, if you want. You’re decent enough company.” He seemed slightly embarrassed by the admission, his cheekbones taking on dusting of color.

“What do you want in return?” Hermione asked hesitantly, aware of his propensity for making deals that served him far more than the other party.

“I’m sure I’ll think of something,” he answered with a smirk, and her pulse quickened at the hint of his tongue darting out to wet his lips.

The fire sent shadows flickering across his face, sharpening his bone structure with every change in the light.

Say something, her heart instructed. Take what you want.

Keep your mouth shut, her head snarled. You’ll embarrass yourself.

“It occurred to me.” Hermione let out a nervous, affected little laugh. “I’ve been caught up in this fight for so long, I’m not actually sure what normal people our age do.”It was true: Hermione had spent so much of her adolescence putting out fires. Spending nights researching and plotting with Harry and Ron, preparing to face Voldemort time and time again.

Draco raised his eyebrows, looking as if he wanted to say something salacious, before reconsidering.“Games, I suppose,” he drawled after a long pause. “Usually those involving drinking.”

“I’ve never played one.”

“Merlin, you Gryffindors are dull, ” he declared. She was nearly insulted, before picking up on the teasing note in his voice. “What did you get up to in the common room? Fist fights and Exploding Snap?”

Hermione was filled with a grim wonder at his casual retelling: how strange, to consider Goyle as a lad, having a laugh and making a drunken mess with his mates, rather than a harbinger of hate and violence, clad in Death Eater robes. She wondered when it had happened— at what age did school boys become truly dangerous?

“What does the winner get?”

“Mostly we played for secrets,” Draco explained. “We asked each other questions, usually designed to be equal doses of incrimination and public ridicule. People revealed a decent amount of family dirt after a few cups, and that’s basically as good as currency in Slytherin.”

“I can see that going awry rather quickly," Hermione said with a shudder, imagining how Pansy Parkinson would have utilized her winnings. "What if you don’t want to answer?”

“You drink.” He raised his wine in demonstration. “The objective is usually to get pissed and gossip, preferably at the same time. It’s not exactly alchemy.”

“What if you lie?”

“Well.” He smirked at her over his glass. “Usually, we spiked everyone’s drinks with veritaserum.”

Hermione blanched at the thought. Answering Malfoy’s most prying and personal questions while inebriated and dosed with truth potion was her idea of Dante’s ninth circle.

“Not like you can get your hands on veritaserum these days, not with the shortage. When we were younger, we’d play using just a vow of honesty. No blood, just the normal assurances: swear on your house, may your line die out if you lie, the usual.”

“Right, the usual,” Hermione scoffed, sitting up so she could drink properly. “Alright then. I, Hermione Jean Granger, first of my house, vow to speak only the truth. At least, for tonight.” Draco repeated her words, adding in a few colorful provisions regarding the last of the Malfoy name dying in destitution, should he be caught in a lie.

It was the least serious vow they’d ever taken, a notion that struck her as completely ridiculous, and she giggled at the thought. He started at the noise and stared at her as if she’d sprouted horns.

“What?” She asked self-consciously, accidentally asking her first question of the night. “What?”

He shook his blond head in refusal, his hair curling at the edges. She liked it like this, a little too long. More imperfect than he usually allowed.

“I’m drinking,” he answered, taking a gulp of wine. His initial question was immediate, as if it had been preemptively notched on a bow. “Were you ever interested in Weasley?”

“Ron?” Hermione asked, surprised by his choice of topic. Why would he care about Ron?

“Why, was there a different Weasley you were interested in?” He asked dryly, seeming unamused by the possibility.

“I wasn’t interested in Ron,” she said firmly, shaking her head. “There were moments that I thought maybe I could be. In fifth year, especially. But it was a bit weird to consider, even then.” She struggled against the urge to never ever divulge her innermost romantic feelings with Draco Malfoy. “Is this a normal topic of inquiry for this game?”

“Yes,” Draco answered. “Interrogating someone’s sexual history is a classic approach. That counts as a question, by the way.” She spluttered about his unfairness. “You didn’t answer the other bit. Did you fancy a different Weasley?” He pulled a face similar to the one he’d made while trying the scotch.

No, Hermione went to say, before remembering something she’d long forgotten. An answer that was so terribly embarrassing, she was forced to take a hearty gulp of wine instead. She would most definitely not be sharing with Malfoy the fact that in their first year, she’d had a harmless, juvenile crush on Percy Weasley. She didn’t think it counted; she was eleven, for Christ’s sake.

“Me and Pansy?” Draco looked bewildered. “What, from back in fourth year?”

“It seemed rather…” Hermione struggled for the correct words. “Intense.”

“If you count a couple of virgins fumbling around in the dungeons for the first time as intense.” He grimaced with self-effacing humor at the thought. “Pansy dumped me at the end of fifth year for Warrington, then she started up with Blaise for a bit, and that was a nightmare for everyone.” Malfoy shuddered at the thought, before coming back to himself. “It was never…Pansy’s like a sister to me. I know that sounds odd, given the fumbling, but I mean it. We were fourteen and curious and when you put randy teenagers in close living quarters, what do you expect?” He worried his lip between his teeth before adding, “You and Krum?”

“What about him?”

“Very cute, Granger. You know what I’m asking.”

“We’re friends,” Hermione defended. “I visited him in Bulgaria the summer after fourth year and we got on...well.” She flushed, swatting any thoughts of their sweet but brief time together to the back of her mind. “But you know, Quidditch was always his priority and school was always mine. It was never anything serious. I think we’d both agree that we’re better off without crossing...any lines that couldn't be uncrossed.”

“Sure,” Malfoy scoffed. “I don’t think he’d say that, but I’ll take your word for it, Granger. Go on, it’s your turn. Want to know more about my embarrassing first ventures into the world of shagging in broom closets?”

Hermione very much did not want to know more about that, not if it meant hearing about Pansy’s involvement.

“Do you still think wizards are superior to muggles?” The question was out before she could stop herself. It was something she hadn’t even realized that she desperately needed to hear until that very moment.

“Straight into the deep end then,” Malfoy sighed. “Why did I expect anything different?”

He took a long pull of wine and she opened her mouth to protest his cowardice.

“Relax,” he drawled, before she could interrupt. “I’ll answer it, I just needed a drink first.” He topped off both glasses, and Hermione got the impression he was buying himself time.

“Yes,” Draco finally said, meeting her eyes. “I think wizards have their superiorities in relation to Muggles. But not because of anything I was taught about muggles being a lesser race and existing only to persecute purebloods. I don’t believe that they eat our young and pollute our gene pools or any of that rot.”

“Charming,” Hermione said, with no small degree of disgust. “You’re a real activist.”

He sent her a withering look. “I only say superior because wizards can do magic and muggles can’t, and I don’t think it’s radical to say that magic is the predominant force in this world. Which isn’t to imply muggles aren’t powerful in their own right. I doubt we’d be so scared of them if they weren’t. You can’t fear something and also call it inferior without calling yourself inferior in the same breath.” Malfoy said all of this very quickly, as if he was scared that if he didn’t get it all out at once, he’d be stopped before he could finish. “I’d f*cking hope that you know I don’t see myself as superior to you, but I’d understand your doubt if you didn’t.”

“But you know me,” Hermione argued, her blood heating. “What about any random muggle on the street?”

“I see magic as the superior force, but that doesn’t mean I assume my life is intrinsically worth more just because I can wield it.” He shook his head bitterly. “There, go have a laugh about how it took me a pathetically long time to realize that some wizards are worse than any muggles could be.”

“You’d be surprised,” Hermione responded, startled by the depth and complications of his response. She didn’t think he’d thought about the sociological paradoxes of his culture. She was impressed, not because of the validity of his opinion— him not being overtly prejudiced left the bar firmly on the floor— but because what he’d concluded was actually rather interesting.

“Muggles can be horrible in the same way as wizards,” she continued. “There have been plenty of unbelievably violent dictators in the muggle world. There’s been countless wars and genocides. Power just manifests differently, there. And there are lots of different kinds of magic in the world; I don’t agree that the kind we’re genetically predisposed to is simply the superior one. Take muggle technology, for example. They don’t need owls or tracking spells or moving pictures, not when they have emails and GPS and films. Electricity is just the bare minimum in terms of innovation these days—” She cut herself off, noting the strange look on his face. “I’m ranting, aren’t I? Sorry, I know it can be terribly irritating.”

Pink cheeked, she took a long drink from her goblet, allowing the acidity to stem her embarrassment. Why couldn’t she go a single evening without delivering a lecture?

“No, I…like it,” Draco said suddenly. He was looking at her in the way one might regard a particularly mystifying piece of art. “I like when you get like that. It’s…I just like it, okay?” His voice took on a sudden snap, bewilderingly defensive once more.

“Okay,” Hermione answered slowly, both bemused by his turn of tone and flustered by his admission.

Outside the study, there was a bright bolt of lighting, evidence of an impending summer thunderstorm. Hermione shrieked, lurching towards him instinctively. Malfoy didn’t so much as twitch, his profile lit up magnificently from the flash.

“It’s just a storm, Granger,” Malfoy smirked at her, having apparently recovered from her line of questioning. “Don’t tell me the brave little Gryffindor is afraid?”

“I’m not afraid,” she insisted hotly, rising to his challenge in a manner that was almost instinctive. She was a Gryffindor, for better or for worse. There was nothing she hated more than being seen as timid, weak. Powerless.

“Not of anything?” Malfoy teased. They weren’t drunk, at least not yet. But they’d conjured a sense of intoxication in the study: something in the way his voice roughened on the consonants of her surname, or how her eyes were undoubtedly shining, the way they did when she found a lesson particularly challenging.

“Are you afraid of me?” He asked, after a beat of silence.

Thunder rumbled outside the cottage, alerting them of the storm’s proximity. If she counted the seconds between the flash and the sound, she’d have found the storm was only a few miles off. But for once, Hermione was completely unconcerned with the world outside of the study, not even fully sure it still existed.

“No,” she answered, resolving herself to honesty. “I’m not afraid of you. Afraid for you, yes. Sometimes, I worry so much it makes me feel a bit sick.”Unconsciously, she rubbed the purple scar Dolohov had left on her chest. He followed her hand’s movements. “Are you afraid of me?” She asked, meaning to lighten the heaviness between them with a bit of a joke, but the admission came out breathy and strangely coy.

Malfoy shut his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them again, she knew that the darkness in them could overshadow any storm.

“Terrified,” he replied, and she saw it in his face, his fear mixed with a savage sort of delight at her answer. She felt a thrill run through her, a swooping sensation in her stomach like she was falling from a great height.

She’d moved much closer. His face was inches away. He was going to kiss her, she could feel it with as much certainty as she’d felt the impending promise of rain.

Draco’s lips were less than a centimeter from hers when Hermione blurted, “I think we should have sex.”

He froze.

Immediately, she wished the ground would crack open a chasm and swallow her, take her directly to Hades where she belonged.

“What?” Draco croaked, drawing back from her.

“I—” You’re supposed to be brave, Hermione, a voice insisted from within her. It filled her with enough resolve to stammer over an explanation. “I thought maybe you wanted that. To, um, with me. We’ve almost…a couple of times, right? And I…I haven’t ever...” Her face was most definitely the color of a brick wall. “But don’t worry about me not knowing how, I’m a quick learner. And I don’t care about some precious virginity sh*te or anything, I won’t make a big deal of it. It doesn’t have to mean anything. Molly Weasley taught me the contraceptive charm,” Hermione finished weakly. “I cast it before I came.”

She chanced a peek at his face, mortified over what she saw.

Draco Malfoy stood abruptly, leaving her sitting up and blushing, before beginning to furiouslypace the length of the study. He muttered to himself under his breath as he went, shaking his head in disbelief.

“M-Malfoy?” She ventured, pulling herself up to stand. “I can, erm. I can see myself out?”

His head snapped around, his eyes like bits of coal.

“Let me get this straight,” he said, his voice like a ship that had run aground, completely wrecked. With every word, he took a step closer. “You’re proposingfor us to shag because you haven’t before and because Molly Weasley taught you the contraceptive charm?”

She backed up instinctively as he approached, putting space between them until her back hit the oak desk.

“Those aren’t good enough reasons to f*ck someone, Granger,” Draco growled, closing the distance between them. He caged her in against the desk, forcing her to lean back onto the wooden surface. “Would you like to hear some good reasons?”

Hermione could feel the tension in the room heighten, crackling around them like uncontrolled magic. At a loss for words for the first time in her life, she nodded.

“I think we should have sex—” Draco leaned in, his breath cool on her neck as he whispered “—because I’ve wanted to for months. Every time I got myself off, I thought of you. Imagining how you’d feel inside. What you’d sound like. How pretty you’d look when you came.”

He reached up and stroked her cheek as he spoke, the delicate touch at odds with the dangerous, charged quality of his words.

“And just so you know, I’d make it mean something. I’d make it good for you. If you let me.”

She couldn’t breathe. If he kept talking, she’d asphyxiate and die.

He kept talking.

“I’ve never seen you in a dress like this. Flimsy little thing. Did you wear this for me?” Draco asked, trailing his hand from her face down her clavicle, her shoulders. “Don’t you dare lie.”

He ran a finger under the strap of her dress, teasing the skin underneath, trailing fire from his fingertips as he went.

“Yes,” she breathed. “I wore it for you.”

He pulled the delicate strap slowly down her shoulder, taking his time in undoing her. She was shaking now, her whole body trembling.

“Good.” He pulled the other strap off, reaching behind her for the zipper. “Tell me to stop,” he warned, fingering the clasp. She shook her head; she’d burn up if he stopped, consumed by how badly she wanted him to keep touching her until she was nothing but ash.

The dress pooled at her feet.

Underneath, she wore a simple set, ordered surreptitiously from Fleur’s catalog of Muggle inspired lingerie. It wasn’t anything complicated or scandalous, just a pretty lace lined bra and matching knickers. The color made her tanned skin look golden, warm against the powder blue.

Her blush spread from her cheeks all the way down to where the swells of her breasts peeked out from under the lace. There was something excruciating about putting oneself on display. She felt deeply self conscious before noticing Draco looking at her avariciously, in the way that a dragon might regard a hoard of gold.

His eyes were dark and wide, caught up in the sheer expanse of bare skin as if he wasn’t sure where to look first. After a long, heated moment, he dragged his gaze up to her face.

“And this?” Draco finally managed, his voice thick with desire. “Is this for me too?”

She nodded.

“I take it back,” he said. “Muggles are superior. I’ll never say anything to the contrary ever again.”

She laughed. He reached out to brush the waistband of her knickers. The slightest of touches sent goosebumps across the soft skin of her lower abdomen.

To her dismay, he pulled back.

“Are you drunk?” He asked, through clenched teeth.

She shook her head slowly. She’d only had a few glasses of wine; she felt warm and relaxed, but not inebriated.

“I won’t—” Draco cleared his throat. His hands shook from the effort it took not to touch her. “I won’t do anything you don’t ask me to. I’ll go slow.” It sounded like he was begging. “But only if you’re sure.”

“Ask me,” she breathed, as if they were simply continuing their game from earlier.

“Are you sure, Hermione?”

In answer, she laced her fingers around his neck, and met his mouth with hers.

It was both more and less desperate than their other kisses. More because of the urgency, her need to have her tongue in his mouth right away. Less because they both knew it was a precursor to something else.

Hermione slid her hands up his chest, undoing the buttons at his collar, impatient to equalize their states of dress. She wasn’t quite sure what to do with her hands next, and she could feel her nerves making a resurgence, fluttering in her chest.

Malfoy seemed unhastened, taking whatever he wanted at the pace that suited him. Moving his lips to her neck and then, to the swell of her breast. He bit down, digging his teeth into her skin. She inhaled sharply, surprised by how good it felt, the little pinpricks of discomfort alongside the heightened pressure between her legs.

Then, he ran his tongue against the dark purpling scar of Dolohov’s curse and she saw stars.

“I was right,” he murmured into her skin. “I knew you’d make such filthy noises.”

She hadn’t even realized she’d cried out.

“Should we—” Hermione gasped, as he pulled down the lace cups of her bra with his teeth. His tongue laved her nipple before sucking it into his mouth. The world exploded and reformed at the sensation.“A bedroom?” She finally managed.

“No,” Draco growled, and lifted her under her thighs, hiking her up around his hips. She instinctively wrapped her legs around him and he lifted her, positioning her body as he saw fit. “Here.”

He lowered them, laying her down on the plush Persian rug, knocking over their glassesas he went. He leaned over her, tasting her neck, mouthing at her jaw.

“The wine—” she protested weakly. “It’ll stain.”

“I don’t give a single bloody f*ck about the rug,” Draco said, his pupils dilating as he took in her figure, splayed out before him. Ducking his head, he licked a long stripe from her waist to the underside of her breast. She let out a harsh breath, thoughts of wine stains forgotten.

From above her, he looked like a classical painting, a marble sculpture. Lovely and hard and unmistakably masculine. His chiseled jaw, the solid planes of his chest and stomach peeking out from his unbuttoned shirt. She could see the sectumsempra scars that she’d healed, the evidence of her magic all over his body forever.

The thought caused her to tighten around nothing. She felt strangely empty.

“I think you should take your clothes off now,” Hermione whispered, before she could lose her nerve.

He moved faster than she thought possible, toeing off his shoes and socks before shucking his shirt and trousers and tossing them haphazardly behind him. When he was down to his pants, he hesitated.

“That too,” she added, watching as he pushed them down, revealing his painfully hard co*ck. She sucked in a breath, remembering that sometimes, especially the first time, sex could be painful.

“Are you…” She questioned nervously, staring at him as he took it in hand, groaning as he gave a sharp tug. “Does that hurt?”

“Hurt?” He asked, taken aback. “No, it—” He took her hand gently, guiding it to himself. She wrapped her fingers around his co*ck in the same way he had, feeling the dizzying heaviness, the warmth of it. Tentatively, she squeezed his length and he let out a sound like he’d been terribly wounded. She jumped, withdrawing her hand apologetically.

“It doesn’t hurt,” Draco managed, his voice utterly wrecked. “It feels bloody incredible.”

He leaned into her until she laid back. Caressed her waist, arranged her hips. Wrapped his large hands around her thighs. The sight caused a bolt of need to flash through her, brighter than any mere lightning.

“Let me show you.”

Draco settled between her legs, slowly hooking two fingers into the band of her knickers, a question in his darkened eyes. She whined in affirmation, already desperate for him to touch her.

Hermione closed her eyes as he pulled them off, overwhelmed.

It wasn’t like she was ashamed of her body, but she wasn’t sure of it either. What if it wasn’t what he liked? Maybe she should have—

When she opened them again, she saw Draco looking directly at her exposed c*nt, his usual inscrutable facade cracked completely open, a rapturous awe in its place.

“You’re so pretty, Granger,” Draco said hoarsely.

She was embarrassingly wet.He dragged his fingers through her, stroking her slit. When he reached the bundle of nerves at the top of her sex, he pressed until she bucked her hips, seeking more friction. To her dismay, he let up, lifting his fingers to his mouth and sucking them clean.

Oh.

Thanks to Lavender’s waxing poetic on the topic, she knew plenty about oral sex, knew some men didn’t prefer it and some men very much did. Butit was one thing to know this hypothetically and another to see Draco Malfoy leaning over her, with his sinful lips inches from her center.

From the way he was looking at her, she’d assume he was one of the latter.

“So wet and pink,” Draco murmured. “What a sweet little c*nt.” He gave her cl*t a soft kitten lick, the barest of pressure, and she gasped at the sensation. It was nothing like what she could do with her fingers. It was indescribably better.

“Has anyone ever done this before?” He looked up from between her legs to meet her eyes.

“N-no,” she moaned, as he kissed along her inner thighs teasingly.

“Good,” he said. “I’ll show you.”

Without hesitation, he kissedher c*nt in earnest. His tongue didunspeakable things to her cl*t as he ate her out, making obscenely wet sounds as he went.

“You taste like ambrosia,” he murmured, spreading her wider for better access. He had her slick all over his chin and the sight made her delirious. “Nectar of the gods.”

Hermione keened at his words. She’d be embarrassed at how wanton she looked, her legs spread and c*nt dripping, but she was too far gone to care. Too desperate for him to make her come, to give her reprieve from the all encompassing tightening of her body.

“Please,” she babbled, unsure of what she was begging for. “Please, Draco, please.”

She could feel him smiling into her cl*t.

“Patience, Granger,” he said, pulling his tongue away despite her whining, so that he could slip a finger into her. She clenched around it instinctively. He swore violently at the sensation, the intense grip of her walls. “f*ck, you’re so tight. We have to get you nice and relaxed so you can take it, okay sweetheart? Gonna open you up for me.” He pumped his finger as he spoke, sending sparks bursting behind her eyes.

“Another,” she insisted, head thrown back as he obeyed. She knew from experience getting herself off that she could take two fingers, but his were thicker and longer and more dextrous.

He f*cked her with them, dragging against her inner walls as he withdrew, heightening the pressure. When he added his mouth back in the mix, lapping and sucking at her cl*t, her c*nt tightened and she came with a cry of relief.

She spasmed as she climaxed, a white hot pleasure coursing from her center all the way to her toes. She babbled praise—so good, it’s so good— and he didn’t let up on touching her, stroking her through it and murmuring encouragements into crease of her thigh as she came down.

When she fully stilled, Hermione covered her face with her hands, pressing her palms firmly into her eyes.

“Thank you,” she croaked weakly, hating how grateful she sounded.

“f*ck me,” Draco muttered, staring obscenely as he pulled his soaked fingers from her. He sucked them right into his mouth as if he hadn’t gotten enough. “So polite when you come. You’re going to be the death of me.” His voice was slurred with pleasure, and she tingled with the thought that she was the one to cause it.

“That’s the idea,” she said, feeling emboldened. “Isn’t it?”

“You don’t have to,” Draco choked out as she wriggled under his body, lining up her pelvis with his as best she could. It was a little awkward—she had to tilt up her hips, lock her legs around his waist so that they aligned correctly— but when his length brushed her center, he made a noise so indecent that she nearly came again.

“I want to,” Hermione responded. “I want it to be you.”

His resolve snapped.

He pinned her under him properly, dragging her hips flush to his and wrapping her legs around him. With a muttered curse, he reached down and ran his co*ck through her folds, coating himself with her slick.

“Tell me if you don’t like something, alright?” he begged, pressing the head of his co*ck into her, the sensation already overwhelming. “Tell me what you want.”

”It’s so much,” she gasped and he growled, his fingers digging into her skin as he pushed in another inch.

“Whatever you want,” he babbled, his eyes shut tightly. “I’ll give it to you.”Another inch disappeared into her c*nt. She started to feel a little discomfort, an overwhelming sense of fullness, like maybe she couldn’t fit him inside her.

She made a little noise and Draco’s eyes flew open, checking her face for any uncertainty. They were loveliest shade of gray— glinting like gunmetal, caught in the sun. Hermione made the decision for the both of them, tightening her legs around his hips and using the leverage to pull him deep. There was a bit of pain—blunt and surprising— and then he was completely sheathed in her.

Her c*nt pulsed as she took his co*ck to the hilt, stretching to accommodate him. His hips twitched, desperate for friction, but Hermione winced, not yet ready for him to move.

Understanding, he stilled and dropped his head into the crook of her neck, whispering about how tight she was into the valley of her throat.

“Like a dream,” he breathed, as she adjusted to the feeling of him. “You feel like a f*cking dream. I can barely— can’t even believe I get to be inside you.”

His fingers found her breasts, plucking at her nipples. He was never not touching her; it was as if he needed to, in order to confirm she was still real.

After several torturous moments of teasing, she ran her hands into his silky hair until he lifted his head, his face inches below hers.

“I want you to move now, Draco.”

Obediently, he dragged his co*ck from her, slowly thrusting back in. They both let out strangled sounds. He repeated the motion more intently. Over and over, until the friction burned brighter than the discomfort, the movements turning devastatingly pleasurable.

Hermione understood now: this was why people launched ships and burnt cities.

As he moved over her, he stared at the place they were joined. Watching as he pushed in and withdrew with her wetness gleaming on his co*ck.

“I’m going to picture this every time I close my eyes,” Draco hissed through clenched teeth, pushing her legs towards her chest and holding her thighs so they were bent open. The position let her take him deeper, and she hissed with pleasure at the change of sensation. She felt completely, devastatingly full. “Every time I close my eyes, I’m going to see the way you look when I’m f*cking you.” He thrust harder, nudging a spot that had her gasping. Encouraged, he reached down and rubbed her cl*t, the combination of fullness and friction sending her soaring. Distantly, she was shocked she might be able to manage a second org*sm.

“Yours,” she moaned in agreement, half out of her mind as she was wound tighter and tighter, the world contracting into a single pinpoint of pleasure. She could feel herself begin to flutter around his co*ck. “Oh Christ, Draco. It’s—”

“— I know, sweetheart, it’s so good. You have to come now, okay? Please, please come for me—”

Hermione fell to pieces, his encouragement tipping her over the perilous edge of a cliff, gentle nets woven of silk waiting to catch her below. As soon as her c*nt started pulsing around him, Draco pushed forward, practically bending her in half, and came in her with a deep moan.

It could have been minutes or hours or years before they moved, Hermione had no idea.

“So… that’s what it’s like?” She finally asked, once she’d found she still had a voice. He was crushing her a little, but she found she didn’t truly mind.

“Sometimes,” Draco managed, sounding a bit strangled. He rolled them both onto his back without disjoining, positioning her to lay on his chest. She rested on him, unwilling for it to be over just yet.

After a short while, she could feel him softening, his come starting to leak from her. Her c*nt pulsed at the sensation, overstimulated, and he winced.

“Sorry,” she whispered, moving off him. Their combined release spilled from her, dripping onto her thighs and the rug below.

To her mortification, he kept his eyes fixed on her c*nt, staring until she squirmed. He reached out and touched her over sensitive center, dragging his fingers through their mess in dark admiration of his own work. She shivered at the look on his face, and as if suddenly coming back to himself, he finally drew his hand away.

Looking slightly lost, Draco summoned his wand from where it had rolled near the desk and conjured a glass of water, somehow predicting that she’d be incredibly thirsty. She murmured her thanks, drinking it in silence.

“That wasn’t my best—” Draco started, cutting himself off. “What I mean to say is, I can go longer—er, make it more— or gentler, I’m not always such a brute—” Finally, he gave up, lacing his hands behind his neck in discomfort. He seemed at a bit of a loss, the snarling confidence from when he’d f*cked her slowly diminishing.

Now, as daybreak loomed, his eyes grew uncertain, perhaps considering what came next. Maybe he regretted it, the cruel voice of insecurity forced her to consider. Maybe sex was supposed to be different, faster or slower or more acrobatic.

“Was I alright?” She asked, her voice smaller than she’d intended it to be. “Did I—I mean, was it—”

His brow creased, like he was flummoxed by the question. He narrowed his eyes in accusation. “Are you taking the piss?”

When he realized she in fact wasn’t making a joke at his expense, he shook his head, the blond strands darkened from sweat.

“You don’t even realize what you’ve done to me.” Draco barked a laugh, his mirth tinged with a strange bitterness. “I’m ruined, Granger.” His tone took on a possessiveness, a claim that shouldn’t have thrilled her, but did. “I won’t give you up. No one will take you from me. No one.”

“No one can take me,” she said and his eyes darkened at her implicit acceptance of his claim. She’d never felt more powerful than like this, naked and spent, under the covetous gaze of Draco Malfoy.

From outside the cottage, birds began to chirp, the hesitant calling of early morning.

“I have to go,” Hermione said, hating the words as if they slipped from her lips. “Everyone will be up in arms if they realize I disappeared overnight.”

She summoned her dress from where he’d discarded it, not bothering with her underthings. A part of her—the part that wanted him to remember this night, to be tortured by it, so he wouldn’t forget her—was satisfied to leave them behind.

“Right,” Draco said tightly, as she dressed. “Of course.”

Hermione fastened the straps of her dress. She couldn’t read his face; he had turned his back as she changed to allow her privacy, a ridiculous thought considering he’d just been watching his come drip from her c*nt in fascination. She blushed furiously at the thought.

“Right,” Hermione said. She knew she should discuss other matters with him before she left, but she couldn’t bring herself to ruin the intimate little world they’d created between them, where the impending war didn’t exist.

Before she could convince herself otherwise, she crossed the room and pressed a brief kiss on his cheek. “Bye then, Draco.”

Malfoy grabbed her wrist, yanking him against her, and kissed her properly— long and languid, with liberal use of his tongue. Both hands cradling her face, like she was something precious.

“Bye then, Granger,” he whispered, before pulling himself away.

*

Hermione slipped back into the Burrow just in time for breakfast, cutting the line for the shower in order to wash the heady smell of sweat and sex from her skin before anyone could notice.

She ignored the banging on the door, feigning confusion as she emerged, scrubbed clean and pink from the heat. Lavender, the origin of the banging, was fuming.

“Sorry,” Hermione apologized sweetly. “Thought it was my turn.” She ducked instinctively, dodging Lavender’s stinging jinx as she went.

Hermione sat at her usual spot at the breakfast table, steadfastly ignoring raised eyebrows from Ginny, losing herself in the hectic bustle and occasional brawl that accompanied mealtimes at the Burrow. Percy had to ask her to pass the eggs twice before she heard, earning more than a few confused looks.

“You alright, Hermione?” Ron asked, half a sausage in his mouth, as Lavender looked on with mild disgust.

“I’m fine,” Hermione managed weakly. “Just haven’t had a coffee yet.” She couldn’t exactly explain that she’d had sex with Draco Malfoy mere hours prior, and that as a result, she was bereft of cognitive function.

She methodically cut her pancake into squares, only half listening to the conversation at the table—chat over the morning’s Prophet, good natured ribbing about Harry’s upcoming birthday—as she lingered in the events of the night.

Hermione had wondered if having sex would feel like losing something, giving a piece of herself up. She’d never considered that it could result in her feeling she’d gained something, a method of expression that was new and stunningly effective.

Hermione was still lost in thought when a wisp of silver came streaking through the open kitchen window, an urgent Patronus. The table immediately fell silent.

The ministry has fallen. Kingsley’s calm voice emanated from the Patronus, echoing around the Burrow ominously. Scrimgeour is dead. It’s starting.

Wizarding Britain was officially at war.

Someone dropped a plate. Molly Weasley gasped. Bill and Fleur sprung up instantly, abandoning toast in favor of rushing out to check the wards. Moody had made them all drill evacuation plans for moments precisely like this one. They had prepared for the worst, but it didn’t change the intensity of the fear that flooded Hermione, leaving her paralyzed at the breakfast table.

The war was no longer a threat, a specter of the future. It was here.And it would demand blood.

End of Part I

Chapter 31: A Missed Migration

Chapter Text

Part II

The last dregs of autumn were still circling the drain, the cold November air only made more frigid by the merciless spray of the North Sea. The desolate island was located off the Yorkshire coast, only accessible by enchanted boat, which meant Draco Malfoy was wet, freezing, and in an absolutely rotten mood.

He swept ahead of his companion, double lined cloak fluttering in the bitter wind as he climbed along the narrow cliffside path. When he finally reached the outlook, he saw what they’d come for: a romanesque castle with weathered stone walls, looming over the craggy bluff. A sentinel of the past, its towering turrets and crumbling battlements casting long shadows that whispered of their arrival.

Draco hated it here. He could hardly hear himself think over the sound of waves, crashing against the jagged rocks. Even the sight of the occasional seabird, cutting across the gray skies, soured his attitude; any bird he saw would undoubtedly be dead in the next few months, one of the stragglers that had missed migration. He hated the miserable cold. Hated the uttered desolation of a place where nothing would dare grow.

And most of all, he hated that it had been three months and eleven days since he’d seen Hermione Granger. Since the gods showered him with undeserved good fortune, since she’d allowed him to f*ck her, hold her, even if it was too briefly. Three months and eleven days, and he’d thought of her—how her eyes sparkled when she disagreed with him, when she laughed, when she came—every single f*cking one of them.

It had been three months and eleven days of war. Of toasting the Dark Lord’s bloody vision of the future while occluding himself half-unconscious. Of raids and duels and bodies, and the relief he felt when each corpse dragged onto the manor grounds had a face other than hers. Of brewing highly illegal potions for the Dark Lord’s stores under Snape’s tutelage, and then when his godfather returned to Hogwarts as the Headmaster, on his own.

There’d been no conversation about Draco returning to school, and he’d not pressed the issue, knowing he’d be all but useless to the Order if confined to the castle. He couldn’t afford to become useless, not when his mother was still trapped in the Manor under his father’s thumb, undergoing increasingly extreme and experimental treatments from increasingly fraudulent healers in hopes to return her magic to its former potency.

Returning to school would also leave him unable to meet with Granger, not that he’d had the opportunity. The only reason Draco even knew she was alive were the responses that appeared, written in her lovely cramped script: Safe. Locked down at the Burrow. No one in or out. He didn’t tell her that the diary he’d give her to communicate with him was half of a pair of courting journals, charmed to only show the contents to the intended recipient. Draco didn’t want her to think he was making any assumptions by giving her such a presumptive gift, but she’d probably figured it out anyway, clever as she was.

Well. That wasn’t the only reason.

Draco had thought it was a trick of the light at first, a side effect of her sudden and prolonged absence from his vicinity. The foreign sensations he’d grown used to feeling since the ritual—her pain and fear, demanding his attention— had grown stranger, stronger. Draco had assumed the distance would numb the channel between them, as it had over Easter when he’d been miles away and unable to feel her at all. Back then, he hadn’t yet realized how much he’d gotten used to the pull on the other side of the bond: Granger, calling for him. He hadn’t realized how intoxicating it would feel, to be needed by her.

But in the months they’d been separated, his sense of her had only grown keener. It wasn’t just when she was scared or in danger anymore. Now, he got flashes of other emotions that did not belong to him, stronger than Northern winds. They overtook him suddenly, so intense he sometimes forgot they weren’t his. There was still fear and pain, but now also rage, sorrow, frustration, concern, guilt. Rage, again.

She was angry all the time. It was a revelation. He shouldn’t have been so smitten over the thought that the perfect, composed Hermione Granger was secretly a cauldron of fury, ready to boil over at the merest of stoked flames. He wished he'd learned this back when he could enjoy himself: wind her up during potions, push her to her buttons in Defense. Prod and prod until she lost control of her temper completely, like when she’d hit him in third-year and he’d been secretly impressed by her ruthlessness.

There were also other feelings, coming from her end of the bond. Too dangerous to even think, much less say aloud. Sensations that forced his lungs to contract, made him catch his breath. Sometimes, at his most desperate, he allowed himself to name them. Desire. Hunger. Longing.

He wasn’t certain it was him she was thinking of, when she sent arousal coursing though the bond. The jealous beast that resided in Draco's chest gnashed its teeth at the possibility she could be getting off to thoughts of someone else. But the smug prat residing in his head reassured him: despite their many other difficulties, they proved quite…compatible, physically. Even though he'd lost his head at the sight of her in blue lace, opened his mouth and started spewing filth about what he wanted to do to her. He had resolved himself to go slow, gentle for her first time, but then she'd begged for his co*ck so nicely, he hadn't had the willpower to deny her.

It happened early in the mornings or late at night, as if desire snuck into her subconscious once already in bed, forcing her to take matters into her own hands. f*ck, he'd kill someone just to watch.Every so often Draco would awaken, slammed by a sudden swell of heat. It swept away all his good sense and left him with his co*ck in his hand, muttering nonsense about brown eyes and dark curls and the way her c*nt tasted sweet and mineral, like spun sugar and the sea.

This was the bullsh*t he’d been reduced to. Spun sugar and the sea. Draco was so unbelievably f*cked.

“Salazar, you’re in a hurry,” the trailing figure of Theodore Nott caught up to him as they approached the castle. “Got somewhere to be after this?”

“Your mother’s bedchambers,” Draco snarled, not in any headspace to be trifled with.

Theo—now far more hardened than he’d been in school, with his face marred with a series of scars to prove it— twitched towards his wand before smoothing himself back into a cold placidity, his expression like a frozen lake. “Stop trying to bait me into hitting you again, Draco.”

Draco grimaced at the thought of their last duel. After Theo had set the world ablaze by killing Dumbledore, Draco had disarmed the git for his own good. The aftermath of casting Unforgivable Curses, especially for the first time, often consisted of uncontrollable outbursts and the development of an unhealthy reliance on dark magic. Draco was doing him a favor, by taking his wand; not that Theo saw it that way. Draco should have just let him blow himself up and saved himself the headache.

Upon reuniting at the Manor, they'd clashed immediately. Theo was always the friend who fought back, and Draco both respected and hated him for it.

They’d dueled out on the grounds, shooting increasingly lethal curses at each other until Theo blindsided Draco by charging him, knocking him to the ground. The sheer force caught Draco off guard, allowing Theo the opportunity to get in a few good punches and wrestle his wand back into his possession.

It wasn't like Draco was ever going to keep the bloody thing in the first place. Had he waited too long to return it? Well, confiscating a wizard’s wand was an exhibition of power, and Draco had never turned down the chance to pull rank.

Touch my wand again, Theo snarled, and I’ll break your f*cking hand. After that, he’d helped Draco up, and they’d never spoken of it again, as was typical of the Slytherin manner of resolving interpersonal issues.

“I’d like to see you try to beat me,” Draco scoffed, as they reached the foreboding castle gates. “Wand to wand, that is. Not wrestling in the mud like brutes.”

“Don't flatter yourself. If I wanted to beat up on someone, I’d play with the new recruits.” Theo grinned at the thought, his smile taking on a feral quality it hadn’t previously managed with any authority. Lately, the Heir to House Nott had taken to releasing his temper on the Dark Lord’s freshest crop of soldiers, many of them the children of his first wave of supporters. He crashed training sessions whenever his temper had been pushed to unsustainable limits, and his thinly veiled practice duels tended to devolve into wands being cast aside in favor of fists and teeth. He’d left more than one wizard bloodied and mangled on the training grounds.

Seemingly unbothered by the wind, Theo removed one of his gloves with his teeth, flipping open a silver switchblade as he went. Droplets of sacred blood fell onto the frozen ground, and the gates groaned, unlocking in recognition. Theo smeared some of his blood on Draco’s palm and the wards shimmered, allowing them both through.

Draco wiped his hand clean on his robes once they’d crossed into the desolate grounds. There wasn’t a single living thing in the entirety of the garden; the earth was inhospitable, even in the summer.

“Ah, Nott Castle, my birthright.” Theo scowled at their surroundings. “What a dump.”

The entrance was guarded by a pair of heavy oak doors, their iron hinges rusted with age. They opened instinctively for Theo, emitting the musty scent of dust, wet wood and tallow candles.The estate had been poorly maintained in the years since Lady Nott’s death, after Theo’s father moved them to a smaller family estate near York. Cobwebs littered the ceilings, swathing ancient, tarnished chandeliers. The floor was strewn with relics of a bygone era, all cracked suits of armor and faded tapestries. The portraits were still, having long gone silent. Draco shivered in the unnatural quiet, the void-like nihility that accompanied it.

“Mother?” Theo called, his voice echoing back from the high ceilings as they wound through corridors, navigating a labyrinth of twisting passages and hidden chambers.

When they reached the main hall, an otherworldly sense of cold ate through Draco’s cloak, a sensation like falling through ice into frigid water, and being unable to resurface.

“Darling,” The figure of a painfully slim woman—translucent in appearance— turned to greet them from where she hovered near the room’s unlit hearth, a grim replica of the act of warming oneself. “You’ve returned.”

Ah yes, this was the other reason Draco tried to avoid Nott Castle at all costs, and the explanation of why Theo’s father had taken his son to live in the country.

The ghost of Lady Aphasia Nott floated before them, preserved just as she’d been when she’d died, thirteen years prior. Fretfully young—no older than twenty-five— far too young for her much older husband. She was still dressed in the conservative, high-necked robes of her day, eternally trapped in time. Theo resembled his mother far more than his father, who was burly in build with a shock of wiry grey hair, a perpetually ruddy complexion and a cruel, thin mouth. In contrast, Aphasia Nott neé Fawley had been quite pretty once, if the portraits were any indication, but in death her eyes were milky and unfocused, dark curls mingling with wisps of shadow as they tumbled down her shoulders, unbound.

“Of course, Mother,” Theo assured, sounding more gentle than Draco thought possible. The ghost reached out to her son, who did not shiver as her hand passed through his face in the memory of a caress. “I always do.”

“What happened here?” The ghost asked, voice like shards of glass as she inspected his face. “Have you been harmed?”

“Don’t you think they make me look dashing?” Theo said lightheartedly, turning his face away to hide his scars. Draco could see where his fingernails were digging into his palm, no doubt drawing blood.

“Did he do this? Did he hurt you again?”

There was no need to specify who he was; everyone in the room, living and dead, knew what Theo’s father was capable of.

The chandelier rattled precariously, crystals threatening to burst as the ghost grew more distressed. Draco looked warily at the ceiling; when disturbed, Lady Nott had a tendency to destroy parts of the castle she was trapped within.

“No, Mother,” Theo soothed. “Just a bad moon. Nothing to worry about.”

“My sweet boy,” Lady Nott moaned, and the tallow candles flickered, threatening darkness. “My husband will pay for what he’s done to you. The ferryman has received his ransom, oh yes. His crossing will not be pleasant. He will die like swine, and his suffering will not abate with death, no it will only have just begun—”

“Lady Nott,” Draco cleared his throat and bowed at the waist, overly formal, interrupting the ghost’s escalation. Theo shot him a begrudging look, a mix of embarrassment and gratitude. “A pleasure, as always. Please forgive our intrusion, Theo was gracious enough to allow me a visit to your library, should you be amenable.”

“Who’s this, Theodore?” The ghost asked, casting her strange, cloudy eyes on Draco as she floated closer. He felt her presence rolling through the room like fog. It reminded Draco of the uncanny sensation of being watched from behind, the feeling of a spider scuttling across his skin.

“You remember Draco, mother,” Theo replied, as casually as if this were a conversation over tea, “Lucius and Narcissa’s son, heir to House Malfoy? He’s in search of a rather rare book, and I thought we might have a copy in the library.” Theo stooped over, dipping his lips as if kissing the specter of his mother on the cheek. “It won’t take more than a moment to retrieve it. Unless there’s any blood curses, in which case, give me half an hour. I know how paranoid Grandfather could be.”

Draco moved to follow him, lest he be left with the ghost, but Theo stopped him with a hard stare.

“Now, now Draco,” Theo chided as he slipped from the room, something wicked in his pale green eyes. “You know the rules. No one visits Nott Castle without receiving a reading from Mother. Yours will be a good one— she’s not had company in months.”

This was the final reason Draco hated Nott Manor: no one could enter without receiving a prophecy from the ghost of Aphasia Nott, who’d taken the gift of the Sight with her after she’d died. Now in her purgatorial state, her predictions were magnified, twisted beyond recognition without the temporal constructs of space and time.

“I couldn’t possibly trouble you,” Draco insisted to the ghost, his stomach twisting at the thought. Several lesser Nott relatives, eager to claim the family seat as their own, had entered the castle only to be driven mad by its poltergeist and her visions. “I’ve already intruded on your hospitality enough.”

“Never an intrusion, Little Malfoy,” the ghost waved him away, her movement sending a gust of cold air and mothballs into his face. “Or should I say, Little Black? I haven't seen you since you were a whelp. You've grown. More of your mother than your father, now, although the Malfoy greed runs deep with you. But it’s not gold you’re after, is it? Or fame? My, what a strange one you are.”

In the absence of her son, Lady Nott drifted closer, examined him in the manner one would while burning ants through a magnifying glass. Draco fought the urge to squirm, squaring his shoulders and shuttering his mind. He was back in his mother’s garden, behind the hedges of his occlumency. He spent most of his time there, these days.

“No mind tricks,” Lady Nott chastened, interrupting his efforts. “How will I be able to See if you’re so far away?”

“My apologies,” Draco said stiffly, forcing himself back to the gloomy castle and resigning himself to get this over with. He reminded himself it would be far more perilous, to anger an unruly ghost.

Lady Nott tilted her head, revealing the dark slash on her throat that was normally kept covered by her collar. Everyone had heard whispers, but few knew the entire story of how Theodore’s father had slit his wife’s throat while she was sleeping, thirteen years prior.

After several years of marriage, during which Aphasia’s gift of the Sight manifested uncontrollably, Tiberius Nott rid himself of his troubled young wife in order to take a new, more suitable bride, not prone to fits of madness and prophecy. The old bastard had no idea of the extent of both her spite and her love for her son. Her ghost proved impossible to be exorcized from Nott Castle, no matter how many soothsayers or warlocks Theo’s father employed, finally forcing him to abandon his own ancestral home and move to the mainland with his son. Tiberius Nott attempted to remarry several times during Theo’s childhood, as was customary for heads of wizarding households with only one heir. On each of his three attempts at a wedding night, he’d found his pretty new bride in their marriage bed with her throat cut. Lady Nott would not be replaced, not while she lingered on this earth, living or dead.

“Do you know what they say about the Blacks?” Lady Nott interrupted his grisly train of thought, a rolling fog taking over her mist-filled eyes. She floated closer to the enormous halls dingy windows, almost invisible when hit by direct light.

“I’d imagine they say quite a lot,” he replied dryly. “Most Noble, Most Ancient. Most Imprisoned. So forth, so on.”

“They say every Black is born alongside the toss of a coin,” the ghost continued, as if Draco hadn’t spoken. “On one side, lies greatness. On the other, madness. It was the ancestors of the Black line, who built our glorious civilization.” She co*cked an ear, as if listening to an interjection from a voice he couldn’t hear. “Of course, they tried to burn it down as well.”

Sometimes, he could feel it. The Black side of him, insistent and nearly always enraged: Take what you want. Burn what you don't. What's yours is yours, in body and in blood.

“The spirits know which way your coin will fall. You're driven by need, just like your ancestors before you. The House of Black, its progeny always blind to everything but their own desires. Your mother’s sister knows this better than most. Oh, but you haven’t seen that yet, have you? The house on the hill? The bluest of blues? Soon, Little Black.”

Draco’s blood ran cold at the mention of Bellatrix, the ghost’s other ramblings thrown to the wayside. Madness. That was what had happened to his aunt, to numerous Black ancestors whose acts of terror were now only spoken of in whispers. Those who had ended up jailed and raving, and far more, who had died at wandpoint.

“Do you wish to know?” Lady Nott hovered before him, caught in a web of glittering dust particles and whisperings from realms Draco was not privy to pass through.

“Know what?”

The ghost laughed like he'd made a fantastic joke, a sound like nails against glass.

“Of your future. You wizards always inquire of love, you know. When you’ll get it, and from whom. Witches are more practical— they ask of wealth, longevity, children—but your gender’s great preoccupation seems to be regarding love as something you are owed. Once you obtain it, you quickly squander it, generation after generation. Your father was foolish to lose sight, just as his father did before him. And you…” The wraith of Aphasia Nott inhaled sharply, taking up no oxygen and emitting no breath. “You are wise, not to think of the girl by name. I feel her magic: strong, although it’s grown stale on you. You’ll do terrible things in the name of love, Little Black, and the world will curse you for it. For you were not made to build nor raze temples; you were made to worship at them.”

“Oh, good,” Draco said, feeling a bit sick. “How smashing that you’ve cleared that up.”

“Mother," Theo drawled from down the hall. "Please tell me you’ve given Draco something to keep him up at night, I fear he’s been sleeping too well.”

For the first time, Draco thought of Theo’s reedy voice as a welcome reprieve, evidence of life in the otherwise vacuous emptiness of the castle.

“His mind is already crowded with fears,” Lady Nott replied, drifting towards her son with a forlorn look stretching over her gray, pallid face. “As are yours, my pet.”

She looked at Draco over her translucent shoulder, pure ice emanating from her unfocused gaze. “You’ll watch over my son, Little Black.”It was not phrased as a question.

“Mum,” Theo groaned, trying to sound irritated, but coming off incredibly fond. “Don’t threaten our guests.”

The ghost of Aphasia Nott ignored his protests. “You’ll keep Theodore safe in your realm. Despite my husband’s best efforts, it is not his time to cross. Your protection will be rewarded, in this life or the next. I swear it.”

“Yes, Lady Nott,” Draco responded quietly. One did not simply refuse a poltergeist, especially one with the Sight. “It would be my honor.”

“You’ll come back soon,” Lady Nott insisted, more instruction than invitation. “And you’ll bring the girl, won’t you Little Black? I wish to See her.”

“The girl?” Theo asked, his dark eyebrows raised in amusem*nt. “The girl, Draco?”

“Now, now, darling,” Aphasia's ghost chided, floating away as if being tugged by an invisible string. “We must allow our guest his secrets, as he allows us our own.” She pressed a wistful kiss to her son’s forehead, and Theo closed his eyes, shivering as she passed through him, before disappearing altogether.

“Bye, mum,” Theo whispered, his eyes suspiciously full. Draco looked away, giving his childhood friend what little privacy he could offer.

After all, they were at war; the only mercies Draco could afford were the small ones.

*

Back in the rickety boat, blasted by the freezing spray of the sea, Draco had to yell in order to be heard.

“Did you get it or what?” He roared to Theo, over the din of the waves, as the little vessel skimmed the surface of the water like an unruly stone.

Theo had his cloak drawn to his nose to keep out the cold as he directed the skiff with his wand, sending them flying back to shore.

“Who’s the girl?” Theo hollered, his voice equally raised.

“Give me the bloody book Nott, or so help me, I’ll have your entrails bronzed and turned into Malfoy heirlooms—”

They crashed onto the shore, the impact sending both of them flying from the boat and into the cold wet sand. Theo shook seaweed from his curls, grinning madly, clearly exhilarated by the ride.

“I got it. You can stop whinging now, you git.” Theo withdrew a blood red tomb from his cloak. “Awful thing, I could feel its magic the whole way. I think it tried to drown us once or twice. What do you need it for, anyway? I thought they had this in the Restricted Section. I bet you a hundred Galleons your library has a copy and you were too lazy to look, weren’t you?”

Draco examined the cover, the title burned into the leather: Magick Moste Evile.

His search for the tome had started a month prior, when he’d received a message in his courting journal.

What I’m about to ask you must be regarded with the utmost secrecy, do you understand?

Another favor, Granger? Draco had responded, a failed attempt at flirtation, before her question shimmered, ink manifesting on the page.

What do you know about the term ‘horcrux?’

“Much like Hogwarts, the Malfoy Library has a censored copy,” Draco explained to Theo, as he shook clumps of sand from his cloak. “The originals have all been burned.” He could feel the sensation Nott had described, a pull that sent a pricking from his Dark Mark all the way to the cursed scars on his chest. That promised him power and glory and blood. “That is, all except this one.”

*

The Dark Lord had temporarily vacated the Malfoy family home after the fall of the Ministry, off attending to pressing matters outside the country. Whispers had placed him in Sweden, near Durmstrang, and then in Austria. In an effort to collect intelligence, Draco had tried to discern what he was looking for on the continent, but it seemed not even Lucius or Bellatrix knew the answer.

Even without the Dark Lord’s presence, Draco evaded his childhood home, preferring to spend his days brewing in Severus Snape’s cramped bungalow in Spinner’s End. He felt miserable and guilty for leaving his mother, but Narcissa’s magic had polluted her mind enough that she thought he was away at Hogwarts most days anyway. Draco’s presence only confused her. Sometimes, even just catching sight of her son brought Narcissa back to the night Draco was marked, which sent her into dangerous fits of accidental magic. After one such instance, she nearly burned down the drawing room and had to have her wand confiscated. It had left Lucius fuming, unable to understand something he could not bend to his will using money or violence; no matter what he paid or who he threatened, his wife's magic continued to devolve.

No, it was best that Draco stayed away. Preparing, planning. Lying in wait, a snake in the grass. He could be disciplined, patient. He could wait for the correct moment to strike.

His godfather had added him to the bungalow’s wards without protest, his glittering black eyes always too knowing, too certain of what Draco stowed away in his treacherous heart. More often than not, Draco slept there, choosing the little cot he’d set up in the kitchen-turned-potions-lab in order to tend to temperamental overnight brews over his plush featherbed at the Manor.

Some nights, Theo came by for his potion, and they’d get pissed together while they waited for it to brew.

For an entire year, Draco had kept Theodore Nott’s secret. He’d helped him conceal the true source of the bruises and cuts that riddled his body, by spreading rumors about how Theo’s father had escalated his violent treatment of his son (to Draco's disgust, they weren't baseless claims). After that first full moon, which left Theo practically in pieces, Draco had taken false responsibility for cursing him in the corridor and sending him to the Hospital Wing for days on end.

That was when Draco began to teach himself to brew Wolfsbane. It had taken months under Snape’s tutelage before he’d managed an acceptable batch.

Draco wasn't doing it to be nice,or anything nearly so pedantic. Wolfsbane was a simply a useful potion, one that every healer required proficiency inbrewing. And if he continued to brew it every month, well. It was important to keep one's skills sharp.

He had been there, when it happened. In a twisted way, it was something they shared. Both of them, pathetic. Powerless to protect themselves and each other. Too weak to deny the mark or to die for their refusal. Theo had passively watched as Draco was marked, watched as his mother was tortured, watched as he was cursed and sliced by Dolohov when he’d failed to kill Hermione Granger. Draco had stood by as Theo was bitten, had chewed his tongue and occluded hard when Fenrir Greyback was released into the woods where the boy he’d grown up with was bound to a tree, like a sacrificial virgin to a ship’s mast.

Once, when they’d been completely bashed off firewhiskey, Draco had wondered aloud why it hadn’t been him, who was bitten.

“Father’s only got me to use as leverage,” Theo explained, and Draco had pretended not to hear his voice crack. “He wouldn’t mind if I died, if it weren’t for his inability to make another legitimate heir, thanks to Mother’s curse. And I’ve got no family to threaten now that she’s already dead, have I? If the Dark Lord had a go at Father, I’d probably send him flowers. But this way, I’m f*cked for life and Father’s precious, unsullied bloodline is ruined by his half-breed son.” He’d finished the bottle before looking back at Draco, sadder than anyone he’d ever seen. “You know, I still think you got the worst end of the stick. At least when you’ve got no one to die for, there’s no one they can kill in your name. He'll have you wrapped around his finger, so long as he has Narcissa's life in his hands.”

At that point, Draco wasn't certain if they were talking about Voldemort or Lucius anymore.

Lately Theo visited the bungalow even on nights he didn’t require Wolfsbane. After the visit to Nott Castle, they congregated in Spinner’s End with a bottle of something strong enough to blind them.

When Draco and Theo got pissed together, they’d pretend they were different people. They sat out in the garden and didn’t talk about the Dark Lord. Dumbledore’s death. Draco’s mysterious dalliance with a certain know-it-all Gryffindor. They didn’t talk about anything that mattered, not if they could help it. Instead, they rebelled in infinitesimal ways, ran their mouths as if they were just a couple of lads, having a bit of a rowdy night.

They sprawled in the grass, unbothered by the cold: Nott because of his lycanthropic tolerance to extreme weather, and Draco because, well, he’d always been a bit of a masoch*st, hadn’t he?

“Greengrass, Pucey, MacMillan.” Theo ticked off fingers, listing conquests as he went. “Davis, Warrington, Davies—”

“Wait, Davis or Davies?” Draco questioned from where he lay on his back, staring up at the night sky and wondering when Theo had the bloody time last year to bed half of Slytherin.

I'd bet you'd have had a lot of free time too, the Black side reminded him. If you hadn't been chasing Granger's skirt. Fantasizing about her pert little—

“Both,” Theo answered with a sharp grin. “Tracy was better with her mouth, but Roger was just prettier.”

“You’re telling me you shagged Roger Davies?!” Malfoy exclaimed, shuddering at the unwanted image of the poncy Ravenclaw on his knees. “I thought he was after Chang all year?”

“Oh, I don’t think one negates the other,” Theo replied. “And technically, he shagged me. Reckon Roger’s a follower of the time honored philosophic belief,a hole’s a hole."

Draco grimaced, not wanting to imagine the previous Head Boy in regards to anyone’s holes ever again.

“What about you?” Theo jibed, swigging straight from the bottle. “Saving it for your bride? Is it written into your betrothal contract? Groom must have the purest of peckers—”

Draco threw a stray pot of lavender at Theo’s head. The other boy dodged it, thanks to his new and improved instincts.

“Mangy mutt,” Draco insulted, and Theo raised the bottle as if toasting the sentiment. “You already know about Pansy—”

“—yes, and I almost obliviated myself after having to listen to that coming from the bed next to mine. No, Draco,it doesn’t go there—”

“Well, you’re evidence that it does go there, aren’t you? And Pansy was…well, it was bloody weird, wasn’t it? But I dunno. Fun. Something to stave off the boredom.”

For a long time, Draco had thought of sex the way it had been with Pansy. Strange and visceral, a mix of pure sensation and directing of bodies: hips up, elbows here, faster, slower, there, there. It was all very transactional: when she sucked him off, he returned the favor. If he made her finish, he was allowed to come. With Pansy, the act of f*cking was a sort of mad, semi-choreographed dash, where Draco raced her towards inclement pleasure.

Then, he’d had sex with Granger and he’d realized it wasn’t just pleasure that he sought. It was complete and total possession. Nothing had been transactional when they’d come together, because it had all been his. Every breathy little sound, every arch of her back. Her eager mouth and her sweet c*nt. When she came, it was for him.

Somehow, it was also all for her. When he pressed into her and she slowly took all of him inside, inch by inch, the beast within him roared in triumph. Finally, he’d been good enough to be chosen, to be owned in his entirety.

Draco told the beast to shut up, told himself it would be the one time. He’d allowed himself the slip, even while knowing it would destroy him to never touch her again.

Fool, the Black side of him cried. Go to her. Please her. Beg.

Theo's mother had been right: the Blacks were insane, all of them, himself included.

“Are you sure you’re straight mate?” Theo snorted inelegantly, ripping him from his recollections. The dark haired boy tipped back his head and finished the bottle. “Because I’m just dying for a mediocre time, and what did you say your specialty was? Oh right, something to stave off the boredom. C’mon, show me your best sixty seconds—”

“—that was the first time, you wanker. I’ve had plenty of practice since. Not your definition of plenty, mind you. Not all of us are the Slytherin trolley, offering free rides—”

Theo barreled towards him in the grass and they rolled around, wrestling: before his bite, Theo had been slight and weedy and Draco could have beaten him to a pulp. Now, he was stupidly strong and eager to burn off aggression; it was no wonder they usually ended up tussling before the night was done.

“Are we out of firewhiskey?” Theo asked, once he'd managed to pin Draco, in a presumptuous use of the first person plural. Draco extricated himself, feeling merciful for once, and refrained from pointing out that Theo always got the drunkest after visits to his mother’s ghost. He’d be a hypocrite to chastise him; Draco did the exact same thing, every time he returned from the Manor.

“You’re out of firewhiskey,” Draco corrected, as the gnarled trees surrounding the bungalow shivered, having recently lost the last of their leaves. “I’ve got tequila left.”

Theo made a face of disgust, but summoned the bottle regardless.A year ago, if someone were to tell Draco he’d develop a taste for muggle liquor, he’d have laughed in their face. Now, the choice of beverage was one of the ways he and Theo communicated without saying the things that would assuredly get them killed.

A month or so ago, Draco had brought muggle scotch whiskey for them to imbibe for the first time, and Theo had stared at him as if he’d placed a severed head on Snape’s kitchen table. It had taken Draco hours of attempting to figure out Muggle currency, before giving up and confunding the clerk at the shop. He never claimed to be a saint, alright? And if he’d bought it to remember the taste of Granger’s tongue that night, the burn of cheap liquor layered under expensive wine, well, Draco wouldn’t think too hard about that.

“Is that…?” The dark haired boy had examined the label carefully, as if the bottle could explode at any moment.

“So what if it is?” Draco had posited, fists preemptively clenched. He hadn't been trying to start a fight that night, but he wouldn’t have turned one down either.

Theo had given him a long, knowing look before accepting a glass. They’d finished the bottle, and then another. Drinking until they threw up all over the bungalow’s hedges. Apparently, muggle liquor, while slightly different in its thick, hazy intoxication, was just as potent.

After that, they’d tried other spirits, growing more adventurous as they went: Caribbean rum, Russian vodka, and Draco’s favorite, a beverage called tequila which left him feeling alternatingly randy and like he wanted to put a hole through a wall. The first time he’d tried the smokey gold liquor, they’d ended the night by beating each other to a pulp. In the morning, Draco had healed them both. As with anything else, they didn’t speak of it.

“What do you think Pansy’s doing right now?” Theo asked as he got into the tequila. This was a game they sometimes played, part of their pretense of normalcy. They guessed at Pansy’s whereabouts back at Hogwarts: was she pitting Crabbe and Goyle against each other in the common room? Tormenting the new faculty? Hiding from everyone in the Owlery, her preferred place to have a think?

It seemed ridiculous that school resumed at all. Hogwarts had been twisted beyond recognition: Muggle Studies, Care of Magical Creatures, and Defense Against the Dark Arts had been slashed, replaced with Magical Race and Nation Studies, the Harvest and Use of Non-Sentient Species, and the eponymous Dark Arts. If Pansy’s carefully redacted letters—filled with obviously false enthusiasm for the new curriculum—were any indication, the classes were base attempts at indoctrination, armed-party politics, and the slaughter of whatever was deemed subhuman.

The few Muggleborn students who had unknowingly registered themselves with the Ministry and boarded the train had never made it to Hogwarts. The papers reported them missing, claiming they’d run off to join the known terrorist group, the Order of the Phoenix, despite the fact that most of them had been under the age of fourteen.

Draco knew those children would never be found.

But— a surprising number had gotten out. Far more than the Death Eaters expected. Most Muggleborns with exposure to the current state of the magical world refused to register themselves all together, and when Ministry emissaries went knocking, they all had the same bizarrely identical experience: no matter how hard they tried to find the missing Muggleborns’ family homes, they’d find themselves elsewhere, doing another task they deemed far more pressing.

“Pansy? She’s probably complaining with Daphne about the lack of eligible bachelors this year,” Draco finally replied, aiming for light but coming off more than a little sullen. "Their biggest problem is probably the state of the marriage market."

“Pity there’s a war on,” Theo responded, putting on a high-pitched imitation of the self-appointed Slytherin princess herself. “It’s ruining the season!”

At this, Draco laughed, the sound sharp and foreign. His breath was visible in the cold, exhales lingering in the air, evidence that somehow, he was still alive.

For now.

Even while drunk, Draco found it impossible to forget that he had an assortment of impending problems that could get him killed at any moment. The fact he was in communication with Hermione Granger, in a capacity far more dangerous than his supposed spying. The increasing pressure he faced, to reveal the location of the Order’s headquarters to the Death Eaters and prove his usefulness.

Draco never forgot, not even for a second, that as soon as he stopped being useful, he’d be dead.

There was also the fact that his Dark Mark—now an ugly, reddened scar that refused to fade— didn’t burn black anymore when the Dark Lord called. Draco had only gotten away with it thus far because of Theo, who he’d luckily been with during the last time it had happened. When the dark-haired boy clapped a hand to his own forearm, Draco recreated the motion, wincing as if he could feel it too.

But what would happen when one day the Dark Lord forced Draco to raise his sleeve?

He thought about confiding in Theo. The boy was undoubtedly his closest ally within the Dark Lord’s forces, and yet, Draco didn’t trust him as far as he could throw him. Theo was infamously hard to read, played at friend and foe in equal capacity. He drank muggle liquor, but he’d murdered Dumbledore without hesitation, in cold blood. The only time he seemed remotely out of control of his impenetrable facade was immediately after a full moon, when the cracks would peek through, before being sealed over once more.

Where did Theodore Nott fall? Draco had only ever come to one potential conclusion: wherever he thought would serve him best.

“Let’s get you inside, Malfoy. Your lips have gone all blue.” Theo jostled him, standing on wobbly legs and dusting himself off. “Want me to warm them up with mine?”

“And get a taste of Roger Davies arsehole? I’ll pass, thanks.”

Draco rubbed his hands together, realizing he couldn’t feel his fingers. Theo passed him the rest of the tequila, looking a little to the side in a way that gave Draco pause. Even though Theo’s expression was flat, eyes giving nothing away, after a lifetime of knowing one another, he recognized what uncertainty looked like on Theodore Nott. A bitten lip, a torn cuticle. A barely noticeable avoidance of eye contact.

“Spit it out,” Draco said harshly, his heart picking up speed. “What’s wrong?”

“They’ve found the Order’s headquarters,” Theo confessed, after a prolonged hesitation. “I overheard my father, arguing with Dolohov about the wards. The Notts are historically—”

“—the famed wardmasters of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, I know." Draco rolled his eyes. "Everyone knows. Hasn't anyone ever told you Nott types that it's in poor taste to brag.”

“I’m not bragging,” Theo said, a bit of flint in his tone. “I’m trying to tell you that they’ve found a way through. They found them and they’re breaking into the wards.”

Draco nearly exploded the bottle, only getting a hold of his magic at the last second. If the Death Eaters had found a way into the Weasley home, it meant they’d found Granger. If they found Granger—

No. He slammed his occlumency walls in place.

“Why are you telling me this?” Draco asked coldly, his feelings of panic tucked into his mother’s garden, amongst roses and rosemary and flitterblooms. “Why would I care?”

“You know why,” Theo said, as if Draco had missed an obvious point. It made Draco want to strangle him. “It’s the same reason you check that diary every night when you think I’m not looking. Courting journals? Really, Draco?”

Draco’s hand was on his wand in an instant. If Theo got him caught, got her caught, Draco would kill him, friendship be damned. He'd do it. Slowly.

“Relax,” Theo instructed, rolling his eyes at Draco’s whitened knuckles. “As Mother reminded me today, your affairs are none of my business. I intend to keep it that way.” He looked Draco in the eye, green meeting grey. “I don’t like owing you, Malfoy. This way…we’re square. For last year.”

Draco had the suspicion that Theodore Nott, in his own, strange way, was trying to thank him.

From somewhere distant, abird called, the questioning song of a creature left behind by its flock,where are you, where are you?not realizing it was too late.The heir to House Nott grimaced at the sound.

“Theo,” Draco said, rolling up his sleeve.“I have to show you something.”

Chapter 32: Unforgivable

Chapter Text

When Draco was a child, everything was simple.

His perception of society was limited to tea at the Parkinson Manor or the Goyle House, the rare trip into wizarding London. History was the double-balustrade grand staircase, adorned with portraits of his ancestors, the Malfoys of days past. The world was made up entirely of the Manor, its high-ceilinged ballrooms and grand pianos and immaculately manicured grounds. Opulent, carefully designed so as to never prompt questions of what lay beyond the hedges, and at its nucleus was the resplendent Narcissa Malfoy. Lovely and sharp as a diamond, catching all the light in the room. Cold and composed, just as a Malfoy wife should be.

But his mother wasn’t cold, not to him. In fact, Narcissa was the only person in his little world that seemed to realize Draco was a child, and who treated him as such. She had a way of making every terrible thing into a lively game. Skinned knees became battle scars, wrought from slaying dragons. His tears, the result of a scolding from Lucius, turned him into a phoenix, capable of healing any wound. And when Lucius was gone on business, when perfection was no longer required of them, there were truffles eaten with his fingers for supper and mattresses conjured in the observatory, so that Draco and his mother could fall asleep under the stars.

When his mother took him to the shops in Diagon Alley, he marveled at how she looked down her nose at everyone around them, as if innately certain they were inherently below her despite being unaware of their pedigree.

“Everyone is below us, darling,” she would say, patting him on the head. “We’re Malfoys.”

Now, Draco thought grimly as he stood at the foot of the grand staircase, everything was terribly complicated. Society turned out to be a vicious, self-immolating beast, bent on destroying itself. His understanding of the world had been wrong. The manor held none of its childhood enchantment. The ancestral home of House Malfoy had been tainted by dark magic, stilting the air and filling the halls with a noxious sense of dread. And his mother—

In her day, Narcissa had been an exemplary witch, with a strong bloodline and powerful magic. That was, after all, why she’d been chosen as a Malfoy wife. But her cold, haughty exterior had always housed an inner sensitivity that only Draco had been privy to. Narcissa’s secret gift was that of nurturement, an inherent predilection for coaxing saplings into groves. She loved her son and her garden. She’d have flourished under a brood of children like the Weasley brats, with enough sons to play at heirs and spares and daughters to dote on and spoil.

Draco knew that after his birth, there had been other attempts. All unnamed, all buried in the garden not the crypt, their graves long obscured by sunflowers and lemon trees. Once, after years of pestering her for a sibling, his mother had shown him their locations, explaining that she had been unable to carry another child to term, not after the stress of pregnancy during the first war.

It was worth it, Draco, because it gave me you. She’d stroked his hair and held him close and said, andyou’re all I need, darling .

Perhaps that was why Draco felt as if he had to present himself as a near caricature of the ideal pureblood Heir, not a person so much as a performance. He proudly shouldered the entirety of the expectations of the Malfoy name, locking the individual bits of himself, the bits that didn’t quite fit the narrative, into his heart’s innermost vaults. He had no one to lessen the load.

Perhaps that was also why Narcissa put all that she had— every kindness, every hope, every drop of magic—into Draco. She hadn’t broken when she was tortured under the Dark Lord’s wand for the sins of her husband. She broke when Draco was marked, when she held her only son in her arms as he struggled and screamed, knowing she’d lost the one thing that had ever truly been entirely hers. It was Draco’s worst memory and the one he watched most often in his father’s pensieve. Not as a form of self-laceration, but as a reminder of the lengths he would go, to ensure it would never happen again.

But now, standing at the threshold of the Manor’s great room, Draco had to lock that all away, make sure his occlumency garden was pristine, its gate unbreakable. He had an audience with the Dark Lord. He could not afford to entertain the dangers of sentiment.

After a year of occupying Malfoy Manor in Lucius’ absence, the Dark Lord typically held meetings and gatherings in Lestrange Manor where Bellatrix and Rodolphus held court, a pointed snub to the now disgraced Malfoys. For the first time in his life, Draco relished at being seen as inferior.

But Lord Voldemort had returned to Wiltshire for a specific purpose: he wished to meet with the heir to House Malfoy. The Death Eater’s youngest and most ineffectual spy.

It was true that Draco’s intelligence had been poor and mostly useless— this had been by his own design. Draco had learned from watching his father flounder in search of power and glory. Watching his godfather mind his webs in the shadows. He’d learned a wizard was only truly in control when his opposition was unsuspecting. He'd learned to play to his strengths: he wasn't the most powerful, nor the most vicious, but he was terribly clever.

When Draco had offered himself up as a spy, he knew he couldn’t use Snape’s strategy; he wasn’t a half-blood with no lineage, who’d willingly joined the cause. He was Draco Malfoy and his servitude was meant to be an act of public ridicule. The Dark Lord wanted Draco to fail, to bow and scrape and beg, and so Draco would give it to him, because a useless spy was rarely suspected of being capable of double-crossing his master. If he wanted proof of that, he only had to look at weak, sniveling Peter Pettigrew.

Draco didn’t care if he looked weak. He cared about getting what he wanted, and he knew the power of underestimation. He’d learned that from Hermione Granger.

“Young Malfoy.” Lord Voldemort was sitting in his father’s seat at the head of the long table in the great room, emanating the noxious fumes of the Dart Arts. Ash and tar. “Join us.”

The Dark Lord’s voice was enough to break Draco into a cold sweat. He wished he had more control of his body, but it seemed to remember his physical reactions to the tone, even when his memories were locked safely away. Lucius was on his right, his head whipping around as Draco entered. A look in his eyes that Draco had long familiarized himself with, a warning. You will not disappoint me. He was unsure when that look stopped meaning anything to him.

“My lord,” Draco rasped, sounding just as terrified as he felt. He took a knee, ignoring the protest of his bones against the cold marble. It was important not to obscure his apprehension; it made the Dark Lord seem feared, and no one expected a knife in the back from the wizard with shaking hands.

“You may rise.” The Dark Lord examined him through slitted eyes. The snake—the origin of many of Draco’s more graphic nightmares—was curled protectively around the back of his chair. “You came to me months prior with a proposal, did you not, Draco? You’d spun quite the web around your plans for Potter’s mudblood, insisting you could use her foolhardy trust for intelligence regarding the movements of the Order of the Phoenix?”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his father’s knuckles tighten around his armrest.

“Yes, my lord.”

The Dark Lord spread his arms, sickly gray hands outstretched, looking around in false uncertainty. “Then where is it?”

“There were plans, my Lord. I gave them to my father, they—”

“I know what you’ve provided. I have no use for potential locations and lists of known affiliates, not when most of them have disappeared without a trace. The days have turned to weeks, all with nothing to show for your efforts. Would you make your lord wait?”

“I found the girl reticent,” Draco tried to explain. When talking of Hermione, he emptied his mind until it was a cold nothing, the night sky during the depth of winter. “She disappeared months ago with the other traitors, and I haven’t been able to—”

“The location of the Order’s safe house has been revealed.” The Dark Lord cut him off as if he hadn’t even been speaking. Draco could feel his hands start to tremble instinctively, his body anticipating pain before his mind had registered the possibility. “Our forces mobilize to strike as we speak. Was that thanks to your efforts, young Malfoy?”

“No, my lord.”

“So, in your own words, you have failed me.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“A disappointment,” Lord Voldemort regarded him with glinting, unnaturally red eyes. “Just like your father, you require proper motivation. Antonin?” He called to the drawing room, where Draco heard footsteps approaching. Two pairs. “Help us inspire the Malfoy men to greater heights.””

No , Draco thought, a bolt of white hot fury breaking through his shields. No, no, no.

Antonin Dolohov strode through the double doors, his wand fixed on Draco’s mother. She was dressed in all the finery of a wealthy pureblooded witch, but even her luxurious robes could not conceal the freshly formed stress lines on her face, the vacancy in her eyes.

“Narcissa,” the Dark Lord’s voice was a mockery of warmth, an imperative threat. “Our gracious hostess.”

His mother said nothing. Mouth slack, gaze lowered to the marble floors.

Stay inside, Draco begged his mother internally, hoping her dissociation would protect her. Stay far, far away.

“My apologies, my Lord,” Lucius explained nervously. “I fear my wife hasn’t been well, but you can entrust me with anything you’d require of her—”

“No,” the Dark Lord interrupted, his eyes on Draco. “I doubt you’d have the same encouraging effect.” He tapped one, spindly finger on the wooden table, as if he were deciding something trivial. “Do you know what plagues me about you, Draco? You have no hunger. No drive. You do as you're told, but only just so. You killed the mudblood’s parents, but couldn’t manage the girl. I admit, I had hopes regarding your plans to use her, mine her for intelligence before discarding her like the filth she is. At least, it showed initiative.”

Draco’s heart pounded, insistent. Do something. He closed his eyes for a split second to bring himself under control. The Dark Lord seemed to take this as an admission of embarrassment and smiled, something hideous and curling, marring his warped face with amusem*nt.

“You spoiled the boy, Lucius. You didn’t prepare him, and now, he struggles to reach his potential.” The Dark Lord tilted his head in consideration. “Members of the noble Salazar Slytherin's house are noted for their ambition, their willingness to reach for power, no matter the cost. Where is your ambition, Draco?”

“I aspire to serve you faithfully, my Lord. To elevate House Malfoy to its rightful rank. To eradicate the scum and swine from our streets.”

The Dark Lord met his gaze. Draco could feel his powerful legilimency prodding, and instantly allowed his walls to give way. His mind became a small room, filled with a heady blanket of emotion: fear, hatred, anger. His memories came naturally: sneering at Granger, cursing Potter, fighting alongside Theo. He let the Dark Lord see his weaknesses: his worry for his mother, his urge to please his father. Allowed his selfishness to swell like the tide: what did Draco want? He wanted control. He wanted wealth. He wanted prestige. He wanted everything he was supposed to.

Lord Voldemort withdrew, appeased. Draco exhaled, but didn’t move an inch.

“We will strike tonight. Despite your lack of results, we have found Potter and his companions, hiding like rats in the dark. The Order of the Phoenix will be reduced to rubble, its vermin exterminated just as its founder was. Tell me Draco, do you wish to achieve the same glory as Theodore, when he felled the late Albus Dumbledore? To wipe our world of its scourges entirely?”

Glory. What a ridiculous concept. Draco knew there was no glory to be found in this world, not for wizards like him. There was death and there was survival and whatever it was that happened in between.

“Of course, my lord.”

“Should I give you the opportunity?”

“Allow him to accompany you, my lord,” Lucius insisted. His eyes had not moved from his wife. “My son will be your most faithful, most valued—”

“Your son can’t cast a Killing Curse, Lucius.”

His father fell silent. Draco knew what was coming. He’d been given this test before.

He looked to his mother instinctively and when her glazed eyes met his gaze, there was a spark of recognition. He brushed against her mental walls gently, just enough to peek over the dunes. His mother’s occlumency had always manifested as a seaboard, sand dunes and sea shells and coloured pebbles, each one of them holding a memory, holding back the tides.

He always found her there, watching the sea. At first, she’d speak, but now he always found her silent. One of his theories as to why his mother’s magic had begun to turn in on itself, uncooperative and eruptive, was that because Narcissa was a natural legilimens, she reacted badly to being forced to internalize her talents, to turn herself inside out. She was never meant to be confined to her own head.

His mother stood on the shore of her mind, staring out at the gentle waves, transfixed. Draco took her hand and led her to a rowboat, as he had many times before.

There will be pain, soon, Dracowarned, as his mother climbed into the boat dutifully. It’s time to return to sea. She was younger, in her mind. Pretty and flushed, less frail. Narcissa Black. It broke his heart.

He pushed the little vessel off the shore and into the bay, willing the tides to take her as far into her subconscious as possible. Draco had designed it—the boat, the oars, the strategy—using his natural talent for occlusion to push the limits of how the severely the mind could divorce itself from the body. The cruciatus didn’t hit Narcissa as hard when she was adrift. Her body and her magic suffered, but her mind remained intact. She was still his mother, still Narcissa. This was all he could give her.

“I am a benevolent master,” the Dark Lord said, ripping Draco from his mother’s head. He hoped their prolonged eye contact had only been seen as a son, looking beseechingly to his mother. Projecting weakness, Draco’s trusty cloak. “I will allow you another opportunity, to earn your spot in tonight’s sport.”

The Dark Lord snapped his fingers. A figure floated from the shadows into the center of the room, bound and gagged. A middle aged witch, her robes filthy and bloodied.

“Do you recognize our guest, Draco?”

Draco shook his head.

“You wouldn’t, would you? No respecting son of House Malfoy would study under such an embarrassment. Behold, the esteemed Charity Burbage. Hogwarts Faculty, Chair of Muggle Studies.” The Dark Lord gave Draco a little incline of his head. “As one could imagine, our new world has little use for such expertise. Kill her.”

Draco knew he would fail. This had happened before, each time resulting in a punishment more brutal than the last. He’d never been able to manage the Killing Curse, could never manifest the green light from his traitorous, uncooperative wand. Even Goyle could manage it, and he barely had any evidence of a developed frontal lobe. Draco’s reticence was an embarrassment, and worse, it put a target on his back and thus on his morher’s. Each time he failed, Narcissa was brought in as motivation, put under the cruciatus for as long as it took for the Dark Lord to grow bored and take matters into his own hands.

Please die quickly, he silently begged the Muggle Studies professor whom he’d never known. For you sake and mine. There was no room for guilt. Just terror, acidic in his throat.

Draco raised his wand.

“Avada Kedavra.”

Predictably, nothing happened. Lucius snarled, fingering his wand helplessly as Dolohov lazily cast the cruciatus in Narcissa’s direction. At his incantation, she began to scream. That was the thing about the cruciatus curse. It never mattered how far out at sea Narcissa was. She always screamed.

“Hurry up,” Dolohov snarled at Draco, as if he wasn’t actively torturing his mother. "Bloody banshee, she is."

Draco would never forget exactly who’d cut up his face, who’d tormented his mother. Dolohov topped his list of those he intended to exact revenge on.Some hideous force curled inside him—born of the Black side, no doubt—insisted on being let free.

“Avada Kedavra.”

His curse flared promisingly at the tip of his wand, only to fail. The Dark Lord tutted, sounding amused. The screaming started again

“My, my Draco. Would you really disappoint me again? I’m not sure Lady Malfoy can withstand another attempt. What do you think, Lucius? Should I allow it?”

Draco didn’t even look at his father, because if he did, he knew he’d break. It wouldn’t go on forever. His mother couldn’t feel it, not really. It would stop, eventually. This was his mantra. He just had to hold on a few more moments and then he could accept his punishment, take her to her quarters to heal her, as he had all the times before.

“Yes, my lord,” Lucius responded, ashen faced. His whisper only barely discernible over the cries of his writhing wife. “My son will succeed this time, I swear it.”

“Oh, come off it, Malfoy,” Dolohov complained, maintaining the curse even as he spoke. “We all know your whelp is more likely to piss himself first.”

The beastly insistence within Draco pulled at its chains. Do it, the Black side of him cried. We have been weak for too long. Free us. Spill the blood which threatens our own. His magic unspooled, buzzing from his throat to his fingertips, with one singular thought: end this.

“Finish the muggle loving bitch off for him, Lucius," Dolohov continued. "I’ll get a headache if your wife goes on like this much longer—”

“Avada Kedavra!”

There was a flash of green light, more powerful than anything Draco had ever managed, momentarily blinding him. The screaming stopped. Antonin Dolohov fell to the marble floor, the life wiped clean from his eyes.

The Black side of him roared in triumph, drowning out everything else. How foolish Dolohov had been to threaten a son of House Black, to threaten him. Draco felt…exhilarated. Dark magic sizzled on his palms, strangely sweet, more energizing than he could have ever believed. He could do anything now, the magic insisted. This was what he’d been missing, a true source of power, a spring overflowing with eternal strength.

In an instant, Lucius had placed himself in front of Draco, already in a position of prostration, preemptively begging for his son’s life.

“My lord, please. You are merciful. My son is young, his magic is still uncontrolled. He didn’t know, he didn’t mean…” Lucius trailed off at the look on the Dark Lord’s face.

Draco squared his shoulders, the sheer force of his magic rippling from his form, the darkness radiating from him. The first time is always the worst, Theo had told him once while drunk. Like filling your veins with poison. He’d been so wrong. Casting the Killing Curse hadn’t felt like poison. It felt bending iron with his bare hands.

Draco raised his wand once more.

“Avada Kedavra,” Draco said again, quietly, more in control. The curse he’d been unable to manage burst from him, feeding on the energy left by its predecessor. Charity Burbage went still instantly. Draco would never have been able to manage it, not against someone so benign and undeserving, without the burst of power from his first use of the spell. Somewhere in the back of his mind—the very end of the garden, where the wildflowers grew— he hoped that Hermione could forgive him.

It was, at the very least, a quick, painless death. More than the likes of Dolohov deserved.

“Stand aside,” the Dark Lord called, gesturing for Lucius to move. Lucius hesitated, and the Dark Lord drew his wand, sending his father flying against the far wall with a sickening crack. At least one broken bone, if he gauged the sound. In Draco’s opinion, Lucius had gotten off easy.

“My, my,” Lord Voldemort studied Draco with renewed interest. “Antonin Dolohov was a loyal soldier. Do you think you should be punished for taking him from his servitude without my say?”

“Antonin Dolohov was nothing.” Draco did not having to conjure the coldness in his voice. It came naturally. “He had no name. No noble house. He was a dog, my lord. I put him down.”

He bowed his head, awaiting judgment. If Draco died now, his last action would have been one of mercy. His penultimate act would have rid the world of the man who’d carved the scar on his face, who’d cursed Granger, who’d tortured his mother. He made his peace.

“I’d be remiss to discourage challenges between my followers. It keeps you young ones hungry, eager to serve. To rise.” Lord Voldemort smiled, thin lips pursed into a slope, which either meant Draco’s answer was compelling enough to keep him alive, or Draco had mere moments left on this earth. “Your first blood. How does it feel?”

This was the real test, Draco realized. Not managing to cast the curse, but how he reacted to it. Would he shiver for hours, like Theo had? Would he show regret? Would he prove himself remorseful?

He lifted his chin.

“It feels as if I’ve been made whole, my lord.”

The Dark Lord considered him for a long moment before striding away, the snake slithering in his wake.

“Clean that up,” Lord Voldemort ordered, gesturing carelessly at Dolohov’s slumped corpse. “And prepare yourself. You’ve earned your place in this fight. Every combat-ready Death Eater lies in wait. Harry Potter dies tonight.”

Draco waited until he heard the tell-tale crack of disapparation, the flinch of the wards. Then, he threw up all over the marble floor.

*

The afternoon sun beat down on Draco’s shoulders, offering a hint of warmth against the cold winter air. He couldn’t tell if it was the violent juxtaposition of temperature or his exposure to dark magic that was making him feel like his veins were simultaneously frozen over and on fire.

“You need to calm down,” Theo said, as they reached the top of the grassy hill, looking out upon the stretch of frostbitten countryside. There was no sign of a dwelling around for miles, nothing to give away the location of the Weasley family home. Whoever had disguised the headquarters had done a more than decent job.

“I’m fine,” Draco insisted, wiping his palms on his trousers. Theo gave him a look of complete and utter disbelief as they crouched in the tall grass, partially obstructed.

Draco was not fine. He was feverish and freezing and overrun with adrenaline. His magic was restless, welling up inside him without any avenue for release. He was relying on occlusion so heavily, he feared it may be permanent, that anything soft and gentle he once called his own might never come back out from the recess of his mind.

How could it after what he’d done?Remember why you did it, the Black side of him reminded, in an effort to stem his rising hysteria. What was your intent? Did it even matter what his intent was? He’d killed someone. Well, he’d killed two people, but only one hadn’t deserved it. Had Hermione taken Muggle Studies, learned under Charity Burbage? What would she say, when she learned of her death at Draco’s hands? She won’t want us anymore, the Malfoy side of him worried, shouldering his Black side out of the way. He wished they’d both shut up.

“It’s supposed to be somewhere here, isn’t it?” Theo muttered. “God knows why they built their hovel in the middle of bum-f*ck. How will she even know where to meet us?”

“She’ll know,” Draco said shortly. He would not be divulging how exactly Hermione Granger would know how to find him, how she’d be able to reach out and touch his magic, use it to lead her directly to Draco’s hiding place.

She would know what he’d done, he was sure of it. He wouldn’t be able to keep up his occlusion, not in her presence. Not with his magic like this, fragile and shaky.

The tall grass rippled, splitting the field and sending veins of movement running through the dead stalks and dry bracken. Before Draco could blink, both his and Theo’s wands flew out of their hands and into the grasp of Hermione Granger.

She stepped over the ward line, whisking an invisibility cloak off her figure. Her eyes were gorgeous and warm and brimming with concern. The exact color of Honeydukes chocolate, the kind with honeycomb swirled through.

It was the first time they’d seen each other since that night. The thought struck him at the most inopportune time, sending heat flooding into his face.

At the sight of her, a swatch of white lilies sprouted eagerly from the cold ground, in full bloom. Unintentional magic, Draco realized, his own. He might as well have come in his pants.

“Oh, Merlin,” Theo groaned, but Hermione didn’t pay him any attention. Theo could have been a tombstone, for all she seemed to care.

“Draco,” she breathed. “What happened?” She was too far away. “What’s wrong?”

What was wrong was that she wasn’t in his arms. He opened his mouth to tell her this, but no sound came out.

“What are you are doing here?” She continued, filling his silence with interrogation, as was her way. “I got your message in the diary, insisting on an urgent meeting. You said you’d bring back up, Draco. Not that you’d bring him.”

“Hello Granger,” Theo offered, greeting her without a modicum of warmth. “I’d say it’s nice to see you again, but given the circ*mstances, it really isn’t.”

Her eyes snapped to Theo, narrowing as she turned her wand on him. “Nott,” she gritted out, exuding pure disdain. “On the way to Slughorn’s party, I told you about muggle recreational pastimes. What did I mention?”

“Movings,” Theo drawled, quickly producing the answer. “Our first date. How could I forget.”

“Movies.” She corrected, tossing her curls over her shoulder imperiously. Draco loved when they weren’t pinned up or subdued in a braid. He should tell her that, the second his voice started working again. “And it wasn’t a date.”

“Forgive my presumption,” Theo replied dryly. “It’s been eons.”

“Yes, I haven’t seen you since you slaughtered our Headmaster.” She didn’t lower her wand, leaving it trained on the dark haired boy. “If we survive this war, you and I will go wand to wand over that. Not today. Not anytime soon. But one day, Theodore Nott. You might forget, but I won’t.”

“Granger,” Theo said, sounding more than a little vexed with her. She had that effect on people. “We can threaten each other later. Things are very, very bad right now. And they’re about to be much worse.” He exhaled sharply before continuing. “You have a rat in your midst. The Death Eaters know where the Order headquarters is. The Dark Lord is coming. Tonight.”

Granger's pink lips parted in shock, suspicion and dread warring for dominance on her face. She seemed so small against the vastness of the cold-deadened fields. It was wrong, somehow. She’d always been larger than life in his mind, a Pallas Athena.

“Why areyou telling me this? Why would you ever help us?” She demanded breathlessly. "How do I know you’re not lying?”

“Why the f*ck would I lie about this?” Theo cried. “You daft bint!”

“Because you’re a liar! A sniveling, cowardly, pathetic little—”

“It’s true,” Draco said, his first words since he’d laid eyes on her. “They’re coming.”

Hermione searched his gaze and he could feel her emotions under his own— relief, confusion, fear, fear, fear—

“Don’t be scared,” he said, taking a step towards her helplessly. The residual dark magic vibrated inside him, itching to be let free, to let him feel in control again. “I can— I can protect you now.”

“I don’t need you to—” she cut herself off, catching the end of his statement. “What do you mean now?”

Draco could tell the moment she felt it. The moment his occlumency failed, flooding him with the intoxicating power he’d fought to keep simmering under his skin. Dark and hungry and alive. Her pupils blew, eyes growing shadowed at the sheer magnitude of the feeling.

“Oh.” She shivered, a full body tremor, like a stalk of wheat in the breeze. “Oh, god. Draco, what have you done.”

Theo raised his eyebrows at their display, unaware of what was happening under the surface, unable to see the tar leaking in, staining the noncorporeal golden threads that connected them.

Draco had only told him the bare minimum when enlisting his help, and even that was too much. Nights earlier, Theo had stood in Snape’s garden and taken one look at Draco's arm, before saying two words: It’s gone?

It’s gone, Draco had confirmed. A question, an admission. Could I? Theo had asked, a flicker of something flighting behind the flatness of his eyes. Draco’s heart sunk into his stomach. Probably not, Draco admitted, unwilling to lie, even while garnering his assistance. Theo looked away for a long time.

Do you love her?Theo finally managed. Draco hadn’t bothered pretending not to know exactly who Theo was referring to. The liquor pushed him towards honesty.

Probably,he admitted miserably.

Then don’t say anything else.Theo had kept his eyes fixed on the ground until Draco rolled his sleeve back down.I’m serious, Draco. I don’t want to know. I can’t know.

Theo, for all his strengths and talents, never had a particularly remarkable capacity for mind magic, and ever since he was bitten, his struggle to regulate both his transformations and their accompanying emotional turbulence made occlusion nearly impossible.

Draco had clapped his old friend sharply on the shoulder, and without another word regarding the Mark, they’d devised their plan of action. Others might have protested, insisted on explanation, but for Theodore Nott and Draco Malfoy, the unsaid had always been the preferred method of communication.

"Draco?" Granger prompted, stepping forward. She reached out and touched his face, her hand soft and cool on his flaming cheek.

A small geyser erupted from ground, bubbling spring water at their feet. Theo coughed.

“I can’t,” Draco shook his head, stepping away from her touch even though every molecule of his body fought him on the decision. “If I start to explain, it’ll all crumble. After. I’ll tell you after. I swear it.”

She must have felt the honesty behind his words, the desperation coming from his side of their bond, because she nodded once, careful and brisk. The look of haunted concern didn’t leave her eyes. Draco quietly hated himself, for putting it there.

“When?” Hermione asked, and he could see when her occlumency walls went up, when she went from the Granger he knew— sharp enough to cut yourself on, painfully sultry and inherently good—to something else, something severe and focused, lacking her usual warmth.

“Tonight,” Theo said, beginning to talk very quickly. “Look, you can’t get everyone out. If you evacuate, it’ll be obvious you were warned, and the Dark Lord won’t stop until he finds the leak and publicly disembowels them. Them meaning us. We’re telling you this so you can prepare to fight, not run.” Theo considered, frowning. “Well, some of you need to run. Children. The infirm. Potter.”

“Harry won’t go,” Hermione protested. “He’ll never leave the others. He’d find a way back to the fight, it wouldn’t matter what anyone did or said.”

“Thenmake him leave, Granger,” Draco insisted. Of f*ckingcourse The Boy Who Couldn’t Pick His Battles was going to be a thorn in Draco’s side. “Unless Potter can end it here tonight, kill the Dark Lord, he needs to be as far from this place as possible. The most secure location you can think of.”

“Preferably somewhere with blood wards,” Theo added, feeling for the protective magic around the Weasley’s property until his hands connected with shimmering air. “These won’t hold for long, not against my father. You lot are lucky you made it so long before you were found. Is this unplottable?”

Hermione nodded absently, running his words over in her head.“Your father?” She blanched, clearly reminiscing on what she knew about Tiberius Nott, none of it even remotely good.

“The Notts are the ancestral wardmasters of the Sacred Twenty-Eight,” Theo explained, his chin in the air. Salazar, not this again. “It’s our birthright.”

“And they never let anyone forget it,” Draco grumbled.

“Father will have these in shreds in twenty minutes.” Theo felt for the wards again, considering. “Maybe fifteen. That’s how much warning you’ll get. Use it wisely.”

“Thank you, Nott.” She managed the expression of gratitude with tremendous dignity, even though she looked as if the admission had been clawed forcibly from her throat.

“I’d say it was no problem,” Theo responded, face twisted into his characteristic sneer. “But I’d be lying.”

“I have to report back,” she muttered to herself, slipping into planning mode. “We’ll set up a defense, and get anyone who is underage the safe houses—oh, but what will I do about Harry—”

“You’re not going to do anything with him,” Theo interrupted, checking his wristwatch. “You're going to delegate, because you’ve got other problems to attend to and very little time to do it.”

“Other problems?” Hermione scoffed. "Other than an impending battle with the most evil wizard alive and the likes of your bloody families?"

Draco’s magic fluttered to life in anticipation, only barely under his control. It had been slightly lulled, soothed by her presence, the familiarity of her magic coaxing his into a deceptive calm. But now the burning sensation was back: he felt like a star experiencing core-collapse, a supernova ready to blow.

“I have to get my mother out,” Draco explained. “Tonight, when no one will be expecting it. And I need your help, because I can’t do any of it myself." He looked at his shaking hands, willing them to steady. They refused. "I used the Killing Curse for the first time this morning and my magic hasn’t stabilized.”

It was all he could hear, ringing in his ears. Killing Curse. Killing Curse. Killing Curse. She wouldn’t want him anymore.She’ll want you, a new, tenebrous voice in his head insisted slyly, if you are powerful, she’ll be unable to resist.

She gaped at him, her horror knocking his increasingly disturbing thoughts aside, causing a familiar sensation to bubble in his chest: guilt. It gnawed at him from the inside, and his magic reacted instinctively, setting a nearby field ablaze. Theo extinguished it quickly, giving Draco a look that instructed him to pull himself together.

"Not right now, Granger," Theo warned, speaking on his behalf. "He's not in control. Set him off and he might blow up half of Devon."

"Please," Draco begged her, apparently the only word he could manage. "My mother…she can't take any more of it. She's going too far from shore. She won't be able to..." He trailed off, realizing none of this would make any sense to her. "Please, Hermione."

She blinked. Once, twice. A glimpse of understanding, of sorrow, of the look he’d seen in her eyes years ago, when she wiped her parents memories. Then, her walls were back place. Brown eyes unreadable, their light extinguished.

“I don't have much of a choice, do I?"Granger finally said, voice cracking. She touched her wrist absently, the exact location they'd been bound by Dumbledore while making the Unbreakable Vow.

Draco hadn't meant it to all go down like this. He’d meant for the vow to be a power play, a last resort. He hadn't known Dumbledore would actually die. He hadn't meant to force her. But it was growing more and more apparent that it didn't matter what the f*ck Draco meant,not when faced with what he'd do.

And for Narcissa? He'd do anything.

"What of Lucius?" Hermione asked,not the question he expected from her. Draco didn't know why he was surprised by this; she'd never been or done what he expected, ever since that first day on the train. "It seems unlikely he'll accept your mother's absence."

"With any luck, he'll be preparing for the invasion," Draco explained. "He won't return to the Manor until it's too late."

"And if we're unlucky?"

“Not what you're thinking, Granger,” Theo drawled. “Judge us how you like, but for now, we draw the line at patricide.” Theo grimaced, looking as if he’d tasted something particularly foul. “We're going to fake the Lady Malfoy's death. And then, you’re going to obliviate me.”

Chapter 33: The Flight of Narcissa Malfoy

Chapter Text

Draco couldn’t get over the sheer cognitive dissonance of Hermione Granger being in Malfoy Manor.

Clad in her muggle clothes, looking so very out of place amongst the tapestries and gilded floors, marble embedded with gold flakes. Like a stroke of color marring the muted work of an dreary Dutch master.

The wards to his mother’s quarters flickered uncertainly at their approach, their thrum like a question. Strangers? Strangers?Draco had arranged for them to be added before he left for sixth year; he didn’t like the idea of leaving his mother alone with the Dark Lord’s most dangerous soldiers, not in her weakened state.

He moved to slice his hand in order to dribble his blood onto the doorway and allow her entry, but to his surprise, Granger stepping right over the wards, as if they hadn’t even existed in the first place.

Theo attempted to follow, only to meet the wards’ resistance. He looked at Draco and raised his eyebrows as if to say, oh, so it’s like that?

Draco jerked his head, a silent signal for Theo to stand watch as he and Hermione entered Narcissa's wing.

He didn’t know how to explain without getting a lecture from the Wardmaster’s son: privacy wards, especially on old pureblood estates, were discerning about who they allowed to enter private chambers, highly limited to close blood relatives.The fact that Hermione was allowed through would be taken as very significant, more significant than he wished Theo to be aware of. An indication of sharing blood, which was considered a positively indecent practice outside of the marital vow, reserved for only the most intimate of situations. He might as well fly a pair of Granger's knickers like a goddamn flag.

Secretly, it thrilled Draco, how easily the manor accepted her. How it could feel his blood in her veins, the tangible aftermath of the ritual that had tied them together. It assured the possessive beast in his chest: she carried his claim under her skin and the thought sent a pleased shiver through him. His magic—still tainted and overly reactive from his use of the Killing Curse—responded, sending the windows of his mothers’ quarters swinging open, welcoming an unseasonably warm breeze, despite it being the early days of winter.

“Draco?” His mother started at the disruption. Narcissa was in her private sitting room, curled on a wingback chair. Staring at nothing, an untouched calming drought on the side table. Blast, she should have taken that hours ago.

“Mother,” he chided gently, crossing the room to press his lips briefly to her cheek. The skin was thin, papery. Without the subtle brush of rouge Draco remembered from his childhood, when his mother was always meticulously made-up. “You haven’t taken the potion I gave you.”

Narcissa looked confused as she stared at the vial, as if learning of its existence for the first time. This tended to happen after she occluded too heavily, a side effect of the repression of her natural instincts. Parts of herself remained stuck on her occlumency shores, the rest of her only half aware of her real life surroundings. They’d have to be careful not to agitate her, lest her magic react unfavorably. Draco had seen it happen before: exploding chandeliers when she was upset, holes blasted through the roof when she was overwhelmed. Once, a notable earthquake that had sent all of Wiltshire rumbling.

It was why Lucius had confiscated her wand; it was an embarrassment for a Malfoy wife to be unable to control her own magic. Like a child. Like a squib.

Draco felt a pang of compassion emanating through the bond, and glanced over his shoulder to find Hermione watching him interact with his mother, worrying her lower lip between her teeth. He scowled at her, never one to take kindly to pity. He didn't want her feeling badly for him, not when he was responsible for so much of the current fallout.

“Who is this?” Narcissa fixed her gaze on the witch behind him, a hint of shrewdness temporarily returning, before flickering out like an extinguished candle. “Draco, who have you brought with you?” She didn't appear to recognize Hermione nor notice her garb, something Draco was grateful for. The whole situation was difficult enough without having to explain his change of heart regarding blood politics and rationalize why he'd brought the muggleborn he'd been told to murder into Narcissa's private chambers.

“A friend,” Draco replied, giving Granger a look that he hoped she'd interpret as approach with caution. “She’s here to help us, mother.”

He needn’t have worried. Amidst all the charged intensity of their fighting, bitter curses and sharp words alike, Draco sometimes forgot that Hermione Granger had an inherent gentleness to her, a soft spot for the hurt and downtrodden. She extended compassion indiscriminately, even to a woman who infamously hated her and her ilk.

Draco had always derided that quality about Granger—only fools busied themselves with the weak— but now, he watched with a lump in his throat as she sank to her knees at Narcissa’s side, meeting his mother at eye level.He hadn't known one could be this way before her. Both sharp and dangerous and endlessly kind, one set of qualities never usurping the others.

“Hello Lady Malfoy,” Granger said softly, outstretching a hand in greeting. Narcissa, jarred by the unfamiliar presence, took it instinctively and turned it over, palm side up.

“Square palms,” his mother mused. “Thin fingers. Ruled by air. Intellectually curious. A strong presence in your outer Mars. Your head line is rather progressive, isn’t it? Plenty of movement there. But your heart line—” Narcissa pursed her lips, examining Granger’s hand further. “Deep. Abrupt.”

“What does that mean?” Granger gave him a look of bewilderment; he hadn’t warned her of his mother’s favored method of evaluation, mostly because he remembered her derision for divination. Draco didn’t find it an infallible science by any means— at least, this is what he told himself, upon hearing Narcissa’s implicit warning. Abrupt. Maybe Granger was right, and it was a load of tosh.

“Nothing good,” Draco interrupted and Narcissa dropped Granger’s hand, having seen enough to apparently get a feel for the witch. “Come, Mother. We’re leaving.”

“Leaving?” Narcissa asked, turning her attention to Draco with a wince. “To the boat? So soon?”

Draco’s heart splintered, watching his mother steel herself for another round under the Dark Lord's wand.

“No,” he said gently. “We won’t be going anywhere near the sea.”

Draco and Theo had figured out the logistics of the plan to evacuate Narcissabefore they’d known Draco would be tested that morning, and the upset had thrown a real ladle into their cauldron. Originally, they’d planned to apparate his mother out while Lucius and the others were distracted with preparations for the invasion of the Order’s headquarters, framing her disappearance as a suicide. Then, Draco would obliviate him and replace his involvement with new memories, featuring a recomposed version of events that removed any hint of Draco’s treachery. Given the state of Draco’s magic, their former endeavor currently proved impossible; hence the need for Hermione Granger, who he’d ripped from her own battle preparations in order to assist with the very act she’d vowed to help him with all those months ago.

Every so often she glanced out the window, or at her silver watch, an heirloom from a house she didn't belong to, and he could feel her gut clench in distress. Granger was not one to sit out a duel; she wanted to be fighting, protecting those she loved, and he'd taken that opportunity from her without a second thought. Draco knew how awful it felt to be robbed of choice, but this was his mother, and she took priority to Granger's stubborn need to martyr herself on Potter's behalf.

(If he were being honest, he was relieved she wasn't there. That she wouldn't be going toe to toe with the likes of the Dark Lord's forces. She wouldn't be safe with him, but she would certainly face fewer opponents, and Draco had always been one to consider the odds).

“You feel strange,” Narcissa mused, reaching out to touch her son’s face. He closed his eyes at the brush of her fingers, instantly transported to childhood. There, there. Don't cry,darling. It upsets Mummy so. “You feel like your father.”

Draco winced at the comparison. Granger flinched alongside him, undoubtedly able to feel his disgust. Narcissa was picking up on the lingering effects of the Killing Curse, hints of copper and coal. Draco remembered hints of it, clinging to his father’s robes when he returned from long nights at the gentleman's club. Staining everything he touched.

“You’ve raised such a wonderful son, Lady Malfoy,” She interjected respectfully. “A credit to your name and blood.” The overly formal words sounded foreign on her tongue, but Granger wielded them with enough grace that they seemed to comfort his mother.“Come with us,” she coaxed. “We’ll be leaving soon and your son needs you to be strong for the journey.”

To his great surprise, Narcissa rose, trembling like a fawn taking its first steps. She always lost motor control after an episode, her body struggling with the after effects from the curse her mind protected her from. Granger was too sharp to miss it and he felt her horror, perhaps her first time witnessing just how severe prolonged exposure to the cruciatus could be. Shame held his heart in a vice grip: Draco hadn’t been strong enough to stop it all those times before.

Granger didn't comment, only offered his mother a steadying arm.

“Sometimes,” she said, her tone confessional as she allowed Narcissa to lean into her side. “I get quite overwhelmed and after being tucked away in my head for too long. I'm like you, you see. My magic pushes out, it doesn't curl in. When I force it to do so, everything can become too much. The sounds, the light, the spells. It makes everything so painful and confusing doesn’t it? Parsing out what’s happening now and what’s happened before?”

Narcissa gave the muggleborn witch a very strange look before slowly dipping her head in agreement. It occurred to Draco that no one had ever spelled it out to her so plainly before: the healers all used highly technical terms, skirting around the reality of his mother’s fractured mind. How did Granger, of all people, know how to explain it?

“It helps me to count,” She continued gently, now under the full fixation of Narcissa’s attention. “Eight counts as I inhale, and then I hold my breath for another eight. When I need to exhale, I do it quickly, in a whoosh.” She demonstrated, breathing deeply. "Like this." Unconsciously, Narcissa began to mirror her, fluttering her eyes shut as she focused on her breath. “I know it sounds silly, but it grounds me.”

This was not a part of Draco's plan.

“What are you doing?” He hissed out of the corner of his mouth. "You're supposed to remove the ring, not instruct her on how to use her bloody lungs."

Granger gave him a sharp look of reproach. It was an expression he'd seen countless times in the last year and a half, informing him that if she was going to be involved, they'd be doing things her way.

Draco glared at his mother'sleft hand where her betrothal ring, a large emerald cushioned with diamonds, caught the light. Draco felt sick as he watched it sparkle innocuously, like it wasn’t the cause of his predicament. As long as Narcissa wore the ring, Lucius could find her, familial blood wards be damned. It was designed so that only his father was capable of removing it, a seemingly romantic pair of shackles. Funnily enough, the Malfoy brides weren't afforded the same opportunity to locate their husbands in such a manner: Lucius' ring was benign, merely a symbol.

Perhaps Granger was right. Perhaps all of his revered traditions were centered on maintaining control: control of the population, of wives and children. More and more, it seemed to Draco as if the only one who benefitted from these supposedly sacred rites were the few elite Lords at the very top of the proverbial tower, and even they had chains of their own.

Narcissa wouldn't be free unless Lucius permitted it, an allowance his controlling father would never grant. But Draco had done enough research to find a singular, grisly exception: a spell invented for situations when pureblood brides sought to flee from violent husbands. A spell that was only ever to be used as a last resort.

“Granger,” he bit out. “You have to do it now.” They didn’t have the time for this. He’d planned to have Granger stun Narcissa and complete the spell while she was unconscious, consequences be damned. Now Hermione was taking a detour in order to teach his mother how to breathe correctly?

“I think she needs to do it,” Granger whispered back. “The spell you found is meant to be cast by the witch in question, its built on the very grounds of personal autonomy. It might not work if I force her.”

“Her magic isn’t stable enough to case a Summoning Charm," Draco protested. "Nor is mine, as you well know." He thought of the lilies he'd made appear when he saw her, and flushed. "Do it, so we can go.”

“Too many choices have been made for her,” Hermione said quietly, with a sadness that was beyond her eighteen years. Draco got the feeling she was remembering something else, lost in another choice she hadn't been able to make. “I can’t just rob her of her agency in the name of protection. I can't just decide what's best and hope her magic understands my intent. I wish I’d realized the dangers of that, before. I wish I’d even tried another solution.”

Before...her parents, Draco realized, thinking back to when Granger had ripped herself from her parent’s minds that fateful day in August. Draco hadn’t cared for her; he’d despised her and everything she’d come to symbolize, but even then, he’d still thought it the bravest thing he’d ever seen.

Narcissa opened her eyes. They were clear blue, a cavernous mountain spring. More cognizant than he’d seen in months. What strange magic had Granger worked? For Merlin’s sake, all she’d done was breathe!

“Draco?” Narcissa said, sounding remarkably like his mother. “Where am I?”

“Mother,” he breathed, and before he could stop, he’d flung himself into her arms. His magic swelled dangerously, threatening to crest. “I’m so sorry. I wish I could explain everything; I promise I will one day. But you might not be here for long, and I don’t have the time to— you're going to have to trust me.”

“Of course I trust you, my darling boy," Narcissa said. Her voice was muffled by Draco’s embrace, but even so, he detected the promise of a sob. "My faith in you is above all others."

Draco drew back and grasped Narcissa’s left hand, running a thumb over the emerald.“We have to run,” he said plainly, watching as realization washed over her expression, a harsh clarity. “Father's gone and we have to run somewhere he won’t be able to follow. Like we were going to, after he was sent away.”

They'd tried to flee, once before. The night Draco was Marked. The result of the attempt was permanently scarred into his forearm.

“Oh,” Narcissa breathed, realizing what her son was asking. All pureblooded witches would: they’d kept this spell carefully maintained, passed from mother to daughter, probably since Circe herself. His mother straightened, a hint of her former dignity emanating through her posture. “I’m afraid I don’t have a wand. My…my magic…”

Draco pressed his wand into her hand. Hermione looked away, and for that, Draco was glad.

“I need you to try,” he begged. “I know it’s difficult for you to cast right now. But I also know you’re the most capable witch I’ve ever met. You could grow an oak on a foundation of pure bedrock. You can manage this spell, just the one. Just the one, and then you’ll be free.” Draco pushed the lump down in his throat as he shoved his sleeve up, exposing his scarred Dark Mark. His mother examined it with horrified wonder, trailing her hands over the once mangled flesh. “Then, we’ll both be free.”

“I know he has been a cruel man. A harsh father. But I love my husband.” Narcissa stared at her ring finger, her lower lip trembling. “Even when he has failed me. Even when he was lied to me. Even when he has brought me to the precipice of harm. I took a vow, to love my husband through it all,” She looked up at him, grim determination on her face. “No one warned me, that I would love my son more.”

With that, Narcissa murmured the incantation and severed her own finger. There was a cry of anguish and then the Malfoy betrothal ring clattered to the ground, no longer a noose. Simply a piece of jewelry, covered in his mother’s supposedly pure blood.

*

Hermione and Theo took over caring for Narcissa, helping her across the grounds and to the apparition point as Draco made his preparations, enacted the plans that he’d had been wistfully concocting ever since the night he was Marked, unsure they’d ever come to fruition.

He left a note, written in his mother's hand, on the bank of the pond. Detailing her unhappiness, her inability to live in a world without her magic. Draco had Granger transfigure his mother’s severed finger, transforming it into a near copy of her body (of course, Draco had gotten the idea from Granger using her baby teeth to create false remains in the first place). He disposed of the fraudulent corpse in the Manor's pond, to be found when Lucius ultimately dredged the waters in search of his wife. Upon recovering the body, his father would realize his deception fairly quickly—no magic could truly replicate a corporeal vessel and stand up to authentication— but by that point Narcissa would hopefully be fathoms away.

He’d just finished the last of it when he felt something, an urgent tug in his chest that he’d come to know and dread.Granger was in trouble.

Draco's fingers itched for his wand as he ran, his magic rearing its head, begging to be used. If you have such power at your disposal, it seemed to call. Why hide it away? Why not welcome it? Allow us to be great.

He skidded around the bend of the grounds, through a thicket of his mother’s roses, their thorns tearing vindictively at his ankles and calves and he trampled them. He caught sight of Theo at the edge of the grounds, a stone's throw from freedom, holding Narcissa firmly behind him. Any progress his mother may have made was clearly lost; her gaze was vacant, evidence that she was out to sea once more.

He felt Hermione before he saw her. Her righteous fury and acrid fear like a punch to his gut. The bond roared, insistent: it was never louder than when she was in mortal peril, a state he found her in quite often.She was positioned defensively, facing down their opponent, a shield charm rippling in the last of the afternoon light. There was a slash on her forehead, a superficial but sanguineous wound inflected before he'd found them.

Lucius Malfoy glanced at Draco from his position on the other side of the shield. His blond hair cascading down his shoulders, onyx wand pulled from its sheath.

f*ck, Draco thought plainly, all plans of a smooth escape dissipating like mist.

“Son.” His father’s voice pierced him, more painful than the thorns. “Would you like to explain to me why I found Theodore Nott and the mudblood trying to abscond with my wife?”

Draco had once idolized his father, everyone knew that. But what people didn’t know was how closely respect and admiration could border fear and mistrust. If one were to ask the subjects of any revered Dark Lord of years past, Draco was positive they’d agree: to deify someone in the way Draco had with his father was simply the mind’s mitigation of the fact that his idol held the power to destroy him.

Draco had learned a difficult lesson, regarding the pedestal on which he'd put his father: not all gods were benevolent ones.

“Let her go.” His voice didn’t sound like his own; it sounded stronger, like a warning. “There is nothing good for her here anymore. You have to see it’s killing her. Don't you love her enough to want her to be free of all this? Let her leave and I’ll do…” He shook his head wildly, breath growing ragged, as desperation crept into his pleas. “I’ll do whatever you like. I'll be the heir you always wanted. Just let Mother go, please Father, I beg it of you.”

Hermione made a small noise of protest behind him, but Theo hushed her. Good, Draco thought. It was best she didn’t draw any more attention to herself than necessary.

“Malfoys do not beg,” Lucius responded, stormy gray eyes a mirror of his own. Azkaban had done his father no favors; Draco had yet to see the color return to his father’s face, the few points of softness that he remembered from childhood gone completely. The rare indulgent smile, the approving nod. All wiped away by a year of imprisonment.

“You continue to disappoint me, Draco. You dare implore me to consider the harm that has befallen my wife? When it was you, who failed to protect her while I was rotting behind bars; I told you to take your rightful position as head of the family, as protector, and what do I return to? A wife that's about as useful as a common Squib. If you’re to consider why your mother spent a year under the Dark Lord’s wand, remember which of us failed him. Which of us proved himself too weak and useless to gain any sort of influence. I tried to teach you so many times: there can be no protection without first securing power. And you, my son, have securednothing. Instead, I find you in cahoots with half-breeds and mudbloods. Conspiring against your own line." Lucius spat at his feet in disgust. "You’re no son of mine.”

Draco felt his father’s words hit home, gutting him like a carp. Lucius was right, of course. If Draco had managed it sooner, killed Dolohov the first time he’d raised a wand to his mother, maybe everything would be different. Maybe she would be safe, maybe her magic wouldn’t be in the state it was, maybe—

Maybe he would have never saved Hermione Granger, the Black side of him added, as the witch in question moved to stand shoulder to shoulder with him, facing down his father like the brave little lioness that she was.

“How convenient,” Granger’s voice rang out, full of condemnation. “That you’ve found a way to blame your sixteen year old son for your own missteps. Where was your power during the last war, Lucius? Where was your power this time around? I seem to remember you being the one who was useless in the Department of Mysteries. Where was your influence, then? Why weren't you strong enough to save your wife and son from receiving your punishments from the evil old crackpot you decided to follow?” She let out a sharp, un-Grangerlike bark of a laugh, too cruel to convey actual mirth. “Even ushalf-breeds and mudbloods can bear the weight of our own sins; we don't blamechildren. And you want to call us weak? How pathetic.”

“Granger,” Draco warned, feeling all the blood leave his face as his father raised his wand. “Don’t—”

“Oh mudblood, I should have killed you when I had the chance,” Lucius snarled. “Better late than never. Avada Kedavra!”

Draco reacted instinctively, shoving Hermione to the ground, stepping into the curse’s path without a second thought. Her shield was no match for a Killing Curse. The bond insisted: you will lay down your life for hers. For once, Draco—the former paradigm of self preservation, prince of egotistic caution— did not disagree, stepping into the light of altruism without pause: I will.

Draco expected to feel the collision, the searing moment the curse hit his chest and after, nothing. Whatever came next, a state of being Draco was not confident in. Worm food, he'd always figured. But then, Narcissa Malfoy let out a blood curdling scream, releasing an uncontrolled wave of black magic so strong that it tore the ground from under his feet.

His father’s curse went over his head. From his fallen position, he turned towards his mother on instinct, calling out a warning that she needed to run, hide, shield herself. But his mother—if he could even call her that, in this state— was burning with intensity, her eyes radiant and completely white.

It was unlike anything he’d seen before during her so-calledincidents. Narcissavibrated with a dark, parasitic energy as the world crumbled in her wake. She stepped towards her husband without truly seeing him, the ground quaking as she went. The inky force emanating from her tore through the Malfoy wards and stone exterior walls, exploding everything from the stables to her once beloved greenhouse.

The traces of Dark Magic in Draco’s blood sang in recognition: this was power and poison, this was familiar, this was what Draco needed— couldn’t he see that?

“Draco!” A pair of small hands frantically grasped for him, running over his chest and neck until they found what they were looking for: a pulse. “How dare you dive in front of a Killing Curse for me?! You're not allowed to die, on my behalf or otherwise, do you understand? Draco? Are you alright?”

"Saved you life," he wheezed. "And you're still yelling at me."

Granger let out a choked sound, somewhere between outrage and relief and tears. She had blood on her face, and he reached up to wipe it away. The combination of Hermione’s touch and the concern flooding their bond chased the voice from his head. He could feel her magic: golden, sparkling, powerful brushing against his own, siphoning some of the darkness away.

There was another explosion as the flood of his mother's crepuscular magic collided with the manor. Something exploded; he guessed based on his vantage point, that it had been the drawing room. Narcissa was shuddering now, overcome, as if she were barely holding together at the seams.

“Mother!” Draco cried and Narcissa whipped her head around, the unnatural white light fading almost instantly from her eyes. The shadows retracted and she crumpled to the ground, unconscious. Theo made it to Narcissa before Draco did, lifting his mother as if she was no heavier than a stack of library books.

Lucius Malfoy snarled—still alive, but held in place by towering, overgrown rose bushes. The result of Draco’s unstable magic; he'd reacted without realizing, trapping hid father in a prison made of thorn and vine. His mother's winter roses. Every time Lucius thrashed, he was torn into by the thorns. They sent rivulets of blood streaming from him, making their blooms indistinguishable from his wounds. Nearly frothing at the mouth, he screamed as Malfoy Manor crumbled behind him, the protections of his ancestral home overwhelmed by his wife's show of force.

“You dare— the Malfoy seat! Traitorous filth—”

“Would you like me to kill him?” Theo asked Draco, regarding at Lucius’ struggling figure with distaste. “I’ll do it. I've had enough of fathers who use their sons as canon fodder, haven’t you?”

Draco—gods help him—truly considered it. It would be an anvil lifted from his chest. It would be a sword sunk into his heart. Ultimately, it was Hermione who spoke on his behalf, as if she knew inherently that this decision could not rest on Draco's shoulders.

“You can’t kill him,” she told Theo, although some of Draco’s residual darkness must have made its way into her heart, because she looked terribly torn about it. “He's a monster, but...it's his father.”

"Suit yourself," Theo said darkly, as he turned his back on Lucius' thorn riddled prison. "But if I ever got a clear shot at old Tiberius, you best believe I'd take it."

“That traitorous scum is noson of mine—” Lucius roared, but Granger had had enough. She strode to Lucius Malfoy’s discarded wand and snapped it with a single stomp of her foot. Undeterred by Lucius’ garbled threats, she whipped out her wand and pointed it directly between Draco’s father’s eyes. “I’m going to make sure you know exactly who is to blame for this, Mr. Malfoy. All of it. Obliviate. ”

*

They landed in a clearing within an unfamiliar forest, queasy from apparition. Draco, Hermione, and Theo, with Narcissa still asleep in his arms, a bloody stump where her ring finger should have been. She was injured, drained, but she was alive. Any permanent spell damage would only become apparent once she woke.

“Where is this?” Hermione breathed, taking in the unnatural stillness, the soaring limbs of the aspen and the black alder trees. Draco didn't dare answer, busy checking for other magical signatures lurking in the woods, enemies lying in wait. He found none on their side of the wards; behind them, there was a plethora, too many to distinguish.

"Granger," Theo said, still carrying Draco's unconscious mother like a bride. "Did you refer to the Dark Lord as an evil old crackpot back there?"

Hermione reddened, embarrassed.

"Lost my head a bit," she admitted. She was terribly attractive when she was all pink and flushed, not that Draco could enjoy it in their present state.

"You're insane," Theo's lips parted in horrified wonder as he shook his head. "I suspected it, but this confirms the fact you've got absolutely no regard for preserving your own life. Send me across the globe and I still wouldn't be far away enough from you bloody Gryffindors."

"Theo," Draco reminded, cutting into their inappropriately timed repartee. Nott could flirt with her later, after they were removed from the dangers of the open forest. "The wards, if you please."

Theo gently deposited Narcissa in the soft detritus of the forest floor before feeling for the wards, locating the point of entry after a few minutes of testing."There," he said, demonstrating the exact spot with a flick of his wand. "Now be a good boy and send me on my way. The sooner I get away from you two, the higher my chances of sustained life will be."

“Nott,” Draco said, knowing words would fail him. What was there to be said? Draco had given him his very life to protect—his mother, Granger—and Nott had proved both fierce and loyal in his efforts, no matter how much he protested he wasn't. “I can’t even…you have my utmost gratitude.”

“I don’t want your gratitude, tosser,” Nott snapped, but there was a pleased twist to his mouth he couldn't hide quickly enough. “I want my debt repaid. Make things even, Draco. Figure out how to get this bloody thing off my arm, and we’ll be square.” He chucked his chin at Draco, as if to encourage him to get on with it.

“Time for another memory charm, Granger,” Draco said, jerking his head towards Theo. “Send him into the fight.”

It seemed unthinkable that miles and miles away, the Order and Death Eaters were clashing, going wand to wand as Draco spoke. That they would have to return to the fray in order to maintain any form of cover, their standing within the Dark Lord’s forces.

“About time,” Theo gritted, clutching at his arm, and Draco realized for the first time that the dark-haired boy was in apparent pain. The result of ignoring the Dark Lord’s summons for so long. “This thing is like hellfire.”

“Are you sure?” Hermione hesitated. “Maybe we could—”

“Don’t tempt me with a good time,” Theo snarled, gripping the point of her wand and directing it harshly towards his own temple. “Get on with it. It doesn’t matter what I remember— I knowyou won’t forget what you owe me.”

She holstered her reservations and acquiesced, removing any trace of the afternoon—of Draco’s betrayal, of Narcissa’s escape, of her presence in it all— from Theo’s recollection. When she was finished whispering directives into his ear, he strode off into the forest without looking back as if completely unaware of their presence, before disappearing on the spot.

Then Draco and Hermione were alone, with only the cold air and rustling trees, mostly empty of leaves.

There were things he needed to say to Hermione. Important things like, I can never repay you. I owe you my breath, my blood. You are everything good in this miserable bloody world.

“Where have you brought us, Draco?”

Hermione’s hair was askew, strands pulled loose from her pile of curls, framing her face in a disheveled way Draco thought was rather fetching. Her denim trousers were dirty and grass stained. She was shivering, her lips slightly blue, and she’d stood up to his father as if Lucius was nothing, an insect under her heel. She was the loveliest thing he’d ever laid eyes on.

Before he could answer her, a woman stepped through the wards. Familiar, but not. Long dark tresses pulled away from her heart-shaped face, which featured severe cheekbones and deep set eyes, the exact same shade of blue as his mother’s.

Their wands were in her hand in an instant. Hermione screamed at the loss, but Draco threw a hand over her lips, muffling the sound.

“Nephew,” the woman said, her posh accent projecting simultaneous disdain and authority as she cast her eyes on Narcissa’s prone form. Draco detected a flash of concern before they froze over once more, icy mountain streams. “Neither you nor my sister is welcome here. Not with Lucius Malfoy’s claim on her finger.”

“Aunt Andromeda,” Draco replied, dipping his head in greeting. “I would say it’s a pleasure to meet you, but I’m afraid it isn't.” He lifted his mother into his arms, holding her without difficulty. She’d gotten terribly thin. “My father won’t prove an issue. Hermione Granger helped me ensure it.”

Andromeda Black’s eyes darted to his mother’s limp left hand, noting her missing finger.

“I see,” she said, looking between Draco and Hermione with newfound interest. “In that case...” She used her wand to create a person-sized hole in the wards. "There's not much room at the inn."She said this as if she'd purposefully made a joke he wouldn't understand, twisting her lips unpleasantly in a manner that reminded Draco uncomfortably of his other aunt. “To my dismay, we’ve found ourselves with a bit of a full house.”

“A full house?” Hermione questioned as she stepped through the wards. "Who else is here?"

“Oh,” his aunt said, ignoring Hermione's question and stopping Draco before he could follow. “I nearly forgot. You’ll need blood to pass, nephew.”

Draco had a very strong feeling Andromeda Black didn't forget anything.

“Blood?” Draco’s brows rose, mind whirling. If there were blood wards on the property, his mother wouldn’t be safe here, not if other members of the family could get through. Maybe not Lucius, but certainly Aunt Bellatrix…

“Not yours,” Andromeda responded, predicting his line of thought. She pointed at Hermione, who looked unsettled by the woman’s attention. “Hers.” She tilted her head slyly, meeting Draco’s eyes as her tone took on a slight edge. “These wards only respond to dirty blood.”

Drace smirked, stepping through without resistance. Andromeda’s eyes widened infinitesimally.

“My, my,” his aunt said, her brows twitching in what Draco thought might be approval. “It seems I’m not the only traitor in the family.”

Chapter 34: The Black Sheep

Chapter Text

Andromeda Black lived on a second son’s estate. That was the first thing Draco realized, as he stumbled after Granger onto the grounds, a mix of adrenaline and dark magic in his veins that left him simultaneously buzzing and numb. His unconscious mother levitated in front of them, held aloft by his aunt’s wand.

Draco felt the ancestral call off the grounds, recognizing another Black heir. The house in the middle of the forest clearing was a Bavarian chalet style cottage—on the smaller side, if Draco were being honest—with an attached gazebo style conservatory, its glass windows winking merrily in the low light.

He was beyond exhausted. The days events had pushed his magic to its very limits. The emotional toll of using an Unforgivable Curse and of his mother’s escape was wreaking havoc on his already battered psyche. He could barely put one foot in front of the other, much less keep up with the frantic exchange between Granger and his aunt, only catching snippets of their conversation.

“—a variation on ancient family wards, really. Only impure blood allows you through, and only if given intentionally. Willingly.” Andromeda explained, as she led them onto the steps of the cottage, periodically glancing back at Draco with a keen interest he found rather worrisome. “Hence my curiosity at how you entered without any bloodletting, nephew.”

He flushed under his aunt’s implication, just as embedded with meaning as Nott’s had been, when Granger stepped through the manor’s wards and into Narcissa’s wing. Walking through protections meant to deter the other pointed to only one thing: shared blood in their veins.

During the unbinding ritual, Granger hadn’t seemed to realize the significance of what they’d done, didn't understand that the act of sharing magical blood was reserved for only the most intimate of situations, and even then it was considered shocking. But Draco had most certainly realized, and agonized over the fact for months. At first, it was because he was nervous of what could happen if someone—especially his parents— found out. Blood magic and particularly blood sharing was not only rare, but also highly taboo even in pureblood circles. Improper. Deviant.

That was the turn Draco’s own thoughts took: there was something sexual about the fact Granger’s magic was in his veins, and his in hers. Something forbidden about his pure blood mixed with hers. Something proprietary, an ancient sort of claiming. Sometimes, at his weakest, he’d gotten hard at the thought of opening his veins for her, smearing his precious blood on wrists, pumping his co*ck to thoughts of others witnessing it. Potter and Weasley, horrified, as Draco Malfoy sullied their precious Golden Girl. A part of him got off on the idea, wanting others to see the indefensible proof that Granger was his. That she’d claimed him, marked him with her teeth.

But now that his aunt and Theo had witnessed their bond, the implications were far less arousing: even if Draco knew the circ*mstances hadn’t been nearly as illicit like what they must have thought—for one, there had been no marriage bond consecrated by blood, or, Merlin help him, any bloodletting during sex— it still left him without a proper explanation, not without revealing how Granger saved his life and bound them together in the first place.

“This is a pureblood manor, isn't it?” Draco blurted the first thought to enter his head, not wanting to encourage Andromeda's inquiries. "A Black manor."

“How do you know?” Hermione turned to him, her amber eyes sparking with curiosity. Her hair swung behind her, curls falling from her ponytail. A mere look her way made him want to ward them in a room together and sleep for about two days, wrapped around each other so he could be certain of her presence, even while unconscious. But after his mother was proved safe and stable, he'd be forced to return, to witness the aftermath of the night’s carnage: an obliviated Lucius, who thought his wife to be dead, a crumbling Manor, and a Dark Lord, thwarted. He wondered if his presence had been missed, during the raid, and if so, how he’d be punished. He wondered what the Dark Lord would do, having failed to secure Potter, and broke out in a cold sweat at the very thought.

“I can feel it, the Black magic. And look,” Draco demonstrated, pushing thoughts of his impending return from his mind. Hermione turned to examine where he was pointing at the door and windows. “See those carvings? Those are protection runes. They went out of style years ago, once wards came into favor, but you won’t see old Pureblood cottages without them.”

“The house was Alphard Black’s,” Andromeda clarified. “My uncle. Mother blew him off the family tapestry because he bequeathed Sirius some gold and left me this place when he died. It was one of the estates that was supposed to go to cousin Regulus, but Alphard's will was ironclad. He always had a soft spot for us black sheep.” Andromeda regarded him coolly. Her eyes lingered on the signet ring he wore on his left hand. The Malfoy ring. The muggleborn blood in his veins. Draco was sure he seemed threatening to her: contradictions always were.“I wonder what he’d have made of you, nephew.”

Before Draco could inquire further, the house's door was flung open, and the sheer amount of movement that was emitted nearly bowled Draco over.

“Hermione!”

Before he could so much as blink, much less warn her, twin figures flooded out into the entryway and straight for Granger. To his horror, she met them mid-embrace in what appeared to be some sort of vertical wrestling match. He could only catch snippets of what they were babbling to her:

“—thank Merlin, you’re alright—” This was the Weasel himself, his hands all over Granger in a way that had Draco’s hackles rising, fingers itching for his wand. "—Moody is dead. So many people are missing—"

“—Burrow was attacked—” Potter was ranting into Granger’s hair; Draco could hear the Surrey accent. “—wouldn’t let me fight—”

“—barely got him out in time—” The Weasel continued. “—haven’t heard back from the others yet, we’re waiting on—”

They extricated themselves from Granger only to realize who she’d arrived with, identical looks of dismay breaking through their relief.

“Death Eater,” Ronald Weasley snarled, and if Draco hadn’t been so drained, both magically and physically, he would have flattened him like a bug just for the sin of touching Granger’s waist.

But as it stood, Draco was barely standing, and so when Weasley cursed first and saved questions for later, Draco was unprepared. He caught the stunning spell in the chest and toppled over to the sound of Granger’s cry of distress. It provoked a familiar insistence within him to fix it, smooth everything over so the world had fewer edges.

Merlin, he’d gotten sappy. When the bloody hell did that happen? He wondered, before losing consciousness entirely.

*

Draco woke with a dry, cotton-filled mouth. He was in a small bedroom, its walls bursting with color: Quidditch posters and concert broadsides, ribbons and postcards, photos featuring a young witch with unnaturally pink hair, all tacked up so that there was hardly any space uncovered. He bolted up, reaching for his wand instinctively, only to find it missing.

Where was he? How long had it been since he’d been awake?

“About two days,” A voice offered, and he’d realized he’d croaked the question aloud. Andromeda Black was at his bedside in a flash, pulling up a chair and handing him a mug of cold tea. “You certainly took your time— I suppose that’s Narcissa’s influence. Merlin, she was always late.”

Draco didn’t care about the temperature— the liquid soothed his parched throat, bringing him marginally back to life.

“Are you injured? The Weasley boy cast before anyone could stop him, took one look and decided you’d brought the Dark Lord’s forces along. Didn’t even remember the wards— that one won’t be winning any critical thinking awards, will he?”

Draco could only numbly shake his head. He conducted a mental check of his facilities; he wasn’t hurt, at least, he didn’t think he was. Just drained, his magic empty and rattling; no wonder he'd slept for two days after being knocked out. Weasley's stunner had been a mercy.

“I need my wand,” he tried, even thought he doubted he'd be able to cast so much as lumos. Without it, he felt like he was missing a limb. “My mother—is she?”

“Your wand is being held, just a precaution. She’s fine,” Andromeda assured. “Your mother lost an exorbitant amount of blood. But she will live. We’ve turned the guest bedroom into a medical bay— you’re in my daughter Nymphadora’s old room— she’s resting there, goes in and out of consciousness. You can go see her in the morning; she’s most lucid after sleeping through the night. Naturally, she’s been through quite an ordeal, but I think your presence could soothe her.” His aunt gave a wry little twist of her lips, more grimace than smile. “She keeps thinking I’m Bella and throwing cups at my head.”

Up close, Draco could see the similarities; although Andromeda heavily favored Bellatrix, she had the same cerulean eyes as his mother, the same regal chin. In the warm light of the window, her hair was closer to auburn than ebony.

His mother was safe. She was alive . She was not fully cognisant, but she was aware enough to throw things, and that itself was an enormous relief, an anvil lifted from Draco’s chest.

“Draco,” Andromeda said. There was a control to her demeanor that could only have been achieved through years of comportment lessons, the sort Pansy used to whine about when they were children, forced to practice manners instead of playing outside. “I’m sure you’re aware of the fact that I left our family under…undesirable circ*mstances. How did you find this place?”

“You sent my mother a letter,” Draco answered, realizing someone had dressed him in muggle clothing, a soft cotton shirt and joggers. He looked around for his robes, the letter tucked in their pocket. “I found it in a hidden drawer in my father's desk, while he was in Azkaban. It was still sealed, dated from nearly twenty years back, but I opened it and it said—”

“I know what it said,” Andromeda snapped, before composing herself once more. “I have not seen my sister in almost twenty-six years. I have not corresponded with her since I sent that letter. And on the day of an attack on the Order, the day I offered refuge to Harry Potter at the behest of my daughter, Narcissa’s son shows up carrying her unconscious form, missing a finger and her wedding ring. Stepping over blood wards that are supposed to keep him out, without having anyone having spill a drop on his behalf. You’ll forgive me, but it is imperative that I understand just exactly how and why my Death Eater nephew appears to be aiding the Order of the Phoenix. No offense intended.”

Well, when she put it like that, Draco certainly appeared to be a sleeper agent, sent to infiltrate a safehouse. His mother, a ruse. There was, of course, a way to prove he wasn’t. It just wasn’t something he felt particularly comfortable allowing from a woman he’d just met, disowned relative or not. But reformed Death Eaters on enemy territory certainly couldn’t be choosers.

“I suppose you have the family talent?” Draco asked his aunt with a heavy sigh, tapping his temple with his wand in explanation and resigning himself to the discomfort of an intrusion. "The Black sisters all practice mind magic, don't they?"

“I’ve been known to dabble,” Andromeda answered, a sly look on her face. She took out her wand, polished cedar. “Let’s see who you take after, then. Legilimens.”

It felt unnatural to willingly lower his defenses, especially while in such a weakened state. Wand missing, magic drained, in uncharted territory. Andromeda’s legilimency was less forceful than Narcissa’s or Granger’s, rougher around the edges, as if it hadn’t been used in a while. Draco offered her selected memories from his garden—it wasn’t as if he was willing to give his aunt carte balance to see everything — selecting the ones he thought would be the most likely to prove his innocence.

Narcissa screaming, on the terrible night he was marked. The state of his mother’s magic, the uncontrolled explosions. Painful glimpses of her under Dolohov’s wand. At Hogwarts, passing information to Dumbledore in exchange for Narcissa’s freedom. Colluding with Hermione Granger in corridors. Granger in the potions classroom, during their occlumency lessons. Granger’s skin, golden under the moonlight—no, not that one, Draco thought, hastily shoving an incriminating memory of himself in a rather compromising position before Andromeda could see. Instead, he showed her the events that preceded their flight from Malfoy Manor: Draco’s successful Killing Curse, Lucius having his mind altered under Granger’s wand, his mother severing her own finger.

Andromeda withdrew, looking shaken by her sister's ordeal. She considered Draco with a curiosity and, possibly, a bit more esteem than before.

“You’re like me, then,” she said. “An occlumens, and a decent one at that. I thought maybe you’d take after Cissy. Your mother was the legilimens of the family, you know. She didn’t like using it, hated the attention it brought her. It was considered a rare trait, especially in a witch; it made her an oddity, and Cissy always so desperately wanted to fit in. Bella was proficient at both, but master of none. Iwas always the secret keeper, the one with the vault.”

“Comes in handy, doesn't it?” Draco said bitterly. “When your life depends on how well you lie.”

His aunt studied him, her astute eyes seeing more than Draco would have liked.

“Does your mother know?” She asked, her tone sympathetic. Like she’d recognized some sort of sickness in Draco, one that was sure to be fatal, and was being gentle in how she broke the news to him. “I assume your father doesn’t, since you’re still breathing.”

“Know?”

“That you’re in love with the Granger girl,” Andromeda said, slowly as if Draco were very stupid.

“I’m not—”

“Of course,” Andromeda demurred, lips twitching in amusem*nt. “I wasn’t either.” She regarded Draco with narrowed eyes, something fox like in the tilt of her head. “Did your mother ever tell you why I was blasted off the tapestry?”

“You ran off with a muggleborn,” Draco related, remembering what his mother had told him, when Draco asked if she had any siblings: that’s a complicated question, my sweet. One sister in Azkaban, the other a blood traitor.“Broke off an arranged engagement to a Rosier, abandoned your family, became a stain on the Black legacy. Aunt Bella’s mentioned you a few times when she’s properly pissed. She used…harsher words.”

“I’d imagine so,” Andromeda pondered dryly. “I always rather liked the thought that I’d become a Black cautionary tale. I suppose it puts me in the unique position of giving my nephew some advice on the topic.” Her voice hardened into something impenetrable. “They’ll be no going back for you after this, Draco. Not to the cause, or the lifestyle, or the manor.”

“Oh, I’m going back,” Draco protested, his stomach turning viciously. “It’s the only way I can help—help her. If I hadn’t been privy to the attack plans, she’d be dead right now.” He carded his hands through his hair, a nervous tick resurfacing at his anxious thoughts. His aunt—an occlumens like himself— was the first person he’d ever told in explicit terms exactly why he’d agreed to do the things he’d done. It was jarring, hearing the contents of his miserable heart aloud. “Without access, I won’t be able to protect her.”

Andromeda shook her head as if Draco hadn’t understood. She took one of Draco’s hands in her own, turning it over so it was palm side up, and traced his lifeline with a finger. Her nails were coated in pink muggle varnish, a strange contrast to the jewelry she wore: two ornate rings, crusted with precious gems, obviously goblin wrought. Another, simpler band with a solitary diamond on her ring finger.

“This is your divide, Draco,” Andromeda explained, looking up from his palm to meet his eyes. “You’ve reached the fork."

"You practice palmistry?"

"Who do you think taught Cissy?" She answered, before continuing with her examination."This split means a choice has to be made, that loyalties have to be declared.”

She withdrew her hands, clasping them in her lap. Draco reeled— was she telling him to choose Hermione, to announce where he really stood?

“I thought you were a Slytherin,” he said, sounding disappointed. “There’s no strategy in publicly switching sides. In shouting your vulnerabilities from the roof, giving your enemies a target.”

“You’re more like me than I thought,” Andromeda grimaced, a far away quality to her gaze, as if she’d had this conversation many years before. “I said the same thing to Ted. He asked me to run away with him a hundred times and every time I told him no, that we could carry on the way we were: I’d love him in secret, from afar. To protect him. I’d settle for stolen moments, I’d lock my heart behind walls. I told him it was for him, and it was, but not completely.”

“What—" Draco paused to clear his throat, fascinated by her admissions despite himself. "What changed your mind?”

“Nothing,” his estranged aunt explained wryly. “One day, my mother caught onto my absences, followed me to where Ted and I used to meet in secret. She waited for me to return home, and then tried to force me to marry Evan Rosier at wandpoint, right then and there in the Black Manor's foyer. In that moment, I thought— how much of myself can I give away, in order to protect him? Could I marry another man? Could I bear his children? There'd be none of me left; for all my protection might have afforded, Ted would only love a ghost, never fully corporeal. So I cursed my mother in the back and escaped. I never returned and never regretted it."

"So you chose him, even if it put him in danger?"

"We’re not bred for bravery, Draco," Andromeda sighed. "The Blacks are not ones for moral compasses or rights and wrongs. I’d sit this war out without a second thought, if it weren’t for my daughter and Ted. It doesn’t come naturally for me, the heroics.”

This woman—his aunt—didn’t know him at all. And yet, Draco had the horrible feeling he’d been given a mirror and forced to examine himself up close, no scar or stain going unseen.

If it weren’t for his mother, Draco would be halfway across the globe. If it weren’t for Granger, he’d be stuck at the Dark Lord’s side, scrambling for purchase. It was an ugly realization, one that sent a strange wave of shame down his spine.

“But then, I fell in love with a muggleborn and realized that no secrecy or subterfuge would be enough to protect our union from a world that wanted to crush us under its heel. I learned that sometime, one has to fight. That the world responds to displays of strength, not strategy.” Andromeda smirked, dark and dangerous, a flash of Bellatrix across her expression. “I proved just how strong I could be.”

Draco considered his aunt, the witch who’d defied the most notorious wizarding dynasty in Britain and lived to tell the tale. There was something to be said, he thought, for the power of a clean break.

“Is she here?” He asked. “Granger?”

“Oh, yes,” Andromeda replied, already standing and collecting the empty mug of tea. “She’s been asking me if you were awake every thirty minutes for the past two days. A real pain, that one.”

Draco smiled, unable to help it. His soft, stupid heart insisted on being seen. He ignored his aunt’s amused look.

“Yes,” he said. “She certainly has that effect on people.”

*

Draco sat up in bed and waited for what felt like hours, but was likely only a few minutes, until there was a tentative knock on the door and Granger’s face peeked through hesitantly. He waved her in and suffered through her fussing— Was he hurt? No. How was his magic feeling? Like sh*te. How much did he remember? Everything, and he was going to kill Weasley—until she got close enough to the bed for Draco to reach out and grab her by the waist, pulling her into his lap so he could press his cold lips into her neck.

“Draco,” She scolded in protest and he blinked at her with false innocence. "Must you always manhandle me so?"

“Just getting my bearings,” he explained, keeping her pressed against him. She smelled intoxicating, like lavender fields. Sweet and herbal, with sharp green undertones.

"We need to talk," she insisted, worry lines on display as she furrowed her brow. "The Order suffered a significant blow. The Death Eaters burned down the Burrow, we're still getting a handle on who is dead or missing or captured. It's been...well, it's been horrible, but I haven't felt like I was allowed to say that because I wasn't there to help.”

“Granger," he soothed, attempting to stymy the guilt she was radiating through their bond. "Enough. Leave the soldier at the door, would you? It's just us. I’ve been unconscious for two days, you know. I heard you’ve been asking after me.”

“I may have inquired of your survival once or twice.” Granger blushed like this was the most embarrassing thing she could possibly admit, like they hadn't seen each other naked before. “It would be terribly inconvenient if you died.”

She twisted in his lap so she could face him, repositioning herself on the mattress. It gave him the tremendous good fortune of being under her, her thighs on either side of his pelvis. She was wearing muggle denims—Merlin, he loved how all their strange clothing seemed to be nearly painted on—and a jumper made of itchy burgundy wool.

“Hmm,” Draco hummed, slipping his frozen hands under her jumper until she hissed, running a thumb against the soft skin of her stomach, tracing the slope of her waist. “Andromeda told it differently.”

“Do you want—” Her breath became slightly more ragged as she grew more and more affected by his touch. “I can get someone to take you to see your mother, or if you need to talk to Andromeda— Christ, your hands are cold.”

He’d snaked them around her, pressing his palms beneath her shoulder blades, spanning her back. Using the leverage to pull himself up, face inches from hers. He watched as her throat bobbed, as she turned her head in order to glance nervously at the unlocked door.

“Granger,” Draco said, interrupting her protests. “I should, by all accounts, be dead.” He sent a wandless muffliato charm at the door, locking it for good measure. Nothing complicated, but enough to give them a semblance of privacy. “I’d not seen you in months, and when I finally did, it was under threat of torture and death.” He swallowed, struggling to keep himself from admitting how he’d thought about her, constantly and without reprieve. “I bloody missed you, all right?”

She looked surprised by this, her lips parted ever so slightly. Before he could say anything else, her hands were in his hair, her lips pressed to his. He groaned into her mouth, pulling her closer, closer. She tasted like winterberries and mint, an intoxicating combination that had him chasing her tongue with his own. She kissed him like she needed it just as badly as he did, like maybe, she’d missed him too.

“We probably shouldn’t—” she managed, a half-hearted protest as Draco used his mouth to explore her jaw, her throat, the shell of her ear. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes, lashes fluttering. “It’s inappropriate. People are in mourning. Harry and Ron are downstairs, and Tonks and Lupin, and your aunt—”

“We're at war. People are always going to be in mourning. We could all die tomorrow, and if we do, I don't want to regret wasting a damn moment,” he growled, pressing a thumb into the hollow of her collarbones, where she had a tiny constellation of freckles. “And I certainly don’t give a f*ck about being a good houseguest, not when you’re in abed, looking like this.”

“Like what?” Granger breathed, as if she didn’t realize how tempting she was. During those last few months at school, it took all his self control not to ravish her every time he saw her across the f*cking classroom. He’d had to avoid her a bit, to stop himself from getting on his knees and begging.

“If that Killing Curse had hit me,” he murmured, looking into her eyes so she knew he wasn’t lying, wasn’t spinning sweet nothings in order to simply get under her robes. Draco had never been very good at that anyway; he was lucky he was handsome. “I would have been happy knowing you were the last thing I’d ever see.”

Okay, he was no poet. But he certainly had his moments.

In glorious response, Granger pulled off her sweater and undid her bra, allowing both garments to fall off the bed. His mouth went dry at the sight of her hovering over him like Venus reincarnate, all smooth honeyed skin, her pebbled nipples begging for his mouth. He reared forward to close his lips around one, sloppily mouthing at her tit* until she pushed him away.

“I assume we have about fifteen minutes until someone comes up to make sure you haven't murdered me,” Granger said, his protests cutting off abruptly as she removed her wand from her back pocket and pressed it to her abdomen, hastily casting the contraceptive charm. “Make it count.”

The last time, it had been exploratory. This time, it was frantic. They both stood, nearly tripping over themselves in urgency: she stumbled as she shucked her jeans and he removed his pants in record time. He lifted her back onto the bed and positioned her under him. Pressing her into the mattress, so he could feel the entire expanse of her bare skin against his. When he pulled her knickers to the side and swiped at her c*nt, he found her soaked, leaving him both smug and aroused, a deadly combination.

She gasped at the feeling, bucking her hips into his hand in search of more fiction. He withheld it, pressing a hand to her pelvis, holding her still.

“Hush.” He smirked as he thumbed at her cl*t, keeping his pace slow and purposeful despite her little noises of insistence. “Do you want the others to hear?”

Last time, he’d seen her body back lit only by the flickering glow of the fire. But now, with daylight illuminating every inch of her, he could indulge in admiration. Her chestnut curls splayed out on the pillow like a halo. Her pink cheeks, dotted with freckles. Her cupid's bow lips, spilling breathy encouragements. The peek of her tongue, inviting him to envision her mouth wrapped around his co*ck. The graceful slope of her waist. The purple scar that stretched from her sternum to her breasts.

Suddenly, Draco realized: he’d killed the man that did that to her. The thought sent a vicious thrum of satisfaction through him, and he pressed down on her cl*t in response.

She reacted so beautifully, her c*nt growing slicker with every increase in pressure. She could probably come like this if he let her, riding his hand until she dripped down his wrist. In turn, he’d wager he could get off just by staring at her sweet little puss*, pink lips glistening as she bore down on his fingers. Clenching around him, making a mess of herself.

Mercifully unaware of his depraved thoughts, Granger whimpered. The sound made Draco painfully hard, his co*ck rubbing against the mattress, stiff and leaking.

“Please,” she whispered, making an effort to beg quietly, and that was the limit of Draco’s self control. "Please."

He gave in immediately: hovering above her as he spread her thighs, positioning himself between them. Gods, she got so f*cking wet for him. One day, he thought, he’d take his time with her. He’d tease her for hours, have her soaked and writhing before he so much as took out his co*ck. But today, Draco was alive and they were in a bed and he would take his mercies where he could find them.

Draco lost himself in the exquisite feeling of pushing into her. The scorching heat, the slick pressure. He moved slowly, long measured thrusts that had them both trembling. She held onto him, squeezing his bicep in a silent request for more, harder, faster.

But Draco didn’t want a fast, hard f*ck. He was delirious, riding the remnants of the terrible, exhilarating uncertainty of doubting whether he’d live to see sunrise. f*cking her was like the first time he’d done proper magic, like the realization of possibility, of something sacred. He wanted to draw it out. He wanted to stop time, so he could bask in it. His heart, still beating. Her c*nt, fluttering around him with every stroke.

But time wasn’t a luxury they currently had; Draco already felt as if they were committing a heist by allowing themselves this moment, however fleeting. Like Prometheus stealing fire from the gods. And he couldn’t drag it out, not when she was lifting her hips, wrapping her legs around his waist to pull them closer.

He lifted one leg to rest on his shoulder, changing the angle so he could slide deeper—f*ck, she took him so well, all the way to the hilt—and her amber eyes flew open at the revelation. Draco supported himself with one hand, using the other to grasp her jaw, keep her from turning her face. He didn’t want her to look away when she came: a star exploding, back arched, a hand over her own mouth the muffle the sounds. When she finally stopped quivering, he managed a few more hard strokes as she smiled heatedly up at him and bit her lip as if to say, go on then. He could feel his magic swell to life, revitalized, setting his nerve endings on fire as he came.

After several eternities, Draco thought that maybe she'd like the breathe at some point and he rolled off her, simultaneously spent and invigorated. Granger stood and busied herself with cleansing charms, keeping her gaze hidden behind lowered eyes. She seemed nervous as she tied up her mussed curls, dawdling as if preparing herself to say something. How strange it was that when they were naked and rutting, they could say nearly anything to each other, free and unencumbered. But as soon as they were clothed again, that assuredness waned.

“Are you alright?” Draco asked, sitting up on the bed to examine her. She handed him his joggers, but he discarded them, preferring to take her wrist instead. He guided her hand to his face, where he leaned into her touch. Look, the gesture seemed to scream. You have me.

She brushed a thumb along his cheekbone, impossibly tender. With her standing and him perched on the mattress, they were at eye level, emotions excruciatingly on display.

“Are you going back?” Her eyes were shrouded again, none of the light he’d pulled from them mere moments ago. “To your father? To the Dark Lord?”

Draco considered what his aunt had said, about the importance of making his choice known. He knew he was not always a good man, that he more than likely didn’t deserve her. But if she was going to allow him a place in her life, no matter how small, she shouldn’t have to maintain—to her friends, to the rest of the world— the assumption that he thought her inferior and wanted her dead. She should be allowed to step into the light.

Maybe he could keep her safe, by returning to the Dark Lord’s side. He could pass her information, protect her efforts, steal moments in safehouses like this one. But— didn’t she deserve more? She was so willing to give herself up; didn’t she need someone by her side, watching her back, making sure she didn't give away too much? Couldn't that be Draco?

“Do you want me to, Hermione?” He asked, with the uncanny sensation he was offering himself up, placing his heart in her hands. “Do you need that from me?”

“No.” She answered and even thought her tone was decisive, it sounded like a plea. “I can’t—when I don’t know if you’re safe, I can’t think straight. When you pushed me out of the way of that Killing Curse, I thought—" She shuddered, unable to finish her sentence."I don’t want you tossing yourself onto the fire for me, Draco.”

She blinked rapidly, as if she were on the verge of tears. He couldn’t stand for it.

“I won’t go back,” he assured, aiming for comfort. “I was a sh*t spy anyway."

Granger garbled a laugh, still choked up but no longer threatening sobs. "You weren't sh*t."

Liar, Draco thought, with embarrassing fondness. He'd proved marginally helpful, but he certainly was no Snape.

"I’ll stay with you," he promised, going deadly serious. He tucked an errant curl behind her ear, leaning forward until his forehead rested against hers. "As long as you want me.”

Andromeda was right: Draco was no lion, never predisposed to a hero’s acts of bravery. But he’d long mastered the art of sacrifice: he knew what it was to give himself up in pieces, trade bits of his soul for those he loved. He wasn’t sure about how to do the opposite, how to save himself on someone else's behalf.

But when she kissed him, half dressed and lovely, he realized that for some reason, Hermione Granger considered him as something worth saving.

Draco had long thought that the world was vicious and cruel, hell bent on returning its inhabitants into ash and dust. That romantic love as the scholars and poets spoke of it was just a concept, a pretty facade used to disguise their more honest, more human realities: desire, hunger, pleasure. That everything good in the world came at the price of blood, and to live was simply to mitigate how much of it one was willing to let from their veins.

But now…Draco was starting to have doubts about all that. It was quite possible, he realized, that he’d been wrong. About all of it.