July 2002

Hermione felt paranoid the following Tuesday when she was foraging, but the journey passed again without incident. That morning, when she arrived at the shack, Draco was already there waiting.

"So, dueling," he said, spinning his wand in his right hand as she walked through the door.

Hermione froze and blanched slightly.

She had braced herself—reminded herself repeatedly that Draco would likely do something incredibly nasty to her as soon as he started feeling better. It was apparently his default method for maintaining distance between them.

She'd healed him considerably more from his punishment than she had after his fight with a werewolf. If he regarded her as overstepping recently in the way she had been touching him—if the space between them really had narrowed—she had reminded herself that eventually he might do something horribly cruel to widen it again.

She'd known—

But walking into it still felt like being gutted.

She dropped her eyes, and forced her expression not to change.

"Right," she said. She dropped her bag by the door and warded it.

His expression was cool and calculating as he stared at her from across the room.

"I want to see if your dodging and evading has improved, but I don't want to rennervate you every minute—"

Hermione flinched faintly.

"Just don't hit my hands," she interrupted him, "I can't work—if you hit my hands again."

His eyes narrowed with annoyance.

"Fuck off, Granger, I'm not intending to hex you," he snapped. He flicked his wand sharply toward her and she felt—liquid.

She glanced down and found a large water droplet spattered across the back of her hand.

"I realize you consider me a total monster," he said flatly, "but I do make a general habit of keeping my word. I presume water will not offend you."

Hermione was still staring down at her hand in astonishment. Finally she looked up at him and blushed.

"Sorry," she mumbled.

"Right." His expression was stiff. "So—I'm primarily interested in seeing how you move. However, do try to land a hex on me, if you possibly can."

He entered a very uncommitted dueling stance, and waited for her to do the same.

She did, and then bobbed her head slightly in a bow before she sent a jelly-leg jinx toward him. He blocked it with the faintest flick of his right hand.

He sent a dozen drops of water in her direction and she easily blocked them with a nonverbal shield.

She sent a series of stunners and he blocked them without moving.

"Why are you so concerned with how I move when you never do?" she inquired as she sent several leg lockers and jelly leg jinxes toward his feet.

"I'm not dueling," he said, shooting her a thin smile as he blocked her spells and caught her feet with several drops of water. "Your shield isn't comprehensive. Stop maintaining it and dodge, or make sure it's full-body."

She flushed and physically dodged the next twenty water droplets while shooting several mild hexes in his direction.

"You aren't even trying to hit me," he said, frowning. "You do realise I basically duel for a living. I fight werewolves, your Order, Death Eaters... Especially lately, everyone in the Dark Lord's ranks thinks that my injury is an open invitation to try to steal my spot."

Hermione nearly tripped and stared at him in horror.

"What?" she said with a horrified gasp. If he were Harry or Ron she'd be smacking him upside the head.

He shot her squarely between the eyes with a drop of water.

"Focus!" he barked, before laying his hand across his brow in apparent despair but still blocking the leg locking jinx she shot. "You're hopeless. Merlin. This is why you lot are losing."

"I'm a healer," she snapped defensively. "If you wanted me to try harder at hexing you, you should have talked about how you enjoy killing kneazles kittens."

"Every night before I go to sleep," he deadpanned as he filled the air with shooting drops of water. The floor was growing littered with puddles.

"Are you really saying that you've been dueling ?" Hermione demanded. She stopped trying to jinx him and was simply staring at him in outrage while she knocked aside all the water he was sending toward her.

Draco rolled his eyes.

"You may recall, I'm a Death Eater," he said. "I am at a loss as to how this surprises you."

"You are injured! I assumed there were some basic tenets of human decency even among Death Eaters." She was seething.

"Well, you'd be wrong. Despite its Muggle origins, the Dark Lord is a firm believer in promoting the survival of the fittest. Hence his aspiration to subjugate all Muggles. If my—chastisement—leaves me vulnerable to overthrow then I ostensibly deserve it."

"So—what? They just get to attack you whenever they want to?" she asked angrily, continuing to ward off the rainstorm he was directing at her. The entire floor was covered in water.

"Of course not," he said, his lips curling condescendingly, "constant infighting weakens military cohesion. There's a designated time each week before the Dark Lord, at which point challenges are permitted. And there are generally restrictions on killing, or doing anything to permanently impair our—usefulness."

"That is vile."

"The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage," Draco said.

Hermione squinted at him in confusion.

"How is it that you know Darwin and Thoreau?"

"Oh, you know. 'Know thyself. Know thy enemy. And you shall win a hundred battles without loss,'" he said with faint smirk. "We savage Death Eaters do know how to read. The Dark Lord doesn't care what I do so long as I continue providing him victories."

He sighed abruptly and stopped shooting water at her.

"You're really not even going to try to hex me, are you?" he asked in irritation, as he banished the pool of water they were both standing in.

Hermione flushed faintly.

"I've spent a lot of time trying to heal you. I don't want to make you fall," she admitted begrudgingly.

"You fucking moron," he said, glaring at her. "Do you expect Death Eaters to extend the same courtesy to you? If you're injured on the ground, cursing you additionally would be funny."

"I think it's generally understood that I would be a pretty piss-poor Death Eater," she snapped.

"Obviously. But I would hope you could be pragmatic enough to duel competently."

"I can be pragmatic. When it comes down to the line, I don't baulk. But—I can't try to injure you right now."

She bit her lip and looked away from him.

"You—" she started, "you've saved several hundred people now. There's a chance no one will ever know. And you were punished for it. So—I'm not going to try to hurt you. Not when you're already injured."

She stood there awkwardly. He sighed and stared at her. There was cold calculation to his expression as he stood considering her. Then a long silence.

"Did you know," Draco said in an airy tone after a minute, "that I was there when the Creevey family was dragged out of hiding?"

Hermione couldn't have been more stunned if he'd just stepped up and backhanded her. She looked up at him sharply while he continued.

"Two Muggle-born wizards from the same family. Quite an anomaly. They were considered high priority. The Dark Lord wanted their deaths spectacular."

"You—," Hermione choked. The words died in her throat, swallowed by her rising horror.

"You should have heard how the Muggles screamed. Dear Aunt Bella had such a fondness for the cruciatus. You recall how she drove the Longbottoms insane? She considered the Creeveys her encore performance. The boys tried to bolt. Good little runners. Smart enough to know they couldn't save their parents."

Hermione felt as though she'd been punched. Repeatedly. She tried to breathe, but her lungs wouldn't function. Her throat felt as though something were closing around it.

Draco continued in a relentless voice, "Of course your Order came eventually, but they were rather late. The father bit through his tongue and drowned in the blood. Bella cut out the mother's womb, just in case the woman was still sane enough to understand what she was being punished for. While they were stringing her organs up around the parlor, I was set to track down the boys. It was easy, since they were blubbering and trying to stay together. Putting them in the countryside miles from another farm was quite an oversight for two wizards who couldn't apparate. Then the littler one stepped in a badger hole and broke his leg. He started crawling through the grass. An easy target for a killing curse. The second person I cursed in the back with it."

Hermione's wrist snapped forward without thinking as she shot a slicing hex at him. It grazed Malfoy's cheek. He didn't flinch as the blood welled up from the razor fine cut and streamed down his face. He stepped toward her.

"You know..." he said softly, "the killing curse. It takes something out of you. It's not something just anyone can throw around. Not repeatedly. Colin could have kept running. If he had, he might still be alive today. But he stopped. For his dead brother he stopped, ran back, tried to drag the body with him."

"Did you—," Hermione croaked, feeling as though she might die from the horror currently welling up inside her. "Are you—"

Malfoy arched an eyebrow and smirked coldly down at her.

"Are you wanting to know if I'm the one responsible for that nightmare in your head?"

Hermione felt that if she opened her mouth again, she might vomit. Her wand was shaking in her fingers, and she felt torn between a desire to scream and sob. She had never felt capable of crucio'ing someone, but as Malfoy closed in on her, his grey eyes glinting, she was sure she'd mean it.

"No," he said softly, and Hermione started slightly. "That was Dolohov. He'd just invented it. He came specifically with the hope of testing it that day. But it's difficult to aim. Useless long range. You have to be within a foot of the target. If Colin had just run—he wouldn't have been hit with it."

Hermione clamped her hands over her mouth and dropped to the floor with a muffled sob.

Malfoy knelt down, forced her chin up, and stared coldly into her eyes.

"That is what Gryffindor sentiment looks like. All those noble ideals of not leaving people behind, not even the dead; of not using the Dark Arts; of not hitting someone because they're already down; of trying to ascribe heroism to people—when you feel like believing in any of that, remember just how and why Colin died in front of you. You have no idea how many of your Resistance fighters I've killed because they believed the lie that goodness is an advantage in war."

He let go of her face and stood.

"If you don't learn to fight now, you will die. The fact you haven't already been killed foraging is from the sheer benevolence of Fate. I'm sure you are too pragmatic to continue relying on such a thing. If you have any sense whatsoever, I'll expect some true resolve from you next week."

He dropped a roll of parchment beside her and apparated away.

Hermione sat shaking on the damp floor of the shack for a long time.

No one talked about Colin.

Out of a combined consideration for both Hermione and Harry, the topic was assiduously avoided. Anything that even vaguely broached it was treated with utmost delicacy.

After it had happened, Hermione had hidden the memory in the recesses of her mind and it had festered like a wound. Malfoy had come across it while teaching her occlumency.

Having him drag it out and use the trauma to berate her was such a staggering blow she felt as though she were going into physical shock from it.

There were very few things that still felt sacred to Hermione.

Not her body.

Not her soul.

But Colin's death—it had always been such a private agony. It had driven her from her friends. It had taken her across Europe and back. It had driven her all the way into the shack in which she sat. All the way to Malfoy, who had used it to belittle the last pieces of herself that still remained.

She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes until they ached. Trying to recentre herself.

She was late for her shift in the hospital wing when she finally dragged herself from the floor and headed to Grimmauld Place.

She felt as though she were floating through the day. Weirdly detached. As though there were glass between her mind and the rest of the world.

Hermione went through the motions of healing and then a long evening of brewing.

The Order needed large batch of Draught of Living Death. It was their method for dealing with prisoners. They wouldn't kill them, and had neither prisons nor enough people to be able to spare some as guards. So Death Eaters they caught were kept in an unplottable location in suspended animation. Bill Weasley and his wife Fleur were in charge of it, using their skills as former Curse Breakers to weave elaborate enchantments and wards in order to accommodate the considerable number of prisoners the Order had accrued over the years.

As she sat waiting two and a half minutes for the potion to settle, she glanced at her watch. It was almost eight o'clock.

She sighed and buried her face in her hands. She did not want to see Malfoy again. If she did, she would probably punch him in his cruel face.

He probably wasn't expecting her to show up anyway.

Her wand chimed to indicate that the time had passed, and she dropped the last bit of Valerian root in.

The potion turned pale pink.

She warded it, and put it carefully aside.

She picked up her jar of salve and rolled it about in her hands. She was almost out of Essence of Dittany. She'd used most of it treating his runes. She tried not to calculate how many other injuries she could have healed with it if she weren't using it on Draco; tried not to quantify his value against the lives of others. How many he'd saved, how many he'd killed, how many lives his intelligence was or was not worth.

He'd killed Dumbledore. The number of deaths he was responsible for because of that act alone was sufficient to damn him. He'd never rebalance the scales, no matter how many people he saved.

Unless he helped them win. If they won, it might be enough.

She smiled bitterly to herself.

Draco Malfoy was exactly the same person he had been the night before. The only difference was that her knowledge of him had broadened slightly.

She couldn't understand him.

Why get so angry and monstrous because she didn't want to hurt him when he was already severely injured? He was so unreasonably angry and bitter. It felt as though she'd shattered the fragile peace between them.

But provoking her with Colin's death was low, even by her standards for him.

Maybe he was actually concerned that she was going to die.

She scoffed to herself. If he were, it was probably only because he didn't want to risk having a non-occlumens as his contact.

Before she could think more, she slipped the salve into her pocket and then headed to the shack. She was four minutes early.

Being there again felt exhausting.

She sat down on a chair and pulled a picture from her pocket. It was of herself, Ron, and Harry in the Great Hall, all mid-bite and looking up, faintly annoyed over being photographed. Colin had taken it.

She always stared at it when she felt depressed.

She put it back in her pocket and then leaned across the table and buried her head in her arms.

Maybe she would dose herself with Dreamless Sleep potion when she got back. She could feel the nightmares in the back on her mind. Just waiting for an opportunity to claw their way to the surface of her consciousness.

She'd already taken the potion eight times that month. She was still having nightmares from all the victims from the curse development division that were brought to her.

She'd tried. She'd tried so hard to save them.

There had been nothing she could do. Almost every single one had died. Those that didn't, she euthanised; to spare them the endless agony they'd been magically trapped within.

If she took Dreamless Sleep Draught, it would be breaking the rules she held everyone else to. Barring injury, no one was permitted more than eight vials a month.

Not that anyone would know. Hermione was the one in charge of regulating the potions. The Resistance was too overdrawn to afford the redundancy of having a supervisor over her. Even if they tried to, unless the person also had a Potion Mastery, there was little chance they could stop Hermione from slyly doing whatever she pleased.

But it was a slippery slope to abuse the rules. Nine times a month. It would be so easy to rationalise ten after that. Then eleven.

Until it stopped working.

Until she wanted something stronger.

Severus had warned her. The number of ways a Potion Master could abuse their skills were endless.

Maybe when she got home she'd go get high with Neville, or see if Charlie would share his firewhiskey supply.

But she didn't really want to get high. And she wasn't allowed to be, even if she did want to. She was always on call in case of a healing emergency.

She could get drunk. She always kept sobriety potion carefully stocked in her stores. But she hardly got along with Charlie when she was sober.

Hermione felt desperate for someone to talk to.

Almost every interaction with Malfoy felt like an emotional punch in the gut, and she had to walk away from them and pretend they'd never happened.

She lived in a house crammed with people and she felt utterly isolated.

There was faint crack of apparition. She looked up dully to find that Malfoy had arrived. Cold and indolent-looking as always.

She wanted to cry and bolt. Or to hex him nastily and just leave him there.

She swallowed it and stood up.

He unbuttoned his shirt and straddled a chair. She didn't say a word as she pulled the fabric off his shoulders and set to work.

"I'm going to use the cleansing charm now," she said in a mechanical voice. She counted to three and then cast it.

Then she swiftly reapplied the salve. The dittany had made progress in neutralising the poison. The cuts appeared almost ready to begin healing. She would probably be able to start closing them within the next week. The process would take several hours to do properly and ensure the scar tissue wasn't taut and wouldn't pull when he moved his shoulders.

She didn't want to talk to him but she forced herself to open her mouth.

"If you have time in the next four to seven days, I can close the incisions. It will probably take three hours. After eight pm and before five am are the best times for me. I have hospital shifts and other duties during the day."

He didn't say anything.

She recast the protective spells and dropped his shirt over his shoulders. Then she turned and walked out of the shack without a word.

The summer evening was cool. She shivered slightly and walked down the lane. She had decided. She was going to go get well and truly smashed.

She stopped outside a pub and hesitated. She was a talkative drunk. She couldn't go into a muggle pub and start crying about everyone who had died. Even if she managed to pass herself off as a doctor in a casualty ward, she was a terrible conversational liar.

She continued until she found a market and bought herself a bottle of port. Her parents had always liked to drink port in the evenings when on holiday.

She carried it to the creek where her prayer tower stood, and then stared in surprise. There were reeds growing along the banks that she didn't remember being there before, and the area felt slightly warmer. Magical. She cast several more muggle repelling spells and a privacy charm over the area and then opened the bottle and started drinking.

She remembered someone telling her that a person could get drunk faster using a straw. She didn't know if it was true, but she conjured a long one and started sipping. She calculated that she had several hours before anyone would think to look for her. More than enough time to get drunk, cry under a bridge, and then sober slightly before heading back.

She hadn't had any dinner; the alcohol hit her rapidly.

She was curled up in a ball among the reeds and was sobbing in short order.

She hated Malfoy. How dare he demand her, and isolate her, and talk about the Creevey family. She hoped she was the one who killed him.

She stood up and pulled the topmost stone off her tower, and tossed it back into the creek.

She did it too carelessly. The whole tower wobbled slightly and then fell crashing into the water. She gasped with horror and tried to rebuild it.

Rock stacking required more finesse and steadier hands than she currently possessed. After several tries she gave up, sat down in middle of the creek and cried and shivered.

She hadn't felt so pathetic in a long time and she didn't even care. She should have bought two bottles of port.

"The fuck are you doing, Granger?"