August 2002

Hermione pressed her lips together as she stared over at Draco, breathing raggedly.

"I'm too drunk. I can't apparate," she said. "I told you, I cry. I can't help it. I don't know how to hold it all in when I'm drunk."

She clamped her hands over her mouth and struggled not to burst into tears. They leaked out of her eyes and slid over her fingers.

Draco sighed.

"Why are you crying now?" he asked when she kept choking back tears.

"Because I'm lonely and I'm snogging you and you don't even really think I'm attractive," she admitted tearfully.

Draco looked at her for a moment and then tilted his head back and stared up at the ceiling for a full minute.

"Why do you think I was snogging you?" he finally asked in a tight voice.

The corner of Hermione's mouth twitched, and she looked away.

"Because I'm here," she said quietly.

"Why were you snogging me?" he asked, looking away from the ceiling to stare at her.

Hermione studied a knot in a floorboard and twisted a curl in her hands.

"Because you treat me like I'm me. My friends treat me like a colleague," she said in a bitter tone, "Harry and I got into a fight, and then he apologised for insulting me professionally. Like that was the part that hurt me. Somehow—you make me remember that underneath everything I've become in this war, the person I was before still exists."

She bit her lip as she tried not to start crying again. She snatched the bottle off the floor where it had been abandoned at some point and gulped more of the remaining firewhisky. There was less than an inch left, and she had a lingering hope that if she finished all of it, it would take her to a point of inebriation beyond feeling.

Malfoy looked away from her, and then leaned back and slung his arm over his eyes. When she had finished the bottle of Ogden's, she glanced over at him. His arm had slumped down; he was asleep.

She stared at him for a long time, studying his features in a way she had never permitted herself to in the past. Then, gradually, she found her eyelids closing. She should—she couldn't quite think, but she should do something. Get up? Or perhaps conjure a cot somewhere? Her sight grew dim. She fell asleep still staring at him.

She didn't know which of them moved but when they stirred the next morning, they were half entwined with each other. Somehow neither of them had fallen off the small couch. They'd slumped down, and burrowed into each other's arms. If Hermione's head hadn't felt on the verge of cracking open, she would have tried to rapidly remove herself, but instead she just lay trapped under Draco in a state of stunned horror.

His expression showed similar horror and almost-panic when he went from asleep to abruptly awake. He tried to pull his arm out from under her, and they wobbled precariously on the edge of the couch.

"If you make me fall off this couch, I will vomit on you," Hermione immediately told him. He stilled, and they stared at each other.

"Any ingenious solutions then, know-it-all?" he finally asked.

"Give me a minute," Hermione said, flushing deep scarlet and closing her eyes as she tried to think of a solution. She was resolutely ignoring Draco lying on top of her. Draco, who was shirtless. The air in the room was cold but his skin was warm, and his breath ghosting against her cheek was hot. His whole body was hard and pressed snugly against her; his arm under her back making her arch into him. There was something distinct and growing pressed into her thigh near her hip and after a moment's bewilderment, she felt it twitch faintly—oh god!

She wasn't thinking about it. She hadn't noticed anything. She was thinking only of her hangover and how to disentangle herself from Draco without either of them vomiting on the other person.

Draco was on top of her with all his weight, but his arm closest to the edge of the couch was wrapped around her waist up past his elbow. When he tried to move it out from under her, their combined weight risked destabilising them to the point of toppling them both off the loveseat.

If he could get his other arm free, he could grab the back of the couch and free himself. But when he tried to move his shoulder, it also resulted in wobbling.

If he could move his legs off the couch first, then he could kneel on the floor and easily get free. But the process, Hermione suspected, would result in a great deal of waist-level friction.

"I think if I move my left leg—," Draco started to say.

"Don't!" Hermione barked, feeling her face grow redder.

"Fuck! Granger, don't shout," he said angrily, wincing.

"Just—let me think," Hermione said, wishing bitterly that she'd had fallen asleep on the floor.

"Fucking unbelievable," he muttered under his breath.

Irritation kindled inside of her chest alongside her embarrassment over their current predicament.

"Don't blame me. I wanted to go home last night. You're the one who blocked the door and demanded I drink with you," Hermione said in a sharp tone.

"I was drunk. Per your suggestion as a supposed medical professional, I might add." His expression was disdainful.

"I apologise for recommending a source of pain relief while healing you," Hermione said, glaring up at him. "If my help is such an inconvenience to you, you can always go elsewhere."

"I already intended to," he said coldly.

Hermione's breath caught with sharp hurt, and she stiffened and then bucked under him sharply. He lost his balance and toppled, and she sat up quickly to avoid being taken with him.

He hit his head with a resounding crack on the wood floor.

"You are a fucking bitch," he said as he gripped his face.

Hermione sneered down at him as she stood up.

"Yes, I think that's pretty well established now," she said, pressing her lips into hard line as she snatched up her satchel and pulled the door open.

"If you have any useful information, leave a scroll. I'll pick it up later," she said, stepping through and apparating before he could say anything in reply.

The moment she reappeared down the street from Number 13 Grimmauld Place, she proceeded to double over and vomit into a hedge. After she'd banished the mess and wiped her mouth, she rummaged through her satchel and pulled out the vial of hangover relief potion she had remembered to pack for Draco the night before.

She swallowed the potion, and her mouth twisted slightly as she stood in the empty street and tried not to cry as she reviewed the previous night from a perspective of sobriety.

She'd kissed Draco Malfoy. More than kissed him. Snogged him. Willingly.

She'd never kissed anyone else but Viktor Krum during fourth year.

But that wasn't what bothered her.

As she stood in the empty street, twisting the strap of her satchel, she feared she'd compromised her mission. Draco had handed himself to her. He'd asked for her company, and he'd wanted to kiss her. She had blown it by being drunk and vulnerable and insecure.

She wasn't sure whether having sex with him would have been the right move, but she hadn't derailed their snogging session with any calculation or strategy on her part. She'd baulked, and he'd seen it.

Willing. He'd been specific about that. The moment she'd hesitated, he'd shoved her back beyond his walls.

She hadn't even been thinking about her mission. He'd touched her hair and told her she was lovely. He had seemed sad for her, and it had made her want to kiss him.

If the alcohol hadn't made her so insecure, she probably would have had sex with him. She hadn't known that being touched by someone could feel meaningful like that. That hearing him groan and react to her touch would affect something deep inside of her.

Theoretically she understood sex and romantic relationships. But practically—personally—speaking, she found herself so beyond her depth she felt as though she'd been dropped down into a deep sea chasm.

There had never been time nor opportunity for any kind of relationship. Not when she'd been training abroad. Not when she came back. Most people her age didn't even have clearance to access her when she was working on research or potions, and visiting was carefully regulated in the hospital. By the time most patients were recovered enough to notice her, they were transferred out of her hospital to a convalescent ward or hospice house.

There simply had never been the time.

She had watched Ron and his cycle of partners and assumed that sex was impersonal. Just something comforting and physical. That it was easy to be with someone and then walk away and not care if they proceeded to find someone else the next day.

She'd thought, that if the step was ever taken with Malfoy, she'd be able to be indifferent. That it wouldn't have to be personal if she were simply rational enough. Lie back and think of England. Women had done that for hundreds of years.

She had been wrong.

Kissing Draco and being touched by him had felt like the most personal thing that had ever happened to her. It had awakened a longing somewhere deep inside of her; as she stood alone in the street, she found herself wishing to re-experience it.

It had felt sacred. It hadn't been something strategic or impersonal. It had been her reaching out and kissing someone who was interested in her. Who had felt kindred in loneliness. Someone who understood the dark world she had descended into. Who wasn't angry at her for wanting to win the war at any cost.

She wanted it to mean as much to him. The knowledge that it probably didn't fractured something inside of her. He was probably like Ron. It was probably just something physical.

The fact that it wouldn't—couldn't—be that way for her felt cruelly unjust. The fact that she still craved it anyway felt the worst of all.

She felt empty. She felt physically and emotionally betrayed by herself.

She never wanted to go near Draco again. She felt like seeing him would hurt every time.

Death Eater. Murderer. Spy. Target. Tool.

Yet she wanted him to touch her. To lace his fingers in her hair, slide his hands along her body, and feel him gasp against her lips as she kissed him back.

She'd never wanted such a thing before, and she didn't know how to ignore it now that it existed. She didn't know how to make it stop. It wasn't a longing in her mind that she could occlude.

It was somewhere deeper.

But it didn't matter. It didn't matter if she never wanted to see him again. It didn't matter how she felt. It had never mattered how she felt. The instructions remained the same: hold his interest, make him loyal.

She swallowed down the bitter aftertaste of the potion and her vomit and headed back to Grimmauld Place.

"Bloody hell, Hermione!" Ron said as she walked in the door.

He was in the sitting room with the insomniacs.

She stared at him, puzzled.

"What happened to your hair?" he asked.

She reached up and felt it all tangled around her.

"Brambles," she lied promptly.

"You look like you lost a fight with a kneazle," Ron said in a teasing tone.

Hermione nodded absently.

"I'd forgotten it was like that," Ron added after staring at her for another minute. "It's pretty, the way you keep it braided now."

Hermione smiled wanly at him and felt her jaw tremble faintly.

"Yes. It's best when I keep it back," she said. "I hardly know what to do with it when it's like this now."

She didn't want to talk to anyone. She especially didn't want to talk about her hair.

She hurried up the stairs to a bathroom and took a shower. She scrubbed herself violently, trying to wash away any physical memory of Draco's hands. The water was scalding, and she couldn't bring herself to turn it off. When she was done washing, she continued to stand there as the minutes rolled by; wasting time she didn't have.

She wasn't crying, she told herself. It was just the spray of the shower. It was just water on her face.

She barely toweled her hair off at all before quickly braiding it into two taut French braids which she coiled at the nape of her neck. Neat. Not a stray curl to be seen.

She was taking a potion inventory when Kingsley found her.

"Granger, you're needed at Shell Cottage," he said.

Hermione froze for a moment before turning and drawing a rune in a very nondescript chest lying on the floor. It popped open, and she pulled out a small leather bag. She lifted the flap and took a rapid visual inventory.

"I'm ready," she said, trying to quell the rapid beat of her heart and the cold knotting sensation in her stomach.

Kingsley led her through Grimmauld Place and then apparated from the front door.

They did not reappear at Shell Cottage. Hermione had known they would not.

They stood at the opening of a narrow cave. Kingsley went over and tapped on a large boulder beside the cave opening.

The ground at Hermione's feet swirled and a staircase descending into the ground appeared. She stared down it for a moment, pressing her lips together before starting down.

At the bottom of the stairs stood Gabrielle Delacour looking ethereally beautiful.

"'Ermione, I 'ave caught another!" she announced in triumph. "'E is not marked but I think 'e is important because 'e is being very difficult."

Gabrielle had been a recent recruit to the British Resistance. One of the few members of the French Resistance who escaped into other parts of Europe when Voldemort had finally seized control of France. Gabrielle's friends and classmates had all died. She had arrived burning for revenge.

Rather than formally induct her into the British Resistance or the Order, Kingsley had swept Gabrielle into his secret reconnaissance team; a team even most of the members of the Order were largely ignorant of.

Kingsley's recruits were scattered across Europe gathering intelligence. They were mostly free agents. Kingsley left them with vague directions and great deal of leeway regarding what means they should use to extract the information. So long as the information was good he made no move to rein in or question their methods.

They were supposed to bring back their targets to be imprisoned. Hermione was called in to heal them before they were placed in suspended animation.

Gabrielle was exceptionally talented at information gathering. She used her veela allure and entrapped her targets somewhere she could interrogate them however she pleased. She also tended to bring back far more information than prisoners.

Hermione suspected she killed most of her targets once she was done with them. There was a cold triumph in the French girl's eyes that spoke of pain both given and received. The beautiful young woman always wore long sleeves and covered herself carefully from the neck down.

When Gabrielle did bring someone back, it meant she hadn't been able to break them. In which case she resigned herself to leaving them to Kingsley and Moody's traditional interrogation methods: legilimency, veritaserum, and psychological pressure.

Whenever Kingsley brought Hermione to the beach, she was never quite sure what would be waiting for her.

She braced herself.

She swung the door open and found a young man restrained in a chair. Small pools of blood sat on the floor beneath him.

Hermione took a deep breath, placed her leather bag on the table and opened it, pulling supplies out and laying them neatly across the table. When she had everything in place, she stepped closer and cast a diagnostic.

Nothing severe. Nothing that could kill him. Lots of small injuries in areas with a large quantity of nerves. They were concentrated on his hands and—Hermione swallowed—genitalia.

He was conscious but ignoring Hermione, which was normal.

Hermione's job was to heal him before Kingsley interrogated him. It wasn't a courtesy so much as an added screw to twist in while the prisoner fretted over what was to come.

Occasionally the dread was enough that they snapped while she was working and started offering their information to Hermione.

The first time Hermione had been brought in and discovered that the Order was tacitly permitting torture, she had been enraged. There was a difference, a profound difference, between using Dark Arts in self-defense and torturing someone. Agreeing to heal those prisoners meant she was enabling it.

Kingsley was unmoved by her conscience. There was no one else with clearance within the Order who had the skills to do it. If Hermione wouldn't heal them, the prisoners would be left in whatever condition they were in when he dosed them with Draught of Living Death, leaving them maimed in suspended animation.

She had tried repeatedly to dissuade Kingsley from giving his recruits such free rein. She offered to brew more veritaserum. He had stared at her and replied that the reconnaissance members didn't want veritaserum, they wanted revenge. By recruiting them, he was simply channeling it as efficiently as he could. The Order needed spies who were willing to do whatever it took; they couldn't send in people who might baulk or hold back at a crucial moment.

He reminded her that they needed the information, and that what happened to the Resistance members caught by Death Eaters was worse. As though Hermione needed to be reminded; she was the one who had healed what was left of those prisoners.

But she felt like a monster each time she was brought in to heal someone caught by the reconnaissance team, wondering whether she was enabling future victims by cooperating.

Even if they were Death Eaters, wanting them dead on a battlefield was different from letting them be tortured.

"I'm going to fix your hands first," she said softly to the man.

She knelt down beside him then lightly placed her hand under his right hand and lifted it into the light.

With a quick spell she aerosolised an analgesic potion and guided the mist around the fingers and thumb. There had been needles driven under the nail beds repeatedly.

When the skin had absorbed the potion, she lightly took the hand in hers and began performing the spells to repair the tissue damage.

She had worked across three fingers when he spoke.

"I know you," he said, raising his head.

She glanced up. He looked vaguely familiar. Solidly built. Dark haired with thick stubble. His arms and hands were hairy.

"You're Potter's Mudblood bitch," he said.

Hermione raised an eyebrow and continued onto the next finger.

"You certainly grew up," he said with a leer. "I would never have thought a frizzhead like you would have ended up looking like that."

Hermione ignored him.

"Granger, isn't it? I'll have to tell everyone I saw you. We thought you were dead."

He leaned forward until his face was unnervingly close to Hermione's.

"I'm going to tell you a secret, Mudblood," he muttered. "You're going to lose this war. And when you do, I'm going to kill the blonde bitch out there so slowly she'll beg me for it."

Hermione continued to ignore him as she closed the razor fine lacerations that had been cut into his palms.

She finished with his first hand and then started on the second. She dreaded the thought of finishing, but eventually there was no more work left to do on his hands, and she could avoid it no longer.

"I'll need you to sit back, if you want me to heal what has been done to your genitals," she forced herself to say steadily.

Her whole body felt cold. Her stomach twisted so painfully she wondered if she'd ever be able to digest food again.

He leaned back in the chair he was restrained in and opened his knees. His expression was taunting, as though he was the one in power.

She wanted to stun him.

She was supposed to leave them conscious when she healed them. It was part of the psychology that Kingsley employed.

She flicked her wand to perform an unbuttoning charm then reached out and opened his trousers.

Gabrielle had used some type of fine blade to carve words into the shaft of his penis. Hermione couldn't read the French through the ragged incisions and blood. She had a brief moment of gratitude that they weren't runes.

Then she got to work.

She was determined to try not to touch him which made the wand work more elaborate. She banished the blood and cast a mild cleansing charm.

The young man moaned in pain for the first time. Then she siphoned out essence of murtlap from a vial and applied it magically. It was less precise and gentle but Hermione refused to let herself care.

Hermione murmured the necessary healing charms and cast a second diagnostic. He had a lot of alcohol in his system. It was probably part of how Gabrielle had gotten close. Hermione pulled out a sobriety potion and poured it down his throat. He recognised the potion because he didn't struggle the way she expected him to.

Then she stepped back and appraised him.

He stared up at her as she reached into her bag and pulled out a hangover relief potion and offered it to him.

After he swallowed it, he sneered at her.

"Patching me up for round two?" he guessed. "And here I thought you were all bleeding hearts with a no-kill policy."

Hermione gave him a thin smile she had learned from Malfoy.

"We're not going to kill you."

Then she turned on her heel and walked out. As the door shut behind her, she stood for a moment collecting herself.

She felt like a fucking bitch.

She had lied to Malfoy the first time she'd been drunk; she had no shreds of decency left. The war had ripped them all away.

The only thing she had left was her determination to save Ron and Harry. To win the war.

She would climb over tortured bodies, sell herself, and tear out Draco Malfoy's heart if it was required to achieve it.

When her friends were safe, she would stand quietly beside Kingsley and Moody, and swallow her damnation without a murmur.