August 2002

Hermione sat on a rock on the beach while she waited for Kingsley to call her back to administer the Draught of Living Death. As she sat, she kept replaying the previous night over and over, looking for anything she might have missed.

She had concluded upon further review of the night that Draco was attracted to her at some level. Afterall, he had called her lovely, compared her to a rose in a graveyard, and claimed he was blindsided. She snorted faintly and wondered if he would ever have admitted such a thing if he hadn't been on his third bottle of firewhisky.

He lacked intimacy in his life. Whether or not she met his general standards for physical appeal, he was emotionally vulnerable to her.

She had also determined that it was probably for the best that they hadn't had sex.

His current interest was like a kindling flame; too much fuel and she'd smother it. Now that it seemed undeniable that she had his attention, she'd have to move cautiously. The key would lie in carefully cultivating it into something uncontrollable for him; something he couldn't stop himself from wanting more than anything else.

It would take time.

Draco was patient. He was willing to lie and manipulate and murder and climb as far as necessary to get what he wanted. The revenge—atonement, or whatever his alliance with the Order was based on—was something he was willing to wait to get; he'd suffer and sacrifice for as long as it took.

To try to direct his ambition and insidiously obsessive nature toward herself was a terrifying risk. As Severus has said, she was as likely to destroy the Order as save it.

She could feel herself panicking at the thought. Her chest tightened, and it felt as though the ocean wind was stealing her breath. She dropped her head between her knees and forced herself to inhale slowly.

She could do it. She could do it because she had to do it. Because there was no other way to win the war.

The very notion of being able to control him had felt delusional and theoretical up until then.

The idea that she could buy the war with her—emotional intimacy had seemed fundamentally absurd until she felt herself dipped into the deep undercurrent of Malfoy's unrestrained attention.

He was so controlled, even when drunk. Even when he had kissed her. He hadn't rushed or been over-eager. His passion hadn't been explosive. It was a smoldering fire; the kind that grew secretly, like a ground fire deep in the earth, spreading and waiting before rising up, destroying the world above. She suspected he burned for things more deeply than even he was aware of.

She laid out her campaign carefully in her mind.

He would be more careful the next time he saw her. He would probably try to force her away and recreate the distance. Perhaps that would play to Hermione's advantage.

After all, there was no greater temptation than the forbidden fruit. The more he was thinking about her; about being careful around her, about how he shouldn't have her, the more she'd consume him. The more he'd want her.

The fact that she wanted him back...

Hermione swallowed and nibbled nervously on her thumbnail.

She would use that too. If the tension was real on both sides, it would make it harder for him to resist. She didn't know how to fake it anyway. She was too inexperienced. The sense of longing she felt would be included in her repertoire.

She smiled bitterly to herself.

She'd prostitute her soul to win the war. Using her feelings as currency should be even easier.

Should be...

Somehow rationalising things didn't always stop them from hurting.

The sharp sound of crunching rocks caught her attention. She turned and found Bill approaching.

"Kingsley sent me to find you; he's finished," Bill said.

Hermione stared up at him. The war had aged the oldest Weasley boy. The jaunty, cool Curse Breaker had been ground down into a hard and pensive looking man.

Bill had been the one on a mission with Arthur when Arthur had been cursed. The guilt had smothered something in him. He was cold and reliable and mechanical in his work, and his work was all he did. Hermione consulted with him sometimes over curse research. There was never any small-talk; no jokes, or off-handed remarks. Even Severus was more conversant.

Hermione stood and followed him. As they walked down the beach, Bill abruptly stopped and looked at her.

Hermione waited.

"Gabrielle—," Bill started and then hesitated. "Fleur's worried."

Hermione didn't say anything. She had no idea what she could say about the girl.

"What exactly is she doing?" Bill asked.

"She intercepts messengers that Tom sends to other parts of Europe," Hermione said carefully.

"I know that. But how?"

"She hasn't told me," Hermione said. "You'd have to ask her or Kingsley."

"I think she's fucking them," Bill said abruptly. His entire face seemed carved from stone. "I think she fucks them and then when they're asleep she ties them up and tortures them."

Hermione pressed her lips together and didn't say anything.

"I don't know," Hermione finally said after a long pause. "I only heal the targets brought in. I'm not informed about methods."

Bill clenched his jaw visibly. "A lot of healing?"

Hermione shifted and brushed at her nose.

"Nothing permanent," she said quietly.

He stood silent for a moment before turning to continue on. Hermione followed him back to the staircase on the beach.

The prisoner was still under the heavy influence of veritaserum when she entered the room. He was slumped down in the chair with his head lolling to the side.

Hermione walked over and cast a diagnostic charm on him.

"We're going to win—going to win. You're gonna die. All of you are gonna die..." he was mumbling under his breath.

Hermione examined the diagnostic and found that Kingsley had administered some kind of hallucinogenic along with the truth potion. She looked over sharply at the desk where Kingsley was writing down notes.

"The chemical reaction of those potions can cause permanent mania and obsessive behavior," she said in rebuke. "You should have consulted with me."

Kingsley glanced up at her.

"I consulted with our other Potion master," he said calmly. "Interrogation is not your specialty. This one knew occlumency. He required additional measures."

Hermione bit her tongue and turned back to the prisoner. His brain showed signs of extreme inflammation. She cursed under her breath and rummaged through her bag for something that might neutralise the effects. It was an unusual reaction; without her full potion supply closet she had limited options for counteracting it.

A tincture of distilled billywig sting slime combined with a drop of syrup of hellebore would have a cooling effect on the brain, she concluded. She amalgamated them quickly in a vial and then tilted the prisoner's head back to administer it.

His eyes were rolled back in his head, and when she touched the vial the to his lips, he squeezed his eyes and mouth closed.

"Come on now," Hermione said gently. "This will help your head."

He cracked an eye open to peer at her for a moment before opening both. She watched as his pupils suddenly dilated, and his gaze fastened on her intently.

"I remember you," he said, "you're Potter's bitch."

"You need to take this or you're going to risk brain damage," Hermione said, unfazed.

He parted his lips and downed the tincture and then hissed and shook his head slightly. Hermione recast a diagnostic and watched the inflammation rapidly fade away.

She looked back at his face and saw that his pupils had contracted into tiny dots in the center of his irises. His gaze was still fastened on Hermione in a way that grew quickly unnerving.

"How do you feel?" she asked.

"Cold...my brain feels cold. My brain is cold, but the sight of you is warming the rest of me right up," he said in a vaguely singsong tone.

He suddenly lunged forward, and his teeth snapped closed on air as Hermione stepped quickly back. He laughed.

"What do you think you are, a werewolf?" she said sharply. The question was rhetorical; diagnostic readings would indicate lycanthropy.

He snickered. His expression was still dazed with veritaserum, but his eyes remained fastened on Hermione.

"I'm not a werewolf. But I'm going to remember you," he said. "When you lose this war, I'm going to remember you. I'm going to kill that blonde bitch, but I think I'll ask the Dark Lord if I can have you. He might want to keep you alive. I'll keep you alive."

His eyes crawled over Hermione, and she shivered. She was coming to regret healing the brain inflammation. Something about the rapid way she'd counteracted the hallucinogenic appeared to have locked the obsessive tendency she'd worried about directly upon herself.

"That's enough, Montague!" Kingsley said sharply, standing up and walking over.

Hermione glanced over, finally recognizing the prisoner. He'd been a few years above her at Hogwarts. Graham Montague.

"We have everything we needed from him," Kingsley said, gathering up several rolls of parchment. "You can put him under."

Hermione nodded and stunned Montague. His eyes were still fastened on her face as he slumped back.

As she finished prepping him for stasis, she consoled herself that even if the Order lost the war, it was unlikely that the cave would be discovered. She would never see him again.

When the Draught of Living Death was administered, Hermione handed Montague over to Bill and then headed back to Grimmauld Place.

Draco had left no scroll of information when Hermione returned to the shack that evening. She stood there for several minutes, wondering if he'd show up to have her check the scar tissue.

After ten minutes of waiting, she left.

She wasn't sure what it meant. It was possible there hadn't been any new intelligence, but she couldn't ease her fear that it was retribution for the morning. She tried not to let it stress her and reassured herself that if he'd had anything urgent, he would have mentioned it sooner.

No longer needing to heal Draco each evening made her progress feel stalled. She found herself thinking about him often. Not strategically. She wondered about how he was, whether the scars were irritating him.

She kept reevaluating and re-analysing their snog session and its aftermath until she felt as though she were a bit mad.

The inconclusiveness of it grated on her mind. She found it difficult to focus or sleep that week.

She had given up on using her room for sleeping. Harry and Ginny regularly occupied it for the entire night. Harry slept when he was with Ginny. He could actually sleep peacefully. The effect was dramatic. His mood stabilised in a way that it hadn't in years, and Hermione rarely encountered him in the sitting room at night. The stress that had been erroding him for years seemed to ease for the first time since Dumbledore's death.

Hermione took to sleeping in whatever empty bed she could find or in the training rooms. She kept exercising and building her stamina up dutifully.

The next Tuesday she was so stressed she took a Calming Draught before she apparated to the shack. She had no idea what Draco might do.

When she arrived in the shack, she bounced on the balls of her feet while she stood waiting. Then she realized there was a scroll laying on the table.

She stared at it for a moment before picking it up and unfurling it. Raids for the upcoming week. Counter-curses.

Nothing directed to Hermione.

—not that she'd expected him to leave her a personal note.

She sighed faintly and left.

She didn't see him for the entire month of August.

She fretted about it. The intentional silence between them gnawed at her. She kept reviewing what had happened, questioning her conclusions and drawing new ones. Maybe she'd ruined everything. Or maybe he was avoiding her because he was afraid of how she tempted him.

She kept vacillating. Was it a good sign or a bad sign?

The worst part was that she missed him. She hated to admit as much to herself, but she felt forced to acknowledge it. Treating his injury had become a significant aspect of her daily life. Interacting with him had become a significant aspect of her life. Having it so abruptly ended made her feel the absence keenly. She didn't have many people that she saw regularly.

She kept replaying all their past interactions. She kept reevaluating him and all his behavior. She was obsessing but she didn't know what else to do. She needed him for the Order.

She had to obsess over him. It was her job.

She didn't need to miss him though, she told herself firmly. That was a personal failing.

September rolled around and he continued to simply leave scrolls without appearing.

Hermione began to feel fractured.

She didn't know what she was supposed to do.

It was smart of him, of course. If she were in his shoes, it would probably be what she'd do. But it didn't solve the problem of what Hermione was supposed to do about it.

She kept foraging and visiting the shack with increasingly dwindling hope.

As Malfoy had warned her, larger and larger swaths of England's countryside had anti-apparition wards dropped over them. For weeks Hermione tried to avoid the areas and forage elsewhere, but eventually the wards swallowed up all the areas she needed to forage in. She tried to find new spots, but she couldn't obtain sufficient quantities of certain crucial ingredients.

When her dittany supply ran out, she gave up and ventured into a warded forest. She cast all the detection spells she knew and stayed alert.

She was harvesting her third, large bed of dittany when the forest grew unnaturally quiet. She immediately stashed her supply and turned sharply, casting new detection spells in every direction. Nothing.

She trusted her instincts. She was a good hundred feet from the edge of the anti-apparition zone. She headed for it calmly, trying not to to betray her concern. She held her silver knife in one hand and her wand in the other as she picked her way carefully through the bracken.

They waited until she was close enough to the edge of the ward to feel hopeful.

Razor sharp teeth suddenly sank into the back of her right leg. She screamed slightly and whirled to find that a gytrash had emerged from the darkness and slashed her calf open.

"Lumos!" she snapped. The ghostly dog promptly released her leg and melted back into the darkness of the forest. Hermione didn't pause to check the injury. She raised her wand and looked for more creatures. Gytrash tended to run in packs.

They also weren't typically aggressive toward adult humans.

As she was turning around warily, something abruptly dropped on her from a tree overhead. She barely had time to look up and see the pale skin and elongated fangs of a vampire before it knocked her flat. The vampire closed its hand around the wrist of her wand hand and pinned her to the ground as it sank its fangs into her shoulder.

Hermione didn't even think. She lashed out and buried the blade of her silver harvesting knife into the vampire's temple, wrenching herself free. She flung herself to her feet and bolted past the anti-apparition wards.

She reappeared and nearly collapsed in the middle of the creek in Whitecroft.

It was not an ideal place to reappear. She glanced around dazedly and wondered why on earth it had been the first place she'd thought of. She was bleeding profusely. Vampire fangs injected anticoagulant venom into the blood at first contact, and Hermione had torn her shoulder badly as she had ripped herself free. Her entire shoulder grew drenched with blood as she stood, trying to regain her bearings.

She looked down at her leg. She was bleeding badly there too.

She didn't have the energy to apparate again.

A car drove by and Hermione ducked awkwardly under the bridge until it passed. She had the supplies she needed to heal herself, but she didn't particularly fancy doing it in the dark under a bridge.

She checked the time. It was more than an hour earlier than she was supposed to show up to pick up Draco's missives. She sighed. Knowing him he'd probably left it the night before anyway.

She cast a disillusioning charm on herself then pressed down hard against her shoulder to slow the bleeding as she limped to the shack.

As she had guessed, the scroll was already on the table when she opened the door. She rolled her eyes and stuffed it into her satchel with her less blood-stained hand.

Hermione sat heavily in a chair and cast a diagnostic. She had bled a lot. She would start getting light-headed if she didn't staunch it quickly. She pulled a bandage out of her emergency kit and used a spell to wrap it firmly around her calf. She'd heal the Gytrash bite after she fixed her shoulder.

She arched her neck and tried to see the gashes. The movement twisted the injury; she hissed and conjured a mirror. The vampire had bitten down on the juncture of her neck and shoulder. When she'd torn herself free, the fangs had sliced long, deep lacerations over to her collarbone, barely missing her jugular vein and carotid artery.

Hermione cut off her shirt and cast a cleansing charm. Using the mirror and awkwardly working in reverse, she crushed and pummeled fresh dittany leaves in her fingers and then stuffed them into the gashes. Dittany wasn't very effective fresh, especially whole, but she didn't have a pestle on hand. She chewed on several leaves as she worked.

Holding her bunched up shirt firmly against the gashes with one hand, she set to work mixing together an infusion that could function as a coagulant. She couldn't brew a potion, but she had yarrow and murtlap essence. She combined them with a few practiced flicks of her wand and swallowed it quickly. After a minute, the bleeding in her shoulder began to ease.

She was covered in blood, and there was a decent sized puddle of it accumulated on the floor beneath her. She ignored it. She'd clean up the shack when she was done.

She used the mirror to start plucking the dittany leaves out of the gashes, then she recast a cleansing charm on the area and reappraised the injury. The upside of vampire bites was that they healed easily without causing any scarring.

She started near her clavicles where the laceration was the shallowest and began muttering the spell to knit the skin back together.

She'd made it halfway across her shoulder when Draco abruptly apparated into the room.

He appeared to blanch slightly when he saw her, and Hermione blushed and immediately wished she hadn't cut her shirt off. Then she snorted, because she was covered in blood; unless Draco had a weird fetish he probably wasn't paying any attention to what clothes she was or wasn't wearing.

"What happened?" he said after staring at her for several seconds.

"I was foraging," Hermione said blandly, refocusing on her reflection in the mirror and resuming her healing. "Sorry. I'll clean up the floor before I go."

"Are you alright?" he asked.

Hermione laughed. She had gotten a lot closer to dying than she had in a long time and she was slightly faint with blood-loss and having such a question directed at her while she was dripping blood on the floor of his dilapidated building was just strangely hilarious to her.

"Well, no," she said. "But it's nothing I can't fix."

Draco grew visibly angry.

"I told you to be careful," he finally said.

"I have been," Hermione said, her amusement suddenly disappearing. He was the one who'd said he'd teach her to defend herself and then refused to even lay eyes on her once she finished healing him. "But as you are aware there are anti-apparition wards all over England. I ran out of dittany. It's a critical supply for us. I cast detection charms and I tried to leave as soon as I sensed anything. But as you yourself noted, it was the benevolence of Fate that I'm alive at this point." Her voice grew bitter, "My luck was due to run out."

"Why not just buy it like a normal person?" he asked as though she were thick.

"Because," Hermione said, her voice tight with a shrill and slightly mocking edge of it, "I'm a known terrorist. Perhaps you've forgotten. And—" she hiccupped "—I don't—have any money left."

He fell silent and just stood staring at her for a minute.

"What happened?" he asked again.

"I was foraging in Hampshire. The forest went quiet so I cast detection spells but nothing showed up. I decided to leave anyway though. I was almost out when I got bitten by a Gytrash, then when I was driving it off a vampire attacked me. I killed it and apparated. I don't know why I came to Whitecroft. I didn't mean to. But I lost too much blood to apparate again and I don't—I used up all my Essence of Dittany. And without Dittany leaves I can't make blood replenishing potion either. So I had to come here to fix it manually."

Hermione's voice was shaking as she finished speaking, and she was on the verge of tears. As she had related what had happened, it abruptly stopped being funny and started being traumatic and horrible and too close.

She started hyperventilating as she thought about how close she'd come to dying all alone in a forest. No one would have even known where to look for her, and by the time they'd thought to, she would have been long dead.

She clamped her mouth shut and hiccuped several times as she tried to breathe evenly.

"I think I'm going into shock," she said.

Her voice sounded oddly small and childlike. She swallowed hard.

She wanted to cry, but she refused to allow herself to. She'd already cried in front of Malfoy several times. She didn't want him to think she was someone who just cried over everything.

She was so angry he was there. That of all the times he'd decided to show up, it had to be then. She wished she'd apparated anywhere else.

"I'm not dying. The Order is not in crisis. So you can just go. I'll clean up before I leave, you won't even know I was here," she said.

It was not the strategic thing to say, but she didn't want to look at him. He'd kissed her and then called her a bitch. He'd let her spend weeks healing him and only thanked her when he was drunk and then told her he intended to go to a different healer the minute he was sober again.

He'd cut her off.

He'd made her miss him like an idiot while he'd probably gone and fucked as many high-breasted, curvaceous prostitutes as his heart desired.

She hated him. And she didn't want him to see her when she was covered in blood and hysterical and traumatised.

Why couldn't he ever leave her alone when she wanted him to?

After a minute she turned back to healing her shoulder in the mirror again. He kept standing and staring at her.

In a few minutes the gashes were closed and only faint cicatrices remained. They would fade once she had some dittany tincture to apply.

She summoned over the other chair and lifted her foot up and started unwrapping her leg. Then she cut off her jeans at the knee and dropped them alongside the remains of her shirt in the puddle of blood.

She surveyed the Gytrash bite. It was difficult to see all the punctures on the back of her calf. She shifted her hips to get a better view. Two long gashes and several punctures. She cast a cleansing charm over the area to clear the blood away. None of them were very deep. She didn't think any of it was likely to scar.

She had it all repaired in short order.

The room seemed to be rotating slowly. She sat back and closed her eyes for a minute. Then she reopened them and cast a new diagnostic charm on herself. She'd lost a little over a pint of blood, which should have been in an acceptable range of loss, but she was sufficiently underweight that it was over 15% of her blood volume.

She blinked at the diagnostic for several moments and conjured a glass of water. Her lips were tingling faintly.

She rummaged through her bag trying to see if she had any food and found a muesli bar that she had no recollection of. She gulped down the water and set to eating, stubbornly ignoring Draco's continued presence. He was still just standing and staring at her.

When she finished her third glass of water and every crumb of muesli, she glanced up at him in irritation.

"I'm going to be here for a while before I'll be able to apparate," she said as she glared at him.

"Why can't you apparate?" he asked.

She stared at him for a moment and then gestured at the floor.

"Blood loss. I had to walk here from the bridge. There's probably a trail, actually. As I mentioned, I was out of dittany, so I have no blood replenishing potion on hand in my emergency kit. I'll have to wait until I feel stable enough to apparate. If I stand up now, l'll probably just faint."

Draco appeared to be growing pale with rage. His jaw kept clenching and releasing the way Ron's did when he was on the verge of exploding. He kept staring at her as though he resented her mere existence.

He'd clearly managed to get entirely over whatever passing interest he'd had in her. She'd been pining, and he'd apparently spent the last six weeks remembering that he hated her, that he'd always hated her, and that her Mudblood existence in the world was an offense to him.

He was a far better occlumens than she was.

She'd have to admit to Moody that she'd misstepped and blown her assignment.

Her lip trembled, and she looked away and started cleaning the blood off the floor with practiced ease. The staining wouldn't come out of her shirt so she banished it rather than trying to repair it.

She glanced up and discovered that Malfoy had apparated away without a sound. Her mouth twisted. She hadn't known he could apparate silently.

She found herself simultaneously relieved and devastated that he'd actually left. She shook her head sharply and only let herself sob once, very softly, before she turned back to cleaning the floor.

While she was rummaging through her satchel for something to transfigure into a shirt, he abruptly reappeared.

"Blood replenishing potion," he said in a cold voice as he handed a vial to her.

She stared down at it. She recognized Severus' spiky handwriting in the label. She unstoppered it and swallowed the contents.

The room immediately stopped moving, and her lips stopped tingling.

"Thank you," she said. She transfigured a piece of cloth into a white t-shirt and, after scourgifying her shoulder, arm, and torso, pulled it over her head. Then she gathered all her supplies back into her kit and stood to leave.

"See?" she said, gesturing at the floor. "I was never here."

He didn't say a word as she walked out the door.