High Reeve Killed in Fiendfyre Accident

Draco Malfoy killed by father in shocking murder-suicide case at Malfoy Manor.

Draco Malfoy, a prominent figure in the Dark Lord's government, and his father, a widower, are suspected to have died in a house fire.

Aurors are still investigating the case. The official statement from the Department of Magical Law enforcement is that the cause of the fire remains unknown, but officials speaking off-record have confirmed the fire possesses all signs of having been fiendfyre that was intentionally set and sustained.

Photos of the Malfoy Manor ruins are almost identical to the ruins of the Lestrange Manor fire from several years before. "Everyone knew Lucius was obsessed with that fire," an unnamed source says, "he obtained all the records and files and revisited the Lestrange ruins dozens of times. It's almost undeniable that the fire was a recreation. It's so tragic: he never got over Narcissa's death."

Close family friends say that Lucius abandoned most of his obligations following his wife's death, handing over the title and estate to Draco, who was twenty years old at the time. Lucius has rarely returned to Britain in the years following, but during his most recent visit his behavior had been notably erratic. Aurors speaking off-record confirm that Lucius is now suspected in several cases of missing persons, including Astoria Malfoy, who vanished less than twenty-four hours after returning from a summer holiday in France.

There were persistent rumours of tension between father and son. Although outwardly cordial, they were rarely seen together, and Lucius did not return from his post abroad for Draco's wedding in 2003.

The title and responsibilities of High Reeve are expected to be transferred to another Death Eater within the week. There are several Generals under consideration. However, at the time of printing, there is no official statement from the Dark Lord regarding a successor or about the deaths of Draco and Lucius.

The loss of a family line as old and distinguished as the Malfoy Family is a devastating blow to the wizarding world. Draco was the last of both the Malfoy and Black families. A healer from the Repopulation Program has confirmed that the surrogate to Draco Malfoy also died in the fire. She was four months pregnant with a Malfoy heir.

After two weeks of sleeping, Draco and Hermione finally emerged. Draco immediately went to check all the wards on the island. After he came back, he gave Hermione a full tour of the house. She gripped his hand when they went into the gardens.

They walked around a corner and found Ginny watching James attempt to scale a pagoda. She gave a tight smile when she saw them.

"Good, you're up. I wasn't sure when you'd stop hibernating." She eyed Draco. "There's someone who's been waiting to see you. Topsy!"

There was an immediate pop as Topsy materialised. She stood staring up at Draco for a moment, her hands clasped together and her enormous eyes shining. Then she stepped forward and kicked Draco.

"Topsy is so angry at you!" she said as her toes collided with his shin. "Topsy is never been so angry in all her life."

She wrapped her arms around Draco's leg and started sobbing. "You sent Topsy away without goodbye. Topsy thought you would be dead!"

She buried her face in his clothes and howled with tears for several minutes until Draco awkwardly reached down and patted her head.

Ginny gave him a pointed look. "When she arrived and found out you were both here, she refused to believe it until she went to see for herself, and then she cried for the rest of the day. I can't believe you sent her here like that."

When Topsy finally let go of Draco, she went over to gather James into her arms and carried him away, still sobbing.

Hermione, Draco, and Ginny stood staring at each other in an uncomfortable silence.

Ginny tugged at the tips of her hair, and then her head gave a little jerk as she squared her shoulders. "I think we should plan to have dinner all together most days. It doesn't have to be every day of the week, but I think it should be most. The rest of the time, we can all have— our privacy, but we should have dinner together."

She studied Hermione and Draco's reactions. Draco said nothing.

"Dinner would be nice," Hermione said. "That's a good idea."

Ginny's expression flooded with relief. "Good." She nodded. "Great. Um. I'll tell the elves and see you both at dinner then."

Ginny turned and hurried inside.

Hermione watched her walk away and realised belatedly that Ginny would probably stop and come back if she called to her. She opened her mouth, but Ginny had already disappeared through the door.

Hermione and Draco stood in the garden for several minutes in silence. She didn't know what they were supposed to do.

It felt surreal. They'd been cut out of one reality, dropped into another one, and just left to find their way.

It didn't feel like a dream. It was real. She could smell the salt in the air, hear the leaves shift in the breeze and the water trickling. She could smell camphor and pine needles. Draco's hand was warm and entwined with hers.

And yet there was an edge of paranoia that she couldn't shake. There had to be something lurking, something waiting, something that was going to go wrong. Inevitable ruin was dangling over her head like the sword of Damocles.

The island felt as though it were built upon a razor thin sheet of ice. If Hermione stepped wrong or forgot to the careful for a moment, it would crack, and she'd plunge back into the black, cold, world she'd just escaped from, dragging Draco and everyone else with her.

Every step. Every breath.

Careful. Be so careful.

You always lose the things you love. Always.

Her jaw started trembling. She wanted to go back inside; it felt safer to be inside. Where was her wand?

"I never made any plans for this," Draco said. "Being here."

Hermione looked up at him, startled from her reverie. He was staring out towards the sea as though he was having difficulty believing it was there.

He found it all as difficult to believe in as she did. The world was never kind to them.

However, when he looked down at her, she realised there'd been a tension in him that was absent for the first time that she could recall. He was still on edge; he was still carrying two wands and several knives and a dark artifact, but there was the absence of a certain bracedness that Hermione had grown accustomed to. He no longer held himself as though he constantly expected to be struck on some quarter.

It was the expression he used to wear when they met in Whitecroft; when she could tell as he apparated into the room that he'd mentally prepared himself that she could be injured. Since she'd arrived at the manor, she realised, he'd always looked that way. Now, for the first time, it had faded.

Thin ice was at least something to stand on.

"What do you want me to do now?" he asked.

She blinked. "Whatever you want. You get to do whatever you want now."

He looked around them. "I don't think I remember how to do that."

Hermione gave a wan smile. "I don't either." She looked around and held his hand more tightly. "We'll find out what it's like together. We don't have to hurry. We have the rest of our lives to figure it out."

Once she wasn't worried about waking Draco, Hermione set to work in her lab. It took her a week to build a basic prosthetic for him. The amputation had healed perfectly, but his blood stayed permanently thin unless he was regularly taking a potion for it.

He sat on the edge of her lab table while she carefully fitted the base of the prosthetic onto his forearm.

"This first prosthetic isn't much," she said as she muttered the spells. "It will only connect with major nerves, so you'll only have a vague sense of the movement and touch. You won't be able to do anything that requires fine motor control, but it will help maintain the neural structures while I make something better. If you wait too long, it's hard to recover full range of movement with a prosthetic since you can't feel it as clearly."

She slid the metal arm onto the base. There was a quiet click as the two pieces fit together. She tapped her wand along the metal fingers, and there was a whirring sound as they twitched. She spent several minutes checking that everything was connected and studying diagnostics to verify she'd fitted everything perfectly. Draco tended to claim that everything was fine until he passed out.

She looked up at Draco with a nervous expression. "This is going to hurt a lot, but just for a split second and only this one time. Unless you break the base of the prosthetic I won't ever have to do this again. I'm connecting the nerves. If I don't do it when you can feel it, the connection doesn't integrate as well."

He clenched his jaw. "Just do it."

"Amalgamare."

Draco screamed through his teeth as the nerves in his arm were lashed together with the magical nerves in the prosthetic. A shudder ran down his entire body, including the prosthetic. The metal fingers spasmed with an audible clicking sound.

"Sorry. I'm sorry."

He shook his head sharply and lifted his arm to stare at it. "It's fine."

She rested her hand against the cool metal. "Can you feel my touch?"

Draco was silent for a minute. "I can tell there's contact, it's a vague sense of pressure, but without a sense of texture or temperature or how much I'm being touched."

Hermione ran her hand along the forearm up to the fingers. "That's about as much as you'll be able to feel with this." She looked at him seriously. "You'll have to be careful. Since you can't feel it, you won't always know how much pressure you're using. There will be a temptation to over-compensate for the lack of sensory feedback by doing things more roughly in order to feel it. I made the hand breakable so that if you exceed a certain threshold the internal mechanisms will be the thing to break and not—something else."

Draco's expression tensed, and he looked at her sharply.

She started to run her wand and fingers along the prosthetic, checking the spellwork. Draco tried to pull his arm away from her.

She closed her hand around the wrist to still it, and he pulled harder. She glanced up and met his worried gaze.

She lifted her wand away. "Draco, you're not going to hurt me. Look."

She tapped a panel on the inner-wrist and opened it, revealing the mechanisms inside. "See where the tendons connect here? The pieces connecting each one are made intentionally breakable. If you tried to use enough pressure to break a bone, this piece will snap. You could bruise a piece of fruit, but you won't be able to break a wand in half. If these break, the part of the hand they're connected to will go limp." She closed the panel again. "You won't hurt me. I just wanted to explain to you why it will probably get broken a lot at the beginning. It's a part of the design. It will take a while to figure out how to tell when you're using the right amount of force. I'll teach you how to fix it yourself too. It's all part of the process."

She spent several minutes casting spells and testing it before she stepped back. "Can you touch your thumb and index finger together?"

Draco stared at the hand for several seconds. His eyes narrowed when the hand stayed still. After a minute the thumb twitched.

He looked annoyed. "I can tell I'm connected to it, but I can't tell how to make it do anything."

"It's fine. It takes getting used to. You'll just have to practice. Close your eyes, and see if you can tell which finger I'm touching."

They had so much time.

They explored the island. Draco showed her the trails and old, mossy paths that wound through the forests. They went down to the rocky beach, and Hermione stood at the edge of the water and stared at the vast ocean stretching out as far as she could see.

It felt like they were the only people on earth. Hidden a world away from the war.

Hermione went foraging. Draco had bought books about the edible and magical vegetation in the area at some point. The island was somewhere off the coast of Japan. Draco, and sometimes Ginny and James, went with her while she wandered through the forests and fields gathering ingredients to create her own supply cabinet.

They slept. They went to bed early and slept late and sometimes didn't get out of bed until well past noon.

They would sit in the garden and Hermione would never know what to say. There was so much time she never felt sure when it was the right time to say any of it.

Sometimes she just wanted to exist pretending her life had only started a few days after they arrived on the island. She didn't want to reckon with the past. She was so tired of living her life on an eternal countdown.

There was so much time Hermione didn't know what to do with it all.

Eventually it began to feel unnatural and anxiety-inducing. A cold sensation of dread would unfurl in the pit of Hermione's stomach when she tried to relax for too long. It was the worst when Draco was away, which he was twice a day when he left to check the wards on the island.

She would visit Ginny and James for half an hour by herself, but when visits extended closer to an hour, she would begin growing tense with discomfort.

Empty hours felt like all the futile, poisonous days in Malfoy Manor.

She couldn't turn her mind off. James was so much like Harry, but when he wasn't, he was a baby, and Hermione's hands would nervously run over her stomach as she watched him interact with Ginny.

James talked constantly. He treated Ginny's mood like a touchstone that he mirrored back at her. Ginny mothered instinctively. She had an immediate sense of what James needed and seemed fluent in understanding the garbled words that rapidly, and sometimes tearfully, poured from his mouth.

Hermione was sitting on the veranda of the house watching while James was gliding around on a tiny broomstick that hovered a foot off the ground.

Ginny looked over at Hermione and noticed the strained look on her face. "Topsy, could you take James to the beach?"

Ginny sat down next to Hermione and, after a moment's hesitation, reached out and lightly touched Hermione's hand where Hermione had unconsciously wrapped her arms around her stomach.

Ginny didn't say anything, didn't ask any questions.

Hermione had noticed that Ginny very rarely asked questions when Draco wasn't present.

"I don't know how to be a mother, Ginny." Hermione said after several seconds.

The corner of Ginny's mouth turned up, and she gave a small laugh. "You've mothered practically every person you ever been friends with. Harry and Ron would have died in their first year if it hadn't been for you."

Hermione swallowed. "That's not the same. I don't even know how to interact with James. I can read him a book, but I don't know how to tell why he's upset or understand what he's saying. I can't tell that he's tired. I don't know how to read children. What if I can't figure it out?"

"Well, they don't start as two year olds. You get to know them. At the beginning they just want to sleep, eat, and be cuddled. If it's none of those things, it's probably a nappy change. You get to two years old one day at a time. Don't worry, I'm going to be here. And Topsy knows everything about babies. She could probably single-handedly raise an orphanage."

She leaned back on her hands. "When James was first born, I didn't want to let him out of my arms, but I didn't know anything about babies except what I'd read. I never knew any babies growing up either, you know. Nursing sounded easy when I read the chapter in the book, but when I tried, James was squirming and screaming. I couldn't figure out how to make him latch on and stay on, and I was so scared I'd break him if I held too tight. I started crying, and James kept screaming louder. Topsy had been there for a month, but I didn't trust any of Malfoy's elves. I was on the verge of hysterical before she managed to convince me to let her help get James nursing. You're not going to be alone."

Hermione looked at Ginny for a moment. "I'm sorry. I can't imagine what it must have been like to be here alone for so long."

Ginny just gave a tight laugh and looked away. "I think it was a lot better than anywhere you or anyone else was that whole time. I really don't have any room to complain."

"Still."

Ginny nodded, and her expression grew pained as she looked across the garden. "Sometimes—I think about all the time I spent hiding the pregnancy, and it feels like a pit in my chest that I'm going to fall into someday. Sometimes I wish I had just died with them. It feels so wrong that I'm alive when no one else is."

"Don't say that," Hermione said. Her voice was strained and sharp. "You shouldn't think that. Harry cared about you being alive and safe more than anything else."

Ginny looked down. "I know. I know—I'm not—it just feels that way sometimes, you know? That I'm only alive because I did something selfish and lied to everyone. Mum would have been so excited. She always said she'd be the world's best grandmum. She never even knew."

"If anyone had known about your pregnancy, Voldemort would have looked for you. Draco wouldn't have been able to pass someone else's body off as yours. You and James are alive because it was hidden."

Ginny still looked grief-stricken, but she slowly nodded.

"Harry said—" Hermione hesitated and felt a wave of guilt that she hadn't told Ginny sooner. "Before he made me promise to take care of you both—he asked me to tell you he'd be thinking about you to the very end."

Ginny was quiet for several seconds before her mouth curved into a tight, wistful smile. "I'm really glad you told him about James. I'm glad he knew that least."

Hermione reached out and gripped Ginny's hand. They sat in silence for several minutes, sharing the weight of all they'd lost.

Hermione buried herself into the lab when she couldn't handle all the excess time. If she were being productive, she felt able to breathe. It was nice to be creative without feeling like any amount of time she was spending there was countdown for someone's life.

There were countless things she could do. Draco had brought enough books and supplies to keep her occupied for years.

Draco, however, floated.

He checked the wards obsessively. He read. He practiced using his prosthetic hand. It took him two weeks to stop breaking the internal mechanisms, but in the process he figured out how to do considerably more with it than Hermione had expected. Then he'd sit in the lab and watch Hermione work for hours on end.

He didn't have anything to do with Ginny or James unless Hermione prodded him to.

Hermione left him alone about it. If he didn't want to do anything else for the rest of his life, he was entitled to do so. She liked having him nearby. If she couldn't see him, it would sit like a knot in the back of her mind, and she couldn't focus for as long before she had to go find him and reassure herself that he was alright.

When he was there, she could relax and focus.

She'd look up from a potion or from working on his new prosthetic and find him just staring at her with an unveiled expression of possessiveness that shivered down her spine and felt like fire in her veins.

She realised he'd muted the tendency at the manor. It had been buried under everything else. Smothered by his conviction that she'd never forgive him, that he'd die.

But as weeks shifted into months, his possessiveness reasserted itself. It was addictive, getting to relish something she'd never had more than snatches of.

She'd put down whatever she was doing and just drown in him. Kissing him, pulling his clothes off, and holding him in her arms, feeling him alive. They were both alive. They'd survived, and they had each other. He'd slide his hand along her throat, kissing down her sternum, and she'd hear him murmuring "mine" against her skin.

"I'm yours, Draco. I'm always going to be yours," she'd tell him, the way she'd always used to tell him.

But there were ripples at the edges of her consciousness. Sometimes, when she looked away from Draco, Hermione would find Ginny's strained expression as she watched them.

Hermione refused to let herself notice it.

The only external thing Draco took an interest in was keeping track of the news regarding Europe. The elves brought an entire stack of newspapers every week: European, Asian, North and South American, Oceanian. Any Wizarding newspaper that was translated into English, the elves were instructed to purchase and bring back. Read collectively, it was possible to get a vaguely accurate account of current events.

It was the extent of Draco's interests.

Hermione sat squarely in the centre of his universe and, now that she was safe, his unrestrained attention had nothing else to obsess over. Everything but Hermione was superfluous.

She thought it would be a phase. She'd thought that once they had more time that he'd let his focus broaden, but gradually she began to suspect that might not be the case. He had no inclination or intention of taking an interest in anything else. Ginny, James, alchemy; it was all just to indulge her.

Even their baby, in certain respects. He took an interest in the pregnancy because it was Hermione's, because she cared; but when he wasn't reminding her that "their daughter" needed Hermione to breathe or that Hermione had to keep herself safe for "their daughter", his concern seemed muted. Perhaps it simply paled in contrast to the blistering intensity that Hermione received.

It was exacerbated by his worry about her brain injury. She would regularly wake to find a diagnostic hanging over her head, Draco staring at it with a tense expression.

She'd push his wand away. "Don't. There's nothing we can do."

The damage was like creeping fissures in her memory; the red mixed with the golden lights still scattered across Hermione's mind. Over the course of the first month, the golden light began to seemingly crystalise around the red fissures in a way that was reminiscent of the way Hermione's own magic had buried her memories. Neither Draco or Hermione were certain about why it was happening or what it meant.

By September, Hermione found she couldn't access the memories even when she tried to. Rather than being something precarious she felt she shouldn't go near, she found herself completely locked out of them, as though she'd been once again blocked from accessing corners of her own mind.

She remembered that Draco's mother had been tortured and that he had become a Death Eater to protect her, but she couldn't recall how she'd ever learned it. The general knowledge was so deeply integrated into her perception of Draco that she remembered it even without having the memories.

She wasn't sure she would even be fully aware that the memories were missing except that she couldn't remember Draco's mother's name. It was bewilderingly arbitrary. She knew about his mother, but she consistently drew a complete blank about what her name had been in a way that made her jarringly aware of her memory loss.

Hermione knew that she had known it. She would find it scribbled on pieces of parchment and slipped into books she was reading and in her dresser drawers. 'Draco's mother was named Narcissa,' in Hermione's handwriting. But once she stopped actively thinking about it, the detail slipped away again. Wherever it was that her mind kept that knowledge, she was incapable of accessing it. A conversation with Ginny or a few hours in her lab and it was gone until she'd stumble across another piece of parchment reminding her "Draco's mother was named Narcissa."

S

For several weeks she kept a diary that she reviewed and filled with more information every hour. She found that once the information was no longer actively at the forefront of her mind, it disappeared into parts of her mind that she couldn't reach. The rest of her memories from the war were returning with increasing clarity, but anything related to Draco's mother remained vague.

She knew Draco knew that she never remembered his mother's name. Whenever he told her anything about his childhood he always specified "My mother, Narcissa," in a way that was obviously habitual.

The memory loss seemed contained and restricted to information about his mother. Everything else was precariously intact.

She and Draco put together a book including details of all the things she didn't remember so she could review them. It was almost pointless because it was only a matter of hours before she didn't remember any of it all over again. She could remember that she was going to forget things, but she didn't know what they were. However it reassured her to know that she could find the information when she needed to.

She tried not to think about it for the most part. There were plenty of things she could do that didn't require her to recall those particular details. She had Draco. He was alive, and he wouldn't be if she still had all her memories.

She would have given up far more than a few memories to buy his life.

That fact did not console Draco.

They were lying in bed, and she was trying to find a spot where he could feel the baby kick.

She pressed his hand against the top of her stomach, and there was a sudden flutter against his fingers.

She met his eyes, her eyes crinkling at the corners. "Did you feel that?"

He nodded. She guided his hand up near her ribs. "Her head is here right now, and her feet are down in my pelvis, kicking me in the bladder all night."

The corner of his mouth twitched, but then his thumb grazed along the narrow scar running between her ribs, his attention shifting away from the baby.

She wrapped her fingers around his hand.

"Draco—" her voice was nervous, and her throat tightened as she spoke.

He looked up at her instantly. His silver eyes were intent, filled with the same possessive, desperate adoration she'd seen in face of Lucius. She swallowed. "Draco, you have to care about her."

He stared at her blankly.

Her heart caught in her chest. "You—you can't be the way your father was."

His expression closed in an instant, and she gripped his hand more tightly. "You have to care," she said fiercely. "The way you are, you have to decide to care because if you don't, you won't, and she'll know."

Draco's eyes flickered with something unreadable.

She sat up and kept staring into his eyes. "She has to be someone that you decide to care about. Someone that matters to you. I don't—" her throat caught, "I don't know how—how I'll be in the future. If something goes wrong—you have to be the one who loves her for me" —her voice cracked slightly— "the way I would love her. She has to be important to you."

Draco had turned white, but he slowly nodded. "Alright," he said.

"Promise me."

"I promise."

She nodded. "Alright."

After months of revolutions breaking out in Death Eater controlled countries, the International Confederation announced its intention to "intervene" in the European situation in October of 2005. Europe's instability threatened the statute of secrecy and endangered the worldwide magical community.

Voldemort barely had the troops to attempt even a semblance of a resistance. The Death Eater army had always relied heavily on the support of the Dark Beings, and with Voldemort's alliances in tatters, he hardly had an army to mount. Even the Death Eaters had no confidence in their ability to win another war. Minister Thicknesse gave weak speeches about British Sovereignty, but despite the dutiful propagandizing of The Daily Prophet, the wizarding world was tired of war and no longer frightened of Voldemort.

There was too much discontent and too few Death Eaters. Without Draco as High Reeve, there was no one who could inspire the same terror.

The International Confederation landed in Denmark in late October and swept down from Northern Europe in a curve towards Britain.

Watching the International Confederation's Liberation Front effectively crush Voldemort's regime had all the feeling of vindication, but there was also a profound sense of betrayal to see how differently things could have been if the International Confederation had been willing to aid the Resistance during the war.

A nauseating sense of pain and rage welled up in Hermione's chest every time she thought about it. There wouldn't need to be a Liberation Front if the MACUSA and International Confederation hadn't left the Resistance be wiped out, imprisoned, and raped for several years.

Harry and Ron and everyone else might have been alive then.

Every time they received the newspapers, reading was a flood of both relief and poisonous grief.

Hermione devoted most of her time to creating a better prosthetic for Draco. It was like building a several thousand piece puzzle. She had to make all the components herself and fit them together in a way that didn't interfere with the other elements.

She finished it in November. Draco studied it as she detached the metal prosthetic and then clicked the new prosthetic into place. Draco hissed and then flinched as all the nerves connected to the new prosthetic.

"How did you—?"

She traced her fingers along the porcelain plating, a smile playing at her mouth. "You can feel it then?"

He nodded. He unfurled his fingers and closed them. There was an almost indiscernible metal whirring sound inside.

Hermione held the prosthetic in her hands, brushing her thumbs across the palm and watching the fingers twitch in response. "See the swirls? The porcelain is laced with silver threads. A sensory aspect on metal plating would have had trouble with variance and interfered with the other components, but by using threads of silver, I could lace them through the external plating of the hand and arm like real nerves. They're concentrated on the fingers"—she stroked her fingers up to the fingertips, and he curved them precisely to catch hers—"so you should be able to feel most things now. The internal mechanisms of this are stronger than the last ones. My plan is to upgrade them every week or so as you adapt."

"Clever. Although," he picked up a pencil and twirled it between his fingers before rotating his wrist and observing how the hand moved, "you could have just given me a silver hand. It would have been quicker."

Hermione gave him an incredulous glare. "You really think I was going to give you a hand that slowly sucked out your life-force? You already have enough Dark Magic being constantly drawn on through your runes, you don't need a silver hand doing it too. Even if it would have been faster, those are incredibly unreliable, I researched them, there are cases where they strangled—"

Draco chuckled under his breath, and Hermione cut herself off and stared at him for a moment before rolling her eyes.

"You have an appalling sense of humour." She tapped her wand against a porcelain fingertip, giving it a small electric shock.

He yelped with surprise and cradled his new hand against his chest.

Hermione eyed him severely as she put away several tools and then pulled out a quill feather.

"Now, serious testing, try a spell."

Draco reached for his wand, but Hermione stopped him with a sly smile.

"No. Not with your wand, just like this." She extended her left hand demonstratively, pointing her index finger and mimed the Wingardium Leviosa hand motion.

Draco stared at her with surprise and looked down at the prosthetic. "You said last month it wouldn't work."

She smiled up at him and tucked a curl behind her ear. "I did. Then I figured it out. Although, no one has ever built a wand into a prosthetic before, so we'll have to check it regularly to make sure all the components are safely isolated. Try it. It didn't work very well for me, but I used one of your wands, so it was hard to say."

He extended his left hand towards the table. "Wingardium Leviosa."

The feather lifted off the table and floated easily through the air.

Draco stared at the hand again and then over to her, his eyes glittering. "That's—How did you make this work?"

Hermione's throat tightened slightly, and she looked over and straightened her set of screwdrivers. "Oh—well, I actually used my research from deconstructing the manacles."

She glanced up at Draco and found that he'd gone still as though he'd been frozen.

She cleared her throat. "Sussex had a lot of really exceptional alchemy and wand core research, you know, the way they stripped and channeled magic, so—" she lifted her chin and met his eyes, "I took the fundamentals of what they developed and used it to make something that wasn't horrible."

He kept staring at her for several seconds, and then he looked down at the prosthetic.

Hermione looked down at her bare wrists. "The worst things are always created during wars; that's the way it is in the Muggle world too. There's never any way of putting them back in Pandora's box once they're let out. In a few years, I'm sure—every Wizarding government in the world will use manacles to suppress prisoners' magic. I thought it should be used to create something that helps people too." She gave him a faint smile and then picked up her wand. "Maybe someday I could send some of the designs to a hospital somewhere. Assuming not everyone maimed during the war was killed during imprisonment, there are a lot of people who could benefit from better magical prosthesis."

She looked up at Draco again, and he was still standing where he'd frozen. Then he stepped towards her and hesitantly captured her face in both hands, turning it upwards, and cradling it in his palms the way he used to. He traced his thumbs lightly across the arch of her cheekbones; one was cooler to the touch than the other. She shivered.

He pressed his lips against her forehead. "You're better than anyone," he said quietly, the words brushing against her skin. "This world doesn't deserve you at all."

It snowed in December. It was beautiful. It blanketed their world in white and Hermione would sit beside Draco and they would listen to the sound of it falling.

Hermione felt as though she were as big as a house, and eight months of pregnancy made her want to hibernate, but Draco pulled her out of bed and coaxed her to go outside anyway.

"It's cold. Walking makes my feet and back hurt," she said sulkily while he wrapped scarves around her.

"I'll carry you."

She snorted. "You will not, you'll break your back. I weigh as much as an erumpent."

"I'll reinforce my hand so it doesn't break," he said with a smirk.

Hermione gasped indignantly, her eyes growing wide. "You're terrible."

"You told me to make you go outside every day even when you didn't feel like it."

Hermione scowled and pulled on her cloak, "I didn't expect it to mean you were going to interrupt my nap."

"I tried to wait it out, but it was unending."

Hermione sniffed and let him lace up and tie her boots.

They walked on carefully cleared paths. The sky, trees and the ground were all glittering white from the freshly fallen snow.

"It's almost Christmas," she said. Her breath rose like a cloud as she spoke.

Draco nodded.

"I didn't know I'd be this sick of being pregnant, but it's hard to imagine that we're going to have a baby soon." She glanced over at Draco. "It's going to be different once there are three of us."

Draco gave another terse nod. Hermione squeezed his hand. "Hopefully she won't inherit our combined stubbornness."

Draco snorted. "If I were a betting man, I'd say the odds are heavily against us."

Hermione smiled. "Probably."

The baby was indeed stubborn.

Hermione's due date came and went without so much as a Braxton Hicks contraction. Hermione went from hibernating to determinedly climbing every flight of stairs in the house and hiking up the steepest paths on the island in the hopes that it would make something happen. Anything.

She was nearly forty-one weeks pregnant and positive she could not endure being pregnant for another day when she finally had a contraction. Then another. They came at irregular intervals for two days before gradually occurring every eight to ten minutes and staying there.

Topsy lingered, bobbing excitedly on her toes as she eyed Hermione knowingly. Ginny handed James off to a house-elf and provided everyone tea. Hermione tried to read and not feel hopeful that the contractions were going to ever stop being eight minutes apart. They were just intense enough that she couldn't ignore them.

Draco appeared ready to die from chronic stress. He'd tense every time Hermione shifted or drew a sharp breath when a contraction peaked. His eyes never left her.

Hermione or Ginny cast diagnostics every hour to see if she'd even effaced fully and kept finding that she somehow hadn't.

Finally, Hermione stood up with a despairing sigh. Ginny and Draco shot to their feet.

She pulled her cloak on and slipped her feet into her boots before casting a spell to lace them up. "I'm going to take another walk. Maybe it will make the labour actually start. If that doesn't work—" she eyed Draco but didn't mention the other options she was considering.

Ginny nodded, her mouth quirking. "I'll go see how James is. You can send word when you want me to come back."

Draco opened his mouth but then shut it soundlessly.

He gave Hermione his arm and let her lead him up as many staircases as she wanted.

She stood at the top of a bridge, gripping his hand while she tried to suppress a moan and breathe through a contraction.

"Granger—I could go get a midwife."

"Absolutely not," Hermione said through her teeth as she doubled over. "Ginny and I can manage. I'm not having you risk it—and I'm not having you bring anyone here and then kill them afterwards in order to cover your tracks."

Draco was guiltily silent.

Hermione released a low breath. "We're not doing that anymore. We're safe. We're safe here. Don't you dare."

"I hate this."

"I know."

"It hurts."

"Yes."

"I'm tired. I've been pushing for hours."

"I know."

"Stop agreeing with me."

Draco was silent for a very long time after that.

Hermione wasn't sure whether she were breaking his hand, or he were breaking hers.

Ginny was between Hermione's legs beside Topsy. "Hermione, are you sure don't want a mirror so you can see?"

"I do not," Hermione said in a flat voice as she caught her breath before another contraction rolled through her. She curled forcefully forward with a groan.

"Good job. Head's out. One more to get the shoulders through." Ginny looked up at Draco. "Do you want to catch her?"

Draco just stared at Ginny until she looked back down between Hermione's legs again.

Hermione gritted her teeth and squeezed her eyes shut. She bore down again, focusing her entire body and mind on getting the baby out.

"That's it. That's it. Yes! Shoulders are out, just breathe now. Don't push."

There was a mewling wail and suddenly a wet, squirming bundle was deposited upon Hermione's bare chest.

Hermione gave a small gasp as her daughter's tiny, scrunched up face nuzzled against her sternum. The baby's head matted with dark wet curls.

Her exhaustion was instantly forgotten. Hermione's hands were shaking as she wrapped her arms around the baby's vernix smeared body and rested her fingers on the sodden head. The baby looked up towards Hermione's face, her mouth twisting as a vibrating wail emerged forcefully from her mouth.

Hermione felt speechless. Ginny and Topsy were both speaking, but Hermione paid no attention. The baby furrowed her feather light eyebrows and widened her eyes briefly.

They were as bright silver as a lighting storm.

Hermione gave a sob and held her tighter. "Draco—she has your eyes."