Archive of Our Own

I.

He had been inside an insidious, shapeless beast for hours.

It was a thing none of his tutors, his father, his friends, the other generals on his side had told him: that a battle would be a formless, structureless animal, where you had to move before understanding.

Draco had grown up on all the gallant stories of war rushing like a river into a sea of meaning, heroics with clean lines, sacrifice that made sense afterwards. Sides. Pretty, neat and precise sides.

The thing amidst which he was standing now had none of that. It was nothing but a thundering noise and flashes of greenish, reddish, and purplish light. The smell of heated stone and burning metal, and something organic that made his stomach churn and which he dared not, no, he refused to identify. He didn’t want to dwell on that.

There were spells criss-crossing and cancelling and detonating in the dark, and above it all, the Dark Lord’s voice, enormous, resounding, all-encompassing, echoing in his mind, as if issuing from the air itself.

“Kill. Kill. Kill,” it sibilated. He took both hands to his ears, pressing his palms so forcefully, a casual bystander would think he was trying to smash his own brain. It was futile. He could still hear him.

Through it all, clutching the elegant, ebony wand he had inherited when Blaise had fallen in battle a few months back, he realised he had not fired a single spell. It wasn’t just because his friend’s wand felt so foreign in his hand, the wood always threatening to cast spells with a fluidness that was never quite his own, it was because he was moving at the edge of the chaos, surfing the crest of that ghastly wave, realising he was waiting, biding his time for a decision regarding something he could not quite tell.

It had all gone to shit, anyway.

His mother was dead, Malfoy Manor, once his happy, proud home, resembled a mausoleum he did not wish to return to, his father not more than a ghost, deathly pale, and he was increasingly aware that this, the side they had so carefully aligned with, the righteousness they thought they had, meant absolutely nothing.

It was all wrong, they were wrong, like a broken limb hanging askew, or an empty fire, no air left to burn.

His chest constricted so forcefully that he was gasping, a compulsion coming over him to take off his mask, toss it and never...

He saw Granger across the courtyard.

She was fighting three from his side at once, ever the over-achiever, and she was winning, because nothing spoke more to the absurdity of that all than watching that wisp of a witch just go at it like a deranged Pict. She probably had Pictish blood and he would find blue tattoos all over her body were he to look for them.

He willed that thought away, remembering the last time he had seen her skin up close, and how he felt sorry for what he had allowed to happen, and how the red of her blood had awoken something in him. His mother’s hands had stilled him that time, but this time, there was nobody there to stop him from looking at her, and she was brilliant, moving like a queen on a chessboard, pawn falling after pawn, imposing order on the chaos immediately around her, the shapeless beast taking a precise form with her movements. He watched her dancing, disarming two opponents in the same motion, pivot, cast a Diffindo that sent the third hard into the far wall. A fraction of a second’s stillness. Then she turned to find the next masked threat.

She turned in the wrong direction.

Rowle came from the left and Selwyn from behind. He knew them both, had sat in the same dark rooms, eaten at the same table, listened to the same voice give the same horrific orders, and he knew, in his heart of hearts, what collect meant when they said it. What they did to young witches they were sent to bring in, especially, especially, to Harry Potter’s best friend, the fucking brightest witch of her age.

Which she was, he reminded himself, not without a tinge of acidity.

He apparated, and before the thought formed in his mind, he was already across the courtyard, arms around her from behind, wand up, word already forming. When she reacted, and of course she reacted the obnoxious way she reacted to everything, soul-deep, completely, every bit of her resisting, it was already too late. Her elbow went deep into his ribs, her heel into his instep, her magic rose, golden, to fight the Apparition before it could take hold, but his matched it, silver-grey.

The world tore open and swallowed them whole, a billow of smoke and the taste of sulphur in the air.

II.

At Hogwarts, they had always explained to them that Apparition with a resisting passenger was supposed to feel like being pulled through a keyhole, and that it was therefore extremely dangerous.

None of their professors had ever tried it with Granger, because it was much worse than that, adding the scratch of cat-like nails to his face, dodging the gouging of his eyes, all while the transit itself seemed to be intent on punishing them, especially him, the caster with a dead friend’s wand. The space between one place and the other had teeth, had intentions, was taking their mutually-assured violence personally. He held to the weight of her body. He didn’t know why he held on, but he felt his life depended on it. Maybe it did.

They hit the stone of the cottage floor together, all twisted, limbs askew, him rolling her at the last minute to cushion her fall. Something hurt so deeply, it whitened his vision.

He tried to reach for it, channelling his magic to assess, as they had learned in training with Severus. Ribs. Arm. There it was, something inside that was exposed, a hot, wet wrongness on his left side, his mind slipping, his only thought that he was trapped and couldn’t move.

Distantly, there was some awareness of her. A rustle, nearby: a shadow obscuring the pinkness behind his eyelids, enough for him to try and peek through his thick, sun-drenched eyelashes, which Mother had always made a point to compliment.

You have such beautiful eyes, my son. All Black, starry-eyed, her voice was so near; had he joined her where she had been? The Asphodel fields, surely.

The strain again to look, and this time, it was a curly-haired, furious witch hovering about him, wand out, her fury so palpable it enveloped her like a Nargle infestation. Cousin Luna was right; he had to tell her when they were next together. Surely the dungeons could not be the last time he’d see her.

Hermione again, apparently growing a few centimetres through anger alone, or at least seemingly larger from his vantage point on the floor.

Good, he mused. Blooming, trepidous anger meant functional, meaning he had succeeded in the one thing he had crossed the courtyard to do.

He coughed, and his mouth bloomed with humid, red petals. He understood, by the quantity of it, it might be an inconvenience. Still, he felt strangely detached from it all, as if he were suspended mid-air, watching his very pale body tint the monotonous stone floor a lovely shade. He quite liked it from above.

He heard her stop moving, the lack of fury in the room a tether calling him back to his body, in and out. He couldn’t see her face from where he lay, though he felt it, spiking his curiosity. As a child, he and Theo used to get into all sorts of trouble because of it.

Her footsteps echoed, rapid, against the stone, making his head hurt and a moan rush through his lips unbidden. Then she was beside him, and he turned his head to look at her.

“Granger,” he rasped. “Why so serious?”

He watched her decide, the moment arresting like a muggle photograph in his mind. One moment, the wand was pointed at him; the other, the same delicate vinewood wand was down on the floor. He had always thought it to be an exquisite piece from Ollivander’s; it suited her so perfectly. Something sprang free in his chest.

“You can go,” he whispered, then, thinking she had not heard him, repeated it. “You can go.”

“I heard you the first time,” she answered, quite snippishly if you asked him. She was already reaching out, her hands ever efficient and healer-impersonal, finding the damage with that keenness she applied to everything ever since he had met her on the train, looking for Longbottom’s toad.

Merlin, he hadn’t thought about that in years, but the picture of her, hair as if she had just stepped out of an electrical field, still made him smile. He closed his eyes, lullabied by it, half a smile giving rise to a dimple.

“Oh dear, you’re smiling,” she tapped him gently on the face. “Stay with me, follow my voice while I work.”

There’s no need to argue anymore

I gave all I could and it left me so sore...

Oh, he was listening, for sure. He let her work, and somewhere underneath the pain and the cold floor and the slow returning of the world to its proper proportions, he noted her hands on him, so soft, her wand commanding him back to the living, her decision made in the dark recesses of her mind, and he locked in the place he kept all his hope.

Tomorrow, he thought. Think about it tomorrow.

He closed his eyes and let her.

III.

Mother had kept the cottage exactly as she kept most of her Black things: quietly, stubbornly, and without explanation, without anyone else, even his father, knowing they existed. He had found the deed when he was fourteen, and understood then that there was more to the stoic, pureblooded wife than met the eye. Narcissa Malfoy, née Black, would never be left without a way out.

In the end, it had been her resignation when being Crucio‘d, and her refusal to scream when made an example of to control her husband and son, that had made Draco realise that the cottage had never been meant for her. A way out, indeed, but for him, whom she loved beyond all human and magic measure.

He was in dire need of an escape, he recognised, when he surfaced properly sometime after dozing off, the pain reorganised into something more bearable, a testament to all the magic and skill Hermione had poured on him. The worst of it was bound, closed, reduced to a dull insistence that throbbed and would probably add another knot to the rugged tapestry that was his upper body, more scars to trace there than stars in the sky. He catalogued himself: ribs, shoulder, and an exposed fracture on his forearm, neatly dressed. There were still the cuts on his face from her nails.

He wondered distantly if those had been left by magical depletion or as a warning. He was betting on the latter.

She was sitting on the cold stone across from him, back against the far wall, her knees drawn up, watching him with clouded eyes that he still couldn’t quite read. He stared at her.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“Safe,” he replied, realising that words made his ribs hurt. He knew he would be painted black and blue come the morning, a trail of dark lilies on this marbled skin.

“That isn’t...”

“An ancestral property that does not appear on any record accessible to the Dark Lord or his followers.” A pause. “Including Father. We are not traceable here.” He stopped, swallowed. “We are safe.”

She held his gaze for the longest of times, and he worried about her next question, if she had heard him say “we” instead of “you” or “I”, and if her brilliant, busy mind was computing all that meant, but when the question formed on her perfectly-drawn lips, it was a much harder one.

“Why,” she said.

He closed his eyes; it was something he still didn’t know how to explain, because that meant delving into chambers that were ruled by his mind and his heart in a warring measure, carefully locked inside. “I don’t know,” he admitted.

IV.

In the small hours and with woollen hands, his fever gripped him completely.

He knew she could feel it when she pressed the palm of her hand to his forehead, then her lips, cooler, because she wanted to make sure, and she was, that he was scorching, his body fighting against the infection that meant that the ribs, the arm, the jump itself had taken more from him than she had yet accounted for. He was a man-shaped fire in the cottage’s iron-wrought bed.

All her experience as a healer had warned her that it was coming; she had seen the glassiness in his eyes, even during his moments of clarity, the deathly sheen on his face, and she had made the only decision available to her.

She stayed.

It didn’t mean he was forgiven, nor did it mean she had decided what to do after all of this. It was just that she was still, through the core, Hermione Granger, saviour of toads and Hippogriffs and House Elves, and Hermione Granger, no matter how much of war she had seen, was not jaded, did not leave people alone in the dark with a fever and what a diagnostic spell made to blink red as an internal bleed she was not yet certain she had fully closed. It was all it was. All that it was entirely.

He drifted away from the shore of his life.

In that undulating state, all his ghosts came and went. There was Mother’s voice again, softer this time. The enormity of how much he missed her gripped him, remembering how he had only felt so forlorn as a first former at Hogwarts, away from the Manor for the very first time, missing the sound of her heels against the massive, oak floorboards in his room at the Manor, which he had known since he was safe, inside her, and that he now would never hear again. Along came Blaise, laughing at something stupid Draco had said in fifth year, his beautiful ebony skin never turning grey under Scotland’s grim winters; then the laugh became a cough, and there was only silence, and he was alone. Then Theo aged nine, utterly distressed because the foundling he had nursed during spring had not made it, shifting to the solemn young man who had been the first in their group to cast an Avada after him. To strike down Angelina Johnson, who had her wand pointed at Draco. Theo, who now pretended those things didn’t matter.

And Hermione, solid and moving around the unravelling frays of it all.

Her voice was his Minoan thread, low and concentrated, spelling something above him. He surfaced to cool cloth against his throat, his pulse points where his veins showed blue, the chill so acute it was almost painful. He came up for air to the sound of her in the kitchen, of water boiling and cupboards opening, and he decided he quite liked to hear Hermione Granger taking ownership, because that conquering attitude that some would find grating, that he would swear was grating for everyone not inside his mind, was the exact thing he thought made her endearing.

He blinked to find her sitting very close, her wand moving in a slow diagnostic arc, her face in the candlelight doing something that made her purse her lips and look unhappy. The spell above him was blinking, pulsing red.

“Granger,” he called, his voice coming out all wrong, too thin and otherworldly.

“Hush,” she chided, without looking up from her wand. “I’m working.”

“Is it gan...”

“I said hush.” The wand moved, the blinking changed, and she exhaled, a tired smile lighting her face beatifically. “You are a terrible patient, do you know? So self-pitying.”

Her face was a dawn, changing from concentration into a complex relief that he was sure she wasn’t going to name in front of him, if at all, and he could recognise it, because he had seen it before, with Mother, when first his father had resumed his ill-portented activities, and she was still waiting, loyally, for him to come home, and then when that had been broken, when Father had gambled their safety and lost, when she waited for Draco, a woman who could only name fear when it was over.

He wanted to say something, thought it fitting, but found there really was no scaffolding for all the penance he had to pay, so he closed his eyes instead and let her work. In a lucid in-between, clearer than the others, the fever dipping briefly, he tried what had been pressing on him since the start of this blundered affair:

“Rowle and Selwyn were coming for you. In the courtyard. You had turned the wrong way.”

He heard her go gazelle still.

“I know what collect means when they are ordered,” he said. “I have been made to watch, been in the same room when they come back with a young witch. Sometimes a wizard. I know what they do.” A deep, mournful sigh. “I was across the courtyard in a blink. I don’t know what that means, but I don’t demand anything because of it.”

Her silence made the summer storm outside seem wilder.

“I’ve never done it. I... I would never take an unwilling witch,” he was growing restless, frantic. “Never. You must...”

“I know,” she said quietly, her soft, small hand gripping his, making him realise how different they were, him with his long, bony fingers, and still, still, her hand fit so perfectly that it brought him instant relief, like Dreamless Sleep.

He got washed away to sea once again.

Hours later, though time had gone strange, so he couldn’t really be sure, he asked her to collect the maps he was sure she had in that bottomless purse she always carried along.

“There is time for that, you need...”

“There is no time, it is of the essence, before they realise I am not dead and defected. I need to show you what I know about the northern approach.”

“You want to do this now?” She was astonished.

“I’m lucid, and I don’t know how long it will last.”

“Fair enough,” she agreed, so he pushed himself up, which cost him a great deal, in pain and in dignity, making room for her to spread the maps between them. He talked, and she wrote in the terrible, terrible calligraphy of hers, all cramped and urgent, covering the same ground from different directions, and it felt like they were a perfect pair, working together, strange and right. As if all their school years should have been made up of them in long study sessions at the library. Together. Inevitable.

“Not from the south, Hermione,” he disagreed, moving his head. “Here,” he pointed with his right index, the left side of him an agony. “The seam. That is where it comes apart.”

“Oh, I see,” and she looked up, her eyes glinting, turning amber in the candlelight. “I can see it now.”

He kept her gaze in his flinty eyes, locking it, feeling something move and grow between them that was so much more than the sickly sugary smell of a fever.

But then, his fever called him back to the shipwreck, and he drifted again before he could examine it.

At the edges of the dark, it was her voice singing that song from earlier that tethered him, then hushing him to sleep, and he thought, vacantly, that a thing worth fighting for was a future where Hermione Granger got to be a mother, because she had been born for it, he was sure.

He locked that too, another of his little parchments of hope, to think about after, later, tomorrow, maybe not at all.

V.

His fever broke just before dawn.

He felt it go, the animal that was taking hold of him finally released him, as if he were a small field mouse in an eagle’s grasp and the bird had decided some tastier morsel beckoned. The relief felt like diving in the Black Lake near Beltane. He lay still for a moment in the aftermath, his mind once again going to his mother and the softest of sheets she had kept at the cottage, then to the inventory of his destruction, coming out of a crisis.

He was, as one would say, pretty roughed up, but he would survive. Hermione had made sure of it, in what was now a tally pending grossly to her side, and a disadvantage in score he had to fix.

The memory of her made him turn his head to find that the weight beside him was, in fact, person-shaped, and he took a few seconds to study how her hand was resting a baby’s breath near his shoulder, the way you place a hand when you have been checking something through the night and have finally, in the last hour, allowed yourself to stop.

She had stayed with him the whole night, and knowing it made something rearrange itself in the sky above the cottage, because it changed everything, because he was looking at her in the purplish-golden light that heralded a new day and he couldn’t, for the life of him, for the gold in his Malfoy vaults, for the rows of ancestors in the Manor, none of it was enough to pay for watching her in her sleep, the cut at the hairline he was only noticing now, probably from their disastrous jump, still healing. Her mane of a hair, with a will of its own. Once, he had made fun of her and called her Medusa, and she had smiled and told him, “Imagine, fearing a poor, raped woman so much you had to cut her head. It tells you a lot about Perseus, don’t you think?” He had felt ashamed for sharing Perseus’ gender that day.

He could see her exhaustion in her face, even in sleep, something weighing her down month after month in this senseless war, impossible to solve in a single night, let alone one where she had sat beside him through the fever, done the diagnostic spells, nursed him gently back to the world of the living. Like she cared.

That was the push, the twist, the lever pending. He reached out and gently swiped the damp hair from her forehead.

Her eyes opened, feline in her alertness.

She looked at him, completely present, and he remembered this was not a feeble girl at his side on the bed, but a warrior made with blood older than his, something forgotten when his people had come to these shores.

And her mind, her mind was the most wondrous thing, for no sooner was she awake, she was assessing him with a healer’s instinct: his colour with her fingers, feather-light on his cheeks; his breathing with one hand at his pulse-joint, and then his eyes, with complete seriousness, as if she was trying to decipher his puzzle.

Whatever she found made her happy, he could tell just by the way her shoulders came down. Her relief.

“You’re back,” she said.

“Well, I couldn’t bloody go anywhere, really,” he grinned. “It seems you wouldn’t let me. I think Thanatos himself couldn’t drag me away.”

“Well, Thanatos would not put up much of a fight,” she countered.

“Even if he did.”

“I would like to see him try,” she answered fiercely, and that’s when he knew she had claimed him as hers during that vigil, so his hand moved to her temple, and she leaned her face on the underside of his good forearm and inhaled. When she exhaled, the air had changed.

He was almost certain he had kissed her first, after she turned her face the precise fraction that made it unavoidable, not that it mattered, not that it would ever matter, because what followed was predestined, Draco was sure, all the tiny, minuscule fragments of his life rushing to this, building since the train and the toad, and the slap, and the taunting, and her dancing with Krum and his jealousy, and her offer of care in sixth form, and his coward ways at the manor, and every time in the war they had overlooked each other and chose a different adversary, and the jump, and the cost that was worth paying.

Willingly. For her, he would pay it willingly.

There would be another time for tenderness, but this morning had years of war to contend with, and one impossible jump and an unbelievable night that meant he felt the devastating relief of being alive after hours of uncertainty. So there was an anger in her kisses, a fury that he matched, because he had been waiting his whole life to be angry about something that mattered and, in hours, she had become precisely that.

So, they weren’t careful, and his body hurt. She had her hands in his hair, and she pulled, pulled, making him graze and nip and bite and suck the curve of her neck, thinking that it would leave a mark and he liked it very much, the mark of him on her. He growled, blood rushing through him, pupils turned black, when with his good hand he pulled her t-shirt from her, and she helped, wiggling out of it, and then she was warm and flush against his bandaged skin, and he couldn’t stop, because he had tasted ambrosia and she was the sweetest drug in the universe.

“This needs to come off, right now,” and his voice was low and dangerous, a perfect match for the smell in the air.

So his hand travelled down to the waistband of her jeans, and he surprised himself with how dexterously he was able to pop her buttons, how swiftly she disentangled herself from the offending piece, her legs suddenly colder than his, making her gasp.

He decided right there he needed to hear her gasp again, so his hand grazed her panties, and then he halted, remembering decency.

“May I?”

There was silence, then a sudden, pixie-like smirk from her, and she pushed back. She was stronger than she looked, always had been, and she used it, getting her hands flat on his chest and shoved, and he let her go over him, hair a wreck around her face, her eyes matching his, and she looked at him the way she looked at problems she intended to solve completely and without mercy.

He remembered being four and wanting an Abraxas pony for his birthday, constantly nagging his parents. It paled in comparison with how much he wanted to be a problem for her to solve.

“We must be careful... My left side...”

“Your down half suffered no injuries, Draco,” and she smirked and raised an eyebrow, and he was sure that he would die, of old age, or not so old if the Dark Lord could get his viperine hands on him, but because of that smirk and that eyebrow stopping his heart.

They were frantic, they were graceless. She rode him with a desperation that had nowhere else to go, but meant, mainly, that she was alive, and he was alive and she needed to feel him, so that all the long months of suffering and death could find a shape, a direction, a body to inhabit, because their survival needed proof of its own realness and this was the realest thing, her velvety, scorching heat around him, squeezing him, the way they fit so perfectly, the weight of her, the fact she wanted him back with the same urgency he felt in his own chest like a second heartbeat, their magic shimmering around them as they went.

Like a drug, he thought distantly, when he was able to prop himself seated and flicked his tongue over one nipple, then another, then sucked and licked in tandem with the galloping of his hips, good arm enveloping her waist, a malicious hand going down, down, squeezing the lovely plumpness of her bottom.

Then came the flooding relief of it, obliterating everything outside the room, of the bed, only her hands, her mouth, her core squeezing unbidden, the exquisite moan she made when he releas...

He stopped thinking entirely. Blank bliss. Hermione undone because of him, screaming with him, and their magic above, shining golden, entwining. Like the dragon who named him, he would guard this memory for as long as he lived.

At some point, they slowed, becoming more careful, his forehead against hers, both breathing the same air. Her hands were no longer pulling at him, but holding on to him, treating him as her anchor.

He would be her fixed point, if she would let him, so he looked at the perfect Cupid’s bow above her lips, at the freckles that danced like stars in her cheeks, at her eyelashes, a fraction darker than her hair, almost black, and he let himself have her, deserve her, burrowing in the curve of her neck, knowing that here, her, now, would be all that did it for him. For eternity.

It seemed Thanatos had come back for him after all, because he had died that night and came back to rejoin the living.

VI.

The rain eased before the sun came up. He was awake to hear it, since he had not slept again after, lying there beside her, listening to the cottage settling and her breathing, and her warmth and thinking, with a clairvoyance he wasn’t sure he had ever possessed before, about what came next.

Before, it had seemed extremely complicated, all of it: the war, the sides, the name he had been born with, the mark he had been given, the blood that flowed in his veins, his claim on magic, the choice he thought he didn´t have.

All bollocks. Not complicated in the slightest. There, in the old iron-wrought bed, with Hermione, with the witch he had claimed asleep beside him, it was simple.

He was angry.

He had been angry for years, he understood now, and he had aimed it in the wrong direction: her, Potter, all the Muggleborns, at the world that had told him he was losing something by sharing it. That anger was his, had always been his, had always been real and justified, and he had let it be redirected by a voice that used it to keep him small and compliant and afraid. He had been a weapon aimed at the wrong target for his entire life, and he was done.

The anger was still there. It hadn't gone anywhere. It was, if anything, larger than it had ever been; the difference was that he knew exactly where to aim it now.

He felt her wake beside him, and he pulled her closer to him.

“You didn't sleep,” she noticed, taking her schoolmistress tone he missed from Hogwarts.

“No.”

Daylight was coming in, soft and unstoppable. Outside, the first birds. "What are you thinking about?” she asked him. Apparently, the only craft she couldn’t master was Legilimency, which was entirely right for her.

“I'm thinking about the seam in the northern wards. I'm thinking about the other safe houses,” she was staring at him, wide-eyed. “Don’t give me that look,” she gave him that look, “your intelligence is so pitiful that, by itself, would drag the war for another year or two. I know three more the Order doesn't know about, three locations he believes are secure. I'm thinking about the names of the people inside his inner circle who can be turned, and how, and what it would cost.” He paused. “I'm thinking about how to end this.”

She was very, very still.

"Before tonight," she started carefully, “you didn't know what side you were on.”

"Before tonight, I didn't have anything to be angry about. Or..." He stopped. Found the honest version, something that was hard for him, since he had so much duplicity at his command, second nature. “I had everything to be angry about and nowhere to put it. And then I was standing in a courtyard, and I watched Rowle and Selwyn moving up behind you, and I thought I could not, would not let them do this. Not to you. And the anger...” An intake of breath. “The anger found somewhere to go.”

She was quiet for a whole movement of a symphony.

“It's me,” her eyes widened. Her voice had gone very careful, carrying the weight of it. “I'm what turned you.”

He didn't look away. “Naturally.”

“Draco...”

“I know what you're going to say. That it shouldn't be about a person, that ideology that depends on one person is fragile. That I need to believe in the cause, not just...” He stopped. “You're right. All of that is right. And I do believe in it, I think I have believed in it for longer than I've allowed myself to know. But you are also the reason I moved yesterday instead of six months ago or never. You are the specific reason. I am not going to pretend otherwise, especially when you say my name like that, emphasis on the second syllable. Dracoooo… It sounds so pretty from your lips.”

She crossed over to him, lightning fast, and smacked him on his injured arm. With considerable strength.

“Ouch!” He whined. “Why did you do that? I’m a convalescent man!”

“You are also a right git, that’s what you are. Your arm is perfectly fine. I gave you Skell-a-grow yesterday, and it’s healing nicely.” And then, there was a shift in her tone. “That's a lot to put on someone,” she said quietly.

“I know.” He took his right hand, his good hand, and used it to lift her chin, taking advantage of it to pull her closer. She was addicting. “None of that downcast look, Hermione Granger.” He held her gaze. “I'm not asking you to carry it. I'm just not willing to lie about it. You asked.”

She looked at him for a long time with that full, unflinching look. He had nothing left to hide behind.

"Okay," she agreed.

“Okay?” He could not believe it.

“Okay.” She sat up, one hand to her ribs. “We go. I bring you to Harry. You tell him everything you know.” She reached for her vinewood wand. “And then we go north. Together.”

Together. The word sat vertiginously between them, making him feel giddy.

“He won't trust me,” Draco warned.

“No. Not immediately, not for years. But he trusts me. And I'll tell him what I know.” She looked at him steadily, and for a shimmer, the steel in his eyes was all hers. “I'll tell him what I saw.”

He thought about asking what she saw, then pushed it away, because when someone trusts you, you don’t demand the reason. They’ll tell you themselves when ready.

He got to his feet, a little shakily, picked up the ebony wand, and looked at the maps still spread across the floor with both their handwriting on them now, covering the same ground from different directions. He rolled them and handed them to her.

“The seam is here,” he pointed like he had done the day before, covering the same ground. “We'll need someone who can hold a Disillusionment under high stress. It should be me.”

“It will be you.” She tucked the maps into her bag. “Because you'll be with us.”

He nodded. “That, I will. When they see the stars, they'd better run.”

“A Malfoy is coming for them?” She asked, dubiously.

“The last of the Blacks is coming for them, witch.”

There were things in that look that neither of them named, as they were just a little too new, too large, too precarious to bear naming yet. The war was still out there. The sun was coming up. There was a great deal still to do, very little margin for error, and no guarantees of any kind.

He was, he realised, not afraid for the very first time in a long time. He thought of his pony and what it felt like to ride it.

He had passed a threshold, a rite into adulthood, somewhere in the dark of the last few hours, and he had learned that having something to lose was not the thing that weakened you. It was, in fact, the only thing that had ever made him feel like he could burn the world down.

He intended to burn exactly the right parts of it.

“Let's go, gorgeous,” and he winked.