during

"Are you a fool?" Draco demanded. Hermione stiffened at his voice but didn't turn around. She was determined to not be dependent, not completely at least. She'd decided she could cook because that wouldn't take more energy than she had, and, if she didn't know a lot of cooking charms, well, she'd found a primer in the back of a recipe book shoved on a shelf and she'd been using those.

She was shaking where she stood from fatigue, and she'd clearly over-estimated what she could do, but she'd be damned if she admitted that now with Draco Malfoy banging the door open and hurling insults at her. "I'm making food, she said. "I understand that even the evil have to eat."

"We live off the agony of our foes," he said. "Blaise, what is going on?"

"She's cooking," Blaise said. He was as disgruntled about the entire idea as Malfoy seemed to be, but he'd stopped arguing, thrown his hands up, and said if she wanted to kill herself he wouldn't stop her. "She wants to earn her keep, or something like that."

Malfoy made an incredulous noise. "You aren't a bloody house elf, Granger," he said. "You were almost dead a week ago. You need to… for the love of… just do nothing, would you? Just let your body heal and don't undo all our work in patching you back together."

"I'm fine," she said. "It's just dinner." She went to sit down in a chair with as much emphasis as she could to let him know she had this and she was fine. She misjudged the distance to the seat, however, hit the edge of the chair, and slipped off to the floor where her hip slammed into the edge of a rag rug. She bit through her lip at the shock of how much that one fall hurt. She was still gasping when Blaise grabbed the wand she hadn't dropped, the spare wand they'd somehow found for her, and tossed it to Draco who caught it and tucked it away.

"Do you want to die?" Blaise demanded. "Was getting captured some kind of suicide attempt? Death by Death Eater?"

She huddled on the floor. She tended to think of Blaise as the softer of the pair of them. He was the one who wasn't branded on his arm, after all, but the neat way he'd taken her wand away from her combined with the efficiency of how he'd passed it over to Draco reminded her that he was just as much a survivor in this world as the other man was, and not her ally. "I'm not," she said. "I just want to do something." She tried to get up but her leg collapsed under her and she would have fallen to her knees if Blaise hadn't grabbed her.

He opened his mouth to scold her again but she just started to cry and he froze. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "I'm just trying to be able to leave so you aren't… I know you don't want me here and I don't… I'm just so worthless right now and I'm not used to being - "

Draco took her from Blaise's grasp and put his hand over her mouth. "You're such a fucking pain," he said. "Have to show off all the time. Oh, brutal torture at the hands of sadists? No problem, not for Hermione Granger. She'll just bounce right back." He swung her up into his arms and some part of her brain noted that being a Death Eater seemed to keep him fit because he carried her like she weighed nothing. "You need to stay in bed and get better, and if I have to bloody well tie you to the fucking frame with a leash to get you to do it, I will, do you understand?"

She considered daring him to try it, but the look on his face suggested he wasn't bluffing.

"Showers," he said. "The toilet. Other than that, stay in bed." He seemed to think for a moment. "You can eat with us at the table."

"I can do what?" she nearly hissed. "You don't get to - "

"Assuming you're strong enough." He set her down on the bed and made a production of tucking her in. "I doubt you are today after over-straining yourself like that."

She began to sputter with an outrage that would have been more effective if being back in the bed wasn't really nice. She wanted almost nothing more than to lie down and go back to sleep.

Almost nothing.

Wiping that smug look off Malfoy's face, however, would be better than sleep.

The look did fade when he saw her mouth. "Fuck, Granger," he muttered, "You're bleeding."

She picked her hand up and touched her lips then looked at the red on her finger tips. She really had bit through it when she fell. "Bit my lip," she said. She reached out and rubbed the blood on his mouth. "Present for you, Malfoy."

He quirked an eyebrow up and said, "Not the first time I've had your blood on me, Granger. Not even the first time this week. If you hoped to make me recoil in horror at your filthy bodily fluids, you've picked the wrong Death Eater." He patted her and added in a condescending tone. "Be good and I'll let you go for a walk outside tomorrow."

"I'm going to see you dead, Malfoy," she muttered from the bed.

He patted her again. "You see if you can keep that thought in your pretty, little head while I go finish the meal you tried to make."

Blaise, the bastard, snickered from across the room and she would have told them both a thing or two if she weren't already falling back into the exhausted slumber of healing.

Blaise nudged her awake after five minutes, or maybe fifty, and she tried to sit. He helped her pull herself up so she could lean against the headboard but as soon as she tried to move to get out of the bed, he placed a hand against her sternum.

"While you slept, I got treated to a lecture about patient care," Blaise said. "I'd been careless, and let you do too much, and now you'll probably have a setback." Hermione began to protest that they weren't her keepers, but Blaise ignored her and just picked up a bowl of thin soup and asked if she needed help eating it.

She didn't, or so she wanted to believe, but her hand trembled as she held the spoon and she could feel a tear hover at the edge of one eye. She wasn't sure which was worse: how frustrating being this weak was, or how humiliating.

Malfoy was washing up the dishes and she could hear him bang pots around. "Just feed her," he said from where he stood at the sink. "It'll go faster."

Blaise's hand moved toward the spoon in hers but he saw her jaw begin to quiver, a quiver she tried to control but she couldn't even get her hand to do what she wanted, much less her emotions. That made him stop. "I think she's got it," he said. "And I'm not in a hurry."

"Suit yourself," was all Malfoy said.

The weight of being a burden sat more heavily on her than the spoon felt in her shaking fingers as she moved one mouthful of broth after another from bowl to lips. "I'll do what you say to get better," she whispered when she finally handed the empty dish back to Blaise Zabini. "Then I'll take off and hide, somehow. You don't have to worry about being stuck with me."

He handed her a napkin and the pity in his eyes stung. "We don't begrudge you space and time to heal, Granger."

No, she thought as she fell, unravelled, back into sleep. You just begrudge that I exist. You just begrudge me your world.

She woke up, again, to the feel of Draco Malfoy's hands running over her skin with slow, deliberate pressure. He'd pushed her loose pajamas up and began with his hands above her knees, wrapped them around her leg, and slowly pulled them toward her foot. The motion soothed the tingles and knives and jerks that ran up and down all her nerves all the time; she didn't open her eyes, didn't say anything. She just lay on his bed and let a man who'd always despised her work at making her ever so slightly less injured. She considered he and Blaise had learned to do this because he'd felt the effects of this curse more than once. At sixteen, he'd said. He'd had his first time at sixteen. Hot tears gathered in her eyes and rolled down onto her pillow as she wept for him, the boy who'd been broken, for herself, barely able to stand for more than a few minutes at a time, for Harry and Ron, still - she hoped - out in the woods. They surely thought she was dead.

Safer for them to think that. They'd try to mount a rescue.

The tears fell as Draco Malfoy worked with gentleness and patience she wouldn't have thought he possessed until she sniffled and he realized she was awake. His hands stilled, she sniffled again, and he pulled the cloth back down around her legs, tucked the blankets back on either side of her, and squatted by her face with a handkerchief.

Of course he had a handkerchief. Draco Malfoy was one of those people who always had a clean, linen handkerchief to hand. The world could end and hell could reign - as it had and did - and he'd have a fabric square somewhere on his person. He wiped at her cheeks with the same steady competence he'd used to settle the creep and prickle in her nerves.

"The pain fades eventually," he said. "I know it's hard to believe when you're in the middle of it, but it does."

She took the handkerchief from him and swiped at her face with far less care than he had.

"You'll get better faster if you rest," he said. "I've rarely had the luxury to do that. Let me give it to you, Granger." She shivered and didn't answer and he pulled blankets up higher for her and turned away.

later

She held the cloth to his forehead. Another day, another bit of torture at the hands of his fellows. Sometimes they seemed to her like schoolyard bullies given cattle-prods. They couldn't resist using them. Late to a meeting? Have a little pain. Didn't find enough useful old spells? Have a little pain. It wasn't even Voldemort. His fools and flunkies were just as happy as he was to hurt anyone they could.

Draco grabbed her wrist. "You don't have to do that," he said.

She pulled away. "Since when do you get to tell me what to do?" she asked. He let out what would have been a mocking laugh once and closed his eyes as she began to wring out another cloth to lay across his head.

It wasn't much. It didn't come close to being enough. It wasn't the week of rest he really needed. She told herself it was better than nothing. It was all she had to offer.

during

After a shower Blaise had conceded she could have on her own, though he'd settled down to read a book and refused to leave the room in case she fell, she sat outdoors and felt the sun on her skin for the first time since she'd been Snatched. Blaise settled behind her, a wide-toothed comb in his hands, and picked it carefully through her curls. He acted offended at her brief concern he might not know how to deal with hair like hers, noted his mother had very similar hair, and proceeded to show he was, as was seemingly a habit with him, right. He knew what he was doing. He was certainly better at the task than Malfoy.

"Why do you stay?" she asked as he worked. "You have money, right?"

"Enough," he said. "Enough to go, enough to take Draco with me, leaving Manor and Malfoy vaults to the current government, but he can't."

Hermione made a curious sound and Blaise added, his voice taut, "He tried to ignore a summons through the Mark once, after his mother. He lasted two hours before he broke and let that… before he answered the Dark Lord's call." The hand combing her hair didn't falter. "I thought they'd kill him just for being late, never mind his parents."

"He survived," Hermione said.

Blaise just said, "Mostly."

"So you can't leave," she said.

"I won't leave alone and he can't leave, so, no I can't. Not unless I want to watch him die in agony in front of me." Blaise said. "And I didn't even care for seeing you suffer, so imagine how much less fond I am of the idea of seeing him endure that."

Hermione cast around for a way to change the subject and settled on, "How did you two meet?"

Blaise laughed at her. "We all went to the same school, Granger, like half the wizards in Britain. We were in the same House. I saw him almost every day from the time we were eleven."

She could feel her face grow warmer at his snort of derision at her stupid question. "That wasn't what I meant," she muttered. "I mean - "

"How did we end up in this little love nest?" Blaise asked, definitely teasing her now. "How did we decide that maybe shrill little Pansy wasn't quite the thing for either of us?"

She crossed her arms and refused to answer.

"It's hard," he said. "I mean, we both like girls too, so it could have been worse, but you do self-censor a lot in boarding school lest you out yourself to the wrong guy and end up beaten to a pulp for your trouble. You don't walk up to someone and compliment him on his arse." He set the comb down and began sectioning her hair into four parts to tie back in neat plaits. "Draco's is quite nice, in case you hadn't noticed."

"It's all the Quidditch," she said without thinking. "Those players all end up with great -"

She stopped in horror at what she'd just admitted.

"I," Blaise said, "am telling him you have been admiring his arse. I bet you've done it for years, haven't you. Sitting up there in the Quidditch stands pretending you care about the game and just ogling the players." He tugged on her hair. "I think I could grow to like you if you're really more than just the stick-up-your-own—arse swot you seem to be."

"You must have mentioned something," Hermione said, moving resolutely on. "McClaggen had a great arse too, but you don't see me living in an idyllic cottage with him."

"He also had a brain the size of a pea," Blaise said dismissively as he braided her hair. "No, Draco's brilliant, truly brilliant, you know. Those 'Potter Stinks' badges back in the day were all him. He's got a mind for magic that's fascinating to watch, and he's loyal - fiercely loyal - and there's that arse." Blaise tied a knot at the base of the last plait and said, "There, that should keep your hair under control for a bit. My mother eventually just went for very short hair, but I don't think you have the bone structure to pull that off, so you're stuck with this mop."

"So how did you…" she prodded one last time.

"He pushed me up against a wall sixth year and shoved his tongue down my throat," Blaise said. "He's loyal and brilliant, but not very subtle."

Hermione began to laugh. "No," she said, thinking of her history with the wanker. "I suppose he's not."

. . . . . . . . . .

A/N - Thank you, everyone, for your many kind responses to this, both here and on tumblr. I appreciate it more than I can say.