Disclaimer: Your questions bore me. Away with you! I own nothing!

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Hermione was calmer.

Or at least, she was thinking calm thoughts. Oceans. Woods. Reading. Fireplaces. Tea. Draco fucking Malfoy! No, no, calm things. Puppies, and… and…

She couldn't believe it. It was almost funny. She almost felt like laughing! Had Lupin known? Had he known that Malfoy was the one at the helm of this fiasco?

He wouldn't do that to me, she thought desperately. He wouldn't… Not Lupin.

She would've asked Hannah, but Hannah and Blaise were a few steps in front of her, bickering fiercely.

She suddenly felt very lonely.

At least he was every bit as upset to see her as she was to see him. It would, after all, have been embarrassing to fly at him if he had forgotten all about her.

Plainly, he hadn't.

She didn't know what she thought had happened to him. She'd never thought that he was dead, because his body was never found. All the bodies turned up, eventually. But he never entered into her mind at…

No, that wasn't true. For the first year after the Battle, she'd wake up in the middle of the night in a sweat, convinced that he'd be standing at the foot of her bed, leaking blood onto her sheets. These panicky dreams had gotten so bad that she'd taken to sleeping in closets. If he couldn't fit in there with her, then he couldn't drip blood on anything. This logic comforted her enormously, but it had been very hard to explain to her parents.

They had been a little afraid of her for a while after the Battle. She had seemed so changed.

Well. She wondered often how they'd expected her to act. And then she'd try not to pass it off as Muggle foolishness. As time went on, she grew more and more attracted to the relative simplicity of Muggle life, and she didn't want to alienate her only link to it.

But, of course, Malfoy had never shown up in her room. There was no way that he could have. Hermione wasn't really supposed to know about it, but she had been very heavily guarded after the Battle. Maybe it was because she had been so close to Harry, or because she had been a central player in the whole ordeal.

Either way, she'd been more terrified than gratified for the help. The fact that they were guarding her meant that there was something for her to be guarded from, wasn't there? And all the spells surrounding her made her ears tingle distractingly.

The fortress ahead of her was one of those ancient buildings that would loom threateningly even if it was shrunk down to the size of a dollhouse. The stone of the outer wall was a deep black, and looked too shiny to be ordinary stone. It was huge, at least seven stories high, with no windows to relieve the very, very ominous black. Hermione had heard about magically constructed buildings, but never something on this scale.

She shivered, and tried to wriggle deeper into her jacket by rounding her shoulders and futilely bobbing her head like a vulture. It was really cold. How was it that Blaise wasn't even shivering? Well, he might've been shivering, actually. He was more or less an agitated blur.

That's why he was so shocked to see me, she realized suddenly. He knew that this would happen. He knew how Malfoy would react to seeing me.

You vanished, Malfoy had said. You weren't supposed to come. What was that supposed to mean? She hadn't gone anywhere. Just to Scotland. Most people had a much different definition for the word 'vanishing'.

She sighed, trying to force herself to relax. Calm… down…

How am I supposed to calm down? She thought frantically, her hands tightening around the straps of her duffel bag, the waves of panic getting perilously higher. I'm all alone, in a world I don't really understand anymore, far away from anyone who could help me or who even knows where I am, and I'm going to be surrounded by hordes of angry wizards who'd probably leap at the opportunity to kill me. Some of them have probably already tried it. And he's here… the last one I wanted to see. Ever again.

Her mind kept wanting to leap back to her last memory of Draco. Almost grateful for the distraction, she forced it away, knowing that she would cry if she revisited it.

As she had always done when trying to force her mind away from a memory she didn't want to touch, she remembered something else. Taking O.W.L.s, surrounded by the sounds of scratching quills and rustling paper, relishing the challenge of the questions on her own paper. Sitting on the floor of the library, not reading, not talking, just listening to the sounds of the castle and feeling wonderful. Christmas at Hogwarts. Birthday presents from home.

It was a shame that most of her happiest memories involved Harry and Ron. They were often the main things she wanted to keep from remembering.

Hermione let out a great sigh, and felt the tension sliding off her shoulders and back.

This is just another problem. Handle it like you would any others. Don't run, and don't cry. Face it, and don't fear it. To do anything less would be an insult to your own skill.

Yes.

Hermione stopped behind Blaise and Hannah, who stood looking up at the wall, and she allowed herself a smile.

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Draco got to his feet, eyes down at the rock around him.

He looked up, towards the fortress. He couldn't see his visitors any more. They were probably at the wall, if they weren't inside already.

He had no time for this… fragility. He needed to do his job. He was acting like a child, as Zabini had forcefully told him.

Draco rubbed meditatively at his sore tailbone, trying to think of an evil enough punishment for his friend. He couldn't dock his pay. Draco had never paid him anything.

He checked himself, and scowled. Focus.

Turning away from the fortress and facing the ocean, he pulled a tiny golden globe out of a jacket pocket. Holding it close to his face, he breathed slowly onto it, watching his breath cloud the translucent surface and freeze.

The globe crackled, and then vibrated slightly in his hand. Good. The globes had been faulty recently. It seemed that he didn't need to curse his engineers after all.

"Yes, sir?" came the voice of Victor Matthews. Low and rasping, it still carried the slight accent he'd saved from his childhood in France.

"Our visitors are here, Victor," Draco said, staring out at the ocean as he spoke into the globe. "And there are a few problems."

"Problems?" Victor's voice was surprised. He had always been of the opinion that the young leader never had problems. Draco didn't bother to tell him that that was only because he would never admit that they were problems. "How eez theez pozzible?"

"I didn't think things through as well as I should have, I suppose," Draco said mildly, though he was glowering fiercely. "But we need to deal with the problems, and then analyze how they were made. Are you going to let me tell you what they are?"

"Yes, yes, of course. I'm sorry, sir. Please do so."

"Our visitors are both women."

"Damn. Young weemen?"

"Yes."

"Double damn. Weeell, I suppose I shall just try to protect zhem for as long as I can. I should start right away sir, eef you don't—"

"There's more, Victor."

"More?"

Draco's grimace faded, and he almost smiled. "Yes, Victor. More," Draco took a deep breath, trying to calm the flutterings of panic that were slowly wrapping around his legs. "These women… I knew them at school."

"At school?" Victor asked slowly. Draco could almost see the big man narrowing his eyes and scratching at the old scar on his neck. "So then that means… Does it? Does zhat mean what I zhink it does?"

"Yes," Draco said, turning away from the view of the ocean and looking back at the fortress walls. "They fought at the battle. And one of them…"

Victor waited. He wasn't going to help Draco with this one, dammit. He'd have to say it. He'd have to admit that it was true, and that she was… that she was here.

"… one of them is Hermione Granger." He finished, stabbing at the ground with the toe of his boot.

Victor let out a low whistle. There was a muffled whumph sound as the man sat heavily down, hopefully on a chair. "Hermione Granger?" He whispered. "Zee brain? Zee girl who was friends with Potter and Weasley? Zee one who fought so wildly that night? Zhat Hermione Granger?"

Draco didn't dignify that with a response. He continued stabbing at the ground with a toe, and waited for Victor to compose himself.

"Ah. Alright. Well, I'll get zee word out, so zhat zhere won't be such a… er… hubbub. You want me to warn zee people, yes? Give zhem time for stewing?"

"Yes, thanks. I'll be there soon to help you out. But they should be inside almost any second. Move fast, or just tell someone else to do it."

"Ha. Zhat only ever works for you. Zhey don't listen to me." Draco could hear him smiling.

"Hmm. Good luck, Victor." Draco said, and wiped the globe clean of frost with a gloved hand. It shivered once in his palm, and then laid still. He dropped it into his pocket, looking at the fortress. It looked different, now, somehow.

Because she's here?

No. That wasn't the reason. It wasn't allowed to be the reason.

The reason Draco would allow, and the one that made him smile to himself as he began the walk back to the fortress, was that the arrival of these good and upstanding people meant that it was beginning. All these months and years… and now it was here.

He would be prepared for it. He wouldn't let Hermione Granger's presence faze him.

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Hermione and Draco stared at the fortress walls, and they swore, in the name of those they loved, that they would win this. And they both really believed that they would. Because they were on the right side, this time. And this time, they'd be stronger. This time, they wouldn't make the mistakes they'd made six years ago.

And they both smiled, wearily, but with a touch of anticipation.

It was beginning.

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A/N: Ok, this chapter actually didn't take me much time. The first part was gathering dust for a while, but I got a second wind or something just after I posted the last chapter. Pesky fanfic muse, making me write tortured introspectives when I'm supposed to be studying Bio.

This is really more like a chapter nine: part II, but whatever. I'm posting them separately. Sorry. Am I the only one who thinks it's pretty funny that the last line of chapter TEN is "it was beginning?" I only realized that while proofreading. Yuk yuk yuk.

I have a question. Is writing out Victor's accent making anyone insane? I'm not sure how big of a character he's going to be, so maybe it won't matter. Let me know what you think.