A/N: Sorry about the wait - I'll let you get straight on with it!
14: Break
Theo stared at the coffee cup in his hand, still hearing the slam of the door; the crack of Draco's apparition.
Still seeing the blanched white of his face.
The cup was the one that he had been drinking from for weeks now: heavy earthenware with a chip on the brim, painted with multicoloured spots of colour. It had become his, just as this Muggle house had become home, and Theo marvelled at how very far from his childhood, from his life before, this life was.
His life before. Nott Manor. His father. Hermione.
"What on earth was that about?" Her voice cut through his thoughts and Theo blinked, looking up from the cup still held loosely in his hand to study her face. She was standing close to him, her eyes soft and sleepy, the beginnings of a frown on her forehead, and he could smell her, feel the warmth of her body, and his head was full of the feel of her in his arms.
"I don't know," he said, thinking of the shock that he had seen in Draco's eyes. Shock, and a flash of pain.
You do not know how to bend, he had told her. But the look on Draco's face had been enough to remind Theo that for all that they had bent themselves to a madman's will they had ended up broken nonetheless.
Broken and useless and he couldn't let her, couldn't have her, couldn't risk -
Theo closed his eyes. Swallowed. He was dark, and cold, and undeserving, no matter what she might whisper in the night, and he felt the aching yawn of his past rise and engulf the hint of brightness that she had forced into his life.
A Nott must have a mind of winter.
He set the cup down on the counter. "You should have sent me away," he said, resting his hand on the wooden surface, staring at it rather than at her.
"What?" Her fingers on the back of his hand, and he pulled it away as though he had been burned, still refusing to look at her.
"Last night - you shouldn't - I can't, I'm not -"
"No." One word, but it sent a shiver down his spine. "No, that's - I'm not going to do that Theo - just because you're - you're -" he could hear the frustration building in her voice. "Do you think you could maybe look at me?"
Still so careful, so precise in her words even when she was shouting, even when bright spots of colour had risen in her cheeks and her eyes had lost their sleepiness and blazed at him.
Fuck. Theo thought. Fuck. Because he couldn't look away. She didn't need a Vow to compel him, because he was fucking lost. The brightness was there again, taking root where before it had seemed there had only been a knot of pain and darkness, and as he looked into her eyes he remembered a whisper - long-buried, his mother's voice.
"Nothing is so beautiful as Spring."
"Hermione," he said (wondering at it, marvelling, the sound on his lips) "Hermione, I can't, I'm not…" Her eyes held his, wide and worried and wonderful and terrible. "When I told you to bend," Theo whispered, "It's because I know what it is to be broken."
"Oh, Theo," she murmured, hand against his chest; against his heart which he could feel gaining pace again within the cage of his ribs. "You aren't," she said, eyes a promise, moving a step closer to him. "They didn't break you. And I won't let this break me."
They. This. The Department of Mysteries. Nott Manor. His father.
Theo closed his fingers around her wrist. "You never told me," he said, thinking of Draco's skittish urgency, his insistent shouting. "What happened at the Ministry yesterday?"
She bit her lip, and Theo felt himself flooded with an utterly confusing mixture of desire and trepidation.
"Today," Hermione whispered. "We're going to see your father today."
OOOOO
Draco hadn't known where to go. Grimmauld would be too many people, would be his mother and Aunt Andromeda. He wanted a drink - needed a drink - but dead men couldn't just walk into the Leaky Cauldron and demand a glass of Ogden's finest.
With seeming inevitability, he found himself back at the Ministry and Draco made sure his Disillusionment Charm was in place before he snuck in via the emergency staircase to make his way down to the DMLE and the tiny office that Potter and Granger had requisitioned for themselves.
Pausing a moment outside, Draco's eyes slipped across the sign in Potter's cramped, messy handwriting. Department of Magical Oversight. A stupid joke between all of them, bringing black humour to a situation that it was becoming increasingly apparent was sickeningly grave.
He checked up and down the corridor before letting himself in, locking the door behind him and opening Potter's desk drawer to find the tumbler and three-quarters-full bottle of firewhiskey that he knew was stored there.
Draco opened the bottle and poured himself a generous amount, swallowing quickly and screwing his eyes shut as the flames licked down his throat.
A hand in his hair, stroking gently. His mother hadn't done this since he was very small and he found himself pressing his head up into her touch, more comforted than he could believe, almost able to forget the sound of Granger's screams, the lingering ache of the Dark Lord's furious punishment in his muscles.
The fingers in his hair twisted, yanking sharply on the fine strands and Draco's eyes flew open to meet his aunt's hollow grey gaze. "You must cut out your heart, nephew," she hissed. Her breath was a rotten wash over his face. "It makes you weak, and there is no room for weakness in the service of Our Lord."
Draco opened his eyes, tried to focus on the way the lamplight winked on the firewhiskey.
Blink.
The fall of light on Granger's face, the soft skin stretching taut across her jaw when she had smiled at Theo. Draco had felt a pull at the edge of his mouth; an instinctive need to reflect the expression back at her, to show her what it meant.
He gulped back the contents of his tumbler, relishing the burn of the whiskey as he sloshed more into the glass.
Blink.
He'd always known that she was pretty - it was just another thing to find infuriating about her.
Blink. Gulp. Pour.
The war had pared the girlishness from her, leaving a stark, insistent beauty in its wake. He had seen it; even as her face had twisted into a scream under Aunt Bella's knife he had seen it; but he had forced himself to forget.
Cut out your heart.
Swallow the burn; pour another.
He had watched the way that she and Theo moved around one another, uncertain as to what had given him pause, until he heard the laugh in her voice as she said Theo's name. Had seen the way Theo looked down at her, bright and warm and wondering.
Blink. The bottle was half-empty but his head was still full.
Theo, watchful Theo. But Theo had always seen her, hadn't he. Draco remembered making a snide comment about Granger in Potions when they were what - sixteen? And Theo had laughed softly, eyes tracing the curve of the Muggleborn witch's scowl as he murmured, "You're a fucking fool."
The burn in his eyes was from the whiskey, Draco told himself, as he tipped back another two fingers.
Because of course Theo had been right. In this, as in so many things. It wasn't just that Granger was lovely: she was also fierce and clever and short-tempered and sarcastic. She'd let his mother and his Aunt Andromeda teach her to play politics, but the new-found grace had only augmented the tooth and claw of her.
She'd saved him, Draco knew, and she had kept on saving him - humour and kindness and sharpness a balm when being dead; when the enormity of the situation in the Department of Mysteries; when the weight of his guilt had been too much.
Blink. Swallow.
But she'd saved Theo too. Theo, who had never stopped seeing her, who held himself walled away behind pain and fear and coldness but who kept on looking nonetheless. Draco had watched them moving around one another in the kitchen, sleep dusted, eyes light when they met. And he had known that watching was all he could do, because it was too late, too late, and he was a fool as he had always been.
The last of the whiskey sloshed in the bottom of the bottle, and Draco abandoned the glass to raise the neck of it to his lips. Before he could tip his head back however another hand had closed upon the bottle and forced it back down to the desk.
"What on earth are you doing?"
Potter's voice, Potter's hand on his shoulder, and Draco leaned forward to rest his elbows on the desk, rubbing his hands over his face.
"Malfoy?" Potter had slid around the desk, fitting himself into the narrow space.
Draco looked up at him, squinted, tried to fuse the swimming vision of two ragged, black-haired wizards into one coherent being. "Potter," he heard himself saying, "have you ever had to consider the notion that you may be fundamentally unlovable?"
It sounded ridiculous when he spoke the thought aloud, and Draco laughed scornfully into his own palm. "No," he said, almost to himself, "No of course you haven't, you're Harry fucking Potter."
"I don't...you're not unlovable, Malfoy," Potter said slowly. "Look at your mum. Defied Voldemort for you. Lied to his face."
"My mother has to love me Potter," Draco scoffed, grabbing the bottle back and finally downing the last of it. "That's how being a mother works, don't you know anything?"
"That's all I really know about my mother." Potter's voice was very quiet. "That she loved me. That she died for it."
"Fuck," Draco swore, feeling, as he would not have thought possible a moment before, even worse. "I didn't even...that was terribly insensitive of me Potter I -"
"I'm willing to let the whiskey take the blame for it." The two Potters wobbled momentarily before him then resolved themselves into one, who smiled ruefully and plucked the empty bottle from Draco's grasp. "It's rather early in the day to be trying to give yourself alcohol poisoning. What the hell's going on?"
"Fucking Granger," Draco muttered, scowling at the bottle when Potter set it back down on the table. He felt the terrible, threatening burn of tears and wished that he still had some whiskey left that he could use as an excuse if they did manage to fall. When he looked up Potter was watching him, his face unreadable.
"Hermione?" he murmured. "What did Hermione do?"
"Nothing," Draco groaned, "She didn't do anything."
"Okay…" Potter drew the word out, obviously waiting for him to go on.
"It's my own fault," Draco muttered. "But of course he's far better for her." He looked up, gave Potter a wry twist of a smile. "Still the epic-levels of self-loathing, naturally, but without the side of rampant narcissism."
Potter frowned slightly. "You mean Nott?" he said slowly, "Nott and Hermione?"
Draco felt the urge to laugh, or maybe vomit, and he pushed himself upright, lurching slightly towards Potter in the cramped space.
"Theodore and Granger," he corrected. "Off to see Thoros Nott to continue playing at happy fucking domestic family bliss." His head was somehow lolling on Potter's shoulder, which was damp with tears he hadn't realised he was shedding.
"I didn't see it," Draco whispered, hearing the crack in his own voice and deciding not to care. "But it doesn't matter anyway, because I am fundamentally unlovable."
"You're not," Potter sighed, a hot huff of air on the nape of Draco's neck.
He turned his face into the angle of Potter's jaw, not really thinking as he mumbled, lips moving over at least a day's worth of stubble. "I am though, bitter and mean and irredeemable and un-"
Potter turned his head slightly so that his mouth cut Draco off, soft-lipped and gentle then pulling away. "Shut the fuck up, Malfoy, and stop being an arse."
He stepped back, putting as much distance between them as the tiny office would allow, hands firm on Draco's shoulders, green eyes holding grey with an unwavering stare. "I'm not going to help you throw a pity party," Potter said. "And I'm not going to provide you with a distraction just because we're both miserable. You either mean it or you don't bother."
Draco swayed against the other man's grip. Had he just kissed him? He thought that he had, but then his head was a mess of firewhiskey and the look on Granger's face when she had smiled at Theo that morning and the clean scent of Potter's robes and -
Potter gave another sigh. "Let's get you home, shall we?"
OOOOO
Azkaban was a horror even without the Dementors, Hermione thought to herself. She could feel tension radiating out of Theo, his nervousness and anger making the air of the small visitors' room difficult to breathe.
She snuck a look at him, noted how his eyes were pressed tightly shut, jaw clenched and hand tapping a rhythm on the arm of his chair.
Of course. You fucking fool.
Hermione sighed and stared at her own hands, twisted in her lap.
"You're serious," he'd said, incredulity in his hazel eyes. His fingers around her wrist were nearly tight enough to hurt, the two of them stood so close that she could see every fragment of colour in his gaze. "You actually think it might help us to go and see my fucking maniac of a father?"
Hermione felt it again, that frustrated anger, and she pulled her hand free to jab a finger into his chest. "I don't see any other option, do you?"
Theo laughed, cold and cruel. "There's the option where we don't go and visit convicted murderers."
"And that's the option where we don't find out what we need to and everything goes to hell in a fucking handbasket!" She was really shouting at him now, gesturing wildly, and she knew that her hair would be a mess, that her face was likely splotchy, and she didn't care, because she couldn't just tell him to, she couldn't -
"A handbasket," Theo said softly, mouth a mocking twist. "How very Muggle." It was a calculated hit but the hurt was real nonetheless and Hermione absorbed it, pressing her lips into a line. Theo stared at her for a moment, and she saw the twist of regret in his gaze before he caught her gently by the shoulders, his tone soft and urgent. "You have no idea, Hermione," (and the sound of her name in his mouth was like nothing, nothing before it) "No idea what he would do to you if he could - if he thought that I had ever so much as looked twice at you -"
"Have you, though?" she asked, knowing the answer but wanting, needing to hear him say it, to look into his eyes and know that it was true and not the by-product of the bloody Vow. "Ever so much as looked twice at me?"
"For fuck's sake." His eyes sparked, glittered, held hers. "I can barely look away."
She looked at his mouth, then: wide and full-lipped and set with determination.
Tell me to break, he'd said. Tell me to break and I will.
She wouldn't; she couldn't.
Hermione swallowed. "The Vow -" she whispered, and Theo dropped his hands from her shoulders, stepped back and pushed his fingers through his hair.
"Unbelievable," he murmured, then gave a humourless little laugh. "I'm going to go and transfigure myself some fucking robes," he said, turning away from her. "If I turn up wearing denim the old man will likely have a heart attack before you get your precious answers."
The door swung open and Hermione looked up as two burly guards hauled Thoros Nott into the room between them, setting him in the chair across the table from her and Theo. A tap of a wand, and chains snaked their way around the man's arms, holding him in place.
Theo had gone perfectly, rigidly still the moment his father entered the room, staring at the old man, at the chains. Thoros sat hunched forward in his chair, small and shrunken, though Hermione could see that the man would have had Theo's height when he was younger.
She opened her mouth to speak, but Theo beat her to it. "Father," he said quietly, voice low and quiet and full of emotion.
Slowly, the old man lifted his head, looking at his son with eyes the colour of pale glass, a blue so cold that Hermione felt goosebumps rise down her arms.
"Theodore," he said, voice a lazy drawl. "You're alive."
There was almost no intonation to the words - as though Theo's father truly didn't care about the fact of his son's continued existence.
"I am," Theo replied evenly, and if Hermione hadn't been able to feel him nearly vibrating with anger next to her she would have believed the boredom in his voice as he went on. "Glad to see you're keeping well."
"Not as well as some," his father said, and Hermione watched those pale eyes drift over Theo's face, lingering on the plain robes that he had transfigured from her father's wardrobe. "You could pretend to have a little pride," Thoros sneered disdainfully.
"Pride, Father?" Disbelief. "In what? Your grand heritage of murder and bigotry?"
Thoros's sneer deepened. "Foolish boy," he spat, "Just like your mother, no sense of what it means to have our blood, to be -"
"Enough," Theo said flatly. "Tell me how to find Nott Manor, so I can leave you here to rot."
"The Manor?" Thoros narrowed his eyes, "Why?"
"So I can raze it to the ground? Why do you care?" Hermione could hear Theo's patience withering by the moment, and laid her fingers gently on his arm. The movement caught Thoros's attention and he turned his eyes to her for the first time. His face went blank with shock.
"You," he breathed, poison and malice and disbelief, and she felt the blood rising to her cheeks even as she met his gaze with a defiant tip to her chin. It hadn't occurred to her that he would know who she was.
You have no idea.
"Me," she said, glad that her voice emerged evenly from her mouth. "We need your notes on the Department of Mysteries. I assume that they are stored at Nott Manor?"
Thoros continued to stare at her, and then impossibly, absurdly, he started to laugh.
It was a horrible choking rattle of a sound, and Hermione had to fight the way her nose wrinkled with disgust as drops of spittle landed on the tabletop.
"Of course," he gasped finally, "Of course you would. And of course -" His ice-chip eyes flicked between the pair of them. "Yes," he murmured after a moment. "I see it now." Thoros leaned forwards in his chair, staring at Theo, though Hermione had the strangest sensation that the old man's attention was still more on her. "Sanguinem invenitur," he whispered. "A drop of blood on your wand and you'll be able to apparate there. Yours will work, no matter how much you've debased it."
Hermione chanced a look at Theo, saw him frowning in confusion. "That's it? You're just going to tell me?"
Thoros gave his horrible laugh again. "It ends here, for me," he said. "I see it now. This is the beginning, but it's where it ends for me." He looked at Hermione, smiled horribly. "I hope you find what you're looking for."
Something in his gaze cut to the core of her, and Hermione found herself shuddering violently even as she cast a quick Patronus to signal to the guards to return. As they hefted Thoros from his seat he looked at his son once more. "A mind of winter, Theodore," the old man hissed. "Do not forget what you are."
Theo stood quickly. "I am alive, and I'm free," he growled. Almost free, Hermione thought with a pang as he went on, "And you are nothing."
His father just continued to laugh softly as the guards dragged him from the room.
"Let's go," Hermione said, closing her hand around Theo's and pulling him behind her as she made her way towards the exit, stopping only briefly to be signed out by the bored clerk, before she reached the apparition point.
"Ready?" she asked, and Theo looked down at her with a sharp nod.
She apparated them to the doorstep, pushing past the door, past the wards, and into the hallway, where she turned back towards him, mouth open to apologise, and found him right there, right there behind her.
And then he had one hand in her hair and one on her waist and he was kissing her; kissing and kissing her; like drowning, like desperation, like fear and relief and joy. Like warmth and sunshine and shivering cold.
Like bending and breaking.
And the feel of him: hard planes of wiry muscle and his insistent mouth and his soft hair when she smoothed her hand up the back of his neck and felt him sigh against her.
She had no idea how long it was before he pushed her gently away, before he leaned his forehead to hers, eyes closed, and whispered, "Don't ever ask me to do that again."
A/N: I'm sorry about the failure to update - have a long and meandering chapter full of DEVELOPMENTS by way of apology! Seriously though thank you so much for reading and for all your reviews omg you're so lovely all of you I don't even have words. This chapter goes out to new readers - apparently quite a few of you have binged this in the last couple of weeks, so thank you! Lots of love and I promise not to leave you hanging so long before the next chapter.