Chapter 36 - Five of Cups
It was too quiet. How ridiculous of her to notice, this charged silence between the two of them, but little else stood out other than their impending task, and it was easier to focus on the present than worry about what the future held for them.
Hundreds of words rushed to the forefront of her tongue, all the questions she had for him vying to be set loose... but none of them felt right, all entangled in the dread that assaulted her being so near the precipice she faced in returning to the manor, so she settled on her cot, worrying the strings of her little beaded bag. Instead of allowing herself to spill all her thoughts, she settled on the floor near the fireplace, upending the beaded bag to reorganize its contents.
It was redundant, menial work, but it filled the silence between them and gave her hands a task to stop their shaking, kept her mind from wandering toward Voldemort and all that faced them. At the manor, she'd left behind most of the books she had packed at Hogwarts; now, all that remained were a few potions books and a handful of ingredients.
Carefully sifting through the items, Hermione moved books to the left, ingredients to the right, and other odds and ends directly in front of her. Each piece she moved brought a new question.
Book. Would they make it to the end of this? Quill. Where were Narcissa, Theo, and Luna now? Bezoar. Who would she be when this was over? If this was over? Item after item, question after question, until there was nothing left to sort. And then she started over, grouping items together by what could be used in potions.
The nervous energy set her jittering; every time she thought she'd settled, accepting what was to come, a fresh wave of anxiety washed over her and she climbed to her feet, checking the parchment before resuming her place by the fire.
The lower the sun set, the higher her unrest climbed.
Draco, for his part, maintained the silence, pacing between the door and the parchment, waiting for some signal that Luna, Theo, and Narcissa had safely made it to Hogwarts. His anxiety manifested in his actions: the slight tremor of his hand, the way he clenched it then pushed it through his increasingly unruly locks, the way he could scarcely stand still for longer than a moment before he was moving again.
Finally, the silence grew too much for her to bear, and Hermione pushed herself upright, following Draco to the window. "Do you think they'll make it?" Her real question was hidden somewhere beneath the words: do you think we'll make it?
Shuttering his gaze, Draco paused his pacing, staring off beyond the copse of trees. "They have to."
And she supposed he was right; there was no alternative. If this didn't work, they'd be taken before the Dark Lord as traitors, tried for treason if they were even given the courtesy, and killed for their efforts. Draco huffed, turning toward the window, eyeing the emerging shoots of grass, the last remnants of snow slipping off the branches. "My mother wouldn't have agreed if she had any doubts." He paused, clearing his throat. "And Theo and Luna have each other."
A knot lodged in Hermione's throat, sensing the words he didn't say. "I'm sorry… about your mother."
A sardonic smile pulled his lips up, but it didn't reach his gaze. "Granger, I know as well as anyone that my mother cannot be stopped when she gets an idea into her head." He dropped his shoulder into the sagging wall, his gaze lost in the falling night outside. "She's had time to prepare. And I've known…" He cut off with a gruff sigh.
Hermione allowed the unsaid words to settle between them. After a moment, she turned, eyeing the sharp curve of his jaw, the bow of his shoulders as he wrestled with his own demons. With a deep breath, she set her shoulders, watching the ripple of his features. "What's it like?"
He started, cutting his gaze to hers. "What's what like?"
Melancholy shot through her, sending her half-hearted smile wobbly as she turned away, fingers rising to trace nonsensical signs through the frost on the window. "Knowing you've people out there still that worry for you? That you care about, people you hope will come home?
As soon as she finished her question, she wished she could take it back. Draco's shoulders tightened, his face closing off, as he answered, "They care for you too, Granger."
Guilt was a powerful motivator, and she turned, steeling her resolve. "There's still so much I don't remember, but I want to." His jaw worked as though he was fighting a retort, but Hermione continued, undeterred. "I still feel it, this connection between you and I." Afraid to push him too far, Hermione lifted her hand, resting it on the forearm he'd crossed before him. A barrier, she thought, for the conversation she was pushing.
Draco sucked his bottom lip between his teeth at the contact, grey gaze shooting to the juncture of his forearm and her palm. "You'll remember that was your decision. Yours and Theo's." Bitterness coloured his tone, his forearm flexing beneath the flesh of her hand. "I had no choice in the matter."
Inclining her head, Hermione accepted the accusation. "You could tell me. Tell me what you wish you'd said before I left." Sliding her hand down his arm, Hermione slowly wrapped her hand around his wrist, pivoting his body away from the window. He moved like stone, heavy and unwieldy, before giving in with a harsh sigh.
"Hermione, I—" His Adam's apple bobbed up and down on a harsh swallow. "I'm not sure now is the time."
She answered his proclamation with a breathy sigh, sudden tears springing to her eyes, though she forced them away. "You heard your mother; there is no more time." Stepping into his space, Hermione clasped his hands, sliding her fingers between his. "Do you think monsters are born or are they created?" Hermione pushed, leaning into his space, desperate for confirmation that he understood.
Draco grimaced and shook his head. "It's not that easy. The Dark Lord... I would say he was born that way. I don't think there are any traces of good in him."
Hermione nodded; she wasn't contesting that Voldemort had been born with something wrong inside him. A chemical imbalance? A never-ending thirst for blood? Whatever it was, she wasn't denying it. But she couldn't bring herself to ask the question she most wanted him to answer: was she a monster?
How could she be anything less after killing her best friend?
Her voice shook around the emotions she tried to swallow. "What about this war? Do you— I don't know, do you think it's making monsters of us all?"
Draco wrenched his hands from her grasp and shoved them into the pockets of his worn trousers, a crease between his brows as he paced. "I don't think it's making monsters of us." He paused, his gaze searching the air between them. "I think we're fighting from becoming those monsters. And sometimes we have to do monstrous things. That doesn't make us bad. It makes us human."
Hermione huffed her disagreement. "But when do we cross that line? When is it just doing what needs to be done, and when do we become desensitized to the horrors and become it? Are we justifying these things because we've become what we feared?"
"Hermione, we're doing what needs to be done. We're fighting against people who want to literally destroy the majority of the population, and for what? To reduce the population down to a select few so that we'll all die out in a few centuries anyway?" His hands shook as he continued. "This is ridiculous! You're not the bad guy here." Draco's voice climbed higher with each sentence, red staining his cheeks and neck as he fought to keep his anger in check.
Hermione's own emotions ran unchecked, the guilt she'd ravaged herself with stifling her. Volatile magic crashed against her ribs, her stomach, fighting for freedom of the reins she carefully held it in check with. For the first time since the manor, she was perilously close to losing control. "I've been telling myself that this whole time, clinging to the hope that there's a reason behind all of this, but… Sometimes I wonder if I believe it anymore."
"Hermione, stop—"
"I'm a monster, you know? I'm one of the dangerous ones. I'm the one I run from in my nightmares. It's my hands that reach out and snare in my hair, wrap around my throat, choke the life out of me." Her voice broke. "There's so much blood on my hands that even if we make it out of this alive… I wonder if I'll know who I am anymore." Tears pooled in her eyes as her mind frantically wheeled from one question to the next.
This was a mistake.
Draco took a step forward to comfort her, but Hermione backed into the cabin wall, a harsh sob punctuating her retreat.
"Don't." Draco sighed, running a hand through his hair, a broken grimace pulling his lips down. His voice was tinged with sorrow. "Don't run away from me."
"I wonder why it wasn't me. Why Harry? It would have been so easy. If I'd have just put my wand down and stood between him and your father—" She scoffed, wilting down the wall and curling into herself, her desolate voice echoing around the threadbare room. "Maybe the potential was always there. Maybe it was just waiting for its chance to strike."
Draco's features tightened, the impending explosion playing across his features. She knew it was coming, knew it would be ugly, and yet she craved it. She craved the shouting and the accusations, the broken yells that would prove to her that they were both still alive. That he still cared. "You don't get to talk about yourself like that, Hermione. You didn't have a choice. None of us had a choice!" His voice trembled, tears filling up his eyes and spilling over as he angrily dashed them away. "Do you think any of the Order wanted you out here, running for your life, half dead and miserable?" Her jaw snapped open, heat flashing across her cheeks in her anger, but Draco slashed his hand down, stopping her in her tracks.
"No, Hermione, don't fucking interrupt me. My mother was out there leaving clues and trails for you to follow, endlessly working to keep one step ahead of everyone that wanted you dead. And then you went and got yourself caught because you're too fucking brave, too fucking stubborn, to listen to a warning when you have one. So I watched you suffer for weeks." Another broken sob quelled his words.
They stared at each other, Draco's eyes wild as he sucked in breath, and Hermione sank down the wall, her legs unable to hold her upright any longer.
"I watched as he tried to destroy you, while he made me use this curse against you and turn you into a shell of yourself, and I watched a little bit of you die every time I had to be in that god-forsaken cage." His sharp intake of breath after his tirade made Hermione curl further into herself. "You don't get to continue to beat yourself up over a situation you had absolutely no control over. Be the fucking Gryffindor that I know you are, pull yourself together, and do something about it." His breathing ragged, he looked at her. "You left me. And I came back for you, but are you even trying anymore?"
Silence reigned between them, and she replayed the past few months in her mind. The blood, the screams, the cruelty with which she was treated. If she hadn't asked Theo to erase her memories, would they still be here?
Draco snapped. "Do you think this is easy for any of us, Granger? We've all had to do things we've regretted. Do you think I liked watching you be tortured by people I'd once considered my friends? Or that it was pleasant to watch our classmates writhe when I tried to get information from them?"
Hermione whimpered.
"I watched our classmates die, Hermione, while the jolly bunch of you traipsed the countryside doing Merlin knows what for six months. I watched him feed people to that giant menace of a snake." He couldn't control the shudder that wracked his body as he knelt in front of her and rested his hands on her knees. "But I'm still here, Hermione. We're still here. Through it all, we made it back to each other. Doesn't that count for something?"
Hermione looked up at him with tear-filled eyes.
"I know you're hurting. What you did— I know it can't be easy. I know he was your best friend; I know you cared deeply about him. But it was an accident, Hermione. If you hadn't killed him, it would have been the Dark Lord. That's more of a mercy than you could ever imagine handing Harry. It's more than they would have ever received from him."
"I see him in my dreams, Draco. He's there, begging me not to hurt him, begging me—" her voice broke, and Draco leaned further into her space, searching her gaze. When she didn't dart away, he gathered her into his arms. Tremors wracked through her as she forced the thoughts out. "I just can't escape the feeling of his blood on my hands and the light going out of his eyes." A gasping sob punctuated her last statement. "I don't know that I can forgive myself."
She could feel tremors radiating through Draco as he tried to calm her. All the guilt, all the self-hatred, that she'd buried the beneath the curse had been pooled just below the surface, waiting for an errant thought to break the surface of her mind and drag her under. It was as though cement blocks were anchored to her ankles, pulling her down until she could scarcely breathe.
Draco's lips brushed against the top of her hair. She barely caught his whisper of anguish. "Hermione, I can't save you. I can barely save myself."
His words woke up the fierce, protective nature that Harry had always brought out in her, but this was tempered by the maelstrom of emotions she felt for Draco. "We'll save each other, then." The way he melted into her quelled her despair despite the pounding of her heart.
Perhaps they'd be okay.
Their breath mingled together in the shaky assurances of their mutual presence. Draco suddenly shifted in Hermione's hold, one hand snaking up to grasp her chin and tilt it upward. He exhaled anothering shaking breath, pressing his forehead against hers. "I'm so sorry, Granger. If I could take it all back…"
But she reached out, tangling her fingers in the worn material of his shirt. "I know, Draco. Me too." Tilting her head, Hermione pressed her lips to his, heart in her throat. Draco responded in kind, cradling her jaw and pressing a heartbreakingly chaste kiss to her lips.
"You changed everything. Everything, Hermione. And I know we don't have much time, but I want to spend whatever time we have left making sure the Dark Lord pays." He sucked in a breath and looked at her, his gaze uncharacteristically bare of all pretenses and masks that he normally wore. "But Granger, you are not a monster. You're the light this world needs. And at the end of the day, some things have to go very, very wrong before they can be made right. I know that Harry would want you to keep fighting, no matter what."
Tears cascaded down Hermione's cheeks as she stared at him. She couldn't save him, but they could fight through whatever came. Together.
Ever so slowly, she slid her hand up his neck and tangled her fingers in the straggly ends of his hair, so different from the pristine blond locks of the boy she knew at Hogwarts. This man was still the same person, but he carried the weight of horrible knowledge on his shoulders, weight that was all too familiar to her. She took a deep breath and, flicking her eyes upward at his when he exhaled sharply against her face, closed her eyes and kissed him.
A/N: So, this was the second scene I ever wrote for this fic... in 2016. So it's been a long time coming (and heavily edited since then lol). I know it's a bit slower than the others and it feels like the action is slowing down, but stick with me. The journey is almost complete and I'm really honored that you've all stuck around for so long. Thank you for reading. Alpha creds to LadyKenz347 and beta creds to tofadeawayagain. See you next Tuesday.