A/N: Hello! I'm happy to be posting a new chapter. I do want to warn everyone that this may pose a trigger problem for some folks towards the end. I hope that the material as I've written it is not problematic for anyone but I want to be as respectful as I can about others' emotional state. Please proceed with caution.

CHAPTER 12

Rae woke herself from her slumber a little before dawn. She was still wrapped up by the wolf but he was awake now. He leaned in to sniff at her side as she rose to stretch. She then began walking herself back to the wizard's tent that was left unused until now. Draco's wolf decided to stay where he was and rest a while longer. She watched as he rolled onto his back and scratched himself by wiggling back and forth. She giggled in her mind as she entered the tent and grabbed the cloak she had stored there.

It was heavy to her in her fox form since she was so small, but she knew transitioning to her human form would be premature as long as Draco's wolf was still around. She drug the cloak through the dirt and grass and field until she was close enough to try to throw it over him. As a fox, this was a very challenging task. She questioned, for the first time in her life, why her animagus form couldn't be a monkey, or something with thumbs. She finally gave up and transitioned back into her human form just as she saw the moon disappearing in favor of the rising sun. She watched in fascination as the fur seemed to recede from draco's skin and the hair on his head changed texture until it was his normal white blonde locks. She was quick to get the cloak over a sleeping Draco before she saw more of him than either of them would be comfortable with yet. Or ever.

As he fully transitioned back into a human Draco, Rae Accio'd potions and breakfast from the tent and sat on the grass next to him until he began to stir.

"Good morning, Sleepyhead." Rae said and Draco opened his eyes. He saw that she was munching on a granola bar.

"Morning," he mumbled as he attempted to sit up. He was sore and tired.

"Might wanna hold tight to that cloak unless you want me gettin a peak at the goods," she winked at him when he looked up and he realized that he was completely nude under the cloak. He grabbed it up quickly to cover him entirely, as though it may fly away on his own.

"I'm naked." He said, sounding shocked.

"Is that unusual after a transition?" Rae asked mockingly.

"Did you- I- How did" Draco stuttered over which question he should ask first. He didn't know why but the idea of Rae seeing him naked made him feel both anxious and exposed.

Rae finally took pity on him, "You can relax Draco, I didn't see anything. I woke up before your wolf and brought the cloak out here to cover you. I figured waking up naked and spooned behind me might be a little jarring since you won't remember last night."

Draco let out a breath. "Thank you," he said quietly, knowing she'd hear him.

"Anytime" she winked at him. She was back to being joking and sarcastic and Draco liked it. She tossed him a chocolate bar and a granola bar while he sat up, careful to keep himself covered up below the waist. He gave up on covering his torso, figuring she'd seen it already anyway. To her credit, she didn't seem at all phased by his scars and markings.

They ate in silence for a while, until he finally noted that while he was sore from the transition, he wasn't in pain the way he usually was. He brought this up to Rae, and she told him about what she had read.

"I know a little bit about werewolves from what I've read and from my time spent with Professor Lupin, too. He's the one that told me about the chocolate, and that a wolf without wolfsbane, will do less damage to himself if an animagus is with him. That's why your cousin Sirius and James Potter became animagus in the first place." Draco hadn't known these things. He'd only been a werewolf for a little less than a year and had never spent time with other wolves. He was lacking for education and experience in that matter.

"Do you feel your wolf? When you're not getting ready to transition I mean, do you feel him during the average day…" Rae asked him.

"It's strange to try to explain, he's a part of me but also something wholly individual. I can feel him under my skin the closer to the full moon it gets, and in particular bouts of emotion, but in general I've always worked to repress my lupine traits and not show the symptoms around people who didn't know already." He informed her.

"You shouldn't work so hard to repress your wolf. By repressing him, when you do have bouts of emotion, or as the full moon gets closer, you lose control of those lupine traits entirely, for example, at the party when Darryl grabbed me, I could hear you growling which is fine, but it was loud enough that others may have heard it too, or yesterday when you received the letter, your eyes flashed and you growled again." Draco was paying close attention, he'd done a fair amount of research but under the thumb of the dark lord and then the ministry he hadn't had much time or success in getting answers and he'd be willing to wager that Rae had started researching heavily the minute she decided to take him in, if not before then. "What I mean is if you allow yourself to bond with your wolf in a way that is more organic, you could work together during emotional or stressful times, pooling your instincts. That way you have more control, even when you lose control. If all that makes sense, I don't know."

"It'll be tough, I've been a wolf for about a year now, and I've always worked so hard to keep him back, I don't know how to let him up front." Draco said.

"Remus always repressed his wolf too, I think he was ashamed to be a wolf, but people like Greyback - " at this Draco growled in earnest, Rae put her hands up in supplication, "I know, I know but hear me out. The reason he is as powerful as he is, is because he has bonded so completely with his wolf, I think he forgets he was ever a wizard to be honest. Crazy sick bastard," she mumbled to herself, but Draco heard.

"The fact remains that you don't have to be an evil cuss like him, to successfully connect with your wolf and harness that energy, otherwise I feel like you're just going to be battling yourself and your wolf for the rest of your life." Rae told him.

"What you're saying makes sense but I just don't know how." Draco said.

"Maybe start by naming him." Rae said.

Draco balked, "What?"

"Give your wolf an identity. It's like you said, he's a part of you but also something completely individual." Rae said.

He'd have to think about that. For now, he had some of his own questions.

"Why didn't you tell me you were an animagus? Do you know how stressed I was when you wouldn't bloody leave the wards!?" He turned his gaze on her. She had the presence to look guilty.

"I'm sorry, but up until we drove up here I was battling with what would be the best option, either to leave you to it, or to spend the night with you." She said.

Draco had to stop himself from becoming excited at how that sounded.

"Anyway," Rae started to get up from her sitting position. "We should get you dressed." Before I climb on top of you and those sexy forearms I never get to see she had to stop herself from adding her inner thoughts.

Draco looked down and blushed remembering that he was naked and eating breakfast with Rae. "Yeah, probably."

Raven held out her hand for him to take to get up and when he grabbed it she came face to face with the dark mark. He saw her glance at it, and although she did everything in her power to remain unaffected, he couldn't help the shame that creeped back in. He couldn't stop the rush of self hatred that pulsed through him and he growled and snarled as he retched his hand back from her. Rae was shocked at first and then understanding reached her.

"I don't deserve this." Draco cried. Quickly marching back to the tent with the cloak wrapped around him. She followed slowly hoping that he'd cool down by the time she caught up with him. He came storming back out of the tent dressed and screaming.

"I deserve to feel the pain of my change! I deserve to be in Azkaban, or dead next to my mother! I don't deserve for you to be helping me, or making me wolfsbane, breaking your neck over your cauldron. I don't deserve to have the kind of life where I ride a fucking horse into the sunset then come home and eat dinner with you and read a book before going to sleep. I'm supposed to be punished! I should feel... I shouldn't feel…" He was running out of steam. About halfway through his rant he had started pacing. Thank Merlin's beard that they were hours away from muggles and the ranch. Draco wasn't done, he took a breath and charged forward.

"Your grandmother welcomed me into her house like I was some goody two-shoes hufflepuff off the street, not like the death-eater, muggle hating, mudblood torturing werewolf that I am! You should have told her! You should have told her the truth about me so she could have thrown me out! Better yet!" he yelled while spinning to face her again, "I wouldn't be here to begin with! Then I'd be happily miserable back in Bloody England where my sinful arse deserves to be!" Draco was starting to deflate. "I don't deserve your kindness." He put his hand to his face and for the second time she saw his shoulders shake while he cried. "I don't deserve to feel like I could end up happy. I don't deserve to be happy. You don't know…"

"What don't I know Draco?" Rae asked in a steady voice, but not a sympathetic voice, which caught Draco off guard enough to look up at her. Rae asked him again, "What don't I know? Is it that you change into a manic, raging beast every month, oh and sometimes a werewolf too? Or that you tortured and killed innocent people during the war? Is it the feel of Crucio leaving my wand that I don't know? Or the Avada that's supposed to evade my knowledge? Is it the threat of everything you've ever lived and breathed for being taken away from you that I should be wary of? Or the fear that you are turning into the people you hate that should scare me? Because I know all of these things, Draco Bloody Malfoy."

To say he was shocked was the understatement of the millennium. Rae was good. Rae was light. She couldn't know about the things she was describing. Rae just continued though, "Draco I have all the empathy in the world for you and what you went through and the lack of support you had. The fact that you couldn't get out or risk your family being BBQ'd, I would have made every decision you did. I can't blame you for the things you've done because I would have made many of the same choices. You act like the world is black and white Draco, like you're dark and I am light, well let me clue you in on a secret Draco, there are more shades of gray than you or I could ever hope to understand. I used just as many unforgivables during the war as you did."

Draco ignored the fact that he didn't know what BBQ meant but he couldn't believe what he was hearing. "No. You're- you're-"

"I'm what, Draco? I'm the good guy? I shouldn't know what it feels like to hold a man twice my size under the cruciatus curse because he thought I'd be an easy target to get off on?" Rae had tears in her own eyes now remembering all these images she had kept buried. She closed her eyes to say, "Draco, you are not the only one who hurt, and got hurt, during this war. I know what a crucio feels like, just like you, and I know what it feels like to use it on someone else. I know what slicing hexes feel like when you're pinned to the ground and the man above you is laughing at your pain, watching the blood seep from your skin. I know what it's like to watch the life leave that man's eyes after my wand aimed the Avada at him." Draco could have dropped dead right there. There was no way that what she was saying was true, but if she was inferring what he believed she was, he couldn't blame her.

Rae continued, "I know what it's like to have scars I don't want to see and to cover up my past from myself and everyone else. But," she took a deep breath and with tears in her eyes, she opened them and said, "but once we let it out, let that pain go, we have to move on with our lives. If we let the people that hurt us win over and over again then what good was it surviving it? You are not perfect Draco, but neither am I."

"And before you say anything," she held her hand up to him, "My Nana knows everything. She knows your past and she knows mine." Draco was once again silenced. Rae said, "I'll admit I didn't want her to know anything. I didn't want her to know what I had done and what I'd been through, but I couldn't bring you here without her knowing the kinds of things you have done, and I couldn't rightly tell her about you without admitting about myself." She kept her eye contact with him now, tears resolving. "I hated every minute of reliving that time in my life. I've worked so hard to move on from it. But do you know what she said when I was done?"

Draco shook his head because words were still escaping him.

"She said nothing." Rae said. "She hugged me and let me cry." Rae had started pacing. "She didn't cry until I showed her my scars," Rae wasn't looking at him anymore, she was looking at her memories as they passed her eyes. "That was the hardest part. That made it real. I hid my scars for so long because I knew revealing them to her made it all real. The war wasn't just some nightmare, or story, it happened. The pain I remembered was real. The darkness in my own heart I'd felt at times was real. But it's why I'm here today. I wouldn't have survived otherwise. I would've been beaten, tortured and worse - worse than I was anyway." Rae was looking at her feet now, mumbling through the last part.

"Even after seeing the scars, she told me she was proud of me. That this guilt and hurt I felt, made me human. She was proud that I hadn't been desensitized to it all. That I could only be considered evil if I hadn't thought anything of the pain I had inflicted…" Rae looked at him then. "Do you know how long I had tried to forgive myself by telling myself that I shouldn't feel guilty because I was only hurting the bad guys? But not everyone was truly evil. Some of the people I hurt, they felt love for someone else, I'm sure. You know better than I do that many of the death eaters were forced into their role. It doesn't matter which side of a war you fight on, people leave people behind to miss them, people that loved them. It was those people I felt guilty for. The kids who wouldn't see their father again, or wife who would never sleep in her husband's arms again. But, it was war, and there were casualties, and I was determined not to be one of them." Rae moved to sit down on the ground and Draco followed sitting next to her.

"It wasn't until somebody else showed me that we all have dark and light in us, and sometimes the dark parts of us break through. For some people more than others. But it's the side we try for, the part of us that we make an effort to become more of that makes us who we are."

Rae moved close to Draco, looking into his eyes. She could tell he was praying to anyone who would listen that maybe what she was telling him was true. "I don't consider myself an evil person, Draco. If I am not evil, then neither are you. Because everything you just told me about not deserving to be happy, is bullshit. If you were a person that truly didn't deserve the things that are coming to you now, you wouldn't give a fuck that you shouldn't have them." As she said this she took his arm in her hands, and rolled up his sleeve to reveal the dark mark.

"I believe you are light too, and that you can be good if someone let you fucking try for a change." She kept her eyes on his arm as she spoke, and he kept his eyes on her face. "You weren't thinking like a dark wizard when you lied about knowing who Harry, Hermoine and Ron were. You weren't thinking like a dark wizard when you threw Harry his wand at the battle. And you had to work harder, I'm sure, to pull those stunts off and live than you would have if you had just gone with the flow and let shit hit the fan." Rae met his eyes now and ran her hand over the dark mark on his arm, "That's what I see your true nature being. That man. That man that did everything he could given his circumstances to protect what he loved while undermining the dark lord in any way possible. Draco Malfoy, the light side would not have won but for your interference. And this," she brought his arm up between them now with her fingers wrapped wholly around his mark, "means nothing to me about who you are, this is who you had to be for a short time to survive, and nothing else. Do you understand me?"

Draco had never thought about his actions in those moments the way she was describing now. He just knew that they were things he couldn't let the Dark Lord have. He was miserable living under the same roof with that mole rat and hated the feeling of helplessness that accompanied his time as a death eater. He had seen everything he had done as purely selfish if not stupid, but Rae looked at him now like some kind of miracle. Maybe he could do this. Maybe he could let himself be happy again. It would be a long walk to that place, but he thought, if Rae would help him, he could do it.

Draco looked at Rae's eyes. They were a rich green and full of understanding, something he hadn't seen in another person in a long time. He took a deep breath and said, "Okay."

"Okay?" Rae asked with a grin starting to appear.

"Yeah, I'll try." He said.

"That's all I've wanted this whole time, Draco." She smiled and hugged him. They had a lot of work ahead of them but at least now they had one less thing working against them.