To RESimon and shestoolazytologin - I love you both dearly. Thank you for all that you do.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Draco pressed slow kisses along her shoulder, fingers tracing across the path of his lips. She moaned, leaning back into his touch as he continued to kiss her heated skin.

"Please…" she moaned louder as his other hand delved deeper between her legs, two fingers gently parting her folds and swirling slow caresses around her clit. They lingered only a moment before they curled deeper, gathering the moisture along their path as he gently pressed his spend back inside her.

"Don't waste it," Draco murmured into her skin.

She twitched and shuddered, her uncontained moans stifled by silencing charms as her fingers grasped at the thick blankets their transfigured clothing had made. He pulled his hand out of her cunt and she let out a low whine as he traced his slick fingers over her skin and turned her onto her back. She watched him quietly as he braced himself on an elbow above her, starting his exploration of her body anew. He started at her collarbone, eyes following the path of his hands. She took in the way his brow furrowed in a way that was both familiar and unfamiliar, focused yet relaxed, eyes almost twinkling whenever his fingers found a spot that made her gasp.

When caught a nipple between his fingertips and pinched lightly, she arched up, eyes fluttering open in time to catch the moment a shadowed figure ducked out of the tent in the distance.

"Draco!" Her cry of alarm was warbled around a gasp of pleasure, but he paused as she caught him by the arm nonetheless, his eyes following in the direction of her own.

Harry moved across the clearing and toward the trees, far enough away from them and their cocoon of silencing and concealment charms that her heartbeat shouldn't have spiked the way it did.

"He's going to pass the wards," she said, shuddering as Draco started to slowly circle his thumb around her nipple once again, teasing her as her arm slackened. "We— we should—"

"He's fine," Draco murmured, his strokes growing bolder, more deliberate. "And he can't see us. But if you want to…" he started to trail his finger lower as he spoke, "...then ask me to stop."

She tried to think through the haze of pleasure she caught another movement in the corner of her eye. She turned toward it, half-expecting a creature to scurry off through the bushes when she froze.

The silver-white glow was unmistakable as it moved through the night, simultaneously corporeal and ethereal.

A silvery doe patronus, standing a few dozen feet away from them in the night.

A few feet beyond it, Harry's shadowed figure moved toward it, matching the doe's measured steps with his own.

"We should follow him," she started, forcing the words out over another moan.

"I've seen it before," Draco said, gently spearing his fingers in her cunt now, "in the trees. Outside the cabin— several times. It knew us— knew we were there. It's safe." He pitched his voice lower as he eased his cock into her, sweat clinging them together as he pressed his weight down upon her. "I promise."

Hermione barely managed a nod before she let her eyes fall shut, only able to focus on the way he started to grind his hips into hers steadily, creating more delicious friction against her clit.

"Look at me." His command was little but a whisper, but her eyes shot open to meet his nonetheless. His eyes narrowed as she did, his hips snapping into hers in the same instant. The choked moan she let out in response propelled him forward again and again, amplifying her pleasure while she tried to stifle her moans.

"Don't," he said, snapping his hips forward once more before rolling himself in a slow grind directly against her clit, "let me hear you."

X

"Draco," Hermione raised an eyebrow at him as she held her hand out expectantly.

Draco said nothing, his eyes continuing to slowly rove her body as he held her freshly transfigured brassiere and shirt in his hand. Her nipples had already puckered in the light breeze, hardening further under his gaze.

There had been a time when she would have dressed hastily and retreated to the bedroom. Another time, still, where neither of them would have lingered, instead focusing on the mission at hand. Now, though, she stood still and watched him watch her. There was something beyond desire in his eyes, something raw that simultaneously made her heart clench.

It was him who eventually stepped forward, dressing her slowly as his fingers swept over her most sensitive parts in slow, deliberate movements. When he fixed the hem of her shirt, she pulled him into a deep kiss. "We should check on Potter," Draco said as she pulled back. Although the words had left his mouth, his fingers had yet to untangle from hers.

She felt the pressure of his grip tightening on hers while her own eyes were trained on the tent where the flaps still swayed lightly in the breeze, as calm as the night around them. It was the antithesis of what lay beyond them, Ron a storming enigma within. "I have to talk to him," she said. "Maybe everything that's meant to have been said has been said, but I knew him once — not this him, but who he really is — or was, but I just need to…"

She trailed off as Draco's grip on her slackened, his fingers slowly dropping hers. "Go."

She searched his eyes for a moment, seeing the sincerity reflected in them. "I'll be okay," she reassured him, feeling the low, almost infestismal pulse of his buried tension curling within him.

He nodded. "I'll find Potter."

X

She stepped quietly into the tent, half-expecting Ron to be fast asleep. She paused when she realized that he was sitting up, his eyes on her as she straightened.

The silence felt thick, cloying as it clawed at her lungs. His eyes didn't move from her form, leaving her feeling trapped as she stood there, unsure if moving would force a break in the silence — unsure if a break in the silence was what she wanted at all.

Still, it was her that forced out the first words. "I'm not in the mood for anymore insults or you degrading me in any fashion," she said, taking one step forward and then another as the anger she'd suppressed flooded back into her form. "If there is anything that you would like to say, the only thing I will tolerate is a thank you."

She had already made several more steps toward her trunk when he spoke. "Thank you." Ron's words were low, yet unmistakable.

Her back was already to him, and she tensed as she spoke her next words, predicating whether she would turn to him fully or not on the next answer he would give. "If you're only saying it as a precursor to a but, then I do not want to hear it —"

"I am," he said, his voice stronger now. "Full stop."

Something in her buckled as she turned to him, feeling aflame. "Then why? Why this, why now?" She stepped closer to him, and as she stepped into the light a part of her buried beneath her broiling anger felt immediate relief to see the way color had fully blossomed back in his features. "I'd thought — foolishly, perhaps — that when you sent that letter, that when you acknowledged that it really, truly wasn't our time, that you believed it. That you would move on. That you could try, even though I know that I'd broken your heart over and over again. I felt selfish, for so long. And then when I came back and saw pure hatred in your face —"

"— I never hated you —"

"You did!" Her voice boomed across the tent, her outburst taking her by as sudden of a surprise as it did him. For a pregnant moment, the only sound that filled the tent was that of her labored breaths. "You did," she repeated as she continued. "You did. Because at first I'd thought it was only the locket, but tonight — tonight it felt like any progress that I thought we had made, any chance that I thought we had had to salvage something of our friendship has just been dashed away as if it hadn't happened at all." She paused then, still breathing heavily with the force of her words.

"Lavender's dead," Ron's voice broke over the words.

Another silence, this time devoid of any sound at all.

"When?" Hermione breathed. Her mind whirled as she remembered the night she had snuck into a safe house, when the first thing she had seen was Ron slumbering in an armchair, Lavender wrapped in his arms —

"We — I made a mistake," Ron said, lips trembling. "She wanted to come on a mission with us. We said no a thousand times, but she was persistent. Said we couldn't do it alone — said we needed someone. We could've taken anyone else. Gone back to the Order for someone with the training and experience that we needed, but I just — caved. I was trying to give it another go, and I thought that keeping her close to me would be best for the time being at least. In case we ever ended up on the run…" He mashed his lips shut, his entire form seeming to tremble.

She stepped closer, reaching out to him. "Ron —"

He held up a hand, stopping her. "We figured out where the locket was. It was at the Ministry, wrapped around Umbridge's neck. It was hard, getting in at first. There was a point where we thought we would make it out. But I made a mistake. I—" I he cut off with an open sob, matching his mouth shut once more as he swallowed it.

She forced herself to remain silent, seeing his need to finish out what he was saying despite how badly she wanted to go to him, to hold him, checking his vitals, at the very least —

"— I made a mistake," he repeated. This time, his voice was devoid of all emotion, hollow around the words he spoke. "I Apparated to Grimmauld as we tried to get away. I didn't notice that Yaxley was holding onto her. I panicked. I tried to swat him off first, but he managed to get out a curse before we shook him." He took in a shaky breath. "It didn't seem that bad, at first. We took her to Pomfrey once we had gotten back to a safe house and were certain we were safe. She hadn't seen anything like it before, so she did some research. By the time we Checked back on her an hour later, the curse was already going up her arm. All of her veins — they were turning black."

Hermione sucked in a sharp breath and she remembered Seamus' mother's blackened veins, the empty look in her eyes.

"By dinner, they'd cut it off. She had a hard time at first, trying to live without it. We tried to regrow it, but nothing would work. She had a hard time sleeping at night, and Pomfrey said that they were normal. Phantom pains. It wasn't until someone else was hit by the same curse that we realized that they'd modified the curse she thought she had identified. This one — it wasn't reversible. Cutting off her arm only made it worse. It was six months before she took her last breath. The way she suffered—" His voice broke as he forced out his next words, "it shouldn't have lasted more than six days."

Hermione's heart thudded in her chest as she recognized the raw despair in his eyes. Her hand ghosted over her chest, clutching at her heart as she had so often in the days that she had been all but catatonic after she'd first encountered the curse herself.

"I swatted at him," Ron said. "Harry shot a stunner, but it missed him by inches. But I was closer. If I could've killed him —" his voice broke again. "I could've killed him in that moment before he shot the curse. It was the longest second of my life. I thought that being good men was not doing it — I thought that being good meant that killing someone would be the hardest thing I could ever do. You did it, though. So easily — with a flick of your wand and he was dead. Just so that you could save my life, when I didn't even want saving."

"Ron," Hermione's voice was as tight as her chest, "anyone could have made that mistake. Anyone." I could have, she said, swallowing the words as she once again felt the everlasting burn of all the could haves and should haves she'd uttered of late.

He looked up at her then, a tear slipping down his bruised cheek. "She told me — she told me that she wasn't ready to die. Not yet."

And Ron broke. She watched it in slow motion— the way he collapsed inward, his chest heaving as he let out a loud sob.

"Ron," she whispered as she caught him in her arms, wrapping her arms around him in a feeble attempt to soothe a wound she knew would never truly heal.

This fic will now be updated weekly on Tuesday evenings until it is complete.