A/N: No words for how blown away I am by the loveliness of the reviews. No words. None. Thank you guys so much! It absolutely means the world, and I'm forever grateful for every single one.
Anyway, I give you angst as gratitude. With plenty more to follow.
Draco sat silently by Marilyn's bedside, as he had done ever since they'd brought her to St. Mungo's - by portkey, not wanting to subject her to even more distress and a possible splinching by attempting apparation, even if she was unconscious. It was best not to risk it. It was that same mindset that had gotten her a private room, in an even more private ward of the hospital. Whether they were trying to keep the press out, or Draco's own family, he wasn't sure - but he wasn't eager to ask, either. Nobody offered the information freely, which likely meant whatever news there was regarding the world outside of this room...well, it likely wasn't good. To the surprise of absolutely nobody, he supposed. But as it was, he was balancing precariously on the small shred of goodwill he'd seized - both from his role in the rescue, and thanks to the vouching the golden trio (as the press had taken to calling them) had done. He wasn't about to put that at risk by demanding newspapers or for word from the rumour mill.
If he was being totally honest, he didn't even want to know. Indeed, he clung to his ignorance like a blanket. So long as nobody mentioned it, and he did not ask, he could pretend it wasn't happening. He could save that battle for when he had the strength for it.
Anyway, the aforementioned goodwill that he was resting on was given only with the utmost begrudgement, judging by the withering stares any and every mediwitch and mediwizard levelled at him whenever they passed the doorway. But Granger had argued fiercely that whatever trivial protocol they'd observe by kicking him out after visiting hours were up was hardly worth the distress that Marilyn would be in, should she find herself yet again in an unfamiliar place, surrounded by equally unfamiliar witches and wizards...and the hospital had listened. A good thing, too, for he'd been quite ready to wreak havoc if they tried to make him leave. But he'd kept that intention to himself, waiting for if it was needed - and was admittedly relieved that it was not.
It had been a long day, followed by an even longer night, and it was now stretching on still into the early hours of the morning. Marilyn's injuries looked worse under the bright lights of the hospital - her face paler, the wounds on her face all the more angry, the blood that had gathered around them standing out in stark contrast to the grey pallor of her skin. He'd forced himself to watch every step of the process as they healed her. They'd allowed him to stay for that too, much to his surprise, but he suspected that was more to do with how surface-level the wounds were rather than any goodwill he'd earned. The only injuries they could tackle while she was asleep were the surface ones. Cuts, scrapes, and bruises. But he'd kept his eyes glued to them for every step of the process, as they dabbed Essence of Dittany onto her face to heal the scratches, and then dabbed some sort of salve across the steadily forming bruises on her face and wrists to soothe and get rid of them.
Every so often the younger healers would glance towards him nervously - the ones who would've been mere first and second years during the war. Not old enough to truly hate him for his part in it, but certainly old enough to know of him. The villain from a tale they'd heard their families tell and retell a hundred times over in the last decade. One of the few who yet lived, at least. He put himself through the strange looks, too - as penance. That's what all of it was. Everything he had to witness and sit through by not allowing himself to flee and hide. It wasn't the same as having those wounds inflicted on him, but seeing as he was the cause of them he felt the very least he could do was bear witness to every single one, so that he mightn't delude himself into thinking it wasn't that bad.
And now there was nothing left to do but wait for her to wake up. He'd been reassured that it would be in the early hours of the morning. They could have forced the matter - forced some sort of medicinal smelling salts under her nose to jolt her into wakefulness, but it was decided that a tactic such as that could very easily do more harm than good. Incite a panic bigger than the one already on the way. This way, she'd wake up when she was good and ready...and hopefully be groggy enough to remain as calm as they could reasonably expect her to be until she adjusted.
It was almost funny. The denial in which he'd managed to cloak himself in up until now. There were different layers to it - different brands, depending on the situation - but that's what it had been every single time. Denial. In the beginning, it was that he would keep her at arm's length. That he'd spend enough time with her to satisfy his curiosity regarding Muggles, until she inevitably proved a disappointment and then he would disappear. It's not like they might cross paths in Diagon Alley - it wouldn't be awkward, or messy. Or so he'd thought. Now mess was all there was. Then, of course, he'd kidded himself that they could just be friends. Distant friends. There to hear the woes of the other, and provide distraction when real life got tough, with the whole point being that those real lives would never clash.
He'd fooled himself into thinking that nobody from his world would find out about her, and when proven otherwise he pretended that the danger wasn't real. That they'd satisfied themselves with one botched attempt at an attack and would leave after that. That they could take down the attackers without anybody else in the community finding out - especially not his family - that they'd get this all sorted out with all of the rewards and none of the consequences. That he had any power to stop himself from caring for the Muggle woman he'd quickly come to spend most of his time either with, or looking forward to seeing. Delusions. All of them. And rather than paying the price for them himself, it had been Marilyn who reaped the consequences of his foolishness.
Anybody could have seen it coming. Even somebody with less than the combined intelligence of Crabbe and Goyle - with Crabbe still being dead. Looking back on that first terrible decision to keep seeking her out, he should have been able to see this happen in slow-motion, like the replays at Quidditch matches. But he'd been so focused on what he wanted to do, that he didn't bother to pay much mind to what he should have been doing. Wasn't that just the story of his life?
Huffing a sigh, he sat back on the cheap and terrible rickety wooden chair that they'd placed by the bedside (he was convinced they'd chosen one with uneven legs purposely upon knowing it was for him), and cast a glance towards the window. The sky was beginning to lighten - turning from black to deep blue. The countdown until she woke up was well and truly upon them, and he still had no idea what he might say. That had always been a problem for later. Shit, the multitude of ways of which this could (and did) go wrong had always been problems for later. Last night he hadn't even dared to hope that they really would save her, nevermind that enough of her mind would remain so as to require an explanation. A conversation.
The most he'd considered the matter was to reserve it for a problem to be addressed at a later date, always with the assumption that he'd know what to say when the time came. Well, the time was knocking at the door and he was still drawing a blank. What could he even say? What clever twist of words could possibly allow him to pretend he wasn't in the wrong here? Well, I never told you that I wasn't a wizard? Such a blatant attempt at shirking blame would only make her truly despise him, if he wasn't already doomed to that fate.
And the battle wasn't done yet. They'd yet to see just how much of her wits Marilyn had managed to retain. That was one of the few things (or one of the only things, rather) that he did not feel quite so pessimistic about. She'd had enough sense to test him, even without fully understanding what veritaserum was and how it worked. The memory still filled him with pride, even if it was dampened by the horror and the fear and the dread. But it was there. And it was something. No, if that was how she'd been immediately following the torture, he allowed himself to be cautiously optimistic as to how she'd fare after some real rest and care.
More worrying, perhaps, were the Aurors stationed at either side of the door. They served as a stark reminder of the fact that they'd eliminated this threat - the keyword there being 'this'. The process of doing so, however, had exposed them to countless others, not least of all his own family. Once upon a time, the Malfoys had been the paragon of blood purity and everything those who valued it stood for. It stood to reason that there would be those who keenly sought to now use them to make a different sort of example; one that showed everybody what happened when somebody of the Sacred Twenty-Eight sullied themselves with Muggles.
His mother had had two sisters, but he'd only ever met one - his delightfully demented auntie Bella. The other was never spoken of, except for in snide tones of overt disgust. Andromeda, the one who fell for a Muggleborn, and was swiftly disowned for her troubles. Draco wasn't naive enough to think he would get off that likely. Andromeda had not been sole heir to the Black name and fortune. Andromeda did not have Lucius Malfoy for a father.
Draco Malfoy was not used to feeling small. It brought him back to the war, feeling trapped inside his own home as the Dark Lord used it as a base of operations. A similar sensation was overcoming him now, though, as though he were a fly, trapped in a web and able to feel it shifting around him as the spider neared, but unable to see it. He could practically feel the reverberations throughout the pureblood circles, his parents spinning lies and explanations alike as they tried to track him down to seek out the truth behind what must be terrible lies made to sully the Malfoy name. As if the last ten years hadn't already done that.
She looked strange in the hospital bed. Not quite dead, thank Merlin, but now like she was sleeping, either. No, this was a far cry from the view he'd all but drank in back when they'd shared that hotel suite in London - her, asleep, strewn across the bed like some sort of explicit painting with her hair in disarray and her arms tangled in the sheets, the covers one slip away from denying her any modesty at all. Now she was stiff and unnatural, lying on her back with her hands placed straight down at either side of her. The sight did little to reassure him. It only served as a stark reminder of how much things had changed since the mornings that had given him the basis for comparison.
The sky outside was a dull slate grey by the time she did start to show signs of waking. Draco had been zoned out at the time, looking through her more than at her, his mind flitting from dilemma to disaster without ever fully settling on one (there were plenty to choose from, after all), when it happened. At first he wasn't sure if he'd been imagining it - the twitching of her eyelids, followed by a slight shake of her head. But before he could even bring himself back to reality to wait for more signs, there was no questioning them.
Her head turned again and she gave a sigh, followed quickly by a groan, and even that sounded pained and raspy. Torn between relief and dread, Draco leaned forward in his seat and reached for her hand - but his fingertips had barely brushed it before he thought better of the idea and pulled it back again. The contact didn't go unnoticed, though, and her hand twitched, fingers curling slightly while her eyes squeezed shut as if she was trying to open them but couldn't quite remember how.
New questions joined the barrage in Draco's mind - although these ones were thankfully much more short-term and manageable in the long run. Did she know where she was? Would she awaken in a blind panic, ready to lash out at whomever was closest, or hazy and groggy and unaware of her surroundings? He didn't have to wait long for an answer. Her eyes opened the slightest amount, so slightly it was difficult to tell if they even were truly open, and that seemed to be what it took to have reality piercing through whatever fog the calming draught had put her into.
The previous groan morphed into a whimper, and she breathed in so sharply he almost worried it would harm her lungs and she seemed to try to will herself into wakefulness, fighting the slowness that she'd been forced into like somebody fending off an attack of sleep paralysis, her limbs twitching like they were being held down by invisible restraints.
He couldn't sit back and watch any longer - he'd spent his entire night sitting back and watching, it was getting unbearable. Draco leaned forward and this time he didn't allow himself to draw back when he touched her, tentatively bringing a hand up to the side of her face.
"Marilyn," he said it quietly, like he was trying to get her attention without alerting anybody else "Look at me."
It was like his touch had snapped her free of whatever sleep-addled constraints she'd found herself trapped under, her eyes flying open as her hands came up in a panic both to shield her face and fend him off. It was disheartening. There were no two ways about that, and he felt like flinching himself when he saw how she cowered, and a grim sort of resignation washed over him. Of course. Whether it was because of what she'd been through, or because going through it had left her frazzled, it stood to reason that she would fear him now.
...But that resignation was made worth it when she finally looked at him, only once she'd swept her gaze around the room and established some sort of awareness of her surroundings, and recognition sparked there. And then she relaxed. Not totally - there were no smiles, no laughs, no jokes, but she lowered her arms and sank into the bed, fingers gripping the covers like doing so took great concentration and effort. And then...Well, Draco continued to wait. He slowly sat back down again, this time on the bed by her legs, and simply watched her.
Her chest continued to heave with every breath she took, eyes still flickering around every now and then like she was expecting the room to change suddenly. Then, finally, she looked to him again, brow creased in a deep frown.
"What the fuck, Draco?" She rasped.
He pressed his lips together. It wasn't the first question he'd expected to be asked, but it was as good a start as any.
Marilyn sat back in a bed. A hospital bed. A magical hospital bed. Her face had been healed, the rope burn around her wrists vanished - but her gums were still cut up, she could taste the blood every time she swept her tongue across them, but likely only because they hadn't found that injury. How could they have? They wouldn't have thought to check. And she wouldn't tell them. It was the only physical reminder on her that it had all happened. That it wasn't some batshit hallucination she'd dreamt up in the midst of another fit. That she wouldn't open her eyes in a psych ward any moment now, soon to discover that she'd had some kind of episode on her way to work and dreamt up a world where her lover was some sort of warlock and she'd been tortured by psychopaths with magic wands. She pressed her tongue into her gums, the pain it caused grounding her.
Draco was sitting in the chair by her bed, just as silent as she was, his face devoid of any emotion. Every so often during his explanations, she watched in her peripheral vision as he looked to her, perhaps worried that she was about to completely lose it, but whatever he saw must've reassured him that there was no impending breakdown on the way, and then he'd avert his gaze once again. Maybe he was just worried that if he continued to stare, he'd really push her over the edge. She couldn't argue with that assessment.
"So you're a...magician."
"A wizard," he corrected solemnly.
"And that's why…"
How could she even finish that sentence? Why there was so much about basic everyday things he didn't know? Why he didn't have a phone or any means of contacting her without actually being there in person? Why he'd never seen a film? Why they couldn't be together? Why she'd been kidnapped and tortured? Shit, which one to ask first?
"Yes."
It seemed that was the answer to whatever she might've been tempted to ask.
"But why? Why me?"
"I...I thought you were one of us. That night we met. The stick in your bag - I mistook it for a wand. I didn't realise you were a Muggle until it was too late."
She might've taken issue with the final part of what he said - 'until it was too late', like she was some dangerous beast, and spoken glumly at that, as though terribly aggrieved by what she'd turned out to be - but it was the word that came before that made her flinch. Muggle.
"What's a Muggle?" She had to force the word out "Those women - those witches, they called me that, too. What does it mean?"
"It's the word we use for non-magical people. People who aren't witches or wizards."
"And...and you hate us for it? They said it was like an insult."
"Some do. It's…complicated."
"I'll try to wrap my stupid little Muggle brain around it," she snapped.
She couldn't not. After what she'd been through, she thought she more than deserved the effort it would take him to explain something, slightly tricky or no.
He didn't flinch under the scorn behind her words, in fact he offered no reaction at all beyond a slow nod as he visibly thought through what he wanted to say next. It was difficult to decide whether that made her feel better or worse than she might have if he'd been bothered by it...but in truth, she suspected there was very little that would make her feel better in that moment. All her display of anger got her was a feeling of overwhelming exhaustion. Futility. It seemed to be the theme of her week.
"There was a war. A couple of wars, really, but the last of them was around ten years ago now and the first was...well, before I was born. A dark wizard rose up, declaring that magic was might. That those who were not magical, or not the right sort of magical, should be...subjugated. He was defeated, but there are still those now who share his views. It's...well, it's an old viewpoint. He didn't exactly have to scrounge for followers."
"A war? Against Muggles?"
How could that be? How could a war have gone on right under their noses while they'd all been none the wiser?
"Not directly. They'd have never won," he didn't say it haughtily, like it was an insult, just bluntly "Against those who came from Muggle families - Muggleborns, we call them, witches and wizards from non-magical families but with magical powers despite that. Others fought with them. Half-bloods, purebloods who disagreed with the cause...Sometimes they attacked Muggles, there was an attack on London, a bridge. Otherwise his...his plans for the Muggles largely remained a priority for once he'd managed to tear through the ones of our sort who could actually oppose him. There'd be the occasional torture by his followers, or even murder, but that was more sport than..."
"Than the genocide they were building up to."
He nodded slowly. It was clear he was struggling to find the right words, that this topic gave him great cause for distress, but she was too busy trying to wrap her mind around what she was being told, everything the last twenty-four hours had wrought, to feel overly sorry for him.
"So the millennium bridge? When it collapsed, that was...that was magic?"
Draco nodded "He would've moved onto enslaving them - you, had he won the war."
"But he didn't," she said it cautiously.
"He didn't," he confirmed "You've already met the ones who defeated him, the big heroes of the war - well, sort of. Granger, you've met. Her husband. You saw Potter back in that dungeon but…"
But she'd been too out of her mind with fear to really make introductions.
"But ten years ago they'd have all been so young."
"Teenagers. We all were."
Marilyn was silent for a moment, piecing it all together. It was a lot to take in. In fact, she was certain that she could be given the most comprehensive history tomes their world had, as well as a year to study them, and she'd still be left with questions and uncertainties. With disbelief. It didn't help that with every nugget of information, she now had to weave that through everything she knew - everything she'd previously thought that she'd known about Draco - and apply it to that. It was during that weaving process that she hit a snag, remembering the tale he'd told her over the weekend. It was all the more pronounced not only by his phrasing just then - his use of the word 'we' - but also by the outright haunted look in his eyes, making the icy grey of them seem all the colder, outright arctic.
"So this friend you lost in your teenage years? The one you told me about in London? That was...that was fighting in the war? You fought in the war?"
There was so much to grasp, and all of it at once. She felt like she was trying to discuss astrophysics with Stephen Hawking after taking an introductory high school science lesson. Draco's face was filled with sadness at her question - sadness she took to be over the memories her question dragged back up.
"I...I did fight in the war," he looked away and then wrenched his gaze back to hers, looking like he might be sick.
"Oh, Draco," she breathed "I'm so sorry."
No wonder he hadn't wished to discuss it. No wonder he seemed so harrowed at times, clearly miles away as the result of a single innocuous question or an accidental probing into a memory best left undisturbed.
But before she could say much else, he held up a hand just slightly, weakly, barely raising it at all really, causing her to fall silent.
"...But not on the right side," he added softly.
She stared at him. Waiting for his words to make sense. Waiting for them to mean something other than what it sounded like they meant.
"What?"
To his credit, something that she very much found herself struggling to give him now, he returned her gaze levelly, but not without chagrin, his jaw set.
"You fought for this man? This dark wizard?" She pressed.
He gave only the slightest of nods, and her breath caught in her throat.
"My family, they raised me to believe...believe the things he preached. My father followed him, during the first war. The path was set out for me before I was even born. By the time I started to doubt...well, there was no room for doubt. You don't leave the Death Eaters. Not if you have much desire to continue living."
And that was why Hermione hated him so. Why they'd gawked at them in the street back when they'd seen them together - why he'd been so eager so get her out of their sight. She could feel the blood draining from her face, it felt like somebody had pressed a mask of pure ice up against it, like it was on the verge of going numb.
"You have to understand," it was the most emotion she'd seen from him yet, his voice about as close as she figured it could get to desperate, entreating her to understand "The way I was taught. The sky was blue, the grass green, and Muggles weren't human. They were...they were animals. Lesser beings. That's what they believed. What I believed, until we met."
Until they'd met. Not until the war, not until he'd grown up a bit. Even just this time last year, he'd believed it.
"What, so I was some little experiment?" Her voice sounded horridly high pitched and frail even to her own ears "You're the David Attenborough of wizards? Is that what this was? Living among the Muggles to see if you could find rhyme or reason in our ways? You-you saw that I walk like a human, talk like a human, started wondering if I fuck like one, too?"
Oh god. Oh fuck. No. In a better frame of mind she might have laughed at herself. Witches and wizards she could handle - magic spells and potions and wands - but this? This was where she drew the line? Unsurprisingly, she didn't quite have the presence of mind to find much humour in it now.
"It was never that," he said sharply, apparently resentful that such an accusation might even cross her mind.
"Then what was it?"
"Real! It was real, Marilyn! I may not have told you the truth, but I never lied. I wouldn't have risked what I have if it wasn't! Had my parents found out, had anybody who knew me found out...I'd have lost everything."
She felt sick - truly, physically sick. It put real fear into her that she might ruin whatever ground she had in this spat by promptly vomiting all over herself. Wouldn't that be a great statement against the 'you're a mindless animal' bullshit? All this time she'd thought this barrier between them had been a class thing - the many rungs on the social ladder that lay between them - and then afterwards, even if only incredibly briefly this morning, she'd almost been oddly uplifted to find it wasn't that. No, it was magic. This strange and bizarre secret community that he'd been born into, that she wasn't permitted to know about. It was a strange relief. To think that it wasn't personal, that it was pure and simple (ok, not so simple) circumstance, and he had no say in the matter.
Any relief she'd managed to build over that was now gone. While the magical secrecy may have played a role, it was now nudged aside by this...this unwelcome revelation, if she was putting it delicately. What was it that Serana had called her? The memory of the woman put the tremble back in her hands, but she hid it by clenching them together in her lap and focused instead on remembering what she'd said. Livestock. Something like that.
So no, it seemed this wall between them wasn't purely made up of class boundaries, nor even of the rules that governed this community of witches and wizards, but of what she was. The fact that if anybody who knew him, from his side - the wrong side, as he himself had called them - found out about her, it would be the same to them as if they discovered he was out shagging sheep. It stung. Not quite so much as the curses she'd been subjected to the previous day, but it still hurt. More than she cared to admit. More than she hoped showed on her face.
It was difficult for her to feel anything positive where she sat now, in a hospital gown, the taste of blood permeating her mouth, in a foreign room, surrounded by a foreign culture, and coming to find that the one man she felt she'd grown to know well over the last few months was perhaps really the most foreign thing to her in the building. It was even more difficult not to feel like what he'd thought she was upon their first meeting, some lesser thing, a neanderthal - and she didn't even want to consider how long it might've taken her to change his mind, that thought would tear at the ache in her chest until it became a crater, hollowing it out entirely. What took the most effort on her part, though, was keeping her shoulders straight and the cracks from her voice as she answered his pleas to understand just how inferior everybody he cared about would view her as.
"Well, thank you for lowering yourself. It was good of you, really. A real act of charity."
Her eyes stung but she got the words out, steeling her throat against the sob that tried to follow them. She would not cry. She would not fucking cry. She had more questions, but she didn't dare trust her voice to get those out just yet. About yesterday, about the fit - no, the attack - that had come before it, that he'd stayed silent about. About twenty-thousand other things that she didn't want the answers to, but needed to know all the same. Whatever response he might've given to what she had managed to force out was interrupted - Hermione Granger stood in the doorway, a man with black hair and glasses beside her.
"We didn't mean to…" she looked between the two of them before visibly deciding to act like she hadn't noticed a thing "We have to speak to you, Marilyn."
Draco rose, fists clenched at his sides as he already took a few steps towards the door.
"You can stay if Marilyn would prefer," Hermione said quickly, before he could get much further.
All eyes turned to her. All except Draco's. Indeed, he was already continuing towards the door.
"He can stay," she croaked the words out just before he reached the door.
It made her sick to say it, but he was the only one in this entire fucking building that she really knew. Or, she supposed, who knew her. She could hardly still say that she knew him, could she? But still, the fact remained that he was the only one who could translate whatever they had to say to her into terms she understood. Who wouldn't talk down to her, or patronise her. Draco seemed as surprised as she was by her words - but not entirely happy about them. Instead he sat back down again stiffly, eyes glued to his hands resting in his lap like a moody teenager about to get chewed out by the headmaster for misbehaviour.
"It might be best that you hear some of this, anyway," the black haired man said to Draco, before turning to her and extending a hand, doing an admirable job at pretending not to feel the tension and the awkwardness that the room was fraught with, nor even the tears that were fast blurring her vision "My name is Harry - Harry Potter."