Here it is! This is the first in a few VERY BIG back to back chapters. A lot is about to change in TSP. Trust me, we have a long way to go in this story.
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter.
"You ready, Princess?"
Hermione started at Blaise's question. He was at her side, as the small group of Order Members knelt at the edge of the Malfoy property, preparing to storm the Manor.
"What did you ask me?" she whispered.
He raised an eyebrow. "I asked: you ready, Princess?"
As the words hit her once again, she understood why they sounded so familiar.
In her mind she saw a different mission, a different friend at her side, a different Manor, and a different Slytherin to save.
Look how far they had come, she thought bitterly.
"That's what Fred asked me," she murmured, tucking a stray tendril of hair behind her ear. It had fallen out of her typical mission high ponytail. She was wearing black jeans, a leather jacket. Muggle clothes again, unless the difference would attract attention.
This moment could've been a month ago. Or a year ago. Or even three years ago, on her first Order mission ever.
But no. As her green eyes surveyed the lawn in front of the gothic manor, she knew this could not be any moment but now. She could only be here.
"What?" Blaise asked, shifting her focus back to him.
"Right before the Zabini mission," she muttered. "Right before we rescued you."
Blaise chuckled. "What goes around comes around, eh?"
"Different snake to save this time."
"A little different. You weren't shagging me."
Before Hermione had the chance to swat at Blaise, she felt Seamus stiffen beside her, where he was flanking her other side. They hadn't spoken this morning. When she showed up in the kitchen, he had handed her a coffee, given her a small nod, then retreated.
Their conversation was swarming her brain. She couldn't get it out of her head; another life, another universe. But every version of Hermione, in every corner of the galaxy, would search for someone else.
But was she wrong for wishing she could give him something? For wishing she could love him the way he loved her? Seamus wasn't nothing to her. He had never been. But she knew. She couldn't choose him the way he chose her.
She wouldn't choose him in the end.
Her mark tingled.
"Are you ready?" Lupin asked from down the line, finding her eyes and breaking her out of her reverie. The mission consisted of her, Blaise, Seamus, Neville, who felt he owed Draco, and Tonks. A small group. An extraction battalion.
She had always hated mission language.
The plan was simple. Lupin had it on good authority from Kingsley's sources that Voldemort was currently out of the country, somewhere in Eastern Europe. The fact that he had left was not giving Hermione any comfort, but rather worry. What would he be searching for outside of England? Or who?
But at least it allowed them the knowledge that they weren't going up against Voldemort today.
Plants around the country, all their informants had had sightings of the major Death Eaters at alternate locations. Was it just good luck? Or misinformation? Hermione did not know. But thinking that Malfoy Manor was lightly protected gave her the courage she needed.
As the thought crossed her mind, she knew it was a lie. Rescuing Draco was not an act of courage. It was an act of necessity. Desperate, carnal necessity.
Given the time to think it over and after her conversation with Blaise the previous evening, she knew that her hollowness after the raid, that physical, bone-chilling hollowness, was because Draco wasn't there. Her mark recognized that they were separated. She knew it the way she had known something in class at Hogwarts, after reading about it for hours in the library.
But this time, it wasn't a book that gave her the knowledge. It was something intrinsic and from deep within her. As if her soul had a whole restricted section on her mark and was only giving her excerpts.
She may not know why, but she needed to save Draco, for all the reasons she had told the Order. It was fair, he had fought with them, he was owed their protection.
But something deeper was influencing her. Something she did not fully understand but had been passed down through generations. The pull she felt towards him was electric and the fact that she was mere moments from seeing him again lit her on fire.
"I'm ready," she answered Lupin, knowing now was the moment. Reaching into her pocket, she took out her wand, feeling it respond at her fingertips. The barely healed cut she had made in her palm was split open once again.
Blood. Wasn't it always blood?
The idea was simple. The wards at Malfoy Manor would be like those at the summer home, at any pureblooded house they had been to so far: blood based. Without Draco, they did not have a direct Malfoy familial connection.
They had something better.
Her magic now ran in Draco's veins. They now shared the most primal part of her, and with every one of his heartbeats, her magic pumped from his head to his toes.
Would the wards recognize the new power in Draco's veins? And in turn, would they recognize that that power was now a part of the Malfoy bloodline?
As she let drops run down her hand into the air, she felt the air give way.
Even the wards agreed. Her and Draco were linked.
The air shimmered and sparkled for a moment before becoming clear once again. Hermione took a tentative step forward. She was not thrown back. No alarm sounded.
The magic recognized her as Draco. She shivered at the thought.
She only had a moment to consider the implications. The ultimate, permanent implications. The feeling in her chest was without description, too all-encompassing for language.
Words rarely failed her.
And she would not fail Draco.
He felt the shift in the air immediately. His heartbeat began pumping faster, blood moving more swiftly in his veins than it had in days. It brought on a feeling of peace.
Which was quickly replaced by dominating dread.
"She's here," Draco whispered to his father. Lucius nodded, and turned to the others in the room.
His midnight hour had arrived. The mission was over.
What maybe at one point in his life would have given him relief, instead chilled his soul.
The full implications of what was about to happen hit him in waves, shaking him to his core. Any hope he had felt over the past few weeks, any moment where he had even considered Hermione and him, them, shattered before his eyes.
He had done it, hadn't he, he thought bitterly. He was about to deliver the Princess to the Dark Lord. She wouldn't leave him. That much he knew to be true, as he knew that the sun rose in the morning.
Not after everything. Not after she had given herself to him whole-heartedly and with everything she had. Not after she had jumped between him and death.
No. She would stay for him.
He had succeeded in his mission.
Then why did he feel like he had failed so thoroughly?
Draco looked away. He would not be a willing participant in his own destruction, he thought weakly.
But that wasn't true. He was the antecedent, the denouement, the plot.
He was responsible.
Gods, how would she look at him?
"The wards are down," Hermione whispered to the group. They nodded before Tonks cast a Delusionment charm on them all. The familiar trickle ran down her spine. The outlines of her comrades surrounded her.
They moved forward as a group. Her heart was pounding. Her mind was racing. With every step they took closer to the manor, she felt energy return, as if she was taking her first breath in years.
He was here. He was alive.
However, her feeling of return was matched by a slight feeling of dread. A franticness took over her steady heartbeat, and she felt sweat form on her brow.
She frowned. Was she just nervous because of the mission? At the concept of saving Draco?
No, something whispered at the back of her mind. Something else is going on.
She ignored it; her vision blinded by white-blond hair.
He stood next to his father, staring at the door which, in just a few minutes, the Order would come crashing through. He held his wand tighter. He hadn't had it in over a month. Feeling the familiar hawthorn wood beneath his fingers, the unicorn hair calling to him – it was comfortable.
But it also felt odd, as if it no longer fully recognized him.
He had come so far to not recognize himself.
There were no guards. That was her first clue that something was amiss.
Hadn't Draco said that Malfoy residences usually had four guards, which had tipped him off at the summer home when there had only been two? And here, none.
She didn't consider it long enough for it to make an impact on her. Instead, she burst through the door with determination.
She had only one thing in mind.
Her heart was beating faster.
His heart was beating faster.
What would she say? He wondered, trying to calm himself. Would she give him a chance to explain? Would she give him a chance to say that things had changed? That he had changed?
Because of her. Everything was because of her.
"Draco," Lucius hissed, his voice low. The other men waiting in the room with them glanced over for a moment but gave them no heed.
"Father," he whispered back, his voice shaking, which shook him to his core.
He was a Malfoy in his ancestral home. His voice shouldn't shake.
"Pull yourself together," Lucius muttered. "I understand that your emotions are…heightened because of Miss Le Fay but remember that she chose you as her Other. A Le Fay can't take that choice back."
But that doesn't mean she won't want to, Draco thought.
Once she knows everything she has chosen.
"Can you see anything?" she whispered to Lupin, as the group finished their sweep of the first floor.
He shook his head. "Empty. I mean, it looks like it's been occupied recently, but not right now."
She frowned. "Any sign at all?"
"I can hear voices," Lupin said, his lycanthropic abilities coming to assist. "Muted, dull voices. They can't be on this floor."
She couldn't hear anything.
"Blaise," she said, as the group reassembled. "What's on the second floor?"
"Drawing room," he replied. "Library, a couple offices."
She turned her eyes towards the massive staircase in the middle of the foyer.
"The only way to go is up."
He could hear footsteps now. With every second that passed, they grew louder.
"I cannot believe this," said a voice to his right. He gave Nott Sr a sparing look. Theo's father had been informed by Voldemort of Hermione's survival, and was practically shaking at the concept of seeing his niece after all these years.
Draco could barely stand it. Nott Sr was one of the vilest men he had ever met. The stories he had heard from Theo alone should have landed the man in Azkaban for life.
Not that Azkaban mattered anymore. Not that anything mattered anymore.
Not when Hermione was seconds away from learning everything.
At the very top of the stairs, after a long hallway was a large pair of double doors. She glanced towards Blaise, and he mouthed the words at her.
DRAWING ROOM.
She raised her wand, knowing that it was now or never. She watched her comrades do the same.
He had moments. He closed his eyes. It was now.
She blew the door open, the crash echoing through the dark halls.
He was the only one who didn't flinch or raise their wand when the door exploded off its hinges. He knew the spell was coming before it hit. He knew her.
She coughed as dust spilled into the air. Casting a small Lumos on the tip of her wand, she led the group forward.
He saw the light before he saw her.
She felt the trickle down her spine and knew the Delusionment spell was gone.
He saw her.
She saw him before anything else, of course. He was all she was looking for.
But as she opened her mouth, lips curving around the syllables of his name, she saw the rest.
The Order did too, falling into a tight formation with her as point.
The room had to contain ten Death Eaters. All hooded and masked, except Lucius Malfoy, and an old, sallow-faced man at his left-hand side.
But her eyes were only on Draco. She felt her mouth pop open as she saw his free hand clutching his own wand.
She recognized it immediately. That was not the wand she had given him the morning of the mission. This was the wand that had chosen him, at the age of eleven, in Ollivander's wand shop. How many times had she seen Draco Malfoy's wand? In classes for years, pointed at Harry at dueling practice, raised in the air in her nightmares.
And now he held it in his hand. His free hands.
She saw him.
In the span of a heartbeat, the pieces fell into place and she understood.
The puzzle was solved.
Merlin almighty.
How could she have been so stupid? Of course, it was planned.
It was always planned.
The pain ripped through her. She felt as if she couldn't breathe, couldn't think, couldn't move, couldn't do anything but stare at this beautiful man as he destroyed her so thoroughly.
Green eyes met grey…they were grey right now, with the soft sunlight sneaking in through the highest window. He looked... she did not know. She couldn't know. Did he even care? Had he ever cared? The night they had spent together flashed through her mind, and she couldn't stop the sound of pain she made, like a wounded animal.
He was standing on the wrong side of the room.
It was over. He saw it disappear before him. The façade was gone. He knew it. Now she did too.
And as she realized the extent of his betrayal, as pain danced behind her eyes and through his veins, he realized what he was giving up. What his deception had stolen from him. What standing on this side of the drawing room would cost in the long run, even if he would've regained favour with the Dark Lord, for his parents, for his family.
Everything he had every known crumbled beneath him as he realized what mattered. The only thing that could ever fucking matter. The only thing he cared about.
His heartbeat steadied. The final piece fell into place.
God and Merlin help him; he was standing on the wrong side of the room.
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