This slight on her friend infuriated Hermione to no end, of course, but she had little time to dwell on it; things were now happening far too fast. Even Draco's transformation was accelerated; another feature of this newly upgraded Polyjuice (yet a fourth feature was that Draco's clothes would transform along with him, adapting to Ron's superior height). A powerful shudder surged through his body, but for all its intensity it lasted only a couple of seconds, and then the thing was done- to all outward appearances it was Ron there beside her, eyes scrunched shut, body tight and trembling in the aftermath of the violent change it had just endured, booted feet braced hard against the cavern's rock wall.
"M- R- Malfoy-" Hermione stuttered, completely flustered. She knew all about Polyjuice Potion, of course; had studied its every aspect and application in textbooks, classes, and even Army training seminars. She'd brewed it herself, successfully, when still just a child. But she'd never seen it take effect before- her only personal experience with it had been that single botched attempt in second year, which had caused her to lock herself in Myrtle's toilet stall in horror. She hadn't witnessed Harry and Ron's transformations, and so she had nothing to compare this to. The reality of the transformation was stunning; it didn't look as if Draco had morphed into Ron, it looked as though he'd been replaced by Ron. This was her best friend, down to the last orange freckle; the stubborn little cowlick that would never lie flat.
Then Draco's eyes- only they were Ron's eyes now, that unmistakable oceanic blue- snapped open and fixed on her. His gaze was intense, pointed. He was obviously trying to convey something to her. A heartbeat later- and she had almost managed to collect herself by then, honestly she had- his hand flashed out and seized her wrist, yanking her own hand upward, into her line of sight and reminding her forcibly of the miniscule broomstick she held. Her lips parted in a dismayed little "o".
Draco didn't give her time to stall further. As a new volley of curses slammed into the wall alarmingly close to their heads, loosing a small avalanche of rubble down onto them, he grabbed both of her shoulders and gave her a single, hard shake, his eyes burning into hers, the message as clear as if he'd been shouting it;
Get a bloody move-on, already!
Grabbing for her wand, she hastily spoke the words that restored the broomstick to its original size and Draco was astride it in a single, fluid movement, pulling her on behind him.
And they were off, just like that, Draco launching them by literally hurling them over the edge of the outcropping into sheer, empty space and plunging them, initially, several yards straight down before recovering, spiraling gradually out of the dive.
Under these circumstances Hermione found herself absurdly grateful for the fact that Draco now resembled Ron down to the last minute detail; it made it far easier to wrap her arms around him so tightly that she must have been restricting his ability to breathe properly, and to slam her face into his back, burrowing in terror between his shoulder-blades.
On the other hand, it was only by reminding herself sternly that this was not, in fact, her beloved friend but Draco Malfoy, prat extraordinaire, that she was able to restrain herself from shrieking aloud in terror as the broomstick dodged, weaved, dove and rolled out of the way of the numerous spells that were now being hurled at it, making its way doggedly toward the cavern's main entrance; the only escape route large enough to fly out of. Had she opened her eyes, Hermione would have seen what Draco did; that the Death Eaters had scattered widely throughout the cavern and were now sending curses at the two broom-bound agents from six directions at once.
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Face set in grim lines of determination (just because he'd taken the precaution of downing that goddamned nasty potion didn't mean he'd actually reconciled himself to death today, not if there was anything to be done for it- his first priority now was to save Granger's arse for the valuable information she possessed, but he fully intended to bring his own arse along for the ride, thank you very much), Draco, for his part, very nearly managed to pull it off- a miracle escape, unscathed.
Nearly. But not quite.
He was almost to the exit when it happened, the Death Eaters scattered about on the ground amazed, outraged at his skill in flight; some of them literally hopping mad. And he probably would have managed to get them both out untouched if he'd been flying in "his own skin"- that is to say, if he'd still been in possession of Draco's body, not Ron's. It was just the slight discomfort he felt in the taller boy's body, the slight awkwardness of the too-long limbs, less aero dynamical than Draco's own- Ron's longer reach was well suited to his customary Quidditch position of Keeper, but his gangly build was less than ideal for the kind of intricate flying that was required in a good Seeker like Draco, or for that matter, was required right now.
And so the moment came where he dodged just a fraction of a second too slow and a particularly well-aimed curse- almost certainly from Bellatrix- slammed into Hermione from behind, nearly knocking her from the broom. Thank Merlin it wasn't the killing curse, which was equally lethal if it hit you in the pinky as if it hit you in the heart. It seemed, however, that Bellatrix had decided to get creative, start using a few personal favorites of her own. This particular one happened to be a knife-edge curse, which would have been just as deadly as the Avada Kedavra had it hit Hermione full-on, but fortunately all it had done was graze her shoulder, slashing it painfully, but not threatening her life. She reacted by tightening her arms convulsively about Draco's midsection and stifling a cry into his shirt.
That was when things really went wrong for Draco.
He felt the impact jolt through Hermione's body and knew she was hit, but because she was behind him he had no way of gauging how bad the injury was. In a momentary burst of panic- his first and only one so far- all he knew was that he needed to protect the hurt and frightened young woman who was clinging to him for dear life. The oath he had taken demanded he protect the information she now guarded, and more than that, instinct demanded that he protect her. No matter that he had never been able to stand the bossy little know-it-all; no matter that she had single-handedly gotten them both into this mess. He was male, she was female, he was sound, she was hurt, he needed to defend her, end of story. And though Draco was usually no more inclined to act impulsively than Hermione was- (though he had often behaved rashly and with false bravado in his school days, he had grown into a far more careful and methodical adult, otherwise he would never have had such success as a spy, even with all of Snape's tutelage)- the present circumstances did not allow time for a lot of deliberation.
So he acted instantly, instinctively, yanking the broom around one hundred and eighty degrees, placing himself squarely between Bellatrix and Hermione, shielding her.
Just in time to take one hell of a curse, dead on.
He barely kept hold of the broomstick, but managed through sheer grit and determination not to let go. It had been another of Bellatrix's curses, of course- (mad as the woman was, she seemed the only one out of all of them who was a halfway decent shot)- another bloodletting curse. The jet of light that had escaped her wand had actually transfigured itself into a solid, three-dimensional weapon something akin to a crossbow bolt- which was now protruding from the center of his chest, quivering from the impact, a warm wet stain, a shade darker than the black of his clothing, blossoming out around it.
Looking down at it, he mouthed Oh, shit- in complete silence, of course.
For a moment nothing happened. He and Hermione seemed suspended in space, in time. The Death Eaters below were all staring up with uniform expressions of shock on their faces, wands useless, forgotten- and Bellatrix, his own aunt, the crazy bitch, was lowering hers slowly, a triumphant smirk spreading across her face, apparently confident that her work was done, that it was only a matter of seconds before he toppled from the broomstick and Hermione, unable to manage it on her own, quickly followed suit.
He nearly did, too- actually began slipping sideways, his grip on the waxed wood handle loosening more from shock than anything else- the reality of the pain had yet to fully sink in. But he steadied himself, focusing on his aunt's sneering face below him. He had never liked the woman, not even when he had still been the dutiful son and Death Eater initiate. She had always reeked of a dangerous, feral insanity that had set his teeth on edge. Damned if he was going to give her the satisfaction of watching him fall off his broom.
Fuck. Her.
He blinked hard against the darkness that was beginning to bloom like flowers in front of his eyes. Not now. Clenching his jaw, he jerked the broom abruptly around again and was off like a rocket, back toward the entrance of the cavern, managing to catch just a glimpse of his aunt on the ground, raising her wand again but too late- her face contorted in furious disbelief.
Then they were into the corridor, the one that led either up to the surface or down even further, into the bowels of the earth. And Draco, now flying no more than half-conscious, made yet another mistake. All of his energy now channeled into simply avoiding the walls and floor, he took the turn which led down, rather than up.
Behind them, the shouts of the Death Eaters faded, as did the light from the bonfire that had illuminated the cavern. They were in nearly complete darkness when he felt Hermione shift behind him, removing one of her arms from around his waist- then she murmured "Lumos." Immediately they were surrounded by a soft, golden glow as Hermione clutched her wand in one hand, his shirt in the other.
"Malfoy," she said in a strained voice, "I really think we're going the wrong way, and- wait, why is your shirt so wet? What is-? Oh Merlin, is that blood? Malfoy?"
He finally lost it then, uncertain whether it was actually hearing the word blood that did it to him, or whether that was simply the moment that his body lost its ability to carry on, but for one reason or another the sort of cold shock he'd gone into was abruptly replaced by a great, rolling wave of white-hot, molten pain in his chest and he couldn't do it any more; couldn't navigate, couldn't see, couldn't breathe. With his last ounce of control, he pulled sharply back on the broom, bringing them to what Hermione, raised in the Muggle world, would called 'a screeching halt'. It was a violent enough end to their flight to toss them both off the broomstick altogether- fortunately, it had been flying dangerously low right there at the end, so they didn't have far to fall.
Hermione landed on her hands and knees and skidded, scraping herself badly on the rough-hewn stone floor. Draco, for his part, retained enough consciousness and will to twist himself in the air- a nearly feline feat- in order to come down on his side rather than risk landing face-first, which would have driven the arrow-like thing in his chest still deeper. Slamming down on his shoulder, he also skidded several inches, and had the additional misfortune to have landed near the wall, which he hit head-first, hard enough to cause an explosion of multi-colored sparks across his vision.
And then it was over, the broomstick clattering to the ground, everything silent, everything dark- Hermione's wand had guttered out on impact. Draco managed, using reserves of strength he hadn't known he possessed, to pull himself slowly into a half-sitting position, back pressed to the corridor wall, his own breathing shallow and ragged in his ears, his ability for conscious thought fading fast.
So this is how it ends, he thought thickly, hazily; underground, in the dark, murdered by my own aunt, in a foreign body- bloody Weasley's body!- and all for the sake of Hermione Goddamn Gr-
"Malfoy? Malfoy!"
There was some scrabbling in the dark, then Hermione's voice, first summoning her wand with a muttered Accio, then reigniting it with yet another Lumos. This time the light, though in reality no stronger than a moment ago, seemed blinding to him; sent shards of agony slicing through his aching head. He scrunched his eyes shut and raised a hand protectively to press against the back of his head, where it had hit the rock wall with such force- and that was how Hermione found him, Draco-who-looked-like-Ron, half seated, half sprawled; half conscious, half dead, an evil-looking foreign object still embedded in his chest.
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"Oh my God," she whispered, horrified, completely mindless of the warm blood that soaked her own shoulder, "oh Malfoy, no. You can't. You can't die, do you hear me? Malfoy, no!" She seized him by the shoulders and shook him gently, but insistently, determined to keep him conscious- he had whipped the broom around back there in the cavern and taken this wound in her stead, she understood that perfectly, and she was not about to live the rest of her life with the knowledge that Draco Malfoy, whom she had never spoken a kind word to in her life, whose motives and loyalty she had continued to question and whom she had treated with undisguised mistrust and contempt even after he had pledged his oath to the Army, had willingly sacrificed his life to save hers. No. No way. She was going to save him back so they would be fair and square. And then maybe- well, maybe she even owed him an apology. But that was for later. For now, she needed to get his attention, and fast. Allowing him to slip away was absolutely out of the question.
"Malfoy. Look at me. Come on, look at me." She grabbed him by the chin. Blue eyes opened slowly, clouded with pain and shock; sought her face, but were unable to focus. It felt so strange to be saying Malfoy's name, yet looking at Ron. If possible, it made things worse that she should be seeing her best friend's body in this state. The thought of the real Ron suffering like this made her feel slightly nauseas. She remembered briefly back to third year, when she had seen Ron endure immense physical suffering, with his broken leg in the Shrieking Shack. He had borne the pain bravely, more concerned about Harry's well-being than his own. Just as Malfoy had been more concerned about her than himself a short while ago, when he'd taken this curse for her.
She shook her own head to clear it. Ron- Malfoy- they were becoming confused, jumbled together in her mind and she couldn't allow that. She needed to keep a clear train of thought; to be able to think both their way out of this. Malfoy had done his part in getting them away from the Death Eaters. He was capable of doing no more at the moment. The rest was up to her.
As if deliberately calling her attention to the urgency of the situation at hand, Draco's eyes slipped shut once more and he suddenly slumped, all the resistance leaving his body at once, having finally given up on the fight to stay conscious. His hand fell away from his head, startling her; she looked down at it where it came to lie beside him and felt her horror increase- something she would not have thought possible a second ago.
It was covered in blood.
He was bleeding… from his head? How in the hell had that happened? Wait- he had a head wound and had just passed out. Oh, no. Oh, hell no…
"Malfoy!" she shouted, shaking him again. "Malfoy!" She grabbed her wand, which she had placed down beside her in order to shake him both-handed, and pressed the tip of it over his heart. "Ennervate!"
The spell jolted through him, causing him to shudder and gasp and open his eyes again. Hermione felt dizzy with relief, even when those eyes narrowed angrily at her. Well, of course he'd rather have been unconscious- who could blame him? However, that was not to be allowed, not with a head injury on top of everything else.
"You have to stay awake," she told him urgently. "I don't know when you hit your head, Malfoy, but you don't have to be a mediwizard to know that falling asleep with a possible concussion is not a good idea. Now you're not gonna like this, but we need to get this thing out of your chest- there's a very good possibility that it carries some sort of poison or curse. Are we agreed on that much?"
Stall glaring daggers at her with Ron's blue eyes, he tried to say something- but of course, no sound would come. He snapped his mouth shut in frustration and exhaled explosively through his nose, then nodded his head once, grimly.
Hermione swallowed. It was one thing to talk about it- another thing to do it. "I'm going to do a simple pain-alleviation spell," she told him. "It won't kill the pain entirely, but it should help."
As she performed the spell, Draco's breathing quickened in anticipation of what was about to happen to him. He pressed himself back against the damp stone as Hermione, finishing her incantation, gripped the arrow-like weapon's shaft firmly with both hands, and glanced up into his eyes. "All right," she said, "on three. One- two-" and she yanked it free.
Draco's whole body arched violently away from the wall as the unwelcome object that had invaded it was finally wrenched free. Hermione, who had been kneeling, fell back onto her rear, clutching at the weapon which promptly disintegrated into nothing- just so much poison-green dust sifting down through her fingers.
"Malfoy," she said, scrambling back to her knees and snatching up her glowing wand, holding it close to the wound to see the damage. Draco's shirt was drenched with blood. She glanced up at his face- it was ashen; his eyes were open, but vacant now with renewed shock at the further trauma she had just subjected him to. "Malfoy?" there was no response. The lights were on, so to speak, but no one was home. She returned her attention to his chest. She needed to see the wound clearly; that meant peeling back his blood-soaked shirt. She found the ragged hole that the weapon had left in the material, inserted her fingers, and ripped.
Draco sucked in a harsh breath through clenched teeth as her fingertips grazed the puncture wound- Hermione did the same as she saw that it was larger and more jagged than she had expected, and was bleeding quite freely. Muttering hastily, she flicked her wand and bandages exploded from its tip, automatically wrapping themselves tightly around and around Draco's midsection. She then did the same for his head, the bandages cutting across his forehead at an angle, throwing the coppery red Weasley hair that would belong to Draco for the next several hours into complete disarray. This done, she collapsed against the wall opposite him, their feet actually touching in the middle of the corridor. They sat that way in silence for several moments as a bright crimson stain bloomed slowly through the white of Draco's bandages.
"All right," Hermione said at length, "I have to figure out a way to get us out of here. You have to stay awake. Do you hear me, Malfoy? For the love of Merlin, just stay awake- that's your only job now. Okay?"
He nodded, but dully, exhaustedly; not appearing to actually be listening to or understanding her at all. Hermione had the feeling she could have asked him virtually anything- for instance, whether Snape cleaned house with a Muggle vacuum cleaner, wearing a French maid outfit and red stiletto heels- and his response would have been just the same.
But there were other things occupying her mind- such as, how on earth to get out? Apparition was out of the question; ditto portkey. The reason being that although they were now most likely outside of the Death Eaters' wards- if indeed the wards were even still in place; it was entirely possible that the Death Eaters had fled and the wards had fallen- but anyway, though there were no wards to worry about down here, their sheer depth made apparating or portkey-ing out unacceptably risky. Apparating from as deep below the earth as they now were carried at least a fifty-percent chance of splinching- and it would be a greater risk still for Draco, who was hurt, weak, and semi-conscious at best. As for transfiguring one of their belongings into a portkey to get them out- well, that was a frighteningly unreliable prospect as well. There were stories of people activating portkeys from far belowground- far aboveground, too, for that matter- and disappearing never to reappear again. It had something to do with the magnetic pull of the earth's core, Hermione thought she remembered reading once.
She didn't think she could navigate Draco's broomstick- (the latest racing model, and notoriously high-strung, she had read in a review in one of Harry's Quidditch mags on a day when no other reading material had been available)- even with only herself on it, let alone with Draco as a passenger. She could barely handle a Cleansweep. And Draco- well, he couldn't fly them out, obviously. Nor did she think he could walk all the way back to the surface, even if she was supporting him. So just what exactly were they supposed to do? She shook her head in frustration, keeping one eye trained on him across the corridor, lit only by her wand, making sure he remained at least marginally awake.
Merlin, but they were in a bind. It had just occurred to her that perhaps she could float him up to the surface using Wingardium Leviosa or perhaps Mobilicorpus when she heard a sound that made her blood run cold.
Shouts from further up the corridor.
It is a truth well worth remembering that no matter how bad a given situation might seem, things can always get worse. And they just had. Hermione hadn't counted on a pursuit; she had hoped that the Death Eaters would have assumed that she and Draco had taken the correct turn in the passage and made a clean escape. She hadn't taken into consideration Bellatrix's sheer tenacity, her resolve to leave no stone unturned in the search for the two agents who had overheard the secret of her code. She didn't know how much they had heard, or how likely it was that they could crack it, but if her lord discovered that the enemy had been allowed to listen in on one of these supposedly super-secret meetings- and then, even worse, allowed to escape with potentially very damaging information, he would be most displeased. Much as she enjoyed helping to mete out the Dark Lord's wrath, Bella had little desire to be on the receiving end of it. So she had launched a pursuit, splitting her followers into two groups- one heading toward the surface, the other deeper underground, correctly guessing that there was an excellent possibility that the wretched "Weasley boy"- she had recognized that hair, of course; there were few who didn't- would have crashed the broomstick, injured as he was.
"Oh my God," Hermione breathed, frozen for a moment in panic-stricken fear, "oh Merlin and Morgana, help us, what are we gonna do?"
But it wasn't like her to sit there and fret uselessly as their enemies drew closer. She had been in tight situations before, time and again with Harry and Ron, and she was still around to tell the tale, wasn't she? She just needed to-
"Pull yourself together, girl," she muttered aloud, and then flung herself across the corridor, to Draco. "Malfoy," she whispered, grasping him by the shoulders, "Malfoy!" In an effort to get a response- (though his eyes were open, the state he was in could very nearly be described as catatonic)- she then resorted to something she had never done in her life until that moment; she addressed him by his given name.
"Draco!"
Her gambit paid off; he blinked at this, focused on her face. Again tried to speak; again failed to make a sound.
"Draco, we have to move," she said, with quiet urgency. "Come on. You've got to get up. Right now." The voices down the corridor were getting louder; nearer.
"Oh, Draco, please!"