Disclaimer: Everything you recognize I don't own. The plot is jointly owned between Rae and me, though mostly by Rae.

Author Notes: I am sorry about the wait, but it took longer than I expected to get it done. I suspect the fact that school started up and then there was a severe family crisis in my life had something to do with it.

Chapter Two


After Dumbledore's death in sixth year, a lot of things changed for Harry Potter. He began the search to find and obliviated the remaining Horcruxes of Voldemort's soul, which was rent into seven separate pieces after seven special murders. While Hogwarts had remained open for the duration of his seventh year, he Hermione, and Ron had forgone their last months of schooling.

To say the least, there were countless bloody attacks in the following, countless weeks. Hermione, after falling prey to a Death Eater raid, stayed in St. Mungos until her wounds healed and began training to be a medi-witch, due to the damage inflicted by none other than one Lucius Malfoy, it left her…different than she had been before.

She became more dependent, needy, always looking to someone else for the answer she herself knew well enough. While it had pained him to watch her go, he knew that she would be in even greater danger if she continued on with him and Ron. She, of course, completed to course with top grades, despite her slowly changing temperament and was one of the few apprentices who had helped with the wounded at one of the last attacks on Hogwarts.

She met and fell in love with Ernie Macmillan that fateful day when scores of mortally injured school children were literally carried into the Emergency Ward of St. Mungos. Ernie had severe nerve damage from exposure to a new kind of curse, one that would later be admitted into the list of illegal spells, that at that point in time the likes had never been seen before.

Hermione saved him. Harry did not see her much after that point; she always seemed to have somewhere to go or something to do with Ernie. Her childhood friends had no place in her now adult life. He had not even been invited to the wedding, nor had Ron. After she became Hermione Macmillan, nobody from her past ever saw her again.

That is, until today. Harry stood outside the house he knew to be that of Ernie Macmillan, crouched down behind a clump of well tended bushes. The rich aroma of the earth his feet had stirred mixed with the odor of newly blossomed flowers brought memories from his times with the Dursleys, a mental shudder accompanying it.

To his surprise, the front door slammed open and a man stomped out, wand quite visible even in the darkness of the night. Harry could not hear what he muttered to himself, though it was extremely clear that he was irate through his jerky actions. He brandished his wand and with a noise similar to the crack of thunder, disappeared from the quaint little lawn in the middle of suburbia.

Harry swallowed heavily and waited a brief moment before rising to his feet and striding through an opening in the hedges, moving silently. He hoped that Hermione was inside and if she was, that she could forgive him for what he had done earlier. He had taken polyjuice potion with one of Dumbledore's hairs, where Snape had gotten it from he really did not care to know, and had made his way to the little town that she was rumored to be living in.

He had impersonated his old headmaster to try and see his best friend again. He sighed quietly and put his hand on the door knob, giving it an experimental turn. To his surprise, the door was completely unlocked and was barely closed. He had thought that Ernie would have wanted to protect Hermione, keep her safe, but the state of the door seemed to contradict that statement.

He shouldered it open and began walking down the hallway, not bothering to keep his footsteps light like he had been taught to in the snatches of Auror training he had received from his motley group of teachers. There was only one door at the end of the corridor that could be the bedroom, for she was not in any of the others, and he quickly pushed it open.

What met his eyes surprised him more than anything ever had before, not even when Scabbers turned into Peter Pettigrew in third year. Hermione had her arms wrapped tightly around herself and was rocking slowly at the foot of her bed, staring with emotionally dead eyes at the mess filling the surprisingly small space.

Her hair fell in messy curls that had been tamed considerably since the last time he had seen her fell across her cheeks, hiding most of her angular, bony face from view. Her clothes fit closer to her body, no more of the loose garments she had always worn during school and the year afterwards, though, all on her body was bereft of colour.

He stepped towards her and when he reached a hand out to gently brush those errant curls from her eyes, she flinched away from his touch. His brow furrowed at her actions and he quickly returned his digits to his personal space, opting for a different approach.

"Hermione?" He asked quietly, concern etched in his tone.

There was no sign that she heard him.

"Please, don't ignore me." Her rocking grew faster, almost as if she was anticipating something horrible.

He sighed softly, before just speaking. "Nobody has seen you in three years. Why did you disappear, if you didn't want us in your life you could have at least written us? Then we would have known the truth, we'd thought you'd died or something equally horrible. What happened? Nothing you did could have been horrible enough for us to want you to stay away. You know we would forgive you for any offence, we just want you back…" His voice trailed away as she slowly turned her head towards him, lank strands falling away.

Her left eye was mottled purple and blue, deeper tinges of sickly green bordering. Her lower lip had been cut and it was clear by the way she clutched herself round the chest that something was wrong there, the gesture not just for comfort. Slowly, he knelt on the bed so he now was far closer to her and reached out to gently touch her shoulder, uncaring to the slowly hardening curls residing there.

Her delicate form stiffened and she clearly had to force herself from jerking away from his fingers. Her manner reminded him strongly of an injured, frightened animal that was afraid of the merest of physical contacts for all it knew of them was pain. She looked up at him with seemingly dead eyes, a glassy sheen hiding the depth of emotion she truly felt.

"Come home, Hermione." He spoke softly, voice filled with the longing and compassion that had grown in the years of their separation.

With three simple words, the glaze layer clouding her cinnamon hues peeled away and she let out a soft, broken noise in the back of her throat. Her arms rapidly unraveled from her middle and wrapped tightly around his neck, thoroughly surprising when compared to her behavior of mere moments before. She mumbled something, her words lost in grief choking her voice, but the general meaning would be clear even to a deaf person.

She wanted to go to the only place she had left in the world that she could call home, the single location that had sheltered her, given her asylum when everyday life threatened to consume her. Through the tangle of clinging, dark emotions fragments rose to the surface, lying strained in the air.

"Home...Take me home."


Draco slammed his fists down onto the surface of his desk, tiny splinters in the shape of stars spreading out across the lacquered wood. His loose golden blond hair fell across his eyes in un-gelled locks; though it did little to hide the fury clouded his mercurial hues. The house elves fled from the elegant study in terror, the vehemence blazed across his face sending them running.

The fireplace in front of his desk had just began to glow its regular mix of orange and red, the lingering emeralds now faded into obscurity. The message that had been passed to him, supposedly right from the mouth of the Dark Lord, was one that truly made him consider breaking away from the group that he agreed with.

"Fucking shite!" He yelled, his voice reverberating as if scores of himself screamed back at him.

His light eyes blazed angrily as he ripped the letter off of the desk before him, the parchment had been given to him before Wormtail's head had disappeared from the fireplace. He tore the seal open and it took him a brief second to skim the words before he let out a wordless roar and flung the yellowish paper into the happily sparking flames.

His manicured fingernails dug into his soft palms, testimony to his years of pampered living, creating deep half moons in the pliable flesh. Voldemort had been speaking lately of his plans, but Draco had never believed that the Dark Lord would actually go through with what he plotted. Did is Master actually believe…He shuddered and could not even complete the thought in his own mind.

The very idea of it disgusted him and made an acrid, sour ball of sickness swell in the back of his throat. Without clogging his rage fogged brain with letting go of the parchment, he strode with the air of a disgruntled child from the room. Only he knew his destination, but the house elf following him at a distance, the end grew clear when the decorations in the hall began to steadily grow more feminine, loosing its more rigid decoration.

Slowly, the strained whispers of ghostly music drifted down towards him and it became clear that he had entered his mother's wing of the Malfoy Manor. He thought little of proper decorum as he firmly rapped his balled up fist against an elegantly gilded door, his regularly Adonis-like features twisted into a dark snarl.

The slap of wood swung open and the wrinkled green face of an old house elf peered up at him, a squeak erupting from it as he kicked it out of the way. His mother looked up at him in amusement from her half reclining position on a deep emerald hued chaise lounge, her nearly colourless eyes gleaming with withheld laughter.

"Something bothering you, Draco?"

He bit down on his lower lip to keep from saying something that he would most likely regret. He sucked in a deep breath through his nostrils before forcing a tiny grimace onto his lips.

"Yes, actually there is. Read this." He brandished the now wrinkled parchment in her face.

With slender fingers, she plucked the letter from her only son's grasp and carefully unfolded it so the slightly warped letters were visible. One of her blond brows arched as she took in the meaning and soon a soft giggle that brought to mind the chiming of a bell.

"Well, it seems as if you are in quite a dilemma, my son. You can either obey our Dark Lord or go against his wishes and most likely be killed for your disobedience. Is your termination truly worth not mating with this mudblood?"

"I'd have to touch her."

"Hm, that would prove to be rather unpleasant. But, if you did this, you would be in the Dark Lord's favour."

"I thought I already was in his good graces."

His mother merely shrugged her shoulders before gently setting the crumpled paper onto a gleaming side table. "I cannot help you with this. It is entirely up to you. Though, it is a blessed that you have been offered Severus' vacated position."

For the past six years, since Severus Snape had murdered Dumbledore, the Potion's professor slot had seen several new faces that could not stand the pressure of seven different levels of potion making. His infuriated mood quite suddenly drained away and he sunk limply down into an empty seat, head dropping into his opened palms.

He raked his fingers through his golden blond hair, the un-gelled strands falling loosely against his skin. He was utterly loyal to the Dark Lord and saw few flaws in his plan for pureblood dominance and so doing what he had been ordered, would go against everything he had been taught since infancy.

What Voldemort asked of him was near impossible to take seriously, but he would not disobey his lord. Slowly, he drew his face from the comforting darkness he had created and stared into his mother's eyes.

"I have no choice but to do as I have been asked. I can stand a few minutes of physical contact with the mudblood to achieve our goal."

Narcissa smiled, the gesture warming her usually flinty gaze. "I am proud of you. What you are doing is very mature."

He then rose to his feet and inclined his head to the seated woman. A house elf crept from the side of the room and quietly pushed the door open, attempting to remain out of notice as it tried to save itself from another kick to the stomach. Soon his mother's quarters were behind him and he headed back to his study.

The mess he had made would have been cleared up by now and he took the speed by which the house elves kept the massive house tidy for granted. He would draft a letter to the headmistress of his old school. Soon, Draco Malfoy would be walking Hogwarts' hallow halls once more.


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