The first time Pansy Malfoy ever disobeyed her husband was, as it turned out, also the last.
The last time she did anything, in point of fact, except become a statistic; one of the countless young people to fall in battle that day, their lives- their potential- cut forever short.
She had promised Draco she'd stay in the manor with his mother- he'd made her promise, made her absolutely swear- because he'd been able to see perfectly well that she intended to stand with the Death Eaters, to fight alongside him. There would be plenty of women fighting for Voldemort, she'd argued, and he had agreed- yes, there would be plenty of women fighting for Voldemort, but his wife was not going to be among them. He had by this time been on several Death Eater missions, and, he had told her heatedly, in his capacity as medic had seen just what could happen to people in magical confrontations and skirmishes. And this would be no skirmish; this would be outright, no-holds-barred war. Things were going to get uglier on that battlefield than sheltered little Pansy Malfoy could even begin to comprehend.
And that was true. Pansy had never dreamed what she'd be walking into. All she'd known was that she couldn't let her Draco go out and risk his life with out at least trying to protect him. (What she lacked in magical ability, intelligence and attractiveness, she certainly made up for in sheer devotion.) Her death was entirely pointless, though… as, far from protecting her husband, she never even saw him once she reached the battlefield- at least, not until the very last few seconds of her life, and then it was purely by chance.
She'd been completely out of her depth, and had fallen to a curse within twenty minutes of taking her leave from Narcissa- (who had proved a very poor babysitter indeed, largely due to the fact that Lucius had doped her up with enormous quantities of sedatives before leaving the manor with Draco; the elder Mrs. Malfoy was, even under normal circumstances, almost ridiculously high-strung, and so Lucius had thought it the kindest thing he could do for his wife on this of all days)- and had apparated to Hogsmeade Village, making her way unknowingly past the very house that her husband had purchased for the woman he'd intended to make his mistress, and heading up to the embattled school. Had she died immediately she would have done so without ever having seen her husband again… but she lingered awhile, lying twisted painfully on her side in a patch of dirty, bloody snow, and so was granted the opportunity to say her final goodbye.
Draco, for his part, had been taking turns between fighting ferociously beside his father on the front lines, and doing what he could for the Death Eater wounded- he was actually racing back from the scene of the thickest fighting toward Voldemort's command post, which was near the edge of the Forbidden Forest, with an unconscious Malcolm Baddock floating beside him on a stretcher, when he saw her- his gaze attracted instantly to the familiar bright, long hair which was now spilled out on the ground around the petite figure in the too-large Death Eater robes.
I know that hair, he thought first, uncomprehendingly, and then, those are my robes, and finally, that's my WIFE!
Baddock, forgotten in an instant, went crashing to the ground.
"Pansy," Draco said, his voice cracking with disbelief. "Pansy?" He went down on his knees beside her, pulling her first over onto her back, straightening her, and then up, into his lap. A quick scan of her body with his wand, and he knew that she was beyond his help. The most he could do was to make her as comfortable as possible. He muttered the words of a pain-reducing spell.
Pansy's eyes fluttered open, focused on Draco with some difficulty. Then, astonishingly, she smiled. "You found me," she whispered, apparently determined to believe that Draco had done this deliberately rather than by sheer coincidental chance. Well, let her believe that if she wanted to; it was a small enough thing to do for her.
"Course I found you," he said, still reeling from the shock of holding his dying wife in his arms when she was supposed to have been safe at home with his mother. "What… what the bloody hell did you come here for, Pans?"
"I was… worried 'bout you," she managed, raising a cold hand to cup his cheek.
And you thought getting yourself killed would help matters HOW?!? Draco wanted to shout at her, but he controlled himself. That would accomplish nothing. Instead he asked, brow furrowing with sudden anxiety, "mother's not here as well, is she?"
"Nugh." It was all Pansy could do for a negative. She paused for a long moment, rallying herself, then whispered, "sh'was… sleeping… when I left." Her hand fell away from his face, her strength nearly gone.
Draco could see clearly that time was running out. There was just one more thing to ask her. "Pansy- stay with me, just a moment more, okay? I have to know- did you see who did this to you? Pans? Do you know who it was?"
Her eyes fell shut, but she nodded. She swallowed thickly, preparing to speak for the last time. "He was… in school with us, I 'member… two years ahead, Ravenclaw. Charles… Charles…"
"Foster?" Draco asked urgently. He remembered the boy from the Ravenclaw Quidditch team. "Charles Foster?" Pansy nodded again. "H'was wearing… Auror robes. Draco… I love… y-y-unngh…"
She spoke no more.
He was a dutiful husband to the last. He held his wife in his arms as her body gave a final convulsive shudder and went still, gently closed her blue eyes once the last of the light had faded out of them. Standing, he took off his own cloak, regardless of the cold mid-February day, and covered her with it, head to foot, giving her corpse a dignity that had been denied to the dozens, hundreds of bodies that littered the ground around her, their staring, glassy eyes and grotesque, grimacing mouths open to the angry, roiling sky above them.
And then he went in search of her killer.
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It was hours later that he encountered Hermione, and he had the blood of dozens of wizards- including one Charles Foster, an unfortunate young Auror who had met with a particularly gruesome end- on his hands.
He sky was darkening; night was coming on, and the fighting was becoming more sporadic- there now appeared to be more combatants dead on the field than alive. Draco was hearing rumors that the fighting was being moved to other places; the Death Eaters' goal of taking Hogwarts apparently thwarted, some of them were leaving the school's grounds in order to move down into the village streets, or apparate to Diagon Alley and wreak havoc there- to inflict the most damage possible in the most places possible, in other words.
Not Draco, though. He was going to stay right here until this thing was finished one way or the other. He wasn't going to flee with his tail between his legs, and neither was he going to go slaughter innocents in Hogsmeade or anywhere else… so he remained, along with a handful of other hard-core Death Eater believers, searching grimly through the dusk for new adversaries.
And he found one.
She materialized out of the gloom in front of him, almost like an apparition.
She was staggering slightly as she walked, bleeding from a dozen small cuts and abrasions, looking every bit as bone-weary and wrung out as he felt. She was dressed all in black; a long-sleeved black shirt, and trousers which disappeared into the tops of a pair of battered looking and too-large black boots; the only badge of identification she wore was a bright band of scarlet edged with gold around her right upper arm. Her hair hung in a single thick braid down her back nearly to her waist, but several dark curls had come loose and hung about her face, framing it. He had his wand trained on her, not knowing if she was friend or foe, before he saw her clearly- and hers, despite her apparent state of ragged exhaustion, was pointed unwaveringly at his chest as well.
Then their eyes met and recognition flared, and he knew in that instant that though they stood there as enemies on opposing sides of this brutal and bloody conflict, he could not hurt her; there was absolutely no power on earth that would be able to induce him to use his wand against her.
Still, he did not lower it, having no way of knowing whether she felt the same. He stood there wary, on guard, even when she swayed slightly on her feet and he wanted nothing more than to run to her, gather her into his arms and carry her away, far away from this place of carnage and death.
In the end, she lowered hers first, allowing him to finally follow suit.
"I don't want to fight you, Malfoy," she said wearily, her voice little more than a cracked whisper.
"Thank you," he said simply, his own voice croaky and unfamiliar to his ears, not really knowing what else to say, profoundly grateful that she was not going to force him into a confrontation he could have no hope of winning, because he could not have harmed her, even to save his own life.
She said nothing more, just turned away.
"Granger," he called, an edge of panic entering his voice- he didn't want to let her go, didn't want to see her wade back into the fray; it was dangerous here, for all that the heaviest fighting seemed to have passed- yes, still dangerous, and that protectiveness that had been born in him a year ago, that night he had found her injured in a dungeon corridor of Hogwarts, in dire need of his assistance though her pride had caused her to try to refuse it, even as badly hurt as she'd been- that protectiveness he had been sure would be gone by the next day, was still here now, right now, as strong as it had ever been- stronger, in fact- and compounded by something else, something he had been feeling and denying almost since that night, something which he suddenly, finally, and despairingly acknowledged for what it was.
He prided himself on his honesty, as un-Slytherin a trait as that was- and yet he had been deliberately fooling himself for months- in a desperate, and ultimately futile, attempt at self-preservation. But the truth was, he didn't only want her. He had never only wanted her, he saw now, in a sudden, sickening flash of clarity. He loved her. God help him, he loved this girl. He was sworn to destroy her and all her kind…and he loved her so much it tore him up inside, loved her in a way that he had never, dutiful husband though he had been, loved his wife.
Pansy he had killed for. But Hermione he would die for.
"Granger," he said again. She stopped and half turned back toward him. She still remained silent, just waiting to hear what he had to say. And of all the thousand, thousand things he wanted, needed, craved to tell her, all that came out was, "be careful."
She didn't reply, just vanished back into the smoky dusk. His every instinct screamed at him to run after her; to catch her, to get her out of here by any means necessary- to Stupefy her if he had had to, but to get her the hell off the battlefield.
But then a spell came at him from the side and he just barely had time to deflect it- someone with less than his almost preternatural reflexes would never have succeeded- and he was caught up once again in the business of simply staying alive. Nonetheless, after dispatching his assailant, he began moving determinedly in the direction he had seen her take.
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Hermione was way beyond exhausted.
She'd barely slept the night before, between fretting over Harry and plotting how to get around him and onto the battlefield… still furious and hurt, she hadn't even let him kiss her goodbye when he'd left, alongside Ron- another chauvinist pig, she thought bitterly- who'd been unable to contain the relief he'd felt when Harry'd told him that she had "decided" to wait out the battle- and had helpfully suggested that she join his mother and Ginny at Grimmauld Place.
"Fine," she'd said through angrily gritted teeth, and had portkeyed away on the spot- but the portkey she'd created out of a quill right in front of Harry and Ron hadn't taken her to Grimmauld Place, it had taken her back to her flat, where she'd rummaged through both Ron's and Harry's rooms until she'd managed to put together a decently serviceable combat outfit by combining a shirt of Ron's with a pair of Harry's pants and old boots- his feet were smaller than Ron's, closer to her own size, though she'd still had to stuff the toes with crumpled up pages of the Daily Prophet. The Order of the Phoenix armband was her own. She then had braided her hair, remembering the effect that wearing it that way had had during her single excursion with Draco, the day they had spent in Hogsmeade- her untamed hair was so much a part of her persona that no one had imagined the girl on Draco's arm could possibly have been bushy-headed Hermione Granger.
Returning to the school, she'd waited until Harry and the rest- (those he'd deemed worthy to stand beside him)- had left the building to make their stand and make history- then had followed, once the battle had been joined and chaos reigned, and there was little chance of anyone recognizing her. She would have to be looked at fairly closely in order for that to happen, she'd reasoned, and by someone who knew her fairly well- and she thought there was little chance of that. Others on the battlefield would identify her as friend or foe based on what she was wearing, and would likely look no deeper. Besides which, all those who knew her well would be holding the very front line- where she should be as well- and so it was simply a matter of avoiding the area of the fiercest fighting.
Still, there'd been plenty to do.
Moving back and forth across the embattled school's grounds in long, sweeping arcs, she had methodically stunned and bound the Death Eaters she had come across, absolutely refusing, on principle, to use any spell stronger than Stupefy.
It had been a long day, full of hard knocks and close calls- war, she thought, for the umpteenth time, with weary incredulity; I am fighting in a WAR. It still didn't seem real to her. In fact, everything was starting to seem slightly surreal, as her extreme fatigue finally began to get the better of her. She staggered slightly, blinked hard, focused on a tree not far from her- she was near the edge of the Forbidden Forest, in a part of the battlefield that was nearly deserted by now- and made her way over to lean against it for a moment, gathering her strength.
Pocketing her wand as she sagged, exhausted, against the trunk, she bent at the waist, bracing her elbows against her knees and dropping her face forward into her hands, covering her eyes and massaging her temples all at once. Deep breaths, she told herself. Deep breaths, count to ten, pull yourself together, and you can head back up to the castle. You're done here- there's no one left to fight.
She had never been more wrong.
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Choosing that particular time and place to let her guard down was quite possibly the worst mistake Hermione ever made. For she wasn't alone, as became abundantly clear in the next instant, when she found herself seized and dragged abruptly upright by her braid, her arms pinned roughly to her sides. Caught off-guard as she was, she was completely immobilized before she even had a chance to react, the only thought in head being there have to be two people doing this; one person alone couldn't hold me this well- how could I let two people just sneak up on me this way, HOW?
And then a voice spoke in her ear, accompanied by a blast of foul breath, "well, well, what have we here?" The armband was ripped from her sleeve for closer inspection, as her braid was given a sharp jerk, causing a cry to spring to her throat, and tears to her eyes. She still hadn't gotten a clear look at her assailant- or assailants. "Order of the Phoenix," the voice continued, "and a nice little piece of ass too, down here all by her lonesome self. Well, that's all right, love- we'll keep you company. All four of us!"
Four! Her mind screamed, in mounting hysteria, there are FOUR? There are four and I didn't HEAR them?! Oh God, what am I going to do? Normally so cool under pressure, she found that most of her ability to think rationally had fled due to her state of near stumbling exhaustion and, now, her quickly mounting panic. She began to struggle, but to little avail. She couldn't reach her wand.
But real panic didn't set in until she saw just whose hands she'd fallen into.
"Turn her around," said a second voice close beside her- whoever was holding her braid, she thought- "let the boys have a look at her. They might know who she is, she seems close to them in age." She was jerked around to face this second speaker, and felt her stomach drop immediately right down through her- Harry's- boots- it was like she was looking into the future; Vincent Crabbe in twenty years.
"No," she whispered, in numb, all-encompassing horror, as the man turned toward the trees and shouted, "hey, Vince! Greg! Come on out, boys, its safe, this pretty little thing won't give us no trouble. Come and tell us if you know her!"
Crabbe and Goyle- the younger versions- lumbered out of the trees in which they'd presumably been hiding… where they'd been told to hide by their fathers? Were Death Eaters even capable of that sort of familial love and protective instinct? and approached her where she was pinned between the older men.
Without preamble, Goyle-the-younger grabbed her roughly by the chin and jerked her face toward him, lowering his own head until they were eye to eye. Then, with a flare of recognition and a sharp intake of breath, he yanked his hand away, looking horrified.
"Aw, shit!" he exclaimed, holding his hand away from his body as if it had been contaminated by touching her.
"Well, who is she?" his father demanded, intrigued by his son's violent reaction.
It was Crabbe- whose expression, as he also stared at her, was just as shocked as his best friend's- that answered. "That's Draco's mudblood," he told his father, almost reverently. "You'd better let her go, dad. Draco said-" he paused and swallowed hard- "Draco said she belongs to him and if we ever so much as laid a finger on her he'd- he'd rip off our balls and serve them to us on a platter." He shuddered; Draco had clearly made one hell of an impression on him.
But the two older men, exchanging glances, merely grinned and chuckled lewdly. "Is that so?" the elder Crabbe asked, appearing not in the least intimidated (as Hermione's mind reeled- Draco warned them off that strongly? But... why, if he never really cared?
Her thoughts were ripped forcibly away from Draco, though, as the elder Crabbe, adopting the tone of a patient adult putting an important concept across to a not-overly-bright child, said to his son, "let's think this through for a moment, Vince, shall we? Draco's married now, for one thing… and for another, this- mudblood, did you say? This mudblood is wearing the insignia of the enemy- something I doubt she'd be doing if she were really Draco's… property, as you seem to think her. And then there's this-" Hermione found her left hand being forced upward for inspection, the diamond engagement ring flashing in the dim light- "apparently someone has staked a claim to the mudblood, but we know it can't be Draco, who has a far superior pureblooded bride. So tell me, son, do you know this girl's engaged to?"
It was Goyle who piped up then; "oh yeah, she's with Potter now."
Hermione felt the hands gripping her suddenly clench with such force that she bit her lip and grunted in pain.
"You're telling me," came the voice of the man who held her immobile, speaking slowly, incredulously but with a dawning of glee such as, perhaps, a child who's just been told that Christmas will come three times this year, "that I am holding Harry Potter's mudblood fiancée right now?" At the nods of both boys, he continued, in a low and suggestive voice that sent chills up Hermione's spine and set her struggling all over again, useless though it seemed to do so, "this is going to be more fun that I even imagined."
"No!" she shouted frantically then, bucking desperately against her captor, having a pretty good idea where all this was going, "no, no no, get off of me!"
The two older men merely laughed. "She's a spirited one," the elder Goyle chuckled. "We'll have to break her in good before we let the boys have a go. You up for it, mate?"
"Always. Turn her around. I saw her first; I get to taste her first."
She was yanked back around to fully face Crabbe-the-elder once again, her breath becoming short with pain at this rough treatment, as well as fear and impending hysteria. "No!" she shouted again, hoarsely, as he grinned at her, moving in for the 'kill'.
"No, don't you touch me, you foul- disgusting- ummnnnnnggh-" she was cut off as the sweaty older man's mouth mashed down on her own.
He didn't try to gain access to her mouth, rightly guessing that given the opportunity she would bite him in a second and consequences be damned- but he licked sloppily at her lips, sucking the bottom one out and then biting down on it, causing her to scream out in pain and despair, her eyes squeezed tightly shut, tears escaping the corners of them to streak down her face.
"Mmm," he said a moment later, finally breaking the horrendous forced kiss, and smacking his own lips theatrically, "mudblood tastes good."
She was sobbing outright now, her body heaving, the world tilting, her mind beginning to shut down, refusing to do anything but repeat the same thought over and over again- not like this not like this not like this not like this- as, with a small sadistic laugh, her tormenter resumed his abuse, licking the tears from her cheeks, then dropping his head to latch onto her throat, sucking, biting, bruising… and his hands- his hands were everywhere, grabbing, pawing, pinching, squeezing, going to the fastenings of her clothing-
Oh God, please not like this- anything but this- someone help me- please- God- NO!
And that was when she heard it; pounding footsteps approaching at a dead run and then a voice- a voice she knew, though it was made barely recognizable by the utter white-hot fury she could hear behind it.
"Get the fuck off of her, you FILTHY FUCKING ANIMAL!"
Her eyes snapped open, a nearly impossible surge of hope suddenly surfacing as she screamed-
"Draco!"