Chapter warning for sexual content, poor mental health, a relatively darker chapter than the rest of this fic.
There was a tiny bit of life, past her eyelids, and Hermione forced herself to open her eyes, though her body screamed to lie down and sleep in the snow – she couldn't die, she had to –
"Stop," he said.
All the clinging death left her as her eyes flew open in shock, her Vowed body reacting physically to his voice before her brain could form coherent thought. Pale and angry, the light of the burning pine tree phasing over him, in his beautiful reflective eyes. Like an actual guardian angel.
"Draco!" she breathed. His expression did not change.
"What happened," he said tersely, but Hermione did not care. How long had it been since she had heard his voice instead of imagined it, she cared not at all how angry he –
Hermione gasped, sitting up woozily, remembering why he was here. "Harry!" she cried, wildly looking around for him.
He lay nearby, but his condition was worse than when she had passed out. Harry's face was mottled grey. Like he had died, but a choking breath was in his mouth where he lay in the recovery position, vomit coating the snow by his face.
"What the FUCK happened," Draco demanded again, standing over her. "You were about a minute from bleeding out when I arrived. That –" he pointed at Harry, who was now hissing and shaking, "is some evil shit."
She looked down at her right hand and leg; they were thickly bandaged and runed, her jeans cut away to access where Nagini had bitten her. Hermione looked around at the snow; there was blood everywhere, unless there was vomit. And a very angry Draco.
She had forgotten a tiny bit what he truly looked like, after six months apart; or maybe he had just changed slightly, with time and months suffering at Voldemort's side. He was more handsome than ever; pale and angular, with fury in his eyes and his twisted mouth. Hermione didn't care how mad he was, she could have happily looked at him forever.
"Ran into a trap," she responded, a sudden awkwardness descending and snuffing out her initial desire to pull him to the ground and crawl into his lap. How long had it been since she spoke with anyone who wasn't Harry? Words felt weird in her mouth. "Thank you for saving me," she said, not wanting to be ungrateful or rude.
"A trap that the Dark Lord's snake was in," Draco sneered. She had forgotten how posh his tone could get when he was in this sort of uptight, angry mood; it made Hermione want to laugh hearing it, it made her think of lessons with hippogriffs and detentions with Hagrid. Of Harry and Ron. And then the joy died in her mouth, looking at Harry's painful seizure, and thinking of Ron throwing furniture at them both while in the ravages of morphine withdrawal.
Hermione blinked. But she should reply to the Draco that was impossibly, miraculously, in front of her. "Yes," she said, her eyebrows furrowing a moment later. "Wait, how did you know it was Nagini?"
He did a strange sort of shrug, or maybe it was a shiver – it was freezing. "The Healer I Imperiused said it was the same wounds he treated on Arthur Weasley. What other snake is going around almost killing multiple Order members," he asked sarcastically.
"Oh," she said dumbly. She had wondered how Draco had managed to stop the cursed bites from bleeding when they had seemed to want to flow without end. Hermione frowned – how much time had passed since she had sent him her distress call, then? She looked behind him at the burning pine tree, and saw it was quite disintegrated, even though it felt like she had only just shut her eyes for a second.
"That was a smart idea," she commented, remembering how long it took the St Mungo's healers to find a solution to Mr Weasley's cursed injuries when he first showed up at the hospital on the Christmas of 1995. "You always think of good ideas in tight spots," she mused. Hermione's thoughts circled back to Gregory Goyle, the personification of her failures and Draco's resourceful reactivity.
"Said he couldn't help Potter, though," Draco said stiffly, jerking his head towards Harry. "All they could say was it was Dark magic."
She crawled over to Harry through the disgusting snow, not wanting to put weight on her bitten leg, and laid a hand on his neck. His skin was sticky with sweat; the tendons in his neck were bulging and stretched taut, fit to burst. "Yeah," she said softly.
Hermione looked up suddenly, feeling Draco watch her.
"This…isn't new to you," he said. Almost a question in his voice.
"No," she replied, shaking her head. "But this is the worst I've seen it." Hermione felt across her body for the chain holding her beaded bag; thankfully it was still connected.
"Help me get him into bed?" she asked, Summoning the tent from their belongings. "There's nothing we can do. We just have to wait for him to get through it."
She had Lucius and Narcissa to thank, Hermione supposed, for the gallant man that dutifully held her up while she did her and Harry's familiar camp set-up routine and put the burning tree out. Draco set her down beside Harry's bed as she levitated Harry's unhappy form to a comfier spot. Manners in even the most absurd circumstances.
Hermione gasped as she saw what Harry was holding in his clenched fist. "Oh no…" she said, dismayed.
His treasured twin core wand. All witches and wizards loved their wands, but Harry was especially convinced the twin cores were protecting him more than his own power. He would be so upset.
"Down a wand," she sighed, gently unfurling Harry's tight fingers to remove it so he didn't immediately wake up to the bad news.
"I can get you another," Draco said. "I've got spares."
It was tempting. But she shook her head.
"How would I explain it to him?" she asked. She felt something cold pass through her chest, like a bucket of water had been dumped over her, as she made herself say the next words.
"And you shouldn't be here when he wakes up," she said, eyes closed so as not to look at Draco. Every part of her body was frozen, inside and out. She hadn't even hugged him yet. This war was really fucking cold sometimes.
It was silent. Eventually Hermione opened her eyes and dared to look at him.
Draco looked truly ridiculous in their rickety tent, his expensive black pea coat against the tarpaulin walls and shabby furniture. This was the domain of homeless teenagers hunting down Voldemort, not heirs to ancient fortunes built on magical hatred and supremacy. Hermione couldn't read the expression on his face. Either she was out of practice, or he'd gotten even better at hiding himself.
"Even after I saved your life?" he asked after a long, silent moment. And Hermione realised what the look on his face was: she had offended him, by trying to push him away. She shook her head, not wanting him to misunderstand.
"It's not like that," she said, realising what he was going to make her say and regretting the cost.
"There's – there's not a second spy amongst the Death Eaters, Draco. To my knowledge." She gestured at Harry's pained face, his jaw clenched so hard she thought he might break it. "This is – Harry has a connection to the Dark Lord. That's how I knew about your Dad's wand, and Dolohov's wife. Because Harry saw it and told me. But it goes both ways. He could look in and see anything in Harry's head. Harry can't close his mind to him."
She looked up at Draco, not sure she had ever felt as sorry for something she had done as this. The lie had been one of the only comforts she could offer him in the hell she had trapped Draco in. And now it was gone, crumbled like the ashes of the burning pine tree in the winter wind, because she had messed up and needed Draco to come save her and Harry instead of handling her own affairs. "That's why Harry can't know about you, as long as you're by the Dark Lord's side," she finished, trying to ignore the groundswell of emotion in her chest. "For your safety."
Draco looked between her and Harry for a moment. "No wonder you…said it wasn't what I was thinking," he eventually said, sounding shocked. He walked over and held out his hand.
"Come on," he said, and she took it, hobbling over ungainfully to the table where she sat with Harry translating horcrux madness.
"Where's your liquor," he asked, opening cupboards in the small kitchen.
"Here," she said, putting Harry's broken wand in the centre of the table, where Ron had poured out Draco's dismantled bracelet, and Summoning gin and glasses out of her bag. "Our entire lives are packed into this bag…"
She dumped flat tonic over top of it and shoved a glass towards him.
"Cheers," she said, clinking her glass on his; he had sat down across from her and merely watched her, not removing his hands from his pockets. "For not dying."
He drunk from his glass alongside her. It felt quite as awkward and cold as last Christmas, when they had swallowed as much of Slughorn's wine as fast as they could.
"So," Draco said after a moment of uncomfortable drinking, looking at her bandaged hand. "How did you fall into a trap?"
Hermione stared at his face, trying to commit to memory as many of the parts she had forgotten or blurred as possible. "We've hit a dead end," she admitted, draining her glass as though alcohol would provide a solution to her and Harry's terrible problem. "We need to find – something of Helga Hufflepuff's. We can't move forward until we do. This was the last place on our list to visit, because we knew there would be a trap there. And there was."
She poured more gin and flat tonic into her empty glass. "We got one tiny, probably unrelated lead," she said, turning her attention to memorising the details in Draco's coat. "And now we're all out of ideas."
Hermione wished Draco hadn't wrapped his fingers so tightly around his glass. She wanted to reach out and grab his hand. There was a space between them, filled with a difficult standoffishness. She drunk from her glass instead.
"It's strange," he said suddenly after a few beats of silence, like he had forgotten how to have a normal conversation too. "To see you so defeated."
It did not feel good to hear depressed Draco Malfoy make such comments, either. "Maybe we need to make him think of it," Hermione said, resting her head in her fingers, leaning on the table with her left elbow. "Then Harry could see the location in his head. It'd be so risky, though." And she sighed and screwed up her face, trying to withstand the crushing feeling of failure.
"I needed to kill that snake, Draco," she whispered, forcing herself to say it out loud. "And I missed."
He said nothing as she eventually wrenched her eyes open again and looked at him. They just stared at each other for a moment.
"That's…" he started, then trailed off. "You are going to kill yourself doing this, aren't you?" he asked. "It doesn't matter how many Death Eaters you kill."
Hermione finally realised what was between them. It was the arm's length he was holding her at. A hesitation to engage with a woman he thought might already be dead. It gave her the confidence to reach over and take his hand in her own. And as she expected, as she pulled his hand off his dirty glass and held his fingers, Draco did not pull away.
"There's still a chance, Draco," she said gently, leaning over the table, closer to him.
He shook his head. "I can see it in your eyes," he said warily. "You don't believe it."
"I do," Hermione said. "I'm just tired." She put her hands on the table to push herself up. "Come with me. What I need to tell you is too important to say in this dingy tent."
He held her wrist tightly as she limped out of the tent, and gingerly sat down in the snow a little way beyond the entrance, under a frozen Scots pine.
"Amongst the pine trees with Draco," she commented, smiling as she looked up through the icy branches to the starry sky. Her teeth started chattering and she felt Draco hit her with a Warming Charm.
"A lot less hospitable than your old pine forest," he said, and she smiled at his almost-joke as he crouched down beside her, leaning over his bent knees.
"That pine forest. Everything changed, there," she said, reminiscing. If she hadn't made the Vow with Draco, she'd almost certainly be dead right now. He probably would be, too. Would Dumbledore still be alive? Would Mad-Eye?
Hermione looked at Draco, trying to focus on him and communicating the importance of what she had to tell him, rather than the attractiveness of the man who had come to save her.
"Draco," she said, trying to gather her bravery. He looked at her like he wanted to know what she had to say. That was the thing about Draco, he said he wanted everything. A light snow picked up again as she began to say her piece.
"I've seen things that…can't be explained," she said, looking into the void of the black night and white snow. "Beyond this world. Beyond magic." She reached out to trace one of his fingers; exactly as cold and strong as she and the horcrux remembered. "I've fought demons with your voice and face. I've heard a boy and his elf, defy a sea of Inferi through sheer force of love." She looked towards the tent. "I've seen Harry get up, again and again, Draco, when he should certainly be dead. You saw him. His physical body is dragged across Death and back again, so many times I've lost count. The Dark Lord cannot kill him."
"He can kill you," Draco replied, and his voice cracked. "This is killing you."
"This is the only place I'm alive anymore," she said. "It's like…the only life in this world, is in these narrow rifts of hell that the Dark Lord has cracked open, and hidden across Britain."
"We're all in hell," Draco said, and she shook her head; he had to understand this, it was vital.
"There's different…densities," Hermione landed on. "There's the regular hell, across all of the United Kingdom. And there's parts where the evil is more intense. In your house, and the castle, and the Ministry." She breathed out, watching her breath in the frozen air.
"But there's a third realm, Draco. So heavy it's like a gravitational singularity." She wondered if he knew these terms, deliberately blinded as he was by his hateful upbringing. "Where only I, Harry, and the Dark Lord can bear to tread. Others can only flicker in it…and when they trespass, their life gets…condensed. It's like it turns into a shooting star…lighting up the world, for one moment of impossible magical power." She thought of Regulus, being dragged under the water and the corpses and his sacrificial love; of Kreacher, escaping the wrath of an angry god with his own strength; of Bathilda Bagshot, and the weeks in which Nagini must have hidden in her corpse, waiting for an evil reanimation.
"If I'm honest, that's why we walked into Godric's Hollow tonight," she said. Draco had to know this. "We knew it was a trap. But we can't…we can't breathe in this world anymore, Draco. It's too…flat. It's not real. Harry and I are just wandering ghosts…waiting for the times when we find the magic that burns this world – the lifeless world – away."
Hermione raised her head to look at him; but his expression was again difficult to define. Draco merely looked at her.
"You and Potter," he eventually said, quietly after a moment, "have fallen into a Darker magic than any Death Eater."
"Yes," she whispered, the leading question on her breath, in her raised eyebrow.
"But I have to pull you back," he said, so quiet it was barely more than a whisper.
Hermione grinned at him. Draco was smart, after all; quick on the uptake. She was so pleased he had almost completely understood.
"I can't be pulled out," Hermione said. "I can only push through." She reached out and held his right hand. Even if he cut it off it would be no use, for the binding was on his life, his soul. "It is like you said. It's an exponential magic, our promise. I'm pulling you in too, Draco. Can't you tell?"
Part of her wanted to cry. But overwhelmingly, she was glad Draco would escape the flat world with no oxygen or real magic in it. He would just have to be brave and strong. He could be. Draco could survive the vortex of evil Voldemort had opened. He had to. He had Vowed that he would protect her from it. And she had promised to protect him.
"Because I can feel it," Hermione said, tracing a finger down his palm to his wrist, where his blood beat erratically under his skin. "I know I'm dragging your soul deeper into hell."
Draco grabbed her hand, stopping her. "No," he said, uselessly.
"The things you're going to see," Hermione said. She couldn't help but be a little excited for him. "You can't possibly imagine."
He was on his feet in front of her now, pulling her to standing and shaking her. "Granger, wake up," he said urgently.
"That's it, though, Draco," she said, reaching up to grasp the collar on his coat and pull him in. He'd grown taller since she last fought him. She placed a soft kiss under his jaw and whispered. "I am awake." She had been woken to something mortals were not meant to see, and it had crawled into Hermione's lungs and heart and mind and made them not fit for the human world.
He slapped her, suddenly and harshly, harder than he ever had before – or maybe she had just forgotten what it felt like to fight him in the flesh. God, it made her body sing, shooting straight from her burning face to her cunt. He was right; she did like this. She was depraved.
"Wake up!" Draco shouted at her, holding her up by the arm and shaking her again.
"When you saw Harry, did you recognise him?" Hermione asked, holding her burning cheek with her free hand. "Or has he transformed beyond your recognition, through the evil he suffers in?"
"I saw you," Draco hissed; she watched the anger buzz through his body, remembering how tension would run through him like electricity. "Bleeding the fuck out in the snow."
"Me and the snake are an even match," she grudgingly admitted, dragging her fingers lightly over his tense arms. "But I have the power to kill her. I just need another shot."
"I am not watching you get eaten by that fucking snake," Draco said, shaking in anger.
"Then help me kill her," she whispered, tilting her head up towards him to kiss him again.
It had been too long. He was perfect under her, the current of his stress paired with a hard, hot anger that she had infused him with. Hermione gasped in his mouth as he shoved her against the frozen tree, kissing her hungrily. Months of desperate lust, of miserable fear and paralysis, of cutting mere men down at their knees.
"How dare you," he said, pulling her coat off her. "How dare you throw yourself in front of Nagini."
"She hated it when I stabbed her, Draco," Hermione said, remembering the thrashing, glittering movements as Draco unbuttoned her shirt. "If a snake could scream."
"Broken fucking witch," he said roughly, shoving her to the ground. "Running into the fire."
"It's not real," Hermione said, sighing as Draco ran his mouth over her throat. "How did I not notice this world wasn't real before?"
He bit down hard and she screamed.
"You," he said, spitting at her collarbone, "were just a longer route to the Dark Lord."
"I gave you the truth," Hermione said, unbuttoning his stupidly expensive coat. "His servants are the most pitiable of all. You have to fight him to get the only thing of value he has. To see into hell."
"You gave me a rope to hang myself with," Draco said, and then his cold, cold fingers were inside her and the world fell away.
"That was cruel," he continued; it was only his voice and his body now, that existed, around her and inside of her. "To make me think you were going to save me."
"I – will – pull you – away," she forced out, shutting her eyes hard to concentrate.
"You are in pieces," Draco said. And then he was on top of her, his legs between hers, him inside of her.
"Come back to me," he said quietly, his mouth against her ear. "Hermione. Please."
"No," she breathed, and she felt her soul pull away as he placed a hand on her sternum.
"You - have to," Draco said, as he ground her into the earth, like it might keep her in this world if her body melded with the dirt. "Have to."
But what was there to come back to? The corrupted heirloom of Hufflepuff was hidden from them. The happy thief that Harry and Voldemort obsessed over eluded them both.
"If I - kill the snake?" Draco asked, moving his hand up to her throat and holding the frozen air in it still. "Will you stop?"
"The cup," Hermione rasped out, wrapping her arms around his neck and holding on. She could kill the snake. But Harry and her were doomed to suffocate if they could not find Helga Hufflepuff's goblet. "I need – the cup –"
But Draco covered her mouth with his hand, smothering her words.
"Stop it," he said, voice strained. "I can't – I can't listen – I –"
And then his coherence fell away too. Hermione wrapped herself around him as tightly as Nagini had Harry, and she was going to die, the pressure on her and in her and around her body and soul was too much. She was as scattered as the three remaining fragments of the Dark Lord's soul. The only true thing in the world was Draco, and she had to protect him, it was all that was left of her soul, the promise she made to him…
"Please," she begged, realising her mouth was free, and Draco's arm was instead crushing her shoulders into his chest. "Please."
He did not stop as she came, holding her tighter still as she screamed and flung her arms out, fingers reaching uselessly for escape from the tension shuddering through her body. And the second it subsided she was terrified. Hermione grabbed Draco, holding onto his shoulders desperately.
"Don't leave me!" she cried, realising her face was damp.
Screaming and crying. Just as he'd said.
And then Draco's whole body tensed, around her and in her, and she finally felt it: the heat she had been seeking from him for a year.
Their breathing slowed and the world came back into view. There was snow everywhere. It was fucking freezing. The moment broke and they moved at the same time; her letting go of him, him retreating. She sat up and knelt on her knees, feeling the fluid slide out of her, down the inside of her thighs. An awkwardness started to descend upon the post-orgasm high, the clarity that was returning.
"Um. Thanks," she said. It felt like Draco had exorcised something out of her. Hermione didn't know what else you were meant to say after something like that.
"If you do that again, there is no point in me waiting beside the Dark Lord," Draco said, standing up carefully on the slippery ice and offering her his hand. "You can't let him in your head."
He said it as matter-of-factly as anything, as though he had seen it many times before. And, Hermione suddenly realised with a strike of realisation, he probably had – at Voldemort's table, amongst the most insane of his followers.
She took Draco's hand with her uninjured left one, and he pulled her to her feet. Hermione could barely stand to look at him. "He's in Harry's head," she mumbled.
"Do not overly insert yourself in Potter and the Dark Lord's destiny," Draco said. "You are supposed to be the fighter by Potter's side. Not a woman possessed dragging him further in. And after that, you are supposed to be mine."
It hurt, to be so ashamed like this. Hermione closed her eyes and crossed her arms against the freeze. She felt Draco kiss her forehead.
"Come on," he said shortly, picking up her coat. "You need tea."
If that wasn't the clearest sign she had landed firmly back in Britain. She followed him dutifully back to the kitchen until he threw an arm out, stopping her outside the tent.
"You – you wait here," he said, aiming another Warming Charm at her. Hermione fixed her buttons and put her coat back on while she waited. He emerged, her cigarettes and two mugs of tea in hand. A very traditional picture of post-coital bliss.
She took the mug he held out. "Is Harry ok?" she asked, guessing why he hadn't wanted to let her in. As though Voldemort's evil was contagious.
Draco jerked his head as he lit one of her smokes with his wand. "Define 'ok'," he said.
"Hmm," she replied vaguely, sipping her tea. "He told me before there's nothing anyone can do. It just has to pass."
He tilted his head back as he exhaled, and Hermione again thought she could have watched him forever, in the dark and snowing Scottish forest.
"What are you going to do next," he asked. She cricked her neck and swallowed, eyes shut in determination.
"There's a thief, that the Dark Lord has been seeking for months," she said, forcing herself to think constructively. "Don't know why. But we got some clues to his identity tonight. Can try to follow them up."
"Is it not possible this thief has your Hufflepuff treasure?" he asked.
She frowned. "I think Harry would have mentioned it."
"But you said he doesn't know what he stole," Draco pointed out. "So Potter doesn't know everything in the Dark Lord's head."
The thought was not welcoming, even though it was a clue. "If he's chased this thief for months unsuccessfully…I don't rate our chances," Hermione said, swallowing more tea, like the answer might be in the bottom of her mug.
"All you and Potter do are impossible things, Hermione," Draco said kindly, handing her the cigarette. "Don't give up hope. Or at least, don't give up hope and then keep wallowing in Dark magic. If you're giving up, tell me and we can finally fuck off to Europe."
She giggled briefly, tucking her hair behind her ear. "Is that where the future waits, then?" she asked, flicking ash onto the snow.
"Well, it's surely not in snowing fucking Scotland," he said disapprovingly, and Hermione laughed.
"Weren't you meant to go to Durmstrang?" she asked, giving him back the cigarette. "It's probably colder there."
"Thank God I didn't," Draco said evenly.
"I'm sure your mother is very pleased with how your Hogwarts education turned out," Hermione said, sighing. "Is she still trapped?"
He didn't answer for a moment, focussing on inhaling as much nicotine as he could. "Yes," he said, coughing slightly as he breathed out. "Father's still wandless, too."
She raised her eyebrows. "Strange that…your father has been stripped of his wand, in this new world," Hermione couldn't help commenting.
Draco didn't say anything.
"A retribution," she continued. "His wish for the lessers to be made to heel granted."
"Hermione," he said, and she knew it was her warning to stop.
"Can you go back ok?" she asked, a tiny part of her hoping he would say no and she would not have to let him go again.
He nodded, and another bit of her heart broke, joining the pieces that had fallen somewhere into the bottom of it when she had attacked Luna and Goyle. "I was with Pansy when you messaged," Draco said.
"Oh," Hermione said, surprised. "She let you go, I suppose."
Something in his eyes flickered. "Yes," he replied flatly, and she waited – but Draco did not explain further.
"I wish you didn't have to go," she whispered.
"I wonder if you anticipated you might feel that way," he said. Hermione knew what he was getting at, and firmly shook her head in disagreement.
"I can safely say, when I made the Vow, I had no idea what I was doing," she replied tiredly, and Draco laughed.
"It was headstrong of you," he commented. "Well…perhaps with the snake? If I help you kill her, there's a way out."
Hermione froze, then turned to look at him. But his expression was mask-like again. "That's what you were thinking, wasn't it?" he asked. "You want to kill her or kill us trying. Even if you haven't found your precious Hufflepuff heirloom." The restrained anger in his voice was plain.
"I'm not leaving you there indefinitely, Draco," she said baldly. "I'm not."
"I can leave the moment you decide, Granger," he said; ah, there it was, her last name, the herald of annoyance and distance with Draco, with everyone. "Do the thing properly or not at all. I'm not camping around Britain with you and Potter."
"I think…I'll do…exactly as I planned to do," she said slowly, and Draco groaned, standing up.
She jumped up, too, with much more difficulty on her injured leg. "You're going?"
"It'll be easier to leave after you've just annoyed me," he said dispassionately, and Hermione wrapped her arms tightly around him.
"Thank you," she mumbled into his coat, and after a moment, she felt his arms reach around her too. Hermione suddenly wondered if they had ever embraced like this. They'd never had a normal goodbye before, she supposed.
She pulled away and looked up at him. "You know, you only got more attractive while I was away," she said, and Draco snorted.
"If you're fishing for compliments, you should try asking when you're not at death's door," he said, breaking out of her grasp entirely.
"So rude!" she exclaimed, but she could see the smile on his face as he left to Disapparate. "Happy Christmas, Draco!" she called after him. "I'll be seeing you."
He turned around as he left the array of the wards, a strange smile on his face. "I hope so," Draco called back, voice wavering, and then he was gone.
A more wholesome Antichrist reference / FREAKY FOREST SEX everyone's favourite trope. Draco's back, after 15 chapters, oh my god so long! And he said no Volmione today haha.