Less than 24 hours after giving Snape her agreement to allow him double that to come up with a solution for his unease at their increasingly risky missions, he had shown up at the bunker early the next morning to present his decided way forward. The man was a Slytherin after all, so she was not surprised at his ability to come up with a plan to get what he wanted quickly, which in a strange turn of events appeared to be their safety. She was however surprised at the decision he had come to and had already set the wheel in motion to make reality. When he uttered the words, "I have set up a meeting with my inside informants," she all but laughed in his face.
She realised he was being serious, which lets face it, she should have known from the start. It wasn't like the man was known for cracking jokes unless insulting people could be classed as comedy. Being on the receiving end of said insults, she was sure that it definitely was not one. Upon the realization that he was indeed proposing they meet with death eaters as a proper solution to what he deemed as their reckless behaviour both she and Neville gaped at him, opened mouthed and lost for words. Luna for her part, just looked at Severus eagerly and commented on how she thought that sounded lovely.
Once Hermione and Neville finally recovered from the shock, they had made their objections to the meeting known in a most certain manner which spanned a debate with their old potions professor that lasted over an hour. They had finally relented on the condition they be given the names of the informants before they gave their agreement.
This was why Hermione now found herself in a situation she should have seen coming. She was driving their car to a location an hour away from their base to another heavily forested area, with Neville in the passenger seat and Luna (who had also insisted on coming), and Severus sat in the back. She started to reconsider her earlier thought of never associating the word funny with the man as seeing him try to sit poised with his usual air of indifference in the back of the car, his skin taking on a slight green shade from obvious travel sickness, all while Luna sat beside him rambling on about some imaginary creature whose nail clippings she heard were "most useful in potion brewing," was perhaps the funniest scene she had witnessed in years, and this time she had no problem laughing at the whole surrealness of it all along with Neville.
She should have guessed the identity of the death eaters that had been passing information along and she was kicking herself for not thinking of it sooner, although she did console herself with the fact that she never would have thought Draco Malfoy would have the balls to defy Tom. She hadn't given him much thought after the battle if she was being honest, but she had always known that the position he was thrust into as a 16 year old child would have been a difficult one. If she had been faced with taking the mark or the certain demise of her parents for her resistance, she would probably have made the same choice, if it could even be classed as being one. A few years back, she would have probably tried to convince herself she would have refused, but war had shown her exactly what she was capable of when it came down to it, and while a lot of people would disagree with the things she had done in the name of avenging her parents, she found she had no regrets.
As the laughter died down and she was left to her own thoughts she couldn't help but remember the last time she had even spoken to Draco.
Harry caught the tears Snape had gestured for him to collect, and immediately turned to leave for Dumbledore's office to use the pensive with Ron directly at his feet. Hermione however, faltered. She could see the shallow breaths the man was struggling to take and her conscience would not allow her to just leave without attempting to do something, anything, to try to help him. She knew that Nagini's bite, while causing extensive damage, which was clear with the pool of his own blood Snape was practically bathed in, also had the extra added side effect of her venom that prevented the wounds from being healed in magical means, and she remembered from when Arthur Weaslry had been attacked by her in 5th year that it also worked to dissolve muggle stitches.
Hermione dropped to her knees next to the man, tearing off her jacket and immediately pressing it to his wound hoping that the pressure would at least have some benefit in slowing the blood flow while she tried to come up with a solution. He was unconscious and although she could feel a pulse that insured he had not succumbed to his injuries yet, it was faint and seemed to be growing more so by the second. From the way he had ordered Harry to take his memories she suspected that there was something he needed to tell him, and she was all but completely positive that it came down to him actually being on their side and orders from Dumbledore. Of course knowing that from the start would have saved everyone a lot of confusion and anger, but Dumbledore always did like to be one step ahead of everyone else and by the looks of things,even in death this had not changed.
Panic began to overtake her as she tried and failed to come up with a solution. If she used the emergency portkey to get him out she would have to go with him to ensure he received treatment, as everyone believed him to be on the side of the Death Eaters. That would mean she would also be stuck there away from the battle as there were no portkeys made for a return. She could apparate to Hogsmeade and run back to the castle, but by the time she convinced someone to treat Snape and made the journey back, anything could have happened and she would have no idea if it was even an option to apparate to hogsmeade or if it would be overtaken by the other side. In his state it was also unlikely he would survive the portkey journey. Sending a Patronus to the hospital wing for help was also out as she had no idea who would hear it or even who would be alive, injured or dead to send one to, and she doubted they could spare anyone to send.
A sob escaped her lips as she continued to run through scenarios in her head that all had the same outcome of being useless. She was startled when she heard a loud gasp behind her and turned around brandishing her wand with the hand not holding the jacket to Snape's neck to be met with piercing grey eyes on the exhausted and dishevelled looking face of Draco Malfoy. The shock at the scene before him was obvious on his features and for the first time Hermione could ever remember in her years as his classmates he was speechless.
"Are you going to stand there and gape or are you going to do something actually useful for the first time in your life and help me save him?" she half sobbed, half shouted.
This seemed to spur Malfoy into action and he was across the room in four steps, dropping down to his knees beside her.
"Wh- what happened? How do we fix this? Merlin there's so much blood. Is he even breathing?"
Malfoy's hands were shaking as he reached out to help add pressure to the wound, pressing his hands over her own. She could tell he was barely keeping it together, and it was just what she needed to pull her own panic back and take charge. She had always been the logical one, the one who had a plan for everything and remained level headed amongst the trio whilst Harry and Ron were prone to acting on emotion alone. She could do this. How many times had she been in a life or death situation before and managed to come up with a plan? This was second nature to her by now and so she closed her eyes and took one deep inhale, gathering all her panic and pushing it down. When she released the breath and reopened her eyes, she was in control again. One of them needed to keep it together.
"It was Voldamort. He believed Snape to be the master of the elder wand and set Nagini on him. He is bleeding out through the wounds on his neck and thanks to the venom, the wound cannot be healed by magical or muggle means. There has to be a solution, but being as I'm not exactly well versed in dark magic imbued snake venom, I am unsure what to do. There has to be some way to remove the venom or counteract it."
Malfoy's hands suddenly pulled back from where they were stationed on top of her own and he began frantically searching all his pockets.
"I have… hold on, I know it's here somewhere… Yes, here it is. It's the antidote to Nagini's is thankfully paranoid enough to have developed one and gave it to me since the Dark Lord is so fond of his disappointment in everything I do and his favourite act of murder seems to be allowing his snake to carry out the deed."
He held out the small vial of shimmering orange liquid which Hermione took with her free hand as Malfoy reached forward again to take over applying pressure to the wound. She uncorked it without hesitation and pried the man's mouth open, pouring it down his throat. She immediately pulled out the small bottle of essence of dittany she had in her beaded bag and dropped the last remaining droplets onto the wound, gasping in relief as it began to heal. The potion had worked. The only problem now was that she had just used the remaining drops in the bottle of dittany and it had barely been enough to heal a section on the outer part of the gaping hole.
She looked at Malfoy expectantly and thankfully he caught on without explanation the question she wasn't speaking, nodding in the negative.
"Well without dittany we are going to have to close up this wound the muggle way." she announced while digging into her bag looking for the mugle first aid kit she had packed prior to going on the horcrux hunt. She hadn't used it as of yet so it was buried deep and Malfoy raised a brow at her as she shoved her arm into her tiny bag right up to her shoulder.
"I may have placed an extension charm on it," she admitted with a shrug of her free shoulder which earned her a slight smirk on the corner of his mouth. At least he appeared to have returned to the controlled Malfoy she knew and loathed, although the fact that he not only had not called her a mudblood and had willingly touched her was a little disconcerting. She supposed even bigotry took a back seat in a crisis.
She finally located the first aid kit she had made up from materials she got from her parents dental surgery, and pulled out the needle and thread. Draco's eyes widened and his face paled even whiter than it already was.
"Please for the love of Salazar tell me you do not intend to manually stitch my godfather back together."
Hermione thought the look of horror on his face may have been amusing in a situation that was not the one they were currently in where they were in the middle of a battle, in a war they were on opposite sides of and where she in fact did intend to manually stitch her old potion professor back together by hand.
"I didn't know Snape was your godfather," she said as she began to thread the needle. "Huh, makes sense why he always seemed to favour you even over the other slytherins."
"Granger, have you lost your damn mind!" he cried. "Have you ever even done this before?" she could tell his panic was starting to climb again so she turned and looked up into his glazed over grey eyes. He really did look awful. The war had very obviously taken a toll on him and for what wasn't the first time, she couldn't help but feel sympathy for the boy before her and decided she should try not to lash out at him and scream how she was doing her best in an absolutely insane situation, and his complete lack of faith, and obvious distrust of her wasn't helping right now. That and she needed him level headed for the help she was going to need from him.
"My parents are muggle healers of a sort. They used to teach me things like this on practise skins. As hard as it is for you to imagine that muggles can actually achieve anything useful without magic, this is our only option to close up the rest of the wound and I'm going to need you to use an aguamenti to clear that blood as I go so I can see what I'm doing. Do you think his pureblood highness can manage such a plebeian task considering Snape is still very much in trouble, or would you rather we just let him continue to bleed while he lays here unconscious until he is dead?" So much for not lashing out she thought. Malfoy really did push her buttons like nobody else, and in her defence it was hard to be in his presence and not completely lose her head after the years of bullying and taunting he had bestowed upon her.
She raised an eyebrow at him and received a sneer and a nod of his head in return as he removed one hand from the now completely blood drenched clothing he was still pressing on the wound and held his hand out towards her.
"Potter still has my wand and my mothers burned in the fire in the room of requirements, so unless you're expecting me to produce water by crying over the gaping hole then I'm going to need to borrow your wand."
Later when she thought about it she would blame the fact that they were in a crisis and she wouldn't be able to stitch and cast the spell at the same time, but she handed him her wand without a second of consideration that she was arming him and leaving herself vulnerable.
He took it and pointed it towards Snape's neck, looking to her for the signal she was ready. She nodded once and he lifted the clothing away from the wound and cast the auguamenti and she immediately began to work.
It was by no means a decent stitching job but after about 10 minutes of sewing the skin with Malfoy continuing to use her wand to clean the area, the wound was completely stitched back together and she pulled the last couple of her blood replenishing potions from her bag and poured them down Snape's throat, followed by a sleeping draught to ensure he stayed out so that he wouldn't be able to protest what she was about to do. She held out her hand to Malfoy who handed her back her wand without question, a fact she would later attribute to the fact that he simply wasn't in his right mind after their ordeal.
She pulled a pen and piece of paper from her bag, wrote a quick note stating what she had done and how she was certain Snape was working on Dumbledore's orders the whole time and she would explain as soon as the battle was over. Attaching the note to the man's robes with a sticking charm she pulled her emergency portkey from her pocket and activated it, placing it in his hand and watching him whirl away.
Without another word she stood up, lifted her bag and made to leave to go find Harry and Ron. Before she reached the door she heard Malfoy speak in such a low voice she barely caught his words.
"Don't die Granger."
She turned around to see Malfoy still perched on the floor, now with his knees drawn up to his chest, arms wrapped around them and eyes cast to the floor.
She turned back towards the door saying, "stay alive Malfoy," as she exited the boat house and made her way back towards the castle.
They had finally arrived at the spot Severus had directed them to, and had parked the car up to make the rest of the way by foot. She could hear mumbled male voices just beyond a particularly thick cluster of trees in the forest they were now well into. They obscured any chance she may have had to ascertain who the other voices belonged to. By her count she could pick out at least two that she was positive did not belong to Malfoy.
When they made their way into the clearing on Snape's lead she could see Malfoy's telltale blonde locks standing with his back to them facing Theodore Nott, Blaise Zabini and Pansy Parkinson. Upon hearing them Malfoy began to turn towards them. "Finally we were starting to th-" His mouth dropped open when he spotted the identity of Severus's company. Pansy looked like she had just bitten into a particularly disgusting every flavour bean, while Theo and Blasie were fleeting between looking like they were about to burst into laughter to looking extremely confused.
The sneer she had seen so many times upon his face when he looked at her made its way onto Malfoy's face. "Is this some sort of joke? You said we were meeting with your vigilantes and instead you bring this bunch of idiots with you. I mean fair enough Granger with a wand is someone I could admit to being slightly intimidated by, but you honestly expect us to believe that the Hogwarts swot, the brainless wonder with a plant fetish and loony Lovegood are behind the brutal deaths of all those death eaters?" He laughed and nodded his head in disbelief.
"Oh I don't go out with Hermione and Neville on their little crusades. Too much blood and violence for me. How nice to see you all again. We haven't seen very many Slytherins since the battle. I hope you all are keeping well." Luna started with a smile, completely oblivious to the mounting tension.
Draco rolled his eyes, glancing back to his friends, "still a bloody nutter clearly." Obviously the war hasn't made him any less a prick, Hermione thought.
Neville bagan to move towards the Slytherin's reaching down into the knife holster on his leg. Hermione grabbed his arm, stopping him from advancing. He looked down at her in confusion.
She met his questioning glare with a smile. "Let me have the pleasure of showing Malfoy just how wrong he is to underestimate us."
Neville released the grip on the handle of his blade, letting it slip fully back into his holster and let out a low laugh. "Oh this is going to be good," he smirked as he gestured out his hand in the direction of their company. She unclipped her knives and handed them to Neville as she made her way to the middle patch between the two groups, glancing back to see Luna was smiling encouragingly at her while Severus simply rolled his eyes.
"What's the matter, Malfoy? Scared to get your ass handed to you by a girl?"
"I don't hit girl's Granger, especially those who clearly can't beat some shape into their hair, never mind another person," he sneered.
"Fine then. How about you simply try to place your hand on my shoulder? If you manage to do that without injury you win gloating rights. If I win however, you stop assuming that you know anything about any of us anymore like you seem to think you do. Do you think his pureblood highness can manage such a task?"
She could see the recognition at her words crossing his face as he scowled at her and handed his wand to Theo. "Fine, but if you get hurt don't bloody cry about it like it isn't your own fault."
"Oh, I'm positive I won't be the one getting hurt," she teased.
He stepped towards her and was only about 2 feet away when he lifted his hand out to grab her shoulder. She instantly dodged under his arm and let out a laugh of glee, thinking about how she couldn't wait to see the look on his face when she was looking down on him like she planned to be after watching him sweat. They carried on like this for a few minutes and she could see him getting increasingly frustrated as he failed to get a hold of her, realising that she was far too quick.
"Oh come on Malfoy, surely you can complete such a simple task as placing a hand on my shoulder? I know you don't have the best track record with actually successfully carrying out tasks bestowed upon you, we remember how the whole Dumbledore assasination ended after all, but surely this one isn't too difficult, even for a useless death eater like you," she taunted. Her jab landed exactly how she hoped it would and she could have sworn he let out what sounded like a growl in anger.
"I'll tell you what, I will even stand still for you this time." she smirked.
He lunged at her and she allowed him to get his hand a few inches from her shoulder before she sprang into action, grabbing ahold of it, twisting around and using a combination of the momentum of both their movements and his weight to flip him right over her back, and twisted his arm so the pain caused him to have to roll onto his stomach. She placed her boot in between his shoulder blades forcing him to remain there as her laughter was joined by Neville's.
"I'll let you up if you say you were wrong and apologize to Luna for your remark about her," she gloated.
"Fuck off!" His ability to scoff clearly meant he simply wasn't in enough pain and so she twisted his arm up higher and pressed her boot further into his back earning her a groan.
"I'm sorry, I didn't hear that. Want to try again?"
"Fucking hell fine! I concede. Clearly swotty Granger has gone full Terminator and surprised us all."
She scrunched her nose in confusion, "How do you know who the terminator is? Also I'm still not hearing that apology for being a prick to Luna."
"Merlin damn it all," he groaned as she placed yet more pressure between his shoulder blades. Any more and she was certain he would need to go to a healer to get it mended. "I apologize to Lovegood for my apparently offensive comment that was so bad it deserved physical violence." She was certain that if she could see them his eyes would be rolling.
"Oh that's quite alright Draco. Thank you for your apology," Luna smiled.
Hermione finally let go of his arm and backed away, allowing him to pull himself back off the ground as she made her way back to her group. She noticed that Theo and Blaise were both trying and failing to hide their snickers at their friends expense and even Pansy looked amused but was clearly trying not to react in any way.
She looked at Draco with curiosity. "You never answered my question about how you know who the terminator is."
Draco shrugged and gestured his head towards Theo who had a look of pride plastered over his face. "Theo has developed a weird affinity for muggle technology since we live somewhere in the muggle world and he is able to try it out. He likes to force us to watch things he decides worthy. Terminator was one of the more tolerable ones. His discovery of the Rocky Horror Picture Show was probably one of the worst since he insisted on belting out his rendition of one of the songs for three weeks straight, complete with him voicing the parts for all the characters."
Theo looked appalled by Malfoy's summarization of his theatrics. "Oh I nailed that every time and you know it!"
Severus stepped forward, clearing having had enough with all their chest puffing. "If you are all quite finished, can we get to the point of this meeting? Specifically the part where you agree to work together?"
Everyone threw him a weary look, well everyone except Luna who was very obviously overjoyed at the thought of having more people to work with and was currently humming to herself with a smile plastered on her face. Hermione could definitely understand why the "loony" nickname was coined, but she also knew that people tended not to see the other attributes Luna possessed. She was fierce with a wand, loyal to no end, creepily intuitive and had a level of intelligence that rivaled even Hermione's own.
Nobody spoke for a solid two minutes causing Severus to sigh and pinch the bridge of his nose. "Can you all at least see the benefits of working as a team?" They all reluctantly nodded in agreement. "good , well that settles it then. Obviously we will have to work on the whole trust issue, but we should start arranging to meet at the bunker to get started if you all agree?" Again more reluctant nods. "Well as much of a pleasure as it's been watching you all posture about like a ostentation of those ridiculous white peacocks that reside at Malfoy manor, I think that's enough excitement for one day. We will be in touch to arrange a time and day for the next step and I can meet you at the cave we use and bring you to the bunker." with that he turned on his heel and began to make his way back towards the car. Without sparing a glance at the Slytherins Hermione and Neville turned to follow while Luna smiled and waved goodbye to the other group and made her way behind them.
Hermione could already feel the tension leaving her body as they walked out of sight of the Slytherins. What the hell had she just agreed to get herself into?