It was a cloudy night but the moon was out; a thick slice casting the world in patchy pools of silver. She stole onto the terrace and down the stairs, her slippered feet near-silent, tip-toeing, head bowed, running free. She should not be doing this. I know, I know, said her fluttering pulse.
Into the gardens, the hedges ingesting her, farther, farther, the willow trees ghostly and pale, her shape in the shallow pond wraith-like, her cape a gossamer river. Would he follow? She wanted to look over her shoulder but made herself be still.
Wet earth, stagnant water, heady flowers drowsy from the onset of autumn. She closed her eyes and breathed in these scents, straining to hear over the blood pounding in her ears.
Would he dare?
Would she?
Meadowsweet and iron. She turned, slowly; he was a few steps away—no helmet, but with features carved from granite and carefully guarded all the same.
Her gaoler, her protector, and now her lover. A thrill went through her stomach and up to her lips. She moved, or perhaps he did, or they moved together, for they were close enough to touch, to taste, the crescent moon reflecting in his eyes, twin silver scythes.
He trailed the backs of his gloved fingers along her cheek, setting the skin alight. His other hand freed her hair from its chignon; it tumbled down her back and around her face, stirred in a soft nighttime breeze.
"This is treason." His throat bobbed, hand sliding away, falling to his side in a balled fist.
Ice speared through her chest. His face came and went in the scudding cloud shadows, all at once beautiful and distant.
"Yes." He held her tender, beating heart in his hand and she let him, knowing that he could crush it with the barest twitch of his fingers. "It is."
He looked away, a muscle ticking in his jaw. Tick, tick, tick, like a clock, hands inching closer to midnight; spellbound with no fairy godmother to save them.
"There are other people in this castle I must protect." He stepped away, putting space between them as though laying down a wall. Brick over brick over brick, every backwards step another coat of mortar, higher, teetering towards the night sky and its delicate slivered moon.
Oh, to be someone with a family to protect. A wonderful feeling, she assumed. To love and be loved, unreservedly, with such devotion it must be physically painful.
The hardness inside her returned, crackling like heated glass. Your mother is perfectly capable of taking care of herself, she might have said, but every moment spent in the garden was another loop in the signature of their death warrant. The hope in her belly was a rose bush, wilting petals peeling away from the core, stems drooping, petals soft as velvet against her insides, but she had no magic; she wasted away, dull, fetid, grey, tired, like the husk of a mutilated building.
She didn't look at him as she walked away. Doing so would surely pulverise her already shattering heart. A shadow fell over the moon and the world was cast in darkness, thick and syrupy, blotting out individual leaves until the hedges were long, solid oblongs muffling all sound; there was only her unsteady heartbeat and the singular crunching of gravel, then another pair of footsteps joined the fray, quicker than hers and discordant, loud and grating. Still, she did not turn.
He blocked her path, breathing hard, eyes wild and glowing like spinning coins. For a heartbeat, an aeon, they stared at one another over the abyss. He moved first, standing so close she had to tilt her head to meet his gaze. A whisper of a not-quite kiss swept her lips as he spoke.
"I wish…" His eyes flitted over her face—a man dying of thirst, he drank her in, hands rising to cup her chin like cool, fresh water. "I wish…"
I wish we were free.
I wish you would kiss me.
Speaking his wish aloud would invite ill omens to swoop in and carry it away, so she silenced him with a press of her mouth. Slow, light, just the barest brush of lips, but she felt it down to her toes in the moments before she pulled away.
Beautiful, he was beautiful under the flimsy moonlight, silver gilding the planes of his face and all its sharp edges, drifting in hazy smudges over his parted lips and knitted brows. He opened his eyes and their stares collided, then their mouths, flint and steel, igniting, consuming.
She burned.
His hands plunged into her hair, hungry kisses, devouring, wildfire loosed on wide pine forests, blazing heat. She hugged him close, stepped in to him, forged anew in the flames. Let this never end. Wrapped in his scent and feel, she was alive, lips moving against his, opening to him; his tongue swept her mouth and she moaned, a wanton sound. Pink suffused her cheeks, burning brighter when she felt his soft laugh against her lips, then her throat, his mouth skimming a flaming trail to her collarbone and back again.
If only she could take this moment, set it in amber, and place it in a locket over her heart. That way, it would never fade; they would be forever young, luminescent with lust and something else she daren't name.
"Run away with me," she whispered. Their foreheads rested together, noses brushing, mouths touching with every word. She tightened her grip on his waist. "We could go into the forest, find the Order of the Phoenix. We could help them, Draco. They could help us."
"We would be caught."
"Not on horseback. We could leave tonight and be in the heart of the woods before the dawn."
He drew away from her, bending one knee so they were level. His thumb ran a smooth arc over her cheek, warm and rough, stopping at the corner of her eye, cradling her like untempered glass. "I won't risk harm befalling you."
"I have already been harmed." She clutched his hand and pressed her face into its warmth. "Again and again and again, I have been harmed. Run away with me."
Lies left echoes. With this fact, she was intimate. A pebble dropped in a placid pool caused infinite bands of ripples to fan from the point of contact to the shore, visible long after the tiny stone has been lost. She saw in his eyes the echo of those ripples as he agreed to leave the castle. I will see you tonight, he said, but the words were pensive and detached.
Return to the ballroom and I will follow, leaving enough time so as not to be suspicious.
I will see you tonight.
Would he?
Combed, cleaned, and made ready for sleep, Hermione sat on the edge of the bed, feet free and swaying, tongue tingling with mint and bitter herbs. Which would be worse: to leave having never seen him again, or for his crestfallen face to be her last memory? Each was too terrible to bear thinking about but think she must—time was a luxury she was not afforded much of, these days.
Think, think, think, but she wasn't thinking, not really—merely rearranging her mind into neat flower bed rows; amaryllis, violets, hibiscus, primrose. She missed her old room with the writing desk and thick woollen rug. Perhaps if she hadn't destroyed it, she would still have her magic.
If she still had her magic, Bellatrix would be dead and she would be great with child, her waist thickened and doughy like old cream, her belly heavy, straining.
But she did not have her magic; just herself, her nightgown, and a pair of flimsy boots she pulled on and laced without feeling. Gardening boots. Comfortable enough, but not made for much more than ambling down paved garden paths and back inside, quickly now, lest she catch cold. She looked out over the Forbidden Forest, endlessly undulating in the weak moonlight, and imagined the biting cold of the shadows lurking beneath the boughs.
Tap, tap, her boots tapped against the floor, so loud after padding everywhere in bare feet or satin slippers. Her fingertips left ghostly marks on the windowpane, as did her breath. In, out, in, out. The forest was so much larger than she remembered.
Would she have time to retrieve The Tales of Beedle the Bard from its hiding place before she left? Where would it fit between the food, water, and supplies? She did not know where to procure food, water, and supplies, but it was too late for that thought to slow her.
The knock came sooner than she hoped. Her flower-bed thoughts were half planted, scraggly, in desperate need of cultivation, but she made herself open the door and step into Draco's embrace.
"I cannot let you run." His hand whispered down the ridges of her spine, curling in the fabric at the small of her back. "I'm sorry, Hermione. This is for your own good."
Already, he was ushering her into the room with his body.
"I understand." She couldn't hear the words over her thudding pulse.
Before he could speak, she angled her face and kissed him, hard, biting at his lips and spinning, pushing him into the room with both hands against his broad chest.
The sounds she made were breathy and needy but no desire sparkled in her core as he kissed her back, teeth and tongue and low, throaty groans. There was only the subtle dance, the push and pull, the hungry undressing with one hand while her other felt for the edge of the door, her fingers caught, she broke away and slammed it in his face, a heavy clunk, the key turned and no amount of pounding fists or yells of Hermione could open it.
His shouts haunted her through the castle, trailing in echoey wisps down the long corridors and tight spiral stairways, curling around her throat, a tightening noose. Caged sobs howled and snarled, throwing themselves against her breastbone until she was running doubled over, clutching at her chest. Running to where, she did not know. Away, towards, it was all synonymous, a rat in a trap, dashing around and around and around in circles.
Silver snakes stared at her through maliciously glittering emerald eyes. The library, cold and imposing, rising from the dark before she even knew where her feet had brought her. The doors swung smoothly open and she was inside, stumbling between the stacks, following a silent but throbbing pull from beneath her sternum, not quite in control of her own movements.
Floating, dream-like, towards the source of the dark pulsation brought her to a raised pedestal—on it, a diadem, dull metal wrought in the shape of outstretched wings, a twinkling sapphire in the centre. A dark thrill shot through her when her fingers closed around the eagle's head, kindling her senses, opening her mind to the coolness of the cavernous chamber and the subtle crunching beneath her boots.
She could not see—the shadows coating the floor like fog were too complete. Autumn leaves, she told herself, even as snapped, jagged shards scratched at her calves and scraps of fabric caught under her feet. She kicked something hard and round and it went skittering down the steps, bouncing hollowly.
Tiny vibrations shimmered from the diadem, racing through her sweat-slickened fingers and up to her shoulder, her neck, humming in the base of her skull.
The Dark Lord's Horcrux. It had to be. What that was, what it meant, she did not know, but she took it, held it close, sequestered it away in a satchel she found, and ran, across the castle grounds and into the forest.
The glistening kernel inside of her shone brighter with every passing hour, burning through the foggy haze of bitter tea. She ran.
And ran.
Bleeding feet, ragged breaths, the tiny, barely-there seed of magic dwindling in her breast. Drumbeats on the winter earth, rolling through the dark trees like thunder.
"Won't you look at me, Draco?"
He's lit a fire. The xanthic gleam of it reflects back at her from his expressionless helm—he is a stranger again, black metal and dancing firelight. But wasn't he always? She knows his body, the feel of every one of his outer edges, but the soul beneath is as strange and unfamiliar to her as it has always been. To him, she is a stranger, too. She wonders what he sees reflected in the glossy sheen of her eyes.
His chin lifts and the glowing flame-pattern crawls from his forehead to his cheek. "I am looking at you."
"Properly." She twists her hands—the bindings pull taut, scratching at her skin—and raises them in supplication. "Without the mask."
Her heart beats in her throat, pulsing against the cold metal collar. It cuts deeper into her skin when she swallows heavily. He's lifting his helmet, laying it aside, and although blazing heat squats between them inside the stone fire ring, it does not ward off the frigid sting in his gaze.
Clipped, constricted—coin purse eyes, cinched tight and knotted most intricately. To think: his eyes used to be silver coins, made for tossing in fountains and making wishes.
I wish, I wish, but the time for wishes has passed.
"We're in the forest. We could still run away." She picks at a spot of lichen on the fallen tree she's sitting on; it gives way easily under her fingernail, peeling up like a scab. In the corner of her eye, he moves, rising and pacing, a caged lion. He scratches the back of his head then stops, curling his hand into a fist which beats a tattoo on the side of his cuisse. Again and again, an uneven rattling, setting her teeth on edge. She knows he won't answer, but she tries anyway. "How did you find me so quickly? How did you…"
"Escape from the room you locked me in?" His barked laugh is unnaturally loud in the muffling silence of the trees. "One of your handmaidens heard me. They have been listening quite frequently at the door, it seems."
Her modesty should be all but stripped away, what with the bathing and the trussing and the perfuming for her nights with Lord Voldemort, but her cheeks still burn, engulfing her head in shameful heat. She drops her chin.
They knew. All along, her handmaidens knew. Lord Voldemort, too—of this, she is certain.
Her hands clench, the tendons in her wrist straining against the ropes. Why should she be ashamed? Draco is young, handsome, and she was so achingly lonely—who else was she to turn to for warmth? Anger courses through her, down her legs in fiery pulses until she's standing, striding towards him. She will not go back to that castle. She would sooner die.
Her mouth opens to say as much but she is so very tired, and hungry—her stomach aches from it. The world shudders in and out, close and far, wavering, the squeeze and release of a great fist around the silver-lined trees.
He's there to catch her when everything tips. His cloak—its scent fiercely familiar—settles around her shoulders, as does his arm, guiding her to the fallen tree, steadying her as the forest floor pitches and sways beneath her ravaged feet.
The sting of dirt and pine needles in the cuts and blisters is distant, a small window of caustic light at the end of a reaching tunnel. She can't remember when she discarded her boots, or if they simply fell to pieces. Time dilates, this deep in the forest. It could be minutes or days since she fled and both would seem perfectly feasible. Could it really be morning? Daylight wafts through the canopy but it's thin and dusty, incapable of piercing the consummate shadows pooling at the base of the trees.
Rest; she wants to rest.
"Eat."
Warmth puffing under her chin, rich, savoury scents—she opens her eyes and Draco is crouched before her, holding out a steaming bowl. When she doesn't move, he presses the rim against her lips.
She spits the broth in his face.
He's taking her back to that venomous court. He hit her over the head with the pommel of his sword.
"You're just like the rest of them." She wipes her mouth on her shoulder, breathing hard through her nose. "Bastard."
Liquid rolls from his temple, arcing over his cheekbone, down his face, dripping from the sharp point of his chin. He brushes it away and flicks it from his gloved fingers like raindrops. She expects him to speak, to make excuses, futilely apologise—raise his voice at her, perhaps. Instead, he cuts her hands free.
Feeling trickles back into her fingers as she flexes them. "And the collar?"
His eyes drop to it and quickly dart away. "I have my orders." A heavy swallow. "I am loyal to the Dark Lord."
"Are you?" She stops chafing feeling into her hands, angling his face towards her with a light brush of her fingers under his chin. The silver in his eyes is dull, tarnished, but no less unyielding. He sets his jaw; she feels the muscles shift. "Where was your loyalty when you were laying with his wife?"
A wood pigeon thump, thump, thumps, startled, through the trees and into the sky, such is the viciousness with which Draco wrenches himself away.
Once he's gone, Hermione drinks the broth, feeling the collar against her throat with every swallow.
