Notes: Thank you all for your continued support. You are the best readers an author could hope for. Seriously. If you haven't already, check out the cover I made for the story. I'm no photoshop guru, but it was the first time I'd made art for one of my pieces and it was fun to do.

~*~ Twenty Five ~*~

When she next pushed through the dark fog, it was daylight and they were at the bank of a stream, its frigid water rushing past under a thin veneer of ice. Hermione couldn't tell where they were and supposed that was half the point. She was atop the pile of blankets again while Malfoy spun a small spit with an unknown animal on it, his back to her. She blinked several times, adjusting to the frosty daylight and the chill in her lungs.

When she was finally able to speak, she murmured, "How long?"

He turned his head, scanning her from head to toe before answering. "Several days."

Hermione supposed that made sense. If they were trying to escape Tom's ability to track her, it was better to keep her under as much as possible. That didn't mean there wasn't the chill of dread in her bones at the thought of being utterly helpless as he chose their path. "You levitating me?"

"Sometimes." He shrugged. "Honestly I try to avoid using any magic. You never know who's out there. Mostly I just carry you."

Her heart did an odd jump. "Like a Muggle?"

Malfoy rolled his eyes at her. "Like a bloody human being, Granger."

Right. She kept forgetting he wasn't the boy she'd known. Although now that they were away from the castle and its herb garden, his hair was fading, the midnight now a muddy brown and the roots clearly showing hints of platinum blond. She wasn't sure she wanted the dye to go away. It was easier to separate him from the boy of her memories when he was all dark brows and inky fringe. Easier to acknowledge how very much she needed him, how much she had come to trust him.

"You're staring, Granger." He didn't seem particularly put out, but if she'd learned anything, it was the man had a poker face to envy.

"Sorry," she muttered, adjusting her focus to the spit in front of him. "What's for lunch?"

"Squirrel," he replied dryly. He cast a frown over his shoulder. "You know you don't have to do that."

"What?" She wasn't doing anything other than looking at the meat on the spit.

Malfoy sighed, running his free hand through his disheveled hair. "The way you are with men. It isn't necessary. Not everything is about sexual attraction."

Hermione blinked, unsure if she should be intrigued or offended. "What are you talking about, Malfoy?"

"Look, I know it's none of my business, but I'm bloody tired of holding my tongue and it looks like we're stuck with each other for awhile longer." He paused, rotating the squirrel. "I know we all have different ways of coping with the hell we go through. Merlin knowns I'm screwed up a million ways from Sunday. But, Granger… Hermione, your worth isn't determined by getting men to take you to bed."

She stared at him, at the eyes full of sorrow and something deeper, at the clench of his jaw, and simply frowned. "I don't know what you're trying to say. I don't—"

"You do. When we first came here, I was expecting to contend with the spitfire I'd known in school, the girl who punched me in the face. Instead you spent the first few days staring at me and Riddle like you wanted to eat us for lunch. Eventually you started staring more at him and less at me, but that's not the point. The point is that you'd just gotten out of a warzone and your first instinct was to find someone to shag you."

He looked less pleased to be saying the words than she felt hearing them. He'd told her this before, during their conversations in the shadows of Hogwarts, but her mind hadn't been entirely her own then and the truth of them not fallen quite so sharply. Now she realized with a sick churn of her stomach that he was right, as he had always been. Although she wasn't sure why he continued to harp on a topic that had brought nothing but ire between them. "It was a way to forget the pain."

"With Potter, sure," he conceded. "But not with me or Riddle. Not when I was your enemy and he was the one you intended to kill. Even if Riddle did get in your head so quickly, you still wanted him, wanted what he was doing to you. What happened to you, Hermione?"

A sudden rush of anger tore through her. What right did he have to judge her, to find her lacking when he was guilty of so much more? "Fuck you, Malfoy. You're no bloody angel either."

He took the spit off the fire, setting the meat aside with a nonchalance that grated at her. "I never said I was. But there are also a number of reasons for my choices. Reasons that, I'd like to believe, explain my actions. Not justify, to be clear, but explain."

"Why should I tell you anything when you've told me nothing?" Not that she even had an answer, her urge for physical connection another effect of wartime trauma she could not fully explain. That Tom had seemed to erase the ache completely by their wedding night was something she wasn't ready to acknowledge.

"You know about my cursed leg."

That was it. She knew nothing else about him except he was willing to risk his life for her now. And that perhaps his relationship with Voldemort was not as simple as it had once seemed. "You've been in my head on countless occasions, Malfoy. I have no secrets left from you. But you, you only have secrets."

"Fine," he murmured, tearing the meat apart and offering her half. "You're not the only one here who has been married."

She took the offering, fingers closing numbly around the charred flesh. It took two full breaths to quell the disbelief his statement had wrought. Malfoy married? It seemed absurd, but she could see the truth in his haunted eyes, in the tension distorting his angular features.

"When?"

He almost concealed his flinch from her, but she saw the sudden tic of his jaw, the grind of his teeth. "If you count the last six months, three years about."

Hermione gaped. "You were so young."

He shrugged, a look passing across his features that broke her heart. "We were in love."

"What happened?"

Malfoy chewed silently on his meat for some minutes before murmuring, nearly too softly to hear, "She died."

Hermione rocked back, the quiet words hitting like daggers. She'd assumed… wrong. That much was painfully clear. All those times Malfoy had looked at her with sorrow in his eyes she'd never imagined it could be the product of such a profound loss. She wondered who the girl had been, how she had met her untimely end, but knew better than to ask. That night in the library, when Riddle had finally dug his talons deep inside her pliable mind, Malfoy had mentioned something about a girl dying for nothing if he gave up. It was now clear that girl had been his wife.

She could hardly imagine losing someone so dear to her as a spouse. Sure, she was technically married to Tom and she would be lying if she claimed there was no emotion tying her to him even after she'd escaped his cognitive manipulations, but she wasn't in love with him. Perhaps she still cared for some parts of him, the facets of his soul that were not so swathed in shadow as to be inhuman, but she would not fight for him, would not place him before herself ever again. The closest she came was the tender love she'd shared with Ron, but she could hardly remember those emotions, so buried between grief and pain they were.

"I'm so sorry."

Malfoy nodded once, stiffly, and turned away. "We all have scars, Granger."

They didn't speak for a long time after that and Hermione welcomed the oblivion that came with the next stupefy.