Notes: Thank you all. You are an amazing audience and I'm so happy to share my writing with you. And now...

In which many questions are answered and we learn much about one Draco Malfoy.

~*~ Thirty One ~*~

Hermione glared up at the flapping material of the tent, the incessant snap of the cloth in the bitter wind driving her closer to madness with every passing second. How were any of them sleeping through this? Perhaps they weren't. They'd split up their forces among a number of tents, leaving the smallest for the two commanders. Which meant the only other person in her tent was Draco and he was out cold. It also meant they likely had the flimsiest tent despite the magic imbued in its threads. At least it wasn't cold, despite the wail of the wind and the never-ending dance of fabric it blew.

Sighing, she shifted onto her side, thankful for the magically enhanced pallet she'd packed the last time they'd stopped at Nurmengard. Despite their ability to apparate to and from battle sites in the blink of an eye, Grindelwald had decided the risk of their enemies tracking their movements back to his fortress had become too high. Hence the tents and howling winds. It wasn't the first time she'd been in battlefront accommodations. There had been plenty of times they'd had a battle rage for days, sometimes weeks, making it necessary to swap in rested troops while pulling out those on the brink of exhaustion. She still remembered trying to find some semblance of rest while the screams of her comrades broke through the velvet night, impossible to ignore. Now, at least, there was only the howl of the wind and the bitter silence of a frigid night. It seemed some sense of propriety still existed in 1944 and wizards did not fight their battles through the night.

"No… No…" Draco whimpered, making her bolt upright from her pallet. His brow was damp and his features contorted as he continued to speak frantically, caught in some nightmare of memory or fiction. "Please… I beg you. I will do whatever you ask… please…"

The pleas continued, his voice contorted by ever increasing desperation until Hermione could bear it no longer. She'd hoped he would wake himself or that the dream would pass, but it was clear neither outcome was forthcoming. Steeling herself, she crawled across the distance between them, a space of half her height, and gripped his shoulders. Her touch soothed him for a moment, but then the cries were back, his voice cracking in a way that echoed in the depths of her soul. Unwilling to wait another moment, she shook him fiercely.

His eyes sprang open, sightless and wild in the shadows of their tent. Then his hands were on her, tracing her face, hovering over her lips as a sigh of relief passed through his. "Astoria. Thank Merlin."

Hermione's heart splintered, its jagged fragments cutting into every facet of her soul. It took all her willpower to correct him. "No. It's Hermione. Astoria is…"

"Dead," he finished dully, his bearings returning to him. He dropped his hands from her face with a ragged gasp. "I'm sorry."

Hermione caught one of his limp hands, lacing their fingers together. He didn't fight her, his breathing still uneven. She took a fortifying breath before asking, "You married Astoria Greengrass?"

His fingers twitched against hers, but he didn't pull away. "Yes."

"That's why you looked like you'd seen a ghost when we met Aurelia."

"I didn't expect her great aunt to look quite so much like her. It was… difficult at first." Hermione remembered the queasy look that had accompanied his ashen features. It must have been more than difficult to see even the slightest traces of his wife in Hermione's roommate. Hermione honestly couldn't remember much about Astoria. She'd been in a lower year than them and had been significantly more reasonable than Daphne, but she couldn't remember her face.

"You must have loved her very much." That much was clear on his face, even through the agony of his memories.

He pushed up until he was sitting beside her, his features hidden by the darkness, but his thigh warm against hers, their hands still joined. "She was everything good about me. She taught me how to be strong, how to see through the lies our parents had told us, to understand that blood purity was an absurd notion. She loved to talk about you, Hermione. You were her favorite example of why our parents simply had to be wrong."

"What?" It seemed wrong that Astoria Greengrass had known who Hermione was, but Hermione still couldn't picture her face.

"You were the top of our year and Astoria loved to tell me that if a Muggle born like you could top every single pureblood, then blood had nothing to with magical power at all. Seventh year, when we were all still at the school, before Potter failed in his plot to draw the Dark Lord out to his death, before we were on the battlefield every day, she made it her mission to change my view. I don't think she planned on me falling in love with her while doing it."

Draco's voice was rough, just this side of the ragged edge as he continued, "But I did. We were married before the end of the school year. Our parents thought it was a fabulous match, a perfect pureblood union. Little did they know neither of us believed in their rubbish any longer. But then Potter screwed up and the Dark Lord decided school was less important than war."

Hermione remembered the first battle like it was yesterday. The others might have melded into a single mire of death and blood and bile, but it stood alone. They'd thought they'd eliminated all the Horcruxes, but hadn't figured out that Harry was one of them or that the Hallows might help. So Harry had faced down Voldemort with their twin cores once again and ended up in St. Mungo's for a month. Another month later Voldemort had taken significant portions of the ministry under his control and the war began in earnest.

The battle had been on the school grounds, the student body dividing along house lines with few exceptions. She briefly recalled dueling with Draco at the end of a hallway, fiendfyre licking around their heels as the Room of Requirement burned. He'd interrupted them destroying the Ravenclaw diadem. But then he'd slipped away, rushing toward the sound of a female voice screaming further down the hall. She'd let him go, more important foes than a former classmate demanding her attention.

"How did…" She trailed off, not sure how to ask the question.

But Draco seemed to understand what she wanted to know. "My aunt was killed during that first battle by Molly Weasley, so the Dark Lord was in the market for a new… assistant." Hermione could hear him swallow, could feel the tremble of his leg where it touched hers. "He knew no one would be as loyal to him as she had been. He also wanted someone younger, more agile and powerful than his former ranks. He also knew I'd just married Astoria. When I returned from Hogwarts to the Manor after the battle, he was…" Draco paused, breath guttering for a long moment. "He was there with her, his wand at her neck, his hands in her shirt, her…"

He couldn't finish and Hermione didn't ask him to. The implication, the truth of what had been done to his wife made her quiver, rage singing through her veins. "And he kept her."

"Yes," he admitted. "We shared a bedroom at the Manor, but she was his prisoner, never allowed anywhere outside our room unless he was present. I tried to be strong for her, to resist him, to find a way out, but my parents didn't believe me and he soon resorted to much more compelling methods than simply putting his hands where they didn't belong."

"He tortured her."

"For hours at a time. To the brink of insanity. Until she begged me just to do as he wished." His hand was a claw around hers, all tension and unchecked fury. "I finally gave in."

"I…" but what did one say in the face of such inhumanity, such incomprehensible suffering? I'm sorry seemed far too little. "I can't fathom what that must have been like."

"If only that was the extent of it, Hermione," Draco breathed, more weary than a man his age had any right to sound. Her head shot up, meeting the shadow of his stare in the darkness. "He knew my allegiance was only as strong as his control over her, and by extension me. Even once I'd become the killer he wanted, the torture hungry fiend the Order now hunted, he would not relinquish that control. He knew I would turn against him. I shielded against him constantly, made sure he never knew how I truly felt, but he was a monster, not a fool. So he tested potions on her, tortured her when I wasn't effective enough, when I didn't inflict enough suffering or destroy enough lives."

All the stories made sense now. How wicked Draco had become, how senseless his crimes had been. He'd damned the world to save his wife. And yet he hadn't. "But…"

"But then the best and worst thing happened. We'd stopped being careful, sure the torture and potions had weakened her body beyond its capability to carry children." Hermione couldn't help the breath she sucked in, the sudden tension in her fingers where they clasped his. "We were wrong. Eight months before I found you on that Tower, she got pregnant. We knew it was ours. He'd been cruel to her, touched her in ways that I can never forget, but he had never raped her."

"You were going to be a father," Hermione breathed, a new chill settling over her.

"Yes." He canted his head toward her, eyes sparkling in the darkness. "It was the happiest day of my life when she told me. It didn't matter that my hands were covered in blood or that there were bruises wringing her neck, for one moment we were just two people in love who had created something special."

If his frantic belief that she was Astoria, alive and restored, had shattered her soul, then this consumed it, burned it to ash until all she could taste was the soot on her tongue. He'd lost not only his wife, but also his unborn child. She asked about his curse instead.

He sighed. "It was early, when I still thought it was possible to save her from him, to run away together and escape the war entirely. He caught us and dragged us back. Gave her some potion that had her puking for days and me this festering wound forever stamped beneath my skin." He traced the outline of the angry lines beneath his loose trousers with their joined hands. "Now I welcome the pain, the reminder of what he took from me, from both of us, from our child."

Hermione trembled, but whether from rage or the chill of the night it was hard to say. Draco broke their hands apart only to draw her into an embrace. She let her head settle on his shoulder, the sound of his pulse echoing in her ear. "I wish—"

"I've learned to stop wishing. Nothing good can come of might have beens." The irony of his words was not lost on her. Here they were in the past, attempting to rewrite history, perhaps the most powerful might have been of all.

"How did she—they—die?"

"An experiment of his gone wrong. It wasn't even an attempt to punish me, it was just the Dark Lord being careless with human life as he is wont to do. He didn't tell me until several weeks after the fact. I never even got to see her body or learn where they were buried." There was a desolate kind of horror behind his words, the type that would be forever seared into her memory, wholly impossible to erase.

Hermione leaned further into him, trying to give him something she couldn't quite name. He pressed a cool kiss to her brow. It was a long time before she said, "It was the day of the final battle, the one where Harry died, that you found out, wasn't it?"

He nodded against her hair. "I wouldn't have believed him but my mother confirmed it. Then I saw you heading for the Astronomy Tower and I prayed you were up to something that would stop him, end the war. Or that perhaps you would just kill me and it would finally be over."

"No wonder you were so angry," she murmured into his shoulder. "I can't believe you've been dealing with this alone for so long. And you had to watch me make a complete fool of myself, using empty physical gratification as a coping mechanism, falling for the man who would grow up to kill your wife and child. Godric, Draco, I have no idea how you didn't just murder us all."

"Oh, I was severely tempted to on many occasions. But Astoria always believed in Hermione Granger, so I decided I would too." Hermione wasn't sure what she made of this revelation. That Draco was supporting her not because he thought she was worth it, but because his deceased wife had thought so. As if sensing her train of thought, he added, "I made that choice before I knew you again. Once I'd spent time with you, even when you were clearly under Riddle's influence, I could make my own decision and I still picked you. I know you don't see it, but you are the cleverest witch of our age and I'm not going to let Tom bloody Riddle take that away from you."

"Oh." It wasn't the most articulate response, but it conveyed her acceptance of his clarification.

"And to be clear, this Riddle isn't anything like the monster that took my family from me." Hermione frowned, shifting so she could see the outline of his jaw as he spoke. "I saw the way he looked at you, when he was sure he'd enchanted his followers to be otherwise occupied. He's in love with you. He's capable of emotions the monster I knew could never have. He thinks he's protecting you by controlling your mind, by bonding with you. He doesn't view it as possession so much as ensuring your well-being. He's completely off base and wrong, but he still has a soul."

"And we still have to kill him." There was a certain misery to those words that Hermione felt deep in her chest.

"I am sorry," Draco murmured, "That you have to kill him. I would not ask it of you if I saw any other path forward."

Hermione breathed out a bone shuddering sigh. "I could never love him enough to save him. Not after everything he did."

"Apparently I couldn't love her enough either."

"It's not the same thing at all."

"Isn't it?"

Her cheek was suddenly damp, but her eyes were only just limned with moisture. It took her a moment to realize the warm rivulets flowing across her skin were Draco's tears and not her own. The realization cracked the dam of her control and soon their grief intermingled, their bodies shaking as they wept together in the darkness, the howl of the wind drowning out the wretched sound of their sobs.