Seventh Year, Part 7, 1997

When she returned to the wooded campsite, Ron and Harry were both packing up the tent and supplies.

Harry ran for her first, hugging her tightly and whispering, "I'm so glad you're back and you're safe. You have no idea how worried I was!"

She pulled back to gaze into his green eyes. "I was always going to come back. You know I wouldn't leave you for good."

A look of relief crossed his face before he noticed the large bag slung over her shoulder.

"What's all this?" Harry asked, gesturing to the bag.

"Supplies! He said it's not safe for us to stay at the property, but he filled a bag with things he thought we might need!" she said, putting the bag down so Harry could look through it.

She glanced over at Ron then, since he'd been uncharacteristically quiet. He looked her up and down, at her clean clothing and freshly washed hair, and then over at the bag Mipsy had packed.

"So that's it? You just up and leave to go fuck a Death Eater?" Ron spit out in disgust. "Now he pays for your services in food and supplies? What was he paying you before to whore yourself out to him?"

"Ron, that's enough!" Harry snapped before Hermione could respond.

"No, it's not!" he shot back. "We're here in the middle of the bloody woods in the middle of the winter, and she's off in some fancy manor house somewhere in the lap of luxury!"

"It was ONE NIGHT, not even an entire night, and he's HELPING us, you bloody moron!" she yelled back. "Get that through your thick skull - a Malfoy is HELPING US!"

"Why am I even here then?" Ron thundered. "He's the bloody boy-who-lived, and your Death Eater boyfriend is giving you supplies and information. Harry needs you because he's obviously not going to fuck Malfoy. No one needs me."

"Ron, take off the locket," Harry said in a tired voice.

"What?"

"Take off the locket," he repeated. "You've worn it long enough."

Ron glared at Hermione as he jerked Slytherin's locket over his head and passed it back to Harry.

She held her hand out for it. "It's my turn. I'll take it," she said with a sigh. She slipped the necklace on and began to help the boys pack up the campsite, knowing that once they were safely set up in a new location, she could tell them about the Lestrange vault.

~oOo~

She should have known that retrieving the cup from the vault would not be nearly as simple as the plan they'd concocted. Polyjuice had turned Hermione into Bellatrix, something she never wanted to experience again, and Ron had accompanied her in disguise while Harry followed them under his invisibility cloak.

All was well until the cart hurtling them down toward the vault passed through the Thief's Waterfall, washing away Hermione's polyjuice and Ron's disguise. She'd had to resort to using the imperius curse on the goblin to force him to continue the journey into the depths of the bank and then open the vault. Ron was horrified at her use of an unforgivable, but what other option did she really have at that point? After the dark magic she'd used against her parents and the dark spells she'd cast in her attempts to destroy Slytherin's locket, an imperius on a goblin wasn't really all that bad in her mind.

Hermione did not have a vault of her own - muggleborns rarely did until they finished school and had full-time jobs of their own - and she'd never been with Harry to his vault. Her foray into Bellatrix's vault was thus a wholly new experience for her. She did not want to speculate on the number of dark artifacts Bellatrix had stored here, but she could feel dark magic emanating from multiple locations in the vault.

It turned out to be most fortuitous that they'd been unable to destroy the locket, for the bit of Voldemort's soul inside it called out to the other piece trapped inside a golden cup in the recesses of the vault. The cup had been cursed with both the gemino and the flagrante curses, and all three of them had been burned by the searing heat of the fast-multiplying cups that soon filled the vault.

They'd wasted precious time - and her limited supply of burn salve - healing themselves as soon as they got out of the vault. Unfortunately in the chaos of the multiplying cups, her control of the imperius curse had slipped, leaving their goblin companion free to call for help.

It was Harry who came up with the idea of using the dragon as their means of escape, and she could have kissed him for that. She hated the idea of a creature as magnificent as a dragon trapped in the depths of Gringotts and apparently tormented by the goblins who used it to protect their vaults.

Riding a dragon was a better idea than staying behind to be punished by the goblins or turned over to Death Eaters, but that didn't mean she had to like it. It was easily more terrifying than riding a thestral or a broomstick, which of course meant that Harry and Ron LOVED it. Even after the beast dumped them in a snowbank in the middle of the English countryside - a fall that could have killed them had Harry not cast arresto momentum at the last second - Ron raved about the experience, insisting that he couldn't wait to tell his dragon-keeper brother Charlie all about it. She, on the other hand, was just thankful to be alive and back on solid ground.

The next message she received from Lucius made her giggle hysterically, as she could absolutely picture his appalled expression when sending it: A BLOODY DRAGON? I TOLD YOU TO STAY OUT OF SIGHT!

She had no doubt he would have used a far different method to get in and out of the vault. Harry's tendency to blast himself out of trouble, be it through a reducto curse on thousands of glass-orbed prophecies or a ride on the back of a dragon, was so impetuous, so utterly Gryffindor. Regardless, they were alive and well and now had retrieved two of Voldemort's horcruxes.

The trio's euphoria soon faded though. They were still no closer to actually destroying either horcrux, and the proximity to two pieces of Voldemort's soul quickly wore on them. They moved from campsite to campsite, staying hidden as long as possible. The supplies Lucius had given her ran out, and they were making do with what they could forage in the woods or steal from nearby farms and towns. Hunger made Ron in particular rather cross. While she spent hours combing through their books and looking for something, anything that might help them destroy the horcruxes or locate the missing ones, Ron sat by the radio, listening to the wizarding wireless and searching for scraps of information about his family.

Their tempers grew shorter with the days, as Britain descended fully into winter. Camping was miserable in the winter, even with warming charms and a fire. She was hungry, and dirty, and cold, and she missed Lucius terribly. They'd been able to send sporadic messages back and forth, but she'd not been able to see him at all since the day he gave her Bellatrix's hair.

The day Ron left was significant, because it was also the day Hermione and Harry realised they'd had an answer all along. Harry had destroyed Tom Riddle's diary with a basilisk fang, and thus the venom was able to destroy a horcrux. Basilisk venom wasn't exactly the sort of item one could purchase in an apothecary, but it was something they knew would work.

Even better, this was the day she learned via "A History of Magickal Weaponse" that goblin-wrought silver could absorb stronger substances – like basilisk venom. When Harry killed Slytherin's basilisk with the Sword of Gryffindor, it had thus absorbed some of the venom. Thus if they could get their hands on either the Sword of Gryffindor or basilisk venom, they could destroy both the necklace and the cup.

Harry shared her enthusiasm at this discovery. It was true that they had neither the sword nor parts of a basilisk, and obtaining either of them would be next to impossible because the Dark Lord controlled Hogwarts, with Severus Snape at the helm. Still, it was a breakthrough, and they could at least begin to plan for how they could possibly get into the castle. Harry was unsure what had happened to the remains of the basilisk and whether there would be any venomous pieces left in the Chamber of Secrets, but if they could not get their hands on the sword once at Hogwarts, they'd have to open the chamber and search there. Either way, it was a decisive action they could take, a plan to move them further along in this seemingly impossible task.

If she'd been more observant, she would have seen how distant Ron had become. She'd been so focused though on their mission, on completing it and putting an end to the war so she could return to Lucius's side, that she hadn't realised just how frustrated and impatient Ron was. She knew he had long borne a chip on his shoulder, that he was deeply insecure. She had not realised just how threatened he felt by Hermione's relationship with 'Draco' or how useless he felt and hopeless he'd become.

Their trio had endured petty squabbles and fights before, but nothing of this magnitude. In the midst of war, in the dead of winter, Ron left them. He gathered his things, tossed the locket onto the table in front of Hermione and walked out of the tent, out of the wards, and out of their lives.

~oOo~

She was numb for some time after Ron left. Perhaps it was shock. Even with all of their fights and petty squabbles, she'd never thought he'd actually leave them. She and Harry spent days in shock and silence, going through the motions of living as they separately dealt with Ron's defection.

Eventually her mind began to wrap itself around the idea that he was really gone. Maybe it was meant to be this way, she mused. Maybe all of the signs had been there, pointing them in this direction, but like the signs of Ron's impending departure, she and Harry had missed them. In years past, Ron had been prone to fits of anger, followed by the silent treatment over Harry's forced entry into the Tri-Wizard Tournament or Hermione's innocent relationship with Viktor Krum.

Anything that he viewed as jeopardising his position as Harry Potter's best friend, Ron took as a personal attack. She supposed Ron was okay with Harry's attraction to Ginny, since she was family. If Harry and Ginny both survived the war and ended up together, well, Ron could hardly object to that, she mused. Having the 'chosen one' as a brother-in-law would be a boost to Ron's own ego. It was inevitable though, that she herself would grow up and fall in love and bring a new wizard into their little group. Whether it happened now or five years from now, it would happen, and she suspected Ron's insecure, angry reaction would have been the same. Ron needed to be needed, and she had completely missed how unnecessary he'd felt on their hunt.

She tried to put herself in Ron's shoes. She knew he was worried about his family. She worried about hers as well, even though they were lost to her, somewhere in Australia. If her parents had been magical, would she have been tempted to go home, to reassure herself that they were alive and well? She had to grudgingly admit that the temptation would be enormous because not a day went by that she didn't want to use the bracelet to portkey to the lodge in the hopes of seeing Lucius.

Still, she hated that Ron had left. Harry needed all the support and help he could get, and the way Ron had left, the way he'd dismissed Harry's loss, the way he'd yelled, "What do you know about it? Your parents are DEAD!" had ripped out her best friend's heart.

Harry had lost so much, suffered so much, survived so much, and he didn't deserve this. He didn't deserve to beat himself up the way he had been since Ron left.

Once it was just the two of them, Hermione found herself offering Harry whatever emotional comfort she could. At night, in the silence and darkness of the forest, he would curl up beside her on a magically expanded cot and sleep fitfully, the weight of the world on his thin shoulders. During the day, he was morose, despite her best efforts to cheer him.

They both knew that they needed to get to Hogwarts if they were ever to destroy the horcruxes, but they still had two more left to find. Was the Sword of Gryffindor a horcrux? If so, could it still be used to destroy the locket and the cup? Or would they need to first stab it with a basilisk fang as Harry had done to the diary? If the snake was indeed a horcrux, Harry reasoned that the creature would surely be near Voldemort, and perhaps should be left for last, right before Harry confronted the dark wizard.

But what of the final horcrux? Surely it was something that had belonged to Rowena Ravenclaw, something that Voldemort would have viewed with some significance. It bothered her that they had yet to figure out just what they were looking for.

As they moved stealthily around Britain under cover of night and magic, they began to formulate a plan, a way to hopefully sneak back into Hogwarts. It was too risky to keep carrying two horcruxes around with them. They had to be destroyed, lest they fall into the wrong hands. Hermione was acutely aware that if they failed in this mission to destroy Voldemort, they owed it to the rest of the magical world to weaken him as much as possible before they met their deaths.

One particularly cold, dark night, Harry looked up from the Marauders' Map at Hermione and tilted his head at her, as if seeing her for the first time.

"How did you and Malfoy get together? You've never said."

She looked up from her books and notes, surprised at his question.

"Why do you ask?"

He shrugged. "I don't know. I'm bored. I'm tired of looking at this bloody map and talking about how unhappy I am that Ron abandoned us. So I'm changing the subject. I want to hear how you and Malfoy ended up together."

She nervously twirled a curl around her finger. "Well, um, there's not a lot to tell."

He looked incredulous. "I find that hard to believe. How do you go from him calling you a mudblood to you being in love and him helping us?"

She looked down at her parchments again, unwilling to meet Harry's eye. She had kept so much from him, for so long, and it ripped at her conscience. He was her best friend, and he deserved the truth, at least, as much of it as she could safely tell. She took a deep, steadying breath before speaking.

"I fancied him, for a long time. From the moment I saw him, really."

Harry made an odd, strangled sound, as if he couldn't believe her words.

"I know that seems odd, but I thought him beautiful. Magic was…it was this entire new world to me, and I wanted so desperately to fit in. I don't know that anyone other than you would understand this, but I had no friends. You were the first person to ever offer friendship to me. In the muggle world I was bright, and I did well at school, but I was this strange girl with her nose in a book all the time, and odd things happened around me. None of the other children ever wanted me around. It was… it was lonely, and I thought…"

"You thought the magical world would be a perfect fit," Harry finished. She nodded, knowing that he'd had a similar experience as a child.

"The difference of course is that you came to the magical world as the Boy-Who-Lived. People wanted to know you. No one cared about me. I went from not fitting in in the muggle world to being thought of as an outcast, a pretender, someone with 'dirty' blood in the magical world.

"And then I met this wizard, this beautiful wizard with hair so pale it seemed unnatural, this wizard whose family was at the pinnacle of our world. I know that the Weasleys care little about prestige or wealth or blood status, but not everyone is like them. Our world, even before the Dark Lord came back, isn't run by people like the Weasleys. The Malfoys… they represented everything to me."

Harry frowned. "You're worth ten of Malfoy, you know."

She smiled at him and shook her head sadly. "Not to them, not to a lot of people. I needed to prove myself, to prove that I belonged here. I needed to get the best marks, the most OWLs, everything, because the deck is stacked against me after graduation. Without a war, without all of this, families like the Parkinsons, the Notts, the Malfoys, they can ensure their children's success, even if they aren't brilliant. I have nothing, nothing but my mind. I have to do better than them, better than all of them, to have any chance of a decent career."

Harry looked as if he wanted to object, to defend her, so she raised her hand, indicating that she wasn't finished.

"I thought…you'll think this silly of me, but I was much younger, and I thought that if I could prove myself, if someone like Malfoy – Draco – could come to respect me, respect my magic and my place in the magical world, then I'd truly belong, and I'd fit in, and I'd…I'd be wanted and valued."

It sounded hopelessly naïve and pathetic when she voiced it aloud, and yet it had worked hadn't it? Malfoy – Lucius Malfoy – cared for her and risked his life to help her.

"So, you what? Tried to impress Malfoy?" Harry asked, wrinkling his nose in disgust. "At some point you had to think he was a right git and not worth the effort."

She laughed lightly at the expression on his face. "Draco IS a right git a lot of the time, but the reality is that he's not a killer."

Harry's expression sobered, and she knew he was thinking of the night Dumbledore died. Draco had indeed let the Death Eaters in, and he had indeed stood by as Snape killed Dumbledore, but even Harry had to grudgingly admit that Malfoy had looked incredibly upset during the entire ordeal. After Dumbledore's funeral, he'd admitted as much to her and Ron both, that Draco had been distraught.

"No, he's not a killer," Harry agreed with a sigh.

"He talks a good talk, but deep down, I think he's struggled to live up to expectations, to be what everyone wanted and expected of him. He's more – so much more – than the face he presents to the public," she admitted, switching mentally from speaking about Draco to speaking about his father.

"I know everyone thinks we're joined at the hip – you, Ron and me," she said, ignoring the flash of pain on his face at the mention of Ron, "But you're not with me all the time. I…I made a concerted effort to see him, to talk to him, and once I did, once I extended an olive branch to him, he took it. He… well, it's a long story I'd rather not tell, but he did something for me, to keep me safe. He didn't have to do it, but he did. The more time I spent around him, the more I realised that it wasn't about proving myself any longer. It was about loving him and being loved in return."

Harry was silent, and she dared to glance at his face, afraid of what she'd see.

"Wow," he said softly. "I never would have thought…"

"Yeah."

"He didn't want the dark mark, did he?" Harry asked.

She shook her head, thinking of Lucius again. "No. He didn't. It was forced on him. Abraxas Malfoy was in service to the Dark Lord for years before Draco or even Lucius came along."

"So what next? When this is all over, what happens with Malfoy?" Harry asked.

"I…I do what I can to protect him, to keep him out of Azkaban. He believes he's damned, that no one will look past the mark on his arm. But if – when – we win, I will do whatever I have to do to keep him safe like he's tried to protect me. He wants you to win. He wants to be free from this."

"People will assume the worst about him, because of the dark mark," Harry acknowledged.

"I intend to tell them - the Ministry, the Wizengamot, all of them - that he helped us, that he supplied information. Harry, it's not just that he's passed information through me to the Order. He's taking out the major players."

Harry sat up straighter. "What do you mean?"

"The missions he sabotaged? They were led by members of the Dark Lord's inner circle," she explained. "He told the Order about them and set those wizards up for failure. Getting rid of them weakens the dark, and it keeps him and his family safe."

Harry's eyes narrowed. "I couldn't care less about the Order taking out a righteous prick like Lucius Malfoy, but I don't suppose Draco-My-Father-Will-Hear-About-This-Malfoy will give up dear old dad."

Hermione frowned at his words. "I know it seems hard to believe, but I...I don't think Lucius wants to be there either."

"You don't believe that!" Harry said in shock. "Hermione, the man tried to kill you in the Department of Mysteries!"

She shook her head. "No, he… he was violent, but you heard him yourself that night. He didn't want anyone dead. He just wanted to get the prophecy and get out."

"Look, I'll buy the idea that Draco Malfoy doesn't want to be a Death Eater and doesn't give a rot about the war, but Lucius? That stretches the bounds of credibility."

Hermione sighed. Clearly she was going to have to work on Harry an awful lot between now and the end of the war if she was going to be able to protect Lucius.

"Everything I have heard about him - and from someone who knows him far better than you - is that while Lucius Malfoy may indeed be a pureblood snob, he did not want to be a Death Eater but is trapped and is just trying to keep his son alive," she said.

Harry raised his eyebrows. "I find that hard to believe."

She shrugged. "You asked. I am only telling you what I know."

He ran his fingers through his perpetually messy hair and looked as if he was trying to take this all in.

"So when this is all over, if you keep Malfoy out of Azkaban, do you see yourself with him? Like… marrying him?" he asked.

The mention of marriage was a knife twisting in Hermione's heart, for Lucius was fully trapped within the unbreakable bonds of the Malfoy family's matrimonial rites. Even if they won, even if she could somehow keep Lucius out of Azkaban, he was still stuck with a bitter, cold witch he did not love. She could be his mistress, his lover, and that was it.

Would that be enough for her? She'd never stopped to ponder that question, for Voldemort HAD returned, and they'd been thrust into war. In a post-war world where Harry was victorious, could she live with the knowledge that Lucius was not fully hers? That he had a wife and a grown child, an heir who absolutely hated her? Would Harry even speak to her when he knew the truth, when he discovered after the war that she was with Lucius and not Draco? What if she wanted a family of her own? Could Lucius give that to her? Would she want to bear his child if he couldn't publicly claim their son or daughter? Would it even be possible to keep the child's paternity a secret if it inherited Lucius's distinctive pale blond hair?

The alternative though was a life without him. It was a life lived in black and white when she'd experienced vibrant colour. It would be like being cast from the muggle Christian Garden of Eden after experiencing its glory. Could she do that to herself? Was some happiness better than none?

Harry was still patiently waiting for her answer. She forced a smile at him. "I don't know what lies ahead for us, for any of us, but I know that he's my future. Whatever it looks like, he's in it."

Harry smiled at her in return, a genuine smile.

"I want you to have that future, Hermione. You deserve it."