Chapter 30

Harry stared at his wrist cuff, taking in the information that scrolled by in a rush. Ginny seemed upset, and he could see why.

Death's Kiss? The flower was called Death's Kiss? And it was only used when someone died.

What the hell was that supposed to mean? Did the Death Eaters leave Harry a message regarding Draco's fate?

That made no sense. Why would they leave such a symbolic message, with no guarantee that anyone would find it, let alone understand what it meant? If they had truly captured Draco, or killed him, Harry was certain that he would have heard about it, or seen a more visible sign.

The fact that none of the Aurors could find hide nor platinum hair of him told Harry that Draco was still out there. The longer it took to find him—or at least some sign of where he had gone—the more Harry felt that his partner was in danger. He couldn't shake the sense of urgency that gripped him.

He had spent a frustrated five minutes pacing in the clearing and checking his wrist cuff, waiting for Hermione to return. Of course she would have left to go retrieve a book. But he had to admit that the flowers, along with the information in the book, had been their best lead.

Now he just had to figure out what the Death's Kiss flower meant. Why were there three of them sticking out a clump of 'protection' white heather?

Harry cursed, briefly, and put a hand to his head. His mind felt foggy, and he could feel his energy levels weakening. His body was trying to tell him that he needed to take a rest. But he couldn't rest until he'd solved this problem.

Draco spoke the language of the flowers. Here he had some mysterious flowers. . .and a missing Draco. It must be connected.

"Think, Potter, think," he said aloud, wishing that Hermione was actually here to do the thinking for him. He impatiently checked his wrist cuff again to see if there was a new message or any new information.

Nope, nothing.

"What does the Death's Kiss mean?" he mused. "It can't possibly mean he's dead. So is it the kiss part? That makes even less sense."

His faithful shadow rose up from the ground where he'd been kneeling, examining the forbidding orange flowers that still stood in the middle of the white heather.

"Death's Kiss?" Ernie repeated, looking again at the flower. "Of course, I should have known. I've only ever seen one once before, at my great-grandmother's funeral. That one wasn't orange, though. It was white, like they usually are."

Harry was trying to think, but none of his thoughts were making any sense. "Are they usually white, MacMillan?" he idly asked him, wondering if the color held any additional significance.

"White, sometimes black," Ernie replied. "It's a pureblood tradition, but not really a popular one. You can see how ugly the flower is."

It was definitely ugly. Looking at it, Harry was uncomfortably reminded of what it was like to stare down a Dementor that was intent on giving you a Kiss. He supposed the name of the plant might have something to do with that resemblance. He refrained from touching it, despite Hermione's assurances that it was a truly harmless plant.

Ernie had no such compunction, as he was turning the leaves over and pushing the blooms aside, trying to see if there was a hidden message or a hidden object that they were supposed to find. He even prodded into that gaping mouth, causing Harry to wince. The teeth weren't real, they were just the design on the petals, but it was still enough to cause Harry a twinge in his unsettled stomach.

"I don't see any other clues," Ernie confirmed, as if Harry hadn't been watching him for the past ten minutes and already known he hadn't found anything.

Think, Harry, think. What did Draco do? Who is this message for?

"How do you use the flowers?" Harry asked. He refused to believe that the meaning was simply to herald Draco's death. There was something important and obvious here, and he was just missing it.

Ernie shrugged, standing up and brushing the dirt off of his hands. "If I remember correctly, we just held some in our hands, and then we each placed one on the grave. But I was very young and I was afraid to hold it, so I didn't go up with the family when they knelt at the grave."

Something in his words set off alarms in Harry's head.

He suddenly fell to the ground, crawling around on his hands and knees, feeling all over the surface of the dirt, looking for something, he didn't know what. The heather was all deeply rooted, but where the ground had been disturbed, the roots were exposed.

Harry looked out at the entire clearing again. There were holes everywhere from the spells that had turned the earth all over the entire area.

But only this spot had the Death's Kiss flowers. There had to be something about this spot.

He felt along on the dirt, reaching over to the clump of heather and the Death's Kiss flowers, tracing their stems all the way down to their roots.

To his surprise, the flowers came away in his hands with just the slightest of tugs. Not just the flowers, but the entire heather bush as well. The earth underneath it was turned just like the other holes in the ground.

"Shit," he cursed. "MacMillan!"

Ernie was already beside him, clearing the clumps of heather bushes away. "What did you find, Harry?"

"Dig." His hands were already moving mounds of earth away.

"What?"

"Dig!" He pushed dirt aside, trying to cover as much of the ground as he could, skimming his hands through it, searching, searching.

"What are we looking for, Harry?" Ernie asked, his hands following the same pattern as Harry's, a couple feet away. "Should I do a blasting spell, like the kind that created the other holes? It might be faster than just digging."

Harry was about to tell him no when his fingers finally found the sign he'd been looking for.

The ground was suddenly damp. Wet and kind of sticky. He held his fingers up to his face, rubbing them together noting how the dirt fell away, but what remained was a startling, sticky, dark red.

The ground was soaked with blood.

"Dig!" he yelled again, a sudden sense of foreboding coming over him as his hands scraped away at the streaks of bloody mud.

Ernie was transfixed by the dark earth and the blood on Harry's hands. But when the hole Harry had been digging revealed a patch of the black leather of an Auror uniform, he sprang into action.

It was Ernie that sent the Patronus that called the other Aurors to them, as Harry wouldn't stop digging.

It was Susan who arrived first, having stayed close to the two men in her searching, and who had the presence of mind to transfigure a small trowel out of a rock.

And it was the three of them who furiously dug away at the earth, until they revealed the entire rest of that Auror uniform, and the unconscious blond with the Bubblehead Charm who was wearing it.

The chairs in Draco's ward were not any more comfortable than the chairs in the waiting room had been. Hermione shifted in them again, for what seemed like the hundredth time.

Harry looked over at her and suggested, for what was also probably the hundredth time, that she leave—get some food, get some rest, take a break.

Hermione didn't even bother shaking her head in answer. Of course she wasn't going anywhere.

It had been several hours. Most of Draco's wounds had been healed, but he still hadn't regained consciousness. The Healers had said it was just a matter of time. He had lost a lot of blood, and the Blood-Replenishing Potions needed some time to completely restore what was lost.

Harry had been officially discharged, yet like Draco's injuries, his own didn't seem to want to heal completely. The bandage wrapped around his hand—the hand that had been carrying the Artifact—prevented contamination and further damage to his wounds, which continued to look an angry red.

The entire left side of Draco's body was a sickly purple to contrast with his deathly pale skin. A spiderweb of broken blood vessels showed above his heart—where the Artifact had lain in his breast pocket.

The nearest the Healers could figure was that the Artifact was being used in some Dark ritual, and after having been ripped away in the middle of the spell, it had lashed out at the men who had taken it. Whatever uncontained magic had been involved in the spell had rebounded back onto them.

So far, neither the Artifact nor the injuries appeared to contain any further traces of Dark Magic. Once Harry had transferred the Artifact to the waiting hands of the wizards from the Magical Containment Unit, he'd been able to safely Portkey with Draco back into St Mungo's.

Still, the injuries caused by the reverberation of magic would not heal properly. Hermione was determined to take a look at the mysterious object herself, at a later time, despite the Auror Department's assertion that they had matters well under control.

For now, she was just waiting for Draco to open his eyes, so she could see for herself that he was fine.

Harry, probably out of a sense of duty to his partner, had stayed with her. Ginny had eventually left to put the baby to sleep.

The room was silent. Too much space for her own worrisome thoughts to grow, take shape, and strangle her.

"Is it true?" Hermione asked, causing Harry's eyes to flicker over to her in question. "That the other Aurors hate him. Is it true?"

Harry sighed, clearly tired from what had been a very long and stressful day. Leaning forward in his chair he scrubbed his face with his hands.

Then he turned to look at her, his hair askew in that way that always made her smile fondly at him. It reminded her of those early days at Hogwarts when life was just a tiny bit simpler.

"I figure it's about half and half," he said. "Half of the department is content to let the past rest and just let him do his job. They know he makes the department stronger, because he's one of our best." He let out a short laugh. "He's bloody brilliant actually, but don't let him know I said that when I wasn't forced to."

His expression grew sober again. "But they still don't want anything to do with him. They're fine with him, as long as he stays away from them."

Hermione digested that information for a moment, thinking back to all those times she'd noticed Draco on the outside of the celebrations and the meetings. She'd always assumed it was mainly by choice, because Malfoys had a tendency to remain aloof. Certainly Draco's bearing had never given any indication that he had a desire to join in the camaraderie the other Aurors engaged in.

"And the other half?" she asked.

Harry crossed his arms, turning to look back at the still figure in the bed. "The other half can't forget."

Can't forgive, is what he meant, Hermione knew. They couldn't take all their hurt and all the ways they and their families had suffered, either as a direct result of Draco's actions, or of his family's, and find a way to let it go.

Not everyone was capable of it.

Merlin knew it had taken her a long time to forgive not just those who had done despicable things in the war, but somehow, more horrendously, the ones who had chosen to stand aside and let the bad things happen. The ones who hadn't cared at all if her kind got wiped out, or if others died preventing it. The ones who hadn't listened when they'd tried to sound the warning.

No, forgetting was impossible. And forgiving only slightly less so.

Harry's eyes were trained on the blond in the bed, but she doubted he was seeing him.

Beneath the bandages that criss-crossed Draco's ribs, Hermione knew there were tiny, near-invisible scars that covered his pale skin. They had come from a duel at Hogwarts that had ended when the man sitting beside her had cast an unknown curse on him. Draco had nearly bled out that time.

She knew she and Harry were both remembering the same incident. There was a look Harry got when he was fighting old guilt. It was not very different from the expression she'd seen on Draco's face when he'd talked about his time during the war.

"Can you forget, Harry?" she asked him.

After so many years together, she didn't have to explain that she had changed topics.

There was a long silence, during which neither of them spoke.

Eventually Harry held his hand out to Hermione, and she took it as they both sat there and stared at Draco.

It had always been this way with them. No one else understood what it was like—to give up everything, to give up everyone, to believe when no one else did, to hold steady in the storm, to worry every day that the choice you were making was the wrong one, that it wasn't enough. And if it was the right one, at what cost to you and to everyone else?

For a very short—and eternally long—period of time, the world had narrowed down to just the two of them, and one very impossible task.

She couldn't imagine what it was like for Draco to feel entirely alone. And to pay the price for his mistakes over and over again.

When Harry finally spoke, he said, "Every time we win…every time we beat them...it helps."

To forget, she knew he meant. To put everything behind them. To build the world into something new, something stronger.

And she knew that in this, the three of them—the man in the bed included—were the same.

A/N: There we go! And don't worry, Draco wakes up in the next chapter. Just because I have occasionally broken your hearts with a story (or two) of mine, that is by no means my normal writing style. I prefer romance and feels and fluff and humor, and everyone being mostly okay in the end. Draco was never in any real danger.

Thank you for your lovely reviews, it's been so fun seeing the traffic on this old story of mine.

I just want to remind you that if you haven't checked out my AO3 site, that is the only site currently posting my explicit works. I have a one-shot and a two-shot and a 30k story that had originally been posted on H&V. And i have another 30k story that I just released this year. You can find the summaries on my FFN profile page, but the stories are only uploaded onto AO3, and only to users who are signed in. If you ever want a copy of any of my works on PDF or ePUb, though, you can message me on my Facebook Author page, and I'd be happy to send it to you.

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