Title: The Misfortunes of Virtue
Author: Winter Ashby (rosweldrmr)
Disclaimer: Harry Potter © J.K. Rowling & Misfortunes of Virtue (title only) were written by the Marquis de Sade in 1787 (more notes about the literary allusions in the footnote of the last chapter)
Rating: M (for language and adult themes)
Summary: Draco steals away in the dead of night on orders from the Dark Lord to either kidnap or kill Hermione. But who is he really loyal to?
Timeline: Post 'The Half-Blood Prince' Some incorporated plot of 'Deathly Hallows'
Warning: Major Character Deaths! Inferi!Character, Necromancism: controlling the dead (NOT necrophilia), strong language, violence, blood, gore, & DH spoilers
Authors Note: Welcome to the Order, bitch! No, there is no school in this fic? I mean, honestly who goes to school while there's a war going on. And, for that matter, who camps out in the middle of the woods for MONTHS while there's a war going on? You know this is more like what you all were expecting from DH. (Except, not the D/Hr bit, or... maybe you were!)

Part Four
Pursuit of Evil

No sooner had the spinning, stretched sensation of the side-along apparation faded than Draco was whisked away from her. As his hand was pulled from her arm, there was a disarming spell fired in his direction. He recognized the signature expelliamus immediately. His wand shot from his hand but he didn't see it. He couldn't take his eyes off her. She smiled something wicked and turned into the shadows.

He might have loved her then, for being so cunning. She took him directly into the heart of the Order, and there was nothing he could do but allow himself to be separated, unarmed, and locked in a dark room.

Outside, he could hear voice, yelling. It was the ghost of an argument between the Great Chosen One, himself and Hermione. He could hear the crisp anger reverberate, even in the disorientating dark.

They were fighting about him.

"What were you thinking?" the man-child asked her, unrightfully so.

"That it's time we ended this war, and they could help us do it." Draco imagined her pale face flushed with anger.

"He killed Dumbledore!"

"No, he didn't. And I think there's more to that story than we know." There was a brief pause and Draco's chest flared at the image in his head of her giving Potter those pleading eyes. "We need them, and with Draco under the unbreakable vow, you won't have to worry about him."

"You made an unbreakable vow with Malfoy?" the indignation in his voice was clear.

"You what?" they were joined by another voice, even louder than the first.

"I had to. It was the only way to be sure we could trust them."

"Hermione, do you realize what that means? You could've died." At this Draco stretched the muscles in his neck and balled his hands into fists. It was the Weasley who'd said it. And Draco was set on making him pay.

"It's fine. He swore his allegiance, and I made him swear to behave, so there's nothing to worry about Harry. What we really need to do, right now, is find out everything we can from him. He said Voldemort wanted me. That must mean that he's desperate. Don't you see what this means?" she implored them, and Draco was glad to see they were too dull to catch on to what she was saying. "He's losing, and he knows it. He's getting desperate, which means he'll make mistakes. And with Snape and Malfoy on our side, now, it's just a matter of time before we get the last 2 horcruxes." The last word was uttered so quietly, Draco had barely heard it.

"Fine, but I want you to stay away from him. He's… unstable." Potter gave the order and Draco could practically hear his ugly face frowning.

After the argument was over, Draco stood in the center of the dark room and considered the hollow feeling in his gut. He had wanted her to fight back, to scream, to yell. Maybe part of him wanted her to defend him, defend her decision to support him. But in the end, all she had done was appeal to 'the greater cause' of fighting Voldemort. And for whatever reason, he was left feeling disappointed.

He sat in the room for a long time, wishing he had his wand back, wishing he'd never come, wishing she'd come for him. The dark was strange, magical, he was sure. He could feel the pulsing in the air, the electric charge of the spells and enchantments around him.

When the door was finally pushed aside, and The Chosen One, The Boy Who Lived (again and again and again), The Great Harry Potter himself strode in, he left little to the question of who was in charge. Everything about him screamed power, he looked much older than Draco remembered him being just a few months ago. Even the way he held his wand made Draco think that the 'unforgivables' had taken a new place in his repertoire of defensive spells.

Draco sneered.

"Why come back?" Potter crossed his arms.

"I missed the company." There was a trickle of pain in his chest and he reminded himself to behave.

"What information do you have?"

"That's all, no small-talk, not 'Hey, Malfoy, how's life as a Deatheater?' or 'It's been a while, you look like hell?'" Draco smiled; sickly so, with malice and resentment.

"Where is Voldemort?" He wasn't taking the bait. He wasn't getting angry. Draco considered that after so long of thinking he was in charge of everyone, maybe it made him into a leader, and not just a cheap imitation of one.

"I can't tell you. I'm not the secret keeper." Draco added quickly, seeing the look that passed over Potter's face. "Where are we?"

"A secret location."

Draco scowled. "Where, Potter?"

"I can't tell you. I'm not the secret keeper." Potter shot back at him, and Draco felt the tiny drop of respect he might have considered having dry up immediately.

"Then who is?"

"Dunno." Potter confessed and shrugged his shoulders. "We have secret keepers for the secret keepers. We learned our lesson before," here Draco interjected a snide remark about Potter's parents, but only in his head, "after Dumbledore died," Potter didn't flinch at all, and Draco could feel the vestige of the fleeting respect return, "we had to abandon the old headquarters. I run things now," as if Draco needed to be told that, "and I do things a little differently."

Potter pulled out his wand and swirled it between his fingers. "Oh?" Draco asked, nonplussed. He watched Potter's wand.

"You will not be given the use of a wand, until I'm satisfied that you can be trusted." Then he added, "Not that it's very likely that will ever happen" just to twist the jagged edge of uselessness in a little further. "If you ever want your wand back, you will help us. When I ask you something, I want the answer. Not a joke, not a lie, not another word besides the answer to my question." Potter turned his back to him and paced from side to side. "You will not harass the other members of the Order, most of them are people you know and probably dislike. You will not step foot outside this compound without myself, Ron or Hermione with you." He stopped walking. "No, wait. You will not step foot outside without either myself or Ron with you. You are never to be alone with Hermione, Ginny, Luna or Neville. Is that all clear?"

Draco was clenching his fists so hard, his knuckles turned ghost white in the light that filtered in through the cracked door.

Potter didn't wait for him to answer. "You will behave exactly like this, or I will keep you locked in this room. Hermione put a spell of Perpetual Darkness on it." And as if by summoning, her slender figure appeared in the doorway, framed in the light cast around her, leaving her face in shadows.

"Promise, Draco." She said from the door, quiet and sullen. "Promise you will behave."

"I've already promised!" he shouted, and he could feel his chest burning. He winced and clutched the front of his robes without even thinking about it.

"The compulsion is set." She told Potter, and turned from him.

Draco wanted to see her face as she said it. He wanted to see the defeated look in her eyes at bending to the will of her leader. He wanted to see her humbled and broken. But all he could make out was a glint of brown in the light as she turned.

"Welcome to the Order." Potter said before closing the door yet again, and leaving Draco with nothing but the memory of the brown spark in the unyielding darkness.

He wasn't sure how much time had passed in that room. He could hear people moving, footsteps, muffled voices. Not like the first time he'd been locked up. Someone must have put a spell over the door, because he could no longer make out what the voices were saying, unless they were shouting.

In the room, the dark mark that branded his arm burned so badly, he would have rather ripped it out than feel the snake and skull crawling under his skin, calling to him, demanding he come back. But strangely enough, it was in that dark time that he learned to shut out the pain. And after a while, he didn't feel it so much. When it moved, and burned, it was just a soft murmur in the dark, something to keep him company. He always wondered if Potter knew what he was doing when he locked him in there. He never asked him. And eventually, they let him out. But that wasn't much better. Potter had his ghoul-of-a-house-elf, Krechure, following him around.

Draco soon learned that when a secret keeper dies, everyone who knew the secret, in turn becomes secret keepers, which meant that the Order's old headquarters, wherever it was, wasn't safe anymore. So Potter created a network of underground cells. They all operated independently, and no one knew where all the cells were, except the liaison.

Hermione was gone a lot, off on official Order business. After she'd convinced her parents that they didn't have a daughter, and sent them to Australia, she became something of a ghost, floating through the empty halls at odd hours, her eyes sunken and looking more exhausted each time he saw her. She infiltrated the Ministry, using the cover of interning at the Department of Magical Law Enforcement as her cover. Draco sneered and pretended he wasn't impressed, but the truth was, the Order of the Phoenix, under Potter's control, was running far better than the Deatheaters, who were camped out in his parents' dining room most nights.

He became a good, little Potterette, dancing on the strings The Chosen One pulled. Draco was bled dry of every ounce of information he could give. But no matter how many times he insisted that the Dark Lord was searching for a weapon, the only thing Potter was concerned about was some kind of treasure the Dark Lord hid.

He asked over and over again if he'd ever mentioned hiding something or giving a possession to another Deatheater. That or, everything Draco knew about Nagini. He asked about how it obeyed, how it communicated, how it killed. He seemed obsessed with it. And when Draco suggested that it might be better off to try and stop the Dark Lord before he got whatever weapon he wanted, all Potter seemed to care about were these things called horcruxes.

He'd only heard the word used once, the night he came to the Order. Hermione had whispered it outside the room of Perpetual Darkness and Draco had come to understand that these horcruxes, whatever they were, were what Potter and his army was after.

Draco couldn't make sense of it. Any way he looked at it, relics and treasures didn't seem to be important. But Potter wouldn't listen.

So, he kept a low profile, mostly. He avoided anyone with red hair and freckles, seeing as how they all blamed him for getting one of their siblings mauled. He also tried to stay as far away from Longbottom and Loony Lovegood as much as possible. After all, those were orders.

He didn't normally take to sulking so well. But in the overcast shadows back then, it was easy to drift off into perpetual self-pity with little effort. And that stupid binding that made him behave was always just a foot above his head, circling.

Eventually, Potter called Krechure off and ordered the sniveling back-stabber on some other secret mission. And a few days later Hermione showed up at his room (which was enchanted to fit on the side of the building they were in) alone. Immediately, as shooting pain gnawed at his chest.

"Get out." He hissed and backed away.

"It's okay." She said as she rounded the door, meanwhile his chest ached and burned. "I release you from that behavior." And immediately, the pain was gone. Draco took deep breaths and held his chest where the flame had been.

"What do you want?"

She smiled, unconvincingly, and pulled a slender wand from her cloak. "I'm leaving in the morning. I'm not sure when I'll be back, so I wanted to make sure you had this."

She handed him the wand. It was thinner than his had been, more supple. It felt strange in his hands, too feminine. "This isn't my wand."

"I know. Harry still won't give it to you. But this one will work, for now. It's not as good as your own, but it'll still do magic. It's quite new. The wood is elm and its core is thestral hair, so it won't be anywhere near as strong as your wand was." She looked apologetic, "but just in case I don't come back, I thought you ought to have something."

By the way she said it, she made it sound as if Potter didn't know she was giving it to him, and it rather sounded as if she made the wand herself. It also didn't escape his attention that she just alluded to her own death. "Why wouldn't you come back?" he asked, not taking the wand from her hand. He let it sit there, in her outstretched palm and looked at noting but her face.

She betrayed nothing.

"Has it got anything to do with the horcruxes?" at this, she gasped a little and drew back.

"How do you know…?"

"I heard you say it the first night I got here. I just figured the snake and the treasure has something to do with it, since that's all you three seemed to be concerned with." She looked relieved.

"So, you don't know what the last horcrux is, you've never heard Voldemort talk about them?"

Draco inched closer, itching to get a hold of a wand, at last, even if it was weak and not his. It was better than nothing.

"No." and he took the stick from her hand, careful not to touch her skin. "Wound it help?" he asked as he turned, not really caring about the answer.

"Yes." He heard before she slipped out the door.

And on instinct alone, Draco swished the wand through the air and whispered "Impervious" where she had just been standing. He knew it wouldn't do any good anyway, but a small part of him imagined that when she did come back, because he was sure she would, he could feel like at least he'd done something useful, even if it was only in his imagination.

He justified it by rationalizing that if she died, then he would die as well. And it was a matter of self preservation alone that made him want to protect her.

While she was away, he hid the wand and practiced with it at night when everyone else slept. He wanted to use it to get his wand back. But even the thought of it made his chest burn. So he silently obeyed the compulsion to behave that she set on him, even in her absence. And when he did slip up, when he did draw the wand because Potter had some hair-brained idea – the shooting, searing, burning pain ate away at him. After the initial shock of finding Draco writhing on the floor, Potter allowed him to keep the inferior wand. And after a few months of the pain, it became a pavlovian response to hold his tongue, not reach for the wand, follow orders.

"What did she make you vow?" Harry asked one morning before Draco was to leave the protective wards of the main cell for the first time. Draco could tell Potter was nervous about taking him, without Hermione around to articulate the terms of his behavior. But when Draco told Potter that the Dark Lord had once visited his family's vault at Gringotts, there was no turning back.

"Like I'd tell you, Potter." Draco was glad to finally be leaving, but he knew he would be in much more danger than any of the other members of the Order if they ran into Deatheaters.

"Hermione told me what the first two vows were." Here, he sneered. Draco clenched his fists as the pain in his chest curled around his heart. He wanted to destroy that look on Potter's face. "She's brilliant, you know." He was baiting Draco, trying to get him to deny it. Draco had no intention of lying.

"That's why the Dark Lord wanted her." Draco shrugged and Potter's face dropped. "She must have told you, how I risked my life to save her." He played the hero, reluctantly so, and savored the anger that washed over The Chosen One's face. For once, he wasn't the one who saved everyone. This time, it had been Draco. He liked the idea of stealing Potter's thunder. "Why don't you just ask her what the last condition was?" Potter frowned, even more.

"She won't tell me."

"Oh, it's like that, is it?" Draco felt rather smug as he leaned back in his chair. He had always liked that she'd kept her mouth shut about it. It was just further proof that she was remarkable in a sea of idiots. The king, of which, was now fuming.

"Tell me, Malfoy."

"No."

"Tell me, or I swear I'll… I'll…" Potter took a step forward in the tiny room, his green eyes blazing behind his glasses and his hands tight at his sides.

"You'll what, Potter, have me thrown in Azkaban? I'm your best chance at getting to the Dark Lord. You wouldn't dare risk throwing that away, now would you?" Draco's hands itched for his own wand.

"When this is over, Malfoy, you're going to pay for every rotten thing you've ever done."

"Why wait?" Draco didn't bother telling him he'd already started making up for them, one by one, the toll was beginning to ebb away at the edges of Draco's once stone exterior. He was beginning to crumble from the weight of his own mistakes.

What is this nonsense about 'behaving'? Draco is NOT amused. Poor, poor Draco. I fear he's beginning to fray at the edges from the stresses of war. Next time: How will Draco adapt to living with the very people whose lives he made a living hell when they were at school?