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: Warning: Character death.

Part Five
Advent of Loss

By the time she did return, skinny, scarred and bruised, tortured, and frail, Draco was nearly convinced he was a different person altogether. He had been given back his own wand and allowed out of the building a few more times. Potter needed him which gave Draco a certain amount of power. It wasn't the kind of power he used to have, but he took what he could.

He didn't see her much at first. The Weasley had taken to her bedside like a leech, and couldn't be pried away. But when he was forced to go on some assignment to look for a horcrux, no doubt, Draco stole a few moments watching her sleep as a reward for placing her under his protection before she left.

She didn't talk about what happened. The only thing he ever heard her say on the matter was at dinner once, near the end of the war, when she commented that his family had a nice house. That, and the way she visibly shrunk at the name 'Bellatrix' was all the information he needed.

He wondered if his aunt asked about him while she tortured Hermione. He liked to think that she would have lied for him, to protect him, and been tortured all the more for it.

Everything else seemed to be going according to Potter's plan. He bossed people around and went to funerals with the air of a seasoned war veteran. And after nearly a year living in their midst, seeing the way they lived and died, Draco was forced to admit that they were an army. First they were The Order of the Phoenix, then Dumbledore's Army, and now Potter's Army.

And he was one of them.

Of course that didn't mean they had to like him. The Weasley was particularly prickled by his continued presence. The more responsibility and freedom he got, the worse the other boy's scowl became. And he frequently took it out on the only person who put up with him, Hermione.

"Why won't you tell us what the last condition was?"

Draco was passing through the mostly-empty halls of one of the dank 'staging facilities' the Order used. There was going to be a mission soon. Everyone was on edge. He could hear one of the Weasleys; the one Hermione was fucking, yelling from down the hall. Draco paused, he didn't have much entertainment these days and a lover's quarrel (over him, no less) was just what he was in the mood for.

"That's between me and Draco." She sounded tired, she usually did these days. Potter was using her like a carrier pidgin to relay messages between all the dormant cells of the Order.

"Oh, so it's Draco now?" The Weasley erupted, a crisp anger to his voice that Draco only wished he still had the power to use. But he had nothing and no one to yell at anymore. Everyone treated him like a leaper these days. "What happened to Malfoy?" It hadn't escaped Draco's notice either that over the past year she'd started to use his name more. He wondered if that was because he started using hers or if it was mutual. It didn't really matter, anyway. It didn't mean anything, he told himself.

"It's just a name, Ron."

"No, it's not! It's what he is, Hermione. He's a Malfoy, and you just want to pretend that he's not. I don't know what happened between the two of you before you brought him here, but I don't like the way he looks at you." Draco smiled at this. He knew exactly what the Weasley was talking about. Draco liked to watch Hermione and pretend that she was his, to do with what he pleased.

"I don't know what you're talking about. Honestly, Ron, just grow up."

Draco slipped into an empty room when he heard the door open and footsteps headed in his direction.

"This isn't over. I want to know what you made him promise."

"I'm warning you, Ron, stay out of it. He's here now, and he's loyal to the Order. Harry trusts him, he give him tasks and gave him his wand back. Whether you like it or not, Draco is one of us now and you're just going to have to get used to it. He's trying to help. That's all you need to know. Anything else is none of your business."

Draco stayed hidden behind the door for a long time, imaging what she looked like as she told him off. He hoped she'd blushed, that would have made him furious.

He wondered too, why she never told them. If he knew her at all, which he berated himself for admitting he did, then she was probably just holding out now because she was stubborn. But what had made her do it in the first place? He didn't know. Maybe it was because she knew they would be infuriated. Maybe she didn't want to start a fight, which if they knew his end of the vow, was very likely to happen.

But for whatever the reason, Draco was hard pressed to find one thing in his miserable life he enjoyed more than the idea that he and her had a secret, together. Even if it was only because it drove Potter and the Weasley mad.

After a few more months it slowly trickled down through the ranks that Draco's Father had been killed. A dementor sucked out his soul, if his father ever had one. It didn't surprise Draco. He knew, when he hadn't come back after the Dark Lord summoned him, his father paid the price. It wasn't the first time a member of his family died at the hands of their master. Dear Aunt Bellatrix was all too pleased to tell the Dark Lord all about his mother's betrayal when she made the unbreakable vow with Snape after her own abysmal failure at the school.

He still couldn't get the bits of flesh and bone out from under his skin. He'd never admit it. Never tell anyone living what seeing that kind of torture had done to him. He was broken, inside. Torn apart, into tiny splinters of what he once was. His mother's screams of agony and begging for mercy, for help, calling out for him and his father – he died because of it. Inside, he was as empty as Hogwarts was. Not a teacher or student had greeted the start of term. Many were dead by then anyway.

He remembered the day the Weasley his age was killed. It was sunny, strangely enough. And he could taste the blood from the other man on his lips. It was a simple mission. Gather information on the last, unknown horcrux. But something went wrong, and he was killed, caught in a dark curse that tore him to pieces on the inside.

Draco felt a wild sense of satisfaction, joy almost at seeing the other boy lying helpless, lifeless in the bloodstained grass. It was an escape, an insane kind of freedom that Draco longed for. He was the one that should have died, but when it wasn't him, it was satisfying, relieving. He was glad it was the other boy who died and not himself. So, it was a shock for him to find tears streaming down his face as he kneeled next to the body.

That's the way Hermione found him, hunched over the body, crying, his head in his hands, streaking blood through his hair.

He woke up some time later in her bed, cleaned and dressed in fresh clothes. He never knew where she stayed before then. She was a liaison between all the sleeper cells, so her location was kept a secret. Before then he would have just assumed that Ron was her secret keeper. Apparently, he was wrong. Later, she would confess that she was her own secret keeper. And he hated that he was proud of her for being so devious.

He found her in a corner of the dank castle, weeping and rocking against a wall.

"Why did you bring me here?" he asked, his hands still shaking, trembling just slightly.

"I didn't know what else to do." She didn't look at him when she spoke.

"What'd you do with…" even Draco's quick wit and sharp tongue failed him. "…with him?"

"I just left him there." She cried some more and there was a foreign itch in his hands and arms.

"Where are we?" it was cold inside the drafty castle.

"Scotland." he almost laughed. It was wretched and painful. In a country full of red hair and freckles, and the only one she wanted wasn't here. He would never come for her again.

Water, water everywhere. Draco thought, and nearly laughed at his own humorlessness. There were tears on his cheeks and he touched them, wordlessly.

Hermione looked up at him, just as surprised to find him crying.

"I don't know why I keep doing that." He said and rubbed the wet tears between his thumb and forefinger. It was a strange reaction, one he didn't quite understand. He'd cried before, before he was broken and hollow. He'd cried last year when he thought of the task he had to complete, alone. But he hadn't cried since the Dark Lord broke him.

"Because, you're not as evil as you think."

"I never thought I was evil." He liked to pretend it was true. It wasn't, he knew better.

She turned her head to the side a little, and her hair fell across her blotchy, tear-streaked face.

A silence crept up around them, so slowly that he hardly noticed as the nothing became comforting in her presence. Eventually, he slid his back down the opposite wall, and watched her in the cresting sunrise. She looked tired, worn, her skin was pale and gaunt. She looked dead, like she could have been an inferi, if it weren't for her eyes. The eyes, he knew were different from the rest of the body, for some reason. And when you really died, it was the eyes that gave it away. He'd seen it before.

"What happened?" She asked a long, long time later. He'd fallen asleep with his eyes open, watching her.

"We were looking for the last horcrux."

She nodded, "That much, I knew."

"Deatheaters ambushed us at the cemetery, the one where Godric Gryffindor is supposed to be buried." He moved his hand into his robe, the one she'd obviously cleaned, and felt his wand, reassuringly.

"Ah." She leaned her head back against the stone wall and closed her eyes.

"It was a trap."

She grunted, a sign that she was still listening. "Ron thought he'd be a hero, I suppose." She said after a minute of Draco trying to decide exactly how to say that without coming off as an insensitive prick.

"Something like that." He leaned his head back and closed his eyes as well. They were beginning to sting again.

"Who was it?"

"Travers and Yaxley. But that was Dolohov's curse, I'm sure of it." Draco recalled the familiarity of the faces accompanying the names.

"Did you kill them?" He'd never heard her sound the way she did before. He opened his eyes to look at her, to make sure it really was her who spoke. She sounded a bit evil just then.

"Yeah." He knew all the unforgivables, relished in them, mastered them they way he seemed to be able to do with all dark magic.

"Good." She opened her eyes and nodded. And the silence was gone, replaced by a conversation Draco didn't really want to have. But he'd already gotten started; it seemed almost rude not to ask.

"What're you going do now?" his wand was a reassurance against his fingertips.

She looked over at him crookedly, like she couldn't understand what he meant. "What I have to." She pushed back against the wall and stood, stretching and still crying but with little recognition of it. She didn't wipe her years away and the string that bound them tugged a little at that. "What about you?"

Draco scoffed. "Kill them all."

"Good." She nodded again, even though Draco had meant it as a sick joke and expected to be reprimanded for it. "You can leave when you want." She waved a hand at him over her shoulder as she walked down the empty halls.

Sorry, you all. It had to be done. Let's all spare a moment of silence for poor Ron. ... Okay, now that's over with - what will Draco do now that he's at Hermione's castle? (Just a little aside, I totally wrote Travers and Yaxley before I read DH, so I had no idea he was gonna become more important. Oh well, I'm glad Draco killed him. The twat.) On a canonical note, yes - Dolohov's curse is canon. It's said to 'leave no external marks' but is 'very damaging'.