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: I probably should have warned you all before, but this is NOT BETA'd. I had a lovely volunteer, but she got one look at the description, and politely decline. (Is it really that messed up?) Man, Hermione get's beat up a lot, doesn't she? (As you can see, I was plainly influenced by a certain chapter in DH.) Love the Dark!Moments of it.
Part Seven
Collapse of Decadence
She disappeared for two weeks after that. As usual, he didn't know where she went or what she was doing. But there was a change in the air when she left this time. It was almost as if he could feel the mounting pressure in the rest of the world. They were close, he was sure. The end was drawing nearer, and every minute that she didn't return, his fear twisted deeper and deeper.
He wanted to set off after her. But he knew she was too clever to be tracked. If she wasn't, she wouldn't have been the liaison. So he combed through her unused bedroom, pressing the fabric of her old robes to his face and pretending that he only wanted her to come back because he was worried about himself.
It was simpler to be selfish, or to think he was still selfish. It was much harder to admit that he wanted, needed her to come back to ease the discomfort her absence created. It was the distance and danger she was in. He remembered the last time she disappeared, taken hostage by his aunt. He never asked how she got away, it never seemed important before. He wished he knew now, now that she was gone and he was left alone in the empty castle and draft corridors lined with torn tapestries and unused rooms.
He was irrational. He was a caged animal, not allowed outside for more than a year, and trapped in a castle with the lingering memory of something he hated and wanted and feared. But still, he feared the outside more, where Potter didn't reign supreme. So he behaved like a good minion, and followed his new master's commands.
Potter sent him a letter with instructions to 'stay put' and 'wait for Hermione'. Draco did so only because it was what he was going to do anyway, not because Potter told him to. And each day that he didn't rebel, didn't live, didn't go after her, he died just a little bit more. For each day he had watched her wither away in front of him, become a shell, empty on the inside and sickly sallow outside, he became what she became.
By the time she did get back, he was half insane. He'd snapped the elm wand she made for him in two trying to accio her back. He didn't tell her this when she asked about the wand. He just shrugged and said it was broken. But the relief that thundered over him when he heard the crack of her apparation was resound enough to leave him breathless.
She was even more beaten than when she left. Her skin was pale and greenish; her hair was singed and torn. Her hands were cut and bruised; there was a gash that stretched along her leg, up her stomach and across her arm. Her robes were tattered and shredded. It looked like the same curse that tore the Weasley boy apart in front of him. She didn't say what happened, or how she'd been injured and Draco didn't ask. He just shook with indignant anger at the sight of her blood spilling from open wounds.
He stood there, for what seemed like hours, watching her in the firelight. She was too busy giving herself first aid to pay him much attention. But eventually, she noticed him, over her shoulder, as she rubbed a salve on her wounds and transfigured books into rolls of enchanted bandages.
"Could you give me a hand?" she asked, one bandage in between her teeth, making it hard to understand her, and another in her wounded hands, trying to make a knot around the binding she'd set to her arm.
He nodded and walked over to her. He could smell burnt hair and mud.
"Tie this knot here," she pointed to her arm "tightly."
Draco did so, reluctantly and tried to keep her blood off his hands.
"Now, I need to bandage my stomach," she informed him as she pulled her robes and shirt up over her head. As she did this, the blood on her stomach dragged along her skin, leaving a thick crimson streak. Her hair frizzed as she pulled the robes away, completely unabashed that she was now sitting in nothing but her bra. "Hold it here." She pinned the end of one of the bandages down with her finger, just to the side of the long, deep cut.
"Like this?" he asked, and tentatively held it down.
"Yes." She answered without looking at him.
And it went like this, her giving instructions, and Draco obeying quietly, all the while trying his best not to touch her. And finally when she was wrapped up, and cast a healing spell on herself, she rolled over on the couch and shut her eyes. He wanted to tell her to get up, that it was his couch. But instead, he sat in a chair, with his back to the fire, and watched her sleep. He listened to the sound of her slow, even breathing and watched the tears drip from her shuteyes. He draped his cloak over her gently when the fire began to die. She didn't wake, but stirred just enough to bury her face in the collar.
After that, he sat on the floor next to her, his fingers itching to touch her bare shoulder. As always, the firelight made her brown hair glow, and even her sunken cheeks looked rosy.
It was a mistake. One he would always regret. It was an accident, he never meant to.
He never meant to care about her, or want her, or love her. But as he watched her sleeping, and the fear ebbing away in the wake of her long absence from him, he knew it was true. The mudblood and the pureblood.
Opposites.
He touched her hair, lightly. Even with all the frizz and curls, it was soft.
Draco wondered what happened to her cat. He remembered she used to have one. A big, fat tabby. As he recalled the faint outline of it resting in her lap on the Hogwarts Express, his fingers dipped farther into her wavy hair. He twisted his fingers in and pressed them against her scalp.
She made a soft noise in her sleep, something like a sigh.
And he found himself unable to pull away. Recklessly, he leaned in, her head tilted back against the cup of his hand on her neck.
She tasted like Earl Grey tea. Bitter and dark.
She opened her eyes and he braced for inevitable screaming that would accompany his lips on hers. But it never came.
She just stared up at him, like she was trying to figure out if he was real or not.
"You smell like the ocean." She said after a long moment passed.
"And you smell like a graveyard." He told her without removing his hand from her skin.
"Tomorrow," She said as she looked past him, to something he couldn't see, "it all ends tomorrow."
"What?"
She smiled up at him, that same, sad smile she used when she'd given him the wand she made. "Harry's found the last horcrux. Once he destroys it, it'll be up to us to kill Voldemort."
A shiver so intense ran over his spine, it made his toes arch.
"What do you mean, 'up to us'?" he still couldn't pull his eyes away from her fire-soft features.
"Harry is the last horcrux. He's going to let Voldemort kill him."
"What the fuck is a horcrux?" Draco was nearly shaking with terror. He never, ever wanted to see that snake-face with slits for nostrils and red eyes with vertical pupils again, let alone face off against him.
"It doesn't matter. Once Harry's been killed, we'll all be protected. All we have to do is kill him." She sounded shallow and dry, like a receding lake under a burning desert sky. She was drying up.
"Let someone else do it."
She gave a real attempt at a smile that time, and reached up to twist her fingers in his shirt. And before he could think to argue, he was bending to meet her lips again.
"Just this once." She was saying, softly into his neck. "Just for tonight."
Finally! Jeez! I know this is a little unusual for my style, all the dialogue and no explicit sex. But I figured in a fic with as many 'pushing the envelope' themes as I had, I shouldn't turn it into smut. So - that's all you get. (Okay, maybe I'll give a few slight references back to the event in later chapters.)