{ Chapter One }

Third Anniversary of the Battle of Hogwarts

Draco stood along the wall in the ballroom, watching the guests as they mingled together. Dinner had already been served and people were beginning to socialize as they waited for the Minister to give his annual speech about a job well done at the Battle, as well as the ongoing clean up effort.

Although Draco had been invited to the ball, he was there not as a guest but as security. There were four MLE agents stationed around the room. Himself, Dean Thomas, Theo Nott and Cho Chang were keeping a watchful eye over the guests and ensuring that no one without an invitation from the Minister was granted access. So far it had been a pretty quiet evening.

Theo stood next to him along the wall and the two chatted away as they scanned the room. Draco had been out of town for well over a year working on various assignments and had only returned home a few days earlier. He used this time with Theo to get up to speed on all of the latest news. Such as Pansy and Blaise getting engaged, or Astoria having her first little Goyle baby.

Sometime later, after the dancing had started, they started to weave their way through the crowd. That's when he saw her. Along the edge of the dance floor Harry Potter stood with his hands on a small brunette witch's waist. Her hands were tentatively placed on his shoulders and she looked as though she was trying to stand as far away from him as possible. She looked small, frail, weak. Draco had to stare at her long and hard before he realized why she looked familiar. It was Hermione Granger. It was her, but it wasn't. It was more like a ghost of what she used to be.

Her eyes. Her brown eyes that he remembered as being full of life and fire and spark, were dead, dull, lifeless.

"Mione, you look terrible. You need to go to St. Mungo's. Something isn't right. I haven't seen you in months, then you come tonight and you look like a damn zombie. Why didn't Ron tell me you were sick?"

She pulled her hands away from his shoulders and stepped away from him.

"I'm fine Harry. Don't worry about me, okay?" Even her voice sounded flat.

Draco watched as she turned and walked away into the crowd. For some reason he couldn't get her face out of his mind. What had happened to her?

An hour later the party was still going strong as Draco and Theo stepped outside to do their perimeter check. They needed to check all the outside entrances and make sure they were still sealed and warded shut. They had made it halfway around the building, almost to the rear entrance when they heard a noise.

It was a soft sound, somewhere between a moan and a sob. They preceded cautiously towards the sound, aware that it could be a trap. There was no way for Draco to be prepared for what they saw in front of them.

A woman, beaten, bloody and broken, lie on the ground. Draco knelt down beside her and gently moved the brown hair away from her face. Her eyes were open, they were looking right at him, but they didn't see him. For one heart-stopping moment he thought that she was dead, until she inhaled shallowly and whimpered in pain. Her eyes focused on him finally and he saw recognition there, and maybe relief, before they flitted closed.

Theo searched the surrounding area, but found no sign of the perpetrator. Once he was convinced no one was hiding in the shadows, he knelt down next to the woman on the opposite side of Draco. It took him longer to recognize the body lying in front of him.

"Holy shit! Draco, that's…"

"Hermione Granger. I know." He ran a hand through his hair as his mind calculated what needed to be done next. "Take her to St. Mungo's. I'll alert Dean and Cho to secure the scene, then I'll let Potter and Weasel know what happened. Wait with her at the hospital."

Theo didn't hesitate to follow orders, gathering Hermione into his arms and disapperating immediately. Draco sent off a message to Dean and Cho and waited for them to arrive before he headed back into the ballroom to find Harry Potter and Ron Weasley.

He found Harry sitting at a table with Luna Lovegood. They were not talking to each other. She was watching people dance. He was watching his bottle cap spin around and around and around. He actually jumped when Draco put a hand on his shoulder and sat in the chair next to him.

"Oy Malfoy! You about gave me a heart attack!" His hand flew up to cover his chest and his green eyes widened in surprise and then embarrassment at being caught off guard. That was a big no-no in the MLE.

"Potter. Sorry to distract you from the amazing bottle-cap there, but I've got to talk to you about something." He smirked at the man beside him. In the two years that they had worked together, they had put aside their animosity and learned to get along. Neither would go so far as to call it friendship, but they weren't enemies anymore either.

"Sure. What's up." Harry shrugged non-commitally before looking into Draco's eyes. Something he saw there made a cold chill go down his spine and he sat forward immediately. "What is it? What's wrong?"

Draco wasn't sure how in the hell he was supposed to break this news, and he was even less sure why he had volunteered for the job. He ran his hand through his hair and inhaled deeply, thinking he should probably just get it over with. Then he thought it would probably be easier to tell them both at the same time.

"Have you seen Ron anywhere? I have something to tell both of you, actually."

Harry's eyes narrowed when he said Ron's name. Damn, he should have said Weasel instead. Dead give away that something was very wrong.

"No, I haven't seen him for the last half hour? Forty five minutes? I don't know. He was with Hermione last time I saw either of them, and they were fighting again." He sighed deeply, not even realizing that Draco's eyes had just widened and his hand had tightened into a fist.

"Really? What were they fighting about this time?" Draco kept his voice steady, almost bored, even though he was on the edge of his seat waiting for the answer.

"I don't even know if I can say they were fighting? Ron was yelling at her about her weight of all things. She was just sitting there. She didn't argue with him at all. Anyway they went out back for some air. I haven't seen them since."

"Isn't that Ron, dancing with Lavender?" Luna's soft voice carried across the music and the two men at the table looked at her in surprise. They had both forgotten she was even there. Draco's eyes searched the floor and sure enough, he found the weasel dancing with Lavender Brown.

"Thanks Luna." Draco nodded at her once before walking on to the dance floor and stopping the couple mid-twirl.

"Mr. Weasley, I need to speak with you for a moment." He used his best 'official business' voice as he gently pulled the weasel off the dance floor.

"What the hell are you on about?" he practically screeched. Draco ignored him and continued to drag him out of the ballroom and into an empty office across the hall. Harry followed along, curious as to what was going on.

"There's no easy way for me to say this, really. Hermione Granger has been attacked. She's at St. Mungo's now. Theo is with her. I don't have any information about her condition or the person that attacked her."

"What? When? Where? Why?" Harry stuttered out questions as his legs collapsed and he sunk into the nearest chair. His face had gone completely white and his green eyes stared straight ahead but were a million miles away.

"Weasley." Ron said into the quiet that followed. He stood against the door, his fingers tapping anxiously against the side table.

"What was that?" Draco stared at him in confusion.

"I said, her name is Hermione Weasley, not Granger." Ron's blue eyes were as cold as ice as he glared at Draco.

"I would think you would have more important details to focus on right now than whether or not I said her name right, Weasley. Your wife is in the hospital right now, possibly dying, and all you're worried about is if I know she's married to you? Yeah, I know. It slipped my mind."

Draco's hands were tightening into fists at his side. What the hell had Granger ever seen in the weasel standing before him? He had no idea.

"What do you know, Malfoy?" Harry's voice interrupted the heated silence and brought Draco back down to earth.

"Not much. Theo and I were doing the perimeter check. Cho and Dean did the same check an hour ago and saw nothing, so the attack had to have happened in the last hour. She had been beaten. There was a lot of blood. Her clothes were torn. She was conscious when we found her, but barely. When she saw us, she lost consciousness."

"I'm going to the hospital." Harry looked sick as he stood and left the room. Ron followed him out and Draco started on the long task of interviewing people at the ball that might have seen or heard something. Of course, he came up empty.

It was several hours later before he was able to wrap up at the Ministry and apparate to St. Mungo's. The waiting room was full of Weasley's, of course. There were Molly and Arthur, George, Bill and Ginny, all sitting together on one side of the room. Harry and Luna were sitting along the opposite wall and Theo was sitting next to the door like a guard. Good. That's right where he was supposed to be.

Draco took a seat next to Harry.

"How is she? Have you heard anything yet?"

Harry leaned back against the wall and stretched his legs in front of him.

"She's alive. That's about all we know right now."

Draco nodded that he understood and settled back in the hard plastic chair to wait along with the rest of the group. He let his eyes wander, taking in each appearance, for several minutes before his tired mind realized that someone was missing.

"It seems we're missing a Weasley. Where is the loving husband, anyway?" The low murmur of voices in the waiting room stopped immediately, leaving nothing but heavy silence in it's wake. Potter's hand had curled into a tight fist, he noticed, and his eyes were hard, narrowed, and focused on a nameless point across the room.

"He said he doesn't like hospitals." Luna's soft voice sounded sad in the echoing silence. The words she didn't speak were even sadder. Ron Weasley was not at the hospital. Even though his wife had been beaten to within an inch of her life, he had not come to see if she would live or die.

"So he left already? He went home?" Draco needed to clarify her words, as one usually did with Luna.

"Left? The asshole never came in the first place." It was Ginny Weasley that answered. The fire in her eyes reminded him of Hermione. Of the old Hermione, not the shell of a person he had seen tonight.

He was about to comment on what a useless fucker the Weasel was when the door opened and a healer stepped out.

After some discussion Harry, as Hermione's next-of-kin and Draco, as the lead investigator on her case, were lead into a small debriefing room.

"Mrs. Weasley is lucky to be alive, honestly. She was severly beaten and sustained several broken bones. She had a broken wrist, a broken nose and a broken rib which punctured her lung. She was sexually assaulted, raped. And it appears she was kicked several times in the stomach area."

Both men shared identical horrified stares at the news. The healer wasn't finished though.

"I'm not sure if Mrs. Weasley was even aware at this point, but she was roughly two months pregnant. We were not able to save the baby."

Four days after the attack, Draco sat in a plastic chair at the end of Hermione's bed. He had been taking shifts with Theo, Dean and Cho, guarding her and waiting for her to wake up so they could question her. She had awoken earlier in the day, but hadn't said a word. Cho had been there, then, and said that she just looked around, figured she was in the hospital, and rolled over and went back to sleep.

Draco was on the night shift, so the hospital was relatively quiet around him. There were a few medi-witches bustling about their duties, but mostly it was peaceful. So when he heard a soft voice saying his name, he nearly jumped out of his chair.

His eyes found hers in the dimly lit room. She was awake, watching him warily.

"Malfoy," she said again, a little louder. "What are you doing here?"

"Just doing my job Granger. Sorry, I mean Weasley. It's my turn to babysit you and make sure no one kills you off before you have a chance to tell us who attacked you in the first place."

Understanding flitted across her face and she wrapped her arms around herself.

"You're wasting your time. I can't tell you who attacked me."

It was possible she never saw the attacker, or that she had been obliviated after the fact. He had his suspicions, of course, but without her testimony there would be no way to convict him.

"Well, that sucks. We were kind of hoping you knew who attacked you." He sighed as he ran his hands through his hair and sat back against the plastic chair again.

She was watching him and for the briefest moment, he noticed something. A spark. A hint of fire in her eyes.

"That's not what I said, Malfoy. I said I can't tell you who attacked me."

He stared at her for a moment as his mind connected the distinction.

"You can't tell me, but you know who it was, don't you?"

She didn't answer him, which he took as a confirmation. After that, silence fell over the room. She opened a book that she had stuffed in her purse and started reading. He contemplated how he could ask her who attacked her without actually asking her who did it.

It was several hours later before she broke the silence.

"Do you still translate ancient runes, Malfoy?"

He started at the sound of her voice, again.

"That's a little random, isn't it Granger?" He smirked at her, ever the bookworm, sitting in a hospital bed with her nose stuck in a book.

"Not at all. I was just curious. That's what I do now. My job, I mean. I'm translating ancient texts for the Wizarding Library of London." She rolled her eyes at him.

"Only you would find that job interesting, Granger." He smirked at her and she smirked back.

"On the contrary, Malfoy. I find it fascinating, not simply interesting. The runes we learned at Hogwarts were really just elementary. As you get into some of the older runes there are tricks you have to know, otherwise they don't make any sense. Look at this for example." She sat up on the edge of the bed and pulled the table over so it sat between them. Then she laid the book on the table, facing him and pointed to a rune at the bottom left hand corner of the page.

"See this? This rune can be positioned in any of the four corners of the page. It basically means 'begin here'. In this case it's at the bottom left, so the runes are read from bottom to top and left to right. But look here, on the next page it's positioned on the top right. So this page is read from top to bottom and right to left. That's not all, though. The pattern within the pages is significant. So all of the pages with the rune at the top right hand corner go together, while all of the pages with the rune in the bottom left go together and so on."

He listened as she went on, as though she were teaching a course on ancient runes herself. He didn't know at the time that he would need to know the things she was telling him. He was just trying to pass the time before Dean took over the morning shift and he could go home and go to sleep.

* * * * *