"A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions." - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Chapter Seven: Human After All

There was dead silence, the type of quiet that came when everything within hearing range held its breath. They were not moving, not daring to shift on the wet leaves. The foliage around them was so dark it appeared inky black even against the plum color of the night sky peaking through the trees. Draco tried not to imagine kneeling on emptiness.

Someone was there, waiting - Draco could feel the fringes of his mind tingling as the Death Eater spread out his consciousness. He could just barely make out the strangely smooth, black shape against the jagged roughness of the surrounding trees and brush.

His concern, however, was not himself at this point - his concern was Hermione.

He cursed the situation, trying not to shake; how could he have been so careless? If he didn't do something, and quickly, everything would be over. He couldn't shift on the wet leaves to reach the wand, though he knew it was their only chance.

He groaned inwardly, realizing what he had to do, and hoping that it didn't scare Hermione out of her skin.

He'd been taught a special brand of magic as a Death Eater - magic that was undoubtedly illegal - that allowed the Death Eaters to communicate mind-to-mind. It was incredibly invasive, and somewhat painful and confusing, but he was out of options.

Merlin, he was hoping to never have to do this again...

Draco slipped from behind the barrier in his mind to reach out to Hermione's. He had never tried this with someone who wasn't a Death Eater... but he had no other choice.

:Hermione?: he thought softly, hoping that his familiar tone and use of her first name would not startle her and thus reveal their position. Next to him, he felt her heart speed up.

Her blood ran cold. She could feel him breathing next to her, but could also feel his emotions, as if they occupied her own body - intense fear, determination, hatred for their situation and the Death Eater in the dark. She tried to reconcile the new feelings, trying to separate them from her own... but the intense emotions were terrifying.

Draco recoiled slightly, as he could suddenly feel her desperate fear, filling his body like liquid. She was all nerves. If they were going to make it out with as little... complication... as possible, he needed to play this strategically.

He had learned to repress his emotions; it was probably the one useful thing, besides occlumency and legillimency, that Snape had taught him.

He'd learned from the best.

Draco tried to focus on calming down, trying to soothe her startled mind. :Focus on an emotion if you can feel this.:

Hermione slowly let go of the panic in her heart and focused on her determination. It wafted into him in waves - it was weak, but was a start.

:Reach into my pocket for the wand.: He filled her mind with what he was seeing; barely discernable in the darkness was her hand, next to his leg, the wand tip just visible.

Hermione hesitated, and he could feel her unease with touching him as well as her excitement with the prospect of wielding the wand. He bristled as he realized that she could leave him there if she wanted. He was giving her the power in this situation. He detected no devilish intentions from her however. The sincerity of her emotions dazzled him for a few seconds.

Hermione touched his leg silently, her warm hand burning his skin through the cold fabric. He sensed her relief as she closed two fingertips over the wand shaft and began to slowly pull up. As the tip left the edge of the pocket, the pocket made a small ripping noise.

A bolt of angry electricity suddenly shot towards them, and Draco pushed Hermione behind the tree they were up against roughly as he went the other direction.

Draco felt for the wand - Hermione still had it.

"Sectumsempra!" she shouted.

The spell hit the Death Eater in the shoulder, slicing the robe and skin open, but the Death Eater wasn't fazed. He sent a silent spell at her, hitting the tree and exploding bark and wood chips in every direction. The tree cracked thunderously and began to fall.

Even Draco was practically blind in the darkness, but he found her surprisingly fast. Before he dissapparated, arms wrapped around her waist and wand in tow, he heard one thing over the noise:

"Fool."

She was taking the pain rather well, or as well as a girl with bits of wood sticking out of her chest could.

He set her down in the damp grass, her delirious moans chilling him as her arm slipped from around his neck involuntarily.

Draco fumbled with the remaining panacea sap, cursing. He should have stopped to treat her sooner!

It had been nearly an hour since the attack, and they were in the forest outside a muggle port city. The glow from the city gave him some light by which to examine her; the moon supplied the rest. He reached for the collar of her shirt, grasping it above her collarbone.

"No!" she panicked, kicking her feet. Whether his intentions were noble or not, she did not want him looking at her there.

Draco held her down by the shoulders, knowing that this probably hurt, but she was making it worse the more she moved. Her gasps of pain and further flailing made him push harder.

"Hey... stop... stop it! I'm going to heal you! Stop moving!" She stopped then, tensed up and ready to struggle, only relaxing when he leaned back. "Do you want me to heal you?"

Hermione hesitated, but nodded. It was a little insulting that she still didn't trust his magical ability (or his intentions) but he reached again for her collar nonetheless.

There were several large splintered pieces of wood sticking out of her now bloodstained green shirt. He magicked these away the best he could and used the wand to rip her shirt open.

... Wow. Ew.

But mostly wow.

Draco gaped at the several large holes, right between her breasts and even marring her stomach. Her skin reflected the cold, blue glow of the moon and the warm tint of the city, and her dark, black wounds breathed and glistened angrily. He found himself speechless at the gruesome sight.

Draco looked up - she was covering her face with her hands.

He cleared his throat and ripped the shirt open more, noting her cringe at the sudden noise, and fetched the water bottle. He had to look away a moment, forcing himself to become angry with her for not wearing a bra like most normal girls.

There was silence as he cleaned her skin, trying to ignore the small, feminine gasps of pain and rise and fall of her chest. There was something morbidly beautiful about it all - the way her skin moved under his fingers and the strange intensity of the red when it smeared. He rubbed slowly, softly, noting that she had uncovered her face and turned her head to the side. Her eyes were open.

He finished as quickly as he could after that, ripping a piece of her shirt to wipe away the rest of the blood and smearing panacea sap over the red blotches. The panacea sap, he hoped, would harden from the exposure to air and create new tissue and protective scabs more quickly. He looked away then to tend to the splinters in her calf.

Finally, with a quick warming charm, he was done. Hermione scooted away from him immediately, clearly glad to get some personal space back, and said, barely above a whisper, "Thank you."

"Sure," he whispered back, turning away.

It seemed as if the world had ended all over again.

Ron sat in his room, as he usually did over the summer away from school, but the bright orange felt nothing like home now.

He hadn't actually realized how much Hermione meant to him, how much he really cared about her until she had gone... how many times did he have to learn this lesson? Ginny. Percy. Harry. He was lucky to have these people back.

But...

Fred.

Moody, Tonks, Lupin. Dobby, even.

And now, her.

He couldn't cry, he couldn't release the rock that had become his stomach. He wanted to take every cell in his body and splatter it against a wall, push every emotion he had ever felt through a shredder.

He wanted to scream bloody murder.

"I know this is difficult for you -"

"Difficult?" He hadn't known the meaning of the word.

"- but we have to brave through it and hope for the best. We are all doing what we can."

Harry, at least, understood how he felt, and understood what it was like to lose so many people he loved in so short a time. Fred's grin still haunted him every time he closed his eyes, and he couldn't look George in the face and see the obvious pain, the clear empty space beside him.

Hermione's loss felt like an empty space beside his own self, a void between him and his best friend. They were a threesome; with one of the three table legs gone, all Harry and Ron could do now was topple over, forever condemned to be imbalanced and hurting from the missing piece.

He was feeling something. Urgh.

He hated everything about feelings - the word, the sound of it, the curdling in his stomach as he felt something he shouldn't... it was all just gross.

And because he hated feelings and hated feeling, he especially knew the signs. He could already sense the stirring in his fingers, and the tightening of his throat… that drug-like sensation, like being submerged in tar...

He hated that weakness, that total submission to his heart. It made him feel inadequate.

Snape had been the one to save him, the one to teach him how to push everything down, make it all evaporate. It had apparently come in great use for Snape... Draco had used it as well for his own purposes.

But extended periods of time? He couldn't do it. Which led him to his current predicament, where he'd been feeling more emotions than he should have been, anger included.

He really needed to get himself together by one, reminding himself of what Hermione Granger really was and two, focusing on his mission. Her accompaniment, however planned it was, came with a bit of shock value as he had not thought too much about all that her tagging along would entail, not even mentioning the blindness. He'd predicted that he'd be listening to her raving about how "ignorant" he was and how "smart" she was, or perhaps lecturing him on Arithmancy theory or something... whatever bookworms talk about.

Instead, he was slowly realizing that she wasn't just some nameless Death Eater target, some former classmate, some Gryffindor. She was a person, a girl. She was a fully-formed human, with thoughts and fears and desires and -

He didn't want to think it, but Merlin, she had breasts.

He tried to clear the image from his head, but it just kept coming back, biting at his mind. No, it was not the first time he'd seen a girl remotely naked. It was definitely not the first time, but he had grown up in a house where mention of sexuality was censored with double entendres and starchy language. This had not been bad enough to leave him scarred, at least he didn't think so. But this did not explain the fascination with her skin that had taken hold, nor the recognition of her as a person, or how he'd basically been unable to heal her objectively without imagining touching her chest under different circumstances...

The memory of her skin, white-blue in the light of the moon, edged in yellow from the light of the city, with black, gritty holes caked with blood clumped together like mold... it was the visual representation, the perfect metaphor of the alien and dirty quality that her kind supposedly had.

But in reality, it was just blood. She was just Hermione. And no matter how much he wanted to put her into the box of mudblood, goodie-good, Dumbledore's golden girl, she was just another human trying to make it in the world, another human that would understandably get embarrassed if someone had their hands on their chest for an extended period of time.

Shit, he needed to focus.

These things that he was feeling, these emotions like... guilt and protectiveness and fascination and curiosity... they just had to disappear before something terrible happened to him:

He might actually become human himself.

And he knew what he should have felt; he should have felt disgusted by her. He should have been appalled to touch her... tainted blood, the dark slime that it was. Instead, he was floored by the distinctly human quality she had... epidermis and blood and emotion, muscles rippling under her blue and yellow skin.

Maybe he should say something horrible, to reaffirm the balance between them...

But no. Even though he was at least unconsciously determined to annoy her in any possible way, there were some things that were better left untouched.

Hermione was grateful for the somewhat numbing sensation caused by the panacea sap. It was a natural painkiller, an absolute must at this point, since she had never felt something more excrutiating in her life.

She tried to steady her breath, but breathing normally was so difficult; the wood had been dangerously close to puncturing her lung, and her chest muscles were horribly damaged. It was a relief that besides the burning pain, she could actually feel the panacea sap rebuilding her tissues. She tried to not think about what would have happened if Draco hadn't found that tree.

Draco.

She'd sensed his surprise and awkwardness as he had healed her, steady breathing be damned. He must have felt something, thought something. She wanted desperately to know what he had been thinking, what he had been looking at. She knew for a fact that her breasts had been exposed; she could feel them moving as he touched her.

It had suddenly occurred to her that she wasn't nearly as repulsed by his touch as she probably should have been; in fact, he'd been touching her pretty frequently. Between carrying her, apparating them, and guiding her through her darkness, she had not felt that his touch was a foreign thing.

It hadn't surprised her, but his gentle hands had been somewhat confusing - he had always been rough with her, pulling her, carrying her with little regard to her comfort.

But Godric, his hands on her chest had felt so intimate, it had taken all of her energy to relax.

Unfortunately, with the unbelievable pain coursing through her, the nightmarish realization that she might die - she wanted nothing more than to lie still and bite through it. And when, through the agony, she had felt his cool fingers, rubbing away the blood and dirt, the sensation had burned through every other sensation she was feeling.

Pushing aside their odd physical interaction forcefully - she didn't want the intense embarrassment and curiosity she'd felt earlier to creep back up again - she wondered how they'd ended up laughing and near-naked in a pond, splashing water at each other. She wondered why he hadn't just left her at the mercy of the Death Eater, or why he had taken the time to clean her up properly. In fact, she wondered why he was even doing this to begin with.

She somehow had not believed it before, but it was so clear now -

He was really trying to protect her. He wasn't just trying to thwart some plan; he intended to make sure she was okay.

And what had she been doing?

All her impetuous escape attempts just seemed so foolish now. She hadn't really imagined a world where she could truly trust him, but now... he had proved that his intentions, and the danger that she was in, was legitimate.

Merlin help them, they were in deep.

"Where did you learn that spell?"

The young wizards were both awake, side by side, trying to turn off their brains as the moon bathed them in blue.

There was a few seconds of silence before she answered. She knew that Harry had used that spell against him, slicing him up, and wasn't completely sure that he didn't recognize the incantation. She couldn't keep the fear out of her voice. "Professor Snape."

"He never told me that one."

"No one..." she gasped uncomfortably at the burning in her chest, "was supposed to know about it."

Draco nodded slowly, studying the stars.

She felt, for the first time, that he was actually listening to her, that they were having a real conversation. The intense pain she had felt earlier had subsided a little; after a delirious nap, she had awoken to him shuffling restlessly next to her, much closer than she had expected.

He had apparently not wanted to just lay there awkwardly, awake and silent, so he had spoken a few charms; another warming charm, an anti-itch charm, and a repelling charm that would keep the bugs away. She had waited as he spoke these quietly, her body tingling. After he had finished, he had checked her vitals, and had passed his wand over her, up and down her limbs, making sure there weren't any other wounds he would need to take care of. She could feel his gaze inspecting her body, scrutinizing her skin, and it had been difficult to lie still and not overthink it.

"It just came out," Hermione continued softly. "It was the first spell that I could think of... to deal damage."

"And it was the first one Goody Gryffindor ever used."

"Professor Moody - "

"That's doesn't count, Granger."

She stayed silent, so Draco found himself searching for something else to ask, something to fill the heavy silence. His brain was swimming with questions - why hadn't she used the wand to escape by herself? Why hadn't her wounds killed her?

But of all the questions that he could of asked, he asked the thing on the tip of his tongue:

"D-Do you still have the walking stick?"

"No... I'm sorry."