Part Nine
Hermione groans, staring at herself on the mirror for a moment as she pushes her sweat damp hair off her forehead with her wrist. She looks like hell. She fills up a tumbler of water at the bathroom tap, and then wets her hand beneath the flow, swiping her palm over her face. The cool wetness wakes her up a little, but doesn't help her feel any better. It's four am, three nights after the day that Voldemort made her torture Malfoy, and she hasn't slept more than a couple of hours in the time since.
His hand bothers him badly, and the whip wounds on top of only half-healed injuries made it so much worse than the first whipping. And as well as that, he seems to have suffered a concussion from her blow to the head that has caused near-constant headaches and nausea, and the burn to his leg has gotten infected. So there has been pain. So, so much pain. Hermione has spent hours sitting and gnawing the inside of her cheek raw as she holds Malfoy's uninjured hand and soothes him, guilt sliding under her skin like needles and blood metallic in her mouth.
The numbing charms can't do enough to dull the pain - she still can't manage full strength charms with Malfoy's wand - and Malfoy has no access to pain potions, so he's not been near comfortable enough to manage any proper, deep sleep. He has a cabinet full of dreamless sleep potions, but while they help make one drowsy and keep nightmares from troubling one's sleep, they can't make someone go to sleep when they're trying hard not to scream and cry from the constant agony.
So Malfoy has been in pain and trapped in a semi-conscious wakefulness for over four days - delirious more often than not, and unable to keep down any food more challenging than broth. Unfortunately, none of those things are conducive to healing, and so he hasn't been doing as well as Hermione had hoped. His recovery is glacial, and it feels like rather like their roles have flipped entirely. Hermione was the one to hurt him. He is the weak one. She has to take care of him. She is the monster and he is the victim, and any lingering fear she had of him is gone now, erased from existence by what has transpired.
It makes her feel even guiltier to think it, but she can't help thinking to herself that Voldemort's plan backfired terribly; instead of making Malfoy hate her, hurting him has only served to make her feel in control again. Stronger. Less cringing and shattered, and more capable. Because he needs her to be. He needs her to be there for him, to care for him, because he can't care for himself right now. It's not easy to overcome the urge to hide in the corner and block out the frightening, overwhelming situation. But she tries. And fails and succeeds in the same day - sometimes in the same hour.
She does her best, but it's hard to go on without Malfoy there - strong and stoic - to anchor her, as he has been since she was first captured. He has been a steady rock, an anchor, a constant - not always able to protect her, or comfort her, or even make anything better, but there at least, always ready to do what was necessary to keep her alive, and as whole as he could manage. And now he's not. Now he's weak and wounded, and entirely dependent on her, and it's terrifying. But she does what she has to; cleans his wounds and changes the bandages, assists him to the bathroom, helps feed him the broth the house elfs bring, hovers over him attentively every minute...
"Here." Hermione touches his shoulder and Malfoy cracks dazed eyes open, emerging from the restless, pain-filled stupor he keeps sinking into. Not true rest, nor true consciousness. His lips are dry and cracked, and his eyes are dull as he lies on his wounded back, half-propped up by pillows. Hermione wishes like hell he'd just fucking well eat. She wishes she had proper pain killers for him. He needs nutritious food and good rest in order to heal, and he's not getting enough of either - he can't hold down one and she can't get the other. It's fraying her already precarious mental state with frustration.
"Malfoy?" She holds out the cup of water and he attempts a smile and reaches up, wrapping his fingers around hers and guiding the cup to his lips. He drains it in a matter of seconds, throat bobbing as he swallows.
"Thanks," he whisper-mumbles, and then his eyes slide shut again. Hermione sighs and crawls onto the bed, curling into Malfoy's side. He lifts his arm with a wince and wraps it around her, and she snuggles closer and lets out a soft, weary sigh, head pillowed on his shoulder as she slides her hand to rest on the hollow of his stomach. She wants desperately to feed him chocolate and fried things and complex carbohydrates to fatten him up; to make him sleek and lean again instead of swiftly tipping toward skin and bone.
It hurts, to see him like this and know that she is the one responsible. It doesn't matter that Voldemort was the one who forced it to be like this - she was still the instrument of his destruction, and it was her hands, not Voldemort's, that left Malfoy terribly wounded.
"I'm so tired," she says aloud, and Malfoy tangles his unhurt fingers in her hair, gentling them through her wild locks. His concave abdomen rises and falls beneath her palm, and his breath is a warm whisper of air on her forehead.
"Sleep, then," he murmurs, voice cracking and thin, barely audible.
"You'll need me," Hermione protests through a yawn, struggling to keep her eyes open. She just wants to stop for a while. She just wants to rest. She wants to go home, to be in an Order safe-house with Harry and Ron and the other Weasleys and...and Malfoy. She wants to get out of here, she wants to be safe, but if Malfoy's not there, the prospect is oddly...unsettling. Wrong. Unacceptable. She can't. The realisation - I can't leave him - feels less like a shock, and more like a puzzle piece sliding into place. If she ever gets out of here, she needs it to be with Malfoy, not leaving him behind here, in this awful place, without her. Anything else is not just an unpleasant thought, but utterly unacceptable.
"I'm feeling better today," he says, and his voice is a slurred rasp that makes his words sound like a lie. But he's acting coherent and lucid at least, which is a definite improvement. "It's hurting less. I think I might be able to sleep myself," he tells her, fingers still sifting gently through her tangled hair. "Rest, Granger. I'll wake you if I need you."
Hermione doesn't mean to fall asleep, but between the warmth of them curled together beneath the bedding, his steady draws of breath, and the mesmerising touch of his fingers to her hair, she slides inexorably toward it. One moment she is forcing her heavy eyes to stay open, trying to figure out when she'll need to renew his numbing charms, and the next minute she is blinking sleepily awake; forehead pressed to the smooth skin of his side, a blissful warmth and sense of wellness suffusing her.
"Malfoy?" Urgent worry chases away the dozy bliss, but then a hand squeezes her shoulder.
"I'm fine, Granger." His voice, rough but calm. "Go back to sleep."
A letter arrives from Malfoy's mother five days after the - after Voldemort - after Hermione was forced to hurt him. It seems short, and Malfoy's mouth tightens when he reads it sitting up in bed, strain etching into his face. Hermione watches from her curl in the armchair in the sun, where she's been reading an old textbook on Healing charms the house elf procured at Malfoy's request. Thank Merlin the house elf is loyal to Malfoy and bound by a confidentiality charm - although even its loyalty has limits; it can't go against any orders that come from Voldemort. Obviously.
Voldemort doesn't seem to have anything against Draco wanting Healing textbooks though, or letters from Narcissa Malfoy.
"You're interested? Well then: Dear Draco," Malfoy says aloud suddenly, with a hint of sharpness, and Hermione flushes at being caught staring, chastised. It's none of her business what Malfoy's mother says to him.
"Sorry." She looks away, out the window, chewing on her lip, embarrassed at having been caught. He huffs a weak laugh and shakes his head, waving off her embarrassment, a little apologetic for his own tone.
"No, really, it's fine, Granger. It simply says - Dear Draco. I was concerned to hear you were injured in the Dark Lord's service; please be more careful, my darling. Your father and I send our best wishes, and hope you recover quickly. We had hoped to return home soon, but it seems your father's business here will not be concluded for some time yet. Your Mother."
He sighs and tosses the scroll to the bed, dragging his hand through his hair, and Hermione chews her lip again, feeling awkward. She has never read a letter quite that cool in tone or stilted before - well, certainly not from someone's own mother at least. Malfoy seems bitter, and she doesn't know what to say. Should she comfort him?
"Do...do you want a quill and parchment, to write back?" She gestures toward the desk tentatively, and he hesitates a moment before shaking his head shortly.
"No. No, thank you, Granger." And that was that; topic closed and his face carved in unfeeling stone. Hermione remembered how much he'd worshiped his father at school, how much he'd clearly cared for his mother, and she feels sorrow for him, welling up.
"Malfoy!" Hermione whispers, finding his arm in the dim light of the shuttered lamp that sits on the bedside table - out of her reach, along with Malfoy's wand - and squeezing his wrist firmly. "Malfoy, wake up. It's okay. Just…wake up. Malfoy! Wake. Up. Merlin-damnit, please, wake up."
There have been several nights where Hermione has needed to awaken Malfoy from nightmares since…the incident, because once Malfoy was lucid enough to do so, he began to refuse the Dreamless Sleep potion. He says that it makes him feel wrong, but Hermione thinks he's being an idiot and a masochist, and has told him so in no uncertain terms. Not that her telling him so has swayed him on the matter. He is as stubborn as her, a fact she doesn't entirely dislike, until times like this.
"Malfoy, fucking wake up!"
Malfoy's nightmares are normally easy to deal with. He has a pattern; he begins making distressed sounds in his sleep and shifting restlessly, and with the way they sleep beside each other and the fact that Hermione is a light sleeper these days, his restlessness is enough to wake her.
She usually scrambles up bleary-eyed and kneels beside him in the dim light of a lumos, speaking to him in comforting, low whispers as she touches him gently. Warm caresses to his bare chest and arms and stubble-roughened cheeks, as she tells him that it's all right, that he needs to wake up, that he's safe, that it's not real. And inevitably he does settle, and wake - blinking wet grey eyes up at her, nightmare-confusion fading, replaced by something else entirely as he stares up at her, and says her first name soft and rough at once. The sound of Hermione all needy and shocked on his lips is unimaginably alien but delicious, and makes her stomach flip and her skin go hot.
But this one tonight is not the normal, Hermione thinks with an edge of panic and frustration, as she lies on her side and murmurs urgently in Malfoy's ear, trying to wake him up as her pulse races and sweat springs up clammy on her skin, growing more frantic for him to wake. It has been eight nights since the - the incident, and Hermione had been exhausted enough, and plagued by enough unpleasant dreams herself, that she had taken the Dreamless Sleep…and slept more heavily than usual.
Which is why, she hazards to guess, she has woken up to Malfoy making wounded sounds in his sleep, tears glistening on his cheeks, as he lies atop her Merlin-damned arm. He has rolled onto his back in his restlessness without it waking her - until he trapped her arm, whereupon she came blearily out of sleep to this mess. The pain of her stupid, bony arm putting pressure on the whip wounds must be excruciating for him - but somehow it hasn't woken him, only driven him deeper into nightmare.
The situation is made more difficult by the fact that waking him abruptly leaves him disorientated and panicky, with the nightmare caught horror-vivid in his mind. The one time she did it - the first time he'd suffered a bad nightmare - he'd had a panic attack after, sitting hunched over in the bed, tears streaking his cheeks even though he wasn't really crying, wheezing and gasping as he'd tried to draw breath and felt unable to. It had lasted nearly an hour and been awful, and neither of them had slept again that night. But then Hermione thinks she feels a splotch of dampness on her forearm, seeping through the bandages Malfoy's back is swathed in, and she doesn't see that she has a choice.
"Malfoy!" She is loud this time, and pats his upper arm hard, figuratively crossing her fingers and desperately hoping he won't react badly. His eyes are screwed tightly shut, and his face is scrunched with pain and distress as he makes frightened, awful whimpers, and pained groans, crying out now and then. He speaks sometimes during his nightmares, usually pleading -'please don't make me, please, don't' - with a miserable despair that's heart-breaking. Tonight whatever words he says are indecipherable mumbles, but the distress on his face is clear enough. It's bad.
"Malfoy! Wake up!" She shakes him by one shoulder with her free arm; he makes a pained noise but doesn't wake.
"Draco!" she cries loudly then, right by his ear, and feeling stupidly guilty for it, pinches the naked flesh of his side. Hard. Malfoy makes a funny, juddering gasp and then jerks upright with a choked groan of pain as the sudden movement hurts his back. His eyes are blank - wide and wild - and his shoulders and chest are heaving as he drags for air. He huddles forward, making wounded, horrible noises as his injuries no doubt scream from the sudden wrenching movements, trying to smother the sounds with a hand pressed to his mouth.
"It's okay," Hermione tells him helplessly, going to her knees beside him and laying a hand on his shoulder, fingers stroking and curling. He doesn't show any indication he even heard her, and so she slides her fingertips up the side of his neck, fingers sliding and tangling through his fine, white-blond hair, trying to soothe him. "It's all right, Malfoy. It was a nightmare. Only a nightmare." And she wraps an arm around him, one hand still on his hair, joined by her lips as she presses them to the crown of his head, enveloping him in the comfort of her warmth. "We're all right," she murmurs over and over, breath ruffling his hair, and his breath judders in and out, catching as her words finally start to sink in.
"I - I -" he begins, and can't continue, and Hermione says I know, and holds him tighter, mindful of his injuries, and he turns his face toward her - resting his forehead on the jut of her collarbone as she cradles him close, there on her knees. Malfoy's tears drip down over her skin, as his uninjured hand comes up to grip her wrist and cling to her, still lost in the daze of sleep and pain, and if his nightmares are anything like hers, vivid memories of all the hurts they've inflicted on each other.
"You're safe now," she tells him through a throat that feels tight and clogged, just like he has tried to tell her so many times, and unlike her, she thinks he believes her choked whisper.
He doesn't seem to remember it, when he wakes.
"Stop feeling guilty," Malfoy tells her calmly but firmly one afternoon, thirteen days after it had happened, and Hermione freezes in tending to his burn, her potion-coated hand hovering just above it. How is she supposed to stop feeling guilty? She wants to yell that at him, but it wouldn't be fair, so she bites her tongue instead, literally. It stings and feels raw and fat in her mouth, although she draws no blood.
She takes a breath, and then slides her hand carefully over the burn scars, feeling for the heat of infection as she slathers on the potion. She does it looking up from where she kneels at his feet, watching as his features subtly shift and rearrange in shape - struggling to bear the pain. His jaw tightens and his eyes flutter shut for a moment, his hands make fists in the bedding, and his thigh tenses like iron beneath her palm. She swallows hard, feeling sick.
"You can't ask me to stop feeling guilty when you haven't even healed, Malfoy," she says, carefully spreading the topical potion out over the edges of the burn, watching the fine blond hairs on his thigh slick down. It's intimate, kneeling here like this with Malfoy in nothing but his shorts and too much bandaging, with her hands pressing against his warm skin. He could do this himself now - of course he could - but neither of them have mentioned that.
Sometimes Malfoy pushes a disobedient bit of hair back off her face, and then ends up idly playing with her hair, carding his fingers through the tangles. Sometimes - always - she touches the uninjured skin of his thigh far more than she needs to, marveling at how warm and soft it feels under her fingertips. She thinks the burn scars will fade away to nothing even if he doesn't get specialised treatment; it's not severe enough to scar permanently, thank Merlin. Unlike his back. His poor back, which had been perfect, smooth marble until Voldemort and she had laid waste to it - ruined it, mangled it. Hermione still thinks it's beautiful - perhaps even more so in a twisted sort of way, because he received those scars to protect her - but she is well aware it is only she who would find them beautiful and not a mutilation.
"It's not your fault," he says, nudging her softly in the side with the knee of his unhurt leg. "Don't be stupid, Granger. You didn't have a choice. And I'm getting better." She huffs a derisive sound. None of that makes a difference in how she feels. It doesn't change the fact that she hurt him. And he shouldn't give her advice that he can't bloody well follow himself.
"Do you feel guilty? For - for what you've done to...me?" she asks him pointedly if haltingly, flushing hot because bringing that up is hard, and awful. She tries to just not think about it usually, because all it does is make her feel sick and horrible and dirty, and it doesn't achieve anything. Malfoy goes ashen white, and his eyes flutter briefly shut as he tries to compose himself. He looks as though she's struck him, and she feels no sympathy. This is reality, and he needs to learn to accept it.
"It's...it's different, Granger." His voice is thick and strained and guilt ridden. Hermione lays a large rectangle of gauze over the burn, smoothing it gently down. She can feel the discomfort humming under his skin as she takes every opportunity to touch him while she winds bandaging over and around the gauze. He's uncomfortable with her kindness, with her care. He recoils from the fact that the thought of him makes her feel safe, he refuses to accept that she could care about him, could want him even. To be fair, she finds it strange as well - but unlike him, she doesn't attribute it all to Stockholm Syndrome. She thinks perhaps there is an element of that involved...but at this point, she doesn't particularly care.
"I'm not sure that it is, actually." Because it's not, not at all. They are both prisoners here, they both of them have been forced to do things against their will, they have been hurt, and forced to hurt, and neither of them should feel guilty. But they still will. No one who has a conscience could hurt others and not feel a sick, gnawing guilt over it.
They have Muggle Thai food for dinner to celebrate, the day Malfoy manages to make it to the bathroom and back without needing help, or to stop and lean against the bathroom door-frame to rest. Thai is his choice, thanks to her descriptions of the food. They eat it in bed while Hermione tries to explain the concept of Muggle movies at Malfoy's pleading, and in the end he's more bewildered than before. 'Moving pictures' are an ironically hard concept to explain to magical folk, and the mechanisms of the film industry are mind boggling to him. But it's nice to smile and relax and talk about something silly, and fun, and interesting.
He asks her about what it was like growing up as a Muggle, and what she'd thought of Diagon Alley the first time she'd seen it, and what she dreamed of being growing up, and how cars worked, and what she'd wanted to be when she grew up before she'd known she was a witch, and where she went for holidays, and what flying in a plane is like... Malfoy is all questions, and he listens with interest, prodding for details with lighter topics, and respecting any shorter answers with things that are more personal. She entertains him as best she can, trying to sustain his cheerful mood by relating Muggle jokes that she's sure she botches terribly, and explaining Muggle technology, and idiosyncrasies, and traditions.
It's for him that she does it, but they both laugh a lot.
Hermione thinks later that she had nearly forgotten how to.
She thinks, when she remembers it the next day while tending the healing whip wounds and changing his bandages, that perhaps the evening had been just as much for her sake as his, and on impulse she lays a kiss at the base of his neck. He makes a startled sound but says nothing discouraging, so she does it again, and his head drops and he whispers her name, pleading and sad, and she doesn't think she should do it again, even if he does reach awkwardly around afterwards to squeeze her knee in a gesture of clumsy intimacy.
It's almost three long weeks before Malfoy is up and about properly again - his fingernails beginning to grow back, the scar on his face a thin, livid mark, and the debilitating headaches from his concussion finally gone. His back is an utter wreckage, but as Malfoy says dismissively, the new injuries really aren't noticeable what with all the older ones, and as he can't see either unless he looks in the mirror, he doesn't care. She doesn't at all believe his bravado; she knows the way it looks troubles him. She doesn't mention that though - if he wants to keep that feeling a secret, well, she can understand that.
Besides the look of his scars, Malfoy moves with the stiffness of an old man, and he's lost a great deal of weight that he could ill afford to lose. His once lean frame is now bony and angular nearly to the point of emaciation, and Hermione finds herself constantly fussing quietly over him, trying to make sure he eats properly and for the most part, failing.
Malfoy resumes his duties in Voldemort's service despite his lingering issues, and slowly the days return to normal. And the crushing fear Hermione has felt since she first awoke in the dungeons retreats just the tiniest bit, because in the eyes of the Death Eaters, Hermione is Malfoy's now, and his alone. For now, they'll be okay. The worst is over. No one can hurt her. Hermione has to believe that.
"He's talking about going to America," Malfoy says randomly, as he emerges from the bathroom in pyjama trousers, his hair damp and spiky from toweling. Hermione looks up from the few medical supplies she has laid out on the bedside table, and winces as Malfoy's back is exposed to her as he yanks a tee-shirt out of a drawer. Even the deepest slashes are scabbed well over now, but even the vivid scar tissue of the lesser the whip strokes, which have lost their scabbing, still look horribly painful. Happily, Malfoy has able to access pain potions over the past few days, so at least Hermione knows it's not hurting him anymore.
"The - the Dark Lord?" she asks, adding: "Don't put that on. Come here." There's a note of casual command to her voice, and Malfoy raises an eyebrow inquiringly but does as she says, moving around the bed with his shirt in hand. They have grown comfortable around one another again, during his long recuperation. Hermione isn't scared any longer - she treats him, she realises, almost like she treats Harry and Ron. Treated Harry and Ron. She bosses him about, and fusses over him.
"Yeah. It won't be happening just yet, but very soon," Malfoy says, sitting obediently on the edge of the bed, and Hermione settles behind him comfortably, and begins tending to his back. She's quiet for a long time before she speaks, thinking about hope and escape and home.
"It might be a chance then. Yeah?"
"Yeah." The hope hangs between them, taut and fragile, and silence falls as Hermione cleans and closes any re-opened, weeping wounds, and begins applying the healing cream. She's easy with him and downright bossy when it comes to matters of his health, and Hermione thinks that the dynamics between them have always been changeable, but they've shifted again over the past several weeks. Hermione is no longer afraid of Malfoy, no longer doubts him even a little; they have reached a certain sense of equality between them. The fact that he was forced to - to rape her, all those weeks ago, no longer makes her feel violated by Malfoy, but by Voldemort, the one who ordered it, the one who made Malfoy do it, the one who is to blame.
The thought of doing anything too intimate with Malfoy still makes her feel...scared and ill though, because even if it's not Malfoy's fault it still happened. The sense of violation, humiliation, helplessness...it's still all bound up with him doing those kinds of things. And besides that, he's still stupidly, stubbornly insistent that they shouldn't. He tells her that she can't properly, freely consent, he tells her that she won't want to once she leaves, that he doesn't want to take advantage, that he doesn't want to do anything she'll regret.
It has taken Hermione a stupidly long time to realise that Malfoy is just as afraid as she is. Not just because of the physical aspects, and the awful associations that certain acts have for them, but because he's afraid of the emotional consequences. She thinks that for Malfoy, sex would be like admitting their feelings out loud, and he's not willing to do that, to open himself to that hurt and that vulnerability. Which is enormously stupid of Malfoy, because refusing to acknowledge and act on his feelings doesn't protect him from suffering that hurt and vulnerability anyway. Idiot.
But Hermione's perfectly all right with not taking their intimacy any further, so she doesn't complain. What they have is quite enough. She sweeps the pads of her lotion-slick thumbs firmly along Malfoy's shoulders, and then glides her palms very gently down over his shoulder blades. The topical potion slicks her way in gliding over the uneven, ridged scars, and Malfoy sighs at her touch. She keeps it light enough not to hurt his still scabbed-over wounds, and her touch is meant more for comfort than for healing if she is honest. But then comfort can be healing, she argues to herself with a tiny smile, as he sighs again and leans back into her touch a little more.
While her hands run over his scarred, marked skin, her mind keeps ticking over though, and a worry worms its way into her mind.
"If - if He goes. Will you come with me?" Hermione asks, hands stilling for a moment, breath held caught in her throat with anticipation. The dread in the pit of her stomach makes her think she already knows the answer. Malfoy is silent for a moment too long.
"I can't," he says at least, dull and lifeless. "I have to - I have to stay. Those are my orders." There is no emotion or inflection in his voice - he is an automaton, but that the planes of muscle in his back go stiff beneath Hermione's hands. She bites her lip, and then shifts awkwardly around so that she is almost beside him, trying not to touch anything with her greasy hands.
"But...what will you tell him about me? Won't they realise, when I disappear, that you're a traitor?" She fixes her eyes to his as he turns his head toward her, his face pale and grave, and utterly expressionless.
"No. Not necessarily. Voldemort said that you are mine, to do with as I wish. I..." He looks away, down at his left hand, examining the almost regrown nails as he keeps speaking in a monotone. "I will obtain a body from the dungeons, mutilate it, skin it, and act as though I couldn't get over you hurting me, and killed you in a fit of rage."
"Oh..." Hermione swallows hard, picturing him doing just that as he explains it to her; vivid in her mind's eye. The fiction is...disturbingly convincing. That was no guarantee though. "But what if they don't?"
Malfoy meets her worried gaze again, his own totally calm. "Then I suppose I die." Anger sweeps her, and bursts out without thought or measure, tears welling and overflowing in her eyes.
"No. No. You can't just... Whatever help you give the Order isn't worth... You've done enough, Malfoy. You've sacrificed enough. They can't make you...no one would blame you..." Hermione trails off helplessly, begging him to listen to reason. He couldn't stay here. Killing her might make a convincing fiction, but not half as convincing as he needed to be, after all his odd behaviour since acquiring her as a slave. Voldemort was not stupid. If he put thought into it and investigated beyond a simple acceptance of Malfoy's word, he would be bound to discover the truth, and what happened to Malfoy once he did... Hermione shuddered to think. "Please, Malfoy. You can't stay. It's madness to think..."
Malfoy looked at her, his jaw tight and his hands making fists, his features still blank, but drawn now - weary and strained despite himself.
"It doesn't concern you, Granger. Why do you care?" he asks her through lips that seem numb, the words dispassionate but nearly slurred at the edges, and his grey eyes are as shiny and flat as sickles. "What is it to you?" And there is some emotion - the slightest hint of disdain for her. It's like a slap to the face. Hermione falls back from him, forgetting her greasy hands on the bed-covers as she shoves herself to her feet, her pulse a thundering stampede, and her chest constricting hard, angry and hurt seizing her roughly.
Hermione stares at Malfoy, as he sits perched statue still on the edge of the bed, staring at her expressionlessly - bare chested and painfully skinny, eyes shuttered and mouth a thin line.
"Why do I care?" she echoes, filled with hurt and disgust, and then echoes him again - angrier this time and just as hurt. "What is it to me?" The tears prick behind her eyes like needles, and she wants to throw something at him in fury, because he should know that he means something to her, and she's sure he does. "You know, you bastard. You know what you - you know what you mean to me. You know that I -" Hermione snaps her mouth shut then, slamming a hand over it, cheeks blazing suddenly hot because he doesn't know that. Not that. At least, he didn't - but she sees the flicker of something in Malfoy eyes as she stops herself - the slight drop of his jaw, and the spasmodic clenching of his fist, the horror of suspicion taking subtle shape on his face.
"Take care of your own fucking back, you stupid fucking bastard," she snarls, in a pitiful attempt to cover her near slip, snatching up a roll of bandaging from the bedside table, and throwing it at him. It hits his shoulder and bounces off onto the floor, as he stares at her, his chest rising and falling raggedly with his breaths, and when he speaks it sounds like he has been running for miles.
"I don't know a Merlin-damned thing, Granger," he says, dazedly. "And neither do you."
"I -" she begins, and he stands then, smooth and graceful despite a wince, stepping in so close to her that she has to crane her head back to meet his eyes, and can feel the heat rushing off him. He feels dangerous and she falls silent.
"When we get the chance, Granger, you are going, and I am not, and that is fucking final, do you understand me?" He stares down at her implacably, waiting - grabbing her arm when she began to turn away, and repeating the question, the words grating out of his mouth, furious and cold. "Do. you. understand. me?" His bony fingers dig bruising hard into her skin, and she can see in his face that he knows exactly how much it is hurting her. Her chin trembles despite herself and tears spill over and down her cheeks, and that old snake of fear that has slept in her belly undisturbed for so long lifts its head, reminding her in little jabs and shivers of what he has done to her.
"Yes," she whispers, gaze falling to the floor, to stare at their feet on the rug, her tears slithering down over her skin to plop by her biggest toe, and he drops her arm immediately and turns away, snatching up his shirt off the bed, and his wand off the bedside table.
"I'm going out," he says, oddly strained, not looking at her, as she stands there stunned and scared. "Don't wait up for me."