It was starting, Hermione knew it. The pain she felt wasn't just bed sores or bruises; it was the Skele-gro and the start to what would become a long night with Malfoy.

Neither of them had gone back to sleep. After Hermione's first bout of pain, Malfoy went about gathering supplies. He had his notes, which, much to her chagrin, Hermione couldn't read from so far away. Muggle medical supplies, the ones he stole from her – it dawned on her that he probably didn't know what half of them were for.

She cleared her throat, causing his eyes to snap to her in an instant.

"All right?" He asked.

Hermione nodded, pushing the blankets off her chest so she might sit up. Her leg had become inflamed and tender to all movement. The epicenter of pain was her glute, which felt like she had slipped on icy concrete and landed directly on her bum. She tried to use her upper body to lift herself, but that was sore, too, and she winced with the effort.

Malfoy was at her side in a flash, an arm around her back to hold her up. Hermione took a sharp breath, startled to be so close to him. With his other hand, he transfigured three pillows from books, the names of them stretched across the soft cotton case: A Guide to Advanced Transfiguration, One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi, and The Dream Oracle. They floated from across the room and nestled behind her, giving Hermione enough support to sit up on her own.

"Thanks," she mumbled awkwardly after he pulled away.

Malfoy's cheeks were pink – or was it the glow of candles? – as he refilled her water and offered it to her.

Hermione took a sip before leaning over and placing it back on the table.

Malfoy hovered at her bedside as if waiting for something else to happen. Hermione was anxious for the process to get started, too. She had read about regrowing bones: the pain would come and go in spurts, with an intensity that would increase as time went on. What was a sharp pain in the arse now would soon become pain worse than falling from the cliff – a sick part of her wondered if it would be anything compared to Bellatrix Lestrange's Cruciatus Curse.

She had three long bones to grow: femur, tibia, and fibula. Based on her estimations, it should take about a day for each of them. Hermione wondered if she and Malfoy would last that long without killing each other and what other information she could get out of him in the meantime.

"Good?" He asked again, more timidly this time.

"Uh, yeah. I was going to ask while you were," she gestured to the table across the den, "doing whatever it is that you were doing over there if you still have my paracetamol?"

"Para-ceta-mol." He recited phonetically, chortling to himself. "And here I was thinking it was pronounced Par-ace-tame-ole this whole time."

Hermione snorted despite herself. "So, you do have it?"

Malfoy wiped the back of his hand across an eye, still laughing. "No."

Hermione swore.

"Why?" Malfoy asked, crossing his arms, "What's it used for?"

Hermione sighed, feeling irritated. "It's a medication that muggles take for inflammation, it can help a bit with pain, too. Not strong like a pain elixir, but just enough to take the edge off."

Malfoy narrowed his eyes. "But it's magical pain," he insisted, "How can something muggle help with that?"

Hermione rubbed her temples. It was bad enough to be in the position she was, but now she got to have another conversation with a wizard explaining something muggle in as simplest terms possible – it reminded her of every conversation she ever had with Ronald Weasley, hence the prefaced headache. In her condition, however, Hermione wasn't feeling so patient. Rather, she jumped to defensive, snapping, "Well falling from a cliff and landing at the bottom is a muggle injury, right? And you gave me a pain elixir for that, didn't you?"

"Yes…" Draco drawled, eliciting her to continue.

Tears pooled in her eyes and she pawed at them, betrayed that they came at all. Her voice was hoarse with thin restraint, "I was bleeding out! My blood that is the blood of muggles! And the Blood Replenishing potion still worked. So tell me, Malfoy, why couldn't a muggle drug help with this magical pain?"

He looked cut by her tone and his face was pinched in trepid contemplation. "Maybe you're right," he muttered. "Clearly it's your area of expertise."

"Well, it doesn't matter," she snapped, "because they're gone." A thick blanket of silence fell over them, but even that agitated her. It was surprising that her preference was to keep the conversation going. Never in her life did she think she would want to hear anything that Draco Malfoy had to say.

There was her curiosity again. She needed to know more. "What'd you do with them, anyway?"

Malfoy shuffled his feet, "I ate them all."

Hermione's jaw dropped. How was he still standing? "Why?!"

He shrugged, staring at his feet, "Wanted to see what they would do."

"They could have killed you, Malfoy!"

He gave an apathetic laugh before turning away from her and heading back to the kitchen, muttering under his breath. Hermione watched as he tied his hair back into a low bun and began pacing, talking to himself. There was a lot of pain under his surface, perhaps more pain than Hermione would feel regrowing her leg.

She was no stranger to pain — physical, emotional, and magical. Perhaps in that way, she and Malfoy were much the same. In all the years that Hermione suffered alone, she always wished she had someone there with her to listen — for while she had friends around it never felt appropriate to burden them with all her feelings.

Malfoy had been alone for years — how had he coped for all this time?

"Hey," Hermione interrupted his pacing.

Malfoy gave her a curious look, but she could see the torrent of emotions hiding behind his facade.

"Would you want to bring the chair over?" She asked. "I think I'll be up for a while, maybe we can talk more?"

Malfoy picked up the armchair with a single hand and brought it to her bedside. She wondered if it were the blood oath bringing him to her or if he was finally ready to face whatever had been eating at him for all these years. He held up a finger before retreating into the kitchen to gather more supplies.

It didn't take him long to get settled. Malfoy set his messy stack of parchment on the floor beside his chair, carefully lined the bedside table with vials of potions, and delicately set a package of peanuts on her lap. Ravenous, she started in on the peanuts, stacking discarded shells in a neat pile on the bedspread.

Hermione reached out and offered him one.

"What was it like for you? During the first year?" She asked.

A distant look clouded his eyes, Hermione had never seen Malfoy looking so subdued. "Scary," he shrugged, taking what she offered. "Every time I was out in the woods, I was worried someone would find me."

"No searches were ever done in the Forest," Hermione informed him. "The Centaurs seized the land in the chaos of the aftermath." Malfoy raised an eyebrow — was he surprised by that? How ignorant could he be to the activity of creatures in the place where he lived?

She popped a peanut in her mouth, crunching loudly. "I'm not sure if anyone from the Ministry has set foot in their territory ever since."

"Until you," Malfoy pointed out.

"Right." She didn't want to talk more about her and what she was doing in the woods. Her eyes scanned the den around them, looking for anything that might spark more conversation between them, but in the dimly lit cavern of his den, it was hard to make out anything other than shadows and blurry outlines of objects he had in piles.

Her eyes fell back on Malfoy, who was deep in thought. He caught her staring and much to her relief, began speaking more, as though encouraged by her attentiveness. "I was hungry a lot."

By the looks of him, he still was. It must have been quite a shock to go from being fed feasts in the Great Hall three times a day to eating… whatever Malfoy had survived on all this time. He'd brought her fruit, even cooked for her — where did all that come from?

Long strands of his hair had fallen from their entanglement and hung in front of his face. He peeked through it periodically as he spoke, as if checking to see if she was still listening.

"Didn't know anything then. Every plant could have been poisonous and I'm not sure if you've ever eaten anything you've killed with magic, but it makes meat taste like fucking sand."

"So what did you eat then?"

"Well, I found some stuff that I knew was okay." Malfoy rubbed at the back of his neck sheepishly, "I'd watch to see what the creatures were eating and hope that I'd tolerate whatever just the same."

The corner of her mouth quivered with amusement, imagining him observing the Forest creatures much as she had been for the census. "None of them seemed alerted by a wolf in the woods?"

He froze. What would have been imperceptible, but Hermione was watching, studying him. "No, they didn't seem scared at all."

This threw her off. She had been scared to see a wolf in the magical woods. She didn't buy that the other creatures weren't concerned about the new predator that could attack them. "But they ran from you, right? I can't imagine a thestral cozying up to a big, bad wolf."

Draco snorted. "The big, bad wolf who couldn't even kill his food with his own hands. No, the creatures didn't seem to mind me." His face began to glow with childlike delight. "There were so many. The Forest was alive after the war, all the creatures celebrating by mating and partying. It was miraculous.

"I remember watching a group of dugbogs playing in the creek." He smiled at the memory. "Babies. Dugbogs have such a short gestation period, you know. They were so innocent." His face fell, "Lucky to not know the woes of life and the darkness of magic."

Hermione was quiet, not sure how to respond. She mumbled something to the effect of, "Sounds lovely," but it wasn't much heard as Malfoy carried on.

"It was otherworldly at times, creatures and foliage alive and treating me like I was one of them… like I belonged." He shook his head, "But I could never enjoy it. I was too paranoid that my cover would be blown. For the first few months, I only went out at night."

"Wasn't it difficult to hunt that way?" Hermione interjected, crossing her arms.

The pink tinge on Malfoy's cheeks has deepened into crimson. He snarled as he tried not to answer her question, but the blood oath was stronger than his will and the truths kept spilling anyway.

"Yes. I had to sink very low to get what I needed."

Hermione straightened with difficulty, her interest piqued. "How low is low?"

He turned to face her; his face was ashen, laden with shame. "What's the muggle word for grave robbing, Granger?"

"Malfoy!" she gasped. He buried his face in his hands, shoulders quivering. Hermione's eyes scanned the room, morbidly wondering if all his possessions had belonged to dead Hogwarts students — trunks buried in the Forbidden Forest as a symbolic gesture to give the survivors some closure, but nothing had been closed for long. His books, parchment, clothes…

Her stomach churned at his confession and Hermione couldn't contain her judgment of him. "How could you?"

Malfoy sat back in his chair, fresh tracks of tears running down his face. His jaw hardened and he gave the dirt wall behind her a very evil stare. "I have to live with the ghosts of my decisions every day, Granger, including the ghosts whose things I stole from. You don't understand, I had to do what I had to do to survive."

Hermione's eyes narrowed, a righteous speech about morality on the tip of her tongue, but she choked it back. Now wasn't the time to berate Malfoy for his wrongdoings, not when Hermione suspected she hadn't gotten to the bottom of things yet. A wave of fear washed over her; grave robbing couldn't have been the worst thing he'd done. Her mind raced to fill in the gaps, a welcome distraction from the ache in her side that was starting to burn.

"I never wanted to die more than that winter alone," Malfoy admitted after ten minutes of silence.

Hermione sighed, hardly feeling sympathetic for him at the moment, but listening to his stories was better than the awkward silence between them. Besides, there was more to the story, Hermione was sure. "Was it cold and lonely?"

He gave a wry chuckle. "You have no idea."

"How did you manage it?"

Malfoy gulped, "By any means necessary."

The First Winter, January 1999

His existence felt excruciating. Every day he desired any set of circumstances, even death itself, as a reprieve from the loneliness that ate at his insides, worse than the hunger pains that kept him awake at night.

It felt wrong to leave the Forest.

Strange to say, but he had felt warmer, safer, in the Forbidden Forest. Something about the shrouding of the leaves or just the fact that he hadn't been out from under its canopy in… he didn't know how long. It had to have been many months, as snow fell lightly in the space between the evergreens and the oak he lived under, which — despite the freezing temperatures — refused to shed its leaves.

Life had come to all but a standstill in the magical woods as most creatures hibernated for the winter and edible vegetation became sparse. Draco tried to follow his orders and stay in the woods, but each day without a meal pushed him closer and closer to desperation — a place that led the white wolf to Hogsmeade Village.

He kept away from the glowing storefronts, instead slinking along the back of the buildings at the edge of the village until he found an alleyway filled with rubbish bins. Saliva pooled in his mouth, dripping from his tongue and jowls at the prospect of finding something edible – cooked – discarded from the houses of witches and wizards that believed him dead.

He placed his snout on the ground and sniffed the area, hoping to be lucky enough to find something to stop the pains that twisted his insides since the weather turned cold and the game went into hibernation. The wolf was able to pick up the scent of food, but most of the bins that smelled particularly pleasing were wrapped up tight. He had to be careful trying to pry into anything to not alert the sleeping village to the predator outside their doors.

The wind blew, sending a loose page of The Daily Prophet through the air. Draco jumped and caught it in his teeth. He trotted over to crouch behind a silver bin where he spread the paper flat with his paws.

Though the light was low, the bold letters of the headlines were discernible. He scanned the page feverishly, pushing back against the wolfish desire to search only for food. Because yes, he was hungry and would kill for something to eat – but he was lonely even more so. And to find out any information about what the hell had happened since the Battle of Hogwarts was more important than even the most essential life-sustaining acts.

Luckily for him, the wind had brought the front page, though Draco had no way of knowing if it were a recent edition or not. However, the date on the issue indicated to him that he had indeed been hiding out in the Forbidden Forest for a substantial amount of time.

January 15th, 1999.

It was jarring to know that the holidays had passed. He had figured they had based on the changing of the seasons, but confirmation of such hit him deep within his heart. His first Christmas ever without his parents. He wondered morbidly if they were even alive at all.

Another morbid realization dawned on him. This would be the first calendar year in which the world would think him dead. The first year that not a single person would see or hear or speak to Draco Malfoy, alive and in the flesh.

If his parents were alive, he prayed to the Gods they had the sense to not have a portrait of him painted, Malfoy traditions be damned. He wondered what other family relics and traditions regarding lineage — tapestries, trusts, and the like — would have to be broken to ensure his secrecy. Though, supposedly, Mother had a plan for all of that.

Draco scanned both sides of the periodical, but there was nothing about his family written there. He wasn't sure whether he should sigh in relief or become more worried. It was, however, somewhat comforting to not see any mention of anyone searching for him. It didn't mention anything about Death Eaters at all. The articles were all fluff about recovering, healing, and coming together to be stronger than ever now that those who tried to tear us apart have all been eliminated.

Oh, Draco thought, so they did find all the Death Eaters and kill them. He could only assume that it ended with a Dementors' Kiss if the Ministry hadn't already exterminated the creatures for their defiance. It explained his Father's fate but also gave Draco more hope that people truly believed him to be dead, as he would be considered someone who tried to tear the Wizarding World apart.

It seemed that, if the papers were to be believed, the wizarding world was healing, and was doing better now that he and those like him were out of the picture. It reinforced for Draco the fact that it was a world in which he didn't belong, one that he couldn't be a part of again. His paw which had held the paper in place, swiped aggressively sending the page behind the rubbish bin.

Why did he even care anyway? They were better off without him and he was safer far away from them.

His stomach growled, reminding him of his mission.

He found a tin without a lid and had to occlude to prevent from crying out in the euphoria he felt at the sight. Standing on his back legs, Draco did his best not to make too much noise when placing his paws against the metallic rim and ripping into the garbage with his teeth and claws. Inevitably, he did make a bit of a ruckus, but his concerns melted away when he discovered a picked-over turkey carcass; he whimpered at the sight.

The cold had kept the meat from rotting, though if he were being honest, Draco would have scarfed the entire thing down anyway, spoiled or not. The turkey tasted of butter, thyme, and rosemary. Draco couldn't taste it quickly enough and began chomping at the carcass, bones, and cartilage crunching under his powerful jaw and sharp teeth.

It was the most delicious thing he had eaten since his last Great Hall meal at Hogwarts. The wolf found himself licking his jowls, savoring the flavor, trying to commit it to memory for use on the nights when no food could be found. He had the idea then to look for anything non-perishable so he might stock up.

Away from where he had previously dug through the trash, Draco found another rubbish bin on the other side of town, tipping it over onto a pile of snow so he could dig through its contents. First, he found colorful wrapping paper, crumpled into balls, and stuffed in the can. His heart gripped painfully at the thought of Christmas, presents, the warmth of a crackling fire while low music came from a gramophone.

Papers pushed aside, his nose caught on something soft and plushy. Teeth wrapped around the item and the wolf withdrew it, letting it fall to the ground while he examined it in the low light provided on a winter's night. It was the likeness of an owl, that once was white but now looked worn, stained… loved. Plucking at his heartstrings, he stared into the beast eyes of the stuffed animal, swearing he heard it begging to be taken home.

The glow of light lit the rear of the home he was scavenging behind. Without thinking, the wolf grasped the owl in his teeth and skittered away from the village. He sprinted back toward the Forbidden Forest with his new companion, hoping the snowy backdrop would afford him coverage in the scattering of light provided by the snowy backdrop of night.

Granger had listened with rapt attention and, naturally for her, had come up with a list of poignant questions. "Why stay? Why not seek shelter somewhere else?"

Draco scoffed, clearly she didn't yet understand. "I was waiting." He stated plainly, the strings in his thoughts tightening with his thoughts.

"Waiting for what?" Granger asked, her brow set with what looked like pain.

"Waiting for her," Draco nodded to an image beside the bed, nestled inside a broken picture frame. Granger snapped her head to it, immediately interested in examining it.

Draco stood, uncomfortable with the truths he was spewing. They were things he had barely allowed himself to think for years, not the type of confessions he ever expected to make to a stranger… or an enemy. He began to feel cagey and wanted nothing more than to go for a run. He clamped his jaw shut, rolling his head from side to side in an agonized way as he fought the urge to say more and more and more.

"Are you okay?" Granger asked, her voice calm and soothing like a gentle rain.

"No," he blurted with a clench of his fists, "I am not okay. I've been safe and hidden for six years and now I can't keep myself from rattling off my every thought like some chatty schoolgirl."

Draco covered his eyes with his fists, rubbing hard until he saw stars. His body was tight, uncomfortable… angry. He let out a wolf-like growl, stalking toward the den's exit.

Draco focused on the senses that guided him and calmed him the most as the wolf. His hearing: the rapid beating of his heart in his ears, his forceful and angry breaths. He focused on his breath, steadying it in tune with the calming of his heart. As he breathed, the familiar smells of his home soothed his growing desperation, and despair — damp earth, oak, and old parchment. He cherished them greedily, but found himself assaulted with foreign notes of wildflowers and vanilla; notes of her. One of the many smells that, thanks to his hypersensitive olfactory nerve, he would not soon forget.

He couldn't take it anymore.

"Where are you going?" She shifted anxiously in bed, attempting to scoot to the edge as if she would stand. But she couldn't, she had no bones in her leg that was still bound to the other, and something told him that Granger wasn't strong enough to escape on her own.

He paused at the door, his mouth moving automatically. "Into the Forest. I need some air."

When he opened his eyes again, his perspective was lower, and his senses slightly altered to the characteristics of his animal counterpart. Hermione smelled like heaven and Draco didn't trust the onslaught of feelings she brought out of him. He needed to get out of here, lest he found himself making a bigger fool of himself than he already had.

Running away would have been a relief, but it couldn't have been, not when Granger had called out to him the moment before he crossed his ward.

"Be safe."

His heart clenched, he didn't deserve her concern. He hadn't done anything to earn her consideration, so why had she said that?

And why did she smell so good? And why did that bother him so much? Was he so starved for human connection that he felt himself developing — or was it the rekindling of — a schoolboy crush on Hermione Granger?

No.

Surely it was just the lingering feelings of humanity that he'd kept hidden for so long. There was no way he could ever vie for Hermione Granger. It was impossible, improbable, unlikely… And exactly what was beginning to take hold of his heart.