She'd miscalculated.
Draco had looked at her like she had lost her mind. Like the warmth of the greenhouse had intoxicated her. He'd even checked the ventilation spells, as if he thought she'd inhaled enough noxious air to forget which side of the war she was on.
You have to let me go, she had begged. If this works.
He hadn't agreed, but then again, he hadn't said much beyond do you know what you're saying, Granger?
Forget the First Wave, or the Second, or coming to Malfoy Manor alone—this was the most reckless gamble she'd taken in the course of the war.
Draco had departed hours earlier, but tending to seventeen rows of plants had only amplified her agitation. Regret bit at her with each breath, the humidity in the air suffocating. The scent of the dirt turned increasingly nauseating until she finally shuffled out of the greenhouse, shutting the frosted door behind her.
The confidence she'd felt in her offer had all but abandoned her, leaving only bleak imaginings in its stead. She could almost hear Bill's voice, branding her a traitor. Tonks's eyes filling with disdain. Draco in full Death Eater regalia, laughing ruthlessly: you helped me get here, didn't you?
Staring at herself in the mirror, Hermione tried to ground herself in the bathroom. Her reflection stared back, her hair frizzier than ever, eyes wide with panic as if she'd seen a ghost. She looked back down, forcing a deep breath in.
You made a decision, Hermione. There's no turning it back.
That night, Draco forgot to give her Draught of Living Death. Or perhaps he had finally decided it was unnecessary.
He forgot again the day after. And the day after.
Then it was December 23rd, the day of the lunar eclipse. Twilight seeped through the windows of Malfoy Manor in tendrils of deep blue, casting an unearthly light into the room.
Draco was still out somewhere—he'd been leaving for longer hours than before. Hermione did not want to know where he went, and Draco never told her.
As she tended to the Valerian in the greenhouse, a sharp barb pricked her finger, blood blooming in the shallow cut. She tried a wandless Episkey out of habit, then gasped as she saw the bleeding staunch itself. The cut hadn't fully healed, but still…
Her wandless magic was back.
The magic felt tentative, like sparks flitting from a wand that didn't quite fit. She couldn't get an Alohomora on Draco's door to work. But there was something, and that was enough to start on some groundwork on the pureblood wards.
She started tracing runes on the back of a Mandrake leaf. Letting her fingertips graze them, trying out wandless elementary spells with her touch. With some sequences, the spells flickered. With others, there was nothing.
Finding a quill on a bench pushed in a corner of the greenhouse, she rewrote the runes with ink, repeating the exercise with a new set of spells. On a separate leaf, she recorded a select set of runes and observations about each.
Midnight came and went, but she couldn't feel the hours pass with the lights of the greenhouse stuck in perpetual daytime. Locked in fierce concentration in the warm enclosure, she plucked over a dozen more Mandrake leaves, filling them all with incomprehensible scribbles.
"Granger." Draco's voice sliced through the comfortable silence, and Hermione startled, jumping out of her seat. He stood at the doorway, his silhouette sharp against the light, still wearing his black outer robes. He squinted at her with suspicion.
"Malfoy."
"What are you doing?"
"I'm doing… art."
"Art?" A raised eyebrow.
Hermione hadn't a good answer, choosing to gingerly sit back down instead of answering him.
"You've had barely two days in here and you're already up to no good," Draco said, dragging his eyes across the spread of vandalized leaves at Hermione's foot. "Destroying Mandrakes instead of watering them."
He strode over to examine the leaves more closely, plucking one up from the ground. Hermione stared at his silence with anxious eyes, unsure what he'd make of her primitive experiment.
"What the hell is this?" he demanded, eyes darting incredulously over the ink. "Have you gone mad?"
Hermione couldn't help the snicker that escaped her lips at his look of utter bewilderment.
"Yes," she confirmed. "I've gone mad."
Draco's gray eyes narrowed but she barely noticed, her mind returning to muse over the last runes she'd played with. Was the interference I felt real or imagined? Did the Teiwaz-Othila-Kaunan sequence do it? Or was Dagaz-Isa-Ehwaz more potent?
"Tell me what this… art is." Draco stepped closer, his presence overwhelming the space, towering over her seated form. His robes brushed Hermione's shin and she could smell the faint odor of the fabric, something woodsy with a hint of clove. She reluctantly looked up to meet his gaze.
"I can't. And even if I could, you wouldn't understand."
"Try me," he countered, a dangerous undercurrent threading beneath his voice.
"Are you always this demanding, or do you save it especially for me?"
"I save it just for you."
Hermione let out a noncommittal sound, squinting back down at the leaf in her hands. Draco's hand reached out to grab it, but she twisted away.
It was definitely the Dagaz-Isa-Ehwaz sequence. That has to be the one.
She scribbled down the sequence and pinned an asterisk next to it, saving it for further examination. She could feel Draco watching her with mounting frustration, but she refused to let it bother her. She was done for tonight—perhaps he'd finish his questioning in the morning. She bent down to retrieve the rest of her leaves before standing up abruptly, knocking into him.
"Sorry," she said half-heartedly, walking out of the greenhouse without looking back.
She scarcely registered his approaching footsteps before a sudden grip on her shoulder thrust her against a window pane. Draco's knee swiftly met Hermione's hip, pinning her against the glass, trapping her in place.
"You think you can just walk out of here after ignoring me?" Draco growled, his breath hot on her face, his eyes a mixture of affront and unrestrained fury.
Her heart skipped a beat at the violence but she pressed her lips together tightly, feigning boredom.
"Stop manhandling me, Malfoy. I'm tired and we both need to sleep."
"You've tried my patience enough. Tell me what you were doing."
"Or what? You'll make me?" Hermione scoffed. "I don't even know what I was doing, to be perfectly honest. I was blindly experimenting. You're not going to gain anything by taking more secrets from me—especially since I've given you the most valuable one."
Draco's lips thinned into a straight line. "I've had a bad day, Granger, and you're making it worse."
"What was so bad about your day? Didn't find enough innocent people to torture?"
"It's none of your business."
"So now you're the one with secrets," Hermione said, eyebrows arched. She crossed her arms, nudging Draco's knee with her own. "Is this really necessary? We can have a civilized conversation with you trying to terrorize me."
"In case you haven't noticed, I don't care what you think, Granger," Draco said, but his knee still lowered, freeing her legs. He backed away, but not enough for her to stroll away again. "And you'd probably have an aneurysm if I told you what I was up to today."
Hermione scoffed. "I'm not nearly as sheltered as you think. Haven't you realized?"
"Fine. I spent the whole day cleaning up Muggles. Fifteen preschoolers, one teacher. Yaxley was overeager while hunting a Mudblood couple hiding in a Muggle village in Yorkshire," Draco said, a challenging gleam in his eyes. At Hermione's grimace, he continued. "He held the Muggles captive in the school, taunting the Mudbloods, announcing exactly what he was doing to each kid."
"Why did Yaxley go after the couple in the first place?"
"The Mudbloods? They'd skipped their registration with the Ministry."
Hermione's heart plummeted into her stomach.
This was her fault.
The Order had been tracking Muggleborns to the best of their ability, tucking them away in safehouses around the country to help them avoid "registration"—a euphemism for imprisonment. Hermione led the initiative alongside Hannah Abbott, but they had clearly overlooked the couple.
The weight of guilt hit her like a punch to the gut. The Order had grappled with resource shortages for some time, and Hermione's nearly week-long absence certainly couldn't be helping.
In her silence, Draco seized the chance to divulge more details.
"The Mudbloods hid like cowards for two hours in a different classroom—all while Yaxley performed a variety of creative rituals on the children. When the couple finally made a run for it, they got out, somehow. Yaxley must have been off his game. In retaliation, he slaughtered all of the children and kept the teacher alive, just so he could watch her fly into a panic."
Hermione fixed her gaze on the opposite wall of the greenhouse, her nose wrinkling in disgust.
"I had to dispose of the teacher, of course," Draco said, a sneer distorting his face. "Yaxley couldn't even clean up his own mess."
A memory of the foul Death Eater's face popped into Hermione's head and she grimaced.
"Yaxley was next, after Umbridge." She said this quietly, under her breath.
"What?"
"We were going after Yaxley. After Umbridge."
"After Umbridge did what?"
"After Umbridge died, Malfoy."
Draco's eyes darted from left to right, his shock impossible to conceal. Hermione presumed that he hadn't known.
"We shot her with a gun and left her in front of a seedy bar for the Muggle police to find," Hermione explained, her voice stony. She bit out a chuckle. "It was Tonks's idea. Brilliant, really. Opting for the most Muggle-esque method to finish her. Letting the news surface in the Muggle newspapers first. Umbridge would've hated that more than death itself."
Draco's gaze was faraway, trying to reconcile what she'd just revealed. "Ah, so that's why Yaxley took over the Mudblood efforts."
"Stop saying that word," snapped Hermione.
Draco rolled his eyes. "I'll say whatever I want in my own damn house."
"Then I'm done talking about this with you. I don't care if your day was bad. You're going on these little adventures of your own free will."
"Not my own free will, Granger."
"Then what?"
"You think I'm doing this mindless drudgery because I have free will?" Vitriol rose in Draco's voice with astonishing speed.
"Why else would you do it, Malfoy?"
"My mother! You think I can convince her all this is useless? Believe me, I've tried. She'll never stop grovelling at the Dark Lord's feet!" Draco shouted. The volume of his voice assaulted her ears and she flinched.
"But you're getting something out of this, aren't you? You're climbing in Voldemort's ranks, which is what you both want."
"Climbing? I've barely moved a single rung, wiping up shite for a wizard who nearly killed me!"
"Who nearly killed you?"
"The Dark Lord, of course. Voldemort!" Draco cursed the last word, as if it took notable effort to wrench the name from his tongue. "What the hell do you think happened after you left the Manor? Huh? After Potter and Weasley were there, and the Dark Lord arrived, and it became clear I had lied! Do you think he believed for a second that I couldn't identify Harry fucking Potter?"
Oh.
So now he was acknowledging it.
"What happened after I left, Malfoy?" Hermione asked tiredly. Draco looked tired too, despite his eyes shining from anger. "I have no idea what happened to you."
"He tortured me. The Cruciatus. For a long time, while my parents watched," Draco said, his voice flat. "They begged. Oh, they begged. And before I lost consciousness, I heard every scream that came out of their mouths."
Hermione listened, rapt for the first time since she'd entered the Manor. Draco's breathing came faster, as did his words.
"Sometime after that, I woke up. After I blacked out, my mum had apparently offered to sacrifice herself to ensure her son's continued health and well-being." Draco laughed humorlessly. "The Da—Voldemort thought that was awfully funny of her. In fact, he was so charmed by this display of motherly affection that he let me live."
Draco shook his head with a deliberate slowness, his eyes glinting like steel. Bitterness emanated from their depths, a hardened resentment cast in the sheen.
"My mum thinks it's because Voldemort had mercy. No. It's because Potter was there. He was finally dead—but Voldemort saw the parallels. He's learned. He killed a mother who sacrificed herself and disappeared for a decade. He wasn't about to kill my mother and risk it again."
His words resonated with truth, but Hermione's mind went elsewhere. It suddenly struck her that Draco had probably seen Harry and Ron die. She'd pieced together the details from the photos in the Daily Prophet, but she'd never realized…
She had the jarring urge to ask him exactly how it had happened, but she bit her tongue. Instead, she asked, "So what did you do after he let you go?"
Draco shook his head as if to clear it from a fog. He dropped his chin slightly, frowning, as if he'd just caught onto Hermione's attentiveness and had suspicions about it.
"Let's just say, the Dark Lord doesn't like it when you betray him," Draco said, his voice frigid. "He doesn't take to it kindly."
"But your mum wants your family to keep serving him. Because she has no other choice."
Draco made a noncommittal grunt. "She's had other choices. But she's never considered them. Even when I—our family—was getting humiliated, she just accepted it. She never, never took a stand."
"Then why don't you?" Hermione asked, tilting her head.
Draco narrowed his eyes, his suspicious gaze meeting her curious. His lips pressed together in an inscrutable line and his silence filled the room, thick and palpable.
"That's not something you get to ask me, Granger."
Hermione watched him carefully, noting the tension in his jaw, the way his hands flexed as if ready to grasp something just out of reach.
She was about to open her mouth again when Draco stepped back, freeing her from her position against the glass. He pivoted away from her without a second glance and walked back to the greenhouse door, treading quickly through the rows of sprouts.
Hermione stared as his robes floated behind his stride, following his form out of the enclosure. A Mandrake leaf slipped from her grasp, but she didn't pick it up.
A strange sensation lingered in her chest, even after the weight of the interrogation had been lifted. Dodging the scrutiny of her rune experiments should have been a cause for celebration, but she didn't feel any trace of satisfaction.
Instead, an unsettling discomfort gnawed at her, and she suddenly wished for an extra jumper, despite the heat of the room.
It wasn't until Hermione found herself lying in her cot, staring up at the solitary hangers holding Draco's clothing, that she realized what the unsettling feeling had been.
Emptiness.
It was as if she had finally unraveled a glimmer of understanding within Draco, only to watch it dissipate into the humid air. She had waited, expecting something—a gesture, a word, a sign—but it had never come.
It was an aching emptiness, what she'd felt when he walked away.