Malfoy Manor
In fairy tales, when you find your soulmate, it's a magical experience that starts with love at first sight and ends in a happily ever after.
It is not when they're bleeding out in front of you on the Drawing Room floor of your family's ancestral home. It's not when your deranged aunt is cutting into their arm, the red of their blood mixing with the red string covering the floor.
Draco had many life changing experiences over the course of his first seventeen years. Getting his Hogwarts letter, being sorted into Slytherin, the first time he saw his string. One of the most defining happened on a day he was violently pulled out of bed by his ankle. His red string was pulled taut under his door leading him out into the hallway. He hurriedly dressed and took off after it, growing more concerned with every step.
The Manor was quiet. It was often full of sound. Bellatrix's crazed cackles filled the halls. Snatchers haggling for better payment. Random Death Eaters roaming the grounds planning vile and heinous acts. But that morning it was quiet. Foreboding.
He see anyone until he followed his string to where it snaked under the doors to the Drawing Room.
That's when he saw them outside the doors. Potter and the Weasel. Potter with his face red and swollen. The Weasel looked haggard and angry, he couldn't make out his shouts as the roaring in his ears was deafening. His father tapping his cane. He barely stopped himself from barreling through the doors to follow his string.
Draco had learned Occulmency at the behest of his mother starting in his fourth year. By sixth year, he had all but retreated behind walls so high he couldn't see past them. Everything pertaining to the string lived in a box shut and locked and stored deep inside those walls.
His walls were crumbling around him. The blank mask that his face had become since the Dark Lord moved into his home wanted to twist to utter horror. He did not know what was going on. His heart was beating too fast and his mind was racing. Why were there only two of them? Where was Granger? Why was his string pulling him so hard? He tried to concentrate.
He had tenuously tried to help them. He knew who was in front of them. No stinging jinx could alter Harry Potter enough that he wouldn't know had been dragged in by Snatchers. But he knew if he said yes, if he confirmed his father's fanatical desire to deliver Harry Potter to their master, that everything would end. Harry Potter would die and he would have to live in a world ruled by a psychopath. So he did what he could, as feeble as it was and stalled.
Then he heard the screams. Even if his string hadn't pulled him so forcibly through the doors he would have followed it anyways.
The taboo. How could Harry have been so careless?
She knew why. He was tired. Hungry. They were all tired and hungry. Hermione was sure they had not had a full meal and nights sleep in over six months. Living in a tent and scavenging for food did not make for level heads. They were also all still emotionally raw from having just destroyed the Horcrux. Spending so much time with that dark of magic around your neck left internal scars that would take time to erase. They were on edge.
She berated herself for not feeling the tug on her wrist before he said the name. For not paying attention. She felt the string's warning just before he said the final syllable.
Her rushed attempt to disguise Harry would do nothing to hide her and Ron's identities but it was all she could do in a moment of panic. When they took their wands and bound them, all she could do was grip the string in her hand and let it remind her she was not alone.
Finding herself in Malfoy Manor was an experience of contrasts. The grounds were beautiful in the morning light. Being dragged through them by Snatchers looking for payment displayed the destruction of that beauty. The Drawing Room she was taken to was grand and flooded with sunlight from floor to ceiling windows. However the insidious magic that permeated the walls made the room feel darker and lifeless.
The Black sisters were their own contrast. Narcissa was icy and regal. She was a pillar of stone as she stood along the wall. Bellatrix was crazed, waving her wand in violent arcs, ranting to call the Dark Lord, ranting that he would be so pleased. They had been separated, Bellatrix wanting to have a girl talk. Hermione could only pray that the boys would get away.
She lost count of the number of times Bellatrix's Curcios hit her. She just held the string in her hand and reminded herself she was alive. She was sane. She had something to believe in. She was not sure when she started screaming. When Bellatrix knelt on top of her and started carving, she began to lose hope. Her vision swam. She lost sight of her string in the red of the blood.
The doors banged open revealing another contrast. The elder Malfoy was a shell of a man, cold and lifeless. His hair limp and his face drawn. Draco however looked desperate. Her pain addled brain registered facts slower than normal. She took in the fear on his face. The way his eyes darted from her to the floor to his feet and back to her. She cataloged everything in stages. Her understanding coming at her in waves of grief and pain and hope and longing.
Draco could not breathe. His thoughts were not coherent. He could not blink in case it disappeared. Because the red string that haunted him for the last seven years was tied around a wrist that was being held down by a mad woman. That string was tied around the wrist of Hermione Granger. A girl he went to school with. A girl he bullied. A girl he had secretly admired for her intelligence and her fire. A girl who looked like she was bleeding out on his Drawing Room floor.
In the small functioning part of his brain, he knew if he did the wrong thing or said the wrong words that she would die. That knife that his aunt held would kill her. He did not have the skills to fight her nor the words to stop her.
So he starred into Hermione Granger's eyes and did nothing. He had no shields left to hide his emotions from her. He couldn't read the emotion in hers. Pain. Fear. But there was something else there too that he didn't know. His mouth parted, he didn't know what he was going to say but he knew he had to stop—
A loud crack filled the air. Chaos erupted as a small house elf delivered Potter and Weasley into the Drawing Room. Later, he could only thank Merlin that the only person to see him toss his wand to Potter was his mother. In what must have been less than a minute, they were gone.
He had one last glimpse of her eyes, saw hers shift to his ankle and back. He saw her mouth part and then watched her disappear with another crack.