Chapter Text
21. We’ve All Been Used Before
Tuesday, August 10th, 1999
Draco walked, following Greamachary Burn as it twisted around the base of Ben Griam Beg, the top of which lay to the northwest, its slopes pale gold and green in the sun, covered in heather and rocky outcroppings. The stream itself was just slightly too wide to jump across and perhaps a few feet deep in most places, rushing along the path it had carved out for itself, bubbling and tumbling over rocks and eroding the embankment in places.
He didn't have a destination in mind – he was just following the stream away, upstream to the west, his strides angry and heavy and his hands shoved in his pockets, mostly staring at where he placed his boots amongst the scrubby grass, the ground dry under his tread rather than boggy.
He’d grabbed his boots on the way out the door but hadn’t stopped to put them on until he’d got to the stream, his socks grubby and wet, and requiring Scouring and Drying Charms that he’d botched several times before getting them right. His mind had been in turmoil – it still was – and his hands had been shaking.
But walking was helping. The sun was warm on his head and the breeze cool and dry, but not chill. The Highlands were cold, especially Kinbrace, but late summer was fairly mild – his oxford shirt half buttoned up over a t-shirt was just enough to keep him comfortably warm, especially combined with his exertions. He breathed slowly and deliberately, in through his nose and out through his mouth, trying to calm his racing mind.
He had wanted so badly to escalate with Weasley in the kitchen – to hex him or hit him, but somehow he hadn't. He’d held back, on a knife’s edge between lashing out and breaking down. He’d managed to avoid the former in part because he knew Weasley was half out of his head with anger and exhaustion, and he hadn't known why what he was saying to Draco stuck home so deeply. And partly because Hermione had hit Weasley for him.
His lips flickered at the memory, staring down at the cotton grass – white puffs waving around his legs, little drifts floating away on the breeze.
She had hit Weasley so hard that she’d left a print of her hand on the other man’s cheek. Draco was suddenly almost a little possessive of that handprint. He hunched his shoulders as he strode along, hands still in his pockets.
The slap had been both shocking in the moment and, in retrospect, entirely expected.
It was Hermione; she was prone to violence. The thought was filled with affection, but no less serious. For all her intelligence and her organisational skills – her love of planning, and her overthinking – when she was overwhelmed with emotion, she turned directly to anger and tears, and when suitable, violence. In fact, from what Weasley had been saying, it seemed she might be more violent than ever.
He wondered exactly what lengths Hermione had truly gone to in her efforts to find him. They hadn’t talked about it yet – considering they were both together and safe, a lot of details seemed unimportant. Too painful to pore over, or simply lacking any urgency. Why talk about the time they’d been apart when they could revel in the simple, overwhelming joy of being together? So things had been postponed. Set aside, by mutual unspoken agreement. Now, however, Draco very much wanted to know some of the details.
“I saw the bodies,” Weasley had said, speaking of a mission that hadn’t been sanctioned by the Order. That Hermione had gone on alone. “You dirtied your hands, you abandoned your principles, and for what? For him?”
What had she done for him? Possibilities flashed through his mind, and he wondered if it was the Legilimency; leaving people’s minds ruined probably counted as dirtying her hands.
He cast a glance back over his shoulder. The house had fallen far behind him as he’d wended upwards and around the slopes that led to the base of Ben Griam Beg, following the burn. He was past the wards, which wasn't wise, but he had his wand, and he highly doubted that Death Eaters had tracked them to the depths of the Scottish Highlands.
He turned away from the house and carried on over the uneven ground, running through the confrontation with Weasley for the dozenth time since he’d stormed out. A sick regret burnt in his stomach. He wished very badly that he hadn’t told Hermione to tell Weasley everything.
Heat crept over his cheeks, prickling at the nape of his neck and spreading over the rest of his body, sweat breaking out, and he felt ill. He unbuttoned his shirt and ran a hand through his hair, squinting against the wind as it picked up.
Weasley knew, now. He knew what Draco had been reduced to. He knew the way that he’d been emasculated; turned into a plaything to be used. It was unbearable. Mortification burnt through him like a fever. Draco could picture the expression of slightly revolted pity on the ginger’s face. Cliodna’s sake, he would never be able to show his face to Weasley again.
And no doubt the ginger would tell Chang, and Potter, and the truth would spread like wildfire. Before long the entire Order would know that Draco Malfoy had been used like a whore.
Fuck.
He lurched to a halt and was abruptly sick into the grass by the stream. His breakfast and cup of tea came up in a rush, retching until his stomach was empty, bile acrid and awful in the back of his throat. He stood there for a moment, bent over and gasping with his hands braced on his knees and then spat on the grass, pulling his wand and using a charm to wash his mouth out before Vanishing his vomit. It felt wrong to leave it there.
“Fuck,” he mumbled aloud, rubbing the back of his hand over his mouth and stumbling on toward a stunted tree just visible up ahead, growing beside a bend in the burn, branches reaching out towards it.
The thought of everyone knowing ate at him. He’d survived worse, Draco told himself grimly. If he’d lived through Rostan, then he could live through the whole sodding Order knowing about what Rostan and the others had done. But he still wished desperately that he’d said something different. Anything except that. In the moment, it had seemed like the right thing to do – show Weasley what a cunt he was being, and just how wrong he’d got it.
It was weirdly difficult to admit to himself, but he hadn’t wanted Weasley to think badly of him. Before the last two months had happened – through that golden May at Godric’s Hollow – Draco had become friends with him. Or at least, as close enough to friends as made no difference. He cared about what Ronald bloody Weasley thought of him. Fucking hell. How pathetic.
In hindsight, it felt like flaying himself open. Cutting off his nose to spite his face. And it was probably pointless anyway. Once Weasley had calmed down, he’d likely have been able to be sensible about things and realise that the Imperius wasn’t some minor thing to overcome, especially when cast by one of the most powerful wizards of the last century.
Draco felt like sinking into the earth, humiliation still clawing at him.
He reached the gnarled tree – an oak, twice as tall as him and growing beside a small widening of the burn after a turn, a large rock shaping the water’s flow so that it nearly made a shallow pool. He sat down in the dappled shade beneath it facing the burn, the ground only slightly soft under him, and leant back against the thick trunk. His eyes slid shut for a moment, and the water made a soft susurrus of sound, the tree leaves rustling in the breeze, and birdsong faint in the distance. The tree was rough and solid at his back, and sunlight seeped through the leaves, warm on his face.
The blooming heather coloured the landscape and made the breeze smell faintly sweet, and he breathed it in slowly.
It was peaceful.
He should have been happy, perhaps. Instead, dread sat miserably in Draco’s stomach as he sat there, his legs outstretched and crossed at the ankle, opening his eyes and watching cloud shadows sweep over the landscape and scud onward, carried on the winds. The world felt beautiful but empty – vast, the Highlands sprawling out around him, Ben Griam Beg and Ben Griam Mor cutting into the horizon, and not a soul in sight. He might be the only person in the world.
It made him want to go back to the cottage and fall upon Hermione – to assure himself that she was still real, to bury his face in her hair and breathe in the sweet scent of her, and know that she was here, and she was his. It was an irrational feeling, and he refused to let it drive him back to the cottage. He couldn’t stand the idea of seeing Weasley. Not yet.
Cliodna’s sake, he was a coward.
There was a shivering, brittle feeling burgeoning inside him as though he was beginning to unravel at the seams.
The weeks he'd spent under the Imperius had felt like months, and the time of imprisonment and torture before that had felt like years. Now that he was free and out and it was over, he felt a little like one of the clouds above him. Free, but rudderless. At the mercies of the wind, insubstantial and powerless. Filled with a rain that was always threatening to fall, emptying him out.
He was free, and he was happy – just being with Hermione made him dizzyingly euphoric – and yet he wasn’t healed. His wounds were still raw and weeping; bloodied gashes dug so deeply into the meat of him that they had scored the bone.
The marks of his capture remained. He had slept better than he had in months over the past two nights, and yet it was still shallow and restless and plagued with nightmares. Small sounds yanked him from sleep too easily, and he found himself checking and rechecking the wards when he woke, paranoid and alert, standing by the bedroom windows and staring out through a crack in the curtains into the starlit night. Watching. Waiting. Fear gnawed on him at night.
An instinctive part of him had been trained over the past two months to always expect pain or threat. To always be prepared for it. For humiliation and violation, for agony, and for horror. He was in a state of constant anticipation. It was exhausting. It had been necessary while he’d been captured, but now that he was free, Draco didn’t know how to turn it off.
He sighed, opening his eyes and looking down at his hands, loosely laced together in his lap. The silver one caught the light, and he turned it palm up, rubbing his left, human thumb over the magical construct. It felt slightly cooler and harder than flesh, although it was accurate down to the tiny lines on the ‘skin’, lacking only the pale downy hairs that his other hand had.
Weasley had been right about the hand; he'd paid for it in blood, whether he'd had a choice about it or not.
If it would undo what he’d done over the past weeks – the people he’d killed and tortured, the horrors he’d seen – Draco would give up the damned thing happily, and go back to having one hand and a stump. Part of him almost missed the thing, despite the practicality of having two hands again. It was strange knowing that the scarred stump was somewhere under the artificial hand, and he found himself wishing he could see through it and make sure it wasn’t killing him. He’d had nightmares that it was rotting beneath the silver that coated it.
Despite the Order’s examination of his hand, he worried that it was laced with failsafes – that when he saw Potter, the hand would try to kill him, that it might try to hurt Hermione, that if he ever came face to face with the Dark Lord, he’d be able to control the hand. But Draco also wasn’t sure the Order could undo the spell. It was old, complex magic, not some minor, modern charm.
He stared down at it, flexing his fingers, and his occlusion faltered, wavering, and shreds of memory floated to the surface of his mind, eddying there. He saw the faces of the people he’d killed while under the Imperius – some with this very hand, crushing their necks beneath his grasp. He saw the blood that had dripped from the silver fingers, and the flecks of flesh that had clung to the knuckles. He heard an echo of the screams.
Draco took a slow, deep breath, and as he let it out, he began pushing his thoughts away. The blurred, muddled pieces of memory, warped and distorted by the Imperius – some of them too dark to even know what was happening in them, he’d been so deeply in the grip of the Unforgivable. A glimpse of a thin wrist in his hand, silver on dark skin. A flash of his fingers dragging at blonde hair. A smeared image of a small, lolling body.
He choked out a sob and pulled his knees up, his arms wrapped around them, bowing his head, his eyes wet and burning. Tears dripped fat and heavy on his canvas trousers. He was a rain cloud that had burst as he tried to repress it all again. To occlude it so deeply it could never crawl out again. Blotting it out.
Guilt and anger burnt through him as his shoulders shook, weeping beneath the gnarled oak until he ran dry. Empty.
Draco knew he should head back to the cottage – that Hermione was probably looking for him – but he couldn't seem to stir himself to move.
Thirst came upon him eventually, and he frowned at the burn, considering drinking from it. It had to be icy cold and fresh – better than the slightly stale taste of conjured water. He was about to get up and do so when he noticed the half-decomposed carcass of a water vole, trapped and half-hidden in a build-up of leaf matter and small branches beneath the overhang of the opposite embankment.
Shit. That dissuaded him. Even if he Vanished the corpse and let the water rush clean, the thought of it still put him off drinking from the burn. Draco sighed and leant back against the trunk of the oak, transfiguring a rock he found into a stone cup and filling it with water from the tip of his wand.
The water tasted as stale as expected but it quenched his thirst, and he sat leaning against the tree sipping slowly, the shade dappled and shifting. The sky was still blue and scattered with drifts of white cloud, the cotton grass nodding peacefully in the breeze, and the heather and wildflowers sprinkling the rising hillside across the burn with colour, the rounded peak of Ben Graim Beg standing proudly.
The only blot on the landscape was the corpse of the water vole, which Draco found his eyes returning to and lingering on. He stared nearly absently at the matted fur and the empty eye socket, the missing ear and the mouth half open, frozen in death, which somehow made it look more pathetic. The little body was a tattered thing, and he wondered how it had happened. What had killed it?
Old age, or nature red in tooth and claw?
It looked so lonely there, forgotten and rotting – made ugly in death, and yet vestiges of the bright-eyed, darting, soft-furred creature that it must have been in life remained in the look of it.
His eyes blurred.
Fuck. He was going to cry over a water vole.
Only it wasn’t the water vole. It was the small hands that had stiffened to claws, the thick eyelashes that framed unseeing eyes, the freckles that had been smeared with blood, the painted toenails that were chipped and dirty. The one earring, the broken spectacles, the expensive watch stopped forever on a time its owner would never see again.
The remnants of humanity and beauty in the people that Draco had reduced to broken water voles, lonely in their deaths, still silently begging for a mercy that didn’t look the way they thought it would.
They wanted a saviour and got an executioner.
Draco managed not to cry again, but he did sit there for a long time, lost in the halls of his own mind.
The sound of something swishing through the grass pulled him from his thoughts, and he looked up toward the cottage to see Hermione approaching, her hair loose and wild. It caught the wind, streaming out into dark, curling banners as she struggled to gather it all together, failing. She had one of his shirts on – a black oxford, thrown over top the t-shirt and trousers she’d been wearing earlier, and she smiled faintly at him as she neared, still wrestling with her hair.
Draco leant back against the tree, the trunk solid and rough at his back, and just watched her. The way she squinted against her flying ribbons of hair, and the nimble shift of her fingers that couldn’t quite conquer the disobedient locks. The slight sway of her hips as she walked, and the shy expression that crept over her face at the way he just stared so blatantly, letting his pleasure at the sight of her show on his face.
“This is pretty,” she said as she came down the shallow slope into Draco’s domain, her face flushed red, as though the walk had been strenuous, just a little out of breath. A touch of worry for her broke through his dark, maundering thoughts. She needed to eat more. To sleep better. To never have to worry about the war again.
You’re pretty, dulcissima, he thought, but now wasn’t the time for that, the words souring on his tongue.
“Yeah,” he said instead, and shuffled slightly to the left. Making room for her.
Once Hermione sat beside him, the wind no longer caught at her as strongly, protected by the dip in the land and the oak, and her hair settled, all wild, wind-torn curls and waves, fluffing around her face and tumbling down her back in a mane. She pushed it back from her face, fingers snagging in knotted snarls, wincing. “Ouch. Merlin, sometimes I think I should just cut my hair right off.”
“But then where would the bowtruckles nest, mea leaena (my lioness)?” Draco asked, deja vu washing over him, catching her impatient hand and enfolding it in his. “You look like you’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards.”
She scowled at him. “Oh, thank you. How lovely. That’s exactly why I want to cut it sometimes. It’s so impractical.”
“Not everything in life has to be about practicality,” he said softly and kissed her knuckles. If they never talked about what had happened with Weasley, he would be happy. Hell, perhaps she hadn’t told Weasley after all. Or perhaps they could just pretend she hadn’t. They could pretend none of it had happened. “And your hair is beautiful.”
“You literally just said I looked like I got dragged through a hedge,” she said, slightly snippily, and arched her eyebrows at him.
“Now you look like a startled owl.”
She frowned.
“Now you look eerily like McGonagall.”
“Pffft—” The splutter escaped Hermione inelegantly, her hand coming up to cover her mouth, hiding the grin that dimpled her cheeks and made her eyes crinkle up, leaning forward as she heaved a series of giggles. Draco’s memories felt very far away – dead and buried – as she snickered beside him under the Scottish sun, making a quiet wheezing sound, and then several snorts before stuttering to a halt.
“Oh,” she said after a moment, and a few deep breaths. “Jesus, I don’t know why that was so funny” – nervous tension, Draco thought – “but it was. Although really, I think I should take it as a compliment.”
“It was meant as one,” he said deadpan. “I always used to wank over – ouch,” he protested as she elbowed him. “Saeva praecantrix (Vicious witch). You’re too pointy.”
She leaned forward, knees drawn up and face turned toward him, resting her cheek against one knee. “My elbows are weapons of mass destruction,” she said lightly, her visible cheek still pink and her eyes catching the sun, gleaming with flecks of gold and amber. “Capable of destroying entire worlds.”
“It feels that way,” he said, reaching out and skimming his silver hand over the masses of hair tumbling down her back. “Let me?”
“Okay,” she agreed and shifted, nestling in between his thighs, and transfiguring a twig into a wide-toothed comb for him. It was restful, detangling her hair; nearly meditative, and satisfying, watching it slowly go from knotted curls and snarls to – admittedly very fluffy – silky waves. Now that he had two hands, he’d be able to plait it for her, something he’d never done before. But how hard could it be?
Hard, it seemed. It took him a long time to weave a serviceable plait, and even then it seemed like half her hair was trying to escape from it. They didn’t talk while he worked. She drew patterns on his right thigh with her right index finger – little hearts and stars against the fabric of his trousers. Squiggles, and what he thought were letters. She mapped the shape of his knee, probing around his kneecap, and then mapped his left knee too, her fingers sliding up his thigh.
They were idle, affectionate touches that made him feel unaccountably loved. It was the gentleness. The familiarity – as though his body was hers to explore, hers to love. And it was.
After weeks of nothing, he had her hands on him again and it felt like ecstasy – like bliss overflowing from a wellspring in his chest, strong enough to make everything else pale in comparison.
When he was done, she passed him a hair band to twist around the tail of her messy plait, and then wiggled back to sit at his side.
“Thanks.” She bumped her shoulder against his, and he slid his arm around her, her head settling heavy against the crux of his shoulder and chest. A moment passed, the scent of heather in the air and the burn gurgling quietly.
“I didn't know where you'd gone,” she said at last, and the world rushed back in. Draco sighed. “You worried me. We aren't supposed to come this far beyond the wards alone.”
“I needed to get away,” he said simply. She knew why.
“I'm sorry that Ron was such an arse.” She made a harsh sound and mumbled, “sodding idiot,” under her breath derisively. “I don't care how upset he was about Cho, it's not your fault. Not in the slightest. Nothing you did while under the Imperius was your fault,” she said very forcefully – nearly angrily – as though they hadn’t already talked about it before. Still, he appreciated hearing it again. Her absolution, given without hesitation or doubt, and it was her forgiveness that was what mattered most to him.
“I know,” he said tiredly and kissed the crown of her head. “I know that, dulcissima (sweetest). It still feels that way, though.”
Hermione sighed and gave a little nod. “Yeah,” she acknowledged, a resigned understanding in her voice, shot through with sadness. “I know.” And then she cleared her throat and shifted uncomfortably, pulling away so that she could meet his gaze, nervousness a cloud around her as she folded her hands in her lap. She picked at her thumbnail.
“And, I, ah…” She bit her lip, and he knew what was coming. “I told him.”
Draco let out a puff of breath and nodded slowly; that was what he'd been expecting. That was what he’d asked for.
An exhausted humiliation settled over him, leaden and miserable – an endless shame, endlessly devouring him. He became an ouroboros of shame and violation, the memories of Rostan rubbing raw over his mind. Nightmares unspooled in his head, cavorting horrors escaping from the darkness, leaving pieces of themselves behind as they squeezed and tore and clawed from their confinement.
The dig of fingers into his hip. The sounds of exertion and pleasure, soft and blurred in his ear. The pain blooming inside him, sharp-edged and bloody. His own whimpers. The flickers of pleasure that sometimes eddied hot and sick-making in his blood. The dragging pull at his hair. The ache in his jaw, mouth open and eyes shut, tears leaking from beneath his lashes.
He wondered how Hermione had told Weasley, and what she had told him. She knew very little, at least. That was a small, pitiful comfort. She knew the spare facts.
She had seen him when they took him away, and she had seen how he was when they brought him back. He vaguely remembered spilling some of it out to her before they’d had sex for the first time in the dungeons – angry and muddled, more rage than detail. Unless, of course, Rostan had told her things at Chislehurst. Draco froze at that thought, feeling sick and cold. ‘He said terrible things’, she’d said.
“You wish I hadn't.” Hermione’s voice was raw – wretched – and she wrung her hands together, her eyes pleading on his.
It took a moment before Draco trusted himself to speak. He stared at the water vole’s body – the bedraggled, half-rotted fur and the exposed teeth, one small paw missing altogether. Now he felt like he was the vole. Destroyed. Ruined entirely – chewed up by life and then spat out to rot, alone and forgotten. But that wasn’t quite true. He wasn’t alone. He shook his head with an effort.
“No.” He sounded hoarse. Broken. He hated it. “I wish I hadn't told you to tell him. That’s my fault. I don't blame you for doing what I said, but – fuck. I don't need him fucking staring at me with pity and knowing what Rostan—" He couldn’t finish the sentence, tension making his shoulders hunch, the muscles in his jaw ratcheting tight. An ache was beginning between his eyebrows.
Hermione’s hand twisted into his silver one, warm and firm, her thumb stroking over the back of his hand, as regular as a metronome and comforting. He wasn’t alone.
“I wasn’t specific,” she said quietly, her gaze on their entwined hands. Her voice was steady and deliberate. “I made it clear, but I didn’t give him any details.”
“What—” Draco began to ask and broke off, and Hermione nodded, understanding.
“I told him that you had suffered, much as I had while I was captured. But that while I had been shielded from rape” – her voice dropped to a hush as she said it with difficulty – “you weren’t. That was it, really.”
Draco let that sink in. “Oh,” he said at last, grasping desperately for pragmatism and a casual flippancy that he could hold up like a shield. “Well, I suppose it could’ve been worse.”
“And I told him he needed to apologise,” Hermione added and grimaced. “Now I’m thinking perhaps I shouldn’t have.”
“Salazar’s sake – he's not coming to do it now, is he?” Draco asked, a frisson of worry that the ginger actually might do that sparking up to life in his chest. The last thing he wanted right now was an apology from Weasley, whether it was resentful and forced, or genuine and dripping with pity. He wanted not to see Weasley for long enough for the rawness he felt to scab over. He doubted that would be possible, but at the very least, he’d like the wound to have clotted. Fuck. “You didn’t—”
He looked down at Hermione, wide-eyed and pathetically anxious, holding her hand tight enough to make her wince, and him mumble an apology.
“No! God no. I told him to go to bed, actually,” Hermione said, her other hand settling over his, a rueful smile playing around her lips, and Draco found himself returning it. “He already seemed to feel awful about what he'd said though. You know he doesn’t think badly of you. He was just dead tired and stressed, and – and behaving like Ron. Saying dreadful things and then regretting them.”
“Mm. And he doesn’t know what it’s like,” Draco added quietly, “to be taken apart. To be tortured, and starved, and be utterly—” helpless, he thought, but he didn’t say it. He didn’t have to. Hermione had been there with him through so much of it. She understood him in a way no one else could.
“No,” she agreed quietly. “He doesn’t have a clue.”
Silence fell after that, and Hermione shifted close to him again. He leant back against the oak, and she leant against him in turn, her head warm and heavy on his shoulder and her fingers idly fiddling with one of his shirt buttons.
Peace crept over him.
“Sometimes I don’t know what’s harder to live with,” Draco said after a very long silence, and Hermione jerked back to awareness – she’d been drowsing on his shoulder, in that hazy, peaceful place between waking and sleeping. It was hard not to slide into a doze when she had Draco’s arm around her, his heart beating steadily beneath her ear and the sound of the burn running past making a harmony of white noise, the tree providing a gentle shade.
She straightened a little, her head still against him and her hand settling on his right thigh, listening as he went on. “What he did to me, or what I did.” Oh. “I—” He hesitated.
Hermione waited with bated breath, afraid to do or say anything that might make him shut down. Talking about it was the last thing she’d expected him to do, but she felt like he should, to some extent. It was what was healthy, as far as she knew – opening up and sharing the pain. A burden shared was a burden halved.
She watched as he took her right hand up off his thigh and folded it into his left one, her faintly tanned complexion seeming nearly dark in comparison to his. His thumb stroked over her knuckles, his nail closely trimmed, his skin callused where he held a wand, an elegant strength in his grip.
“It feels selfish to feel more – bothered,” he said, pausing before he chose the – entirely inadequate – word, “by what they did to me. What he did to me.” Tension vibrated in his voice, like metal pushed to breaking point, losing its structural integrity.
“Why?” Hermione asked cautiously when he didn’t speak again, feeling as though she was picking her way through a minefield, her heart aching for him. He didn’t even feel entitled to grieve what had been torn from him – to be angry about what they’d done. Her own anger flared beneath the quelling blanket of carefulness. Hermione sat up with her hand still tucked in his, looking up at him – at his pale, haunted face, his eyes somehow ancient and achingly young at once, filled with a knowledge of suffering that no one should live with. She silently cursed the adults who had failed him. Who had failed them all.
“Because I’m still alive,” he said softly, staring at something in the burn, his eyes shining pale in a shard of sunlight that fell through the dappled canopy of oak leaves. “And most of the people I hurt – tortured – are dead. Whether I killed them, or someone else.” He shot her a glance that was overflowing with pain and guilt, his misery hitting her like a physical blow. It was as though he was begging her to give him an answer. To make it make sense.
“I’m still here. And they’re gone.” Draco tipped his head back against the oak and stared out across the burn, up into the hills, and Hermione stared at him. She saw the pain he held in the clench of his jaw and the tightness at his eyes, in the exhaustion that radiated off him – not physical, but no less tangible for that. He was tired.
“I’m lucky,” he said, his eyes wet, and he sounded hollowed out. “Right?” He glanced down at her again, and his lips trembled and then pulled into an awful smile that vanished as he sighed. “I get to live with it. With the fucking shame, and the—” He broke off, looking away, his jaw working.
Hermione’s heart wrenched again as she searched for words. He needed permission; she saw it now.
“You killed people as a mercy,” she landed on, holding his gaze. “In a situation where it cost you – pain, suffering – you took that on yourself in order to save them from bearing it.”
He nodded reluctantly, a small acknowledgement.
“I suppose. I tried,” he said unhappily, as though somehow what he’d done was lacking, and Hermione wondered what the war had done with the Draco Malfoy she remembered from school. The man in front of her – who felt guilt boring into the very marrow of him because he had lived while others had died, even though he’d had no say in that… He wasn’t the boy that she’d known.
“No one gave you mercy,” she said quietly, and his jaw tensed, his eyes sliding shut. “No one saved you when you needed it,” she said, and he made a funny little gasp, wet and broken, before he clamped his lips together. “Not – not even me, although I tried.”
“Fuck, I know you did, mea lux,” he got out hoarsely, barely intelligible, his arms hard and possessive as he pulled her onto his lap. “I know. You tried so hard. It’s not your fault.” She went with his rough pull, straddling him, her hands cupping his cheeks, forcing him to meet her eyes. His own were like sickles in a wishing well – gleaming wet and filled with silent, fragile hopes, tossed out into a universe that didn’t care one way or another.
“None of it was your fault either. None. You were a victim, whichever end of the wand you were at. And there’s no shame in any of it. Do you remember? You told me when we were first captured that whatever happened, the shame wasn’t mine. It was theirs. The shame, the guilt – that belongs to them.”
He swallowed hard, his eyes sliding away from hers. “Yeah. But – after what I’ve done, I don’t deserve to—”
Frustration leapt up in Hermione. “Jesus. You’re allowed to grieve what happened to you. You’re allowed to be angry. It’s okay if that hurts you more. It’s okay.” He stared at her, full of mute misery as her hands slid down to rest on his shoulders, wanting to shake him. “You’re not a fucking saint, Draco, you don’t have to self-flagellate for not saving every person in the war. You couldn’t.”
“But I lived, and they – died,” he said, sounding nearly bewildered – lost and broken, guilty that he’d survived when others hadn’t.
Hermione wanted to cry. He was a perpetual motion machine, pinballing between traumas in a constant cycle beneath the surface. His own pain and anger at what he’d suffered, twisting into the guilt he felt at what he’d done, and the guilt in feeling worse about what he’d suffered than what he’d done, which led him back to his own suffering.
She wanted to butcher Rostan. She wanted to tear his mind apart from the inside, and then his body from the outside. Or vice versa. Whatever would make him suffer more. And then do the same to every Death Eater that had laid their hands on Draco. The visceral desire to destroy the people that had hurt him leapt up in her, confronting in its intensity.
She longed for vengeance in a way she had never imagined herself capable of before.
God. She didn’t know how they were both supposed to get past this. The enormity of their capture, their torture, their separation; it was so much that she couldn’t even imagine where to begin. She hadn’t even started to process what had happened to them – over the past weeks, she’d been so focused on finding Draco that all her traumas had been shunted aside to be dealt with later.
They could hardly deal with them properly now either, with the Order preparing to attack Hogwarts as soon as the Room of Requirement was operational.
But Hermione would try to do what she could for him. She couldn’t undo what had happened, and she didn’t know enough – not yet – to support him the way he deserved, but she could tell him the truth.
“I’m glad,” she said, her fingers brushing gently through his hair at his temple. It was silky soft and nearly white against the rough, dark bark of the oak, and long, the faintest wave to it. “Not that they died, or that you had to” – she waved a hand, not wanting to say it – “but that you’re alive.”
Hermione took Draco’s hands and pressed them to her waist. His fingers pressed in and his breath shuddered out. “Touch me,” she murmured, pressing her forehead to his, their eyes locked. His were darkened but shot with a craquelure of silver, his pupils swollen blots of ink as his hands skimmed up her sides, his lips parting as he inhaled.
There were a million things she wanted to say to him.
“You’re alive, and you deserve to live, meus alcyon. You have nothing to be ashamed of – nothing.”
“I was his whore,” he whispered as if in answer, his eyes fluttering shut, and the words cut her to the quick. A bolt of horror and revulsion lanced down into her stomach, and she felt sick. She swallowed hard, her hands settling on his shoulders once again.
“No,” she said, very calmly, “you weren’t.”
“You can’t deny it,” he said, shame burning in his voice that was shot through with anger, and Hermione felt her chest tightening, as though someone was closing a vice around her ribs. He looked away, his hands firm at her sides, his fingertips digging in a little too hard. “He used me like one. There’s no point in pretending otherwise.”
“You were a victim, not—”
“I was a whore,” he said like a correction, that anger sharpening in his voice – cutting like steel. Bitter and hard. “I was his toy, and he loved to show me off; come watch it bleed, watch it scream, watch it weep, and grovel, and then beg for more. Fuck it however you like. Degrade it. Wreck it and ruin it – don’t worry, we can heal it for next time.”
Hermione felt very cold, horror filling her up. Icy and awful. Her stomach churned. She didn’t want to hear this. Her hands held his shoulders very hard, her fingers feeling numb as she stared at him unblinking, his head bowed and his fringe hanging forward over his eyes.
“You have no idea,” he said in a choked voice. “The things that they did – I don’t ever want you to know. Fuck, I wish I could forget, but no matter how much I occlude, it bleeds through. I can’t—” He took a juddering breath. “He didn’t just want to use me, you see. He wanted to break me. If it was about what he – they – did, any Muggle-born or Muggle would’ve done the job as well as me.”
Oh god. Hermione’s heart was pounding, sweat dampening her skin, her t-shirt clinging to her back, her stomach roiling with nausea. She could think of nothing to say, but she didn’t have to – he went on.
“The thing he loved the most was who I was. A pure-blood of the highest calibre, reduced to nothing. To his own personal torture doll. The higher they fly, the further they fall, right?” His eyes flickered to hers for a moment, wounded and filled with something Hermione couldn’t untangle. A kind of self-loathing misery, eating at him. “There’s no fun in ruining something that’s already dirty.”
“You’re not ruined,” Hermione choked out, tears blurring her eyes as he bowed his head again, a dappled pattern of light and shade on the white-blonde of his hair, her right hand sliding to settle at the nape of his neck. He sighed and pressed his head against her cheek, his breath hot on her throat and wisping down over her chest.
“I used to think that I was someone important, you know? Back at Hogwarts, before the end of fifth year – before everything went to shit – I thought I was above everyone else. I was a Malfoy. A member of the Sacred Twenty-Eight. My father was Lucius Malfoy, and woe betide anyone who tried to fuck with me.”
“My father will hear about this,” Hermione murmured, her fingernails dragging up and down the back of his neck. Draco huffed a broken laugh.
“Yeah,” he said wearily. “I was a bigoted little arsehole. I loved wielding the power that I had, and using it to degrade and humiliate the people that I despised.” He sighed. “Ironic, how things turned out, isn't it? Some people might call what Rostan and the others did to me justice. I finally got a taste of my own medicine.”
“God, no,” Hermione burst out, denying it without pause, hating that he could think that. As if on some cosmic scale, his childhood bullying – as cruel as it had been – was balanced out by rape and torture. The thought was abhorrent.
“No. It's not justice, Draco. It's not even close. What happened to you was” – Anathema. An aberration. Unimaginable – “evil,” she said plainly. “You didn’t deserve any of it. Even if you think that the universe demands some kind of payment for ill deeds, you would have already paid in full and more besides. Your hand, your father—” She shook her head in a denial.
“It feels that way though,” he said and rested his forehead at the crook of her neck. “I can tell myself whatever I like, but underneath – in my bones, in the very marrow of me, there are two things I can’t get away from,” he said, his breath on her chest, and he sounded so tired, his right thumb tracing circles on her back and his body hot and tense under hers. “That I must have deserved it. And that – that I’m that forever now.”
I was his whore.
“Neither of those things is true,” Hermione said, losing the battle to keep her voice steady, tears filling her eyes and overflowing. “You told me when we were captured, you—”
“I know,” Draco said, his weariness heavy in his voice as he lifted his head and met her eyes, and she wanted to look away from the shame and agony in his. “I fucking know that, Hermione – intellectually at least – and it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference. I still feel like I’ll always be what he made me, like perhaps I deserved it.”
“You didn’t. You aren’t,” she said helplessly, but he was lost in memory, her words sliding off him without effect, insubstantial in the face of his trauma.
Remembering the torture that she’d gone through during their capture made her feel shaky and sick, panic creeping up her spine and breathlessness building in her chest, her emotions threatening to tailspin out of all control. There were moments during her days where she just stopped, trapped in a memory – in a feeling, in a sensation – for long seconds before she could dispel it. She woke from nightmares, panting and sweating. She wept in the shower. She stared at the mirror and wondered who she was now, and where the old Hermione had gone. Lost to brutality and deprivation, snuffed out like a candle flame.
She couldn’t imagine how much worse it must be having his experiences piled on top of that.
“I tell myself that at least it was me and not you,” he said quietly and quickly, as though he was making a confession. Lost in his own head and trying to make sense out of the senseless – trying to find a justification for the hell that he’d suffered. But there wasn’t one. “I tell myself that out of the two of us, it was better for me to—”
“No—” Her heart ached and throbbed, her hand lifting to his cheek, and he pressed into her touch with a tiny gasp.
“—I deserved it more than—”
“Stop it! You didn’t deserve it! It wasn’t better,” Hermione snapped, hating that he felt that way, but he kept talking, like a dam had broken – a flood of admissions.
“I feel so ashamed,” he said in a choked voice. “So fucking ashamed.”
“Oh. You don’t—”
“He didn’t just – just violate me,” Draco said, and his cheeks slowly coloured as he spoke. “He broke me. He made me crawl and beg. He m-made me part of it. He made me ask for it – made m-me ask for him to – to” – he took a shuddering gasp, unable to say it – “because it was better than the agony. I – I cooperated. I pleaded for him to – I did it willingly. Eagerly.”
Oh god. Self-hatred dripped from his voice like venom, and Hermione felt helpless. How could she protect him from himself?
“Every human is driven to avoid pain,” she said swiftly. “It’s part of the human drive. It’s inbuilt – innate. That’s not you being willing or eager” – the last word tasted like ashes on her tongue – “that’s human instinct being turned against you with torture.” She remembered hanging from the chains, agony eating her, half mad with the pain and willing to do anything if it would only stop, and shuddered. “I would have done the same. I – I begged them to stop; you know that. I broke, long before you. If – if not for what Snape had said, I would have been the one pleading Rostan for – that, to stop the agony. That’s not on you, remember? It’s on them.”
“I know,” he said again, looking past her shoulder. He blinked hard, his eyelashes wet and spiky, shining with tears. His jaw tensed. “Do you think if we say it enough, I’ll believe it? Because right now, I keep going back to that. That he made me his – his—” He couldn’t finish, and Hermione couldn’t let those words stand like that – he made me his. She felt torn open, her heart beating in the air, all her insides exposed and bleeding, anger fuelling her.
“You’re mine,” she said fiercely, and she held his face in her two hands, a kind of madness hot in her chest. “Mine, not his.”
Draco sucked in a short breath, his eyes flying to hers, his lips parted, a shivering kind of tension seizing him. His hands tightened on her body. “Sum tuus (I’m yours),” he whispered, barely audible, an echo of her.
“He doesn’t define you, I do – meus alcyon (my kingfisher), meum cor (my heart),” Hermione went on, “and I say that you aren’t that. You are the strongest, most resilient person I have ever met. You have survived things that would have destroyed me, and—”
“I feel broken,” he whispered almost like an apology, as though he was ashamed of feeling that way. Her heart felt rent yet again as she pivoted in her head, searching frantically for words that fit as he stared into her eyes with his wounded ones; storms and silver, haunted by a grief that hurt her.
“Broken things heal,” Hermione said, as though she had no doubts, as though she wasn’t wounded half as badly, as though she wasn’t just as lost as he was. “You’ll heal. We both will, together. And I’ll be here, always – however long it takes, and then forever afterwards. Tu meus omnia (You’re my everything).”
Her hands came back up to press to his cheeks as she closed the scant distance between their lips and kissed him with a tender cautiousness; on his mouth, and then on each of his closed eyes, his lashes caught with tears that made her taste salt. Her kisses were a benediction – a promise – and when she drew back, he let out a juddering breath and bowed forward, resting his forehead against her shoulder.
Oh.
Draco’s own shoulders shook, his hands pressed to Hermione’s body as though she was the only thing keeping him grounded, and she slid a hand – carefully – through his hair and held him close, a hitching breath escaping him. Dampness anointed her skin, seeping through her clothes as she rested her lips atop his head, letting him silently weep.
She held him for a long time. Until his breathing eased and his shoulders stilled, and he lifted his eyes to hers, red-rimmed and bloodshot. He took a slow breath and let it out even slower.
“Mea solatium (My solace),” he said, a hint of embarrassment sharp beneath the gratitude in his voice, his cheeks flushing, tear-streaked and damp. It had been like this in the cell, this kind of raw, ashamed vulnerability, but it felt different now; free beneath the morning sun, the breeze carrying the scent of heather. Nothing was hidden. “Fuck. I’m sorry – I didn’t mean to—”
Hermione silenced him by kissing the corner of his mouth, her thumbs swiping away the remnants of tears. It made her want to cry too, seeing him like this, apologising for needing her comfort – as though it made him weak, when he’d survived more than anyone she knew.
“Don't be sorry,” she murmured, kissing him lightly again. He made a sound and the chaste press transmuted into something as raw and needy as he was, his hand at the nape of her neck, holding her there. Oh, she thought again as pleasure licked through her, molten and demanding, turning her pliable in his hands.
It was almost as though he was reasserting himself, she thought vaguely as he left her mouth kiss-bruised and gasping, her skin prickling hot as arousal swept over her in a wave. Her desire was the tide, rising inexorably with his touch.
She felt like an instrument tuned to him, thrills running over her, her head spinning. He dragged her shirt – his shirt – off her left shoulder and pulled the neck of her t-shirt aside, exposing her skin and the bite scar that lay beneath, and pressing his mouth to it. Sucking at it in mimicry of the bite. Tingles ran down her spine and she made a soft sound, clutching at his shoulders instead of his hair as he ran a hand up her side beneath her t-shirt.
“Fuck,” he mumbled against her shoulder. “I want – take this off before I rip it off,” he got out, seizing a handful of her t-shirt before biting her shoulder lightly, and Hermione’s breath stuttered, desire filling her until it became hard to think.
“J-just rip it,” she said breathlessly, and he pulled back and met her gaze, his eyes pools of ink shadowed by the oak canopy and drowned by pupil, dizzy and wanting. His kiss dragged her under into a mindless ocean of sensation – hot and overwhelming, arousal tying knots low in her abdomen, wet between her legs, her nerve endings alight.
His silver hand tore her t-shirt with an ease that startled her, the fabric giving with a soft sound, and then pushed it and his shirt down to her elbows, pulling back and looking at her with those dilated, lust-drunk eyes. The breeze was on her breasts and her nipples hardened to points, and he reached out, hands curving over them and cupping the weight, his thumbs brushing over the rosy tips. An almost electric pleasure shocked through her, and she whimpered, her hands gripping his shirt at his upper arms.
“Dulcissima,” he murmured, his hands on her tender flesh gentle and searching, and she moaned at the way he teased her – god, it was overwhelming. He leant her back and his mouth found her left breast, hot wetness engulfing her, and she felt overripe and overfull, near to bursting. “Mea voluptas unica (My only pleasure). Merlin, you’re so beautiful.”
“Mea parva lutra (My little otter),” he called her, kissing her sternum, his fingers playing over her ribs. “I would suffer through anything for this. For you.” Draco’s thumb followed the curve of her lip and then pressed into her cheek, where she dimpled. “For your smile. For your love. You make it all worth it. I would bleed for you until I ran dry, and be grateful.”
Draco laid her down between the roots of the oak, in a bed of moss, cotton grass, and nodding Scottish primrose, the scent of honey wafting on the breeze. He stripped her bare with the ease the two hands gave him, pulling her hair loose again so that it fell down over her breasts and tickled her skin just like the grass did – heavy dark curls strewn against the green. Perhaps she should have felt exposed, naked under the sky with Draco kneeling between her legs, but she didn’t. Desire crowded out reason and worry; she could think only of him.
“You,” she said, ineloquently, wanting to see him too. “Meum cor, please, take it off,” and he did. Shrugging off his shirt and yanking his t-shirt over his head, his hair tousled and displaced, catching the light. His body was a patchwork of fading scars – his hurts printed into his flesh like a reflection of what was inside. But more than that; his skin was marble, his thin shoulders broad and wiry with lean muscle, his ribs shadows beneath his skin, his abdominals cast in sharp relief. Too thin and so scarred, and yet no less perfect.
“God, you’re incredible,” she said unbidden as he knelt between her legs, pushing his silver hand through his hair. The dark blonde hair at his armpits, and the way his throat bobbed as he swallowed. The sharp line of his jaw and nose balanced by the lush fullness of his mouth. The faint trail of dark blonde hairs leading from beneath his belly button to his waistband, his trousers hanging low on his hips.
And then he popped the button open, shoving both trousers and shorts down his thighs – muscled and sprinkled with blonde hairs – and his cock sprang free, flushed and hard, the veins an embossed tracery.
Hermione’s mouth watered, and her thighs fell a little further apart, feeling as though she was melting, molten – hot and malleable, eager to be shaped by him. Her heartbeat thudded fast and her vulva felt slick and swollen – sensitised by a kind of arousal that felt like a weight bearing down on her, so immense she could hardly breathe, dizzy and mindless. She could feel the wetness slowly trickling from her, her body throbbing like one great pulse.
“Please,” she said, her voice almost slurring, and he grinned, wicked and bright, everything falling away from him for a moment. He sank down, pressing his mouth against the crux of her, his tongue hot and firm, delving and swirling, licking an electric, burning ecstasy into her flesh. Her fingers seized fistfuls of grass, her back bowing and her panting moans filling the air as he worshipped in the church of her body, nestled in the grass beneath the dappled shade of the oak.
Hermione came with his name on her lips and his fingers curling inside her, and a moment later – as aftershocks spread through her like ripples on a loch’s surface – he settled over her. She looked up at his face against the oak leaves and sky, parting her lips in invitation, and he kissed her, softly and lingering as he reached down between their bodies. She tasted herself on his swollen lips, an intimacy that never failed to seem strange.
Then an animal moan – a wounded, strangled thing – escaped her mouth into his, her whole body tensing, her fingertips burrowing into his shoulders as he pushed his cock into her.
He filled her and stretched her with one smooth push, and it felt like continental plates shifted, like the world tipped on its axis, like time stood still, her cunt pulsating around him with the aftermath of orgasm, exquisitely sensitive and reactive. Another moan escaped her; a shuddering, distorted thing, and buried to the hilt inside her – her body in delicious shock at the abrupt intrusion – Draco released her mouth, looking down at her with darkened eyes, his cheeks flushed.
“Is that – are you alright?” he asked, holding very still inside her, love and concern mingled in his expression, and Hermione nodded.
“Oh god,” she breathed, “y-yes.”
“You just sounded—” He didn’t finish, his voice choked. Hermione’s legs came up around him, her thighs gripping his sides.
“That was a good sound,” she huffed and tilted her hips up. He made a low sound himself, and his eyes shut for a second, a furrow of concentration between his brows. He slid halfway out and then slowly in again, and they both moaned. God, she felt ridiculously sensitive in the wake of her orgasm.
“S-sometimes it’s hard to tell,” he managed in a thin voice, and Hermione squeezed her inner muscles, and he gasped, thrusting deeper as though it was involuntary. “Cliodna’s sake. You’re – you’re so tight,” he grated out, as though it was taking every ounce of his self-control not to rut her like an animal. Hermione rather wished he would.
“Mmph,” she responded and crossed her wrists behind his neck. “Don’t stop,” she told him. “More. Please, I want all of you.” And as though something had snapped – as though he was an animal let off the leash – he gave her more, driving into her until she forgot where he stopped and she started, pleasure rushing through her endlessly.
Her cries echoed through the glen.
When they walked back to the house after mending Hermione’s t-shirt, Draco seemed lighter to her, some of the tension lifted from his shoulders. She wasn’t sure if it was that a burden shared was a burden halved after all, or merely post-satiation bliss, but either way, right now he had a fragile air of contentment. He held her hand with his real one as they strolled back toward the cottage following the burn, an ease to his stride, his hair fluttering pale over his forehead in the breeze.
Hermione felt happiness suffuse her.
Just the two of them, alone together under the sun. She could almost believe that the war was over, and this was another time altogether.
A future in which everything was as perfect as it could be, and the past lay far behind them. A sad past, yes, haunting them from time to time – but insubstantial compared to the squeeze of his fingers on hers, the satiated bliss radiating through her, and the love in his eyes when he glanced down at her, a small, satisfied smile catching at the corners of his mouth.