Wincing, she put both hands around his and slowly moved his left hand in the necessary motion as she said the incantation in time with each movement.
He got it right on the third try.
“And then after you repair the lung tissue it's — just a regular healing charm to fix the diaphragmatic muscle and close the incision,” she instructed when she could finally breathe again.”
She slumped down to recover while he cleaned the blood off her. It was crusted on her face, in her eyelashes.
“What were you doing there?” he asked in a low, shaking voice as she turned and transfigured a piece of dressing into a shirt and started trying to pull it over her head.
“Harry asked me come,” she said with a small shrug. “I told you, we need Ron.”
“You aren't experienced in combat,” he said. He was pale, and his hands were trembling faintly as he helped her pull the shirt over her head, “Why are they bringing you out again without even giving you a partner?”
Hermione didn't look at him. She swallowed and slid her right hand down the sleeve. “They needed a healer. Our other healer lost her foot foraging. I was chosen because I could walk faster.”
He drew a sharp breath.
“You knew it was a trap,” he said. “You knew it. But you went anyway. Rabastan's prison ambush. No one actually thought the Order would be idiotic enough to fall for it. It was a training simulation for the rookies.”
“Harry was going to go.”
“So?”
“Harry is the point of this war. If he dies, it's over. I will always follow him. Strategically, I'm a casualty we can afford. Harry is not. If I improve his odds at all, it's worth it,” she replied in a steady voice as she twisted gingerly and lifted her broken wrist up to slide down the sleeve.
“You weren't saving Potter. You were saving Weasley.”
Hermione twitched her shoulder. “Ron is critical. Harry — needs Ron. If something happens to Ron, it'll break him. He needs Ron to want to win.”
“What about you? Doesn't Potter need you?” Draco said. His eyes glittered with rage.
Hermione looked away. “Not like he needs Ron. I'm — not like that to him.”
She swallowed the lump in her throat.
“The Weasleys—,“ she started, and then she gave a short sigh. “They're his family. They're everything he wants. To win, he has to be able to see himself with them afterward. That — is what drives him. If he loses it — stops believing that he'll get it — he won't keep going. He won't be able to.”
“I thought you were part of the Trio. Won't Potter despair if he loses you?”
“No,” she said, glancing away. “He'd grieve, he'll be angry. But I'm — I'm not emotionally vital. I was never very good at—,” her lips twitched, “—Ron connects to Harry emotionally. Harry is driven by his emotions.”
“So — what? Potter drags you into a firefight you have no experience trying to survive because you're expendable enough?”
“Ron comes first. Harry will always take care of him first. He doesn't think clearly when the people he regards as family are in danger. He doesn't realise he's risking others,” she said, lifting her chin. “He's always been that way.”
Draco stared at her. “So who cares for you, Granger, if Potter doesn't?”
She blinked.
“I don't need anyone to care for me,” she said stiffly, but her voice shook. “It wasn't an accident, Draco. I chose to reduce my casualty value.”
His expression hardened. “You let yourself become expendable to Potter.”
“The more weaknesses Harry has, the more vulnerable the entire Resistance is.”
She hadn't thought Draco could look angrier than he already did, but he suddenly looked ready to explode.
“When I think I can't hate Potter more, he finds a new way to prove me wrong,” he said, pulling out several more potions and handing them to her.
She tried to pull the corks out with one hand but couldn't manage it. She was pretty sure if she had to move her left wrist again, she would faint.
“What happened to your left hand?” he abruptly asked, snatching back a vial and unstoppering it for her.
“You — broke it.”
He seemed to get paler.
“It was already injured,” she said in clarification, “I got hit by that acid curse. By the time I managed to counter it, the bones were pretty much wrecked. You just happened to grab it.”
“You should have told me.”
He reached into his robes and pulled out the kit she'd given him for Christmas. He snatched the analgesic from its slot, doused a cloth, and wrapped it around her wrist and hand.
Hermione nearly gasped with relief as the burning subsided.
“Do you need me to remove the bones?” he asked after a moment as he watched her cradle her wrist against her chest.
She looked up at him. “Could you? I–I was going to do it myself, when I got a chance.”
Removing bones with precision, especially shards, was a painful process. Unless she wanted to regrow her whole arm, it was going to be a slow ordeal that would be difficult to remain focused and steady-handed throughout. She'd planned to deal with it after she went back to check on Ron.
“I know the spellwork. Do you want me to stun you?” he asked.
“N-no. I should stay awake, unless you already know all the names of the bones in the hand and wrist.”
“No,” he said, glancing away, his mouth pressed into a hard line.
Unwrapping her hand again, she cast a diagnostic spell over it and surveyed the damage. Aside from the deep pockets the acid had burned into the flesh, there were four bones that had been crushed and another six with varying levels of corrosion, including her ulna. She'd have to debone half her forearm.
She stared at it for several minutes before drawing a sharp breath and looking away.
“The fifth metacarpal first. Quinque metacarpus.”
“Quinque metacarpus ossios dispersimus.”
The sharp stabbing pain as the bone in Hermione's hand abruptly vanished nearly made her scream. She dropped her head against Draco's shoulder and shuddered.
Pain without the adrenaline surge of battle was harder to handle.
“Then the hamate. Os hamatum.” She shivered against his shoulder, trying to brace herself.
She was crying into his robes by the time he had removed all the bone shards. Half her forearm and most of her palm were largely boneless and lay puddled in her lap.
Draco pulled a bottle of skele-gro out. She gagged it down and then winced as the stabbing, needle-like sensation of the regrowing bones enveloped her arm.
He poured Essence of Dittany across her entire arm to repair the pockets of corroded tissue. She was tempted to scream at him.
“Don't!” She tried to grab the vial away from him. “It's a waste. I can heal them with spellwork after the bones regrow.”
He glared at her. “Shut up.”
She fell silent while he doused her arm a second time and then rummaged through more materials from his supplies and assembled a magical cast with surprising efficiency.
“Why do you have all this?” she asked, surveying all the supplies as he wrapped the frame around her hand and up around her elbow, so that the bones could regrow straight.
“I got it for you,” he said. She stared at him in surprise. “After Hampshire, I was worried you'd show up injured again. I thought if I had everything you might need on hand, I'd worry less.”
Hermione's heart hurt inside her chest as he helped her get the sling of the cast up over her head.
“But — this is a lot. This is practically a casualty ward's entire inventory list.”
He raised an eyebrow. “I didn't know what kinds of things were crucial for casualty healing at the time. I researched it. Then I got a long lecture on healing common battle injuries as a Christmas present last year. It helped me round it out with anything I'd missed.”