He gripped Hermione's hand. “I couldn't — do anything. I tried to shield her. I kept her in her rooms as much as possible. I brought in healers to help her recover. The mind healers couldn't do a damn thing. I should have had her treated sooner. That's what they all told me. That I should have gotten her treated sooner.”
Hermione squeezed his hand and slid her fingers across his runes. Unhesitating, cunning, unfailing, ruthless, and unyielding; driven to succeed.
To avenge his mother. In penance for all the ways he felt he'd failed her.
“I'm so sorry, Draco.”
He was quiet. He closed his eyes and drew a sharp breath.
“Then—” his voice cut off. He tried again. “Then—” Draco's mouth twisted, and he went silent for several seconds.
“Then — she'd just started to recover a bit, and I hesitated at the Finch-Fletchleys. There was a little girl; she couldn't have been in primary school yet. Unforgivables — there's no cheating with them. You have to feel it. You have to mean it. I was ordered to use the cruciatus and I couldn't — I couldn't make it work. She was — so little.”
He swallowed. “Bellatrix cursed me and the girl before letting Fenrir Greyback have her instead. He — enjoyed children. When my failure was reported, the Dark Lord took it as a sign I wasn't committed or motivated enough. He had my mother brought out so he could demonstrate how to properly perform the cruciatus.”
There was a long silence.
“She'd — just started to get better when it happened.”
Hermione suspected that her hand would have bruises where their fingers were entwined.
“Bellatrix did care for her sister, in a way. She never spoke against the Dark Lord, but she did try to keep me from failing. The summer before I returned to school, and when she realised that my punishments would be meted out on my mother, she poured everything into getting me to a point where it happened rarely. I asked her to teach me everything she'd learned from the Dark Lord, and she did.”
His voice had shifted. It grew more familiar as the story moved through his life. Traces of his hard, clipped tone started to emerge.
“I tried everything to get my mother away. To get her out. But I couldn't run with her. I had everything prepared — but I couldn't convince her to leave without me. I considered trying to imperio her, to make her to go. But I knew her. If I got knocked out or died, the second it dropped, she would have come back to find me. And I couldn't lock her away somewhere so that she couldn't. I wasn't — I didn't want to be someone who caged her. I didn't want her to feel trapped again.”
His voice grew deadened. “When she died — I arrived to find Lestrange Manor in ruins. I didn't know what had happened until I was summoned. It was barely mentioned that she'd been there — that it counted for anything that she'd died. Dumbledore's wand had split in half. Something to do with Bellatrix somehow. The wand was the only thing that mattered. He killed every Death Eater who survived to report back. I was standing there, surrounded by the bodies, trying not to start screaming.”
He fell silent and didn't say anything else for a long time.
Hermione shifted out from under him and sat up. There was a dull, tearing sensation in her chest as she stared down at him.
His eyes were guarded as he looked back her.
She touched him lightly on the cheek. “Draco — I am not your mother.”
He flinched and started to open his mouth, but she continued without letting him interrupt. “Moody and Kingsley are not going to hurt me if you fail an assignment. They are not going to torture or endanger me to punish you. I'm not a hostage. I'm in this war because I choose to be. I am not fragile. I am not going to break. Please,” she brushed her thumb over the arch of his cheekbone, “believe that about me.”
“Let me get you out. Please, Hermione. I swear to god, it won't affect my aid to the Order. Let me get you out.”
She shook her head. “I can't leave. I am loyal to the Order. I'm not going to run while everyone else is fighting. We fight this war together. Let me help you. You don't have to do everything alone.”
His eyes flickered, and she saw the despair and resignation in them. It tore at something in her.
“Draco, you can't ask me to run away from the war.”
His lip curled and he sneered. “Why not? How have you not already done enough for them? They sold you. What if I'd—,” his voice cut off. He looked away from her. “The same offer from someone who'd meant it. You would have still — and if I hadn't trained you, Potter would have still left you on your own in that field.”
She traced her thumb across his skin. There was the barest, faintest line of a scar there, from where she'd hexed him. “I agreed to it, Draco, all of it. No one made me. We don't get to choose when we've done enough and then leave others behind to bear the consequences. That isn't how a war like this works.”
He clenched his jaw and stared up at her bitterly.
He didn't care. He didn't care whether anyone survived the war but her. They could all die, and he wouldn't care.
He'd made an Unbreakable Vow. Even if he could get his Dark Mark off, he couldn't run, not as long as the war continued. He'd trapped himself in heart of it.
Hermione gave a sad sigh and dropped her head, burying her face in his shoulder. He wrapped his arms tightly around her.
She was almost asleep when she heard the faint whisper of his voice begin once again. “I'm going to take care of you. I swear, I'm always going to take care of you.”
The rescues ground to a halt. Kingsley put them on hold until more was known about the trace from Sussex. Early prototypes of the shackles were being rolled out to all the prisons.
The Resistance was almost entirely driven underground and into the Muggle world. There were so many dark beings and Snatchers it was difficult to move.
Kingsley began leaning even more heavily in his reconnaissance team and utilising Draco within Voldemort's army. Misinformation. Sabotage. As though the Death Eater army were a machine to be deconstructed. The envelopes with orders kept growing thicker every time Hermione delivered them.
Draco rarely mentioned what he did, but she could tell he was on the verge of breaking from the pressure. He grew steadily more and more desperate each time he saw her.
It burned in her. To watch him eroding under everything he was expected to maintain and produce for both sides.
Almost all pressure on Hermione from the Order vanished. She was a collar around Draco's throat; Kingsley and Moody had nothing more urgent to ask than that she maintain it.
She was simply left to live with it.
She felt like a caged animal inside Grimmauld Place. She travelled from safe house to safe house just for a change of scenery.
When she wasn't healing or caring for Ginny, she poured her energy into research and experimental magic. She went further into researching Dark Magic than she ever had in the past. Maybe the Order wouldn't use it, but Draco might.
She tried to find a way around the shackles. Draco regularly brought updated scrolls of analysis for her, and she pored over them, trying to find a flaw, something to exploit. They were ingenious. They were a work of art.
They horrified Hermione with their rapid evolution.
In addition to irremovable traces, Sussex began experimenting with shackles intended to suppress magic. Tungsten inlaid with iron. Tungsten plated with copper or aluminium. Shackles with wand core materials.
She'd barely sleep unless she was with Draco. The rest of the time, she'd just lie in cold terror at the thought of what would happen to anyone captured. The Order might not ever be able to save any of them.
Death Eaters were already being given the shackles to carry in order to more easily apprehend members of the Resistance. Once closed, a shackle couldn't be reopened without two bearers of the Dark Mark performing an incantation variant of the Morsmordre.