"Not all of us have your dazzling intellect." His tone was light. He hadn't moved from the door. Hermione studied the space between them and bit her lip as she hesitated.
"Today, you didn't say you'd always come for me. You used to say that to me before you left. Whenever—" she looked down and wrapped the hem of his cloak tightly around her fingers so they wouldn't twitch visibly. She furrowed her eyebrows, trying to recall a clear memory of it, but unable manage. A bleeding pain started to spread up from the base of her head. She gave up and looked back at Draco again. "I think — I think I remember that. Whenever you had to go, you'd promise to come for me. Didn't — you?"
Draco froze for a split second. Then he blinked, and his mouth twisted into a bitter smile as he looked away. "Well — I thought it was a rather empty-sounding promise at this point."
Her throat caught, and her hand started to move towards him. "You looked everywhere. That wasn't your fault."
He gave a short, barking laugh and stepped back as though struck. The abrupt sound made Hermione start.
He stared at her for a moment, and then his eyebrows arched upwards.
"Right," he said slowly. "Everywhere. I looked everywhere." He rolled his jaw as though he were feeling the shape of the word inside his mouth. "Except the one place that mattered — where you were — but everywhere else, certainly. I suppose I deserve credit for my effort if nothing else."
There was something cruelly familiar in the relentless intensity he spoke with. Her stomach curdled.
"Poor little healer, with no one to take care of. No one who needs you, or wants you."
She couldn't remember when he'd said it. Was it a memory from during the war? No, after — in the Manor.
Draco gave another laugh, and it startled her from her reverie.
She stared at him.
His expression was twisted. " — not my fault?" he was saying. The words were so clipped it was as though he were biting off the end of every one of them. "Is that how I should think about it all? That nothing is ever my fault? Not my mother. Not Dumbledore — or really anyone I've ever killed. If I rationalise enough, I had no choice in any of it, did I? What about you? Is what's happened to you not my fault either? Should I blame you instead? Or the Dark Lord? Or perhaps the world in general?"
He was breathing through his teeth, the words pouring out of him.
Then he seemed to abruptly catch himself. His mouth snapped shut, and he just stared at her for several seconds.
"If Potter hadn't mattered, you wouldn't have either."
Hermione blinked away the memory, her heart in her throat when she tried to swallow.
Draco sneered and laid a pale hand over his heart. "Would embracing eternal victimhood somehow make me feel better?"
His voice, beneath the caustic tone of sarcasm, was vibrating with suppressed rage.
Hermione looked down at her lap, breathing in slowly through clenched teeth. Her fingers kept trying to spasm nervously. Her whole body was tense as she tried to stay focused.
There were so many things she was trying not to think about or panic over that, it was like trying to keep her face above the surface before she drowned in the morass of her mind.
Her memories wouldn't come back with any kind of clear order. She had hundreds of memories of Draco, but she couldn't tell exactly what sequence they were supposed to go in. They were distant blurs and then flashes of clarity; things she knew but couldn't quite pull together into anything sufficiently cohesive.
Instinctively, she felt certain there was something more to what was happening and Draco was hiding it from her; something he didn't want her to know. If she just knew him better — if she could remember more clearly — she'd know what it was, but she couldn't pull it together clearly enough.
"That's not my point. I'm not — trying to talk about that yet," she finally said after spending several seconds trying to focus herself. "The part I don't understand is if everyone in the Order is dead now, and you can't kill Voldemort, how exactly are you going to defeat him and cause the regime to collapse? That doesn't make any sense to me."
She glanced up. "You aren't planning to have me kill him, are you?"
Draco stared at her and didn't even dignify the question with a response.
Hermione nodded to herself and looked down. "If you and Severus remove my manacles, Voldemort will know. Even if he doesn't know that Severus was the one to help you, you're responsible for me. If I escape, the blame will fall on you. There's no way for me to leave Europe without Voldemort realising you betrayed him."
Draco said nothing.
Hermione stared up at him, a cold sensation creeping over her as the pieces of information she'd gathered over the months finally snapped into place. "That's the plan. Voldemort's dependent on you. You're the lynchpin, the thing stabilising the regime. That's why you exposed yourself as High Reeve, so that he couldn't try to replace you with someone else." Her mouth felt dry, and she swallowed, her fingers rolling the fabric of his cloak between them. "Have you — have you found a way to remove your Dark Mark then?"
Draco stood immobile by the door as his mouth curved into a smile. "Of course. Once your manacles are off, I'll be able to remove it."
He reminded her of the New Year's Party. Every motion was so perfectly practiced. Despite how much she'd hated him, she'd still watched him; noticed details whose meanings had eluded her. Now, fused with her past knowledge of him, she could see the glimmers of Draco underneath. The person she'd known, ground down under his runes. He'd almost vanished, but there were still traces of him left.
She tilted her head to the side. "How?"
He gave a smooth shrug. "Severus figured something out. He did work with Dolohov for years."
There was an unnaturally long pause.
"You're lying," she finally said.
He cocked his head and studied her. His freezing, mocking intensity suddenly surfacing. "Really? Do you think you still know me well enough to tell?"
Defensive. He was always cruelest when he was vulnerable.
The corner of Hermione's mouth quirked up sadly. "Yes." Her heart felt like lead in her chest. "You used to be mostly truthful — to me."
His mouth twisted into savage smile. "Yes, I was."
Hermione tried to breathe and found herself drowning in raw grief. There was a sea around her, and Draco was standing fifteen feet away.
Her heart was beating faster and faster. She took a slow breath, and she met his eyes.
The fanfare is in the light, but the execution is in the dark.
"You're lying to me. You aren't going to remove your mark. You're not even intending to try. You're planning to die. You exposed yourself as High Reeve so that when Voldemort kills you for letting me escape, the regime will destabilise and collapse."
Draco stood staring at her for a moment before his lips curved into a smile bitter as poison. He sighed, and the facade fell.
"I had hoped the library would preoccupy you for at least a week." He looked disappointed and tired.
Hermione waited for him to say something else, but he didn't.
"That's your plan?" Her voice was shaking with disbelief. "Two years and your plan is still to hide me somewhere, get killed as a traitor, and think that I'll — I'll be alright with it?"
Draco was silent for several seconds, then he gave a low laugh. She felt it in her bones.
"Do you have a better solution this time too?" His tone was freezing. "After all, not every single horror that I've ever imagined has happened yet. Losing you and spending sixteen months trying and failing to find you. Finding you tortured and broken. Keeping you as a prisoner in this house. Raping you." His voice was growing raw with grief and rage. "Having to hold you in my hands, and feel you in my head while your mind was ravaged. Finding someone raping you in my garden—"