The pregnancy guide had included a long section explaining the risks of displacement transport during pregnancy. Portkeys were preferable to apparition, but either form tended to make witches violently ill and could cause contractions or premature labour. A potion to settle the stomach and a dose of Calming Draught beforehand were strongly recommended if the use of a portkey was necessary.
Hermione had no idea how she'd handle portkeying. In a worst case scenario, repeatedly portkeying could send her into premature labour.
If she lost the baby in the process of escaping without Draco, she thought she would probably die.
It might make a difference if she were less physically fragile.
She started with basic lunges and crunches. She couldn't push herself off the floor to do a push-up, but she made herself begin doing regular repetitions of everything she could manage.
Three weeks. She had three weeks to come up with something better than Draco's new plan.
She just needed to get his Dark Mark off. If she could get it off, there would be numerous methods of escape available to them.
If they killed Voldemort, the Dark Mark would vanish. Potentially so would the only existing mechanism for removing the manacles. The manacles needed the Dark Marks to activate the release mechanism; without marked Death Eaters, everyone manacled might wait years before a way of overriding or recreating Voldemort's Dark Mark was invented.
It might save Draco though. However, Hermione had no idea how to go about it. Draco refused to discuss any ideas that endangered her or ran the risk of his cover being blown before her manacles were removed.
She didn't even know where Voldemort's castle was.
If she could just get Draco's mark off.
The anniversary celebration came, and the manor sat silent. Hermione spent the day reading, gnawing her fingernails to the quick, and doing exercise repetitions when she felt so anxious she thought she might start panicking. Draco had left the previous afternoon and not returned, that was all Bobbin knew.
Lucius had been back to the manor, apparently no worse off for having murdered Astoria.
Hermione knew because early in the morning she saw him standing in the path outside her window, staring up at the North Wing.
She'd ducked quickly out of sight.
The day of the anniversary passed without event for Hermione. Her room felt claustrophobic, as though she were going to suffocate while waiting there.
It was the middle of the night when Draco abruptly appeared in the room next to her door.
He stalked across the room and nearly collapsed on top of her as he wrapped his arms around her waist and dropped his forehead on her shoulder.
Hermione's spine bowed slightly as she held him up. The spent dark magic hanging off him was almost enough to make her gag.
“Are you alright? What's wrong? Has something happened?” she asked, her voice frantic as she ran her fingers over him trying to find an injury.
“Mmmfine.” His voice was muffled in her robes. “I'm just tired.”
He lifted his head and straightened as he stared down at her. “It was a long day.”
“Sit down.” She pulled him over to the bed, and he sat heavily on the edge of it. She studied him. He looked frayed. “What happened?”
He stared up at her, his expression was drained but there was a sort of cold triumph in his eyes. “The Dark Lord didn't take news regarding Romania well and over-exerted himself yesterday. He failed to appear at today's celebration.” Draco tilted his head to the side, and the corner of his mouth twisted up into a smirk. “There's blood in the water. If anyone had doubts that he's weak — it's all but confirmed now. He's facing the end — even he knows it.”
Hermione studied him. The light in her room was dim but he seemed ghastly pale, as though he'd been drained of colour. “But—?”
He shrugged a shoulder. “Well — I'm his supposed successor. I had to fill both roles in his absence.” The triumph in his expression faded into exhaustion. “It was a few more Killing Curses than I'd expected.”
He suddenly looked young. A flicker of boyish vulnerability appeared for a moment. “I don't know—”
He cut himself off and was silent for several seconds.
“I'll be fine. I'm just tired,” he finally said.
Hermione tangled her fingers in his hair. “Oh, Draco.”
She wondered sometimes if there would be an eventual point when the Heart of Isis would fail. Surely it couldn't function indefinitely. It was already absorbing all the dark magic that should have been seeping out of Draco's runes, that combined with everything else Draco regularly did—
Hermione banished the thought. He had a far more immediate fate to escape before she needed to worry about Dark Magic corrosion killing him.
She brushed her fingers against his cheek. His skin was icy cold. In the moonlight, with his pale hair, skin, and eyes, he almost seemed like a ghost she was clinging to.
She was magicless. She had no spells or healing to offer.
“Go to sleep. You should sleep,” she said. “You'll feel better if you can rest.”
He gave a nod and slumped down.
She ran her fingers through his hair, twisting it around her fingers and watching it slip free. She traced along his knuckles, and then rubbed her hands against his, trying to impart some warmth from wherever it had leeched out of him. His hands spasmed from time to time when he moved his sleep.
He had such long fingers. In another life, he could have been a healer or a musician. He would have had the perfect hands for it.
Just another thing Voldemort ruined.
She sat beside him watching him sleep, feeling him grow slowly warmer.
He jerked abruptly awake, snatching his fingers away from hers and gripping his left forearm as he sat up. He pressed a kiss against her forehead and left without a word.
Hermione didn't see him again for two days. She read the Daily Prophet's recap of the anniversary celebration. Predictably Voldemort's absence was barely mentioned and heavily excused. There was more time devoted to Astoria's failure to appear.
Draco had killed seventy-five prisoners over the course of the day. Speeches and entertainment and then he was called up to kill traitors and resistance fighters. It had happened in three sets. Twenty-five prisoners all lined up for him to execute. Again. And Again.
It was an unbelievable quantity of killing curses.
The revolution in Romania was dismissed as a minor, local uprising, not related to Voldemort's regime at all.
Hermione read the paper through twice and then went back to her books, back to her exercise repetitions. While she was forcing herself to do any unbearable quantity of crunches on the floor, she refined and perfected the theory of the potion until it was flawless.
In another life, if she could have become a researcher, inventing the theory would have been a distinguishing success. Like the twelve uses of dragon's blood, even if four were entirely theory-based, the deepened understanding of magical theory would have been notable in its own right.
But Hermione didn't care about a theoretical potion. She needed a real one with ingredients she could actually obtain.
She had no idea how to get hold of phoenix tears.
Fawkes had vanished after Dumbledore's funeral at Hogwarts and never been seen again. Phoenix weren't even native to Europe.
The only two known domesticated phoenix in the last century were Fawkes and Sparky, the mascot of the New Zealand Quidditch team. Domestication had been more common a few hundred years before, but whatever the art of reliably earning a phoenix's loyalty was, it had been lost to history.
She lay in the middle of the floor, panting and thinking while she caught her breath. Her abdominals and legs were burning.
If Draco tried to run with her, they'd be hunted down. Voldemort could find him through the Dark Mark. They'd be hunted from refuge to refuge, and the travel would be more and more difficult for her as the pregnancy progressed. Assuming she didn't eventually miscarry from the stress of living on the run, there would later be a baby they were trying to flee with.