“Sit down and drink this,” she instructed as she handed him a potion. “It'll deal with the concussion you have.”
While he was downing it, she rubbed her hands together to warm them and then dipped her fingers into a small jar of paste.
She eyed him thoughtfully for a moment before lightly setting her hand on his bare shoulder.
He nearly jumped out of his skin.
“Relax,” she said, feeling the muscles in his shoulders grow taut beneath her fingers. “It won't sink in well if you're tense.”
Malfoy didn't relax at all.
She rolled her eyes.
She drew her fingers lightly over his shoulder, spreading the paste and letting him get used to the contact. The muscles in his shoulders flinched and twinged slightly. It reminded Hermione of petting a skittish horse.
Of all the contexts in which she had imagined Malfoy eventually half-naked in her presence, healing him had surprisingly not been one of them. But — she could use this to patch things and continue working on her initial strategy.
He was assuredly lonely. He seemed unsettled by physical contact that wasn't either violent or sexual.
She supposed that wasn't surprising. Who was there to be kind to him? By his account his brutal training with Bellatrix had been unimpeded by anyone, even his mother. The thought made her shiver slightly.
Crucioing a sixteen year old to teach him occlumency and then leaving him to pass out from it.
She could use that emptiness. That loneliness. The need for comfort was written into the human psyche. Malfoy might not even be conscious enough of the absence to be defensive. If she awakened that need—
— she'd be in.
Non-sexual physical contact was something she was comfortable with. Touching bodies. Being soothing and comforting. It was, she realised, an unexpected advantage she held over Malfoy. He liked clear lines. She would blur them and then slip through the gaps.
She leaned forward, just slightly, so that her mouth was close to his ear. His skin smelled faintly of salt, along with subtle, biting undertones of oakmoss and the sharp green scent of papyrus.
“This will hurt a bit,” she said softly.
Then she began to knead the muscle in order to force the healing paste deep into the tissue and restore the stretched tendons. If she didn't get it to sink in fully, the damage could become permanent and Malfoy might become prone to getting his shoulder dislocated.
“Fuck,” he groaned. “You are a bitch.”
Her hands stilled for a moment before she resumed.
“The claim has been made before,” she noted quietly.
That response seemed to catch Malfoy slightly off-guard. He subsided and clenched his jaw while she continued. Within a minute she was done but she continued massaging his shoulder. Gently. In a way that was — strictly speaking — not medically necessary.
After an extra minute, she paused with her hands resting lightly on his shoulder.
“I need to finish up with your ribs now. It's easiest if you lie back.”
He sighed, and lay down on the floor. She stuffed his cloak behind his head, and shifted herself around so that she was sitting beside him.
He was staring at her with intense suspicion.
She busied herself with her healing kit, and fished out a large vial of serum. After a quick spell to clean the paste off her hands, she poured the viscous liquid into her palm. She spread it across his arm, side, and chest in small circular motions. She took note of where it vanished fastest, and added an additional layer of serum.
With her free hand she cast a new diagnostic charm. He had a kidney contusion too. She sighed faintly.
“You've got a bruised kidney. I don't have the potion for it with me, so you'll have to go see a healer for that. It's not severe, but it'll hurt for a few days if you don't get it taken care of.”
The bruises on his chest were slowly vanishing beneath her fingers. As they did, the circular motions she was drawing grew gradually slower as she appraised him.
He was — quite attractive. Physically.
He must have a genetic propensity toward low body fat because all the muscles in his torso and arms stood out with stark definition. His whole body was hard and angular, without even a hint of softness. He wasn't a bodybuilder, but he was — fit.
Most men had at least a layer of fat cushioning their flesh before meeting muscle. Despite how strong all the Weasley boys were, their muscle definition was generally somewhat faint beneath their skin. Harry had an eternal propensity toward scrawniness, regardless of his physical condition.
It wasn't surprising, she supposed. Lucius Malfoy was well-built and far from portly, while Narcissa had been thin as a lath.
She studied Malfoy thoughtfully.
“Do you leer at all your patients, or am I special?” Malfoy abruptly drawled.
She started and blushed.
“I wasn't,” she said defensively. “I was just wondering about your body fat ratio.”
“Of course you were,” Malfoy said snorting.
She withdrew her hands.
“You're done,” she told him quietly.
He sat up and rotated his shoulder as he studied her repair work on his ribs. Then he drew his shirt back on, and rebuttoned it quickly.
Hermione looked away and began packing up her healing kit.
“So — how does a person beat a werewolf without killing him?” she inquired.
“A Bombarda Maxima with the wandpoint against his eyeball seems to do the trick,” Malfoy said casually as he picked up his cloak and stood. “But you have to let them get that close. Which obviously did not go entirely as planned.”
She stared at him.
“You blew up his eye?”
“It would have killed a wizard, but werewolves never know when to die.”
“He is most assuredly going to try to kill you,” Hermione told him seriously.
“I'm counting on it,” he said savagely.
She rolled her eyes and stood up.
“So. More werewolves. Any other information?”
He wandlessly conjured a scroll.
“A few new non-lethal curses your Order might deign to use without impugning their precious consciences. Details on a new prison in Cornwall. Also, the Dark Lord is considering making his name into a taboo. You may want to warn all your foolhardy fighters against throwing it around as a demonstration of their Gryffindor courage.”
Hermione accepted it, and he turned to go.
“Thanks for the patch job, Granger.”
He vanished.
Hermione glanced around the shack for a moment before slipping the scroll into her satchel.
She had healed Draco Malfoy.
She had healed loads of people, but somehow healing him felt different.
For a few minutes he hadn't felt like a Death Eater. He had simply been a person who was in pain.
A person.
She wasn't used to thinking about him in that way.
It felt safer to make him impersonal. A concept in her mind.
Death Eater. Murderer. Spy. Target. Tool.
That was how she preferred to categorise him.
Not as an injured person. Not someone who winced from fractured ribs. Not someone so unused to physical touch they flinched away reflexively. Not someone — attractive.
The interaction had appeared to patch the awkwardness; to bridge the space that had formed. But it had also carved away at the “otherness” that she had been able to apply to him; as her enemy, the murderer of Albus Dumbledore. The perspective that enabled her to think unflinchingly about potentially manipulating him into his grave.
Thinking about him as a person made him less of a monster in her mind.
She couldn't allow herself to do that. It awakened the Hermione of Hogwarts, the fourteen year old girl who had knitted hats and started a Society for the Promotion of Elvish Welfare. That righteous teenager would be horrified by how her future self stood rationalising the strategic necessity of intellectually dehumanising Draco Malfoy.