“No more.” Draco made his voice a touch harsher. “No more explanations. No more talking.” He aimed a meaningful glare at Ginny. “…It can wait.” He aimed another glare at George and Fred Weasley, who had joined them. “…All of it can wait. I’m taking her out of here and seeing to her wounds. None of you are following us.”
No one argued.
Not even Henry Granger seemed inclined to argue with him, although he and Jean exchanged looks, and Jean quirked an eyebrow, her lips twitching expressively. Whatever she thought of Draco’s words, or even his arm wrapped tightly around her daughter’s waist, she kept that thought to herself.
At the end of the rather awkward-feeling pause that followed his words, Draco saw Arthur Weasley lean to Henry’s ear, and murmur something Draco only just caught.
“…Need to do the same for your wife, you know… maybe you could let me handle it, Jean, while the kids are seen to by their potions professor… I have quite a lot of experience with broken bones and other nasty wounds myself, given our seven children…”
Draco thought it was pretty slick of the Weasley clan elder to phrase it that way.
Appeal to them as a fellow parent, without seeming to cave to Draco outright.
Anyway, he wasn’t wrong.
Jean Granger still had the remnants of that broken jaw, and the several hits he’d seen her get while she was in the dungeons. Since those remnants bothered him each and every time he looked at them, he was glad the Weasley patriarch had offered to heal her. He had no doubt he would be skilled in healing magic of that kind, either.
Still, he would ask Snape about potions he might have for all of the Grangers when he found him, not just Hermione.
Strangely, Arthur Weasley, who Draco’d been raised to more or less hate, ended up being the most comforting, matter-of-fact, and calm presence inside the stone house. Molly Weasley looked at Draco with outright hostility, and stared at his arm around Hermione like she’d like to have snatched Hermione physically away from him and whisked her off to their family hovel. She glared between them with so much anger in her eyes, Draco didn’t look at her any more than he had to. The last thing he wanted was to get into it with Hermione’s semi-adoptive wizarding family, and not only because Weaselbee the Wanker was a card-carrying member.
Arthur Weasley, however, seemed to accept them in some way.
At the very least, he didn’t let his disapproval show.
It was odd to think the same adult wizard had gotten in a near-fistfight with Lucius in Flourish and Blotts a day before Draco’s second year began at Hogwarts. He didn’t seem to be anything like spoiling for a fight now. He didn’t seem to be anything like his youngest son, either, not in temperament nor intelligence. His magic was certainly nothing like Weaselbee’s. Draco found he almost liked the Weasley patriarch, whereas he still had a strong urge to break something on his youngest son, and maybe not fix it next time.
“Hush,” Hermione scolded softly.
“No one can hear me but you,” he reminded her, equally soft.
She grunted, as if reluctantly conceding his point.
He wrapped his arm even more firmly around her waist, partly as a message that they were definitely leaving the sitting room this time, and maybe as a second, slightly more vicious message to Molly Weasley. He didn’t wait for reactions to either message. He knew how likely it was that someone might raise another topic Hermione would want to discuss, or pose a question Hermione would definitely want the answers for.
He was worried about her parents, but he trusted Weasley Senior to handle that.
He was more worried about her.
He did give Henry and Jean final appraising looks, until he saw Jean smile at him warmly and give him an encouraging nod.
They’d decided to let Draco care for their daughter.
He felt touched by that.
It also worried him.
He hadn’t worried so much until he saw that look in Jean’s eyes. He wasn’t used to adults placing any kind of trust in him, certainly not with their kids. Oddly, he hadn’t worried about fucking that up until he saw the trust there in the first place.
It was too late to change course now, though.
He purposefully half-guided, half-carried her out of the sitting room.
He guided her determinedly away from the cluster of wizards and witches.
He walked her more slowly down the hall and deeper into the stone house.
Arthur already told him where the potions lab was located, where the study would be, the kitchen, the loo, the one full bath downstairs with shower and tub, Snape’s bedroom, the two doors that led into the back gardens, and the stairs that led up to the other bedrooms and a second shower, bath, and loo.
Like Arthur surmised, Draco was looking for Snape.
He wanted his godfather mostly because he wanted his help with Hermione, but he also wanted to find Snape for another reason––as much as the thought disturbed him on some level––out of concern for his godfather’s own wellbeing. Snape and Nott had been set upon a lot harder than he’d realized when he snapped at the elder wizard outside.
According to Theo, less than a minute after they’d passed through the Nott ancestral wards, Snape got hit with a vicious type of acid curse that rendered his wand arm useless, ate through large parts of his leg on the same side, and nearly killed him before Nott managed to get him out of there.
Between them, they’d managed to stop the curse before it did kill him… first with healing spells Snape taught Nott to perform, then with a collection of potions once Nott got him back inside the stone house… but Theo thought it unlikely Snape would ever walk without a limp again, and even more unlikely he’d regain use of his left arm or hand.
Nott himself got hit by a particularly nasty crucio from Goyle’s father in mid-apparition, but otherwise appeared to be unharmed. Because he wore the Dark Mark, he’d been completely unable to go back and help Hermione, Pansy, or Draco himself, and would’ve been even if Snape hadn’t been near death.
Theo had never been factored into that part of the plan, anyway.
They’d known all along he would draw Death Eaters wherever he appeared, so once they’d used that as a distraction to allow Hermione, Pansy, and Snape to get inside the manor, he was supposed to leave the wards for good.
His only role after that had been to contact the Order if anything went horribly wrong, or if he got signaled via the gold coin to do so by Hermione or Snape. He was also there as possible backup to quickly apparate one or more of the others out, if Dobby couldn’t for some reason. Since Nott could enter and leave the wards at will, he’d likely be able to get at least one of them out if he knew exactly where to find them.
Nott explained everything––mostly to Hermione––while Draco listened.
The younger Slytherin only occasionally dropped comments about the original plan to Draco himself, and to the group of wizards and witches who gathered around to listen to him explain how things had gone wrong when they first entered the wards.
His voice and hands still shook as he described casting healing spells on Snape in the forest, struggling with his wand from the effects of the crucio he’d absorbed, and the trouble they’d had with the dark wizards guarding Dumbledore’s house, since Snape could no longer hide Theo’s Dark Mark from view, or help Theo fight them off.
Theo managed to disillusion Snape and himself before they made that last apparition. He landed them as close to the back gate as possible, knocked one Death Eater out, disarmed another, and dragged Snape inside the wards just in time.
Arthur Weasley took over speaking after Nott.
He explained about the polyjuiced wizards who’d taken the Grangers’ place in the Bavarian safe house.
It hadn’t been difficult to determine the truth, not once the Order knew to restrain them for a few hours until their last doses of potion wore off. Aurors found large jugs of pre-brewed polyjuice potion hidden under floorboards of the safe house; they were still investigating how Voldemort’s people managed to get the jugs in there without anyone in the Order knowing, but Artis Bixby, one of the lesser Order members who’d been helping guard the safe houses, had disappeared as well, so it was now believed he’d either been polyjuiced himself, or turned traitor.
Weasley Senior seemed to think that was a detail.
He also seemed certain it had been Lucius who made the switch, and that he’d done so well before the Easter break. From piecing together what he’d learned from Hermione’s actual parents since they’d arrived at the cottage, he now believed they’d been taken not long after Draco and Hermione began to live together at Hogwarts.
Which Draco found disturbingly believable.
Unfortunately, the two wizards impersonating the Grangers got away.
While under questioning at the safe house in Bavaria, they managed to break free with the use of a hidden third wand, which one of them had tucked in a boot. Both wizards got outside the wards and apparated away before they could be stopped, and before their identities had been verified. Aurors from the D.M.L.E., along with aurors from the German Ministry of Magick in Berlin, were looking for them now.
Draco hadn’t recognized the descriptions of either.
He didn’t much care, frankly.
All of that felt out of his hands now.
Presumably that was the Ministry’s problem now, and the Order’s.
It hit him, somewhere in listening to them talk, that he was verging on some kind of emotional and adrenaline crash himself. A flicker of guilt followed when he realized he wanted out of the sitting room for himself as much as for Hermione.
He needed to get the fuck out of there before he crashed for real.
Too many things had knocked into him: too fast, and harder than he’d pretended.
He had to make mental lists just to make sense of the scope of it all, everything he still hadn’t managed to feel anything at all about yet. He struggled to make those things feel real now. He struggled to decide what he felt about any of it. He struggled, and wondered what was wrong with him that most of what he felt was numb.
His father dead.
Roland dead.
Voldemort dead.
His mother possibly dead… or gone from him, likely forever, in any case.
Crabbe senior, dead… Goyle senior, dead… Greg, dead… not to mention Avery and Dolohov and Mulciber and Macnair and countless other Death Eaters and friends of his father’s he’d known since he was a child.
Aunt Bella, dead.
Greyback dead… again, nothing but a benefit to wizarding and humankind, but the memory of it still kept flashing behind his eyes for some reason.
Countless other faces crowded and washed through the dark spaces behind his eyes, but he couldn’t identify a lot of them, and those he could, he barely recognized. Some subconscious area of his mind must have recorded more of what was there than what he could consciously remember seeing. He couldn’t even be certain which of them he’d killed.
It struck him suddenly there’d likely be an inquiry.
Someone, surely, would want to know how all those people died.
They’d want to know what happened at Nott Manor.
They’d likely want someone to blame.
They’d definitely ask questions––about him, about his magic, about how those wards came down. They might want to know how it happened, who could have done it.
They might start looking at him.
They might start looking at Hermione.
But even that wasn’t something he could use to snap his mind back to more practical thoughts, or even ground himself in reality. The idea of being sent to Azkaban, or having to make a run for it, or even being killed outright for what he was… it all remained too abstract and distant to feel convincingly real.
He’d seen Hermione dead.
That had been real.
Really, that was the last thing he remembered that had shattered every remaining wall in him. He’d nearly felt dead himself for those few minutes.
He’d seen her sprawled on that sitting room floor: bleeding from hitting her head, her throat covered in welts and bruises from Voldemort’s fingers, her hands and fingers curled loosely, her face slack and deathly white, a savage, ragged cut on her arm, her gold-flecked eyes open and empty, her long, wild curls matted with blood and spread out on the stone… and he’d known she was dead. He’d known it.
He’d fucking felt it.
It was probably good he hadn’t been able to act on that knowledge.
He would have eventually, but for those few seconds, he simply couldn’t.
He’d stared down at her, and he’d seen his life end, just like that.
Thank Salazar she’d come back before he’d been capable of doing anything more than letting the knowledge reach him. He’d only had time to stare down at her, to feel the reality of her death, and to be utterly paralyzed by it. It felt like she’d been gone for… Godric, he didn’t even know how long it had felt. It was strange to realize it had been Lupin’s hand on his arm, Lupin squeezing his bicep gently, that caused Draco’s eyes to click back into focus.
When he’d glanced up at his old Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, however, Lupin hadn’t been looking at him. He’d been staring at Hermione. Draco thought at first the shock he saw in Lupin’s eyes was due to her death… then Lupin glanced at him long enough to jerk his chin to get Draco to look at Hermione, too.
He’d watched the blood rush back to her face in disbelief.
He’d seen her eyes open to stare dazedly up at the sky above Nott Manor.
He’d been over her, and then…
Nothing. That blank, numbness descended, and he hadn’t been able to think or feel anything. He hadn’t been able to react the way he wanted to about anything.
It was like he remained stuck in that half-dead emptiness.
Then Potter was climbing to his feet and Draco could only think about getting out of there, getting Hermione the fuck out of there, before something worse happened, before his father rose from the dead or someone worse tried to take her away from him again. He’d barely managed to ask Potter to look for his mum. He’d felt more than a flicker of guilt at that, at entrusting his mother to Potter’s hands rather than staying to look for her himself… but he couldn’t seem to control that impulse either.
He had to get Hermione the fuck out of there.
He couldn’t leave her alone, not even for a minute.
Everything still felt far away. Everything still felt unreal.
Was this shock? Was he in shock?
Should he really be thinking about getting Hermione out of the country right now? Because that’s all he could fucking think about. Someone would report him to the authorities, wouldn’t they? Now that they knew what he was? Some do-gooder in the Order would decide he needed to be put down like a rabid dog. Then what would happen to Hermione? Would she be safe without him?
Would she even leave with him, if he asked?
What about her parents?
Her fingers tightened, and that time he noticed.
For the first time, he realized her good hand had wrapped around his where he held her around the waist, and she’d been squeezing him for a while, likely trying to get him out of the tightening spiral into which his mind had fallen. As he brought her carefully down the corridor, he realized he was shaking. It felt like he’d held himself together all that time with muggle glue and spellotape, and now he falling the fuck apart.
“Hey.” Her voice was soft. “You’re not falling apart. What you’re feeling is normal. As normal as anything can be, given what you just went through.” She squeezed his hand again, and he felt more of the warmth she was trying to impart. “I’d be a lot more worried about you if you weren’t reacting. And yes, you’re probably in shock. We’ll go to Snape, and he’ll help us with that. We’ll both probably need to sleep for about thirty hours, and eat a week’s worth of food. We’ll take showers first. We’ll have some cocoa and you’ll talk to your friends. Then we’ll sleep and when we wake up, we’ll do regular, normal things for a while. Things that will let you absorb all of this at a normal speed.”
“They’ll want to question us––” he muttered.
“No.”
She gripped him tighter.
“They don’t get to question us,” she said, a touch colder. “They don’t get to question you. We were the victims in this. You were kidnapped and nearly killed by your deranged father. Voldemort forced you to take the Dark Mark, then chained you to a wall and collared you. There are plenty of witnesses to that. My parents can testify to that. Dobby. And we have no idea how all those people died. They killed each other. Voldemort killed at least some of them… I saw him do it. The wards got blown out by a dark ritual that backfired… they were high on poisoned wine and lost their minds––”
“Hermione––” he began, exasperated.
“We’ll kick everyone you don’t want here out tomorrow,” she added, firm. “If we have to, we’ll go hide somewhere, but only if our friends pester us so much it’s the only way we can have any peace. I’m not letting anyone near you, Draco. Not from the Ministry, or the Order, or anywhere else. No one will tell anyone what you are. I’ll obliviate them, if I have to. I’ll obliviate Kingsley and Lupin if I have to. I’ll obliviate anyone who knows… anyone apart from us. Even Harry.”
He fought to let her words in.
He nodded jerkily, but felt his face warm a little anyway.
“We’re not going to have to make a run for it––” she began.
“You don’t know that,” he blurted, unable to help it.
“––My parents won’t have to make a run for it, either,” she continued, as if he hadn’t spoken. “And no one is putting you in Azkaban. No one is doing anything to you––”
“You can’t know that,” he muttered stubbornly.
He was trying, though.
He tried to feel her words, to feel her certainty… to let it in.
It struck him that a part of him felt lost.
It was humiliating to realize that at least part of that feeling came from feeling unmoored because his father was gone.
His father had controlled every aspect of his life for so long––
“Not every aspect,” Hermione reminded him quietly. “In fact, he never controlled the most important ones. He never broke you, Draco. You never turned into what––”
But Draco was already shaking his head.
“He did break me,” he insisted. “For a long time, he did.”
She opened her mouth as if to argue the point, then seemed to decide against it and closed it again. He wondered if it was because she was tired, or because she thought she had no right to argue, or if she thought it wouldn’t do any good, or if she’d decided he might be right. Then he realized he was overthinking every reaction of hers right then, and that, more than anything, he desperately wanted a shower and then to be alone with her.
He clenched his jaw and decided not to speak at all.
He might have imagined it, but he thought she gripped his hand even tighter after that.
They found Snape in the kitchen.
Draco had gotten really quiet, and Hermione tried hard not to read what he was thinking from his magic. His magic itself had gotten quieter too, which might mean he was occluding again, whether consciously or not.
Snape looked utterly exhausted.
His face looked thinner and paler than Hermione had ever seen it, and he looked strangely small seated at a kitchen chair and looking out the window, a cup of tea and the remainder of a bowl of his tasteless porridge on the table in front of him. She couldn’t help but wrinkle her nose at the bowl.
“You should have had Molly cook you something,” she scolded. “She’s an excellent cook. And literally anything would be better than that gruel you torture yourself with.”
He turned his head slowly, and stared at her with his near-black eyes.
His lip curled slightly, but from the glassiness of his eyes, she suspected he was less restraining himself from answering her back, and more too tired to manage it.
After a brief, unreadable glance in her direction, Draco maneuvered her over to the chair across from Snape, and eased her down into it.
He walked to the kitchen stove without a word, shook the kettle, then washed it out and filled it with water before he set it on a burner. He went through cabinets to find a frying pan. He set that on a different burner, and turned both burners on.
Hermione watched him, half in a daze as he started to pull things out of the refrigerator: eggs, butter, sausages, tomatoes, potatoes, mushrooms. She watched him, more bewildered than anything, then looked back at Snape.
He was looking at her broken hand, which rested on the top of the table.
He held his wand in his right hand then, which she happened to know wasn’t his dominant one. Before she could say anything, he muttered a spell, and she let out a shocked yelp. The spell forced all of the splintered and broken bones in her hand to rearrange themselves back into roughly what and where they were supposed to be. The most shocking part was the piece of bone that stuck out of the top sliding backwards into her skin before it reformed in the spot where it was supposed to be.
It hurt. The bones themselves hurt with a shockingly intense burning, aching sensation as the pieces reformed and merged.
But then the pain faded abruptly.
It went so fast, she was still panting for a few seconds after it stopped… as much in shock at the memory of the pain as even the pain itself.
Then she was just looking down at her hand, opening and closing her fingers.
“Thanks,” she said. She took a shaky breath, and watched the bones and tendons move the way they were supposed to.
Snape leaned forward clumsily. She startled and leaned back, shocked to see him move so unlike his usual stealthy grace. He lurched even more clumsily to his feet. He made the legs of his chair screech when he shoved them back.
“Where are you going?” she asked, bewildered.
Snape already had his cane in his good hand, and was limping and leaning on it as he staggered out of the room.
She looked over at Draco, but he only shrugged.
She thought for certain Snape had left the room for good… or at least until he was reasonably sure she and Draco were no longer in it.
She heard the thump of the cane what couldn’t have been more than five or six minutes later, however, and then he was limping back into the room, past where she sat with her back towards the door, and into the window seat against the opposite wall.
He sat down heavily, and she saw he had the satchel she remembered him carrying back when Draco was hurt at Hogwarts.
Without saying a word, he dumped it on the shelf that formed part of the window seat, set his cane down next to it, and then drew his wand.
He looked at her, his face pinched now, lined with pain, and even more pale.
“Professor,” she began, unable to disguise the worry in her voice. “Perhaps you’d better––”
“Where else?” he asked coldly. He aimed the wand towards her neck with a lazy wave. “I can see that well enough… but what else is there? What can’t I see? You needed Draco’s help to even walk in here, so I assume there’s more.”
Before Hermione could blink past her surprise, Draco walked up and snatched Snape’s bowl off the table.
“I was still eating that––”
“No, you weren’t. And Hermione’s right. It’s disgusting.”
Without pause, he answered his godfather’s question next, his voice casual.
“Her knees are injured,” he said. “The Dark Lord used a sticking charm on her, to keep her immobile on the floor… but then he was throttling her, and he put all of his weight on her. I’m not great at diagnostic spells…”
He walked back to the sink, dumped the bowl in the porcelain basin, and picked up a wooden spatula. Hermione stared at him, but he didn’t glance at her, or alter his tone.
“…but it looked to me like the tendons were damaged. Maybe the knee-joint, too. She also got thrown onto her head and back… hard… after getting a rebound hit from a killing curse, so she probably has a concussion or even a cracked skull. Her arm was cut open for the blood ritual. Her throat and windpipe are bruised, as you can see. She had blood all over her when I first found her, and looked like she’d been punched in the face at least once. Her arms were wrenched back in a restraining spell. I imagine they hurt her in other ways she hasn’t told me about, but those were the ones I witnessed.”
Snape didn’t bother to look at him, or even to nod.
He cast a spell on her she didn’t catch––mostly because he murmured the words below his breath. Once he had, reproductions of her leg and skull appeared in green and orange light and hovered over the kitchen table. She watched as Snape rotated them in a number of different directions, then as he flicked his wand and the diagnostic rippled back into nothing.
He cast a few spells rapidly after that, one after the other, and she winced and gasped at a few of those as they burned the back of her head and neck and even her jaw. Another set of spells stretched and pulled things in her knees and thighs and ankles and then at something in her lower back, jerking it sideways with a hard wrench.
At the end of it, she could have cried.
First in shock, and then in a relief so profound, she wanted to hug him.
She’d been keeping the pain back with an effort, ever since Draco helped her up to her feet in front of the Nott Manor fireplace. Now, for the first time since, that horrible burning, grinding pain she’d felt, especially in her head and back, had vanished.
It was just… gone.
Tears ran down her face as the pain continued to not be there. She wiped them away with the back of her hand, but didn’t feel particularly embarrassed. She was too relieved to be embarrassed. Or maybe she was just past that, with both of them.
She expected Snape to make some sharp remark, out of discomfort if nothing else, but he didn’t. He set his wand down on the window sill and proceeded to go through his bag, one-handed.
He set a very familiar-looking metal tub on the top of the table, then a number of other bottles… some of which looked familiar, and some of which didn’t.
He motioned towards her with his good hand.
She stared at him blankly.
“Your arm, Ms. Granger…” he said, some of the sneer back in his voice.
Realizing what he meant, she jumped. Then, jerkily, she stretched out the arm the Death Eaters cut to collect her blood. She watched, half-fascinated and half wincing, as Snape pulled out an even more familiar-looking vial and began applying drops of the dittany tincture inside to the cut along her inner arm.
She hissed a little with the first three or four.
She saw smoke rise and winced, although she couldn’t have said why.
Her arm seemed to go numb after the first few drops, and she simply watched as he went over the deep cut a few more times. The skin knit entirely back together by the end, so that she couldn’t even see a scar––not even a small, silver scar, like the ones Draco had.
The cut had been nearly to the bone.
She wondered that she hadn’t lost more blood.
“You did lose blood… a lot of blood,” Draco grunted from over by the stove.
She glanced at him, and saw him using the frying plan to try and angle an egg on top of a piece of toast. He carefully placed the second egg in the skillet on top of another piece of bread. The eggs looked a bit mangled, and he’d definitely broken at least one of the yolks, but she found herself impressed, regardless.
These Slytherin boys and their cooking skills were a little baffling.
Had Draco hid in the kitchens as a boy, like Theo had?
Snape re-corked the vial of dittany and placed it on the table. He pushed the tin of what had to be essence of murtlap salve closer to her, making it clear he didn’t intend to apply it himself.
“You can use some of the dittany on Mr. Malfoy’s neck, once he’s done playing house elf,” Snape said, a touch coldly. “I doubt my hands are steady enough.”
She carefully took the tin of essence of murtlap and pried open the lid.
She dug out a small amount of salve and smoothed it over the cut on her arm. As soon as the thick mixture touched her skin, she sighed a bit, unable to help herself.
“Godric, that does feel heavenly,” she muttered.
“Told you,” Draco said, sounding a little smug.
Her arm wasn’t a magical wound; it was from a dagger. Even so, the salve felt better than it had any right to feel.
“There’s no magic in that cut?” Draco directed the question at Snape, even though he obviously plucked it out of her thoughts. “You’re certain?”
“I never said there wasn’t,” Snape said coldly.
“So is there?” Draco pressed.
“A marginal amount. Perhaps.”
He still sounded annoyed, but Hermione found herself peering at her professor, anyway. The truth was, his voice sounded weak. She watched as he leaned back in his chair, his skin looking even more pale than it had. For the first time, she’d stopped actively suppressing her own pain enough to truly worry about him.
Draco didn’t say anything at first to Snape’s vague assertion of magic in her wound. After he’d finished with the plates and began bringing them over to the table, Snape spoke again, in a more tired, gruff, subdued voice.
“It’s minor,” he said, his voice less annoyed. “It shouldn’t do any harm. It wasn’t necessary magic… meaning, it’s not what made the cuts… likely just remnants from the blade used, or possibly a side-effect of the blood magic.” He gave Draco a sharp look as his godson set a plate of eggs, sausage and toast in front of him. “I assume there was blood magic? That looked like it came from a blood-letting knife. A ritual knife.”
“There was,” Draco conceded. “And it did.”
Snape set a second, smaller tub on the table. “Bruise paste,” he said, sounding annoyed again. “I suggest you apply the paste liberally to your neck.”
She didn’t hesitate that time, but reached over the table and drew the tin towards her. She pried that one open too, and began rubbing the paste all over her throat. Again, it felt positively heavenly. She felt her throat slowly start to relax.
“I have a healing potion… but you should take it after you eat,” Snape muttered next. “Your voice sounds off.” He sniffed, his words carefully indifferent. “I assume whoever tried to strangle you to death harmed your throat… the potion I have should take care of it.”
“Thanks,” Hermione said, hiding a smile more for him than herself.
Draco glanced over from the stove, hesitated. “Her magic is her own again, though?” he asked finally. “She’s got it all back, I mean?”
Snape frowned. He turned and cocked his head slightly as he looked over Hermione. “I have no idea how to answer either of those questions. You would first have to tell me what you mean. And why you would ask me something so preposterous.”
His derisive tone didn’t faze Draco at all.
“Voldemort tried to steal her magic,” Draco explained, his own voice still bland, still matter-of-fact. “After I avada’d him for trying to murder her with his bare hands, he possessed her, then from inside Hermione’s body, the Dark Lord tried to avada Potter, and it rebounded onto her and killed both of them. I’m still not sure how, but they came back to life a few minutes later. Hermione was herself again, and Potter was babbling about a magic rock and Dumbledore’s wand…”
Snape turned his head, and now he was staring at Hermione.
His eyes looked briefly astonished, then slowly grew indifferent once more.
For a long moment, she didn’t think he’d say anything.
Then he sniffed, and his words came out sounding close to his old contemptuous drawl. “Sounds like a perfectly rational response to Ms. Granger to me,” he said flatly. “I have had at least a few of those impulses myself.”
Draco grunted, and Hermione hid another smile, unable to help it.
“Do I want to hear this story?” Snape asked next, directing the question at her that time. He sounded almost wary. “In detail, I mean? Because I suspect that I do not.”
“Probably not,” Hermione admitted.
Draco dumped a second plate in front of Hermione, then a third in front of the empty third chair, which sat closest to the window. He walked up to Hermione first and motioned for her to tilt back her head. She complied, and he leaned over her and peered at her neck and throat, obviously inspecting Snape’s work. He picked up her hand that had been broken next, examined it, then looked at where her arm had been cut.
“Does it pass you high standards?” Snape snipped.
“It’s flawless,” Draco said, no trace of guile in his voice. “Perfect.”
He kissed the back of her hand.
He put it down quickly, as if he only just realized what he’d done, or maybe who he’d done it in front of. He walked around Hermione’s chair and dumped his weight so that his back was to the window. Hermione couldn’t help noticing how exhausted he looked. He looked blank still, and now she was starting to worry about him again, too.
She’d let him eat, then attend to his neck.
She’d thought he would eat––immediately, that is––given he’d made such a point of cooking, but he was looking at Snape instead, his gaze narrow in that way that made her think he was probably looking at Snape’s magical aura, not his physical body.
“Can I see the arm?” Draco asked.
“No,” Snape said, a little peevishly.
Draco sighed, and picked up his fork.
He still appeared to be focused on Snape, however.
Hermione watched, curious. She could feel something happening through her magic, but she had no idea what it was. She could tell it had something to do with Snape’s arm.
Snape himself didn’t seem to notice at first.
He was looking down at the plate in front of him and frowning. “Why would I want two breakfasts?” he muttered.
Then, as if stung, he flinched, and stared at Draco.
“What are you doing?” he hissed.
Draco didn’t look bothered by his reaction in the slightest.
He continued to concentrate, until Snape actually gripped his arm in his hand, as if trying to shield it from Draco’s magic. He looked like he was trying to decide if he should stand up, but in the end just remained huddled there around his own arm, glaring at Draco like he thought his godson was definitely trying to kill him, or perhaps remove the arm entirely.
Her breakfast forgotten, Hermione watched both of them, silent.
Abruptly, the heat and intensity around both of them dimmed.
Draco frowned.
“I could probably do more, if you’d give me some spells,” he muttered, stabbing his fork into a piece of fried potato. “I used the ones you’ve already taught me… and a few I picked up from books in the Restricted Section when I was looking for my condition with Granger… and one I got from Salazar Slytherin’s biography in that dungeon, of all places, which was utterly useless, by the way, in getting that damned collar off, but had a surprising number of other spells, including some for healing dark magical wounds…”
He said all of it in a low mutter, like he was annoyed.
He never quite looked up, or met Snape’s gaze.
Or hers, for that matter.
Snape was staring down at his arm, which had been tightly bound in black cloth and inside a tight black sling she suspected had been arranged that way so he wouldn’t bang his arm into anything… which suggested it still pained him. His face looked less pale now, although he still looked as exhausted as Draco, if not more so. He stared down at his arm, a blank look on his face, like he wasn’t sure he wanted to know what lived inside the sling.
In the end, curiosity seemed to get the better of him.
Draco was eating eggs and sausage by then, wolfing down the breakfast he’d made like he hadn’t eaten in days. Hermione wondered if he hadn’t… but then he was nudging her, with his magic as much as the hand of his that squeezed her arm, and she started to eat her eggs, too.
They were half-cold by then, and mangled with yolk all over her plate from where he’d broken it. The toast was only warm, but the sausage was still hot and just the tiniest bit burnt, and every single bite tasted utterly amazing.
She found herself eating as quickly as Draco.
Unlike her husband, however, her eyes never left Snape.
Snape reached up cautiously with his unbound hand and arm, and loosened the strap Nott had likely tied around his shoulder and back. He loosened it enough that he could lower his arm down to his lap, and then he began carefully tugging the sling off his arm, rather than tugging his arm out of the sling. He got the limb free of the thicker black cloth, and Hermione winced when she saw the blood-soaked bandage underneath.
The blood mostly looked dry though, she noted.
He started to unwrap the bindings, keeping most of his arm and the bandages under the table. It took him a few minutes to get it all off, even though he was nearly yanking at them by the end.
“Is it better?” Draco asked casually. He kept his eyes carefully down at his plate. “If it is, I can do your leg after I eat… after that, I need to sleep.”
Snape didn’t speak at first.
He didn’t look up from where he stared down at his arm, his face and black eyes blank.
When his dark eyes rose, pinkish spots had appeared at the top of his high cheekbones.
“How am I supposed to explain this?” he snapped testily.
Hermione flinched in surprise at his tone, then rolled her eyes and stifled a snort. At the same time, her smile might have widened a bit when she looked down at her plate. Snape already looked better, and now he sounded better, too.
Well, he sounded more like himself, at least.
Draco remained unfazed.
“Not my problem,” he said.
He pointedly ignored Snape’s glare, and went back to eating his eggs and toast.