When Monsters Falter
Hermione’s lungs burn, each breath dragging through her chest like shards of glass, raw and unrelenting. The stench of fire and blood coats the air, thick enough to taste, seeping into her skin like a second existence. Her legs threaten collapse with every step, the muscles quivering under the weight of exhaustion, but stopping isn’t an option. Not here. Not now. The battle has blurred the edges of time itself, dissolving hours into moments, moments into eternity. War does not allow for clarity. Only survival. Only the next spell, the next scream, the next heartbeat hammering like a war drum beneath her ribs.
Somewhere behind her, a structure collapses, stone and timber groaning as they surrender to destruction. Screams fracture the night, splitting the darkness into something unrecognizable, something violent and wrong. Her ears ring with the echo of spellfire, the roar of the dying, the guttural incantations of curses meant to shatter and maim. And yet, beneath it all, she can hear her own pulse, rapid and insistent, a reminder that she is still here, still fighting, still bleeding into the same ground where so many have already fallen.
She barely hears the curse before it slices through the air toward her, a hiss of death that should have been her end. Instinct grips her before thought can, wrenching her wand up in a desperate parry. The force of the impact rattles her bones, sends her stumbling back, boots slipping in the mud thick with ash and blood. Her vision tunnels, black creeping in at the edges, disoriented, vulnerable—too slow. She is too slow.
The Death Eater is already there, already on her. His presence looms, wand poised at her chest, lips curling around the syllables of a curse she will not survive. In that moment, time does not slow; it does not grant her the mercy of reflection. There is no room for fear, only the cold certainty of an ending she cannot escape. Her heartbeat slams against her ribs, a wild thing trapped in its cage, and she braces herself for the inevitable.
And then—
A flash of green. A hollow thud. And he is gone.
The body crumples gracelessly at her feet, as lifeless as the others scattered across the battlefield, another husk emptied of breath, of cruelty, of existence. Hermione exhales sharply, unsteady, staggering back as if distance could dissolve the horror. Her breath rasps against her throat, and when she looks up, Draco is standing there.
His wand is still raised, the last remnants of the Killing Curse dissipating into the night like smoke from a dying flame. The world shrinks, the battle reduced to a distant hum of carnage, and for one impossible second, there is only him. He is breathing hard, his chest rising and falling beneath robes untorn and unbloodied, silver eyes reflecting something she cannot name. His hand does not tremble.
He has just saved her life.
And he looks furious about it.
"What the fuck is wrong with you?" His voice cuts through the chaos, sharp as a blade. "Are you trying to get yourself killed?"
Hermione bristles, shock snapping into irritation. "Oh, excuse me for not anticipating that particular homicidal maniac," she spits, chest heaving. "I had it under control."
Draco lets out a bark of laughter, bitter and biting. “Oh, really? Is that why you were just standing there, waiting to be slaughtered?” His voice is low, dangerous. “If you’re going to be this fucking reckless, Granger, you might as well hand yourself over and save everyone the trouble.”
Her grip tightens around her wand. "I don’t need a lecture from you, Malfoy. If you’re so concerned about my well-being, maybe you should focus on your own side. Or do they not have enough bodies to step over yet?"
His jaw clenches, something dangerous flickering in his expression, but then his gaze drops—just for a second. And then he stills.
"You’re bleeding."
Hermione frowns, but when she follows his gaze, she sees it: blood trickling from a deep gash along her arm, staining the fabric of her robes a dark, seeping red. She hadn’t even noticed. Not until now.
Draco exhales, something shifting in his face—something almost like hesitation, almost like concern—before it vanishes beneath the hardened mask he always wears. Without another word, he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small glass vial, the potion inside glinting in the dim light.
“Take it.”
“No.”
His grip tightens around the vial. His teeth grind. “Take it.”
The words scrape out, raw and forceful, but something passes between them then—something unspoken, something that doesn’t belong in the midst of war and death. It’s a whisper of memory, a ghost of something softer, something lost. A reminder of stolen moments, of fleeting touches, of things neither of them dared to name.
And suddenly, she sees him. Not the boy who spat insults in corridors. Not the Death Eater in black robes. Just Draco.
“Why are you doing this?” she asks, her voice quieter now.
A muscle feathers in his jaw, his grip tightening around the vial for just a second. “Because if anyone’s going to kill you, Granger, it sure as hell isn’t going to be him.”
Her breath catches. A silent understanding settles between them.—an understanding that has nothing to do with sides, or war, or the bodies lying cold around them. It's something far more dangerous.
Another explosion shatters the moment, the air thick with flying debris. Draco shoves the vial into her hand, his fingers brushing hers for a fraction of a second—too brief, too much.
Both of them turn away from each other, both gripping their wands tighter, both returning to the battle—without a second’s hesitation, without a single thought that the other might use this moment of vulnerability to strike and end it once and for all.
Because that was never going to happen. Not between them. Not like this.
One truth remains, sharp-edged and impossible to ignore: Draco Malfoy just saved her life.
And she doesn’t know what to do with that.
It shouldn’t mean anything. It should be just another moment swallowed by the chaos of war, another nameless act buried beneath the wreckage of survival. It shouldn’t carve itself into her like a wound, raw and festering beneath her skin, refusing to heal. But it does. It lingers, curling in the hollow of her chest, pressing against the fragile walls of everything she thought she knew.
The battlefield does not permit debts. It does not acknowledge sentiment. It grinds all things down to the same inevitable truths—live, kill, die, repeat. There is no space for kindness, for hesitation, for the ghost of a hand brushing against hers and leaving something behind that she cannot name.
But this isn’t that.
This is something else, something tangled in old warpaths and whispered histories, in years of stolen glances in dimly lit corridors, of hands brushing too long over borrowed books, of tension so thick it swallowed them whole. It is woven from the memory of hushed voices in the dead of night, of a pull neither of them ever dared to name, of something that had never quite been allowed to live and yet had never truly died. It is a phantom, an echo of a past too complicated to claim, lingering between them even now, when everything should be simpler. When they should be enemies.
But the truth is, they never really were. Not in the way the world had always assumed. Not in the way they had pretended.
Draco Malfoy should be nothing to her.
And yet, here he is, standing at the edge of something neither of them understands, a ghost in smoke and fire, both of them caught in the space between what they were and whatever they are now.
The vial in her palm is warm where his fingers brushed hers, an imprint of a moment too brief to be real, too long to be forgotten. She wants to drop it, let the earth swallow it whole and pretend none of this ever happened. But she doesn’t. She can’t.
Because she saw it—just for a second.
The flicker of hesitation in his eyes. The way his fury cracked, just slightly, before he forced it back into something sharp, something safe. The way his fingers lingered, the weight of his presence like something caught in her ribs.
He saved her, and not out of strategy, not out of obligation. Not even out of some misplaced sense of old superiority.
No, this was personal.
That terrifies her more than the battle, more than the blood staining her robes, more than the bodies littering the ground around her.
She forces herself forward, back into the war that does not care for moments like these, back into the fire that does not burn for things left unsaid. But she carries it with her. The knowledge. The truth.
Draco Malfoy saved her life.