Marked for Ruin
The note arrived like a whisper in the dark, a silent emissary slipped beneath her door in the fragile hours before dawn. Hermione stirred before she was even fully awake, as though her body, attuned to the shifting undercurrents of war, had already learned to anticipate its weight. She sat up, the dim glow of morning elongating shadows across the wooden floor, her breath still suspended between the realms of sleep and waking. Just beyond the threshold, the parchment waited—small, unassuming, yet charged with quiet urgency.
She reached for it, fingertips skimming the coarse edges before unfolding it with the reverence of someone unearthing an ancient artefact. Coordinates. A time. Nothing more. But it was enough. She understood.
Her movements were precise as she dressed, slipping into the city's subdued hush as though she had always belonged to its quiet, unseen spaces. The air hung damp, thick with the scent of stone and rain-soaked pavement—a stark contrast to the untamed magic of the countryside. London stirred around her, its faceless denizens immersed in the mundane rhythm of their lives, oblivious to the war threading its way beneath their feet, silent, insidious, waiting to strike.
The café was unremarkable, tucked between a laundromat and a bookshop, the kind of place designed to be overlooked. Inside, the mingling scents of burnt coffee and ink-stained newspapers settled into the walls. She ordered tea, fingers wrapping around the ceramic’s warmth as she waited.
A man approached—middle-aged, unremarkable, a figure that could vanish into a crowd without consequence. He neither spoke nor hesitated, merely set a folded slip of parchment on her table before dissolving into the city’s flow.
Hermione unfolded it with steady hands.
An attack. That night.
Not enough time to fully prepare, but enough to brace for impact.
The words pulsed beneath her fingertips, stark in their precision. Each letter a calculated risk. Draco was meticulous. Draco was methodical.
And he was right.
The Order moved swiftly, assembling what defences they could in the scant hours before twilight bled into night. The weight of anticipation coiled thick and heavy in the air. Plans were adjusted, barricades reinforced, spells sharpened. And in the still moments before battle, a single unspoken truth echoed between them: some among them would not live to see another dawn.
Then, as dusk stretched its fingers across the horizon, they came.
The battle unfolded in violent chaos. Spells cracked like thunder, the sky painted in jagged flashes of red and green. The acrid scent of burning earth and charred flesh clung to the air, interwoven with the metallic sting of blood. Shadows twisted and fractured beneath the dim glow of streetlamps, bodies colliding and breaking apart in a deadly waltz. The ground trembled with the force of magic unleashed, a battlefield drenched in the raw desperation of survival. Screams splintered the night—some sharp with agony, others lost before they could fully form.
But they held.
Barely.
When the last Death Eater vanished into the darkness, when the battlefield lay strewn with the wounded and the dead, the Order remained. They had lost too many—but not as many as they would have without the warning.
Victory was never clean. It was measured in who remained. And tonight, they had survived.
Weeks passed before another note arrived.
This time, it led her to a Muggle library. Familiar. Nostalgic. The air inside smelled of old paper and ink, a scent she had once found comforting but now carried the weight of something else—of secrets hidden in plain sight, of knowledge that could damn or save them.
She moved through the aisles with purpose, fingers trailing over spines worn from years of touch. Dust clung to the air in thin, weightless clouds, catching the light as she walked past rows of bookshelves that stood like sentinels, silent witnesses to the knowledge they guarded. The quiet hum of the library wrapped around her, a kind of stillness she had once cherished. It reminded her of late nights in the Hogwarts library, the scratch of quills against parchment, the flicker of candlelight over texts filled with magic and history and secrets waiting to be uncovered.
But there was no comfort here now. Only anticipation, sharp and pressing against her ribs like something solid.
She reached the shelf and let her fingers hover over the spines, finding the one book that had once been a solace to her. It felt strangely poetic that it should now hold something entirely different—something that could shift the course of the war, even if only slightly.
A slip of parchment, thin and unassuming, nestled between the pages like a whisper meant only for her.
Another attack. But this time, not against them. Against those who had refused to kneel. Magical creatures—creatures Voldemort had sought to recruit and who had denied him.
This was different. It wasn’t just battle plans or tactical advantage—it was a warning, an act of defiance against Voldemort’s cruelty. She wondered, fleetingly, if Draco had hesitated before writing this one. If, just for a moment, he had questioned why he was doing this at all.
Or if he had known, without doubt, that he would.
She slipped the parchment into her pocket, taking one last glance at the library around her. The world outside these walls continued, untouched, unknowing. Students bent over their work, lost in studies. A young boy traced the illustrations of a fairytale, lips moving in silent wonder. An elderly man turned a page with delicate precision, as if the words were something sacred.
Life carried on.
And because of this warning, more lives would too.
They arrived just in time.
The air was thick with the scent of damp earth and fire, the heavy mist of an approaching storm pressing against their skin. The creatures—centaurs, a handful of rebellious werewolves, and a clan of winged thestrals—stood in tight formations, bracing for the inevitable. Their eyes flickered with mistrust when the Order appeared, but there was no time to explain.
The first curse split the air like a lightning strike.
Then, chaos.
Hermione barely had time to duck before a jet of sickly green light shot past her head, splintering the tree behind her into a shower of burning wood. The screams of battle erupted around her, the heavy thud of bodies colliding with the forest floor, the sharp metallic tang of blood hanging in the air.
She cast without thinking, instincts taking over. Protego. Expulso. Confringo. The force of her magic sent two Death Eaters sprawling backward, but more took their place.
The creatures fought brutally, magic colliding with claw and steel. The thestrals swooped from above, shrieking as they carried off those who dared to raise a wand against them. Hermione saw one Death Eater ripped from the ground, their terrified scream cut short as the creature disappeared into the sky.
Flashes of red, green, and gold lit up the night, each spell carving another mark into the battlefield. Hermione’s breath came in sharp, ragged bursts as she fought her way forward, her mind a blur of incantations and counter-curses. She could hear Kingsley shouting orders over the chaos, could see Tonks darting between trees, her hair flashing a bright, disorienting white as she took down another opponent.
The tide was turning.
And then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was over.
The remaining Death Eaters fled, disappearing into the darkness, their mission failed. Silence descended, heavy and thick, broken only by the ragged breaths of the survivors.
They had won.
This time, they had saved them all.
The pattern had solidified, revealing a meticulous design—one that was neither erratic nor impulsive, but deliberate in its construction. The notes arrived with methodical precision, their intervals spaced just enough to evade predictability. No owl delivered them, no signature marked their origin. The locations varied, yet a singular thread bound them all—each site was Muggle, each selection calculated.
Hermione found herself questioning how Malfoy had come to know them so intimately.
She envisioned him there—seated beneath the dim fluorescence of a library, his fingers ghosting over pages filled with histories never meant for him. Wandering through a park, the wind raking through his pale hair as he moved unnoticed among those he had been raised to disdain. A world entirely removed from his own, one he had once deemed beneath him, yet now passed through with a quiet anonymity, slipping through its currents unseen.
Did he pause at street corners, observing the effortless choreography of the world around him? An elderly woman scattering breadcrumbs for pigeons, a father hoisting a laughing child onto his shoulders, two teenagers absorbed in something trivial, something utterly unremarkable. Did he linger outside café windows, watching people exist within the simple cadence of their lives—concerned only with missed trains, lukewarm coffee, tangled headphones? Did he wrestle with the notion that a world so vast could persist without ever knowing his name, without bending beneath the weight of his family’s legacy?
Did it unsettle him? Did he recoil at the sight of Muggles moving through their days, oblivious to the war twisting in the margins of their existence? Did it disgust him, knowing that these people—whom he had been taught were lesser—had constructed something so complete, so self-sufficient? Or did it enrage him that their world would endure regardless of the outcome? That their lives would continue, untouched, indifferent to who emerged victorious?
Or did it make him wonder?
Did he ever allow himself to be consumed by the scale of it all? Did he stand on train platforms, watching people stream past him in a blur, feeling something disturbingly akin to envy at the way they belonged so effortlessly? Did he sit on park benches, the scent of damp earth and blooming flowers settling around him, and wonder what it would be like to dissolve into it—to sever himself from expectation, from bloodlines and war, to step into obscurity, into anonymity, into freedom?
Did it tempt him? The notion of disappearing entirely, of surrendering to the vastness of the world and vanishing within it. Leaving behind the war, the suffocating weight of his surname, the history that had been inked into his very existence. Did he ever entertain it—not as a passing thought, but as something dangerously tangible?
Or was it a reckoning? Did each step through these streets feel like an exile, a confrontation with every belief he had once held immutable? Did every breath in this foreign world feel like a quiet betrayal of the boy he had been conditioned to be?
She had no answers.
It was late when she met with Kingsley, the fire carving restless shapes upon the stone walls, its flickering light stretching shadows that ebbed and shifted like the unspoken thoughts crowding her mind. He stood near the hearth, unmoving, his expression a mask of careful deliberation as he listened to her recount the latest success.
“It’s working,” she murmured, fingers tightening around the warmth of her tea, as though it could ground the instability within her. “He has been consistent. Every piece of intelligence he has provided has been precise.”
Kingsley inclined his head, his nod deliberate, measured. “And how does that sit with you?”
She hesitated. Such a simple question, yet it fractured something in her, sending fine cracks through the walls she had constructed around her own certainty. She had arrived prepared to discuss strategy, to refine their approach—but not to examine the implications that reached beyond the battlefield.
“I… I don’t know,” she admitted, her voice quieter now. “It feels unreal. I never thought Malfoy—”
“Would be an asset?” Kingsley supplied, his tone unreadable. “Or that you would allow yourself to trust him?”
She exhaled slowly, her gaze slipping toward the flames. They flickered and swayed, never still, never resolute—just as she was. “Both.”
Kingsley observed her, his scrutiny absent of condemnation but imbued with a weight she could not ignore. “Trust is a precarious thing, Hermione. Misplace it, and it can be fatal. If this unravels—if he is discovered, or if his allegiance wavers—you will both be in greater danger than before. You understand that, don’t you?”
She swallowed against the constriction in her throat. “Yes.”
But she did not say what haunted her most—that the peril was not what unsettled her. It was not the prospect of exposure or treachery that unsettled her bones. It was the quiet, insidious realisation that despite every rational objection, she wanted to trust him.
She wanted to believe that the person who sent those notes, the one who chose her to receive them, was acting on something beyond cold calculation.
And that terrified her more than she dared to admit.
Since Malfoy had begun supplying them with intelligence, she had been less present in the field. It had been six weeks since she had last seen him.
She told herself it was inconsequential. Their arrangement did not necessitate proximity, and whatever existed between them—if it could even be named—was strictly utilitarian. A cipher of clandestine messages and veiled truths, a delicate interplay of risk and necessity. And yet, thoughts of him remained, woven into the quiet moments, lingering at the periphery of her consciousness, slipping through the fractures she refused to acknowledge.
Did he think of her as well? Did his mind, in moments of unguarded solitude, betray him as hers did? Did he ever find himself wondering where she was, if she was safe?
Did he regret it—the warnings, the intelligence, the choices that had inexorably tethered them to one another in ways neither of them had anticipated? Or had he long since excised sentiment from it, reducing their unspoken alliance to something clinical, something pragmatic?
Was she merely another variable in an equation he had yet to resolve, another piece on a board he manoeuvered with strategic detachment? A decision forged not from emotion, but from logic—a calculated risk, a favour strategically deployed, a move in a game whose endgame he had yet to define?
She envisioned him alone in Malfoy Manor, a solitary figure amid its cavernous halls, ensnared by the weight of expectation. Did its grand architecture feel constricting, a prison built from marble and lineage? Did the ghosts of its past press against him, whispering of duty, of legacy, of inevitabilities long written? Or did he still find solace in its cold opulence, in the privilege that had been imprinted upon him since birth, even as it threatened to consume him whole?
She wondered if he lay awake at night, staring into the vastness of the dark, listening to the silence—the same silence that stretched between them. Did he recognise, in those moments before sleep, that on the other side of it, war awaited them both?
And perhaps the most perilous thought of all—the one she refused to grant shape, the one she sought to smother before it could fully form—was the possibility that he did not think of her at all.