Her Chains, His Mask
The magic binding Hermione’s wrists seared into her skin, raw and unrelenting, but she scarcely registered the pain beyond a distant flicker of awareness. Her head lolled back against the carved wood of the chair, its edges biting into her skull, eyes fluttering shut as exhaustion warred with adrenaline. Her ears, however, remained alert, attuned to the revelry erupting above her like a storm of chaos. The Death Eaters were celebrating. Laughing, drinking, howling with delight. Celebrating her capture. Celebrating her humiliation. Celebrating what they believed was the fall of one of the last pieces of resistance. Celebrating her.
“…The Dark Lord will be pleased,” one voice slurred, thick with intoxicated malice. “Potter’s Mudblood. Just imagine what he'll do with her.”
Laughter followed—harsh, splintered, jagged. It grated against her like shards of glass beneath flesh.
“Maybe we ought to enjoy her first,” rasped another voice, low and serpentine.
Hermione forced her breath to remain steady, each inhale deliberate, mechanical. Panic would serve no purpose here. Fear was useless currency in this room.
“She’s not for us,” a third voice interjected—measured, cool, possessing the authority of one accustomed to obedience. “Malfoy and the Mudblood went to school together, he should have the first crack at her”
Footsteps retreated. A door closed with a decisive click. Silence followed, heavy and oppressive, settling over her like a burial shroud. Then, after an interminable pause, the door creaked open once more.
Draco Malfoy shut the door behind him with almost ritualistic precision, the motion unhurried. As though this were a matter of routine, an errand to be completed. His face betrayed nothing. His gaze swept over her, pausing—briefly, tellingly—on her bound form.
Relief surged in her chest, sudden and disorienting, nearly shattering her composure. He’s going to help me.
But then—like the cold edge of a blade sliding between her ribs—she saw it: the emptiness in his eyes. That chilling detachment. The same mask she had glimpsed once before, in their sixth year, when he had returned to Hogwarts a ghost of himself and distanced himself from her without a word. Night after night, she had waited for him, hope dwindling with each unanswered look toward the darkened corners of the corridor where he'd once appeared. She had clung to the idea that something—anything—might tether him back to her. And when, at last, she had caught his gaze across the Great Hall, it had been the same—distant, indifferent, utterly unreachable. As though he had never known her at all. As though everything that had passed between them had been imagined—a fleeting illusion that dissolved beneath the weight of reality.
The memory struck like a fist to the sternum. No.
No, no, no.
Her breath caught in her throat. No
“Captured so easily, Granger?” he drawled, his voice soft yet full of malice. He advanced slowly, hands clasped behind his back, the image of cool control.
Relief curdled into something sick, acidic. It sat in her stomach like a stone.
“I…” Her voice cracked, fragile. She despised herself for it. “Draco—”
His head tilted slightly, something like amusement flickering in his expression. “Draco?” he repeated, as if the name was unfamiliar coming from her mouth. “How quaint."
He studied her in silence, his gaze dissecting. Then with a quiet scoff, he said, “I heard they caught you by accident. Disappointing. I expected more.”
Her thoughts spun, fevered. Panic clawed at the edges of reason. That fragile sliver of hope dissolved into something cold and bitter.
She met his eyes anyway, forcing defiance to the surface, wearing it like armour. Her pulse thundered, but she smirked—though it felt brittle, like something brittle on her lips, an echo of strength rather than the thing itself. “Even the best can get unlucky.”
He tilted his head, considering. “Unlucky,” he repeated, tasting the word like wine. “Is that what you’re calling it?”
Then he knelt. His knees brushed hers, and suddenly the world narrowed.
“Tell me,” he said, voice almost tender, too quiet to trust. “Was this your strategy? Get caught, hope for a timely rescue?”
Hermione held still, refusing to flinch. She locked her eyes with his, willing her expression to remain neutral, to give nothing away. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her voice came out steadier than she felt, but it didn’t fool her. It certainly wouldn’t fool him.
He laughed then—a low, mirthless sound, the sound of steel dragged across bone. “Liar.”
Something shifted in the air between them, dense and electric, like the static before a storm. Words became irrelevant, stripped of meaning beneath the weight of what passed silently between them. His gaze wasn’t searching for answers; it was hunting for weakness. For betrayal. For confirmation of a truth he didn’t want to name but was already half-convinced of.
He didn’t believe her. Not for a second.
He thought she was playing him—manipulating him the way one might have manipulated a chessboard, always three steps ahead, always hiding something just behind the eyes. He thought this was a game, and he was the mark. That everything between them had been part of a carefully constructed lie, a web she had spun with intention and cruelty. And yet, beneath the suspicion, there was something else too—something raw and flinching, as if he needed her deception to be true, because the alternative would undo him completely.
But there was no trust here. No connection. Nothing left.
He would not save her.
The certainty landed with the weight of a tombstone, heavy and final, crushing any remaining illusions she might have clung to. Her chest constricted, her thoughts splintering into fractured shards of dread. There was no cleverness to rely on now. No strategy. No hope of outwitting the inevitable.
She had known it—deep down, she had known—but hearing it in the coldness of his voice, seeing it in the way he looked at her, it was like the world shifted beneath her feet, leaving her suspended in a void.
This was it. This was what he was choosing to be. This was the man standing before her now.
Think, Hermione. Think.
But her thoughts were a snarl of panic, tangled and fraying at the edges. Every instinct screamed in disarray.
There was only one move to make now. One she’d buried beneath layers of pride and pain and the ache of lost things—of trust broken, of nights once shared in silence, of a boy who’d looked at her like she was more than the world burning down around them.
She had to make him feel it. Make him remember. Make him choose.
Without allowing herself a moment’s hesitation, she leaned forward and kissed him.
For a heartbeat, time ceased. He didn’t move, didn’t respond. Her lips hovered over his, close enough to feel the warmth of his breath, yet met with nothing. She felt the stillness of him, taut and unreadable, as though every muscle in his body had turned to stone. The air between them trembled, thick with tension, brimming with a thousand feelings long buried away—grief, longing, fury. Her heart pounded against her ribs like it was trying to escape, to force him into remembering. But he remained frozen, and she remained suspended in that fragile moment, lips barely brushing his, waiting for the past to breathe life into the present.
Then she kissed him again—fiercer this time, chasing the past, baiting it to resurface.
Memories surged through her like a tidal wave—too fast, too full, too much. Every kiss they had ever shared—tentative, reckless, aching—collided inside her like sparks finding kindling. She remembered the press of his mouth against hers, the tremble in his hands, the way he'd once kissed her like she was both salvation and sin. The quiet intensity of stolen moments, the way time had folded around them, the way he’d looked at her like nothing else existed. The weight of it all—of him—crashed over her: every touch, every word, every unspoken vow.
She couldn’t breathe for it. The flood of memory and emotion dragged her under, pulled her back to a time when they’d still believed in each other—before war, before betrayal. Before everything had gone so irrevocably wrong. She kissed him harder, desperately, as if memory alone could resurrect what they’d lost. As if he could feel it again too. As if she could remind him they had once belonged to something real, something that had mattered.
And suddenly, as if something shattered inside him, he responded.
It was not soft. It was not tender.
It was fire.
As his mouth collided with hers, Hermione was engulfed by a visceral heat—an involuntary ignition of desire she neither anticipated nor realised still lingered within her. The kiss was unrefined, frenetic—a volatile culmination of years of repression and unresolved emotion. It was as though his body, governed by instinct rather than reason, had surged forward, propelled by the mnemonic force of what they had once been. There was no prelude of gentleness, no measured overture—only the raw immediacy of desperation, a ravenous need mirrored in her own response, as if through this act they might reclaim what time and silence had eroded.
His fingers twisted through her hair, tugging her nearer with a desperation that seemed to plead for dissolution—of space, of time, of everything that had fractured and calcified between them. The kiss, though unrelenting and tempestuous, bore within it the spectral imprint of memory: a quiet undercurrent of everything they left behind—and for the briefest moment, it was as though the intervening years had dissolved, and they stood once more in the half-light of Hogwarts, untouched by ruin, tethered only to each other.
Hermione’s heart raced, but it wasn’t just fear that gripped her now. It was something deeper, something dangerous—something she hadn’t thought she still wanted, still longed for. She pulled back, just enough to catch her breath, her forehead resting against his. Her lips were swollen, trembling, and she whispered against the space between them, “Let me go, Draco.”
The world seemed to fall silent again, and she could hear the sound of their breathing, ragged and uneven. In that moment, she could feel everything—his grip on her, his body against hers, the weight of their shared history, the ache of everything they could never have again.
Then, in a voice so soft, it felt like a confession, he whispered, “I can’t.”
The words hit her harder than she expected, as if the brief moment of connection had been nothing more than an illusion, a cruel reminder of what could never be. It was a truth she already knew, but hearing it from him—hearing it in that voice, in the silence that followed—was like a final blow.
She wanted to say something, anything, to hold on to him, but the moment was over.
The door creaked open, and they both jolted apart. A Death Eater peered in, suspicious. “Everything alright, Malfoy?”
Draco straightened. When he spoke again, his voice was cold. Detached. “She’s not going anywhere.”
“You don’t have to do this,” she murmured, her final appeal barely audible, the words disintegrating on her tongue like dust. She needed him to hear the desperation beneath them, to recognise the vestige of hope she still harboured—tenuous, irrational, but alive nonetheless.
Draco’s jaw tightened, the angular line of it stark in the dim light, like something carved from stone. His gaze—glacial, inscrutable—remained locked on her for a breathless moment, as though he were calibrating something within himself, weighing choices already made long before she had spoken. The silence between them grew unbearable and just for an instant, she thought she saw a flicker of sorrow behind his eyes—but it vanished before she could decipher it, swallowed by the impenetrable mask he wore with such brutal ease.
“I do,” he said at last, his voice low and deliberate, each syllable honed with the precision of a blade. The irrevocability of it struck her with the finality of a slammed door, a sentence passed.
His hand twitched at his side, the smallest betrayal of restraint—as if he might reach for her, might shatter the distance between them. But then it fell still, the gesture retracted, cold. He didn’t look at her again. Instead, his gaze slid past her, scanning the room as though trying to flee the weight of memory, of what they had once been. And then, without ceremony, he turned and walked away.
Each step was a rupture in her chest, reverberating through the stillness like the slow toll of a funeral bell. He didn’t look back—not once—not even to offer a final flicker of the boy she had known, the boy she had once believed could be saved. He receded into the shadows of the corridor, and the door shut behind him with a soft, definitive click, a quiet punctuation that shattered her world.
Hermione remained there, motionless in the gloom, as the enormity of what had just occurred enveloped her like a shroud.
This was the end.
He had made his choice. His allegiance, his future, his silence—they were not hers to share. He hadn’t simply walked away; he had discarded her, as though their history were a mere fabrication, as though everything they had built—every glance, every word, every night spent suspended between fear and something perilously close to love—had never existed. There was no longer a place for her in the world he had embraced. And no space for him in the one she would now have to rebuild alone.
The echo of his footsteps receding down the corridor felt like the dying breath of a dream too fragile to survive.
She closed her eyes and let the darkness take her, the full weight of her solitude sinking in.
She was truly alone now. And Draco? He was lost to her.