Blinding
Hermione doesn’t know how much time has passed when she wakes again.
Her entire body feels fatigued, as though she’s run multiple marathons one right after the other. Her head feels fuzzy, her mouth dry. It’s nighttime when she wakes, forcing her eyes open, her body resisting the action completely. When she sees a figure sitting at the foot of her bed, she draws in a ragged gasp and pushes herself into a sitting position. The movements are uncoordinated and sluggish.
“Relax,” Malfoy says, reaching across the bed to put a hand on her legs. “Granger, relax. It’s just me.”
“Doesn’t help,” Hermione mumbles. Her throat feels dry and rough, a remnant of the screaming. Malfoy’s mouth twitches and he sighs heavily, scrubbing his hand down his face.
“Do I need to dose you with another Dreamless Sleep?”
Hermione pauses to think. That doesn’t sound like a half bad idea. Malfoy stands and rolls his eyes. He paces slightly, like he always does when he’s agitated and trying to think.
“I don’t want to fight,” she murmurs, settling back against the pillows. “Too tired. You’re too annoying.”
Hermione’s sure it’s just the remnants of whatever potions Malfoy and Snape forced down her throat, but she hears the ghost of Malfoy’s laugh. He turns and walks to the head of her bed, kneeling and resting his chin against his folded arms. He’s appraising her with eyes that are wider and more open than she’s ever seen from him. She just stares, resisting the impulse to draw away from him completely.
“Granger,” he starts slowly, one of his hands picking at a stray thread on the pillowcase, “it’s my fault that we’ve been so at odds. I know that. I need you to know that things aren’t what they seem, and I need you to trust me.”
Hermione can’t help the laugh that bubbles out of her. Her eyes widen incredulously.
“Trust you—you had me dragged here and you’ve held me captive. You’ve threatened to kill my parents—you hunted them down, Malfoy! You handed me to Voldemort to have me tortured for information—”
“I didn’t want that,” Malfoy snarls, his eyes freezing over and flashing. Hermione can see him clenching his teeth together. “I tried to stop it. I never wanted that for you, I told you—”
“Yes, you told me you’re sorry,” Hermione cuts back, twisting in bed so she’s facing him. “You told me I wouldn’t be harmed here and it’s another of your lies. I’m not angry about that, Malfoy, because it’s hardly a surprise.”
For just a moment, he looks as though all the air has gone from his lungs. His eyebrows are drawn together and he sucks against his cheeks. Malfoy takes a deep breath, and the veil of ice descends over him again.
Hermione presses on before he can speak. “You are erratic and confusing. Mostly, you’re downright bloody unpleasant to be around. You have done everything to manipulate me into helping you. I do not trust you, and I never will. As a matter of fact, you may as well hand me to Voldemort and have him kill me if you’re too weak to do it yourself. I’d rather be killed than hand Harry straight to him.”
Malfoy’s hands clench into fists. She may have done it now. He stands and shakes his head. She’s too angry to be afraid; yes, she heard him while she was drugged half to sleep. She felt him murmuring apologies into her hair, felt his fingers on hers when he thought she was asleep. None of it changes anything. It’s just another way for him to manipulate the softness inside of her, most of which died with Harry. How well he’s managed it is a testament to the horrid person he is rather than the opposite.
“You spent seventh year hunting horcruxes,” Malfoy declares, looking at her as though she should find this some great revelation. She shakes her head and glares back at him, because it isn’t. Every horcrux they destroyed, Voldemort felt. Voldemort knew, which means Malfoy did. “You missed one.”
This is a revelation. Hermione blinks and shakes her head.
“No, we didn’t,” she says. “The last one was the snake, she was killed at the Battle of Hogwarts. There were seven.”
Malfoy regards her impassively. “You missed one, Granger.”
Hermione leans forward, venom roiling through her. “I don’t know what you’re getting at and I don’t care. I mean it. You will have to kill me.”
Malfoy takes a deep, irritable breath and shakes his head. “I know you’re a Gryffindor, so the complete and utter idiocy is boilerplate, but you are Hermione Granger. Please, take a moment to think.”
“I have,” she hisses. “And I think you’re insane.”
Malfoy barks a laugh, high-pitched and nearly hysterical. His hands slam down on her bed and he leans in close to her. Hermione grits her teeth; if this is the point they’ve reached in the conversation, it means he will storm out and leave her alone soon. He just needs another little nudge.
“I ask you to rub some of those plentiful brain cells together and what you deduce is that a madman is a madman?” Malfoy shakes his head and tuts. “What a shame.”
Hermione leans in close, her nose nearly brushing his. It’s an intimate closeness; there’s a flash of confusion on his face, but he doesn’t pull away.
“You look just like your father, did you know that? When I hit him and he had blood on his face, all I could think about was the way you’d cried like a baby after I hit you in third year.”
Malfoy’s nostrils flare and she can feel the anger boiling just under his skin. When he pushes himself roughly off the bed, Hermione flinches and expects to feel his hand collide with her face. Malfoy doesn’t even bother to leave through the door, he simply apparates out of the room.
When he’s gone, Hermione lets out a deep breath and settles back against the bed. She really should’ve convinced him to give her another Dreamless Sleep.
As much as she doesn’t want to admit it, what Malfoy said does get the gears in her brain turning. A missed Horcrux. The feeling is absolutely hopeless; it was hard enough to find the ones they did manage to destroy, and they relied heavily on Harry’s Occlumency. Voldemort said himself as a boy that his intention was to create seven: the ring, the locket, the Diadem, the cup, the journal, Nagini, and a piece of his soul within himself. All intelligence pointed to seven Horcruxes.
Malfoy said things weren’t as they seemed. Hermione’s under no illusions about that; all she and Malfoy have done is lie to each other, try to twist the other into doing their bidding in one way or another. Was he searching for this hypothetical last Horcrux? Why would his search include Harry?
Hermione lays back down in bed, rubbing her temples. Everything is aching dully. She doesn’t want to think about Malfoy’s convoluted way of presenting information, she wants to go to bed. As she rolls onto her back and stares at the ceiling, she quickly resigns herself to the fact that it’s impossible.
She catalogs what she knows so far. Assuming Malfoy is telling the truth—an ill-advised leap of faith though it is—Harry is alive, Malfoy is trying to find him under orders from Voldemort, and somehow that’s all related to finding an allegedly missed Horcrux. Perhaps Harry found out about the last Horcrux and that’s why he didn’t face Voldemort at Hogwarts. Perhaps he wasn’t taken by a member of the Order and sheltered at all… perhaps he ran because he knew he’d die for nothing. He didn’t stand a chance of surviving the Killing Curse a second time in his life.
Something clicks in Hermione’s brain and she sits up, her hand slapping over her mouth. Surviving the Killing Curse. When Voldemort attempted to kill Harry as a baby, the curse rebounded and reduced Voldemort to nothing. It left the scar on Harry’s forehead. The theory is that the failed curse is the reason Harry and Voldemort had such pertinent things in common—wand cores, Parseltongue, their Occlumency connection. But if a piece of Voldemort’s soul split at the time the curse rebounded, that means…
Harry’s the lost Horcrux.
Malfoy knows. That’s what he was trying to tell her.
But then… if Harry’s a Horcrux—the last Horcrux—Voldemort would want him alive, want him close. If Harry dies, so does Voldemort. She thinks of the prophecy—neither can survive while the other lives.
Her feet are on the ground before she can process this realization and she’s running through the halls of the Manor. She halts at Malfoy’s door—barely—and pounds on it wildly with a flat hand. After a moment that he doesn’t answer, she pounds harder. Malfoy finally swings the door open, looking shocked, and she pushes her way into his bedroom.
Malfoy closes the bedroom door and turns to look at her, his eyebrows nearly disappearing into his hairline.
“Granger—”
“It’s Harry, isn’t it?” She’s out of breath.
Malfoy bites his bottom lip and is silent for a moment. He nods.
“You’re trying to kill him.” Her voice breaks. She feels a sense of horrified desperation. She thinks of Malfoy sitting in the chair at the corner of her room after her panic attack; that’s what he’d said. That he’s trying to kill him. Malfoy just watches her for a moment, a quizzical look on his face as though he’s trying to parse what she means. “Voldemort. You’re trying to kill Voldemort.”
“Yes,” he murmurs, nodding again.
Tears well in Hermione’s eyes and her throat aches as she tries to swallow them.
“And you have to find Harry,” she rationalizes, her voice faltering again. She feels a moment away from breaking entirely. All of her hope, all of her relief at discovering that Harry is alive—if all of this is true, it’s going to be ripped away from her just as soon as she’d begun to believe it.
“Yes,” is all Malfoy says. His face is a mask of sympathy. There’s something molten in his eyes, as though he truly pities what this means for Hermione. She feels breathless and she puts her hands over her face, turning away from him. A sob breaks free from her chest. It’s unfair. It’s all so goddamn unfair.
She feels hands wrap around her shoulders and she whips around, shoving her palms hard against Malfoy’s chest. She screams as she does, an explosion of her rage, and something somewhere shatters. Malfoy grabs her wrists and holds them close to her chest with one hand, using his free arm to pull her close to his chest. She tries without avail to slam her hands against him again, sobbing wildly, tears completely obscuring her vision, her foot attempting to find purchase with Malfoy’s shins. She’s devastated and enraged. The months of imprisonment, the beatings, the torture, grieving her best friend who wasn’t even dead, being manipulated by Malfoy, kissing him and enjoying it—it’s all bubbling over in a volcanic eruption. In the end, Malfoy is larger and stronger, and she’s subdued against his chest. She wails and her legs fail to support her weight. Malfoy lowers her slowly to the ground.
“I hate you,” she howls against his chest, finding no strength to push him away. “I hate you.”
“I do too,” he says grimly, his hand raising to rest over her head. “I really do too.”