He’s cold. That’s what she’d say of Draco Malfoy if anyone asked; it was neutral and inconspicuous and true. Hermione watched him pick up his shirt from the ground and try to shake out the wrinkles, the muscles of his back pulling beneath his pale skin interrupted by scars and bruises in different phases of healing, and she could feel the pumping of her heart in her chest. In the moments between the heartbeats, she thought of all the possible scenarios and questions and conversations because one of them would let it slip, be too soft, get too protective. She thought that cold described him best: the blond of his hair more white than yellow, silver, except in the amber of twilight, and the clear blue of his eyes that placed her in a second and pinned her almost as thoroughly as his words. Certainly no one would argue with her if she gave that opinion, she couldn’t think of a single time Malfoy hadn’t carried himself without some form of haughtiness that kept the flittering faces of every day life at arm’s length. From the sidelines, even with his family and his friends, there was an air of professionalism, as if he were talking to a loan officer at a bank, an image she could just barely place from an early childhood memory with her father.
Her father, Hermione curled onto her side on the bed roll , warm from the heat of her body, and dismissed the thought before she could linger on it further, felt the suppressed ache of her heart widen.
Yes, “cold” seemed like the best word to use. She couldn’t bear anything stronger, nothing that would slander who he’d become. Not with how everything was falling apart around them. Not with their friends being picked apart and cursed into pieces of themselves (both metaphorically, none of them were the same they once had been at Hogwarts, and literally, she suppressed that thought too of the new curse, flaying Order and Ministry forces alive in the foggy, disorienting forests too close for comfort). Not with the justifiable evils of dark magic and their after-effects ripping and fraying their souls. Not with Harry doing who knows what after his vehement refusal and ultimatum never to use it (at least Ron went with him). Not with the more brutal non-magic (others called them “muggle” – blaming – but she knew that it was more in line with being human than the state of one’s magical ability) methods she wanted to forget about. Especially not with the war that was slogging through mud and grime and the holes in her boots. Merlin, her boots, sitting thinned and holed and worn by the entrance to the tent in some tousled disarray. When she had started calling it the “foyer” jokingly a couple months ago in a mockery of his posh vowels, Malfoy had said it was the closest she’d ever get to a real one at the current rate and quickly hid the pull of sadness at the realization. He started calling it the foyer too shortly after. She wished she could just charm the boots new again.
More than that Hermione wanted to be able to bear the self-imposed distance between them because, even though Malfoy had proven the fabric of his character and made his vows to never call her “mudblood” ever again more than two years ago and denied his family and sworn himself to a cause made of people that generally disliked him after a victory, she knew it would be worse if the camp knew. Somehow their situations had flipped: the mark branding his forearm that had once signified first his inbred sense of blood superiority, then the burden of being an heir to the inheritance of all things hateful, all things murderous, all things evil, now was an unremovable painful stain. It marked him as a traitor to goodness (though she was unsure if any of them could be considered “good” anymore) among their forces, and, despite any change, he was treated as an unforgivable curse. Hermione found an odd sort of irony in this, that his current state had him ostracized in a similar manner to what he had crudely attempted to do to her during school, but she recognized that this could be, at least, more justifiable. She blinked back the last of the sleep pulling at the back of her eyes and watched his quick fingers fasten the buttons of his shirt starting at the collar. He cursed under his breath, softly enough that she could barely hear him, when he noticed he had skipped a hole. She swallowed her laugh at his mild misfortune.
Regardless, Hermione prided herself on never being the sort of person that would reject true repentance , and she understood that the only path forward for the wizarding world would be to accept those that recognized their error back into society rather than the illogical conclusion to simply eradicate half of the wizard population. Furthermore, if she had learned anything over the past five years, it was that this war was being fought upon the dead bodies of child soldiers. While most of them had forgotten it, she was painfully aware that she was only twenty-three and had stopped being able to count the deaths she’d seen on the collective number of her fingers and toes when she turned nineteen. But even more tender, she knew that she was lucky that her childhood had been full of light and wonder. She shifted in the discomfort of the thought and the hardness of the ground pressing up through the bed roll to the bone of her hip.
Most of her friends had been born into the after-effects of the former war, dead or incapacitated parents and missing Death Eaters and fear. Fear. And she wondered how any of them survived it. In her mind, they didn’t; the war had stained all of them (her too with her steep introduction to the magical world). And, yet, Hermione found it startling how few of them realized it. On either side, most of the soldiers were bred into this violence.
Knowing what she did now, Hermione bled when she thought of Draco’s childhood, born into violence and evil and a lost war and the rumors of wars. She would never tell him, of course; his pride would shun her sorrow – calling it pity – even if she meant it more as a sort of righteous anger, validation for striving towards a better future. He would shun that too, see through her Gryffindor bravery to the soft flesh of her soul, and he’d tell her that she wouldn’t be able to bear the price. Her mental image of him was slippery like an eel in her grip, but she resolved to prove this iteration of him in her head wrong nonetheless, and she knew his ambition would have him beside her. Beside her like he had been just a few moments prior… His heat was still radiating, rapidly cooling, in the space next to her. She pressed her face briefly further into her pillow and breathed in the collective of their scents, twined together inseparably.
While the thought of him working beside her did give her an odd sort of pleasurable warmth, Hermione wanted more than anything for him to have the choice not to, for all of them to have a choice. She recognized that, like all truly dark magic, the mark had both costs of the soul and the physical. Draco had traded his desperation for fulfilling familial duty for the desperation to atone, even if he would deny it to her. She saw him rub his arm when he thought she wasn’t looking, noticed the redness from scratching when she breathed in his breath, and, one terrible time, she thought she had seen cuts from him trying to peel it off. She had to excuse herself from conversation to recenter herself among the herb stores and potion ingredients. She would be lying (which she had already to the inventory officer) if she didn’t admit that she’d suppressed a frustrated scream to the point of kicking the corner of a table with a bottle of essence of dittany that toppled over and cracked. She had cried desperately as she tried to save the most of it before it seeped into the ground.
It would be impossible to hide their involvement completely, even if Hermione wished they could sequester off this small piece of the world for their own; something in Malfoy had always called out both the best and the worst of her. Perhaps it was his annoying sense of entitlement, his obnoxious determination, or, more likely, that his cleverness sometimes caught her unawares. Whatever it was, it sharpened her, kept her quicker, keener, and more ruthless. Sometimes she thought he found more joy in the last than he should.
Bile wriggled into her throat when she imagined the reaction to the true nature of their relationship: the anger and outrage and already suppressed pain from the drawn-out conflict distilling against Draco as a natural target. She could imagine their concern for her, a golden girl corrupted, already manifested in the disapproving stitch in Harry’s eyebrows when she’d suggested they changed their tactics. The limitations on her experimental healing techniques in response to the enemy’s ever-evolving cruelty. The negation of all her arguments for the use of dark magic in combat (something more than the charms that had left their forces outnumbered and ill-prepared in the first couple years of the war) as twisted thinking from subtle manipulation. The erasure of all of Malfoy’s atoning and cunning, the victories partially due to his quick thinking, his contribution to their effort, and his personal sacrifices. The reduction of their characters to an evil man expert at infiltrating their strongest members and the foolish girl, once great but naïve, that lost all her direction in the manipulation of a man. The collection of all of these responses would result in an expulsion of Malfoy from their midst (a terrible idea for their effort, but, more so, a severe risk of him being discovered and subjected to whatever the Death Eaters thought best for his crime of desertion; she tried to trust that he would be capable to keep himself safe), an even greater communal malice toward his presence in the camp (she’d watched those that had lost most in this vile war and their hungry, bitter, vengeful eyes following his every movement), or, perhaps what she feared the most, a mockery of a court martial where he would be “killed” publicly (most likely suffering a worse fate behind closed doors). Hermione knew that her ending would be the same, removed from her important position as healer and a high-ranking member of the Order and forced to undergo some form of re-education until she could be relegated into a quiet face of resistance, of “goodness”, of the evil of the enemy. They would hold a drowning man underwater and throw her onto the fire.
“Where did you go, Granger?” Draco had lied back down beside her, face close enough to hers that his whisper was startling with the life of him. He weaved his fingers into the tangled mess of her curls and pressed his palm against her cheek. Hermione was overcome by the softness of gesture and closed her eyes against the wet swelling of tears. He’s cold, she repeated to herself as she remembered the unguarded clarity of his eyes inches away from her, the anxiously straightened mess of his hair, the constant fatigue and adrenaline etched into the lines and dips, the half-straightened wrinkled collar of his shirt that she knew was the source of the small tick of annoyance at the corner of his mouth. She leaned into his warm touch.
“I was thinking you really should work harder at not getting yourself injured. You’re a substantial draw on our resources. I can put you in touch with a specialist if you need help putting one foot in front of the other.” She shored up the fragments of her heart carefully and opened her eyes.
Liar, he called her within the curve of his lips, and he stroked the shell of her ear gently with thumb.
“We could capture heat from how much energy you spend overthinking and use it instead of fires at night.” Humor was pulling at his features, and she narrowed her eyes, preparing for a biting response. He kissed her before she could get it out of her mouth, and it slipped from her grasp as she sighed into him. “I have to go,” he murmured against her lips and began to pull back, knuckles brushing against her cheek. She merely nodded and fixed the collar of his shirt in the back, stained to the point it was hard to remember it had once been a stark expensive white.
“Don’t come back in pieces,” she whispered like prayer, to his back after he’d exited her tent into the dark, into the cold, on another mission she had begged him to let someone else take.