Idle Worship

"I don't need my magic to fucking murder you Malfoy, don't think I won't!" Hermione threw the plate like a frisbee and it shattered against the wall just a few inches from his head. Hermione gripped the side of the bed frame with both hands, which she had tipped on its side and dragged in front of her like a barricade. Initially she had erected the temporary wall so that she didn't have to look at him any more, and it was a serendipitous coincidence that it doubled as a break wall for flying tablewares.

Draco popped up from behind his own bed-barricade, hair tousled and cheeks flushed from shouting.

"You need to stop talking about things you don't know anything about." He ducked in time to dodge the mug she hurled straight for his head. It smashed like fireworks on the rock face and rained down over him. 

"Just because you invented a few good potions and decided to stop being a raging bigot doesn't mean you're a good person!" Hermione punctuated the statement with another plate, this time aimed at the bed frame. "Fuck a truce! While we were in the fucking trenches, just trying to survive, you and your fucking friends were running around murdering people and hosting dinner parties." Hermione shocked even herself with just how malicious she sounded, and in that moment, she truly believed that she could murder Malfoy with nothing but her bare hands. 

Draco used both hands to hurl his bed out of the way, sending it skidding across the barren earth and clamouring off to the side. He stalked towards Hermione, and she was acutely reminded of the Malfoy she had always known. The hateful boy who had watched her suffer. He was entirely unguarded, she had all of the dishes and was still crouched behind her bed frame, but he approached her confidently. His eyes were glazed over, like he was somewhere far away, nowhere good. His voice was pure ice when he spoke, pointer finger raised and aimed directly at her face.

"I've never killed anyone. And don't you dare talk about my friends. You don't know them." He was close enough. Hermione could wrap both hands around his neck and squeeze until his face turned blue and his eyeballs popped out. Instead, she balled her hands into two hard fists and looked him right in the eye.  He was breathing heavily and was thrumming with rage. Hermione couldn't pin down what she was feeling, only that she couldn't move and her stomach started folding in on itself. 

"How am I supposed to know anything if you refuse to tell me." Hermione whispered, every syllable deliberately slow and acerbic. 

Draco broke the contact and walked back to where he had thrown his bed aside, righting it and brushing off the dust. He straightened up and spoke to the wall. 

"Fine. No more throwing dishes. You will listen. You will not speak a word against my friends. And you will believe me, because I give you my word that I'm telling you the truth." Draco turned around calmly, face schooled into artificial disinterest. Hermione rose slowly from her crouched position and schooled her own features. She stepped around the mess, kicking aside a pile of ceramic shards with the toe of her shoe. She walked right past him to start a pot of coffee, and she heard him drag a chair out from the kitchen table behind her. 

They were silent until Hermione returned with the steaming espresso. A lick of shame crept over her when she had to reach behind her overturned bed for two mugs. Draco didn't react, just sat ramrod straight with his hands clasped in front of him on the table. Hermione placed a cup next in front of him before she sat down and wrapped her hands around her own. He nodded once in thanks and took a sip. It was always the perfect temperature.

Hermione held her breath until Draco finally spoke.

“By the time we were marked, Bella had climbed high enough in Voldemort’s ranks that he was often... distracted. She kept him busy, which kept him blind. We could get away with more than while we were in school." Draco paused. He and Hermione both knew what he had done. What he was forced to do as penance for his father's failures.

"At the end of the day, it was Pansy’s mother that got us out.” Hermione furrowed her brow.

“What do you mean out?” Draco didn't meet her eyes. He looked right through her, over her shoulder. Like he was talking to a ghost that sat behind her.

“For the past four years, I’ve been confined to the Parkinson Estate. I haven’t left, seen anyone. Other than Pansy and Theo.” Draco turned to face her for just a second, still with that faraway look. Hermione's eyes widened, like she could read the subtext if she opened them wide enough.

Four years.

“Sabine concocted an elaborate rouse of lost artifacts on the estate. She told Voldemort that there may be some weapons hidden there. The wards on the estate are extensive, yielding only to direct members of the bloodline. In this case, Pansy. Having Pansy in the house protected the rest of us from the wards.”

 
Hermione did not know Pansy's mother, but she was admittedly impressed.

 
“There was a similar mission conducted at the Nott Estate. It was extremely lucrative. I’m sure that’s where Sabine got the idea, and why it worked as well as it did. Theo was included to identify and handle the dark artifacts we were to find.”

 
Hermione never would have imagined that Sabine Parkinson would have had so much influence, especially when it came to Voldemort himself. These weren't the sort of things that made it into the Prophet. She had never been able to wrap her head around the idea of sitting across the table from Voldemort to discuss strategy or brainstorm ideas, like they often did across the kitchen table at Grimmauld Place. Draco took a sip from his mug and set it back on the table.

“I was marked before they were, and being from my family, I was always held to a higher standard. I was sent along to…” He fished for the right word. “Supervise.” 

Hermione shot him an exasperated look, to which he protested.

“I’m well aware of how stupid that sounds, Granger. But remember, this assignment was entirely fabricated by Pansy’s mother, right down to my involvement. She knew that if she suggested sending someone to supervise, Voldemort would send me. I recognize that it's ridiculous, but he truly held me in a higher esteem than the others based solely on my lineage." Draco shook his head. "Pansy, Blaise and Theo were able to get away with far more than I ever could. There were certain things that no one, not even my mother, could protect me from.” 

 
“And what about Blaise?” Hermione asked. She was glad that Draco had brought him up, otherwise she would have had to inadvertently admit to remembering who his closest friends were.

The look on Draco’s face told Hermione that something was wrong. 

“He was supposed to come with us.” Draco looked away. “Bella took Blaise.”

Hermione felt rocks drop in her stomach. 

"What do you mean, she took him?" Hermione asked quietly.  Draco looked down into his lap. 

"Things... started to unravel a bit once Voldemort realised that his Horcruxes had been discovered. Bellatrix had always been his right hand, but things changed. She was running meetings, making decisions. She arranged a marriage between Blaise's mother and Antonin Dolohov."

Hermione gasped. There were bad men. There were Death Eaters. And then there was Antonin Dolohov. 

"Blaise agreed to make an Unbreakable Vow with Bellatrix in exchange for his mother's freedom. Bellatrix accepted, but on the condition that she would be the one to write the vow. Blaise agreed to it." Hermione was immediately overwhelmed with dread. An Unbreakable Vow was a fickle thing in the first place. But one written by Bellatrix? Draco didn't go on.

"What was the vow?" Hermione whispered. 

"That Blaise would answer to her for the next six years." Draco gritted his teeth and looked away. "A year for each of Mrs. Zabini's previous husbands." Draco balled his hands into fists, muscles in his arms cording. "Bella's words, not mine." Draco seethed. 

He knew better than most that though the sins of the father were not those of the son, they were often the ones to bear the burdens of them. For all its riches, Slytherin house also seemed home to more orphans than the other houses. Children neglected in the name of the same status that they claimed made them superior. Hermione had never thought about it too hard, but the war had made things apparent to her. She watched Death Eaters slain and imprisoned , put some of them down herself, leaving their heirs to stand alone in the marble foyers and lush gardens that had once felt like home. Hermione couldn't imagine the manors and estates of the Sacred Twenty-Eight felt much like home to anyone, anymore. Wondered if they ever had. 

"What does she make him do?" Hermione asked, quieter still, she wondered if he could even hear her. 

"I don't know." Draco whispered back. He raked a hand through his hair. "She took him the day before we all left for the Parkinson Estate. We had no means of communication in or out, couldn't risk the chance that someone would come across a message from us and question why our supposedly lucrative endeavor had turned up nothing. We depended on everyone being so caught up in Bella's chaos that they forgot about us. And they did." She could feel her fury dissolving with every word he spoke. It wounded her pride to admit, even to herself, that she had been wrong.

"I'm sorry. About all of it." Hermione said instead, and Draco nodded solemnly.

"Thank you." He whispered back.

"Do you want to break some shit with me?" Hermione asked, and he raised an eyebrow when he looked up at her.  "I promise I won't be aiming for you this time. I think that we both have more than a few reasons to be angry. Breaking shit helps." Draco was biting back what almost looked like a smile. Almost.

"As long as we spare two mugs. I don't think either of us would survive very long down here without the coffee."

"As if I would ever deprive us of coffee. It's like you don't know me at all." Hermione said dramatically, like she was acting for a period drama, draped over the back of a gossip bench.

"I'll figure you out eventually." Draco drawled, though it lacked the bite that tended to be there even when he was joking. She chuckled lighlty and shook her head, finding that a smile had crept its way onto her lips. 

"I can't wait to see you try."

Neck craned back as she paced, she circled the empty space like she could make a pattern appear in the rock face if she looked hard enough. 

"What if I stood on that table and climbed up on your shoulders?" Hermione suggested like it was breakfast, like it was something they did often. Draco looked up from his cup of coffee and raised an eyebrow at her, thoroughly unimpressed.

"Granger, what in Merlin's name makes you think that I would let you sit on my shoulders, even if there were a reason to? Try again. I won't indulge."

"Oh yes you will, Draco Malfoy." Hermione turned around, scolding him with a finger like a dagger. "You may be content to sip coffee and sit here until we die, but I'll be damned if I kept Harry and Ron alive for as long as I did only to give up now.  In no universe do we die down here. Now stand up, and lift me." Hermione huffed, clomping her way up onto the table and tapping her foot impatiently. 

Draco craned his neck to look up at her, pupils all the way up into his brow.  Her returning gaze was sharp.

"You're not going to give this up, are you?" Draco drawled. Merlin, if someone dipped his past-self into a pensieve and showed him this memory, he would have had them examined by a mind healer. Alas.

"I think you know the answer to that."  Hermione said, unflinching. 

"And what is the objective of this endeavor, exactly?" 

"I want to make sure we're not missing anything. I don't think we've inspected the walls thoroughly enough, what if there's some way we can escape? I know there's probably nothing we can do, but until we can know for sure, I won't give up completely. Not ever."

Draco made a point to emphasize his annoyed huff, but a disgruntled "fine" was unmistakable in the grumbling. He stood, positioning himself so that Hermione could swing one leg over his shoulder. He reached behind to help her bring her other leg around. Any cussing was done benignly and under-the-breath, and then they were settled.

"Alright. You want to check out the walls?" Draco asked, knowing that the sooner they got this over with, the sooner he would be able to eat some toast and stare at the kitchen table until the wood grain made his eyes lose focus. 

"Yes, just in case there's anything we've been missing."

Hermione found herself in a perpetual state of unrest, unable to make heads or tails of what she was supposed to be doing. What if this was some kind of test? There was nothing finite to suggest it, but there was nothing on the contrary, either. What if they overlooked something, something critical, something in the shape of a door or a window or anything to take them away from this place. What if this was some sort of fucking Truman Show, not that Draco would have any idea wha that was, and everyone they knew was watching them; helplessly smashing fists against the glass, open mouths with no screams coming out, begging them to see what seems so obvious to them because they know to look for it. 

But the counterpart to that, the uglier thought, was that they really were trapped. That someone put them there. That they wouldn't leave until they were let out. That they should just drink their damn coffee and eat their fucking toast and throw dishes and talk about the things they never wanted to and sit at the kitchen table just to hold on to every false iteration of normalcy that they could.  She liked having the answer to things, always had. But she didn't know what to do now, and she didn't have anywhere to go to find the answer she sought. 

The press of her hand on the cool stone drew her out of the toxic recesses of her mind. She could feel Draco's hands wrapped around the front of her legs and the rock biting into her hand, reminding her that this was all real. As Draco walked around the perimeter of the cave, Hermione asked for him to press one of his hands up higher, too, in case there was something hidden in the same way as the kitchen. 

Draco didn't feel anything. Hermione couldn't see anything, just rock that looked the same and a skylight that never got any closer. Just light that waned too quick on the days she needed it and lingered for too long on the days that she wished she could just pretend that none of it was happening. 

"Anything?" Draco asked, and Hermione could have wept with the force of her frustration. She didn't though. She swallowed the lump in her throat and felt it burn in her belly, all rage and dissappointment and screams she never let leave her mouth.

"Nothing."

"I'll help you down, yeah?" Draco said, and he couldn't keep himself from sounding gentle. They were both so damn tired. He might have been better at hiding it, but he felt just as lost as Granger. They had their beds, the bath, the loo behind it, the table and chairs, the sink, the dishes, the coffee pot, the knives and toast. The Vanishing Cabinet. The clothes on their backs. The pulp left from the books had disappeared while they slept, in the same way that their clothes always turned up clean and folded if they left them on the floor. 

Draco grabbed Hermione by the waist, holding her to his chest as she untangled her legs and slithered down from her station. The way his arms were wrapped around her was so much like an embrace that Hermione couldn't take it, he felt so human, he was so human and so was she, but she felt so fractured. She fisted both hands into the front of his shirt and grit her teeth as she buried her face in his chest. His arms stayed wrapped around her, and she felt the infinitesimal way they tightened when she pressed herself into him. 

"I feel like I'm going fucking crazy." Hermione whispered, like she was confessing to a crime. 

"You're not crazy, Granger." Draco muttered into her hair.

"I can't lose it, Draco. I can't.  What am I good for if I can't figure this out." 

"I feel like I'm losing it too, you know." Draco whispered. "But we'll be okay. Whether you figure it out or not. That's not on you, Granger. I'm not sure if it's really on either of us at this point. I just don't know."

"What are we going to do?" Hermione was so tired.

"We're going to drink a cup of coffee. And you're going to tell me the dumbest thing you've ever had to talk Potter and Weasley out of doing. And then I'm going to tell you the most ridiculous occasions Theo has come up with just for a reason to celebrate. And then we'll sleep, and we'll try again tomorrow."

"Merlin, Theodore, what is it now? National Fizzing Whizzbee Day? The five-hundredth anniversary of the day Ogden's was founded? Did someone finally agree to date you?" Blaise drawled like he couldn't have been less interested, but he was pouring himself a tumbler of Firewhisky and didn't seem to be measuring. Oh, it was going to be a good night. 

"We're celebrating, Blaise. There doesn't need to be a reason. However, it does happen to be International Pygmy Puff Day, so later we will be discussing what color we would. be if we were a pygmy puff. Drink up, you miserable git." Theo came up next to Blaise at the bar-cart, wrapping an arm around him so he could upend the contents of the crystal glass at his lips into his mouth. "That's the spirit!" Theo cheered. Blaise rolled his eyes, but there was no mistaking the gesture for anything other than relentless fondness.

Draco and Pansy came into the sitting room, already engrossed in a conversation about some potion they were working on. Blaise wasn't interested enough to interject, and Theo, despite being truly quite intelligent, couldn't brew a potion to save his life and therefore understood every fourth word of the conversation at most. 

Blaise poured a drink for everyone, splitting the lot with Theo and carrying them over to the coffee table. 

Without preamble, Theo threw a hideous, melon-sized throw pillow (velvet, beads, predating women's rights) at Draco's head. Before he had lifted his drink, of course, Theo wasn't a savage. Theo hid a laugh in his cheek when Draco looked up at him, exasperated. Supremely irritated, absolutely resigned.  At some point, you just have to accept that the toddler is going to draw on the walls, and always with a permanent marker. 

"To Pansy!" Theo toasted. "For breaking my fucking heart." The group raised their glasses, Pansy included, sans Draco. 

"What the fuck, Theo." Draco muttered. That was callous, even for him. 

"And to Blaise!" Pansy cheered, met by a chorus of whooping. Draco was still in stasis, trying to get Theo to meet his eye. "For signing his life away to dear Aunt Bella." Draco was going to be sick. 

His head swam as another chorus of glasses clinking and rowdy cheers erupted around him. He tried to stand, but Blaise put a hand on his thigh, keeping him seated next to Pansy on the chaise. 

"And to Draco," Blaise said, looking Draco dead in the eye. "For putting us all here in the first place."

He could feel it all. Every syllable of their cries, the cacophony of voices he had always known and the blood rushing in his ears and glass breaking and screams.

Screaming his name. Who was screaming?

He was screaming, but so was Hermione. Granger? She was on her knees, straddling him, knuckles bunched up in the skin at his shoulders, shaking him so desperately he knew she had been at it for a while. He sucked in a deep, gasping breath, coming back to himself somewhat. She sunk back onto her heels, hovering over him while she dashed stray tears from her cheeks. He cleared his throat.

"I'm, uh..." He cleared his throat again, running a hand down his face. "I'm sorry about that. I apologize for waking you." He admitted awkwardly. This week had done a lot to dissolve what he would have previously considered normal boundaries, but that didn't mean the idea of Hermione Granger being privy to his more vulnerable moments would ever feel... normal. 

"Come off it, you don't have anything to apologize for." Her gentle scolding put him at ease. The long-suffering shake of her head made him feel safe. She didn't pity him, thank Merlin, the last thing he wanted was her pity. She just understood. And that was more than he had ever hoped to have, from anyone, really, but especially not from her. 

She swung her leg around to climb off him, settling with her knees tucked to her chest. He pulled himself up onto his elbows so they were side by side. The twin sized bed was narrow, the outside of her left leg still resting against him even though he was all the way to the edge of the bed. 

"Do you want to talk about it?" Hermione whispered. Draco appreciated her asking, even though they both knew the answer. He scrubbed a hand over his face again. 

"No." Draco whispered, but he did not feel her weight rise from the bed as he had expected it to. He took his hand away from his face to look at her; she had both arms wrapped around her knees and her gazed fixed on some invisible point in the inky black. Head erect, engrossed in something only she could see. She didn't move when he readjusted himself to sit against the wrought iron bed frame that came halfway up his back. 

They just sat, for a bit, in the quiet of understanding. It felt good, just to have her there. Not that he would ever tell her that. When did it start feeling good to have her there? For fucks sake, he would take that to his grave. He didn't want her. But he did need her. He had no illusions about his pride, he was far from humble, but possessed enough humility to admit that he would be much worse off in the cave if he was alone. 

Then he felt her move, felt her lift the blankets and curl up next to him. She didn't speak, didn't look at him, just laid her cheek against his chest and fit herself against him. He peered down to try and catch her eye, but she wasn't looking back at him. He decided to be the one to break the silence. 

"I don't need you to stay."

"Maybe I'm the one who needs to stay." She murmured, just loud enough for him to make it out. Maybe she did need it. But she could see right through him in the dark, and she let him lie.

His heartbeat against her temple lulled her to sleep, and he drifted off to the sound of her breath. Neither of them dreamed.