May 2002
The news regarding Voldemort's absence was the opportunity Moody and Kingsley had been waiting for.
They had been slowly sharing the blueprints, prison rotations, and other information that Malfoy had been supplying the Order with. Laying out plans. Waiting to strike.
They were ready.
Charlie, Harry and Ron had been urging for such an attack for months.
At long last, everything aligned.
It was the biggest coordinated attack ever made by the Resistance. Almost every fighter they had was brought in. They targeted several of the largest, most protected prisons, as well as the curse development division.
Hermione was so stressed leading up to it, she nearly had a nervous breakdown. Stocking the hospital. Brewing massive batches of all the crucial healing potions. Trying to be prepared for anything.
There was a terrifying doubt, deep down, that she might have sent the Resistance to its doom. That it was possibly all a long elaborate trap, laid by Voldemort and Malfoy.
She kept replaying Malfoy's momentary hesitation, wondering whether it had been a sign of betrayal.
Everyone else left and Hermione, Poppy, and a handful of other healers waited nervously in Grimmauld Place. Waiting to hear anything.
Hermione nearly wore a hole in the floor of the foyer with pacing until the bodies started pouring in.
It was a flood of dying and injured people.
Her clothes and hands were drenched in blood, and the entire house was converted into a hospital in order to accommodate everyone.
She barely believed it when she was informed hours later that it had all been a spectacular success.
The Order broke several hundred prisoners free and reduced the prisons and the curse division to rubble as they fled.
At the advice of Severus, the Order raided the labs of the curse division and brought back a huge haul of many rare and incredibly valuable potion ingredients that Hermione had been unable to get her hands on for years; including an entire flagon of Acromantula venom. Hermione nearly wept when Padma Patil handed it to her.
The condition of the survivors brought from the curse division was horrific. They were so horribly tortured and cursed that many were insane. Their bodies destroyed and ravaged beyond repair. There was no recovery for most of them; she could only ease their pain and hope they'd die quickly.
The animosity toward Severus among the younger Order and Resistance members aware of his role in the curse division spiked to an explosive extent. Moody had to exclude Severus from Order meetings in order to maintain peace.
For the uninjured fighters, the coordinated attack was accomplished in less than a day. But for Hermione and anyone else with even a scrap of healer training, it was only the beginning.
They were run ragged trying to care for the inundation of horrifically injured and malnourished people abruptly thrust into their care, in addition to all the injuries sustained during the attack.
They moved the basic injuries out of Grimmauld Place as rapidly as possible, to free beds for the complex curses and wounds that required Hermione's specialised care.
It was weeks before Hermione could be spared to forage or liase. Malfoy had, in the meantime, summoned her urgently twice to retrieve notes he'd left, warning of impending counter-attacks. Voldemort had been enraged by the blow and struck back at the Resistance forcefully. Godric's Hollow was burned to the ground, both the muggle sections and the magical. Voldemort strung together and hung the bones of Lily and James Potter from a gallows for the Order to find when they arrived.
Voldemort scattered vicious attacks across Muggle England; swamping Hermione with a flood of cursed Muggles that she had to stabilise before the Order obliviated them and turned them over to recuperate in Muggle hospitals.
Hermione pulled twenty-four hour hospital shifts with four hour breaks for sleep until her magic gave out entirely toward the end of the third week.
Poppy had dragged her out of the hospital ward and told Moody that if he didn't want Hermione to die or permanently injure her magic, then he and Kingsley would find healers to cover for her.
Hermione suspected that Kingsley took several healers from St Mungo's hostage for the two days when she was recovering. Poppy refused to meet her eyes or answer the question when Hermione had asked who subbed for her.
After nearly a month, things finally calmed slightly.
Hermione had run out of most of the locally foraged potion ingredients. She had headed out. In the lushness of late June she was able to restock most of her supplies quickly before going to meet with Malfoy. She had barely had time to think of him during the last several weeks.
He appeared the moment she stepped through the door. As he did, his expression twisted and he stumbled slightly.
They stared at each other.
"You look awful," he finally said.
"Thanks," she said acerbically.
"What happened?" he inquired.
"The Resistance doesn't have any other healers with my specialty," she said in a tired voice.
She stared at him.
"You look rather awful too," she said, looking him over carefully. It was an extreme understatement.
He glanced down at himself. His face was tense and gaunt, as though he'd lost a dramatic amount of weight. His features were twisted and drawn. His skin was grey and papery looking. He looked as though he hadn't slept at all since Hermione had last seen him.
"You may have noticed the Dark Lord was rather upset about the attacks," he said in a bland voice.
Hermione felt herself pale, and her chest hurt as though she'd been struck. She hadn't even thought-she'd had the information and she'd run with it. She'd worried over the possibility of his betrayal, but she hadn't even paused to think that the legitimacy meant Malfoy might pay for having given it to her.
"What happened?" she demanded, drawing her wand and coming toward him.
"It's fine," he said in a clipped voice.
"What did he do to you?"
"Fuck off, Granger," Malfoy said, grimacing. His fingers spasmed slightly as he drew away from her.
Hermione ignored him and cast a diagnostic spell. He didn't move.
The diagnostic indicated that he'd been extensively crucio'd. Probably right up to the limit, given that he was still showing the aftereffects weeks later. Or perhaps it had happened repeatedly.
There was something else in the diagnostic. She cast a more obscure diagnostic spell to try to identify what it was.
"What-happened to your back?" she demanded finding it difficult to keep her voice steady as she tried to read the information her charm was revealing. It was a mangled blur of Dark Magic and poison; she wasn't even sure how to interpret it.
Malfoy's face tensed slightly.
"The cruciatus curse is such an excellent punishment for failure," he said in a light tone, "but overusing it risks compromising the mind. Sometimes a different, permanent reminder is deemed additionally necessary."
"Take off your shirt," Hermione demanded. She needed to see what had been done or she wouldn't be able to read the results of the diagnostic. The damage it indicated was an extensive combination injury, unlike anything she'd encountered before.
"Leave it be, Granger," he said in a hard voice. "Your Order got just what it wanted." He scoffed faintly. "I just hope it was worth it and you lot didn't only drag out a lot of useless cripples."
"Let me see," she pressed. "Just let me see."
"Don't pretend to care," he said coldly. "Are you really going to act surprised? You expect me to believe you somehow didn't anticipate this? After all, weren't you hoping I'd die once you had everything you could get from me?"
The bitterness in his voice was so acrid Hermione could almost taste it. It twisted through the room and Hermione could feel his resentment. His loneliness.
"No. I-I'm sorry. I didn't-" She drew closer to him.
He'd been hurting for weeks because of the opportunity he'd given them. With his rank in Voldemort's army, the blame had surely fallen on him even if he weren't suspected of enabling it.
She hadn't even paused to realise it. Hadn't thanked him. He'd just-slipped from her mind. It hadn't occurred to her how extensively he might pay for it.
"I'm sorry," she said, reaching toward him, feeling faint with horror and guilt. "I got so caught up in work-I wasn't thinking."
She unclasped his cloak and gently lifted it off his shoulders. He flinched and stared up at the ceiling, looking resigned.
She slowly unbuttoned his robes and shirt and then, walking behind him, as lightly as she could, drew the clothing off his shoulders.
She gasped.
There were dozens of runes carved into each of his shoulders. Deep. Straight down. Cut all the way into the bones.
The Dark Magic hanging over them was sickeningly palpable. Just standing near them Hermione felt her body break into a cold sweat.
Hermione had read of sorcerers who used dark runic rituals to bind their servants. The brutal ceremony had been outlawed for over a thousand years.
Malfoy had been conscious as the blood and magic was invoked in his flesh; as each line was sliced into him.
The cuts of each rune were still raw, as though they couldn't heal, even though they were clearly weeks old. It reminded her of werewolf injuries. The Dark Magic had become visibly septicemic.
She lifted her hand but refrained from touching him. "What did he do? Draco, how did he do this to you?"
"Goblin-wrought silver blade, infused with Nagini's venom. I'm told that they may eventually heal," he said in a wooden voice. "There's nothing you can do. Now that you've satisfied your curiosity, we should return to business."
He tried to turn to face her but Hermione stepped around him, casting several different obscure diagnostic charms and inspecting them. Her magic was stable again, although sleep deprivation made her head feel light and hollow.
There were black tendrils beneath his skin from the mixture of the venom and dark magic. She could see the poison in his veins, halfway down his back, up over his shoulders and around his ribs like a poisonous vine. Crawling into him and sinking into the core of his magic.
She summoned her satchel.
"I'm so sorry. I-can't heal this. But I think I can help contain it. Please let me try."
Malfoy eyed her over his shoulder but didn't try to step away from her again.
Hermione cast a complex spell and then, gently as she could, traced the tip of her wand slowly over one of the long black tendrils. Starting near his lowest rib she gradually forced the poison back toward the incisions and then siphoned the tiny thread out of the rune it had spread from. As she drew out the poison and contained it in a empty vial, she had to sever the connection between the thread and tissue with a sharp jerk.
Malfoy nearly dropped to his knees as he screamed. It was a nearly soundless, guttural rasp of someone intimately acquainted with torture.
"What are you doing?" he half snarled and half groaned. "Is this somehow not already a sufficient amount of pain for you?"
Hermione laid a hand on his arm, trying to hold him steady. "I'm sorry. I'm not trying to hurt you. I have to pull out all the excess Dark Magic. It's poison. If you let it stay, your body and magic will try to assimilate it. And-when you have dark magic in you at a cellular level like that-there's no going back. It just starts eating you from the inside. Magic like that is why your Dark Lord looks the way he does. And-with the quantity of runes-you'll have a few years at most. Either your mind or your body, Dark Magic exacts a price."
"I am aware of how Dark Magic works," he hissed, his hands were balled into fists and he was shaking slightly.
"Then please, let me try to fix this."
Draco dropped his head slightly and huffed faintly as though he were laughing. Hermione studied him for a moment. He didn't say anything else.
She traced out two more threads. By the third Draco collapsed to his knees. He was deathly pale and his skin felt cold and clammy to touch.
She laid a hand as gently as she could on the front of his shoulder. She could feel the arch of his clavicle under her fingers, and see the mad, pained flutter of his pulse beneath his jaw.
"Do you want me to stun you?" she asked quietly. "I can do it faster than way. It won't change the efficacy. But you have to trust me."
Malfoy went still. Apparently considering.
"Go ahead," he said after a minute. "You're already more than capable of getting me killed any time you happen to feel like it."
She braced him against herself, his head pressed against her diaphragm.
" Stupefy ," she said softly, and caught him as his dead weight slumped against her. With a practiced lightening charm she eased him gently to the ground and laid his head on his cloak.
Hermione worked quickly. She had done the spellwork once before when she'd been training in a hospital in Albania. It had been a single, self-inflicted rune on an aspiring dark wizard who hadn't understood the Dark Magic he was trying to invoke until the poisoning nearly killed him.
With Malfoy unconscious, Hermione's guilt was able to strike her fully.
She should have realised. She should have come back sooner to check on him. She was afraid she was too late. The runes were set. Deeply.
She traced out all the dark magic until she had eight vials full of the mix of the curse and poison. She'd have to incinerate them in a magical fire.
She carefully laid a containment enchantment around all the runes on each shoulder. It was a spell Severus had taught her; he'd used it to contain the curse on Dumbledore's hand. Given that the magic was in Malfoy's back she was doubtful that it would have any affect, but she tried nonetheless.
Malfoy's injuries were not intended to kill him immediately; rather, they were meant to hurt, and corrupt his magic. A gradual death sentence. Dark magic like runic blood rituals was deep and old.
She read the oath.
It wasn't a typical runic oath. Voldemort, in his vanity, hadn't utilised a traditional vow of loyalty and honesty. Rather it seemed tailored to the specific failure. The runes bound Malfoy to be unhesitating, cunning, unfailing, ruthless, and unyielding; driven to succeed.
Hermione wasn't sure how effective runic blood oaths were; but she suspected that Voldemort's overconfidence in the Dark Mark had spared Malfoy's life. If Malfoy had been forced to have an oath of loyalty and honesty carved into his bones, he would likely have been forced to admit his betrayal. Instead Voldemort had accidentally used ancient magic to fuel Malfoy's drive to do whatever he wanted.
The excess in cruelty was horrifying. It wasn't like a battlefield injury; quickly inflicted, but slow to be repaired. The ritual had surely taken hours while Draco was strapped down and kept conscious for it. The precision and uniformity of the cuts. The steady invocation of the Dark Arts. Time taken to wipe away the blood before making the next incision. Driving the tip of the blade all the way into the bones was unnecessary; it had been done solely for the additional pain. It was an oath of the flesh; there was nothing that required it be written into his bones. He'd also been crucio'd, either before or after the ritual was performed, possibly at both points.
She felt she might vomit just thinking about it.
Hermione pulled out her Essence of Dittany. She only had a few vials of it left.
She pulled out her murtlap tentacles and crushed them together with ten drops of Essence of Dittany into a salve which she gently pressed into the cuts of the runes. She couldn't heal the incisions but she could ease the pain and reduce the potency of the venom so that they would recover faster. Then she cast a protective ward over Malfoy's back to seal everything in without bandages.
She ran her fingers lightly over his arms, feeling the rigid knots in his muscles from the cruciatus. It appeared he had at least gotten some therapy for that.
Voldemort clearly did not want to damage Malfoy to the point of ruining him entirely, but he had had no qualms about torturing Draco all the way up to that exact line.
Malfoy was a weapon for Voldemort. The decision to carve runes into him made Draco more deadly. They sharpened his edge, but also made him a short-term tool.
Heavy use of Dark Magic was eroding over the course of many years. There was a reason dark wizards didn't tend to reach a hundred. They went mad, or deteriorated physically. With the quantity of Dark Magic that had been emanating from the runes before Hermione treated them, Malfoy would be lucky to live a decade; possibly only a few months before his mind began slipping. He already tended to arrive drenched in Dark Magic.
Hermione's hand wandered up to her neck, and she twisted the chain of her necklace between her fingers as she stared down at him.
She drew his left hand into hers. His long fingers dwarfed hers. There were the familiar callouses from flying and dueling on his palm and fingers.
She lightly massaged his hand. The fingers spasmed slightly at her touch, even though he should have been insensate. She tapped her wand tip across his hand at the various pressure points, sending mild vibrations into the drawn muscles to help release the tension.
When his fingers fell open, she began bending and rubbing and massaging them until they could fully open and close without twitching spasmodically. Spasms like that could be life or death in a duel, interfering with a wand motion or a person's aim.
As she worked she tilted her head to the side and studied his face. Unconscious, his features relaxed from the hard, closed expression he usually wore. He looked sad.
She felt so guilty it hurt. She also felt like an idiot. She should have realised. He could have been killed.
Unlike her, he had to have known he'd be punished for the attack he'd enabled. His hesitation-
He could have prepared. It could have been a trap. He knew exactly which prisons they had information about.
How had he phrased his advice?
" The response to Order activity will be slightly delayed. If the Order has been waiting for an opening, it may be the edge they're looking for....if the Order were to attack multiple prisons simultaneously, the response will be-less cohesive."
He'd given them their first massive victory in years. He'd handed it to them, and then paid for it. It was his response that was delayed and less cohesive.
Whatever it was he thought he could get by aiding the Order, he clearly wanted it more than anything.
She moved to the other side of his body and cast a gradual rennervation spell on him. It reduced the grogginess and likelihood of there being a headache when he regained consciousness.
While he was waking up, she began tapping her wand across his other hand and then massaging it. The instant he became conscious, she could feel the tension radiate across his body. He froze instantly.
It had been, she suspected, a tremendous leap of faith for him to let her stun him. Trusting anyone did not come naturally to him. She kept coaxing his fingers into pliance as he turned his head. She could feel his eyes on her but she kept working and didn't look up.
"There's no need," he said after a few minutes. "I have a session with a healer later today."
"If it's the same one who has done nothing about your back, I would recommend feeding the idiot to a giant squid," she said sharply.
He lifted his head and looked back at his shoulders with a pained grimace.
"What did you do?"
"After I siphoned out all the excess magic and venom, I laid a containment enchantment over the runes. I can't reverse them, but hopefully it will keep the Dark Magic contained to the runes rather than sinking into your soul. I've packed them with murtlap and dittany to help ease the pain. I'm assuming you're already taking pain relief potions." He gave a faint nod. Hermione ran her fingers up and down his hand carefully, feeling the familiar wand calluses along his fingers, seeking out any trace of tremors, and muttering spells under her breath as she bent and massaged them. "Hopefully it will heal the incisions a little faster. There's nothing I can do about the scars, or the ritual curse they contain. I'm sorry-I should have come back sooner. If I had-maybe we could have removed the bones and regrown them before it had settled in. Now, even if I replace them and flense you, the oath will re-emerge..."
"It doesn't matter," he said, snatching his hand away from her abruptly and getting up. It had to be agonising to move but he didn't make a sound. But he was paler and wavered slightly once he was standing. "As you mentioned, you were rather busy. It doesn't appear that you were off at the seaside sunbathing and willfully neglecting your pet Death Eater. Healing me was never intended to be your job."
He was apparently feeling a little better, given that his sarcasm had re-emerged.
"I should have come," she repeated. "It needs to be monitored. And the salve, it should be changed daily for best effect-"
"Unfortunate."
"I can come," she said. "It will only take a few minutes. If you can spare the time morning or evening. I'll come."
He stared at her.
"Really? You have time for that?" he asked snidely.
"I'll make time."
He seemed to be considering something for several moments. "Fine. Eight o'clock in the evening. If you come I'll show up. If you can't, it's no matter."
"I'll be here."
She helped slip his shirt up over his shoulders and buttoned it. She paused halfway up.
"I'm really sorry, Draco," she said.
He stared down at her and quirked an eyebrow.
"If I'd known a bit of healing was going to make you so familiar with me, I never would have let you do it."
She looked up at him as she finished buttoning.
"Do you not want me to call you Draco? It just seems rather odd to still go by surnames after so long. Assuming neither of us die in the war and you don't get tired of me, I'm guessing we're going to be around each other for a while."
He rolled his eyes doubtfully.
"Call me whatever you want, Granger. I'm not changing anything."
Typical.
She suspected that surnames were just another way to maintain distance. Which was why it had occurred to her that perhaps she should begin referring to him as Draco.
Subconscious distance affected behavior. If she wanted to get closer she had to move first, and she couldn't let her own subconscious attitudes hold her back.
"Any information this week?"
He gave a short nod, the corner of his mouth twitched faintly. "The new curse development division is going to be in Sussex. It's budgeted to be a considerably larger one. They're expanding the laboratories beyond curses. It's a research facility, using prisoners."
Hermione swallowed. "Of course."
"Hogwarts is being turned into a prison. It already has enough wards; it will replace all the prisons lost. They're purging it currently of any magic considered uncooperative."
Something inside Hermione wrenched at the news. When Hogwarts had been abandoned they had tried to take what they could, but the House-elves and portraits had been bound to the school; they left them behind. Her mouth twisted slightly.
"I'm sure the school will fight it," she said.
"Undoubtedly. The choice was made because the Dark Lord is hopeful the news will enrage Potter. And-it's intended as final insult to Dumbledore."
Hermione's eyes flickered up to his face and then rapidly away as he said the Headmaster's name. She forced her expression not to change.
"I'll ensure Harry is braced for it and doesn't do anything foolish."
He gave a short nod.
"I'll see you tomorrow then," she said and looked him over again. "Take care-Draco. I'm so sorry."
The corner of his mouth twitched for a moment, then he pressed his mouth into a flat line and his expression tensed; bracing himself before he apparated away.