Chapter Text
what did i know, what did i know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
— "Those Winter Sundays", Robert Hayden
1:
She should have paid better attention, but an eight-year-old war made everything expensive. What used to cost galleons now costs an arm, a leg, a principle. Conflict makes for terrifying inflation.
Hermione should have paid better attention, but like many others, she hadn’t much left to pay with.
She’d been struggling in the last two weeks, anxiousness gnawing at her frayed edges. Whispers of the war’s end were dangerous, but the imminent aggression pushing both sides to their most desperate spoke of some grain of truth. Sleepless and torn was not a good look on a member of the Order’s War Council. She’d waited and waited patiently for two knocks and a few stolen hours. He did not come.
She finds out from Harry, however, that he’d checked in briefly with the Order — without dropping by to see her. Not a single hello, not even a scribbled note.
This is the first oddity.
She thinks perhaps he’s been busy, tying up some loose ends from the Belgium assignment. She will never forgive Severus for insisting he return to the field so soon after that last check-in. She’d fought like hell behind closed doors, arguing with the whole Council almost at wandpoint: he’d been in no condition to return to field, not after a Portkey to the Manor Headquarters in a near-catatonic state.
But the war was a hungry thing; it took Harry and Robards arguing for his safety to silence her. If they’d held him an hour longer, he could have been compromised. They couldn’t afford to lose their best spy, not with everything on the line every single day. Hermione conceded then with a silent helplessness. War did that to everyone. It fed on choices.
So Hermione lets this slide.
But when weeks pass by and he hadn’t so much as acknowledged her existence, something uncomfortable lodges at the back of her mind. Something not quite right.
He checks in again for the second time in three weeks.
She walks into an urgent debriefing in one of the makeshift meeting rooms in the Manor, and there he is: relaying information to Bill and Tonks. Face grimy and muddied, blood trickling from a gash near his temple. Bloodstained hands. Wand tucked into the holster on his side, still in his Death Eater robes, sans mask.
Hermione drops the mug of coffee she’d been nursing. It shatters loudly in the hushed quiet of four in the morning. The three others turn to her. Bill has his wand out.
“Sorry, sorry, I—”
She tries to glare at him — tries to hold his gaze, What happened? Why didn’t you come to me? Why aren’t you speaking to me? — but the look he gives her is an unexpected knife to the chest:
It is a frowning, uninterested empty. A look for strangers.
Hermione rushes out of the threshold of the study, trembling and unsteady. She almost runs, fast and far away from the one thought she doesn’t want to entertain:
Something is most certainly not right.
.:.
The Retinencia potion is double-distilled, requiring many layers and extra steps to make brewing it as complex as magically possible. The excessive lengths made it completely unreconstructable, resistant to every kind of diagnostic or analysis charm. Every Order member had a vial. Even those undercover. Especially those undercover.
Hermione grips hers in her palm. If it had a label, she would be plucking at its corners with blunt, dirty fingernails. It does not. It stews, all smooth black glass in the heat of her sweaty hands.
She closes her eyes and breathes;
Her inhales sit like weights in her chest. Her head is cloudy with premonition, fatigue mixing with the nebulous dread of what if . She hasn’t eaten in over twenty-four hours, but she had hoped she had a little more time before her exhaustion became its own unreliable narrator. Before the body — the mind, the reason — turned against itself.
It’s happened often enough.
The decrepit Muggle apartment she was in — yellowed wallpaper, stained porcelain and linoleum — was as expected; it was a liminal space. Nobody cared for liminal spaces. The place wore forgottenness like ill-fitting perfume. She could swear she’d know that ancient Muggle telephone anywhere, but she knew other safehouses looked eerily similar.
She eyes the offensive wallpaper, wonders whose idea it was to charm the ugly brocade to be able to show urgent messages from the Manor headquarters. A good idea executed with terrible taste, Hermione thinks.
Granted, the last time they’d been here, the wallpaper was the least of her concerns.
When the digital bedside clock turns two am, Hermione starts counting by the seconds, sitting at the edge of a bed with the faded, striped bedsheets. Her ears and her detecting charm do not waver, far too used to the comfort of high alert.
When she gets to the three-hundred-second mark, the doorknob clicks.
She is up on her feet, barely able to dodge a precautionary stunning hex before her wand is out and she is faced with a wary Draco Malfoy, wand similarly poised. He seeps into the room calmly. He shuts the door behind him with his other hand, the click of the lock sharp in the silence. Hawthorne and vine nearly cross each other in the small space, but Draco moves with a precision he’s known for.
There are no sudden movements. Only two people circling one another in the small space.
He is pristine. All polished dragonhide, pressed and crisp shirt lines, tailored robes. His hair is neat and his complexion is healthy, bearing no signs of troubled thoughts.
Hermione stares at the unfamiliarity in his expression.
She watches him, tries to remember he is a dangerous man in every form, but all she feels is ache.
“Granger,” he says, friendly enough to anyone’s ears.
But Hermione isn’t just anyone. Not after all this time.
She hears the undercurrent of distrust in his tone. It chips away at her meager hope.
“Malfoy.” The word is unsteady and almost foreign to her. Whispered and less sure than she’d like, but she is not a bad soldier. Not by a long shot.
“I assume you have something urgent for me?” He does not lower his wand.
“Aren’t you going to ask me a question first?”
“Am I?” he parries.
“Just follow protocol, Malfoy.”
He is still for a beat. And then: “Fourth Year. Yule Ball. What colour was your dress?”
Another piece of her heart flakes away. Turns into dread as it drops into her stomach.
She closes her eyes, lowers her wand. “It was periwinkle,” she tells him, before tucking her wand in the holster by her thigh. The fight drains from her; she sits at the edge of the bed.
(“How many times did I make you come two nights ago in the library?” was what he’d last asked her for protocol. He always asked specific questions.)
There is a long moment where he does not move, does not lower his wand. And then: “Well? What’s yours, then?”
Suspicion is something she hasn't felt between them in years.
Hermione takes a moment;
Her eyes land on the view from where she is sitting: the bathroom door is open, incandescent light bouncing off the grimy tiles.
“When was the last time we were here?” she whispers, not looking at him. Not able to.
“What?”
Hermione repeats the question.
“Granger, what are you on about? We’ve never been. This is the first time I’m stepping foot in this godsforsaken apartment.”
Her hope is cleaved clean in two.
She closes her eyes. Takes one, two breaths. Swallows something down.
Eight years. In her eight years of intimate acquaintance with conflict, Hermione had taken comfort in preparation. To survive was to adapt, and to adapt was to foresee. She has had many nights to catastrophize, years as a senior member of the Order to have had layers upon layers of back-up plans, should the worst come to worst.
But this?
Not in her most dreadful nightmares.
She opens her eyes as she throws up mental walls, just as he’d taught her once upon a time.
(“Imagine a structure representing your mind,” he’d told her once, stroking her hair while she fought off sleep, her head on his lap, her hand around his thigh during one of their many excursions in Muggle hideouts all over London. Where they sometimes disappeared to live out bits and pieces of their undisclosed marriage. “ Store your emotions inside. Occlumency is like propping up the walls with buttresses and counterforts—”
“I don’t know half of what you’re saying, Draco, let me sleep.”
She had yawned into his stomach, the soft cashmere of his jumper tickling her nose. Falling asleep to fingers scratching her scalp and trailing down her features.)
“I won’t keep you, then,” she tells him now, standing up suddenly, ignoring him as she takes in the space around them. Looking at everything else: the walls, the carpeted floor. The faded sheets on the cramped bed. The yellow light of the bathroom that once cast his white-blonde, sweat-soaked hair in warmth while he fucked her against the rattling door, waiting for hot water to fill the bath. She could still remember the lungfuls of steam, the shallow panting by the side of her neck, the heat of his open mouth as it pressed incoherent praises on her collarbones. The taste of the frontlines on his skin. Blood that wasn’t his, darkness that was.
Hermione’s hand instinctively moves to her chest, over a ring in a chain beneath her shirt.
Tiredness comes crashing over her. “You should know, though, you were probably almost compromised,” she breathes.
“Wh—what?” His wand is up again.
“Check your vial.”
Code red. She sees it in the widening of his grey eyes, the flash of terror that inhabits him.
His right hand reaches for inside his robes. It is hidden for moments longer than it should take to magically summon the potion. Hermione watches as it dawns on him slowly.
“How did you know?” he asks, wand leveled at her. Instinct ever on high alert, because like her, he is not a bad soldier. “Granger, how did you know?”
Hermione would go cross-eyed if she stared at his wandpoint, but she doesn’t. She stares at him.
“Doesn’t matter, but you need to let Moody know.” Hermione trains her gaze on the wall above his left shoulder, staving off a panic. Refusing to entertain the possibility that he is compromised by the enemy. “Go to Robards for protocol. You could be suspected.”
“I know what to do,” sounds affronted that she’s treating him like a rookie, when he is, technically, ranked as a General. “I still remember my job. I still know the Order inside-out. I can’t have taken it—”
“Let me check, then. Sit down.”
She almost reaches for his shoulders, almost tugs him to sit on the edge of the bed so she can perform a diagnostic spell, but he moves of his own accord. Hermione almost flinches from how differently he navigates the shared space around her now.
Sitting down on the low bed, his head is leveled with her chest. She steps between his legs, then watches a strange expression flit his face. Discomfort, perhaps. She steps back slightly.
Lights emerge and runes crowd over his head after she mutters the spell against his temple. They confirm what she has suspected all along.
“You’ve taken it,” she tells him quietly, putting her wand away. The lights disappear, thinning into the air.
“Can’t be,” he insists, clearly still aggravated by the idea. “Do it again, I need to be sure—”
“The potion needs to take a memory group, Malfoy. If you’re not missing the Order, it must have taken something else,” she tells him.
She hears her words, but her mind is in its own stasis. Suspended in disbelief.
(Distantly, her shoddy Occlumency tries to shield her from the sound of her breaking heart.)
She observes him: he is grasping at straws now, looking for something that must no longer be there. With a small voice, she adds: “You do — do you remember formulating this potion with me?”
Wordlessly, and with horror dawning on his face, he shakes his head.
Hermione smiles again. There is a stinging in her eyes that she blinks away. “That’s — no matter. Doesn’t matter. Work with Robards, but you should lie low until we’re certain—”
“What aren’t you telling me, Granger?”
Granger.
Her walls crack.
“It doesn’t matter,” she tells him, voice coming out steadier than she feels.
She was never a bad soldier. Not terrible at all.
And now, she can be a very good one.
“Get in contact with Moody and Robards. It likely happened a month ago, during the Belgium assignment. Please, just… make sure you aren’t suspected first. And lie low until then, alright? I — I mean, take care of yourself… Malfoy,” she swerves at the end, because they’ve developed habits, the two of them. Now, that’s one more thing she can no longer afford.
“You didn’t answer my question,” he almost hisses, impatient as he rises from the bed to tower over her. “Granger—”
“You’re dismissed, Agent Malfoy.”
She has to crane her neck to look into eyes that no longer remember her.
His thoughts assemble one by one on his features: disbelief, disdain. He scoffs, angry, but instinct has him respecting their protocol and chain of command. He may be a ranking General, and one of the most critical personnel to the Order. But so is she.
He leaves without another word, silently fuming.
As his footsteps fade, Hermione rushes to the bathroom to retch the meal she didn’t have.
Her mental walls barely hold.