***
Shaded was her dream
By the dusk curtains:—'twas a midnight charm
Impossible to melt as iced stream:
The lustrous salvers in the moonlight gleam;
Broad golden fringe upon the carpet lies:
It seem'd he never, never could redeem
From such a stedfast spell his lady's eyes;
So mus'd awhile, entoil'd in woofed phantasies.
John Keats, The Eve of St. Agnes
***
Hermione Granger was locked in a tower when he found her, bewitched and imprisoned.
He saw her from a distance; a slim figure in clothes too thin and diaphanous to be something of her own choosing. The erotic image she presented overrode his heroic impulses; interrupted his train of thought, stopped him dead in his tracks, his limbs refusing to heed the warning bells in his head.
She was almost completely nude. All that covered her was a thin, short shift through which everything was visible.
The first time he had seen her up there, he had gulped and stared. His eyes were unable to blink, his palms started to sweat, and his mouth became dry. All around him, the ivory white flowers from the bramble thrummed, pulsing with a fragrant, intoxicating scent that unfurled around him, tendrils that threatened to overset his faculties. A thicket of thorns jutted every which way, completely covering up the sky and any light from the sun. The barbed shrubberies shifted around him, its ripe red berries rustling with deceptive allure, waiting to fell the unsuspecting victim. Yet, he stood captive to another trap; of a young, beautiful woman combing her hair just before a sensual coupling with her lover.
Whatever his intentions for finding and rescuing her, he had never envisioned her to be as debased as this, or as alluring and provocative. She had a lithe body that he had never seen so visibly displayed in all the years he had known her, all slim limbs and smooth peach-hued skin. She was not fleshly and overblown, but curved in all the right place, with breasts that were so small as to be barely detectable from the side—but from the front there was the hint of an enticing shadow upon her ribs, and they were punctuated by two hard nipples that puckered the fabric of her shift. She had a slim waist that flared out into high round buttocks and a tantalizing gap at the very top of her thighs just before they widened and narrowed at her knees.
Her hair looked impossibly long and wild from a distance; thick, chestnut hair glinting with rich bronze and copper tones from the firelight behind her. Where it once framed her small face, it now encapsulated her body, tendrils pointing in all directions like the brambles around him. He was hypnotised by the movement of her slim arms in brushing out this thick skein of hair, over and over in a slow repetitive motion that drew his eyes and left him as mesmerised as though he had been charmed by magic.
He had stared for quite a long time, unable to hear anything over the rushing in his ears. He couldn't remember if he had ever imagined her naked, but now the vision of that small, flat belly leading to a dark triangle just visible through the cloth made him realise he could never get the image out of his head again. For the rest of his life, he would be haunted by a young girl surrounded by hair the shade of walnut wood, with shades of mahogany and pine and chestnut, and a pair of perfectly shaped small breasts with its two darker peaks standing out at attention so high in the sky. She floated just out of reach like an angel, a prize to be won.
Even if he had imagined her like this every day for seven years, he never would have gotten every detail exactly right.
Every day for the rest of his life, he would have this image with him, and the startling sensation it sent coursing through him. If he closed his eyes, he could feel her pebbled nipples against his chest.
As he stood there, breathing hard and gripping his wand in clammy fingers, he felt the unwelcome twitch of his co*ck and struggled to regain equilibrium.
He watched the two of them at play, his feet fixed as though he had shot down roots into the ripe earth. He had fasted for four hours in order to get up the nerve to paint himself with blood. After wandering through the woods, visions of beef savouries and glazed desserts were swirling in his head. He was tantalised by the ripe, silver quince and fat, luscious berries quivering amidst the flowers and thorns; every so often a distant thud of the fruit falling onto the ground would remind him of how empty his stomach was.
All that had been forgotten once he saw her. Them. A different type of hunger had started to tingle through his body, bypassing completely his initial horror at what he was witnessing.
As he watched the hand roving down Hermione's slim torso until it reached the apex of her thighs, it was his own hand he imagined. It was his own head nesting there, and not the dark-haired figure between her legs. The two figures moved in sinuous symmetry, their heavy breathing absorbed by the deep woods, vibrating through the rocks and mud and briars around him. He felt every sigh, every caress, every movement as keenly as though he were right there in the tower with them.
It was his hand he imagined creeping up under the thin shift to rub insistently over her hard and tight nipple, his fingers that left possessive crescents on her tender skin, and his tongue that firmly stroked her to ecstasy. It was him up there with her making her moan and undulate her hips, causing her small hand to shake when it lifted to cover her mouth as she gasped out her approaching pleasure.
His participation in the sensual acts were so vivid that he braced himself against the rising excitement in his own stomach and the growing need of his erection as it rose to become level with his stomach. He gritted his teeth against his body's own reaction and tried to tear his eyes away from the view atop the tower.
For a moment, he wrestled with himself, turning away from the tower. His breathing was harsh and laboured in his own ears, his eyes tightly shut against the images that continued to replay itself on the insides of his eyelids and his fists balled so tightly at his sides that his arms ached afterwards. The wand lay sticky and forgotten in his clammy hands, the discomfort of the rocky path underneath his bare feet similarly dismissed.
It was no use. The temptation of the vision in the tower was too strong for him to resist, and he paused just before Apparating away, irresolute, reluctant. Surely to watch was no crime. It was such a little thing for someone so starved as he was.
When he turned back, it was with a pit of self-loathing in his stomach as his own shaking hand reached down to touch his own member, lightly, unconsciously.
He must have forgotten to breathe at some point; his chest felt so tight. Possibly he had not even blinked in the last few minutes. His own breath felt harsh, loud, and uneven. He was so hard that he hurt. He touched himself again, shakily, unwillingly, squeezing himself at the base of his co*ck, the stickiness from his sweat mixing with the blood on his skin and making the friction almost too rough.
He imagined himself on top of Hermione, her slim leg thrown over his shoulder as he knelt in front of her. His thumbs gripping the soft fleshy part of her thighs, holding them open so that he could bury his nose in the secret, dark part of her. In order to inhale and breathe in her private scent, to lick and taste her juices, to insert his tongue and feel her body contact around him.
He groaned, a guttural sound that, if he were not careful, would be heard by them. His blood was roaring in his ears, and his hands slid up his length. He was harder than he had ever been before in his life. His shaking hand firmed, became more sure in its practised motions.
It wasn't enough, his own touch. He wanted something else. He wanted Hermione's small hands on his hard length, her small breasts with their distended nipples digging into his chest, his cheeks, his mouth. He wanted to knead his fingers into her lush buttocks and bite down on the softness of her firm, young breast. He wanted that clawed hand to be his, stroking the narrow waist; he wanted that red slash of a grinning mouth to be his, leaving lingering kisses across an endless expanse of silky landscape; he wanted that cursed and damned tongue to be his own throbbing co*ck, thrusting into unexplored depths.
Above, Hermione panted for air, one hand kneading her own breast, rolling her own nipple between her fingers, the other hand gripping the top of his blond head, threading her fingers through his hair. There was something like the sound of wind and waves roaring through his ears.
He was so hard. He released himself and then pulled his foreskin back on his co*ck, the friction sending a tightening all the way down to his scrotum. His entire body was shaking with his need. He fisted his co*ck, over and over again until he came, spurting again and again, his hips thrusting against air.
Then, breathing hard, he withdrew his hand from his body. All around him lay red berries, shaken down from their barbs and branches in a flurry from his unrestrained movement. With a breath of disgust at his own lack of self-control, he muttered a Scourgify over his hand and co*ck, and Disapparated to come up with a plan.
Above in the tower, Hermione came apart with a loud exclamation and Bellatrix Lestrange rose from her haunches, mouth and nose glistening as she licked her own hand.
Bellatrix twined her hand through the hair at the back of Hermione's head, pulling their faces together, and their mouths met, mated. Her heavier breasts swung with her exertions before pushing into Hermione's smaller chest, which glistened with the aftermath of passion. They stood, pressed up against one another chest to hip. Hermione's hand delved below to Bellatrix's belly.
The two women continued their dance, completely oblivious to the watcher who had come and gone.
Bellatrix had always had a strange obsession with hair. Her own hair, from what he remembered of old portraits of her as a child, was stick straight and bobbed, the image of a respectable Pureblooded witch of the times. All three of the Black girls had such manageable, obedient hair courtesy of their father, who was a stickler for the things that didn't matter and made sure not a curl was out of place at the dining table. But Bellatrix had been a special exception for Cygnus Black, who ran a tight ship, especially when he had been expecting his firstborn to be male.
By the time she had been about to graduate from Hogwarts, Bellatrix had managed to break the spell her father had put on her. Curls, thick and abundant, had been the triumphant result. She had kept her thick mane of hair until the day Andromeda had run off. Then she had cut them off when her engagement to Rodolphus Lestrange was announced.
“You see, Draco,” she had said once in the middle of reading to him from a book of fairy tales. “The hair is always where the power is. So many stories have it as the source of the power.” Her fingers stroked Draco's hair as though he were a pet before suddenly tightening and holding his head in place. “Cut it off yourself and you prevent others from using you—”
“Bella!” his mother had called from his door. He saw the figure of his mother, felt the hand in his hair stiffen before loosening, and scrambled up to run to his mother. Her arms came to wrap around him for a brief, tight moment before easing him off to the side, half behind her hip. “You know I don't like it when you scare him with those tales—”
“Truths, Cissy,” Bella said. She slowly uncurled herself from his bed and rose to her full height. He still remembered the fear and awe that he had held for his aunt, she who could reduce his formidable and stern father to uncomfortable silence. “Rapunzel, you see, was locked into a tower on account of her long hair. Our father had it right after all, cut it off, defeminise us—he was trying to protect us all along!”
She burst then into laughter and he hadn't understood what was so amusing, only that his mother did not seem to find her joke funny either. He peeped around his mother to see that she had laid a hand on Aunt Bella's arm. “Bella,” she said, her words slow and hesitant. Draco fidgeted against his mother's arm around him. “If you ever need to talk—”
“What can you do?” Bella said, throwing off her mother's arm and glaring at the both of them, now looking as angry as she had been filled with mirth a moment ago. “You have your darling Lucius and—Draco. You don't know what it's like for me.”
Before his mother could respond, his aunt had stalked off down the hall, and a moment later, the sound of the nearest Floo could be heard.
“Is Aunt Bella angry with me?” he asked his mother in the uncomfortable silence that followed.
Narcissa crouched down in front of him and took him gently by the shoulders to look into his eyes before scanning the rest of his figure, as though to assure herself of his well-being. “No, darling. Aunt Bella isn't—she isn't happy with—with Uncle Rodolphus but it isn't any business of ours.”
Draco considered his mother's words and thought back to his aunt's story that evening, of a young girl locked up in the tower. “Is that why Aunt Bella cut off her hair?” he asked. “So that she wouldn't be the Mudblood in the tower?” It was puzzling to him why the story had made his aunt so angry. After all, it was the witch who had bound the young girl into servitude, draining any power out of her through her long hair. Perhaps just the fact that the young girl was a Mudblood was enough to make Aunt Bella froth at the mouth.
His mother shushed him. “Don't let people hear you using that word, Draco.” She sighed a bit and then gathered him into her arms. “I love you, darling. Go to sleep, now.”
He had obediently crawled back into his bed, still wondering a little at his aunt's strange words and obsession about Mudbloods and hair.
He wondered now how far back in time her insanity went.
“Mudblood, Mudblood, let down your hair,” Bellatrix's crazed, singsong voice called from outside the tower.
He hadn't acted immediately. To do so would have been foolhardy. He watched and waited in the nearby woods, completely naked but for the vial hanging from his neck and the blood smeared all over his body—the only way he was able to venture onto this lonely island, Cailleach Craig, a place passed down through the generations and kept as a solace for the Black women.
Cailleach Craig was a small, unplottable, windswept piece of rock that housed nothing but the ruins of a long abandoned keep on the cliffs, battered by cold North winds and crumbling to the ocean until nothing remained but some sections of the curtain wall and the remains of an old grey turret.
It was the blood magic that bypassed the wards of the island. Blood magic was the strongest magic there was and one just outside the bounds of sanity and morality. Thus it was what had tracked Bellatrix down when nothing else worked.
At first, he thought he had followed another red herring. He stood on the broken heap of the only remaining wall, tasting the salt spray of the freezing ocean waves, the wind slicing straight through his shivering, red-painted body despite the sun blazing high up in the sky. The sandy rock felt gritty and scratchy beneath his feet and he watched as pebbles and broken shells dropped off the edge to hurtle through the air into the glittering ocean.
Amidst the screeching of wildlife and the waves crashing against the cliffs, he suddenly heard something else, something that didn't belong in the desolate isolation here—a hum of magic. Strong magic.
He turned and sensed, rather than saw, the pull of wards in the lowest part of the island, where dense forest prevented anyone from encroaching. It was toward this thick wood that he ventured, and his pulse accelerated when he first saw the firethorn shrub.
A wildly rioting plant with thick, barbed branches erupting into heavy clusters of glossy, red berries, it gave off the impression of a brush fire, especially when the viewer became intoxicated by the perfume of its small white flowers. His heart beat faster: "Berries red, scent so sweet; of your heart will they eat ," his mother used to say. He cast a Bubblehead charm and progressed into the brambles.
It was a maze. His excitement grew as he found familiarity in walking through the thorny, winding path. Magic did not need to be wasted when old-fashioned, hardy, and hallucinogenic hedges were just as good at keeping away unwanted visitors. This was something he remembered his mother saying as she took him on long walks through her cultivated gardens. As he cautiously made his way through the thicket, his excitement increased, and so too did his speed—the layout of the maze, for his first instinct had been right, was familiar. Too familiar. He could have walked it with his eyes closed.
The oppressiveness of the silence grew as he walked deeper and deeper into the darkening woods. Firethorn shrubberies gave way to silverthorn trees, its thorns now as long as an entire finger, ready to jab and pierce any unwelcome and unknowing intruder drunk on the scent of the firethorn flowers. Berries and fruit dangled from branches, enticing and forbidden amidst the miniature swords that glinted with a needle-sharp point. Brambles and briars, thick curling tendrils of barbed branches, reaching for the sky like wild fiery swords, cutting off any light except for what shone from the tip of his wand. He extinguished it, relying on memory and instinct to guide his steps.
Here, no birds peeped, no rodent scurried, no insects buzzed. There was only the sound of his own breathing and the thud of his own heartbeat as he neared the center of the maze. The tingle of magic brushed over his body like curious fingers testing his identity, and easing away after it caressed the blood on his skin, ruffled the matted hair on his scalp, danced over his face. Who are you? it seemed to ask. You belong and yet you do not.
He was shivering but resolute. He had made it this far; he could do it. He could confront one of the most powerful female witches in the world.
But next he was faced with the impossibility of the tower, a strange looking edifice with five sides and an open top. When he saw it, he stopped wondering why Hermione had failed to get away. It locked her in as surely as the dementors did their prisoners in Azkaban. She was entombed and waiting for death as though speared on a blackened pyre.
The top was completely open for all to see, with something like a filmy ward containing the contents within. It was impossibly high, with what looked like a brick veneer, black as though scorched by fire. He was to find that the edifice was completely smooth on the outside, with not even ivy that dared to approach to cling to its forbidding exterior. No way to enter or leave, completely self-contained. Nothing magical could approach it within the outer wards. He could have seen it from the trees and flown towards it with a broom and failed to ever see what was there. Only by passing through the maze was he deemed worthy to see it.
He had gotten this far. He decided to wait a little longer to see what he could make out about these place.
That was when Bellatrix had appeared in the opening from the maze to stand just below the tower and call out her little taunt.
Something bade him wait. To gather more information before storming in. To find out exactly what sort of spell kept even Bellatrix from Apparating into the tower itself.
Hermione's hair was let down from the top of the tower. Glorious hair, really. He had always thought so, even if she had been teased mercilessly for it. The riotous thickness was tamed and braided into a coarse rope from the waist down. Her head appeared at the top of the tower, a small face dwarfed by her wild, curling hair. He discovered only later that Bellatrix had cast a speed-growing spell on Hermione so that the hair never stopped growing.
Was that a trick of the eye as well?
He was pondering this when Hermione's figure came into view.
He realised then that he was no better than Bellatrix. Not when it came to this girl.
And yet, he had to give it his best shot and give her the choice of freedom.
The war broke something in her.
By the time she was free, it was too late.
He doesn't care. He would rather have a part of her than no parts at all.
“Is that you, Malfoy?” a voice calls from the gloom.
His boots, charmed to be silent, make no sound as he walks across the dim chamber, with only the slightest of drag behind him as he makes his way to her. The room is as welcoming as he could make it, with rugs on the cold and jagged stone flagged floors and tapestries on the patched walls to cover up the places where portraits used to hang and now only scorch marks remain. There are new and billowy curtains to cover up the rough and uneven sections around the window frames and an entire portion of a wall that has never been right after a particularly nasty skirmish. Somehow, the entire flooring is slanted, but he has managed to put bookshelves in here and balance them against the unevenness. Some would consider this place for demolition, but it's become homely, broken edges and all. The flowers help. A profusion of jasmine plants dot the place, charmed against the cold and the dark, a bright white that turns blue with the dark or yellow against the candlelight.
It's better for her this way because she can't go out.
It is the only place they can be together while the whole world outside clamours for them. They stay secluded in this unplottable location, somewhere he refers to as elsewhere. An obscure and forgotten book on magic helped them construct this place, their retreat from everyone.
Maybe the dream he had of her, of the two of them together in a happily ever after was always meant to be a dream, but he's done his damnedest to make it a reality.
Light flickers as he approaches. When he gets close enough to see her, he sees that she conjured the light wandlessly, bright and capable witch that she once was. The ball of light hovers above her palm, illuminating only one side of her, the side that projects youth, vibrance, and beauty.
She doesn't like to look in the mirror and see the other side. The side that is carved over and over with the word “mudblood” so many times that they overlap in multiple places.
He wept when he found her.
Mudblood, she said to him.
Mudblood.
Mudblood.
Mudblood.
It was the only word she said for days.
“You're in a mood,” he says now. “Else you wouldn't call me Malfoy. Have you taken your potions today?” His wand is loosely grasped within his hand, still hidden in his sleeve. It wouldn't do to risk her ire, not when she is feeling unstable.
“I call you Malfoy because that's who you are,” she says. She stands there wearing traditional witch robes, the neckline revealing a V of tantalisingly smooth skin that glimmers in the moonlight. She stares at him with an unnervingly hostile glare.
She forgets who he is and what they've shared whenever he leaves her by herself too long. It makes him grieve that he has to keep dousing her with potions, but without it, her monsters claw their way out, overturning furniture in helpless fury, unintended magic blasting through sections of the wall.
After she drinks it, she blinks at him for one unnerving moment before one side of her mouth—the good side—lifts into a smile. A sweet smile, the kind she reserves for her friends. Encouraged, he comes forward and she allows him to gently wrap his arms around her slight frame.
She is too skinny. She worries too much. As though to prove his suspicions correct, she asks, “It's still not safe out there?”
“Not yet.” He lowers his head and buries his nose into the curve of her neck, breathing in her scent.
“Why did all of this have to happen? To you? To me? To us?” Her voice is a whisper in his ear, and he shivers as her warm breath blows across his nape; tickles the fine hair behind his ear. He knows that today she is not seeing him but someone else. She is entangled in her own nightmares, a trap of which she can never fully escape. Sometimes, he sees her caressing her own stomach although she doesn't remember exactly what she mourns. He's made sure of it.
When her tongue comes out to lick his ear, and her hand starts to toy with his nipple, he groans and catches her hand. “Let me help you,” he says, because what she's doing today is not what she does when she's aware of him as him. “Do you need me to help you?”
Her answer is a short, jerky nod against the side of his face. Still holding her against him, he grips his wand tightly. There's a moment of hesitation in him, but only for a second, before he casts a glamour over himself. He remains motionless as the spell takes shape: as his height shortens, his muscles stretches and loosens, his hair darkens and grows and grows. He watches as Hermione's unblinking eyes drift close and her hand drifts into his pants and fondles him there where nothing exists of his co*ck but a slit. It's a strange sensation, but it's still him inside, and he feels it just as keenly. He bites down on his lips to stop the sounds that came out, to stop the voice that is not his but that used to belong to Bellatrix Lestrange.
When she saw him in the tower for the first time, she shrank back in disbelief. “Who are you?”
All he could do was blink back at her, nonplussed by the blankness and terror in her eyes as she gazed at him, shielding herself behind a chair. “It's me. You know who I am. We've gone to school together for years. Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus, remember?”
It was as though something flashed behind her eyes and some enchantment shimmered and faded next to an even stronger power. “Hogwarts,” she said, blinking, focusing on him as her fingers relaxed their grip around the iron back of an old-fashioned chair. “Why
did they send you? And only you?”
He gave her the truth. “Nobody sent me.”
The longer he spoke, the more she seemed to regain her faculties and memories. Her brown eyes were shrewd as they raked over his figure. “Is everyone else dead?” Her voice was a little too calm to be asking this, as though the only reason for his presence was because everyone in the world had perished. Something seemed drained out of her even though with every beat, she appeared more lucid.
He didn't want to lie to her, so he stayed silent. Trust her to not ask about him, ask all that he did to get here, or question the disguised voice that he used to get her massively long hair down to him.
“Is Harry—?”
He should have known that would be the person she asked for first. His lips twisted into a sneer. “Dead.”
She cried then.
“I'm sorry,” he said. His hands hung at his side, his wand pointed downward, like the corners of his mouth. Was she not even going to plead to be rescued? He didn't explain what he was apologising for; for not being who she wanted, or his lies. She cried, and he let her cry.
Then he had left her there.
He returned. He spent days with her. Days spent trying to break the charmwork protecting the tower. Day after day in which he would emerge from the woods, the briars and the brambles unfurling around him to release him at the foot of the tower like sentient spikes.
“Tell me again how you were able to get in,” Hermione said. Her arms were crossed as she paced across the room. It was surprisingly capacious and made him wonder the exact physical dimensions of the original building through which Bellatrix had managed to construct this place. From the inside, there were picturesque windows facing the outside. A winter scene melted into flowers of spring and the slight chirping of crickets and a rushing creek before the inevitable sway of the red and gold trees of autumn, all depending on which direction one looked.
It was not a prison, this place with throw pillows and a richly-woven tapestry of nudes adorning the final side of the pentagon-shaped tower. The temperature remained constant and moderate, thus Hermione's ability to walk around almost naked when outside this place, autumn had descended on them, with chilly winds and incessant rains.
She gave no explanation for what she did here, and he didn't ask.
“Blood. Black blood.” He didn't look at her as he emphasised the word “Black.”
She understood at once and frowned, stopping and whirling around to fully face him, her mouth puckered into a moue. “Everyone else's dead.” Then her horrified eyes looked up. “Narcissa.”
“She's dead now too.”
“Did you—?” She couldn't even finish the question, but the fact that she thought it made his face tighten.
“No, I didn't.”
She didn't look like she believed him entirely. He swallowed and looked away, feeling his gorge rise as he remembered that battle. So many dead. “But there were rumours about Bellatrix's...experiments. I thought it was worth a try.”
“It did work,” she said. She gave him an appraising look. There was even something mildly appreciative on her face, as though she finally saw something admirable in him. “I don't have a wand though.”
In the back of his mind, he saw her naked body, and the person who came forward to cover it with his own was himself, pushing aside her hair to—
He gritted his teeth to prevent the colour from rising in his cheeks as he tried to control his thoughts. “I know.” He held out his hand, turned it over so that his palm faced up and opened his hand. His wand lay there; a long, dark stick. There was an almost imperceptible shake to his hand that he hoped she didn't notice.
She stared at the wand for a moment before looking back at him. She hadn't made a move for it.
He was impatient with her. Did she want to stay here forever? “Well, go on. Take it!”
Her hand tentatively reached out and then more boldly gripped the length of the wood. Then she dropped it back in his palm with a grimace and snatched back her hand. He watched as she nursed the hand as though it hurt. “It burns. Bellatrix did something to me. I can't—I can't do magic anymore. I'm a Mudblood, just like she said.”
“You're not a Mudblood,” he said. He was surprised his teeth were grinding down.
She looked surprised too. “Thank you. For saying that. And for coming here.”
“You're giving up?” He sounded incredulous; he was incredulous. The Hermione Granger he knew never gave up, not even when all the odds in the world were stacked against her. Not like him.
“No, of course not. You try then.”
They tried everything. He even snuck in books to her. She could touch nothing magical without suffering burns so painful that her skin looked reddened afterwards. That was the reason she couldn't touch the wards, the reason she couldn't climb down her own hair. She was trapped within the tower like an animal ensnared in brambles, left to pace and pace the strange room, with nothing to do but to comb and comb her ever-growing hair. There were no books to occupy her. Any marks she made on the window disappeared like puffs of hot air in the wind.
“Blood magic,” she said. She snapped her fingers.
His head came up, and he saw his thoughts reflected in her eyes. “It's worth a try,” he said, but his reluctance showed in his voice. There was so little of the blood left. Every time he used a little less of his stash and cast a stronger multiplier spell. Soon there would be none left, and he would be left outside of this place that was invisible and nonexistent unless he came covered in bloody tribute. They had to get her out and yet he dreaded what he had to do to get more of the magic.
She swallowed, her eyes lucid and apprehensive, knowing what it entailed. “But Narcissa. She's... dead. Can you get more blood?”
He was silent for several beats. There was a strange hum that encased the tower, cutting it off from all life forms. Even dust mites did not intrude in this high place. Light appeared as though through a prism through the scenes of the changing seasons, at once night, at once day, at once with ten moons in the sky and one star and five billion dark Suns. It was a place to drive a person mad the longer one stayed here.
“I can get more blood,” he said. It sounded like a vow. He looked down and their hands were so close that they almost touched. His fingers flexed. Her hair lay strewn around them, as fulsome as the barbed woods outside.
“Is it—very hard?” she asked. She looked tentative, as though she hated to ask it of him. She used to have a fairly low opinion of him, as he recalled. Nobody but Harry Potter in her horizon for her. But he would, if she...
His lips tightened. Instead of thinking about his task, his mind had drifted off to more forbidden areas. He watched her every evening with Bellatrix. If not for Bellatrix's odd, mad turns, he thought it would have been possible that a real relationship between the two could endure. Instead, Bellatrix was given to mad rages, during which she set fire to everything in sight. No matter how benevolent her good times, Hermione would never stay.
He had never told her he knew what was happening between the two, and she had never volunteered. Yet the subject was clear to both of them; his transfigured clothing but a shroud for his blood-smeared figure, the strange views from the windows a beacon of abnormality, her nearly translucent shift a dead giveaway of her indecorous status and activities.
“I can get more,” he said. Then he withdrew without another word, without looking back at her.
He stayed hidden in the woods until Bellatrix showed up. He watched the two at their play. His hand again drifted down to his hard member as it did every time he watched them fondle and tease each other. Again, he came with her name on his lips, thoughts of her in her school uniform dancing in his head.
He would have done infinitely more than blood magic for her.
It was distasteful business, getting blood out of a dead body.
It was necromancy at best and breaking all rules of lawful order at worst. He could feel his soul being pulled apart when he executed the necessary spells to reanimate the body long enough for the heart to start pumping blood. The rest stayed inert and as still as death.
His vision blurred as he cast the spells to start draining the blood. It wasn't really her, he reminded himself. The Malfoy matron had been dead long since, kept in stasis in the family tomb. He was not only grave-digging but also robbing the dead of even the dignity of a peaceful death. He wondered if Voldemort ever felt like this—the slight jolt to the senses as the lines of morality and decency became blurred by the urgency of one's goals.
It was on this last thought and with the vision of the dead woman on the floor that he passed out.
He woke up two days later and had enough blood to fill a bucket.
It didn't work. All the damage he did to his soul, and it didn't work.
By then he had been there a full month, testing every spell they could to break the force of Bellatrix's. Her dark magic held.
They stood there, smeared head to toe in Narcissa Malfoy's blood. Both of them were naked.
He had always had the decency to clean up and transfigure a covering over himself before he climbed up the tower. Today, he appeared as he always did in the forest near the tower. Naked but for his wand and the vial of blood hanging around his neck.
She stared at him as his bloody head appeared before her and backed up as he clambered over the ledge.
“Is it...you?” Her voice was hesitant, but unafraid. He noticed that she had backed up to the fireplace next to the tapestry. He wouldn't have been surprised if she had held a poker behind her.
“It's me.” He tried to look as nonchalant as possible, covered with wet and drying blood, feeling his skin crack and pull in places where the blood had dried in a thin, rusty layer. The smell of iron pervaded the air. He licked his dry lips and tried not to think of the blood that he tasted.
Her eyes flickered over his body, pausing as it lingered over his nether regions. He tried to remain unmoving, but he felt his co*ck twitch at the attention. What did she see when she saw him? A friend perhaps, or had his visits developed their relationship into something else? Co-conspirators in awful crimes against nature, perhaps? He thought then that however close she had been with Harry Potter, in some things, the two of them were now forever linked together in some unnatural, unforgivable way. She had to know how he came by the blood, yet she did not stop him, only whispered a entreaty to be careful.
He had seen her unclothed many times, but always from a distance. Up close, the thin shift failed to be as translucent, though he was always taunted by the sight of those double peaks on her narrow chest. By now, his brain had run through the entire repertoire of what he'd like to do to her nipples. Suckle them, tongue them, pinch them, bite them, rub his co*ck over them—he had replayed his favourite variations in the darkness of his home and then added other things to the list. Nipple clamps perhaps. Ice to make them stand up for him. Melted wax to make her wince. He wanted to slap them, to kiss them, to worship them.
Hermione slowly took off her shift, her eyes fastened on the jar he held in one hand. Blood sloshed against the side, and the lid remained tight. She hesitated, her hand outstretched. “Should I?” Her eyes pleaded with him to understand her dilemma.
She clearly wasn't used to body painting with blood, and especially not the Malfoy matron’s blood. If only she knew that Lucius Malfoy often used Narcissa's monthly flow in his darker rituals, she would be less afraid—or perhaps even more so. It was crossing a threshold that even she hadn't realised she held. Despite her long imprisonment with the maddest witch in the British Isles, one who had locked her up for Bellatrix's own pleasure to be used in ways that nobody in public even dared to imagine, Hermione still hesitated, unsure.
“I'll do it,” he said. His voice sounded unnaturally low, even for him, and he raised his eyes from the jar to look his fill on her body. He looked at the small shadows under her breasts, the crevice between her legs, and the two rosy nipples that looked as ripe as berries and more succulent, a perfect snack for his hungry mouth. An image he had memorised by now and on which he would have to sustain himself after she was freed from this place. He would have no more excuse to keep seeing her like this, a secret erotic painting for his own perusal.
Right now she was the closest he had ever been to her like this.
He tore his eyes away and felt his co*ck lengthen and rise, an overt testament to his thoughts.
She said not a word as he carefully uncapped the jar and began to dip his hand into the blood. It had started to harden on the glass.
He painted her in the flickering candlelight in the room and the unnatural glow of the prism of the charmed sky, his hand leaving red streaks across her back, her legs, her arms, her throat, her cheeks, her ears. She closed her eyes, and he dyed her hair with dark red and covered her small feet in crimson. She inhaled when his hands smoothed the color over the firm curves of her buttocks, and she exhaled through her mouth as his fingers brushed over her belly.
When he reached her chest, he stopped breathing and she opened her eyes. Without glancing down at the rigid hardness nudging her side and smearing the blood on her hip, she grabbed his hand and covered her breast with it. Her nipple was a round pebble in his palm; no longer the color of ripe raspberries, but the unnatural brightness of blood. Their eyes locked in that strange room. His hips rocked forward of its own accord, his co*ck seeking a home in her warm folds. Then, with the last of the blood, he reached down and smoothed his hand between her legs before dipping once, twice on her most private parts.
Her hips lifted, her legs fell apart for him, and his finger scraped a line across her slit.
They were both breathing hard when he stepped away and capped the jar. “I think that's it. You're completely covered.” His voice sounded even more gravelly to his own ears. The air was so thick with tense silence that he imagined he could hear the dripping of blood as the excess fell to the floor around them in artistic splatter.
“Am I?” She looked away then and her eyes fell to his engorged co*ck, stiff and thick, protruding from his middle like a club ready for action.
She ran a finger along her folds and held it out to him for a moment before wrapping her hand around his co*ck, where his skin was the color of excitement rather than blood-red. He might have closed his eyes and groaned as she gave his member a tug before she let go.
“There.” There was a note of satisfaction in her voice as she stepped back and surveyed him, now as clinical as she was sensual but a moment ago. “Now we're both ready.”
It would have been the wrong time to f*ck her. He knew this.
They were both covered in a dead woman's blood, after all, and more importantly no one knew how long they had before Bellatrix returned.
He turned resolutely away from her toward the runes he had drawn on the floor. He murmured the incantation that would counteract with Bellatrix's magic. The blood on the floor and their skins shone in reaction to the spell.
Then, holding her sticky and drying arm in his grip, he Apparated them both away.
It didn't work, of course.
He found himself alone and sprawled back in the swampy fields far away from the tower. Of Hermione, there was no sign.
He pounded his fist against the earth and let out a roar of disappointment as his hand dove into the mud. He didn't feel the wet, sharp rocks digging into his legs, the thin, crisp blades of wilted grass scratching his skin, or even the rain-soaked mud under his toes as he stood and squelched his way home.
The magic was too strong. Bellatrix had learned infinitely more from Voldemort than anyone could possibly have imagined.
There was no point in returning. He could kill Bellatrix, torture her, but there was a very big chance that even that would not break the spell. But that was what he had to do.
“No,” Hermione said when he brought it up.
“We've got to.”
“You're no killer.” There was no judgement or flattery in her voice; it was a simple stated fact. “You'd put yourself in even more danger trying.”
“But what about you? They all think you're dead.”
“I am dead,” she said. She was staring out one of the windows when she started to laugh. And laugh and laugh. He let her, although he wasn't sure whether she was hysterical or whether her imprisonment had started to break her mind.
Then he reached out and gripped her shoulder. She turned to face him and embraced him so hard he felt his ribs contract. When he left that day, his transfigured shirt was wet on one side.
Eventually, the loneliness got too much for her.
Eventually, when he climbed up the tower to her, she let him hold her, and hold her.
When his hand moved down her back, she stiffened but didn't pull away. When his mouth brushed against her ear, she didn't push him away but angled her head to give him better access. When he kissed her for the first time, lightly on the lips, she lifted her chin and thrust out her tongue so that their mouths mated with one another, sucking and licking, like a sensual dance. When his hand caressed her breast, her hand moved over his to teach him the motions that she liked best. When he pulled away to dip his head down to her belly, she parted her legs willingly and lifted her hips to give him better access.
When she came that day, it was on his hands, on his mouth, and later, on his co*ck. When he turned to leave that day, she called him by his name.
Some days she is lucid. He isn't sure whether he prefers those days to the ones where she seems lost in her own world. She is less buoyant on those days, the ones on which she calls him by his name. Melancholy and despair grips her then, and she makes marks on her arms as though trying to rub out something from her skin that only she can see. Sometimes her fingernails are so rough they tear through her own skin. Even though he heals them with a murmur, he's afraid that one day she will crack and he will find that she was just a shell all along, that the girl he loves never existed but in his imagination.
“Dance with me,” she says, leaning forward so that her whispered words brushed over his skin. “Dance with me like how we never danced at the Yule Ball.”
He remembers that night like nothing else in his life. How the sight of her made the breath catch in his throat, and he suddenly realised what she had meant to him all along. The moment of epiphany, some people call it. It was then that he decided he would protect this girl forever.
They dance in the room with the moonlight shining through the filmy curtains. A curtain billows from the draft in the crumbling hole in the wall. They dance until the fire burning in the grate becomes a different type of fire within them for each other. Then they are rubbing against each other, trying to soothe the rising excitement building between them. The clothes slip from their bodies into a puddle on the floor and he's chanting. Chanting. Chanting.
I'll protect you always.
When their movements surge into a climax and slow into languorous touches, she turns to him. “It's not an easy task. Protecting me. Especially from myself.”
He's not lying when he rolls over so that he's above her, bracketing her face between his hands and arms, his hair swinging around his forehead as he gazes down at her. “It's not hard. Not for me. Not if it's you.”
They had three months in the tower before they were discovered.
In the real world, the war raged on, unabated despite the destruction of Voldemort. Wizarding Britain lapsed into primeval times, without rule, without order, with everyone meeting another wizard at hostile wandpoint. The Muggle world was feeling the effects. Without the more tolerant wizards to stand between them and the extremists, the bouts of unexplained violence and terror increased steadily.
His goal, though, had remained the same since the beginning: to find Hermione Granger and to break her out. All the moments of ecstasy with her were tainted with an edge of desperation and despair that he felt more acutely every time he had to leave her in her wretched tower.
His life was quickly turning into those brief moments with her. He resented the times when he had to leave her in a hurry. His obsession meant that he was starting to be less careful, to spend far too long pacing around the clearing until Bellatrix had gone. All his thoughts, his actions centered on her and only her.
He wasn't careful enough.
“She knows,” Hermione said one day afterwards as they lay together. His arm was under her, his hand tracing lingering patterns on her upper arm.
“We're careful.” He refused to be pessimistic.
“I'm pregnant.”
Her body was no longer relaxed. At some point, his hand had stopped tracing runes on her skin. His throat closed up, and his pulse skipped a beat.
“How sure are you?” he asked. He forced his hands to continue to stroke her arm, but his actions no longer felt natural.
She didn't speak right away. Then she took his hand and placed it on her abdomen. “I've gained weight. A lot of weight. Haven't you noticed?”
Now that he thought of it, there had been more of her breasts to hold and caress. Her buttocks seemed lusher and fuller when she sat on top of him. He turned his head to face her, blinking as he sought to connect all the dots.
“I've had no monthly since that first time,” she said. Her brown eyes were steady and unafraid. “She knows. Or suspects.”
He shifted her off his arm and sat up. “We've got to get you out of here.”
“How?” She wasn't hysterical; she seemed eerily calm as though prepared for the worst. “We've tried everything, even the arcane. I don't think it's even tied to her existence. It's something else.”
They argued, and he won. When next Bellatrix returned, he was waiting for her.
“O-ho,” Bellatrix said, an unsightly grin stretching her blood-red mouth across her face like a wound as she turned to see who had summoned away her wand. “Come to join us, have you, nephew? Come to have your fun with the Mudblood, have you?”
“Don't call her that,” he said, an automatic response as he pointed his wand at her. Then he cast the ultimate Unforgivable.
And again.
And again.
All to the backdrop of her cackling laughter. “You've got to mean it, you know! You've never been able to do it, have you! You still can't!”
Bellatrix wandlessly summoned up a small object that came flying across the room to her. Her eyes stared across the room at him, as dark as endless night, and the object—a relic—grew and expanded, shrugging as it came free of its flat trappings.
“HOW MAY I SERVE,” an unearthly voice intoned, sending reverberations into the stone flooring beneath their feet. The Being had no face, no form; it loomed over them, under them, all around them, and within them. The voice had pounded his way into his heart, and he gripped his chest against the jarring sensation.
“Destroy him!” screamed Bellatrix, pointing straight at him.
Hermione ran forward and thrust her arms out as to shield him from the Being. “No! Release him and I shall stay here with you!”
“With me, you unfaithful creature? With me?” Bellatrix's voice rose on a screech. “How dare you cavort with him when I have kept you, protected you—”
“Spare him,” Hermione said, her voice cold, even, and powerful. She was just as much a force as the Being, and she stood between him and them.
Gently, he moved her aside to stand in front of her. “We belong together, Bellatrix. We always have.”
Bellatrix smiled slowly and disturbingly. “You’ll never be together without me.”
And then, he found himself falling. A voice, Hermione’s voice crying on a thin, reedy note. A burst of light appeared before him, causing him to flinch. For a brief second, he felt suspended in air as he watched his wand float past his eyes on its path downwards. A shrill cackling of unending laughter echoed by the booming rumble of an unearthly voice. He stretched out his hand in expectation of flight and the wind whistled by him in unsympathetic response as the ground rushed up to meet him.
In the end, Bellatrix killed herself by such an action. In the end, Bellatrix hardened Hermione’s own resolve to escape, to control the Being herself to escape from Bellatrix’s new prison.
In the end, the answer lay in Hermione's hair, and she had figured it out, even under mind control and torture.
The fall had left him with one leg permanently shattered. When they dance now, he drags one foot behind him.
He wasn't the only one who suffered. Bellatrix had lived up to her own promise. Hermione was not left without scars. When he saw her again, one side of her face was permanently scarred with Bellatrix’s anger and jealousy. Mudblood, the scars read. Mudblood,it says on part of her scalp, where the hair grew back uneven and thin, nothing like the glorious mane it once was.
They are not even the worst of the scars Bellatrix left on Hermione.
He’ll never look on you again without thinking of me,Bellatrix had told Hermione.
Amid all the atrocities, Bellatrix had done the worst thing she could to him. Bellatrix had wiped all the memories of their moments together in the tower, confusing Hermione's senses so that she doesn't know which is what. What he is doing now is only in reaction to that—their life together is worth so much more than a few scruples.
That is why, even when she resists, he gives her the potion. She needs it. It subdues her demons.
He does so now, watching as her fingers relax from the claws she held up to him and she drops the paper she was reading onto the grate. She smiles beatifically at him, and he wants to weep at this, at what he has to do to preserve their happiness, the precious little they have because he wasn't able to save her in time.
He swallows back his agony and takes the hand she holds up to him.
“Funny,” Hermione says now. She pauses in her humming to lean back and stare full into his face, her eyes flicking up to the top of his head. She frowns a little in confusion. “Somehow I thought you had red hair.”
“No,” Draco Malfoy says, not pausing a step in their dancing. “It’s always been this blond.”
The paper she dropped merrily burns in the grate behind them, sending happy, flickering flames dancing up to consume the words: Fourth Annual Celebration to Commemorate Harry Potter Being Made Head Auror.
