Thank you guy for your patience with me. There'll be another chapter out within a week. As always, so much love goes out to the incredible RESimon and shestoolazytologin for all their work on this fic.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The door clicked shut behind Narcissa, leaving the home in silence. Hermione stood, her eyes straying between where Narcissa had turned as she'd exited and where the stairs were. She could leave. It would be easy to walk away and disappear, to abandon the mess she'd made in hopes that it would sort itself in time.

She twitched toward the steps. She couldn't pinpoint when it had happened — only that at some point her world had detached itself and re-anchored around him. She could try to fool herself into thinking that walking through the door was a possibility, that she could somehow extricate herself from him, but she would never be able to ignore the compulsion that tugged at her belly like a string pulled taut

She was halfway up the steps before she registered that she'd been moving at all.

A half dozen more steps and she was stopped outside of the bedroom door. Another, and she was pushing it open and stepping inside. Her husband was sitting at the end of the bed, his head buried in his hands. He pulled them away and looked up at her as she entered, looking as impenetrable as he had ever been.

She pulled the door shut behind her, carefully holding his gaze. "There have been…" she trailed off, trying to sort through all that she wanted to say and trying to settle for one, " —so many times that I've tried to talk to you. But every time I've run into one of the dozens of walls that you've erected around yourself. Or you explode at me, we explode at each other, and we—"

Her heart stuttered as she recalled how many shouting matches had ended in slammed doors. Slammed doors, and then sex. How many times had they used their bodies instead of words?

They'd always been this broken, hadn't they?

They'd built whatever they had on a foundation of nothing, the ground they'd tried to build it upon crumbled from the beginning. They'd fought and had sex and had sex again, words swallowed by desperate physicality that they'd tried and failed to use to fill the wide nothing between them. Maybe it was what war had done to her — made her desperate to forget, and equally desperate to feel anything other than the crippling reality of what had come upon them.

"We've come to this— this indescribable position we've found ourselves in." She clenched and unclenched her hands tightly. "I love you Draco. And you knew— you knew before I did. It's why you trusted me. And I betrayed you anyway."

His expression tightened.

She crossed her arms, tucking her hands tightly into her elbows to stop them from twitching toward him. "Somehow, you love me too." Saying it out loud sent a shiver through her, the words slow as they came out as she still tried to process the truth of them. That, and the many other truths that lay bare between them, hovering untouched. "But you— you have filled me with so much doubt."

The few feet between them felt like a chasm, widening with every word she spoke. "How could I have known you loved me? You've turned me away at every opportunity. Any conversation that involves actually talking ends in a shouting match or in bed. But no words are ever spoken between us — nothing real, at least."

He was still as stone and said nothing.

"I've spent so much time doubting whether you cared for me at all. And now…now I don't even know what we are, Draco." She looked away from him, from the piercing gaze that seemed to bore into her soul. "I don't even know if we can be anything. What are we, if not each others' destruction?"

She fell silent then. She waited a beat for him to speak, for him to say something that would fill the chasm that only grew wider in the silence. Another beat passed and the silence felt almost palpable.

She let another pass before she left.

X

Her feet carried her outside. Melting snow peppered the landscape in hues of whites and browns as the muddied grass below was revealed, hastened by the sun's warmth as it peeked through the clouds. The property was surrounded by thick forest on all sides, tall trees with branches weighed down by the last of the winter's snow. There was a large pond a few dozen feet away, a small weathered dock perched at its edge. A man stood on the dock, a ray of sunlight illuminating his shock of red hair.

There was no mistaking that it was Ron.

The knot in her stomach tightened as she approached him. The sound of her feet crunching through the snow was not quiet, yet he did not move or acknowledge her presence even as she drew closer. She expected nothing less. She stopped beside him, watching the light breeze carry a broken sheet of ice across the water. He remained stiff and silent, the antithesis of all the tender softness she'd known in him.

It was Hermione who broke the silence. "I didn't know it would come to this," she started. There was no change in his demeanour. "The war was looming, and it was only a matter of time before I knew that we'd be on the run, fighting for our lives. When the Order came to me, I…I didn't expect to live out this war, Ron. It didn't matter enough for me to want to run or hide, though, because if it came out of the sacrifice for helping Harry win, for helping the next generation of Muggleborns live— then it's something I would have done a thousand times over. But Draco— he wasn't a factor that I'd ever considered."

Ron was still, frame tense and eyes still trained on the water before them.

"Ron…" she started before pausing, searching for a word that could encompass the pain she felt as she looked at him. "I love him," she said, whispering all the wrong words instead. "I didn't think I'd ever love him. But now he's everything, and it's all been mucked up and I don't know if we'll make it through this— but I'll never be able to say that I regret him, because I don't. I just know that now I'm so desperate to win, and to live, because—"

"When?" Ron was looking at her, eyes cold.

"Ron, you have to understand—"

"When?!"

Hermione swallowed. "Last year — after the Christmas holiday."

Ron's manic laugh echoed in the air, the leaves rustling in the bushes nearest them as something scurried away. "Over a year." He laughed again, the words hollow and disjointed. "You've been married — for a bloody year."

"I didn't expect them to come to me, I didn't expect any of—"

"Them?!" he spat, his features blossoming redder as he spoke. "You made a choice. And I—" he huffed out a sound that fell somewhere between a laugh and a cry, "— I would have waited for you— I would have waited forever for you."

Her stomach was coiled so tightly that it felt like she was simultaneously contracting inward and ready to shatter. "You didn't deserve to get caught up in any of this—"

"Then why did you let me be?!" His entire body was heaving with the force of his words. "Why did you let me hold on to hope like a bloody fool?! To me, you were—" He cut off, dragging his hands through his hair.

She touched his arm. "Ron—" He wrenched away and she turned to follow him only to pause mid-step.

Harry stood a few feet away, eyes blazing with as much fury as Ron's. "Why are you even here?" he asked, his voice low and cold. "Was it worth it? Was it worth abandoning us for him?"

"Did I mean anything to you?" Ron said, still dragging his hands through his hair. "Was it fun, fucking me and leading me on and getting married behind my back—"

Hermione clenched a fist. "I didn't know then, I never would have done that to you—"

"Never?" Ron spat. "If you expect us to believe a damn thing you say ever again—"

"That's not fair, Ron." Her chest grew tighter. "I never stopped fighting on your side."

"You think you deserve to say that after you told us that you're married to Malfoy?!" Harry exploded. "There was a time when we trusted you, and now I can't even look at you—"

"Fuck you, Potter." Hermione whirled to find Draco standing but a few feet away, his features dark. She hadn't even noticed his approach over the growing pounding in her head, clouding her vision with dark splotches at its edges.

There was a shift in Ron's tone when he spoke again, the void of anger suddenly filled with something much emptier. "You— you were with him at Grimmauld, the last time we— when you—" His face was white, quickly flushing red at the edges. "Was he there?" His eyes went behind her then, and she knew without looking that he could read the truth in Draco's eyes.

"You disgust me," Ron snapped. "You—"

A spell flew out of Draco's wand and singed past Ron before he could utter another word. "She's not yours anymore, Weasley—"

"ENOUGH!" Hermione was left heaving in the wake of her scream, her harsh breaths the only sound in the sudden silence. She sent Ron's and Harry's wands flying off into the snow with two quick flicks of her wrist. Ron's eyes were slightly wide as she stepped toward him, anger blazing through her. "I belong to no one. Do you think that it's been easy? That any of this has been easy?!"

She heard Harry scoff from behind her. "Fucking Malfoy was that difficult?"

"Damn you, Harry!" She bore down on him, feeling the spark of magic igniting on her fingertips. "You have no idea what I've been through to help the Order. I have never strayed from your side, not once!" Her body felt aflame with the rage that burned through her. "I have sacrificed so, so much fighting this war, and you try to talk to me about trust? About loyalty?"

She looked over at Ron, his expression still stony. "I have never stopped loving either one of you— never stopped fighting for you. But you will never, ever ask me to say that I regret him, because I don't." She looked around at the three men again, her muscles tensing further. "You have no right to speak to me that way after everything I've done for you. I have always chosen you, believed in you. And I am tired of being treated like this war hasn't upended everything I've ever known too — like this war isn't threatening to consume everything I love."

She turned and stormed into the house, letting the door slam in her wake.

X

She opened the door to the room — their room, she supposed — to find their trunks pushed against the far wall. Her eyes strayed to the bed, the weariness in her bones urging her to curl up in it and sleep for days. But her eyes were drawn to her trunk and what had lain buried deep within it for too long. There was a hollow pang deep in her chest, ringing with a familiarity she'd tried and tried to suppress by forcing down the memory of what she'd done.

She was pulling open the lid of her trunk moments later, for once dismissing the urge that told her to turn away. She dug through to the bottom of the trunk, feeling raw with pain as she peeled back yet another layer of what she'd been trying to suppress. The gleam of the silver box was visible even in the dark corner she'd shoved it in, and her fingers trembled as she lifted it out. The latch gave a small whir and released at the brush of her fingertips.

The first thing she was was the smiling faces of her parents as they hugged her tightly, their eyes squinting as the magical camera flashed. She had no more tears left to shed, but it did not stop her chest from shaking and spasming as she thumbed through the pictures and shrunken trinkets she'd stowed inside. Pain had become little but a stream that had formed somewhere in her mind, threatening to suck her into its dangerous undercurrent if she strayed too close. Today, she welcomed it. She let it drown her as she looked through everything, savouring each memory captured in the photographs and letting her touch linger on each item as she touched it.

She didn't notice them until she neared the bottom. She'd been lifting out one of the last photographs when something rolled out from beneath the pile, and she froze as she recognized it. A vial. Her lips fell open as she lifted the photographs to find more of them beneath. Seven total, each swirling with iridescent mist.

Not mist — memories.

Her parents' memories in their entirety. Everything she'd stolen from them intact and in her hands, while she'd spent the better part of the last year thinking them lost in the ashes of her home. Her knees buckled beneath her and she sank to the floor, her hands trembling as she clutched the vial.

The door clicked shut behind her, and she looked over her shoulder to find Draco standing there, watching her silently. She held the vial in her hands tightly as she stood to face him, her heart still racing.

"When?" she whispered, watching his eyes flicker to the vial and back to hers.

"The same day," he said. His voice was soft, tinged with the same weariness she felt. "Are they yours?"

She shook her head softly, rolling the vial gently between her fingers. "My parents'. It's… everything I stole from them."

She heard him let out a short breath. "You were protecting them."

"I thought I'd lost these forever," she said, looking up at him. "I don't know if words are enough to express my gratitude."

"Why did you give me access?" he asked, nodding toward where the rest of the vials sat in the box.

It had been a hasty decision at the time, but she hadn't been uncertain either when she'd charmed the lock to her husband's touch as well. "I thought that if something ever happened to me...that you'd save them."

"You hated me then. You didn't know what would happen between us, but you trusted me anyway."

She met his eyes, knowing her own were burning with emotion. "I trusted you because I just knew." She paused, her hand tightening around the vial. "Can you ever trust me again?"

There was a beat of silence before he answered. "Yes."

"I don't want things to end between us," she said. "But we can't continue as we are. We'll be each other's destruction if we do."

Draco remained stoic for a moment before he gave a short, nearly imperceptible nod.

She crossed over to him and took his hand in hers, wondering if she'd imagined the slight shiver that went through him at the touch. She sat down beside him and curled her fingers through his. The feel of his hand in hers was something she'd grown used to, but it had only ever occurred when they were rushing into or out of harm's way. Until now, she'd had no idea what it was to feel the weight of it as they sat idly, feeling the ridges of his warm palm against hers.

"Do you think we can survive this war?" she asked, feeling her own answer to the question echoed in the empty feeling deep in her stomach.

His hand tensed in hers. "No."

Hermione looked down at the floor. Every part of her wanted to see this through — live this through — for him. "Do you want to survive this war?"

She looked up at him to find his eyes already on hers, burning with the same intensity as the feeling in her chest. "Yes."

She lifted the hand that wasn't tangled in his and cupped his cheek. "I want to survive this— for you." She felt her chest constricting as she thought of how slim the chances of both of them living through it were. "You're all I have left, Draco."

Hermione's throat felt dry as she came to terms with the words. She might never be able to properly restore her parents' memories, or her friendships with Harry and Ron—

"Stop."

She looked up just as Draco's lips descended upon hers, neither gentle nor bruising as he kissed her. He pulled away only when she was near breathless, her heart fluttering in her chest. He caught her by the chin and pressed another slow kiss to her lips, pulling back just far enough that their lips barely brushed as he spoke. "I'm here."

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