Author's Note: This piece was written for the Dramione Fanfiction Writers' Nikita Gill Poetry Challenge. My lovely prompted poem was "Wild Embers". Be sure to check out her other works of brilliance. This piece is a little different and a little experimental - I hope you enjoy xoxo

Alpha love as always to the wonderful Kyonomiko. Errors are my own.

Disclaimer: I do not own any part of the Harry Potter franchise.

"Wild Embers" by Nikita Gill

We are the descendants
of the wild women you forgot
we are the stories you thought
would never be taught.

They should have checked the ashes
of the women they burned alive.
Because it takes a single wild ember
to bring a whole wildfire to life.

They said she was fire incarnate.

They said she had been taken by the wilderness.

He might have believed it himself – she had spent so many years on the run – if he didn't know better. If he didn't know her better.

Dangerous. Feral. Insatiable – like the fire magic she possessed.

Words thrown forth by those who didn't know her, who feared her and cowered before her.

Draco felt a smile curve his lips as he gazed out upon the terrific display of magic and power before him. He could feel her stare on him and the grin broke. Her mirth rang in his ears as fire crackled and blazed, discordant all around them.

Because the embers that flew forth from her fingertips had nothing on the wildfire that raged in her heart.

Draco had been young the first time he ever heard of Hermione Granger. He'd been only a foot soldier in Riddle's army, following in the steps of his father. He'd been both blind and naive, to think that the path he walked would lead to better days.

The rebellion was still fresh, then. They were young and numbered few.

Draco had laughed along at Riddle's taunts, with the other new recruits seeking favour. He hadn't realized the truth until it was too late.

He couldn't pinpoint a time, but at some point the rebellion transitioned from a joke to a threat. They had been building a following underground, and by the time they emerged, they were a force the likes of which Riddle was not prepared to face.

The rebellion had magic.

The thought alone caused Draco's blood to tingle in his veins, both with trepidation and a deep-seated, long-buried intrigue. Magic was forbidden across Riddle's domain.

They told him Hermione Granger was the brains of the rebellion. She was a powerful fire-wielder with the brilliance to match. She was formidable. She was wild.

They told him she was kept in a cage.

Uncertain what to believe, Draco never spoke of his desire to meet her.

He hadn't yet learned that she wasn't the brains – she was the soul.

It was an unbearable day in mid-winter that Draco was captured. A blizzard raged around him and he had become separated from his unit. When he made his way through the squall he was dismayed to learn he'd been left behind – even as relief settled in his soul.

If he was presumed dead he wouldn't have to return to Riddle's army. Two years had passed since his indoctrination and he'd become disillusioned with the cause in half that.

Pushing onward, Draco drove himself to exhaustion before he came across anyone. He succumbed to the cold and fatigue at the edge of a cave, slipping into nothing.

But when he awoke, he was no longer alone.

A girl sat nearby, her gaze fixed on a small fire, crackling and dancing on the floor of the cave. She looked to be around his age, but there was something about her – something in the way her bright eyes flickered to him as he stirred – that caught his interest.

Her clothes were meagre and singed; she wore a head full of wild curls. She was stunning.

"You were fighting the early stages of hypothermia." She said the words as a greeting, her voice soft and melodious. Her gaze landed on him like melted chocolate and she brandished a skewer of cooked meat. "It's all I have right now, soldier."

It took Draco a moment to realize he'd been stripped of his infantry gear to his shorts, and draped with some sort of hide. The girl wore something else – something wilder – and his heart froze in his chest. "You're with the rebellion."

She flashed him a grin – her teeth were straight and her canines sharp – and took a bite from her own meal. "And now you're my captive." She tossed him a bag and Draco caught it, confused. "Put this on. You'll freeze outside."

"Captive," Draco scoffed, even as he slipped the garments from the bag and dressed, grateful for the din in the far side of the cave. "Why wouldn't you have killed me?"

The girl took another bite of her skewer, drumming her fingers on the floor of the cave where she sat with her knees bent. "I'm quite certain I can manage you. But if you try to run…"

She let the words trail off into the darkness between them. She rose to her feet, dusting her hands off as Draco finished the last of his own skewer, quelling the anxious hunger gnawing at the pit of his stomach. "And besides – I've yet to determine whether you deserve death."

She shouldered her pack and Draco followed suit with his own, uncertain what to make of the situation.

But when she waved a hand at the small fire and it went dark, his heart leapt with intrigue even as it fell into his stomach. Then she strode out into the dead of winter.

Hermione, as he learned her to be, was an enigma.

She was everything they had claimed, and nothing at all. She was brave and reckless; she was a brilliant strategist and firm. She was loyal to a fault and full of determination.

She was kind, sometimes. And she had a heart of gold.

Draco was never handed back to Riddle's army, nor was he used as a bargaining chip. He wasn't certain why Hermione kept him at her side, because the more he came to know about her the less he understood.

She lived in the wilds, finding a new place every night, despite that the rebellion managed regular and cyclical camps. Draco went along on the days when she checked in, but he preferred the times when it was only the two of them.

Her parents had been taken by Riddle's army when she was a child, their words too outspoken and methods too forward.

She had learned of her fire-wielding abilities by accident. Draco laughed out loud when she told him the story over a bottle of smuggled wine and they shared a grin.

There was something otherworldly and ancient about her – the shine in her eyes, the way she spoke – that suggested she knew more than she let on. And something soul-wearying in the way she walked, as if she carried the weight of too many worlds on her back. As if she had seen too much.

Draco would observe as she practiced her fire-wielding, teasing him with the heat and the embers.

But in battle… in battle she was chaos and wrath, unrelenting and devastating as the fire she threw. Her skills in battle made her practice look like parlour tricks and left Draco suspended in a state of awe.

The first time he kissed her was a balmy summer evening in the middle of a long unkempt field, it's grasses tall and lazy in the breeze around them. She had smiled against his lips and pulled him closer; her skin was soft and enticing against his that night beneath a blanket of stars.

She was his first. His first love. She taught him more than he ever learned as a trained soldier and he grew to long for a world without the dark shadows of war.

Draco coveted the time he spent with her.

But yet, Riddle's forces strengthened and withdrew behind their impenetrable fortresses. Even Draco's knowledge couldn't help and times grew dire.

He held Hermione as she mourned, every time one of the rebellion was lost. For each loss she felt, deeply within her, as each was her own.

And still, he watched the spark within take on a life beyond her.

He could see it in her eyes and he knew.

In time, it would be set ablaze.

The early hints of autumn's chill swept through the crackling leaves when Draco awoke one morning, and he felt it before he even opened his eyes. The ground beside him was cold.

Hermione had gone.

He had feared the thought even as he knew it would one day come.

In her place remained only a short letter and her favourite eagle-feather quill, it's inked tip dry. As dry as his eyes remained as he read her tight words.

Draco

I seek a way to drive out Riddle's forces from within. I cannot ask you to reveal yourself, as I cannot ask you to stay by my side, for I do not know whether I will return.

Protect my heart for as long as you can because it is yours to keep.

Hermione

He folded the letter and stowed the quill, at once in awe of her courage and cursing the same.

The next day he sought out the rebellion camps, to offer his assistance. To do what he could in securing her safe return.

But at night, he returned to the wilds.

It was where she had stolen his heart. It was where she would one day find him again.

For months Draco planned and strategized with the rebellion. They plotted and ambushed and gave as good as they took. But still, the fleeting strength of the rebellion waned and days grew darker as numbers grew thin.

Every night he returned to the cave where Hermione had first found him.

He longed for the feel of her curls. The soft touch of her hand and the raging inferno of her spirit.

He forgot the sparkle of her eyes, as tears broke from his own in the dark dead of night. He missed the melody of her voice.

He would dream of her, and awaken cold and alone.

Draco wished she hadn't gone, even as he longed to take up the fight at her side in equal measure. But the few times he approached Riddle's nearest and largest strongholds, he found no sign of her.

He knew she was alive, through the meagre and stolen newsprint the rebellion kept.

But beyond that, he didn't know. He so greatly desired to know.

The smallest sliver of hope was kept alive by the spark of a borrowed ember she had implanted in his soul.

It was the sweetest dream he could remember, and Draco woke with a smile lingering on his lips. An early spring dew clung to the verdant canopy beyond the cave as he reached for the fading wisps of the dream.

But his heart stuttered with joy even as it sunk with despair, for clutched within his hand was a note.

It simply read, Tonight.

He repeated the word as he brandished the letter in the rebellion camp that day. Watched as they all cracked a smile for the first time in weeks, knowing they felt that same spark of hope at last.

And Draco couldn't steady the racing cadence of his heart as they prepared.

Tonight.

They heard the first explosions at midnight. Powder kegs in the magazine, someone said.

Madness erupted, like the dancing flames from within.

Unarmed soldiers fled, green with youth and lacking in the convictions Riddle had attempted to force upon them. Draco recognized it in their eyes as their world burned.

Shots rang out in the night as the corrupt forces of the domain made their stand.

But still more fires arose and chased through the stronghold with unnatural strength, until the sounds of gunfire were quelled by the crackling of endless, furious flames.

Soft fingers, still warm, grazed his as Draco stood on the hill beyond the chaos, and he wrapped her small hand in his as he pulled Hermione into his arms.

"You waited," she breathed.

His lips found her temple, her jaw. "There was never another option." Her mouth, soft and warm against his own. "I would have gone with you."

A smile, as she settled into his side. "I know."

The night fell silent around them, but for the crackling discord of the flames all around, flaring in the darkness of the sky.

Hermione's eyes shone with tears and the flames within her.

He would go anywhere with her. Could go anywhere with her, now.

She was his wildfire in the wilderness.

And Draco longed to burn.