marked me (like a bloodstain)

off the deep end

i miss you in the same ways i hated you

He was forcing the air out of her lungs.

Hermione wasn't quite sure how Draco Malfoy was doing it, but he definitely had been making it difficult for her to breathe. It was his thing, after all; he had done it before, twelve years old and taunting her with a you'll be next, mudbloods , seventeen years old with a split lip and loathing in his silver eyes when he whispered a command against her ear, a take your knickers off, Granger that still plagued her half a decade later.

When the scorching words echoed inside her head, shattering any illusions of sleep the moon and midnight sky promised, she had often (reluctantly) wondered if it still plagued him, too. In his cold, dark cell, she wondered if he remembered saying it at all—or how easily (quickly) she had obeyed, slipping her underwear off, her gasp resounding across what was left of their old Potions classroom when he pushed his way in.

She wondered, too, if he despised her even more for having been the last person to touch him before being imprisoned (alone) for the rest of his life.

"I know there are a lot of questions," Robards commenced after Kingsley's timid assistant secured the privacy wards in their conference room, his tone gruff and impatient as ever. "And the Minister and myself will answer what we deem necessary, but, as always, you'd do well to remember the confidentiality clauses you were bound to when you took on the title of Auror."

Harry slid his right hand off the large, sleek, white-oak table; his fingers gently circled Hermione's wrist, squeezing three times like they were still trainees in need of silent encouragement to keep going. To keep surviving.

She knew she had to find her breath again, but the relentless, grey storms in Draco's narrowed eyes made it difficult to force her lungs to function again. Especially when his gaze had flickered to where Harry's hand had disappeared, like he could see through the wood and he was still not above ridiculing and judging them for how openly they displayed their weaknesses.

The situation was much worse by Lucius Malfoy finding her brown eyes almost as frequently as his son.

"They know their positions, Gawain," Kingsley said to his Head of the DMLE as he leaned against his chair, arms crossing over his broad chest. To the other occupants in the room, he looked every bit a Minister for Magic that was not afraid to roll up the sleeves of his expensive robes and put in the work where it was needed. To Hermione, he looked just as he did in the ancient, dusty rooms of Grimmauld Place—like a soldier, a strategist, a survivor.

But now a liar, too.

"Five years ago," he continued, "the wizengamot held a private sentencing for the Malfoy family. A selected few were allowed in aside from the council, those being two members of the Daily Prophet , myself, and Harry Potter. The world demanded Death Eaters to pay their reparations with blood, but we needed the Malfoys elsewhere. The wizengamot proceeded with their original verdict: life in Azkaban for Draco and Lucius Malfoy and three years of house arrest for Narcissa Malfoy. It was the sentence we gave to those two reporters. And it was the sentence they passed on to you, the public."

Hermione tugged her hand free from beneath Harry's.

At the hollow center of their conference table, a projection appeared. It was the front page of an old Daily Prophet she knew every word of: DRACO AND LUCIUS MALFOY, SENTENCED TO LIFE IN AZKABAN FOR WAR CRIMES.

"Once the reporters were escorted out of the hearing, we gave the Malfoys a choice: a life of limited freedom and magic in France, forbidden from ever returning to England, or twenty years of exile, guaranteed a sentence reduction if they aided our undercover Aurors and the Ministère des Affaires in tracking down fugitive Death Eaters in that region."