Chapter Text
Hermione Jean Granger was dead.
The headline shouted the statement in capital letters of thick, black ink from the front of the Daily Prophet. It seemed so bold and final and… His suddenly-dry mouth made swallowing virtually impossible.
His heart stuttered before stopping completely. Just for a moment as his eyes skimmed the line of text again. A chill moved across his skin, and he shivered as his eyes took in every word trying to read between the lines. Because the headline couldn’t possibly be accurate, she couldn’t be dead!
The wood-panelled room swayed around him as he sat back in his chair, a weight pressing on his chest as if an erumpent rested there. Hermione Jean Granger was dead.
She was. Panic swelled, mingling with a scream of anguish threatening to escape his mouth as the truth hit home like a dagger.
“Master?” a small voice squeaked from the ground next to him. Draco turned to meet the elf’s large saucer eyes. How could the world have the audacity to keep moving when she no longer was? “Is Master well?” the elf croaked again.
“Leave me, Werty. Please,” he whispered, unable to find his voice. The elf bowed and left the room with a click of her fingers.
Alone with his grief again, he swallowed the sob that attempted to escape his lips. The silence exaggerated his quick breathing as it pressed in on him like soup, threatening to drown him.
Hermione Jean Granger was really dead.
He returned to the paper and dared look at the photo of her as it moved. She seemed to stare at him accusingly as if he had something to do with it. An undignified squeak escaped as he jumped back, meeting her eyes from beyond the grave. She stared at him for one more moment before turning and passing through an office door.
With shaking hands, he picked up the paper and stared, waiting for her to come back out of the office. But she still hadn’t reappeared after what felt like an eternity. Finally, he tore his eyes away from the image and continued to read the rest of the article. The crime had taken the entire front page and several pages within, which was no surprise. Hermione Jean Granger, also the Minister of Magic, had been killed. But how? By who? And why? But despite having so many questions unanswered, the article answered so few.
A sudden, manic drive filled him as he searched the text for clues. Unlike the financial pages he usually studied, the details would be found in words and turns of phrases, not in curves and dips of an exchange rate chart.
The journalist had advised that there had been an attack in her home on Friday night. There had been no other casualties found at the crime scene. But, of course, Potter had discovered her body when she hadn’t turned up for work on Monday. According to the writer, she had died at some point over the weekend.
Draco knew the exact moment life had left her body. If only he had realised that was what he had been experiencing! His strange and sudden fever started sometime on Friday night, leaving him weak and delirious at times until; he assumed the moment she died. Sunday night, nine thirty-eight precisely. From then, his symptoms evaporated without a trace, but so had something else. He hadn’t realised it then, but now its absence hung heavy in his chest. He closed his eyes and concentrated, feeling the gaping hole with his magic, like probing with one’s tongue, a gum for a missing tooth. There was a space that hadn’t been there before. Jagged edges like a wound where something had been ripped away.
Screwing up the paper in his hands, he raged silently as he let his defences down. How long had she been conscious, waiting for help that would never come? How much time had she spent afraid, knowing she would die?
All his adult life, he had stayed away, hoping that by keeping his distance, she would be safe. Since school and the war, he had tried to protect her by keeping his distance. If he hid how much he loved her, no one would try to hurt her.
When he was younger, he imagined his link to her like a golden chain or a heavy thread. Before the war and the return of the Dark Lord, he spent afternoons studying the strange link. Occasionally, he felt he could sense the other end. But then the dark lord came, and the fear of its discovery forced him to bury the memory so deep that even legilimency couldn’t dig it out of him. When the snatchers came, dragging her into his house, along with the others in their seventh year. It was then that he realised that it was her. She was his anchor and the end of their chain.
Now the chain was torn from him, and he was lost at sea with nothing to hold on to.