Chapter 7: The Potion's Price
The world came back in pieces.
First, the smell of her own sweat, sharp and acrid. Then the feel of cotton sheets plastered to her skin, damp and chilling. A sliver of brutal morning sun cutting across her eyes. Hermione groaned, trying to lift her head from the pillow. The movement sent a bolt of nausea straight from her gut to her throat.
She swallowed hard, pressing her forehead into the mattress. The clarifying potion. Healer Selwyn had warned her. Draco had warned her. Fatigue, mood swings, potential magical fluctuation.
This was more than fatigue. This felt like her skeleton was trying to dissolve.
A deep, grinding cramp seized her lower abdomen, a vicious twist that had nothing to do with a cycle and everything to do with purgative magic scouring her from the inside. She gasped, curling in on herself. Her magic, usually a steady, humming current beneath her skin, was sparking–little painful zaps at her fingertips, a static buzz in her teeth.
Wand. I need a stabilizing charm. Something for the pain.
She fumbled for the nightstand, her vision swimming. Her fingers, clumsy and weak, brushed the polished wood of her wand—and knocked it clattering to the floor. It rolled under the bed, out of sight. A sob of frustration caught in her throat.
Next to where the wand had been, the copper Portkey knob gleamed in the sunlight. Dull, inert metal.
Another cramp hit, worse than the last. It stole her breath, made stars burst behind her eyelids. A low, pathetic sound whimpered out of her—a sound she didn’t recognize, wouldn’t have permitted if she had any control left.
As the pain crested, the copper knob glowed. A sudden, gentle warmth pulsed from it, thrumming in time with her own frantic heartbeat.
He’d know. The moment she touched it, he’d know. He’d be there, with that cold, assessing look, seeing her like this–weak, sweaty, trembling on the floor. He’d win. The contract would become real in a way it hadn’t been in Selwyn’s sterile office.
Pride was a rusty anchor. She clung to it.
“I’m fine,” she whispered to the empty room, her voice cracked. “It’s just… side effects. I can manage.”
She tried to push herself up. Her arms buckled, sending her back to the mattress with a jolt. The room tilted. A fine, hot tremor was working its way through her limbs now, the magical fluctuation making her own skin feel alien and unreliable.
The Portkey’s warmth intensified. It wasn’t a command. It was an invitation. A persistent, stupidly logical invitation.
“No,” she growled through gritted teeth.
The next wave wasn’t just a cramp. It was a systemic revolt. Nausea won. She barely lunged for the small bin by her bed before she was sick, violently and messily. It left her shaking, tears of sheer physical humiliation stinging her eyes, strands of hair stuck to her damp forehead.
She was hollowed out. Empty. And still, her body wasn’t done. The tremors were getting worse, little seismic shocks that rattled her teeth. The sparking magic made the lamplight flicker wildly.
This was dangerous. Healer Selwyn’s clinical voice echoed. Magical shock.
Her pride, that rusty anchor, snapped.
With a final, shattered gasp, her fingers scrabbled across the nightstand and closed over the copper knob. It was blazing hot now, almost too hot to hold. She didn’t think of a location. She just thought, Help.
The hook behind her navel yanked.
There was no graceful transition. One second she was kneeling on her bedroom floor, the taste of bile in her mouth. The next, she was sprawled on the cool, woven rug in the cottage sitting room, the world still spinning violently.
She heard the sharp crack of Apparition from another room. Fast. Too fast for safe distance.
Boots on floorboards. Quick, firm strides.
Draco appeared in the archway to the sitting room. He wasn’t in sleek wool this time. He wore dark, fitted trousers and a thin, grey jumper pushed up to his elbows, his hair disheveled as if he’d been running his hands through it. In one hand, he held a crystal stirring rod. He smelled of ozone, crushed herbs, and a sharp, cutting worry.
His eyes scanned her in a single, comprehensive sweep: the sweat-soaked tank top, the trembling limbs, the hand still clenched white-knuckled around the Portkey, the pathetic state of her.
“Merlin’s sake, Granger,” he said, his voice low and stripped of all its usual sardonic lace. He was across the room in three strides, kneeling beside her. The crystal rod was tossed onto the sofa without a second glance. “You waited until you were in magical distress. Of course you did.”
“The potion,” she managed, the words slurred. “It’s… working.”
“It’s working you over,” he corrected, his hands moving—efficient, not gentle. One pressed to her forehead, the other closing around her wrist, feeling for her pulse. His skin was cool against her feverish own. His touch was clinical, but where his fingers met her wrist, a different kind of current settled, a deep, resonant hum that quieted the chaotic sparking under her skin by a fraction. “Core temperature elevated. Pulse erratic. Magical signature is fraying at the edges. Textbook onset of shock.”
“I’m not going to shock,” she argued weakly, trying to pull her wrist back. His grip tightened, just enough.
“You’re already in it. Stop arguing.” He released her wrist and pulled a small, ebony box from his pocket. It opened with a click, revealing several slim vials nestled in velvet. He selected one filled with a viscous, pearlescent liquid. “Stabilizing draught. My own modification. It’ll taste like a bog, but it’ll cork the magical leakage. You need to drink it.”
“I don’t want—”
“What you want is currently irrelevant to what you need.” He uncorked the vial. The smell was indeed foul, like wet earth and copper. “Drink it, or I’ll spell it down your throat. It’s not a negotiation.”
The absolute, alpha-finality in his tone brooked no argument. It should have infuriated her. Instead, a treacherous part of her brain, the part screaming in pain, interpreted it as certainty. As a decision she didn’t have to make.
She let him tip the vial to her lips. The draught was thick, sludgy, and every bit as horrible as promised. She choked it down, her body trying to reject it. He held her jaw steady, his thumb rough against her cheekbone until she swallowed the last drop.
Almost immediately, a cold, calming wave spread from her stomach outward. The tremors began to subside. The dizzy, fragmented feeling in her head started to coalesce. The magic stopped sparking and settled into a low, sore throb.
“There,” he murmured, more to himself than to her. He watched her eyes, tracking the return of focus. “The worst of the cascade is stopped. The purgative process will continue, but now your system won’t tear itself apart doing it.”
The relief was so profound it felt like a new kind of weakness. She sagged, the last of her energy spent. Before she could slump to the rug, his arms slid under her—one behind her knees, the other around her back. He lifted her as if she weighed nothing.
“Put me down,” she mumbled into his jumper, but the protest had no heat.
“You’re filthy and you’re getting sweat and Merlin-knows-what on my favorite rug,” he said, his voice gruff near her ear as he carried her out of the sitting room and down a short hallway. “And you need to be horizontal somewhere I can monitor you.”
He shouldered open a door into a small, neat bedroom. The bed was large, made with simple linen sheets. He deposited her on it, then immediately cast a series of silent, intricate spells over her body. Cooling charms. A mild analgesic. A diagnostic charm that left a faint, gold shimmer in the air above her, displaying rhythmic pulses of light he scrutinized closely.
“Damage?” she asked, watching his face as he read the magic.
“Contained. Not optimal, but contained.” He vanished the gold shimmer with a flick of his wrist. “You’ll sleep now. The draught will force it. When you wake, the physical cramps will be mostly passed. You’ll feel hollowed out and weak for the rest of the day.”
He turned to leave.
“Where are you going?” The question was out before she could stop it, sharp with a panic she despised.
He paused at the door, looking back at her. The morning light from the hallway cut across him, highlighting the tension in his shoulders. “To salvage what’s left of my moonstone concentration, which is now entirely ruined. And to brew the next dose of your tincture. You’ll need another at six o’clock precisely.” His grey eyes held hers. “I’ll be in the next room. The cottage is warded to my magical signature. You are safe here. Sleep, Granger.”
He closed the door softly behind him.
Alone in the quiet, clean room, the forced calm of the draught pulling her under, Hermione finally let go. The last thing she was aware of was the distant, rhythmic clink of glass from another room, and the faint, unmistakable scent of mint and frost seeping under the door.
The rhythmic clink of glass from the kitchen was a lie. It was the sound of discipline, of furious, focused control. Draco stared at the ceramic cauldron on the cottage’s scrubbed pine table. His ruined moonstone concentration swirled inside, a pearlescent grey sludge that had crystallized into useless, jagged shards the moment her distress had spiked through their fledgling bond. A thousand galleons of raw ingredient, wasted.
He should have been furious. He only felt a hollow, ringing calm.
His hands moved on autopilot, vanishing the spoiled brew and beginning the meticulous process of sterilizing the equipment. Every movement was precise, economical. But beneath his skin, a war raged. The scent of her—pain, sweat, fear—had soaked into his wool jumper where she’d slumped against him. It was all he could smell now, even over the sharp reagents. It made his throat tight. It made his fangs ache with a dull, persistent throb.
His every instinct had screamed to bundle her up immediately, to pull her into his lap right there on the rug and cover her with his own magic, his own body, until the trembling stopped. To growl comfort into her hair. To make the world outside the circle of his arms irrelevant.
He had taken her pulse instead. He had spoken in clinical terms.
He measured out a new base for her clarifying tincture, his eyes on the silver scales but his senses locked on the quiet bedroom down the hall. Her breathing had evened out into the deep, draught-induced sleep. Good. The stabilizer was holding. He added powdered asphodel root, stirring counter-clockwise seven times. His knuckles were white on the stirring rod.
A soft, muffled sound came from the bedroom. Not a whimper. A sigh. A faint, distressed creak of the mattress.
He froze. The rod hovered over the cauldron. Every muscle in his body coiled, urging him to go to her. To check. To simply… be there. His alpha nature painted vivid, possessive pictures: smoothing her hair, adjusting the blanket, watching the fragile flutter of her eyelids as she dreamed. Ensuring her comfort on a cellular level.
He set the rod down with a sharp, definitive click. He braced his hands on the edge of the table, head bowed. The fight was a physical tremor in his shoulders. He could not be that for her. She would recoil. She would see it as a claim, as dominance. She’d bolt the second she had her strength back.
Clinical care was the only thing she might tolerate. A transaction. A contract.
So he had been cold. He had been brusque. He had called his favorite rug filthy to mask the fact that he’d have burned the whole cottage down if it meant easing the shattered look in her eyes. He forced a breath, then another. The scent of her on his clothes was a sweet, punishing torture.
He finished the tincture, bottled it, and labeled it with the exact time she was to take it. His script was sharp and unforgiving. Then, because the silence from the bedroom was somehow worse, he pulled a spare blanket from an oak chest. It was spelt-wool, impossibly soft and warm.
He moved down the hall, his footsteps silent on the floorboards. He opened her door just wide enough to slip inside. The room was dim, lit only by the filtered light through the linen curtains. She was a small, curled shape in the center of the large bed, one hand tucked under her cheek. She looked younger. She looked breakable.
He approached, the blanket in his hands. His movements were slow, deliberate, a careful predator not wanting to startle prey. He did not touch her. He did not smooth her hair. He simply laid the blanket over her, up to her shoulders. A practical act. She’d been sweating; now she’d chill. This was logical.
As the wool settled over her, she stirred. A deep, subconscious sigh escaped her, and she nuzzled slightly into the new warmth. Her scent softened, the sharp edges of distress blunting into something like peace.
Draco stood there, arrested. The urge to kneel, to press his face to the blanket and breathe her in, was a physical punch to the gut. He clamped down on it so violently his jaw ached. This was caring. This was gentle. And it had to remain a secret, even from her, especially from her.
He retreated to the doorway. He forced his voice to be flat, cold, speaking to the empty room just in case some part of her could hear. “The next dose is at six,” he whispered. It sounded like a vow. It sounded like a sentence.
He closed the door and went back to the kitchen. He began cleaning again, scrubbing an already-spotless cauldron with a bristled brush, the gritty sound filling the quiet cottage. He would wait. He would monitor the diagnostic charms he’d woven into the very walls of the bedroom. He would be clinical. He would be detached.
He would burn with it.