Chapter Text
A Dark Necessity
Written for the Merlin Trials Fest
Chapter 1: The Things We Cannot Save
The first time Granger asked Draco to teach her the Unforgivable Curses, he laughed.
Not because it had been funny. Because it had been absurd.
It had been two o'clock in the morning, the castle half asleep beneath layers of snowfall, and Hermione Granger—the brightest witch of their age, the girl who had once slapped him in the face for saying the wrong thing—had stood in the middle of an abandoned Defence classroom with shadows beneath her eyes and said, very calmly:
"I need you to teach me how to cast Avada Kedavra."
The laugh had died quickly once he had seen her eyes. Granger was dead serious, extremely so.
Draco had leaned back against the desk behind him, arms folded tightly across his chest. "That was genuinely the most concerning sentence anyone had ever said to me."
"I am serious."
"Yes, Granger, that is precisely the problem."
The room had been lit only by wandlight. It had carved sharp lines across her face and caught the exhaustion hollowing her cheeks. She had looked thinner than she had during the war.
Harder, too.
Draco had spent all of Eighth Year learning how to recognise dangerous people.
The Ministry hearings had taught him that.
But it was the war that had taught him better.
Dangerous people were not always loud. Sometimes they were quiet, focused.
They were composed.
And sometimes they looked like Hermione Granger.
"I said no already," he had told her quietly.
"You did not let me explain."
"I had not particularly cared to hear why the Golden Girl had decided she wanted murder lessons."
At that, something had flickered across her expression.
Draco was familiar with her anger. Unfortunately, she was not mad at him then.
But the disappointment in her mesmerising eyes was worse. Because, even though he would never admit it out loud—he had grown to crave her approval, her company.
He had craved her.
Hermione had reached into her satchel and tossed a thick folder onto the desk between them.
Photographs had spilled loose.
Draco had glanced down automatically.
Children.
Some moving in the pictures. Some not.
Bruises. Restraint marks. A little girl no older than eight with blood on the front of her nightdress and terror in her eyes so absolute it had made his stomach turn.
The laughter had vanished from him entirely.
"What is this?"
Hermione had said nothing for a moment. And then, in a voice so quiet that he had to strain his ears, she whispered hauntingly, "Did you know how many missing Muggle-born children there had been since the war ended?"
Draco's jaw tightened. "No."
"Neither had I."
She had moved closer then, opening the folder precisely. Ministry documents. Ledgers. Names. Transfer permits. Financial records.
All stamped classified.
Draco felt something cold crawl slowly down his spine.
"There was a trafficking ring operating through old pure-blood networks," she had said. "Children with accidental magic. Muggle-born. They were being moved
through France and northern Italy."
"That is impossible."
"I thought so too."
"You reported this?"
A humourless smile had twisted her mouth. "To the Ministry? Repeatedly."
"And?"
"They told me not to pursue it."
Draco had gone still, recognition dawning on in him. Of course they had.
Hermione watched him understand.
"That little girl," she had said softly, touching one of the photographs, "died three weeks ago."
The classroom had fallen silent except for the crackling fireplace.
Draco looked back at the picture. The child had been staring at the camera like she had already known nobody was coming for her.
Something ugly twisted further in his chest.
"Granger—"
"No." Her voice had sharpened suddenly. "Do not stand there and tell me to trust the system. I had done everything properly. Everything legally. And children are still disappearing."
"You thought the Unforgivables are the answer?"
"I thought the people doing this knew them."
There it was. Granger really was not one for vengeance. Or unnecessary cruelty. Draco saw the cold calculation in her expression, terrifying him more than he was horrified.
Draco had rubbed a hand across his mouth. "Why me?"
"Because Harry would never teach me."
"That is reassuring."
"You know what these curses actually do." Her gaze had locked onto his. "You know what they cost."
He hated the way she said it. Like she had already decided she was willing to pay whatever price it was.
Draco looked away first. "You do not understand what you are asking."
"I do."
"No, you understand the theory." He had pushed away from the desk, suddenly furious. "Knowing you, you have got every cursed text in the library memorised and convinced yourself knowledge equalled preparedness, but these spells are not incantations, Granger. They are intent. They require something from you, something dark. Something you could not turn back from."
"A dark necessity. I know, Draco."
"Do you?" His voice had dropped, Draco tried to keep his emotions in check. His voice trembled. "Because once you cast them properly, there is no pretending you are untouched anymore."
For the first time that night, Hermione looked tired instead of determined, "I stopped being untouched during the war."
Draco stared at her, her words felt like salt being poured over wounds he had not had time to lick clean yet.
He averted his eyes—just to avoid hers—and his gaze landed on the photographs.
Draco was reminded of the Manor. Of screaming. Of the way evil became ordinary if enough people decided not to look directly at it.
Slowly, horribly, he realised Granger really was not asking for permission.
She had been asking whether he would help her survive what she had already chosen to become.
"I will not teach you the Killing Curse," he had said at last.
Hermione's face shuttered immediately. "Then I will find someone else."
"There is no one else."
"Exactly."
Draco closed his eyes briefly. And memories of Hermione flooded his brain, from their first year, to the War, and then, even after that. From how she had testified for him. Reached out to befriend him at the start of eighth year. To their late night study sessions in the Library. To finding that sneaky room by the Defence Against the Dark Arts Tower by the Astronomy Room. Their quiet conversations in the Room of Requirement.
Of how much he felt for her.
Of how far he was willing to go for her.
Merlin help him. He had fallen in love with Hermione Granger and he was willing to walk with her in the Dark if only he could save her from herself.
When he spoke again, his voice sounded exhausted.
"If I do this," he said quietly, "you listen to me exactly. No improvising. No bright ideas to improve these curses. And the second I see you are losing yourself, I walk away."
A long silence had followed.
Then:
"Agreed."
He should have left.
He should have reported this. Confiscated the documents. Told McGonagall. Told Potter. Anyone, really.
Instead he had heard himself ask: "How much do you already know?"
Hermione opened her satchel again and pulled out a notebook thick with annotations.
Of course she had.
Draco stared at it in disbelief.
"You are frightening," he muttered.
A faint shadow of her old self had appeared then.
And like a blind man seeing sunlight for the first time, Draco could only stare at it in silence, desperate to savour its warmth before it disappeared again.
"So I have been told."
As she gathered her things, Draco's gaze wandered to her open notebook, a list of names, children. Dates. Locations.
And beside several of them, written neatly in Hermione's precise hand, was a single word:
Dead.
He turned the page. There were more names. More dead children. His grip tightened around the edge of the parchment. It dawned on him, that this...was her burden. Taken it upon herself to fix. No matter the cost.
Draco looked up at her again and Hermione stood very still, as if she had already said everything she needed to say and was simply waiting for the world to disagree with her.
It did not.
He did not.
A strange clarity settled over him then—quiet, absolute, and terrifying in its simplicity. This was never about learning the Unforgivables, no—it was about what came after. About what she would become if no one stopped her from walking too far into the dark alone. And worse, about what she would lose on the way there.
Draco swallowed.
He had spent years surviving things he had not chosen. But, this was different.
This was a choice.
And it was his.
The storm in his chest settled into place like a vow he had not realised he was already making.
If she was going to step into darkness, then he would be there too.
But to drag her back if he could.
To remind her—however many times it took—that she had not been made for ruin.
That she was still a light worth salvaging.
Draco closed the notebook gently.
When he spoke, his voice was quieter than before, "Alright," he said.
And then, after a pause that felt like stepping off a ledge—
"We start tomorrow."
Draco did not sleep that night.
He lay in his four-poster bed in the Slytherin dungeons, staring at the canopy above him while the lake water cast shifting green shadows across the stone ceiling.
The castle was silent now, truly silent, the kind of stillness that only came in the deepest hours before dawn when even the portraits had stopped their gossiping and the ghosts had drifted off to wherever ghosts went to rest.
His mind would not quiet.
He kept seeing her face. The hollows beneath her eyes. The way her hands had trembled, just barely, when she had touched that photograph of the dead girl. The practiced, detached precision with which she had laid out those documents, each one a testament to a system that had failed, a world that had looked away.
Draco turned onto his side, pulling the blankets tighter around his shoulders though he was not cold. The dungeons were always temperate, regulated by enchantments older than the castle itself, but something inside him felt frozen all the same.
He thought about the war.
He thought about the Manor, about the room where they had kept prisoners, about the way his aunt's laughter had echoed off the stone walls and how he had learned to make himself small, to become part of the furniture, to see nothing and hear nothing and feel nothing because feeling meant breaking and breaking meant dying.
He had been sixteen. He had been a coward. He had been a child playing at being a soldier in a war he had never wanted.
And now Hermione Granger, who had fought that war with her teeth and her wits and her refusal to bend, was asking him to help her become something she had never been.
Dark.
He closed his eyes and saw her standing in that abandoned classroom, the wandlight catching the exhaustion in her face, the determination in her shoulders. She had looked like a general preparing for a battle she already knew she could not win. Like someone who had counted the cost and found it acceptable.
That was what terrified him most.
Not the curses. He knew the theory well enough, had heard his aunt describe the proper casting of the Cruciatus in that sing-song voice of hers, had watched his father practise the Imperius on house-elves until their eyes went blank and obedient. He knew what they required. He knew the emptiness they demanded, the hollow place inside yourself that you had to carve out and fill with something else, something that did not care about mercy or consequence or the person screaming in front of you.
He knew because he had done it.
During the war, in a moment of desperation, he had cast the Cruciatus on a prisoner who had looked at him with too much knowing in his eyes. He had wanted to prove himself. He had wanted to be worthy of the mark on his arm, of his father's expectations, of the name Malfoy.
The spell had worked.
The prisoner had screamed, a wet, broken sound, and kept screaming until his voice gave out and his body convulsed on the stone floor and something in Draco's chest turned to ash. He had stood there, wand trembling, and felt the hollow place inside him grow a fraction wider, a fraction deeper, and knew with sickening clarity that it would never close again.
He had not slept properly for a week afterward. Had flinched at every sound, every shadow, convinced the man's screams had followed him out of the cellar. But they hadn't. What followed him was worse: the knowledge that he had reached inside himself and found the darkness waiting, eager, hungry , and that he could reach it again if he chose to.
He had not chosen to.
Not since.
And now he was going to teach Hermione Granger how to do what he had done. How to reach inside herself and find that dark, hollow place and make it grow.
How to become the thing she had spent her whole life fighting against.
For children she had never met.
For a justice the Ministry would not deliver.
For a world that had never thanked her for saving it.
Draco sat up, running his hands through his hair, his fingers catching on tangles he did not remember making. The green light from the lake shifted across his palms, making them look alien, strange, like someone else's hands.
He thought about what he had said to her.
The second I see you are losing yourself, I walk away.
A lie. He knew it even as he had spoken it. He would not walk away. He would never walk away from her, not now, not after everything.
He had watched her testify for him at the Ministry, her voice steady and sure, listing the ways he had helped her and Potter and Weasley when he could have let them die. He had watched her reach out to him in the Great Hall on the first day of eighth year, extending her hand across the house divide like it was nothing, like the war had not happened, like he had not stood in that drawing room and watched her scream.
He had taken her hand. He had not known what else to do.
And now here they were.
Draco lay back down, staring at the canopy again. Somewhere above him, in the castle proper, Hermione was probably doing the same. Or perhaps she was still awake, poring over that notebook of hers, adding names to her list, tracing connections he could not see, planning operations he did not want to imagine.
She had always been like that. Even at eleven, she had been the one with the plan, the answer, the book open in her lap while everyone else panicked. He remembered watching her in the library during their first year, her bushy hair catching the candlelight, her quill scratching furiously across parchment, and thinking—though he would have died before admitting it—that she looked like she belonged there, like the books and the knowledge and the quiet were her natural habitat.
He had wanted to be near her even then. Had made fun of her to cover it up, had mocked her blood status because it was what his father expected, what his house demanded, what made the wanting feel less dangerous.
Some things never changed.
Draco closed his eyes and breathed deeply, trying to find some centre of calm in the storm of his own making. Tomorrow. They would start tomorrow. And he would teach her the theory, the wand movements, the mental disciplines, everything except the actual casting because he could not, he would not, be the one to push her over that edge.
But she would push herself. He knew that too. Knew it with a certainty that settled in his bones like winter.
And when she did, he would be there.
Not to walk away.
To catch her. To remind her, however many times it took, that she had survived too much to become this.
That the war had not taken everything. Not yet, he refused to let it.
That she was still Hermione Granger, and that meant something, meant everything, meant more than any curse or darkness or desperate choice could ever takea way.
The lake water shifted above him, green and endless and silent. Draco listened to the sound of his own breathing, steady and slow, and waited for morning to come.
It would not be kind to either of them, he knew.
But it would come all the same.
And they would face it.
Together.