Call Me Psyche - Dramione

22

Draco lay in the dark, eyes open, listening to Tonks's footsteps hurrying away from his bedroom door. He had opened his mouth to question her further about the trouble outside the cottage. But before he could speak a word, she had ordered him to send Hermione and the Sororal Triad battle wand to safety, and then she left as abruptly as she came.

Still in need of answers, he disentangled himself from Hermione's arms and legs, easing her warm, smooth face from his chest and onto a pillow. She murmured in her sleep, clumsy, drowsy arms reaching out to hold him back. Draco trailed a kiss along the soft, pale inside of her elbow as he slipped through her arms and out of bed. Barefoot and shivering in just pants, he stepped to the room's single window. Even before he reached it, he could tell the glass was lit with a glow from outside, a flickering orange light. The meadow beyond Andromeda's garden was crackling with a row of low flames, raising plumes of white smoke, burning up the green spring leaves and twigs.

So this was their game.

He swore quietly to himself and lit his wand to search the room for the clothes he'd thrown off hours before. It wasn't until he was dressed but for one shoe, fastening his belt, that he forced himself to stop delaying waking Hermione. He knelt on the floor, leaning over the bed, his face level with hers where she lay sleeping on his pillow. She slept so beautifully in his bed, the picture of perfect contentment, still in the dream he'd barely left himself, where all they did was love each other. He crooked his finger and stroked the side of it along the curve of her cheek.

"Granger?"

There was a slight flutter in her eyelashes.

Despite the growing orange light behind him, he took the time to give a sad, quiet laugh. He was like Psyche again, watching his beautiful, powerful spouse sleeping, mad with love for her, knowing when she opened her eyes to find him gazing at her, everything would change.

He laid his palm against her cheek and brushed her lips with his thumb. "Love, we've got to go."

At that, she sat up, too fast and suddenly awake but disoriented, summoning her wand without a word. She glanced down at herself, as if surprised to not already be dressed. "What? What is it?"

He stooped to gather her clothes. "Fire, outside the wards. And not a wildfire. It's burning in a straight line, like a razor's edge, deliberately set." He was turning her shirt right-side out. "Whoever's done it, they can't see through Andromeda's concealment spell, but they know we must be nearby. So they're trying to flush us out with fire even if it destroys the entire countryside."

Hermione hopped to the window wrapped in the bedsheet. "Fiendfyre?" she said. "Is it? I've never seen it outside of books."

Draco was holding her from behind, looking over her bare shoulder at the waving, flaring light gradually getting closer and higher. "Since we're not already burnt to a crisp, I'd say no. Watch the flames."

She hummed. "They aren't rising in dragon shapes. No wings or tails or talons."

He spoke with his lips against her shoulder. "But that doesn't mean they can't be made into Fiendfyre at any moment. It's a curse any fool could conjure."

"That's what makes it so dangerous," she finished, shivering now in spite of his warm breath on her skin – or maybe because of it. She held the sheet closer, trying to think.

In the distance a sound was growing louder, the wail of sirens, volunteer Muggle fire brigades on their way from the nearest villages to fight something they couldn't possibly match.

At this, Hermione startled, springing out of Draco's arms to grab at her clothes. "It's Bellatrix, isn't it," she said. "No one but her or You-know-who himself would have so little concern for Muggles being involved."