Kingsley began leaning even more heavily in his reconnaissance team and utilising Draco within Voldemort's army. Misinformation. Sabotage. As though the Death Eater army were a machine to be deconstructed. The envelopes with orders kept growing thicker every time Hermione delivered them.
Draco rarely mentioned what he did, but she could tell he was on the verge of breaking from the pressure. He grew steadily more and more desperate each time he saw her.
It burned in her. To watch him eroding under everything he was expected to maintain and produce for both sides.
Almost all pressure on Hermione from the Order vanished. She was a collar around Draco's throat; Kingsley and Moody had nothing more urgent to ask than that she maintain it.
She was simply left to live with it.
She felt like a caged animal inside Grimmauld Place. She travelled from safe house to safe house just for a change of scenery.
When she wasn't healing or caring for Ginny, she poured her energy into research and experimental magic. She went further into researching Dark Magic than she ever had in the past. Maybe the Order wouldn't use it, but Draco might.
She tried to find a way around the shackles. Draco regularly brought updated scrolls of analysis for her, and she pored over them, trying to find a flaw, something to exploit. They were ingenious. They were a work of art.
They horrified Hermione with their rapid evolution.
In addition to irremovable traces, Sussex began experimenting with shackles intended to suppress magic. Tungsten inlaid with iron. Tungsten plated with copper or aluminium. Shackles with wand core materials.
She'd barely sleep unless she was with Draco. The rest of the time, she'd just lie in cold terror at the thought of what would happen to anyone captured. The Order might not ever be able to save any of them.
Death Eaters were already being given the shackles to carry in order to more easily apprehend members of the Resistance. Once closed, a shackle couldn't be reopened without two bearers of the Dark Mark performing an incantation variant of the Morsmordre.
Dean Thomas appeared at Grimmauld Place a day after capture. His wand hand severed. He'd stolen a knife and sawn his hand off at the wrist in order to escape.
A week later Severus brought word that the shackles were being moved out of Sussex in order to expand production. They would now come in sets of two.
Draco brought Hermione a set of the prototypes one evening and watched her analyse it.
They looked almost like bracelets.
Hermione built an elaborate web of analytic magic around it, dissecting all the components; the alchemy, charms, the arithmancy, the runes set in the iron core.
She spent hours trying to find a flaw, until she fell asleep in the middle of it and woke to find Draco carrying her to bed.
“I can't — there isn't a way around them.” Her brain felt clouded by exhaustion. She was almost shaking with frustration. “There has to be something. Using imperio won't work, it shows up in the spell signature and cancels the incantation. I thought, just cut through them, but the core is charmed to explode. I'm just not — maybe I have to come at it from a different angle. My alchemy is all self-taught. Maybe I just haven't researched enough.”
She started to pull away from him and tried to go back toward the stacks of books she'd brought. Draco stopped her. He slid one arm around her waist and wrapped the other around her shoulders.
“You can't save everyone, Granger.”
She stilled and stared despairingly across the room.
“I don't know how we're going to win this war,” she finally said.
Draco was silent. There was nothing to say that wouldn't be a lie.
She lifted her hand and gripped his arm around her shoulders.
“I don't know how to save anyone. Everything I do just puts it off so that they die in a worse way. I wish — I wish I'd never become a healer.”
She'd never admitted it to anyone before. That she hated it.
She told him about the horcruxes. She wasn't supposed to. She hadn't been cleared to. She told him anyway. Everything she knew, about their creation and destruction, and all the Order's ideas about what they could be. About the Founders' lost items.
“We think there might be one in Hogwarts,” she said when she showed him all her research. “But I don't know how many he could have. There couldn't be more than five, could there? Splitting his soul like that — it's poison in the body. It will eat him from the inside out. His current form is the best restoration he could manage with a regeneration potion. It should have returned him to his physical prime, but his soul is so deteriorated making a sort of body was the most it could do. So there has to be a limit to the horcruxes. I don't think he can keep making them. If we can destroy all the horcruxes, he'll become unstable enough that even if no one kills him, eventually he'll just cease to exist. But we don't know where they could be. There's so little information about his past.”
“He gave one to my father during the first war?”