Her heart was pounding in her chest, and she closed her eyes and focused on the sensation. The weight, and warmth, and sensation of his skin against hers. She breathed in against his shoulder and traced her fingers over the scars on his back.
She felt her clothes slip off and a coiling heat spread through her.
His hand brushed along the side of her breast. It felt different. Highly sensitive, as though his touch had run electricity through her body. She didn't think it had ever felt that way before. She shivered into the contact and gave a low gasp. He dragged his thumb over her nipple, and her whole body shuddered.
She felt his mouth on the inside of her right breast.
She went rigid. Like being dunked into ice water, and suddenly the heat was gone.
She tried to breathe, but her lungs refused to expand. Just breathe, and it would go away.
Her throat closed. Her fingers twitched against Draco's shoulders.
She couldn't breathe. The memories were pouring over her in a rush.
She tried to blink it all away, but it wouldn't go.
“Stop,” she forced the word out.
Draco froze instantly and started to draw back. She gave a dry sob and wrapped her arms tightly around his shoulders, burying her face against his throat as she fought to breathe and willed her heart to stop pounding painfully in her chest.
Stop shaking. Stop shaking.
Draco sat immobile, not touching her. She couldn't even feel him breathing.
She drew several slow breaths and shakily lifted her head to look at him.
“I just—” her chest hitched, “It was too much for a moment. I think — I'll be better now that I know I can say stop. It was good.” Her fingers on him tightened. “It was good — until it wasn't…”
She swallowed hard.
Draco nodded. His pupils had contracted until his eyes looked like ice. His expression was tense and drawn as he looked at her.
He looked like something she could shatter in her hands.
If she ruined this, she might be destroying the last good thing he had.
She slipped her hand along the curve of his jaw and felt his pulse in the dip behind the bone as she pressed her forehead against his.
She wasn't going to cry, she told herself. She wasn't going to cry.
They just needed more time.
She went to library. She had avoided it, but the elves were limited in their ability to cross-reference for her when she didn't know all the potential resources there might be there.
Topsy fidgeted beside her as Hermione stood in the doorway, hesitating and trying not to look up.
“I want to start in the Dark Arts section,” she said.
“Which parts?”
“All of it. I want to see all the book titles.”
Hermione kept her eyes fastened on the floor or the shelves as she moved through the library. Focus on the books. Focus on the words.
She had to save Draco. It didn't matter if she couldn't see the ceiling. She just had to breathe.
Sometimes repeating the reminder to herself worked.
Other times it didn't.
She woke up, dazed, in her room and every muscle in her body was burning. Draco was sitting beside her, her hand in his.
She stared at him in bewilderment, trying to remember how she'd gotten there.
“You had a seizure in the library,” he said, expressionless. “You had a panic attack, Topsy couldn't calm you, and you had a seizure. A severe one, even with the interference of the anticonvulsant potion. I was in Austria.”
Hermione didn't say anything. Her throat felt as though she'd screamed it raw.
Draco stared out the window for a moment and then sighed. He began to massage the centre of her palm without looking at it, tapping his wand across the pressure points until the muscles relaxed and her fingers unfurled. “You don't get to have everything, Granger. There's a point when you have to realise you aren't going to get everything you want, and you have to choose and let it be enough for you.”
His hands stopped moving, and he just stared out the window for a minute. He swallowed slowly and turned to stare down at her. “The mind healer said if you have another seizure like that, you may cause irreversible brain damage to yourself and likely miscarry.”
Hermione pressed her lips together and pulled her hand away, curling into a tight ball around her stomach.
“I can't leave you behind,” she said, her voice thick.
She felt the bed shift, and Draco brushed her hair off her face, tucking a curl behind her ear as he leaned over her.
He gave a low sigh as his hand slipped down from her hair and rested on her shoulder. “You'll have other people to take care of. You promised Potter to take care of Ginny and James. You have a baby who needs you, and you know that.”