However, when he looked down at her, she realised there'd been a tension in him that was absent for the first time that she could recall. He was still on edge; he was still carrying two wands and several knives and a dark artifact, but there was the absence of a certain bracedness that Hermione had grown accustomed to. He no longer held himself as though he constantly expected to be struck on some quarter.
It was the expression he used to wear when they met in Whitecroft; when she could tell as he apparated into the room that he'd mentally prepared himself that she could be injured. Since she'd arrived at the manor, she realised, he'd always looked that way. Now, for the first time, it had faded.
Thin ice was at least something to stand on.
“What do you want me to do now?” he asked.
She blinked. “Whatever you want. You get to do whatever you want now.”
He looked around them. “I don't think I remember how to do that.”
Hermione gave a wan smile. “I don't either.” She looked around and held his hand more tightly. “We'll find out what it's like together. We don't have to hurry. We have the rest of our lives to figure it out.”
Once she wasn't worried about waking Draco, Hermione set to work in her lab. It took her a week to build a basic prosthetic for him. The amputation had healed perfectly, but his blood stayed permanently thin unless he was regularly taking a potion for it.
He sat on the edge of her lab table while she carefully fitted the base of the prosthetic onto his forearm.
“This first prosthetic isn't much,” she said as she muttered the spells. “It will only connect with major nerves, so you'll only have a vague sense of the movement and touch. You won't be able to do anything that requires fine motor control, but it will help maintain the neural structures while I make something better. If you wait too long, it's hard to recover full range of movement with a prosthetic since you can't feel it as clearly.”
She slid the metal arm onto the base. There was a quiet click as the two pieces fit together. She tapped her wand along the metal fingers, and there was a whirring sound as they twitched. She spent several minutes checking that everything was connected and studying diagnostics to verify she'd fitted everything perfectly. Draco tended to claim that everything was fine until he passed out.
She looked up at Draco with a nervous expression. “This is going to hurt a lot, but just for a split second and only this one time. Unless you break the base of the prosthetic I won't ever have to do this again. I'm connecting the nerves. If I don't do it when you can feel it, the connection doesn't integrate as well.”
He clenched his jaw. “Just do it.”
Draco screamed through his teeth as the nerves in his arm were lashed together with the magical nerves in the prosthetic. A shudder ran down his entire body, including the prosthetic. The metal fingers spasmed with an audible clicking sound.
“Sorry. I'm sorry.”
He shook his head sharply and lifted his arm to stare at it. “It's fine.”
She rested her hand against the cool metal. “Can you feel my touch?”
Draco was silent for a minute. “I can tell there's contact, it's a vague sense of pressure, but without a sense of texture or temperature or how much I'm being touched.”
Hermione ran her hand along the forearm up to the fingers. “That's about as much as you'll be able to feel with this.” She looked at him seriously. “You'll have to be careful. Since you can't feel it, you won't always know how much pressure you're using. There will be a temptation to over-compensate for the lack of sensory feedback by doing things more roughly in order to feel it. I made the hand breakable so that if you exceed a certain threshold the internal mechanisms will be the thing to break and not — something else.”
Draco's expression tensed, and he looked at her sharply.
She started to run her wand and fingers along the prosthetic, checking the spellwork. Draco tried to pull his arm away from her.
She closed her hand around the wrist to still it, and he pulled harder. She glanced up and met his worried gaze.
She lifted her wand away. “Draco, you're not going to hurt me. Look.”
She tapped a panel on the inner-wrist and opened it, revealing the mechanisms inside. “See where the tendons connect here? The pieces connecting each one are made intentionally breakable. If you tried to use enough pressure to break a bone, this piece will snap. You could bruise a piece of fruit, but you won't be able to break a wand in half. If these break, the part of the hand they're connected to will go limp.” She closed the panel again. “You won't hurt me. I just wanted to explain to you why it will probably get broken a lot at the beginning. It's a part of the design. It will take a while to figure out how to tell when you're using the right amount of force. I'll teach you how to fix it yourself too. It's all part of the process.”