The Shattered Dragon

Chapter 23: Bruise Paste

He stayed awake as long as his body would allow it, watching as she twisted and twitched beside him, her head tucked against his chest, arms curled between their bodies. She whimpered and he smoothed the furrow from her sleeping brow, cooing in her ear to soothe her.

"It's OK, Sparrow. You're OK. You're safe. I'm here."

Of course why would that comfort her? He was the one who left her alone, left her vulnerable to Archlight. He was the one who hurt her after she'd chosen to trust him. Draco brought her to the Dragon in the first place, tearing her apart when she was at her lowest point, trapping her in this hell, stealing her wand. And yet her crying stopped and she burrowed in against him, sighing over the runes inked on his chest. Forgiveness, Grief and Guilt. Two of them ached with a bone deep pain when she breathed on them and he adjusted his position, closing his eyes to breathe through the agony.

The rhythm of their breathing synced together and it made his eyelids heavy. She muttered quiet, nonsensical words in her sleep and in doing so her lips moved against his skin and he shivered. While running his hand through her hair and finally he drifted off to sleep.

The sun woke her slowly, like swimming up through a thick sea, as if her mind didn't want her to return to the world she'd closed her eyes to. She blinked and stretched and felt the ache in her jaw, the tenderness around her eye. She lifted two fingers to touch it and hissed in pain. The medical advances in the wizarding world were incredible, but they couldn't remove pain instantaneously or completely. Beside her Draco whimpered in his sleep, his brow furrowed in deep consternation, his chin trembling, mouth forming silent words.

"Draco," she whispered, running a hand over his cheek.

He was injured too, his eye blackened, lower lip puffed and split, a slight swelling where the skele-gro worked to knit his jaw back together. It pulled his lips down a bit into a lopsided frown. She touched them, parted and swollen, a bit of dried blood gathered in the corner.

"Draco, you're ok. It's OK. I'm here."

She pressed a kiss to his forehead and he woke with a start, pulling back from her to get his bearings. The nightmare he'd been drowning in dissipated in the sunlight but his heart was still racing and it took a moment for him to recognize her touch, her voice. She reached for him again and he let her touch his face, her fingers grazing over his wounds, her eyes filled with tears.

"I'm so sorry Hermione," he said, pulling her hand from his face to press a kiss to her knuckles. "I wish I could...I want to take what happened...."

"I know Draco. You can't. It happened. It can't be undone. And I don't want you poking around in my brain to try and undo it. I'm just grateful that you got here when you did or I would..." She shook her head and sat up, pulling herself gingerly from the bed. "Thank you for staying with me. I'm...I'll be ok now."

She smiled at the line up of potions on her vanity table along with an extra pain potion and a little pot of bruise paste. Everything was the same. She was still the trapped little sparrow in the brothel, her pimp had simply rescued her from a particularly difficult night. It was what her brand was for, after all. She swallowed the potions and slipped the paste into her vanity before moving towards the bathroom to start a bath. Draco was climbing out of bed himself, pulling on a robe from her armoire.

"I would never leave you girls if I thought someone was planning...I would never..." he couldn't pick the words correctly and his head pounded with a headache from the skele-gro and being punched eight or nine times in the face.

"Then what was it you wanted to tell me? Before you left?" She said, turning on him, blocking his path to the door. "Did you know that Trevor would be here last night? Is that what was so important?"