Touchstone || Dramione

Introduction & Prologue

A/N: This is a slow burn romance. Also, it's full of heavy plot, tangled symbolism, much needed fluff and character analyzing. Updates will take time and likely not adhere to any working schedule.

DISCLAIMER: None of JK Rowling's world belongs to me aside from some OCs.

TIMELINE: 3-4 Years Post HBP (AU - Voldemort Wins)

AU NEXUS POINT: Malfoy Manor (Trio's Capture) *loosely based*

RATING: MA/R

TRIGGER WARNINGS: Explicit Language, Abuse, Psychological Trauma, Mentions of Rape, Mentions of Cannibalism, Self Harm, PTSD, Gore, Extreme Violence, Explicit Sexual Situations, etc.

PROLOGUE

- o -

DECEMBER 2001

War never truly ended. We called it by different names and it ebbed and flowed as the rivers do over the lands, receding and expanding, eroding away mountains, cutting valleys and canyons deep into the bedrock. War scarred us, defined us, determining our paths like the fixed movement of the sun.

This was what Hermione Granger learned after the death of the beloved Boy-Who-Lived. There was a war before him and there was still a war after him. He was a small piece lost in a sea of broken soldiers. They all were broken, enslaved to the fight even before their birth. Genetically unavoidable, she'd come to often say.

Mistakes counted more while on the warpath. Death dressed itself in lavish and vivid attire—its funeral garments the garish and insensitive color of red, like the blossoming rose on Ron's chest that day in Malfoy Manor. Like the lovely and macabre tears that had stained her parents' anguished faces as their hearts ruptured at the will of Tom Riddle's wand.

Mistakes were a poisonous currency in a world of monsters. She never wanted to believe she herself was a monster, but due to her analytical nature, she couldn't deny the dangerous line she walked. A dark stretch of road that wore the soles of her aching feet, a road that began and ended in only two places: before this and after this. The 'during' part was incidental, a flawed sequence of means absent a necessary end. This was where the mistakes hatched, like festering parasites smothering her world with their cancerous probabilities.

Truth be told, she never would have guessed the strange mistake waiting for her only months down that road, bruised and donned in chains, hair long and ragged, eyes empty and grey. No. That mistake died not long after Harry, she'd heard. Rumor had it that he died bloody, broken, and screaming. As broken as the rest of them.

She never quite kept up with the time, but Luna told her last week that it'd been over three years since Harry's death. She could have sworn it felt longer. The months seemed to drag now. Wartime ran differently, she supposed. She sure felt much older... and looked it, too.

In hindsight, it's not all that shocking how quickly this became a Wizarding World War. After Harry's defeat, Riddle seized absolute control of Wizarding Britain. In two years, France's Ministry fell. German's Ministry followed suit only a year later. Propaganda, disinformation, and coercion were rampant.

Unlike others of the Order, Dumbledore realized what was building before Voldemort's second return. He withheld this information from everyone, except her. Within the pages of 'The Tales of Beedle the Bard', she'd found a parcel of torn parchment with a single message.

'If Harry should fail, enact the spell, Miss Granger. If the time should come, remember our discussions.'

She hadn't understood it then and she scarcely understood it now despite following all his enigmatic instructions thus far. Before Dumbledore's death, he'd spoken privately to her on several occasions, mostly cryptic and one-sided conversations that left Hermione unfulfilled and wondering. She realized now why he'd called upon her, at least to some degree. Dumbledore obscured his slyness beneath a clouded veil of genial charm, but Dumbledore was anything if not opportunistic. The more she thought on who Dumbledore really was, the more convinced she became that he'd bet on more than one horse. Harry was simply his immediate course of action. Hermione had been his contingency plan.