Originally written for Round 9 of the Dramione Remix. The original couple was Little Red Riding Hood/Big Bad Wolf

I. Hermione

Hermione whimpered, the pain still echoing behind her eyes, under her skin, deep in her bones. Warm fingers cupped her face, tilting it up and she tried to focus, tried hard to think around the pain and the nausea and the bone-deep exhaustion.

"Breathe, Granger." Malfoy's voice was soft and gentle. His thumb moved across her cheek, the small parody of a caress. "Tell me what I want to know and it all stops. Aren't you tired?"

She was. Merlin, she was. Tired enough to want to cling to that gentleness; tired enough to want to lean into his touch.

"Go— Go to hell, Malfoy," she said — out of habit or reflex or bullheaded stubbornness — but Draco merely tutted at her, brushing a strand of hair away from her face.

Another Death Eater walked in, and in the few seconds between the door opening and closing, shrill, blood-curdling screams filled the room, together with Bellatrix Lestrange's wild, raucous laughter. A sob rose in Hermione's throat as she glanced at the door, at the glimpse of darkened corridor beyond it, at the two Death Eaters speaking in hushed, hurried tones in the corner. Malfoy shushed her, his fingers steady and warm as they curled around the back of her neck.

"Don't look at them, look at me," he said softly. "You've always been smart, Hermione," he added, and when had he ever called her that? "Be smart about this."

The enchanted rope keeping her tied down to a heavy, old-fashioned armchair tightened slightly around her, the feeling of it oddly comforting, oddly grounding, as if it was the only thing holding her together.

"Please," was all she managed to say, all she had in her to say. She wasn't even sure what she was asking for. Please kill me? Please let me go? "Please."

"Tell me."

But she could only shake her head, choking back a sob, tears falling down her face. She couldn't hold out forever; she knew that. But she could hold out long enough for the others to realise something had gone wrong. For the others to get out. Hermione knew too much; she was privy to too many secrets. If she talked — when she talked — that was that for a large part of the Order.

Malfoy sighed, squeezing the back of her neck before letting his hand fall away.

"Very well."

Hermione gasped as the rope coiled tighter and tighter around her like a snake, digging painfully into her arms and legs, the crushing pressure of it increasing around her chest until she couldn't breathe or think or do anything but panic.

When the Cruciatus curse hit, she did not even have enough air in her lungs to scream.

The whole thing had been a disaster from the get-go, made worse by the fact that Hermione was rusty and out of practice. She hadn't been out in the field in months, too recognisable and too much of a target to do anything but sit quietly indoors, where it was nice and safe, and Death Eaters couldn't find her.

She was the only surviving member of the Golden Trio and the most well-known Muggle-born in the resistance. She was a symbol, and symbols were meant to be looked at, not put out in the world where bad things could happen to them and damage morale. Or so Moody kept saying. It was a lesson the Order of the Phoenix had learnt the hard way when Ron had fallen during a costly and ultimately pointless skirmish trying to reach Bellatrix's Gringotts vault. The point had been driven home when Harry had been taken out by a Death Curse in broad daylight in Charrington Cross, in the heart of Muggle London. They had yet to recover from it.

So, no, Hermione wasn't given any missions. She was barely given licence to step outside the door. Instead she was given maps, and lists of names, and scraps of information, and told to work out a miracle with their shrinking army and dwindling resources.

It was important, necessary work; it showed trust in her and in her abilities, and she shouldn't have resented it half as much as she did. But she did resent it. Every time they received revised lists of casualties, she resented it a little bit more.

The night it happened, Hermione had been sitting by herself in what had once been the dining room at Number 12 Grimmauld Place. The large wooden table was covered in scrolls and maps, and she was busy frowning at the wildly inaccurate plans they had of Gringotts. There was a Horcrux in Bellatrix's vault. They knew that. They had known that for two years, for all the good it had done them. The blasted thing might as well have been on the moon for all that they were likely to get their hands on it. But still Hermione kept taking out the schematics every few weeks and staring at them, hoping for inspiration, hoping for a miracle.

The house was quiet, the only sound the soft crackling of the fire and the rhythmic tick-tock of the grandfather clock, so when a loud bang echoed by the front door, Hermione almost jumped out of her skin. She shoved to her feet, instinctively drawing her wand before recognising Ginny's voice calling for help.

She ran towards the noise, but Molly Weasley beat her to it, falling to her knees next to Padma Patil, who was barely conscious, dark blood staining her robes.

"Someone talked," Ginny said, easing Padma down all the way to the floor. There was a red smudge on her cheek. "The Sigma cell is collapsing." Hermione cursed under her breath, reaching for the Galleon she always kept in her pocket, but Ginny's urgent, "No, don't," halted the movement. "One of the Death Eaters had one. If the Ministry is monitoring it, it will give away the whole network."

Hermione almost roared in frustration. She touched her wand to the Galleon, ending the enchantment, turning the dozens of enchanted Galleons safely tucked away in the pockets and purses of members and informants of the Order of the Phoenix into regular Galleons, cutting off their connection to the Order, cutting off their connection to each other.

"Who do they have?" Hermione asked, flicking her wand at a stretch of empty wall. The lights dimmed in the hallway as shiny dots appeared against the dark wallpaper, connected by thin trails of light.

"Macmillan for sure." Ginny's hands were shaking as she tried and failed to open a corked vial. Arabella Figg, who had rushed in carrying bandages, gently took it away from her, nudging her aside and kneeling on the opposite side of Padma from Mrs Weasley. "I think Hannah Abbott might have been in the house as well. I'm not sure."

Hermione stared at the wall, trying to think. It was only a matter of time before Macmillan gave away the identity of everyone else in his cell, and that was assuming the Death Eaters didn't know it already. There was no helping any of them. Not without the Galleons; not quickly enough for it to matter.

"Mrs Figg," she said anyway, without looking away from the wall. "Send owls to Katie Bell, Florean Fortescue, Tom Belcher and Hannah Abbot. Tell them to go to ground."

Ginny came to stand next to Hermione as Mrs Figg hurried away, and they both stared at the starry map. Ginny couldn't see it like Hermione could, not with any level of detail. For her it was just bright dots on a dark background, no names or locations. Even Hermione would forget all of it the moment she let the spell fall. Ginny pointed at two dots on each side of the Sigma cluster, the two where Sigma and its neighbouring cells intersected.

"And those?"

"Neville and Tabitha Jorkins. We have to get to them before the Death Eaters do, or we'll lose the Rho and Tau cells as well." And the cells next to them, and the cells next to those, on and on like a row of dominoes.

"I'll take Neville," Ginny said, pulling the hood of her cloak over her head.

"I'll take Mrs Jorkins," Hermione said.

"Neither of you is going anywhere." Mrs Weasley looked up just long enough to glare at them, before a whimper from Padma turned her attention back to the injured witch. "If they got to them already, they will be waiting for you."

"If they did, we have to know." Hermione let the spell fall, and the lights in the hallway brightened.

"And if they didn't, we have to contain this, or the whole system unravels." Ginny knelt down next to Padma and carefully removed her cloak, despite Mrs Weasley's objections and Padma's pained gasp. She threw it at Hermione. "Here. You know the Apparition sequence?"

"Yeah."

"Don't stray from the path." Ginny pulled Hermione to her, hugging her tight. "And don't get yourself killed."

"You too."

"Ginny. Hermione. Girls."

But neither of them paid Mrs Weasley any mind. Ginny leaned over her mum and kissed the top of her head before rushing to catch up to Hermione, who was already on the front steps of Number 12.

"If it comes to it," Ginny said when the door swung shut behind them, "don't let them take you alive." And with that she Disapparated. Hermione took a deep breath and pulled the hood of the bright red cloak over her head before doing likewise.

Fred and George had come up with the cloaks, one of the last things they'd worked on before Fred's death, before George had decided he really didn't care whether or not he was on the receiving end of an Unforgivable, so long as he didn't have to move. The cloaks were enchanted to mask magical displacement, the sort that occurred when someone Apparated or Disapparated. The puppet Ministry under Voldemort's control had taken to tracking Apparition as a way to pinpoint 'illegal' activity.

Even with the cloaks, it was impossible to completely conceal the energy signatures of Apparition, particularly over longer distances, so the Order had established fixed Apparition points and warded them against detection. It made travelling by Apparition slow and troublesome, since they had to know where the safe spots were and then follow the path by skipping from one to the other to reach any given destination, but it was safer than the alternative. For the most part.

Hermione muttered the Apparition sequence under her breath, trying to remember, trying to hurry, trying not to fall flat on her face. The world blurred in and out of existence as she skipped from location to location to location, Apparating and Disapparating in the fraction of a second, all the while praying she could reach her destination without splinching herself or stepping outside the safe areas. All the while praying she could make it in time.

When she reached the Apparition point closest to Tabitha Jorkins's house, she cast a Disillusionment Charm on herself and forced herself not to run. The spell could only do so much.

She kept glancing worriedly at the dark park around her as she walked, on the lookout for anything out of place, for anything that might spell disaster. Lampposts along the path cast dark shadows on the ground and gusts of wind shook the leaves of nearby trees, grating on Hermione's frayed nerves. She tightened the fingers around her wand and gritted her teeth.

Mrs Jorkins's house was a small, two-storey building at the end of a cul-de-sac, surrounded by a generous garden that separated it from the neighbouring houses. The path through the park led to the back of the house. It was late in the evening, but not so late that most people would already be abed, and Hermione could see light in the windows of most of the houses. Everything seemed as it should be. There was no commotion, no signs of a struggle, no Dark Mark over any of the houses.

Hermione walked towards the back of the house and knocked. A little girl answered the door and looked up Hermione, expectantly. She couldn't have been more than twelve years old, with bright red hair and serious green eyes.

"Is your grandmother home?" Hermione asked.

The girl stood aside without a word, motioning for Hermione to get in. Hermione walked past her and followed the direction indicated by the girl's outstretched hand.

"Mrs Jorkins?" she called, hurrying past the dark kitchen and down a corridor, towards the light coming from a room at the end of the hallway.

Tabitha Jorkins was an elegant woman of advanced age, who for over fifty years had worked as personal assistant to over a dozen Ministers for Magic, and who firmly believed that the hostile takeover of the Ministry by the inbred rabble led by He Who Must Not Be Named was no reason why that should change. After all, whoever was in power, memos still had to be filed. And if copies of said memos sometimes found their way to the hands of certain persons said to be affiliated with illegal organisations, why, she was sure she could not account for it.

Hermione found her in a small living room, standing by a window. She wore dark green robes and her hair was a mass of white curls, perfectly coiffed, not a strand out of place. She turned when Hermione walked in, looking at her from behind old-fashioned spectacles, and the thought came to Hermione unbidden, "My, grandmother, what big eyes you have."

"Mrs Jorkins, we have to go. Right now. Death Eaters are on their way."

Mrs Jorkins did not move. She glanced at a point behind Hermione with a raised eyebrow, and Hermione could feel more than hear the little girl a short distance away.

"Come closer, child," Mrs Jorkins said to Hermione.

"If we don't go now, it will be too late. Please, Tabitha, we have to—" But just then Hermione caught a glance of Mrs Jorkins's wand, and she knew it already was too late. "Expelliarmus!" she yelled, and whipped to the side, narrowly avoiding being hit by the hex cast by the girl behind her. Her own spell had missed, and Hermione cast a desperate shield just in time to absorb Tabitha Jorkins's stun.

My, grandmother, what sharp teeth.

"Two Death Eaters for one little Muggle-born witch?" she said, frantically trying to think of a way out. "It's almost enough to make me feel important."

"Drop the wand, Granger," Jorkins said, edging towards her. He was between Hermione and the window, while the clearly-not-so-little girl stood between Hermione and the door.

"Bite me, Malfoy." Hawthorn, ten inches, unicorn hair. She had seen that wand often enough during their years at Hogwarts to recognise it now. "If you want it, come and get it."

Hermione cast a shield just in time to deflect his curse, the violence of it forcing her back another step that she could ill-afford. There weren't many steps left between her and the wall.

"The Dark Lord will reward us richly for this night's work." The little girl's smile was a predatory grin. "That we should be the ones to deliver the Mudblood to him."

No doubt he would, but they had to catch her first. Without giving herself time to think better of it, Hermione flicked her wand at a spot high above their heads, and Fiendfyre exploded against the opposing wall with a roaring sound, showering the room with sparks and bolts of fire.

The girl yelped, and Hermione took the opening to hit her with a stun that sent her sprawling towards the inferno that was quickly engulfing the small, cluttered room. The girl's panicked shrieks as her clothes caught fire drowned Hermione's pained gasp as Malfoy's Sectumsempra grazed her arm. She shot a stun back his way that missed by a mile, but Malfoy was quickly becoming the least of her problems. In a matter of seconds flames had spread over walls and tapestries and furniture, and if she didn't get out now, she wasn't going to. Malfoy lifted his wand, but just then a burst of fire exploded close to the ceiling, knocking them both down.

Hermione scrambled to her feet, bolting for the door. Trails of fire followed along the walls and ceiling as she ran down the corridor, past the kitchen and out the back door. She ran towards the park without looking back, without pausing to check if anyone was following. She couldn't Disapparate; she had been trying since she had realised it was a trap. There was no telling how far their wards extended, but she hoped that if she made it to the Order's Apparition point, she'd be able to get away. She just had to keep running.

A flash of red hit the grass close to her feet, missing her by an inch, and Hermione's heart jumped. She shot back a jinx over her shoulder without looking, trying to run faster. There was movement at the edge of her vision as dark shadows flashed around her, because of course their bloody wards wouldn't keep them grounded. Hermione hissed in frustration that quickly turned to horror when two Death Eaters Apparated right in front of her. She came to a grinding halt, turning frantically around for a way out, but she was surrounded. Cloaked figures closed in around her, their grotesque masks catching the soft light of the full moon.

"My, my, my," one of them said, and Hermione recognised Rabastan Lestrange. "Look what the cat dragged out."

There were six of them and just one of her, and Hermione did the one thing she could do. She turned her wand on herself, the Death Curse on her lips, but before she could finish the cast, a Disarming Charm hit her square in the arm, sending her wand flying.

"I told you to drop it."

Hermione spun around, holding her arm to her chest, and watched as Malfoy walked past two of the Death Eaters that stood in a circle around her. Mrs Jorkins was gone, and this was Draco Malfoy as Hermione knew him — fair skin and blond hair, and cold grey eyes that had never looked at her with anything but contempt or disapproval.

"I'm surprised to see you, Malfoy," she said, just managing to keep her voice steady. "Who's making sure your batty mother doesn't choke on her own drool while you're out playing dress-up?"

His smile was a sharp, bitter thing that carried no humour. "There's a fine line between bravery and stupidity, Granger; anyone ever tell you that?"

"Is it true she was found naked, fucking a house-elf on the living room floor?"

Hermione did not even register him disappearing before he was suddenly behind her, his left hand clutched painfully around her throat. The Death Eaters around them laughed and cheered as Hermione clawed at Malfoy's hand, struggling to breathe.

"She's a feisty one, Malfoy," one of them taunted. "Think you can handle her?"

"You can't make me kill you," he said, his breath warm against her ear. "I suggest you stop trying."

But despite the words, he did not let up the pressure on her throat, did not give in an inch even as she desperately tried to pry his fingers away. The last thing Hermione saw before passing out was the Dark Mark floating high above Tabitha Jorkins's burning house.

The whole world dwarfed to boundless, endless, uninterrupted pain, and Hermione couldn't breathe or think or do anything but scream. Eventually she couldn't even do that. When she finally broke, words fell from her lips, tripping over themselves in their haste to reveal all the things she knew, all the secrets she had sworn to take to her grave.

"Good girl," Malfoy said, briefly dropping his hand on her head before stepping away, but Hermione barely heard him, barely noticed that the screams in the room next door had also gone silent.

Her thoughts were a jumbled, tattered mess, and the more she tried to focus on any one thing, the more it all slipped away like smoke. She wasn't sure what she had said, wasn't sure whom she had named. The only thing she knew for sure, the only thing she knew with perfect clarity, was that when it had come down to it, the great Hermione Granger had been all too glad to sell out her soul for a moment's peace.