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After her first raid-gone-bad, she washes her hands. She walks into the bathroom as the morning rays touch the horizon and soaks her hands before she does anything else. She scrubs the dirt out of the lines of her palms, dries her hands off, pushes back her cuticles and withdraws. She leaves the bathroom just as she found it, with speckled puddles on the counter and streaks of hard water deposits around the faucet. She does not look in the mirror.
She washes her hands, she goes to breakfast. The morning meal in the safe house is always sparsely populated, only George sits at the beaten table in the centre of the room. He nurses a steaming mug in shaking fingers, and she wonders if there's more than tea inside to calm his tremors.
They don't make eye contact. She fixes up some porridge, adds double cream and caster sugar and goes out onto the porch to watch the sunrise. Even though her bones are aching, her mind won't stop reeling with thoughts of the last few hours.
They had been too late to save Neville from being tortured, it had been too late to save Hannah Abbott at all. But she had gotten out the other side with Neville well enough. Even now as he lay in bed in convalescing, she wonders if he will be sane when he wakes. Maybe Bellatrix has taken another from the Longbottom family. Maybe, after all this time, there wouldn't be enough room in the Janes Thickney Ward. She can't decide if it would be better for him to be alone but sane or for him to be gone with his parents.
As the sun kisses the tops of unknown trees and stretches languidly across well-manicured lawns, she wonders where she is. She can't smell the ocean, she's far away from her last safe house. She recognises nothing of her surroundings. Even the finger-painted sky with shades of yellow behind the grey clouds doesn't seem like home. Doesn't seem like Britain at all. Where was the handbook that told her where she was? Where was her atlas, her globe, her satnav?
She doesn't have a handbook, an atlas, a globe, or a satnav. All she has is a lacklustre sunrise, an empty bowl, and guilt that lingers like the blood underneath her fingernails.
Three months pass while she goes on raids. Some successful, most not. As with the first time, she washes her hands, makes breakfast, goes out on the porch. Every raid, the same routine. Wash, eat, watch, wash, eat, watch. Sometimes she is too sick to her stomach to eat, but she forces it down. It was the one rota she wrote, and she would keep it. In her weeks, she attends clandestine meetings, underhanded assemblies, accepts back-alley payoffs and continues to live her hand-to-mouth existence. Neville is relocated to a safe house near St. Mungo's. He hasn't woken. She and Tracey Davis are relocated to a run-down shack at the bottom of a hill. She can just see the top of Uffington White Horse from outside her window and tries to ignore the fact that she's in Wiltshire. Her studies of Death Eater files have hammered into her head who lived in Wiltshire, and her memories have filled in the rest.
Secondhand news told her that all the Malfoys have been dead for months. Their Manor empty and their bones picked clean by everything from common starlings to the ravens at the Tower of London. But it doesn't stop her from setting wards thicker than the walls at Hogwarts and taking turns keeping watch with Tracey Davis.
When she returns from the first raid-gone-bad after her reassignment, she scours her hands with Tergeo so many times that her knuckles crack and split and the blood from her hands mingles with the blood already there. She curses the fact that she doesn't have running water and sleeps with her hands flung above her head, as far away from her body as she can manage. She doesn't want the deeds her hands have done to crawl up her arms and infest her heart. When all she has is her wand, a cable knit sweater, an empty bowl and a wooden shack, she wants to keep her heart away from her handwritten sins.
She is told she has one more assignment before she is moved to Shell Cottage for Christmas. The shack had long since been too cold for her to feel her fingers most days, and she was eager for a change in scenery. Just one more raid. One more night of scoured hands and bleeding knuckles stuck out of her blanket and freezing in the Wiltshire winter.
It is an RGB. She tells Tracey Davis as much when she returns panting and sweating despite the cold. The Slytherin watches in mild fascination while Hermione again casts Tergeo fifteen times on her left hand, then her right. Then she pulls out gauze and wraps it around her knuckles and wipes the blood from the lines in her palms. She pulls on her hand-me-down jumper and collapses on the bed while Tracey Davis goes for a walk in the early December air. She wants to cradle her hands, but she doesn't want her deeds to jump like sparks from her throbbing fingers to her pulsating chest.
Some say that the hand is quicker than the eye, but Hermione had known different since she turned eleven and her letter from Hogwarts came. Now, as she sits on the floor of the wooden shack and tries to close up bleeding wounds, she wishes it were still so.
Tracey Davis left early that morning to go on a raid near the Forbidden Forest and came back from her RBG with more than she bargained for. A dying Draco Malfoy. Which, if Hermione thinks about it logically, makes no sense at all. He's been dead for months, how did Tracey find him alive? Where did she find him? Why did she save him?
Alive and save were subjective terms. He really is bleeding quite a lot. The wooden floor is being stained by hand with his noble ancestry. It is seeping into the cracks and fissures in the planks, caking on her hands with dirt and grime. She presses a handkerchief to smaller cuts and uses her wand to close the bigger ones. Tracey Davis is huddled in the far corner, a deathlike pallor on her face. Hermione tries to palm off a job or two on the Slytherin, but she isn't dealing well with the blood.
The blood. It is everywhere. It is spreading, it hits metastasis like a cancer, it is growing out of his body in claret spirals and filling her eyes and her nostrils. It wedges into her brain and clouds her thoughts. Soon she isn't thinking of whom she is healing, but of each individual cut. Of each scarlet line traced precisely into his skin, like handmade geometric Reticella lace. Her knuckles are stinging.
When she drops her wand and settles back onto her haunches, she throws in her hand. There is nothing more she can do, and his breathing is slowing down. With all his wounds sealed and no other injury to be found, there is nothing left to be done except hope that Life had the upper hand on Death this round. Draco Malfoy would live or he would die, and he would have to deal with the cards he was dealt.
Overcome with exhaustion, Hermione disintegrates next to the miscreant in an unconscious heap.
She wakes with a slowly progressing horror that pumps through her veins. Her clothes were cold and wet with blood. It had congealed in her hair and on her face. The salty sweet taste loiters on her lips and flakes off her fingers like a croissant sheds flecks of pastry. She has become dirtied by the very thing she has fought to save. She looks up at Tracey Davis, her mouth open in silent, manic dread. The woman is tending to the blond man that lays in her bed and Tracey watches calmly while the Gryffindor grabs her wand in haste and gallops from the shack with stumbling strides and a burbling scream that tears out of her chapped, blackened mouth.
The Tergeo is too weak to remove the gore. She scours her hands again and again, but they only turn red in the places where the skin is clean. She moves from Tergeo to Scourgify, from Scourgify to rubbing her raw hands in the snow. The blood haemorrhages from her fingers into the whiteness. Her face pricks painfully with the cold as she scrapes blood off her cheeks with numb fingers. Everything is a murky brown colour, from the sky to the snow around her. She is drowning in the mournful blood, blood from Malfoy, blood from her cracked knuckles, blood from her heart. She swears she can feel her sins spark from her fingers into her face, travelling along her capillaries and veins, settling in her heart and pushing the blood out to make room for her sins.
Her sins were getting out of hand. Scenes flash before her eyes, running, always running through her mind as much as she fights against the tirade. Raids gone bad, Crucio after Crucio ripping through her limbs, fighting to stay upright with Neville on her back, Perkin's tent those months on the run, Butterbeer dates with Ron. Her brain settles at last on the face of Antonin Dolohov right as he killed Ron, laughing while his Avada Kedavra soared through the air and hit her precious Ron in the back. Then she saw Dolohov's face as his laughter died along with his soul, as he crumpled to the ground. His cold, dead eyes shining eerily from his immobile sockets. Her outstretched wand shaking with her anger. Looking at her hands as if they didn't belong to her. Hermione screams anew while her memories fade away, leaving her staring at the snow between her knees.
It doesn't look much like snow anymore. Wasn't snow supposed to be white? Pure like she was when she was eleven? When magic and the world that harboured it was a beautiful, breathing thing? When she discovered that magic was not slight of hand, not something used to trick the foolish?
She laughs bitterly. How naive she had been to think she was wrong. Real magic is used to trick people just like the summertime magic shows at Trafalgar Square. But real magic is worse. Real magic is used to hurt and to maim and to kill. Real magic is used to make people bleed, to make her bleed, to hand out scars like a Muggle magician releases birds into the sky.
Hermione's body was cold as ice when Tracey Davis got to her. Hermione looked almost…comfortable laying in the snow, her limbs splayed out like a snow angel on the frosty grass. The slush all around her was muddy and melted, a thick crimson sludge that hugged Hermione's body like a glacial blanket. She obviously had passed out.
Tracey picked her up gently and carried her into the shack. She moved the still unconscious Draco Malfoy to her bed and turned down Hermione's own sheets. Tracey dried Hermione's clothes and removed her shoes before tucking her into bed and placing warming charms on her blankets. She checked for wounds and for fever but found none.
She looked at Hermione's hands last. They were tinted brown and her fingernails were black underneath. Her knuckles were peppered with minuscule scars and lumps under the skin, testaments to how much Hermione had done to help others. Tracey still didn't know why the Gryffindor soured her hands like she did, but it didn't seem healthy. She must know that Tergeo removed all moisture. She must have known better than to injure her hands that way. If Hermione Granger had worked into insanity to save the life of an enemy, why hadn't she saved herself?
Tracey reverently wrapped gauze around Hermione's fingers, then eased her arms into her blankets. She pulled Hermione's sheets up to her chin and watched the lines from her face relax.
Tracey Davis kept vigil the entire night. She watched the two pilgrims sleep and watched the sun stretch its fingers across the white rolling hills of Wiltshire. The snow sparkled like diamonds and the Christmas Day sky cleared up.
As she ate a humble breakfast of porridge oats from Hermione's ceramic bowl, Tracey Davis pondered Hermione's hands and wondered when her scars would fade from her knuckles. Someday, when all of this was over, Tracey Davis knew that Hermione's scars would fade from her hands, leaving smooth, toughened skin in its place.