T h e . G l a s s . M a n

Author: Tinuviel Henneth

Rating: PG-13, I suppose

Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.

Summary: The war was over, but there were still those out to avenge their Lord's demise. Now, Blaise Zabini's world is contained in one room in a hospital, and Hermione Granger's world is like nothing you've seen before.

Note: These companion stories, written in July of this year, are the Blaise/Hermione ship's first official darkfic. A list of a few inspiration songs are after the story.

T h e . G l a s s . M a n

000

"I don't know his name," she murmurs. She presses her hand against the cool, black tile floor. It was my idea to have a dark floor in there. Too much white was blinding and I don't think that an absence of color was going to help her get better.

I know she isn't going to get better.

"I'm not doing this for you!" Later, she calls to the mirror. She can't see me on the other side but I know she knows I'm here. I'm always here. I sleep in this five-by-seven foot observation nook. I have a nice, soft blue sleeping bag I roll out at night. My entire world is inside the room I watch; it would be silly of me to try to continue on with my life.

When it first happened, people would ask me how I could do it, visiting her all the time, even though she couldn't make heads or tails of anything. They told me I was much braver than they were. That's a load of crap, of course, because I'm the biggest fecking coward in the world. It's not courage keeping me here, it's fear. I'm scared to death that if I leave she might snap back and I won't be there. Maybe I'll stray too far into the Muggle street and get run over by a lorry.

I know she isn't going to snap back, though. That's the funny thing. She's as gone as Alice Longbottom, except Alice Longbottom didn't have some man watching her day and night like she was an animal in a zoo. Welcome to the rebuilt St. Mungo's. Welcome to the Spell Damage floor.

I should explain why I'm here and why she's in a box. Why I sleep on the floor. Why she doesn't know me. Why I sleep on the floor. Seriously, though, it's to the point where I survive on vending machine coffee and stale donuts nicked from the desk down the hall. The candy-stripers and the Healer who's in charge of her all think I'm as mad her, staying here all the time, my hand against the glass. They don't understand how I can do it.

It's been four years. I've lived here, too, for three of those years. I don't remember what a mattress feels like under my back, or what real meat tastes like, or the crush of people in Diagon Alley on all sides. It's strange how the word "side" rearranges into "dies."

"I'm not doing this for you!" she's shrieking, but not at the mirror any longer. She's turned away so she doesn't have to look at her reflection. They don't know if she knows that it's her in the glass looking back at her, and I agree. She hates the image more than she resents me for being here, but I can't leave. I can't just leave her there, behind the glass.

She's wearing a pair of white cotton pants and a pale pink tee shirt. It's the most basic of ensembles, but it can't hurt her. Almost every morning I help dress her. Even though she doesn't know who I am exactly, I'm the only one she lets touch her. She's calm when I'm talking and when I'm in there and for a little while after I leave her, but only for so long and then she's violent again, agitated, restless. She doesn't have a bed in her little room, only a mattress and sheets. She destroyed the bed in one of her episodes. That's what Healer Mathers calls them. Episodes. I just can't wait for next season.

I just wish I could change the channel.

When it's time for her to eat, I go in and sit on the edge of the mattress while she sits on the floor with her tray and eats. Her meals are small because her episodes are sporadic and we never know when they're going to come back. Once, she was in the middle of eating steamed vegetables when it happened, and I ended up with a smear of carrot across my face. Someone had to tranquilize her so they could scrub the room down.

They can't afford to have her attack anyone, so she can't come into contact with strangers. That's why she's in solitary. It breaks my heart to see her sequestered, but she's not a catatonic. They can't sit her in a bin with all the other hatters. It doesn't work that way.

There isn't a stick of furniture in her room. She broke the chair, galvanized steel, into above five pieces. An orderly hadn't paid attention to the sign. He had to have one of the chair legs surgically removed from his shoulder.

I wish I could kill the bastard who did this to us. He didn't just destroy her, which was his plan. He destroyed me, too. I would have been the most loyal little Death Eater there was, but they made the same mistake they made a lot, the Dark side, and hurt someone I cared for. For a while I entertained thoughts of tracking him down and doing something similar, but of violence only comes more violence and it was a rare fit of Gryffindorism I exhibited in being the noble one. I quit my job and sold my flat and bought a sleeping bag and dedicated my entire existence to being the guy on the other side of the glass.

Only a moment has gone by since the last time she spoke. "I'm declining!" she screams, suddenly kneeling. "I'm declining!" She falls backwards to the floor and stares at the ceiling. "I swear I will!"

They wonder why I do this. There's no hope of a recovery. They tell me I'm wasting my life. Molly Weasley comes by sometimes, and sometimes she brings Hester, sometimes she doesn't. Hester doesn't understand; she's too little still. Molly is all the Mum Hester knows and can know, and my world has narrowed to tightly for even Hester to fit inside. Molly told me once that she knew that the odds were against her, and that out of seven, one was bound to be rotted. She wouldn't have picked her baby boy out of all of her choices, but sometimes a mother can only do so much. I don't blame her, but what I think can't absolve her own guilt. That's all on her head.

She told me, on a Hester visit, that she was worried about me. She brought a little chocolate cake for Hester's fourth birthday, and made me eat two servings. She said that she admired me so much but it disturbed her. She told me that she thought I was only alive anymore out of habit. "Don't you dream anymore?" she asked.

Truthfully, I haven't had a dream in years. The money I do have goes to a nightly supply of Dreamless Sleep, which is delivered at the same time my Daily Prophet is in the morning, right to the hospital. It's entirely possible that the potion is addictive, but I wouldn't know if I'm hooked because I haven't dared to go without it since I've been sleeping here. I don't ever tell Molly this. She would only worry more, and her attention needs to be focused on her grandchildren and adopted grandchildren, like Hester, who looks so much like her mother and not remotely like me.

We had a great relationship. We were at a ball. She was with him, the one who did it, and I was with some Ravenclaw Sixth Year. Her hair was up, I was wearing a borrowed robe, and she looked up at me with this grin. "You'll save me a dance, won't you?" she asked. I shrugged, mystified that the Head Girl was asking such a thing of me, lowly Slytherin (!) Keeper and resident nobody.

We danced three dances. She kept a running, nervous narrative and I listened. Apparently, she hadn't been accustomed to a male who listened entirely, not just biding his time until he could monopolize the conversation for himself. Truth is, I hate talking, about myself or otherwise. I can't think of anything more boring.

The war wasn't kind to any of us. I'm a half-blood, you see, and maybe that's what conditioned silence into me. Being a Slytherin tempers you a certain way, and when you don't have the inbred pedigree of a Malfoy or a Crabbe, you aren't even soapscum in Slytherin. When you don't live to have a crony on each side and, or have a bizarre fetish for pissing others off, you'd best just blend into the flagstones. The war, waged by a half-blood against the very people who sired him, was especially hard on my ilk. We couldn't figure which way to let ourselves be torn. In the end, I went with the girl I danced with at the ball, the Head Girl, the girl whose friend was her leader.

Like any Slytherin, I followed the path of least resistance. Like any Slytherin, I picked the side with the best outcome for me.

Is this outcome best?

Now, she's sitting against the wall, her chin tucked onto her knees. Her fingernails are charmed to stay short. Her hair is spelled into a tight ponytail and is trimmed every six weeks by Healer Mathers herself. She eats with a bewitched utensil that won't allow her to use it as a weapon. She's entirely quiet now, watching the clouds cast shadows across the sun as they pass by her window. There's a layer of chain-link fence between the two panes of glass, spelled to be Unbreakable.

She has never looked out the window, to my knowledge. I don't think she knows it's there. She never liked heights much.

Hester was born after it happened. They were worried what would happen during the birth, since she was so far gone. There wasn't enough human being left in her for her to have any maternal instincts. We had picked the name one night in a bookshop in Piccadilly, when she was seven months pregnant, so I didn't have to think when Hester was born. I wasn't able to take the baby, and thank God for Molly Weasley. I couldn't even take care of myself. My vision charms wore off from crying and forty-nine hours without sleep and I had to go back to wearing glasses. I was too fatigued to recast the charms. I lost forty-four pounds in two months, which I'm aware is completely unhealthy. I was somewhat chubby before it happened, because she liked that I was always warm and "squishy," but losing so much weight left me gaunt-faced and saggy-skinned. She would have hated it. I hated it myself, but I couldn't bring myself to eat.

I went to the memorials for all the war heroes that first year, before I gave up on the outside world. I didn't go to hers, but Molly took baby Hester. There was a big picture in the Prophet of the two of them. The memorial for Harry Potter, who died six feet from where she stood, in a blaze of befitting green glory, was the worst by far. The one for Percy Weasley was somber and everybody cried for the spy who risked everything, including his family's love. Theodore Nott's memorial was a strange occasion full of the foremost figures in every circle that Theo had touched. Theo was quite a social butterfly. Even Broderick Bode's affair was almost cheerful in comparison to Potter's. One that didn't happen was the one for Ron Weasley, which is a pity because I would have fully gone. Apparently, the Wizarding world doesn't celebrate traitors.

I would have raised my glass to the man. I would have kissed Hester's forehead. I would have been in all the papers, as delusional to all as Gilderoy Lockhart. The point is, I honor the dead. That includes the dead who have trespassed against me.

The glass is smudged from me leaning my forehead against it so often. It's my altar of sorts, I suppose. I went with my Muggle mother to a church in Rome once. She knelt in front of a sea of candles in individual cobalt glass cups. She lit one candle, and then two, and then three, and then she closed her eyes. She stayed that way for a long time, I remember, and tears were streaming down her cheeks from under her lashes. I didn't ask what she was doing. My father would have been horrified that she had taken me to that place. They had an agreement that I was never to touch her religion. It wasn't any holy sort of experience to watch my mother light a few candles, have a cry, then take my hand again and go back into the Roman sunlight. It was startling to see the ocean of flickering light, though. She told me in explanation later that each light was a prayer and a person somewhere. I don't know if she was telling me the kind of truth a mother tells her child to make him appreciate the glory of God and the stars in the sky or just a sliver of her dogma, but it doesn't matter. That's the truth I've taken into my heart.

It happened on the twenty-eighth of May, a day full of lilies and sunlight. On June first, I was in a Roman cathedral, my forehead and sternum and shoulders slightly damp where a man in black robes dabbed me with water, lighting a candle, and then another. I lit one in a red glass cup, and one in a green. The man in the robes watched me and called me "Signore," and knew somehow that I was not a practiced Catholic. He didn't interrupt me, he didn't say anything else, just let me go about my grief.

The glass is my altar, then. Like my mother lighting candles and praying for people who need it--namely, my father; she prayed for him all the time-- I kneel before the glass and watch my life as it refuses to acknowledge its own reflection in the mirror.

"There aren't any lights in the world," she whispers before she sleeps.

000

Autumn's Monologue (From Autumn to Ashes)

Can't Not (Alanis)

Amen (Jewel)

Honestly Okay (Dido)

You Could Make a Killing (Aimee Mann)

I Know (Fiona Apple)

000

Dedicated to nobody because I'm not in the mood.

Posted 24 September, 2004 (written 13 July 2004)

--tinhen