She's strange, you've decided. You can certainly see why it was so hard to make friends in your first year. You can see why he looked down on you with such disdain.
You've stayed up countless hours, drifting from memory to memory, trying to pinpoint the exact moment you changed.
It was gradual, you finally settle on, a gradual change that morphed you from brainy know-it-all to an accurate description of a Slytherin. It was five years, but it was enough time to grant you smooth curves and straight teeth, enough time to learn those hair spells, enough time to study and grow and train and lo-
You cut that train of thought before you can finish it.
She's loud. And bossy. And an absolute disaster. She makes it endearing though, and you hate how her eyes narrow as you tip your head and rest your finger on your chin as you watch her. You hate how she haughtily yells at you while you sit there quietly. You hate how she can't match your smirk or your wit or your charm.
You wonder if that was how he thought of you all those years ago.
She can normally hold her own in a duel but up against you she's a clumsy, bloody mess. She can't keep her shields up, can't slice her wand hard enough, can't spin or duck or dodge. She's loud here too, but this time it's with her body. You know as soon as she twitches to the right to expect an offensive spell, and as she pulls her arms closer to prepare for a defensive one.
It's almost like a dance with an uncoordinated partner. As she tells you you're cheating, you wonder when you learned to look so emotionless in a fight. You wonder if you can teach her what he taught you.
You decide you're not a very good teacher.
She grows fond of you after two months, and decides to look at you like you're a guardian or a big sister. You don't tell her how her talking about Mr. and Mrs. Granger sends a sharp stab of pain through your heart. You don't tell her how they die in two months. You wait, prepared to hold her as she cries like no one did for you.
She starts to talk about Ron a lot. 'Ron said this today,' 'Oh Ron is going to try to get on the Quidditch team!', 'Ron is a bloody idiot', 'Ron wrote me two letters today.'
It goes on.
You don't tell her how low he compares to him. How his compliments were like a caress to your skin, how he could insult you and tell you you're brilliant at the same time, how you had to fight to get him to learn to respect your intelligence, how he took you and twisted you into something great, how excited you were the first time he let you make your shared potions assignment without his help.
You know she wouldn't understand.
After three months she starts calling you 'Mione exclusively, which you think is ridiculous and immature and tell her so. You are her, you remind her, just from a different time. She says she knows, but you can tell she doesn't fully understand. It's not the first time you regret coming back. You without him is dreadfully dull, you think.
You can't teach her to stop burying herself in books. You can't make her apply herself. You can't open up her head and show her all of her untapped potential. You try, but she doesn't get it. Her life is rules and words and numbers and orders. Books are her well of knowledge. There is no passion outside of class, there is no application to real world problems.
You miss the way he would challenge you. The way he ripped you apart and taught you how to put yourself back together, better and stronger each time. You wish he could be here, could hold your hand and roll his eyes at her and her naivety.
You remember how lonely your house seemed the night the police came to your door. You remember how cold it was the next morning without your dad to light the fireplace and your mum to make tea and oatmeal. You remember sobbing in your parents bed for days, wishing you could have stopped them from going to the cinema that night. You suggest she goes to visit Ron that week, and you're wearing one of his blank faces, the one that leaves your eyes hard and offers no room to question your confidence, so she does as you bid without question.
She introduces you to Ron and Harry as her cousin from her mum's side of the family. Of course muggle families wouldn't just trade information on the wizard world during long distance phone calls, don't be ridiculous Harry, she lies smoothly. You would like to think she learned that from you, and it makes a rare smile form.
Ron is the same as you remember him, with all of his lanky limbs and furious nods. You remember what he said, when he peered into your mind once as you cried over your "lost love", and you can't decide if you should laugh or cry when you look at him for the rest of the trip. Harry is much more suspicious of you, but he trust her wholeheartedly. You remember Harry, your brother, and it aches somewhere deep inside you that you thought you long ago got rid of to see him stare at you with such cold, empty eyes.
You determinedly not think about how a piece him is inside of Harry. You don't look at his hair and picture yourself running your hands through his. You're not a complete masochist, you decide, but you can't control yourself as much as you would like to think, and you find yourself hugging him halfway through the trip.
If you tear up, neither of you acknowledge it, and if he awkwardly places his hands around your shoulders and whispers soothingly, you don't compare it to him.
When she gets home and receives the call, you're there to hold her. You're there to take her tears and shush her. You're her punching bag, as she fist her hands into your cardigan and tugs you and screams at you that you could have saved them, that you could have stopped them, that you could have told her to tell them not to go, that you could have warned her.
You don't tell her how many times you considered the possibility. You don't mention that Dumbledore warned you you wouldn't be able to make drastic changes until after you convince her to not accept a bargain nicknack in a rundown store. You let her blame you, like you blamed yourself. You don't want her to carry that self loathing, not like you did.
She won't have him to distract her from the pain, to laugh as she cried and call her an idiot for believing she could have stopped it. She won't get to see his charming smile while he rocked her back and forth and whispered that she couldn't have stopped it. She will never get his validation.
You did though, and you can take whatever she throws at you with her tiny fist and half formed sentences. You have his words in your mind, reassuring you that it wasn't your fault.
It takes two days for her to accept the food you leave at her door.
It takes three weeks for her to come sit with you on the couch and read.
It takes a month and a half for her to reply to you when you talk.
It takes time, but she heals faster than you did. She smiles sometimes, and she even laughs at the letters Ron and Harry send her. She talks about Hogwarts and her classes and asks what you took your seventh year. You talk about almost everything, like you did before. She has steered clear of asking you about your past and why you came back to her from it, and you respect her and don't talk about her parents.
You go back to training, as normal, and you teach her to use nonverbals and then how to use wandless magic. You teach her the potions he taught you, and you write a notebook full of tips that you and he learned together. You don't answer her when she asks how you know all of this stuff, and you shake your head when she asks if your time had better teachers.
You think in secret that he would have been a great professor.
She's never quite as good as you, but she's learning. She relies more on herself and trust her basic instincts now. You don't think you'll ever be able to reach inside her and teach her how to flow with her magic like it's her own soul, but you think she gets close to it sometimes.
She says she's not anywhere near as great as you and you don't correct her.
You take her shopping for her last year of Hogwarts, even though she says you don't need to. You need to be here, after all. You don't tell her this is the reason why you came back. You hope she never knows, because you know she will never understand.
You still don't understand it, not fully, not as well as you would like to. You think you should by now, but the memories hurt and going over every little detail for hours is torture. Sometimes you wonder if you really are a masochist. He would probably laugh at you, snark something about how this is the one thing you don't know.
You keep her away from Borgin And Burks. You keep her close to Harry and Ron and the Weasley's. You make sure she's happy with them, happy and content and naive in a way you'll never be again. You take great pleasure in seeing Ron trip Malfoy as he passes, and for a minute you remember Abraxas withering on the floor under the force of your crucio. You allow yourself, just for a second, to feel the pleasure of using it to harm the git. You let yourself remember his smile as he watched you unfold yourself and let enough hate to mar yourself to use the unforgivable.
You think about going to that store and buying it again. You want to run your hands along the edges of the ring and hear it whisper in languages you could never hope to understand about power and curses and wealth and fame. You want to place it on your finger, to say the words engraved on the inside, to go back to him and let him hold you and speak to you just once.
Just once more, is all you ask.
She keeps you from doing it, though. You don't know how she knows to do it, but she does, and later, as you help her pack her trunk back up, you ask her. She fiddles with a few misplaced papers before she answers, and says it was just a feeling she had.
You allow yourself to smile, a real one, because your lessons weren't all for naught. He was so proud of you the first time you felt that tug, the magical pull that opened a gateway to seeing. He held your cheeks in his soft hand and kissed you slowly, so slowly, until you were gasping for breath and he was holding you close. He whispered in your ear about how powerful you would be, how easily you both would achieve greatness together, how the world would bow to you both.
She spends the night holding you while you cry softly, the first time you've allowed yourself to the entire time you came back. She pets your hair soothingly the entire night, and you know she wishes she knew how to help, but you don't want her to know, don't want her to go looking for what you lost, for what you protected her from.
You find yourself sobbing, admitting that you're protecting her from so much and she doesn't even know it. She holds you tighter as you say that, and you wish you could let her experience what you did, you wish she could feel his embrace and hear him speak and learn from him and laugh with him and love him. Love him so much he encompasses her entirely, love him so much she breaks over and over again as he latches his soul onto different things and lets his lust for power consume him.
You wish you had been able to protect yourself from him, but you can only protect her and hope she can kill him.
Because you never could, and for that, you need her to protect you.