"Mummy, what's this one from?"

Hermione looked down to see five-year-old Rose's still-pudgy fingers tracing the v-shaped scar on her right thumb. Rose had been sitting in her lap in the old rocking chair in her room while they read "Babbitty Rabbitty and Her Cackling Stump." It was a story Rose could read on her own, but sometimes a little girl still needed to cuddle with her mother. From the earliest days when she could intentionally move her fingers, it seemed that Rose's had homed in on the scars that made a map of Hermione's life. Other children, even her sweet young Hugo, soothed themselves by sucking their thumbs or twisting hair around their fingers. But Rose was always comforted by touching her mother, and her little fingers knew every ridge, every wrinkle of her hands and face.

"Hmm?" Hermione pulled her mind back to her little girl, from where it had drifted. Babbitty Rabbity wasn't as riveting as it had been when she searched the Tales for insight into why a slightly batty but respected wizard had sent her on a chase that had ended with her in a cold tent on the run with Ron and Harry. Just now her attention had drifted to the report still sitting on her desk at the DMLE. While she had been reading the familiar story, she'd ben mentally outlining the last bit of the argument she needed to make in her newest request for opening the Aurors Office to non-humans. If she could just get fifteen more minutes at work tomorrow, she'd be able to finish it and send it on to her department head. She'd been almost done when the owl had dropped a note from Ron on her desk. It was his day to watch the children, but he'd been called in on a case that had been "totally back-burner, 'Mione, but now it's not!" So, she'd gathered her things and Flooed home to take care of the Rose and Hugo. He'd better be home soon, was all she could think. Because once she got Rose settled, she'd have to check on Hugo one more time. Then she could sift through the pile of potential projects sitting on her desk and reprioritize what needed to be done next. But finishing Rose's bedtime routine first meant paying attention to her little voice with its bigger-than-realized questions.

"Oh, I was cleaning a phial in the potions lab when it cracked and sliced my thumb. The dittany was a little further away than I remembered, so it never healed quite right. Why do you ask, Rosie-mine?"

"Just wondering, Mummy."

Hermione's brief answer satisfied Rose, but it started a chain of memories. It was true that she had cut her hand open cleaning a phial in the potions lab. And it was true that the dittany was inexplicably further away that she thought. But she had a severely edited the story. The accident had taken place in Fifth Year Potions lab when her attention was yet again divided between the potion they were assigned to brew, making sure that Harry and Draco didn't come to blows, and preventing Neville from either collapsing under Professor Snape's glare or causing the Potions classroom to explode. It was when Harry had been insisting (again) that Draco was up to no good, and Ron had been encouraging him.

"Oi. Harry, pass the hedgehog spines. I've got to grind them up," he had started. "And Hermione, you might as well admit there's something worse than normal with Malfoy. Has to be. He hasn't harassed Hagrid in weeks."

Hermione paused in her repetitive stirring. She didn't know what would happen to her brew if she lost track of the number of alternating clockwise and counterclockwise stirs of the cauldron, but someone needed to manage what was going on in the classroom. She divided her muttering between Neville ("No, grind them, not drop them in whole!") and Ron ("Honestly, your evidence is that he's a slightly better human? That's how you know he's evil?"). Her muttering wasn't quiet enough to avoid Professor Snape's attention.

"Detention, Miss Granger. Perhaps you will remember to work individually in the future?"

She gritted her teeth and held tightly to the phial into which she had just decanted the assigned potion for the day. Too tightly, as it shattered in her grip, splashing drops on her fingertips of her perfectly brewed Restfulness Restorative, which was supposed to help OWL students at least feel as if that had slept when they had been studying.

When she showed up that evening for detention, she still had Harry's and Ron's complaints about the unfairness of it ringing in her memory. Professor Snape was sitting at his desk marking first year essays and indicated with a nod that she should clean the cauldrons left behind by the Third Years. She began to think that Harry and Ron were right about the basic injustice of being required to scrub when she really would be better served doing almost anything. However, she started scrubbing the cauldrons by hand and soon fell into a rhythm marked only by the scratching of Professor Snape's quill as he wrote scathing comments on the first years' essays. Hermione had moved on to the glassware when Professor Snape suddenly hissed and gripped his arm. The potions classroom had been so silent that she startled at the noise and cracked the phial that she was currently cleaning while her hand was still inside it. As she twisted to see what was wrong with Professor Snape, the glass sliced open her thumb. When she turned back to her work, she realized first that she was bleeding and then that the cut was deep enough that she could see bone. It was her turn to gasp.

Professor Snape stood and tried to dismiss her. "Miss Granger, you have cleaned enough for tonight. I forgot another appointment that I must now leave to attend. Take your things and go back to your common room."

She tried to interrupt him to let him know she was injured, but he left through the door into his private stores before she could get out more than a "But, Professor…" So, she grabbed a clean cloth to wrap around her hand and headed for Madame Pomfrey. By the time she got there, pale-faced due to how rapidly the blood was coloring the cloth she had taken, and Madame Pomfrey had summoned the dittany, she realized that there must have been some residue inside the phial from whatever potion it held previously. Madame Pomfrey tutted as she worked over Hermione's hand and finally ended with, "Well, dear, I'm not sure what he had you cleaning, but it looks as if there will be a scar. I'm sorry."

The scar itself had never bothered Hermione, but feeling Rose's finger trace it gently, over and over, made her wish that she had understood what Professor Snape had been doing when he rushed from the dungeon, that she had known what he had risked every time he left the grounds of Hogwarts in his false service to Voldemort. It wouldn't have changed the outcome of anything. But she still wished she had understood and maybe been kinder. When she looked at the scar with her daughter on her lap and remembered the prickly man and repeated, "Well, the dittany was too far away."