It was finally over. They had won, Harry and Ron were safe, Voldemort was dead. But Hermione felt empty. A hollow feeling had nestled itself right above her heart and she could feel the space every time she swallowed, feeling as though she was breathing in inexplicable sadness with every inhale. How could she avoid it? The grief of those who had lost loved ones, the sorrows of families ripped apart for eternity, the loss of Fred, Tonks, Lupin—these emotions coagulated in the air around her, pressing down on her lungs until she couldn't breathe, gasping for fresh air but only consuming more sadness until the hollow feeling had expanded through her ribcage and she needed to leave the Great Hall of mourning.
She murmured some excuse to Harry and Ron, both slumped at what used to be the Ravenclaw table and hurried out into the welcome yet paradoxical sunlight that streamed through the open doors. The weather seemed to enjoy playing a cruel trick on this day of tragedy, wounds too raw for the celebration the sun was coaxing out of the survivors. Her eyes, dry before, filled suddenly with tears; she brushed them away angrily, refusing to succumb to the emotions threatening to overwhelm here. She buried them beneath numbness instead.
A shock of platinum blonde hair caught her eye, and she glanced to the side to see Draco Malfoy huddled with his family on the staircase. It was too much for her to bear. Forgiveness only stretched so far, and here was a family who bore responsibility for the horrors that had occurred, for the wild goose chase she had been on for the past year. Anger knocked any compassion or reason out of Hermione's head, and before she realized what she was doing she had strode over to the Malfoys, turned to face Draco, and slapped him as hard as she could. She stood there, breathing angrily but brimming with the same satisfaction that she had felt third year when she had hit that smug face for the first time.
There was no retaliation, just silence. As the pause stretched out even longer, Hermione came out of her cloud of satisfaction and really looked at Draco, ready to inflict more damage if necessary. Then she saw the blood trickling down his face, a wound she had unintentionally reopened with the force of her slap.
"I don't know!" Hermione screamed, twisting in Bellatrix's grasp with uncontrollable tears running down her face.
She watched in horror as the word "mudblood" was carved into her skin, the blood making a crisscross pattern around her arm, taunting her with her own weakness as she struggled to make it stop, make the pain stop…
Hermione screamed, waking up to total darkness at Shell Cottage from another nightmare. She shook her head, trying to get rid of the image of Ron's loving face, eyes closed in submission as the blood meandered down from a fatal head wound he had suffered.
"Make it stop…" she moaned, grabbing her head and backing away. "Stop. BLEEDING!"
The entire Malfoy family looked at Hermione, aghast.
"Hermione. You just slapped me and my wound reopened. What did you expect, that Malfoys bleed evil or something?" Draco tried to reason with the clearly-insane muggleborn.
Hermione simply stared at him, eyes as wide as those of a deer in headlights, and ran back into the Great Hall without saying another word. She had to be strong. She needed to be there for Harry, Ron, the Weasleys—weakness was not an option. Hermione had managed to push away her aversion to blood through sheer adrenaline on the battlefield, but now, when everything was calm and her brain could think again, all the terror came rushing back. Her brain was its own enemy now.
"Hermione, are you all right?" Harry's concerned voice broke through her reverie. "You look quite pale."
Ron simply nodded in assent, eyes filled with both concern and lethargy as he tried to keep his head from crashing into the table.
Hermione nodded, pasting a wan smile onto her face.
"I'm perfectly fine, Harry. You guys worry too much about me. Now come on, you guys both look like you could use a nice, long nap. I think I'll take one too."
She marched both boys purposely out of the hall, ensuring that her eyes didn't stray to the corner where three blonds still huddled. However, on her way up to the girls' dormitory on her own, she couldn't help recalling those chilling gray eyes, the pale alabaster skin, and the red that contrasted so sharply with his features.