Disclaimer: I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

***

From the journal of Hermione Granger

(undated – third week of May)

Everyone is asleep now. I'm writing by wandlight. I can hear the Burrow creaking in its sleep, and I imagine I hear the breathing of everyone asleep in this much-inhabited house. We're doubled and tripled up since the war, with Andromeda and Teddy here and Harry rooming with Ron and Dean and me sharing a room with Ginny and Luna.

I can't sleep so I will write.

After Madam Pomfrey arrived, she gave Draco a good dose of Dreamless Sleep and he passed out rather heavily and instantly so I could finally get my hand back. All of that angel-of-mercy stuff is vastly overrated, like most things that look good in paintings. The first thing I did was run down the hall to the loo. Then Neville and I took a long walk.

We walked around the lake a couple of times without talking. It was late afternoon and if you looked in the right direction, it was an ordinary spring day at Hogwarts. Students were sitting out on the grass, and a few were circling over the Quidditch pitch on brooms. If you looked in the wrong direction, you saw the ruins.

Then Neville explained to me who Draco's attackers were. War orphans. Hogwarts students whose families were killed by the Death Eaters. That's one of the reasons they didn't close the school. There's nowhere for the kids to go.

There are no wizarding orphanages.

Joke shops, yes, but no orphanages.

Neville knows all of those kids; he recited their names and what happened to their parents and what was done to them this year. He told me that the ringleader was the little girl with the pigtails, a second-year Hufflepuff. Wilhelmina something. I didn't even see her; I was concentrating on facing down the bigger boys. He told me about how he cleaned her up after Crabbe Crucio'd her in detention. Nobody else wanted to do it. Blood didn't unnerve them anymore but shit was too much. And Crabbe thought it was really, really funny so he did it to her more than once. Neville shrugged and said, "Well, it doesn't bother me. I help out with my parents, you know."

Then he told me what the kids had been doing to Draco.

What they were doing was

Here's what he said

This is almost impossible to write down even though I can still hear his words.

Especially after Ron yelled at me for being three hours late to meet him. At first it was fine because he was worried about me especially after the panic in Hogsmeade when they killed Pansy Parkinson. But when I told him about helping Neville in the hospital wing and that the patient was Draco-sodding-Malfoy he yelled at me. I don't want to write down what he said in particular but the general drift was that the war isn't over for him and never will be and I had better be clear about what side I'm on.

I am shivering almost too hard to write.

He said Pansy deserved it because she was ready to hand over Harry to Voldemort.

I am not sure. I think she was scared and she let her mouth run away with her. She paid for it with a fairly nasty and painful death. Madam Pomfrey told me and Neville that the curse cut up her face and chest and throat; she was still trying to talk but you couldn't make it out through the bubbling blood. She is fairly certain that Pansy was asking for her mother and for Draco.

I don't want to think about

What I don't want to think about. Much better. A list. I like lists.

Who knows about Sectumsempra? Anybody that heard the original story from sixth year with all the juicy details of who threw what curse. Draco tried Cruciatus on Harry and Harry answered with Sectumsempra, and Draco almost bled to death.

It is in the nature of magic to run out of control. Most curses don't stay secret for long. The name of the weapon, and its intent, is the weapon itself. "Sectumsempra. For enemies." And wizarding folk are rotten at documentation. I don't think Snape wrote down how to reverse it, or maybe Harry just didn't read to that part. In any case, that book is ashes on the wind now, and Snape is dead.

There are feral war orphans roaming the halls of Hogwarts. Neville says they set on Draco because he was an easy target. His parents are in Azkaban. He was a prefect again this year so they can blame him for what happened. He's visible, and alone. He dresses like a Pureblood aristocrat. He has the same attitude he ever did. Madam Pomfrey is keeping him in isolation in the hospital wing because it isn't clear he'll be safe anywhere else.

Most of the shouting wasn't hexes. They were telling him what they were going to do to him next, and everybody had a suggestion. Neville will not tell me the particulars. We caught them before they could finish shearing his hair and tearing off his clothes.

What I keep averting my eyes from and which therefore is engraved on memory.

What I saw: I recognized who it was. I recognized him as soon as I picked up the hair—who else has hair that color? Platinum. I stuffed that hank of hair in the pocket of my robes because it kept slithering to the floor and I didn't want to leave loose hairs lying around. I found it when I got home and it's sitting on my desk, like a keepsake. A lock of Draco Malfoy's hair, held in an onyx and silver clasp and crusted with blood where they cut off the queue as if they were amputating a limb.

Very pale hands against his black robes. His hands were loose on his thighs and they were shaking uncontrollably.

There were his books with pages torn out, scattered in front of him.

The glassy averted stare. The way that he turned his face away, into Neville's chest, when Neville was washing the blood out of his hair, as if he wanted to close his eyes and deny he was there at all. The ugly cut on the back of his neck that crossed the spine and ran up into the scalp, where they'd cut off his long hair and not particularly cared that they took skin as well.

My own averted glance, when Neville sat him up and the torn remnant of his robes fell to the floor and exposed him neck to hip, a horrible blinding expanse of bare skin. I remember the raw edge of his clavicle and how I'd never thought about him having a body and still didn't want to. Neville fished for the torn edges of the cloth and draped it awkwardly over Draco's shoulder and I did the Reparo without looking.

Oh yes, and Neville ordered, as we set off: "Wand out. Cover me." As if we were in a combat zone. He expected the attackers to return, and he didn't intend to leave the hospital wing until Madam Pomfrey came back.

In the hospital wing. Neville settled Draco back onto the pillows and he just flopped, bonelessly. I saw the vulnerable underside of his jaw as his head tipped back.

The succession of expressions on his face when he opened his eyes:

Utterly unfocused astonishment, and then the glare, the peasant-fear-me glare, and then the sneer or the beginning of it, which he almost didn't live to complete because that's when the rage flared and I could feel the killing curse begin to cast itself. Then his eyes opened very wide and his mouth too as if his death were coming at him from an unexpected quarter. And then I saw again Tonks' wide dead eyes reflecting the empty sky over the Great Hall. The bone structure of the nose and the eye sockets—that's what they have in common—and it may have been that kinship that saved him.

Then he grasped my hand so tightly I thought I would have bruises, and held it to his cheek, and whimpered like a five-year-old.

Neville said, "He had a concussion. That's why he kept falling asleep. And I don't think he recognized you except when he heard your voice."

"So who did he think I was?" I asked.

"His mother," Neville said. "When he took your hand. I saw him with his mother in the Great Hall and he was holding her hand like that, as if he were safe as long as she held on to him. When you tried to kill him, I suppose he thought you were Voldemort. Or maybe Bellatrix. He must know what the backwash of the Killing Curse feels like."

I sat quiet over that one a bit. Narcissa Malfoy and Tom Riddle and Bellatrix Lestrange. The last three people in the world anybody would mistake me for. His mother, for Merlin's sake. Narcissa the ice queen. Except to Draco, Narcissa wasn't ice. She was mama, a warm lap, safe harbor.

I said, "I almost did a wandless Avada Kedavra on a helpless patient and you're still speaking to me." It scared me to say it aloud, as if saying it made it more real.

Neville said very quietly, "I was always afraid that would happen if I let any magic out at all. It took me years to stop being afraid of killing everyone around me."

Then I remembered abruptly that time in our fifth year when Malfoy made that smart remark about the closed ward in St. Mungo's and Neville lunged at him and it took Harry and Ron both to restrain him and they nearly didn't. Neville must have remembered the same thing because he said, "If I'd gotten to him, he wouldn't have had a face. I wanted to wipe his smirk off and I would have taken his face off to do it."

He dropped his voice even lower, so I had to strain to hear him. "When I heard that Fred Weasley was dead I was glad that I hadn't seen it. I would have wondered forever if I'd really been the one who got him." He whispered, "I spent more time dreaming about killing him and George than I ever spent on Malfoy. Everybody thought their jokes were so funny, especially when they were on me."

***

Fourth week of May 1998

It's a rainy Tuesday when Hermione Apparates to the alley outside the entrance to St. Mungo's. She's two hours early for her appointment with Boudicca Derwent, less from punctiliousness than from a desperate desire to find herself anywhere but the Burrow that morning.

She is still disturbed by the argument she had last night with Ron about the situation at Hogwarts. He isn't particularly disturbed that someone seems to have declared open season on the seventh-year Slytherins. Gregory Goyle is dead too, another Sectumsempra killing, as is Blaise Zabini. Millicent Bulstrode is unaccounted for. Ron's argument seems to be that they would or should have ended up in Azkaban, and in the good old days it would have been the Dementor's Kiss. This way is cleaner: no drooling shells to warehouse.

He doesn't understand Neville's worries about the roving gangs of orphaned students. "We got up to pranks when we were in school," he says. Never mind that McGonagall and Pomfrey both reacted to the attack on Draco with identical looks of grim resolve and proceeded to bend the rules to keep him safe.

The worst was that after the argument, Ron wanted to kiss and cuddle, and he was annoyed because she wasn't interested. Well, she could see his point, given that he'd arranged for Harry and Dean to be elsewhere for the evening and privacy is at a premium at the Burrow these days. Molly seems to be a little less vigilant about the young folk sneaking off together of an evening, but Hermione suspects this is because she assumes weddings are just around the corner. It doesn't take great subtlety to discern this, as she makes fond eyes at Arthur over the crowded family table and talks about the breathless days of their elopement during the First War Against Voldemort.

Hermione has never felt less romantic or domestic in her life. She had quite enough of domesticity on her extended camping trip. Between Ron's notion that a noisy argument is some form of foreplay and his expectation that somebody owes him home-cooked meals and clean laundry, she finds that she's feeling decidedly less romantic once they're alone.

She really should have known better than to have tried to talk to him about her nightmares and her disturbing flares of rage. First he wanted to write it off to female hormones and time of the month.

She said, "This isn't normal. I almost AK'd Malfoy in the hospital wing, and he wasn't even giving me a particularly dirty look."

Ron looked at her and said "What's wrong with that?" Then he smirked and said, "Actually, Avada Kedavra's too good for him. Let's start another of your do-gooder societies. S.C.A.M.—Society to Crucio All Malfoys."

"You know, that might have been almost funny when they were winning. But now it's just sick. They slammed Lucius and Narcissa up in Azkaban and I think they're probably going to make an example of them. Draco doesn't have a lot left except his stiff-necked pride and his smart mouth, and that's not going to get him far." She felt a momentary flash of gratitude to Neville for spelling that out for her.

She didn't add that he didn't find Crucio such a humorous idea when he was listening to her screams through the floorboards, but that's too close to the bone to use for point-scoring. Harry tells her that Ron wakes him up several times a week shouting her name. None of them are weathering the post-war particularly well. Harry is closemouthed about his own nightmares, but she suspects from the bruised look of the skin under his eyes that he's not doing very well either.

She stands for a bit in the lobby, looking at the portraits. Mercifully, they're not paying any attention to her. The imposing canvas of Dilys Derwent is empty; maybe she's visiting her portrait at Hogwarts. Something clicks. She looks at the calling card with McGonagall's note on the back: Boudicca Derwent. Yes, probably the same family. The wizarding world is too small for anyone to coincidentally share the same surname.

There really isn't a place to sit down, and she's already feeling restless. She checks her watch; an hour and a half yet to her appointment. She's contemplating going back out and wandering Muggle London for a bit, when the door opens and Neville enters, folding up his collapsible umbrella and brushing rain off his overcoat. He looks up and beams at her. "Hermione! What are you doing here?"

"I have an appointment," she said. "And you?"

"My first chance to see mum and dad since the war."

"I was just going to take a walk," she said. "I got here early."

"Let's get a cuppa first," Neville says, taking her arm.

The visitors' tea room is crowded. They find a tiny table in an alcove tucked around a corner. Neville leans in and speaks in a low confidential voice. "McGonagall got the Ministry to send some Aurors to keep an eye on the situation. It seemed to make a difference that it was a prefect they tried to kill. So I finally have a day off."

"Good. I was worried you were going to have to carry that alone. Hero of the Battle of Hogwarts and all that." She pauses, tears unexpectedly welling up. She swallows them. "I'm glad McGonagall is coming through for us. It's nice to have some adult backup."

"She's feeling responsible for the Slytherin situation," he says. "You know, Pansy and Blaise. And Draco, too. She thinks evacuating the whole house during the battle sent the wrong message."

Neville gets up to bring them hot tea and she takes out the card to read McGonagall's note on the back. Specialist in memory-related spell damage and Pensieve analysis. She's bothered that it takes several readings for the meaning to register. Maybe she should ask Derwent to check her for spell damage. She's having these lapses in concentration lately. First things first, though. She pats her bag, where she's secreted the stack of tomes on memory charms, along with full notes on the magical and non-magical work that went into her parents' relocation to Australia.

When she first received the Owl from Derwent setting the appointment, she had set immediately to the task of writing it all out; she wanted to be sure that the Healer knew exactly what she did so that there can be no mistake. She was surprised at how long it took, and when she reread the notes she realized for the first time just how much she had done. Every bit of it completely unauthorized if not illegal: hacked into public records, created two completely imaginary people and worked out fictional identities for them, collaborated with her parents in writing an alternative history of the last twenty years, done a complex layered spell that most Aurors didn't know how to do. All well in advance of her NEWTs year. Oh yes, and without any official training in the Muggle world, either.

Or anyone to check the work to see that there wasn't some glaring error. This wasn't a Potions essay but her parents' fate.

Cleverest witch of her age, indeed.

She puts her head in her arms to hide her tears.

"Here, this should help," Neville says, and she feels the warmth of the cup next to her arm. She wipes her eyes as discreetly as she can and sits up. He hands her a handkerchief and she sniffles and dabs at her eyes. She sips at the tea. It helps, but only a little. The gloomy chill of the rain outside seems to have followed her in here.

"It's never easy coming here," he says. He hands her Boudicca Derwent's card. "Seems we're going to the same place."

"You know her?"

"She's the consultant in charge of my parents."

Small world, indeed. She remembers a rumor she heard years ago: that Neville's notorious forgetfulness was the fallout from a botched memory charm. The whispers said that the Aurors who arrived at the aftermath of his parents' torture had Obliviated him rather too zealously.

She isn't sure if she should tell Neville why she's seeing Healer Derwent.

She smiles weakly. "Here we are, all grown up," she says, not sure where the thought is going. "And it's the first time the grownups are helping at all. McGonagall gave me her name." She covers her eyes again, feeling unutterably weary. "Sorry," she says. "I'm just tired."

"Not sleeping well." It's not a question.

"No, not since… not for a while," she says. She uncovers her eyes, looks at him. Neville she can tell this. He's been through the same.

"Cruciatus," she said. "A couple of weeks before the battle. Easter holidays." She pauses. "It's not that it was that much. I know you've been through worse. Only half an hour, I think. Maybe not even that."

He says, "Any of that is too much," he says.

This is the first time she's told the story to someone she knows. "They brought us to Malfoy Manor, and … it was Bellatrix who did it to me."

He looks at her and it's as if his face has set into granite. Oh. She must be stupid because it's just sinking in now. Bellatrix. Who tortured Neville's parents.

He says, "And Draco was there."

"How did you know?"

"You said Easter holidays. And the way you looked at him in the hospital wing. If looks could kill…"

"Not a figure of speech," she said. "And you know that."

"I could feel it. Wild magic. I never heard of a wandless killing curse, but that was it, or almost, wasn't it?" She nods, swallowing hard. Wrapping words around it makes it easier, just as it had when they talked in the hospital wing. For a moment it's an idea, rather than an actuality.

She can still feel the diffuse cloud of raw energy trying to shape itself into destruction. It revisits her in her dreams, and she's terribly afraid that it's real there too and she'll wake up having killed Crookshanks, who sleeps tucked next to her, or Ginny, or Luna.

She shakes her head. "That was appalling… what they did to him. And it was only children."

"Seven of them. Not good odds. And he wasn't paying attention. What possessed him to wear that prefect's badge, I don't know. Maybe it was already pinned to his robe and he forgot. He didn't even see them until they'd disarmed him." He pauses, shaking his head. "I think they took his wand away from him by hand and threw it away. If it had been Expelliarmus, one of them would have been holding it."

She's still remembering the reluctance with which they had given way.

"And he underestimated them. They were all second- and third-year Hufflepuffs. You know, the so-called house for duffers, except they stick together. I wouldn't fancy facing a Hufflepuff mob. It moves as one beast."

She says, slowly, "We were little beasts at that age. Or at least I was. I still remember smacking Malfoy in the mouth when he was taunting me about the hippogriff, and being so pleased that it impressed Ron and Harry. He was just the last thing to annoy me that day. I don't even remember exactly what he said, but I do remember how good it felt when my knuckles hit his teeth." She added, "Ron and Harry thought it was pretty funny when he got turned into a ferret and bounced around the Great Hall. I can't imagine what that must have felt like."

Neville frowns. "So the Carrows just spent a year training little beasts to plumb the depths. And Draco is the last Slytherin standing. Not that he's the worst, but he's the most memorable, and he has a talent for provocation." He looks at her. "The next time they may not back down."

She takes a deep breath. "It seemed they almost didn't back down this time."

He nods. "It's not good. Everything has changed, but they're still pretending it's a school." He looks at her. "I'm glad you're seeing Healer Derwent. She's the best. If you have any spell damage, she'll find it."

"It's not for me," she says. "It's for my parents."

Neville looks puzzled. "I heard your parents were out of country…"

She's boxed in now, and not sure how she got into this nor why she feels compelled to tell him the truth when she feels pretty sure he'll disapprove. "No, I'm here to see Derwent more as… a colleague." He looks at her, and she takes a deep breath. "I did a memory charm on my parents. To change who they were and remove me from their story. And I want to make sure it's undone properly…"

It's pure force of personality; otherwise how would Neville's round face and crooked snub nose and brown eyes turn into a mask of adamantine condemnation?

"They consented," she says. "I explained it and they said yes. I told them about the war, about Voldemort. I told them things I probably shouldn't have told them." His eyes don't move from her face, and his expression doesn't change. "I told them about your parents. They chose."

She's not going to cry, because she won't cry in front of Neville. "I couldn't leave them in plain sight for the Death Eaters to pick off. Look at what happened to the other Muggle-borns' parents! Harry's relatives were the only ones the Ministry actually put themselves out for." She says, "McGonagall already told me I overreached myself. And Derwent is going to give me all the horrid details."

He looks at her. He doesn't say a word.

She wasn't going to cry and she's blinking back tears anyway. It shocks her how much this hurts, as if everything is falling apart at once. She's wanted Ron since she was twelve, and now that she has him, they're arguing all the time. Now Neville thinks she's wrong, too, irreducibly wrong, not in a matter of fact but of soul, and he will never respect her again. She didn't realize that Neville's respect meant anything until she had lost it.

She reaches for her teacup blindly and stumbles away from the table to return it. She knows that the people in the tea room are staring at her; they can't help but be staring and it's too crowded for her to pass unseen. She pushes through the door into the mercifully empty hallway, where she leans against the wall and wipes her eyes with the back of one hand. She takes a deep breath to calm herself. Of course he'd think she was arrogant. McGonagall said the spell was beyond the scope of most field Aurors. And what had Neville's parents been? And how many years did they train for that? And they're lying downstairs in the locked ward with wrecked memories, so how else is Neville supposed to look at me?

If she breathes deeply and evenly, she reminds herself as the tears run down her face, at least she won't sound as if she's crying. She's concentrating on this so hard that she doesn't hear the door open, nor does she hear what Neville says as he puts his arm around her. Then it's both his arms around her and he's stroking her hair, not awkwardly as Ron does when she's upset, but with authority, as if he had comforted generations of heartbroken children. That embrace feels so much like safe harbor that she starts sobbing, and doesn't worry that her tears are soaking into the fuzzy warmth of Neville's shirt.

Afterward, she goes to the loo and washes her face with cold water. Then she follows Neville downstairs to the closed ward to visit his parents for the first time since the Battle of Hogwarts.

***

Author's notes:

"S.C.A.M." I owe to Zahra's "Anatomy of a Dysfunctional Relationship." See http://www (dot) obsessedmuch (dot) net/dysfunctional/anatomydis (dot) html. Summary: Harry hates Draco. Nonetheless...

Boudicca Derwent began from J.K. Rowling's suggestive description of the "motherly-looking Healer" on the closed ward (see "Christmas on the Closed Ward," (Order of the Phoenix chapter 23), but turned into someone else entirely.

Neville's animus against the Weasley twins: pretty plausible from canon, but it was A. J. Hall and RedHen who wrote about it at length, in the context of the larger problem of bullying at Hogwarts. As mentioned above, my debts to these two writers cannot be acknowledged sufficiently. General references: A. (fiction and some commentary): http://www (dot) lopiverse (dot) shoesforindustry (dot) net/ ; RedHen (commentary): http://www (dot) redhen-publications (dot) com/Potterverse (dot) html

(All web links accessed 12/3/2009)