Now betaed =) Thanks to my amazing and wonderful beta!
Hermione squinted at Luna as she roamed the Hogwarts Hospital Wing. Miss Lovegood, the future Mrs. Longbottom, the teacher of Charms and Spells, and the idol of all the kids of the school, rearranged the potion bottles from place to place, sniffed the ointments and stacked piles of candy wrappers.
Hermione was sitting with her back on the pillows and watched with interest the actions of her friend. Luna was the first one who rushed to The Hospital Wing after she had found out what trouble had happened to Hermione, and spent the night sitting by her bed until the morning, as it often happened in the past during the work on the restoration of Hogwarts.
Neither Hermione nor Luna believed that time healed, that all the war heroes would be happy and carefree. A common misfortune had brought together irreconcilable enemies, once separated by silly inter-faculty strife and racial prejudice. The victory and the loss equalized the rivals and strengthened the already strong friendship.
Draco Malfoy, unable to cope with his guilt that lay on his heart like a heavy burden, came to Hogwarts to repent and help in the restoration. A whirlwind named Lavender Brown immediately hit him. One might wonder what could connect two completely different people but they soon became friends.
Lavender was a stupid, noisy, glorious fashionista and gossip, always dressed in colorful clothes. Draco grew more and more silent those days and he usually left to wander the corridors of the School, hiding in the depths of his heart his resentment towards his parents and disappointment with life in general.
It was there, among the abandoned statues and old, forgotten portraits, that Lavender usually found him most often. She stood in front of him, her hands on her hips, and spoke, deliberately drawling words, as was often done by aristocrats.
"Stop mourning your life, Draco, we all ended up in the same boat, so let's paddle out."
"What do you want from me, Brown? You were dumped by the Weasley, so you couldn't find a better job than repainting the Great Hall?"
"Trust me, Draco, repainting the Hall is much better than throwing yourself a pity-party party as you do."
Draco raised an eyebrow deliberately in an imitation of his godfather and stared back.
"What would you have me do instead?"
"You know, there is no better remedy for depression than physical labor. Or do you, purebreds, not know such a concept?"
"Ha, you know nothing of pureblood culture! I studied with the best fencing masters, I studied Latin, Greek, physics, astronomy ..."
"I perfectly understand that, but what else can you do, Draco, except to pore over books, huh? What do you say, my good boy from Slytherin?"
Draco cast a haughty glance at his interlocutor and, snatching a bucket of paint from her fingers, ran down the corridors.
"Look and learn, Lavender, what real aristocrats can do!"
And the echo picked up Malfoy's lengthy lecture, which he shouted at Lavender, running towards the Main Hall of Hogwarts.
"Let it be known to you that from the middle of the 18th-century children of nobles were also taught art and literature. This was due to necessity rather than broadening one's horizons. Small landowners quite often had to engage in construction and repair work in their homestead, and they could not always afford an architect. Therefore, a young nobleman had to be able to draw a construction plan, draw up an estimate of costs, and monitor the progress of construction work. And I can do all this! My father taught me this personally!"
Lavender had to do just that: distract Malfoy from his sad thoughts and force him to switch to other tasks. Let him be proud of his origin and education.
Lavender was wrongly underestimated. Born into a Muggle family with a bunch of brothers and sisters who lack magic gifts, Lavender learned early on how to understand the difference between Muggles and wizards, between rich and poor, between a noisy and friendly family and loneliness. She hid her dissimilarity behind gossip and fashionable clothes, but the restoration of the School changed everything.
Lavender, having gathered around her the junior courses of all four faculties, painted the sky above the Main Hall, inventing outlandish combinations of constellations. Then Draco came and began to help, without ceasing to give her lengthy lectures on astronomical topics. So, imperceptibly for themselves, they became friends. It seemed that Lavender needed a mentor, and a little self-confident and lonely Malfoy needed a noisy and bright girlfriend who would accept him without judgment or prejudice.
Luna watched her new friends with an enigmatic smile and usually went to the greenhouses to help Neville take care of the plants. His love for flowers and herbs and Luna's passion for all the mysterious and invisible creatures tied them together. Neville did not fully understand where Luna got the seeds of mysterious plants from, but Snape, who once looked into the greenhouses with some errand from McGonagall, examined the Abyssinian fig tree, black hazel, Hyena tree, and the shoots of the Whomping Willow, lost the power of speech and advised Luna to start making magic wands. Luna only blushed in response and said that without Neville she would never have been able to breed the Whomping Willow, much less Hyena Tree. And Professor Flitwick, once having gone for an ointment for radiculitis, which Luna made especially for him, admired her success in using Charms in Herbology, and without hesitation offered her apprenticeship and his every assistance.
Luna and Neville spent more and more time with each other: soul mates who, by an absurd coincidence, were brought to the wrong Houses. Neville would have been much more comfortable in Hufflepuff, and Luna, it seemed, too. Peace-loving "badgers" stood up for their own people and accepted everyone with all their shortcomings and possible oddities. If one were to decide to reform Hogwarts politics one day, one of the Hufflepuffs would undoubtedly have become that leader.
"My mother was an outstanding witch," Luna used to say when she and Neville were resting after the righteous labor of rebuilding the greenhouses. "She loved experiments, loved to invent new spells, one of them, however, cost her life, but her works went down in the history of magic. I would like to be like her one day."
"You just take care of yourself, Luna, and if you accidentally forget, then I will take care of you," Neville answered her, completely emboldened, and fell silent, looking into the distance.
"I know you would like your parents to be proud of you. And I'm sure they are proud, there are much fewer Crumple-Horned Snorkacks around them these days, perhaps this memory recovery potion that Hermione is working on will help them?"
"And if not, then we will continue to fight, right?"
"Definitely!" Luna smiled, and Neville really wanted to believe her.
Life seemed to be getting better. United by common losses, fellow students from different faculties spent more and more time together, forgetting senseless rivalry and feuds. Gryffindors were friends with Hufflepuffs, Slytherins invented enchantments with Ravenclaws, and after a hard day, everyone piled into the nearest bar and remembered those who did not survive the Great Battle.
Hermione was all alone. She worked on the restoration of the Main Hall, she wandered around the School grounds alone and spent her evenings with books retrieved from the Restricted Section. Deep down, she envied the easy-going Luna, who managed to recover from her experience faster than the others. Hermione herself seriously took up the preparation of potions for depression and even filed patents several times with the Ministry of Magic.
Without the help of medication, she could not cope with depressive moods and panic attacks, and on the night of the Halloween Ball, just such a disaster happened: Hermione forgot to take her potion, spent too much time in the cold, which provoked an attack of panic, exacerbating the already existing symptoms...
"You scared everyone a lot, Maya," Luna chided, arranging get-well gifts by size.
"Sorry, the last thing I wanted was to ruin your fun," Hermione looked down apologetically. She still had little understanding of what happened to her after Professor Snape took her out of the greenhouses. "I still don't know what happened to me, and how I ended up in the Hospital Wing."
"Madam Pomfrey said Professor Snape brought you here at dawn," Luna said thoughtfully, pacing the room, and absent-mindedly painting the walls in the colors of all four houses.
"Oh Merlin, that is, I was in the greenhouses all night?"
"I don't think you have any signs of frostbite, Madam Pomfrey only said that you were under severe stress and probably had a panic attack, but Remus and Professor Snape intervened just in time."
"I'm so embarrassed," Hermione muttered, fiddling with the corner of the pillow. "I had to act according to the protocol, I had to wait for the professor, and not rush headlong to patrol the School territory. I was too angry at Professor Snape's remarks, although he was generally right: I was asked to help, and I began to have fun instead."
Luna looked up from the sunbeams and sat down on the bed and took Hermione's hands.
"You had every right to have fun among friends, do you still remember what friends are for? We are worried about you, Maya, no matter what Professor Snape says, it was he who found and saved you, after all."
Hermione smiled enigmatically.
"Maybe I dreamed it, but it seemed to me that he called me "dear" at some point yesterday evening. It was a strange dream, but so comfortable."
"The Crumple-Horned Snorkacks left the Professor after the Battle, who knows what exactly happened, but he changed, believe me."
And Hermione, for some reason, really wanted to believe the strange words of Luna.
Snape wandered through the greenhouses in search of Hermione's lost wand, which responded to his call immediately. He was about to leave when a bottle snapped under his boot and that attracted his attention. Brushing away the shards, Snape brought the rest of the potion closer and sniffed: St. John's wort, valerian, ginkgo, ginseng.
Valerian root was known to be widely used to overcome mild anxiety and to improve sleep. It should not be mixed with other sedatives, as their effects were cumulative and could lead to unpredictable results. John's wort should not be taken by people taking antidepressants. These drugs affected serotonin levels, and the summation of their action with the medicinal herb led to unpredictable consequences. Ginseng was a popular herbal remedy for toning. Combining ginseng with antidepressants sometimes led to manic psychosis, and combined with caffeine it could cause irritability.
"In what illegal pharmacy did you buy this potion, dear?" Snape muttered and left the greenhouse.
Well, this hellish mixture, however, explained to him the panic attacks and the general loss of strength in Hermione. He was determined to deal with whoever had prescribed such medicine for her.