A/N: If you'd like to hear the inspiration behind the title of this chapter, check out my tumblr
Trigger warnings: Anxiety, mentioned menstruation, food
Fear was their fuel as they packed up all their things, transfiguring and shrinking possessions within an inch of recognition before tossing them in the bag. Hermione had never been so slapdash in her life, but she couldn't bring herself to slow down and do things properly.
Narcissa was slightly more composed, but it hardly mattered when Hermione was the one doing most of the work due to her frantic speed.
They finished just shy of twenty minutes after they had started. Standing there amidst the trees, everything they owned rested on Hermione's hipbone in the smart little handbag. The motionless bodies of their victims still rested beyond the campsite.
"We should move away on foot before we disapparate."
Narcissa wordlessly nodded and made a gesture as if to say, After you.
Hermione turned and strode in the opposite direction, sensing rather than seeing Narcissa follow. She'd expected the walking to be soothing, therapeutic even, but not being able to see what lingered behind her was the equivalent of injecting fear straight into her bloodstream. The unease egged her on, nudging her heels.
She bolted.
Hermione had no destination in mind; she simply let that primal instinct take control of her limbs and drive her forwards, then to the left, around a tree, over a rock, swerving to the right…
She couldn't keep it up for very long, perhaps a minute at most. As soon as the trees seemed unfamiliar and she could no longer spot the bodies, Hermione stopped. Narcissa stumbled to a halt beside her, panting. For some reason, the woman had kept her hair down since they'd escaped. The blizzardy strands fell around her shoulders now, all disarrayed by the running. Some hung in her eyes and her cheeks were flushed pink by exertion and the chilled air. Today was the coldest day they'd yet had.
"Sorry," wheezed Hermione, struggling to stay upright as her thighs trembled. She wanted to verbalise how she couldn't stay still any longer, to try and explain herself so Narcissa understood, but she couldn't find the words. In truth, she wasn't sure she could even explain her feelings to herself.
It seemed she wouldn't need to. Absently brushing hair from her face as she caught her breath, Narcissa kindly returned, "There's no need for apology." They both took a moment to stabilise their breathing. "Have you chosen where to apparate?"
Hermione nodded and held out her hand for Narcissa to take. The witch's fingers were soft and warm, securely wrapped around Hermione's knuckles. Hermione focused on the tender velvet of her skin and dragged her mind into as calm a state as she could get it.
She had decided on London. It was one of the only Muggle places where her memories were strong enough to confidently apparate two people. The other locations were too close to her family for comfort. After all, this was one big guessing game. If she didn't stay one step ahead of the Death Eaters, throw them off the scent, then they would be done for.
Picturing London in her mind's eye, Hermione tightened her hold on Narcissa's fingers and got ready to turn.
But it was so hard! Her head echoed with the sound of spells being hurled through the Department of Mysteries, the shatter of glass in the café after the wedding, Dolohov's curse slicing open her insides, Sirius being swallowed by the veil…
Narcissa's hand twitched and Hermione tried to focus—again.
Was it getting even colder? Or was she imagining things?
Hermione spun and with a crack, she and Narcissa vanished.
They had the good fortune of landing in a rubbish heap. Hermione supposed she ought to be grateful for the cushioning it provided as they tumbled onto their backs, but she really would have preferred not to reek of rotten food.
Narcissa was struggling to catch her breath without inhaling the stench. "Are you alright?"
"Fine," responded Hermione as she tried to push herself onto her feet. It seemed one of the bags had ruptured, because her hand came down in some sort of vegetable compost. Had they landed behind a restaurant?
Finally standing, Hermione took a moment to congratulate herself on not splinching either of them and took in her surroundings. It seemed they had indeed materialised behind some sort of restaurant or bar; they were in an alley between two buildings, both of which smelled of cooking food and fermenting rubbish. Noisy fans, which Hermione assumed were air-conditioning units, whirred and clunked in their metal cages mounted on the wall.
But there were no security cameras or windows to be seen, so Hermione was satisfied.
Narcissa joined her on her feet, brushing herself down. "Where have you brought us?" she asked curiously.
"Um…" Truth be told, Hermione wasn't totally sure. She definitely hadn't intended on emerging in a pile of rotting vegetables in a dirty alley.
But before they ventured out into Muggle territory, she needed to check, to make sure…
"Wingardium leviosa!" she whispered, and to her immediate delight, the rat at which she had aimed her wand steadily rose into the air, squeaking in fright. The sight of it brought back unsavoury memories of Pettigrew, but this one was quite a different colour and wasn't missing any digits. Hermione gently lowered it back to the ground, and it quickly scurried out of sight.
The wand certainly wasn't the most comfortable fit, but at least Hermione could rest knowing her magic would actually obey her wishes.
Narcissa was giving her a strange look.
"Sorry," Hermione muttered, pocketing her wand and leading the way out of the alley. "Just wanted to check if it worked better without the wards. I'm not quite sure where we are—I was aiming for somewhere in Muggle London, but this wasn't it…"
Surely they couldn't be too far off? A few blocks away, Hermione could understand, but they couldn't be out of London, or Britain.
When they reached the mouth of the lane and stepped onto the street, Hermione was reassured she had not missed her target by much.
The Tower of London loomed ahead of them, black and foreboding. Its silhouette dark and grim, Hermione imagined how it had been in its glory days: the final stop for prisoners who had defied the Crown. With a jolt, Hermione realised she had been rescued from a very similar fate, only she doubted her own execution would have been as neat as Anne Boleyn's.
She had visited a few times, on primary school excursions and with her family. That's what she had been focusing on when she disapparated: the warmth and security of family, of love.
Hermione turned to Narcissa beside her and almost immediately recoiled. This was not the witch she knew. This was Narcissa Malfoy. Her expression was boarded up, eyes cold and calculating as she scanned the crowds of Muggle tourists.
Hermione was utterly surprised by the pain this caused her, and she suddenly wanted nothing more than to bring her Narcissa back.
"I know where we are," she offered, smiling a little. "I've been here before."
Narcissa turned and Hermione thought she saw some of the warmth return to her pale eyes.
"Lead on, then."
Baffling herself yet again, Hermione took Narcissa's hand and pulled her into the street.
They had only been camping a week, and yet returning to civilisation felt like nothing short of whiplash. The flurry of words was deafening—patches of conversations in every dialect and language imaginable. Usually, Hermione had great fun trying to identify them all, but today she struggled to keep track of her own thoughts. Was it possible to experience aural claustrophobia?
She was suddenly very pleased with herself for having the foresight to hold Narcissa's hand, because surely the currents of bodies would have dragged them apart if not for their death grip on each other's fingers.
Hermione hadn't realised just how clean their campsite had been. The smell of cigarettes was making her lungs twitch and she couldn't help but cough into her hand a few times. That, and the car fumes, exotic scents from restaurants, a thousand perfumes…
By the time she'd dragged the two of them into a corner store, Hermione decided she'd had enough stimulation for a lifetime.
Food. First, they needed food. Going on nothing but dried fruit, biscuits and a few packaged vegetables for a week was not enough, at least not in the quantities they had. Hermione doubted she'd eaten a full meal since that extravagant hotel breakfast when they'd first fled.
Hermione made a beeline for the hot oven beside the coffee machine. Opening it, she was met by a puff of warm air and the smell of hot pastries of dubious freshness. Reaching in, she plucked out a plastic-wrapped meat pie, and then another. Her dormant hunger was waking in her belly.
"Lunch," she explained plainly to a curious-looking Narcissa.
Once again, it struck Hermione how very much like a child this witch could be when confronted with Muggle technology. When Narcissa felt the heat in the oven, she immediately snatched her hand away.
"But this is a heating charm," she told Hermione.
"No, it's a device called an oven. I'll explain it later, if you like. I don't want to attract attention."
"Yes, of course," muttered Narcissa in response. She bravely reached inside and pulled out the first thing her fingers brushed.
Hermione shut the metal-rimmed door and turned to peruse the few shelves of goods. To stock up on food, they would need a supermarket, but it wouldn't hurt to check this place, too. Scanning the rows of labels, Hermione found plenty of junk food, which she overlooked due to health concerns. (She'd be lucky if the pies alone didn't make her sick.) Tampons—ha, she hadn't bled since she'd run away with Harry and Ron, which was for the best, really; periods are terribly inconvenient and those boys could be very foolish about some things. Razors were equally unnecessary, as were air freshener and laundry detergent.
Hermione went to the till where a young person reading a gossip magazine greeted them with an expression of deadly boredom.
After Narcissa produced some miraculous cash from who-knows-where, Hermione eagerly rushed back outside to unwrap her prize. The pie's filling was perhaps too salty and the pastry a bit dry, but to Hermione it was bliss. She could feel bits of crumb and sauce clinging to her mouth, but she took another sizeable bite anyway. She caught Narcissa give her a perplexed, slightly distasteful glance, her own meal sitting untouched in her palm.
"Eat it, if you're hungry. One will mind. And besides," Hermione swallowed. "No-one knows us here."
Hermione watched Narcissa finger the packaging, as though testing it. A pair of chatting businesspeople in suits rudely pushed past her, causing her to frown. "It seems rather… messy."
Hermione nearly laughed. "It's sort of supposed to be, I think. Just go for it; I promise not to laugh." To prove it, she gave Narcissa a bright smile, showing off the bits of meat stuck between her teeth.
They'd stopped walking, waiting for the lights to change. Narcissa had grasped the basics of Muggle traffic and paused with the rest of the pedestrian crowds. With a weary quirk of her lips, she gently tore apart the wrapping and brought the crust of the pasty to her lips. She took a timid bite.
The way Narcissa's eyebrows jumped was almost comical; the filling nearly exploded onto her lips. Hermione chortled and instinctually reached up to brush away some tomato from the corner of Narcissa's mouth.
"Sorry; I said I wouldn't laugh."
"I was right, though—it is messy."
Hermione's smile widened. "But good?"
Narcissa gave an elegant little shrug. "I suppose."
Hermione was happy with that. Smiling, she turned back to the road. She'd forgotten how brutal London traffic could be, especially during the lunchtime rush. The lights would change soon, surely?
Regardless, Hermione found that after half an hour of walking, she'd rather accustomed herself to the crowds. At first, they'd been swirling masses full of potential threats. Suffocating. Now, surprisingly, she felt almost at ease.
And she was proud.
Perhaps it was due to the first hot meal in ages, but she wanted to shout, Look at me! I did it! I'm still here!
She couldn't keep the smile off her face. She looked at the people around her, with their absent eyes and cheap coffees in hand, letting herself see them as real people and not just empty bodies of matter which might hurt her. There were more people in this world than Harry and Ron, than those that wanted to do her harm, than Narcissa. The world was not a binary and it was this magnificent complexity that she was fighting to save.
Like the child in the green jumper, trying to wake their baby sibling asleep in the pram; the student brooding in their uniform, the person eating a muffin and getting crumbs in their scarf, the one staring at her from across the street…
Oh. That certainly wasn't something Hermione had missed about civilisation. It wasn't often that Hermione was the victim of this brand of negative male attention, but its effects never lessened. His gaze alerted all her nerve endings, but not in the way he probably imagined. This was the ancient fight-or-flight which made her self-consciously shift on her feet and step nearer to Narcissa.
The lights changed and everyone stepped forward into a steady trot. Hermione followed, eager to pass this man and be rid of him. She was pretty sure she would find a supermarket up this next block…
The man's golden hair glinted spectacularly in the sunlight, acting like a beacon. Hermione could see him weaving his way through the foot traffic in her direction.
And just like that, Hermione's mood plummeted into a deep, heavy dread. She tried to track him discretely, rapidly hating the congestion of people around her. She needed to run, to breathe.
She gripped Narcissa's arm instead.
Now only a few layers of people separated her from this stranger. Sleepy Londoners caged them in from all sides.
Hermione stopped looking for an escape. She couldn't.
Her gaze locked with a pair of green, malevolent, owlish eyes.