Tender Remedies Chapter 2: Part II: The Night Shift, a harry potter fanfic

Part II: The Night Shift

Hermione's POV, takes place roughly 3 years after the Battle of Hogwarts and between 2 years and 1 1/2 years BEFORE the events of Part I, The Last Drop.

Summary: After three years training to be a healer, Hermione was left in charge of a safe house hospital ward. The night shift was lonely. Until one night it wasn't.

Hermione arrived at the safe house in Inverness to a full hospital ward. Without so much as a hello to anyone there she began to tend to patients in their beds. Flitting between simple stitches to more difficult injuries. Mending bones and healing burns.

Justin Finch-Fletchley had been hit by what must have been a stabbing curse. He wailed throughout the night, despite the pain potions. The noise contained behind the curtains surrounding his cot.

"It's alright," she said, cleaning the blood from the wounds. "It's perfectly alright."

First she tried a counter curse, murmuring the incantation over the cuts. The deeper ones refused to close until she'd repeated the words three more times. She'd had to stun him until she'd finished, then renervated him and slipped him some more pain potion and a sleeping draught. After that it was more scrapes and bruises to pull her into deep focus. Crossing the ward to wherever she was needed.

Someone relieved her when the sun rose. Maybe it was Padma or Anthony or Adrian. They'd all trained together for two years and rotated between safehouses assisting older healers for another year. While she stood at the edge of the ward, scanning over the sleeping patients, Percy laid a hand on her shoulder.

"You should sleep in the flat upstairs. It's empty," he said. "It would be easier and safer than traveling back to London."

Hermione nodded and continued up the stairs. It was a small building, just three storeys. A pub on the ground floor that provided an illusion for Muggle passersby, a magically expanded hospital ward, and a one-room flat at the top.

There was a single bed, a settee that reminded her of her grandmother's house, a tiny table with two low stools that fit snug beneath it. She cleared the cobwebs and performed a refreshing charm on the faded plaid sheets. Even though she'd worked through the night she wasn't tired yet — all the adrenaline. The gramophone in the corner was broken, and repairing anything musical required a certain precision and understanding of music that she didn't possess.

Reaching into her little beaded bag, she pulled out an old collection of Shakespearean tragedies. She read the editor's introduction until her eyes grew heavy.

For almost two weeks she worked in this way, at the Inverness safe house. Rinse and repeat, just like the Muggle toothpaste her parents insisted she use. At the start of the third week, Percy assigned her as the night healer there, per Madame Pomfrey's instruction. He mainly dealt in logistics for the Order, assigning jobs and figuring out locations for safe houses and the like. It was a good role for him — the quintessential Head Boy even after he'd graduated and Hogwarts was half in ruin. The remaining half protected by ancient magic infused in its stones by the Founders themselves. No matter how hard the Death Eaters tried to get in, they were always forced back. It was a fortress.

But to move the Order's operations there meant exposing too many secrets. So the school lay empty, except for Filch and Peeves and the ghosts. Holding down the fort.

It was just as lonely at her new flat. Most of her patients were quick patch ups. The rest weren't in any state for conversation. Crookshanks had taken residence in the Forbidden Forest after sixth year, which was likely the safest place for him. So she read to have some connection to life outside of the hospital ward. Alternating between the Healer's Guide to Potions and fictional works.

During the day she foraged for healing ingredients like dittany, which grew wild in a secluded patch of forest not far from town, and aconite, to brew wolfsbane for Remus and Lavender. They would come through on occasion, and she made sure to keep it stocked for them. Especially Lavender, who hadn't quote adjusted to her lycanthropy, even after three years. She took wolfsbane more frequently than Remus.

Percy brought her letters and kept her updated on everything he was able to talk about. There was plenty he didn't know. Most of her correspondences with Harry or Ron or Ginny were single sentences on scraps of newspaper. Stay safe and new lead promising. She hadn't seen them since Ron's birthday, when they'd had an hour to pretend like their world was normal. To eat the chocolate cake Molly made at one of the Welsh safe houses.

Foraging kept her busy. Brewing fresh stores of essence of dittany and skele-gro and dreamless sleep kept her busier. She tried to bring a little bit of life to the flat by hanging a photo of her parents along with a few art postcards she had in her bag. From a lifetime ago.

The first time she saw Draco Malfoy in her hospital ward he'd limped in, held up by Charlie Weasley, who deposited him on a cot and quickly returned to wherever they had been. The diagnostic scan showed three broken ribs, a fractured wrist, and incendio burns that licked his feet. Each injury she'd healed silently and meticulously. Even though he'd worked for the Order since the end of sixth year, when Dumbledore offered him sanctuary just before he'd died, she didn't see him often. He was there the day she'd been carved up, unable to do anything to help them besides feign uncertainty as to their identities. Something that had helped a little, sure, but Hermione had still been tortured and maimed while he stood to the side. To keep his cover. He was there at the Battle of Hogwarts, though he left with his parents when Voldemort retreated. To keep his cover. She rarely saw him in the three years since. Always in passing, when she would stop in other safe houses. Just a glimpse of his platinum hair and dark robes.

When she was done, she told him he was free to go and began cleaning her station.

"Thanks for this, Granger," he said, lifting his mended arm and dropping it back to his side.

She nodded, and he left.

The second time she saw Draco Malfoy in her hospital ward it was for an acid hex on his leg about six months later. Someone had placed a medical stasis charm over his thigh to prevent it from spreading and apparated him there. She wasn't sure if he'd had any pain potions, so she grabbed the strongest one she had on the way to his cot.

"I need to cut through your trousers to better see the wound," she said. "Is that alright?"

"I've others," he replied through gritted teeth. She sliced through the wool with a severing charm, trying to keep a modicum of his personal space as she did so.

Hermione tipped the pain potion against his lips, full but pale. He was always pale in her memories but having only seen him with injuries in the last six months, he was paler still when she randomly thought of him.

"An acid hex is painful to heal. You'll need to talk with me while I heal you to stay awake."

"Fine. What do we—Fuck!—" he hissed when she removed the stasis and immediately began siphoning the hex from his sizzling flesh. "What do we talk about?"

"Why don't you tell me a story," she said. "Any kind that you like. I'm fond of most anything."

He scoffed, and she watched his eyelids flutter.

Gently tapping his cheek she told him to keep awake. "You were going to tell me a story, remember?" She said, tipping a little more of the pain potion into his mouth. Waiting for him to swallow before she got back to work. The hex was deeper than she'd liked, but then again they usually were. The week before she'd healed a similar wound for Kingsley.

She siphoned the acid from the wound, twirling her wand to extract it. Every so often she misted the area with dittany to clean it. His flesh steaming. Acid hexes were a specialty of Rabastan Lestrange. She'd mended more than a few of his targets, grateful that his aim hadn't improved.

"Right," Malfoy replied. "I assume you've graduated beyond Babbity Rabbity…" His head lolled to the side and snapped back up, coughing.

Hermione quickly put the wound in stasis and leaned his torso forward, patting his back a few times. "It's alright," she said. "It's perfectly alright."

When his breathing stabilized she leaned him back against the pillows.

"You have to admit, it's quite funny." He looked up at her. The purple beneath his eyes stark against his pale skin. The cuts and bruises prominent. His lips were nearly colorless but his eyes were the same stormy grey.

She waited until she was sure the pain potion had taken effect before she replied. "If you say so."

He laughed, mirthless and watery. "It is. Spent years hating your existence and now you're pulling a curse from my blood while I choke on my own spit. Fucking hilarious."

"Yes, well, I'm sorry to say the pub downstairs is all booked for comedy night."

She was about halfway through the extraction, focusing on getting every last bit of the curse.

"See, you do find it funny." Malfoy said. "I was right."

"Fine," she admitted with a wry turn of her lips, "ten points to Slytherin, then."

The acid was gone, and she rinsed the wound with dittany. A little more than she'd normally use, given how deep it was. Then she started to knit the flesh back together.

"Keep talking, Malfoy," she ordered. The skin of his thigh was paler than his face, with nearly translucent blond hairs and to her surprise, a few little freckles. They were pale, too, but there nonetheless. Like flecks of dirt on his pure skin.

Malfoy regaled her with a story from when he was a boy, being chased by the peacocks on his family's estate from his broom. "I thought of it as practice to be a seeker someday. Flying as low to the ground as I could. Letting the grass skim the broom sometimes."

"And the fowl didn't like that?" She stitched him back together in even lines.

"Have you met a peacock?"

"Does Lockhart count?"

He laughed, and it was firmer than before. A good sign. "Bloody right he does. The real thing's a bit more…cantankerous. Still have the scars on my ankle to prove it."

She traced her wand over the stitches until they glowed. Just as she was taught in her healer training. There were theories about potions to reduce scarring, and she'd been reading up on them in her free time. Eventually she hoped to brew something to help minimize them.

The ward around them was quiet, but then it was usually quiet. Each patient was given a silencing charm and other privacy protections behind their curtains. Her work was done but she found she liked talking with him. It had been a long time since she'd talked of anything other than war. Of death.

"I'm going to give you another dose of pain potion and a sleeping draught. When you wake in a few hours you should be good as new. Someone else will sort you out in the morning."

"Not you?"

Hermione shook her head. "No, I'm the night shift." She opened the vial and leaned closer. Breathing sharper when she realized she'd rested her hand on top of his, and moving it would be too abrupt. So she left it.

He nodded and tipped his chin up, opening his mouth. The potions dropped onto his tongue and down his throat. Adam's apple bobbing as he swallowed with eyes closed.

While she cleaned up her vials and bits of gauze his breathing slowed. She'd never been great at tailoring charms but she mended his trousers as best as she could.

"Granger," he said, head turned to face her. One of his hands twitched at his side and she cast a diagnostic, worried she'd missed something that would cause tremors but nothing showed up on her scan. "Sorry."

"It's alright," she answered reflexively. "Sorry for what?"

He breathed in and out. Lashes fluttering shut once more. "Being…a coward."

And as he drifted into dreamless sleep, she thought at least he's trying. It was all any of them could do.