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They don't speak again until they're forced to.
Slytherin is weird, but at least they leave her mostly alone. The looks and mutterings are suspicious, rather than worshipful. She finds she prefers it.
She sits with Parvati most days at meals. They don't talk about Lavender much, just the first night when Parvati slips onto Hermione's bed and says, "They told me you saved her life." She bursts into tears and Hermione holds her for a while and thinks about how she wasn't quick enough, about how Lavender is still in a coma while they regrow her throat. About how Fenrir Greyback had brain damage but hadn't died. Parvati is less talkative than she'd been, but she's made friends. They've lived together too long not to have a bond. It tightens a little now they're both in new territory.
The best part is having her own room. That night, that first night when Parvati visits, is the only night Hermione has a roommate. The seventh year girl she is put with vanishes the next day to some other room. She awkwardly tells Hermione it's to be with her own friends. Hermione suspects it's because she's a Muggleborn but she doesn't care enough to press it. The outcome is too good: she is left with a twin room to herself. She spends her evenings changing it. She joins the desks together to make one big one. She shrinks the second bed down and turns it into a passable sofa. She widens her own green-curtained one. It's cold but Hermione is good at fire magic. She doesn't need a fireplace to make a warm blaze. The window into the lake is fascinating. She sits staring out of it for hours, the translucent light calming. She sees fish and Grindylows and distant mermaids and the Giant Squid. One morning she's sure she sees a kelpie.
She spends her evenings working at her desk instead of the library and reading on her transfigured sofa instead of in the Slytherin Common Room. It's not that she cares about the prickly atmosphere or the odd rude comment from her new housemates, exactly, it's just distracting.
It's been a long time since the opinions of people like Renard Wilkes in the year below could penetrate her skin. She's bolder now. Taller. She can slice Wilkes open, shut him up with just a flash of a smirk down the table. He might be named for a fox, but she is a lion and bloodied in battle. They're not pleased she's there, but they're scared of her.
She thinks she'll have to watch them, though, him and his friends. And anyway, she mostly stays inside her little haven.
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[The letter from Harry is incredulous, but resigned. The letter from Ron is incredulous, and angry. It's a continuation of the fight they've had all summer and boils down to them both believing the other person has made a mistake by going back/not going back to Hogwarts. She writes back a soothing set of half-truths about unity and peace and quiet and quite a lot of distracting rubbish about schoolwork. She does not mention who else has come back. I miss you, she writes to them both, and means it. It's so weird without them. They walk at her side like ghosts.]
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A week passes. At night, she lies behind the green velvet hangings and dreams about Bellatrix and being chased by baying hounds. Sometimes, in Hermione's dreams, she is the one who kills Bellatrix.
[She wonders if she could have beaten her, if she hadn't been handicapped using the woman's own wand against her. She hates that she doesn't know.]
[In other dreams her wards fail and the hounds in black cloaks burst into the tent. She always wakes up before she can save Harry. Sometimes she gets to Lavender quick enough to blast Fenrir away before he gets to her.]
Hermione doesn't know what bothers her so much about the stares and the whispers and the questions that follow her around the rest of the school. Why she feels a little bit sick every time someone thanks her. Hermione spent six years chasing the adulation of the world she'd been thrust into, and one year mostly just surviving, and now that she is finally recognised as something special she feels even less one of them than she had when she was just the swotty Mudblood friend of that nutter Harry Potter.
She'd just wanted to be normal. Just for a little bit. She'd wanted to sink back into the comfort of Hogwarts, to spend hours in the library or curled up on a red armchair by the fire and forget there had ever been a war.
Now she has turned up at Hogwarts only to find all of that longing for normality has no fulfilment here, that the thought of being in Gryffindor without Harry and Ron was a bleak one, and that everyone keeps fucking staring at her like she was the one who'd died to save them.
She's turned up and seen a dangerous bit of hate directed at children. Sins of the father.
Anger at injustice felt normal, a little bit. The closest she's felt.
But no. No - that's not true. She'd felt normal on the train, when she'd slid into Malfoy's compartment. Malfoy had been there on the night and Malfoy is there in her nightmares, and so when Malfoy was there - really there - on the train she made sense again. If Malfoy was there and Malfoy was real and Malfoy was just a boy, then her nightmares were just nightmares and the war was really over. But she doesn't want to unpack that.
She thinks about the castle instead, and how it's not the home she's come looking for.
It's still broken for one thing. Not like it had been last time she'd seen it. But she can see where the scars are.
When she goes to Transfiguration she passes three patches of bare stone wall where there used to be portraits. When she walks into dinner she passes the new hourglasses and remembers the rubies scattered across the floor like blood, months ago or yesterday. Going to Arithmancy takes her down the hallway on the third floor that used to be lined with suits of armour. It's bare.
It's strange, the things that bother her. She can eat in the same Hall in which they lined up all the bodies, but when she walks past the bare stone on the third-floor landing of the staircase to the library where the portrait of Darius Panopoly (inventor of the self-focusing telescope) used to call out that she had bad posture, she feels sick every time.
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"You're looking well," Ginny says. It's a Thursday afternoon. They're sitting outside, bathed in a burst of mid-September sunlight. Ginny is right. Hermione looks in the mirror every morning and sees a little of the hollowness filling out. She'd been thin, too thin. But she's eating now. It's easy to eat at the Slytherin table. There's nothing else to do anyway. They're not a very chatty bunch, in the Hall, with the school's eyes on them. "Slytherin must suit you."
"Maybe it does," Hermione concedes. And that's the thing. It does.
Because, in Slytherin, she is useful. She is a buffer against cruelty for the younger students, and the older, skeptical ones treat her much as they ever did. A few have whispered their gratitude in late nights in the common room but mostly they just... tolerate her. And she doesn't care any more what they think anyway. It's quiet. It's nice.
Except Malfoy. Malfoy might be quiet but he is not nice. Malfoy is watchful.
It's discomforting. It makes her feel awake.
She sits near him that evening in the hall and feels the war slide away and out of reach, feels the castle come into focus. Breathes.
"Pass the cabbage please, Nott," she says politely, charming her book to hover above the table so she can read and eat at the same time. He passes it without a word. They've never spoken in so far as Hermione can remember. "Thanks."
She meets Malfoy's grey eyes over her book. He rolls them, sneers, and turns away. She smiles.
Awake.
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A week later she has to talk to Malfoy and everything changes again. He's not in Transfiguration, which Professor McGonagall is still teaching. She's hired someone else now she's Headmistress but she's taking the NEWT classes while she trains up Professor whatever their name is. Hermione notes his absence, doesn't care.
But at the end of an interesting lesson on Untransfiguration the Headmistress holds her back.
"Mr Malfoy is in the hospital wing," Professor McGonagall tells her. "As you are now housemates-" her nostrils flare "-perhaps you would be so kind as to take him your notes."
"Of course," Hermione says.
"How are you settling in down there?" Professor McGonagall asks. Hermione hesitates.
"It's quiet," she says truthfully. "But I think we need to do more to foster unity."
Before they can continue someone knocks on the door. It's the new teacher. He is about forty, dressed in vivid blue robes, with a hawkish nose she rather likes.
"Professor Montgomery," McGonagall says, "this is-"
"Hermione Granger needs no introduction," he says with what she supposes is a charming smile. "It's an honour."
"Nice to meet you, Sir," Hermione says, politely. She doesn't care about meeting this man. "I'd better get to the hospital wing."
She slips out before they can object and, with nothing better to do, decides she might as well drop the notes off for Malfoy.
Hermione hadn't bothered to wonder what was wrong with him, but when she gets there she can't see him and wonders if she's wasted her time. He's always been a total nightmare for exaggerating things to get out of lessons or get sympathy. Maybe he's already gone. But when she asks for him, Madam Pomfrey, a little surprised, points to a screen blocking off one of the beds. It's the best one, the one slightly set back in an alcove in the quietest corner by a window with sweeping views to the lake and forest and mountains. If there's any privacy to be found in the Hospital Wing it is in this bed, and so it is reserved exclusively for those likely to make a stay of at least one night and, crucially, it is only granted if Madam Pomfrey feels sympathy for the patient. She puts time wasters and idiots in one next to the door.
She had not been given this bed when she'd taken the bungled Polyjuice and spent weeks being untransformed, though she had been kept behind a screen. But she had woken up there after the Department of Mysteries, with a St Mungos healer on hand to help and a ten potion regimen. It would have been lethal, they'd said, if he hadn't been silenced. She'll still always have the scar. She's proud of that scar now, though she'd cried at the time, worried it would be hideous on the beach, to a boy. It's still jagged and red, a raised line running from just under her right breast in a clean, straight, diagonal slash .
Hermione pulls back the curtain, curious as to what could have happened to Draco Malfoy for him to be hidden away here.
He's propped up on pillows, the bed raised up so he can see out of the window. He's gazing out of it but not intently. His pale face is even paler, dark bruised shadows like thumbprints under his eyes. His blond hair is rumpled. He looks undone in a way she hasn't seen since the end of the battle at Hogwarts. Unravelling. She wonders if he is always like this on the inside.
His left arm is resting in a shallow basin filled with some shimmering green potion. The skin around his mark is blistered and raw. Her stomach clenches. She wonders what he has been doing to himself.
"I brought you Transfiguration notes," she says, deciding not to acknowledge it.
"Thanks," he says listlessly, still staring out of the window. It makes her ears ring with something, makes a little panic rise up. If Draco Malfoy is broken and Draco Malfoy was there, then what is she?
"Isn't your Daddy rich enough to pay someone to take notes for you?" she mocks. There's no bite in it, not really, but a tiny bit of colour blooms in his pallid face. His lips quirk. He looks a little bit more like the boy she's always known. He meets her eyes. There's a question in his as he retorts.
"Why bother when some swot will do it for free?"
The ringing fades away. Awake. Hermione smirks. She puts her notes down on the bed and taps the parchment - she hates parchment she thinks, she should just start using Muggle notebooks - making a perfect copy. It's a surprisingly tricky thing to get right and so she's pleased to see his irritation as she does it.
"There's an essay. I put the title at the end. See you around."
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The exchange unleashes something. They begin to swap insults.
"Pass the pumpkin juice, Theo. I'd ask Granger but I doubt she can drag herself away from that book long enough. NEWTs are only nine months away after all."
"Zabini, I thought Hogwarts only allowed owls, cats and toads. However did you get a ferret past Filch?"
Silly, childish insults. The things they used to say. Her hair, his rich dad, her swottiness, his ferret alter ego, her long-fixed teeth, his now-discarded propensity for hair gel.
Loathing him is such a comfort.
"I can't believe he still talks to you like that," Parvati hisses after breakfast when Malfoy has asked her if she's awake that there's a wild animal nesting on her head, and she's made very short work of his Quidditch inabilities.
"He doesn't though, does he?" Hermione points out mildly. "He doesn't call me Mudblood."
"Quite the bar," Parvati snorts. "But fine. I don't know how he has the gall to show his face, let alone walk around like he does."
Hermione wonders what Parvati sees, wonders if her sight stops at the veneer of disdainful confidence he has tried to pull on to cover whatever turbulent mess makes up his underneath.
"He doesn't bother me any more," is all she says. "Not like he did."
It's an odd sort of truce. It doesn't last.
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thank you for the nice reaction to chapter 1! I'm tempted to only update this one on AO3 because I truly hate the formatting on here but I will keep going on here if you guys would rather? Let me know
