Hermione sat between a street gutter and a cement imprint of a child's hands. She was perched on the sidewalk curb in front of her house with her knees pulled into her chest. Her old leather trunk slouched next to her. Crookshanks sulked in his cage and meowed his grievances.
There was a ticket in her right hand and a letter in the left. She smoothed her thumb over the indents on the broken rust-colored seal. She'd already said goodbye to her parents at breakfast but the kitchen window curtains fluttered and she could see the silhouettes of them watching her.
Ron had written her back a few days later; her worry doubled when Harry's chicken scratch signature was missing. Harry had locked himself in his room and Ron needed her to come talk some sense into him.
The screech of the Knight Bus made her ears cringe. She shot up and away from the curb, years earlier Harry had warned her of the conductors rather risque driving.
The bus jerked back in motion as soon as she stepped through its doors. She gave a strained but polite smile with her eleven sickles and headed to the first seat she saw.
As soon as she arrived, Ron yanked her away from all of the warm embraces and greetings to push her up the creaky stairs. He acted like they were a SWAT team on their way to diffuse a hostage situation. Every time a floorboard groaned underneath their racing footsteps or she slowed down, he would toss her an exasperated look over his shoulder.
When they arrived at Harry's door, she turned to Ron for guidance only to see he had vanished.
She tried a trick she'd picked up from Ginny, "A hot fudge sundae with cherries, sprinkles, whipped cream, candied nuts, chocolate sauce, and ice cream bars? Well if no one else wants it..." she trailed off.
No response. Someone had used it one too many times to trap the redhead and he picked up on its intention.
She knocked a series of short rasps, the house was completely silent –everyone was listening downstairs in the kitchen.
She cleared her throat, "Harry, it's Hermione," The door opened on its own. Hermione quickly closed it behind her.
The striped covers of his bed were pulled up just above his shoulders. He was turned towards the wall; his messy black hair was matted in the back from sleeping. The peeling black and grey wallpaper coupled with the covered windows created a cave-like ambiance.
If he hadn't used magic to open the door for her, she would have assumed he was asleep. He was as still as a statue.
She sat down on the edge of the bed, facing away from him and towards the draped windows.
"Hi, Harry," she tried.
"Hi, Hermione," he responded, the blanket muffled his whispered response.
As blunt as Ron, she cut straight to the point, "So are you going to get out of bed?"
"No."
"Well, you can't stay in bed for the rest of your life." It's what her mother told her the day after Hermione invited her neighbor—the first boy she'd ever had a crush on— for ice cream, only for him to tell her she was "...bleeding. Like a lot. Seriously, did you sit on something?".
"I can, and I will. I'm not coming back to school," his words were still muffled by his blanket.
"And why not?" she huffed.
Silence. A clock in a different room ticked. Someone dropped a dish in the kitchen, various people took turns scolding who she assumed to be the guilty party before someone loudly shushed them all.
Hermione sighed, her hand traveled across the bed to his shoulder. A cold and hesitant hand covered hers.
"I'm scared."
"I'm sorry. I know. I am too," she says. And, knowing that it was no consolation, she added, "I'll always protect you."
She was as young as him and sometimes she was even more unsure and incapable than him. But when she said she will always protect him, she meant it. Against one of the most fearsome monsters to ever walk the Earth, she knew her loyalty was little to compensate. It was little to offer him, barely a speck of dust in a universe, but it was the greatest treasure she could share.
"I don't think you can protect me from him. He's in my head, it's like he's infecting me," and then, quieter, he muttered, "I think I am too far gone."
Ron had told her that Harry had a vision of a snake attacking . And while it saved the Weasley's from a devastating loss, the disturbing fact remained that Harry had a mental connection to Voldemort.
"I was Voldemort, Hermione. And it felt..." she imagined if she could see his face, his eyebrows would be drawn together, "it felt good. And I hate myself for it. I'm not safe to be around anymore. I don't think I should return to Hogwarts with you and Ron."
"That's ridiculous, you're coming back with us. It's not your fault."
"Hermione, I wanted to attack..." he spit the words out like chunks of a rotten apple, "Dumbledore when I told him about the dream. Voldemort, he's infiltrating my mind."
"As I said, it isn't your fault. You can't control it. It won't do any good for you to run off on your own"
He's silent again, clearly not agreeing.
"Hey!" she shoved his shoulder with her free hand, trying to roll him over so he would finally look at her. He twisted away and groaned in annoyance, swatting her hands away.
"Harry, you're not leaving us. You're an idiot," she said. Sometimes bullying is the only way to break through his thick skull. "And you're a coward, doing exactly what he wants you to, running and hiding instead of staying with the people who love you. A martyr complex never looks good on anyone."
A single sliver of fading sunlight had managed to sneak through his covered windows. It covered his folded glasses on the bedside table like a sliver of golden cloth.
She yanked the pillow out from under his head, "Now. Get. Out. Of. Bed", she says through gritted teeth, punctuating each word with a slap of the pillow.
"Leave me alone, Hermione! You don't understand what this is like for me!" he shouts. And truthfully, nobody could understand. But he didn't understand what it was like to be a muggleborn at Hogwarts and yet he still tried to support her to the best of his ability.
"I'm not leaving until you get out of bed."
He rolled over onto his stomach, keeping his head turned towards the wall.
"Fine," she got up and walked towards the door. She heard a slight rustle of blankets and knew he had rolled over to watch her walk out.
Suddenly, she pivoted and let out a vicious war cry, sprinting towards his bed and cannonballing on top of him like a starfish. He yelled at her and violently twisted, trying to shake off her weight but trapped under his mountain of blankets, unable to free his arms.
They both paused when the door creaked open, Ron stood in the doorway. Harry's pleas for assistance transformed into shouts for mercy when Ron charged at them like a bull.
His weight knocked the breath of Hermione; she couldn't imagine how Harry felt under both of them. He pitifully tried to push them off, shoving at their faces while they choked on laughter.
At some point, the jerky movements of Ron's limbs quieted and he embraced both of them. Although unsure of what sparked the sudden cease-fire, she and Harry relented into his hug. It filled her chest with liquid gold, bubbling and foaming into something uncontainable, something she could express only through sharing it with others.
Only when it was time for her to go settle into her room before dinner did she notice. Dried tear tracks ran down Harry's face. His eyes were bloodshot and swollen. Ron dutifully looked away from his face but kept his arm slung around his shoulder.
Later that evening, Harry walked down the stairs for dinner. Cleopatra rising from the dead and knocking on the door for a cup of sugar would have garnered the same reaction.
Dramatic exclamations ensued of a resurrected soul asking for Fred Weasley to pass the dinner rolls, and for Sirius to hand him the Pumpkin juice. No one mentioned Harry's trembling smile or his shining eyes.
It was thirty minutes past their usual meeting time. Hermione was awkwardly propped up against a wall in the Great Hall, a Little Red Riding Hood looking basket in one hand. She didn't know if she was imagining it, but the cluster of Ravenclaw girls kept looking over at her.
She stood there hovering like a mouth breathing giant, passing students sent her skeptical side glances. Everyone knew this was where she met Malfoy to go into the Forbidden forest, and so everyone knew she was stood up by him. He was ditching her at the risk of losing his Prefect badge. It practically spelled out that she was unbearable to work with.
Long forgotten, were the minutes spent listening through split earphones to soulful screeches of guitar and the booming thud of drums. In these moments, she could only remember the cruel curl of his lips as he hurled insults at her like river rocks.
Ten more minutes passed before she reached her limit of judgemental eyes. She left without him, marching through the halls with the importance and urgency of a seasoned war general.
It was only when she was spouting curse words in her head and viciously ripping Cowbane from the Earth that she remembered he hadn't been in class today. Hermione had to rub the green stain of their leaves off of her forehead after she smacked her palm on it.
She had worked out a system that had almost a 100% success rate for successfully sneaking a glance at him during classes without being caught. One glance while everyone was still sitting down, another spent when the Professor asked for volunteers, and a third used when class was more than half-way over and everyone was dozing off.
Sometimes his head was resting on his fist and she could only see a pale golden halo of hair. Other times his face was animated in conversation with whoever he was sitting with, making snide comments about the class. She found the latter rude and disrespectful to their Professors.
Her favorite moments —though they nearly put her into cardiac arrest— happened when she turned to see his murky silver eyes already on her.
But today, his desk had been filled by another. His light hair failed to catch her wandering eye at breakfast and lunch. When she walked by the window his friends always lounged under between classes, she hadn't heard his sarcastic drawl.
Her anger abated, a feeling akin to disappointment surfaced and she nearly dropped her basket in shock.
The forest was dark, the curled and winding branches of the trees looked like a storybook witches' crooked fingers. She hadn't noticed the sun go down when she was focused on uprooting white blossoms of Cowbane and purple blooms of Fluxweed. The sudden shift in awareness to her surroundings made the hair on her arms stand up.
The gentle thump of her protective amulet against her chest as she walked did little to squash her anxiety. The sky was sapphire sprinkled with flimsy petals of hydrangeas; the stars had yet to take their place but the sun had fully retired.
She had never been out this late in the forest to forage before. It had taken her much longer than usual to gather the ingredients since she lost her partner, and because she had a late start.
The wind rustled bare tree branches, her boots cut through the snow in a steady, fast rhythm. Although she knew her amulet guaranteed that she would never be at the mercy of another creature in the forest, her cold hands trembled around the handle of her overflowing basket. Her pace increased every time tall grasses of a bush shifted or a shadow in her peripheral vision moved.
A dim glow to her left flagged her attention. For a second, she swore the stars fell from the sky and down to her knees. The heliotropes she and Malfoy had found before winter break were shining like lightbulbs.
She made her way over, no longer skeptical of dark shadows and tall bushes. The base of each purple blossom contained a white glow. The stone path was illuminated by their beacon of light. She extinguished her light and followed the flower trail back to Hogwarts.
The homely warmth of the infirmary warmed the chill in her hands as she ground the Fluxweed with Madam Pomfrey's mortar. The office was empty and the healer was nowhere to be found, so Hermione went ahead and prepared the plants for use.
Unlike Muggle hospitals that reeked of chemical cleaners, the Hogwarts infirmary smelled like peppermint candies. Even in the warmer months, Madam Pomfrey insisted on the seasonal fragrance to counteract all of the less desirable scents birthed from ill students.
She turned to grab one of the empty glass jars on the shelf when a glimpse of Malfoy standing in the doorway caused her to jump. Her hand pressed against her racing heart and she opened her mouth to admonish him for startling her and for ditching her but something in his face stopped her.
"What the fuck, Granger?" he said with furrowed eyebrows. He paced towards her and she resisted the urge to step back. His face was flushed, not in the way it pinkened when he caught her staring at him. He looked feverish, his eyes were sunken in and there was a sheen of sweat on his forehead.
She bristled and laced her fingers in front of her, "Excuse me?" He was only a foot or two away from her now, she could feel the heat radiating off of him.
"Did you go out alone?"
A glance to her left reminded her of how empty and isolated they were. Every bed was empty, each blanket folded precisely and every bedside table bare of personal belongings.
She squared her shoulders and glared at him, not appreciating his tone. But it still came out as a question, "Yes?"
His eye's narrowed, "Oh, I didn't know you were trained in the martial arts". There was a glazed, slightly disoriented look in his eyes that made her wary.
"What?"
"An expert in the dark arts then?" She rolled her eyes, understanding where he was going with this.
"No."
"So you're just an idiot then. Marching through the Forbidden Forest alone like it's a petting zoo." His tone was biting. Hermione hoped he knew that if he didn't look like he might fall over at any moment, she would be more than willing to show him how fast she could become an "expert in the dark arts".
"What's wrong with you? You look like you ran a marathon without any training," she hesitantly inched closer, crossing an invisible threshold between them. He stepped back from her, suddenly wary.
"You shouldn't have gone out alone. I'll be expelled if you go missing," he sneered, his eyes darting around her face like a cornered animal accessing a predator.
She turned back to where she had been grinding Fluxweed into powder and started shoveling it into the glass jar, miming an unruffled state. "You didn't show up. I didn't want you— I didn't want us to get in trouble for ditching it so I went alone."
He was silent for a moment, she looked up to see his features riddled with confusion. "I told Theo to tell you I was sick," he tried.
She shook her head, he rubbed the edge of his palm into his brow. "Oh. I'm sorry, for storming in like that." He made a sound like he was going to say something else before he cut himself off.
A few minutes passed with her grinding plants into powder and packaging them into jars. He stood watching her. "What would you have done if you saw a Werewolf? What if you got crushed in a stampede of Centaurs?" his tone had lost its original seething fire but the embers of some other strong emotion still burned.
Wordlessly, she pulled the amulet out from under her shirt and held it up for him to see. He fell silent again and she looked up from her work.
It was uncharacteristic for him to be so forgetful and slow. He was shuffling his feet when she put down the stone pestle and reached to put the back of her hand on his forehead. He jumped away like a frightened deer. Stubbornly, she grabbed his arm to steady herself and yank him closer.
The navy blue wool of his jumper was soft under her fingers, his eyes were a murky puddle of blue and grey. The skin on his forehead was sunbaked and burning, slowly she pulled her hand away.
"What are you sick with?" her whisper floated in the air between them. His eyes were glassy, the same way her mothers were when she caught a nasty case of the flu last year.
"It's nothing contagious if that's what you're wondering. Just brought on by exhaustion, I'll be fine in a day or two," he muttered, eyes flickering across her face. Warmth spread across her back and through her jacket, his hand had curled around the curve of her ribs. He didn't even seem to notice.
"You didn't get any sleep at home?" her hand was clutching at the material on his shoulder.
He hesitated, then nodded, "I never sleep well there." His head dipped down and his thumb started rubbing circles on the small of her back. He was swaying a bit, taking her with him, a strange, almost delirious expression on his face.
The heat radiating off of him showered her in warmth, it made her want to step closer. She could smell faint notes of green apple and mint fighting against the overpowering peppermint scent of the infirmary.
"How come you came to the infirmary?" she asked even though the answer was obvious. He didn't seem to mind as he answered, "To get a healing potion".
The quick march of footsteps outside the hallway startled Hermione out of his trance. She hastily took a few steps back, he made to follow her but Madam Pomfrey burst through the doors. She scowled at Malfoy before noticing Hermione. She thanked her profusely for her work and then ushered her away so she didn't miss dinner.
Madam Pomfrey began to lecture Malfoy about loitering in her infirmary like a vagrant. She felt his eyes on her as she walked away and when she spared a parting glance, his grey eyes seared into her flushed face.
