Nineteen
Day: 1436; Hour: 15
"I don't think you understand. Or, at least, I'm hoping you don't understand, because I would hate to see someone that stupid in such a position of-"
"Hermione," Justin whispered, but she jerked her arm away from his touch and shoves another finger into the Auror's chest.
"You are out of line-" Auror whoever begins, but Hermione cuts him off with a fake laugh and another raw poke into his sternum.
"And you are insane if you think I'm going to leave you alone for a second before you do something about this!"
The man grabs her arm suddenly, his fingers digging so hard into her wrist she feels the bones might pop. "We still have people we're pulling out of the fucking mud, hospital rooms filled with injuries, and a full morgue. We have a-"
"You think I don't know that? Huh? I know that! My friends have died today, and throughout this entire fucking war! People I considered my family are in that morgue, so don't you dare preach to me about what we have lost!" Hermione screams this in a way that breaks her voice open, splinters the expression on her face, and she hates that she is crying.
"Sir," Justin tries, and Hermione lets him leave his hand on her shoulder now. "First, I suggest you drop her hand before we take this up with Lupin. Second, all we're asking from you is for you to organize all in good health to form a search team. Both of us are already volunteering for it."
The Auror clenched his fist after releasing her, face pulled into disgust. "All decisions on missions are handed down the chain of command. If you want a search team, go get in the line bending the hallways at Mungo's to talk to Lupin."
"Ron Weasley is a good man. He has sacrificed-" Hermione starts, her hands shaking.
"They are all good people. They have all sacrificed. There is a long list of people that are missing. Unless he's got the ability to come back and save us all, he's waiting to be saved with the rest of us."
Because he was not Harry Potter, and she was angry at the darkness in the way she thought it, but all she could feel was callousness.
Day: 1437; Hour: 7
The healer tells her that Lupin has demanded Harry doesn't know about Ron yet. Ron is the exception, the woman tells her, and he knows about the status of the others they have documented so far. Documented, and Hermione wonders if the healers have lost their emotions from the war that was so huge it also had the energy to rip through hospital corridors with all the ferocity of a lion.
Ron is at his home, healing, and should be in good health within two weeks. That is their story. That is what makes Hermione want to scream, and vomit, and stay perfectly still all at the same time.
Harry is in much better shape than she had expected. His left arm was in a sling, small scratches lining the right side of his face from temple to jaw, and four broken fingers. There was the tint of a healing balm peeking out from the collar of his hospital gown, and a soft orange glow across his ribs came from under the thin fabric. For some reason, she had thought of some horrible disfigured face and body with claw-locked hands, and then she realized that she had lived too long with her worst fears. Magic would have him healed in a day, perhaps two. It was the mental damage she was most scared of now.
He took her hand and didn't let it go for an hour, both sitting in silence save their breath and the noise outside the room. He stared at the ceiling and then at her, in her eyes, and for a good fifteen minutes she was afraid to blink. It was like she was scared that he might not find what he needed there if she did.
"I love you." This is the first thing he says, and the tears jet to her eyeballs from the weight in her chest.
She nods for several seconds until she feels that her vocal chords might work, if she tries really hard. "I love you too, Harry. I love you so much."
He apologizes for her not being able to come earlier, but he had forgotten to inform them to let her in until that afternoon. He tells her that he doesn't want to talk about anything that has happened yet, and she irrationally feels the words of her anger bubble up inside her. She wants to know why he didn't make sure to get her before the battle, when he has always gotten her in the past, and why she was not good enough for this to him. But it is not the time, and she knows it will not be for a long time now, when there is room for her bitterness over the grief of loss that they all share now.
He does ask her who she has visited and how they are, and when she raises her chin in defiance to anything he has to say when she tells him she has visited Draco Malfoy as well, his answer is not one she is expecting. She tells him that he is fine, and looks worriedly at the sudden faraway expression on his face before he lapses into silence once again.
Before she leaves, he speaks up when her hand is on the knob. "Hermione?"
"Yeah?"
"If you see Malfoy again...tell him I'm sorry."
"For what?" She shakes her head in confusion, and he shakes his own in refusal to answer.
"Just tell him."
"Alright."
Day: 1437; Hour: 10
"I know, Hermione. Our organization is non-existent, everything has been blown to ruins. We're not even sure about all the casualties or how many are going to pull out of their injuries, let alone where everyone is."
"We still need to find Ron! The others that are missing too, yes, and organize funerals, and comb the area for other casualties, and everything, I know. But Ron is out there, waiting for us! I know what it was like to be that person, and I am sure that I did not have it as bad as him!"
"I care about Ron too, Hermione. I know the things we have to do. We're trying to reassemble as quickly as we can, and as soon as we do, I plan on creating a rescue mission for Ron and all the others. He is important to us, but everyone else who is missing is important to other people as well-"
"I know that! You're not listening to me! We have enough people, especially now that we-"
"Hermione! We are gathering able people and our resources to form several search teams for everyone that is missing, but we don't have enough people that are able, not performing another duty, and that we know the location of to form a team at this very second! We-"
"Then figure out where they are, Lupin! Ron could be dying, and you, and you..."
Hermione trails off, because there is a sudden, stark look that overwhelms Lupin's face. Exasperation is there, but there is also something else, more deep and personal that she doesn't know except for the feel of it. Because he is the one in charge, who is supposed to be the best at this and to get done what needed to be done. But he couldn't. He couldn't because no one was good enough in war.
"Tell me what to do. I can't sit here. I can't sit here, Lupin, please don't make me." She whispers this, and if she sounds broken, it is nothing he doesn't feel.
"Organize them. Locate the Order members and Auror's who are in a decent health and haven't been assigned anything else. Compile the names and bring them to me."
Day: 1437; Hour 14
Harry is sleeping, so she visits everyone else she has yet to see that day or at all.
Anthony, Tonks, Angelina, and Ernie MacMillan. They are all more positive than she had expected, and if Ron wasn't missing and Neville wasn't lost, she might have also felt that blister of hope. But she could hardly be relieved, not yet. McGonagall had already left, along with George and Molly Weasley, and Hagrid. She ventures to Draco's room, and he is glaring at her nearly as soon as she enters, but she expects it and ignores it.
"How did you sleep?"
"I had dreams about deer mating with fish, how do you think I slept?"
She scrunches her face. "That's disgusting."
"You're not the one with the mental images. Though they are in thanks to you."
"It's not my fault you have strange sex dreams when you take pain potions, Malfoy."
"They give me too much, that's why."
"Tell them not to."
"I do."
Hermione looks around for a chair to pull up to his bed, but doesn't find one. She wonders if she happens to be the only one who has stopped in to visit him. His bedside table is empty of cards or candy, and she realizes that she probably is. Draco has friends, but in the distant sort of way that he talks to people sometimes, and she thinks the only people who put up with his crap are probably Neville and she. Her, now... her.
"You left the ring, I'm guessing." She nods and he nods in return, and she wonders if he has ever managed a 'thank you' in his life.
The silence goes on long enough for her to start fidgeting, and she breaks it with the first solid thing that comes to mind. "I saw Harry last night. He told me to tell you he's sorry."
Draco's tapping thumb stops, and his face realigns into the something she can't place. "Is that so."
"Yes. I don't know what he was sorry about, but..." she trails off, knowing by his reaction that he knows exactly what Harry is sorry for.
"For something that's none of your fucking business, Granger. And you tell Potter," he spits the name, "that I don't need his fucking pity, or guilt. You tell him that."
Hermione blinks down in surprise over his sudden flash of anger that darkens his features, and she really must find out what all of this is about when she sees Harry later. "Alright, geesh."
His jaw works, his temples moving as he grinds his teeth, and turns his head to look toward the curtain-covered window. Harry's room faces toward the back of the hospital, to where the press cannot reach, but Draco's window faces the front of the hospital directly. She figures he keeps the curtains drawn shut at all times.
She stays with him in his surly silence for another fifteen minutes, trying to make conversation, to which he either replies with short, curt answers, or not at all.
Day: 1437; Hour: 15
"Your scar is gone."
"What? No. No, it's just faded." She approaches his bed tentatively, eyes glued to his forehead, until she is close enough to validate that it is indeed still there.
"That's strange."
"I think it happened once I killed him. It was like... like I could feel him. My head was just... exploding. It was the most intense pain I have ever felt, and I just dropped to my knees. I thought I was going to die after all. That... that maybe I couldn't live without that piece of him inside of me. That all of Moody's paranoid rambling in the beginning, about a Horcrux being inside of me, was really the truth after all."
"It must have been horrible."
"It was. It was, Hermione. I can't even describe it. I blacked out then, and when I came to, I saw Ron lying a little ways away from me. I think the only reason I didn't pass out again was because I was waiting for him to move, so I knew he was alive. When he shut his eyes, I did too, and I woke up here."
Her mind whirled with the information, and she can't stop herself from wondering why they didn't take Harry as well. Then, that rage of paranoia that war brought, wondering if Lupin was hiding Ron's death behind a story of capture so she could get through this too. But, no, because he would have told her when she was back there screaming at him. He wouldn't put her through the idea of hope.
And then, suddenly, all she could see in her mind was the imagined vision of Harry and Ron spread out on the ground, just a couple yards apart. Blood-soaked clothes and trembling bodies exhausted, blue against green as they both waited out the call to unconsciousness to make sure the other was alive. She isn't sure if there was a better way to define them at the end of the war.
"You've survived."
He nods, breathing out, because he probably hasn't grasped it yet. He has lived more than half his life in the looming shadow of Voldemort, and with the knowledge that he might just end up dying by the same wand that took his mother and father. Harry has only known danger and threats, and has spent so long looking for it and living with it, that he is probably more clueless than she as to how to live without it.
They pass the time with idle chatter and by the time he reaches his questions on how everyone else is doing, she is nervous. She knows, almost certainly, that he will ask about Draco, and she isn't sure just how she should respond.
"Did you see Malfoy again?"
"I did." She holds her breath.
"Did you tell him?"
"I did."
Harry does not ask what Draco's reply was, because she thinks that he knows it wasn't a good response. Instead, he trains his eyes on the fading colors of light through the cracks in the blinds, and is quiet in thought for several beats of her heart.
"I killed Lucius Malfoy, you know." It clicks now; his apology, Draco's fierce reaction to it.
"Good."
Harry gives a small shake of his head. "He was... he had Ron. Ron's wand was gone I think, and he was just... torturing him. He gave him that cut. On his face. Did you see it?"
"Yes," she lies, and it hurts.
"I had two Death Eaters fighting me, and one more coming in from the left. I couldn't do anything. He was there, leaning against the side of a tree, about to die, and I did nothing."
"You couldn't, Harry. If you tried, you would have been dead yourself before you even stopped Lucius. And Ron is alive," is he, is he, is he? "there's no reason to feel guilty over something that didn't even happen."
"I know. I know this. That's why I don't feel guilty about that. I would... if something had happened, I mean."
"But you killed him."
"Malfoy - Draco Malfoy. I looked over, and he was there. Had his father's wand in his hand, and his wand was on him. They were saying something, but I don't know what. Draco, his... hand was shaking. And I just remembered the Astronomy Tower all over again, because that's what it was. Malfoy in front of someone he has to kill, and not being able to do it. He couldn't do it. I saw it."
"So you killed him."
"Yes. Yes, I did. Because I didn't... Because I didn't want Malfoy to change his mind. I didn't want to give him time to decide that he could. How can a son live knowing they killed their father, no matter what side they are on? And I didn't blame him one bit, Hermione, because I don't think I could have either. I didn't want him to live with that."
"That's understandable."
"It just... it must be something, you know? To have to raise your wand to your own father. It makes me think of just how much he really gave up. It worked out in the end for him, but... Jesus, Hermione, his father. Standing in front of him and waiting for you to kill him. And it doesn't matter sides then, does it? Because either way you're going to feel like a monster."
"But you killed him, Harry. You stopped him from having to."
"That's the thing though. I... I killed him, right in front of his son. And I know how that feels, Hermione. I know what it feels like to have someone murder your father, who you love, no matter what. Then there I was. Me. Doing it to someone else."
"There was no choice there, Harry."
"I know! I know there wasn't, but that doesn't make it better, does it? Because I killed a bloke's dad right in front of his face."
"Draco knew it had to be done, Harry. He knew, and that was why he tried to do it himself. If anything, he's more thankful that you took it out of his hands, than he is angry with you."
"I just..." He shakes his head. "Malfoy turned around after, dry heaved into his arm, and he was crying. Not in a real dramatic sort of way, but just enough for me to see his face was wet. Then he turned back around, and... And he looked right at me. Right at me, Hermione. And I swear to God I have never felt so guilty about something in all my life. I felt like crying. Like puking. It was Lucius Malfoy, and I've never felt so bad about hurting another person."
"You did what had to be done, Harry. He understands that, I'm sure. You have nothing to feel guilty about. Lucius was a horrible, terrible human being."
"I know he was. But I just... I don't think I'll ever erase the way he looked at me after. I think I'll live the rest of my life with Malfoy's face, just like that, burned into my brain."
"If it wasn't you, it would be someone else. You did the right thing."
"Maybe," he whispers. "Yes. Yes, I did. But it was so hard after."
"I think the right thing is always the hardest."
"And they say God doesn't want us to be sinners or evil."
She smiles, and he gives her a faint one in reply, sinking back into his pillows, and gazing in quiet sadness at the window again.
Day: 1438; Hour: 17
Hermione hasn't slept since leaving Harry's hospital room, too bent on locating people before exhaustion took her. She has been to three safe houses and five homes, and still only managed to find seven people - one of them stumbling out of a pub near the hospital as she traveled back to check in on people. Harry had been getting ready to leave and Draco had already been gone. She didn't know how they planned on keeping the news of Ron from Harry for much longer.
She is at the white safe house, staring blankly at the abstract painting still attached to the wall by her gum. It feels like decades since she painted it with Dean. It looks worse than she remembers, though it could be because of her drooping, bleary eyes - but probably not.
"Where is Malfoy's mother?"
Hermione's head jerks up in surprise, the question random and distant in her exhaustion. "I... don't know."
"Oh." Cho fiddles with the emptiness between her fingers.
"Why?"
"I was at Malfoy Manor this morning and Justin and Anthony were looking at something out the window. So I went over there, and I saw Malfoy... I guess his father was buried on the property - he had something set up with his lawyers and a caretaker, I heard, because the Ministry would have just let him rot there."
"I'm sure," Hermione replies when Cho pauses for too long, because she wants to get back to the part about Draco.
"He was just standing there at the grave for awhile. He was a good distance away, but Justin and Anthony said they saw him talking before I got over there. Then he starts digging at the ground... I thought we would have to go out there and stop him. Sometimes people go temporarily insane when they lose someone, you know? And I thought... Well, he wasn't doing that. He just dug a little hole and then covered it back up. Justin thinks he changed his mind about digging, but I think he just put something there."
"That's odd."
"Yes. Maybe. But I was just thinking about how hard it must be for him. To have his father die, knowing his son betrayed him. I mean...we don't know who Lucius Malfoy was. An evil man, yes, but we don't know if he was a good family man, or how much he loved Draco. You know?"
Hermione nods, and mutters a "Yes," when she sees that Cho isn't looking at her, poking at her fish instead. She has to wonder when people suddenly started giving a damn about him. When Harry, and Cho, and everyone started caring now when they should have realized it was okay before this. But maybe that was just her. Hermione always saw the humanity in things that other people took awhile to come around to.
"He's alone." Cho shrugs. "His father is dead, his friends are dead or in Azkaban. And you could see it, when I looked at him standing there, and when he walked away. Because he knows he's alone."
He has me, the thought was like a spear through her brain, and she works to keep her expression free from the surprise she feels at it.
"I just wonder where his mother is. If she's in hiding, or departed, or something. I don't know. It was... so sad."
Day: 1438; Hour: 18
The front page of the paper reads 'Victory!' in large, bold print. Below it is a picture of Harry in glimpses through a wall of guards as he heads to the Apparition point within St. Mungo's. He gives a curt nod to the photographer before a guard blocks the view, smacking the camera down. The pictures goes to feet, the floor, walls, before focusing back on the guards face and starting all over again.
Hermione rips the two pages of the story out of the paper, folding them carefully, and putting them in her bag. When she gets back to Grimmauld she will put it in her trunk for memories sake. She thinks it is important to carry the good things with them as well.
She falls to the bed loose-limb and aching. She will wake up in three hours, having set the alarm, and that is when she will find Ron. Even if she has to do it herself - she is not waiting another still second that feels like a frantic year within her.
Day: 1439; Hour: 8
Lupin and McGonagall call a meeting, standing stoically in the front of the room at the Ministry. They discuss the 'final battle', the lack of its finality, and inform them all that they will be going back to where they were before the battle happened - the safe houses. There is disappointment clouding the air, but it is not prevalent over the sense of victory and survival that has crept in since the news spread.
The last of the Death Eaters still need to be captured before there are celebrations, and before the Death Eaters can hurt more people or produce another Dark Lord. It isn't a done deal that they have won yet. Lupin is stern with this, and the Death Eaters will be out for revenge, and so they should expect everything. She does not know if Lupin and McGonagall's faces seem more severe from their new positions as heads of war now that Moody is gone or because of the war itself.
Hermione travels back to the safe house, noting several people - including Harry and Draco's - lack of presence at the meeting, and the tired way in which they all left the room compared to the jubilation upon entering. Hermione returns from the meeting the same way she had left for it, because Draco has told her these same things all along.