Forty-Five
Day: 1563; Hour: 10
She lies with her hands up, fingers spread across the sky. Sometimes she feels like she can curl her fingers and dig chunks of blue into her grip. Then she opens her eyes really wide, like she's trying to shove the world into them, and feels herself disappear.
Day: 1563; Hour: 13
A hot mouth dragging down a long scar on her arm, then the rasp of a tongue over another on her hip. They are from the mission when Seamus and Justin died, and Ron was saved. They are her ugliest scars, and the ones he favors most.
Day: 1563; Hour: 17
She wonders about souls and rebirth. She wonders if she will look down at the eyes of Justin's child, and find him there, inside. If she were to get pregnant, perhaps it would be Neville's soul inside of the child, inside of her. People had been scared to have children when the war was like a hurricane through their cities and homes, destroying everything. When Harry killed Voldemort, when they claimed a temporary victory the world thought was final, it was like they celebrated by forming a new generation.
She wonders if they are all coming back. If she'll walk down the street in a couple years and see Fred's new self throwing Dungbombs into open doors of shops, some kid laughing like Seamus with his arms waving about like the joke was too much for him to handle. Two twins whispering and giggling, a child with a dazed wonder talking about things that don't exist, or maybe even Marcus Flint's twitching eye next to a Muggle-born mother.
Some people believe in reincarnation, and some people believe that babies remember their past lives. Their memories evaporate to fog by the time they're a year old, but it's then, in the beginning of their new humanity, that they remember all of who they really are. At this moment, is Lee Jordan clinging to his past as his new life threatens to destroy it? Is Terry Boot opening his eyes for the first time since he closed them on a battlefield, and peering into the face of his new mother? Are all of them lost and afraid? Are they not crying out at night for sustenance for their bodies, but for their souls? Is losing it just like dying all over again?
The mother in front of her shifts her child away with a strange look toward Hermione. The baby turns his head toward her and maintains their eye contact, his dark, brown eyes unwavering.
Day: 1563; Hour: 20
The night is always the worst. It's always the hardest part to get through. During the day she can actively force her brain to stop thinking about those screaming, shadowed places inside of her. She can find someone, or a book, or a television. She can shake her head, and concentrate harder, and slam it back again.
The night is the hardest. She tries to keep herself occupied until she is so tired her eyes burn, but it doesn't help. She can exhaust her body with missions, or with Draco, to the point where it rules her head and grants her sleep. But when she can't, her mind is far more powerful than any call to slumber. There's no denying the will of that darkness to be remembered.
Her dreams are the very worst. Nightmares forged with knowledge and memories. She dreams of battles, empty faces and broken bodies, of Harry behind the whip and Draco's tortured screams. Sometimes she dreams of her friends dying, or herself, or getting lost forever in a world of smoke. Sometimes she dreams of the ones who already are – she sees their death in front of her eyes, and no matter what she does, she can never save them. Sometimes she is cruel, and in her dreams they are there and laughing, telling her they are alive.
She doesn't think they will ever stop haunting her. And no matter how much it hurts, or how much she fears getting lost, she is more afraid that they will leave her be.
Day: 1565; Hour: 8
"He doesn't come out of the basement."
Hermione glances up from the floor to the young man in front of her, then watches the back of the Auror down the hall. The folder she had been sent to give him smacks off his thigh, and she gives it one more greedy look before the muffled, off-key song comes through the floorboards again.
"What do you mean?"
The redhead shrugs, sinking his hands into his pockets. "His mother died down there after coming out of a mission a couple months ago. He hasn't left."
"What does he do for food?"
He shrugs again, cracked nails and bleeding cuticles shoved into his mouth, and the saliva on his teeth gleams as he bites into his fingers. "I've been here for four months. I cook for him."
She thinks about George, about what Draco said. "Maybe you should bring him-"
"No magic here. The bloke is... There's no moving him."
"What happens when you have to leave?" She moves her shoulder back when he spits out a shred of nail or skin, though there's little chance it would hit her without wind or magic.
He spits again, again, and then laughs. "I don't know. That song has become my life."
She doesn't know what he means by that, because she doesn't speak French – but the way it's sung over broken things, she can understand. Everyone has their own war story.
Day: 1566; Hour: 1
He stumbles down the steps clad in only his boxers, rubbing his eyes and sleepy-footed. She thinks her body recognizes his presence before he registers fully in her eyesight. He stops for just a second when he sees her before continuing down the hall. She hasn't seen him in two days, and she hadn't even known he was here. She had thought she heard his voice yelling some unfamiliar name a couple hours ago, but she had been sure she was imagining it.
She shifts on the couch, sighing, bored and distracted with her thoughts, wishing there was a television to drown them out. She looks up at a clamor coming from the kitchen, followed by a muffled exclamation several seconds later, and shakes her head with a smile. A lot of people would probably tell her it was worrying how comforting his presence is to her, but she has accepted these things, because she doesn't have the energy to fight them too. She can regret it later.
She hasn't been able to sleep. Her mind is both her greatest strength and greatest weakness, depending on the situation. There are times when one must throw off their blankets in resignation and concede to the fact that there would be no sleep to be had that night. She gave up the fight at the pull of midnight, and hasn't looked back.
Draco walks back into the living room more coordinated than he had been before he left, and surprises her by sinking into the couch next to her rather than heading up the stairs. He takes a gulp of his water and reclines, throwing his legs up on the coffee table.
"Can't sleep."
"And here I thought it was because you could sleep that you decided to sit here in the dark at three in the morning."
She shrugs, her eyes following the crack that runs along the length of the far wall. Draco drops into silence, holding his cup of water to his chest, his fingers tapping on the cheap fabric of the couch.
"Do you believe in God?"
"I don't really know much about it." He shrugs. "I believe in the things that happen. Things that I can touch, see, feel. I believe in life, because that is tangible. It's where we are, and what we do, and it's everything."
"Well, that's where faith-"
"It's just a way to get answers, Granger. To explain the unexplainable. To feel better about the things that scare you, because God gives a reason to them happening."
"It's not just about answers. And how do you explain things anyway, then? Like how we got here, or the purpose of our lives, or where we go when we die."
"It doesn't matter how we got here, because we're here. And the purpose of our lives is the one we come up with when we're living it, and it doesn't matter where we go when we die, because we're dead."
"So you make up your own answers?"
"I don't need answers, Granger, that's the point. You die. You die, and you know exactly when, and why, and where, and how - but that doesn't change a damn thing, does it? Because you're still going to die. In the end, it doesn't matter. Answers are useless."
"But they bring peace of mind."
"So does not thinking about the questions."
Hermione doesn't think she'll ever be the sort of person who doesn't think about the questions.
"Staring is rude."
"Sorry." She blushes, caught with her gaze on the odd looking gap between his big and middle toe.
"You do that a lot."
"Stare?"
"Blush. Around me."
She blushes deeper at this, which is horrible, since all her energy is concentrated on not blushing at all right now. She glares at his smirk in self-defense. "I do not."
"You do."
"It's an illness I have."
"Oh?" He looks entirely too amused.
"Yes. A, uh...blood pressure illness. It rises too high at times for no real reason, and changes my coloring." She knows this is perhaps the worst lie she has ever told, but she sticks with it anyway.
"I see."
"I was diagnosed at a young age. Very traumatic."
"I bet." She can hear the laughter under his voice, deep and restrained.
She gives him a humph before latching onto the first subject change she can find. "Can I touch it?"
"What?"
"Your..." She gestures to his foot.
"I...guess." He gives her a look to let her know just how strange he thinks she is for asking.
She ignores it, leaning forward to touch a gentle fingertip to the gap. He squirms as she feels along the small bump, the smoothness of his skin in contrast to the slight roughness of the thin red scar.
"I forgot you had a foot fetish." He arches his foot, his toes spreading out as she runs her finger in a circle.
"I don't have a foot fetish."
"You're the-" He cuts himself off, jerking his foot back, and she pauses, her finger hovering before she looks up at him with a grin. "Don't."
"The great Draco Malfoy has ittle ticklish feet, does he?"
"Yes, well... We all have to have an Achilles Heel, I suppose."
She snorts, leaning back into the couch again, and stores away the fact that he's ticklish there. Though she can't really use it against him. He had already discovered how incredibly ticklish she is on her neck, when he found just light breathing turns her into a squirming, giggling mess.
He stands suddenly, nodding his head to the hallway behind him. "Come make me tea."
"Make you tea?" She raises an eyebrow.
"You can put more water on for yourself if you want some."
She's indignant, but stands and heads toward the kitchen anyway. She puts the water on but makes him pour it, and they sit for hours in the kitchen, until it's lit with the day and they are tired of talking so much. About the weather, Neville's hopping nervous dance, and the strangeness of Lavender's lovers, though they both ignore his own inclusion – her with a glare, and him with a blank expression. They discuss people, and places, and ideas. They argue and debate potions, theories, and Muggle medicine. The conversation is fluid and easy, and she thanks whoever is listening that he woke up and decided to stay that way.
"Professor at Hogwarts or a researcher." He tastes the words on his tongue.
"Yes. I want to do some volunteer work, but... I want to find cures, like for the aftereffects of Cruciatus or a Werewolf bite. I think if I balanced it out enough, I could teach during the school year, research in my free time and during the summer holiday. Maybe."
He nods, his spoon tapping on the table to some old beat that is familiar but that she'll never place. "You're just going to take on everything at once then?"
"Should I not look to the future?"
"Look to the future all you want, but you're only going to crash if you try vaulting yourself there."
"But if you don't find something to work toward, what's the incentive to overcome your current obstacle when you see no reason to?"
"There's every reason to." He looks at her as if she should know this, and then he laughs, like he can't believe it. "Merlin...you're never going to stop trying to save the world, are you?"
"What are you talking about?"
"Win the war, educate the generations, free the house-elves, mother the orphans, invent the cures for all that ails us. My little bleeding heart Gryffindor, with her hero complex. What is it? Do you think by saving the world, you can save yourself?"
She stares at him, her mouth opening and closing twice before she scowls. "Does the idea hit close to home, Draco?"
His head pulls back on his shoulders, like she just slapped the words into his forehead. She doesn't regret it, though, because it's true, and if he wants to try and shove truth at her, she'll push back. Draco never had to fight. Maybe he did because Pansy wanted to at first, and he didn't want to leave her alone. Maybe it was his revenge. Maybe he didn't know what else to do with himself. But, mostly, he fought for his redemption. He fought to bring himself out of that spinning void that stole him from the idyllic fantasies of his childhood. That ripped off their facade, and spit the crude underbelly into his face, and screamed this is what you will become, this is who you are. Draco fought to save himself, even if it killed him in the process.
"You got it, Draco. Despite everything it took, and how hard it was, you pushed your boulder off the mountain." It's not likely that he has a clue what she's talking about, but it doesn't matter. "You aren't your father's son. You've earned every inch of your redemption. I'm...I'm really proudofyouforthat."
He's staring at her, but she doesn't know the look on his face. It scares her, and makes her want to cry, hug him, and take a cautious step away at the same time. She looks him in the eye long enough to let him know that she's serious, and swallows thickly. She means every word of it, and maybe she should have told him sooner. Maybe it matters to hear it from her, or maybe it doesn't mean a thing, but he should know. He's earned the right to hear it.
"But for me," she continues, her quiet tone still booming in the room, "it's not about that. Winning the war was about saving the world. Everything after this... If I can help people, it's what I want to do. I cannot stand people who have the resources, the abilities, to help people who can't help themselves, and they do nothing. Helping people makes me happy. And... Well, maybe I am saving myself in that case." She laughs, something surprised and bitter, and it's ugly. Personal revelations.
Silence. She stares at the table, tracing the grooves in the wood. There's a burn mark near the edge, and a memory hits her of Lavender resting her cigarette there, shuffling about the kitchen with kiss-stained lips and a grin. She had forgotten about that. Hannah had been singing a children's song, and Hermione had been trying to nonchalantly feel her lips to see if they were as swollen as Lav's.
Draco clears his throat, fifty-four ticks of the clock later. "There are worse things to do for happiness."
"Yes."
"But sometimes the things we want aren't the things we need."
"But sometimes you need to take a chance in life." And she has stopped thinking about her career ambitions, and has started thinking about him now.
"And you need to make sure the chance is worth taking." He picks up their empty mugs, moving to put them in the sink. "I think you need to go to bed, Granger. You're about three seconds away from drooling."
"I am not." But she is tired, and so she follows him out into the hall.
They stand unsure in front of her door before she reaches out to squeeze his fingers in thanks and moves into the bedroom. She hopes he will follow her, but he doesn't. She awakes curled around him in the afternoon, breathing deeply into her hair.
Day: 1566; Hour: 11
Hermione walks into the Burrow to find Harry and Ron playing chess, and it's so close to normal, she feels like crying.
Day: 1566; Hour: 16
Hermione leans back with a sated smile, unbuttoning her jeans with a groan at her full stomach. It's the first good meal she can remember eating since...she can't even remember when. Probably before the Graveyard, here at this table. It had been different then. More people, laughter, and that urgent hope that the war couldn't change it. There are three empty spaces now, two with a plate set out in front of the seat. The third plate is upstairs – George had made it to the staircase before turning back for his bedroom.
Ginny's head is resting on Harry's shoulder, Molly and Arthur's hands clasped between a serving bowl of potatoes and a salt shaker. Molly is staring at her and Ron in that way that she does, and Charlie is complaining about too much food making him immobile. Bill is making fun of her for actually having to unbutton her pants, and Fleur awkwardly points out the appearance of Hermione's ribcage a year ago in an attempt to shut him up. Ginny glares at the older woman and looks to be attempting to strangle her drink.
She thinks they can work with this. Eventually the breaks of silence will fill, and the empty spaces won't feel like they take up most the table. If this is what they'll have left, they can still be okay. There is still enough to hold onto.
Day: 1567; Hour: 11
She finds him on the back porch, looking out into the woods, with his wand rolling between his fingers. She almost laughs, because life is funny like that. Because it has a way of spinning circles. A year ago, tomorrow, she found him on a different back porch, guilty over his failed mission. She had given him her virginity a few days later. It felt like years ago. Like centuries had passed just to find them here again. She wonders if he's thinking about it too. If he remembers that at all.
He had talked about plants, she can remember. Plants winding and winding in search of the light they can grow toward. She thinks that's all of them, in the war, in life. Draco Malfoy had come like a large, sharp stone, shoved into the tender framing of her bark. And as she grew, he grew into her, and her around him, until he became a part of her. Some foreign, embedded object that no one can really understand how it got there, or why the growth of the tree shaped to it instead of dislodging it.
She can't remove him from herself. Only he would be able to do so, and if he wanted to, he would have to hack and peel, splinter and dig. It wouldn't break her if he walked away, if he left her in the tide of war that she had truly first found him. But it would leave behind a hole, shaped to fit only him, and only him ever again.
He knows her in every moment, in every way. He knows her in her happiness, in the dark, in her breakdown, in the passion that can overcome her. He knows her when she doesn't know herself, when she is a killer, when she is stripped to the basics of her humanity. He knows her when the world is falling apart, and when she is fighting to hold it together. He knows her gutted and filled up. He has been with her as she wound and wound, and he has wound with her. Searching for the light, or winding her around himself when they can't find it. He knows her in the worst ways – in the ways she wouldn't tell other people, ever. He knows her war, because it is theirs.
He knew her when all she knew was him. It had been him. It has always been him, through most of the war, through the hardest things she's ever known. Somehow, it has been him.
"Don't hurt yourself, Granger."
"Huh?" She snaps out of her daze, meeting his eyes and smiling at the leaf that hits his cheek.
"You look like your oversized brain is going to explode."
There's a faint curl to the corners of his lips, and his eyes are on her hair. She reaches up tentatively, and locates two leaves stuck in her curls. Of course he didn't tell her that, the prat. She looks down at the red and green leaf and opens her palm, letting the wind take it in flight.
"Know the feeling, Malfoy? I suppose it happens quite often when you only have a handful of brain cells." She stares at his hair long and hard, until he grows self-conscious enough to run his fingers through it and take out any leaves.
He glares at her when he finds nothing but a smug look on her face. "Does it?"
She knows that was meant to turn the tables on her, but she doesn't let it. "Yes," she says very slowly, and gives him an encouraging smile. He sneers, she grins. "Going somewhere?"
"Headquarters."
"Oh."
He looks hesitant, and it isn't often he forgets to cover up his lack of certainty, so she stares. "I'll probably be back here tomorrow."
"Oh." It's her turn to look hesitant and his to stare too hard. She never knows what to do when he's tracking her every movement and she's not occupied with his own. It flusters her, and she speaks before she decides if she wants to. "It's my birthday tomorrow."
"I know."
She didn't think he would, but she covers her surprise by looking at his feet. "I'll be going to the Burrow for cake and dinner. Youcancomeifyouwant. I'll be here all day except for that. And...you know, here at night."
Molly will probably assume she'll be staying there, but if Draco is going to be here, she doesn't want to miss him. She knows he wouldn't come to the Burrow and she wants to see him. It's probably going to be hard to deny Molly, but Harry and Ginny will have it harder. Molly looked anything but approving when the two had left with Hermione after dinner last night. I don't understand why you all can't stay here instead of traveling back to the safe house. You shouldn't be traveling that much, and this is... And then Molly had cut off at the very red faces of her daughter and her boyfriend.
"Alright." Draco gives her a nod, and she nods back at him.
Day: 1567; Hour: 12
Draco leaves for Headquarters with some muttered goodbye in his kiss. She watches him Portkey away, and doesn't notice that Harry and Ginny have emerged from the kitchen until they speak.
"Still weird."
"Really weird."
"It..." Harry trails off and makes a face. "It really creeps me out."
I'm scarred, Harry had said the first time he caught a glimpse of her fingers on Draco's neck and his head lowering. We already know that, Potter, Draco had said, and that had been the end of it. No other comments, no strange looks, no anything she might have expected.
Hermione rolls her eyes, but she knows Harry deserves time to grasp it. Some days she has trouble grasping it too. He's been better than she could have hoped.
"It's a little scary." Ginny holds up two fingers, an inch between them, and laughs.
Hermione gives a small smile to herself, looking back to where he was last standing. "I know."
Day: 1568; Hour: 1
Something is wrong. Something is very, very, wrong, and her eyes snap open at the scream somewhere below her. She lurches upward, her hair flying forward in sweat dampened curls, staring at the flames eating at the walls. She has to punch her thigh twice to convince herself it's not a dream. She had dreams that felt just as real as this, and the pain in dreams was always very real to her dream-self. But this...the heat, the crackle of flames, the ache from her fist.
"Hermione!"
She throws herself out of the bed, grabbing her wand as she rolls to her feet. There isn't a fireplace, there had been no candles in her room, and she doesn't think Harry and Ginny would light any for effect and let it get this out of control. She slams her feet into her boots, her body jerking left and right between her trunk and the door in indecision before going right. The brass knob scorches her palm and she hisses, shaking it out, and promptly blows the doors off the hinges.
"Hermione!"
"Here!" she yells back, and can hear the tight edge of panic matching Harry's.
The roof is raining chunks of fire, flames dancing closer to her feet along the floor. She runs toward the staircase, her laces smacking against her bare calves, and comes to a halt when she doesn't find any stairs. It's only a drop-off to the floor below, the fire high and angry. She can't see anything below from the dark cloud of smoke and blur of heat, and then it is Harry, soaring up through the flames and ashes.
"Get on!" Ginny yells from behind him, and the broom swerves, offering her just enough room between the redhead and the fire at the end.
Hermione quickly puts out the flames with a wave of her wand, the spell simple with such a small fire, and throws her leg over the broom. The second she wraps her arms around Ginny, they are off again with a jerk. "Why aren't we Apparating or-?" It's not like they'll ever be coming back to a safe house that had burned to debris.
"We can't! Aim for the ground! Duck now!" Harry yells back.
She can see him raise his arm and duck his head, and the two women follow his example. Hermione squeezes her eyes shut as the window shatters, glass flying back to tug at her skin. She gasps in the colder air, and her stomach clenches as she opens her eyes. She only gets a glimpse at the ground before it is all sky, the three of them spinning straight up into the air.
Ginny's thin fingers clasp around Hermione's arm, squeezing but not pulling away the death grip. The heat fades quickly from her back, and she's shaking in her father's old T-shirt and her pajama shorts from the frosty night air, the flight, and her adrenaline. Harry straightens the broom, and they circle the flaming carcass of a safe house from birds-eye.
"I don't see anything," Ginny huffs out, and then breaks into a fit of coughs. Hermione loosens her grip, but her eyes continue searching for any movement or figure. "There's no way a fire spread that fast by accident."
"And if we couldn't Apparate out, someone had to put wards up." Hermione coughs, the smoke sitting heavy in her lungs and the cold air too crisp.
"I'm going to fly lower, so we can search..." Harry trails off, and Hermione feels it too. "Shit."
The broom nearly tips them over when Harry shifts to reach into his pocket, the extra weight threatening to roll them. "What is it?"
"Headquarters."
Her Portkey to Headquarters is in her...trunk. Hermione looks back down at the house as it crumbles, and her heart squeezes painfully. Her pictures, her notes, her books, her clothes, her Phoenix band, all of her possessions for the past four years. She has a letter from Neville in her trunk, and pictures, and the flower Justin gave her two summers ago, and Luna's jar of 'good luck' bugs that Hermione couldn't see or had ever heard of.
"Oh, no," she whispers, only just holding back from grabbing the broom and forcing them back.
"What's wrong?"
"My trunk." Is that her voice? She reaches up to wipe at her face, catching wetness on her skin.
There is silence for a moment, because they all know it's too late to do anything about it. She can also feel the heat from the coin in her pocket, and it doesn't matter. The safe house was just attacked, and now they are getting called to Headquarters. She just lost most the physical representations of her friends, but something bigger is going on now.
This is war. Suck it up, Granger. She shakes her head, clenches her jaw. Is that your brave face, Hermione? Neville laughs inside her head. I don't think that's your brave face. Go, rawr. No laughing! Raaawr! Brave face!
"Rawr," she chokes out.
"What?"
Oh, Jesus. Get it together, she snaps at herself. They're just stupid things, it's not like you'll forget. Stupid things, stupid things, stupid... "Does anyone have a Portkey?"
"Yeah. I'm going to put it in my palm, and both of you will put a finger on it. Alright?" Harry's already flicking open the box, and he turns toward them as much as he can. "Make sure you keep your finger on it."
Harry stretches his arm back, and the broom sways as she and Ginny rush to touch what looks like an old toothpaste cap. Feeling that pull at her bellybutton was always a little disconcerting, but feeling it while hovering far into the sky is not something she'll ever want to repeat. The broom spins them madly, and they cling to one another, Hermione's thighs locked around the ridiculously thin handle.
The broom hits a tree branch and sends them end over front twice, before they plummet headfirst toward the ground. "Lean back, lean back!" Harry screams, and they straighten just two meters from the earth with a collective gasp.
"And you wonder why I hate broo-" Her sentence cuts off in a gurgle of loud sound.
Her eyes are wide on the unguarded gates, the left hanging crookedly, and the right completely blown out onto the lawn. There's screaming in the distance, and high above the towering manor, a snake slithers from the mouth of a skull and tangles in the clouds.