If anyone asked Hermione where her first born was buried, she would not know the answer. She accepted it. She had no choice.
If anyone asked her if she was present for the burial, she could at least say yes. And she could say fuck the tiny box that held the body of her child she never knew she wanted. And fuck the Ron shaped hole who should be there with her.
Instead, she got Draco Malfoy.
He didn't hold her hand and he didn't pretend to understand what she was feeling. She was grateful for that. And his presence was better than standing completely alone on the windy hillside, the air filled with the scent of green and sky, as she watched brown earth coat the too small box that might as well have been a bloody shoe box.
It should have been that insignificant.
Losing her baby should have been like losing everything else in this war.
It wasn't.
It wasn't.
Because with losing her child, she slowly lost everything else. Her sanity seemed to melt into the bed below her. Her friendships decayed. Her relationships seemed to have never existed at all.
Ronald was a visitor she grew accustomed to. Never without his chess board, she came to name the pieces with their own unique descriptors. She knew the queen and king, she remembered Ron being hit when he took up the mantle as a knight in their first year. But everything else had become something else for the time being; tower, staff, and pillars.
She never cared for the game. But, as books ran scarce, and her mind grew bored, all that was left was chess. And the ridiculous mind games.
Draco and Madam Pomfrey moved around in the dark to their various groaning and moaning patients. Hermione knew their names sometimes when it was whispered into the dark to wake them, or feed them, or bathe them. But they were gone so often that she realised, remembering them served no purpose other than knowing how far away Draco was from her in this stifling room.
But she was there. One with her sheets, the smell of her filled her lungs. Even with sponge baths, she couldn't get rid of that smell . The smell of death. She wasn't sure if it belonged to her, or that box that never left her mind, or the beds that surrounded her.
Hermione just knew that warmth was foreign to her body. Human touch – just blood pumping behind thin skin held against her own, but without heat or the usual comfort – was like swallowing something too quickly, and feeling nausea build in her stomach, threatening to lurch everything back up. She hated Malfoy's hands on her skin when he checked her pulse. Sometimes he would press a palm to her forehead and she would wake to silver eyes peering back at her.
Sometimes, Malfoy would be asleep beside her. In a chair, not her bed, but his posture was that of a man who had no intention of leaving someone's side. Simply someone who was also so exhausted, there was no other option than to hurt their body in uncomfortable positions to sleep, even if for a few minutes.
On her better days, Hermione would have magicked him into her bed, given him her pillow, and left. On better days, she would have felt sorry for the man who seemed to be giving her everything of himself just to ensure she didn't do what she was thinking every second of every minute of every day. She never got to meet her boy. But she found herself wanting to.
While the war raged on, evident by the constant ebb and flow of the bodies around her, she stared blank faced and blank mindedly into the darkness as her mind created scenarios that would never happen.
"I think you should let me diagnose you now." Draco presented her with a small bowl of soup. All there was to eat was soup. A mixture of root vegetables would swirl in the too thin liquid. It tasted of the earth most times, but it was all they had. She had no appetite. None. But Malfoy's persistence annoyed her and she wanted him to go away.
So, she sipped the soup and ate the mouthful of soggy vegetables at the bottom.
"Did you hear me?" Malfoy touched her chin, and her eyes focused and found him in the dark. He was speaking so softly, it sounded like someone had passed his voice through a veil, and she was eavesdropping. "Granger," his thumb stroked her chin and her jawline, before he seemed to catch himself and he stopped. He still held her face, determined to make his point. "Granger, it's been three days, I need to do a proper diagnostic, to understand-"
Hermione pulled her face from the rough pads of his fingers. He sighed.
Her stomach had solidified inside her. Or rather, it felt like her insides didn't exist at all, instead, in its place were various parts of a machine, ticking away and doing their due diligence to keep her alive.
The chess pieces stared blankly up at her, in their various stages of destruction, on the abandoned chair that was less frequently occupied by the man who was supposed to share the emptiness inside her. She wasn't aware of Malfoy's absence, much like she wasn't aware of anything else.
"Mione."
Hermione blinked and the room flooded her mind. Her eyes had been open but she was staring for so long, everything had turned into a dark tan colour as the details blurred and her mind drifted. Green came into focus, and shockingly black hair. Harry.
A smile would have alighted her face if she had the energy to do it. Instead she blinked the dryness from her eyes and gazed at him. His hand, warm and foreign, slipped into her palm and she fought the urge to pull it away.
"How are you feeling?" The question was asked daily and Harry received the same response. Silence. Harry's eyes flitted away and back to her again. He seemed uncertain and Hermione hoped he understood. Leave. Her. Alone.
"Mione, we need you to get diagnosed because of your memories-" She blinked slowly and it somehow silenced him. He sighed and shifted nervously.
"I came to tell you something." His eyes flickered away again and then back to her. "We need to go." Something stirred inside her at his words. Like the tail end of a wind under a door, shifting the dust bunnies on the other side, moving them into life. But they settled quickly, and the mechanical insides ticked away, unrelenting.
Sirius Black was at the door, peering in at her from twenty feet away as though he were simultaneously ashamed to be there, while also serving as a reminder for his godson to hurry up. She was vaguely aware of Sirius' sighing and huffing. He tried to hide it by looking away, but sound in a quiet place travelled as clear as light could at midnight.
"I'm so sorry about what happened," Harry was saying, as his hand squeezed hers reassuringly. And that's what she hated: someone offering pity, or pretending to know what this loss felt like. "But, we're losing time now. And, you can always join us-" he paused and swallowed, his eyes flitting over her as she didn't react, "when you're ready, of course," he added hastily.
For whatever unknown reason, she looked away from Sirius and away from Harry and found Malfoy, his posture told her that he was bent over his notes, or medical charts, but his spine was rigid. His breathing was shallow. She found that staring at Malfoy's back was the only soothing thing to calm her against the rage fueled by her hollowness; rage soon to be directed at Harry, her best friend.
"Where is Ron?" Her voice was a stranger's. Hoarse from disuse, it forced her to clear her throat. A glass beside her bed refilled silently with water and she drank it. Harry had the decency to look ashamed.
"He's packing." Harry's voice was small like a scolded child; Sirius shifted anxiously and Hermione wished he would simply leave because his presence was making Hermione want to hex him. And Harry. She looked at Harry now and he wilted under her gaze. "He wants to go with Sirius and I."
"I'm sure he does." She looked at the chessboard again. "I suppose he got bored of keeping the mother of his unborn - and dead - child company."
Harry swallowed audibly. "Mione-"
"We have a war to win, right?" Hermione met his eyes steadily. Her mind felt awake, and she knew it was fleeting, but it seemed like she was intent on remembering this. The moment they left her.
Harry was an idiot, she surmised, because he had let relief light his features before it registered just how cold she was being. Her lips curled into a smile, and she knew she must look deranged. "Go get him, then. What's stopping you?"
Harry looked at her for long moments, her heart counting the seconds. Then he kissed her forehead, inhaled her scent at the crown of her hair, and left. Sirius met her eyes as he shut the door, and she somehow despised them all.
"He has PTSD, you know." Malfoy said into the corner, like it wasn't really meant for her to hear, but he wanted her to. There was no one else in the room., Madam Pomfrey had gone to lunch because there was nothing to do on this rare day of empty beds.
"Post-traumatic-stress-disorder?" Hermione recited from something she had read somewhere, once upon a time. Medical journals were a part of her childhood, but she had forgotten the acronym until now. Malfoy smiled a little at her, in the ' of course she knows this ' kind of way. It annoyed her a little but the topic interested her.
"I don't know what you guys did out there, but, what brought you three back before …" He shifted uncomfortably and shut his journal. "When you came back four days ago, it seemed like it was bad."
"Bad enough to give Harry PTSD," Hermione asked slowly. Malfoy nodded.
"They said that once you had destroyed the horcrux-"
"The what?"
"- you were attack-" Malfoy narrowed his eyes at her. She didn't like how slowly he approached her, or the sound the chair made as it dragged across the wooden floor so that he was beside her. She narrowed her eyes back at him. He seemed unsure what to do with his hands and settled for leaning onto her mattress and propping himself on his elbows.
"You don't remember?" Malfoy kept his eyes trained on her, like he was checking for lies.
"Remember what?" Hermione asked. "Horcruxes?" She had to think, and it was foggy like piecing a thousand piece puzzle together by touch and not sight. "I think Harry was looking for information on it in sixth year, but Slughorn was difficult."
That felt like the correct words. Like reciting something she had read. Malfoy relaxed a little.
"Granger, let me conduct the test." He was pleading. She could see the concern there in his eyes; in the tired creases of his downturned mouth, in the pinch of his eyebrows and pink of his ears.
"I have memory loss." She said more than asked. Malfoy nodded.
"I think you might have forgotten everything from somewhere at least after sixth year." Malfoy said in a rush, like a child excited to tell an adult something interesting they had seen earlier in the day.
"Because I remember what a Horcrux is." Hermione asked, unsure if she guessed right on how he came to his conclusion.
"Yes. And we need to know just how much you've forgotten, because it's been three years." Malfoy said cautiously. She twisted her mouth as she thought.
"Why didn't you just cast the diagnostic before?" Hermione had wondered why he didn't just diagnose her in the ways she had seen him do to other unconscious patients. He half grunted, half hummed.
"Consent is important to me, especially for traumatic events." He gave his head a little shake, his eyes shut tight. "Some people want to forget, and diagnosing you might trigger a memory barrage. You might remember everything-"
"Do it." She said after a moment. Malfoy's body sagged in relief. Steely determination was a byproduct of feeling like a machine. "I want to remember."
With magic, he lifted the back of her bed so she was sitting upright. Then he placed himself beside her legs, and she was staring down the tip of a wand belonging to a man she had once punched when they were thirteen.