Malfoy was gone often. Madam Pomfrey would walk with her around the house, and Hermione never turned the corner toward the cemetery. When she was finished with the book, she would accompany her old school nurse to the recuperation floor and observe how the infirmary functioned.
Anne Rice kept her company as a woman and her child were scanned. The mother – Hermione assumed it was the girl's mother – was without a wand. The thin woman was terrified. She couldn't apparate and had found help at the cafe. Headquarters sent her by portkey.
Nothing was physically wrong with them, so Madam Pomfrey helped her with paperwork, sent several glowing orbs of Patronuses and finally, Hermione watched them leave. She observed the man who met the pair of them at the top of the hill giving the woman something, and then they all disappeared.
"Where's Malfoy?" Page 214 of Anne Rice stared up at her, unread. Madam Pomfrey looked at her in that same tired way Malfoy would. "I mean, he's gone so much, and-" She was about to say she missed him. Which was absurd. Madam Pomfrey gave a knowing look and Hermione shut the book with a loud clap.
"He's studying, dear." Madam Pomfrey returned to her papers. "Or whatever he does when the emergency floor is out of patients."
"I'm still here." Hermione didn't understand why she was so angry. There was no discernible cause of it. "I'm still a patient."
There it was. Pity.
She glared at Madam Pomfrey and stood abruptly, intending to go back to the basement. She didn't. The countryside was brilliant today. A rare autumn day where the sky was free of clouds, brilliant blue, the grass lay flat from constant beration of the wind, the distant but distinct scent of manure tinted the breeze.
She saw him return. He was a hillside away, and the uneasiness she was unaware existed until that very moment, dissipated.
—
"I want my wand back." Hermione was finished with her Anne Rice book for the second time. It lay beside her like a diary of her thoughts when all it contained was a world different from hers. Malfoy shifted in his chair, the scratching of his quill stopped, but he didn't turn to look at her.
He had, at some point, stopped looking at her.
"I was wondering when you would ask about it," he more muttered to himself than to her. He turned, but still, his eyes didn't meet hers. She almost gave an exasperated sound, but this could all be in her head and she was probably going mental. Because he and Madam Pomfrey were the only two people she had seen in a week and a half, and her boyfriend, (was he still her boyfriend?) had stopped visiting her.
"And?" She gritted out instead of yelling at him.
"I have to request one." Malfoy chewed his bottom lip. "Well, you specifically-"
"Why do I have to request one?" She frowned in confusion.
"They're destroying them." Malfoy looked out the window. And pointedly, not at her.
" Who is?" Hermione was baffled. Wands were weapons. Why would anyone destroy weapons when they were in the middle of a war? Malfoy gave her an irritated expression and she almost smiled at him because finally, the bastard deigned to look at her. She managed to scowl instead.
"The Green Bloods." Malfoy murmured. He must have realised that he said something she wouldn't understand and looked at her again. But then, to her annoyance, looked away. Again. "What they call themselves – the group of them. They're not all Death Eaters and some aren't Snatchers."
"The Green Bloods? Couldn't they have been more creative?" Hermione scoffed and she saw the tug of his mouth, but he didn't smile. "Okay," She said, with patience she didn't actually have, "they're destroying weapons like the idiots they are, and where does that leave me? Where's my wand?"
Malfoy's mouth did the yea-it-sucks twist. "It didn't come with you. My guess, Weasley didn't grab it, or you let it go before he got to you and apparated out of there."
Hermione let the revelation hang in the air like a fog. Suffocating and thick, blinding and disorientating.
"How do I make the request?" Hermione hopped off her bed and began pacing. She had a task at hand and she wanted it done as soon as possible.
"I," Malfoy's hesitant tone stopped her in her tracks. She narrowed her eyes at him as he turned back to his desk, shoulders hunched in an uncharacteristic way. His quill began scratching against paper, and she was about to ask him to finish his sentence when he turned around and held out a piece of paper to her. "I already sent one in on your behalf."
Once more. He was being entirely opposite to everything she ever knew him to be, again . Considerate, kind. He was her bloody caretaker. She took the carbon copied document. Something about him spelling her name, sitting there and writing it out, felt indescribably intimate. Like holding her hand on the hill, even if it was to steady her.
"How long does it take?" Hermione said instead of thank you. "To get one?"
"Unsure." Malfoy studied her and his eyes felt like physical touch. "Potter gave mine back to me after the entire Manor incident."
"Manor incident?" That piqued her curiosity. Malfoy went still like someone being caught doing something suspicious.
" Fuck ." She thought she heard him swear. It sounded like a sharp exhalation.
"Are you going to tell me?" She pried.
"You were all picked up by snatchers," Malfoy began begrudgingly. "I lied and said I didn't recognise Potter-"
"Why?" Hermione was becoming curiouser and curiouser. Then something else occurred to her. "I thought you've only been with us for three years?"
Malfoy's ears went pink where the light from the window shone down. "I was a little shit." He sounded bitter. She almost regretted asking. "I thought it was him, I didn't want to be wrong and it wasn't, then we summoned the Dark Lord there for no reason and ended up getting my entire family in trouble."
"Where is your family?" This time, she did regret asking. It was tactless. After losing what would have been the beginning of her own family, she didn't know if his mother and father were both dead. He looked away and she sank back into her bed, suddenly tired. "Sorry. Don't answer that."
He let her apology hang in the air like forgotten laundry.
"And thank you." Her words were hardly audible against the pounding of blood in her ears.
She stared for long minutes at the back of his head as he worked silently in the corner on what Hermione had spied to be journals. Medical journals, she concluded. When he wouldn't look at her, or acknowledge they were sharing the same air, Hermione glanced at Anne Rice again, considering a third read.
Just behind it in her field of vision was another smaller book. It was laid on top of the abandoned chess board on the shrine chair to her absent boyfriend; like it had always been there. She bent forward to pick it up and was pleased that her wounded side hardly twinged.
It was a chess strategy book. A beginner's into intermediate guide.
She looked at him again, his straight back and long neck. His hair caught the beam of light as the sun began to disappear around the house making him look like an apparition at his desk. Malfoy had become simultaneously real, and unreal to her. He was no one to her, and in the past week and a half, he was all she knew.
She picked up the chess board and set the pieces. Then she opened her new book to page one.
—
At the end of her second week, Harry came to visit.
Their hug was warm and so big. For the duration of it, Hermione felt like they were waiting on Ron to walk into the room with snacks. She was happy she showered that morning instead of skipping it with the excuse that the day was cold. Malfoy had laid out fresh clothing for her, and she hadn't had it in her to thank him. She was embarrassed:, especially about the folded knickers.
"You look good." Harry's eyes lingered on her bandaged side, only noticeable by the bulge under her beige t-shirt. "Are you feeling better?"
She could have been an asshole, but she was so happy to see her best friend, she didn't have it in her to say: No, Harry. I've lost a child and you're with the man who impregnated me and then abandoned me – to be with you.
"Yea." She pressed a palm to her wound which only felt a little sore now. "Yea, it's alright."
"It was a nasty spell you were hit with. I'm surprised you're walking around already." Harry kissed the crown of her head as he pulled her into a hug again. Harry smelled like grass and earth, the way he would smell after playing a match of Quidditch. "I'm happy you are."
"Have you had any luck?" She was being careful not to mention Ron. Harry was tactful enough to oblige.
"No. No, uh," he scratched the back of his head and he got shifty on his feet. She missed his warmth already, the only physical contact she had had besides Malfoy's pushy attempts to ensure she didn't fall over two days ago. "We've been following some leads, but we can't find the locket."
Horcruxes. Her spine tingled. "Harry, which one did we destroy the day," she gestured at herself, "this happened to me?"
Harry went white. He glanced at the door like he was planning an escape, and she just wanted to know why it was so bloody difficult to tell her what happened.
"I don't know, Hermione." He said in the way that told her he was explicitly told not to tell her anything. She growled in a burst of frustration. He took a step back. "I- you're fragile right now-"
" I'm fragile?" Hermione scoffed, a grin splitting her face and her lips. She could feel the blood bead from the crack in her lip and licked it off. "I lost a fucking baby, whose father is our best friend, and I'm being forced to stay here. Meanwhile, he gets to run away and pretend it didn't happen!" Harry recoiled, his eyes widened in fear. She couldn't stop the deluge.
Unused and unchanneled magic sounded like static in her ears.
"And he doesn't have the fucking balls to visit me, and you're here pretending all I got was bloody shafted in the lung!" Harry gaped like a fish. She scoffed again, because of course, her Golden Boy best friend was the worst person she knew ever to deal with conflict. He always froze. He always chose the least combative way out. He always relied on others.
And he was expected to lead a rebellion.
"Uh." Harry got one syllable out at least. It seemed to cultivate more. "I uh- Sirius is waiting for me upstairs." He dug into his pockets- and pulled out a wand. "I got this for you because, well, I saw the paperwork come through at HQ asking for a new one for you. I wanted to speed up the process, save you some time."
Guilt crept up and made a home inside the too small cage in her chest. Her heart throbbed painfully. Harry's eyes fell on the half-played game of chess,on her lived-in bed, and sorrow filled them like thick liquid.
"I love you, Hermione," Harry said into the silence. He hesitated to step toward her, but he did. He slipped the wand beside the chess board, planted a kiss on her cheek, pressed their skin together for a second of mild comfort, then he was gone.