Blaise Zabini finds himself doing a deep dive into glamours, with – of all people – Neville Longbottom.

Lovegood had wrangled up Longbottom, who has surprising expertise in glamours. His parents, he informs Blaise over a quick lunch at the shoddy St Mungo's café, reside in the Janus Thickey Ward at St Mungo's for incurably ill patients. To keep their minds calm during states of severe unrest, the Healers on the ward sometimes use certain types of glamours to soothe them to their surroundings.

"Some of them operate like intricate hallucinations. Cast properly, the Healers can imitate an entirely different environment," he says, stuffing his mouth with nearly half a gyro. He fits an impressive amount in there at once, and Blaise is temporarily side-tracked as Longbottom attempts to chew.

"Stotch wouldn't be one of those Healers, would he?" Blaise had finally remembered the Healer's name, fortunately before having to introduce the man to anybody.

Longbottom nods, incapable of speech.

"So, er, you and Luna –" Blaise begins, perhaps unwisely, and Neville shuts him down with a hand. He manages a heroic swallow of gyro.

"No, not any longer. If you must know," he casts a furtive look about, "I was rather hoping to ask Pansy to dinner. Is she seeing anybody, by chance?"

Parks? Blaise doesn't think so.

"Why do you ask about the glamours?" Neville asks, mouth otherwise unoccupied for two questions in a row.

"We're doing some research into what the Death Eaters were experimenting with during the war. One of the possibilities was a type of glamour similar to what you're describing – but used in horrible ways. Mind taking a look for us?"

He'll keep a sharp eye out for Stotch on the way.

Pansy sees Blaise stride into the lab with the Healer named Stotch in tow, and – good gods – Neville. She turns her back at once, trying her best to seem busy, while she straightens her pencil skirt and smooths out her hair.

"Hello, there Neville," says Luna with a broad smile, eyes fixed somewhere around his right ear. "How are you doing tonight? It's nice to see you."

"Er, hello, Luna," he mumbles, his gaze darting around until it lands on Pansy. She feels the shared awkwardness at once and fervently hopes she's not as red as she feels. Her cheeks must be flaming.

Blaise cuts in, oblivious to this. "Thank you for connecting me with Neville, Luna. He was very helpful. He and Healer Stotch might be able to provide some clarity on the glamours."

Stotch looks uncomfortable, now, and Pansy's glad to shift some of it to somebody else. She keeps her stare firmly on the Healer, but it becomes difficult to ignore Luna, who drifts around the room at random.

Stotch doesn't seem to mind. "I'm a little embarrassed, truth be told." He looks at Elena Vasile, and then Slughorn. "I never even thought about this."

"No one knew there was a glamour present at all until recently, and I had no one to collaborate with until a week ago," Vasile emphasises, though gently. "Now that we're able to work together – with or without Hermione's consent," she hedges in discomfort, "we're making much faster progress."

"She's not here to consent, but I'm driving this research. She can be angry if she chooses. I'll take it. This is a research team hired and funded by the Malfoy family, investigating experimental Dark curses being developed during the war. Continue, Stotch."

Draco's leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed. Pansy, as ever, has to respect the Slytherin-style justification. There's a reason most politicians are Slytherins. Theo's positioned at Draco's shoulder and Luna brightens noticeably at the sight of him.

"Well, it's much as you've surmised. The right glamour could impart a false reality."

"Show me," Draco commands, still against the wall. Stotch looks supremely nervous but raises his wand, before lowering it.

"What fiction would you like?"

"Does it matter? No; make it something they could have used in the war. Not what St Mungo's is using in Janus Thickey."

This doesn't seem to ease Stotch's mind at all. He raises his wand again and releases a non-verbal spell that drifts from his wand like a mist. It's nearly clear but has a distinct shine in the angle of the light behind him.

Draco is still for a few moments, stretching to nearly a full minute. The room watches in silence, and Pansy notices Luna slowly make her way towards Theo. Her eyes don't leave Draco, either, but she reaches one hand up to yank out one of Theo's curly brown hairs with two slender fingers.

He flinches, but otherwise seems to shiver a bit. Pansy files it away for later, amused. She herself lost one to the batty blonde Unspeakable not thirty minutes ago and wonders if Luna will attempt to get one from Blaise's short-cropped head. She might be able to snag one from his goatee, but it'll be harder to do on the sly. Pansy hopes she tries this afternoon.

"I read their auras," Luna had shrugged absently, already staring at Slughorn. "And I keep them for later. I have a sealed jar."

Draco shakes his head violently, shuddering as if he was sloughing off an invisible cloak. "That was – bizarre." He seems disoriented. "How long has it been?"

Pansy glances at the others. "Two minutes?"

"Two minutes?" He blanches, eyes wide. "I lived through being notified my father died, my mother arriving and sobbing all over me, getting ready for a funeral, preparing a eulogy, the service itself. Two minutes?"

Stotch, profoundly uncomfortable (bordering on fear, if Pansy's reading him correctly), offers a thin, "…Sorry about that."

"No, I asked. That was wild, though. Had that level of development been reached during the war?"

Stotch looks at Luna, who moves over to the book on the table. She runs a hand over it, fingers streaking down the stack of pages. "Nearly, but not quite. That is very impressive. Very difficult."

Nothing here makes sense to Pansy, who doesn't pretend to have proficiency in any of this. But there's no doubt of the use it could have in the Janus Thickey Ward, where an agitated patient could be soothed in a matter of minutes. She watches the dark-haired Healer, who lifts one of the purple vials up to the light. There's a slight shimmer to it when it tilts, something that strikes Pansy as unexpectedly creepy. It grows darker purple at the edges, the contact points at the Healer's fingertips.

"So…" she begins, wanting to make sense of it and feeling quite underwater, "that type of glamour was part of the curse?"

"We think so," says Vasile. "Now that we know this, I'm going to begin testing it immediately."

"Do you have enough samples?"

"I don't need more from Hermione. I want to recreate it and see if it matches what I took from her. With that book of records, I've finally been able to cast the modified type of Mind Flayer – I think. Now I have this to work with, too. When I can combine every component, I'll know we're nearly there."

A hush falls, giving Pansy a bit of a chill. It didn't feel coordinated, but everyone feels the gravity of it.

Or maybe the chill is just because she can feel Neville's eyes on her.

"Then what?" Draco says at last. "How do we fix it?"

"We don't know quite yet. But this is farther than anybody's ever gotten," Stotch says in a solemn tone. Vasile nods distantly, still inspecting the vial with the curse still trying to reach her skin through the glass.

Pansy scans the room, finding nearly every eye locked on the same vial, seeing what Vasile sees – except for two people: Neville (watching Pansy, and doesn't she get the most electric little jolt when their eyes meet) and Theo, watching Luna. Pansy has no idea if Theo feels similarly electric, but it's something she'd recommend, if asked.

She thought Neville and Luna were still together but it doesn't seem that way, and suddenly she's quite warm under the collar.

Ginny expects at least a bit of friction at Gringotts, even with Harry being Harry. They are trying to enter someone else's vault, after all, and Ginny's prepared to argue the point. He's Harry Potter, the Chosen One, and he's entering the vault of his oldest friend who fought alongside him against Voldemort – all that decade-old rot, if necessary, to insist that they aren't up to anything untoward. Harry would never rely on those sorts of things, but Ginny has no such compunctions. This is the moment to do what needs doing.

She won't hesitate to exploit Harry's long list of accolades (she'll keep the Order of Merlin, First Class that he received tucked in her back pocket as a last resort), but they don't need to. The goblins don't blink.

Harry shows them the required key, and since Hermione doesn't have old pureblood ties to the bank, there are no other blood wards or ancestral protections on her vault.

Ginny has the oddest sensation of déjà vu, which is absurd, because she wasn't here for the infamous Gringotts heist of 1998. But she's always wished she'd been – dragon included, please and thank you – and although the only original thief here is Harry, Ginny still looks around in wonder, imagining how it would have been to impersonate a Death Eater sneaking into one of the most heavily-guarded vaults. The key alone could not have gained access to the Lestrange vault, Ginny is quite sure.

But there are a few similarities she lets herself briefly appreciate. The owner of the vault would certainly not want them here, for one thing, and they're stealing what they're stealing for a Good and Noble Purpose.

Ginny always felt she'd have done well in Slytherin, easily able to rationalise her actions. Some of that was years of the bundled 'Fred and George' influence, which she'd have to be daft to ignore. But she's always felt the pull towards a little extra bit of troublemaking. She contemplates whether the Sorting Hat considered putting her twin brothers in Slytherin and decides to ask George about it later.

It's a relief how comfortable being with Harry is. Ginny'd been concerned. They hadn't seen each other since he'd left, and although they'd parted on good terms at long last, she'd worried it would be awkward. The urgency of the situation brushed all that aside, however, and she's extraordinarily relieved about it.

Harry even confessed that he's seeing someone new, in Helsinki, though he only just got settled in. It seemed the wrong time to ask for details, but Ginny's happy for him. She and Blaise – well, they haven't told anyone yet, but Ginny's decided she's going to tell Hermione as soon as they find her to break any tension. It'll be a good verbal confringo to shake things up if it seems needed.

The goblin guiding them – Balkor, or something like that; Ginny knows it's the height of impoliteness to ask them to repeat it and she'll suffer through using no name at all rather than risk fumbling over it – stops the cart at a modest, smaller vault. It's the sort used regularly by everyday wizarding citizens, not the totally mental old, inbred cohort.

The vault swings open with a weight and severity completely disproportionate to the emptiness of it. A meagre stack of folders sits on the floor in the middle, and as Harry seems too dumbstruck to approach them, Ginny snatches the lot.

She doesn't know what the bloody hell is going on with Hermione, but the trail Hermione herself left led them straight here. Ginny has a horrible fear that 'after I'm gone' meant after her death, which leads her to believe her friend is thinking of doing something stupid. She hasn't the faintest clue why Hermione would – and she's battling back her own distinct hurt and insult at being kept in the dark about any problems Hermione's struggling with – but she knows mentioning it out loud to Harry could be devastating.

Harry's likely come to similar conclusions, but Ginny knows him well enough to know that voicing them breathes life into them. Harry needs to keep things like this abstract, convince himself he's being ridiculous if he must. Ginny saying the same would make it real to him.

Then the point of debate neatly resolves itself.

"One's got your name on," she says, a little distantly to her own ears. Harry holds out a hand and she forks it over without another word, sifting through the rest. Pansy, Ron, Theo and Blaise (sharing one, oddly), Ginny. Mrs and Mr Weasley. Some unexpected: Kingsley Shacklebolt. Some outright bizarre: Poppy Pomfrey. Horace Slughorn. Liopolde Stotch.

Draco.

"Are you quite finished?" barks Balkor in impatience, nearly swinging the heavy vault door shut on them, and Ginny and Harry both leap to follow the goblin back to the rickety cart without another word. Ginny has the presence of mind to tuck the set of folders back under her arm tightly before they depart, but her own is clenched between her fingers. Gods, why can't she read it here? The wait is driving her mad.

Some are thicker than others – a lot thicker. The thickest one in the stack she still holds is Ron's, and Ginny has a horrible sense of foreboding about what's inside them. Harry managed to get the gist of his, having started reading it before Ginny ever reached her own. Sitting behind her, he's making strangled noises that Ginny doesn't think are the work of the cart's horrifying speed and dubious personal safety features.

"What is it?" she shrieks behind her, long red hair whipping Harry in the face, but he doesn't answer. Maybe he can't and that's definitely worse. Ginny resists the urge to fling the emergency brake on the cart to read everything right here, four-hundred-metre drop be damned.

Balkor finally brings the cart to a halt at the exit and Ginny jumps out. She extends a hand to Harry automatically, but he's frozen in his seat. Looking numb, his face slowly lifts to meet hers.

"She's dying."

Something isn't sitting right with Pansy and she can't quite put her little manicured nail on it. She tried to tell herself that Neville's blatant attention has her off-kilter, and even though it definitely does, acknowledging it doesn't resolve the odd feeling she has.

She moves towards Luna, amused to see Neville's face grow a tad anxious. "Lovegood, can we talk?"

The drifty witch turns around and nods, favouring Pansy with excruciatingly direct eye contact. "Of course, what about? Is it Neville Longbottom? We were together. But not anymore. No more intercourse for us. Call him over now."

Pansy nearly chokes and battens down an ill-timed swallow that threatens to reappear. "Ah, no. No, I want to talk about this with someone who isn't a Healer. Because I have no idea what they're all talking about, and even though I know you know more than I do, you're the closest thing to a regular person here."

"That would be Neville," Luna insists with a serene smile, "but I'm happy to try, too. Let's sit over here."

Ignoring that she couldn't possibly speak to Neville with anything approaching sense just now, Pansy aims her wayward train of thought towards Luna instead.

"The glamour is bothering me."

"The glamour, you say? Neville's quite adept with those –"

"I'd rather speak with you, if that's alright."

"Seen Theo's aura? It's quite agreeable, yes? He shines so brightly. It's very pretty. He's very unencumbered. Not much like Neville's. His was always odd. It was entwined with your own. I know it was yours. Once I pulled your hair, now it's all so obvious -"

That's four times in a row that Luna's brought up Neville or Neville-adjacent talk, and for the second time in a row, Pansy cuts her off. No Neville. Not if she wants to concentrate, and Hermione's more important. Mustn't think too much about Neville, or Pansy will be (1) sprinting home to change her knickers or (2) too mortified to stand up from her chair without a towel to dry it off. Come to that, both of those things seem likely, just in reverse order. Standing, abject humiliation, towel for chair, new knickers for Pansy Parkinson.

She's doomed.

Hermione flops bonelessly out of the Floo in the Hotel Estheréa, utterly exhausted. Two Apparitions from Finland to the Netherlands shouldn't have wiped her the way it did, and she thinks her latent anxiety and stress might still be keeping her a bit drained. At least the Floo journey was short and she doesn't have nausea to contend with, too.

Another tiny favour she wants to cheer about, if she had the energy: Septimus is not in his portrait. He must be in his other one at the Manor and Hermione slinks off to find the proprietor, Esther (or Estheréa, if one prefers accuracy), to obtain herself a room. She hopes they have one; bugger, she hadn't considered that. She's too tired to go somewhere else, and figures if they don't have a magical room open, she'll take a Muggle one. Surely they have something.

But she's in luck, for what feels like the first time in over a week and could cry in relief. Even Esther doesn't seem to recognise that she was here recently, with her gorgeous, tall, blonde companion the relative of Septimus Malfoy, which could easily have been memorable. No, Hermione can relax into the anonymity she's craving, if only for a little while.

Curled up under the cushy bedcovers, Hermione reflects on the urge that brought her here to begin with. No, nothing else came to immediate mind and she'd been in a bit of a hurry, but it was more than that. She'd been happy here so recently. She'd like to see other places, soon, and travel more. A lot more. But she still feels a need to recover, to just rest and… and mourn. Mourn herself, Draco, the loss of what she could have had. The life she could have had.

At moments, it feels like she was thrown right back into the stages of grief. She's past denial. Stage one is over. But now she's a mix, bridging anger and depression, caught in a hurricane of emotion and the numbing apathy that has her laying here right now.

Dimly, she recalls 'bargaining' is supposed to be the middle stage between the two she currently feels. What would she give for more time? What would be frittered away? How could she negotiate this like a Slytherin, if it were even possible?

She wouldn't trade Draco for more time. What good is more time if it's spent alone? She wants both; the time and him to spend it with. They could have been here together, doing the exact same things they did last time or entirely new things. They could have done that for years and years without growing bored of it. If she'd ended things with Ron sooner, maybe they could have been doing it for years together, already.

Suddenly Hermione is so furiously angry she can't contain it anymore.

She wards the suite she's in - locking, silencing, guarding - and proceeds to destroy it.

Her rage spills out. The unfairness of it all, what she had to do to her friends, to everyone she left behind. Her selfishness and self-loathing and misery all pour forth. Her wand rises and falls again and again, as the tears come down.

She screams and shrieks and falls apart, completely and utterly alone.

Pansy is steeped in the middle of a (very distracted) brainstorming session with Luna, doing her damnedest to pay attention to what matters the most. Her finger twirls attempted ringlets in her bolt-straight hair.

"Hermione's dying. The curse is killing her; fine – well, no, not fine, but you know what I'm trying to say. What if the glamour had another purpose? What if it's meant to make her think she's dying?"

Without her notice, Elena Vasile has wandered over. Stotch isn't far behind, and – Pansy can't help but notice this titbit – so does bloody blasted Neville sodding Longbottom. She tries to focus, cheeks heating up.

"I have no idea what I'm talking about; ignore me, please."

"No, keep going," Elena says thoughtfully as she studies Pansy, who swallows hard, feeling rather on the spot.

"Well, er… what if part of the curse is an illusion? What if it wasn't just masking the curse itself, but meant to do something to her?"

The door slams open and all nine people in the lab jump. Two things get knocked over outside Pansy's field of vision, and Slughorn spills his fresh cup of black coffee on his oversized shoes, swearing.

Ginny and Harry stand in the lab doorway, waving a stack of folders in the air. Pansy recognises these as something Hermione frequently had, but frequently hid. She'd assumed they had to do with her confidential work, and nearly groans. Of course, they had. It had been both.

Ginny flings folders at people with the skill of a talented Quidditch player, flicking them with a wrist. Some stay clamped under her arm, but one she holds back and looks uncertain, hedging. Harry takes over as people begin to rifle through their respective folders.

"She's dying," he announces bluntly. "I'm sorry to drop it on everyone like this, but –"

He eyes Draco with apprehension and hands out his folder, having relieved Ginny of it. Clearly expecting surprise with their proclamation of Hermione's impending death, they absorb the lack of it anywhere in the room.

"You knew?" Ginny asked Pansy, who cringes at her lies of omission. "For how long?"

"Since Saturday. She left and none of us knew why. We pieced it together, but in a different way from the pair of you, it seems."

Ginny talks directly to Pansy. "She was at Harry's."

Draco makes a choked noise and Pansy watches him with concern. His face goes red and an alarming white, in quick succession, and Ginny finishes her statement. "She must have heard me arrive. She Apparated out before I could confront her about why she disappeared. We don't know where she is now."

Draco briefly covers his face with one hand, and then shouts, "Healers out. Give us a moment. Just her friends, please."

He's staring at the folder, thin and limp, and waits until Vasile, Slughorn, and Stotch retreat into one of the ancillary lab rooms.

Luna gazes around and turns to Neville. "Come on now, Neville. She didn't leave us something. We should go out, too."

She'd like to argue with Lovegood's embarrassing level of bluntness, but Pansy finds she's incapable of speech with the folder in her hand. It's an odd feeling. She flips it open, knowing inherently what it must be.

Knowing what she knows now, it's obvious. How could it not be?

Pansy, I'm so sorry I didn't tell you. I'm so sorry you found out this way. I wish I could say it in a way that justifies things, but I know nothing could. I wish I was stronger. I wish I could have said something. I wish loads of things. But I want to tell you how happy I am we became friends.

You saw me in line at the café downstairs in the lobby that first time and complimented my skirt. I thought you sounded impressed that I'd successfully managed to dress myself in the morning and was ready to retort something… less snappy, I'm sure, but then I realised you meant it. You liked the skirt.

She can't keep going. Her eyes are full of tears and she struggles to muffle a sob. The way Hermione had phrased it, it's clear she had written this sitting right in this lab.

Flipping through, there must be close to ten pages of parchment. Some are longer and fuller than others. Some just have a paragraph, but nearly all of them start the same.

I'm so sorry you found out this way. I'm sorry I didn't tell you.

And suddenly, Pansy is so angry. How long had Hermione been writing these? Looking around, most of the ones she sees are similar in bulk to hers. But Harry's is thick and Pansy knows she must have been writing it the longest. Ginny has another thick one tucked under her armpit and that must belong to Ron.

Draco's is thin and Pansy's heart breaks for him. She sees his jaw moving back and forth. His fist closes over one page and then he hurriedly straightens it again, flattening it out as if it's precious.

Pansy, look after him. He's going to need you.

She goes over without planning to and puts a hand on his arm.

"Want to break things?"

He does.

Lovegood provides nicely, showing them a particular room in the Department of Mysteries they can destroy and restore again and again. She says, in her odd way of speaking, that it's used to explore and catalogue Muggle things like automobiles, the current point of interest for study. These seem needlessly complex to Pansy, but Luna explains that they encompass multiple areas of Muggle ingenuity in one big package.

Also, they get wrecked a lot. Apparently a lot. And Muggles try and fix them over and over, and the Muggle Prime Minister wants the British Ministry to find a way to make them more durable – or, at the very least, less hazardous to human cargo inside.

All that means is that they don't need to worry about destroying something valuable. The destruction of these goes towards testing – or some such rot. Pansy doesn't care, and neither it seems, does Draco.

Ginny finds Pansy leaning against the wall, taking a short break. She's got a wary eye on Draco, who seems keen on battering down loads of things in his path, and Ginny follows her line of sight.

"How is he?"

Pansy considers, fidgeting with her wand between her fingers. "Not great. He's got something to focus on, for now. He's holding up but I think this has all been harder on him than her leaving was. I think he was in shock then, but everything we've found out is just one blow after another. If the research hits another dead end, I'm not sure where his pent-up anger will take him. I think it really hurt him that she went to Harry."

Ginny winces a little. "I can understand that. But she didn't tell Harry, either."

Pansy stops, staring. "She… didn't?"

"No, I thought I said earlier – either way, if it didn't come across, no. Hermione didn't tell Harry any of this. She just said she'd broken up with Draco and needed time to clear her head."

"How'd the two of you get the folders?" Pansy can't follow any of this. She's still angry with Hermione, too. All the times they sat in that lab upstairs, chatting about light things, heavier things. The times she caught Hermione crying. None of it ever made Hermione feel like she could tell Pansy what really mattered? What could she have done differently? What should she have done?

"When she Disapparated out before I could confront her, she left a Gringotts key behind. A note told Harry to use it 'after she was gone.' We interpreted that literally and went straight to Gringotts."

Pansy chuckles under her breath. "Nice one, Weasley. But – she wouldn't overlook something like that. Not Hermione. I think… some part of her wants us to know. I have to believe that, even if she couldn't tell us herself. She must know if she left that behind and it was our only lead, we'd use it."

The two witches fall silent for a minute before Pansy asks, "Aren't you angry with her?" Ginny sounds mostly sad and regretful, and Pansy can't figure it.

Ginny starts to talk and Draco wanders over. "At the end of the war… none of them could tell anybody anything. Every secret was held within. It drove me mental when Harry wouldn't tell me anything. He never said a word, ever. I knew they had secrets and he refused me every single one, and it made me want to scream. He thought he was doing what was best by me, but I couldn't accept that for a long, long time."

They both watch Ginny thoughtfully. Pansy doesn't think either of them has ever heard the war from this point of view, someone who was so close to the three of them and yet still outside the circle. How would that have felt?

"And Hermione was the one carrying the other two; nobody can deny that. Harry held the stress of his connection with Voldemort, and Hermione held everything else. Where to go, what to do, how to survive there. How to keep them all alive at least long enough to end the war. I don't think she ever thought all three of them would live through it. I can't imagine the weight she carried."

Draco's face twists and Pansy wants to interrupt, wants to tell him that Hermione hadn't told Harry either, but Ginny's still talking.

"I don't know what happened during that battle down here," she looks around, "at the end of the war and most of us probably never will. But I'm sure she didn't want to add any stress or uncertainty. If Harry and Ron thought there was something wrong with her… she wouldn't have put herself in front of them to worry about. If she could keep it to herself, I'm sure she did.

"And then…" Ginny shrugs helplessly, glancing around at the destruction in the room. "Then, maybe it was just habit. Habit and a deep desire to resolve it before she ever had to admit it was still there. You know; she could figure out anything. She'd always been able to sort it out. The next thing she knew, year after year had passed."

('It's hard for me to accept that I might be at a dead end. Nothing's ever been unsolvable if I just worked hard enough. It feels like failure, that I can't do it')

Hermione's words from that long-ago chat in her lab come rushing back to Pansy and her throat grows thick.

"And, look; yes, it's self-absorbed and narcissistic and incredibly big-headed, but Hermione probably figured none of us could figure it out if she couldn't. When has any of us been able to best her in anything?"

Ginny laughs and Pansy finds herself laughing a little, too. She certainly wouldn't have been any help. But she still could have been there.

Draco explodes another automobile without warning and stalks back over to the centre of the floor. The witches exchange a pained look.

Draco wonders if there'd be any intriguing aspects to an intact Muggle automobile and decides idle curiosity doesn't outrank his need to blow things up.

She went to Potter over him. Potter, who had a fucking folder as thick as a notebook, full of letters and missives and goodbyes. She ran away from Draco, and ran to Potter. She'd left him and went –

His throat lumps up again and he blasts another automobile, enjoying the way the black circles at the bottom splinter out into ropes twisting in the air.

What more could he have done to make her stay? How did he let her believe, even for a minute, that he wouldn't want to be there for her? With her, through anything? It's nothing less than a failing on his part, and now they have no idea where she is.

Wait. Potter's here.

That thought stands out from his jumbled, tortured thoughts. Potter's down here right now. Isn't he? Draco looks around, and yes; there's the bespectacled git over there, talking quietly to Longbottom with his head hanging low.

Time for a talk.

A gentle throat-clearing nevertheless pierces the air. Bewildered, Hermione lifts her head.

She's been buried in one of the plush hotel pillows. It's the feather kind, which she absolutely cannot stand, and she destroyed every other one in the room to immense satisfaction. Her near-irrational hatred stems from their utter uselessness, their flaccid existence a complete waste of space. When she sleeps, she hates sinking into the middle of one. Her head ends up practically against the mattress with both pillow sides floofed up by her ears, and then she inevitably suffocates herself when she rolls on her side in her sleep.

Now, that exact quality is what makes them so fantastic to scream into. She'd saved one and only one.

"Are you alright, dear? I thought I'd best not interrupt, but now that you've reached a bit of a stopping point, I figured I ought to check."

Hermione hadn't realised she had an audience. In hindsight, the presence of a portrait shouldn't be a surprise. Glancing around, she finally spots it on a wall nearer the entry, facing a window overlooking a beautiful, colourful garden outside on the grounds.

She's glad it's not in the bedroom. Bit creepy, that.

Wiping her eyes and feeling rather embarrassed, she approaches it. "Er, sorry about the -" she gestures around with a hand. Looking at the destruction she wrought, she feels like a child at the end of a vibrant public temper tantrum.

"Not at all," says the young woman in the portrait, a regal, high-born lady in old-fashioned dress, complete with hoops and all. Her light brown hair hangs in perfectly coiffed ringlets in an up-do with curls hanging just past her shoulders, and she has lovely, large hazel eyes. "What's the matter?"

Hermione has set to repairing what she can in the room and unexpectedly comes right out with it. "I've been given a short time to live. I'm not handling it well. Or at least, I thought I'd handle it better than this."

She and the portrait both survey the damage in silence.

After all the dancing around it, it felt surprisingly good to just say it aloud. She inhales deeply and turns to face the small sofa, which needs quite a lot of work. "It's not like I haven't known about it. It's just – hitting home, I guess. It seems more immediate, more tangible. I don't know."

"What's your name?"

"Hermione," she answers absently, still sniffling a little as she repairs the back cushion.

"Hermione," the portraits repeats in a soft voice. "Shakespeare."

She doesn't respond, fastening the stumpy wooden leg back to the right corner of the sofa.

"Maybe you shouldn't be alone, Hermione. Is there someone who should be with you right now? You shouldn't go through this on your own, especially if you're not handling it well. And don't give me that look; you just said it yourself."

"I don't want to make the people I care about most watch me die. There's nothing anyone can do and I don't want – I don't their pity, or their helplessness, or their misery at the situation on top of mine. I just want to travel a bit on my own and do a few more things I never got to do."

The portrait falls quiet and Hermione repairs a precarious wall sconce that luckily wasn't lit when she began wrecking things – although she thinks she might have noticed if she'd set the place on fire.

"Have you been to Amsterdam before?"

"Yes," she says, her words a little thick. She dabs at her nose again. "Just the other week, for the first time. I came back here because it – it felt familiar."

"You enjoyed it here?"

"Very much." More tears are threatening to fall now, and she sits down hard on the sofa with her face in her hands. It still wobbles and she forces herself back up. More to do; this is her fault. Her damages.

"You don't have long left to live, but part of living is sharing it with people whom we love. You can wander around new cities alone and miserable, but I don't call that living."

Hermione doesn't want her opinion and turns her back to the portrait, focussing on the furniture in front of her, what's left to repair.

"You want to see places and things you never have, and yet you came back to this one. There's a reason."

She doesn't want to be confronted about this. She knows everyone in her life would disagree with her current path. In a sudden rush of impatience, she stalks closer, prepared to tell the portrait to leave it alone. It's not her business. She'll switch rooms if she must.

The shiny golden placard on the frame makes her stop. Her eyes rise to the elegant young lady, who is calmly watching her movements. She almost stutters, unable to take her eyes away.

"You're… Catharina."