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It started with a burning in her chest, on a quiet autumn morning. The strange feeling was gone as quickly as it had appeared, and she thought nothing of it. She had gotten used to random pains in her chest since the battle at the Department of Mysteries.
It came back, two weeks later. And again, a week after.
Two months after the first appearance of the sensation, it felt as if her lungs were constantly on fire.
The healer she saw told her it was nothing to worry about. A minor infection due to the cold that would be gone in a couple of weeks if she took the right potions. She took the potions, but the burning did not go away.
Then came the cough. One inconspicuous little cough that quickly turned into a constant as the burning spread out to her throat.
When the new potions her healer gave her only made her cough harder, Ron took her to a different healer.
“I was cursed a few years ago,” Hermione explained when the old witch frowned at the purple scar on her chest. “It should have killed me but I survived.”
“Maybe not for long.”
With no more explanations and a prescription for a whole new set of potions, Ron’s healer sent her to a specialist. A specialist with no manners or empathy who told her no potion in the world could help her.
Dolohov’s curse was acting up again. His magic had bonded her to him, and the part of him that was in her was slowly killing her.
The specialist wrote her an explanation as detailed as he could, which barely covered half a page of parchment, and told her she didn’t have more than a year left to live before sending Hermione back home.
Ron told her he’d make her year special. The best of her short life. All her friends offered him their help. Hermione refused.
She wouldn’t simply accept death. She couldn’t, not after all she had gone through to survive.
She took her half parchment of explanations to Kingsley, who didn’t take much convincing to allow her to meet with Dolohov. The Minister for Magic, her friend, was the first to tell her he’d do what he could to stop her death and she cried for longer than she would ever admit to anyone at his words.
She came back to the Ministry a week later and was greeted by Kingsley who announced he had made a deal with Dolohov. If the Death Eater could find a way to unbind them without killing her, his sentence would be reduced to fifteen years. The catch? She would have to spend time with him for him to study the effect of his curse.
Ron took the news of her planned meetings with the prisoner even worse than he took the news of her upcoming death.
“You want to spend time with that bastard? Wake up, Hermione! He’s never going to save you, he’s a Death Eater! His nickname for you is probably a slur!”
No, it wasn’t, so she wasn’t sure what the russian word he used to address her meant. Hermione didn’t budge.
Her first meeting with Dolohov went better than expected.
He offered her his hand and without needing any prompting, Hermione took it. She stopped coughing. The burning receded. He didn’t throw any slur at her, didn’t criticize or mock her. He simply asked her questions, took notes of her answers, and compared them to the notes the Aurors had brought from all the things that had been confiscated in his home after his arrest.
Two days went by before the burning and coughing were back. She waited for three more before asking to go back to Azkaban.
To Ron’s displeasure, their meetings became a weekly event.
“You could be happy right now,” he told her one day when exasperated by his constant foul mood, she asked what was wrong with him. “We could be happy. Instead, you’re obsessing over a curse that can’t be lifted and spending every weekend in Azkaban.”
“It’s not that simple.”
Curses of that complexity were not that simple. Neither was happiness, but how could she ever tell him that?
“It could be,” Ron insisted, his tone harder. "What's the deal with you always wanting to ruin your own life?"
“I want to live!” She snapped. “That’s my deal! I want a future! A career! I want grey hair and tons of photo albums I’ll store somewhere and forget everything about for decades before opening them again. I want a chance to have a husband, children, pets, and a house in a stupidly uninspiring neighborhood. I want a chance to decide I don’t want any of that and to become the weird aunt no one knows much about but love anyway because she always brings gifts when she visits. I want everything I was promised I’ll have when I fought against Voldemort!”
Her rant fell into a deaf ear, and so did Ron’s warning that Dolohov wouldn’t be the one who would give her any of that.
She celebrated her twenty-second birthday in the depressing prison, and couldn’t have cared less. Ron wasn’t in their apartment when she came back that evening and she didn’t care about that either.
She was fascinated by Dolohov. His notes were like an open window to the inner workings of his mind, and Hermione could not get herself to close the blinds, even when she was away from the dark little room where they studied his curse together.
His proximity chased the pain of his curse away. It prolonged her life, too, and maybe she shouldn’t have started associating him with the thing she wanted most. Try as she might, Dolohov was her ticket to survival.
“I broke up with Ron,” she announced as soon as she arrived in Azkaban at the end of December.
She didn’t know why she felt the need to tell him. They didn’t talk much outside of the necessary conversations about his curse.
“Good girl,” Dolohov congratulated with what Hermione assumed was his version of a smile.
Two years went by.
Two years of weekly meetings. Two years of intellectual debates with the man that had almost taken her life, of stolen glances exchanged over runes and equations. Two years of Harry and Ginny becoming hesitant to invite her to their home, Ron still coming over without a warning anytime he felt like it and not being able to stand being in the same room as her.
Two years of Hermione assembling bits and pieces of information Dolohov gave her, like the pieces of a blurry puzzle.
While the curse was meant to kill her, it wasn’t what his intention had been when casting it. She was merely a chess piece he had chosen to take a bet on when faced with the realization that the powerful master he had thought was back turned out to be a degenerate. He had bonded himself to her, wanting to believe the supposed genius muggle-born best friend of Harry Potter would become important to the Wizarding World if her side won the war. Important enough for people like the Minister for Magic to be willing to make a deal with him. The fact that she had been in pain, dying, had only been a detail meant to motivate whoever would be in charge to act fast.
“What if I hadn’t been popular enough?” She asked eventually. “You would have let me die for a chance to get out of here?”
“I’d curse and kill anyone for a chance at freedom,” he answered without a second of hesitation.
“I could have died.”
“Then I would have died with you. Death is a form of freedom, I suppose.”
Dolohov offered to strengthen their bond to create a balance between their magic. His magic wouldn’t be so corrosive to her if hers was part of him. She didn’t consider his offer for long before agreeing.
She was fully bonded to him, and her life wasn’t in danger anymore.
Before she left Azkaban for the last time, he gave her a piece of paper. An address was written on it. She didn’t ask for an explanation before passing the door. Didn’t need it.
The years went in a blur.
She left Britain as soon as she obtained her mastery, wanting to experience more of the life she had sacrificed so much to have a chance at.
She met scholars, wrote articles and books. She met people that became new friends, some that became lovers. Two that broke her heart. She took it all, the good and the bad, always needing more to remind herself that she was alive.
She came back to Britain a few times. Made a speech at Neville’s wedding, babysitted for Harry and Ginny, helped Luna move her things into the house she and Rolf had bought a month into meeting each other, planned a party for Dean’s divorce.
She kept track of Dolohov’s whereabouts too.
The day he was released from Azkaban, she apparated to the address he had given her, abandoning her things behind her in the small apartment she had bought in Berlin. She waited. A day. Two days. A week.
He was coughing when he finally appeared, the distance taking as much of a toll on him as it had on her fifteen years ago, and she welcomed him with open arms.
“I’m sorry,” she offered a few days later, as he inspected the massive collection of books she had moved in that very morning.
“It’s alright, Solnishko. I actually thought you’d have more books than that.”
“I meant about all of this,” she clarified with a vague gesture toward the walls of the room they were in. “Living together. Being bonded. That can’t be what you meant when you planned for your freedom.”
Rising to his feet, Antonin approached her, stopping so close she had to bend her neck to see his face.
“I cursed you to be free of masters and cells, but I never wished to be freed from you.”
His hands cupped her jaw as his eyebrows dropped into a frown.
“Do you want me to apologize? For forcing you into a life you didn’t want?”
Hermione shook her head without hesitation. She had experienced life. Thirty-nine years of it. None of it was worth living for when she missed half of herself.
“Good,” he grunted. “Because I wasn’t planning on it.”
She laughed and it was the end of it.
She wasn’t in love with him, not in the way she had been with other people before. It was something else between them. Something visceral that she couldn’t deny herself of.
Antonin was simply a part of her. His presence made her whole.
Maybe that was enough to live for.