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The white hospital linen slid between Hermione’s fingertips like a rasp. She matched corner to corner and edge to edge with a precision previously applied to loftier pursuits. It didn't matter in the slightest how crisp the lines of a bedsheet were beneath the weight of the wounded. But it was something to do. It was just about all she could do anymore.
So she folded sheets. She folded her hands. Folded herself into a shade of what she once was.
. . .
Staring dumbly at the closed door — arms stretched around the unwieldy box — damp cold settling on her skin — her mind and mouth reached pointlessly for a word that would no longer obey her. She leapt to the brink of tears and teetered there.
It was often the smallest inconveniences, the subtlest of indignities, that seemed to affect her the most. Hermione drew in a long, even breath, letting it round out the desolate backwaters of her lungs, suffusing her blood. She held it in for ten counted heartbeats as she searched for serenity, then pushed it back out, having found none.
Supporting the box with her knee, she managed to reach the door handle and let herself inside.
Beneath the lid, tins of cooked beets nestled against children's trainers and bars of soap cozied up to cartons of eggs.
So she sorted donations into piles. Sorted her thoughts and feelings into boxes. Sorted herself into the periphery.
. . .
Skelegrow and Pepper-up potion on the lower shelves. Calming draught on the top. She took her time tucking each pre-portioned vial away. Because she could. In the past she’d wished for a break. For the opportunity to do anything in a leisurely manner, but day after month after year, the stakes of the war only grew more grave. Urgency had been the only mode and still was. For everyone but Hermione. Apparently, leisure was a natural byproduct of irrelevancy.
So she measured potions into vials. Measured the growing void inside her. Measured the distance between how high she'd ridden and how far she’d fallen.
. . .
“Brought you a new friend, Tildy,” Hopkins sniggered from the other room. “He’ll need the standard S02 intake, and he’s to start on the serum immediately. Council’s orders.”
Hermione’s ears pricked up.
Protocol S02 – Voluntary Supportive Surrender: A Death Eater who wished to renounce their former allegiances and fight for the resistance.
A spark of adrenaline caught fire inside her; she dropped her inventory list and grabbed a vial of magic suppression serum and the appropriate forms, then dashed out of the storeroom.
“Bit of a klutz, this one, Tildy.”
She heard a laugh, then the scuff of a boot, and turned the corner just in time to see the hooded man lurch forward, wrists bound behind him, unable to break his own fall. She winced preemptively, every muscle in her body tensing in the split second before she heard the heavy thud of his body and the sharp crack of his skull against the tile. Futile rage seared through her.
Rushing past Tildy and the other wide-eyed, statue-like Mediwitches, she knelt beside the silently bleeding man and helped him sit up. When she slid his black hood down to assess his injuries, the breath caught in her throat. She turned his head toward her, hands shaking, and carefully brushed the long platinum hair, now stained and sticky with blood, away from Draco Malfoy’s battered face. He met her with a look of shock so paralysing that she nearly forgot herself. Like, sitting there in the once aptly named Granger Infirmary, she was the completely unfathomable one.
Her mouth twitched soundlessly before she got it working again. “Isn’t anybody going to do their godsdamned job and help him?” she snapped at the room without looking away.
While the trainee Mediwitch attempted to set his broken nose, heal the cut on his bruised forehead, and reduce the swelling around his eye, Malfoy agreed to every S02 stipulation, including the three months of probationary magic suppression and community service.
“Do you have a sponsor? If not, one will be appointed to you at random.” She glanced up; the fear and desperation in Malfoy’s eyes sank right through her ribs and squeezed like a fist around her heart.
He shook his head.
It may have been adrenaline, her overabundant empathy, or just plain reckless stupidity, but she signed her name on the sponsor line at the bottom of the form and set the clipboard down. She swallowed the lump in her throat. “Right, well, I suppose you'll be coming with me then.”
. . .
They lay motionless but awake in her small, ink-dark room on base.
“I’m sorry, Granger. For what I said earlier… I didn’t realise that you…”
Losing her magic hadn't hurt. She’d always imagined that it would, but it honestly hadn’t felt like anything at all. It had been a slow, silent kind of loss. Gradual, like the gathering of dust which only seemed to occur in those unused fractions of seconds — the ones that nobody ever cared enough to look for or to miss. Unnoticeable until suddenly there was enough to dull the furnishings.
It had made a home in her.
Or perhaps she'd made a home for it... She'd been widely criticised for employing even voluntary magic suppression in her Asylum Programme, but after Kingsley's assassination, it was the only way to keep the programme running and keep everyone safe. She stood by her protocols but wasn't blind to the irony of her own fate.
Friends and colleagues had been sympathetic at first, but over time she felt the shelf they'd set her on grow higher and higher until she could no longer find the ground beneath her feet. She was adrift — a spectator to her own life — nothing but atmosphere cradling her.
Nobody needed her anymore. Nobody sought her expertise or input. She was just a name on a door.
“We’ll see if we can’t find a spare cot in storage for you tomorrow,” she replied, steamrolling over his apology.
“The floor is fine, really, I—”
“It’ll take both of us to carry if we do find one. We’ll get you some clothing too. Then I'll show you around, and we’ll find something for you to do.”
“Right…” he cleared his throat quietly. “Thanks, Granger.”
Perhaps there was one person that needed her after all. Even if only for the next three months.
|
“Between your midnight operatics and how hard that floor is, it's a wonder I get any sleep at all,” Malfoy whinged, squinting down at the fabric in his hand as he pulled the needle through. He grunted in frustration as another one of his stitches failed to catch and simply evaporated before his eyes.
“Oh, boohoo, Malfoy. I told you, you’re welcome to sleep here in the infirmary any time there’s an empty cot.” Hermione handed him his weekly serum dose and watched him gulp it down.
“I’d rather a bed of broken glass, to be perfectly honest. You haven’t tried to murder me in my sleep yet, so I daresay my odds are better on your floor than out here with bloody Hopkins and his ilk,” he sighed.
She bit her tongue, remembering the hidden bruises that still lingered on his body. “No, of course. I’ll ask around again about a cot. But until then, we'll take turns in my bed. You’ve been on the floor for a month now. That's far too long.”
“No,” he said flatly. “Absolutely not. There is no way I’m taking your bed.”
She scoffed, “Is the thought of sleeping in my bed really so detestable that—”
“Granger, I’m not letting you sleep on that floor. Of the exceedingly few things I was able to escape my previous life with, I’d like to think a modicum of decency was one of them.”
“Oh...” She took a moment to consider.
“Hah, look at that! I think I did it… Does that look right to you?” He gazed up at her hopefully, holding the cloak out for her inspection.
She gave it a tug and watched the stitches flex and hold. “That is a really tidy mend, Malfoy,“ she lauded. "Nearly as neat as mine."
There was a light behind his eyes she hadn't seen since they were in school and a warmth deep inside her that she hadn't felt in quite some time either…
“I know it's small, but we could try sharing the bed if your sense of decency will allow it.”
His mouth opened softly, wordlessly, and he nodded, transfixing her yet again with a different sort of disbelieving desperation.
| |
If there was one thing in life that Hermione hadn't anticipated, it was the mixture of amusement and pride she felt from witnessing Draco Malfoy marvel at his own mastery of everyday Muggle skills.
A look of smug wonderment spread over his face as he tasted the first pancake he made all by himself. It reminded her of how it had felt to cast her first Wingardium Leviosa.
"What do you think, Granger?" He watched expectantly as she accepted the bite from his fork and returned a deeply appreciative 'mmmm'.
His mouth curled into a coy smirk.
"Utter perfection, Draco. Really."
And then he was properly beaming, and she couldn't help but smile too.
She gazed down at her hand, a whisk in place of a wand. She surveyed the creases, so cleverly placed to let her fingers bend and flex. Thought about the symphony of electricity inside her, the push and pull of ions across cell membranes, of muscles contracting and relaxing. Of finely tuned joints and ligaments. Billions of years of evolution gave her this hand that could hold a whisk and scramble an egg.
Perhaps that was its own kind of magic.
For the first time it occurred to her that maybe she wasn’t broken, only out of context. Within the Muggle-centric microcosm that she and Draco had ensconced themselves in, she didn’t feel quite so useless. She felt full. Happy almost.
But she knew it couldn't last. Soon enough his probation would end, and everything would return to the way it was before.
| | |
Hermione’s lips pressed together like a child unwilling to part with a secret. She pried them open.
“Draco, I'm leaving,” she announced to the ceiling.
“You're… What do you mean?” He rolled toward her on the tiny cot.
“Don't worry; I'll be at your hearing tomorrow to give my report and enthusiastic recommendation. But once that's seen to, I'm going back to the Muggle world. For good. I think.”
For several suffocating seconds, he said nothing. “Right, well, I suppose I'll be coming with you then.”
She turned to him. “Don’t be silly; you’ll have your magic back. There's no reason for you to—”
“Is wanting to be near you not reason enough?”
His unexpected words and their tender sincerity stole the breath from her lungs. “I…” she faltered.
“I’m sure there's a lot more I’ll need to learn, but I have an excellent tutor,” he said softly.
His fingers skated over her cheek in a tentative caress, and as she melted instinctively into his touch, the respectful distance they’d kept destabilised.
“I'll do whatever you ask… I'll darn your socks and cook for you."
Her thigh brushed his, and in that surreal moment as the gap between them edged ever closer to extinction, it was like feeling the ground beneath her feet again.
“I’ll fix the fence posts and tend the vegetable patch.”
The tip of his nose grazed hers, and butterflies filled her stomach.
“I'll harvest rainwater for your baths and herbs for your tea.”
She hadn’t allowed herself to hope. Not for anything, least of all him. And when her eyes threatened to well, for once, she let them.
“I mean it, Granger. Please, let me come with you,” he quavered.
The warmth of his words ghosted over her parted lips, and she trembled, heart racing in her chest.
“It simply isn't worth being anywhere you're not.”