Jagged

Bitter

For the first full moon since she met Tom Riddle, Hermione sleeps soundly. No interruptions. No tossing and turning.

Just Myla, shaking her awake and dragging her down to the lake for their morning run. Hermione never sleeps well, and she's so shocked to be brought out of her deep sleep that her wand is at Myla's throat before she truly knows what's going on.

When she comes to, Myla's eyes are wide and her hands are in the air.

Hermione pulls away and sits back on her knees, breathing heavily.

"I'm sorry," she says, because she doesn't feel like any excuse would work on Myla.

"It's fine. Are you coming with me, or not?"

And as much as Hermione doesn't want to, she feels bad for the early morning threat. Besides, it's a good way for her to burn off energy and feel endorphins.

The run is miserable— the ground is slick with ice, snow sticks to her eyelashes and the breeze blows miserably around them.

But in the grand scheme of awful things, the run doesn't even crack the top fifty. So she tries her best to keep pace with Myla and fights the urge to look towards the Forbidden Forest the entire time.

She wonders when Tom will come out— if he's already made his way back to the castle. Perhaps he's at the Room of Requirement, waiting for her.

It's enough to distract her, to keep her mind busy. When they're done, she rushes back to Gryffindor tower to shower and grab the healing potions for Tom. She's curious what kind of effect they'll have this time, now that his soul has been anchored. There's at least a dozen questions she wants to ask him about the differences he felt— about pre-transformation, during and after. The academic in her itches to take notes and compare.

When she makes her way to the Great Hall, she forces herself to wait five minutes before letting her eyes wander over to the Slytherin table.

The spot next to Abraxas is empty, which isn't surprising, but disappointment still laces through her.

The Room of Requirement then, she tells herself.

She reminds herself to eat at a reasonable pace. When she stands to leave without Myla or Lorraine, they give her a strange look, and Hermione babbles off an excuse— about the library, studying for their upcoming exam— and the girl's immediately tune out. Hermione has never been so relieved to be surrounded by Gryffindors.

When she gets there, Tom is nowhere to be seen, so she busies herself by readying the room.

She lets herself in and begins to build a fire. She pulls back the blankets on the bed just in case he's as bad as last time. Dragging him around is not an experience she wants to repeat, even if it's just a few feet.

He stumbles in not long after, while she's laying out the potions on the table by the fire.

Hermione straightens. "How are you feeling?"

His clothes are torn and muddy, and there's a smear of dirt across his cheek. His skin is pale and blood drips from up his sleeve, down his fingers and onto the floor.

"Fine," he bites out, staggering to the chair furthest from the fire.

He's quite clearly drunk, feet dragging and speech slurred. This time the bottle isn't with him, which means he either found an appropriate place to stash it in the woods, or he finished the entire thing in one go. Hermione desperately hopes he has more sense than that. 

But either way, he looks better than last time— able to stand on his own, breathing only slightly ragged. It's still much worse than she'd ever seen Remus, but she feels confident this transformation won't kill him.