Manacled by Senlinyu

chapter 27: flashback 2

She slept when she was too exhausted to dream.

She stared up at Fred. "It's just a bad day."

He gave a tight smile. "It's all right, Mione, you're entitled to have them like the rest of us. Honestly, I can't for the life of me understand how you keep doing this."

Hermione turned and looked around the infirmary feeling helpless.

"If I didn't—who would?"

The Order relied upon her being there.

It wasn't a sentiment born from an inflated opinion. It was simply a fact. At that point in the war, Hermione was more specialised in healing dark magic and curses than anyone else in most of Britain.

When Voldemort had taken over the Ministry of Magic, the Order had been forced to stop going to St Mungo's. Any Resistance members sent to the hospital were immediately arrested on terrorism charges and then disappeared into Voldemort's prisons.

The Ministry takeover had been carefully timed. The first law enacted was the Muggle-born Registration Act. Voldemort understood the vital role healing played in a war and so St Mungo's was the first place purged under the new law. All the Muggle-born and half-blood healers were quickly arrested and had their wands snapped before they could flee to the Order.

Poppy Pomfrey suddenly became one of the Resistance's most broadly experienced Healers. Hermione had been apprenticed under her and studying intensively since Dumbledore's death. When European Healers sympathetic to the Resistance had secretly reached out and offered training, Hermione had been the only person with enough healing knowledge to qualify that the Order could afford to spare.

She had left everyone behind. Said her goodbyes and been smuggled across Europe from hospital to hospital to learn as much advanced healing magic as she could. She returned after almost two years when their hospital was compromised during a battle and all the healers they had recruited were killed along with Horace Slughorn. Severus had trained Hermione in potions until she'd left and she'd continued her studies as they related to healing during her training throughout Europe. When she returned, Hermione was both a fully trained emergency Healer and medical Potioneer. Her specialty was deconstructing curses in order to develop counter-spells.

The first counter-curse she invented was for the flaying curse.

With Voldemort's curse development division constantly debuting new experimental spells during every battle, the need for her was desperate.

Hermione trained as many Resistance members in healing as were willing to learn. Unfortunately, healing magic was a precise and highly subtle art. It required tremendous attention and devotion to achieve success. The Order tried to include at least one person with field healing abilities in every skirmish in order to try to keep fighters alive long enough to get back to the infirmary. But, because of the high demand to deploy them, field healers were overworked and had the Order's highest fatality rates.

Most fighters preferred to spend their free time drilling more defensive magic rather than believe they'd need to know anything more than basic magical first aid. The stubborn optimism it revealed made Hermione shake with frustration when she allowed herself to think about it.

The Order simply did not have enough people to utilise many of them well. The failures in leadership trickled down and affected the entire Resistance.

They'd been unprepared for the war. Dumbledore's death had effectively cut the legs from under them and they had been struggling to survive since then.

Malfoy had done that.

His murder of Dumbledore had crippled them. Doomed them.

Now he was trying to appear like some twisted savior, willing to staunch the wound he'd opened.