marked me (like a bloodstain)

creating ghosts

'cause when i'd fight you used to tell me i was brave

Liars, for the most part, had the tendency to avoid eye contact when misconstruing the truth.

Hermione had seen this often: offenders fidgeting in their seats, eyes focusing anywhere inside the interrogation room but at her or the evidence in front of them, Miles Bulstrode looking at her hair when asked if he filed his paperwork according to her own effective system, George Weasley rolling his eyes way too often when questioned if the newest explosion in Diagon Alley was a direct consequence of one of his experiments, and her own gaze drifting to the left, anywhere except the glistening blue of Ron's eyes when, years ago, he pleaded just...tell me why,'Mione. Why him? (she never turned to him when she said I don't know why ).

In the years since their childhood, Hermione had discovered that Harry, because of his own learned survival skills when living with the Dursleys, kept eye contact when he was lying through his teeth.

Hermione had seen this often: eleven years old, telling her he wasn't still looking for the Mirror of Erised, thirteen years old, promising he'd still choose not to kill Pettigrew if they turned back time once more, fifteen years old, chanting over and over again that he was fine, and yes, he was sleeping well, too, seventeen years old, fury in his emerald eyes when he told Ron to leave, and, now, at twenty-three years old, staring unmoved into her brown gaze when her unexpected question made him look up from the mountain of legal documents and victims the Greybacks had left behind.

And yet, despite knowing this tell, she believed him. For years she believed Harry when he looked her in the eye.

For a moment, Hermione had assumed she was imagining things. Although infrequent, her repressed memories had managed to break free from the dark, occluded parts of her mind before—a consequence of an overworked one, especially when now triggered by the violent, unforeseen passing of Phillipa Hugh, someone whom Hermione, no matter how hard she fought against it, connected to someone else. She would, of course, manage to stop her walls from shaking, tucking those memories back where they belonged, buried and neglected, but, if even for an unwilling second, she remembered.

Vividly, achingly so, she remembered Draco Malfoy.

On the way back to the Ministry, her favorite coffee growing cold and forgotten in her hands, she allowed herself to ponder the opposite. What if she had not imagined him there, sat in Señora Herrera's shop, scattered scars across the right side of his face? White-blond hair longer, silkier, and definitely devoid of the grime and blood she had once felt under her bruised hands? Silver eyes bright and enthralling as the treacherous moon, calling out to her the same way they had long ago, only this time there had been no trace of his loathing, fury, and grief.

If she had the courage to shatter the concrete barriers she set up around the most vulnerable pieces of herself, Hermione would pull out every fragment of time where Malfoy appeared and lay them out in front of herself. She'd take a magnifying glass, hoping sunlight would soak in through the lens, turning each recollection into ash so she could finally be free of him.

But she never would. She knew that all too well.

Not when his colors were what her nightmares built themselves around.

Not when his colors were the same shades as her most cherished possession, too.

"Granger," Miles scrambled out from behind his desk when he saw her enter the bullpen, his eyes wide in panic. "I can't find the fucking werewolf registration of September 2001. I thought we had it filed with all the other Atlas Greyback shit, but it's not—"