In truth, Hermione didn't care if Draco Malfoy ate or not. Still, every afternoon, she came to the back garden with something edible for him to tear to shreds, delicately, deliberately. He was like an emaciated raccoon, nimble fingers and deep shadows around his eyes, picking at his food as she sat on the bench between him and sleepy Brutus. Mangled snacks gave their time together a focus other than conversation. When they did talk, they weren't hostile and vulgar, as they used to be at school. Instead, their talk was strange, fascinating to her in its oddness, its detachment from the emotional context of their history.
"You really remember, Malfoy?" she asked him once. "You remember the days before the hospital?"
"Everything," he answered. "I remember it all--all of it but what it must have felt like."
Today her offering was something special, nothing taken from the hospital dining hall but something owled from the Burrow that morning, still warm from the Weasley family kitchen when it arrived at her window. It was a thick slice of sponge cake full of gumdrops which Malfoy was now pinching between his fingers, one by one, setting them down on the bench in a straight line inching its way toward Hermione's leg.
"The gooey half," he said, "is your half."
She had to laugh, like a cough, just once. "This is not what I envisioned when I invited you to share."
"This is from your family?"
She smoothed her hair and dropped it behind her shoulders. "From the Weasleys? Yes. Just eat it."
"They love you?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Malfoy, what a thing to say--"
"Why would anyone send this to someone they were supposed to care for?"
She watched his fingers dropping cake crumbs into the grass too close to his feet for the pigeons to tiptoe over to eat them up. Melted gumdrops in purple, green, yellow. "Amethyst, emerald, topaz," he called them. Sticky jewels advancing toward her. But the thick patina on an orange one had cracked and burst, coating the tip of his index finger with gelatin and sugar when he touched it. He frowned at the stickiness, flicked his hand hard, but the sugar stayed stuck to his skin.
"What did you expect?" she asked, reaching into the pocket on the front of her smock for her wand to clean him up. He hadn't seen his own wand for two years, not since they took him in. It had been brand new then and, frankly, he hardly remembered it.
He growled at himself over his candy-coated fingers, and there, for the first time since their re-acquaintance, Hermione saw the real Draco Malfoy--Hogwarts Malfoy, Slytherin Malfoy, the Malfoy she and Ron and Harry had known. His lip curled back in disgust, eyes narrowed in anger. He was on his feet, scanning the yard for someplace to wipe his fingers clean.
She gripped her wand inside her pocket, waiting, experimenting, her compassion for the pallid psychiatric inmate curbed by his sudden resemblance to the glowering, towering true Malfoy. "Lick it off," she told him. "It's a sweet. It won't hurt you."
He flinched at the suggestion but raised his hand toward his face, wetting his lips.
"Yes, that's it," she laughed at him. "Pretend you're a nice cat. Just open your mouth and--"
He swore. "Sick," he said, holding his own wrist as if to restrain himself. "No. Help me, Granger."
"If you don't want to lick it, just wipe it on your smock," she said.
He looked down at his white hospital shirt, and when he looked up, the corner of his mouth was twitching--a sneer or a smile. "I'll wipe it on your smock, Granger."
"Don't be vile."
"On your hair, then."
"No!"
Brutus snorted in his sleep.
"Granger." Malfoy was lunging at her, reaching, fingers grazing her clothing. "Come here and--"
And then he was on his knees, in the grass and cake crumbs, palms mashed against his temples, eyes closed tight, his sticky fingertips soiling his own hair.
Brutus bent to raise him to standing. "You've gone and tripped it again, have you Slim?" he asked an insensible, groaning Malfoy. Brutus nodded to the doorway. "Got to let it go. Jean, my dear, would mind letting us back in?"
----------------
Up on the seventh floor, Hermione leaned against Nurse Whalen's desk. "About our project," she began. "With the wraith. Slim. Draco Malfoy. I don't know but I think I'm making him worse."
Nurse Whalen listened to the account of the gumdrop outburst in the garden, sniffing into her paperwork. "Not at all. It's progress," she said. "Definite progress."
Hermione didn't understand, shifted on her feet, waiting to hear more.
Whalen hummed. "It's a good spell," she observed. "I wonder about Dr. Berlant's professional judgment from time to time, but I never doubt her spells."
Hermione frowned. "Malfoy is enchanted?"
Whalen raised her head, blinking. "Of course. They're all enchanted across the hall. That's what forensic psychiatry means at St. Mungo's." Whalen beckoned Hermione closer. "Innocentia," she whispered. "He was given an array of mind-quieting spells to choose for his treatment, and that's what he picked. No patient ever picks it--too dangerous. And no normal doctor would ever risk it, even if they did. It's difficult but Berlant's execution of it was flawless. You saw for yourself. As soon as his emotions flared at you, the spell took him to his knees."
Hermione repeated the word to herself. Innocentia.
"You know, with your experience casting mind-altering spells--unfortunate though it may be--you've probably got the chops to be a fine psychiatrist yourself, Jean."
Hermione shook her head. "Innocentia, a healing enchantment where a mind is regressed to a state of childish submissiveness and openness," she recited. "A state of flexibility and--weakness."
They'd lobotomized him. That's what her muggle parents would have called it. Dr. Berlant and her staff had magically lobotomized Draco Malfoy.
"Hermione," Dr. Berlant was standing behind her now. She'd been listening, enjoying Whalen's compliments and watching Hermione in profile as a new picture of Draco Malfoy took shape in her mind. The doctor was answering as if she knew exactly what a lobotomy was, and what it meant in the non-magical world. Perhaps she did know. "Hermione, you need to understand it was done with Mr. Malfoy's consent. There's no darkness in the spell. It's temporary and reversible."
Hermione held back her signature tirade on the falseness of the dichotomy between dark and light magic as Dr. Berlant continued. "Innocentia does nothing but create a quiet place where patients like Mr. Malfoy can heal--something like this hospital unit of ours is for you, only it's on the inside of his head instead of the outside."
"But how," Hermione said past a lump in her throat, "how can he be released back into the community in a state like that? There's less than a week left for him here, isn't there? But he's still numb and starving. He's still gone."
"That's it exactly. We can't release him like this," Berlant continued. "We'll release him from the forensics unit but then he'll need to join us over here until we can be reasonably sure he can function without the innocentia enchantment. But he needs to want to live without it. That's what seems to be lacking. We were already in the process of weaning him off of its influence, and frankly we were concerned when we saw how little the withdrawal was affecting him. Part of the success of disenchantment depends on his will, and his will has vanished. Or, it had seemed that way until today, in the garden with you."
Hermione scoffed. "That? That was nothing exceptional. That was just--him, healthy as I've ever known him."
Berlant nodded. "Yes, healthy with you. That's the point. He needs a reference--something of his self as he was before his admission here. You see, another part of the trouble with Mr. Malfoy's rehabilitation has been the--er, unavailability of his family members, or anyone from his past, to lead him back. It's true that bringing you and Mr. Malfoy into contact was not something we planned, but it may be a very fortunate coincidence. Especially since, well, you're not thriving here either, Hermione. You're restless and glum. Not everyone heals best in a quiet place. Some of us heal only when we're working."
Whalen was shaking her head, chuckling softly. "Here we go."
Dr. Berlant ignored her. "So will you work with us, Hermione? As part of your rehab, will you work to help us get Draco Malfoy to let go of the excess of his innocentia enchantment? Know that if it ever gets to be too much, you're free to end it in an instant."
Something flickered behind Hermione's sternum again, the familiar sensation she was feeling for only the second time since coming to St. Mungo's. It felt like potential, a goal, something new, something to grow toward. Perhaps it was inspiration, or more than that: hope. Dr. Berlant might be right. External fixing was the same as internal healing for Hermione Granger. If she could fix something here, all alone without the shelter and safety of Ron and his family, something as broken as the wraith-ish remains of Draco Malfoy, it might be enough to launch her into her future, into her marriage, into her home.
________________
Draco Malfoy was released from the locked forensics ward of St. Mungo's Hospital just before noon on the first sunny day of that May. No one came to fetch him--no family, no friends. No one held him or wept for joy at being reunited with him when the steel door opened and set him free. Once, he had been truly loved, but those people were shut up somewhere else, or otherwise gone.
Only Brutus came along with him, walking farther ahead than usual, leading him across the landing where the hospital's main staircase terminated, past the potted plant, and into the regular psychiatric ward. Whalen rose from her seat in the nursing station to greet them, taking Malfoy by the hand to unlock the metal band from his wrist and fasten a beaded bracelet in its place.
In Malfoy's room, Brutus set his bag of personal belongings under the bed, nudging it beneath the hem of the coverlet with the toe of his shoe, as if to hide it. "Alright then, Slim," he said. "Let's head down the hall for lunchtime."
Malfoy blinked in the sun from the skylight in his high, white ceiling. "In a minute."
Brutus shrugged. "I'll take my leave of you here then," was all he said as he turned and left Malfoy alone--alone in the same room as his wand for the first time in two years. Malfoy remembered it should be back in his control now, remembered that they couldn't keep it from him once he'd been lawfully released. He pressed the large front pocket of his smock, patted the waistband along his back. No, it must be in his bag. There it was, another hawthorn, like in the beginning. It bent slightly when he flicked it.
"Careful," someone said from the doorway. It was Hermione Granger, telling him, "Put it away and come to the dining room for lunch. Doctor's orders."
"It's a wand," he said.
"Yes, of course it is."
He raised it, pressed its end against his own throat, between the wispy, overgrown whiskers, to the pale skin underneath. "You've raised a wand against me before." His said, his tone flat. "You held it right here. Why? What were you going to do?"
She remembered. "We were kids, Malfoy. And you were awful."
"Awful. Awful what a wand can do, to a throat."
"Malfoy, put it down. You'll hurt yourself."
"How?"
"It's best we don't find out. Set it down."
The wand stayed at his throat while his other hand felt the flesh up and down the length of his neck.
"Enough," she said, stepping into his room, closing her hand around his fingers still gripped to the wand. With just a little pressure, she guided the end of his wand toward the floor. "Behave, Malfoy. Don't make them take it away again. Don't do anything to make them think the spell is unbreakable."
"Innocentia," he said.
"Yes."
"What?" he asked. "What would I feel for you, the girl who threatened me with a wand, if it weren't for my innocentia?" His left hand was moving across the short distance between them, thin fingers outstretched, touching her neck, tapping lightly at her throat, one fingertip pressing against her harder than the rest, like the end of a wand.
She scoffed. "What are you, a vampire now? Did you read Voyages with Vampires while you were locked away? Huge Gilderoy Lockhart fan, are you? He used to live here on this unit, you know."
Malfoy said nothing but his eyes narrowed, not with anger, with interest. She kept talking. "I understand the appeal of the vampire fantasy. Muggles are crazy for it. Still, it's not worth giving up real food. Come on, Malfoy it's time for--"
With one more step, he was even closer to her, standing directly beneath the skylight, sunlight shining on his white hair, reflecting not off each of the strands, but through them. He had the look of a child as the pair of them stood there. Like a child, he stared at her, unembarrassed, eye to eye. This close, she sensed his height, well above hers. He was too thin, too bright in the sunlight, but had an ethereal quality about him which was verging on beautiful, even to her. In her throat, her pulse began to pound, beating faster as the pads of his fingers pressed themselves to it again.
She stepped away, breaking their contact. Was she scared, embarrassed, furious? And did he know?
Of course he didn't know, she told herself and she strode up the corridor, leaving him alone. All of his mumbling in that weird new Bela Lugosi cadence of his, the dilated grey-eyed staring, all the fiddling with her flesh like it was meat on his plate--clearly, the last thing he was thinking of was anybody else.
________________
He never did come out of his room that first day. Kitchen staff came in and out with trays of hot food. Dr. Berlant and her nurses went in, wands drawn, and lightened the innocentia enchantment further than they ever had before. "Jean," the doctor called into the common room as she pulled Malfoy's door closed behind her staff. "Can I have a word, Jean?"
In her office, with just Hermione as a witness, she fell heavily into her chair. "No reaction at all," the doctor said. "Just the same dull stare, stilted speech, flat affect. The innocentia is barely there now, but he behaves as if the enchantment is fresh and new and still in full force. I swear he claws it back every time I try to take it away--casts it on himself from the inside now, hiding. I'm talking nonsense but I've never seen the likes of it. Of course the spell is supposed to have a lingering effect--a therapeutic effect. But this is well beyond."
The doctor was scared. Hermione recognized herself in the nervous pitch of her shoulders as she poured her tea. Berlant was a star medical spell-caster--successful, formidable, the youngest witch to ever be named head of a department at the most prestigious hospital in wizarding Britain--but Draco Malfoy's stalled recovery was marring all of that. It was sullying her reputation, her sense of herself as a capable healer, her sense of herself as--herself. It was enough to prompt Hermione to return to the project and, in spite of the awkward exchange over wands and throats at lunchtime, to try something new with Draco Malfoy.
Balancing a tray on her arm, she rapped on the door to his room before letting herself inside. He was sitting on the floor, knees pulled up to his eyes, lounging in a ray of sunshine beaming through the skylight. At the sound of the door he opened his eyes.
"It was cold," was his opening non-sequitur.
She looked up, into the light warming him. Vampires aren't supposed to be able to abide sunbathing, but she wouldn't press that any further, not now. She focused on a successful conclusion to the innocentia project, for herself, for Ron and the family, for Dr. Berlant, and yes, partly for Draco Malfoy's welfare as well.
"Up off the floor," she told him.
He didn't move to stand, just turned his profile to her, rubbed his ashy beard with one hand.
"Have it your way," she muttered to herself. The sunbeam on the floor was wide enough for both of them and she sat in it with him, setting the tray on the stone floor, lifting the white towel draped over the top of it, disturbing the dust motes floating in the sunlit air around them, tiny lights whirling, drawing Malfoy's attention if not his curiosity.
Hermione drew a deep breath, bracing herself, before she tugged lightly at the whiskers on his chin. "You need to come back, Draco Malfoy," she said. "People's reputations are at stake and what's more, you will never leave here unless you properly recover." She lifted a brush from the tray, swirling it in a pestle, lathering the paste inside it into white foam scented with peppermint.
Malfoy sniffed.
"Truly, you don't even look like yourself. Though I can tell you've been eating a little more. Good thing too. It fills out your face, makes this easier." He was still in profile so she began at his ear, dabbing the brush against the end of his jaw. "Keep still. This is how muggles shave..."
She nearly flinched as she spoke the trigger: "muggle." No reaction at all. She worked and waited. Finally, he spoke. "How do you know that?"
She swallowed, spoke the second trigger. "My father."
Malfoy fingered the shaving lather on his face.
"My father," she went on, "he would say that he was never himself in the morning until after shaving. Saturday, Sunday, every day, he shaves his face, just like this." The brush moved in circles across Malfoy's jaw, cheek, crossing his chin to paint the other side like the first. He flinched as she lathered the skin of his upper lip, finally raising a hand to push the brush away. "Leave it," she said again. "Be patient. It won't be there long. Now tip your head. No, backwards."
He didn't understand. His hand still covered hers as she held the brush, his other hand braced against the floorboards as he leaned away from her. She held her breath and tightened her focus on his face, resisting the urge to draw back and see the full panorama of what was happening. At this instant, she was engaged with the most invasive, most triggering, the most demanding thing she could think to do for Malfoy. It was close, tense, and she hardly breathed, watching his eyes, looking hard for tiny cracks to form in the glaze of his innocentia. "Tip your head backward," she said again. "Close your eyes and look up at the sun, as if you can see through your eyelids."
This he understood, baring his neck to her as she brushed it with suds. Hermione wet the razor in the basin of water she'd brought. Not a straight razor--nothing so dramatic--just a blue plastic muggle safety razor, like her father might still be using to shave every morning, in Australia, as Hermione was going to bed in St. Mungo's Hospital.
"Ow."
"Sorry," she said. "Your beard's a bit long. Dad never let his whiskers get like this."
"I'm not your dad, Granger."
There it was. She laughed quietly. Pressing the razor against the underside of Malfoy's chin. "No. You are not my icky non-magical dad. Aren't you going to ask me where my dad is? Whether he survived the war?"
He said nothing, but as she cleared the melting white foam from his throat, the flesh twitched. "Look at that," she said, knowing he couldn't look. "You're not a vampire after all, Malfoy. Sorry, but your heart is clearly beating. I can see your pulse through your skin. What is that blood vessel, there in your neck--the jugular?"
"Carotid."
"Carotid, yes. I always muddle those two. Almost done now. Look at me, yeah?"
Malfoy lowered his head, his chin level. His face had changed. Lines were forming on his forehead. His teeth were clenched. The glaze over his eyes was hardly there. "Malfoy?" she asked, almost cooing. "Are you alright? The innocentia, is it hurting?"
He gripped his knees with both his hands, his arms faintly quaking. "Finish," he said.
When all that was left to shave was his upper lip, she tried to show him how to hold his face so the skin was stretched safely taut. He didn't understand. He was agitated, swaying his head slightly from side to side. The project was working. She could see that. What she couldn't see was the line between loosening his grip on what was left of the innocentia spell and driving him into the limits of the spell, the emotional pitch where it would punish him, the way it had in the garden, with the gumdrops. At school, Draco Malfoy had been formidable at potions. In those days, she had noticed things like that. He was the kind of critical student who could tell his carotid from his jugular. Potions was the most experimental of the magical sciences. And, she reasoned, the real Malfoy behind the psychiatric spell would want to push this, to see the experiment brought to its conclusion.
Hermione extended her forefinger, connecting with the bow of his upper lip, drawing it down, holding it taut herself. Malfoy shut his eyes, breath hot against her hand.
He spoke through the sides of his mouth. "Doesn't hurt."
"Did you know, Malfoy, that my father and mother had their memories wiped clean of me with a modified obliviate spell, before they were sent far away. I vanished right out of existence, far as they're concerned. It was a mercy, the only way for them to survive the violence of those days. I haven't seen them since before the war. And, to their knowledge, they've never seen me." She held the razor below his nose, leaning into the final stroke. "It was a dark witch who took their only daughter away from them."
With the towel she had brought clasped in her hands, she waited a moment more as he shook and strained on the floor, not knowing she had finished. She tossed the towel over his head. "Wipe your face, Malfoy."
He clawed at the fabric, scrubbing it against his skin. "I can still smell it."
"Of course you can. It's lovely."
"I hear you," he panted. "Your parents--you sent them away yourself. You did it."
"You're right," she said, tearing the towel out of his hands. There was his face, clean, fragrant and a bit pink. "I am that dark witch."
He was on his feet, pacing in front of his bed, yanking his wet smock over his head, standing in the centre of the room half-dressed.
She hurled the towel at him again. "Look at me, Draco Malfoy."
He had caught the towel and slung it over his shoulders. "I can still hear you, Granger. You're pushing," he said. "You're with Berlant and the rest. You want me out."
"Yes."
"You're forcing me out of innocentia so I'll have to go back to--whatever there is. Don't think I can't tell. Don't think I don't know."
Ten minutes ago, he would have been right. But now, Hermione's visit to Malfoy's hospital room had nothing more to do him. She was on her knees in a shallow puddle of spilled shaving water, furious, yelling. "Listen to me! Will someone listen to me?"
For the first time in two years, Malfoy remembered there were people outside of his field of vision. He didn't need an active innocentia enchantment to limit his impulses and prompt him to take responsibility of his social environment anymore. With just the clinical residue of the spell, he would control things himself, if he could figure out how. Granger was making a terrible racket. He glanced at the closed door of his room. Someone would be coming soon. And not Brutus, but something less friendly.
Hermione drew in a deep breath, ready at last to tell someone everything. "I know now," she began, "that if our life at school, at war--all of it--was ever written down, made into a book, I know who would write it. Do you know?"
Malfoy had turned his back to her and was pawing through a drawer, looking for a dry smock to put on before anyone could open the door--damage control.
"Answer me!" she howled at him.
"I don't know," he replied from inside his shirt. "Who cares? You could write it yourself. Go ahead."
She slapped the wet floor, sending dirty spray into the air. He raised his arms against it. "No, not me!" she said "The author would have to be a mother."
"Fine," he agreed.
"A mother. I can tell," Hermione said, quieter now. "I can tell by the way every real hero in our story has been a mother--Harry's against the Dark Lord, Molly against Bellatrix, Tonks, and even your own mother, Malfoy--every time someone really, truly needed saving it wasn't us, it wasn't some powerful headmaster or professor or minister. It was mothers. No one writes stories like that. Only another mother would write that way."
He looked up through the skylight as she spoke. His mother, who had lied to a monster to save just one life, his life--where was she now?
"To bring us to where we are right now, every mother in our story got to be a hero, except for mine," Hermione went on. "It was me who took that from her, without even asking. I didn't think she was strong enough. I didn't believe motherhood was strong enough--not for us. And for that, the author to this story, if there is one, sitting somewhere, crafting all of this whether she intends to or not, has punished me, marooned me between here and the Burrow. I am a perversion--my mother and me. I am twisted and wrong and I can't--" Her voice broke and she began to sob.
It was loud and shrill, not a pretty cry. It was a cry of illness and grief. His eyes flicked toward the door, his ears strained to hear footfalls in the hallway outside.
"Because of what I am, I can't set foot in the next chapter of my own life," she said, bowing toward the floor, her hair in the shaving water.
"Hey, quiet," he tried. Not used to reaching for his wand to fix everything yet, he swooped toward the ground with the towel in his hands. If he couldn't shut her up, the least he could do was clean her up before anyone found them like this. He sopped up the puddle around her. He had no idea what she was on about with this mother-author line but he spoke to her anyway, in a low voice far calmer than he felt. "Oh, you're alright Granger. Come on, let's get up off the floor before Berlant breaks the door down. Up out of all this manky water, at any rate. Look, you're filthy."
She wailed louder than ever, angry again, shoving at him, speaking the last, worst trigger, the final test unfolding with ugly spontaneity. "Filthy mudblood, yeah? Is that still it, Malfoy?"
He could hear footsteps along the corridor for real now. Someone was coming. Desperate, Malfoy bent his arm around Hermione's neck, pulling her face into his shoulder, muffling her sobs against the front of his clean shirt. "Quiet," he whispered into her ear. His breath was still hot, blown against her face now. His mouth touched her skin as he form the words, and in a wave of lingering peppermint told her, "Innocentia survivors do not use that word."