There hadn't been much water, just a small shaving basin's worth, but Hermione Granger was drenched, flat on her back on the floor of Draco Malfoy's hospital room.
"Get off me, Malfoy."
She shoved hard at his shoulders and he sat up quickly, eyeing the doorknob as it rattled and sparked. Hermione wiped her cheeks, clearing away tears that didn't feel like her own anymore and smoothing her skin, effacing the sense of the rough front of his hospital shirt. Her face had been pressed against it as they'd scuffled, tipped off balance, and fell from kneeling to lying on the wet floor.
The doorknob was now glowing green with the strained alohomora of someone breaking in from the outside. Nurse Whalen's voice came calling through the wood. "Jean? Are you in there? Don't tell me she's still in there. Jean dear, is everything all right?"
Hermione swatted Malfoy's arm. "Open it."
He was still feeling for his wand when Whalen let herself in. There was surprise, alarm, and then elation as she took in the scene. The wraith was breadless though rather raw-faced from a terrible shave, and the ghostliness in his eyes had been replaced by embarrassment. Innocentia an embarrassment cannot coexist. Whalen knew, and she spun in a circle and ran for Dr. Berlant.
As the room cleared, Hermione got to her feet. "Keep the shaving gear," she said, hurrying for the door as fast as she dared without slipping in the water again.
"Wait."
"For what, Malfoy? For me to cut your hair?"
He was indeed standing next to the open door fingering the ends of his hair, noticing, at last, that it had grown all the way to his shoulders since he had last been presented to the barber who would come through the forensics ward. He was still transfixed with it as Hermione darted past him, pulling the door closed behind her.
"My darling Hermione, if you weren't my patient I would hug you," Dr. Berlant told her later, in her office after Hermione had got clean and dry. "Excellent results with Mr. Malfoy today, excellent. Of course we'll hold him for at least another week, until he's stable and we can sort out a transition situation for him. The last photo I saw of Malfoy Manor it was boarded up, right after the trials. It will take time, but in every respect he now seems to be making a proper rehabilitation."
Hermione nodded and laughed along with Berlant--at least, she tried her best.
Dr. Berlant frowned. "Something's happened."
Hermione raised both her hands in front of herself, like a shield. "No, no, it's nothing."
The doctor sat up straight in her chair. "Did he meddle with you?"
"Who?"
"Mr. Malfoy," Dr. Berlant said, "did he--do anything to you? You seem different than when I saw you before you met with him this afternoon. As your doctor, I need to know why."
Hermione sighed. "It's just that I got to rambling about my parents. I planned it all out before I went to Malfoy's room and didn't think it would affect me, but it did. It led to all sorts of ideas I've never been able to string together before. And I said them all out loud in a great rush that I can't take back."
Dr. Berlant nodded. "Yes, well it's good to feel your feelings. Part of the wellness journey you're on."
"But I said it all in front of him," Hermione continued. "I wasn't working with you, like a healthy patient. I was yelling at him. It was humiliating and awful. I lost control. I made a mess."
Doctor Berlant scoffed, possibly at the term "healthy patient." She assured Hermione that a mess in the psychiatric ward was fine. "Muggles call that kind of outburst cathartic," the doctor mused. "It has no medical value but it doesn't hurt either."
"I cried in there," Hermione said. "Sobbed."
Dr. Berlant's straight posture pitched forward, leaning toward Hermione. "That's new for you. You've finally cried over the loss of your parents? Not just 'eyes swimming' but openly cried?"
"Yes. Cried on Draco Malfoy's shoulder while he tried to keep Whalen from hearing me."
"He comforted you?"
"I wouldn't say that. It was more like we launched our tragedies together into a large hadron supercollider and blew each other to bits."
"A wot?"
Hermione shook her head. "Sorry, my father subscribed to muggle science magazines. It's a gigantic machine that uses energy and electromagnets to blast elements together and create new materials no one's ever seen on earth before--or something like that. Dinner conversation at our house was fairly demanding."
"Supercollider--this is the muggle answer to philosopher's stones?"
Hermione shrugged.
Dr. Berlant leaned back in her chair. "When you speak to Malfoy, you're speaking to your past. And it provokes the question of what kinds of new elements you discovered in Draco Malfoy's room."
Maybe the doctor didn't mean for the question to sound like an innuendo. Whether she did or not, Hermione did not blush. Instead, she deflected, tearing into her theory--the private one jarred out of her, spoken aloud for the first time to Malfoy that afternoon--about the mother-writer crafting their story, omnipotent and unseen, making an example out of Hermione for her lack of faith in motherhood which drove her to send her own mother away.
"And I'm not the only one who lost her," Hermione explained. "When I changed my parents from the Grangers to the Wilkins, everyone who loved them lost them--their parents, my aunts and uncles--everyone. I changed the names on their dental degrees. I left them their living, but I took their lives. And after all that, I can't properly love what the writer has left for me. She foils me."
Beneath Hermione's disordered ranting about a vast, godlike writer in control of her life, Dr. Berlant spotted a breakthrough. She ignored the rest of the nonsense to pounce on it. "I hear you saying you can't properly love what you have. Who do you mean by that?"
Hermione twitched. "I didn't say that."
"You did."
"No, my new family--the Weasleys--they're everything to me. I adore them. They are my own heart now, that's the problem--"
"But you came here to be on your own."
"Yes, for medical treatment. I'd never abandon them for good."
The doctor slumped, visibly relieved. Engagements had a way of coming apart at St. Mungo's. She'd seen it before and wanted no part of breaking up two thirds of the golden trio, innuendos or not. "Perhaps we should invite some of the Weasleys here for a visit, yeah? You're over halfway finished your stay. It would be completely appropriate."
Hermione nodded. "All right then."
She had stood up to leave when the doctor began to speak again. "Hermione, no one is in charge of your life but you. No one else is writing your story. You are independent and capable in ways few witches your age will ever be. You've made hard choices but those should just go to show you that no one can choose who you make your family but you. Try to think of it that way."
"Yes, doctor."
"Don't," Berlant called out as Hermione's hand grasped the doorknob. "Don't talk to anyone about your--metaphor--about the all-powerful writer--"
"It's not just a metaphor--"
"Hermione," the doctor interrupted. "You and I will discuss it tomorrow. But do not mention it to anyone else. Write a sweet letter to your fiance and go to sleep."
But she didn't go to sleep. According to the all-powerful writer-mother, she was meant to rest on and on in a happily ever after. She was meant to peak at seventeen and then make children for a sequel with the man who'd been assigned to her when she was eleven. They would work to stuff a vault at Gringotts, and retell their stories in the past tense. Perhaps this was why she resisted, walking, not resting, not reading, not writing love notes to Ronald Weasley, inviting him to come and fold her back into a book. She walked past all the closed doors of the other patients, past Whalen's nighttime replacement toiling over parchments. At the top of the staircase between the regular and the forensic psychiatry wards, she stopped.
Malfoy was there, sitting on the top stair, looking up through the dome of glass over the rotunda at constellations spread out for him like a family portrait. She kept quiet, standing well behind him, looking at northern stars her parents could not see. How would the mother-writer compose the next scene? And what would be the most spectacular way for her, for Hermione, to frustrate whatever the writer intended? She took a deep breath, and in it, she smelled peppermint and wet stone.
For today, it was enough. And without a sound, she turned and went to bed.
______________
Ron sat in the common room of St. Mungo's psychiatric ward, nodding at the catatonics. "Morning, morning."
He had come as soon as the owl with the letter asking for him had arrived, apparating onto the grounds of St. Mungo's with his hair barely combed. He had that sleepy-redhead look that is easily mistaken for illness. Sure, he had arrived earlier than she'd asked for him but - where was she? It's not like there was anything here for her to do.
A stranger was striding across the common room now, her hand extended, calling his name. She did not introduce herself which meant, of course, that she must be the doctor here. Ron was polite but didn't manage to wait until the two of them were shut away in the doctor's office before blurting, "Where's Hermione? Is she alright?"
The doctor summoned a chair for him. "Do sit down, Mr. Weasley."
Ron's alarm grew as the doctor explained Hermione's theories about the all-powerful author.
"Is she off her head then?" he asked.
Dr. Berlant scoffed gently. "No, but she is dealing with enormous stress. That's why I wanted to meet with you before you see her. "
"Right, right," Ron rushed. "Stress. So if she tries to convince me about a writer controlling all of us, I don't make it worse by arguing over it. I am here," he said, as if speaking from a memorized script, "to offer support."
The doctor rotated her swiveling leather office chair a full 360 degrees. "Well, no," she began. "Chiefly, you are here to ground her in reality. Do oppose her delusions, just make sure to be kind. Firm but kind."
Ron cocked his head. "Oh. Well alright then. You're the doctor."
Mornings are hospital doctors' busiest times so she dismissed Ron quickly. There was no time to mention trivialities like an old rival from school being somewhere on the ward. Hermione was in the common room when Ron left Dr. Berlant's office. She hopped to her feet at the sight of him, rushing to throw her arms around his neck, dragging his face down to her level, pressing their cheeks together. Not all of the reasons for Ron and Hermione's connection were the punitive, overbearing reasonings of an overlord author. There was also this--this very good reason of their physical affinity for one another, the way they filled each other's arms so perfectly. She heard him inhale the scent of her hair, breathily describing the awful depths of his loneliness softly into her ear.
Above it, Hermione heard a thin, frail voice speaking from the ranks of patients lounging on sofas behind them. "Aw...."
Taking her hand, Ron stepped back. "Let's go for a turn around the garden."
On the green lawn outside St. Mungo's, after explaining the mother-writer to him in almost exactly the same terms Dr. Berlant had used, Ron and Hermione began to argue as soon as they broke physical contact with one another. "I'm sorry, Hermione, but the most important thing is that you stay grounded in reality," he said. "Which means don't go loony in here. Don't let it make things worse. Get well and come home. It's horrible without you."
"I do want to come home," she assured him. "But I'm not ready yet. And I may have to veer out of reality for a little while, just so I can make sure it see it properly, see if it's actually--real."
Ron was nearly through with trying not to take offense. He was talking fast, in a higher pitch than usual as he said, "I completely agree, Hermione, that the fact that someone like you wants a life with someone like me makes no sense at all. No one knows that better than me. But please, tell me there's something more to it than the whim of some mythical, invisible author."
"Of course there is."
"Then why does it matter if that sort of creature is real? It won't change how we live, or how we feel."
"It matters because of my parents," she said.
Her parents: the great enders of arguments. Ron always crumbled in the face of a loss like Hermione's. Since the war ended, he'd been encouraging her to travel to Australia, find Wendell and Monika Wilkins, turn them back into the Grangers. He'd sat in the offices of a muggle travel agent and asked bizarre questions about Australian money and muggle passports, ready at whatever moment she chose to go with her to find them. Her resistance was hard for him to understand.
"It wasn't a standard memory charm," she had explained to him, years ago. "It was a modified obliviate--the standard spell but with something new I invented myself, to make it reversible. But there was never any way to test it. I can't be sure they can be brought back. And if I attempt the reversal and it fails, they're lost forever. But as long as I don't try, that possibility, that hope survives a little longer."
Ron didn't see the point in protecting a swishy idea like hope if it meant not actually getting to have her parents in their lives but--it wasn't up to him. "Schrodinger's parents," she called them, which made even less sense to him than any of it. In the garden at St. Mungo's now, he struggled to gather her many threads.
"I'm ready to find them," she said. "If the writer believes so much in mothers and families, maybe she will strengthen my memory spell, make it work the way she wants it to, and everything, with everyone, will go back to the way it would have been if there had been no war. She will undo what I did. I'm confident enough in her will that I don't need confidence in my own skills."
Ron snatched at her hand. "Good, yes. I'll start figuring out logistics to get us there before the wedding. There isn't much time but someone's got to have a Britain to Australia portkey somewhere--"
"Ron, no," she said. "I'm not letting the writer have it completely her own way."
He felt his face blanch, his stomach tighten around his breakfast.
"Ron," she said, "we won't be going together."
---------------------------------------
By the end of Ron's visit to St. Mungo's, they had agreed to nothing. He remained adamant that he and Hermione would travel to Australia and find the Wilkins together. "You're still sick," he reasoned. "Still on about some daft mind-control--"
"Story control--"
"Whatever. All I'm saying is if you had a broken leg, I wouldn't ship you off on a trip to Australia by yourself. If you had some kind of--"
"Pox, yes you are a darling, Ronald. And you are not coming with me..."
It was Brutus who brought the conversation to an end, appearing on the lawn asking for Jean, reminding her that Dr. Berlant was expecting her for a session soon. Ron kissed her harder than he meant to and warned her to expect to see him again at suppertime the next day. She was rubbing a swelling lip as the air cracked with his disapparation.
It wouldn't be quite right to say Draco Malfoy had been ignoring them. To ignore is to choose not to pay attention to something, and as it was, there was simply no reason for him to care about them--not anymore. Getting used to eating was more difficult than Malfoy could have guessed. Without innocentia, his need to eat was compelling but also embarrassing--loud, wet, and dirty. He couldn't escape dinner, but he could escape dinner companions, and he'd been taking whatever meals he could outside, alone. From where he sat on a bench in the garden, eating what the pigeons now considered far more than his share of a ham sandwich, Malfoy had spotted Weasley's hair.
In the more heated parts of their conversation, he could hear Ron's voice, not the words but the sound of it. Malfoy had hummed in recognition. So there goes Weasley, same as always. The pigeons had taken wing at the crack of Ron's disapparation. There went Weasley. The jolt of anger Malfoy used to feel at the sight of him was gone. Maybe it was the therapeutic trace of the innocentia treatment, maybe it was an extension of his cool gratitude to Granger for pushing him out of the spell, maybe it was because he'd been out of his father's influence for two years, maybe it was the death of the dark lord himself, or maybe it was just growing up. The best he could muster in bad-will toward Ron Weasley was to mutter as he watched Hermione and Brutus walking back into the hospital, "The future Mrs. Weasley? What is Granger thinking?"
Berlant called him into her office in the afternoon, when the medical potions most of the patients had taken with their lunches had them happy and sleepy, and the ward was quiet, so sunlit it hurt his eyes. It was a pleasant time of day she reserved for unpleasant tasks and it had long been Draco Malfoy's time-slot in her office. Without innocentia, he could read her face--the distaste for him which she had always had--and he better understood what it now meant to be a Malfoy.
"They're talking 'truth and reconciliation' for former Death Eaters," she explained. "You'll have noticed your arm, no doubt. The mark has been gone since before you were brought here. It wasn't that way last time, the first time we thought we'd won the war, when we all believed, wrongly, that the threat had passed. But this time--no mark, no you-know-who."
Even the sound of that non-name gave Malfoy the feeling of ice crystals shifting in the tissues of his heart.
"Whatever clemency the ministry offer them, it's going to take time to work all of the incarcerated Death Eaters through the system. Now that you're getting well, I assume you'll work to expedite your parents' release. Make moving, penitent speeches? A dashing yet sympathetic photo-spread in the Daily Prophet, perhaps?" She paused, reading his response to her needling verbal tests, watching him across her desk. And even though she didn't raise her hand, she seemed like someone holding her nose. "Why haven't you asked me, Mr. Malfoy?"
"Asked?"
"Yes, why didn't you come howling at me demanding to see your family the moment the innocentia enchantment ran its course?"
"You mean, as soon as Granger broke it for you?"
"However you like it, Mr. Malfoy. Answer my question. Why have you shown no interest in your family? As your doctor, I need to know."
He leaned toward her. "As my doctor, I reckon you already know."
She leaned forward as well. "Tell me about your mother, Draco Malfoy."
He sat back, laughing, running his hands through his hair. "Thanks ever so much for all your hard work over the past two years, but I believe we've finished here. I'll spend tonight, if you please, and in the morning, I'll go. Right." He stood to leave.
The doctor matched his false, hostile politeness with her own, every bit as aggressive. "Rushing off? Well, we're in the process of assembling your transition team but if you'd rather not wait for them, that's certainly your prerogative. Smart of you, making a clean break from a place that was, in actuality, a prison for you, the site of such horrible degradation. Oh, but do take care to go quietly. Don't upset any of the other patients on the way out."
The slamming of the door cut her words short and left Malfoy standing alone in the corridor while the unit still napped. He leaned against the wall, breathing deeply, experiencing anger for the first time in ages. There was too much violence behind it, a great, awful crashing, and it tripped the lingering innocentia in his brain, aching against his forehead. At the far end of the corridor a door opened, he turned in the opposite direction of the sound, moving pressed against the wall, getting away. But there were steps following him, getting quicker. He was fighting to outrun them, moving through the open doorway to leave the unit, slumping against the bannister of the staircase. Now there was a gasp and a hand on his shirt, tugging him back, forcing him to sit down hard on the topmost stair.
"That's dramatic," a voice said. "Off to throw yourself down the stairs, Malfoy?"
It was Granger. With the traces of innocentia flaring, he couldn't quite form a sneer. "What do you want? Why aren't you in there sleeping off your craziness with the rest of them?"
"I wish I could. But Dr. Berlant says I get well by keeping my mind active."
"And by running around like a house elf doing her job for her?"
"Shut up, Malfoy."
The pain in his head was abating. He straightened his back, dropped his hands from his temples. "Your doctor friend and I--we don't get on."
She scoffed. "Why am I not surprised? Well, learning to work together will be part of your recovery, I'm sure."
He shook his head. "Not a bit. I'm leaving tomorrow. Getting out before she hexes me with balding, or something, and then tries to act like it's all natural, even though my dad's never had anything but loads of hair."
Hermione laughed at so oddly specific a worry, and he turned to look at her when he heard the sound of it. "Not to worry, Malfoy. If that's your biggest worry for the future, rest easy. You are well on your way to Lucius Malfoy-level hair glory." With one finger, she flicked the ends of his hair, sending it springing into his face. He flinched at first, but the laughter was placating.
She kept talking. "I'll be leaving soon too."
"Wedding, yeah?"
She forced herself not to sigh in front of him, and explained her trip to Australia instead. He nodded at all the parts about Schrodinger's parents, the whims of the mother-author. Her delusions were familiar to him and she was welcome to them, as far as he was concerned. It was when she told him that Ron wasn't coming with her that he finally broke in. "Is that wise?" he asked. "Going right from St. Mungo's to traveling through a muggle society you've never seen before?"
"I lived half of my life in muggle society," she offered.
"That's just the British muggle society, you daft thing. The rest of the world's not like here."
"Of course not, but--at least they speak English in Australia."
"If your parents even ended up there. They left enchanted by a memory spell, not an imperius curse. And why didn't you just send them to Canada? It's only a trans-Atlantic trip. Australia is the other side of absolutely everything."
"I was thinking of the weather."
"Fair enough, but what about the bugs?"
Yes, there was that too. Spiders and kangaroos were some of what used to come to Hermione's mind first when she thought of Australia--typical foreigner. She sat beside Malfoy, laughing softly to herself, sadly. Spiders--Ronald Weasley's nemesis. Maybe even as she was first sending her parents away, she already knew to arrange things to keep him from coming with her to retrieve them. "Canada," she said, flicking her wand to bring a map of the globe to light in front of herself. "Look at that. Even on a muggle airplane we could've made it to Canada's east coast from here in only seven hours."
"What?"
"That's not even a full day's work."
Malfoy shoved at her arm. "'We?' What's 'we'?"
There it was--the answer to the problem she'd been fussing over all day. She had revealed it before she was ready, but there it was. She covered her face with both of her hands, bowed her head into her knees, disappearing from him into her hair. "Do it, Hermione Jean Granger," she whispered to herself. "Do it."
"It's as you said, Malfoy. I need a traveling companion. And in the condition I'm in, I need someone I react to emotionally without having them actually affecting my destiny. Someone who won't be hurt when he hears me ruminating endlessly over the trauma that brought me to this point. I need to travel with someone who won't exert any pressure on me to shift toward my Mrs. Weasley form. Someone who doesn't even want my future to be any of their business."
There was a pause. "Granger, what are you on about?"
"You're not that dense," she said. "Stop playing at being stupid and just say you'll go with me. There are so many good reasons for you to be the one to come along."
He scoffed. "Yeah? Give me these reasons."
She rotated her posture toward him. "Well for one, you're clever enough."
"Though a complete and utter failure at every important task I've ever been given."
"Don't try that with me, Draco Malfoy. All of the tasks I know of came to you from a genocidal maniac looking for excuses to further punish your father and his loved ones. Every time you failed, it was because you were purposely set up for self-destruction. It's hardly a fair measure of your abilities."
He waved it away. "Give me another one."
"You're unemployed. You may as well be abroad as anywhere else."
"More."
"You expect nothing from me at a time when I have nothing to give."
He frowned, but answered, "Well, that one's true."
"And," she said, "you already know about my--my theory about the all-powerful mother-author dictating my life. I can't un-tell you any of that, so you're part of my inner circle on that point." She stopped and drew a breath so deep he watched her shoulders rise and fall with it. What he hadn't asked her was what her mother-author theory had to do with him. It didn't sound as crazy to him as he knew it should. In fact, there had been something similar in his own mind when he had rashly taken his leave of Dr. Berlant without having anywhere to go. He let Hermione speak the words anyway.
"Honestly, I've hardly slept since the day we broke your innocentia enchantment and I told you about the author-mother. Now that I've told you--told myself--that she's there, I've been trying to discover what I could do to wound and defy her will with the force of my own will, to shake her power over me. What could I do to pry her grip loose? And now I think I know."
Malfoy raised his face to look at her, braced himself for what he knew was coming.
"You have to come with me for your own sake as well as mine. Think, Malfoy. If someone was writing our lives as a long, flabby book, from the very first, before writing a word about new evil schemes of grownup Death Eaters, there was a little boy written as the bad guy. There was you. Wouldn't it infuriate our author friend if I were to make my escape with you? Wouldn't she scold us for romanticizing your badness? Tell us to stop? Write an epilogue to nip it all? Wouldn't she?"
At the top of St. Mungo's rotunda, he blinked. The light outside was dimming. The stars would be out soon, looming overhead, a roll call of his lineage and everything he wanted to be free of--at least for awhile. Perhaps there was only one way out of a hate he was, truthfully, never very good at living.
He held out his hand. "Shake," he said.
"You don't have to try to hex me."
He snatched at her hand, speaking louder this time. "No, shake. Shake my hand, Granger. We're sealing an agreement."
She gripped his fingers in return. "Yes, agreed. We're leaving."
"Tomorrow. Yes."