Hermione was on the third floor in Grimmauld Place. The hallway was quiet and dimly lit; it was either late in the evening or early hours of the morning. As she passed one of the smaller rooms she caught sight of a shock of red hair bent over a table of maps. She paused and tapped lightly on the door.
"Hey Mione," Ron said distractedly as he moved pieces across the maps and then scratched his head absentmindedly with the tip of his wand. His expression was tense.
"Got a minute?" she asked.
"Sure." He stuffed his wand into his back pocket and looked up at her. "Just reviewing what's been happening since I left. Lot of raids while we were away; you must have been busy."
He was giving her a penetrating look. Hermione dropped her eyes.
"I'm sure you see the strategy," she said quietly.
"Kingsley's using the horcruxes to keep Harry off the field," he said.
Hermione gave a short nod. "You understand why, don't you?"
Ron's expression hardened further as he shrugged and nodded.
"No good risking him in a skirmish when we need him for the final blow. Yeah. I get it. That doesn't mean I like it. And some of these—," he pulled a few scrolls over and glanced over them. "They're pretty much suicide missions. I hadn't realized how safe Kingsley has been playing it because of Harry. Seeing what he'll do when we're gone for a few weeks—"
He broke off as he stared angrily down at the reports. "What exactly were the casualty rates while we were gone?"
Hermione opened her mouth to answer and he cut her off.
"I don't need you to tell me. I can see the numbers right here. Fucking—fucking bloody unbelievable. If Kingsley were here I'd punch him."
His face was growing scarlet with rage.
"Ron, we can't afford to play it safe anymore," Hermione said her stomach knotting itself as she thought about how many people's eyes she'd drawn shut during the past several weeks and the new hospice safe house she'd helped Bill ward. "I don't think you realise how depleted our resources are. How many years do you think Harry's vault can feed an army? The hospital ward is running on fumes. Europe is getting locked under Tom's control. The only option we have left is to take risks. And we can't risk Harry."
Ron was silent. Hermione could see the muscles of his jaw working as he kept clenching and releasing it.
"We need to find the horcruxes," he finally said. Hermione let out a low, deep breath that she'd been anxiously holding and nodded.
"We do," she said. "Tom and Harry are the linchpins. Ideologically the Death Eaters are too diverse. It's Tom's power that keeps the army cohesive. If we can kill him, permanently, there should be enough infighting to give the Resistance the upper hand."
"I guess that's the one upside to Tom's delusions of immortality: he isn't bothering to groom a successor," Ron said woodenly as he looked over another mission report. Hermione could see her signature on the bottom; verifying the injured, calculating the losses in neat, impersonal numbers. "Although I don't doubt the Malfoys will think they're first in line now that Bellatrix is dead. Fucking psychopaths."
"You need to convince Harry that the horcruxes are the first priority," she said, staring at Ron intently. "Especially now, after Ginny. I'm worried he just wants to ignore them."
Ron expression grew strained.
"Yeah," he said quietly.
Hermione hesitantly drew closer.
"Ron, I hope what I said at the meeting last night didn't make you feel like it was your fault. You saved Ginny. I didn't think it would be appropriate to withhold the information but I didn't mean to hurt you by disclosing it."
"It's fine," he said, expression stiff. "You made the right call."
"I'm sorry—"
"Don't. I don't really want to talk about it," he said in a shaking voice that brooked no argument.
Hermione's eyes darted across his face, recognizing the tension around his eyes, the scarlet tipping his ears while his face grew so pale his freckles stood out like drops of blood across his face.
If she pushed he'd explode.
Hermione felt her heart sink.
"Right. Well, I'll leave you to review," she said turning to leave.
Hermione regained consciousness and dazedly found someone leaning over her, tilting her head back. The right side of her face and body were rigid. She couldn't move her fingers and her tongue hurt as though it had been bitten repeatedly.
She jerked away from the hands upon her and the person, a man, stopped touching her. He stepped back eying her carefully. She stared at him in confusion. He was pale and blond and his face, which had seemed expressive when she'd first opened her eyes, was carefully blank.
"You had a seizure," he said in a calm voice. "Apparently fertility potions and legilimency don't mix."
He glanced down at a wand in his hand. "Can you speak? You were screaming for several minutes."
Hermione fought to swallow. Her throat felt raw, as though several minutes were a gross understatement. She tried to open her mouth and found that the muscles in the right side of her jaw were so tight she could barely part her teeth.
She felt exhausted. She felt as though she'd been electrocuted; her muscles and tendons felt as though they'd been pulled taut until they'd been about to snap. When she tried to breathe there was a low, gasping sound that emerged from the back of her throat.
She tried to remember what had happened. She tried to sit up, but her body was uncooperative. She burst into tears.
"Who are you?" she slurred through her teeth when she finally stopped sobbing. She stared up at the man standing beside her.
A myriad of emotions suddenly flickered across his face. He opened his mouth, then shut it firmly and hesitated.
"I'm in charge of your care," he finally said, his expression blank once more. He pulled a small bottle seemingly out of nowhere. "You should take this. You'll probably be able to remember what happened when you wake next."
Hermione hesitated and then nodded in acquiescence. He slid a hand under her neck at the base of her skull and helped tilt her rigid body up so she could swallow it. As soon as she drank it, her exhaustion took hold of her fully, and she felt herself drifting off.
"Do I know you?" she asked as her eyes slid closed.
"I suppose you do."
When Hermione woke again, the right side of her body felt faintly sore and her tongue had the subtle sensation of a healing charm across the surface of it.
She cast her mind back, trying to remember what had happened.
She'd been talking to Malfoy about Voldemort, about horcruxes—she suddenly remembered the word. She'd finally asked her question; which had hardly been a question because she was almost certain she was right. Voldemort was dying.
Then everything in her head had felt like it had exploded, the room turned red, and she'd collapsed.
She'd had a seizure in front of Malfoy.
When she'd woke the first time she'd been practically immobile and hadn't even remembered who he was. He'd dosed her with Dreamless Sleep Draught.
She thought back on the exchange. 'In charge of her care' was a very generous way for him to describe himself. She snorted.
She shifted her shoulders and tried opening her mouth. Her jaw was sore but she could part her teeth fully. She sat up gingerly and examined herself.
She'd been treated.
Seizures were not her healing specialty, but Arthur Weasley had suffered from them mildly after he'd been cursed by Lucius Malfoy. She had researched it. The treatment was similar to treating someone for the cruciatus, a treatment that she was quite familiar with.
It was not exclusively wand healing but magi-physical therapy; using spells and then massaging the knots and tension away by hand. Someone had touched her. At minimum they'd massaged the entire right side of her body in order for the tension and rigidity to be so thoroughly relieved. Considering that she felt almost normal, she suspected that she'd been treated on both sides from her jaw down to her toes.
She shuddered slightly, but tried to reason with herself.
It was healing. Just healing. She'd healed hundreds and hundreds of people. Treated injuries on every part of the body. An injury was an injury. Healing was healing. It was quite removed from any sense of sensuality or sexuality. Clinical. Bodies rarely even registered as anything more than something to heal.
But still... The thought that someone had been handling her while she was unconscious in Malfoy's house made her feel ill.
She clutched her blankets against her chest protectively.
She glanced at the calendar on the wall and found that two days had passed since her conversation with Malfoy.
She shifted and hissed, glancing down. Her breasts were sore and—enlarged. She stared in abject horror for several seconds before remembering that it was a side-effect of the fertility potion Stroud had given her. She grimaced and climbed out of bed.
Malfoy had used cleaning charms on her after bringing her back from Voldemort's Hall, but she hadn't actually washed any of it off. She gathered up towels and clothing and went down the hall to the shower in the other bathroom.
A long shower relieved any remaining aches in her body. She tilted her head back under the spray and thought back on the memory of Ron she'd unintentionally broken open. Horcruxes. And casualty rates. And Ginny.
It always came back to Ginny.
Ron. He'd looked so gaunt. So ground down by the war. His hair had been streaked with grey even though he couldn't have been more than twenty-two. She'd forgotten those details. She'd forgotten how the war had eaten him; how physically the stress had manifested in him.
He'd planned missions with Moody and Kingsley. He'd taken his talent for strategy and wizard's chess and learned how to apply it to war. He'd been so proud the first time Kingsley had approved one of his strategies.
It had taken time for Ron and Harry and DA to accept that the war would be long. They thought the magical communities would rise up in support of the Order. That having witnessed Voldemort's defeat during the first wizarding war would imbue the Wizarding World with confidence in the power of Light.
But Voldemort had learned from the first war. He was more clever, wary, and cunning than he had been the first time around especially after the missteps of the battle at the Department of Mysteries. He limited his reign of terror to Muggle-borns, half-blood families and blood traitors. He seized the Ministry early and had the Order of the Phoenix labeled a terrorist organization. He had Dumbledore killed in the Headmaster's own school by a sixteen year old boy.
Any confidence the Wizarding World might have had in the power of Light was quickly smothered. Muggle-borns and half-bloods were a fragment of the wizarding population. It was easier for the established magical community to simply choose to keep their heads down and leave the Order to fight Voldemort alone.
It was difficult to fight a war as a terrorist group.
Even if you had money, going to Diagon Alley and accessing a Gringotts vault was hard. Ministry identification became required for buying anything, food or potion supplies; and buying large quantities drew suspicion. A person could be sent to the hospital after a battle but any injuries sent to the Spell Damage ward required St Mungo's to contact the DMLE; injured members of the Resistance were charged with terrorism, placed under arrest while convalescing and disappeared into one of Voldemort's prisons upon release from St Mungo's.
The Resistance was not prepared for how decisive Voldemort's initial sallies would be. They hadn't stockpiled. They hadn't put enough people into hiding and many that they did try to protect they'd failed to hide carefully enough. There was always some goodbye people thought they could get away with before they left, some small hint that Death Eater torture proved capable of dragging out from neighbors.
The pride Ron experienced when his strategies were used quickly faded as he discovered it was almost impossible to devise a skirmish without casualties. People were not reusable pieces on a chess board; when sacrificed they died. Horribly. And even if you did everything possible strategically to protect them, they didn't always do as instructed or predicted. And even if they did, the enemy didn't.
Ron tended to take every death and injury as his personal responsibility. The lustre of heroism and the envy he used to have for Harry vanished. War quickly sobered him and the understanding bonded him and Harry even more closely together; mending any fractures his past jealousy had created over the years. They became united in guilt, determination, and idealism. Closer than brothers.
There had been little room left for Hermione.
Hermione sighed and dropped her head down, feeling the water slide down her cheeks. Her lips twisted and trembled as she thought back to Hogwarts.
Harry, Ron, and Hermione: the inseparable trio....until Dumbledore's death, when Hermione had chosen potions and healing over drilling defensive magic with Harry and Ron and the rest of DA.
Her days were spent studying healing under Poppy Pomfrey. Her nights were spent studying potions with Snape. Her friendships fell to the wayside. Even her grades slid.
She had little time to devote to drilling defense spells. Everyone was studying defensive magic. No one else seemed to be worrying about injuries or how to counter curses. Or about being able to make the potions needed to heal injuries.
For a month following the Battle in the Department of Mysteries Hermione had taken ten different potions daily in order to repair all the internal damage from Dolohov's nonverbal curse. She had been lucky to have survived it.
When Dumbledore died only a few months later, she had felt keenly aware of how vital a role healing and potions would play in whether the Resistance would survive the war long enough to win it. But she was the only one worrying about it. Everyone regarded her as paranoid. Hospitals were a neutral territory; if anyone needed healing, there would always be St Mungo's to turn to.
But then they were terrorists. Hospitals weren't neutral for terrorists.
When Voldemort abruptly seized control of the Ministry, the first act of Minister Thicknesse signed was the Muggle-born Registration Act. It was a carefully timed and strategised move. The Muggle-born and half-blood aurors in the DMLE and Healers of St Mungo's were arrested and had their wands snapped before they could flee to the Order.
They would have been invaluable members of the Resistance if the Order had been able to reach them in time.
Instead, the "terrorist organization" found themselves abruptly cut-off from the world, briefly leaving Poppy Pomfrey as their most experienced Healer. Any fighters in the Resistance were brought to a boarding school matron to be healed of battle injuries and dark curses. Kingsley managed to recruit two general practitioner healers to set up a semi-functional hospital. However Voldemort's tendency towards punishing entire families, most wizarding folk were reluctant to leave their entire lives behind and ally themselves with the Order if they didn't have to.
The war was concentrated in Britain at that point. After the British Ministry of Magic was seized European Magical hospitals sympathetic to the Resistance secretly reached out and offered specialised training in healing dark magic and curses. Hermione had been the only person with enough basic healing knowledge to qualify that the Order could spare.
It had hardly been a question. The Order needed a casualty healer, if they couldn't recruit one they needed to create one; Hermione had the aptitude. She was barely given time to say goodbye before Kingsley had her smuggled out of Britain. She hadn't known when she would come back.
She trained obsessively for almost two years. She was reaching the end of her training when the Order's hospital safehouse was compromised in the aftermath of a skirmish. A Death Eater had grabbed ahold of Ernie MacMillan when he was apparating there. Once the Death Eater was inside the protective wards he immediately left and brought back several more Death Eaters.
Beyond the Fidelius charm the hospital had not been well protected. There was no evacuation plan. No guards. It was a bloodbath before the Order managed to gather and send in a response. The Order lost the two healers they had recruited, their healer trainees, Horace Slughorn, and almost every injured fighter convalescing there.
The Death Eaters left Ernie alive out of spite.
The Order needed Hermione back immediately.
Voldemort had allowed Antonin Dolohov to set up a curse development division; new and deadly curses were used in battles that required advanced spell analysis to counter. Hermione's specialty. They also needed to replace their potion master and Hermione had qualified to do that too.
Within three days, Kingsley personally arrived at the Austrian magical hospital where she'd been studying and brought her back to England.
In her absence, Harry and Ron had reforged themselves into a duo. Upon her return the trio tried to resume their friendship but the two years had sent them in separate directions.
Hermione hadn't been able to share in the idealistic belief that Light, by its inherent quality of goodness, would eventually turn the tide of the war. In her eyes it seemed to be steadily turning further and further against the Order.
From the moment she returned to England she lived in the new hospital ward that had been set up on the second floor of Grimmauld Place. She spent her days and nights watching people die; watching them realise they were going to die. Trying to save them. She sat beside them and explained as gently as she could that they'd never speak, never eat, never see, never walk, never move again. That they'd never have children. That their partner, spouse, or parents or children had died while they were unconscious.
She lived every day in the aftermath of the battles; breathed in the devastation until she was drowning in it.
She wasn't allowed to fight. She wasn't allowed in the field. She was too valuable as a healer and potion mistress. The Order couldn't risk losing her.
She stood endlessly in the aftermath of battles she had no influence over.
So she used what she had, her voice and her position as an Order member. She used her seat in meetings to urge the Order to expand training beyond defensive magic. She wasn't advocating for torture or Unforgivables; she had just wanted Resistance fighters to actually be given explicit rather than merely tacit permission to kill Death Eaters in self-defense.
She hadn't thought it could be a particularly fraught or complicated position to hold three years into a war.
It was.
Harry was adamant: they would not use dark magic; they would not kill people. The majority of the Order had fallen in line with Harry's vision.
Hermione had been the outspoken odd-one-out. It had steadily eroded most of her friendships.
It wasn't entirely surprising that Ginny had concluded that Snape was the only person Hermione could have been in a relationship with. Ginny had been right. Hermione had been almost entirely alone.
Hermione sighed to herself and turned off the shower.
If she'd done something differently, could it have changed the outcome of the war? If she had devoted herself to defense? If she hadn't pursued healing or potions? If she hadn't left for two years?
Would it have made any difference? Saved anyone?
A lump formed in her throat as she replayed Malfoy's taunt from months before:
"You didn't even fight during the war, did you? I certainly never saw you. You weren't ever out there with Potter and Weasley. You just hid. Spending all your time in hospital wards. Waving your wand about futilely, saving people who ended up being better off dead."
She swallowed hard and pressed her lips together into a hard line as she stepped out of the shower and toweled off.
She paused a moment and stared at her reflection.
She hated her reflection. Hated seeing it. She tried to avert her eyes whenever she encountered a mirror. She barely recognized the person she found in the glass.
In her memories of herself, she'd been gaunt from stress and malnutrition. Pale from staying inside healing and brewing potions. Her skin had been pallid. Her unmanageable hair always carefully restrained in tight braids that she'd kept coiled at the back of her head. Bony and thin-limbed. Her eyes, large and dark, but with fire in them.
Now...
Her face was no longer gaunt. With adequate nutrition she had filled out so that her cheeks were no longer hollowed. Regular daily walks meant her color was improved with a faint natural blush to it. Without a comb or any hair ties she could only comb with her fingers and leave it to hang loose. It fell, in a riotous mass of waves and curls, down past her elbows. Her knees and elbows and hip bones and ribs no longer jutted out. She'd built up muscle mass exercising.
She looked healthy. Pretty even. Normal. Like a Hermione from a different life.
But her eyes—
Her eyes were dead. There was no fire in them.
The spark that she regarded as most intrinsic to who she was had gone out.
She was a vibrant corpse.
She turned away from the mirror and dressed.
The fertility potion affected the fit of her robes. The buttons over her bust pulled and she could see her nipples through the fabric. She rolled her shoulders inward to try to conceal it and pulled her hair over her shoulders.
When she returned to her room she found a lunch laid out for her. She poked at a cucumber salad and stared out the window. The snow had melted. The estate was comprised of endless grey. Even the sky was grey.
She was still staring out the window when the door clicked. She glanced over and found Malfoy had entered. He was wearing his 'hunting' clothes. They were clean, so her guess was that he was heading out rather than returning.
She stared at him. Without robes he was noticeably tall and lithe. The clothing was all black but his forearms, chest and legs had a metallic silver protective gear strapped onto them. Ukrainian Ironbelly hide body-armor, Hermione concluded after studying him for a moment; for spell and weapon protection, unless he had a dragon taming hobby she didn't know about. He was gripping a pair of gloves in one hand.
She wondered if he'd worn that outfit when he'd killed Ginny, Minerva McGonagall, Alastor Moody, Neville, Dean, Seamus, Professor Sprout, Madam Pomfrey, Professor Flitwick, and Oliver Wood. He probably always had it on under his Death Eater robes.
Ironbelly hide was highly resistant to magic and almost impenetrable to physical attacks. In a duel, unless the attacker could land a headshot or used a killing curse, Malfoy would be difficult to beat. Someone with manacles blocking their magic would have no chance against him at all.
Then again, when had Slytherins ever cared about fighting fair?
His eyes met hers from across the room and he studied her carefully.
She crossed her arms protectively across her chest.
"Remember me now?" he asked.
"To my profound dismay," she said glancing away from him. He approached slowly.
"I informed Stroud about what happened. Apparently she didn't bother to verify that fertility potion wouldn't interact negatively with a legilimency session," he said with a faint sneer.
"I doubt the combination is something regularly studied by potion masters," Hermione said in a dry voice.
There was a pause and Malfoy pulled a newspaper out of thin air and handed it to her. She plucked it from his fingers with a curious expression.
"You've clearly been putting your reading to good use," he said as she unfolded it.
"Peace Talks in Scandinavia!" announced the front page.
She smiled to herself as she skimmed the article.
"How did you guess?" he said after a minute of silence.
She looked up from the newspaper.
"About this?" she said, widening her eyes innocently and indicating the article.
He rolled his eyes.
"No."
The corner of her mouth quirked.
"I'm a healer," she said, then glanced down at her wrists. "Or I was, at least. I specialised in healing dark magic. I know the signs of magical corrosion. Too much of certain kinds of dark magic and it turns to poison in the body. The body and the magic try to assimilate it. Once there's dark magic at a cellular level, there's no going back. The magic eats the body from the inside out."
She set the newspaper aside. "The magic is still highly potent of course. He's still one of the most powerful wizards in the world. But physically he's deteriorating. Even all that unicorn blood he's imbibing and bathing in can't sufficiently manage the symptoms. Lying in a torpor under a nest of snakes is just delaying the inevitable. Even if he's immortal, he'll be little more than a shade soon. He'll fade into ether. With Harry dead, he has no way to rebirth himself again. If all his horcruxes have been destroyed—he'll just—cease to exist."
Malfoy looked at her sharply and she met his eyes.
"The tethers, they're called horcruxes aren't they?" she asked.
He nodded slowly.
"New memory?" he said.
She nodded.
"During the seizure," she said, leaning back in her chair. "The Order was hunting them. Ron and Harry were assigned to."
"Anything else?" he said, his voice low and dangerous.
"Ron was upset about the casualty rates. We were starving. I doubt it's anything you don't already know," she said quietly.
She looked up at him steadily, expecting him to immediately move to invade her mind. To verify it. He just stared at her.
She looked away. After a minute she glanced back up, hesitating.
He noticed her attention and inclined his head, arching an eyebrow.
"Kingsley Shacklebolt..." she said. "Hannah didn't mention him. Everyone keeps saying that I'm all that's left of the Order, but I don't remember—"
"He died a few months before the final battle," Malfoy said, looking away from her. His jaw rolled slightly.
Hermione had known—but she still felt a sharp ache in her chest when she heard the confirmation.
She felt sure she already knew the answer to her next question too.
"Were you the one who—?"
He met her eyes and nodded. "He was in my way."