If My Ashes Run Cold

Hermione woke without a hangover. That was the first wrong thing.

The second was the bedroom—too pristine, too poised, the kind of old money elegance that felt less like a home and more like a mausoleum dressed in silk. White and brown, soft and feminine, but in the way a dollhouse was—delicate, curated, meant to be looked at rather than lived in. The air was thick with the scent of aged wood and something floral, something powdery, like the lingering touch of a woman long dead.

The third—her hair.

She reached for it absently at first, fingers tangling in strands that shouldn’t have been there. Too long. Too smooth. It cascaded down her back, to her hips, pooling in her lap like something detached, something growing despite her.

Panic slithered up her spine, cold and quick. She lurched upright, limbs unfamiliar, breath shallow. The heavy sheets tangled around her like dead weight, trapping her in the suffocating hush of the room.

She shifted, and her own body felt foreign—a doll stitched together wrong, a stranger in her own skin. As though it was Frankenstein’s first trembling steps, she lurched forward, knees buckling as she tumbled onto the cold floor, hair cornering her view.

The golden mirror caught her in its gaze—tall, ornate, watching.

She leaned in, breath ghosting over the glass, and a girl not-quite-her stared back. Bloodless, untouched, a doll preserved in some forgotten attic.

Something had peeled her open, hollowed her out, and left this too-perfect thing! in her place.

The room smelled of lavender and dust, fresh death and money.

Her lips parted in a laugh, girlish and soft sound.

She touched her cheek, expecting it to give, to slip away like wax under heat—but no. She looked like a thing made, not born.

“Horrid,” she murmured, pressing harder, half-wondering if she could dig her nails in deep enough to find herself beneath it. But there was nothing.

“So I’m dead, or dreaming. Or worse—” her lips curled, ”—I’m expected to live like this.”

The thought should have rattled something in her, but there was only that steady, hollow hum beneath her ribs, the same one she’d carried since the war. This wasn’t the worst thing to happen to her.

Just the strangest.

A knock at the door.

Hermione barely had time to process it before the freakishly detailed door cracked open.

“Feena—”

A young man stepped in, sharp-boned and self-assured, his dark curls slightly tousled as if he’d run a hand through them in impatience. His eyes were the same deep brown as hers—Feenas—but filled with something too knowing, an adoration.

She may just bite her own nerves out of her skin.

And then he saw her, sprawled gracelessly on the floor in front of the mirror, and his mouth twitched.

“Honestly, must you always be so bloody theatrical?” he drawled. “If you wanted to make a statement, you could’ve at least fainted onto the chaise like a proper tragic heroine.”

Hermione stared at him, her breath sticking in her throat.

Feena. He called her Feena.

Her hand twitched. She couldn’t help an undirected sneer at the ceiling. This is how you ruin a perfectly good day, she thought. Make her a girl who looks like she’s about to be fed to a slaughterhouse of politeness. A Feena, indeed.

The young man’s smirk faded slightly as he stepped closer, eyeing her with mild scrutiny. “Or did you actually hit your head? Don’t tell me you’ve finally rattled that absurdly clever brain of yours.”

Hermione forced herself to move, dragging her limbs beneath her and pushing off the floor.

“Unfortunately for you,” she murmured, smoothing down the nightgown she hadn’t fallen asleep in, “I’m still just as clever as ever. I simply woke up with the terrible realization that I’m related to you.”

His grin was immediate, sharp and conspiratorial, like they had done this dance a hundred times before. Except She had meant it.

“Ah, there she is,” he mused. Then, tilting his head, “Though you’re off your game today. Usually, you’d have insulted my parentage by now.”

How dull. They’re already a breed of walking decay, no need to add more rot to the pile.

She let the silence stretch,

She didn’t know this boy. Didn’t know her own name until he spoke it. And yet he knew her. Knew her well enough to joke, to tease, to expect a sharp-tongued retort in return.

“Come on, get up,” he sighed, turning toward the door. “Father is waiting. You know how he gets when you play dead for too long.”

Hermione stiffened.

She didn’t know.

And yet he was waiting for her to.

She exhaled slowly, schooling her expression into something indifferent.

“Well,” she said lightly, following him out the door, “wouldn’t want to ruin his morning.”

He wasn’t malfoy. Instead, here she was, stuck with something far more human, and frankly, far less interesting. She snorted internally.

Maybe she had gone mad.

She noticed spiders— maybe one too many near the door. At least the spiders in the corners of this decrepit house didn’t pretend to be anything they weren’t. They just sat there, spinning their webs, waiting for the next victim. Honest little things, really. More honest than her damned reflection.

But fine, if her body was a liar, then she’d play along. Maybe the spiders would be more forthcoming with the truth. After all, they’d been around a lot longer in this world than she had.

🕰️

The evening dripped with oppressive weight, a shadow that followed her every step as Hermione—Feena—hurled herself into the nearest bathroom, her stomach twisting violently. She had once been an orphan, alone in her time, her past a broken mirror scattered on the floor, reflecting shattered fragments of things she could never reach again. She wasn’t prepared to be anything more than that—alone.

Not her brothers. Not her father. Not her house. Not her. Not now.

She hunched over the toilet, the sharp sting of revisited grief breaking free in violent spasms. Her dinner from earlier—now a rotting, bitter memory—spilled back up into the world she had tried so desperately to escape. The Muggle god who had stolen her family from her once had been cruel enough. But now, to dangle a new family in front of her—this family—like a toy freshly unwrapped, its shine taunting her, was enough to make her insides churn and twist in disgust. How dare they? To remind her of what she’d lost by placing a cruel mockery before her. The thought of them—them—had her retching again, bile rising in her throat, burning in its acidic path.

Feena’s family, the one she hadn’t yet learned to claim, had two brothers—Kae and Rius. Their faces, almost too familiar, like shadows cast from her own reflection, haunted her.

She could feel her heart shudder at the recognition, her body aching with the knowledge that these brothers—these strangers, these too-similar ghosts—belonged to a life she wasn’t allowed. Her mind struggled to grasp the sharpness of the image, each thought bitter as it slid into place. Her heart squeezed, pulling the air from her lungs.
She didn’t want to see them. Didn’t want to know them. And yet, there they were. Kae and Rius. Faces she could never call hers. A family she could never belong to.

No Malfoy here. No drink to dull the edges. Just the quiet, the creeping sense of displacement, the realization that she had no anchor. And that silence—it screeched in her ears, the kind of silence that made you feel as though the world had forgotten to turn, leaving you behind with nothing but the echo of your own desperate thoughts.

The family was a crypt of silence, where the air never stirred, and the shadows clung to the walls like uninvited guests. The moment her father fetched her for dinner, the suffocating stillness in their home pressed in on her like a vice.

His voice, coated in some long-forgotten tenderness, had referred to her as “his little angel,” but she felt the weight of his grief , her mother if she had to guess, like a blow to the skull, each syllable hammering into her bones. A mockery of warmth.

She had dragged herself across the old radiator from the cracked, cold tiles, her skin burning where the scar had once marked her—a ghost of its former presence, the pain lingering like an ancient memory, one she could never fully forget.

At least Bellatrix wasn’t born yet, she thought bitterly. The war was still a distant shadow, something that would eventually eat the world alive, but not yet. Not now. Not in this pause before the storm. A strange peace, cloying and suffocating in its inevitability. A time when families whispered in corners, pretending that the rot hadn’t already begun to spread.

Back in her pearly bedroom, she hunched over the girl’s journals, tracing the pages as if they might contain some forgotten curse. She couldn’t recall any feena, rius or cae.
The names written in ink —sacred, pureblood names—were always, usually so familiar. So predictable. She was at a loss. But then there it was, near the back: Seraphina Greengrass. The name burned her fingertips, an unfamiliar bite, a spark of something she hadn’t expected, and it felt as if the universe had spat its rancid bile into her mouth.

The Greengrasses. Tiberius, Caius, and now Seraphina. Her stomach turned. Those two men, Tiberius and Caius—they were known in the quietest corners of the wizarding world. Defiant.
Heroes once, yes, but they had resisted Voldemort’s pull long ago, before the madness truly gripped the world, and their names—chiseled into the stone at Hogwarts—remained, forever frozen in time. Statues of honor. But her. Seraphina.

Her name was forgotten, like a whispered secret in the dark. She had disappeared one day, as if the earth itself had swallowed her whole. No one remembered her; no one cared.

And then, in her time, the Malfoys were still rotting, still clinging to the last vestiges of power. Draco, in his eternal dance with Astoria Greengrass—Caius’ granddaughter—marrying for status, for image, for something that tasted like poison on her tongue. A perfect match of pureblooded apathy. Another play in a long, bloody game.

She could hardly contain her disgust as she threw herself from the bed, the sheets heavy, suffocating with the weight of time, and onto the brittle, faded carpet.
It wasn’t even white anymore—just a color that had once been, now reduced to a sickly pale mockery of what it should have been. The universe, it seemed, enjoyed attacking her when she was already at her lowest, but it didn’t matter.

She had learned long ago that floors were often the most faithful companions when life turned its back on you.