Ambush
Hermione was tired.
She knew that seeing the castle would hurt her, stab into her heart like a poisoned blade. The fortress was exactly as it had been, glorious and beautiful, and it made her chest hurt. The cliffs and forests filled her mind with memories of before she became the broken, ruined, thing she was today. The turrets rose into the clear blue sky, and the Great Lake was sparkling with the sunshine. Even the trestle that led into the dark woods was looking uncharacteristically less shabby.
But the castle had been destroyed. It had been filled with the screams and suffering of students who would never walk the halls again. That bridge had been just another casualty, and yet here it stood.
The bodies, though. They were not healed, the war would never wash away from them. They would forever remain in the terror of May.
Every time she looked at something beautiful her thoughts ruined it. Whether it was a warm drink or a good book, it was exhausting. But everything was exhausting to her these days. It made her skin itch, to not understand how to fix whatever was boiling under her skin. There was never a problem she couldn’t solve; And yet here she was, without a solution to herself.
So even as she looked at Hogwarts through the train’s window, she didn’t feel the warmth of returning home. A feeling of wrongness was there instead, and she couldn’t help but think that it was because she was looking at something that had been so utterly wrecked by the War and yet not a mark of harm remained. There was a retched part of her that wished the castle would have stayed broken. That way it would have been welcoming. It would have been broken just like her. She was so broken that the girl she was before felt like she was unreachable, and this unhopeful, scattered mess was who she would stay.
Maybe the feeling of wrongness was because, for the first time since the beginning, Harry and Ron weren’t sitting on the train with her. She sat alone in her cabin. Avoiding Ginny, Neville, and Luna was a necessity that no one understood.
How could she disappoint them when they were already laughing and smiling and perfectly mended? She had always been serious, but laughing now seemed like an exercise she could not complete. Harry and Ron had tried to help, but Harry was so torn himself that she would have rather suffered alone than put on more stress to him. He was the most important friend she ever had, and no matter how far she sunk into her despair, she would never hurt him by pushing him down with her. Neither would she do that to Ron, even as they were right now.
When the ministry released the mandated repeat year, using the testimonies of Neville and Hannah Abbot along with other students who stayed that seventh year as evidence of the insufficient learning, there wasn’t much backlash. People understood. People wanted things to go back to normal.
The reporters had asked Harry, Ron, and her what they wished in their careers after being deemed “War Hero’s,” at age 17, when they exited the courtroom after Lucious Malfoy’s trial. She thought it would be best to support the ministries’ words, so she expressed her excitement at the chance to return to Hogwarts. Ron said he wanted to take up business with George rather than go back, and just like that, a pardon from the Minister appeared. Excusing him.
She remembered her hands shaking when he got the letter at the Burrow in July. How could she do it without him? He had whooped with joy, and there was no darkness in his eyes. She felt dirty next to him. Next to all of them, the Weasleys who had lost so much, and never had much to begin with, and yet they were happy. She excused herself outside and was staring out into the field, looking at nothing, thinking of nothing, when Harry appeared at her right.
“I can’t face it, all fixed up. They are going to patch that castle up and sweep all the fucking pain under the rug next year, and I won’t be able to deal with it, Mione. Not when Colin, when Lavender and Fred and Remus won’t be there to see it too. I am not going back.” He had said to her then, his eyes watering and his face drawn.
“I found out that I own a manor in Poland, with farm and cattle. It belonged to my father’s parents, and the assets were frozen until I turned 18. I’m going there, to figure out how to heal. Kingsley already approved. I’m sorry Hermione, but Hogwarts will be good for you. You were always at your best within that library. Come visit me over the holidays, yeah?”
That smile was the hardest one she had ever had to fake.
That was the last time she had seen him. Sometimes the thought of writing him a letter crossed her mind, but every single time she pulled out a pen all she wanted to write was rude words. Hermione knew it was wrong of her to be angry at him. Selfish. But she couldn’t help it, so every letter was burned.
When it truly went downhill, she and Ron fought soon after. It had hit early August when Ron had turned to her while she was sitting in one of the chairs in the living room, trying to stop the small black dots from dancing across her vision anymore, and said, “How long am I going to wait, Mione?”
“What?” She had said, and it was small.
“I’ve been waiting for you for years, and now we have all the time in the world, and you still won’t take me? I thought we had finally reached somewhere.” His words weren’t angry, but there was a taint of flushed annoyance that made her eye twitch.
After their explosive first kiss during the Great War, Hermione knew that something was either going to boil between them or burn out. After they settled back into life while not on the run, and the adrenaline of furiously trying to stay alive lessened, her feelings hit a wall. She had loved him for the entire length of girlhood.
But she was a shattered woman now.
She told him that she didn’t know if they should jump into something when neither of them was truly healed or settled after the past year. It was logical.
“Every time I think you’ve finally stopped being a know-it-all priss, you come right back at it.” The way Ron had said it made it sound like he was making a joke, but the words had inflamed something nasty in her heart. Her face had turned red, and her skin felt like fire was burning under it. Without consciously doing it, her wand had slid into her hand.
The cool wood had broken the haze. And that’s when she apparated away. It was just a blink of time, but it was either escape the stifled air of the Burrow, Ron’s freckles, and the life she was living, or explode into a mess of anguish. Letters didn’t ever find her, and it was because she was a wraith moving through London. Motels, Hostels, whatever she could find.
She spent the rest of the summer floating along, alone.
She took her head off of the window in her compartment. She had to get up soon and put on her Head Girl badge and robes on. Put on her smile.
It was hard all the time, these days, to wear a smile. Somewhere in the last year, smiling became like putting on a clothing item. Something to cover what she didn’t want others to see. There was quite a bit that she was hiding. Her sadness, her tiredness, but beyond that, was a secret that no one could ever know.
She had only one condition when Dumbledore came to her. Not a soul would be told about her condition or the strategy he devised to use it for the Order’s advantage in the war. Unless she utters it herself. Hermione had demanded the Unbreakable Vow from the headmaster. He obeyed.
That secret was heavy, nowadays.
The train began slowing down, hard enough for her to shift forward at the force. She stood up and swayed. When was the last time she’d eaten? She couldn’t remember.
She caught her reflection in the window. Her mane of hair was frazzled, and longer than it had ever been. Her eyes were lightless, and her skin was wan. The dark smudges under her eyes stood out even more because of it.
Head Girl. Golden Girl. War Hero.
She tugged the curtains closed on the compartment’s locked door. Changed into her school clothes, which hung loosely off her body now. She stabbed the Head Girl Badge on her shirt.
And she stuck on a smile.
*****
The sorting was miserable. But she clapped and cheered her way through it. Introducing herself to the First Years, stopping rowdy Third Years from throwing mashed potatoes at them. Her smile never fell. If only because she felt McGonagall’s eyes on her. Her heart hurt at the quietness that dampened the joy of the feast at times. The younger kids seemed to keep looking behind them as if the Carrow’s would appear and punish them for gracing smiles. It almost made the memories that attacked her subconscious sometimes sweep in.
But the disbelief kept her present throughout the feast.
Draco Malfoy. Head Boy. What the bloody hell was McGonagall smoking?
In truth it made sense. Nothing to heal old wounds like a publicized redemption arc. But the idea of sharing a dorm with him did not make her think logically. It almost made her want to laugh. Just a bit. Purely on the fact that it seemed her life couldn’t give her a bloody break.
“So, you’re Hermione Granger, aren’t you?”
She blinked and realized her smile had slipped. She slapped it back on as she turned towards the voice.
A small raven-haired boy sat to her right, staring up at her with shrewd eyes too dead for an eleven-year-old. He raised his eyebrows expectantly as she didn’t respond right away.
“Yes, I am. Who’s asking?” She tried to have a kind tone, but it came out with a flat edge. There was no way she was about to be rude to an innocent boy, not even if she was withering away. “Sorry, I mean what’s your name?”
“William Nott.” A surprise. “My brother has told me about you.”
“Did he now?” What could Theodore Nott possibly say about her? The number of times they interacted were limited, and even then, those times were usually him laughing at Malfoy’s Mudblood jokes. Unless…. No. Not even she was that unlucky.
Muggles called it PTSD, but wizards usually revoked such things. There were no magical therapists, no help group for tortured souls of Wars, and she knew that because back in her ignorance she had looked. They usually were labeled as “crazy old bats” and that was all.
So, when the memories came, she had no idea how to stop them from sweeping her away.
She was running towards the courtyard, where she had heard a shriek that sounded like Luna. It was hard to tell though, as explosions flanked her on either side, along with the screams of the dying. She thought that sound would ring forever through her ears. Her breath was scraping through her lungs, and her legs burned. She should have trained as Dumbledore suggested, and when she saw him in Hell, she’d let him tell her he told her so.
Racing through the last doorway, Hermione was almost to the fighting, when a cough struck her from the right side of the hall.
Turning, absent-mindedly, almost on instinct, that’s where she saw Theodore Nott laying against the wall, with blood pouring straight out of his mouth. Their eyes caught, and he smiled at her, even as the blood continued.
She stumbled.
Stop, she told herself.
She forced herself to turn again to the boy after her vision cleared, seeing that he had nodded and was staring at her still as he ate his pudding, dribbling it all over his lap. She cringed slightly and offered him a napkin.
“Are you happy with your sorting?” A bold question to ask, as this child was from an All-Slytherin family that dated back to the 1200s. She wondered if Nott was watching them angrily at the notion of his little brother conversing civilly with a Mudblood, but if she caught his eye, then the memory might come back.
William shook his head, and she was on her way to tell him that if his family didn’t accept it then they could shove it, when he said, “Theo thought I would belong in Ravenclaw, and Mum and Dad I haven’t seen for a while. Theo tells me that they are just away for a bit, but I snuck into the maid’s quarters before I got here, and saw the newspaper. They are in Azkaban. I don’t think they are coming back.”
They aren’t, she wanted to tell him. Even as she tried to cut the newspaper out of her diet after memories were routine when reading about the trials, she knew. The Nott’s got 80 years in prison, Lucious Malfoy 120, and the Parkinson’s 35. The rest of the names, like the Goyles and Crabbe’s and Zabini’s, all got minimal sentences.
“I’m sorry about that.” The jab of pain in her heart for the child awoke her, but it blended in with the rest.
Her eyebrows shot together as he laughed, “Oh no, I don’t mind. They didn’t talk to me much and were always gone. I’m just glad I didn’t have to say goodbye to Theo.”
She had helped this child then. It was the one saving grace to her pain, that she had helped people survive.
It was a gift that McGonagall announced it was time for Prefects to lead the houses up to the dormitories. The image of a four-poster bed was calling her name, and the thought of a room all to herself and a bathroom, kept her from dropping dead on the walk up the staircases. When she had given the prefects of Gryffindor their password, Hickory Bicket, it was time to meet with McGonagall in her office with her fellow Head Student.
Spectacular. Draco Malfoy. Bloody hell.
The halls echoed as she made her way up to the office, as almost as if the castle was trying to speak to her in the language of creeks and cricks. Thad had been her favorite part of coming to Hogwarts, besides the library. The castle itself seemed to be a sentential being. The idea had been so important to her that she remembered studying all the books she could find about the castle and the founders to try and formulate evidence enough to convince Harry and Ron, but didn’t end up finding much.
But still, the dust sang to her. And she tried her hardest to listen.
Hermione couldn’t level her eyes off the floor though in case she stumbled upon one of the new portraits. The ones that portrayed Colin Creevy or James Newton, the second years that snuck upon the battlefield. And wasted their lives. The ones that she didn’t save.
My fault, my fault, my fault, her heart sang.
Because of that, her eyes were on the floor, she ran directly into Malfoy's back.
Malfoy flew back, as if he was burned, and stared down at her. His gaze was so intense as he inspected her that she could almost feel it caress her face, and her heart began to pound. But she didn’t lower her eyes, damn him if he thought that she was afraid of him still. She had seen so, so much worse.
But damnit, she didn’t even reach his shoulders, and for all the unhealthy habits that he participated in the last year, he was massive. Quidditch muscles, her brain dully reminded her. If he chose to be hostile towards her, she very well didn’t stand a chance against him.
His eyes began to flash, and she could feel her mind begin to whirl backward as a memory began to form, but she steeled herself on anything else. To hell if she was going to break in front of him.
He shot her a weird look, something flitting through his slate-colored eyes, before he sighed. Weird.
Malfoy glanced back at the gargoyles and then glanced down at the expensive-looking watch on his wrist. “Did this silly bint forget about our meeting?” Ah. That’s more predictable.
If Hermione hadn’t been shoved through a metaphorical meat processor in the last year, she would have defended the headmaster without delay, but she didn’t have energy to fight much these days, let alone snarky men. Malfoy seemed to notice her lack of reply because his eyes were on her again.
The doors opened before the awkwardness could settle in.
Entering the office was like reading the prologue of her suffering, the very setting in which her demise truly began. Luckily it looked so different in McGonagall’s decorations and styles that the flashbacks did not invade just yet.
“Please, Mr. Malfoy and Ms. Granger, take a seat.” McGonagall sat behind her desk, bun perfectly in place and robes spotless. She noticed that the office was mostly empty, a juxtaposition to the clutter and disorganization that was Dumbledore’s. There was a reason Minerva was her favorite.
She jumped into the red velvet chair facing the desk. Malfoy sat silently, gracefully crossing his ankles in front of him without a sound. It was hard to miss his perfect posture, or the way that his eyes flicked to the door every five seconds. But that she could understand, having her own back face the door was not something she was fond of anymore. That lesson had been learnt.
“Come here, come here, you special little witch. Let me taste your light and feed off your-“
Breathe. Breathe. Do not break.
The headmaster took a deep breath, then pinned that infamous stare on them both. Even as an Eighth/Seventh Year, that stare still terrified her. “Now, I know that you both are well aware of the scheme that is at play here,” Hermione almost huffed. “You both have electrified public images right now, and putting you in this position will help build up the image of Hogwarts that people need to see at this moment. If the wizarding society see’s the world’s most famous Golden Girl being cordial, even friendly with what people named “the youngest Death Eater ever,” then even the most hardened minds can be changed.”
Yes, if they could get along, then Voldemort and Dumbledore themselves could be friendly. However, there was a flaw in this plan, and it was blaringly obvious. Malfoy would never respect her, and she would never enjoy him. To use them so obviously as political pawns made her tick, and she would have assumed that Malfoy couldn’t be too cheery about it either.
Yet he did not speak out.
If she had enough energy to care, then she would have wondered about that.
Minerva nodded, “I’m glad you both understand, but I’m not surprised as you both are ranked 1st and 2nd in your year.” If the air between her and Malfoy wasn’t charged before, it was now. “Because of this, I’ve prescribed you to both have the same classes this year. During five of your core classes, Gryffindor and Slytherin will be together, but for Potions, and Defense Against the Dark Arts, Ms. Granger you are only with Slytherin. And Mr. Malfoy, you are alone with the Gryffindors in History of Magic. During your chosen electives, Ancient Runes, Alchemy, and Advanced Arithmancy, lucky you both chose the same, you are with a mix of every house. Now, your Head Student duties include…” The headmaster kept going, but Hermione’s mind was spinning.
She could do this, even if she had to be with Malfoy all the time. Lock into school, and study. Become the Hermione Granger everyone wanted to believe she was again. If she acted like herself for long enough, perhaps there was a chance she could shove all the despair and hatred she felt for the world behind.
She glanced to her left, observing the boy she would have to survive for the next year.
Malfoy was unnerving in the way he sat so still. Like a shell about to shatter. His eyes tracked Minerva’s words, and yet she couldn’t shake the fact that his mind wasn’t in this room, not really. When the headmaster dismissed them to the dorm with the instructions on how to enter the dormitory, the walk back was silent.
He didn’t so much as breathe too loudly around her, and she found it almost comforting that there was no forced small talk and anything such as discussing anything mundane. They just walked together, even as he had to slow to allow her to keep up. Their steps echoed down the lone hall that led to the isolated dormitory. She hadn’t been up there yet, but her trunk must have been delivered. They reached the Statue of Merlin near the sixth story.
Hermione watched as he took the liberty to be the one to tap his wand five times on Merlin’s right shoulder, even the flick of his wrist in such precise movements. He must have already been up to the dorm before the feast, which is why he hadn’t been on the stairs, guiding the First Years like she was. She jumped three feet in the air and pulled her wand out as a loud crack! Rang through the air.
Malfoy’s eyebrows shot up, and then the expression disappeared. It was almost amusement. The statue vanished, and in its place a doorway. Malfoy gave a flourish, seemingly saying “Ladies first.” Twit. She couldn’t help but leave her wand raised as she stomped up the stairs. She hoped he didn’t notice.
It was all of two seconds of scanning the room before her eyes locked onto the figure on the couch, and for Malfoy to point his wand at her.
“Hello, love. Care to explain what we all know you’re hiding?” Theodore Nott drawled from the furniture.