A Broken Daughter
Hermione Granger’s head has never ached so terribly. She raises a hand to rub her temples, closing her eyes as she turns to lay on her side. Below her, the ancient bedsprings groan.
Hermione whines with them, scrunching her eyes together as she tries to will the throbbing pain in her skull away, tries to conjure sleep. She takes a shaky breath, presses her hand to her forehead, and begins to count backwards the way her mother taught her when she was young. 100…99…98…97…
When it finally arrives, sleep does not bring peace. It hasn’t for six nights now. Her ears ring with screams and the sound of stone stairways shattering around her. Bursts of bright lights dance across her eyelids, a strange firework display that strikes fear into her chest. The lights become brighter, harsher; the sounds grow louder in her ears until she is almost certain that Hogwarts is once again crumbling under her feet. The screams ring, and no matter where she turns there is horror. She looks down in time to see Remus Lupin, her old kindly professor, fall to the ground, his eyes glassy under the moonlight.
She wakes with a start, a scream dying in her throat as she flails in the twisted sheets. As she looks around, she slowly remembers where she is: in the attic bedroom at the Burrow. Gradually, her breaths slow; the heat emanating from her face and chest dissipates. Hermione raises a hand again to her temple. The headache has gone for now, but she knows it will be back.
She runs her fingers gently across her cheek, down her neck and over her collarbone; the last vestiges of her injuries are barely noticeable now, but she will always remember them: the deep gash an inch below her throat, the thin slice on her cheek. They had been healed after the battle, leaving smooth white scars in their wake. Madame Pomfrey has assured her that the scars, too, will fade with time. Hermione hopes they don’t.
With a sigh she sits up and swings her legs over the side of the bed, feeling the cool wood floor under her feet. She picks up her dressing gown from the chair where she had dropped it the evening before, ties the belt tight around her waist. Before leaving the room she pats the top of her head gently, ensuring her unruly hair remains contained in its tight plait. When that is done, she opens the attic door and descends the rickety stairs.
The clock in the kitchen reads 1:20 in the morning, but the Burrow is full of commotion. Hermione is not the only inhabitant who has found the nighttime suddenly strange and unwelcoming in the week since the Battle of Hogwarts concluded. As Hermione traipses down the stairs she spies Harry and Ginny out the window, hovering idly on broomsticks and throwing a quaffle back and forth. On the main floor, Percy sits in an armchair by a dwindling fire, staring placidly at a book without ever turning a page. Perhaps worst of all is Mrs. Weasley sitting beside him, rocking furiously in her chair while her knitting needles dance; Hermione doesn’t know what the needles are creating but even from the kitchen she can make out a large yellow ‘F’ on the fabric. She swallows, closes her eyes and pushes down the image of Fred Weasley’s lifeless face.
The kitchen is thankfully empty, and Hermione makes herself a cup of tea. As she sits at the table and takes a sip, she looks around the funny, cozy home that has absorbed her so fully into its embrace. The Burrow has always seemed wondrous to her, as a daughter of two muggle dentists.
Before the war, before all those months wandering the country with her two friends, before the battle that she can not push from her mind no matter how hard she tries, Hermione had loved the feeling of being surrounded by magic. Now it all feels faintly ominous, like a charlatan drawing her attention to a puff of smoke while his assistant slips her money from her purse.
Hermione takes another sip of tea, holding the scalding liquid on her tongue a moment longer than wise. She has seen what magic can do, the wonderful and the evil. And now, for the first time since she received her Hogwarts letter at eleven years old, she lets herself wonder if it is worth the trouble.
A small thud jerks Hermione from her thoughts, and she turns to see Harry out the window, broomstick gripped in his hand. She drains her tea quickly, not wishing to intrude on his and Ginny’s nighttime game. More truthfully, she does not wish to sit and make conversation with them, love them as she does. There has been precious little to talk about the past week other than the battle, the people they lost, and the rebuilding efforts which have already been mobilized. Hermione does not have the energy for any of it.
A low buzz begins to sound in her ears, and she feels a faint tension creep up the back of her head. She groans, sets her tea cup on the counter, and makes her way back to the attic.
***
The Burrow looks much different in the daytime, and Hermione puts on her best attempt at a smile as she sits with Ron and Percy in the sitting room. She, along with Harry and the Weasley family, has spent the seven days since the battle doing her best approximation of ‘normal,’ whatever that should look like now. She eats the food put forward by Mrs. Weasley each evening, chats with Ginny and Percy about nonsense, tries to play chess with Ron, and struggles to figure out what she will do the next day or the next year or for the rest of her life.
It is exhausting.
Hermione hangs her head in a flash of shame whenever she thinks this. She knows, of course she knows that she is extremely lucky, all things considered. With all the people who fell during the battle, the families who lost a loved one, the friends who were grievously injured in one way or another, Hermione knows she is lucky to have walked away with as much of her life intact as she did.
But still a heaviness weighs on her chest that she cannot banish. Still she wakes every night feeling as though she is staring down the wand of Bellatrix Lestrange, of Yaxley, of Dawlish or any other masked tormentor. Still, her mind drifts towards her parents, somewhere in Australia without any inkling that they have a broken daughter back home.
The others grieve and heal in their own ways. Percy pretends to read; Mrs. Weasley knits. Harry has hardly left Ginny’s side since they returned to the Burrow. Everyone lets them be together without much comment, even Mrs. Weasley. Ron makes a half-hearted protest one evening, but even he can’t seem to muster much enthusiasm.
Hermione’s eyes flicker up the staircase, and land on a sliver of light spilling from a closed door. She has hardly seen George Weasley since returning to the Burrow. Almost nobody has seen him, apart from his mother. He hardly comes out of his room, and when he does it is as if an inferius creeps within the house.
The shop in Diagon Alley sits shuttered, this Hermione knows from Mr. and Mrs. Weasley’s furtive, worried whispers. Ginny maintains she saw a letter from Lee Jordan come through a few days before, and that George will reopen soon, but Hermione isn’t convinced. She hasn’t even been able to bring herself to return to her parents’ house yet, and they aren’t — well, they’re just in Australia. She can’t imagine how George will be able to face the joke shop without Fred.
The front door wheezes open and slams closed. Hermione looks up to find Mr. Weasley shaking off his cloak as he walks into the sitting room.
“Any news?” Percy asks from his seat.
“It’s still a bit of a mess,” Mr. Weasley grimaces as he shrugs off his cloak and sinks into a nearby sofa. “But there’s some progress.”
“Oh?” Beside Hermione, Ron raises an eyebrow. Even with Kingsley Shacklebolt as interim Minister for Magic, the ministry has been in chaos the entire week as it tries to clean up the school, round up the last of Voldemort’s supporters, and hold trials for those already in custody. Mr. Weasley has brought home news every evening, but Hermione is surprised by how uninterested she is.
“They’re asking for volunteers,” Mr. Weasley says, “for a reorganization project. People who can travel across Britain over the next few weeks and take inventory of the damages inflicted by Voldemort’s regime that will require ministry assistance.”
“I’ll do it.”
Hermione is startled by the strong, assured tone of Ron’s voice. She turns to look at him, her eyebrows climbing towards her hairline. His mouth sits in a line, his blue eyes sparkling in the dim light. He turns to Hermione, the edges of his expression softening as he looks at her.
Her stomach roils. She turns away, unable to return his gaze.
“I’ll put your name in with Bill,” Mr. Weasley nods toward Ron. “He’s helping with the planning.”
“I’ll go too,” Percy says from his armchair. “I expect there will be quite a lot of work to sort out.”
Mr. Weasley nods, his hands going up to cover his face. “Yes,” he says in a tight, tired voice. “I expect you’re right.”
“What do you say, Hermione?” Ron turns to look at her again, nudging her shoulder with his own. “You going to join us?”
“Oh…” Her voice sounds higher than usual, and brittle. She swallows as her eyes flit from Ron’s face, entirely too close to her own, to Percy’s expectant expression. She gives her head a small, swift shake. “No, no. I don’t…”
“I know you’ll have more important things to attend to,” Ron says with a small smile, leaning back so his shoulder touches hers. “But if you want to come…”
“Thank you.” Hermione fidgets in her seat. Truthfully, she has no plans to do anything more important than the ministry project. The project, in fact, sounds like something she ordinarily would love to be part of. But the thought of spending another several weeks traipsing across the country, staying god-knows-where with Ron right beside her—
No. No, she cannot do it. That would be asking entirely too much.
***
That night she wakes again twisted in her bedsheets, her hair plastered to her cheeks as her raw throat throbs. When she descends the stairs the light still flickers under George’s door, and she can see Ron and Percy whispering in the sitting room.
She does not go to the kitchen tonight. Instead, she returns to her books. The tiny library on the other side of the sitting room is barely larger than a cupboard, but Hermione doesn’t mind as she closes the door behind her and lights her wand. Her own collection of volumes was lost with the beaded bag somewhere in the school but she finds battered textbooks on the shelves before her and reads them, just as she had done seven years before when she had lain awake anxious about attending an unknown school full of unknown people. The familiar instructions and precise explanations wash over her, coating her nerves like a balm.
As she reads, her mind slips to memories of her parents, as it often has in recent days. Ever since the battle ended and Voldemort fell, she has thought about them constantly. They are out there, somewhere in Australia, without an idea that she exists.
When Hermione cast the spell that wiped their memories she hadn’t really considered the possibility that she would live to undo it. She had said she could find them and reverse it, yes, but…she had thought she would die. Or Harry would die and she would then have to stay in England to carry on the fight. She hadn’t anticipated this swift, definitive end.
The Burrow is lovely, make no mistake. The Weasleys are lovely, every one of them treating her as a member of the family. Her friends are lovely, Harry and Ron; how she loves them both, though this thought brings on a new, different, agony.
Yet even with all her luck, her joy at finding herself alive on the other side of the battle, her deep and unyielding attachment to her friends and their welcoming family, it is not enough.
It is not hers.
After so many months of hunger and fear and exhaustion, after seven years of a half-life, Hermione desperately wants her parents with her. She wants to have her father crush her in a hug, to sit on the floor and have her mother braid her hair so tightly it hurts her scalp. She wants to visit a bookstore with them, spend an hour or two silently studying their own separate sections of shelves and then coming back together to walk home and cheerfully discuss their selections. She wants to sit down in a home that is her own.
She wants to breathe.