But even so I wish and long day by day to reach my home, and to see the day of my return.
---
She started work immediately.
The Death Eater attacks were less frequent than they had been before she left, not a peep from them in three weeks, Angelina said. Hermione didn’t like it. If they were quiet, it wasn’t because they weren’t doing anything, the Order just didn’t know what; since Shacklebolt had been taken down, information about their inner workings had stopped flowing.
She didn’t even know which Death Eaters were still alive.
She turned back to the parchment, having secluded herself in the empty front office. At least the lack of attacks meant she had more time to sort things out.
The most pressing matter was the people. She needed numbers.
Behind the reception desk was a map, organised and labelled, each caravan and tent site given a grid coordinate. Orderly.
She could do with some order.
There were proper pads of lined paper here, pens, a phone. She could call someone, if there was anyone to call. The smooth plastic of the receiver felt heavy and foreign in her hand.
She started her list with Angelina, who slept in the TV room at the head office. Alicia Spinnet was there as well, two long couches pushed together so they didn’t have to be alone.
She found that was common, even before she was sent away. People didn’t want to be alone in the dark. She didn’t know where she would sleep.
She didn’t know if there was any room for her here.
She started with caravan A1.
---
She found the first person she remembered in campsite B16, the sea wind cold and unforgiving through the rows of makeshift housing.
Ernie Macmillan swung open the dented door of a caravan, face raised in something close to a smile, dropping quickly into open-mouthed alarm when he saw her standing in the mud and haze of rain. “Hermione?” he said in surprise. “I didn’t know you were coming back.”
He wasn’t the first person today who’d reacted to her with something akin to horror. It didn’t feel like a very good sign.
She didn’t know what to say to him, so she did her job instead. “Are you sleeping in this one? Does anyone else stay with you?”
He stared at her. “What’s happened? Why are you here?”
Her throat felt tight. Why would he make her say it? “Because of McGonagall.”
Ernie didn’t flinch, which felt wrong. Did he know? “Did she have enough of your experimenting?” he demanded with a frown. The boyish roundness of his cheeks had disappeared. “I wondered when it would get too much, even for you.”
Hermione didn’t know what to react to. Her experimenting…
“McGonagall is dead.”
Ernie visibly balked, taking a step back into the caravan. “The mission last week—Are you sure?”
She didn’t want to talk to Ernie anymore. McGonagall had been dead a week, long enough that if they were going to tell people he would have been told. “Ask Angelina. I’m just here to…” She thought about being cruel, briefly, saying experiment, but it wouldn’t serve her function. “I’m here to help manage things.”
“Manage things? Is that a joke?” Ernie looked at her, and for a second she remembered him in fifth year, fretting about revision timetables. He’d revered her for her marks, asked for her opinions on his essays like it meant something.
She let the coldness spread out from the pit in her chest to her face, and watched him lean back subconsciously. The hair on his arms raised in the cold, bitter wind. “Why would I be joking?”
Ernie let out a quick breath, the ghost of a laugh, and stepped back through the doorway. “True. You didn’t joke before, either. It’s me and Hannah. Am I cleared to tell her? About McGonagall?”
“Ask Angelina.”
He closed the door with a bang that shook the whole caravan.
---
Long after the sun slid down the mercury-grey sky, she had an annotated map and two lists on the Muggle paper, her writing cramped and microscopic from practised scarcity, two rows of writing between every line.
The first was an annotated list of occupants of the campsite, their names and ages, any strengths or weaknesses she noted that might affect their ability to fight. It would be useful to Angelina.
A hundred and thirteen, not including herself.
Hardly an army.
The second contained all the safe houses that people knew the location of. She thought it was mostly accurate; there were some that she knew from before, some that were marked as burned, some new.
The sick and injured—the few that survived—were being housed with the orphans, no real oversight happening over any of it. No one could give her a clear answer about how many children were in their care, nor how many might age out within the year and join the Order.
The other safe houses were full of Muggles, kept against their will after being rescued from Death Eater raids. From what she could tell, they’d been stuck there for weeks, if not longer. There were only two people left in the Order with the skill to Obliviate them and send them back to safety, and they were slow and reluctant to work. There seemed to be no management plan for their release—people were just being set back out on the street like feral cats who would hopefully find their way home. The International Statute of Secrecy was hanging on by the barest of threads.
She wondered, briefly, whether some other safe house was still out there, the location dead with McGonagall or Shacklebolt or—
A house full of Muggles with no way out.
The thought haunted her.
But she couldn’t dwell. Tomorrow she would visit the ones she knew about, list the occupants, start making plans for food and clothing and all the other things that came with masses of people. McGonagall had been gone a week, and no one had stepped up in her place to manage the houses.
She’d been counting on finding a little room to work in, some peace and quiet to keep developing spells that might actually get them ahead, might provide the smallest bit of leverage. Judging by the state of Whitby, there would be no time to research, and certainly no room. Neville and Charlie had both already found places to tuck themselves away overnight, people to be with, but Hermione was coming up blank.
She sat at the reception desk until her eyes started drooping. She stood and flipped the light switch, the darkness a welcome reprieve from the flickering fluorescents.
It felt familiar to be alone. Safe.
As her eyes adjusted, she saw the phone again. Her thoughts flickered, and some sense memories came back unbidden. A phone ringing. A coin against her thigh, body-warmed gold. The feel of her teeth sinking into skin.
He had sent her away.
She tried—recklessly, and only for a second—to pull at the memories, to remember something more. Who was he? Why had she been sent away?
The thoughts scattered like ashes, and when she tried to catch them her head hurt.
She transfigured the chair into a low bed and pushed it under the desk, crawling into it. Her muscles felt ragged, more exerted from walking through the mud of the campsite today than they had been in the cabin for so long. She hadn’t eaten since the morning; tomorrow she’d have to sort something out.
She opened the bag Charlie had given her and ran through her supplies, counting the smooth glass vials of her potion. She had four weeks worth, but after that she would need to use someone’s cauldron, or find her own, and gather the necessary supplies. One of the safe houses might have some. She thought that was where they’d stored it all, before, vaguely remembering the drag of crates on residential carpet.
She planned, and planned, and after she had a full mental itinerary of the next day, she finally fell asleep.
---
Her last stop, the next day, was the Burrow.
Every other house had been bleak, lists and lists of Muggles and orphans and people who would never fight again. People they had to hide away until Voldemort was dead and the war was won. People she’d have to come and kill if the Order was compromised.
People who seemed to hate her.
It was sentimental to save it until the end. Stupid, really. But the Burrow was a place she associated with food and people and warmth, with tea and finding what she needed.
Lavender Brown sat in the kitchen, the thick red scars on her face mostly faded, one eye still missing. The glasses she’d worn once were gone, the scar over her empty eye socket smooth. She was chopping something magically, a young boy sitting at the table next to her with snot on his face. He eyed Hermione warily.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, frowning down at the onion in front of her. She didn’t look as surprised as the others had. Hermione wasn't sure if it was because news had already reached her, or if nothing surprised her any more. “Is McGonagall gone?”
“She’s dead.”
Lavender nodded once, like maybe she’d expected it. She didn’t look up at her. “She was the only one who ever came here. You’ll send the food, then?”
Hermione nodded. This new Lavender was totally foreign to her, the dead sound of her voice and the solemn downwards turn of her mouth. “I need to know who’s here. Names, ages, willingness to fight.”
Lavender looked at her coldly.
“What are you going to do to them?” The boy looked up at Lavender’s tone, his eyes wide.
A muscle in Hermione’s temple twitched. “Do to them—”
Lavender stood, levitating vegetables into the pot on the stove. “Everyone knows what you do, Hermione. That you’re the reason they have all these spells. I might be locked up here but I’m not stupid. There’s no way you’ve done that without—” Her eyes flicked quickly to the stairs, to the child next to her. “You can’t have them.”
Hermione almost felt too surprised to argue. That’s what they thought of her? She’d thought people had been shocked to see her, horrified at McGonagall’s death, not horrified because they thought she was some kind of monster that experimented on civilians.
She’d been working for years, years, to win this fucking war.
The rage that she’d tried to tamp down for three years flared, fresh as the day she’d left.
What had Lavender ever done, other than sit at safe houses and cook?
She bit at the side of her tongue. It didn’t matter what they thought. She was doing this for them, had come back for these children and the Muggles this morning who had shouted at her for keeping them there, caged like animals in ordinary suburban houses that magically entrapped them. She'd done it all so there was a world for them all to go back to. She scowled, and the child looked at her like she might bite.
“I need a list or there’ll be no food. Don’t tell me names, if you want, but I need ages and willingness to fight.”
Lavender looked at her with a blank, unfeeling blue eye.
“When they’re seventeen they can join the Order,” she said, as if Lavender didn’t know.
Lavender didn’t move, didn’t even blink, for a long minute. Her wand twitched in her hand, and Hermione moved to protect herself, but Lavender merely summoned a quill and parchment, wrote a list of ages. At the top of the list was herself and another adult their age. Hermione’s eyes moved past them. The next oldest was sixteen.
“Willingness to fight?”
“They all will. They always do.” She’d heard the same at the other houses. Lavender looked so tired Hermione thought she might cry.
Hermione stood to leave. She lingered at the door for a second too long.
“Is he— Is he well?”
Lavender didn’t look at her, moved to get a tissue for the boy. “As well as can be expected. It was his memory.”
Hermione swallowed and her throat was dry. McGonagall would never tell her what had happened. “Can he speak?”
“A word or two, on good days. Never names. There’s a lot of damage, and I’m not— He needs a real Healer.”
There were no Healers except Pomfrey, who was only trained as a Medi-Witch. But Lavender knew that.
“Thank you,” Hermione said, finally opening the door. “For the list.”
---
When she got back, the camp was alive with movement, light spilling out from the main building and people running around like ants.
Angelina was in the dining room. “Tell Charlie we need at least twenty,” she said to Alicia. “The village is small but we don’t know how many of them there are. Briefing in five.” Alicia nodded, moving around Hermione like she might be contagious.
“What’s happening?” asked Hermione.
Angeline watched Alicia leave with the fondest look Hermione had seen on anyone all day. She looked over at Hermione, and her expression dropped. “Stay for the briefing and you’ll find out, I’m not repeating myself.” She wrote a note on the back of her marred hand with the sharp point of a quill, looking away from Hermione. “Did you have a useful day?”
“I need more information about the financial situation, but it can wait until tomorrow.”
“Astoria can help with that, she does the money.” Angelina looked at her properly, now. “Go and get something from the kitchen. You look like shit.”
Hermione ignored her, sitting in one of the dining room chairs. She could eat when the others left. It’s not like she’d be going.
The others gathered, twenty two in all, Neville and Charlie at the opposite end of the table to Angelina. She had a battered map in front of her, coming apart where it had been folded. “First scout says fifteen Death Eaters, clearing houses from East to West. They’re taking most to the village hall, Apparating some out. The men, mostly.”
“Any known fighters?”
“Rookwood, Dolohov, Avery. And the good old Slytherin Quidditch Team,” said Angelina. Hermione felt the air leave her, some deep old wound twinge.
“Do we know who’s leading it?” asked Charlie.
Hermione felt like she might break. The others’ voices turned to buzzing. She couldn’t know this, didn’t want to know this. She couldn’t even remember half of these Death Eaters. This shouldn’t affect her.
She should stand up and go into the kitchen, leave now while she still could.
She didn’t stand.
“Malfoy. First sighting in a month. Can’t say I’ve missed him.”
There are four people enrolled in N.E.W.T. level Alchemy, in 1998.
There are four people enrolled in N.E.W.T. level Alchemy, in 1998, and one of them is Draco bloody Malfoy.
Hermione almost can’t believe it as they stand outside the classroom door. First they let him back — practically force him, the way the Prophet tells it — and now he’s the one who got Alchemy added back to the timetable? They’d had three, her, Ernie, and Luna, but McGonagall had insisted. It was the school board’s decision, and the school board said four.
Ernie Macmillan looks similarly aghast next to her. It’s not like they haven’t had classes together, but this is different, with only four of them. Close. Personal.
“Granger,” he says. “Macmillan. Lovegood.”
Luna recovers first, tilting her head towards him. “You look well, Draco,” she says. “Like you’ve been in the sun.”
Hermione lets out a sound that might be a cough. He looks as pale as ever, tall but less gaunt than last year, broad across the shoulders. He’s wearing the new eighth-year uniform, with their hideous new tie that has all eight house colours striped together.
Malfoy doesn’t seem to know how to respond to that.
---
He slides his first note to her after a week.
Do you understand this?
Normal. Simple. An absolutely acceptable question from anyone else.
Hermione stares at it, wide-eyed, for so long that Professor Pyrites turns to see what’s wrong with her, and she realises the Professor asked her a question. She vanishes it from her hand and tries to look innocent.
“Gold, sir,” she manages.
Professor Pyrites nods and turns back to his whiteboard. He’s obviously very… knowledgeable, but Hermione can admit that his lecturing style is drier than Professor Binns, who at least has the excuse of being dead for several decades.
Malfoy doesn’t look at her, but the side of his mouth turns up, and she suddenly has to tie her hair up before she overheats.
---
They saw him over the summer, is the thing.
He’d been arrested, after the Battle of Hogwarts, and only avoided a lifelong Azkaban sentence by being unbelievably and unexpectedly candid. He’d told the Ministry and the Prophet everything: Dumbledore’s offer; Voldemort’s stay at the Manor; his own crimes; and, most importantly, the crimes of all of the various Death Eaters, accomplices, corrupt ministry officials and school board members.
It caused absolute chaos.
It also meant that at every trial, he’d been there. She’d spent all summer trying to avoid him in the narrow hallways of the Ministry of Magic courtrooms, but she’d seen him.
Watched him, maybe.
---
He tries again, in the library.
Well, he sits down at her favourite table, even though she’s claimed it — the two chairs are just a suggestion, and she has a lot of parchment, which needs a table’s worth of space—
It’s not like there aren’t other, empty spaces.
She’d move if it was busy.
“Granger,” he says.
Hermione looks up at him and blinks. His pale blond hair has gotten longer, a little unruly.
“Malfoy?” she says, and it comes out as a question.
He holds his satchel in front of him like a shield.
“This Alchemy essay” —he pulls out the parchment with writing on it in tight, neat handwriting— “does it make any sense to you at all?”
Hermione frowns at him.
“What?” she asks. She shakes her head and tries to remember how to communicate like a normal person, someone who’s not taking nine N.E.W.T. courses when they were offered an honorary place in any Ministry Department they liked. “I mean— I haven’t read yours. I don’t know.”
Malfoy squints his eyes together like she might have gone insane. Maybe she has. Draco Malfoy is talking to her of his own free will, so something must have gone very wrong along the way.
“These are the instructions, Granger. I haven’t even started. I have no idea what the man is on about. Are you alright?”
Hermione looks down at her own pile of parchment. She hasn’t even started the bloody Alchemy essay, and if Malfoy can’t understand it…
She groans. “You’re clever,” she says.
Malfoy huffs out a laugh. “I have years of evidence to the contrary.”
Was that a joke? Was Draco Malfoy joking with her?
“I mean, you’ve always… gotten good marks,” she tries. “I haven’t started either, but if you’re finding it hard— Have you asked Ernie?”
Malfoy looks at her like he’s trying to solve a very difficult puzzle, his eyes squinting together a little bit. “Would you like me to ask Ernie?”
Oh, Merlin, of course. He couldn’t ask anyone else. Ernie had, quite publicly, declared his disdain for Malfoy the second they’d all gotten on the train. “No,” she says. She should be diplomatic. The war is over, after all, and they can’t have a unified wizarding world without… being united.
“No. No,” she says, and she can feel a blush rising over her cheeks at how idiotic she’s being. “Sorry.”
“If you haven’t started, we could… work on it together, perhaps?” His hold on his satchel has released a little. “Not now. When you’re free.”
Hermione nods. It’s not a bad idea, although if he turns out to be useless she doesn’t want to spend a whole year dragging him along the way she did with Harry and Ron. But it has been… quiet, with them at Auror training. “Alright. I planned to start tonight, after dinner. Is that— Are you free?”
His whole face seems to pull upwards a little, pleased. It suits him. “Seven?”
“Seven.”
---
He’s not useless.
She’s actually not sure why he needs her help — as soon as they sat down together he pulled out a set of notes so detailed that they rival Hermione’s own. They make an outline, and then start working side by side. It’s not horrible, actually, to have someone to do her work with — not many people from her year came back to Hogwarts, after last year, and Ginny’s always off on Head Girl business. He’s not asking for the answers, he’s not moaning about the workload, he’s just… getting on with it.
She gets to the end of her first paragraph before she looks up at him and finds him looking at her.
“Are you alright?” she asks.
He looks back down at his essay and pauses for a second.
“What do you think about this… ‘Zosimos viewed innerpsychic transformation as the final goal of Alchemy’?”
She looks down at her own essay, where she’s just written something similar. “It’s fine. I mean, it’s technically correct.”
“Technically correct?” He doesn’t sound pleased.
“Yes. You’re not wrong."
“Not— Well, how would you put it, then?”
Hermione shows him her parchment, the ink still a little wet. He reads it with a sceptical expression.
“Hmm,” he says.
“Hmm?”
He looks at her again. “I’m not used to agreeing with you. Give me a minute.”
It takes several hours for Hermione to stop feeling pleased.
---
Somehow, he ends up sitting at her table in the library most days.
He comes to her after Charms with a question, and then they’re arguing about the right way to process a Fanwort. She doesn’t mind it.
If she’s honest, it’s nice: he’s clever, he only interrupts her very occasionally, and he’s—
He’s not bad looking. Fit, Ginny said.
Until one day, just after the Christmas holidays, she looks up and finds Ernie there instead.
“Ernie?” she says, and even in her head it sounds rude. “I— Are you—? Hi.”
He smiles at her, and behind him she can see Draco arriving.
She stands up without even thinking about it, and she realises, when Ernie stays seated, that every time she stands up near Draco, he stands up too. She waves at him with a little too much enthusiasm and he smiles at the back of Ernie’s head.
Ernie looks between them. “Sorry, are you two—?”
“Granger,” Draco says by way of greeting, and then, in an entirely different tone, “Macmillan.”
“Sorry, Ernie. Malfoy and I are— We study together.” Ernie and Draco’s eyebrows raise at exactly the same time. “We’re, like… study buddies.”
Draco nods and looks at Ernie smugly. “Study buddies.”
It sounds ridiculous coming from his mouth. He looks delighted.
“Right, sure. I’ll find another table then, I suppose,” Ernie says, picking up his things. He looks embarrassed, and Hermione does feel bad, she really does. But they really are— Christ.
They’re study buddies.
“Thanks, Ernie. Sorry. You know how cramped these tables get.”
Draco stands and watches Ernie leave, and doesn’t sit down until Hermione does. “Alright, study buddy,” he says, and his grin can only be described as shit-eating. “Don’t tell me you finished your Transfiguration project over Christmas?”
Hermione smiles right back despite herself. “Yes. And I got the scales right, too.”
---
He passes her another note, in Alchemy.
Are you going to Hogsmeade?
Hermione looks over and makes eye contact with him. Pyrites has been talking for seventeen minutes about an obscure use of silver that Hermione suspects is both irrelevant and of great personal interest to two people in the world, one of whom is Pyrites, and the other who exists solely in his unpublished manuscript of dialogues.
He raises a single, fine eyebrow at her.
She knows his face well, now. There’s a slight curve to his mouth that means to say ‘can you believe him?’ and also ‘Luna is definitely asleep.’ He’s leaning back on his chair, like he always does, insouciant and relaxed in that annoying high-brow sort of way.
Hermione raises her eyebrows once, her mouth stretching out. She might go. She might not.
Draco tilts his head up and shrugs quickly, his mouth flickering to a grin. He’ll stay with her whether she goes or not.
Luna snores herself awake next to her, and it seems to shock Pyrites out of his monologue for long enough that Hermione can put her hand up.
“Professor, what are your thoughts on the links between alchemical uses of silver and Lycanthropy?”
Pyrites huffs in delight.
Draco gives her a look of amused disbelief, and Hermione smiles, looking down at her notes.
---
They end up in Hogsmeade together, the eighth-years all with special privileges to stay out past curfew. They go to the new place, a pokey little not-quite-bar, not-quite-pub that popped up just before Christmas and has been fighting off underage students valiantly every night since then.
He buys her her very first cocktail, and laughs when her face curls up at the taste of something other than Butterbeer or Firewhisky. She laughs, then, when he takes a sip and makes the exact same face.
She drinks two, maybe. Or three? God. Four?
She’s absolutely sloshed.
They stumble out in the wee hours of the morning together, everyone else gone back to Hogwarts or out, to the clubs in Muggle London, with a pocket of Floo Powder and not nearly enough Muggle money to get by.
It’s been snowing, the ground wet and slushy underneath the streetlights, and Hermione thinks the pink tip of his nose might be the best thing in the world.
She laughs at something he says, and they stumble loudly across the empty street in the freezing cold until they reach the bench outside of the Three Broomsticks, their fireplace open all night for a Galleon if you manage to wake up the night doorman.
The snow is just starting up again, and Hermione hits her knee on the bloody bench, swearing loudly.
“The mouth on you, Granger,” he says, holding her elbow to keep her upright. His hand is so warm that she wants to curl up in it, and she shivers.
“Cold?” he asks.
Hermione looks up at him, and the world stops spinning. Snowflakes are floating down to catch in his hair, on his flushed cheeks. She watches one land on his eyelash, and then another on his lips, the same pink as the tip of his nose.
“No,” she says.
He catches her lips with his, and she doesn’t even manage to close her eyes. He pulls back after a second.
It’s hardly a kiss, really. More like a touch of his lips to hers, the barest brush.
Hermione stands with her mouth half-open, blinking. She’s fairly sure her knee is bleeding.
Draco watches her carefully. After a second his brow furrows, just the tiniest twitch down.
“Granger?” he asks.
He’s uncertain. She’s not used to seeing him uncertain.
Hermione moves to hold his robes with both hands.
The rest of their Alchemy classes are much harder to pay attention to.
“Do that again,” she says. He smiles at her properly, his face wide with delight and his cheeks rosy, and Hermione thinks back to what Luna said before their first class. Like he’s been in the sun.
