Chapter Text
The school looks smaller than Hermione remembers, the corridors with their high ceilings even seem cramped. There can only be a quarter of the number of students present than usually enrolled, and it still feels overcrowded. Constricting. Suffocating.
The eleven year old first years look like children, had Hermione really been that small before?
Who sends their child here?
Even without the damage done in the final battle this school is a death trap. She rubs the pad of her finger against a roughened and exposed edge of stone against the wall. Probably where a missed spell hit.
A spell probably meant to kill someone.
Her parents didn’t know, they have a pass. All you have to worry about with Muggle boarding schools in Britain are eating disorders, drugs and privileged knobs that might teach your kid about entitlement so they come from school bitter and hating you.
But not here. Still have the privileged knobs, drugs and eating disorders but also about a thousand ways to be permanently cursed, petrified or killed. She’d been idiotic the way only a child can be – attacked by a troll? Grand, she read every fucking book the library had on trolls, found every passage, every passing reference.
Petrified? Sure, no problem, Hermione can probably be considered one of the leading experts on Basilisks and can brew the petrification antidote in her sleep.
She’d been almost eaten by a three-headed staffordshire bull terrier and she still can't stand to be around dogs. When she hears a dog barking it's automatic, her wand out, Reducto on the tip of her tongue.
She’d been attacked by a Werewolf, knocked out and dragged to the bottom of the Black Lake, hit with an unknown curse that caused something to grow in her intestines, then asked to fight a bloody war, which she did. Which they won.
For what?
For her to be forced back at wand point to this mutinous murder institution.
Wait. Was this corridor? Yes...
She looks around and sees the very spot on the floor below the Divination Classroom balcony where Lavender Brown was mauled to death by Fenrir Greyback during the Final Battle. Hermione can still see the way her body jerked and spasmed under Fenrir’s teeth. Trelawny dropped a crystal ball on his head, then Hermione shot him with a Bombarda.
Lavender died crying for her parents.
A sharp pinch makes her look down.
Oh bugger. She’s sliced the skin of her finger open on the edge of the stone.
She brings her finger up and gingerly puts it in her mouth.
“Miss Granger? You can come in now.” Professor McGonagall looks old, older than anyone Hermione’s ever seen. How can she still be here? If it were Hermione, she’d be as far from this country as she could drinking strong cocktails hoping to die in her sleep.
She follows the Professor into her office. She’s Headmaster now but still hasn’t moved into Dumbledore’s old office.
“I trust you’re settling in.”
Ha.
“Yes.”
“The offer still stands that I wrote to you about. That I did not receive a response to. But I imagine you had much to do.”
Ah, yes. The offer for Hermione to be Head Girl. Somehow it just didn’t seem like something she wanted to do. Still doesn’t. Cosplaying student.
She isn’t a student. She’s a charity case. A ticking time bomb. Liability.
She knows in the way others speak so softly to her, slowly. Like she’s learning this language for the first time. This language of peace. This language of safety.
“Yes, I received your letter. It would be better suited for one of the seventh years.”
McGonagall sighs, the same goddamn sigh everyone gives her. The sigh of disappointment or worry or some other sickeningly patronizing and infantilizing feeling.
“Very well. And your classes?”
Hermione is exploding. There are bombs erupting in her head and she is on fire. She wants to scream, this inane and meaningless conversation makes her want to attack something.
And this is why she’s babied, this is why she’s watched with careful and fretting eyes.
Because she is not alright. And she is showing it. And now that the war is over, she is to return back to normal life. Except there’s no room for someone who’s been tortured to play a round of exploding snap, no room for someone who’s committed grand larceny in the Prefects rounds.
“Miss Granger?”
“Right, classes are fine.” Except McGonagall is expecting more, “Er, they’re just picking up, so they are… they’re fine.”
“It’s quite an interesting case for you eighth years, not many of you came back. Most of them were here during their seventh years so aren’t required to come back, but still missed out on the curriculum–”
Yes, her classmates stayed at Hogwarts after Dumbledore died, many of them. Some were pulled out by parents who had family in America or Canada but many believed Hogwarts was the safest place. She did not see what Hogwarts was like under the Carrows, under Snape.
“– given the similar nature of your requirements. How does that sound?”
She considers asking McGonagall to repeat herself, to repeat what she said while Hermione wasn’t listening, but she doesn’t want to give any more credence to the widely held belief that she is broken, that she’s only half there, that you need to talk slowly and softly to Hermione Granger so her poor war addled mind can understand.
“Yes, that sounds fine.”
“You’ll receive an owl with other details.” McGonagall hesitates. They sit there in silence. “Are you sure there’s nothing I can do for you?”
She can stop this charade that the largest battle in the Second Wizarding War wasn’t fought in this very school, that they aren’t walking, chatting, teaching over the place where their classmates died, that there aren’t new ghosts floating through the corridors, that everything and everyone is moving on and there are assignments to complete and meals to be eaten–
Hermione’s absentmindedly rubbing the beading blood between the tip of her pointer finger and her thumb, letting them slip and slide past each other.
She shakes her head no.
McGonagall sighs. That fucking sigh. “Very well, you’re dismissed.”
She’s standing mechanically, walking back through McGonagall’s office when she hears, “Please send in Mr. Malfoy.”
That’s right, she forgets he’s here too. She hasn’t seen him yet but hears the talk in the corridors, in the Great Hall, in the classrooms.
The Death Eater has come back to Hogwarts.
When she opens the door he is indeed standing there. It’s like being dropped into a fever dream and she presses hard on the tip of her finger. She likes this ache. It grounds her.
It’s not right, seeing him, taller than the other students, dressed in the school uniform down to the Slytherin green tie, robes billowing around him, aged well beyond his eighteen years. Misplaced in these school corridors. Maybe that’s how others see her as well.
“McGonagall says to go in.”
Her voice sounds robotic, even to her own ears. He doesn’t even look up, which is fine, she doesn’t either. He slides past her into McGonagall’s office and closes the door as Hermione walks down the hallway.
She doesn’t try to stop herself from staring at the place where Lavender Brown died. She wished at one point that something bad would happen to Lavender, sixth year, while Lavender was dating Ron. She laid in bed, while Lavender slept next to her and wished something bad would happen to her.
Hermione still can’t eat meat, when she cuts it with a knife, it reminds her of the way Lavender's body looked as Fenrir ate her.
Hermione’s staying in the dungeons, in the Slytherin girls dorm. Not a single Slytherin Sixth year came back and the Seventh year girl dorms are completely open.
When they first arrived at Hogwarts for the term, an extra bed was placed in the Gryffindor Seventh year dorms, but Hermione turned into a restless sleeper.
Her screaming was disruptive to the other students.
So they moved her to the empty Slytherin dorms. They give her a special password and a separate entrance so she doesn’t have to go through the Slytherin Common Room. There is an alcove with a disappearing wall that opens with a tap of her wand right into the dorm room.
It’s just a single bed. There should be four or five, but it’s just hers, no need for privacy curtains but she has them. The sheets are red. There is a replica of the Unicorn Tapestry in the Gryffindor Common Room hanging on the wall, but it looks perverse and inverted with the shimmering dark and green tinted light reflecting on it from the water of the Black Lake.
Grindylows swim past the window and their shadows pull long, moving across the room like guardsmen.
She sits for hours, watching these shadows pass by, watching the wall, watching the light filter through the water as the colors shift from the warm gray of the afternoon to a cold slate as the sun sets, to the dark emerald of night.
She sits for hours, thinking she can’t do this. Thinking this is unbearable. Thinking that she wishes the water could flow in, fill the room up, submerge her in its cold fist. Then alternates to thinking that it’s not so bad.
At least she isn’t Harry.
Harry sits in his own room, his own bed, watching his own wall in the Psychological Injuries Ward at St. Mungos. Harry has something wrong with his brain, something Muggles call PTSD. They took his wand away because he keeps forgetting he’s not in a duel, stunning everyone he sees.
Harry, Ron and Hermione were given conditional probations along with their Order of Merlin Awards, required to remain under the supervision of a previously approved administrator in the aftermath of the war. Harry is under the care of St. Mungos, Ron is under the care of his mother at the Burrow, and Hermione has nowhere else to go.
So Hermione was sent to Hogwarts, McGonagall her chosen administrator for her probation. The probations are a formality but the Wizengamot insists they receive some form of punishment lest they fall under criticism in the future for the crimes they committed during the war.
She picks at the scab that formed on her finger and summons a bottle of Firewhiskey from her trunk.
Ron sent her back to Hogwarts with four bottles and tins of biscuits made by Mrs. Weasley, and promised to send her more if she needed it. She bets he’s sending Firewhiskey to Harry in St. Mungos as well. She’s halfway through the second bottle, the biscuit tin unopened.
Sweet Merlin, it slices through her chest like God. She swallows the Firewhiskey like a sword, letting it burn and scald her on its way down. It cleans her from within, splashing over the rotten insides, bleaching them anew.
It calms her brain and helps her feel relaxed enough to fake trying to finish her parchment for Charms.
Her assignment is a foot long essay on Dimensional Charms, charms to increase or decrease the size properties of an object. She considers not doing it and just showing up with her beaded bag that still sits in her trunk, that still holds their tent, their clothes, books, a medical kit and supplies, a broom and the broken remnants of two Horcruxes.
She can’t throw it out, but she can’t bring herself to clean out the bag.
She’s paralyzed.
She can’t even bring herself to write the essay, if she touches quill to parchment, she’s not sure she won’t write about the benefits of bringing an expanded bag with you just in case a wedding is ruined by being ambushed by Death Eaters and you have to go on the run for months.
It’s hysterical, really.
The things she was capable of, and now she can barely focus enough to complete a single fourth-year level assignment. She drinks more of the Firewhiskey, needs something to blur her vision other than the shimmering light off the Black Lake, something else to distract her body from the numbingly frustrating anxiety other than playing with the cut on her finger.
She drinks and watches the wall counting down the minutes until two in the morning. She’s learned this so far, if she falls asleep too early, she’ll only wake up in the middle of the night. If she times it correctly, she usually wakes with the sun.
Her wand beeps indicating the time, and she holds it up, the tip placed right against her chest and she stuns herself.