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part i.
The elf didn’t say anything when she arrived.
That was how Hermione knew.
Mipsy was standing in the entrance hall of Nott Manor with her hands folded in front of her and her great amber eyes dry, because elves grieved differently, elves grieved inwardly, and Hermione had approximately three seconds to register all of this before her legs decided they were no longer interested in holding her up.
She didn't fall. She didn't let herself fall.
She’d been not letting herself fall for eight months.
“Mipsy.” Her voice came out wrong. Too steady. The steadiness of someone who had been bracing for impact for so long that the impact itself felt almost like relief. “Where is he.”
Not a question. She knew.
The elf turned and walked toward the east staircase and Hermione followed, still in her coat, still with her wand in her left hand because she’d grabbed it off the nightstand when the elf’s voice had crept into her dreams at half past four in the morning.
“Miss Hermione, please, Mispy is sorry to wake you”
She’d been out of bed and reaching for her shoes before she was fully conscious.
Some part of her had always known this was how it would end.
She hated that part of herself. She hated that she’d kept hoping anyway.
The corridor on the second floor was dark. She and Mipsy walked past portraits that didn’t speak, past a window that showed a sky that was beginning to grey at its edges, past a closed door that she knew led to the study where she used to sit on the floor beside him with books spread between them and the fire going trying to get him to laugh like he had once.
Mipsy stopped outside his bedroom door.
Hermione put her hand flat against the wood.
She stood there for a long time.
The house was so quiet that she could hear her own heartbeat, which was so strange, because she would have thought that by now it would have stopped.
She pushed the door open.
The curtains were drawn and the room was very still. Theodore Nott just laid there in the centre of his bed with his arms at his sides and his eyes closed and his chest was— his chest was—
The sound that came out of her wasn’t a scream. It was something that existed well before the mankind language, before thought, before the cruelty of being a person who understood things, who testified to things, who chose words specifically only to watch them fall anyway.
It came up from somewhere below her ribs and it tore on its way out.
Later, when she had a conscious mind, she would be told that the poor little elf caught her. That Mipsy, who is small and ancient and loved him in the way that elves love, which is without condition and without end, held Hermione Granger on the floor of Theodore Nott’s bedroom while she came apart at the seams.
She wouldn’t remember any of it.
She would only remember his chest.
And the way that the room smelled, like his cologne and old books and somewhere underneath it all, like Azkaban. The salt and cold creeping in over the smell of an extinguished soul.
She had waited.
She had waited too long.
Morgana help her.
part ii.
Their coming together wasn’t dramatic.
That was the thing no one believed, not that she told many people, she kept it to herself in a deep dark caveat no one went searching for, part of her had stopped sharing things with people since the war started.
They met on a corridor on the third floor, just after nine, just Hermione making the mistake of taking the long way back from the library because she’d wanted five more minutes with a chapter on counter curses and had lost track of time. Just Mulciber and two others whose names she’d never bothered to learn because people like that didn’t deserve to be remembered.
She had her wand. She wasn’t afraid.
She was just— tired. So profoundly tired.
And then Theodore Nott was standing at the end of the corridor.
He didn’t say anything. Didn’t draw his wand, didn’t make a speech, didn’t do anything that could be reported or remembered or used. He just— stood there. Hands in his pockets. Looking at Mulciber with an expression so empty it was somehow worse than anger.
The silence lasted four seconds.
Mulciber left. The others followed.
Hermione stood very still and watched Theodore Nott turn and walk away in the opposite direction.
He didn’t even look at her.
She didn’t thank him the next day because she didn’t see him.
She didn’t thank him the day after that because she didn’t know how.
By the third day it seemed too late, and by the end of the week she’d almost convinced herself it hadn’t meant anything. That it had been coincidence. That Theo Nott had simply been walking somewhere and happened to stop and happened to look at somewhere in that way of his that happened to make three people decide they had somewhere else to be.
She was very good at talking herself out of things.
She had been doing it for years.
She'd told herself she wasn't crying.
She was mostly succeeding.
The Room of Requirement had given her exactly what she'd asked for without her having to articulate it, a small space, a fire, silence and she was sitting on the floor in front of it with her knees pulled up and her teeth pressed together and her eyes doing something she was categorically refusing to acknowledge.
It was fine. She was fine.
Ronald Weasley was allowed to kiss whoever he liked and Lavender Brown's shriek of Won-Won was just a sound, just noise, just something that would fade if she breathed correctly and thought about something else, something useful, something that wasn't his face or the way she'd stood there in the doorway for three full seconds before her legs had remembered how to move—
The door opened.
She had her wand up before she'd finished the thought.
Theodore Nott looked at it with the expression of someone mildly inconvenienced by the weather.
"Wrong room," he said. He didn't move.
"Clearly." She didn't lower her wand. "Leave."
He looked at her face. She hated him for it, for the way his eyes moved across it like he was reading something, cataloguing it, filing it somewhere precise and private.
"No," he said, and came in.
The door closed behind him.
She should have cursed him. She was going to curse him, the words were already forming, something that would make him deeply regret the particular arrogance of the word no when he crossed the room, sat down on the floor a few feet away from her, and opened the book he'd apparently been carrying this entire time.
He didn't look at her again.
Hermione stood there with her wand raised for another five seconds.
Then she sat back down.
The fire went on crackling. She stared at it. He read. The silence between them was strange, not uncomfortable in the way silence with strangers usually was but something more textured, more considered, like it had been arrived at rather than fallen into.
She didn't know how long they'd been sitting there when the door burst open.
Ron and Lavender tumbled in laughing, tangled together, not looking, and then looking and the laugh died in Lavender's throat and Ron went the particular shade of red that Hermione had once found endearing and now found exhausting.
"Hermione—" Ron started.
She was already on her feet. The curse was already in her hand, the words already rising —
"Granger's helping me with Arithmancy," Theo said, without looking up from his book. His voice was so bored it was almost architectural. "We'd rather not be interrupted."
Silence.
Then he looked up. Just at Ron. Just for a moment.
"Congratulations," he said, "on finding something that makes you happy."
It landed like a stone dropped into still water.
Ron's mouth opened. Closed.
Lavender pulled him back through the door.
Hermione stood very still in the middle of the room.
Theo looked back down at his book.
"You can curse me if it would help get it out of your system," he said pleasantly. "I've been cursed by better."
She let out a breath that was almost a laugh.
"Why did you do that," she said. Not an accusation. A genuine question.
He turned a page.
"You weren't going to feel better after," he said. "You would have felt better for about four seconds and then you would have felt worse. You're not built for cruelty." A pause. "It's not a criticism."
Hermione looked at the side of his face for a long moment.
Theodore Nott, who she knew as a name on a parchment. As a grade below hers in every subject except Ancient Runes, where he'd beaten her twice and she'd never quite forgiven him for it. As a face at the Slytherin table that she'd never had occasion to look at directly.
"Arithmancy," she said.
"Mm."
"You don't take Arithmancy."
He turned another page.
"No," he agreed, "I don't."
She never told the Room what she wanted.
She didn't have to.
That was the thing about the Room of Requirement that the teachers never quite explained, it didn't just respond to need, it responded to the shape of need, the specific hollow of it, the frequency of a person's exhaustion. And Hermione's exhaustion by November of sixth year had a very specific shape indeed.
It was the shape of a table by a window. Of a fire that didn't crackle too loudly. Of enough space for two people to exist without performing anything for each other.
She didn't question why Theo was always there.
He didn't question why she kept coming back.
That was the agreement, unspoken, the way all the things that mattered between them would turn out to be.
She came at dawn because dawn was the only hour that belonged entirely to her. Before Harry needed something, before Ron said something that sat wrong in her chest, before Lavender Brown's laugh carried down the corridor and reminded her of all the space she'd somehow ended up occupying alone. She came with her bag and her books and the silence of someone who had been loud for other people all day and needed somewhere to put it down.
The Room gave her Theo.
She chose to keep him.
It started with Ancient Runes.
They worked with the comfortable rhythm of two people working in parallel, the scratch of quills, the occasional soft sound of pages turning. She helped him with a Transfiguration essay in the first week of December because she'd read the relevant chapter three times and the argument he was making was structurally wrong in a way that would cost him six marks and she found she couldn't watch it happen.
He read her Ancient Runes translation in January without being asked and circled a single word in the margin inauspicious choice and when she looked at it properly she understood he was right and changed it without comment and he never brought it up again.
This was how they spoke, mostly.
In margins.
Never outloud.
There were days he came in looking worse for wear.
She didn't know the details. Didn't ask. Had enough information of sixth year Slytherin to understand that the things happening in that dormitory, in that common room, in the whispered conversations that stopped when she walked past, those things were carving something out of him. She could see it in the set of his jaw. In the way he sometimes sat for twenty minutes without opening his book, just staring at the fire with his hands very still in his lap.
She didn't ask.
She moved her chair slightly closer and put the kettle on, the Room always provided a kettle, she suspected it understood her better than most humans did and set a cup beside his elbow without comment.
He always drank it.
He never said thank you.
She never needed him to.
There were days she came in having been crying, or close to it, or past it, the specific hollowed-out feeling of someone who has already done the crying somewhere else and is now just carrying the aftermath. She didn't hide it. Didn't perform composure at him the way she did for everyone else.
He didn't ask about those days either.
He just stayed. Which was more than most people managed.
Once, in February, she came in at half past five in the morning after a night that had involved Harry's suspicions and Ron's obliviousness and the loneliness of being the person who held everything together for everyone and had nowhere to put her own falling apart, she came in and sat down and put her head on the desk and didn't move.
She felt him put a book beside her hand.
Not her book. His.
She didn't lift her head to look at it. Just moved her fingers until they were touching the spine of it.
They stayed like that for an hour.
When the light changed and she finally sat up he was reading something else, and his face was carefully arranged as though he was playing a role, and he didn't look at her, and she understood that what had just happened would not be spoken of and would not be forgotten.
That was the thing about Theo.
He understood that some things were too important to discuss.
She started arriving earlier.
She told herself it was the work.
She was very good at telling herself things.
The castle was different at Christmas.
Hermione had stayed before, third year, fifth year, the years when going home had felt more complicated than the alternative, but she had never quite noticed the way Hogwarts exhaled when most of its students left. The corridors lost their noise and their performance. The staircases moved more slowly, almost thoughtfully. The Great Hall felt enormous in a way that was closer to honest than lonely.
She went to the Room on Christmas morning because she didn't know what else to do with herself.
Theo was already there.
Neither of them acknowledged this as significant.
She sat down. He was reading something that wasn't a textbook, she clocked the spine, a novel, something in French and she had her Ancient Runes notes spread in front of her and the kettle was already on and outside the enchanted window the Room had provided, snow was coming down in the slow deliberate way it did when it meant to settle.
No books got opened.
Not really.
She made it twenty minutes before she looked up at him and said, without planning to.
"Why did you stay?"
He turned a page.
"Same reason you did, I imagine."
She waited.
He looked up then, briefly, and his eyes were very blue in the winter light and entirely undefended in the way she was beginning to understand was his way of speaking.
"It's quieter," he said. "When they leave."
She understood that completely and immediately in the way she understood very few things that weren't written down.
"Yes," she said.
He went back to his book.
She went back to her notes.
But something had shifted, almost imperceptibly, the way ice shifts in late February, no visible crack, just a change in the quality of the tension. The sense that something that had been frozen was beginning, slowly, privately, to consider movement.
It was him who started asking questions.
Small ones, at first. The questions of someone who had been paying attention for a long time and had decided, finally, to let that be known.
Which subject do you actually like, not which one are you best at.
She'd blinked at that. Set her quill down.
"Ancient Runes," she said, without hesitating. "Because it's like— it's like the language underneath language. It doesn't care about being impressive. It just is."
He nodded once, like she'd confirmed something.
What do you do when you can't sleep.
"Read." A pause. "Walk. Sometimes I come here."
Here specifically?
"Here specifically."
He was quiet for a moment.
"Me too," he said.
January became February and somewhere in that grey and unremarkable turning Hermione stopped bringing her books.
Not consciously. Just, she would arrive and sit down and the conversation would already be there waiting for her, already mid-thought, like they'd been talking even in the hours they were apart and were simply resuming. He asked her things no one asked her. Not about grades or homework or what she thought of this teacher's method or whether she'd heard about that, but actual things.
What are you afraid of.
She'd looked at him for a long moment.
"Failure," she said. Then, more quietly, more honestly: "Not— not failing an exam. Failing at something that matters. Being wrong about something important when it counts."
He considered it for a long time.
"That's not a fear," he said. "That's a conscience."
She felt something move in her chest. Small and bright and inconvenient.
"What are you afraid of," she said.
He looked at the fire for a long time.
"Becoming something I decided not to become," he said, "and not noticing until it's already done."
The room was very quiet.
"Theo," she said. The first time she'd used his name. Just his name, nothing attached to it.
He looked at her.
"I don't think you're capable of not noticing," she said.
He looked at her for a moment longer than was strictly comfortable.
Then he looked away.
But he was almost— almost smiling.
By March she was arriving before dawn and leaving after breakfast and calling it studying to herself with less and less conviction.
By March he had started bringing two cups instead of waiting for her to make the tea.
By March they had stopped sitting at opposite ends of the table.
She didn't examine any of it too closely.
She had always been better at understanding things that were written down.
It started, as most important things between them did, with nothing.
A Friday. Early March. The sky outside the Room's window was doing something uncertain and she'd been staring at the same paragraph for twenty minutes and he'd closed his book a while ago and was looking at the fire, knowing that in his mind he was turning things over quietly, like stones in water.
She waited.
She'd learned to wait for him.
"I used to watch you in the library," he said. "First year."
She looked up.
He didn't look back. Still watching the fire.
"You used to come in on Saturday mornings before anyone else. You'd take the same table every time, third from the left, facing the window and you'd line your books up by size before you opened any of them." A pause. "I thought that was the strangest thing I'd ever seen."
Hermione was very still.
"You never said anything," she said.
"No."
"For five years."
"Yes."
She turned to face him properly. He was still looking at the fire, and there was something in his profile that she recognised now, the vulnerability of someone saying a true thing in the direction of something that couldn't respond, because it was easier than saying it to a person.
"Theo."
He looked at her then.
"My father," he said, "would have called it a correctable impulse." His voice was completely level. That was almost the worst part, the flatness of it, the way it had clearly been flattened, deliberately, over years. "Noticing a Muggleborn. Thinking she was— " He stopped. Started again. "He had very specific ideas about what I was supposed to want."
The fire crackled.
"What did you want?" she asked quietly.
He looked at her for a long moment.
"I wanted to know what books you were lining up," he said. "I wanted to know if you always sat facing the window because of the light or because you liked to watch outside. I wanted to know what you were thinking when you argued with professors, whether it was anger or just— certainty. Whether those were the same thing for you."
Hermione felt something in her chest that she had no clean word for.
"Theo—"
"I'm not telling you this so you'll do anything about it," he said, with great precision. "I'm telling you because it's March and you've been coming here since November and I think you deserve to know that it's not— it was never an accident. That I was here. That I kept— " He stopped again.
"Kept what," she said softly.
"Kept finding reasons," he said. "To be in rooms you were in."
The rain, or almost-rain, tapped against the window.
She thought about the corridor in October. His hands in his pockets.
"Your mother," she said, carefully. "What happened to her."
Something moved across his face.
"She left," he said. "When I was four. She looked at what her life was going to be— what I was going to be raised intoand she made a calculation." He said it without bitterness, which was somehow more painful than bitterness would have been. "I don't blame her for the calculation. I just grew up understanding that the things my father valued had a cost, and someone always paid it." He looked down at his hands. "I decided a long time ago I wasn't going to be someone who made other people pay it."
"Is that why," she said. Not finishing the sentence. Not needing to.
"Partly." A long pause. "Partly it's just you, Hermione. It was always just— " He exhaled. Short and quiet. "You."
She sat with that. Let it be real.
Then without much thought, she told him what she’d been thinking about since Christmas.
"I'm going to obliviate my parents this summer," she said.
He went very still.
"I've already decided." Her voice was steady in the way his had been, deliberately flattened. "It's the only way to keep them safe. I'll modify their memories, give them new identities, send them somewhere he can't reach them." She looked at her hands. "They won't know they have a daughter."
The silence was very long.
"Hermione," he said, and the way he said it, just that, just her name, with all of his careful composure briefly and completely gone, she felt it like something physical.
"It's the right thing to do," she said. "I've gone through it every way I know how and it's still the right thing to do."
"I know," he said. "I know it is." He paused. "I'm sorry."
"It's not your fault."
He looked at her. And she saw it immediately, the way that landed wrong on him. The way he received it as the thing she hadn't said, which was: it's your world's fault. It's what your world does to people like me. It has always done this.
"Theo," she said. "It's not—"
"Don't," he said quietly. Not unkindly. "You don't have to—"
"I mean it."
He shook his head. Small and final.
She looked at him, at the line of his jaw, at his hands, at the boy who had watched her line up books by size in first year and said nothing for five years because his father had taught him that noticing her was something to be corrected—
She reached over and put her hand over his.
He looked down at it.
He didn't move.
"It's not your fault," she said again. Slower. Like something she needed him to keep.
He turned his hand over beneath hers.
He still didn't believe her. She could feel it in his stillness, in the way he held the words without letting them in.
But he held her hand.
And outside the almost-rain became actual rain, and the fire burned steadily, and neither of them moved for a very long time.
She almost walked past him.
That was the thing she'd think about later, how close she'd come to taking the other corridor, the longer way, the route she usually avoided because the torches on that side flickered in a way she'd never quite trusted. She almost didn't see him at all.
But she did.
Theo, pacing outside the stretch of blank wall. Not the measured, thoughtful movement of someone thinking, something tighter than that. Something that lived in the body rather than the mind. Three steps, turn, three steps, turn, his hands at his sides and his jaw set and his eyes focused on a point approximately six inches in front of his feet.
"Theo."
He stopped.
He looked up at her and for just a moment, just one unguarded second, she saw something in his face that she had never seen there before and never wanted to see again.
Fear. Not the careful, managed kind. The real kind.
"I can't—" he started, gesturing at the wall.
"You can't think of the room," she said.
"I can’t talk to you here, I just—"
"Come with me."
She didn't wait. Just reached out and caught his sleeve and pulled and he came, which was perhaps the most frightening thing of all, Theo who moved deliberately and at his own pace, following her immediately, without question, down the corridor and up two flights and out through the door at the top of the Astronomy Tower.
The night air hit them both. Cool and vast and smelling of the grounds, of the lake somewhere below, of everything that was still and ordinary and untouched beyond the castle walls.
She let go of his sleeve.
He walked to the railing and put both hands on it and looked out.
She watched him.
She'd been watching him for months now, really watching, the way you watched something you were trying to understand and also, underneath that, the way you watched something you were afraid of losing, and she knew his face better than she'd ever intended to. Better than she could explain. She knew the difference between his silences. She knew which ones meant thinking and which ones meant feeling and which ones meant he was holding something back that he'd decided she shouldn't have to carry.
This one was none of those.
This one was the silence of someone at the edge of something.
"Something dark is going to happen in this castle tonight," he said.
She didn't move.
In the torchlight from the doorway she could see it properly now, what she'd registered somewhere beneath conscious thought when she'd found him pacing. The shadows beneath his eyes so deep they looked bruised. The exhaustion of someone who hadn't slept not because they couldn't but because they'd chosen not to. Because sleeping would mean losing a few hours of something they were trying to hold on to.
How long has he known, she thought. How long has he been carrying this.
"Theo—"
"I won't be able to save you," he said. Still looking out over the grounds. Still not looking at her. "Whatever happens tonight— I won't be able to— there are things already in motion that I can't— " He stopped. His hands tightened on the railing. "I need you to stay with Potter."
"What's going to happen—"
"I need you to stay with Potter," he said again, and this time there was something underneath the words that stopped her argument in her throat. Not a request. Not quite a command. Something more desperate than either. "He's the only one who can stop this from becoming its absolute worst. And I need to know that you'll be there. That you'll keep him— that you'll make sure he—"
"Theo." She crossed to the railing. Stood beside him. "Tell me what you know."
He shook his head.
"What's going to happen to you."
He shook his head again.
"Theodore."
The name landed. She felt him feel it, saw it in the slight change in his shoulders, in the way his breath shifted.
"Nothing that isn't already decided," he said quietly.
She stared at his profile. At the jaw she knew, the line of his nose, the blankness he was maintaining with visible effort. She thought about how he’d been watching her since first year, and how he probably had the time to categorise every bit of her because the world he'd been born into hadn't given him language for what he noticed.
She thought about the corridor in October.
She thought about March. His hand turning over beneath hers.
Nothing that isn't already decided.
"You knew," she said. "When you— all those months of— you knew something was coming and you still—"
"Yes," he said simply.
"And you let me—"
"Yes."
"Theo, if you'd told me I could have—"
"What." He looked at her then. Finally. And his eyes were very steady and very tired and entirely, devastatingly honest. "What would you have done, Hermione. What could either of us have done."
She opened her mouth.
Closed it.
He looked back out over the grounds.
"I didn't want to spend whatever time there was trying to fix something that couldn't be fixed," he said. "I wanted—" He stopped. She watched him choose words with the particular care of someone who understood their weight. "I wanted the library. The room. The tea." A pause so small she almost missed it. "You."
The wind moved between them.
Below, the grounds were dark and still and innocent of what was coming.
"I don't think," Theo said slowly, "that I will ever know what love is."
She went very still.
"My father's version of it left. My father's version of it walked out a door when I was four years old and I don't— I grew up understanding love as a word people used for things that cost other people something, and I don't know how to—" He paused. His voice was completely level. That terrible deliberate flatness. "I don't know how to trust what I feel because I don't know if I learned feeling correctly. I don't know if what's in here—" He pressed one hand briefly, almost unconsciously, to his chest. "—is the real thing or just the shape of it."
She couldn't speak.
"But I think," he said, "that in a world where I knew what it was—" His voice caught. Just once. Just barely. "—I would have loved you, Hermione Granger."
The castle was very quiet.
She crossed the last distance between them and kissed him.
He made a sound against her mouth that she felt in her sternum, something that had been held a very long time finally, briefly, being put down. His hands came up to her face and they were shaking, she realised. Theodore Nott's hands, which were always steady, always precise, were shaking.
She was crying.
He was too.
She could feel it, the wet at his cheek beneath her hand, the breathlessness of someone who is crying and trying not to and has lost the battle so quietly they almost didn't notice.
They stood at the top of the Astronomy Tower with the dark grounds below them and the castle humming with something neither of them could stop and they held on.
We gotta get away from here, she thought, with a desperation that had nowhere to go. We gotta get away from here.
part iii.
She never told anyone about Malfoy Manor.
Not the parts everyone knew, those were documented, witnessed, cross-referenced in the reports that the Ministry assembled afterward with their characteristic appetite for turning suffering into paperwork. Bellatrix Lestrange. The chandelier. The knife. Harry pulling them out through the fireplace and all of them landing on a cold beach with the sea going on indifferently around them while Dobby bled out to death.
Those parts existed in the record.
What didn't exist in the record was Theo.
He'd been in the drawing room when they brought her in. Standing near the far wall with the other young Death Eaters, the ones who were there because their fathers were there, because absence would have been its own confession. She'd clocked him in the first frantic sweep of the room, cataloguing exits, faces, wands, odds and their eyes had met for just a second.
Just one second.
His face was completely still. The blankness she knew that she now understood was survival. But his eyes— his eyes did something she felt in the base of her throat.
I'm sorry, they said. I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry.
Then Bellatrix's hand was in her hair and the floor was coming up to meet her and the world became very loud and very white and she stopped being able to look at anything.
She never told anyone that she heard him leave the room.
That she'd known, somehow, even through everything, that he'd walked out rather than watch. That this small act of refusal, not heroism, not intervention, just the inability to stand there and witness, was the bravest thing she'd ever seen anyone do in that house.
She never told anyone because she didn't have words for it that didn't also implicate him.
She never told anyone because protecting him had become, somewhere along the way, as instinctive as breathing.
She saw him twice at the Battle of Hogwarts.
The first time was in the corridor outside the Great Hall, both of them running in opposite directions, and they had half a second— just half a second and he caught her arm as she passed and she felt him press something into her hand and then he was gone.
A bezoar. Small and ordinary and potentially lifesaving.
She closed her fist around it and ran.
The second time was in the courtyard.
The battle had paused in that terrible suspended way it did, both sides pulling breath, and she was standing with Neville and Ron near the steps and she looked across the rubble and the smoke and the space where people she'd known had fallen —
And he was there.
On the other side. Alone, slightly apart from the cluster of Slytherins, looking across at her with his face completely open in a way she'd only ever seen in the Room, in the Tower, in the small private hours that had belonged only to them.
He looked at her like he was memorising her.
She understood then.
She understood that he thought this was the last time.
She shook her head. Small and fierce.
No, she said, without sound. No.
The battle started again.
She lost him in the smoke.
She found him afterward. Alive. Sitting on a piece of fallen wall in the courtyard with his forearms on his knees and his head down and the dark mark on his left arm facing upward like an accusation.
She sat beside him.
She didn't say anything.
After a long time he said, very quietly. "It's over."
"Yes," she said.
"And now," he said, "comes the accounting."
She reached over and covered the mark with her hand.
He let her.
The trial was four months later.
She'd testified in seventeen trials by then. Had learned hwo the Wizengamot worked, the way the chamber swallowed sound and returned it flattened, official, drained of the texture of actual experience. She'd learned to speak clearly and look at the Wizengamot and not at the accused, because looking at the accused made her voice do things that undermined the appearance of impartiality.
For Theo's trial she looked at him the entire time.
She told them everything she could. The corridor in October. The bezoar. The way he'd positioned himself, consistently and deliberately, as someone who refused. Who found the smallest possible acts of resistance available to him and performed them without telling anyone.
She told them he'd had no choice about the mark.
She told them he was seventeen when he received it.
She told them she was alive partly because of him.
The Wizengamot listened.
And then they looked at his arm.
The verdict took eleven minutes.
She counted.
Theo didn't look at her when they read it. He was looking at a point somewhere above the heads of the Wizengamot with his face arranged in that blankness, and she understood that he had known. That he had done the same calculation his mother had done and arrived at the answer long before this room had.
She was on her feet before the last word was spoken.
It didn't matter.
The aurors were already moving.
He looked at her then, finally, at the last possible moment, as they took his arms, and his face was still composed, still steady, still arranged in the blankness that she knew now was not coldness but armour, was not absence but the presence of someone who had decided not to make the people watching him feel worse than they already did —
But his eyes.
His eyes said the same thing they'd said in the drawing room at Malfoy Manor.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
She stood in the chamber of the Wizengamot with her testimony still in the air, still warm, still true, every word of it true, every word of it insufficient and watched them take him out of the room.
We never learn, she thought.
We've been here before.
Why are we always stuck and running from the bullets.
The Ministry allowed visitors once a fortnight.
Hermione went every time. He had no one else to go. Draco was withering in a cell down th corridor.
She told Harry the first month. He'd looked at her with that expression she'd learned to dread, the one that meant he understood but wished he didn't, that meant he was going to say something careful and insufficient and he'd said Hermione in a tone that contained an entire argument she didn't have the energy to have.
She had it anyway.
"He helped us," she said. "He helped me—"
"I know," Harry said. "I know he did. I just—"
"Don't," she said quietly. "Please don't."
He didn't bring it up again. But she saw him watching her sometimes, in the weeks that followed, with something in his face that she recognised as the helplessness of someone watching a person they love walk toward something they can't follow.
Ron didn't say careful things. Ron said the thing he was thinking, which was: "Hermione, he's a Death Eater," and she had looked at him across Grimmauld Place's kitchen table and felt something close with a very soft, very final click.
"I know what he is," she said. "I also know what he isn't."
She didn't explain further.
She stopped explaining after that.
The first visit she brought books.
Of course she brought books. She brought seven, wrapped in brown paper, tied with string, because she'd spent three days selecting them and another day second-guessing the selection, too heavy, not heavy enough, does he want distraction or does he want something with weight, what do you bring someone who is— what do you bring—
The guard unwrapped them. Checked each one. Handed them back to her without ceremony.
She carried them in herself.
He was sitting at the small table when they brought her in. His hands folded in front of him. His back straight. He looked up when she entered and she looked at him and for one horrible elongated second she thought— wrong room. Wrong person. This is someone else.
Then she saw his eyes.
They were still his. Barely. Like a room where someone had taken most of the furniture but left one thing— one thing that was still recognisably his, still precise, still there— but the room around it had been emptied.
"You came," he said.
His voice was the same. She held onto that.
"I brought books," she said. She put them on the table. She sat down. She didn't look at his hands because she already knew about the hands, had been warned, had prepared herself. She looked at his face. "The third one is in French. I thought— you were reading something in French, in December, I never asked you what it was and I—"
She stopped.
He looked at the books.
"Thank you," he said.
She'd heard him say thank you before. This version didn't sound like the same words.
The second visit he asked her not to bring books anymore.
She didn't ask why. She understood why. In here, books were things you started and couldn't finish, things that required a continuity of self that the dementors made impossible, you'd read a page and come back to it and not recognise having read it, not recognise the person who had. Better not to start. Better not to have the evidence of your own disappearance sitting there in your hands.
She brought food instead. Small things. Things that didn't require hope.
By the third month she had learned to do what he'd done for her, once, in the Room, to sit beside the fact of someone's pain without trying to fix it. To just be there. Present and steady and refusing to pretend.
But it was harder. So much harder than it had been for him, because when she'd come to him crying she'd still been fundamentally herself. Still intact. The pain had been circumstantial, external, something happening to her rather than in her.
This was different.
What was happening to Theo was happening to the very thing that made him Theo.
He didn't sit in his carefree maner like before. Now he sat. Folded inward. He answered questions but rarely asked them, and when he did they were small and slightly delayed, like signals from somewhere very far away.
Is it still autumn out.
Did you take the train or did you apparate.
What does it smell like today. Outside.
She answered every question with the same care he'd once given hers.
"Cold now," she said. "It smells like leaves and wood smoke and the coffee from the cart outside the Ministry."
He closed his eyes.
She watched his face and didn't let hers do anything she didn't want to show him.
She was going insane.
She knew this with complete clarity, from a slight remove, the knowledge sitting in her like a stone she'd learned to carry. She was going insane quietly, in the margins of her life, in the space between the person she presented to everyone and the person who sat in Ministry waiting rooms every other Friday and counted the days and tried to remember what his voice had sounded like in December when it was still fully his.
Ginny noticed. Of course Ginny noticed, Ginny who watched people with the same precision she watched Quidditch, who understood the patterns of things.
"You're not sleeping," Ginny said, one evening in November.
"I'm sleeping fine."
"You're not eating."
"Ginny—"
"I'm not telling you to stop going," Ginny said quietly. "I'm not going to say what Ron said. I just need you to hear me say that I see you. That what you're doing is—" She paused. "It's the most painful thing I've ever watched someone do voluntarily."
Hermione looked at her hands.
"He would have done it for me," she said. "He would have— he is the only person in my life who ever just stayed. Without needing anything from it. Without making it about themselves." Her voice was very steady. She'd become expert at very steady. "I can't just—"
"I know," Ginny said.
"Nobody understands that—"
"I know," Ginny said again, softer. And she reached across and put her hand over Hermione's in a way that felt, for just a moment, like an echo of something, of a hand turning over on a cold morning in March, of a small and insufficient gesture that was nevertheless the only true thing available.
Hermione pressed her lips together.
She didn't cry. She'd learned to save the crying for after.
By December he forgot her name once.
Just once. Just for a moment, a small and terrible moment where he looked at her across the table with those emptied eyes and she saw him searching for her and not quite finding her and then finding her again—
"Hermione," he said. Like surfacing. Like remembering how to breathe.
"I'm here," she said immediately. "I'm right here."
He nodded slowly. His hands on the table were very still.
"I know," he said. "You always are."
She walked out of Azkaban and got exactly as far as the apparition point.
Then she stopped walking and put her hand over her mouth and stood there in the grey December cold and shook apart, silently, completely, for approximately four minutes.
Then she put herself back together.
She had to. She was the only one who was going to.
She told herself February. She told herself if she could just get him to February, something would shift, the Ministry would review, someone would listen, there would be some mechanism of justice she hadn't found yet because she hadn't looked hard enough—
She looked harder.
She found nothing.
She told herself February anyway.
part iv.
The appeal took eight months.
She didn't sleep properly for any of them.
She filed every form that existed and several that she wasn't certain existed until she invented the argument for them. She wrote letters to seven members of the Wizengamot. She cross-referenced his case against four comparable trials and documented the inconsistencies with the particular controlled fury of someone who had learned that rage was only useful when it was precise. She got Harry to testify. She got Kingsley Shacklebolt to review the original sentencing.
She did everything right.
She always did everything right.
The Ministry reduced his sentence in March. Two years taken off. Six months remaining. The letter used words like compassionate review and exceptional circumstances and she read it standing in her kitchen at seven in the morning and felt something that she thought might be relief and then realised was just the temporary absence of dread.
She went to tell him the same day.
He didn't understand at first.
She watched him process it from across the table, watched him receive the words and turn them over and try to locate himself in relation to them and it took longer than it should have. Longer than it would have, once.
"Six months," she said again. Gently.
"Six months," he repeated.
"And then you come home."
He looked at her.
His eyes were not the same eyes.
She had known this for a long time. Had watched it happen increment by increment, visit by visit, the thing that made him him retreating further each time like a tide that didn't fully come back in. But she had told herself, had needed to tell herself that somewhere behind the emptied expression and the delayed responses and the hands that no longer moved with any particular intention, he was still there. Still collecting. Still watching. Still the boy who had lined up his observations the way she lined up her books, by size, by weight, by importance.
She looked at him now and searched for him and found—
Glimpses.
Just glimpses.
"Hermione," he said slowly. Like he was reading her name from somewhere far away.
"I'm here," she said. The way she always said it. The reflex of eight months.
He nodded.
"You always are," he said.
The same words. The same words as December, as February, as every visit where he'd surfaced briefly and found her there and seemed both grateful and confused by her continued presence, as if each time he was faintly surprised that she hadn't done the calculation. Hadn't walked out the door.
She reached across the table.
He looked at her hand for a moment before he took it.
His grip was looser than it used to be. She remembered his hands shaking at the top of the Astronomy Tower. The desperate strength of them against her face. She held on tighter to compensate.
"Six months," she said again. "And then we'll fix it. We'll— there are people, Theo, there are healers who specialise in—"
He was looking at her with something in his face she couldn't read.
"Okay," he said softly.
Not yes. Not I believe you. Just— okay. The word of someone too tired to argue with hope.
She took it. She took the okay and she built on it, the way she'd been building on nothing for months, the way she'd learned to construct entire futures out of the smallest available material.
She walked out of Azkaban in March sunshine and told herself six months.
Just six more months.
He came home in September.
Mipsy collected him. Hermione wasn't allowed, wasn't family, wasn't legally anything, wasn't anything the Ministry had a form for and so she waited at the manor and heard the crack of apparition in the entrance hall and made herself walk, not run, to the top of the stairs.
He looked smaller.
That was the first thing. Not thinner, not paler, though both of those were true, just smaller, the way a house looks smaller when you've been away too long, some essential quality of scale lost in your absence.
He looked up at her from the entrance hall.
"Hello," he said.
"Hello," she said.
Mipsy pressed her face briefly against his hand and then bustled away, and Hermione came down the stairs and stood in front of him and looked at him properly for the first time without a table between them.
He looked at her the same way.
"You're here," he said.
"I told you I would be."
Something moved in his face. Distant. Like light through deep water.
"You did," he said. "You always—" He stopped. His brow creased slightly. "I know you. I know— I know who you are. I just—" The words lost their thread. He looked briefly, horribly lost.
"It's okay," she said immediately. "It's okay. You don't have to—"
"Hermione," he said. Like finding it. Like relief.
"Yes," she said. Her voice was completely steady. She'd had a lot of practice. "Yes. I'm right here."
She came every day.
Mipsy cooked. Hermione sat with him in the study, the same study she'd glimpsed from the corridor that first terrible morning, the one with the fire and the books and the ghost of what it might have been and she read aloud when he wanted her to and sat in silence when he didn't and in the evenings she would go home and sit in her own flat and stare at the wall.
It wasn't enough. She knew it wasn't enough. The healers she'd found said the same careful, insufficient things, significant exposure, long-term effects, we'll need time to assess and she heard underneath all of it the thing none of them said directly, which was: some of what's been taken doesn't come back.
She told herself it would.
She told herself it the way she'd been telling herself things for a year with less and less conviction and more and more desperation, the belief worn thin from overuse, from being the only person who held it.
October came. He had good days and bad days and the good days were enough to build on, were enough to make her think, were enough to make her hope, which was perhaps the cruelest thing the good days did. The good days made the bad days a surprise. The good days made her forget to brace.
In October he laughed once.
She was reading to him, something inconsequential, a novel she'd grabbed off his shelf, she hadn't even registered the title and she read a line that was apparently funny and he made a sound that was small and rusty and unpracticed and so completely, recognisably him that she stopped reading entirely.
He looked at her.
"Keep going," he said.
She kept going. She didn't let her voice do the thing it wanted to do.
That night she sat in her flat and cried for an hour and called it relief and went to sleep feeling, for the first time in a very long time, like something was coming back.
November came.
The good days got quieter.
Mipsy didn't say anything but Hermione saw it in the way the elf moved through the manor, the extra attentiveness, the way she always seemed to be in whatever room he was in, small and ancient and watchful. Elves grieved inward. Elves loved without condition and without end. Hermione recognised in Mipsy's silent vigilance a mirror of her own and found it both comforting and terrifying.
She started coming earlier in the mornings.
She told herself it was because he was better in the mornings.
She didn't examine what she was actually afraid of.
The last time she saw him awake was a Tuesday.
He was in the chair by the study window. The November light was coming in grey and thin and he was looking at the garden, or at the direction of the garden, she wasn't certain he was really seeing it and when she came in he turned his head toward her with that slow, searching quality she'd learned to meet with patience.
"Hermione," he said. Found her. Settled.
"Hi," she said.
She sat in the chair beside him. They looked at the garden together. The trees had lost most of their leaves and the grounds had that particular stripped, honest quality of late autumn, nothing hidden, everything exactly what it was.
After a long time he said, very quietly:
"I used to watch you in the library."
She went absolutely still.
"First year," he said. "Third table from the left. You lined your books up by size before you opened any of them."
She couldn't speak.
"I thought that was the strangest thing," he said. And something in his voice, something distant and wondering and almost, almost— "I never said anything."
"No," she managed. "You didn't."
He was quiet for a moment.
"I should have," he said. "I had—" He lost the thread. His brow creased. "I had a lot of years. I should have—"
"Theo." Her voice came out wrecked. She couldn't help it. "It's okay. You don't have to—"
"I would have loved you," he said simply.
Past tense.
The study was very quiet.
She reached over and took his hand and he let her, his fingers barely curling around hers, and they sat there in the November light until he fell asleep in the chair.
She stayed until evening.
She kissed his forehead before she left.
Mipsy's voice came at half past four in the morning.
Miss Hermione. Please. Mipsy is sorry to wake you.
She already knew.
She was out of bed and reaching for her shoes before she was fully conscious, her wand in her left hand, her coat half on—
And some part of her, the part that had been bracing for impact for so long that the impact itself almost felt like relief—
Some part of her had been waiting for this since March.
She hated that part of herself.
She had hoped anyway.
What did she win.
She stood in the entrance hall of Nott Manor with Mipsy's great amber eyes on her and the east staircase ahead of her and the grey beginning of dawn at the windows—
What did she win.
Eight months of visiting. An appeal that cost her everything she had. Six months taken off a sentence that killed him anyway. A Monday in November when he'd remembered first year, when he'd said I would have loved you in the past tense like he already knew—
What did she win.
She already knew what was at the top of the stairs.
She went anyway.
Just stop your crying, he'd told her once.
It'll be alright.
We can meet again somewhere.
Somewhere far away from here.
The sound that came out of her wasn’t a scream. It was something that existed well before the mankind language, before thought, before the cruelty of being a person who understood things, who testified to things, who chose words specifically only to watch them fall anyway.
It came up from somewhere below her ribs and it tore on its way out.
Mipsy caught her.
The elf who had loved him without condition and without end, who had brought him back from the edges of himself one morning at a time, who had called Hermione because there was no one else to call.
Mipsy held her on the floor of Theodore Nott's bedroom while the grey dawn came in through the curtains and Hermione Granger came apart at every seam she'd spent a year and a half reinforcing.
She had waited.
She had done everything right.
She had waited and appealed and testified and visited and read aloud and held his hand and kissed his forehead and told herself February and then six months and then just a little longer, just hold on, just—
We never learn.
We've been here before.
Why are we always stuck and running from the bullets.
Outside the window the November garden was grey and stripped and exact. The trees stood in the early light. The world went on with its characteristic indifference, the way it always did, the way it had when she'd stood on a beach after Malfoy Manor and the sea had continued regardless, the way it had when the Wizengamot had read a verdict and the chamber hadn't shaken, the way it had through all of it—
She pressed her face into Mipsy's shoulder.
She had no more words.
She had used all of her words and none of them had been enough and he was gone and she was on the floor and the world was going on outside the window and she had absolutely nothing left to say.
We got to get away.
We got to get away.
We got to, we got to, away.
et finalment.
She found his mother in a churchyard outside Aberystwyth.
It took her three weeks. Parish records, a name she'd found in the back of an old Nott family ledger, a handful of letters she probably shouldn't have read but read anyway and then a grey October morning, standing in a small Welsh churchyard with the sea audible somewhere beyond the hills, looking at a headstone that said Elowen Rosier-Nott, 1952—1989 and feeling something settle in her chest like the last piece of a sentence.
She'd made the arrangements herself.
She didn't ask anyone for help. There was no one she wanted to explain it to, no one who would have understood why it mattered that he wasn't buried in the Nott family plot in Wiltshire, under his father's name, in the ground of everything he'd spent his whole life quietly refusing. She understood. That was enough.
The vicar didn't ask questions. The grave was small and plain and next to his mother's and when it was done Hermione stood there for a long time with the Welsh wind moving through the grass around her.
Now, she thought, you're not alone.
Now there's no world between you.
She apparated home.
She didn't cry. She'd run out of that somewhere around February.
The years after were quiet in the way that erasure is quiet.
Harry and Ginny got married in the spring. She was there, she was always there, present and correctly dressed and capable of saying the right things at the right moments, she'd always been good at that. Ron and Lavender had a daughter who they named something cheerful. People bought houses, changed jobs, became gradually and naturally the next version of themselves, the way people did when the war was far enough behind them to stop defining the shape of every day.
Hermione didn't become the next version of herself.
She stayed exactly where she was.
She went to work and filed her paperwork and answered her letters and occasionally had dinner with Ginny who watched her with careful eyes and didn't push, because Ginny had learned not to push. She was functional. She was competent. She was, by every external measure, fine.
She just couldn't move.
Couldn't move past a Room of Requirement at dawn. Past seven books. Past a Sunday in November when he'd said I would have loved you like he already knew, like he was leaving it somewhere she could find it afterward.
She went to Wales every year on the same day.
She brought two things, flowers for Elowen, whom she'd never met and who had left and who Hermione had decided to forgive anyway because she'd spent enough of herself on the ones who stayed and a book for Theo.
She left it on the grave.
Always French. Always something she thought he'd have chosen himself.
She never stayed long. Just long enough to stand there in the wind and feel the pain of loving someone who no longer existed in any form that could receive it.
Then she went home.
She made tea.
She sat by the window.
She thought about his laugh. Small and rusty and unpracticed, in a study on an October afternoon that she would spend the rest of her life returning to, not living in, she wasn't living in it, she was just, returning to the way you returned to the place you'd left something important, even when you knew it wasn't there anymore.
We can meet again somewhere, he'd said.
Somewhere far away from here.
She was still waiting.
She thought she'd be waiting for a very long time.