Breath Mints / Battle Scars

Chapter 19: XIX

November 25th, 1998

Diary,

It's this fucking thing on my arm.

Destroying my life.

Draco

November 30th, 1998

Six days.

It's been six days, and nothing.

Not even from Parkinson, who's such a talented gossip she's known to have information ages before the subject even does.

Which means Zacharias hasn't said anything.

Hermione doesn't like that. It makes her uncomfortable. Because she's already told Harry and Ron and Ginny and Parvati and everyone else who noticed their distance and cared to ask that they've broken up, meaning he could play his hand at any moment.

But like Malfoy said, he only has one card.

Her stomach ties itself in a sailor's knot. She's added the boathouse to an ever-growing list of places in Hogwarts she can no longer visit. And while, if anyone ever asks, she can cite Snape's death as her reasoning, she knows inside that it has nothing to do with Snape.

Malfoy has been notably absent from classes - on both the remaining days of last week as well as today, it seems. Absent from meals, too. She's almost as worried as the morning she thought he'd drowned himself, even as she has no right to be.

She shouldn't have said the things she said to him. Shouldn't have encouraged this silly attraction of theirs, when what she'd known would happen all along in her heart had happened not five minutes later.

Aside from the time she fell off a playhouse as a child - saw her own bone jutting out through the skin of her leg - Malfoy is tied to every horror in her past. Malfoy Manor lives in his eyes and in his touch and in his voice, and she was foolish to ever think differently.

Still - even the logic of this can't prevent her from worrying.

Ginny is another problem.

Hermione had an inkling that she doubted her relationship with Zacharias, and now that it's proven to be so short-lived, the suspicion in her eyes has doubled. Half the time, during meals, Hermione finds the pretty witch's gaze sliding over her, and it makes her second guess each bite.

She has to lay low. She has to stay away from Zacharias - away from Malfoy at all costs. No, in fact - she thinks she has to stay away from everyone, for a while. Things had been simplest and safest toward the beginning of term, when she'd kept mostly to herself.

It'll seem like a regression to her friends, no doubt. But a necessary one. The Hermione they'd become accustomed to - broken and unexciting and empty, like a shell - well, she isn't much but she's certainly safe.

Yes, reverting back to her old ways seems like a brilliant plan.

For all of twenty seconds.

She's brewing Skele-Gro for Madam Pomfrey, quietly lost in all of these thoughts, when it starts. A slow-building raucous, somewhere down the hall from the Hospital Wing. Shouting, scuffling, several sets of desperate footfalls. She and Poppy glance up at the same time, and somehow, instinctively, Poppy knows to clear off the cot she's standing beside.

A moment later, a huddled mass of students comes careening around the corner through the entryway.

"Pomfrey, Pomfrey - help!" Nott is shouting.

Hermione drops the flask in her hand. It shatters on the flagstone.

"Put him here! Here!" Madam Pomfrey's response time is quick, like a whip-crack, and she's guiding the students to lay him on the bare cot as she rolls up her sleeves.