Chapter Text
“…and then I said, bloody hell, George, they don’t call it a bath box, they call it a bathtub! And do you know what he said to me?”
Hermione stared out of the window into the bedrizzled moors, dark eyes tracing the droplets of rain.
“’Mione? Are you even listening?”
“Sorry?” She blurted, eyes focusing and hand dropping from her chin as she blinked blankly a few times across from her at Ron.
He raised a ginger eyebrow questioningly and waved his palms around.
“I am, Ron,” Harry said placatingly next to him. He patted his friend’s arm.
Hermione thought that was a bit dramatic.
“Well, at least one of you bloody are,” Ron folded his arms and sniffed, shooting Hermione a look. “You’ll like this too, ‘Mione. It’s about Muggles.”
“Oh, sorry, Ron. Go on,” Hermione said, and made a point to shift in her seat to show her interest, flicking her hair over her shoulder. “Go on. Really.”
He went on.
She couldn’t care less.
No, that was rude, she thought to herself. She cares. Of course she cares. And usually, on any other day, she’d be showing it.
There was nothing interesting outside except the same dreary sights she’d seen every year since she’d first started at Hogwarts. The same slightly yellow stained windows, the same seats with cushions so worn down there was barely any padding between their robes and the hard wood of the seat.
But she was restless. What had happened last year had crawled into her skin and began to weave its way into her veins, across her sinews, between her ligaments and bones and resting in her chest as a heavy weight and reminder of what she’d experienced.
What they all had, really.
Hermione felt her eyes glaze over as she unseeingly watched Ron make a gesture that resembled plumbing (somewhat) to Harry.
Harry laughed, eyes crinkling at the sides.
All Hermione could think is that Sirius Black was dead. And the world knows of Voldemort. And all Hermione can think is of the old saying of bad things seeming to happen in threes.
Her neck felt itchy again, like whatever whisper of memories from what she saw last year was trying to bubble to the surface. Like a fog pressed up against some glass.
Yeah, that was it, she thought. A fog. A black, horrible fog. It was getting bigger.
Hermione itched her neck. Itched it again.
Dug her fingernails in.
And then, quite suddenly, she stood up.
“I think I want something from the sweet trolley,” she said abruptly.
That was too loud, she realised absently, as two pairs of eyes swung on her.
“You missed it, like, twenty minutes ago, ‘Mione,” Harry said, and he looked mildly worried. She probably shared the expression as she looked back at him. He’d had dark circles under his eyes ever since they left the Ministry. “Are you alright?”
“Yeah, you’re looking a bit pinky,” Ron said, scratching his jaw absently.
“It’s said ‘peaky,’ Ron’,” She snapped, and immediately put the palm of her hand to her forehead.
She promised she’d stop snapping at these two. At Ron.
“Right. I’m sorry. Look, I’m going to go try see if I can get something, maybe the trolley is only a few doors down. I’ll get you some frogs.”
She looked at Ron when she said this and offered an apologetic smile. He looked wounded.
“I’m sorry.”
With that, she opened the door to their compartment and took a long, deep breath as she closed it behind her.
She knew she wasn’t being fair, not really. Realistically, Harry had every right to behave this way. Not her. Sirius wasn’t the same to her as he was to him. And he seemed to be handling it.
Well. Maybe not quite.
Absently dragging her finger along the compartment walls as she walked down the thin corridor, she thought of the mornings after sleeplessness where she’d turned to Hedwig knocking at the glass of her window impatiently to drop a note sent by Harry in the middle of the night. Telling her about the nightmare, telling her he couldn’t sleep, and, as always, finishing with telling her not to worry Ron. Not after what had happened to Arthur, not after the attack from Nagini.
Maybe they were both coping with it differently, she supposed.
Hermione itched her neck again.
The trolley must be near, what with the ‘ooooh’s emanating from a compartment filled with first years as they stare up at what, she muses fondly, must be their first chocolate frog.
God, they looked so young.
“…and Cedric, put it back! That ones mine, yours is the one that’s halfway up the glass, isn’t it? Stop eating it! Spit it-“
At the name, Hermione’s head snapped back from where she had briefly paused, lost in memory, to watch their frogs climb over the walls and back down to their faces.
Cedric? What was-
“Cedric; you’re fat, and you’re ugly, and I hate you,” one of the young girls was fuming towards a young boy as he shoved the last of her frog into his mouth. “Your sister was right about you. You’re disgusting.”
He had dark hair, dark skin, and was unequivocally not the body of the boy she had seen a short two years prior.
His eyes swivelled to hers, most likely feeling the intensity of her gaze.
Hermione walked on quickly, flustered. Her neck itched, and the fog felt pressed against the glass. This corridor was too long, too thin, too stretched. Her nails dug into the back of her neck, itching painfully, and she blinked furiously as she turned into the nearest compartment and slid the door aside jarringly while inhaling a furious gasp of air to control her panic.
First, she feels the crackle of magic. There’s a certain feeling to a room recently charged with spell work.
Her eyes shoot up, and she’s faced with the looming back of Malfoy.
The spell leaves her mouth before she can stop it. Finite Incantatem.
A flicker. A fracturing ripple. The air warps, and for a breathless, disbelieving heartbeat, she sees them - wings, raw and blood-slick, the skin around them grey and wasting. Bone pushing through where no bone should.
She understands in the split-second before Malfoy turns around in horror, wand raised, wordlessly reanimating the Glamour charm: he has wings.
And it's a death sentence.