Chapter Text
The sun smiles where no one has asked it to, casting a blanket golden and warm that leaks through tarnished bars over windows. Today she needn't come up for air. She will stay here, under the glow of morning with her crossword puzzles and her freshly sharpened HB pencil and an inexplicable assuredness that today is supposed to end and begin with something wonderful.
It lasts all of seventeen minutes.
Little Peter isn’t quite little. He is a grown and weaselly man, older than Hermione, with grabby hands. Always in everyone else’s business. Always touching things that don’t belong to him. Hermione avoids him at all costs.
In one moment, he's looking out the window, humming an unfamiliar tune. And then his fingers are in her hair. Just for a moment, but a moment too long—enough for her to know he caught a metallic glint, long enough for him to snatch up what does not belong to him. Rationale leaves her body. It remains on the floor of the rec room with her puzzles as she takes chase after him.
“Give it back, give it back!” she is screeching, socks slipping and sliding over waxed tile as she spins the corner and crashes to her palms. It stings something horrid, no cushion for her knees as they thump even harder.
Three minutes, twice a day for weeks—months, months scraping bloodied fingernails under the mirror in the bathroom. Biting nails into the wood under her seat in group when Dr Jones is watching, picking the chair worst for wear, splintering on the sides so her performance is convincing. So there would be a reason for her nail beds to be jagged and stained red and cut in wood.
Hermione had tucked her prize from behind the mirror, a single unbent nail, into her nest of hair, under bound curls in a messy bun—safer hidden where no one would look than tucked into her bedding before housekeeping made rounds.
Efforts gone to waste because of Peter and his grubby hands.
All she wanted was something concrete, something permanent. So each piece of her they filed down might be carved into a solid thing, something she could touch. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of runes used to dance in her head with her eyes closed tight. She had them memorized and translated. The symbols blur together now, their meanings lost.
She would see red hair and freckles, and the boy with bright green eyes.
A man with a crooked nose and black, greasy hair and hate in his heart, and people on brooms in the sky and a feeling almost like love captured on the edge of a scent. Portraits that move and eyes that end lives and people, children, fighting a war that never ends. A war inherited by their parents before them, and theirs even before that.
But portraits don’t move.
Children don’t fight wars.
And a simple look cannot kill.
If it could, she wouldn’t be chasing Peter down the hallway of Ward C while he screams bloody murder for Dr King.
She is a mad woman on a mission now, on her feet again. Faster and breathless, he reaches the nurse’s station with his stupid fucking arm raised to high heaven and her little rusted nail between his scarred fingers. It’s too late, the footsteps are storming behind them, but an object in motion will stay in motion, and her rage and panic keep turning like a wheel until she has her hands on him.
And instead of lashing at his arm or shoving him to the hard tile, Hermione drives the tip of her pencil into the flesh of his arm with a retching sob and without a second thought.
The scream he unleashes is that of an animal caught in a snare. A high-pitched dying noise coupled with white, fear-stained eyes. She knows she’s staring back at him with the same look in her own: not sorry, but pleading. She didn't mean to, not really—
For a second, his lip twitches upward with a sense of satisfaction. Peter’s fingers wriggle in a tinkle of a wave as she goes down.
They have her face pressed to green tile before she sees the first blood.
The last girl painted. There were vivid green flames, and silver flying rabbits, and chains around trees with broken clocks and limbs. Worlds familiar yet mountains apart mapped her canvas and her skin and the lilt of her voice. She would tell Hermione what she heard her scream in the night, and Hermione would test the words against her hoarse throat.
Sometimes it was a plea and a promise, and Luna would repeat the words like a songbird, each sound bright and paired with a long stroke of her brush turning the words to gold ribbons.
Other times there was a name. A boy. Sometimes Hermione even remembers his face.
They said Luna was crafting poison from stone pits and storing her arsenic inside her paint cups. Perhaps a batch on the outside disagreed with the wrong someone; it was bound to happen sooner or later, and as good a reason as any to put someone away. She didn't seem dangerous to Hermione. Morbid, maybe. Fascinated by strange imagery and discomforting human behavior. She quite liked mirrors. When she did smile, it never quite met her ever-wide awake eyes. They called her Loony Luna and the girl always smelled of bitter cherry and acrylics.
Hermione suspected she might be the kindest and the sanest of them all. She had things to say about the way things were.
The night before they took her away, she kissed Hermione on the forehead, and it left a red stain that took days to scrub clean.
Hermione started hiding her pills after that. She couldn’t afford to forget her, too.
Lavender informs her about her nightmares now, in fewer words.
The smack of a pillow. A shrill threat to fuck the boy Hermione calls for in her sleep.
She misses Luna, but at least it's no secret why Lavender is here.
And while she's alone in the white room, maybe she misses Lavender, too.
“I swear, just one more try—I remember it now, I just forgot. I can show you. I can make it move. I can make anything move.”
Her mum presses a palm over her lips and chokes something back as she shakes her head.
“You don’t have to show me, sweetheart.”
“I can, just not in front of the doctors,” Hermione whispers harshly. She leans in closely, so as to obscure her face from Dr Jones’ line of vision behind the glass. “There are rules. We have to follow the rules. But if you believe me, you can-can get my wand and I can make them forget. I can make everyone forget. Please—”
The sound of the heavy door breaks its seal, and a draft of cool, outside air flutters in with Dr Jones.
“How many times are we going to go through this?” her father asks. His arms are crossed over his chest and he hasn’t left his station by the door. “Do you have any idea what you’re putting my wife through? She’s not ready.”
“She’s our child—”
“Monica.”
He, finally, finally steps toward his daughter and sinks onto the bench beside Monica. Dr Jones is silent as she lowers her clipboard against her stomach.
A hesitant offer, he takes Hermione's hand from across the table. Tips are calloused from woodwork in the garage, little animal figurines he's crafted for thirty years. The skin around them is warm and soft. “We love you,” he promises, “but we can’t take you home if you don’t let the doctors fix you. Don’t you remember what happened last time?”
“I'm not broken.” Hermione shakes her head. “The last time—”
What have you done?
What was in the glass? This isn't—
“Perhaps you’re right,” Dr Jones interrupts. “These visits are clearly distressing. Maybe it’s in everyone’s best interest if we take some time apart from mum and dad. We can schedule if Hermione seems more agreeable under the new doctor's treatment.”
“I’m not distressed,” Hermione hisses back. “I'm just trying to—well, I'm doing okay, aren’t I? I admit, I made a mistake, but I didn’t intend to hurt anyone, and I’ve been taking the pills and—and I haven’t asked for Ron in weeks—”
She catches her tongue before they realize what she's done.
Wendell’s eyes leave his daughter as his hand draws away from hers to clasp at his wife's. He kisses the knuckles of her hand, as he has for as long as Hermione remembers.
Dancing in the kitchen. Beside her in a restaurant booth. The train station.
Like he doesn't see his daughter, like she isn't even there. They don’t even turn back when she calls for them.
“Wait! Accio—"
Hermione doesn’t get the chance to ask when they’ll come back for her before the door seals again.
Time moves differently in the white room. There are hours laced in faceless howls through the thin membrane of walls.
Hours where the pipes hiss low and cracked, and whisper her to sleep.
She misses meals and landslides and slow climbs and nothing. No one comes looking. As though she could vanish and no one would know the better. Sometimes the punishment feels fitting, though Hermione can't remember why by the time each stay has come to an end.
The door eventually pops with a grunt from the security guard. He shouldn’t be touching things here on the lower levels, but she shouldn’t be here either, so perhaps it’s fair play. He squints one eye harshly against the battering of light from her room as he gruffly informs her the mess hall closes any minute. The guard limps the other way down the hall and has a flask in his palm before he’s even rounded the corner.
Roasted beef and potatoes and carrot, and bread and gravy are on partitioned plates on banquet tables when she climbs the stairs and pushes through the double doors into the dining hall. It must be a special occasion, and it’s a shame she’s missed it, because her platter is nightmarishly carrot-heavy. She eats every bite.
Hermione swallows the contents of her white paper cup during rounds. No sleight of hand, no foul play. A medley of ever-changing color and shapes and plasticity drops onto her tongue, a single gulp of water forcing them down her throat. She’s given up asking what they’re for.
“They make you better,” is all Dr Jones ever says. “You want to get better, don’t you?”
They check between her fingers. Hermione has earned herself special attention in a place where the smartest thing to do is disappear. She displays her open mouth, jutting out her wriggling tongue in demonstration for the approval of Dr Jones.
Her compliance is noted on a clipboard.
Air escapes the cushion of her chair as she sinks into the seat—a dark brown, cracked leather with large bronze-colored studs along the sides. The carpet is an ugly shade of green, chuffed and stained, and the bookshelves built into the wall behind the doctor's desk are empty. Cardboard boxes line the back wall and sit stacked on a chaise that matches the chairs and looks just as worn and plasticky.
The windows don’t look to have a clasp or sill, but they aren’t barred like the ones in the dining hall or the rec room. There’s a cup of pens and a letter opener on the desk. Hermione touches her hair, feeling for mats or knots she could catch and bury either in, her fingers are still mangled into her curls when the clack of footsteps sound from the hallway.
The doctor is young. His grey sleeves are cuffed to his elbows, his chest covered by a matching vest. Well-dressed, if not more comfortable and casual than she might expect of a first impression.
“Nonsense,” he’s insisting to the orderly in the doorway, “she’s perfectly capable of answering a few questions on her own, isn't she?” The new doctor turns to face her. With more than a side profile, she sees little wrinkles at the corners of his lips that indicate he is perhaps older still—and yet somehow more interesting for it.
“Hermione—it’s Hermione, is that right?”
She blinks twice at him, crawling back into herself. She has no good reason why. Perhaps because he's present and lively, and that alone is terribly jarring. Perhaps she's still shaken from what had to be two or more days in isolation.
He’s playing coy like she’s a child, like he hasn’t prepared for this moment. Memorized her charts and every scribbled non-diagnostic note. Hermione knows what it says. Fantastical delusions. Aggressive tendencies toward female authority figures. Biter, but easily subdued.
“Did they do shocks?” he asks, turning back to the orderly. “I specifically said I wanted her natural.”
The orderly flounders. He doesn’t know. He should, but they change out so often; most of them don’t even learn the patients’ names. Hermione certainly doesn’t learn theirs.
She's been calling this one Skinny in her head all morning. He’s tall and weedy, and takes his job far more seriously than the one who’s been slipping Lavender an extra fruit cup in the afternoon and a cock in the evening. He looks like someone, or perhaps it’s just the red hair.
That’s still our child—
An echo comes and goes. The doctor stares at her curiously, and for a moment his face asks a question, strange only because he shouldn’t know to ask it.
“I—No. No shocks,” she answers.
His examination lasts a few seconds longer—a look she can’t quite make out—before he nudges the orderly out into the hall. The man tries to protest again, but the doctor has already locked the door and spun back to face her.
“Right then. Shall we get started?”
“I don’t think you’re supposed to do that,” Hermione says quietly.
“Oh?” he asks. He raises his brow and something she might even call a smirk settles in on his face. “And what’s that? Chat with you alone?”
Chat. Just sitting down for tea and biscuits. Her in her wrinkled hospital linens and uneven beige socks—still fresh off release, housekeeping hasn’t yet returned her things from their “cleaning”—really, just an invasive search through everything she calls her own. It’s always the same.
And him, clean and smooth and perfectly pressed. He finds his chair behind the desk, a tweed jacket hanging over the back and slips in across from her. God, she misses fabrics.
They aren’t treated much different from prisoners, she supposes. Maybe worse sometimes. Patients don’t have rights to trials or juries. Just judgement and an execution of sorts.
"Are you a danger to me, Hermione?”
Her eyes dart to the letter opener in the black cup once again. He takes note and gestures toward it with an open palm. Hermione remains still.
“To myself and others, it would seem,” she says slowly.
“Is that what you think your chart says?”
“Is it not?”
He doesn’t sound anything like she supposes he should. Charming and playful with a stinging undertone of mockery. Still, this wriggling in her brain screams something is wrong outside, outside, and while his persona is a crack in this miserable place that she should embrace, Hermione hesitates to use her voice.
There’s always a strategy.
Round two of their staring match feels eternal.
His skin is clear, unfreckled and unscarred, but for two dots on his jawline. Hermione scans him for more distinguishing marks and makes it to the line of exposed skin above his collarbone, where she finds two more beauty marks identical in size and spacing to the first two, when he clears his throat.
“Let’s start over, shall we? I’m Dr Riddle.” He taps the name plate on his desk, though his crinkled smile twists sour with distaste.
In white on black, trimmed in bronze, is the name Dr Tom M. Riddle, Jr.
“And you are…”
Quiet and unmoving, her eyes lap the room again. There’s nothing new to glean from it, except that he's taking his stay more seriously than the last owner of this office. Fresh paint and new light sconces. A few clunky pieces of mediocre art.
He waits a beat before tipping his clipboard toward her like a drink he’s unfamiliar with, flattening the already smooth pages like he’s parsing out the flavor.
“Hermione Wilkins,” he reads. “A repeat offender. On your third and longest stay with St Mungo’s Institution, congratulations.”
He clicks the pen in his hand twice and sets his clipboard back down. With stripped training wheels, he recites from memory.
“Top of your class in secondary school, slotted for Oxbridge. Mental breakdown after drowning yourself in inhumane quantities of amphetamines in preparation for exams. Lost your scholarships, lost everything. And instead of lying in the bed you made, you set your family's home on fire in an attempt to regain control. Does this tale of woe sound familiar?”
Hermione frowns. It’s foggy and familiar, a story she’s heard before. One she’s learned to repeat.
“That’s what it says, doesn’t it?” she says instead.
Dr Riddle folds his hands together and smiles. “Heavy is the crown, hmm? Would you like to discuss the incident?”
“Which one?” Hermione asks.
“Any. We could talk about Mister Pettigrew, or your parents, or—what was that boy's name?”
He glances down at his notes.
“Harry,” she whispers.
Dr Riddle's face is stone. “Yes, would you like to talk about Harry?”
Hermione shakes her head. No, no she can’t. The last time—
“Hermione, can you tell me who Harry is to you?” he asks, tilting his chin toward her.
It’s on the tip of her tongue, but the words won’t come out. She stares blankly.
“What do you remember about him?”
The doctors have always been unwavering in their assessment: there was no point in her life in which she ever made a friend who bore a lightning-shaped scar across his forehead. They never took down a troll or rescued dragons or duelled dark wizards. Because trolls and dragons and dark wizards simply don’t exist.
The boy whose name she beseeches in her sleep and the wand she cries for take chase down the narrow of her mind. There was a red-headed nurse named Charlie who they have sworn up and down she was rather fond of the last time she was here. Not Ron.
His eyes weren't blue.
“It’s not your fault. I’m surprised you remember your own name.”
Dr Riddle makes a note on the margin, then he withdraws a pad of paper from his breast pocket and scribbles something else down.
“I’m going to make some changes to your dailies, if that’s alright with you. You may have vivid dreams while you adjust, but I’ll be around to monitor you.”
He taps his pen before biting on the end in thought.
Dr Riddle has a soft enough face, something pretty, so when he tilts his head, a slip of dark brown hair falls over warm eyes in a boyish way that makes her feel as though she could be sitting with a friend. He's too many things at once.
She thinks perhaps she sees through him, but Hermione’s uncertain what it is on the other side.
“I want you to think about something until our next meeting,” he says carefully. “You’re clever, aren’t you? Sneaking and hiding things. You don't want to be here. You don't feel safe between these walls. I can help you. But you’re going to have to do the work. You have to decide if it's worth it.”
The work is lying—harder, louder. To herself and to everyone else. She's tried and she's tried, and she's haunted still.
As if he’s read her mind, he says, “Let’s crawl before we run, shall we darling?”
The telly in the rec room blasts a twenty-two minute infomercial on a special Order-Only toothpaste. It changes colors when your teeth are well and brushed, and comes in Cherry-Mint and Orange Frost.
Call in the next hour and receive a travel-sized tube free!
Order immediately and we’ll throw in a golden toothbrush!
Buy two and we’ll slash the cost of shipping!
It plays on a loop. The hosts, two red-headed men who look a touch familiar, speak in sync from time to time. It’s sort of charming, and she finds herself watching the loop thrice over before it starts to feel like rot and she asks to use the loo. An orderly escorts her.
The mirror has been replaced. It is smaller and higher. Too tall for her, in so that she can only trace a shred of her reflection pressed to the back wall. From a distance, the stranger almost looks like her.
The remaining old nails have been pried from the plaster, shredded paint and crumbling chunks marking each hole. The faucet drips three at a time, keeping pace with her careful string of inhales.
Outside, there’s a scuffle.
Shattering glass. Metal on metal. Curses and screams.
When she finds the nerve to step out, the halls have gone silent.
In the rec room lies the wreckage of what human tornadoes have left behind. Upturned tables, half-painted canvases slashed and smudged and tossed to the wayside. Abandoned jumpers and shoes are scattered like fragments of ghosts, and the metal legs of a chair have been put through a window, hanging still by two feet.
Rain pulses from the foggy outside, pooling on the tile below.
Something purple and shimmering is splattered on a table that still stands upright nearest the window. Hermione moves through the destruction, the television still playing quietly behind her. She's careful around unswept glass and wet paint, and she dabs her finger against the peculiar liquid. Drags it to her nose. The smell is bitter and earthy, almost like raw cocoa.
“Wilkins!”
She blinks and it’s clear. Odorless.
Water on the table. Water on her fingers.
A large man’s hand rests on her shoulder.
“I missed so much,” she says quietly. “What happened?”
“What always happens.”
Hermione turns to find Dr King behind her, and his palm falls away.
“And in your dreams,” Dr Riddle says, “are the people always the same?”
“No, not always. It's more like they're borrowing faces. Recycling from—well, I don’t know exactly.” In a whisper, she adds, “They're here, too. The patients. The workers. The doctors.”
Dr Riddle leans forward, pressed with intrigue and surprising ease. A nerve tenses at the back of her neck as he smiles. “Do I play a role in these fantasies?”
“No,” Hermione says too quickly to contest the claim of fantasy. “You're… new.”
“What do you think that means? Does that make me more or less real?”
She ponders the thought. Everyone, everything she sees, has been embedded and consistent and known in some capacity. But Dr Riddle is concrete and strange. He shakes this impression she has begun to accept. Broken little girl. Unfixable mad woman. He speaks to her with decency, if not also with a humanising level of indecency.
He bites the cap of his pen off and holds it there as he makes a note at the end of his clipboard.
When he looks up, plastic still gripped against incisors, his brow arches.
She decides he is real indeed.
No one really talks about Dean since he shattered the barred windows. Hermione heard it took three orderlies and a guard just to sedate him; the doctors, of course, never get their hands dirty. The place he once sat in group leaves a hole, a break in a perfect circle. They pulled his chair and the vacuum draws her eye to the bruised wood he would rock back and forth against every session.
Today, they're supposed to talk about their perfect day.
Someone shares a night out at the pub with his old school friends. Another yearns for one more day with her child.
Lavender dreams of a wedding. She doesn't care to whom. In her ideal, there are white gardenias, and bridesmaids in red and gold, and stars everywhere. Dr Jones calls for Hermione to share, but Lavender isn't done.
“...indoors, of course. Perhaps we'll paint the ceiling, or-or twinkle lights. I wonder if my parents’ church has enough in storage. The stars are so important. I can read them, did you know? There are those ones that look like a teacup, that's my favorite. Oh, it could be tea party themed…”
Lavender runs long and it never circles back to Hermione.
Hermione didn't have much to contribute, but she can't swallow her cumulative annoyance when bedtime comes and the Irishman sneaks in silently again. She falls asleep to the sound of the squeaking frame and Lavender’s breathy little gasps.
Despite earlier impressions, the doctor is nice.
Too nice.
He gives her ice water so cold it makes her teeth throb. He offers her a pencil with a fresh pink eraser on the end, the kind she likes to clean the lines.
The wood between her fingers, the scratch of graphite against paper, and her wrist in motion—it soothes an itch she didn't know was aching since they took them away from her.
Hermione knows better than to record words. But squiggly lines, curled shapes that remind her of horns, a circle inside a triangle with a line down the centre, numbers with elongated tails… the symbols pour from her, sentimental yet meaningless.
She admits to him, this was what the nail was for. Sure, it would double as a weapon. As defense. Control.
But all she really wanted was to memorialize the shapes in her head so she'd know they were real before they were washed away with the rest of her memories.
Dr Riddle watches intently.
Dinner is served with hot, fresh rolls.
Hermione's cup of pills has been replaced by a single green pearlescent gel capsule.
She swallows it without fuss and Dr Jones nods in approval.
“What is it you're actually afraid of, Hermione? That you aren’t enough?”
It's rained for days. The fog outside the doctor's windows is so thick, it looks as though it could catch her fall in a pillow of damp cotton.
Hermione traces the panes with her fingertips, feeling vaguely for a clasp. She shakes her head uncertainly. “The opposite, actually. Like I'm too much.”
Dr Riddle rests his backside against the ledge. He wears black and white, and has gone without any embellishments today. No vests or ties. Just Dr Riddle and a collar with two loosened buttons. She stares too long, searching for those marks above his collarbone to match the ones on his jawline. They must have been along his neck.
With Hermione in green sweatpants and a too-short matching t-shirt, this juxtaposition between them doesn't seem to bother him. Her need to touch, to examine and test boundaries doesn't faze him, either.
“Sometimes I've hurt people when they don't listen,” Hermione admits. “I don't mean to. But when people are wrong, they should have to face it, shouldn't they?”
He luxuriates a response, rolls it around in his mouth for a long moment first. “And are you always right and righteous? Or are you too capable of mistakes and selfishness?”
If she managed to open the window, would he restrain her himself? Would she make the landing?
“I—”
“It's alright to be selfish sometimes,” he assures her, “but patience is important. I've waited and worked a good long while for many things myself. If you want it enough, you can turn that feeling into something better. It isn't being too much to simply wish to be heard.”
The rec room on film night offers a special reprieve from the daily madness.
Hermione’s instinct is to prop herself at the front of the room. Head of class, closest to the professor like a smitten school girl. The first pair of eyes to see, the first ears to hear.
She bites back at that inane line of thinking and slides into a flimsy grey folding chair in the back strip of them. Scattered seats are filled across six rows on two sides by the time the lights go dim and the first wave of images refract onto the screen.
It feels social. Almost normal.
It’s exactly the environment someone like Lavender thrives in. And she does, parked in the second row of folding chairs with her legs strung across the aisle. Her blond hair is combed back into an intentional sort of updo, two pieces framing her cherub face as she knocks her head back and laughs uproariously. Sometimes she’s more clever than Hermione gives her credit for, because her lips are swollen too, no doubt from pinching and the application of pineapple to swell them full and pink.
Hermione can’t imagine those sorts of pains for beauty; especially not in a place like this. She misses her hair creams and soft sweaters and open-toed shoes, and she wouldn’t turn down a nail file or a pair of tweezers. And maybe, maybe it isn’t the worst idea to like what you see in the mirror—when you can find one.
To feel like a whole person.
Maybe Lavender has the right idea after all.
The newest nurse fiddles with the projector for a few minutes more. He looks far too young to be here as anything but a patient. Tired too, small and grey-faced when he should be full of life and anywhere but here. That sort of thing used to make her sad.
Then she remembers he's free.
It's an older film, black and white, and something she might have seen as a child. The actors don’t look like anyone she recognizes, but she’s familiar with the dialogue, and surely she's walked these streets in London.
She watches absently, though she drifts back to the chattering patients and the singularly focused ones, and the doctors along the wall so too enthralled by the movie. Maybe it's a classic.
“Enjoying your evening, Miss Wilkins?” Dr King asks.
Hermione twists her attention to the man behind her, tall and dark, dressed in rich purple and black that disguises him further in the darkness. He smiles, maybe—it’s hard to tell the difference between one and polite resignation.
“The first hour was mandatory, sir.”
“So it was,” he hums. He raises his wrist to check his watch. “If you’re terribly unhappy, you’re free to turn in early in a few minutes. I hoped you’d stay. I had you in mind when we picked it out.”
Her gaze flits to the reel, grainy flickers dancing across the screen.
A woman waits just ahead and out of sight. A blurred shape at the edge of an alleyway. The man draws nearer, but her image blurs further.
“Did you take care of it?” he asks, before the camera even reveals her. She shushes him, her voice low and harried as she grabs the shoulder of his jacket and pulls him into the dark.
He grunts, knocking wire-frame glasses up the crook of his nose.
“Me?”
Dr King is patient with her response; no expectant brow lifts, nor comes a tone of exasperation when he adds, “Dr Riddle said it was your favorite. That you deserved a reward.”
Hermione turns to the screen.
“No one knows. I want to help,” she murmurs, “but if they catch me again, I don’t know if I can lie for you.”
He kisses the woman on her cheek, the camera closes in on their interlocked fingers against brick. She makes a soft, surprised noise. The man kisses her neck and her body folds into his.
“Don’t do that,” she says half-heartedly, “You don’t want me.”
“I need to be close to you,” he insists. “It's like I don't know anything else.”
Hermione looks at Dr King again with a furrowed brow. “I’m afraid I don’t recognize it.”
“Odd,” he says. “Very odd.”
Hermione makes it through the next 7 minutes. The film still echoes through the halls once she parts for her dorm, a distant cry from the girl on screen that sounds like a call for help at the climax of the story. The man promised he had it under control.
No one is coming.
A noise that resembles the leak in the white room, louder and more erratic, hisses through the halls. Like a pinhole of water streaming through a pipe.
The nurse’s station is empty and the offices are closed. The dorms are mostly unoccupied: not a soul among them isn’t in the rec room or dead asleep, and why shouldn't they be? The halls are so hollow, the drop of a pin would echo off the walls.
And it's not her problem, really. But while everyone is away, she could have a peek. It’s an odd gift, to freely explore for these few minutes. Something earned.
Only one door is open and hardly a crack—the staff restroom on the furthest end of the hall.
Hermione meets it and presses four fingers to the wood, nudging just enough to grant herself sight between the hinges. She sees the drip of the faucet. Two drops at a time.
Dr Riddle stands before a sheet of mirror. Her lips part for apologies, instead halted by the image.
A pool of black water fills the sink to the porcelain rim. Each drop ripples the still waters. It never rolls over the edge.
His lips move as the sound of the sputtering pipe sibilates instead from his own mouth. Long strings of esses and ahs flick off his tongue, dragging syllable to syllable, dripping back into the pool of black inside the basin.
And her eyes and ears must be wrong, because despite the cutting silence through everything else, she hears with perfect clarity when something hisses back.
“How did you sleep?” Dr Riddle asks.
She tells him she hasn't for days. She doesn't tell him why.
“Well, Hermione, you can’t count on pills for everything, can you?”
Dr Jones and Dr King have always been so adamant that drugs were the solution. That a higher dose would fix her. Make her forget. And sometimes they would.
But the image of him whispering—no, hissing—into the water, into the pipes in the walls now haunts her endlessly. Hermione wonders: is this what the drugs have been shielding her from? The telltale heart of her own sanity beating in the walls and in her skull? It thumps against the sight of him, thumps against the moments she's alone, thumps against the moments she is not.
Hermione tries to be Good. She volunteers to clean. Early to bed, early to rise. Soothes the insufferable old woman spouting gibberish, who demands tea and the open skies and promises the End to All.
And then the faucet in the loo drips three, four, three, five, and something stilts inside her that screams wrong wrong wrong.
So she doesn't sleep. And when Dr Riddle promises her it will just take time, that she'll adjust to her new medication and she'll see it all so clearly, Hermione only thanks him.
It was a mistake to pad the green pill under her tongue.
The overnight nurse knows right away—a sharp prick to her foot that Hermione lacks the stone-faced resolve to ignore. The nurse, a particularly spiteful toad-faced woman who seems to love her job in loathing the patients, takes it upon herself to place Hermione under a 24-hour isolated hold.
No one questions it.
So she’s here now, as she has been before, in this room too bright. Rattling and rolling against leather and steel, resisting the cold that turns warm in her veins until the nurse clouds her mind.
Until she sees images that don’t exist painted on the ceiling and behind her lids. Until the slicing tinker of broken pipes whispers away into silence.
Until endless white fades into shadowed bars and night swallows her into a dreamless sleep.
The Irishman isn't sneaky when he crouches beside Lavender in the rec room after group. He whispers something in her ear; both go pink at the tips and she bites her bottom lip. She remains the star of her own show.
When Lavender looks up at him, he places a single serve cup of triple cherry fruit cocktail and a flimsy disposable spork in front of her.
When Lavender catches Hermione watching, she sneers.
The doctor asks a question she doesn’t answer. Instead, Hermione leans forward and plucks a pen from the black cup on the corner of his desk. She clicks it open and runs the blue ink over the tip of her index finger, then clicks it rapidly open and closed, pressed into her hand.
“When someone asks a question, it's only polite to humor them,” he dryly insists. “Let’s try this again. Those sleeping pills, Hermione—would you prefer sedation to get you through the night, or are you going to put in the work and burn that energy off during the day like you promised?”
Hermione never promised anything, she’s almost sure of it. Things are far less foggy without an assortment of drugs poured down her throat each day and, yes, she’s positive she never promised more than good behavior. But he knows how to elicit the answer he wants from her, what to dangle in front of her like the threat of a yanked carrot.
“No, I don’t want to take the extra pills.”
Her eyes flick up and capture his. They spark, nearly pleased with her compliance, and she feels the words that stoke the flame fall from her lips.
“Please, sir.”
He leans forward, elbows on his desk and meets her halfway across it. Dr Riddle smells a bit like burnt wood and citrus and he smiles, like he means to scorch her with those lingering embers. His clasped hands fall to the desk, almost brushing the pen she’s claimed.
“I used to recite Latin to fall asleep. For every question answered, I had four more to keep me up at night. I wonder if that's what it was like for you before.”
“What would you recite?”
“Phrases. Conjugations. Long forgotten speeches and poetry.”
“I know a bit of Latin,” she says carefully. “I mean—it was important in language studies.”
He hums. “Well, we can avoid the drugs if you behave yourself. You've been far better behaved than your record would have had me believe.”
Relief washes over her, and she fights the mortifying urge to preen. She has been. No trouble for weeks. Hermione has since chalked up her strange vision to the vivid dreams he warned her she might have, and her uneasiness now to her lack of sleep since she's returned to his regiment.
“I’m trying very hard to work with you, but I need you to work harder than you have been. Can you do a little more? For me?”
Hermione offers a small nod.
“Can you put yourself to sleep without the drugs, darling? Wear yourself down all on your own?”
The small weight of the pen lessens as he grips it, and she hears the click from his own hands. Once. Twice. His eyes never leave hers.
“With Latin? Oh—I’m not sure what you’re suggesting.”
Dr Riddle cocks his head.
Click. Click.
The room blurs around her, the lingering cardboard boxes and leather chair and wood-paneled walls funneling back to him and the crinkles on the corners of his lips as they twist into a smile. To his darkened eyes and the flare of his nostrils when he inhales like he’s breathing her in. And for a moment, black is brown is red and—
“You’re a smart girl. I’m confident you’ll work out the best way to service your needs. And if you can’t, well—my office is always open if you require a hand.”
Hermione releases the pen they’re both holding and it falls to the desk between them.
She looks where it lands, but his fingers are still clasped together in front of him. Like he never—
And he’s sitting upright and still, those flames of curiosity still dancing in his eyes.
“Pardon?” she stutters.
Dr Riddle narrows his brow in concern. “Are you feeling alright, Hermione? You look a bit green.”
“I just don't understand the point,” Hermione says one night in their dorm. There is a film tonight, and Lavender is using the metal frame around the glass as a mirror while she pins her hair into an intentional mess.
“And that's why you're where you are and I'm where I am,” Lavender answers coolly as she puckers her lips. “You don't have the common sense to make use of what you have. It's about what you can sell.”
They walk together in silence and part when they catch sight of the projector.
Lavender's orderly, whose name Hermione has since learned is Seamus, finds an excuse to approach her in the dark and slip her an extra little bag of popcorn. Lavender does something with her tongue against her cheek and Hermione finds herself turning tail. She runs face first into Dr King's chest.
He asks where she's going and she says she's tired. The lights are flashed by the doors, their silent notice that the reel is in place. To settle down and find their seats.
“That’s twice in a row. The film's only starting.”
“I just don't feel well, Dr King; you know, if Lav's late night visitor wasn't keeping me up half the night, I might pretend to care just for the food,” she says lightly. “But I could really use the rest.”
Hermione didn't mean to say it, tries to swallow the words the moment they tumble out as she pushes past him. Dr King grabs her. His hand wraps all the way around her forearm, but he doesn't tug; he waits for her to face him.
“That's a serious accusation.”
“I don't—it's not an accusation, I don't know. Please, I just want to go to bed early. It was a joke.”
The double doors creak, and their heads turn in synchronicity. They watch Dr Riddle latch the doors gently behind him so as not to disturb the film. And when the doctor twists around, he stills with a raised brow at her skinny arm pinched under Dr King's fist.
“I need you to be more specific, Miss Wilkins.”
She stares at Dr Riddle as though he has some obligation to her. As though he might tell his supervisor to fuck off and sweep her away, but he does no such thing. He observes—a curious pinch to his expression that borders on stifled amusement.
Her eyes flick to her roommate, who hasn't noticed the affray yet, although others are looking now and knots tease her stomach. Hermione’s lungs burn with the taste of that bitter something, her throat chocked like she's drowning in dirt.
“Finnegan?” Dr King asks.
Hermione yanks her arm back and pins them both around herself. Dr Kingsley flinches like he's been burned.
Lavender's eyes are on her now. Murderous. She is on her feet. The screen flickers from behind, a grainy monosaturated flame climbing up a curtain in the dark. White fire frames the window and licks at the popcorn ceiling.
“Are you insane?” Lavender is screeching. “What's she saying? You can't listen to her. She's absolutely gone! Have you heard her in her sleep? Insane!”
The room's gone grainy like film.
Rows of patients in bleak linens and pilted pastels watch her next move.
The weight in her chest begs to drag her into the earth, and with the taste in her throat, she's halfway there. Hermione steps backwards.
Dr Riddle watches.
“I don't like that word,” Hermione chokes out. “I'm not crazy.”
Skinny grabs Lavender as she lunges, and she kicks and screams; Dr King stares daggers through Seamus, who is frozen against the wall, a fly trapped by fear, just a swat away from death. There is movement amongst the residents, but her mind can't keep up and Hermione backs away further.
The film follows the flame upstairs, a slithering thing that catches on everything it tastes. The grey-faced nurse who works the projector stares, mouth agape at the screen no one else is watching.
And no one stops Hermione as she stumbles out into the halls.
She doesn't go back to her room.
She could. She should. Someone will come to question her.
But Hermione runs—through the corridor that is now too dim for her liking, past the empty nurse's station. The walls melt in her periphery, the way the screen did, in and out of silver with each flicker of fluorescent lights. How long will it be until she knows exactly where everyone is again?
Dr Riddle’s office door is ajar and she moves quickly.
There's a file cabinet installed by the window behind his desk. Each drawer rattles when she tugs, but has no give. There isn't time—
Then the strangest thing catches her eye.
There, on his desk, is a Manila folder with a printed label. She runs her finger over the bumps, a white sticker with black text, peeling at the corners, that reads Granger, H J. Hermione opens it to an assortment of photographs. A head of unruly curls in the street. Somewhere, in the distance, there are flames that stretch a row of houses at least four deep.
Hermione bites her lip and curls a finger around the next page. She peels it just so and sees the words possession and distribution at the edge.
A door slams.
Hermione drops the folder.
Pages scatter over the desk and the floor. Top to bottom blocks of text, black and white photos she can't see because she's slack-jawed and staring at Dr Riddle in the doorway.
“You should be in bed,” he chides her. “They’re already escorting Miss Brown downstairs and Mr Finnegan was sent home until they've reviewed footage. You're going to be questioned in the morning.”
He rolls up his sleeves, and crooks a finger as he steps closer, and like the beckon of a snake charmer, she finds herself drawn forward.
“You seem distraught,” he hums. “Have you been seeing things again? Hearing things?”
They're face-to-face on the other side of his desk.
Hermione swallows, and her lips are achingly dry, but she doesn't move or dare to answer. Her pupils must be so dilated and glassy for him to know on sight.
“Eyes on me.”
On instinct, she obeys. From his chest pocket, Dr Riddle withdraws a pen-sized tool. He twists it and a light glares gainfully bright from the end in response. He points it directly at her right eye.
“Eyes up.”
She looks up.
“Down.”
Hermione looks down.
They repeat for the left, and without fail, when he says, “Right on me again, darling,” she is obsequious. An invisible hand turns her head; it peels back her lids so she stares into the sharp light that shines through blood and veins, spotting her vision red and white.
For a second, his eyes look—
Her balance falters, speckles still dancing in her skull as she grasps for the desk and Dr Riddle catches her by the shoulders. He twists the pen light off while she presses fingertips against her lids, trying to coax her vision to rights.
“I’ve got you. Poor thing. Haven’t slept in days, have you?”
Dr Riddle levels her, and steps away for a moment to place his penlight back in the drawer. He returns with a black pearlescent gel caplet she’s never seen in her assortment before.
“Now Hermione, you can’t be wandering the halls at night like this.”
She shakes her head. “No, I said—I said no extra pills. You asked.”
He tuts. “That was when you were on good merit. How do you think it looks for me if someone were to find you out of your bed with your clothes all mussed up, in my office like this? With what you just started tonight… Why, they might think I was taking advantage of you, Hermione. That you were trying to cause a distraction. You should be asleep when they find you.”
Hermione shakes her head in resistance again, but his thumb and forefinger take claim to her jaw. Something is still wrong with his eyes; she can’t put her finger on it, but they burn through her, and he tilts her head just so, forcing her to stare down her nose at him.
Dr Riddle speaks slowly, each syllable pointed.
“I can be very nice to you or I can be a mean man. You get what you earn. If you do as you’re told and hop off to bed like a good girl, we're golden, aren’t we?”
His thumb presses to her bottom lip, drawing her lips apart. Saliva pools under her tongue while she fights the pull of her jaw. Dr Riddle dips his thumb forward, stealing wetness from her tongue and gliding it over her lower lip. He rests there, placing the pill on her tongue with his other hand.
“No games. I’m going to watch it go down.”
She tries to swallow and finds herself struggling with her mouth pinned open.
“Push it back with your tongue,” he whispers, his hold on her jaw unwavering still.
She rolls her tongue upwards, filling her throat with a wet, choked noise as she pushes the pill down dry with a gasp.
“There she is. Is that what you came here for?” Dr Riddle brushes her lip with his damp thumb once more before using the same hand to tuck an errant curl that has fallen over her eyes back behind her ear. Hermione keeps still but for the desperate exhales through her nose, the sound grating even at her own ears.
“They used to treat patients intimately for this, you know. Restless, sleepless, violent women. You know what quelled them?”
Her vision warbles. Hermione darts her tongue out to wet her lips as her head lolls. The taste of his skin lingers metallic like blood.
“Fucking their needy cunts to tears.”
Somehow, the sharp edges of his eyes have softened and that warm, crinkly smile of his washes over her as his hands fall to her shoulders.
“It’s time for you to go back to bed, darling. Before the drugs kick in and I get in trouble.”
The invisible hand that compelled her before does so again, despite his words and his smile. Hermione inhales the scent of burnt wood that ghosts over his clothes, a cologne that permeates her soul and tastes like the perfectly poisoned outdoors. Her fingers blindly catch on the buckle of his belt.
This is what Lavender does, isn’t it? How she maintains her freedom in a place like this, how she takes purchase of her own body.
Hermione can’t go back into isolation. Or worse: what happens if they move her, like Dean? Back to the mountain of pills? Life in darkness—or under bright, endless lights that keep her eyelids lit and red, arms drawn so she never knows a moment’s peace.
No.
It can’t be that hard to play the game. His game.
He's the one who closed the door.
“I think I understand what you meant before,” Hermione says slowly. The heat of his cock soaks through his trousers, her knuckles grazing the tenting bulge beneath them. “If I play by your rules, you’ll help me. If I scratch your back, you’ll scratch mine.”
Dr Riddle's expression remains unfazed as she unclasps the silvery buckle from brown leather, as she falls onto her knees because it is all she can think to do, as his hands fall away.
But before she can take his fly, before either secedes to the way of things, Dr Riddle crouches down before her like he’s leveling with a child. His smile is cloying and his voice is low. The words trickle over her in a forked hiss.
“You aren’t even on the board yet, darling. Get yourself into bed, or you’ll learn what mean really looks like and I promise, you’ll wish you’d behaved.”
The television mounted to the wall flickers. A line that runs snowy, discolored ripples over two-thirds of the screen.
Still, Hermione watches.
Dad used to smack the telly on the side with a hard palm when it acted up at home. A good shake to set it to rights. Reruns of trivia shows and late night infomercials on low, the harsh glow and host’s bellows traveling to the top of the stairs where she'd sit in her matching blue pyjama set. They’d pretend they didn’t realize she was out, and she’d always sneak, quiet as a mouse. Sometimes she’d fall asleep right there on the steps and wake up in her own bed.
Safe.
The color to the left of the line grows dimmer by the time the recording loops back to the Cherry-Mint display.
Call in the next hour and receive a travel-sized tube free!
Something sparks. Smoke trickles from the wires, and on the screen, the man on the left wearing a cheeky grin flashes a wink at the camera. At her.
Buy two now and we’ll slash the cost of shipping! You heard that right, free shipping!
The glass implodes behind the tube on his side.
The man on the right turns as if he sees it too, while the imprint of the remaining image slowly burns away. Only a shattered hole of black remains.
“Freddy?”
Shards and static. They're clearing the room. Calling for security.
And still, Hermione watches.
Monica and Wendell try to maintain their composure on the opposite side of the table. They are still like a portrait in progress, posed for so many tired hours while strokes define their posture and pores.
Hermione nods and smiles the way a healing patient should. Mostly, she lies. This pleases them, and that's all she really wants.
Dr Riddle leans in toward Monica with an infectious smile and insists he knows where her daughter gets her cleverness. She bats at his arm and scowls with the same narrowed brow and pinched lips that Hermione wears.
He tells Wendell she's quick but mouthy, and her father's charmed by this impression.
“They said with a regimented schedule, if we all put in the work, we might be able to take you home at the end of the year,” her mother says hopefully. “How do you feel about that, Hermione?”
Beside her on the bench in the family room, where there's enough room for both she and the doctor, his thigh is pressed against hers. On a quick peek around, she finds a couple on the far side of the room, exploring a photo album riddled with events from the life of someone who no longer exists. No one is behind them.
Dr Riddle's hand is on her leg.
“When's the end of the year?” Hermione asks instead. “That sounds like forever.”
“It's only a second,” Dr Riddle counters.
A strip of one-sided glass faces her directly; anything below the table top is obstructed by chairs and bodies and jackets hung over edges where they don't belong.
Fingertips she knows the taste of mottle into nerve and muscle. It's perfectly possible he's trying to keep her centered. Like the pen she clicks into her fingertips for the sharp prickle, or the way she tugs her hands through knots instead of drawing gently through curls with a wide tooth comb. This visit was unexpected. And after the last time—
It's possible he's forgotten where the heat of his palm is when it rounds her knee, then teases up her thigh.
It's possible.
Dr Riddle grins and slaps a deck of cards on the center of the table. He tells her to deal a hand, so she does. Hermione clenches her thighs together and his fingers dig and demand, stilling her against him. His thumb strokes higher. A reward and a punishment.
She could make him stop.
Except he looks over his hand of cards when he's so close he might feel the rhythm of her blood, and certainly the heat of her, and his left hand—long fingers, large and spotless and unadorned—taps a tempo on the table she matches her breathing to.
And he isn't touching her at all. No bunched fabric at the apex of her thigh, no legs pressed together. But she can feel the tender marks of prints that never were.
He lowers his head to her ear. “Just like we talked about, darling. Thought you wanted in the game.”
So they play Blackjack, no bells and whistles. Everyone gets one win, except Dr Riddle who sweeps the rest. Everything is ordinary.
Hours later, behind the door of his office when they're long gone, beside the unbarred window where she paces frantically, he tuts.
“Shame. I thought you were almost ready.”
“Ready for what?”
This time, he's the one who does not reply.
Punishment is meant to echo.
Hermione did the kind thing and rifled through what's left of Lavender’s belongings before they came by to search and seize. There wasn't much when she started; scavengers had already drudged through while she had group.
Hermione salvaged a few stretchy hair ties, and a keychain-sized beanie bear. She found tampons and a tube of chapstick under the mattress.
When Lavender returns, it's been days. Her blonde curls are a raucous mess, her skin angry and red with blotches.
None of her altered linens and sweats remain to individuate herself, the pinched wrists and cut off shorts rotting away in Ward B or D or perhaps just across the hall.
Hermione hears her own timidity before she can restrain the tiny hello that falls out.
Lavender doesn't have anything to say.
Hermione thinks, for almost a quarter of a moment, that perhaps she ought to apologize.
They didn't ask her much more than preliminary questions in the end; the footage was enough. It's unlikely charges will be pressed, because this would be an awfully sore look in the public eye. No, they'll erase it from evidence and bury him like they do. And Lavender, if she even gets to stay, will pay the price.
“They didn't brush your hair,” Hermione says. So she leaves her own comb out for her, an olive branch untouched.
The eyes might not only be outside the door tracking comings and goings—they could be watching them here, too. Maybe Lavender is thinking the same. With her tired, purple-ringed eyes, she stares distantly at the glossy white painted cement wall.
Without her costume, Lavender is just a girl. They aren't so different.
The dark comes in the silence. Neither dares to upset it; this is how they stay for hours gone uncounted. And in those last moments before the world goes black, where the heat of near sleep and the weight of something like death presses on her bones, Hermione’s body jolts just on the line and the cycle begins again.
Dr Riddle’s words wriggle inside.
Sharing a room with someone who has gone from express dislike to genuine contempt doesn't quite help. But patience is a virtue, just as he said. The thing Hermione finds herself lacking. She wants to fix everything all at once—she needs to get her ducks in a row.
First thing first, she needs to get back inside Dr Riddle’s office alone.
He has to know what she saw. The water, his eyes, the file. Yet he holds his tongue. It's a tactic, surely—but what is his game? Maybe he's the sort of person that takes pleasure in the power he holds over others. The way she has no choice but to bow to his will because there are consequences at his disposal.
Lavender makes a sound.
A moan.
Something more indulgent than she does with company. A pithy, needy sound.
“Oh, Ronald.”
It's enough to shatter the illusion of near sleep in an instant.
There's a tug deep in her gut as starchy sheets crinkle. Lavender darts her hand between her legs and Hermione bites down on her tongue. The taste of salt and copper is quick and ready.
Every dream, every nightmare, every break and every episode—Lavender proves she has been attentive. She demonstrates with a cruel little giggle and a raspy whisper.
Lavender recites the words she's memorized night after night. “Of course he doesn't know. There's nothing to tell.”
A chain is wrapped around her insides, taking hold of organs and pinching at nerve endings. This is Hermione’s punishment. Lavender was always listening. And now, so does she.
The girl inhales through her wide mouth, and Hermione mirrors the length of the breath through her own flared nostrils.
“I need to be close to you,” Lavender whispers. Her words are a rhythmic taunt as her shoulder moves above the covers, her knees tented up on either side. “It's the last time, you understand? Oh, right there—”
Hermione closes her eyes and tries to will it away, but a slick sound follows her. A foggy canvas paints itself behind her lids.
A one-shouldered hug and a maroon jumper.
‘You'd tell me if something was wrong, wouldn't you?’ the boy asks. ‘With Harry?’
‘Of course.’
It's their night time ritual. Rich dark chocolate and steamed milk and little chocolate shavings atop the squirty cream that melts away with each sip.
She pushes the steaming mug into his palm and he clasps his hand around it.
“If there was something to tell, you’d be the first one I'd find, Ron.’
“Shove it, Lavender,” Hermione hisses.
Not real.
“He'll hear you,” Lavender whines. “Oh, Ronniekins—”
Not real.
Hermione squeezes her eyes shut. Lavender doesn't cease her ministrations, her labored breaths growing louder and harsher. Each exhale is a knife. A sliver on her spleen. A nick against a valve. A jab into her stomach.
“No, not Ron, was it? How did it go? Fuck—”
“Please—”
Not real.
“‘Fuck me like it's the last time,’” Lavender whines. “‘Oh, Gods, Ha—’”
‘And still no dreams?’ she asks as she unweaves a scarf from around her neck. He crawls across the bed on his knees and takes it from her. His hands are on her hips before she's even unbuttoned her cardigan. Fingers dancing and soft. Impatient and familiar.
‘Just the one,’ he tells her cheekily, ‘where you haven't run off by morning—’
‘I need to be in and out of the apothecary before anyone wakes up,’ she says. Her voice teeters on sharp, defensive, but a smile creeps through with the fantasy.
The pads of his fingers climb up her sides, thumbs gently circling under her breast.
‘You take good care of me,’ he tells her. He's scrunching her top between his fingers, exposing her belly to make way for a soft kiss between his thumbs. ‘No one else has ever taken care of me.’
And he looks up at her, lost and reverent. She wants to keep him, wear him, wrap him around every inch of her. She can't begin to make sense of it. She's gone mad with the taste of his reverence. Bright green eyes that beg her to have.
She does. She will.
‘It's the last time. You can't tell.’
Hermione palms his cheek.
He won't remember anyway.
He never does.
‘My Harry.’
The chain snaps.
In one instant, Hermione is gritting her teeth so tight, the scrape of bone on bone feels like something cracking.
She blinks at the ceiling, tracing paint into imaginary demons to chase away these real ones here and now. Air never comes. Reprieve does not belong in this body.
She blinks, and she is leaning over Lavender, knees on either side of her.
The letter opener from Dr Riddle’s office sticks out between two knuckles of Hermione’s fingers and a line of red drips down Lavender's check.
The metal falls from her open hand, bouncing twice against the tile. It makes tiny speckles in its wake. Like Luna's shaken paintbrush. Like rain splashing on the tile floor.
She blinks, and the girl is grey. So grey and gone.
She blinks, and Lavender is screaming and shoving and sobbing.
It's a matter of seconds before the door cracks behind her.
Hermione doesn't even think to fight back.