March 2002

Hermione pored over the books she'd bought during every spare minute she had. She transfigured them to resemble texts about arithmancy, ancient runes, and healing, and no one even blinked to find her plowing through them while brewing, during the quiet moments in the hospital ward, or during meals.

She wasn't sure if any of the information would actually be useful, but she was completely at a loss as to how else to prepare. Books were the only resource she had. So she read and brain-stormed and worried, and found herself snapping defensively at people.

"I'm sorry, Fred," she said, wincing when he stopped by to visit George. He had tried to lighten the mood by recommending she provide a naughty nurse routine while caring for his brother. Hermione, abruptly finding the subject matter sensitive, exploded at him and nearly slapped him across the face.

She looked away. "I just—I haven't been sleeping much lately."

It was a pathetic excuse.

No one was sleeping much and hadn't in a long time.

No matter the safe house, there were always a few people up at any hour; playing cards, smoking, and doing anything else to while away the long night hours.

Harry was almost always among the insomniacs. He seemed to exist on an impossibly insufficient amount of sleep. He wasn't even sure anymore if the nightmares were Voldemort or just his own stress and guilt. When he'd start walking into walls and standing and staring blankly off into space, Hermione would drag him into the hospital ward and dose him with dreamless sleep.

Hermione had her own nightmares, mostly of Harry and Ron dying while she tried and failed to save them.

The faces of the dead haunted her too.

All the people she hadn't been quick enough; hadn't been clever enough; hadn't been skilled enough to save.

Colin Creevey often appeared in her dreams.

Colin had been the first person who died under Hermione's care. It was shortly after Voldemort seized the Ministry, before the Order had been forced to abandon Hogwarts. Madam Pomfrey had stepped out to buy new potions when Colin was rushed in. Harry had been there, keeping Hermione company during what had been a quiet afternoon.

Colin had been struck by a flaying curse. There was no countercurse for it.

Hermione couldn't knock Colin out.

The curse forced him to stay conscious. Stupefy. Dreamless sleep. Even Draught of Living Death. None of it worked. The curse tore through and kept him conscious. Hermione tried everything she could think of to reverse it. To slow it. To stall it. The skin kept cutting away. Colin kept screaming. If she restored the skin somewhere, it flayed itself again. If she didn't replace the skin the curse moved deeper. Into the muscle and tissue.

The curse didn't stop until it reached his bones.

Colin Creevey died surrounded by a pile of wafer-thin layers of his flesh and a pool of blood while Hermione sobbed and tried everything she could think of to save him.

He'd been a perfectly excised skeleton when Madam Pomfrey returned.

Hermione never recovered from it.

She didn't smoke, didn't drink, didn't pick fights, didn't have casual sex. She just worked harder and longer. She didn't have time to grieve or regret. There was always a new body being brought to her and she had no time to second guess herself.

She slept when she was too exhausted to dream.

She stared up at Fred. "It's just a bad day."

He gave a tight smile. "It's all right, Mione, you're entitled to have them like the rest of us. Honestly, I can't for the life of me understand how you keep doing this."

Hermione turned and looked around the infirmary feeling helpless.

"If I didn't—who would?"

The Order relied upon her being there.

It wasn't a sentiment born from an inflated opinion. It was simply a fact. At that point in the war, Hermione was more specialised in healing dark magic and curses than anyone else in most of Britain.

When Voldemort had taken over the Ministry of Magic, the Order had been forced to stop going to St Mungo's. Any Resistance members sent to the hospital were immediately arrested on terrorism charges and then disappeared into Voldemort's prisons.

The Ministry takeover had been carefully timed. The first law enacted was the Muggle-born Registration Act. Voldemort understood the vital role healing played in a war and so St Mungo's was the first place purged under the new law. All the Muggle-born and half-blood healers were quickly arrested and had their wands snapped before they could flee to the Order.

Poppy Pomfrey suddenly became one of the Resistance's most broadly experienced Healers. Hermione had been apprenticed under her and studying intensively since Dumbledore's death. When European Healers sympathetic to the Resistance had secretly reached out and offered training, Hermione had been the only person with enough healing knowledge to qualify that the Order could afford to spare.

She had left everyone behind. Said her goodbyes and been smuggled across Europe from hospital to hospital to learn as much advanced healing magic as she could. She returned after almost two years when their hospital was compromised during a battle and all the healers they had recruited were killed along with Horace Slughorn. Severus had trained Hermione in potions until she'd left and she'd continued her studies as they related to healing during her training throughout Europe. When she returned, Hermione was both a fully trained emergency Healer and medical Potioneer. Her specialty was deconstructing curses in order to develop counter-spells.

The first counter-curse she invented was for the flaying curse.

With Voldemort's curse development division constantly debuting new experimental spells during every battle, the need for her was desperate.

Hermione trained as many Resistance members in healing as were willing to learn. Unfortunately, healing magic was a precise and highly subtle art. It required tremendous attention and devotion to achieve success. The Order tried to include at least one person with field healing abilities in every skirmish in order to try to keep fighters alive long enough to get back to the infirmary. But, because of the high demand to deploy them, field healers were overworked and had the Order's highest fatality rates.

Most fighters preferred to spend their free time drilling more defensive magic rather than believe they'd need to know anything more than basic magical first aid. The stubborn optimism it revealed made Hermione shake with frustration when she allowed herself to think about it.

The Order simply did not have enough people to utilise many of them well. The failures in leadership trickled down and affected the entire Resistance.

They'd been unprepared for the war. Dumbledore's death had effectively cut the legs from under them and they had been struggling to survive since then.

Malfoy had done that.

His murder of Dumbledore had crippled them. Doomed them.

Now he was trying to appear like some twisted savior, willing to staunch the wound he'd opened.

Hermione hated him. More than she hated anyone but Voldemort. Antonin Dolohov, the head of the curse development division was a close third.

Malfoy had started the war, caused all the hurt and now she was required to swallow all her loathing and be—

—willing.

The dread since her initial conversation with Moody was already swallowing her.

She didn't know how to stop hating Malfoy. She didn't think she was good enough an actress to be able to pretend that she had. The thought of being in the same room with him without trying to curse him—to punish him for everything he was responsible for—she wasn't sure if she had the self-control.

Hermione gritted her teeth and pressed her forehead against a windowpane while she tried to think, trying to force herself to breathe and not break something or start crying.

She couldn't break down. She needed to compartmentalise. She needed to force all her hatred of Malfoy into a box and keep it somewhere where it couldn't bleed out and taint all her interactions with him. She wouldn't think clearly if she were constantly seething with rage.

She needed to take a wider perspective.

Utilising his spying was more important than the short-term satisfaction of hating him.

They needed him.

Yet a part of her wanted to make him suffer. She couldn't help but hope that once she had what they needed from him, she could make him pay.

But—if they won the war as that point, the victory would be owed to him. Hermione had agreed to be the price for that. As much as she loathed him, if he saved them all, she knew she'd feel obliged to uphold her end.

No matter what it was he intended to do to her.

She suddenly felt nauseated. She was shaking, and simultaneously hot and cold.

She pulled her forehead from the glass.

Her breath had created a circle of condensation on the window.

After a moment, she reached out with a fingertip and drew the rune thurisaz: the force of destruction and defense, hardship, introspection, and focus. Beside it she drew its reversal. Its merkstave: for danger, betrayal, evil, malice, hatred, torment, and spite.

Herself.

Malfoy.

She watched the runes vanish as the condensation evaporated back into the air.

She turned back to her books.

Moody found her that evening. "We have a time and location."

"Where?"

"Forest of Dean. Friday. Eight in the evening. I'll scout it and apparate you to the address the first time."

Hermione nodded, meeting Moody's eye. There was a bitter part of her that wanted him to remember the moment. To drive into his memory what she looked like—before.

He seemed to hesitate before his expression hardened. "You need to keep his interest as long as you can."

Hermione's mouth twisted but she nodded.

"I realised that," she said, running a fingertip along the edge of her book until she felt the crisp pages were about to cut into her. "I'm not sure if I can, but I'll do my best. Is there any chance I could speak to Severus before Friday? I have some questions for him."

"I'll set it up," Moody said. Then he turned and left.

Friday.

Two days away.

So little time to prepare.

But so much time to dread.

She hadn't eaten since her first conversation with Moody. Couldn't bring herself to. Every time she tried to take a bite, her throat closed. She'd been living off tea.

Hermione closed her eyes and forced herself to breathe evenly.

She snapped the book she was holding closed and focused on her occlumency.

According to Severus she had a talent for it.

She slipped through her own memories and thoughts, sorting and organising them. She bolstered the walls around important Order meetings. The horcruxes. Then she shoved away all the memories that she tried not to think about.

There were so many memories of people dying inside her head.

She pushed them into the back of her mind and tried to squash them so she couldn't hear the dying screams that they were filled with.

She filtered her hatred of Malfoy out and packed it carefully into a corner where it couldn't distract or overwhelm her.

Practicing occlumency was the closest thing to mental peace she could find.

It was part of what made her a talented healer. She could shutter her sympathy and empathy and simply focus on the process and procedure of healing.

It seemed like it was a common trait among healers.

Someday, when the war ended, perhaps Hermione could do a study on the number of natural occlumens in the field of healing.

She suspected that most casualty healers had at least a bit of a subconscious proclivity toward it. Occlumency was so rarely taught, most people probably didn't realise when they used it. Hermione hadn't.

For a long time, she had just thought she was cold. As the years of the war rolled by, her growing tendency to turn off her emotions and simply be rational was stark in its contrast to Ron and Harry's emotional drive.

She wasn't unfeeling—she felt things. But the emotions were supplemental. They didn't decide things for her.

It was always head first, heart followed.

It had started after Colin died. She couldn't be like Harry. That death became a defining moment for each of them.

After watching Hermione try to save Colin, Harry had become utterly convinced of the pure evil of dark magic. He became driven by what he felt was right; how he believed things were supposed to be.

For Hermione, the opposite had occurred. She realised the impossible advantage that the Death Eaters had over the Order. It was her awakening to the price of failure. She became convinced that almost any means could be justified to stop Voldemort. The cost of choosing to ascribe to idyllic morals and lose was too steep. It was simply the logical conclusion. The longer the war lasted, the more good and innocent people would suffer and die.

That difference in conclusion created a schism between herself and Harry.

Dark magic was responsible for robbing him of his parents, Sirius, Dumbledore, Colin...They'd all been stolen away by the dark arts. That Hermione's solution was to fight like with like was unthinkable to Harry.

Harry was determined: they weren't going to be killers. The Order wasn't going to be like that. Love had defeated the killing curse before. It would defeat Voldemort.

The cynical and pragmatic members in the Order were all but shouted down by everyone else. Even as the war grew worse, the conviction only became more firmly entrenched with each new life lost.

The believers in the Light couldn't abandon their position because it would force them to admit that all the deaths had been for nothing. That they'd asked people to die for an ideal that ultimately failed.

Rather than face such bitter truth, they became more and more convinced that the sacrifices and losses were somehow becoming so tremendous that they had to become worth it. That the balance of the scales between good and evil would soon tip to favour them, because—it simply must.

It made Hermione leave Order meetings ready to cry with frustration. She even resorted to writing up a presentation explaining sunk cost fallacy, irrational escalation of commitment, and self-justification theory. When she tried to explain muggle psychology it was brushed aside, and when she tried to push it she was treated like she was some kind of craven monster; trying to use psychology to legitimise murder.

She once spent thirteen hours in the infirmary painstakingly reconstructing Professor Flitwick's lungs. When she was called to an Order meeting immediately afterward she went in exhausted, and broached the topic of dark magic out of renewed fury. She'd been angrily informed by an equally angry and exhausted Ron that she was being a bitch and didn't even seem to understand the point of the Order.

Several other members nodded. Harry hadn't, but he refused to look at her, and he'd patted Ron on the shoulder as he left the meeting.

She cried afterwards.

Severus had found her in a storage closet, having an emotional breakdown. After alternating between mildly insulting her and grossly insulting the rest of the Order for several minutes, he'd managed to make her regain her composure.

Flattery by way of restraint.

The next time he attended an Order meeting he had given her a book on occlumency. He hadn't had the time to train her, but Hermione hadn't needed training. Just reading the concepts enabled her to internalise the technique.

Severus later told her he'd suspected as much. She was a natural occlumens. It was part of why she was talented in healing and potions. She had the ability to fully compartmentalise when she needed to.

After five years of war, Hermione felt as though her entire life had gradually become sequestered into various little boxes. Her eternally strained relationship with Ron and Harry was carefully buried in a corner where she couldn't feel it. Most of her relationships felt put away. In the center of herself, in the enormous space her friendship with Harry and Ron had long filled, there was now a cavern that she kept dutifully occupied with work.

After a few minutes, she reopened her eyes and resumed reading. She only had two days left to prepare.

Minerva McGonagall unexpectedly arrived at Grimmauld Place the next afternoon, as Hermione's hospital shift ended. The former headmistress of Hogwarts rarely left Scotland. After Hogwarts had been shuttered, McGonagall had undertaken guardianship of all the underage witches and wizards who were orphaned or whose parents were fighting in the war. She'd returned to her father's manse in Caithness and after abusing expansion charms to an absurd degree, making it large enough to house over a hundred children.

She regarded anyone without parents as being her charge. With Hermione's parents obliviated and hidden in Australia, that meant Minerva regarded Hermione as being under that umbrella as well.

They went to tea in muggle London.

When they had seated themselves, she stared silently at Hermione for a long time.

"I had hoped you would refuse," Minerva said at length.

"Did you really think I would?" Hermione asked, her voice steady as she finished pouring the tea.

"No," Minerva said stiffly. "My hopes and beliefs have been separate things for some time now. Which is why I said it was unconscionable."

"The Order needs this."

There was a silence as each woman studied the other. The tension between them vibrated; like the sob of a violin bow drawn carelessly across the strings. Sharp. Aching. Deeply felt.

After a minute, Minerva spoke again.

"You...were one of the most remarkable students I had the privilege to teach. Your relentlessness back in Hogwarts was always something that I admired—"

Minerva paused.

"But—?" Hermione pressed, preparing herself for the sharp critique that waited on the far side of the compliment.

"But—" Minerva put her teacup back in its saucer with a sharp click, "the way you have carried that tendency into the war has troubled me. I sometimes wonder where the line is for you. If you even have one."

Once—such a rebuke would have made a Hermione blush and reconsider herself. Now she didn't even blink.

"Desperate times call for desperate measures," she said. "For extreme diseases, extreme methods of cure, as to restriction, are most suitable."

Minerva's expression hardened, her lips thinning.

"And what of 'first do no harm'? Or do you think the oath does not apply when the harm is to yourself?"

"Hippocrates never said it." Hermione sipped her tea with more casualness than she felt. "Primum non nocere. It was coined in the seventeenth century. The Latin gives it away. Besides—I'm not doing this as a healer."

"That Moody is asking this of you at all makes him as depraved as the mind that conceived of it." Minerva's Scottish burr became overt from the emotion her voice carried. "I would have thought there would be limits. When does the price of winning become too steep? This is a war already waged with the blood of children. Are we selling them now too?"

Hermione sighed. "I'm not a child anymore, Minerva. This is a choice I'm making. No one is forcing it on me."

"Anyone who knows you knew you'd agree to it. Draco Malfoy knew without any doubt what you'd say when the question was put to you. Do you really think that for someone of your nature it was ever a question of choice?"

"No more than becoming a healer or anything else I've ever done then." Hermione suddenly felt drained. "Making hard choices—someone has to do. Someone has to suffer. I'm willing to. I can bear it. Why try to force it onto someone who can't?"

"You're so like Alastor," Minerva said in a bitter tone. There appeared to be tears in the corners of her eyes. "When he told me, I told him no. I said, never. There are lines that cannot be crossed because once we ask those things we're no better. And then he told me he wasn't telling me in order to consult. The decision had already been made by himself and Kingsley. He was simply telling me so that someone with concern for you would be aware—in case of what Draco Malfoy does to you—"

Minerva's voice cracked abruptly.

Hermione felt overwhelmed by a surge of affection, but she forced herself not to react. Not to waver.

"He killed Albus," Minerva said after a moment, the words trembling with emotion.

"I know. I haven't forgotten."

"He was barely sixteen then. He killed one of the greatest wizards of our time in cold blood in a hallway full of first-years. Even Tom Riddle was closer to seventeen when he started killing, and he started with a schoolgirl, in secret in a bathroom. What kind of person do you imagine Draco Malfoy is now? Six years later."

"He's our best chance of turning this war around. We need this, Minerva. You see the orphans, but I see the bodies. We can't afford to waste any opportunities now. I'm not going to turn down something that can give the Order even a fraction of a better chance of winning. No single person matters more than the whole war."

"You would do anything to end this war."

"I would."

"James Potter used to say that war is hell. I used to agree with him. But now—I think he was wrong. War is far worse than hell. You're no sinner; this is not a fate you deserve. And yet, it seems as though you're determined to try damning yourself if it means winning."

"War is War. Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse," Hermione quoted and then smiled sadly. "My father used to say that. It came from a muggle television show."

Hermione hesitated for a moment before adding "You're right. I am willing to do anything to win this war. I don't know that I'm doing the right thing, I'm sure that most people will say I'm not. I know there will be no coming back from this—not to Harry or Ron, even if it buys us a victory in the end. But—saving them is worth it to me. I have always been prepared to pay the price for the lengths I'm willing to go. I have never been blind to the consequences."

Minerva didn't reply. She sipped her tea, and stared at Hermione as though she never expected to see her again.

Hermione met her gaze and wondered to herself whether it might be true.