Chapter Text
Hermione was staring at the ceiling. She knew the little patch of plaster above her bed very well. Too well. The whole room had a yellowy hue including the ceiling, and most of it was cracked and ragged. But right above her pillow where she stared up in the morning, the afternoon, and at night, there was this bright white swath. It looked nearly perfect.
The ceiling was filled with patch jobs done badly, mismatching colors and textures. Little divots where the putty knife must have slipped but no one bothered to tidy it up. So what did it mean that right above her head was this one patch that was done right?
She wondered how badly the perfect plaster had been damaged for it to be repaired so well. Did they cut out an old, rotten, molded chunk? Did they have to fill in the hollow hole with paper or chicken wire to retain the shape? Did they do a good job because they felt the house deserved better. Would they be ashamed of what had happened to the ceiling since or were all these blemishes already there? Would they be happy to hear that someone stared at their handy work for at least 3 hours every day.
No, they’d probably be pretty sad to hear that.
That might seem like a long time to stare at the ceiling for a person with things to do, but Hermione was not a person with things to do. She had removed every responsibility from her life over the past 8 years. She didn’t even mean to at first. She was doing a noble thing. When she removed herself from her parent’s memories, she was protecting them, and the hopeful child in her assumed she could get them back. They never came back.
That was the first step of a long and deep retrenchment from the world. And in comparison to that first Gordian knot every other tether to her old life was so simple to cut.
She had sold her childhood house with everything in it except one dining room chair which now sat in the corner of her room covered in her all black uniforms which she would wear too many times between washings. She could tell it was time for laundry when her normally distant coworkers distanced themselves even further. She always waited till the last possible moment. She had often gone to work in slightly wet pants still not dry from being washed the night before.
The rest of the steps to remove herself from civilization fell into her lap. She responded to an ad in the paper from a retired teacher looking for a boarder. She got a room on the second floor of her house. She shared the bathroom with a traveling nurse who maybe wasn’t traveling anymore. How many years until it becomes your life and your home?
Hermione had been there for 7 years and she wouldn’t call it home. It was an older house, but didn’t have any fireplaces. Well there probably were fireplaces hidden somewhere in the walls, but they’d all been boarded up in the 70s. She was so grateful that it had been so thoroughly ransacked of all its charm.
The lack of fireplace was the first excuse why she couldn’t see Ron and Harry. Why she never needed to invite them over. But within 6 months she barely needed an excuse. She had fallen off the magical planet. For a few months she would visit to buy dreamless sleep potions, but it quickly became too painful. Every time she apparated she would think of the terrible things that had followed that dizzying feeling. Not knowing if the place she landed would be a place she would be captured or where she would watch her friends die. Now just the thought of her feet lifting off the floor while the world shifted around her made her sick. Her heart would race and it would take hours with her eyes glued to the ceiling to return to a slow laborious beat. She stopped going to Diagon Alley. Instead she found weed. Her dreams stayed dreamless.
The one thing that gave her solace was knowing there were other people who must be as fucked up as her. Not her friends, no they all appeared to be doing well. Ron had made it out alright, he had his family. They had all somehow gotten closer after the war. Harry got to join them, he was with Ginny and they all lived together in a house where you could never be alone with your thoughts. They seemed to like that, but it made Hermione shiver. They all had jobs, no even better, they had careers. Work that would allow them to grow and shift, change the wizarding world if they chose to. They were the types of jobs she had dreamed of, back when she used to dream.
She didn’t know when she had last seen them, but she remembered they had smiles on their faces. And in her memories they were all smiles. All laughs. So it must be that they’d never felt the immense hole that threatened to suck them in. And if they had felt its pull, they hadn’t chosen to set up camp at the bottom of it.
But she knew someone else had felt it. Had no choice but to live at the bottom of a dark hole. And it gave her peace that whenever she thought of Draco Malfoy he wasn’t smiling. The last time she’d seen him he was a skinny, dying husk. He had bet his entire personality on villainy and he had looked so unsatisfied with the results. And now he lived on in her memories looking as hollow as she felt. The only person who was as lifeless as her and it made her smile.