Vita Labyrinthae Similis In Quo Umbrae Vagamus

CHAPTER 11

Help me, please, burn the sorrow from your eyes

--Hole--

Freezing rain lashed against the windows of the hospital wing. It wasn't a comforting sound; Hermione, lying listlessly in bed, thought it sounded as if hundreds of tiny claws were scraping at the windows, trying to get in. A horde of snow-demons, she thought. How very festive.

November had drifted by, without much warning. She knew she was all right, that she could perfectly well go back to classes by now, but for some reason all her passion for learning seemed to have frozen solid as the weather grew colder, and she felt no motivation at all to go back to school. She wrote her assignments, cursorily, and answered the teachers' concerned notes with apologetic scribbles. I'm really sorry I can't attend class, she'd say. I'm trying my best to keep up with the work.

She felt empty and weak, despite her recovery. The energy that the Vita Reflectus had drained from her had been renewed quite quickly with Madame Pomfrey's potions. It was as if, along with energy, the spell had taken from her any desire to do anything at all except lie wearily in bed and pretend time was not passing.

She hadn't seen Draco again. She was sensible enough to deny herself further mental anguish, and she was fairly sure that any more visiting him would cause herself mental anguish. The pain she'd felt when he had used his familiar sneering tone on her was still fresh along her nerve endings. She didn't want to repeat that experience.

Nevertheless....she wanted to see him. Wanted to be reassured that he was still there; that he hadn't faded away to the snow-ghost he resembled. But there was enough sense left in her to deny that sensibility, and she had not gone to visit him again.

She sighed, turned over in bed, and pulled the History of Magic text off the table. There was some small comfort in knowing that the others were actually being forced to sit through Binns's lectures, while all she had to do was trudge through the reading and write the essays. Even in the days when she'd been Swotty Hermione, she'd loathed Binns's classes. She had once remarked to Harry that Binns's lectures reminded her strongly of the sensation derived from hitting oneself repeatedly on the forehead with a teaspoon.

Harry.

Oh, Harry. She shut the book again tiredly and closed her eyes. Harry had come to see her several more times, with less and less happiness on his face every time he'd seen her. She knew what she looked like: the mirror in the little bathroom hadn't been charmed to lie. She'd lost weight, and her hair hung lank and lustreless over her face; her eyes were dull and circled in shadows, and the bones of her face stood out sharply. She looked like a refugee, to put it baldly, and she didn't care. But Harry apparently did.

"Hermione," he'd said, the last time he had visited her. "Hermione, we're worried about you. When are you going to come back to school?"

"I don't know," she had told him.

"We've got tests coming up soon," he had pointed out. "Ron's panicking without you to help him revise."

"He'll do fine."

"Hermione...." He had trailed off, staring at her. "Are you really all right? You look horrible."

"I'm fine," she had said dully. "Madame Pomfrey says I just need rest."

"You're not resting, though, are you?" Harry's green eyes had glittered with anger and worry. "You're lying here and getting more miserable by the day."

"I don't know what you're talking about," she had said tonelessly. "Harry, stop worrying about me. I'm all right."

She sighed. Poor Harry. He honestly did think there was a happy ending.

And why are you so sure there isn't one? You saved Malfoy's life. That's a good thing. That's heroic. And Professor Snape seems to have found happiness. What's not to end happily?

Oh, shut up, she told herself, and read Binns's horrible book.

But she couldn't concentrate on the words, and they seemed to swim and blur before her eyes with the familiar pricking of tears.

"I don't get it," said Ron that afternoon as they sat in the library, trying to ignore the insistent click-scratching of the sleet on the windows. "What's wrong with her? She's never been like this before. Remember midterms? She was studying almost from the beginning of school, and she's been going on about NEWTS ever since we passed the OWLs. Hermione not caring about tests is like....well, it's like me caring about them. Weird."

"I know," said Harry, running his fingers through his hair. "She looked like hell, too, all pale and skinny and big-eyed. I bet it has something to do with Malfoy. She's been like that ever since Malfoy went into the hospital."

"You don't think he's cursing her?" Ron's eyes flashed.

"Don't be daft, he's still sick, or hurt, or whatever. I doubt he can even get up the strength to call her a mudblood. I think it's got something to do with Malfoy and what killed his parents, though." He hadn't told Ron what Hermione had revealed to him. That hadn't been a hard decision, but he still felt guilty about keeping the truth from his friend.

"Maybe she knows something we don't," said Ron, sucking on his quill.

"Yeah, maybe," said Harry, his voice carefully level. "Hey, do you know anything about vampires? I have this DaDA essay I haven't started yet."

"Nope," said Ron bleakly. "Only that they've got nasty sharp pointed teeth and Muggles make movies about them." He sighed, then brightened. "Hey, Milton!"

A dark-haired Ravenclaw girl looked up, scowled briefly at the interruption. "What is it, Weasley?"

Ron gave her what he probably thought was a disarming grin. "You know a lot about vampires, right?"

"More than you do, Weasley." Harry suddenly remembered seeing Crystania Milton at the Yule Ball the year before last; she was a year ahead of him, and she had been dancing with a Beauxbatons boy until Malfoy had come up to her, shaking Pansy off his arm, and swept her into a tango. He and Ron had watched, their mouths open. Milton was talking, and he pointed his mind back at the present with some effort. "I spent the summer in Romania working with vampires and I've got a few in my family tree. Why do you ask?"

"There's your expert, Harry," said Ron. Milton gave Harry a considering look.

"What do you want to know?" she said.

"Um," Harry said brilliantly, "what's the difference between a vurderlak, a vampire, and a dhampir?"

Milton sighed, leaned back in her chair, and began to lecture. Harry found himself rather interested, and his worry for Hermione receded into a dull throb at the back of his mind, not unlike the occasional pain of his scar.

Nadezhda encountered Snape on his way back from the hospital wing that evening. The bleak look she was so familiar with was back on his face, and he looked deathly tired. She didn't even have to ask where he'd been.

"He's no better?" she asked, as they slid into their places at the staff table. He shook his head.

"He's just slowly fading away," said Severus, looking helplessly down at his plate. "He won't speak unless spoken to; he won't eat unless Poppy makes him...not that he's able to keep much down....he just lies there like an ice statue and looks at the ceiling."

"How long now?"

"Weeks. I think it's been three weeks since I told him about his parents."

"Don't blame yourself," she said quietly, as the feast appeared on the tables without warning. "None of this is your fault."

"Most of me believes that," he told her, "but..."

"I know. We've got to talk to Dumbledore about this."

"About what?" inquired the Headmaster, who had suddenly appeared in his place and was regarding them with some interest. Nadezhda sighed, sent a glance up and down the table.

"After dinner, sir?" she said.

"Of course. Now tuck in, you're both looking rather peaky."

She had to laugh a little at that. She wasn't hungry; hadn't been, for a long time. Beside her, Snape pushed a forkful of roast chicken aimlessly around his plate. "Nadezhda," he said in a low voice. "It's not just him."

"Granger?" she murmured back, under the din of conversation. He nodded.

"She looks awful," he said quietly. "And her grades are slipping. She hasn't been doing much of the work, which is bizarre, since she's the best student in the year."

"Is it because of him?"

Severus gave her a glance. "I have to think so."

She looked down at her own food, began mechanically to eat. She desperately hoped Dumbledore would have some ideas, because she had no idea what to do.

She found herself staring out over the student tables. The Slytherins had more or less accepted Blaise Zabini as Draco's replacement, and Pansy Parkinson was staring at him with the same fawning expression she'd once reserved for Draco; no one seemed to miss him. The Gryffindor table wasn't much altered by the absence of Hermione Granger, either. Harry and Ron were sitting next to Ron's older brothers, who were explaining something with extremely vivid gestures. Neville and Ginny were deep in conversation. Life carried on. Nadezhda supposed that was a good thing, but she couldn't stop herself feeling strongly that life was not carrying on for the two students lying in bed upstairs, and that for all her cleverness and years of study, she was powerless to help them.

She felt Lupin's yellow gaze on her, ignored it firmly. The last thing she needed was his sympathetic concern; she felt she would probably break down in floods of tears if he asked her one more time what was wrong, and she really didn't want to do that. I'm sorry, old friend, she thought firmly at him. This isn't your fight.

Dumbledore's office was becoming unpleasantly familiar. As she and Severus took their accustomed seats before his ancient desk, Fawkes swooped down from his perch on the corner and took up position on Severus's shoulder. Good, thought Nadezhda. He could use a little comfort.

"Well?" said the Headmaster, steepling his fingers and giving them an encouraging look.

"It's Draco Malfoy," said Snape, his low voice level but full of pain. "He's not getting better. At all. It's as if he's turned away from the world."

"And Hermione Granger," Nadezhda said quietly. "She's fading away."

Dumbledore sighed. "I know. Something happened to Miss Granger when you used her to help cast that spell. I've tried and tried to quantify it, but I just don't know the full ramifications of what happened."

Snape coughed, suddenly, painfully, bent over. When he got his breath back he regarded Dumbledore with a burning glare. "You mean, we did this to her. Whatever's wasting her away from the inside is our fault." It was an accusation, but Nadezhda knew it wasn't aimed at Dumbledore; the anger was for himself.

"No, of course not," said Dumbledore, an unaccustomed note of impatience in those beautifully modulated tones. "Severus, stop being so self-centered. It's not all your fault."

Severus subsided back into the chair, looking tired and confused. "What is it, then?" she demanded.

"I think the spell may have awakened unknown reserves of power inside her," said the Headmaster. "Her apparent decline has nothing to do with that. It's entirely emotional, and is contingent on young Malfoy. You say he's not recovering?"

"The opposite, if anything," said Snape, not looking at either of them. Fawkes gave a soft cry, and nudged Severus's cheekbone with his head. "He seems to be getting worse."

"You've spoken with him?"

"Of course," said Severus. "I've tried to....to pull him out of his shell, if you like. He won't oblige. He merely lies there and will answer questions put to him, but he won't volunteer anything. It's like talking to a wall."

Dumbledore frowned. "Perhaps I should talk to him."

Nadezhda sat forward in her chair. "Would you, Headmaster? We've tried our best, but we don't seem to be getting anywhere."

"Certainly," said Dumbledore, and got up. "No time like the present, is there?"

They swept into the hospital wing together. Nadezhda saw Hermione asleep in a bed at the far end of the ward, books and presents piled high on her table; she was curled in on herself, like a baby, trying to keep the world at her back. She found she remembered doing that herself, at boarding school, when she was little. It made everything go away for a while.

Madame Pomfrey met them at the door to the office. "Can I help you?"

"We've come to see Draco Malfoy," said Dumbledore quietly. The nurse looked mutinous, but gave in.

"All right," she said, "but you can only have a few minutes. He's very weak."

Dumbledore gave her a little nod, and they found their path clear to Malfoy's door. Dumbledore opened it with a gesture.

Nadezhda found herself surprised at how much thinner Malfoy was, as if the flesh was melting off his bones with each passing day. He looked almost as bad as he'd done at the crisis of the simulacrum mortus, only without the hectic fever-spots staining each cheek; he was colorless and silent, and the only sign of life in him was the slow rise and fall of his chest.

Dumbledore took the chair by the bedside, and Nadezhda stood behind him, Snape at her side, like some sort of honor guard. The Headmaster touched the boy's hand, and he came awake, his great eyes opening slowly to regard the ceiling.

"Draco," said Dumbledore, and his voice held some of the lilt of phoenix song, "how are you?"

Draco's eyes meandered down from the ceiling to the Headmaster, widened almost imperceptibly, and returned to their metallic blankness. "Fine," he said tonelessly.

"You've got people worried," said Dumbledore. "What's bothering you?"

Draco flicked that blank silver gaze over first Severus and then Nadezhda, and back to Dumbledore. "Nothing," he said. Dumbledore sighed.

"I can't force you to talk," he said, "but, Draco, you're not alone, and you're not friendless. Your fellow students are wondering when you'll return to them."

"No they're not," said Draco, scorn dripping from that flutelike voice. "They'll have found a replacement for me by now."

Nadezhda shivered. How right he was. Zabini was now the Slytherin ringleader; he had assumed Crabbe and Goyle as bodyguards and Parkinson as consort as easily as one might put on the mantle of a leader. Dumbledore frowned.

"You give them too little credit," he said. "We are here for you, Draco. You need to talk about this. Keeping it all inside you is doing no one any good."

"I'm fine," said Draco again, and now Nadezhda thought she saw a spark in the limpid depths of his eyes. "I don't need any help, and I don't want to talk to anyone."

"What you want is not the deciding factor here, Draco," said Snape roughly. "Believe it or not, there are people out there who don't want to see you waste away to nothing."

"Right," said Draco, "of course there are, and my father wasn't a Death Eater, and I've got hordes of friends. Of course. I should have known."

The bitterness in his voice rivaled that of Snape, talking about his past. Nadezhda wanted to hold the boy, just to make the world go away for a little while, ease some of the awful pressure on him. "Don't hate us all," she found herself saying. "We need you."

"No, you don't," he told her clearly, and fixed her for the first time with the full force of his eyes. She gasped at the emptiness in that gaze, the complete and utter void. It was like looking into a mist. Nothing looked back. "You need someone to pity."

The unfairness of this stung her, but she said nothing. Dumbledore gazed at Draco, his blue-ice eyes unreadable. "Very well," he said, after a while. "We will leave you. But don't think we are ever very far away."

"I don't need you," said Draco simply, and closed his eyes again.

They left.

"You see?" Severus hissed to the Headmaster as they closed the door to the hospital wing behind them. "You see how far he's retreated? He's turned his face to the wall and is waiting to die."

"I know," said Dumbledore simply, raising his hands in an eloquent gesture of hopelessness. "But you must see how little we can do. Forcing him to talk about what's bothering him would hurt even more. We've simply got to hope he has enough strength to work through this on his own."

"Haven't you got potions that would help?" Nadezhda demanded. "Cheering Charm sort of things?"

Severus stared at her, then sighed. "Sometimes I forget that you don't know everything," he said tiredly. "No. There's nothing I can give him that will stabilize his mind. I have euphorics, of course, but they're notoriously dangerous in cases of massive depression...and he's not producing enough serotonin to even make any difference. I hate this," he said suddenly, his elegant hands curling into fists. "I hate this helplessness."

"I know," said Dumbledore. "I will do all in my power to help Draco—but there's a point where we can't do anything else, and it's up to him."

"That's what I'm afraid of," said Severus bitterly.

Hermione woke, completely, in the utter darkness of a starless night. She rolled over, stared at her watch: four in the morning. The great windows gave no light.

What had woken her? The hospital wing was completely silent; not even the breathing of a fellow student filled the vast quiet of the night. She was alone, and something had woken her; something was deadly wrong, and she couldn't tell what.

She sat up in the bed. It wasn't quite dark; light outlined the rectangle of a closed door by the health office.

Malfoy, she thought suddenly. Something is wrong with Malfoy.

And the thought sent such shudders through her that she didn't even notice she left her wand on the table as she slid out of bed and padded over to his door, still limned with yellow candlelight in the utter darkness of the ward. "Draco?" she hissed, tapping at the door with her knuckles. No answer.

The feeling of wrongness increased. "Draco!"

Nothing. Hermione scowled fiercely at the door, pointed the fingers of her right hand at it, and hissed "Alohomora!" The lock was absurdly loud in the night-silence as it slid open. She nudged the door, which opened inwards, and stood transfixed on the threshold by what she saw.

Not the curse again, her mind whimpered. We killed.....his father. There, I've said it. His father, who was putting the curse on him. How is there so much blood...?

But her body knew what it saw, and she hardly knew what she was going to do as she closed the door behind her and stuck out her hand in an irrefutable gesture of summoning. "Expelliarmus," she snapped, and the scalpel slid out of Draco's hand and flew across the room to her. She stared at it, bemused, for a moment. "Malfoy, you idiot," she demanded, flinging the scalpel to the floor in horror, "what do you think you're doing?"

He looked up at her with wide, guileless, weary eyes. "I'd have thought it was rather obvious, Granger," he drawled. "Kindly give me back my knife and go away."

Hermione's fury rose and suffused her mind, making the edges of the room white and blurry. She crossed the room in two steps and took him by the shoulders. "You don't get to do this, Malfoy," she spat. "We saved your wretched life down there in Snape's dungeon. You don't get to waste that because of some piteous little angst-fit."

"Go away," he said, weakly trying to remove her hands from his shoulders. The right wrist was bleeding freely; the left was only barely cut. She blinked, trying to focus through the scintillating tide of sorrow and anger, and was hardly aware of what she was doing as her right hand let go of him and rose in the air. The harsh ringing sound of the slap echoed through the chamber, and shocked her back to lucidity; his eyes, too, seemed a little more focused as he recoiled from her, hand raised to the red mark on his snow-colored skin. "What..?"

"Don't you understand, Malfoy?" she hissed at him, her left hand still clasping his shoulder. "You don't fucking get to throw yourself away like this! It's not your decision! You are not alone in the world, despite what you keep telling yourself, and there are people out here who care for you. You don't get to be that selfish, Draco. You don't get to throw away what we bought for you with our pain and our effort and our magic. Even you can't be that ungrateful." She showed him the red mark of the wand still burning on her palm. "That's your life, Draco. Professor Snape and Professor Serenskaya are marked with it too. It's not all yours to throw away now." She sat down on the edge of his bed as some of the white-hot fury started to fade. "Why? Why are you trying to give up what we bought for you at such an awful price?"

"You wouldn't understand, Granger," he said bitterly. Blood was blooming on the sheets. "You don't know what it's like. I'm useless now. My life was shaped around one purpose, and that purpose is gone. I'm not worth all this energy and effort. It would have been better if you'd failed. Better if Lucius had killed me."

"Don't you dare tell me that," she snapped. "You're not the ultimate arbiter of life and death. You know how cruel fate can be, Draco? Sometimes fate can make us live. You're strong enough to do that; you just don't want to go through that pain. You're a coward."

He stared at her, the mark of her hand still livid on his cheek. "What did you say?" he muttered, his voice deadly.

"You're a coward, Draco Malfoy. You'd rather die by your own hand than face the pain of a life without your comfortable past to support you."

"I am not a coward," he snarled. Something of the old Malfoy had come back into his eyes. Something alive, for the first time in weeks. "How dare you call me that?"

"Prove to me that you're not," said Hermione steadily, holding that gaze with hers, willing him to come back. He had been so far away for so long that the journey was not an easy one. "Prove to me that you're brave enough to call yourself a Malfoy."

His eyes snapped sparks. "I don't have to prove myself to anyone, Granger. Especially not to you. Not to a..." He trailed off. Hermione's eyes narrowed.

"A mudblood? Go on, say it."

Something bizarre had come over his face. He dropped his head into his hands, heedless of the blood that smeared his pale cheeks, and turned away from her. "I can't," he said, his voice muffled. "I can't go down that road. I'd become like Lucius. Mudblood, pureblood, what the fuck. What does it matter who your ancestors were? I can't use that anymore. Oh, God, what am I going to do...."

And, wonder of wonders, he began to cry. Hermione made a wordless noise of pain and sympathy, and reached out to him....and now she was sure she was still asleep and dreaming, for his arms crept around her, and as she drew him close, he clung to her, drawing comfort from her, and her entire body was alive with the magical electric power of his touch. She held on to Draco as if she was the only thing connecting him to life, and he clung to her as if he knew it.

He cried for a long time. Eventually his sobs died away to uneven, hitching gasps, and she loosened her hold on him. He sighed, still holding on to her. "Granger," he muttered.

"Yes, Draco?"

"Can you...mend these?" He drew back, held out his wrists to her. She blinked away the tears that rose in her own eyes.

"Then you're not going to..."

He looked away. "I suppose it would be bad manners to try again, when you and two of my teachers suffered second-degree burns trying to save my life the first time." He sniffed. "And Malfoys are known for their good manners."

"Are they?" she murmured, staring down at the wounds.

"This one is," he said fiercely.

She looked up at him, and could have cried out for joy: his eyes were alive again, entirely and utterly alive, red and swollen from crying, but no longer the steel mirrors they had been for so many weeks. She nodded, simply, that joy thrumming along every fiber of her being, and concentrated on his wounds.

"Curatio," she muttered, passing a hand over the flesh, and the cut vessels mended themselves, the edges of the skin springing back together, without the thinnest of white scars to show the path of the scalpel. He gasped as the edges of his flesh twisted themselves, but the pain was gone in an instant. She busied herself removing the bloodstains from the sheets with muttered charms, as he stared at his wrists in astonishment.

"Hermione," he said softly, and she felt her skin tingle at his use of her given name, "did you know you just did that without a wand?"

She frowned. She had thought her wand was in her pocket; but she remembered suddenly that it was still lying on her bedside table, back out there in the ward. "Emotional upheaval," she muttered. "Temporarily enhances magical ability."

"Your emotions were upheaved?" he asked, ungrammatically.

"Well, of course they jolly were," she snapped, staring at him. "What do you think? This is the second time I've saved your life, Draco. I'm starting to get a bit attached to it."

Those astonishing eyes widened briefly. "Hermione?"

"Oh, fuck," she said, and felt her own tears threatening again. "No use hiding it. I like you, Draco Malfoy. I like you an awful, awful lot, despite my better judgment. And I will personally turn you into a ferret and bounce you all the way down the stairs from the top of the Astronomy Tower if you ever, ever, try anything like this again." It was her turn to turn away, staring down at her clasped hands. Silence filled the room for a long, awful moment. She had just about got up her courage to leave when a slender hand touched her shoulder.

"Hermione," he said, his voice rather rougher than usual, "that may be the sweetest thing anyone's ever said to me in my life."

She turned to him, her eyes feeling scratchy with unshed tears, and found that his arms were open and waiting for her. Coming into that embrace felt like coming home.

"I've been watching you for a while," he said into her hair, "ever since the Yule Ball our fourth year, as a matter of fact. You'd always been infuriatingly clever, and you clearly didn't fit into any category of girls I knew about; you didn't seem to spend half your life glued to a mirror and the other half glued to Witch Weekly, and you certainly didn't know how pretty you were, because if you had, you'd have been insufferable. I thought you were fascinating, but utterly unknowable. And of course there was nothing I could say to you; we were of different houses, different worlds, and then I was honor-bound to Lucius to treat you with as much disdain as possible. But when I was there in the dungeon bathroom, and you and Potter found me...no one had ever been so kind to me, without wanting something in return. No one had ever been so simply concerned for me, or tried to help me. No one. Nobody had ever cried for me before, either. It was rather surprising to know that anyone could cry for me." He paused, pulled back enough so that he could look her in the eye. "Hermione.......I'm sorry I've been such a bastard, for so long."

"It's all right," she murmured. He was making her feel dizzy with his nearness. "You were trained. There's no shame in following instructions."

He grimaced. "Oh yes there is, when they're given by a Death Eater. No, I've got no good excuse for behaving as I have done for the past five and a half years. But...Hermione...thank you."

She closed her eyes against the tears; but now, instead of being wrenched from her by vast unsympathetic forces, they welled up from a warm spring of something just underneath her breastbone, something that swelled and pulsed like a new life. She couldn't stop smiling. "No, Draco," she said unevenly, "thank you."

He hugged her tighter, unmindful of her tears splashing the collar of his starched hospital-wing pyjamas, and she held him in her arms, her mind cracking and falling apart under a torrent of utter joy.

Madame Pomfrey, on her morning rounds, found them together; Hermione lay curled up in her dressing gown on the edge of the bed, her arms around Draco, who was holding her so securely he wouldn't let go until she prodded him firmly with a finger. Smiling a little, she ushered the half-asleep girl back to her own bed, and returned to Draco's room to tuck him in. She's done it, then, she thought. What Dumbledore couldn't do. She's pulled him back.

The freezing rain stopped just after dawn, and turned into soft white snow that mounded every crenellation on the castle and turned the trees in the Forbidden Forest into huge marshmallow sculptures. November had become December, and it seemed an auspicious change.