Her lip trembled, and she looked away and started cleaning the blood off the floor with practiced ease. The staining wouldn't come out of her shirt so she banished it rather than trying to repair it.
She glanced up and discovered that Malfoy had apparated away without a sound. Her mouth twisted. She hadn't known he could apparate silently.
She found herself simultaneously relieved and devastated that he'd actually left. She shook her head sharply and only let herself sob once, very softly, before she turned back to cleaning the floor.
While she was rummaging through her satchel for something to transfigure into a shirt, he abruptly reappeared.
“Blood replenishing potion,” he said in a cold voice as he handed a vial to her.
She stared down at it. She recognized Severus' spiky handwriting in the label. She unstoppered it and swallowed the contents.
The room immediately stopped moving, and her lips stopped tingling.
“Thank you,” she said. She transfigured a piece of cloth into a white t-shirt and, after scourgifying her shoulder, arm, and torso, pulled it over her head. Then she gathered all her supplies back into her kit and stood to leave.
“See?” she said, gesturing at the floor. “I was never here.”
He didn't say a word as she walked out the door.
September 2002
When Hermione returned to the shack the following week, there was no scroll on the table.
There was also no table and no chairs. The little bit of furniture that had been there before was gone.
Her stomach dropped, and she felt the doorknob rattle in her hand.
She kept staring, willing a scroll to appear. She looked around the rest of the room. Perhaps she'd overlooked something.
The furniture was gone.
She walked slowly into the room and glanced around.
Maybe he was just busy. Maybe he'd bring it in the evening, she thought nervously.
But the furniture was gone.
Maybe he'd been injured or killed. It hadn't even occurred to her until just then; he might die and she wouldn't even know. He'd just disappear, and she'd never see him again.
Surely Severus would let her know if Draco died...
Besides, the furniture was gone.
She stood in the middle of the room, wondering what to do.
Surely he wouldn't end his arrangement with the Order just because she'd bled on his second-hand furniture. He'd had his back carved into ribbons to be a spy. Trailing blood into his safehouse could not possibly be his limit.
Perhaps he'd just burned the furniture.
She turned around one last time and then started for the door. She'd come back in the evening. If there was nothing by the next week, then she'd let herself panic. She wasn't going to let herself panic yet. There might be some other explanation.
She was halfway out the door when she heard a pop. She turned and found Malfoy standing in the center of the room.
She stared at him, wide-eyed and uncertain. He looked her up and down, as though he expected her to be injured again.
“We should resume training,” he said after a moment.
Hermione said nothing. She felt torn between a desire to laugh or cry. The corner of her mouth twitched, and she tried to swallow past a hard lump in her throat. Her hand shook faintly as she fought to hold in all the furious things she wanted to say.
She didn't say anything. She just stood in the doorway.
She wanted to just turn and leave. To go and try to make sense of why she cared.
She cared. She felt betrayed.
He'd given her dire warnings, ordered her to work out, practice dueling, and be careful. He'd made her paranoid and stressed every time she ventured out to forage for potion ingredients until she could hardly breathe when she was out; until she couldn't even eat the night before because the food tasted like ash, and her stomach knotted so tightly with anxiety that she couldn't force it down.
He'd made her realise how much she didn't want to die.
She didn't want to die.
He'd told her he'd train her, ridiculed her for not being ruthless enough, and then — abandoned her.
He didn't abandon the Order.
He'd only abandoned her.
Which should have been fine. It should have been fine with her. It was always only supposed to be about the Order. But it had hurt. Every week he hadn't shown up had felt like being abandoned all over again.
Was she just that easy to leave behind?