“Perhaps you can start by seducing me,” he advised drolly, leaning back in his chair and looking her up and down. “Steal my heart with your wit and charms.”
Hermione rolled her eyes.
“Right. Maybe tomorrow,” she said, her mind already churning. “Well, this has all been very illuminating,” she said. “I won't disturb your reading further.”
Then she turned on her heel and strode back into the hedge maze.
She wound and twisted through the hedge-maze as she thought. Her options had narrowed further. Malfoy clearly did not expect her to escape. He did not even appear concerned about it. She didn't blame him. She didn't expect to be able to escape either.
It had already been a fool's hope. Now it felt like total idiocy. She sighed faintly and watched her breath puff away as a cloud in the cold air.
When the potion wore off she was going to be severely depressed.
She explored the entire hedge maze. Her feet were numb with cold and soaked by the time she exited again. She limped back to the veranda. Malfoy said nothing and she walked past him back into the manor and up to her room by herself.
Emotionless as she was, it was nice to feel more like a functioning person again. No grief. No fear. No depression or despair. She didn't have to worry her body would betray her with a panic attack.
The potion could easily get addictive.
Not that Malfoy would allow it. Healer Stroud had mentioned that potions for anxiety could interfere with pregnancy, so she was probably only going to be dosed with it for a short time.
Hermione wished she knew more about magical pregnancy. It had been a largely overlooked aspect of her training as a healer. Given parchment and a quill she could write a thirty inch essay on anxiety potions and how they interacted with healing magic and dark curses. But pregnancy was excluded from casualty healing. Almost no one had babies during the war and if they did, they stopped fighting and went to a midwife.
She wondered how the potion was made. She was almost positive it contained billywig sting slime, valerian and sopophorous bean. Maybe sloth brain mucus too. She thought back over the flavor and tingling as she had swallowed it. Perhaps that was a reaction of the sting slime combined with syrup of Hellebore.
It was nice to have something new to think about. Her brain had felt like it had scratched itself raw ever since the war. Completely starved of anything new to turn over in her mind. It was full of the past. Reviewing it over again and again. Wondering what had gone wrong.
Her past was like a millstone. Always dragging her down. Dragging her inexorably back as she wondered again and again what had gone wrong.
Had she known? Had she known why the Order had lost the war? Known and hidden that information? Chosen to torture herself by concealing it?
Why? As Malfoy had said, she had lost the war. What would she bother protecting even in the aftermath? Knowing that everyone she cared about was already imprisoned or dead?
Like Dumbledore's death the details surrounding the end of the war felt foggy. She couldn't remember why they had gone to Hogwarts. She couldn't even remember getting captured. She remembered Harry dying. And then she was in a cage watching the Weasleys being tortured.
She'd assumed she'd blanked due to shock.
Hermione explored the entire wing of the manor from top to bottom before nightfall. The attics, every closet, and servant's stairs and tunnels. She didn't comb through the rooms, but she hoped if she grew familiar with them that she'd be able to come back without panicking or having a nervous breakdown even without the potion.
She wondered how many house elves the Malfoys had. There wasn't so much as a cobweb in the darkest corners of the attic.
The next morning she woke and felt like a boulder had been placed on her chest. Pinned to her bed and overwhelmed by the whiplash of despair she'd been unable to experience the day before. She fought to breathe.
The twelve hour respite made all her emotional pain hurt more. Cast it into stark relief. She hadn't realised how deep the cuts of grief and loneliness reached inside of her until she was briefly freed from the pain of them.
As the weight of it bore down on her once more she felt as though she were being ground to dust. She could almost feel the edges of herself crumbling and breaking. Dissolving into ether. There was almost nothing left of her but hurting.
Her spine and the back of her neck felt overheated. While the rest of her body was clammy and icy cold. Her skin was damp. As though she'd sweated the potion out in the night.
She rolled from the bed and was violently sick upon the floor before she could bolt for the bathroom.
She slumped down, shivering. Her body felt leaden. She could barely move her arms. She wanted a shower. She was too hot and too cold.
She was thirsty. She was desperate for water.
She wanted a hug.
A fresh wave of loneliness struck her so abruptly she burst into tears.