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Hermione read the day's newspaper twelve times before tearing it into neat squares. She had spent the previous night going through a list of things she thought she might be permitted to have. She had assumed that she couldn't have knitting needles. Being restricted from yarn had been a guess, although where Malfoy worried she'd hang herself without a portrait catching her seemed questionable—

Maybe outside. She'd have to look more carefully at the trees on the estate… She brushed aside such schemes to save for a later date.

She wasn't thinking about suicide. She wasn't thinking about the way her head still throbbed; as though Voldemort had done permanent damage to her mind. She wasn't thinking about how sounds hurt. Or how her hands had started spasming because of the clock again. Or that the way Voldemort had forced her to re-live being raped had felt even more traumatic than the times when it happened. She wasn't thinking about how she was never going to escape.

She wasn't thinking about anything but carefully ripping up The Daily Prophet as steadily as her spasming fingers would allow her to.

That was all.

It was the only thing she was thinking about.

When she had made several perfect squares she set to folding them. She started with origami cranes.

She couldn't remember exactly where she had learned to make them. The ability felt like muscle memory, creating the precise creases in a specific order that she didn't recall memorizing.

Her father? Maybe?

Someone with agile, precise fingers. At a kitchen table guiding her through the steps.

“If you fold a thousand cranes in one year, you'll get a wish,” a male voice said.

“No, you get good luck and happiness,” came a woman's voice from the next room.

“Same thing.”

“Not really. A wish assumes a person knows what's best for them. Good luck and happiness leaves it to Fate to lead you to the right place. I'd much prefer to be gifted with good luck and happiness than a single wish.”

“Ok, Confucius. I'll defer to your superior understanding of the mystic.”

“Now you're purposely trying to provoke me. Conflating Confucianism and Japanese Mythology is an offense before the gods of pedagogy. I will not let you fill our daughter's head with such misinformation.”

“Maybe I'm doing it to encourage her critical thinking…. Fine, I sincerely apologise for how horribly miseducated she'll be now. I will accept full responsibility when it causes her to be cast from civil society and forced to wander the earth as a nomad. In the future I'll be sure to cross-reference everything I say at the library first.”

“ Yes, thank you. That would be great.”

“The trouble with marrying someone who never bores you is that they don't even leave a man in peace to teach his daughter his favourite hobby. Here, I'll show you how to make origami tessellations. You mother doesn't know a thing about those. I just read a paper by an astrophysicist who proposes using the technique to store large membranes on satellites.”

Hermione folded origami cranes until her fingertips felt raw. Then she arranged them on the floor so they would stand, wings extended.

The newspaper was not an ideal strength for origami but it was something to do. Hermione hadn't had anything to do in so long.

It was too bad that Japanese mythology wasn't actually real magic. She'd fold a hundred thousand cranes if it would give her a bit of luck.

She gathered the cranes up and flattened them all. Leaving them in a neat pile for the elves to banish.

She wondered what her parents had been like. What kinds of jobs they had.