She wasn't crying, she told herself. It was just the spray of the shower. It was just water on her face.
She barely toweled her hair off at all before quickly braiding it into two taut French braids which she coiled at the nape of her neck. Neat. Not a stray curl to be seen.
She was taking a potion inventory when Kingsley found her.
“Granger, you're needed at Shell Cottage,” he said.
Hermione froze for a moment before turning and drawing a rune in a very nondescript chest lying on the floor. It popped open, and she pulled out a small leather bag. She lifted the flap and took a rapid visual inventory.
“I'm ready,” she said, trying to quell the rapid beat of her heart and the cold knotting sensation in her stomach.
Kingsley led her through Grimmauld Place and then apparated from the front door.
They did not reappear at Shell Cottage. Hermione had known they would not.
They stood at the opening of a narrow cave. Kingsley went over and tapped on a large boulder beside the cave opening.
The ground at Hermione's feet swirled and a staircase descending into the ground appeared. She stared down it for a moment, pressing her lips together before starting down.
At the bottom of the stairs stood Gabrielle Delacour looking ethereally beautiful.
“'Ermione, I 'ave caught another!” she announced in triumph. “'E is not marked but I think 'e is important because 'e is being very difficult.”
Gabrielle had been a recent recruit to the British Resistance. One of the few members of the French Resistance who escaped into other parts of Europe when Voldemort had finally seized control of France. Gabrielle's friends and classmates had all died. She had arrived burning for revenge.
Rather than formally induct her into the British Resistance or the Order, Kingsley had swept Gabrielle into his secret reconnaissance team; a team even most of the members of the Order were largely ignorant of.
Kingsley's recruits were scattered across Europe gathering intelligence. They were mostly free agents. Kingsley left them with vague directions and great deal of leeway regarding what means they should use to extract the information. So long as the information was good he made no move to rein in or question their methods.
They were supposed to bring back their targets to be imprisoned. Hermione was called in to heal them before they were placed in suspended animation.
Gabrielle was exceptionally talented at information gathering. She used her veela allure and entrapped her targets somewhere she could interrogate them however she pleased. She also tended to bring back far more information than prisoners.
Hermione suspected she killed most of her targets once she was done with them. There was a cold triumph in the French girl's eyes that spoke of pain both given and received. The beautiful young woman always wore long sleeves and covered herself carefully from the neck down.
When Gabrielle did bring someone back, it meant she hadn't been able to break them. In which case she resigned herself to leaving them to Kingsley and Moody's traditional interrogation methods: legilimency, veritaserum, and psychological pressure.
Whenever Kingsley brought Hermione to the beach, she was never quite sure what would be waiting for her.
She braced herself.
She swung the door open and found a young man restrained in a chair. Small pools of blood sat on the floor beneath him.
Hermione took a deep breath, placed her leather bag on the table and opened it, pulling supplies out and laying them neatly across the table. When she had everything in place, she stepped closer and cast a diagnostic.
Nothing severe. Nothing that could kill him. Lots of small injuries in areas with a large quantity of nerves. They were concentrated on his hands and — Hermione swallowed — genitalia.
He was conscious but ignoring Hermione, which was normal.
Hermione's job was to heal him before Kingsley interrogated him. It wasn't a courtesy so much as an added screw to twist in while the prisoner fretted over what was to come.
Occasionally the dread was enough that they snapped while she was working and started offering their information to Hermione.
The first time Hermione had been brought in and discovered that the Order was tacitly permitting torture, she had been enraged. There was a difference, a profound difference, between using Dark Arts in self-defense and torturing someone. Agreeing to heal those prisoners meant she was enabling it.
Kingsley was unmoved by her conscience. There was no one else with clearance within the Order who had the skills to do it. If Hermione wouldn't heal them, the prisoners would be left in whatever condition they were in when he dosed them with Draught of Living Death, leaving them maimed in suspended animation.
She had tried repeatedly to dissuade Kingsley from giving his recruits such free rein. She offered to brew more veritaserum. He had stared at her and replied that the reconnaissance members didn't want veritaserum, they wanted revenge. By recruiting them, he was simply channeling it as efficiently as he could. The Order needed spies who were willing to do whatever it took; they couldn't send in people who might baulk or hold back at a crucial moment.
He reminded her that they needed the information, and that what happened to the Resistance members caught by Death Eaters was worse. As though Hermione needed to be reminded; she was the one who had healed what was left of those prisoners.
But she felt like a monster each time she was brought in to heal someone caught by the reconnaissance team, wondering whether she was enabling future victims by cooperating.
Even if they were Death Eaters, wanting them dead on a battlefield was different from letting them be tortured.
“I'm going to fix your hands first,” she said softly to the man.
She knelt down beside him then lightly placed her hand under his right hand and lifted it into the light.
With a quick spell she aerosolised an analgesic potion and guided the mist around the fingers and thumb. There had been needles driven under the nail beds repeatedly.
When the skin had absorbed the potion, she lightly took the hand in hers and began performing the spells to repair the tissue damage.
She had worked across three fingers when he spoke.
“I know you,” he said, raising his head.
She glanced up. He looked vaguely familiar. Solidly built. Dark haired with thick stubble. His arms and hands were hairy.
“You're Potter's Mudblood bitch,” he said.
Hermione raised an eyebrow and continued onto the next finger.
“You certainly grew up,” he said with a leer. “I would never have thought a frizzhead like you would have ended up looking like that.”
Hermione ignored him.
“Granger, isn't it? I'll have to tell everyone I saw you. We thought you were dead.”
He leaned forward until his face was unnervingly close to Hermione's.
“I'm going to tell you a secret, Mudblood,” he muttered. “You're going to lose this war. And when you do, I'm going to kill the blonde bitch out there so slowly she'll beg me for it.”
Hermione continued to ignore him as she closed the razor fine lacerations that had been cut into his palms.
She finished with his first hand and then started on the second. She dreaded the thought of finishing, but eventually there was no more work left to do on his hands, and she could avoid it no longer.
“I'll need you to sit back, if you want me to heal what has been done to your genitals,” she forced herself to say steadily.
Her whole body felt cold. Her stomach twisted so painfully she wondered if she'd ever be able to digest food again.