She started hyperventilating as she thought about how close she'd come to dying all alone in a forest. No one would have even known where to look for her, and by the time they'd thought to, she would have been long dead.
She clamped her mouth shut and hiccuped several times as she tried to breathe evenly.
“I think I'm going into shock,” she said.
Her voice sounded oddly small and childlike. She swallowed hard.
She wanted to cry, but she refused to allow herself to. She'd already cried in front of Malfoy several times. She didn't want him to think she was someone who just cried over everything.
She was so angry he was there. That of all the times he'd decided to show up, it had to be then. She wished she'd apparated anywhere else.
“I'm not dying. The Order is not in crisis. So you can just go. I'll clean up before I leave, you won't even know I was here,” she said.
It was not the strategic thing to say, but she didn't want to look at him. He'd kissed her and then called her a bitch. He'd let her spend weeks healing him and only thanked her when he was drunk and then told her he intended to go to a different healer the minute he was sober again.
He'd cut her off.
He'd made her miss him like an idiot while he'd probably gone and fucked as many high-breasted, curvaceous prostitutes as his heart desired.
She hated him. And she didn't want him to see her when she was covered in blood and hysterical and traumatised.
Why couldn't he ever leave her alone when she wanted him to?
After a minute she turned back to healing her shoulder in the mirror again. He kept standing and staring at her.
In a few minutes the gashes were closed and only faint cicatrices remained. They would fade once she had some dittany tincture to apply.
She summoned over the other chair and lifted her foot up and started unwrapping her leg. Then she cut off her jeans at the knee and dropped them alongside the remains of her shirt in the puddle of blood.
She surveyed the Gytrash bite. It was difficult to see all the punctures on the back of her calf. She shifted her hips to get a better view. Two long gashes and several punctures. She cast a cleansing charm over the area to clear the blood away. None of them were very deep. She didn't think any of it was likely to scar.
She had it all repaired in short order.
The room seemed to be rotating slowly. She sat back and closed her eyes for a minute. Then she reopened them and cast a new diagnostic charm on herself. She'd lost a little over a pint of blood, which should have been in an acceptable range of loss, but she was sufficiently underweight that it was over 15 % of her blood volume.
She blinked at the diagnostic for several moments and conjured a glass of water. Her lips were tingling faintly.
She rummaged through her bag trying to see if she had any food and found a muesli bar that she had no recollection of. She gulped down the water and set to eating, stubbornly ignoring Draco's continued presence. He was still just standing and staring at her.
When she finished her third glass of water and every crumb of muesli, she glanced up at him in irritation.
“I'm going to be here for a while before I'll be able to apparate,” she said as she glared at him.
“Why can't you apparate?” he asked.
She stared at him for a moment and then gestured at the floor.
“Blood loss. I had to walk here from the bridge. There's probably a trail, actually. As I mentioned, I was out of dittany, so I have no blood replenishing potion on hand in my emergency kit. I'll have to wait until I feel stable enough to apparate. If I stand up now, l'll probably just faint.”
Draco appeared to be growing pale with rage. His jaw kept clenching and releasing the way Ron's did when he was on the verge of exploding. He kept staring at her as though he resented her mere existence.
He'd clearly managed to get entirely over whatever passing interest he'd had in her. She'd been pining, and he'd apparently spent the last six weeks remembering that he hated her, that he'd always hated her, and that her Mudblood existence in the world was an offense to him.
He was a far better occlumens than she was.
She'd have to admit to Moody that she'd misstepped and blown her assignment.
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.
Flashback 18
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.
I've been here every week. You're the one who stopped coming. I didn't even want to drink that night. You made me stay and then punished me for it. Why do you even care? Why are you here? Why are you spying for us? Why can't you make sense so I can stop wondering if you're redeemable or not? I was here. I was here and you were the one who never came back.