It didn't feel like a dream. It was real. She could smell the salt in the air, hear the leaves shift in the breeze and the water trickling. She could smell camphor and pine needles. Draco's hand was warm and entwined with hers.
And yet there was an edge of paranoia that she couldn't shake. There had to be something lurking, something waiting, something that was going to go wrong. Inevitable ruin was dangling over her head like the sword of Damocles.
The island felt as though it were built upon a razor thin sheet of ice. If Hermione stepped wrong or forgot to the careful for a moment, it would crack, and she'd plunge back into the black, cold, world she'd just escaped from, dragging Draco and everyone else with her.
Every step. Every breath.
Careful. Be so careful.
You always lose the things you love. Always.
Her jaw started trembling. She wanted to go back inside; it felt safer to be inside. Where was her wand?
“I never made any plans for this,” Draco said. “Being here.”
Hermione looked up at him, startled from her reverie. He was staring out towards the sea as though he was having difficulty believing it was there.
He found it all as difficult to believe in as she did. The world was never kind to them.
However, when he looked down at her, she realised there'd been a tension in him that was absent for the first time that she could recall. He was still on edge; he was still carrying two wands and several knives and a dark artifact, but there was the absence of a certain bracedness that Hermione had grown accustomed to. He no longer held himself as though he constantly expected to be struck on some quarter.
It was the expression he used to wear when they met in Whitecroft; when she could tell as he apparated into the room that he'd mentally prepared himself that she could be injured. Since she'd arrived at the manor, she realised, he'd always looked that way. Now, for the first time, it had faded.
Thin ice was at least something to stand on.
“What do you want me to do now?” he asked.
She blinked. “Whatever you want. You get to do whatever you want now.”
He looked around them. “I don't think I remember how to do that.”
Hermione gave a wan smile. “I don't either.” She looked around and held his hand more tightly. “We'll find out what it's like together. We don't have to hurry. We have the rest of our lives to figure it out.”
Once she wasn't worried about waking Draco, Hermione set to work in her lab. It took her a week to build a basic prosthetic for him. The amputation had healed perfectly, but his blood stayed permanently thin unless he was regularly taking a potion for it.
He sat on the edge of her lab table while she carefully fitted the base of the prosthetic onto his forearm.
“This first prosthetic isn't much,” she said as she muttered the spells. “It will only connect with major nerves, so you'll only have a vague sense of the movement and touch. You won't be able to do anything that requires fine motor control, but it will help maintain the neural structures while I make something better. If you wait too long, it's hard to recover full range of movement with a prosthetic since you can't feel it as clearly.”
She slid the metal arm onto the base. There was a quiet click as the two pieces fit together. She tapped her wand along the metal fingers, and there was a whirring sound as they twitched. She spent several minutes checking that everything was connected and studying diagnostics to verify she'd fitted everything perfectly. Draco tended to claim that everything was fine until he passed out.
She looked up at Draco with a nervous expression. “This is going to hurt a lot, but just for a split second and only this one time. Unless you break the base of the prosthetic I won't ever have to do this again. I'm connecting the nerves. If I don't do it when you can feel it, the connection doesn't integrate as well.”
He clenched his jaw. “Just do it.”
“Amalgamare.”
Draco screamed through his teeth as the nerves in his arm were lashed together with the magical nerves in the prosthetic. A shudder ran down his entire body, including the prosthetic. The metal fingers spasmed with an audible clicking sound.
“Sorry. I'm sorry.”
He shook his head sharply and lifted his arm to stare at it. “It's fine.”
She rested her hand against the cool metal. “Can you feel my touch?”
Draco was silent for a minute. “I can tell there's contact, it's a vague sense of pressure, but without a sense of texture or temperature or how much I'm being touched.”
Hermione ran her hand along the forearm up to the fingers. “That's about as much as you'll be able to feel with this.” She looked at him seriously. “You'll have to be careful. Since you can't feel it, you won't always know how much pressure you're using. There will be a temptation to over-compensate for the lack of sensory feedback by doing things more roughly in order to feel it. I made the hand breakable so that if you exceed a certain threshold the internal mechanisms will be the thing to break and not — something else.”
Draco's expression tensed, and he looked at her sharply.
She started to run her wand and fingers along the prosthetic, checking the spellwork. Draco tried to pull his arm away from her.
She closed her hand around the wrist to still it, and he pulled harder. She glanced up and met his worried gaze.
She lifted her wand away. “Draco, you're not going to hurt me. Look.”
She tapped a panel on the inner-wrist and opened it, revealing the mechanisms inside. “See where the tendons connect here? The pieces connecting each one are made intentionally breakable. If you tried to use enough pressure to break a bone, this piece will snap. You could bruise a piece of fruit, but you won't be able to break a wand in half. If these break, the part of the hand they're connected to will go limp.” She closed the panel again. “You won't hurt me. I just wanted to explain to you why it will probably get broken a lot at the beginning. It's a part of the design. It will take a while to figure out how to tell when you're using the right amount of force. I'll teach you how to fix it yourself too. It's all part of the process.”
She spent several minutes casting spells and testing it before she stepped back. “Can you touch your thumb and index finger together?”
Draco stared at the hand for several seconds. His eyes narrowed when the hand stayed still. After a minute the thumb twitched.
He looked annoyed. “I can tell I'm connected to it, but I can't tell how to make it do anything.”
“It's fine. It takes getting used to. You'll just have to practice. Close your eyes, and see if you can tell which finger I'm touching.”
They had so much time.
They explored the island. Draco showed her the trails and old, mossy paths that wound through the forests. They went down to the rocky beach, and Hermione stood at the edge of the water and stared at the vast ocean stretching out as far as she could see.
It felt like they were the only people on earth. Hidden a world away from the war.
Hermione went foraging. Draco had bought books about the edible and magical vegetation in the area at some point. The island was somewhere off the coast of Japan. Draco, and sometimes Ginny and James, went with her while she wandered through the forests and fields gathering ingredients to create her own supply cabinet.
They slept. They went to bed early and slept late and sometimes didn't get out of bed until well past noon.
They would sit in the garden and Hermione would never know what to say. There was so much time she never felt sure when it was the right time to say any of it.
Sometimes she just wanted to exist pretending her life had only started a few days after they arrived on the island. She didn't want to reckon with the past. She was so tired of living her life on an eternal countdown.