Harry and Ron and everyone else might have been alive then.
Every time they received the newspapers, reading was a flood of both relief and poisonous grief.
Hermione devoted most of her time to creating a better prosthetic for Draco. It was like building a several thousand piece puzzle. She had to make all the components herself and fit them together in a way that didn't interfere with the other elements.
She finished it in November. Draco studied it as she detached the metal prosthetic and then clicked the new prosthetic into place. Draco hissed and then flinched as all the nerves connected to the new prosthetic.
“How did you—?”
She traced her fingers along the porcelain plating, a smile playing at her mouth. “You can feel it then?”
He nodded. He unfurled his fingers and closed them. There was an almost indiscernible metal whirring sound inside.
Hermione held the prosthetic in her hands, brushing her thumbs across the palm and watching the fingers twitch in response. “See the swirls? The porcelain is laced with silver threads. A sensory aspect on metal plating would have had trouble with variance and interfered with the other components, but by using threads of silver, I could lace them through the external plating of the hand and arm like real nerves. They're concentrated on the fingers”—she stroked her fingers up to the fingertips, and he curved them precisely to catch hers—“so you should be able to feel most things now. The internal mechanisms of this are stronger than the last ones. My plan is to upgrade them every week or so as you adapt.”
“Clever. Although,” he picked up a pencil and twirled it between his fingers before rotating his wrist and observing how the hand moved, “you could have just given me a silver hand. It would have been quicker.”
Hermione gave him an incredulous glare. “You really think I was going to give you a hand that slowly sucked out your life-force? You already have enough Dark Magic being constantly drawn on through your runes, you don't need a silver hand doing it too. Even if it would have been faster, those are incredibly unreliable, I researched them, there are cases where they strangled—”
Draco chuckled under his breath, and Hermione cut herself off and stared at him for a moment before rolling her eyes.
“You have an appalling sense of humour.” She tapped her wand against a porcelain fingertip, giving it a small electric shock.
He yelped with surprise and cradled his new hand against his chest.
Hermione eyed him severely as she put away several tools and then pulled out a quill feather.
“Now, serious testing, try a spell.”
Draco reached for his wand, but Hermione stopped him with a sly smile.
“No. Not with your wand, just like this.” She extended her left hand demonstratively, pointing her index finger and mimed the Wingardium Leviosa hand motion.
Draco stared at her with surprise and looked down at the prosthetic. “You said last month it wouldn't work.”
She smiled up at him and tucked a curl behind her ear. “I did. Then I figured it out. Although, no one has ever built a wand into a prosthetic before, so we'll have to check it regularly to make sure all the components are safely isolated. Try it. It didn't work very well for me, but I used one of your wands, so it was hard to say.”
He extended his left hand towards the table. “Wingardium Leviosa.”
The feather lifted off the table and floated easily through the air.
Draco stared at the hand again and then over to her, his eyes glittering. “That's — How did you make this work?”
Hermione's throat tightened slightly, and she looked over and straightened her set of screwdrivers. “Oh — well, I actually used my research from deconstructing the manacles.”
She glanced up at Draco and found that he'd gone still as though he'd been frozen.
She cleared her throat. “Sussex had a lot of really exceptional alchemy and wand core research, you know, the way they stripped and channeled magic, so—” she lifted her chin and met his eyes, “I took the fundamentals of what they developed and used it to make something that wasn't horrible.”
He kept staring at her for several seconds, and then he looked down at the prosthetic.
Hermione looked down at her bare wrists. “The worst things are always created during wars; that's the way it is in the Muggle world too. There's never any way of putting them back in Pandora's box once they're let out. In a few years, I'm sure — every Wizarding government in the world will use manacles to suppress prisoners' magic. I thought it should be used to create something that helps people too.” She gave him a faint smile and then picked up her wand. “Maybe someday I could send some of the designs to a hospital somewhere. Assuming not everyone maimed during the war was killed during imprisonment, there are a lot of people who could benefit from better magical prosthesis.”
She looked up at Draco again, and he was still standing where he'd frozen. Then he stepped towards her and hesitantly captured her face in both hands, turning it upwards, and cradling it in his palms the way he used to. He traced his thumbs lightly across the arch of her cheekbones; one was cooler to the touch than the other. She shivered.
He pressed his lips against her forehead. “You're better than anyone,” he said quietly, the words brushing against her skin. “This world doesn't deserve you at all.”
It snowed in December. It was beautiful. It blanketed their world in white and Hermione would sit beside Draco and they would listen to the sound of it falling.
Hermione felt as though she were as big as a house, and eight months of pregnancy made her want to hibernate, but Draco pulled her out of bed and coaxed her to go outside anyway.
“It's cold. Walking makes my feet and back hurt,” she said sulkily while he wrapped scarves around her.
“I'll carry you.”
She snorted. “You will not, you'll break your back. I weigh as much as an erumpent.”
“I'll reinforce my hand so it doesn't break,” he said with a smirk.
Hermione gasped indignantly, her eyes growing wide. “You're terrible.”
“You told me to make you go outside every day even when you didn't feel like it.”
Hermione scowled and pulled on her cloak, “I didn't expect it to mean you were going to interrupt my nap.”
“I tried to wait it out, but it was unending.”
Hermione sniffed and let him lace up and tie her boots.
They walked on carefully cleared paths. The sky, trees and the ground were all glittering white from the freshly fallen snow.
“It's almost Christmas,” she said. Her breath rose like a cloud as she spoke.
Draco nodded.
“I didn't know I'd be this sick of being pregnant, but it's hard to imagine that we're going to have a baby soon.” She glanced over at Draco. “It's going to be different once there are three of us.”
Draco gave another terse nod. Hermione squeezed his hand. “Hopefully she won't inherit our combined stubbornness.”
Draco snorted. “If I were a betting man, I'd say the odds are heavily against us.”
Hermione smiled. “Probably.”
The baby was indeed stubborn.
Hermione's due date came and went without so much as a Braxton Hicks contraction. Hermione went from hibernating to determinedly climbing every flight of stairs in the house and hiking up the steepest paths on the island in the hopes that it would make something happen. Anything.
She was nearly forty-one weeks pregnant and positive she could not endure being pregnant for another day when she finally had a contraction. Then another. They came at irregular intervals for two days before gradually occurring every eight to ten minutes and staying there.