She looked away. "I just — I haven't been sleeping much lately."
It was a pathetic excuse.
No one was sleeping much and hadn't in a long time.
No matter the safe house, there were always a few people up at any hour; playing cards, smoking, and doing anything else to while away the long night hours.
Harry was almost always among the insomniacs. He seemed to exist on an impossibly insufficient amount of sleep. He wasn't even sure anymore if the nightmares were Voldemort or just his own stress and guilt. When he'd start walking into walls and standing and staring blankly off into space, Hermione would drag him into the hospital ward and dose him with dreamless sleep.
Hermione had her own nightmares, mostly of Harry and Ron dying while she tried and failed to save them.
The faces of the dead haunted her too.
All the people she hadn't been quick enough; hadn't been clever enough; hadn't been skilled enough to save.
Colin Creevey often appeared in her dreams.
Colin had been the first person who died under Hermione's care. It was shortly after Voldemort seized the Ministry, before the Order had been forced to abandon Hogwarts. Madam Pomfrey had stepped out to buy new potions when Colin was rushed in. Harry had been there, keeping Hermione company during what had been a quiet afternoon.
Colin had been struck by a flaying curse. There was no countercurse for it.
Hermione couldn't knock Colin out.
The curse forced him to stay conscious. Stupefy. Dreamless sleep. Even Draught of Living Death. None of it worked. The curse tore through and kept him conscious. Hermione tried everything she could think of to reverse it. To slow it. To stall it. The skin kept cutting away. Colin kept screaming. If she restored the skin somewhere, it flayed itself again. If she didn't replace the skin the curse moved deeper. Into the muscle and tissue.
The curse didn't stop until it reached his bones.
Colin Creevey died surrounded by a pile of wafer-thin layers of his flesh and a pool of blood while Hermione sobbed and tried everything she could think of to save him.
He'd been a perfectly excised skeleton when Madam Pomfrey returned.
Hermione never recovered from it.
She didn't smoke, didn't drink, didn't pick fights, didn't have casual sex. She just worked harder and longer. She didn't have time to grieve or regret. There was always a new body being brought to her and she had no time to second guess herself.
She slept when she was too exhausted to dream.
She stared up at Fred. "It's just a bad day."
He gave a tight smile. "It's all right, Mione, you're entitled to have them like the rest of us. Honestly, I can't for the life of me understand how you keep doing this."
Hermione turned and looked around the infirmary feeling helpless.
"If I didn't — who would?"
The Order relied upon her being there.
It wasn't a sentiment born from an inflated opinion. It was simply a fact. At that point in the war, Hermione was more specialised in healing dark magic and curses than anyone else in most of Britain.
When Voldemort had taken over the Ministry of Magic, the Order had been forced to stop going to St Mungo's. Any Resistance members sent to the hospital were immediately arrested on terrorism charges and then disappeared into Voldemort's prisons.
The Ministry takeover had been carefully timed. The first law enacted was the Muggle-born Registration Act. Voldemort understood the vital role healing played in a war and so St Mungo's was the first place purged under the new law. All the Muggle-born and half-blood healers were quickly arrested and had their wands snapped before they could flee to the Order.
Poppy Pomfrey suddenly became one of the Resistance's most broadly experienced Healers. Hermione had been apprenticed under her and studying intensively since Dumbledore's death. When European Healers sympathetic to the Resistance had secretly reached out and offered training, Hermione had been the only person with enough healing knowledge to qualify that the Order could afford to spare.
She had left everyone behind. Said her goodbyes and been smuggled across Europe from hospital to hospital to learn as much advanced healing magic as she could. She returned after almost two years when their hospital was compromised during a battle and all the healers they had recruited were killed along with Horace Slughorn. Severus had trained Hermione in potions until she'd left and she'd continued her studies as they related to healing during her training throughout Europe. When she returned, Hermione was both a fully trained emergency Healer and medical Potioneer. Her specialty was deconstructing curses in order to develop counter-spells.
The first counter-curse she invented was for the flaying curse.
With Voldemort's curse development division constantly debuting new experimental spells during every battle, the need for her was desperate.
Hermione trained as many Resistance members in healing as were willing to learn. Unfortunately, healing magic was a precise and highly subtle art. It required tremendous attention and devotion to achieve success. The Order tried to include at least one person with field healing abilities in every skirmish in order to try to keep fighters alive long enough to get back to the infirmary. But, because of the high demand to deploy them, field healers were overworked and had the Order's highest fatality rates.
Most fighters preferred to spend their free time drilling more defensive magic rather than believe they'd need to know anything more than basic magical first aid. The stubborn optimism it revealed made Hermione shake with frustration when she allowed herself to think about it.
The Order simply did not have enough people to utilise many of them well. The failures in leadership trickled down and affected the entire Resistance.
They'd been unprepared for the war. Dumbledore's death had effectively cut the legs from under them and they had been struggling to survive since then.
Malfoy had done that.
His murder of Dumbledore had crippled them. Doomed them.
Now he was trying to appear like some twisted savior, willing to staunch the wound he'd opened.
Hermione hated him. More than she hated anyone but Voldemort. Antonin Dolohov, the head of the curse development division was a close third.
Malfoy had started the war, caused all the hurt and now she was required to swallow all her loathing and be—
— willing.
The dread since her initial conversation with Moody was already swallowing her.
She didn't know how to stop hating Malfoy. She didn't think she was good enough an actress to be able to pretend that she had. The thought of being in the same room with him without trying to curse him — to punish him for everything he was responsible for — she wasn't sure if she had the self-control.
Hermione gritted her teeth and pressed her forehead against a windowpane while she tried to think, trying to force herself to breathe and not break something or start crying.
She couldn't break down. She needed to compartmentalise. She needed to force all her hatred of Malfoy into a box and keep it somewhere where it couldn't bleed out and taint all her interactions with him. She wouldn't think clearly if she were constantly seething with rage.
She needed to take a wider perspective.
Utilising his spying was more important than the short-term satisfaction of hating him.
They needed him.
Yet a part of her wanted to make him suffer. She couldn't help but hope that once she had what they needed from him, she could make him pay.
But — if they won the war as that point, the victory would be owed to him. Hermione had agreed to be the price for that. As much as she loathed him, if he saved them all, she knew she'd feel obliged to uphold her end.