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Sometimes, she could forget. Filling her days with quidditch and her nights with friends, she could go days, weeks even, without remembering. It was nice, when that happened. When she forgot why she did everything she did, played pretend at it being for fun.
It always seemed to creep back in, though. She’d open her eyes, and instead of her bed she’d find stone. Cold, hard, wet stone. She’d find it pressed against her cheek, and her body, and she’d feel the cold down to her very bones.
She’d see the darkness of the chamber, and cower from it. She’d see the snake, horrifically long moving around. She’d see Tom too, watching her. The look of cold disinterest in his green eyes as he watched her fade away.
She would see her breath in the air and she’d try to move, but she was never able to. That feeling of being so weak and so tired clung to her, but the worst was always the hissing.
Most people were fascinated by parseltongue; she thought that maybe if she’d heard it first somewhere else she would be too. But she didn’t, and every time she heard Harry speak that language it took everything in her to stop the tremors threatening to make themselves known.
She wondered if most people knew that death had a smell. It was distinctive and subtle at the same time, and in the chamber it had clawed its way into her senses and found a home in her memories. She found it in the oddest places: on her way to class, walking through the fields outside her house, in her room.
The first time she’d smelled it, she’d frozen. Her face had paled and her body had shook, until she turned around. But nothing was there, nothing was ever there. After the first few times she wondered if it was coming from her. She wondered if death itself had somehow sunk into her skin like the smell of it had sunk into her memories, and she wondered if she’d ever free from it.
Six years later and it still wasn’t. He was dead, but he still clung to her, ruining her. Because, when it came down to it, that’s what he’d done. He’d ruined her.
Everyone lauded Harry for his victory, for surviving Lord Voldemort, but they all seemed to forget that she had too. Harry and Ron had brushed it off, saying she was safe when she’d woken up in the hospital wing and then never speaking of it again. Her parents had called her “their brave girl” and forgotten about it as soon as they learned about it. Everyone else seemed to have forgotten by the next year too.
She’d wanted to laugh, the first time Hermione had teased her for her crush. “I see you watching him,” the older girl had told her. And so she’d smiled, and nodded along.
What else was she supposed to do? Like everyone else, Hermione had forgotten that Tom had been in her head. She wondered if he was as kind to Harry as he’d been to her. Because he had been kind, he’d listened to her, given her advice, and made her laugh.
When she started losing time, he’d comforted her. When she’d woken up with feathers in her hair and blood on her hands, he’d reassured her. Told her that she must have done it while she was asleep, but it was okay, because he understood.
She understood just how easily people had joined him. How he’d convinced all those people to kill for him, to die for him. Those months where they’d shared her body he’d become her closest friend and her closest confidant. Finally, it had felt as though someone understood her. Appreciated her.
Until, of course, she’d woken up on that cold stone floor. She told herself that she hated him, and for the most part she did. But she kept watching Harry, watching his green eyes that looked so like Tom's, and wondered if on his worst days, he missed him too.