Title: How Do They Rise Up
Characters/Pairings: Hermione & Padma, canon pairings
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: A fair bit of remembering war.
When: Post-DH.
Summary: Hermione has always been good at analytical.
Disclaimer: Characters and world courtesy of J. K. Rowling. They're hers, in other words, not mine.
Author's Note: Beta-ing done by the amazing torylltales & marycontraire (both on LJ)- huge thanks to both of them. The title, of course, is from the song that features heavily in Terry Pratchett's 'Night Guard', all copyright Pratchett. This is the longest piece I've ever done, winding up at 3.5K. Some notes - this is AU in that at some point Rowling did state that Hermione was the only one of the Trio to return to Hogwarts, which I kinda completely switched. Other than that, all canon pairings are in place, canon deaths, etc. Thanks for reading! Feed-back is loved.

*

Harry's deluged with half of England and Ron's somewhere with his family. Hermione had once imagined having time to herself when Voldemort was finally defeated, but she can't just stand by Harry's side forever, so she rolls up her sleeves and pulls out her wand, says incantations and spells, stitching wounds and holes in bodies closed with words, and tries not to remember that only half an hour ago she was slicing holes in skin and tearing open bodies.

Once, almost eight years ago, a hat had whispered to her of Ravenclaw and Gryffindor, and she still holds enough Ravenclaw in her that she can use that part of her brain now, the part that can operate on knowledge and facts and words and wands and forget that the things she is working on are people, or perhaps once were, now just mutilated flesh and blood. It is harder to accept that sometimes there is nothing you can do, but if she is just analytical enough she can do even that.

Hermione has always been good at analytical.

One of the healers finds her trying to help and soon pairs her up with Padma Patil.

"It's better to have two people together," she explains with a sympathetic smile. "You keep an eye on each other for slips. It's easy to make mistakes when you're exhausted, and everyone's exhausted." Hermione nods and gets back to work. Padma doesn't say anything, but they talk in glances, in fierce concentration and in the gentle press of magic on broken bodies.

Mrs. Weasley finds her eventually and pulls the two of them out, sitting them down at a table and putting mugs of hot heat in their hands.

"They've got all the basic care done, they're transporting everyone they can to St. Mungo's now," she says, and orders them to eat before she heads off, presumably back to her family.

They take small sips together, expressionless and silent. There isn't really anything to talk about.

*

It's a very small, unobtrusive paragraph in the Quibbler, crammed among all the other funeral notices the newspaper is dedicating itself to these days. "Memorial service to be held for Parvati Patil," it says, and goes on to give the time and place. Hermione circles it in black magic marker she'd found somewhere and thinks that the color is appropriate. It's the fourth funeral in today's paper she's ringed in marker, and she knows it won't be the last.

Her days are already overfull with funerals, and she'd never known Parvati well, but she re-irons her black robes for the ninth time that week and goes, because she and Padma had worked over the dead and dying and the living (that lucky few) together.

Padma is wearing midnight blue and there is no body, but Hermione had already guessed that would be the case. Those who have a body have funerals, not memorials.

She stands at the back and then slips out afterwards. She isn't sure how to heal her own wounds, much less anyone else's.

By the end of the week, she's lost count of how many funerals she's been to.

*

Hermione doesn't see Padma for a while after that. When she meets Harry and Ron for Hogsmeade weekends, they tell her that Padma, like Hermione, hasn't returned to re-take her 7th year, instead taking her N.E.W.T.'s at the make-up exams and moving on.

The two boys push Hermione to come back ("They're accepting people back until a month after school starts! I know you already took your N.E.W.T.'s but this would be educational!" and "But we're here! What are you going to do?"). She doesn't know how to tell them that she can't eat her meals in a place that to her reeks of blood and people she tried to save.

Instead she laughs it off, flaunts her N.E.W.T. scores in a highly uncharacteristic manner, and says that she'll find something, and anyways they're going in for Auror training next year, she'll be by herself then too won't she? She's not sure they accept her explanations, but they accept her at least, and even if it strains the tentative relationship she and Ron are building she thinks they have a solid foundation.

They'll weather it.

*

On the day of the first anniversary, Hermione finds herself in Hogsmeade, not particularly sure why she's there. It's more crowded than usual, and Hermione recognizes others who fought that day. They look proper and normal, and she doesn't want to go up and say "Hi, do you remember?" because she's fairly certain none of them want to remember.

She sure as hell doesn't.

So instead she sits down and orders a drink in The Three Broomsticks, at a table far in the corner, and stares at her drink. The poetry she's been reading at home comes to mind, and she begins to recite it quietly.

"We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day."

"It fits, doesn't it?" someone says, and she looks up to see Padma standing there. "Wrong name of the day, but you can't get everything perfect. Do you mind if I sit?"

"No," Hermione says, and then adds, "I was just remembering" though she knows she doesn't need to.

"We all are, in our own ways," Padma says.

"I heard Susan Bones broke her wand," Hermione says, and the unspoken words linger beneath. I heard she broke her wand and swore she'd never use magic again, not after The Battle, not after seeing what it could do.

"Burned it too," Padma says, and signals for a drink. "I thought about that, at first, but I don't think I want to after all."

"I don't think I could," Hermione says. "And I don't think it would help."

"Perhaps not," Padma says, taking the firewhiskey from the waitress' hand. "So what are you going to do, then?" Hermione hesitates, then looks at Padma and thinks why not?

"It's just an idea, but I think I would like to go to Muggle university," she says. "They have a science they call psychology. It's learning how to heal everyone's inner wounds, the wounds on their souls. They even have special courses on being a psychiatrist for war veterans." Padma tilts her head to the side.

"I don't think I could do that," she says. "I still have wounds of my own."

"Most of us do," Hermione says. We were the lucky ones.

"We few, we happy few," Padma murmurs, and Hermione toasts her with an attempt at a smile. They drink.

*

Hermione,

Perhaps you'll think this presumptuous of me, since we know each other very little, but I want to make a proposal.

I've been thinking about what I'm going to do myself, and if you'd be all right with it I'd like to room with you at Muggle university. I want to study Philosophy, and History. We didn't get enough of that at Hogwarts. And if we roomed together, well, we could do magic in our room without worrying about our roommate coming in. We could rent a flat or stay on campus, I don't know.

Anyways, I'll just give you my address, and if you're at all interested get back to me soon, please.

Either way, good luck.

-Padma

Hermione had charmed all her luggage to be feather-light days ago in anticipation of the crowded stairs. Everyone else is dragging heavy boxes and bookcases up, but Hermione had carefully prepared and it takes her and Padma only three trips to get all their boxes into what is now their room. Once everything is safely up they close and lock the door and pull out their wands and set to work to get their room looking more like a home and less like a blank box.

Hermione's charmed her pictures to stay still, and she places the two frames down on her desk carefully. Her with Harry and Ron. Her with her parents. Padma places a picture of her with her parents and Parvati carefully on her dresser.

Together they Scourgify every surface of the room. Hermione likes the smell of lemon-scented soap that follows the spell's wake – it's good to remember that you can use a wand for something other than destruction.

*

"Why did we never learn this at Hogwarts?" Hermione says in frustration. "This is important!"

"Mmm," Padma says from her desk at the other side of the room. "Hm?" Hermione spins her chair around to face Padma.

"This is basic," she says. "Writing and math. But we never learned it! We got essay assignments, but that was more get-it-right or fail than actually teaching us how to do it."

"And this is nothing like Arithmancy," Padma says with a thump of her hand on the College Algebra book on her desk, paying attention now. "I'm going to take Biology next semester, I've decided. Did we ever learn anything about our body, or how plants and animals grow and why they have the properties they do?"

"I don't think we did," Hermione says.

*

She buys a laptop while she's home on Christmas break. When she comes back to school, Padma's plugging in a laptop to the wall. They smile almost guiltily at each other.

*

"Kinesics 101, Memory and Concentration Techniques, and Organizational Psychology," Padma says. "You have the weirdest classes."

"You're the one taking classes called Aesthetics and Ethical Theory!" Hermione retorts, snatching her schedule back. "Anyways, I have a paper due. Tomorrow."

"And I thought you were the only person in Gryffindor who didn't procrastinate," Padma says a bit smugly, folding her arms over. Hermione narrows her eyes.

"It's not my fault!" she protests. "I just… got caught up in stuff."

"You got a Livejournal?" Padma says, staring at Hermione's screen. Hermione flushes deep red and then realizes that Padma is blushing too.

"You have one too!" she almost crows, jabbing her finger at Padma.

"It's not really going Muggle!" Padma says. "It's just… admitting that sometimes they come up with awesome stuff?"

"Maybe that's something wizards could use doing more often," she says.

*

Hermione writes down words, stringing them together into paragraphs, and paragraphs into essays until she thinks she will bleed ink.

"Sometimes," Padma says one night right after Hermione switches off the light, "I wonder if she would understand me doing this." Hermione rolls onto her side and looks across the room.

"Why wouldn't she?" she asks.

"Parvati was a Gryffindor for a reason, you know," Padma says. "She was always braver than me. I wonder if she would think I was just running away from it all, trying to hide from everything. Sometimes it feels like I am."

"I don't think we are," Hermione says. "I think we're just remembering that there are other things in this world besides death and war." Padma is very silent.

"It still feels like I'm running away," she says finally, and Hermione doesn't know how to answer. Sometimes she feels like she's running away, too.

*

The second anniversary comes around during finals. Padma, to Hermione's deep surprise, smuggles Firewhiskey into their room and pours them both a glass.

"To the Fallen," she says, and they both drink. By the time it's midnight they're both more than a little tipsy and in no condition to be studying. "Do you think we'll ever actually forget?" Padma says, voice muffled by the pillows she's curled up around.

"No," Hermione says. "But maybe one day we'll be able to remember, too."

"She wore red and I wore blue," Padma says. "And half the time people didn't even realize we were twins until we were out of uniform. And she was always the brave one, and she could make me brave just by association." There is a short pause. "And I think I'm going to be very, very sick," she adds shakily, and Hermione gets a pot over to her just in time to catch the vomit.

She cries for a bit, short, breathy sobs that shake her body, and Hermione runs a cool towel over her face and brushes her hair out of her face.

*

"Sometimes I feel like we're just two orphans running around in the world trying to find out where we're supposed to go," Padma says the next morning.

"Very hungover orphans, but yes," Hermione groans. Padma seems to have slept off her hangover, while Hermione somehow ended up with the pounding headache and the cool towel on her face. Padma turns a movie on and they watch it together as Hermione waits for the aspirin to take affect.

When it's over they buckle back down to studying, Padma unconsciously shaping the words of the text as she reads. Hermione jots down more notes and tries to push down the fear of failure that's already started to rise.

*

At night she lies in bed, presses her fingers against the pulse at her throat and falls asleep to the gentle beat of her own heart.

*
"The thing is," Hermione says, "we've been dealt the good cards. So we've got to play them, or it's letting everyone else down."

"I wonder how well unicorn hair burns?" Padma mutters, throwing a look at her wand.

"You'll be needing that tomorrow," Hermione says. "When you aren't drunk." She considers that statement. "When we aren't drunk," she corrects herself.

*

When Padma takes Anatomy of the Human Body their second year in college, Hermione joins her. They learn about humors and liver and bile and adrenaline.

"I think it may be a good thing we don't study this at Hogwarts," Hermione says thoughtfully one night when they're studying. "Imagine the spells people could come up with if they knew the human body that well."

"I don't want to," Padma mutters.

Hermione dreams about wands carving paths down the lines of her veins.

*

Padma shows Hermione the drawings in her Biology textbook, how blood vessels connect the body up and down. It looks like the pictures in Hermione's History of Magic textbook, the diagrams of ley lines it claims run through the ground and connect the land together. Hermione puts her fingers to her throat and feels the blood pulse through it. She digs her feet into the earth and imagines she can feel the magic running through the earth.

"Maybe that's what happens when we die," she says. "Maybe our blood is magic and it runs through the earth." Padma throws her a very Ravenclaw look, and Hermione just shrugs her shoulders. "Not all Muggle ideas have to be wrong," she says. She imagines England like a person now, magic connecting every inch of it to the rest, veins and arteries and capillaries spreading outwards.

When she holds hands with Ron she lines up the pulse points at their wrists and imagines the land connected together as she kisses him.

"We should visit Avalon," she tells Padma.

*

The first time Harry and Ron come to visit her is in the fall of her sophomore year. They're bubbling over with excitement about the training programs in the Aurors.

"It's really rushed, because they need new people out in the field as fast as they can," Harry explains seriously, his green eyes shining, "But they're still doing their best to give us good training. It's really intense and tough." It's easy to see how much he loves it, and Ron isn't following along any more – he loves it just as much.

The two boys start to go into the details of their training, describing some of the spells they're learning, and Hermione can feel Padma stiffening all the way across the room.

She heads the conversation back into the theoretical territories of their training deftly and Padma relaxes a little.

*

When the third anniversary rolls around, they don't drink. They have finals and papers to turn in almost all day. At dusk they apparate into Hogsmeade and stand there on the main street looking up at the castle.

"Do you want to go up?" Padma says finally.

"Do you?" Hermione asks.

"Not really," Padma says. They apparate to the little park near their dorms and head back up to get some sleep.

*

By the start of their third year Padma has switched her major to Biology with a minor of Philosophy.

*

Ron apparates into their room with a loud crack and Hermione spins around in her chair.

"Ron?" she says. "I thought you had a test today!" She crosses the room swiftly and hugs him.

"I aced it!" he says jubilantly, grabbing her hands. "It was my Movement and Disguises test, remember? And I aced it!" She giggles as he spins her around.

"I'm so proud of you!" she squeals.

"I'm taking you out to dinner to celebrate," he says.

"Ron! I've got tests to study for too!" she says, but it's no sort of an excuse and she's already grabbing her hat and some paper to leave a note for Padma.

*

They visit Avalon on New Year's, and the land pulses beneath Hermione's feet. She grabs Padma's hands and whirls her around in an impromptu dance under the stars, cold snow crunching underfoot.

"See?" she shouts. "You can feel the earth's heartbeat here!" Padma laughs wildly and they spin under the stars together until they collapse and head back towards the room they rented at a little hotel.

That night, Hermione dreams of gaping holes in the earth, the flow of magic stopped and deadened. When she wakes up, she lies in the dark and listens to the earth sing outside her window.

One day it will do that everywhere, she promises herself.

*

"To the Fallen," Padma says, and takes a small sip of Firewhiskey.

They drink their glasses and sit together, and then Padma breaks the silence.

"When we were really young, like maybe five, Parvati convinced me to try Firewhiskey," she says, and Hermione smiles.

*

"We're seniors," Padma says. "We're really seniors."

"Damn straight we are!" Hermione says in glee, and pirouettes. "And we are going to graduate!"

"It'll be weird, not being in school," Padma says, but she laughs and grabs Hermione's hands and they spin wildly under the cool autumn sun.

*

"I feel a little guilty," Hermione says abruptly one afternoon as Padma's padding around the kitchenette making tea. "Ron's out there doing his Auror work, and so's Harry, and here I am going to Muggle school. I'm not doing anything that's helping at all. I'm just avoiding it all."

"Remember what you said to me a while ago?" Padma says, putting a cup down in front of Hermione. "You told me we were just remembering that there's still good in the world. That still holds." Hermione nods and bites her lip.

"Thanks," she says, and Padma smiles at her.

"Drink your tea. And have you had breakfast yet?"

*

"Are you going to the ceremony?" Harry asks, and Hermione looks up from where she's crouched over examining the potted rose bush on their porch.

"My nose is all red from the cold, isn't it?" she says, and then blinks. "Ceremony? What ceremony?" Standing up, she tucks her arms close over her chest to keep in the heat and hops on one foot.

"Fifth year anniversary of the Battle," Harry says seriously, shoving his glasses back up his nose. "They're putting up a monument, all the Aurors are going to be there."

"I dunno," Hermione says. "We'll see."

Ron mentions it once but he doesn't ask her to come, and she's thankful for that.

*

"They're going to hold a ceremony up at Hogwarts," Hermione says, tapping her pencil on her book. "Fifth anniversary, putting up a monument, all that."

"We should go," Padma says, but neither of them makes any effort to get ready until it's dusk. When they step onto the grounds for the first time in almost five years, the crowds have dispersed. The memorial is a blank dark black wall that stretches to the edge of the forest. They walk up to it together, and names begin to shimmer and appear, spreading out in all directions.

Together they search for Parvati's name, and then stand and look at it for a long time. Padma reaches out and brushes the name with her fingers.

"To tomorrow," she says. "It's what Parvati would want." They turn and walk away together, the names behind them fading out.

*

Hermione flings her cap up up up and doesn't need to Levitate it. Coming back down is all part of the experience, so she throws her head back and laughs as Padma tosses handfuls of conjured confetti over them both and Ron and Harry whistle loud and clear.