Chapter Text
Rosemary for Remembrance
Hermione Granger is lost.
Not in the physical sense of the word, as in lost without direction somewhere in the world. She’s lost metaphorically, as in she has absolutely no clue what is next for her. She would have honestly preferred the former, because being lost in a physical sense is more like a puzzle: and Hermione is good at puzzles.
She is practiced at being physically lost, like in first year when she, Ron, and Harry found themselves on the moving staircases and had tried to find their way back to Gryffindor tower. Or like in the Department of Mysteries in fifth year, when they’d had to escape from the Death Eaters. These were examples of the kind of ‘lost’ she could handle. She was a highly logical person, after all. She would be able to figure it out, eventually—use a compass, solve a riddle, retrace her steps.
There is no retracing your steps when you’re lost in the metaphorical sense. If she were to do that, she thinks she would only find herself back at Hogwarts, standing in the ruins of a battle that had killed her friends, peers, and mentors. She thinks that there, in the courtyard, was the last day she remembers having a sense of direction. There were paths that she needed to follow to start rebuilding her life: plan funerals for Fred, Tonks, Remus, and the dozens of other souls lost to the war. Fix the ruined remains of the castle, one stone at a time. Testify in the trials of Voldemort’s supporters and all of the Death Eaters that had been captured or surrendered. Tell Ron that she couldn’t find it in her to begin a relationship under the current circ*mstances, and face the repercussions of this rejection. These were all of the things remaining after the war, all of the things she needed to do. It should have been hard—and emotionally, it was, of course.
But there was some small, sick part of her that couldn’t help but enjoy the methodical, organized way in which these things presented themselves as a checklist to her. It helped to distract her from her own nightmares and the hours of sleep she was losing because of them. Waking each day with a task ahead of her was the only thing soothing about it all. It had been nice, while it lasted, cleaning up the mess that the war had brought. Terrible, but strangely comforting.
So now, with all items on this checklist scratched off, some twice, Hermione feels utterly and horribly lost.
Completely without a map.
As a young girl, she had always thought about the many options for her future. Working at the ministry, maybe, somewhere in Magical Law. Head of the Wizengamot, or a new position in Protection of Magical Creatures, where S.P.E.W. could take on a fully developed form under her leadership. If none of these worked out, she could always teach at Hogwarts, she used to think. With nearly perfect OWL scores, it hadn’t been a problem to pass her NEWTS with flying colours in her final year back at Hogwarts, only a few months after the end of the war.
She had every tool she needed to follow one of the many paths her younger self had paved for her. For Merlin’s sake, she had even used a time-turner in third year to stuff in as many classes as possible. She had taken every measure to ensure a future for herself beyond Hogwarts.
So why was she so stuck?
It was a terrible, unfamiliar feeling, to not have any clue what was coming next. Even in the years she spent at Hogwarts she always knew that something was coming next— some big task she would have to complete. Exams, homework, fighting off Voldemort, finding Horcruxes. Despite how awful some of these things had been, and all that they had taken from her, she had at least known that there was something coming. Something worth fighting for.
In her little one-bedroom flat in London, Hermione has no clue what is next. And this, she thinks, is the scariest thing she's faced yet.
“Go home, Hermione,” Kingsley had told her earlier this month when, finally, the last of the Death Eater trials had come to a close. She had watched with a sense of finality as Dolohov was pulled away in his cage to be sent back to Azkaban, and, collapsing into a chair with the weight of it all, this is what Kingsley’s final words to her were.
“Go home, Hermione. You can rest at last.”
Rest. Could she ever truly rest again?
She supposed that she was inclined to feel the same sense of definitive relief as everyone else. It had been over a year. The war was over. The bad guys locked up. Hogwarts rebuilt. The wizarding world back to normal. The word normal sounds foreign on her tongue. Things will never be normal. And she feels as though she will never quite understand the word ‘rest,’ again, either.
It had been eerie to watch how quickly Harry and Ron had slipped back into their normal selves. She found herself feeling as if it were her first year at Hogwarts all over again, watching the two of them whisper and joke to each other while she walked two steps behind; always two steps behind. Watching as Harry and Ginny fell into their relationship, finally getting to hold each other without worrying that they might be torn from each other’s arms by some evil force. All the while, she and Ron found themselves balancing on a tightrope, wobbling between years of history and a new future— a future that did not, as she always thought, include each other. Not in the way she used to want, at least.
Touching him was no longer second nature as it used to be. She couldn’t reach out and playfully hit his shoulder or brush past him at The Burrow without thinking about the tender way he had held her in their tent while they were searching for Horcruxes, or the stolen kisses they’d had at Grimmauld place while Harry slept. They had crossed a line that they could never take back, nor move forward with.
She had watched as they gracefully accepted Auror positions at the Ministry when they had been offered to them, not letting their physical or emotional scars get in the way of continuing to hunt down dark wizards and clean up what was left of Voldemort’s mess.
They’d come home and sleep soundly, wake up, and do it all again the next day.
Like Hermione, they’d come to testify at the trials of those who had done the Dark Lord’s bidding. This was the only time she felt as if she still belonged in their world: when they talked about the past. She wondered if they had anything in common anymore, other than the terrible things they had been through. Had they ever had anything in common, other than always being at the wrong place at the wrong time?
She remembers the night after the last trial when they’d gone to The Burrow for celebratory dinner, and she’d watched as Ron laughed at something George had said. Laughed. A deep, true, belly laugh that bubbled with happiness. Meanwhile, Fred’s body was in the ground of a mass grave, surrounded by bouquets of flowers that would eventually join his flesh in becoming part of the earth. And yet, they were laughing.
“You can let yourself be happy again, Hermione,” Harry had said later, as they nursed glasses of Firewhiskey long after everyone else had gone to bed. “After everything, you deserve it.”
Funny, she thought, what was there to be happy about?
Maybe the fact that her parents were somewhere on a different continent with no memory of her whatsoever? Or the fact that she’d never see Tonks again, and get to watch the colour of her hair turn from pink to purple. Maybe that she’d have to watch as Teddy Lupin grew up without either of his parents. Were these things that warranted happiness?
Would wounds like these ever close and fade into scars, like the awful letters on her right forearm? She thinks they won’t; that they’ll remain open and painful forever.
Bleeding.
She knows that no one has forgotten what has happened. That despite trying to move on, they still cry for the ones they’ve lost and wake up in cold sweats as they hear the killing curse shouted at them in their dreams.
She knows she isn’t the only one hurting. She knows that the pain is not hers to carry alone. But why is she the only one not able to begin healing?
So as she sits on the couch in her apartment, petting Crookshanks and nursing her second glass of Firewhiskey, she tries to obey Kingsley’s parting words in her head.
You can rest at last.
She tries to consider answering one of the many job offers she’s received over the past few months.
She tries to find words to write a letter to Neville, whom she hasn’t seen since summer.
She tries to pretend she has direction.
But the truth is, she can’t.
And in her 18 years of life, she has yet to come across something she can’t find some way to do, one way or another. It’s completely and utterly defeating.
So when the clock on her wall strikes midnight, she leans down to the orange kneazle in her lap, whispers “It’s my birthday” into his ear, swallows the last bitter sip of her Firewhiskey, and goes to bed.
~~~
“Happy Birthday, Hermione,” Ron grins in the lopsided way that used to make her heart flutter.
“Thank you, Ron. It’s very thoughtful,” she tells him politely, examining the bracelet in front of her as she crumples up the wrapping into a tight ball. It’s pretty. Red, gold, and yellow—Gryffindor colours—but also not very…her. She almost never wears jewelry. Ron extends a hand to help her put it on, and she gives him a deceptive smile. She’s good at those now; usually, people are none the wiser.
“Open the one from Harry and me now,” Ginny says, pushing another wrapped gift towards Hermione. They’re all sitting at the breakfast bar in Hermione’s apartment, remnants of Hermione’s birthday pancakes surrounding them.
They’ve gotten her a journal. It’s simple but quite nice. Leather bound, with an attached ribbon for a bookmark and lined pages inside.
“We thought it might be a good way for you to…” Harry hesitates, looking at Ginny as she nods in encouragement, “..get back to your normal self.”
He blushes slightly pink at the words. Hermione wants to laugh but restrains herself.
“Therapeutic, in a way,” Ginny adds in support, nodding at Hermione.
Hermione thinks this is ridiculous. Writing everything out that she already feels, all day, every day? She’d be writing pages and pages of the same words, she thinks.
She smiles, despite herself.
“Thank you. It’s lovely.”
Harry nods, seemingly satisfied with this answer, and jumps up to throw all of her wrappings in the bin. The bracelet feels alien on her wrist. Too heavy, like a shackle. She scratches the skin under it.
Ron begins to tell a story about someone they work with at the ministry, Harry chiming in every few words while Ginny laughs. Hermione goes through the motions – laughs, smiles, makes a joke about how much Moody would have hated him.
This is her new checklist, she thinks. How to act normal. Pretend to listen: check. Laugh when everyone else does: check. Smile when Ginny pokes fun at Ron for eating too much: check. Its torture.
An owl brings her The Daily Prophet, and even the routine of seeing Rita Skeeter’s name on the front page brings a little relief. Read The Prophet every morning: check.
She slips the owl a few coins and sends him back off through the window, finally glancing down at the front page.
The sneering face of Lucius Malfoy in Azkaban robes peers up at her over the crease of the folded paper.
The headline causes her to zone out of Ron’s diatribe as she hungrily unfolds it, hands shaking slightly.
"Lucius Malfoy, Convicted Death Eater, Dies Behind Bars Less than a Year after Trial"
She skims the article, eyes wandering back to the cold, sleep-deprived gaze of the silver-haired wizard she’d last seen in a courtroom at the ministry. His had been one of the first trials she’d attended, and one of the only ones she hadn’t spoken at. He’d been sentenced to 25 years. He’d not even lasted one.
“-ultimately died of natural causes … funeral will be a small affair… only family member outside of Azkaban is his son, Draco Malfoy, who was released from his own short-lived sentence last month –“
Hermione frowns. She’d forgotten that Malfoy had been released already. His was the trial she most remembers. The way he’d looked at her as she fought blindly for his freedom – as if he thought she was acting like some greater-than-thou Gryffindor with a saviour complex. She wished he knew that she couldn’t care less if he personally ended up in Azkaban or not. She only wished to tell the truth: that he, school bully or not, was certainly no Death Eater.
It’s strange how a year can seem like a lifetime ago.
“Lucky bastard,” Ron scowls, breaking Hermione from her ruminations. He’s looking at the paper that she’s placed in front of her on the counter. “-hadn’t even been kissed by the dementors yet. I was hoping he’d rot in there for a lot longer.”
Ginny comes to stand over her shoulder, reading as Hermione re-reads.
“Aren’t we supposed to be making amends? Trying to forgive?” Hermione asks Ron pointedly as Harry pulls the paper gently from her hands.
“We can make amends all we want. Just not with anyone who played house with Voldemort while he killed our friends and teachers,” Ron barks. Hermione shrugs, taking a sip of the tea that’s gone cold in her mug.
This was another thing she was missing: anger.
She found it was hard to be so passionate about her anger at the people she’d helped lock up. People who had hunted and tortured her. Ron and Harry could spit venom about each and every one of them, while Hermione sat and listened. It was hard to be angry when she was numb.
“I wonder how Malfoy Junior is taking the news,” Harry says, laying the paper back down and sliding it away from him.
“Probably just thinking about all the money sitting in Daddy’s vault at Gringotts that’s under his name now,” Ron suggests, popping another chocolate chip in his mouth from the bowl they’d put aside for the pancakes.
“Can we talk about something else?” Ginny asks quickly, eying the way Hermione shifts uncomfortably in her stool, eyes downcast on the half-eaten breakfast on her plate.
“Hermione, have you thought any more about Kingsley’s offer?” Harry prompts, taking a sip from his coffee mug. His green eyes are gentle, questioning, careful. She knows he’s been tiptoeing around her, trying to get answers about what she plans to do now that everything has settled. Ron could care less, she thinks, because he never asks. Ginny’s offered to have Hermione do publicity for the Hollyhead Harpies, who are just beginning their first season back since the war.
“I’m not… I don’t know yet…” Hermione replies, trying to avoid her best friend’s eyes. She knows he is just trying to help. He’s worried about her like the rest of them are. She wishes she could explain to them that taking some willy-nilly startup job at the ministry was not going to make her happy. Nor would taking a teaching position at Hogwarts. In fact, she wonders if she’ll ever be able to go back there at all.
She would like to write a letter to whoever is in charge of the 'Post-War Gratuity Fund' that keeps writing to her and asking when she would like her money deposited into her vault at Gringotts. The rest of her friends already had theirs.
She thought it was ridiculous – the ministry trying to reimburse her for everything she’d lost in the war with galleons. What would she ever do with all of that money?
Instead, when she got the letter each month with its stupid amount at the top telling her that a deposit was pending, she burned it. Let it go to something more worthy, she thought.
“Aren’t you restless? Sitting in this flat all day? It might be nice for you to get out and work, even if it’s not forever,” Harry continues, and Hermione wills herself not to roll her eyes.
“Yeah, I’ll keep thinking about it,” she smiles tightly, praying someone will change the subject to something that’s not her.
“We still on for drinks tomorrow night? There’s that new place in Diagon Alley that I think we should try.”
It was Ron’s idea in the first place, to go out and celebrate her birthday on a night that they didn’t have to work in the morning. This was the only idea that Hermione was actually ecstatic about – a chance to down Firewhiskey and make bad decisions without anyone questioning her sanity. Her birthday is as good an excuse as any, and she thinks the buzz that the alcohol brings her might make it tolerable to spend the whole night with them, to pretend that she is as okay as they are.
“Can’t wait,” Hermione smiles. Ginny asks her what she plans to wear, and demands that Hermione bring her into her bedroom to show her what she has in her closet. When Ginny closes her bedroom door behind her, Hermione knows this is about more than clothes.
“We’re all worried about you, Hermione,” Ginny murmurs quietly as Hermione lays out a few dresses for the youngest Weasley to inspect.
“I’m alright,” Hermione says, her back to her, already tired of fake smiling. And it’s only 10 am.
“You don’t seem fine. And you’re not as good at lying as you think.”
Hermione sighs, tossing one last dress onto the bed, though she knows Ginny couldn’t care less about what she’ll be wearing tomorrow.
“I’m just… finding ways to adjust.” Hermione lies. She laughs at herself internally. You’re not even trying.
“Is there anything I can do?” Ginny asks as Hermione sits beside her, flicking through the dresses and inspecting each of them.
“No, Gin. I promise I’ll be okay.”
Ginny can tell this is bullsh*t. Hermione is smart enough to know that. She’s also stubborn enough not to care. She rakes her fingers absentmindedly through her wild curls, trying to tame them as Ginny goes on about how they are always there to talk when she needs to. Hermione gives her a hug, mostly to give Ginny some sense of achievement, but also to show her that Hermione can appreciate the effort she’s putting in to be a good friend.
Except she doesn’t get it, some awful part of her thinks. The other part of her tells her that these are terrible, selfish, untrue thoughts to have. Of course Ginny gets it – she lost her brother. She lost friends. She fought in the war too.
Ginny picks a short, unworn black dress from Hermione’s closet, ignoring the ones that Hermione has pulled out to consider. Hermione remembers buying it, even knowing that it was a bit too skimpy for her to ever wear in public. Back when she thought maybe one day she’d wear it for Ron. It still has the tags on it.
“It’s your birthday,” Ginny smiles softly, hanging the dress on the back of her door. “Live a little."
~~~
Diagon Alley is one of the few places that still holds visible remnants of the war. Some shops had returned to normalcy right away— renovating whatever broken, burned structures remained with a little bit of magic, and going back to business as usual. People still needed the buy things, after all.
Life stops for no one, for nothing; not even war.
About half of Diagon had been rebuilt— though not entirely returned to its original façade— while the other half had been left in ruins. Shops that had caught fire, exploded from spells cast by Snatchers and Death Eaters, abandoned out of fear by owners who never returned. This was the side of the alley that was slower to rebuild, a small portion of shops still blackened by smoke and ransacked of all its goods. This area of the alley had been affectionately renamed ‘The Strip’ which was a very unclever short form for what people had once referred to as ‘The strip of Diagon Alley that never recovered from the war.’
That was how long the shops had been abandoned. Long enough to be given a nickname for its lack of progress.
Hermione hadn’t walked down The Strip for a while now; she’d avoided it completely, knowing that a few of the shops had been places she used to go to get supplies for Hogwarts. Flourish & Blotts was one such shop, and she has no idea why she’s brought herself here for the first time in months on her birthday.
She stands on the cracked cobblestone in front of the building, looking up at the broken windows and the blackened door that had once been green. If she looks hard enough, she can still see a few surviving painted gold letters: Flo & l ots
It stands among about 20 other shops with the same, eerie darkness, just steps away from the open shops whose windows are flooding the streets with light. Of the 21 shops on The Strip, only three are shops that have reopened. This is the first time Hermione has seen them, beacons of hope in the blackness. Maybe the rest of The Strip will follow, and eventually, all of the shops will return in some form or another. She can only hope.
She could stand here all night, staring up at what was once Flourish & Blotts, and thinking about the time she’d seen Gilderoy Lockhart there, or of the very first time she’d come with her parents to collect her school books.
Memories are painful, Hermione thinks. Even if they’re good. It’s as if the goodness of them only reminds her of the terribleness of now.
She has to force herself to look away, to move her legs and continue to walk down the abandoned street. She spots an unfamiliar glow of neon lights around the slight bend towards the end of the alley. One of the reopened businesses, probably, though she doesn’t know which one. No one ever comes down here, so it’s absurd that someone has decided to open or reopen a shop at the very end of the alleyway. This is the end that used to jut off into Knockturn Alley—she hardly ever came down this way, even before the war.
She walks past a number of dilapidated shops, looking over her shoulder only once at the silhouette of Gringotts in the distance. Its creamy white pillars still stand tall after the war.
After the war, after the war. Everything is after the war. When will she stop referring to the present as after the war?
She stops in her tracks when she reaches the source of the neon glow, tilting her head up to look at the sign.
Scratch the Mark, she reads, in shades of neon green and pink, placed between the rounded windows of an old shop. The rest of the exterior is hardly touched – still stained with black smoke, patched up lazily here or there. The windows are covered in white posters with drawings and designs. It’s a tattoo shop, she realizes.
Hermione has never been reckless. Brave, quick thinking, and inclined to risk-tasking maybe— but never reckless. Quite the opposite actually. She had always had to be the one to clean up after Harry’s recklessness when his emotions got in the way of logic. Hermione liked to think she was rather balanced in the two: emotion and logic. She usually didn’t allow one to take precedence over the other, because as her two strongest assets, she needed them both.
But for some reason, a reason she’ll never understand, she pulls up the sleeve of her jacket and looks down at her forearm, eyes glancing over the small, fading letters that take up less than half of the pale expanse of skin— Mudblood. Shesteps forward, pushing the door open.
The jingle of a bell signals her arrival, and she looks around curiously, itching with the need to make a stupid decision.
The inside of the parlour is bare-bones— exposed brick wall on either side of her, lined with framed art and examples of tattoo designs. A few more neon signs emit the same colourful glow as outside, casting shadows on the black leather tattoo chairs and stools that line the walls. It’s relatively small, with only three chairs and a front desk, but Hermione feels exhilarated for the first time in a long time. Her eyes scan the room, and she’s in awe of the way the shop has seemingly been built over the ruins and utilized its broken, deteriorated walls to achieve such a, for lack of a better term, badass look.
She runs her fingers over a few frames displaying small tattoos, eyes flicking over each design with interest. They’re beautifully detailed, not tacky at all, and she thinks about Dean Thomas and the art he used to create. As she glances over each dainty design, her body is filled with an energy that she is unfamiliar with. An urge to stop thinking, to discard logic, to feel something.
Feel something. She’s forgotten what that was like.
“Hermione Granger?”
The voice startles her, and she jumps away from the row of tattoos she’s studying, turning around to face its source. She hadn’t heard the voice enough at school to recognize it straight away, but she places his face as she turns to see him, leaning his elbows on the front counter, face punctuated with both surprise and a mischievous delight.
“Blaise Zabini-” she breathes, eyes investigating his dark skin and sharp brows. He studies her with a calculated stare, on the defense, she thinks, as if he’s waiting for her to attack. “Do you work here?”
“I own the place, Granger,” he smirks, quirking up an eyebrow at her. Pushing himself off of the counter, he straightens and walks around to greet her. She tries not to let her face give away how taken aback she is by his admission. Blaise had never joined the Death Eaters officially, but his family was known for being Voldemort sympathizers. He’d gotten off easy at his trial, probation and the same court-ordered rehabilitation program that was forced upon many of the other children of Death Eaters, sympathizers, and pure-blood families who openly despised the muggle-born. She’d noted Pansy Parkinson, the Greengrass sisters, Theodore Nott, Adrian Pucey, and Draco Malfoy himself among the other unwilling participants of this rehabilitation initiative.
“You look surprised,” Blaise teases, leaning his back against the front counter and crossing his arms. He’s taller than she remembers, though she hadn't known him very well at Hogwarts. “Shocked that a former almost-Death Eater like myself can own a business in this recession?” he mocks, tilting his head at her as he awaits her response.
The irony of the situation isn’t lost on her. Blaise Zabini, who had barely escaped a sentence in Azkaban, now owns a business in Diagon Alley. Hermione, decorated “war hero,” lives in a sh*tty flat, and doesn’t even have a job.
“A little,” Hermione admits, moving closer to him with careful steps. “But not for the reasons you think.”
He raises both eyebrows, standing up taller now as she reaches him.
“And for what reasons are you surprised, then?” he challenges, dark eyes searching her face. She can tell he’s still unsure about her presence, not fearful, but intrigued. She swallows.
“I guess I just didn’t know you were an artist,” she states, motioning to the designs displayed around the shop.
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Granger.” He states, his face remaining stoic as he analyzes her.
“Fair enough,” She replies.
For reasons she can’t explain, she extends her arm in front of her and pulls sharply at the sleeve of her jacket, allowing it to slide up to her elbow. She twists her arm, exposing the white scar on her forearm and holding it out to him.
“Think you could cover this?” she asks him, fist clenched, as he leans forward examines the raised letters. She watches him as recognition falls over his face, sharp, angular cheekbones moving as he clenches his jaw. His eyes flick up to hers, and he gives her a real smile, white teeth flashing at her.
“I’m sure I could help you out, Granger. If you’ll trust me.”
Hermione pulls her sleeve back down, straightening her back and holding her chin high to show him she is not afraid.
This is something she has been craving for a long time, she realizes. Something crazy.
“I trust you,” She states in an unwavering voice, her eyes piercing into his in an attempt to show him that she means this. And she does. She has no idea why, but she does.
“You know it's permanent, right?” He jokes, standing and leading her over to the first black chair by the wall, patting the leather with his hand in invitation. She sits, pulling her jacket off and placing it beside her as Blaise pulls black latex gloves over his long fingers.
“Thank you, Zabini. I’m quite aware.”
He shrugs, pulling a silver cart with tools and pots of ink over to him, and he starts to assemble the needle with practiced fingers. He’s handsome, she thinks, as she watches his focused eyes screwing things together and reaching behind him to plug a cord in.
“What are you thinking, Granger?” he asks, and he takes her forearm into his gloved hands now, twisting it slightly to examine it. The scar is long and thin, and it’s not perfectly straight, curving a bit at the end closest to her hand.
She knew what she wanted the second she came into the shop. If she closes her eyes and thinks hard enough, she can almost smell it.
“My parents used to grow rosemary in our garden,” she tells him, eyes closed as she feels tears prick at the base of her skull. “If you opened the kitchen window in the summer, you could smell it. Mum would cut some and bring it inside, cook with it, put it in a vase when it flowered. The whole house would smell of it. So would she.”
When she opens her eyes, Blaise is looking at her thoughtfully. She doesn’t cry; hasn’t in a long time.
“She used to say that rosemary was a symbol of remembrance. And there’s a lot of things I’ve lost that I’d like to remember.” She finishes, and he nods once in understanding.
“Rosemary it is, Granger.”
He tentatively draws it for her with his wand on her skin first, making sure she likes the design.
It’s beautiful. Minimal, thin black lines, no shading, delicate and unassuming. She nods at him, and he starts the needle, the soft buzz of it filling the air of the small room.
“What made you decide to do this? To open this up? Here?” she asks, gritting her teeth and trying not to move as the needle penetrates her skin.
It’s a good kind of pain. It makes her feel something. Her eyelids flutter as the needle runs along the sensitive skin of her forearm in slow, careful strokes.
“I started it as a way to offer my services to those who wanted their Dark Marks covered,” he admits, eyes remaining on his work. He uses a wet cloth to wipe away the excess ink after each stroke, reexamining, and diving back into each new line and curve. “And it grew from there.”
She blinks at him.
“You cover Dark Marks?” She prods further, and she can see one corner of his mouth lift in amusem*nt. Hence the name of the shop, she thinks. Scratch the Mark. Clever.
“Yeah. Word on the street is they’re not very fashionable anymore.” He winks at her. “Those of us who had them and didn’t get carted off to Azkaban wanted to get rid of them. But you can’t: they’re cursed marks. So we decided to cover them up instead.”
She doesn’t respond, thinking instead about people she knows that actually took the mark. Theodore Nott. Pansy Parkinson. Adrian Pucey. Draco Malfoy.
“That’s great, Blaise.” She tells him as he wipes his cloth on her arm again, and she watches as the black ink bleeds into the cloth. “You’re very talented.”
He stops, rests the hand holding the needle on his knee, and looks up at her.
“Careful Granger,” he grins, pulling his glove up tighter on his hand, and leaning forward again. “I might just start to actually like you.”
Hermione actually smiles. He finishes a few minutes later, and Hermione can’t help but admire it. She can hardly see her scar anymore; certainly can’t make out the letters. She thanks him, staring at it as he uses his wand to heal it right away, muttering a spell so that the pain and redness are alleviated immediately. He cleans up, throwing his gloves in a bin and helping her off of the chair.
“How much do I owe you?” She asks, making her way to the front counter as she reaches into her small coin purse for some galleons.
“It’s on the house,” Blaise says as he goes around the back of the counter. “I always cover up Dark Marks for free.”
Hermione frowns, as he leans his elbows on the counter again.
“But this isn’t a Dark Mark,” she argues, looking down again at the dainty branch of rosemary that is now on her skin forever.
“It might not be the Dark mark, but it’s a dark mark nonetheless, no?” he states simply, and she realizes how intelligent his eyes are as he tilts his head at her again. She nods, once, and slips some money into the tip jar anyway.
“Nice to see you again, Zabini. And thanks. It's beautiful," she gestures to the tattoo on her skin.
Blaise only nods his chin at her, and she can feel his eyes on her back as she makes her way over to the door, bell jangling as she exits the shop and finds herself back in the darkness of The Strip.
She glances down at her tattoo again, coat draped over her other arm.
Rosemary for remembrance.
Though, she almost wonders if there are fewer things she wants to remember, and more things she’d rather forget.
