Long enough to fall asleep.

She didn't mean to fall asleep.

She'd told herself she was just resting — just closing her eyes for a moment, gathering what was left of her strength, staying alert enough to monitor for any change in the sound from the common room.
Hermuone had every intention of keeping watch.
She was going to be very careful. Checking the gap in the door frame every few minutes, note whether the voices were getting quieter, judge the moment when she could move.

She was asleep within two minutes.

Slumped against the passage wall, head tilted to one side, arms still loosely around her knees. Breathing deep and even.
Oblivious.

And while she slept, the common room emptied. Students yawned and closed their books and said their goodnights and climbed the dormitory stairs one by one, taking their lamplight with them.
The fire burned itself down to embers.
The room fell quiet.

Hermione slept through all of it.

What woke her was voices.

Not from the common room — from below. Coming up the passage staircase.
Multiple people, their footsteps distinct on the stone steps, getting closer with every second.

Her eyes snapped open.

For one disoriented moment she had no idea where she was or what was happening.
Then it came back, all of it, crashing back in the space of a single breath.
The passage.
The door.
She'd fallen asleep.

And there were people coming up the stairs.

She scrambled to her feet, legs stiff and unsteady from cold and exhaustion, and rushed to the door.
No time to think through it.
No time for anything except the gap in the frame and what she could see through it.

The common room.

Empty.
Fire in embers, chairs vacant, not a single student anywhere.
How long had she been asleep?
She had no idea.

The footsteps on the stairs were close now. Nearly at the top.

Hermione grabbed the door handle and pulled.

The door opened.
She stepped through into the common room and turned immediately, using both hands to ease the door shut behind her as quickly and quietly as she could manage.
The latch clicked.
She held her breath.

On the other side of the door, the footsteps reached the landing.

She stood in the common room and didn't move and didn't breathe and counted the seconds.

The voices murmured on the other side. Someone laughed at something.
Their footsteps shifted — exploring the landing, she thought, checking the space.
But the door stayed closed.
And after a long moment, the voices began to recede.
Back down the stairs.
Away.

Hermione let out a breath.

The common room was still warm.
The embers still gave off enough light to see by — the familiar furniture, the worn rug, the Fat Lady's door, all of it exactly as it had always been.
She was standing barefoot on the hearthrug in a state that could not be adequately described to anyone who hadn't been there, and she was home.

She didn't let herself stop. Couldn't afford to feel it yet. She crossed the room quickly, bare feet silent on the familiar floor, and went straight to the dormitory stairs.

She climbed. Her legs protested — everything protested — but she climbed, and the stairs delivered her to her corridor, and her corridor delivered her to her door, and she opened it and stepped inside and locked it behind her.

Her room.

Exactly as she'd left it. Books on the desk, parchment with half a Transfiguration essay on it, quills in the jar where she kept them. The wardrobe she'd been standing in front of when the elf appeared.
The bed with its covers still turned back the way she'd left them.

Hermione stood in the middle of her room and looked at all of it.

Then she went to her wardrobe, took out a clean blanket, and wrapped it around herself. Just for a moment. Just to feel covered.
The fabric was soft and familiar and she stood there with it around her shoulders and let herself have thirty seconds.

It was enough.

She picked up her toiletries and went to shower.

________________________________________

The hot water was almost too much to bear.

She stood under it and didn't move for a long time, just letting it fall on her — on her head, her shoulders, her back, everywhere the night had reached, which was everywhere.
The grime and flood water and everything she preferred not to name went down the drain along with it.
Hermione could feel the heat reaching into her muscles, the ones that had been clenched and working and desperate for hours, and she stood there until they began, finally, to unknot.

She washed her hair twice.
Scrubbed her skin until it felt like her own again.
Stood under the water a while longer after that, not because she needed to, but because she could.

When she turned it off, the silence felt enormous.

She dried off with a clean towel — her own towel, soft and whole and untrapped in any door — and dressed in her dormitory, one piece at a time.
Knickers.
Shirt.
Pajama bottoms.
Socks, even.
Each one felt like something recovered.
Hermione stood in front of her wardrobe fully dressed and it felt stranger than she expected.

She sat down on her bed.

The elf had meant well.
She kept coming back to that, and kept finding that understanding it didn't make it easier.
He'd heard about her work with S.P.E.W. and misunderstood in good faith, had acted on an impulse that was, in its way, kind.
She knew that.
She'd known it within minutes of arriving in the kitchen.
It didn't stop the anger from being there, settled low in her chest alongside everything else, warm and unreasonable.

She wasn't going to resolve that tonight.

What she could do was follow the chain of events with the part of her mind that dealt in causes and consequences, and she did, and it was almost interesting in a removed sort of way: the towel in the door had been an accident, the locked kitchen behind it had been standard procedure, the elves not helping her had been a failure of context rather than malice.
A perfectly ordinary series of things, each one following from the last with no particular intention, and the cumulative result had been—

She thought of the library.
The students at the checkout desk, and Madam Pince stepping away at exactly the right moment.
The suit of armor in the alcove on the first floor, right where she needed it.
The parchment-checking student in the closet who'd already been told it was empty.
The common room emptying while she slept.

She'd been lucky.
She'd been more than lucky.
She'd been saved, repeatedly and systematically, by things that had no obligation to go her way and had done so anyway.

And no one had seen her.

The thought sat with a particular quality.
No one had seen her, no one knew, no one would ever know — and this impossible, humiliating, exhausting thing that had taken the better part of an evening would remain entirely hers.
She would carry it and it would become a story she would never tell and one day, perhaps, find funny.

Defeated Voldemort and his Death Eaters. Survived torture and war. Nearly done in by a towel caught in a door.

Nearly.

Hermione lay back on her bed and pulled the covers up and closed her eyes.

________________________________________

THE END

(Note: This chapter was beta’d by user qwertpoint.)