She stays hidden, but her bladder need grows.

Through the thin gap between the closet door and its frame, Hermione could see into the classroom. Four students — younger years, from the look of them — were dragging desks into position, spreading books and parchment, lighting their wands.

Not passing through. Settling in.

She let out a slow breath in the darkness. Naked in a storage closet, listening to children do their homework. She had faced Voldemort. She had been tortured at Malfoy Manor. She had spent a year living rough while Death Eaters hunted them across the country. And here she was. This was apparently what finished her.

She positioned herself near the gap and watched. Charms homework, from the snippets that reached her. One student was already writing steadily. Another was rehearsing a wand movement over and over, the same small gesture repeated with slight variations. The other two were consulting a textbook together, pointing at passages, arguing quietly about something. They were completely absorbed. They had no sense of time pressure at all.

Hermione settled in to wait.

The closet was cold — unheated, and standing still without the warmth of movement made it bite. She was acutely aware of her own skin in the darkness, the air against it, the confined space. Her breasts, her stomach, the inside of her thighs — every surface felt the cold and the closeness of the walls in a way that clothing would have insulated her from entirely. She'd spent most of the last hour focused on what was outside her body. In here, alone and unseen, there was nowhere else to look.

Time passed. She tracked it loosely by what she could see through the gap — the essay progressing line by line, the wand movement gradually smoothing out, a second inkwell being uncorked. The students' conversation drifted in fragments: McGonagall's marking was brutal, someone's older brother had told them a trick for the Summoning Charm that probably didn't work.

And gradually, the pressure she'd been carrying since the pumpkin juice spill began to ask more of her.

It had been manageable while she was moving. Easier to set aside when there was a corridor to navigate, a hiding place to reach. But standing still in the dark with nothing to do, it was harder to ignore. She pressed her thighs together carefully, the gentle inward pressure helping to hold things steady. Her right hand moved lower, palm flat against her lower abdomen, adding counter-pressure. She held herself there, focused, and felt the urgency ease back slightly. Just slightly.

She shifted her weight from her left foot to her right and back again — small, slow movements, barely perceptible. Standing completely still made it worse. Moving, even this little, helped.

Through the gap, the students worked on, oblivious.

Twenty minutes in, the urgency had continued to build steadily, no longer content to sit quietly in the background. She could feel the effort it took to hold against it — a conscious muscular tension she had to actively maintain, her pelvic floor clenched and working constantly, the way it might during a long exam when she'd been too focused to take a break. Except that had been an hour at most. This was longer, and she had been holding since long before the closet.

She pressed harder with her hand. Bent forward slightly at the waist, just a few degrees — an instinctive adjustment her body made to relieve the pressure, to find a position that was more manageable. Her thighs were pressed firmly together now, knees nearly touching. She could feel the strain of it in her legs, a low trembling that had nothing to do with the cold.

This building pressure on her bladder made Hermione realize something. It wasn't a catastrophic thought. It was a practical one, arrived at through the same kind of clear-headed calculation she'd been applying all evening.

She was most likely not going to make it.

Four more floors to Gryffindor Tower. More corridors, more obstacles, more hiding. She'd already lost time to the blocked corridor, the library, the detour up to the fourth floor. The time she was spending in this closet on top of all of that — she was honest with herself about what the trajectory meant.

She would have to find and use a bathroom before she continued upward. The question was which one.

The third floor bathrooms were at the far end of the corridor — wrong direction, more exposure. Higher floors meant more distance. The second floor was riskier with the tutoring sessions, but one bathroom on the second floor was reliably empty: Moaning Myrtle's. Students avoided it on principle. Gloomy, unpleasant, haunted — nobody used it voluntarily on a quiet weeknight evening.

It wasn't a pleasant option. But it was the right one.

She'd decided, then. Myrtle's bathroom. As soon as these students left.

The students' voices continued, maddeningly ordinary.

Then one of them looked up from their work toward the storage closet.

"Does anyone need anything from in there? I need more parchment."

Hermione went completely still — including, involuntarily, the small compensating movements she'd been making. The sudden stillness made the pressure spike immediately, and she clenched hard against it, jaw tight, not daring to move or make a sound.

"Already checked when we got here," another said without looking up. "Nothing useful. Just empty shelves."

A pause. Hermione didn't breathe.

"Oh. Right." The first student turned back to their parchment.

She breathed again. Very carefully. And quietly resumed the small shift of weight from foot to foot, re-found the angle at her waist, pressed her thighs back together. Getting back to baseline took a moment — the sudden freeze had cost her something, and she had to work to recover the equilibrium she'd built. She pressed her free hand against the closet wall for balance. Breathed through it. Watched the students.

The students worked on. She watched through the gap and managed, and held, and waited.

It was getting harder. The margin between holding and not holding was narrowing steadily. The constant clenching was tiring in a way that was difficult to describe: not painful exactly, but wearing, the same muscle group asked to sustain effort far beyond what it was built for. She found herself bearing down and releasing in tiny cycles, brief moments of relaxation before the urgency crept back up and she had to clench again. Each cycle left her slightly worse off than the last.

Then, finally — the unmistakable sounds of packing up. A book closing. An inkwell being stoppered. The scrape of a desk.

"That's enough for tonight."

"Thank Merlin. My hand's killing me."

Hermione watched through the gap as they shouldered their bags and extinguished their wands. The classroom dimmed. The door clicked shut behind them, and their voices faded down the corridor.

She gave them twenty counts. Standing in the dark, thighs pressed together, bent slightly forward, hand flat against herself — she stood and counted and held on, and did not move until she was certain.

Then she opened the closet door.

The classroom was empty. Through the door to the corridor — quiet.

Hermione stepped out into the open space and sprinted to the classroom door.

She pressed her ear against it, and listened.