She was unpetrified on a Tuesday.
He knew it was going to happen — had been tracking the approximate timeline in his head since the Chamber, knew that Madam Pomfrey had been working toward reversing the petrification as soon as the mandrake restorative was completed — and had been thinking about the conversation for several days. Not anxiously. More the way you think about something you want to get right.
Harry went with him to the hospital wing when they heard. Which was the right instinct. Hermione needed to see them both.
She was sitting up in the bed when they arrived, still slightly glassy in the way people were immediately after reversal, her hair doing the particular thing it did when it had been left to its own devices for two months. She looked at them both with the progressive focusing of someone whose eyes were adjusting to a world that had moved on without them.
"You're alright," she said. The relief in her voice was real and thorough. "Both of you. And Ginny?, The Chamber "
"Everyone's alright," Harry said, pulling a chair to her bedside. "Ginny's home. Lockhart " he paused " Lockhart is fine. Mostly. In a comfortable sort of way."
Her eyes moved to him.
He was standing slightly back, which was a choice he'd made because he knew this moment was going to require her to process something and he didn't want to crowd the processing.
She was already doing it. He could see it — the quick, thorough attention she gave everything moving over him, taking in the things that were different, cataloguing them with the speed of someone whose baseline for him was very well established and whose mind was calibrated to notice deviation.
"You're different," she said.
"Memory charm backfired," he said. "Lockhart's spell hit me as well as him. Side effect appears to be" he paused, choosing the word carefully " cognitive clarification. Everything processes faster. More clearly."
She stared at him.
"That's not a documented side effect of …"
"No," he agreed. "Madam Pomfrey wrote to St. Mungo's. They couldn't explain the mechanism but couldn't find anything harmful about it either." He paused. "I know. I've looked."
She looked at him for a long moment with the expression of someone filing something under unexplained but confirmed and building a new framework around it. Hermione Granger could not bear incomplete data, but she was too rigorous to substitute a satisfying explanation for an accurate one. If the evidence said unexplained, she would call it unexplained and keep watching.
It was both the best and most challenging thing about her.
"Alright," she said, slowly. "And you've been — how have you been managing?"
"Better than usual," he said, pulling up the second chair. "We have a lot to tell you."
They told her. Harry took the Chamber, as before, and he handled the aftermath — the wand, the electives, the Gringotts meeting, the basilisk sale, the money.
The money produced the expression he had anticipated, which was the expression of someone who has just been given information that requires significant internal reorganization and is trying to perform that reorganization with some dignity.
"A hundred thousand Galleons," she said.
"Between Harry and me, yes," he confirmed.
"Each."
"From both of us, combined," he said. "Fifty from Harry, fifty from me."
She was quiet for a moment. Then: "You didn't have to "
"You found the answer," he said simply. "Before you were petrified, you left us the information that told us what we were dealing with. That research is the reason we knew what to walk into." He looked at her steadily. "You deserved something for that. We both thought so."
Harry nodded.
Hermione looked between them with the expression of someone who was having difficulty knowing what to do with genuine recognition and was falling back on practicality as a coping mechanism. "I'll invest most of it," she said finally.
"I told Harry that's what you'd say," he said.
Harry made a quiet sound that was almost a laugh.