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Chapter One: A Dead Geranium
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
- T.S. Eliot, Rhapsody on a Windy Night
She slipped out like a ghost, silent and unsubstantial and caught in limbo.
Lightless, she went through the dark in careful steps. The wind whistling through the cracks in the mortar disguised any sound of her presence; even three years after they had lost the war, she was still careful. You could never be too careful.
Hogwarts had fallen into ruin in that time. What battle magic had not destroyed, nature had reclaimed. Vast, uninhibited creepers clutched the walls and sprawled across the multitude of floors. Scorch marks were erased by the night only to reappear with the first trickle of light, reminders seared upon the wall, graffiti of a hellish, indelible nature.
From a distance, it must have appeared a wreck – a haven fallen into gothic decay, teetering towers and crumbling walls. The Forbidden Forest had crept out to consume it, so Hogwarts rose from the dense foliage like the hand of a drowning man, slowly faltering.
Inside was little better. There were certain places where she did not go, rooms so deformed by layer upon layer of spells that they were little more than death-traps, savage reflections of the people who had fought in them. Katie Bell’s voice screamed endlessly in one, the last imprint of a girl long dead.
It had been her home; now it was her last refuge, and she had learned to navigate its treacherous paths.
For months after the last battle, she had shivered in the secret spaces between the walls while Voldemort and the Death Eaters ransacked Hogwarts. One by one, her hiding places had been revealed or destroyed as she fled before them, the shrieks of others less lucky, less clever, echoing in her ears. For months she hadn’t seen sunlight, lost in shades of grey as her eyes grew used to darkness.
At last, they left. She remained, the last living thing left in all of Hogwarts.
Hermione Granger, the ghost in the walls.
X - X - X - X - X
She took her usual path, squeezing past the toppled pillars of the east hallway, clinging to the cracked masonry of a staircase as it swung out over the long fall down to the ground floor. The last few risers were gone; she made the jump easily, although her heart still hammered every time, fearful the stones would dissolve under her.
On the landing, she took a brief detour into her old Muggle Studies classroom. Here too the vegetation had conquered all, but the trees that had burst up through the floor were hung with apples. Small, shrivelled, sour, they were at least food. She tossed a few into her makeshift bag, an old robe she had stitched together with judicious spells, and went on.
She passed the place where Ginny had lost the fingers of her left hand to a hex as sharp as a blade, carefully ignoring the dark patch on the flagstones. At the next corridor, she leapt from stone to stone as if playing hopscotch.
At last she came to the steps of the Astronomy Tower. Slowly she began to climb.
Every night she made the same pilgrimage. Every night, she walked the battlefield again because of a promise, because some part of her still hoped beyond all reason.
So, following her fairytale, she climbed the steps to the tallest tower, unsure if she was beauty or the beast, either way imprisoned.
At last she reached the top – shafts of moonlight struck her, and she breathed the cool air. Around her, weird lights rose, curling and unfurling like flowers, yellow and blue and orange, a great, strange garden of fire. The sky around Hogwarts was always lit now, more residue from the spells left by the war which reacted with oddly beautiful alchemy.
The roof was long gone, blasted away in a careless spell by Bellatrix Lestrange. She could not forget those wild eyes, those parted, dark lips, smudged and shining as if Bellatrix had smeared them with poison.
No books to help you now, little girl, she had whispered, moving like a panther. Nothing but you and me and our magic.
She’d had a voice then. Her name had been more than an echo in her own head. Hermione Granger had been someone quite different and she could still not quite grasp how she had diminished, shrunk down until she was slight as mist, the ghost in the walls.
Wrong, she said, shrill but defiant. I have a brain as well.
Oooh, so sharp, so sharp! Bellatrix sneered. Better be careful you don’t cut yourself-
Her wand flicked so fast Hermione could only react with instinct; her shield flashed red as the bolt of purple light rebounded from it.
Bellatrix only smiled her terrible, beautiful smile. So, Mudblood-
Hermione! Lupin roared – he sprang onto the tower, eyes wild, flinging a quick succession of spells at Bellatrix. His next words were fired at Hermione. Go! Run!
Yes, run! Bellatrix mocked, countering his magic with sweeping gestures, body as sinuous as a snake. It’s over now – the Boy Who Lived is nothing, nothing, nothing, and the Dark Lord has all that he deserves!
Including you? Lupin said softly. If you think you are anything more than a weapon to him, Bellatrix, you are much mistaken.
Her screech was thin and feral – she turned back to him with the ferocity of a wounded animal. You are wrong!
Hermione was forgotten, a toy tossed aside as Bellatrix aimed all her energies at Lupin. She wanted to stay and help, but one look from him said he would not tolerate it, and obedience to authority was deep in her bones. She would only be in the way, leverage if Bellatrix thought to use her.
Nor did she have the battle skills to help. Light flew about them in a dizzying display, until they were lit by gold and green and red, until the walls shattered about them. She didn’t even know some of the spells, although the Unforgivable Curses she knew far too intimately.
The tower rocked. She was thrown to her knees, dust raining down on her. Knowing she could not stay, she could not let Lupin risk so much for nothing, she crept to the stairs and went down, wand at the ready, the curses she had memorised so arduously on her lips.
She had left him, and he had died.
Hermione could not forgive herself for that. Each night, she came back, and remembered anew, ached anew, hated anew.
But she didn’t come back for him. She came back for another friend.
George said there’s a way, Ron had said. He said the Order knew this might happen...they planned for the worst, hoped for the best, that old routine. They have a signal. Use it, and one of them – us now, I suppose – will find you.
It had been a lull in the fighting, the two of them crammed behind a desk, She remembered how pale he seemed, blood livid on his cheek and arm. He’d roused a shadow of his old cheeky grin for her.
They won’t need to, she’d hissed. We’ll make it – Harry’s still alive-
His smile faded. Hermione...you saw what happened to him.
He’s alive! she insisted. We can rescue him. We have to. As long as he’s alive, it isn’t over. The Boy Who Lived.
I hope you’re right, he’d said quietly, seeming infinitely older. She saw his grief then, raw on his face, as if he was fighting not to break apart. Hermione...I...
Whatever he was about to say was destroyed by the explosion that turned the desk into powder and threw them both backwards. A curtain of fire separated them, and then she was trying to fight a manticore - one battle disintegrated into another until it was a mad rush through the castle – walls and flames and wind and monsters.
And the place where the war had ended for her.
The library. Him.
It had ended, but she could not forget the words Ron had said. She clung to them. Some part of her wanted to believe that even in a world subsumed so completely by Voldemort and his endless, starving ambition, the Order survived.
So she raised her wand, as she did every night, and sent up the spell-
Only...
She hesitated. She always sent it up when the midnight lights were at their brightest, trusting a casual observer would think her signal part of the show. But lately, the thought had begun to niggle at her: what if no one could see it? What if she had hidden it so well she was all but invisible, even to the eyes that wanted to see her?
So that night, she waited until the lights were dim, muted – and then, ignoring her fear, she whispered the spell.
Light rose into the sky to join the flames simmering there; but this unfolded itself into the outline of a bird and blazed for a moment, white on the indigo sky.
If any of the Order remained...if they looked at the right moment...
She had cast the spell hundreds of times. No one had come. Logic said she should give up. But she would not. Even as every night whittled down the probability further, she defied statistics and she defied the ruined world she stood in, and hoped.
She stood there a moment longer, then as it always did, the memory of Bellatrix Lestrange drove her back down the stairs, back into the walls.
X - X - X - X - X
She never went out in daylight. Some days, she lingered until sunrise, but once the light had become more white than grey, the sky hinting at blue, she departed. It was too much to see what remained of Hogwarts. Night hid the worst of its wounds; daylight revealed them cruelly.
But she did roam freely at night. And midnight always found her in the same place, the only place she had been unable to leave to the intruding flora and magical debris.
In the library, it was almost as if nothing had changed. The silence here was safe and authorised, that of a sacred space, not the hollow hush of a morgue. The scent of old books and resin was comforting, the few splintered shelves carefully repaired by her. She knew its nooks and niches, walked its narrow aisles with surety.
Voldemort, she was sure, could not have plundered all of Hogwarts’ secrets. Oh, he had left the library in a mess, books thrown on the floor, spines bent and trodden upon, fingermarks on the pages, but she doubted he’d read anything. Worlds to conquer, after all, people to oppress.
It was her finest weapon: knowledge. In three years, she had absorbed spell after spell, truth after truth. Not knowing what waited for her if she ever left, everything was relevant. Everything mattered.
She told herself that she would leave, as soon as she was ready. But Hermione knew that if she left, it was unlikely she would return, so she gobbled down words like a glutton. One more day, she told herself every day, and then I will be prepared.
There would be no more running. She wouldn't leave again because she didn't know enough. So she had to be prepared, had to be ready, had to have a knowledge so vast that she would never abandon anyone again, that she would never hear anyone die while she still had words and truth and magic.
Book after book, night after night. Fierce and determined as any warrior, she honed her weapons. Soon, she told herself. Soon I will be ready.
She went to the restricted section, as she did most nights, and dug out the tome she was partway through. It was an awkward weight in her arms, the parchment rough on her fingers-
“You don’t change, do you?” The voice was cool and contemptuous and unmistakable. “World’s in crisis, the Dark Lord’s running the show, and you’re still looking for revelation in the library.”
The book slid from her frozen hands, thudding onto the floor. Hermione turned, fear cold in her spine.
The moonlight turned him to a monochrome angel, bones angular and bare as ivory beneath the silver light, hair pale, half his face masked in shadow. His wand gleamed at one hip; a hooked knife at the other, and neither was as deadly as the smile on his lips. The Dark Mark was stark on his arm.
Somehow, she found the courage to meet those eyes, turned to liquid in the gloom, amused and empty.
“That was always your mistake,” he said softly, and stepped towards her in a lazy saunter. “Being so-”
Hermione snatched for her wand – he moved, a blur, and the impact of his fist on her wrist sent the wand clattering amidst the shelves.
“-predictable,” he said without missing a beat, and his stare cut like a blade. “Careless, Mudblood. Very, very careless.”
He was right. Damn him. He was right, and she was afraid, because they had found her at last.
In the gloom, Draco Malfoy’s smile curved like a scythe.
And far away, she heard a clock strike midnight.
Those are pearls that were his eyes
- The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot
The clock struck midnight, and her heart struck with it.
One. Hermione was tensed, her body resonating with the low, slow toll of the bell that swung in the depths of the dungeons even though it was cracked, the clapper gone. She did not know what magic made it sound, made it say: it is over again, the death of another day is upon you.
But she knew what it meant.
She scanned the floor for her wand; this was her opportunity. She would need to seize it.
Four
“Nothing to say?” Draco said, his voice mocking. “That’s unlike you.”
The seventh chime rolled out. Nearly, nearly...
There it was! She could see the tip of her wand underneath a bookshelf. She would have to get past Draco, but she had the element of surprise on her side.
And the past, of course, hovering like a mist upon the place, close and cold and all-consuming. That was hers too, intimate as a lover.
Nine.
Before he followed her glance, Hermione met his eyes. Her voice was rusty with disuse, but fearless, and she prided herself on that.
“I thought I’d let them say it for me,” she said.
Eleven.
Bemusement flashed over his face, the question framed on his lips: who?
Twelve.
And suddenly a great cacophony filled the air – screams, shouts, gasps and wails and moans - as the dead of Hogwarts swarmed from the stones where their blood had been spilled. Outside, pale forms flickered like fireflies, fighting a dead war with their dead hands.
Colin Creevey ran into the library, a white shimmering figure, eyes vast with terror. Draco swung around at the movement, and she moved, diving for her wand.
He realised his mistake and snatched for her, but she was too quick.
It was there, in her hand, and she whipped around, the spell silent, as all her spells had been silent since the end of the war.
Expelliarmus!
His wand snapped out of his hand, launching like a javelin through the ghost of Colin.
Accio wand! she thought, all her will aimed at it. It shot into her hand with satisfying speed.
She expected rage from him, and was already running the first syllables of a blistering hex through her head, but Draco was motionless, distracted. It took her a moment to realise what he was staring at.
She had seen the ghosts so many times that they were part of the backdrop. But to Draco, they were new and ghastly.
Colin backed away, mewling, his voice a thin keen against the whirlwind of sound. “Expelli-“
He jerked as a hex hit him. Hermione counted off the twitches, one, two, pause, a third, as familiar with the rhythms of his tragedy as if it were a nursery rhyme. The liquid that splattered the ground was thick and cherry-red – she knew if she touched it, there would be nothing there, but for a few minutes, the library was daubed with blood, disfigured.
“See what you did?” she heard herself hissing, the words rolling out with the ferocity of steam before she even knew they were there. “See what you did to us?”
Colin slumped against the desk, shaking. He raised a hand to some invisible assailant. “Please...please, don’t...”
Draco’s face was like marble, frozen and unreadable. But he did not look away.
Colin raised his head, and said in a small, weak voice, “Will it hurt? The curse?”
If he had ever received an answer, it was lost as surely as he was. Colin shuddered and toppled forward, mouth slack, hand curled like a dead spider.
His shade dissipated into the floor, the bloodstains fading with it. Slowly, the other voices across the castle died away. One by one, Hogwarts’ dead sank back into its stones, pinned like butterflies, waiting for midnight. Whatever magic kept them there, it was a spell so cruel, so ruthless, she could only think it was Voldemort's work. Who else would not be satisifed with mere murder - who else would need to chain the dead?
Her eyes burned with tears she refused to shed.
“Predictable, am I?” Hermione said, her voice hoarse.
Draco turned slowly, and she could have sworn his eyes were dazed, but then his usual smirk began - before he remembered she had his wand.
“Every night, they rise again,” she spat, advancing on him. “And they die again, because that’s all you and your foul Death-Eaters left them. They have no release. They have no respite. You tell me I’m predictable, well, here’s the world you created! It runs like clockwork – you can tell the time by the dead you left here! That’s the world you want, isn’t it, so predictable. You rule and we die and our ghosts scream in a world where no one hears them.”
Not one whit of his arrogance had faded. She could have killed him there and then – a silent wish, a flash of green, but she didn’t. She was better than that.
“You know nothing about what I want,” he said coolly. “And don’t tell me you know anything about the world either. You’ve been cowering in Hogwarts.”
That stung. Her fingers gripped the wands so tightly she felt every ridge of the wood. “Forgive me for not handing myself over to Voldemort for a quick death.”
His smile was very gentle. “Oh, it wouldn’t have been quick. It wasn’t for any of the others.”
She grimly ignored the bait, even though part of her hungered for news, even bad news so the uncertainty would be over. Her voice was harsh, the words like bullets. “How did you find me?"
A lazy, crooked smile. "A little bird told me. Well. A big, fiery bird. Not exactly the height of subtlety, Mudblood."
She cursed her luck. "What do you want?”
His eyes swept her in a languid examination. “You, alas.”
“Me?” She gave a brittle laugh. “If you think I’m going to let you drag me back to your master like the dog you are-”
“Tempting as that thought is, I have no intention of handing you over to the Dark Lord.”
“What?” She surveyed him. He appeared to be serious; no trace of a smile, his gaze steady on her. But even if she’d drowned him in Veritaserum, Hermione wouldn’t have trusted his word. The mark livid on his arm was warning enough. “I doubt that.”
“I thought you might. So I brought you something. A token of my good faith, I suppose.” She hated those bored, clipped tones, the insouciant way he stood there, as if it was all so amusing.
He drew something from his clothes; it was a moment before she recognised it. A tiny, slouched figure, scowling in the way she knew so well. But it wasn’t moving like most magical figurines, which was strange.
It was Viktor Krum. But...
“Where’s his hand?” she said, puzzled.
“Missing.”
“And it doesn’t move. Why have you brought me a broken toy? Even for you, this is pathetic.”
“I don’t think most people would consider this a toy.” Draco held it carefully, as if it might fall to bits. “This is a Homonculus Charm.”
Horror slowly spread over her. The staid sentences she had read leapt to life, suddenly chilling, the truth before her in grotesque shape.
A representation of a person...a curse of devastating proportion which few wizards have the ability to perform...actions enacted on the homunculus are replicated on the target...
Her breath felt fast in her chest. “You mean...his hand...”
“Gone,” Draco said flatly.
“Why did you bring me this? As a lesson?”
Oh, Viktor...what must it be to know that they can break you piece by piece; that as long as the charm exists, you cannot die, cannot know mercy, cannot even move unless they will it so.
“No. Like I said, as a token of good faith. I thought you might trust me if I showed you that the killing and the torture and all those things you find so disagreeable are strictly business.”
She realised he was holding it out.
“Strictly business,” she said through gritted teeth. “Do you think that makes it all right?”
He shrugged. “We all do what we must to survive.”
She took him in a with a savage glare; the high quality clothes, his unblemished skin, the thick silver ring on his finger, untouched by suffering in even the flimsiest of ways. “Yes, I can imagine how tough it is to survive. I mean, there’s always the danger that you’ll be crushed by the weight of your own wealth.”
“My father abandoned the Dark Lord when he stumbled the first time,” Draco said. “Do you think the Dark Lord forgets? Do you think he forgives those who failed him?” For the first time, she saw hints of emotion – his fists clenched, a bitter twist to his mouth. “He needed my father to bring him to power. Now that he has it, he doesn’t need him at all. You don’t know what the Dark Lord has become since he defeated Potter.”
“He was already a monster,” she snapped. “I saw what he did to Harry. And the others – all of them, I’ve lived with what he did here.”
“Hogwarts was just the start,” Draco said shortly. “It’s worse now. My mother...”
He stopped; how white he was, the smudges under his eyes dark as blackberry stains.
Then he said in a listless voice, “I need your help, Granger. I need you to find the Order, if there’s anything left of them.”
She was beginning to believe. She couldn’t take her eyes from the figure of Krum, couldn’t stop the insidious echo of Draco’s voice: It’s worse now.
“What do you think the Order can do?” she said.
He took a breath. She saw how grim his face was, how subtly older he looked. The child was gone, the man in his place no less arrogant, no less cold, but perhaps a little wiser. He tossed her the figure – she fumbled for it, terrified it would shatter on the floor. And she knew in that moment that this was not altruism: Draco had decided that he would be better off without the Dark Lord. It wasn’t valour or glory that drove him – it was ambition and the need to survive.
His voice was firm. “Kill the Dark Lord.”
At her astounded look, he flashed a grin, savage and bright and ironic. “How about it, Mudblood? Fancy saving the world again?”
“Don’t call me that,” she said sharply. “That’s what got us into this mess.”
His smile faded. He watched her, measuring, analysing. “Very well. Granger.”
“I still don’t know if I can trust you,” she said, fingers cupping the figurine of Viktor. “And I have to be able to. I can’t take that risk.”
He cocked his head. “What do you need?”
She didn’t want to do it, but knew it was necessary. “Two things. I want to show you Hogwarts.”
She needed him to see what had happened here. And she needed to see if he could show remorse, if there was anything human left in him. If not...if not, how could she trust him? If he put no value on life, she could not hand him hers if carelessness or arrogance might end it.
And too, all that dwelt here would be part of him: she would not be the only one who knew the dead of Hogwarts, a living breathing memorial to them. They would not be abandoned then, would not play out their nightmare scenes in solitude.
He raised an eyebrow. “Peculiar. I can’t imagine why, but if you must show me the old slum, I suppose I can bear it. What’s the second?”
She looked straight at him. “An Unbreakable Vow.”
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot
There was silence: brief, sanctified, he caught within it like an insect trapped in amber.
And then Draco laughed, and the sound was jagged and bright.
“Are you mad?”
“No,” Hermione said levelly, though when the nights had been at their darkest and coldest, her mind so sluggish with hunger and fear that her thoughts trickled like blood, she had wondered. “Just sceptical about your intentions.”
All the mirth vanished from his face. His voice was soft, calm, emotionless. “What exactly do you think I have planned for you?”
“I don’t know,” she said, keeping her wand pointed firmly at him. She had to fight to keep her eyes from drifting to the knife hung at his waist. “Maybe you’re trustworthy. And maybe this is all just a way to make me leave without a fight so you can package me up for the Dark Lord.”
“Do you think you’re that dangerous?”
“No, I just think you’re that lazy.”
That hit him; his mouth tightened. “If I wanted to give you to the Dark Lord, I’d have done it by now.”
His fingers brushed the Dark Mark; she found herself fascinated by it, curving with sinister grace on his arm.
“Just one touch,” he whispered, and his eyes were dark as ink. She could have sworn it was almost longing in his voice. “That’s how close he is.”
His fingers slid over the mark, tracing it, slow, idle, lingering. It was quite the creepiest thing she had seen that night, which was saying something.
“Do you think you could stop stroking yourself like that?” she suggested acidly. “If you want, I can leave you alone with your...thoughts.”
He took a ragged breath. The expression on his face reminded her of something. It took a moment before she realised what it was – the memory seemed like a golden dream of someone else’s life, of before.
Ron had looked the same way whenever Fleur was close. Half-dreamy, half-hungry, a look of obsession. Or addiction.
“Frightened?” he said.
“More repelled.” She surveyed him closely, marking new details. There were scars on the pale inside of his arms – raised crescents, marching over his skin like the phases of the moon. Dark shadows lined his eyesockets; his lips were bitten. “Exactly what do you do for You-Know-Who, Malfoy?”
His face smoothed out, blank as an eggshell. “Whatever he asks. Same as everyone else.”
“And what does he ask?” she said, hushed, prying for knowledge.
The silence bristled.
“Everything,” he said, and she heard in that word desperation and admiration, felt the things he did not say like shadows cast upon them.
And then he gave a soft, tired laugh; turned his face so that the darkness concealed it, and said with something more akin to his familiar scorn, “Just like you.”
She took the hint, and slid back into the safety of insults. Whatever she had glimpsed unsettled her deeply. She had lived so long with the tormented dead that she had forgotten the immediacy of pain – she had forgotten what it meant to live in malice and terror that was new, unpredictable, ever-changing. Her grief was known and mapped, her fears as well-travelled as her paths through Hogwarts.
“I’m asking for an Unbreakable Vow. Betray me, and the worst that’ll happen is you’ll die. Betray You-Know-Who...I get the feeling it isn’t death you’re worried about.”
His cheek twitched. “Nice to see you haven’t forgotten how to be sanctimonious. But you obviously have forgotten that we need a Bonder.”
“I haven’t forgotten,” she said quietly. “Does that mean you agree?”
He gave a small shudder. “I agree,” he said, as if the words hurt him.
“Good.” She let out a breath. “Can you visit prisoners?”
His eyes flickered, uncertain. “Yes.”
She uncurled her hand. In it, the tiny figure of Viktor Krum lay. “Then we have a Bonder.”
He let out a hiss. “We can’t free him.”
Part of her protested. The part of her that had seen war, that had begun to see beyond the here and now, accepted it grimly. “But we can help him. And in return, he’ll help us.”
His eyes narrowed. “What do you have in mind?”
She spoke, the knowledge pouring out of her. It seemed to her that she had waited for this, that all the words and the silent spells had been keyed to this moment when she stepped from between the walls and faced the world once more.
He listened, and he argued, and they amended and debated, as cool and impersonal as any two people doing business. Their voices echoed about Hogwarts, and only later did it occur to her that it was the first time that the living had spoken there for three years.
And it seemed somehow apt that they spoke of rescue and daring in this place that had seen so much of it, right to the last.
X - X - X - X - X
“Where are we going?” he said, following the wavering light of her spell. It darted like a firefly before them, illuminating walls missing bricks like teeth, rotting tapestries that dangled from mere threads.
“I told you I’d show you Hogwarts,” she said, skimming through the darkness with ease. Behind her, she could hear him, clumsy and fumbling. She knew the worn steps and the missing flagstones; she wove through the intruding plants where he fought and sputtered.
“This isn’t Hogwarts,” he said. She heard a metallic scrape; then a series of thuds. When she glanced back, she saw he had hacked through the plants with his knife – he held it as if it were an extension of his arm, as pale and gleaming as his hair.
Stood there, he seemed savage, fierce, more than the spoilt brat she had once known.
“Why do you carry that thing?” she asked. “You have a wand.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Which you are holding,” he pointed out. “Are you planning on giving it back?”
“Not yet.”
“Then you can understand why I have the knife.” He spun it lightly in his palms; it glittered like frost. “Everyone needs back-up.”
She supposed that was true. But not many people could find comfort in the edge of a blade.
What sort of world was it where he expected to be deprived of his magic? And then she thought of his scars, and the Dark Mark he bore, and understood that it was a world where Voldemort ruled.
“What’s it like out there?” she said, unable to stop the question.
Hogwarts had delineated her life for three years. She knew nothing of the world bar what she could see from its walls – shadows, lights in the sky, amorphous shapes. And now that she had to leave it, she was frightened of what she might find.
“Changed,” he said slowly. “The Dark Lord controls everything. Even the Muggles are his now, though most of them don’t know it. He keeps them frightened and that keeps them obedient. In the wizarding world, anyone with sense keeps quiet. The ones that didn’t are dead or fled, or screaming in a cell. I thought it would be better when he ruled. I thought we’d be great again.”
“Surprise,” she whispered, scrambling down crumbling spiral stairs. “You elect a tyrant, he runs a tyranny.”
He didn’t answer. The only sound was his breath and his steps.
X - X - X - X - X
When she came to the bottom, she nearly stumbled from sheer surprise. A short passage twisted away like a madman's smile.
It opened out into a small room, barely bigger than a prison cell. The walls were lined with mirrors, dull, dark as lead in the gloom. A dark sheet hung over something tall and wide at the end of the room.
Her light darted in before her, multiplying until it streamed away into the distance, until the room seemed vast as a cathedral, echoing out into forever.
Hermione stopped as she saw her reflection for the first time in months, startled. She didn’t realise how wiry she had become, her hair lank and unwashed, her arms tautly muscled from climbing every day. Her face seemed strange; shorn of its puppy fat, it had a stern cast, her brows straight, her mouth determined, its prettiness transmuted into something more enduring.
She looked like someone who knew how to fight, and that reassured her.
Draco bumped into her. “Granger, did you come here to stare at yourself? I thought I was the vain one in this enterprise.”
She started, but recovered quickly. “No. You’re the annoying one.”
“Actually, I’m fairly sure I’m the heroic one,” he countered, and preened a little in the mirrors. Suddenly she was surrounded by images of Malfoy, flashing his outrageous smile. Beside him, she was ordinary, dull as a sparrow. “Betraying my dark master and all.”
Despite his flippancy, there was a huskiness in his voice when he spoke of Voldemort. It frightened her.
“Are you sure that’s what you want?” she asked, cool.
“You’re obviously not,” he said. “Why are we here?”
She walked over to the covered shape and with a sharp tug, pulled the sheet away.
The gold frame of the mirror was bent and twisted in places; the phrase across the top was broken away, the remainder smeared with dirt and ash. A spiderweb of cracks ran out across the glass; beneath it, the surface moved strangely, as if it were water swirling. She was careful to stand to one side, unable to see her own reflection.
“I hear you get seven years bad luck for that kind of damage,” Draco remarked. “Very careless, Granger. Hasn’t the world suffered enough without you frivolously breaking mirrors?”
“This happened in the battle,” she said. “I want you to look in it.”
His face was wary. “What is it?”
“It was the Mirror of Erised. It showed you your heart’s desire. And then...the spells changed it. The battle broke it, same as everything else.”
“What does it show you now?” he said, eyeing it with suspicion.
“The cost of receiving that desire,” she answered, and cursed herself at the tremor in her voice. Images burned themselves onto her mind, fragmented by the shattered glass. She had looked, and she had seen the grim future. She could still not reconcile herself to it. “So you’d better decide if you really want to stop Voldemort. Maybe this will help.”
She stayed only long enough to see him step in front of the mirror, jaw set, showing no fear. Then she walked out, not stopping. Not at his gasp, not at the sound of metal on glass, not at the high sobs of a woman; not even at the hard thud that might have been him falling to his knees. She did not stop. She did not look back. She left him to his personal, private future, and hoped it was better than hers had been.
X - X - X - X - X
She sat on the bottom steps and waited, his wand in her hand. No matter what he thought, she had left him in there without a weapon. Now she would see whether he really knew how to fight.
His shadow crept over her, weightless warning. She glanced up. He was breathing hard.
“I’ve seen enough,” he said, sounding bored and indolent. “Give me my wand.”
His face gave away nothing, his voice even less. But she had to trust him until they could get to Viktor. If she didn’t, she might as well crawl back into the walls, stumble back into her half-life, her after-life, drift like a dream through the broken castle once more until she too was a relic in the stones, crying out for release in the midnight hour.
She gave it back.
Draco settled it in his hand, then his mask shattered – she saw something raw and primal, something anguished as he raised the wand-
She flinched back as spells that tasted of fear filled her mouth...
He turned and screamed a hex that scorched the air. Rays of red light shot into the room of mirrors, and deafening crashes erupted until the air seemed full of the sound of breaking, until the world was crashing down about them.
Clouds of dust drifted from the doorway. She shoved past him, and stopped on the threshold.
Every mirror in the room was reduced to powder. And at the end, only a misshapen golden frame remained of the Mirror of Erised.
“The cost doesn’t matter,” Draco said in a voice like steel. “He has my family. And I’m telling you now, he’ll pay. No one but him.”
His fingers closed around her arm, bruising. He didn’t look at her, or at the destroyed room; he was already turning, ruin in his wake. And she drawn after him, a little aghast at what she had begun, at what she had to end one way or another.
“We’re going,” he said. “I’m sick of ghosts.”
As she followed him up the steps, struggling to keep up, she felt a surge of fear. So it was happening. She would leave – not alone, not even in the company of a friend, but with the enemy of her enemy, because he was all she had. They were tied together now, one way or another, and it seemed to her that she left something behind in the room of mirrors – some brief reflection, caught in the walls forever with all the others, the last piece of the girl who had been safe in Hogwarts.
“Wait...” she called.
He paused but didn’t turn, his back a fortress.
“I want to say goodbye,” she said.
His laughter was brittle. “Granger, I think the last three years have demonstrated that you’re incapable of it. You chose – you chose – to live with ghosts, to spend your every bloody night with them. You carry your damn dead under your skin, and nothing will change that. You cling to them. It makes you weak.”
“It makes me human,” she hissed.
He whipped around; his face was terrible in the half-light, as beautiful and as ferocious as a god of war. “And it’ll get you killed.”
The silence hung in the air like an accusation.
Then he said, “I’m leaving. Whether you come with me is up to you.”
He needed her, she knew that, but his expression was unyielding. He would do it. He would leave her here; he would chase down the Dark Lord because whatever he had seen in the mirror had decided him once and for all. And ultimately, she was sure, he would fail because his only back-up was a knife, his heart divided into two ragged pieces between Voldemort and his family.
He had lived in a nightmare world for three years. It had moulded and defined him.
She had been left untouched. She had learned unfettered, and most importantly – singing out like a wolf in her heart – she still believed.
She could save the world. She believed it.
Hermione had to wonder what he believed. But she knew that he would not tell her, that whatever it was lay in powder at the bottom of the descent.
“Let’s go,” she said, and believed. It felt good. Terrifying, but good.
Chapter Four: Each In His Prison
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of a key, each confirms a prison
- The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot
Dawn moved across the sky like a spider, a creeping, stealthy thing. It spun a web of pale, ghostly light over Hogwarts, until the dark bulk of the castle was a monstrous fly dying in its midst.
It was the first time in three years that she had not fled the sunlight, and she could not help but feel naked, bared to the world under its unforgiving glare. Even in the thin half-light, she fought an urge to find some shadowed corner, some patch of concealment in which lay at least the illusion of safety.
Her heart was hammering, fear oozing from her pores to lie damp in her palms and trickle down her back. There was no more hiding. There was no more time to prepare, only this: the slant of his back, proud and straight as he led the way, the sure thud of his feet on the flagstones an echo of her heart, the long groan of the doors to the Great Hall as he heaved against the rotten wood.
He threw a vexed glance over his straining shoulder. “Granger, despite my rippling muscles, I could use some help here. In case you’ve noticed, these damn doors aren’t opening themselves.”
The words jolted her. She fumbled for her wand, then said, “Stand back,” wondering why he hadn’t done the same.
“I wouldn’t,” he advised. “My father told me all about the charms he put on these doors. Just in case anyone was left, you know.”
Her arm dropped.
He blinked, and the flash of surprise was hidden as quickly as it had appeared. “Or perhaps you didn’t. Don’t tell me you haven’t even been outside in three years.”
“Considering what the castle’s become, I didn’t think wandering about in the grounds was a good idea,” she said, but some part of her felt small, almost ashamed.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Draco said. “I’ve always thought the carnivorous spiders lent the place a certain ambience. An ambience of gruesome death and some disturbingly symbolic sticky stuff, admittedly, but given that you’ve spent the last three years shacked up with people whose conversational skills are restricted to shrieks of agony, it might make a nice change.”
She stared at him. “Was that a joke?”
“Could be,” he said dryly.
“Then it was in incredibly bad taste,” she said frostily.
“So is standing there while I dislocate my shoulder trying to get out of here.” There was an edge of malice to his smile. “I’ll mind my manners if you mind yours.”
She flushed. There was something incredibly irritating about being lectured on her conduct by Draco Malfoy, a man who’d always thought the most significant aspect of common courtesy was the fact it was indeed so dreadfully, vulgarly common.
“Do you think you could mind your mouth as well?” she said shortly, but tucked her wand away and went to lend her weight to the door. Teeth gritted, she stood beside him, pushing until at last with a screech no less human than the cries of midnight, the wood gave way.
It flung open so fast she stumbled and hit the floor in an ungainly heap.
When she got up, he was poised and smug as a cat, his balance as impeccable as his clothes.
“Falling at my feet?” he said brightly. “It’s a little soon for that, Granger. I haven’t saved the world yet.”
She bit back her reply: save yourself first, worry about the world later.
Because there in the burgeoning light, he seemed softer, younger, all blurred edges and pale shades. Only the lurid stain of the Dark Mark on his arm destroyed the image: she saw again the dreaminess in his eyes when he spoke of Voldemort, sharp contrast to his scars and his bitter words.
It seemed to her that she could not afford to pry at his weaknesses. Not yet, not until he could not betray her.
“Then we’d better get on it with it,” she snapped.
X – X – X – X – X
There is no silence in the cells. They lie there, the tortured and the dying and the captured, some still and some in the same endless motion as the sea, tidal in the rhythms of their pain. Even though the darkness is complete and all-consuming, he knows he is not alone because he hears them.
The sound of flesh on stone, scraping. The clink of chains. Footsteps are thunder on the steps, the roaring monster of their human storm. He has heard countless prayers whispered up to the unforgiving air, and he listens to them, a fallen god as they are all fallen here. In his mind, he answers, and so creates dialogue and with it the illusion that he is not alone, that none of them are alone in a terrible, self-made stony hell.
Please let them come for someone else today, they say.
Today or tomorrow or ten years from now, it makes no difference. You are here: they have already come for you.
Let me be brave, they say.
Wish for something better. Wish to be a coward, wish to be double-faced as a coin, wish to be one of the few they make their own if you break in the right, sweet way. It will be easier for you.
Let me die, they say. They all say it eventually.
And he says back to them: yes, now hush, and dream of tender hands, and slip away.
Sometimes, amidst the small noises – breath and sobs and fingernails on metal – he hears something far greater. He hears the cessation of sound, a small sacred moment of silence.
He knows then that they have heard him, and escaped the only way they can. He blesses them, and then he forgets them because it is the only gift he can give them: he will not hold even their memory prisoner. In that, at least, he can deny his jailers.
Each day, in his cell, he lies motionless, unchained, endlessly forgetting. In a world of people waiting, waiting for death or pain or mercy if they’re fool enough to believe that, he waits for nothing. He forgets and he dreams and he no longer even knows how to put a name to himself.
He does not know that in the blackness, it is him they pray to: he has forgotten even that.
They cling to his image as a talisman. They deify him, the fallen god, and whisper the name he had once: The Boy Who Lived.
X – X – X – X - X
The castle was surrounded by a thick wall of vegetation. Draco had hacked a tunnel through it to get in, and as she crawled through the cylindrical green space, she tried to ignore the insistent thought that it might close about them, tangle and strangle them before they could leave. At several points, she had to stop, jammed in the narrow passage while in front of her he cursed and hacked away at vines that were trying to reclaim their space.
At last they were free. She gasped as she came out into bright morning sunlight; it struck her eyes like a white knife, and the pain was instant and immense. Tears streamed down her face as she shaded her eyes and blinked, hoping they would adjust soon.
She had seen some light – she knew the tricks and shadows of moonlight, the warning glimmer of dawn, but sunlight was as strange to her as peace. It seemed an enemy then, vast and burning and ruthless, stripping her of all her secrecy. She fought it, and hated.
“Wait...” she said, irrationally afraid he would leave without her.
“Thank god we’re out.” He turned; his face was a pale blur, but she heard the sneer in his voice, slick as oil. “Don’t tell me you’re crying for that grotty hellhole!”
Rage surged up in her; her reaction came from somewhere deep inside, some fretful, wounded place that laid the golden days of Hogwarts over its creaking ruin like a shroud; that recalled fires and laughter and peaceful days of sunshine beside the lake.
“I-”
“It isn’t worth it.” He cut across her, callous. She paid no attention to the bitterness in his voice. “I’d have burned it to the ground myself if the Dark Lord hadn’t done the job for-”
She kicked out and heard a satisfying thud as her foot connected with his shin.
And then things moved so fast she could barely keep track – a scraping sound, her feet knocked from under her so she fell to her knees, a hand yanking her hair, and suddenly, a prick of pain at her throat.
She gazed up at Draco, her neck at such an awkward angle that she could barely breathe. The sun was directly above him, and it threw a narrow white line about his silhouette. He was reduced to a black form, his fingers digging into her scalp, the hand that held the knife at her throat absolutely steady.
A cold, calm little thought seeped through her panic.
He went for the knife.
Even when he had the choice, he went for the knife instead of his wand. That’s what I’m dealing with. That’s who he is. Murder before magic, weapons before words.
His voice was soft and slow. “You seem to have forgotten a few things, Granger. I’m one of the Dark Lord’s chosen few. You should treat me with a bit of respect.”
“You should earn it,” she hissed back. Ideas unfolded like chess moves; small steps, a sacrifice, large gains. Where his body was, a quick calculation of angles and space. The freedom of her hands, and the occupancy of his. How much he needed her. How much he underestimated her. How skilled he was.
Move after move, until she saw the path she needed.
She jerked her head forward; his reaction was so fast she didn’t even have time to feel relief – the knife was whipped away because he didn’t want her dead (not here, not now, not yet, whispered her mind); her elbow went up and out as her hair tore from her scalp, and landed right in his groin.
She heard a groan, and he folded like a sheet.
Hermione scrambled to her feet, brushing her eyes clear. She turned, ready to kick the knife from his hand, but he was otherwise engaged.
He was shaking; a strange noise came from him, husky and repetitive, and it was a moment before she realised it was laughter.
When he raised his face to her, it was equal parts agony and amusement.
“You bitch,” he gasped. She fancied there was a note of surprise in it. “You Mudblood bitch-”
She drew herself up, ignoring her stinging scalp. She could afford to lose some hair. She could not afford to lose this skirmish. “I guess I’m not the only one who’s forgotten a few things, Malfoy. I’m not as helpless as you think. I survived the war.”
Those grey eyes were narrowed, giving nothing away. “Because I let you. Or had you forgotten that part?”
She could not forget. Three years ago, he had shown one swift flash of mercy. It had brought them here, now. It was a fragile thread from which to spin this mad enterprise, but it was there.
“No,” she answered softly. “I hadn’t forgotten.”
“Oh. Good. Because the screaming agony in my balls begs to differ.”
She eyed him as he cautiously got up, looking a little green around the edges. Shame curled in her stomach. How had she expected him to react? She’d seen already how he had changed – Voldemort had honed his violence, until Draco himself seemed a weapon. It hadn’t been her smartest moment.
“Sorry,” she offered.
“Tell it to the children I’m never going to have,” he muttered. “I’m not the enemy here, Granger.”
“Try to behave less like it then,” she said, but with little anger.
He looked like he wanted to say something in response, but she wasn’t the only one trying to regain some control because he only offered her a cool stare, then produced his wand and said, “Accio Firebolt!”
It came zipping through the air; a chill went through her at the sight of it. “Is that...”
“Don’t look at me like that,” he said curtly, settling onto it. “It’s not as if Potter’s going to be playing Quidditch any time soon. If it helps, he’d probably get a warm glow from knowing I’m using it to thwart the Dark Lord.”
“Is that your trophy?” she said coldly. Hermione suspected that if Harry had known Draco had annexed his broom, he’d get a red mist rather than a warm glow.
Draco gave her a long, hard look before he said in an empty voice, “It was the Dark Lord’s gift. A reminder, if you want, that I’ve failed him too.”
The colour leached from her face. She had forgotten that Voldemort had tasked Draco with killing Dumbledore.
“There must be another way,” she said, a touch desperately. “Thestrals?”
Draco’s look was contemptuous. “Granger, there’s hardly a wizard left in the country who can’t see those revolting beasts. Look, just get on the broom. It’s this or you can make your own way through the Forbidden Forest with whatever fluffy, demented mutations that imbecile Hagrid left there.”
It was no choice at all. Reluctantly, she sat behind him and gingerly put her arms around his waist.
“This is not how I thought saving the world would start,” she muttered at his back.
“This is almost exactly how I thought the world would end,” Draco replied as the broom rose into the air. “Don’t get any ideas, Granger. Your hands had better not move.”
She nearly choked, but then the broom shot forward and the wind ripped away any answer she might have had.
X – X – X – X – X
It was a long, cold flight. The bright light burned her eyes, and so after a while, she kept her head bowed against his back, shielding her vision as best she could. The rags and tags of her clothes were little protection against the icy wind; the warmth charms she whispered took the worst of it away.
Hogwarts shrank into the distance; she did not look back.
Below them, the world seemed markedly unchanged. The fields were a patchwork quilt of green and gold, stitched together by fences and roads. Clouds skimmed by; flocks of birds wheeled in vast, amorphous shapes.
Then she began to see changes.
A bridge broken in two as if a giant’s fist had smashed down onto the middle of it. An entire street of a village reduced to rubble. As the roads became more prominent, the settlements more thickly clustered, she realised where they were heading. It was inevitable, she supposed.
London loomed before them, immense, complex. Gothic buildings squatted next to high-rise glass confectionary, an architect’s tale of Cinderella and her Ugly Sisters. Lights speckled the city; the river was a blue ribbon winding through it.
She felt the vibrations in his body as Draco muttered a series of spells. Some she recognised – defences sank over them, shields: he fumbled for something in his clothes, raised it to his lips and then passed it back to her.
The gleam of Felix Felicis was unmistakable. She had to hand it to him, he had come prepared. Hermione gulped down the last of the potion, and handed back the empty vial.
Almost at once, they began to descend, swooping down into the very centre of the city. Even knowing how much magic protected them, she felt vulnerable. But no one so much as looked up as they circled over the busy streets. She recognised Canary Wharf, glittering in the distance; the scent of the Thames reached her.
They landed in a dingy alley, unseen. Draco tucked the broom under his arm, and said, “We can Apparate from here.”
“Where are we going?” she asked, quiet.
He gave her a brilliant smile; his eyes were distant as the moon and just as barren. “Home.”
He had caught her before she could register what that meant; he turned, and pressure bore down on her like stone, as if she were being buried alive, air squeezed from her-
They reappeared on a familiar doorstep, and she only had a second to gasp in air before she heard a familiar voice, sleek and cold and purring, whispering, “What a pretty present you’ve brought me, darling.”
She raised her eyes to the tall, terrible figure before her, the knowledge of betrayal almost painful. Those dark lips were parted, her tongue flicking over them with sensuous promise. Her eyes were vicious as knives.
Bellatrix Lestrange.
Chapter Five: Sparrows In The Gutter
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands
- Preludes, T.S. Eliot
The world slowed until time was thick and glutinous. The Felix burned in the back of her throat and the pit of her stomach, and her body obeyed it thoughtlessly. Her legs folded; she prostrated herself upon the steps of 13 Grimmauld Place as if Bellatrix Lestrange was a goddess.
“Dark Lady,” she breathed, as if overawed by her mere presence. Felix crafted the words for her. “Is it truly you?”
Bellatrix’s laughter was smoke and promises. “You train your pets so well, Draco.”
In Hermione’s mind, the future stretched out taut as a tightrope, and she edged along it, knowing that to misstep would be fatal.
Lay still, oh lay still and submit. Be a coward, and bore her; safety is tedium, is fear, is submission absolute.
She reached out a hand to the hem of Bellatrix’s robes. The scent of gardenias wafted from them, oddly feminine for a woman so strong and so cruel. There was no need to fake her tremors. “Great Lady...”
“Show some respect,” snarled Draco, and kicked her hand away. It only stung; but she clutched her fingers to her chest as if it had been mortal. “You do not touch the Dark Lord’s chosen ones.”
She kept her head down, hunched in upon herself. She could not stop the humiliation that swept her as she quivered at their feet, but with luck coating her tongue and teeth like honey, it was the wisest course of action. She had to be anyone but herself. Hermione was valuable; she needed to be worthless.
“Sorry...” she whispered, careful to keep her voice high and girlish. “So sorry...”
Nails dug into her scalp, a languid caress. “How obedient she is,” Bellatrix murmured. “Where did you find this one, Draco?”
“Quaking on a street corner, covered in glamours and charms. Not much ability, you understand, but enough to make herself marketable.” He snorted. “Her mother’s gone and her father doesn’t care. Same old song. Whatever she earns goes on potions that make it all better.”
“Pure?”
“Hardly.” He oozed contempt. “Mudblood. Practically a Squib. Good enough to practice on.”
She dared not think what that might mean.
Bellatrix leaned over her; Hermione felt the darkness close in with the heavy scent of gardenias, and something sharper, wilder beneath. The sickly-sweet of blood, perhaps, of rotting things. She slid a hand along Hermione’s spine, as if she examined a dog.
“The Dark Lord praises your little experiments,” Bellatrix mused. “Perhaps I should try for myself. Broken things are so...beautiful. All shiny pieces, all warm in your hands, all warm and wet and still...”
“Eventually,” remarked Draco.
“I could break her,” Bellatrix said reflectively, and her fingers fluttered like rain on the back of Hermione’s neck, then closed about it. “I could make even this drab little insect beautiful. She’d shine in the end, like they all do, shine and be silent and hollow as him...red and white, that’s what beauty is, my darling, red and white and broken things...”
Her fingers were a choker on the back of Hermione’s neck, spreading and squeezing.
She knew what to do; she turned, all slow and sluggish, let her mouth hang, her face empty of anything except adoration. She prayed that three years and luck were enough of a mask to fool Bellatrix Lestrange.
That face had not changed; she saw echoes of Draco in the scornful droop of her lips, the arctic edge of her beauty which even madness could not obliterate. Only the eyes were different, dark and cryptic as a tomb, empty of anything human.
Behind her, Draco was staring with something close to disbelief.
“Great Mistress...” she whispered, and tilted back her head so that her neck was as stretched and bared as her nerves. She offered herself, a scrawny sacrifice on the altar of his home. “Make me beautiful, please.”
Bellatrix drew back as if repelled, and the morning light replaced her. “So obedient,” she said with a sneer in her voice. “So dull. I thought you had better taste, Draco.”
“I do,” he said, his composure recovered. “But the Dark Lord demands, and I gladly obey him.”
The mere mention of Voldemort was enough to soften her; something stirred in her eyes, dreamy. “As you should. Your father never learned to bend his stubborn neck. I warned Cissy...”
“My father is a fool,” he said in words that had the sound of rote to them.
“And your mother is a fool for him,” Bellatrix answered swiftly. “Make her see reason. She angers the Dark Lord, Draco, and only his great mercy has stopped him so far.”
Hermione had to admire his control. He did not so much as twitch. “Maybe you should talk to her, Aunt Bella.”
“I have talked. She stares and she cries and she screams prettily if I tell her to, but she will not stop...her love for me is not what it was.”
He swallowed. All else was stillness, and silence, the heavy hush of a grave.
“I see,” he said softly.
“Make her see,” Bellatrix snapped. “The Dark Lord sent me to tell you that his patience grows thin. They have a fortnight to tell him what they know, and then he will send them the way of all the other traitors. And they will deserve it!”
Her cloak whirled about her – perfume billowed from its voluminous folds, flowers and death, and Bellatrix was gone in a swish of magic.
Hermione let out a breath she didn’t know had been trapped in her throat. The cold of the stone steps sank into her, or maybe it was shock: she stared at Draco, who was the same listless grey as the city smog.
“She tortured her own sister?” she said.
“I didn’t know.”
She felt a stab of unexpected pity for him. It was quickly overriden by other concerns. “Did you know she’d be here?”
“No. But she doesn’t believe in warnings.”
“Looks like it runs in the family!” she pointed out. “If she’d recognised me-”
“She didn’t.”
“Because of the Felix,” she threw back at him.
His smile was vicious and, she felt, designed to annoy her. “I make my own luck. Literally.”
“And when it runs out?” she said tautly.
Some of the mockery faded; he looked her at her with something close to puzzlement, as if the harsh light revealed something in her that he had not suspected. “That’s why you’re here.”
X – X – X – X – X
Inside, the house was much as she remembered. The grime was thicker, the dust shifting in clouds under her feet, but other sets of footprints showed that Grimmauld Place had not been abandoned after the Order left. She felt a strange sense of duality stepping through it, as if the Hermione of now and the Hermione of then met and meshed in its walls.
She knew it had never meant anything but pain to Sirius, but she had good memories of this place. Harry and Ron bantering; the Weasley twins concocting their endless pranks, comfortable meals with the Order full of hope and plans.
Everything and nothing had changed.
Draco moved in front of her, spells lighting up the place one by one. With a touch here, a whisper there, he threw back the shadows. It did not reassure her. Adrenaline thundered in her veins, driven by uncertainty.
She watched and waited, and when she judged he had relaxed a little, said, “Tell me about these experiments.”
He froze. Then said in a cool voice, “No.”
“Is that what you do?” she pressed on, relentless. “Pick out girls and give them hope, then hand them over to You-Know-Who? Were there others like me?”
The face he turned to her was blank as an eggshell. “No - they were quieter. Do you practice being a shrew, or does it just come naturally?”
“Don’t try and brush me off with insults. What happened to all your ‘little pets’?”
He was close suddenly, and she was startled by the heat of his body, mere promise of the fury that filled his eyes. “What do you think happened, Granger? What do you want to hear?”
“The truth.”
“Here’s the truth, then, and I hope it’s music to your bloody ears. They died. One by one by one they died, and they died so the Dark Lord could see how loyal I am. That’s how he measures our loyalty – in blood, in bones, in the people we sacrifice to him. And if I can’t find a way to save my family, he’ll ask me to sacrifice them too.”
The silence was immense. Inches away, she saw him suddenly with the same duality as herself; he was a killer and a threat, and a boy stood alone in a world of dust, his only luck a drug in his veins.
His whisper was like a knife.
“And I might just do it.”
He left her stood in the middle of the corridor, suddenly glad of the glimmering lights and all that they held back.
One by one by one they died.
X – X – X – X – X
In the thunder of the club, they love her. These are the things she knows: the beat and her body and the wonders that no one else believes.
She dreams of mermaids in the sea as her hips curl like breaking waves; she knows their language, knows their siren songs too. Her head is full of Crumpled Hornsnacks and cheap beer; her arms are loaded with bracelets that jangle as she dances. She’s silver and cream, long hair and long legs that shimmer in the dim lights.
The Jack O’Lanterns grin down on her, filled with captive fairies that shine until they die. No less grotesque are the grins of her customers, flicking Galleons onto the stage as she sways. Whatever is bitten behind their teeth, it’s nothing of starshine or wishes or wings.
In the bawdy atmosphere of Magic Touch, even her name is an asset.
Lovegood.
It doesn’t take much skill, what she does. The dancing isn’t so bad – it’s all curves and angles, like Fibonacci spirals. Hips and hands and shoulders, she trusts her own motion as she trusts her belief. The music is part of her now, familiar as the place where her mother used to be. She doesn’t mind much – there’s even a kind of peace in it, in losing herself in the rhythm.
As for the rest, when the music stops and it’s all dark rooms and urgent whispers, well, there’s rhythm there too, and when it gets too bad, she drifts deep inside herself. She stops feeling, and instead she reflects on all the wonderful things that are still out there, hiding, hardly-known. Tarnished Junebugs and Schrodinger Cats and pots of gold sparkling at the end of the rainbow.
Summer sun and friends and coins that send you secret messages of hope.
There’s one coin that never leaves her, hanging in the spot above her heart. She waits for it to burn again, waits for the things that are strange and true. While she waits, she occupies herself. There are meetings in corners, disguised as trysts; she squirrels away information and sends it where it’s useful, inscribed on the inside gaudy jewellery she flings to her favoured few. Safe places, safe people; she fights as best she can, and keeps them safe while the music drowns out the world.
One day the coin will burn again. The message will change. And Luna will go to join them, because she loves them still, and because they are the cornerstone of her dizzying, imagined world, the unbelievable and the fantastic:
Jabberwockys and Vampire Bunnies and we can still win.
She dances in the glow of dying creatures, her hair a stream of silver, and she takes their money and she takes their time, and when she’s ready, she’ll take her leave, because these are the things she knows: the beat and her body and the wonders that no one else believes.
X – X – X – X – X
A host of noises came from the kitchen – bangs, clatters, the unmistakable sound of glass on glass. When she ventured in, Draco was methodically searching the cupboards. She caught glimpses of strange and arcane objects within them. Instead of tins or mugs or plates, the Black kitchen was crammed with magical paraphernalia.
A grinning skull leaned against a heap of half-burned wax candles; Boomslang skin was unmistakable next to jars of what looked like insects preserved in chemicals. Herbs and spices were surprisingly innocuous, but the hanks of hair that hung on hooks like clumps of basil were anything but.
Ingredients were lined up on the table. She recognised the Sopophorous Bean, the pale petals of Forget-Me-Not, and a reddish powder that might be iron or blood or powdered butterflies. Over the hearth, a small cauldron was already heating.
“What are you looking for?” she said.
He didn’t look up. His voice was curt but civil. “Valerian root. I spent an entire week organising these cupboards when I moved in, only to have Aunt Bella-”
“You live here?” she squeaked. “But I thought your family had a manor house...”
He stilled. “Had. Past tense. Voldemort seized the house when he seized my parents. Grimmauld Place was the consolation prize. I’m the only male of the Black family left. They don’t tend to live long.”
“If they’re all like you, I can see why,” she noted.
To her surprise, instead of annoying him, her comment earned her a quick, brilliant smile. “There’s no one like me, Granger. Ah...”
He pulled out a cluster of small, shrunken roots. When he laid them on the table next to the other ingredients, she had a sudden, vivid flashback of sixth year and that first lesson in Slughorn’s class.
“You’re making a Draught of Living Death,” she said slowly.
He didn’t look up from chopping the roots, fast and efficient. “Took you a while.”
“Why?”
And then he did look up: his eyes were hard and grey as slate. “I want that Vow. I want you to stop questioning my every move. I want you to stop poking and prying and meddling in things that are none of your damn business.”
“You’ve killed people! That’s my business. You want Voldemort gone so people will stop dying-”
“No, I want him gone so my family will stop dying,” he snapped. “The rest of the world can burn.”
“It already has,” she said softly, and they stared at one another while the knife rattled on the table, his eyes familiar in their contempt. Yet he himself was strange, alien, the distance between them more than the table and the tiles: she could not comprehend how he could care so little, how his world could be nothing more than the nucleus of his parents and himself.
Her mind was crowded with people, as her life had been crowded with ghosts in Hogwarts. She thought of Harry, of course, and of Ron and Ginny and Luna and Neville, beyond them the ranks of the DA, forever seventeen in her memories, some missing, some forgotten. Beyond them were her classmates and her housemates; her own family, safe at least, but distant as the stars through her own devices, the Weasleys and the teachers, the house elves, the goblins, the likeable and the repellent. All people. All important.
Suddenly he swore, and she saw specks of blood on the table, dribbling from the hand he had clutched against his chest.
She moved quickly, whipping out her wand. “Give me your hand.”
There was a moment when she thought he’d refuse, though she couldn’t comprehend why. Then he held out his maimed hand, and she saw how deeply the knife had scored into the tips of his fingers.
“It’s fixable,” she said. “You’re lucky.”
His smile was mirthless. “For now.”
As she cast the spells, he didn’t flinch. His flesh knitted smoothly; she was quite proud of her handiwork.
If only she had known these spells earlier. It might have made a difference.
He wriggled his fingers then went to wash off the blood. She expected something – thanks, a nod – but all he did was turn back to the table to examine the roots.
“They’re clean,” he announced. “I can still use them.”
“Aren’t you going to thank me?”
He gave her a startled look, and she realised it hadn’t even occurred to him. “What for? I could have done the job myself, Granger, you just got there first.”
She didn’t know what to say, then words came to her in a blistering torrent. “You ungrateful, arrogant, unethical toad!”
“Don’t hold back,” he said, sounding amused. “Tell me what you really think.”
“I think you don’t have a shred of courtesy in you! I don’t expect you to behave like a saint, Malfoy – let’s face it, there’s mould under rocks with more moral fibre than you – but if you want my help, you can treat me like a human being, not like one of your endless parade of slaves.” The bitterness bit deep. “Or pets.”
His eyes were narrow and glittering. “All this because I didn’t fall at your feet and vomit gratitude?”
She struggled for control. It came to her with air; deep forced breaths that gave her at least the illusion of calm. “I need some sign that there’s a person inside you, Malfoy, because it’s not looking good. Right now, I don’t believe you want the Dark Lord gone. I think this is just another diversion for you. And for all I know, I might just be another of your little pets. Another experiment.”
“And if I say please and thank you and good day, how you are you, Miss Granger, you’ll be miraculously convinced that the pit of evil festering inside me has vanished?”
“No. But I might be convinced that you can care about a cause enough to fight for it.”
“I know how to fight. Which, for the record, is where I have some reservations about you. Oh, you care about this cause, Granger, like you cared about your silly petition for house-elves. But I’m just not convinced that you care enough. I’d kill for my family, and I’d kill to be free. Would you?”
The challenge lingered like a noose.
She looked back at him, this boy who knew what it meant to drive home the knife, to whisper the curse, to be left victorious and breathing and alone in a space which had held two and had room for only one. Could she be like him?
No. Never.
But could she kill...? It was a different question. And the answer frightened her.
“I...don’t know,” she said finally.
He nodded, as if it was what he had expected. “That’s why you need me, Granger. So don’t think you’re doing this to help me out. You get something too. You get to keep your conscience.”
She had to swallow hard to free her throat of the lump there.
X – X – X – X – X
The message is nonsense to anyone who doesn’t know their secrets.
First star on the left, straight on till morning.
It takes Luna long hours to etch in such tiny truths. She does it between dances, lying on her stomach on her uncomfortable bed with her wand moving in increments. The coin around her neck dangles over the edge, turning and gleaming in the dim light.
It hides another message that she whispers into the etchings. No one can reach it unless they know the key, and only her sacred few do.
“Clear out Chapel Weston. A Death Eater has caught its Secret-Keeper.”
The Death Eater in question breathed that into her ear, weight pressing her flat to the wall. He paid his price, and now he has paid hers; the door slams shut, and she is theirs for a given value of time. Such dances are intensely private, conducted behind locked doors because she is known to be loyal. After all, her father is withering away in the deep, silent parts of Azkaban. Voldemort holds her to ransom.
None of them understand that all they have done is ensure that she has nothing to lose and everything to gain by his downfall.
So they come into her arms, and hide their smiles at the turns of the lock (for its key is only a word), and they think her as easy to open, empty and pleasure-filled, treasure-filled as Ali Baba’s cave. She takes care to cultivate it, telling them of wonders and nonsense, and when they need her to laugh, she thinks of her friends, and it comes easily.
They lay their hands on her like explorers planting a flag into some uncharted, exotic territory, and thinking her conquered, never look for danger.
When she plucks her wand from its hiding place (counterfeit, not quite as good as her first wand which they confiscated because we protect our loyal subjects so well you’ll never need magic again, sweet little Luna), they’re so surprised.
Imperio, she whispers, and her will is always greater than theirs. She’s known pain at the bottom of a pit, and it ended. She’s seen a war lost, and she survived. And she will not be broken.
She’s always gentle with them, because there’s no need for violence.
So they pay her price, and she pays theirs, and then she etches what remains into her bracelets.
“There are Immolating Fireflies there too,” she whispers to the bracelet. “They’re only native to Chapel Weston and Atlantis, so I think it’d be nice if you could save them too.”
Her message completed, she seals off the spell. Now no one can find it unless they know the secret: that if you run your finger over the words and whisper I believe in fairies, and clap your hands three times, you’ll hear her voice, speaking of modern miracles. Using Muggle fairytales to hide their secrets seems a neat sort of balance to her.
And tonight, when Ernie Macmillan squeezes into the crowd, she’ll wend her way to him, distributing touches and glances on her way like confetti. She’ll toss him a bracelet, one of a multitude that the crowd clutch, and only he and she will know that this one will keep a few more people from Azkaban, or from lurking just out of sight.
She slips the bangle back onto her wrist.
And then as she does each day, she practices her sleight of hand: Luna the rebel vanishes under make-up, stowed beneath corsets and veils and exotica. No one knows that her wand has replaced a bone in her corset. No one knows that she has Transfigured the coin around her neck into costume jewellery.
Finished, she reaches under her bed and draws out a dog-eared copy of The Quibbler, which is ridiculous enough to have survived the censors.
She thumbs through and reads about mermaids off the coast of Scotland and gremlins in Durmstrang’s attics, and a dreamy smile curves over her mouth, because the wonder’s gleaming on her wrist: we can still win.
X – X – X – X – X
Draco made the potion in silence. She had to admire his deftness: the natural ability he’d had in school had been honed into artistry. At last the Draught of Living Death was ready, pale pink and smelling of myrrh and mildew.
Hermione couldn’t help but feel uneasy, even though they had discussed it in Hogwarts. “You’re sure this is the only way I can get into Azkaban?”
“Certain. They’ve put up all kinds of extra defences now. Polyjuice Potion and Animagi are useless now. No one alive can pass through unless they’re tested and approved by the Dark Lord. He doesn’t want an escape.” His lip curled into a sneer. “As if Potter was even capable of it.”
“Have you seen him?” she said.
“Of course. Everyone goes to see The Boy Who Lived To Regret It.” He filled a cup from the cauldron. “Here.”
She didn’t want to ask the next question, but could not stop herself. “Do they...do they hurt him?”
He watched her for a long time, and she knew what he thought: weak. In the shimmering fumes from the cauldron, his face was obscured, blurs and ripples. “It’s not as if there’s any point. He’s beyond this world.”
Her shoulders sagged with relief.
“He’d be better off dead,” Draco added matter-of-factly. “At least he’d be a martyr then. He certainly managed to act the part when he was compos mentis. Now he’s mental compost, he might as well get the lamenting hordes he wanted.”
“Harry wasn’t like that,” she snapped.
Draco only raised his eyebrows in answer. “You got to see the Boy Wonder, Granger. The rest of us saw the Boy Wan-”
“Oh, shut up!” She slammed her hand on the table. “Let’s get on with this. Give me the potion.”
“You know, it’s a little unflattering that you’d rather be comatose and mostly dead than finish a conversation with me,” he remarked. “But you’ll have to hold off. If I throw you into my toolkit, it’ll probably break a few bones, and I’m still feeling tender from the last time I annoyed you.”
He went out for a few moments and came back with what looked like a black briefcase. He opened it onto a disturbing row of silver...implements encased up in foam. Draco murmured a series of spells that she recognised as increasingly complicated unlocking charms. When he finished, he lifted up the foam to reveal a narrow, black space dropping away.
“There’s a ladder fixed into the wall,” he said. “Climb in.”
She felt intensely nervous at the thought of voluntary incarcerating herself in anything belonging to Draco Malfoy. But this was the last time she would need to trust him without any security, she reminded herself. After this, an Unbreakable Vow would tie them together.
“Do I need to take the potion?” she muttered as she scrambled into the tight space.
“Yes. Azkaban’s wards will detect anything living. Technically, you’ll be dead. You enjoy the rest: I’ll enjoy the silence.”
It was only a short climb down to the floor, which was made of stone. Lumos showed her a surprisingly cosy room: there was a chair and some books, and even a garish rug on the floor.
Draco floated the potion down to her. Despite the fact it was still steaming, the cup was ice-cold. She settled herself into the chair as comfortably as possible, then extinguished her spell.
She raised the potion to her lips, and drank.
It slid through her like ice, settling in her stomach and spreading outwards. She felt old and slow as a glacier; her thoughts dribbled to a halt, and there only darkness and cold and...and...
Nothing.
X – X – X – X – X
Somewhere, a clock was striking. The sounds seemed to drag at her, pulling her from oblivion. She rose through layers of grey as if she swam some strange and fathomless ocean.
She found herself stood in the Great Hall at Hogwarts, and she was not alone.
“So you came back to us,” said Cho Chang, her arms wrapped about herself. The fatal gash across her throat was livid, beaded with blood like a ruby necklace. “We knew you would.”
“You’re one of us.” Michael Corner spoke in a strangled hiss; his feet twitched as they dangled in the air. The Death Eaters had strung him up by a noose in front of the House banners; he was straight as the sword that the Slytherin snake curled so lovingly about. “You always were.”
“You betrayed us,” a new voice said, one she didn’t recognise. The dead crowded in on her, missing eyes and broken limbs and ghastly wounds.
“...leaving us...”
“Malfoy is one of them.”
“He’ll betray you. It’s in his blood, breeding and betrayal...”
“Didn’t you hear them screaming in Grimmauld Place? All those girls, left in the cellars to die after he took the sunlight and the warmth and the hope from them. They break their nails trying to claw the locks of the doors, and they chew on their lips because there’s nothing else, and we can hear them screaming in the bowels of the house...”
She turned around, trying to find the speakers. Insidious, their words twined about her like wire.
“And you’ll come back to us too, dear girl, if you don’t stop.”
She whirled and found herself face to face with Lupin, kind and creased. His eyes seemed sad, dark as ink, a stain spread wide over his heart. It was the only colour in his greyed form, crimson and stark.
“You’ll be red and white and broken, and he’ll think you beautiful, because he only knows how to destroy. Go now, be safe. Leave this mad enterprise. Live. Remember us.”
But the others overrode him, driving past him to surround her. “Avenge us.”
They took up the call like a mantra.
Revenge...revenge...revenge...
X – X – X – X – X
“Granger!”
She stirred, a moan escaping her. Someone was shaking her. Breathing was hard, stifled...
She opened her eyes onto Draco, and realised it was his hand over her mouth. The light from his wand threw spooky shadows across his face, and for a moment the words resounded through her: it’s in his blood, breeding and betrayal…
It had just been a dream. A horrific dream, but nothing more.
"Sleeping Mediocrity awakes," he said lightly, and drew back his hand. "For a moment there - a horrifying, deeply upsetting moment, I might add - I thought I was going to have to wake you with a kiss."
She sat up, feeling groggy. In a way, the banter was comforting. It was familiar when all else was new and unknown. In an uncertain world, she could rely on Draco to be an enormous prat. "Well, it would have worked."
He looked taken aback. "Would it?"
"I can't think of a more traumatic way to wake up, but yes, the horror probably would have dragged me out of an enchanted coma," she said dryly.
"I think you mean the ecstasy," he informed her loftily.
"No...I mean-" She got to her feet, and the thin grayish shaft of light coming through the hatch was a sharp reminder of just where she was. All her calm vanished. "Are we here?"
“Yes,” he said. “Ready to inextricably tie yourself to me?”
They had done it. They were past the guards.
The thought sent shivers through her. “Not really,” she said. “But let’s get on with it.”
She was in Azkaban, and she had come to make the Unbreakable Vow.