Disclaimer: I own nothing, I make no money.
Author's Note: You can set it anywhere you want. My treat. I needed some Sirius.
Hermione's Hero
"It's easy to immortalize someone when they're everything you're not."
Hermione remembers once, the summer just before fifth year, a conversation she had with Sirius Black in an empty study, in the early morning hours still too dark for the sun, of the still very unfamiliar Grimmauld Place.
She had woken early, as she usually does, and when she was dressed and showered, made her way downstairs to meet the others. But no one else was up yet so she decided to wander the dark halls and map out the parts of Grimmauld Place she had yet to discover. That was when she had come across the small study tucked away on the ground floor.
She opened the deep mahogany door and stopped in the threshold to peer inside the room. The walls were a dark burgundy, lined on three sides of the room with large bookcases of wood and evergreen. Tomes were packed tightly into the shelves, leaving no room for even air inside the cases. There was a large desk near one of the cases, corners and legs carved elaborately from fine mahogany wood, and more books resting atop the surface, next to a few bottles of ink, quills and two rolled up parchments.
The candles set up around the room burned dimly, casting shadows across her form, so that it took her a moment to notice the two deep green armchairs against the wall that hosted the doorway in which she stood. She turned to her right to survey them and was startled to see the figure lounging comfortably in the chair on the right.
Sirius Black.
He was smiling knowingly at her, a glass of some liquid held limply in his left hand as his arms hung over the armrests of the plush chair.
Hermione fumbled for a second. "I'm sorry. I didn't realize you were in here. I'll leave if you like." She began to turn out the door when she heard him chuckle.
"It's alright, Hermione."
She stopped and turned back to face him, her hand still on the doorknob.
"Besides," he turned his gaze to the shelf of books across form him, "I could use the company."
She seemed to hesitate a moment, before closing the door behind her and making her way to the second armchair. She sat upon it, her feet placed on the ground, as she rested her hands in her lap.
He still had not spoken, so she took the moment to sneak a glance at him from the corner of her eye.
His black hair was still not neatly combed, though he did seem to have cut it a bit since last she saw him. His chin carried the beginnings of a beard, his cheeks a little sunken in, but slowly gaining their fullness since his time in Azkaban.
She turned her attention to the books before her and began to think of something to say.
"You know," she began, "I've been working on a probability case."
Sirius turned his head to look at her. "Oh? What about?"
Hermione looked at her hands. "Our chance of winning this war now that Voldemort's back."
Sirius didn't say anything.
Hermione looked up at him to continue. "I've worked out a few formulas that can equate each side's possibility of dominance. There's been a lot to take into consideration, as far as variables go. Tactics, knowledge of spells, the element of surprise, region, group strengths, group weaknesses, morale, power fluctuations, adaptability, support, long-term endurance and…" and Harry's survival, "and other undetermined factors."
"You seem to have thought about this a lot. Have you come to any conclusions about either side?"
"Well, there are a lot of variables to account for, and of course room for outliers. There needs to be thought for the unexpected, and equations made to prepare any change in the constants seeing as there is no control group here and…" She noticed the look on Sirius' face.
Hermione cleared her throat. "But yes, I've come to a statistical chance of our success."
Sirius gazed at the glass in his hand. "I'm not sure if I want to hear our probability of a win," he laughed softly.
Hermione bit her lip and decided not to say anything. Truth was, she hadn't wanted to know either that they had a 42 percent shot at victory. After all, though it still is a chance, it's not even close to the enemy's 58.
Perhaps she had made the equations and computed the numbers because she needed something solid to rely on when they came face to face with their opponent. She had thought if they were in the greater percent than she could be safe in the knowledge that they stood a far better chance than once thought. And if they were in the lesser, she would have the chance to fight it, prove that there were some things she couldn't know the answers to.
She decided to leave it at that and not enlighten Sirius about her musings.
After a minute of silence, she looked at Sirius' glass and saw him lift it to his lips to drink from.
"Alcohol?" she asked.
Sirius raised a brow at her and lowered the glass again after taking a sip. "Now, Hermione, you calling me a drunk?"
She had the grace to look sorry. "No, I mean, I didn't…well, is it?"
Sirius laughed and handed the glass to her to sniff.
She took it and held it to her nose. She looked up at him with a smile and asked coyly, "You drink cider?"
Sirius shrugged and took the offered glass back from her. "Sure. It's good stuff. Besides, if I had wanted alcohol I'd have had a whole bottle of scotch up here with me."
Hermione smiled.
"Hey, Hermione."
"Hmm?"
He looked at her curiously. "How old are you?"
She looked at him questioningly. "Fifteen. Why?"
"Well, isn't that around the time muggles start to drive?"
Hermione blinked. She had never really thought about it much. Before coming to Grimmauld Place, while she stayed with her parents for a part of the summer, she had taken her mum's car out a few times, just to get familiar and learn the basics. She hadn't driven much; it hadn't been one of her priorities.
"Yes," she finally answered. "I suppose it's around that time. Why do you ask?"
Sirius was looking at the books again, only, to Hermione, it didn't seem like he was looking at the books at all, like he was off somewhere else, where they weren't held in by the walls of the study.
"I drove in a car once." It sounded so bittersweet, coming from that place deep in his throat, a memory worth remembering.
Hermione looked a him then, the way his eyes seemed to gleam, and she had the intense feeling that she was about to be let into a part of Sirius Black that very rarely glimpsed the surface.
"With James and Lily."
Hermione blinked in surprise, suddenly aware that this was an honor even Harry had probably not come upon. So she stayed silent, and just watched him as he delved into days she thought had not survived the dementors.
Sirius smiled. "It was the summer before seventh year. Me and James and Lily took a portkey to Corsica. A way to escape our folks for a good week, not that we left much of a note." His smile broadened at the thought.
"But we were just so free then, so untouchable. Lily had had a license then and we took a car out – a convertible – to drive the highway following the beach on the east side of the island. I remember it was an old red mustang. And I remember thinking, 'A mustang. It's so right. Flying like a wild mustang.' And we were. We well and truly were. Flying like mustangs. We didn't even need magic to fly like that. Just us. Just there. I stood up, my feet braced by the seats and I spread my arms and closed my eyes and I just let out this cry of freedom, loud and soaring with the wind and alive. I had never felt so alive as I did that day, driving in that car with James and Lily as we whooped and yelled our freedom and soared. Like wild mustangs."
Hermione was breathless. She stared wide-eyed at Sirius, and wished with everything she had that she could feel one iota of what he felt. That flight. To be free and flying like that, with Harry and Ron and the wind and nothing else but her shouts of liberation carrying on the breeze, across the oceans and the continents and out to places she's never been but yearns to see.
There was something so boundless about Sirius Black that she couldn't help but be just a little bit in awe, regardless of that rational part of her mind that kept saying it could never happen to her.
Hermione Granger could reason out anything to you, make a list of pros and cons and then tell you the safest most accurate path possible. But no one ever told you that Hermione Granger wanted Sirius Black's spirit. No one told you that Hermione Granger wanted her eyes to glow like his did. No one told you that Hermione Granger wanted more to live for.
And that scared her.
Sirius broke from his thoughts and cocked his head to look at Hermione, only to find her staring at him in this sorrowful wonder. He blinked and cleared his throat, to bring his mind back from that Corsican road. "And that's when I had a vision."
The words were piercing to the fog of Hermione's mind, bringing her back sharply into focus to see Sirius looking at her with a warm smile upon his face. "Your motorcycle?" she asked, surprising even herself with the efficiency with which the words came out.
Sirius tipped the glass to his mouth to catch the last drops of cider and reached his hand across to the desk beside the bookcase, setting the glass down upon the sealed top of the wood. He sighed nostalgically. "Yeah. My baby. Epona."
Hermione cocked her head, confused. "I'm sorry?"
Sirius looked at her as he settled back against the green of the chair. "Epona. It's her name."
"Whose name?" Hermione paused. "Wait. Don't tell me you named your motorcycle." She raised her brows incredulously.
Sirius smirked. "Of course I did. Don't you ever do things like that?"
Hermione thought about it, if she had ever given anything more meaning than it really needed, and she couldn't for the life of her think of any whimsical fancy she ever had of the like. She lowered her gaze, and when the words left her, they were tinged with something Sirius could have sworn was regret. "No. I never did anything like that."
Sirius raised his arms to rest behind his head. "You should try it sometime Hermione. To me, it makes her all the more special because of her name."
Hermione looked up. "Well, what does Epona mean?"
He paused for a moment, and Hermione thought he had escaped these walls once more. "It means 'horse' in Gallic. The name of the Celtic goddess of horses."
Hermione was suddenly immobile with the marvel such thoughts brought her. "Like wild mustangs," she breathed.
Sirius locked eyes with her, and his voice seemed to come from a time when she never knew him. "Like wild mustangs."
There was a moment, a split second in time, in which Hermione questioned how any human could affect her so. But it was gone in an instant, replaced with the reverence she suddenly felt for this soul sitting before her. And it didn't matter that she would most likely never get to see inside him ever again. It just mattered that she had the chance to witness what she had probably always wanted, what she would probably spend the rest of her life aching for.
She didn't want to compute 42 percent chance statistics in her head anymore. What did that matter at all when she only wanted to fly?
There was a desperateness in Hermione now, to keep that force within him, to watch it come out in the sun and spread it's arms wide through the wind and howl out it's untamable freedom to the world. An abandon Hermione had never felt herself. And it was then that she knew, then that she realized, she would live to her dying day immortalizing Sirius Black. Grasping for that everything she never had. Living. And flying.
Like wild mustangs.