Here Without You- Chapter 1

Explaining To Trina

Author's Notes- This is a sequel to Cherished Memories and follows the events that happen starting the Monday after Hermione and Ron leave Harry's house until the time when Harry shows up at Hermione's door. Thanks to Quinzy for giving me the plot bunny to write this.

Disclaimer: I own nothing of Harry Potter.

"Hey, Boss? You O.K.?"

Harry lifted his head from his hands and looked blankly at Trina. She saw his eyes were red, as if he'd been crying or hadn't slept in a few days. She entered his office and came to stand right in front of his desk.

"What happened?" she asked in alarm. "Is it Morgan's case? Is the judge going to drop it now that Jeffery is ?" Harry shook his head, then dropped it back into his hands.

"No," he simply answered. Trina decided to let the subject drop for now. She knew from experience that Harry would tell her when he felt like talking.

"Where are your friends? I noticed they aren't around today."

"They went home," came his muffled response. She noticed that he seemed to choke on the words, and knew that she was going to have to force him to talk. She frowned and came around his desk and put an arm around his shoulders, pulling him out of the chair.

"Come on, Harry," she said.

"What?" he asked, his voice dispondant.

"We're going into the kitchen and you are going to talk to me, that's what." She dragged him to his feet and pulled him down the corridor. They entered the kitchen and Trina shoved him into one of the chairs at the table. "Now what's up?" she asked, going to the refrigerator to get a bottle of water.

"I've made the biggest mistake of my life."

"What'd you do? Misfile one of your cases?" Trina joked, returning to the table and placing the bottle in front of Harry as she sat down. He stared at it and started picking at the label.

"I let her go."

"You let who go?" Trina wasn't any less confused. The only person she could think of that would have made this much of an impact on him was... "Morgan? B'cause if so, Harry, you know you can't get involved like that with her. It would compromise the case and the judge would have to drop it." Harry threw the bottle of water across the room as he jumped out of his chair. It hit the wall and broke open, its contents sloshing down the paint to the floor.

"It's not Morgan, damnit!" he yelled, stalking over to the window and leaning against the sill. Trina stared at him in shock. Harry had never talked to her like that before.

"O.K.," she said hesitantly.

"It's Hermione," he whispered.

"Oh. Ooohhhh!" Trina said as she realized now. Hermione was the one that he'd been talking about for the last week whenever his two friends had been elsewhere in the house, and Harry's eyes had lit up whenever he'd heard her name or her voice, and he'd practically glowed when he saw her.

"I love her, Trina. I can't believe that I could be so stupid!" Harry hit himself on the forehead.

"You're stupid because you love her? That doesn't make any sense."

"No, I'm stupid because I let her leave Friday. I didn't do anything to keep her with me!" He pushed away from the window and turned to face her. "I didn't say anything, I didn't even fight!" He smacked his head again. "Why? Why am I so stupid?"

"You're not stupid, just confused, and stop hitting yourself, or I'm going to do it for you," Trina said, getting a small smile out of her employer.

"How am I confused?" Harry asked.

"If you didn't do anything to get her to stay here with you, then I would say you're a bit confused, Boss."

"Huh. Hermione would have called that stupid." Trina smiled ruefully.

"Why don't you tell me exactly what happened?" she said, patting the table where he'd been sitting a minute earlier. He resumed his seat with a sigh.

"O.K. Friday, I was sitting in the other room watching television, and I heard the two of them lugging something down the stairs. I went to see what was going on, and they had brought down their suitcases. I asked where they were going, and Ron told me that they were going to make the portkey connection back to England." Trina interrupted him.

"Portkey?" she asked.

"That's how we travel over large distances without taking planes, trains or boats, remember?" Trina knew that Harry was a wizard. She and a few other people he relied upon in his line of work- and he knew they would never reveal his secret to anyone.

"Oh, yeah," she replied, nodding.

"Hermione asked if I was ready, and I told her that I wasn't going. She wanted to know why not, and I said that there wasn't anything for me in London, that I'd just be going back to everyone in the magical world wondering where I'd been and hounding me for the story of what I've been doing for the last three years. She reminded me that she lived in London, and her job was there- she had no intention of leaving it." He sighed heavily.

"I can understand that she wouldn't want to leave all that she's ever known, Harry," Trina said.

"Yeah, I can too. But that's not the worst of it. I went on to tell her that she'd wasted her time coming here to take me back, and she informed me that if I couldn't take her living in England and our relationship as compensation to all the attention that I would be recieving, that she didn't want to talk to me anymore and for me to have a nice life. Then she Disapperated and Ron started on me."

"What did he say?"

"He told me that Hermione loved me and that since they'd known me for as long as they had, that they'd already gotten a lot of media attention, and that she didn't care about that. Then he told me I should think about it, and he left." He brought one hand up to rest his chin on, sighing again.

"I stand corrected," Trina said with a small smile.

"About what?" Harry asked.

"You are stupid."

"That's what I've been telling you," he laughed mirthlessly. "I let her leave without even fighting for her. I didn't even make the attempt!" He slumped back in his chair.

"Why didn't you?"

"I don't know. I guess I thought she'd be willing to stay here with me. Or at least work out something where she'd come see me a lot."

"Uh, that more than likely wouldn't be possible. It would get extremely expensive for her having to travel back and forth all the time just for you." Harry chuckled.

"Yeah, I know. But I wasn't thinking about the expense at the time. But I was planning on maybe going to see her every once in a while. In secret of course. I wouldn't have wanted the press to find out about it." His receptionist shot him a look.

"What is it with you and the press?" she asked, sarcasm dripping into her words. "I mean, really, Harry, you'd be willing to give up the woman you love just so you could have privacy? Now that's stupid. If from what you tell me is true, and you are as famous in England as you say," Harry looked at her in shock. "Then I would have thought you'd be used to it by now. I'm not saying you have to like it. Just be able to get past them butting into your life all the time. If celebrities did that here in the States, people would start writing that they're rude, snotty and start to dislike them. You don't want that to happen to you, right?"

"Well, that's sort of the whole point. If I'm not in England, they can't write anything about me. Not without coming here to find me, and I know that Ron and Hermione won't tell anyone where I am." His heart contracted painfully when he mentioned her name- he clutched at it briefly with a small groan. He stared across the room when it had passed, and grimaced when he saw the large wet spot on the far wall. He stood up, walked over and picked up the pieces of the bottle he'd thrown.

"How did they find you, anyway?" Trina asked as Harry started mopping up the puddle on the floor with a dish towel.

"Ron told me that they'd been searching almost the whole time since I left. Then it was his brothers Charlie and Bill, but they had no leads, and gave up soon after Ron went into Auror training. He started it up again when he graduated from the academy, in secret of course, because he didn't want the whole Ministry to know what he was up to. He started by running checks on my magical signature. See, the Ministry of Magic keeps track of all underage witches and wizards by putting a trace on them when they're born, so when they start school, they don't use magic at home or in front of Muggles. The trace is lifted when they turn seventeen, as we are considered s in the eyes of the Ministry, but our magical signatures stay on file until we die."

"How would it stay on file? I mean it's not something that you can touch, right?" Harry tossed the sodden towel into the sink and turned to face Trina.

"The actual signature isn't, no. But the records of it are. That's what he was looking for."

"And how is it that he was the one who thought of looking for you that way? Because it seems just a bit funny that no one else would have first."

"That's because it didn't occur to anyone else. They just all figured that I had gone into hiding after the final battle with Voldemort so that his followers wouldn't try to attack me. But that's the most idiotic thing I have ever heard. I finished my last year at Hogwarts before I went into hiding? What sense would that make? Anyway, I don't know that Ron really thought to look for me that way, he had just been sent down to the Trace Office to return a couple of files. One of them was alphabetically right before me, and he stopped to have a look at my file. He told me that it said that all traces of my signature had left Great Britain, so he knew that I was either out of the country, or not using magic." He was silent for a few minutes. Trina knew this couldn't be the end of the story, Harry hadn't told her how he'd been found yet!

"So, what happened next?"

"Ron knew that I wasn't going to give up using magic, so that meant I was no longer in Great Britain. He went to Charlie and Bill that night and told them what he'd found. They agreed to help him look for my signature in Europe. They figured that I wouldn't have gone too far. Charlie started in Romania, he was working with dragons there at the time, and Bill went to France with his wife, Fleur. They made their way all over the European continent, and realized that they'd been wrong. This took them about eight months. By then, according to Ron, the rest of the magical world had stopped wondering where I was and had gotten on with their lives. But Ron and his brothers didn't give up. They knew I was out there somewhere. Bill asked some of his friends to help him search across Asia, Charlie began in Australia and Africa. When those didn't pan out, the two of them went to Antarctica on a far-fetched hunch. I guess they thought that if I really wanted to hide, that would be the place to do it as there aren't that many people around. Now two years had passed. Bill wanted to go home to be with Fleur and their new baby, Megan, Fleur had a difficult delivery with her and Bill regreted not being there for most of her pregnancy, and Charlie had to get back to Romania, or risk losing his position altogether. So Ron took up the search again. He used his brothers' contacts to search the last two continents. They searched South America first, that took about half a year, then started on North America. Finally after another five and a half months, they got a break. They were in Indiana, near Fort Wayne, and they detected a magical signature. In an area where there are no wizards. They went in to investigate further, and found that it matched mine. They wanted to report to Ron, but not until they were sure that I was still in the area. I had been there for a lead on the Hertley case and had needed to use magic to light up the basement where I caught his wife with that truck dealer?" Trina nodded.

"I remember," she said.

"Well, they tracked it to the Ohio border and informed Ron when my signature started to get stronger. Two days later, they hit the jackpot, so to speak, and found the source, me of course, here in Bryan. Ron booked the next portkey to America, grabbed Hermione, and came after me. You know the rest, as Hermione showed up on my front doorstep the next day."

"She showed up wanting to use the bathroom," Trina laughed. "But what made me laugh is that she told me afterwards that she needed your help when I told her you were a private detective. She said she was looking for her friend. Turns out it was you, huh?" Harry nodded and smiled sadly. "Why did she come with Ron? What was her motive?"

"Because of what happened our last night at Hogwarts," he said, returning to the table.

"And what was that, if you don't mind my asking? You've never said anything about why it was that you came to the States, and I didn't want to pry, but..." She shrugged.

"It's all right, Trina. It's all come out to Ron and Hermione now, the reason I left England. I might as well tell you, too." He sat down. "Our last night, I was trying to comfort Hermione after Ron and I had returned from getting a couple cases of firewhiskey in Hogsmeade. She had just lost her parents then, and hadn't been eating anything. I was worried that she'd make herself sick, or worse, and went to talk to her, try to get her to eat something, you know? She didn't seem to be listening to me, so I was just going to go to bed, maybe try again before we all left the next morning, when I heard her start crying behind me. And I don't mean just crying, I mean she was on the verge of hyperventilating! I ran to where the firewhiskey was and brought it back to her, giving her a shot to calm her nerves, but when she saw what it was that she was drinking, she grabbed the bottle and started to suck it dry. I took from her, and told her that she hadn't eaten in two days, she grabbed it back and she told me go get her something, then." He chuckled and sat silently for a few seconds, then continued.

"I did as she asked, but when I got back to her with the plate, she started towards the portrait hole, taking two more bottles with her. She told me when I questioned her where we were going that it was nowhere special. We headed down to the Black Lake and sat under a tree when she started crying again. I hugged her until she pulled away to start on one of the other two bottles she'd brought with us. She'd already drained the first one. We talked a bit about what we were going to do now that we were leaving Hogwarts, and she said that she knew why she was drinking, but not why I was." He smiled thoughtfully.

"I said it was because I didn't know what to do with myself anymore, since my life had been planned from the time I was a toddler. But I had fufilled my destiny, so what was I supposed to do now? I didn't know if I wanted to be an Auror anymore, that was from when Voldemort was still a threat. And until a few days ago, I always believed what happened next was because we were both drunk- Hermione asked me to kiss her. I asked why, and she said she just wanted to know what it was like because she'd seen me kissing Ron's sister while we were going together in my sixth year. I started to tell her it didn't make sense, and she grabbed me, kissing me, and the next thing I knew, the two of us were laying on the ground. Well, of course, being a seventeen-year-old, male and a little under the influence, it affected me." Trina smiled and nodded, thinking that she knew what had happened now.

"She changed her mind, didn't she? Realized she was with her best friend and decided she didn't want to ruin it?"

"No, actually. I pulled away and tried to hide it, and go back up to the castle, but she stopped me. She climbed onto my lap and started kissing me again, telling me that she was flattered and wanted to do this with me. Then she took her shirt off, and I'm sure you can guess where it went from there."

Trina was confused. "Well, I don't get it, really. If you two had by that tree," Harry met her eyes and nodded. "Then what happened to make you run off? You said that you were in love with Hermione, right?"

"Yes, and I was then, too. I didn't know it until after she'd gone to bed, but I thought that she'd wake up in the morning and want to kill me. I didn't think that we'd been in the right state of mind to do that. We were both drunk, she was grieving, and I felt like I'd taken advantage of it, even though it was offered to me. See, all my life I've had sort of a guilt complex. I've always thought that people that got close to me always died, or else something bad would happen to them. Now I thought that I had done the bad thing, and decided to leave before she woke up and cursed me."

"You really thought she would?"

"Oh, yeah. You don't know Hermione like I do. She gets mad at you, you're going to feel it for a week. Or at the very least, hear about it. It wasn't until I talked to Ron this past week that I knew she'd been crying on the train, and whispering my name the whole time. He said she'd been pretty catatonic otherwise, not talking to anyone else."

Something seemed to click in his head.

"What is it?" Trina asked.

"She was in love with me then," Harry said softly, shock on his face. He jumped up from the table and ran from the room towards his office.

"Where are you going!" Trina called.

"Clear my schedule for today, Trina," he answered. "I have to write a letter to Hermione, I have to get her back!"