Disc: Your humble narrator acknowledges that characters and settings discussed here belong to J.K. Rowling, on whose lofty munificence she would impose enough to have free reign in the distortion and manipulation thereof.
Hermione crept through the hallway, leaving red footprints on the linoleum. Photographed people peered out at her: her cousins parasailing in Antigua, her grandparents at the annual inter-village cricket match , and Aunt Mildred at her wedding reception, wearing a light pink bridal gown with giant poofy sleeves. Impossibly, given that they were ordinary muggle pictures, the images seemed to follow her progress with disapproving stares. Hermione backed up against the wall, and pressed her ear to the door; she could hear steady breathing on the other side.
Anxiety burst like hot acid in her stomach. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale- she imagined that Death, the mythic creature of scary stories for little children, was on the other side, breathing in her soul a bit at a time. She would open the door and there It would be: in all Its finery, scythe in skeletal hand. It would hold out its claw, offering her the chance to come willingly, but she would shake her head. And in a fraction of a second, It would have sliced her chest apart, and her physical body would peel away from the lesion like a second skin, and she would stand before It without artifice or cover, and It would bind her arms in a translucent chain and lead her to the Underworld.
Mrs. Galbraith was getting impatient. She lifted her fist and knocked.
The door vibrated with the sound against Hermione's skull. She clutched her head, surprised, but the pain created a window in her mental cell of Fear. She leaped out of it, and landed on the asphalt of Practicality. She looked through the opaque glass, and saw the nosy neighbor, Mrs. Galbraith, wheezing into a ratty handkerchief and from foot to foot. Her options were to leave, or to open the door and invite the woman in, take her coat, and allow her to walk first into the house, discreetly picking up the letter opener on the sideboard and plunging it in between the older woman's ribs, shutting the door with her foot as the woman fell limp in her arms. She could not contemplate the second option; she would have to go out the back.
She tried to remember the murder mystery novels her father loved so much: how was evidence disposed of? She could use magic, but an investigation by the Ministry would surely uncover the traces of her spells. She could set fire to the house; that seemed like the best option. She would never have considered destroying her first home; but the area had succumbed to urban decay and they had had to move into this place, this monument to the most mundane of suburban habits. These thoughts had carried her back to the living room- a mistake. The smell of burnt flesh overwhelmed her senses as she stepped over the charred corpse of Bellatrix Lestrange. She identified another as her husband, and another as Antonin Dolohov; she remembered their pictures from the Daily prophet a year ago. Ron had cut out the mug shots and pasted them to the bulletin board in the common room; for months the photos had sneered at passing Gryffindors, before Neville had set fire to that corner of the room and burnt away their menacing little faces. She did not know the man whom she had beaten to a bloody pulp, and she could not bring herself to look at the two other bodies, lest her tenuous grasp on clarity should slip and she dissolve into hysterics. She realized that she held an unfamiliar wand, the one she had grabbed from one of the attackers. She used it to transfigure her clothes and banish the blood that had caked in her hair. Another spell, and three other wands came into her grasp, including her own, which she had stupidly kept in the drawer of her nightstand. Apparently, Lestrange's wand had been burnt to a crisp.
In the basement, Hermione examined the various gray pipes that stretched along the wall behind the water heater. She knew nothing about it,of course, but she had heard of enough amateur arsonists blowing up buildings like this to assume that it could not be too difficult. Standing in the doorway, she levitated a wrench. She jerked her wrist suddenly, and the instrument threw itself at the pipes with enough speed to puncture the metal. She turned around and ran up the stairs. The fire was on in the living room; presumably the entire structure would go up in flames any minute now. She rushed for the kitchen door-it led to the garden- and realized that she had forgotten something. She saw a draft shift in the air; it was thick and viscous. She grabbed her mother's wallet from the dish in which they'd kept their keys, and made for the exit, numbly registering self-disgust at her unfeeling sensibleness. Flying out the door, she landed face-down on the grass; it smelled like commercial fertilizer. Behind her, a light flared and the house issued a loud groan. She did not stay to watch it-and them- burn.
She was about 70 kilometers outside of London. There, she supposed, she would have a better chance at finding acceptable accommodations than in her small town; there was only one inn , and the landlady knew her by name. And she could not afford to be seen, not until she figured out what she was going to do, what she was going to say. It would be convenient to be presumed dead by her muggle acquaintances,if only to escape suspicion, but at the same time she had to withdraw money from an automated teller machine, which she knew made films of its customers. If she did so, the police would assume that she was the perpetrator, on the run. Perhaps most pressingly, she had an unknown curse embedded in her lower back, myriad aches and a migraine from the Cruciatus, and a persistent stinging in between her legs.
And there was precious little that she could do about it; she could not risk using a healing spell, with any of the wands, because she knew next to nothing about the system the Ministry used to monitor illegal magic. Somehow, it had never occurred to her that she would one day need that information. Since no Aurors had come barreling through her door, welcome as they would have been, she assumed that the Death Eaters had found a way to circumvent the Ministry's policing, either by charming their wands, or by a manipulation of magical energy around her house. In either case, she was hopeful that her own spells would therefore go undiscovered, since she had used one of their wands and performed magic inside.
On the main street, Hermione got on a bus, paying the fare with loose change in the wallet. It wouldn't take her direct, but it was warm inside and she could sit. The driver looked at her oddly, and she wondered whether she had something on her face, before realizing that she must look bloody awful, if the way she felt was any indication. She took a seat at the back and looked out the window, seeing herself superimposed upon a moving background of dark country landscape. Watching the passing of roadside sycamores and lulled by the rhythm of the wheels, Hermione Granger drifted off into a delirious sleep. Slowly, blood oozed out of the wound on her back and fell in silent drops onto the pale leather of the seat.
