THE LONELY ONES


six: the goddess of wisdom and beauty, the savant, and the lord of lies


"Why the hell not?" Hermione shouted at Dumbledore.

Used to dealing with emotional, slightly homicidal teenagers, the old man merely looked at her over his half-moon glasses. "For precisely this reason. Young people - not just you - cannot control themselves. They make mistakes. They do not have experience with the real world. They are undisciplined and unreliable. They are too emotional. There are a dozen other reasons I could list for you right now, but I think you get the point."

"I'm of-age!" Hermione said. "I can make my own decisions."

"Really?" Dumbledore asked, one white brow raised. "So that Ministry law changing the age to eighteen was just a belated April Fool's joke?"

Her mouth clamped shut with an audible click, nearly taking an inch off her tongue. She glared, wordless, trying to make him understand by force of will alone - this was something she had to do. She had to be in the Order, had to fight, had to avenge her parent's deaths.

"I'm sorry, Miss Granger," Dumbledore said gently, and her really did mean it. "But when you are of-age, and when you have proven yourself able, you may join the Order. And 'able' is not just knowing everything there is to know about fighting a war. It means able to make the right decision, at the right time, and the right place, for the right reasons."

Hermione kept her mouth shut even as she left the office. She could see, quite clearly, that Albus Dumbledore would never help her on her path. And despite what that should've said to her, she did not care.

There were more important things than her damnation.


Hermione almost tripped over one of Harry's brood in the hall outside the headmaster's office. The little boy, maybe six years old, shot her a wide-eyed look and scampered off after his friends, already halfway down the corridor without him.

It had taken little more than a week for Harry Potter and his girl to adopt all of Hogwart's orphans, previously cared for by older students and anyone with spare time. The plan had been for Friday to just stay with Kidd's family, but that didn't last long. Harry didn't seem to be able to walk away from problems, even ones that weren't strictly his own. He saw children in need of a family and offered one - and they came running. There were at least two dozen running Friday and a few others ragged every day.

Harry himself was chasing this group of children, pretending to be a monster. He made little growling and roaring noises, eliciting squeals of laughter and screams. He stopped beside Hermione for a breather, watching the kids stop and dissolve into a game that seemed to consist of simply jumping and screaming as much as possible.

"They have so much energy." Harry said, grinning.

"I don't know how you put up with it. Are you going to be rested enough for training tonight?" Aside from being taught magic by Hogwarts teachers and Dumbledore himself, Harry was also learning from Hermione. Since he still didn't seem to need sleep, he had more time than he knew what to do with and filled it with these things.

"Probably. I just hope we don't have another accident like that last time." He winced, remembering.

Hermione did, too. Instead of taming his rather wild magic with practice, Harry only seemed to be loosening it. It came more readily to him now, both through a wand and without one. The problem with the latter was that, often, it followed his whims in moments of clear, sparkling power. At those times, if he for a just second wished something would happen, it did.

Last time, he'd produced an entire forest of trees in a classroom and populated it with rabbit-bat creatures that favored children and attacked adults and loved Harry like nothing else. It was now a favorite playground for Harry's brood of children. He swore he'd never even thought about creating something like it before.

"I think I'll be visiting Kidd as soon as I drop these ones off with Friday. He's been asking me to do a job with him for a while."

Hermione shrugged and, already tired of conversation, moved along without another word.

The library was her place of solace, but not today. She was too angry for its silent shelves and knowing books. Instead, the Forbidden Forest beckoned.


When Hermione got back, bleeding from a few scratches, covered in leaves and spider blood and one tire track, she went right to the Hospital Wing. She found it already full, most of the people gathered around one bed.

Hermione recognized Jenna and Kidd Mors, Harry, Dumbledore, and Madame Pomphrey. Through these gathered around, Hermione caught sight of a red-faced Friday laying on the bed.

"Get back, everyone!" The nurse ordered. "Mr. Potter may stay. The rest of you, give the poor girl some privacy!"

It was at this point that Hermione realized Friday was having her baby.

Magic made the process a lot faster and smoother, and soon Pomphrey was pushing a bright red infant into Harry's arms and returning to attend to Friday. Harry seemed to know exactly what he was doing as he got the baby to take its first breath and begin to cry.

Then he gave it back to Friday and Hermione became aware again that she had stepped in at least four streams, her feet were soaking, her already wild hair was covered in blood and leaves, and she was very uncomfortable.

The breath rushed out of her all at once and she decided she could use this opportunity to practice her cleaning and healing spells, and she left.


When she was cleaned up, Hermione fled to the library. The immediate atmosphere of quiet study was a welcome balm to her often testy attitude. The only problem was that someone was sitting at her table.

Ron Weasley, and Slytherin in her year. She didn't think she'd ever spoken to him, or worked with him. He was the least noticeable person in the world, despite being a flaming red Weasley in the house of snakes. She remembered there'd been and uproar about it in her first year, but she hadn't understood about blood then. Now she did and still didn't care.

She looked pointedly at him, and jerked one thumb over her shoulder. People tended to do things when ordered with the kind of authority Hermione could summon at will, even if there wasn't an actual threat to back it up. It was the illusion of power that she liked to use.

Except he didn't so much as blink.

He just sat there, not even studying. It occurred to Hermione that he'd been waiting here, for her - the thought was so foreign she almost didn't know what to do with it. How did people her age interact again? She'd forgotten.

She went with angry and demanding, always safe to fall back on.

"What are you doing here?" She asked him.

"I want something from you." Ron said. His voice was flat and almost dead. "Everyone knows you're always studying in here. That you want to join the Order when you graduate."

"So what about it?" Hermione demanded. "To the point."

"I want you to teach me what you're learning." Ron said, simply.

"No," Hermione told him right away. "I'm already wasting some of my waking hours training someone else. I don't want to take any more time to train you or anyone else. Get out."

"Hear me out." Ron insisted. "I know a lot more than you think. You've been asking Dumbledore to join the Order for months. You're already good enough to be in, and in a few months you'll probably know enough to be counted among the best of them. But he still refuses you. Why do you think that is?"

"He says I'm not ready. He says I want it for the wrong reasons."

"You want it to gain revenge for your parents, and for everyone else who's died in this war." Ron said. "I want to learn because I want to get revenge for the only family I've ever known, and the family I didn't get to know. I want the Death Eaters to die in agony and burn in a special part of Hell."

His eyes burned with something Hermione recognized; she saw it in the mirror every day.

"My proposal to you is simple: I want to form another Order. I have a few people in mind already, who want as we do and will work for it. With you as our leader and trainer and me as the strategist. What do you think?"

"I think you're having delusions of grandeur. The answer is still no." Hermione turned to walk away, her mood severely ruined and not about to brighten.

Ron caught her arm not three steps away. She hadn't even heard him get up. Hermione threw him her dirtiest glare and jerked her arm away.

"Think of it." He murmured in her ear. She couldn't see his face. "Picture it. You are leading them into battle. Your forces cut through the enemy because they are masters at magic and because you are in the lead. You have none of Dumbledore's silly sentimentality: your troops are killers and they are proud to avenge all the horror wrought upon them and you. You have their undying loyalty. They love you. They are your friends and they would do anything for you. You have a new family and they help you remember the one that was taken from you by the monster, Voldemort.

"You kill the monster yourself, with your own hand. You wish his death could be longer, and more painful, but he's too dangerous to leave alive for a moment longer. You do take the time to make sure his followers know the pain your parents did as they were murdered. You can almost feel their ghosts being put to rest. Your father's, your mother's, and the unborn child growing within her."

Hermione sucked in a breath, wondering how he could possibly know.

Even resisting it, Ron's whispered speech still touched something in her. The small child who sat lonely on a swing at the park and watched the other kids play, and decided she didn't need other people to be happy, to be great. The lonely child who wanted friends but wasn't willing to risk her heart for them.

Somehow, he'd unburied that part of her and brought it into the light. Hermione suddenly ached with a want for that vision, so hard it actually hurt in her chest. It was heartbreak and she'd never even had the pleasure of giving her heart away before it was crushed.

"You're a liar, Ronald Weasley." Hermione said, because she knew none of those things could ever happen. Then she found herself saying, "So, how are we going to do this?"