The Founder's Medallion
Chapter 7: Stands Between Both Sides

Disclaimer/AN: I do not own Harry Potter and am not profiting from this in any way. Dumbledore's advice to Hermione is taken from Order of the Phoenix, although it is paraphrased. Thanks to H3RM10N3, who beta-ed this, and Lily Severn, who wrote the prophecy, since I am awful with rhyming.

A huge group of seventh year Gryffindors were gathered in the Great Hall for the first meeting of the defence and peer help group. All of the tables were gone like they had been for the Yule ball in Hermione's 5th year and for Lockhart's dueling club, and had been replaced with a wide assortment of huge soft cushions for stunning, hoops for apparation practice, and a bookshelf containing the entire defence against the dark arts section from the library with Madam Pince's warning of 'Treat the books with respect OR ELSE' printed on a large sign that hung from it. Many of the younger students mulled around apprehensively by the door while the majority of the rest of the school chatted aimlessly as they waited for it to start.

Finally, Dumbledore stood at the front of the room and raised his hands above his head in his favoured attention getting position. "Welcome to everyone who has come for the Defence Group! Now, as I'm sure you all know, this program is operated on a students-helping-students basis, and as such, it is a good idea that you be aware of some of the most basic charms used for safety purposes. Aguamenti, the water charm, make sure you know it. Repeat after me, aguamenti!"

"Aguamenti," chorused the students.

"Excellent, thank you! Now, I'm sure you're all anxious to begin, and there will be teachers walking around to supervise, so you may start!"

At that, the noise level in the Great Hall escalated to gargantuan proportions as everyone yelled out at once to their friends in an attempt to decide where they were supposed to be going. Hermione and the other girls made their way around the hall, looking out for people who needed help as well as doing a considerable bit of talking amongst themselves.

"Lily Evans, I never though I would see the day, that's for sure!" said a girl whose name Hermione thought was Charlotte.

"Well, um, neither did I, to be honest with you," Lily said truthfully, pausing to tell an ambitious fourth year how to pronounce 'expecto' properly instead of saying 'execto'.

They laughed girlishly. "You really like him, then?" asked a second as the other girls looked to her for a response.

"Yeah, I think I do," Lily said, seeming to savour the concept. "I really wasn't being fair to him before, he really is a nice guy when it comes down to it, just a bit full of himself."

They laughed again, but were interrupted by James's sudden interjection.

"Full if myself, am I?" he said gaily. He stepped between Lily and Charlotte and looked at Lily in a more healthy and less obsessive way than he had before.
"Hello, we were just discussing you," Adelle told him.

"Really? Were you discussing me, too?" Sirius put in, grinning.

"No," Hermione said.

He'd freely admitted to having an ego problem as a kid, but it was still kind of funny to witness firsthand from someone whom you'd only known as an adult, even an extremely childish one. Unfortunately, she knew what was to come for him, and she held her breath painfully as she watched the unbridled enthusiasm for life that was growing closer every day to drying up.

"Sirius, you need to get used to the fact that the entire world does not revolve around you, my poor misguided friend," said Remus, shaking his head.

"I don't think he understands how that could ever be possible in a million years," Peter commented.

Sirius held his hands out dramatically. "Why's everyone on my case now?"

"Because-" Peter began.

Seeming to understand what it would take to shut Sirius up, James hit him hard in the back of the head.

"Thank you," Malfoy said.

Hermione turned around slowly--she'd completely forgotten that he was there. Unfortunately, she didn't turn slowly enough to escape his notice, and for the split second she met his eyes, he gave her an infuriatingly haughty look that seemed satisfied she was taking notice, be it negative or positive.

"I think we ought to go help," Lily started, pointing to another cluster of third years trying to practice with boggarts.

"Yeah, we should go. That's why we're here, after all--to help them," agreed Hermione.

"Okay, but actually me and Adelle are going to stay here and work on protego, you lot go over there," said Lily.

Peter spoke up. "Can I work with you? I need to brush up on protego, too."

He looked embarrassed, but that wasn't what Hermione was focusing on. She was just hoping rather pointlessly that Lily wouldn't agree to help Peter with his spell work. She knew that it would happen no matter what, but that would still be a huge irony in the worst possible way.

Instead of Lily, Remus stepped up to help Peter, which Hermione lamely reflected wasn't much better. Soon, though, she had a much more annoying problem to confront. Since Sirius and James had automatically paired up, she was left to work with Malfoy. She bit her lip and tried to tell herself to be calm, just like she had always been taught to be, and not to hand over her power by getting angry at him.

"Riddikulus!" she coached the frustrated third year, demonstrating the wand movement a final time. "Try it,"

"Riddikulus!" he echoed. His pronunciation and wand movement were fine, which Hermione took to mean that his humour image was the thing lacking.

"As far as I can tell, you're doing it right," she told him kindly. "So, the problem must be your image. Since your boggart is a werewolf, you could-" She thought for a moment. "You could, er, give it a poodle's haircut."

The boy laughed. "Okay, I'll try that. I've been putting a muzzle on it, but that was scary too, actually."

Hermione opened the suitcase, and a werewolf as large as a man with shining gold eyes and matted grey fur emerged, snarling like mad. Many of the other students turned around in horror, but they quickly realised that it was only a boggart and went back to their practice.

The boy gave the creature a hard look and bit his lip. Raising his wand, he said firmly, "Riddikulus!"

For a brief moment, the wolf stood unaffected, then its fur grew and shortened oddly until it looked like a larger version of a show poodle, but a second later, it was gone with a faint pop.

"Thank you!"

The boy danced away happily to go show off his newfound boggart repelling skills to his friends, leaving Hermione and Malfoy standing alone next to the ragged suitcase as the boggart rattled violently in an attempt to escape. Just as Hermione was about to start shouting at him for just standing there, Dumbledore glided over and recruited them to perform a duelling demonstration for the group.

"Stand on the table," he instructed, indicating the dining table turned makeshift stage. "And perform an example duel. No spells Madam Genees won't be able to cure with a flick of the wand, I don't want any accidents."

Hermione sighed, then obediently climbed onto the table and took her place at the end of the table, opposite Malfoy, who glared at her with a disturbing mixture of irritation and anticipation that suggested he was disappointed that he wasn't going to be able to use her to refine his skills of magical criminality to a fine art, if, Hermione thought darkly, he hadn't already.

Taking a deep breath, she gave him a stiff bow without moving her eyes from his leering form as he did the same. Then, straightening up, she waited. Later on, she would have to throw a spell, but for the moment all she wanted to do was deflect them and make him angry. That, she thought, would be a very satisfying show to watch.

"Expelliarmus!" he shouted, seemingly resigned to the idea of using only the most harmlessly boring spells.

With a casual flick of her wand, Hermione sent the jet of light ricocheting off the stone wall, then it simply faded into the enchanted ceiling. He sent more jinxes and the occasional hex, but each coloured bolt faded benignly into nothingness.

Malfoy eyed her suspiciously as he waited for her move, and it amused her greatly to know that he wasn't going to get it. He shifted his weight from one foot to another, then took a slow step forward, daring her to stand still. She did exactly that. After a minute's silence, he raised his wand and muttered some inaudible incantation, but noting appeared to happen. Everyone watching, including Hermione, crinkled their eyebrows in puzzlement, except Malfoy, who merely smirked.

Slowly, a faintly shimmering green orb began to take shape. It hovered at Hermione's chest level then began to spin with increasing speed as the colour of it faded from dark green to light and back again with glowing and sparkling flecks glittering in it all the while. Then, the orb began to turn in on itself and elongate into a long, spindly finger like a unicorn horn that extended itself slowly in Hermione's direction.

She stood and studied it carefully as it spiralled towards her. She couldn't think of what the rapidly forming green rod encircled by a pixie dust glow could be, but she had a sinking suspicion that coming from Malfoy, it couldn't be anything good. Thinking fast, she pulled her wand from her side and aimed it, drew a circle in the air around the rod, pulled her wand up, and with a quick slashing motion from Hermione, the green rod stopped swirling. The long tentacle recoiled back into its original shape, the sinister orb glowed sliver, then turned green again, went brittle, and shattered, the fragments briefly resting on the ground before fading into the grey stone and sucking the light and air from the room with them, leaving the hall in the smothering dark and silence of a long deserted crypt.

Warm sunlight poured in through the curtains that were drawn wide in the windowsill above the metal bed frame covered with blue-green linens that were obviously meant to exert a calming effect on patients. But, as the bed's occupant finally awoke with a jolt and snapped her head around wildly, her tangled brown hair whipping around and hitting her bluntly in the face, it didn't seem to be working especially well.

Hermione was dazed. She didn't know where she was, when it was, or how she had gotten where she was. Her first thought was that she had made it back to her time, but she noticed a middle aged witch with greying curls who definitely wasn't Madam Pomfrey hurrying over to her, she quashed that idea.

"Oh, hello dear, so glad you've woken up. How are you feeling?" Madam Genees asked kindly.

"Good," Hermione said. She took the cup that the nurse offered her and downed its steaming purple contents, then continued. "What--what happened?"

"Mmm," She pressed her lips together in contemplation.

Hermione's eyes scanned the room quickly. She was not in the hospital wing, as she had blearily thought upon waking, but in the Great Hall, which had been converted into a sort of infirmary. Students lay in rows where the tables usually were in beds that had obviously been conjured at the last minute, for two prefects were scurrying around tapping them with their wands to ensure they didn't vanish while taking care not to disturb their occupants, most of whom were either asleep or unconscious. Some student sat up groggily and looked around at the others or tried to chat with friends, but everyone mainly remained silent. From those who did speak, though, she heard grim mutterings like, "spell", "curse", and "murder".

At the last word, Hermione looked pleadingly at the nurse as she watched a prefect talking in a low voice to a second year who was in hysterical tears. "I think that Professor Dumbledore wished to speak with you himself," she said firmly. "Now that you're awake, I'll send someone to fetch him to tell you himself."

"Please, ma'am," Hermione said. She would have prodded more, but she could tell from her firm expression that all the prodding in the world wouldn't be able to extract a kernel of information from between her thin lips.

"Miss Mathieu," Dumbledore said when he arrived. Almost immediately, everyone awake in the Great Hall turned to look at the Headmaster, prompting him to add to Madam Genees, "May I speak with Miss Mathieu in private?"

"Yes, of course, do whatever you need to."

"Thank you." Dumbledore waved his wand and a curtain that Hermione assumed was soundproof encircled the bed. "There, that's better," he said. He adjusted his silver spectacles and looked straight at Hermione with his nearly clear blue eyes. "Now, I imagine you have quite a few questions, but before you ask, I would like to do my best to explain the situation to you. I will not withhold any facts from you, but you also need to bear in mind that I do not know all of the answers myself. Finally, some of what I say is highly classified and may weigh very heavily on you and your life, and you are one hundred percent free to tell me that you don't want to hear any more. I will of course honour that request and you may continue with your day to day existence."

"I understand. Please, I need to know."

"I was almost positive that you would say that," Dumbledore said approvingly. He straightened his glasses again and tugged on the gold cord that fastened his robes. "Hermione, what do you remember?" he asked.

Hermione though hard for a moment.. She unconsciously twisted part of her bed sheets into a tight coil as she tried to call up every last bit of information that lurked in the crevices of her brain. "There was a lot of green light," she said confidently. "But it wasn't Avada Kedavra. I had been duelling Malfoy and--" Her face blanched. She had just said aloud what had happened. "He did it, didn't he? Some kind of curse?"

"Yes," Dumbledore said. "It was a variation of Avada Kedavra used by the Death Eaters to kill people in large numbers at a time, but it can be blocked easily. The danger of it is that it is a somewhat guarded secret, and many people are unfamiliar with it and don't know when to take action. You blocked it, which is why everyone wasn't killed, but you have been unconscious for more than a week."

Hermione was still in shock. "Professor--I--I have something about Malfoy. He worked for Voldemort in our time, but I thought that he changed, and that the Founder's Medallion knew what it was doing, and--. I was so confident that the Medallion and the Sorting Hat were infallible that I just let it go on. Of course I never trusted him as a person, but I trusted his goals. It was all just an act and I got taken in and he's probably out there now doing God knows what because of my blindness."

Dumbledore laid a fatherly hand on her shoulder. "He, I'm glad to say, is in Azkaban at the moment. He hasn't done anyone any lasting harm, although he will be staying there until we can find a way to send him back to his own era in a way that won't let him do anything else to anyone."

Breathing a sigh of relief, Hermione continued. "So why did the Medallion send him if this was all that would come of it? He could have stayed in Azkaban in our time all along, it's not as though Voldemort would have let him out." Dumbledore looked at her questioningly, and she explained. "I found him because he was in prison with me, he must have upset him."

"You say that Voldemort is in power in your time? The boy in the prophecy, he didn't defeat him?" Dumbledore asked. Hermione wondered why he had mentioned the prophecy to her, but she assumed that he knew she already knew.

"No, he was my friend, my dear friend, but he was killed by Voldemort just an hour or so before I arrived here."

"So sorry," Dumbledore said somberly. "Those kinds of things are never easy, but the dead never truly leave us. Not ever." He gave her a half smile before continuing. "But about the prophecy, there is another chance. There is another prophecy."

"What?" Hermione said, sitting bolt upright and staring at Dumbledore with shock etched on every inch of her face. Harry and Ron had told her about one prophecy, but never two. It briefly crossed her mind to shout at them for keeping things from her the next time she saw them, but then she realized that Dumbledore had just told her that she was there for another prophecy and not for the horcruxes. Harry and Ron were never coming back. She wanted to curl up and hide and weep, but she forced herself to listed to what Dumbledore had to say.

"It refers to you," he said. "And Malfoy."

She looked at him in disbelief. "How can it, what does it say? Are we to defeat--No, he would never agree to work against--"

Dumbledore began to recite, apparently from memory.

"Blackened heart and blackened skin
Golden heart or dead within?
Birth will bring him nearer still
To bending to his inner will
To serve a master, and kneel to kiss
Or bring the world unending bliss?
Son of he who has once tried
Son of she who hath defied
Tied to webs only he may weave
Tethered to dreams he can believe
Vanquish foe or side with the dark
Cold as ice or sweet as lark?
Destiny shall be fulfilled
Only blood of one is spilled
Sunset brings the dawn in red
Whose face shall be among the dead?
Only he now born decides
Where he stands between both sides"

"A child," said Dumbledore. "Yours and Malfoy's. Either to serve the Dark Lord, or to defeat him." His silver, almost iridescent hair shimmered in the light, making him look like some king of specter bringer of bad faith.

When h was done, she couldn't speak. Everything she'd learnt in the past few minutes felt leaden and inescapable in her mind. She didn't shout, or faint, or do anything at all. She sat for a moment in absolute silence, then, when Dumbledore finally left, she slid under the scratchy blue blanket and sobbed bitter, desperate tears to mourn what she would never know.

A/N: Well? Will she end up with Malfoy for the rest of her life? Will she be miserable, or will she learn to love him? Will he learn to love her? Is there a way out? What does a prophecy really mean anyway?