AN: I know, I know. It's been forever. Cut a girl a break! I've got me some work to do. I didn't even get off this week, just yesterday and today. But never fear. I'm done school December 18th, and I don't back until January 28th. So there's that to be thankful for. I honestly am so tired from helping wrangle tiny children all day that I have no idea if this is any good or not, but I'm hoping it'll do. I'm in the car back home all day tomorrow, so I wouldn't be able to post this until sometime Sunday, and I think you guys want this sooner rather than later. Am I right? Wonderful. On to the Anons:
Sugarbaby – Thanks! And I so know the feeling. Does school not appreciate all my fanfiction writing/reading needs? I will do my best.
Gi – Glad you're having fun. And we'll see about that. I'll do what I can.
Shonnarae – Thanks very much. Aw, dude, you're making me blush! Who doesn't love a broody man?
flixie6 – You're welcome. Sorry about the delay, but they gave me a project over Thanksgiving on top of all the final studying I'm doing. College is hard.
– Can't say I'm sorry to hear that. It's funny to me, keeping Ron and Harry out of the loop. Especially Harry. He spent so much time being the only one with all the cards, it's great to see how frustrated he is when he's the one in the dark.
Alright, here it goes. If it sucks, don't blame me. Blame my family for having seven kids under the age of nine and only two older kids willing to help babysit. I'm so sleepy …
Disclaimer: If I owned Harry Potter, I would've hired professional babysitters and watched "Numb3rs" tonight instead of "Ratatouille" for the third time.
"IMPEDIMENTA!"
Almost precisely halfway to the ground, Hermione encountered the curious sensation of being suspended in midair after a sharp fall. Her stomach, which had shot straight up to her throat, was crawling back down to her belly and was trembling uncontrollably. Body entirely immobilized, her eyes nonetheless shot open, and she saw the stars up above her, and felt absolutely nothing beneath her but air. Her entire body felt numb, the blood moving sluggishly through her brain but pulsing intensely in her fingers and toes, the hair on the back of her neck and her forearms prickling; old scars burned with intensity, the strain of her new position, back half curved and limbs askew, pulling them beyond their limits.
To say the least, it was an unpleasant sensation.
The thing to be glad for, she mused, was that it could hardly last much longer. As she was thinking that, her suspended state ended with a sort of snap. Once, again, she was hurtling to the ground with no idea what to do about it
"Oof!"
The ground was good deal softer than she'd remembered. And person-like. She'd therefore fallen on a person. Ah. Her brain, which had become a sort of white blank spot in her head, began to work again.
The first thing she realized was that she wasn't dead. That became a very important fact and she took to muttering, "I'm not dead, I'm not dead, I'm not dead …" very rapidly under her breath.
"No, no you're not. But if you don't get your bloody elbow out my bloody lung, I might be."
It was at this point Hermione realized a second and third thing. The second was that Ron had been the one to cast the spell and the person who had broken her fall with his body. The third was that she was still on him.
Coughing, she rolled over the ground beside him. She crouched feebly and concentrating on not breathing so hard. The grass beneath her came into focus as her eyes, which had started to water from the wind rushing by as she fell, dried out. Her fingers knotted as more violent coughing wracked her body; her throat felt as though it had been set on fire.
A groan emitted weakly from her right. "I know you never took to brooms, Hermione," Ron remarked hoarsely, "but the basic concept is to stay on them."
"I'll remember that," Hermione managed to choke out. She fell to her side, chest still heaving uncontrollably. "Thanks," she added as an afterthought, staring up at the stars and feeling all sorts of giddy now that she had solid, packed earth at her back.
"Yeah, well," more groaning ensued as Ron rolled onto his feet, "if I'd let you die, Ginny would've thought I'd pushed you or something. Then I'd get the seat by the door in the Burrow at Christmas."
Hermione could help chuckling a little. "If you'd let me die, do you think Ginny would let you live until Christmas?"
"And this year's the one I'm s'posed to get a scarf instead of a sweater, since Mum noticed I never wore mine." Shakily he stood to his feet, flexing his fingers experimentally.
From her position at his feet, she gave him her best scrutinizing glare. "Why were you back here?"
"Harry said you'd come this way with a broom. I thought I'd come take the mickey out of you for a bit." He'd begun to shake his head at odd moments, like an animal expelling water. "More interesting question is, why were you back here? You fell off without even moving, and you screaming, and y'know … sort of glowing. Wait." Comprehension lit up his face slowly. "What kind of magic were you doing up there?"
Hermione sighed, letting her head flop back down into a patch of moss. "Something I found in this ancient book Harry's got tucked away in his collection. It's one of Dumbledore's, I think. And whoever's been watching me? I don't think he'll be trying anything like that again."
"Yeah?" Ron extended a hand down to Hermione; gingerly she took it, quaking a little as she was hauled unceremoniously to her feet. "Makes sense. He doesn't have to do much work if you go around trying to off yourself."
"I wasn't trying to 'off' myself, Ronald," she countered, rubbing her legs ruefully, trying to get the feeling back into them. "I find it peaceful up there, if you really want to know."
"Peaceful?" Ron snorted. "You hate heights. You hate brooms. You used to say that if I wanted to sit on a twig a hundred feet in the air, that was my business, but you fancied yourself a bit more sensible than that, thank you very much."
Hermione stopped rubbing at her arms to look at him. "Those were my exact words. How did you remember that?"
Ron shrugged, focusing his energy on leaning painstakingly against a nearby tree. "You said it a lot. Doesn't explain why you were up there."
Hermione didn't want to answer and remind Ron of all the reasons he had for hating her at the moment, but she didn't see a way out of it. "Guard duty," she said as casually as possible. "We would have to get in a high vantage point and cloak ourselves, so we could see anyone coming in time for a mass move of camp. I spent hours up there, with nothing to do but sit and wait. I still don't like flying, but being higher up in the breeze … I'm not sure. It's nice, I guess." She tried to stand as nonchalantly as possible, hoping that Ron wouldn't jump on the opportunity to point out her absence. Again.
For a moment, something like sadness passed over Ron's face. Just as Hermione did a double take and began to regard him in earnest, it was gone. "I dunno where it was that they taught you flying, but here's a tip. Do magic, especially big, silent magic, on the ground."
Apparently deciding that he'd helped her enough for one night, Ron turned abruptly on his heel and vanished with a familiar crack.
Hermione could do nothing but blink with surprise for a few minutes. Then she tilted her head to look up at her still-hanging broom. Silently it drifted back down to her, nudging her gently in the same manner a dog asks for forgiveness after it digs up the yard.
Hermione took off down the path towards the Potters' house, her broom trailing just behind her the entire way.
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Three hours later found Hermione sitting in front of a roaring fire, hands wrapped around a cup of hot chocolate. The liquid rippled and jumped, disturbed by fingers that could not stop trembling. Hermione's eyes were glazed over, and her lip was a stark white from lingering between her teeth for such a long time.
Harry dropped down silently on the floor beside her. "I don't think we've had a fire in there since we moved in. What happened?"
Removing her lip from her teeth, Hermione took a quiet sip of chocolate.
Harry pressed on. "You do realize that you were the last person to light a fire here, right? Which means that you're either really upset or Ron's done something wrong and you're attempting to burn his apology note."
"Ron doesn't write apology notes to me anymore," Hermione noted, taking another small sip.
"Which means you're really upset."
Deliberately, Hermione blew on the surface of her chocolate, making tiny waves of brown lap against the edge of the mug.
"You're really not going to tell me, then?" Harry shook his head. "C'mon. You spent years telling me everyone and everything that irritated you, and now you're keeping it shut?"
"I fell off my broom."
Harry's face contorted as he tried not to laugh. "Is that it?"
"Because I was fighting off the person who was watching me."
Harry was no longer in danger of laughing. In fact, his face, turned scarlet with the effort of concealing his merriment, rapidly lost color and got the look of someone who's just been punched in the stomach. "He came to find you? He was here?"
"No, I mean magically," Hermione amended. "And Ron saved my life."
"Ah." Weakly, Harry reached for a small stone from the bowl of brightly colored rocks perched on the table beside him. He took his wand out and pointed it at the stone. After a moment of intense concentration, the tiny thing gave a shudder, before melting out of its shape, elongating, adjusted itself. Moments later, Harry was holding a mug the same sky blue as the stone had been. Harry then turned his wand to Hermione's cup and muttered a charm; the tiniest drops of liquid floated up and rolled slowly through the air to the rock-turned-mug, and tipped themselves slowly over. Steaming hot chocolate poured itself into the mug until it was full to the brim. As soon as their job was done, the beads of brown dropped unceremoniously to join the rest of the beverage. Harry took a large swallow, ignoring the heat that it radiated.
Hermione smiled slightly at her friend, her gaze still fixed contemplatively on her drink. "I did what you two were saying earlier. Looking at the magic, I mean. Only, I was looking in myself instead of at someone else, and I suddenly found it. There was this thing tucked in there and I … sort of fought it. I beat it, but it knocked me off my broomstick. Ron caught me. In a manner of speaking," she added ruefully.
"Hermione, you are the single most brilliant person I've ever met," Harry informed her in a slightly high-pitched voice. "And Teddy Lupin could tell you that doing dangerous spells alone thirty yards up in the air is stupid. Where did you even get the idea to …?"
"I found a book in your library. Specialis of Veneficus, Utriusque Atrum quod Lux lucis. Dumbledore's handwriting's all over the pages. Very neat notes, of course," she stipulated hurriedly, as if afraid that Harry would look down on his old hero for having bad penmanship on top of the already unthinkable crime of writing in a book. "There was a chapter on spells for watching and tracking, and there was only one that could break through the sort of barriers that I had on me, and the book didn't have any idea how to break it, just that you could. It's called "Con Occhi di Fuoco." It's … not nice," she concluded lamely.
The corner of Harry's eye twitched. Hermione took that to mean he had barely checked his inner teenager's desire to roll them. "Yes, Hermione. But what does it do?"
"Actually, it's less of what it does than the steps you have to take to make it work. It's fairly difficult; it'd take a powerful wizard to …"
"Hermione."
"An ancient curse, originating in Italy. First known use in 1472," Hermione rattled off, sounding as though she'd written the chapter herself. "The person who performs the curse makes a sort of bargain with dark magic. For example, if a person creates a Horcrux, they must forever give up an entire soul – unless they feel remorse, which hardly ever happens, of course. In this case, the dark magic is almost life-like. While the spell is in effect, the magic lives in the host's body and the victim's. As long as it remains undetected, able to mingle with the magic of both hosts. But if it's thrown out of the victim, it takes something from the original caster."
Harry leaned forward, eyes intent. "It takes something?"
"Yes. Generally a limb, most likely the hand or arm."
"And it does what?" Harry prompted tensely.
Hermione shuddered. "It watches you. Anytime, anywhere, in spite of absolutely every kind of magical block. It's powerful magic, Harry."
He didn't reply, which was good. There was something else she needed to say, and it was hard.
"In the notes, Dumbledore wrote the word 'Introspection' next to the spell. Well, considering what you and Ron had learned, I realized had to mean looking in at your magic. That's where it was, of course, nestled down in my magic. And I think – for a moment, Harry, only a moment – it was telling me to join it, and I was listening. I'm not sure what there was to join, exactly, as it's the result of a spell, which according to Vladimir Putchkin's Thesis of Relative Being …"
"You didn't join it, I take it," Harry clarified.
"Well, of course I didn't," Hermione snapped back waspishly, "and that wasn't the point, thanks very much. No, what I mean to say is, it was asking me to join it, though I didn't really realize it at the time. After I fought with my magic, it sort of screamed as well. Only … I knew the person. The man who was talking and screaming. But it wasn't Kregan."
"Who was it then?" Harry asked urgently, sloshing some chocolate onto his Aurors robes as he leant forward.
Hermione shook her head. "I haven't the slightest idea. I know that I know it, but I still can't place it. But Harry, do you know what this means?"
"Kregan has help."
"And I know the person who's helping him." Hermione stuck a thin finger into her cup and swirled her drink around a little. "Ron was decent to me. Actually, truly decent."
Harry looked down at his own mug forlornly. "You know what this hot chocolate needs? Firewhiskey. With a Butterbeer on the side." He stood up to head off to the kitchen, leaving Hermione to stare into the fire by herself once more.
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London had many pubs, and many of those many pubs were suspicious and dank. However, the pub in which Kregan sat was probably the most suspicious and dank in the entire city, had anyone bothered to compare. The barkeep was using his own spit and the corner of his apron to clean the mugs, surveying his dingy place with a lidded eye; stubble covered him from the hairline next to his ears to the collar of his jacket, and dirt had sunk the crevices of his weathered face. Only a few customers had chosen to occupy the dirty wooden tables and benches, and none of them looked exactly savory. A woman in the back had a slightly drooped face and nails at least six inches long and covered in red. Anyone close by could have guessed it wasn't nail polish, but there few people sufficiently brave to get close enough to confirm that it was some sort of blood. At the end of the bar sat a man with sallow skin and vacant eyes; his robes were torn, and beneath was nothing but unidentifiable darkness.
Kregan fit in with his surroundings. The hooded figure with whom he sat did not. There was a certain way in which he sat, his back stiff and head regally erect, that indicated to anyone who cared to see that this pub was not good enough for him. "This is really the best you can do, eh, Danny boy?"
"I'm being tracked by that Mudblood and Harry Potter, if you hadn't noticed," Kregan commented, agitated.
"James Daniel Kregan, hiding out in a dive, eh?" The hooded man's disgust was apparent, thinly veiled under smooth tones. "Bet your dad'd have a thing to say about it. Couldn't even be evil properly, could you?"
It was though Kregan had been dealt a physical blow; his yellow skin quivered with rage as he hissed vehemently, "Do not forget who you're talking to. I have risked much to get where I am, and I will risk more to get where I'm going. Don't become someone who gets in my way. And don't believe for a second," he added coldly, "that I'd be speaking to you if you weren't a family friend. You are frankly of little use."
"Of little use am I, Danny?" The man's amusement temporarily tempered his dislike. "I s'pose that's fair, after all. I handed you Granger, but that's just the Mudblood, isn't it? Too small of a fish for you to catch."
"Handed?" Kregan's lip curled in a sneer, his eyes drifting lazily down to the edge of the long black robe's sleeve and back up to the shrouded face.
"I offered you weeks of intelligence, and still she hunts you," the man replied, a bite lingering in his voice. "You shouldn't be so obvious of your hatred or your plans, Kregan, lest you come to the same end as your master."
Kregan's chair shot backwards as the former flew to his feet; his eyes burned red as his wand pressed into the depths of the velvet hood. "You go too far!"
A clink echoed around the cavernous silence; the red-nailed witch paled as Kregan's murderous eyes flashed to her, pinning her to the spot, helpless as a bug on a card. Every being in the pub was frozen with unbearable tension.
There was a collective intake of breath as the hooded figure raised his hand. Silently, he wiped away the spittle that had shot from Kregan's quivering lips and then flicked it to the side dismissively. He stood up in a labored manner; when he was finally straight, it seemed to the occupants of the bar he must be at least ten feet tall, though in reality he probably didn't quite reach six. With a sardonic tilt to his glass, he drained his Firewhiskey in an instant.
The slam of that glass on the table chilled all that heard it.
"I can't go too far, Danny." The light voice had gained a controlling quality that couldn't be denied. "Where is your master now? Defeated by that Mudblood that still dogs your heels. She counts me as her ally, does she now? I'm still here. I'm still fighting. I won't worry about getting in your way, because you have to be careful not to get in mine."
Whatever else Kregan might be, he wasn't stupid. He stayed silent. He was stuck in a position of reeling back, shocked and defensive, like a master bitten by an obedient pet.
"The plans to the Ministry, if you please."
Kregan rummaged through his pockets, tremblingly producing a roll of blueprints, sparkling at the corners with the remnants of large amounts of magic.
"And the files."
Immediately Kregan whipped out a stack files from the same place as the blueprints; the foremost had written on it in tiny boxed litters, "Ms. Hermione J. Granger," and seemed to be the largest of the lot.
The be-robed head nodded curtly. "Good work, Danny. I'll send for you when it's necessary. Keep your head down in the meanwhile." And with that, the man swept imperiously out the door and into the busy London street beyond.
Everyone in the bar instantly relaxed. Kregan, for his part, dropped down to his seat, white and shaking. He had no idea what had come over him, how the dynamic between him and his conspirator had changed. Nothing is more upsetting to one who craves power to find he doesn't know where the power in a relationship lies. Besides, as Kregan reflected, bringing a numb hand up to wipe his sweating brow, the man had taken control of the room so completely without once taking out his wand.
Things were different now.
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The next morning found Hermione in a tumble of emotions glazed over by a night of staring at the ceiling of the house that wasn't hers and drowned in three cups of coffee without cream, sugar, or artificial flavors. Wand a-wobbling, she attempted to break through the complex spells she had placed on her office door. Thirtieth time was the charm, after all.
"Paranoid, then?"
Startled, Hermione jerked back her wand hand, succeeding in whacking herself in the stomach and partially knocking the wind out of her. Clutching the front of her robe and the knob of the door, Hermione managed to wheeze, "Hhh…hello, Ron."
"Gorgeous image," Ron commented conversationally. "You'll make some man very lucky, eh? With this and your thing with canaries, you'll have another bloke within the week."
Hermione shook her head, stopped, nodded, stopped, then decided to concentrate on breathing.
Ron snorted altogether unkindly. "Well, I've had all the beautiful images I can stand for today. Harry's got me looking into Kregan's work in with the Aurors when he worked in the department, so I'll be by later this afternoon. Try and figure out how to open a door by then, alright?"
He strode down the hall, leaving Hermione doubled over and entirely confused.
AN: This chapter got written out of the course of two weeks, with much stopping and going. Plus my current state of being while writing most of the last two sections over the last two days. I hope you enjoy it. I'm off to enjoy a shower … Love? Hate? Review!