Dispelling the Silence: a Harry Potter AU
By Indygodusk
Chapter 12: Sirius Speaks of the Past
Breathing in deeply through her nose, Hermione nodded silently. Everyone then followed Sirius through the busy streets. He and Gabrielle kept up a light conversation along the way. They finally stopped at a little café called The Bunny Eats.
Harry stayed quiet while they sorted themselves out, but followed behind Hermione close enough that she could almost feel the heat of his body through her robes. She still hadn't quite recovered from the surprise of his fame yet. However, she also knew that beneath the chaos of her emotions she still liked him. She didn't want him to disappear from her life forever. She just wanted him to stay close until she got over her embarrassment and decided what to do with him.
Sirius opened the restaurant door and waved them inside. "The food here is vegetarian except for the rabbit dishes. You can either eat like a bunny or eat the bunny." Sirius shrugged philosophically at Gabrielle's disbelieving look. "The owner has a strange sense of humor."
Although a line snaked from the counter all the way to the door and out past the front window of The Bunny Eats, Sirius didn't seem worried. As soon as they stepped inside the restaurant, the owner hopped out of the kitchen and rushed over. To Hermione's delighted amusement, the dark-skinned owner with his curly black hair and big teeth looked a little bit like the black rabbit from one of her favorite childhood stories.
Hermione used to have teeth like that too. She'd told her dentist parents that they'd gotten shrunk in an accident, but really she'd let Fleur fix them for her at age 14. Fleur had wanted to go even smaller, but Hermione had gotten cold feet and made her stop.
"Thaddeus Hare, at your service, Lord Black," he said with a bow.
"That can't be your real name!" Gabrielle blurted out in surprise, then blushed at her rudeness.
Mr. Hare laughed and took her arm, leading her to the table in the corner. "Ah but it is, my lovely young lady. I used to get teased about how my last name perfectly fit my rabbitty appearance. After a few years, I decided to stop crying and embrace my differences instead. I vowed to be the epitome of the perfect Hare."
He fetched two more chairs for the reserved table with his wand and gallantly seated Gabrielle. "But despite my best efforts," Mr. Hare said, swishing his wand to bring plates, silverware, and cups zinging out of the kitchen, "I never managed to win a running competition." He winked at them, causing Gabrielle and Hermione to giggle in surprise.
He continued his story, "So I gave up on running and turned to food instead. In this, I have had much more success. If you don't believe me, just try one of my dishes." After floating a menu in front of each of them, he smiled and returned to the kitchen.
As the table became quiet, Hermione kept looking up from her menu to sneak glances at Harry. The stress lines around his eyes turned to laugh lines after the fourth time he caught her at it. Even knowing he was Harry Potter, she still wanted to get to know him better. She wanted to learn more about Harry.
Once she decided on that, she felt herself start to relax. The next time their eyes caught, she gave him a small, forgiving smile before looking away again. She could see his broad grin out of the corner of her eye. The tension between them morphed into something new.
At the table Sirius sat across from Hermione, with Harry and Gabrielle on each side. At first she thought it might be a good thing, since she wouldn't be staring directly at Harry, but then he kept accidentally-but-probably-on-purpose nudging her with his knee. It was a subtle slide, not a knock, but it was driving her crazy.
Each time he touched her he made her pulse jump and elevated her temperature. She hadn't yet decided what to do about it, but she needed to do something soon or else he would make her drop her fork. Her subtle glares just made his lips twitch in amusement.
Once they'd all made good inroads on eating their food, Sirius turned to Hermione. "So I have a question that seems extremely relevant in light of you and Harry's awkward silence."
Confused as to Sirius's meaning, she looked back inquiringly. He'd obviously missed that they'd progressed past awkward silence and into flirting glances and nudging knees. Just as well.
Sirius continued, "Hermione, just what is your last name? I've looked for you over the years, but since we never actually exchanged last names, I had no luck. You'd be surprised by how many Hermiones there are in France."
Blushing, Hermione unexpectedly felt a laugh bubbling up. It did put her annoyance with Harry into perspective. At least she'd only been ignorant about his last name for one day instead of for six years.
It soothed a hurt to know that Sirius had looked for her despite his abrupt departure from her life. She'd purposely never asked her chocolatier the name of the other regular customer always buying Violet Mint Morphos because she hadn't wanted to track down Sirius again only to be rejected. His question made her feel foolish for not clarifying names for both of them on the steps earlier.
"My name is Hermione Jean Granger," she said. "It's a pleasure to finally formally meet you, Mr. …?" Trailing off, she looked at him expectantly, playing along.
Sweeping his arm out regally, he barely avoided knocking a cup off the table as he bowed his head and pronounced, "Lord Sirius Orion Black, at your service. Please allow me to introduce my adopted son, Lord Harry James Potter."
"It's a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Granger," Harry said, a smile lurking around the corners of his mouth as his knee slid across hers under the table. "Call me Harry and," he bowed his head and looked at her through his eyelashes, "if it pleases you, can we pretend that this introduction is how our first meeting really went?"
Gabrielle giggled.
"I'll take it under consideration," Hermione said dryly, suppressing a smile of her own. "You both, of course, already know my cousin, Ms. Gabrielle Ariel Delacour." The conversation flowed much more easily after that.
After eating the last candied pecan in his rabbit, nut, and berry salad, Sirius dabbed at his mouth with his napkin and then sat back with a contented sigh. Looking around the table, he smiled. "You may not have realized it, Harry, but I have mentioned my friend Hermione to you before."
Harry looked at him in confusion. "Hermione isn't that common of a name, no matter what you say. I would have remembered."
Sirius smiled with a hint of sadness. "I told you about her, but I didn't use her name. I wanted to respect her privacy in case my heroic tale got out."
Then he turned to Gabrielle. "Your cousin helped save the entire wizarding world, you know. We couldn't have defeated Voldemort or won the war without her. She's a great hero and it's time someone else knew about it."
Now Hermione was confused. "Just what are you on about now, Sirius?" she asked. "I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm no great war hero. I spent the war over in France." Harry and Gabrielle both looked confused but intrigued.
Turning to Hermione, Sirius said, "You asked why I abruptly disappeared on you without saying goodbye. I'm about to explain why." Then he leaned back in his chair. "When we met in France for the first time, I thanked you for your help and invited you to lunch at that quaint little café, remember Hermione? We had lunch and you told me about your interest in old spells."
Tilting her head, Hermione tried to think back to that time. It was something she usually avoided doing because of all of the bad memories. "I think I remember that. I'm sure I babbled on about a lot of things that day we ran into each other," Hermione said, "but spell discovery has been a passion of mine ever since I found out about magic and moved to France to study."
She turned to their lunch companions and explained, "Sirius got lost in magical Paris and refused to admit it. I rescued him from a literal tourist trap and he repaid me by treating me to lunch."
Clearing his throat, Sirius defended, "I wasn't lost, I was just distracted by my thoughts. I would have escaped from the trap eventually on my own. Hermione just expedited the matter."
Harry snorted a laugh, not believing a word of it.
After a put-upon sigh, Sirius continued, "Well, I found myself interested in a very particular spell Hermione told me about during our first lunch together." He turned to look her in the face. "When we met up again at the Institute, you wouldn't speak about it. I could tell something bad had happened to the vibrant intellectual I'd met just a few weeks earlier, but we never discussed what. During our friendship, I had to reconstruct the spell from the hints you dropped here and there. You always talked around things and I had to learn not to press," Sirius said. "Making you uncomfortable led to me feeling bad and spiraling into my own problems."
Hermione had no reply to that.
"At first it was just an intellectual itch I just liked to scratch at to distract myself from my own troubles. My flashbacks of my time in prison had gotten worse," Sirius said. "But then one day I realized that your spell could help Harry find the Voldemort's snake Nagini and potentially even Voldemort himself, that it could help us win the war. I got so excited that I immediately raced off to find you. Unfortunately, before you could answer my questions you took ill. Then I somehow took ill and the stuff rushed the both of us off in different directions for treatment. By the time I recovered, you were nowhere to be found. My impatience got the better of me and I just left you a note with the nurse and the last of my gourmet British chocolates."
Turning to Harry, he added in aside, "She's the only person I've ever met who actually loves Violet Mint Morphos like I do."
Then he returned his gaze to Hermione and Gabrielle. "I spent the next week tracking down a copy of the old diary Hermione had told me about. Inside its pages I found the spell." Sirius smiled with remembered excitement, "just like she'd said. The family had originally used it to track down pets that wandered off, in particular their prize hounds, but Hermione had some ideas for tweaking it to make it more useful." Sirius twirled his finger and pointed at Hermione to encourage her to continue the explanation.
For most of his story she'd felt just as lost as everyone else. But then suddenly it had all come together. Hermione realized just what spell Sirius was talking about. She'd felt a zing of shock. She didn't remember telling him about that spell, how could she have even hinted at it during her time at the Institute? Sirius must be as clever as he always said he was if he could figure it out from one lunch and the occasional fragments she'd mentioned through her cloud of depression. Just thinking about talking about it now had her tongue frozen against the back of her teeth. She couldn't say anything.
Sirius took up the narrative again after an expectant silence where everyone was looking at Hermione to speak. He awkwardly turned back to Harry and Gabrielle to explain. "As I said, I managed to track down a copy of the diary. The original family had created a rather gruesome spell to track their dogs that relied on sacrificing one of the littermates, breaking apart its soul in ritual, and then binding those soul pieces to the other pups and then to either the house or the family magic. They used those links to track the hounds down when they got lost."
Abruptly Harry straightened up in his seat and leaned forward. "Are you talking about tracking horcruxes?"
Sirius pointed a finger at Harry. "Exactly or at least something that's a close cousin to them," Sirius confirmed.
"What's a horcrux?" Hermione asked around the lump in her throat.
