Trigger Warning: Brief suicidal ideation at one point, and then self-mutilation at another in the form of cutting one's wrist to perform an Oath - not in an actual suicide attempt. A quick forewarning so it doesn't blindside anyone.
This fic is getting major kudos and comments and I love you all. I hope this chapter pleases.
Fourteen
FEELING SYMPATHETICALLY
Harry was giving her a headache.
Hermione had retreated from his temper to the green couch in the Common Room. It was quickly becoming her favorite. Few others liked to sit on it, either because it was Slytherin-colored or because the stains were often "mistaken" for accidents like the less mature of the Gryffindors. But the couch smelled slightly musty, like the less-used areas of the library, and tea. It reminded her of her mother's office at home, where Hermione had spent much of her time stretched out on her mother's yoga mat, reading, while the dentist scheduled appointments over the phone. The office always smelled like tea, her mother rarely without a cup, and the walls were covered with shelves and shelves of books. It was Hermione's very favorite place and she missed it terribly, just as she missed her parents terribly. The couch was a nice reprieve from homesickness.
It was also very obviously not the place other people wanted to be. While some of the Gryffindors had chosen to spend their Saturday away from the Tower, some had remained in the Common Room, chatting, studying, or playing games. Harry's temper, which Hermione was learning was a terrible thing, had driven them off to various corners of the room and well away from her green tea-smelling sanctuary.
It wasn't that he had yelled at them. He didn't need to. Between his furious pacing and the deep-set glare on his normally placid face, they wanted to be anywhere but in his way. Hermione had tried reasoning with him earlier when he'd been ranting but he had no desire to listen. She had simply gone quiet and fetched a book, sitting on the couch and retreating into learning to ignore his temper. She kept an eye on him, not allowing herself to delve as deeply into thought as she normally would, just in case Neville came back in. The poor boy had bolted when Harry's temper had first shown itself and Hermione wondered if he would even risk coming back to the Tower for curfew, the way Harry was acting. Poor Neville. He didn't deserve to feel like a victim of this argument.
Not that she understood exactly what the argument had been about. Harry's ranting hadn't exactly made a lot of sense. She got that he was mad at Ron about him being a Seer and not saying anything, but she didn't get why. Ron hadn't told anyone else. It was obvious by the way he had abruptly left the Great Hall during dinner the night before that he hadn't wanted anyone to know. Hermione had to admit she was a little disappointed because she hadn't realized that seeing the future was a real magical talent, but from what she had read so far, it apparently wasn't a very common one. So she could forgive Ron easily for not saying anything to her about it. She wished that Harry would, too.
She watched him as his furious pacing seemed to slow. Good. Wearing himself out and burning off the anger would hopefully mean he didn't take his temper out on Neville or Ron, whenever he got back. Harry had been talking to Dean and not paying attention when Fred and George grabbed Ron from his dorm room and dragged him down the stairs. They'd sent Hermione a wink as they left and she hadn't wanted to draw attention to them. She'd already listened to Harry rant a little that morning and if Fred and George were getting their brother out of the line of fire, she would do what she could to help. Distracting Harry by telling him that she was going to the library, and then leaving for said library, seemed a decent way to accomplish a little peace and quiet, and watch for anyone who planned on accosting Ron as the twins led him through Hogwarts. Harry hadn't followed them, so that was a plus, and the one third year who'd tried to approach Ron was hit with a spell courtesy of one of the twins. Hermione didn't know what it was, but having your boogers turn into bats and attack you was both horrifying and repulsive. She'd separated from them and gone to the library after that.
Finding books about divining the future was easy. Finding books about divining the future that didn't sound like absolute rubbish was something else. Hermione spent a couple hours just scouring the same shelf, until she managed to find only two books that looked remotely credible. She skimmed through the one in the library. It turned out just to be a discussion of various prophecies that had been told over the years. It mentioned Nostradamus, a name even Muggles recognized, and hinted at rumors of a room in the mysterious Department of Mysteries that contained nothing but prophecies.
Hermione wasn't sure she believed that. It sounded more like a tabloid than any sort of credible possibility, and she returned the book to the shelf, only checking out one. She'd debating staying in the library to read that one, too, but breakfast had ended and the library was starting to fill up. Ambient noise was swelling and she chose to escape for the Common Room.
Her eyes skimmed across the information on the pages. The introduction just spoke of different types of foresight gifts. There weren't just Seers, with precognitive abilities – that is, the ability to see things before they happened. There were prophets, who specifically revealed the future through prophecy, and oracles, who were said to deliver advice and warnings directly from the gods themselves. There were lesser forms of Divination that didn't rely on an inborn gift. Theriomancy was the study of different animals to determine omens of the future, like Ailuromancy, the study of cats, or Augury, the study of birds. It all seemed rather silly and filled with superstition to Hermione.
Astragalomancy was divination using small bones inscribed with numbers or letters. A small moving picture of someone casting a handful of the bones to the floor made Hermione think they might be better done using dice. Tarotology was obviously divining using Tarot Cards, which Hermione honestly thought was a game, much like the Ouija Board. She was pretty sure she'd seen them for sale in bookstores in London. Palmistry was something Hermione was familiar with from movies and carnivals, and prior to coming to Hogwarts, she thought it was all just silly nonsense. She read a little more until the book mentioned Rumpology, the study of warts, folds, and crevices on someone's buttocks, complete with pictures. Blushing, she decided to move on to a new chapter and leave the introduction behind.
Just as she was about to delve into a chapter that focused specifically on Seers, Harry flopped onto the couch beside her. She pursed her lips as he huffed but didn't say anything. She wasn't going to be a target for his temper.
"Are you mad at me?" he asked quietly.
Hermione looked at him over the top of her book, her bare toes just an inch from him. They were cold and she considered tucking them under him for warmth, but decided against it.
"The only one who's angry is you." She looked back down at her book.
A Seer (noun, someone who sees) is someone capable of seeing the future literally, as though they have or are living it. Similar to Clairvoyance, the Seer is less constrained, not limited to something they have touched or somewhere they have been.
"But it isn't fair!"
Hermione huffed in irritation and looked back up at him. "No," she said sharply, "it isn't fair."
For a moment, he looked pleased at her agreeing with him.
"It isn't fair that you're angry at Ron for something he clearly didn't want anyone to know."
Harry's face turned petulant. "He should have told us."
"Why? Why should he have?"
"Well, he knows all about us, doesn't he?"
Hermione went very still. "What's that supposed to mean?"
Harry gave her a dirty look. "The only reason he wanted to be friends with me is because I'm Harry bloody Potter."
"You must think really highly of yourself, but I suppose you have a reason to." Her sharp tone clearly took him aback, as he stared at her in sudden confusion. "After all, you're Harry Potter, great defeater of dark wizards." She stood up from the couch and shoved her feet into her sneakers. She'd tied the laces too tight and they dug into her feet painfully, but she ignored them, turning to look at him. "Ron was really nice to us on the train and he hasn't treated you any differently than anyone else, except that he clearly likes you. But he doesn't say you're Harry Potter, the great dark wizard slayer. He treats you like you're his friend." She could feel tears welling up in her eyes and it made her even more furious that she couldn't control them. "I've never had a friend my own age before, so it's nice that someone's actually wanted to talk to me, instead of just pretending their interested because of who my parents are." She grabbed her bag and threw it over her shoulder, nearly throwing herself off balance with its weight. "Maybe if you'd stop being a selfish jerk and let him talk instead of screaming at him like you did last night, he'd tell you why he didn't say anything."
He was staring at her, dumbfounded, and Hermione wished her hands weren't full so she could hit with hard with one of the couch pillows. "I'm going to bed," she said firmly, and turned to stomp away. "Goodnight!"
He didn't say anything back to her and she didn't look back. She climbed the stairs to her dorm and shut the door behind her, then face-planted on her bed and screamed into her pillow. She'd meant what she said about not having friends her own age before. She'd concerned both Ron and Harry one, and now she just might have ruined her friendship with Ron.
Sniffling, Hermione grabbed the book and curled up on her bed, opening it back up to the chapter about Seers. At least she could learn a little bit about what Ron could do. Maybe that would answer some of the questions she had, too.
A Seer (noun, someone who sees) is someone capable of seeing the future literally, as though they have or are living it. Similar to Clairvoyance, the Seer is less constrained, not limited to something they have touched or somewhere they have been. Also unlike the Touch-Know, a colloquial term for Clairvoyents who rely on physical contact, Seers lack control of their foresight. The visions they experience come suddenly and can last seconds or minutes, often leaving them in a trance, incapable of moving on their own and unaware of their physical selves. The longest known Seer trance was held by Ignatius Avant, who fell into the trance on December 22nd of 1594 and awoke January 21st of 1596, spouting a warning of the world's destruction.
Notable for their oddity, Seers are often known for showing mental signs of advanced age, from a higher maturity to a startling number of stress conditions prominent in those thrice their senior. It is believed this is because Seers rarely arise when there is peace in the future, and the visions they experience are often filled with death, disease, or war. Rarely has it been recorded that a Seer was born who did not foresee some measure of destruction. There are numerous skeptics of this gift of foresight, however, as many professed Seers who have warned of some manner of doom had lived through the time of their proclaimed catastrophe without it ever occurring. Still others suggest this is because the Seer has so seen it, thereby changing Fate, or outright acted to prevent such destruction.
This debate has been in effect since the rise of the first Seer, and will no doubt go on for centuries more.
Hermione let the book rest open on her chest as she stared at the ceiling. Seers arising specifically when they were needed and not during times of peace. That was a frightening thought. If true, that meant that something was coming that would adversely affect some part of the world, perhaps even her. Could that be why Ron hadn't said anything? Did he hope no one would know so no one could ask? What could be that terrible?
Hermione thought of her history class and learning about the bombing of Hiroshima, the gas chambers were Jewish people were forced in to die. She felt her skin turn icy cold and she swallowed thickly.
Nevermind, she thought. She knew exactly what could be so terrible.
Hermione closed the book and tucked it under her pillow, pulling the curtains closed around her. She dragged her blanket up over her as she curled into a ball and wondered if Ron's brothers were helping him deal with the fallout from everyone learning he was a Seer. She hoped so.
What a terrible burden. She felt tears fill her eyes again, but these weren't for herself or her anger, but for a friend. She buried her face in her pillow and let herself have a good cry. It helped not to keep it all inside.
Being Harry Potter had been easier at the Dursleys' than it was at Hogwarts. Being hated, it seemed, was far easier than being loved.
It's not really love, though, Harry told himself, as he climbed the stairs to his dorm. They don't love you. They don't even know you.
Magic. He'd known magic existed for little over a month and it still seemed like he'd wake up at any moment to Aunt Petunia's rapping on his cupboard door. Magic had been that unattainable possibility, read about in books he sneaked home from the school library, tucked between worn textbooks and read secretly in the middle of the night by the yellowed light of a dying torch. The Lost Years of Merlin, Unicorns of Balinor, Dragon's Gold, Serpent's Silver, Chimera's Copper… he'd devoured them all, the worlds of magic a reprieve from a life being treated like a slave or something to be stepped on and smeared across the bottom of a shoe. But he'd learned early on that magic wasn't something that would save him from his life, just as he learned that no lost member of his family would come and take him away. He was the unwanted child of a cruel world that should have taken him along with his parents.
Learning about… learning that his parents had been a witch and wizard, that he was a wizard
"You're a wizard, Harry."
It was ridiculous. It was a cruel trick. It was a fantasy, something his mind had made up.
Maybe he'd finally snapped. Aunt Marge had always said he was a twisted thing. Maybe she meant in his head. Maybe there was something in him that was broken, wrong. Maybe something he had done was the reason his parents weren't alive anymore and he was. Maybe this was his punishment.
Aunt Petunia would argue that this was a punishment on them, not him.
He'd thought… learning he was a wizard, that he was going to go to a school to learn magic, far away from the Dursleys for most of the year. It had been a dream. Was probably still a dream, but one he didn't want to wake up from. One he was just starting to believe he wouldn't wake up from, that it was real, that he was here. He was here and Dudley wasn't here to keep him from making friends, from being Just Harry and not Dudley's cousin you didn't go near if you wanted two functioning eyes and all your teeth.
And then the whole Harry Potter thing came to light and he realized that even here, he couldn't be Just Harry. These people he didn't even know thought he was someone special. He'd heard so many things even on his walk with Hagrid through Diagon Alley. Nevermind the catastrophe of the Leaky Cauldron, he'd seen books on him. Not just one or two, but a whole shelf of them. He'd been too flabbergasted to look at them then, and then later was appalled. Were people spying on him? Was he being watched the whole time he was at the Dursleys, getting smacked around and yelled at and locked in his cupboard? Had someone been watching all that and recording it for the whole world to read?
But the way people acted wasn't the way they'd act around someone who was regularly pushed around by his relatives. They acted like he was some sort of celebrity, all because Voldemort somehow blew himself up trying to kill him and no one knew what happened. That hardly meant he was the reason. He'd been a baby! If he was someone so special, some great super-powered wizard, there's no way Uncle Vernon would have been able to toss him into his cupboard or Aunt Petunia swing a frying pan at his head on a regular basis. Aunt Marge's dumb dog Ripper wouldn't have chased him up a tree and kept him pinned there overnight, and Dudley's favorite sport wouldn't be called Harry Hunting.
So no, he wasn't anyone special, but everyone seemed to think he was. Whatever they wrote about him in these books that he'd never heard about until he was eleven, they weren't about him. They were some sort of fantasy Harry Potter he didn't even know, and they were all delusional.
Meeting Ron had been so nice, because he'd just said he was going to ignore that Harry was The Harry Potter, and on the train, he'd treated him just like another person. Not like Harry was special or anything. He was Just Harry, and it was great. And then Hermione had come in and that was fine, it was, but Harry realized that Ron had friends other than Harry. He had other people that he could hang out with and if he decided that he didn't like Harry, then he could just let him go and it'd be okay, because he had other friends. He'd been a wizard for his whole life, and Harry had only been a wizard for a month and five days and he had no idea what he was doing and he must look like an absolute idiot next to all these people who knew things about Harry Potter that Harry Potter didn't know.
And then it turns out that Ron is a Seer – a Seer! – and the whole bloody school knows before Harry does, like it's some big joke, and he just knows that Ron saw him there, in his head or whatever, and knew who he was and so found him on the train, because who doesn't want to be friends with The Harry Potter? Except Harry wants friends who are friends with Just Harry, not some fantasy version of a magical superhero he only learned about a month ago. He's spent his whole life being unwanted and hated, and now he's come to a place where he's fawned over and loved, only it's not him they all want. It's some warped funhouse mirror version of him and he hates it, hates this place, hates them all, and he's never wanted to go home to Privet Drive so much in his life, but he'd give anything to be back in his cupboard, back listening to Aunt Petunia screech at him to get up and picking spiders off his socks, because at least there he knew how they felt about him. There weren't any secrets there in the Dursley household. He knew exactly how they felt about him, and that was fine. It was. It was fine.
Harry threw himself down on his bed and felt the rage rush out of him like heat, leaving him cold and shivering, tears burning in his eyes, and he wouldn't cry, he wouldn't.
He sobbed into his pillow.
Oh, what the hell. Everyone else was lying. Why not him too?
He buried his head in his pillow and cried, because he was Just Harry and nobody cared.
Ron woke to the ambient sound of dinner-goers. The clinking of utensils against plates and conversation, sounds overlapping in a background noise similar to Headquarters, war councils over the dinner table, plans argued out between bites of whatever meal had been thrown together for those few minutes when there wasn't some explosion or invasion to deal with. He blinked open his eyes, expecting to see Harry standing in the kitchen, cooking to relieve the tension in his shoulders. Maybe Ginny had taken a break from her forays into memory, settled at the table across from Hermione, who would be trying to draw her out of her silent prison, back into the here and now. It had been getting more and more difficult. Easier to poke and prod until they'd struck a nerve nowadays, call up her temper until she was a torrent of fury that raged back against them. Not a bonfire, which burned hot and long. A firecracker. One good explosion and then silence, back into the prison of her mind, leaving just an afterglow behind – a burning scar where he words had torn wounds that would never heal. She knew how to hit hard and it only got better the deeper she delved.
Ron sat up, expecting Headquarters, and instead found wooden walls of old but firm wood. Expected a phantom pain where his arm should have been and instead found two hands, smaller than he remembered, pushing him up from where he lay on a bed. He sat up fully, looked around, saw Bill, breathed deep.
Memory was a terrible thing, it turned out. Remembering and not remembering were twins versions of Hell. This wasn't the first time he'd woken up forgetting that he'd come back, expecting to see someone who wasn't there, or expecting a shadow of grief where someone still lived.
Bill was here, alive. He was eleven.
Back in time, remembering a past-that-wasn't, a future that wouldn't be. Couldn't be. Not if he could help it. Not if they—
Merlin, he'd told Bill, hadn't he?
Not everything. He'd kept some things to himself. Scabbers was… dangerous. Too dangerous. But some things, little things that could be done now without changing too much. Bill could help with them. He'd promised to. He'd sworn an Oath.
He sliced his wand across his wrist before Ron could stop him, could demand what he was doing, let the blood flow down his arm, a river of death that turned Ron's veins to ice. A wand, tip glowing white, burying itself in blood until it burned crimson. His brother's eyes matched to his, more serious than Ron had ever seen them, his face pale not with blood loss but determination. A side of him that he had never seen.
"I, William Arthur Weasley, swear on my magic and my life, that I will hear all my brother, Ronald Bilius Weasley, speaks of his visions of the future, and that I shall speak no word of it to any person or creature or thing that could understand or take record of my words, beyond he himself, and around no person or creature or thing that could understand or take record of my words. I swear to uphold this oath, on penalty of this fatal wound and, surviving that, loss of my magic. So I have sworn, so mote it be."
Weak with awe and horror, Ron murmured, "So mote it be."
The flash of light from the Oath taking hold blinded him and he turned his head away, swearing. Unperturbed, Bill cast a cleaning spell on the floor. Ron considered hitting him.
He'd expected an Unbreakable Vow or, barring that, some generic Wizard's Oath that called a small flash of light from the wand to declare its authenticity. Not for Bill to slit his fucking wrist open and bleed buckets all over the floor. He still felt sick when he thought of it.
He pulled himself from the bed, studying Bill. The older man was sitting cross-legged on the floor by the wall, hands in his lap, eyes closed. Ron didn't think he was sleeping, though he'd never seen Bill meditate before. Then again, Bill had done a few things today he'd never expected from him. How much about his brother was he unaware of?
Stepping over to where he was sitting, Ron crouched down, gently touching Bill's left arm. When he didn't rouse, Ron turned the arm wrist up and studied the scar that was ran across the vein in his wrist. A fatal wound. No amount of healing would sew it together, Bill had said, if he ever broke his Oath. No magic would undo it.
Ron cursed his brother. Far be it for him to do something simple, instead he had to pull some ancient Wizard's Oath he'd learned about in Egypt or Namibia or wherever he had been, digging up mummies and breaking old curses. Ron wanted reassurance. He didn't want his brother's blood on his hands! Did he already have enough blood on his hands?
"This future will cease to exist," Hermione said quietly, trying to look brave, though her eyes shone with terror. "Once you go back… this will all be gone."
Too much blood. He came back to save all those that had been lost, but what about those that had still been alive? They paid their lives for his chance to come back and make things even worse. Paid in blood they'd shed unwillingly, and now Ron was soaking in it. Drowning in it.
And now he'd pulled his brother down with him, into this writing sea of death.
I can't do this. I can't.
He thought of chocolate-brown eyes blurred with tears and fear.
Hermione, I wish you were here. You'd know what to do. And I'm so lost without you.