I don't own Harry Potter or the Hunger Games!
3rd Person POV
Harry barely heard the thud of the cannon or the whip-crack as Malfoy summoned his sword back into his hand and Disapparated, arm in arm with Nott.
Ron's murderer...
He hadn't moved since the dreadful curse had been fired, still staring vacantly at the empty space the Slytherins had just vacated. Hermione was on her knees in the grass in front of him, sobbing, half-formed sentences passing incoherently past her lips.
Harry tried to think of something to say, something to do, but there was nothing.
Slowly sinking to the floor beside Hermione, anger flooded him as he surveyed the scene in front of him, but quickly; he could barely bring himself to look up.
Ron's dead. Ron's gone, there's nothing I can do for him now, it's just me and Hermione...
Suddenly anger flared up within him, unfurling itself from within his chest as he blinked back tears, a terrifying mixture of grief, despair and fury coursing through him as he forced himself back to his feet. He was angry with Nott for performing the deed, with Malfoy for drawing them in, the Gamemakers for everything they had done with him, the whole world just for being there-
"COME BACK!" Harry was on his feet before he had realised, shrugging off Hermione's desperate attempt to keep him calm as he charged through the forest, veins throbbing in his temple as he surged blindly through the trees. Finally his heart broke, exhausted, and he stopped in a grassy clearing with no idea where he was.
"COME BACK, YOU FILTHY COWARDS!" He bellowed, desperate for someone - anyone - to take out his anger from, no longer caring who heard him. But nobody came except Hermione, who had stumbled after him, in no better shape than he was.
"Harry," Hermione said gently as she reached him, trying to offer at least some comfort, but the anguish on Harry's face was enough to tip her over the edge again, and she burst into tears again, flinging herself at Harry.
"I j-just can't b-believe it," Hermione cried, through muffled sobs into Harry shoulder. "That we l-let them - that we c-couldn't do a-anything..."
"I know," Harry said vacantly, glaring at the tree line, relaxing into an uneasy, hollow state as he slowly rubbed a spot on Hermione's back as she funneled off her misery into him. The muscles in his jaw were beginning to ache, and his head was throbbing, but he didn't care. "I know."
Slowly the uneasy silence that had spread over the forest since the cannon and Ron's death began to lift, Hermione's tears masked as the birds found their voice again. The weak sun still shone optimistically overhead. A pair of young rabbits danced unnoticed through the grass just metres from Harry and Hermione's mournful embrace.
Through the misery, life still went on.
The afternoon passed slowly, lost in a haze of loathing and regret. Harry led the way as he and Hermione wandered slowly through the arena in search of somewhere safe to rest, barely paying attention to his surroundings.
Harry knew they were vulnerable, but he didn't give a damn. All he could see was Malfoy staggering backwards through the grass, that flash of green light...
It just didn't seem right. He still couldn't quite believed what had happened. That Ron wouldn't be there any more, that he wouldn't come bounding up to them, making some sort of half-witty, half cutting remark at Hermione and glossing over everything he had seen that afternoon. But he had seen the spell, seen Ron fall... It was Sirius all over again. If he'd failed to hunt down Bellatrix Lestrange last year, he'd be damned if he let Nott and Malfoy get away with it this time around.
Despite everything that was piled onto him as he trudged through the woods, he could see that Hermione was in a worse place than he was. Keeping to herself, kicking her feet along after Harry, Hermione would often stop, taking deep breaths and looking hopefully into the distance, as though she still expected Ron to show up again at any moment. At every unexpected noise, she would stop and search around hopefully, only moving on when, once more, she was forced to admit that Ron was nowhere to be seen.
It hurt Harry to see her look so helpless and broken, but he didn't know if either of them could cope with him forcing a conversation onto her.
Eventually the afternoon faded into the evening, and Harry had found himself back in the rocky mountains in the south, not far from the site where he and Ron had survived the horrific lightning storm near the white glass tower. Last time he was here, he was with one of his best friends, and unsure whether the other was alive or dead. This time Hermione stood by his side instead of Ron, but there was no longer any doubt in his mind concerning his friend's fate.
As the sun set over the arena, Hermione spotted a small opening in the rocky wall of the mountain they were climbing. It was around four feet high and no more than three feet wide, as though it had been designed for house-elf, and not human, use.
"Do you really think this is a good idea?" Harry said nervously, as Hermione crouched down in front of the opening, directing her lit wand into the dark space beyond the hole in the mountainside. "Don't you remember the lighthouse?"
Hermione didn't answer his question, but instead began to crawl into whatever lay on the other side. "Wow," Harry heard Hermione say, followed by at least four echoes, each one less coherent than its predecessor. "It's really spacious in here!" Harry could tell from the way that Hermione was speaking that she was making more effort than usual to be positive. He didn't need to be reminded why.
"What can you see?" he asked.
"Nothing," Hermione replied. "Well, I can see the whole cave, but there's nothing in it. Just clean rock. Come and have a look!"
Reluctantly, Harry bent down beside Hermione at the cave's entrance and peered inside. Hermione was right; there was nothing inside. The smooth stone floor stretched maybe thirty metres back from the opening, with a roughly carved, domed roof. To Harry, it seemed too artificial, too suspicious.
"Don't you think there's likely to be some sort of trap?" He asked Hermione, who frowned.
"I don't think so," she said slowly. "I mean, if anything was being held in here, it looks like the Gamemakers have already let it loose, doesn't it?"
Harry waited for Ron to come up with a quick remark, then remembered with a painful start that Ron was dead.
"I suppose so," Harry said quickly, desperate to force his mind away from such thoughts.
"I think this could be a good place to set up the tent," Hermione suggested. "It'll be well hidden within the rock. Nobody will stumble across us here."
Harry shrugged. "Why not?" He said. He was drained, both mentally and physically, and would be glad of the rest. Noticing how relieved Hermione looked as she leaned back into the rock, completely exhausted, he offered, "Do you want me to set up the protective enchantments for once, Hermione?"
"No," she said determinedly. "I'll be fine. You can set up the tent, you always do it with-" Hermione stopped short, her sentence left hanging in the air between her and Harry. There eyes met, and there was nothing else for either of them to say. They turned their own ways, with their own tasks to perform. Slowly constructing the tent by hand in the light at the cave's entrance, he could hear Hermione casting defensive enchantments around them, see the slight glistening in the cold evening air as the spells took effect:
"Protego Totalus... Muffliato... Salvio Hexia..."
Ten minutes later, and the tent had just been installed within the cave when the Capitol anthem began to play, announcing the death recap for the end of the fifth day of the Games.
Harry and Hermione sat cross-legged on the floor outside the cave, watching the sky together. Both of them turned away at first, knowing that Ron's face would be the first to appear, but looked back in time to find out who had been killed the previous night; Pansy Parkinson and Susan Bones.
"I wonder what happened there," Harry said in an effort to make conversation on the quiet hillside, but when he got no response from Hermione he turned to her, only to find her face tracked with tears once more.
Harry was just considering retreating into the cave to get away from the cold, biting wind when the voice once again spoke out.
"In case you were wondering, here's a clue," it whispered and screamed, forcing a gasp of surprise from Hermione and a sense of expectation from Harry. He listened intently for a clue, for anything more to the message, but eventually he conceded that the single sentence was all that he was going to get.
"What was that about?" Harry asked, turning to Hermione once again. "There was no clue there!"
Hermione sat and pondered for a moment, drying her face with her sleeves before pulling her knees up to her chest and hugging them, trying to fend off the cold. Harry could just see her brown eyes, focused in thought, above the top of her knees and beneath her mass of bushy hair. Eventually, in a quiet voice, she spoke again.
"When we fought the Slytherins earlier," she began, stopping to take a deep breath. Harry waited patiently for her. "When we fought the Slytherins, and ran through all of that fog, there was no voice."
"So?" Harry said, trying to understand what Hermione was on about.
"It means that the voice isn't warning us about danger, like we had suggested," Hermione explained quietly. "Even without the voice, we found ourselves in enough trouble..." Harry didn't press that point any further.
"So that's the clue?" Harry said, feeling slightly disappointed.
"Maybe," Hermione replied. "Although the Gamemakers might have chosen that message deliberately to make us know there's more to understand."
Harry sighed. He could see Hermione had a point. "So you think the next message will be the real clue?"
Hermione nodded. "I think this one was just to rule out one of our theories. I imagine everyone else in the arena is trying to decipher this, just like we are."
Harry chuckled slightly. "I doubt it," he said with a smile. "I'd never have thought that there was anything else to them other than trying to scare us. It's only because of your amazing memory-" Hermione blushed slightly "- that we can recall the whole thing and attempt to analyse it. And if we can't figure it out, I'm sure nobody will be able to."
"So why are we bothering if nobody else is going to work it out either?" Hermione asked frustratedly.
"Because it'll be worth it," Harry said confidently. "If it's so hard to work out, surely there will be a good prize for anyone who can manage to work it out?"
"I'd like to hope so," Hermione said, sighing. "From what I've read, the Gamemakers have a good history of sending tributes off on wild-goose chases, with no rewards at the end of the trail..."
Harry didn't know about that, but he hoped that for these Games at least, all of their stressing and fretting would be worth it.
No more thought was given to the voice until the next morning, when Harry woke in the tent within the cave exactly where he had fallen asleep; huddled up beside Hermione, desperate to conserve warmth. Desperate to stretch his legs, Harry clambered out of the small opening and into the light of day. Momentarily dazzled by the bright light (he had been in almost complete darkness in the cave), he brought his hands up over his eyes, hairs sticking up along his arm from the cold as he did so.
When his eyes had become accustomed to the light of the early morning sun, Harry noticed that a frost had settled on the ground during the night, and that his breath now hung around him in icy clouds as he exhaled.
His disturbance in leaving the tent had woken Hermione, who soon ventured outside to stand beside Harry, wearing the thick fur-lined coat as she surveyed the scene around them, the sun glistening off of the icy ground all around them.
"I'd call it beautiful," Hermione said bitterly, "if this wasn't the location for two dozen murders." Harry didn't know what to say to that, but yet again he was saved by the terrible, chilling voice.
"The secret unravels at the start," it said, the final word echoing into oblivion over the deathly silence in the rocky mountains. Harry was impressed that, for once, Hermione didn't start at the sound of the voice. He had the feeling she had spent the whole night waiting for the next message.
"'The secrets unravel at the start,'" Harry repeated quietly. "Hermione, what were the first two messages again?"
"'The arena is ready to play a game,'" she began. "'However hard you try, you can't keep out the night.'"
"But that means nothing!" Harry exclaimed desperately. "And they're saying that there's a clue in that?"
"No," Hermione said slowly. "I don't think that's what it means."
"So what, then?" Harry snapped frustratedly. He imagined that, if nothing else, the next message would at least shed some light on whatever the voice was trying to tell them. "Unless you're trying to suggest to me that the message means the literal start of the Games or something like that-"
"Harry, I think that's exactly what it means."
"But that's impossible!" Harry countered, feeling more and more angry and disappointed by the second. "What do they expect, that we can all just pull time-turners out of our-"
"Harry, use your head!" Hermione interrupted hurriedly. "Where did the Games begin?"
"The Cornucopia, everyone knows that," Harry said, and then it dawned on him. "Whatever the Gamemakers are trying to get us to do, there's a clue waiting for us, hidden somewhere near the Cornucopia." He clapped a hand to his forehead. "Of course. Everyone would be able to work that out..." Hermione nodded. "So does that mean that everyone else will be charging off towards the Cornucopia to find this clue?"
"I think so," Hermione said, biting her lip nervously.
"Well then, we'd better beat them all there, hadn't we?" Harry said determinedly, a new spring in his step.
For the first time, things seemed to be taking a turn for the better.
They made the decision not to Apparate to the Cornucopia, reasoning that if someone else had beaten them there, they might be dead before they had a chance to take in their surroundings. Instead, they set off immediately for the centre of the arena at a fast walk.
"So," Harry said as they walked. "How many of us are left now? Ten?"
"I think so," Hermione replied. "Well, there's the two of us, Padma Patil and Michael Corner from Ravenclaw-"
"Nott and Malfoy," Harry spat, interrupting.
"Yes," Hermione said uneasily, continuing. "So that's six. There's Zabini from Slytherin, too, and then the three Hufflepuffs, Justin, Ernie and Sophie. So that takes us to ten."
Harry nodded in agreement. "I wonder who will be next to go," he said darkly, more to himself than to Hermione, but if he had been expecting a remark from Hermione, he didn't get one.
The morning passed quickly as Harry led the way back towards the Cornucopia. They stopped their journey just twice, both times for parachute deliveries; once for Harry to receive a coat identical to Hermione's (he had been shivering from the cold all morning), and the other time to collect his wand from the Gamemakers, which both he and Hermione took as a sign that travelling back to the Cornucopia was the correct thing to do.
Due in part to their redoubled efforts following this delivery, Harry and Hermione were hovering on the edge of the trees at the edge of the central clearing before noon, the Cornucopia glowing in the wintry sun close to them. Harry had not returned to the Cornucopia since the traumatic opening moments of the Games (he felt a piercing stab of pain through his chest as he remembered this, the panic he had endured with Ron, and what became of him), which meant that he had never seen the Hufflepuff camp before, but the Cornucopia had changed even since Hermione's last visit. As Harry watched the scene in front of him, he became more and more convinced that the camp was deserted, owing to the disarray of the objects on show, the poorly put-up tents (indeed, one of them had collapsed) and, most importantly, the complete lack of tributes.
After ten minutes of patient watching and observing nothing, Harry took the decision to advance slowly towards the Cornucopia, taking extreme care not to catch himself on the many nettle plants lurking the grass. Hermione was most adamant that he took care to watch his step, reminding him every few metres to take care as she walked in his wake, her loaded bow held ready to shoot, constantly on the lookout for danger.
Harry arrived at the camp beside the great golden horn without incident, and once he was there he had little difficulty in working out why the camp had been abandoned. All around him, there were signs of a struggle. Boxes of supplies were left upturned, their contents flung across the grass. There were scrapes and skid marks in the grass where it had been turned to mud by the frequent movement of tributes around the camp. The remains of the campfire were still burning itself out, having been neglected for presumably hours. The collapsed tent had two long slashes through the fabric presumably caused by a sword. All around Harry, on the floor, struck into crates, into sacks of supplies, even buried into the metal of the Cornucopia itself, were arrows.
It was clear to Harry that the occupiers of this camp didn't leave without a fight. And yet there were no signs of blood around the camp, and there had been no cannon that morning; the dying campfire suggested the attack had been a recent event.
Somehow, however impossible it may have appeared from the chaos all around him, it seemed as though the occupiers of the camp had managed to escape without injury.
"Are any of these yours?" Harry asked Hermione when she caught up with him, pointing at the arrows on the ground. He remembered that Hermione had fought the Hufflepuff alliance here four days ago.
Hermione shook her head, her eyes glistening as she viewed the scene around her with disgust. "Possibly a couple of them are, but I barely shot any arrows; I never had many to begin with. Clearly someone else in the arena has taken to using a bow."
"Who do you think did this?"
"I have no idea," Hermione said nervously. "But it was clearly a group effort, by someone other than a Hufflepuff. None of them had a bow."
"I guess we'll never know," Harry shrugged, crouching to pick up a few useful supplies from the wreckage and stuffing them into his backpack. The occupiers of the camp had clearly left in a hurry; they had left plenty of good supplies behind for other to scavenge.
"Harry, you do realise what this means, right?" Hermione said nervously, taking a step towards him.
"What what means?" Harry said irritably, panicking slightly.
"The clue, or whatever it was," Hermione said sadly. "Someone else has beaten us to it."