A/N: To give you a heads up, I consider the first section of this chapter to be the darkest of this story. So know that going in, but also know that this is the darkest it is going to get. I think.
Light 'Em Up
Entering from the darkness outside, Hermione's eyes adjusted quickly to the dim light of a few scattered torches attached to the Hangar walls. Her first thought was that the interior strongly resembled the farm park outside Surrey that she and her parents would visit when she was a child: along the entire length of the building to her right was a wide aisle way lined with closed-wall stalls. But instead of lambs and horses, piglets and goats, these immediate corrals held thestrals.
Despite the presence of so many animals, the Hangar was chillingly still. Must, hay, animal sweat and leather permeated her senses as she cautiously moved down the stable-like walkway, fully cloaked beneath the third Deathly Hallow, silencing her steps in case they crunched against any stray feed. She was fully aware of the surveillance camera perched near the entrance.
In her own universe, Hagrid allowed the Hogwarts thestrals to run free in a herd on a pastured area of the grounds. But in this world, white chalk, similar to that demarcating Lucius Malfoy's cell, traced around each stall. Not a single thestral snorted or even looked in her direction when she passed, though Hermione knew the animals had extraordinary senses that certainly would have allowed them to sense her despite her invisibility.
It was as though Hagrid was using the chalk wards to deliberately keep each thestral separated from the others… but why?
Hermione passed at least thirty thestrals before she came upon a very different creature.
A unicorn poked its magnificent, horned head out from the next stall, its white coat a stark contrast to the midnight black thestrals beside it. Unlike the thestrals, which seemed healthy despite their strange containment, the unicorn's coat looked lacklustre and dull, its horn worn and patchy. Its head drooped heavily over the stall door, staring downward blindly. Hermione could see a bucket of grain inside the stall behind it, but it looked untouched.
Hermione had only seen a unicorn once, while she had still been enrolled in The Care of Magical Creatures. To this day, what she remembered most of the encounter was the beautiful creature's soulful dark eyes.
The hauntingly blank gleam in this unicorn's gaze sent an ominous chill down her back.
She couldn't see what Hagrid might have done to it — perhaps it was simply the act of being held in captivity that had so worn its soul — but that gaze alone simultaneously kindled a flicker of dread and anger in Hermione's chest. She clenched her jaw angrily but continued on. For some reason, some inexplicable sense of foreboding that had crept into her gut, she felt herself drawn forward into the heart of the Hangar, though toward what, she didn't know.
Off the main passageway branched a few rows of smaller cages that seemed far too crowded to be ethically correct. Hermione caught sight of immured gnomes, auguries, imps, jarveys, and, finally, a flock of excessively plucked jobberknolls, only a few blue feathers remaining in their normally magnificent, speckled plumes.
Her ire again flared. Oh, she knew exactly the reasoning behind these Hunting "classes": Jobberknoll feathers were a key ingredient in truth serums and memory potions. No doubt the Sovereignty was using resources from these and other trapped animals to fuel their despicable reign of terror, exploiting the free labour of students like Ronáld who were having the time of their lives learning what the school marketed as 'tracking skills.'
Somewhere in another world entirely, Dolores Umbridge, that slimy, horrid excuse for a human being, was probably laughing delightedly in her cell in Azkaban, and Hermione had never been more grateful for how strongly the Dumbledore of her universe had fought to keep Hogwarts sheltered from the government's agenda for as long as he could.
Beside the large, garage-like Hangar entrance, she encountered two towering forest trolls, penned in by the clearly quite powerful invisible boundaries the chalk conferred, their oblong faces bored and irritated; clubs the lengths of two men were strewn haphazardly on the ground outside the lines.
And then Hermione found herself at the end of the very lengthy row of stalls and partitions, facing another wall in which a single iron door was inset. To her left was the entrance to a small, narrow passageway that stretched backward into darkness.
The darkness was unsettling. The door before her, on the other hand, drew her curiosity; she approached it warily and lifted her hand…
Bam!
She jumped at the distinct sound of another door flinging open, and a muffled voice echoed off the walls from the small passageway leading toward the depths of the Hangar. "—aft blighter's already left?"
Hermione instinctively leapt away from the iron door, gripping her wand, though she reminded herself she couldn't perform magic — not without tripping one of the surveillance cameras. She hastily pressed herself against the wall as rapid footsteps approached, holding her breath.
The lighted tip of a wand appeared, and a tall figure approached the main body of the Hangar.
Hermione's breath caught again when he stepped into torchlight.
Fred - or George - Weasley stopped walking only meters from Hermione, peering down the long length of the aisle of stalls. The sleeves of his Oxford shirt, marked with the small logo of a Muggle brand name, were rolled back to his elbows.
His arms were splattered dark with what could have only been blood.
Harry's description of the twins flashed through her mind:
They design tools that help track, trap, and extract information. They're extremely twisted human beings.
In a surge of horror, Hermione realized that the blood in all likelihood did not belong to him.
"Gone," he proclaimed over his shoulder. "Skiving off again. And no one's the least bit surprised."
"Blasted half-breed. He knows this was the last of the lot." Down the passageway, George - or Fred - sounded as though he'd stuck out his head from whatever corridor the other twin had emerged. "What's he expect us to do, leave them to rot in our office all night?"
Hermione swiftly pieced together that comment and the blood on the arms of the twin closest to her and fought to quell a sudden and very violent urge to vomit. She clutched her chest, forcing air through her lungs and thoughts through her mind. Who could they possibly have been extracting information from here,at Hogwarts? Wouldn't that sort of thing be done at the Phoenix? It couldn't possibly be a student, Hermione decided… a House-Wizard?
She swallowed back another wave of nausea and forced herself to focus on the twins, clenching her wand tightly in her hand. Perhaps whoever it was wasn't killed yet. Perhaps she could still find a way to help them. But first she needed more information.
The twin closest to her had turned back toward the other's voice. "I'm positive that cretin doesn't have the mental capacity to process that sort of thing, Fred. A hundred galleons says the only kind of creature he's been hunting recently's another of his kind. He seemed a little too cheerful this week, if you ask me. Reckon he's off doing a bit of the horizontal mambo right now instead of his job."
The sound of pseudo-retching could be heard. "Thank you, brother, for that extremely disturbing image. Can you imagine the offspring? They'd be furry in the womb."
"Bet she's a troll."
"I literally just shivered thinking about it. Let's do wizardkind the favour of injecting her with a termination potion when the baby announcement comes."
The twin's bantering seemed almost exactly the same… but the content most certainly was not. And while they were standing here joking around, somewhere within the depths of the Hangar… something or someone was losing blood and rotting.
George began walking back to the tunnel. Before Hermione could stop herself or analyze the prudence of her actions, she stealthily followed him, breathing as shallowly as possible. "I'd rather terminate Hagrid for professional negligence before it even comes to that. Buggering off to leave us to do this ourselves?"
"Wasn't in the blasted contract," Fred agreed.
"You're damn right it wasn't; I've got far better things to do with my night, and so do you."
"You know, we just might have the chance," Fred sad thoughtfully. "Lax disposal standards? The Sovereign will be less than pleased. I bet father could convince darling Minerva to let us take the giant oaf back to the home office for fifteen minutes."
Hermione could hear her heart hammering in her chest and prayed they couldn't. She squinted carefully at the ground in an effort to stay in the dim circle of light George's wand cast; tripping over a stray bucket or harness was not even an option. As the twins continued their animated conversation, she trailed behind them through another door into a large, square tunnel. Auditory locks and a disillusionment charm inhibited the entrance; if Hermione hadn't leaped in directly behind Fred before the metal door slammed shut, she would have thought the original passageway was simply a dead end.
"Could it have killed him to start the incinerator?" George grumbled.
"Why George, after all these years of spectacular brilliance and innovation, you mean to tell me you aren't capable of lighting your own fires?"
"Oh ho, look who's the big talker today. You know exactly how capable I am of lighting a fire, brother… when I'm paid to do it."
"Lies. Angelina doesn't pay you a knut."
George chuckled. "No, when it comes to that kind of fire, I'm fairly certain the only one paying in knuts is me."
The twins launched into an avoid discussion of Angelina Johnson's sexual aptitude — apparently, the both of them were familiar with it— and Hermione rolled her eyes in spite of herself. Some things didn't change…
She shook her head and tried to peer around them, at a dim, blue light glowing at the end of the tunnel. Despite the carefree repartee occurring in front of her, Hermione gripped her wand tightly, trying to prepare herself for the very serious injuries she might soon find. Even during the height of the Second Wizarding War, she had gotten little insight, beyond the Unforgivables, in exactly how extensive the Dark Arts could be as a tool of torture; shockingly, she was gaining an education of the most horrific kind here, in a distinctly non-combative state, but she was afraid that whatever lay ahead might go far beyond even the awful experiences she'd had in her Dark Arts classes and with Draco.
Mentally, she repeated the Impressions Charm to disarm the surveillance cameras he had taught her only a few hours earlier. If she could perform the charm correctly, she might be able to stun Fred and George — she did have the element of surprise, and invisibility — then Obliviate them, then take whoever it was they were torturing and run…
At the same time, she knew even that plan had the great probability of going very, very badly.
Suddenly, the tunnel emptied into to another long row of stalls, these made of metal. This aisle was more narrow and much darker than that in the main body of the Hangar, the low-hanging ceilings almost tomb-like. Bluebell flames had replaced regular fire here, casting long cyan shadows along the stone walls.
Fred and George briskly set off down the room's length, hardly giving any of the stalls a second glance. These were quite unlike those in the main Hangar: inhumanely narrow for any kind of thestral or animal that would traditionally be housed in such a corral.
Strangely, all of them were empty.
The maze of individual enclosures eventually spilled out into a large room. Hermione slowed near the final stall as Fred and George walked right up to a long worktable set beside a full fireplace and hearth. Then she saw what was on the table and across the stone floor:
Splatters of the same dark liquid that covered George's arms.
She froze completely.
Fred began packing a briefcase with instruments, though what they were exactly was difficult to distinguish in the darkness; as she squinted at them, George walked in front of her, blocking her view. The twins were clearly cleaning up, muttering scourgifying spells; George rolled down the sleeves of his now-clean shirt and buttoned the cuffs; Fred closed the briefcase with an audible snap.
Hermione quickly scanned the rest of the room: Stopped bottles, potions and powders lined shelves on the wall behind the twins, as did unmarked boxes, jars with spiders and snakes, and more strangely shaped contraptions that likely had vile uses Hermione could only shudder to guess.
But where were the people Fred had mentioned…?
Suddenly, the twin in question crossed the room, passing from her line of sight. "What should we do with this lot?"
Hermione's stomach turned over, and her breaths doubled in speed. Oh god, whoever they were, they were right there, on the other side of the stall. She gripped her wand, her hand sweaty and shaking. This was it. If she was going to do anything - if there was anything left for her to do… now was the time.
George glanced over at his brother, in the middle of fastening on a necktie. "Just light 'em up. Can't be terribly difficult if that bloody moron has been able to manage it for the past five years, can it?"
Hermione gritted her teeth and silently crossed to the far side of the aisle, every sense in her body on full alert and every nerve electrified. The gaping room stretched backward a great deal farther than she had expected, and she again squinted, peering into the blue shadows toward —
She suddenly stopped moving. Stopped feeling. Stopped breathing.
She simply stared numbly, dumbly at the sight right in front of her.
Four fully-grown centaurs lay limply on the floor within circles of white chalk. And around them… Hermione's mind blanked, unable to fully fathom the carnage her eyes were seeing. Around them was…
Blood.
Mutilated limbs.
Chains.
Bones.
Everywhere.
They had all been… They had been butchered.
In a rush, the realization of what she was observing suddenly slammed into her. Her vision narrowed in a tunnel of yellow and black; she collapsed to her knees and hardly had a moment to silence herself before she finally vomited beneath the Invisibility Cloak. She clutched the floor, trying to breathe, her entire body shaking while Fred and George continued to speak as though they were simply having a conversation over tea.
"—Sovereign fancies procedure on this."
"And since when have we ever followed any flipping procedures, I'd like to know? They don't have eyes on this room. Let's get rid of them. You never know when the International Confederation of Wizards'll drop by; meddling bastards have a nose for these sorts of things."
"Excellent point, Fred."
"Of course it is. Inexpugnabilis decrusto — niblet!"
Hermione vanished her own vomit and looked up slightly, still curled on the floor, her body soaked with sweat. Fred was standing with his wand pointed down at the floor. She forced herself to try to see only what he was aiming at, and nothing around it. As if his wand was an eraser… the chalk wards etched on the stone had begun to vanish.
She thought back quickly to the incantation he'd spoken, and forced it through her memory, over and over, over and over, so she wouldn't have to focus on the next thing Fred had begun to do — levitate the slain centaurs, one by one, across the room toward what at first only appeared to be a particularly dark section of the far wall.
But then bricks moved aside, revealing something else entirely, and as Fred began to pile the animals on top of each other as if they hadn't been living, breathing, intelligent beings and flames flickered to life, Hermione numbly recognized it for what it was.
George had earlier mentioned an incinerator.
This was it.
Hermione didn't have the emotional energy to feel any more horror or abhorrence than she already did. Why anyone would ever do such an unspeakable thing to such wise and beautiful creatures was not a question she could even bear to ask. Could they have stood with Riddle during the Second Intervention? But surely they couldn't have posed enough of a threat to such a powerful wizard as Dumbledore to have warranted so monstrous an end as this…
And she had been too late.
They were all dead.
Water began to drip down onto her hand. She jerked, her response dulled, and she suddenly became aware that tears were streaming down her face.
"Wait," Fred said suddenly, sounding surprised. "This one's still breathing."
Those words jolted Hermione out of her stupor. Swiftly, she looked back up. He was standing above the final centaur, the only one whose limbs had not been so… brutalized. Her blurred vision focused on the creature, straining against the dim light. He had silver-blond hair, though it was so caked with blood and dirt she at first had not noticed, and she suddenly realized with an electric-like shock that it was Firenze.
Fred carelessly prodded him with his boot, and Hermione herself cringed. "Should I kill it already?"
She gripped her wand and stood abruptly. She felt dizzy as soon as she did, and she quickly bent double, clutching the wall, until her circulation system returned its natural flow to her brain. She didn't know would be able to do, not in this state. All she knew was that she had to do something.
Until George saved her from having to do anything at all.
"Really, brother? You'd spare that one from a long-suffering death?" He laughed harshly. "You're going soft on me. Leave the beast for Hagrid. Whenever he re-emerges from his lurve cave."
Fred snorted and turned away from Firenze's motionless body, crossing the room to the incinerator. "The last of the centaurs. Pity the Sovereign's suspending the project; I've quite enjoyed traversing our old stomping grounds. Shall we have some sort of ceremony?"
The last of them? Hermione thought numbly. That didn't - That couldn't possibly be right. The Hogwarts herd had held over forty — or fifty —
"Oh, unquestionably." George picked up a bottle from the shelf and smiled. "And I do believe our good friend Raziel would like to join us."
Hermione recognized the reference instantly: Raziel's powder, a partially unstable metal alloy Nicolas Flamel had discovered some centuries earlier. When directly mixed with a pre-existing spark, the slightest pinch would burn to over 1200 degrees Celsius.
A malevolent smile that was at once so like and yet so unlike Fred's given the horrific context of his surroundings lit up his face. "Send him right on over to me."
She knew what was coming and couldn't watch. As George tossed the bottle to Fred, she turned away, burying her face in her hands, forcing herself to breathe, breathe, breathe to ward off what could surely become another panic attack. A flare of hot wind swept across her face before she heard the incinerator door slam shut with a deafening clang.
When she finally raised her face slightly, her hands still cupped in horror around her nose and mouth, the twins were standing at the fireplace beside the table. George shoved a hand through his hair. "How do I look? Shag-able?"
"Undoubtedly. Give it to her for you and me both. I'll wrap things up at the Phoenix."
"I owe you one, brother. We'll switch next time; she'll never know."
They simultaneously tossed Floo powder into the air and disappeared in a burst of green flames.
The room descended into a deafening silence.
Hermione took two shallow breaths before she stumbled forward, then dashed to the fallen centaur. She had heard George - Fred - one of them say this room was free of surveillance cameras, and she didn't doubt it was true — she could only imagine the Sovereignty didn't want the mass slaughter she inferred had happened here to ever be recorded. She still muttered a quick diagnostic charm to be certain, but when it came up empty, she threw off her Invisibility Cloak and fell to the ground at Firenze's side.
Blood gushed from gaping wounds over the entirety of his body, his hands and equine legs stiff, as if he'd been immobilized. She didn't waste a moment; she reversed the spell and began to mumble every healing charm she knew to stitch together his split skin. Some healed slowly, so painfully slowly… but many others simply refused to respond, which meant they'd been inflicted by a tool or poison of incredibly Dark Magic.
Hermione's heart sank. She blinked back another wave of tears. "No, no, no, no…" she muttered frantically, unsuccessfully pressing her own hand against a festering stab wound on his chest to try to stop the bleeding, his body trembling beneath her fingers—
"Human…"
Hermione started violently and barely restrained a small shriek. Her heart pounding, she looked quickly to the centaur's face. Firenze's eyes had cracked open. He was staring straight at her, and the intensity of his piercing blue eyes pinned her in place.
"I do not… believe we have met," he breathed faintly.
The last time Hermione had seen him had been at Dumbledore's funeral, standing strong and proud. But now… now the situation was almost completely reversed, his nearly shrivelled, shaking form a far cry from her memory.
What sort of awful human being would ever inflict this kind of pain on another? Nothing no creature would or could ever do would ever deserve to have anything like this done to him. Never. Images of Draco and Hestia and Daphne Greengrass's mother and now Firenze flashed before her eyes, and here Hermione was in the middle of it and didn't know what to do,and she choked back a sob and began to cry, openly and unashamedly.
"But we have met," he whispered suddenly.
His voice jerked her into action. Roughly, she sniffed and wiped the tears from her face and hurriedly placed her hand back over the profusely bleeding wound on his chest. He hissed in pain, and she began to apologize, over and over. He was dying, dying because one of her own kind had done this to him.
She had to stop it. She would stop it.
Fred's mention of a slow and painful death could only mean one thing: poison. Her fingers fumbled in her robe pocket for the knapsack, enlarging it and summoning the object she sought. She attempted to grasp it and dropped it twice; finally, her uncontrollably shaking fingers closed around it. "This - This is a bezoar," she said quickly, holding it close to his face. "Here - just - just take it - It can draw out the poison —"
Firenze shook his head, the motion so weak it was hardly perceptible. "The stone will not… remove this poison," he whispered, his speech lurching, slurred.
Hermione stared at him in astonished horror. "Won't you even try?" she cried, bringing it nearer his mouth. "Please! There's a chance it could work!"
His back stiffened and straightened, and his gaze shifted to her sharply, shining with emotion. For a moment, the movement harkened back to image of the powerful creature he had been. "It will not, and I… I will not have that shoved… down my throat. Let me —" he choked in a shallow breath of air, "— pass from this world with — dignity, human."
Hermione froze, her tear-filled eyes locked with his. His words evoked the horrible memory of one of her earliest interactions with Draco, when he begged her to simply let him die. Of course she hadn't — the very idea of it was as unthinkable to her now as it had been then — but if the poison the Weasleys had used on Firenze was incurable, this was a different situation entirely. And for these people and creatures who had been kept in captivity, it seemed that choosing the manner and nature of their own, imminent death was to them to be the greatest freedom they could seek.
While Hermione, thank Merlin and all the gods, had never been in a position where she could understand it herself… she could certainly respect it.
A heavy sorrow settled into her soul. She looked down at the bezoar held limply in her fingers, and curled her hand tightly around it.
"Is there nothing I can do for you?" she whispered.
At once, the energy that had sprung to Firenze's frame departed from it. His gleaming blue eyes slowly fluttered shut. "The… stars. I would — like to…"
He didn't finish speaking, but Hermione understood.
Another wave of tears burned at her eyes. She lifted her wand and, looking up, murmured a transparency spell; the ceiling dissolved, and the black expanse of sky above Hogwarts spilled out above them, thick with glowing pinpricks of light. At the same time, she extinguished all the bluebell fires save one that very faintly illuminated the both of them. "Now you can," she said thickly.
Firenze's eyes again cracked open and shifted sideways, toward the view of the universe. He let out a long sigh.
Hermione set her jaw, her chin trembling. "Can I help you move so you can see a bit better?" she asked waveringly. After he looked at her for a long time before nodding, she shifted behind him and carefully helped him twist his shoulders and head upward, raising them so they rested in her lap. "There," she whispered, trying not to cry.
For a moment, he did not speak at all, his blue gaze fully open now, staring into the night with such longing it broke her heart. She wiped fiercely at her eyes, but one of her tears accidentally landed on his face; she gently wiped it way. "I'm so sorry," she choked.
His eyes suddenly focused on hers. "What is your… name, human?"
She sniffed, tried to compose her face, and failed horribly. "Hermione… Granger."
"Hermione… Granger," he echoed, staring at her intently. "You have… travelled very far to… get here."
For a moment, Hermione thought she must have heard him incorrectly.
Then she jerked and stared down at him.
"What?" she whispered.
Firenze looked back at the sky, his eyes shining with tears in the faint blue light of the bluebell flame. "One by one, they… found us all," he breathed, "tried to… extract our… most valuable prediction from us." He inhaled in a slow, gasping breath. "But I always knew, I would… see it come to pass before my own light too was… extinguished…"
Hermione had to listen closely to follow his slurring voice; when she pieced together his words, she started. "Wait," she said slowly. When he'd said… seeing the centaurs' most valuable prediction coming to pass, he couldn't have possibly meant…
"Me? No!" she exclaimed, then retracted her statement quickly lest she crush the dying beast's final convictions. "I mean — my being here - It was a mistake - in - in battle, in my universe. A - A miscast spell—"
"Look at the sky, Hermione Granger," Firenze said very suddenly. Hermione opened her mouth to protest, but his gaze was so intent that she shut it and lifted her head, looking upward. "Do you see… a very bright light, directly north of the… easternmost star in — Cassiopeia?"
After a moment, Hermione reluctantly identified the W-shaped constellation, even though her mind was already sceptical of whatever he was about to say. Celestial predictions were made for and about Harry Potter, not her. "Yes. I see it," she said, even though she doubted she had found the astral body to which he was directing her.
"That is a… binary star," he breathed. His body had begun to shake more violently, and his voice began to fade. "It… is projected to eclipse the… great red giant Xeranthemus Dai. You must… understand… the significance of this."
Her heart had began to pound, and she found she suddenly, selfishly didn't care one whit about the stars. She desperately wanted to shake the centaur, demand he tell her everything he knew of how and why she had come to be here rather than speak in bloody riddles, but she simply couldn't… not when the Weasleys had already done far worse for what she suspected were very similar reasons.
"You know, don't you? That I'm from a different world," she whispered. "Please, please, can you possibly tell me… Is there any way of going back?"
"Going back?" Firenze echoed in astonishment. His gaze shifted toward her, but the clarity and intensity of it had faded, his line of sight disoriented. "Your past is… simply training for your… present. Interdimensional shifts require vast… astral power. They do not just… happen in error." He choked in a breath. "You were… brought here — for a deep purpose."
His words crashed into her like a landslide; they were not ones she wanted to hear. "The purpose of what?" she couldn't help but exclaim. "Standing against an entire empire?"
The centaur suddenly stared deep into her eyes, his own wide. "Like it or not, this is… your world now, Hermione… Granger. I beg you to… use the power you have been given to… create a… place in which… the… innocent among… us… can…"
His eyes slipped shut, and his body began to convulse violently. Desperately, Hermione tried to protect his head; after an agonizing expanse of time, the spasms slowed.
"Firenze?" She brushed his tangled hair away from his sickly pale, sweat-soaked face, shaking his shoulders very slightly. "Firenze, please, please wake up… Firenze!"
A few moments passed before his azure pools cracked open only slightly. She let out a heavy sigh of relief, even though they fluttered shut again just as quickly.
"Do not let— centaurs… perish again in… this place…" he rasped hoarsely.
She nodded immediately. "You have my solemn word," she said fiercely, hot tears again streaming down her face.
Firenze's lips continued to move, but his voice had become so faint Hermione had to lean her head right beside his mouth to hear. At first, it sounded like gibberish; after a moment, she realized with a jolt he was speaking in ancient runic, and she swiftly translated the last thing she heard.
I do so love the stars.
The words puffing lightly against her ear stopped.
Hermione's own breaths temporarily halted. "Firenze," she said softly. "Firenze!"
This time, he did not respond.
Emotions sprang to her eyes and began to pour from them with an uncontrollable ferocity. "No…" she choked, but it was the only word she could manage to speak. She bent low over the centaur's head and heaved gasping sobs until her tears ran dry.
For a long time, his breaths were so shallow Hermione could hardly see his chest moving. At some point, though Hermione did not know exactly when, even this faint motion stopped. When she eventually realized it had, she took a small breath, cleaned the blood and dirt from his body, very gently lay his head and shoulders back on the ground, and stood.
The heaviness in her chest was gone. As what so often occurs following the release of such powerful emotions, her grief and anxiety had been replaced by something else entirely: a very clear sense of purpose.
Firenze was right.
In constantly remembering the people and things she would no longer be able to see and do from her life in Universe A… Hermione had forgotten who she still was, both there, and here. For however long as she was in this world, it was hers as much as it was anyone else's, and what was happening in it was so horrendous, obscene, horrific… Well, there simply were not enough words to describe what it was, and if she ran for her own life now without at least trying to do something for these people and creatures, now that she had seen exactly the sort of life, and death, to which so many of them had been sentenced —
She would never, ever forgive herself.
Hermione gazed around the despicable torture - no, death chamber.
She would honour Firenze's final wish.
These walls had witnessed a great abomination. Never would such a thing happen here again. Nor would those complicit in the atrocity walk away unscathed.
And Hermione knew exactly what to do to accomplish both.
Tap. Tap tap.
Harry gritted his teeth, clenching his quill in his hand.
Tap. Tap tap tap.
He began to grind the tip of the quill into the parchment of his Dark Arts assignment. He didn't care if it would leave a mark on Granger's exquisite cherry desk, where he'd been forced to take up residence after the awkwardness of that evening had sent Malfoy scuttling back to Harry's room, and Pansy promptly running after him like the goodhearted witch she was.
Tap tap. Tap—
"Don't you have someone else to off and ruddy annoy?" he exploded, spinning in Hermione's desk chair.
The much-detested mindreader blinked up at him innocently from her place sprawled on Hermione's bed, her eyes wide. The flat side of her own quill was poised over an open book, ready to smack it again. "What?" she said with such surprise it surely must have been feigned. "This is bothering you?"
Harry raised his eyebrows at her in disbelief.
The dwarf-ette — is that what the females were called? — sighed and thankfully set down her quill. "Sorry, it's just… I know… what's happened. With Uncle Luc. And what you want to happen."
'Uncle Luc?'
Harry wanted to hurl either his dinner or his inkwell, he wasn't certain which. His lip curled in disgust, and he shoved a hand through his hair. Of course she knew. There wasn't a single thing the blasted child didn't know. Merlin, he knew he shouldn't have let her in when she'd come knocking on the door an hour earlier.
He shot her a dangerous expression. "Then you realize how utterly classified that information is. If anyone discovers what you now know, you little mandrake, I will find you and personally—"
"I told you already. No one will," she interrupted, sounding tired.
Harry wasn't particularly pleased he had to take a twelve-year-old's word on that. He considered Obliviating her, but she had already pompously informed him that it wouldn't work - she'd just 'read' him again, or whatever it was she did.
His gaze shifted to the timepiece on Hermione's desk. It was three hours past curfew. Where the bloody hell was Granger? He reminded himself to dig out his Marauders' Map as soon as the little imp wasn't looking; he didn't know if Granger had already blabbed to her about it or not, but he at least deserved to keep one secret from her all-seeing gaze.
"The day is coming when you'll be caught out after hours," he told her sourly. "And when it does, I won't be the one saving you from detention."
"Worth it," she said without a moment's hesitation, opening her book again.
Harry honestly had no idea how she could stand to be around him; he prided himself on his ability to drive off anyone he deemed too obnoxious to share his presence (i.e. everyone), but though he had countlessly tried to be his anal worst around her, still she stayed.
"Why are you here?" he repeated.
She looked back up at him, resting her chin on her book. "Same reason you are. Neither of us can be in our rooms right now. In my case, my housemates are, er…" She ducked her unruly head, studying the bedspread. "They don't… quite… like me very well. I'd… rather stay here forever, if I could."
Harry honestly couldn't say he didn't feel the same about his own housemates, let alone the psychopathic female Weasley. The Corner distraction had seemed to be working so far, but he was waiting for the moment Ginevra remembered her real obsession was him and was back to clinging to him like static electricity.
Yes, the isolated Head dorms were one of the main reasons he'd worked so bloody hard to get Head Boy. But Harry had never expected My would have convinced their dear mother to buy her Head Girl. Nor had he ever expected that the nightmarish living arrangement would transform into the closest thing to heaven he might ever experience.
Except when it was invaded by bloody pests.
He realised then that Cassiopeia — honestly, what kind of idiotic nickname was Peia? — had, thank all the gods, stopped talking. Sighing in relief, he turned back to his potions homework.
"Harry?"
He hadn't even written two lines.
"What?" he snapped.
"How do you do it?"
Harry looked back at her impatiently, narrowing his eyes in question.
After a moment, Cassiopeia looked away from him, which he considered a victory. "Still… talk to your mum," she continued. "After you found out what she did to your family."
His heart automatically began to pound. Vexation and panic clenched his stomach. He gripped his pen tightly. That little tattletale… She'd ruined things enough as it was, spilling what she had in front of Malfoy and Pansy of all the ruddy people in the world, and now she wanted to discuss it like they were confidants?
"Did Pansy put you up to this?" he demanded. She'd already tried to ask him about it, but he'd managed to change the subject or extract himself from the situation before she could lock him with the pleading blue stare he knew she knew he had a very hard time turning down.
"No!" she exclaimed. "It's just… I mean, I… It's - It's hard, isn't it? Knowing… that, and… having to pretend you don't, every time you meet."
Harry's jaw tightened. He quickly looked away from her and her blasted Legilimencing gaze before she could heaven forbid see the vulnerability her unwitting words were causing him to feel.
The girl had no bloody idea how hard it was.
He looked back at her to tell her exactly that, but when he opened his mouth to tear into her… his sharp gaze noticed something strange. Cassiopeia wasn't even looking at him; she was instead again picking at the bed, her shoulders slumped.
Now that Harry thought about it, she really hadn't been quite so annoyingly chatty that night as she usually was.
On any other day, he would have rejoiced and left her to her moping. But he suddenly found her uncharacteristically glum demeanour rather illuminating. If she was able to see everyone's memories, which she obviously was, even the nightmares, the sins, the hidden desires, the hatred and the crimes… Well then. Perhaps she did have some idea of how difficult it was after all.
"Having a goal makes it — bearable," he found himself saying, the words flat on his tongue.
Cassiopeia gazed up at him, her brow furrowed. "What sort of goal?"
Harry couldn't believe he was actually voicing this aloud, and to the midget bane of his existence, of all people. "Revenge," he said simply.
She frowned sadly. "No… I don't want to cause anyone more pain than they're already feeling," she said, staring at the bed. "It just… hurts sometimes."
Harry suddenly realized she wasn't interested in forcing him to share his feelings about his disturbed childhood. No, what she really wanted to talk about was her unfortunate living situation with the nasty Gryffindor second years.
A curious mixture of relief and annoyance flooded him. Of all the ruddy things in the world… Now the little imp was sodding telling him her troubles?
At the same time, a part of him felt strangely obligated to respond.
"Don't even bother with what they think," he grunted. "They're all sodding idiots anyway."
Cassiopeia seemed to brighten, and he cursed himself; what was he doing, acting friendly? No, not friendly, he reevaluated — he was taking drastic measures to ensure she didn't start sobbing on his shoulder.
She crossed her arms over the top of her book, resting her chin on the top of it, and studied him closely, which, he had quickly learned, was never a good thing. "You should tell her. Pansy."
Harry slammed his hand down on the desk and spun toward her. Today had been nothing but one blasted blitz on his character after another: first Granger, then Malfoy, then Pansy shooting him a dark look before she left to tend to Malfoy's ego, and finally this — this judgemental nuisance, who probably wasn't even old enough to know how to spell that word. How dare they? It wasn't as if they were all ruddy saints themselves!
"The bloody hell I will!" he snarled. "What do you think I am, one of your darling Slytherins? I'm not sensitive, I don't have friends, and I don't have to cry about my problems to anyone within listening distance!"
She stared at him, her eyes wide. "It isn't for you," she said snottily after a minute with a know-it-all attitude that reminded him so much of Granger, his right eye twitched. "It's for her. So she knows you trust her."
Granger's earlier comment about friendship not being about yourself but the other person exasperatingly buzzed in his head like a mosquito.
"Pansy knows I trust her," he said automatically, trying to ignore the fact that he was arguing with an adolescent.
Cassiopeia shook her head. "Not when you won't tell her the only other thing you can never stop thinking about."
The quill in his hand snapped; he threw it on the ground and leaned toward her furiously. "Now you listen here, you little busybody, just because you have access to everyone's secrets does not give you license to go around broadcasting them!" he hissed. "Did you ever think that the reason I don't talk about it is because I bloody well don't want to? Have you? What you've seen is no one's blasted business but my—"
"Harry?"
Mid-word, his mouth snapped shut. His gaze shot daggers at Cassiopeia.
He would kill her yet. He would.
After a moment, Harry forced himself to look toward the door. Pansy was standing there, looking worried. And the last thing Harry had wanted to do was give her something else to worry about.
"Is something wrong?" she asked slowly.
"Nope," Cassiopeia said before he could respond. "I was just leaving." She sat up and hopped off the bed, gathering her books. For a moment, she looked back at him, and with a surge of dread, Harry knew what was coming before she even opened her mouth. "I think Harry has something he wants to tell you anyway."
If Pansy hadn't been standing right in front of him, Harry wouldn't have hesitated to give the devil child the two-fingered salute.
He glowered at her, even when she gave him a wavering smile and turned to leave.
"Wait a minute, Peia," Pansy said suddenly, reaching out to catch her. "It must be beyond late by now; you shouldn't go out without Harry's Invisibility Cloak. You remember where he keeps it, don't you?"
Harry swiftly stared at her in alarm.
Pansy was already looking over at him appraisingly.
He raised his eyebrows in disbelief that this was even a question and gave her a forceful expression that unequivocally said NO.
She pressed her lips together, her eyes narrowing in determination.
"You can give it back tomorrow," she said firmly — to him, rather than the five-year-old menace who was about put her grubby little fingers all over his father's…
Gritting his teeth, Harry took a breath, and then another, forcing his temper down before it exploded. Pansy didn't know the Cloak was the only thing he had of James. She didn't know she was the only person on earth who knew it still existed with the exception of the person who gave it to him. She didn't know it had taken Harry over a year and a half to bring himself to even show it to her.
She couldn't possibly have known… because he hadn't told her.
Mentally, he heard Granger and Cassiopeia sing as one, "Told you so!"
He let out a frustrated breath and looked up again. Only Pansy remained in the room, her blue eyes unreadable. For a long moment, she simply looked at him.
Harry shifted uncomfortably, fully aware of the question that was sure to come any moment, and that he was going to have to respond somehow.
No, a part of him argued, he should respond. Pansy certainly deserved that much from him, if not for the love she still felt for him now, for the kindness and concern she had once shown him when no one else in the world had noticed or cared.
But he couldn't tell her.
Not when there was the chance, however small, that she wouldn't understand. That she would turn away from him. That she would hate him.
That she would suddenly feel toward him all the things he felt toward his mother once he'd discovered what she'd done.
"What did you want to say to me?" she asked hesitantly.
Harry stood and turned to the window — anything to avoid looking into her concerned blue eyes. "Is there a single tissue left in my room after Mushy Malfoy mopped up his tears?" he asked sardonically.
She sighed. "Harry, don't be a box, not about this." Her words became muffled slightly, as if she'd covered her face with her hands. "Oh, it was an awful way for him to find out. Merlin… I wanted to run away like Hermione did. Hide under that boulder by the lake... you know the one. You and Hermione — you weren't obligated to tell him like I was. I'm his oldest friend, Harry! I should have said something; I've had so many chances…"
Harry fought the urge to turn and pull her into his arms and comfort her with the knowledge he might break if he did.
He heard her approach him from behind, her voice tired. "Can you just imagine what any of us would go through if we overheard the same thing?"
He tensed, and didn't turn around.
He knew he never would overhear the same thing.
His hands clenched into fists. Malfoy had no blasted idea how lucky he was. Even if his father might not be alive much longer, at least the Slytherin had a very slight chance of seeing him one last time.
Harry's father, on the other hand, was very dead.
Pansy moved beside him, sitting down on the window seat, her brown hair tumbling down over her shoulders, wearing a powder blue sweater that perfectly matched the colour of her eyes. Harry suddenly didn't want to talk about his father or Malfoy's father or talk about anything, really; he instead much preferred to do several things that didn't involved talking at all.
Pansy laced him with another searching stare that halted those thoughts in their tracks. "Does it have anything to do with why you've been avoiding me?" she asked quietly.
He quickly looked away from her, crossing his arms. "I haven't," he grunted.
"You have." She bit her lip. "Ever since Peia mentioned your… mother, the other night, you have."
He set his jaw. Damn that meddling child. She'd had no idea the can of worms she'd opened. For as long as Harry could remember, everyone had always pointed out — whether complimentarily or disparagingly — his similarities with his mother: his eyes, his stare, his unwillingness to tolerate extraneous nonsense, his ability to see the weaknesses of others and rip them to shreds.
Somehow, Pansy had been able to see through that, see something deep inside him that was not Lily Evans… and her unfailing confidence in that, whatever it was, was one of the very few things that made Harry himself also believe he wasn't fated to turn into his mother.
But what if the truth made Pansy reconsider that?
A hand gently touched his arm, and he stiffened.
"Harry, I don't want to pry, and I don't want to cause you undue grief, either," she said softly. "You don't have to say anything, really you don't. But I'd — I'd like you to know the only reason I asked at all is because I love you."
She took a small breath, and he briefly shut his eyes, pressure choking at his chest. "And I… I know I probably can't do anything about it, and it'll protect the both of us if you don't. I know that, I do. But if simply having someone else share the weight of that knowing, whatever it is, would help you, somehow… It's remarkable how much of a relief that can be. That's all I want."
Harry clenched his jaw, his heart racing in his throat. No — This fight was his and his alone. He didn't need or want help, didn't need or want to put at unnecessary risk the only person who he knew cared about him without strings and without fail. Yet some almost foreign part of his soul that only seemed to activate around Pansy compelled him to open his mouth, even though every bone in his body bellowed their disagreement and his stomach clenched in knots at the sound of his own voice.
"Do you remember," he began slowly, his gaze locked impassively on the blackness outside the window, "when we first started working together, our third year."
In he window's reflection, he saw Pansy look back at him quickly. After a moment, she nodded. "Yes, of course I do."
"And when I was doing an embarrassingly terrible job on that project, I said it was because I'd been having dreams that were interfering with my sleep, but that was all."
She nodded again, her eyes questioning.
"That wasn't… the whole story." Harry paused. When she didn't say anything, he took a deep breath and said woodenly, "The green flashes — They weren't just a dream. They were a memory. I hadn't known, until I used a Pensieve to look at them, right after school started. When I did, I saw—"
His mouth abruptly stopped working. He tried to continue, but all he could think of was the scene that had haunted him for five years, and the hazy memory of it for far longer than that: the shout of surprise, the two green flashes in quick succession… the mop of black that transformed into a shock of red.
Suddenly, Pansy's hand gently curled around his. "What did you see, sweetheart?" she asked softly, dread in her voice.
He gritted his teeth and forced himself to go on. "Lily… impersonated my father. She was the one who killed my grandparents, Liv. Not my father."
For a moment, only silence met his words. As it stretched out painfully, he braced himself for the fallout, dread crushing his chest like a thestral had suddenly stood on top of him.
"What?" Pansy finally whispered.
His hands tightened into fists. He bowed his head, unable to look at her.
"But you were… you were so young! Weren't you just… weren't you only three when it happened?"
He nodded. "My father's parents were… visiting," he said hollowly, flatly recalling other details the Pensieve analysis had revealed. "Lily was at a party, but my father had stayed home. It was late - I must've gotten out of bed to look for them. That's when I saw it."
"But…" For a moment, Pansy couldn't seem to speak either. "But… your father. I thought he… I only know what I've read and heard, but didn't he confess to it?"
Harry shook his head once, tautly. "Lily set it all up perfectly," he said bitterly. "She's the one who dug up those old letters between my father and my grandfather - the ones that showed them arguing about supporting the conservative movement. She left the empty bottles of firewhiskey around him. He'd started drinking again, so of course it wasn't a stretch for anyone to conclude he'd had too much, and that things escalated from there."
Recounting it again dragged up every intolerable emotion Harry had fought so hard to constrain to the deepest depths of his being. Sentiment was an unacceptable weakness, Lily had taught him — crying had never been an option, not even as a child. Harry had cried, really cried, only once in his life, after his mother had told him his father was a bad man, and was never coming back home.
He still remembered the sting of Lily's slap.
After that, during any visible moment of weakness, his mother would spit at him that he was turning into his soft, spineless murderer of a father who had drank and had wallowed in his personal miseries and had let his emotions get the better of him, and Harry had learned very quickly to bury any shreds of James Potter's evident personality.
"The worst thing was that he believed he'd actually done it, though of course he didn't know why," he said bitterly, unable to completely mask the well of hatred he reserved especially for Lily Evans. "The Imperius would have been too kind — my father would have known he'd been under it, even if all the evidence still pointed against him. So she used the Confundus Charm instead to make him unsure of everything that had happened that night. He was labelled an unstable Old-Blood, a closet conservative who lashed out against his progressive parents. And for that… he received the Dementor's Kiss."
"While your mother walked away with the Potter fortune and her Muggle-born name," Pansy whispered, sounding horrified.
Harry swallowed and nodded, his jaw tight. Against his better judgement, his attention was drawn to his reflection in the window: Quidditch build; dark, messy hair, poor vision that absolutely would have resulted in glasses if Lily hadn't forced him into contacts as soon as he was old enough to wear them and then an expensive Muggle surgery to fix his eyesight at 16. While he might have acted like his mother, he looked exactly like his father.
Lily had always hated that about him.
Abruptly, Pansy stood stiffly, her eyes red-rimmed and puffy.
Fear clenched Harry from his shell to his centre. No one in their right mind would ever want any part of the nightmare that was his family, his life. She would surely fear him now. She would surely leave him. She—
— wrapped her arms around him, burying her face in his side. "Oh, Harry," she breathed, her voice choked. "I'm so very sorry for what happened to your father."
He froze. To his horror, his chin began to wobble, and he stubbornly set his jaw, trying to breathe. Unspeakable gratefulness and pain and relief rushed through every nerve in his body.
The corners of his eyes began to burn.
At any other time, he would have swallowed back the sentiment with an efficiency and skill few others possessed. But as he watched a single drop of water slip down his cheek in the window's reflection, Harry suddenly realized that, in that very moment, he felt and looked more like his own conception of James Potter than he perhaps ever had.
His mother would have scorned him instantly. But, in that brief moment, Harry embraced the emotions like the father he would never have the chance to know.
And as the only woman who had ever truly loved him held him tightly, he released the tears that had waited fourteen agonizing years to fall.
Hermione dragged herself into the common room, the Marauders' Map clutched between her fingers. She knew exactly where everyone was:
Pansy and Harry, her room.
Draco, Harry's room.
Peia, Gryffindor Tower.
She suspected the disclosure of Lucius Malfoy's whereabouts was the reason behind the somewhat odd placement of Draco and Harry. Something inside her ached slightly simply thinking about it, but she forced herself to refocus.
There would be time for that. But it wasn't right now.
She checked the Map of the Hogwarts grounds for the hundredth time.
No one.
Hagrid was safely inside his hut.
Filch and Mrs. Norris were in the dungeons.
Fred and George Weasley were long gone, even though they'd never shown up on the Map in the first place, which led her to suspect some part of the Hangar had been made Unplottable.
She collapsed on the plush armchair at the back of the common room, near the well-warded basic living quarters she'd constructed for Draco after Harry had announced he couldn't stay with him anymore. Any passer-by who hadn't donated a single drop of blood to the ward — in other words, anyone other than Harry, Pansy, Hermione, and Peia — would see only a continuation of the common room wall, and nothing more… certainly not a small, partially walled-off room.
Hermione closed her eyes in exhaustion.
Blurred images of a Harry Potter-worthy plan flashed before her:
Locating and disabling every surveillance camera perched around the Hangar with Tom Riddle's Impressions Charm.
Casting a silencing charm so no noise escaped the building.
Using the same "Impenetrable" chalk-erasing spell Fred had uttered to create enough of a space in every warded stall and pen that the animals constrained within them could squirm free.
Levitating the troll's clubs to strategically destroy whole swaths of the stables, then punching through the wall into the area she had mentally labelled the death chamber and decimating just as many stalls there.
Reuniting the trolls with said clubs and provoking them with a flock of dive-bombing canaries until the two creatures had beaten a gaping hole into the side of the Hangar.
Using the Muffliato Charm on their steps as they lumbered after the birds into the Forbidden Forest.
Throwing herself behind a fallen stall door as an angry herd of malnourished hippogriffs that had been imprisoned behind the initial iron door she'd found hurtled out the hole the trolls had made and launched themselves into the night.
Coaxing the thestrals and other animals out the same hole using raw meat and feed, shooing them off in the forest as well.
Running through every passageway in the Hangar, every previously locked door and blocked wall, using the Homenum Revelio charm and other life-sensing spells until she knew without any shadow of a doubt that every creature had been accounted for and removed.
Finding a small bottle of hydrozoic acid, one of a shockingly large number of explosive chemicals stored in a frighteningly haphazard manner amongst Fred and George's stash of pain-inducing aids and instruments.
Sprinkling Raziel's powder around the interior perimeter of the Hangar, down every aisle and along every wall.
Emptying the entirety of the knapsack's Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes explosives onto the floor in the middle of the death chamber until the pile stretched well above her head.
At the very memory of the bluebell flame-lit hall, tears stung Hermione's eyes. She blinked rapidly, swiping at her face. She wasn't finished yet… one final step remained. And with Harry and Pansy in her room, the only place she had left to complete it was right here.
Somewhat numbly, she reached into her pocket and pulled out a small, squat white candle, the twin of one she had strategically placed in the Hanger. She set it on her lap and looked back at the Marauders' Map.
Nothing. The area was completely clear.
Hermione shifted her gaze back to the candle and took out her wand.
For several moments, she simply stared at the wick, gripping the stick of wood tightly in her hand. Her heart raced at the knowledge of what was to come, but sitting enclosed within four walls and not a single window made it seem distant, somehow - more concept than reality.
She didn't know if this course of action was right or wrong. All she knew was that such an abhorrent place shouldn't exist, couldn't exist. But it did. And she couldn't stand by and allow the horrific fate she'd just witnessed to befall any other living thing. In a world that had gone insane, this,as mad as it seemed, was the most sane solution Hermione could rationally conceive.
More tears slipped down her face. This time, she let them, barely noticing the stinging in her eyes. The only thing she saw was Firenze, as he stared up at the stars one last time.
Had anyone asked earlier, she would have said she didn't believe in spirits in the sense of beings who were no longer ghosts. But at that moment, she felt as if the centaur's presence was still there, waiting with her for the closure she hoped this would provide a countless many beasts who had died within the Hangar's walls.
"Never again," she promised them fiercely.
Then she lifted the candle.
And lit it.
They had reversed positions.
Harry held Pansy now, the both of them sitting on the window seat. He leaned against the wall, while she curled up against his chest, the weight of her body and her breaths moving in sync with his. A part of him still couldn't believe this was happening, that she was still beside him… that he would ever be so fortunate to have someone like her in his life.
Pansy had always seen him at his despicable weakest — it was how their relationship had sparked in third year, when they'd been assigned as partners for a semester-long Muggle Studies project. Harry was still reeling from the aftermath of his discovery that the father he'd always believed to be a murderer was in fact innocent, and he was still living with the true murderer. Even though Pansy hadn't understood the reason behind his exhaustion and dark moods, she, the timid, Old-Blood Slytherin wallflower, had been the only one to try to offer support, which he'd at first rebuffed vehemently.
But he had never expected even her inexhaustible concern to hold once she had learned the same dark secret.
He wrapped his arms around her waist more tightly and leaned his head down, tiredly resting the side of his head against hers and his chin on her shoulder. His eyes drooped shut. Sentimentality was bloody exhausting. How in the blazes did Slytherins like Pansy and Malfoy and surely Granger, if she'd been sorted here, manage to get by day in and day out if they felt even half of what he just had?
"Harry," she said suddenly, "why didn't you want to tell me?"
He sighed, and hesitated. "I may have thought you'd… think I was capable of that as well," he admitted tautly.
"What?" She looked up at him, her eyes wide. "Why on earth would I? You are nothing like her!"
The words warmed Harry's cold heart, even if they still sent a wave of disbelief through him every time she said something like them. He gave her a small, soft smile. "That you honestly believe that is why I—"
In the blink of an eye, the darkness outside became as bright as the sun.
A deafening CRACK! exploded, followed by a thunderous roar.
In a surge of adrenaline, he dove to the floor with Pansy still in his arms. The windows above them shattered; a shock of hot air blasted over them, sending her hair whipping into his face. The castle beneath them shuddered violently, as though the earth itself was shaking.
Then all was still.
Harry's ears rang. His shoulder ached.
He gasped in a breath. "Christ—"
Pansy was lying partially beneath him. He swiftly hauled himself up slightly and leaned over her. The lights in the room had gone out, and he cupped her face in his hand, trying to search her stunned blue eyes with only a faint, eerie reddish-orange glow for illumination. "Are you hurt?"
She shook her head. "I'm— alright," she gasped. "What — What was—?"
He swiftly turned to the open window… in time to see the final remnants of a massive white ball of fire mushroom high into the night sky. The tower of flames cast a hellish red glow over the entire panorama of the grounds. Harry squinted at the source of the raging inferno, directly beside the lake near the south-eastern wall, his heart pounding so hard he thought his ribcage might actually burst. He could hardly make out the skeleton of the… it couldn't possibly be the—
In the distance, he saw what only appeared to be bones of the Hangar's once-great structure were violently aflame, plumes of white-orange fire shooting high into the air in a mesmerising dance.
Not even during the Second Intervention had Harry seen such an explosion, though he didn't doubt the conservatives had.
He remembered Pansy then and ripped his gaze away from the flames. She was gingerly pushing herself up, trying to avoid touching the shattered glass on the floor around them. Quickly, Harry muttered a repairing spell, and the glass shards reassembled themselves into the window. He took her arm, and they climbed to their feet. She abruptly reached out and took his hand, and he grasped it reassuringly, following her wide-eyed gaze out the window.
"Sweet Merlin," she whispered.
Harry remembered watching the impressive compound constructed during his first year.
Now it was utterly decimated.
It didn't take long for his mind to begin calculating. What would have caused such an explosion? An accident? A deliberate act of sabotage? Certainly not from the conservatives' end; they didn't have the strength to produce something like this. Anyway, there was no chance in hell any Light-loving Old-Blood would ever destroy a building with so many…
He stiffened.
Shit.
Harry shook the last of the dazed cobwebs from his mind and leaned down, quickly kissing Pansy before he let go of her hand. "I have to go. I'm sorry. Animals were in that building. McGonagall'll need us and the Prefects to do damage control immediately. Bloody first years'll be running amok thinking their favorite jarvey's been vaporized."
He shoved a hand though his hair, gritting his teeth at the idea of having to wrangle idiotic children who would certainly either be traumatised or bouncing off the walls with glee. On top of that, the Phoenix was going to be all over this; he didn't doubt Magical Accidents and Catastrophes, MLE and the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures were on the scene already.
Merlin, this was a bloody nightmare.
Halfway to the door, Harry quickly turned back toward Pansy. "My mother will return for this, Liv," he said, only his eyes holding the foreboding he felt. "Tell Malfoy and prepare yourself. I don't know if she'll stop here, but I don't want him in my room if she does. And tell Granger to get her sodding arse down to the Headmistress Office the second she gets—"
Granger.
His speech lurched to a stop as an extremely disturbing thought entered his mind.
Granger had obviously been as devastated as Pansy had been when the conservative movement's beloved blond poster boy had had his feelings hurt that evening.
Granger had been gone for hours and still wasn't back at the exact same time an explosion had occurred unlike any Hogwarts had seen in the past several centuries.
Granger was a seasoned war veteran perfectly capable of devising a stunt like this.
Pansy's gaze shot toward him then, her eyes filled with terror and dread, as if she was thinking the very same thing. "Harry…"
Suddenly, Malfoy barged into the room. "What just—" He stopped barreling forward and in the same motion took a stumbling step backward, slamming into one of Granger's dressers.
Even in the darkness of the bedroom, Harry could tell his gaze was transfixed on the fiery scene outside the window.
Harry glanced toward the explosion once more; the flames were shooting many stories higher than the Hangar had even been, but now he could barely make out multiple jets of purple and blue contrasting sharply with the transfixing red and orange inferno — the first responder team had already arrived. Ignoring Malfoy's paralysed gawking, he returned his focus to Pansy. "I know what you're thinking, Liv. It isn't. I know it isn't."
No, this wasn't Granger. Granger refused to to anything more dangerous than pretend to sleep with his former best friend and creep around the castle under an Invisibility Cloak. He had seen the wild apprehension in her eyes when he'd breached the topic of Lucius Malfoy; she absolutely did not have the nerve to follow through on something of this monumental a scale.
Harry turned back toward the door. If first responders were on the scene, he had lingered here far too long. "Malfoy, stay with Pansy," he commanded. "I don't doubt my mother will be here tonight."
"Where's Hermione?" Malfoy asked abruptly, looking over at him expectantly.
Harry cursed. Merlin — what was he, the impossible woman's sodding keeper? How in the blazes was he supposed to know where she chose to go bury her head?
Something shifted in Malfoy's expression, and he jerked up straight, taking a single, limping step toward Harry. "Evans, where is she?"
"Do I look like a bloody locator spell to you?" Harry exploded. He fumbled in his pocket for the Marauders' Map and flung it at him. "Have a look; if I'm not standing in the Headmistress's Office in the next five minutes, our entire blasted cover'll be up when the sodding witch'll suspects I'm involv—"
"I'm here."
Harry's gaze shot toward the voice.
Granger stood in the doorway, looking extraordinarily calm. She didn't even blink at the staggering conflagration burning outside the window.
Harry needed no other evidence.
At once, he advanced on her. "What did you do?" he snarled.
Her brow knit, and her eyes narrowed. "I think you'll find I could hardly do much if I've been right here."
That was utter rot if he'd ever smelled it; her cool response and entirely unsurprised reaction blatantly stated otherwise. "Are you out of your mind?" he hissed, stalking directly into her personal space. "Do you think they don't have investigations for this sort of thing? The Sovereignty will find—"
"Nothing." Granger actually advanced on him then, her eyes blazing. "The Sovereignty will find nothing, because there is nothing to find." The unexpected force and undaunted intensity that leapt to her gaze jolted him; it was unlike anything he had ever seen from this iteration of My Granger. "Now, earlier you asked me to help you help Draco's father," she said evenly. Her eyes shifted away from him, though her expression remained just as intense. "Consider me in."
Harry followed her gaze to Malfoy, who was standing stock still a few feet away, wordlessly staring back at her. Harry's eyebrows flew up, and he swiftly looked back at Granger to further analyse whatever this unspoken exchange was between them, but she had already turned away.
"McGonagall'll have expected us there ages ago." She disappeared from the doorframe, and he could hear her starting down the stairs. "Are we doing this or what?"
His mouth dropped slightly.
Christ. If she'd had something like this buried inside her all along… then she might be bloody well formidable after all.
-c-
A/N: The only thing I originally had in my notes for this chapter was, "Hermione blows up shit." I hope you found the resulting content to have significantly more depth than that.
For anyone who might have wondered, I use two primary criteria when developing my "reversed" Universe B characters: 1) I make the people who were more inclined to be ethically "good" in Universe A more inclined to be ethically "bad" in Universe B, though the extreme to which that ethical propensity swings and the choice of whether or not each character will fall upon the conservative or Sovereign side is ultimately up to them and their personalities (e.g., Filch still self-identifies as a creepy jerk in both worlds; Universe B! Harry chooses to lean Lightward even though he hates using his decent side). 2) I build upon that based on each character's personal experiences and recent societal history and norms (i.e. Muggle-borns and the Dark Arts being given preference and the Light Arts and purebloods being shunned).