Disclaimer: I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

From the journal of Hermione Granger

Early hours of Christmas Day, 1998

Just past two o'clock in the morning

To every reaction, an equal and opposite reaction. I have been reading all night, under electric light, with pauses to sleep. Copies of me are sleeping in various of these rooms, or reading, past or present or future. I lose track of which I am. No, I am the one in the lead, I think. I am the one ahead of the ones I've left behind, the version of me that walked into another empty room and flipped the time-turner back as many turns as would take me… to five minutes after I walked in here, hours ago, and turned on the lamps in anticipation of my arrival.

My parents raised me to be thrifty, after all, and it is real and tangible resources that are eaten by a lamp burning in an empty room: the long-gone forests of coal or oil, the slow burn of radioactive decay… Something burning away in void, that haunts me, the notion of waste. A sin.

Original sin: to inquire after what humans were not meant to know. Faust or Edward Teller or Merlin, I cannot remember which I am imitating just now: perhaps all three.

To each reaction, an equal and opposite reaction. The primitive terror of not-us, the outer darkness, bred the witch hunts—and some of that, I know, was the primitive hatred of male for female, the one that I never have understood, for we're all the same stuff, aren't we?

Aren't we?

And then the witch-folk withdrew, in terror of their fellows' blind thirst for annihilation, and in self-defense called up… the very avatars of Annihilation, the creatures whose mouths open on Void, who can make any of us, as nothing: everything that we've ever dreamed or felt sinks into utter void, the place of no-feeling, and in the extreme, no-being.

On my mother's high shelves, higher even than the Amnesty International reports and the histories of the continental genocides and the books and pamphlets of the Nuclear Freeze movement, stood the paperbacks from her university days. She didn't read philosophy, not formally (too abstruse a pursuit for the child of lower-class strivers, who needed to find a profession, but she read it for pleasure). There was one I still remember: Being and Nothingness, and as a child, I spotted it up there and asked her how anyone could know about Nothing, because it wasn't there.

Void is the true nature of Evil. In the middle ages, they understood that. I've looked at the face of death, but the face of Void is different… it isn't there. Neither black nor white, but not there.

My skin crawls thinking about it. Much easier here, of course, under electric light, because one can reason oneself into being reasonable. We are rational. It's the twentieth century — well, the last dying tag-end of it, never mind what may fall apart at the turn of the millennium; for all we know, the reactors in Siberia may melt down when the numbers turn over to 2000.

At Hogwarts, at my flickering fireside, all of this would be much more difficult. There, the light shifts, in the reddish end of the spectrum, leaping and flickering like a living thing, and the Floo powder turns it cold emerald green, and renders the flame harmless —

I wonder (historical note to be pursued on return to Hogwarts) in what order those were discovered: the flame-freezing charm and Floo powder? They seem related, now that I think about it.

Now that I think about anything, it is to escape what stares me down: the face of Annihilation.

I wish I had studied at Durmstrang Institute. Well, I would not have been admitted, I don't think, being both English and Muggle-born. But there is a certain stern and unwavering willingness to look upon the Terrible, in that snow-bound place with its great fires and its fur-swathed students… well, yes, and I do admit once to having daydreamed of romantic interludes with Viktor Krum, naked under furs by a great roaring hearth. There's something in the cast of his face I always found charming, that glower of heavy brows and beaked nose, the high Slavic cheekbones and the oddly expressive mouth.

I dreamed those dreams very much later, of course; my imagination didn't extend to male nudity when I was fourteen. I was very much more interested in the naked face of Fact, of the things suppressed… such as the teaching of Necromancy.

"It is only the Banishing Rite they teach us," he had said, as we whirled in the sparkling wonderland of the Yule Ball. "That is dangerous enough in itself."

"Why is that?" I asked, looking up at him. His eyes were fixed on the middle distance, looking at something terrible that I could not see—and that I wanted him to describe.

"To Banish, one must rightly Name," he said. "Foolish children think that's a light matter." He was glowering, and this time it was personal; there were Draco and Pansy near us, the latter of whom caught my eye and childishly stuck out her tongue. I half-laughed, and Viktor smiled slightly. "A very, very foolish child," he said, "and I don't mean that little girl, but her cavalier."

I didn't learn until years later the depths of the contempt in which Viktor held Draco Malfoy, who had apparently been so foolish as to assume that a Durmstrang student was necessarily an admirer of the Dark Wizard of the Continent. I wondered that Draco was still alive, after praising Grindelwald to Viktor Krum.

Outside it's snowing. At Durmstrang, no doubt, it's a picturesque and magical blizzard. I did love that picture, the world sunk in a wolf-howling, demon-haunted snowfall, cut off from the outside fully half the year… I would not have minded that isolation, not when its consolations included of one of the finest libraries in magical Europe. A true outpost of the Middle Ages, in the territory of Kafka and Kepler….

I shivered. I still love the antique scratch of quill on parchment, and even more when I hear it as I'm reading the track of long-dead scribes across parchment older than most of London, but… what these leaves tell, I don't want to contemplate.

I am circling about it. Void. That is what I'm contemplating: Nothing, and how we may banish the animate gateways to Annihilation.

ooo

I looked up just now, and startled at my face in the mirror: hollow eyes and cheeks, the lines of the skull more than evident. It's true: my own death will have my bone structure. Dean tells me that's the whole art of the portrait. Find the bones: draw the sitter's death, and then lay over that the softening layer of flesh and the play of gesture that brings it alive. That double portrait of Blaise and Draco was sketched in sixth year, when I now know that Draco was contemplating his own end, and his mother's, in the shape of the mission that at the outset had seemed an honor. Dean tells me that he couldn't take his eyes off Draco's face that year. There are many, many drawings of Draco in Dean's portfolio, and that picture, for all of its apparent frivolity, has an echo of momento mori even if one doesn't know the principals.

Blaise Zabini is dead these six months. Draco Malfoy would be dead twice over, but for my actions, and Neville's.

I'm shivering. It's late night, and winter, and of course I keep the house cool to economize, but it's a more than physical chill.

The demon-banishers of Durmstrang have a conjecture as to the True Name of the hive-demon; it is a cousin to the one of ancient state, whose name is Legion.

I dare not say it aloud, for fear of Summoning them.

These books terrify me. I feel the urge to chalk a pentagram around my desk, lest I be unprotected … should I murmur something under my breath while reading.

ooo

Four o'clock in the morning, Christmas Day.

Unto us a child is born. The last enemy to be defeated is death.

Vanity and chasing after wind. Something that howls in the desert places, the voice of emptiness, the song of Annihilation.

These books are unclean. No, they are the means to banishing that which… that with which the Ministry has defended itself against its own these three hundred years.

A hive-demon, which recognizes the Ministry as its own, and with which each successive Minister has renewed vows. The Minister is nothing to them but a specialized function, no more an individual than a termite queen. An organ, no more.

"Like bees in a hive, less the queen." The Dementors are indistinguishable one from the other; there is no hierarchy that can be marked out by human eye. They reproduce in a miasma of fear and despair, and they know neither male nor female. I shiver at that thought as I never did contemplating the lives and loves of insects or fungus or microbes.

Dark Creatures—those sentient creatures whose whole being is malevolent. Werewolves are incorrectly so classified; they are merely human most of the month, and only a thirtieth of their lives is taken up by destruction. They do better, in that regard, than some substantial number of those who call themselves fully human.

Remus Lupin, for example, for one very sad example: worn-down and shabby and harrowed by guilt for what he may have done when he couldn't remember, and for what he had failed to do when he could remember.

ooo

Six o'clock in the morning on Christmas Day.

I slept a little, we slept a little; there are six others of me, seven of us in all, Tom-Riddle-Horcrux-fashion, and we have been reading all night, with breaks for sleep. There will be light soon, and all of this will be easier to bear.

The conclusion is inescapable, however: if we are to succeed in Banishing the Dementors without annihilating every human being in the Ministry and his or her children, we must persuade the Ministry… to dissolve itself. The compact is, in fact, mutual assured destruction.

The Dementors of Azkaban, and those abroad in the land, rogue-fashion, are a Hive-Demon, and know no fashion of existence except for the hive. We are human beings, who voluntarily form ourselves into hives… which call themselves institutions, or nations, or governments, or corporations, but which have existence only as long as we believe in them.

"The urge to destruction is also a creative urge." (Emphasis mine.) Much quoted, and usually out of context—but the original sentence stands at the end of an essay on the logical necessity of political opposition. The greater the tyranny, the greater the opposition it rouses in answer.

In this case, it is the escape clause… the strait and narrow path to salvation. The one in a billion chance…

I have never been so cold in my life.

I am done with reading. There is an invitation to dinner awaiting me. More than dinner, of course—a guerrilla raid, a rescue, Percy summoning us to help him to save his sister, who is being poisoned by her own kin.

Very much more cheerful to contemplate than the face of Annihilation .

ooo

At Hogwarts, 1 pm

Neville departed for Longbottom House a few hours ago. I'm still thinking about that goodbye in the apprentices' corridor. He reminded me of the invitation for Boxing Day, breakfast, which given that it's Gran, means eight o'clock, and then a walk after… Gran will be doing correspondence into the early afternoon, he said, and I didn't miss that he held my hand while reminding me.

I don't know how to describe how he looked, except to list the details: the little smile, the way his hair fell over his face, and he kept brushing it back. He's still wearing that antique hair-clasp in onyx and silver—Death Eater colors, I thought, though of course that's anachronistic, because that clasp was fashioned centuries before the Statute of Secrecy, let alone any of the after-echoes that led to the Knights of Walpurgis and the Daughters of Hecate and Gellert Grindelwald and Tom Riddle.

There is something wrong with me, perhaps, if I can't look at a boy I fancy without thinking about wizarding history. He's part of it, of course, as are his parents, whom he will be visiting in St. Mungo's today with his Gran, before they return to Lancashire for the traditional Christmas dinner with the usual collection of elderly kin, Algie and Enid and the rest. Oh yes, and Draco Malfoy. I don't envy Draco, actually, given what Neville has told me about the typical Longbottom Christmas dinners.

Bright eyes and pink cheeks and oh yes, broad shoulders, and those large gentle hands… well, I do admit that I fancy Neville Longbottom, Pureblood genealogy and all, and I'm pleased that I will be standing shoulder to shoulder with his redoubtable Gran when we take on the avatars of Annihilation… when we attempt the Banishing of the Dementors.

When we succeed, because there is no alternative. And I'm reassured, looking at Neville, because he's always been about life, and hope, and the nurturing of living things, whether plants or children: what stands against the Void.

I wonder if Draco will take the opportunity of Neville's visit, to make one more appeal to him… odd that he complained to me that Neville turned him down. Very like a child going from one parent to another in search of treats… no, that's not a good analogy, or at least one with which I'm comfortable.

"They'll be leaving me to it soon enough," he said to me, and I realize that he means they'll be turning me over to the Dementors. He wants that last taste of life before he's abandoned to the darkness.

And Neville and I both have made use of him. That's how it looks, no doubt, from his point of view. He's been seduced and abandoned, and he wants to be re-admitted … except he's been the middle term. He talked me into impersonating what Neville is not: the terrible Slayer of Nagini (if Voldemort's familiar was terrifying, then the one who did away with it must be more fearsome yet.) Except, of course, that he didn't reckon on my being the scarier of the two. Oh yes, make no mistake about it, Neville has potential, but it's clear enough to me, seeing him from the inside and the outside, that he's terrified of what he could do, and keeps that volcanic fire banked, to pass for domestic warmth.

Domestic warmth that I wouldn't mind cuddling up to. Yes, I can't blame Draco too much — who wouldn't want that?

I felt my face flame, because I was in fact imagining, or remembering, Neville without his clothes, only adding the tactile track to that visual recollection, hot bare skin against mine … except that hadn't been him, but Draco in disguise.

What I haven't told Neville.

"Are you quite all right?" Neville asked, holding both my hands.

I nodded. "Sorry I was absent-minded. I was up late reading." He smiled at me, that smile of tender recognition. I find myself thinking about how alive and absolutely luscious he looked, with those soft dark eyes and that look of concern, and then that lovely smile. Yes, I like sweet boys; I've quite developed a taste for that…

…well, yes, except I also have a taste for wriggly blond creatures who remind me that I know how to do scary, kinky things to them. I don't think Draco understands just how real that performance was…

… and I remember all too well how he flashed me the face of Bellatrix, when he was wearing his cousin's changeable shape. Oh, I am so glad that I Vanished those hairs… though not before he showed me, as if in a mirror, that in his eyes I am a face of Power, along with his terrifying and glamorous aunt.

(Yes, Draco had a crush on Voldemort's torturer-in-chief, and I'm not sure if I'm more disturbed because of the kinship tie or her title, but surely he wasn't a witness to most of her atrocities. To judge from the Pensieve depositions, he had little taste for it by the end, to her immense disgust.)

Neville took both of my hands in his, and kissed them, and whispered to me, "Take care of yourself, will you? And good luck tonight." He knows what we're about. "I'll see you tomorrow morning, then." Still holding my hands, he leaned in and kissed me on the forehead.

I stood on tiptoe to kiss him on the cheek, but I missed, and instead my mouth met his jawline and neck … and I felt rather than saw his blush, as the skin heated under my lips. He wouldn't have done that two weeks ago; I can feel that sweet gravitation, the same that he does. Something will happen soon; it's inevitable.

ooo

What the time-turner will not do is to spare me the tedium of waiting. I have read enough, supped full on horrors for a week during which the sun never rose, so the sight of print makes me faintly nauseous; and there is nothing else to do, except to dress and then to wait. My invitation is for five o'clock; Neville is gone, and I am standing in front of the mirror in my little room once more, and once more it compliments me on my resemblance to the Furies. I am wearing the same clothes in which I observed the Decommissioning of Malfoy Manor; it is not coincidence, I think. I feel armored in the black tunic and black jeans, and wrapped round in my winter cloak, I might be a stagehand or a ninja, all in black and prepared for stealthy deeds.

But there's nothing to do, just yet, but watch the hands of the clock make their slow progress. The time-turner only turns back the flow of time; it lets us double back, but not skip forward. Just as well; we'd lose great chunks of life that way, all the parts that we think are tedious, that stand between us and the end of life.

Outside, the snow falls.

ooo

I am no longer subject to the curfew, so I went for a walk. The corridors are empty at this hour, except for the ghosts; Peeves appeared to be otherwise occupied in some other part of the castle, or he took no notice of me. The Grey Lady nodded to me, and the Friar; Nearly Headless Nick gave me a tip of the hat (and with it a disconcerting bob of the head… no, after seven years I'm still not used to ghosts).

Well, there's a ghost with whom I might have business. The one who was deputed to teach us history, and in so doing, put us to sleep.

The History of Magic classroom was still dimly lit by the fading light when I walked in.

Binns turned from the dusty board on which he'd been writing dates of Goblin rebellions. Yes, even in the absence of schoolchildren, he carried on his appointed rounds. I recognized the lecture as one he'd given in my fourth year.

"Professor Binns," I said.

He turned. "There are no classes at Hogwarts, Miss…" He squinted.

"Granger. Hermione Granger."

"Ah, Muggle-born. Yes." His gaze was disconcerting, for all I could see the wall behind him. "I remember you, yes. The one who stayed awake."

Well, that said something about his powers as a lecturer, if that's how I distinguished myself in his mind.

"Altogether too attentive, yes." He looked at me with deceptive mildness… deceptive, I knew, because I could feel the hairs rising on the back of my neck. I'd had the momentary foolish notion of asking him some of the questions that had been circulating in my mind, and as he looked at me, eyes hollow, I realized that it would be a very bad idea.

I was looking at one of the Ministry's gatekeepers.

"You kept awake, yes." Binns smiled, and it was not pleasant. "Constant vigilance, eh?" Yes, I supposed I was of the school of Alastor Moody, the real one, that is. Never lose track of what may be sneaking up in your peripheral vision.

He said, "I think you ought not to ask so many questions. Sleep is not a bad thing, you know."

I said, "There will be plenty of time to sleep when I'm dead."

And with that I left the room, having the sense that it would be a bad thing to tarry in that place, so close to the dark of the year.

ooo

At the appointed hour, I threw the handful of Floo powder in the hearth, gathered my cloak and my blue beaded bag, made sure of my wand, and stepped through.

The hearths whirled by in the darkness. I caught a glimpse of white marble, and two bored Aurors — was that Malfoy Manor? – and a cavernous kitchen, which might be Longbottom House and might be some other home of similar vintage. And then I stepped through the cold green flames, into the warm clamor of the Burrow.

ooo

Author's note: "The urge to destruction is also a creative urge." Michael Bakunin, from his essay on the opposition in Germany. The essay leading up to this memorable quote is very much of the school of Hegel, and therefore less-remembered than the coda.