The kerosene lamp turned the canvas walls into a shadow theatre. Hermione sat cross-legged on the floor, using her wand to guide a needle in and out of a sock. Harry's sock, to be precise.

"You could have gotten trench foot."

He didn't reply, but she knew he was rolling his eyes.

"Harry, you have to change your shoes and socks more often. And you can't be in wet shoes all the time."

"Yeah, I think I knew that already," he grumbled.

She bit back a cutting retort. The only thread in Hermione's repair kit was black; the patch she was darning would stand out like an ugly bruise on Harry's grey sock.

A shuffling noise beyond the canvas flaps told her Ron was shifting positions. He had volunteered for the entire night watch, probably out of penance.

Hermione tied a knot, and neatly severed the excess thread with her wand. "Here you go."

"Thanks." Harry pulled the sock onto his right foot and clicked his heels together like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. He was lying on his back on the camp bed, staring up at the slanted canvas ceiling with that same vacant expression he'd worn for weeks on end. Hermione watched as his fingers went to his chest and then his neck, as if to check for the locket that was no longer there. And then he touched the pocket where his holly wand was no longer tucked. It was like a religious gesture, this thing she had noticed him doing, over and over.

"Harry."

"...yeah..."

"Do you mind if I put some music on?"

"Go ahead," he muttered, and he turned over to face the canvas wall.

She took Ron's wireless from its spot on a cluttered shelf, and drew out the antenna. Turning the dial, she searched for a station that was intelligible; most were hopelessly fuzzy, their broadcasting range hardly reaching their campsite. Finally, she found a crackling but audible FM station. An electric guitar cut melancholy arpeggios into the quiet. A lazy drumbeat kicked in, followed by rhythm guitar, and finally, a female singer's mournful cry.

Hermione approached the stack of dishes in the sink. "Scourgify," she cast authoritatively, pointing her wand at each tin plate in turn. The bubbles were satisfyingly fat, bursting like fireworks when she touched them. Since their faucet did not connect to any genuine plumbing, she had to rinse the plates with artificial water from her wand. After washing the dishes, she replaced them in a little plate rack she hadn't thought to pack, but had "purchased" (stolen and left money on a counter) from a shop back in Manchester.

With her evening housekeeping routine completed, Hermione was going to climb the ladder to her own bun, but she noticed Harry had rolled back onto his back. His eyes scrunched shut, his cheeks distorted; Harry's hand was clapped to his forehead.

"Are you alright?" she said softly.

"Yeah," he breathed.

"No, you look really sick." She came over, leaned over his bed. "Are you having a vision, Harry? You have to be honest."

"I'm...not. Just...hurts...a lot."

"Do you want a cold washcloth?'

"No," Harry grunted. "It'll...be gone...in a minute."

"I'll stay here," she promised, and sat down on the floor, leaning against the edge of his bed. She placed a hand on Harry's sweatshirt-covered elbow, tentative. Sometimes, he curled away from any physical contact, like the leaves of a touch-me-not plant. Hermione tried not to take it personally, knowing who he was and how'd he grown up, but it still hurt.

But Harry did not move away from her; he stayed stock-still, face clenched in agony. Hermione waited, wondering what was in his head. Was Ron right? Would Harry lie about his visions? And if he did, what else would he lie about?

No, no no, she castigated herself. Doubt and suspicion are locket thoughts...we destroyed the locket, we can't keep thinking this way...

The music drifted around them, filling up the tent with moody verses. The singer was Irish; she had a way of abruptly shifting from quiet resignation to open misery, stretching and compacting her vocals with jarring intensity

. Hermione sighed along with the slow chorus, wondering whether she ought to shut it off, as might be making Harry feel even worse.

Suddenly, Harry gulped for air and breathed heavily, as though he had run a marathon. And perhaps he had, for the distance between him and Voldemort was surely wide...Harry had said so, he was certain that Voldemort was abroad.

"Is it him?" she squeaked. "What was it? Did he speak? Did you hear somethi—"

"No," said Harry, his voice dull as an old penny. "I...it was just pain. And, like...blurriness. It just hurt a lot, but...I feel better now."

"Your scar's not hurting anymore?"

"It's not killing me anymore." Harry brushed his sweaty fringe away from his forehead. His skin had been breaking out since they'd escaped Godric's Hollow. Once clean and pleasing, his face was greasy and blemished, and he had several healing cuts from shaving without a mirror.

"Should I tell Ron?"

Harry shook his head, rolling it side to side on his pillow. "There's nothing to tell."

"Okay..." Hermione relaxed a little, flexing her socked toes.

Harry fell into blank silence again. She felt uncomfortable leaving him, and wondered whether Ron had also noticed that Harry looked more than just unkempt. A year ago, he'd been Quidditch Captain, athletic, cheeky, at the peak of his popularity and fancied by more than a few girls. But now, she wondered where that Harry had gone...he only had two remaining moods now: either blank and silent or manically describing how the Deathly Hallows were the way forward, the only way, and how they ought to go searching for more information on them right this minute. But thirty minutes later, he'd be lying down again, pressing the golden Snitch to his mouth or caressing it like a tiny kitten, uninterested in completing basic chores around the campsite. She left it to Ron to remind Harry to bathe every few days. Everything else, it seemed, was her responsibility.

"Harry," she said.

"Yeah..." He rolled over to face her with an exhausted sigh, as though he hardly had the energy to move at all.

"I don't want to nag you," she whispered. "And I know you're just going to want to brush me off, but..."

"What."

She moved her hand from his elbow to forearm, and gently squeezed it. "You've not really been yourself lately."

Harry's green eyes were glassy and vacant. "Who else would I be?"

"I don't mean it like that."

"What am I s'posed to be doing here, playing Quidditch? Writing essays?" He sighed and sighed his chest again, where the locket had been.

"Harry, you don't need to sarcastic. I'm only looking out for you."

"I told you what I wanted to do," he said, more forcefully than she expected. "You and Ron refuse to even consider it—"

"It's because we think it's a bad idea for more than one reason."

"It's dangerous," said Harry. "So's everything else we've done this year."

Hermione let go of his wrist and ran her fingers through her thick hair. "We've talked about this before. There are smart risks, and there are stupid ones—"

"But we have no other choice," Harry cut in. "Other than just hiding here forever, eating roadkill."

He could have showed more gratitude for the food she cooked, every night, the food she had seasoned with a spice kit that Hermione had thought to pack well in advance of their trip, anticipating that Ron and Harry would complain about meals that didn't live up to Hogwarts luxury... he didn't normally gripe as much as Ron or hold her to the standards of a mother he'd never known, but she was so, so very tired.

"I'm trying," she insisted, her voice thick with mucous. "I'm trying so hard, Harry." She turned away from him to sniffle.

"Hermione..."

"All I'm doing is trying to keep you alive and to make things easier on us—"

"Are you crying?" he asked, bemused. "What—what's wrong..."

She pressed hard against her eyes. The song came to an end with a sharp cymbal tap. When the DJ announced the next track, a syrupy pop song, Hermione slashed her wand in the air violently to turn off the wireless.

Harry eased himself up onto his elbows; she heard the creak of the mattress behind her.

"Hermione...Accio glasses..."

He had left them unattended by the sink. His glasses flew across the room and tangled in her air, wire arms opening and closing as if trying to escape. She picked hairs out of the hinges, gingerly untangling them. His lenses were smudged with fingerprints.

"I wasn't trying to make you cry," Harry said, sounding uncertain.

She handed him his glasses, and he pushed them up the bridge of his nose, not seeming to notice or care how filthy they were.

"I'm not crying," sniffed Hermione, giving him a wry smile, as if to acknowledge the lie. "I'm no different from you. I just want to go home."

Harry gestured from the entrance flaps to the kerosene lamp. "This is my home." He stared into the flames. "Don't have another."

This only caused Hermione to release a fresh wave of tears. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. Harry looked at her like as though his glasses were the walls of an aquarium, and she were a mysterious creature inside. If Ron had made her cry and then looked at her like that, she'd be furious; she may even have slapped him by now. But when Harry did the same thing, she only felt sunken by grief for the terrible weight he carried, so much of which she tried to shoulder for him. Hermione knew she indulged Harry too much. But his life had become her greatest project, and his misery, her own anguish.

Harry half-heartedly patted her shoulder, but it was clear he hadn't a clue what she was feeling.

"What'd I do?" he said quietly.

"Forget it," she choked. "I'm just...having an awful day."

"...right," he muttered, and lay back down. "Maybe you should take a nap."

She wiped her eyes with the edge of her sleeve, but it was useless; new tears burst forth as soon as her eyes were dry. He would never give her what she needed, and she had long since accepted that, except for the times when really, she didn't accept it at all.

Hermione pushed herself up from the floor, feeling the buttock-shaped imprints of dirt on her jeans. Standing made her dizzy.

"Do you mind if I go sit outside?" she said.

"No."

"Okay," she breathed. "I won't be far."

"I know."

She ducked through the tent's opening. Canvas flaps brushed her frizzy head like a mother's caress. Ron was sitting a few yards out from the tent on a fallen log. She recognized the mild glow of an Impervious charm on his trousers, protecting him from the log's damp and mildew. He looked up from a comic book on his lap and patted the log beside him.

She sat down next to him. His wand rested on the comic book, casting a bluish halo of light just large enough to read two panels at a time. Above them, the muffled moon glowed through wisps of cloud.

"What's that?"

"It's an ancient Martin Miggs book. I found it kind of crumpled into the bottom of my knapsack."

"Oh."

It wasn't really raining, just misting enough to prevent Hermione's skin from ever really feeling dry. She wiped the last few errant tears off her cheek.

"He's gone to the bowling alley," said Ron. "The Muggles throw these massive balls at a bunch of milk bottles to knock them down."

"I've been bowling, Ron."

" But there are ghosts there," he continued. "And they keep going through the Muggles, floating through them as a joke, and y'know it how it feels kind of like icy water? Well, Martin and his friends are getting into a fight because they think one of them is sneaking up behind them and pouring milk onto their head, so then Martin punches this one guy, but the guy turns out to secretly be a wizard and he sort of panics, and casts an Expelliarmus and Martin's bowling ball flies out and explodes all the rest of the milk bottles onto the floor, and it gets all slippery."

Hermione sniffled. "They don't use milk bottles. They're called pins, and they're weighted, but there's no liquid."

"Oh." Ron tugged the hood of his sweatshirt up and out from his coat, and pulled it over his head. "You should waterproof yourself if you're going to sit here for a while, you know."

She wordlessly touched her wand to her head, her knees, and her feet. A tickling sensation spread across her skin, like the touch of a cool fern on a hot day.

"You're really good at nonverbal spells."

"Thank you," she replied. Ever since he'd returned, Ron had been offering her these compliments, shiny little glass stones of his affection.

Ron shuffled a bit on the log, making more room for her. But she was too cold to spread out, wrapping her arms around her puffy coat and squeezing her crossed legs together.

"Can I ask you something?" Hermione said slowly.

"Yeah, of course."

"It's about Harry."

"Right..." She could feel his deflation—just a tiny bit, because he took pains to hide it, these days.

"Do you think we should just...maybe just humour him a little, about the Hallows? Even if they're totally fake, or useless, maybe it would...it might..."

"Wake him up a bit?"

"Exactly," she nodded. "If we just...made him think that we were taking it seriously, then maybe we could at least get him up and about for a while. I just feel like..." She toyed with a strand of hair, her curls going limp from the mist. "He won't do anything these days."

Ron answered without looking at her. He was staring at the glowing tent. "I know what you mean, but I think you have to be careful about lying to him."

"It's not lying, exactly—"

"But Harry won't see it that way," Ron pointed out. "If he thinks you're only pretending to be interested in the Hallows, he's just going to be more pissed off."

Hermione sighed. "I guess you're probably right. I just wish..." She trailed off and sat in silence for a long minute or so.

Ron nudged her knee with his own. His legs were so long, compared to hers; his feet rested far in front of the mossy log. "What?"

"I know this sounds awful," she admitted, "but I wish he'd never heard The Tale of the Three Brothers. It just put ideas in his head that he can...you know, "overcome death" or something, and we know it's not true, but now he's obsessed with it and he won't let it go, and now I have to be afraid that he'll do something massively stupid."

"I know he gets these obsessions," said Ron carefully, "but sometimes he's got...maybe an intuition that might be—"

"No, you can't possibly be on his side of this!"

"I'm not saying I'm on his side," Ron backtracked. He turned to face her. Wand light lit up his face, tracing his long nose and turning his red eyelashes an eerie violet. "But he did have that thing about Malfoy last year, and it did turn out to be kind of true..."

"That's different," Hermione said, miserable. "At least it's physically possible for Malfoy to be up to something. You can't bring people back from the dead, Ron, you know you can't." She was clutching at the rain in her desperation to make him understand, empty hands closing around the cold air.

"I'm not saying I think people can come back, that's mad," said Ron. "I know that. But the invisibility cloak, I mean...we know Harry has one—"

"And you think Death personified made it for him?"

"Well, not for Harry, but—"

"Ron, listen to me! Please!" She realized how shrill she sounded, and tried to lower her voice half an octave. "You...you need to see how dangerous this is for Harry, especially. He's—it's worse for him, than for us, you know."

"Hermione." Ron touched her right hand tentatively. His skin was dry and warm, like a stone in the sun. "I get it." He squeezed her thumb.

"Do you?" she whispered.
"Yeah." He stared at their shoes, as though searching for his words. "It's...been a lot, the last three years. He's lost people. I mean, if that stone thing was real—not that I think it's really, 100% real—it's what Harry would want, isn't it?"

She did not fail to notice that he had not let go of her thumb.

Ron continued. "Now he doesn't want to look for the Horcruxes anymore 'cause he wants this more... I don't blame him really. If I was him, I'd want something better than a bunch of pieces of You-Know-Who's soul. But it's still something to think—it might have a grain of truth. The story, I mean."

"I wish it was true, Ron." Hermione took a deep, wobbly breath. "For Harry's sake, I really do."

Ron said nothing, just sitting next to her, his body emitting warmth that she could just barely sense. The light in the tent dimmed; Harry must have been turned the flame low. They sat without speaking, listening to the gentle susurration of pine needles in the wind. Ron's wand light faded from blue to black, and she could no longer make out anything but the vaguest outline of his body.

Hermione sniffed again, wondering why she'd been so weepy all day. Wrong time of the month, maybe.

"It's gonna be okay," murmured Ron. "I don't know how I know. I just do."

"I hope so."

"And... I'm really sorry about the rabbit."

The mist was turning to fine slivers of rain, gently repelled from their skin and clothing by magic. Hermione closed her eyes. The night before she'd Obliviated her parents, she was standing in the hallway, listening to her father typing on the computer. Each keystroke like a tiny raindrop. Her wand was in her hand, and she knew she should do it, just cast the spell, get it over with, approach him from behind and he'd never suspect a thing. Her own father, her asthmatic dad who blew up the balloons for her seventh birthday party without a pump, forty-nine balloons for good luck. The balloons that nearly killed him. Her father who played Scrabble with her for four hours because the girls her age didn't want to play "school games" at a party. Point the wand at the back of his head and wipe his dearest memories for complex political reasons that had (so she convinced herself) something to do with love. And that nearly unforgivable act had granted her the privilege to sit on this mildewed log in a pitch-dark forest, holding Ron Weasey's hand. Rain enveloping her in her father's memory. And hoping very much that Harry was alright, but not about to step out of the tent and shatter this moment.

"I forgive you," she said.