Inside Your Velvet Bones
Chapter 1 - Ghosts
Hermione caught herself wondering again as to why she was doing this job. Being a detective, steeping herself deep into the darkness of the human mind, shuffling and rummaging between the charred bones of the human psyche, inviting nightmares to her mind's doorstep time and time again, every day.
The problem was, she was good at it. She had a cold logical mind and a steel of a determination to see things through, keen eye for detail, endurance to not let go until a case was , Hermione had a hard time walking away from something she was good at, even if it was making her unhappy. There were few things in life that could bring her more satisfaction than a job well done, when the puzzle fit together, when the obscure shape of a murder finally became clear, when through the darkness, in her mind there shone a sudden light.
And yet...she grew tired, she realized, sitting in the passenger seat of a Volvo smelling of tea and subway sandwiches, the London drizzle locking her in by obscuring the view from inside.
Some days passed by in a numb endless day to day routine, and some days the sudden call and order to go out and check a crime scene made her skin crawl. It was a kind of premonition she would get before an especially disturbing case. She had felt it this morning. In moments like these, she needed to go through her secret little routine of mustering up the courage to face the day. Gripping her knees, she took in slow deep breaths with eyes closed, stealing away the last private seconds to regroup her defences so she could look her usual confident self in front of her partner.
As if on cue, the door opened, letting in the wet cold as well as the sound of the pouring rain. As the dark-haired man got in, dripping with rain, glasses all fogged up, Hermione's eyes snapped open and she put on a neutral expression. She felt she had been tense, gone almost rigid, but her partner's presence brought a certain ease over her. He brought with him the smell of coffee, the one thing that could transport Hermione into a momentary space of peace. The length of that first hot sip was, to her, like one whole sunlit day. She had to find little comforts where she could. Her little anchors, Harry had called them.
As he handed her her coffee, passing it over with a well-worn smile, she saw none of the fear and apprehension she was feeling. She had always envied him his almost aggressive courage when a new case was beginning. He was capable of harnessing an anger that drove him and banished whatever was holding him back.
"Ready?"
Hermione never really was, but she was good at convincing herself otherwise.
"Ready."
After a silent drive that took them out of the city, they arrived into a wealthy-looking area with Victorian houses and greenery lining the streets. Their destination loomed before them – St. Hedwig's Secondary School, an 18th century building with an arched entrance. They walked inside and emerged onto a grassy courtyard wet with the rain and surrounded by yellow police tape.
The inner campus was bathed in reds and golds of the trees, some sun shone through the steeple and spires onto the grounds where the body had been found. Hermione sighed as she inhaled the crisp morning air and looked up into the sky, through the soft haze that was slowly rising off of the place, giving it an eerie, almost magical feel.
She made her way through the forensic team and photographers, pulling gloves on, hearing Harry do the same as a short blonde woman with grey streaks in her hair approached them. Jocelyn, the medical examiner.
"25-year-old female, teacher at the school, with a single stab wound in her chest, which appears to be the cause of death..."
The rest of the description fizzled out of Hermione's head as she approached the body. As if her eyes wanted to postpone what came next, they first settled on the combat boots, then stockings, burgundy skirt, coffee-coloured coat muddy at the hem. She then looked upon the woman, her face, her freckled skin, a halo of red hair contrasting like flame upon the frozen grass.
The victim was lying flat on her back, blue eyes staring emptily into the sky, with her right arm lying beside her, and her left arm folded over her chest, looking stiff as if she had been clutching at something. The legs were bent at the knees, turned sideways. Hermione observed lacerations on her forehead, considerable clotted blood about her hair and face.
It came unexpected, the way Hermione suddenly lost her breath. Immediately she looked towards Harry, white, hollow, a storm in his eyes. He saw it, too. A resemblance, a ghost, an echo of a past they had pretended to have buried.
"This is what she was holding," the medical examiner said, her voice sharply piercing through the thick shock still holding Hermione's limbs locked and rigid. Harry moved towards Jocelyn, taking the leather-bound journal from her.
A wave of nausea overcame Hermione as Harry opened the journal gingerly. But to her surprise, it was empty, no riddles, no text at all, just a bunch of blank pages, with some ripped out in the middle.
"Damn," was all Hermione could mutter as they sat back into the car.
"Yeah," Harry said, gripping the steering wheel and staring ahead through the wind shield. "You think it's possible that...no one else has noticed?"
"What? The fact that the crime scene looks exactly as the one from twenty years ago when Ginny was murdered?" Harry winced and Hermione cursed herself internally for blurting it all out so abruptly. She was shaken to the core with the reminder, unable to hold her own rattled emotions in check as they spilt out of her. "Harry, if anyone knew, we'd not only never be given the case, we'd be sent straight on forced vacation just to get us as far away from the case as possible. You, I mean."
Harry sat pensively, his shoulders tense, jaw clenched.
"What do you want to do, though?" she asked carefully. "Maybe we should pass this on."
"No," he said without a second of hesitation. "We'll do it. Especially because of the similarity, I have no other choice."
"Of course you have a choice," she said, trying to keep the exasperation out of her voice.
"You don't have to get involved, I can ask Scrimgeour to reassign you, he'd be thrilled, prattling on forever about what an annoying duo we are."
He cracked a smile as he said it, but Hermione knew him well enough to know the joke was a front, although the offer wasn't. If it were up to him, he'd have ditched her a long time ago, for her safety or whatever, and she was having none of that.
"Of course I will be involved if you are. It just...you know how it is, it goes against a lot of what is ethical and psychologically sound. Not to mention if anyone gets a wind of your connection to the case, we could both lose our jobs. But," she added quickly, before he could start rambling on about how she's free to abandon him, "I'm only asking you to fully consider everything, with all the information. No matter what you decide, I'll be right by your side."
"Thanks, Hermione. What would I ever do without you?"
"Probably gotten fired ages ago, given what little consideration you have for the rules. Either way, here's the thing, it's...it's just the uncanny resemblance, right? For all we know, it might be completely unrelated." Hermione saw Harry staring with hard eyes ahead. Either he wasn't hearing her, or he had made up his mind already that he didn't agree with her on that particular point. "Right?" she pushed.
After a pause, Harry shrugged and started the car. "Sure."
"Do you really agree or are you just saying it to appease me? You tell me, what does your instinct tell you?"
"That it's just a coincidence," he replied blankly.
Sighing, Hermione sank into her seat. She knew that blank stare, he was shutting her out. "Alright then, we clearly need more information to go on than what we've just seen. But, the moment there's a wind of this being the Riddle Killer-"
"As I've said, Hermione," he cut in, with a slight raise to his voice, "you have an out any time."
She saw there was no arguing with him. His mind was set. She wasn't religious, but in her mind she crossed herself as she had made her decision.
"Nice try, Potter. I know you're only trying to make me quit because I'm better than you. No such luck, not today."
Harry had no response, he just grinned to himself and started driving. As they sped through the roads, memories grabbed Hermione by the throat as sheremembered - it was because of him that she was still in this damn job.
Being a detective was not something Hermione wanted to do with her life, but an incident from her early teens had changed that. While a young student of thirteen, her three best and only friends were kidnapped by a killer. Two of them got out, while one, a girl, was murdered in the end.
Harry and Ron went after the killer, stupidly and foolishly, but it was at a time when the local police didn't believe their claims they had encountered the actual killer baiting them. So they set out after him on their own. They got there too late, managed to catch the murderer in the act, but it was too late for Ginny, Ron's little sister. The murderer, towards the very end, assaulted Ron and beat him something rough. It was Harry, a scrawny child of thirteen, who managed to get the upper hand and bring him down, but most of the damage had been done. Ron, heavily injured and emotionally scarred, had been taken by his grieving family out of school and eventually out of the country.
Hermione and Harry hadn't just lost one friend but two all at once. She wasn't there, so she got out unscathed except the deep emotional trauma that followed having to deal with the loss of her best friend and a boy whom she thought would be her first love, and having to deal with Harry himself. He was all she had left and from that moment on she had vowed her life to protect him.
Harry had never quite forgiven himself for what happened that fateful night, a child who had taken on himself the immense guilt that he had buried deep inside and used as fuel in his future endeavours. Hermione was perhaps the only one who realized how much it was also poisoning him from within. So when he decided to become a detective, hunting down killers like the one that had ruined their lives, naturally she followed.
It was difficult but she had always been a good student, she managed to fly through all the tests and psychological evaluation, the physical exam being the only one that gave her pause. Harry and Hermione had served in all sorts of departments before finally landing the Murder squad, sometimes together, sometimes apart, but they did promise each other that once they got to the squad, they would aim to partner up, and so they did.
They worked well together. She was logical, she knew how to push and blackmail suspects into spilling the truth. It was baffling to her sometimes, how good she was at lying, how ruthlessly she learned to proceed. Harry, on the other hand, brought a certain instinct to the job. His hunches got him on the right track more than actual detective work did. He was good with suspects as well as witnesses, whenever it was needed to reach out to people. They trusted him, even the bad ones.
Harry was a great detective, the only time when Hermione ever worried about him was a few times when he lost himself, usually during cases that bordered on the personal. He could get very impulsive, aggressive to the point of disregarding his own safety. She hated it and confronted him about it from time to time, but as bold and brash as she could be toward ruthless criminals as well as old-fashioned sexist colleagues who didn't believe she belonged among them, Harry was the one person she would always shrink underneath. He had never explicitly said it, but she did feel that whenever she tried to reason with him, to get through to him, he would look at her with that silent reproach, "you weren't there," his green eyes would say.
She looked at him from the corner of her eyes as he was driving, and felt that familiar rush of loyalty that gave her purpose and sometimes threatened to drown her at the same time.
Yes, she wasn't there that night, but she would be everywhere else if anything else was to happen to him, that was the point of all this. Even if the two of them somehow always felt broken and incomplete.
Shortly before they reached their offices in Westminster, she wondered about Ron and how he was doing. Something stirred inside her soul, a sudden sadness blooming wildly in her chest, chasing tears to her eyes.
They had had no news of him for years. Perhaps that was better, though. He had been through enough, and deserved peace. She could handle the ghosts.