Chapter 146: Just Get on with It
Sleep didn't come easily. It wasn't surprising. Hermione's heart was pounding hard in her chest. It had started feeling like her pulse was irregular. A bom-bom-pause-bom-bom-pause, resounding through her chest, into her arms, and up into her head.
Just the anxiety, Hermione told herself. Her heartbeat wasn't really irregular. She was young, healthy, and got regular check-ups by a medical professional. She didn't have a heart problem. She was just letting herself perceive her heartbeat as irregular. And she needed to not think about it, else she'd start to panic that her heart was going to stop in the night. And that wouldn't help at all.
But anxious thoughts opened the doors to other anxious thoughts, and that in turn to thoughts of yearning. Especially in a dark room with no distractions and an uneasy nearness to Sirius. Thoughts that stampeded through Hermione's head, together and one after another. Memories of days spent feeling the kid with her parents. Times she'd turned to them to make everything better.
A montage of moments: her mother instinctively flinging an arm out to serve as an extra seatbelt for Hermione in the passenger seat any time her mum had needed to break hard; that time a car had just missed hitting them when Hermione and her dad were crossing the road, and her dad had given the driver an earful while Hermione had hidden behind him; a time when she'd been very small and had wrapped her arms around the jean-clad leg next to her, only to look up and realise it wasn't her father's leg, her own dad ready to catch and hold her when she'd burst into tears and run to him; the time, not too long ago, when the French shopkeeper she'd tried to buy a bottle of water from had shoved her change right back and refused to serve her – how her dad had rubbed her back as Hermione had tried to keep a mature expression on her thirteen-year-old face while her mother stormed in to buy the bottle of water for her.
So many years Hermione had spent thinking she was doing all right without them; knowing, for the last two, they were better off far away from her. She needed them now. Badly. She wasn't ready for her entire life to change – she couldn't do what her parents could. Not yet – she needed to be older. Have more time to learn how to stick up for herself and the little child soon to be in her care. Her mum wouldn't have squeezed her eyes shut and let anyone do whatever they wanted to her in that Ministry cell. She'd have been a force of righteous fury, just like she'd been to the shopkeeper, or the time she'd stalked into Hermione's head teacher's office when she'd been called with the news a boy had pushed Hermione over during sport and made her skin her knees.
How could Hermione be a mother herself when she still wanted desperately for mummy and daddy to come and make it all better?
Sirius was asleep, his quiet snuffles sounding peaceful on the pillow next to Hermione. Staring up, unseeing, at the dark ceiling, she breathed a near silent plea: 'make it all better.'
Then her chin started jumping uncontrollably and wetness spilled out from either side of her eyes.
The rush of extra pressure to her head of a silent cry kept the tears coming, her breath hitching in her throat, her eyes squeezing shut as the tears stung dry corneas.
Finally finding herself able to breathe again, Hermione wiped at her face. She turned over to her side, facing Sirius so as to not dislodge his hand, and concentrated on sleep.
A drowsy drifting came first. Filled uncomfortably with a weird sense of outlines of bodies, disturbed to be broad and unnaturally weighty; making Hermione's body feel leaden, held hard by extra, heavy-metal weight to the mattress. They were outlines living in the phosphines behind her eyelids. Ones her eyelids were too heavy to open and dispel…
Hermione slept then, her dreams awash with things her sleeping mind sensed as old repeats: metal bars, stone, Dementors, Bellatrix Lestrange and Orion Black. Rowle and Flint. Clammy air…
Hermione woke to grey light and Sirius's grey eyes. He saw her blink her eyes open at him, smiled, the little lines creasing around his eyes, and turned his face so he could reach it with a hand to rub sleep out of the corners of his eyes.
There was a warm weight directly on top of Hermione's crotch. Her hand found it, feeling soft fur; a paw stretch out sleepily, and the vibrations of sedate purrs. Crookshanks.
Sirius yawned and pushed himself up to sit. The covers tumbled off his bare chest, wafting the scent of early morning man at Hermione. The back of her mouth soured – but only slightly. The nausea more a memory of past attacks than an acute, present one.
'G'morning,' Sirius said, now wiping the watering of the yawn from his eyes. He leant over and pressed a kiss to Hermione's forehead. Fingering the covers down her torso, Sirius murmured another, 'Good morning,' to her belly too.
Panic crashed over Hermione suddenly and with such intensity it seemed reality around her stopped being comprehensible. When the world righted her teeth were clenched so hard her entire lower face hurt, her fingers dug into the bedclothes beneath her; her body quivering like the reverberations of a struck gong.
'I –' Hermione broke off. Sirius was frowning concernedly at her, his hand resting on her side – and it was like being pinned down by a hefty weight.
It felt like a bad dream – something Freaky Friday – waking up in someone else's body – someone else's life –
Hermione scrabbled to get out from under both Sirius and Crookshanks.
'Ah – hot flash –' she prattled desperately. 'I need –' Stumbling, Hermione pulled her leg out from the other side of a startled Crookshanks. 'Go sit on the balcony.'
She turned then, denying herself the sight of cat and husband staring at her, and ran for the door, pushing through it, up the stairs, and out into the frigid morning air – shutting the door before she realised she was in only knickers and a top.
It took a long time in the freezing cold to cool the feeling of feral terror and sense of disconnected reality. It took a lot of Hermione reminding herself of all that had happened up to this point – all the million moments worth of memories – just to gain some clarity on how this was the moment she was living in. Yet none of those memories seemed real in the overcast morning light, the dilapidated square of Muggle London below her.
She didn't know herself, Hermione thought frantically, staring out at the great, wide world and the billions of lives being lived in it. How, in that crazy world, had she gotten here?
She didn't know how to go on – where to go on. All of a sudden, nothing made sense – nothing held meaning for her. What was she going to do with her life? What was she going to do with her day? She didn't give a toss about the NEWTs anymore. And that morning – that morning that should have had her cooing over a snuggly cat and her heart melting under Sirius's affection – hadn't!
She didn't care about them!
Yet there was nothing else for it. Hermione was chilled to the bone, her feet painfully frozen, shivering with god knew what – cold, or whatever else. She had to…
Hermione turned and faced the large glass paned door. She could see through it, straight into her life. Encapsulated, at least most of it, within that house: all she should love. One other, big part of that category in its own capsule within her body.
'Oh god,' Hermione whined, shaking hands dragging down her face so her fingers dug into her closed eyes. 'What am I going to do?'
Her mum had told her something once about studying medicine – or, well, dentistry, but her mum hadn't differentiated. It had stayed with Hermione, in the back of her head: "there comes a time when you're sure your mind can't fit anything more into it – when you're sure you can't cope. And then someone comes along and tells you just to get on with it. And you do. That's studying medicine."
Hermione remembered she'd been very young, flipping through her parents' textbooks, her mother looking through a scientific journal that may have looked thin as a magazine on the outside, but wasn't the moment you read one sentence. In their house, there had been reading material for Hermione, and reading material for her parents, a gargantuan leap between the two. Hermione had barely understood the paragraph she'd been trying to read in the textbook, noting only that it had something to do with nerves. So she'd asked her mother how she managed to know enough words to understand any of it.
It seemed like scraping the bottom of the barrel for advice from her parents, but Hermione hadn't anything more than what her mother had told her back then. Sirius wasn't about to tell her to suck it up and get on with it. Someone had to. And it was telling herself to do just that that got Hermione stepping back into the house.
But two things Hermione realised were lacking from her broad appropriation of study advice to life advice: one, there was no end achievement of a dentistry degree in life, and, two, people studying medicine didn't seem to care how happy they were.
Hermione did go down to breakfast, because she couldn't avoid taking her elixir, and left it with two slices of toast – the quickest things to grab – and a quietly-worded wish to be left alone again. She tried not to feel the guilt the glimpse of the look on Sirius's face had given her.
She'd gotten down both slices of toast, counting that as some small achievement. Every mouthful had stuck in the back of her throat, fastidiously unwilling to progress down her oesophagus.
She made it through note after note, focused more on the process of read, absorb, annotate, than on isolating and properly understanding the points Hermione thought likely to be examined in her Charms and Transfiguration NEWTs. And each of the thousand times she stalled into piteous self-reflection, Hermione repeated her mother's advice to herself, and bent her head over her books again.
She worked through lunch, and right up to dinner, the tough-love answer of "just get on with it" wearing thinner and thinner.
By dinner, even if it meant a break from battling emotions with clinical, impersonal note-taking… Heading downstairs to be with people felt like a massive mountain to climb.
Her mum's most disapproving look in her mind's eye, Hermione's thin, half-truth excuse that she didn't feel like being chatty at the moment ready, Hermione set one foot in front of the other and made it down to the kitchen.
'Nah, it seems they have bigger things than Nadine to focus on,' she heard Sirius's voice say as the approached the bottom of the kitchen stairs. 'Those rumours about dragon pox jumping containment are now saying it was a Ministry employee who's in a closed ward in Mungos. If it's true, it'll be a massive problem to stop the spread through the Ministry.'
'Be a massive problem if it's Perks or Wilkie who've got it,' said Harry, 'if they're the only two who can cross the Border.'
Schooling herself to appear at least somewhat socially acceptable, Hermione stepped into the kitchen.
Always the kitchen, she thought irritably. Confrontations always happen in this kitchen.
Harry's turn to look at her was cursory, merely noticing the new arrival. Sirius's eyes lingered on Hermione. She knew it even as she kept her focus on casually looking elsewhere.
'See The Prophet this morning?' Harry asked them both. 'Rabbie MacBride's been sentenced to Azkaban. Use of excessive force, acting outside of his responsibilities, unsanctioned attacks – or something like that. Enough to get him a life sentence.'
Hermione had taken her usual seat. Rabbie MacBride was that Auror that had refused to leave the Ministry. The first to be audited. She blinked. The view from her usual seat looked different somehow. Greyer, maybe.
'Heard it from Brian,' said Sirius. 'He reckons the last few Aurors are in for the same deal. It won't help them to get out now.'
'Mistress Hermione didn't eat lunch,' Kreacher, setting a large steaming dish on the table, said reprovingly. His next words sounded a little less reproving. 'If Mistress has little appetite… Kreacher made lasagne, but if Mistress would like anything else…?'
All attention had turned on her. Hermione wished it hadn't. And she could've done without Kreacher pointing out her lack of lunch. She felt Sirius's eyes like concerned, questioning bores.
'Lasagne sounds great, Kreacher,' she said.
Kreacher beamed at her, snapping his fingers for plates.
'Did Brian say how bad MacBride's crimes really were?' Harry asked.
Sirius shrugged. The question, at least, had turned his attention from Hermione.
'You can spin what an Auror does any way you want to,' he said. 'What's an objective definition of "reasonable force"? And it's hard to explain to someone who wasn't there why you didn't use a less damaging spell in the heat of the moment. If you took the deeds done by an Auror and considered them without context, it's going to sound bad. You've got to try an Auror's actions with input from their peers – those who were there and those who weren't – to see whether it was a reasonable action at the time.
'Kingsley knew Rabbie as a great Auror,' Sirius finished, 'and I remember Bloodworth saying the same. Neither of them would have let any misconduct slide.'
'According to Bill, there's a rumour MacBride was conspiring with vampires,' Harry said.
Sirius snorted.
'At least it's not werewolves this time.'
'And,' Harry went on significantly, 'he says people are talking about sightings of Dementors on the mainland again.'
Hermione had dutifully put a reasonable amount of lasagne on her plate and a forkful in her mouth. It soured on her tongue. She looked up at Sirius, for the first time making eye contact with him.
'You've got to be careful, Sirius,' Harry said for her.
'I am careful,' Sirius said, digging into his own lasagne.
'If they're on the mainland,' Harry said pointedly, 'then they're not following Umbridge's orders to stay put in Azkaban.'
'I'd be very surprised if Umbridge has put any effort into ordering them to not give me the Kiss,' Sirius said wryly. 'I'll be more careful,' he conceded, a little irritably.
'Anyway,' he went on, 'it was only a matter of time. There was no way the Dementors were going to stay in Azkaban. I don't know how Umbridge got them to go back there, but she's always been deluded if she thought a thousand Dementors with a taste for freedom would be satisfied packed onto an island rock.
'But Umbridge is losing control regardless. Brain's heard mention of a resurgence in Muggle baiting. Either that or Umbridge has just completely given up on attempting to enforce any international law.'
Silence followed this pronouncement. Becoming more and more uncomfortably jumpy in the silence, a part of her feeling it was her place to fill it, Hermione sped up her eating. She longed for the easy solitude of the library again.
Into the silent room, carrying with it the disjointed sense of both pleasant cheer and the likelihood of bad news, loped one of the Lupins' silvery wolves.
'Child dead,' the Patronus said in Remus's voice. 'Order arriving shortly.'
Hermione's eyes slipped shut, praying it was all a nightmare – praying everything would just stop.
When she opened her eyes, everything had already gone topsy-turvy. Harry was whisking the leftover lasagne back to Kreacher, Sirius launching up the stairs towards the sounds of many people heading down the corridor above.
'She just – blew up!' a very traumatised Hannah was saying, descending blindly into the kitchen under the arms of Neville and Ginny. 'I saw it – plain as day! Right inside her living room – blew the glass out of the window! Couldn't understand what had happened. 'Till – 'till I heard the screaming…'
A train of people were filing into the room after her, Sirius and Remus, close in conversation, bringing up the rear. Not the entire Order – some were still on watch – but many of them, all pulling out seats and sitting down around Hermione; her sat amidst them, breathing deep and slow, trying to stay the feral beast inside her that wanted desperately to get away from all of it.
The tale came out, bit by bit, from Hannah. She'd seen it through the Turnbulls' front window, approximately ten minutes after the family had finished eating dinner. Fiona, the eldest of three children at seven years old – the Muggle-born witch of the family – had been standing in the living room when, without warning, she had quite literally self-combusted.
Magic could be gory, Hermione knew. The exact description of what happened to the little girl's body was something she didn't let herself hear, her fingers in her ears, the gorge rising in her throat.
When she let herself listen again, the Order had been grilling poor Hannah on whether anyone at all had been seen near the house. Now not only shaken to the core, but withering under guilt at the thought she could've missed anyone, Hannah had managed to stutter out that, to the best of her knowledge, the family had been alone.
Inside their protective wards where, as the Order had tried to ensure, no witch or wizard other than Fiona could go. And even the magic of a traumatised child wasn't known to turn inwards like that – wasn't so self-destructive.
They were still bandying loud opinions back and forth when Molly arrived. Remus had sent her straight to the Turnbull's house the moment Hannah had reported to him, Molly having been the "neighbour" who'd previously made contact with the parents.
She walked in, still Transfigured into her neighbourly disguise, and fell into a seat pulled out for her by Bill. Her eyes were already red-rimmed.
'No – no,' she answered their questions thickly, shaking her head. 'The family has no idea what happened. No one else was around – nothing that could have done it –
'I've never seen anything like it – half the sitting room destroyed, burns on both the little ones – wailing fit to burst. Oh – that poor woman – to be questioning her right then!'
'You deedn't make eet sound like an interrogation?' said Fleur, shocked.
'Not – not me,' Molly asserted, shaking out a damp handkerchief with rapid, fussy flicks. 'Those Muggle please-men. Men in yellow suits stomping through their house… Half the neighbourhood out to gawk. Not a Ministry representative in sight – no one to help – must be the worst day of their lives! And that poor mother –' Molly blew her nose. 'She'd been telling little Fiona off! I can't even imagine –'
Bill patting her back, Molly just shook her head, digging the handkerchief into her eyes.