Protection

"Found it yet?" Harry's voice broke through Hermione's train of thought.  

Hermione barely looked up from her book, shaking her head and clicking her tongue impatiently. "I'm not sure it's an 'it' yet. I'm not even sure what it is we need to find, you know. And I won't be finding anything if you keep asking me every five minutes."

"How are we supposed to find whatever it is you're looking for if you don't even know what you're looking for?" Harry groaned.

Hermione rolled her eyes and went back to scanning the huge volume in front of her-most of which was in Latin, a language that she had just begun to grasp over the summer, through a correspondence course she'd taken. She'd figured it might help to not only learn how to do spells, but to truly speak and understand the language that was behind so many of the spells in the wizarding world.

Of course, even so, this text was barely legible, given that it was not the Latin that was taught through correspondence school today or even the Latin spoken in Ancient Rome. No, this language was archaic, most likely some fusion of the newly developing Latin and whatever language had come before it.

"I don't know," she said, sighing in exasperation, a bit of the hopelessness she'd begun to feel after hours spent in the library searching for… what? Some sort of magic cure? Some way of defeating Voldemort without risking Harry's death? "There has to be something. I'm just waiting for it present itself."

"Right," Harry snorted. "Like the answer's just going to fall right into our laps. Hermione, have you considered the fact that we haven't found anything because there's nothing to find?"

Hermione frowned at the bitterness in his tone, biting back a snippy reply about the fact that she was merely trying to help and that negativity would get them nowhere. She and Ron had been walking on eggshells around Harry since Dumbledore's death. For a few weeks there, he'd entirely shut them out and when he'd finally come to apologize, there seemed to have been an unspoken pact that they would do whatever it took to not drive him away again.

He needed them. They'd both agreed on that, and right now, staying in contact with him was more important than the fact that he was apt to streaks of irrational moodiness, directed at the ones that cared the most.

After, there would be time to put him in his place.

Or rather, Hermione held to the hope that after there would be no need.

In fact, Ginny was the only one who refused to walk on eggshells around Harry. Shortly before he had apologized to Ron and Hermione, Hermione had overheard Ginny putting him firmly in his place late at night in the Common Room when she'd woken up and remembered that she'd left a book down there.

Of course, she hadn't wanted to walk in on the row, but the next day, Harry had approached Ron and herself and apologized, so clearly Ginny's influence had worked well.

"Oi, watch where you're going!" Harry's voice broke through her train of thought yet again, and she looked up to see an owl plummeting towards them, seemingly having a difficult time flying in a straight line.

The owl dropped a package on Harry's lap, careened into the stack of the books and then took off again.

"Potter! Granger!"

"Oh no," Hermione muttered, quickly shoving as many of the books as she could in her knapsack as Madam Pince appeared, her face livid.

She waved her wand and the books flew towards their shelves.

"Enough. You two have been causing disturbances in this library all week. Out."

"But Madam Pince-" Hermione began, only to be cut off by a severe look from the librarian. "Okay," she said meekly. "Going now." She gathered up the remaining books-those she'd checked out that hadn't been sent back to the shelves, and walked out with Harry. She waited until they were a good distance from the library, glancing at Harry, who had begun to open the envelope accompanying the package.

"Who's it from?" she asked even as he crumpled the parchment angrily and shoved the whole package into his knapsack. His face contorted angrily, and he shook his head. She fell silent, knowing now was not the time to press him. With Harry, sometimes it was best to let him tell them things in his own time. And sometimes it was best to press. The trick was knowing the difference.

And now was certainly a time to let things drop.

A few weeks later, Harry had a vivid nightmare in which he witnessed Peter Pettigrew's death. He told Ron and Hermione of the dream and then withdrew into himself for a few days. None of them could get through to him. Not even Ginny, who seemed to have made it her personal campaign over the last two years to keep him from shutting them all out during his mood swings.  

But finally, when Harry seemed ready to pull out of his mood, he handed Hermione a journal.

"It was my mother's, and I think it might have something that could help us," he told her, and then looked away, the expression on his face making it clear that any further discussion on the subject was off limits.

Hermione opened the journal to the page Harry had bookmarked, her eyes scanning over the charm that was detailed in his mother's tidy scrawl.

"Harry, I think this might be what we've been looking for!" she exclaimed excitedly, grabbing his arm and dragging him towards the common room to find Ron and Ginny. "It looks extremely complicated, of course, and I'd expect it will be a long hard slog to complete them, but if they worked, Harry, you do realize they'd give us the space to win the battle, don't you? I mean, if they can deflect curses the way your mum seems to believe they can…"

Harry smiled for the first time in weeks, for the moment caught up in her enthusiasm.

The journal turned out to indeed be useful, and it might have been helpful if they had discovered it earlier. But, on reading the letter that Harry had left tucked in the journal, no doubt on accident, Hermione understood exactly why he hadn't opened the parcel in which it had been contained until now.

Harry,

I'm certain I'm the last person you'd hear from right now, but I've risked my neck to send these to you. Believe it or not, I don't always break my promises, and this is one I realized I shouldn't break. I'm not sure if it will make any difference, but your father entrusted these items to me shortly before… the unfortunate tragedy. Do your best with them, as I'm not sure how long any of us can survive under him.

Good luck, Harry.

Peter Pettigrew

Wormtail

The charm Lily Evans seemed to have developed involved combining herbs and a few other magical ingredients into a protective charm that would deflect even the darkest of curses, for a time at least. The necklace could only absorb so much dark magic before it would become useless, but the borrowed time might just be enough to give them time to fight back when the time came to do so.

The catch was that each student could only make one for one person. And of course, they would be no use against Avada Kedavra. Nothing so far, except for Harry's mum's sacrifice had been proven to combat that. Hermione, Ron and Harry had called together a meeting of the DA and explained the charm to everyone, Hermione watching as Colin Creevey, Lavender Brown, Parvati Patil and a few others scrambled over who would make Harry's amulet. They'd exchanged a worried look as Ginny stood off to the side, both knowing that it would be best for someone close to Harry to make the amulet.

But Dean Thomas pulled Ginny aside, and Hermione turned towards Ron, her brow raising a bit. She was torn between Harry's and Ron's, but she'd wanted nothing more than to make Ron's since she had found the spell. She just couldn't trust it to anyone else. With one last guilty glance at Harry, who seemed a bit taken aback by the rush to be his partner, she bit her lip and looked up at Ron.

"Would you mind?" she asked quietly. Before the meeting, she'd pulled Ginny aside and asked her if it was all right if she made Ron's amulet, and Ginny had agreed.

The tips of Ron's ears turned red and he ran a hand through his hair, causing it to stick up in several directions. She bit her lip to keep from smiling as she couldn't help thinking how endearing it made him look.

"Of course not. I was hoping you'd-" he stopped himself and grinned sheepishly. "Are you sure you want me making yours? I mean, I'm not exactly known for my excellent charms or potions work, you know."

"Nonsense," Hermione cut him off. "You do just fine when you put your mind to it. You just don't apply yourself as much as you could to those subjects."

Ron rolled his eyes in annoyance. "Hermione, school's nearly over. Don't you think it's time you stopped nagging me?" he moaned.

Hermione spent the next two weeks working on the charm whenever she could-even allowing it to cut into her studying and homework time, actually turning in one Transfiguration assignment a few lines short as she'd been up nearly the entire night before working on the charm. Something really worrisome had helped, as she'd found herself nearly faint from the exertion near the end.

She'd talked to Ginny and a few other members of the DA, but no one had experienced anything even remotely similar.

Ron caught up to her after class, his long legs easily catching up to her hurried strides towards the common room, without any exertion on his part.

"I think your essay might have been shorter than mine, Hermione," Ron told her, a bit of awe in his voice at the fact that she'd given less than her best on an assignment.

She flushed slightly and looked up at him, fishing his ward out of her backpack and handing it to him. "I was finishing this. Took a bit longer than expected, and I do hope I did it right. I was concentrating a bit hard, and I'm not sure if that might have thrown it off, but…" she stopped as he took the charm from her, their hands brushing slightly. Her cheeks burned and she looked away, feeling very silly, only to look back a second later and feel his eyes on her.

After a second of mutual staring, he cleared his throat, his face slowly reddening to match the colour of his hair as he thrust his hand into his bag, coming up a few seconds later with her own protective necklace. "Here, I finished yours too," he muttered, still blushing inexplicably as she looked it over.

After a few minutes of walking in awkward silence, Ron spoke up again. "Do you really think these things will do the trick?"

"I hope so," Hermione replied, her brow furrowing in concern. "If we're going to stand by Harry, we're going to need all the help we can get. I'm afraid what we're going to be facing will be far worse than the end of our fifth year."

They both fell into an uneasy silence for a moment. There had been an unspoken rule between the three of them to never bring up the events of their fifth year. As frustrated as it made Hermione that the two boys were so clammed up on the subject, she understood Harry's need to deal with the death of Sirius in his own way. And the memory of nearly losing three of the people she cared about most that night still haunted her.

"Can you believe he still thinks we should back off?" Ron asked, breaking the silence.

"He just wants to protect us," Hermione said gently. Her brow furrowed again, a concerned look crossing her face. "Harry keeps thinking that just because he's the only one mentioned in the prophecy, he's meant to do this alone."

"Well he needs to buck up and realize that we're his friends, and we don't want to be anywhere else but at his side when the time comes," Ron said, his fist closing around the amulet fairly tightly in frustration.

Hermione reached out and gently pried his fingers off it, easing the grip. Again, she noticed the touch and looked up at him sheepishly, her face burning now.

"Don't want to break that," she murmured, wishing he would stop staring at her like she had a bit of trifle on her face.

"Right. Sorry," Ron said, his face matching hers as he looked away, much more gently putting the protective amulet into his bag.

"Well, when the time comes, he won't have a choice as far as us being at his side," he said with a decisive nod.

In the present, Hermione sprang to her feet as soon as the lights went out in the Great Hall.

"Ron? Harry?" she called, fighting her way through the chaos as her brain quickly processed what was going on. From the corner of her eye, she spotted someone moving towards her, but before she could turn and react, a hex was whispered and an orange light slammed into her. She stumbled slightly as the curse slammed into her, but otherwise felt no side-effects, the charm fastened around her neck burning slightly as it did its job.

In spite of the situation around her, she grinned. It worked! The charm had worked!

She threw off a few expertly aimed hexes, fighting her way through the hooded Death Eaters, until she nearly ran into Ginny.

"Hermione! Are you all right?" Ginny asked, her eyes wide as she followed closely behind Harry and Ron.

"As good as can be expected," Hermione replied, her eyes trained on Ron and Harry, determined not to let either boy out of her sight. She wouldn't be left behind. Not in this. "The amulets work!" she told Ginny quickly.

"I know. Lucius Malfoy attempted to hit me with Relashio on my way over here," Ginny replied. As she spoke, an arm reached out to grab her, her defiant scream muffled as Lucius Malfoy's arm covered her mouth.

"Ginny!" Hermione shouted, turning away from Ron and Harry and pointing her wand at Lucius Malfoy, attempting to get a good aim as she fired off the body binding curse.

Instead, the curse hit Ginny, her amulet glowing as she struggled against Lucius Malfoy.

Realizing her wand would be useless with Ginny in the way, Hermione stuffed it in her pocket for the time being and dove at the pair, kicking at Malfoy's shins in an attempt to get him to release Ginny.

"STUPEFY!" a voice yelled from behind them, and Lucius instantly crumpled, releasing Ginny. "We've got this one!" Anthony Goldstein, followed closely by Terry Boot and Michael Corner, shouted. "Go help Harry," he told the girls with a nod, even as another Death Eater undid the curse on Malfoy, who recovered and whirled on the boys, attempting to Crucio Anthony.

"Hermione, we've got to go!" Ginny shouted, grabbing at Hermione's arm, throwing one last concerned look at the boys, who were holding their own, their amulets clearly working.

But for how long? They could only absorb so much. Five hexes at most.

Hermione raised her wand to help out when suddenly she was hit by the most sickening feeling. She dropped to her knees, convulsing in spasms of pain as flashes of the boy with ginger hair flew past her eyes.

"Whatever house I'm in, I hope she's not in it."

"You're a girl, Hermione."

"Oh well spotted, Ron."

"You know the solution, don't you? Next time, ask me first and not as a last resort!"

"Books and schoolwork! That's my specialty. You two are going to get to the last fight and you're going to leave me behind because I can't defend myself as well, I know it," her voice sobbed in her ear.

"Hermione-we wouldn't-that's not-Hermione, we'd never leave you behind. I promise."

"Hermione!" someone's voice broke through her thoughts, a hand shaking her shoulder urgently. "Hermione, wake up!"

She blinked, looking at Ginny. "Ron," she choked out, her senses beginning to come back as her legs started moving, every fiber of her body needing to get there. "We need to get to Ron," she said, pulling Ginny along as she pushed her way through the crowd in the Great Hall, dodging the fallen bodies of both Death Eaters and students as she ran.