Chapter 2: Magic Done in the Dark
AUTHOR: Mnemosyne
For Disclaimer and other information, see chapter one.
My head is spinning constantly --
How can it be?
How could I be so blind to this addiction?
If I don't stop, the next one's gonna be me.
Only emptiness remains;
It replaces all… all the pain…
(Won't you come out and play with me?)
-Martika, "Toy Soldiers"
Hermione stood up slowly and advanced toward him, her jaw set in a grim line. "Do you really think I'm a Death Eater?" she croaked.
Ron stared her down. "Let's put the pieces together, shall we?" he snapped. "You've been sneaking out of the girl's dormitory to brew potions in the middle of the night in a haunted house, using a smokeless fire and illegal plantlife. You don't speak to me any more, and you won't even LOOK at Harry. The only schoolbook I've seen you read with any interest this term is the one for Defense Against the Dark Arts. And to cap it all off, you look like something out of Hagrid's Monster Book of Monsters." He raised his chin defiantly. "So yeah, I have my suspicions. Prove me wrong."
Hermione glared at him. "You really are an idiot, Ronald Weasley," she growled in her acid-soaked voice. "In case you've forgotten, I'm a MUDBLOOD. Do you really think, even if I WANTED to become a Death Eater, that You-Know-Who would allow it? That he wouldn't kill me on the spot, as an example? Do you REALLY think that? Do you even think at all?"
Ron ignored her more hurtful remarks. She was talking. If he could keep her talking, maybe he could get her to tell him what the hell all this was about. "Then explain this." He gestured to the room at large. "When did you become Snape's little protégé?"
"Professor Snape has nothing to do with this, and neither do you. Get out." She turned on her heel and marched back to the smashed crockery on the floor. With a muttered word, the bowl fixed itself and lifted off the floor into her arms, bringing its contents with it.
"Nothing to do with me?" Ron sputtered, incensed, as he watched her carry the creeper to the table and set it down beside a bubbling cauldron of green slime, her back to him. "Nothing to do with me! We're friends, Hermione! Or have you forgotten that since you started playing with your chemistry set? I've been watching you walk around the castle like a zombie for the past month and a half, and now I find out it's because you've been buying up what looks like half of Knockturn Alley's black market contraband and using it to brew God knows what. It could be poison or bloody CANDY floss for all I know, because you won't TALK TO ME! We couldn't shut you up before, but in the course of this argument alone you've said more words to me than you have for the past month combined! Tell me that's normal. Tell me I shouldn't worry! Because I DO worry, Hermione. I'm not stupid. I DO think. And I think that whatever is going on here must be an ugly thing, or else you wouldn't be doing it alone. Since when have we ever done anything alone, the three of us? God, between you and Harry, it's like living with two blocks of stone. Miserable, tormented, bloody FRUSTRATING blocks of stone, and I can't do a damned thing to help because I'm just Ron Weasley, and Ron Weasley apparently wouldn't know his head from a croquet hoop, judging by the way his friends treat him!"
His tirade ended and he stood there, nostrils flaring, panting for breath. It felt good, in a perverse way, finally expelling his anger and frustration in Hermione's direction. At last, he'd said it to SOMEONE. It was as if a dam had broken somewhere in his gut, and now all the pent up fury that he'd been bottling since last year was loose and felling trees in its wake. It was a liberating feeling.
Until he saw her shoulders shake, and realized Hermione was crying.
She hadn't turned around during his entire diatribe, but her head had sunk lower and lower with every sentence, and now her chin was virtually touching her chest. That first hitching sob was followed by another, louder one, then another, and another, until she was sobbing into her arm against the edge of the table.
"Oh, Ron…!" she wept, still not looking at him. "I… I'm s-sorry…! I kn-know that you've worried s-so much about me. I've s-seen it on your f-faces, you and Har-Harry. I wanted to te- … t-to tell you s-s-so muuuuch…!" Her voice trailed off into a long, miserable wail, and she collapsed to her knees on the floor beside the table, sobbing uncontrollably.
Ron was paralyzed with shock. He had absolutely no experience with comforting hysterical girls, as Ginny would have gladly told anyone who bothered to ask. He generally left such things to wiser people, and hurried away quickly before he could say anything idiotic that made the situation worse. But there wasn't anyone else about at the moment, and this was HERMIONE, not just some girl in the Gryffindor Common Room. He had to do something.
Edging forward, he slowly knelt down by her side. "Hermio-"he began, but was cut off as she pulled up out of her slumped-over heap and threw her arms around his neck, drenching the shoulder of his jumper with tears.
Clearing his throat -- and deciding that now was not the time to think about Hermione's shivering body pressing so close against his own -- Ron carefully wrapped his arms around her waist and rubbed her back, as his mother had always done for him when he was a child and needed comforting. "It's all right, Hermione," he said, thrilled with his tongue for coming up with such an original idea. "Please don't cry. I'm here now. It's going to be all right, I promise."
Several minutes passed, during which nothing was said between the pair outside of tears and murmured words of reassurance. Eventually, Hermione pulled away from his shoulder and stared into his eyes. Her own eyes were bloodshot, and her face was even whiter than before. "I've wanted to tell you…"she choked out, her eyes searching his face for some kind of approval.
Ron didn't know how to answer that, so he nodded. "I know," he said carefully, rubbing her back. "I understand."
"You don't!" she argued, shaking her head. "You don't understand! Oh, Ron…!"
Afraid she'd explode into more hysterics, Ron quickly broke in. "Tell me now, then," he suggested, reaching up to tuck an errant lock of hair behind her ear. "I'm listening."
Hermione bit her lip and stared at him for a few seconds, then let out a long breath, deflating her thin body. Ron quickly wrapped his arm around her waist to keep her from falling over, and her head came to rest on his shoulder. "It started over the summer," she murmured with her acid-stained voice, her breath tickling across his chin. "I was worried about Harry."
"We're all worried about Harry," Ron reminded her softly.
"I know," she admitted, pressing closer. "But I couldn't stop thinking about his Occlumency, or lack thereof. I knew that when he was at Hogwarts he was safe enough, but what about when he was home with the Dursleys? Would he be safe then? Would You-Know-Who be able to reach him there? If he did, what would happen? Would Harry survive? Would he do terrible things? Would he disappear like Bertha Jorkins? I couldn't sleep; I could barely eat. I was terrified.
"I started Flooing to Diagon Alley during the day while my parents were at work. I told them it was so I could visit the library there, and I wasn't lying; I just didn't tell them my reasons. I buried myself in the section devoted to Protection Spells, but there was nothing that matched what I needed. There were spells to dispel bad dreams, or to give good ones, but nothing to defend against a determined, evil mind bent on domination. You-Know-Who was weakened during his fight with Professor Dumbledore, but not defeated, and I had no idea how much time was left before he regained the strength to attack Harry's sleeping mind again. I was getting desperate, which was how I ended up in the section on dark magic."
Ron's muscles stiffened. "Hermione," he breathed in warning. "You didn't-"
She tilted her chin up to look into his face. "I almost did," she murmured, her eyes dark and distant. Then they cleared, and she shook her head. "But I didn't. I read every book on defense against the dark arts that I could lay my hands on; even the old dusty ones that no one had touched in over a century.
"That was where I learned about the Night Mare."
Ron frowned in confusion. "The what?"
"The Night Mare," Hermione repeated, lowering her face again and cuddling up against his side. "It's rather like a Patronus, but… different. Quite different. It was the power that interested me. I saw the ingredients, and I knew that I was looking at a spell that could do what I needed. It could repel You-Know-Who."
"What, you mean it could hurt him?"
"No. I wish, but no." She sighed, and it shook her body like a baby's rattle. "But it can keep his mind at bay, away from Harry."
"How does it work?"
With another heavy sigh, Hermione pushed herself away from his side and sat up, pulling her knees up to her chin and curling her arms around her legs. Ron got the impression she was trying to make herself as small as possible. "The Night Mare is a very old spell," she explained wearily, closing her eyes and resting her cheek on her knees. "It was used before the advent of Occlumency, to protect ruling wizard monarchs from the mental assaults of their enemies."
Ron whistled low. "Wizard monarchs? Sounds upper-crusty."
"Very. And with good reason. It wasn't the sort of spell ordinary wizards could… particularly afford to do."
Ron cast an eye over the panoply of bubbling cauldrons and smoking beakers that filled the room. "I can believe that."
"I don't mean the supplies."
Ron shot her a look. Her eyes were still closed. "What do you mean then?" he asked.
"I mean the people, Ron. The kind of monarch that needed a Night Mare for protection wasn't usually a very nice one, and didn't much care about anyone else's welfare. It's the kind of spell that wears heavily on the spellcaster."
This time, Ron's eyes roamed over Hermione's ravaged body: her skeletal frame, bony wrists, sickly complexion; the stepladder notches of her vertebrae, visible even through her sweater. He thought of her hollow eyes and pale lips, and the razor-sharp edges of her cheekbones.
He nodded faintly. "I can believe that," he repeated, his voice hovering at a distracted murmur as his eyes traced her too-thin arm from shoulder to elbow and back again.
Her thumb began absently stroking her knee as she continued. "It's not actually a spell," she explained, struggling to be heard despite the sandpaper rasp of her voice. "It's a potion. When taken in the proper dosage, the Night Mare that is created can protect a person for 24 hours before the potion has to be administered again. It is completely invisible to anyone but the person who drinks the potion, and anybody who is in that person's presence at the time." Here her eyes opened and fixed Ron with a penetrating stare. The familiar chocolate brown of her irises was hidden by shadow, making her eyes little more than a pair of glinting orbs of pure black. If the situation weren't so serious, he would have made a joke about snowmen and carrot noses and eyes of coal, but this was not the time, and frankly, her eyes made his spine tingle with fright.
"What does it look like?" he heard himself ask before he could stop the question from tumbling out. She didn't look like she wanted to think about it.
It took a minute before Hermione finally answered. "Like a horse," she said simply, closing her eyes again, as if visualizing behind her eyelids. Ron was glad to have that gaze diverted. "And it's black, but not like the color black. It's black like a hole. Not dark, but empty. As if someone's taken a cookie cutter and cut a piece of the world away, revealing whatever's behind it. You can't look at the edges -- it hurts your eyes. Reality meeting unreality and other mind bending concepts. When it runs, it sounds like hoofbeats in a far away tunnel. Light and dark and color all disappear into it. I think it could swallow the moon, if it was told to; and it has to be told what to do. Otherwise it will just stand there and stare at you with invisible eyes, and drink your mind like a water trough." She shivered visibly, and Ron wondered if perhaps that last example was given from experience.
"It doesn't sound like a Patronus to me," Ron muttered, trying to ignore the quiver in his voice. "Sounds more like a bloody Dementor."
"I suppose it could be, if someone ever decided to use it like one," Hermione admitted, nodding weakly against her knees. "But if you use it right, in the manner for which it was designed, it can be a savior. It absorbs thought, Ron. Any kind of thought, but especially sharp, directed thought, which is exactly what Voldemort keeps trying to use against Harry. Haven't you noticed how well he's been sleeping?"
Of course he had. So had Harry himself. But that wasn't the point. "Hermione, this is a very nice thing you're doing, but you've got to stop," Ron argued. "Harry's learning his Occlumency, and he'll be right as rain before long, thanks to Dumbledore. But I don't know about you. You look like Death's been using you as a doormat."
"Thank you for the striking simile, Ron."
"It's true! You want me to lie to you? We're friends, Hermione, and I think we've had enough of the lying for a while. You look like hell. Worse, you look like something a cat coughed up IN Hell. Everyone's noticed, not just Harry and I. We're all… worried about you." He felt himself blushing, but plowed on. "Harry's especially worried, and you know how overprotective he can be. It's only a matter of time before HE decides to follow you on one of your late night escapades, and you'll have to explain everything all over again. You should just stop now, come back to the Tower with me, and get some sleep."
Hermione shook her head. "I can't, Ron." As if everything he'd just said didn't matter.
Ron frowned at her. "Why not?"
"This is too important. Harry's too vulnerable right now for me to just give it up."
Ron rolled his eyes. "This from the girl who's always trying to get us to spill everything to Dumbledore and the Order? Tell someone! Tell McGonagall, or Dumbledore, or Lupin, or Moody for Pete's sake. One of them should be able to help! They're full-fledged members of the Order, remember? If they find out you've been doing this… Well, all right, they'll be bloody furious at first. But THEN they'll think of something else to do, and you won't have to make this Night Mare thingy anymore." He smiled, proud of his skillful use of logic.
Hermione opened her eyes and raised her head. The placid look on her face was a striking contrast to what she said next.
"They know."
Ron blinked. "Excuse me, what?" he asked, sure he'd heard her incorrectly.
"They know, Ron."
"Who know?" He looked over his shoulder at the fireplace, at the long, jumping shadows in the corners of the room, as if expecting cloaked spies to seep out of the woodwork.
"Dumbledore. McGonagall. Most of the Order."
Ron stared at her. "They… Wait, they KNOW? About this?" He gestured to the room. "What do you MEAN, they know about this?"
She sighed and rubbed the bridge of her nose. "How do you think I get all the necessary ingredients, Ron?" she rasped wearily. "Do you think an underage witch can just go to Diagon Alley and buy Sleep Creeper? Do you think I could go window shopping down Knockturn Alley? They've been helping me. Professor Lupin even suggested I use the Shrieking Shack as my laboratory."
Ron's eyes were burning, but he couldn't seem to blink. "How…how long have they known?" he managed to ask.
Hermione lowered her hand and stared at her toes, unwilling to meet his eyes. "Tonks found me passed out in my room at the Leaky Cauldron the first night I conjured the Night Mare," she mumbled, then smiled derisively. "I was rather noisy, apparently. The other residents thought I'd been murdered in my bed. Tonks was downstairs and came running up to investigate."
"The Leaky… What?"
She waved a hand dismissively. "I told my parents I was going to visit Viktor for the end of the summer, and took a room at the Leaky Cauldron. I wanted to focus on my research."
It was as if the Hermione Ron had known since First Year had been replaced with a hollow Hermione clone, only this Hermione lied to her parents and screamed bloody murder in bed. "What…happened next?" He was in a daze, unable to connect what he knew of the girl in front of him with the story she was telling him.
"Tonks took me to Grimmauld Place," Hermione continued, in the same drab monotone, her thumb scrubbing idly at the toe of her shoe. A hint of a smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. "It was like you said, of course. They were furious at first. I've never seen Professor McGonagall so red in the face, let alone Professor Lupin. The only one who didn't seem very fazed was Moody." Her thumb stopped, and she slid her hand up her leg to cup her knee.
"He said I'd make a good Auror," she murmured.
Ron lost it. "So that's it!" he exclaimed, throwing his hand out in a violent gesture of disbelief. "A little bit of praise from a paranoid madman and you're willing to pour your life down the drain on some useless cause!"
Hermione turned to face him and fixed him with a harsh stare. "Of course not!" she argued back, her hoarse voice grating like sandpaper in his ears. "It wasn't about praise, Ron! It's about sacrifice! That's what makes an Auror different from everyone else -- they're willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of others!"
"Oh , don't bloody give me that sacrifice malarkey. Someone else could be doing this! It doesn't have to be you!"
"WHO, RON?" she demanded, getting on her hands and knees and marching toward him across the aging floorboards. "WHO! Do you think Dumbledore could do this? Do you think no one would notice if he started to look like this?" She pushed back her bangs so he could see the skull-like ridges of her face. "Professor McGonagall? Professor Snape? If Lupin could have done it, I'm sure he would have done so, but unfortunately every month he turns into a BLOODY WEREWOLF, so he'd be too weak and preoccupied to worry about protecting Harry!"
"Tonks! Shacklebolt! Moody! They're Aurors, aren't they? Real ones, not little girls pretending. Why can't they do this?"
"DON'T call me a little girl, Ronald Weasley. And in case you didn't notice, we're in the middle of a war, not a bloody leaflet campaign. People are fighting -- REALLY fighting. Would you honestly deprive our side of their best warriors when they're most needed?" She tilted her head. "Our side can't afford to lose anyone, Ron. We're stretched too thin as it is."
Ron felt something in his chest deflate. Whatever righteous anger had been keeping him afloat disappeared, and he wilted. "Stop arguing with me, Hermione," he murmured, looking down at the floor. "Don't blame me for being selfish. I don't want to be deprived of YOU."
When she didn't say anything he looked up, and saw that she was watching him with soft eyes. Tears were welling against her lashes. "Don't cry-" he said, reaching up to touch her cheek, but she pushed his hand to the side and wrapped her arms around him, burying her face in his neck.
"They wanted someone else, Ron, but no one else made sense," she whispered, voice trembling. "I'm close to Harry. I'm the best at brewing potions in all of Sixth Year, and even Professor Snape can't argue that. And I'd already done it once." She shivered. "The war isn't going well, Ron. Our side is losing. They would have used someone else, but there's nobody they can spare."
Ron squeezed his eyes shut and held her, his arms tightening around her narrow waist until he made himself stop, afraid he'd snap her brittle bones. It wasn't a shock, really, to learn the Order was losing the battle against You-Know-Who. After all, if the dark wizard hadn't tried to kill Harry all those years ago only to have his spell backfire, he would have won THEN. It was something nobody wanted to admit, but anyone who looked at the facts knew it to be true. Ron had heard his parents muttering about it late at night in the living room, when they thought everyone else had gone to bed, and didn't realize their youngest son was sitting up at the top of the stairs, desperate for every shred of news he could get. The adult members of the Order were worried; worried that there were no magical baby boys looming on the horizon to rescue them from You-Know-Who's growing power. They didn't know how to fight him fifteen years ago, and they were barely able to keep their heads above water now.
"If he gets to Harry, everything is lost," Hermione whispered, as if she'd been reading his thoughts. "Harry's the key, just like he's always been. He's more important than any of us, Ron. We have to protect him at all costs."
"Even if that cost includes you?" he murmured.
She nodded faintly. "Even if that cost includes me."
To Be Continued...