Harry Potter and the Slow Bloom Chapter 8:

Null Time

Tear along the dotted lines and insert standard disclaimer here. ……………

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The rest of this work will have a far more serious tone to it. The tone of some of the last chapter, was, I feel, rather out of keeping with the plot, and for this I apologise. This is but a filler, designed to reset that tone.

Two days had passed. Ron was due to be discharged from the Hospital wing, pending regular check-ups to ensure that there had been no lasting mental or physical damage. There had been no flashbacks for a few days now, and for that he was grateful – but he was itching to get back into his normal life, schoolwork or no schoolwork. There was far too much at stake for him to be lying here dozing.

Malfoy had disappeared, had vanished off both maps, "official" and clandestine alike. In his towertop office, Albus Dumbledore sighed, paced and planned as the scope of the war widened and curled its intangible tendrils once more into the heart of normalcy. He had no doubt that when it all came down to it, he might very well be fighting some of his own students, past… and present. He was far too wise, far too experienced to think that it would not come to pass once more.

In the end, he had to remind himself that he was fighting an enemy, one that would show no quarter, no mercy at all. His world had been devoid of such enemies for only a little while, and yet, like a cold, dark draught, they and their actions slid slowly back into the spaces filled with light and hope, and cast new and more terrible shadows upon the minds of wizardkind.

He hoped that he would not have to become like them, steel-like and intransigent, punishing and deadly. He had forced himself to be, a long time – oh, a very long time ago, so it seemed! – but now? Could it be done? Could he become like that again, cold and hard and unmerciful, filled with violence, destruction and death?

He was, he realised, an old man, asking himself old men's questions.

He continued his tireless pacing under the gaze of wizards who were long-dead and now, by compassion, silent.

Harry and Hermione moved like two sides of the same spun coin, at times one following the other, at others hand in hand and side by side. It was as if an intangible line had been drawn between them, faint and fuzzy and golden. Classes drew them apart, thinning the thread, and the evenings found them in the common room, the air between them alive with unsaid things, the thickness of the thread growing as each toiled silently in their work. Occasionally one would look up and gaze at the other, and they would, within an instant, look back and smile before working on. The people around them noticed this, and smiled and nodded and, in some cases, exchanged coins, for the inevitable had at last happened, and things, in a small way, were finally how they should be.

But slowly, so slowly as to be almost unnoticeable to an outside observer, Hogwarts became quiet, a place of murmurs and nods and glances as each student weighed his or her thoughts and found them uneasy.
The disappearance of another of their number had wrought a strange change in them. It was as if Malfoy's flight – along, it seemed, with a few select others who had simply vanished - had sounded a tiny, shrill alarm bell in their minds, saying that all was not well and that darker days were ahead. There was a sense of time being slowly squeezed to a halt, one day passing another with no marker except sleep. Time itself had been divided into two distinct periods: one before Malfoy's decomposition and flight, one after.

There could no longer be any doubt in any of their minds. The lines were being inexorably drawn, the pieces weighed and measured. Only the board was unknown, and that would only be revealed at the last second. Time was short, and getting shorter by the day.

With the coming of any kind of feeling of imminent terminality, the human mind is freed from outside pressures. Extraordinary, unlikely things become possible, and it is easy to form new bonds and feelings. Nothing really matters anymore, and old worries slip away. There is freedom, of a sort.

And so it was within the walls of the castle. New relationships sprang up like orchids after a storm, giving rise to snatched moments of tenderness and passion in the niches and closets of the school. Even Argus Filch, under his crusty and worn exterior, was affected. He started giving up his patrol of the more remote parts of the place and retired early to his quarters, murmuring softly to his cat and running his old, gnarled hands between her ears over and over again.

At nights now, couples sat in the Owlery, the Astronomy Tower, or between the crenulations of the battlements outside, sometimes face to face, sometimes one in the arms of the other, outlined against scarlet sunsets and sharp silver moonlight. There was no need for privacy. There was no judgement, no condemnation. Some talked softly. Some sat and cuddled and kissed, interrupted only by the occasional fall of a feather or a rustling of wings. A few others, at times, led their partner by the hand into places and rooms unknown, seeking a more complete form of fulfilment and comfort.

It was happiness, of a sort.