A/N: Before I give you the chapter, I feel I must address an issue of dire importance (er, sort of). Anyway, I was quite literally gobsmacked to see that an alarming number of you really thought I would put Hermione and Albus together. WHAAAAAT!
Good lord! Once I regained consciousness, I went back and looked at the earlier chapters. I think I found the passage that may have confused you.
I told you to look out for blushing. You saw blushing when Hermione was telling Albus about why she missed the last Order meeting (a Slytherin student had spiked a bunch of people's goblets with a lust potion). Well, quite apart from wanting to shag Dumbledore, Hermione was blushing because she was LYING, YOU SILLY GEESE! She was lying to Albus because she wasn't sure if she wanted to tell him about her and Harry yet. As you will find out soon enough, on the date in question Hermione was, in fact, with Harry and he was proposing. That is why they both missed the meeting. You silly, silly fools, you. I may be cruel and very strange, but I would never put Hermione and Dumbledore together! Major ick!
Well, I think I've made my point clear enough. Here's the chapter (though I don't know if you really deserve it seeing as you're all mad as badgers)…
Thick clouds blanketed the sky as a new Scottish morning broke, cool and gray.
In the very pit of the Hogwarts castle, in a drafty room warmed by a very few creature comforts, Hermione paced back and forth over her threadbare scarlet rug.
Her hair hung in a mass of wild, tangled curls: her pale hands clutched her off-white robes together: her face had grown gaunt, her once bright eyes now appearing sunken and dull. A nervous tick was driving her to nibble her lower lip until a spot of crimson blossomed on the tender flesh.
It had been two weeks since Dumbledore's emergency Order meeting. Two weeks without any word from Severus. Or Harry. That is, unless you count the hastily written note Hedwig had dropped on her head the morning before last.
'Hermione,
Can't say much here. Will see you soon.
Love,
Harry'
Atleast, that's what she was pretty sure it said. He had smudged the ink in his apparent haste.
Hermione felt unsure of herself. So unsure that she was currently wearing a track in the floor with her incessant pacing.
She should have been overjoyed. She should have trusted the tiny part of herself that insisted that her nightmare was over and Severus had been recovered. She should have picked herself up, dusted herself up, and moved on with her life. Gotten back to her teaching. Perhaps even started working back in the Hospital Wing part-time.
But…
Oh yes. Isn't there always a 'but'.
Every time she let herself slip just a bit into complacency, when she began to trust her impulses...something terrible would happen.
It had started a week ago. Having been back at the school for a full week with no appearance from Severus, Hermione had grown back a bit of her confidence. She returned to her classes with a renewed vigor, admitting to herself that she was still smarting a bit from Severus telling her she was an insufficient teacher.
It had been a long day. The students were tired, having just completed one of the most difficult potions that was to appear on their N.E.W.T.s. She watched with mild satisfaction as the seventh year Gryffindors and Slytherins packed away their things. Only two groups had not managed to complete the potion properly. But as one of these groups was comprised of the brother of Luna Lovegood and a round-eyed, forgetful boy who very well may have been Neville Longbottom himself, she was resolved not to be upset.
She had just started to sift through the large pile of third-year essays on the corner of her desk, when suddenly a loud and resounding BANG ricocheted through the classroom.
Her desk shook violently, several of the small ink quills resting on it fell to the floor and burst in a shower of purple and red.
She leapt up from her desk immediately, fingers automatically scrambling into her robes to grab her wand.
"Nobody move!" she screamed, sounding more like a terrified school girl than a learned Potions instructor. "What was that noise?"
But the students had begun screams of their own, backing away from the only cauldron the remained standing, right in the back of the room. They retreated to the walls like lightning, most yelling, and quite a few covering their faces with clawing fingers.
Hermione banged her hip into the sharp corner of her desk as she tore around it. Hissing in pain, her eyes watering, she blinked furiously as she quickly approached the cauldron before her.
Now, at a distance of about ten paces, she could see that it was the cauldron of Lovegood and the other boy. Her mind raced for a moment, searching for a name. Gervais. Dominic Gervais.
Neither boy was in sight.
She whirled to her right, where one clump of students was gathered about twelve feet from her.
"What happened here?"
The girl nearest to her was shaking, her face a deathly white. "We don't know professor. It just…the cauldron just…" she murmured off, her eyes sliding slightly out of focus. It was then that Hermione noticed that the girl, along with several of her classmates, was covered in something that looked horribly like…
"Where are Lovegood and Gervais?" she demanded loudly, spinning around, a distinct note of fear in her voice. "Come here immediately or you'll both serve detention indefinitely!"
"He's over there!" a voice cried suddenly, and she saw someone pointing an outstretched hand at the far corner of the room.
She sprinted quickly to where she could now see a shiny black shoe protruding from the shadows.
"Lovegood? Lovegood!"
She pulled the boy from the shadows, and noticed quickly how his skin was the color of parchment.
Holding her wand like a sword, she severed the front of his robes and his shirt, leaving his pale, motionless chest exposed.
Her eyes widened in horror as she saw the six-inch gash that danced across his rib cage, several steady trickles of blood dripping from it to pool on his side.
"Scourgify Minima!" she said quickly, instantly vanishing the blood and cleansing the wound.
"Reparo Exama!" she followed, passing her wand in a circular pattern over the gash. Obediently, the wound sealed itself.
Her eyes roved over him for a moment, searching for signs of life.
"Oh I really hate doing this…" she murmured. But, resigned to the inevitable, she lifted her wand and clutched both her hands around it, pointing it downward like a dagger she was about to drive into his chest.
Raising it right above her head, she brought it down sharply, drawing several astonished and horrified gasps from her on-looking students.
Just before the tip of her wand made contact with the boy's chest, a jet of solid purple light shot from it. The boy instantly began gasping harshly, coughing and rolling onto his side.
Hermione staggered a bit, doubling over at the sudden loss of energy. Every time she had performed that spell in the past, she had needed days to recover. Now, however, she had only seconds to pull herself together. One of her students was still missing.
"Lovegood," she gasped, forcing her eyes to focus. "Where's Dominic? What's happened to him?"
Lovegood only coughed weakly, bringing a slight flush to his face.
"Listen to me," Hermione demanded, placing her hand on the boy's shoulder and blinking sluggishly against the gathering darkness in her own vision. "I have to find him. I have to heal him. Where is he?"
Unable to articulate an answer, Lovegood raised a hand and gestured up to the ceiling.
"What…?" brows furrowed, she tilted her head back to look where Lovegood was pointing.
And her eyes alighted upon something more terrible than she ever could have imagined a single image to be.
Attached to the high, stone ceiling was a single, steel chandelier, peppered with hundreds of glimmering, pale candles. But it was not the candles that drew her attention; it was the candlelight.
Which was currently dancing across the face of her dead student.
Suspended twelve feet in the air, so that if she stood, his toes would barely touch her head, was Dominic Gervais, hung from his neck by a thick black rope, the other end of which was wrapped around an arm of the chandelier.
Silence complete and absolute blanketed the room. For a moment, Hermione was sure that every breath was suspended and every heart skipped a beat. She never truly appreciated how loud silence could be. That is, until the absolute chaos exploded around her.
Hysterical screams and sobs filled the air. Hermione could hear several students pounding on the wooden door, attempting to force it open.
Apparently, someone had found it necessary to trap them in the room with the dead body.
The world swam before her, but she quickly jumped to her feet, pointing her wand at the rope.
"Dissendium!" she shouted, severing the rope neatly.
"Wingardium Leviosa!" she added quickly.
"Leave the room!" she screamed over her shoulder. "Go! Quickly!"
"Professor the door is stuck!" she barely heard this desperate cry over the din of sobbing and screams, which echoed terribly off the stone walls.
"Ackerly, use 'Bombarda Stratum'!" she commanded loudly.
A second later, she heard her best student bellow the spell, and the heaving crowd around her surged into the corridor, sprinting off in a million different directions.
The world around her was growing black and the ground lurched beneath her feet, but Hermione focused every bit of her strength on lowering the body neatly to the floor, and then staggering over to the large fireplace in the back of the room.
She threw a pinch of the glittering dust from the jar on the mantle into the flames, and then called, "Professor Dumbledore! Come to the Potions room immediately! There's been a terrible…terrible…trage…" she swooned, her eyes fluttering closed, her wand slipping to the floor.
She hardly noticed when a pair of strong arms, clad in black, wrapped around her from behind, lowering her gently to the floor before disappearing completely as a white haired man stepped out of the fireplace.
A/N: Also, I don't know if anyone caught it, but I made a HUGE mistake.
In the last chapter, I said that Ron gave up his chair to Ginny at the meeting.
GINNY ISN'T OLD ENOUGH TO BE IN THE ORDER. D'OH!
This also completely contradicts the slight backstory that will be coming regarding her and Luna and why they were even at Grimmauld Place to begin with.
I grovel and apologize. I can't believe none of you caught that. I'm embarrassed.
Edit: I've fixed it :)
Your humble and contrite author,
Little Lotte