II
Anyone watching Hermione over the next few days would have noticed some odd behaviour. She spent many hours sitting at her window, staring into a bowl of water, or at a candle flame. Mute and motionless, she would appear to be unconscious, barely breathing, but her eyes, beneath her autumnal tresses, would be focussed and sharp, riveted on the object of her contemplation. But the strangest thing of all was the times she chose for this activity- dawn, dusk and midnight, casting an alarm spell to make sure she was awake at the right hour.
It was on his fifth night in Berlin that Neville first saw Hermione in his dreams. Just a fleeting glance of her, but significant because she did not belong in the dream she had invaded. Not that she hadn't featured in many of his dreams over the years, but usually they were memories, or she was there behaving strangely in an environment not her own, but in context, as the folk of one's dreams usually do, easily forgotten in the morning.
This was different; she suddenly appeared in the middle of the scene, glanced at him and disappeared again. Almost as though she had discovered a way to apparate in and out of a person's dreams. Most peculiar of all however, was that this Hermione was not the girl he had known at Hogwarts, or even the woman he had met in France five years ago, but an older incarnation, subtly different, with new lines around the eyes and a countenance softened by the passing of the years.
The next night, as he prepared for bed after a day of long talks with friends and those who might be inclined to be sympathetic to his cause, he fleetingly remembered the previous night's strange occurrence and wondered if he would see his old friend again.
Sure enough, his dreams that night were peopled by many of the companions he had been at school with, including the younger Hermione he had known, but it was not the strange vision of the night before. Not until just before he awoke did she appear again, this time reaching out toward him and opening her mouth to speak- unfortunately, just as she did so, the spell he had cast to wake himself activated, and he jerked awake. For a moment, he cursed, annoyed that he had missed what she was saying, before reality kicked in and told him it was only a dream. Then he wondered what his psychiatrist Alex would have to say.
It was not until the fourth time that she visited him in his sleep, that Hermione was finally able to convey her message. "Neville." Her voice at least was the same as of old. "Neville, if you can hear me, next time you're in France, come to Paris. I work at the central library."
As Neville walked toward the library- one couldn't just apparate into the middle of a muggle building- he briefly wondered what he was doing. What credence could he place in a dream? He hadn't seen Hermione in five years. Even that was only for a few short hours. They hadn't been close friends since he was twenty, in those awful months following the deaths of Harry and Ron. Then there came the night when she suddenly appeared in his room, shushing his questions, telling him that she had to leave, would disappear from everyone who loved her, who wanted to support her. Before he could beg her to stop for a moment and talk it over with him, she had told him to look for her at the whumping willow and disapperated again.
When Ginny had died so suddenly in the attack a few months later, leaving her daughter parentless, and what was left of her family in tatters, Neville had gone to the whumping willow in desperation, knowing that Hermione might be the only one who could help.
He had found a message burned into the tree, a series of nonsense words. Above them, the words "read aloud." And below, "the Gryffindor fireplace." Dutifully he had sounded out the syllables, using the general wizarding dialect. As he enunciated the final consonant, the words on the tree had smouldered red. When nothing more had happened, he had gone into the castle, learned the password from McGonagall and greeted the Fat Lady for the last time. Ensuring no students were in the common room, he had taken the most comfortable armchair in front of the fireplace. He'd had some idea what to expect, but all the same when two hours passed without anything happening, he had considered giving it up as a failed attempt, but just then Hermione's head had appeared, floating deep in the flames. She had not given him a chance to talk, but rattled off the directions to a pub in the outskirts of Paris and a date six days from then and disappeared again.
It had taken him five days to convince Fred, Percy and Charlie to let him take April away.
Now here he was, following a trail that seemed even more ephemeral than the last. No method of communication he had ever heard of had included invading someone's dreams, but then, Hermione had always seemed to know more than anyone else. At first he'd ignored the dreams, but when she appeared the seventh dawn in a row, Neville had called his grandmother for advice. Gran had told him to trust in Hermione, but then, she had always liked her as a girl. Finally, he found himself scheduling a morning free to visit Paris. He told himself he would check it out and when he'd made sure that the dreams were just that, he'd go back to his meetings, back to his life that made sense and forget about dreams and people who were gone. Taking a deep breath, he walked up the steps of the library and under the marble arch.