Chapter warning for poor mental health, abuse, a generally darker chapter than the rest of this fic.
It was late morning before Hermione woke up the next day; she felt she had squeezed several days into the preceding 24 hours. Hermione blearily stared at her bangle, and felt a sick disappointment wash through her.
Weasley senior is in Azkaban. Pinned Umbridge on him. You got the credit for Yaxley.
Of course she did. She didn't even need to read the article to know how the papers would play it. Umbridge had been hit with the Killing Curse, of course done by a pureblood wizard; while Yaxley was torn from his dick to his throat, and such barbarism could only be a horrible, unprovoked mudblood act of terrorism.
It was probably the most reasonable but positive result they could have hoped for. Hermione was so glad Ron's dad had not died.
She rolled out of bed and saw that Ron was in the tent, sitting at the table doing some sort of potions work.
"Morning," she yawned.
"Barely," he said.
"Where's Harry?" she asked.
"Outside," Ron said, looking towards the tent entrance as he unscrewed a bottle. Hermione realised he was not doing anything potions-related at all.
"Are you following the instructions for that stuff?" she said. "The nurse wrote it down."
Ron made a vague non-committal noise, shrugging his head. "Yeah," he said, very unconvincingly.
"Ron, this is serious," she said, sitting down on a chair next to him and taking the bottle out of his hands, blinking through the spasm that ran through her hand as it brushed his. "It's very easy to kill yourself on this stuff. You must follow the instructions exactly."
"Ah yes, Hermione and her rules," Ron said, merely pulling another bottle of morphine out of her bag. "I am a wizard, you know."
His inference was obvious and shitty. "Are you," she said blithely, feeling outside herself with anger.
"Yep," he said breezily.
Hermione walked out of the tent to find Harry under a nearby tree, staring at the snitch.
"Harry," she announced, crossing her arms. "We have a problem."
Ron became downright ugly after Harry destroyed the remaining morphine, in pain and with memories of the warm blanket of opioid numbness. Hermione wasn't sure if Harry had ever been on the receiving end of Ron's shouting, although to be honest, she wasn't sure she had seen Ron this angry before either. Harry handled it admirably coolly, though. He had been yelled at a lot over the course of his life, Hermione supposed, as she watched him deliberately and slowly blink while another plate broke against the Shield Charm she had cast over them while Ron raged.
"If you've got energy to be this angry, you obviously didn't need it," Harry said uncaringly.
"Fuck YOU, Harry," Ron shouted, throwing some sort of hex at them; it reverbed off the shield and set a table leg on fire. "If it wasn't for me and Dad, you wouldn't even BE here to talk about it!"
"And you!" Ron spat, looking at Hermione with a face like thunder. "If you hadn't shrunk away for one goddamn second, you wouldn't have fucking SPLINCHED me, but oh no, god forbid the great Hermione Granger even touch the hand of the guy who just saved her skin –"
"Remove the Shield Charm," Harry said, uncrossing his arms and looking very unimpressed. She flicked it away and Harry Stunned him before Ron could respond.
Hermione thought he might say something, but Harry merely turned on his heel and walked out of the tent. So he didn't want to talk to her either, it seemed.
Ron blames me for getting Splinched, she sent Draco, from the relative safety and solitude of the locked bathroom.
Who gives a shit, the bangle blinked back, as uncaring as Harry.
I think it is my fault. And I think it might be your fault too? she wrote back uncertainly. When he grabbed my hand to Disapparate, I twitched.
Hermione didn't know why she told him this. Maybe because a tiny part of her thought Draco would be sorry, and that his remorse would somehow affect the Vow so she no longer revulsed from the least of Ron's touch. Maybe because she felt so guilty that Ron was right, and Draco was the only person she could confide the secret in.
If you truly thought he was necessary for Potter's mission, you wouldn't have flinched, Draco wrote back, a shining, horrible truth in the dimly lit bathroom. I told you before there was no way Weasley needed to be on it. Deep down you obviously agree.
Ron snapped at her the next day when she tried to help with a Fainting Charm, Harry was so tired of it all he just ignored them, and she was back on her bangle. Thus an unhealthy loop began.
He's being so mean, Hermione whinged unhelpfully, tears bubbling over her eyelids as she engraved her complaints into the metal. You and Harry are always so grateful to me when I do magic to help. He told me to fuck off with my weak spell shit.
She enchanted an orange leaf to spin in the cool autumn air while waiting for Draco to reply, incinerating it at the apex of its flutter. It took a few minutes; he was probably in class, Hermione thought jealously. Surrounded by friends, actually learning something useful instead of going mad translating disgusting Dark magic journals that doubled as a love note to the author's unfortunate sister.
So don't try to help him? Draco asked, and she could tell he was just as annoyed as Harry. I told you to stay away from him.
But as it turned out, Draco's command was unnecessary. Over several weeks, in the meandering bleakness of trudging homelessness throughout Britain, the core of her and Harry's friendship with Ron rotted away. It was like it fell into the mud they stomped through each day to set up a new camp, with new protective charms; the dampness soaked through it and would not leave.
Harry and Ron both forgot or ignored her birthday, but Draco bullied Hermione into baking herself a cake. She mixed ingredients while he shared or invented every scrap of boring, meaningless school gossip he could think of over the Protean Charm, a valiant effort to try and cheer her up.
I feel terrible I don't have as funny a story as when you cried in front of your cousin to share, he wrote while she grated lemons. I tested out a couple on Zabini and he said I was better off giving up.
I find it hard to believe nothing funny happened to you in eleven years before Hogwarts, she replied suspiciously, in between folding flour and egg together.
He said it was pureblood stuff that wouldn't translate, Draco said.
You told him you were dating someone who wasn't a pureblood? she asked, surprised. That seemed rather bold given muggleborns were being genocided by the Ministry.
I told him I was dating someone French. About as foreign as muggle Birmingham, he replied, making her snort.
Sacré bleu, she teased, slamming the mix in the oven and checking the clock.
So - no funny story, but I've got a secret you can have, he said, after she wandered outside to lie in the grass and wait for her birthday cake to bake.
I want all your secrets, she sent back smiling, lying back on the wildflowers and weeds, trying to enjoy the slightly warm sun against the autumn breeze.
I'll get you a better gift for your nineteenth birthday, he promised. But here you go. I think Pansy suspects it's you.
Hermione sat up suddenly. What? she sent back. Was that supposed to be a good present? How was it at all good news if gossipy Pansy Parkinson was about to blow his cover?
I think you gave it away on the train, he wrote back. She was already so nosy about what I was doing last year. And saw you were unusually absent from the library.
A dim memory lit up in her head, from before Draco had even admitted he had been Marked, of him saying Pansy had noticed her library habits.
Will you Obliviate her? she sent back blankly. Half question, half request.
Why? he asked, like it wasn't obvious. Pansy won't say anything. And she doesn't have any proof.
Were they talking about the same girl? Pansy never met a rumour she didn't want to crow about, in every class or corridor or bathroom at Hogwarts.
It seems very risky, she wrote back, polite as she could. She couldn't force him to do anything. Are you sure it doesn't trigger the Vow?
But Draco only turned the question back on her, the true aim of this bad birthday present coming into view. You think it would risk the Vow if Potter knew about me?
That was unfair. It was her birthday, and Draco was only supposed to send her nice things today, not questions she had been trying to avoid. Maybe, she wrote back, thinking of Harry's connection with Voldemort.
She's my best friend, her bangle flashed earnestly, and she suddenly felt like Ginny, trying and failing to understand what in Merlin's name Bill saw in Fleur. Pansy isn't going to screw anything up. She wants me to be happy.
The unsaid contrast to her and Harry's friendship hung in the air. I don't want to talk about Harry, she sent back explicitly. But why do you think Pansy suspects me?
Pansy loves a secret, he replied, as Hermione stood back up and wondered if she could convince Harry that birthday gin would not set Ron back several steps in sobering up. Any time you come up, she looks at me like she's desperately trying not to crack up.
Hermione felt sick. That sounds terrible, she wrote back honestly.
Not at all, he disagreed, bangle warming her hands in the cold autumn air. It reminds me that you're real.
"I'm eighteen today," she announced at dinner, while cutting Harry and Ron thick slices of lemon cake.
"Oh. That's why you baked a cake!" Harry said, smiling at her. "Happy birthday, Hermione."
"Cheers, Harry," she said, smiling back. A quite uncomfortable silence settled in over them as Ron didn't say anything.
"If you could spend your birthday anywhere," Harry asked politely, ignoring Ron's shitty silence, "where would it be?"
"Hmm," she considered, stabbing a chunk of icing. "Some sort of European tourist trap," she said, thinking of Draco's safe house.
"If we're still hunting them this time next year, let's actually go to one," Harry said.
"Ooh, that's-"
"Next year?" Ron interrupted, looking between them both with a distinctly unimpressed expression on his face. "You think we'll still be wandering around Britain achieving fuck all next year?"
Usually when Ron was being a dick, Hermione would jump to argue with him. But something had changed since the Splinching. There were no words left in her mind or mouth when Ron said something terrible. There was literally nothing Hermione had to say to him. She looked at Harry, and saw his face had become blank and tired too.
They all just sat there, in silence, until Ron stood up and left the tent.
When Ron wasn't insulting her or Harry, he stalked about the camp unhappily in his pain, creating a pervasive mood of unhappiness not unlike a dementor. Hunting horcruxes was never going to be fun, but they could have at least trudged through the translating and strategising work and then relaxed over some drinks. Harry was now insistent that they didn't carry any drugs or alcohol on them, after Ron drunk a half a bottle of whiskey one night before either of them realised.
The only vices and comforts left in the small, cramped world she lived in with Ron and Harry were Draco's bangle, whatever mind-numbing magic she could sneak past Harry, and whatever cigarettes she could sneak past Ron. He apparently agreed with his mother that they were a filthy habit.
"I see," Ron commented nastily as she wandered along a riverbed with Harry near Halloween, commiserating about the lack of ideas for where to hunt for the next horcrux, smoke in hand. "Hermione's disgusting muggle cigarettes are ok, but a few Butterbeers, that really would be too far."
"Oh, sure," Harry said, his surly expression several miles away. "Let's just pop down to the Three Broomsticks."
And then she and Harry would both miserably imagine Draco and Ginny, actually having fun with their friends at school while they trudged around Britain growing more and more depressed by the day, stuck in their horcrux mission.
You really are going mad on Potter's mission, Draco said, somewhat amused one night when she petulantly whined about this dream Hogwarts that she and Harry imagined every day in the depressing tent. It's much worse here than last year. No one is having fun parties or flirting or any of the weird shit you're imagining.
Can you do my Ancient Runes homework for me, she sent, staring at The Tales of Beedle the Bard loathsomely as Ron muttered to himself in the corner.
What? I'm the one with homework, Granger.
She didn't want to finish this translation. She wanted to shoot a Fainting Spell in her face and pass out, and forget she was living this dreary life for twelve hours.
We never got to do homework in the library together, she wrote back, mind wandering away from the Tale of the Three Brothers.
You really should have told me earlier that you would never forgive me if we didn't fuck in the Restricted Section, Draco replied. She couldn't tell if he was entertained or exhausted with her useless hormones.
Surely you know the Tale of the Three Brothers. Can you please just tell it to me, she sent, clicking her pen and waiting above a notepad to transcribe.
Oh Hermione, he said, and she hated the pity she could feel; he had been right to hate how much she felt sorry for him, it felt terrible. I'm not used to you being miserable, he said, before sending her his recollection of when Death met Three Brothers.
"Finished!" she announced happily, slamming 'Galon ddrwg' shut.
"Finished what?" Harry asked, looking away from a map of Europe he had been staring a hole into for over an hour.
"'Galon ddrwg,'" she said. "I never have to read about Mr Brochfael's horrible sister love ever again."
"Will you shut the fuck up about your disgusting incest book," Ron said, not moving from where he lay on his bed.
"What are the key points, do you think?" Harry asked, walking over to look over her shoulder at the table.
"Well, we know how one is made now," Hermione replied. "He's doing well to still have a body, his hands, and most of his face left after making so many."
"Shut UP," Ron repeated, growling at them both.
"Are these your notes?" Harry asked her, ignoring him.
"Yes," she said, and he started to gather them up, pulling on her arm to lead her outside.
"Yeah, go on," Ron said sullenly as they left. "Fuck off and do your revolting book club somewhere else."
They walked out into the cold air, amongst the pine trees, and Hermione felt the last thread of affection she had for Ron fray.
"Harry," she said quietly, as he lead her to sit under one of the trees. "Why is Ron here."
"I don't know," he replied. It was hard to imagine even two months ago that such an answer would be on the tip of his tongue.
"I don't know if I can do this anymore," she said, and Hermione took his hand as Harry looked at her, sudden fear in his eyes. "I don't mean the mission. Ron just makes me feel so empty inside." Hermione let go of Harry's fingers and let her hand fall limply onto the fallen pine needles and mud. "He sucks the air out of the room. He makes it hard to get up in the morning. I can't do this with him anymore."
It should have felt terrible to say. It was a betrayal. But it felt like Ron had steeped them both in a vat of poison, or cast a curse that had drained their energy away. The depression was so numbing she didn't feel anything anymore.
If you don't get rid of him by Christmas, I will hunt you all down and get rid of him for you, Draco had assured her two nights ago, after weeks of whining to him about Ron and the miserable fog that had fallen heavily around her. I can't listen to this without doing something about it anymore. And I will not let him poison you against yourself. Even then, it had been hard to summon the energy to do this, to take an action that would help save her's, Harry's, Draco's and Ron's lives, such was the malaise Ron had infected them all with.
"I – let me talk to him," Harry asked, and she shook her head. "Please, Hermione?"
She could never say no to Harry. Hermione closed her eyes and shrugged, and Harry clapped her encouragingly on the back. "Now, then. What else did the Welsh sex pest have to say about splitting your soul?"
It was obvious when the talk had happened, because Ron walked over to the table where she and Harry were studying that evening, and cracked open her 'Guide to Old English' for the first time since she had shoved it towards him in his bedroom at the Burrow.
"Will…'Feorþ heáhgræft' be less offensive than that Welsh smut you read for two months?" Ron asked disdainfully, picking up one of the horcrux books she hadn't started yet.
Harry gave him a pointed look.
"I don't know," she replied honestly. "I haven't read it. You could tell us?"
She meant it as a polite suggestion, but Ron sneered as he sat next to them at the table, making the rest of the evening a quite uncomfortable, although silent, study session.
Harry's talked to him, she messaged Draco later that night, when she was keeping watch outside. He's actually doing work now.
I give it a week, Draco bet.
But the foundations of their friendship fell out less than a day later, under the weight of foreign translation and something she had forgotten about in her Ancient Runes syllabary.
"Hello Hermione, Harry," Ron greeted them pleasantly. She and Harry couldn't help it; it was so unusual for Ron to be cordial, they glanced at each other uncertainly first.
"What are you working on Harry?" Ron asked brightly, leaning over to look at the documents in front of him.
"…trying to match Hermione's translations to Dumbledore's lessons," he said warily. Ron nodded enthusiastically.
"And you, Hermione?" he asked. But the barely contained anger in his tone and his shaking fists was now clear. Hermione put down her book and tried to subtly grab her wand.
"What's wrong, Ron?" she asked, not wanting to play his game.
"I've just been doing some translation work of my own," he said, passing a piece of parchment to Harry and opening one of his fists to tip something in his hand into the middle of the table.
Hermione couldn't help her reaction as she saw the silver links and ruby charms pour like sand onto the shabby table, winking at them all in the afternoon sun that streamed through the opening to the tent. Her eyes widened as she started and jerked her head up at Harry, recognising what he was reading.
"So. It's not Viktor," Ron said, placing his hands on the table and staring at her. "Who could it be?"
"What gives you the right to break my things?" she asked. Thank God she kept the bangle on her at all times – if he had broken the Protean Charm...
"And why would you lie about it, Hermione?" Ron continued, ignoring her. "That's the real question. What do you think, Harry?"
Harry put Draco's Valentine's note down on the table, and looked at a spot somewhere past Ron's head.
"Apologise to Hermione," Harry said to the middle distance.
"Lying, cheating scum," Ron said softly. "Going behind mine and Ginny's back. You're sick, the pair of you."
Wait, he thought she was with Harry? She suddenly realised how Ron had put the context together incorrectly: Draco's stupid note poorly impersonating Viktor, the arguments Ron had with both her and Harry at Bill and Fleur's wedding. Harry looked at her, and his expression was one of utter exhaustion.
"You were right," he said. "I can't live like this." He stood up, and Hermione quickly followed, gripping her wand tightly with her hand hanging stiffly beside her leg.
"You are completely mental to think Hermione and I are together," Harry said disdainfully, now looking at Ron in the face, eyes lidded with disappointment. "Your judgment is clearly shot and you have done nothing but be deliberately obstructive since the Ministry."
"Easy for you to fucking say," Ron said viciously. "Your side bitch didn't half amputate your arm getting out of there."
"Get out," Harry said, sounding more tired than angry.
"Why?" Ron asked. "So you guys can cuddle up in here, reading your disgusting evil books while you hike uselessly around Britain?"
"So we don't have to slit our wrists listening to this," Harry said icily. "Like this mission isn't depressing enough as it is."
"What mission? You have no idea what you're doing!" Ron yelled, face screwed up in hardened, angry hatred. "This was doomed from the start. You're never finding another horcrux, and we all know it."
Hermione's heart jumped into her throat as Ron said one of the words they were avoiding in case it was Tabbooed. "We need to leave," she whispered to Harry; if it was Tabbooed, they had minutes at most before her wards broke.
"Oh sure, Hermione's made-up rule –" Ron started, but there was no time. She Stunned him and magically threw his unconscious body out of the tent.
"Harry, come on –" she said, grabbing the beaded bag and running out of the tent. He followed her out and she collapsed the tent as quickly as she could, hearing the furniture inside breaking.
"Grab Ron –" she said, but Harry had already done so, reaching out for her hand as she held the rapidly dissembled canvas. They Disapparated, landing on a non-descript riverbed Hermione didn't recognise.
Harry let go of Ron, dropping him on the wet rocks by the water stream.
"Ennervate," Harry cast. And with a coldness Hermione didn't realise he had, Harry grabbed her wrist and Disapparated again before Ron came to.
Harry didn't speak to her again that night, as she tried to fix the parts of the tent that had broken when she rapidly collapsed it, hunting for the tiny silver links and ruby bird and tree charms that Ron had broken, fallen into tiny corners all over the tent. It was still a miserable silence without Ron, only a tiny bit better than the anger that pervaded the camp when he was present.
He's gone, she wrote to Draco that evening, sitting outside the tent while Harry almost certainly lay awake, no sleep finding him.
Finally, Draco replied, and Hermione felt like it should make her cry, but she had nothing, nothing left to give.
A familiar feeling crept into Hermione's soul along with the new winter freeze. It held her tongue when the silences between her and Harry stretched out for hours, as they struggled to translate Ancient Greek and Old English and the remaining foul horcrux texts. It was like a colder, much less friendly version of the sensation she felt after Ron was poisoned in sixth year: that something in her friendship with Harry had cracked, and it was breaking further and farther apart each day.
At least with Ron gone, Harry had not cared when she started drinking again. On occasion he would sit beside her in near silence, drinking as much gin as he could as fast as possible. The alcohol was a slight warmth against the snow that started to fall across the United Kingdom, and the hard dead end they appeared to have run into.
If it was only the snake they could prepare a suicide mission and storm Malfoy manor once Draco said Nagini was there. But Helga Hufflepuff's cup may as well have been the Holy Grail – they had no idea where Voldemort might have hidden it. Harry had taken to opening his mind to Voldemort as much as he could on the off-chance he thought about it (or so he said; Hermione thought this might be the suicidal tendency of someone who could no longer summon the motivation to avoid danger). Hermione, meanwhile, broke her promise of secrecy to Harry and Dumbledore in everything but name.
Has he said anything about Helga Hufflepuff, about treasures or artefacts, she sent Draco, annoying him constantly with questions he did not have answers to. Do you know what places are important to him. And of course he hadn't said anything of the sort, Draco replied, and what did she mean important places – Voldemort didn't care about anything like a normal human would.
They travelled to Helga Hufflepuff's birthplace, to the village where Voldemort's parents had grown up and Voldemort murdered the last of his muggle family, to the orphanage Voldemort was born in.
"What about Borgin and Burkes," she suggested one night, after countless whiskeys.
"He hated that place," Harry said listlessly. "That was just a convenient place for him to spy and steal treasures from. He won't have left it there."
It seemed hard to believe that a few months ago she was eagerly preparing a reading list, begging books on curse breaking off Bill Weasley. In hindsight, her confidence that they would find any curse to break was breath-takingly arrogant and hilariously misplaced. Ron's angry, accurate words echoed around the tent as loud as when he had been there, some days. What mission? It wasn't a hunt, or a quest; it was merely a drudgery in limbo, the muddy grounds of purgatory hardening into frozen earth as time overtook their progress.
And so she and Harry arrived at it, so tired and exhausted that the fact Voldemort had probably laid a trap there hardly seemed a problem: a visit to Godric's Hollow.
"It's probably not there," she felt obliged to point out after they had already agreed, packing up the tent and digging Polyjuice Potion out of her bag. Might be heading into something dangerous, sorry. I'll let you know, she had etched on her bangle, pretending to ignore the heat against her inner wrist that had followed after.
"There is literally nowhere else for us to check," Harry said. "I don't want to hide from my parents anymore." He sounded so sad that Hermione reached out to hold his hand; and for once, he did not pull away. She squeezed Harry's fingers, and then they swallowed the potion, threw on the cloak and Disapparated from the Highland forest they were camping in.
Godric's Hollow was a picturesque English village: cute cottages, snow and twinkling Christmas lights. And it was full of sprites of love and appreciation for the Potters.
"Harry – look," she whispered, as a war memorial in the square transformed into a statue of a happy young family. The stone Lily held her baby Harry up, showing him to the world; and Harry's father James next to them both, with the sculptor clearly focused on capturing his smile.
It was like the Potters beckoned them into the silent, blanketed graveyard by the church. The ground was so soft and the air cut so cold as Hermione opened the creaky gate, wading through the snow like it was waves in the sea. And Harry pointed his lit wand, his voice growing stronger and more excited at each name he recognised, enthralled by the connection across the thin veil of this world and the next.
Hermione felt it, too; she called out for Harry, strong and clear when she recognised the name, Dumbledore. Mother and daughter. Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also, their grave proclaimed, and Hermione thought about the heart Draco had ripped out of her chest and exchanged with his own. The grey between a heart and a body and a soul.
She looked at Harry, whose loud excitement had suffocated on seeing the name of the man who had left them on an endless mission. "Are you sure he never mentioned -?" she asked, but he cut her off, continuing to seek his parents.
Hermione had another false start; a Peverell instead of a Potter. Curiously for a several hundreds year old grave, an ancient carving of Grindelwald's mark was engraved there. She looked away, thinking of Luna and her father, dancing in their yellow robes and blinking at Viktor as he informed them the emblem around Mr Lovegood's neck was a sign of hate. That didn't seem to accord with a much older carving of it being on this grave. Perhaps Viktor had been incorrect, and Luna and her father knew something more about it than she had assumed?
Harry continued checking every tombstone, but by luck or otherwise, she found his parents first.
"Harry," she called out, voice brittle and certain. "They're here…they're right here."
He panicked as he read the engraving under their names, Harry's thoughts suddenly turning to Death Eaters and their useless ideals. She assured him it didn't mean that, it was about living after this world, and Harry cried so steadily and bitterly she thought the snow might melt underneath them with his tears. Hermione held his hand, and he gripped her fingers back tightly as she created a wreath of roses with her wand for him, for James and Lily.
Harry placed it, gentler than anything, on top of the stone that marked where his parents rested. Then, he suddenly put an arm around her and pulled her away, out of the graveyard - and she heard something.
"Wait," she said, pulling apart from him to aim her wand; but Harry seemed not to care about death.
"If it was a Death Eater we'd be dead by now," he said blandly, and she felt her heart harden a little, like it always did when Harry said things about Death Eaters or Slytherins that lit a dim light ahead of her, illuminating things she did not want to see. Hermione pulled Harry deeper into the village after he threw the cloak back over them, looking for the historian who had known Dumbledore and Harry's parents. Until suddenly Harry saw something he was looking for, pulling her along the icy road behind him.
"Look," he urged, staring into something she couldn't see as she tried not to fall over on the icy stone road. "Look, Hermione."
"I don't –" she started, but the destroyed cottage suddenly came into her perception. "Oh!" she gasped.
How was it frozen in time, sixteen years later? But Harry did not care about such questions, leaning over the fence hungrily for the life that was cruelly stolen from him here. Happy, carved messages sprouted up magically from the sign indicating the historic event that took place here. Harry smiled bigger than she had seen in months – maybe years.
And then it slid off his face as he looked past her, behind her. She turned around to watch a tiny, stout figure approach them. Was this the noise she had heard earlier? They were surely not a Death Eater. She felt naked and unprotected by the cloak; the woman could sense them, they all knew this.
Harry called out, making her jump beside him; but Hermione trusted him as he pulled the cloak off their disguised forms. The woman started hobbling back the way she came, and they followed her, silently in the night like ghosts out of the cemetery…and maybe they were already dead, because everything felt different to the mind-numbing, boring world they usually existed in. Soft and sharp all at once.
They entered her house, the scent of death reaching them. The woman shoved past Hermione, and she frowned slightly. Suddenly, a small fleeting worry in her head made her want to speak up.
"Harry, I'm not sure about this," she whispered, barely audible on her exhaled breath.
"We can overpower her if we have to," Harry said; of course he was unconcerned. It was Harry, and these thin, dark situations were where he came into his own. "Listen, I should have told you – Muriel said she wasn't all there."
A hideous clacking noise came from the room Bathilda had just entered; she couldn't help it, Hermione clung to Harry, fearfully grabbing his sleeve. But Harry smiled; he was so brave, and so kind, taking her hand and leading her closer to the woman. To make a noise like that – something about it was ancient magic.
The tiny witch wandered about lighting candles, and Harry hurried over to help her. Hermione looked around the horrible room; dust everywhere, and rotting food. Was Bathilda a hag? That might explain the magic that surrounded her…and the smell.
Harry picked something up from a display cabinet – a piece of paper, perhaps? – as Hermione lit the fire for the elderly lady.
"Mrs – Miss – Bagshot?" he called out, and for the first time, his voice trembled a little. "Who is this?"
A photo, then? Harry brought it over to them both; it was an old wizarding photo of a young man with golden hair.
"Do you know who this is?" Harry insisted, speaking slowly. "What is his name?"
But Bathilda just blinked at him, and Hermione thought of how awful memory magic was. What had Rita Skeeter done to this woman? Hermione's mind flooded, thinking of bugs, bugs in a glass jar prison, bugs crawling over her skin in a bad trip, asking Draco over and over: there are no bugs, are there? And he had looked at her, through the drug kaleidoscope, and said "No, Granger," in that new way he said her name after they made the Vow - making her pause, something catch in her throat.
"Who is this!" Harry yelled, taking her out of her mind and back into the vortex of the present.
"Harry," she said reproachfully, but he was insistent.
"This picture, Hermione!" he said, tone urgent, important. "This is the thief he's hunting!"
The thief Harry muttered about, in the waking and dreaming world; the man who had made Harry collapse as Voldemort hunted him viciously throughout Europe the night before they attacked the Ministry. Of course there was information here. How long they had denied it in the mud and forests of Britain. They were meant to have come to Godric's Hollow, not waste time in the normal world, running from bland, average government terror.
"Why did you ask us to come with you, Ms Bagshot?" Hermione asked, finding her voice at last. "Was there something you wanted to tell us?"
She tottered closer to Harry, and after a moment, he understood.
"Hermione, she wants me to go upstairs with her."
"All right," she said, moving to head up the stairs. But Bathilda turned around, finally acknowledging her, and shook her head.
"Alone," Harry added helpfully.
No. "Why?" she demanded, and Bathilda moved a little in response to her objection.
"It'll be ok, Hermione," he said, totally unafraid, and he followed Bathilda into the hallway. Leaving Hermione alone.
She shook – was it fear, or anger, or both? Hermione strode over to the photographs Harry had been inspecting, throwing one with the golden-haired boy in Harry's dreams into her beaded bag, and frowning at a pink, lurid book, and a note written with memorable bright green ink.
Dear Batty, Thanks for your help! Here's a copy of the book. You said everything, even if you don't remember it. Rita.
Hermione felt the anger tense in her fingers as she shoved the book into her bag as well. Next time they were dying of boredom in the wastes of Britain and their youth, she was going to find Rita.
And then –
The sound of something fragile shattering.
Calling out to Harry suddenly, and the silence, the loudest silence she had ever heard following it.
Running up the stairs and into the hell she and Harry sought out, that secret place which burned the most terrible things into her eyes, while she was unable to look away.
It was Nagini, she knew, on top of Harry, strangling the life out of him.
"Bombarda!" she screamed, focusing her explosion, hoping her aim was true – but Voldemort's snake was made of sterner stuff than his measly Death Eaters. The curse bounced off Nagini's shiny scales, and the snake recoiled, at least letting go of Harry – and ready to strike.
Horcrux, she remembered dumbly after she aimed a different and just as futile fire hex at Nagini, screaming as she ducked from the snake's strike. The curse, again, rebounded, breaking the window, sending glass everywhere, into her hands.
Fang, Hermione thought, pointing her wand into her bag. Accio fang. The basilisk fang sprung from the beaded clutch; Hermione clenched it in her left hand, pure adrenaline springing in her muscles as she leapt up in the dark, broken room.
There was Nagini, horrific and eldritch, shining though there was no light. "Protego!" Hermione screamed, but it was no use; Nagini passed through the Shield Charm as though it were merely a Lumosed light. And after all the men Hermione had cut down, their hateful names and corpses blurring together, it was her own blood that finally flew free, arcing like Yaxley's had as Nagini's fangs sunk into her wand hand.
Hand for a horcrux, something in her recalled, as she stabbed with the basilisk fang. Finally, with Slytherin's Monster's venom, she had a magic that could touch Nagini. The snake recoiled wildly as the basilisk venom touched her.
"He's coming!" Harry screamed. "Hermione, he's coming!" But Nagini had found her again in the dark – fangs tearing into her thigh, tail smacking the fang out of her hand.
Harry kicked the snake off her, grabbing her arm and pulling her away; and Hermione screamed as he did, Nagini's fangs doing even more damage on the way out as the snake's mouth disconnected from her leg.
"Confringo!" she screamed, aiming her bloodied wand at Nagini as she leapt at Harry. The pain from her body channeled through her wand and shattered across Nagini's still strong hide, hitting a mirror. Reflective, painful glass exploded everywhere, into her face, her hands. Still Harry ran, dragging Hermione behind him, and she heard loud steps as he pulled her out of the window, turning them into thin air and suffocation.
And then – they were back in the still snow of Scotland they had left an hour prior. A silent night apart from Harry's stiff convulsions and her gasps for frozen air.
"Harry!" she whispered, leaning over him; but her leg gave way and her vision blurred, and Hermione fell in the snow. The snow warming with her red blood, her life dripping a river into the forest haunted by the death fey Ly Erg.
Everything was dark and growing darker still. Hermione pulled her bangle off. Glenmore Forest Highland Scotland, she sent as quickly as she could, and then the ground was by her head. "Tân nwy," she mumbled, watching a tall pine tree explode into flames just as her vision rolled away.
Author's note: Just in case anyone thought it might be less miserable without wearing a horcrux, or that every non-magical idea like hard drugs was going to be a winner.
Voldemort is banging on the door of this fic, really wanting to be let in lol. Tom's my favourite character in the series so it's hard to keep him out!