Note: this is an AU, set in sixth year and disregarding completely the HBP summer and events during the school year. An irrational reality, one that I've just noticed is kind of like Lord of the Flies. I'm not looking, however, to kill off some random main characters.
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Hermione is dreaming, although she thinks outside of the dream and knows she will remember it when she wakes. There is a hill that she stands on and it's tall and grassy, lit by the harvest moon above. She can taste salt spray on her lips, though she can't feel it against her skin, and all around her little island is a sea, calm but filled with waves.
Someone swims through the sea and, when near to her little hill, she sees it to be Harry, his bare and pale chest shining in the moonlight, marred with two great bloody gashes. She cannot move, and maybe it's because she doesn't want to, though Harry looks at her beseechingly for a moment, his glasses perfectly dry though buffeted by sea spray.
Harry opens his mouth and blood runs out of it, staining the perfect blue of the water, and she thinks detachedly that he will say something. He looks as though he is yelling to her, though she cannot hear him in the perfect silence. She tries, then, to break off of her little hill, but finds she is a part of it, all covered in the grass and dirt, warm under the surface.
Harry screams, finally, and she hears a loud buzzing of a huge swarm of bees, and then he sinks beneath the surface, narrow arms and hands resting on the top of the calm water before disappearing with a slopping sound underneath it.
Hermione doesn't remember the dream, but perhaps that's only because being shaken roughly and smashing your nose into a pile of pillows isn't the best way to wake up at four in the morning.
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"You want to go now? At four in the morning?"
Hermione, still half-asleep, looks at Ginny's face lit by the glow of a candle she is holding. It is excited, with sparkling eyes, and the youngest Weasley looks as though she is a little girl again, playing in a green meadow filled with hidden secrets.
"We can be back before breakfast. Maybe there'll be elves there, and we can bring back food!" Ginny's voice is quiet but forceful. "Come on."
She doesn't want to get out from under her covers and, indeed, she can't until Ginny moves aside. After a few seconds of Hermione sleepily staring at her she finally understands and hops off the bed to lean against the wall, her red hair pulled into a loose ponytail swinging behind her. Hermione yanks the covers off herself and, although steeled for the inrush of coldness, is pleasantly surprised that the warming spells are working.
"You're still wearing your clothes from yesterday?" Ginny surveys her with a sharp gaze. "Get on something warmer. The rest of the castle won't be this comfortable."
By the flickering light of the candle Hermione smiles and makes for the grey darkness of her chest. "I know that, Ginny."
Beneath what seems, in the early morning, like piles upon piles of books, a veritable ocean of clothing, is an old caftan-type knitted thing of yarn. She pulls it out with some difficulty and holds it up in the dim light.
Ginny smiles like a child, irrepressibly, and Hermione smiles ashamedly in response. "From Aunt Elaine. She never did like me much."
"It looks like one of my mum's. They should get together sometime."
The terrible picture of her strict, old, wizened aunt being in the same room as Mrs. Weasley is unimaginable, and for a perfect moment she forgets that Mrs. Weasley is outside—perhaps safe, perhaps dead—and, just like the tattered edge of her aunt's amateur knitting, is torn from reality. She knows that Ginny thinks of that too because her face darkens.
"Let's go, then."
Hermione pulls on the knitted monstrosity, the yarn tickling her face, and Ginny opens the door, its hinges squeaking. Her room is now large in the sudden darkness and she follows the dark red hair that is tied up in a loose braid in front of her.
"Won't Seamus get mad?"
Ginny turns to look back, at the top of a long, curling spiral of stairs. "I talked to him last night, while you were asleep. He was trying to get some rest before he went out—I don't know why he volunteered. But I think I got through—he was sprawled in his chair and looked half-dead. He kind of nodded, or something."
Hermione rolls her eyes and starts down the stairs. They are slippery, stone worn with little half-moons in the middle of the steps, and for a second it feels like she will fall. Her hand grasps, in the moment when her heart stopped for fear, the wall. Nails scrape it, barely perceptibly, and then she catches herself.
Ginny, in front of her, hadn't even noticed, and they continued down the dark tunnels of hallways and stairs until reaching the Common Room. It isn't lit brightly; the fire is almost out and provides no real light, and the only other illumination comes from a set of three candles in a holder on a desk. Everything is empty and quiet, and as they come to the portrait hole Hermione draws even with Ginny. Passing through the door together, both are hit by the wave of coldness that sweeps down the deserted hallway, as black and frigid as the night outside.
It looks bleak, the way in front of them, and Hermione thinks that the candle provides almost no light, certainly not enough to feel safe. But Ginny seems perfectly happy with her impending freedom from the Common Room and empty classrooms and has a slight bounce to her step, almost imperceptible if not seen in conjunction with her flushed and happy face.
"We planned today last night."
The sentence sounds strange until Hermione makes sense of it. "Oh, the meeting. Was it any good?"
"Not much. Without you there were only five people there. Just the same old boring reports for most of it." Her voice deepens, apparently in mockery of Seamus. "And what shall we do now? Vote? Oh, look, it passed unanimously. What a surprise."
Hermione doesn't find it that funny but laughs as they round a corner. It is different, walking with Ginny in the early morning, than talking with her in the Common Room or going to get breakfast.
"We're having showers after the party tonight. It looks like the reservoir on the roof's pretty full from the snow a few nights ago and we're going to heat it. Somewhere."
"What's with the party, anyway?"
"Oh, the same." Ginny shrugs and the candle moves up and down, its shadows shaking on the walls. "Some music. Games, whatever people cook up. Food. Speaking of which, if there's stuff in the kitchen, we get first pick!"
Hermione brightens at the thought of exotic foods like warm eggs and sausage or actual coffee. "Merlin, I hope so."
She doesn't think that there's anything off with what she has just said but she sees Ginny looking at her with a perplexed expression. "You sounded like Seamus."
Their conversation lapses into silence until they reach the West Corridor. Seamus is, true to Ginny's word, collapsed in a chair pulled up in front of the door. His candle had gone out sometime during the night and he looks exhausted. Ginny bends down to look into his face.
"His eyes are shut." Her whisper is like the thinnest wisp of air.
Hermione tentatively pushes open the door to reveal yet another stretch of hall and then looks back to Ginny. "Shouldn't we wake him to tell him we're going?"
Ginny shakes her head. "Why? We'll be back before he gets up. It's only around seven minutest to the kitchens, and that's with traffic."
Hermione takes four more steps out, into the completely black corridor, damp with the smell of mildew and age, and Ginny closes the door behind her. Their little circle of light doesn't make the shadows any better and the walk ahead looks bleak. She wants to break the silence, but not at the cost of having Ginny make up some game about seeing things in the shadows.
She broaches the subject that she has tried not to think about for the past minutes. "What d'you think about the Hufflepuffs?"
Ginny's face darkens, both in expression and because the flame shifts beneath it and she looks like a serious clown from a circus. "I dunno. Neville thought the Slytherins got them."
"What, and are holding them in terrible dungeons?"
"Actually, Colin started to spin a nice tale about how they were torturing them by skinning them alive. I don't think Seamus cared for it."
She can imagine his reaction. "And you?"
"Oh."
Ginny is silent for a while, and the only sound then is both their feet hitting the hallways as they veer to the right and down a flight of wide stairs.
"I…" Ginny's voice is very quiet and scared. "It's not—I mean, they can't be gone. The Slytherins couldn't have taken the whole House, it's—it's impossible, look at Susan." Her voice gains strength as she convinces herself. "They'd fight back, of course they would, and unless—"
They arrive at the bottom of the staircase and Ginny falls abruptly silent again, not finishing her sentence. Hermione constructs different endings to it in her head, but all lead to essentially one point: unless Death Eaters were helping them.
"They can't be. It's just not possible. They would have gotten us already."
It is morbid. but she can tell Ginny is relieved. "You're right. Of course."
There are some more hallways, filled to the brim with nothing aside from faded tapestries and dusty statues and then a large painting looms up in her vision to her left. Both she and Ginny stop and stand in front of it, and Hermione raises her eyebrows. The bowl of fruit seems to have been invaded by the inhabitants of other paintings: she can see Violet, the Fat Lady's friend, asleep on a pile of grapes that had spilled out of the bowl onto the velvet-covered table that served as the painting's background, and an old hag who could possibly be a man is crouched in front of the large pear, his (her?) legs astride the stem of an apple.
"You'd be wanting in?"
Ginny jumps and Hermione is filled with chills at the unexpected voice from a painting that she didn't think would talk. A small boy, who looks only nine or ten, is perched on the side of the wooden bowl. He is dressed in brown trousers and an white shirt, opened half-way to reveal a pale and freckled chest, all while being around five inches tall.
He looks Irish, and Hermione thinks of Seamus, asleep in his chair.
"Yes, please." Ginny, she sees, decides to go for the polite route.
The boy lifts a miniscule harp from the bowl to his side where he had put it down. He plucks a string and it rings out smoothly from the painted surface. "And why'd that be?"
He speaks in a lilting voice, like the stereotypical Irish peasant shown on documentaries back in the Muggle world. "There's not much in the kitchen nowadays."
"Can we check?"
The boy's small face peers at Ginny, who is a few inches away from the canvas. "You'd be Gryffindors, wouldn't ya?"
"Yes."
"Alright, then."
There is a small movement as the boy puts his harp down, and then he climbs up a pile of fruit, tiptoeing across the surfaces of grapes and an apricot so as not to wake the others. He extends a little hand as both she and Ginny watch with baited breath and then he tickles the pear. The painting opens.
In front of them is a cavernous room. Hermione hasn't been down here that often and walks into the great kitchen with a sense of wonder. Though much of the room is cloaked in a half-light that fails to show any movement, a few enormous windows near the ceiling let in what seems to be the sun, rising early, or is simply an enchantment like the Great Hall.
She walks over, quickly, across the great expanse, to a line of two-story cabinets, with huge doors that look as though they would hide food. Ginny is behind her, almost on her heels, presumably in excitement. They both arrive at the cupboards together and Ginny, reaching out a hand, yanks one of the gargantuan doors open by a low and little wooden handle. It almost hits Hermione, but she jumps aside to peer into the darkness of the cabinet.
Shady piles of boxes and bags line shelf after shelf in front of them, from their feet to well above their heads, and a horrible smell drifts out.
Ginny wrinkles her nose even as she reaches and pulls out a bag into the light of her candle. "You'd think there'd be preservation spells or something."
Hermione looks over her shoulder with keen interest: right now, at five in the morning, nothing is more important that what is in Ginny's hands. She shuts the door to block out the odor as Ginny, with trembling hands and wide eyes, opens the unmarked bag.
"Flour." A cloud of white dust had flown up in her face and she coughs, closing the bag. "We could make something with this, if there was sugar and eggs—"
Hermione thinks the probability of them finding eggs is fairly low, but she truly smiles, if only at Ginny's cooking mentality.
"Here. Hold this, I'll look for more. Take the candle too."
Though she is relegated to holding a heavy bag of flour in one hand and a candle in the other, Hermione thinks that it's much easier to do that than prod around in dark and stinking cabinets, potentially filled with all kinds of rotting food. But Ginny apparently is digging into her task with gusto and already she removes two more flour bags.
"More flour."
Looking around the kitchen is the only other thing to do aside from watching Ginny's arms dart in and out of the cupboard and so she sets the flour down next to the other two bags and, holding the candle out in front of her, begins to walk away towards a pair of giant fireplaces against the far wall.
"I can't see anything without that candle, Hermione."
"Sorry."
Ginny emerges from the cabinet to look at her. "Just leave it here, on the floor. I think this is sugar." She holds the bag aloft towards Hermione, as if she wanted anther opinion.
After depositing the candle on the ground she resumes her journey across the massive room. It is much bigger than when she and Harry came visiting Dobby, and without the general clatter of hundreds of house-elves cooking who-knows-what, it seems much larger than before. She cannot see much, aside from what is bathed in the grey light from the windows, and though making her way around various tables in the middle of the kitchen is easy enough she steps on something.
Hermione looks at her feet.
"Ginny!"
Her faint cry makes the other girl turn, a large can of something cradled to her chest. "What?"
The voices echo in the corners like a dream.
"There's a—" Hermione turns around quickly and looks straight ahead, because it's better than looking down at what she could possibly step on. Breaking into a half-hearted run, she quickly meets Ginny halfway across the room. She grabs Ginny's arms, not caring if her fingers bite into them.
Ginny's face is innocent and filled with a mixture of fear and curiosity. "What?" she asks, more insistently, and shakes away Hermione's grip. "What's wrong?"
"It's an elf."
Ginny's face is confused for a second, all contorted into little wrinkles, and then Hermione knows she understands. She thinks that their faces must mirror each others, both grasped in a shudder of fright and revulsion, though only one has seen what is on the floor, almost completely hidden in the darkness under one of the long counters that roll around the kitchen on huge wheels.
"On the floor. I stepped on… on its head."
They both start back towards the pile of food, walking with an unsteady and uncomfortably fast gait. "Why would it be?"
It could be a question in and of itself or an unfinished sentence and Hermione tries to figure out through her rebelling stomach what had happened. "They're magic, almost all magic, you know."
Her mind slowly works through the knowledge silently, until Ginny interrupts, and then she realizes that they are at the cupboards again. "Like the wands?"
It's terrible, and Hermione picks up some bags of flour in one hand to accompany her revulsion, somehow managing to hold their weight, and hoists what seems to be a can of dried tomatoes against her body with the other. "Let's go. We can come back later, if Seamus wants. Or he can come himself."
Ginny, though clearly shaken by the unseen but dead house-elf on the floor, takes a last, longing look at the shelves. "There was… sugar. I got some."
Hermione doesn't care now and she moves quickly towards the door that is the beginning of the way back to Gryffindor. "Let's just leave."
She thinks that Ginny is taking as much food as possible in her arms but doesn't really care; like last night, things are too quick and too much for her. Even though she doesn't have the candle—it bobs along behind her with Ginny, its shadows whirling on the walls—she doesn't care, and when she pushes the door open and sees the complete darkness beyond she walks into it, fearing more what is behind her than ahead.
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It is much easier to think when she is before the Fat Lady, and when Hermione says "Forti et fideli nihil difficile" her voice betrays no outward emotion and she says the Latin perfectly. The Fat Lady smiles at her correctness and pats her hair, which appears to be in a sort of disarray. "They say that you two were at the kitchens a bit ago."
"Oh, yes." There is much more she can say but she refrains and the portrait looks put off.
"Well, then. Nick said you two were the first ones in there for a few weeks."
Ginny, her arms unburdened by the food she had dropped off in the food storage room, folds them tightly across her chest in a mix of curiosity and annoyance. "Nick—you mean that adorable little Irish boy?"
The Fat Lady seems taken aback by her question. "Of course, dear. Haven't you seen him before, by the Great Hall?"
Both she and Ginny shake their heads.
"A pity. He's such a charming boy—oh, yes, I'm sorry," the Fat Lady says when she realizes they've been waiting. "Have a good morning."
She opens and the Common Room is spread out in front of them, like a great tapestry filled with things different but the same, contributing to a greater whole. Stepping in, with Ginny behind, Seamus gets up from a chair, where he had apparently been waiting for them.
"And you two were…" His voice, though clearly still tired from staying awake all night, is brimming with anger.
Hermione looks pointedly at Ginny and she throws up her hands. "It's not my fault you were half-asleep when I asked!"
A few heads turn towards the trio, out of the scattering of people down in the Common Room this early, and Ginny blushes a bit. "I only mean, I asked you, and you nodded," she said, much quieter.
"Where were you?"
Hermione speaks then, mostly to keep Ginny from making a fool of herself. "In the kitchens."
More people turn to them, just like yesterday, and Hermione wants to keep this from developing into something big. "It was—fine. We'll tell you later."
She practically drags Ginny away from Seamus, who is staring at them with hard eyes. "You didn't actually ask him?"
Ginny sighs. "Yes, I did. It wasn't my fault that he wasn't awake."
Hermione is annoyed and tired and still feels queasy. "Fine." She slumps in a chair, vibrating with an energy she doesn't want to hold in but has to. Ginny sits beside her, as if she wanted to comfort her, and Hermione refuses to look at her and thinks. It's only been two days since things have turned around. And then she thinks back further and finds, in the quiet buzzing of the Common Room, that it's only been around three months since everything was regular. The same.
"It's been long—"
Ginny looks up at her inquiringly. "What?"
"Never mind."
She knows Ginny will want to get going to do something, overriding her concern. Within two more minutes of a stony silence Ginny gets to her feet. "I'll go and get things ready."
Hermione shrugs, her eyes staring blindly at the ceiling, and wishes Harry was here.
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Ginny doesn't know why things are so hard, because they shouldn't be.
She thinks of her mother standing over the expansive, porcelain kitchen sink in the Burrow that her dad had brought home from work, saying it was from an old Muggle home. It has always acted up, spewing water out of the little hose-spraying-thing, and her mum constantly whispers nasty things at it when she thinks no one is looking. Ginny can see her there, right now, with hair pulled back, looking tiredly out the window onto the garden, blanketed so thickly by protective wards that the gnomes have been driven away.
The twins, then, messing in their room, back from their shop, testing some contraption or doing other horrible things she's always suspected but never dared to bring up. Charlie, and Bill, both back from whatever they've been doing with the Order, crowded around the kitchen table and making joking small talk with their mother, trying to cheer her up. Her father, still going off to work at the Ministry because he feels it's his duty, even with two of his children in Hogwarts, if even.
If any of that was true, it would be the biggest relief in her whole life, and she thinks that if Ron knew about something that good he would be jolted out of his depression and actually, or only maybe actually, do something.
Ginny doubts that any of that is true, and she knows that probably someone is dead, and somewhere deep in her heart she is secretly glad that she's kind of safe at Hogwarts, instead of out in the real world where things happen. Presumably, of course.
She decides, then, as she sees a rush of people headed towards her just like in her dream last night except with more clothes on—that was a strange dream, that was—that although this is hard, it's good enough. For now, at least.
For now.
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