Author's Note: This is kind of short…ah well. Thanks for the nice review, lyesmith, it was greatly appreciated, and as to your previous review, well, you'll just have to wait patiently until later chapters for your questions to be answered, won't you:)In the meantime, read on.
Chapter 8
Godric's Hollow
Hermione stood in the Weasley's sitting room near the fire, fidgeting nervously. They were going. They were finally going. It hardly seemed real. Harry had just taken Ginny into the kitchen after her outburst a few minutes earlier. She wondered what Harry was saying to her; she wasn't exactly sure about he'd feel about her wanting to join them at Godric's Hollow. He knew it pained him a great deal not to be able to be with her; the look in his eyes when she was in sight told everything.
At that moment the door to the kitchen swung open and Harry came through it, looking extremely pale.
"Let's go," he said quickly, grabbing a handful of Floo powder from next to the grate and stepping in. Ron and Hermione glanced at each other surreptitiously, worried expressions on their faces. Hermione looked back at Harry who threw the powder into the fire and shouted "Godric's Hollow!" into the bright green flames, spinning around and disappearing instantly.
She and Ron each looked at the empty grate, and then back at each other. Things can't have gone well in the kitchen.
"What do you…er…think happened?" Ron asked, looking concerned. Hermione shook her head and looked back at the empty fireplace, feeling as anxious as Ron looked.
"But we'd better go…he'll wonder what we're doing," she said, stepping toward the fire and grabbing a handful of powder. "And remember, the password's 'Phoenix feather'. Godric's Hollow!" She shouted the name as green flames erupted around her and sent her into a spinning flurry, grates zooming past her eyes.
At the wedding that day Hermione and Harry and Ron had talked with Remus Lupin, who had told them everything he knew about Harry's parents' old mansion. There were precautions and spells set on it, but not nearly as many as Hermione remembered Grimmauld Place as having. You couldn't Apparate within miles of Godric's Hollow unless you knew the counter-charm, which Lupin did not. What Lupin did know, however, was the password to enter through the fire. He had told them that if anyone tried to access the manor through Floo powder, and didn't have the password, they were completely frozen in the grate, not able to move a muscle until a counter-curse was performed. He had begun recounting the many a time the Potters had found frozen witches or wizards in their fireplace and had to remove them.
"But they never, ever took that charm off," Lupin had chuckled, looking reminiscent. But suddenly his prematurely lined face had turned somber. "But if they had, they might have been gone…even sooner." It was at that point that Ron and Hermione had exchanged uncomfortable looks while Lupin hugged Harry and bid the other two a farewell.
As glimpses into hundreds of different wizarding homes whizzed past her eyes Hermione squeezed them shut before she started to feel sick. Just seconds later she found herself in an enormous fireplace looking into an equally mammoth scarlet-colored sitting room, unable to move a muscle. This was a problem, she discovered, because she was unable to move the muscles of her mouth to speak the password. Gazing around at the large, comfortable looking armchairs and sofas, Hermione's heart started to pound loudly in her chest.
Phoenix feather, she thought desperately. Phoenix feather, Phoenix feather! And to her surprise, she felt each muscle in her body relax again and she was able to move and step out of the fireplace, dusting soot off of her robes. Immediately after she walked into the sitting room she saw Harry at the far end of the gigantic high-ceilinged room examining objects in a glass and chestnut armoire. She headed over to him and as she did she heard a small pop in the grate behind her and knew that Ron had arrived. She hoped that he would be able to unfreeze himself.
As she reached Harry she looked over his shoulder into the extremely dusty glass case. It contained various ancient-looking sorted items of which included a massive teardrop ruby necklace on a stand, a golden ring on a long silver chain, and a mysterious looking black case with dull gray clasps. Hermione put her hand on Harry's shoulder and he turned to face her, his face just as pasty as it had been in the Weasley's sitting room.
"It's big," he said roughly, his voice echoing as he looked around the room with his hands in his pockets. Well, that may be the understatement of the year, thought Hermione. She thought that her parent's entire house might be able to fit in only this sitting room. The handsomely paneled walls were bedecked with paintings of people in magnificent settings; there were gray-haired men in high-backed chairs around a table playing an odd game with coins and a pretty elderly witch sagging with sparkling jewels who looked as though she might be Harry's grandmother. A long bookcase filled with hundreds and hundreds of very dusty, very old-looking books also took up much of the wall opposite the fireplace.
Ron, it turned out, had managed to remove himself from said fireplace, though it took him a considerable amount of time more than it had taken Hermione. He joined Hermione and Harry who had now taken to examining the books that were in the bookcase. They varied in subjects from A Study of the Dark Arts and How to Protect Yourself, and Spectacular Spells in Five Minutes Tops! Just as Hermione had cracked open Do-It-Yourself Wand Repair, she heard Harry mumble something about looking at the rest of the house and wander off through the doorway and into what looked like the entrance hall. She slipped the book back into its place on the shelf, followed by a puff of dust, and looked at Ron who was gazing towards the door that Harry had just exited through.
"Do you think he'll be okay?" he asked, frowning slightly.
"I think he just needs alone time," said Hermione, heading towards a door in the opposite direction of the one that lead into the entrance hall, followed by Ron. It turned out to lead to the massive kitchen. Dulled pots and pans hung from the ceiling and white marble counter stretched around the perimeter of the room. There was a rectangular counter in the middle of the kitchen, also, on top of which sat a wooden cutting board and several pieces of stray silverware. A floor-to-ceiling stove was also against the wall, looking as though it hadn't been used in years, which, Hermione reminded herself, it probably hadn't.
Leaving the kitchen, she and Ron moved on to explore what they could of the house (there were several doors that remained mysteriously locked, even when the counter-charm was performed). There were four floors in all, not including the basement which was a dingy, low ceilinged room with a dirt floor and cobbled walls. They had not lingered there. Wondering where Harry might be, though not wanting to intrude on his privacy, Hermione and Ron exited the last room they had been looking around (the fantastic cheerfully yellow-walled drawing room) and headed outside. Godric's Hollow looked fabulously majestic from the outside. The walls were of red brick and incompletely blanketed with thick green ivy. On the north wall was a white trellis crawling with enormous, beautifully overgrown roses that smelled absolutely glorious. Tower-like peaks rose from the roof of the house and a colossal octagonal window which came from the north sitting room jutted out of the side of the house. Towering old pine trees were growing around the manor, which was surrounded on the north, east, and south sides with dense forest. The brick walkway that led to the door extended fifty or sixty yards all the way up a sloping hill to large iron gates flanked by stone lions the crouched on posts, looking ready to pounce.
Hermione, it turned out, had been right when she had suggested that Harry needed a bit of alone time. Over the next few days he remained secluded from the other two, his favorite haunts including the balcony that branched from what appeared to be his parents' old bedroom on the second floor, and the greenery-covered gazebo in the backyard. Hermione felt quite helpless, not to mention useless to soothe Harry's pain, and she was sure that Ron felt the same way. To break the awkward boredom, she and Ron had taken to cleaning the dusty place. By the end of the second day they had gotten rid of about three boggarts, dusted every room from head to toe, and tuned the old grand piano which stood in a room on the third floor by magic.
By the end of their third day at Godric's Hollow, Hermione was starting to feel exasperated to the point of tears. She lay in the bed that she had selected to be her own (in a dark mauve bedroom on the third floor) and couldn't help wondering whether they would ever get anything productive done here. She was still getting the Daily Prophet, which reported more and more deaths each day and growing destruction caused by the Death Eaters. Harry's moodiness was starting to grate on her nerves, and so in the morning she had gotten up, prepared breakfast for the other two, seized as many books as she could from the bookcase in the south sitting room, and spent the rest of the day locked in her room reading them. She had felt bad about leaving Ron to fend for himself with only the non-talkative Harry for company, but she felt as though she might explode if she spent another minute wondering what they were going to do and when they were going to do it.
Moonlight twinkled in through Hermione's window as she lay restlessly in bed, books strewn on the floor below her. She could hear faint movements from below her, and knew Harry was awake. Again. As far as she knew, he hadn't slept since their first night here. She wondered what had happened to her friend Harry that she used to know, because this wasn't him. He had been replaced by a reclusive, ashen-faced boy who hadn't spoken to anyone in days.
Sighing heavily, Hermione sat up and felt around for her wand on her bedside table, lighting it when she found it. Giving up on sleep, she heaved herself out of bed and stepped quietly out of her bedroom into the dimly lit hallway. Ron's muffled snores came from behind a door on the other end of the hall as Hermione made her way out to the landing and down the immense staircase.
The second floor was comprised of two different corridors. Off of one of these branched the drawing room, another spare bedroom, and a magnificent sparkling bathroom complete with a bath the size of a swimming pool sunken into the middle of the floor. It reminded Hermione rather of the prefects' bathrooms at Hogwarts, except lacking the assorted bubbling taps around the edge. But she headed not for that corridor, but for the second one. Her bare feet made hardly a sound on the dusty wood floors as she walked towards a door on her left that stood slightly open. A dim, flickering light told her that there was a fire dying in the grate, and she pushed the door open more, peering inside.
Author's Note: I know, lame ending…:( Sorry. Not much happened in this chapter except for arriving at Godric's Hollow and whatnot…I apologize. Next chapter is more exciting. But I have a question to be answered if you are going to review:I have this awesome idea about getting Harry and Ginny back together, and it's so romantic. But like...I dunno if it's too cliche, to get them back together? Feedback, anyone?Read and review: the good, the bad, and the ugly!