A/N: I hear you all enjoyed the last chapter... Glad to hear :P I did warn you though, so... there's that.
As always, massive thanks to Lib for all she does.
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Hermione watched her breath on the air as she sat against a nearby tree. As had happened every time she had a little time to herself, her thoughts were on Minerva and she ran her thumb over the ribbon that remained doggedly attached to her wrist. She tried to smile as she felt the heat in reply, but she couldn't. The tears that had been threatening to fall since they'd left Godric's Hollow in such a rush, started falling and just kept falling.
Ron had left them, and she was still so angry with him, and Harry wore the locket often enough that she had started to despise him for his dark moods. Not that hers were better. She was so angry. They had done everything the hard way and everything had seemed to have gone wrong. She was so much better than this and she hated what had happened at Godric's Hollow. And she hated Ron for being so cowardly. And she hated herself for wanting to just pack it all in and go home.
She got up in a huff and paced endlessly.
They had been at this for nearly six months, and they were no better off than they were when they started. In fact, despite now having a Horcrux in their possession, it was possible that they were worse off than when they began, having lost Harry's wand and said goodbye to Ron in the process.
Her wrist warmed again and she stopped, taking a deep breath of cold air and calming down. The ribbon had turned out to be Hermione's saving grace. Whenever she was scared or lonely or angry, Minerva seemed to know. So far, she'd only felt the reciprocating warmth when she needed it but after hearing about the world on Ron's radio not too long ago, she feared for Minerva's future. There were whispers of what was happening at Hogwarts and she could not bring herself to even imagine what they were going through.
It broke her heart.
She took another breath and ran her thumb over the ribbon once more, telling Minerva that she was okay. She wished she had thought to make something more communicative, but it was enough for now. It was enough to know that Minerva was with her. She looked up at the sky and noticed a few constellations that she recognised and remembered something.
She was not far from where Minerva had lost her watch, nearly a year ago. Her breathing quickened as she glanced at the tent and then out into the darkened forest.
It was risky to even attempt and after a year, it was not likely that something as trivial as a watch would even be there still. They had no idea who else was in the forest and they knew that there were roving parties of Snatchers combing the countryside, but this was worth it, wasn't it? It meant a lot to Minerva, which meant that it mattered a lot to Hermione too. She nodded to herself and put away her wand, trialling her wandless magic as she had been doing since Minerva taught her. If anything she almost preferred not to use a wand for some things these days. Minerva had been right in those first few weeks: Magic was breathing. And, it was just another way to be close to the woman she loved so deeply.
Making up her mind, she went back to the tent and peered inside. The locket was hanging on the bedpost and Harry was asleep in the chair by the fire. She was in two minds whether to wake him but she decided against it. She didn't necessarily want him to wake up to her gone, but he'd also worn the locket for two days and he was so exhausted. So she left him sleeping. She scrawled a quick note on a piece of spare parchment and left it beside him with her wand. Seeing as they were sharing now, it was only fair that he keep it, just in case. She stood, panicking a little at what she planned on doing until she decided that she didn't care. Harry could forgive her this one thing.
Just this once, she would do something that she wanted to do.
Not for the Order, not for the good of the people. Not for Harry. For herself. She pulled on her coat and scarf and used the wand to alter her features just enough so it wasn't immediately obvious who she was. She took one more look at her best friend, and then she strode out of the tent, across the boundary protections and out into the forest.
As she stepped over the boundaries that she made herself, she knew she might have a hard time finding her way back. Hermione Granger, however, was nothing if not resourceful. She pulled a ribbon from her bag and tied one to a branch, just outside the protective circle. She just hoped that she would be able to find it again after she returned.
Assuming she did return.
She knew that it was risky, of course she did. At best, she would have to come back to this exact spot and wait for Harry to fetch her back inside the protections. At worst, however -
She didn't want to think too much about that.
Seeing as she was already outside, she set off north in the hope of eventually stumbling upon Goodrich Castle. She knew from memory that she was close to where her parents had taken her camping - a smaller campground just north of the Muggle motorway through the forest. Logically, that meant that the castle was further north still and she set off that way, working out roughly where she was going from the stars above them. The forest was anything but silent and as the distance between Harry and herself grew, it did not take her long to realise that she was an idiot for making such a rash decision. Hearing a noise off to her left, she dropped to the floor and rolled beneath a fallen tree, watching through the dark. With no wand and a rapidly diminishing sense of bravado, she was a sitting duck. She'd never been so relieved to see a badger waddle across the clearing, just beyond where she was hiding. As she moved to leave her spot, she heard another noise and froze.
No badger was big enough to make that sort of noise.
She tucked herself back under the log as quietly as she could as two sets of boots crashed into the loam, not two inches from where she'd just been about to appear. Her heart was in her mouth and she clamped her lips shut in case they heard her breathing. She tried to stay calm, but when one of them turned around, she just managed to bite off a squeak as the moonlight shone off something wet on the boot. It looked very much like blood and she was not interested in taking a closer look. She lay as still as possible, berating herself for her stupidity while they hung out in the clearing. She couldn't hear too much of what they were saying over the heartbeat thumping in her ears, but she let out a soft breath when a third pair of boots joined them. There was a flash of light and she stopped breathing completely until she realised they were just lighting a cigarette before they walked off in the opposite direction. She nearly wet herself in relief.
Once she was sure they were gone, she climbed out of the hollow tree and crouched down behind. She wondered, perhaps, if it was the locket's influence that had pushed her away from Harry so insistently. But now she was here, she might as well get on with it. She would go, she would look and whether she found it or not, she would return to where she thought she needed to and that would be it.
Honestly, it would have been so much easier to do this with a wand in hand, but she could not have left Harry unprotected. It was one thing to make a horrendously selfish decision, it was quite another to be that selfish. She shook her head and cleared her thoughts. She took another look at the stars but the clearing was not very big and beyond it, it looked very dark. She needed a new plan.
Glancing around again, she leant against the tree and considered her options. She could continue walking in the direction she was going. Potentially, she could stumble upon it, but there was a much greater potential of her missing it completely. After Minerva had told her about it, Hermione had looked up Goodrich castle on a map and in a few books that she found in the library. If she had her wand, she could simply apparate there, take a quick look for the watch, and be back with Harry in no time at all. The problem was, of course, that nobody could Apparate without a wand.
Nobody.
Not a single person.
Ever.
Except, Hermione reasoned, nobody had ever tried it, as far as she knew. After their six months of exile afforded her time to practise, Hermione was well aware that she had the proclivity for the evolved power that Minerva had alluded to. She no longer had to think of the spell to levitate something or to summon something. She didn't really even need to move her hand. She only needed to think about something and it would often shoot into her hand without hesitation. So if summoning could be done without a spell or a wand, and levitation could be done without a spell or a wand -
Maybe.
Just maybe.
She stood cautiously and stepped into the clearing. Knowing she would have to be the calmest she'd ever been, she relaxed her shoulders and rolled her neck. She filtered out all of her thoughts, except for where she was going. She wanted to arrive just outside of the field that Goodrich Castle sat in. From the picture she'd studied, there was a line of trees that bordered the north and west walls. If she arrived there, she could take note of any hostiles from a place of cover and act accordingly. Beyond that, she needed to find somewhere where the scars of battle remained and if she could not, she would immediately return.
But, if there was a chance, she would take it.
She took one more deep breath and recalled one of her favourite memories. Minerva's silky voice in her ear as she levitated all the books in her library played on repeat. She felt the warmth of her on her back and the squeeze of strong hands on her shoulders. Smiling, Hermione then let go of that memory in favour of visualising the trees outside the castle. She held onto it, concentrating only on that.
On nothing else.
Hermione Granger turned on the spot and disappeared from the clearing.
She gasped as she landed on her backside in a small but dense patch of trees behind a big stone wall. She lay there breathing hard before she patted herself down for any splinching injuries. She had to clamp her mouth shut to stop herself from cheering when she found herself not only whole but exactly where she wanted to be. Pumping her fist, she crouched down behind one of the trees and looked around.
"Homenum Revelio"
The spell returned no signals and after a few moments, Hermione tried again, not completely trusting the results without a wand. Finding the area clear, she crept along the wall and around the corner.
She followed the big castle walls until they ran out into an open field and she stood at the edge of the trees, searching for the place she needed. It would have been a small space; a defensible position that Minerva could have used to spy on whatever they had been doing here at the time. It was near a stone wall that was now partially collapsed.
Only there were no stone walls in the field, save for the castle. She searched again, knowing that the moonlight could only offer her so much before she decided that maybe Minerva had been in the castle at the time. The castle itself had seen better days and she crept forward, using the dead grass and the windswept walls to hide her approach. The entrance seemed to be above her, at the end of a long, curving footpath that was walled on both sides. She couldn't see a thing except what was in front of her, but she crept forward again and cast another revealing spell.
There was nobody there.
She couldn't for the life of her work out why Minerva had been here in the first place but reasoned that it was possible that a year ago Voldemort and his followers would have needed a more defensible position while they gathered their forces. Though it was popular with campers in the summer, she didn't think many Muggles would have ventured here in the winter or early spring, which was about when Minerva had been hurt. She abandoned caution and sprinted to the wall and used a gap in the wall where it seemed to have collapsed to heave herself up onto the path. From here she could see the entrance to the castle and most of the road and it was only when she was about to race up to the entrance that she realised where she was.
"Oh," she whispered to herself, looking down at her feet. "Of course!"
This would have been a great place to hide while she watched the comings and going of a castle. Even more so as a cat. She glanced around, seeing the cleaner sides of some of the bricks scattered about. The different textures to the ones that had already been overgrown by moss and grasses. She clambered back down to where most of the debris seemed to have gathered. She used the moonlight as best she could, moving brickwork by hand to try and see around it. In the end, she gave up and took another careful glance around her, she pulled up her sleeves and held out her hands. Concentrating carefully, she lit her Bluebell flames and transferred them to her left hand. The light danced ominously off the stones but it sped up the search immensely as she dug under the remains in hope but with a growing sense of despair.
She placed the little flame on a stone close by and used both hands to search, trying to be as quick as possible. If there were Snatchers around, it would not take long for them to notice the light in such an open expanse of ground. Just as she was about to give up, something glinted out of the corner of her eye. She turned and her breath caught. She stared at it; a tiny sparkle, glittering in the low lights. Her heart thumped happily as the silver casing danced in the light of the flames. Hermione beamed. As she scrambled to her knees to extricate it, there was a shout across the field.
"OI!"
Hermione dosed the flames and shifted the stone as quickly as she could. Her fingers were cold and numb but she didn't care as she scrambled to shift the rocks. She had just managed to move enough dirt to pull it gently out of the frozen ground when the first shot whistled over her head. It exploded in a burst of light on the brickwork, illuminating her position, but also helping her to finally pull the watch free.
"STOP!"
She ducked the second shot and flung her arms in the direction of the spells and cast her own in return. She had no idea what she was doing, and it was not a great idea to announce her presence like that, but it would slow them down.
And it did.
The field exploded into flame. The grass was dead and dry and it burnt happily. In the flames, she could see the silhouettes of three dark figures trying to avoid getting caught in the flames and push forward to her position. She used the remaining seconds of her luck to check that she had actually found Minerva's watch and grinned as she realised it was exactly what she was looking for. She pulled herself up onto the walkway and ran into the castle, using the walls for cover while she found somewhere quiet to apparate away.
She tucked herself into a corner and clutched the watch to her chest. She thought of the ribbon she'd tied to the tree outside of their tent and turned. She felt herself being squeezed from all sides and felt her feet lift from the ground.
And then she felt the ground rushing up to meet her as she was slammed back to earth again.
She swore and groaned as her body protested the sudden return to Earth. In the time she'd spent scrambling for the watch, they had cast an Anti-Apparition net. Shaking her head at her stupidity, she tried to work out how to escape without getting caught, without losing the watch and without leading them back to Harry. She got back to her feet and peered around the doorway to see where the enemy had gone. She glanced around for something to use and noticed that the stonework was not looking so good. Using her fingers, she scraped at the mortar and grinned maniacally as it fell to dust under her nails. Just as the three were set to round the corner, she ran out of her hiding place across the courtyard and screamed at the top of her voice.
"BOMBARDA MAXIMA."
Hermione Granger was not a stupid person, as a rule. She recognised that, current situation aside, she was actually - normally - a rather sensible person. What she was not, however, was an architect or a structural engineer. In her haste to cast her spell and cut across the castle to where the walls were a little lower that she might clamber over them and escape the net, she had managed to take out most of the front of the castle. The problem with that was that the front of the castle seemed to be holding up most of the interior walls. It did not take her long to realise that she needed to be running away before she became part of the castle's destruction. An explosion from outside the walls sent a lot of the debris back onto her. She dodged a giant block of stone and dived through an opening into another room at the back of the castle just as it started raining stones and dust and debris.
She searched wildly for another exit and decided just to hope for the best. She backed into a corner, as tightly as she could, and tried not to worry about the castle falling on top of her. She tucked the watch into her beaded bag for safe-keeping and turned on the spot without hesitation.
This time, it worked and she slammed back to earth. She allowed herself a few seconds to catch her breath before she got up and with a quiet cry of triumph, found the tree that she'd tied her ribbon onto. She undid it and tucked it back in her bag while she tried to remember whether she'd tied it to a southern branch or an eastern branch. Just as she was about to lose her mind with worry, a hand appeared out of thin air and yanked her off her feet.
"Are you out of your damn mind?" Harry nearly screamed. "What the hell are you doing!"
"Harry," she breathed.
The adrenaline that had been coursing through her, evaporated as she lay on the frigid ground and she felt one or two tears fall from the corners of her eyes.
"Are you okay?" he asked, kneeling by her side. "What happened?"
"Don't ask," she pleaded. "Just," she groaned. "Please don't ask. I," she looked up at him. "I'm so sorry. I made a bad decision. I'm fine," she reassured him as he started looking her over. She was filthy, covered in rock dust and dirt, but she was fine. "I just," she groaned, letting her head bag onto the ground with a thud. "Made the wrong decision for the right reasons. And got really, really lucky."
They stared at each other for a long time, before Harry sighed.
"Come on," he said finally, offering her his hand. He was a better friend than she deserved, sometimes. "You need a shower. It's my turn to take watch and then you need to sleep. Leave the locket. We're going to take a break for a while."
She nodded and let him help her up. They had managed to rig a shower up and she made use of it now, using her wand to warm the water. She luxuriated under it for as long as was feasible before wrapping up in warm and comfortable pyjamas. She pulled her blankets onto the sofa in front of the fire. Harry was ensconced in the tree hollow she'd been perched in earlier, keeping watch for enemies, so she took out the watch and looked at it properly. It was filthy and scratched, but incredibly, it was intact and still worked. Letting caution to the wind she kissed the ribbon wrapped around her wrist and felt a stab of heat in return. She laughed, then stopped at the almost foreign sound, before she laughed again.
Hysterical giggles fell from her as she clutched the small timepiece to her chest and as she fell victim to the warmth and the happiness that overtook her, she imagined Minerva's face when she returned it to its rightful place.
Right there beside her ribbon.
Just above their intertwined hands.
