Chapter Four
For those who saw my update on AO3 (which I have now deleted), my computer has been repaired and is back in my possession, so here I am. Again, I'm sorry for the wait!
I have an important notice – don't worry, I'm not announcing my impending death or anything else which will throw a spanner in the works (again). For the first time, I'm on the lookout for a beta. I've never beta-ed or had a beta, but I have finally swallowed my pride and realised that a second brain and pair of eyes would be useful. I don't expect you to stick around forever, if you get bored of me just let me know and I'll put this message up again. I swear I won't get offended.
If you're thinking, what's in it for me, I shall list the benefits. Uh, obviously the pleasure of my company, being on semi-personal terms and the privilege of being able to hassle me for new chapters by non-anonymous means.
If I've swayed you with my obvious charisma and you're interested in joining me behind the scenes, please contact me at 'disposabl . e . mail 987 gmail . com' (remove spaces between words and use 'at' symbol). As you may gather from the email name (super creative, I know), it is disposable and I'll be deleting it as soon as I have a permanent beta who will be able to contact me through my actual email. So if you send something to this email address and it bounces back, now you know why. :)
12 Grimmauld Place was as silent as a grave when Harry returned, enveloped in the Invisibility Cloak. Hermione and Ron had not yet risen, despite the sun now climbing into the sky. He could barely believe his luck as he shut the front door quietly and removed the cloak, making for the staircase. He could make up a story about how he encountered Malfoy at a different time, then he'd never have to reveal the truth behind his late-night wandering.
Harry placed a foot on the bottom step. It gave an ear-piercing shriek.
He winced, glancing down at the stair then back up again. The only problem was when his gaze returned to the top of the staircase, two very angry figures had appeared. One lanky wizard and one witch whose bushy hair had bristled up like an indignant potato brush.
Fuck.
"Where have you been?" demanded Hermione shrilly, storming down to meet him. Ron tailed her, his face uncharacteristically grave.
"No–" Harry's voice cracked and he grimaced, surreptiously whipping the Invisibility Cloak behind his back. "Nowhere."
He backed down to the ground floor, keeping it hidden from sight.
Hermione stalked after him, hands braced on her hips and eyes flashing.
"Don't lie to us!" she warned, her voice impossibly high. "We've been up for an hour, we thought you'd been taken or worse–"
"You really think that I could be snatched like an infant from a crib?" retorted Harry, mildly offended.
"Your bed was stone cold! You'd been gone all night!" Hermione all but shrieked. "What was I meant to think?"
"I couldn't sleep, I just stepped out the door to get some air– hey!"
Someone had yanked the Invisibility Cloak from his hands. Ron. He had circled around Harry without his notice.
"Stepped out the door to get some air with this?" asked Ron, raising a sceptical eyebrow. "Give us some credit, mate. Now, would you mind telling us the truth?"
Harry opened and closed his mouth silently for a moment, alternating his gaze between his two friends. Hermione was looking rather pink in the face, Ron's was solemn.
"I–" Harry sighed heavily, dragging a hand through his hair in his now flustered state. "Fine, I'll come clean with you two. I need some space, alright? This place is stifling and I hate being in close quarters with you all the bloody time."
"Well, it's not exactly a holiday for us, either!" spat Hermione, her gaze scathing on him. "You think that we're enjoying ourselves? You don't think that I'm going mad, cooped up in here, that Ron isn't terrified for his family and would do anything to see them again? But that doesn't mean that we just off and disappear during the night, does it?"
Harry glared down at his feet, fingers curling into fists at his side. If only she'd shut up for a second, then he could just explain. But her diatribe showed no sign of ceasing.
"Use your head, Harry! I'd have thought that you'd've learned some common sense by now, but no, the Boy-Who-Lived knows best! I can't believe you were so stupid–"
"Hermione," said Ron sharply at last. It was as if he had yanked the rug out from under her feet, whipping away that whirlwind of fury. It dispersed around her like mist.
"I was scared." Her tone dropped to a whisper, the only remnants of her anger the quaver in her voice.
Harry chanced a glance at her. Bright green met dark brown. If he had somehow forgotten the extent of the sheer love and loyalty they had poured into each other the entire year prior, he remembered it now. Staring into Hermione's eyes, Harry saw a deep, dark chasm of memories reflected in hers.
His heart gave a painful twang. He averted his gaze again.
"Sorry," he said.
Hermione made a sound and next thing he knew, her arms were a vice around him, his nose full of bushy hair. Harry hesitated for a split second, but then he saw Ron raise his eyebrows expectantly. With a weary sigh, he allowed his body to release all tension, if only for a little while.
Hermione mumbled something into his shoulder.
"What?" asked Harry. She lifted her face away to glare at him.
"Swear you won't do it again," she said.
"I…" he wavered, knowing that it was a promise that he couldn't keep, not with such a dangerous entity living beneath the very same roof. But with Hermione's attention fixed so fiercely upon him, he crumbled. "I swear. I swear that as long as the option stands, I won't leave you behind again."
His words lowered a leaden cloak of tension back over the group. Ron clapped his hands together loudly.
"Well," he said, clearly attempting a bright tone but failing miserably. "Now that you're back in one piece, Harry–"
"–and have been suitably reprimanded," added Hermione.
"Yeah," said Ron, picking the ball back up. "That too. But as I was about to say, we have news for you."
"I have news for you, too." Harry's words were abrupt. He was still internally reeling from what he had learned from Malfoy barely an hour ago. Hermione ignored him.
"Ginny's owl arrived," she said, eyes hard on Harry and her lips pulled taut. "You know what that means."
All words dissolved on Harry's tongue. The rush of adrenaline from the encounter with Malfoy had wiped away the memory that the Basilisk fangs were expected to arrive this very morning.
"Oh," he said.
There was a pregnant pause. It was clear that they were expecting Harry to fill in the silence, offer a window to his thoughts, but all activity had died in his brain. Total shut down. A ghostly hush swooped over him, spreading across his chest until his heart ached. Ice cold realisation that he would be facing Tom Riddle – not Voldemort, but Tom Riddle, the very one he had grown to love and loathe – sooner rather than later.
Hermione had stepped away from him by now, her arms rising to cross firmly across her chest. There was a furrow in her brow, dark anticipation written in the rigid lines of her body. But what she was anticipating, Harry wasn't entirely sure.
Ron pulled his shoulders into a reluctant shrug.
"We can wait," he managed. It sounded as though he was choking on his words, each catching in his throat before he hacked them up into the space between them. He so desperately wanted to close that rift that had opened between them – this Harry could appreciate, but Hermione had other ideas.
"The longer we wait, the longer we prolong this war," she said, brushing aside Ron's attempt at a diplomatic response. "Now isn't the time to take our personal sentiments into account. But we need to know whether you're able to involve yourself in this duty, Harry, or if you're no longer in commission."
Harry stared at her, the pulse of blood rushing through his ears. The noise flooded his brain, making it impossible to think, to conjure words with any meaning.
The cold light filtering in through a window suddenly seemed impossibly bright, blinding him.
He had known what he was getting himself into when he began the hunt for the Horcruxes, he had known that it would come down to this. But now that he had arrived at this bridge, now that the time had arrived to cross it, he couldn't… he couldn't…
He became dimly aware of a hand on his shoulder, of a distant voice. He was underwater, trapped in the raw, still world of a lake. Blinding light shot through the water surface in narrow streaks, cage bars around him, and he could only hear his own heart, ricocheting against his ribs.
He was a child again, shut in the cupboard beneath the stairs. He was a Triwizard Champion, bound to a headstone in a graveyard. He was a believer, watching as his godfather was snatched from the world of the living before his time. He was a student, frozen still as his mentor fell from a great height like a ragdoll.
He was just a boy, dying in the arms of his greatest enemy.
But somewhere high above on the shoreline, the shadow of a figure was calling for him, or two, and now there was a flock of them, of all the people he had loved and been loved by. Their voices harmonized, wove together like birds in flight, dipping and diving to save him.
"–rry? Harry?"
Harry blinked rapidly, returning to himself. His fingers rose to touch the hand on his shoulder – Ron – to reassure himself that he was truly here. Hermione stood by Ron's side, gripping a handful of his robes.
She was looking significantly paler than before.
"Yeah?" Harry grunted, lowering his hand.
"You good, mate?" asked Ron steadily. "You blanked out for a moment there."
Harry stepped out of Ron's reach, rubbing his chest as if that could shed the constricting viper around his heart.
"I'm fine," he said. "It's nothing."
"Then…" there was pause during which Ron exchanged a look with Hermione. "Then what do you say?"
Harry's tongue darted out to wet his chapped lips before glancing down. He could see that his boots were scuffed, his fingers yanking his sleeves down over his knuckles – a nervous tic that he hadn't known he'd adopted until Hermione pointed it out to him.
"I think," he said slowly, as reasonably as he could muster. "I think that I need to try. Hermione's right, I can't let my emotions cloud my judgement anymore. What we're dealing with is bigger than all of us."
He swallowed around a lump in his throat.
A blind man could have noticed the relief that trickled across Hermione's face – it rippled out of her pores in waves. She turned and started back up the stairs, pausing only to say, "I'll prepare everything."
The meaningful stare she directed towards Harry strongly suggested that he should too.
The locket and the diadem were sitting innocently on the table in the drawing room when Harry and Ron entered. Hermione held a crinkled brown package in one hand – it was likely that it hadn't been that battered up upon arrival.
She cast a sideways glance at the two Horcruxes, stationed side-by-side, before reconsidering their positioning. She swept the diadem up and pinched the bejewelled circlet between her index finger and thumb, holding it away from her.
"When this Horcrux is opened," she said aloud, nodding towards the locket, "I cannot predict what it might do. I'd rather not risk it influencing the other Horcrux and have them play gang ups on us, like some sick schoolyard game–"
"Why not order Kreacher in to keep an eye on it in the meanwhile?" suggested Ron, stepping forwards to relieve her of the diadem. She swung it out of his reach instinctually, her eyes shuttering.
"You know how I feel about giving house-elves orders. This hierarchy which was established by rich old wizards is cruel and barbaric–"
Hardly in the right mindset to put up with her preaching, Harry cupped a hand around his mouth and called, "Kreacher!"
Hermione clucked disapprovingly just as the old house-elf Apparated into view with an ear-splitting crack. Harry fell back one step, never quite able to adjust to the speediness with which Kreacher responded.
"How may Kreacher serve you, Master Harry?" Kreacher now croaked, lowering himself into such a deep bow that the tips of his floppy ears grazed the floor.
"Right," said Harry awkwardly, scratching his head. "Could you take that diadem from Hermione – over there, see, the one she's holding – and keep it safe just in case something goes wrong while we're destroying the locket? The one like Reg– Master Regulus's locket, you know?"
Despite her disapproval towards this order, Hermione seemed unable to help herself from interjecting.
"You need to be more specific," she said. "What does 'keeping it safe' even mean?"
"Fine," retorted Harry, his tone sharper than before. "Listen then, Kreacher. If the… if the thing inside the locket has any detrimental side-effects on us, or anything at all goes wrong while we're trying to destroy it, you must ensure that the diadem does not end up in the hands of anyone affiliated with You-Know-Who. And whatever you do, do not listen to what the diadem tells you."
"Understood, Master Harry." Kreacher bowed again, took the diadem from Hermione, then bowed for the third time. "It will be safe with Kreacher. It will be chained up and buried under some maggoty bread until Master Harry calls for it again. Perhaps Kreacher will chop it up with a meat cleaver, then burn the little pieces in–"
"That's not necessary," Harry said quickly. "I don't know whether chopping it up is even possible but… keep it in one piece, please."
Kreacher blinked bloodshot eyes at him slowly, then nodded his head and Disapparated with a clap that resounded through the still air.
Hermione sighed, then held out the package she still clutched firmly.
"Harry," she said, her voice painfully sombre. "Will you be doing the honours?"
Avoiding eye contact with both her and Ron, Harry stepped forward and grimaced down at the parcel. He could now see that someone had already torn it open, exposing yellow-stained fangs the length of a forearm. Gritting his teeth, he plunged his hand past the crinkled paper and wrapped his fingers around a fang.
Unexpectedly, a phantom pain throbbed up his arm, like slow-moving venom. Harry closed his eyes and shuddered.
Ron pushed forward and gripped Harry's shoulder bracingly.
"Maybe he should sit out for the first one," he said to Hermione, but Harry shook his head.
"No," he muttered, his thumb rubbing against the tarnished ivory surface. "I've got to try. I've got to try for all of you."
Silently, though with painful relief flooding the recesses of his face, Ron removed his hand and took a step back.
Thank you.
Hermione retreated with him, her eyes scorching bright, like dark fire in water.
I'm sorry.
These unspoken words of theirs spun around Harry lightly, as if suspended by fine spider web. Delicate, yet able to carry the weight of a thousand sorrows.
The stage was now his.
Harry pressed his lips together, swivelling to gaze upon the quiet locket, perched upon that table. Too quiet. But there was no doubt in his mind that Tom would not go down without a fight.
Without realising that he had drifted forwards, Harry found his fingers lingering mere millimetres above the locket, the thrum of energy searing his skin, travelling through his veins. It seemed to buzz around his mind, bouncing around his skull, filling him up. But unlike last night, it kept its silence.
Speak to me, Harry wanted to scream, because no matter how furious he was with this man – this monster, this shadow of his past – he missed him.
Tom would be wearing some infuriating, self-satisfied smirk if he could hear Harry's thoughts now. His soft, pale lips would curve upwards, and perhaps some low level of mirth would reach his eyes. Such a rare sight, but when it did happen, Harry's heart would swoop and soar, an unfettered bird, and he could believe that this was love after all.
His pulse had reached a brisk rate, keeping pace with the locket's own internal rhythm.
Thrum-da-da, thrum-da-da, thrum-da-da.
Was it just him, or was the locket heating up, as though in anticipation?
Thrum-da-da, thrum-da-da, thrum-da-da.
He could hear Hermione and Ron breathing somewhere behind him, but it seemed as though a great distance separated them. Perhaps it did.
Unable to bear the suspense of the moment any longer, Harry brushed his fingers over the surface of the locket, drums thundering in his ears, and whispered, :Open.:
All at once the drumming stopped. It was disconcerting, as if he had lost all sense of sound, plunged into a silent world.
The locket opened with a tiny pop. All was still for a single breathless moment. Then the room dimmed imperceptibly and a semi-solid shape started to push out of the Horcrux in a cloud of grey mist.
A head, a torso, then legs, poised above them all.
Tall and slender, black hair styled immaculately. Smooth skin, high cheekbones, a perfectly straight nose. Deep, dark eyes, all too easy to drown in.
Tom Riddle looked exactly the same as the day Harry left him behind.
His mouth suddenly dry, Harry faltered a step backwards.
"Stab it now!" Hermione hissed. "Stab it before it can use its silver tongue!"
He could see through his peripheral vision that despite her words, she was just as transfixed by the image before them, face upturned to the beautiful man before them.
But Tom was already speaking.
"Mon amour," he murmured, and to see those words shaped by his lips again sent an electric shiver down Harry's spine.
"No," he croaked, gripping the Basilisk so hard that his hand ached. His palms were moist with sweat. "This isn't real."
Tom tutted, quirking an eyebrow elegantly. "I suppose that I'm only as real as you make me. How real am I to you, Harry?"
There was a long, drawn out pause. Harry's shallow breaths were torturously loud in his ears. Tom smiled slowly, and there was no need to answer the question aloud.
"Harry," Hermione whispered, voice barely audible. "Don't listen."
"No," Harry repeated loudly, unable to register her words, brandishing that puny fang as if it could offer him some form of protection from this entity. "No. You don't know me, Tom. Don't pretend you do."
Tom laughed, but his face was set into a mask. It was a frightening image, and Harry took yet another step back, another in the wrong direction, away from his fabled enemy.
"Do you love me, Harry?" he crooned, and his voice was so gentle, but his eyes were so hard. "Because how I love you. I want to tear your eyes out of your head so that you may never look upon another man or woman the way I have seen you look at me. I want to rip your heart out of your chest so that I may keep it forever."
Harry's lips parted, but there were no words to say. Tom's eyes softened.
"But I could never inflict damage upon you," he breathed. "And I know that this is a requited sentiment. Lower your weapon, mon amour, and we can be together again."
He didn't even notice that he was nodding his head until he had released the Basilisk fang, listening to it clatter on the floor. Total surrender.
"Don't, Harry." Hermione, her voice weak.
Something rekindled in the pit of his stomach.
He remembered false memories fluttering around his head like feathers in a breeze. He remembered blinding green light and Hermione falling, almost graceful in her descent.
He could not forgive.
"I told you already," Harry said breathlessly. "You don't know me."
The Horcrux's eyes shuttered, giving way to the flat black of a shark's. It lowered itself onto one knee and pushed its face forward so that they were almost nose-to-nose. Not even a breath stirred Harry's hair and he found himself frozen.
"You are indeed a liar, my dear," it said, "a master manipulator, much like myself…"
I'm not, Harry tried to shout, I'm nothing like you, but with a replica of Tom's face so close to his, his tongue had stuck to the roof of his mouth, curling in on itself.
"But I have seen your soul," the Horcrux hissed, its voice garbled between Parseltongue and English. Unspeakable pain threatened to split Harry's head in two and he dropped to the ground, yowling as he grabbed his forehead, fingers fisting in his hair.
It was enough to break the spell.
"That's enough!" Ron bellowed, lunging past Harry to seize the fang from the floor. Through his delirious vision, Harry saw Ron plunging the sharp end into the locket, and now it wasn't only him screaming, it was the Horcrux, a high, keening wail as it was encompassed by oblivion.
For a split second, Harry's head cleared again. Then he was flooded by a tidal wave of fear and fury because of course Voldemort knew what had happened, and it overwhelmed all his other senses.
Finally, it was over.
Collapsing on his side, his chest heaved in exhaustion and he curled into the fetal position, no longer seeing the world around him.
He hadn't been able to do it. He had failed.
"What's going on? What's happening to him, is it You-Know-Who?"
"No, Ronald, he's in shock."
"But why–"
"We asked too much of him."
An extended silence.
"We never should have done it."
"Isn't hindsight a wonderful thing? Fetch me a Potion for Dreamless Sleep from my bag upstairs. Quickly now!"
It abruptly became silent and when the voices finally returned, hands were prompting him to lift his head, pressing a bottle to his lips.
"Drink now, Harry, everything will work out fine." The voice was so soothing, so warm, he could almost believe that it belonged to the mother he never had. "I'll handle everything."
And so he drank, and as he lost grip on what was real and what was not, he believed every word of it.
When Harry came to himself, he surfaced pleasantly, buoying up on a soft wave in warm water before breaking the surface to face the sun riding high.
Sleepily, he acknowledged the fluffy pillow beneath his head, the scratchy blankets swaddled around him, the sofa beneath him, and was content to drift for a few minutes longer. He hadn't felt this good in a long time, and he lazily wondered how long he had been out for. That was before he remembered everything and promptly turned on his side to bury his face in the pillow, wishing he could forget and bemoaning his own weakness.
"How could I be so stupid," he whispered, his fingers fisting the blanket, tears leaking from his eyes.
By the time he had realised that it wasn't his Tom he had been speaking to, it had been too late.
The door cracked open and misleadingly heavy footsteps approached his side. A croaky voice said, "Master Harry, Kreacher hears that Master Regulus's mission has finally been fulfilled. Kreacher has come to return this to Master Harry."
Harry lifted his head enough to see that the house-elf had extended Ravenclaw's diadem to him in spindly hands. He dropped his head again.
"I don't want it near me," he muttered. "Give it to Hermione."
"Yes, Master Harry."
Receding footsteps, the door clicked shut again. Harry drew in a deep breath, calming his frayed nerves. Muffled voices crept beneath the crack in the door, and when it opened once more, he was ready.
When Ron and Hermione entered the room, they were welcomed by the sight of Harry sitting upright, blankets spilling around his shoulders, grinning like an idiot. Ron actually stopped to stare, perhaps questioning whether the past events had liberated Harry from his last few brain cells.
"So," said Harry in a horrible, hearty voice that wasn't his own. "I suppose congratulations is in order."
"What," said Ron.
"You destroyed the first Horcrux. Congratulations."
"Enough!" Hermione said sharply. "What are you doing?"
The grin slid off Harry's face and he stared at a patch of rotting floorboards sourly.
"Isn't this a triumph for the team?" he asked. "Don't you want me to be part of the team? Since I was a complete and utter disappointment, the least I can do is be supportive of your successes."
"You truly think that we're doing that?" Hermione asked, her tone dropping a notch.
"That depends on what you think that I think you're doing," said Harry stubbornly, losing all pretence of cheeriness.
"I know what you're thinking."
"Then hip-hip-bloody-hooray for you," Harry snapped.
"You lost me," said Ron apologetically.
"Emotional range, teaspoon." Hermione didn't bother to face him when she said it. "Harry believes that we're trying to force him into the mould of the heroic 'Chosen One'."
"We're not, Harry, I swear," said Ron immediately, then grimaced. "Well, I'm not, I can't speak for Hermione…"
"Honestly," she said waspishly before frowning at Harry. "Well? Is my deduction correct?"
"You got it right on the nose." Every word was dripping with sarcasm. "Except, wait a minute. It's not you two who're trying to force me into that mould. It's me."
Hermione opened her mouth, stopped, then closed it again.
"Oh," she said in a very small voice. "I was a little off."
Harry gave a humourless laugh.
"No matter how much you or anyone else want me to be the Chosen One, the great vanquisher of the Dark Lord, I know that nobody will ever be as disappointed as me when I can't do it. I wish we'd never ended up in some time-travel freak accident. If we hadn't–" he scrubbed furiously at his eyes. "If we hadn't, You-Know-Who and I would never have had a history. He wouldn't have dirt on me, I'd be able to face him with my head held high, but instead I become a pitiful wreck when faced by the mere memory of him. I'm–"
His voice broke. Hermione and Ron spoke up at the same time.
"Harry–"
"You don't have to–"
"Shut up," he said fiercely. "I've got to say it. I'm sorry, but I can't kill him."
He tipped his head back to glare at the ceiling, blinking tears from his eyes. Let them hate him. Nobody could hate him more than himself, anyway.
He heard Hermione choke on a watery laugh.
"You're such an idiot," she whispered. "If only you'd stop letting your mouth run away from you and just listen for a moment."
Bewildered, Harry brought his gaze back to them.
"What?"
Ron was beaming.
"You may not have to kill him," he said. "We've been searching all year in private – Hermione mostly, and there may be another way."
"But we mustn't get our hopes up." Hermione was smiling too, belying her attempt at pragmatism. "We didn't want to tell you what we were doing in case we couldn't find anything, but I think I've finally cracked the code. At least, the first level of it, but it's more than we had before."
Harry continued to gape at them, not quite registering their words, too fearful to believe. Surely they were due to laugh in his face at any moment and scold him for believing their cruel joke.
"What're you saying?" he asked hoarsely.
Hermione slapped a hand to her forehead.
"Of course, I'll give you the book, it'll clear everything up," she babbled. "Some may consider it a little dry of a read, but I personally enjoyed it, though it did take me a few days to read. It should clear everything up, yes, you should definitely read it. Accio!"
She swished her wand and a moment later, a book came zipping into her hand. It was a very familiar book, but Harry was loath to admit that he had flipped through it before.
"Tales from Beyond," she announced, brandishing it in his face. "Here."
She all but shoved it into his chest. That would surely bruise later. Ron winced on Harry's behalf, but he barely registered the brief burn of pain. He was staring down at the book, unable to believe that this could be the answer to all his troubles.
"I still don't understand," he said haltingly.
"Neither do I," said Hermione fretfully, "not completely. That's why we're leaving. How does tomorrow sound?"
"The sooner the better," said Ron. "I can't wait to leave this place."
"But we can't let our guard slip in our haste," she said chidingly, as if it had been his idea to leave immediately. "This will be dangerous. Very dangerous. And we'll have to pack supplies, who knows how long we'll be on the road…"
"Kreacher can handle our supplies."
"Oh, Ron, we shouldn't rely on him to do all our work. Speaking of which, should we bring him with us or…?"
"Are you kidding me? Kreacher'll rip his ears off and eat them before he leaves Grimmauld Place for more than a minute."
"You shouldn't exaggerate," said Hermione, "but I suppose there is some truth to your words. Oh dear, I'll ask him anyway… now, I'm going to pack my books, I've got something on the international Floo Network somewhere, I know I do…"
"I'll get Kreacher started," added Ron, and they both made to rush out the door.
Harry, whose eyes had been volleying between them the whole while, finally piped up, "Can somebody please explain to me what's going on before you run off like headless chooks?"
Both glanced around at him in surprise, having forgotten that he was rather behind on everything.
"How silly of me," Hermione declared. "We're going to Australia!"
Ron clapped his hands eagerly and bustled away, muttering, "Finally doing something productive…"
"What for?" Harry squawked, not nearly as pleased as his friend.
"If we're going to time-travel again," Hermione said, already halfway out the door, "We're going to need the help of the author of that book, Hardwin Fjord."
Again, if you're interested in beta-ing, please refer to author's note at top of page. :)