Seventh Year, Part 9, 1998
She grabbed her wand and cast tempus, noting the late hour. It wasn't time to relieve Harry of his duty. Normally she would have attempted to go back to sleep, but tonight something stopped her. Instead she decided instead to put on her coat, hat, scarf, and gloves and venture outside to check on Harry. He could probably use some company anyway.
Except that Harry wasn't seated right outside the tent.
He was not beside the fire.
Nor was he sitting beneath the big pine tree on the makeshift chair they'd created from transfigured pine boughs.
Perhaps, she thought, he'd wandered off to relieve himself behind a tree. She waited and listened in the still of the forest but heard no footsteps, nothing that sounded like Harry.
She shivered and felt the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. Something was wrong. She was certain of it. Harry wouldn't just wander off when he was supposed to be on duty. They had a protocol they followed, for their own safety. She cast lumos and scanned the campsite and the surrounding woods.
Nothing. No sign of Harry. No sign of a struggle.
Her wards were strong, she was certain of it, and she would have detected someone breaking through them. Harry had to be within the perimeter of the campsite.
Either that, or he'd left the warded area voluntarily.
She tried not to panic as she scanned the area again, looking for any sign of him. He could have disapparated, she realised, and he could be anywhere.
She almost missed the tracks, the footprints in the patchy snow. They led east, away from the campsite, and she followed them, whispering a silent prayer for Harry's safety.
She followed the tracks as they wove through the trees, until she reached a snow-less bit of ground and lost him. A wave of inspiration came to her then, and she wanted to curse at herself for not thinking of it sooner.
"Point me!" she whispered, holding out her wand. The vine wood jerked to the left, and she followed it through the woods until she came to a small pond. Her heart sunk as she saw Harry's coat, scarf, and mittens on the ground at the edge of the pond. Surely he wouldn't be crazy enough to get in the frigid water…
The surface of the pond rippled, and she held her wand out, casting light over the dark water.
Oh god, yes, he was that insane, she realised in horror. She could barely make out the shape of a figure, moving below the surface of the murky water.
She dropped her wand and started to strip off her coat before she paused. For a brief second she could almost hear Lucius's drawling voice in her head.
Are you a witch or not?
She clutched her wand and cast the most powerful levitation spell she could manage. A wet Harry was much heavier than the feathers they'd floated about in first year charms class, and it was much harder to lift something from the water than lift something through the air. She was panting by the time Harry's soaked and shivering figure emerged from the water As soon as he was in shallow enough water, she dropped him not so gracefully and rushed to his aid as he coughed up pond water. He stumbled, his legs not functioning from the cold water, and crawled onto the muddy bank of the pond.
"Harry! Oh my god, Harry! Are you okay? What the hell were you thinking?" she cried as she half-hugged, half shook her wet friend. His skin was blue and icy to the touch.
"I g-g-got it," he said, teeth chattering from the cold.
She looked down and realised just what he had clasped in his hands.
"Is that…"
"The sword. It was in the p-p-pond."
The Sword of Gryffindor.
The very object they'd identified as capable of destroying a horcrux - and possibly a horcrux itself - was clutched in Harry's pale, shivering hands.
"How on earth did you find it?"
He wiped some of the water from his face and brushed his wet hair back from his face.
"So cold," he whispered.
"Oh god. I'm such an idiot!" she whispered to herself. Of course he was cold! She immediately cast warming and drying charms on him.
"Come on, let's get back to the campsite and get you in new clothes and in front of a fire."
She was a nervous wreck at how exposed they were outside the wards around the campsite, and she hurried him back to safety. Despite the warming and drying charms, he was still shivering by the time she plopped him down in front of the flames and added two more logs for good measure. Harry still clutched the sword of Gryffindor as she wrapped a blanket around him.
"Are you going to tell me what possessed you to go for a swim in the middle of winter?" she finally asked, irritation bubbling up at how easily he could have died, how quickly hypothermia could have set in and drowned him.
She listened with wide-eyed surprise as he told her about the mysterious doe patronus that had emerged from the woods, and how he'd followed it to the pond where he saw the sword through the water.
A slight stinging hex flew from her wand before she could stop herself.
"YOU UNBELIEVABLE, BRASH, STUPID GRYFFINDOR!"
"What?"
"You could have been killed!" she hissed. "Harry, that patronus could have come from ANYONE!"
"It was a doe though."
"So?"
"So my mum's patronus was a doe as well," he said simply, as if this minor detail explained everything.
She was utterly dumbfounded by his logic.
"Harry, had I not woken up, had I not gotten up to look for you, you'd be dead at the bottom of that pond right now."
He at least had the decency to look ashamed. He tugged at Slytherin's locket, still hanging from his neck.
"Pretty sure the damned thing tried to drown me."
She stared at him in wide-eyed horror before she found her voice again.
"What possessed you to jump in the water? Why didn't you just summon the damn thing?" she asked as she dried her own clothes where they'd gotten damp helping him back to their tent.
"Well, that's the thing, 'Mione - it couldn't be summoned. I tried," he said with a small shrug of his shoulders. "I think maybe you have to commit some sort of act of bravery to get it."
Hermione rubbed her eyes in frustration. Stupid bloody sword. Who put that kind of an enchantment on a damn sword? And just how in the hell was jumping in a frigid lake in the winter 'brave?' Reckless was more like it.
"Why didn't you just wake me so I could help you?" she asked with a weary sigh. She'd not slept well in ages, and it was beginning to catch up with her.
He looked at her in surprise. "I didn't want to risk the sword disappearing. I don't know how it ended up in the pond, but I didn't want to risk going back to camp to get you and losing sight of it. Besides - you were there. How did you know to be there?"
She sat down beside him in front of the fire. "I didn't. I...I don't know why I woke up. I was having a rather nice dream, actually. Bit disappointed that it ended. I panicked when I didn't see you by the fire, and I followed your footprints in the snow and used a point-me spell to find you."
He draped an arm over her shoulder and hugged her. "I'd be lost without you, you know that, right?"
"I know."
He released her and stood abruptly to pull Helga Hufflepuff's cup and Slytherin's locket from his now-dry robes.
"So, what do you say? Wanna destroy some horcruxes?" he asked with a grin.
"Now? Harry, it's… 2 am," she said, glancing at her watch.
"No time like the present. Which one do you want to stab with the sword?" He held the sword of Gryffindor in one hand and clutched the cup and necklace in the other.
"You want ME to destroy one?" she asked with a squeak.
Harry was the Chosen One, the one who was supposed to end Voldemort, if one believed in prophecies. It was nothing short of miraculous that the sword had appeared for Harry, but then she supposed, why wouldn't it appear for him? He'd pulled it from the Sorting Hat in the Chamber of Secrets, hadn't he?
It seemed almost wrong that she destroy a horcrux.
"Sure. Why not? You helped me get them, didn't you?" he offered. "It just seems right that we should both get to destroy one. Which one do you want?"
She looked at both items before making a decision. "The cup. Regulus died getting the necklace out of that cave, so I think, well, really Sirius should have the honour of destroying it, but since he's not here, you should do it."
Harry nodded sagely. "Makes sense."
He moved them both away from the fire to the edge of the campsite and placed the cup in the snow.
"I know we said we thought the sword could be a horcrux, but I'm rather convinced it's not," he said.
"What makes you say that?"
"Well, I had both the horcruxes on me, didn't I? If the sword was a horcrux, then you'd think the dark magic in it would have called out to the other two, the way the locket called out to the cup in the vault."
"It didn't?" she prompted.
He shook his head. "Nope. Damned thing jerked away from my neck and tried to pull me back down to the bottom of the pond once I had my hands on the sword. The cup may have tried to do the same thing, but by that point, everything I had on was so wet and heavy anyway, it was hard to tell."
He offered her a grim smile, and she stared back at him, amazed that time after time, Harry managed to survive incidents that would have killed lesser wizards.
"Okay, so if this works like the basilisk fang worked with the diary, you should be able to just stab it," he said. "It'll fight back, probably make some awful noise, and this black stuff will seep out of it. Kind of like… like…"
"Ichor?" she asked. Harry looked at her blankly.
"Nevermind. Stab it. Awful noise. Black stuff. Got it," she said.
He held out the sword, and she clasped the jeweled pommel in her hand, admittedly a bit in awe that she was holding Godric Gryffindor's famed sword. It was lighter than she'd anticipated, and she wondered if it had a lightweight charm of some kind applied to it. Surely it did for a 12 year old Harry to be able to wield it against a basilisk.
She stared down at the gold cup, unsure how she was supposed to stab it with a sword. Would the sword penetrate another metal? How did that even work?
"Don't overthink it. Just do it," Harry said encouragingly, sensing her reticence.
Here goes nothing, she thought as she lifted the sword, pointing the sharp end at the cup. She brought the tip down as hard she could, putting as much force into her movement as possible.
To Hermione's surprise, the sword pierced the golden cup, slicing through the metal. As it did so, an inhuman shriek of agony emanated from the damaged vessel.
"Don't drop the sword!" Harry yelled before she could react to cover her ears at the awful noise.
She tightened her grip on the pommel, pressing harder to pin the cup to the ground. The scream faded to a hissing sound, and she realised then that it was the same voice, the same horrid, vicious hissing whisper she heard when she wore Slytherin's locket.
"I have seen your heart, and it is mine."
She had carried the cup before, in the pocket of her robes, but it had not tormented her as much as the locket had. But this… this was new. The horcrux trapped within the cup was actually speaking. Aloud.
"You want so desperately to prove yourself, to fit in, and you think he can give that to you," the voice hissed.
Hermione stared at the cup as a thick black substance began leaking from the point where the sword punctured the golden chalice.
"Don't let go, Hermione!" Harry said. He stepped forward to put his hands on her, to help her hold onto the sword, but it was as if an invisible barrier blocked him from touching her.
She watched, entranced, as a mist swirled from the black liquid, moving upward and thickening. It churned and became a cloud that hovered in between her and Harry until it dissipated enough to make out two silvery figures.
Her eyes widened in shock as she realised the figures in the mist were Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy.
It was the first time she'd laid eyes on Lucius in ages, and he was beautiful, so beautiful, and she'd missed him so much. His long blond hair was straight and smooth over his tailored robes. His familiar snake-head cane was in one hand, and with the other, he held onto his wife.
The shimmery image of Narcissa Malfoy moved closer to her husband, and Hermione was struck again by how absurdly, inhumanly perfect Lucius's wife appeared. The lithe, willowy figure in formal dress robes leaned into her husband and trailed a manicured hand over his chest.
"Such a silly, pathetic little thing, Lucius. Whatever were you thinking?" Her voice was amused, derisive in tone.
Hermione sucked in a breath at Narcissa's words. Her hands felt suddenly clammy as she grasped the pommel of the sword.
"Darling, she's Potter's mudblood. Why wouldn't I take advantage of such a naive, innocent little girl? She was so eager, so terribly eager to learn from me, to spread her legs for me, weren't you, pet?"
His voice drawled in that same seductive way he'd always spoken to her, and he looked at her then, a smirk twisting his lips.
"Hermione?"
She tore her eyes from the image in the mist to see Harry, dear, sweet Harry. He looked so utterly confused, and she knew, knew then that he could see and hear every single thing emerging from that awful mist.
"I will admit that I would rather not roll about in the mud, but sacrifices must be made for the Dark Lord, you know."
Lucius sneered at her, and Hermione blinked back tears. His voice was suddenly cold, so horribly, painfully cold. He'd never talked to her like that, ever.
"Why on earth would you ever believe that MY husband, Lucius Malfoy, scion of the house of Malfoy, member of the Sacred 28, would ever lower himself to care for the likes of YOU?"
Narcissa's sneer twisted her beautiful face before she leaned in to pressed a possessive kiss to her husband's cheek.
"Lucius LOVES me. He's always loved me. But not you. You're nothing. You're a pathetic piece of filth he soiled himself with in service to the Dark Lord."
"Yes, the Dark Lord is most pleased with me. He hardly believed me when I told Him the mudblood gave me the prophecy herself, but He agreed we should take advantage of such a brilliant opportunity."
Lucius's voice was a seductive purr, and Hermione was hypnotised by it, even as she felt the bile rise in her throat at his words.
"As far as missions go, I could not have asked for a more satisfying one. After the Dark Lord kills Potter, He has agreed to let me keep you, pet. And you are such a good pet, aren't you? You knelt so prettily before me with your mouth open for my cock. It's where you should be, on your knees, before your betters."
"It's… it's not REAL, Hermione!" Harry yelled. "It's NOT REAL. STAB IT AGAIN!"
"Stab," she whispered, unable to tear her eyes from the silvery, shimmering couple before her.
"He never cared about you. He doesn't LOVE you."
Narcissa's laughter was knives stabbing at her heart.
"STAB THE CUP, HERMIONE!"
"How could I love filth like you when I have such a perfect pureblooded wife? You're a pathetic, insecure, naive little whore who doesn't belong in our world. If you weren't Potter's best friend, you'd be worthless to me after a good fuck."
She felt a hot tear slide down her cheek as his words cut through her and reverberated in her brain.
You are nothing, you are nothing. He doesn't care about you.
"HERMIONE STAB IT AGAIN!"
Somehow, Harry's frantic shouts cut through the mist, cut through the horrible, hateful words coming from the image of the man she loved. Her palms, sweaty with fear, slipped on the sword. She could barely see the cup through the haze of her tears.
She drew on all of her Gryffindor bravery to try to block the taunts and sneers from Lucius and Narcissa, and choking back a sob, she tightened her grip on the sword.
You are nothing.
She drew in a shaky breath and lifted the sword from the cup, blinking down at the gash in the metal.
Filthy whore.
"DO IT! STAB IT!" Harry yelled.
Pathetic, worthless.
With a primal scream, Hermione plunged the point of the sword down again, spearing the metal. The mist swirled harder, and that awful scream returned.
"I'm not nothing. You're not real," she whispered.
Darkness leached from the cup, into the mist, and to her immense relief, the silvery, shimmering, sneering images of Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy swirled into nothingness.
A sickening hiss, a last gasp emanated from the cup, and then silence.
It was done.
She fell to her knees in the snow, still holding onto the sword with a death grip, and broke down into heaving sobs and what she'd just witnessed, what she'd just done.
"It's not real, it wasn't real," she whispered to herself, mindless of the tears dripping down her face. "It was Him. It was the horcrux."
She knew, logically she knew. It was the horcrux. It was the tainted bit of Voldemort's soul.
She'd worn the locket, she'd carried the cup. She knew how the dark magic within had whispered to her, taunting her, playing on her fears and insecurities.
What she'd just witnessed wasn't real. Lucius loved her, not Narcissa. He loved her, and he would never think of her in such a horrible way. He wanted out, he wanted to be free from the Dark Lord's service, and he was helping them. None of this had been real.
Her mind knew this. It was much harder to convince her heart.
"Hermione?"
The hushed whisper of her name from Harry's lips drew her back to the present and startled her. She dropped the sword and scrambled back from the soiled cup. She ended up on her arse on the cold ground as she wiped at her face with the sleeve of her coat.
She was alive. She was alive, and none of this was real, and Lucius was fine. He was fine, and she would message him with the bracelet, and he would tell her that all was well.
A tiny burst of hysterical laughter bubbled from her lips. She'd done it! She'd destroyed a horcrux! They had the sword!
"Hermione?"
The sound of her name being called yet again finally cut through the chaos of her mind and she looked up. Standing a few meters away, still clutching the blanket she'd wrapped round him, was Harry Potter, and from the look on his face, she realised then that he'd witnessed the entire thing.
Harry's face was white, ashen from cold and shock, and his hands were balled into fists.
"What," he hissed, "the fuck was THAT?"
~oOo~
I promised something big this week, and there it is. I know I'm evil for leaving you with yet another cliffhanger, but hopefully it will be worth it when you read the next chapter. I'm really struggling with some upcoming chapters, and I am trying very hard to not miss a weekly update. You WILL get another update next week, I can promise that. When I started this journey back before Christmas, I had no idea I'd still be writing in late July. This story took on a life of its own, and it's so much more involved now than I ever anticipated when I started the outline for it months ago. Thank you so much for continuing to read and share your thoughts with me.