Disclaimer: No money made, no disrespect intended. Thanks.

Author's note:

To everyone who left me a review for the last chapter, Clooless, Yvonnia, PinkTribeChick, Caged Sparkle and of course MandaPandaAR...I continue to be pleasantly surprised that anyone wants to read this pairing, but you all are proving me wrong. Thank you all: ))

Summary : "If we were alive today, we would never have met."

When the Order Of The Phoenix learn of Voldemort's latest plan to use the Veil to experiment with immortality, they embark on a mission to destroy it once and for all. Hermione Granger is nineteen, and in charge of finding the spell that will succeed in this task. But when the mission goes wrong and Hermione is pulled in, who can she possibly turn to for help, now she's….well..dead?

Three

Night And Day

" The things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist."

"You're a bit useless, really, aren't you?"

The black-haired boy was lighting a fire in a roughly built stone fireplace. After he had managed to get Hermione standing, he had asked her if she was able to walk, to which she'd answered that of course she could, but it turned out that she wasn't able to do this for long.

But for someone so slightly built, he had swung her up into his arms with ease, feeling with his feet in the forest floor, and finally kicking aside a pile of bracken and dead leaves from the foot of a blackened oak tree to reveal a rusty black trap door, roughly two feet wide.

"It's a bit of a squeeze," he said. "And you're not in any fit state for a jump, but you'll have to. You can't stay out here."

Somehow, she did not know how she managed it, but she found herself slipping into the trapdoor, the prospect of being somewhere other than the treacherous dark of the woods overwhelmingly welcome.

It was not a soft landing just as he had warned, but by now, Hermione was past caring: what was another bump or bruise alongside all the others she'd collected today? She'd be black and blue in the morning, but who cared?

There was a soft noise behind her, and she turned to see the boy, voluminous black cloak and sword still in place, and holding up an old fashioned lantern, his pale skin luminescent in the lamplight.

"Hang on a moment….." he muttered, opening the glass front of the lamp and taking out a stub of wax. "There, that's it."

Candles flared into life as he walked along the walls of a small stone underground room touching them with the flame. It was sparse and square and empty, with nothing but a fireplace at one end and a small table with nothing on it. There was a threadbare rug draped before the hearth in a dark shade of green, a three legged stool, and a very dirty and battered black iron bedstead holding a pile of blankets (also green, she noticed) had been shoved in one corner. The blankets were smooth and looked as if they had never been slept on.

The fire crackled into life, and Hermione, steered towards the stool by her rescuer, leaned into it gratefully before his words had filtered through her consciousness. She looked around at him indignantly.

"I'm not useless! But how can I be expected to find my way home in a place I don't know and know nothing about? I've tried…but I just can't seem to get anywhere, find anyone except…except..." she struggled to continue with the effort from earlier, but the boy, who had been pulling one of the blankets off the bed, finished her sentence for her.

"Except me. Yes. Well, then, you were very lucky, weren't you. I've been here quite a while, and believe me, you learn fast. Well…..I suppose some of us do." He put the blanket around her shoulders.

Hermione tried to ignore the reappearance of the haughty tone and rubbed at the cut on her arm that was healing surprisingly rapidly for such a recent injury, and was beginning to itch. The boy regarded her clothing again, with distaste, and took a rag out of his pocket.

"Try to stay quiet." he muttered, wiping her face with water from a small bowl. " It tends to encourage them…otherwise." At Hermione's bemused "Them?" he gestured upwards.

"The Malevolents. Those things.From last night."

Hermione shivered in spite of the fire and the blanket.

"Thank you," she said. "For saving me….both times."

He smiled a little.

"There's nothing we can do about your clothes tonight." he said, prodding the fire thoughtfully. "More's the pity. Tomorrow we can hopefully find a stream of some sort, some way to get the mud off. But not tonight. Too dangerous."

He sat down on the stone floor by the fire whose flames were now crackling merrily and shooting up what must be some kind of chimney. His gaze seemed very intense, the grey eyes unnerving to Hermione, who wondered why watching her was so interesting for him, but she didn't like to say anything.

The boy watched her still, as if he was waiting for her to speak first, and she supposed he wouldn't be disappointed, because she had a great many questions.

"Who are you?" she blurted out at last.

He gave a short bark of a laugh that sounded oddly reassuring, even in the gloomy, echoing room.

"I told you, remember? I'm nobody."

"You must have a name?"

"Why must I?" he rolled his grey eyes.

"Well, everybody does."

"Not me. Not anymore. At least, no name I care about."

The look on his face told her not to ask any more questions, not tonight, at least. Maybe she could ask him again, another time. Maybe there was a reason for him not wanting her to know. She tried a different tack:

"Where are we?" she asked.

The answer came a little too quickly, as if it had been expected and rehearsed for. Flippant.

"No idea."

"You said you'd been here for quite a while, though. So surely you must know?"

"You ask too many questions."

The boy's brows knitted together and he looked away. Hermione didn't want him to leave her alone again in this place, even if he couldn't or wouldn't answer anything , so she fell silent, and watched him quite as intently as he had been watching her, a little while earlier.

He broke the silence first this time, unexpectedly.

"Why don't you tell me about you?" he suggested .

"Well, I did tell you my name," she began. He nodded. "Yes. You told me your name was Hermione. Sounds like a name from a Muggle storybook. Did you make it up yourself?" He grinned slyly, looking at her from under his eyelashes to show her he was joking.

Hermione didn't know why her cheeks suddenly felt hot, but she carried on.

"I left school, Hogwarts, last year," she said. He raised an eyebrow. "Hogwarts?" he asked. "And what house were you in?"

"Gryffindor." came the proud reply. The boy smirked as if at some sort of private joke.

"Should have known. Brave girl, are you? I hope so."

"Why?" Hermione couldn't keep the tremor out of her voice at the foreboding note in his voice.

"Because you'll need to be, here. How old are you? Eighteen?"

"Nineteen,"

The boy suddenly looked wistful. "I was nineteen once," he said.

"Most people are, at some point," said Hermione, smiling. "How old are you now, then? You don't look any older than me, so you must have been quite young when you got here…however you got here."

The boy shrugged. "I've always been nineteen here. I don't know. I was nineteen once. Can't remember being twenty."

A cold feeling crept around Hermione's heart even as she struggled to believe it, but try as she did, she kept seeing the black fronds of the veil, moving closer, closer…touching her cheek…and falling…..

"Are you…..are you …a ghost?" she whispered.

The boy turned his pale eyes to look quite as keenly at her as he had the night before, in the darkness of that night of terror.

"Are you?" he asked.

His voice was light and his eyes were deadly serious. Hermione fell silent. Somewhere in her mind, she supposed that if, as she suspected, she really had fallen though the veil, like Sirius, then she would automatically die. The boy pushed back a lock of fine black hair that had fallen across his face and watched her .

"I don't….think I am.." she said finally "Maybe I 'm…just ……just…..lost? Do you think…..I might be? Lost, that is?"

The boy said nothing for a moment, just looked at her with his own long pale hands folded across one another, and a wistful smile playing around the very edges of his mouth.

"Lost," he echoed, at last. "Yes. Perhaps we both are."

-

"It's light." said an unfamiliar voice a little later, when Hermione, having slept little if at all, awoke on the batterd bedstead in the stone room.

"I took the liberty of cleaning those ridiculous shoes of yours," said Hermione's rescuer, crossing the room and picking up the shoes by their laces, the way one might pick up something the cat dragged in.

"They wouldn't have lasted much longer, especially if we're going to be travelling."

"Travelling?" Hermione asked. "Don't you live here? I mean, I thought….."

He laughed, the peculiar short laugh from the night before.

"No. No, I don't live here. I was staying here. As a rule, I am used to far more home comforts, but I was passing through on my way to…….well, on my way to somewhere. It's hard to explain at the moment. In any case, if you want to get…er…..home…you might as well travel with me. Doesn't really seem to be safe to leave you on your own."

"Well….!" Hermione began, but his lazy smirk wrong footed her, and she found herself smiling, too. Daylight was filtering down into the room, presumably from some kind of skylight cut into the earth. She looked around and wondered vaguely who this place had belonged to. It looked as if it had been abandoned some time ago.

"People come and go, here." her companion said, noticing her expression. "You'll get used to it."

"I don't want to get used to it. I want to go home."

He sighed.

"Here," he said, handing her the shoes which really hadn't been cleaned very well. " It's the best I could do in the circumstances, but I'm afraid I have no idea about girls' things. That was always my brother's forte."

"You have a brother?" Hermione asked, taking them and looking around as if said brother might suddenly walk into the room. The boy laughed as he noticed her look.

"Did have. Who knows what happened to him? We didn't exactly get on…well, not in the end, anyway. We used to be best friends, but he left home when I was about fifteen and I only ever saw him once after that."

"I'm sorry," Hermione said softly, a little surprised at this sudden admission from the boy sitting in front of her. He got to his feet shaking his head so his long hair fell around his sharp cheekbones, with the uncomfortable air that he felt he'd said too much. In this new quality of light, Hermione noticed that under his eyes were dark shadows, as if he hadn't slept for weeks.

"Where did you sleep, if you don't mind my asking?" she said.

"Sleep?" he looked a little startled. "Ah…..well, you know, I slept…I slept on the floor. After you went.." he made some sort of gesture towards the bed that she'd spent the fitful night in, and to her astonishment, she noticed he suddenly looked shy.

"We'd better start," he said, after an awkward pause, and then said, rather stiffly, as if he felt he needed to somehow justify himself:

"I'm only taking you with me because I was passing this way, in any case. You should know that I'm better off on my own, and it's not as if there's much company around here anyway. But you'll see that for yourself." he continued, a dark look crossing his fine-boned features.

He picked up his his cloak and slung it around his neck. Hermione didn't quite know what to say. He looked at her and then looked away very quickly. Then he'd gone swiftly to the very back of the room now and was feeling around on the wall.

Hermione caught him up and watched what he was doing. His long fingers moved along the blank wall like they were searching for something, and he had evidently found it, for a moment later, Hermione heard a 'click' and a door shimmered once and solidified in front of her eyes.

"Here." he said abruptly, indicating the doorway. "After you."

It was pitch dark. Hermione felt like they were in a sort of narrow passageway. She could hear the boy behind her, his boots making a soft 'clack' on the stone floor of the tunnel. She quite literally couldn't see her hand before her face, though, and so walked slowly and with trepidation. It was a little unnerving to be in the dark with somebody whose name she didn't even know, but in the circumstances, she reasoned, there wasn't much of a choice. She sensed they'd reached something solid after a short while, and put her hands blindly out, finding nothing and then she felt a hand on her shouder, quite suddenly, making her jump.

"Find the other handle, would you?" he asked polite, but seemingly a little exasperated.

"Don't do that!" she whispered angrily.

"What?" came the amused reply. "Ask you to open the door so we can get out? Fine with me. Let's just stay here in the dark ….." He hummed a little tuneless song to himself.

With that, Hermione grabbed in front of her at nothing in particular and by a stroke of luck, her fingers closed on cold metal. She gave the handle an almighty wrench and shot forward, literally falling out of the door and onto hard earth.

-

They were standing, well, he was standing and she was somewhat sprawled, she noted with annoyance, at what appeared to be the foot of a large mountain.

The boy was laughing, closing the door calmly behind him, and Hermione watched as it simply melted away.

"You didn't have to scare me. I don't like the dark." she said, angrily, but he just laughed again.

"Got you to hurry up, didn't it?" He offered her a hand, and with surprising ease, he pulled her to her feet.

She glared at him furiously, and he let her hand go abruptly, widening the gap between the two of them and turning slowly on the spot to survey the landscape. To Hermione's surprise, a slight breeze, the first she had felt since she'd arrived in this place, ruffled his hair and the black scarf he wore about his neck.

It was reassuring to at last have the weather behaving a little closer to normal, to leave behind the ghastly cloying humidity of the woods and fields. She took a great gulp of air, ignoring in her turn the curious look he gave her, and got to her feet once more, brushing her dress uselessly with her hands to try and remove the caked black mud on it, but to no avail. He saw her, and nodded.

"Stream's not far."

"Thanks," she said grudgingly.

"Don't mention it. And that dress would be all right, you know," he said. " If it were clean, that is."

He smiled a little, and for the second time since meeting him, Hermione was reminded of someone else.

She was still trying to ascertain who exactly it was, when they began to walk along the steep path that curved up and around the side of the mountain, but like an elusive word on the tip of one's tongue, it kept escaping her.

Perhaps this place has addled my brains, she thought, as she plodded along after the black-haired boy, whose long legs allowed him to stride with ease, betraying no sign of effort.

Here I am, with somebody I don't even know, following then somewhere I don't know where , but I don't have any other choice…

"Er…" she began, wondering what to call him and settling on nothing. "Er…….where are we going to, anyway?"

"Looking for something," he answered in a sort of closed voice. "Someone. Whichever. Someone who might be able to tell me what to do next, at least, because much like yourself, I'm not too keen on this place either. As I said, precious few home comforts, and not at all what I'm used to."

All this was said, Hermione thought, in a tone quite worthy of Draco Malfoy.Even his voice was similar, that kind (she grinned a little to herself here) of faux upper-class accent undercut with hints of a terrible London drawl. She couldn't help but roll her eyes behind his back, but even so, she was still curious to know about him.

"You're from one of those rich families, I suppose?" she said, making a face behind his back.

He nodded. "Purebloods, of course." Hermione opened her mouth to remark on his tone of superiority, and then shut it abruptly as he continued: "And I'd appreciate it if you didn't make the comment you're about to. It's quite obvious you aren't one yourself. I've never heard your surname before, and you have a certain gracelessness about you that always gives it away."

"Well!" she spluttered indignantly, trying to catch him up and round on him, but when she did, she realised he was grinning from ear to ear.

"You know, I used to believe that." he said, seriously. "Not anymore though."

"Why not?" Hermione asked, forgetting her anger.

"We all die the same in the end, right?"

"Do we?" Hermione asked him.

"Yeah," he muttered. "Well, maybe not all quite the same, but even so."

It was almost impossible to talk, as well, with the steep mountain slope merely trying to retain one's footing was an effort. Once or twice, she slipped, and he, with remarkably quick reflexes, grabbed her hand just in time to steady her, which made her blush slightly, and drop it quickly as soon as she'd set herself right. He didn't talk much, though they did stop to rest occasionally, she suspected this was more for her benefit than for his, as he never seemed to tire. Interestingly, though, Hermione noted that she too was not out of breath, even after the steepest slopes, and attributed this to all the Quidditch she'd been trying to play with Harry, Ron and Ginny in the holidays.

Still, despite his relative quietness, Hermione was grateful to have someone to protect her when the now familiar dark looming patch appeared in the dull grey/blue of the sky.

"We'll stay here the night," he announced, as he steered her down a small ridge. They'd crossed around the mountain, and around the next corner she saw what , on closer inspection by the two of them, appeared to be a small cave, with a tiny stream running some distance away. The boy frowned in thought and then turned to Hermione, indicating the stream with one elegant hand.

"You can wash your dress in there. Be quick. We'll need to make a fire, to dry it." he said. "At the entrance. I don't know what's up here, really, I'm just going the way I heard of."

"Heard from who?"

"Never mind"

By 'what's up here' she assumed he meant something similar to the night-prowling creatures of their first encounter, what had he called them? Malevolents? Hermione shivered.

Perhaps her companion misinterpreted the shiver, because a thought seemed to occur to him at that moment, and he reached up, unbuckling his long, black cloak and handing it to her.

"Here," he said, with a look that Hermione might almost have interpreted as embarrassment. "You'll need……."

He let the sentence trail off, and walked quickly away, keeping his back turned from a discreet distance as she undressed and dipped her dress in the stream. It really wasn't a great deal of help, as the stream itself was a muddy brown, but at least it removed the worst of it. She wrung the forlorn garment out, deciding, as she tried to pull the tangles out of her hair, that vanity may well have to be abandoned in this place. Slinging the dress rather hopelessly over a large flat rock, she wrapped the cloak around herself and walked to join her companion as he looked out across the darkening mountain.

Quoted: Hemingway.

Next time...truth hurts, as Hermione finds out. Comments welcome.