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

Author's note:

To everyone who left me a review for the last chapter, thank you so much. Each and every one is appreciated so very much. Chapter 4, then. I hope you enjoy!

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?

Four

A Kind Of Living

"Some things you have to believe.."

"We need some more wood for this fire." the boy muttered. "And try to keep your voice down would you? I would really rather not attract too much attention tonight."

"Attention?"

He nodded.

"You don't want anything else turning up, do you? Even I don't know all of what's in this place, and most of what I do know I'd rather I didn't."

With this enigmatic remark, he stalked off to grab handfuls of dead scrub. Thankfully, it wasn't damp as the very slight breeze seemed to have dried it a little, and soon the two of them had made a sizeable pile that went up nicely.

-

Sitting at the fire that night, looking at each other through the dancing amber flames, Hermione asked him:

"What did you say those things were again? In the night?"

"The Malevolents." he said softly.

"What do they do?"

"Oh, nothing much."(he gave a weird, sour chuckle) "Only eat your soul. They're parasites. That's what they subsist on. D'you know what Dementors are? "

Hermione nodded.

"Well, they come from here. Nice thought, isn't it? They eat the souls of those who end up here, to gain power."

"How do you know all this," she asked sceptically, wondering briefly if he was making fun of her.

"I saw it happen. Only once, but believe me, that's enough. The screaming-" he looked away suddenly and didn't complete the sentence.

"So you're telling me these things gain strength by consuming human souls? Why?"

"I'm told it gives them enough strength to pass between worlds. Between this realm, and the other."

"The other realm? What other realm, exactly ?" said Hermione impatiently . "Are you ever going to give me a straight answer, or some proper information, or are you just going to talk in riddles all the time?"

He laughed at her, his black hair glinting in the flames, giving him a slightly wicked look.

"Maybe."

Hermione watched him, irritated. For a moment. his gaze seemed to drift off of her, and into the flames, where they danced in miniature reflected in the glassy grey of his hooded eyes.

"You should lie down," he said at last, pointing inside the cave. "You aren't used to this place, as I am."

"Won't you be cold, without your cloak?"

"No. I don't get cold."

She bit her lip, holding the cloak to her chest, wondering how to say what she was about to say without it being really embarrassing.

"Are you….I mean…..don't you want to come. Not like…"

She saw him smirk and close his eyes briefly in the half-light, but his reply was matter-of-fact:

"That won't be necessary."

Hermione nodded, her cheeks burning. "Right.." she managed. "Wake me up when you need me to take over." she said.

He nodded curtly, and settled himself by the fire. Hermione had the strong impression that he wasn't paying much attention to the last sentence, but she retreated inside the cave, which was far from comfortable, but at least it was reasonably dry and she had the cloak, which not only went over her, but was also big enough to pad out the floor a bit. She was surprised to find that, instead of the black and blue skin she had predicted the day before, her skin was smooth and unblemished. Perhaps she had imagined that it was worse than it really had been?

She lay as comfortably as she could down on the hard rock floor. The cloak, though, was thick, luxurious and soft with something of an almost soothing smell about it, very male, like expensive Wizard cologne, and clean, like fresh open air, which was strange in this place. She wondered who he was and why he was being so evasive.

Perhaps she wouldn't need to know. Hopefully they would get to somewhere she recognised soon, or perhaps she'd find a telephone box or something first. She was still apprehensive about this stranger, especially as he was not exactly free with the personal information.

She could still see him, through the mouth of the cave, sitting perfectly still by the fire, studying a grubby piece of parchment he held in his hand but although he glanced round once, when he thought she wasn't looking, he was silent, and so was the mountainside. As she drifted off to a kind of half-sleep, Hermione watched him in-between the vague, incoherent thoughts of an overloaded mind until her eyes got too heavy and finally closed when the dark of the night blended with the small breeze blowing the loose, black strands of his ponytail in a way that was almost hypnotic. Through this, her mind, against the will of exhaustion, continued to wonder just why a face she had never seen could be so familiar.

-

He didn't wake her. The daylight did, for it couldn't be said that there was any kind of distinct sunlight; rather like the dark, the day simply spread out across the sky and stayed there, unchanging until the night spread out over it and took it back again. It would, she thought, be a little less unnerving if she had been able to tell the time by the sky, like her father had taught her to do on Sunday morning walks when she was a little girl, but here, this was impossible.

She was grateful to her mysterious stranger, of course, for not having disturbed her, but another part of her hoped he wouldn't be angry with her for not waking and taking her part in the watch. He might abandon her once more, and then where would she be?

-

He'd kicked the fire out that morning and they had set off again. It was downhill this time and a little easier than before. Hermione glanced at him curiously as they walked, trying to judge his mood by the look on his face, but despite the shadows under his eyes being as dark as ever, he looked no different, no tell-tale crease of the eyes or set of the jaw to betray himself.

She had the disconcerting feeling that he knew she was staring at him, but he was just choosing to ignore it. She turned away, looking over the endless grey of the terrain, as she stumbled on next to him.

"Who else is here?" she asked him once, as they turned a corner and began another uphill path, the road twisting and turning like some sort of perverse rollercoaster.

"Don't know." he answered. " It changes. Some people leave, one way or another. Some don't. Like me."

"What do you mean?"

"Like I said, I've been here quite a while."

"How long?"

"Seems like a lifetime." he said vaguely, and she saw him press his lips together as if to keep from speaking. He hunched his thin shoulders and put his head down, rubbing his face with his cuff as if he was thinking about something unpleasant.

"I said not to speak in riddles," she grumbled.

"Don't ask the questions then." he said, shortly. "You might not like the answers."

"I could decide that, if you'd give me them for once," Hermione grumbled, in a low voice.

He raised an eyebrow.

"Well for most people, it's too late by then, " he commented, and went back to his silence.

They didn't speak again until it was time to make camp. The scenery stayed as grey and unchanging as ever, but they found another cave, smaller than the first one, but it was going to have to do. In any case, she thought, he'd probably just sit and stare at the fire all night. Goodness knows what he thought about, she mused. There isn't much here to inspire a person, so it can't be that he's thinking up poetry.

She giggled a little to herself, for his clothes, standard for Wizard nobility, so he probably really was a Pureblood, as he'd claimed, really did look a little like those of overdressed Muggle poets in old-fashioned pictures.

They carried on in this manner for the whole of the following day. Hermione was feeling more and more agitated, and the grey sky seemed to be getting lower and lower, dusty air as thick as soup. More disturbing still, she had begun to notice that she hardly needed to eat here, having lost her appetite completely, and not even feeling the urge for sustenance despite the fact that they were walking miles upon miles.

In actual fact, the very thought of food made her feel a little nauseous. She had picked a few berries, and even tried to roast some peculiar kind of mushroom over the fire, much to the amusement of her companion, who simply sat and watched her, a slight smile on his finely-cut features, reminding Hermione, again, of somebody else; she was sure that she'd seen that nose and jaw before, but she just couldn't place them. He declined, of course, to partake of her cooking, looking haughtily down his nose and prodding one of the mushrooms with a hand so soft-skinned and pale that she was convinced that he'd never cooked so much as a piece of toast in his life. Goodness knew, then , how he'd survived out here for as long as he'd implied he'd been there. She'd never yet seen him eat. He said he wasn't a ghost, and he felt as solid as anyone should be.

Later, she had retired to that night's cave to attempt to get some sleep, but even that was proving fitful, as if her mind no longer wanted or needed to rest.

She put this down to the stress, and the change in climate, and hoped fervently that she wasn't about to break a fever, for there was surely no doctors near, and she didn't really think that they were in Wales, now….not anymore.

The more agitated Hermione became, the more watchful her companion was, as if he sensed her disquiet. It came to a head that night, when they had finished finding enough fuel for a fire, which had been a lot more difficult that night, as the air had suddenly become damp and cloying again, like it had been in the beginning.

"How do I know, " Hermione said to him, breaking a silence spanning, she thought, more than an hour, as they sat on opposite sides of the fire, whose flames were at last rising high into a low, black sky. "How do I know that you aren't going to hurt me, just when I began to trust you?"

He looked up in surprise, and for a moment, she was thrown by the wide-eyed, boyish expression of surprise he wore. Perhaps he was telling the truth, that he really knew nothing about girls. Especially intelligent girls, Hermione thought, grimly. Well, he was about to find out.

"You do trust me, then?" he said, quite genuinely, with no trace of the smirk he seemed to favour so often as a response to any question.

"I don't know yet," Hermione said, and to her dismay, her voice came out sounding rather childish and petulant.

He raised his eyebrows so high that they disappeared into the hanging black hair that had come loose from it's velvet tie to settle around his jaw-bone.

"I like your reasoning, then. Despite the fact that I have come to your aid twice already, saving you from spirit-sucking parasites, and pulling you out of a swamp, even though I doubt it would have hurt you for long, you still feel that I have some dark agenda, some secret that I'm hiding. Well, perhaps I have….but I guarantee that it has absolutely nothing to do with you."

For the first time, since she'd began questioning him, he actually sounded angry. Hermione resolved to tread carefully, she really didn't want him to take off, leaving her alone in the dark, because despite her need to ask these things, it was her head that needed to know. Inside her heart, she really knew he wouldn't harm her, but some perverse need for information spurred her on to say:

"It's hard to trust you, when you won't even trust me with your name or what you are doing here." she countered.

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," he said, rather more to himself than to her, but she pounced on the words and said:

"Try me."

He smirked.

"You can call me Mr. Smith." He told her, grinning at the old cliché. "Will that do?"

"It's a start, but that's not you real name, is it?"

"How do you know?" he said, the grin darkening. "It might be."

"I was at school with some Smiths," Hermione told him, shrewdly. "They were all short and chubby and blonde, and they were all in Hufflepuff."

He wrinkled up his nose, and for once in a while, she seemed to have his full attention. He sat up a little straighter, stretching his arms in the sleeves of his dirty-white shirt. Hermione now wore his cloak wrapped tightly about her more as a comfort than a means to warmth, but he didn't seem to mind without it. Hermione noticed for the first time that the shirt had some dark stains that looked like blood around the cuffs and collar. He noticed her looking at them and quickly turned over the material so it didn't show, though whether this was from vanity or another reason, she wasn't quite sure. Very probably a bit of both, from the evidence so far.

Suddenly, he began to talk very quickly, deliberately not looking at her, even though she had not taken her eyes off of him, and was now watching him intently as he prodded the fire with the toe of his boot and muttered, almost as if to himself..

"What you need to understand here is…that thing aren't what you think…" he began.

"What I think…?" Hermione began, but he held up a hand to quiet her.

"You talk of home." he said. " But where exactly, or rather, what exactly, do you mean by that?"

Hermione looked at him, wondering what made him ask such a ridiculous question.

"Well," she began sarcastically, " As much as I assume you want to get back home to your nice rich Pureblood parents, I'd also like to go home and see my parents and Ron and Harry again. My friends. In London, which is where I live, and you'd better not start doing that superior smirk, either, because I can tell that's where you are from, as well, no matter how you try and cover it up."

He did smirk again, but only briefly, and said, in a very different tone.

"Sorry. When I was very small, my brother used to take me with him when he snuck out of the house to play with the Muggle kids. He was a year older than me, and he liked the Muggles, mostly because he had an ego the size of London itself and couldn't resist the way they worshipped him. Obviously, they had no idea he was a wizard, just believed that he was uncannily good at pretty much everything. It was fun, for a while, until Mother found out." he paused, a shadow passing over his face like he was actually seeing it all happen once more. "She went berserk," he muttered, the accent plain in his voice now, and he made no attempt to hide it. "Said we weren't to play with the filth, as she called them,"

Hermione huffed angrily, but he carried on "She used to carry this cane, anyway," he continued, " And after that day, if we even so much as spoke like the kids of London, she would slam it down over our knuckles." he actually winced a little here, and Hermione saw him rub the knuckles of his left hand with the fingers of his right as if recalling the old punishment. "Anyway, I never dared go with him after that, although he still did. I was too scared. He called me a coward, and Mother all sorts of horrible names, most of which were probably true, but there you go. He'd go out with them, and I'd stay at home and be the good son and try to cover for him. It didn't always work, though, and on those days I got Mother's cane for lying for my brother, and then he would come in and threaten to break my nose for letting her find out." he laughed sourly. "Happy times. So long ago, now, though."

Hermione was silent, not really knowing what to say or do. Eventually, she said:

"I don't have any brothers or sisters, and my parents are Muggles, so I daresay we had very different lives."

He nodded, and looked up at her. "Like I said, though. We end the same don't we? In this bloody place, and goodness knows if we'll ever leave."

Hermione moved around the fire to sit next to him, and said, in what she hoped was a suitably soothing voice:

"It's only until we get home," She patted his hand awkwardly. "We just have to find out where we are, then we can get help."

To Hermione's surprise, he stiffened at her words;

"I don't think you get it," he said, slowly and carefully, after a long pause. "This isn't the Wizard of Oz, you know. We can't get back."

A nasty feeling had begun in her stomach when he said this. There was another ominously long pause, and she sensed that he was waiting, pre-empting her next question with the answer ready to deliver.

"The Wizard of Oz was never a real wizard anyway," she muttered, more to herself than to him, but she felt him shift beside her.

"I think you are a ghost, really." she told him, suddenly. "I know you don't sleep at night. You don't get tired. I've never seen you eat anything. And what's worse, it's starting to happen to me, too. Why? What's going on? Tell me!"

"I'm not a ghost." he said, with a deep sigh. " Not as such. Something happened to me, it's a long story. But we can't go home from here. It's not that simple."

"Not a ghost as such! So you're telling me we're in some sort of other world then?" Hermione said, angrily.

"How ridiculous! And you talk about your childhood as though it were forty years ago!"

"It was the Sixties." he answered flatly.

"You're my age, and I most definitely was not alive in the Sixties." Hermione told him.

"You said you were nineteen," he said "but how is that, if you weren't around then?"

"I was born," Hermione said, loudly and clearly "In 1979. The nineteenth of September. And as far as I am aware, whatever this bloody place is, the year is 1998."

She knew he was staring at her, but as far as she was concerned this had gone far enough. She stood up and stormed away from him into the cave, flinging herself down and sobbing in a corner. At first she thought he was just going to stay quiet and sit staring into the flames again like he did every night, but then suddenly, she heard quiet footsteps and someone knelt down in front of her. She opened her eyes, rubbing her sleeve furiously across her face in a futile attempt to disguise the tears, and found herself on a level with him, his grey eyes looking into hers, but there was no anger there.

"Hermione," he began gently, and somewhere she was aware that it was the first time he had actually called her by her name. She hadn't even been sure he'd remembered it.

"Hermione," he said again, reaching out nervously and touching her cheek with those long, pale fingers. "You need to try and believe me. We're both dead. That's what we're here for. We died."

"Howe can you know that?" she said, shrilly, trying to keep her voice steady and failing miserably; it wavered like a child's. "How can you be so sure?"

He swallowed.

"I'm sure." he said, quietly. "I'm sure because if we were alive today, we would never have met. You just told me you were born on September 19th, 1979. That was the day I died."

-

Quoted: Coldplay - Speed Of Sound.

Comments very welcome...