Disclaimer:Not mine, no money made. Thanks.

Author's Note:I just want to say a big thank you to everyone who left me a review for the last chapter! So many and that's great and unexpected at the same time! I hope you enjoy this one just as much. It's a long one...

I also wanted to address the question that some of you have asked about the whole Sirius/Regulus issue. Resolution? Who knows, but I don't think it would be very like Sirius to stay entirely out of his little brother's fanfic, do you...?

--grins evilly--

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?

Six

Over The Edge

'It's always have and never hold
You've begun to feel like home
What's mine is yours to leave or take
What's mine is yours to make your own...'

-

When the light came the next morning, neither of them spoke about the night before, but the atmosphere between them had altered, imperceptibly. In daylight, you could think more and Hermione thought now, with a clear head. The boy she was travelling with was now not just anyone, but Sirius' younger brother. She remembered a conversation overheard while she'd sat with Ron eating lunch in the drawing room of Grimmauld place. It was strange to think that she, too, had lived in the house her companion had grown up in. Regulus Black, the 'little idiot' Sirius had talked about with such disgust. The Death Eater who ran away, to be murdered by Voldemort.

By rights she supposed, she should hate him, but it was hard to do that, knowing him now, as she did. She even understood why he hadn't wanted to tell the truth about who he was when he'd first rescued her. He probably thought she'd judge him too, just as Sirius seemed to have done.

Perhaps he thought the same, because he kept looking at her, almost nervously, out of the corner of his eyes as they walked. She wondered how she really did feel about him now. Did his revelation alter anything? He'd admitted to being a Death Eater, but he had died because he wanted to stop. Surely that counted for something?

-

The map lay spread out on a large, flat stone as Hermione pored over the runic characters.

Regulus was similarly spread out on the grass nearby, long legs folded over one another and his eyes closed as one lazy hand smoothed the long hair he had undone from it's velvet ribbon. The ribbon lay discarded on the grass, and Hermione found herself watching his hand move through his hair almost hypnotically, until, as if he somehow knew she was watching him, he opened one eye and grinned at her.

"Do you ever stop fiddling with your hair?" she snapped, irritably, turning her attention back to the map.

"You can do it for me, if you like," he said lazily, closing his eyes again, and stretching out in the field they were sitting in, which, unlike the dead, yellowing first ones Hermione had walked through, was lush and green and full of wildflowers . She wondered how a place could be so different, even the air seemed to have cleared a little, though there was still only greyish skies and a hint of thunder in the air. Hermione wondered briefly if it could even thunder, in a land where you were dead.

"No, thank you." Hermione told him curtly. "You can attend to your own beauty routine. I'm busy."

Regulus gave a short bark of laughter, and once again, Hermione was jerked back to memories of another man, an older man who'd laughed like that. She forced herself to turn back to the map, trying to make out the sketched pictures Regulus had obviously been trying to follow.

On one edge of the map, whoever wrote it had scribbled black lines in a kind of cloud-shape, with one word written above it. Hermione screwed up her eyes to read the tiny print.

"Void." she read aloud. Regulus opened his eyes abruptly and leant over to see what she was looking at.

"Pardon?"

Hermione pointed to the dark space on the map.

"It says 'Void'," she repeated, looking up at him. "It looks a bit like the place I woke up in. I felt like I'd been knocked out, and then I woke up there. There was this mass of dark stuff in one corner of the field. Like a fog, only it looked like it was concentrated around one place."

Regulus looked interested suddenly.

"What were you…er…..doing, then, exactly, when you came through to here?" he asked.

"What do you mean?" Hermione asked him, puzzled.

Regulus clicked his tongue, a little impatiently.

"How'd you die?" he said harshly, as if for some reason he wanted to remind her of the bizarre circumstances under which their camaraderie had been forged.

Hermione sat back and thought hard.

"I can't recall," she said, finally. "We were looking for something. I remember that much. Harry and Ron and I were looking for……."

She tailed off, trying to think back into her mind as to where exactly she had been at the time, but nothing came. It was if her mind and memories of that time had been wiped clean with a cloth. She rubbed the side of her head in frustration.

"I don't know," she said at last. "In any case, we need to move. There's no shelter here and I have to finish translating this. The drawings are completely indistinct on this next part. You'd never have been able to make them out, but the words are still readable."

Regulus nodded, and tied his hair back carefully with the frayed old ribbon before getting to his feet. He straightened his cloak first, and then, as if he'd just remembered he was a well-brought up Pureblood wizard, he offered Hermione his slender hand to help her up.

She rolled up the map and took it as they walked on. He didn't let go straight away.

-

Later that night, when shelter had been found (a tall, narrow cave at the foot of a smallish hill upon which sat a curiously shaped black rock) Hermione pored some more over the faded parchment with it's mysterious runic script.

"Void," she said again, under her breath, tracing the faint line the maps' previous owner had scratched on the fragment of vellum. Then came "Trail" (this, she decided, must have been the endless fields she had walked through on her first day here, then "Trees", "Swamp" (she knew exactly what that was, she thought, grimly) and a series of arrows pointing downward. That must have been how Regulus had discovered the underground room, she decided. Perhaps it had once been more of a house there and was now just used for travellers to avoid the very real night terrors of this place.

Regulus moved around the fire to sit next to her, reading over her shoulder.

"If I had something to write with," she said, half to him, and half to herself as he settled next to her on the log she had found to use as a makeshift 'bench', "This would be a lot easier."

"What have you got?" Regulus asked her, leaning over and angling the map she was holding up a little for a better look. His fingers momentarily closed over hers, and it wasn't until he repeated the question, in a slightly amused tone, that she realised she hadn't answered.

"Oh," she said, flushing. "This bit where it said void must be where I got here, however I did. Then it has the route I followed, until I met up with you here," she put her finger on the downward arrows. "Then it says "Mountains"- we've done them," she continued with the air of someone mentally ticking off homework assignments. "Then there's a sketch that looks like it's supposed to be more fields, which is probably where we are now. And then…." she frowned in thought. "Then the drawings are virtually indecipherable, but the words remain."

"And you…you can read these, can you?" Regulus said, sweeping his long hair out of his eyes and mirroring her frown at the writing.

"Yes," Hermione told him. "Most of them….sort of make sense. Like the next one: "Stream", and after it: "Fall", I don't know what that could be, but I suppose we'll find out soon enough. But then there's something called "Keeper's Gate". Then after that, "Forest," another easy one, then "Burnt Cottage" which just sounds horrid. But I can translate all of those apart from these last two," she said.

"Why not?"

"Well, I've tried and tried, but they don't make any sense. The thing is, there's no doubt that the wording is correct, it's just…the term, as it were." It's this part here,"

Hermione pointed at the very end of the map where another dark arrow appeared to point right off the edge of the map, but with no explanation,

"This one means 'soul'.And this one (she jabbed the second) is the translation for cross or crossing. Soul Crossing."

"That's where the map's meant to lead, though, isn't it? So there must be something there. Something we need to get out of here. Or," she continued in a low voice, " Some thing to at least tell us where to even start."

Regulus didn't say anything for a moment, just stared at her hand pointing to the words on the map as if he was trying to sink into the page by the power of the mind. Then, slowly, he nodded, and just said, in a vague sort of voice

"Yes. Yeah." and then, noticing the curious look Hermione gave him, spoke a little more briskly. "Well, can't do much tonight, though. It'll be light soon, and then we'll look for.." he looked back at the parchment still dangling in Hermione's hand.

"A stream, then. And whatever else."

"Are you all right, Regulus?" Hermione asked him, wondering if she had said or done something to cause his sudden peculiar mood.

"Yes, of course." A little too quickly.

"Is something wrong?"

"No…..I was just thinking."

"About…?"

"Doesn't matter."

Hermione sighed "Boys…."

Regulus stared at her, his eyebrows lowering, looking angry.

"Don't call me a boy. You sound like Sirius."

Hermione looked up at him, having meant the comment lightheartedly and now utterly astounded he was looking so furious.

"I'm sorry," she began. "I didn't mean.."

"I haven't been a boy for a long time," he cut across her, his fingers clenched. "You have no idea of the things I've seen."

"I know you were a Death Eater," and to her horror, her voice sounded far more spiteful than she'd intended. "I'm sorry…" she began again, trying to take it back, but Regulus still looked angry, his voice low and hurt.

"It wasn't a game. Oh, yes, some of them thought it was, but if you think I was one of them, one of those filthy animals that took some sick pleasure in going out and killing people…killing kids, (his voice had gone shrill all of a sudden, harsh in the quiet of the night and the still landscape) then you don't know me. But that's fine. None of them really knew me. None of them knew me at all, not even my own brother. I never killed anyone either, that's why I left. Because I never could do it, and you can only bluff it out for so long. And even though you say he's still out there, alive, one day he'll know…..the Dark Lord. He'll be sorry for what he did to me."

As if he'd suddenly realised what he was doing and where he was, Regulus stopped as abruptly as his outburst had started. He looked slightly stunned for a moment, perhaps that he'd had it in him at all.

Hermione, fairly speechless herself, watched him stalk away into the cave, leaving her alone by the fire. She didn't really want to be out there alone, but neither did she want to go after him, so she prodded the fire with a long stick until the flames leapt higher and higher, making abstract shapes and long shadows. Hermione tried not to drift into the peculiar kind of 'trances' she seemed to end up in, in lieu of sleep now, which, when one was dead, she reasoned, seemed rather redundant, but she liked to rest her mind all the same.

She didn't know how long she'd been dozing when she realised there was a very tall shadow standing right next to her, and it was talking to her.

"Sorry," it mumbled, thrusting a ball of black fabric at her, and then,

"Thought you might be cold."

Hermione looked at Regulus, his pale face illuminated in the leaping flames, dark shadows even more prominent underneath those haunted eyes.

"It's ok," she said, softly, and patted the space next to her. "Sit down. Don't lets talk about it any more."

Regulus silently took the space next to her, folding his long legs in front of him, ankles crossed. They sat like that in silence, just looking into the flames, until a chilly breeze began , and Regulus took the cloak Hermione still had balled up in her lap and draped it carefully about her shoulders. Unconsciously, she leaned into his touch and the warmth of his arm, and although if his heart could still beat it would have been pounding in his ears with nerves, he held her close and together, they watched another day begin.

-

The stream was found easily, not by sight, but by Hermione's sharp ears. They'd been walking for twenty minutes or so (though Hermione had no idea how they measured time in this place, or even if they did) looking for the map's next signpost to the mysterious 'Soul Crossing', but with no success. Then she'd had the idea of simply listening for the sound of the water. She squeezed Regulus' hand lightly, and said 'Shhhhh!' and sure enough, the faintest trickling and singing of flowing water could be heard, a little way over to the left.

They trudged towards the sound, Hermione's feet getting damp from the droplets of water hanging on the long grass, and Regulus' boots clumping heavily through it until they reached the stream. It flowed generously from a somewhere that looked as if it was up in the mountains, and was as clear and unspoilt a stream that Hermione had ever seen in her life…or her death, she thought wryly. She ran towards the water, leaving Regulus to hang back and look on as she splashed her hands joyfully in the cool water.

"I can wash! Finally, I can wash!" she sang happily. "You wouldn't have a handkerchief or anything, would you?" she asked him suddenly. " I want to finally clean myself and this dress up."

He put his hand into the pocket of his trousers and drew out an immaculate silk handkerchief with dark green embroidery in the corner. Hermione ignored the monogram (probably the stupid Black family motto) and dipped the square of fabric into the stream, wiping her face with it, before dipping it back and rubbing at the now-faint mud stains still on her dress. Regulus, who never seemed to look anything less than groomed, never appeared to get dirty no matter how far they walked or how dusty the path, but he did edge to the waterside and dip his hand gingerly in the water before quickly withdrawing it and retreating back to watch Hermione without comment , wondering at the ways of Gryffindors.

He undid his hair and began to smooth it out the way he liked it. Hermione was wading up to her knees in the cold water now, and laughed at the sight of him 'preening' as she called it.

"Sirius used to hog the only bathroom without a ghoul in it at your parents' house just trimming his moustache every morning," she had teased him only the day before. Regulus didn't want a moustache, not that he had much choice in the matter now, but even so, he'd always thought Sirius had looked ridiculous. He wondered whether he would have changed his mind by and by. He didn't think so.

Hermione splashed him and the water landed mostly at his feet. He gave her a look of mock-warning, privately wondering how a Muggleborn girl could look so damn beautiful standing with her hair wet and her dress hitched up in the middle of a stream, and decided that his mother really had been wrong about so many things, and if Sirius had been wrong about the moustache after all, then at least he had been right about that.

Hermione was in higher spirits than she had been before as they followed the stream in the direction marked on the map. She walked carefully, looking for the next marker. All they had to go on was an oblique clue on a scrap of ancient parchment. She could tell that Regulus was being similarly cautious; he too walked more slowly than his usual long stride from long legs, normally she would often struggle to keep up.

-

Once again, they heard the clue before they saw it, for after a while, a low rumbling roar of water reached their ears. Hermione began to run a little, hoping to find where the noise came from, and then, as they turned a corner, it came in to view.

Three streams converged from different directions to create one, almighty, magnificent waterfall.

Regulus caught Hermione up as she gasped in sheer awe at the glorious sight before them. It was surely the most wonderful thing she had ever laid eyes on, she thought, even before she…..(she could not bring herself to say died even inside her head) arrived in this place.

The air was full of the spray of the relentlessly pounding, falling water. Tiny rainbows glinted in the air where the hazy light hit the water and suddenly, surreally, Hermione realised she had tears in her eyes.

Regulus, whose hands were feeling his hair to see if it had become damp, turned in surprise to look at her.

" What's wrong?" he asked her.

"Nothing!" she smiled at him as he looked down at her, concern in his grey eyes. "Just….it's so lovely. Makes me miss my friends. I want to tell them about it, and now I can't. Isn't that stupid?"

He shook his head. "'Course not. I think of things I want to tell Sirius all the time. Not all of it's as nice as looking at a beautiful waterfall, mind you , (here, his eyes had a mischievous glint) but even so. I'd like to tell him. But I save it all up, and I suppose, or at least, I hope, that one day I'll see him again."

They stood in comfortable silence, and for the very first time, quite unexpectedly, Hermione felt that somebody truly understood her. It was a nice feeling, she decided.

But the warm feeling did not last long. It was a few minutes before Hermione realised that this was where the map had led them…this was where the road stopped. Regulus might have known what she was thinking, for he was suddenly agitated, and put his hand into his trouser pocket looking, Hermione presumed, for the map.

She was right. He found it, and looked at it privately, with a tense, closed expression and his tongue moistening his lower lip as he eventually held out the worn parchment to her in two long pale fingers. Hermione snatched it from him and her eyes fell on the arrow drawn in a curving downward arc to the next destination. But how to get to it?

"Only one way down, it seems." said Regulus bleakly.

-

"There can't be!"

Hermione bit the words off furiously as if she wanted the place at large to know all about it's injustice. Regulus walked a few yards back from the water and sat down carefully, cross-legged, with his chin in his hands rubbing the ghost of a slight stubble that time could no longer lengthen.

Not for the first time since she had been here, Hermione's hand strayed towards her back pocket where her wand usually was, and finding it of course, absent, she made an angry noise and stalked back over to the water's edge. Regulus watched her.

"There might be some rocks. We can climb down," she called, although this had been the first thing he'd looked for, and he knew there was not. She'd find that out for herself, though.

He waited, fixing his line of vision upon a blade of grass that, if he concentrated long enough and blurred his vision just a bit, was almost the exact same colour as the curtains in the Slytherin common room………..

"There aren't any rocks." came the voice through his thoughts, as he knew it would. Hermione was prodding the grass irritably with her foot. "What are we supposed to do? We can't stay here….we can't just stay here forever, never knowing……"

Regulus looked up at her from under his lashes.

"We aren't supposed to stay here, no. But as I said….one way down."

"What are you suggesting?"

"It's not that deep. And it's not that high. And you can't die twice."

"You're seriously suggesting we go over a waterfall?"

Regulus raised one black eyebrow.

"Not at all." he answered. "I'm suggesting you go. If that's what you want, of course. Take the map, if it pleases you. I'll not need it. I suppose I could go back. Stay here and just wander like I did before…….."

He didn't complete the sentence and it hung in the air like a fog of indistinct saids and unsaids. Hermione listened to the water pour over the cliff into the gully below and thought of going on without him, and felt curiously bereft all of a sudden.

"You want ….you mean…I'm to go on without you? Why?"

Regulus licked at his bottom lip again anxiously .

"I'm not very fond of the water."

"You said we'd be all right."

"I said you would be."

Exasperated, Hermione stalked back over to the edge and peered down.

"We could do it," she said loudly, so he could hear.

He sighed and stood up slowly, walking over to where the water poured down into the valley below.

Hermione slid her hand into his. He looked quickly at her out of the corner of his eye, but then held her hand in both of his, still staring mutely at the natural wonder before them.

"What are you afraid of? Can't you swim?" Hermione asked him tentatively after a moments pause. He gave a brief laugh.

"Yes, of course. I was taught when I was about six years old. Uncle Cygnus had a stream, much like this one in the grounds of the other Black house. The nicer one."

Hermione smiled. "Who taught you? Sirius?" she said, liking to hear these snippets of information on Sirius' childhood. Regulus laughed loudly.

"No…he was useless. Bella taught me to swim, actually. She was about sixteen…that was before she met Lestrange. She was all right then. Nice."

Hermione could not imagine Bellatrix Black Lestrange being 'nice' in any set of circumstances, nor could she picture her, her hair perhaps still thick and glossy as in the old photo in Kreacher's den, but she didn't say anything, and the fine bones of Regulus' face were set in a strange, closed look now.

"I was very good at it actually." he continued unexpectedly "But I don't like it much now. It's just since I was here, really."

He stopped abruptly, but in his mind he was revisiting a cave, a lake glowing, bodies alive and not………deep water and greenish light, dim on the walls…glinting off old gold clutched in a hand oozing darkest red, the colours, he imagined, of betrayal, and perhaps, of courage.

"I would hold your hand," said the quiet female voice next to him.

Regulus closed his eyes and remembered how it felt to find courage where you thought you never could.

He jumped first, and she followed.

-

Hermione felt the bite of the cold water like a blow to the chest, taking her breath away. Chilly water seemed to fill her lungs, her eyes and ears, shutting down her senses as she fell down for what seemed like an age, the water pounding on top of her.

'In any other cirumstances I would have been killed' she thought. The noise was screeching and rushing through her eardrums, and even as she tried to hold on to Regulus's hand, she felt it being pulled away in the water. She groped for it, hoping against hope, but there was nothing to find, and she kept falling, down and down, and she couldn't breathe…

She abruptly ended her fall. The water fell upon her, plunging her deeper still underwater. She knew she must now be at the bottom of the fall, and flailed her arms tryng to swim out of range of the falling water, but it was no good. She went under, pushed down further by the rushing torrent from above, and there was never going to be anything she could do to prevent it……

We're going to drown…

She kicked out again, remembering vaguely Muggle primary school lessons, and opened her eyes under the water. It was clear and bluish, but there was no sign of anyone else next to her. She forced her head upwards, and tried to swim, pushing with arms that felt like they no longer had bones, but it was too late. She had been holding her breath, but every light in the water, every time she thought she had reached the surface there was just more water,and she had to breathe, she couldn't hold on any longer…….

She opened her mouth, knowing that this was the last time, that the water would rush in and that would be the end. But she was dead already…so how could it be……..

Hermione opened her mouth.

And breathed.

She broke the surface of the water to find herself in a pool some way from the fall. She could still see it crashing a little way off, but it had been a success, she had reached the bottom. She laughed as she came up into the air, her light hair streaming down her back no longer bushy curls, but hanging in wet ringlets around her face.

Exhilarated, she bobbed back under , realising that she could stay under for just as long as she chose now, oh! to have been able to do this when she had been on earth and living! It must have been the first good thing about this place, she thought, turning a somersault underwater. Apart from meeting Regulus…..

-

Regulus.

This sobering thought made her stop. She looked around for the bank and swam carefully over to it, pulling herself up with shaking arms onto warm, dry land. There was no sign of Regulus, the surface of the pool had settled to be smooth and clear, disturbed only by the ripples from the direction if the waterfall.

"Regulus!"

She cried the name she had read so many years ago on a forgotten tapestry with a date of death, a note of rising panic now in her voice as her eyes swept the water for any signs of life. "Regulus!"

She stood up on unsteady legs and ran around the edge of the water, still calling for him, not caring that her clothes were wet and her shoes were squelching horridly on her freezing feet, her hair dripping down her back from her waist. But the water provided her with no answer other than it's incessant waves, running and breaking across the surface, keeping time. She sank down onto the bank and screamed his name with all her might, despair in the pit of her stomach; the one person she could rely on here was gone.

Hermione didn't care how long she sat there on that bank, hot tears seeping through cold, wet fingers. There didn't seem any point in going on now, even though that was what he had wanted her to do, alone.

Maybe, when the dark blotch that heralded the dangerous night came, she would simply stay here, challenge whatever was out there with her own fate and see if she was still conscious in the morning. Maybe she would never move again.

She gave another choking sob and rubbed her face with the back of her hand, looking for one last time out across the water that had claimed her companion, and decided to keep on walking. And then she heard it…

'What're you crying for?' said a familiar voice behind her.

Hermione whipped around.

Regulus Black was standing there, tall, proud, haughty and as handsome as ever, even despite the fact that he was soaked to the skin, his white shirt torn and clinging to his top half under the black scarf that was dripping water on to his boots. His soaked cloak was over his arm and his hair was loose as he gingerly squeezed out the water, and he was smiling at her, the kind of smile that would probably melt even the hardest heart …and in a sudden insight she realised he probably thought she hadn't made it either.

She didn't think about what happened next when she stood up, crying with relief, and running towards him, she threw her arms around his neck.

For a moment, she thought he was crying too, as he shook slightly when she held him. But his eyes were dry when she looked up at last into those clear eyes, and his arms were around her, holding her tight and warming her despite the cold. And in that moment, time might not have mattered at all.

The world seemed to slow and stop for Hermione, she could not longer feel the cooling breeze of approaching night or hear the distant sound of the waterfall. All she could think of was that he was here with her and so close and looking so intensely at her as he touched her cheek with wet fingers that made her shiver, the body she'd almost forgotten could feel like this, awakening under her clothes. They both stood there for a moment, eyes on the other as if reluctant to give up their hand, reluctant to break the spell. He's going to kiss me she thought. He's really going to kiss me.

But he did not kiss her. The sound that came from a small outcrop of gorse bushes just behind them where a small red brick path led, shattered the moment into a thousand pieces, and they pulled quickly apart.

A voice could be heard, high and tinny, floating on the rapidly darkening air, and as foreign in this land of silence as anything possibly could be.

To be continued -

Quoted: The Fray, 'Look After You'. Comments very welcome.