As it always happens with the first chapter, this is the one that dictates the diverging point from the canonic 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows', with the next I truly aim to get the ball rolling with the more brutal changes I planned for the storyline. I hope you enjoy it!
Say 'No' to Godric's Hollow
The wind howled across the trees while the typical English rain fell at an angle, covering all the white noises of the random patch of the countryside where the tent was placed under its pitter-patter. Enchanted as it was, the old magical tent was drafty, and for some reason, even the enlarged spaces didn't manage to stave completely off the cold: the boundaries of the young mages abode occasionally rippled and fluttered because of the air, as the wards placed were only aimed at any intruders that might come snooping, muggles or not.
Despite the cool and rather unwelcome currents that slithered their way inside and out of the tent, it felt as if the air was dead still. It felt as if some heavy cloak made of absence rested on the shoulders of the only two mages present, stilting conversation, preventing laughter, holding them pinned despite all the urgency that their task imposed them.
Harry Potter was no stranger to loneliness, no stranger to the hollow feeling of being abandoned, and dare he say it? Betrayed. It had happened already, years before, for the most idiotic of reasons, and it was hard to not draw parallels between then and now. He could deal with open danger following excellent instincts and relying on the extraordinary reflexes of a trained seeker at the peak of his health, he could endure hunger thanks to the tender care of the Dursleys, and he could overcome the seemingly impossible odds by virtue of the single-minded stubbornness that allowed him to keep going with a mixture of spite, anger, and a lonely, undeniable, distant hope that all Voldemort represented would one day end.
Hermione Granger, clever beyond what the mere word could hope to convey, had too known the kind of loneliness that came from being bright enough to blind everyone around her, and while she couldn't count on the Chosen One's impeccable instinct when it came to fighting, she knew a plethora of spells for each one that the wizard could cast. The occasional pangs of hunger given by a lack of skill when it came to using magic to cook were recognized and cast aside, as her extraordinary mind was capable of prioritizing: all that mattered was the war, and the task that Dumbledore had left for them.
A task that, it was undeniable, they were woefully unprepared to tackle. They had a horcrux, but didn't know how to destroy it. They suspected what some of the other items could be, but they didn't have a way to know for sure. They knew how many they had to find, but didn't have a single idea as to where they could find them, nevermind how to bypass eventual protections put in place.
To make the dire situation worse, Ron Weasley, used to a comfortable life where he didn't have to put in any work to coast by, had let his insecurities and fears dictate his actions at what could almost be the worst possible time, bringing about a confrontation that had been left silent since they recovered Slytherin's locket, a row in which words were said, shouted loudly enough that they could not be taken back. And so, the last member of their group had fled, leaving Hermione and Harry to fend for themselves.
As an answer to the current, grim reality of their circumstances, the Chosen One fell into morose silence more and more often, a churning rage in his gut warring with the trepidation born of feeling utterly lost amidst a war that couldn't end in victory without their success. The brightest witch of her age, unable to muster the energy to force some life into the tent she now shared with the wizard, too fell on old behaviors, developed at a tender age: too clever to be understood, too inexperienced to see how or why her peers couldn't hope to keep up with her, she closed herself off while reading.
Of course, her book selection couldn't truly be unbound by the necessities imposed by their ultimate task: destroying the anchors that kept Voldemort from being truly mortal. So, while she did have more academic tomes to peruse, and with the occasional run amidst the children's tales left to her by Dumbledore, she could only pour herself again and again over Magic Most Evile, and Secrets of the Darkest Arts.
Harry and Hermione had reached their current position after a random series of apparitions, and thus they had a few days to rest while helplessly thinking for a solution, for a lead, for an idea that could breathe new life in what appeared to be a doomed task.
Off to the side of what passed for a living room in the tent, Harry sat morosely on a wooden chair, the work snitch buzzing about his head while his eyes shifted from lost into nothingness to checking the Marauders' Map. With ratty sneakers, worn-out jeans, and a warm woolen jumper, he looked almost like a puppet with his strings cut, waiting for anyone to tug at his strings: only the movement of his green eyes and the minute rising and lowering of his shoulders betrayed that he wasn't just another piece of furniture.
Seated on the old bench at the wooden, marred table in the middle of the room, Hermione refused to give the boy any attention: what would sit still watching what other people were doing accomplish? How was it possible that Harry, the linchpin of the whole war effort, couldn't bring himself to do anything to try and figure something out? Yes, the witch understood many of Ronald's objections and fears, which wasn't the same thing as dumping the Chosen One to deal with everything on his own. She could also already hear his objections if she were to rise the point that he could do a bit of reading on the very dangerous magical items that were supposed to be destroyed as soon as possible: 'But Hermione, if you didn't find anything, how could I? I'm not as smart as you...'.
The witch swallowed her irritation and turned another page, her eyes going over words she had long since memorized while her mind tried to pick apart what she knew only to reconfigure it time and time again. She despised how quick both Ron and Harry had been to put her on an unreachable pedestal, using her own cleverness as an excuse to not put in any real effort. She might be smarter than the entirety of Hogwarts' student population, but that didn't mean that she ever allowed herself to slack off.
Slightly disgusted by the contents of the book, she closed the old tome with a huff, finally reaching her breaking point: "Harry, Dumbledore ever told you..."
"I told you everything that he told me." the reply was issued without Harry even rising his eyes from the Marauders' Map, tiredly, and with just the faintest hint of irritation underlining the wizard's words.
Hermione's hand twitched towards her wand, and she swallowed her instinctive reply: "Well, maybe you should read these, they might make something click..."
As predictable as the dawn and the sunset, Harry barely refrained from rolling his eyes: "If you didn't find anything..."
"It doesn't mean that you couldn't figure something out!" she interrupted him just as she had been interrupted before, rising to her feet with a glare hammering the side of the bespectacled boy's head, "Harry, I understand that you've lots to think about, but clearly if some revelation was to come to you while brooding, it would have come already."
Her voice had turned snappish at the end, and it managed to elicit an actual reaction: the wizard too rose to his feet, squaring off against his friend as he dragged his free hand through his unkempt, messy black hair: "What would you have me do, Hermione? If..."
"Put in some effort!" the witch barely refrained from stomping her foot onto the ground while she stepped towards the wizard: "I can't be the only one..."
"I'm not as smart as you!" the Chosen One was close to shouting now, the arm holding the Marauders' Map perfectly still while his free one swung wildly in an open gesture as if to encompass everything around them: "All of this is because of you! I don't know what to do, Hermione!"
"Well, it doesn't mean that your opinion is worthless!" her tone matched him while her chin jutted the tiniest bit forward as if to challenge him to reply, "But I can't be the only one to try, Harry! Dumbledore talked to you since Quirrel, he must have said something, or left a clue, or, or anything at all! Maybe reading these will make it click, but not trying just doesn't make sense! We can't just keep roaming without a target!"
They were barely on this side of a shouting match, but something in what Hermione had said made Harry clench his jaw, his free hand closing in a fist as the nervous energy thrumming into him had no way to escape.
After a few seconds spent staring each other down, Hermione unwilling to back down, and the Chosen One already too deep in his tunnel vision to consider simply acquiescing to her reasonable request, he gritted out: "Well, I want to go to Godric's Hollow."
Something akin to pity welled up in Hermione, but she ruthlessly squashed down the feeling: "Harry, it is the first place where he would set up a trap for you." then she added, "Well maybe after Hogwarts."
"You just asked me to do something to stop roaming aimlessly!" the wizard barely refrained from kicking the chair behind him, choosing instead to fold the Marauders Map with mechanical movements, only to tuck it back into his mokeskin pouch, but his face was set in a scowl, and Hermione recognized the blind focus of the desperate, the same thing that had caused a bunch of students to storm the ministry back in their fifth year.
"I asked you to actually learn about the horcruxes and to think about it!" Hermione wanted to rip her hair out, or to strangle him, or both, "Not to blurt out the first thing that passed into your head! Honestly Harry, you told us..." she swallowed, forcing herself to cast aside the turbulent waterfall of feelings that came with even an oblique mention of Ron, "...me, you told me that he would have put them in places important to him, unless you're saying that the place where he was defeated is so important, symbolizing his power in some manner, that he returned there after the Triwizard to set up the equivalent of that cave of inferi into your parents old home!"
Frustrated, and unwilling to recognize just how nonsensical his proposal was, the gryffindor wizard gestured wildly: "Well, he might have! He's insane, Hermione!"
"But hardly stupid, or we wouldn't be here in the first place!"
"I have a feeling alright?"
"Like you had during our O.W.L.s?!" Hermione regretted the way she basically threw in his face Sirius' death in the very moment the words left her mouth, but she simply bit her lip, her brown eyes not leaving Harry's green orbs while they briefly clouded with unresolved grief and guilt.
I'm sorry. The words almost tumbled out of her mouth, but the witch only bit her lip harder, while Harry breathed deeply, trying to handle the emotional wound she had just reopened. And Hermione was sorry for hurting him, but she had seen where following his instinctive impulses led, Dolohov had struck her with a curse in the ministry, Neville had almost been butchered by Lestrange, and Ron had his arms almost indelibly scarred by cognivores... "Dumbledore and the Order aren't here to pull us out of any mess we get ourselves into: if we fail Harry..."
The rest went unspoken while the Gryffindor wizard turned on his heel, his hands opening and closing while he did his best to ignore the common sense in the witch's words. Suddenly, the Chosen One's right arm grabbed the snitch as it zipped past, bringing it briefly to his lips only to observe the last message Dumbledore had managed to sneak to him: I open at the close.
Before he could start talking, Hermione rolled her eyes anticipating the wizard's thought process with the familiarity born of their long friendship: "And now you're looking for a way to make it seem like 'I open at the close' is somehow related to Godric's Hollow: how can the place where you survived be defined as a 'close'?"
"It's where my parents died, Hermione." Harry's tone was almost defeated when he replied, even if the anger that had briefly dominated him was being pushed back by the grief the witch had so easily summoned.
The girl sighed, her gaze softening minutely as she observed the tense posture of her friend: "I know, Harry," she took a step towards him and raised a hand, as if to grasp his shoulder, only to fidget and to bring it back down, "but it really doesn't make sense, and it's truly the first place where he'd set up a trap for you... I'll accompany you there, I promise, but after the war."
"I... just don't know what to do, Hermione." the tone was so defeated, so forlorn, that she closed the small distance and hugged him fiercely. After a second, she felt him replicate just as tightly.
"We'll just keep trying to figure something out, Harry, but just... don't be too impulsive?" she talked softly in his hear, and she felt him nod in the untamed mess that was her hair.
This wasn't the mature and deliberate decision of a leader she had been looking for, but it would have to do.
For now.
AN
Longest absence ever by my standards, I know, but work has been keeping me incredibly busy in real life, and the whole debacle with those scummy characters copypasting my work on pat re on and we bno vel kinda soured the whole experience of simply sitting down to write a chapter every now and then.
So, this is chapter 1 for yet another story: mostly because I needed something to get me again in the swing of things, and this is an idea as good as any other. My writing speed has decreased incredibly during my afk-time, so I'm just warming up my fingers. On the other hand, I've been thinking about my other stories and adjusted the pacing here and there for the parts that are yet to come, trying to make the transition from one scene to the next less clunky.
Still, the idea behind this particular story is rather simple, and as a writer, I'll have to deal with way fewer elements.
As it is a children's book, there are countless plot holes in the Harry Potter series, this particular fic starts by addressing the absolutely nonsensical decision to actually visit Godric's Hollow while Harry hadn't even tried to read the books that Dumbledore made possible for Hermione to retrieve, which would tick off immensely our favorite bookworm.
As the decision to not mindlessly jump to Godric's Hollow is a relatively minor one if one doesn't already know the events to come, I managed to work the entire chapter around a small attrition between the two characters of Hermione and Harry: how did it go? Let me know!
