A/N: The comment was made that Harry's eviction of the Grangers 'may as well not have happened'. Suffice it to say that not every consequence is immediately visible.

I will be expanding on a few things already mentioned in Ch 11, I apologize in advance for the repetition. Standard disclaimer applies: first time author, no beta, all that. Still, I'll try to do better.

We will have a flashback and then move forward. Comments, constructive criticsm and reviews are always welcome – and encouraging to yours truly.

Chapter 12 Lessons and Rituals

Number 12 Grimmauld Place

Dec 18th, 1993

Hermione sat in the familiar sanctuary of the Library but she was unable to concentrate on her studies. The three tomes concerning her assigned topic sat untouched, she could not pull her thoughts from the ritual that would either mend or finally destroy the fragile hope that kept the house going. The house that she had come to think of as home.

She felt torn with the conflict over keeping things from Harry for these last weeks - well, little over one week by his time. She dwelt upon her one and only conversation with him, it was the day after Sirius had disappeared and he had seemed so lost, so sad.

.o0o.

November 2nd, 1993

Hermione found the young man who was the unwilling Lord of the house in the kitchen. Dobby had told her that she should ask permission to read the books when the elf had found her in the Library. He'd also told her "Just calls him Harry, 'Lord Black' does makes him sad."

"Uh, Harry?" the girl had almost whispered.

The boy shifted in his seat, some form of pastry sitting untouched in front of him. He did not meet her gaze, "Yeah?".

"Oh, I was just, that is I was told that I should ask before I use the library, but Sirius told me, that is, he gave me permission, so, would it, that is, can I?" Hermione wanted to kick herself. She could see the way the boy reacted when she mentioned the missing man's name, but it was true and she was so bored sitting outside for hours. She just didn't want Harry upset with her for getting into 'his books'; if that was how he looked at things, she just didn't know what she'd do.

He had at least finally looked her way. She couldn't read his expression; she had been right in her initial assessment, this young man was well used to hiding his emotions. At last seeming to come to a decision, the boy got up from the table. "Yeah, sure, but just so you know, you may have some trouble with some of the books," he intoned flatly as he moved towards her.

"Oh, what kind?" She was already walking back towards the library, happily surprised that he was speaking with her and not calling her a bookworm or telling her to go outside... she really had to get over her hangups!

Oblivious to her internal struggles, the green eyed boy followed.

Taking a quick, cleansing breath, the witch finished her fragmented thought: "What kind of trouble, I mean, or is it the books?"

A ghost of a smile lit his features for a moment, then was gone. "Nothing bad, I mean Si, he, uh."

Harry took a deep breath in through his nose, then let it out slowly through his mouth. He repeated the action twice more and it almost seemed as though he'd forgotten she was there. Hermione wondered at the way he used the same breathing exercise she had been taught when dealing with stress.

Continuing down the hall, he finally spoke, his voice lower and thicker. "Sirius removed all of the really nasty stuff - the tomes of dark magic and books cursed to bite Muggleborns and the like."

She still wasn't used to this. The very idea of magic was still so new. The casual way this boy went on about biting books just reinforced how very different their worlds were.

"What I meant was that you won't necessarily be able to take down many of the books. Sirius explained it to me years ago; it's one of the old family spells to keep kids out of trouble. A book will only let you take it down if you are magically ready for the contents."

Harry stopped dead in his tracks just inside the library door.

Stacked on the long reading table were over 20 books, the gaping hole in the shelf to one side proof of their origin.

"Sorry," the girl blushed, looking from the books to his face, then quickly back to the books. "Those all looked so interesting; does that mean I can read them?"

Harry only nodded dumbly, eyes a bit wide as he peered at her uncertainly. "Sure." He paused to shake his head a bit, "No problem, I guess," then turned to walk back towards the kitchen.

"Harry," the young witch called, a bit of a plea in her tone. "I'm really sorry. For what happened, I'm so very sorry." She looked up just as the boy looked away, the stony visage she had glimpsed told her that he was a long ways from forgiving her or her father.

A few minutes later the floor once again reverberated with Harry's 'practice'.

He hadn't given her the chance at another conversation since, though to be fair, she had not made any further special efforts.

. . .

The very next day Remus Lupin arrived and began Hermione's magical education. He had received a note from Sirius asking him to come evaluate a refugee for special tutoring. Although he still taught DADA at Hogwarts, he was also giving lessons at the two refugee houses that had school aged children. He was a very busy man, yet he seemed full of energy and reminded Hermione of her favorite quality in the best instructors of the many she'd met over the years: he loved to teach.

What he found in Hermione was a student more willing and adept at learning than anyone he'd known since his own school days. He had to revise his lesson plans - and pace - three times in the first two weeks. She had spent almost every waking hour in the library, excepting the two hours a day she helped with the little ones and the three times per week that she was 'forced' to go running with either Tonks or Remus in the early morning hours.

Her discovery that Remus was something of a 'health nut' and enthusiastic runner was balanced by the consistent grumbling of Tonks about it being 'too early to be awake'. The young Auror mostly ran because she had been forced to since being taken under Moody's wing as an Auror recruit. Hermione did notice that Tonks didn't once complain when the three of them ran together once a week.

She wished she could say the same when they decided to teach her how to fly. The young woman had wonderful visions of flying like Superman, even Mary Poppins method of flight would have been preferable. But brooms?

Hermione had freaked out a bit when they gave her flying lessons on what she couldn't stop thinking of as a cleaning tool. Both of her coaches tried to excite her with descriptions of how free she would feel, of how different the world was from on high. She was much happier to strive for that 'runner's high' gained after an hour in the park instead. Recalling how she first learned about that feeling gave her pangs of bittersweet memories of her runs with James, who, along with her other college friends, now thought her dead.

She'd not even been allowed to go to her own 'funeral', only knowing about it from the brief article in the paper that Tonks had given her father. Everything had been arranged without anyone consulting her. Now it was too late to protest being cut off from her old life.

Shaking physically and mentally away from the miserable thoughts, she focused on the good. Hermione thought about how during those runs she had become a little closer with her instructors. The pace Remus had finally set for her was somewhat dizzying, yet the young witch was alight with smiles at the challenge.

Each of her teachers had some specialized knowlege, Tonks was a whiz at Charms and was teaching her rudimentary magical first aid, Potions and Herbology. Remus was amazing at Transfiguration and DADA and was introducing her to Astronomy, Arithmancy and Ancient Runes because Hermione had seen the tie in between certain spells and mentions of either star charts or the numeric and runic base identifiers.

Both instructors taught her Wizarding History, both ancient lore and more the current events and how they mixed with 'muggle' history. Both also taught all classes with the principles of wandless magic as it was decided by the unofficial couple that teaching her wandless magic before she was told it was 'hard' would make it easier. They needn't have worried, she learned everything she could as if it were all a wonderful opportunity, and her enthusiasm was contagious to her instructors.

It was Hermione's discovery, just over a month before the Solstice, that gave Remus his first real hope since he'd heard the Headmaster's evaluation of Sirius's condition.

.o0o.

Hermione was endlessly curious and in her reading she had come across the mention that some dates and times were more important than others, especially with regards to Magic.

In her subsequent research she found that the Winter Solstice was particularly auspicious for rebirth and renewal, and had asked Remus if they were going to bring Sirius back on that day.

Remus had almost choked at the girl's insight, revealing everything in the words "how did you know?" before he could stop in his amazement.

How she knew was due to an unlikely collaboration between herself and the Weasley twins. (The twin's had lent her a prototype of something they called 'extendable ears' in exchange for any 'intel' she could obtain while she used them.) Within a few days of beginning her research Hermione had found mention of a House Magic that fit the description of what she had 'overheard'.

The adults liked to conduct 'secret meetings' of their Order of the Phoenix in the kitchen at Number 12 and she took full advantage of this fact. She might have felt somewhat guilty about breaking the rules but the fact of her age being their only reason for denying her admission rubbed her the wrong way as she was the one who found the text regarding the Vault.

From that point forward the girl had put all of her 'free time' into researching the best means of retrieving Sirius from wherever he was.

She had spent weeks pouring through the Black family library - and had both Kreacher and Dobby working on finding the research books for her. Hermione had to suppress a snort - the memory of the first time she had requested help of the mean-eyed little elf was a mix of comedy and terror. She wasn't sure if Kreacher was actually going to curse or bite her in his revulsion. Then she had said those magic words: "This might free Sirius".

Kreacher was never kind like Dobby, never even close to polite really, but he was very knowledgeable of where all the 'other' books were kept, yet careful to never give her anything truly Dark. Either that or Sirius had destroyed/moved them all. She honestly believed that if she just kept treating the Black family servant with kindness and respect, that he would not be so... well, hateful.

If the scrawny elf would just stop referring to her, Harry and most of the Order as 'blood traitors' under his breath (but loud enough for everyone to plainly hear), he'd be much more pleasant to have around.

Now that she thought on it, she wondered why the nasty tempered Elf avoided Harry and spoke so ill of him. Shouldn't he be bound to respect the young man who was his Lord? She wondered why Dobby was so drastically different in his treatment of Harry - well, honestly the elf was helpful and kind to everyone and hadn't stopped finding ways to help her ever since she had mentioned her plan - the little elf had immediately intuited that this would make Harry happy. When she had time she'd have to do more research on House Elves and... 'focus'.

Putting together other clues, Hermione's curious mind came up with some startling revelations:

Harry never once did that neat teleport trick since the day he'd evicted then returned them to his home. (Her father had actually threatened to leave if Harry didn't stop apologizing every time he saw them.)

Instead the boy always stumbled in using the floo, grumbling every time, and he always walked up and down the stairs to the forbidden basement. This made her wonder, if he was able to jump around the house as he'd shown that one day, why wouldn't he keep doing so?

He didn't throw parties like she saw the Malfoy's were doing in the Daily Prophet, which was likely just due to Harry's personality and the sense of loss that hung like a pall over the Black house.

Also, she never saw him in those fancy robes again, though the pictures in the Prophet showed Draco wearing similar dress robes to every event that he lavishly threw and the few he attended.

Harry didn't seem to use the house as anything more than a private place to exercise his frustrations. He never slept here, barely stayed for a meal a week and seemed to generally avoid Number 12 altogether.

He never once ordered Kreacher to do anything (at least in her presence, and you could hear voices quite clearly throughout much of the bottom floor's tomb-like silence); instead he asked politely and even then it was always couched within terms of keeping the Black family home in good shape. Never once did the young Lord ask anything for himself, or even the guests.

None of this was conclusive, and even Hermione's pestering inquisitiveness could not find a real conclusion to these facts. Still, she had the strangest feeling that Harry was not the true Lord of the house, which led her to believe that Sirius was still alive.

The fact that they had never conducted any form of burial or funeral was inconclusive as she had no idea how magical society did things.

Any one of which were hardly of consequence, but when listed out together they added up, at least to Hermione's thinking.

She was shocked when she asked Minerva about magical burial practices and discovered that many magical folks practiced the same religious beliefs as the Muggles, and that Minerva herself was a "lapsed Presbyterian".

She did mention that what Muggles termed "Wiccan" and "Druidism" were much more strongly represented faiths among wizarding population. The Professor volunteered that the 'Old Ways' were banned by the Wizards Council, the predecessor to the Ministry, but that it had happened so long ago that Minerva wasn't even sure why.

This discussion led to questions, of course, and the two witches spent hours in conversations as McGonagall was just as inquisitive as the younger witch. Minerva further confirmed Hermione's research about the Ancient Houses having a Rule of Hospitality that went back to the dark ages. When Hermione revealed that she had 'overheard' some plans to free Sirius, and, based on that information she had done 'a bit' of research...

Minerva was no fool, she knew straight away that 'a bit' of research to Hermione was probably a full term paper's worth.

Thus it was that with only a scant week to go before the turning of the season that Hermione was knotted up in feelings of conflict. She could see the distress on the boy's face as he sat at the kitchen table those rare days he came to "practice" and stayed for a bite. She'd also caught not just a few whispers of how the young lord had become 'unstable'. Why didn't the Headmaster tell Harry, or even let her tell him of their plan?

Because it was Their plan - Hermione's and Professor Dumbledore's.

If Dumbledore's supposition that the Malfoy House Magic had protected Lucius instantly when the explosion happened, then it stood to reason that the Rule of Hospitality might have saved Sirius as he was a prisoner under Lucius's protection. The problem was that the wizard calling himself Voldemort had apparently escaped the blast using that same Rule to bend the House Magic to protect him as well.

The fact that Bill had detected a magical construct deep under the rubble of the Malfoy home - covertly, of course - only reinforced their hopes. Hermione's find showed a ritual that would whisk the Lord of the House, his family and guests of his choice away to a magical Vault in the case of an attack upon the home or other named conditions. Since the explosion gave so little time, and the rest of the family was not in danger, it stood to reason that only Lucius, and his Guests, would have been saved.

In the meeting, Dumbledore had outlined the problems with getting to Sirius; they were three fold:

First, the Vault was still under Malfoy's House Magic.

The young Malfoy Scion had reportedly not been able to claim his Title, and though this supported their theory that Lucius was still alive, it also presented them with the problem of freeing Sirius without freeing Voldemort. Not to mention the fact that they would be in the middle of a potentially hostile Ancient House's magic, not something to be trifled with.
Additionally the wing was under construction - repairs started the day after the explosion.

The young witch had not found anything thus far that helped her understand this problem, let alone providing a solution for it. Through lessons with Tonks about Ancient families and their effects upon society, Hermione had learned why Draco had to pretend to assume the appearance of the Malfoy Lord. (Hermione would later be horrified when she learned that this was a lesson no Hogwarts student had received in History of Magic class.)

She still had trouble understanding the motivation of the boy to be so garish in his displays of wealth and power. The parties had started one week to the day after his father's "funeral", which was itself an epic affair if the Prophet's four page spread was any indicator.

The second issue was that the Malfoy Scion had no reason to want to free Sirius Black - and if Harry's reports were true, his classmate was reveling in the power of Lord of House, even if it was in theory not practice. Therefore they would need someone to be invited into the home to get by the wards, someone the young Malfoy did not distrust.

Harry himself had supposedly been keeping his Ascension a secret, though tales to the contrary were troubling the Deputy and Headmaster both. In any case it kept him from being invited as he had no 'status' to appeal to the Malfoy ego. More importantly, Harry's presence was needed in the Black house as an anchor for the ritual to bring Sirius out of the Malfoy house bolt hole.

Since it was not unusual for Sirius Black to snub (and be snubbed by) Wizarding society, his absence from the public eye was only slightly longer than average. Harry would still never be invited to any parties by Draco, even if he were not directly associated with the Malfoy's hated enemy/family, the Blacks. Hermione had gathered enough clues to believe that the two boys did not get along well, even though they were classmates.

Thirdly, the magic necessary required a specific number of participants, both on site and in the Black Manor as it was the seat of the family magic. They could count on Harry doing his part, but the ritual would require at least two people on site at the Malfoy Manor to focus the magic through the ritual.

Hermione had already found a way past the third problem: The Malfoy's were throwing a Winter Solstice Party. Harry had been overheard complaining about Draco using his status as Head of House to get out of school two days early to prepare for his own party.

If she were to go to the Party as a French witch, she could be one of those who cast the spell on site. She knew it was well within her capabilities, having researched the ritual in it's entirety. It wasn't actually that advanced of magic, mostly involving tracing symbols in exacting detail and precise order.

The fact that she was under the protection of House Black should give her some tie to Sirius, which would only increase the effectiveness of the spell. She'd also heard enough by eavesdropping to know that Tonks was an excellent infiltrator, in addition to being a blood relative of the Black family, making her another excellent candidate.

Now how could she get all of this information - gathered mostly by clandestine means - in front of the adults without them shutting her down before she got started just because she was 'too young'?

.o0o.

A/N: Still much to come – and it's written, just needs revising. As mentioned I no longer have a Beta, so all mistakes are mine and I'll be happy to correct those you point out – flames however will be deleted.

Recommended reading is Hogwarts Battle School, by Kwan Li. This is a great take on Hermione as well as an excellent twist on an Alternate Universe Harry/Hogwarts... Everything!

So many thanks to those of you who have bothered to keep reading my little tale. Special thank you's to Euphemism, SmolderingJade, free-wall-e, arabellagrace, Publicola, Tellur and Noble Korhedron who reviewed Ch 11. Fond thanks to my sis Thirst4light for pointing out a couple of holes in my logic.

Lastly my fondest thanks to my wife, Diana, for her reviews, but more importantly for her support and catching many of my worst mistakes. My work, as poor as it might be, is much better due to her time and patience.

Blessings,
Majerus