Note: Rejoice, for the double bills have returned! Enjoy the first half of today's offering. And it might be a bit late, but it is STILL MONDAY, therefore I have kept to the Monday updates!
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Pen is Mightier
It was a singularly odd feeling, being the only three students in the school, thought Hermione. Of course, she had been in the castle when there had been very few people there – the Christmas of their third year when Sirius was still a dangerous fugitive rang particularly clearly in her mind – but knowing that she wasn't technically meant to be there was something else entirely. She felt both awed and privileged to be in her unique position as she wandered down the corridors that seemed familiar but really weren't. It had taken her six years to get used to the castle's ever-changing layout, and even now there were mysteries deep within its ancient walls that she knew she was destined never to know. Had the times not been so pressing; had the situation not been so gloomy and depressive, Hermione would have taken the opportunity to borrow the Maurauder's Map and go exploring in an effort to satisfy her natural curiosity. Hermione had always been the willing vessel of a vast and unknowable yearning to find out, to learn as much as she could. She had always been encouraged to learn as a child, and it as a process that had never lost its charm, fascination or beauty as she had grown older. People might call her a know-it-all and a swot, but Hermione had, in time, learned to pay them little heed. True, once she had acquired a certain degree of knowledge, the desire to prove herself worthy of receiving more was deliciously addictive, and she knew that it had got her into trouble and would not doubt continue to do so. But she accepted this fact with good grace – after all, no-one was human without their faults – and she continued to immerse herself fully in the gaining of multifarious new knowledge; of learning for the sheer pleasure of discovering and mastering something new.
To this end, Hermione had been headed towards the library, figuring that since the exploration of the castle did not, to her mind, seem to be a particularly useful task, she might as well indulge her natural thirst for reading as well as the unparalleled access to the library resources to further their search for clues about the horcruxes. Harry had explained their status quo to the Order the previous afternoon, and the small resistance had spread out its scanty forces across the country, looking for clues and trying to piece together the exact nature and location of the dread items. The knowledge that they now had allies in their quest had mollified Hermione somewhat. Whilst she would be there for Harry until the bitter end, she had been apprehensive about their undertaking this journey for all the reasons that Professor McGonagall had presented to them over the summer. Hermione feared for her parents, an acute fear that she still could not shake even now. They were not unaware of the situation in the magical world that their daughter inhabited, but Hermione had not been entirely forthcoming as to the extent of the danger she was facing with her return there. She shuddered as she thought of what would happen should Voldemort turn up on her doorstep in the middle of her respectable neighbourhood, demanding to know her whereabouts. For a few panicked days, Hermione had even considered an elaborate and involved plot consisting of modifying her parents memories to exclude her existence and establishing them under new identities in Australia, but she had thankfully come to her senses. The magic involved would be exhausting and complex, and while she was confident of her own magical ability, there was no guarantee that something would not go wrong at the last minute and she would be unable to reverse the process once it was all over. If it's ever going to be over, Hermione thought to herself darkly, before pulling herself firmly out of that downward spiral and determining on a more pro-active train of thought. Research. Perhaps the answers lay somewhere within the depths of the library. Perhaps, in the wake of Dumbledore's death, the books that he had taken from the shelves would have since been returned there, and her efforts would bear more fruit. Perhaps she might even brave the wrath of Madame Pince and ask for assistance. After all, it was a matter of life and death, literally.
Hermione's relationship with the Hogwarts librarian had been a definitively strained one. It seemed to her that the hawkish woman was concerned solely for the wellbeing of the tomes in her care, rather than helping the students as was part and parcel of her job. But Hermione had to concede that when push came to shove, they were not all that different. Whilst Madame Pince certainly loved the books in the library, some might say a little too much, it was obvious that she did not admire them simply for the sake of it. She, like Hermione, respected the power that books could bring, and it was this that made her so inordinately protective of them. It was simply a shame that she allowed this protectiveness to rule over her general demeanour, instead of using that passionate love of the written world and trying to instil a similar awe in others. As things stood, her behaviour served the opposite purpose, driving students away from the library where they might otherwise have discovered wondrous things. Perhaps that was the whole point; perhaps Madame Pince did not want to share the knowledge that she had been entrusted with. Hermione shrugged inwardly. The witch's tactics had certainly not put her off, and she was not going to let uneasiness stop her now, not with such an important mission to complete as soon as possible. She made to turn towards the library, but just as she reached the entrance hall, a thunderous knock resounded from the front doors, reverberating all the way through the castle. Hermione ducked out of sight; she had the feeling that no matter who was at the door, she would do better to keep her distance rather than be asked the awkward question of what a student was doing in school before the term had started. Most of the teachers had been informed discreetly of their premature arrival, and indeed most of them stayed squirreled away in their classrooms preparing for the new year, but Hermione still felt nervous should she bump into anyone on her travels.
Professor McGonagall appeared, hurrying down the main staircase. She swept past Hermione into the entrance hall and opened the doors with a flick of her wand. From her vantage point, Hermione couldn't see the visitors, but she could hear them, and as soon as they spoke, her blood ran cold.
"Ah, Headmistress McGonagall. Please excuse us. We're from the Committee for Re-Education and we're here to evaluate your library."
"Evaluate?" Professor McGonagall repeated. "I believe that you'll find Hogwarts library has been in perfect working order ever since its inauguration over a millennium ago. We've certainly never had any complaints and our librarian, Irma Pince, keeps everything in exceedingly thorough order. Good day, gentlemen."
"Professor McGonagall, you don't appear to have understood." The voice that had spoken went from being smooth and slick to cold and authoritative. "We are going to take a look at you library and unfortunately you do not get a choice in the matter." The calm manner returned. "After all, we wouldn't want anything falling into the innocent hands of the students now, would we?"
Professor McGonagall took a step back into Hermione's field of vision, her face set in an expression of utter fury.
"Now, I don't think we'll be needing your assistance with this particular venture. We will need to speak to your librarian, however."
Unseen, Hermione smiled. If they were going to pick a fight with Madame Pince over books, then they weren't going to get very far. The younger witch knew from experience that the librarian became a fierce mother bear whenever her precious haul was threatened.
"This way, gentlemen," the headmistress said through gritted teeth. She led them in the direction of the library and Hermione sat back against her pillar and let out the breath she had been holding in. A sudden thought crossed her mind and she got up, and ran halfway across the entrance hall. If the Ministry were going to be going through the library with a fine tooth comb, then there was always the possibility that the books she needed would soon be out of her reach, if they existed at all. Hermione stopped herself in the middle of the entrance hall; she couldn't very well run into the library on a horcrux-book-rescue mission, could she? Especially not when she had just been hiding from the people who were in the library at that very moment. She turned back towards her hiding place, pausing to consider her next course of action. On the one hand, going to the library to rescue some Defence Against the Dark Arts books that might or might not have been useful to her was akin to suicide. On the other hand, she couldn't just sit back and do nothing whilst these Ministry goons pulled apart her beloved library, turning it into a shell of the grandiose spectacle that it had been before, all the most interesting and useful books replaced with Ministry-approved editions that would, naturally, omit anything that could possibly be used to eliminate their opponent. Even if Hermione had not been so fixated on finding any reclusive works that might prove useful to them and the Order in their quest, she would still be vowing to protect the school's literary heart for the new first-years even if for no-one else. She didn't want them to be deprived of the same wonderous resources that had been available to her during her earlier years. As she had read all that time ago in Hogwarts: A History, the school's library was a legacy that had been constantly maturing and expanding for the past thousand years. People could not simply walk in and take bits away from it. It was almost as bad as chopping Rowena Ravenclaw's right arm off. Hermione made her way carefully towards the library, pausing every so often to duck behind a pillar every time that she heard movement in her vicinity. Half a plan was forming itself in her mind. The Ministry representatives who had come to the school, what little she had seen of them, certainly did not look to be the brightest blooms in the bunch. There was always the chance, albeit a slim one, that she could perhaps summon the books she needed without their noticing, and no-one would be any the wiser.
She was almost there when Peeves came whizzing down the corridor towards her. Hermione groaned; Peeves was the last person she wasnted to meet whilst she was trying to be surreptitious. She stepped into the shadow of a suit of armour, hoping that it would provide sufficient cover from the anarchic poltergeist. Thankfully, Peeves seemed to be wholly focussed on a different goal. He hurtled down the corridor, turning somersaults as he went and cackling with unadulterated glee.
"Chaos!" Hermione heard him say as he passed her hidey-hole. "Chaos!"
She didn't, at that moment, know whether the chaos to which he was referring was a chaos that he had just created or was just about to create; she suspected the latter from his malevolent expression but when she stepped back into the corridor and remembered the direction from which he had come, she realised his meaning with a feeling of ice-like dread. He had come out of the library, and the sounds coming from within the room were in no way ones that Hermione wanted to hear anywhere near it. The thudding of heavy tomes hitting the floor, the muttering of repeated spells and the rush of magic that accompanied their effects, but above all, a mournful howl of pure and tragic anguish. Presently another sound pierced through the rest, that of cruel laughter. She picked up her pace towards the source of the sound, pausing at the open library door to peer through the crack that formed between the door and the frame. She could not make out much, but what she could see did nothing to quell her worries. There was a pile of books in the main space in front of the issue desk, their covers torn and ripped, pages bent were they had been pulled roughly out of shelves and simply thrown pell mell onto the pile with no thought for their care or their owners. She shifted slightly and she could make out the form of one of the Ministry men picking books off the pile at random, tossing them across the room to an unseen recipient. She moved slightly again, casting a spell under her breath to widen her field of vision without widening the gap in the door. She found the recipient easily, lazily shooting flames from his wand as the books came towards him and laughing as they went up in smoke. He was using the venerable volumes as target practice; his colleague congratulating him on particularly tricky shots. Hermione shook her head, feeling the bile of anger rising in her throat. So much wanton destruction in such a short space of time; it was truly reflective of the way that Voldemort wanted to take over the world that they held so dear. That which he could not control, he would simply destroy. He had no control over books that had already been long-written and published before his birth, so he would rid his world of them instead. Suddenly, the rising anger reared into her head and it was all that Hermione could do to remain still where she was and try to think with a calm head. She had once read a theory somewhere, possibly by a German anthropologist, that the sharing of knowledge was what made humans human, the one thing that caused the separation between their modes of communication and those of animals. The opposite of this process, however, the deliberate withholding of knowledge from others by dint of its destruction… What did that make the people who were performing this atrocity, because it certainly did not make them human? Even animals did not destroy knowledge so that no-one could use it; they merely kept the things they learned to themselves. The men that Hermione was watching were worse than animals, and they were making her blood boil.
It was only when one of them spoke that she managed to come sharply back to her senses, for she had been one man short. Three people had come into the building but she had only accounted for two in the library.
"Oh shut her up," the one throwing the books moaned as the howl that Hermione had heard earlier renewed itself and was quickly stifled. She widened the spell's field of vision imperceptibly, finally finding the third Ministry man standing by the issue desk, restraining a rather dishevelled looking Madame Pince. From her rumpled appearance and the tears streaming down her face, it was obvious to Hermione that she had long since given up what seemed to have been a spirited fight, and now she was simply mourning the loss of her books; the tomes that she had guarded with her life and been so protective of during her tenure as librarian.
"I'm bored with this," groaned the man who was holding her, one strong hand clamped over her mouth to muffle her mournful sobs. "Let's just finish the job and get out of here."
The others pointed their wands at the books and they burst momentarily into flame before vanishing, leaving no trace of the inflagration that had just occurred. Hermione shrank back behind the door as they left, congratulating each other on a job well done. She narrowed her eyes as they passed her, suddenly overcome with a childish desire for revenge, but knowing that she could not do anything too outrageous lest she betray her position. She racked her brains for the perfect curse, casting just as they reached the end of the corridor and were about to disappear out of her eyeline. She ducked inside the library, listening with a grim smile as they yelped their way into the entrance hall.
"I told you some of those books were cursed," yelled one to the others. "Now look what you've done!"
Hermione's momentary good humour did not last long, however, because the evidence of the destruction of the library was now there in front of her eyes with no door in the way to limit her field of vision. Not only could she see the gaping holes in the bookshelves where various tomes should have been nestled, she could see the librarian, slumped on the floor where her captors had let her go and she had not had the will to stand again, her face buried in her hands. Cautiously, Hermione approached the distraught witch. Her previous feelings towards the librarian aside, after such wanton destruction had been wreaked upon her domain and she had been powerless to stop it, somehow, Hermione felt sympathy. Who could not feel some sort of empathy with the sheer and utter despair that she was now looking at; the picture of a life ripped to pieces? When one lived for one's books and those alone…
"Madame Pince?" Hermione asked cautiously, but the older woman did not appear to have heard her. "Madame Pince…" She broke off; it would have been completely ridiculous to ask 'are you alright?' since she quite clearly wasn't. "Is there anything I can do for you?" she finished finally.
The librarian shook her head.
"They're gone…" she murmured through her fingers. "Some of those were first editions, out of print, never to be seen again. Gone, gone, gone…"
Possibly against her better judgement, Hermione knelt slowly on the floor beside the weeping witch.
"There must be other books, elsewhere," she said, "Books turn up in all sorts of places and you can bet that the Ministry won't think to look in them. We can get some books back."
She wondered what she was saying, since she had no idea whether it was true or not . It was simply a feeling, but it seemed to have the desired effect.
"Hermione! Hermione!"
Ron and Harry skidded into the library.
"We heard the Ministry blokes come in and we wondered where you were and…" Ron trailed off. "Bloody Hell, where's the library gone?"
This sent Madame Pince into fresh floods ruining Hermione's hard work. She put an arm round the older woman's shoulders, trying to comfort her as best she could, but she knew that she was not really the best person to try, and she looked up at the boys with annoyance.
"Well, don't just stand there looking like lemons!" she snapped. "Get Madame Pomfrey!"
Ron and Harry, looking rather uncomfortable with the drama unfolding in front of them, seemed relieved to be given an excuse to leave the scene of such anguish and took off at a run once more. Hermione rolled her eyes, typical men. She stayed kneeling on the floor beside Madame Pince until the nurse came bustling in to take care of her. It was a strange sort of five minutes, but one thing was certain.
It was the beginning of a new and wholly unanticipated camaraderie between Hermione and the Hogwarts librarian.
Note2: Typical men, jitter at the sight of crying women. I can't remember at the moment who had the theory about sharing knowledge making us human, but I'll find out for next time. Now, onwards to the next part!