This took longer than expected. Other projects got in the way, and there were the inevitable delays normally associated with something you do for fun. But here it is, enjoy.

FWIW, I hope to update at least once a month.

I don't consider any of this 'finished', so if you have corrections or suggestions please feel free to be specific in the comments.

There was a sense of burning and fire and flames, pure and warm, and then, suddenly, she was a person again.

The fear was the first thing to hit her. Familiar, mind-numbing horror smashed into her brain, magnified one-hundred times above any previous experience.

A few seconds later she heard the boy's voice say "Expecto Patronum" and the horror went away. Then she remembered the last 20 minutes.

Fifty people dead on the word of an eleven-year-old boy. For her.

Hermione felt sick. There was an empty feeling near where The Biology of Man assured her the pancreas took up residence. And her brain kept insisting on playing back the murders in the Wizengamot in phantasmagoric slow motion. It was the eyes that haunted her. Terrified one moment, utterly empty the next, and the dream-images hung on each corpse across the space of those moments and let her savor it in detail.

It wasn't just that Harry Potter terrified her. And he did terrify her. But now she was complicit. Responsible.

This inevitably sent her thoughts spiraling to her last morning at Hogwarts, where, knowing she had killed – attempted to kill – Draco Malfoy, she had done nothing in the hopes she wouldn't be caught.

True horror, she realized, was not the artificial fear of dementors. True horror was a consequence of choices made for the worse, and having to live with those choices and their consequences. A patronus, or even just running away, would dispel the horror imposed by a dementor. There was nowhere to run from herself.

She realized Harry was looking at her. Sad. Hurt? Then she realized the hand she had given him before was withdrawn as if she'd been bitten. Was that it? What about what he'd done to her?

Think of something else. Fine silty mud sucked at her shoes as she shifted her feet. She noticed her robe was wet from far more than sweat and tears, and realized it was raining. A driving drizzle, if such a thing was possible. Heavy stone walls were vaguely visible through the rain in each of three directions. Where am I? At least that's what she meant to ask.

Instead she screamed "I'm only twelve!" into the rain. Totally overwhelmed, she collapsed to her knees and started crying.

She didn't know how long she knelt in the ooze crying. Once started, the tears just wouldn't stop. At one point she felt Harry put his hand on her shoulder, but she couldn't even summon the will to shake him off.

Then suddenly there was warmth and comfort, like the best hugs her dad gave her. The warmth landed on her left shoulder and brushed against her cheek, cawing softly. She wiped her eyes before looking up.

"Fawkes?" She had forgotten he was there.

Fawkes lifted his head and screamed loudly towards the sky and the rain. She turned her head to look at Harry, who was looking down at her.

"We're in Azkaban, Hermione. The very center. Where the dementors are kept."

She felt the impulse to run in terror, but the peace from the Phoenix reinforced her resolve. She couldn't feel the dementors at all. Why are we in Azkaban? She noticed Harry's patronus, still standing in silent vigil.

"We need to destroy them. All of them."

It was definitely all too much. She was probably going insane.

"I can't even cast a patronus, how are we going to do that!"

"You can, you just haven't thought about the problem."

She wasn't sure what her facial expression was, but she was certain it was good impression of Professor McGonagall. Skeptical would be far too kind a word.

"Hermione, what are dementors?"

"Fear."

"No."

What?

Was this a riddle? Hermione was pretty good at riddles, but this was a riddle that apparently most of the wizarding world got wrong.

Wait, hadn't Harry said something before the world went totally insane and people died?

Hermione hadn't really been paying that much attention to what Harry was saying in the Wizengamot. There'd been the horror of the dementor behind her, and the horror of her impending sentence to Azkaban before her. To say she hadn't been thinking clearly was an understatement of gross proportion. But she had an excellent memory.

Dementors are death.

She wasn't sure that made sense. Yes, death was fearsome. Many people were afraid of dying. She was afraid of dying. But she was afraid of lots of things, including a certain 11-year-old boy, and she was pretty sure he wasn't death. Well, reasonably sure.

On the other hand, Harry was meticulous about "testing hypotheses", to the point where he disregarded the accumulated wisdom of older wizards. She still remembered the bats. He would have collected evidence. Hadn't he been asking other students what they saw when they looked at the dementor back in January...?

"Harry, why were you asking the others what they saw when they looked at the dementor? In January, I mean, when we were learning the Patronus charm?"

"That's not quite the right question."

"You are very frustrating."

So, what was the right question... Well, he also saw the dementor. Maybe he wanted to see if the others saw something like what he saw?

"Did you see the same thing they did?"

"No."

What?

"What did you see?"

"Initially? Nothing."

!?

"Nothing?"

"Dementors' appearances, like their actions, conform to the expectations of people around them. Because most people believe false things about dementors, they see only falsehood. My brain caught itself trying to clothe the dementor in a lie and wouldn't let it, so I couldn't actually see it. To see a dementor for what it really is, you have to discover the truth."

And then Hermione was thinking about Godric Gryffindor's biography, which she had read cover to cover and cried afterwards. Dementors are wounds in the world. Not dead people or other nightmarish concoctions. Wounds. Nothingness. He had known, as Harry knew.

"I suppose we need to go find a dementor then." Hermione couldn't believe she had just said that.

"That shouldn't be hard." Harry deadpanned.

Godric had enough courage to see the truth. Hermione could live up to his example. She had enough courage to have gone in front of a dementor knowing her patronus wouldn't work. She could be a hero, a real hero, despite her fear and her doubt. And her guilt.

It didn't take them long to find a dementor.

The dementor was just hanging in the air limply, totally unaware of anything. No sense of fear attacked Hermione's senses as they approached it.

"Are they supposed to do that?"

"My patronus is kind of overwhelming for them."

They stood there for a few moments in the muck, looking up at it.

"Um, Hermione, I can't really dispel my patronus safely. There's over 100 dementors down here and I'd need to be sure you could call one up immediately if I was even going to attempt that."

"The fear is just a distraction anyway, right? It helps sustain the delusion?"

Harry nodded.

Hermione stared at the dementor hanging in space. She thought of how fearsome the dementor had been in January. She couldn't even look at it then. How it had spoken to her. Except it had told her exactly what she wanted and expected yet feared to hear. She had been worried for Harry, and distrustful of the Professor Quirrel, and she had heard it tell her that the defense professor wanted it to eat Harry. Her thoughts, her fears, projected on the dementor and speaking through the dementor's mouth. It was hard overcoming the power of memory even with it motionless and unaware.

Godric Gryffindor hadn't looked away when he had seen the truth, she was sure of it.

I can be a hero. I am a hero. You frighten me but I am stronger than my fear.

But in that moment her guilt nearly overcame her. How could she be a hero now? Her complicity in Draco's attempted murder, her complicity in the murders in the Wizengamot – these were not the actions of a hero! That was when she realized that dementors didn't really frighten her anymore. Dementors were nothing next to her own guilt.

Where at first the dementor had held an appearance of a terrible death, bloated, organs dangling from large tears in the flesh, it was now merely emaciated and sickly looking.

You no longer frighten me. Hermione stepped closer. Your form is a lie.

She was standing just before it now. Fawkes radiated heat from her shoulder.

No more lies.

In the space of a blink it was gone. Before her there was a nothingness of substance where her mind refused to let her see.

I name you. You are death.

And there, in the mud and rain in the middle of Azkaban, Hermione saw death and comprehended it.

"Show me how to destroy them," she said without turning. Maybe she couldn't be a hero anymore, but her fear of dementors was broken.

Auror Li still wasn't sure what was going on. It wasn't that the recent communication from Director Bones was unusual – it was far beyond unusual – it was her mood. She was shaken. This wasn't the all-business director who, while outraged and alarmed, hadn't just given up when Bellatrix Black escaped. She took charge and had done everything in her power to re-apprehend the fugitive. That she had thus far failed to recapture her hadn't slowed her down. But this...

He looked down at the orders he had requested in writing. If you see anything unusual happening, report it immediately. Do not investigate.

And Director Bones had seemed... beaten. Li couldn't remember her ever being beaten. He had a terrible sense of foreboding. Something awful had happened, not that anyone was telling him anything, and it wasn't something as simple as "Bellatrix Black has escaped from Azkaban" or even "Voldemort has returned". What could possibly be so much worse than that? What could have happened to break Director Bones?

Li looked out the window facing inward to the pit where the dementors stayed from across the room. Something that Director Bones thought was going to manifest here in Azkaban. Expected it to. There was no reason for these orders otherwise.

Auror Li shuddered.

Hermione was certain that this wasn't how things were supposed to work.

"Your happy thought is what?"

"My rejection of death as part of the natural order."

"You just killed 50 people, not one hour ago!"

"Have we not moved past that yet?"

"It was less than an hour ago!"

Hermione stormed off a couple paces. She wasn't feeling much like herself. Her guilt was gnawing at her, and it was making her moody and surly. It threatened to overwhelm her and reduce her to tears again. She needed a warm fire and a cup of tea and chocolate. Lots of chocolate. And a good book. And a day, a week, a month with no Harry Potter. His presence kept reminding her of those awful moments.

"I can't do this Harry. I'm not good enough. I can't be a hero."

"You're the most good person I know," Harry said softly.

Tears gathered at the corner of her eyes. When would she be able to stop crying? She turned halfway. "I feel so guilty."

"You haven't done anything. You were False Memory Charmed into thinking you had killed Draco."

"I did. I woke up and knew, or thought I knew, what had happened and said nothing. And then there's all those people dead..."

"Which is entirely my fault. You were helpless at the time."

"I asked. And I should have known what you might have done. Professor Quirrel was right, you are dangerous."

…

"I can't believe I said that..." she finished quietly.

"That you should have known?"

"That Professor Quirrel was right."

...

"Hermione," Harry began, pausing to find words. "I think its your guilt that makes you such a good person. You can't move past these things because you know they were wrong. And the very fact that you were even connected to something wrong upsets you horribly. Villains don't feel guilty about doing the wrong thing."

When she didn't say anything he continued.

"Maybe its guilt that makes heroes, real heroes, attempt to do the right things. Because they understand the consequences better than most, or feel them more keenly."

It was remarkable what words could do. Not that it made everything better, although she supposed that was part of the point, it was never going to be completely better. She needed to remember how awful it was. But those words gave her hope and perspective. Maybe it wasn't goodness that was lost, just innocence. The gnawing emptiness lessened a little bit. Just a little, but it was enough.

And hero or no, she couldn't let feeling guilty stop her from doing the right thing now. Dementors were evil, and destroying them was the right thing.

"Ok Harry, I'm together enough. For this. For now. Tell me about your happy thought."

And so Harry described the stars in space, perfect and coldly beautiful. He described the completion of the image, the earth as seen from space, among the stars. And you could feel the emotion in Harry's words as he described it – this was something he truly cared about. It was a wonderful image.

But her intuition was that Harry wasn't right. Couldn't possibly be right. Not completely. And yet there was Harry's Patronus, bright and pure in the drizzle.

This is just another riddle. I'm smart enough to solve this.

Dementors weren't physically Death. Sure, they could kill you, but so could a lorry if it hit you. And if you weren't being strictly literal, people weren't the only things who died. Dreams died. Hopes failed. Innocence was lost. Magic faded. People died a little inside every time these things happened. Small deaths before the final one.

She remembered reading The Lord of the Rings and being upset at the end because all the magic was going away. It was ineffably sad, as if all bright colors were become muted and pale.

She had watched in horror as the Wizengamot debated her fate, and those who might have championed her remained silent.

She remembered her shame as Snape castigated her and S.P.H.E.W. She remembered Dumbledore saying nothing. Professor McGonagall hadn't even shown up.

People let evil happen by failing to take action to stop it.

She needed to believe in a future of dreams fulfilled, evil vanquished, and hopes undimmed. She needed a world without all those deaths of spirit. But describing this world in swaths of pretty words wasn't enough. She needed a crystal clear vision, primal, her own metaphor for victory over death. The way Harry's earth among the stars metaphorically embodied his vision of a future without physical death.

A world where Snape praised her? No. That would be a world with bullies still.

And then she remembered Draco helping her up off the floor. Draco who caught her when she slipped on the roof. Draco who visibly distanced himself from all the antagonism directed at her. Draco who she couldn't believe wasn't plotting against her, because he was Draco Malfoy. Draco, who had been doing what was right against all expectation and incentive. It was a strange bittersweet happy thought she arrived at: a world where she could innocently believe in a Draco Malfoy who was helping her.

Her wand came up.

As she set her stance she realized that her world of hope and innocence, her happy thought against the darkness, was beyond her. That even if she made it a reality, there would be no place in it for her. But would Harry's world really have a place for him? We pursue these things so that others may have them because we did not.

"Hermione... you're crying?..."

She ignored him.

"Expecto Patronum!"

A second glowing person joined the first in the pit of Azkaban.