It wasn't a nightmare, as such. She never woke screaming or anything like that. There were cold sweats, though. And that sick feeling that lingered for hours after she woke up.
It began in the kitchen. The whole house was creepy, but the kitchen was the worst. It was an old house, lots of exposed stone and grayed plaster. From inside, one expected a thatched straw roof, but it was just shingles.
She'd always felt like she was underground in the house, even sitting by the window in her room upstairs. It was just that kind of house.
The kitchen had been the worst, though. It was actually mostly underground, with an old-fashioned hearth at one end and a long table in the middle; the open pantry off to one side and stairs down to the cellar. It really was just a kitchen, probably the only room in the house that lacked anything legitimately sinister. It was still awful, though.
The dream was just the kitchen, Nothing happened, there was no dreamy sense that she was supposed to do something. It was just the kitchen.
The worst bit was waking up. While the dream was just the kitchen, memories suspended in the wings, everything rushed back when she woke up. The smell of it after—dinner burned, sweat, vomit, blood. Her hands would ache for a moment until she could convince herself it was a phantom thing and dismiss it.
She hadn't felt the ache at the time, or registered the smell. She hadn't noticed how humid it was from the water boiling to nothing on the stovetop. She hadn't felt tired or scared or any of it. No sense of urgency.
She'd been aware or her heart racing, knowing that was the adrenaline. Also knowing that the adrenaline would eventually wear off and she'd be miserable.
There had been no guilt, and she certainly hadn't been appalled at herself. There was a bit of that later, knowing she should feel bad about it and feeling bad that she didn't.
Her first deliberate kill. Murder.
She had retrieved her things from the room upstairs, retrieved her wand, cleaned herself up, put clothes on. She'd gone outside and sat on the bench by the kitchen door. Things would have gone differently if it hadn't been the middle of the night, her sitting out there watching the house burn, but nobody saw her.
She sat and tried to take stock. She knew she was hurt. She'd surprised him—almost as much with her presence as with the physical attack. None of it had been her blood.
She was injured, though. She had felt something break. Not a bone, and not that night. It had been when she was locked away, practicing Occlumency to deaden her senses against it all.
It was like there was a line she had instinctively known better than to cross. A barrier within herself. She didn't know if it was for her own protection and mental well-being, or if it was just a block. (In fact, it was something common to Muggle-borns, a wall blocking the magic left over from when they were very young and confused, insulating against the magic, tamping it down, locking the strangeness away. She wouldn't learn that until several years had passed, though.)
Whatever it was, it was gone now. Shattered.
She hadn't known if she was free of it and better off, or if she was going to hurt for it later. All she'd known that moment was that she was free of him and was definitely better off that way.
\\
Hermione woke from the dream again, the third time in a week, and stumbled out of her bed for the bathroom, splashing cool water on her face. It was just past three in the morning.
She ached all over. They'd had a particularly vigorous time of it practicing dueling in Defense, and she'd overdone it. She was too old for the leaping and the throwing herself down on the stone floors again and again for an hour. It had amused the hell out of Severus, but she was paying for it now.
With plans to weasel a cup of cocoa out of the house elves in the kitchen and nick something to ease her joints from the hospital wing, Hermione wrapped her dressing gown around herself and headed down the stairs only to stop in the common room. Ron was there, poking morosely at the fire.
"Hey."
"What? Oh. Hi, Hermione."
"What's wrong?"
"Harry had a nightmare."
"A nightmare nightmare, or a vision nightmare?"
"Just a nightmare. But it got me thinking of the vision nightmares. And then I couldn't sleep."
"Hm." She sat with her back to the fire. He continued to prod it, lost to his own thoughts, so she looked out at the common room behind him. It was a pleasant, homey room. Reds and golds glimmered in the firelight, like Ron's hair. When she looked back at him, she realized she'd been more lost in thought than she'd realized: He was watching her instead of the fire.
"You're different since Christmas, did you know that?"
"Er—"
"It's not my fault, is it? I know we kinda had a—well not a thing, but not nothing either. Before." He put the poker back in its stand, sitting on the ledge next to her. "It changed, though. I didn't notice it until my birthday, but you're different."
"Ron," she said slowly, then covered her face with her hands because she really didn't want to see his face in that moment. "I think I need to tell you something. And I need you to tell me if you think I should tell Harry."
"Er… Okay, sure."
And she told him. She told him more than she probably should have.
She started with the Time Turner, reminding him of the one she'd had their third year and explaining how the one Dumbledore had given her was different. He didn't ask questions as she glossed over her "adventures" Turning for the headmaster.
"So you're like Harry's bodyguard now?"
"I suppose."
"Do you even like him anymore? I mean, we're just a couple kids to you now."
"Of course I like him," she said, finally looking up at him. She'd told most of her story to her feet. "Ron, the two of you are still my best friends. That's the weird, complicated part of all this. I may have been growing older and meeting different people and doing different things, but I knew the two of you were waiting back here, exactly the same as I remembered you. Even if you didn't know you were waiting for me to get back."
She had to stand up because the heat of the fire was too much against her back. She rose and paced the small clear space in front of the fire. She hadn't told him about Severus, and she'd given him a very abbreviated version of most of it, skipping Remy Bird and the Muggle Fights entirely.
"But you're only at Hogwarts to keep him from breaking rules and stuff."
Hermione snorted, and Ron raised his eyebrows at her.
"My instructions were to let Harry get up to his usual mischief, but to keep that mischief from killing him." Ron looked skeptical, so Hermione sat next to him again, turning her side to the fire this time so that she could look at him more directly. "Do you remember our first year? Fluffy and the Devil's Snare. The giant chess game."
"Of course I remember." Ron frowned at her.
"It was a test."
"What?"
"The headmaster was testing Harry, testing us."
"No…"
"Yes." Hermione sighed and scrubbed a hand down her face, feeling the tingle of her Glamour. After a moment's thought, she dropped the spell. It might hit home better for him if he could see a few of the lines on her face. "Hogwarts might have been a fairly safe place to hide something, but if that was the goal why announce it to the whole student population at the welcome feast? And why drop just the perfect hints into Harry's lap over the course of the school year—Hagrid taking Harry with him to retrieve the Stone at Gringott's, letting us get through the door with a simple Alohamora? Not to mention the Invisibility Cloak (which isn't something you give an eleven year old even if it does rightfully belong to him). It was a test."
"Bloody hell."
"Precisely." Hermione let him digest the idea for a moment before she carried on. "I don't think he intended Voldemort to actually be present—he didn't count on Quirrell. But it was a test, hide something and lead Harry to believe that something was in danger, see how he reacts."
Ron stood and paced the space once, then slumped down onto one end of the couch. Glad for the excuse to leave the fireside, Hermione joined him. She leaned her back against the arm rest and pulled her knees up to her chest.
"He's been preparing Harry for the war since he came to Hogwarts."
"That's… That's—"
Hermione could think of far too many words to complete that sentence, and none of them were particularly nice.
"Do you think I should tell Harry about the Time Turner?" she asked Ron bluntly. She watched his face carefully as he thought the question over. He was very good at chess, at strategy games—he was giving it due consideration.
"No," he finally said, though not particularly decisively. "No, I don't think you should. Not right now, anyway."
She nodded. Over the course of telling her story to Ron, she'd come to the same decision. Harry would see it as being left out of more Order business—didn't he deserve extra training up?—or resent her for keeping secrets. Not that not telling him would solve that last bit.
"I think he should know. He deserves to know. It's just… this weird connection to You-Know-Who. His dreams. What if it goes both ways? I hate to think this way—because we're not pieces on a chess board, we're actual people—but wouldn't it be good to have a secret like this? Somebody from the Order close at hand at all times?" He sighed. "I don't like the idea of Dumbledore testing us and training us up without us knowing, but I agree that we can't… It's getting to the point that we're in over our heads. We need… you, I guess."
Hermione seethed for a moment. Most of the trouble that they and Harry had gotten into over the last few years had been a direct result of the headmaster not telling Harry things. Sharing information. Even now, she was keeping secrets from them for the headmaster.
"I need to tell you one more thing."
"Oh, great." She raised an eyebrow at him, and he looked sheepish. "What?"
"I know what a Horcrux is."
"I thought you said it's not in any of the library books."
"It's not."
"Well?"
She told him. He looked like he might be sick.
"It gets worse."
"How?"
She told him about Harry, about their suspicions on his connection to Voldemort. Ron went very pale, and sat back against the couch.
"Are you sure?"
"No," she said immediately, but then had to look away. She looked back to the fire. "And yes."
"This is… This isn't fair."
She looked back at Ron, raising an eyebrow again. He met her eyes, and she realized he was mentally comparing her to Severus, recalling that she'd just told him about all the time she'd spent helping him brew. She looked away.
Behind them, the portrait swung open nearly silently. Hermione quickly cancelled the privacy wards she'd put up before telling Ron so many secrets, and put her Glamour back in place.
"You two should be asleep," Minerva admonished. She was wrapped up in her tartan dressing gown, her hair braided loosely over her shoulder.
Ron glanced at Hermione, shared secrets written all over his face.
"You told him, didn't you?" Minerva asked.
"Yes." There was no point denying it.
"The headmaster specifically told you not to tell them."
"And you argued that it would be good for them to know."
"That's beside the point, Hermione."
"What he don't know won't hurt him, Minerva." The portrait of the girl with the flowers in her hair gasped, and Hermione shot her an annoyed look. More than likely, it was the portrait who had gone to get Minerva in the first place.
Minerva didn't look convinced.
"Would you like to me Obliviate him, then?" Hermione asked, producing her wand from the sleeve of her bathrobe. Ron stood up, suddenly looking nervous and wrong-footed. She felt bad about it for a moment, but there was no point.
Minerva sighed. "No."
Hermione nodded and put her wand away. Ron continued to look nervous.
"We've decided not to tell Harry," Ron said after a moment of awkward stillness.
"And why is that, Mr. Weasley?"
"He's, well, he could be a—"
"His dreams," Hermione interrupted, trying to send Ron a quelling look without Minerva noticing. "What if that connection goes both ways?"
Minerva nodded slowly. Ron shot her a questioning look, and Hermione mouthed "later," hoping he could wait.
\\
Ron didn't seem to know how to talk to her after that. Sometimes, he sought her out with questions on her experiences with the Order, or fed her tidbits of information about Harry's dreams. Mostly, they tried to pretend like things were as they always had been. Harry, luckily, had too many other things on his mind to notice.
There were a few funny moments when Ron would ask her to look over his homework, then freeze in the act of handing over his essay to look at her like she was about to hand him over to Minerva for cheating. For her part, Hermione tried to act exactly the same as she always had. She maintained that following Malfoy obsessively was stupid. She bossed the boys around and reminded them about homework. She watched their Quidditch games and shrugged afterward when they weren't impressed with her lack of interest. She Disillusioned herself when she lingered on the girls' staircase waiting for Harry to go up to his room at night.
"Is there some sort of test you can do?" Ron asked one night in the library. Harry had been a bit suspicious about Ron choosing to go with her to study, but she thought he might suspect that they were trying to secretly date or something.
"Test?"
"Yeah, about the you-know-what. Is there a way to tell if Harry's really one?"
"Not really. If he was a quill or something—an inanimate object—there are spells that determine that. The problem is that they work with souls, showing their presence or not. Harry has a soul of his own, so it would be almost entirely impossible to use those spells to determine if the… manifestation of the spells came from Harry's soul or a piece of his."
"Huh."
"I was trying to develop new spells for it for awhile, or manipulate the old ones. It's just not my forte." She'd been meaning to ask Severus to have a whirl, actually. He was very good with that sort of thing.
"Well, alert Binns on that one," Ron said, grinning crookedly at her.
"What?"
"You just admitted that you aren't absolutely perfect at something."
"I'm not absolutely perfect at most things, Ron," she said, affecting her most teenagerly hauteur, primly going back to an essay for Flitwick. Ron laughed.