Song Inspiration: Titanium - David Guetta, Sia
Chapter 27
Hermione stood just outside of Shell Cottage. She wore a set of ill-fitting robes that Fleur had dug out of a trunk of old clothes in the attic. Staring down at the single strand of black, curly hair that was clutched tightly between her thumb and forefinger, she felt as though she was going to be physically ill.
She really did not want to do this. Not only had a terrible sense of foreboding churned in her gut since she had woken up that morning, but she had also been obsessing over an irrational fear that somehow, she would get stuck in the body of Bellatrix Lestrange after taking the Polyjuice Potion. Logically, she knew that it wouldn't happen but the image, and the terror that accompanied it, would not leave her mind.
Taking a deep breath, she finally dropped the hair in the glass that Draco was holding out for her, wrinkling her nose at the acrid smell that wafted up from the glass when the hair made contact with the potion inside. She forced herself to down the entire potion in two huge gulps, then dropped to her knees as the horrid bubbling sensation roiled through her body.
It was so much worse than the three times that she had taken Polyjuice Potion before (cat incident included, which had been an incredibly uncomfortable transformation). She wondered if it was because Bellatrix was so evil and vile that her body literally could not handle the change, or it if was because she was so unwilling to transform into her chosen body, unlike during the previous three times she had experienced it.
She gasped for breath, eyes watering, then looked down at her hands that rested on the sand beneath them. Well…not her hands anymore. The bubbling and boiling feeling had finally faded to leave behind pale skin and cracked, talon-like nails replacing her own. She could see the curly black hair that fell down in tangled sheets on either side of her face, and the robes that had been loose and ill-fitting on her petite frame only moments before now seemed to be a near-perfect fit for the taller, slightly wider body of Bellatrix Lestrange.
After taking one moment more to try to catch her breath and regain her composure, Hermione rose to her feet and looked at Harry, Ron, and Draco, who all stood around her. Harry looked impressed at the overall success of her transition into the body of the older witch, while Ron's expression was one of mild distaste.
Draco's expression caught her eye the most out of the three boys. Her wizard looked absolutely horrified. When she reached out to grasp his forearm, trying to reassure him, he literally recoiled from her, taking several steps back until he was out of her reach.
"I'm sorry, Granger," he said, the words coming out slightly strangled as he stared at her in dismay. "I just…I can't right now. I'm sorry."
A grin of reluctant amusement spread across her face, and Draco's eyes bulged at the sight as he took one more step away. Clearly the sight of his aunt looking at him with anything close to a normal expression on her usually manic face was just too much for him to bear.
"Well," Harry said, clapping his hands together, "no time like the present! The sooner we can get there, the sooner we can get...what we need," he censored his words with a quick glance at both Griphook and Draco, "and get out. The clock is ticking now."
Hermione nodded, ready to go, but Draco's words stopped the group.
"Potter," he said, sounding equal parts amused and annoyed, "I can't really go barging into Gringotts without my wand."
He held his hand out for the wand that Harry had taken from him at the Manor and had yet to give back to him.
"Oh, right," Harry mumbled, pulling another wand from his back pocket. Instead of handing Draco back his own wand, however, Harry handed him the spare. At Draco's look of irritation, Harry added, "I need to keep yours for now. You can just take this one. Bill and Fleur had some extras here at the cottage, and this one should do just fine."
"I want my wand back, Potter," Draco said, crossing his arms across his chest, "not some random Snatcher's."
"I can't explain why I need to keep yours yet, Malfoy, but I will, once I'm able to. Please?"
With a murderous look on his handsome face, Draco finally agreed and begrudgingly took the borrowed wand from Harry as if it were a live snake waiting to bite him once he got too close.
"Let's just get this over with," he said, clearly irritated, and the rest of them nodded. With a few flicks of her wand, Hermione had altered Ron's appearance enough that he would be unrecognizable as a Weasley. She turned to Draco and did the same to him, altering his short platinum hair until it was long and so dark it nearly looked as black as his aunt's. With some deft magic, she softened the hard lines of his face to make him look much less stately and patrician, then with a final wave of her wand, his distinctive blue-grey eyes changed to a nondescript brown.
Pleased with the effect and knowing that neither of them would be recognized like this, she slipped her own Vinewood wand into the holster that was snugly secured to her right thigh before reaching out and taking the curved wand that was an inch or two longer than her own and, to Hermione, seemed to vibrate with the lingering traces of the Dark Magic that it had performed. She shuddered at the feel of it grasped in her fingers.
Harry knelt down on the soft sand so that Griphook could clamber up and onto his back, then flung the Invisibility Cloak around the two of them until they were completely gone from sight. Hermione reached out with her right hand to clasp tightly to Draco, and her left hand grabbed onto Ron. She watched as Harry's hand slipped out from under the Cloak to hold onto Ron's other arm.
With a look at Draco and Ron, who both nodded at her with determined looks on their faces, Hermione closed her eyes and thought of Diagon Alley, then she turned on her heel and dragged the five of them into the tight crush of Apparition together.
Hermione clung tightly to the scales that ran along the Ukrainian Ironbelly's spine. Harry was in front of her, and she could see Ron's red hair in front of Harry. Draco was behind her and out of her line of sight, but his hands grasped securely around her body reassured her that he had not gotten separated from them during their mad escape from the bowels of Gringotts.
It had been close…too close.
Hermione's gut churned at the thought of what would have happened to them had the dragon not been there. As grateful as she was that she had been able to release it to secure both its freedom and their own, she also knew that they were in a precarious situation. The dragon either hadn't noticed or did not yet care that there were four humans riding on its back, but she would not risk their lives on the assumption that it would continue to be ignorant or uncaring of their presence. When she spotted the large lake swiftly moving into sight beneath them, she reached out a hand to prod Harry in the side.
"We have to jump," she shouted, fighting to be heard over the wind that whooshed in their ears. He nodded, confirming that he had heard her, then leaned forward to pass the message to Ron while she leaned back into Draco's body to tell him.
Once they were over the darkest, and hopefully deepest, part of the lake, they all slid from the back of the dragon and plummeted to the water below. Hermione cast a cushioning charm on the water before they hit, hoping to soften their landing enough to avoid any broken bones from the impact.
Even though the charm had worked, the pain of the impact still jarred her very bones, and Hermione had to fight the instinct to gasp in pain.
Wouldn't that be the biggest joke in the universe, she thought wryly, to survive breaking into Gringotts and escaping on dragonback, just to drown myself?
She kicked her way to the surface, lungs burning from the need for oxygen, and gulped in large mouthfuls of air once her head finally broke the surface. Looking around her, she saw Draco treading water, waiting for her to emerge. He propelled himself over to her and gripped her arms securely as he looked her over, ensuring himself that she was okay. Harry and Ron were behind him, and once they were certain that she had survived the fall, they began to make their way to the small island in the center of the lake, Draco and Hermione following closely behind.
As they all dragged themselves from the water, attempting to wring the liquid from their clothes as they went, Hermione suddenly heard a gasp come from in front of her. She watched as Harry's hand went to his scar and he clutched his head as if he were in pain, then he collapsed to his knees in the ankle-deep water.
"Harry!" she gasped, rushing forward to support her friend as Ron rushed back to do the same. They watched helplessly as Harry writhed in the shallow water, doing their best to keep his head from slipping beneath the surface of the water amidst his thrashings.
After a minute or two, that felt like much longer to them, Harry's body finally relaxed, and his vivid green eyes popped open.
"He knows," he said hollowly.
"How do you…Harry! You're not supposed to be letting him in anymore! Haven't you been practicing your Occlumency still?"
Harry glared at her, not appreciating the motherly dressing-down she was giving him, before snarking out in reply.
"Yes, 'Mi, I am, but I can't always control it."
As she, Ron and Draco worked in tandem to haul Harry out of the water, Hermione looked up at Draco, who looked absolutely befuddled as he tried to follow along with their conversation.
"You-Know-Who…he has a link to Harry's mind. Sometimes Harry gets flashes of what he sees."
Draco's jaw dropped, and a horrified look glazed over his eyes at the thought of sharing thoughts with the Dark Lord, but Hermione turned away from him with no further explanation.
"What does he know, Harry?" Ron asked, and the three of them watched Harry as he tried to gather his thoughts. His green eyes darted up to look at Malfoy, seeming to debate something with himself, before he gave a nearly imperceptible nod and looked back at Hermione.
"He knows that we're after his Horcruxes."
"WHAT THE FUCK?!" Draco shouted, and Hermione knew that, unlike herself and Harry and Ron, Draco Malfoy needed neither books nor memories from a Potions Professor to explain to him exactly what the Dark Magic was.
She rose to her feet, intending to try to placate Draco, but he backed away from her.
"You mean to tell me," he said, voice trembling with suppressed emotions, "that the thing we almost died to get out of Gringotts, the thing that my aunt was keeping hidden in her vault, was a piece of the Dark Lord's soul?"
Harry simply nodded.
"I told you that this was our chance to end it all, to end him," Hermione interjected softly, wanting him to realize just why their actions today had been so necessary.
"We can't defeat him," Ron added, "until we destroy all of them."
"Wait just a fucking minute," Draco said, rubbing his temples as though fighting against a massive headache. "What in Salazar's saggy ball sack do you mean, 'all of them'?"
"He made seven," Harry said, matter of factly, and the three watched as Draco's already pale face leached of color and he stumbled backward, falling to his ass in the grass.
"Seven," he whispered weakly, more to himself than to any of them.
Hermione walked forward to sit beside him, pulling her legs up to her chest and wrapping her arms around them.
"It's what we've been doing for the past nine months, Draco," she said quietly. " We've been hunting down his Horcruxes so that we can destroy them. The cup is one, and we have two more to find after we get rid of it."
"It's at Hogwarts," Harry added suddenly, and Hermione, Draco and Ron all looked at him. "I saw it. It's the one that is connected to Ravenclaw, and it's somewhere inside Hogwarts… I'm pretty sure the final one is the snake. He's worried about it now."
There was silence as all four of them mulled over the implications of Harry's words.
"The snake stays with him," Draco said. "Sometimes he'll send it out somewhere on its own to do something for him, but ninety percent of the time, it's with him."
Silence again, this time broken by Hermione:
"We have to go to Hogwarts," she said, reluctance and determination battling in her voice. "We can end it all there."
Harry and Ron both nodded at her words, but Draco knew it wouldn't be that easy.
"You can't get into Hogsmeade," he warned. When the three looked up at him, he explained. "They've placed a Caterwauling Charm over the entire village: they'll know the second you get there."
Hermione seemed to ponder his words.
"We still have to go; we don't have a choice. But forewarned is forearmed, so since we know about the charm, we know to expect it. We'll have to improvise from there."
She rose to her feet and pulled the small, beaded bag from the inside pocket of her robes. Draco watched, bemused, as she stuck her hand inside all the way to the elbow before pulling out a dry change of clothes for all four of them, along with a small vial of Dittany. She poured a miniscule amount into each of their hands, soothing away the burns left behind from the Flagrante curses that had scorched each of them while they dug through the vault for the cup.
Once they were all dressed and dry, Hermione tugged one more item from her bag: the Invisibility Cloak.
"It'll be a tight squeeze for all four of us under here," she said, looking at all of them appraisingly and lingering on Ron and Draco, whose tall bodies both reached just over six feet tall. "But if we crouch and move slowly, it should be enough to keep us hidden."
Draco, feeling the anxiety churning in his stomach, nonetheless joined the three of them under the cloak, then clenched his teeth as he felt Hermione pull them all into the squeezing crush of Side-Along Apparition for the second time that day.
Okay, so I know this is like the one thing you're not supposed to do when you're writing, but I'm doing it anyway. Full disclosure: I'm not very happy with how this chapter ended up coming out. I refuse, however, to not finish this story just because I can't quite get this one chapter the way I want it. So here it is! Hopefully you all liked it more than I do, but if not, I'm sorry. Gotta keep this moving though!
Also, I purposely decided to leave out Gringotts itself. Mainly, this was because, in this story, his presence didn't change what happened much, if at all. I therefore didn't want to write it out just to have it read like the chapter in DH.
sbz