Chapter 39: Wednesday, June 18, 1980

"When you're going through these difficult times of chaos and trauma, the most important thing is to keep those who are closest to you together."

-Michael Imperioli


Hermione's knees buckled under the weight of Marlene as her feet hit the floor of her living room. The moment Marlene fell to the ground in a heap, Hermione felt her stomach roll. She pointed her wand to her own face, muttering a quick "Episkey!", wincing as her nose snapped back into place. She then performed the charm over Marlene to show her vital signs.

Marlene was dying.

Her heart rate was weak, her temperature beginning to fall, her magical core was nearing complete depletion- likely from trying to keep her alive. She had minutes left, if she were lucky. Hermione sighed, casting a feather-light charm over the blond on the floor and bent down to scoop her up, with a bit of difficulty, and moved her to the guest room. She laid Marlene on the small bed and used a few charms to clean her up. No one should have to pass into the afterlife looking as beat and battered as the woman did.

Hermione closed her eyes, placing a hand on Marlene's shoulder. "I'm sorry," she whispered.

A few minutes passed before she heard two loud cracks come from beneath the floor. The cellar was the only part of the cottage Hermione had yet to reconstruct, as run down as it had been, she didn't have a use for it but now she found herself wishing she would have. With quick footsteps, Hermione made her way to the door in the hall that was embedded in the floor. She had placed a rug over it, to keep from tripping over the brass ring that acted as a handle. She quickly yanked the rug from the floor, grabbing the handle and hoisting the boards up.

"Sirius!" She called down the stairs, "Sirius you need to get up here!"

She heard some scuffling, it sounded as if Moony was not pleased with the mode of transportation that had brought him here. She heard a few murmurs from Sirius, suggesting that he was placing some wards and then he began climbing the rickety, narrow steps that led up from the cellar and into the space between her two bedrooms.

"Are you okay?" Sirius asked, "Marlene, is she…?"

Hermione bit her lip as she looked down, her shoulders slumping a bit. "I'm sorry, Sirius. She doesn't have much time left. You should go be with her."

When he remained silent and unmoving, Hermione brought her eyes to his and could see the tears building in them, his jaw tightened, his mouth twisting to the side as he bobbed his head. Without saying a word, he stepped past Hermione and into the guest room, closing the door behind him.

Hermione stared at the closed door for several minutes until her attention was brought back to the trap door near her feet, as it lifted, James stumbled blindly up the stairs.

"It's a lot easier to see as Prongs," James said, "You all right?"

Hermione couldn't stop herself. She threw her arms around James, tugging him into a tight hug. "You idiot! How could you go and get captured?!"

"Not like I meant to," James grumbled, his arms circling around her back and hugging her just as tightly. "Besides, you lot are the ones that came in looking for trouble. Have you got my glasses?"

"Oh, erm, Lily has them."

"Oh god, Lily!" James said, his face frantic as he pulled away from Hermione. "Fuck! I need to go home! Do you reckon she's there?"

Hermione followed James into the living room, looking at the clock on the wall. "It's after four in the morning. We left Dorcas' place around mid-morning and I don't think Lily got any sleep for the two days you were gone. I assume someone would have forced her to go home and sleep."

"I'll floo and tell her to come over," James decided, stepping over to the fireplace and grabbing a handful of Floo Powder, tossing it into the grate. "Lily!"

"James!" Her voice rang out as a sob merely seconds after James called for her, "Step back, I'm coming through!"

Hermione stepped out of the living room to give Lily and James a bit of privacy, chuckling as she heard the sounds of Lily swearing at him, accompanied by "ouch! Stop hitting me, would you?!"

She lingered in the hall, her hand on the raised top of the door, ready to close up the cellar when she heard groans of pain. Very loud, very human groans of pain.

Hermione's eyes blew wide as she rushed into the living room, grabbing her bag from the place it had been dropped on the floor and sprinted down the hall, nearly tumbling down the steep stairs. Remus laid curled in a ball on his side, his entire body trembling as he shook with sobs, his face screwed up in pain. Hermione fell to her knees next to him, dropping the bag on the side and grabbing his face in her hands.

"Remus, look at me. Look at me!" She begged, the urgency in her voice evident.

His eyes opened, bloodshot and unfocused as he cried into her hands. His face was filthy, sticky with dried blood and swollen with bruises. She urged him to roll to his back, pulling her hands from his face to remove his arms from their fold over his body as he tried to hide his nakedness. He yelled out as she gingerly clasped his forearm, above his burned wrists, and moved his arms to his sides. His torso was blistered and weeping with blood and pus from the severe burns of the silver chains. She could see they were beginning to heal, but it wasn't fast enough.

"Oh Remus," she whispered, tears springing into her eyes as they roamed over the damage that had been caused to him. "What did they do to you?"

She returned her hands to the sides of his face, leaning forward to press her lips to his, kissing him hard, ignoring the throbbing pain of her busted lips, and desperately trying to put as many of the emotions she was feeling for the man into it. Hermione pulled away, turning back to her bag and began pulling salves and potions out. Deciding that Essence of Dittany would probably be her best bet, she uncorked a blood replenisher and a concentrated pain potion and slipped a hand under Remus' head, angling it so he wouldn't choke on the liquid.

"Is anything broken that you can tell?" Hermione asked, "Did they break any bones?"

"No." Remus answered, miserably, as he choked down the potions.

"I have to use Dittany, it's going to burn."

Remus gave a despairing little sob and a weak nod as Hermione began dropping the Dittany over his wounds. Remus clenched his teeth, writhing beneath her as the liquid hit his skin, searing into the wounds on his chest and knitting them together. She moved to his wrists, casting a cooling charm over the skin before dropping the Dittany onto it. A loud, agonized wail came from his throat and Hermione found it increasingly difficult to choke back her own emotions as he cried under her hands.

"Just one more, love. Just one more," she said, her voice shaking as she moved over to his other side, casting another cooling charm and dropping the liquid onto his wrists.

"Fuck!" Remus screamed, his breath shaking as tears cut clean lines into the grime on his face.

Hermione conjured a cloth and a bowl, filling it with water from her wand and dumping a pain potion, a bit of dittany, a phial of murtlap essence and a numbing solution into the water. Using the diluted solution, she soaked the cloth and began to clean the wounds as they closed, Remus' breath slowing into whimpers of pain instead of screams of agony. She conjured another cloth, changing the diluted solution and dipped it into the bowl, bringing it to his face to clear the grime that had been caked onto his beautiful features.

When his face was more or less clean, she dried the cloth and transfigured it into a large blanket, draping it over him. With a large amount of effort, Remus pushed himself into a sitting position and pulled her into his chest, his shoulders shaking as he held onto her, his face pressed into her neck, while he took deep breaths through his nose.

"I love you," he whispered, so quietly Hermione almost missed the words as they slipped through his lips.

"W-what?" she asked, her heart rate jumping up and stuttering in her chest.

"I.. I said that I.. I love you. I thought… I thought I was going to die, I thought you were going to die. And I… I just knew that I loved you."

"Remus, I-

"I know you don't have f-forever… here... with me. I know that. But fuck i love you, and I.. I have to tell you. It's okay if you can't-

"Shut up," Hermione said, pulling out of his tight grip. She pulled away to look at his face, his eyes sad as he looked at her, obviously assuming the worst.

"If you don't feel… I get it. I really do, I won't be upset if… If you can't say it… If you don't want to say it…"

"Stop talking, would you?" Hermione said, her heart swelling painfully in her chest, her eyes leaking with salty tears. "I love you too, you daft man! I think I have loved you for a very long time."

Remus surged forward, slanting his mouth over hers and wincing into the kiss as he pulled her into his lap. When she tried to shift away, to spare him the pain, he held her tighter. Her hands wound around his back, gripping into the flesh covering his shoulders as the gravity of the last sixteen or so hours settled over her like lead. She had come so close to watching him die, so close to dying by his hand, so close to never being able to tell him. She had been through so many battles in her life, had lost so many people, yet she still found it hard to tell people when she loved them.

Perhaps it was fear that kept her from saying the words, fear that one day she would have to say goodbye to them. As she did so many people in her life… But she was in love with Remus; Time Stone, Order mission, wrong timeline, be damned. She was in love with him. And Remus deserved to know that he was loved. Above all, Remus deserved to know..

Remus' hold on her slackened as he pulled away from her, looking into her face with an intensity that made her breath hitch. His hands cupped her cheeks, the pads of his thumbs running lightly over the bruised skin beneath her eyes. She suddenly remembered how filthy she must look, not taking the time to clean her face before coming down to help him. Her lips still broken and swollen, a tooth somewhere in the top row missing, from the backhand to the jaw courtesy of Greyback, her face black and blue and her hair matted with blood and dirt. But the way he looked at her, as if she were the only thing on the planet, in the universe he had eyes for… It stole her breath away.

"You… You do?" Remus asked, a glint of uncertainty stealing his features.

Hermione bit into her bottom lip, instantly regretting the action as her lip burned. One of Remus' thumbs fell from her cheek bones, running over her lip as his brows knit together in concern. He leaned forward, pressing a soft kiss to her lips before pulling back.

"Yes, I really do."

"Hermione? Hermione? Are you okay down there?" James' voice called from the top of the cellar stairs.

"Yes! I'm fine. We're coming up!"

"We?"

Hermione pushed herself up from the floor, offering a hand to Remus to help pull him up as well. He bent nearly completely in half to avoid hitting his head on the low ceiling as he wrapped the blanket around himself. Hermione climbed the stairs behind him, given he was still on shaky legs, his knees threatening to buckle with every step he moved up. James offered him a hand, helping Remus up the last few steps. When Hermione exited, she pulled the cellar door closed and pulled the rug back in place.

"The sun hasn't come up yet," James said, bewildered.

"They gave him a potion, James. A potion that we don't know the properties of. It's very likely that whatever was in that potion, wasn't meant to last a full night. Or if it was, it was poorly brewed and- oomph!" Hermione's words were cut off by Lily nearly tackling her to the ground, hugging her tightly.

"You lot had me scared to death! Don't you ever run off again! Do you understand me?! Eighteen hours you were gone, Hermione! Eighteen hours! And you could have- Jesus! Look at you! What's happened to you all?!"

"I'm sorry, Lily." Hermione said, squeezing the redhead back tightly. "I'm sorry. If I would have known-

"It doesn't matter. You're safe now. Where's Sirius?" Lily asked, dropping her embrace and taking a step back.

Hermione's eyes roamed over the guest room door, "Marlene…"

James and Remus both swore under their breath, Lily's hand flew to her mouth as tears leaked from her eyes. Hermione sighed, "Let's get cleaned up. We'll need to call an order meeting."


After showering and changing their clothes, Lily was able to convince Sirius to leave Marlene's side and freshen up. Hermione placed a stasis charm over Marlene to ensure that whatever curses the Death Eaters had used on her, would not continue to eat away at her body while they were gone.

Arriving at the headquarters was in and of itself a fiasco. Hermione had to nearly fight to get an exhausted James and (still in an incredible amount of pain) Remus to a chair. Every person stopped them with every foot fall, asking questions and begging for answers they couldn't provide. One by one, they explained what happened. James telling them about the two days he had been missing, in which he had been beaten and tortured several times. Apparently Lord Voldemort was not pleased that he was a pureblood wizard who was refusing him, and had given reins over to Dolohov to do whatever it took to get James to concede.

Sirius had been put under an Imperius curse, and forced to torture an already dying Marlene. Eventually, he had found the willpower to fight his way through the curse, something Hermione had only heard of happening once, when Harry did it while they were Defense Against the Dark Arts their fourth year. Immediately after breaking through the curse, he shifted into Padfoot and attacked the other Death Eaters in the room, ripping their throats out, quite literally. He found their wands in the pocket of the robes of one of the Death Eaters and fought his way to find James.

Remus' situation, before Hermione's arrival to his cell, had been gruesome. He was tortured by Fenrir Greyback, watched as the man disemboweled a child before using the blood of the child- who Hermione speculated must have been a werewolf as well- to finish the potion he forced on Remus. Minutes after the potion was swallowed, the silver chains holding his stripped body upright began to sear into his skin. He had been enduring the caustic torture for several hours before Hermione had found her way into his chamber.

It occurred to Hermione that while they were locked in these rooms, her sense of time had been skewed. The events felt as if they had taken only minutes to unfold, that she had been under the control of Death Eaters for merely an hour, two at most, and had come to the conclusion that after being beaten senseless, her brain may have been more addled than she cared to admit.

Her hand eventually found its way to her left forearm, pressing against the remaining scar from the last time she had been captured and tortured. Again, a time that felt as if it had lasted only minutes, but in fact, she had been under the wand of Bellatrix Lestrange for at least an hour before Ron and Harry had shown up with Dobby.

Sirius, James, and Remus all trembled occasionally as the meeting dragged on. Their bodies would jerk violently, even double over, from the after effects of the torture they had endured. Hermione sat still as she could, the only sign of her torture the occasional chattering of her teeth, knowing she had not received a fifth of the brutal treatment the Marauder's had experienced. At one point, Moody became so irritated with a violent fit from Remus, he put him in a body bind, which then reduced the entire Order into a screaming match amongst themselves. Finally, Moody released the bind and Remus stood up roughly from the table, stomping through the house and slamming the door shut as he exited through the front.

Hermione sighed, "I'm going to go check on him."

Only Lily and Molly seemed to hear her, and gave a terse nod as she stepped from the room. Hermione's body ached, her mind moving at a sluggish rate as exhaustion settled in her bones, her eyes feeling heavy as the dull throb of her head intensified. She was glad to exit the chaos that the meeting had become, if only for a few moment's peace.

She pushed open the front door, carefully closing it behind her and saw Remus sitting on the front steps, his elbows dug into his knees, his head in his hands as he swore in Welsh when another violent tremble tore up his spine.

"Do you want another pain relief potion?" Hermione asked, from behind him.

"No use," he said, miserably. "They don't last very long for me. Best to keep your resources for people who need them."

"You need them," Hermione whispered, falling into a seated position beside Remus. "I have plenty stocked up, and I can brew more tomorrow. You shouldn't sit in pain, even if they only last a half hour."

"I deserve to be in pain," Remus murmured.

"Excuse me?"

Remus closed his eyes, shaking his head. Hermione slid down the stairs, kneeling in front of him, forcing her way into the space between his knees. She pulled his hands from his face and stared up at him.

"Say it again, to my face this time. Tell me why you deserve to sit here in agony."

"Look at you!" Remus said, his voice practically vibrating with anger, "You were beaten bloody! Not to mention James and… and Sirius. M-Marlene… Fuck. God, it's all my fault!"

"You were the one who tortured Sirius and made him do those terrible things, were you? You kidnapped James? Beat the piss out of him and left in a room to die-

"No, but I-

"I wasn't finished." Hermione said, aggravated with the way he was blaming himself. "When you should have killed me, you didn't. This was not your fault, Remus. Do you understand me? None of this was your fault. We are at war, in case you haven't noticed! And we knew the risks! You are not at fault here. The Death Eaters are, Voldemort is!"

He flinched at the name but remained steady otherwise. She could tell he didn't believe a word that came from her mouth, but she would do whatever she had to do to make sure he knew that he was not a bad person, that he did not cause what had happened. If anything, being face to face with Dolohov when she wasn't sure she'd make it out alive only solidified her need to see him brought down for good.

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a/n: Okay, I couldn't in good conscience leave you hanging like that, right? So, another bonus chapter this week.

xo

mimi