Thunder clapped in the distance. Hermione jumped. She spread her fingers across the bed and let them glide over the random assortment of things that fell from the upturned purse.
She remembered Professor Moody's chest; how closing and reopening a different compartment showed a different assortment of items each time. She pulled the strings of the purse to shut it, then reopened it. Still, she met the bed through the bottom of the bag, and her arm refused to go deeper. She had never been so frustrated to see only her hand disappearing into a space, instead of it swallowing her arm up to her elbow.
Over the sound of the howling wind and rattling window panes, she heard Bill and Fleur's voices. They weren't so loud that she could hear their distinct words. It was a nice distraction from her mounting frustration and resulting anxiety before she returned her attention to the problem at hand.
She had no hopes for the contents of the notebook. She knew she wouldn't be clumsy enough to leave a way in, written clearly for others to have easy access. She opened it and her lungs expelled all air.
Memories.
Not quite.
Some of the pages were dated. Most of the pages weren't. Her handwriting was scrawled, and some ink was smeared on pages like water splashed across it, which made it unreadable. A few of the water stains were yellowed at the worst. But, some words were clear.
"Revelio. " Hermione tapped the notepad with her wand. Nothing happened. She flipped through the warped pages again and found nothing new on the blank sheets. She opened it to the first page. Her hands were shaking. She lit her wand tip to illuminate the lined paper.
Don't say name. Taboo.
Voldemort. She was sure of that, because it sounded like something he would do. Speak his name, and he would know. She wished that page was dated, she'd understand what happened to get there.
DM?
This entry confused her. It was just two letters scribbled under smeared letters. Nothing came to mind immediately so she promised herself to return to it.
Mushrooms, salmon, eggs
A catalogue of what they had eaten? It sounded horrifying. At least in terms of sourcing them in the wild. Mushrooms were poisonous. Salmon was seasonal. Eggs could be half or fully-formed chicks.
Her hand skimmed her stomach absentmindedly.
The Tales of Beedle the Bard. Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Ali Baba. Red Riding Hood. The Gingerbread Man.
All random folk tales. Except, Hermione didn't recognise The Tales of Beedle the Bard. It tugged at the frayed ends of her mind, but the title stayed firmly on its shelf, sealed.
He left.
Hermione stared at the words. It was dated November 3rd.
"Who left?" Hermione spoke to the empty room. The wind roared, joining the boisterous crash of the waves. They helped form her thoughts into the truth with their vague voices. Ron, they whisper-roared. "Ron?"
There was a knock on her door, and she shut the book like she was keeping a secret. "Come in." Her voice elevated before she could catch it. Her tone was high-pitched. She sounded guilty.
"Hey, Hermione." Bill peeked through a crack in the door. He looked a little sheepish, and a lot exhausted. Hermione got off the bed and approached the door, pulling it open wider so it didn't feel odd, like two people scared to look at each other.
"Figured things out?" Hermione peered up at him, backlit slightly by the one candle in the hallway. He must have started the fireplace because logs' crackling echoed down the short corridor.
"Yea. Kind of." He stepped back so they had some space between them. Hermione wondered if she had forgotten personal space, or if Bill thought she was too close. The idea that she smelled and his wolfish sense picking up on it made her clamp her arms down to her sides. Malfoy was in her ear, teasing.
Bill heaved a sigh like it weighed a bag of bricks. "The halfway house is now a full-time house." Hermione's eyes widened involuntarily. "Only for now. And we'll oversee anyone who comes and goes."
"Won't we be stepping on whomever's toes by being here? Who's the cottage's keeper?" Hermione peered around, expecting a dark figure to emerge and tell her exactly that.
"Sirius. He used to stay here. It gave him freedom to roam as he saw fit, as long as he helped those who came here," Bill shrugged slightly.
"But … he was allowed to go with Harry and Ron …" Hermione said slowly, piecing it all together. "Is it because operations have halted?" Bill nodded. "So we won't be seeing many people anyway?" She hoped.
Hermione was eager to leave; to be outside, to do some harm to the other side. Being tied here was not the plan.
"Yes, and no," Bill said carefully. "There are three of us." Hermione didn't like where this was going. "I was instructed to take you with me, or for Fleur to take you with her. Someone must remain with the house."
Relief washed through her, and she leaned against the doorframe for support. She was tired. It had been a long day. Her purse's conundrum was haunting her, and her mind was shutting down.
"We are to see in which ways you can be valuable." Bill sounded like he was reciting something.
"You were told to keep an eye on me," she simplified. Bill smiled, then laughed silently, his shoulders shaking faintly.
"Yea, something like that." Bill turned to climb the staircase. "We'll begin tomorrow. I have someplace to be, I could use the backup. For now, let's get some shut-eye."
"Thanks, Bill." Hermione wanted to climb into bed and curl up. It didn't feel real, the words he was saying, the idea of being outside. Of being here.
She wondered if Malfoy was scribbling away in his journal in the infirmary. Or if now that she wasn't there, he would do the incessant scribbling in his bedroom. Did he have a desk in his attic room?
"Hermione," Bill's voice called her back to Shell Cottage. She blinked Bill's face into focus. His eyes looked sincere in the low light, his scars hidden in shadow. It was like meeting him accidentally in the Burrow while on holiday, before anything bad ever happened. "It's good to see you on your feet."
Hermione smiled. Then shut the door.
—
Being beside the ocean could be incredibly lonely.
Hermione was driftwood in a riptide. But, while riptides could kill, they can lead to discoveries of destinations unknown. She just had to keep treading water.
Hermione gripped Bill's arm as they stood on the sandbank.
The feeling of apparition was a different discomfort to swirling around endlessly when using a portkey. She was keenly aware of Bill's solid arm through hers, and how easily it might be to let go; if she let go, she would be splinched. She might die.
The thought left her head as her feet landed on the cobblestoned floor. Bill pushed her into a wall and then flattened himself beside her. Not too long ago — the day before yesterday – Malfoy had done the same. This was different, and she couldn't place why.
She wanted to ask where they were. What they were doing. Anything. Bill hadn't briefed her.
Everything felt like a poorly built raft and they were expected to captain it with success. She needed to get back to headquarters and get answers.
If operations were halted, why were they allowing her out? Or Bill and Fleur?
Bill splayed his hand over her shoulders and kept her pressed to the grimy wall. Finally, he released her.
She followed his lead, copying every spell he cast on himself so that he was invisible and made no sound as he walked. They were careful to avoid the stream of people and cars, before jogging across the road.
It felt wrong. She was exposed to everyone. One wrong move, and she expected to die.
"Stay outside, tell me if a man with a top hat comes through." Bill's voice was very close to her face. She had no idea how he knew where she was, or if he was just guessing.
"That's nothing to go on," she hissed, but he was gone. She knew it by the dead air around her, and she plastered herself against the front of the store so as not to stand on the pavement.
How was she supposed to tell him if she saw anyone?
She could only take comfort in knowing that Bill did this alone, usually. And her being there was probably an inconvenience more than it was help.
Hermione wanted to be useful. She wanted to ' be valuable ' so she could stop being in the dark. Her beaded purse hung uselessly on her hip. The weight anchored her as it swung.
Casting a quick succession of spells, Hermione pressed her ear to the glass pane of the shop. She didn't notice before, but it was a meat shop. For a wild moment, she thought Bill was just here to buy steaks for dinner. Then, she heard voices.
It wasn't loud like she hoped, it wasn't clear either, more like listening through Weasley's Wizarding Wheezes' Extendable Ears. It felt like listening through a cup telephone she had made with her father as a school project: echoing, and distorted, and only connected by twine.
"-delivery was missed," a stocky man with a bloodstained apron grumbled.
"So? Get a new one," another man, this time with a full handlebar moustache and dressed in a funny mixture of a mime costume and a three-piece suit, spoke. "He won't be happy-"
"He won't be happy, " the stocky man mocked, "I'm not happy!"
"You should be. You're being compensated." The moustached mime drew himself to his full height. The stocky man huffed and waved a dirty cleaver over his head.
"Tell your boss that he should pay me with the English pound, yea?" He brought the cleaver down with a heavy thud, and fresh blood joined the bright red across his gut. "I don't get what I'm s'posed t'do with silver and bronze."
Wizards buying from a muggle butcher shop? Why?
A man apologised loudly enough that Hermione glanced up. Shifting her gaze from inside the dimly lit store to the pavement was too bright and too sudden for her eyes to adjust quickly enough. Her eyes ached for an unbearable second.
She was too late. The man with the tophat had already pushed his way into the store.
The man in the tophat wasn't anyone she recognised.
Then he inhaled deeply through his nose, like a dog extending their instincts to the wind. She didn't know of anyone who would willingly do that in a butcher shop. The gesture made her think of Lupin when he had transformed into a werewolf in front of them.
He moved with a familiar gait. Fear trickled down her spine.
It reminded her of something, and a bright red alarm rang through her entire system.
Without thinking, she pushed into the shop, the door moving by an apparent invisible force. This drew the shop's inhabitants' attention. Before they could react, Hermione ducked, rolled, then aimed three consecutive spells at the men and hoped none would find Bill.
The stocky man fell like lead. The suited mime crumpled, his arms and legs splayed in wrong directions.
It wasn't over.
A spell grazed her cheek because the man with the tophat had already cast a protection charm. She remembered a spell, one she warned Harry not to use because it was in a suspicious book he had found.
She knew it would get past his weakened shields. She knew that the other side would not expect it from the Order. She squared her shoulders and bellowed, "Sectusempra! "
Her expectations were bad. But nothing prepared her for the gashes that adorned the man before he fell to the floor. He began to gurgle. His top hat came to a halt beside him and was slowly being surrounded by deep, crimson blood.
"Hermione," Bill's panicked voice came, "What did you do?" Hermione looked toward the sound of his voice and couldn't find him.
Her blood was pumping through her faster than her lungs could oxygenate it. She was shaking.
The man's body thrashed at her feet, blood gurgled into his throat, and she could tell he would drown on it. She felt no inclination to save him.
"I-" She inhaled. Her eyes were stinging. "He smelled you." She didn't know how she knew that, but she knew. "He was going to-"
"We need to leave." Bill opened the door. it appeared to swing open on its own. She trudged after him. "What did you do," Bill muttered and muttered. People turned to stare, but she knew they wouldn't find the source.
"Who were they?" Hermione demanded. He couldn't be angry with her. She saved him!
"The man with the top hat, we suspect, is Greyback." Bill's footsteps splashed in a long puddle. "And you just- what did you do to him?"
"I don't know," Hermione admitted. "Never used that spell before." The dark tendrils had crawled up her wrist from the wand. Like awakening muscles by flexing them, the dark magic made her want to use more.
"This fucks with everything."
She ran into his invisible back. He grabbed at her body, and found her wrist. He dragged her to an alley. By now, they were blocks away.
"If you had briefed me-" Hermione began to retort.
"I already told you what to do. Keep an eye out for him. Not kill him!" Bill's voice was close to her again.
"He's not dead yet." Hermione felt a little bratty and like she didn't deserve to be chided, because she wasn't given the entire picture.
"We're going to see Lupin," Bill sounded agitated, "You shouldn't have come with me today."
"You're right," Hermione agreed, equally as agitated, "I should be on my own."
Bill scoffed. "Greyback was being sent to buy meat. By He-who-must-not-be-named himself!" Hermione went still. Bill paced two steps and then there was a loud thud. She could only assume he punched a wall. "I was trying to figure out where the meat was going. If we had traced them, we could attack-"
"Attack?" Hermione felt mad laughter grip her. "With what army? With what force?" Bill was still now, she could at least hear him breathing.
"We're trying, Hermione," Bill sounded defeated, "We have to keep trying."
"Take me to Lupin." Hermione held her hand out, realised she was still invisible, then groped around until she felt his arm. He jumped, momentarily disappearing from her sense of touch before he grasped her hand.
"Merlin, help us, Hermione," Bill said beside her.
Hermione had a lot of work to do. Or the Order would be lost.