Reminder:
Reg Cattermole = Ron Weasley
Mafalda Hopkins = Hermione Granger
Albert Runcorn = Harry Potter
2 September 1997
"Magic is might," Ron – currently disguised as one Reg Cattermole – murmured to himself as he, with a similarly disguised Harry and Hermione, stood in front of the statue in the atrium of the Ministry of Magic.
"Muggles," Hermione whispered hollowly, eying the deformed, contorted bodies that made the foundation of the monstrosity with something dangerously close to rage simmering in her blood. She swallowed and lifted her chin, letting that anger freeze and set into something harder. Something far more useful than simple hatred. "In their rightful place."
Harry, stoic, gave her sleeve a light tug and the three of them waded into the flow of traffic, away from the statue and toward the bustling lifts.
Hermione took a deep breath, in through her nose and out past pursed lips, like she was blowing out the candles on a birthday cake. They could do this; all they had to do was locate Umbridge, find out where the locket was, adjust her memory if necessary, and replace said locket with a decoy.
It was a simple plan, but one they'd been working toward for weeks, lurking in the shadows and watching. Waiting. They could do this.
She managed to convince herself of that right up until Corban Yaxley abruptly stepped in front of them, blocking the entrance to the lift that they were waiting for.
"I requested somebody from Magical Maintenance to sort out my office, Cattermole. It's still raining in there."
Hermione watched the color leech from Ron's face as he began to visibly flounder, her mind racing. Yaxley said something else, but she barely heard it.
Raining in his office.
Raining in his office.
Raining in his –
"Attend to it Cattermole," Yaxley finished dismissively as he made to step into the lift they'd been waiting for. "Or your wife's blood status will be in even greater doubt than it is now. I don't have to remind you that her trial is scheduled for this morning."
Ron had turned from pale to a sickly shade of green by the time the three of them were ensconced in their own lift, blessedly and briefly alone.
"What am I going to do?" Ron asked, frantically looking from Harry to Hermione and then back again. "If I don't turn up, my wife – I mean, Cattermole's wife – "
"We'll come with you," Harry reassured gamely, Ron bobbing his head in enthusiastic agreement before Hermione cut in.
"No, we won't," she said sharply, shooting Harry a look. His penchant for altruism was not going to ruin this. "There isn't time for that. Ron, listen to me very closely. If the rain in Yaxley's office is what I think it is, the counterspell is Meteolojinx Recanto."
"Wh - how could you possibly know that?" Harry asked, raising thick brows that didn't belong to him. "You can't just know all of the spells, Hermione."
She allowed herself a stolen, impish smirk. "I know it because I was there when George came up with the product that it counteracts. I didn't know they had it in production already, though. Say it back to me now, Ron, quickly. We don't have much time."
He said it more or less correctly twice in a row just before the lift doors opened and a heavily whiskered man stepped inside, pulling Harry into a conversation that he managed to follow with a fair amount of success.
They nudged Ron off on level two a few minutes later and then, upon reaching level one, they came face to face with a toadlike woman wearing a pink, velvet bow in her hair. Hermione almost smiled.
Brilliant.
"Ah, Mafalda," Dolores Umbridge greeted her. "Travers sent you, did he?"
Harry bristled, but Hermione didn't miss a beat. "He did," she replied in a compliant tone, deferentially stepping aside.
"Good, good. You'll do fine." Umbridge stepped in and then turned to the man beside her, and it took Hermione a moment to identify him as the shell who was supposedly their Minister of Magic. Umbridge idly read names from a clipboard, people to be tried that morning for various charges concerning 'magical theft.' Hermione noted that Ron's – Reg's – wife was, indeed, among them.
"We'll head straight down, Mafalda. Everything you'll need is waiting for you in the courtroom." Umbridge turned to Harry as the lift doors opened again, looking at him expectantly. "Aren't you getting out, Albert?"
"Oh, right, of course," he stammered, looking at Hermione with recklessly undisguised anxiety. Umbridge thankfully didn't see it, nose buried in her clipboard once more.
It was clear on his face that Harry thought she couldn't handle this one her own, that she was out of her depth. But this was precisely what they were there to do, and Umbridge, unwitting though she was, had walked right in and given them an opening they'd have otherwise had to search for. So, as the grate began to shut and the lift prepared to move, Hermione shot Harry the barest flicker of a wink.
"Such a disgrace," Umbridge tutted as they were rocked into motion once more. "The wife of a ministry employee, one of our very own."
"Oh, indeed, Madam," Hermione agreed solemnly, her eyes fixed forward as the lift rocketed through space. "Tragic, really."
She began to play out her options, watching them on a reel in her mind. If the two men behind them, still deep in conversation, got off on a different floor, she was fairly certain she could stun Umbridge and the Minister and freeze the lift before they knew what was happening. Timing, it would be all about timing. She let out a breath and wrapped her fingers around the wand stowed in her pocket, tracing the familiar grooves along its hilt.
Umbridge continued prattling on until the lift doors finally opened and the two men behind them did indeed step past and get off. Just as two more stepped on, wearing the same robes as Umbridge and clearly headed to the same place that they were. Damnit.
"Parkman, Towers," Dolores nodded at each in turn.
Subduing two unsuspecting people would be easy. Three would be pushing it. Four would be reckless.
Hermione bit the inside of her cheek and resisted the urge to swear; she was going to need another plan.
"If you struggle, you will be subjected to the Dementor's Kiss," Umbridge repeated for the third time since they'd settled in the drafty, dank chamber that was serving as a courtroom. Though to call the space a courtroom would imply it might be a place where something resembling justice occurred, and that was most certainly not the case. In truth it was more like a dungeon, dark and far more accustomed to suffering than integrity.
What was worse, Umbridge made the comment casually. As if she'd ordered it done before. As if it weren't one of the most abhorrent, unthinkable things that a human being could endure.
The man being dragged from the room screamed in spite of the warning, begging his innocence, and it rang in Hermione's ears like a chorus with all of those who'd previously occupied his space in the center of the chamber. All of those that would go on to occupy it before this nightmare was through.
She'd listened to their stories, heard how agonisingly similar they were to her own. A summertime visit from a peculiarly dressed professor; a trip to a wonderous place with owls swooping overhead and racing broomsticks displayed in the shoppe windows; a wand coming to life in their hands for the very first time.
A life that had chosen her as much as she had chosen it.
It wasn't an idle threat, either. The horde of dark clouds swarming and twisting overhead, outside a bubble of silver magic, made it all too real. Hermione had no choice but to allow herself to think of things she wouldn't otherwise, given the circumstances. Warm, familiar thoughts that kept the darkness at bay and her mind clear.
Leather binding beneath her fingers.
A warm cup of coffee.
Boundless blue eyes watching her. Always, always watching her.
She blinked, pulling herself back to reality again. They were running out of time. She had no idea what had become of Ron or Harry, but she knew that they would be fools to attempt this same ruse again. There would not be a better chance.
Hermione's eyes flicked to the gold chain around Umbridge's neck, catching the dim light and winking at her like it knew why she was there. She could feel it when she'd settled into the bench beside Umbridge, and she knew Harry's search of the woman's office would be fruitless. The thing they were looking for was right beside her, mere inches away.
"Next – Mary Cattermole," called Umbridge, and Hermione watched as a slender, terrified woman got to her feet. She passed the dementors guarding the door and Hermione could practically see her heart pounding frantically in her chest.
It was behind Mrs. Cattermole, though, that Hermione caught the briefest flash of a shadow near the base of the steps. Anyone else might disregard it, but she was not everybody else. Harry was there, under his cloak.
Hermione's spine stiffened and, as sympathetic as she was to Mrs. Cattermole's plight, she realised with a rush that she was out of time. Not because of the Polyjuice, though that was certainly an increasingly critical factor, but because Harry would not be able to stop himself from acting if he saw the things that she'd just spent the better part of an hour bearing witness to.
The stomach-churning injustice. The obvious way that these people, these desperate, piteous people, had already been condemned.
Besides the dementors, the biggest problem would be Corban Yaxley, the bookend opposite her on Umbridge's other side. He'd joined them shortly before the proceedings began, much to her irritation. The other members of the court were hardly awake, and she was fairly certain that their priorities began and ended with their own skins.
Hermione, still dutifully taking notes with her right hand, very slowly drew her wand from her robes with her left, shifting to cross her legs, tucking it between the folds of her skirt, and carefully angling behind Umbridge's back until it was pointed at Yaxley's hip.
It wasn't the plan they had discussed, and it was crossing innumerable lines that Harry would surely protest, but there were far greater things at stake than his opinion of her if they did not get what they came for. So, Hermione took another deep breath and exhaled, concentrating in a way she never had before and hoping she had the conviction to actually carry out what she was planning to do.
Imperio.
The magic felt immediately and viscerally wrong, like grease that was slicked on her fingers and refused to wash away. The tip of her quill trembled and black ink blotted messily on the parchment, but Umbridge didn't notice, her beady eyes fixed cruelly, eagerly, on the woman unraveling before them. Pleading for her life and the lives of her children.
It wasn't difficult to subdue Corban Yaxley's mind – in fact, Hermione had long theorised that very few of Voldemort's followers would possess the self-actualisation to resist this sort of magic. They were, after all, followers.
Cold sweat beaded at the nape of her neck and her stomach churned as she maneuvered Yaxley like a marionette, her own force of will the sole driving force behind his actions.
Draw your wand.
He obeyed, keeping his glazed eyes fixed forward. The words echoed in her head, but nobody else noticed. Nobody blinked. Nobody watched. They were too distracted by the woman sobbing loudly in the center of the chamber.
Stand.
Yaxley got smoothly to his feet. He was not a large man, but he towered over Umbridge's squat, seated form, and it did not take long for her to stop speaking and look up at him in confusion.
"Corban, what are you doing? Sit back down this instant."
Hermione shut her eyes and, not for the first time that morning, wished that she was somewhere else.
Kill her.
She expected the killing curse itself, prepared for the flash of green light, but it seemed that whatever part of Yaxley's mind she had in her grip favored other methods. Just as Umbridge moved to grab her wand, realising too late that something was terribly wrong, Yaxley flicked his wrist and cut her throat.
A warm, wet spray of metallic blood spattered Hermione's face, and the stunned scream that slipped from her lips was genuine. She dropped the imperious curse and Yaxley stumbled back, dazed and looking around as the chamber in its entirety began to panic.
Harry, somewhere behind her, threw his cloak off in the confusion as people started to run for the doors and the magical barrier between them and the dementors began to flicker, directly tied to Umbridge's waning magic.
Then Albert Runcorn, dutiful member of the ministry that he was, stunned Corban Yaxley while Mafalda Hopkins, alarmed bystander, crouched beside Dolores Umbridge, who was clutching her thick throat and gurgling her final breaths.
Mafalda made a show of checking the poor woman's pulse with shaking hands, but tragically there was nothing to be done. And if she reached down and unclasped the golden chain around the dying woman's neck, slipping the heavy locket into the inner pocket of her robes, not a single person would have noticed.
Hermione paused then and looked into the hateful woman's eyes as the light slowly faded from them, and she tried to feel remorse for taking this life. Truly, she did. But the man's screams from earlier and Mary Cattermole's sobbing still echoed in her ears, and it was simply a little too loud to hear her conscience.
Hermione straightened as Harry reached her side.
"What did you do?" He asked her, the look on his face stunned as he regarded her. Stunned, and maybe a little something else. Maybe a little disturbed. Maybe even a little afraid. "W-what did you do?"
Hermione stared right back, Umbridge's blood still cooling on her skin and growing sticky on her hands.
"I got the locket," she replied simply, before stepping past him and heading quickly for the doors. The chamber was empty by then, and she could feel the moment that Umbridge's lingering magic gave out. Like a veil dropping, the dementors began to advance on them and ice nipped at her skin while a foul, rotting odor overpowered her senses.
Harry made his way to Mary Cattermole, forgotten in the center of the room and staring in shock at Umbridge and Yaxley, prone behind the benches they'd been seated at.
"EXPECTO –"
"No!" Hemione lunged forward and pushed the tip of Harry's wand toward the floor. He had perhaps the most recognisable patronus in all of Wizarding Britain and, as of this moment, they were nothing more than a pair of confused, shaken ministry employees. They needed to stay that way for as long as they possibly could.
Hermione raised her own wand toward the onslaught of billowing black cloaks approaching them.
Lips brushing the bare, scarred skin between her breasts.
The taste of firewhiskey as a clock struck midnight.
A silver key pressed into her palm.
"Expecto patronum," Hermione said clearly, the otter bursting from the tip of her wand the brightest and most clearly defined it had ever been. It dove forward, diverting the throng and reestablishing a barrier as Harry grabbed Mary Cattermole's forearm and began to tow her along with them, out of the chamber and into the corridor.
Hermione glanced sideways at him, but he didn't look at her. The only people remaining in the hall, save for a couple pale-faced members of the court, were the muggleborns still awaiting their own trials. They had stayed seated exactly as they were, obviously confused about what was going on, but too scared to move for fear of what might happen to them. What might happen to their families.
No, Hermione didn't feel much remorse at all.
Her silver otter diligently kept the dementors contained while Harry, in an uncharacteristically deep voice, addressed the crowd.
"It's been decided that you should all go home and go into hiding with your families," he began and Hermione had to resist rubbing her temples. "Go abroad if you can. Just get well away from the ministry. That's the new – er – official position. Now, you can follow us to exit through the Atrium."
They got to their feet, looking even more confused than when they had emerged, and a few shot Hermione nervous glances. She raised her wand and deftly cleared the blood from her face, schooling it into a numb, frightened mien. Harry was just about to call a lift when one clanged to a halt in front of them, depositing Ron.
Within seconds, he was nearly tackled by a hysterical Mary Cattermole.
"Reg! Oh Merlin, you're alright. Yaxley just – just murdered Dolores Umbridge, right in the middle of my trial. I don't know what came over him, it was horrible. Runcorn told us to leave the country. We should, we really should. Oh, Reg, let's go home and fetch the children, quickly. We can head down to Dover, to my parents, and wh–why are you wet?"
"Rain," Ron said noncommittally, extracting himself from her embrace as best he could as he looked over her head to Harry and Hermione with concern. "Murder?"
"Later," Hermione replied tightly before Harry could speak. "Everything alright?"
"Yeah, the spell you gave me worked. Just took a while to find you after."
"Good. Let's get moving, it won't be long before someone comes down here to see what's happening."
Harry turned toward the silent assemblage waiting against the wall, opposite the lifts.
"Who has wands?"
About half raised their hands, some holding their wands forward as if he were asking so that he could take them.
"Pair up," he ordered, in the voice of someone better suited for leading than she. "Everyone who doesn't have a wand, stay close to someone that does."
They did as ordered, and then everyone crammed into two lifts, Mary Cattermole still whispering to her presumed husband about fleeing the country.
Hermione kept her eyes fixed on the brass gate, waiting for it to open and fingers flexing around her wand. Harry didn't notice it, but she also kept a hand wrapped in his robes. If the place locked down before they could make it to the exit, they still had an out. The thin silver chain around her neck burned warmly, a contrast to the repulsive weight of the locket in her robes.
"Level eight," the discorporate voice said coolly. "Atrium."
Her pulse quickened as the doors of the lift opened and Hermione knew immediately that they were in trouble. Ministry workers were running from fireplace to fireplace, shutting the grates and sealing off the floo network.
"Bloody hell," Ron murmured hollowly from beside her. "What are we going to do?"
Her mind was racing again, trying to come up with any alternative, any at all, that didn't take them to the shop via her portkey, but as each floo closed, it felt like another option disappeared.
"STOP!" Harry thundered suddenly, Albert Runcorn stepping in front of her and addressing those working on the floo network. He wiggled his fingers at his side and Hermione and Ron followed him, shuffling and herding the muggleborns along like sheep.
"What's going on, Albert?" A dark-skinned, balding wizard asked. He looked nervous.
"This lot need to leave before you seal the exits," Harry said, gesturing toward the assemblage behind him. The wizards who'd been working on the floos slowed and glanced between themselves.
"Someone was killed, we've been told to seal all the exits and not let anyone –"
"Are you contradicting me?" Harry demanded and, for a second, she genuinely forgot that it was him. He truly seemed the cold, unyielding man that he was pretending to be. "You know what I did to Dirk Cresswell. Would you like me to have your family tree examined next?"
The man stepped back, eyes instantly fearful, and just like that, the muggleborns began to flee through the last few open grates.
"Mary!" A voice called desperately from behind them, and Hermione turned in time to see Reg Cattermole, the real Reg Cattermole, come running toward them from the lifts.
Mary looked between him and Ron, and Hermione swore aloud. It was at precisely that moment that another lift arrived on the other side of the atrium, the gates opening to reveal a horde of DMLE employees.
"SEAL THOSE LIFTS NOW!" the man at the front shouted at them as onlookers scattered and pressed into the walls.
Harry moved quickly as the balding man began to raise his wand, punching him squarely in the jaw and sending him to the ground, unconscious. The other employees finished shutting every other grate, save for the one directly behind them, and then melted into the crowd.
"He was helping the muggleborns escape!" Ron shouted, gesturing at the unconscious man, but it didn't slow their approach. As they got closer, Hermione recognised the figure at the front – it was Yaxley, already revived and looking positively furious.
He raised his wand, aiming it at Harry until Hermione stepped between them and directly into its path.
"INCENDIO!"
A white-hot wall of flame erupted between them, carving an arch around the last open floo, with the three of them and the Cattermoles on one side, and Yaxley and the DMLE on the other.
"GO," she ordered over her shoulder, backing toward the hearth and noting only as they stepped in that Harry and Ron had stunned the Cattermoles and were dragging them along.
Hermione turned her head and met Yaxley's eyes through the inferno, his arm raised to shield himself from the searing heat. And she felt as her face began to shift back, features rearranging and wild curls springing free from Mafalda Hopkin's demure bun. The last thing she saw before she blasted the floo into rubble behind them was his enraged, shocked face as he realised precisely who he was letting escape.
They arrived back in the toilet cubicle in a crushing tangle of limbs, Harry and Hermione supporting Mary Cattermole and Ron with the real Reg Cattermole draped over his shoulder. They carefully dragged the two limp bodies into the corner of the lavatory, beside the rubbish bin.
"We need to go," Hermione panted, grabbing for the boys' robes and intending to apparate on the spot, but Harry leaned away from her grip.
"We should make sure they're okay," Harry said stubbornly.
"There's no time," she said, looking desperately to Ron for reinforcement. Before he could answer there was a flushing sound and a bang, and the cubicle door beside them flew off the hinges to reveal Yaxley.
"HARRY!" Hermione screamed, throwing herself into her friend as Yaxley lunged for them. She felt Ron grab for her shoulder and she turned on the spot, once again pulled into darkness.
It wasn't until pain flared in her leg that she realised something was wrong. Beyond the usual discomfort of apparating, a vice gripped her ankle so hard it felt like the bones were going to crack. Everything went blurry, upside down and backwards as the world twisted around them like a kaleidoscope. She felt Ron's grip on her shoulder start to slip, knowing that she couldn't grab him without letting go of Harry. And she couldn't let go of Harry.
Hermione couldn't breathe. She couldn't think. For the barest of seconds, the front door of Grimmauld Place came into view, and she felt Harry pull toward it, but she tugged him back hard.
In a blind panic, she kicked her free foot toward the pain in her ankle. It connected and there was a grunt as the pressure disappeared and Hermione threw them backwards, away from Grimmauld Place. The last thing she heard as they spun away and back into darkness was a choked, agonised scream.
Hermione regained consciousness in a rush, twigs and rocks digging into her back while her ankle and head brutally throbbed. She sat up so fast that the world spun again, searching frantically until she saw Harry a few feet away, unconscious but otherwise intact.
On her other side, a little further away, was a crumpled form and a shock of ginger hair. The canopy over them rustled in the unseasonably warm breeze and Hermione watched in uncomprehending shock as the light caught on a dark shadow, creeping slowly outward from around the body.
"Ron? RON!" Hermione screamed, hands scrabbling in the blood-soaked dirt as she dove forward and crawled toward him. With as much care as she could manage, she gripped his shoulder and rolled him toward her and onto his back.
His complexation resembled chalk, and his lips were a greyish blue. She couldn't see where the blood was coming from, only that it was coming fast and from beneath his shirt.
Hermione reached into the pockets of her stollen robes and pulled out her small, beaded bag. Yanking at the drawstring, she didn't take the time to recover her wand, just reached her hand out.
"Accio!" Three small phials obediently flew out of the bag and into her palm. With shaking fingers, she unstopped one and pressed it to the swell of Ron's lower lip, clumsily trying to prop him on her knee. Her ankle screamed at the awkward angle as she pushed it into the ground, but it was drowned out by the panic thrumming in her chest. Ron groaned, but managed to drink most of it, briefly diminishing his chances of bleeding to death.
She put her hand out and summoned her wand to her, buried in the leaf litter some distance away. As soon as she had it, she began cutting away Ron's robes and his shirt until the mangled, twisted skin of his shoulder came into view.
"Harry, wake up! WAKE UP!" She screamed over her shoulder and her voice echoed through the trees, beginning to unstop another phial and decant the shimmering liquid over the worst of Ron's wounds. His lips parted in a silent scream that came out as more of a gasp, his whole body jerking and shuddering. "I know, I'm sorry," she murmured, using what few healing spells she'd mastered to begin closing the smaller lacerations. It was slow, tedious work that she wasn't at all accustomed to doing.
She was at it for a while before comprehending that the flickers of white that she could see as she periodically cleared away the blood were bone. Every so often she would shout over her shoulder to Harry, to no avail.
"W-what happened?" A shaking voice finally asked from behind her. Hermione finished the spell she was casting before answering.
"Ron got splinched," she said tightly. "I need you to get me another bottle of blood replenisher from my bag, and then start putting up the wards. Now, Harry. We're exposed out here."
Hermione was surprised at the level, sure direction that she gave him because she certainly didn't feel calm. She felt as if her skin was crawling, pure adrenaline combined with something else. Something primal in her that responded to the sight of that much blood coming from somebody that she cared about.
She didn't know how long Harry was gone, only that he eventually came back and knelt across from her. He didn't say anything, nor did he offer to take over. He couldn't if he wanted to, he hadn't studied the same healing spells that she had. He hadn't thought it worth the time.
Ron faded in and out of consciousness, sometimes responding and flinching at her ministrations and other times ignoring them entirely.
Hermione felt herself begin to flag as she healed the last of the wounds that she felt comfortable closing. There were others, but they cut into sinew and tendons that, if healed improperly, could permanently inhibit his mobility. For better or worse, nature would need to take its course on the rest.
She placed a barrier charm on what remained and wrapped it in clean gauze, binding his arm tightly to his chest so he couldn't move it upon waking. Then she administered one last blood replenisher, followed by Wiggenweld and dreamless sleep, and sat back.
Lifting her hand to clear the hair and sweat from her brow, Hermione froze, seeing that it was coated in rust-coloured blood and dirt. She raised the other one and looked at them both, trembling.
And she realised that she didn't even know precisely whose blood it was caked beneath her nails and between her fingers, drying in the creases of her knuckles. It could be Ron's or Umbridge's. Friend's or foe's. She stared and stared and stared at them until they swam in her vision, the edges blurring and blending in with the leaves and branches littering the ground.
Harry had just begun to speak when, without warning, Hermione turned and managed to crawl a couple feet away before vomiting the contents of her stomach onto the forest floor. It had been hours since she'd eaten anything, and sour bile burned her throat. Her stomach rolled and her eyes stung as cool, clumsy fingers scooped the curls away from her face.
Harry knelt behind her and cleared the sick away with a murmured spell when she finished. Hermione couldn't help it, she collapsed backward into his chest, tears of anger and fear and pain spilling onto her cheeks, the latter both physical and yet also soul-deep.
"It's okay," Harry said quietly, hugging her to him, but he was wrong. He was so very, very wrong. Nothing was okay. Ron was hurt beyond her ability to mend, Grimmauld Place was lost to them, and in the span of an hour, she'd both taken a life and saved one.
In that moment, Hermione wondered if things would every truly be okay again. She wondered at what point she'd become a god, with the right to make decisions about who lived and who died.
She shifted her weight and her ankle flared, a shuddering gasp breaking through her sobs.
"What is it?" Harry asked, looking around them, immediately on alert.
"Just-just my ankle," Hermione replied, swiping her sleeve over her face. She awkwardly stuck her leg out in front of her and could immediately see that it was swollen. She took her shoe off and carefully tore away the foot of her nylons, rolling them back until the mottled purple skin of her ankle came into view.
"Bloody hell," Harry swore, leaning forward for a closer look. "Are those -?"
"Fingers," Hermione finished desolately, examining the darkest bruises, where Yaxley's fingers had wrapped around the joint and bitten into her skin. "Can you get the bruise balm from my bag?"
Harry did as she asked and Hermione opened the small jar, beginning to smear the ointment on her tender skin. The application was painful, but the relief was nearly immediate.
"What happened?" Harry asked.
"Yaxley got ahold of me," Hermione said. "I tried to take us back to Grimmauld, but he saw, Harry. He saw and we – we can't go back there again. Not until all of this is over."
She could see the argument on his lips, the desperate hope that perhaps that wasn't the case and she was wrong, but something on her face must have told him this was not the time to start an argument.
"Can you get the tent set up?" Hermione asked quietly, crab-walking backward until her shoulders hit the trunk of a large beech tree. She leaned back and propped against it, uncomfortable but solid.
Harry examined her silently for a long moment and then nodded, getting up without further comment and heading to retrieve it from her bag.
A bird chittered loudly overhead, and Hermione looked up just in time to see a flash of white as a magpie on the branch above her took flight. She tipped her head back against the rough bark of the tree trunk, shut her eyes, and tried very hard not to feel anything at all.