Hermione was dreaming. Low voices swirled around her in the dark.
"-have talked about this. I care about you. More than you know."
"Stuff it in a sack. If you cared about me you wouldn't be inventing excuses to be single." A quiet sob.
She stirred, looking for the source. And became aware, slowly, that it was not a dream, that she was actually awake. The fire had dwindled to a few hot coals. There was another soft cry from the dark.
"Ginny, please." Harry, pleading. "There's no one else."
"Right now."
Hermione rubbed at her eyes. Her thoughts were thick, fighting out of sleep deeper than it had been in a long time. Where were they? She saw two cots - empty. Harry was not in his cot. Where was Harry?
She could hear him.
"I want you to live your life, have adventures. Yes, with other people - other men." He was trying to console Ginny.
"That's not what I want."
Hermione twisted her head, peering into the dark for her friends. And only saw - Malfoy. He was still on his back in the same position he'd been in all night.
"They've been fighting for awhile," he drawled. "Surprised you slept through it for this long. The Ginger's moaning could wake the dead."
Frowning, Hermione scrambled to sit up, the camping blanket falling away. She heard stumbling footsteps somewhere in the large cavern.
"Gin, wait." Harry called. But then he was back, his head down.
"Harry?"
He sat heavily on his cot. "She wants to be by herself." Hermione could hear the footsteps fading, as Ginny left their little campsite.
"I hope you said goodbye." Malfoy was loudly cheerful. "It'll be virtually impossible to find someone down here."
Oh bother. Hermione stood abruptly, swaying slightly from her premature awakening, and awkwardly stepped into her boots. "I'll find her."
"Thanks," said Harry. "I'd go with you but that would probably make her run away even faster."
Hermione cast Lumos and set off in the direction of Ginny's steps.
"Don't forget to leave a trail of breadcrumbs lest Potter needs to come fetch you." He laughed.
Fuck off Malfoy. Had she said it or thought it? Either way, she meant it.
After several minutes of walking away from the large cavern - which she was now referring to internally as The Bunker, Hermione found herself moving through a narrow series of passages that twisted and turned and looped back on themselves.
She called for Ginny several times, her voice echoing uselessly off the cave walls. There was a tickle of fear, deep inside - the kind that always bubbles up when you're alone in the dark.
Nothing I haven't dealt with before. But as she wandered, stumbling over rocks in the pitch black, in the silence, alone, that tickle of fear became a fist in her chest. Just when Hermione was beginning to question whether she should turn around and go back for Harry - would Malfoy assist? - then she heard a snuffle and rustle. "Gin?"
"Hermione?"
"Oh thank Merlin. Yes, I'm here - where are you?"
"I've taken a break from my aimless meandering before I go back."
And then Hermione went around a corner of sorts and saw her friend. Ginny was sitting on a low boulder, the light of her wand weak in the opaque darkness.
Hermione stepped forward and sat beside her. Ginny buried a tear-streaked face in her shoulder. "What happened?"
"I couldn't sleep and neither could Harry and we got to talking. Well, whispering. Which turned into whisper-fighting."
Hermione squeezed Gin's shoulders. "About?"
"What do you think?" Ginny pulled away, wiping her cheeks. "Being together. I wanted him to come over and hold me."
Hermione cringed. "Even with Malfoy nearby?"
"His eyes were closed," said Ginny defensively. "And I don't care. It's scary in this hideous cave."
Fair. "And-?"
Ginny shrugged. "You know. He wants me to go be with someone else for awhile. Make sure my desires aren't 'tainted by nostalgia.' Ensure that I'm not 'settling.'" She spat the last word.
Hermione was about to speak, to defend Harry, to find a middle ground as she had so many times before. But she felt a twitch at her wrist. Her left wrist. She held it up into the light. Her watch was vibrating. They both leaned forward to look at it, to see the source of the noticeable whirring sound. The tiny hand with Ginny's name was oscillating furiously - over Danger.
Their eyes met.
"Why-?" began Ginny. But Hermione sliced her arm up - a sign to be quiet.
Something was there.
It was approaching from beyond the periphery of their light, the sound of it hurtling forward before they could see it. It made a scraping, sloshing sound against the stone - steps that dragged. It was heavy. Focused. And faster than she'd expect for something that sounded so large.
They had found it, the creature from the moors. No. It found them.
From the back of the passage, from where they had come, the creature had looped back on them. Followed them. Hunted them.
Hermione and Ginny moved instinctively, their shoulders pressed together, wands extended, as the object of their pursuit emerged from the darkness.
It was the size of a large stag perhaps - foreboding but not huge. Its appearance was not consistent enough to be described. It was a semi-opaque cloud of magic, a bit like a shapeless Patronus. That was where the similarities ended, for this was dark magic. It carried the terror of death and grief and shame. It moved forward and folded in on itself continuously, emitting a sound like the guttural inhale of a dragon before it unleashes its fire. She thought maybe it had a face - but then it shifted and she saw it didn't. Or did it? Was it alive?
Hermione cast a Stunning spell that had no effect. Ginny tried a couple of hexes that . . . the mass simply absorbed.
The shifting thing bore down upon them.
Panic flooded her. The kind of panic that muffled any sound but her heartbeat in her ears. Panic that slowed down time but also rendered her brain and reactions sluggish. Panic for Ginny. Get Ginny out of here. Send her for help while you hold it off. But there was no time - they were in a cramped tunnel, surrounded by stone and oppressive blackness and nothing else. Maybe if we make it ten yards or so - maybe there'll be an exit. There had to be. There must be. Hermione willed it into being. We will get out of this. Harry will come.
But still it advanced, faster than they could keep their footing - taking a yard for each of their inches.
Screaming at each other to get back, taking turns casting spell after useless spell, they retreated step-by-step together.
When it was about ten feet away, Hermione had a horrific realization.
We're not going to make it.
Until Ginny stumbled. Hermione took the chance and reached for her, shoving her friend as hard as she could. Ginny fell away, behind and to the ground, crying out in shock.
There was no time to explain, no time to apologize. The creature was on her. Hermione felt it. She felt the terrible, heavy magic of it upon her skin. It filled her chest, squeezing and invading - her lungs, her ribs. Her heart. A roaring in her ears so loud everything went still.
With one last free breath she prayed to Merlin that Ginny would survive.
Hermione could not ever say, later, how long the attack lasted. It was hours and a moment and no time at all. She was able to say, clear eyed and confident, that it was the worst thing she had ever experienced, since or later.
She felt it happen in slow motion, felt it roll over her. It was falling into quicksand. Being pulled under an ocean wave.
The world she knew was flayed off of her.
She imagined it was how one would feel being shoved through a black hole in the cosmos - put through insane pressure only to be thrown violently through a too-small space into a new world. She was apparating through time, back through history.
But it was not her history, just as her corporeal body was no longer her body.
For there was something worse than the physical pain.
Her mind existed, yes - somewhere. And the skin and bones surrounding it were beating and moving and breathing and hurting. But the existence of one had virtually no connection to the existence of the other.
They had been severed as if a sword had been run through her.
Every happy thought Hermione Granger had ever had -
Every smile she had ever shared with her parents, with a friend, with a stranger on the street -
Every day she had ever spent in the sunshine, in a cozy library, around a dinner table full of love and laughter -
Each and every shred of joy -
It all disappeared. Had it ever existed?
Banished to a place she felt sure she would never be able to find.
If Harry himself had asked her to either describe it or face the killing curse she would have laid down her wand and waited patiently for death. Such was the impossibility of putting words to it.
And yet, as horrible as it was - there was something worse. For as the creature's attack subsumed her, Hermione did not lose her warmth, light, happiness, love to a void. No. Where all of that had been was now filled, surely as dark water rises up and spills over the walls of a levee in a storm.
In the space in her mind where she'd held her most treasured memories she now saw only the worst of the past, the present, the future.
Man- and wizard-kind's cruelty and depravity slipped through her consciousness with ruthless abandon.
And because Hermione had had so much goodness, there was plenty of room.
She saw war, yes - men and women bloodied and broken, in various stages of dying, begging for each other, for their mothers, for the end.
But she also knew things far worse than war. Parents learning that their children had died. Their screams were fists that seized Hermione's spine.
The horrors of history - the curses of slavery, colonization, of genocides, of famines. The burning of innocents. The pain of it all sank into her bones.
Children hiding from abusive parents - and being found.
Animals butchered for meat, for entertainment, in acts of unspeakable cruelty. Alive until they weren't, but fully aware.
Hermione saw a fisherman at dawn, as clearly as if she'd been in his boat. He drew up a net of his catch, his hands strong and callused, his eyes vacant and tired. The fisherman picked out what he wanted to sell, taking his time. Hermione would have screamed at him - hurry up. For as the man lingered she watched the fish he hadn't chosen - what he wouldn't take to market - flop and fight, inches from the water. They gasped for air. One by one, their eyes clouded over. The fisherman eventually threw them back into the sea.
And simpler pains. The agony of adolescence, of waiting for friends, of hoping for comfort that doesn't come.
Loneliness, from all who have felt it.
Unrealized dreams, dashed and destroyed.
The visions, they did not stop. And as her brain struggled to process it all, to hold itself together, to continue to breathe, to survive . . . she sank to the ground. Her wand slipped, useless, from her fingers.
She was away - from magic, from the cave, from Ginny, from Harry's distant presence.
That was all over. Hermione Granger was gone.