After her shocking revelation Hermione Lion Heart had not deigned to wait around for Harry's explanations or excuses. She had bounded off, leaving Harry and Ron quite slack jawed and thoroughly abashed. Harry felt ill with guilt. All the way back to the Gryfindor commons he felt the Hogwarts ghosts flitting about above his head trading recrimations about him and his guileless cruelty in their ghostly whispers.
Outside of Mecha Granger 20-30's room was a large milling crowd. Most of Hermione Lion Heart's fans and admirers had distanced themselves from her upon the scandalous Daily article that besmirched her, but there was no such taboo against the other members of the Golden Trio and students from all the houses had turned out to show their support for the heartbroken mech droid. Anxious faces briefly left the door to appraise Harry, a few people spat when they saw him. Harry Heartbreaker they muttered sourly.
He didn't see the Time Child anywhere and figured she must be inside with the technician. Probably pecking about like some nervous fidgeting mother stork while he worked. Harry could imagine the poor technicians patient consternation. 'I've got to get in there,' he thought.
If MG23 were to loose the ability to cry because of him then it was only fair that they would share their final tears together, as one, and maybe in that mingling of sorrow some lugubrious angel would descend and entwine their hearts like little sticks in a birds nest. A nest of mutual remorse and longing.
Harry tried to push through the crowd. Someone stamped his foot causing him to cry out, "Please, please, you must let me in, this is all my fault and maybe I can make it better," he tried to say but as he spoke a loud, damning chant erupted from the lips of the assembled.
Kraug was there too, paralyzed and disheveled as ever. Harry tried to meet her eyes but she flicked her glance fiercely away from him. "Kraug no like Harry Potter," she confided to a 2nd year girl standing nearby, "Harry Potter hurt people. Hurt them in the heart!" The girl nodded scornfully. Indeed. He did.
"We say NOTer to Harry POTter! We say NOTer to Harry POTter!" they chanted and chanted. Harry sank against the wall furthest from the door in terror. The chanting continued, grew in its fervent stringency. Ginny was there, the little green eyes that had always so adorned him with praise were now cut like slits and she chanted the loudest. She kicked him in the shins, breaking his reverie of mortification, Harry ran.
He ran so far away.
As he bounded down the cavernous hallways his footsteps echoed dolefully behind him like some baleful whirlwind of all of his past indescrections. He ran. And he cried. The blazing sconces on the walls guttered and died with the passing gusts of his great and inescapable sorrow.
As he tried in vain to scamper away from his ever surmounting sorrow he come upon Professor Trelawney, who was reeling about the hallways in a state of pure inebreation.
"Get out of my bloody way you inefectual drunkard!" Harry positively screamed at her. He spat in her face, the syrupy eructation of his despair clung to her pallid cheek and dribbled onto her neck.
She fell to her knees, a high keening wail of anguish erupting from her liquor sodden lips. For all her predictions and future sight she had never seen so vicious a jab coming. To his surprise Harry immediately felt better. Much better.
He ought to have felt ashamed of himself but he didn't. Not quite at all. As he jogged on he began to giggle to himself. He had nearly forgotten what it was like, to laugh, after being so suffocated by his own demons of despair and self loathing.
Before he knew it he was near the Slytherin commons, the hallways were mostly empty this time of inky black night but up ahead a group was huddled as if they were hobos around a trash can fire. As he got closer he could just make out the silky white hair of his mortal nemesis, Draco Malfoy.
"Oy! Look everyone, it's Harry PotteryBarn!" Malfoy jeered while Harry zipped past him and his gaggle of hurtful friends. They all began laughing savagely and without the slightest modicum of self control or mercy, their faces distorted like jackals in the thrall of pure hilarity. Their cruel guffaws bounded off the walls, echoing, distorting into something even more fierce and unwieldy.
Luna appeared from out of a corner and after a moment of silent admonishion of the Slytherins she glided up to Harry. He was begining to cry once more but she caught his first tear as it was still on his cheek with her outstretched finger, "No, don't cry for them," she said and plopped the little gob of saline and sorrow back into Harry's eye, "save your tears. They don't deserve them."
Harry blinked that sole tear back into his system and felt wholely revigorated. He and Luna stamped past the insulting mob with their heads raised high, humming loudly so they couldn't hear the feckless remonstrations being cast their way.
Once they were out of sight of Malfoy and his mosterous gang of companions Harry slumped into Luna's woefull arms and shuddered all over with despair. He was positively convulsing with his sorrow. Great thundering quavers shook him to his very core and Luna patted her hand through his hair, an evil smile curling her purple painted lips.
They were both now in a far corner of the great teaching castle. As far as Harry knew no one had ever come this far into it's labyrinthine interior. They huddled together out of a sudden gust of fear. A dark intimation was curdling at the corners of their young minds. Although the fear that exuded like stinking rivulets of sweat out of Luna's very pores was a mummer's farce. She coughed twice, the pre agreed upon signal for Padma to enter into the ploy.
Padma emerged, moaning fearsomely. Her skin was painted white with flour and confectioners sugar and she used a levitating spell to hover above the ground.
Harry fell to ground, his knees having buckled in terror. "It's! It's a ghost!" He stammered, falling for the ruse of the two mischevious girls.
The apparition glided toward Harry ominously. The resemblance to the long and mysteriously dead Patil twin was uncanny. Harry began to sob with fright. "What do you want, spirit!" He screeched in mortal terror, trying inefectually to put distance between himself and the bilious ghost by scrabbling away on the cold hard floor.
"Justice!" the ghost responded, with the icy exactitude of the deceased. "Justice."
Back in Mecha Granger 20-30's room, Hermione Lion Heart paced with a full heart and heavy chest. The technician, Johan McStruggle, did his best to ignore the spiral headed worry wort and bent over Mecha Granger 20-30's opened chasis. The tight coil of wires and nodules, circuits and gears, was beautiful to him. He didn't pine for Beyonce or Melissa Joan Heart, to him beauty could only be found in the intricate workings of a highly advanced battle droid.
The Time Child paced, and the technician pined. He soldered a few loose wires together, blew a bit of dust out of Mecha Granger 20-30's motherboard and closed the great hinged door to her mechanical, glittering, heart. He was almost distracted enough by Mecha Granger 20-30's mechanical beauty to forget his terror of the Time Child... almost.
He shot furtive glances at the Time Child every so often, trying in vain to peer through her skin into the dark abcess where her appendix ought to have been but she caught his side glances and huffed warily.
"Well?" She asked, hands about her hips in impatience.
The technician sputtered, "err, um... err..." He imagined that dark abysmall space inside of her, her great lack of appendix and faltered, flabergasted.
"Is she going to be okay?" Hermione said. "Did you manage to fix her tear valves?"
Johan let out a lenghty sigh of relief. "Should be, had to replace her saline ducts and rev up her sorrow processor to handle the influx of her incipient sadness, other wise it's like to overload again and we'll be right back where we started.. but I think it did the trick..." He prayed that he was right, lest he face the wrath of the appendix-less monstrosity before him.
With a tremulous finger he depressed Mecha Granger 20-30's start up button. There was a soft robotic whine as she slowly powered on. Hermione Lion Heart leaned forth in anticipation, 'oh please let her be okay, she just has to!' She had been quite lonely with Mecha Granger 20-30 out of commision. That dratted, slanderous, article had managed to push away many of her newfound friends. With Mecha Granger 20-30 in temporary stasis and Kraug still paralyzed she had been thoroughly alone, and in her solitude despondancy had nourished on the bitter leavings of her many punctured heart.
Mecha Granger 20-30's startup chime sounded in the dim room and she slowly raised her head. As soon as the mechanical girl had realized she was concious tears of lachrymose intensity began sliding down her faceplate. The wounds that Harry had so carelessly inflicted were still raw and seeping it seemed.
At the opposite end of the school Harry was still prostrate on the cold cobbled floor in horror. "What justice could I possibly give you!" He beseeched the 'ghost' that hovered before him. "I'm just one boy, barely on the cusp of pubescence! There is nothing I can do! Please go back, foul spirit, back to the darkling depths from which you have emerged to torment me!"
The ghost would have none of this. "You must avenge my death. You must bring the Time Child to justice!"
Harry couldn't believe his ears. The Time Child? A murderer? He prayed that he was only dreaming, that the warm morning sun would soon tickle his cheek and whisk him forth from this vile reverie, but no such escape was eminent.
"I don't understand! Hermione Lion Heart was in her own timescape when you perished! Surely she could not have had a hand in your untimely demise!"
Luna flinched, she and Padma had not planned for this contingency. Luckily for her Padma was much quicker on her feet, and the faux ghost retorted, "She is The Time Child! The aeons are her playground!"
Harry's head slumped to his chest in anguish. It was true. It was all true...
Meanwhile, in the nurses station, Susan Bones stirred fitfully. The full moon rose just enough to cast its shinning tendrils onto her sleeping cheek and she began to change.