Some Psycho's Curse

"What time did Hannah say?" Hermione asked. She, Harry, and Ron were sitting on the ground, in the dark, under the Hufflepuff stands on the Quidditch Pitch. They had arrived out of breath with frazzled nerves and twenty minutes later, with no sign of anybody or anything else coming, they were becoming antsy.

"Just before midnight," Ron replied for the third time.

"You're sure? Midnight was seven minutes ago! Are you sure we're in the right place?"

"Yes, I'm sure! Who's bright idea was it to listen to some possessed 11-year-old anyway?"

"Yours!"

"I'm getting a bad feeling about this," Harry interjected.

"Maybe we should just go," Hermione agreed. She and Harry stood.

"After everything I went through to get here? I'm seeing this through," Ron insisted.

"You just said that it might not be a good idea to listen to some possessed 11-year-old," Harry pointed out.

"Well she wouldn't be possessed if the person behind all of this wasn't possessing her, so really we're listening to some psycho who cursed us and possesses children," Ron reasoned.

"I felt better when we were listening to a possessed 11-year-old," Hermione admitted.

"Then you're going to love this," came the voice of Hannah Abbot.

Ron leapt to his feet and they all turned in the direction of the voice. Sure enough, Hannah emerged from the darkness. She seemed perfectly pleasant with her Hufflepuff uniform neat and tidy and an inviting grin on her face. Quite a contrast to the others who had seen better days after their grand escape from the castle and were incredibly anxious to find out what would happen next. Harry started to pull out his wand, but he didn't know what he'd do if things got violent. He certainly didn't want to hurt Hannah.

"Why won't you show your face? Why drag Hannah into this?" Harry demanded. He wasn't happy about the fact that their unknown enemy was communicating through her. It reminded him of the time during his second year when Voldemort was possessing Ginny through that diary of his.

Hannah laughed. "I'm not even here, I'm just a puppet pulling the strings. As for the girl, it's easier to control younger, more impressionable minds. I can see everything that's going on through her eyes."

"Okay, next question," Hermione began. "Who are you?"

"You three aren't exactly in a position to be demanding information so I'll just cut to the chase. I want the stone. The Sorceror's Stone."

"Bloody hell," Ron blurted. Harry and Hermione were speechless.

"That's pretty much it, really. Just one little thing. Go get it, bring it to your friend Hannah here, and you can go home. Don't, and you will remain here to relive the past 5 years in real time. And I will spend my time doing everything I can to mess up this future you three are trying so hard to preserve."

"What do you want that for?" Harry demanded.

"To bring the Dark Lord back, of course. We all know he didn't manage to get the stone on his own like he planned."

"But he's already back, though. He came back with that weird potion thing, Harry saw it!" Ron pointed out.

"And his reign is going well, that's true. But it could be better. Imagine what might have happened if the Dark Lord had gotten ahold of the stone? What if he held the power to create the Elixir of Life? He and his followers could live forever like gods! You three will help me achieve that dream."

"Or what? Or you'll mess up the timeline? What you're asking us to do could change everything!" Hermione exclaimed.

"Clever girl. The timeline will be destroyed either way. What I am offering you is an opportunity to do this the easy way. Give me the stone, and you get to go home. And how much will it have changed really? The Dark Lord is already at large, as your friend said. But if you refuse to give me the stone, you will have to fight me every day as I set out to change everything. And trust me; you will not win. You will watch as I destroy the lives you built for yourselves day by day. The choice is yours."

"You're mad!" Harry insisted. Hannah screamed.

"Where am I? What's going on? How did I get here?" she exclaimed. It appeared as though the poor girl's possession had ended.

"Hannah!" Harry said quickly, instantly feeling bad about having just screamed in her face. She probably felt mad and didn't need one of her peers reinforcing that idea.

"Everything's alright, you're at Hogwarts. We-"

"Ron!" Hannah exclaimed, cutting Hermione off. She ran and flung her arms around him.

"Erm, hi," Ron sputtered. He patted her back a couple of times, unsure of what to do.

Hermione pulled out her wand and pointed it at the back of Hannah's head. "Stupefy."

Hannah went limp in Ron's arms. He lowered her a few feet and then let her drop the rest of the way onto the ground. "What did you do that for?"

"How are we supposed to explain this? She'll wake up thinking this was just a strange dream," Hermione insisted.

"She won't if she wakes up alone out here!"

"We'll have to get her back to bed, then."

"Hermione, she's in Hufflepuff. We can't get her back to bed!" Harry pointed out.

"We'll bring her to the Hospital Wing, then! I don't know, we've got bigger problems."

"No bigger immediate problems. We caused a lot of trouble getting out here, there's no way we can get back in," Ron insisted.

"If it were just us it wouldn't be a problem, we could stay out here for a while, clean ourselves up a bit, and then slip back in in the morning acting like nothing happened," Harry reasoned.

"Okay," Hermione said as she tried to think the whole thing through. "We just keep Hannah stunned until then, sneak her back into the castle with us…"

"And wander around the corridors with her unconscious body," Ron helpfully finished.

"I'll be honest, we don't have any good options here," Hermione admitted.

"Alright," Harry began. "What if we wait until morning, take her unconscious body up to the castle, and hide inside the passageway until she first starts to wake up. While she's still disoriented, we quickly move her out into the corridor and pretend we just happened upon her and insist that she doesn't look well. We then offer to escort her to the Hospital Wing. If she asks how she got there, we can suggest that perhaps she was sleepwalking. Thoughts?"

Hermione shrugged. "Works for me."

"Looks like our only plan," Ron agreed.

"That's one problem solved. But what do we do about the stone?" Harry asked.

"Let's not talk about that now," Hermione suggested. "Let's let everything sink in and pick up that conversation tomorrow. You two try to sleep, I'll stay up for a bit and make sure Hannah stays knocked out."

The next day, after escorting Hannah to the Hospital Wing,

("…Sleepwalking?" Hannah repeated through her drowsy haze.

"People do it all the time, it's perfectly normal," Hermione confirmed.

"You're sure this hasn't happened to you before? Maybe you just don't remember," Harry insisted.

"No, I… Oh, Ron!" Hannah perked up at the sight of her favorite ginger, pouncing on him in yet another hug. Once again, Ron didn't really seem to know what to do about it.

"Feeling okay, Hannah?" he asked.

"I had a dream about you! It must have been a dream, but it felt so real. We were under the Quidditch Pitch together in the middle of the night…"

"You're sure I wasn't there, too?" Hermione asked, suddenly annoyed.

"Why would you be, Hermione? It never happened!" Harry reminded her quickly.)

and after explaining their absence from the night before to Neville, Seamus, and Dean,

("We were in the Common Room all night," Harry insisted.

"What were you three doing down there?" Seamus asked.

"Pulling an all-nighter. I insisted that they help me study for the Charms exam. Ron could use the practice, anyway," Hermione explained.

"Hey!" Ron exclaimed in protest.

"I really hope I studied enough… Maybe I should have joined you guys. Let me know next time," Neville said nervously.

"You're sure you didn't have anything to do with all the dung bombs and broken statues in the corridor last night?" Dean asked.

Harry, Ron, and Hermione exchanged stunned looks.

"Wait, what happened?" Harry asked.

"Blimey, you three haven't heard? Someone went mental last night. Made a mess of the corridor. All the teachers were after them, but they never got caught!" Seamus explained excitedly. He clearly lived for this kind of gossip.

"It's just a rumor that's going around, nobody knows what really happened," Neville confirmed.

"Oh come on, Neville everyone's saying it happened," Dean confirmed.

"Then why do the corridors look so clean today?" Harry pointed out.

"The Hogwarts faculty can clean that up in a second, everyone knows that," Seamus insisted.

"Well I for one can't imagine that anyone would be so reckless with the rules," Hermione said, practically switching into lecture mode. "Don't they know how much trouble they can get in for stupid pranks like that?"

"Yeah, they wouldn't be pulling crazy stunts like that with Granger around," Dean reasoned.

"Shame really, I'd like to think we were dorm mates with the ultimate Hogwarts pranksters," Seamus agreed.

"Hermione, do you think I could look over your Charms notes?" Neville asked.)

Harry, Ron, and Hermione hid in one of the secret places they remembered from the Maurader's Map so that they could speak in private.

"So," Hermione began. "This person wants the Sorcerer's Stone."

"Can we call this person something? It would make it so much easier to talk about him. Or her," Ron suggested.

"Not a bad idea. What should we call them?" Harry asked.

"Taylor is a nice name," Ron said with a shrug.

"Why would we call them 'Taylor?'" Hermione asked, curious about the logic despite the seriousness of their situation.

"I dunno, it's a name that works for either a man or a woman."

"Fine, Taylor it is. So what are we going to do?"

"Well obviously Voldemort not having the stone is better than Voldemort having the stone," Harry reasoned.

"Obviously," Hermione agreed.

"But not being stuck here and fighting Taylor every day for the next five years is better than being stuck here and fighting Taylor every day for the next five years," Ron pointed out.

"Okay, now we're all clear on our current dilemma," Hermione said. "So what should be our next move?"

"We weigh our options, I suppose," Harry replied. "Either way, it looks like the timeline we all know is going to be seriously messed up."

"Not necessarily, nothing is set in stone until it's done. And nothing has been done yet."

"Well, if we give Hannah the stone we know what will happen. And it's not good," said Ron.

The three of them were silent for a few moments, imagining a world in which Voldemort could not be killed. At least with things the way they were back at home, Voldemort was perfectly mortal as far as they knew. His mortality meant hope. But if he had the stone, if he couldn't be killed… certainly nothing could be worse than that.

"So then, we don't give him the stone?" Harry asked.

"That's not really doing something. It's not doing something. But are we sure we're ready to rule that out?" Hermione asked.

"We can't just give up, can we? At least this way we can fight. Things may change but there's still hope that some day we can beat… Taylor. Ron, the name really doesn't seem to fit the evil, here."

"Harry, who names their child thinking, 'Oh, this is an evil baby, I'm going to give him an evil baby name?'" Ron pointed out.

"Harry's right," Hermione insisted. "We can't just give Voldemort the stone."

"So, we're stuck here," Harry said.

"And so we're stuck here," Hermione agreed.

"Taylor's going to be mad," Ron noted. Harry and Hermione grinned. At least that was a plus.