Chapter Text
Harry
After the Battle…
I’m so tired, I can barely stand upright.
Kreacher brings me a sandwich and a full tea service laden with sweets and cakes. The little elf throws himself into my lap, crying in my arms, before bowing so low his nose touches the ground, then popping away with a crack. I sleep like the dead for fifteen hours and come to with Hermione in the bed beside me, leaning against the headboard and reading a book.
“Ron is with his folks,” she says softly, running her fingers over my fringe. “But I needed to make sure you were still breathing. Please don’t die again.”
“I won’t,” I promise, creaky and broken, my voice dry and weak from disuse. “I came back at least,” I try to say, and Hermione scowls in response. She hands me a glass of water, which I drink in its entirety before she runs her fingers over my scar again.
“Go back to sleep. You need it.”
I try to tell her no.
I need to see Ron.
To see Gin and our friends, and start to help with the cleanup.
But I don’t do any of those things.
She pulls the blanket back up to my chin, tucking it around her legs and I wrap my arm around her thighs to use her lap as a pillow. I do as she says, like I always do, and fall asleep with her fingers running over my hair and sleep until the following day.
In a community as small as the British wizarding one, with so many deaths taking place simultaneously, you have to coordinate funerals.
I thought the fighting was the worst thing I would ever see. That nothing could be more horrible than the soul that was Tom Riddle, whimpering and crying on the floor on Kings Crossing. But the meeting coordinating the dozens of funerals that needed to take place over the coming days and weeks was worse than either of those things.
I shouldn’t be here. I’m an orphan with no family. I have no funerals to plan and no knowledge of how to do so if I did. But they want me here, and Ron was here since his mum won’t let her remaining children out of her sight.
They offer me the head chair at the table. I have no desire to take that place.
I stand in the back, eyes dry despite my desire to cry, and hold Hermione’s hand while they plan the burial of our friends.
The sound of baby Teddy cooing, another orphan casualty of the war, is the only sound of happiness that breaks the oppressive depression.
“Hi.”
I’ve taken to walking to the very edge of the Weasley’s property line to get away from the chaos inside. George is a half-broken man who keeps starting jokes and expecting his brother to finish them. Molly alternates between weeping and cooking obsessively, and the rest of them are jumping from one emotion to the next so fast it makes my head spin.
Hermione is asleep.
She’s been sleeping for days.
We could barely wake her up long enough for the funerals. Ron had to carry her to her room last night because she fell asleep at the kitchen table. It seems the woman who was so strong during the war has finally found her breaking point.
“Hi,” I say, but don’t bother to turn around and look at the girl who at last has worked up the courage to follow me out to the fence.
“We really haven’t had much of a chance to talk,” Ginny says quietly, and I can hear the hesitation and hope warring in her voice.
“I know,” I sigh, then finally turn to meet her eye.
She’s so beautiful. Sleek and trim, like my Firebolt. Her hair, much like Hermione’s, hasn’t been cut for an age and so falls down her back and over her shoulder in a waterfall of red, reaching nearly to her waist.
“The war is over,” she says simply.
I spent so many hours thinking about her. Watching her on the map, wondering what she was doing and if she was thinking about me too.
But now?
Nothing.
Ginny is beautiful, but I don’t ache for her like I once did. I don’t crave her touch or long to hear her voice. I went, and she stayed, and that’s the way it had to be. But too much has happened now, and I can’t go back.
When I don’t say anything, she continues.
“I didn’t wait for you,” she says defiantly, her chin raised and her shoulders back. I grin. Maybe this conversation wasn’t going to be what I thought. “It was lonely, and hard in the castle, and some nights the only way to ensure you made it through to the next day was to find your solace in another person. I wouldn’t blame you if you did the same.”
Now I do smile.
“I thought about it a time or two,” I joke, “but your brother isn’t much of a cuddler.”
She throws her head back and laughs, and even with the long line of her throat on display and the soft edges of her curves accentuated in the dying light, nothing so much as stirs inside me.
“Good. I’d hate to have to fight him for you.” A blush fills her cheeks, and she bites her bottom lip. “I just thought that now—” I shake my head and place my hands on her upper arms, leaning in to place a kiss on her cheek.
“Thank you, Gin. I do love you. I always will. But I can’t go back. I can only move forward, and you and us, we’re part of the past.”
She tightens her lips around her teeth, nodding at me softly.
“I knew you were going to say that, but I had to give it a shot.”
She links her arm through my elbow and joins my walk around the property line.
“So, all those warm bodies at the castle...anybody I should know about?” I prompt her, and she giggles in a happy sort of way.
“Welllll,” she teases, and it feels good to be here with her like this. Light. Happy. “Neville was bound by some pureblood pledge to keep his virginity, so he would give out orgasms without asking for anything in return.”
I snort so hard it hurts my throat, turning to look her in the eye.
“And Luna,” she says, giving a mysterious grin, “claims that Ravenclaw House’s love of education included learning about sex, and was quite good with her mouth. Apparently, orgies are a thing there.”
I’m blushing and laughing so hard I can barely hear her, but catch “…and did you know that Seamus and Dean are gay? Seamus taught me how to give head. You don’t know what you’re missing, Harry. The things you learn when dozens of teenagers all share a single hidden room.”
Sounds like we missed more than just our classes last year.
“I like the beard, by the way,” she says unexpectedly, and automatically my fingers reach up to run through the scruff on my face.
“Thanks. I didn’t do it on purpose, I just couldn’t find time to shave, you know, with everything going on. Now it feels, I don’t know, like too much effort I guess.”
She gives me a sad, knowing smile, and places her head on my shoulder, relaxed in a way we could never have been before.
“I know exactly what you mean.”
“I can’t,” Ron says for about the hundredth time, watching Hermione shove her freshly washed clothes into her bag. I’m trying to stay out of it. I’m sitting on the cot bed in Gin’s room, waiting in silence unless I’m needed to play peacemaker. Mione’s motions are jerky, and she hasn’t looked Ron in the face in hours.
I don’t blame her.
I don’t blame him, either. Not really.
But still.
Her magic, always so touchy lately, flares so bright it hurts my eyes before bleeding back into her skin. Ron looks over his shoulder at me, and all I can do is shrug. Don’t look at me to explain girls’ emotions.
That’s Hermione’s job.
“That’s fine, Ronald. I understand. Stay here with your family. They need you. Of course, they do. But it’s time for me to take care of mine.”
Even I flinch at the frost in her voice.
In her anger, she swings the little beaded bag over her shoulder with too much force, and I cringe when I hear the books topple over from their piles. Hermione closes her eyes and breathes deeply through her nose, letting it out slowly through barely parted lips.
“You say that ‘Mione, but it doesn’t sound like you really mean it.”
Let it go, Ron, I try to tell him with my eyes, giving my head a tiny shake, but he keeps poking at her anyway. When will he learn that pushing Hermione past her limits never ends well for the pusher?
She takes another breath before finally meeting his eye. Her chest sags slightly, and she rests her hand over his heart.
“I do understand. You guys are mourning. But I can’t wait any more. I have to see my parents. Stay, come, I don’t care. But I’m going, Ron.”
His shoulders slump at the peace offering in her voice, and he leans down to place a kiss on her lips, but she turns her chin at the last moment, and he gets her cheek instead. He brushes it off like he meant to do that, but I can see the frustration building behind his eyes. She turns on her heel and marches from the room without another word.
“I would come if I could get away, but mum….”
Molly Weasley has lost a child. I understand that. But she’s not the only mother to do so, and life does go on.
“I know, mate. I know.” My shrunken trunk is already in Hermione’s bag, and I give Ron one last hug.
“We’ll be back—” I falter and stutter to silence again. I don’t know when we’ll be back. “Soon,” I say with a half-hearted smile.
Ron smiles warmly, once again back to his regular self. Emotional range of a teaspoon indeed.
“It won’t take you too long anyway. Hermione is a genius. I know she already talked to St. Mungos. All she’s got to do is reverse the spell, and her folks will be back home in no time.”
I don’t know why she didn’t tell him, but if she didn’t, then I won’t either.
“See ya,” I say instead and follow Hermione down the stairs and out the front door. Our portkey to Australia leaves in an hour.
It’s so strange that it’s almost wintertime here, yet back home, summer is blooming. There’s a cool breeze blowing over our skin. The smell of the ocean is fresh in my nose. I can taste the salt in the air.
“Are you okay?” I ask the witch at my side, and she graces me with a weak smile, not bothering to take her eyes off the couple ten meters to our right.
“Of course,” she answers, the same response she gives me every time I ask.
We’re at the beach, on a towel, under an umbrella. It’s in the twenties, so not that cold, but not precisely swimming weather either. She tells me her parents come here on their days off to read. It’s something they used to do when they were still them.
I let go of her hand and wrap my arm around her back instead, pulling her to my side. Her skin is hot to the touch. Almost scalding. If she were to walk into the ocean, I imagine the water would sizzle against her flesh. As I watch grains of sand lift from around our blanket, floating and spinning in the air.
“Hermione!” I whisper in a panic at the undeniable display of magic.
“Sorry,” she says sheepishly, and the sand falls listlessly to the ground, her skin cooling so rapidly her flesh breaks out in goosebumps.
It’s our third day here, our third day following her folks.
She can’t return their memories.
Can’t make them remember who she is.
We knew that before we got here. Hemione talked to every memory expert willing to speak to her, and being who she was meant she had a conversation with everyone. She spent three hours on the phone with a specialist in the States. Most healers couldn’t even believe she could perform such an advanced piece of magic, to begin with. St. Mungos already offered her a spot in their healer’s program.
They all said the same thing.
She took too much from her parents, and it’s been gone too long. Maybe if she’d tried a week, a month, after she obliviated them, she could have restored her parents to the people they once were.
But we’re much too far past the point of no return.
She didn’t come to Australia to get them back. We came to Australia so she could say goodbye.
Her mother, who looks so much like her daughter, laughs so light and bright that it chips off a part of my heart.
Hermione is the perfect marriage of her parent’s features.
Her skin is a golden brown, not dark ebony like her mother's or pale like her father's. Her hair twists and turns in riotous curls, a perfect medium of the tight spirals her mother wears and her father’s straight brown locks. We haven’t been close enough to stand side by side, but even so, I can tell she’s right between her mother’s diminutive form and her father’s towering gangliness.
How difficult must it be for Hermione to look in the mirror and forever be reminded of the parents who are still alive but forever gone from her life, and knowing that they weren’t taken from her, but instead, she gave them up?
How disgusting am I that in a small deplorable part of my heart, I’m…not happy. But I’m not alone anymore. I wouldn’t wish this pain on even my worst enemy, but I’m not alone in my pain anymore either.
Now we’re both orphans.
It feels nice that I can help her with this, the same way she’s helped me with everything else.
“Does it ever stop hurting?” she asks, her voice cracking and the tears finally starting to fall.
“No,” I tell her honestly and pull her against me as tight as I can. I kiss her on the top of the head and hold her closer still as her chest begins to heave in wracking sobs. “But you learn to live with it anyway.”
Her parents, who don’t know who we are, give me a sympathetic smile, staring at the girl falling apart in my arms, and finally, my tears break free too.
We cry for our parents, and our friends, and everything we’ve lost so that we can live.
“I can’t go back to the Burrow, Harry.”
Tears are slowly slipping down her face, though she doesn’t seem to acknowledge them. It’s late or early, but the muggle hotel we’re staying in has twenty-four-hour room service, and the hot chocolate is a balm against our battered hearts.
“I know they’re grieving, and I know they love me like a daughter, but I’m not their daughter, and I need space so that I can grieve too.”
I’ve been thinking about something similar. It’s too loud, too bright, but at the same time, there’s a darkness that’s fallen over the bustling family that’s exhausting to be around.
“Come with me to Grimmauld then?” I suggest, and her eyes light up with a long-missing fire. She hastily wipes the tears from her cheeks, huffing in irritation that they were even there, to begin with.
“Really?” she gasps, moving to the edge of her seat.
I place the empty cocoa mug on the table and run my fingers through my hair in thought.
“I mean, it’s probably a mess,” I concede. I haven’t been back since we broke the Fidelius. “Who knows the condition Riddle left it in. But it’s mine, and we can live there if you want.”
Hermione throws herself at me so hard I tumble backwards in my chair, laughing and catching her around the waist.
“Yes!” she cries, and then cries for real, as more tears leak onto her cheeks. She roughly wipes them away, smiling at me through the halo of her hair. “Yes. Thank you. I would love that.”
“Then Grimmauld Place it is,” I confirm, and it feels right to go back there. To start again, with my best friends at my side. “Maybe Ron will even move in.”
“Maybe!” she agrees, but I notice she doesn’t seem all that excited. A yawn escapes, which I quickly duplicate, and she covers her mouth mid-stretch to hide her laugh.
“Sleep first,” she admonishes us, “then we can order a portkey in the morning.”
She rises from the chair we’re both sitting on and places a kiss on my cheek before heading into her room.
We don’t leave in the morning, though, or even the day after.
Hermione, still recovering from the emotional blow of seeing her parents one last time, sleeps for two days straight.
“Uhhhh.”
I went to sleep last night and woke up in a different house. Or at least, that’s what it feels like. Somehow, in the nine hours I was upstairs, Hermione has transformed the lower level. We’ve been cleaning the place out, room by room. Starting with the spaces we picked as our bedrooms. But this is…
“How did you do all this?” I ask, scratching at my head. The entire living area is bare. Not Molly Weasley trying to clean out the infestations bare, but the walls are empty, the trash and broken furniture are gone, looks like it’s ready for new owners’ type of bare.
“Oh, you know,” she shrugs, and I take my eyes off the empty floors and turn them to my best friend instead. Her eyes are wide and glassy, and her hands are twisting and pulling in her lap. Her hair is back in a plait down her back, but strands are falling out in such a way she looks like she stuck her finger in a light socket. “A little of this, a little of that. Magic helps, you know.”
No. I don’t know. Dumbledore would have struggled to accomplish what she did last night.
The lights flare, and the room fills with a manic sort of energy that makes the sconces pulse on the wall.
“When’s the last time you slept?” I ask her, and she shrugs, not paying me any attention.
“Tuesday, maybe? I don’t know. I’ll sleep when I’m tired.”
It’s Friday morning.
McGonagall shows up unexpectedly.
While most returning students simply got the standard Hogwarts letter, we got a visit from the Headmistress herself.
“It’s so good to see you, Professor McGonagall!” Hermione enthuses, happily accepting a hug from the Scottish matron.
“I think we can drop the honorifics, dear,” she says in a kind and playful voice. I startle at the tone. I don’t think I’ve ever heard her speak like that to me. Usually, when I’m in her presence, it means I’m in trouble. “Call me Minerva, please. At least while we’re not in front of other students.”
Hermione blushes horribly, her sense of right and wrong obviously having difficulty with the lack of proper respect for an authority figure. Still, I laugh and readily agree, accepting my hug from the Transfiguration professor.
She hands us both our envelopes and gives me a cunning smile.
“I know that you’ve been offered a spot in the Auror training program,” she says, and I swallow back my sigh of frustration, nodding in agreement instead.
“Your enthusiasm knows no bounds, Harry,” she jokes with a bland voice, and I do smile at that.
“I don’t know what I want to do, to be honest. Before…” She knows what I mean by before. Before the world stopped spinning. Before I died and made the choice to live again. “I did want to be an Auror, before. But now?” I shrug, and greedily take the tea that Kreacher places on the table before us. “I don’t know what I want to do. I admit I’m not all that keen to go back to school either. It’ll be hard to be, well,” I flush slightly, but I’m not going to lie about it. Luckily, I don’t have to finish.
“It’ll be hard to go back to being a student when you’ve just saved the world?”
Now I’m blushing for real, but I jerk my head in some semblance of a nod.
“That’s pretty much the way of it, yeah,” I agree, and she seems to understand. She turns in her seat, giving her attention to Mione.
“And you, Hermione? I’m counting on you for Head Girl, you know. I missed our teas last year too. It’ll be ever so difficult for me when you’ve finished your NEWTS, but I hope you’ll agree to come back and do so.”
Hermione beams at her before her face contorts with a yawn.
A quick gander at my watch says it’s barely after one. She didn’t wake up until almost eleven. Hermione seems to sway in her seat before a quick shake brings the smile back to her face. If a little broken from the wide one of a moment ago.
Minerva’s expression is more curious still. Her eyes go wide, then tighten into slits as her mouth firms into the hard-line I’m more used to seeing on her face. When Hermione smiles, Minerva does too. It doesn’t reach her eyes this time.
“Yes!” Hermione says exuberantly. “I’m very excited to go back to school. With everything that happened, the war, and my parents, I’m looking forward to getting back to normal.”
Minerva’s face falls slightly at the mention of Hermione’s parents. It’s not well known, but it’s not a secret either.
We spend a good quarter-hour talking about the updates to the castle since it was forced to renovate this summer and the new additions to the teaching staff.
Then—
Minerva places her cup on the tray and links her hands in her lap, her aura of geniality gone.
“Can I speak to Hermione alone for a moment, please, Harry?”
Hermione is looking anywhere but at me, and my stomach twists in knots as I glance between the Headmistress’s placid face and that of my best friend. Hermione is an excellent liar. To everyone but me.
She won’t meet my eyes.
“Sure. I’ll take these things back to the kitchen then,” I agree, picking up the serving tray. As soon as I step from the room, I feel the privacy wards go up.
They don’t take long—just a couple of minutes. I’m leaning on the counter, my arms crossed over my chest, and my legs crossed at the ankles when I feel the wards fall and the ladies walk into the kitchen.
“I’ll see myself out,” Minerva says, offering me a warm smile. “Please, do consider coming back this year. There could be a head-boyship in it for you, or,” she tries again when my obvious disinclination is bare, “as little responsibility as you wish.”
She takes Hermione, her favourite student, into her arms and whispers into her ear. Hermione smiles and nods and wipes a tear from her cheek that I pretend I don’t see. We stand in silence until I hear the front door open and close.
Right then.
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” I ask.
Hermione finally looks at me, and there’s a gale storm roaring behind her eyes. I’ve depended on those brown pools of emotion to tell me what’s right and wrong for so long, and for the first time that I can remember I can’t read what’s going on in her head.
“I don’t know,” she says with a shrug, pushing her hair behind her ear. It’s a nervous habit, one she uses to buy time and take attention from herself all simultaneously. I give her a hard stare, not moving an inch. “I don’t know,” she insists, some of that old Hermione tone in her voice, the one that says she’s right and don’t question her because you’ll lose.
“Then what’s wrong?” I try, and she lifts one shoulder in answer.
“I don’t know that either.” She licks her lips and pushes another strand of hair back that’s escaped, and when she smiles at me, it loosens some of the knots twisting in my stomach. “When I know, you’ll know,” she says, and I’ll have to take her at her word. If I can’t trust Hermione anymore, then I can’t trust myself.
Ron shows up a week later, trunk in tow, declaring he can’t take his mum crying for one more lousy minute.
“Can I stay?” he asks, a little unsteady, a little unsure of his welcome. We’ve only seen them once or twice in the two weeks we’ve been back from Australia.
I grin at him, just relieved that things are finally getting back to normal.
“Don’t be daft, Ron.”
That’s all the encouragement he needs.
He hauls his trunk behind him, then stops dead in his tracks.
“Where’s Hermione?” he asks, eyes scanning the empty house looking for his girl.
“Asleep,” I admit, and I try not to let my worry show.
“Weird,” Ron says with a shrug. “Once I get my shite upstairs, want to play a game of chess?”
If he’s not worried, I guess I shouldn’t be either. But I am, and I can’t help it.
It takes almost a month after the final funeral for the summons to come from the bank. I’d been expecting it, but it didn’t make the nerves any less.
They demand restitution, big surprise, but it’s not as bad as it could be, I suppose—a couple of Goblin artefacts from the vaults, a pile or two of gold. I also ensure that they don’t attempt to demand payment from Ron or Hermione in the future. They only robbed the bank because of me.
I don’t want them to have to pay the cost of my mistakes.
Bellatrix didn’t have a will and thanks to more pureblood patriarchal bullshite; her private vault reverted back to me as the acknowledged head of the Black family.
They add the Order of Merlin reward to my vaults and the money the Ministry gave me so I don’t publicly shame them for allowing a seventeen-year-old boy to solve their dark wizard problem for them.
I’m in control of my own affairs for the first time in my life, so I take the opportunity to look over my parent’s will and go over my accounts. My parent’s cottage was just one of my family’s residences, so I take the list and inventories of vaults and properties and businesses back to Grimmauld so Hermione can help me sort it all out later.
Potter Manor has a nice ring to it, though.
I leave the bank richer than when I walked in, my grandfather’s title of Lord Potter attached to my name, and still nowhere closer to knowing what I’m going to do with my life now that I have a life to live.
They want us there for every war criminal trial, but I absolutely refuse. I won’t be used as some sort of mascot for the Ministry, a puppet in their games. The only trials we attend are the Malfoy’s.
“You’d think the person accused of ambushing Dumbledore would have drawn a bigger crowd,” Ron huffs in irritation as we make our way to the spectator seats.
“Hush, Ronald,” Hermione reprimands him, slapping him upside the head. “That wasn’t his fault, and you know it. I’d like to see what you’d do if Riddle held your mother hostage.”
“Not that,” he grumbles low and under his voice, and Hermione pretends not to hear him. There aren’t a lot of people here, that’s for sure. Narcissa, who was cleared of all charges last week, is sitting up front. She gives us a regal nod, and Hermione does the same, slipping into the bench behind her.
“Thank you for saying that,” someone says from outside the aisle, and I turn to the side to see a smirking sandy-haired man offering Hermione his hand. “And for being here today.” He tips his chin in my direction. “Potter here may have been the Boy Who Lived, but Dray was the Boy Who Had No Choice.”
Hermione looks puzzled for a moment but stands to accept his hand.
“I’m only saying the truth, Nott. No more, no less.”
I rise from the seat beside Hermione and kick Ron’s foot to force him to stand as well.
“Theo Nott,” Hermione makes the introductions, “meet Harry Potter, and Ronald Weasley. Harry, meet Theo.”
I shake the man’s hand, surprised at how firm his grip is.
“We went to school together for six years,” he grins, running his hand through his hair and then shoving both fists into his pockets. “But unlike my Slytherin peers, I know how to keep my mouth to myself. Unless someone requests it be put to good use.”
Hermione blushes horribly, ducking her head to the side, and I feel the blood rush up my neck as well.
“Another Death Eater’s son,” Ron gripes, and I kick his foot again.
“Sins of the father, and all that jazz,” Theo agrees, sliding in next to Hermione. “But I stayed the hell outta dodge.”
He slides off his designer suit jacket and rolls up both of his shirt sleeves to show his unblemished arms. Not a dark mark in sight.
Hermione stares at him for a long moment, then gives a sharp nod.
“Planning on going back to school this year then?” she asks.
Her interested tone of voice tells me that she’s already forgiven him for what he may or may not have done. If there’s one thing Hermione is serious about moving forward, it’s letting old prejudices die.
That’s the way we stay, chatting about the pros and cons of returning for our final year until the courtroom is called to order, and Draco Malfoy appears in chains.
Three hours later, he leaves with a pardon in his pocket and his mother and Nott on either side of him. We shake hands, maybe not as friends, but not as enemies either.
His father gets life in Azkaban.
When Andromeda brings Teddy over to visit, it’s both one of the happiest and most painful moments of my life. He already looks so much like his parents. An orphan like me. Like Hermione.
Tonks and Remus’s will has made it through the legal system. It’s official. I am Teddy’s guardian. The thought is terrifying and exciting all at once. Andromeda made it clear she wants to and is willing to raise her grandson, and I can be as involved as I like or don’t want as the case may be.
I can’t take care of a baby right now. I can barely take care of myself. But Hermione and I went to Diagon Alley and a muggle store, and now Teddy has more toys and clothes than poor Andi knows what to do with. I bought them a new camera too, and get pictures almost daily.
My first thought when I wake up gasping for air is that I’m drowning. That I’ve somehow transported back to the pond with the sword at the bottom, and Ron never saved me.
The next thought is that drowning doesn’t smell like smoke.
“Master! Master!” Kreacher cries, pulling on my arm and half dragging me from the bed. “I can’t reach Master’s Miss Granger! I can’t make it stop!”
I can’t breathe because the house is on fire. Smoke is billowing in through my open door, and Hermione’s screams rent the air.
It’s coming from her room.
Ron is in the hallway, shouting at the top of his lungs. Water pours from his wand tip, but it isn’t enough. It’s not nearly enough.
She’s not screaming from the fire.
“Harry! Don’t take Harry!” she shrieks, her body contorting on her sheets. Her bed seems to be the only thing not on fire. The flames lick at the ceiling and spread over the floors, keeping us contained in the hallway.
It’s a horrible sound, like Fiendfyre consuming everything it can reach. It crackles and burns, devouring her room and pouring into the hallway.
I'm sweating as if I've run a mile.
“I can’t get to Master’s Miss Granger!” Kreacher wails and begins to run his head into the wall.
“Kreacher, don’t hurt yourself!” I snap before apparating to her bed.
I can’t.
I’m thrown back with such force I skip on my arse over the carpets, smoke and pain filling my lungs. I skitter back to my feet and try to battle the flames to get to her, but it’s a lost cause. Only she can save herself now.
“HERMIONE!” Ron and I scream together, and finally, she jolts to an upright position.
I can barely see through the smoke, but her eyes are wide, and she begins to cough and hack as the smoke fills her lungs.
Then it stops.
The flames are pulled back from the hallway, the floors returning to their original colour. It’s like watching a movie on rewind, as all the damage to the walls and ceilings reverses in on itself until the hallway is pristine, and the only sound from her bedroom is the almost silent sobbing of the witch in the middle of the bed.
Her hands are raised, her palms open, and her fingers spread. She’s mumbling under her breath, chest hitching and hiccupping as she rights the damage done without her wand and without uttering a single spell.
“I’m sorry,” she sobs. “I’m so, so sorry.”
“Oh, Luv,” I gasp and throw myself into her room and onto her bed, pulling her into my arms. “It’s…” but I don’t know what to say because I have no idea what happened and have even fewer thoughts as to how she made it stop.
Ron is standing at the foot of her bed, gulping in heaving gasps, looking at her like she’s just sprouted a second head.
“I’ve got—,” she sobs and looks between us, then gazes around her room. “I can’t stay here,” she heaves, and then she’s gone.
I fall forward on her bed, her body no longer there to keep me upright.
“HERMIONE!” I yell, but it’s too late, she’s gone, and all that’s left are the wet and rumpled sheets where her nightmare set the world on fire, her tears still drying on my bare chest.
It doesn’t take very long, an hour, maybe less, until her otter Patronus appears beside me. He looks animated. Solid. As if a Disney artist drew him to life. I’ve never seen a Patronus that corporeal before, even when Dumbledore used the spell. When her voice drifts from the animal, I almost sob. I’m so relieved to hear her, even if it’s from a spell.
“I’m at Hogwarts. I’ll be back in a few days. Please don’t follow me. I love you both.”
But how did she cast a Patronus when her wand is in my hand?