Summer II - Rabid Dogs
On the tenth of July, Ron picked her up in the remodeled Weasley Ford Anglia and drove-flew her out to Ottery St. Catchpole, and they made pretty good time, considering the fact that they nearly stalled out over Stonehenge when Ron forgot to shift gears right and had a fight so vicious above Exeter that Ron threatened to make for Cardiff.
“I’m serious, Hermione,” he said, and slammed his fist down on the damn dash. “I’ll drive us into the ocean.”
“Do it, then,” she snapped, and of course he didn’t.
They did not talk about the Ministry.
Apparently, there was an emergency Order event, so Ron had been reticently dispatched to fetch her. He didn't know what the emergency Order event was, but, unlike last summer, didn't seem to want to know, either. Her parents had been delighted to meet Ron, because they were delighted by the Wizarding world in general, and Mrs Weasley was equally delighted to receive Hermione’s mother’s strawberry pound cake, which she had sampled three years earlier, when the Weasleys offered to chaperone Hermione at the Leaky Cauldron. So her mother sent her with the poundcake, and promised a follow-up package of the usual: things she’d forgotten to pack, a small gift that a friend or a neighbor had left for her, her favorite snacks, her mother’s chocolate-chip banana bread, the new book she wanted. They sent them all in a rush because they were spending August in America, and tried to stagger the mail, but the Wizarding system got confused and dumped it all over Hermione’s breakfast on her second day in the Burrow.
Mrs Weasley told off the owls, and Ginny helped Hermione carry them to her room. Each package was delicately wrapped by her mum, corners crimped and taped, and labeled goofily by her dad. For our wonderful daughter, “Herm” Ione; To A Miss Granger, Reading’s Future in Dentistry; Enclosed—Your Prize for Being Marc’s Most Gracious Cousin. It hurt her heart to see, so she shoved them under her bed, where they sat among old socks and chittering dust bunnies, gathering shadow.
But no one seemed to notice that she was slightly down. There was plenty to do: housework for the Burrow or in the gardens, homework for next year, and, more exciting, some real Order work. Ron, Hermione, and Harry weren’t officially members of the Order, but they were living in the de facto headquarters of the Order, and they had kind of been involved in what turned out to be a major Order directive, anyways, and most senior members of the Order were traipsing in and out, popping by for tea or biscuits or a bit of fresh air, leaving nuggets of information in their wake. Mad-Eye Moody was brisk and didn’t let anything slip, Dumbledore never showed, but Lupin came several times a week, and didn’t have the tightest lips, especially if Tonks or Bill wanted to talk shop.
So it was tacitly decided—although who had decided what remained stubbornly unclear—that, while not members, they could still participate, sort of like interns. Hermione and Harry were unofficially asked to co-design a basic defense curriculum with Lupin, who met with them twice a week. Mrs Weasley knew and disapproved, but couldn’t argue with the logic that Hermione, Harry, and Ron had learned the basic tactics necessary to run a secret organization. Bill gave them a semi-official training on the do’s and don’ts of recruiting, which Hermione could’ve written herself, and encouraged them to think about Order members from the DA. (Fred and George were actively recruiting. So far they’d gotten Alicia Spinnet and Lee Jordan.) Ron was tasked with working with Ginny to hammer out some talking points to convince wizards and witches to join the Order and design the pamphlets. It was desk work. Intern stuff. Little logistical tasks no one else had time for, or could even pretend to want to do. Hermione loved it. It reminded her of her fourth summer at home, when her parents took her to the office.
Their fourth meeting was the day before Harry’s birthday. Lupin was a little gloomy, like always, Harry was unfocused, and they could not agree on the first module. Harry was insistent that the Disarming Spell should come first, and Lupin said:
“You’re absolutely sure you want to start with this? As a lesson, and not review?”
“It was our first lesson in the D.A.” Harry crossed his arms.
“Which, while admirable, was a student group at the most secure place in the British Wizarding world.”
“But it helped us.” Harry was starting to heat up, static crackling through his unruly hair. She could sense a storm. It was Harry’s failing. No, not failing—his circumstance. He’d persisted and endured the years at the Dursleys’ and the most harm he’d ever done was make some glass disappear in front of a snake. He’d never thought to strike back, and it bothered him when others did.
Hermione caught Ron’s eye. She could see the confusion and tension in his face, but he was still working out a move, so she hurriedly asked the first question that popped into her head. “What did you do in the Order, the first time? What were your operatives?”
The question caught him by surprise. “My Order operatives…,” Lupin trailed off. He stirred the spoon in his tea. “Well, they’ve really always been about the werewolves.”
That didn’t seem like a line of questioning she could pursue, so she ungracefully switched topics. “What made you join the Order the first time?”
That made him frown too, and he was silent for so long. “All my friends did,” he said, a ghost of a smile tracing his cheeks.
“Harry’s dad?” Ron asked. His ears were pink. How cruel it was that Harry’s dead dad was the easiest name to say. Peter was unmentionable. He was the reason the Order had reactivated, and why James had died. And, Sirius. Would be worse.
“James, certainly,” Lupin agreed. “As for me…well. It would’ve been hard to find work otherwise, and we graduated in 1979.”
“Did people talk about the war much at Hogwarts?” Ginny asked. She was watching Lupin, expression rapt.
“It felt like not at all,” he said, and stirred his tea, “then the Frasers died, and after that, someone was dying every day.”
“Frasers?” Ginny frowned. “I don’t know any Frasers.”
“They were a Muggle-born wizard couple. They were the first Muggle-born killing, around Christmas. All in their beds. After that the Death Eaters developed their signature mark in the sky.”
Hermione felt as if someone had doused her in gasoline and thrown her into a volcano. She was thinking of the Muggle family—and hated herself for thinking of them as the Muggle family—that owned the campgrounds where they’d seen the Quidditch World Cup.
Mosmorde!
The way they all floated, bathed in green smoke, peaceful only in the manner of corpses. Happy to be dolls or ghosts. Muggles in their rightful place.
“Muggle-born….killings?” Her voice sounded hoarse.
“Not always. The McKinnons were halfblood, and the purebloods were killed, no one knows why.” Lupin’s hands shook. “The whole family…but mostly Muggle-borns, yes, and they didn’t have to be Order members to…be targeted.”
No one knew what to say to that. Ginny was looking down at the illustration of the witch on her pamphlet, who was blinking right back. Harry looked like he was off in his own world. Ron’s eyes kept flickering towards Hermione’s hands, and then back at his own clenched fists.
“So, did everyone in the Order come back then?” Ron asked. He tried to make it sound blasé, but it so obviously didn’t, even he winced.
“Everyone who survived,” Lupin said softly. Hermione looked at Harry, and then realized that Ginny, Lupin, and Ron were also looking at Harry, thinking, clearly about the Boy Who Lived.
Then the math started ticking in Hermione’s head. Bill’s comments from the night before— “Blimey, it’s like you’re starting from zero again,” and Remus to Tonks: “You’re a senior member too, now”—and Lupin’s little glances. How many Order members survived the first war? Lupin, Mr and Mrs Weasley, Hagrid, Moody, Dumbledore, McGonagall. How many hadn’t? The Longbottoms. Harry’s parents. That McKinnon family. Everyone else in that picture: Peter Pettigrew, Mrs Weasley’s brothers, those unfamiliar names, like Benjy Fenwick, Dorcas Meadowes. And now Sirius.
Then a more horrible thought: how many Muggleborn Order members survived the first war?
Hermione closed her eyes and tried to think of a Muggle-born Order member and came up blank. Surely there had to be. There were more halfbloods than Muggle-borns, yes, but the Order was about the protection of Muggle-borns, so where…?
Mosmorde!
She pictured the Death Eater symbol rising above her terraced house in Reading, three snakes visible in the distance, everyone in her extended family, smoke curling up and up and up.
She waited until her hands had stopped shaking to drink her tea. Ron was looking at her with a strange weight to his bunched eyebrows. She shook her head at him and forced herself to tune back in.
“You’re sure you want to start with disarming?” Lupin was asking Harry, who crossed his arms.
“It helped me against Voldemort.”
But that trump card, on Lupin, didn’t work. Instead he said, with his characteristic dryness: “I’m not sure that full-grown wizards and witches will find that nearly as charming as you Hogwarts students do.”
“It works,” Harry said, stubbornly.
“And it does, but if you’re facing three of them, Disarming doesn’t remove the threat when the others are jinxing you.”
“But I’ve faced him twice now.”
“Harry, the Death Eaters shoot to kill.”
Lupin seemed to realize what he had just said. He blanched. The mood in the room visibly tanked: Ginny winced, Ron scowled, Hermione blinked back a tear, and Harry—
—had already stood up. His face was blank. “I’m going to practice on my broom now.”
“Why don’t we just wrap up?” Hermione sounded desperate and she knew it, so she focused on her hands. “Professor Lupin, think of it—like a placeholder spell. Disarming is a good way to gauge someone’s readiness for combat, and it—it—um, Ginny, what else does it do?”
“Helps with confidence,” Ginny said, nudging her brother as her sentence ran out of steam, “So then you feel good—er—about your ability to react, and—”
“And, if you can disarm someone, you get more time,” Ron said. “You don’t have to worry about counterjinxes and the like.”
But Harry had stood up and was walking to the door. It swung shut, and the conversation closed.
“Harry…,” Hermione called, but she waited until he was out of earshot to do it. She, Ron, and Ginny exchanged a worried glance. Then Ron stood up.
“I’ll go talk to him.”
“Will you actually talk?” Ginny pressed.
Ron scowled. “Merlin, no, he doesn’t like talking. He probably just wants to fly around the country on his broom. That makes him feel better.”
Then they heard a strangled noise, something in between a balloon deflating and a whine, and turned as one, remembering then that Lupin was also present and his face had gone an awful shade of grey.
“Right, that’s you two,” Ron said, and the kitchen door banged shut behind him.
“Professor?” Ginny asked. “Lupin?”
“Remus?”
But he was mute.
“I’m going to get Mum,” Ginny said, and started running.
“Remus?” Hermione repeated.
His eyes were still focused on nothing.
Then, hesitantly: “Moony?”
That snapped him out of it. With a deep breath he came back to life.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Are you okay?”
Lupin considered the question for an uncomfortably long time.
“Sometimes,” he said, “Harry takes after his father.”
Ginny and Mrs Weasley came rushing back and stopped abruptly. “Are you—”
Lupin offered them a weak smile. “I’m sorry for the scare.” He stood up and began to pack his things. He gathered all the papers together and straightened them on the table by holding them perpendicular and tapping them gently against the wood. It was a simple gesture, a familiar gesture, but Hermione stared at it all the same. No one in the Wizarding world straightened papers like that. Only Muggles.
Mrs Weasley insisted on checking his temperature, and declared it just a fright, and then she went back outside, bumping into Ron as he stormed back in.
“Didn’t want to talk,” he mumbled to Hermione. Sometimes Harry didn’t.
Lupin was reaching for the Floo powder when Ron said, “Wait.” Hermione wondered what he was getting at. He was shooting looks with Ginny.
“Why didn’t you tell Harry that you knew his parents when you were teaching us?”
Lupin blinked. He looked at his hands. “Dumbledore thought it would be prudent if I held a normal student-teacher relationship.”
Ron scoffed. “But you knew his mum and dad.”
“That wasn’t my decision.” Lupin sounded firm, but tired. The circles under his eyes were large, and his robes were even shabbier than usual: clean, smelling faintly of lavender, but an even muddier color than they had been the summer before.
“Right.”
Hermione caught Ginny’s eye. Only Ron could put so much bile in a single syllable.
“That’s not fair, professor,” Ginny said.
“You’re not his guardian,” Lupin said softly. “You’re just his friend.”
For a second, no one at the table seemed to breathe. Hermione heard the knitting needles in the living room, clearly, clack-clacking away at the Christmas sweaters. The knives peeling potatoes and carrots for the supper roast. Mrs Weasley, somewhere upstairs, humming one of the Weird Sisters’ hits from the 70s.
Ron crossed his arms. “Sirius was justyour friend. But you stayed with him at Grimmauld all last year, didn't you.”
Lupin’s face looked hardened, but Hermione could tell that his expression was starting to sag, especially round the eyes. The Sirius comment had hurt him. Well. Everything about Sirius hurt. To Lupin. To Harry. To Hermione and Ron. Even to Ginny, probably. Hermione had never asked.
“Just because he’s Dumbledore doesn’t mean he’s always right,” Ron spat, with magic, by mistake. The coins and letters he’d been working on blew off the table, knocking over his mug and flying around the room, although Lupin’s folder remained unruffled. The laundry stopped folding itself, and the knitting needles dropped straight to the floor. The radio turned off. Mrs Weasley’s knives clattered off the cutting board with a couple of the carrot cubes. The leaky sink, frozen in the middle of washing a colander, dripped. Once. Twice. Three times. The crackle of Ron’s magic hung in the air.
Lupin stood up and inhaled deeply. The scent of lavender grew stronger, then faded out suddenly. The knitting needles picked themselves back up. The radio turned on. The kitchen hummed with life.
"Until next week, then," he said. No one acknowledge him.
Right after he Flooed away, Ginny elbowed Ron in the ribs. “That wasn’t very nice!”
He scowled.
Ginny smacked him.
“Ow!”
“Lupin can’t do anything about Harry if Dumbledore doesn’t want him to!” she said, sharply. “So stop taking it out on him. He can’t do anything.”
Ron and Hermione exchanged a glance.
Ginny crossed her arms. “I don’t know why you’re so surprised,” she huffed. “I’m not that much younger than you. I notice things too.”
“If he can’t do anything,” Ron said, pointedly, “then who can?”
* * *
As she finished her homework for the day and got ready for dinner, Hermione heard the contours of Ron and Harry arguing upstairs. Harry had come to the Weasleys’ on his shortest fuse yet, which was saying something. She tried to tread lightly, which worked, unless Harry was talking about Draco Malfoy, and then Hermione lost her patience. In some ways, Malfoy was their most uniquely evil classmate, manipulating their teachers and administrators just to fuel his feud with Harry; in other ways, he was the most mundanely evil, floundering in his privilege like any other rich white boy in England. She’d met plenty of Draco Malfoys in her life and heard about many more through her cousin Marc and was sure that Harry had as well. She wasn’t sure why this one stuck to his mind. Ron was no help in the matter. “It’s just because the Malfoys are pure evil,” he would say. “They’re all a bad lot. Lucius did horrible things at school in my dad’s day. And the reforms, you should know. Even worse.”
“Right,” Hermione would say, “but Harry doesn’t know about the Malfoys like you do. He didn’t meet Malfoy until he was eleven.”
Ron would shrug. “They’re a bad lot,” he’d repeat, and Hermione knew the topic was done.
A door slammed. Ron’s footsteps squeaked on the stairs. She felt him pause in the doorway and then he came and sat down next to her.
“Harry’s in a foul mood,” he said, and fiddled with his prefect badge. “I wanted to polish it, but he’s throwing looks—I think he still wants it, you know.”
“Harry’s always in a mood.” She gulped and flicked her eyes to Ron, who was still fiddling with the pin on his badge. She shouldn't have said that. It was true, though. It was true, and it wasn't Harry's fault. He always said that he didn't want to be the Chosen One. That he wanted a normal life, where his parents weren't dead. But he'd say that, and then something extraordinary would happen where he would, for a moment, not be the copies-off-Hermione Harry, but the Boy Who Lived, and...well, he was, wasn't he? No one could do what he did. No one had done what he did. He was The Boy Who Lived, regardless of whether he wanted it or not. Maybe Dumbledore would finally tell him the truth. She hoped he would. Harry had been through enough.
Ron stabbed himself with the pin and swore. Hermione yanked the badge from him and popped the hinge into place. No magic required.
“What was it this time?” she asked, giving it back. Their hands touched for a moment. She made sure she was looking out the window.
“I moved his sock, I think. Or he moved my sock? Couldn’t really tell.” Ron scooched a little closer on the bed to Hermione. “You would’ve thought seeing Malfoy would’ve cheered him up a little, get him to take it out fully on someone else.”
“Malfoy’s too much of a wild card,” Hermione said. “Sometimes he just winds up Harry more.”
“He’s a flaming little piece of shit,” Ron said. Hermione knew what he was thinking about: Malfoy shouting Mudblood, Malfoy getting Buckbeak close to killed, Malfoy using his father whenever he could, wherever he could.
She sighed. “I know—”
“It doesn’t mean that Harry’s always right about him though.”
Hermione’s breath caught in her throat. She’d been expecting the usual, the bad lot, and the confession caught her up short. “He isn’t?”
“Er—I’ve always known families like the Malfoys,” Ron continued. “Impossible not to, even if, well, your last name’s mine. I’m a Prewett, on my mother’s side, and my auntie Muriel has all those crazy values you think only Slytherins would have, so I’ve had my fair share of extended gatherings like that. Not with the Malfoys, or any open Death Eaters, but…after a couple of firewhiskies, most wizards just say anything.” He played with his badge: opening and closing, opening and closing. “Winds up mum and Dad.” Opening and closing. “But they still go.” Opening, closing. “Sometimes I feel sorry for Malfoy, that snaky little bastard. Can’t be fun, being an only child, with parents like that, no real cousins or anything. You know, most pureblood families don’t believe too much in love. They like discipline, and marrying their cousins. Well. Not always. But plenty of marriages are arranged, you know that? There used to be a joke about how OWLs were for girls and NEWTs were for boys ‘cuz so many girls dropped out after their fifth year. They used to sell that as a pin in some of the Hogsmeade shops.” He sighed. “Hogwarts only got rid of caning two years before we started school. Even twenty years ago…I’d imagine you go a little crazy, what, with just the house elves who hate you to talk to.” He snapped the badge shut. “Would be nice to have all that money, though. And a room to yourself. More than just a room to yourself.” He looked up and seemed to realize that he’d been rambling, flushed bright. “Sorry, Hermione,” he said. “Just been thinking.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “I like it when you’re thinking.” She meant to say it lightly, but the words seemed to take a different quality when they left her mouth, and Ron went a deeper shade of pink. She didn’t know what to call these moments, or why they kept happening. They said something that was a joke, except it wasn’t a joke, and then it got all silent and weird until Mrs Weasley reminded them to degnome the garden, or Ginny asked to borrow Pidwidgeon, or they accidentally knocked over some of Fred and George’s experiments and dealt with something smelly and haywire. It would go back to normal, afterwards.
“You gotta let me do some of it, sometimes,” he said. “You do enough for all of us.” They stared at each other. She could feel her pulse racing. The flush was still hot on Ron's cheeks. Should she say something? Like—oh, it was stupid. Then Ron tore his eyes away and pointed down towards where her unopened packages lay and spoke breezily. Like nothing had happened. Which was fine. Nothing had happened, really. “Like why haven’t you opened any of your parents’ stuff? Overthinking? You know how much I like your mum’s banana bread.” He held his hand in the air for another minute, waiting.
It was an easy out, and she would take it, but there was a rush of emotions hanging between him and her and she tried to sort it out. She had that froggy, weighted feeling in her throat that meant she needed to say something. Not about whatever had just happened. About, she decided, Harry. Did Ron ever have doubts about being his best friend? “Harry’s such an asshole right now,” she said. “We’re his friends. But he can’t seem to accept that he has friends.”
Ron squeezed her hand. She squeezed back.
“Sirius died,” he said simply, and looked her directly in the eye. “Can’t blame him, in the end.”
She knew what he was thinking about, which is what she was thinking about. Christmas, with Sirius, housebound but determined to make Harry smile if it killed him. He didn’t regale Harry with tales of his misadventures with James over shots of firewhiskey, as Hermione semi-feared, nor encourage Harry to get any more detentions than he already received.
After dinner, as the fire went low, Sirius told Harry, in wandering drabbles, about little things: baby Harry’s favorite color, an eggshell blue. The Potters’ cat, a fat tabby named Rags but called Lipstick after he broke into Lily’s makeup box and ate six tubes of her favorite shade. The broom Sirius sent Harry for his first birthday. How the cake on James’ and Lily’s wedding day nearly caught on fire. About Harry’s paternal grandparents, the Potters. If Ron and Hermione moved a muscle, Sirius would withdraw, lean back. He couldn’t make himself talk to Harry alone. Hermione saw in his face that when he looked at Harry he was trying very hard not to cry. How could that feel? To watch your friend betray your best friend, and have to try and explain your platonic soulmate to his impossibly-grown-but-somehow-still-a-baby son? And on the other side: to be with someone who was supposed to fill you in, and not know what to ask.
Hermione had always known that Harry had lost his parents and had grown up without a lot of love, but she’d never really stopped to think deep and hard about what it meant, not having parents or family in his life. It wasn’t just sleeping under the stairs, or being beat up by his cousin, although that was bad enough. It meant no one was there to save Harry’s macaroni art and tease him about it, when he grew up enough to find it funny, too. It meant no one ever took his picture, or knew exactly how to discern his anger from sadness. It meant that no one could tell him if he laughed like James, if they found the same things funny, if his dislike for chunky mashed potatoes or preference for chocolate came from his mother or his father. It meant that he didn’t even know what to ask about. It meant that there was an ocean of secrets he knew he’d never know, and he was stuck swimming in circles, hoping for another taste of salt that would steer him somewhere to sea. Loss, incomprehensible loss, and all people would tell him was that same incredibly stupid bit about having his mother’s eyes.
“No, we really can’t,” Hermione said, thinking of Sirius laughing as he described the picture he’d received of baby Harry nearly knocking into the cat, and then something just above her stomach snapped and she started to cry.
“Oh, Hermione,” Ron said. She heard him shuffle a little, and then he gave her a sort of hug from behind: arms around her shoulders, his head resting on top of hers. “What’s going on?” he asked. He wasn’t that great with talking about feelings. If she was less upset, she would maybe laugh, but she just kept crying.
She couldn’t bring herself to tell him. “It’s just a lot sometimes,” she confessed, and Ron shifted on the bed so he was holding her and she could hear his heart beat. It was going fast. So was hers. A package clattered to the floor. Why was he comforting her like this? She tried to bat that thought away. Because their trio was more boy heavy than girl heavy, they, as an unspoken rule, didn’t touch very much: Harry and Ron exchanged the light slap, tap, and bump; to Hermione, they might brush her fingers once or twice, tap her on the knee during their talk, awkwardly pat her on the shoulder if they needed something. Hermione always initiated a hug, and it was always only before or after a break, and Ron and Harry always hugged her lightly, politely, tenderly, putting lots of air between their chests. This was nice. Unprecedented and nice. But Ron would do this, maybe, if another friend asked. He had a large family of brothers and one sister. His parents kissed every night. Surely a touch to him meant something smaller.
“It is a lot,” he agreed. “You have me, you know?” He sighed. “I’m not smart like you…brave like Harry…but you still have me, okay? If you need me.”
She noticed that his eyes kept flickering between her eyes and her lips. His hand shifted to her cheek. Her hands shifted to hold his chest.
She thought about saying something. Or leaning in. She was thinking so hard she almost missed it: the brush of Ron’s lips against hers, jerky and nervous. She was so stunned it took her almost a full second to return the favor. Then she heard the stomping of Ginny coming up the stairs and Ron backed up so he was standing, then reaching down to pick up a package, voice bright and cheery and saying, “Hermione, you can’t have forgotten how to open Muggle packages, have you? Hear, hand me the sizzlers, I’ll cut the tape myself--” and she was laughing a little and saying, “They’re scissors, Ron,” and Ron was opening up the boxes of nonmagical candy and some fiction books and exclaiming loudly over every little thing. Harry stopped in their room as Ron tried a Twizzler and screwed up his face in disgust, and then Harry was laughing, too, heaving with it, and the three of them were losing it so hard they didn’t hear Mrs Weasley’s call to dinner until she marched into the room, saw them shaking on the floor, and chuckled herself too.