Libraries and Lashings
Hermione’s back was cold when she woke up the following morning, the blankets had been tossed down around her hips and her bedmate had left long enough ago that any trace of bodyheat had seeped out of the mattress.
She found him in the sitting room next door to the room they’d slept in. His back was to the door and he was slumped down in the wingback chair, facing the charred Black family tapestry. His wand was dangling from one hand, his other tangled through his messy black hair.
Hermione stood there for far too long, her body still weak from blood loss and needing to lean heavily against the doorframe. She tried to adjust her stance, shifting her weight off the wall and onto her legs.
The solid thump she made when her knees buckled and she hit the ground was what alerted Harry to her presence. He turned abruptly at the sound, his whole body moving in one fluid motion so that he was now standing and facing her, his wand raised and a curse on the tip of his tongue.
“Merlin Hermione!” He exclaimed, his posture relaxing only slightly when he realized it was her and not a death eater. “You nearly scared the life out of me.”
She held her hands up by her head, palms towards him and wandless where she sat on the floor. He chuckled at her as she lay in a heap of limbs and curls on the floor by the doorframe. Hermione shot him a glare, but there wasn’t really any heat behind it. She was certain that she looked ridiculous, bed head and transfigured pyjamas and all.
Rather than help her up, Harry chose to settle on the floor across from her, his back pressed against the backside of the sofa and his legs crossed underneath himself. Hermione settled herself in a more comfortable position against the wall, knees pulled into her chest and head rolled back to stare at the ceiling.
“Where is everybody?” She asked finally.
“Out. Some are patrolling, the rest are on various reconnaissance missions.”
“Oh..” Hermione didn’t know what to do with that information. They were alone in the house, together. “Don’t you find it weird? Dumbledore was murdered yesterday, yet life goes on today. Don’t get me wrong I’m not mourning the old coot, but I thought you would be.”
Harry looked at her funny, his gaze confused briefly before it flashed with something sad and resigned.
“Dumbledore was already dying Hermione, didn’t he tell you that?” She thought back to that first night, she’d been so preoccupied with her newfound freedom and the opportunity that they had laid at her feet, that she hadn’t noticed anything amiss. Had he really been dying right before her eyes without her knowing?
“No, why would he? He certainly liked to play with all his cards as close to his chest as possible.” She shrugged uneasily, not entirely comfortable. This was the longest conversation they’d had yet, and she was worried their tentative peace would shatter any moment, likely at the fault of her apathy.
“Because, his death was the reson The Order decided to break you out. In fact…”
Harry kept talking, but his words muffled into the background as the ringing in her ears intensified. What did Harry mean when he said Dumbledore’s impending death was the reason she’d been freed. Was she supposed to have saved him? Would they expect her to avenge him or replace him or something? How was she connected to it all?
Hermione shook her head viciously, banishing the wayward thoughts and the tinnitus.
“... and with the horcruxes and such Dumbledore insisted that we would need you.” Harry finished. He’d obviously continued talking the entire time she’d been trapped in her thoughts, not even noticing that Hermione wasn’t listening to a word he said. He looked at her expectantly, while her brain finally processed the fraction of his words she’d actually heard.
“What the fuck is a horcrux Harry?”
—
That’s how Hermione found herself sitting crosslegged on the carpeted floor of Grimmauld’s library, a long-gone-cold cup of tee and some biscuits courtesy of a disgruntled Kreatcher abandoned beside her.
Harry was sitting across from her, his back against the bookshelves and a book abandoned on his knee. For the last three hours, he’d done nothing but watch her read Magick Moste Evile and other equally dark works, and for the last three hours Hermione had pretended she didn’t notice him staring at her.
The silence was suffocating, but she refused to be the one to break it.
“Can I ask you a question without you cursing me for it?” Harry was the first to break their tense silence, drawing her attention away from the words on the page in front of her.
“You just did.” She responded flatly, observing in her peripheral vision the way he fidgeted nervously. It was oddly funny to her, the way he was so discomforted by her presence. Hermione had vague memories of her and Harry from before. Of times when they used to curl together on the couch and she would read their textbooks aloud to him, or when Harry had been determined to break her of her fear of flying by hauling her up to sit behind him on his firebolt. They were fuzzy, and Hermione couldn’t remember the details of them, but she was about eighty-nine percent sure they were real.
“Can I ask you another?”
Hermione had to actually restrain herself from pointing out that that was technically another question, lest she disrupt the tentative peace that had settled between them. Accepting that she was done reading for the time being, she closed the book and settled it onto the floor in front of her to give him her full attention.
“Why would I curse you for asking me a simple question Harry?” She fixed her eyes on his, watching as hesitancy and something else flashed in his emerald gaze. He only held her stare for a moment before he looked away, back down to the wand he still held in his grasp when she was around.
“What happened to you?” Was his only response.
“I spent three years in solitary confinement in Azkaban Harry, that changes a person.” She tried to keep her voice friendly, it only wavered a bit over his name, not enough for him to notice she hoped.
“No, you were different even before that. I know nobody said anything, and I doubt Ron or even your parents noticed, but I did. You were different after you came home from the Department of Mysteries.” He continued, undeterred by her lack of a real answer and seemingly unaware of the way her hands curled into fists in her lap.
“Yet you never said anything.” She was talking more to herself than to him. She’d noticed the changes in herself, small enough that she could brush them off as trauma or a trick of the light. But if Harry had noticed there was something wrong with her, why didn’t he say anything? Why didn’t he try to help? Why did he still so easily turn his back on her that day in the courtroom? Hurt began to swirl in her chest as her thoughts threatened to run away from her.
“I was a child Hermione-” he started, and at his words she felt her ever-simmering temper boil over.
“SO WAS I!” he flinched at the volume of her tone, his body recoiling and his wand raising to point at her chest. Hermione was undeterred, she could barely see through her haze of fury. “I was just as much a kid as you were! Except I had just come back from the brink of death, was on a regimen of healing potions so extensive that I could barely fucking function, and was sent home to my parents who I wasn’t allowed to tell how I’d almost DIED. Where were you when I was crying myself to sleep every night that summer? Where were you when I was defending you against those two bloody death-eater wannabes who were planning to kill you before you got back to school.
“I-” he tried to interrupt, but Hermione wasn’t done. There was no putting a stopper in her words now.
“You seem to have forgotten that I was a child too Harry, when I was sat down in front of the entirety of the wizarding justice system with nobody there for me except some court-assigned public defender who couldn’t care less that I was on trial, because he was to hung up on being forced to help a lowly mudblood. Where were you when they snapped my wand in front of my face and then threw me in that hell hole? Where-”
Her voice broke there, her fury all of a sudden turning to heartbreak. Any words she might’ve had left to say were replaced with wet sobs, and to her horror she could feel hot tears streaking down her cheeks.
Harry looked lost for words, his eyes impossibly wide and his mouth hanging open. His wand was still pointing squarely at her chest, but his fingers no longer had the white-knuckle grip around it.
“So to answer your question about what happened to me Harry, I don’t know. But I do know that despite whatever happened to me being at least indirectly because of you, I’ve been all alone for the last three years. Maybe the better question should be what happened to you?”
Not giving him the chance to try and respond, Hermione climbed to her feet and snatched up the book before she turned on her heels and practically ran back to what had become her room on the upmost floor. She could hear his footsteps following her, but Hermione managed to slam her door shut and throw a strong locking charm on it before Harry caught up to her.