Into the Night
Nighttime shadows dance around Hermione, and the edges of the world bend.
She turns to lay on her side, pulling the stiff hotel sheets tighter around her. She breathes in, slowly, cautiously. The air pours through her nose and into her lungs. Hermione holds it for a beat, and then pushes it out again.
She doesn’t know when breathing became something she had to think about, when she stopped trusting her body to accept air. All she knows is that she has to pause and ensure each breath has found its mark before allowing herself to take another.
Hermione sighs and twists the blanket more firmly around her shoulders. Sometime in the past year the world has once again crumbled and attempted to reassemble itself around her, the jumbled jigsaw pieces forming a picture she no longer understands.
She closes her eyes as the oxygen travels through her veins, and thinks of the days ahead of her. The life ahead of her. She tries to imagine what life will look like when she returns home, how it will feel to step back into the house in Hampstead Garden with her parents alongside her.
The images feel frustratingly foggy, trapped like the smoke within crystal balls she has never been able to coax into coherent pictures.
Hermione makes herself inhale again, pulling the air inside her.
Lavender and Parvati had been good at divination, she remembers. They had talked about it incessantly, shooting her dirty looks whenever she sniffed and mentioned Professor Trelawney’s obvious shortcomings as a teacher.
It used to infuriate Hermione, their undisguised scorn at her dismissal of the subject. As though she were a lesser witch because she couldn’t read tragedy in a heap of tea leaves.
As though not having the Sight meant there was something wrong with her.
The old, familiar, fear creeps up her throat and Hermione swallows heavily as she curls into herself. She had been so horrid to both Lavender and Parvati, flaunting her disdain for them and their beloved Professor Trelawney.
She wishes she could find this piece of herself, the small pebble in her soul that makes her cold and horrid to people until they decide they are tired of her. She wants to rip it from her body and crush it beneath her foot, throw it into fiendfyre like it is a horcrux. Maybe then she can keep more than one friend. Maybe then she will be a person others can love up close.
A gentle rustling echoes through the room, and the bitter fear blooms against Hermione’s tongue as she thinks of George.
He sits awake on the bed opposite her, this she knows though they have hardly spoken since those stilted, awful moments after she pulled away and his hands dropped from her face.
She supposes she ought to be grateful that he had simply risen, face expressionless, and gotten ready for bed. He could have shouted, called her heartless and frigid and unfeeling. He could have decided he had finally had enough of her and left altogether.
He could have laughed and told her it had all been a joke.
George shuffles again, and Hermione stifles a sigh. She does not know if his silence is intended to be punishment or mercy, but she wishes it would end. She thinks dejectedly to the days ahead of them, scanning list after list of names in search of her parents without the promise of a joke or a twinkling laugh.
She hadn’t realized how much she had waited for those jokes, how his laughter burrowed into her chest and lightened some of the terrible tightness. The days ahead feel grayer, heavier, without the prospect of hearing them again.
Yet another thing she has ruined.
With a groan, Hermione rolls onto her back and lets her head flop onto the pillow. A thrumming pulse begins to beat against the base of her skull, and she puts a hand to her forehead in an effort to quell it.
Her head lays heavy on her pillow, the swirling thoughts bouncing against the edges of her brain. With another sigh, Hermione rests her fingers against her temple, pressing gently, as though she can catch hold of the thoughts and make them sit still.
An arms length away, George shuffles against his own mattress and lets out a soft cry.
Hermione inhales, her fingers pushing harder against her head as she turns to face him in the dark.
“George?” she whispers, the words sounding overly loud and plaintive against the quiet. “Are you alright?”
She waits. No answer comes.
Hermione lets out her breath and falls deeper into the pillow. Her head seems to be growing heavier, and her limbs feel buoyant, almost weightless. Like a gentle breeze could lift her from her bed and carry her off into the sky.
She looks again towards George, unsure now if he is awake or asleep.
The clock on her nightstand flashes 4:16, glowing numbers making her shiver for their soft red light. She closes her eyes, remembers the vicious jets of red and purple flying from Yaxley’s wand as he pursued them. She remembers the scarlet blood streaming down George’s forehead, the red lines on her cheeks where she had pressed herself into his shirt.
She glances again at the bed near the window, silent since the cry she heard a few moments ago.
Hermione bites her lip and momentarily thinks about rising from her own bed, taking the two steps to cross the room, and sitting beside him. She imagines taking his hand, holding onto him as he sleeps as he had done for her the night before.
She swallows and releases her lips, locking the thought away in a dark corner of her mind.
He has not asked for her to sit with him, she tells herself sternly. And after the events of the evening, her presence would not be a comforting one.
She would only be a nuisance, and she has promised herself not to make his life any harder than she already has.
Another rustle comes from the bed near the window. Hermione turns away, squeezing her eyes closed as the pounding in her head grows louder.
Sleep will not come for her tonight. She knows this. She swallows and thinks again of George, of how much easier it was to face the darkness when he sat beside her.
She hopes he is asleep.
She hopes it is peaceful.
***
The next day dawns clear and grey. Hermione and George read through the morning with barely a word spoken, the air between them thick.
Hermione sits cross-legged on top of her bed, her eyes floating over the list of names in front of her without absorbing any of them. George lays sprawled across his own bed, flat on his back with his book of white pages lifted in front of his face.
Hermione’s gaze drifts towards him before snapping back.
They have spent other days in near silence, she reminds herself. In the library they had spent hours on end quietly reading alongside each other. She shouldn’t worry.
Still, that bitter fear blooms again in her throat, and Hermione thinks again of the night before. The way his hand had cupped her jaw, his breaths gliding across her skin.
She remembers the confusion in his eyes, the horrible coolness in his voice when he pulled away.
Shaking her head, she adjusts her legs and bends to review the list of names in front of her again, one finger coming forward to trace the page as she reads.
She comes to the end of the surnames starting with W and sighs, flipping back to the beginning of the volume and beginning again.
She could move faster, she knows this. She could simply read through the surnames beginning with W, verify there are no listings for a Monica or Wendell Wilkins, and move on.
Yet she finds herself flipping back to the beginning, reading through each page with painstaking attention lest she miss something.
She could never forgive herself if she missed something.
Morning slips by and at midday George stands and announces it is time for lunch before once again conducting a symphony of household spells in the kitchenette.
Hermione takes the opportunity to set aside what feels like her thousandth volume of white pages and lay back on her mattress. The sun blares through the window, the heavy rays kissing her through the glass, seeming to warm her from the inside out.
With a contented sigh, Hermione wriggles out of her jacket and sits up, her t-shirt letting the filtered sunlight graze her skin.
A clatter sounds from the kitchenette, and Hermione turns to see George approaching her, the small refrigerator closing itself behind him.
“Here,” he says, holding out a plate laden with a sandwich and crisps towards her.
“Thanks.” Hermione reaches and takes the plate from him, her stomach rumbling at the sight of food.
George stills in front of her.
Hermione frowns and looks up. “What?”
George’s eyes snap to her face, and his hand drops from the plate. Slowly, he nods towards her arm, still outstretched between them.
Hermione glances down and feels her breath catch as she understands. The word Mudblood glints in the sunlight, the coarse letters white and puckered against her skin. She hurriedly sets the plate on the mattress and reaches behind her for her jacket, tugging it back on.
“Sorry,” George says gruffly, stepping back and sitting on his bed across from her. He sets his plate on his lap and picks up a crisp. “I hadn’t seen that before.”
“I don’t publicize it,” Hermione says coolly, crossing her arms against her chest.
“I know. That’s not what I meant.” George frowns and pops a crisp in his mouth.
Hermione doesn’t reply. She picks up the sandwich from her plate and takes a bite, avoiding George’s gaze.
“Did that happen at the battle?” He asks.
“On the run.” Hermione chews the inside of her cheek and looks down at her knees. She feels somehow unnerved, exposed. A hand comes to pull at the sleeve of her jacket. The scar seems to burn against her skin, reminding her of its presence.
Out of the corner of her eye she sees George lean slightly towards her, a hand ghosting over his own arm, as though expecting an identical scar to burst through his skin.
“Do you think about it?”
Hermione looks up and finds him watching her again, his forehead creasing as he stares at her covered arm.
She bites her lip and shudders, her arm pulsing as though it is once again held down against the floor of Malfoy Manor. She can feel the blade of the knife slice her flesh, can hear Bellatrix’s cold whisper in her ear, the hiss of the word “mudblood.”
“All the time.” Her voice scrapes against her throat, her chest tight as she remembers the terror, the pain that had seemed to cut through her bones and strike fire to her soul.
She hears shuffling, and then feels the mattress beside her dip. She can smell cinnamon, can feel George’s fingers drag against her palm and then wrap around her hand.
“Sorry,” he murmurs. “It just caught me off guard.”
Hermione takes a ragged breath and lets her head come down to rest against his shoulder, ignoring all the reasons she has promised herself not to do such a thing again.
“It’s alright,” she says. “I can see how it would be a bit startling.”
George’s hand releases hers, and Hermione feels him shift as he brings his arm up to drape across her shoulders, pulling her closer towards him. “Who was it?”
“Bellatrix,” she whispers. “At Malfoy Manor.”
“She cursed you?”
Hermione shakes her head. She straightens and rolls up the sleeve of her jacket, holding her arm out in front of George. He takes it in his free hand, his thumb brushing gently over the letters.
“It was a knife,” she says. “The one that killed Dobby. It had some sort of curse on it. I still don’t know how it didn’t kill me.”
George’s fingers flex around her arm, and Hermione can hear him swallow as he bends to examine the scar further.
“Is there any way to get it to heal completely?” he asks. He runs the tip of his finger just under the raised skin, making Hermione shiver.
“No.” She shakes her head. “I asked Madame Pomfrey when she healed everything else. She said with it being Dark Magic—if there were something that would make it heal completely I would have had to have used it right away. So even if it were possible, it was too late.”
“You keep it covered.” George runs his thumb over her forearm again, the arm around her dropping to sit around her waist.
Hermione purses her lips and turns to face him. “If someone branded you for being a mudblood would you want everyone to be able to see it?”
He shrugs. His eyes flit over her face, locking momentarily on her own before dropping back down to the angry scar.
Quietly, slowly, he brings her arm up so it is level with his face. George runs a finger over the marred skin again, then leans forward and presses a soft kiss into it.
Hermione’s heart stutters in her chest, and she squeezes her eyes closed.
“George—”
“Right. Sorry.”
His voice is low, rough. He brushes the pad of a finger over the letters one final time before gently releasing her.
Hermione swallows as the arm around her waist retracts and he pulls away.
“George—” she tries again, the words quivering in her throat.
Her arm burns, the skin freshly branded where his fingers and mouth had touched it.
“I know,” he says stiffly, rising from the bed with his face hidden. He picks up his plate from the bed near the window and walks towards the kitchenette. “I forgot myself. Won’t happen again.”
Hermione bites her lip and looks to the floor. “I’m not—”
“You should eat.” He shuffles in the kitchenette, his back still to her as he rearranges plates and casts a careless scrubbing charm over the refrigerator. “We can’t have you wasting away to nothing before we find your mum and dad.”
Lip still clamped beneath her teeth, Hermione takes the plate beside her and gingerly pulls it onto her lap. “Thanks for making this,” she murmurs as she bites down on a crisp.
George shrugs. “Tell me if you’d rather have something else.”
Hermione shakes her head. “No,” she says quietly. “This is lovely.”
George waves his wand again so the meager array of plates and silverware arrange themselves neatly beside the kitchenette, and then turns back to face her. Hermione watches as he scoops up his abandoned volume of white pages before flopping onto the bed near the window.
“We’d best get back to it,” he says lightly. The white pages fall open in front of him and he turns onto his side, facing away from her.
Hermione does not reply. She takes another bite of sandwich and picks up her own volume, finding the page where she left off. She glances up at George, his shoulders hunched over the pages in front of him, red hair gleaming against the sunlight.
Her chest pinches, and Hermione looks down at the list of names in front of her again.
It is for the best, she tells herself. It is all for the best.
***
Hours flit by, and the sunlight filtering through the window wanes.
Hermione sits in the same position on top of her mattress, shadows dancing around her as she reads by lamplight in the darkened hotel room. George sits on his own bed, a hand running through his hair as he reads a book on memory charms.
Hermione sighs as she casts aside the white pages in her hand. Her eyes drift to the pile of volumes on the floor nearby. The pile is much smaller than it had been the day before. They must be getting close.
She takes out her wand and shrinks the volume beside her, tossing it carelessly onto the entertainment stand before getting to her feet and snatching the next.
George continues to read silently, barely looking up at her movements.
Hermione settles on top of her bed again, stretching her legs out in front of her and running her thumb through the stiff pages of the book. Her eyes drift to the window, the world outside hidden under a cloak of darkness. She thinks again of the life waiting for her back in England, the foggy image of what it will look like to return home with her parents.
She looks down at the white pages, then up towards George. He sits hunched over the book in his lap, a finger tracing the words on the page and his mouth moving soundlessly as he reads. Something heavy crests in her stomach, and Hermione swallows.
“Have you found anything?” she asks.
George looks up, frowning, and shakes his head. “Nothing I haven’t already shown you.”
Hermione sighs and leans back against her headboard, absently twisting a piece of hair around her finger as she stares at the ceiling.
“How about you?” George shifts against his mattress, stretching his legs out in front of him.
She grimaces and looks down at the white pages beside her, flipping back to the first page listing telephone numbers for all the national libraries and museums. “Nothing,” she says.
A familiar pressure closes itself around her throat as she looks again at the diminished pile of volumes on the floor. If she cannot find her parents in any of these pages then they will have to go back to visiting individual libraries and hoping for a miracle.
Hermione closes her eyes as Yaxley’s sneer again flashes through her mind. She imagines him lurking in some dark corner of Sydney, trying to find a way to reach her. Trying to find a way to reach her parents.
She must be the first to find them.
George watches her carefully from across the room, his eyes seeming to burn against the dim light. Hermione opens her mouth, a dozen unformed words bubbling up onto her tongue. One of George’s eyebrows slightly rises, and she can almost hear the question asked.
She closes her mouth, shakes her head slightly.
George’s face drops, a curtain falling over his expression. Without a word he turns away from her and bends his head over his book.
Hermione catches her bottom lip with her teeth and curses herself once again for her foolishness this afternoon. She has been so weak, so very selfish in letting herself get so close to him.
Her eyes drift over George’s tousled hair and bent shoulders before straying to the window beside him. Sydney sits quiet under a shroud of darkness, the buildings and winding streets sleeping peacefully under the shadows.
Hermione runs a hand over her hair and lets out a sigh. Her parents are somewhere on this continent, sitting in the same darkness as she is.
She glances at the clock and wonders if they are still awake. She can readily imagine them together in a cozy sitting room: her mother with her reading glasses perched on her nose and a book open in her lap, her father wearing his favorite horrible striped jumper that he used to wrap Hermione in on especially cold evenings.
Hermione chews the inside of her cheek and sinks further into her bed. For the first time, she lets herself imagine the life her parents have built for themselves in this new country. She wonders if they set up a new dental practice; she took care to leave their memories of dentistry and of the practice they had owned back home. She doesn’t know Australia’s laws when it comes to licensure, but surely Monica and Wendell will have been able to find a way to rebuild their professional lives here.
Outside of work, they will have thrown themselves into whatever little community they had found themselves in. They will have gotten library cards. Her mother will have gone to the neighbors’ homes with a batch of biscuits to say hello and introduce herself. They will have attended neighborhood parties and visiting lectures and passable community theater productions. Her father, an ardent supporter of local politics, will have tried his best to find a way to vote in the local elections and convince everyone around him to do the same.
Hermione smiles to herself as she remembers his appeals to their neighbors back home, insisting that it was not only their privilege but their duty to make their voices heard when it came to mayoral and local council elections. She wonders if he did the same in Australia this past year.
She opens the white pages and runs her finger absently over the first page. She doesn’t know if Wendell Wilkins would be eligible to vote in Australia, but she knows he would have found a way to still be involved. Maybe he was able to register as a permanent resident. Maybe he registered himself with the English government as an expatriate to ensure he could still vote in British general elections.
Hermione freezes, her finger hovering the page.
“Oh, goodness,” she breathes.
Hermione scrambles off her bed and towards the entertainment stand, rifling through the tottering pile of shrunken white pages. Warmth blooms in her chest, and she can feel her heart begin to drum against her ribcage.
“What are you doing?” George calls, frowning as he watches her over his shoulder.
“I got—I know where we need to look,” Hermione mutters, peering at one of the tiny volumes before tossing it to the floor and hastily snatching the next. “It’s just a question which one of these—”
“What?”
“I know where to go!” Hermione cries, still digging through the pile. “I just need the address—I’m sure the Sydney white pages will have it—”
She hears George sigh and sit up, the bed sheets rustling around him.
“Here.”
She turns and sees him bend to retrieve his wand from the nightstand, his brows knitted together as he flicks it towards the pile of shrunken books.
A book flies out from the bottom of the pile and into George’s outstretched hand. He taps his wand to the book so it returns to its normal size, and then wordlessly holds it out to Hermione.
“Thank you.” Hermione snatches the book from him and sits back on the corner of her mattress as she hastily opens it, flicking through the stiff pages.
“What are you looking for, exactly?” George asks, still watching her skeptically.
“Something about voter records,” Hermione says, letting out a cry of relief as she stops on a page. She looks up, her face breaking into a smile. “I know how we can find my parents’ address. I’m sure this is where we have to go.”
George’s frown deepens. “I’m going to need you to explain more.”
“My dad loves local elections,” Hermione says quickly. “He votes in them every year, they’re one of his favorite things. He’s always going on about how we all have a civic duty to vote in our communities and ensure we’re doing our part to uphold justice. When they moved here, he would have either had to register as an Australian voter or as a British expatriate in order to be able to vote in one of the two countries. And to do that, he would need to provide a permanent address.”
George runs a hand through his hair, looking from Hermione to the white pages in her hand. “And you expect we can find that in one of these books, then?”
“Not directly.” Hermione shakes her head and holds up the white pages victoriously. “But it will tell us where to go. Most countries have a single national library where they store electoral roll records. Everything we need will be there.”
George nods slowly. “Alright, then,” he says. “We can pack up and get ready to go to this national library tomorrow—”
“No,” Hermione jumps up from the bed, hand tight around the white pages. “We need to go now—we know exactly where it is. There’s no reason to wait.”
George blinks at her, jaw tightening. “Granger, in case you haven’t noticed, it’s nearly ten o’clock. I doubt a national library is open right now.”
“Exactly!” Hermione bounces on the balls of her feet, brushing her hair from her shoulder and nodding. “We can get in tonight, find what we need, and tomorrow be ready to go to the house and find Mum and Dad.”
She pauses, imagining for a shining moment them returning to the hotel in just a few hours, address in hand. She can be reunited with her parents within twenty-four hours, can be on an airplane back to England within the week.
George raises an eyebrow. “So you want to break in.”
Hermione rolls her eyes, leaning down and snatching her knapsack from the floor. “Like you’ve never broken into a library before to find something.”
George frowns. “We’ve talked about this before. I never broke into the library in the middle of the night.”
“Well, between the two of us I’m sure we can manage it,” Hermione sniffs, picking up her wand and waving it so the mass of white pages rise and float into the open knapsack. “I’ve broken into bloody Gringotts before—”
“Hermione—”
“We’ll just need to get into the building, which I’m guessing a simple confundus on the security system and an unlocking spell will allow us to do—”
“Hermione —” George rises from his bed, crosses his arms over his chest. “Just slow down, we have to—”
“We can’t slow down!” She rounds on him, the knapsack swinging wildly in her hands. “We have to go tonight—”
“We don’t—”
“Yaxley is out there!” Hermione cries, pointing towards the window and clenching her jaw. “He’s out there, probably looking for the two of us and would love to use my parents as bait. He’d love—”
She breaks off and breathes in, her pulse hammering against her neck. “Anytime I’ve ever tried to plan and prepare it’s all gone to hell anyways,” she says. “We’ve done things mostly by the rules so far but it’s too slow. Yaxley is out there and knows we’re looking for my parents. We know where we have to go, and we have to go now !”
A muscle jumps in George’s jaw.
“I thought you were supposed to be some sort of rule-breaking genius?” Hermione glares at him. “You don’t let curfews or locked doors or anything get in your way, isn’t that right?”
George’s face darkens. “That’s not—”
“We both have our wands,” Hermione snaps. “And our bags.”
She reaches down and closes the knapsack before hoisting it onto her shoulder. “I’m going whether or not you come with me,” she says, her eyes landing on his. “The address is listed in the white pages. I know where it is.”
“Fine.” George gives her one last furious look before flicking his wand and transfiguring his bag. He swings it on his shoulder and steps towards her, face stony. “Let’s go.”