Disclaimer: I only own what can be recognizes as something not borne from the genius mind of JKR…which really leaves very little. How sad.
Okay, here is the chapter mostly everyone was waiting for, where the question `is she really dead or maybe not?' gets an answer. I'm afraid hat from an outside point of view this might be either skewed or quite farfatched, but hey, it's all spewing forth from my overactive imagination, whoever said that had to be realistic? Well, I hope you enjoy.
Harry Potter and the Bite of No Mortibus
By Pearl Drop Angel
Chapter 7: Connection
Drip. Drip.
Through a hazy cloud of pained sleep, sound was beginning to come back.
Drip. Drip.
And that dripping was beginning to get annoying.
Drip. Drip.
It was water. Water that, falling from a height, seemed to shatter the surface of the small puddle that had formed, and, along with it, the thick fog that would not allow conscious thought.
Drip. Drip.
And beyond that fog was a splittling headache.
One unlike any that this particular mind had ever felt. She felt the urge to gurlge a disapproving wince, to give a groan of displeased pain, to hiss at the discomfort that completely invaded her form.
She was a creature of reason, and she would act accordingly, no matter how unbearably loud her muscles were screaming or her head was pounding. She would use said head before anything else, therefore pushing the sounds of disapproval till she had everything figured out.
Well, first off, she felt cold. A chill that seemed to come from her very bones and out rather than the other way around, which she found extremely peculiar. Oh, and her body was lying flat on a gelid, uneven earthly surface, completely flattened against it with her limbs lying at odd angles. She felt like a boulder the size of Hogwarts was on top of her and preventing her from moving.
And her body tingled in the way that feet tend to do when they fall asleep. However, that rather unpleasant feeling was invading every inch of her form, in places she didn't even know she had, and it did not feel good.
She ached. Everywhere.
It felt like waking up after months of petrification. Almost as though she'd died only to be pulled away from the afterlife and forced back in a body that could no longer hold life in it.
And at that thought, the recalling of it all hit her still groggy mind, piercing realization into her.
She remembered.
She remembered walking out of the infermary right after having helped Anthony (a first year Hufflepuff), who'd nearly lost his life while climbing the stairs to his dorm, just to have her world end.
That moment was burned into her mind.
As she'd closed the heavy wooden doors behind her, she felt an overwhelming oppression taking hold of her, a sense of foreboding of the kind that she generally scoffed off as jumbled nerves that she couldn't ignore. She'd felt watched. Actually she'd felt so even before entering, but she'd written it off as nothing. Yet when she'd walked out she'd felt like two holes were being burnt into her.
There were footsteps approaching as well. Two heels beating heavily on the gravel stone floors, running at a pace that spoke of desperation, seeming to come in her direction. But those heavy footfalls she felt she could trust, and they seemed to be telling her to run.
Yet, before she could, her eyes caught moment from a short distance away. Her vision wasn't fast enough to register what it was that was suddenly at her feet until it was too late.
Two sharp deep points broke through her socks and lacerated the flesh of her ankles, where her flesh seemed to become burning ice. And looking down she saw.
She'd never seen it before, but she'd heard enough about it to know what it was. Nagini. Voldemort's snake. She'd felt a scream escape her throat, or rather a loud gurgle that spontaneously burst from her as the only sign of obvious pain.
And the footsteps. They were replaced by a true scream of horror. One that had not been borne from her. It was deeper in tone and far more desperate than hers. Despite the fact that she could already feel her conscious leaving her, her eyes sought out the source of such an anguished cry that she had never heard of in her years.
Her body was leaving her, crumbling to the ground, but all her thoughts were of him. Harry. Her best friend. The boy that was still mourning for his godfather. The same boy that didn't deserve to mourn anyone else close to him. Ever again.
It was strange in those moments.
She knew she was dying.
She knew that she could have never seen the light of day again. She'd contemplated her death often, being Harry Potter's friend, she'd accepted it as a strong possibility, almost a certainty. And she'd always thought that, in that moment, she would be a frenzy of thought, or that her memories would flash before her eyes in such a blur that she couldn't follow them, or that she wouldn't think at all and simply succumb to the numbness.
But the case was that she didn't reflect any of those. Her only thought for him. For the boy that was covered in a cold sweat, his shoulders shaking as he held her, his eyes and voice desplaying a sorrow that no creature of the world (Muggle or magical) should ever go though. Harry should never have had to know it. Not him. Not sweet, lovable, selfless Harry, who had already lost nearly everyone that had ever mattered.
And, if she mattered even a fraction of what he meant to her, her death would devastate him. She could already see it. She could see it in that moment while he looked to her, their eyes locked together, him begging her not to leave him alone in a world that would never understand him.
She didn't want to die. She'd wanted to be there for him still, to continue being the rock that he clung to when his own limbs seemed to give out. She wanted to continue being the one that kept him sane. Ron was the one that kept him happy, but the one thing that she was proud of in her life was precisely that. She kept him grounded. Many believed him to be cold and calculating, not even realizing how far from the truth the truly were. Harry was a creature of feeling and emotion and irrationality, even if he could hide it in the moments where it mattered. When he wasn't facing his death, however, she knew that he relied on her, however subconsciously, to keep him in this world.
But she could no longer help it. She'd tried to open her mouth, tried to tell him that she would always be with him. But she'd never managed to. Her forces were leaving her.
And she found herself praying to whatever entities were listening that the strength that would soon no longer be with her, would reach him instead and fill him with something that belonged to her to rely on.
She didn't know if she was just imagining it, if it was just a subconscious wish on her part, but she'd felt, with a certaintly, that her life was leaving her-not in a painful, sorrowfilled void-and that it was seeping out of her still-not-yet-healed-scar from the Department of Misteries, and flowing into Harry. She'd felt connected with him then.
He didn't seem to feel the same, but that could have been because he was choking on his sobs. Despite that, Hermione had died happy, knowing that she'd given to Harry everything that she could have, though her last thought was that she wished to live their intense friendship far longer than they'd been able to. Just a moment longer.
But, if she had died then, what was she doing there now? Wherever `there' was, of course. It seemed to be pitch black.
Oh, wait! Maybe if she opened her eyes she might be able to assess whether or not she was in hell or had simply been subjected to the experiment of some sick, cruel, ressurecting rite.
Her eyelids felt glued shut by that awful grime that seems to form when one slept too long, but, after several tries, she managed to pry them open.
And, suppressing a gasp, screwed them back shut as she realized that Dolohov, the one that had injured her just a few months earlier (or maybe longer, as she didn't know how long it was since she'd died) was not two feet away from her with his back against the cave wall. She stilled her breathing, hoping he didn't notice that she had risen.
Then she heard a shuffling sound, as though he was shifting, a dull thud followed by a sort of snorted snore, and another shuffling.
She tried to keep her face from displaying any signs of life, but…was he snoring? She cracked one eye open just enough to see that he had, in fact, slipped down to the ground and turned his back to her, facing the cave wall, to sleep. She didn't dare sigh in relief.
Still not moving, she tried to assess things around her from the one eye that was only partially open. For one thing, it was still very dark. It could have been night, but she couldn't find the opening to the cave, so they might have simply been too deep into it to discern whether or not it was day or not. Then again, she was surrounded by sleeping Death Eaters.
Besides Dolohov, who was obviously supposed to be keeping guard of her and was failing rather miserably, there was a group of about a dozen cloaked figures huddled against another wall of the cave, which she realized, was extremely vast. She couldn't see who the Death Eaters were since their hoods were drawn to give them even that small bit of protection against the biting chill of the space they filled.
But she could guess.
And there were two figures in particular which were not difficult at all to pick out amongst the other two. One was broad shouldered, with his hood covering the top half of his visage, though it didn't matter. The permanent sneer and the unkept tangle of dirty silver blond hair were unmistakable. Lucius Malfoy.
And close to him a smaller, more feminine figure. Overly pale hands crossed over a small bosom, long ebony black hair just as unkept as Malfoy's, and a face which she would never forget.
Bellatrix Lestrange.
Screwing her eyes back shut, Hermione felt the overpowering urge to call to the boy that the sleeping woman had hurt possibly beyond hope.
Harry!
She hadn't been expecting an answer.
*°*°*
When in the process of transfiguring an object (animate or inanimate) into another of a different nature, it is best to picture the shifting of its shape in one's mind several times before beginning, then, when confident, to replay the process over mentally but with the addition of wand movement. Once that has been mastered, simply imagine what had been played in one's mind happening as the incantation is pronounced along with the practiced wand movement.
That, at least, was what Hermione had written several months earlier in the study sheets that she'd passed he and Ron to help along with the OWL studies. Harry had hardly looked at them twice at the time. Now, they had begun his Bible. Not as a momento of her, because, in his mind, Harry felt that she was still alive. And she would come back.
When that did happen, she would be most upset if nobody had bothered to get good notes for her. Since he was the only one who believed that she would someday return among the living (not that he'd told anyone that), such a job had to be taken into his own hands.
And he found that burying himself into his studies was a good way to stop the flood of conflicting thought from drowning out his mind. He knew with absolute certainty that Hermione was alive (not that the papers had given any indication or any more hints since her…body had still not been found) but he also knew that he was very likely in denial. After all, he'd been feeling the same thing of Sirius.
Was it possible that two of the most important people in his life who had fallen right before his very eyes were both still salvageable? Not very likely. But he had to cling to that or lose himself to his despair. And so he studied.
Taking a deep breath, he looked down at the small circle made by a short chain of ivy. He was supposed to be transfiguring it into a small hand held mirror. Looking at it he tried to picture the best way to go about it, deciding that using the ivy as a garland in a way of frame to the mirror and filling in the space with the reflective glass would be the best way to go about it. Following the directions in the study notes (which he didn't even need to look to anymore since he knew them by heart), he closed his eyes, drew three circles in the air with his wand in an anticlockwise movement, and pronounced the word "Ederspecchio".
When he blinked his eyes open, and looked down expecting no change at all, he stared in surprise. There, in place of the small palm sized wreathed ivy, stood a very similarly shaped mirror, it's frame made of white gold in the form of the ivy leaves. It looked as though he'd turned the green leaves into thick ice, the small drops of dew solidified into small diamonds, the reflective glass that he'd made appear out of thin air as sparkling as the water in the depth of small rivers racing down snow covered mountains, it's edges thinly webbed with what might have looked like ice outside a frozen window, but was in truth tendrils of more thinly and delicately worked white gold.
It looked like it had been kissed by Christmas itself.
He sighed deeply.
Hermione would have loved it. She loved winter and Christmas in all its immaculate beauty. It was her favourite time of the year. He'd never pictured her to be one to carry small mirrors in her pocket (unless considering the basilisk accident in second) just to be able to check her reflection whenever needed, but, if she would carry one, he was more than certain that the one he'd made would have never left her pocket.
He sighed again, and this time McGonagall heard him. She turned to see what was bothering, and stared in shock at what lay on Harry's workstation. While everyone else still hadn't even managed to solidify the outside edges of the ivy leaves, Harry had made the most beautiful ivy mirror that she'd seen since his father had made his own. Recovering from her state of disbelief, she cleared her throat, and announced that Harry had managed to complete the assignment first, assigning him thirty points (based on the difficulty of the task) for doing so. He looked up at her, and she was taken aback by the sheer look of pain written across his face, as though he hadn't understood what she'd meant.
She tried to keep her softened expression from showing to the on looking class as she told him, "Use the remaining class time as you wish, Potter," and with that moved on.
Harry, not noticing how Ron was openly glaring at him for some reason, decided to spend the time left doing the only think he'd been able to do since he'd returned to Hogwarts two days earlier. He thought of Hermione, and whether or not he was crazy to think that he still had the chance to see her in the flesh.
But he had to think that he could, or completely lose his sanity.
And it didn't help that Ron still acted awkward around him, seemingly more so than before, even though Harry himself had been acting much more like the boy he'd been before the Department of Mysteries (without the anger, of course, and maybe a little too much depression). Ginny had welcomed him warmly, much like her mother would have before Grimmauld Place. And he'd welcomed it; her motherly behaviour was comforting, if a little smothering. It felt like the only true contact left in his life.
But it didn't replace Hermione, and the firm, calming grip that she'd always had over him. Nothing could ever replace that which had so quietly grown inside him with her. Not having her there was like having no more home.
Again, he sighed. Home. He'd always thought that Hogwarts was home. In a way it was, but only when it held everything he cherished in it. Now, when he walked down the halls he could hear the sympathetic whispers softly muttered behind hands, the strange looks, and even the badly concealed mutterings of the possibility of him as her murderer.
If she had been by his side, he could have handled them, somehow. Alone, he couldn't. He could never do anything without her.
Then again, it was exactly in those moments, when he walked the cold stone halls and heard the familiar voices hushing about him, that he felt that her life was not gone. He felt that because they didn't oppress him. They didn't suffocate him. They didn't kill him. Everything in the castle breathed of Hermione, and it didn't hurt to have this constant reminder of her. It reassured him.
Those were the moments when he knew he would see her again, and hear her voice call out his name in a startled gasp, as though his presence always delighted her and somehow surprised her. As thought she found it impossible for him to seek her out. He'd never paid attention to the way she'd pronounce his name in earnest. Like he was precious to her.
He wished he could hear her say his name again.
And then it came.
"Harry!"
He jumped in his seat, the name he'd been thinking of cried in a mental shout of "Hermione"! and around him, there was the sound of shattering as the solidified ivy leaves fell to shards simultaneously. His mind called out, as he looked around the class, and noticed that everyone's assignment had broken the very second that he'd heard his name called. Everyone's, except him own, which was concealed in his hand. Afraid that someone would notice, he slipped it into his pocket, berating himself for what he was allowing his mind to play on him.
"Idiot!" He told himself. "Hermione's not here! She can't have called you! Stop kidding with yourself, Potter!" He screamed inwardly. He knew that the only reason why he'd heard her voice was because he'd wanted to hear it. "It came from inside my head anyway," he reasoned, "that has to mean it was just borne from my desire her to hear her."
That sounded very plausible, but, if that were the case, he wouldn't have shattered people's assignment. He knew that it had been his doing, however unwilling, but every muscle in his body seemed to tense to its breaking point when he'd heard her voice, and the mirrors must have shattered in his place.
Her tone of voice. It was terrified. Ignoring the ruckus around him, he rolled his eyes skyward, and sent a silent prayer. "Please be okay, Hermione!" And yet, as silent as it was, his prayer had been heard.
"H-Harry?!"
He jumped again. That was Hermione's voice alright, and he'd heard it with his ears, not his mind, although it seemed to come directly from his eardrums, not registered by them. And the voice sounded surprised, as though it had heard him calling to her, and didn't believe that it could be possible.
And it couldn't be possible. "Oh, Merlin! I'm losing it! He thought, horrified. It can't be Hermione, it just can't be! She said that even for wizards it was strange to hear voices. I've lost it completely." He tried to convince himself. He felt himself trembling. He wanted it to be Hermione.
"Harry," this time the voice seemed more confident, as though his words of incredulity had convinced her that it was real. Whatever `it' was.
"Her-Hermione?" He tried to call out to her with his mind.
"Harry!" She answered, her voice relieved and surprised and pleased to hear him, just as it was in the moments that he'd been recalling such short minutes earlier.
"Am I losing it?" He asked. He had to be. His best friend was nowhere to be found, and yet he was having a mental conversation with her. Or rather, she said his name, and he conjured and shared thoughts with her. "I'm definitely losing it."
"I don't think so. You sound pretty sober to me, if a little more depressed than what I would like…I just don't know how this is possible!" She exclaimed. "I've never read of anything of the sort. Oh, how I wish I could go to the library and find out!"
"Oh, gods! It really is you!" He rejoiced within, and he practically felt her grin at his sigh of relief, but then he felt her confusion.
"Harry, what happened to me?"
He hesitated at that. "What do you remember?"
Her reply was ready. "Getting bitten in front of the Hospital Wing."
He winced as that mental image flashed his mind again, as it did countless times during the day. "And then?" He prompted her.
"Nothing", she answered quickly, as though she'd already studied the situation, which, of course, she had. "I just woke up here."
"Here where?" He asked confused. She was in a physical place, then?
"A cave of some sorts, and it must be pretty deep," she explained. "I can't tell whether it's night or day."
"You don't remember how you got there?"
"No. But I would think it had something to do with the dozen or so Death Eaters sleeping around me" she told him far too calmly.
Harry nearly shouted out a cry of terror at that, but, fortunately for him, it was drowned out by McGonagall dismissing class for all the commotion of the broken ivy mirrors and the following shuffle of departing students. He tried to swallow his gurgling emotion. "What?"
He began to gather his things as well, lurking behind everyone else, hoping that nobody would try and wait for him. No one did. Not even Ron.
She didn't answer his question, so he repeated her. "Hermione, what Death Eaters?"
She hesitated, but finally decided to answer. "The ones that were freed from Azkaban," she told him reluctantly.
Harry had to fight to keep his gasp from escaping. Bellatrix Lestrange and Dolohov had been among them!
Yes, Harry," she confirmed his fear, "but they're sleeping now, and I haven't moved yet from where I am, so they don't know I'm awake."
"Awake?" Harry repeated. It was a strange word to use.
"I don't know of any other word for it. I just…woke up."
"So…you didn't die?" Harry asked, feeling stupid. She had been medically declared dead by the wizarding medical community.
"I…I don't know. Maybe I was in a sort of hibernation," she conjured. "I just woke up in this cave feeling like I'd slept for half a year. I still can't move." She paused. "Harry, how long have I been…gone?"
"Eleven days," He replied readily.
"And how did I get here?"
"You were…" he searched for the right word, "stolen…when you were being sent back to your parents." He knew he didn't need to tell her that she was supposed to be buried by that time. She knew.
There was silence. For a second, Harry was afraid that he'd been imagining the whole thing and now it was gone, but, thankfully Hermione spoke to him again.
"How are Ron and Ginny?" She changed the subject.
"I don't know really," he replied honestly. "I didn't really stay long after you…fell."
"Why?"
"Because…Hogwarts is full of you."
She hesitated before speaking again, as though she didn't know what to make of what Harry had said, but it really was rather obvious. There wasn't one inch of Hogwarts that Harry had stepped through in which she had not accompanied him. Something like Grimmauld Place and Sirius.
"Where did you go?"
"Grimmauld Place," he replied tonelessly. There really was no other place safe for him after all, and she ought to know that.
"Why did you come back?"
He sighed aloud, but she still heard him in her mind. "Dumbledore called me back when you…disappeared."
At the mention of Dumbledore, Harry felt, as though she were sitting next to him and the air had shifted in display of movement, Hermione jump.
"Hermione?" He asked confused. "What's wrong?"
"I don't know, Harry," she spoke apprehensively. "I don't know that you should tell Dumbledore."
"You reckon he'll think me a nutter," he replied quickly. Not that he would have blamed the old mage, he was wondering so himself.
"No," she answered quickly. "He's always believed you before, there would be no reason for him to doubt you now."
"But you said yourself that even in the Wizarding World it wasn't normal to hear voices in your head."
"Yes! But Harry, listen! If Dumbledore sent for you than he must have had good reason. I think he suspects that I'm not actually dead. He'll believe you if you tell him that your hearing my voice."
"Yeah, in my head!" He exclaimed.
"Harry, he'll believe you if you tell him," she told him strongly. He believed her. He knew she must have good reason to say so, even if he didn't see it. "Just don't say anything to him yet."
"Why not?" He was rather baffled by her request, since, from the very beginning, she had always adviced him to keep their Headmaster always involved in what was happening around him-and sometimes-within him.
"Just don't. Not yet. We need to know more of what is going on. If you tell him now, he'll try and get things started and bring attention to himself, as subtle as he is. It's happened before. I mean isn't that the reason for why my kidnapping was so obvious? Voldemort wants Dumbledore to search for me, and I'm sure he'd doing that, but I'm also sure there is no lead yet, as we're here in a cave in Merlin-knows-where!" She exclaimed anxiously. "I don't want the Order to come charging in thinking they're going to save me, just to run into an ambush. We need to bid out time, Harry, and find out what's going on."
Harry resisted the urge to physically nod, and was about to reply when he heard his name being called. Several times.
"Mr Potter," came a quiet voice behind him, slightly huffing in an attempt to keep up with the maddening pace he set whenever his mind went in overdrive. He'd never heard Iridis Larvae speak before, and it surprised him. Despite the fact that she looked like some kind of ghostly figure that might have been found in a Muggle movie, completely ethereal and seemingly made of air and ice, her voice was surprisingly concrete, rich in texture, and deep in tonality, slightly throaty as well.
Harry blinked at her, trying to get his mind back into his own body. Until that moment, he'd felt as though he'd been asported to wherever Hermione was to converse with her. He shook his head lightly to clear it. "Yes, Professor?" After all, she was the new Defense Agaisnt the Dark Arts teacher.
She took a deep breath, saying, "You were so lost in thought, you didn't even hear me call you all those times." She seemed amused by this, but when Harry caught sight of her eyes, which he'd first thought to be two entirely white orbs with no iris or pupil, he was struck by the reality that, in fact she did have both, though they were entirely blank, her iris slightly outlined by a shadow, as well as her pupil, and he remembered what Hermione had told him about her.
"Can you see them?" He asked her, slightly alarmed.
"Your thoughts," she spoke as though asking a question, but was rather stating a truth. She took a breath and shrugged her milky whtie strands over her shoulder. "Not exactly. Your at least, though I can still feel you."
Harry's eyebrows furrowed. "Er, what does that mean?"
She shrugged. "Your feeling aren't just your own," she explained, "From what I'd seen, your thoughts never managed to space out much, not enough for me to see them well," she squared him, and he saw the small shadow outllining the pupil that fixed him in her gaze dilate as she searched deeper. "It seems different now."
Harry didn't know what that meant, but she gave off a small sound that made him think that she thought that a subject to be looked over at a later time. "That's not important now." She waved off the topic, making Harry very confused. He would have thought her to be rather like Dumbledore, one that did not truly say what was happening in and around them, but she'd been surprisingly open with him. "I wanted to speak to you of your friend."
"Hermione?" He asked, worried. Did she hear her thoughts through his mind?
"No, your other friend," she replied quickly.
"Ron?" His question was confused this time.
"Yes," she replied, and she looked as though she was furrowing her features, though they remained smooth. "I've…noticed some changes in the way I…percieve him." She explained.
Harry blinked. "Oh, well…I guess he's not taking…it…too well," he answered, although he didn't truly know. Ron had seemed distant, but that had been during the summer as well.
The Oculus Immensus was still seeing right through him. "Yes, he's not taking it well," she answered. "Watch out for him," she advised him, and with that walked away, her pale billowy robes whipping around her as she stepped down the hall in the opposite direction.
Harry stood in the hallway, wondering what had happened, and why, within all that had happened in the few days, the strangest occurance seemed to be what had just transpired with the `seeing' woman, and that fact that her `advice' seemed to tell him to what out `from' Ron, rather than `for' him.
To be continued.
Okay, that was it. Next chapter out next week. Thanks to Michelle White for betaing (shame on J, who seems to have disappeared off the face of the planet again!) and Kudos to whoever is lovely enough to leave a review. You know I thrive on feedback (even flames are welcome as it is getting quite cold here lately ^_^)
Thanks for reading
Pearl
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