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See Chapter 1 for Disclaimer.
She closed her eyes slowly, then opened them and looked up toward the ceiling. Squeezing Harry's hands once more, she took a deep breath and focused her eyes again. "They're safe," she said, though not truly convinced.
"Yeah," Harry said. "They are. And you are too."
She managed a small smile, and got to her feet. Although she still had a bit of a spaced expression in her deep eyes, she had returned to a hardened look that meant that she was ready for work. "So... I'm not to leave," she began.
"Right," Harry said, standing up himself. "So... are you hungry?"
"Not really," she said.
"We have a guest room, but somehow, if the Dursleys do come home... I don't think it would do to have a girl they don't know sleeping in it." He paused a second. "You can have my room. I'll steal Dudley's, or sleep on the couch... don't want to touch Dudley's room with a ten-metre pole."
"You will not sleep on the couch--" she began, then stopped abruptly and her eyes lit up a little. "Do you have a bureau?"
"Yes..." he answered slowly, not sure what that had to do with anything.
"To your room, then," she said, outstretching her arm to allow him to pass. She threw a quick spell to the kitchen. "Don't want that water to boil over."
He smiled, and began up the stairs, with her following closely on his heels. They arrived back in his room, and Harry, still not knowing what his bureau had to do with anything, pointed to it. Hermione opened it, and noticed the lack of clothing in it. "Where do you keep your clothes, if not in your wardrobe?"
He pointed. "There, and there..."
She sighed.
"What does my wardrobe have to do with anything?"
"I can't very well live in the guest room, so I plan to--"
"You are not going to live in my bureau!"
"And why not?" she asked, bossily, as if people lived in bureaus routinely.
"Because... because it's a bureau!!!"
Hands on her hips, she looked at him. "It looks like a bureau. I'm a qualified witch. I don't intend to live in it the way it is. Honestly."
His eyes went wide.
She turned away from him and waved her wand, swishing and flicking, at the open wardrobe. She said incantations he'd never heard before, and gold sparks shot from her wand at random intervals. She finally lowered her wand. The bureau looked exactly the same as it had before. She closed the doors, and tapped them once with her wand. She then took both knobs and opened the doors simultaneously. Where the wall had once been, there was now a whole other room.
Her room was cozy, with a sage green bed in the center. It was quietly feminine. It just looked comfortable and warm. Bookshelves lined every wall, and there was, ironically, a wardrobe identical to Harry's. The room seemed to embody both the intellectualism and the caring, the heart, that was Hermione. Harry felt oddly welcome here, and he felt as though he could just stay for hours. It was a strange feeling.
"Welcome to my room, Harry," she sighed. It hurt her to think that maybe her real room, the one that looked identical to this one, was destroyed. Next to her bed was a nightstand, and on it, along with an alarm clock, were two pictures. One Muggle picture, of her family. And one Wizarding one, of she, Harry, and Ron. Her parents and Ron, both in hiding. She tore her eyes away from the photos.
Harry wandered around her room. "This is what your room looks like?"
"Down to the last book," she said softly. "But I think I'll have to make one modification."
"It's really nice," he said. "Really... comfortable."
"That it is," she said, making her way toward her own bureau. She said more spells, and when she opened this one, she found herself in a white bathroom. Everything was clean and white and shiny, except for the fluffy towels that matched her bedspreads. She found it to her satisfaction, and left it to go inspect the rest of her conjured room. Harry, on the other hand, stepped into the small bathroom. It seemed lived-in, from the toothpaste on the counter to the bottle of strawberry shampoo in the shower.
"Harry, is there something wrong?"
He turned quickly. "No, nothing wrong," he said. "This is incredible! How did you...?"
"Books," she said. "And... a few practical lessons."
"You really are talented," he said. "This is very advanced magic. And it's wonderful. It's all so real."
She blushed. "Thank you. I hope it's real. I'll be living here." She opened a nearby drawer, full of her clothes.
They stood in silence for a few minutes.
"Thank you so much for your hospitality," she said softly, sitting down on her new bed. "I feel like I'm imposing. I'm sorry. I never even asked if it was all right to come over in the first place. I just popped in... how rude I was. And now Professor McGonagall wants me to stay here. I'm... I'm really sorry. I'll not be a bother."
"A bother? Are you kidding?" he asked. "You surely didn't ask to have your house attacked. You didn't ask to help me, I called you to ask for your help. And the only reason you don't have a home that you can go home to right now is because of me. You're my friend, and that makes you a magnet for Death Eater attacks," he finished somewhat bitterly.
"They would have gone after me regardless," she said. "I'm Muggle-born. It has nothing to do with you."
"Damn it, Hermione, it does. Why do you think they go after you first? Why do they target the Weasleys? They're pure-blooded. It's that you have ties to me."
"You need to stop blaming yourself for things that you have nothing to do with you," she said snappishly. She never got this tone with Harry.
Their eyes met, meeting fire with fire. Finally Hermione looked away, striding across her room to close the doors to the wardrobe-bathroom.
Harry looked down at his hands. He couldn't stay mad at her, even with his proven talent for holding grudges. "Are you sure you don't want anything?"
"I'm really not hungry, but thank you," she said gently. There was a bit of an awkward silence, until Hermione spoke again. "What do you say we look at that message on the mirror? That is, after all, why I'm here."
He looked at her. "Are you sure you're OK?"
"I'm fine," she said. "Where did you put the mirror?"
"Kitchen table," he said. "If you stay here, I'll get it."
She nodded, sitting back on her bed. He left the room through the door leading to his room, and she turned back to her nightstand. Harry and Ron were looking back at her, a playful glint in their eyes as they teased her. Ron leaned over to whisper something into her ear. In the next frame, she sat, posed formally, with her parents. They were all in one of those Muggle photo shops, and her parents smiled straight to the real her through the glass.
Tears formed in her eyes and she lifted both of the picture frames from the night table. Hastily opening the drawer, she shoved them both in. Blinking her eyes to rid herself of the evidence of her tears, she rearranged herself to sit cross-legged on the bed.
Harry opened the door, and walked through his bureau to where she sat, waiting for him. "Would you please turn on the overhead light?" she asked him as he brought her the mirror. He did as he was asked and then sat down beside her on the bed when she motioned him to. She turned the mirror over in her hands and enunciated an enlargement spell to make it easier to read.
A HUH CHIGED DIN HIT WHIT NTH TSO
THREEPENCE TREKS RETS MINT SO
A AD HELENE VHF SILT LO TO
BETECHI NGELY EN GO LORN LUNT SO
DEC FEE HI NO TRUSS SUS
A AD REST GUN PHERS NTH OPT A LUCIFER SILO MU
A PHTHALATE I MI YIN WYNN POSY
A AED FENSUGRELEK TRI IES POLL SUNN.
She silently read it several times. "You said this message just... appeared?"
He nodded. "I threw it against a wall... the second time, and I looked at it, but the message that was on it was gone, and this engraving was there in its place."
"I don't recognize the language. I wish I could say that I did," she sighed. "There are words, though... words I've seen before. But they aren't all from the same language. Curious."
He looked at the words again, as if staring at them would make them make sense. She got up from her bed, and went toward one of the many bookshelves. She returned with a book that seemed so wide that it could hold the entire English language. Taking out a Muggle ballpoint pen and a sheet of lined paper, she copied the entire inscription and underlined words that she knew she'd heard before.
"Threepence," she said, half to herself and half to Harry. "We know what that is... and treks are journeys. Mint is an herb with medicinal properties... I don't see how these are related. Truss... that's a support for a bridge, and a gun, well, we know that also, and a posy... a posy is a flower... maybe that's an old spelling of 'sun'... and 'tri' refers to the number three... Helene... Harry, would you look up Helene?"
Harry, thankfully, seemed to notice that she had spoken directly to him this time, and opened the gigantic book to search for Helene. He flipped through the time-worn pages, finally finding Helene. "It's a Greek name," he said. "It's the thirteenth moon of Saturn..." he paused, reading. "In Greek mythology, Helene was an Amazon... she fought with Achilles. That's all it says."
She quickly wrote down what he had told her, and her eyes went back to the message on the mirror. "Lucifer... I've heard that before."
Harry didn't need to look that one up. "Lucifer means light-bearer," he said. "Literally, that is. It's used to refer to the Devil. Ironic, isn't it. Lucius Malfoy. Sounds a lot like Lucifer. The devil."
Her eyes darkened and she scribbled down the meaning. After several more seconds of writing, she sighed. "I don't see this making any sense. Maybe we've got the words confused..."
"I don't know, Hermione," Harry said. "It doesn't look much like that to me. Half of those words just seem like the letters were just put in some random order."
"They wouldn't have put letters in some random order," she said flatly. She looked at the mirror silently once again.
"Then there has to be a link between these words," he said. "Light-bearer... Helene... threepence... mint..."
But Hermione had stopped listening. A strange gleam appeared in her eyes. "They wouldn't put letters in a random order," she repeated to herself, but she didn't sound at all like she believed it. "Maybe the words really do mean nothing..." She took the paper quickly from where it lay on her bed, and pointed her wand directly at the text she had just written.
Harry looked up from the mirror to see Hermione tap the paper with her wand. "Arreglo," she declared clearly. Her letters lifted themselves from the page and, in a majestic swirl of ink and paper, rearranged themselves in midair. Harry had a momentary flashback to the last time that he'd seen letters in midair. He shook his head to clear it, and watched, mystified, as Hermione's paper patched itself together. The edges were ragged and the paper was no longer rectangular, but as the paper settled back onto the bed, Harry could see that the letters had found themselves new places. Hermione took up the paper again, and an image of complete elation crossed her face. "I knew it! You're a genius, Harry... the letters were put in a random order!" She threw herself at him, giving him a huge hug, her bushy hair flowing everywhere.
She pulled away, to see Harry's somewhat confused face. "It's an anagram, Harry... the letters were rearranged to confuse anyone who tried to read it. It has nothing to do with Helene or Lucifer or mint. It's a clue."
I know, a cliffhanger like that is mean. If you want to know, please review. It will expedite my writing and get the answers to you faster!