Disclaimer: They belong to JKR, I'm only playing.
A/N: So, this is the long one. You guys have no idea how nervous I am about posting this. The mood here is different to my other little stories, it'll seem bleak at times, but I promise, me being me, there's light at the end and plenty on the way too. So make of it what you will. I foresee around six or seven chapters, some still being written, some being beta'd. I hope to post fairly regularly (that is, if no one's run away screaming!).
And once again, many, many thanks to my beta, miconic, without whom the whole thing would be a veritable convoluted catastrophe. (If it still is, it ain't her fault!)
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Prologue.
"And I sing of other times, when I was happy, though I know that these are fragments of my mind and nowhere I have ever been."
Jeanette Winterson, 'Sexing the Cherry'
It's cold inside the castle, so cold. Wind darts in through every crack, gloom digs nails into every corner. And these stone walls and open pillars, draped with cobwebs and the dust of a thousand years- these are meant to be worn and smooth.
They're not.
They stand coarse and unsympathetic at her attempts to hide among them.
So, so cold.
She's been wandering around for nearly half an hour now, and the Healer waiting in the hospital wing would probably be pacing the floor in forced patience. They haven't yet come swooping down on her with their pitying eyes and frustrated pleadings, not because they don't know where she is, but because once they find her, they wouldn't know what to do with her. She doesn't blame them, not really. If she turned a corner and came face to face with herself, she thinks she too would be flummoxed.
What do you do with someone who has silence rammed in her throat like shards of glass?
What do you do with Hermione Granger when she will not, cannot speak?
Would she still be Hermione Granger?
She doesn't think so.
She doesn't think that this living thing crouching inside her skin is Hermione Granger. How can it be, if what it does all day is drift about in the castle in a careful path that circumvents places previously inhabited by Hermione Granger?
This is someone else. Someone who definitely would not be found in the library anymore, who frequents the squashy armchair in front of the Gryffindor fireplace increasingly less, who's rapidly becoming a mere fleshly blur between the sharpening shadows of her two best friends.
Ever since her wanderings began--very early in the term--she has found places within the castle she's never known existed. She thinks she'd soon be a formidable rival to the Weasley twins' reputation for knowing the castle better than its founders. Unsurprisingly, some of the places she found were sinister. Narrow, unremarkable corridors leading off the main hallways would end up in dark crannies full of cobwebs and objects that seemed at home in Moody's drawing room. Or tiny doors tucked into the corners of spacious corridors would lead to high-ceilinged halls like the one she is in now, empty in a strange, deliberate way, as if they were condemned to be kept bare of all their purposes.
But in some of the places that she discovered she felt peaceful. She found an old stone ledge on the far side of the lake facing the castle, half-covered in moss and riotous weeds, some of which sprouted tiny yellow daisies. Insects and moths constantly trilled and scuttled inside the green tangles, and the lake sighed a few meters from it, fingered by the wind. The stone was shaded by the tree that stood beside it, dying, choked by a parasite with large, glossy leaves. When she sat on the stone, her feet didn't reach the ground. She remembered being eight years old, sitting on the swing in the front-yard of her parents' house, both content and excited by the fact that soon, her Dad would lift the latch on the front gate and stride in, his face breaking into a smile, his arms lifting towards her. The afternoon sunlight, liquid gold, would linger on the creases of his laugh lines--perhaps the reason why the translucent amber of afternoons always instilled in her a sense of complete security--and she would hop off the swing with a shriek and jump into his arms. Soon.
She found so many of such hidden or neglected places and noted them carefully. It doesn't escape her notice that she's applying herself to this task with a diligence and method characteristic of Hermione Granger, but she prefers not to dwell on it.
Some things just hurt too much.
Things that catch like metal hooks midway inside your chest every time you take a breath.
**
Sometimes at night, lying wide awake in her bed, twisted around her sweaty form with arms, legs, chest like a body of water around a sinking vessel, he wonders what shape these hooks are, what's reflected in those shards of glass.
What sounds would her screams make if ever they broke out?
**
Now, drifting about in the looming, empty hall, she leans against a pillar, feeling satisfied by the way its rough surface grazes her flesh. The sky-light gleams feebly and the cold--out of which the stone seems to be hewn--pushes its needle-like fingers into her. She shifts on aimless feet and treads on something alive that squeaks and scampers away. She stumbles, turns around and dives into the stone. Her eyes sting and a wail flares in her throat, aching for sound but never finding it; a feeling that's become horribly familiar in the past weeks. She feels around for a place to sit, sneezing from the unsettled dust and suddenly something gets caught underfoot again. Her arms push out to grab hold of something to keep herself from falling. But instead of cold stone, she finds her hand pushed into someone's chest.
"Your shoelace's undone."
He removes her hand and leads her to a ledge a few feet off. In the gloom, she cannot see his expression, but she resents her body for the way it rises to the comfort of being near him.
He tugs her hand to make her sit and kneels in front of her, pulling one foot towards him. She watches the top of his head while he re-ties her shoelace and gives a testing tug to make sure it's tight enough.
"There, all done."
He looks up and she can make out the faint shape of a smile on his lips. She waits for the reprimand she knows will never come. She's supposed to be stronger than this, smarter, she's not supposed to cower in dark places when he has the world to save. She's supposed to be by his side, helping him to become the best he is. But look at her now; she's failed him. He should despise her with all his being, avoid speaking her name, turn away whenever she's in sight, forget about her and find other friends, more powerful, useful allies, but he doesn't.
Instead he plays the game with her, the game she wants to play.
"We'd better get back," he says softly, apologetically.
She nods and gets to her feet. He turns, his hand finding her wrist, and she lets him guide her out of the labyrinth of stone. Because while no one knows what to do with her, Harry does. Even when she doesn't know, he does.
She wonders when that happened.
As they walk slowly towards the hospital wing, where a Healer would be waiting to do her dreaded, weekly check-up, armed with the latest set of spells to try and lift the curse that's made her voiceless, she thinks that he seems taller and straighter somehow. The hesitation she always associated with him has fallen away. Instead, there's an assured gentleness in the way he touches her and patience--oh, how she hates it--in the soft, still boyish lines of his face as he looks at her.
I love him, she thinks, I've loved him for a long time but I didn't want to say it.
And now, you stupid, stupid girl, will you ever get to tell him?
**
He's surprised but relieved that she came away from that monstrous stony place without protest, but it worries him too for a reason he can't quite pinpoint. May be it's because when she puts up a fight, she seems more like her old self. (More herself, not old self, he corrects himself). He doesn't remember her being so small, as if there's less of her to hold on to. When he takes up her wrist to lead her down the dark corridor, his fingers seem to slip through her skin, penetrating her bones and muscle, then meet the tip of his own fingers on the other side. He clutches her tighter. She looks up and wriggles her hand fully into his.
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