A Howling Wind

A Howling Wind.
A/N One shot set in their seventh year...the darkness has fallen and those who once were held high have fallen from their pedestal. Not the Lions Universe, but what could have happened in it, if certain...choices were made. This is a plot bunny that hopped in my head and just wouldn't leave so here it is. I threw this together so I don't know how good it really is.

****************************Hogwarts******************************

October 31


A howling, freezing rain swept the top of the Astronomy Tower this dark Halloween Night. Far below, safe in the walls of the ancient fortress, students celebrated the occasion with a feast and parties; very few of them had any clue of the true darkness that surrounded them, and especially not of the darkness within the walls. The parapet was slick with rain, the ancient stones that made up the walls dark with moisture. A shadowy figure stood at the edge, looking out over the darkened grounds. Silver lighting lit the night, casting a figure into sharp relief, his skin shown silver for an instant, almost ghost-like under a sodden, unruly mop of inky hair.

Harry glared out towards the edge of the forbidden forest, down towards where the ruins of Hagrid's hut still stood. His knuckles were white on the stone as he considered the times and the events that had driven him to his lonely vigil on the tower. A presence suddenly filled his mind, one that almost made up for everything,

"Harry" Hermione shouted over the noise of the storm, "what are you doing out on a night like this? It's not safe Harry." A gust of wind flung her hood back; she did not bother to replace it. A bare moment later, her normally curly, almost to the point of being bushy hair was sodden. The icy rain was driving into her eyes and she didn't care, not anymore.

Harry laughed bitterly as he turned to her. Her eyes were dark with some emotion, while the rain had plastered her hair to her face. She shivered slightly with the cold but did not turn to go. Somehow he knew she never would of her own volition. But even though his heart knew it, his words didn't, couldn't show it. She couldn't know, not anymore, not after everything. "SAFE HERMIONE" Harry snapped, "SAFE!" He sighed, "Did Dumbledore send you to make sure his precious weapon didn't rust in the rain?"

"No goddammit Harry. Could you just for once accept that someone was concerned" Her eyes filled with tears, "That I was concerned Harry?" She added softly in a whisper that would have been lost in the storm to anyone but him, and his heart stammered. Can't she just leave me alone...you would think she would know better. A sudden spike of anger erupted from his core, the exact source of which he did not know, nor did he really want to know.

Harry closed his eyes. He flung them open, and a feeling of sudden, ancient power crackled in the air. Both of them were thoroughly drenched now, and little eddies of energy snapped about his body. "Hagrid was concerned...Remus and Tonks were concerned...RON WAS CONCERNED about me Hermione, and where are they now, damnit...THEY'RE DEAD MIONE." Harry spun back to the grounds, afraid of himself. Looking out into the storm, away from her, "Dumbledore was so fucking CONCERNED, that he sent them straight to their deaths." The stones of the parapet wall exploded under his hands as a sudden, uncontrolled burst of power ripped out. "Just leave me alone Hermione...maybe if you had...your..."

"WHAT HARRY JAMES POTTER?" Hermione screamed suddenly, around her, eddies of energy erupted as well, her voice grew soft and lethal, "that my parents would have lived if I had ran and hid like a good little witch? Well FUCK YOU. The bastard wants us all dead Harry, deal with it." Harry spun and stared into her eyes. Orbs of jade and brown were filled with an odd fire, and as quick as it had begun; it stopped. Harry's emotions collapsed and he slid from his feet to sit at the base of the wall with a splashing sound. Hermione sucked in a breath, ran over and sunk to her knees beside him as he trembled.

"Oh, God Mione I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. I'm such a fuck up." Harry muttered in a broken whisper, as soft sobs escaped his throat. "I buggered it all up, Hermione."

"I'm sorry Harry, it wasn't your fault." Hermione whispered as she wrapped her arms around his shoulders. "It was never your fault."

Harry shook his head morosely, "Yes it was Hermione...yes it was." Harry objected in a breath. "If I had just listened to Dumbledore and Moody and not been on the train back, then they wouldn't have attacked and your parents wouldn't have suffered and died just to see their daughter. But I just had to ride the train with my friends." Harry looked down at the ground, afraid to meet her eyes.

Hermione shook her head violently, her hair throwing a spray of icy water across the way. She placed her hands on his face and pried it up to meet her eyes, "No love." She whispered, though to Harry, it might as well have been a shout, "Dumbledore was at fault, he had heard of an attack, but sent his forces off elsewhere on some other errand, that was why only Remus and Tonks...and you, Harry, were there to save the students...and you saved almost all of them. I could never blame you for something that wasn't your fault Harry."

"You mean it..." Harry replied, his voice cracking, his eyes pleading for what he thought he had heard to be actually true. "The l...love part."

"Yeah," Hermione replied softly, "I do."

"Me too."

"I know. I've always known Harry." Leaning forward Hermione kissed his forehead tenderly. With a noise lost to the night, she sat down beside Harry at the base of the parapet wall, and leaned her head against his shoulder. Her hand found his, and their fingers intermingled, almost the only warmth in either of their bodies now, as a light sleet started to mix with the rain. "Harry..."

"Yeah." Cold rainwater coursed from his hair and lashes as he turned to find her face in the night.

"You weren't going to the Dursleys last summer." Hermione replied softly, slowly.

"I wasn't?" Harry inquired; this was news to him. Immediately after Harry, Tonks, Hermione and Lupin had fought off the Death Eater squad sent to attack the train, and that had killed thirty students and fifteen parents, including Roger and Jane Granger before they were stopped, Dumbledore had immediately appeared and sent him on a portkey to his hated relatives without even the chance of telling Hermione goodbye. He had not let Harry be there for her at the funeral, or to send owl post either, as he thought it a risk. Harry would never forgive the old man that transgression, in a way it was worse than the morning four months prior to that, that had seen Ron and Hagrid die. They at least had gone out like lions, defending the underclassmen from a surprise attack on Hogsmeade.

"No," Hermione squeezed his hand, "Remus and Tonks had had enough too; they were going to take you to my place right after you got to the Dursleys." Hermione's cheeks were wet, not only from the rain, "I had this plan to tell you how I felt...mum and daddy knew..." Hermione choked up suddenly. His heart sinking even further, Harry pulled her into his arms and onto his lap, and started crying as well. Through her sobs, she squeezed out, "it's just you and me now Harry, Dumbledore has sacrificed almost everyone else to this war, his fucking war, your parents, mine, Sirius...Ron... It's a feud between Tom Riddle and Albus Dumbledore and woe be it to any mere mortals that get in their way."

"Than so be it, Love." Harry whispered as he leaned forward and softly captured her lips with his. The moment was dark, but so were their souls, now, "we get in both of their ways..."

"Okay." Hermione whispered darkly, "we will. If Dumbledore thinks his weapons are dangerous to just Tom Riddle, he will learn that the sword might just have a second or even third edge that can cut him." Harry looked into her eyes and nodded. Leaning forward he softly kissed her, once more.

Harry freed his hands and cupped her face, he stared into her eyes; "then you need to know everything...Legilimens." Instead of one of the brutal attacks of Snape, his thoughts reached out to hers and intertwined softly, as if completing a puzzle long abandoned. Flashes of the true prophecy, not the edited one Dumbledore had made him tell her. His early morning conversation with his true brother Ron, the day before Ron had died, about Harry's true feelings for the brunette now in his lap. The soul rending pain he felt as the last of the old Marauders fell side by side with a fuchsia-haired witch at King's Cross, and the sheer power he had felt as his magical counterattack had shattered the ranks of the assaulting Death Eaters. The passing wave leaving only Hermione untouched among the combatants. By that time they had been the only two left on the side of the light. And finally, the heartache he had felt from her as she saw her parents drop as an escaping Death Eater took a last bit of revenge, and the almost duel with Dumbledore to try to escape Privet Drive to go to her in her grief.

In turn he saw the day she had clung to him, their tears mingling, as Ron was laid to rest in the Weasley family cemetery alongside his fiancée of a week, Luna, who had died right after him trying to save a little girl. Of her talking to Tonks soon after that event, the pair of them under invisibility cloaks, hiding from the very Order that was ostensibly the good guys. She was recruiting Tonks and Lupin to get Harry away this summer, and of her admitting to the older witch that she had loved him since third year, at least. And of her time in hiding last summer when Dumbledore had hid them from each other as well as the Death Eaters and her utter joy at seeing him alive in the Great Hall.

"Finite" Harry whispered, and the images faded, but the link did not. They could feel each other's powers and their feelings, and almost their thoughts. They had been at that cusp for years, and now it looked as if they were going to fall over it.

"That's it then...that's why he has..." Hermione said softly, her tone thoughtful. "That's why he has trained you like he has...he's made a kamikaze out of you." A new flame grew in her eyes as she thought of the bearded one. "He's only training you enough to go down with Riddle...not to beat him decisively." She paused, "And that's why he wouldn't let us really train with you. Wouldn't let me..."

Harry nodded, his eyes never leaving hers. A bare ghost of a grin, danced across his face, "But we have much more in reserve than they know, don't we my dear?"

A slightly feral expression lit her face, "yeah we do...Dumbledore never knew that Remus and Tonks were training us, or that we have sources he never knew of." She thought back to the black phoenix that had appeared in the night, one month into the summer after their fifth year which had given Harry and Hermione joint ownership of the Black properties, wealth, knowledge and resources. Especially, he did not know of the books on combat, the dark arts and other subjects that they had found in the libraries of Grimmauld Place; the same books that seemed to have inexplicitly vanished from the restricted section of the Hogwarts Library. The very knowledge that just might give Harry a fighting chance to walk away from that final battle with his life as well as a victory. Sirius had explained in the letter that he had not trusted Dumbledore for sometime, so he let Dumbledore think that he had expired without a will, which threw Grimmauld place automatically into Limbo, and rescinded the old wizard's access to the house. "And we are both, much more powerful than he realizes, consciously at least."

"Neither Tom nor Albus wanted a rival." Harry kissed her once more, "they now have two."

"Yeah, and they're going to pay for that oversight." Hermione agreed as she leaned into his lips and together they sealed their pact on a storm swept rooftop, in the oldest coin known to muggle and wizard kind alike, as a red-headed ghost looked on with a small nod.

"Good Luck my friends." The words were a whisper, lost to the storm as he faded from view.



A/N: Ok like I said earlier this is from a version that I never pursued of where the lions universe might go. I really don't have any intention of continuing it, but I thought you all might enjoy it. Plus when some of the howling hits at the first half of HP and the War of Shadows starts (Lions of Gryffindor series) I can say see, I could have been much meaner :) Ok I'm kidding....mostly.

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