The Locked Room

A/N: This one-shot is based on a request by my dear friend Mrs Tonks, who wanted ‘the missing chapter’ between OotP and HBP.

So I did what I could. *grins*

A massive thank you to my LJ f-list, who have collectively Betaed this thing, and who are also responsible for this actually being completed! *blows kisses*

Disclaimer: They belong to JKR, I’m only playing.

**

The Locked Room.

“So you will see I am stepping on

The stones between the runnels getting

Nowhere nowhere. It is almost

Embarrassing to be alive alone.”

The Stepping Stones

--W.S. Graham--

*

AFTER the incident with the garden shears, he had been permanently banished to his room. Not that he minded. That was just four days into the summer. One for mum, one for dad, one for Cedric. And one for Sirius, a fresh Saturday moist with the smell of cut grass, doors and windows thrown open for the sun. The shears were thrust at him on Sunday. He took them without batting an eyelid and went outside. Dudley crouched near the hedge, poking at an anthill. Out came the ants in an unbroken, frantic black line to be crushed artlessly under Dudley’s shoe. From where Harry stood with the shears, the massacre had no real dimension, no blood, no screams, no visible fear; the victims were simply too tiny. Really, there was no need to get into a rage.

But before he knew it the shears set to work. The hedge was flattened in what seemed like a mere matter of minutes, down to the last root. Worms wriggled out of the fresh brown earth. No 4 Privet Drive gaped at the street of well-groomed houses like a bald pate which suddenly found itself without its false hair.

Aunt Petunia was in hysterics. Uncle Vernon spluttered for good ten minutes before handing out the sentence. Dudley grinned maniacally until the full implications of the incident sunk in.

Harry stalked upstairs without a word, slammed his door behind him and leaned against it. His hands were sweaty and shaking, he was still clutching the shears. He stared at the blades for a moment, his scissored reflection gleaming at him. He grinned to himself. Fear was a useful thing to have at one’s disposal.

They thought it was magic that flattened the hedge.

If only they knew.

After that the summer was like the wreck of toy boat sunk in a still pool renounced to weeds. Things moved and made light and noise outside, cars, voices, birds, streetlights, sunlight—but inside he mastered gloom and silence to sheer perfection. Three times a day knuckles rapped at his door, and he opened it to find food left outside. When he needed to use the bathroom he had to hammer at the door.

He kept the curtains closed all day. They were opened at night to let the breeze in and Hedwig out. But as soon as daylight began to push at the glass, its great rolling body swabbing the dew off trees and night off the sky, he flicked the curtains shut.

Life was stable, predictable. No concealed destinies, no veils and no long-lost godfathers, found and then lost again forever.

As long as he kept his eyes open, that is. As long as he stayed awake.

*

“HE'S not getting any letters from me anymore! You go tell him that!”

Hedwig cocked her head, not the least ruffled.

“I mean it!” The window creaked slowly in a gust of wind. Crookshanks glided across the wooden floor and hopped nimbly on to the windowseat, settling next to Hedwig. Together they gazed at Hermione, unblinking.

“Oh, for heaven’s sakes!”

The whole house shook as she ran down the stairs. The kitchen smelled of tea with a little too much sugar. China and silver gleamed on the counter, chairs pulled neatly against the table, napkins folded just so. Summer sunlight settled over the dark tiles like a cat on well-worn rug. The walls were patterned with tulip shadows from the lace curtains. She didn’t feel at home in this house anymore. Its days flowed by like water down a familiar slope and it was as if she’d stepped out of the way, its measured, calm rhythm a reproach to her own state of mind.

She thought she must be behaving like a typical teenager at last, for her parents were giving her those looks. She had been secretive and distracted all summer, speaking only when spoken to several times loudly. She left them to garner their own conclusions. Once or twice she heard several words that made her eyes roll. ‘A boy--don’t joke--trouble--wizard--careful’.

Yes Mum, I’m in trouble with a boy wizard.

If only you knew how much.

*

AND then there were the letters.

For every one by Ron, there were ten from Hermione.

Ron’s letters managed to pull out momentarily the laughter that lay trapped beneath the spring’s wreckage. Mum caught Dad helping the twins with some of their joke shop stuff. She was spewing mad, as you can imagine. Harry could. He could imagine Mrs Weasley yelling at a sheepish Mr Weasley, the twins trying to hide their grins and Ron watching from a safe distance. He could imagine the Burrow, a little crooked, a little too crowded, a little battered—a house bursting at its seams with…was it love? He could imagine them all in the cluttered but tidy kitchen, a pot steaming on the hearth, dishes washing themselves in the sink, everyone engrossed in their own task but together, somehow. He could imagine, he could go on—but at this point the resurrected laughter would begin to flail and sink again, so he’d set the letter aside and return to bed.

Hermione’s letters were different. For starters, she wrote every day. He learned more about her daily life, about her parents, about her life as their daughter rather than his best friend in that short summer than he’d learned in all their years together. It was like looking at a map of a place you knew well. Suddenly you could see the bigger picture; the lay of the land around her, all the roads that led to her, her life spreading out beneath his fingertips in the musty morning light.

Her letters forced him to be still, to find his footing even for a seconds. For you couldn’t really head out anywhere if you didn’t know where you were or where to start off from.

*

THE gate rattled shut. Four houses down, across the street, old Mrs Cooper was watering the strip of dirt in front of her house where nothing ever grew. Hermione made a conscious effort to calm down. If she didn’t breathe properly her chest began to hurt. Not too badly, just a twinge, like a stitch on her side when she ran. But that twinge was like a switch that turned on a tangle of invisible pain and nightmares and there she was, gasping like an animal caught on charged fencewire.

Yes, nightmares.

He thought he was the only one to have them.

He didn’t know how he fell night after night through the veil.

She turned left and headed down the shaded path that led to the common, past Mrs Cooper’s house. Trees were in full leaf, absorbing much of the heat. She glanced at everything deliberately, the polished red post box, the fence wreathed in ivy, the cricket bat leaning against the wall next door, as if these tangible, solid things might make the wet stinging at the corners of her eyes less real.

She wrote to him every day, pages and pages of entreaties thinly veiled with inconsequential natterings about her day. She waited for Hedwig each morning, after her mother and father had left for work. It was a good week if Hedwig brought back a reply two days a week. It was a particularly bad one if she had to plead with the owl to make Harry write to her.

When she did get a reply from Harry, it was a blank parchment scattered with a few words like scraps of soot from a great fire burning somewhere too far to reach.

I’m fine.

I’m glad.

Don’t worry.

She didn't even try. It wasn't in her nature when it came to Harry.

*

HE tried his best, he did. Every day when Hedwig brought the neatly sealed parchment, he read it a few times, then sat down at his bare desk to form a reply. But he and words—they didn’t get along. The quill was stubborn in his hand. He scribbled on parchment after parchment, then crumpled the lot and threw them in the bin. Hedwig watched from her perch on the rim of the bin, twitching her feathers. How could words ever come close to the cacophony in his head? To say, Hermione, no, I’m not fine, would be like saying the sea is wet. Words were like that--there were hundreds and millions of them floating around but none to say exactly what you felt.

So he resorted to silence and spaces. He thought they both understood those. After all, she knew like no other how to finish off his sentences, to fill the gaps in his mind. She knew how to pick up meaning where he left off. So she’d know that near-blank parchment wasn’t really blank, it wasn’t meaningless. The emptiness, the gaps, the silence; these were code.

She’d know.

He was desperate for her to know.

*

Three houses down, she came to a decision.

She decided she meant what she’d shouted at Hedwig. She really wouldn’t write to him.

She swiped a hand across her eyes and quickened her step. Mrs Cooper raised her head, squinted, and waved. Hermione waved back. Mrs Cooper’s watering ritual was a standing joke among her neighbours. Rain, shine or snow she was always seen outside the house at this precise hour, hose in hand. Her neighbours had given up trying to convince her of the futility of her endeavour, but she just smiled and went about her business as if she knew something they didn’t. As if she could see things happening, life budding unseen in the earth in front of her house. Hermione hurried past to avoid getting into a conversation.

No letters for at least a week.

That should teach him.

A bicycle whirred past, sunlight spinning in its wheels. A football game was in progress in the common. The thud of a ball and the echo of loud voices filled the air. Determination felt good; the pain that came with it felt clean and uncomplicated, blood pulsing almost palpably across the scar in her chest. She dug her hands in her pockets, the new-found resolve curled tightly in her fist like something precious but frail, hard but light, something that would drift away given the slightest chance.

*

HEDWIG returned usually before lunchtime. His watch was lost under a pile of clothes, he hadn’t the energy to look for it. The clock above his desk which used to hang in Dudley’s room was missing the hour hand, the result of Dudley’s response to a dentist’s appointment. There was no help for it; reluctantly, Harry twitched one curtain open. The midday sun slit the glass, light pouring in like blood. He squinted, looking for a sign of Hedwig, but the sky was empty. She was never this late. And Hermione never forgot to write.

The curtain still open, he turned back to his room. Faint sounds of dishes and cutlery came from downstairs. A bowl of half-eaten cereal languished on his desk, a banana peel and breadcrumbs beside it. There were clothes everywhere. Hedwig’s cage was filthy and a handful of feathers and bacon rinds littered the floor beside it. His suitcase gaped with a mass of books and robes, with the occasional glimmer of a Honeydukes wrapper among them. His bedclothes trailed on the floor. Dustmotes spiralled busily in the sliver of light from the window, jostling for space. He had never subscribed to the Dursley’s propensity for fanatical cleanliness, but he was never on Ron’s end of the spectrum either.

This was vile, a festering heap of all the days he’d crumpled up and thrown away.

He started from the corner nearest to the window.

Hedwig was never this late and Hermione never forgot to write.

He tried not to worry.

*

MIDDAY light lay heavy on her eyelids, but she didn’t want to move. The wooden seat on the edge of the common was set so high that she could almost swing her legs. Her shoes swished through the grass.

The Department of Mysteries had a chamber for everything. Did it have a room for mysteries themselves? A proper place for all those things that were so hard to explain or understand, things without names or words to describe them? Things that lay between the big mysteries of Love and Death and Time, little things that could, like the pulse of a second hand on a clockface, could bear so irrevocably on the big mysteries themselves?

How much did little things matter? How much of a difference did her letters make in the great bloodstained uncertainty that was Harry’s life? How would she know?

She sighed. The football players were dispersing in boisterous groups, presumably for lunch. One of them cradled the ball under his arm. He had dark hair and strong shoulders, outlined beneath a sweat-stained t-shirt.

How much of a difference did she make for Harry?

Harry’s friendship with Ron had no conditions; Ron was Ron, and was accepted as such. But she felt different. Was she imagining it? That if it wasn’t for all the charms she could cast and the problems she could solve, all the obscure magical facts she carried in her brain that came in useful one way or another, he wouldn’t notice her gone?

She immediately regretted the thought. That’s not fair, Hermione. She blinked against the bright light.

But the thought persisted. Will he really miss her when she didn’t write? Miss her, not Hermione the smartest witch of her age or Hermione who always had answers, but her, just Hermione.

With a sudden sharp pain that stung her eyes, she realised that that was what hurt the most. Not the fact that he didn’t tell her how he was doing; she already knew. Harry was quietest when he had too much to say.

She just wanted to be missed.

*

HIS lunch had been placed at his door. He hadn’t yet bothered to pick it up. Shadows were lengthening out in Privet Drive. His room was cleaner than before. A large plastic bag leaned against the wall next to the door, full of owl droppings, bits of food and other rubbish he’d rounded up. Hedwig’s cage still needed to be washed out, but he had been distracted by a penknife.

Well, technically it wasn’t a knife anymore.

He sat on his bed and stared at the stump of a handle topped with disfigured molten metal on the end.

Why was the Room of Love in the Department of Mysteries locked beyond all magical means?

Well, of course. His parents died of what was in the Locked Room, didn’t they? The mutilated penknife fit in his palm perfectly. And Sirius too--he lost Sirius not to the Chamber of Death but to the Locked Room.

A slight wind was curling along Privet Drive. Trees stretched languidly in it, warmed by the afternoon sun. The manicured hedges longed after it too, but they were bound by their shape. The sky was still empty, but so deep, waiting and beckoning. For the first time since—well, everything, his eyes sought his Firebolt. Not that he was planning to do anything, but still.

Maybe she was ill. He’d seen how Dolohov’s scar hit her, right across the chest. She’d never mentioned it afterwards. He hadn’t the nerve to ask. What if she said it hurt really bad? Or worse, what if she said it didn’t just to spare him?

He stood up and went to his window. A car drew into the driveway of the house across from No 4. He unlatched the window. Maybe she’d had to go somewhere with her parents. But surely, she’d have mentioned it, wouldn’t she? Being Hermione, she’d never miss a detail like that.

He ran a hand through his hair and turned away from the window. Now that his room had a semblance of order, it was relatively easy to locate a piece of parchment. He uncorked a bottle of ink and dipped his quill in it. Then he sat down at his table and began to write.

*

AN insect was crawling up the hem of her jeans. She brushed it gently and it fell on the grass. Her stomach was grumbling. But the uneasiness right above her belly was worse.

She pulled the hairband out of her messy ponytail and twisted it back on, wincing when it caught on tangles. Her eyes were aching from squinting at the sun for so long. The common was empty, a green pool of shimmering desolation, a swallow skimming in its blinding heat.

She stood up, stretched, and made her way out onto the road. The jingle of an icecream van rang from faraway. It only took minutes for her to pass the block and cross to her side of the street. She wished for the day to be over, for the whole summer to be over, so that she could be where she needed to be, where he needed her. She glanced over at Mrs. Cooper’s house; the blinds were drawn.

On a whim, she crossed back to the other side of the street. The heat was a sure sign it would rain at night. But not even the highest probability of rain would have stopped Mrs Cooper from picking up the hose. One just cannot take chances on some things, dear, she’d say. The hose was looped around the garden tap. Hermione stood outside the gate, scanning the ground for whatever Mrs Cooper saw every morning. The narrow strip of dirt was slightly more moist than the rest of the street, shaded by the wild rose bush that clung to the gatepost. But there was nothing else, nothing to suggest greenery in the dusty ground the old woman watered so faithfully every day.

Just because you can’t see it Hermione, doesn’t mean it’s not there.

A week was a long time. Seven empty days evaporating in the slow heat of anxiety, seven wide-eyed nights. She couldn’t do it. Even if her letters made no difference, she couldn’t not write. He was like a badly wrapped package; you constantly had to check the strings to make sure they held. Hers were flimsy, they probably didn’t do much to keep him together, but still. You just can’t take a chance on some things.

By the time she’d made her way to her room, Hedwig was poised on the window-sill, ready to brave the heat. Crookshanks hopped off her chair with a superior twitch of his tail, the string that tied a brand new roll of parchment between his teeth. A few stray leaves trembled uncertainly on her desk, among the neat pile of books and parchment. She swept the leaves off and reached for a quill.

*

The sky opened and spilled in that way it happens only in summer. Rain lowered in a great gloomy sheet and reflected off every surface, dissolving the sharp yellow of streetlights into slippery orbs. The sky that had seemed endless only an hour ago was now curling into itself, the light burrowing deeper and deeper into the cloud-cover, all distances shrinking. Across the countryside, in cities and towns, people were heading home. Wheels squealed on manicured streets, umbrellas snapped open, and doors opened and closed hurriedly. Sweet tea brewed in tulip-shadowed kitchens. In all that confusion of homecoming, other arrivals were missed. Almost. White wings skidded through the rain and swooped to the side of a house. A light tap, and a window flew open. Lights came on.

**