Shadow Walks
My shadow's the only one that walks beside me
--Green Day, "Boulevard of Broken Dreams"
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Chapter Sixteen:
But love is not a victory march; it's a cold and it is a broken Hallelujah
--Allison Crowe, "Hallelujah"
He stood in bewilderment as the kitchen around him seemed to morph, changing as a new universe settled into place around him. Hermione and Sir Nicholas vanished. The sudsy pile of dishes was gone. The merry light that had resonated throughout the entire house was obliterated, as if by an unseen hand. The house was dim and dark, the worktop was dusty and rough, neglected planking creaked beneath his feet. There was the faintest of flickers in the corner - not even really a flicker, just a slight change in shadow, and he realized with chagrin that he'd set off a ward.
You don't want to reappear somewhere restricted and get into trouble, Luna's voice admonished him. The home of his babyhood was not necessarily a place where one would think to need clearance, but it appeared that the end result could be the same if he did not depart quickly, he thought, more than annoyed with the situation.
He slid noiselessly through the kitchen door, holding it open with just enough clearance for him to slither into the open great room that narrowed into the front entryway. The house was utterly silent and dark as death, but Harry still kept toward the walls, hoping that he would, at no time, make himself easily visible to whomever might be watching.
But his eyes were slow in adjusting to the darkness, and he only realized that someone else was in the room, when a blast of spellfire narrowly missed the top of his head, and shredded part of the barely swinging kitchen door.
Damn! He cursed mentally, and dropped into a crouch, making an attempt to Apparate away, but determining immediately that a ward preventing that had already been put in place. The attacker had given his general location away, at least, with the spell originating from the back corner of the room. Harry did not want give any more aid than necessary, and decided against returning fire. He cast a non-verbal Disillusionment spell on himself, and sidled toward the front door. Every nerve fiber was vibrating at high alert, as all of his Auror instincts came slamming back into play.
The adversary did not fire, but Harry could feel his presence, as surely as if he could hear each breath taken. It was as if the room was a living thing, hovering, waiting…
He could make out vague shadows now, a large and lumpy outline that could have been some piece of furniture, the patchy squares of fireplace and windows, but the rear of the room was shrouded in utmost black. He wondered how well the other person could see him…
There was another whoosh of light, and Harry flinched instinctively, although the spell missed him by a good meter. He can't see me, he thought with some measure of relief, he's guessing.
Harry was desperately trying to work out his exit strategy. He knew that whoever was firing at him could not have responded to the ward breach from elsewhere, but had already been on site; he had been much too quickly detected, even for a magical person. If someone entered through the front door, and cut off his escape, or Flooed in, bathing the room in green light, he could be in serious trouble, even leaving out the fact that he would then be outnumbered.
It was also within the realm of possibility that the person firing on him was not an enemy, but, in fact, an ally. There was no way to know, however, and with all possibilities open, he decided not to chance it. If he'd been anyone else in the world, he might have been able to try, but breaking a ward somewhere that was under apparent heavy guard and shouting at an unknown and armed assailant, "Hey, I'm Harry Potter!" would not top the list of Most Brilliant Plans of Action.
Then there were the undeniable ethics of the situation. He was sure that similar sorts of rules applied to traveling to other universes as to traveling through time. It wasn't exactly polite to go mucking about in someone else's universe. He just wanted to get out of the house and find Hermione.
Another hex missed him, this time more narrowly. It appeared that the attacker had determined that he would most likely make for the door, having changed position in an attempt to cut him off.
Of all the bloody times to be in phase! He thought with irritation, eyes going to the grayish windows. The door was there, in the blank nothingness between the two windows. When I try to open the door, I'll be seen. I'll be lucky if I don't end up with a hex between my shoulder blades. He briefly reconsidered firing, but discarded it again.
He continued to creep toward the door, and the attacker did not move. Harry knew that he was merely biding his time, waiting patiently for Harry to open the door. Staying low, Harry raised his wand, and hissed,
"Fumo!" Thick, billowing clouds of smoke began to pour from his wand, quickly dispersing and reducing the visibility in the room to zero. He stood up and lunged for the handle of the door, but when he touched it, fiery heat crackled up his nerve endings from fingertips to shoulder. It was only by clamping down on his lip with his teeth that he kept from crying out.
He heard his attacker attempt to smother a cough, and he permitted himself a small, satisfied smile, before raising his wand to blast the door into oblivion, when he felt something ruffle his hair.
He looked over his shoulder, confused, but realized that his foe had used a Ventosus spell to produce a wind that would rapidly blow away his cover. And he was hit with non-verbal Disarming and Leg-Locker jinxes before he had time to react further.
He heard his wand hit the floor and roll into a corner. His own ungainly tumble nearly masked the quiet footsteps that approached him.
"Who the hell are you, and what are you doing here?" came a quiet voice that Harry nonetheless recognized.
"Oh, God," he managed to say, though it felt like a steel bands had wrapped themselves around his heart and were tightening. The Leg-Locker had also had a lot of magical force behind it; the sides of his knees were pressed together painfully.
The victor in the duel must have recognized something in his ground out exclamation, for he heard a soft gasp, air drawn in suddenly and involuntarily.
"Lumos," came the soft rejoinder, and Harry turned his face away in anticipation of the brilliant blue-white light.
It was Hermione standing over him; he'd known it the moment she'd spoken, but before he could even turn and squint up at her, his wand was jammed painfully between his ribs.
"Who sent you here?" she said, her voice forceful, vibrating with repressed emotion. "Who are you?"
"It's - it's me - it's Harry," he rasped, wondering even as he spoke if she knew him in this universe at all. A spasm passed over her face; the light from her wand threw her features into planes and shadows, accentuating the hollows in her cheekbones and beneath her eyes, prematurely aging her.
"Who sent you here?" The fury that trembled and roiled beneath her voice made Harry feel that he was seconds away from being on the business end of Avada Kedavra.
"Nobody sent me. I came here on my own. I've been looking - "
"Harry's dead. I'll ask one last time: who are you?"
"I am Harry Potter, just like I said," he said, hastily raising his hands in a gesture of surrender. "I'm - I'm not from this universe."
There was a snort of derisive, mirthless laughter.
"That's original, at least. Did the Ministry send you here?" She had not moved the wand. Her eyes glittered diamond-hard, and she gave off the distinct impression that the Ministry had sent people before, and had not met with a pleasant hostess.
"The Ministry? No! I'm telling you the truth. I'm from another universe. I'm looking for - for you…" he trailed off uncertainly, wondering where on earth he would begin explaining, if he was even given the opportunity to do so.
"For me?" The poke of the wand demanded his prompt reply.
"I was in - we were fighting the - the Final Battle - against… Voldemort?" He said the name questioningly, and she nodded, flinching a little in recognition. "You were taken hostage, sent to another universe, stranded there. For five years, everyone thought you were dead. I've been looking for you - that is, my - my universe's you. Does - does that sound familiar at all?" he asked tentatively, a bit put off by her flinty expression.
"I think I would remember being transported to another reality against my will. I did fight in the Final Battle two years ago. You - Harry - defeated Voldemort, but he was killed doing so. Nearly everyone was…" The final phrase was whispered hauntingly, almost to herself. "I've been living in hell since then, but I suppose it's the hell I belong in. I doubt you could prove any of this to me. Why should I believe you?"
"Would Harry have ever lied to you… done anything to hurt you?" he asked entreatingly. She was quiet for a long moment, and he was acutely aware of the heavy silence in the room, of the pressure of the wand in his side, and of his knee joints pushed against each other. A faint smile finally flickered at the edges of her mouth before rapidly dying.
"No," she sighed. "He wouldn't have." There was another moment of silence, and she seemed to come to a decision, as she doused the light from her wand, and ended the jinx on his legs. "Get up," she ordered abruptly. "We've been up here too long already."
She prodded him ahead of her, motioning in the direction of a small door wedged between the fireplace and the kitchen access. He knew that it led to the cellar, and was grateful for his vague familiarity with the house, as they were both walking in all but pitch blackness. Hermione's steps behind him were sure and unfaltering, but very quiet.
"Do you … live here?" he asked hesitantly.
"I don't live anywhere," she said in a wooden voice, laden with bitterness. He thought this was a rather curious answer, and would have said more, but suddenly became very conscious of his hand pausing in the act of reaching for the doorknob. She seemed to instantly realize the reason for his hesitancy.
"Only the front door's rigged," she informed him. "Little concept I borrowed from the Weasley twins. I suppose you know them?"
"Sure, I know Fred and George…" Harry responded, his voice trailing off as he didn't really know what else to say. This was definitely one of the weirdest situations he'd ever found himself in. They made their way down the rickety cellar stairs in silence He lowered his foot to the next step, as they neared the bottom, only to find nothing there. He wavered, struggling to keep his center of gravity balanced on his other foot.
…and there was a lightning quick hand at the back of his collar, hauling him up.
"The bottom four steps are gone. Sorry," Hermione said explanatorily, not sounding particularly sorry. "I left it that way because it makes people think nobody's been down here in ages."
She hopped lightly off of the stair, and Harry followed, somewhat dubiously, as the idea of jumping into blackness did not appeal to him overmuch. He couldn't see where Hermione had gone, but he could hear her wand tapping in a rhythmic pattern against one of the brick walls. As he moved in the direction of the sound, the bricks began to rearrange themselves much like the process at the Leaky Cauldron.
Dim light now filtered into the cellar, and Harry could see Hermione framed within it. He was struck by the contrast of Hermione as he'd seen her in the previous universe, framed in the front door of the same house, but with light and warmth and love abounding.
She looked back at him, and indicated with a jerk of her head, that he follow. When he'd crossed the threshold, the wall closed up behind him, with only the barest rasps of moving stone. There was no sign that there was any kind of door there at all, and he spun slowly, slightly unnerved, but taking in the small living space.
There was a faded parchment map on the wall of the layout of the house, each room delineated, along with all windows and doors. Silvery light occasionally around the borders, and Harry knew immediately that it was a ward marker, and that this was how she'd known the moment he'd arrived, as well as his location. A battered sofa sat along one wall, and from the pillow and folded blanket on one arm, he deduced that it did double duty as her bed as well. There were two battered bookcases, filled near to overflowing, as well as a complete Potions lab in one corner. A shabby desk was perched near the sofa, and was full to capacity with stacks of neatly rolled parchment. Next to the desk was a tiny little stove and cooktop, with a battered cabinet atop it. A far corner of the room was curtained off - this was evidently a bathroom. And a wide-mouthed duffel bag was on the floor near where the door had been, unzipped and empty, clearly prepared for a hasty departure if needed.
The place was Spartan and efficient, neat and organized, but clearly not meant as a permanent place of residence. Harry could understand more fully what she'd meant when she'd said, "I don't live anywhere."
"Approve?" she asked somewhat acidly, and he realized with a jolt how long he'd been staring.
"Hermione, why?" he asked, his tone almost pleading. She flinched a little at his familiarity, and he could understand that as well. She did not answer his question, but instead strode the short distance to the Potions table, and withdrew a vial of clear liquid.
"Drink this," she said. He stared first at the vial, and then at her.
"You're making me drink Veritaserum?" His tone sounded almost wounded, and he winced at the tone.
"If you don't have anything to hide, then it won't matter, will it?" she asked coolly. She scanned him quickly with her wand, laying his down on the back of the sofa, and seemed satisfied. "No traces of polyjuice or recent Imperius activity."
He looked at her sourly for a moment, and then knocked back the contents of the vial. He couldn't really blame her, he supposed, but it did hurt to have someone with Hermione's face regarding him with such suspicion and mistrust.
"Who are you?" she asked evenly, as the Veritaserum spread its serene tentacles into his bloodstream. He wondered if she knew that he'd been trained to overcome the effects of the elixir, but decided that she was right - he had nothing to hide from her anyway.
"I'm Harry James Potter," he answered.
"Where did you come from?"
"I came from another universe."
"Why?"
"To look for the Hermione Granger that belongs there." With me, was what he did not say.
"What happened to her?"
"She was stranded in an alternate universe during the Final Battle."
"Why?"
"Revenge against me for Voldemort's death."
"By whom?" The questions were quick and clipped, coming rapidly, and she didn't really seem all that interested in the answers.
"Bellatrix Lestrange and Antonin Dolohov."
"Are you married?"
"What? No," he said, and almost smiled at her. It was only now that he recognized the technique; she was trying to rapid-fire questions at him, in the hopes that something would cause him to stumble, exposing some kind of hole in his fabrication.
"How old are you?"
"Almost twenty-three."
"What football position do you play?"
"I don't play football. I used to play Quidditch. I was the Seeker." Something wistful wafted into her dark eyes for a moment, but then was gone.
"Where do you live?"
"A flat in London." He tried not to sound exasperated with her. There were things he needed to be doing, an amplifier that needed to be made, a crystal calibrated. He needed to find out about this universe, and she was his best source of information. But instead of helping him, Harry, she was grilling him as impersonally as though he were a shoplifter caught in the act of lifting potions ingredients from an apothecary.
"With whom?"
"With - with Ron Weasley and Luna Lovegood."
"Do they - do they know you're - " She struggled to keep her composure, but her voice cracked and betrayed her. "Damn it," she said, turning away from him and dashing tears away with the back of one hand.
"What's wrong?" he asked, his eyes flitting to where his wand lay, on the back of the sofa. He could probably make it, if he lunged for it now, while she wasn't paying attention. But something held him back.
"It's just - it's just been a long time since I've heard anyone say Ron's name," she sniffed. "And - and Luna…" She blinked her eyes fiercely, and swallowed, able then to proceed in the impersonal voice that she'd adopted. "I last saw Luna three weeks ago. She wasn't at our usual meeting place last week." Harry could see that Hermione had already consigned Luna to her fate.
"So - so Ron - they're … gone … here too?"
She nodded, swallowing, apparently groping for another question and obviously irritated at herself for her lapse in control.
"Don't you believe me yet?" he asked.
"You came - you came all this way to look for - for H - Hermione?" She said her own name with a curious lilt, almost as if it were proceeding from her mouth for the first time.
"Yes."
"Why?"
He looked up at her then, his emerald eyes blazing, and let himself be completely unguarded. The intensity of his emotion poured from him like waves of radiant heat, and he saw two spots of color appear in her cheeks. One of her hands groped blindly for the back of the desk chair for support.
"Why do you think?" he said simply. There was a moment of tense, charged silence between them, before she forced an artificial smile to her compressed lips.
"Well, she's very lucky," she said, almost flippantly, and Harry knew that somehow he'd hurt her. She began to turn away from him again, her long plait flipping out from the nape of her neck. He was stricken again by how thin and haunted she looked, by her clothes, much faded with multiple Reparos, by how rigid and unyielding she seemed, as if she'd been hurt so much that she could no longer face any kind of pain.
"Wait! Were you - were you and Harry - " he faltered, unsure how to proceed. She shook her head, her misty eyes looking at something far away, something he could not see.
"No," she said, and repeated it again slowly. "No, we - we never… I - I sometimes hoped that - but there wasn't any time, and he - you - he - then he - "
"Then he died…" Harry finished for her, and she nodded again. "Voldemort killed him?"
"Voldemort was already dying. We all thought it was over." There was self-loathing in her voice at this assumption, seen as erroneous in hindsight. "Harry had already broken his wand. But - but he twisted this signet ring he had on, muttered an incantation, and - and - "
"It was through the scar, wasn't it?" Harry asked with a dull voice of certainty.
"Yes… they say - they said that you - that he and Voldemort both stopped breathing at almost the exact same moment. I don't know for - for sure, I was - I was - "
She didn't finish, and she didn't have to. Harry knew all too well what she'd been going through, as she watched him die. He'd seen himself react the same way to her disappearance in Ron's memory, only recently.
"I couldn't believe you were gone," she said, and her voice was broken. She was misusing her pronouns, but didn't seem to notice, and Harry didn't bother correcting her. "It seemed - it seemed so … so wrong somehow. I mean, you'd defeated him, you'd won, and - and then you were just… gone… Ron had to drag me away, and - and I - I - you don't know what it feels like to see you again…"
"I do understand, more than you know," he replied, and they exchanged slightly self-conscious glances. "But - but if Voldemort was defeated, then why are you - why - you're a hero… why are you hiding in a cellar?"
"The war destroyed nearly everything," she said in a dried voice that held all the regrets of an entire generation. "The Ministry was gutted, the Minister dead, Diagon Alley destroyed, Hogwarts emptied. People had fled in droves, and - and still the Order stayed and fought - we stayed and fought. We lost people, one by one, Charlie, Bill, Ginny, Neville, McGonagall…" she listed several more people that Harry did not know at all. "After you - after Voldemort, there was - there was nobody left - and - everyone was so tired… tired of fighting, and somehow - somehow Lucius Malfoy ended up as the Minister of Magic." She sounded weary and regretful.
"No!" Harry's voice was a low exhalation of horror.
"He declared martial law. At first, it seemed necessary. Everything had been destroyed. We were rebuilding from the ground up. Then he gave the Death Eaters general amnesty - said he wanted to `bury the past, and start afresh, as a united nation'." She shook her head in disbelief, a twisted smile distorting her face. "He took over the bank, he - he started blaming Muggles for all of our problems, pointed out that Voldemort had been a half-blood, and look what he did! People started… disappearing, their assets confiscated, their businesses shut down. Everything's Ministry-run now. Mudbloods are worse than second-class citizens. I'm - I'm a wanted criminal, Harry," she said this with a false brightness, but Harry actually had no trouble believing her at all.
"Was Voldemort killed two years ago?" he asked, remembering her comment about having lived in hell for the last two years. At her nod, he continued, "I don't understand why it was different. So far, our universes seem pretty much the same. For me, the Final Battle was five years ago."
"Did he have horcruxes?" she asked, dark shadows swimming in her eyes.
"Yes, he did. Dumbledore told me all about them. In fact, we'd gone to recover one the night Snape killed him." Hermione was already shaking her head.
"Snape didn't kill Dumbledore. Draco Malfoy did. Poisoned him with some mead during our sixth year. Professor Slughorn actually did time in Azkaban for it - died there. But everyone knew it was Malfoy."
Harry was stunned. If Dumbledore had been killed that earlyin the school year, and Slughorn sent off as well, then their education regarding horcruxes would have been incomplete at best.
"It took you longer to find them all…" he said in a dull voice of realization. There was a long silence, as they stared at nothing, each lost in their own thoughts. Finally Harry spoke again,
"Why don't you leave?"
She turned so swiftly that Harry thought she'd surely wrench her neck.
"Leave?" she asked, as if she did not understand the question.
"Leave!" he repeated, throwing his hands out in an expansive gesture that encompassed the room. "Get out of this place. Go to America, go anywhere - anywhere but here." She sighed, and finally sat down on the sofa, letting her hands hang limply between her knees.
"I feel closer to him here," she said, and she didn't have to specify about whom she was talking.
"He's gone, Hermione," Harry replied gently, but she flinched anyway. "He's gone, and he's not coming back. He wouldn't want to see you like this. He - it hurts me to see you like this. If there really is no one left, nothing else that can be done, you ought to wash your hands of this affair and have a life of your own, instead of - of mourning after ghosts."
She drew herself up regally, her eyes flashing with fire, and retorted,
"As you've done?" Her voice was as brittle as glass. "You've given yourself away by what you haven't said. You were torn apart when she disappeared, weren't you? You've been drifting for five years, pretending to have a life, even knowing that she would have rather died that day than seen you like this. And now, you're grasping at the faintest threads of hope, on this wild goose chase to find her! Do you even have a plan? Do you have even a glimmer of strategy? Or are you planning on drifting around different universes for the rest of your life, hoping you'll bump into her accidentally?"
Something in her voice made him feel defensive, set his teeth on edge.
"As a matter of fact I do have a plan," he responded, and told her what the other Hermione had related to him through Sir Nicholas. "I think that means we have to extract enough of my magical signature for an example, and then calibrate it with a crystal and a Homing spell. I was getting pulled out of that universe, so I'm not sure what she told me was complete, but it seems like doing that would pull me straight to the universe that she was in."
Hermione's hand was cupped around her chin; she was listening intently.
"And then what?" she asked.
"And then we use this," he pulled the crystal out from the collar of his shirt, and showed it to her. "And we go home."
Grief winged its way across her weary face. He waited for her to give it some kind of voice, but she did not, saying only,
"I guess we'll be breaking into the Ministry then."
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AN: Okay, I really had fun writing Bitter!Left behind!Hermione. I guess I'm usually jerking Harry around, so it was fun to unleash it all on someone else!
Hope everyone liked it. Happy Halloween.
You may leave a review on your way out, if you like.
lorien
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