Disclaimer: Not mine; more's the pity.
Shadow Walks
My shadow's the only one that walks beside me
--Green Day, "Boulevard of Broken Dreams"
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Chapter Seventeen:
I used to know the sound of a smile in your voice
--Good Charlotte, "Say Anything"
"Break into the Ministry? Just like that?" Harry asked, a hard edge that he'd tried to squelch rising in his voice. "You're a wanted felon, and I'm supposed to be dead. Lucius Malfoy and his goons are running things. We're not going to get little name tags from the welcome desk!"
"I'm sorry," Hermione said snippily. "I know this may have sounded exactly like the kind of half-arsed thing you'd go barreling into without thinking. But I assure you that I have a clear plan in mind. I've gone in before." She turned away from him, but he sprang up from the sofa and caught her by the elbow. She faced him again, and, as their eyes locked, an electrical pulse surged between them.
Harry dropped her arm, as if the contact had burned him.
"I'm - I'm sorry," he stammered abruptly, but sincerely, surprising them both. "I - I should have - I should have known that you wouldn't do anything that you hadn't already sussed out ahead of time."
They both stopped, the truth of their situation slamming them squarely between the eyes. They had known each other, and yet had not. It was as he'd noticed in the previous universe, but this was worse, because he was being forced to actually interact with a person that was and wasn't the Hermione he knew. And she had to face someone who was both like and unlike the boy-man she'd loved and lost.
He could read the conflicted emotions in her eyes easily, for they mirrored the myriad swirling around his own mind.
"There's a - there's a ventilation duct running down to the Department of Mysteries from the roof," Hermione said, faintly at first, then cleared her throat awkwardly. "Luna dismantled the wards blocking it, put up some experimental shield spells that make the wards seem intact. It's how I used to sneak in; she would feed me information - let me look at memoranda that were charmed so that they couldn't leave the building…"
"How did Luna keep her job?" he asked, blurting out the question as soon as it entered his head. "Wasn't she known as an ally of mine? If she - "
"It's a long story," Hermione said, with a shudder of horror, her eyes becoming blank and expressionless. "Luna - Luna went above and beyond the call of duty to keep herself in a position to receive information. She did it even after the line of resistance became all but defunct. We - I used to put out a grass-roots kind of newspaper, but - but people disappeared; it got too dangerous. And … nobody really cares anymore." There was a kind of detached disgust in her eyes. "They've accepted the status quo."
"How could they?" Harry asked, feeling her revulsion and loneliness in the center of his gut. "After Voldemort - and - how could they go back to that?"
"Life under Lucius Malfoy isn't that bad - if you stay in your `place'," she made sarcastic air-quotes with her fingers, "and toe the party line. It - it makes a kind of sense, I suppose, especially for those with families to worry about. There just weren't enough people left after the War with the character to speak out." Her voice got very small. "Sometimes I get so tired."
He understood what she was not saying. She was tired of being alone, of being the only one who cared, the only one who really understood the wrong being done. In their own way, Malfoy and his henchmen were probably frightened of her, of what an intelligent Mudblood with the chutzpah to speak out could do, but as it was, she had been overrun by sheer numbers.
Compassion for her racked him suddenly. She was different, true, but she was still Hermione, and he hated to see her in pain.
"Hey," he said softly, pulling at her arm again, and more than a little surprised when she allowed herself to be moved next to him. "Hey, Hermione…"
She looked at him suddenly, her eyes luminous, but dry, in the low light of the room. He knew she was one who did not easily succumb to tears, that she had probably stamped all emotion out of herself after she'd seen her Harry die.
It was not unlike what he had done upon Hermione's disappearance.
She brought her hands up, as if she were going to take his face between them, but she stopped short, folding her hands, and almost forcing them back into her lap. Instead, she said,
"Merlin, I've missed you."
The wistful yearning note in her voice pierced him to the quick. He closed his eyes for a moment, and breathed in her scent, still the same, still the same, of parchment and leather-bound books and ink, plus the vaguely feminine, fresh-air clean smell that seemed to be unique to her.
When he opened his eyes again, she was regarding him solemnly, an unreadable expression on her face, and he felt the stirrings of something that he had long thought dormant. Desire. It alarmed him, and he inwardly and instinctively tried to shy away from it. He wasn't a stranger to the more pleasurable physical aspects of carnal knowledge - there were prostitutes at the more exclusive brothels who were discreet, who could be counted on not to sell their story of their torrid night with Harry Potter to the highest bidder - but love had never even remotely entered into the equation. He could still remember his first time, probably less than a month after the Final Battle, where a sympathetic call girl at least five years his senior had showed him what to do, had not so much as blinked when he called out another name, and had cradled him in her arms as he wilted afterwards, struggling desperately not to cry and wondering how he was going to live without her.
One hand came up to caress her cheek and jaw line of its own volition. Harry wondered absently how it had gotten there in the first place. He saw her shudder slightly at the contact, and her long, inky lashes drifted downward over her chocolate eyes.
"Hermione…" he said again, his throat nearly closing over the word. He tried to find some way to move back from the precipice, but she opened her eyes to look at him again, and he was undone.
His lips met hers with gentle damp warmth at first that quickly turned into something more heated. Harry felt a low growl begin in his chest, when she encircled his neck with her arms, and opened her mouth under his. It felt surreal, heady, addictive, seductive, everything he'd always wanted, suddenly coming true when he'd long thought it never would.
He gathered her closer to him, and she did not resist. He could feel her wiry slimness against him and wondered at it, with the small part of his mind not utterly absorbed in plundering her lips. Hermione had never seemed the sporty type, preferring the library to the Quidditch pitch, and…
It was as if cold water had been poured unceremoniously on his head, and he careened away from her, pressing his back into the opposite arm of the sofa - hearing it creak ominously - and breathing heavily. She was more athletic here because she had to be; living in secret, on the run, she had honed herself into the perfect outlaw, using every possible advantage she could get her hands on to stay free.
She was not who he wanted her to be, not who he was looking for…
He felt like he had betrayed her, his Hermione, in the worst possible way, in a way that had never occurred to him during any dalliances, because his emotions had never been fully engaged, as he functioned solely on his baser instincts. But this… this not-Hermione that stared at him with large, dark eyes from the other end of the sofa, a mixture of shame, rejection, and mutinous defiance on her face - he wanted this, wanted her, like he hadn't wanted anyone since the day she'd disappeared.
And he utterly loathed himself for it.
"We can't -" he gasped. "We can't do this. You're not - I - I'm not -"
Her chin jutted forward, as if she would refute him, but at the last instant, her pride stepped in and took over, so she said nothing. She stood, Summoning a single roll of parchment from the stack on her desk, and a battered knapsack from the corner. The lines of her spine and shoulders were rigid, a perfect, perpendicular `T'.
"We should get going," she said woodenly. "We'll need to be out of there before the first Unspeakables arrive at dawn." She would not look at him, unrolling the parchment and consulting it carefully.
"Hermione…" he said lamely, feeling that whatever explanation he attempted to make would not help, and could make things worse. He wasn't even sure that he could explain it in any way that would make any sort of sense at all.
"Don't!" She ordered, with a sharp, desperate edge in her voice, whirling on him with pleading in her dark eyes. Her facial muscles were tense, her eyes shining, and he could tell that she was fighting tears for all she was worth. The desire thrummed up in him again, like the gunning of a combustion engine, followed immediately by self-recrimination. He had done this to her; he had hurt her, made her already difficult life even more of a hardship.
"I'm sorry," he offered, though it seemed indeed an unworthy sacrifice.
"You've nothing to be sorry for," she said, in that same distant, clipped monotone, as she made a great show of checking the contents of the knapsack. He saw a thick roll of rope poking out a coiled edge, and he blurted the noun before he thought,
"Rope?" She looked at him rather witheringly, a look she would have reserved for Ron at his most irritating and inane, and Harry felt the wall between them that had seemed to crumble with their mutual touch, reappear even higher and more intimidating than before.
"To get down the shaft," she did him the courtesy of answering. "The duct is shielded so that they can't detect us, but they will be able to detect it if we do magic. It's a trade-off, you see. Either we go during business hours where magic use is high and cannot be reliably monitored, but we stand a greater chance of being seen and caught, or we go at night, when nobody's around, but our magic would stand out like a hippogriff in a cattle herd."
"And you've done this before?"
The dubious tone of his voice was a mistake, and her eyes flashed dangerously at him.
"Over a dozen times," she said, clear challenge in her voice. "Have you done anything unauthorized lately, Auror Potter?"
"As a matter of fact, I broke into Draco Malfoy's French villa, just the other day… " He trailed off, wondering exactly how long it had been since he'd left his own universe. "And how did you know I was an Auror?"
Hermione snorted.
"Please," she said sardonically. "As if you'd have been anything else." They glanced at each other, and Harry sucked in an uneven breath as their eyes met. The air was heavy and thick with tension and longing. He jerked his gaze away, and cleared his throat noisily.
The awkwardness was back, and once again, she was not looking at him, as she shouldered the tatty knapsack. She pulled up her sleeve, pushed her wand into a kind of leather wrist holster concealed beneath her clothing, and looked at Harry with determined, but detached eyes.
"Let's go." Harry picked up his wand from where she'd forgotten it on the back of the sofa, and followed her out.
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They took Disillusioned brooms to the rooftop of the Ministry building itself, that decrepit, abandoned affair that seemed less than nondescript in Muggle eyes. There was a weather-beaten metal door set into a banked section of the rooftop, and Harry eyed it longingly as Hermione pried open the hooded ventilation grate, revealing a slender, square descending tube of utter darkness.
"Can't we - ?"
"It's warded," Hermione said, without looking at him or the door. "Wards are checked regularly. It's only because this vent is so small that it isn't given more than the barest of routine checks. Luna's shield spells hold well under that kind of scrutiny." Her face shadowed briefly with worry, and Harry remembered that she'd said she hadn't heard from Luna in quite some time.
He looked dubiously into the deep hole.
"I'm not going to fit in there."
"Sure you will," Hermione said laconically, raking him up and down with an impersonal glance. "Besides, it widens out further down. I've plenty of room, and you're not that much bigger than me." He gave her a wounded look, which she ignored, concentrating instead on securely fastening the rope around one rung of the hood, which she made sure was heavy enough - and propped against the lip of the vent - so that it wouldn't move overmuch.
"No magic from here on out," she reminded him, and grasping the rope, lowered herself into the vent. After hesitating only a fraction of a second, he followed, misjudging his grip on the rope, and falling perhaps half a meter, before arresting the motion and continuing his descent in a more coordinated manner. He heard a muffled oath, and thought he might have accidentally caught Hermione in the head with the soles of his shoes.
"Sorry," he called down into the darkness. "Rope-climbing is not really a part of Auror training. In fact, I'm not sure how much help I'm going to be, if we can't use magic."
"That's precisely why this has always worked," Hermione replied, her voice echoing tinnily somewhere below him. "Wizards never even think about doing anything the Muggle way."
Harry risked a glance down, and found that he could see absolutely nothing. The opening to the duct was nothing but the smallest of grayish circles above his head.
"How much farther?" he asked.
"About ten more meters," Hermione answered. "Then the duct branches off to the right and left. You'll have to stay right with me; in other directions, there aren't any of Luna's shields."
Thus far, there had been silence, only broken by the hollow sounds of their muted voices and their breathing as they descended. But then, another sort of noise entered Harry's auditory processing, a sort of stretching sound, like that of Velcro being slowed pulled apart.
"Hermione, I think the rope is -"
There was a distinct snap, like a twig being broken in half by a heel, and the rope suddenly went slack in Harry's hands. He felt his stomach rise up into his throat, as his climb down suddenly accelerated. He heard Hermione bite off a shriek, and before a heartbeat had passed, he had landed with a noisy clang at the bottom of the shaft, striking his head on the ceiling of the duct where it branched off, and landing on something soft.
"Damn," he muttered softly. "I've broken my glasses. Hermione, are you okay?" The surface beneath him yielded and moved, and he heard Hermione's voice, so close to him that he could feel her warm breath on his face.
"Harry, can you please get off me?" He took only an instant to newly appreciate the lovely softness on which he'd fallen, and then quickly moved back with a muffled apology, groping for her hands to pull her into a more upright position. He was briefly alarmed at the feel of something wrapped around his left leg, but realized it was the rope, and retrieved it, blindly winding it into a spool around his arm, and handing it to Hermione.
She flicked on a Muggle flashlight, and grimly surveyed the frayed end of the rope, shaking her head.
"It's carried me all these times," she said, "but two people were just too much for it."
"How are we going to get back out?" Harry asked, trying not to notice the way the yellow light of the torch reflected golden lights into her eyes and onto the ends of her hair. She shook her head again, deep in thought.
"I don't know," she replied. "I guess we'll figure that out as we go." She cocked her head toward the tiny passageway that led to the right. "We're going to have to crawl. Stay close."
Harry crawled, following the bobbing light of the torch and trying not to look at Hermione's arse right in front of him. There were many twists and turns, and he tried not to think about the fact that he might only be able to sit if he were bent nearly double. Instead, he strove to concentrate on the turnings, so that he might be able to find the way out if necessary, finding himself slipping easily back into Auror mode, though he kept his wand tucked into his back pocket, hopefully beyond the reach of temptation.
"Can't - can't anyone hear us?" he asked, at one point, of their muffled thumps and clangs as they crawled.
"Luna's shields have built-in Silencio," she informed him shortly. Her voice remained business-like, telling him that she had not forgotten his rejection of her back at Godric's Hollow.
After a few more moments of crawling, she told him,
"It's just through here. The vent's high up in the wall, near the ceiling. It'll be about an two and a half meter drop." They turned a final corner, and Harry could see dim stripes at the end of the duct, where the grate opened out into a room.
Hermione pushed on the grate gently, dislodging it from its place, but grabbing the slats before it could fall.
"Luna removed the Sticking charm," she said quietly, and carefully peered out of the grate.
The hairs on the back of Harry's neck prickled, as some sixth sense began to surge into overdrive. Something felt wrong; it was too still, too quiet.
As he opened his mouth to mention this to Hermione, she spoke.
"Looks good. The broom in the corner is propped upside down. That's Luna's signal that everything's clear. She could be on the other side of that shelving," she whispered. "Or maybe she just stepped out for a moment. Come on." Something like relief flashed in her eyes, a letting go of the worry that had plagued her ever since Luna had failed to meet her at their prearranged spot.
She leaned across a slight gap to rest the grating on top of a high bookshelf, and let herself drop lightly to the ground below, landing in a cat-like crouch. Every instinct Harry had was shrieking an alarm, and he double-checked to make sure his wand was in place, before landing neatly beside Hermione.
She had already started forward, when he caught her by the elbow, and moved in front of her. The effrontery of his protectiveness was written all over her face, and she would have shouldered her way back in front of him, but he caught her by the upper arms and peered intently into her face.
"Something's not right," he mouthed. "I'd stake my life on it. Go slow."
Hermione looked as if she'd like to argue, but some inner voice had evidently reminded her that this was Harry - or some form of him, at least - and, all evidence to the contrary, she did trust him.
Harry did not reach for his wand, not yet, but he moved soundlessly, keeping to the shadows thrown by the massive shelves. There was not a sound, not a breath, and it gave Harry the creeps.
As he rounded the first corner, he saw it, at the far end of the aisle, extending out of his sight around another corner.
"Shit," he swore under his breath. Blood. The crimson stain on the floor was unmistakable. He strode toward it, quickly but quietly, and knelt down beside the puddle, not going far enough to reveal himself around the next bend. He stuck his finger in the pool, and found it to be tacky and congealed.
He eased forward, careful not to step in the blood, and peered around the edge of the shelving. At the sight of what met his eyes, he was unable to contain a hoarse cry of dismay.
"What is it, Harry?" Hermione asked, protesting against him as he tried to hold her back. "What is it? Let me see."
Her horrified gasp was followed by the soft clap of her hand to her mouth. Harry was feeling a little shaky himself, and hoped desperately that he was not going to be sick.
There was a desk filling an alcove just around the corner, piled with papers and notations and odd whirling instruments. Luna sat in the chair, though it was positioned to face them, rather than the desk, as if she had been propped to greet them.
Her throat had been slit from ear to ear, her eyes vacant, blood staining the ends of her hair, the front of her clothes, and the chair, running in meandering rivulets to pool where they'd found it.
"Oh, Luna," Hermione's voice was heartbreaking. Harry was struggling to beat back a flood of images, Luna bringing him wine, Luna admonishing him gently with her eyes, Don't look at me like that Harry, Luna serenely telling him that the universe was out of balance.
It isn't her; it isn't her, he said to himself, struggling to belie what his eyes were telling him.
"Who would've done this to her? Why would they have left her like this?" Harry asked. The body had obviously been placed under various stasis charms, or the smell would have alerted them before they'd even gotten near her. Luna had to have been dead for some time.
"They must have found out what - what she'd been doing, that she'd been giving me information. If they left her here, it - it was to send a message." Dawning horror lurked in her eyes. "It's a trap. They knew I would come eventually. After we came out of the vent, we came out of the shields. They must still be intact, or they'd have been here waiting for us. But I'll bet they're on their way now." She looked at Harry, who was trying very hard not to look at Luna. "Harry, we've got to go."
Harry tore his gaze away from the blood on the floor, noticing for the first time the rows and rows of necklaces.
"We can't go yet. Not without what we came here for."
Hermione's eyes flashed angrily.
"It's all very well for you," she said. "One incantation and you can leave this universe behind, but I'll still be in Ministry custody."
He grabbed her by the arms, and pressed a hard and defiant kiss to her pliant mouth.
"I would never abandon you to the mercies of Lucius Malfoy, Hermione," he said fiercely. "I don't care what universe we're in. But we're not leaving yet." He shot a couple of complicated spells - Auror in origin - that Hermione didn't recognize at the door, sealing it shut decisively. "Reckon it doesn't matter whether or not we use magic now. We've got to have calibration equipment and maybe a couple of blank crystals, just in case. Can you find what we need?"
Hermione stared at him for one wide-eyed moment, before nodding, and darting around the corner. He heard the faint rustle of her movements, and turned to go through the desk, his eye lighting on a leather-bound portfolio full of sheaves of handwritten notes. The stamp on the front said, Multiverse Theory. He shrunk the tome, and placed it carefully in his pocket.
His sorrowful gaze fell on the still corpse of Luna Lovegood, and he placed one hand on the back of her blond head, smoothing down the still shiny hair.
"I'm so sorry," he murmured brokenly.
His introspection was interrupted by shouts and curses from outside. The magically sealed door rattled ominously on its hinges.
"Hermione, love," Harry called out in a low voice of warning. "Are you ready to go? I think we've worn out our welcome."
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