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 Eight:
Hope dangles on a string, like slow spinning redemption, winding in, winding out. The shine of it has caught my eye.
-- Dashboard Confessional, "Vindicated"
Harry bolted through the waiting area of St. Mungo's, heedlessly scattering people as he went, nearly overshot the room he was searching for, and skidded to a halt by grabbing the doorframe when he caught a glimpse of Ron's ginger hair. His best mate was seated on the edge of the bed, casually propped on one hip, with one of Luna's hands clasped in both of his. Harry didn't say anything upon his initial entrance, but his eyes ran over Luna with the practiced detailing of a trained Auror.
"I'm fine, Harry," Luna said, smiling, albeit using a voice weak enough to denounce some of her veracity.
"What happened?" he asked, moving around the bed to sit at its foot, on the opposite side from Ron.
"I'm sorry I've - I know there were things you counted on doing today," she apologized, but he waved it off with one hand.
"There are very few ways this day could be any worse for me. Having something happen to you is one of them. I'm just glad you're okay. You are okay?" He added the question with a pensive lift of his eyebrows.
"I was at work, and someone broke in. I was hit with a Stunner, and my head happened to make the acquaintance of my worktable. They're going to let me go home as soon as the healer clears me."
"She was very lucky," Ron put in, still holding Luna's thin hand in both of his long-fingered ones, his eyes fixed on her, as if she might fade from sight at any moment. Harry's eyes danced briefly from Ron's face to Luna's and back again. When he met Luna's eyes, she gave him a knowing look, inclining her head toward Ron, and then lowered her gaze until her lashes fanned out across her cheeks. Ron's finally acting like Luna matters to him. Good, Harry thought matter-of-factly.
"Did they catch who did it? Did Shacklebolt send anyone down? Are they investigating?" Harry's questions were rapid-fire, and Luna could tell that he was about a millisecond away from going into full-on Auror mode.
"The Head Auror sent somebody down to look - somebody - somebody named MacNeil or was it O'Shaughnessy? I think - "
"MacKie?" Harry exploded, interrupting her. "Kingsley sent down a bloody trainee after Ministry employees were attacked?"
"But nothing was taken. They - my supervisor went through and checked, and everything's exactly where it should be. Calpurnia's handbag was still right out on her desk where she left it, and she was the first one hit."
"Is she all right?" he asked solicitiously. "Who else was hurt?"
"She wasn't injured. But whoever came through Obliviated her. She doesn't remember anything after she sat down at her desk, until the emergency workers came."
"Emergency workers?" His questions were clipped, quick, and Luna could not suppress a fond smile.
"I - I - when I woke up, I was on the floor, almost under the worktable, but my wand was only an arm's length away. I sent out the St. Mungo's emergency Notification spell. I was bleeding, and I could see Calpurnia down on the other side of the room. I didn't know what had happened, and I was worried that perhaps that herd of Graphorns had broken out of the dungeons; they could have caused all kinds of mayhem rampaging around the Ministry."
"Who else was down there? Working in the Department of Mysteries?" Harry queried.
"Look, Harry," Ron interceded. "Luna's been through a lot today. Perhaps you should just - "
"Ron, it's okay," Luna reminded him gently. "This is how Harry lets me know how much I mean to him, right, Harry? I'm fine. I don't mind answering his questions." Harry colored violently at Luna's first assertion, but her smile finally elicited its counterpart from him. Ron eyed them suspiciously, and muttered something about Harry always playing Auror, to which Harry replied that he actually was an Auror in real life, thank you very much. Ron bristled, and for a moment, it almost looked like they would come to blows, using Luna as an excuse for their as yet unresolved issues involving Hermione, but Ron subsided, declaring that if Luna was okay with being interrogated, then he supposed he could deal with it.
"Nobody was there but Calpurnia and me. It was the weekend, but we had been working on a project involving - it - " She blinked apologetically at Harry. "I'm sorry, but I'm really shouldn't say." Harry shook his head, as a way to tell her not to worry about it, and to tell him what she could. "Anyway, we were the only ones there. You know how it is," she shrugged at Harry. "Nobody ever comes down there - we're just a lot of crackpots going on over someone's half-baked ideas." She tucked her lower lip between her teeth, casting an anxious glance at the other two, as she remembered whose half-baked idea had been recently abandoned, even by the crackpots. "Nobody's ever even tried to break in before that I know of, except - except…" She didn't finish, but they all knew who she meant. They'd all been there that night, after all. "There's nothing terribly valuable down there, either - at least nothing that an outsider would be able to understand - except maybe the - "
"…Time Turners…" Harry filled in for her, suddenly looking alarmed. Something had been niggling at the back of his brain when Luna said `nobody ever comes down there', but it vanished with her last words. The three of them exchanged a wide-eyed glance. Luna was shaking her head.
"It's no good, Harry," she said matter-of-factly. "Time Turners are strictly regulated. If I wanted to use one, there would be paperwork in triplicate and a waiting period. That room is warded to the ceiling. If someone even tried to steal a Time Turner… trust me, we'd know." There was an odd inflection in her voice that caused Harry to look at her intently, but her face was completely bland.
Harry was not so blasé, however. His heart was pounding so loudly in his chest that he was certain his flatmates could hear it. This was all tied together; Dolohov's arrest, the break-in, the anniversary… the timing was not a coincidence. Some of his detractors might say that it was terribly presumptuous of him to assume that everything always had to do with him, but … it always did have to do with him.
"I need to go down there," Harry said firmly. "And I need to talk to Calpurnia. Do you know where she is?"
"Up on the fourth floor, I guess…Spell Damage," Luna said thoughtfully, after ruminating for a moment.
"All right, then," Harry said, and then stopped and turned at the door, looking quite seriously at Ron.
"Stay with her," he said, and the two men locked eyes for just a moment. Something indefinable, but very real just the same, passed between them. Harry's look seemed to say, I'm trusting you to do this. Ron's seemed to reply, I know I've misplaced your faith in me, but I'll never do it again.
"Harry, mate!" The words seemed to burst from Ron, even though he'd tried to hold them back. Harry was halfway out the door, but popped his head back in quizzically. "What's going on?" Ron seemed to be pleading to make some kind of sense out of all of it.
Mental pictures flashed in Harry's mind in quick succession, pieces in a puzzle that he'd not yet been able to assemble, pieces that he wasn't at all sure had even come from the same box.
Do they haunt you, her eyes? Lost, bewildered, confused.
Bellatrix was right.
That is what you did to her. Turn about is fair play.
She's not…
Turn about is fair play.
There are things worse than death.
He could feel a breakthrough hovering on the edges of his consciousness, taunting him, just out of reach. The countenance he turned back to Luna and Ron was wide-eyed and confused.
"I'm not sure, but something's going on, and it involves us."
"How do you know?"
"Because it involves Hermione."
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Harry found Calpurnia Wilcott in a room on the fourth floor, looking rather dazed and dreamy, even for one of Luna's friends. The door was cracked open, and the healer was not in sight, but Harry didn't know when he or she would return. Given his almost certain future status as persona non grata at the Ministry, he'd rather be neither noticed nor questioned.
"M - Miss Wilcott?" he asked, stammering slightly as he tried to sound professional.
"Yes?" she turned politely to him. Everything about her seemed pale, wide, sky blue eyes, broad pale forehead, skin so white as to seem nearly translucent. All of this was topped by a cloud of inky black hair that was curly to the point of kinkiness. It was pulled up into a fluffy knot, held in place by what looked like four or five chopsticks. The entire effect was somewhat disconcerting, Harry reflected. He absently noted several areas of scaly blotchiness on her hands and forearms, only faintly visible as they had been Glamoured over, and remembered with a kind of dazed bewilderment that the eczema salve wasn't ready yet.
"You're Harry Potter, aren't you? That Auror friend of Luna's?" she asked, and Harry realized that he'd been standing in the doorway, saying nothing. He couldn't suppress a small grin at her description of him, one he was sure had never been applied to him before, that Auror friend of Luna's.
"Yes," he said simply. "I'm glad you're okay, but I was hoping you could answer some questions for me, if you're up to it."
"I'll be glad to," she said, "but I must warn you, I was Obliviated, and I don't know how much use I'll be."
"Did you see anything unusual today?" She blinked mildly at him.
"I expect I did. It's probably why they Obliviated me." They looked at each other owlishly for a moment, and Harry could see why she and Luna got along so well.
"I meant - as you came in for work, was there anyone in the lobby, in the corridors, that shouldn't have been there?"
"Not that I can recall," she said thoughtfully. "It's always rather light on the weekend, you know - Why, whatever's the matter with you?" Harry had gone completely still, staring off into middle distance with a startled green gaze. Nobody ever comes down there.
Malfoy had been coming around the corner when they collided. Harry had been going to see Luna, so Malfoy could have only come from the Department of Mysteries. What the hell had he been doing down there?
"Was Draco Malfoy down in your department yesterday?" Harry said, collecting himself enough to ask the question almost naturally. Calpurnia rolled her eyes.
"Yes. He's been coming round for awhile now. Chatting up Aurelia - she's the receptionist. He brought her lunch yesterday, hoped they could eat together in the break room, but she was out sick." Calpurnia's tone of voice clearly said that the receptionist was lying. "She called in yesterday morning, saying that she'd had a run-in with a rabid Mooncalf. Couldn't she come up with a better lie than that? There wasn't even a full moon last night! Everyone knows that she was trying to skive off work so she could see her brother - he was playing in a football game in Bristol… I don't know why she just didn't tell Protheroe that, although he's such a git that he probably wouldn't let her, just to be - "
"But Malfoy…?" Harry asked, trying to steer her back onto topic.
"He was quite put out that she wasn't there. Seemed dead set on having lunch with her. Though you'd think it would have come up at some point in their conversation the day before that she wasn't going to be there. And I don't know why anyone would choose to eat in the break room. The smell back there is ghastly. Smithers has been experimenting on his chameleon with energy extraction charms in his spare time. Anyone could tell you that the ratio is all wrong; a chameleon is much too small of an animal for there to be any positive and measurable effect, but…"
"So he left?" Harry interjected desperately, finally cutting her off mid-syllable.
"Who, Smithers? Oh, you mean Mr. Malfoy…yes - yes, he did. He looked quite angry. I thought he might've been trying to hide from someone. He looked like someone had roughed him up quite nicely."
So Malfoy had been trying to gain entry to the Department. The rotating room only allows people into the reception area during office hours, and he couldn't go anywhere else with someone else's authorization or access.
"What room were you in?"
"When I got Obliviated?" At Harry's nod, she continued, "Luna and I were working on something… it's classified." Her eyes flickered up to him and then down to the folded hands in her lap.
"I didn't ask what you were working on, just what room you were in," he protested, hoping that the loophole would reveal something.
"We were in the multiverse room," she said hastily, and in a low voice, as if she were afraid someone would overhear. She had a pained look on her face, and Harry knew that her very title as `Unspeakable' was coming into play. It was likely that the only reason she'd been able to tell him anything about the room was because he was an Auror, and therefore authorized. All the more reason to act quickly, he thought.
"The…" Harry's mind groped at shreds of cryptic conversation that he'd overheard at that befuddling lunch he'd had with the two Unspeakables. "But isn't that all theory?" Calpurnia pressed her lips together tightly, met his eyes, and slowly and deliberately shook her head.
"But what would you possibly have that would be worth stealing?" Harry sounded more than a little lost.
"Nothing was taken," Calpurnia sounded as emphatic on this point as Luna had. Harry opened his mouth, but then closed it again, decided not to disclose what they had postulated about Time Turners, unless it was absolutely necessary. He still believed it was a possibility, regardless of Luna's dissenting opinion. "It's just what happened that other time. The door was open, when everyone arrived in the morning and Protheroe thought I left it open, even though I would never do that. I remember because Lydia Wyngate had brought a German chocolate cake from her mum into the office, and I was taking a piece home. I had to get my wand out of my purse to lock the door, and I dropped the cake. It was really quite irritating. Of course, Protheroe didn't believe me. But nothing was gone, so…" she shrugged expansively.
"Wait…" Harry said slowly, trying to sort through her garbled narrative. "It's happened before? The door was open? What door?"
"The door to the multiverse room. It was open, even though I always make sure to lock it. I mean, we can't have just anyone wandering in there; it would…" She clamped her mouth shut suddenly.
"Luna said nobody had ever broken into the Department of Mysteries, except for - well, you know…" he gestured toward the scar on his forehead, with a sheepish look on his face.
"Well, this was before she worked here. I think she was still in school. And it's not like we could prove anything happened. As far as that git of a supervisor, Protheroe, cared, it was my negligence, and nothing more. He was that convinced; he didn't even file a report."
Harry didn't hear much beyond Calpurnia's assertion that Luna had still been in school at the time of the first mysterious break-in. Dread was pooling like warm lead in his stomach, slowly beginning to solidify.
"When was it?"
"The other break-in - I mean, `alleged' break-in?" Calpurnia rolled her eyes, and made air-quotes with her fingers. Harry merely nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
"Five years ago - let's see… yes, five years ago last week, I believe…yes, because Lydia's birthday was just on the seventh." She looked surprised, saying this as if it had just occurred to her. "Yes! I remember we always joke that if Lydia's birthday had been only a few days later, she would have had a holiday from work on it every year - all thanks to you, of course - I say, are you sure you're all right?"
"Thank - thank you for your time, Miss Wilcott," Harry said stiffly, as if someone had pulled a string on his back to make him spit out the words.
She had not even gotten an entire farewell sentence out, before he had bolted from the room, and she really hoped that he was not going to be sick out in the corridor. That always left such an odor, and that smell combined with a cleaning charm was actually worse…
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When Harry arrived back down at Luna's room, Ron was in the corridor, lounging just to the right of the door, which was closed.
"Healer's looking her over. Chucked me out," Ron said, in response to Harry's raised eyebrows. "Did you find anything out?" He stopped and leaned forward, to more closely peer into Harry's pale face. "Tell me what's wrong," he ordered. Harry scrubbed one hand over his face and sighed.
"Something…everything…I'm not even sure. But things aren't right, and it has to do with Hermione and the Final Battle, I'd stake my life on it." When he looked back up at Ron, his eyes were too-bright in his chalky face, and Ron knew that he was moving on autopilot, pushing himself doggedly through the soul-searing agony that always seemed to flare up on this day of all days. "I think - I think Hermione's alive, Ron," he spoke breathlessly, hurriedly, as if afraid that if he hesitated, he'd not say it at all. He braced himself, as if waiting for the verbal castigation that would come.
Ron ran long fingers through his disheveled hair, his freckles standing out as spots of color in a face that looked nearly as ashen and world-weary as Harry's. There was a long moment where neither said anything, and the only sounds were the bustling of mediwitches from the station down the hall.
"What have you found out?" Ron asked heavily, meeting Harry's gaze squarely. The gratitude that washed over his best mate's face was enough to send him into a profound spiral of shame, even as his thoughts drifted longingly to the bottle of Ogden's in the cabinet in his room. Be so nice to just forget all this for awhile, he mused.
Speaking slowly, as if it were taking a great deal of effort, Harry began to outline what he'd discovered: what Calpurnia had said about the previous break-in and its timing, what Dolohov had said before he died, Malfoy's rant in the halls of the Ministry, and where he had been just prior to that. When he got to that part in the story, Ron's eyes lit up.
"The receptionist? Aurelia?" At Harry's nod of confirmation, he continued. "Luna's told me about her. There's no way Malfoy would be caught dead sniffing around her." At Harry's blank glance, Ron rolled his eyes. "And you call yourself an Auror! Calpurnia even said that her brother plays football, Harry, football. She's Muggle-born."
"He was making for that multiverse room," Harry said. "When Aurelia wasn't there yesterday, he decided to come back later. He must have enough access to the Ministry to get him in the Department of Mysteries… he just couldn't be seen there without a convenient excuse, in case something went wrong."
"He probably didn't expect anyone to be there on the weekend," Ron inserted grimly. "But how do you know where he was going?"
"Five years ago, the door was found open, when Calpurnia is sure she locked it. She and Luna were in that same room today." Harry's eyes were moving rapidly, as he ticked off goals on his fingers. "We need to talk to Luna and find out what is in that room that he could have been after, and then we need to get in that room - the sooner the better."
"Why the rush?" Ron asked.
"Because by Monday, I probably won't be authorized personnel anymore," Harry said shortly. Ron's jaw dropped and his eyes were wide with astonishment.
"Harry, it wasn't - it wasn't because of - " Harry shook his head, a small, sad smile briefly touching his features.
"No, Ron, it was entirely because of me." He fumbled with something in his pocket, finally removing it, and he flipped open a small hinged lid on a nondescript, round, black box made of some kind of matte-finish metal. It was empty. "I need your memory of the Final Battle - the last time you saw and heard Hermione." Ron was backing away from him, looking with distaste at the object Harry held.
"What the hell is that?" he asked.
"It's a portable Pensieve, Ron. Standard issue for Aurors. I really need that memory - I need to hear what spell Bellatrix cast, and you're one of the only people who were close enough to hear it."
"But I don't remember - "
"You don't think you remember it, but it's probably still recorded in your mind." He held out the small round box again. "I'm going to talk to Remus too. I need to know exactly what happened when he killed Bellatrix, and whether or not he actually saw Hermione vanish." Another thrust of the box toward Ron. "Please."
Ron sighed, and put his wand to his temple, slowly pulling a silvery strand, which he then deposited into the receptacle. His expression seemed to ease somewhat with the absence of the excruciating memory, and Harry snapped the lid closed and fastened the latch.
"Why do you need Remus' memory of killing Bellatrix?" he asked, as the healer exited Luna's room, and they moved to enter. Harry shoved the portable Pensieve into his pocket.
"Because I don't think she's dead either."
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AN: Okay, now things are starting to move. Harry's on the case now…and there were several large hints (I won't say they were anvil-sized!!) in this chapter, not the least of which was the room mentioned.
Hope you're continuing to enjoy. You may leave a review on your way out if you like!
lorien
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