Bridges
Chapter Nine: Bridge Collapse
Harry's tread was heavy as he and Ron walked down the large middle aisle that threaded through the mass of cubicles that made up the MLE. The place was normally as bustling and chaotic as an anthill, but in the middle of the night, even it was mostly docile.
Without speaking, the two friends entered Ron's office. The latter flopped into the rolling chair behind his desk, and Harry found a place to light after Banishing two large cardboard containers to a storage closet. He hoped Ron would be able to find them again later. There was a beat of very dense silence.
"So, let's have `em," Ron finally said. Harry's responding look of befuddlement was very good, but Ron was not convinced, remaining unmoving, until Harry rolled his eyes, sighed, and began fishing in his pockets. He pulled out the shrunken ESU, and tossed to Ron, who clapped it between his palms.
"I didn't not want the MLE to have these. I just - I just - " Harry seemed at a loss, and gestured heavenward in frustration.
"Wanted a little more time before everyone found out about your little illicit shag-fest with - " Ron stopped at the look on Harry's face.
"It was more than that, Ron," Harry sighed, dropping his face down into his hands for a moment. "At least, I thought it was more, or - or could be more… or maybe I was just wishing…"
Ron leaned back in his chair, propped his long legs across his desk, and crossed his ankles.
"So, forgive my confusion… but why didn't you tell Hermione any of this, you know, twelve years ago?" Lazily flourishing his wand, he expanded the unit, and withdrew the pieces of parchment from its depths, unfurling them on his desk, without really looking at them. His full attention was on his best mate.
"I don't know. It was all so … unexpected, and then it - it was just there, and I hadn't ever really thought about it before, and I - I didn't know what to do with it, and … "
"Wait, are we talking about your feelings for Hermione or your…little wand?" Ron's gesture and eyebrow lift made his innuendo quite clear.
"Ron!" Harry narrowed his eyes in a withering glare, and braced his hands against the metal arms of the chair, as if he would rise and leave. Ron held his hands palms out in an appeasing gesture.
"Easy, mate. I was just having you on. I'm sorry. You were saying?"
Harry looked as if he now doubted the wisdom of continuing his story, but did it anyway.
"I was afraid."
"Why?" Ron's question was surprisingly serious, and he fixed his gaze on Harry, as if to compel him to answer.
"I didn't know what I wanted. I didn't know what she wanted. I was afraid that if I - if I asked her to, then she would… but it wouldn't really be what she wanted to do, and she would - feel trapped or something, and … "
Ron snorted.
"You are a girl," he said. "When has Hermione ever done anything that she didn't really want to do? Even for one of us?"
It was so like what Hermione had said to him all those years ago that Harry just stared at him.
"Well, there was something Ginny said that really - "
"Wait one bloody minute... You talked to my sister about this? Not to me, but my sister? You know, the cheeky little one with the fixation on you? You're dumber than I thought, and Hermione thinks I'm the idiot. Does she know?"
"Know what? That I talked to Ginny? No."
"Good, `cause she'd kill you."
"I don't see what business it is of hers who I talk to or what about. Ginny's my friend…" Another snort from Ron, but Harry plowed over it. "And anyway, she asked. She actually bloody well guessed what had happened that night, and offered her opinion."
"I'll bet she did," Ron muttered under his breath.
"What are you on about?"
"For someone who's been an Auror for over a decade, and who's nearly thirty years old, you really are surprisingly naive."
"Do go on." Harry's voice was chilly.
"Did it never occur to you that where you are concerned, Ginny might not have the purest motives?"
Evidently, it had not, and it was plain to read on Harry's face. Ron felt sort of sorry for him; this was something that would have been patently obvious to anyone used to the machinations of siblings - or anyone who really knew Ginny at all, he thought.
"But she's a friend, and she's Hermione's friend, and - and your family - I mean, it feels like my own, and I - "
"You thought you could trust her," Ron supplied for him. "In most things, you probably can. But you know what they say: Sooner turn your back on a Bludger than a woman in love."
Harry's look spoke eloquently of his doubt as to whether "they" had actually said anything of the sort.
"That's just nonsense. Ginny isn't in love with me."
"Maybe not now, but she was devastated when you left for Australia - and even more so, when you'd made it clear you weren't interested in coming back. She tried to take it out on Hermione a time or two, but I set her right straight about that."
Harry had straightened in the chair at Ron's last words, his eyes blazing in automatic defense of their other best friend.
"Take it out on Hermione? Why would she - ?"
"It hasn't exactly been some enormous secret, Harry. You left, and you and Hermione were no longer speaking to each other. It was obvious something had happened between the two of you - I never would have guessed it was this, but Ginny obviously had no difficulties figuring it out." Ron's look was dour. "And then she probably appealed to your bloody nobility to step back from Hermione and let her live her own life…" He cracked a smirk at Harry's dumbfounded look. "That's what she said, isn't it? And you believed her. You ruddy great sod. Bet it chafed Ginny's knickers though, when you bloody well left the country. That couldn't have been in her plans."
Ron seemed to find pleasure thinking of Ginny's thwarted objectives, but Harry thought that it was small comfort when one thought of a dozen wasted years. He thought of Hermione, alone, scared, laboring to give their child life, with only her Muggle mother in the waiting room. He wondered if she'd cursed him, if she'd cried out for him. His heart wrenched painfully in his chest, and he wondered if the regret would ever stop its cruel piercing. I'd have been there, Hermione, in a moment, in a heart beat… I've never stopped loving you, and I'd have been there!
Harry twitched restlessly the uncomfortable chair, and Ron took the movement as a cue to drop the subject, and return to the matter at hand. He bent his ginger head over the two pieces of parchment, occasionally tapping his wand against one or the other of them, and murmuring a variety of Revelatory Incantations that were Auror standard operating procedure.
"That box over there, by the door," Ron said, gesturing with one hand without looking up. "It's the records we `confiscated' from the Ludlow manor. I know I saw their Gringotts ledger in there."
Harry was already rifling through the contents, taking a second to marvel at Ron's leadership. When exactly had that happened? And what else had he missed while he'd been gone?
"Will that be just Peter's records, or the whole family's?" Harry asked.
"Oh, it's the family's," Ron said, furrowing his brow, as he threw another spell at the stubborn parchment. "Pure-blooded all the way. Live in the same damn house; no wonder they all end up nutters. I'd bet my Cannons tickets that Mother Ludlow still holds the purse-strings, and her boys are still on her dole."
"Does that mean Griselda Ludlow knew about the blackmail?"
"I'll wager there's not much that goes on in that house that she doesn't know about," was Ron's sage reply. Harry hefted out the heavy book then, opening the creaky leather binding, and spreading it out in his lap.
Hermione looked mournfully at her open trunk, her belongings neatly stacked, sorted, and folded, filling it to the brim. Her room - the lovely room that Harry had picked out for her - was looking forlornly bare. She was leaving tomorrow.
She was leaving tomorrow.
She couldn't understand why she felt so bereft about it. She should feel charged, ambitious, excited. There had been a rather nasty run of things right after the Final Battle, when Harry had drifted around the Burrow looking like he'd lost instead of won, but once the three of them had moved in together… life seemed to take on a new shine somehow, freshly polished and ripe with possibility.
Here was her possibility, hovering before her like a snitch, just waiting for her to grasp it.
And yet, it smacked of triviality. The night she'd shared with Harry had skewed her worldview; she was seeing things from a different angle now, and she wanted desperately to know if Harry had experienced the same alteration.
She never could quite bring herself to ask him. And she knew the reason why. For all her vaunted Gryffindor bravery, she was afraid. She was afraid that, if she broached the subject, he would admit to her that the earth, in fact, hadn't shifted beneath his feet the way it had beneath hers. He would tell her that, no, he had not been reliving that night non-stop since it happened. She figured that, like her, he had indeed wished for it to happen again, but that was just because he was a man, and that's the way they worked.
It's better this way, Hermione, she told herself, wondering why she didn't believe it. You both said you wouldn't have this transfigure into some big `thing'. Harry had seemed relieved when she'd said that, absolved of some kind of responsibility, and somehow, that had hurt too…
He'd been getting Owls from Australia, and she knew that he'd been casually conversing with the Auror Unit Down Under, but she didn't really think he'd relocate. After all, Ron was here and the Weasleys, and - torrid night together notwithstanding - she was still his best friend, and she knew that he loved her, at least on that level.
She tried to push away the thoughts of the heavy envelope she'd found in the post, of the cheery multicolored logo that had peered from beneath the open flap. But her mind ventured there anyway, and proceeded to mercilessly examine the facts, as painfully as ripping off a scab. Harry was going on holiday. With someone else. He'd had ample time to ask her, yet he hadn't. She doubted Ron would be the recipient, or Harry would have simply bought three tickets. It couldn't be Ginny…
She couldn't bring herself to ask him, to reveal to him that she'd fallen to snooping through his post, to let him know that she was as hopelessly obsessive as the silliest teenager, and that she'd broken her vow to refuse to let that night eclipse all their years of friendship.
How could she, Hermione Granger, have plunged to such depths? Was she really going to go out with such a pitiful whimper? She stood then, suddenly, and felt determination swell within her chest, at least momentarily squelching the soul-paralyzing fear of his rejection. The resolution on her face hadn't been seen since the day they descended from the Common Room to face the fight they'd all known was coming.
She was going to have it out with Harry before she left, promises be damned. She flung open her door, and was suddenly brought up short into a wall of chest.
"Harry…" she spluttered, backing away from him, telling herself that she had only imagined the heat of him through the thin fabric of his shirt.
"Hermione," he said in a bemused way, unsettled by her flustered reaction. "I was looking for you." He had on a plastic smile, of the sort that he used when confronted by the press, the Ministry, or his fans. The fact that he was using it with her - with her! - was as painful as if he'd cursed or struck her.
"I'm right here." Her voice sounded cheerful, though she had to quell the urge to vomit. "There was - there was actually something - "
"Oy, you found her then?" Ron trumpeted down the hall. "Let's be off then. Before all the good booths are taken."
"Be off where?" Hermione mouthed, arching one tell-me-what's-going-on-now eyebrow at Harry.
"It's a party - you know, a going-away party… for you," Harry answered her helplessly. "Don't tell. It's supposed to be a surprise." He was looking at her accusingly, as if she'd coerced him into giving away the secret, and she couldn't keep back the smile that twisted her lips or the muffled laugh that vibrated in her throat.
He reached for her hand then, tickling his fingers across her palm and swirling his thumb over her first two knuckles. She felt like she was caressing a live wire, and her breath came unevenly.
"What was it you wanted to tell me?" he asked, as his eyes searched her own. He seemed more than a little strained, but his gaze was hungry. She knew if she just said one word, made one gesture, she'd find herself on her bed, beneath his warm length. Her fingers twitched in his, aching to crook themselves in the direction of that bed; her lips pursed to form the syllables; her body pleaded with her to take this opportunity.
Harry's eyes had gone over her shoulder, and something in them flattened as he saw her bare walls, her brimming trunk. He straightened suddenly, blinking as if he'd just come out from under the Imperius.
One look, one word, one touch…Their eyes locked, simultaneously begging for and shying away from.
"Harry..." Her voice cracked.
"We should go," he said.
"Right…" she agreed faintly.
Harry's eyes were crossing as he skimmed the rows and columns of the impeccably recorded family ledger. If he hadn't known better, he would have sworn that someone had hexed the entries to blur and wiggle in front of his bleary gaze. He'd nodded toward the pages once, and then jerked so suddenly that the book had toppled onto the floor.
"Go home, mate," Ron said perfunctorily. "How long have you been up? Your internal clock's got to be completely wonky by now. There's nothing you can do here that can't wait until morning anyway."
"I'm fine," Harry replied, not at all convincingly. He met Ron's knowing stare evenly, trying to pretend that his disinclination to stop for the night had nothing to do with the fact that he didn't want to go to the flat they'd used to share.
"You can always kip on the couch at my place," Ron offered, reading Harry perfectly.
"I'm…" Harry began to say again, but then stopped. What was the point in denying the fact that he was bone-weary, heart-weary, soul-weary, in such a profound way that a mere night of sleep couldn't hope to repair it?
"C'mon," Ron said companionably, standing. "I'll come too. Let me try one last thing. Hermione would think it right poetic that I'm sitting here using an Editing spell, of all things, but these records haven't responded to anything else. The only alteration to - to Lily's is the addition of your name. I keep thinking that there must be some reason Callaghan had Annemarie's records as well - he'd found out Hermione's secret; the Ludlows must've had one too … perhaps Annemarie wasn't really Peter Ludlow's daughter?" He tapped the topmost document with his wand, and muttered a rather complicated incantation that Harry only vaguely recognized. "It should undo all revisions made to the document, if there were any."
He rolled his eyes toward Harry, as if to share in the commiseration that it was indeed a long shot. But the parchment shimmered, inky letters twisted in on themselves to reform with new meaning, and Ron peered down at them.
For a long moment, he was utterly motionless, save for the helpless bobbing of his Adam's apple in his throat. He finally swallowed noisily, and looked at his best mate with blatant shock.
"Bloody hell." Limp-wristed, he tapped Lily Catherine's record and repeated the same Editing spell. It, too, began to change. Ron's face seemed nearly the color of old cheese.
"Ron, what is it?" Harry finally said, wondering what in Merlin's name could have garnered such a response.
They were interrupted by a light knock on the jamb of Ron's open office door.
"You keeping late hours too, Weasley?" said a dark-haired Auror. He glanced dismissively at Harry, did a double-take, and said, "Holy sh - "
"'Dyou need something, Spencer?" Ron cut in, with thinly veiled annoyance. Harry noticed that his eyes kept drifting down to the parchment, as if of their own accord.
"No," Spencer responded, still eying Harry sideways. "Just got called in for a suspicious death, heard voices, and wondered who else was here."
"Well, now that you've satisfied your curiosity - "
"Whose suspicious death?" Harry's sudden question cut off whatever disparagement Ron had been about to utter. Spencer shrugged the shoulder that was not propping him in the doorway.
"Some old mediwitch," he said, consulting the roll of parchment he held with disinterest. "Calista Hieronymus, retired from St. Mungo's. Evidently, she quaffed a whole bloody cauldron of Calming Draught. Probably suicide. What the hell?"
Harry had all but dived across the desk to look at the birth records Ron still had, and Ron was desperately trying to cover them with his large hands.
"Harry - Harry, wait a second, mate, it's not - you should - " Ron spluttered, but Harry had not been a Seeker for nothing, and soon held the parchment, which looked slightly worse for the struggle.
"What - what did you say her name was?" Harry panted, slinging the question at Spencer, with burning eyes.
"C - Calista Hieronymus," Spencer repeated slowly, still watching both of them with a wide, wary gaze.
"See that?" Harry shoved the document under Ron's long nose. "Both the presiding Healer and the Mediwitch in charge dying on the exact same night? Suicide, my arse."
"Yeah… yeah, Harry, but…"
For an instant, Harry wondered why in the world Ron looked so…destroyed, and then he glanced at the record again, this time taking in all of it, not just the line whereupon the Mediwitch's name had been neatly inscribed.
The color went out of Harry's face so quickly that Ron Accioed the chair.
"She's - she's…" he stammered initially, and then his mouth continued to open and close soundlessly.
"Yeah, mate. It's her."
"Oh God." The silence was throbbing and heavy. Spencer shifted uneasily in the doorway, as if he didn't want to leave without saying something, but didn't want to interrupt the other two Aurors either.
"This is why Callaghan was blackmailing the Ludlows? Why would he blackmail them? If - if he brokered the deal, then he - he would be implicating himself." Harry's words sounded good, analytical and Auror-ish, but his voice was a whispery shadow of its normal self.
"To him, it was probably a good idea. There was a young, single, teenaged mother, obviously distraught - "
Harry groaned, and sank his head into his hands.
" - and a young married couple who - whose baby wasn't going to survive - even a Muggle-born couldn't save all that damned Pureblood inbreeding - he just - he probably thought he was doing Hermione a favor."
Doing her a favor… Harry tried to dredge up some righteous anger, but it was crushed beneath a swamping helping of guilt. If Ron's suppositions were correct, then none of this would have happened if he'd just sodding been there.
"So why did he suddenly change his mind? How could he be sure that the Ludlows wouldn't go trumpeting to the Prophet about illegal Knockturn-alley adoptions?"
"Maybe he started it when he found out it was you…" Ron suggested, tapping on the blinking emblem next to the scrawled addition of Harry Potter, which looked faded and feeble above the Not Given written in the official St. Mungo's script.
Harry lifted the forgotten ledger from the floor, and flipped over to the last page he'd been looking at.
"He started blackmailing Peter Ludlow six months ago. Hermione said that Callaghan occasionally picked up shifts in Emergency, and that Annemarie - " Lily Catherine! - "had broken her arm. If he - if he - "
Sometimes I wondered if he'd guessed it, Hermione's voice rang in his mind. Had Callaghan guessed it? Had he seized the opportunity of Annemarie's accident to gather evidence?
"If he suspected - then I reckon my - my files would provide him all the confirmation he needed," he finished. Paternity. His hands were trembling, and he tried to lock them over the ends of the armrests. Scarcely twelve hours ago, he had realized that he'd had a daughter, and now…
"The Ludlows definitely have a motive," Ron pointed out. "Offing Callaghan gets rid of the blackmailer, and by eliminating Peter and Tabitha - and that nurse - " He nodded toward Spencer; Harry looked startled, as if he'd forgotten the other Auror's existence. "They're covering their tracks quite nicely," Ron added. "There's not even anyone left who was there that night, except - except the baby - Harry?" Harry was backing toward the door, shaking his head. He had to swallow twice before he could speak again.
"No," he said. "Not everyone. Not everyone… holy hell, Callaghan even mentioned Hermione on his Dicta-quill. Who knows what he may have said while he was being tortured? If - if the Ludlows don't know that she had no idea…"
And then he was gone, knocking Spencer unceremoniously aside, headed for the Apparation point as though a Hungarian Horntail were after him.
Ron was right on his heels.
TBC
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