A/N: Hi again. Here's the second chapter in what I'm planning to be a three-part fic. Enjoy your read, and feedback and/or suggestions would be very kindly appreciated.
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Hermione was standing in a wide, empty corridor, where sunlight was glinting off the high windows. The bright beams bounced jaggedly off the walls and left pools of white to scintillate on the wooden floor, as if heaven itself had opened up from the ceiling. Hermione closed her eyes, enjoying the light washing over her like water, filling her up with a warmth that had previously been forgotten. But she knew she had something she needed to do, even though she wasn't quite sure what, so after a minute her eyes snapped open with purpose, and she took a step forward.
She inhaled sharply, feeling as though she was suddenly exposed, vulnerable. Confused, she looked downward at herself and realized she was naked. Embarrassment swept through her with the intensity of a fire, and although the corridor was deserted, she instinctively covered her chest with her arms. As if realizing her shame, robes suddenly appeared on a nearby suit of armor, and Hermione gratefully put them on.
She caught her reflection in the silver of the armor and froze. Even though her view was distorted, she could see that her face, previously sunken and thin, was now full and healthy, like it used to be. Her hair cascaded down her shoulders and gleamed in the sunlight, no longer lank, but strong and beautiful. Hermione would have normally questioned this sudden change in her appearance, but time seemed to be running out; she had to hurry down the corridor, for someone important was waiting there at the end.
Hermione looked back as she walked. There the inert suit of armor stood behind her, shining with the reflections of a dozen light beams.
As she continued to stride down the hall, she could make out a dark figure at the end, standing there, waiting. Her heart started to pump faster as her brisk walk dissolved into a jog, and the jog into a run. Gasping with excitement, she saw a pair of glasses, with the light from the outside sun reflected off its frames, and without meaning to, she laughed and flung out her arms as she ran. The young man waited at the end of the corridor, the entrance hall visible behind him, the corners of his mouth crinkling into a grin, and he opened his arms as well. Hermione cried, "Harry! Harry!" and she bounded up to where he stood at the arched doorway and jumped-
And he was gone, and Hermione found herself land painfully on her knees. She looked up wildly and found a deep fog before her; she whipped her head around for the arched doorway, but the only thing in her view was thick whiteness. She got up quickly with desperate, searching eyes, calling out Harry's name repeatedly, a terrible anguish overtaking her for a reason she did not completely know herself, ignoring the prickly pain shooting through her knee. The fog curled around her, thicker than ever. She would die there, she thought, with the white wisps as her only companions.
Hopeless, Hermione sunk down again onto the hard floor. As long as Harry wasn't there, it seemed that nothing in the world was worth living for.
***
Harry woke with an abrupt start. He could swear he had heard Hermione's voice calling him. Her voice was ringing with desperation and longing, as if she had just lost something very important to her and was futilely calling it back. Fear suddenly washed over him. What if Hermione needed him? What if something bad had happened to her?
He bounded off the cot in Ron's room and grabbed his wand. As he opened the door, he glanced back at Ron's sleeping form and considered waking him up too; he would definitely want to know what was going on. However, for some unknown reason, when Harry opened his mouth, nothing would come out, and the auburn-haired boy carried on in his light snores a few feet away, lost in another world. The snowflakes that started falling a few hours ago continued to dance outside the window. Harry whipped around and closed the door behind him. He felt, in his innermost being, that Hermione needed him alone. He slunk down the creaking stairs and out the door as quietly as possible, concentrating with all his might on the towering figure of St. Mungo's in his mind, and turned on the spot into the suffocating darkness.
***
"I say, Miss Granger," a voice suddenly called out from nowhere in particular. "I was not expecting for you to show up here out of all places."
Hermione squeaked and peered through her hands, but her eyes only alighted upon more whiteness. "Who are you?" she said loudly, squinting into the mass. "Where's Harry?"
The mysterious voice did not answer immediately, but instead the engulfing fog began to thin and curl away. Footsteps echoed in Hermione's ears, and a tall figure unexpectedly drifted out of the mist before her eyes.
"P-Professor Dumbledore?" Hermione breathed, letting her hands fall to her sides in disbelief. "That's impossible. You're dead."
"Ah," Dumbledore replied. His piercing blue eyes were twinkling behind his half-moon spectacles. "But beyond death lies another journey that will take you to places you can scarcely imagine."
"Then this is a dream," she said, her voice trembling a little. "Either that, or I'm dead, or in some sort of limbo." Willing herself not to think about that, she gazed upward at the rapidly thinning vapor and could detect a vast, clear dome hundreds of feet above her, overlooking a sea of chairs spread across the floor, almost as if she and Dumbledore were inside a train station.
With a jolt of recognition, Hermione almost snorted in astonishment. "Is this King's Cross?" she inquired, her eyebrows arched.
"Funny you should ask that, Miss Granger," Dumbledore said. "I have had the pleasure of talking to Harry in this very place about…ah…four-and-a-half months ago, I believe."
Hermione gasped. "But that-that means-then he came back-?"
"Oh, for various reasons," Dumbledore said airily. "He still had important matters to fulfill." His blue eyes clouded over for just a second with reminiscence, before turning back towards the girl squatting in front of him and saying, "Miss Granger, I am very proud of you. If it were not for your help, Harry would never have succeeded in his task."
Hermione opened her mouth to thank him, but before she could do so Dumbledore continued. "As for your unlikely venture into this place," he said, waving his right hand towards the nearest row of chairs, "your case differs with Harry's just slightly. At this moment, you are not dead."
Hermione sighed with relief, an enormous weight seeming to lift off of her and vaporizing with the mist into thin air. She could now clearly see the intricate pattern etched carefully onto Dumbledore's robes, billowing about him in an absent breeze. Although the fog was nearly all gone, the air surrounding them at King's Cross still had a drowsy, hazy feel to it, as if it was of a different world.
"I don't have very much time, so please listen carefully," the old wizard said, a bit of sadness inflected within his warm, tremulous voice. "You are very near death. But a part of you has been left over in the previous world, a part of you that is at this very moment being desperately clung onto by a certain person sitting next to your bed at St. Mungo's."
A sort of strange hope suddenly flared within Hermione like a lit candle. Struggling to keep her voice even, she asked, "And who is that person?"
At first glance she knew that the aged man before her would not offer an answer, at least directly. To Hermione's disappointment, the fog that had been receded into nothingness a few minutes earlier was now circling back around them yet again, whispering an unintelligible stream of mist.
Dumbledore's lips bent upward in a pensive smile. "Sometimes," he told Hermione, "one doesn't realize how much he loves someone until that person is about to disappear."
"What do you mean, Professor?" Hermione's heart was pounding against her chest with such intensity that it almost felt as though someone was hitting her on the back with a hammer. She could not help but feel irritated at him for skirting around her question. "Whom are you talking about?"
"But that latent love," Dumbledore went on as though he had not heard her, "will surely blossom into something that will last beyond death." His eyes were closed, and he seemed deep within the bowels of thought.
"Please, Professor," Hermione pleaded, crawling forward a couple of inches. She was so desperate she almost grabbed the front of his robes. "Please tell me who it is that's keeping me alive. Please."
Dumbledore's eyelids opened slowly, and his piercing blue eyes gazed down at Hermione with an expression that seemed to have been drawn out of a bottomless ocean. His mouth opened, and he said, with a voice almost of wonder, "Someone who values you deeply, who unknowingly treasures you above all else. Someone who loves you from the very depth of his soul. Love of such capacities that I cannot even begin to imagine."
"Professor, who….?"
"The question is not who," Dumbledore said with that same air of benign wonder, his eyes twinkling, "but how…"
Hermione was quite confused, but she did not have time to react, for the fog was thickening around her swiftly, and the tall figure before her was melting into the mist.
"Professor-!" she cried out again, but her voice was stifled. She squinted through the heap of white and almost gasped. For a moment she was sure she glimpsed a single glossy tear, slipping slowly from Dumbledore's twinkling eyes and running down his face, clear as a pure droplet of water.
Then he was gone, like a breath in the wind.
***
Harry was perched over the bed with a fear he had never known in his life.
"Hermione," he was whispering over and over again, his trembling hand on her shoulder, shaking her gently. "Please wake up. Please wake up, Hermione." His breathing was ragged and coming out in what sounded like dry sobs, yet Hermione continued to lie on the bed, her eyes closed almost peacefully, oblivious to Harry's unbearable anguish.
With wild urgency Harry grabbed her wrist, and he felt her pulse feebly thumping against his index finger, ringing through his own body like the chirps of a dying bird. "Hermione, please wake up." He did not want to imagine what would happen if she didn't wake up, if she just laid there forevermore, captured within the world of dreams for the rest of eternity. He would lose himself; he would go mad. His throbbing heart was sending waves of despair coursing through his veins, leaving him with an awful tingling sensation burning through his skin-he was on the verge of insanity already-
She wasn't waking.
She wasn't waking.
Oh God…
"Hermione! HERMIONE!"
And with that Hermione's eyes snapped open abruptly in the darkness, and Harry felt the entire world come crashing down around him as he swooped downward and captured her thin body into his crushing embrace.
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