Unofficial Portkey Archive

Chapter Ten: Assumptions Burned

"That mate of Ron's - what's his name? - you know, the one who only ever wants to eat raw vegetables and kept pestering you about Muggle gym memberships?" Harry asked absently, peering through a gap in the curtains of his living room window. Hermione looked at him curiously from the kitchen doorway.

"That's Sinjin." She shook her head. "I'm not sure how he and Ron became friends, really, even being in the same training class. Their philosophies on eating - and everything else probably - are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Why do you ask?"

"MLE's got him on watch. He's just there, at the newspaper stand." He looked back at her, worried concern on his face. "Don't you think they should have someone with a little more training out there? They've not even advanced rank yet."

Hermione laughed. "Harry, there was a time when you would have pitched the biggest bloody fit the British Isles had ever seen at the mere thought that any sort of Auror at all needed to watch your building! Who should be out there? Ezekiel Entwhistle?"

"No…" Harry drew out, mock glowering at her for bringing up the Head Auror. "I'd settle for his Deputy. Besides, this is …different." He let his eyes drift down the hallway to the spare room that had so recently lost that title. He had been teasing her, but his face grew more somber with the thought of the new responsibility he'd taken on… even more so than Teddy, since Eleanor had no one else.

Hermione's pensive gaze tracked his own down the corridor, and he saw her fingers begin to twist and tangle themselves together.

"Why don't I plate everything and get the table ready, and you go tell Eleanor that it's time to eat?" he suggested gently. They had withdrawn to let Eleanor explore her new room - door left open - on her own terms. "Last I saw, she was looking at her books." Harry wanted to meet her eyes with a conspiratorial smirk about the book-loving, but instead, Hermione looked worried and subdued. He crossed the room to stand beside her, and quietly said, "Hey, what's wrong?"

"I don't know - it's - you'll think it's silly, but - she makes me nervous."

"Why? You deal with children - sick children even - on a fairly regular basis."

"Eleanor's different. She's yours. That makes her special, even if she weren't - already exceptional. I - "

"She's yours too." The reminder was too gentle to cause defensiveness.

"I know. I just… don't want to mess this up. She can see thoughts, Harry. What if she knows that I was … less than enthused about this? I don't want to hurt her."

"Hermione, you have one of the kindest hearts of anybody I've ever met. You can do this." He picked up a plate of food, balancing its underside on his five fingertips, and smiled at her, cocking his head in the direction of their daughter, before sending various plates and cutlery soaring over the table. To all appearances, he was setting the board for dinner, paying her no heed as she moved warily down the hallway, but she could feel his concerned gaze watching her over the rims of his glasses.

She peered around the corner of the open door, reaching up with her knuckles to rap on the edge of the doorframe. Eleanor was sitting primly in a child-sized chair, a glossy picture book spread on her lap. Something in her posture was heartbreaking to Hermione, who as a young child would have been sprawled on the floor on her stomach devouring books by the stack. Eleanor looked up almost before Hermione made any noise at all. She stood up immediately, carefully and precisely closing the book and replacing it on the shelf, and then facing Hermione with her hands behind her back.

…waiting for instructions. Hermione wanted to cry.

"We're in no rush," Hermione said in as soothing a voice as she could muster. She sat on the edge of the bed, and patted the mattress in invitation. "What are you reading?"

Reluctantly, Eleanor slid the book from the shelf, and brought it over to her, sitting stiffly in the place Hermione had indicated.

"I was looking at the pictures. I do not know how to read."

For some reason, it surprised Hermione. Eleanor's manner of speaking, the way she carried herself, made her so much older than her years, that Hermione had trouble remembering that the girl was only five. Eleanor's education wouldn't have been much of a priority for her captors anyway.

"Books bring whole worlds to life! You can go anywhere, meet anyone, do anything when you read a story. Would you like me to teach you how?" Hermione felt herself turning red, imagining how Ron would react to her soliloquizing about the joys of reading. Eleanor was looking at her, her head cocked slightly to one side, like an inquisitive little bird.

"I would like that…Mother." The word sounded tacked on and ponderous. Hermione knew there had not really been an "official" introduction, but then, she supposed, Eleanor wouldn't have really needed one.

"Splendid!" Hermione said, her enthusiasm for the task outweighing her nervousness. Laughter colored her voice, and she wasn't even trying. She tapped her fingernails on the slick cover of the picture book. "We can start with this one after dinner, shall we?"

Eleanor nodded solemnly, as though they had just made a pact. "All right."

"Did you - did you ever get to look at books… or do anything for fun - before, I mean? At the place where Auror Falworth found you?" Hermione's voice was gentle. She was relatively certain that Harry would not approve of such a line of questioning, but she also knew that any bit of information they unearthed might help them apprehend those responsible.

Eleanor's demeanor darkened visibly, as she shook her head no.

"What did you do? What - what did they want you to do?"

"I played the card game. They wanted me to know the picture - to see it without seeing it. I could do that if someone else saw it. I could see the picture in their eyes. And sometimes they wanted me to make a moving picture stop moving or go backwards - without touching the buttons. They brought other people - they called them Muddles and they didn't have wands - they came in and sat in chairs and I tried to see the pictures inside their heads, the pictures of what they did-not-say."

"Could you see inside their heads?"

"Sometimes. I didn't like to do it. The Muddles were scared. They didn't like it. Sometimes they cried." Eleanor's lower lip trembled, and the childish treble cracked. "I didn't want to hurt them, but they made me. The `Perio spell made me feel all floaty, and then I would… do it." Her voice became impossibly tiny on the last two words.

"Okay… okay, Eleanor, you don't have to talk about it anymore. I'm sorry." Hermione brushed a lone tear off of her daughter's cheek with the pad of one thumb. Eleanor stiffened and froze, as though the thumb had been conducting electricity. "Ssshhhhh," Hermione soothed. "No one is going to hurt you here. No one is going to hurt you anymore. Your… father and I would never let that happen." She met the little girl's gaze squarely, unsure of exactly how the gift worked, but pushing all the thoughts of loving care and comfort and safety into the forefront of her mind. She was rewarded by obvious relaxation of the tension in Eleanor's frame. "Now, shall we go eat? I think there's cake for afters."

"Cake?" Eleanor's eyes lit up in one of the first displays of real childlike emotion that Hermione had witnessed. "Sometimes the cards had pictures of cake. That's what they said it was called. Will - will there be candles in it?"

Hermione was completely floored by the swamping and overwhelming desire to laugh and to bawl at the same time.

"If you want candles, we'll have candles." Her voice was sure and confident. Harry would conjure them out of thin air, if he had to. The slightest of smiles lit Eleanor's eyes, without changing the shape of her mouth.

Hermione reached for the little girl's hand to lead her back down the hallway into the dining area. Eleanor froze for an almost infinitesimal amount of time, but her mother saw it, changing her motion midway and turning it into a gesture: after you.

Walking behind Eleanor, Hermione was able to get the full effect of the sunrise-look on Harry's face when he saw his daughter. Seeing the way he had fallen head-over-heels into unconditional love did funny things to her heart. She couldn't have blasted the smile off of her face with a well-aimed hex, as he pulled out their chairs with overdone formality, using grandiose gestures that actually made Eleanor laugh.

As they ate, Harry kept the conversation light, steering it toward discussions of favorite animals and favorite colors. Hermione felt even more certain than ever that he would not have wanted her to question Eleanor about her experience, that he would prefer Eleanor to approach them on her own terms. She forced her attention back to the two people at the table, only to find that Harry had offered a trip to the zoo, and that Eleanor had agreed happily, on the one condition that there were giraffes.

"Where's Ginny?" Hermione finally asked gently, the domesticity of the entire scenario conspiring to make his girlfriend's absence all the more noticeable. "Everything is all right, isn't it?" She scoured Harry's face for any kind of brooding anger or heartbreak, even though she had noticed nothing amiss at any point that day.

"I asked her to - to give us a little privacy tonight." He inclined his head toward Eleanor ever so slightly, feeling grateful that she seemed absorbed in the act of dipping her bread into her mashed potatoes. "I thought - I thought it might be easier if we settled in without hordes of people all over the place. Ginny was great… brilliant, really. She said she's all in - that she supports my decision and everything that - " Hermione noticed the second that guilt flared up in his bright eyes. "I'm sorry, Hermione. I wasn't trying to rub it in - I'm sure you and Ron will - "

"Honestly, Harry," she said, trying for her trademark snippy tone, but ending up sounding somewhat fatigued. "I'm glad Ginny's been so understanding, truly I am. As for Ron and me… I don't - I - it's like what we talked about at Fortescue's. I think this has just brought issues to light that have always been there - we've just been ignoring them until now. I - I wish - " Her lips trembled slightly, and she bit them together to keep from breaking down completely. Harry instantly enveloped the nearest hand to him with both of his own.

"Hermione…" All the apology and regret and frustration that he could not fix this, could not help her, could not take her pain on himself was rolled up into that one word, her name.

"I'll be okay." Her assurance was frail, a barely audible whisper.

"Excuse me, Father," came a polite little voice. "But Mother said there was cake." Harry and Hermione exchanged bright glances, laughter gamboling in their eyes.

"You know what?" he asked her in a conspiratorial tone, leaning down until he was on Eleanor's level.

"What?" Eleanor's eyes were dancing. Harry lowered his voice into a stage whisper.

"Your mother is an extremely smart person. There is, in fact, cake for dessert. Do you want some?" The little girl nodded enthusiastically, and Harry ignored the excitedly swinging shoes that were occasionally catching him on the left shin.

Hermione raised her napkin to her lips, and coughed a single word at him. He looked at her quizzically, eyebrows raised, until Eleanor offered,

"Mother thinks you should put some candles on the cake, because I asked for them and I would like it." Harry snorted at the way a blush rose up in Hermione's cheeks, and moved into the kitchen. She could hear various drawers sliding open and shut.

"I only have the tall skinny ones - "

"Tapers," Hermione interjected.

"And the little squatty ones - "

"Tealights."

"Ginny left `em over here, I reckon. I'll have to transfigure some - what do you think? Out of toothpicks?"

It must have been a rhetorical question, because Harry was back out of the kitchen almost immediately, bearing a cake topped with two bubble gum pink candles.

"And here we go!" He sat the cake at the center of the table with a flourish. He dimmed the lights, and drew his wand, incanting, "Incendio."

The twin teardrops of light danced atop their respective candles almost instantaneously.

And then Eleanor screamed: a high-pitched, soul-rending wail of utter panic, her fingers first biting into the table top in front of her, and then reaching up to pull ferociously at her hair.

"Eleanor, what's wrong?" Harry's face was a mask of alarm.

"The candles, Harry! It's the flame, the fire!" Hermione shrieked. Her goblet split down the middle, the dislodged piece falling as if sheared away by invisible tools and shattering into her plate. The light fixture above the table trembled.

Harry's first instinct was to blow out the candles, but in the eternal moment of Eleanor's terror, the two tiny flames had grown into thin columns of heat and light, reaching nearly to the ceiling. Even as his mind acknowledged and processed the information, the fire expanded, its brilliance nearly blinding. He could no longer see Eleanor. Part of the ceiling was discoloring, ashy-black.

"Aguamenti!" His voice wrapped around and blended with Hermione's, and the twin jets of water made short work of the conflagration.

Eleanor was no longer in her chair. He called her name out once, hoarse with terror, before he heard her keening, and stooped to look under the soaked and smoking table. She was crouched underneath, folded forward over her knees, her hands over her ears, rocking, rocking, rocking. Her brown hair swished back and forth, obscuring her face.

"Sweetheart, come here." Hermione's voice was cool and soothing from the other side of the table. She was closer, so she bent to take Eleanor's hand, to guide her out and calm her down. Eleanor recoiled away from the touch, a frenzied grunting momentarily replacing the sobs, making her sound more like a trapped animal than a human child.

"Wait." His tone was gentle, yet still clearly commanding. "Let me try." And he simply crawled under the table with her. "Eleanor, it's me. Your dad. I'm here. It's all right." He continued in like vein, using short, simple, reassuring statements of fact until she stopped rocking. He ignored the water that was dripping down through the leaves of the table, distantly hearing the clatter that meant Hermione had started washing the dishes. "Is everything okay?" He ventured. "Do you want to tell me what happened?"

"I…didn't… know," Eleanor hiccupped.

"Didn't know what?"

"That candles… were… fire." The last word was a dread whisper. "They were… in … pictures… on the … cards. With… crayons… didn't know."

"And you're afraid of fire? Eleanor, I wouldn't let anything happen to you."

"I don't like fire. Fire hurts people."

"Were you in a fire?" Harry had not intended to touch her, after seeing her reaction to Hermione, but he reached up to smooth her snarled hair, without really thinking about it.

A middle-aged woman sat in a nondescript plastic chair, her hands and feet bound to it with Velcro restraints. Small disks had been affixed to her head with a gel-like material. Uncertainty and fear were obvious in her eyes. She was thinking of her children. They would be coming home from school soon.

"All right, Eleanor. We're getting a reading. Go deeper."

The little girl swallowed, and looked at the woman with deeper concentration. The woman's moan of pain and terror was audible. Blood started to trickle from her nose.

"Keep going, Eleanor."

"It hurts her!"

"Do as I say!"

"No!"

A wand came up, not from the one standing at the computer, the one who had spoken, but from another masked scientist.

"NO!" The sheer fury that blistered Eleanor's voice seemed to ricochet around the laboratory, and the wand flew from its owner's grasp, bouncing against the wall with a hollow clatter. Several items of glassware exploded.

"Eleanor, if you do not follow instructions, you will be punished."

There was an angry Accio. The wand returned where it belonged.

Then Eleanor's gaze was caught by activity at a far table… where an assistant had just used her wand to light a flame beneath a beaker. She took that flame, she stoked it, she called it to her… and then she released it.

The room erupted into an inferno, as though accelerant had already been splashed around the walls, but somehow stayed clear of a small patch encircling Eleanor and the Muggle test subject. Doors flew open, spells glowed in the flickering light, people screamed. Somewhere an alarm was wailing.

Eleanor was scared. The fire had gotten away from her; it wasn't minding her anymore, and she wasn't sure that she could stop it.

A voice spoke an angry spell, a cold, deadly spell, from somewhere over her shoulder. A green light flashed in her peripheral vision, and then the captive slumped over, a dead weight, supported only by the bindings around her wrists.

Eleanor could not process what had happened. She heard Aguamenti being cast; she could feel the warm rush of steam, as water met flame. And then,

"Stupefy!"

Her world went black.

When Harry opened his eyes, he was lying flat on his back, with the lower half of his body still under the table. Hermione's face swam before him, and he felt the warmth of her hands cup his cheeks.

"Where's Eleanor?" He blurted with sudden urgency.

"She's on the sofa. She's fine… well, relatively speaking." With the ease of long friendship, he reached up, and she helped him to his feet, stabilizing him under his elbows when he initially wobbled a bit. He took in the scene before him: the charred ceiling, the sopping table, the cake that was now an unidentifiable, misshapen and crusted mass - and then his daughter, seeming small and far away on the other side of the flat, silvery twin tracks of tears evident on her face. "Are you going to tell me what the hell is going on?" He placed a placating hand on her arm, and pleaded wordlessly for a little patience, before crossing to where Eleanor sat.

"Are you okay?"

"I hurt you. I made you scared. I'm sorry. I'm sorry!" She looked as if she would start rocking again, lost in a world of terror and abuse, so Harry knelt in front of her.

"Eleanor, I'm fine. I'm not hurt. You didn't scare me."

"You're lying."

"You didn't scare me much," Harry amended, a twinkle of humor flashing in his eyes. "I'm not sending you away." He took her by the shoulders, intent on verbalizing how important she was.

"You killed her! You did! You are a murderer."

"I didn't! I didn't kill her. I don't have a wand. I can't cast that spell."

"If you hadn't caused that fire - if you had just done what you were supposed to - she would not have died."

Eleanor curled forward on her cot, in utter misery. That woman had children. They were coming home from school. She knew how much she hated it here, how much she wished to live in a real home, with a family, like the picture cards sometimes showed. And now she had killed their mother, somebody's mother… She wished that she were dead, that the green spell had hit her instead.

This time, Harry managed to claw his way out of it, tamping down the vision that wanted to rise up into his conscious mind. Eleanor was looking at him with wide, sorrowful eyes.

"Harry." Hermione spoke only the one word, but he could see in her watchful gaze all the bafflement and concern, and knew that she noticed that he'd gone under again.

"It's okay. This was an accident. It can all be fixed." He waved his arm vaguely at the scorched, soggy mess behind him. "Healer Desai and Auror Falworth are going to help us. And your mother and I will figure this out, I promise." He directed her toward the rear of the flat, showing her which drawer her pajamas were in, and where her very own toothbrush sat in its shiny cup on the sink. When she was ready for bed, he tucked her into her new sheets, made sure the nightlight was on, and the door was open.

"Get some rest," he instructed gently. "It's going to be okay. Maybe we'll go get some ice cream tomorrow." His hand ghosted over her warm forehead, clammy from her tears and panic attack. Her eyes barely open, she reached up to brush her fingers across his fringe, mimicking his touch.

"Thank you… Father…" she sighed, already most of the way asleep.

"Always," he smiled, and slipped from the room.

Hermione had repaired almost all of the damage done by their small inferno, but when she heard his footfalls behind her, she whirled on him.

"What was going on? Were you communicating with her? And the fire? None of that was in her file." Hermione's speech was accelerating toward its usual breakneck pace.

"When you touched her, when she was under the table, did you see anything?"

"Anything like what?"

"Like a vision… or - or someone else's Pensieve memory?"

"No. Why? Is that what you saw?"

"Eleanor can - can access information from the minds of other people." He cocked his head, as he ruminated over his other encounters with her. "I think she has to be looking at them, or they have to be looking at her… or both. But - but I can see into hers - I can see her memories. I think it happens when I touch her. Eleanor said nobody's ever been able to do that before - I can tell you what happened to her in that place, and it was awful."

The lighting in the flat was low, and their voices were hushed in their desire to let Eleanor sleep undisturbed. Hermione's eyes were large and dark, and in them commingled concern, worry, and elation.

"If you can identify them, then…"

"Then they can be caught."

Hermione hadn't seen this look, this Harry look in some time - not once he'd quit Auror training anyway. "But what about what it does to you?"

"It doesn't do anything to me. I'm fine."

"Harry, you were unconscious under a table! This is not traditional Legilimency. I - I don't know what it is. There's no way to know what effect this could be having on you."

"I think you're - "

"I'm not overreacting! What about the fire? That's pretty intense accidental magic for a five-year-old! Shravana had said her levels weren't that high yet - they were actually low from the suppression. What if that was why her magic was being suppressed?"

"I know what the Healer said, Hermione. I was there. That wasn't ordinary accidental magic. That was - that was a - a - what do you call it? - a post-traumatic response."

"What did you see?"

Harry described for her the vision he'd seen under the table, as well as the abbreviated second one, sparing no detail. Hermione's eyes were round with horror and wet with tears.

"Who are these people? How are these things still going on - after all - after all we - ?"

"Maybe this - this link I have with her will help us find out. But there's got to be some way to - to control it. I can't have a vision every time I touch her."

"We can talk to Shravana about it. I'm not sure Occlumency would work in a case like this, but it would be worth a try."

"Occlumency…" The word was a muttered, long-suffering sigh.

"Harry, all this is dangerous. I hate to say it… but she could be dangerous." Something in Harry's eyes shuttered ominously at her words, and she propelled herself forward, ducking under his arm to hug him around the waist. "What if she has a nightmare, or someone comes after her, and she burns this place down?"

"I don't think she'll do that."

"You don't think? I agree that she wouldn't do anything on purpose." She rotated her head on his shoulder to look up into his face. "I don't want anything to happen to you."

"She's a little girl, a traumatized little girl - my traumatized little girl. Nothing's going to happen to me. She's not a monster."

"I never said she was."

Harry's shoulders slumped, and his arm hung like dead weight around her.

"I knew this would be complicated," he admitted quietly. "I didn't know it was going to be complicated quite like this. I wanted to - I hoped that - I want to - to fix her, I guess. To make her happy, to wipe away those bad memories, and teach her what life is supposed to be about - to be a family…"

The passion in his voice surprised Hermione. She'd always known he wanted a family, of course. But she couldn't reconcile that yearning urgency with his seeming contentment with the status quo of his and Ginny's relationship.

"You've been amazing tonight, Harry. No one watching would have believed you'd only been doing this for a day. She's very lucky to have you for a father." Hermione touched his jaw lightly with her fingers, tilted her head up to kiss his cheek.

"Thanks, Hermione," he said tiredly, heaving a sigh. "I think I'll - "

"I'm going to stay. Here. Tonight. Just in case," she continued adding information upon his querying look.

"Hermione, there's no need for you to - "

"Please let me stay. For Eleanor… and you. I'll just Floo home and get my things, and I'll be right back."

Harry yawned a jaw-cracking yawn, arching the fatigued muscles of his neck and back. "I've got stuff you can wear. You're not sleeping on the sofa." He tacked on the last sentence, as he saw her move toward the furniture, toeing off her shoes and lining them up next to it.

"I'm not taking your bed."

"You're not sleeping on the sofa."

"Harry, you're being ridiculous."

"Okay. You're still not sleeping on the sofa." Hermione huffed in response. Harry smothered a smile, as she followed him back to his bedroom, where he took out a soft, baggy shirt and some drawstring flannel pajama bottoms. Hermione looked at them dubiously, and Harry rolled his eyes. "They're not Dudley's, I promise." He gathered his own pajamas, and then took his pillow and a spare blanket for the sofa. She heard a soft whump as he dumped the bedding in the living room, and then returned to change in the bathroom, turning in the doorway before he entered.

"I'm glad you're here," he said softly. "Thank you for staying."

She leaned on the doorframe to his bedroom, watching him with soft eyes. The flat was very quiet.

"What?" He asked with teasing self-consciousness.

"We'll figure this out. You know we will."

"I know."

"I love you, Harry."

The self-deprecating half- grin, the one that she loved so much, flashed across his face. He ducked his head, and then looked up at her through his fringe, fondness for her glimmering in his eyes.

"I love you too."

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