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~Chapter 6~
“Crucio.”
“No! Hermione!”
Harry started awake on his cry, bolting upright and then stumbling out of his bed only to crash heavily against the wall.
He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t breathe. He felt as if he were being strangled. He yanked at the collar of his shirt, ripping it, but it didn’t help. Air. He needed air!
Outside!
He attempted to move but his knees buckled beneath him as his fingers scrabbled madly at the wall.
His chest hurt and he suddenly wondered wildly if this was what it felt like to have a heart attack. He couldn’t get enough air into his lungs, felt as if his ribs and his chest were being compressed.
He panted and gasped for air but could never get enough of it. He couldn’t see, his eyes narrowing, his vision dotted with tiny points of light.
Through the sound of his own harsh gasps for air, the mad sound of his heart pounding, the screams he could still hear in his head, he vaguely heard his door open.
“Harry!”
He still couldn’t see but in the next moment, he felt her beside him, felt her hand on his back.
He clutched at his chest. “I… can’t… breathe!” he wheezed out.
“It’s okay, Harry. Slow your breathing down. Inhale. Hold it. Exhale.”
She was barking mad! He couldn’t breathe and she wanted him to slow his breathing?!
“Inhale. Exhale. Slowly, Harry.”
He didn’t understand. She was barking mad-she had to be-but he listened to her. And he did what she said.
Forced himself-in defiance of every instinct, everything he wanted to do-to inhale slowly, hold the breath for a couple seconds, and then exhale just as slowly. Inhale. Exhale. In. Out.
He felt her hand on his back, rubbing in slow, comforting circles. “Breathe, Harry. In and out.”
And slowly-amazingly-it helped. The spots clouding his vision faded and he blinked rapidly as his vision returned. It was too dark for him to see very clearly; her face was just a pale oval in the darkness. But he didn’t need to see her. His mind filled in her features where they were indistinguishable in the darkness. He focused on her face, his mind superimposing the concerned expression he knew she would have, as he controlled his breathing, feeling the tightness in his chest ease little by little. And also little by little, the screams he heard in his head quieted.
“I’m here, Harry. Just keep breathing, in and out, slowly. In and out…” she kept up her murmuring, as well as the warm pressure of her hand on his back.
Belatedly, he became aware that she was adjusting her breathing to his, imitating the slow, deep, steady breaths he was forcing himself to take. Something softened inside him at this indication of empathy, of solidarity. He still felt jumpy, tense-but he was no longer alone.
“Feeling better?” she finally asked, softly.
He managed to nod a little jerkily.
“Let’s sit down.” She slipped her arm around his back, providing some added support for his still somewhat shaky knees as they made it the couple steps back to collapse heavily onto his bed. Or more accurately, he collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut while she sat down normally.
A silence fell. He no longer needed to concentrate quite so much to keep his breathing even, his heart wasn’t pounding quite so fast anymore. But he still felt tense, his calm a ragged façade. He could feel it, the tendrils of the panic, the heart-wrenching terror he’d felt, hovering just at the fringes of his mind, not gone but biding its time.
“This was where I first saw the ocean. My grandparents had just rented this place for the first time and my parents and I flew out here for a week in the summer.”
He blinked and turned to stare at her, confused, at this non-sequitur, the apparent randomness of it. Except this was Hermione and she was never random. She wasn’t looking at him-he could just make out her profile as she looked down towards the floor-as she went on, softly.
“I’d never seen the ocean before. My grandfather tried to get me to go into the water but I refused. I was terrified and wouldn’t set foot in the water. I must have been all of 5 years old or so at the time, I think. My grandfather pleaded and cajoled but I was stubborn and insisted that I wouldn’t walk one step into the ocean. Finally my grandfather promised me that he and my Nana would never ever ask me to do anything that wasn’t safe or was dangerous for me to do. And then he picked me up and promised me that he wouldn’t put me down until I asked him to. Then, still holding me, he walked slowly into the ocean.”
He still wasn’t quite sure where she was going with this but couldn’t help listening. Her voice was quiet. She had, he thought with some surprise, a pretty voice. He’d never noticed it before but there, in the dark, where he couldn’t really see her as anything much more than a darker shadow, her voice was lovely. Like the sound of water to a man dying of thirst in the desert.
“I almost strangled him with every step he took into the water but I didn’t cry out and he kept on going. He didn’t stop until the water was just deep enough that it came to about where my knees were as he carried me. By then, I couldn’t help but be curious at the way the waves moved and that nothing bad had happened. So when he stopped and checked with me, I finally said he could keep on going and he did, until the water was almost level with our shoulders. I was still a little scared but my grandfather only laughed a little as he said, ‘you see, ‘Mione, isn’t this fun?’”
“Your grandfather called you ‘Mione?” he interrupted, forgetting himself in that moment of surprise.
“My family almost always called me ‘Mione when I was little. My parents only started calling me Hermione when I started Hogwarts and my grandparents still tend to call me ‘Mione.”
“You never let us call you ‘Mione.” He distinctly remembered one time in Second Year when Ron had been trying to wheedle Hermione into letting him look at her essay and Ron had pleaded, “Aww, come on, ‘Mione, please…” And Hermione had given Ron one of her patented looks, the one Harry had mentally named her spider glare, and Ron had-as always, when he was on the receiving end of that particular look-surrendered and retreated with the haste that had inspired Harry’s name for the look. Ron had dropped the subject of the essay and he and Ron had both finished their essays laboriously, without so much as daring to ask Hermione a question. And neither of them had ever dared to call Hermione ‘Mione again.
“You never really asked and, anyway, it was my little kid nickname. It would have been silly to keep using it at Hogwarts. We didn’t call Ron Ronniekins either.”
“Not unless we wanted to make fun of him,” he interjected.
She laughed a little and he managed a slight smile. And realized as he did so what Hermione had intended by telling him this story from her childhood; she had wanted to distract him from his panic. And it was working. He felt calmer, no longer needing to focus so much on the pace of his breathing.
He reached out on impulse and gripped Hermione’s hand, squeezing it briefly. “I can’t imagine you being so scared of the ocean.”
“Oh I was. At the time, pretty much all I knew was that the ocean was deep, deeper than rivers like the Thames, and I had this idea that it meant the land just ended, dropped off like a cliff at the water’s edge. So I thought if we took one step too far into the water, the land would end and we’d step right off the cliff and fall into the depths of the ocean. So of course, I was terrified.”
He could hear her smile in her voice. He could picture it, a smaller version of the Hermione he had first met, little Hermione-no, little ‘Mione-lifting her chin as she refused to walk into the ocean and then the gradual conquering of her fears.
“I wasn’t much of a Gryffindor back then,” she quipped lightly.
“Yes, you were,” he blurted out. “You could have stopped your grandfather from picking you up at all or you could have stopped him from going any further when he stopped to check but you didn’t. You were still scared of falling into the ocean but you didn’t stop him.”
“My grandfather promised I’d be all right.”
“Still. When-” he broke off abruptly but then went on, his voice a shade rougher, quieter, “when Dudley didn’t want to do something because he was scared, he’d throw tantrums, shrieking and crying, ‘til he got his way.” He couldn’t quite believe he was saying it-he never usually talked about Dudley-but somehow, in the dark, with only Hermione there, the words simply came. And part of it, he realized, was that his fears-the things that haunted him-no longer involved the Dursleys. Not really, not anymore. He might not be comfortable-he suspected he never would be comfortable-talking about the Dursleys, but at least the thought of them didn’t close his throat.
“Oh,” was all Hermione murmured even as she squeezed his hand for a moment. And he knew she realized what it meant both that he’d mentioned Dudley at all-but that she also wasn’t going to press him on it. He felt a sudden rush of affection and gratitude-and wondered, not for the first time, just what he would do without her. She was-of course, she was-his best friend but more and more, he realized she was more than that. Somehow. Ron was his best friend too, just as certainly, but he knew without thinking that he would never be able to talk about any of this with Ron. Ron would not-could not-understand. Hermione was different. Hermione was more. How much more or what “more” even meant, he didn’t know. Some part of him still shied away from even thinking it. She was just… more… and “more” was undefined. And it was fine that way.
“Tell me more about your grandparents,” he finally said.
“My grandparents are great. I loved visiting their house because I loved my grandfather’s study. It was full of books. Both my grandparents loved to read and, more than even my parents did, encouraged me to read all I wanted to. They were both teachers, my Nana taught secondary school and my grandfather taught history at university.”
“So bossiness and liking to lecture people runs in the family.”
She laughed and bumped him with her shoulder. “If I’m anything like my grandparents, I’ll take it as a compliment.”
“I meant it as one,” he said quietly.
“Grampa was a great story teller. He told me stories from Greek mythology and the Arthurian legends but most often, he told me about history whenever I visited. About the lost princes in the Tower, about Henry VIII and his six wives, about Guy Fawkes and his Gunpowder Plot, about Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and about Eleanor of Aquitaine and all her adventures.” Her voice softened until he could hear a smile in her voice. “He used to call me his little Gloriana because he knew that the stories he told me about Elizabeth I were always my favorite. He told me that she proved what no one had really thought was possible until then, that a woman could be just as clever and just as powerful as any king of England had ever been and that he never wanted me to forget that. The summer after our Second Year was his 70th birthday and to surprise him at his birthday party, I memorized Elizabeth’s speech at Tilbury to recite to him.”
“What speech?”
“It was just before the Spanish Armada and troops had gathered to try to prepare for the invasion of England. Elizabeth went out to Tilbury to where the troops were and gave what’s probably her most famous speech.”
“Do you still remember it?”
“Honestly, Harry, it’s not…”
“Please. I want to hear it. I’ve never heard of it before.”
He somehow sensed her slight flush but after another moment’s hesitation, she began. “My loving people, we have been persuaded by some that are careful of our safety, to take heed how we commit our selves to armed multitudes, for fear of treachery…”
He had asked mostly out of idle curiosity and a wish to keep being distracted but he listened with an interest that surprised him. She started out rather haltingly, her voice a little uncertain, but soon the old-fashioned phrasing flowed quite naturally. “I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm…”
He’d never cared much about history, either Muggle or magical, but now, listening to Hermione, he couldn’t help but get some sense of the drama of the speech. Not because Hermione was any sort of actress, able to imbue the words with dramatic power; she wasn’t. She sounded amazingly matter-of-fact as she recited the speech. It was more because he could hear all of Hermione’s love of history as she spoke, couldn’t help but be amazed at how she remembered this, in spite of the fact that she had memorized it years ago, before the War had started.
And there was something oddly… comforting… about that. When he often felt as if he’d thought of nothing else but the War for almost his entire life, when he sometimes wondered if he even knew who he was when he wasn’t Harry Potter, the Boy Fighting Voldemort, it was comforting to be faced with this evidence that yes, there had been life before the War, life that wasn’t part of the War, and Hermione still remembered it.
It was comforting. It was also off-putting as he wondered, a little sickly and not for the first time, just what Hermione was doing being friends with people like him and Ron. Hermione, who was so clever, who enjoyed history, and was reciting from memory a speech given some 400 years ago, a speech he’d never even heard of before!
She finished and he stayed silent, just staring at her-or what he could see of her, which was little more than her profile-for a moment.
“Did I put you to sleep? I told you it wasn’t-”
“How can you stand to hang out with us? What are you doing, being friends with an idiot like me?” he blurted out. “You-listen to you talk about history and stuff and I-I don’t know anything about that and-”
“Harry, stop it.” she interrupted him quickly. “You’re not an idiot and as for why I’m friends with you, we’ve already been over this, remember?”
He frowned. “What-”
“It’s because there are more important things than books and cleverness. Cleverness doesn’t mean much on its own. Tom Riddle was clever too.”
He stiffened, jerking in spite of himself at the name. Oddly. He didn’t react like that at the thought or mention of Voldemort but something about the human name, Tom Riddle, bothered him. Maybe because Voldemort no longer sounded-or looked-like a human but Tom Riddle was just another boy’s name. Maybe because he was still bothered by the superficial similarities between him and Tom Riddle-half-bloods with unhappy childhoods, both Parselmouths… Whatever the reason, he reacted, releasing her hand as he jerked as if he’d been electrocuted.
He heard her sigh and then after a moment, she started again. “Anyway, you shouldn’t focus so much on my cleverness as if you’re stupid. We’re not that different, you know. We’re both Gryffindors too, remember. The Sorting Hat could have put me in Ravenclaw but it didn’t.”
“Lucky for me,” he finally said. He tried to imagine Hermione being sorted into Ravenclaw-possibly never becoming friends with her. He felt a slight shudder go through him at the thought. Thank all the Fates that the Sorting Hat had put Hermione in Gryff-
“Why did the Sorting Hat put you in Gryffindor?” he blurted out. “Not-not that you’re not brave but it just… you know… at first thought, it does seem like you belong in Ravenclaw…”
“I know. Other people have said so too and I’ve wondered about it too.” She paused and then added, “I was surprised when the Sorting Hat announced Gryffindor.”
He turned to look at her. “You were?”
“Of course. Well, Hogwarts: a History explained about the different Houses and I’d assumed in reading it that I belonged in Ravenclaw.” He saw her shrug. “Loving to read, studious-I sounded like the perfect Ravenclaw.”
He smiled. “Yeah, you do. Did the Sorting Hat say anything to you before it sorted you?”
“Mm, just that I was an interesting one. That was really all it said before it announced Gryffindor. But I’ve thought about it and I think I’ve figured it out.”
He grinned to himself. Of course she had. “Then why were you Sorted into Gryffindor?”
“Because Gryffindor was where I would grow the most, as a person. If I’d been Sorted into Ravenclaw, I wouldn’t have needed to really change or grow up much. I’d have been surrounded by people who studied just like me; I’d never have gotten into trouble…”
“That’s true. Ron and I were always the ones to drag you into trouble.”
“You didn’t drag me; I walked into trouble right beside you,” she retorted.
A laugh escaped him before he’d even realized it, amused-and somehow warmed too-by this flash of spirit. So very Hermione.
He sensed rather than saw her answering smile before she went on. “But because I was Sorted into Gryffindor, I had to grow up, surrounded by people who weren’t exactly like me. It pushed me so I didn’t study as much-”
“You studied plenty,” he interrupted her rather dryly.
“Not as much as I would have if I’d been in Ravenclaw. I think… being Sorted into Gryffindor… well, it made me become the person I had the potential to become but wouldn’t have been otherwise, if that makes sense.”
“It makes sense.”
“It’s the same with Neville too. On the surface, he seems more like a Hufflepuff; he has the same sort of bone-deep loyalty and he’s not competitive or aggressive or outgoing. But he has hidden depths and now-”
“He’s just as much a Gryffindor as any of us are,” he finished for her.
“Yeah. He grew up, just like I did.”
“And I stayed exactly the same,” he quipped. “Reckless and impulsive then and now.”
She laughed. “Some people are hopeless.”
“Maybe it just means some people didn’t need to change and started out perfect.”
She bumped him with her shoulder. “Perfectly egotistical, you mean,” she teased.
He nudged her back with his shoulder. “Hey, I’ll have you know a lot of people think I’m quite a swell fellow.”
She laughed again as they engaged in a playful mock-tussle, pushing against each other with their shoulders, that ended in what amounted to an armistice as he flung his arm around her shoulders as her head settled against his shoulder.
...
On to Part 2 of this chapter...