The Gift of the Knowing (4/?)
Hermione vaguely wondered if this wasn’t payback for all the times that she had been such a know-it-all. Trying to explain the childhood and school years of Harry Potter was no easy task, and it was made doubly more complicated by the fact that Sirius felt the need to interject every few minutes. From the Stone to the Basilisk, Sirius’s incredulity grew as the stories themselves got more outlandish. By the time that Hermione got to the story of the Deathly Hallows, Sirius looked as though he might have an aneurysm at any moment.
When she was finished, Hermione concluded with, “And…yeah, that is pretty much it. Now you know the whole story. How Voldemort survived, how we fought, and how we eventually beat him.”
Sirius stood then, pacing back and forth in front of her. Hermione was tempted to also stand from her perch on the rock, but decided against it. She could only imagine what he was thinking and the process he had to deal with in order to make sense of all the information she had just inundated him with. His strides were big and his steps heavy, but he did not falter in his pacing. She knew this weighed heavily on his mind, and that nothing she could say would make the acceptance easier.
After about fifteen minutes, Sirius paused and turned to Hermione, “Okay,” he said. “Okay, I get all that you told me. Really, I think I have a firm grasp on the concepts of everything. But let’s clear a couple of things up, yeah?”
“All right,” Hermione responded.
“Great,” Sirius responded. “Right. First order of business: these Horcrux thingies. There are seven of them?”
Hermione shook her head. “Not yet. Six, in addition to the piece of soul encased in Voldemort’s body. Well, currently anyway. The snake hasn’t become one yet. Right now, there are six, I think, plus the specter that Voldemort is at the moment. The diary, the cup, the locket-”
“Located at Grimmauld with Kreacher the crazy house-elf and my toad of a mother,” Sirius interjected.
“-the ring, the tiara, and Harry,” Hermione finished, as if he hadn’t spoken.
“Right,” Sirius nodded, interlacing his fingers. “And the things that destroy them are Basilisk venom, Fiendfyre, and possibly the Killing Curse.”
“Yeah, we’re not too sure on that last one. Harry and I reckon that it could work, ‘cause it worked on him, but we can’t be positive.”
Sirius inhaled deeply, his nostrils flaring, but he continued on, “All right, second: Harry has to be killed at some point-again-by Voldemort.”
“Yep,” Hermione said, nodding. “He has to be the one to destroy the Horcrux, but only after Voldemort uses his blood for the Resurrection Ritual.”
“Oh, dear Merlin!” Sirius moaned, rubbing his hands over his face. “There are only two possibilities here. One, I am utterly crazy and you are merely a symptom of my delusions. Two, this is all true and we are all really fucked.”
Hermione frowned. “Don’t you think that is a little overdramatic? We did win in the end, after all.”
“And how many people died first? Exactly.”
“You are rather ungrateful,” Hermione commented with an annoyed tone to her voice. “I could be spending this time figuring out a way home, but instead I spent it with you, trying to help you. Do I get thanks? No, of course not.”
“Look, love-”
“Hermione!” she snapped, her eyes flashing.
“Look, Hermione,” Sirius said sarcastically. “I dunno whether you are playing with a full deck or not, but even I know that you are kidding yourself.”
“What do you mean?” Hermione bit out, not liking this younger, brasher Sirius at all as he had an unsettling ability to see right through her.
“I mean that you have changed things, haven’t you? Saving me, giving me all this information…”
“Yes, well that was the point,” Hermione said frostily.
“Exactly,” Sirius said. “So how the hell are you supposed to get home when the future is nothing like you remember it?”
“What do you mean?” she asked shakily. “The future is still the future; we’ll just have won a bit sooner is all.”
“No, love, that’s not all,” he said. “I am talking about all the changes you have made to it in the meantime. You told me that you became friends with Harry and this Ron fellow because of a troll that the mad professor let in. Well, there isn’t going to be any mad professor this time, is there? ‘Cause I know about it, and I can tell Dumbledore. You aren’t going to have any of your crazy adventures with the boys, ‘cause they won’t be necessary. Your whole future will be different because of this. So why, love, do you want to return home to what could be an awful unknown?”
Hermione stared at him, speechless. She couldn’t believe that she hadn’t thought of all this.
“I mean, think about it,” Sirius continued. “Even with all the information you are furnishing me with, things could still go wrong. Different people might die this time. What happens if you died when you were fourteen, but then you go back in your twenties? It would create a paradox, wouldn’t it?”
Awful things have happened to wizards who meddled with time, Miss Granger… the words once spoken to her by Professor McGonagall were ringing in her ears. How could she have been so stupid, so impulsive? Harry and Ron were supposed to be the ones who jumped first and looked later. She was supposed to be the logical one, the thinking one. But instead, she had made a greater bungle of everything than they ever could have done.
“What a mess,” she muttered, dropping her head into her hands. Tears quickly filled her eyes and began streaking down her reddened cheeks with no signs of stopping. Hermione’s heart filled with despair at the trouble she had caused. Not go home? What, was she supposed to just stay here, completely out of her time and depth? Helping Sirius and Harry win was one thing, staying here indefinitely was another. What place would there be for her in a world where she hadn’t attended Hogwarts or fought in the Order of the Phoenix? People here simply didn’t know her. How was she supposed to get a job without NEWTs or references? And what about money? The muddle that she suddenly realized was her life made her anxious and fearful of the future.
Sirius must have sensed her distress, for he stopped his pacing and came over to sit beside her. Awkwardly, he patted her hand and said, “There, there. It will all be all right, you’ll see.”
Hermione gave a watery laugh. “You are really bad at comforting. I am guessing you don’t voluntarily deal with crying females too often?”
“Right in one,” Sirius said with a laugh. “Lily is the only female I voluntarily see with any regularity, most other girls I only have around when I need a good…” he trailed off, his cheeks pinkening. “Never mind.”
“No, continue,” Hermione said, grinning at his discomfort. “It was all quite fascinating.” Hermione didn’t know why, but she was charmed to her toes by this impulsive, roguish Sirius. When she had known him in her own time he had been so haunted that she had only ever seen glimpses of the man in front of her.
“All right, laugh it up,” Sirius grumbled. “And after you’ve had your fun, let’s get started.”
“Get started?” she parroted back.
“Yes, get started. We need to figure out a plan.”
“Plan?” Hermione repeated. “Oh, no. I am done. I have told you everything you need to know to defeat Voldemort and save Harry from years of suffering. My involvement ends here. What I need to do is figure out if my returning to my own time will put a crack in the universe, or something.”
“Hermione,” he said, his tone wheedling. “I can’t do this without you. You seem like a right smart witch, and Merlin knows how I am going to do this on my own. I am not a planner; that always fell to James or Remus. I need you to help me.”
Hermione sighed, feeling the weight of the world on her slim shoulders. How did she get herself into these situations? “I can’t help you, Sirius. Not anymore than I have.”
“Please,” he said quietly. “I need you.”
Hermione’s breath caught in her throat as she looked into the steel-grey eyes that had ensnared her in their gaze. He said so much without words, and she wanted nothing more that to lean into his side and hold him close. “Fine,” she said with a sigh as she gave in, “I will get you to Dumbledore, all right? Then, he can help me home-well, at least figure out if that is even possible-and you can work to fix everything.”
Sirius looked aghast at her suggestion. “Dumbledore? Are you out of your mind?”
“What?”
“The man would have me Kissed or tossed to the Dementors. No, we need to do this on our own.”
“Really,” Hermione said pertly, “you are being silly. Dumbledore might be occasionally manipulative, but he wouldn’t toss you in gaol without adequate proof.”
“Sure love, keep telling yourself that,” Sirius replied, his tone matching her own. “He’ll just calmly escort me into his office and offer me a lemon drop. Then, when I say why the bloody fuck not, he’ll coolly stun me, bind me, and gag me then call for the hitwizards. You were convinced that going to the Ministry was a bad idea, well I am telling you that going to Dumbledore is just as barmy.”
“Well what do you want to do then, Sirius?” Hermione asked. “We cannot very well stay here indefinitely. Eventually, we will need to resurface for food or some other reason and then we shall be right back here. On the run.”
“Look, I don’t fancy hiding anymore than you do, so what we need is a plan.”
“A plan? All right, first we need a place to hide.”
“That’s easy, ducks. My uncle left me a flat that no one knows about. Even James didn’t know about it.”
Hermione tucked that little nugget of information away and said, “Are you sure? There is not a chance, even the smallest of, that you can be tied back to it?”
“’Course I am. He might have given me an inheritance when I was in school, but Uncle Alphard only kicked it this past year, just after Uncle Cygnus. It’s an Unplottable flat and Alphard was extremely secretive. Not even my mother knows where it is. I only know because my uncle called me to his death bed. It was the first and only time I have been in his house.”
“It’s Unplottable?” Hermione asked with a furrowed brow. “Like Grimmauld Place? But I thought your uncle got himself blasted off the family tree.”
“Well, yeah,” Sirius said with a cheeky grin, “that’s what I heard, but love, he was still a Black first and foremost. And Blacks are secretive, moody bastards who don’t like the Ministry sticking its nose where it doesn’t belong.”
Hermione sighed. “Fine, right, I give up. Let’s go there and we can plan some more.”
“Here,” Sirius said, handing her a scrap of parchment he had pulled from an inner pocket of his robes.
The address of Sirius Black is 35 Queens Road, Kensington and Chelsea.
“It’s under a Fidelius?” she asked in confusion.
“No, just a modified Unplottable charm. It won’t work if someone knows where the house is or is supposed to be, but it does cause everyone else to ignore it. Sort of like a Notice Me Not charm, but about ten times more potent. But now that I have told you where the house will be, you shall have no problem seeing it.”
Hermione’s eyes followed Sirius’s lips as he spoke, admiring the way they curved around the vowels and consonants. Then, shaking, she mentally reminded herself that it would do no good if she let her hormones run away from her for Harry’s godfather. Control, Hermione, she thought, control.
“Ready?” Sirius asked, holding out a hand.
Hermione nodded, grabbing his arm and allowing him to apparate them away.
They arrived on the front stoop of a five-story Georgian townhouse which caused Hermione to start in awe. Lightly touching the wrought iron fence, she looked down to see the windows of the basement just below them. The façade of the house was impressive; white on the ground floor, with brick on all the above floors. The windows were trimmed in white and arched on the ground and first floors, but square above that. Hermione could tell just from looking that this type of home would cost millions of pounds in the Muggle world.
“Just a flat your uncle left you, hmm?”
Sirius laughed and then tapped the heavy blue door, which had no handle only a simple brass knocker, with his wand. “Aperio!”
The inside was as impressive as she thought it would be. Once Sirius closed the door behind her, Hermione felt free to stare as she turned in circles. A grand staircase was laid against the far wall, wrapping around to the upper levels. High windows let in bright light, and Hermione couldn’t help but be struck by the difference between this house and Grimmauld Place. As she moved across the ground floor, her eyes took in the elegant drawing rooms along with a dining room and a library too. She was also fascinated by all of the knickknacks that proclaimed this a Wizard’s home. There were clocks with planets instead of roman numerals, moving pictures and paintings, elegant oil lamps instead of electric wiring, and even a sideboard with various types of Firewhiskey and Magically brewed wine with crystal goblets, glasses, and snifters.
When Hermione saw out the back windows, it suddenly became clear to her why this house wasn’t used for Headquarters for the order in her original timeline. The backyard, which should have been the size of a pound-note in keeping with the other houses on the street, was immense. It was as if this house located in the center of London had somehow been transported into the country. Huge trees grew up as far as the eye could see (conveniently blocking out the other houses and provided the illusion of isolation), and a full stream wound through the property with abandon; bridges built over it to accommodate the path it flowed in. And in the very distance, Hermione could see the stream end in a small lake with a Grecian folly on the far side of it. When she had learned about the Fidelius charm, it had been made clear to her that smaller properties (or compacted ones) worked best, and that, while it didn’t break down other enchantments, it was best to use it on dwellings, or objects and rooms within a dwelling. A garden this immense was simply too large and too full of protective enchantments and wards already to be effectively concealed along with the house. Hermione vaguely wondered to herself if Harry ever knew about this place. She fancied not due to the fact that he lived in Grimmauld after the war, yet always complained about it.
How horrible for Sirius to have to live in Number Twelve when he knew that this was an alternative.
“Well,” Sirius said eventually, “will it do?”
Hermione rolled her eyes and grinned at him. “Yes, Sirius. I think somehow we will manage to squeeze in.”
He laughed. “Excellent. Let’s go into the parlor and you can tell me what that brain of yours has been concocting in the past half hour.”
After he poured four fingers of Firewhiskey for himself, and she declined, he settled himself on one of the chaises. As he shifted, Hermione took the opportunity to examine him as she hadn’t allowed herself to before. He really was different from the man that she remembered. Expensively tailored robes hung from well- muscled shoulders that couldn’t hide his perfectly filled out frame. His hands were the elegant hands of a pampered aristocrat who had never seen a day of work in his life. But his face-Merlin, his face!-that was where the real differences could be seen. Gone were the lines around his eyes and the gaunt features framed by lank hair and dead eyes. It their place was one of the most beautiful faces she had ever seen before in her life. Chiseled features and perfect lips were set off by bright grey eyes, darkened with sorrow, and thick ebony hair that varied between curly and wavy. Hermione had never felt plain next to a man before, but Sirius did that to her easily.
Pulling herself from her perusal, Hermione cleared her throat and said, “Before we start, should I worry about them?” She indicated the paintings behind her.
Sirius turned and saw a couple of his rebellious ancestors hanging onto their every word. He smiled at Hermione and shook his head. “No, not at all. They don’t have any other portraits and can only stay in the house. Same is true for all the paintings here. I told you, my uncle liked his privacy. No one was allowed to disturb him in the Rookery.”
“The Rookery?” Hermione repeated, vaguely wondering if Alphard Black had been a Dickens aficionado.
Laughing, Sirius nodded. “There is a coop outside. My uncle used them to deliver mail in lieu of owls. Used to drive my mother batty, which wasn’t too hard. But anyway, that’s what he always called this place: the Rookery. Because of that, my parents were convinced that he lived somewhere in the country on a ratty old farm.”
Hermione shook her head with a small laugh. “Right, anyway. So, I was thinking that the best way to play this would be to track down the Horcruxes one by one. Once we have them, and have destroyed them, we can go to Dumbledore with our evidence. It will probably take a couple weeks of careful planning to execute this, so that ought to give him plenty of time to calm down and be ready to listen to us rationally. There are a couple of tips we can give him over the next few weeks too that might help. I guess we can use this place as a base, though I don’t want to even think about what we will do about food and such.”
Sirius waved her off with his free hand. “Don’t worry about that. There is a house-elf attached to this house. She can shop for us as long as I give her the galleons. Her name is Laffy, or something equally ridiculous,” he muttered.
Hermione pursed her lips forcing back all the invective she wanted to spew about slavery and house-elf rights, finally managing to say, “Well, that will certainly ease our way.”
He nodded, then put his glass on the mahogany side table and sat forward, hands clenched . “There is one thing we haven’t talked about.”
Feeling her stomach sink, Hermione forced herself not to visibly react. She knew exactly what this was about.
“Harry,” he stated.
Right in one.
Hermione sighed, looking down at her hands. Idly, she noticed that she had broken two nails on her right hand, leaving jagged edges behind. Funny, she didn’t remember that happening at all.
“Hermione, I need you to look at me, love.”
Her head snapped up, brown eyes meeting stormy grey ones. It amazed her to think of how many different emotions she had seen him exhibit in the last several hours. He had gone from low to high and back again, stopping at every feeling in between. With another sigh, she said, “What do you want me to say, Sirius? It kills me to leave him where he is-for any length of time. Those people aren’t fit to care for kneazles, let alone children, but with the blood wards up it is probably the safest place for him. There is no other alternative.”
“Yes, there is,” Sirius said steadily. “He could come here.”
“Oh, right,” Hermione said sarcastically. “We’ll just take him along on our Horcrux hunt, shall we? I’ll strap him to my back and let just pray that none of the dangerous places we are going will hurt him. Honestly, Sirius!”
“Merlin take it Hermione, that’s not what I am saying! I mean, he could stay here. My house-elf could care for him. And we are using this place for a base, so you and I will be here at night and in the morning, and we could see him then. You have to admit that a kindly house-elf caring for him is better than his awful relatives.”
Indecision caused Hermione to bite her lip. “I suppose that is possible,” she allowed.
“Ha!” Sirius crowed.
“But,” she said, “there will be consequences to this, you know there will. Instead of just being one of many Death Eaters the MLE Squad has to track down, you will be the kidnapper of the Boy Who Lived. The Aurors will give you no peace; you will become the number one priority on their radar.”
“The who?” Sirius asked, responding to Harry’s soon-to-be-famous nickname. “Look, I don’t care about any of that. What I care about is taking care of my godson. I promised James that I would look after him if it came to that and, let’s face it, I have cocked the whole thing up so far. I never should have let Hagrid take him. He is my responsibility, my charge. I love the little bugger and I can’t let him stay with those people for even one moment longer if they are half as bad as you say they are.”
Staring into those desperate grey eyes, Hermione realized that she would never be able to deny Sirius anything that he wanted. Just as she couldn’t deny him in the forest, she couldn’t deny him here and now. Beneath that thin veneer of arrogance and hauteur lay a man, barely out of his teens, who was frantic and worried for the little boy who was all that remained of his best friend. If she closed her eyes, she could easily see Sirius’s haunted face as he told Harry, “You truly are your father’s son…” He was still that same man, Hermione realized. He wasn’t haunted by eleven years in Azkaban and endless guilt, but it was still him. The man she had risked her life and freedom to save. Then and now.
“Please, Hermione,” he pleaded. “Help me.”
When she was finished, Hermione concluded with, “And…yeah, that is pretty much it. Now you know the whole story. How Voldemort survived, how we fought, and how we eventually beat him.”
Sirius stood then, pacing back and forth in front of her. Hermione was tempted to also stand from her perch on the rock, but decided against it. She could only imagine what he was thinking and the process he had to deal with in order to make sense of all the information she had just inundated him with. His strides were big and his steps heavy, but he did not falter in his pacing. She knew this weighed heavily on his mind, and that nothing she could say would make the acceptance easier.
After about fifteen minutes, Sirius paused and turned to Hermione, “Okay,” he said. “Okay, I get all that you told me. Really, I think I have a firm grasp on the concepts of everything. But let’s clear a couple of things up, yeah?”
“All right,” Hermione responded.
“Great,” Sirius responded. “Right. First order of business: these Horcrux thingies. There are seven of them?”
Hermione shook her head. “Not yet. Six, in addition to the piece of soul encased in Voldemort’s body. Well, currently anyway. The snake hasn’t become one yet. Right now, there are six, I think, plus the specter that Voldemort is at the moment. The diary, the cup, the locket-”
“Located at Grimmauld with Kreacher the crazy house-elf and my toad of a mother,” Sirius interjected.
“-the ring, the tiara, and Harry,” Hermione finished, as if he hadn’t spoken.
“Right,” Sirius nodded, interlacing his fingers. “And the things that destroy them are Basilisk venom, Fiendfyre, and possibly the Killing Curse.”
“Yeah, we’re not too sure on that last one. Harry and I reckon that it could work, ‘cause it worked on him, but we can’t be positive.”
Sirius inhaled deeply, his nostrils flaring, but he continued on, “All right, second: Harry has to be killed at some point-again-by Voldemort.”
“Yep,” Hermione said, nodding. “He has to be the one to destroy the Horcrux, but only after Voldemort uses his blood for the Resurrection Ritual.”
“Oh, dear Merlin!” Sirius moaned, rubbing his hands over his face. “There are only two possibilities here. One, I am utterly crazy and you are merely a symptom of my delusions. Two, this is all true and we are all really fucked.”
Hermione frowned. “Don’t you think that is a little overdramatic? We did win in the end, after all.”
“And how many people died first? Exactly.”
“You are rather ungrateful,” Hermione commented with an annoyed tone to her voice. “I could be spending this time figuring out a way home, but instead I spent it with you, trying to help you. Do I get thanks? No, of course not.”
“Look, love-”
“Hermione!” she snapped, her eyes flashing.
“Look, Hermione,” Sirius said sarcastically. “I dunno whether you are playing with a full deck or not, but even I know that you are kidding yourself.”
“What do you mean?” Hermione bit out, not liking this younger, brasher Sirius at all as he had an unsettling ability to see right through her.
“I mean that you have changed things, haven’t you? Saving me, giving me all this information…”
“Yes, well that was the point,” Hermione said frostily.
“Exactly,” Sirius said. “So how the hell are you supposed to get home when the future is nothing like you remember it?”
“What do you mean?” she asked shakily. “The future is still the future; we’ll just have won a bit sooner is all.”
“No, love, that’s not all,” he said. “I am talking about all the changes you have made to it in the meantime. You told me that you became friends with Harry and this Ron fellow because of a troll that the mad professor let in. Well, there isn’t going to be any mad professor this time, is there? ‘Cause I know about it, and I can tell Dumbledore. You aren’t going to have any of your crazy adventures with the boys, ‘cause they won’t be necessary. Your whole future will be different because of this. So why, love, do you want to return home to what could be an awful unknown?”
Hermione stared at him, speechless. She couldn’t believe that she hadn’t thought of all this.
“I mean, think about it,” Sirius continued. “Even with all the information you are furnishing me with, things could still go wrong. Different people might die this time. What happens if you died when you were fourteen, but then you go back in your twenties? It would create a paradox, wouldn’t it?”
Awful things have happened to wizards who meddled with time, Miss Granger… the words once spoken to her by Professor McGonagall were ringing in her ears. How could she have been so stupid, so impulsive? Harry and Ron were supposed to be the ones who jumped first and looked later. She was supposed to be the logical one, the thinking one. But instead, she had made a greater bungle of everything than they ever could have done.
“What a mess,” she muttered, dropping her head into her hands. Tears quickly filled her eyes and began streaking down her reddened cheeks with no signs of stopping. Hermione’s heart filled with despair at the trouble she had caused. Not go home? What, was she supposed to just stay here, completely out of her time and depth? Helping Sirius and Harry win was one thing, staying here indefinitely was another. What place would there be for her in a world where she hadn’t attended Hogwarts or fought in the Order of the Phoenix? People here simply didn’t know her. How was she supposed to get a job without NEWTs or references? And what about money? The muddle that she suddenly realized was her life made her anxious and fearful of the future.
Sirius must have sensed her distress, for he stopped his pacing and came over to sit beside her. Awkwardly, he patted her hand and said, “There, there. It will all be all right, you’ll see.”
Hermione gave a watery laugh. “You are really bad at comforting. I am guessing you don’t voluntarily deal with crying females too often?”
“Right in one,” Sirius said with a laugh. “Lily is the only female I voluntarily see with any regularity, most other girls I only have around when I need a good…” he trailed off, his cheeks pinkening. “Never mind.”
“No, continue,” Hermione said, grinning at his discomfort. “It was all quite fascinating.” Hermione didn’t know why, but she was charmed to her toes by this impulsive, roguish Sirius. When she had known him in her own time he had been so haunted that she had only ever seen glimpses of the man in front of her.
“All right, laugh it up,” Sirius grumbled. “And after you’ve had your fun, let’s get started.”
“Get started?” she parroted back.
“Yes, get started. We need to figure out a plan.”
“Plan?” Hermione repeated. “Oh, no. I am done. I have told you everything you need to know to defeat Voldemort and save Harry from years of suffering. My involvement ends here. What I need to do is figure out if my returning to my own time will put a crack in the universe, or something.”
“Hermione,” he said, his tone wheedling. “I can’t do this without you. You seem like a right smart witch, and Merlin knows how I am going to do this on my own. I am not a planner; that always fell to James or Remus. I need you to help me.”
Hermione sighed, feeling the weight of the world on her slim shoulders. How did she get herself into these situations? “I can’t help you, Sirius. Not anymore than I have.”
“Please,” he said quietly. “I need you.”
Hermione’s breath caught in her throat as she looked into the steel-grey eyes that had ensnared her in their gaze. He said so much without words, and she wanted nothing more that to lean into his side and hold him close. “Fine,” she said with a sigh as she gave in, “I will get you to Dumbledore, all right? Then, he can help me home-well, at least figure out if that is even possible-and you can work to fix everything.”
Sirius looked aghast at her suggestion. “Dumbledore? Are you out of your mind?”
“What?”
“The man would have me Kissed or tossed to the Dementors. No, we need to do this on our own.”
“Really,” Hermione said pertly, “you are being silly. Dumbledore might be occasionally manipulative, but he wouldn’t toss you in gaol without adequate proof.”
“Sure love, keep telling yourself that,” Sirius replied, his tone matching her own. “He’ll just calmly escort me into his office and offer me a lemon drop. Then, when I say why the bloody fuck not, he’ll coolly stun me, bind me, and gag me then call for the hitwizards. You were convinced that going to the Ministry was a bad idea, well I am telling you that going to Dumbledore is just as barmy.”
“Well what do you want to do then, Sirius?” Hermione asked. “We cannot very well stay here indefinitely. Eventually, we will need to resurface for food or some other reason and then we shall be right back here. On the run.”
“Look, I don’t fancy hiding anymore than you do, so what we need is a plan.”
“A plan? All right, first we need a place to hide.”
“That’s easy, ducks. My uncle left me a flat that no one knows about. Even James didn’t know about it.”
Hermione tucked that little nugget of information away and said, “Are you sure? There is not a chance, even the smallest of, that you can be tied back to it?”
“’Course I am. He might have given me an inheritance when I was in school, but Uncle Alphard only kicked it this past year, just after Uncle Cygnus. It’s an Unplottable flat and Alphard was extremely secretive. Not even my mother knows where it is. I only know because my uncle called me to his death bed. It was the first and only time I have been in his house.”
“It’s Unplottable?” Hermione asked with a furrowed brow. “Like Grimmauld Place? But I thought your uncle got himself blasted off the family tree.”
“Well, yeah,” Sirius said with a cheeky grin, “that’s what I heard, but love, he was still a Black first and foremost. And Blacks are secretive, moody bastards who don’t like the Ministry sticking its nose where it doesn’t belong.”
Hermione sighed. “Fine, right, I give up. Let’s go there and we can plan some more.”
“Here,” Sirius said, handing her a scrap of parchment he had pulled from an inner pocket of his robes.
The address of Sirius Black is 35 Queens Road, Kensington and Chelsea.
“It’s under a Fidelius?” she asked in confusion.
“No, just a modified Unplottable charm. It won’t work if someone knows where the house is or is supposed to be, but it does cause everyone else to ignore it. Sort of like a Notice Me Not charm, but about ten times more potent. But now that I have told you where the house will be, you shall have no problem seeing it.”
Hermione’s eyes followed Sirius’s lips as he spoke, admiring the way they curved around the vowels and consonants. Then, shaking, she mentally reminded herself that it would do no good if she let her hormones run away from her for Harry’s godfather. Control, Hermione, she thought, control.
“Ready?” Sirius asked, holding out a hand.
Hermione nodded, grabbing his arm and allowing him to apparate them away.
They arrived on the front stoop of a five-story Georgian townhouse which caused Hermione to start in awe. Lightly touching the wrought iron fence, she looked down to see the windows of the basement just below them. The façade of the house was impressive; white on the ground floor, with brick on all the above floors. The windows were trimmed in white and arched on the ground and first floors, but square above that. Hermione could tell just from looking that this type of home would cost millions of pounds in the Muggle world.
“Just a flat your uncle left you, hmm?”
Sirius laughed and then tapped the heavy blue door, which had no handle only a simple brass knocker, with his wand. “Aperio!”
The inside was as impressive as she thought it would be. Once Sirius closed the door behind her, Hermione felt free to stare as she turned in circles. A grand staircase was laid against the far wall, wrapping around to the upper levels. High windows let in bright light, and Hermione couldn’t help but be struck by the difference between this house and Grimmauld Place. As she moved across the ground floor, her eyes took in the elegant drawing rooms along with a dining room and a library too. She was also fascinated by all of the knickknacks that proclaimed this a Wizard’s home. There were clocks with planets instead of roman numerals, moving pictures and paintings, elegant oil lamps instead of electric wiring, and even a sideboard with various types of Firewhiskey and Magically brewed wine with crystal goblets, glasses, and snifters.
When Hermione saw out the back windows, it suddenly became clear to her why this house wasn’t used for Headquarters for the order in her original timeline. The backyard, which should have been the size of a pound-note in keeping with the other houses on the street, was immense. It was as if this house located in the center of London had somehow been transported into the country. Huge trees grew up as far as the eye could see (conveniently blocking out the other houses and provided the illusion of isolation), and a full stream wound through the property with abandon; bridges built over it to accommodate the path it flowed in. And in the very distance, Hermione could see the stream end in a small lake with a Grecian folly on the far side of it. When she had learned about the Fidelius charm, it had been made clear to her that smaller properties (or compacted ones) worked best, and that, while it didn’t break down other enchantments, it was best to use it on dwellings, or objects and rooms within a dwelling. A garden this immense was simply too large and too full of protective enchantments and wards already to be effectively concealed along with the house. Hermione vaguely wondered to herself if Harry ever knew about this place. She fancied not due to the fact that he lived in Grimmauld after the war, yet always complained about it.
How horrible for Sirius to have to live in Number Twelve when he knew that this was an alternative.
“Well,” Sirius said eventually, “will it do?”
Hermione rolled her eyes and grinned at him. “Yes, Sirius. I think somehow we will manage to squeeze in.”
He laughed. “Excellent. Let’s go into the parlor and you can tell me what that brain of yours has been concocting in the past half hour.”
After he poured four fingers of Firewhiskey for himself, and she declined, he settled himself on one of the chaises. As he shifted, Hermione took the opportunity to examine him as she hadn’t allowed herself to before. He really was different from the man that she remembered. Expensively tailored robes hung from well- muscled shoulders that couldn’t hide his perfectly filled out frame. His hands were the elegant hands of a pampered aristocrat who had never seen a day of work in his life. But his face-Merlin, his face!-that was where the real differences could be seen. Gone were the lines around his eyes and the gaunt features framed by lank hair and dead eyes. It their place was one of the most beautiful faces she had ever seen before in her life. Chiseled features and perfect lips were set off by bright grey eyes, darkened with sorrow, and thick ebony hair that varied between curly and wavy. Hermione had never felt plain next to a man before, but Sirius did that to her easily.
Pulling herself from her perusal, Hermione cleared her throat and said, “Before we start, should I worry about them?” She indicated the paintings behind her.
Sirius turned and saw a couple of his rebellious ancestors hanging onto their every word. He smiled at Hermione and shook his head. “No, not at all. They don’t have any other portraits and can only stay in the house. Same is true for all the paintings here. I told you, my uncle liked his privacy. No one was allowed to disturb him in the Rookery.”
“The Rookery?” Hermione repeated, vaguely wondering if Alphard Black had been a Dickens aficionado.
Laughing, Sirius nodded. “There is a coop outside. My uncle used them to deliver mail in lieu of owls. Used to drive my mother batty, which wasn’t too hard. But anyway, that’s what he always called this place: the Rookery. Because of that, my parents were convinced that he lived somewhere in the country on a ratty old farm.”
Hermione shook her head with a small laugh. “Right, anyway. So, I was thinking that the best way to play this would be to track down the Horcruxes one by one. Once we have them, and have destroyed them, we can go to Dumbledore with our evidence. It will probably take a couple weeks of careful planning to execute this, so that ought to give him plenty of time to calm down and be ready to listen to us rationally. There are a couple of tips we can give him over the next few weeks too that might help. I guess we can use this place as a base, though I don’t want to even think about what we will do about food and such.”
Sirius waved her off with his free hand. “Don’t worry about that. There is a house-elf attached to this house. She can shop for us as long as I give her the galleons. Her name is Laffy, or something equally ridiculous,” he muttered.
Hermione pursed her lips forcing back all the invective she wanted to spew about slavery and house-elf rights, finally managing to say, “Well, that will certainly ease our way.”
He nodded, then put his glass on the mahogany side table and sat forward, hands clenched . “There is one thing we haven’t talked about.”
Feeling her stomach sink, Hermione forced herself not to visibly react. She knew exactly what this was about.
“Harry,” he stated.
Right in one.
Hermione sighed, looking down at her hands. Idly, she noticed that she had broken two nails on her right hand, leaving jagged edges behind. Funny, she didn’t remember that happening at all.
“Hermione, I need you to look at me, love.”
Her head snapped up, brown eyes meeting stormy grey ones. It amazed her to think of how many different emotions she had seen him exhibit in the last several hours. He had gone from low to high and back again, stopping at every feeling in between. With another sigh, she said, “What do you want me to say, Sirius? It kills me to leave him where he is-for any length of time. Those people aren’t fit to care for kneazles, let alone children, but with the blood wards up it is probably the safest place for him. There is no other alternative.”
“Yes, there is,” Sirius said steadily. “He could come here.”
“Oh, right,” Hermione said sarcastically. “We’ll just take him along on our Horcrux hunt, shall we? I’ll strap him to my back and let just pray that none of the dangerous places we are going will hurt him. Honestly, Sirius!”
“Merlin take it Hermione, that’s not what I am saying! I mean, he could stay here. My house-elf could care for him. And we are using this place for a base, so you and I will be here at night and in the morning, and we could see him then. You have to admit that a kindly house-elf caring for him is better than his awful relatives.”
Indecision caused Hermione to bite her lip. “I suppose that is possible,” she allowed.
“Ha!” Sirius crowed.
“But,” she said, “there will be consequences to this, you know there will. Instead of just being one of many Death Eaters the MLE Squad has to track down, you will be the kidnapper of the Boy Who Lived. The Aurors will give you no peace; you will become the number one priority on their radar.”
“The who?” Sirius asked, responding to Harry’s soon-to-be-famous nickname. “Look, I don’t care about any of that. What I care about is taking care of my godson. I promised James that I would look after him if it came to that and, let’s face it, I have cocked the whole thing up so far. I never should have let Hagrid take him. He is my responsibility, my charge. I love the little bugger and I can’t let him stay with those people for even one moment longer if they are half as bad as you say they are.”
Staring into those desperate grey eyes, Hermione realized that she would never be able to deny Sirius anything that he wanted. Just as she couldn’t deny him in the forest, she couldn’t deny him here and now. Beneath that thin veneer of arrogance and hauteur lay a man, barely out of his teens, who was frantic and worried for the little boy who was all that remained of his best friend. If she closed her eyes, she could easily see Sirius’s haunted face as he told Harry, “You truly are your father’s son…” He was still that same man, Hermione realized. He wasn’t haunted by eleven years in Azkaban and endless guilt, but it was still him. The man she had risked her life and freedom to save. Then and now.
“Please, Hermione,” he pleaded. “Help me.”