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Title: Harry Potter and the Dagger of Ravenclaw, Chapter 4: The Mutatio Curse (1/2)
Author: kanedax
Spoilers: HBP; Seven Soldiers (see above)
Rating: R for language and partial nudity
Summary: Harry and Hermione escape Egypt with Ron, and his condition is revealed
Notes: I hope this chapter doesn’t drag too much. It’s a lot of talk, a lot of sitting around, but in the end I hope it works out. I’ve decided to cut it short a bit, and Chapter 5 will be my last chapter in this series. As usual, I don’t own Rowling. Rowling owns Rowling.
Previous Chapter (Cairo) / Next Chapter (The Mutatio Curse, Part 2)
Harry Potter opened his eyes, and saw nothing but darkness.
Oh, no, his mind quivered. It was too many. Too far. I’ve heard stories about things going horribly wrong with Apparitions, did I leave my eyeballs behind?
He quickly realized, however, that he needn’t have worried. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he began to see blades of grass beneath him.
It was the shock to the eyes, he thought. Going from the lit room of Khufu’s to the outside. It’s like when the Dursleys had a blackout; there’s a few seconds where you can’t see anything, even if the moon’s shining right through your window.
He slowly untangled himself from Hermione Granger, who was still beneath him, crouched over the unconscious body of Ron Weasley, and stood up, then fell to the ground exhausted.
Okay, he thought, checking his body, we made it here in one piece, even though it wore me out. Now is it the right ‘here’?
“Are we alright?” the Sorting Hat asked as Harry got his first look around. “I’m not fused to his hip, or anything?”
Despite the situation, and the events of the past hour, Harry couldn’t help smiling to himself. When they were first deciding on a flight plan at the Burrow (which felt like years ago to Harry, even though they had only been gone a little more than a week) he and Hermione had searched through a travel guide for Italy. After they had found a suitable location (isolated, yet within striking distance of a magical settlement if the need was absolutely necessary), Harry had caught a photograph of the area on the opposite page.
To his astonishment, he appeared to have memorized it perfectly. In his previous Apparitions, he had been to the destinations before, so had been able to picture them in his mind. This was the first time he had ever traveled somewhere that had only been seen on a piece of paper, and his heart briefly fluttered at his accomplishment.
They were standing on a hilltop in the Apennine mountain range of Tuscany. He looked down at the base of the hill, and saw a light line of a dirt road curving around it and off into the distance. He turned to the other side of the hill, and saw the outline of a grove of trees.
Uninhabited, he thought to himself. It can’t be any later than 9 or 10, there would still be lights on by now if there was a house in there.
“I gotta hand it to you, Potter,” said Gavin. “I didn’t think you could pull it off. Remind me to bring me with you to your Apparition test. I’ll put in a good word for you, and hopefully Wilkie won’t even make you take it.”
“We’re not out of the woods yet,” said Harry. “We have to get under the cover of those trees. Hermione. Hermione!”
Hermione was still on her knees, her arms curled around Ron’s body, her eyes never breaking from his face. Harry reached down and shook her shoulder, and her head snapped quickly to face him. Harry had to quickly steel himself to not take a step backward in shock. Hermione was wearing an expression he had never seen on her face before. Her eyes were wide and far-off. Her breathing was shallower, faster than normal. There was a slight muscle tic on the side of her temple.
She’s starting to lose it, Harry thought nervously.
“Hemione,” he said, gently but urgently, “We have to go.”
“Not without Ron!” she instantly snapped back, her voice showing a hint of hysteria. Her arms tightened around Ron’s body even more, if that were possible.
“No, not without Ron,” Harry added.
“You wouldn’t leave him,” Hermione babbled. “You didn’t leave Cedric, you didn’t leave Dumbledore, and you won’t leave Ron!”
“Of course I won’t leave him,” he replied. “But there’s a road down there, and we might be seen if we stay up here.”
“I’m not leaving him,” she said quietly.
Dammit, all of a sudden I have to be sensible one, Harry thought angrily, and then, shocked that he even thought it, viciously pushed the thought from his mind. He kneeled down beside Hermione and Ron and took a hold of her chin, turning her eyes to meet his.
“Hermione, look at me.” He took his glasses off to make sure that she could see him clearly, even if she became mistier in his eyes. “Ron’s alive. He’s not dead, do you hear me? He has a pulse, he’s breathing, he’s alive. He’s just sleeping. But right now, we need to get under those trees until he wakes up.”
Hermione’s head whipped to the side, and then started looking everywhere at once, like she was realizing for the first time that they weren’t in Egypt anymore.
“We can’t move him,” she said, her voice still panicky. “What if he’s hurt? What if the knife cut his throat, or his spine? What if he has internal bleeding?”
“He’s not bleeding,” Harry said. “And his throat looks fine. As for anything else, we can only do the best we can. But there’s a road down there, and we’re about fifteen minutes outside of a town, so who knows who’s going to come driving by. We need to move him.”
“But…”
“Hermione!” Harry said sharply. She flinched, but he continued: “Now’s not the time to crack on me. I need you here. Ron needs you here. You’re our rock. You’re our sanity. If we’re going to help him, we need you to calm down. Okay?”
She nodded, and Harry was relieved to see that she was trying to compose herself.
“Now we need to get him into those trees,” Harry explained again slowly. “We can carry him, or we can float him, but we need to get under cover. Do you think you can help me do that?”
Hermione nodded again.
“Are you here?”
She nodded a third time.
“I want to hear you say it,” Harry said. “Are you here?”
“I’m… here…” Hermione said quietly.
“Are you with me?”
“I’m with you.”
“I’m going to need you to let go of Ron for a minute, okay?” he said soothingly. Hermione looked down at Ron’s pale face, let out a small sob, then lay his head down on the ground.
“You might want to take me with you for a bit, Potter,” said Gavin softly as Harry removed Ron’s broom from his back. “In case he’s out for a while.”
Harry nodded, then bent back down and, straightening Ron’s body, unclipped the Sorting Hat from Ron’s belt and attached it to his own.
“Hold this,” he said to Hermione, handing her Ron’s Firebolt. After she took it from him, clutching it close to her body, he put his glasses back on and pulled his wand from his cloak, pointing it at Ron.
“Mobilicor-“
“Don’t,” said Hermione scathingly. “Don’t use that spell. Don’t use that word.” She held the broom tighter. “Don’t even think it.”
Harry sighed. “Wingardium Leviosa,” he chanted. Ron’s body lifted from the ground, a little more jerkily than Harry would have expected from the Mobilicorpus spell he had been trying to use. It did the job, though, and soon Harry, Ron, and Hermione disappeared into the Italian forest.
As Harry gently lowered Ron to the ground, Hermione pulled the Firebolt and the book, both surprisingly undamaged, from her back, and then removed her Covert Cowl. Harry dug a small hole in the ground near the pair, and created a small blue fire, the trench partially sheltering it from the wind and from being seen outside of the woods.
“Here,” he said to Hermione, pulling off his Cowl. She took it from him and rolled it into a clump, tucking it under Ron’s head, and lay her own over his long body.
Harry opened his mouth to suggest that they start researching, but saw Hermione pull herself back down to her knees at Ron’s head, and silently picked the up the Hogwarts book and carried it a few feet away.
The moon slowly moved its way across the sky as Harry attempted to make heads or tails of the book. He had never been very good at finding specific books in the Hogwarts library, and being able to pull them all by a simple command didn’t make things as easy as he had hoped.
“Magical Maladies,” he said, pointing his wand at the pages, and what appeared were words so tiny, so complex, that they reminded Harry of a dictionary that was a million times more difficult to understand. He flipped the pages, and saw page after page of the same tight font.
He sighed in frustration, and set the book aside. He looked up and watched Hermione, watched Ron, and hoped for something to happen.
As the minutes turned into hours, Harry began to feel the cuts in his back beginning to ache, and the blood on the inside of his shirt beginning to dry to his back. Reminded of the situation they had left, Harry got his first good look at Hermione, whose back was to him.
Her cloak removed, Harry could see some of the damage. Luckily for Hermione, the book and the broomstick had cushioned most of the impact against the glass display case, but he still saw slashes along the arms and sides of her tan blouse. Many of them, he could see in the blue light, were dark around the edges from dried blood.
“Hermione,” he said quietly. She slowly turned her gaze from Ron, and Harry could see that her tired eyes were looking at him blankly, as if she were gazing through him and far away. Her face was emotionless in its shock.
“Come here for a minute, could you?” Harry requested. “I want to check on those cuts, make sure they’re not anything bad.”
She slowly stood up, and walked toward him with a slack-armed sluggishness that reminded Harry uneasily of the Inferi he had faced with Dumbledore.
“Sit down by the fire,” he said. Hermione did as he asked, facing Harry with that same dull look on her face. “Turn around,” he continued. “You can watch Ron, I won’t stop you.” She nodded slowly and spun around in the dirt. Harry realized that the blue flame might not be enough light, and cast a small Lumos with his wand.
“Where does it hurt?” he asked, running his wand slowly up and down her back.
“I don’t feel anything,” Hermione mumbled sadly.
“You’re still bleeding in a few places,” Harry said, worried. “You might still have some glass in some of the cuts. Do you mind if I take your shirt off?”
Hermione shook her head slowly.
“Lift your arms,” he said, and she did as he asked. He reached down around her waist, untucked the blouse, and pulled it off over her head. As he examined her back, bare except for the now bloody bandage wrapped around her ribs, he saw what he had feared. Hermione had slashes, ranging from a half-centimeter all the way to three inches, all along her sides and the back and insides of her arms. In many of them, he saw glittering fragments of glass poking out of the bleeding wounds. The rest of her back, the part not cut, was washed in black and blue, a bruise from her impact. He could even see the bruise stop at a sharp angle, which he assumed was the corner of the book that had been strapped to her.
“I’m going to take the bandage off, okay?” he told Hermione without a hint of embarrassment or self-consciousness. “Just keep holding your arms away from your body. I don’t want you to help, or you’ll only make the cuts worse.”
She silently held her arms out slightly to her side and Harry, having plenty of experience with Ace bandages in his years with Dudley, unhooked the metal fastener and began to unravel it, reaching around her a few times until it was loose enough to fall to her waist.
“We don’t have any tweezers,” he explained to her. “And even if we did I probably wouldn’t trust myself with them. So I’m going to try something to get the glass out of these cuts. It might hurt for a second, but trust me, okay?”
“I trust you,” she responded.
He took a deep breath. Might as well try it on one of the big ones first, he thought, seeing a particularly large shard poking from Hermione’s tricep. Make sure it’ll actually do what I want it to do.
He gently placed the tip of the wand, still glowing, on one of the shards of glass. It shifted slightly at the touch, and he looked nervously at Hermione’s face for any signs of pain. She continued to stare blankly at Ron, and Harry decided to proceed.
”Evanesco,” he said quietly. The shard of glass disappeared into thin air. Now free of its blockage, the blood began to flow quickly from the open wound. “Episkey,” Harry said quickly, and the cut sealed itself, leaving nothing but a faint scar behind. He breathed a sigh of relief.
Magical First Aid is a bitch, he thought and repeated the Evanesco/Episkey pattern on another of the jutting pieces of glass.
“When do you think he’ll wake up?” Hermione asked softly, jerking Harry from his focus.
“I don’t know,” said Harry. “Soon. Episkey.”
“What if he doesn’t wake up?” she asked, her voice shaking.
“Evanesco. He will.”
“But what if he doesn’t?” Hermione repeated. “We don’t know what kind of curse was on the Dagger. And now that it’s destroyed, we may never know. We may never be able to help him.”
“Episkey. I don’t know,” Harry repeated. “Right now, the only thing we can do is wait and see if anything happens. It’s difficult to narrow down what kind of curse it was -Evanesco - if the only symptom we have is ‘unconsciousness’.”
“I can’t lose him,” whispered Hermione. “I don’t know what I’d do if he were gone.”
“I know,” said Harry, his wand hand suddenly feeling unsteady. “I don’t know what I’d do, either. He was the first friend I ever had, and he’s my best mate. But don’t give up hope, okay? We’ll wait and see what happens.”
“I’m not giving up hope,” said Hermione quietly. “Ron’s always been hopeless, so I have to have enough for both of us.”
Harry put his hand on her shoulder. “We’ll be hoping together.”
They sat in silence for the next few minutes, broken only by Harry muttering Evanesco and Episkey, until Harry was sure all of Hermione’s wounds were cleaned and healed.
“I think I got them all,” Harry said as Hermione pulled her blouse back on. “You’re probably going to want to sleep on your front the next few nights, because you’ve got a right nasty bruise across your back. And you’re going to have a few scars until find some potion after this is all over. But you’re not bleeding anymore.”
“Thanks,” Hermione said, wiping her sleeve across her cheek to clear off any more tears.
“You should probably get some sleep,” Harry said, rubbing her back.
“No,” she said, turning around. “You should probably take your shirt off.”
“What?” he spat, blushing. He was feeling like this conversation was beginning to sound like something out of one of Aunt Petunia’s ‘bodice-rippers.’
“I saw your back, too,” she said. “You’re probably slashed up at least as bad as I am. Was.”
“Oh,” Harry said, chastising himself as he pulled off his shirt.
“Besides,” she said, turning toward Ron as she rolled her bandage up, “I probably won’t be sleeping much tonight. I’ll clean you up, then you can sleep and I’ll watch over him.”
“I know you might not be able to,” Harry said as Hermione walked around behind him. “But I want you to at least try, okay? I want to keep an eye on him, too, so we can sleep in shifts.”
“Good Lord, Harry,” Hermione breathed as she got her first look at his back. “It looks like someone attacked you with a pair of golf shoes.”
“Thanks for the mental picture,” Harry said, grimacing.
“Golf shoes made of broken glass,” she continued. “Evanesco.”
“Thanks again,” he sighed, thankful that no one had a camera nearby.
“Tell you what,” said Gavin from Harry’s side. “I can take a shift, too.”
“You can?” Harry asked.
“Sure, why not?” said the Hat. “Stuff me on one of your heads, and I’ll wake you up if he moves.”
“Episkey,” Hermione muttered, and Harry felt slight warmth on his back as one of his numerous cuts was healed.
“Either that, or send you some disturbing image that’ll pull you right out of your sleep.”
“Like what?”
Gavin shuddered. “I’ve had to sit on the heads of hundreds of Slytherins over the years. I’d rather not talk about what goes on in their twisted little minds.”
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