Shadow Walks |h.p/h.g|

ch. 20

Hermione Granger was drifting through the corridors of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

In five years, she had perfected it, honed it, fashioned it into an art form: that of using her time as well as she could until another inevitable change occurred. She estimated that she had changed universes over one thousand times - uncharacteristically, she had lost count somewhere in the high eight-hundreds.

She had been terribly disoriented at first... Bellatrix's wand had been digging into her throat; there was a glint of gold and a flash of gemstone, a snarled spell...

And the world as she knew it had vanished from around her.

Remus had been dueling Macnair, and suddenly they were both gone. Lestrange was gone. She had lost track of Ron in the woods - and Harry? Had he succeeded? Was the war over?

Instead of answers to these questions, she found herself facing an inferno. Hogwarts was ablaze; Gryffindor Tower had fallen in on itself. There were bodies everywhere.

She couldn't understand it, mentally denying what her own sensory processing was trying to tell her. There had been no fire. She remembered screaming, her throat raw with emotion,

"This isn't what was happening!"

And then she found that no one could hear her, that she could touch nothing, be seen by no one. She had fingered her wand; it felt real beneath her skin, but was powerless. She could pass through walls, trees, other people, utterly invisible, insubstantial, unimportant.

Wherever she was, she was strictly an observer, unable to participate or interact in any way.

What had Bellatrix Lestrange done to her?

And then, when she had finally found Harry - her fingers skimmed lightly over the finely bound volumes shelved in the Ravenclaw common room, without actually touching them - she could still shudder with the soul-sucking horror that had suffused her when she saw him.

Harry. But not Harry. Cloaked in black, something hollow and cold curled in the depths of his eyes. She had witnessed, invisible, mute, as he ordered the death of Severus Snape, speaking in a low menacing hiss that might as well have been Parseltongue. The screams of the Potions professor echoed in her ears.

But it was the nothingness in his gaze that gave her nightmares...

However, she was not Hermione Granger, former Head Girl and top of her class at Hogwarts for nothing. As time melted and blurred past her - it was nearly impossible to keep track - she studied, took notes, watched for patterns. It took her only three changes to figure out that she phased out when there was a Hermione Granger alive and well in a particular universe. And after she lost all her meticulously kept notes when a change shifted her out rather abruptly, she learned to keep her research on her person at all times. She could manipulate things that had been with her, things that were in her phase, although she could not use them to act on any of her surroundings.

She studied, she waited, she skulked around the Department of Mysteries, postulating, theorizing, observing ...

She remembered the day that she had realized she was waiting for Harry. Her lips had curled into a bitter, twisted rictus. How ridiculous! She didn't even know if he'd survived the Battle; she didn't know if they'd figured out what happened to her. Maybe everyone thought she was dead. Maybe everyone she knew was dead.

Yet still - the forlorn little hope, like a tiny, but resilient seedling, would not be quashed. With every change, she found herself looking for him, every time she saw a new version of him, she watched him with bated breath, waiting for the exclamation of recognition, for a realization that she was there, whether or not she could not be seen, for the knowing look in his eyes, for a low, throaty,