Forever Knight [Harmione]

Chapter 20: Hogwarts

Hogwarts had dungeons a-plenty for students, guests and prisoners.

Personally, Harry thought it would do those insufferable Slytherins good to be informed that there were vampires situated beneath their common room, but as Hermione said, even the most vicious vamp child didn’t deserve to get slain in cold blood.

He dug into his robe for his watch and he checked the time.  It was an hour yet before the meeting.

Sooner still before I go spare, he thought, picking up a stone and tossing it into the lake.  It plopped in heavily.  He never did know how to make a rock skip.

He briefly recalled their arrival at Hogwarts, all quiet and furtive so as not to wake the students.  The Head Boy and Head Girl had met them at the front steps to escort them to the Great Hall, where the Headmistress waited. 

Harry had looked at the young man in Ravenclaw blue with bright blue eyes and brown hair.  He was just seventeen, and perhaps he didn’t understand many things, but he understood the gravity of the situation, because he hadn’t smiled when he let them through.  Winston, the Head Boy, had taken account of them for a brief moment with his serious eyes and said, “Please follow us.”  He had questions.  Harry could tell.  But Winston had chosen not ask them. 

The Head Girl, an interesting young lady with long wavy black hair and bright green eyes seemed a bit less grave, but she hadn’t smiled either, nodding as she followed the Head Boy’s lead.

It was behind these young adults that Harry had watched Hermione as they walked the dark, quiet hallways of Hogwarts.  He had seen these hallways many times beneath the veil of his invisibility cloak, and it felt very strange to be walking back into it at this hour as if they owned the joint. 

She had been cloaked like a druid, her dark robes and the fluid movement of her gait casting her as an enigma.  And even so shadowed, even having watched the nerve-wracking events on the train, he couldn’t forget that those minutes he had with her on the train car had showed him something he knew made the last five years of searching for her worthwhile.  She was strong; she was ferocious; she was vampire; but for that one blessed moment, he realized that the Hermione he knew was far from gone.  Samir had been more than a frightened, vampire boy.  He was everything Hermione once believed in.  He was the scared little boy who lived that Hermione chose to guide; he was the oppressed elf that Hermione adamantly fought for; he was the abandoned half-kneazle that Hermione felt compelled to save; he was the unloved orphan that needed her to take care of him; he was the reason Hermione broke the rules; he had become the key that had locked away her true self. 

She was right there, but for some reason, she had filed that part of herself away, those parts that were the reasons Harry had loved her—loves her still.  He could only suppose that she had shut down that part of herself that cared and loved so much because Samir had been taken so violently away from her.  Hermione had—in spite of having so much love to give—been a creature of thought.  Logic and reasoning had been her strong point.  When the emotional became too much for her to explain with clever words and objective processing, she either cracked—raging in Yule balls, conjuring psychotic canaries and rushing to her parents’ house to see if they were alright—or went cold—scolding him about strange potions books, lecturing him about girls or perhaps, abandoning him without so much as a goodbye…

In the last five years, the only emotional anchors she could’ve had were Lucien and Solomon. She cared for them, and they seemed to care for her.  If only for that, he could let go of his petty jealousies of them; of Solomon seeing her as more than just a friend; of Lucien swearing devotion to her when he probably never promised anything before to anyone in his entire egocentric life.  But then more often than not, it seemed more like they leaned on her.  She was their anchor.  So when the burden got too much, who did she turn to?