February 1996, the Great Hall, morning
The days went by greyly at Hogwarts, and the castle had learned to match them.
Umbridge's tyranny ground on — the Decrees, the Squad's swagger, the portraits falling silent at the click of small heels and over the top of the general grey, for one particular table at breakfast, lay a second and more personal layer of it.
Because Harry and Luna had fallen out, properly and publicly, and the group that had orbited the two of them all year was discovering what a cold thing the middle of that orbit had become.
Ron and Neville sat over their breakfasts and made a dogged effort at enjoying them anyway — Ron on the principle that misery was no excuse for wasting sausages, Neville out of quiet loyal habit — but the effort showed, and the conversation kept dying in shallow water.
Hermione and Viktor arrived and didn't improve matters.
Hermione sat down looking undetermined — an adjective so foreign on her that Neville actually glanced twice — picking at toast without opening a single book, and Viktor settled beside her with the flat restlessness of an athlete in a becalmed season.
Even the approach of the O.W.L.s, that great engine of Hermione's year, seemed to have lost its grip on her.
"You're not revising," Neville observed, cautiously.
"I'm ahead," said Hermione, without energy.
And it was even true — the Mind Palace had seen to that.
She and Ron had both got the door open weeks ago under Harry's teaching, and while neither had gone past the memory-halls, the warning had been repeated and they had honoured it, the difference it made to revision was frankly unsporting: whole chapters walked into, shelved, and recalled at will.
The O.W.L.s, for the first time in Hermione Granger's life, were not the largest thing on her horizon.
The largest thing on her horizon was sitting alone somewhere in the castle behind a business smile, and she couldn't get at him.
Viktor let out a long sigh and looked down the Hall — at the staff table where pink sat enthroned in the centre chair, at the Squad badges glinting along the Slytherin benches, at the general dimmed hush of a room that had once roared.
"You can feel it," he said, low. "Veek by veek. The castle gets... dimmer. The Toad and her goon squad take charge of everything, and the life goes out of the valls a little more each day. Even the staff now. Flitvick has stopped humming. McGonagall marks in silence. The whole faculty is grey."
He considered. "Except Snape. Snape is exactly the same."
"Snape was born grey," said Ron, around chicken. "You can't dim him. He's pre-dimmed."
Nobody was surprised, nobody laughed much either, and then Draco and Astoria arrived and the table shuffled round to admit them.
Astoria looked pale.
Not dramatically — a shade off her colour, a carefulness in how she lowered herself to the bench — but the table's collective eye caught it at once, along with the direction she'd come from, which was the hospital wing.
Again.
Hermione's small crease appeared and was smoothed; there had been a silent understanding for months now that one asked after Astoria, and did not ask about her.
"You're well?" Hermione said, for the courtesy.
"Perfectly," said Astoria, nonchalant as ever, buttering toast with steady hands. "Madam Pomfrey and I have a standing appointment for tea. She does a better brew than the elves; don't tell them." And that, as always, was the end of it — though Draco's hand, Hermione noticed, had come to rest lightly on the bench-edge behind his girlfriend, not touching, just there, and his face gave away nothing at all.
Then Draco settled, and turned to business, and the business was Harry.
"Right. Ronald. Neville." He kept his voice down; the Squad had ears. "You share a dormitory with him. How is he — actually? Because since the corridor, he's avoided every one of us, and I've heard four rumours and no facts."
Hermione and Viktor turned too, four sets of eyes converging on the two Gryffindor boys — because it was true; since that night, Harry had melted out of the group's daily life with the same quiet efficiency he'd once used on the Inquisitorial Squad's patrol routes, Luna also had done the same from the other side, and the friends in the middle were living in the crater.
Ron sighed — a long, deep, put-upon sigh and gestured grandly at Neville with a drumstick: proceed, the gesture said, I am eating. He then continued to chew, under the twin despising gazes of Hermione and Draco, with the serenity of a man long past shame.
Neville cleared his throat.
"He's... not good," Neville said honestly.
"He's up before any of us and back after curfew — he's using the Cloak all day, we're fairly sure; his bed's slept in but nobody sees him. When we do find him it's the library, behind about a fortress of books. Or the dorm, pretending to sleep. Or..." he hesitated "...the Room. Not the old M.S.S.G. one — a different space he's set up, you need a sequence of Ancient Runes at the wall to get in; he showed me the key ages ago and I don't think he remembers he did."
Neville looked down at his plate. "I haven't used it. It felt like reading his post."
"He's blasting dummies," Ron supplied, swallowing at last. "That's what the Room's for. Bet you anything. Hours a night, blasting training dummies into sawdust for nothing and calling it O.W.L. practice."
His voice was light and his eyes weren't. "He did the same after the graveyard, first week. Dad — Ethan, I mean — sorted him then. Ethan's not here now."
Hermione put her face in her hand and sighed from somewhere near her shoes.
"And Luna," Astoria said, "is in the forest."
Heads came up.
"The Forbidden Forest," Astoria confirmed, and there was sadness under the nonchalance now, imperfectly hidden. "Most days after lessons. Alone. She takes her creature journals and goes in past the treeline and comes back at dusk with mud on her hem and that serene face on... it's the loneliest thing I've ever watched."
"Is that... safe?" Viktor asked, frowning. "That forest is not a garden. Acromantula, the herd territories..."
Astoria's mouth curved, briefly and genuinely. "Nothing in that forest would dream of troubling her. You forget what she is."
She let the words Ethan's disciple sit unspoken; at this table, they didn't need saying.
"And beyond that — she knows the forest, Viktor. Properly. The territories, the seasons, which groves belong to whom and what courtesy each of them expects. She's been walking it for years. I'd wager the only human alive who knows it better is Hagrid, and I'm not certain of him."
The curve faded.
"She's safe. She's just sad, and doing it among Thestrals instead of us."
The table absorbed that.
"There is good news," Astoria went on, visibly deciding the mood needed it.
"Two pieces. First — Rolf." Every eye sharpened; she waved a hand.
"Calm down. That's the news: nothing. Whatever the corridor did, it didn't push her toward him — rather the opposite. She's cooled on the whole business. They're still friends — ordinary ones. He walks her to Charms sometimes and she's kind to him and that is the entire extent of it, and Scamander, to his credit, seems to have read the weather and furled his sails."
A pause, dry: "He looks, these days, like a boy who won an argument and lost the thing he was arguing for. I almost pity him."
"And the second piece?" said Hermione.
"Daphne," said Astoria, and the wicked light kindled, "and Anthony Goldstein. Are serious. They seek each other out all day now — library, courtyard, breakfast; he waits for her at the dungeon stairs, which takes actual nerve; she has started laughing at his jokes in public, which for my sister is roughly a proposal—"
Hermione's eye met Astoria's across the table, and a thoroughly mischievous glance passed between the two of them — a whole future's worth of teasing, catalogued and filed for deployment while Draco shook his head slowly at the pair of them.
"One catastrophe at a time," he murmured. "Please."
And at that, Hermione's face changed.
The listlessness went out of it all at once, like a sail filling.
She sat up, clasped her hands together on the table with a small decisive clap, and when she looked round at them her eyes had gone from tired to burning — the full Granger blaze, the one that colour-coded revision timetables and every other unstoppable object of the last five years.
"Right," said Hermione Granger. "I've had enough. We are going to capture him."
Ron and Neville leaned back instinctively, as one, the movement of men clearing a blast radius.
"We corner him — properly, physically, somewhere he can't deflect and can't leave and we do not let go until every last stupid, noble, self-sacrificing thought in that boy's head is out of his mouth where we can argue with it."
Her jaw set. "He's had three weeks of brooding in his own company and it has made everything worse, because his own company agrees with him. So he can have ours... By force."
"...I'll pray for him," said Ron solemnly, and went back to his chicken.
"Tomorrow," said Hermione. "Match day. He'll surface for Ron — he promised nothing yet, but he will; work on him tonight, Ron. And afterwards, when his guard's down..." She looked round the table.
Viktor patted her back, wearing a wry smile and the expression of a man deeply glad to be on this side of the plan.
Astoria and Draco exchanged one glance, and nodded together, slow and grim and entirely committed.
The committee was in session. The resolution passed without dissent.
The next morning, Gryffindor Tower
Harry was up with the dawn, as he was every dawn now, and moving quietly for the door with his bag already shouldered and the library already fixed in his mind — the day mapped, as all his days were mapped, into a sequence of defensible positions when a voice stopped him cold.
"Morning."
Ron was sitting on the end of his own bed.
Fully dressed.
In his Seeker's kit, scarlet and gold, boots laced, gloves on his knee — awake, by every visible sign, before Harry, an event without precedent in five years of shared dormitory and looking at him with a fierce, level, unblinking directness that Harry associated with Bludgers.
"...Morning," Harry managed, wryly. "You're up."
"Wood used to have us training at five," said Ron. "Angelina found his old schedules. I don't sleep any more; I ready."
He stood. "Big day."
"Right. Yeah. The final. Good luck, I—" Harry edged doorward. "I was just going to—"
"Cormac ate Doxy eggs."
Harry stopped. "...What?"
"Doxy eggs. A whole handful. Day before yesterday." Ron's face was a masterpiece of neutrality. "Nobody knows how — they were in a dish of sugared almonds in the sixth-year dorm, complete mystery, terrible business and they're mildly poisonous, so he's in the hospital wing swelling gently for a fortnight.... Which means Ginny's playing. Officially. Reserve Keeper, first proper match, the final, against Ravenclaw, for the Cup."
Harry's eyebrow rose despite everything. 'Doxy eggs. In sugared almonds. Complete mystery.'
He filed it next to the twins' departure and Angelina's "fixing him" project and decided, on balance, not to investigate.
"That's brilliant for her," he said, and meant it, and edged doorward again. "Tell her I said—"
"Tell her yourself. Come to the match."
"Ron—"
"And before you start—" Ron held up one gloved hand, and Harry, who had been assembling the opening clause of if this is about Luna, or about me, then don't, found it dismantled before delivery "—this isn't about anything. It's about Quidditch. It's the final, mate. It's the Cup. I'm playing, and Ginny's playing her first match, and she asked if you'd be there — she asked, not me and you've watched every match I've ever played since first year, and I have never once in five years had to persuade you to come to Quidditch, and I'm not going to examine why I do now."
He took a breath. "Just — come. Not for me if you don't want. For Ginny. For the house. Or just... for a change, Harry. Two hours in the open air where nothing's your fault and the worst thing that can happen is Ravenclaw scores. It'd do you good. It'd do your head good."
And then Ron Weasley — six feet of Seeker's kit and freckles — deployed, deliberately and without shame, the puppy eyes.
Harry held out for four full seconds.
"...Fine," he sighed, defeat total. "Fine. I'll be there. I promise."
"Excellent." Ron was past him and out the door in a scarlet blur, his voice floating back up the stairs: "Stands by eleven! Wear the colours! Cheer for Ginny or she'll hex us both—"
Harry shook his head, and allowed himself, alone in the dormitory, the first unguarded half-smile in a week — and then shouldered his bag and stepped out through the portrait hole, where Hermione Granger was leaning against the corridor wall with a stack of books under her arm.
Every muscle in Harry went quietly to stations.
He braced — the deflections queuing themselves, the business smile arriving at his mouth, the day's defensible positions redrawing around this new incursion and got as far as opening his mouth—
"I'm coming to study with you," said Hermione, calmly, pushing off the wall. "You're heading to the library, aren't you? I've Arithmancy to finish and you're better company than Ron for it, because you're quiet." She fell into step beside him, already opening a book one-handed as she walked. "There's a table by the Runes section that catches the morning light. Come on."
Harry could only nod.
And for the whole of that morning, and the whole of the early afternoon — through three hours in the Runes-section light, and lunch taken at the library's edge, and the slow drift of the castle down toward the pitch — Hermione Granger stayed at his shoulder and, much to his mounting astonishment, asked him nothing.
Not one question.
Not a probe, not a meaningful pause, not a single gently-laid conversational trap.
She worked her Arithmancy. She passed him a better reference for his Charms essay without being asked. She argued with him, briefly and enjoyably, about rune-order in compound wards, and won, and let it show only slightly.
She was, for six unbroken hours, simply his friend beside him — undemanding, unworried, normal and by the time they walked down to the stadium together in the cold bright afternoon, some rusted, hypervigilant mechanism in Harry's chest had, without his permission and entirely without his noticing, begun to stand down.
Which was, of course, the entire point.
...
The stadium was a wall of noise — scarlet and gold on one side, blue and bronze on the other, the Cup itself glinting on its plinth by the commentary tower and Harry and Hermione had barely found seats in the Gryffindor stands, barely watched the fourteen players rise into the cold sky, Ron pale and determined before the hoops; Ginny a bright fierce streak on her Cleansweep, hunting the Snitch's airspace like she'd been born in it, barely heard the whistle —
— when an enormous hand closed on Harry's shoulder.
"'Arry. Hermione." Hagrid's face, half-hidden under a moleskin collar turned up to his eyes, was urgent and furtive and bruised — freshly bruised, Harry registered with a jolt, new marks over the old ones. "Need yeh. Both of yeh. Now, while ev'ryone's watchin' the match. Won' take long." His black eyes were pleading over the collar. "Please."
Harry looked at Hermione. Hermione looked at the sky — where Ron had just made his first save to a roar and then at Hagrid's face, and made the arithmetic everyone always made with Hagrid, which was that he never asked unless it mattered.
They went.
He led them not toward his cabin but past it — to the treeline, and then over it, into the Forbidden Forest, along no path Harry could discern, deeper and deeper while the crowd's roar shrank to a sea-sound behind them and the light went green and scattered — and he talked as he walked, low and rushed, the words tumbling out of a man who'd been holding them for months.
"It'll be soon now, see. Me sacking. With Dumbledore gone there's nothin' standin' between me an' her — bin on probation since January, she's jus' waitin' on an excuse, an' when it comes I'll be marched off them grounds before I can pack me kettle." He shoved a branch aside. "An' I don' care, fer me — I've had worse — but there's... there's somethin' I can't take with me. Someone. An' I need to know he'll be looked after, an' yeh two are the only ones I'd trust it to..."
"Hagrid," said Hermione, with rising unease, ducking under the branch, "who—"
They came out into a trampled clearing — young trees snapped off at head height, the ground churned, a hill of turned earth against the far slope and the hill moved, sat up, and was not a hill.
He was sixteen feet of him, at least.
Grawp — Hagrid made the introduction with desperate tenderness, "me brother, me half-brother, Grawpy, this is 'Arry, an' Hermione, they're friends" — was a giant, but small for one, Hagrid explained, undersized and bullied in the colony, which was why: left behind when the tribe moved on, and Hagrid could no more have left him on that mountain than left a wounded dog on a road.
So he'd brought him back.
Walked him home across Europe, hidden, at night, which explained the months of unexplained injuries — "he don' know his strength, tha's all, he don' mean nothin' by it" and the fresh bruises this morning, and everything else.
The meeting was, in honesty, rather unpleasant.
Grawp's idea of greeting involved seizing; Hermione was snatched briefly off her feet by one enormous hand before Hagrid bellowed him into setting her down; the clearing smelled of earth and giant; and both of them spent the visit at a prudent bounce-ready distance while Grawp regarded them with small, dim, curious eyes and pulled a young pine out of the ground for something to do.
And yet.
"When they drive me out," Hagrid said, low, his great hands twisting together, "he'll have no one. He can't fend — not proper, not yet — an' if he wanders, the centaurs'll... I jus' need someone to come by. Talk at him. Bring him food if it's bad weather. Jus' till I can send fer him, or come back, or..."
He trailed off, and looked at the two of them, and his beetle-black eyes were wet. "He's me brother."
And Harry — looking at this half-giant who had carried his undersized bullied brother across a continent on his back because family was family — found that, whatever the wisdom of it, there was only one answer in him.
He heard Hermione arrive at the same one beside him, heard it in her exhaled "oh, Hagrid," and they were still in the middle of giving it when the clearing's edges moved.
Centaurs.
They came out of the trees on three sides — a dozen of them, then more, bows in hand, arrows not nocked but present, and at their head a hard-faced chestnut-bodied male whose name Harry dredged from Hagrid's old lessons: Magorian.
Their eyes swept the clearing — the trampled trees, the giant, the humans and what was in their faces was cold fury, banked but very near its limits.
"So," said Magorian. "The rumour is confirmed. You harbour this in our forest, Hagrid. A giant. In our ranges — fouling the streams, felling the groves, blundering through territory that was old before your castle's first stone was cut."
His gaze raked across Harry and Hermione. "And now you lead human foals to it, as though the forest were your paddock to tour."
"Magorian—" Hagrid began, palms out. "He's harmless, he's jus' a—"
"He is a giant. And the forest's patience is ended, Hagrid." Magorian's voice rang off the trees.
"Hear it plainly, and carry it to your castle. The herd's grievances are grown too many. The giant. The she-toad who rules you now—" and here Harry blinked, because the centaur's lip had curled with genuine loathing "—yes, we know of her; we divined her nature in the sky's margins the week she first set foot on the grounds, and we have watched her since. A creature of cages and collars, who names our kind half-breed filth in her Ministry's papers, and now holds authority over the very border of our wood."
His eyes were flint. "The old tolerance is spent. From this day, any human who walks beneath our canopy uninvited does so at the herd's mercy — and the herd's mercy, hereafter, is not to be presumed. We will not hesitate. Do you understand me, Hagrid? Any human."
The clearing held its breath. Grawp, sensing something, had gone still and low behind Hagrid.
And then Magorian's gaze came back to Harry and Hermione — and something in it shifted.
Not softened; considered. His eyes moved over Harry with a slow, star-reader's attention, the same slightly-around-the-edges look like the one Firenze had turned on Ethan, and whatever the centaur read in the margins there, it changed the weather of his face by a degree.
"...These two foals," Magorian said at last, grudgingly, as though each word cost him, "are marked in matters the herd does not choose to obstruct. The sky has its own business with them, and the herd does not shoot at the sky's business... Therefore. For these two — these two only — passage is suffered. On conditions."
He stamped one hoof, and the conditions came down like law. "The giant's range is bounded: from the broken ridge to the cold stream, no further — teach it so, Hagrid, or the herd will teach it. The foals come to the giant's ground by the northern fringe only, skirting the herd's ranges, touching nothing, hunting nothing, straying nowhere. They come by daylight. And they come alone — the suffrance is theirs and is not lent onward to any other human, foal or grown."
His eyes swept all three of them, iron. "Break one term, and every term is broken. Is it heard?"
"It's heard," said Harry quietly, before Hagrid could speak. "And thank you."
Magorian regarded him one moment longer — "do not thank the herd; thank the sky," he said, unreadably and then the centaurs turned as one and flowed back into the trees, and were gone as if they had never been.
They took their leave soon after — Hagrid wringing their hands, half-broken with gratitude, turning back at the clearing's edge to bellow gentle instructions at his brother and Harry and Hermione walked out together along the northern fringe in silence, each carrying the afternoon's freight: a giant, a promise, a forest gone to a war footing, and the strange cold knowledge that even the centaurs had read Dolores Umbridge in the stars and started stringing their bows.
The trees thinned.
The sea-roar of the stadium swelled ahead through the trunks — and it had changed key, Harry noticed distantly; no longer the ebb and flow of a match in progress but one single sustained wall of sound, the unmistakable roar of something decided and the light of the open grounds showed gold through the last of the branches, and Harry, tired and full and three hours unguarded now, let the watchfulness drain the rest of the way out of his shoulders as he stepped past a broad oak—
Hermione hit him.
It was fast, textbook, and total — a pivot, a sweep, an armlock straight out of whatever terrifying Muggle manual she'd been supplementing her education with and Harry, combat-trained survivor of golems and graveyards, went down like a dropped bag purely because no part of him had believed, even as it happened, that the incoming assault was Hermione and before he'd finished landing, his holly wand left his sleeve in a neat arc and slapped into a pale waiting palm.
"Evening, Potter," said Draco, twirling it once, stepping out from behind the oak.
Shadows detached themselves left and right.
Astoria, wand levelled, face set. Neville beside her, wand up in a duellist's guard Harry himself had drilled into him, and holding it steady, though his ears were scarlet. Both of them watching not Harry's hands but the air around him, alert for the shimmer of wandless work — because they knew exactly what they'd caught, and they'd planned for it.
"Stupefy on the first flicker," Astoria informed him, pleasantly. "Both of us. We drew lots for who apologises after."
Harry, flat on his back in an armlock in the mud of the forest fringe, began — helplessly, wryly, for the first time in three weeks — to laugh.
"You're all mad. You know that." He turned his head against the dirt.
"And you've got a flaw in the plan — Ron. Ron's still playing, the match is still—"
"Match's over," said Ron.
He strolled out of the treeline last of all, unhurried, mud-streaked, glowing — and carrying, tucked under one arm with the negligent ease of a man holding a loaf of bread, the Quidditch Cup.
Harry stared.
"Won it about forty minutes ago," Ron said, examining the Cup fondly.
"Kept out everything Ravenclaw threw for the last half hour — Davies was crying, it was beautiful and Ginny took the Snitch off Chang in a dive you'll be hearing about for years. First match. The final."
He shook his head in fraternal wonder. "She's a menace. She sends her greetings, by the way — said, quote, 'tell Harry he owes me a hug for missing it, and I'm collecting with interest.'" He looked down at his best friend, pinned in the mud by a prefect, and grinned the grin of a man whose day was going perfectly in every particular.
"Anyway. Don't mind me. Carry on."
"Ron—"
Hermione hauled him up.
She did it one-handed, with strength Harry had no idea she owned, and in the same motion turned him and slammed his back against the oak hard enough to shake down a scatter of dead leaves — and then she was six inches from his face with her forearm barred across his collarbones and her brown eyes blazing, and there was nowhere left to go, no wand, no Cloak, no library, and no business smile on earth that was going to survive the next thirty seconds.
"Now," said Hermione Granger.
"Talk. Why have you been acting like this — what happened to you and don't you dare smile at me, Harry Potter. We're your family, and you're going to tell us everything, and none of us are leaving this forest until you do."