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Someday I'll create something this cool. Until then, just let me play with someone else's toys. I'm not stealing them, and I don't want them for my own. I just want to play.
A/N: This chapter is hard to even conceive of writing, and while I feel that it needs to be done, I never felt very capable of doing it before I started. Some of it contains things that may be disturbing to some readers, and I hope that it provides both food for thought and something resembling entertainment.
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By March, things had gotten so strained between Hermione and Ron that Harry almost wished for the days of their third year when they had just stopped speaking completely. Both of them seemed reluctant to make it official, and they were both miserable.
The few times that all three of them would try to do something together, Hermione and Ron would invariably end up in a fight, and one of them would end up just walking away. As time wore on, Hermione became less of a fixture when Harry was doing anything with Ron, and, try as he might, Harry couldn't seem to bring her back.
Ron said it was almost like she'd stopped being their friend but hadn't really gotten around to telling them yet. She ate alone, studied alone, and refused to speak to them more often than not about what she was doing.
At some points, she simply sat and stared into space wherever she was – in the common room, the library, at a meal with a bite of food halfway to her mouth. For some reason, no one was aloud to talk to her when she was like this – she'd simply start yelling at them for disturbing her.
Although Harry was sure that something needed to be done about this, he wasn't really sure what to do. Hermione, he felt, would come back to the fold when she was good and ready, and he didn't know how to push her or if he should. Ron just tended toward misery, although, when asked, he would deny it.
Several times Ginny or Luna had tried to talk to Hermione, but without success. She simply was not interested in help, or friends, or anything outside what she was reading or whatever she might be thinking about.
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The school was eerily quiet these days. Most of the time, in the past, there had been the constant background noise of eight hundred kids doing spells, yelling, and generally causing trouble. Now, walking down the corridors in near silence, punctuated only by the sound of Peeves breaking something or Mrs. Norris meowing in boredom, it was downright infuriating.
Harry missed the school the way it had been. He missed his life the way it had been, too, before Voldemort returned and any chance he'd had for normalcy had scattered in the winds. As time wore on without the slightest hint of what Ravenclaw's Horcrux could be, he had more and more time to brood. He missed...
“AAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!”
The scream startled him. Ron, who was walking next to Harry, jumped about a foot in the air. “What was that?” he asked.
“I don't know,” replied Harry, “but I bet someone's hurt.”
They ran toward the noise, which did not repeat. Soon they reached a fork in the corridor. There were two options – turn left, or go straight.
“Where now?” asked Ron.
“Straight,” replied Harry.
“How
do you know.”
“Well, otherwise we'd be standing here all day. We've got to try something.”
They picked up the pace and ran again, straight down the hall. It wasn't long before Harry realized that they were in the same unused area of the school that the Mirror of Erised had been kept in six years before. What was going on?
Eventually they arrived at the end of the hallway, surrounded by closed doors. “What do you think?” asked Ron.
Harry was about to answer when he heard a voice coming from behind one of them – Hermione's voice.
The word she spoke filled him with dread.
“Crucio!”
He was gripping Ron's arm. How could she? What was she thinking?
There were no sounds from inside, so either no one was actually being tortured or there was a silencing charm at work. The voice had come from a door to his right, and Ron nodded at it. The message was clear - “open it.”
They did, despite not really wanting to know what they would see inside.
Hermione was standing over a body on the floor. They couldn't see who it was – the face was hidden behind a table from their view at the door. Hermione had not yet noticed their presence – she was standing next to the table, and while they could not see her face, they could see her body shaking with sobs.
“What in the bloody hell are you doing!” shouted Ron.
Hermione turned to face them, and her face was streaked with tears. “Go away!” she cried.
“No!” replied Harry, “We heard you a minute ago. We can't let you do whatever you're doing to...” he moved slightly so he could see the face of who she was attacking. “Neville.”
Neville was curled into a ball, his eyes wide. “Hermione...” Ron muttered, “Blimey.”
“Hermione,” said Harry, “give me your wand. I don't know what you're doing, but it's going to stop. Give me your wand or I will stun you.”
Hermione, shaking, gave him the wand. “I was only trying to end this,” she said. “I wanted you to get on with your life.”
Harry wasn't sure how torturing Neville with the Cruciatus Curse would help, but he let it pass for now.
“Ron,” he said, “take her out of here.”
Ron stepped forward and took Hermione's hand. “Come on,” he whispered, and pulled her away.
“Take her up to the room of Requirement,” added Harry, “and keep here there until I come.”
The door closed and they were gone. Harry ran over to Neville. “Neville?” he asked, “are you all right?”
“Yeah,” replied Neville, sitting up. “I think so.”
“Do you want me to get Madam Pomfrey?”
“No,” said Neville, “I don't want that. I just need to think.”
“Do you know why she did it?” Harry asked, trying to understand what had happened.
“Yeah, I think so,” replied Neville. “She thought I might have some kind of hidden memories – memories protected under a Memory Charm. I think she thought she could torture them out of me.”
Harry couldn't believe what he was hearing. Hermione, the girl who had been so militant about rules she had once sneaked out of bed in the middle of the night to see that Harry and Ron didn't sneak out, had decided to torture someone for information they didn't even have? Where had this come from?
“The weird thing,” said Neville, “is that I think it actually worked.”
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Neville had asked for some time to gather his thoughts, and Harry had left him to it, making him promise to see Madam Pomfrey. He didn't ask if Neville was planning to tell her what had happened to him, and Neville didn't volunteer what his plans were. If he were being honest with himself, Harry admitted, the way he was feeling right then he would have been on Neville's side if he had said something to someone about what Hermione had done.
He didn't know what had happened to make it come to this, but Harry was beginning to see a pattern in Hermione's actions that he had never noticed before. In their first year at Hogwarts, she had been a bright student, eager to please all her teachers. She had been the one to not only follow the rules to the letter but turn in others who failed to follow those rules. The sad thing was, no one had liked her at all.
Until that run-in with the troll, when he and Ron had saved her life. Somehow, she had come to the conclusion that the best thing to do was lie to protect them from getting in trouble for it, and she had done so, lied straight to McGonagall's face.
Right now, Harry was wishing she had just told McGonagall the truth. After that...well, Hermione had lost something about her. Innocence, maybe, or just honesty. She had started to be the one to encourage rule-breaking. It had been Hermione's idea to brew the Polyjuice Potion illegally, Hermione's idea to capture Rita Skeeter in a glass jar and blackmail her into publishing a story she didn't want to write, Hermione who had Confunded Cormack McLaggen last year just so Ron could get on the Quidditch team...
Really, Harry realized, it had been there all along. He just hadn't seen it.
HPHPHPHPHPHP
When he arrived at the Room of Requirement, he found Ron and Hermione sitting on a couch. Hermione was clinging to Ron, and he had his arms around her. She was still crying.
Ron looked up when Harry walked in. “How's Neville?” Hermione stiffened at Neville's name.
“He's okay,” Harry said. “He went to see Madam Pomfrey. I think he'll be fine.” He turned to Hermione, who had turned her face toward him. “Hermione...why?”
“He knew something,” she muttered. “It all fit – the Lestranges attacking his parents. Do you know they left him alive for some reason? I couldn't figure out why, but his memory's always been so bad. I was doing some reading, and I read that Memory Charms can damage the minds of the very young. It seemed so obvious. Neville must have heard something when they attacked his parents. Whyever they couldn't kill him, they couldn't risk someone realizing what he knew when he was old enough. And whatever it was, there was a chance it related to the Horcrux. I had to break that Memory Charm.”
“But...Hermione...” said Ron, “Neville's your friend.”
“There's no other way!” she cried. “That's the only thing you can do – I looked everywhere! I didn't want to do it, but we needed that information, and there was just no other way to get it.”
“Then we should have done without it,” said Harry. “We're smart. We could have figured it out in the end. I know you've never been under the Cruciatus, but I have, and trust me when I say I wouldn't wish it on Voldemort himself. There are some powers no decent wizard uses, and you crossed that line.” He paused. “Actually, it's partly my fault. You've been doing things for a long time now that aren't really very moral. Rita Skeeter, for example. I just didn't notice how bad it was getting.”
“It had to be done,” said Hermione.
“Why
didn't you tell me what you were up to, at least. I would have talked
you out of it.”
“I didn't want you in trouble. If you didn't know about it, you couldn't be the one who let it happen.”
Harry sighed. “Hermione...whatever happens, don't even think about doing something like this again. There is a reason Voldemort is the one who uses power like that, and a reason we don't. I tried to cast it, too, once, and I don't think I could do it again.”
“I couldn't either,” whispered Hermione.
Harry didn't know what to say to that. “Good,” he finally replied.
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