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Deep in the recesses of her beaded bag, she finds a silver bracelet, stars spilling into the palm of her hand. Her mother gave it to her the summer before her seventeenth birthday, right before she left for the Weasleys again. The purple scar that still sits on her stomach was fresh that year. She had been eager to stop lying.
The locket hangs round her neck like a prayer even though she’s never been to church. Sometimes the only thing that will stop its whispering- failure, you’re a failure- is to dig around for some forgotten necessity in her bag, pretend like she’s doing something useful. So far, she’s found: a gleaming Galleon,polished like her parents’ smiles ( useless, says her or the locket), a book about Quidditch ( Do Ron and Harry even know how to pack?), and the bracelet.
“I know that witches and wizards get watches on their seventeenth birthday,” her mother had said. “And so, I thought, well, I’m not a witch or a wizard. Think of us, whenever you wear this. We’ll send you a watch for your birthday.”
“I promise,” Hermione had said. “I really love the stars. It’d be good for Astronomy.” And she’d thrown her arms around her mother, and…
Remember, how her mother woke up and was halfway through asking her a question when Hermione had pointed a wand in her face.
They are safe now, she tells herself.
You’re a bad daughter, the locket tells her.
Sometimes she feels as if the war out there is so much smaller than the one in her head. She knows the boys feel it, too, all of them passing the locket quickly lest it burn their hands. They hardly go a day without fighting. Screaming the locket’s words at each other like curses, the kind that get passed down in your blood.
She hooks the bracelet around her wrist, silvery stars clinking against her hand, and keeps her promise.
That evening she hands the locket over to Harry and tries to find the nearest Muggle town. Maybe this one won’t have dementor-mist hanging over it, a funeral shroud.
Instead, over the grocery shop, she finds a Dark Mark.
Where are the police, she thinks inanely when she sees the corpse. Then, she looks like my mother. She looks like me.
This woman’s parents will never know who killed her. They will not even know what she died for. Likely the muggle authorities, left to flounder up their own excuse in the absence of a Ministry willing to deal with them like equals, will come up with some story about a heart attack and strange weather phenomena.
Likely people in dark corners of the internet- yes, Hermione knows how to use the Internet, though in a strange role reversal her parents taught her- will murmur conspiratorially about secret military experiments. Just as they do about the “gas explosion” Peter Pettigrew disappeared into, which has more explanatory theories than the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Hermione can only wonder what they will make of what happened to Princess Diana. She had read about that herself, on a newspaper scrounged from a bin the day after they broke into the Ministry. It had happened the same night as she and Harry and Ron ran over their plan for the final time. Perhaps it was a bad omen. Sometimes Hermione comes up with her own conspiracy theories.
After all, there’s magic in the world, and it kills.
If anything could kill the Statute of Secrecy for good, that crumbling edifice held together by tradition and fear, it’s this war, with its one foot in the Muggle world, its body trail. If she dies, Hermione thinks, that’s the only thing that could save her. It’s unlikely Lord Voldemort would stand against nukes. It’s likely her analytical parents would hear of Obliviation and think it might have happened to them.
Then, maybe then, someone will wonder where her body is buried. Maybe someone will learn what she died for. Because she knows just as she knows the earth orbits the sun that she will go down with Harry and Ron, if Ron goes the Weasleys will follow. Everyone that is likely to remember her is also likely to die with her.
(Except, she says in the locket’s voice, the ones that can’t remember.)
She finds a public telephone, feeds in some of the Muggle money she took out of her trust fund, rationalizing that it wasn’t stealing, just repurposing. She is halfway through her home number before she remembers that no one will hear it ring. Then she dials 999.
“There’s a body, in front of the grocery shop,” she says, clutching her wand tight lest she be inadvertently summoning Death Eaters. “A woman. I think she’s been murdered.”
Then she disapparates, before the police arrive and arrest her for being truant from school.
“I found a woman’s body,” she tells Harry and Ron, shut up back in the tent. “With the Dark Mark over it. I called the police.”
“Are you mad?” Ron explodes. “There could have been Death Eaters still around! They could have infiltrated the Muggle police! You could have been killed! We all could have been killed.”
“I sincerely doubt Death Eaters know enough about Muggles to know there is a Muggle police,” she says, coldly.
“They still could have been in that town! You drew attention to us,’ he says.
“No. I drew attention to the body,” she says, feeling like she’s correcting an essay. “I couldn’t just leave her there. What if the next person to walk down that street was her mother? Then that would be her last memory of her daughter. A body. A dead body, instead of whatever the last thing she said to her mother was, whatever joke they laughed at, or-” She’s crying, she realizes distantly.
“Okay,” says Ron quietly. “Okay. I understand. Okay.”
“I wonder what they’ll say she died of,” Harry says with morbid interest, after a silence.
“I told them I thought it was a murder,” says Hermione. “In retrospect that was probably a bad idea. They’ll think I was the murderer. I mean, I disguised my voice with a spell just to be safe-”
“Of course you did,” says Ron. “You’re such a swot.” She recognizes this for the apology it is.
“But they’ll spend a lot of time speculating on the call. Play it on the news.”
“It’ll be the next grassy knoll,” says Harry.
Hermione laughs. “Yes! Or maybe more like the Zapruder film. Whenever people talk about the murders in whatever the town was, they will bring up the phone call. ”
Harry grins. “Our very own Lee Harvey Oswald.”
“No,” says Hermione. “I’m not Lee Harvey Oswald in this scenario, how could you possibly believe the single-shooter lies of the Warren Commission.”
“What on earth are you talking about,” says Ron. “Should I be taking you to the Janus Thickey Ward? Were you dropped too much on the head as children?” Of course, they can’t go to St. Mungos, but laughing together makes the joke land.
Harry sighs, big and dramatic. “Once upon a time, the summer before fifth year, I was very bored and frustrated-”
“Ooh, Cho, take me now! I’m a specky git!” Ron groans, in an imitation of Harry’s voice. “ALSO I AM VERY ANGRY!”
“Frustrated,” repeats Harry. “And so I decided to go to the Little Whinging Public Library and research famous Muggle crimes.”
“And you fell down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories,” says Hermione.
“Exactly.”
“Should I be proud of you for researching things or fleeing your imminent criminal genius?” says Hermione.
“Obviously, Harry’s gearing up to be the next You-Know Who,” says Ron. If they hadn't just been laughing together, it would hit too close to home, Hermione thinks, but sometimes they all can push away the locket and the war. “Or the next- whoever you were talking about. What were you talking about?”
“Well, there was this Muggle American president,” says Hermione.
“And he fell off a grassy knoll and died, and that is why you should not mix up Switching Spells and Shrinking Solution on the OWLs,” says Ron.
Hermione and Harry look at each other and burst into the kind of laughter that brings tears to your eyes, the kind she can’t remember having for so long it might never have happened. Ron joins in, and soon they’re draped all over each other, locket forgotten for once, warm with stupid laughter and each others’ bodies.
Who will remember this when we’re all dead , she thinks. Even if we die heroes ?
“The good thing about having a million conspiracy theories about your death,” Hermione says quietly, “is that no one will ever forget it.”
“Yeah,” says Harry quietly, his face grave.
“I understand what you mean,” Ron says, after a pause. “About the woman. You did the right thing.”
“Do you ever wonder what would happen to us?” says Harry. “If we die?”
“Don’t be so morbid, mate,” says Ron, like a warning.
Hermione would say all the time but they are trying to make progress.
“You know,” says Harry. “Regulus Black- he was a Death Eater, I mean, but he was another Horcrux hunter.”
“Just like us,” says Hermione, the weight of the knowledge settling over her like a storm cloud.
“And his family never learned what happened to him. And we have no idea what happened to his body. It probably became an Inferius,” says Harry.
“No,” says Hermione. “There’s a special ritual, to make Inferi. You don’t just become one by bitten, Muggle zombie movies are really misleading in that assumption.” She focuses on the part of his sentence she can fix.
“Sirius thought he just tried to defect,” says Ron glumly.
“I know,” says Harry coolly. Their laughter is gone, like a fallen shield. Their wounds are open, displayed on their skin. Anyone can see.
“Our families won’t know, either,” says Ron. “What we died doing.” He means his, the only one of them that still has a family.
“Maybe,” Hermione says, a prayer she doesn’t believe, “we won’t die.” She fidgets with her bracelet.
“Keep telling yourself that,” says Ron.
That night she dreams of space debris again. She remembers when she thought that nightmare was comforting.
When she falls back to sleep she dreams instead that she is Regulus Black. She stands, breathing the musty air of Grimmauld Place, in the grandeur of his bedroom. There is a great snake on his ceiling. She knows it with the certainty dreams give to unfamiliar familiar things. Kreacher lies before her, sniffling on a bed.
Tell me what happened, says the dream-voice that is hers and not hers. She hears the story as if through a Dementor’s fog. The locket. Tell me about the locket.
She feels the pieces click into place, the dizzying rush of a puzzle solved. A freefalling horror, both lightheaded and sick, creeps into her. This, she or Regulus knows, is what will kill her.
Then she is standing on a great craggy outcropping of rock like a demon’s finger. Her imagination has been fed by Harry’s stories- yet more proof that she thinks too much. Below her there is a terrible lake of water, choked with bodies. She stands up straight and clutches her- Regulus’- wand. Squares her shoulders before the executioner. Out of the water a boat creaks to life. She crosses.
There, bathed in green light like the Killing Curse, there is the locket. And then she is drowning, pulled beneath, trying to scream but she can say nothing-
She wakes. There is thin morning light creeping into the tent. It is Ron’s turn to wear the locket, will be hers in only a few hours. Her stomach turns with dread at the thought. Her legs feel heavy with lead, like she’s still drowning.
As always, she turns to a book. When she emerges from Magick Moste Evile, dark rituals still running through her brain, it is her turn to wear the locket.
“Here,” says Ron, thrusting it towards her, and she places it around her neck. This, her noose. When she was young her father showed her a piece in the news he disagreed with and said- “See, the writer gave himself enough rope to hang himself with.” She chuckles darkly.
“What,” says Ron. “Is something wrong?”
Everything’s wrong, she thinks. Is this me? Is it the locket? Whichever one it is it is true.
“I’m going outside,” she says. “Maybe some fresh air will help.”
“Don’t get lost,” says Ron. She’s not sure if he means it as a rebuke or a joke. Perhaps it is both, the locket’s cruelty infecting his easy humor.
She steps outside of the tent, careful not to slip outside the range of their protective spells. She fingers the handle of her wand. It is so thin, the stick of vine wood, it could snap so easily like the twigs she snaps under her feet. Then all the magic she has ever cast, in six whole years of school and plenty of extracurricular adventures, will be gone forever, locked beyond her reach. It would be so easy to wipe away her wand. To wipe away her life.
Regulus Black’s wand must have gone to the bottom with him, unless the desperate thrashing of his last moments or the grasping fingers of the Inferi destroyed it. Did he cast protective spells too, if he ever had to hide? Would it be enough, if Lord Voldemort had found his note instead of them?
This is silly, she thinks, he died before he had a chance to run.
She looks beneath her and sees dead leaves and dirt below her trainers. The trees loom over her like mountains. What she can see of the sky is gray. It might rain, and then she’ll be trapped in the tent, nothing to do but argue with Harry and Ron and think about Dark magic and Regulus Black.
She is standing in dead things. She smells the wet smell of rot, the trees infected, dead while they live. All the mushrooms in her line of sight are the poisonous kind. Her stomach growls angrily.
We will starve here, she thinks. I will starve us, I led us here, I am a failure.
It is a litany. Ritualistic. Could almost be a spell.
It is cold, here in this little stretch of forest, close enough to walk to town but not close rough for them to have been found by the Death Eaters. She pulls her jumper around her more closely. It blows in the cold wind.
Off the lake, where the locket was, there must have been sea spray. What she saw in her dream, it was missing details she knew from Harry, but that is the way dreams are, never wholly true but always dead certain. It was winter. It must have been cold, the breeze off the ocean bracing. The water was not yet frozen over- perhaps it was charmed, so it could not freeze. Outside the trees must have stood like they do now, bare-leafed with the heaviness of late autumn, early winter. Seasons blending into each other like blood.
Someone has carved a little cross, scratches in the wood that seem almost natural. Perhaps, beneath her feet and the layer of decomposing organisms she learned about in her parents’ books, there is a body. Not an animal, not the woman she saw in town, but older, nineteenth-century perhaps. A being that once breathed and laughed with their friends and tried to kill monsters.
If they die here, she will have no headstone, no memorial. Not even something as small as a cross carved into a tree. No one will bury her. Just as Regulus lies entombed by his failure, so will she. Her parents will die with half themselves erased, always talking around the holes in their memory, and Harry and Ron will die with her. Perhaps she will rest right under this tree, cocooned in its discarded leaves.
The locket wants her to throw it away.
Give up, it tells her. You cannot win. Your quest is hopeless. You will carry this locket like a gallows until it kills you. There is no way to destroy it. Give up before you kill your friends, the part of your parents you stole.
You are a liar. A failure. A bad daughter and a bad friend.
Involuntarily, she feels her hands moving, plucking the locket from her neck. She sees her bracelet on her wrist. She thinks of her mother. Her mother, safe and alive in Australia, cannot think of her and it is all her fault-
But her mother is safe and alive. Hermione has not been buried beneath a tree yet, body discarded like rubbish.
When she goes back into the tent to hand the locket off, she asks Harry if she can look at the note from the cave again.
I want you to know it is I who discovered your secret, she reads. A desperate grasp for immortality. For some kind of meaning to the one who killed him. Lord Voldemort never saw this note. It is unlikely he ever will unless he is very obsessive when going through Harry’s things.
Maybe they should write their own notes, fingers to the face of Lord Voldemort.
No, she decides, it’s too morbid. Too hopeless.
“He failed,” says Ron, looking at her with the note in her hands. “If you’re looking for some kind of inspiration from Regulus Black, it won’t come. He failed.”
“We won’t fail,” says Harry, something strident in his voice. “Not if we find the Deathly Hallows.”
“We are not going after the Hallows,” says Hermione, at the end of her patience with the day. “We are not chasing something that might not exist when we have something that does.” She softens her voice when she sees his face. “You can’t master Death, Harry.”
“We’d be fools to try,” says Ron, in the strange morose way he has of late.
How did Harry survive the cave, when Regulus didn’t, she thinks. And then it comes to her- because Harry had Dumbledore with him. And Dumbledore is dead, poison choking his lungs when the Killing Curse hit. There has to be a sacrifice.
The next day they move camp. Hermione is tired of the forest, of the dead woman’s town. Instead she takes them to the seashore, a beach her parents took her to once. There is no one there. No one else wants to watch the dark water swallow the sand, feel the icy breeze roll off the waves. Above the beach, great dark rocks watch them like Death Eaters.
“This feels familiar,” says Harry, glancing warily at the rocks as Hermione casts the protective spells.
“We’ve never gone to the beach before,” she says.
“Are you sure there’s no one around?” says Ron.
“No one wants to be here in the winter,” she says. The sand stretches gray like the sky unbroken by people. Then it falls into the dark water that smells of salt. It is too cold for anyone to be outside, and the beach is too lonely.
“No,” says Harry. “I think this is near the cave.”
Water rushes through Hermione’s ears. She feels faint. The dark rocks loom ever more menacingly. This beach, Lord Voldemort would have played as a child. He probably threw sand at all the other children.Then he climbed up the rocks. Regulus would have stood, by the cave, waiting, watching. Her feet walk their paths. The locket has never looked quite so cruel.
“We can’t stay here,” says Ron. “I don’t believe in Divination, but this has to be a bad omen.”
“We have to,” says Hermione, surprising herself with the force of her words.. “I’ve- already set the protective spells, and everything.”
The rocks call to her. Like the locket does. They seem to haunt her. She closes her eyes and seems them still. There is something up there, not Inferi or Horcruxes, but something else. Perhaps there is knowledge to be gained by walking the footsteps of those who came before them. Perhaps she needs to see Regulus Black’s watery grave.
“We can set them again,” says Ron.
“And waste all my hard work?” says Hermione, frustrated. She can’t tell them how she needs to climb those rocks, they’ll think the locket is influencing her too much.
“Fine,” says Ron. “Fine. It’s your funeral.” He storms into the tent, flings the flap of the tent shut so hard it swings a little.
“This place gives me the creeps,” says Harry, joining him.
She walks across the beach, leaving little indents in the sand. She places her hand on the first of the rock. It is taller than her, smells of the ocean and cold to the touch. She pulls herself atop it and begins to wind her way up the rocks, following a small path upwards. If she falls, she will die just from hitting the water. Never mind drowning. The ocean crashes over itself with the roar of a car wreck.
At the top of the path, right where Harry and Dumbledore would have apparated, she sees a glimmer of silver. Like the bracelet on her wrist. There’s a cool feeling about it, different in some unnameable way from the ice of the sea wind. It’s like the sun distantly behind clouds. This, she thinks, this is what has been calling her. The ghost.
“Hello, Regulus,” she says.
“Don’t go to the cave,” he tells her. “There is death in there, it hides right under the water.” His voice is like poetry. It gets away from you just as you think you understand it.
“I’m not here for the cave,” she says. “I’m here for you.”
“Sirius?” he says, the hope audible even with the drifting quality his ghostly voice has. “Is that you?”
“I’m not Sirius,” she says sadly.
“Are you Narcissa?” he says. “Or Andromeda? Or Bellatrix? I hope you’re not Bellatrix.”
Despite herself, Hermione laughs. The sound creaks her tongue. “Not Bellatrix, either.”
“Who are you?” asks the ghost.
“I’m Hermione Granger,” she says.
“And who,” says the ghost, “who is Hermione Granger?”
“That’s quite the question,” she says. “It’s too big, to answer correctly.” Then she remembers herself. “ Harry and Ron would check me for Polyjuice if I ever said there was a question you can’t answer correctly.”
“Are you a ghost-hunter?” the ghost asks. “One came once. I think. Tried to chase me away. Said I needed to go to the beyond, whatever that means.”
“It means they thought you needed to die properly,” Hermione says.
“There’s no such thing as dying properly,” says the ghost.
“I’d rather not find out directly,” says Hermione. “I don’t want to die.” She feels like she could scream it. She doesn’t want to die. She doesn’t want to die.
“Neither did I,” says Regulus. “I thought I did. But that’s why I’m here, then.”
“Because you weren’t ready to stop living,” says Hermione. She knew this already but it feels like a revelation.
“But I wanted to end him,” Regulus says. It sounds so plaintive, like the saddest song she’s ever heard.
“You’re in luck, then,” she says, more confident than she feels. “So do I.”
The ghost smiles. It should be horrifying but is instead just sad. “I saw how much he did. How much pain he caused, for Kreacher, for Sirius, for everyone else. How much pain he made me cause.”
“Kreacher’s happy,” she says, like an offering.
He smiles again. “Good. I’d ask if Sirius was, but I don’t think I want to know the answer.”
“And I’m so sick of lying,” says Hermione. “To myself. To everyone. And lying and saying I’m telling the truth.”
“Did they ever find my body?” asks Regulus.
“No,” says Hermione. “When I die, it’s quite likely no one will ever find mine.”
“You won’t die,” says the ghost. “Not if you try to stay alive.”
“I don’t quite understand that,” Hermione admits.
“You will,” he says. “I know it’s hard. So hard. But trust me, I know.”
“Tom Riddle always liked to play games,” Hermione says, remembering something Ginny told her once, whispered the secret as they hid in her room. “But I’ll try to beat them.”
“Will you end him?” the ghost asks her. “The Dark Lord?”
She nods, feeling the weight settle over her shoulders. She thinks of her mother and the dead woman in the town and the ghost before her.
“I promise,” she tells the ghost. And for a single shining moment she believes that she can still keep a promise.