These Strange Familiar Things

Chapter 9

Lucius Malfoy

No more tears now; I will think about revenge.

- Mary, Queen of Scots

The words marched black and bold over the official Ministry parchment.

Crime Report, 8/7/1997

Dept. of Magical Law Enforcement

Ministry of Magic

In the case of murdered Muggles Agatha and Prentiss Granger, found in their London residence on 29 June 1997 by daughter Hermione (aged 17, student at Hogwarts, Scotland), the Department of Magical Forensics has established without doubt the following:

One--that said crime was committed by followers of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, as evidenced by a Dark Mark that was cast into the air.

Two--that the attack was carried out by a standard three-person Death Squad, two male wizards and one female.

Three--that their Magical signatures, although masked, revealed them to be adults, two middle-aged and one of the males in his youth.

Four--that through cooperation with Scotland Yard in London, it is known that one of the perpetrators was blond, another brown-haired, and that they have no record of any "finger-marks" for the three in Muggle criminal dossiers (as was expected). The evidence is currently being analysed magically in St. Mungo's research division.

Five--that causes of death are pinpointed as the following: Mr Granger was tortured to death by prolonged use of the Cruciatus curse from two wands simultaneously; Mrs Granger was exposed briefly to the Cruciatus before being assaulted with the killing curse...

Hermione froze inside, feeling as if she had been struck with a rough hand. Her face devoid of colour, she bowed her head and tried to appear engrossed in the words, ignoring Dumbledore's receding footsteps. She focused on the one detail she could pinpoint, the blond hair--Lucius Malfoy--and forced up the anger inside like bitter bile. Flashing in her mind came visions of a million horrible deaths for the aristocratic reprobate.

As the flash of fire appeared in the corner of her vision, and Hermione released herself from the tense dread she had been maintaining in her muscles since the headmaster had arrived. She flung the parchment across the room with force in a move reminiscent of the glass she had thrown a few days earlier, but it rather disappointingly drifted gently to the ground not a metre away. She slumped and wrapped her arms around her waist, shivering despite the warmth of the July day.

-:-:-:-:-

Hermione crouched in the semi-dark of dawn, her heartbeat crashing in her ears. She held her breath as she peered through the narrow crack of her open bedroom door. The muffled click she had heard from the front hall could mean only one thing. Dark Magic. The wards that cradled the Granger's residence were too extensive and secure to have been broken any other way.

They were in.

Her breath came in strangled gasps, and she suddenly knew with horrified clarity what was coming. She heard muffled footsteps in the front hall and burst out of her room, rushing across the hall to her parents' bedroom, screaming at them to wake up! Run! They're here! WAKE UP! But they slept on, oblivious, expressions of complete peace on their relaxed faces. For a moment she feared they were already dead. Her heart froze in her chest--she stumbled forward and grabbed for her father's arm only to find, to her horror, her hand slipping through empty air.

She screamed.

Hermione started to feel a paralyzing panic, eyes darting round the room in caged desperation, looking for a way to reach her mum and dad. Any minute now they'd be mounting the stairs, their slow steady footsteps approaching in a march of doom...

A sudden screeching sound assaulted her ears, and she jerked, realizing as her parents stirred that it was their alarm, sounding much harsher and higher-pitched from so close a distance. (All three Grangers were natural night-owls, and all three had the ingrained habit and philosophy of getting up extremely early in the morning--which partially accounted for their great success, but also necessitated extreme measures for resuscitation.) Hermione saw with a sinking stomach that they were dressing slowly, washing away the sleep and going down for breakfast. A glance at the Hogwarts calendar on the wall--I gave them that last Christmas, she thought--told her it was the day of her ill-fated arrival at King's Cross Station, and she willed down the bile as her eyes confirmed what her heart had known all along.

Her mind, however, had obviously missed the memo, because as her parents opened the door and began to leave her in the empty room, it was coldly wondering why the Death Eaters hadn't burst into the room yet. They would certainly have known where the Grangers would be at this time on a Thursday morning in June; they were evil beyond words, but never stupid... her ever-rational brain followed the thought to its rational conclusion.

They were waiting downstairs, of course.

She shuddered at the sudden chilling certainty, and frantically threw herself between her parents and the open doorway, which suddenly seemed to her to be the gaping maw of some horrible deadly monster--to no avail, of course. They passed through her like mirages in the desert, except that she could still see them; they hadn't disappeared and wouldn't, either, and she'd be forced to watch the past unfold... she felt as if she were in some horrible parody of a pensieve, knowing what was to come yet still somehow innocent of it. Forced to experience but powerless to affect.

Except that she knew this was a dream, a nightmare--her mind's masochistic attempt to fill in the details of an event she was grateful not to have witnessed. Wake up, she screamed inside her head. Wake up!

It was no use. She may have been having a lucid dream, but she was trapped in the horrific landscape of her nightmares, unable to escape no matter how hard she screamed.

-:-:-:-:-

Hermione woke with a tiny moan. The sleeper's scream. It had been worse this time, the details not nearly as blurred. She looked around her in panic, pulse still pounding madly. The letter lay forlorn on the carpet at her feet, and she jerked when she saw it, letting out an involuntary cry. She could still see the words, taunting her, cutting into her heart... murdered Muggles Agatha and Prentiss Granger... she gulped as the dream repeated inside her head, unable to escape the images... a standard three-person Death Squad... she saw in her mind's eye the stark white masks, like pale malevolent moons in an unnaturally black sky. Red eyes glinted in her mind, though she had never seen them outside of dreams... tortured to death... two wands simultaneously... assaulted with the killing curse... killing curse... she brought up her hands and gripped her head tightly with shaking fingers, willing away the hissing voice in her head. She shuddered and blocked out the portion of her traitorous mind that haunted her at night with imaginings of her parents' death throes, refusing to let them follow her into the waking world. She sobbed loudly, trying to stop the tears from rising, wiping furiously at her eyes.

This is ridiculous, she thought angrily, pushing the images to the back of her mind with great effort.

Hermione got up and plucked the Ministry paper off the carpet, stuffing it into her pocket without another glance, and marched into the kitchen. She grabbed a bottle of water from the pantry and walked through the front hall and out the door, stepping into her shoes as she passed them.

A light drizzle fell from the pearly sky, giving her pale cheeks a slight sheen. She walked without purpose or direction, eyes on the footpath advancing beneath her scuffed boarders, filling her mind with the mundane image. People passed her, their faces blurred as if roughly sketched with paint, and she kept her gaze on her shoes. Time passed without measure, and then she saw a familiar glass and stone building on her right and took the turn up its drive.

She stopped before the plate-glass double doors, eyeing her reflection in them. A tall thin girl looked back at her with hollow eyes, short hair dark and curled from the damp air, long grey coat and black board shoes, with the navy stripe of her jeans jumping out between them. Gray sky behind her head.

Grey had always been Hermione's favourite colour. On her eighth birthday she had thrown away all her pink, frilly things disgustedly, and decided grey would be her new favourite colour. Sober, sophisticated--grown up. As she so desperately wanted to be. The colour of the sky when it rained, and she felt like dancing mercy was falling on her head. The colour of her mother's eyes. Later it became the colour of Harry's invisibility cloak (freedom) and his Patronus (hope). Ron's favourite socks, patched in different shades of charcoal. The silver of moonlight.

And now it seemed like endless grey surrounded her, and she had put away her old sea-green comforter in the back of her closet and pulled out a shaggy, comfortable greyish-blue one with milk stains from her babyhood; it sweetened the pain at night.

Hermione shook off her dismal thoughts and opened the heavy door, stepping inside. She took a relieved breath and surveyed her surroundings as she walked into the building--polished marble floors from which rose endless stacks of books, all sizes and colours, and the smell of the books and magazines and armchairs and the tang of the floor wax combined in that certain smell to evoke her childhood summers. She'd used to spend all her time in this library, until her father would come to drag her home before sundown, jokingly scolding her all the way (she'd known he was secretly proud of her, though).

She immersed herself in the towering stacks and didn't emerge for hours.

-:-:-:-:-

She walked through the front door, a stack of books under her arm, with an almost alien feeling of satisfaction, she hadn't had it for so long. She locked the door behind her and kicked off her shoes, setting her day's harvest on the bottom stair, and decided that she actually felt hungry, for once. She walked into the cheery kitchen with an almost smile on her face--

"Ron." She stopped dead, eyes wide in her shocked face.

"Erm, hi, Hermione," he said uncertainly. He was sitting at the kitchen table, chair turned and his elbows on his knees, an odd, expectant look on his face. Hermione's pleasant mood disappeared all of a sudden to be replaced with a sick, miserable guilty feeling in the pit of her stomach.

Ron smiled nervously, and held out a cat carrier, which was emitting a disturbing level of hissing yowling noises. A bright, surprised smile bloomed on her face. "Crookshanks! Oh, Ron, you brought him! Thank you."

Ron blushed and shrugged. "He wasn't... er... very happy when he realized you had left."

Hermione had meanwhile taken a very affronted Crookshanks out of his wicker carrier--who was glaring at her in that supercilious way that only a cat can manage--and was petting him affectionately in an attempt to assuage his assaulted pride. "Sorry, Crooks," she crooned. "I had a lot of stuff on my mind..." she trailed off and her expression grew stony again. She appreciated Ron's effort; his casual manner notwithstanding, she knew how much animosity her cat and her boyfriend--former boyfriend, she thought with a wince--had for each other. His generosity brought a fresh surge of guilt to the surface, and the momentary excitement at seeing her cat suddenly turned stale and flat. The silence lingered and grew between them, neither knowing what to say.

Ron blinked at her, noticing her changed appearance for the first time. She looked awful, but dating Hermione had cured him of at least his most obvious blunders, so he said instead, "You cut your hair."

"Obviously," she replied, narrowing her eyes. She covered her sudden misery with annoyance. "What are you doing here, Ron?"

"Your Auror let me in."

"Ron," she said warningly.

He flushed and looked away, revealing a flash of hurt in his blue eyes. Fiddling with his fingers, he mumbled, "I wanted to talk." He seemed to gather some courage. "We need to talk, lo--Hermione." She cringed at the familiar, incomplete endearment.

"About what?" she asked abruptly.

He let out a shaky breath. "I just wanted to tell you... I mean... do you still feel the same way as the last time we spoke?" There was an embarrassingly vulnerable look in his eyes as he looked up at her.

She huffed in real irritation. "Well, I don't see why I wouldn't, Ronald, considering that nothing has changed."

He got that stubborn look around his mouth then. "Look Hermione, I realize you're grieving, and I respect that, but I wish you'd let me in so I could help. I've been going mad with worry these past two weeks. Harry won't even let me come with him. I just don't understand why you're freezing me out like this!"

Hermione stared back at him in disbelief. "And I can not for the life of me imagine why you think the world revolves around you! You are unbelievable. I don't want to talk to you about--even Harry was a bit of a stretch, but at least he can understand what I'm going through! While you, Ronald, with your sickeningly whole, sickeningly happy family, can not!" Her voice softened at this. "Nor do I ever want you to, because I love the lot of you, and I'd never wish this pain on you, Ron. I just..." she sighed and dropped into a kitchen chair, folding her arms on the table. Her eyes fell on the flowery pattern of the tablecloth and her bony shoulders slumped. Dropping her head onto her arms, she didn't speak for a long while. The kitchen clock ticked in the heavy silence. Ron, thinking she had fallen asleep, rose reluctantly to leave, when a muffled voice sounded on the other side of the table.

"You really want to help me?"

He blinked, not sure where she was going with this, but seizing the chance to prove himself to her. "Er... yes! Of course I do. Anything you want."

She raised her head and looked him in the eye. Ron shrank back involuntarily at the cold, cold look in her eyes. "Dumbledore brought me the Ministry report this morning. About my parents," she added when he blinked in confusion. His eyes widened. "It said... well... there were three of them, and one..." she took a deep breath. "One of them had blond hair. Most likely male, and middle aged."

Ron gasped, going pale. "Lucius Malfoy," he breathed, saying the words as if they were cursed, filthy.

"My thoughts exactly," Hermione replied grimly. "It couldn't be anyone else, really. He's high enough in the ranks that it's plausible Voldemort would trust him with something so... strategically important." Gruesome, her mind substituted. She fell silent.

Ron cleared his throat, his eyes blazing with a deadly rage. "But what can I do, Hermione?" he asked, his voice hoarse with suppressed anger. "Malfoy is--he's untouchable."

She stood, steel in her gaze. "No one is untouchable. We just have to find a way to get to him. Because I swear to you, I won't rest until I have his blood on my hands, Ron." Ron stared at her in shock, not recognizing the side of Hermione manifesting itself before him. Where was the sweet forgiving girl he loved? But then, he thought with a burning mind, she had been destroyed along with her parents. And he'd best remember that.

Besides, he felt rather murderous towards the demonic Malfoy, and he imagined her feelings were hundreds of times stronger than his. He sighed, and closed the distance between them, putting his hands on her shoulders. "I know you don't feel that I can relate, and I can't, but--how are you feeling, really? Harry won't tell me anything"--he held up his hand before she could speak--"and I'd hoped that underneath everything else, we're still the best of friends, Hermione. And friends want to ease each other's pain. Friends would die for each other."

He looked down and smiled half-heartedly. "And about before... I'm sorry for pushing that on you." He mumbled the last with shame colouring his face and voice. "I... forgive me?"

Guilt tugged at her insides. He looked up at her with his shaggy hair falling in his face, hope and chagrin in his sad blue eyes, like a naughty puppy. For a moment, she was reminded forcibly of Sirius Back, and she took a shaky breath. And then smiled slightly. "Of course I forgive you. Only, forgive me too? For hurting you?"

He grabbed her and hugged her tightly, and it was like it had been in the old days, when they were a boy and a girl, awkward best friends, seeing each other for the first time after a long separation. Except this time it was he who was squeezing the breath out of her. She laughed a bit. "Can't breathe, Ronniekins," she jibed with a hint of the familiar teasing. He pulled back, flushed but pleased.

"Don't call me that, Herm-own-ninny," he said with a mock glare. They both smiled.

She turned serious then, her brows coming together in a look of fierce determination. "Will you get Harry, then?" He opened his mouth, his head full of doubts, but thought better of protesting when he saw the come-hell-or-high-water expression he recognized so well. He sighed and followed her to the family room, where he watched in silence as she unlocked the fireplace with a whispered password and started a fire in the grate. He tossed the powder in and shouted into the green flames, and as he was swept through the Floo network, he felt uneasiness creep over him like soot.

-:-:-:-:-

Harry stumbled into the room after Ron, both boys looking rather agitated as they greeted Hermione, who had been pacing impatiently in front of the hearth, muttering obscure facts to keep her mind from running away with her. She turned an intense gaze on them, her eyes almost glittering in the firelight. The room was dim, as the sky outside had darkened with dusk and she had neglected to turn on any lights.

"Harry! Did Ron tell you? I think--"

"Yeah, he told me. Hermione, are you out of your mind?" He took in her dishevelled appearance; her unbrushed hair, the almost desperate glimmer in her eyes. Something wasn't right about her expression.

She stopped and blinked at him, offended. "What? Don't you want to help me? After all we've been through, Harry--I mean the three of us, we're unstoppable! And Lucius Malfoy--"

"Is a deranged psychopath," snapped Harry, his eyes starting to spark familiarly. "And he's extremely intelligent. You of all people should know never to underestimate your enemy, and he is a formidable one! You obviously haven't thought this through properly--"

"Pardon me, Harry," Hermione interrupted sharply, "I haven't thought this through? Out of the three of us, I'm the one who always--"

"Which is exactly why it bothers me to see you acting so irrationally! Hermione, I know that you're grieving but you can't just waltz into Malfoy Manor and kill its master! You aren't thinking."

Hermione inhaled sharply, a dangerous look coming onto her delicate features. "Harry Potter. I lost my parents, not my mind. I'm no idiot, and by no means do I underestimate Malfoy--nor do I have any illusions about the nature of this undertaking. But he is just a Death Eater--a man, not some semi-divine being."

She held up a hand to forestall their words of protest. "Don't you think Voldemort wants to see me broken and despairing over this? Well, I refuse to give that thing the satisfaction. There is no--bloody--way I'm going to sit back and let my parents' murders float through the system, waiting for justice to be served or miscarried, according to the latest whim of a castrated, cowering Ministry!" They flinched. Hermione had almost growled the last bit, breathing heavily, her pale forehead damp with sweat. She sighed and seemed to deflate, looking awfully small and fragile all of a sudden.

Then her expression hardened with resolve. "This is my fight, boys, and I am going to battle. You can fight at my side--or not. Your choice entirely." Her face looked cold and foreign to her best friends, her brothers who had known her so long, yet had never seen her in this state: half-wild and despairing under a cold mask of vengeful anger. Harry felt a pain in his chest as he recognized her look as his own after Sirius had fallen.

The two boys exchanged a troubled glance, coming instantly to an unspoken decision.

Ron stepped forward and squeezed Hermione's shoulder.

"We're with you, Hermione," said Harry with a weary smile.

He couldn't ignore the uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach, however, and fought off the irrational certainty that something was about to go very wrong.

-:-:-:-:-

Two quiet pops sounded in the darkened living room, one following on the other. The doorway let in some golden light from the kitchen, which spilled into the room by way of the corridor that ran the length of the house. Silhouetted in the dim light, two figures stood in the room which a moment ago had been quite empty. "Hermione?" one of them called.

"In here," came an answering voice. They walked out the open doorway and into the kitchen, where she sat at the table, a map spread out before her, brow furrowed. She lifted her head and smiled slightly at them. "Hi, boys. Ready?"

They certainly looked ready. Both wore rough clothes (although Hermione suspected they would have anyway, as it was summer) and carried knapsacks on their backs, each clutching a broomstick in one fist. They had rather grave expressions on their determined faces, and Hermione felt her own weak smile wither.

"...So," she started, "Do you have your checklists? Did you make sure--"

"Relax, Hermione," said Ron. "We've got everything you specified. Although," he wrinkled his freckled nose in puzzlement, "I have no ruddy idea why we'd need a Put-Outer."

She answered with a trace of her customary manner. "We have to be ready for every eventuality, Ron. There's no excuse for rushing into this without proper preparation."

At the mention (however oblique) of what they were going into, each admitted to himself that "properly prepared" or not, dread filled their bellies at the thought of what they were about to attempt.

"This is insane," said Harry with a flat laugh.

No one spoke for a second. Then Hermione seemed to regain a bit of her trademark spunk and retorted, "Oh, look who's talking! You've led us into more mad situations than any rational human being could dream up. And it's been bloody wicked, Harry." She grinned. Harry and Ron grinned back, after an eyebrow raise from the former and a mutter of "hypocrite" from the latter at her uncharacteristic language. They felt a surge of confidence, of energy, that only happened when they worked together on something.

"Let's do it." Three spoke as one.

Hermione gathered up the map she had been studying with such concentration and stuffed it into a side pocket of her own knapsack, then slipped the bag's straps over her slight shoulders and gripped her wand. She doused the light with a flick of her wrist.

They Apparated out simultaneously.

Not ten minutes later, a small brown owl came down through the chimney and alighted on the kitchen table, releasing from its talons a slim envelope addressed in green ink. It left again as silently as it had come, the letter lying unnoticed upon the tablecloth.