The Ravishing Thrall

Chapter Three: In the Still of the Night

Hermione returned home long into the early hours of the morning, and she was quite happy to jump right into bed. Apparently, however, a sound sleep was not in the cards for her tonight. About an hour after she'd drifted off, Hermione awoke abruptly, startled to hear a "pop" that echoed unpleasantly around the empty bedroom. She sat up, fumbling with one hand to grab her wand off of the bedside table, and blinking blearily through the misty fog of sleepiness that still hung about her.

"Hermione?" a voice murmured, hesitantly. Hermione relaxed. Harry Potter, as bleary-eyed and tousled-looking as herself, was standing next to her bedroom fireplace. She shook her head, trying to clear it, and waved her wand at the ceiling, and whispered, "Lumos!" The welcoming smile that she'd prepared when she heard Harry's voice faded quickly, as she noticed the expression on her childhood friend's face.

"Hi," Harry said, looking very awkward. "I, um. I'm sorry, I woke you up."

Hermione looked at the clock. It was five o'clock in the morning. Of course he'd woken her up, she thought. Had he expected that she'd be awake at this hour? "It's fine," she said, rather than voice those thoughts. "Not a problem. What's up, Harry? You're...well, you're white as a sheet, and you don't look like you've slept tonight either."

This was perfectly true. Now that he was in the light, Hermione could see that his face was several shades paler than it normally was, and that there were large, dark bags under his eyes. "Yeah, well," Harry was saying, looking slightly uncomfortable, "I've had...a rough week."

"Where's Ginny?" asked Hermione, shaking her head reprovingly at him. "Does she know you're out in the middle of the night, when you're obviously in no shape to be anywhere but in your bed?"

"I dunno," Harry replied, bleakly. "I sort of thought that she was with you."

"With me?" Hermione stared at him. "No, of course she's not with me, what would Ginny be doing with me?"

"Girl's night out, or something," Harry muttered, quickly adding, "I guess," in what he apparently thought was a nonchalant manner.

For a moment, Hermione was terrified. If Ginny was missing, something might have happened to her. She could be anywhere. They should be making calls, searching their favorite haunts. Hermione stepped forward, making as if to reach for some floo powder from a small jar above the fireplace. Harry didn't follow, and Hermione glanced back at him, raising an eyebrow in some surprise. Then, she remembered. They weren't in the middle of a war, anymore. Those days were over. Ginny was missing, not kidnapped. "Oh," she said, in a very small voice. "Oh, no, Harry, I'm sure she's just..."

"Was she here the other night, then?" he interrupted, refusing to look Hermione in the eye. "On Wednesday?"

"I haven't seen Ginny in weeks," she insisted, hating herself for it. "She must have meant she was going to see someone else..."

"Yeah," agreed Harry bitterly. "Yeah, I expect she must have."

"Oh, but, no, that's not what I meant..." Hermione trailed off, recognizing how useless her assurances were, as she saw the closed, blank look in Harry's eyes. Disturbed, she wondered how long Ginny had been telling her husband that she'd been spending 'girl's nights' with Hermione, and why it was that Harry had believed her. Surely he'd known that Hermione would hardly have invited Ginny over night after night, and never so much as asked for him.

"Nevermind," he muttered, running a nervous hand through his hair as he turned back to the fireplace. "Just forget it. I'll...let you sleep, now. G'night."

"Harry." Hermione put a hand on his shoulder, forestalling him. "Don't go like that. Sit down for a minute and we'll figure out where she is. You don't look like you're in a state to travel, anyway."

Harry allowed Hermione to push him into a sitting position on the edge of the bed. He still wasn't looking at her, but was instead staring intently at the opposite wall, so intently that Hermione thought he might bore a hole through it with sheer force of thought. He didn't move or speak for so long that Hermione was temporarily convinced that he'd gone to sleep with his eyes open, the way her father had used to do. She left him there, and continued to the fireplace, taking a pinch of floo powder, and tossing it into the fire.

Harry's voice forestalled her. "No, please." She turned to see him, hardly asleep, shaking his head and holding out a hand in a gesture of protestation. "Don't ask anyone. I don't want it noised about everywhere. If she doesn't want to come home, then she doesn't want to." He shrugged, as if that was that.

Hermione stared at him, unconvinced. "And...you're not going to do anything? You're just going to let her run around on you, and act as if you don't know anything about it?"

"I dunno," retorted Harry, although he sounded more resigned than confident about it. "You've got a better idea?"

Hermione didn't, so she said nothing. Instead, she just stared at Harry's dreary, dejected face, feeling helpless, and angrier than she'd ever been at Ginny Weasley. She and Ginny had been fast friends, when they'd lived together at the Burrow, and when they'd been students at Hogwarts. Ginny was a very pretty girl, with one of those laughs that turned men's heads wherever she was...and women's heads, too, now that Hermione came to think about it. That had all been well and good at Hogwarts, and even for a few months after Harry and she had been married. To be completely honest, Hermione reminded herself, she hadn't expected anything like this to happen. Maybe Ginny was really out working extra hard at night to...buy Harry an extra-special Christmas present?

She looked over at Harry, and, instinctively, put her head on his shoulder, giving him a one-armed hug. Harry didn't object, but continued to just sit there. "Thanks, Hermione," he mumbled.

***

"Here's a thought," Hermione said, as she conjured up a batch of cheese-drizzled scrambled eggs an hour or so later. "There's something I forgot to tell you. You'll never believe who I ran into last night."

Harry was sitting at the kitchen table, still having gotten no sleep, but looking a bit less morose. He sipped at a glass of orange juice that Hermione had forced in front of him, and made a concerted, although unsuccessful effort at sounding really interested. "Yeah? Who's that?"

"You have to guess." Hermione grinned at him.
Harry rolled his eyes. "Come off it, who'd you meet?"

"Remus Lupin," replied Hermione, deflating somewhat. He clearly still wasn't in the mood.

That announcement, however, had a very strange effect on Harry. He acted for a few minutes as if he hadn't even heard the information, still sipping stupidly at his juice. Then, all of a sudden, he gazed up at Hermione, his eyes widening as if in slow-motion. "Remus Lupin? The Remus Lupin?"

"I don't expect there are any other Remus Lupin's that I'd be so keen to tell you about," shot Hermione. She brought the plate of eggs over to the table, along with a second dish for Harry, and a pair of forks. "Eat, you have no color."

Harry wasn't interested in the food. "Well," he asked, grabbing her forearm across the table in his excitement, "where is he? What's he up to, how'd you run into him? How's he doing, is he all right? Did he ask for me?"

"Slow down!" Hermione smiled, pleased to see that she'd had such an effect on Harry, who was no longer acting like a decorative stone gargoyle. "It's a long story. And..." She bit her lip. "And come to think of it, I definitely shouldn't be talking about it."

Harry raised an eyebrow. "What do you mean, shouldn't be talking about it?" He jabbed a finger at his own chest. "To me? Have we met, Hermione? I'm Harry Potter, your best friend from school. We fought Lord Voldemort together. Oh, and you were the maid of honor at my wedding." His face fell as he thought about his wedding, and about Ginny.

Hermione spoke hastily, hoping to turn Harry's mind back to the thoughts that had seemed to invigorate him moments before. "Of course," she promised him, "of course it's different, but...well...we shouldn't talk about it anywhere else, all right? He's not in a good position, if you will."

"A good position?" asked Harry. "Well go on, don't be enigmatic. Tell me where he is!"

Hermione gestured at the food in front of her friend. "I won't speak a word until you've eaten some of your eggs. Lupin isn't going anywhere in the next ten minutes, I shouldn't think.

Harry ate his eggs, so quickly that Hermione was frightened that he'd choke in his hurry to get them down and out of the way. When he was halfway through with them, and didn't show any signs of slowing his pace, Hermione reached forward and ripped the plate out from under him. "All right, all right," she accepted, shaking her head. "Don't kill yourself. I'll tell you!"

She did tell him. Hermione explained what she'd been doing at the theater, and described the totally unexpected appearance of Remus Lupin, posing as a Muggle stage hypnotist. When Harry didn't appear satisfied by her explanation, she went on to describe some of the tricks that he'd used. "And," she added, "he promised me that it wasn't the Imperius curse, but it was certainly a good imitation of it!"

Harry was nodding, slowly. "I imagine that not everyone would believe his explanation, if they saw him manipulating a Muggle like that. Maybe they wouldn't be so quick to agree with you that it wasn't an unforgivable curse."

"Doesn't matter," Hermione said with a shrug. "Potentially exposing the magical community, and practicing magic, any magic either on or with Muggles is a criminal offense! A really serious criminal offense...but, you should know that already."

Harry grimaced. He knew it all too well. "What's he up to there, then? Gotta be something we're not seeing, like...some sort of ulterior motive. Maybe he's really working for the Ministry, you just don't know it. Scouting out some troublemakers, or-!"

He trailed off at the sight of the look on Hermione's face. "He can't get employed anywhere else," she said simply. "Not since that Dangerous Creatures Bill passed last week."

"Even him?" Harry asked. "But he's a war hero! He helped to save most of our lives! Surely they'll make exceptions."

"No exceptions," murmured Hermione glumly.

Thoughtfully, Harry reached over and retrieved his eggs. He kept eating them, but much more slowly, obviously turning something over in his head as he munched. Hermione made a plate for herself, and joined him. She recognized that thoughtful, eager look on his face, and she wasn't entirely sure she liked it. She also, however, wasn't entirely sure that she didn't like it, and part of her wanted very much to see the fire back in his eyes that she'd been used to in the days before the war.

"I want to see him," Harry said, after a while. "Will you take me there, Hermione?"

"Absolutely not," she retorted, applying herself to her eggs. "It's not a good idea, and the more attention that we draw to him, the less good we'll do him. You know it."

Harry begged her with big, hopeful green eyes. Hermione sighed.