Soul Searching

Mick The Bartender threw his towel onto the counter in disgust. "You no good lousy bastard! Last week I extended your tab, and what do you tell me now? 'I'm leaving for England, Mick!' 'Sorry I can't pay back the tab Mick!'"

Harry looked at Mick, worriedly. "Mick! I'm your friend! Your best customer!"

"A customer pays," Mick interjected.

Harry took a pretzel from the bowl in front of him and continued on. "Without me, you would have no one in this fleabag bar of yours!"

"Oh! So now it's fleabag! Look who's high and mighty when he's sober! Only last week you were in here toasting this lovely establishment." Mick walked to the end of the bar and swiped the bowl of pretzels from Harry's hands. "Those are for paying customers! You know, the kind of person who comes in here and actually passes bills once in a while!"

Harry sighed and wiped his hands on his pants. "Look, Mick. I just can't pay you, alright?"

"What do you want me to do? Give every lazy bum who comes in here a free tab because pressing matters means they can't pay me back? Do you really think I'm that big of a fool?"

Harry grinned, for which Mick responded with a strong glare. "Something like that. Look Mick, I'll leave a deposit. Here are the keys to my apartment. I've got a color television and a nice table. You'll probably have a month to fence anything you want before my landlady uses brute force to get in." Harry pressed a set of keys into Mick's hand.

Mick gave Harry a suspicious glance, twirling the key ring with his index finger. "What's the matter, kid, not coming back? Gonna make a permanent residence in jolly ol' England?"

Harry sighed again. "I don't know Mick. I don't think I'll be coming back. For all that its worth, you were a good listener, even if I didn't have much to say."

Mick snorted. "Jackass. Do you think that going home will change anything at all? You'll still be stuck here, on this bar stool. You can't change who you are. Just a lousy drunk who tries to con off his old shit to pay for his bar tab. A lousy drunk who mumbles about some imminent evil, and all the things that have gone wrong in his life. God forbid the rest of us share some of the misfortune! No, you like to wall it all up inside of you, because it gives you justification to get drunk as hell every night. And in normal circumstances, I wouldn't even mind, since I do own this bar, but since you haven't paid for a drop of liquor in over four months, I sure as hell have something to say about it. The way I see it, you owe me a lot more than your furniture."

Harry gave Mick a sharp look. "What was that? Some sort of rhetoric? I have nothing to give you, anyway. Barely even my soul."

"Mm hmm. Is that so?"

"Look, I'm sorry I mentioned it. Just take the keys and be glad I'm one of the lazy bums who came back at all."

Harry walked out of Mick's bar, leaving Mick to try to understand what was going on inside the complex mind of the short messy haired man. Mick just sighed and went back to cleaning the bar, muttering oaths under his breath.

~*~

Hermione looked around her apartment. It was spotless. Not one thing of its previous resident remained, except for Hermione herself. She had been planning this for a while. The apartment was too big, too unwelcoming, to live alone. But no, she would not think of Draco today. Today she was going to move. Going to finally leave this place, and go back to London. The thought of London made her face flush. Back to her parents; her childhood.

Hermione sighed. It was no use going back to that topic. She had become an adult in one moment. When she had left Hogwarts after her fourth year, she knew she had lost something. It had taken her several years to realize that it was her innocence.

"Goodbye! And I hope your next inhabitant has better luck!" With this final farewell, she turned on her heels, and walked briskly out the door, to the Knight Bus already waiting for her.

~*~

Harry walked slowly out the door. It was still dark out, and the reluctance of the sun to come up seemed to signify something greater. He breathed a deep gulp of the dirty Los Angeles air. England didn't have air like this. England's air was stale, it tasted of age. Los Angeles, on the other hand, seemed alive. It held electricity in the air, it buzzed, a sense similar to after a spell was completed. Los Angeles was moving, and it wasn't going to wait for Harry.

He had left everything in his apartment, true to his word. Being a Gryffindor had left him with some nobility, enough to know not to go back on a promise, if not enough to leave him with a sense of bravery.

After struggling for several minutes with a bag that obviously was too large for him, Harry gave up and charmed his bag to be weightless. He was on his way, up the street to the bus station, routed for the airport. He had tried to take only the necessities: several robes, jeans, his broom, invisibility cloak and wand, which was secured in his pocket. Hedwig had been dead for several years, so there was no need to carry a bulky owl cage also.

After standing on the corner for an unidentifiable time, the bus finally came. Apperating was out of the question. It was hard enough to move yourself from one place to another, but across an ocean gave an added degree of difficulty. He had seen pictures of people who had been splinched.

Floo powder was certainly not Harry's favorite form of travel. Considering his recent assault, he felt it was more appropriate to fly, and certainly not by broom; but by plane. He was posing as a Muggle, after all. These measures were meant to keep him safe from the threat of the Death Eaters. He stepped onto the bus and tried to make himself comfortable as he drifted to sleep.

The airport was a hard place to navigate, and Harry was so lost he was considering whispering /point me/ to navigate through the maze of gates and terminals. This was one thing that Harry believed wizards were superior in; they didn't have to find their way through an airport to get somewhere. But at least this was better than Floo Powder, Harry reflected.

When Harry had looked back at the plane ride, most of it was fuzzy. He had fallen back to old habits, and had downed a considerable amount of alcohol, enough to drive away the demons of his consciousness. It seemed to him that soon enough, he was back in England, at Heathrow Airport.

He took a deep breath. But instead of tasting a staleness common of England, he felt something else. The people all around him were oblivious to this, but even in this completely Muggle place, he could feel it. The sense buzzed through the air. It whispered to him. Fear, apprehension, it coursed through the air, emissions from even the few wizards who spotted the walkways of the busy terminal. Determined by this emotion, he pushed past the other people in the airport, towards a taxi.

Harry's head pounded, a reminder of the alcohol he had drank during his journey. The sight of the hotel gave him some hope: a bed, where he could lie, where he could find some escape from the relentless fear flowing through the air.

Harry went into his room and slept. He wasn't sure for how long, but when he awoke, he felt almost alive. This was an unfamiliar feeling for Harry, who was accustomed to a pounding headache accompanying a hangover. But today Harry felt different. He had a purpose, a goal. And he knew what he had to do.

He took out a phonebook. "Gallager, Glass, Gomes, Granger. There! Right outside of the city..."

Harry wasn't sure why he had gone to Hermione's parents first. Maybe they could tell him about her since he had left. Maybe he just couldn't stand seeing this girl, his only link to the world, the only thing holding him back. She had been sending owls weekly to Los Angeles, but Harry had never written back. He had nothing to say.

He had knocked on the door, and to his surprise, Hermione stood at the doorframe, leaning against the ajar door. She wore faded blue jeans. The older style, long, straight and tight at the bottom, with white socks bunched on her ankles, and dirty white canvas shoes on her feet. She had on a blue shirt that once had words on it, but they had peeled off of the fabric, and left only some remaining glue. Her frizzy brown hair was tied loosely at the bottom of her neck with a rubber band, and a few wisps of hair remained at the sides of her forehead, giving her a crown of fuzz. Her countenance was unreadable.

"Oh! It's you, is it? Well, come in, I suppose." She beckoned him into the house, and led him into a parlor, where there were several pictures of her on the mantel. She went over and picked up one, and sat down on a couch across from Harry.

"Hermione, I'm back." Harry looked at her with a sigh of relief.

She studied the picture and put it on the table separating them. "Oh, yes, you're back. For what? Just felt like finally getting out of your drunken stupor and coming home? Well, this isn't your home anymore Harry."

Harry picked up the frame. It held a picture of him, Hermione and Ron, taken in the summer before their fourth year, a few days before the Quidditch World Cup. He looked up at her, his eyes pleading. "I don't want to talk about this."

"Oh, so you think that you can just walk back in here, and everything will be okay?"

"Well I was hoping you would at least give me a chance to explain."

"What does a drunkard deserve? Nothing, nothing at all, least of all from me."

Harry cut her off. "I may be a drunkard, but you have let your hate consume you. I did nothing to you."

"Nothing. Of course you did nothing. You have my life in your hands, and what do you do? Drink it all away! Do you think that helps?" Her face was savage now, reddening in color, her fists were balled.

"It dulls the pain."

"Life is pain, Harry! Anyone telling you differently is trying to sell you something. But that's what separates you from me. I deal with my pain as much as I can. I know what happened, and I don't forget it. You run from it!"

"Hermione, I never meant to hurt you!"

"Well, you have! And I can't forget it! Harry, everyone is gone! Ron is dead, Draco is gone, even Ginny..."

"Ginny is not dead yet! I will not give up hope!"

Hermione stood up, knocking over the table. She towered over the slight frame of Harry, and slapped him in the face. "Oh, yes, Harry, very healthy. Live in the past, where you can pretend that none of this," she made a grand gesture, "ever happened! You can pretend what you want, you can drink what you cannot pretend, but you cannot forget that he is coming! Less than three months left! And what are you going to do then?"

"Why should I have this weight! I have never asked for anything!"

"Well, you know, Harry, at least you have the opportunity to do something! Some of us are forced to watch from the sidelines because we cannot make our opinion heard! You have the opportunity to do something great! And what do you do? You run."

"I do not want this responsibility."

"Who says you have a choice?! Think of Dumbledore! Think of Snape! Think of Ron." She stood, grabbing the picture from Harry, and holding it to her breast.

"Ron is dead and there is nothing I can do about it!"

"At least he made a difference. He's still making more of a difference than you ever did, and he's dead, Harry! We're not in school anymore! This is the real world and we all have our burdens to bear!"

This statement seemed to shock Harry. He looked into his hands and cupped his face. "God. Look at what this place has reduced us to. We're still children, Hermione. Can't you feel it? I've been holding back my childhood. Hermione, people aren't supposed to die."

"But they do, Harry, and sitting here isn't going to help." She looked up at him, straight into his blinding eyes. "Why have you come back?"

Harry gave her a strong look, feigning a bit of confidence. He felt to his pocket and pulled out the ring, and placed it in Hermione's free hand. "I have a plan."

Hermione looked down at his face, and closed her hand around the small gold band. "Ginny's ring...you kept this the whole time?" Her face finally betraying her, she let out one tear.

~*~

a/n- There is a deficit of angry Hermione stories. So, I though I would do my part and fill in that missing genre.

I have a Princess Bride quote in here....look for it. And review, too!