A Trio Sundered

A/N: Thanks again to Phantom of Desire for beta-ing.

~*~*~*~

Reaching the head of the wide, sweeping staircase buried deep within the Ministry of Magic, Hermione paused, gasping for breath, while she swayed backwards and forwards. Ron was hovering nervously off to one side as though utterly convinced that she was about to pitch backwards down the long flight.

As Hermione herself didn't feel certain that she wasn't going to take a tumble, she kept up her death-grip on the banister and decided against telling Ron off for hanging around her like a worried shadow. As for crossing the corridor, she would wait until her breathing had steadied and the strange awareness of her pulse pounding in her knees and wrists had faded.

All things considered, she decided, it was good to have Ron here by her side. And not just for the physical support. Hearing about the goings on outside the Parkinson Estate had bothered her. She still found it hard to believe that Harry - her Harry; the boy she had grown up with - would willingly attack Aurors.

Shaking her mind out of its wool-gathering, she took a step forward and released the polished banister. Directly across the hallway from where she was currently standing, weak with exhaustion, loomed the large, gilded doors to the Ministry Library. It took her a couple of shaking steps to get to the threshold, but Hermione was determined and, before she knew it, she had passed through the towering doors and was leaning heavily on the Information Desk. Oh yes, Ron would be teasing her later about her magnetic attraction to books.

As for herself, Hermione was already planning out the twin letters that she intended to send out that evening. One, a letter of thanks, to Myles Moore, the elderly inventor of the Muscle Maker Mixture, without whose concoction she'd still be bed bound. The second, a letter of complaint, would address the Ministry's atrocious lack of consideration for people with disabilities and list their categorical dependence not only on league after league of stairs, but on moving stairs at that. She thought it must almost be as bad as Hogwarts and considered building up an access campaign before deciding that she had enough to do just then and filing it away for future consideration.

Catching a stray whiff of dust, furniture polish and that strange indescribable scent that meant 'book', Hermione was helpless to stop the smile that played about her lips. She drew in a deeper breath. The air hung thick with the taste of mouldering papers - dry and dusty and oh so comforting. It felt better than a hug from Ron. She justified that to herself with a quick count of all the extra years she'd been besotted with books before she had even met Ron, forget fallen in love with him.

Ron must have caught the change in her pose, because he shot her a sharp look as he walked past her into the library, presumably looking for someone to assist them. For a moment, the guilty corner of her mind that maybe really did love books as much as Ron wondered if she'd taken to muttering her thoughts out loud while she was in her coma, but her suspicions proved unfounded when Ron just rolled his eyes at her.

"I should have known better than to keep you away from here for so long. And there I've been, trying everything to get a grin from you."

Smiling mildly over at Ron, Hermione just shrugged. "I'd have expected you to know me better than that after all this time." Stepping past Ron, she ventured deeper into the Library, heading towards to several tall, elaborately carved shelves housing the stacks of cross-referencing cards.

"Just what do you think you're doing?"

The strident stones were so reminiscent of Madam Pince that Hermione was already turning, a smile at the ready, before she remembered that Madam Pince was dead; gone in an insane attempt to guard her books as flames had licked through Hogwarts' ancient tomes.

Sure enough, the woman standing with her hands on her hips behind Hermione, keeping her entire body carefully interjected between Ron and the Library proper as if to prevent him from taking one step further, was not Pince. And when she turned away from Ron, it was not to return Hermione's smile, but rather to glare down her nose. Her frown seemed to intensify as Hermione just stood there and there was a long, uncomfortable silence before the librarian raised her eyebrow.

Hermione felt herself flush dully. She'd been asked a question and here she was, walking off down Memory Lane without a care in the world. "Erm, I'm here," she said, gesturing vaguely towards the shelves around her, "to look things up." It was quite possibly the most idiotic sentence that had ever passed her lips and she sounded shaky - like she was lying - but told herself that it was alright to sound like that because although she really was shaky, she was telling the truth.

The next question took her entirely by surprise.

"ID?"

"Pardon?" Hermione's voice sounded breathless and she was rapidly getting annoyed with her inability to articulate in a rational way.

"Your ID; Let me see it now."

Hermione might have been annoyed with herself, but it was rapidly being displaced by how insulted she felt about having demands barked at her for no good reason whatsoever. She felt like snapping back a retort about courtesies costing nothing, or maybe pointing out that the Ministry Library - unlike almost any other in the Wizarding World - was open and freely accessible to anyone who wanted admission. So it was that, feeling rather hard done by, Hermione started to rummage through her bag for her purse. After a moment or so, Ron copied her and tugged his wallet out from under his robes.

The librarian seemed somewhat mollified and moved back behind the Information Desk as she flicked through Ron's Apparition License papers and made notes in a visitors' book.

Handing over her own Apparition License and seeing all the rows of details stretching out above Ron's name and birth date, Hermione felt a brief wave of embarrassment surge through her. Of course there would be some sort of procedure at the Library. You couldn't expect the Ministry not to keep track of people with the current troubles going on. It just went to prove that Ron and Harry were right and that you really couldn't learn everything from books, depressing though that truth might be. She'd just assumed that reading all of the Ministry's leaflets and looking through the Treaties on the Library's establishment would give her all of the necessary information, but, in reality, sometimes people did just have to experience things for real.

Their names logged, they seemed to lose any sense of interest that the Librarian had found in them, for she turned back to filing without so much as offering them a second glance.

It really was nice to be out of the hospital ward, Hermione decided, as she dropped her cloak on a high-backed chair at one of the empty study tables. Ron took the chair across from her - she'd broken his habit of trying to sit beside her, thus obstructing her access to sections of the table better used for stacking up books, long before they started to date - and began to worry at his robes. Hermione couldn't remember seeing his fingers still in the entire time since she had awakened. Of course, they never had in the past either, but something in the motion seemed bleaker, more despondent, than the endless games of Exploding Snap or Wizarding Chess. Hermione thought that she might have even been able to put up with the irritating distraction of mapped out Quidditch strategies if only he would stop looking hopelessly worried.

"Spit it out," she commanded.

Ron looked wretched, but complied, saying, "I really hate this ID-ing everything. I know that they've got to, after everything that's happened." His miserable gesture seemed to encompass Harry and Dean and the entire war. "But still, I wish that they didn't. Do you know what I mean?"

Yes, Hermione thought that she did know. Keeping Death Eaters out of important government buildings had become relatively simple once the Minister put his mind to it. The Dark Mark was something of a give-away. Controlling randomly rebelling citizens, some of them upstanding heroes of the previous wars, however... That was a different kettle of fish altogether.

And then, blindingly, she really did understand.

Reaching across the table, she clasped Ron's large, bitten hands in her own. "Don't worry, Ron. You've never done anything wrong. And you're never going to succumb to this..." She hesitated; searched desperately for a word whole enough to encompass the entire precarious situation that Voldemort's death had left them in. "You're never going to succumb to this infection. We'll find a cure. You'll never be struck off whatever lists the Ministry has of 'good' people. I won't let you be. And we'll get Harry back too. Soon this will all just seem like a nightmare. It'll be over."

For a second she thought that Ron might just shrug her assurances off; that he might act in the same tough and cynical way he had in the war. In the last war.

Ron wasn't a naturally cynical person, though. He just wasn't cut out for that level of disbelief in the world; at her words, he seemed to melt into her touch, shoulders slumping, forehead coming to rest upon her knuckles. "You'll never know how glad I am to have you back, Hermione."

His breath ghosted over the back of her hand as he spoke and Hermione nearly shivered with the gentle heat. She forced herself not to. The new troubles that Voldemort had caused seemed to have made Ron even more insecure than ever, both of his place in life and of her affections, but explaining that her body's reaction had stemmed more from desire than disgust was hardly something that Hermione wanted to discuss in a library.

"It's really hard," Ron whispered at length. "I can feel them looking at me. They're just waiting for me to flip out, I just know it."

"Oh, Ron."

"It is hard," he said through gritted teeth, his grip suddenly as tight and harsh as his voice. "It makes me so angry. And when I'm angry it's almost like I can feel Voldemort stirring inside me. Why don't they understand that? Why don't they realise that they're making it worse?"

His sudden change in temper was almost frightening, but, more than the fear or the pain from the bruises on her wrist, it hurt to hear Ron's voice so raw like that and to know that there was nothing that she could do to soothe it. So Hermione bit her lips to keep her mouth shut and petted Ron's hair instead, waiting until he had calmed down; allowing him time to collect his self-control from wherever it had scattered to.

Hermione had heard it said that you knew it was love when your happiness depended upon another person's happiness. Sometimes, in her blacker moments, she thought that it was just a nice way of alluding to how very much your lover's pain could hurt you.

Time passed.

Ron sat back up. Let out a ragged breath. Scrubbed a hand through his hair as though embarrassed by his rage and possibly also to delay looking at her. His eyes, when they met hers, were tight with misery. Fear too.

Hermione squeezed his hands consolingly before releasing them and aiming for some degree of cool efficiency. "Well, I think it's fair to say that we know more about Horcruxes than anyone living, so there's probably little enough new in here for us to research, even supposing that Voldemort's dependence on them is what triggered all of this. Still, we might as well have a look, just in case there's something that we missed before.

"I think we should also have a look at literature pertaining to soul damage. After all, it's possible that, during the moment of his death, Voldemort flung out what was left of his soul to damage others. I remember hearing about other magical folk doing that in one of Professor Binns' lectures. Apparently it used to be a rather common way that various rulers used to control the future population in several of the primitive societies that existed before the Greek civilisation.

"And there are also those old branches of magic that Harry was talking about playing about with in the war. I remember finding references to it in, oh, which book was it? It was one of the older ones in the Restricted Section. Do you remember it, Ron? Not that it matters seeing as it's burned and gone now, but we could look up creation and cessation magic here. After all, Voldemort was quite good at cessation magic. Of course, he did call it Death Magic, and preferred to follow the human sacrifice subdivision of it and-"

Ron had gone white.

"Honestly, Ron, It's not as bad as it sounds. You should know that. Death Magic has been used lots of times to help save people. It's not evil, it's just-"

"Just misunderstood?" Ron suggested. Hermione could feel herself beginning to brindle at his tone. "That's what Harry used to say, though I suppose you weren't awake to remember." Her rage deflated just as rapidly as it had appeared. She had a sinking feeling that there was an implied 'and you know what happened to him' somewhere in Ron's words.

"Harry?" God, she hated having missed so much. What had he done?

"He went off and played with Death Magic. It must have been about two weeks after you were, well, attacked. Said that it was about protection and all that damn type of thing. Said that he was going to find some fantastic new shielding wards and that he'd use them to keep us all safe. That nothing else dangerous could happen to us then. Oh, yes, and I do distinctly remember him saying that the magic itself was just fine." Ron rolled his eyes. "Old magic, not black magic, my arse. Might not have made him fall, but sure as Hell it didn't do anything to help him."

"Sooo. So Harry was using Death Magic then?" Hermione asked. "But, Ron, that couldn't have caused his downfall. Voldemort caused that, remember? The magic that Harry was using really couldn't have had anything to do with it. And there really is an awful lot of evidence that shows that the old magics are just fine. Utterly inert."

"Hermione, it relies on killing things-"

She opened her mouth to object, because that certainly wasn't true. She might not have read much on the subject, but the books had been very clear on that point: cessation magic wasn't purely focused on death anymore than creation magic was focused purely on sex.

Ron must have guessed that she was going to object from her frown, however. He didn't stop to let her speak in any case. "Whatever else it may be, Hermione, it's based upon pain at the very least. Death. Suffering. Destroying things. Don't try to excuse it, it might not be inherently evil, but it's a long bloody way from the light.

"And besides, you weren't there." Was the bitterness that she heard really there, or was that just her guilty conscience speaking? "Harry changed. Even before Voldemort died, Harry was changing. It was only a little, I'll grant you, but it was as clear as daylight in hindsight. You know that I was never as good as you at seeing things for what they really were, so it took me a while to notice. Yes, he got grimmer, but didn't we all? I thought that it was probably just your... loss.

"But he got more distant, too. That wasn't anything to do with you. That was all so that he could wander off and work on his blasted miracle-cure Death Magic. He was obsessed with it even before Voldemort fell and then even worse afterwards. Maybe if he hadn't been so distant we'd have seen what was going on before it was too late.

"But we didn't, so the darkness took him."

"Ron," Hermione spoke gently, "that doesn't mean that the magic he was using caused or accelerated anything." Although maybe she should take note of Ron's reaction and start referring to it as cessation magic rather than Death Magic in the future so that no one else jumped to problematic conclusions.

"It didn't help," said Ron, voice as flat as lead.

And that, Hermione had to concede, was quite possibly true.

"Well, we're not researching it to use it, just to rule it out," she said firmly. "In fact, if you're right and it did affect Harry, we really should learn more about it."

Ron looked like he regretted ever starting the conversation. The look that he gave her rather implied that he thought she was mad. Thankfully he seemed willing to indulge her for the moment. "Just don't expect me to go looking it up," he said. "They'll have me in custody before I can blink if I do."

"That's fine. How about you investigate possession and behaviour-altering curses? I'll look into Horcurxes and-" No time like the present to learn good habits, she thought. "-cessation magic. Sound good? Oh, any don't forget to keep your eyes open for any texts that might allow us to see discrepancies in someone's soul."

"That sounds as good as anything with that list of subjects in it ever can." The words were dark, but Ron was smiling and it was a nice wry smile, not that bitter twist to his lips. Hermione's heart to lifted from a pit she hadn't even realised it had sunk into.

The Ministry Library was even bigger than Hogwarts' had been. It made sense, really, seeing as Hogwarts - vital though it had been as a bastion of light - was only a school. This was the Hall of Learning for an entire nation. Unfortunately it also seemed to have a much more complicated filing system than Hogwarts had had, assuming, that is, that there was a filing system.

Finally, after wandering around hopelessly for the better part of forty minutes with neither hide nor hair of a useful text pertaining either to Horcruxes or the old magics, Hermione conceded that she might need some help.

Hopefully Ron was doing better with his more conventional topics.

The Information Desk seemed to appear out of nowhere, leaving Hermione feeling rather like the confused little eleven year-old she'd once been with too-big teeth and too-wild hair. She'd been terrified of Madam Pince back then. Shockingly worried about how foolish she'd look when forced to enquire about the Wizarding way of ordering books after she hadn't been able to find the once familiar Dewey Decimal System labels. By now it had been years since she'd last entered a Muggle library to do much more than shelter from the rain. She wondered if she could still remember all of the different numbers for the different sections and spent a moment, there and then, trying to recall the code for amphibians, before telling herself off for stalling.

She took the remaining steps up to the desk in something of a rush. "Excuse me. Where do you keep your books on magics to do with the soul?"

The fearsome librarian, who on closer inspection wore a name badge declaring her to be 'Hello. Xena Lightleaf - here to help', barely glanced up from the books she was carefully stacking onto a trolley. "Third aisle to the left."

"I've already looked there. Do you have soul magics stored anywhere else?"

"There's spirituality on the seventh aisle past the statue of Samuel the Studious; ghosts, ghouls and various states of life and death are on the third tier - mind the ladders, please; and the various workings of boots and fish are in the third room off the main corridor."

"Er..." How could she most subtly put this? "And magics cast on the soul?"

Lightleaf visibly stiffened. Her eyes, now that they had left the trolley, were piercingly sharp, leaving Hermione feeling flayed to the bone. "Your permission slip?" The words should have dripped acid.

Unfortunately the request left Hermione somewhat at a loss. Surely people in the real world didn't need a professor's permission slip to access certain books?

Except that she did want to look up Horcruxes, so maybe she did need somebody's permission. It was a rather dark area to research and holding the books pertaining to it in restricted access made a certain degree of sense. "I don't have a permission slip. Who would I have to apply to to get one?"

"The Department for the Control of Base Artefacts, naturally. Except, of course, that I wouldn't bother."

"Why?" Hermione asked, startled. "Don't they often grant permission?" She had hoped that there might be some small advantage to the tiny level of fame that she'd acquired as one of Harry's constant companions, particularly since she'd been far enough removed from Voldemort's death that she should have escaped the ensuing corruption. Surely that renown would help her application? "I'm optimistic that they should be able to help me sort something out."

"Everybody says that." Lightleaf sounded bored. "I tell them all the same thing: no slip, no books." And then, before Hermione could open her mouth to respond, she continued on. "Besides, I meant it when I said that you shouldn't bother. I can tell you for a fact that we don't keep those types of books anymore."

Hermione blinked. "You don't? But then, where are they kept?" She was beginning to get a bad feeling about this.

"Why, the only place that they can't do harm," the librarian said, speaking slowly as though addressing a madwoman or an idiot. "Under Ministry directive number two-five-seven-one, all books dealing with the Dark Arts must be burned. We sent them all to the Eternal Fires months ago."