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I.
Worrying about the consequences was what Hermione did, and what she had been doing since first year, and after fourth year the consequences grew greater and more immediate than ever before. Her mind was a lightning rod for the chain of causation, each possibly catastrophic choice flashing out into possible futures in an instant, with Hermione the ghost in the machine, sorting them, analyzing them. That was never the trouble. The trouble was figuring out which futures were worth worrying about, and assuming that was handled, coming up with contingency plans and the possibility of averting them.
She had plenty of time to consider these consequences, and come up with new things to worry about, staying in Sirius's house over the summer. Grimmauld Place was weird, weirder than Mrs. Weasley or any of the Order seemed prepared to admit. The work of cleaning and disarming and dismantling the house could only do so much to disguise the simple surrealism of staircases that spiraled differently on different days and doors that were only sometimes there.
Then again, Hogwarts did those things too, and the Burrow was the only private Wizarding home Hermione had visited before. Maybe the others made no comment on these developments because they were considered commonplace, not worthy of note.
Hermione found the Blacks' book collection by mistake, in the course of what was probably the significant error of being awake and out of bed and alone on the stairs at two in the morning. Later, once she realized a small portion of what Grimmauld Place was like she wouldn't have done that, but it was only her third day there and she still wasn't used to either sharing a room with Ginny or being so rigorously supervised. At Hogwarts nobody really cared what you did if you weren't actively supposed to be in class, and Hermione's parents, aside from how little they saw of her these days, had been too busy and too trusting to bother much since she was very young. They had come to the conclusion that left to her own devices, Hermione would only take advantage of uninterrupted reading time years ago.
So Hermione couldn't sleep, and Ginny was snoring. The two neat cots in what Hermione was fairly sure had been servants' quarters lacked the heavy curtains that allowed her to avoid disturbing Lavender and Parvati by reading at night, and practically all of her waking hours were caught up in cleaning, bickering and trying to spy on Order meetings -- all of which made getting out of bed and into her housecoat seem reasonable, and leaving the questionable safety of the thoroughly decontaminated narrow bedroom to be no worse than dubious.
Out on the stairs, her wand lit – Hermione had found out how Underage Wizardry was monitored ages back – and at the whim of all the creaks, moans, and occasional blood-curdling shrieks that Grimmauld Place could offer, this decision seemed much stupider on the other side of the door. But Hermione was committed now, and simple terror had woken her too much to bear the idea of going back to the room and trying to sleep. So instead, visions of awful curses playing through her mind, Hermione inched downward. She might have only wandered through the dubious and groddy rooms of the houses for a bit before getting tired and going back, but a few floors down she spotted a door that hadn't been there before.
Lots of doors in Hogwarts were only there sometimes, and even more were completely fake and appeared because the castle was annoyed with you, or entertaining itself, or had been transfigured by Peeves or an obnoxious fellow student. Still, Grimmauld Place seemed an entirely different animal from Hogwarts (maybe literally – Hermione hadn't found any books explaining self-altering dwellings in any detail, and wasn't sure if they were properly alive). Warily she cast the best spells she had to check for dangerous magic, which were unfortunately not very good, and when she didn't come up with anything she turned the doorknob – with proper caution, using her wand instead of her hand. Surprising objects in Grimmauld Place turned out to bite.
On the other side of the door was a ruined table with a variety of smashed objects that had once rested on it, and a vast space beyond which proved, when Hermione lifted her wand, to contain books.
Tom Riddle's diary aside, she had never properly believed a library could be other than safe. Only residue of caution remaining, she tiptoed into the dark room, and with an absent wave of her wand, lit the candles still ensconced on the wall.
The Black library turned out to be selective and at first glance mostly awful: not a single ordinary magical cookbook, for example, but volumes and volumes on poisons and illegal potions. This suited Hermione fine, particularly that year: she couldn't cook and she wasn't in the mood for nice reading material. She was terribly worried about Voldemort and the Ministry and Dark Magic, Dark Magic being used foremost on Harry and secondarily on everyone else, and nobody would let her at the seriously restricted stuff in Hogwarts then.
There was nobody guarding the Black library, though. This could have led to serious consequences, especially with Hermione reading in secret in a room nobody else could seem to find, but she was lucky until she came across a book on dealing with cursed books, left out on one of the intact reading tables further inside the library. After that she was careful, and her care sufficed, to the extent she could tell.
As far as Hermione knew, nobody else had found their way into the library. At least, when she asked Mrs. Weasley if they would be working on books, she had said something dismissive about how it was a lot of effort and dangerous but thankfully there weren't many in the house, and perhaps they had been removed. From this, Hermione took it that Mrs. Weasley hadn't found the library, and nobody else mentioned it, either.
Hermione read what the Black library offered, anything that seemed like it might help: advanced combat magic, reversing horrific curses, torture magic and death magic and blood magic that might be used against them. At first her reading gave her nightmares, but by the time Harry arrived in Grimmauld Place she had grown inured and then immune. She took notes in her usual color-coded system, though in place of Transfiguration theory and Potions ingredients on the Hogwarts curriculum were spells meant to shatter an enemy's morale or melt a person's bones. She left her notes in the library after her first few visits: nothing was disturbed there as far as she could tell, and it was a lot more private than the room she shared with Ginny. The house never made the notes vanish, if indeed that was within its power, and nobody else commented on finding them.
As she read, Hermione slowly gained a more focused idea of what she was doing (aside from hurling herself into the only large mass of previously unread material in Grimmauld Place). There were really three large categories of information, subdivided by magical discipline and legal status and so on. First was the obvious application of the Black library, horrible things somebody might do to Harry or society more broadly, and ways of resisting or fixing those horrible things insofar as she could find them. Here were the torture spells to make you swallow your tongue or your skeleton grow through your flesh, the rituals to enslave the will without the direct contact necessary to cast Imperius, possession and Inferi-making and so on. There were indefinite awful things to do with magic, as Hermione was discovering, but that didn't make learning about them futile: the better you recognized a hostile magic, or something like it, the better your chances of undoing it promptly.
Then there were legitimate or at least not morally awful – by Hermione's muggle standards, which were decidedly not magical Britain's – means of using magic to fight a war, which she studied with the straightforward and self-honest desire to learn and use: undetectable and ergo legally restricted means of expanding space, particularly destructive combat magic, magic to track enemies and the like. Some of it she could practice herself, although most of it would really need more space, a spotter or in some cases instruction by somebody actually knowledgeable in case of disastrous errors. It was all worth knowing about.
Finally there was a slowly shaping category which Hermione was reluctant to think too loudly about: magic of last resort.
Hermione thought about trying to smuggle some books with her as the start of term grew nearer and she had nowhere near approached an exhaustive search. Reluctantly she concluded she had better not: she knew most of the books had to be restricted on the basis of their subject matter but felt no certainty about how seriously, which ones might be entirely illegal to possess, or how likely such laws were to actually be enforced against a minor attending Hogwarts.
Anyway, she couldn't possibly read and memorize or distill to notes, carefully enchanted against prying, every book in the Black library. What she found in the time she actually had would be enough or it wouldn't.
When Hermione found herself unexpectedly returning to Grimmauld Place for the winter holiday, she had the opportunity to learn more, and months of frustration over what she hadn't found, not to mention the debacle with Umbridge and the DA, to guide her. There were apparently some limits to what the Room of Requirement could give her in reading material, though its library was also quite extensive: it could create something that looked like the Black library easily if nobody else was using it, but the book selection had only a small overlap and margin notes and dedications and damage were missing, so they were actually different copies. Perhaps it was drawing from the books in the castle, or the minds of everybody who had used it, or something. Hermione ached to know more but didn't have time to experiment, and suspected she didn't have the right theoretical background to begin to understand the answers.
Still, the Room of Requirement had thoroughly provided her with advanced combat magic, field medicine and the like, so when Hermione returned to Grimmauld Place her priorities were two: books which appeared to be unique to the Black collection or else extremely rare, and the Darkest of Arts, the sort of thing about which Hogwarts would or could not provide information. After all, to fight them, she had to understand.
When Hermione first found her way there, after Mr. Weasley was stable in the hospital and Sirius had commenced Christmas decoration, she had to duck a strand of tinsel, but the door was there for her as always. Inside, she found her usual table had two books on it, set out as though waiting, and - she carefully verified – uncursed. She was alarmed and not, at the same time. Since she was a small child libraries had felt to Hermione like friends, and the Black library had given her occasional reason to believe it was aware of her search beyond the simple fact of the door's selective appearance to her alone.
The first book was a handwritten manuscript attributed to some Black aunt on library magic. The second's title read only, Magic Of Necessity, stamped on a slim cover of smooth black leather.
Hermione sat down, put her note-taking materials carefully in order, and flipped the book open. Then she swallowed, hard. Inside the cover was a detailed drawing of a person of indeterminate gender and features with long spread hair, lying with their face to the ground and with a section of their back spread open. Their lungs had been pulled back and out, like petals of some grotesque flower, and something that might be a wand was laid on the exposed spinal cord. (Wouldn't that risk damage to the wood?) The moments of work it took to understand the stark black lines did not improve the image on understanding.
At the bottom, a delicate caption in italics read, For Summoning The Death-Spirits.
Hermione flipped pages until she found the table of contents. Not all banned books had these, or really magical books in general. Contents and summaries and indices and the like were technology writers or printers or copyists had to decide to use, and she always had to be grateful when they were available. On recollection of this, Hermione pulled the library magic manuscript to her instead, and spent a pleasant two hours practicing charms that listed chapters for you or found all instances of a word in a book, with increasing technicality and elaboration as the book proceeded, until she had to go to bed.
The next night, she reopened Magic of Necessity and navigated to the chapter titled "When All Hope Seems Gone." The handwriting of the main text was cramped and spidery and she had to squint to make out the words, so that it took Hermione some moments to begin to read, fluently, that When ordinary means and even ordinary magic have failed, the individual of extreme power may begin to consider extreme measures. Most times this is a trap, for sacrificial measures and great rites are not essentially different from other magic: they work best with adequate preparation, careful timing and meticulous consideration, and the consequences if they should be performed incorrectly or unnecessarily tend to be of a somewhat grander scale and deeply unpleasant.
There are, however, exceptions, which I will discuss here. It goes without saying that any immensely powerful measure which does not come with an immensely large cost is going to be performed quite regularly, and in the course of its performance studied by those who wish to recreate or defeat it, and as the ingenuity of humankind is virtually without limit some sort of counter is generally worked out in a few generations at most. Magic is unlike other natural forces in being tied, closely, to the human's imaginative capacities and these have certain intrinsic properties and limits; it is easy to find two people who cannot understand each other, but harder to find anybody who cannot be understood by someone in a reasonable large and diverse group, and this understanding is the key to undoing another's magic. We try to obscure the details of our castings and hold our family secrets to slow this process but our success is always incomplete.
For this reason rituals which may feasibly be performed casually or as a first resort are hardly ever unbeatable or truly decisive alone, that is without proper attention to adjacent military matters of equal importance. But in this chapter we are supposing that military matters have been neglected or inadequate or tell the magic user to give in, and for some reason he is simply unwilling to do so; we may imagine him, perhaps, as the last heir to a slaughtered family, a widow and her young children standing alone in defense of a gate besieged by thousands, or a hostage in the depths of an impenetrable fortress held by a hundred enemies.
I must urge my hypothetical reader to seriously consider surrender nonetheless; for magic which gives us the might to stand against ruin in the worst of circumstances does not always do so for our benefit. Negotiation is often sufficient to get out with at least your life; and in the face of some horrors a peaceful death followed by only the ordinary mysteries of death may be nothing to cast aside.
The writing was curiously modern. Hermione flipped to the front, but saw, again, no author's name, not even a reference to some family member. She swallowed, and read on:
In the event that raising one particular individual from the dead is necessary, the following recipe may be used. The most basic requirement is a wholeheartedly willing human sacrifice who honestly wishes to exchange one's own life for the dead, which may be the caster or somebody else. Some part of the body of the deceased is necessary, but in the case that it cannot be found grave dirt or blood of a near relative may suffice. After standard ritual preparation, the incantation below should be read three times, with mounting volume and triumph (the emotion is important), and finally if a sacrifice other than the caster is used a clean death should be dealt, the throat cut or the heart stabbed through from the stomach. If the caster is the sacrifice, the most usual arrangement is for him to fall on his sword. The reader should take heed that with any wavering of the will, the resurrection will not work, but the sacrifice shall still be certainly dead.
Well, that was convenient. Hermione read on with mounting skepticism a catalog of similar rituals supposed to turn back fate, frequently with penalties that seemed worse than the circumstances for the rite: a means of banishing an enemy army that accepted a curse of uncontrollable bloodlust upon the family so defended for seven generations (...which is alleged to be responsible for certain peculiar traits exhibited by certain well-known families, although I can neither confirm nor deny it and decline to list names. I will simply note that anybody who does not wish to afflict their descendants with a persistent habit of cannibalism or a desire to fill their kitchens with cauldrons of human blood should reconsider...); a way of summoning a supposedly demonic and invincible assassin to kill one's enemies which required the caster to give the demon a bride from his own family (...and it is said that the last casting was done by the brother of Emmeline Bulstrode, who went about her days with thorns drawn through her limbs like stigmata and gave birth to hounds of hell...); even a spell for pregnancy by the dead, meant to revive a recently-extinct family, which required the caster to "lie" with a corpse. The introduction to the chapter had been relatively sensible, Hermione decided, but the actual recipes were only myth. The writer clearly had no verifiable reports any had been cast.
The very last rite in the chapter was titled only "A Second Chance." Underneath was a gruesome drawing in ink, depicting a person so twisted by pain and mutilation that gender and age were indeterminable despite their nudity.
Hermione tried not to look at the drawing. Instead she bent her head very closer to the book's pages, as the writing on these pages was very faded and the handwriting particularly bad. Eventually she decided that the section said:
I cannot recommend this course of action, but it is the best attested of the rites in this book, as the price appears superficially rather less. It all depends on how one interprets the experiences of Godwyn Boarstooth, who had nightmares the rest of his life of his shadow self's tortures, or Morwenna Greengrass, who soon committed suicide. But the only sacrifice is of the caster, who does not seem to be lastingly dead – yet one most consider the many meanings and interpretations of 'seem.'
The rite winds back time, that is, it sends the knowledge and memory of the caster twenty-four hours back. Some adjustments are supposed to allow the caster some control of the exact moment. Furthermore it does so with one small adjustment to circumstances, so that the caster's enemy will make some mistake that may be seized.
The disadvantage is that after the ritual suicide of the caster, described below, their original soul & mind are transported into eternal torment, which they glimpse in perception when unconscious or inattentive, until at the end of their life they are supposed to be sent to join the rest of their soul. This last part of course cannot be documented, and there are those who claim the whole thing is nonsense, unprovable as the time travel of memories is; anybody might have nightmares. I leave the question to the reader's judgment, though I do not advise testing it.
A complete list of alleged castings is included at the end of the spell. The first step...
Well, that was the end of the chapter. Hermione closed the book, and stared at the stamped cover for long moments in the silent library, wondering what entity had left it on the table for her.
Then, not quite daring to put her reasons into words even in the privacy of her own mind, Hermione flipped it back open. She found "A Second Chance" again, and began to take notes.
II.
The winter of 1997-98 was bad.
The badness was all a blur to Hermione, even at the time. The days were similar and their progress seemed nonexistent. Each new camping site was easily confused with the one before, each stupid argument, each near chance. They stole food and scavenged and ruined it trying to cook, then they bickered over the failing to cook and the washing up, then they slept badly before starting again. She couldn't put things together in her mind after. She would picture Ron in Godric's Hollow with them and then correct herself, or imagine the locket somewhere it wasn't.
They had been lucky, and despite all her preparations she had been unprepared. Or else, Hermione corrected herself, their enemies had been unlucky.
Their enemies had been made unlucky, perhaps.
When had their own luck run out, or threatened it most? What was the worst plan Hermione had agreed to? The Ministry hadn't been so bad. Godric's Hollow, which she had always known was a mistake? Gringotts? Harry and Ron shoved into the cells at Malfoy Manor, miraculously still with half their possessions? Lestrange grabbing Hermione, and Hermione managing, with her out-of-books Occlumency and her frightened lies, to deceive her?
Sometimes she remembered it differently – remembered Lestrange ordering them stripped before being tossed into the cellar; remembered Lestrange coldly agreeing to take Ron first when he suggested it. It wasn't essentially different from the false memories of Ron pushing open the kissing gate of Godric's Hollow's churchyard in the snow, or the locket bouncing around Hermione's neck back at Grimmauld Place. Probably.
Sometimes she remembered it like this:
Malfoy Manor's cells were little more than a repurposed wine cellar, but the door was stout and didn't so much as creak to the hammering of Harry's fists and the stone and dirt of the floor was rough on Hermione's bare skin where she had fallen, naked and totally disarmed, halfway down the stairs.
With difficulty, Hermione pulled herself up. She was bruised, but nothing seemed to be broken from her fall after being pitched down the stairs headfirst. That was the first bit of luck they'd had in days, she thought bitterly, and climbed slowly down the stairs in hopes there was some way out, or something to help them.
There was nobody in the cellar, and Hermione had just decided this meant their prison was ad hoc and very likely to have something helpful – a second exit, abandoned tools, anything – when she found the first body in one of the small storage rooms.
It was very dark in the cellar, and there was no smell of decomposition, but the body was quite cool. Hermione touched the long, straight hair, and the face, and did not know if the Death Eaters' murdered prisoner was someone she should have known or not.
Above her, Harry was still hammering on the door and Ron was screaming. Hermione took a slow, deep breath and shut it all out.
All hope was lost. The book had been right. She didn't have anything on her and she'd need, at least, something sharp to complete the ritual. With distaste held at bay, Hermione began to search the cell around the corpse – and when she found nothing, the corpse itself, which was wearing clothing
There was an old nail in one pocket, fortunately of a decent length and filed to an edge down one side. That would have to be enough. She thought about saying something to Harry but decided not to. His current shouting would continue to distract their captors, and he probably wouldn't agree to it, and if he did he'd insist on using himself.
Hermione had always known her job was to get Harry to the finish line. She was expendable. Harry was not. She proceeded, feeling her way lest she trip, into the darkest part of the cellar, where she crouched. She did not hurry, because that was how you made mistakes, but she did not hesitate, either. There was no time. At any moment the Death Eaters might open the door and take another captive. Ruthlessly she forced herself not to hear Ron screaming again. If this went well, all of that wouldn't have happened anyway. The only person who would take lasting harm from this timeline was Hermione.
There was no proof of any of the consequences, anyway – the book had said as much.
Hermione remembered practically everything she read, and copying it over once cemented words forever in her mind. She took three deep breaths from her diaphragm and went through the motions of washing her hands in air, the minimal ritual preparation when you didn't have anything else. She whispered the very simple incantation in English: "I adjure thee for a second chance, though I do pay with my very soul," three times, and she took the nail and put it straight through her left hand, into the dirt of the cellar floor.
The pain was excruciating. She couldn't let that incapacitate her; they'd all die. With a great effort she gripped the nail by its head and pulled it out, and dabbed blood over her heart as instructed. "I adjure thee for some better luck, though I do pay with my very blood," she said, and this time she put the slippery and half-sharp nail through her tongue, scraping into her palate. She gagged, and screamed around it, she couldn't help it. But Ron was screaming above, too, and she had to hope she had enough time to finish.
The nail had to come out for the last bit. It took her three tries with her trembling hand, and blood was filling her mouth. She had to spit it out. Harry might have called her name but she ignored it. She tried to say with her ruined tongue, "I adjure thee for another try, though I do pay with my very life," which didn't have to be comprehensible but did have to be meant, and put the nail into her throat.
Hermione wasn't practiced at killing people, particularly not with her hands, and the nail was a bad tool. She drowned in her blood rather than dying of neat exsanguination. She was conscious long enough to perceive Harry struggling down the stairs, calling her frantically, and something that might have been his hands on her in the dark before she lost consciousness.
Or maybe, surely, that was just another nightmare?
III.
After the war, everybody got married, probably for something to do. Hermione wasn't a part of everyone, though, and neither were Ron or Harry, for all that Mrs. Weasley spent half of every family occasion hinting about it. That was all right, because they had something to do anyway in attending all of the weddings.
Hermione, Harry and Ron were welcomed by the DA, but there was a sort of wall between them all the same. The three of them had abandoned the DA, because they had not shared in their peril or triumphs except at the end, and then again the three of them had experienced other dangers. The DA, also, had had each other, and then they had also been forced to bow to Death Eaters and carry on their struggle mostly covertly. It wasn't the same.
It wasn't the same between Harry and Ron and Hermione either: another, lower wall stood between Ron and the others, who had not at any point abandoned their struggle in part because they had had no option of surrender, surrender leading to nothing but death; and then Harry also did not know what Hermione had done. If indeed she had done it. And likewise Hermione did not know what had befallen Harry when he went out to meet Voldemort and his own death.
Hermione and Ron moved in with Harry not long after the war was over and the weddings stated, and the place they lived was Grimmauld Place, though substantially renovated. The house elf heads were gone and the furnishings were new and there was no door to the library, not that Hermione could find and no matter how many nights she wandered down that steep and narrow stair.
Once, she risked asking Harry though she was sure to keep it hypothetical: "You don't know of a library here, do you?" she said, when they happened to wander into the kitchen for breakfast around the same time one morning.
"Oh, no, sorry," said Harry, though he was thinking about it. "I've heard most rich Wizarding families have them but I think the Blacks must have kept it somewhere else. You know they had other houses, this was just the only one Sirius had control of. Sorry to disappoint," he said, grinning at her, and Hermione laughed and said – something ordinary enough.
She wasn't exactly disappointed. Some part of her was relieved that perhaps she had somehow made the whole thing up.
But then again there were the dreams. Hermione had remembered her dreams all her life and none had been like these. You didn't feel much pain in dreams normally – but now she did, and yet the pain was not their defining trait. She could not put them in a clear and coherent order any more than she could her memories of the war, but this was mostly for the pain. For example:
There was no sense of gradually falling asleep or slow awareness in the dream. She put her head down and lost consciousness and was transported, as though by Apparition. She came to herself in a world utterly void, void except for the searing pain which seemed to glow in bright lines in her head, through where her body should be, though she could not see anything at first.
At time the pain seemed an abstract thing, a thing that was imposed upon her in waves and lines and bright bursts of intensity. At other times she was cruelly aware of forces upon an actual body: pressure seemed to rip her joints apart, stretching her from sides or head to feet, and yet the tearing sensation was never finished, never over; or it came as a battering series of blows, bashing her to pieces; or she was disassembled piece by piece, or creatures seemed to gnaw on her, taking hungry bites of her flesh, eating up limbs and torso and the pieces of her face and yet never running out. There was never any oblivion in the dreams, for of course they were dreams. The only escape was that eventually she would wake and return to the world – exhausted, drenched in sweat, and not much less tired than when she had fallen asleep.
Hermione began to avoid sleep, as much as she could, and acquired deep circles under her eyes and a pallor. It was not just the physical pain, which in its way was rather boring in all the drain it put on her. Only at first could she see nothing, some of the time: other times it was as though she stood or floated surrounded by mirrors, and she saw--
Herself: her torn and naked body, covered in bloody wounds and missing pieces with exposed bone, the white gleam of her ribcage visible in place of her breasts, her hair torn from her bloody scalp, with only the gleaming, tear-filled eyes to show it was not a corpse reflected at Hermione. This was her shadow self – her original self? - and it hated her. It knew she had condemned it to torment in her stead, to buy herself some cheap and mortal victory. Yet it was satisfied by pulling at her in her unconscious moments, and the knowledge she would someday join it at last, forever, and that with every hour of sleep she lost that day grew nearer.
In the dream these were not guesses or imaginings. Her shadow self whispered to her, muttering sometimes gleefully, sometimes sorrowfully, but always with a cold anticipation under it all.
Harry and Ron noticed she was sleep-deprived, but Hermione had always had a bad habit of reading at all hours. She promised she was sleeping and they let it go. She tried. She tried Dreamless Sleep, other more specialized sleeping potions, muggle sedatives, and alcohol. Some of it worked, sometimes. Some of it trapped her in the void for longer periods and kept her from waking. None of it worked well, or consistently.
In the waking world, in the daylight and in the midst of a book, she could dismiss the whole thing – sometimes. The nightmares felt constant but they weren't really, she did get some normal sleep. Sometimes it lasted a few days and she felt nearly normal. Everyone had been affected by the war, some of them very badly: Lavender was drunk almost all the time, Ernie had a permanent case of the shakes, and everybody had nightmares. This probably wasn't different.
Then she would have the dream again and know it wasn't true.
She had to find that book again, but it was obviously banned and not obviously the sort of work which would exist in multiple manuscripts. At any rate some discreet questioning turned up no information about the Ministry's secret collections or copies for sale. She had to find the book again, which meant finding her way into the library. Determined now, Hermione checked the floor where the door had appeared every hour for two days but it didn't appear. She felt Grimmauld Place was laughing at her, and perhaps had willfully tricked her, and she was in the midst of snarling accusations when she heard a door open upstairs and shut up rapidly.
"Hermione?" Harry called sleepily. "Are you all right?"
"Fine," Hermione called hoarsely, checking her watch: one in the morning, dammit.
"I thought I heard something!" Harry called.
"Sorry, I tripped on the stairs!" she said, and counted seconds until he mercifully shut the door. Then she kept counting, for five full minutes, until she felt certain Harry was back in bed, and she closed her eyes.
"Merlin help me," she whispered to Grimmauld Place, the image of her shadow self's mutilated body reflecting on the insides of her eyelids, "That door had better come back when I turn around."
Then Hermione opened her eyes. To her great surprise, there the door was.
Finally, she thought grimly, pulling the door open. She might or might not be damned for all time. There might or might not be any cure for her sleep. But she would get some answers.
The library was undisturbed by Harry's renovations, and both books and furniture lay covered in dust as before. Hermione strode slowly inside, and saw the chair pulled back at her usual table, and a small stack of three books pulled for her.
Perhaps the house had helped her before and perhaps it had damned her. Perhaps those had been one and the same. But she had taken its advice now and could not now turn back. Nobody else could help.
One was the original leatherbound volume, Magic of Necessity. One was a battered printed volume with the front cover sheered off, which she found on reaching the title page was called, Alternate and Additional Selves in Practice. The third was a manuscript attributed to a Black, in beautiful blackletter writing between a hand-tooled gilded cover, called Sleep Magics For Dire Need: How To Survive Life as a Black.
When Hermione deciphered this last, ornately written title, she laughed until she cried.
Then she opened the last book first, and for the first time in months felt a small spark of optimism. First she would find out how to sleep like this. Then she'd see if she could fix the rest.
In the silent library, Hermione began to read.