Corners

A/N: Very much love and gratitude to the beautiful bevy of alpha readers without whom - well, you know: Anastasia, Annie Talbot, Indigofeathers, and Lady Karelia. An extra blessing upon Karelia for her late-night beta-read; ditto upon Mr. Ari for an evening of companionable digital solitude so I could finally get this one edited.

15: Corners

“If – when it does take me to that night, what would you have me do?”

-----

“‘Do’?”

“Yes, sir.”

She’d unconsciously gone back to calling him “sir,” and something inside him cracked. “I don’t see…”

“I think you do see,” she said softly.

And somehow the crack seemed less sharp.

“And what do you imagine you would be able to ‘do’?”

“There are several options. Option 1: thanks to you, I now know exactly how to prevent your death, and I can try.”

He sighed. “You can’t change history, Miss Granger.”

“No,” she agreed. “And it very well may be that your death and anomalous presence since that time are in some way tied into the ‘sweeping forces of history,’ as Demetrios calls them, and I shall find my hands tied despite having all awareness that I could have prevented your loss.”

A low growl in his throat.

She stopped it with a gesture. “I know you know how that feels, but so do I, now. I could have prevented your death, Professor. I’m offering to know it twice, Professor. Twice. I’m willing to.”

He had no idea how to react, never mind respond, so he merely prodded the conversation along. “And should it be the case that history requires my death, Miss Granger, then what?”

“Then… then I shall at least bear better witness to your dying than I did the first time.”

“How comforting. And if my ‘anomalous presence’ isn’t tied to the forces of history?”

“That brings me to Option 2: If your presence in your current form is one of those moments that history overlooks, then I can try to save your life. It would be the matter of a moment to do it – two spells and a potion.”

He said nothing.

“Or, if you prefer to die…” She swallowed but soldiered on. “Option 3: Then I can remind you to choose when you do, to stay as a ghost or to simply leave, for real, to move on. I can try to act, in which I’ll succeed or fail, or I can do nothing, as I did before, but I can be there in a way I couldn’t at nineteen. I don’t know if that would mean anything, but…” She paused. “Whatever you decide, I’ll only have a moment – I rather suspect that I was implicated in the ‘forces of history’ that night. I know Harry was, and we didn’t linger.”

His eyes were wide as he stared at nothing.

“Those are the options I’ve identified, Professor. There may be more, but I think I’ll leave you be.”

She set the kitten down and stood, her arm half raising toward him. Then she let it fall. “I’m sorry.” She left the living room.

A moment later, he heard the bath and, releasing a breath, stormed down the hall into the spare room and closed the door.

---

Mimi followed and looked up at the doorknob, staring at it with curious eyes. “Meee?”

It didn’t open. She stretched up but couldn’t reach the doorknob. She pawed at the door. “Meee?”

When it still didn’t open, she curled into a ball in front of it, wrapped her nose in her tail, and went to sleep.

---

It was nearly an hour before the sound of Hermione drawing more hot water into her bath drew him back into a mind he scarcely recognized as his own.

He recalled waking up in the Shrieking Shack, and for just a moment, he remembered how he’d felt when he’d determined – however wrongly – that he was still alive. When he’d believed she’d found his instructions, acted on them, and left him in peace, to decide his life for himself.

Just as she had done that evening.

He listened instead to the sounds of her bathing.

She’d changed. No. Grown.

He closed his eyes and listened some more. The sound of the water lulled him quietly into the place where no thought was necessary.

After her bath, he heard her pad down the hall to the living room, heard the occasional rustlings and thuds that told him she was organizing her books.

Without her bath to distract him, he groped through the ambiguous maze she’d made of his death and his mind. Once or twice he thought he’d heard her voice from the living room. No words, as far as he could tell, and only once or twice, but she’d quickly muffled whatever sound she made, and he’d paid it no further heed.

She’d left him in peace and was, even now, restoring order where he had left only rubble.

Typical.

But the feeling he’d had that long-ago morning refused to be silenced by the sound of books.

Her announcement that she was in possession of the owl was… disturbing. Although he dearly wished he could fault her logic, barring the appearance of Athena herself (an event he would prefer to forgo, given a choice), an authentication by Demetrios of Alexandria carried otherwise unsurpassable authority.

He frowned, picking at a thread on the soft patchwork bedspread.

Hermione had given his half-remembered feeling of freedom its first breath in seven years, and as he sorted through the options she had laid before him, seeking any she might have missed, he grudgingly realized that he’d been breathing life into that same feeling for several hours.

Alone in the dark back bedroom of his former student’s flat, he could admit a small flicker of hope – even if his admission could only be silent, made only to himself in the cramped, abandoned corner of his mind to which he’d fled some forty years before, mentally outrunning his father’s anger and his mother’s tears.

Before he fully knew what he was doing, he had closed his eyes and leaned back against the headboard, listening as Hermione ordered her books, and he found himself drifting…

… to stand in the corner of childhood, his eyes drawn toward a small speck of light.

… and he felt himself drawn forward, out of alone, and as he slipped a finger under her chin and slowly drew her face to his, her breath a sigh of gentle laughter…

He blinked.

Reflexively, he jerked half-upright, half expecting to find himself in the Shrieking Shack again, the morning after battle.

No. He was in a rather comfortable bed.

He checked his hands.

Still invisible.