Beneath Her Dreams

With special thanks to my partner-in-darkness (and, as of this chapter, my official beta), Anastasia. Thanks also to Melenka and Tobert for helping me articulate (and testing my thinking on) the backstory.

2: Beneath Her Dreams

Tonight the wind was rising, and, from the place beyond her name, beneath her dreams, tonight she felt it rise.

The headmistress looked up from her desk as a soft chime from the spiraling stair signaled the presence of one of the castle's ghosts. She straightened in her chair and eyed the door. "Enter."

At the sight of the Bloody Baron, she rose slightly, but he shook his head, gesturing her to sit. "He's no worse."

Sighing slightly, she eased herself back into her chair. The head of Slytherin House had hidden his condition from everyone, brewing an increasingly complex set of potions whereby he was able to tolerate the worst of the symptoms and continue teaching, but he had finally collapsed just before the end of the previous term.

"Forgive me, Minerva," he had said, as Poppy stepped back from his bed and caught her eye. No words were needed; the two had seen too much together. "I have so enjoyed teaching..." He had leaned back on his pillows, a soft smile relaxing his features as the pain potion took effect.

"The wind is rising, Headmistress."

The Bloody Baron's voice brought her back to the present, and Minerva eyed him skeptically for a moment. "You sound like a centaur."

The Baron snorted, wafting backward slightly. "She senses it." He drifted toward one of the tall, narrow windows. "She senses it, even if she lacks the sense to know it. It won't be long now."

"Are you certain?" The flatness of her tone belied the sudden chill in her stomach.

He nodded.

Minerva leaned heavily on the armrests, her fingers falling automatically to tracing well-worn grooves in the carving. "But when he dies, that should..."

"It will happen before then, as you well know," the Baron continued, quietly, not turning away from the window.

Tracing a curl in the carving, Minerva realized that the ring she wore spun more easily on her fingers this year, its stone falling heavily against her fingers as she thought. The snick it made against the wood was soft, but real, and for a time she held her hands deliberately still. "Then I suppose it's time."

The Baron turned to her, floating a few feet sideways as he framed his next sentence with visible care. "The facts are inarguable." He hesitated for a moment, still drifting. When Minerva did not speak, he added, "She walked straight through me."

The headmistress closed her eyes and exhaled. "No sign at all that she felt your presence?"

"No. None."

"Her research is at a critical stage; perhaps –"

"No," the Baron countered, floating a few metres closer. "It was not distraction; nay, nor absorption, neither."

Some corner of Minerva's brain frowned at the Baron's characteristically serpentine syntax, and her eyebrows pinched. Just a fraction, but he caught the movement and the judgment it betrayed and swooped over to her chair.

"She did not even see me. She cannot see me, Minerva. She can no longer see any of us."

Minerva's hands clenched in her lap and grew cold as his words hung leaden in the air, but she pointedly refused to look away.

He hovered at her, leeching the warmth from the air until he was certain she understood him. Then he retreated to a polite distance.

Thermal etiquette was one of the things he had taught the students from the train.

Minerva sighed, remembering, then looked decisively to one of the portraits. "Albus?"

In the shadowy gloom near the vaulted ceiling, Dumbledore's portrait seemed to fade slightly. "I have expressed my doubts regarding this course of action on more than one occasion, Minerva."

"But Albus, surely, you see –"

"Rather more than you do, I am afraid," he said; indeed, from his position high on the wall, he could easily make out the entire Quidditch pitch. He had requested that his portrait be moved for that very reason.

The fact that his view now also extended over the Forbidden Forest did not escape Minerva's notice. She pressed him further. "What else can be done?"

"Why, nothing, of course," he said calmly.

"Then –"

He dropped his chin to look at her over the top of his spectacles, and her words died unformed. In a deceptively serene tone, he continued, "In any matter, Minerva, one may nearly always act; however, it does not necessarily follow that one should."

She shot him the piercing look with which she had always met such pronouncements. "Then how else are we to determine –"

"It may not be for us to know."

She regarded him coolly; he met her gaze evenly, but did not speak further.

After a few minutes, the Bloody Baron coughed politely. "Headmistress, if you require nothing further..." He let the sentence hang, unfinished. At her nod, he wafted through the door. "I shall update you on Slughorn's condition in the morning, then. Goodni–" The word was cut off as he disappeared through solid wood.

----

Wrinkles weren't permitted, and the sheets were soft. And the pillows gentle under her hair... no edges, no stone, no footsteps, no echoes.

And she felt her face soften, and she slipped into the place of shadowed half-thoughts, of dreams half-formed, hushed under the ever rustling of the wind in the moonswept branches. No words, no body...

... no mind.

She was free.

----

Minerva paced in the lamplight.

----

Too soon, she slept.

She didn't want to look at Ron, to where he had been thrown, broken. So close. She didn't want to...

Harry – his eyes – and she felt him starting to fade, to fall.

"Hermione," Ron gasped, struggling to rise on one elbow to look directly at her.

Eyes wide, she stared back at him, and, stepping back, she shook her head, her mouth open in a formless protest.

"Hermione, please." His eyes were desperate.

"I can't!" A whisper, a scream; both, neither; but he knew, he heard her, and his eyes were steel.

"You have to. You're the only one who –" he mouthed – a spasm jerked his head, and he fell back. His head lolled on the ground, staring at the sky, his silent mouth forming the words, "You can."

Wrenching her eyes away, back to Harry, she saw what she had hoped never to see – deep in his green eyes, a glimmer of red – glowing, growing...

An involuntary glance to where Voldemort's body lay, and back to Ron, his eyes to the sky, still mouthing, "You can..."

She closed her eyes in a wild, childish wish, wishing only to be somewhere, anywhere else, someone else, born for something other than this.

And the voice in her mind had whispered...

When she opened her eyes, she was on her knees, gasping for breath, her wand broken, and Ron's eyes were wide open, staring at her, glassy, indifferent.

But Harry's eyes were green, only green, and the Order's bonds were broken, and in the sudden snap of sound returning to her ears in a murderous rush, they had all hurried past her to Harry, and she had watched them.

----

The lamp had burned low in the headmistress' office, the warmth receding from the walls as, row by row, the portraits of the former heads of Hogwarts slipped upwards into shadow, and still, Minerva paced, slipping one fold of her robes endlessly between her fingers.

Abruptly, she stopped and she flicked her wand.

----

A bolt of silver shot past his window, and Severus Snape looked up from his parchment. It had been over twenty years since he had last received a Patronus message, but his face betrayed no surprise as he adjusted the wards to admit Minerva's emissary.

All it said before it faded was, "You are needed."

His eyebrow twitched. He rolled the parchment he had been reading into a neat scroll and, placing it into a waiting valise, he Summoned his broom and sent his Patronus ahead of him into the night.

----

Her head tossed roughly on her pillow. Under her damp hair, a faint pink stain.

In the morning, the watery-eyed house-elf that was assigned to her would change the pillowcase. Ordinary ink stains were routine for the Hogwarts house-elves, but, for reasons none of them questioned too closely, that particular ink set with those particular tears had proven permanent, and the professor's cast-off pillowcases had long since clothed every house-elf in Britain. When asked about the stain by an especially observant master or mistress, the house-elves' eyes would widen, but they would shake their heads and, uncharacteristically, say nothing.

No witch or wizard ever thought to ask twice.

In the morning, the professor's assigned house-elf would shake her head sadly as she changed the pillowcase, just as she had every morning for over twenty years.

The professor, donning her teaching robes, wouldn't notice, just as she hadn't for just as long.

But now it was still night, and a small, wordless whisper was rising from the place beneath her dreams, having no more substance than a wisp of smoke. It arose, hushed, insistent –

"No," she mumbled.

Every portrait in the castle flinched, and, on its shelf in the headmistress' office, the Sorting Hat screwed its eyes firmly shut.

And, standing sentinel in Slughorn's chambers nine floors below, the Bloody Baron looked up. He had heard her, as clearly as if she had shouted.