Lamentation

A/N: My thanks to Anastasa, AnnieTalbot, Indigofeathers, Macshefa, and FerPorcel for their assistance with this chapter. Special thanks to AnnieTalbot for beta duty, and to Hans Zimmer for writing "Up Is Down."

Summary: In which some things resolve, and others fray, and still others must wait.

... and the Darkness spoke with Hermione's voice, and his fingers clenched in mortar and they fell in a shower of shattering stone.

Below, far below the feet of the castle, beneath the solid Highland bedrock, the echoes of Hermione's laughter fell into molten depths that flowed and cooled and darkened and flowed again, ever hungering, endlessly silent.

--------------------------

The echoes of her laughter died away as she drew her legs under her, scraping on the fallen stone, and she arose, hair wild, her robes fallen from one shoulder.

Stepping over the man with whom she had fallen, she moved through the corridors, the torchlight flaring into her eyes, her vision fragmenting and waning as she obeyed a single impulse, a single call...

She did not remember...

Darkness.

She knew its name, and, in its depths, she need not remember that she'd ever known her own.

Long she wandered the corridors, moving in a memory of shadow long-denied, her arbitrary turnings matching an arbitrary sequence of long-ago events leading her farther into the past, leading her deeper, to depths far below her very soul, all the while reaching for a silence in which she could finally, finally be free.

In her blood, a wind was rising; beyond the limits of her skin, the torchlight bowed back, drew aside, parting before it.

The ghosts sensed her passing and vanished into corners, through stone, losing themselves in the walls.

She moved in shadow, as shadow, and even the dead gave way before her.

Only their eyes could pierce the darkness she had drawn around herself. Only they knew that she went to kill, and they gave her place – whether because they remember, or because they are curious – and some time after they followed.

She remembered him falling. Long before, another had fallen.

She remembered falling with him, as she had fallen, long before.

She checked her wand, and this time, although she closed her fingers around it with the brittle strength of old worked iron, this time, she did not break it.

She had something to do.

And after many more turnings, and many moments spent poised in timeless freedom between the memory of what once was and the knowledge of what was now, after, long after she left the darkened man lying somewhere behind her in a pile of fallen stone, Hermione disturbed the torchlight outside the chambers that housed the remains of what had once been Horace Slughorn.

The Bloody Baron looked up from his vigil as the strip of light around the door went out, although whether it died or had merely been eclipsed, he did not know.

The door opened silently, and a small, slight figure slipped in.

She comes in darkness, he thought, drawing back reflexively, although he knew she could not see him, and could not harm him if she did.

Turning slowly, quietly, a pale hand emerging from her dark robes as she eased the latch back into place.

A pause, and had he but had breath to hold, the Bloody Baron would have done – and then the hand turned the key.

Only a ghost could have heard the slight touch of metal to metal as the bolt slipped home.

Only a ghost could have heard the faint rasp of metal as the key was withdrawn from the lock.

And only a ghost could now enter the chamber in which Hermione stood.

As she pocketed the key, Hermione's hair rippled away from her face, and her robes slipped past her shoulders in a soft rustle of black silk.

In the dim light cast by the Bloody Baron's misty glow, her skin was the color of a shadow, cast by moonlight, on the snow.

The Bloody Baron eased away from the bed, his gaze wary on the professor's hands as she raised her head and fixed her eye on the still form on the bed before her.

The small window high in the wall gave a slight rattle as a tendril of wind twined around the base of the tower that marked Slughorn's resting place, but Hermione paid it no heed.

Her eyes raked the pale coverlet, tightening as she spotted a single, deeper shade that marked the presence of the flower stem. Her mind shrieked in scorn at such wasted sentiment, and she reached into her robes and withdrew her wand.

Mine, she thought. All that you were, all that you are – which isn't much, not really – all mine. It is mine to do, it is mine to decide.

The mind of Horace Slughorn made no response; it could no more awaken to her presence than his exhausted form could prevent the end she had long carried with her.

The Baron watched, mesmerized, as her wand traced a pattern in the air.

He frowned. Her movement formed no spell he recognised.

So focused was he on following the movement of her wand that when she spoke, he did not at first realise that there were words in the sound.

"I know you can hear me," she said, her voice low and even. "I know you can, you see – well, no, you don't see, really, do you? Not any more." Her laughter a sliver of ice in the chill of the dungeons, breaking away once again to a blanketed silence.

She spoke again. "I know you can hear, you see. Ron tells me you can. He tells me, in his own way, always. Every night." She moved a step closer to the bed, trailing her free hand against the coverlet.

"'But Ron is dead,' you protest." Another shard of laughter fell in the deadened room. "Yes, he is. And yet –" Her hand trailed aimlessly on the coverlet. " – yet he's not. No, not really." She shook her head, her hair a mockery of sadness against the endless darkness of her robes. "A terrible thing, it was. Terrible." She looked at Slughorn's unmoving form for a long, slow moment, and the Bloody Baron watched as some last warmth caught, held, and faded, replaced in their brown depths with broken steel.

"I did it," she breathed. "I snapped his soul – he knew I could. 'Give it to Harry. Replace Voldemort, in Harry, with me,' he said." A shudder under her skin, of horror, of ecstasy, she didn't know – didn't care. "Oh, the sound it makes, when a soul breaks." Her hand stopped on the coverlet, and her tone quickened with curiosity. "Did you hear it? When I broke yours? I always wondered if Ron heard... he's never told me..." Her voice trailed away in a low whisper, and her fingertip brushed the flower stem. "Did you hear it? Did you"

Slughorn made no answer.

She placed her palm over flower stem, and she leaned over Slughorn's body, slowly, closer, until her breathing moved his hair on the pillow. "Could you hear it, Horace, when I broke your soul?"

A caress away from his cheek, her wand resumed its tracery in the air.

The Bloody Baron's eyes narrowed.

"I asked you a question, Horace," she breathed, pressing on his chest.

Some air moved through his body at the pressure, and his body sighed.

Hermione frowned.

Deep in her mind, she felt the edges of the stasis spell Snape had placed on the body, and she reached for its edges and pulled.

Snape's spell unraveled into nothingness around her.

And then she could sense the fragment of Slughorn's soul –a pale, insubstantial afterimage, the misty halo edge of what had once been fully formed, round, and perfect, and as she felt it, a wispy corona around a permanent, empty center, the ghosts of Hogwarts castle slipped into the chamber, one by one, drawing around her in her darkness over Slughorn's recumbent form with a hazy, indistinct glow that only they themselves could see.

The Bloody Baron took automatic tally as their numbers swelled to a brightness that was, to his eyes, almost unbearable.

Hermione saw nothing but the frail empty circle of a once-human soul.

All the castle's ghosts were somehow in the chamber.

All, that is, but two.

---

The stones of the castle had carried the rasp of the key in the lock far below to the alcove in the Head's office. The tiny ghost heard it and clutched the Sorting Hat, burying her face in its moldy folds.

In the Great Hall, Harry Potter was left suddenly alone as Neville veered sharply upwards, disappearing through the hazy recesses of the vaulted ceiling.

---

Hermione's hands traced the air where, in her mind, she felt the remnant of Horace Slughorn. She took her wand and placed its tip within the vacuum at its center, stirring it slowly in the emptiness that rested there.

At first the movement was a slow circle, and none of the ghosts dared move.

But the movements grew sharper, and curves grew into lines grew into a sudden, jagged series of lines followed by a series of low, jerky curves, ending with a small, punctuated pause.

The ghosts waited.

Nothing happened.

"Is that a spell?" one of the student ghosts asked quietly.

"No," the Baron murmured. "At least not one that I recognise."

The ghosts watched intently as Hermione, unhearing, her gaze fixed on an empty space of air, sat absolutely still, then they moved closer as her wand, seemingly of its own volition, began the series of movements once more.

---

"I don't want to go down there," Neville said softly, floating through the curtains to where the tiny ghost sat clutching the Hat.

She shook her head, her hair swirling silently around her shoulders.

"I'd rather sit here with you," he said, and eased himself to floor level beside her. "Is that okay?"

She peeked out at him through her hair.

He met her gaze. "Did you hear?"

She nodded.

"Do you have any idea what's happening?" he asked quietly.

She shook her head again, burying her face back in the Hat.

He sighed, and slipped slightly into the floor.

After a moment, a small hand appeared within his and drew him out.

"Thanks."

She nodded, regarding him seriously for a moment before turning back to the Hat.

It didn't look back.

She traced where its eyes should have been with a careful, insubstantial finger.

"You were never Sorted, were you?"

She closed her eyes.

"Well," Neville said, shifting his position slightly, "what do you say we do it now?

Her eyes flew open, glancing to the inert Hat and back to Neville.

He grinned. "Dumbledore seemed to think it's sort of broken at the moment, so what can it hurt?"

She stared at the Hat in her hands then looked questioningly at him.

He smiled. "Professor McGonagall placed it on our heads. I'd do it for you, but I can't hold onto it."

She hesitated.

"Well, go on."

She put the Hat on her head. It slipped down over her eyes and rested on her shoulders.

---

Hermione's wand made that final, punctuated movement again, and her hand stopped in the air for a moment before falling back to the coverlet.

"You all must have thought me quite mad," she said, her tone so conversational that a few of the ghosts started. "Afterwards, I mean. Long after. I don't suppose you all noticed anything, initially. It's possible, so very possible to just go through the motions, and everyone will think everything is fine, getting back to normal, to the way things should be." She spat the last words, and several of the younger ghost flinched, drifting backwards through their elders. "I just..." Her hand clenched around her wand, and another shard of laughter fell and shattered on the stone. "I couldn't bear it – couldn't bear to see their children, those children with those eyes, staring at me, every day, an accusation sitting in the fourth row of desks, every day their trivial dramas, their arrogant ignorance that plagued my every move, my every step. I drove them out – away – all of them, as quickly and efficiently as I knew how. I'd learned, after all, from the best. And then – then I didn't have to remember. I could not remember. Not think. Not be forced to think. And all of them with their happy smiles, their promising futures, their little happy lives... all of them ignorant, all blissfully, stupidly ignorant of the fact that nothing ever happens without some cost. Nothing."

There was no movement in the chamber.

"The cost was nothing. Nothing at all. Everything – everyone was fine." Her vision blurred. "Except..."

She shook her hair out of her face. "I'm here to kill you, you know," she said, standing abruptly from the bed.

The ghosts drew back.

"It's the right thing to do." She laughed sharply.

But she didn't move.

"For it to work, I have to want to. That's the way that spell works, they say."

She drew her breath and raised her wand.

"Which is fine, except – except I don't want to."

"What do you want?" one of the ghosts asked, moving forward through the palely glowing circle.

She didn't hear him.

"I didn't want to do it to Ron, either. Oh, I didn't kill him, of course, but I didn't want..." her voice trailed off. "It was the right thing to do," she said, her tone flat, monotonous with the final voicing of endless internal repetition. "It is the right thing to do."

She leveled her wand at Horace's heart and stood poised on the edge of speech.

Then her wand fell.

"That's not a good enough reason, not any more. It was, once."

And the darkness left her side and she stood, just Hermione, at Professor Slughorn's bedside, and soon her wand began to move again against the coverlet in those same movements, tracing...

Writing, the Baron realized, his eyes following the letters she traced.

And as she finished, again, the ghost who had spoken reached out and covered Hermione's hand with his own.

She didn't feel it, just sat staring at her wand tip moving on the coverlet as though within its movement she would find some answer.

And as she again made the final point, she felt something touch her hand.

It was warm.

She looked down.

Blood.

Her eyes widened.

Another drop.

And another.

And another.

Hermione stared at the blood spattering on her hands, and leaped back from the bedside and fumbled blindly with the lock, fleeing the chamber.

As the bleeding ghost followed her echoing retreat, one of the student ghosts asked, "What was she doing?"

"Writing," the Baron answered.

"Writing? What?"

"Her name."

---

"Anything?" Neville asked, as the wee ghost removed the Hat from her head.

She shook her head and tried to smile.

She hadn't expected anything. Not really.

"Well, Dumbledore did say it had to be replaced for its magic to return. Why not put it on the shelf and see?" Neville glanced meaningfully toward the curtains that separated the alcove from the main office. "They can't stop you, can they?" he whispered.

The tiny ghost placed the Hat very carefully on the shelf, and floated backwards to stand with Neville.

One eye blinked open.

"Well, child, what are you waiting for? We haven't got all the time in the world." The Hat twisted its mouth into a broad, lopsided laugh. "Except, of course, we do."

She reached for the Hat and in an instant the world went dark as it settled itself onto her shoulders.

"Hmmm... well, you're dead, of course, but that poses no real problems," the Hat began.

The smaller ghost giggled audibly, and Neville floated backwards several paces in astonishment.

"It's easier to speak when you've something to ground you, isn't it?" the Hat continued conversationally.

The little ghost nodded happily, and the Hat bobbed precariously. "Easy, girl! I've no wish to fall again, even if I've no real feelings."

The tiny ghost giggled again, but remained obediently still.

"Hmm... don't speak much, do you..."

She shook her head carefully.

"Of course, of course... and what's this?"

An image of the teacher formed in her mind.

"O, ho," said the Hat, and what passed for its eyebrows flew up.

Neville would have given much to know what it was saying to her.

The Hat continued, "So, you're thinking Slytherin, because you like the teacher, eh?"

The ghost nodded once, carefully.

"But my dear, she wasn't in Slytherin House at all... she was in Gryffindor."

The little ghost's eyebrows flew up in surprise.

"Spend a lot of time with her, do you? And you never knew she was a Gryffindor? Interesting... and troubling, very troubling. No, not you, dear. Let me see... no, you're definitely not a Slytherin..." The hat chuckled as it continued to read the small ghost. "Oh, yes, he was most definitely in Slytherin, although he was a challenge... could have gone anywhere, really... viciously loyal, that one... and yes, I see he's been worried about her too, eh? Hm... I almost placed him in..." It chuckled again. "Quite setting a cat amongst the pigeons, to loose that one in Hufflepuff."

The little ghost frowned.

"Hm, yes... very interesting... not often I get this sort of feedback, you know..."

The ghost waited patiently.

The Hat gave itself a small shake. "Right. Well, we're supposed to be Sorting you, then. Best get on with it. Hm... yes... right."

At the Hat's sudden cry of "Hufflepuff!" Neville shot backwards into some bookshelves from which he had a bit of difficulty extricating himself.

When he finally emerged, the small ghost beamed at him proudly, and he found he had to clear his throat before congratulating her.

She took his hand and, waving to the Sorting Hat, drew him urgently through the floor.

She knew now where she had to be.

---

Hermione was staring at the blood on her hands in the torchlight when she heard a small droplet hit the floor.

She looked up. She couldn't tell where it was coming from, but her eye moved from one drop to the one before it, spreading darkly into the stones.

The sad-eyed ghost hovered before her, watching her, as the blood from his hand fell to the stones.

A very fine trembling started in her limbs as she followed the droplets back into Slughorn's chamber, where they ended at the bedside.

I'm going mad, she thought wildly, raising her wand. It's the right thing to do.

Closing her eyes, she whispered, "Avada Kedavra."

And the bleeding ghost stood sad-eyed in a flash of green.