Nor Words to Speak

A/N: Almost everyone I know midwifed this one. My especial thanks to my betas, Anastasia and AnnieTalbot. Thanks also to Indigofeathers, Potion Mistress, Melenka and Enigmatized for their generous responses to the first scene in this chapter. :serious bow of profound gratitude:

It had waited so long.

So very long, the castle's great cornerstones had rested on bedrock – rock that stretched far under the Highlands – on the great veins of stone carrying the timeless past, the memories of the land, the blood from which a single seed, or perhaps a pebble, drew its strength to arch toward the sky, to grow with a slow, deliberate, violent hope.

Some few called that hope "life." Fewer still called it "magic."

Most didn't think of it at all; most registered the presence of a tree – or a bush, or a stone – and went about their business.

Creatures of language name things, imagining that names matter, and they almost always get it wrong.

And, almost always, language doesn't matter – not to stones, nor bushes, nor trees. Always they reached for the sky, in a burning fire of hope, fueled by the blood of the land, drawn from the bed of rock on which it rested – the rock which had for millennia kept land separate from pounding, roiling sea. The sand, the grass, the cliffs had no need of names, not for themselves; it was enough that they were, and slowly, imperceptibly, they reached forever for the sky, under the blind gaze of burning sun, the soft caress of falling rain, the endless calling of impossible stars.

For almost always, language didn't matter.

But not very many years before, one of the creatures had taken this life and named it love, and another had taken this magic and called it power, and both had claimed the violence – the slow, heavy, urgency with which mountains grew, robing themselves in forest – both had claimed that violence and called it their own.

One ignored the darkness and called it light. One rejected light, claiming its absence, calling it dark.

They were both wrong.

And from that wrong, a crack. A crack that never widened, never shrank.

For years the castle had stood frozen, a crack beneath its immense stone feet, waiting, not reaching; waiting, to stand or fall.

And then the boy – but the crack had not healed.

And then the girl – and still it waited.

Waited as, without hope, she grew. Listened as, without language, she was silent.

It drew upon its foundation of the past, the burning memories of molten stone ever rising from beneath its magic, from beyond life, it drew the past forward through time, up, through its bones, into the high arches of its vaulted ceilings, where, from the shadows, it whispered to her in the way of stones.

It had neither mind nor words to speak, drawing its breath from the crack below and the window above, and its whispering kept her awake.

Barely.

For twenty-two years.

No time at all, to stone.

And then the man.

And then –... as he drove her beyond the last shred of reason, Hermione thrust her bloody hand into the fabric of time, her fingers tangling in the dropped threads of their lives. She closed her fist around them, and pulled.

Hard.

And the crack in the rock beneath its great cornerstone ground closed and, finally, stone on solid rock, it rested.

But still, it waited.

---

"Hermione... you cannot remain in this darkness forever." He closed his eyes. "Forgive me."

From somewhere far above them, carried downward by the bones of the castle, a shout, followed almost instantly by a shattering fall of glass.

To Neville's surprise, the little ghost turned to him and beamed.

He regarded her with mild astonishment, but the only response he received to his silent inquiry was a deepening of her dimples. "Do you know what that was?" he asked, gesturing upwards toward the source of the sound.

Her eyes sparkled in the darkness, and she nodded.

Neville looked at her for a moment then laughed. "You enjoy your secrets, don't you?"

She tilted her head slightly then nodded again.

He smiled at her and gently tweaked a loose strand of hair. "Okay, little enigma. You were pretty serious about getting down here." He gestured to the dark chambers where they floated. "Was there something you wanted to do?"

Smiling softly, she took his hand and floated toward the stone fireplace. With a pale hand, she reached out to touch a small, black statue.

It wasn't moving, and Neville saw that its eyes were filmed over with grey.

"Oh, no," he said, watching as she touched its head with a careful, misty finger. "Was it broken?"

She nodded, not taking her serious eyes from the dragon's still form.

"That happens, sometimes," he said sympathetically. "There's no reversing that when it happens, though. Professor Flitwick was clear on that in class – 'Some Charms only work once,' he told us. Professor McGonagall agreed. Sure, you could Transfigure something that was broken into something else that was whole, but it would never be what it was before." He squeezed the little ghost's shoulder. "I'm sorry."

She hung silently in the air, contemplating the statue.

"Was it you?"

She looked a question at him, and from the faraway look in her eyes, he knew she hadn't been listening.

"Did you break it, I mean?"

She shook her head and went back to contemplating the pattern of scales on the dragon's back.

Neville bobbed silently, his thoughts traveling upward to whatever the shout had been, and he wondered why they were there. Still, it did seem important to her, so he settled in the air to wait, wondering what had happened up above. His eyes wandered toward the ceiling, and his memory replayed the sound of shattering glass.

A movement caught his eye, and he saw her hand emerging from the pocket of her robes.

"What have you got there?" he asked quietly, his thoughts returning to the present.

She opened her hand to reveal the seed.

His eyes widened slightly. "Is that the one that... hm... woke me up?"

She nodded.

Squinting, he examined the seed closely. "Ordinary dandelion, is it?"

She nodded again.

Something flitted through his memory, but he couldn't quite trace it. He shook his head; ordinary dandelions had, as far as he knew, no magical properties. Mystified, he reached for the seed again, but stopped himself. "Do you have any idea how that worked?"

She hesitated then shrugged, tipping the seed into her other hand.

Neville floated quietly beside her. He thought he knew what she was about, and he tried to keep his sigh silent, his presence still. He remembered now – Hermione and Ginny talking, laughing, of stars and eyelashes and dandelions, the two of them blowing seeds in sunshine in a long-ago, late Spring courtyard.

And Luna; Luna, with a look of mild astonishment at the other girls' superstitions.

He swallowed hard and blinked, turning his face up toward the shadows, willing his vision to clear before he looked once more at the small ghost.

Her hand was hovering over the dragon's tiny head, carefully positioning the seed over its grey, lifeless eyes.

And although he knew it wasn't going to work, Neville couldn't help smiling at her seriousness; he remained, floating patiently at her side.

She closed her eyes, concentrating on her memories of hours spent in the dragon's company, of floating about as it flew after her, of countless games of silent tag in the low, long-forgotten room.

She remembered and, opening her hand, let the seed fall.

---

... and her window shattered.

The thousand fractured shards of glass arced through the frosted air. As they fell, each for a split-second caught and refracted the light of the rising moon, casting for an instant a frozen rainbow against the dark tower stone.

In the silence that followed, the full force of the Highland winter invaded the room that stood suddenly open before it. The wind was a torrent of darkness, its passage whipping Hermione's hair to a frenzy and snapping Severus' cloak about their ankles.

Hermione recoiled, pressing the side of her face into his chest, her eyes screaming shut against the moonlight, her face contorted in the sudden, blinding clarity. As the wind howled and died around them, he stood at her back, his arms dark around her, unmoving.

The wind relaxed with an easy sigh, skittering a curl of parchment across her table before it wisped upward into nothingness.

Eyes closed, half in darkness, half in light, she felt the icy air settle around her until she was warm only where he touched her.

His voice velvet in her hair: "Open your eyes."

She shook her head.

"Hermione. Please."

Another voice, younger, older, long ago: "Hermione, please."

Ron? NO!

She struggled slightly in Severus's arms. "I can't."

"You can."

Again, a breath of an echo. "You can."

She concentrated on the man, warm at her back. Swallowing hard, and nodded.

And opened her eyes full toward the moon.

It shone silently, implacably, over the gently moving tops of the tallest, darkest trees in the Forbidden Forest.

She felt her vision blur, the scene before her eyes merely an echo of another, far older, far more real...

Other trees another moon another night...

The moon rising full in Ron's dying eyes...

And before her window, Severus strong at her back, she gasped, "It was his soul."

Severus rested his cheek against her hair and said nothing.

And instead of spasming back to loll gazing at the sky, Ron's body smiled at her. And his soul in his eyes, and his dead mouth shaping the words, "Thank you."

Ron's voice fading, the falling away of a shadow under the whispering trees in Godric's Hollow, twenty-two years before...

... and the wind in the trees became the whisper of black silk around her, warming her, and, from the shadowed recesses of the vaulted ceiling, the last of the memories sighed a blessing and were gone.

She stood in his arms at the empty arch where the heavy leaded glass had hung for twenty-two years.

In radiant moonlight, the two before the window cast a single shadow on the floor.

---

And their shadow far above made no sound at all in the room far below where two ghosts hovered breathless over the form of the broken dragon, watching a single seed as it fell to rest gently on the silent dragon's tiny, ridged forehead.

As they watched, the grey film slowly receded from its eyes.

It blinked sleepily, and lifted its head to look about.

The little ghost's smile melted Neville's heart.

Seeing the tiny ghost, the dragon launched into a dizzying spiral flight upwards, its wings seeming to leave the faintest tracery of darkest purple wisping behind it in the air.

Before Neville was certain what he'd seen, he blinked, and the colour vanished against the pale radiance of the little ghost.

The seed drifted lazily back to the mantel.

Neither the little ghost nor the dragon seemed to notice. The tiny black dragon was hovering, its wings brushing softly against her pale cheek; she held herself absolutely still, her eyes round with joy.

And the dragon crooned a single, soft note of triumph in the darkness.