Chapter Two - Waiting

The sound of someone talking woke Hermione up hours later, and she nearly fell out of her chair. She quickly stood and surveyed the room nervously, wanting to kick herself for having slept so long. The sun was shining brightly through the windows, and she must have been asleep for hours, she realised with a fleeting feeling of panic. She darted to the bathroom, glanced inside to make sure no one was hiding there, and then ran to the window.

Outside, as she'd observed the night before, there was nothing but a forest so thick that she couldn't see more than ten feet past the tree line from where she stood. Frowning at the wand in her hand and wondering how long it would take for it to work correctly for her...and would it ever, if it wasn't suited to her?...she considered venturing outside to see if she could determine where Snape had sent them. But then she heard the same voice that had woken her, and this time realized that it was Neville; he was talking in his sleep. He didn't seem to be forming actual words, though, just mumbling.

Pulling her chair across the room to sit beside his bed, she saw that he was sweating profusely, and wiped his face gently with the edge of the blanket. He felt disconcertingly warm, and she eyed his injuries nervously, wondering if they weren't healed all that well after all. Not sure what else she could do, and not having enough experience with healing spells to risk attempting anything herself...especially with Neville's wand...she dug around in the bathroom cabinet until she found an old rag, cast a quick cleansing charm on it, and then wet it, placing the cool cloth on Neville's feverish head.

'What am I going to do?!' she asked herself, feeling only seconds away from sobbing. 'Things weren't supposed to go this way!' Sniffling and doing her best to hold back her tears, she considered her options.

For all she knew, they'd lost the battle. Maybe they'd even lost the war. She had no owl, and for a moment she decided that the best thing to do would be to send a message using her Patronus to let her friends know she was all right. But then the thought occurred to her that even if Harry and Ron were alive, they might not be alone. They may very well have been captured, and sending confirmation that she was still alive could endanger their lives...or Snape's, for that matter.

Did she care if they found out Snape had helped her? She wasn't really all that sure she did. But a little voice in the back of her mind kept telling her that he'd saved her, and so maybe he really wasn't trying to kill them all. Maybe there was more to the story than she'd thought....

She briefly entertained the idea of Apparating back to Hogwarts, or to the Burrow, or St. Mungo's, anywhere to get help, but hesitated. Who knew if someone would find the cottage? She could hardly leave Neville alone and defenseless.... And Snape had told her to wait, and if he was to be trusted, then perhaps there was a reason he'd sent them here, of all places.

A cold chill crept up Hermione's spine at that thought, and she quickly pushed it aside, resolving to wait for now, at least until Neville was strong enough to work his own wand. She didn't much like the idea of trying to do anything as risky as Apparating with it to a strange, not when she could barely cast a simple locking charm without a significant amount of difficulty. While Apparition didn't necessarily require a wand, she didn't much like the idea of being practically defenceless when they arrived at their destination.

Sighing inwardly, her eyes fell on the refrigerator, and she realized that she hadn't eaten since the morning before. As if reminded that she should be hungry by now, her stomach growled loudly.

Unfortunately, the refrigerator, she soon found, held nothing but rotten food. It was still cold, and seemed to be running on magic instead of electricity, but everything was months old at best. Most of it had even started to take on a greenish hue. Finally, after quite a bit of searching, she found some canned soup in a cupboard. After cooking it the Muggle way (because really, the last thing she needed to do, she reasoned, was burn down the cottage by trying to heat something with Neville's wand), she ate half, putting the rest in the refrigerator in hopes of giving it to Neville if...'When,' she corrected herself quickly...he woke up.

Bored and feeling more than a little anxious, she made up her mind to go outside and look around before it got dark again. She's slept longer than she'd realized, and the sun was already starting to get a bit low in the sky. It took her a few minutes to get the nerve to open the door, and even longer to take the first few steps outside, but it all was rather anticlimactic. After walking twice around the cottage, she realized that there really wasn't anything to see. There were trees and grass... and more trees. The occasional bird flitted around the yard, but for the most part, there were just trees.

Pressing her hand to her side gently and finding that it didn't hurt quite as much as it had the night before, she carefully climbed up into the branches of a tree on the side of the house and found that the forest extended as far as she could see in all directions. In the distance, she saw something that she suspected was the ocean, but it looked like nothing but a thin line of color on the horizon, and she worried that it could just be her mind playing tricks on her.

Hermione had never had the best sense of direction, and she realized that if she was going to leave, she'd have to do it by magical means or risk wandering in the expansive forest forever. She wished, more than anything, that Harry and Ron were there. For some reason, even when they panicked, she was usually able to keep her calm when with them and decide on a course of action. By herself, with no one to reassure her that she knew what she was doing and look to her for answers, she couldn't make up her mind.

Still feeling tired, hungry, and overwhelmingly afraid, she went back inside and returned to her seat beside Neville's bed, clutching his clammy hand in hers as she fell asleep.

~*~

She spent three days in the small cottage before the decision to wait or leave was taken out of her hands. Now she had to do something, whether she wanted to or not. Neville was getting worse...much, much worse. His fever hadn't gone down; if anything, it had risen. He was muttering and mumbling to himself deliriously almost constantly, and his wounds were obviously infected now. She hadn't heard a thing from Snape, or from anyone else, for that matter. Hermione had given in to temptation and sent a message to Ron the night before using her Patronus, but it had come back to her almost immediately. Her attempts to contact Harry, Professor McGonagall, and Arthur Weasley had similar results. She hoped that it was just a matter of strong wards surrounding the cottage, and not... well, she didn't want to think about what else it could mean.

She was out of food, and despite practicing daily, she was not having much luck using Neville's wand. Hermione knew that the wand was supposed to choose the witch or wizard, and that they were rarely were suited to just anyone, but Ron had used his brother's old wand, hadn't he? And Neville had used his father's for years.... It didn't seem fair that now, when lives depended on her ability to be able to conjure things like food and clean water, the odds were not in her favor.

Whatever reasons she had for remaining in the cottage as long as she already had, none of them seemed to matter anymore. If they stayed, they'd probably starve, and she wasn't sure Neville could survive much longer without the attention of a Healer.

The rest of that day she practiced Apparating while holding things, since she'd never had much reason to use Side-Along Apparition until now, trying to be as careful as possible. She'd seen the spell used to reattach body parts after a splinching and knew the incantation, but she'd never preformed it herself, and the thought that she'd accidentally leave something important behind, like her head, terrified her. After a few successful Apparitions from one end of the cottage to the other and then onto the roof and back again, she decided she would leave in the morning if nothing had changed.

Perhaps, she thought, the reason that she was so reluctant was that she had no idea where she was. Long-distance Apparition was significantly harder than going somewhere nearby, and if she couldn't find help, she had no idea how to get back to the cottage again. One had to have a very good idea of exactly where they were going to Apparate there without issue, and now was not the time to be testing that rule.

She finally decided on St. Mungo's as her destination. The battle had been fought in Scotland, after all, and even if the good side had lost, she doubted that the affects of the defeat had been felt as far away as London yet. The Healers could help Neville, and she'd be able to find a way to contact her friends.

When the next morning came, she rose before the sun, wanting to get to London early and avoid as many Muggles as she could. Focusing all of her concentration on her spells, she cast cleansing charms on herself and her clothes in an effort to look less conspicuous, and a Disillusionment Charm on Neville. Then she removed his robe, leaving him in rather plain looking clothes. She hoped that she'd be able to get inside the hospital without any Muggles seeing him floating beside her, unconscious and barely alive, but if for some reason someone did see him, the bloody robes would have made it all that much harder to explain.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, she pulled her friend up until he was leaning heavily against her shoulder, wrapped her arms around him tightly, gritted her teeth, squeezed her eyes shut, and Apparated to a small alley she knew was located just down the street from the wizarding hospital.

~*~

They landed with a thud in a dark, narrow alley, and Hermione quickly checked them both over to ensure that they were completely 'there'. Satisfying that the Apparition had gone well, she carefully propped Neville up against the wall, hid him behind some dustbins, and removed the Disillusionment Charm. If she was going to leave him without a wand, it wouldn't do to have him recognized as a wizard immediately if someone...like a Death Eater...happened to find him.

Glancing around nervously in the dim light of the early morning, Hermione stepped nervously out of the alley and headed towards the hospital, and then stopped dead in her tracks.

When she'd made the decision to Apparate to St. Mungo's, she'd considered all the things she might find there. The scenario she was hoping for, of course, was to find that everything was fine, that she'd been thought dead and would be reunited with her friends. At worst, she suspected that Death Eaters might have taken control of the facility and that she wouldn't be able to go there for help after all. But nothing she'd imagined could have prepared her for what she saw.

Where St. Mungo's had once stood, there was now only a ruined, burnt building. She could see what looked suspiciously like dead bodies lying on the street. Looking around, she realized that she didn't see anyone else. No Muggle buses that usually drove past the hospital every few minutes; no children darting through a crowded street. No Muggles at all. And even though it was still early in the morning, she couldn't remember ever seeing this street empty before, even in the middle of the night.

The street looked completely abandoned, and when she strained her ears to listen, she didn't hear the sounds of a busy city. She heard nothing, and she fought the urge to turn around and run back to where Neville was waiting, to just get them both as far away from London as possible.

Squaring her shoulders and holding Neville's wand in front of her body protectively, she stayed close to the wall and crept towards the entrance to the hospital, desperately hoping that the horrific scene before her was some sort of Muggle deterrent and that she'd find Healers inside. But once she stepped through the broken, misshapen doorway, she realized that her surroundings hadn't change. St. Mungo's really had been destroyed...destroyed so completely, in fact, that it seemed the Death Eaters hadn't even bothered to leave someone behind to guard it.

The only people she could see were already dead. One looked like he was wearing Healer robes, and the other two were Aurors she recognized from meeting them during dealings with the Ministry over the years. Looking them over at a distance and wondering what spell had been cast that had left the pavement tinged red with blood, she was nearly sick with panic when she realized that they had small, round wounds over various parts of their bodies. She wasn't certain, but they looked like bullet holes. And she knew wizards didn't use guns.

Turning on her heels and running towards where Neville was still lying in the alley, she heard the distinct sound of voices behind her.

"It's one of them!" Hermione heard a woman shout shrilly over the other voices, and as if on command, Muggles seemed to pour from the surrounding buildings. At least a dozen of them were running after her, and she fought back the urge to cry, knowing that it would only make her run out of breath faster. She had a head start, and so she ran as fast as she could, desperately trying to reach the alley before they did.

The sound of a gunshot echoed behind her, and a bullet hit the pavement only inches from her feet. Another flew past her head a second later. Letting out a frightened, startled scream, Hermione careened into the alley, threw herself down on top of Neville, clung to him tightly, and Apparated away.

Many thanks to ladyinthecloak for her support, encouragement, and the wonderful rec on LJ and Potter_Place! :)