Fortress

She woke, feeling at peace again. She had fallen asleep under his gaze, and woken without it. It seemed to be the way she was destined to see him, until, perhaps, Haloween night. Consulting her inner calendar, she came up with a distressingly short amount of time between now and then, and with that twinge came her first instinct to go to the laboratory, the better to work on some scheme to make sure she might at least try to thwart this bizarre death sentence, but as she neared the door her thoughts turned instead to Jason. As she walked through the Saturday-morning silence of the corridors, she wondered at her own fitness as a mother, given that the pull towards her child had not been her first instinct. Hullyully, she thought, it was the instinct she acted on, rather than the first one to come to mind, that mattered.


Somehow it was not a surprise to find Jason leaving the Ravenclaw common room just as she drew near.

"You're up early," she said, her voice hesitant despite herself.

His smile was a relief. "A credit to you, no doubt," he said, the light humor in his voice a cautious reference to his father's nocturnal habits. "Have you eaten?"

She shook her head, not trusther her voice at finding her son so readily kind.
"Let's get some breakfast."

He took her arm solicitiously, as he might have an older woman, but she reflected that he would not have a chance to support her in her doting old age. His children would never know their aging grandmother"¦ she stopped that train of thought before she dissolved into tears.

Just before the great hall he installed her in an empty alcove and left her, hurrying in. She watched him, noting how his robes fit around his shoulders. She would have to ensure that he had new ones before she"¦ left. Suddenly she felt tired at the notion of how much there was to do, to complete in her life, but that sentiment was cut short when Jason reappeared, carrying a stack of toast and marmalade wrapped in a napkin, and a thermos of tea.

They walked to the lake, then followed the path around it. Despite having spent so many years near its shores, Hermione had rarely walked the the way around, one of the few times being when she had taken Harry some breakfast back when he and Ron had been fighting during the Tri-Wizard tournament. It was a lifetime ago, she thought to herself, literally, it was practically her lifetime ago. They were a quarter of the way around the lake, Hogwarts' edifices barely visible, when Jason finally spoke.

"Have you seen him again?" In his words, she could hear the effort he was making not to sound too eager.

"I have," she said, coloring a little even to be mentioning the visit, even without its context, to her son. "He did not give me any news I did not already know." She paused while she carefully chewed a piece of toast, now pleasantly soggy with the marmalade. "Except to mention that he can sometimes hear us when we talk."

Jason raised an eyebrow at that. "What has he heard?"

"He heard us discussing the myths of old, and how I thought they might relate to my," she paused. "My odd situation."

Jason nodded. "What did he say to that?

Hermione hesitated, not wanting to tell him. "He said I was right."

Jason snorted with laughter, startling Hermione so much that she dropped almost an entire triangle of toast into the lake. "Still taking your side, I see," he said. They both stood and watched the toast float for a moment, hoping the giant squid might surface and eat it, but it merely took on water and sank, by which time they were both feeling a little chilled. The October sunshine was warm enough if you kept moving, but not for any length of time standing still.

They walked in silence again, until Hogwarts began coming back into view. I have to tell you, Mother," Jason said, "I find my own peace with this situation hard to understand. I'm not worried. I am hardly sad. I feel no fear, for you or myself." He looked at her questioningly, seeming years younger than he was.

"You describe my feelings exactly," she said. "I cannot explain them either."

They finished their walk in near silence. As Hogwarts nearly disappeared from view again around the last turn in the lake, he took her hand.

They both looked up as Hogwarts came back in to view on the shore, just in time to see a dark shape in the sky, slightly larger than an owl, and with longer, more tapered wings.

"Achilles." Jason's voice said the bird's name as an endearment and a statement all at once, holding out his arm as though he had always expected to see his pet materialize so far from his home.

"He's come back to you," Hermione said softly as the great falcon perched firmly on Jason's arm, squeezing him through the layers of cloak and robe.

"Perhaps he'll bring you a present tonight," Jason said lightly, yet not able to disguise his pleasure.

"That's alright," Hermione said, "somehow, I don't think a dead mouse would appeal to me."

October 30th. The syllables of the phrase seemed to repeat themselves in her mind so often that she barely noticed them anymore; they had become a whir.

She had missed her classes that day, a Friday"”the older students were more than happy to have the free time before that rare thing, a Saturday Halloween, but Cho Chang had been less than pleased with her. Hermione was past trying to appear polite, or even imagining explaining her plight.

The lab was filled with white rabbits, the infernal offspring of her original pair, and as darkness fell she found herself standing among the teeming masses, watching them hop with a sort of despair. She had made a promise to herself: no matter what, when morning dawned on the day of Halloween, she would begin walking into the Forbidden Forest. That way, no matter what might befall her, the Death Eaters would not be likely to take out any other innocent souls.

She sensed a kind of trick in that thinking, though, and as yet another fluffy white rabbit hopped by her she thought of how people became disoriented in the forest, how simple it would be for some evil intent to guide her back towards the confines of the castle grounds.

She sighed and leaned against the wall, narrowly missing another rabbit. The moors, then, she thought, would be the best place. On a fridged October evening they would likely be just as deserted as the forest itself.

She riffled through one of the many drawers, beginning to despair. She had had dreams of meeting her death head on, devouring it before it could conquer her, but now she seemed destined to merely spare as many innocents as she could. What the Death Eaters wanted with her she could hardly think. In one of the mind-bending conundrums she was wont to come up with when pondering the nature of fate, she wondered if the Death Eaters would have indeed killed her had she not heard the prophecy from Severus' lips in the first place.

Her hand closed around an oddly shaped bag, and, curious, she pulled it out, nearly laughing when she saw the flash powder she had confiscated weeks ago. The laugh escaped, feeding, rather than releasing, the nervous energy that had built in her to what she'd thought was the breaking point. She threw some of the powder on the ground, smiling as the heat from the instant combustion hit her face. Sensing a last, desperate chance she dragged her wand through the remaining powder, aing ing her magic to its properties, hoping despair would be a good substitute for careful timely work.

Summoning all the energy that her strange head-state would allow, she turned to the nearest rabbit, but found it would not hold still long enough for her to even steady her wand. Her frustration grew to a point she had not allowed herself to feel since she was a small child, and she pointed her wand at random, into the thick of the teeming mass of rabbit.

The spell, so quickly altered from the original one that Fred had been so keen on, worked to a degree she could not have begun to imagine. At once the air was filled, not with leaping rabbits, but rather with a thick and glittering suspension of the same flash powder that had been in the bag. Cautiously, she reached out and took some of it in her hand. She stepped into the hall, and carefully closed the door.

In the dim light of the corridor, she examined the handful of dust. It glittered like the toy flash powder, to be sure, but there was only one way to know if the transformation had com complete, rather than merely cosmetic. She threw it on the floor.

The column of flame that sprang up was even more radiant than the ones the original powder had produced, and for a touching moment she rued the fact that her life would not continue long enough for her to deduce exactly why the change had come. With an intuition hard won from years of practicing witchcraft, she felt that it had come from the addition of her own energy, her own volatile but powerful despair.

The flames vanished, leaving only a column of heat that, while it was intense, was also strangely comfortable to step into. Her hair stood on end as she did, feeling a certain prickle in her skin she had not felt since Harry had been alive. It was as though someone had once again cast a white light around her, protecting her, body and soul from any evil force or intent.

She looked at her watch. Three minutes past midnight"”it was Halloween, already. Technically morning, but a time thome ome might call night. Therein was a trick, she felt, one that Severus might have brought to her unwittingly. Not knowing whether she was running to or from her death, she bolted the door and ran down the hall.

As she ran her face was covered in tears, last-minute regrets that she was not able to say a proper good-bye to the few people left on earth who would merit it of her. The Weasley twins, Sirius, Remus, and, above all, her son. Yet, no hurried words at the end of her being could begin to compare to the lifetime she had already spent with him, to the understanding, so much beyond his years, that he had given her only in the last month of her life. The tears were the stuff of mere petty regrets, not anything like the deep longing to live she thought she might feel.

There were people about, she knew, she could feel the presence of teachers roaming the halls, and even the odd student, and while she ran she had the odd notion of calling out to all of them, as random as they may have seemed in her waking life they were now some the last waking allies she was likely to encounter. She was skidding on the smooth stone of Hogwart's main entrance when she nearly ran into two of them.

"Fred, George," she gasped as she steadied herself on Fred's arm. "What are you doing up?"

"Nevermind that," George said, looking at her askew, "where are you going?"

The instinct for flight was too strong to allow her to answer him, but in that moment she remembered something.

"George," she gasped, "my lab. It's full of that flash powder. Please, figure out some way to bring it out of the air without setting it off."

The look he gave her was filled with concern and wonder, but he merely nodded.
"Hermione," Fred called as she was taking off again, "wherever you're going, please be careful." She smiled and nodded, not trusting her voice.


She ran over the moors, not trusting any magical means of transportation at this late stage in the game. Better to rely on her own legs, she figured, than to allow another entity's magic to interfere with Apparation or Portkey.

When she began to sense dawn drawing near, she began to wonder if her instinct had been incorrect. The prediction had been that she would be killed on Halloween night, yet her urge, her instinct had come on Halloween morning. Idiom, though, still called those dark hours before dawn night, and she had as much suspected some trick as she had relied on her own intuitive powers.

She paused, catching her breath as the wind threatened to steal it from her. As the wind kicked up, strewing the dry loose grass all around her in a sudden whirlwind, she knew she was not alone. She was, it seemed, surrounded, yet her eyes peering through the dark and finding nothing.

Yet the presence grew, until it was a pressure she could feel both within aithoithout her body. Acting on sheer instinct, she grabbed the handful of powder and tossed it on the dry ground, sending up a column of flame. In the brief and dancing light she saw just what she had expected"”a circle of faceless white masks, reflecting the light in eerie patterns that managed to look somewhat like the faces they were concealing.

As soon as the flames diway way she stepped into the heat, feeling its protection again even as the circle of faces drew in around her. Without thinking, she raised the wand, and turnas sas she had in her lab, as she transfigured the standing Death Eaters into a nimbus of glittering powder.

Their consciousness, however, was far greater than the rabbits' ever could have been, and she knew, as she saw the powder twisting and swirling before her eyes, that she did not have long before the Death Eaters managed to perform some kind of a finite incantum spell, restoring their bodies. Summoning all her strength, she levitated the cloud of powder, then brought it crashing down on the dry stalks.

The resultant light was so bright that it woke Muggles several miles away, who, thinking it had only been lightning, simply went back to sleep. Hermione exaulted as she found herself surrounded by an unfathomably strong and complete field of heat energy, exuberant at cheating what had seemed an immutable fate.


She woke before her own fire, sprawled out on the couch, with no memory of how she had come to be there. Staring at the flames, she realized that she just barely felt their heat.


"Jason." Her voice felt weak, but it was enough to summon the attention of her son, who sat in one of the chairs before the fire. As he turned, she noticed that Severus, now looking more substantial but even bluer than before, was standing behind him.

"Ah," Jason said, an unusually cheerful mien in his voice, "you're awake."

Severus moved from behind his son's chair to kneel in front of Hermione, reaching out a hand to stroke her forehead. To her surprise, his touch felt warm, human, and she leaned in to it, feeling his hand press into her forehead as if he had been alive.

"You did wonderfully," Severus said quietly, "killed all the known remaining Death Eaters in one fell swoop. My brave little chicken."

Hermione laughed softly, remembering the old endearment.

"And as you can see," she said, her voice still rasping, "I am very much alive."

Jason cleared his throat at that. "Actually, Mother," he said, "it would seem that you have become Hogwarts' second new ghost in over three hundred years." She felt frozen, afraid, but finally looked down at her hands, the only part of her body immediately visible to her eyes. Indeed, they looked substantial, but translucent, and blue. She met her son's eyes, surprised that they looked no different to her seen through her ghostly ones.

Jason stood, no longer able to control the battling currents of joy and sadness. It was something he would have to face, Hermione knew, but he was showing a wisdom far beyond his age in setting it aside for another, quieter, time. "It seems that we are still a family, at least," he said, straightening his robes, "what do you say we go to the Halloween feast."

Severus stood and offered her his arm. She was grateful for it, for she found that getting up from a reclining position was more difficult than she had imagined, and stopping the progress once it had commenced was also rather difficult to negotiate.

As she allowed her husband to guide her through the open door (she couldn't quite stomach the idea of gliding through it) she remembered the stunts the ghosts usually put on at the Halloween feasts.

"No need to worry, my dear," Severus murmured as they approached the doors, "we will no stay here long." She looked at him questioningly, not knowing how to take his words. "At the feast," he amended, "we can talk of the other later, when you have adjusted somewhat."

Older and more experienced in life, older and more experienced in death, she thought wryly, but merely smiled and glided into the hall with him behind their son, bowing her head modestly and wondering if ghosts could blush when the entire assembly burst into applause at her appearance.


She hardly remembered the details of the feast; as Severus had warned her, time had taken on an entirely different feel as a ghost. Still, she clearly remembered that as they slipped out early Nearly Headless Nick had given them a sly look, and Severus had held her reassuringly tight as they moved through the solid stone walls, whispering as he held her especially tight, "I hear that lovemaking as a ghost is incredible."


Thtilltill had their old suite of rooms for the moment, a fact for which Hermione was extraordinarily glad.

"How long do we stay here?" she asked, "at Hogwarts, I mean." She reclined on the bed merely out of habit, being now just as comfortable floating near the ceiling, a fact that Severus had used to his bawdy advantage.

"As long as we want, really," he said, "as far as I know we retain these forms as long as we stay inside the castle grounds. Once we pass that barrier, when we choose to, we become something much less corporeal." She traced her hand along his jaw, relishing the ability to touch him again, and thought of how Nick had stayed in the castle for over five-hundred years.

"Are you in any hurry to find out what that might be?" she asked.

He shook his head. "Not until our son leaves, at the very least," he said. "Our time here will have its limitations, as our lives had theirs, and more so, but I do not know if beyond these boundaries we will be together in such a way that we know what being together is." Then he drew her close. No need for breath, she thought, save for the pleasure of their bodies, such as they were, moving together in the old ways. With the confines of her body gone, she found, sweet sensations that had once been confined to one small spot were now spread all over her, becoming her entire awareness.

"You wail very prettily, my dear," Severus advised, "shall we go haunt Gryffindor Tower for a while?"