He Nearly Killed the Cat
The Secret Desires
By Anne B. Walsh
Pat blinked free of his vision and reread the short segment of story, frowning in confusion.
This isn't our Neenie, but this never happened in the ridge either. The "girl" with the frogspawn and the bits about Lavender say ridge sixth year to me, but I'm positive Hermione never found the Room of Hiding. Especially not when someone else was already in there.
If this is what writing—sorry, Chronicling—is like in Outer Time, I'm a bit worried for what might happen if I get back into it on a regular basis.
But for right now, I want to know what she's going to find in there as much as she does. I know what it ought to be, but somehow I don't think it will…
He placed his hands on the keys again and prepared himself for another rush of story, but it came more slowly, more patiently this time, as though it were now confident it would be seen and could move at its own pace. Sentence by sentence, he recorded what he saw, pausing every so often to stretch his fingers or his back. Outer Time or not, he wasn't as young as he had once been.
Maybe if I forget that I should be getting old, I won't be.
It was his last thought fully conscious of himself before he dived once more into Chronicling the scene before him.
Hermione gazed around her in wonder. She remembered the Room of Requirement as it had configured itself for DA meetings, an area about the size of a typical Hogwarts classroom, its walls lined with bookcases and its floor studded with large cushions. This room was vast, vaulted and walled in stone, and filled with heaps of…
Well. Everything.
Scratched, dented, battered, and broken everything.
This seemed to be where the Hogwarts house-elves stored things that the students had damaged beyond repair, but which might still be useful in the future, and where the students stored things that they didn't want the house-elves, or the teachers or prefects, taking away from them.
But most of it looks like it's been here a long time. Like things people thought were so important that they had to hide them away, and then they went and forgot all about them.
She giggled. Harry and Ron would think I was trying to teach them something if I said that, but really it's just the truth.
But oh, just look at all the books…
Her heart sang at the sight of the teetering piles, but she knew better than to dive right in. Even without Ron's cautionary tales about eyes being burned out or stories you could literally never stop reading, even without the far more graphic example of Ginny and Tom Riddle's diary, she knew that most of these were probably commonplace books which had simply been stolen for a lark, or for revenge, and tossed here to be out of the way.
Either that, or someone's been writing in them. The way Harry and Ron wrote all over Harry's Care of Magical Creatures textbook. Back when we still had Care of Magical Creatures, of course.
Lost in thought and memory and wonder, she began to meander up and down the aisles, marveling at the incredible variety of things which Hogwarts students had thought it worth their while to hide. Is that a stuffed troll? How did anyone ever get that into the school in the first place? And there's the Vanishing Cabinet Sir Nicholas had Peeves break in our second year, to get Harry out of trouble with Filch. And is that a—
"Er, hello."
Hermione shrieked and whirled around, yanking out her wand. The boy standing a few paces behind her held up his hands, looking alarmed. "Sorry. Sorry. Didn't mean to startle you."
"Who are you?" Hermione lowered her wand, looking him over. He was about her own age, with straight brown hair and a fine-boned, heart-shaped face, and she had a feeling she knew him, though she couldn't bring his name to mind. His robes were emblazoned with the Hufflepuff crest, which might account for it.
"Call me Mal." The boy smiled, charming and nervous at the same time, and suddenly Hermione placed him. He was the image of Tonks, Tonks as she appeared when she wasn't using her Metamorphmagic.
I guess she has a little brother she never told us about. Or maybe a cousin. A cousin would make more sense, I think she'd have mentioned if she had any siblings still in school…
"And you're Hermione," Mal continued, stepping forward and extending his hand. "Hermione Granger."
"Yes, I am." Hermione shook the offered hand, wondering why she felt like she was waiting for something, and it wasn't until Mal released her that she realized what he hadn't said.
He didn't say, "You're Hermione Granger, Harry Potter's friend." Or, "You're Hermione Granger, the smart Muggleborn." Or even, "You're Hermione Granger, the girl who got Viktor Krum to take her to the Yule Ball." When he looks at me, all he sees is… me.
She couldn't decide if that worried her or thrilled her.
"So what brings you into the Room of Hiding today?" Mal asked, tucking his hands into the pockets of his robes. "Got something you need to hide?"
Hermione laughed. "Only myself," she said. "Everything just got to be too much, and I needed a place to get away from it all…"
"And the Room provided." Mal nodded. "It does that. Now me, I'm working on a project. Not everything that's in here is so broken it can't be fixed, at least I don't think it is." He pretended to loosen the collar of his robes. "I'm going to be in a lot of trouble if I'm wrong. I made a promise. To the sort of person you don't want to disappoint. And if I don't deliver…"
"What is it you're trying to fix?" Hermione drew her wand again. "Maybe I can help. That is, if you'll let me."
"Let you?" Mal stared at her, open-mouthed. "Let you help? I've admired your wandwork since… well, forever. Never thought I'd have the chance to tell you, but you're here and I'm here and…"
And he blushes easily. Which Tonks doesn't, but then, she's an Auror. She's seen things I can't even dream about.
"What I'm trying to say is, yes, I'd love to have you help." Mal made a grand gesture indicating the Vanishing Cabinet. "With this. It's a shame that it got broken in the first place, it's a priceless antique, I don't know why they let Peeves stop around here with all the trouble he causes…"
"They may not have a choice." Hermione started back toward the Vanishing Cabinet, looking it up and down. There was a good bit of cosmetic damage, but she suspected Mal had deliberately left that in place to remind himself that the underlying spellwork still needed repairs. "I did some reading on poltergeists for extra credit back in my third year, for Professor Lupin, and if I remember right, they're usually emotional manifestations. They appear in places where people have a lot of extreme feelings, either good or bad."
"Extreme feelings? At Hogwarts?" Mal put on an astonished face and clapped his hand to his chest. "I would never have guessed!"
Hermione laughed again, some of the troubles which had been weighing her down dissolving with the sound. "It's true. So Peeves will be here as long as we all keep having feelings. Which is to say, as long as we're all human."
"Yeah. All human." Mal seemed interested in his shoes. "I know who you hang out with," he said without lifting his head. "And where you come from. The war seems pretty easy to you, doesn't it? I mean, not the fighting. Not people getting hurt, or going missing, or dying. But figuring out who's right and who's wrong, deciding which side to support."
"Yes, it does." Hermione paused with her wand raised for a standard diagnostic spell. "Was it not that easy for you, then?"
"I don't know that I want to be on either side." Mal sat down on a ripped ottoman, pulling absently at the stuffing. "My family is strong for one of them, but I… it may sound terrible to you, but I don't really care. Not enough to go out and risk my life over it, not unless I had to. I hate seeing people get hassled, get hurt, over things they can't help, but how is my getting killed going to fix any of that? So I'm staying in school, keeping my head down, and hoping it will blow over by the time I leave." He looked up, molding a piece of stuffing between his fingers. "And now you hate me, don't you?"
"Why should I hate you for having an opinion?" Hermione ran her fingers along the door of the Vanishing Cabinet. "It's different from mine. That doesn't make it evil, or automatically wrong. Maybe another time we can talk more about it. For right now, do you want to show me how you've been trying to fix the magic on this?"
Mal got to his feet and drew his wand, shaking his head. "I like you, Hermione," he said, coming to stand beside her. "But I don't understand you."
"The world would be dull if we understood each other all the time." Hermione tapped her wand's tip against Mal's, then performed her diagnostic spell, the preliminary motion allowing him to see the results as well as herself. "Oh my goodness. That is a lot of damage, but I can see where you've cleared a good bit of it away. How long have you been working on this?"
"Most of the year," Mal admitted in a mumble. "When I could get away, that is. Our common room isn't exactly near this place."
"No, it's not, and the secret passages always seem to know when you're in a hurry and decide to go somewhere else that day, don't they?" Hermione smiled, and after a moment Mal smiled back. It was a singularly sweet expression, but shy, as though he didn't use it much.
What he said about me goes double from me to him. I like him, but I don't understand him a bit. Still, there's no harm in just helping another student with a project. And it will give me a rest from listening to Ron talk about Quidditch and Harry obsess over Draco Malfoy.
She ignored the feeling that she'd just thought of something significant in favor of raising her wand once more, using it to point out a section of her diagram. "This is where I'd go next. You see how it interlocks with these other pieces? If we can clean it up, make it work as it was designed, then these three parts over here will all be easier, because we'll have a clear entry point…"
Mal followed the line of her wand with his gray eyes, nodding in agreement and occasionally interjecting a comment or question. These, to Hermione's surprise, were usually intelligent and to the point.
But then, if he didn't know what he was doing, he'd never have got so far as he did on his own. With both of us working on it, we should finish much sooner than he would have alone.
Well. She sneaked another look at the boy by her side. Maybe not that much sooner. We might hit some unexpected snags. And of course we'll want to thoroughly test it before we declare the project finished.
Pushing these thoughts aside as well, she vanished all the sections of her diagram except the one they were concerned with, enlarged it, and transferred it to a blank bit of parchment from her pocket. "All right. Let's see where would be the best place to start with this…"
Two brown heads bent over the diagram together.
Pat pounded in the five asterisks he used to denote a section break, hit return twice, and sat back, picking up the first few pages of his latest manuscript. Carefully, paying attention to details, he read it over, and at the end of it had come to a conclusion he didn't like.
Better run it by the rest. Just to be sure I'm not seeing things.
But when he showed the section to his wife and daughter, and to his niece and nephew, both the conclusion and the unhappiness with it were unanimous. Fox, in particular, returned the sheets of paper to their Chronicler by one corner, as though they were covered with a noxious slime. "Not your writing," he assured his uncle, flexing his fingers. "Just… him. You understand."
"The sad part is, that's a plausible person for him to be." Neenie held out her hand for the papers again, and Pat handed them over. "As plausible as ours, anyway." She poked her brother in the ribs, sticking out her tongue at his growl. "And probably through the same mechanism. Early intervention, just with a different person."
"I wonder if there's a world out there where it happened that way?" Carrie asked, slicing apples for the dinner of bread, fruit, and cheese which was in its final stages of preparation.
"I bet there is." Meghan twirled twice on one foot and nearly lost her balance. Fox caught her before she could fall. "Thanks. Dad-dy…" She scowled at the elision the protective magics on the domain had forced, then rolled her eyes and went on. "Do you think you could Chronicle it, the world where he is that way for real, not just for pretend? Go looking for it, and let us know what happened in it, how things came out that way?"
"I can always try." Pat rubbed his hands together. "You know how I love a challenge."
Neenie flipped to the first page of the manuscript and let out a small gasp. "Uncle Pat! Look at this!"
"What?" Pat came to look over her shoulder, as did Fox and Meghan on her other side.
"Look where she's thinking about Ron." Neenie's finger traced along two lines. "She thinks she sees something in him, 'something better, something more.' Couldn't that be…" She let the words trail off, her face alight with hope and fear.
"It would explain why you were drawn to Chronicle that world, instead of any other," said Carrie, coming to have a look for herself. "But this is definitely off the ridge, which means the RC's may be showing up there to start fixing things at any time. And if they get in before we do, then we'll have to start over from the beginning looking for those two, and possibly for the others as well."
"They caused it," Fox murmured.
"Beg pardon?" Pat asked, already feeling the stirrings of further Chronicling at the back of his mind. It should go on like this for a few weeks, until Harry starts to notice that both his best friends and the girl he's falling for have secrets they're not telling him. And then maybe a big blowup, in the hall outside the Room…
"Our two, our missing two who are in this world. They made this happen." Fox mimed with his fists a pair of magnets being attracted to one another. "This change, this pulling together, it fits us. It's something you'd expect to see in a spin or a tell of our main. But it doesn't fit the ridge. Our two must have hooked up somehow, and that resonance Lin told us about, the reason they put us into the worlds in pairs, it's ramped up to a level where it's affecting the world, taking it from the ridge to a tell."
"Which might explain why this pair is together." Neenie's hand rested, apparently carelessly, on the front page of the manuscript, but Pat could see one of her fingers lying squarely over the name of the person she'd mentioned before. "If they can do that kind of, pardon my language, damage inside a world, imagine what they'd do if they were apart. They'd have the walls down within three weeks."
"There may be another reason," Carrie said, sliding an arm around her niece. "These two are from a family with a long history of both bravery and devotion, to causes and to the ones they love. By giving them each a family member to care for, the RC's may have hoped to bypass their desire for their mates, which would otherwise be just as overwhelming." She grinned, the quick fierce flash of teeth which Pat found eternally alarming and just as eternally stirring. "We see how well that worked, now don't we."
"So we've got our next pair picked out for us." Fox drew his flute out of his pocket and played a quick liquid run of notes, looking at the papers still in Neenie's hand. A set of numbers and pictographs formed in glowing green on the air in front of him. "Should we try to run it ourselves, or wait for Dad? And who's going?"
"As much as I love to be out there doing, I think I'd be better in the stands for this one," Pat said reluctantly. "I need to finish Chronicling, don't I, now that I've started?"
"There's no law about it," said Neenie, setting the papers aside. "But worlds that aren't Chronicled to the end are more likely to be invaded by the RC's. Of course, correlation isn't causation. A lot of times, the reason the world stopped being Chronicled is because the RC's got to it, so there was nothing left for the Chronicler to see."
"Best explanation for writer's block I've ever heard. 'The little gray men came and took my story away.'" Pat shook his head. "Why do they do that? What do they get out of it?"
"Existence?" Meghan suggested. "If they didn't destroy worlds, they wouldn't have any reason to exist, and here in Outer Time, if a thing isn't needed, it goes away."
"As far as any of the senior Legendbreakers have ever been able to tell, the RC's don't act on their own." Neenie sat up straighter in her chair, unconsciously adopting her lecturing tone. "They're directed by… well, by a lot of different people. Some of them sincerely think that spins and tells are dangerous to the ridge, that they somehow suck energy out of it and endanger its life, so they devote themselves to destroying other worlds in order to, as they think, save their own. And some of them are just in it for the nasty fun. But all of them need exactly what we do. They need power. They just get it in the opposite place."
"Basically, upgraded de… black floaty soul-killing things," Pat self-censored at Carrie's look. "Living off people's pain and unhappiness, and making their own if they can't find exactly the flavor they want. As if there wasn't enough of it out there already."
"Which is why the Legendbreakers' work is so important." Carrie held out her other arm to Meghan, who came and laid her head against her mother's shoulder. "The more stories that have happy endings, the more people will start to believe that happiness is possible. And once they believe it, they'll go looking for it, and that's the first step towards finding it."
"So," Fox said, a little over-brightly. "Are we heading out on this mission right away, or are we waiting for Dad to get back from wherever he's gone off to? Personally, I say we should wait for him, unless the situation goes critical. The more of us we can put on this one, the better, and we don't have to worry about wrecking the ridge anymore, because it's just turned into a tell."
"Will you keep an eye on things for us, Uncle Pat?" Neenie picked up Pat's manuscript and gave it back to him. "It's… kind of important to me that we get this one right."
"I know it is, sweetheart. Don't worry, I'll keep a close watch for things going wrong." Pat flipped to the last page of the manuscript and frowned at the blank space under his section break. With his left hand, he scribbled the letters P-E-N in the air, and plucked the required implement out of that section of space. "Should have a couple quiet weeks there at least," he muttered, beginning to write down his notes. "Can we link it up with Outer Time, make it run real-time relative to us?"
"Usually that only happens when someone's actively on a mission there, but I bet we can do it anyway." Fox pulled out his flute again. "Let me see what I can figure out…"
Far away, in a town once devoted to industry and now, thanks to the merging of the Muggle and magical worlds some eighty or ninety years ago, a museum center and living historical exhibit, John White stood on a street named for the main activity which had taken place in the old mill looming over him, listening to the sounds of life going on all around.
His child is grown now, and although he'd never admit it, I think he's getting tired of teaching. He's had nearly twenty years of peace, even discounting this rather frantic last few months. And his wife has never had a real adventure of her own, and might be willing to give our type a try.
It's worth a shot.
He stepped up to the door and knocked. The worst thing he could hear, after all, was "no."
Author Notes:
If you have read most or all of my long works, you may be able to figure out where John is and who he's planning to talk with. I will tell you that time-wise, he's at the end of a sequel which hasn't been officially Chronicled yet. But it will be. *evil grin*
As for Hermione and her new friend, if you're getting some weird vibes off that one, well…you should be! And that is all I'm going to say about that.
The Highwayman's Apprentice continues to spin itself into new and fascinating configurations. I think that it needs a prologue, establishing how the Highwayman and his Apprentice first met. Said prologue involves a rainstorm, a thick branch of driftwood, and a great deal of screaming. Further details when the story is ready to be seen. Which, judging by the hold it's got on my brain, shouldn't actually be that long.
I do know that you want Surpassing Danger, and I'm not going to forget about it or shelve it. Shall I see if I can make Sundays my update days for it?
That is all, except for the usual "plz review" type of things. Except that if you want to see how THA will begin, why not go buy or rent a DVD of "Celtic Thunder: Storm"? It's worth it, trust me!