Without you - Matt
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DON'T BE SORRY
Disclaimer: not mine, Rowling and WB own it all
With a loud thumb he landed flat on his back on the invisible floor and within a second Hermione appeared unfazed by these events and offered her hand to help him up.
‘Er… Thanks.’
‘No problem, Harry. This is the dimension of light, let me just do my thing and then we’re out of here.’
‘Hey, I’ve been here before,’ said Harry, recognizing his surroundings as the same ones in which he found Snape on the ground out cold. ‘You’ll never believe who I met here – well not really ‘met’, but that’s beside the point.’
‘If I had to guess it would have been Snape,’ she replied seriously.
‘H-How did you know,’ sputtered Harry with a look of disbelieve.
‘I’ll tell you later… Stay here while I take care of my business.’
‘But…’
‘No buts, this is something I have to do on my own. Just trust me, okay?’
‘Why can’t I go with you, I can help!’
‘No, Harry, not this time; for the last time, this is my destiny and no one but me shall be allowed to do it,’ she said beginning to walk away from him, but he grabbed her wrist and turned her around to face him.
‘You’re not coming back, are you?’ he asked incredulously noticing the tone of a goodbye in her voice.
‘Harry…’ a tear was slowly creeping down her cheek.
‘Answer me!’
‘I’ll come back, just not in the way you want me to. Look this is not the time to argue. Though time may seem of no importance in here the opposite is true. If I won’t handle it soon everything might have been useless, everything we’ve worked for this past year will have gone to waste,’ she pleaded. ‘I will come back to explain it all, but for now you’ll just have to do with trusting me to do the right thing.’
‘No you can’t do this to me. Tell me now: what do you mean by ‘not coming back the way I want you to come back’? What are you going to do and why in Merlin’s name can I be of no assistance at all?’
‘I can’t tell you, not now. If I tell you, you will come after me and that would ruin everything. Just trust me, I’ve never let you down before and I won’t do it now. It’s for your own good even if you wouldn’t agree with me.’
He let go of her hand and before he had the time to change his mind she pulled a grey Portal from her pocket and with a last ‘Goodbye’ she activated it and disappeared from his sight.
How long he stood there motionless he couldn’t remember later, but eventually he sank to the ground and began to sob. He didn’t know what Hermione was doing but he didn’t have a good feeling about it, in fact he had a very bad feeling about it. All he could do was wait for Hermione to return in a way he didn’t want her to, probably dead he thought bitterly.
This time there was nothing keeping his mind occupied and the nothingness was slowly driving him nuts, he no longer had a reason to be here. His reason had just abandoned him with a promise that didn’t predict anything good; he felt like smashing something into a million pieces, but there just wasn’t anything to break within a mile.
He tried to put all the pieces together and figure out what exactly had been happening. What was Hermione doing here, what was Snape doing here, what was with all the dimensions, what could have been so important for Hermione to sacrifice herself for and keeping him out of it. The questions didn’t have answers and only gave him more questions to think about.
He didn’t want to stay here, but at the same time he knew he didn’t want to leave here either. It would mean giving up on Hermione, a thing he promised himself he would never do, ever… But this place made him feel so useless, here was Hermione probably saving the world while he was sitting there feeling sorry for himself.
He waited and waited for what seemed like days but might have been a few hours all the same, growing more restless with every second ticking away without Hermione returning.
‘You promised,’ he shouted randomly. ‘You promised you’d come back, but why aren’t you here yet. I can’t go on like this forever, I need you to come back, I’m nothing without you…’ And with that he sprinted off in no particular direction, needing to find a way to get rid of his frustrations.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
‘Harry, wake up…’ a soft voice woke him and he was being poked in his side; he tried to push it away sleepily, but it didn’t stop. ‘Don’t make me conjure a bowl of water over your head,’ threatened the voice now.
Slowly he opened his eyes and was temporarily blinded by the brightness of the light. Instinctively he reached for his glasses on his left, but he only felt a soft fabric and realized that he was actually still wearing his glasses. As his eyes came into focus he was greeted by a happy sight.
‘Hermione! Finally, I thought you’d never come back…’
‘I promised didn’t I - I always keep my promises.’
On a closer inspection he realized that she didn’t look very happy, sad was a far better way to describe her face, but why would she be sad? Wasn’t she happy to be back, wasn’t she happy to see him again?
‘I also promised that I would tell you everything when I came back,’ she continued. ‘But I think I should give you some time to wake up, because I don’t think you’d be able to process all the information in your state.’
‘No, I’m O-Okay,’ he said but the yawn in the middle of his sentence proved the exact opposite, but he quickly got up and sat up and moved a bit to face her at the spot where she had kneeled to wake him up. ‘Just start, okay? I’ll tell you when my brain goes in to overheat.’
‘Very well then. The beginning is a good place to start.’
She sighed and took in a deep breath and started her story.
‘You remember how we were searching for a way to finally get rid of Voldemort?’
‘How could I forget, hours and hours spent in the library and absolutely no results at all. But thanks to you we finally made it, didn’t we.’
‘Well, actually that’s the whole problem –‘
‘What do you mean,’ he interrupted her in a flair of desperation.
‘Please let me finish this, it’s hard enough as it is,’ she said exasperated. ‘And please, don’t hate me…’ she whispered softly.
He was tempted to interrupt her again, but the look in her eyes told him how hard this was for her and the last thing he wanted now was to make it harder no matter how curious he was.
‘I haven’t been completely honest with you. The spell that you used to finish of Voldemort didn’t do what I told you it would.’ She paused, expecting a reaction from him, but none came. ‘When I discovered a simple Avada Kedavra wouldn’t be able to take him out - because in his quest for immortality he already had made himself immune to that; but you already knew that… – I figured we would have to resort to the dark arts, only for once. I never told you, because you would never have agreed to it. Sometimes I still hate myself for it, because I made you do a thing you were absolutely repulsed by and without you even knowing it.’
She started pacing and Harry didn’t know if he was supposed to say something now or to just shut up and let her gather the pieces for her story. He wanted to let her know he didn’t hate her for doing what she did, but still he felt a pang of betrayal and he was afraid that anger might take over if he started talking. Finally it seemed she had found a point where she could continue, but she kept pacing while she began to talk.
‘This… world - if you could call it so – around us at this moment, it’s a sort of layer behind the world we know. It will still be there when you’ll return, but at the same time it isn’t, for you can’t smell, taste, feel, hear or see it. I already told you that these are the so called dimensions, you could compare it to the dimensions that Muggles have defined though they are significantly different.’
‘The easiest, but probably incorrect, way to define it is to say that this particular dimension is a representation of good, the dark one where I found you could be seen as the evil dimension and then there’s a third dimension… Even I don’t know exactly what it is, even after the huge amount of research I’ve done, but it’s rumored to be time itself. It is said that nobody has ever returned after they had used an Polar to get them there, so when I began reading about these three dimensions outside – or if you want inside - our world I toyed with the idea of sending Voldemort into there.’
‘The spell you used: Trita Velita, is an ancient spell used to transfer objects as well as animals and humans to these three outer dimensions, usually as some sort of religious rite by sending the things back to where they supposedly belonged or sometimes as a punishment. But as wizards and witches began to believe in religions less and less, because the source of all things around us was proven to be magic and even the most sadistic ones out of us found the punishment that awaited people to barbaric, the common knowledge of this place was lost. Only a couple of books had been written and preserved, but since nobody was looking for it, they hadn’t been touched in ages when I stumbled upon them.’
‘I found the book in the Black’s library, but until I found a way to use this new knowledge and get it to work I decided to keep you two in the dark and made you keep searching for an other solutions. There were more than enough reasons I told myself; I’d be saving you a big disappointment if this theory also turned out to be a dead end, there might be a chance you two would find a more effective way to rid the world of Voldemort, but most importantly to keep you from finding out this had something to do with the Dark Arts.’
‘And in the end I was happy I had taken that decision, because the solution asked for a horrible sacrifice… That’s the thing about the Dark Arts, everything comes at a price and this was a price I wasn’t prepared to let you pay. You see, the spell asked for three components: one victim, Voldemort, one spell caster, you, and one helping hand. The helping hand would be forced to stay in the outer dimensional world together with the victim, the only difference with the victim being that the helping hand is allowed to choose to return to the real world, but would then be faced with death.’
‘I was the helping hand, after the spell was cast all three would be transported to one of the three dimensions. The caster to the evil dimension, as a relatively light punishment for performing the Dark Arts, the helping hand to the dimension of good, for he or she was not to be blamed, and the victim to the dimension of time, where he would supposedly be lost forever. And well, considering recent events I’m quite sure we succeeded in just that.’
Finally she had stopped pacing and looked Harry in the eye, who was staring back at her blankly; having trouble to digest the information indeed, as she had predicted.
‘But, that means that y-you –‘
‘Yes, that means that I will not be returning to the real world alive,’ she finished sadly. ‘I could stay here forever, but to be honest with you I’d rather die than to stay here forever. There’s no way I’d be able to keep my sanity in here for long. I’m not afraid of dying, especially knowing that I did it for an extremely good cause.’
‘No – you can’t do that. I won’t let you…’ he whispered, tears threatening to break out.
‘You haven’t got a choice, Harry.’
‘We’ll find a solution, there has got to be a solution to this. I won’t give up this easily, not when I went to all this trouble just to save you.’
‘No, Harry I won’t let you do that. Haven’t you wondered how Snape got here in the first place? He was trying to get someone out of here by the means of a potion, sadly the potion did quite the opposite and made sure he got trapped here forever and I can’t take the risk the same will happen to you. You deserve to live a happy life and I’m sorry I won’t be there to experience that by your side, but remember that I’ll be there inside you; that’s all I’m asking.’
‘You just don’t understand, do you? How could I possibly live a happy life if you’re not there in person – and don’t give me that crap of being there inside my heart. Maybe I could have lived if you would have died in the war, I don’t know for sure. But not like this, I can’t let you give up this easy; maybe there are better ways to get you out of here. Even if I would have to make a freaking potion to succeed and risk to get trapped here forever, I would do it; everything better than to let you die without a try. Please give me a chance to free you from this place, that’s all I’m asking.’
‘No, Harry, there’s no way I can let you do that…’
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