Hermione nodded distantly. “Like making everyone think that I…
Harry, did I actually do anything to You-Know-Who?”
“No, that was all me, though please don’t tell anyone that. Just so you know, that time the Boy-Who-Lived supposedly defeated Voldemort, on the night of Halloween in 1981, that was Dumbledore’s victory and he let everyone think it was me. So now I’ve defeated a Dark Lord once, and gotten credit for it once. It all balances out eventually, I guess.”
Hermione went on gazing to the east. “I’m not really comfortable with this,” she said after a while. “People thinking I defeated the Dark Lord Voldemort, when I haven’t done anything at all… oh, that’s the same thing you went through, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Sorry about inflicting that on you. I was… well, I was trying to create a separate identity for you in people’s minds, I guess. There was just the one opportunity and everything was sort of rushed and… I realized afterwards that maybe I shouldn’t have, but it was too late.” Harry cleared his throat. “Though, um. If you’re feeling like you want to do something that’s actually worthy of the way people think about the GirlWho-Revived, um. I might have an idea for what you can do. Very soon, if you want.”
Hermione Granger was giving him a look.
“But you don’t have to!” Harry said hastily. “You can just ignore this whole thing and be the best student in Ravenclaw! If that’s what you prefer.”
“Are you trying to use reverse psychology on me, Mr. Potter?”
“No! Honestly!” Harry took a deep breath. “I’m trying not to decide your life for you. I thought I saw, yesterday, I thought I saw what might come next for you—but then I remembered how much of this year I’d spent being a total idiot. I thought of some things Dumbledore said to me. I realized it genuinely wasn’t my place to say. That you could do anything you wanted with your life, and that above all, the choice had to be your own. Maybe you don’t want to be a hero after this, maybe you want to become a great magical researcher because that’s who Hermione Granger really was all along, never mind what your fingernails are made out of now. Or you could go to the Salem Witches’ Institute in America instead of Hogwarts. I won’t lie and say I’d like that, but it really is up to you.” Harry turned to the horizon and swept his hand wide, as though to indicate all the world that lay beyond Hogwarts. “You can go anywhere from here. You can do anything with your life. If you want to be a wealthy sixtyyear-old merman, I can make it happen. I’m serious.”
Hermione nodded slowly. “I’m curious about how you’d do that exactly, but what I want isn’t to have things done for me.”
Harry sighed. “I understand. Um…” Harry hesitated. “I think… if it helps you to know… in my case, things were being arranged for me a lot. By Dumbledore, mostly, though Professor Quirrell too. Maybe the power to earn your own way in life is itself something you have to earn.”
“Why, that sounds very wise,” Hermione said. “Like having my parents pay for me to go to university, so I can someday get my own job. Professor Quirrell bringing me back to life as a Sparkling Unicorn Princess and you telling everyone that I offed the Dark Lord Voldemort is just like that, really.”
“I am sorry,” Harry said. “I know I should’ve done it differently, but… I didn’t have much time to plan and I was exhausted and not really thinking straight—”
“I’m grateful, Harry,” Hermione said, her voice softer now. “You’re being too harsh on yourself, even. Please don’t take it so seriously when I’m snarky at you. I don’t want to be the sort of girl who comes back from the dead, and then starts complaining about which superpowers she got and that her alicorn fingernails are the wrong shade of pearly white.” Hermione had turned, was again gazing off at the east. “But, Mr. Potter… if I do decide that dying a horrible death isn’t enough to make me rethink my life choices… not that I’m saying that just yet… then what happens next?”
“I do my best to support you in your life choices,” Harry said firmly.
“Whatever they are.”
“You have a quest already lined up for me, I’m guessing. A nice safe quest where there’s no chance of my getting hurt again.”
Harry rubbed his eyes, feeling tired inside. It was like he could hear the voice of Albus Dumbledore inside his head. Forgive me, Hermione Granger… “I’m sorry, Hermione. If you go down that path I’m going to have to Dumbledore you, and not tell you some things. Manipulate you, if only for a short while. I do believe there’s something you might be able to do now, something real, something worthy of the way people are thinking about the Girl-Who-Revived… that you might have a destiny, even… but in the end that’s just a guess, I know a lot less than Dumbledore did. Are you willing to risk the life you just got back?”
Hermione turned to look at him, her eyes widening in surprise. “Risk my life?”
Harry didn’t nod, because that would have been outright lying. “Are you willing to do that?” Harry said instead. “The quest that I think might be your destiny—and no, I don’t know any specific prophecies, it’s just a guess—involves literal descent-into-Hell type stuff.”
“I thought…” Hermione said. She sounded uncertain. “I thought for sure that after this, you and Professor McGonagall wouldn’t… you know… let me do anything the least bit dangerous ever again.”
Harry said nothing, feeling guilty about the false relationship credit he was getting. It was in fact the case that Hermione was modeling him with tremendous accuracy, and that if not for Hermione having a horcrux, the surface of the planet Venus would have dropped to fractionalKelvin temperatures before Harry tried this.
“On a scale of zero to a hundred, how literal a descent into Hell are we talking about here?” said Hermione. The girl now looked a bit worried.
Harry mentally calibrated his scales, remembering Azkaban. “I’d say maybe eighty-seven?”
“This sounds like something I should do when I’m older, Harry.
There’s a difference between being a hero and being a complete lunatic.”
Harry shook his head. “I don’t think the risk would change much,”
Harry said, leaving aside the question of how much risk that really was,
“and it’s the sort of thing that’s better done sooner, if someone does it at all.”
“And my parents don’t get a vote,” Hermione said. “Or do they?”
Harry shrugged. “We both know how they’d vote, and you can take that into account if you like. Um, I said for Dr. and Dr. Granger not to be told yet that you’re alive. They’ll find out after you come back from your mission, if you choose to accept it. That seems a bit… kinder on your parents’ nerves, they just get the one pleasant surprise, instead of having to worry about, um, stuff.”
“Why, that’s very thoughtful of you,” Hermione said. “It’s nice that you’re so concerned about their feelings. May I think about this for a few minutes, please?”
Harry gestured toward the cushion he’d set down opposite his own, and Hermione moved over with fluid grace, and sat down to look out over the castle-edge, still radiating peacefulness all over the place. They’d really need to do something about that, maybe pay someone to invent an Anti-Purity Potion.
“Do I have to decide without knowing what the mission is?” Hermione asked.
“Oh hell no,” Harry said, thinking of a similar conversation before his own trip to Azkaban. “This is the sort of thing you have to choose freely if you do it at all. I mean that’s an actual mission requirement. If you say that you still want to be a hero, I’ll tell you afterwards about the mission— after you’ve had some time to eat and talk to people and recover a bit— and you’ll decide then if it’s something you want to do. And we’ll test in advance whether returning from death has allowed you to cast the spell that normal wizards think is impossible, before you go out.” Hermione nodded, and fell back into silence.