The sky had lightened further by the time Hermione spoke again.
“I’m afraid,” Hermione said, almost in a whisper. “Not of dying again, or not just that. I’m afraid I won’t be good enough. I had my chance to defeat a troll, and instead I just died—”
“That was a troll empowered by Voldemort as a weapon, plus he sabotaged all your magic items, just so you know.”
“I died. And you killed the troll, somehow, I think I remember that part, it didn’t even slow you down.” Hermione wasn’t crying, no tears glistened on her cheeks, she simply gazed off at the lightening sky where the Sun would rise. “And then you brought me back from the dead as a Sparkling Unicorn Princess. I know I couldn’t have done that. I’m afraid
I’ll never be able to do that, no matter what people think about me.” “This situation is where your journey begins, I think—” Harry paused.
“Excuse me, I shouldn’t be trying to influence your decision.”
“No,” Hermione whispered, still gazing at the hills below her. She raised her voice. “No, Harry, I want to hear this.”
“Okay. Um. I think this is where you start. Everything that’s happened up until now… it places you in the same place I started out in September, when I’d thought of myself as just being a child prodigy before, and then I found something new I needed to live up to. If you weren’t comparing yourself to me and my,” adult cognitive patterns copied off Tom Riddle, “dark side… then you’d be the brightest star of Ravenclaw, who organized her own company to fight school bullies and kept her sanity under assault by Voldemort, all while she was only twelve years old. I looked it up, you got better grades than Dumbledore did in his first year.” Leaving aside the Defense grade, because that was just Voldemort being Voldemort. “Now you have some powers, and a reputation to live up to, and the world is about to hand you some difficult tasks. That’s where it all begins for you, the same as it began for me. Don’t sell yourself short.” And then Harry shut his mouth hard, because he was talking Hermione into it and that wasn’t right. He’d at least managed to stop before the part where he asked, if she couldn’t be a hero with all that going for her, who exactly she thought was going to do it.
“You know,” Hermione said to the horizon, still not looking at Harry, “I had a conversation like this with Professor Quirrell, once, about being a hero. He was taking the other side, of course. But apart from that, this is feeling like when he argued with me, somehow.”
Harry kept his lips pressed shut. Letting people make their own decisions was hard, because it meant they were allowed to make the wrong ones, but it still had to be done.
Hermione spoke carefully, the blue fringes of her Hogwarts uniform now seeming brighter against her black robes as the sky all around them became illuminated; there were no more stars in the west. “Professor Quirrell told me, he said he’d been a hero once. But people weren’t helping him enough, so he gave up and went off to do something more interesting. I told Professor Quirrell that it hadn’t been right for him to do that—what I actually said was ‘that’s horrible’. Professor Quirrell said that, yes, maybe he was an awful person, but then what about all the other people who’d never tried to be heroes at all? Were they even worse than him? And I didn’t know what to say back. I mean, it’s wrong to say that only Gryffindor-style heroes are good people—though I think from Professor Quirrell’s perspective it was more like only people with big ambitions had a right to breathe. And I didn’t believe that. But it also seemed wrong to stop being a hero, to walk away like he’d done. So I just stood there looking silly. But now I know what I should’ve told him back then.” Harry controlled his breathing.
Hermione stood up from her cushion, and turned to face Harry. “I’m done with trying to be a heroine,” said Hermione Granger with the eastern sky brightening around her. “I shouldn’t ever have gone along with that entire line of thinking. There are just people who do what they can, whatever they can. And there are also people who don’t even try to do what they can, and yes, those people are doing something wrong. I’m not ever going to try to be a hero again. I’m not going to think in heroic terms if I can help it. But I won’t do any less than I can—or not a lot less, I mean, I’m only human.” Harry had never understood what was supposed to be mysterious about the Mona Lisa, but if he could have taken a picture of Hermione’s resigned/joyous smile just then, he had the sense that he could have looked at it for hours without understanding, and that Dumbledore could have read through it at a glance. “I won’t learn my lesson. I will be that stupid. I’ll go on trying to do most of what I can, or at least some of what I can—oh, you know what I mean. Even if it means risking my life again, so long as it’s worth the risk and isn’t being, you know, actually stupid. That’s my answer.” Hermione took a deep breath, her face resolute. “So, is there something I can do?”
Harry’s throat was choked. He reached into his pouch, and signed CL-O-A-K since he couldn’t speak, and drew forth the fuliginous spill of the Cloak of Invisibility, offering it to Hermione for the last time. Harry had to force the words from his throat. “This is the True Cloak of Invisibility,”
Harry said in almost a whisper, “the Deathly Hallow passed down from Ignotus Peverell to his heirs, the Potters. And now to you—”
“Harry!” Hermione said. Her hands flew up across her chest, as though to protect herself from the attacking gift. “You don’t have to do this!”
“I do have to do this. I’ve left the part of the path that lets me be a hero, I can’t risk myself adventuring, ever. And you… can.” Harry reached up the hand that wasn’t holding the Cloak, and wiped at his eyes. “This was made for you, I think. For the person you’re going to become.” A weapon to fight Death, in its form as the shadow of despair that falls on human minds and drains away their hope for the future; you will fight that, I expect, in more forms than just Dementors… “I do not loan you, my Cloak, but give you, unto
Hermione Jean Granger. Protect her well forevermore.”
Slowly, Hermione reached out, and took hold of the Cloak, looking like she was trying not to cry herself. “Thank you,” she whispered. “I think… even though I’m done with the notion of heroing… I think that you always were, from the day I met you, my mysterious old wizard.”
“And I think,” Harry said, his own throat half-closed, “even if you deny that way of thinking now, I think that you were always destined to become, from the very beginning of the story, the hero.” Who must Hermione Granger become, what adult form must she take when she grows up, to pass through Time’s narrow keyhole? I don’t know the answer to that either, any more than I can imagine my own adult self. But her next few steps ahead seem clearer than mine…