Who: Hermione (Narrative) What: Her arrival into Lawrence When: Thursday afternoon [3-8-12] Where: In the city, then the coffee shop Rating/Status: PG/Complete
Hermione felt her heart leap into her throat as she watched Haggrid carry a very limp and lifeless Harry over the threshold and listened to Voldemort prattle on triumphantly and demanded that they all surrender in light of their hero being dead. She wasn't sure if she could keep it together any more. Her best friend of seven years, the boy she saw as a brother, was dead. How would she even begin to be able to process this? No one was dare speaking up to him at this point, hope lost, abandoned, uncertain of what to do. And then someone did speak up. Neville. What was he doing? No, he was right. Harry wouldn't have wanted them to give up. Neville was right in his defiance and she knew it.
She stood, frozen to the spot as she listened to Neville stand up to Voldemort all on his own and deny his offer to give him a rank among the Death Eaters. Voldemort cast a Body-Binding spell on him and summoned the Sorting Hat to be placed on his head. Neville was forced to wear the hat as Voldemort set it on fire, and as he screamed out in pain, everyone finally seemed to be brought back out of their trance and they reacted. With Voldemort and the Death Eaters distracted, Neville was able to pull the hat off and produce the Sword of Gryffindor. Yes! This was it, this was the end, it was truly in sight now! She watched as Neville took the sword and swung it down in a single, swift motion and Nagini's was dead.
And then something happened. The scene changed. One minute she was there in the middle of a battle at Hogwarts and the next, she wasn't and she had no idea what was going on. Hermione stopped where she stood, eyes wide, taking in her surroundings. She had been through a lot today, had seen a lot of unexpected things, but this? This she did not have an explanation for. She did not see anything remotely familiar around her. How had she gotten here? Had Neville activated some strange spell when he killed Nagini? She couldn't be sure at that moment. The only thing she was sure of was that she was lost, and that wasn't much to go on. Standing around wondering wasn't going to get her answers, though, and Hermione was quite assertive when she needed her questions answered.
She walked along the mostly empty street until she came to a cafe. Seemed as good a place as any to stop to find something out. There were people there and it was surely not quite so cold inside, both good things in her book. She slipped inside and after a brief talk with the girl at the counter, she came to realize she was in a place called Lawrence, Kansas. That did not make anything any more clear to her, but she was directed to a computer network that supposed could help her figure something out a bit more. The idea of the internet helping her seemed a bit mad, but at this point, she'd take anything she could get.