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Chapter 3- The Come-and-Go Room



Sirius paced.

James had tried calming him down, but nothing seemed to work on the agitated seventh year. He ran a hand through his hair, casting a glance at the doors. The large entryway of Hogwarts was swathed in shadows, and moonlight spilled in through the higher windows. Other than that, the only light available was distributed from the many candles that were floating in brackets on the wall.

Remus remained in the shadows.

“She hasn’t really fought in a war, has she?” James said in a small voice, looking between the two of his friends. He shook his head, hair flying everywhere. “She’s too little.”

Sirius would have laughed. He had heard Prongs describe many girls with a colourful plethora of adjectives, but never ‘little’, and never with so much compassion. Only emptiness and silence answered him, and the boys were struck with how strange it was that whilst the entire school was sleeping soundly, they were waiting for a girl who had fallen out of the ceiling.

“Do you think she’ll stay here?” Remus asked quietly, and inquisitive as always. Sirius stopped moving.

To be honest, the question threw him off. Would she stay here? If she was telling the truth about fighting in a war, then where else would be safe for her? Where else but Hogwarts, under Dumbledore’s watchful eye?

Everyone knew he was the only one You-Know-Who was afraid of.

But why did he even care? Realistically, they’d only known the girl for about an hour. Why did he care if she was safe or not?

He gulped. This aloof attitude did not become him, and he couldn’t even fool himself.

The doors opened suddenly, and the object of his thoughts walked out. Sirius blushed.

Hermione looked healthier than she had when they had left her, with a slight colour to her cheeks. But he noticed it didn’t reach her eyes. Why didn’t it reach her eyes?

“I see you’ve gotten changed,” James commented, winking. He walked up to her and played with the end of the tie. Sirius caught a slight wince, but otherwise she stayed still. “Good choice. You’ll like it in Gryffindor, where dwell the brave at heart!”

He said the last bit dramatically, his eyes and fingers never leaving her tie. The other two shared a glance. James had never been noticeably nervous around a girl other than Lily.
Hermione smiled slightly, reaching up to put her hand on his. This seemed to jolt him out of his reverie, and his ears went pink and he coughed and stepped away. He really was like Harry, and it broke and melted her heart at the same time.

“So,” Sirius said, grinning. “D’you want us to lead the way to the Common Room?”

She shifted uncomfortably at the thought of having to be around more people, and the fact that the Common Room was somewhere that she wanted to avoid for as long as possible. Futile as it may sound, she wasn’t yet ready to watch the blonde boy die in front of her again and again. She cleared her throat, feeling faint. “Actually,” Hermione began. “I’d rather not have to be around anyone at the moment…”

Remus nodded understandingly, then frowned. “Where would you like to go?”

This surprised her. “O-oh. You don’t have to-”

“Don’t be silly, love,” Sirius replied smoothly. “We’re not about to leave you alone. Especially in a big and draughty castle like this! Who knows what monsters roam these very halls?”

Remus looked away.

“Sirius is right! You, fair maiden, happen to be in the fortunate company of The Marauders! Well, three of us, at least. And we know everything about this school!” James added happily.

Hermione couldn’t help but smile softly at them. “Lead the way then, my knights!” She replied jokingly, laughing as James and Sirius immediately sprang into life and galloped down the corridor acting, true to their title, like marauding knights. Remus shook his head, but was grinning as he offered her his arm.

She took it.

It was only too late when she realised that they were heading to the Gryffindor Common Room. Hermione attempted to pull her arm away, but Remus simply took her hand instead, looking at her with sincere amber eyes.

“We’re not going in,” he assured. “We’re just retrieving Peter. It’s not exactly fair on us to leave him alone to fend the Sixth Years.” At her confused look, he said, “They seem to find it amusing to turn him purple.”

Hermione, despite hating the Peter Pettigrew she was accustomed to, could not help but laugh at the image presented. Remus cracked a grin, his eyes soft.

The portrait hole swung open and out came the two dark-haired boys, with a slightly scrawnier boy who was wiping his eyes. He yawned.

“Peter, this is Hermione,” Sirius introduced, before adding with a cheeky wink, “she fell for me.”

Peter’s watery blue eyes popped out of his head, but he smiled at her still, a genuine smile, and waved lopsidedly in greeting.

If Hermione was honest, this wasn’t what she had expected the young Pettigrew to look like. Contrary to popular belief, he wasn’t plump, but skinny beyond belief. The bones in his body were protuberant, and she could easily see where he got his rat-animagus from. His nose was pointy, his ears were large and his lips small.

He was extremely short when compared to James and Sirius, who easily stood at about six foot.

They set off slowly down the corridor, and Hermione frowned when she realised that they were, for some reason, walking in the exact opposite direction to the Room of Requirement. She stopped walking, causing Remus to be wrenched backwards suddenly. His lanky frame being catapulted easily.

He spun around and looked at her with wide eyes. “Hermione…?”

Her mind on overdrive, she said quickly, “This isn’t the way to the Come-and-Go Room, is it?”

Remus cocked his head. “The what?”

“The Come-and-Go Room. The room Professor Dumbledore told me about when you left. I asked him for a personal suggestion and he said that. I assumed that’s where we were going.”

He considered this for a minute, before turning his head and calling, “James, Sirius, Peter. Come back here one minute.”

They complied, frowning too when Remus asked curiously, “Have any of you ever heard of the Come-and-Go Room?”

Sirius and James glanced at each other. Peter shook his head, hands deep in his pockets and yawned again. Her lips tilted at how dopey and cute he looked. Then she backtracked. Cute? Never in her other life would she have described Peter Pettigrew as cute. But he was, in an innocent and hamster-like way.

“Hermione tells me that Dumbledore mentioned it, as a quiet place.”

Their attention switched to her. “I thought that you knew…” she trailed off, mentally congratulating herself on her acting skills.

“No…” James said thoughtfully, racking his brain for any mention of this room. He pouted suddenly. “If Old Dumblydore told you about this secret room, then we better start sucking up fast! He knows more than he’s letting on! It would be great for the-” Map.

Hermione nearly grinned. They were careful. To anyone else, it would seem they had just forgotten something useless, but that was the second time they had almost slipped up, and Hermione knew them. Or at least, she would in twenty years’ time.

“Show us this Come-and-Go Room then, kitten,” Sirius said, grinning impishly. She did, turning on her heel and taking one or two small steps before she faltered, remembering that she shouldn’t know where she was going.

“He said it was on the Seventh Floor, opposite a tapestry depicting Barnabas the Barmy trying to teach trolls ballet…” They looked at her blankly. “I don’t know where that is,” Hermione said slowly, waggling her head a little to emphasise her point. “I’m new, remember?”

They erupted into action, brushing past her and leading her down the way they had come. She followed behind, feeling more and more relaxed as she familiarised herself with the stone walls that had encompassed and protected her since she was eleven years old. She had not participated in the battle up here.

Within seconds, they were stood outside the tapestry. She could feel their eyes burning into her, curious and confused. This only increased as Hermione began pacing outside the wall, biting her thumb and thinking of solace.

This time, Hermione knew, the room wouldn’t take on the form of the Gryffindor Common Room. There were too many bad memories concerning that place.

As expected, the wooden doors began to form, and without looking at the marvelled expressions of shock imprinted on the four boys’ faces, she entered the Room of Requirement.

What she required, turned out to be a library of some sort.

Bookcases as high as the ceiling lined the perimeter, crammed full of browning pages. A fireplace, equipped with a crackling orange fire, broke the line of shelves to the right. In front of which were three comfortable-looking couches, shaded a coffee colour that complimented the darkness of the wood, and danced yellow in the firelight.

Hermione sighed in bliss.

Even Remus’ lips quirked upwards.

Sirius and James raised their eyebrows and groaned. “Really? A bloody library?”

“Oh dear lord,” James cried, closing his eyes and pulling a wounded face. “It seems that Remus is now not only the only book-lover in our midst!”

“Yes,” Sirius agreed in mock-horror. “They will most assuredly get married and have lots of bookworm babies! Oh Pete, however will we cope?” The shaggy-haired boy flopped
onto Peter’s shoulder, who looked vaguely amused in his sleepy state.

“I don’t know, but I think you’ve tortured them enough, looking at their blushing faces,” Peter said, before shrugging his friend’s head off and walking over to the smallest sofa.

Remus and Hermione glanced at each other and, true to Peter’s word, saw that they both were sporting prominent blushes that in turn, made their faces and neck go even pinker.

“You like books?” Remus asked, trying to break the tension. He was nervous, and although he was the tallest of them all, at six foot two, he seemed to have the smallest presence. Russet coloured hair was draped across his forehead, and thin, almost invisible scars ran down his face. Hermione couldn’t help but think he was rather good-looking, in a less than conventional way.

She smiled. “Of course. Ron used to say that if I could, I would probably marry a book! Which was ironic, as everyone knew that I loved-”

Him.

She loved him.

But she couldn’t admit it aloud. Her face dropped, and the flicker of life in her eye was doused in something dark. Hermione had no idea whether she had left behind a boyfriend… or a corpse.

She had run. Run so fast away from the scene that she had not even bothered to see if Ron was okay. He’d lost a best friend too. And now, she realised with a hollowing sense of regret, he’d lost a girlfriend as well.

Hermione might have lost herself in the past. But Ron had lost everything in the present.

She closed her eyes, inhaling sharply.

A gentle touch made her open them again, and amber eyes were staring at her intently. His thumb brushed against her cheek and Hermione felt tears cloud her eyes, her resolve crumbling.

She couldn’t pretend.

She couldn’t do this, and pretend that everything was okay, and normal, and the same when it wasn’t.

Everything was royally fucked up.

And Hermione had only just grasped that.

She was barely aware of Remus leading her over to where the other three were sat. Barely aware of him sitting her down, and letting her rest her head on his shoulder. She could feel his arm around her, hugging her close, and the warmth from the flames in the hearth crawled up her skin. His breath kissed the stray hair and the shell of her ear as he whispered over and over again, “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

And that was how Hermione Granger fell asleep; in the Room of Requirement, in the company of a werewolf, a traitor, a convict and a carcass.

oOoOo

As soon as Hermione’s breathing evened out, Remus tore his eyes away from her face to look at his friends.

They were all staring at him.

Sirius’ eyes strayed to the sleeping girl every now and then, before he shook his head and stretched out on the armchair that had been conjured. “What the hell happened to her?” He asked sadly.

“I don’t know,” Remus replied, shifting to try and get into a more comfortable position. “But whatever it was, I don’t think it’s fair for her to mourn alone.”

“Mourn?” Peter asked, bewildered. Remus shrugged.

“The look in her eyes… It’s a look of emptiness. A look that proves she’s loved and lost far too much for far too little…”

Nobody asked how he knew that, for they already had an idea.

Remus was a werewolf. He was accustomed to suffering. He’d seen it first-hand, experienced it.

They were all quiet.

Then Peter spoke up.

“Things are going to be different now, aren’t they?” He asked.

James’ head jerked upwards. But they realised that he was right.

They didn’t know how, or why, but they knew that something was changing. It was subtle, but the arrival of the girl with the bushy hazelnut-coloured hair, and the dead eyes seemed to disrupt their normal sequence.

There was no reasonable explanation for the closeness they felt to Hermione Granger.

It was like they knew her, but that was impossible.

Right?

Looking down at her sleeping face as she nuzzled further into him, Remus found that he wasn’t sure what breached the boundaries of possibility any more.