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Biding My Time: Our Way	By : watchyerback Category: Harry Potter > Threesomes/Moresomes Views: 9795 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, nor any of the characters from the books or movies. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 7
- 8
- 9
Disclaimer:
Harry Potter and company are the property and creation of J.K.
Rowling. The only things that're mine are the purely non-profit story
below and the Coerceo Solvamus potion.

CHAPTER SEVEN:

“I thought I’d
find you here. Would you mind?” Lupin indicated one of the
chairs across from Hermione, who nodded.

A couple of seats away, Ron shut the
book he’d been pretending to read. Since his arrival two days
ago, he was always at Hermione’s side. At the same time he
sensed how uncomfortable she was in any male presence, and kept some
distance.

The former professor fiddled
uncomfortably with an open Hogwarts: A History book. “We’ve
found out some things,” he began hesitantly, “but I
understand if you don’t want to hear about it.”

Hermione
leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms in front of her. “Ron,
can you excuse us?”

The boy clearly didn't like
being left out. “What? But why? Hermione -”

“Please.”

“Fine!” he
snapped and stomped off.

Hermione sighed. She sensed
how badly Ron wanted to know what was going on, but she wasn’t
ready to talk about what had happened yet. Besides, she had an idea
where this discussion was headed. She turned her attention back to
her old Defense Against Dark Arts teacher. “It’s an
augmenter, isn’t it?”

Lupin was stunned. So
that’s why she’s been in the library all this time. “You
really are the brightest witch of your age.”

The girl’s lips
actually twitched at that. “At first I thought it was some kind
of love charm, but it didn’t fit the facts,” she
confessed.

“What have you found
so far?”

“An augmenter can be
in any shape or form, although it’s normally a small item.
Pieces of jewelry are favored because of their size and romantic
association, but basically it’s anything that’s charmed
to magnify what a person feels. The augmenter usually targets
feelings of love or lust.” The way she recited it reminded
Lupin starkly of the precocious thirteen year old he’d first
met on the train to Hogwarts.

Poor girl. He nodded
and said softly, “Then you know that it acts only on what’s
there.”

Hermione looked down. The
books had led her to almost the same conclusion. An augmenter was not
like the love potion Ron had accidentally ingested last term. It
didn’t manufacture feelings that didn’t exist. But she
still wasn’t ready to believe it. “There was never
anything like that between Harry and me.”

Lupin said very gently,
“When I first met you, I was glad to see the bond between the
three of you. But I always got the feeling that you and Harry got
along better. As friends, I mean,” he clarified as the girl
shifted to protest. “Maybe it’s because, unlike many of
the students at Hogwarts, you and Harry come from strong muggle
backgrounds. You don’t have to explain to him, do you, what a
phone is?” he joked.

More seriously, he
continued, “Hermione, the bond between you and Harry has always
been strong. Maybe you’ve always cared for each other deeply as
friends, but emotions, especially powerful ones, are not easily
compartmentalized. Sometimes you care for a person on many levels.
Eventually, some of those feelings you act on and some you don’t.
There’s no shame in it.” He paused. “You touched
the augmenter, didn’t you?”

The girl flushed. Of course
Lupin would remember how Tonks and he had found them. “Yes. It
let me understand a little of what Harry felt. It’s very
strong,” she said in an objective tone, “but ...”

It doesn’t explain
what he did. When she had held it, she had felt desire, yes, and
she had kissed Harry. But nowhere in that had been the urge to hurt
or to force. Unless ... “The attack.” Because of
everything that had happened Hermione had nearly forgotten about it.
“Professor, what’s going on?”

“This isn’t
going to be easy for you to hear,” he warned. “We’ve
received information from a highly unlikely, but so far reliable,
source.” He didn’t think he needed to mention young
Malfoy at this time. “The attack on Harry was meant to do two
things: let a Death Eater plant the augmenter, and get a highly
specialized potion into his bloodstream.

“The substance on the
icepick.”

Lupin nodded. “The
clever thing is that the augmenter and the potion boost each other’s
effects, but they do work separately as well.”

“What is it?”
the young witch asked, curious despite herself.

The older man
looked positively grim. “It’s called the Coerceo
Solvamus, usually referred to simply as the Solvamus. It
was outlawed a hundred years ago. Almost no one remembers how to make
it anymore.”

“Except
maybe former Hogwarts potions professors,” his companion
guessed caustically. “What does it do?”

“In a word?
It drives you mad.” The lycanthrope tried to rein in his
disgust. The Coerceo Solvamus was a new low even for Snape,
but to use it on a mere boy and a former student was practically unthinkable! “Sorry.
The potion breaks down a person’s inhibitions.”

The girl looked
puzzled. “That doesn’t sound too bad.”

Lupin’s
eyebrows rose. “You think so? Hermione, you must realize that
most of our lives are spent learning to control what we feel, do and
say.” He straightened in his chair and suddenly it was as if he
was her Hogwarts professor again.

“Our
inhibitions to a certain point define who we are, because it involves
a constant choice of what we will and won’t do. It takes years
of everyday living to build restraint. The Solvamus strips you
of that in days,” he revealed darkly. “How many people do
you think can survive that sort of mental strain? Wizards and muggles
alike have gone mad from the Solvamus.”

“The worst
thing about it,” he continued, “is that it targets
exactly those passions and feelings over which the victim has been
exercising the greatest control. In short, what that person
considers to be a moral restraint, some impulse or emotion that he
absolutely must rein in. Add to that the fact that the augmenter
magnified Harry’s feelings a hundredfold ...”

He did not
notice, until it was too late, that the color had drained from
Hermione’s face. When she finally spoke, her voice was
trembling with suppressed horror. “Are you ... are you telling
me that ... Harry has always WANTED to do those things to me?” She
sounded horrified.

Oh Merlin
forgive me. In his indignation, he had forgotten to whom he was
talking to. “No,” he replied quietly. “I’m
saying that Harry must have had feelings for you for a long time, and
that he made a firm decision somewhere along the way to bury them as
deep as he could. There’s a dam bursting inside him now, and
considering what he was up against, Tonks and I are actually
surprised he was able to fight it for so long.”

He took a deep
breath, reluctant to continue. “I’m sorry, but there’s
more. Again, I’d understand if you’d rather not ...”

To his surprise,
the young witch actually muttered several expletives under her
breath. Then she nodded.

“They had a
plan. It’s heartless, but Tonks and I agree that you must
know.”

The
girl was visibly bracing herself. “Go on,” she said in a
near whisper.

“Another
cruelty of the Solvamus is that it wears off exactly at
the moment its victim completely breaks free of his restraint. The
Death Eaters thought that Harry wouldn’t be able to resist,
that, with the augmenter, he would break within hours, not days.”

Lupin forced
himself to meet the young witch’s eyes. “If Harry had
succeeded in his ... plans that night, if at the moment of the act,
he returned to his true self, what would he have done?” What
would Harry or Ron do to anybody who truly hurt Hermione? He
could guess. The Marauders would have torn anyone apart who would’ve
dared to attack Lily that way. Not that he and Sirius had even been
half as close to Lily as Harry and Ron were to Hermione. “I
think we already know what Ron would do.”

Hermione looked
ill. “That’s what this is? Another attempt on Harry’s
life? Only this time Harry was supposed to kill himself, or Ron would've...?”

“Or
you, if you were defending yourself.”

He
could give her no more than a moment to absorb it. “There’s
one last thing.” Suddenly the thin man looked old and tired.
“I’m sorry to say you were right the first time. The
Solvamus isn’t really classified as a poison, because of
what I just told you. But eventually the struggle between the person
and the potion takes a toll on the body, specially the heart and the
brain. We went to Snape’s old potions professor with a sample
of the Solvamus. He estimates that we have seven more days to
find an antidote. If we don’t ...”

He
could see that Hermione already knew what he was going to say, but he
had to anyway. “Harry will go mad, or die.”

================

Would
you like to see him? It’s perfectly safe. Harry’s
unconscious while we’re treating him, and Tonks and I will be
with you the whole time.

Lupin
departed soon after his unexpected offer. He left an extremely
conflicted girl behind.

Do
I want to see him? Hermione bit her lip. The mere thought made
her heart drum nervously. She hadn’t told anyone, but when she
closed her eyes at night she was still haunted by images of Harry
looming over her, of his wild feral gaze as he unbuttoned her blouse
and palmed her breasts with rough hands.

It
had been the face of a stranger. More, it had been the face of a man
she could fear ... and hate.

She
was afraid he would always look that way to her now.

Hermione
had never hated Voldemort and his Death Eaters more than right at
this moment. How DARE they? How dare they mess with us this way?!

The truth was her
friendship with Harry and Ron had become one of the anchors of her
life. It was something she felt would be there no matter how
much time passed or how they changed or what else happened. The boys
knew her as few people ever would. All the bits - from her at-times
irritating bossiness to the idealistic but misguided heart that
founded S.P.E.W., to the compassion and the protectiveness, the
determination, and yes, the cleverness that applied equally
to school and, surprisingly, to breaking the rules, too – and
they accepted her, no, actually liked her for all of that.

Hermione
had learned from them, had become the person she was now in part
because of the boys and what the three of them had been through. A
better person, she felt, who knew how to risk everything when it was
important enough. For all her love of books, she felt that some of
the most valuable lessons she had learned over the past years had
come from being with Harry and Ron.

Like
learning how to tell when something was important enough to
risk everything for.

“Books!
And cleverness! There are more important things – friendship
and bravery and -”

How
to be brave.

Standing
between her friend and a convicted murderer. “If you want to
kill Harry, you’ll have to kill us too!”

How
to love. How to be steadfast.

“You
said to us once before that there was time to turn back if we wanted
to. We’ve had time, haven’t we?”

Hermione
covered her face with her hands. She felt like weeping. Should I turn back now? She could, and she knew that no one would
blame her for it, Harry least of all.

“Are
you alright?”

She
dropped her hands, and found Ron standing in front of her. He
looked worried, and she could see that he badly wanted to comfort her
but didn’t know how.

She
reached out to him, and his large hands gladly enveloped hers. He sat
down in the chair next to her, facing her. They sat that way for
awhile, not saying anything, just holding hands.

“I’m
glad you’re here,” she said, meaning it.

He
grimaced. “I should’ve been here sooner. If I had -”

“No,
don’t even think it!” she interrupted fiercely. “I
just, I can’t bear `if’s’ right now.”

For
a second he seemed like he might argue the point. Then he
relaxed, and asked, “Do you want to talk about it?”

She
was hesitant. “Some. How did you find out?”

“Lupin
came to the house to see my parents. I eavesdropped. I came here
straightaway and ... well, you saw the rest.” He didn’t
think Hermione needed to know how murderous he’d felt. If they
hadn’t interrupted him, he might very well have beaten Harry
almost to death.

But
she was looking at him curiously. “Ron, when we came in, what
was that bit about you and Harry promising not to let anything happen
to me?”

“Oh.”
He felt the color rise in his cheeks. “It was years ago. We
never told you, but we were really shaken up when the basilisk petrified
you. It was just wrong, seeing you like that. One day we got
to talking and we sort of agreed that, since we were the blokes in
this gang and all, that we should be the ones taking the risks. So we
made a pact, you know, the way kids do.” He cleared his throat.
“Not to let anything happen to you if we could help it.”

Now
it was Hermione’s turn to look like she was about to argue.
Instead she let out a deep breath. “That was very sweet. Thank
you.” But her eyes flashed as she said it, and Ron knew what
that meant. She wasn’t about to stop taking risks and doing
what she thought was right.

In
a way, it made him glad. For the past few days the young witch had
been pale and quiet, not saying much and burying herself in books. So
unlike the girl Ron had grown up knowing. Well, except for the
books part. “What did Lupin want?”

“They
found out what’s wrong with Harry.”

Ron
frowned. “That’s it? I can tell them what’s bloody
well wrong with that -”

“We
were supposed to kill him. Or let Harry kill himself.”

“WHAT?!”

Hermione
quickly told him about the augmenter and the Solvamus.
Although she left a lot of details out - particularly the part about
Harry’s long-buried feelings - there was enough to make Ron
grasp what the Death Eaters had planned.

When
she finished, Ron’s eyes were wide. He’d known all this
time that the Voldemort and his Death Eaters were evil personified,
but this! Was there nothing these people wouldn’t stoop to?
“You mean to tell me Harry’s going to die if ...”

“Hermione!
Ron!” Tonks ran breathlessly into the library. “Come with
me right now!”

The pair shot to
their feet. “What is it?” Hermione asked as they sped
after the Auror.

“Harry did
it again. I saw it with my own eyes this time. One second he was lying on the bed
completely immobilized, and the next he was running past me.”

“Where did
he go?”

Tonks looked
uncharacteristically grim. “The roof.”

===================

It’s
a long way down. Harry adjusted his glasses as he gazed
dispassionately at the street below. He had never realized before how
tall and narrow Grimmauld was. He wondered what would happen to the charm
that kept the house invisible from the muggles below once he jumped. Would the magic
keep him hidden even after he fell, or would his body suddenly appear
on the pavement out of nowhere? Probably the latter, Harry thought.

From
behind, he heard the crunch of slate as someone else climbed out the
attic window onto the roof, like he had. “Remus,” he said, using
Lupin’s given name for the first time. “Tell Hermione and
Ron I’m sorry.”

“Tell
me yourself.”

He
whirled around so fast that he nearly stumbled.

“Careful!”
Hermione gasped as a small piece of tile broke away under the sudden
movement and plunged to the pavement below.

Harry
actually closed his eyes for a second. The sight of the
brown-haired witch instantly set his heart pounding. “You
shouldn’t be here. You’re not safe around me,” he
said bleakly.

“Did
you really expect us to just stand by and let you do this? Shouldn’t
you know us better by now, Harry? Don’t you know me?”

“Don’t
try to save me this time, Hermione. I’m not worth it.” He
said it with absolute conviction. “What I did to you ... what I
still want to do,” he swallowed. “Do you remember how mad
I was when I thought Sirius betrayed my parents? To me, turning on your friends is one of the worst things in the world. But it’s exactly what
I’ve done.”

Hermione
found herself in the strange situation of trying to save her attacker from harm. No, not her attacker, she told herself. Harry. “It wasn’t
you,” she tried to reason. “It was the pin and the drug
in your system. Ask Lupin if you don’t believe me.”

The
dark-haired wizard seemed to hesitate. “What drug?”

“Come
inside and we’ll tell you.” Hermione held out her hand.

“Better
do what she says, mate.” The slate crunched under Ron’s
feet as he stood next to the girl. “You know how she is when
she doesn’t get her way.”

Harry
looked at the pair of them in disbelief. “There’s no way
you can forgive me for this. Things between the three of us will
never be the same.”

Ron
and Hermione exchanged a look. Then Ron held out his hand, too.
Ironically, it was the same hand he had used to pummel Harry a few
days ago. “You’ll never know, will you, if you stay out
here? Let Lupin tell his story. I want to hear it myself.”

Harry
stared at their proffered hands and suddenly he was filled with a deep thankfulness
for his friends. Even if I do every single thing that’s
expected of me, nothing I do will ever mean I deserve this. He nodded shakily. Then he let them guide him in.

In
case anyone misses the stuff, some smut will resume in the next
chapter. Reviews much appreciated!

Sammie:
Glad you liked the way Ron got to beat Harry up. I thought someone
needed to and it was fun to write. I keep thinking Hermione should
dish out some punishment but haven't figured out how yet. Hope you
like this chapter. It's a bit longer. =)

tabitoo:
thank you! I hope you didn't miss it too much. I've been trying to
update once a week so hopefully it's not too long a wait between
chapters.

PrphtssP:
thanks! the fact that you're reading the story at all is pretty
much high praise. Can't do much about the fact that it's a het
story, but the relationships will definitely be a huge part of the
story every step of the way.

Amira:
as much as I'd like to, it's going to take a few chapters more. As
for Harry and Hermione, the story codes guarantee that they will get
together at least once. =)

Avanell:
Glad to hear from you again. I tried, but kept ending up with these
awkward bits that went nowhere. Guess that particular conversation
was really just beyond me
- 7
- 8
- 9
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