Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (216 page)

Harry nodded, then said “Yes” because Hermione wasn’t turning toward him, though the word felt blocked in his throat.

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Hermione said. “It was, in fact, an exceptionally gruesome and painful death.”

“I, um. I did set some things up
just
in case
you still wanted to be a hero. There were some short windows of opportunity where I didn’t have time to consult you, I couldn’t let you see me because I expected you to be given Veritaserum later. But if you don’t like it, I can undo most of what I did and you can just ignore the rest.”

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, toward where London lay in the unseeable distance. “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 Girl-Who-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 sixty-year-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 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 college, 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 fractional-Kelvin 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.

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 that time, he said that 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, but her face was resolute. “So, is there something I can do?”

Harry’s throat was choked. He reached into his pouch, and signed C-L-O-A-K since he couldn’t speak, and drew forth the fuliginious 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 -”