A/N: This exists entirely because of the heathens and rats of a certain Bellamione discord and some strange eleventh hour inspiration provided by all the beautiful mess therein, with a side of Hermione's thirty-ninth birthday. I have no other explanation. This is all their fault. To steal from the disclaimer I gave my discord children, may I present to you a very rough, very unpolished, very written-in-its-entirety-late-last-night-and-not-touched-since 4k one-shot full of ideas I'm sure have been done before, but none of which have been done by me, because I've written, hmmm, one thing for y'all ever.

Until now.

As one of those one-hit-wonder ficsters, I feel like I have to be Very Upfront that this has absolutely nothing to do with Glass Silence. Instead, this is quite possibly the strangest attempt at an almost canon take on somehow making Bellamione happen on, well, today. 9.19.2018.

Missed ya,

- Zarrene.

Jinx and Counter

"Well, well. If it isn't the magnificent Ms. Mudblood herself. Hermione Granger, in the flesh. Aren't you getting a bit old to be lurking around Hogwarts, sneaking about after hours?"

"Evening, Bellatrix," Hermione answered with a calm she couldn't fully feel as the shadowy figure circled her, soundless on the chilly, mid-September flagstones of this rarely used seventh floor corridor. "You don't look a day over fifty."

She earned a chilling laugh. "And you look like death."

At this, Hermione smiled. "Thank you."

Now that she'd found what she'd come back to her alma mater in search of, Hermione allowed herself to settle on the nearest stone bench, tucked securely between two stalwart suits of sleeping armor. She sat in the center. This evening, she was disinclined to share. She wanted to sit, she wanted a drink, and she wanted to look Bellatrix Lestrange in the eye after all these years, and—

Well. Beyond that, she wasn't sure.

Tugging the flask and unadorned silver cups from the deceptively small handbag at her side, she poured two measures of Firewhiskey. She looked up as she drank from her own without offering a toast, taking in the haphazard curls, wild, hooded eyes, and thin, distrustful lips of the witch before her. All steps accomplished, then. Sat, drank, stared. Came, saw, conquered. Perhaps she should leave.

"To what do I owe the pleasure, then? Or have you come solely to gawk."

Hermione considered the low, pointed question, then rejected it. "It's my birthday."

At that, Bellatrix snorted. "Rough year, hm? Drink with a Death Eater looked better to you than drinking alone?"

Hermione couldn't help a tiny frown, or the added sharpness in her reply. "Not particularly. Rough, that is." She swirled her drink with a restless hand. "I'm thirty-nine years old and I suspect I'll make Minister before I'm forty."

"Not gawking, then. Gloating."

Hermione drew in a short breath between her teeth. "No." Not that, either.

Bellatrix wore exasperated disinterest like a particularly artisan jewel. "What, then, oh successful one? Merlin forbid I die of suspense."

Hermione continued to hold her state, feeling smaller and more tired by the minute. "I don't know," she said at last. "I just thought... After twenty years, you know, it seemed like I should – I could ..." She caught her hand fussing at her sleeve, tugging, fingers about to wander up and trace well-faded letters, wrap tight and twist until the skin was rubbed red, until the white shown through as brightly as the red once had, the days fresh after its carving. An old tic. One she'd thought she'd long since shaken. "It seemed like something to be done. That's all."

"Don't take that tone with me." Bellatrix rolled a shoulder, reached up, and slid her wand free from her hair, sending full curls bouncing wildly as she tapped the tip against the corner of her lips. "Sounds like someone has a personal problem."

"Yet here you are," Hermione snapped.

"Guilty as changed." She grinned, then. Held out two pale, thin wrists, as though awaiting Hermione's shackles. She had just enough time to spot rings of marred flesh before her sleeves dropped over them again. "But I'm always here. You're the visitor. If you've got something to say to me—" Her eyes went wide, falsely innocent, as she let her words go high and lilting, then plunged back down into an unwelcoming hiss. "—say it."

She leaned in, lending weight to her sharpened words, close enough Hermione thought she caught a whiff of torch smoke and silver polish, the nightmarish remnant of a single unforgettable night in Malfoy Manor twenty too-short years before.

But Bellatrix slid two steps back, and the memory shattered. "Never let it be said that I am not a good host," she finished with the same wicked grin, propping her chin up upon her knuckles.

Hermione downed the second glass of whiskey in a single eye-stinging gulp.

"Well. That wasn't polite."

Hermione pierced her with a glare, wishing the oversized shot had left her eyes a little less watery. "Were you going to drink it?"

She didn't wait for the response. Whiskey courage and a keen desire to stop getting beaten to punchlines finally loosed her tongue. "You know, I've done a fair many things in the years since I met you. Winning the war was a start. The steps we've taken towards equity for magical creatures... nothing short of revolutionary. The Ministry is an entirely new world these days. And there have been... Death Eaters, too. Changed. Rehabilitated and reintegrated into society. Azkaban is closed for good. I- I've worked beside some of them. Your sister, even. We've come so far, accomplished so much in such a short time that I—"

Hermione came up so short she thought Bellatrix must have interrupted her, yet found nothing but the same eerie, intent disinterest staring silently back at her. It was all her, unable to find the words.

"It shouldn't matter anymore, should it?"

"What?" Bellatrix drawled into the echoing silence. "That little miss revolutionary wears my brand? That she sobbed and screamed on my dining room floor?"

"No," Hermione said. Insisted. "No. That you died."

For the first time this cursed evening, Bellatrix looked taken-aback. Her eyes narrowed, concealing her surprise a second too late. "Didn't realize you cared, Granger."

Hermione bobbed her head back and forth, a jittery sort of 'yes-and-no' that had the warmth of the earlier drink slinking back and forth in her chest. "That's just it, isn't it? I shouldn't. There's no reason to. And yet, I do. Always have done. Why did you?" The question came out hasty, an unsubtle deflection. "Care, I mean. Enough to... stay."

A flicker of something like pain crossed through Bellatrix's silver-shrouded eyes, dark beneath the glow. "I had a bad feeling." Her words dripped sarcasm, but they were both poor deflectors tonight. "About what was waiting." Her lips cracked into teeth again. "Besides. Turn down the chance to live on, embodying the collective nightmare of an entire war?"

Hermione's lips twitched, then fell. "Of everyone I ever met who served him, I think I understood you least... and best." Honesty, at last, seemed her easiest choice. "I suppose I've been... hung up on this because I wish ... or, because I think I might have reached you, if you were one of the ones we'd been left with. I learned so much more, after it all ended. About you, your family. You were brilliant in your years here." Her fingers traced the chipped stone lip of the bench, chafing against irregular divots and scars. "Always fanatical about your cause, near unstoppable with a wand. Yet you chose to serve him. Why?"

"You chose to serve the chosen one," Bellatrix snapped, Harry's old epithet flung like a knife.

Hermione, expecting it, caught it with ease. "Yes. I know. That's why I asked."

Bellatrix frowned, expression—full body, really, flickering. "His was a vision of a greater world, the greatest possible future for wizardkind, the utmost—"

"—He had a cause," Hermione cut in. She poured herself another half a glass, then half into the second for the company that would never drink again. "And he was... a figurehead, which you could never be. I couldn't, either. Sharp girls with wild ideas aren't good for... causes. I had the drive but not... not the conscience," she confessed. Bellatrix was frowning at her, weight shifting restlessly, but she remained across from her, seemingly content to wait out her discontent with Hermione's words. "It takes such faith, such blind belief in something, to lead a movement, a revolution, instead of just... a classroom, a government, a cloistered pureblood society with a thousand laws... We both followed someone into war for a chance to lead in the future, lead a world whose vision had already come. We couldn't be trusted. Someone like us, leading a war would have been..."

"Bloodier," Bellatrix said with a grim sort of glee.

"Frankly, yes." Hermione clasped her hands, leaned back against the wall behind her. "I never was all that 'good.'" She peered up at Bellatrix through narrowed eyes. "And I will not hesitate to lie about the content of this conversation, should you take it upon yourself to repeat it."

"Naughty."

Hermione's lips twitched again. She did feel it, the schoolgirl rebellion of this whole silly endeavor captured in that word; the creeping into Hogwarts well past the students' curfew to sneak up to the place she'd learned from her children was the most frequented haunt of Hogwarts' least favorite apparition. All for the sort of soul-baring typically reserved for late night confessions at bleary-eyed slumber parties full of young women drunk on their parents liquors and tired of being discouraged from having any kind of depths, let alone exploring them.

"I suppose what I'm saying is... You've always been stuck in my head, in the back of everything I do, as this distracting mix of a bad dream, a missed opportunity, and an... an almost something. Do you know what I mean? Do you have any idea?" She asked it with sudden desperation, gripping her glass so tightly she could feel the metal fighting her bones. "Not that I ever thought you've been floating around the castle muttering and moaning about the Mudblood you tortured a few weeks before you died, but it seems so..." She let out a huff of frustration, feeling her words leading her down paths she'd tread too many times with the husband who'd left her, the boy who'd fallen in love with the girl from the war, who couldn't understand why she continued to fight, why she needed to work, to lead, and why a dead murderess from the other side of the battle continued to hold such inexplicable fascination for the one she'd left alive. Ron had never understood why she couldn't be just a wife, just a mother, and he'd understood, even less, why she couldn't let distant ghosts lie. "As if, in some other strange time, I could have followed someone far worse than Harry down a path not all that different from yours."

Bellatrix squinted at her, unblinking and unspeaking for long enough Hermione started in on her wrist again. Tug. Squeeze. Twist.

"Shove over."

Hermione blinked.

"Do you want to feel the dirty blood freeze in your veins?"

Even knowing it was an empty threat, it was enough to drive the point home, and Hermione made room on the bench. Bellatrix settled exceptionally poorly, not quite resting on any surface, one elbow through the wall beside her, one foot propped up on thin air.

"When you showed up, I expected more, you know. Thought for sure the day I saw you again would be the day you'd cracked death open and found a way to banish me to hell yourself."

Hermione felt her cheeks protesting the reappearance of her tiny smile. It felt ill-used. Bellatrix had been uncomfortably on the nose when she called it a rough year. New Year's had been the end of a marriage. Everything since had been untangling. Homes and their belongings, children and their lives. With the house empty and the children... here, somewhere below and above, hopefully sleeping, Hermione had been confronted with a first birthday alone in a very, very long time.

She could have called Harry. Hadn't had much chance to catch up since hasty hellos at Kings Cross at the start of term.

But she had come here instead.

Bellatrix weighed her smile in a second. "Proved your point, have I? Knew you had secrets the first time I looked at you. You screamed like someone who had something to hide."

It should have chilled her, words like these, but the whiskey had done its warming job, and even Bellatrix's sharpest taunts lacked the power to hurt her, now, like this. She was a shadow, a remnant. "I sometimes imagine a darker Order," she confessed. "In a more drawn out war. Wonder if I'd have been the one with my wand at your throat."

"Would've liked that, would you?"

She leaned into the taunt, casting out a chill breeze over Hermione's face and neck, raising goosebumps. The bench had begun to frost over beneath her, and Hermione suddenly wondered if Bellatrix was not being entirely facetious, when she claimed she could freeze Hermione's blood. "No," she said. "But it took me a long time to realize that. Not to want revenge." She finally allowed Bellatrix to see her own sharper smile, the smile of witch who had, in fact, spent a long several months in the depth of the Department of Mysteries, searching out the secrets of death that would ensure Bellatrix's spirit would not be waiting when her children arrived at Hogwarts' gates.

Secrets she had neither shared, nor acted upon, and Rose had come home unharmed.

Bellatrix's glow paled. "Gawking, gloating, and threats." She crossed her legs on the bench and propped an elbow on each knee, chin on hands, hunched forward with mockingly eager intent. "What's next, then, hmm?" She blew a curl out of her eyes, bathing Hermione's skin in a breath of ice. "Feels like this is just the foreplay."

At that, Hermione flushed, Firewhiskey lending speed and wide-open blood vessels to her embarrassment. She nursed her last inch for a reprieve from eye contact, knowing she'd just been matched—discomfort for discomfort, jinx for counter. "This was it," she confessed. "Come here, have a drink, see what would happen if I saw you. See if I could finally put it out of my mind."

"Your lost cause," she said indifferently.

"I didn't say that."

"Missed opportunity," Bellatrix amended with a wave of her hand, and Hermione was somewhat surprised she'd absorbed her words. "And have you, then?"

Slowly, Hermione shook her head. "No," she admitted. She set down the glass, still searching the depths of Bellatrix's cold, empty, glowing eyes, hating, in that moment, that she could see the stone behind them, but not the thoughts between. "It's..."

She didn't catch herself reaching out until she'd reached, and the tips of her fingers went cold and clammy, fingerprints outlined in stark relief by the glow two centimeters into Bellatrix's untouchable cheek. She pulled back like she'd been scalded.

She startled twice over when Bellatrix stood, knocked the last half glass of whiskey with her knee and barely caught it by the rim before it could plummet to the floor. "This way," she said, and started off down the corridor.

Hermione frowned, took a second to gather herself, then followed.

She felt more out of place, standing. She still wore her work robes, Ministry cut, dark and professional and modern, out of place hurrying down an ancient hallway after a glowing woman at an indecent hour of early morning. Her hair had been up, but leaning against the wall had been a fight it couldn't win, and she could feel tendrils that had escaped the chignon ticking the back of her neck.

Bellatrix did an abrupt about face in front of an eerily familiar stretch of wall. Hermione took two paces back to avoid being walked through, and stared, pit forming in her stomach, as Bellatrix crossed the same set of uneven stones three times.

A door appeared in the wall.

"I thought..." Hermione whispered. "After the fire, I was assured it had been destroyed. My daughter..."

Bellatrix held it open. Just as she spoke, Hermione noticed the door's faint glow. "Oh, it was." She held it wide, grin beckoning Hermione closer. "Things that die at Hogwarts have a most unfortunate habit of not staying dead."

"But I can still go inside?" Hermione whispered even as she stepped closer, one toe on the living side of an impossible threshold.

"A living wish would not have brought it," she said with unusual patience. "But yes." Still, Hermione hesitated. Bellatrix rolled her eyes. "Do you honestly believe if I had the power to murder your precious Mudblood children just by luring them through a door, this school would still be open?"

Hermione stepped through.

The landscape she found was dizzying and cold, lit by innumerable shadowy objects strewn about a thousand ghost-lit shelves and desks and clutters of floor. Things seemed to have settled all on top of one another, layered into shared spaces where stacks of textbooks were skewered by the silver-gray prongs of a wire birdcage, where the back wheel of a bicycle spun slowly in midair as the front half tangled with the guts of a filing cabinet, spokes and paper tabs coexisting in complete disharmony. Hermione reached out to still the dizzying motion of the tire, but her hand encountered nothing but chilled smoke—the circle continued unarrested. The forgotten things had truly been reduced to memory.

The hand that caught her chin, however, was shockingly solid. "Time is a strange thing," Bellatrix said, holding her jaw tight with cold, long-nailed hands. Hermione stared, too shocked to pull away, to stunned to move. "You've caught up to me."

Hermione stared into eyes as black as pavement ice, impenetrable. Skin as pale as death touched her own, but this was the living pallor of all branches of the Black family tree Hermione had ever met, no longer the ghostly silver-blue of their surroundings. Her hair gleamed with life, thin lips dark and flush with blood, cossetted robes caging her waist, hem of full, dark skirts dragging properly against an eerie, star-polished floor, no longer stirred by the faint, ever present whispering wind from the other side.

And yet, she was right. Hermione Granger stared into a face untouched by the years which she herself had known. Here, time and death had made them equals. "The room can give you this?"

Bellatrix cocked her head. "More or less. Haven't fully figured if it gives me something or takes something from you, but I'm more, here."

"Yes," Hermione said, knowing it was more, even, than the color in her form or the touch of her skin. She had known ghosts. Bellatrix was more herself than any she had seen before. Now, knowing this was her chosen haunt, knowing she spent her time fed by the unexplained magic of this room and a need to be powerful, vibrant, and alive, she thought she better understood why.

She reached up and tugged Bellatrix's hand away from her face, hesitating before touching her of her own volition, as though the skin of her hand would still be slick with Hermione's decades-old blood. "Why bring me here?" she asked. "Why sit through all of that. Why listen to me at all?"

Bellatrix licked her lips. Before Hermione could release her hand, it twisted in her grasp, grabbing her wrist without warning, pushing back the sleeve as she gasped.

Sharp nails lanced the old letters. "Wanted to see my handiwork one last time." Hermione tried to yank away, but here, Bellatrix's grip was strong. The nails retreated, replaced by fingertips, but the gesture was no less cruel. "I'm the thing you couldn't solve, hmm? Means something to you. Well," she crooned, voice suddenly soft and tripping the tipping edge of sanity. She pulled Hermione close, pressure against fragile wrist bones. "You're the last thing alive I broke, dearie." She pulled the scar to her lips, licked it like an animal cleaning her own wound.

And, Hermione supposed, in a way it was.

Frozen by the casual violence underlying each movement Bellatrix had made since dragging her in here, Hermione stared up into too-familiar eyes, waiting to be thrown back into the past, into the last time those eyes had been upon her and she had been screaming in pain, fearing for her life. She'd had nightmares. Had been told some wounds never heal.

Instead, she found herself staring into those exact eyes, and seeing only the eyes she'd imagined a thousand times over in a thousand distracted maybes since that day, the eyes of an imperfection in her vision of the world she would lead, the eyes of a self she might have been, had she left herself unleashed, or tethered herself to madness.

Had Bellatrix broken her? She supposed that might be true. But, lacking the ability to mend the dark-right-hand-sized hole she'd left in all of their lives, she'd remade herself instead.

So when Bellatrix stopped pulling, she pulled harder, dug her own close-cut nails in to cold, impossible curls, and dragged cold lips down to meet her own. Tongue on skin - lips on lips - jinx for counter, discomfort for—

Cold, still, the cold of a magic which did not fully understand a mimicry of life, but a cold that tasted of torch smoke and skin in a way no magic should understand, in a way which was unmistakably Bellatrix, the nightmare of their war, in the flesh, in her arms, in her mouth. In because she was being kissed, because Bellatrix had done nothing to stop her, had taken initiative from invitation to play her tongue inside Hermione's too-hot lips, behind her teeth, death-haunted cold slowly thawing against her even as claws dug deeper into the skin of her arm, even as the other hand found her waist and gripped her through her robes like it belonged there, and never planned to let go.

So Hermione staked her own claim with her teeth against Bellatrix's bottom lip, pressing her nose so close she could share Bellatrix's breathing, could wonder with the part of her mind that never stopped questioning the magics of their world why, even here, a ghost should choose to breathe.

But choice for smoke given form was necessity for the merely mortal witch tangled up in her, so she pulled free with the hiss of air sucked too quickly into her lungs, feeling her pulse pounding wildly in her chest, her throat, the space behind her eyes.

Bellatrix eyed her with an odd expression, tongue sliding out to slowly trace the lip Hermione had just finished bruising. "What's wrong with you?" she murmured with joyful abandon, eyes bright, words taunting.

"Nothing," Hermione croaked, not wanting to take the bait, then realizing, a second after saying it, it was true. She coughed, trying to cover how tight her throat had become. Her hands trembled, one still caged by Bellatrix's skin-warmed fingers. "What about you, then?"

"Me?" she squawked in mock indignation. "I'm not the future Minister sticking her tongue down—"

"And I'm not the Dark Lord's right hand, scourge of Mudbloods everywhere, dragging one into her personal hideaway to lick her—"

"I'm dead! What's your excuse?"

Hermione sobered, intentionally revisiting her original plans for the evening, staring Bellatrix Lestrange directly in the eyes. "I'm thirty-nine years old today, Bellatrix. I'm not the same girl you carved open over a stolen sword. You have no power over me any longer." She looked down at Bellatrix's deadly nails framing the word she'd left behind. In the glow of the ghostly forgettings around them, it appeared as insignificant and silvery an apparition as the spinning bicycle tire six feet behind her head, and her words rang true. "I got exactly what I came for," she finished softly. A little closure. A little vindication. Suspicious proven, questions answered without words. "What about you?"

In the face of Hermione's calm, Bellatrix's eyes lost their focus, skittering left and right, seeking an escape that did not exist in an unplace like this. "I always knew you'd come to kill me," she muttered, and Hermione realized a final truth she hadn't understood before, even when she'd confessed to a full night's game of cat and mouse just to see her scar again.

Bellatrix Lestrange had very much been pacing the halls of Hogwarts, muttering over her absence, cursing her name, for all these years.

"Never thought it'd come to this, though," she said, face twisted in a sneer ruined by the restless circles her thumb had begun to trace on the skin of the M on Hermione's arm. She looked down then, too, stilling her hand with visible effort. "Never thought you'd taste like..."

Hermione stepped in, notching them slowly together, feeling a heady rush come over every inch of her at the feeling of doing something she should absolutely never have done, but which absolutely no one, now, would stop her from doing. "Like what?" she asked.

Bellatrix growled, low in her throat, and Hermione felt an echo of lethal rage in that sound, but it didn't seem to be directed at her. "Like my magic," she rumbled, pulling Hermione's arm back up to her lips, dragging over imperceptible lines with both teeth and tongue. She left the scar with reluctance, ghosting her sharp, proud nose up the rucked sleeve of her robes until her lips could threaten ice against the curve of Hermione's throat, until her eyes could pierce her from centimeters away. "Like life," she added with a bitterness steeped in longing.

Hermione stared back, knowing there was a last line about to be crossed, but that Bellatrix would have to be the one to do it.

"Fuck, Mudblood," she breathed at last, unblinking, noses brushing. "I am going to eat you alive."

And when Bellatrix pressed in to kiss her, pressed her back through senseless chills of a thousand devoured belongings until they reached a solid wall that bordered the waiting world and hiked Hermione's legs up around her waist, Hermione laughed into her lips with the delirium of finally breaking the best and worst of every rule she'd ever followed, and hummed to herself between kisses, "Happy. Birthday. To me."