Chapter 1: Broken

Ron woke up as the first beams of day broke through the hospital curtains. He awoke to an overly white hospital room. His first thought, as always, was breakfast, but as his mind drifted to his mother's cooking, he remembered his mother was at The Burrow with the rest of his family. It was all coming back: the battle, the accident, and finally the news that shook his world right of its axis.

The pain flooded back so quickly that he surely would have fallen if he had not been sitting down. His feelings were so intense that he couldn't even tell what exactly it was that he was feeling. Was it regret? Sorrow? Loss? Grief? Physical pain? Love?

That was it. He was feeling love. But this was not the storybook love. The love that made teenage girls giggle and was always in the sappiest novels was definitely not this. This was lost love. It was knowing that his one true love was gone. Well, to be more accurate, she was not actually gone, she was lying about 5 feet away from him in the hospital bed.

The slow, struggling movement of her breathing chest proved that she was not completely gone. As far as he knew though, she might as well have been dead. Ron immediately mentally scolded himself for thinking that terrible thought. He could never, ever wish Hermione dead. Ron knew that he ultimately would give his everything to make sure that never happened. Tears welled up in his astonishingly blue eyes as he remembered that his everything had not been enough to save her.

He tried to wipe them away, worrying that she would wake up and see him breaking down, but as his thoughts grew sadder, he couldn't help himself from letting the tears fall. He hadn't helped her or changed anything at all. Now, because he wasn't enough – he was never enough- , she could never look at him the same again and he would never see those big brown eyes spark up with the excitement of learning something new. He would never see her bushy hair become tangled in her fingers as she furiously twirled it – a constant nervous habit of hers. He would only see this fragile, broken shell of his girl. The doctor's mind shattering words from last night made that eerily true. He unwillingly remembered the previous night's events for what seemed like the hundredth time in the past few hours.

The doctor, Dr. Harrison, flipped through papers on a clip board. His lips pursed in thought and his eyebrows creased. The man then spoke, and if he hadn't put his hand gently on Ron's shoulder, Ron wouldn't even have heard. Ron broke his constant stare away from the slowly breathing body next to him and looked up through tear stained eyes at the doctor.

"Mr. Weasley, I'm sorry to say that Miss Granger cannot make a full recovery," Dr. Harrison whispered, seemingly afraid to go on as if Ron would murder him for bringing such news. The stunned silence from Ron was taken as a sign to continue. "She will live a full life but she will not be the same girl you remember. She has…"

He broke from his painful memory when his love mumbled something in her sleep. God, he hoped she was dreaming of him somehow. Ron laughed at the thought. It had been his first laugh in the past few days but it did nothing to lower the weight on his shoulders, because it was a shallow, sarcastic laugh. He thought his new, unronlike laugh almost resembled Malfoy's. The laugh was only a mere shadow of his previous, hearty laugh. He secretly hoped he would never happily laugh again. He wanted to never move on, never heal. He would rather sit here in his darkest hour with her forever than even think of living a happy life without her anywhere near him. His heart broke even more- something he thought was impossible due to the pathetically shattered state it was already in- and wondered if she was even going to want him near her when she woke up.

"No," he thought, "She must want him. He would not leave until she admitted it. Until she screamed that she loved him and forced him to believe it." How vain and desperate he had become. Such a broken person he was that he would force her to remember her feelings for him, even if she no longer felt them.

Her eyelids fluttered which in turn, caused his heart to skip a beat. She was waking. He would now know if she would let him stay at all. Her sleepy gaze went from her hands, to the door across the room, and fell finally upon an anxious Ron. His heart suffered an immense blow when he received not a hug, kiss, or even smile from his beloved. He was given only a confused look, the kind of look that you only give to a stranger that has done something odd. It was not the type of look you were supposed to give your neighbor, let alone your boyfriend of 9 months.

Her words were enough to make him want to grab the nearest wand and curse himself into nothingness. "Do you know where I might find a book, sir?" she asked in a childlike voice.

It was completely different from her old, sophisticated voice that sounded like "I already know what you just told me so you wasted my time." It might seem odd that he would describe the voice he constantly dreamed about with such a negative phrase, but he had always loved the know it all part of Hermione.

The voice that had come out of her throat was not Hermione's. He could not come to love this voice as much as the old one but he would always love anything this girl did, no matter how heart breaking it was for him.

She looked a bit agitated at his lack of response and then said a little louder, "Sir, are you a doctor? I would like to have something to read pretty please." Pretty please? That was definitely something that has never crossed Hermione's lips before in front of him and he didn't know why it made him even sadder.

"Umm… no, I'm an… old friend," Ron said, smiling with fake happiness.

She obviously didn't recognize the falseness in his voice though because she replied, "Hi. I'm sorry but I don't remember you."

Surprisingly, this didn't hurt him because he knew she would eventually say it. As he looked into her big, chocolate brown eyes, he remembered the last few sentences from Dr. Harrison:

"She will live a full life but she will not be the same girl you remember. She has lost her memory from around age ten and up. We aren't even sure if she will remember that she is a wizard. There is no way to get her memory back quickly, it may take years to remember anything at all and we aren't even sure it can occur at all. The curse Miss Granger was hit with is unheard of and is immensely dark magic. The doctors here do not want to meddle with it and I'm sorry to say that if she doesn't wake up in the next few days, we will have to take her off the oxygen machine."

The doctor had waited a few minutes and only received a blank, absent look from Ron, so he walked out of the room promising to return in the morning to check on her.

"Yes, I know 'Mione. I'll be right back," he said after he snapped back to reality, trying to mask all of his emotion from her. Without looking to check her expression, he sped out of the hospital room and into the long hallways of Saint Mungo's to alert the Grangers, his own family, and the doctors of his love's awakening.