A/N: This is some heavy angst, people. Might be a little graphic for those with a colourful imagination. Anyways, please leave a review. Thanks!


autumn afternoons


You miss it, you miss it, you miss it.

You miss her, and nothing makes sense because you shouldn't have to be missing her.

Forty-nine hours ago, you were pressing your fingertips to hers, laughing at her silly dance moves and the fact that you have two left feet. She whispered something in your ear, something like 'I love you', and you did the same because you owed it to her – seven years, and you never told her a thing. So you told her.

Only six hours ago, you told her again, and this time, she never answered you back. You hugged your knees to your body, because you needed to be warm in a world of only cold.

You're slack today, though; you don't deserve to be warm when she can never be.

When such ugly words are left carved in your dearest Hermione's skin, how can you think any uglier? Nevertheless, you do, and you hate. You disregard the hideousness that chaperones the word itself; there aren't any other reasons why you shouldn't.

You hate the way that she's stuck in the most unnatural of smiles – torn from ear to ear – and you miss her set of pearly whites, the ones that you loved to see, no matter her opinion of them. She was beautiful once, and she's beautiful now, only you just can't see it.

It wasn't you who found her though; God, no – you wouldn't be able to live through that. You were never told who did it, nor have you ever found out – but all you wanted to know was why, where, when, and most importantly, how. You wanted – no, you needed to know how anyone could hurt something so particularly lovely.

Regrettably, you did find out. The morning they told you – well, it was empty. Quite like the afternoon when they found her.

It was under a canopy of branches and stars that her delicate, torn figure lay, quite stray among the warmth of autumns rainbow; leaves and outstretched roots. It was foul, the small pond of red that lie underneath her broken frame, painting the soil beneath a sickly sort of crimson. Her eyes – those beautiful, beautiful eyes of bronze – stared into the sky thoughtlessly; you wonder if maybe that was a good thing, or if it was bad, because your Hermione was never thoughtless.

With something like inopportunity, you let her into your dreams last night, though it was not the bushy-headed brunette with her nose in a book. You wanted to sleep, you wanted to sleep for oh-so long, but you preferred waking up without a wet pillow and a runny nose. You preferred the façade of clutching to an empty mass of sheets, imagining it was something with a beating heart and a S.P.E.W. badge right over top.

Now, it's the sometime in the day where you find yourself at the Granger home. You stop on the second step of the porch, where once-upon-a-time, you found yourself on one knee, and you break down. Harry holds you up and rubs your back, just the way that you had rubbed hers only a week ago. He likes to play as if it had been sudden, like she had died almost instantly, and it wasn't barbaric and ruthless like the pictures say.

The morning that some man turned up on your door, you cried for hours on end. You can't feel the warmth of her palms in your hand, nor the tiny kicks beneath the skin of her stomach. You would have been a father, a father of a baby with curls like hers and blue eyes from you, and maybe without the explosion of freckles. Instead, you watched time twist and turn into something altogether.

You miss it, you miss it, you miss it. You miss her.

There was no afternoon that day, and there is an absence of one now.