Disclaimer: I don't own any of these characters, nor places mentioned.
Curtains
It was difficult for Hermione to come to grasp with the meaning of death.
Death was a concept that she had studied extensively in theory. After all, one always had to be prepared for the inevitable. To Hermione, death was nothing but words, until that day, a day unlike any other. The tenuous hold she had in the culture she had adopted began to slip out of her grasp the day that Dumbledore died.
Hermione was only sixteen at the time. The only time she had experienced death prior to that was the secondhand experience when she was four. Her father informed her that her Grandmother had 'passed on,' which had meant little to the girl because she didn't understand the term anymore than she had understood any of the ramblings of her wellmeaning but slightly senile grandmother. It was only a year later when she had learnt how to read that she discovered that 'passing on' was a euphimism that adults used for death, a state of being that was irreversible and made everyone else uncomfortable.
She simply could not comprehend death at such an age and in her ensuing years simply forgot that anyone around her was even capable of doing such a thing, dying that is, for Hermione was a pragmatic girl.
As Hermione sat on the windowsill of her bedroom of the upper floor in Number Twelve Grimauld Place she reflected on all the death that had taken place that had forced her and her two best friends into hiding in this near decrepit house. Dumbledore's death had shaken the very foundations of the Order of the Phoenix. The kind mentor and protector had given so much to them was gone.
She remembered that even in first year, the headmaster had spoken to her after the disaster of the Philosopher's Stone. In no uncertain words, Dumbledore had informed Hermione that should she choose to stay friends with Harry, it would be a troubled road upon which they walked, but Hermione had answered that she would protect him, always.
In the second year, she had experienced petrifaction. It had only been for a moment and for an eternity, for those in the petrified state stopped existing on the same plane as the living. They couldn't move there, and could only experience the outside world as though encased in cotton. Sounds were muffled. Any sense of touch was so faint she thought that she had only imagined it. But she was never afraid because it was hard to fear what one could not change. Harry and Ron came, she knew, but after awhile they left. It worried her that they did not come back after such a long time Dumbledore came to her then and told her all that had transpired since her petrifaction. Knowing that the boys had done nothing too stupid and had survived was a great comfort to her, at least until they had cured her.
In the third year, Dumbledore had warned her that the timeturner would be instrumental to completing all the tasks she needed to accomplish that year, in telling her that he had also mentioned that the promise she had made in first year would be tested thoroughly in the following years. She held fast to her pledge and because of that, they saved two innocent lives.
In the fourth year Hermione had met a boy. He was intelligent, good, kind, brave and at the end of the year he was a hero, a dead hero. She would remember Cedric Diggory.
In the fifth year they lost Sirius, and she began to understand that the war was all about death, all about loss.
The day after Dumbledore's funeral she had wandered down to the gravestone at day break and sworn to the dead man to protect Harry as she always had. In her mind's eye Hermione saw Dumbledore smile, knowingly, and saw the twinkle from behind his spectacles.
Death was only a state of being, one that Hermione knew she too would come be. It was possible that it would be sooner than she'd hoped, because she was what she was. A muggleborn in a war that aimed to wipe out muggleborns. She closed drew the curtains closed.
Author's note:
I'm sure that this was supposed to be a Hermione/Cedric fic once. I wrote the first half of it almost a year ago now, and all the unfinished fics I have lying around are H/C, but I cannot for the life of me remember how this was supposed to go and so I chopped out almost everything that referenced Cedric, except that one line. I am certain it was supposed to be longer.
In any case, I've always believed that Hermione and Dumbledore had a very close teacher/pupil sort of relationship, as she needed someone to guide her intelligence towards the light path.
I've been doing research for my thesis for almost a year now so I haven't had much time to finish anything. Please let me know if it sounds a little bit too disjointed, because this was written in two completely different states of mind. Doing a thesis can do that to you apparently.