Falling Backwards
'NO!'
It echoes shrilly throughout the corridor in St Mungo's, packed with patients and Healers and survivors. She's shaking; her hands are trembling.
'NO!'
She's shouting, angrily; there's a lump in her throat and she wants to cry but she can't do anything but shout and make herself heard.
'No – no, no, no, no, no, no –'
And now she is crying, the "no" pushing its way past her lips so desperate it sounds like one word only, but it's not enough, and Harry is looking at her with tears in his eyes and she can't bear it at all.
'No, no, no, no –'
There are two strong, warm hands holding her wrists, but she doesn't care, because Ron – Ron is –
'No,' she says, and then crashes against the warm chest with its erratic heartbeat, and she doesn't even know who it is.
It's minutes, hours, days, weeks later.
Time has lost its meaning, and she's stopped crying.
She's sitting at the table in stony silence, staring at the fireplace in the kitchen. Dimly, she's aware of voices in the background. Someone is offering her tea.
She doesn't even hear, doesn't give any indication that she's noticing anything but her own ragged breathing and the images playing in her mind, over, and over and over and then once more, making her feel nauseous.
Harry tries to speak to her, but she doesn't let him.
It takes weeks for her to say anything at all.
Her hair is tangled; messy, bushy tendrils snaking around her face. She has pasty skin with hollow eyes, which stare bleakly at portraits and look past people. But when Professor Lupin brushes past her on the stairs, she says, 'Oh' when she nearly falls, and everyone stops what they're doing to look at her.
'Come along, Miss Granger,' Professor Lupin says, taking her hand and Disapparating out of the Headquarters without a word to anyone.
He takes her to a quiet cottage near the Scottish border. It's enclosed by a forest.
She still isn't speaking, and she's unable to fully look at him - focusing instead on a place that's right next to his eyes. He doesn't pressure her, but cooks for her and talks about when he was young, telling her a new story every day.
He knows what it's like to lose your best friends, hangs in the air. He knows what it's like to be left among the shattered pieces of a war, alone.
After nearly two months, when he puts tea in front of her, she looks up and offers, in a voice that's low and creaky from neglect, 'Thank you.'
It's soft, tentative, barely there. But it's progress, and he'll take it.
He's sitting on the sofa with a glass of amber-coloured liquid, making a slightly arrogant tilting motion with his wrist. The drink swirls and splashes right over the rim and onto the carpet, but he makes no move to fix it, lost as he is in his own thoughts.
She enters the room and sits without a word; he feels the slight dip in the sofa, the shifting of weight and he glances at her from the corner of his eye.
'Miss Granger?' he asks, and knows that when she shakes her head she doesn't want to talk.
He stares back at his glass, and is startled when she says, very softly, very brokenly, 'Professor Lupin?'
He raises his head, meeting her eyes over glass just-barely-just, and then she's suddenly very close and kissing him, and it's really all sorts of wrong –
'I -' he starts, drawing back, and she only shakes her head, tears brimming in her eyes.
'Please,' she says, voice hoarse, and he thinks it's quite disgusting that he's hesitating.
'Please,' she repeats, much softer now. He kisses her back, the glass tumbling upon the woollen carpet as he opens his hands to shape their way over her face towards her shoulders. He pushes.
She falls backwards onto the pillows, and looks up at him with eyes filled with love lost, life lost, and pain that's so raw he feels it scratch a hole in his heart.
She smiles - the very first time he's seen her smile since that night.
And with her neck exposed to the fading fire in the hearth, he breaks.
He wakes up the next day, confused for a moment. It is soon replaced with anger at himself, cloying dangerously beneath his skin.
She's not there.
There is a river within the forest, deep and pure, water flowing south. She goes there, sometimes, watching the water with a stillness he knows.
He realises his mistake when he sees her still body, submerged, her graceful hand the only part still visible above the water. Its exposed wrist is fragile, the golden band reading "Ron and Hermione always" around her ring finger flashing in the deceptively cheery sunlight.