A/N:
The title is from the song 'Raglan Road' by the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh. It's beautiful. If you fancy hearing what Seamus' side of the story might sound like, you can listen to it here (just add Youtube dot com first): /watch?v=EuafmLvoJow
Disclaimer: I don't own the characters and make no money from this. I'm just writing for fun!
Thanks to 321-ella, who was a brilliant beta and helped me get all those pesky tenses right!
-ooOoo-
Hermione's finger softly brushed over the notice in The Quibbler, as she struggled to make sense of what she was reading.
The death has occurred of Seamus Finnigan, of Kilfenora, Co. Clare, Ireland
She always read the obituaries; it had become a habit after the war. Seamus had told her once that the 'death notices', as he called them, were read out on Muggle radio in rural Ireland. Distantly, Hermione wondered if any country dwellers were listening to his own death being announced today.
It had been a long time since she had last thought about Seamus.
Since the day she had walked away from him, the door to the time when she couldn't tell where her own limbs ended and his started had resolutely remained closed. Hermione had carefully boxed up her memories at the back of her mind, and this was the first time she ever let them out since then.
They had met again, of course, but it had been in public and Hermione couldn't even remember what they had talked about. Nothing of importance; everything that mattered had already been said, and only empty phrases remained.
Now, the gates of memory burst open, unstoppable. Untarnished by distance and time, Seamus returned to her with a clamour. The image of his face and the smell of him were so clear in her mind; as if it was only the week before that she had last woken up next to him.
It had started with an impulse. A chance encounter in Diagon Alley when she was at a loose end turned into a messy night at the Leaky Cauldron, which ended at the Muggle night club in Charing Cross Road where slightly dodgy characters were singing along to Jon Bon Jovi songs. Hermione couldn't dance and Seamus couldn't sing, so they fit right in.
That summer, she seemed to bump into Seamus everywhere; he was also renting a room off Diagon Alley, and was always willing to lend her some milk when she'd run out or to convert her pounds to Galleons, cheerfully lying outright to the goblins when they asked him if it was on his own behalf.
The first time Hermione kissed him she was sitting cross-legged on his floor, pouring the last of his milk into her cornflakes and laughing at him calling the goblins 'as tight as a nun's knickers'.
It was easy to fall into Seamus' bed; easier than anything else she had ever done.
There was none of the fighting there always had been with Ron. Somehow, Seamus and Hermione never ended up hurling insults and accusations at each other. Instead, Seamus would defuse the situation with a joke and they would crack up together, her anger dissolving into laughter with alarming speed.
In Hermione's memories the sun seemed to be shining all through that summer, but it couldn't possibly be right. The English weather hardly changed just because you were in love and life was as easy and simple as the wide open sea.
She remembered Seamus' skin peeling off in huge flakes for a week after they fell asleep in the sun on the busy lawn in Soho Square. Even as she was picking the flakes off, unable to resist the lure of revealing the clean pink skin underneath, Hermione told him repeatedly how disgusting it was.
Seamus was fascinated by her hair, and could never seem to get over the way he could loose his hands in it and still have plenty left to play with. When Hermione was reading, he would pull at a strand of hair until it was dead straight and she was mumbling in protest. Then, he would let it go and watch it curl up again, as if nothing had happened.
They got drunk on cheap rosé wine from Tesco and almost got caught having sex on the stairs in Hermione's building by her landlord, Mr Scribbulus.
Hermione would usually wake up before Seamus; she would lie and watch the way his stubby eyelashes flickered as he dreamt.
Both of them had nightmares. They hardly knew anyone who hadn't. Hermione found that they didn't matter so much, when you woke up to peace and sunshine. The lines on Seamus' anxiously furrowed forehead would slowly disappear, as he saw that she had returned to the land of the living where Bellatrix was dead and Voldemort defeated.
The end came very quickly.
Things started unravelling in the middle of August, when Seamus asked her what she wanted to do for her birthday. Every single year since the war, Mrs Weasley had hosted a birthday party for Hermione at the Burrow. Her parents bought a flat when they came back from Australia, declaring that they had wasted enough sunny afternoons weeding and cutting the grass, thank you very much, and there was no way everyone could have fit into their place.
Hermione hesitated, not knowing whether Mrs Weasley would be willing to organise a birthday party for her son's ex-girlfriend, too. It was only when she saw the storm building on Seamus' face that she realised that a better question would have been why she would be looking at her ex's mother to sort out her birthday celebrations.
Seamus, who didn't mind being told he was completely wrong about the properties of aconite, or that Hermione wanted to finish off her book before going out for drinks with Harry and Ginny, lost his temper rather spectacularly.
They managed to patch it over, but from then on, the end was as inescapable as an oncoming freight train thundering down the tracks towards them.
The truth they had managed to forget for a while was that Hermione belonged with Ron; always had, always would.
To her despair, that didn't mean that it never could have worked out with Seamus. The summer had proved to them that they were greater together than apart; there was a levity and ease when they were together that seemed to make them into slightly better versions of themselves.
If Hermione hadn't been welded to Ron through eight years of loyalty and jealousy and a fierce love, so different from Seamus' easy offerings, she could have stayed, for the rest of her life, and they would have been happy.
Dealing in hypotheticals was useless, and she knew deep down that there was no choice to be made. Unless you wanted the whole tree to wither and fall, some things ran too deep to uproot.
On the first of September, she had quietly packed her belongings and left. Through it all, Seamus had kept looking at her with a curiously blank face, as if he was watching a Muggle film of no more than passing interest. Hermione hadn't kissed him goodbye; they had just shared one final long, hard look, before she walked down the rickety stairs to his flat off Diagon Alley for the last time.
Hermione hadn't fallen out of Seamus' bed into Ron's.
She just wasn't made like that, and there was much to settle between her and Ron before they could even start thinking about that sort of thing. Nevertheless, from that day on, her future belonged to Ron and Seamus had been firmly relegated to the past.
All those years later, Hermione could close her eyes and picture Seamus exactly the way he was that summer. Crinkles around the corner of his eyes; eyebrows so pale from the sun that they were almost invisible; and always that smile, as if the two of them knew something the rest of the world didn't. His hair had already started to creep backwards from his forehead, but he declared he didn't give a fiddler's fuck about it and Hermione believed him.
Forever twenty-two, Seamus shone in her mind, and wordlessly she saluted him in farewell.
Recalling where and when she was, Hermione returned to the preoccupations of the present. With creaking joints, she rose from the kitchen table and hobbled over to put on the kettle. Ron still looked appalled whenever he caught her out, but she liked not using magic for everything. It reminded her of where she came from, of distant mornings in her parents' kitchen where the electric kettle had jostled for space with the toaster and coffee machine.
Sighing, she poured two cups of tea and waited patiently until the brown liquid had the right intensity, before Levitating the tea bags into the bin. The tea in Ron's cup was a tad darker than hers, and the dollop of milk she added to it was a shade smaller than what she poured into her own.
Carrying the two cups, she tucked her wand under her arm and went to find Ron. She knew he'd be in the conservatory, having a nap; he always was, at this time of the day. At the last minute, she turned back and fetched The Quibbler, to show Ron. He relied on Hermione to tell him what news he absolutely had to be kept abreast of, and happily ignored the rest. Military coups, the Chudley Cannons actually winning a match or old friends passing away fell into the former category.
Awkwardly balancing the tea cups and the paper, she remembered the ancient crack about a wizard's life being one long slide into obscurity if one's birth was announced in The Daily Prophet and one's death in The Quibbler. She was pretty sure Seamus would have laughed.
They would go to Ireland for the funeral, of course. Lately, what remained of Dumbledore's Army mostly met at funerals. Ron never tired of wheeling out the old joke about going to other people's funerals to make sure that they would be turning up for yours; every time, there were fewer and fewer of them to snicker tiredly. Then again, once you reached a hundred and fifty, there were very few jokes you hadn't heard before.
"Ron," Hermione said loudly, to rouse him from his half-slumber. Her husband of more than a century sat up, face softening into a smile as he saw her approach bearing tea.
It was only then that Hermione realised that the grieving family listed in the obituary was just Seamus' nieces and nephews. No loving wife or faithful partner, and her heart clenched painfully again as it dawned on her what she might have ruined, one crisp September day all those years ago.
-ooOoo-
This was written for starlightmoonprincess's Pairing Hermione Granger Competition and Empress Empoleon's Colors Competiton, both from the Harry Potter Challenges Forum.
If you have any feedback, good or bad, I'd love to hear it!