Author's Notes: Story title is from Sylvia Plath's wonderful poem Mad Girl's Love Song. Thanks to PigWithHair for a great beta.
This is nothing like she imagined. Not that she'd allowed herself much time to imagine the end. It was too much like imaging you'd won the sweepstakes or been born beautiful or written a best-selling novel. It was fantasizing. It was tempting fate. Still, she must have had hopes, even when she was living too close to the edge to indulge them. Surely, she'd dreamed of being in this house, with these people, free from the constant secrecy and anxiety that had become an increasingly more insistent undertone to her visits. Awake, aware, she hadn't expected it to be easy or bloodless or without grief. But not this blood. Not this grieving. Despite being a part of every act, Hermione is deeply shocked at the ending.
There is always someone awake at the Burrow, and there's always someone asleep. Harry, Ron and Charlie sip Firewhisky at three o'clock in the morning, staring out over the moonlit back garden. Ginny and Mrs. Weasley nap on her bed at lunchtime. Mr. Weasley pads around the house at all hours, draping hand-knitted blankets over people who have fallen asleep where they sit, because deciding to go to bed means choosing that still, quiet time before oblivion hits.
The house seems fuller than ever, but there are no more children at the Burrow.
Bill arranges those necessary details which must attend death for his parents, adding years to his scars. Fleur cooks hot meal after hot meal, most of which go uneaten. Her fragile, pale beauty has turned ashen and almost ordinary with exhaustion.
Hermione slips the knife from Fleur's hand as she is chopping another huge mound of carrots, and tells her to sit with her husband for a while. Fleur wipes her hands on a towel and briefly lays her head on Hermione's shoulder before following her advice. Hermione watches a slow, familiar smile break out on Bill's face as his wife comes closer.
Hermione knows what it is to draw that smile from the face she loves and is beginning to think she can't imagine life without it.
Percy brings his mother endless cups of hot tea in apology that she sips once before pushing away. His eyes are glued to her face as though he will be able to ease her sorrow once he can decipher her expression. Mrs. Weasley pats his hand frequently, but now one of her own will always be missing.
She has never felt more at home here and yet never less a part of the family than now. She will retrieve her own parents soon but believes she owes it to Mr. and Mrs. Weasley to give herself to them without distraction, even if all she is doing is the washing up. With the absentmindedness of the grieving, she is not in the least a guest anymore but another mourner among mourners.
Bill, who has been gentle with her ever since her time at Shell Cottage, cups her head or lays a hand on her shoulder in passing and Charlie treats her with a mix of the casual courtesy he shows Fleur and the off-handed kindness he shows Ginny. Mostly no one fusses over her. But until now the Burrow has only been someplace she loved to visit, not someplace she needed to be. Still, she hovers around everyone's edges. This is the first time she hears the story about twins turning Ginny's bathwater orange and telling her she'd washed her freckles off although everyone else starts laughing halfway through. She doesn't know what sort of baby-sitter Bill made. No one is lost in this crowd but her.
She came too late, she features too little. She sits silently by, holding Ron's hand, while his family picks out the pieces of Fred's life they are going to quilt together into his story.
Mrs. Tonks comes by one night with the baby. None of Hermione's friends have ever had a baby, and she marvels at how translucent his skin is and how little his fingernails are when he starts fussing a bit.
Harry, who is holding him, turns to her with a panicked expression on his face, and she opens her mouth to laugh at him when she is suddenly rent in half with a deep, silent, sob. Ron gently leads her from the room, and she is hurtling back in time; flying past the long bloody line of dead bodies (Oh, Tonks! Oh, Remus!), her heart stopping with a thump once again as Harry lies lifeless in Hagrid's arms. Back, back past Dobby's sad, tiny grave, and how she couldn't believe, just couldn't believe that Ron would leave her and what it was like always being hungry and scared and angry, back to needing to think and react so fast to keep them all alive that she felt like nothing but nerves firing rapidly right under her skin, back to erasing even her own birth from her parents' minds because she had to imagine herself dying.
Then she weeps herself stormily forward through time until she is aware that she is sitting on the Burrow stairs with her head on her knees, Ron hunched silently next to her. No one comments. Everyone has taken their own journey with sorrow this week.
Fred's funeral is over. With a face waxen and drained of blood, his red hair seemed an insult; almost obscenely alive when he is so very dead. More bones. More dust, she thinks, more ashes, more dirt.
George leans forward in his chair and opens his mouth, and everyone stops what they are doing to look at him. But then he falls back again, not yet able to imagine speaking without an echo. Charlie takes a gulp of cold tea, and Mr. Weasley's shoulders droop. Harry stares stonily down at the table, while Ginny bends her lovely head to cut another slice of cake no one will eat. They are as group survivors of the Cruciatus Curse; wrung out and uncertain of just how they have managed to live through such pain.
At night when everyone else is finally sleeping, she takes his hand and leads him from his room. She lies down for him, and his voice breaks in passion and grief when he calls her name.
"Hermione." Everything shatters around her with the sound. The suffocating shell is broken and she is outside herself again. It rings clear and pure as a bell welcoming them to the charmed and painful and wonderful and sad and never-ending circle that is life. She is an old, old woman ready to be made young again in her lover's arms.