All This Time…

By: PhoenixCGandAC
Ship: Hr/D
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None

Summary: A SEQUAL TO LOVE IS PAIN: "If you love something, set it free; if it comes backs it's yours, if it doesn't, it never was." (Richard Bach) After falling in love with Draco Malfoy, the most unlikely candidate she could have chosen, Hermione's life has taken a new course: as Harry Potters wife. Through the pages of this story will unfold the mysteries of love and all of its counterparts. Love is a complex thing and it is never simple, especially when formed between two people at opposite ends of the battlefield: people such as Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy. Can the love they had ever become something tangible? Can someone save Hermione's life after it was torn to pieces by Draco's death? Could anyone but Draco ever really do that? And above all else, what is the definition of death? And are you really dead, when your heart stops beating?

Read to find out…

Recommended you read Love is Pain but not necessary.

Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter, the world they live in, or any of the characters in it. Ms. Joanne Rowling owns them all, so I say she should keep them. I'm just making up stories from her original plot and own nothing, not even the computer I'm typing this on, that's my mothers. Lol. Sad, yes, but true. Oh, and I should probably mention that I don't own the Princess Bride either, since I used lines from the movie and am thinking about using some of their plot ideas. And I use a line from Holes, too. I'm not the owner of any part of Holes, so we should clarify that now. The line says, "I feel so cold" and I stole that from the movie.

This piece of fanfiction was made as a sequal to the other fic I wrote, Love is Pain, as stated before. I was looking up Hr/D challenges on the internet and ran into this challenge on http/

#5 Let this quote inspire a story:
"If you love something, set it free; if it comes backs it's yours, if it doesn't, it never was." (Richard Bach)

I happen to think that the entire story I'd already started here revolves around this famous quote and have now decided to enter this piece of fanfiction in this challenge. So read and enjoy… or don't. 

Chapter 1: Existing in Death

A pair of pale eyelids holding prisoner stormy gray eyes fluttered open for the first time in what felt like years. The sun's rays blinded the man's pupils, causing him to shut his eyes again and let out a groan of protest. He suddenly became aware of a blinding pain shooting up from his left side and another one from his left foot. His head began pounding as consciousness slipped slowly back to him and he felt as though it had been filled with lead as he struggled to lift it from the earthy ground and into the cold air around him. His right arm could have been undergoing the utmost torture from the way it pained him to lift his hand to his eyes and shield their pupils from the sun. Trying his vision again, he opened his eyes and blinked.

He had been left alone, stranded, and deserted in an empty wasteland. The trees looked stripped of their bark and the grass pleaded to him for water. He had been left in a clearing to die with trees surrounding him from all sides, the nearest ones maybe twenty feet from his lax body. The taste of dust lingered alone on the tip of his tongue along with the faint taste of coppery blood caked to the corners of his lips and swirling around his tongue as the smell of dead plants ensnared his nostrils. The silence surrounding him caused the hairs on the back of his neck to stand on end. This couldn't be natural, this eerily non-existent noise.

He couldn't remember a thing. Breathing heavily, he relaxed into the ground and groaned. The pain in his side continued to become more apparent by the second, and he could feel shots of pain extending from it to his foot, as though a flaming rope had attached itself to his skin and branding a mark from one hot spot to another. He allowed his gaze to wander to his side to evaluate the damage and saw that a stream of blood had soaked through his clothing to create a blanket of blood around his side. His foot felt broken and his left leg looked like it, too, had blood extending from one wound to another.

Forcing his eyes to look away, he looked up at the canopy of trees instead, the shapes of the leaves swirling around him. He could feel his consciousness slipping away from him again, bit by bit, as the minutes wore on. It became apparent to him that he might have a concussion and he vaguely remembered reading about it being possibly fatal to fall asleep with a concussion.

But what does it matter? a voice seemed to say in his head. You have nothing left to live for, and sleep would be so comforting right now.

Agreeing full heartedly with this decision, the man tried to ignore the pain enveloping his body and focused on allowing his body to fall asleep, when it hit him…

He did have something to live for. Her: the women who had changed his life. The women who had saved him from his father, the girl whom he had teased constantly as a child, the girl who hadn't cared and looked for the good in him anyway, the only women who had ever been able to steal his most valuable trait… his heart.

And it had all been because of Hermione Granger:

That damnable, Hermione, effing, Granger.

Thinking of her for the first time brought about a change so complete in Draco's demeanor, no one who knew him would ever believe it. He sat up, not caring that it seemed likely his head could fall off his shoulders from the pain, but simply knowing that he had to stay alive, for her if no one else.

And he did. He lifted his shoulders off the ground and screamed a loud roar of pain as the stitch in his side split open afresh from the sudden movement, but inside, he couldn't have cared less. He needed to get back to London. To find Hermione and show her the pain he had been forced to endure because of her, because she had let him go without her. For he felt sure, now, that it must have been she who had pushed him to go. For surely no sanctimonious person would ever deny his heart the indescribable feeling bestowed upon him when she permitted her presence to linger around him.

And the answer suddenly appeared, staring him right in the face; he needed to get home, and he needed to get home now.

Gasping again at the fresh shot of pain, he subconsciously placed his hand on his side to try to ease the bleeding. Concentrating as hard as he could, he placed his other hand on the ground and used it to push himself to his feet. It took him about two minutes to finally stand upright, but eventually, he managed it. Unfortunately, by the time he got to his feet, the weight he supplied to his broken foot overcame him and he immediately fell to the ground, crushing his kneecaps on his way down. Pain beyond anything he had felt earlier shot like an electric shock through his body in waves from the point his legs had hit; at his kneecaps.

Letting out another roar of pain, he lowered himself to the ground completely, his face pushing into the dirt and weeds below. His left hand stayed at his side, but he allowed his right to slowly wander to the pocket of his robes in search of his wand.

Of course, as he should have known, it was not there.

"Damn it," he swore under his breath. He groaned as realizations began to dawn on him; if he couldn't even stand up, he couldn't walk. And if he couldn't walk, then he couldn't reach a nearby city. And if he couldn't reach a nearby city, he couldn't find a way to present himself in a respectable way for Hermione and if he couldn't do any of that, then he would surely die, banishing all hope of ever seeing Hermione again from his mind.

A feeling began to stem in his heart: a feeling of despair. Considering what he had just been thinking about, this should not have been surprising. And yet, this feeling felt completely unrelated to his own feelings at the moment. The feeling, he somehow knew, did not belong to him, but to someone else. Someone else felt despair overtaking them along with a feeling of being alone, forgotten, and dead. Her heart cried out to him, bleeding, and dying from the inside out.

That someone was Hermione.

He knew it. It had to be. No one else on the face of this earth affected him nearly as much as she did. His parents? Hah! Don't make me laugh; they had betrayed him. The Dark Lord had wanted him to kill a very important person in his sixth year and he had failed to fulfill his task; someone else had instead of him. Everyone had been under an agreement to act as if Draco had performed it. They had made a pact not to tell the Dark Lord that it had indeed been Snape who fulfilled the perilous task, and not Draco. And the Dark Lord had found out because his mother and father had told on him. Under wand point, yes, but it was the principle of the matter. Draco hadn't spoken to either of his parents since that day; he could never trust them again.

A newfound energy coursed through his body as he came to the realization he had been trying to avoid: Hermione was dying. A pit of depression had overtaken her mind and he needed to save her. Breathing heavily, he flung his right arm away from his body, trying to find something, anything to help him. Moments after flailing about hopelessly, his hand found a button. A button sunk low in the weeds and dirt, but nevertheless, a button. Surprise and joy giving him a new hope, he touched it with his finger and all the sudden, everything changed.

Colors began to swirl in spirals from the point his hand had touched the ground. First red, then orange, then yellow, and so on through the rainbow, and then repeating itself. As the tight swirls of color reached two inches away from their axis, a blinding light shot from the middle of the pool of color and soaked the surrounding environment in it's rays. At that point, Draco realized that his situation had slowly evolved into something even worse then he had originally figured.

The trees fell away, the dirt and weeds replaced by cold, metal flooring, and the endless woods replaced by stonewalls. Chains gripped his arms as they extended from the floor and Draco could have sworn the temperatures dropped from the harsh environment alone.

A voice echoed around the room, soft, yet powerful. "I wondered when you'd wake up. I've been waiting for you."

Draco looked up. He could see the shadow of a person from the far corner of the room but a dark light surrounding him, blocked his face from view. "Who are you," Draco managed to gasp, his head spinning from the words and his breathing hitching in his throat.

"I?" The voice questioned, amusement etched in its very core. "I am the man who has made your life hell. Tell me, are you aware that this is the tenth time you have performed this very same task?"

"What?" Draco whispered, his voice hoarse from strain.

"You have woken up from this very same allusion-forest ten times now. It's the way it's been ever since I captured you. You wake up, you look around, grasping your bearings, you try to stand because there is still some hope within you which I have been unable to crush as of yet, you fall down, you end up touching the button and the environment all falls away. Then, we converse, well, actually, I do most of the talking, and then I torture you. And after that, I obliviate your memory and you fall asleep.

"What is it you still wish to fight for? Surely nothing in this world could have entered your meaningless life strongly enough to keep you alive for this long. So who is it? Who is she? I know there must be someone so there's no use denying it, boy."

"Who are you?" Draco asked again, his eyelids had begun to droop from fatigue and his body had subconsciously slumped over.

The man simply laughed. A cold, icy laugh which fit the room's environment perfectly. "Do you not know?" he asked. "After all these years, can you still not recognize me?"

Draco looked up at the man who stood so close, and yet so far away. He began to find himself lifting up, as though his soul watched his body from a distance. And then, a voice entered his mind. He had experienced this same feeling moments before, when he had felt Hermione's emotions.

"Who is she?" the man asked.

Words flooded Draco's mind as they flowed on a never-ending cycle through his clouded mind. He could feel the words reverberating off the bones in his body as they pounded through his very essence. It's so hot, Draco, and yet I feel so cold. I'm dying without you here with me. Save me, Draco. Save me… Draco, Draco, Draco…

"Hermione," he whispered to himself, and then his world went black.

Hermione's eyes opened slowly. Her soft bed seemed to caress her head as she lay there, awakening from her slumber in the early hours of the morning. She had been waking up in the wee hours of the morning ever since she had married the man who lay next to her. Her husband. The man, she… loved.

Yes, her brain argued, I do love him.

But in what way? her heart retorted. You love him as a brother, yes, but what about a lover? Could this man ever truly replace Draco?

A tear crept down her cheek as she recalled the vivid memories she had of that day. That day he had left her. The day she had died. She hadn't been the same person ever since that day. She had lost the brightness of her small and her consistent, obnoxious opinionated ways. She had been reformed and she blamed it entirely on Draco Malfoy for taking her soul with him to America: all because she had allowed herself to fall in love.

I will never love again, she whispered in her mind. She had developed it as a sort of mantra. She had been repeating this to herself ever since she had found out Draco had died. When Harry had tried to take his place, Hermione remembered locking herself in a room with Ginny and sobbing, "I love Harry like a brother but I could never love him as I loved Draco." And Ginny had, somehow, understood. Hermione couldn't understand how, exactly, and yet Ginny seemed to acknowledge every word she had previously uttered. That may have been because it had been Ginny who had heard the first words Hermione said after Draco left her that dreadful day. "I will never love again."

She had said it with such a forceful and blank expression that Ginny had been heartbroken by it. She had placed a bet on Hermione, when her life had rested at Hogwarts with Harry and Ron, that it would be Hermione who married first and fell in love with the man of her dreams. Well, she most certainly had fallen in love with the man of her dreams, but at what price? It had all ended up so horribly that Ginny had been scared for Hermione's life. How could it all have gone so wrong?

Harry Potter rolled over in his sleep, muttering rubbish as he pulled the sheets off Hermione's lap. Another tear roamed down her cheek as she watched him sleep. He didn't deserve this, not after all he'd been through. And yet, he didn't seem to care. It almost seemed like, sometimes, he knew her heart belonged to another man, alive or dead, but he never mentioned anything. Not even when Hermione had refused to sleep with him on their wedding night. He had just accepted it without question. They slept in the same bed, but their nocturnal activities continued to rest with sleeping.

It had been almost two years since their marriage, and the same excuse Hermione had uttered that night couldn't be upheld for this long of a time, especially in a healthy marriage, so they had slept with one another, but Hermione never found joy in it. She didn't find joy in much of anything anymore. Her life seemed to be filled with gray, she had given up sifting through it to find some black and white… a little change of scenery. She didn't care. The only purpose left in her life fell to just living, and nothing more. Why should she go on in life when the only one worth living for had abandoned her… abandoned her for death.

The tears crumbling down Hermione's face, now, had trodden a steady path in their wake. Rolling onto her side, she closed her eyes and fell asleep. She had nothing left within her to whisper; you'll wake up to a new and brighter tomorrow! Nor a voice that whispered, You're life may appear glum now, but imagine the happy parts of life and look forward to when it will turn over a new leaf! For tomorrow, in Hermione's mind, would not be any better… nor would the day after, the day after, or the day after.

Her life had been reduced to one dimension. She existed each and every day. And you can't really call existing living.

A/N: Hey everyone! Please don't kill me for the first chapter of the story… after all, it is just the first chapter! I always have a hard time writing them and then getting my audience to like them… the chapter, that is. So please don't give up on the story yet! I know most of you who read Love is Pain would currently like to kill me for changing the end of the story, but I didn't. This has been my plan from the moment I wrote that story. Lol. So I know you all hate me for making it so cliché, but just go with me. I'll explain everything later on, but you'll probably hate me more after I do. Anyway, I love you all and hope you look out for the next chapter! Thanks for choosing to read this and I hope I can get the next chapter out soon!

throws cookies over shoulder as she runs away from pack of angry readers

PhoenixCGandAC, Caitlyn