Somehow, sitting still under a silent sky and pressed against Ron, his smell dark with fear in her nostrils, all she can remember is how the ceiling of the dungeons used to gleam with steam and condense. Extracts of every potion ever made stored in layers of cold stone. If she'd have dared, if she had not felt the stare of the dead and the living piled on her shoulders, she would have scraped the walls and swallowed it whole to see what death and life do together in a body. Maybe it was something like what is happening now.
What is happening now. She can't hear Harry anymore, but maybe that's because Ron's placed his hands over her ears and rocks her back and forth whispering sorry sorry sorry sorry which she can only hear because she knows he's saying it and she feels it in his breath on her cheek. Her nose is pressed against his shoulder. The smell of damp grass and cookies and Molly Weasley and herself, from back when she'd worn this sweater. Only an hour ago. Now she's naked pressed against Ron and all he can give her is the warm cage of his limbs.
Only an hour ago. As if time had skidded to an awful stop and now there is no Harry and only Ron and that red stuff on his face where they've hit him with spells that curved off into the forest as if they'd been unleashed – no Hermione it's not my blood, don't touch it please don't you'll get hurt – and the smell of poison in his hair that had been there, too, that one day when she'd watched the dungeon ceiling as he had touched her knee with one gentle finger under the table. It had set things in motion.
Things in motion. Ron is still rocking but he's stopped whispering to her and she feels that his warmth is falling away from both of their bodies. As if he's failing, fading. As if he's being turned off. Like an electric light. that would be strange since he'd never know what it was if he saw one
If he saw one like he's seeing things now that she isn't that he doesn't want her to see. She feels it in how his shoulders strain. Even cookies and Molly Weasley cannot stop the scent of burning coming in through her nose and still all she can see is those dungeon ceilings dripping like a damp cave; she remembers how she'd been on her back after hours in that cold and Ron was just breathing every part of her to keep her warm like only he could and in his eyes were the kind of lights that only the sun can give as it tumbles in through an open window on entangled bodies. Warm bodies beginning at their skin stopping at their skin. Meeting one another at the borders without crossing them. Starting at their ending point. That's how he'd looked at her then and she forgot how stupid it was to make love in the dungeons. Time and time again and every time she was amazed at how red the inside of his mouth was against the wet walls and his hair like a torch in the dark. The dungeons made their skins ache with cold and made every touch like pain and fire. Crossing the borders. And all around there were potions flowing down the walls and she drank them and felt how you could die and still choose to live. The smells of Ron's neck and old parchment and love and heat and hate and death and every little spot that went from where they were to where their clothes were in another colder world. Every cosmic space between them that they tried to cross. those smells
Those smells she finds in his sweater even as they're pulled apart by rough hands and shown what happened to Harry and she feels as if the sight is being planted in her brain right at the centre of everything where everything hurts where everything's coloured Harry (and Ron) and she knows Ron feels the same. She can't look at Harry because even if she doesn't look she already does and he's everywhere in every point in her body. That little trickle of blood from behind cracked glasses and there goes the small lunch they had (when she was wearing Ron's sweater, only an hour ago only an hour ago) and she feels how Ron wants to get closer but can't.
She gives herself up. She closes her body like a shell. She feels how you can live and still choose to die. Everywhere around is how the forest used to smell right before Harry hit her with a snowball right after Ron sneaked her a kiss. It's all she can remember, somehow, before the green closes in.