If she hadn't been so utterly accustomed to dead silence around Neville, Hannah would have been feeling rather uncomfortable in the calm quiet of Charlie's bed. Neville was still in his sleep; there was no arm around her waist, no chest pressed gently into her back, no soft, easy breathing that sometimes ghosted along her neck. Neville didn't make a sound while he slept.
Charlie was warm, though, Charlie was new. Charlie had a little rumble to his breath when he exhaled and he occasionally rustled around in the sheets. Neville never moved, never snored… if you asked Hannah, she would have told you more than once she thought Neville to be gone.
She loved Neville, she did, and he had been everything she had ever wanted when she left Hogwarts. He was charming, clumsy, still the same boy he was in first year and she admired that, always would. She would forever and always be in love with him.
But Charlie was different and that's what made him seem so loud.
Charlie's dog barked when she Flooed in or when she Apparated into the kitchen (and she often crashed into something since he was always moving the furniture around). The teakettle shrieked because he never kept track of time. He stomped the dirt off his boots whenever he trudged into the house. In the morning, the birds rose with a flurry of noise that aggravated Hannah and fascinated her at the same time. Neville liked the quiet too much to live in a place like this.
If you had asked her two years previous whether or not she thought there was a difference between silence and quiet, Hannah would have given you an arch of her eyebrow and a quirk of her lip. But she knows now that silence is cold, lonely, she knows that silence is not waking up to warmth and a smile. Quiet is the happy, content murmurs in the night, the delicate circles that are drawn on her shoulders. Hannah knows that for so long she had been drowning in the silence that she had forgotten just how amazing the quiet could be.