A Place To Belong
I was talking to BlueRose22 the other day and suddenly, a bunch of ideas came to me. A lot were Sirius/Hermione, Regulus/Hermione, and even Fred/Hermione, but most were George/Hermione. I was looking at the poll results for my next fiction, and Sirius and George were in the lead. I picked George as the next ship. The poll has changed since then, but I had already written a few chapters.
In the poll right now (I've taken down George/Hermione), Sirius/Hermione is in the lead with 10; Fred/Hermione and Regulus/Hermione are tied with 8; Remus/Hermione has 6; Fabian/Hermione, Gideon/Hermione, and Other/Hermione have 5; Ginny/Regulus has 4; and Hermione/TVDcharacter and Ginny/Other are tied with one.
If this story sounds interesting, please tell me, and I'll gladly continue it!
I have finals this week, so good luck to anyone else who does, also.
Disclaimer for the ENTIRE story: Sadly enough, I don't own HP.
This story is dedicated to Brendan. We'll make it.
Grief
It was as if the world froze. No one moved a muscle. For miles around, the horror unfolded upon them. The wall crumbled, and all was silent.
After what seemed like a lifetime, a single shout of pain rang out into the night. It was the cry of a brother, a friend, a twin, a mastermind, a partner-in-crime, a prankster-in-chief. It was the sound of despair. In that moment, everyone present, no matter which side, felt the pain.
As the wall crumbled, they didn't know what to do. All were in shock.
As if in slow motion, George ran towards the rubble.
Fred and Percy had just backed into view, both of them dueling masked and hooded men. Harry, Ron, and Hermione ran forward to help as jets of light flew in every direction and the man dueling Percy backed off, fast. His hood slipped and they saw a high forehead and streaked hair.
"Hello, Minister!" bellowed Percy, sending a neat jinx straight at Thicknesse, who dropped his wand and clawed at the front of his robes, apparently in awful discomfort. "Did I mention I'm resigning?"
"You're joking, Perce!" shouted Fred as the Death Eater he was battling collapsed under the weight of three separate Stunning Spells. Thicknesse had fallen to the ground with tiny spikes erupting all over him; he seemed to be turning into some form of sea urchin. Fred looked at Percy with glee.
"You actually are joking, Perce… I don't think I've heard you joke since you were—"
The air exploded. They had been grouped together, Harry, Ron, Hermione, Fred, and Percy, the two Death Eaters at their feet, one Stunned, the other Transfigured; and in that fragment of a moment, when danger seemed temporarily at bay, the world was rent apart, Harry felt himself flying through the air, and all he could do was hold as tightly as possible to that thin stick of wood that was his one and only weapon, and shield his head in his arms. He heard the screams and yells of his companions without a hope of knowing what had happened to them.
And then the world resolved itself into pain and semidarkness. He was half buried in the wreckage of a corridor that had been subjected to a terrible attack. Cold air told him that the side of the castle had been blown away, and hot stickiness on his cheek told him that he was bleeding copiously. Then he heard a terrible cry that pulled at his insides, that expressed agony of a kind neither flame nor curse could cause, and he stood up, swaying, more frightened than he had been that day, more frightened, perhaps, than he had been in his life...
Hermione was struggling to her feet in the wreckage, and three redheaded men were grouped on the ground where the wall had blasted apart. Harry grabbed Hermione's hand as they staggered and stumbled over stone and wood.
They were unmoving. All but George, who tried, desperately, to get to his twin's side. "No, no, no!" George shouted, "No! Fred! No!" George was shaking his brother while Percy and Ron were kneeling beside them. Fred's eyes stared without seeing, the ghost of his last laugh still etched upon his face. Their minds were in free fall, spinning out of control, unable to grasp the impossibility, because Fred Weasley could not be dead, the evidence of all of their senses must have been lying. A body fell past the hole blown into the side of the school and curses flew in at them from the darkness, hitting the wall behind their heads.
"Get down!" Harry shouted, as more curses flew through the night. He and Ron had both grabbed Hermione and pulled her to the floor, but George lay across Fred's body, shielding it from further harm, and when Harry shouted "George, Percy, come on, we've got to move!" George just shook his head.
"George!" Harry saw tear tracks streaking the grime coating Ron's face as he seized his elder brother's shoulders and pulled, but George would not budge. "George, you can't do anything for him! We're going to—"
Hermione screamed, and Harry, turning, did not need to ask why. A monstrous spider the size of a small car was trying to climb through the huge hole in the wall. One Aragog's descendants had joined the fight.
Ron and Harry shouted together; their spells collided and the monster was blown backward, its legs jerking horribly, and vanished into the darkness.
"It brought friends!" Harry called to the others, glancing over the edge of the castle through the hole in the wall the curses had blasted. More giant spiders were climbing the side of the building, liberated from the Forbidden Forest, into which the Death Eaters must have penetrated. Harry fired Stunning Spells down upon them, knocking the lead monster into its fellows, so that they rolled back down the building and out of sight. Then more curses came soaring over Harry's head, so close he felt the force of them blow his hair.
"We have to move!" Ron yelled.
Hermione looked at George, who exchanged a glance with her. "George, we can take him, too."
Harry, realizing that George wouldn't move unless they took Fred with them, stooped to seize Fred's body under the armpit. George kept clinging to the body while Percy helped, Together, crouching low to avoid the curses flying at them from the grounds, they hauled Fred out of the way.
"Here," said Harry, and they placed him in a niche where a suit of armor had stood earlier. He could not bear to look at Fred a second longer than he had to, and after making sure that the body was well-hidden, he took off, Ron next to him. Hermione looked around at the battle that kept raging. She glanced for one last time at George before running to join her friends.
The bang was like a cannon blast, and the golden flames that erupted between them, at the dead center of the circle they had been treading, marked the point where the spells collided. Harry saw Voldemort's green jet meet his own spell, saw the Elder Wand fly high, dark against the sunrise, spinning across the enchanted ceiling like the head of Nagini, spinning through the air toward the master it would not kill, who had come to take full possession of it at last. And Harry, with the unerring skill of the Seeker, caught the wand in his free hand as Voldemort fell backward, arms splayed, the slit pupils of the scarlet eyes rolling upward. Tom Riddle hit the floor with a mundane finality, his body feeble and shrunken, the white hands empty, the snakelike face vacant and unknowing. Voldemort was dead, killed by his own rebounding curse, and Harry stood with two wands in his hand, staring down at his enemy's shell.
One shivering second of silence, the shock of the moment suspended: and then the tumult broke around Harry as the screams and the cheers and the roars of the watchers rent the air. The fierce new sun dazzled the windows as they thundered toward him, and the first to reach him were Ron and Hermione, and it was their arms that were wrapped around him, their incomprehensible shouts that deafened him. Then Ginny, Neville, and Luna were there, and then all the Weasleys and Hagrid, and Kingsley and McGonagall and Flitwick and Sprout, and Harry could not hear a word that anyone was shouting, not tell whose hands were seizing him, pulling him, trying to hug some part of him, hundreds of them pressing in, all of them determined to touch the Boy Who Lived, the reason it was over at last.
The sun rose steadily over Hogwarts, and the Great Hall blazed with life and light. Harry was an indispensable part of the mingled outpourings of jubilation and mourning, of grief and celebration. They wanted him there with them, their leader and symbol, their savior and their guide, and that he had not slept, that he craved the company of only a few of them, seemed to occur to no one. He must speak to the bereaved, clasp their hands, witness their tears, receive their thanks, hear the news now creeping in from every quarter as the morning drew on; that the Impirius'd up and down the country had come back to themselves, that Death Eaters were fleeing or else being captured, that the innocent of Azkaban were being released at that very moment, and that Kingsley Shacklebolt had been named temporary Minister of Magic.
They moved Voldemort's body and laid it in a chamber off the Hall, away from the bodies of Fred, Tonks, Lupin, Colin Creevey, and fifty others who had died fighting him.
George clung tightly to Fred, tears streaming down his face and onto his brother's. The Weasleys all ran to him, finally getting their time to grieve. Molly sobbed into Arthur's shirt while Ginny held Fred's hand, trying to convince herself that it just wasn't true—that Fred was just asleep. Bill and Fleur held one another. Charlie stood still, unmoving, and not daring to look at the crumpled form of his brother. Ron shed silent tears as he worried for his girlfriend while grieving over his brother. Percy, feeling guilty for not being the one lost, sobbed on the ground by Fred's feet.
Harry and Hermione grieved from afar. Harry moved over to one of the tables (McGonagall had replaced the House tables, but nobody was sitting according to House anymore: all were jumbled together, teachers and pupils, ghosts and parents, centaurs and house-elves, and Firenze lay recovering in the corner, and Grawp peered in through a smashed window) and started to converse with Luna.
Hermione sat in the corner of the Great Hall, remembering Fred Gideon Weasley. He was a true character—he was always kind to her, no matter how harsh she was on him. She would miss his joking. She would miss his smile, his laugh, his aura. She worried about George. She wasn't sure what would become of him.
She thought back to her own situation. Her parents were gone. They were killed. Not that the Weasleys knew that. She neglected to even tell them that she Obliviated them. She had nowhere to go. Surely, the Weasleys would welcome her into their home, but she didn't want to place a burden on them. She hadn't even had proper time to grieve over her parents. She worried about the future—would she go back to school? Where would she work? What would she do with her parents' house?
She, like George, didn't belong anywhere.