AN: Written from a prompt given by my boyfriend for a Luna/Hermione fic. Friendship fic that may develop into more.
Disclaimer: I do not own.
Summary: When Ron dies in an explosion that nearly kills Hermione as well, a whole new world is opened up to her where she learns to let Ron's death go and become whole once again.
Pink Kneazles
By xrosepetalsx
- Chapter 1 -
Hermione Granger isn't crazy, and she knows it, but everybody else in the world tries to convince her that she is.
They tell her that those things that she see's? They're all in her head, figments of her imagination, and all she has to do to make them go away is stop giving them any attention.
But she can't, because she finds that through this world, she is finally able to heal from all the wounds the war, and Ron's death, have given her.
And even when she does heal, sometimes she still sees Ron there, and she won't admit it to anyone, but that tiny little bit of unhealthy insanity in the back of her mind was her addiction.
Two years ago, there was an explosion, the level two offices of the ministry of magic destroyed in an attack by a new sect of witches and wizards deathly afraid of the corrupt force of the ministry.
73 dead, 49 injured, 12 lucky to be alive.
When the war ended, and clean-up and prosecution begun, those who still believed Voldemort had followers in the ministry controlling everything, letting off known, suspected, even convicted death eaters with nothing more than a slap on the wrist, caused riots that put more innocent to death than guilty.
They had calmed the riots, even put an end to many people's fears, but there were plenty left who couldn't be calmed. Thus the explosion.
Ron had died in that explosion. So many of Hermione's friends were content to pretend that she had too. But she hadn't.
She wished that she had.
Their friends had visited her in the hospital at first, crying over her limp and burned body, begging her to wake up. Harry never left her bedside, steady as a rock, unflinching.
No one ever heard him utter a word, never saw him shed a tear, and the nurse's worried over how little sleep he seemed to get.
Hermione suspected he regretted all that time wasted, just like all of the others, when he realized that she'd gone crazy.
Of course, he was the only one who never tried to convince her that she was, but she could see it in his eyes, could see it in the way he avoided her gaze when she insisted that what she was seeing was real.
After a while, she'd given up on him. He was the only friend she had left, and she was tired of seeing that look of pity in his eyes.
The first night she woke up in the hospital room, it was to Ron burning and screaming in agony at the end of her bed, and she launched herself out from under the covers without concern for the IV drip's and needles that were keeping her alive.
She didn't yet know they existed.
The nurses ran in when she started screaming, and didn't expect to see her crouched on the ground clutching at something that wasn't there. She screamed at them to help her, screamed at them that Ron was dying, to put out the fire, but they didn't listen, tearing at her arms and forcing her back in bed.
The floor was covered in her blood, but Hermione didn't notice. All she could see was Ron burning to death, mouth wide open in a scream that only she could hear, eyes pleading with her to help.
Harry clutched at her arm and tried to tell her that Ron was dead, but his mouth wouldn't open because the words were stuck in his throat.