shadowy faces and flickering candles, the sporadic pearly white of the ghosts dotting the hall and the constant light of the stars overhead -
and the Hat, stamping her with her new epithet - her fumbling fingers as she removes it from her head, applause ringing almost painfully in her ears - feet that trip as she scurries to a table, her table now - her body bumps so ungracefully as she slides into place, what must they all think of her? -
every inch of her skin is tingling with something and she did hope for this, so of course she's just ecstatic but there's something - she doesn't - she refuses to acknowledge it, even to herself but -
does she really fit in here?
("GRYFFINDOR!" the Hat had roared, celebrating and crucifying her with a single word.)
"I wanted to be Gryffindor," Argus Filch confesses under the protection of the night, but only Mrs. Norris is there to listen.
Harry holds her as she weeps.
His arms wrap around her tightly, fortifying her. His words pour into her ear, comforting her. His thumb traces patterns and words on her back almost mindlessly - i love you, he writes, imagining that he's tattooing it across her spine.
And she shudders against him, a mess of incoherence and shaking sobs and agony. "I'm tired of being brave," she whispers, "I don't want to be a Gryffindor anymore."
"You don't need to be, not with me," he murmurs. "I love you."
And he does love her, he does. His heart is burning with grief, so much so that he wants to yank it straight from his chest just to stop the pain. But sometimes, when she talks numbly of Fred's burial and her emptiness and how wrong it all is, he remembers a cold Christmas and two immaculate graves and the pity Hermione fed him on for days, and a thought darts treacherously across his mind:
welcome to my life.
He's tired of being brave too, you see.
when the days are longer and lonelier and her wand lies languidly on her desk, Hermione coats her nails with red and gold. She rattles around a familiar house, suffocated by silence and solitude, her fingernails stained with the memory of home.