Hermione hadn't roused herself from her stupor for days. She performed all the necessary tasks: foraging in the forest around their campsite for mushrooms and other edible plants for their sparse meals, helping Harry pack and unpack the tent each time they changed location, and researching, always researching. But Harry could tell her heart was not in it. To be honest, his was not either. He didn't know who suffered more from Ron's departure, him losing his best friend, or Hermione losing the man who was slowly becoming... more.
Harry picked up the broom that rested in one corner of the admirably spacious tent and began to sweep the rough wooden floors, the movement soothing him and allowing him to clear his thoughts and return to the problem at hand. Ron had left. He was not coming back. He could not come back even if he wanted to. The first day he and Hermione had silently agreed to stay at their campsite for an extra night, hoping against hope that Ron would recover his senses and return to them. Neither had slept very well that night: jumping at the smallest whisper in the trees or rustle in the underbrush around the tent. But Ron had not returned. They waited as long as possible the next morning, even going so far as to lower their wards for an hour before they reluctantly apparated away from the clearing.
Harry had wanted to cry. He had never thought Ron would desert him. Sure he had a temper and it was not surprising that he had stomped off after their argument. But to actually leave? To not come back? He had never imagined-.
But he understood why. Ron had made it painfully clear that Harry was not fulfilling his end of the bargain. Harry, like Ron and Hermione, was clueless as to what they were supposed to be doing. They had been wandering rather aimlessly for months now. Subsisting off of food that they had to forage from the forest or from lonely farms that they passed. Harry had told them everything he knew about horcruxes, about Voldemort's life, about Dumbledore's lessons. They had bounced ideas off each other endlessly. Repeating the same old phrases over and over again with the same arguments cropping up each time.
It did no good. They were no closer to discovering the other horcruxes then they were to destroying the one in their possession. The locket. The horrible, cold hunk of gold that seemed to invade their waking moments and their dreams as well. Some part of Harry recognized that he and Hermione were going to go mad if they did not find a way to destroy it soon. Ron had been feeling the effects more strongly than both of them and was merely acting from a subconscious form of self-preservation when he had left them.
Or so Harry tried to console himself.
Hermione stuffed the last of the tent into her beaded bag, straightened up and met Harry's eye. She gave him a nod took his arm, apparating them again away from the fourth campsite they had been at since Ron had left. Yes, she was counting. She could admit to herself that this was probably not a good practice and would not in any way help her get over Ron's betrayal, but she could not seem to stop.
Time seemed determined to torment her. Sometimes it would stagnate around her so that each second had to be forcibly wrenched out of the chasm of the universe and pushed onwards. Minutes would pass at painful speeds and nothing happened to divert her thoughts from the darkest recesses of her brain. Then there were other times when nothing seemed to be able to stop the hurricane of thoughts that pounded down on her, gusts of emotion threatening to knock her over and despair, like heavy rain on a tin roof, making itself heard.
Recently, focussing on her books had been the only possible recourse to a sane mind.
Hermione looked around at the new surroundings. She had not really been paying attention while apparating them, and glanced over at Harry, happy to see that she had managed to do so without splinching them. Thank goodness she had practiced so hard back at Hogwarts in preparation for their apparition test. She had been worried that she might mess up this new form of transportation so unique to the wizarding world and so she had spent hours practicing and researching common mistakes and ways to improve her precision. Not that she didn't research everything important that came her way, she mentally prodded herself back to the present yet again.
Harry had left her side and started erecting their wards and anti-muggle protections around their chosen campsite. Campsite Hermione thought with a trace of wry humour. This was so far removed from all the camping she had ever done previously. With her parents in the summer there had been hiking and laughter and it hadn't mattered if their fire was smoking because they did not have to hide from watchful eyes. They had roasted their meals over those fires, and hot sticky marshmallows for dessert that left a wonderfully sweet taste on the tongue so often mingled with the burnt taste of ash when the marshmallow had inevitably caught fire or touched a log. Best of all had been the nights. Lying in her sleeping bag in the tent which had a removable cover over the mesh ceiling so that one could look out on the treetops and through them the stars. Sometimes they had set up camp in an open area like a grassy field and her mother had pointed out the constellations and they had made up their own constellations and the stories to go along with them. The last summer that she had gone camping with her parents had been in the summer of her fourth year. She had taken astronomy at Hogwarts by then and she knew so much more about the stars than she had as a child. Even better, she knew the wizarding constellations and the stories behind them. Tales full to the brim of mythical creatures and magical quests and heroes rewarded for their heroic deeds with a place among the stars. She had regaled her parents for hours with her stories. Now the stars provided her with some comfort. Knowing that everyone she loved, her parents in Australia, Ron and the Weasleys, her friends still at Hogwarts, could see the same stars as she. She remembered a quote she had once read by Og Mandino. "I love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness because it shows me the stars."
Hermione blinked and returned from her thoughts. There were no stars out yet although the sun was nearing the horizon, casting lengthening shadows from the trees all around them and stilling the air as though in anticipation for the passage into night. They had left their last campsite late again today; both her and Harry still out of the routine since… Ron. Harry was almost finished the charms around the campsite and Hermione quickly accioed the tent from inside her small beaded bag. With a flick of her wand it unrolled itself and quickly expanded. The stakes driving themselves into the corners of the tent of their own accord and the flaps covering the entrance pulling back to reveal the warm glow emitted by the lamps inside the tent that never seemed to go out or to burn anything even when knocked into the side of the tent's wall. Hermione loved magic. Sometimes the small things like the everlasting lamps inside the magically expanded tent could leave her awed. She knew Harry felt the same way after growing up with his muggle Aunt and Uncle. There were some things about magic that she would never be able to take for granted.
Harry walked over to Hermione who was lost in thought again. She had been doing that a lot in the past few days. He couldn't blame her really. If he was more of a thinking person himself he would probably have done the same. But he was not. He was an action person and so any of his tension and frustration was taken out cooking, cleaning, setting up the wards (which Hermione had let him do once she had ensured that he knew exactly how to perform each charm and even knew the theory behind them), finding food, or stomping around the tent making a nuisance of himself. Sometimes he wished desperately for his Firebolt so he could take off into the air and just fly. Feel the wind bighting his cheeks, stinging them. Twisting his hair around his head and knocking the breath from his body. He wanted to dive towards the ground as fast as the broom could take him, feel the huge rush of adrenaline that could only come with flying, and then pull up at the last second, skimming his feet against the ground before shooting back up in the air.
He felt so stifled in the still atmosphere of the tent. It felt like a library with their research books scattered over every available surface and Hermione doing a good impression of Madame Pince and shushing angrily anytime he made a sudden move. Harry knew that Hermione's volatile temper was merely her way of expressing her own dislike of the situation, but it had not helped his and Ron's state of mind in the slightest.
But since Ron was gone the full force of Hermione's crankiness had fallen on Harry. And, he acknowledged with regret, his own anger and resentment had fallen on Hermione. They both needed some sort of action. Some sort of conclusion to at least one of the things that they had been working on. But that was the problem wasn't it? They were getting nowhere and damned if Harry knew what to do next.