The House of Brandy
"Harry, I couldn't help noticing... there's a lot of brandy in this house. Not proportionate to the number of occupants, is what I mean," said Hermione carefully; she guessed at the reaction this would get.
Harry slouched further into the expensive, burnished leather of his only chair, and glared half-heartedly up at her. She hovered over him, which he found irritating. But he was forced to admit she had little choice: his sitting room, like the rest of his absurdly large house, lacked the furniture to accommodate more than one person.
This was not so of his liquor cabinet, as Hermione had identified.
"I'm not an alcoholic. No one could call me that," he said after a while.
"No," she badgered. "But it's not really, for want of a better word, spiritually healthy--"
"Spiritually," Harry muttered darkly.
Hermione's voice rose marginally; they were used to talking over each other: "For want of a better word, I said! --To be marinating in your gloom like that. Night after night. Why didn't you tell us you were so sad and lonely?"
Harry would have laughed, if he weren't so stoned and irritated. As it was, he just smiled, bleak and a little mad, like he'd practiced in the mirror: "Jesus Hermione, don't suger-coat it or anything, don't hold back, eh? Just say what you mean, eh? Why didn't I tell you?" he continued. "Because I knew you'd come running over and tell me to get over myself. Which, you know, is exactly what you're doing now. And after all I've seen, can you really begrudge me a bit of depression and a splash or two of drink?"
"After all you've seen? After all YOU'VE seen?", she was really shouting now. Her large, matronly bosom rose and wobbled a bit as she gathered the wits and breath to give him a verbal thrashing.
But instead she just came and sat on the arm of the chair. Harry didn't like her there; it was too close; he didn't want her to touch him. He stilled deliberately. Her thick buttock squashed against his bicep, and she stooped to put her arms around his neck: like her dog, she's owning me. He made his breathing louder and slower, pushing through his nostrils rudely; she ignored him.
"Harry, stop that, and just listen. You're acting spoilt. Now listen:" she had become matter of fact. It didn't match with her benevolent, possessive grip on his neck. "We have a war to fight. It will continue to be political. By the grace of God, we happen to be on the same side, and that side is winning. We are your comrades and your friends. I am your friend. I love you – no don't snort like that. After ten years, I am more than entitled to love you. I love you," she continued, "And I care when you're not happy. It is my job to care, as your section partner, and it is my priviledge, as your friend."
She stopped there. Harry could not but admire her craft: she had a gift for stopping at the most dramatic point. And in the same speech, accusing him of drama.
He shrugged her arms off his shoulders and looked at her face. He looked at her heavy, frizzy, silvery-brown fringe loitering low on her hard-browed eyes. The skin on her small, straight nose was stretched to white at the bridge – indicative of concentration, generally, and disapproval of Harry, specifically. She hated it when he did this, called it "talking through her".
"Hermione," he began placidly (and sarcastically), "I just came home from a crap day at the Headquarters, where I had to sit through a three hour meeting with a bunch of white-beards, and two hours of that, incidentally, was a statistics report on deaths of students, families, and other innocent people; two hours, mind you; and then you decide to drop by on your good Samaritan tour and chew me out because, if I've got this right, 'you love me'."
He paused, confident that it he wouldn't be interrupted, that there was nothing which tongue-tied Hermione more than being called on her dramatics.
"Hnh," he snorted. "We're not sixteen anymore. You can't just tell me you love me, and put your hands all over me, and expect me to get so horny that I forget all my other problems."
Hermione folded her hands tightly in her lap, and began to cry. When she had been quietly snivelling and quaking for a couple of minutes, said in a wavering voice, "I'm twenty six and I have grey hair! I know you notice it, it's one of your favorite things to focus on when you talk through me. Do you have any idea how much that hurts?"
She didn't wait for him to continue, didn't want a response yet. She heaved a snotty sigh and slid her eyes off his face to stare out his window at the darkening pastoral outside. "I read Ron his orders this afternoon – he's off to the continent for four months. I also visited Luna, they said she's got a couple of days left, a week at the most. She couldn't talk, they drug her to sleep most of the day now. Anyway, I thought you'd want to be told, so I came over here... To find you – stoned and drunk."
She cried harder, but her voice didn't rise, only her words came out more fragmented now: "I know you don't like my hugs, Harry. I know you don't even really like me. But since Mum and Dad died – I miss – I don't know – I just thought – do I... repulse... you?"
The truth would definitely have hurt her, and probably have made her go away and leave him alone for a while. He considered it. But he didn't have that many friends to chose from, to be honest, and there was something pathetic, and vaguely flattering, about how she kept mothering him, when it was bloody obvious, he thought, that he was just fine. So he untucked his crossed arms, and reached over. He put one hand on her back, and the other on her stomach, and pressed down into the thick-knitted wool to the layer of soft fat he knew she wore underneath.
She frowned wretchedly, and said, "Oh stop it. You've missed the whole point. You can't just 'make it all better', you know. Like you said, we're not sixteen anymore."
He ignored her, and pulled her into his lap. He was startled to recall how little she weighed – she seemed much bigger than she was, with her middle- aged woman's body, but it was only a little plumpness after all. Harry almost laughed.
"What the hell's so funny?" She held herself away from him, her torso at a weird angle with the effort. He seemed to hold her as he would a large box. His arms felt all wrong around her.
"You don't weigh a thing," was his absent reply.
Through her ugly crying-face, already pink, she blushed.
"Sad about Luna," he said blandly. Hermione keeled toward him gingerly, stopping when her shoulder and head met his robes. If she had cried earlier, she was sobbing now: those awful long, keening whimpers which seem to snake out from behind closed eyes. Her hands were clasped together in prayer-shape, fingers entwined and stuck down to conceal their shaking.
Harry removed one arm and reached over to the side-board; he picked up his pipe and brought it to his mouth, then repeated the move for the matches. When the pipe was safely lit – he had verged on laughter again, as he pictured setting her vast wooly hood of hair on fire – he put his free hand over her double fist. She drew a sudden breath at its coldness, interrupting a particularly wrenching sigh. It seemed to recall her to where she was, where they were: stoned and sad, both hunched on the only piece of furniture in the room. She sniffed so that Harry could imagine the mucus being pulled up her nostrils, and he wrinkled his own nose in distaste.
Hermione made to get off him. He deliberately kept his arm around her. She sneered: "Decided a hug isn't the worst thing that could befall you, eh?"
"Come on, have a glass of brandy with me, and we'll remember Luna and Ron. We owe it to them," he added piously.
It was Hermione's turn to snort. "Ron's not dead yet."
"Neither is Luna," Harry said.
They contemplated this: both their comrades had only a matter of time. Hermione pulled herself up with a grunt, and looked around the room.
"It's in the kitchen," Harry told her.
She walked across the room; the floorboards creaked to follow her, becoming more pronounced when the rug ran out.
Some while later...
The bathroom door must have been open; he could hear her throwing up at the end of the hall. As he passed out, the new brandy bottle fell out of his fingers to leak fumes into the rug stretched flat on the floor.