Disclaimer: JKR owns Harry Potter. Me? Not so much.
A/N: Hermione, Draco, the end of the world... for Lou, with all my love. (Even though it's ever so slightly late. Deadlines don't agree with me, I'm afraid.)
Many thanks to Lemonella for the great job she did beta-ing this.
And uh, yeah, feedback would be nice. :)
And The Rain Fell
It is a dark and stormy night, though hardly more so than any other night this autumn. It's as though the weather knows of the great misfortune that has befallen them. The scales are not in balance any longer.
She is dressed in black, of the kind that calls to mind starless nights and despair. She stands by the door. He never thought her pretty, but she will do.
Her hair is up in a serious bun. Her gaze flits through the room. She was always the kind of girl who paid attention.
He says her name, softly.
Her eyes focus on him. They are almost colourless.
"I worry," she says. "I don't like these rumours."
He shrugs.
"They are just rumours, Hermione," he says. "The ministry always told some lie to keep everything nice and dandy and under perfect control."
She shrugs. Outside, they can hear the storm raging.
"Every rumour has to be founded on a grain of truth, no matter how remote," she says. Her voice is barely higher than a whisper.
She is wearing his mother's jewels. Not that they are worth anything now.
"Harry Potter saved the world," he says. He hates how bitter his voice is sounding - as if Potter doesn't deserve every single thing that happened to him. "He's made sure that Voldemort is not ever going to come back."
He speaks the words without fear now, yet they still fall empty from his mouth.
She flinches at the sound of the name.
"I'm not afraid," she says. "I never said I was."
He gets to his feet, running a hand through his hair.
There is a roll of thunder - quite appropriately dramatic. He almost smiles at that.
"You're brave," he says. "Gryffindor, and all that."
"Oh, shut up." Suddenly, she is angry. She steps to the window, as though she might see something beyond the rain. There is nothing to see, of course. There isn't anything left worth seeing.
"Your words, they hurt me," he drawls, but comes after her, resting a featherlight hand on her shoulder.
She slips away from him.
He always calls her by her name now. There's no use to insulting her now.
When they came here, some time ago, they played dress-up with his mother's clothes, like two children discovering a chest in an attic. Narcissa's green robes did not suit Hermione.
She read all the books in the library, sitting behind his father's desk for hours, her face set in grim determination.
"If we had these during the War," she told him once, but did not finish the thought.
He never kissed her. Never bloody well touched her, at that. He doesn't know why. For all purposes, she literally is the last girl in the world. The last one worth touching, in any case. Maybe that is why he doesn't.
He loves her with no more affection than one would show an old dog.
"They say," she starts, and swallows hard, "that the dead are rising from their graves."
"Inferi?" He cannot believe it. "Where did you hear that?"
She shrugs. "About," she says, and he should be used to the way that Hermione can extract information out of thin air by now - or so it would certainly seem - but he isn't.
He catches the gleam in her eyes.
"He wouldn't be the same," he says, softly.
All emotion vanishes from her face. "I know," she snaps, and her voice is probably harder than she intended to make it.
He tries to touch her again, and this time, she lets him. Hermione's shoulder is warm under his hand. He wonders at how bony she has become.
"Come," he says. "It's almost time for dinner."
She stares out of the window, as though she hasn't even heard him.
They dine of empty plates, wine glasses filled with something that, with enough luck, might be water, but might as soon be not.
She drinks in small sips. He finds himself mesmerized by the sight of her lips, chapped as they are.
After dinner, he lays out a fire whilst Hermione watches from the couch, her face looking old and drawn. The promise of her youth has long left her.
It's chilly. It always gets chilly at night, and he has to use several covers. When he suggested she'd crawl in with him so it'd be warmer, she punched him. He felt mildly offended at that.
She reads, sometimes, but not today. She stares into the flames, as though she might find the answers there.
"Will you stop staring at me?" she says, suddenly turning to him. "I swear, Draco, you're getting creepier every day."
He holds back the bark of laughter that threatens to burst forth. So it's him?
"Sorry, Hermione," he says instead, and would they ever have believed that he would say these words, ever, back at school?
She doesn't smile.
"I'm going out," she says instead.
"And do what?" he asks. He can still hear thunder crashing.
His hands feel cold. He rubs them together - of course that does nothing to warm them again.
"See," she says. "I can't just stay here. Do nothing."
"Granger," he says, and his voice is suddenly harsh. "Think for a moment. Do you really believe that a Mudblood could ever save anybody?"
He sees the hurt that flits over her face at that. He's almost sorry.
"I can try," she says, and sounds strangely determined.
"Don't think I'll help you," he says. "If you want to kill yourself, that's your business."
It's not like she expected him to, either.
The rain drenches her. It soaks through the expensive silks that Draco's mother used to wear, and onto her own skin, until she is shivering, and cold, and convinced that she will never, in her entire life, feel warm again.
She has to see it. If the dead are rising from their graves, she has to see it. (The only valuable reality is the one that we can perceive ourselves.)
She never liked to fly, and she still doesn't. Not in this weather.
The Malfoys' land is warded well. There is little that can come through these wards - that is why the house did survive so much of the War. Only the south wing lay in ruins. The south wing where they found -
But she pushes back that thought.
She mustn't think of that.
During the war, they heard horror stories. About how Death Eaters had taken their victims' bodies and impaled them for everyone to see. How they had raped virgins, and hung men by their entrails. Not half of the stories were true, of course.
She wraps her robes tighter around her self. The wood of her wand feels smooth in her hands.
She walks the grounds. Her shoes are soggy by now, her toes, she is sure, frozen blocks of ice. The wards make sure that she can't Apparate whilst she is still on Malfoy land.
The streets are empty. She can smell smoke, but there is no fire. No heat. The fog is so thick that she can only see for a few metres.
Her grip around her wand tightens, and she tries to remember to be careful. It's been months since she last saw the outside world. It feels strange. Everything always used to be so full of people, and now there is nobody.
She can't shake off the feeling that there are dozens of eyes on her. But she resists the urge to call out, just to see if something will answer. She wanders through familiar streets, but all she can see are boarded up windows, and glass shattered on the ground like a thousand diamonds.
Her feet lead her, even though she doesn't know where she is going. What seems to her, at first, like a meaningless maze of unfamiliar alleys and streets, leads her in front of a house that might once have been familiar enough to call it - no, not home, never that place - but...
She shouldn't do this. Rationally, she knows this. But she knew a lot of things, and none of them had saved her, and so - she opens the door of Grimmauld Place.
(Better the devil you know...)
She just has to know.
Mrs Black's portrait wakens as soon as she crosses the threshold, and she thinks that of all the vicious things that she has ever encountered, this one is perhaps the most annoying one.
She ignores it, as she has ever since she first set foot into this house. She has to see... she has to see...
She can't not see. Not now that she is here. She has to know that -
The doorhandle of the living-room is dusty. She is worried that the dust is the sort that will never come off her hands again. Sticks to the skin, making it discoloured and gray, like a dead man's hand.
It strikes her how little has changed about this place. How they all might just walk back in again, and how Molly would complain about the mess, and how she would sit with Harry by the fireplace, and have a nice chat.
She opens the door, slowly. There is nothing here that she should be afraid of. Nothing but dust. She pauses, tries to think of the dead rising again, and of Harry, how she saw him last in that room, his face bloody, and his eyes empty. (If she could only see him one more time... She's not asking for anything else.)
She opens the door. Beyond it lie only bones.
She runs then.
And runs, runs as quick as her feet will carry her, across the muddy ground, and when she shuts the door of Malfoy's house with a bang behind her, she doesn't actually feel safe (even though this probably is the safest place left in the world.)
They never leave the house these days. They do not dare to brave the storm. But perhaps dare is not the right word. Perhaps there just is no reason left to go outside anymore.
He rests his head against the cool glass of the window.
His mouth tastes of chalk and nothingness. He can hear her pace upstairs, talking to herself. He looks outside, and watches the rain fall. That's all there is to do.