Ergo, Sum
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Act Zero
She's Standing on Crumbling Cliffs
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Third Tuesday, August
Ron comes in on Tuesdays while I'm not awake yet. He brews tea and sets out marmalade. When the clock strikes ten-forty-five he comes into my room and wakes me. I have to rub at my arms while I sit in bed for at least ten minutes. I can hear his weathered slippers down the hall of my apartment. He shuffles when he walks, I note. His once sprightly step lags.
I push myself out of bed. My room is decadent in gloom. The curtains block the late summer sun, tinting the walls myrtle green. The dark furniture sit silent and sullen. I slip on a robe and drag a brush through my tangled hair; I know it's impossible to tame, but I have to try anyway. Soon it's my feet that go down that calloused floor, past rows of stretched shadows and flickers of light, to emerge into the kitchen. The usual tea is set in those brown mugs Harry got me that Last Christmas. The usual scones are piled haphazardly on a plate. I wonder why Ron is doing this; he knows he's a horrible cook.
He comes out from the bathroom rubbing his large hands down the sides of his jeans. His fingers are gnarled like the ugly tree branches that line the driveway in the fall. The skin of his forearms, down to his yellowed nails, is blistered and blackened from when he reached into the Fire. He smiles at me, and three years are lifted from his face. We're only thirty—I want to say to him—so why do we look like we're dying?
He tells me that today I'm going out. Today I'm going out onto the streets of London, today I need to brave the world. I refuse—I want to hide, to cry, to go back to bed. I don't know where my weakness comes from. I don't know why I can't go outside, only that an irrational fear builds up toward the back of my mouth and down my throat when I think about the sun, about the Muggles, and about the Last Days. Everything outside reminds me of the Last Days now, I tell him. Everything external is synonymous with death and decay.
'It hasn't been so bad since Fred and George beat back Parkinson and Nott from the city,' he says. The deep grooves around his mouth lengthened. His skin, from this distance, looked like ash. 'Hermione, you can't stay bottled up in this flat forever.'
Yes I can. I warm my hands on the ceramic cup as he spreads marmalade onto a scone. I can do as I'd like. I will do as I like. The silence is laden with secrets. He seems to want to tell me something.
I spot the old typewriter by the window, inky black in a beige room. 'Is that—for me?'
I can see some of the old Ron when he smiles. He is suddenly boyish, blotched and freckled skin aside. His hand travels up to the back of his neck and his ears faintly pink as he chuckles. It's for you to write your liberating manifestos on.
I inch over toward the machine, unable to believe my eyes. Computers and other electronic equipment go haywire inside my magical building; a typewriter, being purely mechanical, is able to work. I run my hand over the keys, gingerly sliding a slip of paper into the slitted opening. 'Thank you, Ron.' The labeling on the J key, I notice, has gently faded away. The previous owner, I surmised, must have loved to tap that as she wrote.
My once sprightly digits take forever to begin working. When I do, the typewriter cracks and groans its way into motion. Three minutes later, I have a title page, an idea, a heartbeat.
BRITISH MAGICAL LIBERATION MOVEMENT
drafted in honor of the boy who should have lived
Ron comes to sit by me on the sepia loveseat. 'Hermione, he says, his hand on my shoulder, 'you have to go out. A demagogue needs to be a witch of the people. Go find the people again.'
'Why did they send you to ask me, Ron?' I pulled out my title page and stared at him. 'Why not Ginny or Luna or Neville? Why do you insist on altering our Tuesdays?'
Ron snapped. 'You're not dead yet, Hermione, so don't act like you are.'
I bit my tongue. I couldn't look at him anymore—I remembered the wretched green light, the sound of serpents hissing, the putrid scent of burning flesh. I press my lips together and hold my head in my hands; I could taste the vomit that threatened at the back of my mouth.
Ron's hands were ravaged and he'd aged beyond his years. But I had suffered more. My face was battle-scored, twisted and tattooed by scars. In my tough hair ran streaks of gray. I had lost part of one of my earlobes; the loss still haunted me whenever I tucked my hair behind my ear, so I'd touch neither hair nor face. It was so strange, because I was never vain before. Now vanity, among other things, was my jailor.
I had no mirrors in the apartment—I feared them. I feared, by association, myself.
'Ron,' I said finally. I couldn't bear to look at him; I could feel his hand was trembling and I knew he was shaking. 'Ron, just go. Go home. I'll be all right.'
'I'm sorry, Hermy.'
'Go back. Report to Terry.' He needed no further urging—he grabbed his cloak from the doorknob. I wasn't surprised by his brisk departure. He had been bothered by our conversation today. Normally, it was about the past, about third year or that one summer he kissed me behind the Burrow. I wish we were so simple now. I could tell he still loves me, or at least a part of him does, the part that's not mature and withered and dying with the rest of the world.
I'm dying too. It's just easier to forget it when I'm hidden in my rooms, lost in my woork.
The boy who should have lived. At least, I bit my tongue, at least Lord Voldemort had died with him. At least the end for him was absolute—he'd done what he needed to do. A tear slipped, dropping onto the Y key of my typewriter. It wasn't fair at all, I thought, fighting to control myself. It wasn't fair that the very course of his life had been determined for him. Perhaps if he had lived he would be with Ginny now, and she wouldn't have turned into the harsh Fury she now was. Perhaps if he had lived Nott wouldn't have taken power after the Dark Lord's death and a second shadow would not have swooped over Britain.
Perhaps if he had lived, I wouldn't be here, paralyzed with fear.
I start typing, start furiously etching out ideas on the paper Ron'd left me. I fantasize that my ideologies and underground manuscripts would spread a brilliant revolution fostered by words. I could see, in my mind's tired eye, a peaceful future: house-elves equal with wizards, purebloods holding hands with muggle-borns, centaurs and wizards sharing knowledge while their children tumbled together on grassy slopes. I could hear Ginny's voice in the back of my head, saying 'Hermione, stop dreaming and start doing…' but I couldn't just stop as easily as Ginny did. I couldn't stop, not when dreams were all I had left to distract me.
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Second Saturday, September
It is early autumn. The trees are only starting to turn color and shed their coats. Outside my apartment, I can count three scrawny leaves that have fallen on the sidewalk. The milling wizards don't notice it. It takes the imperturbable silence of solitude for these little details to register. When they do, they bloom like lotuses across the vision, until when I look at my table I don't see my books, but their scratched covers, and when I tie my shoes I don't see the laces, but the little scuffs on its side. The minutiae overwhelm me.
'Hermione,' I tell myself, 'you are going insane.'
I spend only eleven hours out of bed now. The rest of it is just dreaming, because in dreams it doesn't matter whether or not I'm insane. In dreams, incoherency is the norm.
I hear a key turning at my door. It's not Ron and I look in my desktop calendar. Ron's name is penciled in on Tuesdays, Ginny's on Fridays, Luna and Neville's on Sundays, and Professor McGonagall on the last day of every month. Professor—I don't know why I still call her that, when Hogwarts has been derelict for more than a decade now. It's too bad that old habits die hard.
A head of pale pink hair pokes into the room. 'Hey, Hermione, you here?'
Tonks. I hadn't seen her in so long. She looked much the same as ever. She hadn't seen me, of course. I shink back and hide my face. 'I'm feeling sick,' I lied. Or perhaps it wasn't a lie, because if I were called anything, sick was at the top of that list.
'I'm sorry to just barge in like this, but Ginny told me you were feeling down and that you haven't been out of this flat in a bloody long time, so I was sent over to—'
'No, really Tonks; I'm fine. I need to take a nap.' She comes down the corridor, and I could hear her Auror boots stomping down my clean wood grain. I scramble under a blanket and cover myself with it.
She takes a look around the room, around the somber furniture and the paper-strewn table, and lets out a long whistle. 'If I didn't know better, I'd think you were the second Remus.' She comes to stand by my bed, next to my huddled form. Her voice is soft when she speaks again. 'This isn't really the type of thing I'm used to, Hermione. But they needed someone cheerful, so I volunteered. I haven't seen you in so long—not until after the Battle, and I think… I know many of the others miss you too.'
'Thanks, Tonks. That means a lot. But I really need to sleep—'
'Don't you think I know when a girl is lying?' She silences me. Gently she pulls off my blanket and gazes at me. I prepare for her flinch, but she merely looks quiet. 'I've seen worse, on the battlefield. Not many, for sure, but definitely worse. There are so many other things that could have happened to you. Be thankful you weren't lost to us.'
I want to throw a biting remark back at her. She keeps talking.
'I remember Hermione. She was a good-natured girl, bright and loyal, and very clever. But she was also intensely logical, idealistic, and optimistic about the future. Where is that? You were once known for your ability to think deeply and rationally, and I don't think that talent's lost. But it's missing.'
She smiles at me, the joyful woman who married Lupin, and handed a hairbrush to me.
'I'm not Ginny; I won't take care of you,' she says. 'But I do care, and I look forward to the day you come visit Remus and me.'
She takes a clear glance at the room around her. She chortles. 'Just as a heads up, now that I've been here, I can come whenever I like.' Then she rises, pulls out her wand, and Disapparated away.
I blinked at the sudden pop in the air and burrowed myself deeper into my bed. But I could hear her voice in my mind, and see her cool appraisal of me in her glance. She was right about me, ultimately. I had been optimistic, even in the Last Days when Harry overstrained himself from stress, had been optimistic at the dawn of the Battle, all the way until I had fallen to my knees in front of Bellatrix Lestrange, and Harry had stepped in the way of her curse. He'd gone on to fight Lord Voldemort in his weakened state; I was paralyzed, guilty, struggling, and watching in horror as every spell left him weaker. In a way, he had won by Lord Voldemort's loss, the other dropping to his knees and withering before Harry gave over, he had avenged his parents, avenged Diggory, and avenged the many others who had fallen. But the cost—
Optimism is helpless against the green light. I shrink into my bed and close my eyes.
-
4th Tuesday, September
Ron comes again. This time he has Indian food with him in hopes of tempting me out. He puts his takeout right outside the door. I summoned it in with a simple Accio. He crossed his arms in front of his chest in frustration. I remembered Tonks.
'I've got agoraphobia, Ron. What am I supposed to do about it?'
'Get over it. I got over agoraphobia, too.'
'You mean arachnophobia.'
'What's the difference?'
I rest my hands in my lap. He did not wait for me, I remembered. He did not stay by me, through it all; he found his own life. I wasn't surprised when he told me he was going to marry Lavender. I wasn't too upset, because I knew I couldn't expect him to keep his promise. Promises made during the Last Days weren't generally kept. Harry had promised then to stay alive. He went back on his word. Breaking a promise made during those days—the short, turbulent two weeks where morning and night blurred together and you're never quite without the presence of Death hanging over you—doesn't make someone a liar. It makes him human.
I wish Harry hadn't been human.
A corner of Ron's robe is frayed. A particularly long thread from it sticks out like a cowlick. I patch it up with a little wand work. Ron feels it and sighs. 'The most talented witch of our generation stuck here, in this dump.' He wants to say that I can't be insane if I can still perform these bits of magic—but he knows my argument. Insanity doesn't impair magical ability. It impairs the human psyche.
I smile, a somewhat bitter residue of regret aching at the back of my throat. 'You're one to talk, considering you live in the Burrow now.'
'Hermione! You haven't been drinking with a Slytherin, have you?'
My patience wears thin. 'Yeah, Malfoy drops buy now and then, and after I fulfill my ardent wish of gutting him with a spork for sixth year, we play poker.' The sarcasm was unlike me. I try to tuck myself away again in my armchair and poke at the curry. Ron pulls my comforter off, and laughs.
His hair is tussled youthfully, but his eyes wrinkle and crease with age. He looks as if he wants to say something, but he doesn't say anything and I appreciate it. I appreciate silence. He's fiddling nervously with his hair, and knowing him as I do, day-in, day-out, for almost twenty years—
'Just come out and tell me.'
He grimaces. 'We found news of them. Athens and Thebes. Most of us are being deployed to the Mediterranean. If we can catch Nott and Parkinson, or even just Pucey, then it'll be a gain on our part. But this means… Well, Lavender insists on going, and Ginny won't be dissuaded and Neville and Dean are like that too…" He coughed uncomfortably, and his rising flush peaked. "So Zabini will be visiting you."
I drop my bowl. It clatters on the floor and the flood spills out, staining the clean wood. 'Zabini? Blaise Zabini?' Ron pulls out his wand and clumsily cleans up the mess.
'I know you never trusted him—'
'He's a Death Eater.'
'Hermione, you're stuck in the past. There are only former Death Eaters now—without Voldemort, that power is nothing, that magic is just a scar, a burn, a painful tattoo. It's Nott we have to worry about, and Zabini left Nott. I have a hard time trusting him myself, but the magic wards inside this apartment is so strong—and he's been stripped of his wand already—not even Neville disagrees.'
'Why not Susan? Or Seamus? Or the twins? Why not Luna?'
Ron rubs his forehead tiredly. 'They're all going down, besides Seamus and backup, but they're all stationed. They don't have time. Zabini is all we have.'
'I don't need anyone—I can get by on my own.' If Zabini comes in to this place, I think sourly, I'll cut him apart.
Ron summons the bowl and laid it on the table. He walks around my room, cracking open a window, adjusting a curtain. I fight the urge to scream; my attention narrows onto the whistling, thin window opening through which the outside world was escaping inside. I glower.
'You can't get by all by yourself for two and a half months,' Ron tells me. He notices that I'm only half listening, and that instead I'm blanched and clutching at my chair, frightened. He hurriedly snaps down the window and locks it. He apologizes.
I breathe slowly, counting. In my mind I see a Time-Turner slowly rotating, and with each dip and turn my heartbeat steadies. 'Ten weeks?' I say finally. Ron is next to me, holding my hand. I notice that my knuckles had turned white with exertion and I loosen my grip; he flinches a little as the blood floods back. 'You'll be gone ten weeks?'
His other hand kneads my shoulder and loosens the tension there. I've missed his touch and I want to lean in; distantly I remember Lavender and the two smiling at each other in their wedding video. I pull away.
'Ten weeks, yeah,' he says, and his voice is jagged. 'And you know it's going to be dangerous.'
'I know.'
'Let Zabini come by, please. I'll owl you, but Ginny and I would feel so much safer about—'
'Yes. He can come by. But only for groceries and errands. I won't accept anything else.'
Ron thanks me, and his eyes murmur that he wants to embrace me before he goes, but he's too afraid to. In the window, I see my reflection speaking to him, and my reflection is his perception of me; small, shrunken, fragile, with spidery thin veins showing on sallow—too sallow—skin, hair harshly, deep imprints under my eyes like kohl smudges, burns and crisscrossing lines swelling across the left side of my face.
I shiver with fear.
'When is the Order going,' I ask him at the door. 'Isn't Lavender too pregnant to go?'
'It's only three months along by now,' he says, adjusting his coat. 'She won't be stopped now. After Parvati was lost… well, I've told you how she's been.' He looked disfigured in the dark; I must have been more alarming to behold.
'We're been deployed, we're gone tomorrow.'
What can I say? The old Hermione would yell at him for not telling her sooner, and perhaps run to her room to cry, but… I nod, and turn away as he opens and shuts the front door.
I slide onto my couch and feed the typewriter another sheet of paper. I begin writing, but I wasn't thinking of the past any longer. Caught in those sore, uneven fingers, weakened, still fighting—I was holding back a deluge. Ron had fondly kissed the top of my head as goodbye. It wasn't the kiss that rankled the most—it was that overwhelming sense of platonic affection he had given me. Reminded once again that he had moved on—that he was starting a family, that what we once had was now fragmented—I let out a quiet sob.
