Sixteen

She's been sixteen for about ten years longer than she should have been. She's not quite sure why, but she likes to think, to speculate, that maybe it's because those are the days she likes to preserve, to keep locked in an air-tight jar and stored somewhere where she can always see them but never lose them. Because those were days of sun, of simplicity, when things hurt for the sake of hurting and not because there was any real stimulus for pain. Because back then, back in those sweet, blue-skied days, when the two of them kissed in the broom cupboard, pressed against each other in a blurred, swirling mixture of colour and scent and lips and rounded, wet tongues and names that were gasped in mindless moments of physical and emotional passion.

She should have turned seventeen and eighteen (and nineteen and twenty) but somewhere along the lines she placed a roadblock in that path and her mentality slammed head-first into that stubborn wall. She refused to change because if she changed she might lose everything that actually kept her sane those three hundred and sixty-five days that she was sixteen.

Like Ron. Ron kept her sane- kept her more than sane- kept her feeling alive and happy and just simply pulsing with feeling. And Ron taught her more about what was right and what was wrong and about sex and love and art and happiness and magic than she could ever learn from parents or school or library books. He was an enigma, a walking, breathing, angel of a human who just seemed to know. And even then - even when they were both awkward teenagers who cut their own hair - Ron just carried this aura of … nostalgia. Wherever he was and wherever he showed up it was as if he'd been gone somewhere between a decade and forever and was just stopping by to say hello and resurrect dead memories.

There wasn't anything to remember, now. Nothing she wanted to remember, actually. There should have been sadness, a sort of despondency, but there wasn't. Ron went out the way he had lived: almost as if he was doing it by accident. He didn't go out with a bang; well, technically he'd gone out with a flash. A flash of fluorescent green, shot from the wand of Bellatrix Lestrange. It hadn't even been a duel; the cruel demoness had attacked him in the street. Several muggles had had to be obliviated, but no one could take Hermione's pain away.

She was always going to be sixteen because Ron had been sixteen. It was as if some higher power had seen that the years were going to rape him of what made him beautiful and decided that the only way to preserve him was to just take him.

She doesn't cry anymore and she tries not to visit Ron's grave. She doesn't mourn with his family and on his birthday she stays inside, expecting and getting phone calls but not responding to them. She takes the medicine that makes her light enough so that she doesn't kill herself and throws out the ones that make her too happy. It's a fake sort of happy, a plastic sort of happy. The only real happy she ever felt was when his parents didn't know what the two of them were doing in the basement. For some reason it makes her realize how much she dislikes the word boyfriend. It leaves room for failure and makes her feel sick.

She misses Ron but doesn't want him back. She wants to go back to a time when things were simple and Cauldron Cakes still only cost five knuts. She wants summer, and kissing, and two lips that wouldn't lie. She wants to go back to being sixteen, because neither of them will get any older. Because nothing will ever change.