After Death, After Dark
Because the darkness just makes love weaker.
"This is... hard. For me. You know me, Harry... you know that I – that I usually don't just disregard the facts like this… But... this time...
Oh, look at me! I'm being an absolute idiot, I really am. I'm blushing. This is terrible.
Alright, I'll drop the pretenses. Harry... Harry, I love you. And I miss you, so, so much. I didn't even know that... Oh, God.
I'm always crying, lately, Harry... I cry for Fred and for Colin, and for Lupin, Tonks... I cry for Mad-Eye... and I cry for you.
Not often. Not… not like I should. Not enough.
It's so hard, you know? It's so hard to get out of bed every day with this giant, gaping hole in your chest, and live a normal life. It's so hard to see that, yes, everyone's struggling, but they're moving on... and to even consider that, well… it's the most horrible thing, because I don't want to leave you, Harry, I don't want to age while you stay seventeen forever.
Please, Harry, don't make me move on. Don't make me leave you. I don't want your face to blur, or your voice to fade... I don't want to struggle to remember your laugh. I don't want you to change, I want to remember, but Harry, Harry it's so hard, it's so hard when you're -
I can't even say it. I haven't said it for so long... not since I had to tell Ginny... and I-I promised that... I wouldn't say it again...
Harry, why did you do it? I could have made a plan, or - or fought harder, or something, you know I would have! Me, and Ron, and everyone - we didn't want you to die! We would have fought for you, Harry, we would have fought harder, we would have won! Why did you - just b-because Ron and I love each other doesn't mean...
Harry... I love you so much... and, and, I m-miss you, so much... Some days I'm afraid my heart might burst.
Some days - Harry, please, don't hate me - sometimes, I don't... I don't think of y-you at a-all...
Harry, did we... did we make a mistake? I thought you knew... how much we loved you..."
Hermione drives.
She buys the car soon after her and Ron are wed, as soon as she's got the money. It's a used Volkswagen, with the old wood paneling on the sides that was outdated even when she was a kid.
But the seats are nice, it's got airbags, and the steering wheel works, so she doesn't mind driving it. She feels grounded in it. Like it's something to hold on to.
Ron didn't understand at first, but he didn't fight it. He still can't drive – he never wanted to learn – but sometimes he can aim it down the road and pick something up from the little convenience store at the end of it. (He thinks she doesn't know he does this. She does.)
The first place she drives her little Volkswagen, before Ron even sees it, is a cemetery.
She doesn't go in.
She sits in the parking lot and stares through the metal fence and feels like a girl trying on a new dress: too nervous to show her mother, stuck in the dressing room.
She can see where he'd be, and knows he can't see her, but it makes her feel better to lie to herself. To say he's watching.
To believe in anything other than pitch black after death.
She's come here just because she feels like she should show him what she's doing, feels like he'd be curious, feels like he woud want to know.
It's stupid, to think that he can see her, to think that he can feel things, because there's six damn feet of ground between him and the rest of the world and even if he was alive he wouldn't e able to see, or even know she was there. How does being dead make it more likely that he can see?
Everyone dies blind, she thinks bitterly. Blind and deaf and mute and unmoving.
She drives away. She'd like Harry to be there to see her stupid purchase, to laugh at her, but he's not, and talking to a headstone won't change that.
The next time she visits, she goes in and stands at his grave.
For all she knows, he's in some paradise that the ignorant believe, talking to his parents and Remus and Tonks and Sirius – hell, talking to Mad-Eye. She wishes she believed in that. Beause it would mean that he was happy… It would mean that he was free.
But she's stuck with her facts, and the facts tell her that Harry's trapped in a little box in a cage of dirt six feet below her, and that he's not talking to anyone.
Especially not her.
The fourth time she goes, it's with Ron. Before then, they'd both gone seperatly… she knows that he's been almost every day… but this time they're together.
Husband and wife.
"Harry," Ron chokes out, and she squeezes his hand tighter than before. "Harry… You know you'da been my best man."
He doesn't know because he's dead. But Hermione says nothing.
"And… and we woulda killed to have you there, Harry," he says, still crying like she's only ever seen him cry like once before. (But she doesn't want to think about that.)
"Hermione's dress was mad," he says, sounding like a dead man. (If dead men could talk.) "The whole bloody wedding was mad. Everything's mad."
She couldn't agree more.
She drives away again in her stupid old Volkswagen. She still hasn't told him about it. She still hasn't said anything to him. It's pointless, because the dead can't hear.
She hates that she can't just turn around and say it was all a dream. She hates that he's not going to be there, that no matter where she looks, she won't find Harry, because Harry is gone and there's literally nowhere that she can go to find him. He doesn't exist anymore – just his dead, rotting body that won't even resemble him anymore, the one that makes her sick to think about it.
Hermione isn't like the others. They take comfort in their memories, and move on knowing that the good times are in the past. They don't think about the facts.
The fact is her best friend in the whole world – her brother, her hero, her everything – is rotting, faceless and skeletal, in his grave, is so wrong that she feels like she could never believe in anything ever again. It makes her feel like magic itself is just some stupid lie, because if Harry isn't there she won't let herself believe in that.
But it's a fact that magic exists, and she believes in the facts. She has to, because there's nothing else to believe.
Something changed in her that day.
She knows when she catches herself thinking of Harry as nothing more than a corpse that something isn't right. She shoud have the same empty look that Ron has, but when she looks in the mirror, she sees dark eyes glaring back at her.
Ron's only with her because he doesn't look at the facts: that she is wrong now, that something isn't right in her, that she's changed, that she's cold and just a zombie walking through life.
She watches them grieve and move on, and they cling to their memories like people do, but she can't allow herself memories because memories get skewed and the facts blur. She refuses to remember a lie – not with this, not with him – so she sticks to the facts.
Harry Potter is gone. And in his grave, a rotting body lays.
Hermione's alone now. She must remember that.
She crashes.
In so many ways, she crashes. But what she's concerned about right now is that the front of her car is twisted up in front of her like some broken accordion.
Ron's there, and as soon as he apparates, as soon as she looks at him, she cries – for the first time since that day, she cries.
And she doesn't just cry, she sobs. She bawls.
"Hermione," Ron says as they get her out – she's fine – "Hermione, what's wrong? It's not so bad, we can get it fixed! What's wrong?"
"It's broken," she tells him.
He looks at her with that lost look… the one he's had ever since Harry.
"What is?"
She's sobbing so hard, and her mascara's smearing, and she looks a mess, and her hair is frizzing, and her car's mashed. "Everything."
She presses into him and wishes.
You're not allowed to keep going after the end, she thinks to herself. After the end, you're supposed to stop. There's nothing to hold you up anymore.
A/N: Not really any closure, I know. It's a sad fic… I took it in a direction that I really didn't want to go, but I had the idea in my head for this plotline, and I just felt like I owed it to the characters to write this. (Is this weird?) Anyway, this was an assignment set by Bad Mum on Hogwarts Online, so… yeah? I'd love criticism, by the way, since I don't really feel like I got the emotions right. Anyway… thanks for reading! Oh, and I hope you liked it. (Duh.)