Vibes
The gift presents with the damselfly.
It hangs a few inches before her, a stringless marionette of armor and lace, and Hermione counts the beat of its wings, three…..four…..five up-down arcs, before time contracts back, and the azure body bolts away.
Hermione sits up and blinks, slow, heavy. Mushrooms, she thinks. The dubious species collected from beneath the Acacia branches. The whole batch will have to go.
She wipes her eyes, grabs the billy and stalks off into the trees.
...
Once is an anomaly. Twice, a development.
The rain is floating. Not not falling, but sinking through the atmosphere so slowly that Hermione thinks, if she were inclined, she could stand, weave her body between the droplets, finally find the pattern in the way they streak from the sky.
Drops splash down, collide against the earth with tiny, swollen blasts. She wants the smell of damp leaves hovering along the curve of her nostrils, but her lungs, still working in sun-time, are stiff, won't reach. At her ear, a breeze like a whisper like a laugh. An invisible digit tugs a strand of hair free from her bun.
Time deflates. The sky opens, looses a torrent of cold, stinging rain.
The locket is a clenched ember cooling in her hand.
...
It's something to do with the trees. Trees, and, Hermione can now see, despair at critical mass.
Harry sits on one side of the fire, Hermione on the other, their lips and knuckles drawing tight from the heat. She looks at him looking past her and into the dark. The bones of her back slot into place just right amongst the bark's terrain and, as her parched eyes focus, it happens, again. Time swells. Night sounds hollow. Flames slink across Harry's face- slow, orange silks veiling his mouth, his nose, his eyes.
Words, not hers- shene yën, shene fel- scratch high and hot in her ear, flutter through her thighs. Fingertips skim the line of her neck, quick-circle the small of her back. Harry's pulse is a sub-sonic boom pushing through the fire.
Time shrinks back. The fire spits, dances. Harry throws her a hangdog glance, the first time he's looked her way all day, then presses his palms to his eyes.
The locket ticks once against her chest.
...
She could publish her findings, if she makes it through alive. The Human as Conduit in Essential Photosynthesis: In With The Bad, Out With The Good.
Hermione sits, legs crossed, one hand around the locket. She is farther from the tent, and Harry asleep inside, than she's ever been, cradled in the roots of the thickest, oldest tree along the perimeter of her protections. A mature tree, so ancient its energy no longer manifests its own capricious outer being. A tree with miles of root. A patient matron of the forest, steadily absorbing all this ground has taken for its own into her soft, wet core.
In the swell, Hermione slumps, captive, unable to breathe, or speak. Tonight, she's forced this chestnut to catch her eyes closed, and she can only listen as it sings along the curve of her back. A single hypnotic tone, deep and warm, smoothing the knots from her spine.
Comforting. But, this can't be about comfort.
It's not about healing. The wounds are deep and as open as ever.
It's not some daft bid to commune with the universe. Nothing to do with astral planes or inner eyes, fringed shawls or crystal balls. This, what she's doing, is science. Quantifiable observation of natural phenomena. A conversion of energy, pure and simple, easily graphed in Xes and Ys. Had she the proper instrumentation for measuring, she could chart her findings, lend credence to the endeavor. She could make real use of the pages of the book of faerie stories by her foot, record something pertinent and lasting over the entire, worthless lot.
If she could only understand the process, she would drain this locket dry.
The swell bursts, and she's right where she left off. Shivering, straining for sense in the sounds of Harry's dreams. Failing, always failing, to interpret that too-fast, sideways tongue.
It's the most he's spoken in days, so she leans forward, breaks the connection to better hear. They barely speak, anymore, and, for a moment, she wonders if he listens for her voice when he's at watch the way she listens for his.
Then she remembers the rustle of parchment, the distinct feel of his magic sealing her out, and she knows without a doubt- no, he does not.
...
It's not supposed to work this way.
The hawthorne takes her by vicious surprise, holds her stuck, plugged in like a live wire. Her sacral bones buzz so fast she can feel her hips' seized attempt to twist free, to keep this red thing in her belly from thrashing to life.
The swell snaps back. Harry looks at her the way he looks through a window at a clouded sky, and she wants to lunge through the fire, pin him to the dirt between her thighs, and squeeze. She wants to twist his shirt up in her fingers, hold him against her face and shout, "I. Am. Here."
She's shaking. She moores her hands in her pockets, leans toward the fire, away from the tree. Harry's never noticed the first thing during or after a swell, before, so she's stunned silent when he asks if she's cold.
Her eyes prickle as, unprompted, he throws another branch on the fire.
...
It's not the struggle it once was: thinking of trees, instead of thinking of Ron.
The day with the damselfly, she'd seen him, the closest she's ever come to a vision. John Doe in a Muggle morgue- drained, refrigerated, tucked naked beneath a blue paper sheet, flesh fish-belly white under red scruff.
Just another young drifter. Off-the-Map. Furnace fodder.
Now, when the locket plants the same sight in her mind, she devises formulae along the lengths of his legs, long strings of letters, dashes, parentheses. She debates with herself the correct unit of measurement to describe one seventh of a soul. Hers is always the only H in the equation.
.Fin.
For the second round of TL's Judgement Day. Prompt: Power. My opponent is Cordelia McGonagall. Her story, The Dangers of Ladders, is brilliant. Go read it.