*Song Recommendation: I See Fire by Ed Sheeran*
Decisions
1998: Grimmauld Place
Hermione looked down at the parchment in her hands, absently tracing the cool, waxed grooves of the Hogwarts insignia on the seal. Head girl, charms apprenticeship, and liberated living conditions allowing weekends of unmonitored coming and going from the property... it was the culmination of seven years of endless research, persistent revising and tirelessly cogitating strategies and counter-strategies, both academic and otherwise. It was also a bearded consolation prize for her ceded innocence to an adolescence fraught with mortal peril, emotional manipulation toward self-sacrifice and blatant, but baseless, alienation.
She couldn't bring herself to rejoice in her "achievements," instead, all she felt was numb.
Forcing herself into movement, she shuffled defeatedly toward a chair across from her best friend and roommate.
"I'm not going back."
The words hung in the air with a foreign tone that troubled her counterpart.
"Hermione, I can't let you avoid Hogwarts. You're meant to be there-"
"Yes, well, so is Colin Creevey!" She sat waspishly. "So is Lavender Brown, for that matter, along with countless others!" Harry could only gape at his friend. He was accustomed to her hot-headed outbursts when championing for the under-recognized or against the unjust. However, this palpable anger was unprecedented and it only served to madden him in return. In that moment, he found her to be something he never thought she was capable of- selfish.
"So go because they can't, Hermione!" He bit out angrily, inflicting further culpability on her already conflicted soul.
"And sacrifice another year of my life for everyone else? And for people who aren't even alive to benefit from it?" Hermione gasped breathlessly, torn between how grossly egotistical that statement sounded to her own ears, and yet how torturously honest and true those words were as they fell from her lips. Stoning her countenance she continued on, disallowing her empathetic sensibilities to betray her irrefutable convictions.
"They're dead, Harry." She stated bluntly, settling upon him the look of inarguable fact that she'd used countless times to scold him on unfinished assignments. "My returning to Hogwarts won't matter a whit to them, and I am not willing to pretend that it didn't happen, to have my life once again outside of my own control because I'm told to, or because it's expected. You of all people should understand that."
Harry watched her face in an attempt to map her emotions, but was left wanting. He'd come to both value and appreciate the openness of her face, as she was not one to mask or obscure her sentiments. She was emotional by nature, and her unguarded features exposed her, making every fleeting feeling fully comprehensible. Her face now scared him. It was deadened, vacant, and apathetic. Her eyes- they weren't even haunted, they were simply void, and it scared him.
"Jeez, Hermione. I'm so sorry, I shouldn't have-" He wanted to appear okay with this, hell, he wanted to be okay with this, but he couldn't find it in himself to. "So what are you going to do, then?"
"I don't know, Harry. I think I'd rather like to just disappear?"
"You're leaving?" He asked with his heart pounding relentlessly in his chest, seemingly threatening to crack the confines of his rib cage. There was no way, just no bloody way, he could coped with another loss, even if the loss didn't equate to death.
"No, I'm not leaving. I just want to- I don't know... hide in plain sight, I guess? 'Go underground' would probably be the most appropriate turn of phrase. I'd like to study here at Grimmauld, if that's amenable to you, then sit my N.E.W.T.s and work in some manner of research. No press, no daily endangerment, no compromising to meet anyone's expectations but mine, and working within my own obscure schedule, free of the small-talk and gossip that is the office hoopla."
"What kind of research?"
"Time, I think. I'd like to work in the DoM." Neither were looking at each other, opting instead to find ineffable comfort in their silent companionship. That is, until Hermione's twisted scoff broke the afflicted quiet.
"The time room... Two years ago that room meant trepidation and a nightmare, now it means sanity and an escape, and neither alter the fact that it took ruination and baneful annihilation to bridge the two. Poetic, isn't it?" She asked Harry with a sinister laugh who, in turn, questioned himself on just when his best friend's humour had darkened so perversely.
"Almost like the phoenix itself." He confessed, though he wasn't confident he believed in that hope anymore.
