November:
On the 2nd, Hermione woke too early and wandered into the library to find Ron there, sipping his coffee and blowing smoke out a half-open window. He didn't turn when she entered, but when she sat down beside him, he didn't seem surprised. After a long silence, he spoke so suddenly it startled her. "I loved you so much once," Ron said quietly, with a hint of sadness but with no bitterness, no regret. "But he loves you more, more than I knew how to." Panic stole her breath, but before she could get it back to pretend innocence, he turned and looked at her with dark, wise eyes, and she knew it was useless. "How did you know?" she asked finally. Ron turned away again, his damaged eye staring unseeingly out the window. "Because sometimes I see him start to lose faith. When you come into the room, he lights back up, starts believing again. You make him fight like he has something to fight for. He's the only one left who does." "Why do you fight, then?" she asked. "Habit," he whispered emotionlessly, and the cloud of smoke that he exhaled with the word caught the first red-orange ray of sunrise. She thought he looked like a wounded dragon: fierce and blind, breathing fire at nothing at all.
On the 9th, Hermione decided to occupy some of her time cleaning out Number 12 Grimmauld Place's seemingly-endless attic. After several hours of work, the only things she had really accomplished were kicking up clouds of decades-old dust and angering some of the animals from an enchanted glass menagerie. By mid-afternoon she was covered in a thin gray layer of dust, and shooting stunning spells at the various brightly-colored, glass-winged birds that were twittering around her head, apparently attempting to nest in her hair. She didn't realize she was being watched until she heard rusty chuckles from the doorway. She looked up to find Draco Malfoy grinning and shaking his head, laughing at her with affection in his eyes. It was the loveliest thing she had ever seen.
On the 14th, Hermione awoke in the middle of the night. Outside, the first snowflakes of the year were drifting down from an utterly black sky. She slid out from beneath Draco's arm and went to the window, pulling a sheet around her chilled shoulders. A moment later, she felt rather than heard Draco come up behind her, and soon his face joined hers in the eerie reflection they cast in the grimy windowpanes. She was entranced by the picture they made. In the frosting glass, their scars were blurred into nothingness, and instead of gaunt and hardened, they looked like slender wraiths, tragically beautiful. Skin that was pallid and stretched too taut in normal light looked nearly translucent now, luminous and unearthly in the forgiving moon glow, and Draco's hair shone like spun silver where it spilled over their entwined arms. His eyes were cast down, like the perpetually-dreaming models of surrealist art, but her own were open, staring back out at her from the glass, dark, huge, and haunted. They looked, she thought, like ghostly lovers, wrapped forever in a hopeless embrace, eternally young, lovely in death. She turned suddenly in his arms and crushed her mouth to his, desperate to feel alive, to feel flawed and real, and to banish the spectral vision in the glass that she had to believe was just the interpretation of a dark imagination and not a premonition of their fate.
On the 19th, Hermione finished her favorite book, for perhaps the twelfth or thirteenth time of her life. She mouthed the last few lines as she read them, her fingers tracing over the beloved words: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." She was on the verge of pondering that thought in all its terror and enormity when she allowed the pages to flip back as they would. They stopped on the blank front page, where faded words were scrawled in her father's elegant, spiky script. The book had been a gift from her parents, many years before, and the words they had written on it drove all thoughts from her mind but memories of them. The last time she'd seen them, she had been saying goodbye, knowing it was probably forever, and all she could remember was how frightened and vulnerable they looked and how they had pleaded with her for answers she couldn't give them. That moment seemed so removed from the life she lived now that she didn't quite believe the memory was hers. She realized, then, that she had stopped missing them a long time ago. She was so appalled she couldn't even cry.
On the 28th, Ginny Weasley had been dead for exactly one year. Hermione cried into her pillow all day. Harry and Ron both came in separately to talk to her, but she ignored them until they went away. Draco was conspicuously absent all day, but after everyone had given up and gone to bed, he came into her room and slid into bed beside her, curling around her protectively. He kissed her temple, her ear, her throat, her face, the lids of her eyes, and finally her mouth. His kisses were gentle but insistent, undeniable, drawing her slowly out of her grief. "It's time to come back," they seemed to say. "Come back to me now."
Quote: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
A/N: Review, review, review!