Half-Hearted
That night, Hermione took the first watch. She took it quickly, almost desperate. She was eager to get out of that tent, where the air was thick and falsely warm. Outside, everything was clear and cold and lovely.
It was as her breath turned into puffs of white that she came to terms with it. With had had just happened.
With what had almost been.
She had nearly kissed him.
It had been innocent enough at first. There was a song on the radio. A few clumsy half-waltz. A half-laugh or two.
They had just been trying to recover, trying to heal. He had left, but that didn't mean the two of them couldn't enjoy themselves. Just because he was gone didn't mean that she and him had to suffer.
Of course, that was a terrible lie, but they did their best to ignore that.
And then everything grew complicated. The music had slipped away, the song ending. They had become still.
His face had been right there, inches from her own. Everything was confused and hesitant, and the air had been full of what ifs.
What if he kissed her now?
What if Ron never came back?
What if she could just love him, right now?
She knew he had almost leant in. She knew she had almost responded.
His eyes weren't the right colour. She could make do.
What was she thinking?
She had pulled away from Harry. Of course she pulled away; what else could she do? She loved him, that was true, but she did she really want to love him like that? Kissing him would only make her feel worse about everything.
But would it? Hermione fidgeted on the stump of wood she and Harry had heated with magic earlier (she still somehow felt cold, though). She tried to stop herself, but she glanced back at Harry anyway, his figure silhouetted by the light of the tent. She watched as he sat down on one of the bunks, and put his head in his hands.
Loving Harry would be so easy, she found herself thinking. And, however strongly she tried to deny it, she knew it was true. It would be comfortable, sweet, and familiar. His strengths complimented her strengths, and his flaws didn't make her flaws seem any more obvious than they already were.
But would be and is are two very different things. She was being logical when she thought about Harry as a possible lover, as a possible somebody special. And logic and sensibility and intelligence have absolutely nothing to do with love.
If they did, she wouldn't be sitting out in the snow, resisting the urge to cry until spring came.
Because Ron was gone.
She took a shuddering breath, staring out through the night. Yes, logic most certainly had nothing to do with it. There were no tangible reasons for her to feel so strongly about him. He'd most definitely never given her any reason to love him like she did. Ron had never been the more agreeable of her two best friends. He had been the one she fought with, the one that made her grit her teeth in frustration.
Not to mention that he had made her cry more times than everyone else combined. He had, so to speak, broken her heart.
And yet…
And yet she still found her heart jumping into her throat every time she had met his eyes, and she couldn't deny the fact that everything always felt brighter and charged with fire when he'd touched her hand, even accidentally. It would be stupid, perhaps, to not think about all those times that he had made her feel so much better, and giddy, and pretty.
It would be stupid to ignore how much she loved everything about him, however insensible all the everythings were.
That red-hair.
The sensitivity that was endearing.
Those few but precious moments when she realised he was much cleverer than he let on.
His humour, those moments when she laughed when she really ought to be serious.
That damn fire again, lighting everything up. She needed it terribly now, she was sitting out alone in the cold, where was he –
"Hermione?" Harry's voice broke through the stillness. She jumped a little, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath. "You forgot your wand." His voice was blocky, chopped. He hadn't forgotten what hadn't happened.
Her wand… it took her a moment, and then her slow eyes registered her wand, grasped in Harry's wand. She very nearly wept. What was she coming to, where she nearly kissed her best friend and left her wand lying around? "Idiot," she hissed under her breath. How could she have been so stupid?
But she said none of this to Harry. "Thanks," she said half-heartedly.
Everything she did now was half-hearted.
Harry handed her wand down to her, and Hermione flinched when their fingers touched. She was waiting for something, anything. It never came. It had probably never existed.
And there it was – the reason. As Harry hurried back inside, Hermione rolled the idea around in her mind. That strange, addicting charge that seemed to pulse from Ron; or rather, the charge that the two of them were able to create, was part of the effect of the effect he had on her. Ron's strengths contrasted with her own, and his flaws clashed horribly with her faults, but that was just it, wasn't it? Harry was like her brother; she knew what he was thinking, she knew what he wanted and she knew how she thought like the back of her hand.
And while that might attract some people, it didn't work for Hermione. Nothing was right for her unless there was something she could solve, and while she got the feeling that Ron was unsolvable, maybe that was why she loved him? Ron was challenging and frustrating and so completely unlike her. It was refreshing.
She knew, even then, that loving Ron would be inexplicable and passionate and strong and invigorating and imperfect, yet perfect…
Something moved in the trees. Hermione froze, like the snow around her, her eyes sorting deftly through the quiet pockets in the night. She saw nothing suspicious, and it was probably a deer, but her imagination had been let loose now.
Suppose there were Snatchers, hiding in those trees, waiting for her or Harry to appear so they could be wrestled to the ground and humiliated…
Or Death Eaters, poised for the kill…
Or, and this was really painful for her, what if Ron was there? What if, despite all the odds, despite how ridiculous it was, he was back, and he was here, and he was sorry? What would she do if he pushed his way through her enchantments and dropped down on his knees and begged for forgiveness? What then?
Hermione didn't know what she would do. It's not like he would come walking through, anyway. She was being ridiculous. Ron had always been much too proud…
And then Hermione noticed for the first time that she was thinking about him in past tense, as if he was dead. Or just simply gone.
She rested her head on her knees and began to sob.
Hermione hadn't known what to say, what she could possibly do, if Ron were to ever come crawling back.
And now she knew. Now that was here and it was too late to plan, oh she knew.
She was angry, of course. All those shivering days and blood-stained hands had stripped away any tendency she might have had to forgive him and let him, no, make him, love her again. That girl had died that night in the dead of winter, and it was going to take a lot more than a few desperate words to make her wake up again.
She was relieved. More than relieved – overjoyed. However much she tried to hide it, it was as the weight of the world had disappeared. If he was here, that meant he wasn't out there, where anything could happen and she and Harry might not know for weeks on end. Hermione could finally breathe again.
She was confused. That was a given. How could one person feel so angry, so furious, and then feel so happy at the same time? If she wasn't so used to feeling like this, her head might have exploded.
She was frightened. Not just by the stories that she listened to Ron tell Harry when she pretended to sleep – about the Snatchers, about how grim and hollow everything outside of their safe little home was. She was also scared by the possibilities, by the idea that Ron had nearly been killed, that Kingsley had nearly been caught… everything was falling apart, and it terrified her.
All of these emotions, she later concluded, were only to be expected. If she hadn't been so distraught back then, she could have easily predicted how his arrival would impact her.
But guilt? That was a new one.
Late that night, Hermione woke up suddenly, feeling sick to her stomach. She sat up and got up and ran across the tent, not thinking about the shadowy inkling of an idea she had that someone else was awake, and they might be lying in their bunk, watching her run and listening to her heavy breathing.
She shoved the door to their pitiful little bathroom open and turned on the light as she passed and she kneeled down in front of the toilet and she breathed. She willed everything and everything to spill out into this water.
But nothing came.
How could she be angry with him when she had done the very thing that he was afraid of, and almost kissed his best friend?
Several moments passed, and she sat like that, breathing hard, trying not to hate herself, trying not to hate everything.
Several moments passed, and the boy who had seen her steal to the bathroom thought something along the lines of what the hell, and peeled back the blankets.
She heard Ron approaching, but she didn't look up, closing her eyes tightly. She didn't want to see him now. Go away, she pleaded silently. He didn't listen. He never did.
Another reason why she loved him.
"Hermione?" came his uncertain, half-afraid voice, walking through the darkness. She slowly looked up. His long figure was in the doorway, the opposite of a silhouette.
"Do you want to talk?" he ventured. Even though it was dark and her vision was blurred by tears unshed, she could see how this was playing out in his mind. She would hesitantly agree, and he would sit down, and they would have a heart-to-heart. She'd be in mid-sentence when he kissed her, his hand tangled in her hair, and she would kiss him back like she had before in a thousand different pretend memories. The two of them would fall asleep in this bathroom, and Harry would find them in the morning, peaceful and content and in love.
Hermione wasn't ready for that, though. Not with everything that was coursing through her and making it hard to see. Funny, how just weeks ago, her problem was that everything she did was half-hearted. Now, her heart was full to the breaking point.
It was her turn to be the challenge, the enigma.
She stood up, brushing her hands off on her sweatpants. "There's nothing to talk about," she said, and she sounded cold, distant.
Brilliant.
Hermione strode past him, and he didn't try to stop her as she walked back, tall and proud, to her bunk. Could he tell, she wondered, could he tell how much of a lie she was? The truth was that there was everything to talk about, too much, even. Hermione wasn't ready to forgive him.
And she wasn't ready to forgive herself.
Welll? This little chapter has come a long way - it started out with me trying to figure out what exactly Hermione saw in Ron. And then I figured that out, and I promptly forgot about it. And then me and my family were watching Deathly Hallows Pt 1 Maximum Movie Mode, and when they were talking about the scene when Hermione and Harry dance, this scene came to me (for those of you who have this movie on Blu-Ray, Maximum Movie Mode for both Pts of the Deathly Hallows is absolutely amazing). And then, I thought it would only be a few hundred words long, because I was really having trouble with it - and all of a sudden, lightning struck me and I wrote like a maniac. So, this was born. I really hope you guys like! Please, just let me know what you think - review, please!
~ Cierra, who (finally) found her cell phone
