In The Aftermath (We Pick Up The Pieces. Like We Always Do.) CescaLR
Summary:
Hermione didn't see it - she missed it when it happened, because she wasn't looking.
And now, now - she sits here, as another casket is lowered into the ground, with so many more yet to come...
And Hermione can't do it. She'd - in all of her foresight, in all of her plans - she'd never expected to be sitting here, next to the boy that has become like a brother to her these past seven years... with her other side void of comfort, void of presence - because the person that should be occupying that space is in the ground, six feet under.
And Hermione can't do it. Not anymore. Not like this.
Notes: Inspired by Let The Game Begin. by CescaLR.
Not a sequel, not a prequel, not even really related to the main story. It's just... what Ron left behind after he died.
Y'know. People grieving, as people do. And picking up the pieces, because - things can't stay broken forever. Eventually, even if it takes years... recovery from loss is possible.
I draw from experience. Nothing as drastic as losing a sibling or a son or a significant other - but close.
A/N: A perfectly ignorable omake, if you are so inclined. This will have zero effect on the main story; I was just feeling melancholy.
Hermione didn't see it - she missed it when it happened, because she wasn't looking.
And now, now - she sits here, as another casket is lowered into the ground, with so many more yet to come...
And Hermione can't do it. She'd - in all of her foresight, in all of her plans - she'd never expected to be sitting here, next to the boy that has become like a brother to her these past seven years... with her other side void of comfort, void of presence - because the person that should be occupying that space is in the ground, six feet under.
And Hermione can't do it. Not anymore. Not like this.
It happened so fast. The snake was advancing, she tells the boy - no, a man now, as much a man as she is a woman (and that feels wrong, wasn't it only yesterday they were huddling for warmth outside the castle around a small blue flame, the tops of their heads barely reaching Hagrid's belly button, if anywhere close to that at all? Or is she remembering that wrong - Hermione never remembers things wrong, and this is a curse as much as it is a blessing, now, though she'd never have thought it the former before... all of this -) but that doesn't matter because his hair is as black and his eyes as green as they ever were; Harry had been haunted much longer than the rest of them, truth told.
But regardless - she tells him, voice shaking yet strong, that the snake had advanced on them, fangs ready to - to - t- to clamp down on... whatever - whatever it could -
She's not ready yet, Hermione realises, belatedly, numb and cold. She's not ready to tell Harry how his best friend died.
At this... Hermione finally cries. And Harry - bless his soul - he'd been crying silent, tear-less sobs s probably since Cedric died. Hermione wasn't sure if he had any left, but as the water burst forth from her own eyes - tear ducts, biology, but she slacked in that department, perhaps if she'd have thought to keep up with specific muggle subjects she'd have had an antidote at hand, or something, maybe anything at all to slow it down just enough - Harry lets out his own, a trickle of water down his cheeks, following the path of previous ones perhaps etched into his features forever.
The curse of the good and the young. Death. To know it, to experience it - for Harry, and only Harry, to survive it literally.
But Hermione knows this time they have to grieve - it will not last. Perhaps for Molly, Arthur, people will be lenient for longer. And perhaps Hermione herself, if she ever confesses they kissed minutes before - before -
Before he died. She can think this, can think it clearly - Ron Weasley is dead. Snake bite; poison, fast acting. A painful death, certainly, but a quick one.
Hermione knows all that. She read, obsessively, all about it.
She wishes she hadn't. Because Hermione won't forget it, ever - can't. The curse of a photographic memory. Eidetic, actually - but more people know the former term. Regardless -
Hermione is emotional. It is emotion that drove her to fall in love with Ron, and it is emotion that refuses to let her let go. Emotions may be a chemical reaction in the brain (Hermione has read about that, of course) but that doesn't make them unimportant, doesn't render them ineffectual, easily dismissed.
Hermione cries for the first time that day. It is the first time she has cried for Ron, for any of the fallen - and she will continue to cry for as long as it takes to cry all the tears she has.
(And Hermione has many. She is an inherently emotional person, even if sometimes - like now - she wishes she wasn't, if only so it wouldn't hurt so much. And crying - that is how Hermione releases her worries, her fears, her stresses - her grief, her guilt, her remorse.
It is how she mourns, too. Emotionally, and logically - that makes sense. Lately, it is the only thing that does - and so, she does it. That combination of emotion and logic is comforting, through the haze of pain and loss and what do I do now, I loved him, I spent my formative years with him, who will I bicker with who will challenge me and help me and make sure I don't read myself to death and who will joke and make Harry look less dark when even Ginny can't get through who who who -)
She doesn't ask him, but Hermione can see Harry doesn't have any of the answers to her questions, either.
So she weeps, and he lets tears he rarely shows in the presence of others streak down engraved rivers on his cheeks (she was never very poetic, but Hermione thinks after this she might write a book about Ron, so people don't forget him as they are wont to do with wonderful, funny, important people that don't have books written about them - so she needs the practice) and she crushes Harry in a hug that he still hesitates slightly before sinking into and hugging her just as fiercely back, and this is how Molly finds them, later, on the couch, wet cheeked and asleep, tired out from... everything.
It's only been a few days since the Battle. They're hold up in the Burrrow, for now, but Hermione knows Harry's thinking about hiding in Grimmauld once the dust settles.
Seeing the burrow, knowing Harry would be going upstairs instinctively to the room just below the attic with the orange everything and the best placement to be slightly drafty and in hearing distance of the ghoul and just too far away from the bathroom to get there before at least two people have used it and also more than far enough from the kitchen to be the last one in there unless you got up far too early - even before the roosters -
Hermione knows why he can't stay here any longer, even with Ginny's silent wishes for him to stay.
(They're only silent because Ginny, too, is grieving. But she deals in different ways to either Hermione or Harry, and Hermione hates that she can't profess to know them as well as she should; the sister to her... the man she'd loved, still loves because his death was too recent for that tense change just yet - and the temporarily on hold significant other to her best friend.)
(In the morning, Hermione - before everyone else is awake - steels her nerve and floos Luna and Neville. They agree to come over, and when Ginny huddles the three of them away in a corner it sends a pang through Hermione's chest that she and Harry won't ever get that companionship again, because it'd be too soon even in thirty years, Hermione knows.
But mostly, she feels glad that Ginny still has it. That comfort, that camaraderie. It's just...
It reminds her of what she's lost - and there they are again. Hermione touches her cheek, and it's stained wet, probably hadn't even had the chance to dry since the last lot of tears - but here she is, mourning one potential love and actual best friend, while Ginny has lost two brothers on the same day. It's - it doesn't even begin to compare.
Hermione returns to her little nest in Ron's room, on Ron's bed, because perhaps the pain of the environment will let her hold on just a little longer. In her nest, on that bed, she reads a book on snakes.
For the fiftieth time, probably. Hermione, for once, hasn't counted.
(That's a lie, of course. Hermione can't help but count. She remembers every single time she leafed carefully through the pages of this book like it was some priceless artefact instead of just a textbook on snakes, and venom, and the various effects of such and also their antidotes (and if they have antidotes at all), she remembers every. single. time. like she'd done it just seconds before, instead of days.
Weeks.
Months.
Years.)
(An eidetic memory - a blessing, and a curse.)
("And... you are?"
"Ron Weasley."
"... pleasure.")
(A Blessing. And a curse.)
(His arm wrapped tight around her as they went down onto the rubble - she buried her head in his shoulder as he sent a spell at the snake, but it rebounded, she saw, out of the corner of her eye, and time seemed to both slow down and speed up, but regardless - Nagini, the horcrux, she lunged for them - and Ron's wand arm, his free arm, moved to wrap around her protectively - and she didn't see the bite, she didn't hear it, but she knew, all the same, because his arm blocked her vision and far too many moments later there was the sound of a sword cutting through the creature, and Neville's voice, but it seemed so far away, as she carefully, calmly, numbly extracted herself from Ron's clutches, and she tugged, uselessly, at his arm, to get him to stand to do something, anything at all, please, you can't be dead don't be dead -)
Hermione sucks in a breath. Harry has entered the room during her reflection, and he's tiredly going through the motions of reading one of Ron's old comics, the mad muggle ones Hermione had turned her nose up at when she'd first seen them but now, desperately, wants to read them, wants to know them inside out so she can understand what Ron enjoyed about them when he was younger, less war-weary and battle-worn, when he was just a kid that like the cannons and read comic books and helped his mum out with the farm and played with his siblings and got pranked by the twins (oh god, Fred, it's not only Ron that's dead and it's so selfish of her, the girl with the perfect memory to forget that, how does she keep forgetting that she saw his body, clear as day, right next to Ron's on the floor of the great hall) and practised to be a keeper -
She wants to know. She needs to know. If she knows, maybe it'll feel less lonely.
But it's not lonely. She's not alone in this grief - maybe in this version, but the loss of a loved one isn't unique.
The loss of Ron isn't unique. Hermione can't be selfish here, she can't, because he's dead. There's no-one to be jealous of, no person to send paper birds at in a plan of emotional, logical attack.
This isn't just some - some schoolgirl crush stolen away, some petty fucking childish drama - this is death. This is real.
Hermione, desperately so, wants her parents in that moment. But they're in Australia, so she'll have to make do with family that's a little closer to home... and that also know who she is.
"Get over here," She says, softly, to Harry, who still jumps a little even a week after the battle, but he does, sits carefully, hesitantly on the side of her nest on top of Ron's bed - his sheets perfectly preserved in whatever state they'd been left before his death. Hermione knows eventually the room will have to be cleaned, at least, to stop infestations of magical pests, but at the very least - every object, every bit of clothing... it can stay. Perfectly preserved, like a time capsule, or a memory. Perhaps not the most healthy - but here, Hermione can immerse herself in her own past, can immerse herself in the little details she missed at the time of the memories creation, but that the imprint on her brain didn't forget.
Hermione pulls him onto the bed, proper, and he sits, relaxes ever so slightly (Hermione doubts he'll ever be able to relax completely again, at least not for years, now, and that thought is awful so she banishes it to the depths of her mental library - but, blessing... curse. The thought will come back, unbidden, when she thinks of this moment at any point in the future.) against the headboard, and sighs, closes his eyes.
Hermione closes her book and, carefully, puts it away in her little beaded bag. She scoots up the nest and leans against the headboard, too, and Harry sighs again, places his arm carefully alongside hers. Hermione laces their fingers together.
"Let's read that comic," She says. "Which one are you on?"
"Issue twenty," Harry says, and he's been busy, it seems. Hermione doesn't know where he found the time, in only a week, to push through the emotional boundaries he's set himself in order to - inhale these comics so quickly.
Maybe they are the emotional boundaries. Harry dealt with Cedric's death abysmally, but if you hadn't know Sirius had died, you wouldn't have been able to tell. It had almost been frightening, actually, Hermione will confess - the disparity in his reactions.
But Hermione thinks she gets it now. Not the ability to seem fine - that's a uniquely Harry quality she'll never master. But the numbness - she gets it. It hurts almost more than anything else, when you feel like you've cried all you can and any more will just... rip your eyeballs from your head, they'll just - fall out, fucking burst from the pressure of needing to cry but an inability to - yet then, then, something will set it off again, and your eyes will burn, horrible, and you'll feel cold, your breaths shallow and hiccuping - and anything at all can set you off, any mention, even, of the person themselves - just a stray thought, a reminder, and you're back to square one.
"Okay." Hermione says. "Talk me through them."
And Harry does.
Hermione stares as the funeral comes to a close, Ron's funeral, Fred's having been held just prior, and everyone here is in some state of disarray by now; two funerals, two deaths to deal with.
Hermione sits there, amongst a sea of red-haired and freckled people; one has Ron's nose, the other has Fred's ears, that one his Ron's chin and Fred's eyes, but softer, on her face, off in just the wrong way to make Hermione feel uncomfortable -
And she feels out of place. Like an intruder, here. Yet at the same time - Ron had so many family members. None of them could have possibly any claim at all to knowing him as well as she does.
And yet they cry, and say words of generic sadness at a family members death, and Hermione feels out of place in this sea of strangers. She feels like one of the only people that Ron knew that actually knew him.
Hermione had never realised how isolating such a large family could feel, until now, on the outside. The Weasleys had always felt welcoming, even at Bill and Fleur's wedding, even when there were so many new faces to learn. But now - the only warm feeling is from Harry's hand Hermione has her own covering, and Molly's soft hand placing itself on Hermione's shoulder.
Ginny is talking to Harry, who appears to have frozen, not unlike Hermione herself. But Hermione isn't frozen, exactly, she's just...
Lost.
"Come on now, dear." Molly says, softly, and her voice is choked, clogged with the aftermath of tears, of whole-body wracking sobs that shake you down to your very core and further - because this is a woman that has lost not one but two of her children, killed a woman to save another and likely thinks about those insidious what ifs and could I haves and I should have beens.
Hermione thinks those too. But Molly thinks them differently; she thinks them as a mother that, in her own eyes, failed at protecting her children from war.
"Come on now, dear," Molly says, "Let's go home."
Hermione lets herself be guided out of the graveyard. Harry stayed behind with Ginny - he still hadn't moved, not a single muscle.
Perhaps he is frozen. Perhaps it took this; took seeing the casket lowered into the ground, took the eulogy and the gathered masses of the extended Weasley family for it to - well. Harry had known, of course, logically and emotionally, that Ron is dead. That Ron is a was, now; he was Harry's best friend, he was Hermione's first love, he was a Weasley and he was a loyal, wonderful, occasionally overcome by bouts of jealousy he always, without fail made up for, good man.
As she was saying... perhaps it took all this for that knowledge to finally be - cemented. Assimilated. For it to register, to settle in and -
Well.
(Ginny returns to the Burrow alone. Hermione can't say she's surprised, but she thinks of Harry, all alone out there, perhaps at Grimmauld, perhaps elsewhere - and there's a pang in her heart again. If that persists, she might need to get it checked - the sheer emotion of it all is physically painful.
Hermione resolves to find him.
Soon.
But not yet.
Later.
Like she'll find her parents.
Later.
Eventually.
When she's ready.)
(Hermione can admit she doesn't know when she'll 'be ready', by any definition of the term.)
Out of all of the Weasleys, Hermione knows George was hit the hardest. Fred's death - Hermione had, she confesses, never even thought it possible. Fred and George are just wizards, she knows, and admittedly not ones in the past she particularly respected or held in any sort of high regard (if she could, Hermione would slap her moralistic younger self for that. You don't know what they'd sacrifice, you stupid, judgemental, fucking child, you haven't seen war, haven't seen death on a scale as large as this, haven't known true loss in your life, even though in a sense she had, in some ways, but certainly not war, she hadn't known war and Hermione envies herself for that) but, but, they were Fred and George.
Hermione confesses that she'd also thought them invincible.
Hermione gets.. antsy, sometimes, around the Burrow. It's small and crowded and it reminds her of small and crowded tents when little information and high tensions and a stupid fucking horcrux made it too small and too crowded and that reminds her of Ron and there's already too much of that in the house, she doesn't need a reminder of the bad times too, so she leaves the house, not only because of that but also because she gets antsy. Hermione got used to being on the run, and it chafes, a little; now, the expectation of staying in one place keeps her jumpy, keeps her expectations of being assailed by any number of her enemies, because Hermione knows she has them, high enough to cause undue stress and anxiety on top of the grief and war-time paranoia that still hasn't faded.
They all do, now.
So Hermione leaves the Burrow because of all that and more, just for walks, sometimes, and nostalgia takes her towards the makeshift quidditch field this nighttime, her way illuminated by another nostalgic action; little blue flames, warm but not burning, cast a soft glow on her surroundings that doesn't drown out the light of the waning moon.
It's a clear sky. Down here, in the countryside, where the light pollution is low, Hermione can trace constellations in the stars. Hermione had spent time doing this, during the parts of summer when she was here with the Weasleys, when Harry was or was not here, alone or with company.
Hermione wasn't too surprised to find George here. He rarely left his room - his room, now, not their room, and the simple change in pronoun usage, terminology... that took most of these last two weeks for Hermione to perfect. Of course, Hermione had always been able to tell the difference between the two, as boys and as men (for as long as Fred got to be such), mostly due to her memory but also because people made it out to be harder a task than it actually was (and Hermione was always up for a challenge, intellectually speaking, and mostly up for a challenge if that clause wasn't met - Hermione's not a gambling woman), but that doesn't mean the twins were and presented themselves as a unit. Much like with herself and Harry and Ron, you'd rarely find one without the other. They shared a room, a business, a title, and friends.
Hermione had no idea how she was going to be, without Ron. She's not entirely sure if George knows how to live without Fred.
"Hello, George." She says, softly, blue firelight casting soft shadows against her features.
She wasn't too surprised to find George here. He rarely left his room, but in these last two weeks - he'd started doing it a little more. The funeral, perhaps, gave him some closure. The eulogy had even startled a laugh out of him - which, after his silence and absence since their return to the Burrrow... it had sounded something like hope.
Hope that they can make it through this. Through the loss of two very good, very important, and very loved individuals.
"Hermione Granger." He says in return. He doesn't continue; Hermione knows - or at least thinks, she retracts, because she can't profess to know the inner workings of his brain, but Hermione thinks he's still getting used to - and won't ever get used to - having to finish all of his own sentences. Getting used to not having a sounding board for conversations. Getting used to having to fill up silence on his own.
Hermione moves over and sits, cross-legged, on the ground; it's still slightly damp from the earlier rain, but Hermione doesn't bother with charms to dry it, or to protect herself from the water. She lets the dampness make her trousers cold, her fingers wet as she buries them amongst the blades of grass and other semi-wild field plants.
Hermione removes her wand from her pocket, and re-conjours up a blue flame, bigger but no brighter, and warm but not burning hot, just like the last one. She pockets her wand then looks at George.
"Careful there, Granger," George says, "Don't want to curse off your buttocks."
"Constant vigilance," She says.
Mad-Eye was the third loss of theirs against Voldemort, as far as Hermione knows. Cedric she counts, because he was Hogwarts', and that makes him theirs. A fellow student, a kind person. It makes him theirs. Then Sirius, and then Mad-Eye - and that opened the floodgates.
George doesn't say anything further; just looks up. Not at the stars, but at the goals, and Hermione remembers daylight and summer and the endless potential of youth, the feeling that this would last forever as she sat on the grass with her books as the others played quidditch above her, and she'd secretly root for random individuals instead of either team just to confuse everyone (and also she doesn't like quidditch, but Ron had loved it, and - god, she wants to go back and take those words away, learn everything she can about his favourite sport and his favourite team and just... revel in his being alive. But she can't. Because time travel doesn't work like that, and besides...
All the time-turners were destroyed during the prophecy debacle.)
Hermione respects his silence, his choice for it - she stares up at the stars, and wonders if she could convince someone to make one in Ron's name.
There's already a lion, though. That will have to do.