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Her fugue, His Lie, and Their Story
Chapter 8: A Love Forgotten
They went down to the brook behind an army of birch trees, where sunlight danced through the leaves and glistened off of damp stones. It was the first place she had thought to take him, for just yesterday, Mr. Pomfrey had been telling her that it was a very beautiful place to just go and think.
Ron however, didn't need to think. Yet she had dragged him down to the quiet bubbling of the water, and he hadn't the heart to resist her. There was so much weight on chest that the air he would have used to protest had been squeezed out of his lungs, and smothered in his throat- not that he had ever been able to resist her anyway.
In the end- because he would do anything for her, he settled for a rigid silence that made him squirm. He could see that's what she wanted, so there they sat, among the stones and the trees, and the brook.
"I know that this is hard- so hard, Ron, but I can't tell you what you want to hear." Hermione relented at last, "Please don't be angry with me. You have to believe that I wish with all my heart I could."
"Could what?"
Hermione fixed her gaze on his, "Love you," she said simply.
For a moment, Ron was mortally afraid that he was going to lose his balance and stumble into the brook. But he didn't. Instead, he spun to face the trees, chest throbbing, willing himself with all his might to calm down and accept that horrible, wretched truth. 'She doesn't love you anymore."
"You're upset." Hermione sighed.
He pinched the bridge of his nose, still unable to face her, "Of course, I'm upset. The person that I love more than anything in this world doesn't feel the same way. How could I not be?"
There was another dreadful, almost painful, silence. Hermione stepped forward, as if to cross the cavernous void between them, "I don't know what to say."
"You've said everything that matters." He spit.
"Ron, I asked you not be angry…"
At this he spun back around. The expression in his eye caught her as a wounded animal, only more dangerous because of the pain. He reached into his pocket and produced a small ring, which he held out in front of her nose, quite obtrusively.
"I've been carrying this with me ever since the night Mad-Eye died- over a year ago, now. It only seemed right to ask you, seeing as how life is so short and unpredictable, and unfair. Yeah, fucking unfair. I never knew why I couldn't bring myself to do it, but now I see." He raged on, a vein in his neck bulging,
"If I thought for one single moment that you would have actually been my wife, I was only fooling myself. It's almost funny, really, that things never seem to work out for people like me. Some bastard is always there to wipe your soulmate's mind so that every last memory she has of you is lost forever. It's a prison. I never knew I could hate it so much to love you."
He flung the ring into the earth below, while she flinched.
"Oh and I'm not angry, Hermione," he continued, his voice had lost its sting, and gone wobbly with tears, "I'm heartbroken."
She barely registered the crackling roar of him disapparating away over the sound of her own heart thumping in her ears.
Perhaps it was breaking too.
Tears welling up in her eyes, she bent down to retrieve the ring that Ron had carried with him so long, and slipped it into her pocket. It felt foreign pressing against her skin, yet she couldn't bring herself to leave it there all alone to rust. Even if she, too, had given up.
Her eyes were still swollen when she reached the cottage, and she nearly managed to stagger in, with all intentions of locking herself up in her room and never, ever coming back down, but Snape met her in the back doorway, carrying a mug, and a copy of the 'Daily Prophet' in each hand. His face took on a strange expression.
"Don't look at me like that." Hermione hissed, her voice so venomous and sudden that she surprised herself.
"Like what?"
"Like you're pleased."
Snape breathed out of his nose shortly, gliding across the patio to sit in a sun-baked chair, "You're crying because some imbecile loves you."
"No, I'm crying because I don't remember that he does!" She shrieked, "And he's not an imbecile!"
"To each his own…"
Hermione groaned in frustration. "Oh, I don't understand a thing about you! Why are you even here? Why are you always here? I'm so tired of meeting like this- just say what you've been wanting to say or leave me be- please!"
Snape nodded, set his jaw, and picked up his paper with such an unconcerned air that Hermione laughed aloud.
"See, you don't know anything either."
"Now you're wrong, once again." He said calmly, taking a sip from his mug, "I do know a thing or two about love- as surprising as that may seem. You'd never believe how much I know about it, Granger. I know that it hurts even when you don't think it should, perhaps even when you can't remember why it's hurting, it still does. I know that it can bring you to your knees, or your destruction with its madness."
"So love's all about pain, then?"
"No, but that's how it always ends one way or another."
Hermione crossed her arms over her chest, as if trying to hold the anger in from leaking out and dissolving into pity as it seemed prone to do with Severus Snape, "What happened?"
The muscle at the base of his jaw flinched, his knuckles going white around the paper in his clenched fist, "I wasn't good enough, and it was all my fault."
She pursed her lips, "It couldn't have been all your fault."
"Oh, it was." he said, "And I've never forgiven myself for it. My penance is paid every single day when I wake up and think of what might of been. Don't make the same mistake, Granger, even if it is a Weasley."
"It's different for me," she sighed, ignoring the dig, "I can't remember a reason to love him."
"Perhaps there will come a day that you will."
Hermione detected a note of fear in his voice, or maybe sadness, it was hard to distinguish a difference, but something was there all the same. She went and sat in the chair beside him, and still he would not look her in the eye.
"I'd be lying to myself if I thought that was true."
Snape grumbled, shifting a little in is seat, "If there's one thing I know, it is the more you practice telling yourself a lie, the more you believe it, and eventually you come to a point where you aren't really lying anymore."
"That's not a very pretty way to look at life."
He shrugged, "It may not be, but I'm afraid you'll find it very true."
"You're a very depressing person," she said, eyes narrowed, but with a glint of humor in them, as if she very much liked the disposition, "did you know that?"
A ghost of a smile pulled on the corners of his lips, "Well, I have a reputation to upkeep, haven't I?"
A/N: Thanks for waiting, school has been rough. I'd really love to hear what you think about this chapter! Please, please tell me what I can do better!
