Disclaimer: Anything HP is not mine.

Changing Leaves (1?)

It was autumn and every time Hermione looked at the changing palette of the leaves, she thought of him. She liked seeing the leaves change to brilliant shades of reds, oranges, and yellows; it was beautiful, picturesque, majestic, and awe inspiring. They looked so bright, but it was only an illusion and it never ceased to fool her. She would go about her normal life, occasionally noticing the brilliance in the trees, but before she knew it, the leaves had fallen to the ground. No longer the bright, vibrant colors they once were; they had become dull and dirty and strewn all over the place; it wasn't possible to go anywhere without seeing them on the ground where they lay to begin their rotting process. And they just lay there, occasionally stirring with the wind, but they usually never went anywhere. They would just sit there like a nagging reminder to rake the leaves.

It always snuck up on her, the leaves falling off the trees. Every year, she was in awe at how things could change so quickly. And raking the leaves was no easy task, at least in the Muggle world it wasn't. You would think that gathering up a few leaves into a neat windrow would be easy enough to accomplish. But it's not, especially where there was an overwhelming amount of leaves. And once you tackled them, there was no turning back if it became too overwhelming. You couldn't rake half a yard and not the other half, it's just wasn't done and it didn't make sense. So once you decided to pick up those leaves, you had better be prepared for the work, sweat, and pain that went into it.

That was what Hermione thought about as she stood outside of the quaint little house she had shared with her now ex-fiancée. With one last deep breath, she turned away from the wooded lot and stuck her wand into the air to hail the Knight Bus. With nowhere to go for the moment, she asked to be dropped off at the Leaky Cauldron.

The nauseating bus ride would have been okay if Hermione had not already felt queasy. She forced the bile that had been demanding exit back down as the violent purple bus came to a sudden halt in front of the inconspicuous inn and pub. Her first compulsion to expel her stomach contents had come when her fiancée of six months, and boyfriend of two years, had confessed that he no longer loved her and had been seeing another woman for the better part of the engagement. The only reason for his proposal was because it seemed logical. Logical. There was no love, no passion, no desire in logic. And this made Hermione feel worthless, belittled, angry, upset, embarrassed, and most of all – foolish. To think that she had allowed that pitiful excuse for a human being kiss her, make love to her, and become the most important man in her life made Hermione feel stupid; stupid and foolish for not seeing the obvious; the weekend "business trips," the late night "office meetings," the disappearance of romanticism, how making love had become merely a mechanical task. But Hermione had been blinded by comfort. They were getting married and that was all that mattered, right? So she focused on work. When he started to spend less time at home, she started to bring her work home to pass the time, and when he saw that she was spending more time on her own work, he stayed away more often and for longer periods of time. It was an unending cycle that Hermione never even noticed until she was sitting alone at the bar of the Leaky Cauldron.

Never one to drink, it didn't take Hermione that many shots of various hard liquors to become sufficiently inebriated. With her head laying on the chipped and stained wooden counter and her arms dangling lifelessly by her side, Hermione's eyes drooped as she vaguely paid attention to the surrounding room that was blurring and spinning before her. She didn't even notice when an unknown person, or at least unknown to her in her current state, hoisted her out of her seat, draped one of her arms over their shoulders, and successfully dragged her unresponsive, limp body up to one of the vacant rooms and into the bed. She didn't even care if the stranger had brought up her travel bag, which contained all of her shrunken belongings. And somewhere in the depths of her clouded mind, it felt good to not care about anything.