Author's Note: The character's are J.K.Rowling's. I am not laying claim, kidnaping or in anyway saying they are mine.
Hermione clutched his chest to her head, her ear desperately pressed to the spot where his heart was. It should be just there, beating, steady and strong. But it wasn't, it wasn't making a noise at all. The worse kind of silence enveloped her body and mind as she searched for a flicker of noise that would not come.
"Don't you leave me Ron. You can't leave. I need you too much." She cried out.
Trying every spell she could think of to restart a stopped heart, Hermione flung out words from her mouth, leaving her voice croaking. She even tried the muggle way of starting a heart and putting breath into his lungs, CPR. The sounds of his breaking ribs, comforting to her begging heart, because it could bring him back, even for just a second. It did not.
A keening cry marked the moment of loss. He was gone, and she couldn't ever tell him all the things she wanted to. That she wanted to be with him, to live and share her life with him. To have the many children and grandchildren they had planned to have. To wake up on a Sunday morning, snuggled up beside him. She was among the living, and he wasn't. His good, gold, pure and loving heart had stopped its timeless beating, all because of a second of distraction.
"Ron. No, no, no, no, come back, stay with me. I love you. I need you. Please, come back. You can do it, I know you can. You've done so much, but please, do this one last thing for me. You need to get up and live, there's so much we have to do still. Please Ron, come back to me." Hermione pleaded with her husband's corpse, her mind wrapped in a whirlwind of pain, loss, confusion and despair. Muddled visions of red haired children, laughing smiles and twinkling blue eyes, passed through her mind's eye. Visions of the future she was never to have.
Twisted bodies and hanging limbs littered the fields in front of her. Blood and sizzling magic littered the ground and air. Choked cries and gurgling last breaths sounded the passing of the many souls of the people too close to death to help. And all the while, Hermione sat, cradling Ron's head in her lap, his ear pressed up against her abdomen.
"Can you hear it Ron?" she asked between sobbing breaths, "That is the sound of your child. She will never know her father, never know the amazing and loving man that he is. Do you remember how happy you were, all this week. You just found out you were going to be a father. You would have been amazing, and perfect, and all that a daughter could ask for in a father. Can you hear us Ron? She loves you. I love you."
Hermione made her decision. The war was lost, all their efforts for naught. Her family was gone, the Grangers killed just two months before. The Weasleys and Harry were gone, picked off one by one, all on the same day. All except Ron, who had almost gone mad with the grief. Harry had been executed at the hands of Voldemort, after being slowly and agonizingly tortured into insanity, right before Hermione and Ginny's very eyes. Ginny had been next, but Hermione instead of death, had been used for many a Deatheater's pleasure. She had only been let out, because they had thought her insane, and it would have been a worse fate for her to be senseless, then dead. They had been wrong. It was a much worse fate for her Ron to be dead.
"There is nothing left to live for. My family is gone. The world is doomed. My daughter will be dead the second she leaves me, because she is not a pure blood. There is no life for her, nor me. My time here is done."
Hermione reached towards Ron's body and lifted his wand out of his hand. Giving him a last kiss, the coppery taste of his blood still on her lips, Hermione arranged herself beside Ron, his cold stiff arms wrapped around her, in a last embrace. Hermione pointed the wand towards her womb, and whispered the words she had developed that would preform the mercy killing of her unborn child. Feeling the pang of silence once again, Hermione knew that her child was also gone, the silence of it all screaming at her. Hermione turned her wand towards herself, and breathed out the same words once again, feeling a surge of happiness before it all faded away. She would once again be with her family.
The black silence was broken by a sound. The one so sought after by Hermione. The beating of a pure gold heart.
A hoarse voice asks a question to the cruel wind. A love's name is screamed out. A curse, thrown to the wind, and a flash of light is seen for any of the few who may still live. And all is still once more.
