"There is no revenge so complete as forgiveness." – Josh Billings

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

In which Hermione can't find the bathroom and Ron eats generic-brand cereal

September 28, 2003

When Hermione found herself in Ginny's room at the burrow, a framed photo of the entire Weasley family watching her expectantly from atop a small blue nightstand, she was perfectly ready to believe that the past three years had all been a dream. She wasn't certain how she felt about that; it had been such a very strange dream. On the one hand, she'd woken up with the most wonderful feeling in the pit of her stomach. She'd felt wanted… warm, fuzzy and bunny-like all-over. It had been a bit like the first day after Ron proposed, multiplied to an almost painful degree. She'd felt loved. Then the feeling had faded, and she'd felt very alone… and dirty. Dirty was the operative word.

She was so dirty that she deserved to lose that fuzzy feeling.

Then she thought about Ron… good, mostly dependable Ron. A sliver of the feeling returned, and she convinced herself that the space inside her was hunger.

There, she had no real reason to feel dirty at all. It was just a dream, however real it might have felt; and she had no control over her dreams. It wasn't her fault.

Of course she felt nothing for Draco Malfoy; he was probably just an embodiment of all her recent problems with Ron… that would be logical. He was an arrogant, rude, pig-headed prick, everything Ron was at his worst… it was so obvious. Her subconscious was telling her something about a silver lining. She didn't especially care, so long as she could say she didn't love Draco Malfoy.

True, she realized with a sharp stab of cold, white fear, her subconscious had probably chosen him out of guilt, as well; but that was just silly. It hadn't even been a Real Kiss.

At least, that's what she told herself when she couldn't sleep.

And then she sat up. It was funny how different the world looked when one changed perspectives. With the light pink comforter pushed back and the entire room laid before her, she knew she hadn't been dreaming.

Three years previous, when she'd been staying in the burrow and anxiously awaiting the arrival of October 5th, the room had been littered with her personal items, T-shirts sloppily re-folded and thrown into the over-flowing closet, the remains of ill-fated wedding magazines strewn across the floor. She remembered a poster of Alice Cooper, long black eyeliner-tears contrasted against moving, smiling pictures of everyone Ginny had ever loved. There'd been a lot of posters, she remembered. Now, the room was as empty as if it had always been a guest room. The walls had been cleaned, the posters replaced with framed pictures of flowers and puppies. The only sign that anyone had spent the night there was her suitcase propped stiffly against the closed closet door.

She brought her knees to her chest and watched the suitcase warily. She'd only had time to pack the essentials, her toothbrush, wand, some family photos and the rings she'd given… er…herself. She hadn't been thinking about clothes, money, books… anything, really. She'd been in such a hurry just to get out of that hellhole her fiancé (whatever remained of that dirty feeling had been pushed to the fringes of her consciousness, where, she realized with a tainted sadness, it had been all along.) called home.

But then, one had no real need of clothing if one had no intention of ever getting out of bed, did one? No; and if she did need clothes she could just borrow some from Ginny. Never mind how Ginny herself might feel about it.

She glanced away from the suitcase and over the pants-clad tops of her kneecaps to her toes; which wiggled in response to her wandering gaze. They were sloppily painted a very tasteful shade of pale pink… or was it baby pink? But then really, what was the difference? None; and did she care? Not really. She was really just avoiding the situation at hand, if it could be called a situation at all. It was very un-Gryffindor of her. She'd been spending too much time around Slytherins and people of a Slytherin nature.

Reluctantly, she turned away from her toenails and lay back down among the fluffy white pillows and baby/pale-pink comforter.

The situation at hand.

Hermione had developed, in the early stages of her life, a logical, outside-in view of everything around her, even her own emotions. When something she was feeling confused her, or caused her to be particularly upset, she simply allowed herself to step back and examine it. She'd learned most things about herself by analyzing the insults thrown at her.

Now, she'd felt dirty. Well, she'd always felt dirty, she supposed. She'd felt dirty ever since… she couldn't even phrase it properly in her own mind. To say she'd "left Ron" held far too many negative connotations. Though, of course, she had left him; but it had been as much for his good as her own. To say she'd "gone away" was the understatement of the century. A year-and-two-months spent locked up inside yourself, far away from everyone you loved, was more than "going away". Hermione called it a Departure From Reality.

To say she'd "run away", as Harry had put it, made it seem as though she'd just sat up one night and decided not to get married. Well, she admitted, it had seemed that way at the time. She didn't realize until later, while watching Draco being sunburned on a white-sand beach, that it had taken her years to leave.

She hadn't felt dirty at the time… no, that was a lie. She had scrubbed herself raw trying to beat off the gnawing grip of filthy guilt with soap and loufha.

And then, they'd go tanning, or they'd be taking their afternoon nap, or Draco'd decide that, for reasons unknown, it was the appropriate time to go swimming with dolphins, and she felt so clean that all dirtiness was forgotten. She was so clean that she had to analyze it. Her mind was scrubbed so cleanly that all it could give her was one word, sneaking up from the depths of her subconscious.

Love.

Love was clean. For an entire year love was clean. Love was a Dream that stretched into the broadest stretches of her mind; and then she'd said, "Let's go home for Christmas…" and The Dream was broken.

As it turned out, no one had taken The Dream quite so well as the dreamers themselves.

Yelling, screaming, kicking, biting, broken china splintered across her floor, mingled amongst the pieces of The Dream.

It was a moment before she noticed the big, lonely tear rolling down her cheek.

Tears, sneers that broke her heart more than he could know.

She wiped it away on one of the pillows. It left a dark, wet spot on the lace.

Floo powder, broken and spilling purple glitter across her carpet.

She'd told him to go.

She remembered a card he sent her for Valentines. "Love means never needing to say you're sorry." Yeah, right. There was always something to apologize for. Love meant knowing when it was needed. Love meant being ready with a big roll of spellotape and chocolates to fix the little daily rips. Love meant always being ready to forgive.

A bouquet and a smile on her doorstep.

She'd never apologized. She'd never apologized for telling him to go. They'd never talked about it. They never spoke of what happened when peer pressure drew the long straw and Love got the shaft. They didn't need to, she knew. It was understood.

He'd gone. She'd analyzed it. She'd needed the time to know it. She needed to know that she loved him; and love was clean.

It was understood, but that didn't stop her from feeling dirty.

She'd never said sorry.

It was a pattern with her, she'd found, to beat herself up over things that didn't need changing.

Hermione was a very logical girl. She knew that if she went messing around with relationships that didn't need and wouldn't sustain messing around with, bad things were likely to happen. So, she wasn't going to apologize.

She'd gone for three-years feeling unclean and she was just going to have to go on feeling so.

She sat up on her elbows and took in the room for the second time. Better. Much better.

Who did she love? Draco Malfoy. She knew that much with a certainty that filled her entire being.

Why did she love him? It mattered very little. She just did.

And the dirty feeling? She felt bad because she hadn't loved him enough, and she'd never said sorry.

So, what was she going to do about it? Marry Draco Malfoy.

Much better.

Analysis complete, she sat up and swung her baby/pale-pink toes onto the carpeted floor. She was wearing the only pieces of clothing she'd bothered to bring, and so changing was not an option, for the moment.

She schlumped out, only to find that the bathroom was not where memory said it ought have been. She warily started down the stairs, checking every unfamiliar room for a toilet and mirror of some sort. Nothing. She was in the kitchen, taking the bowl of cereal that Ron handed her and sitting down, before she even noticed where she was.

"Oh… thank you." She watched the whole-wheat letters float in and out of word forms on the surface of slightly rainbow-colored milk.

"You already said that," he said.

"Oh." She took the spoon he handed her and began to eat, suddenly ravenous. It had been over twenty-four hours since she'd had food in any form, and even the lowliest of generic-brand cereal was welcomed. "Thank you."

"Your welcome." He placed his bowl on the table across from her, behind a vase of yellow daffodils, and sat. She could only see a flash of red hair and stubble through the stems.

"You're growing a beard," she remarked. Had it been so long since she had actually taken the time to look at Ron?

"No." The bit of pink cheek she could see through the flowers burned red. "I just haven't shaved yet."

"Oh." She hurried to fill her mouth with another spoonful of A-Z's.

They sat in empty silence for a few long moments, words replaced by the monotonous crunching of D's and J's.

Finally, a tiny black and white saw-whet owl swooped in through the open window and dropped the Daily Prophet with an ominous smack!

Ron stood, retrieving the five knuts from a dish on the countertop. "Here you are." He paid the owl, which hooted softly and swept back from whence it came.

Hermione reached out and took the Prophet from beside the vase.

Hermione had developed a peculiar way of opening the newspaper when she was at the impressionable age of eight. Her parents having imposed a rule which called for her to read one news article per comic strip, she developed a technique of speed reading that allowed her to read a comic (her town's local paper put their comics on the back page) in the split second in which the back page was facing her. Then she would flip the paper over and leave it for her father to read.

Even though she no longer read comics, she still instinctively unfolded the paper backwards and scanned the back page before flipping it over.

"What the hell…"

It wasn't every day that she caught sight of her own face mid-speed-read.

A/N: Review? Please?