Chapter 2: Dead Heart + Dead Drunk Intoxicated
"Drink water, save beer," I choked out.
I was drunk. Three hours at a bar can do that to a person. Three hours. Three hours since I had seen her. Three hours since I heard her voice. Three hours since I had last held her. Three hours and counting.
I was dying, slowly, and she didn't know it.
My heart was dead. It is a stone now, and will never be real again without her. I was so stupid not to recognize the signs, since so many girls had fallen for me, I couldn't tell that I had fallen for her.
I should have stopped myself, but it was to tempting to have someone, to not be alone. To have someone to share with. To love. Love wrapped me around its finger, twisting me until I was the happiest that I have, and could, be. Intoxicating me with a young girl who was my godson's best friend.
I had been so blind to her, to us. Too blind to stop this from happening, too old to see, to even know what was happening.
As I stared at my empty shot glass, I remembered something that she had told me.
'What do see?' she had asked me, smiling and holding up an empty glass. 'Something that us empty, so just waiting to be filled?'
What my answer was then, I do not remember, and nor does it matter, but I know my answer now, now that she was forever lost to me.
My glass would be forever empty, and I held it up to the bartender so I could leave.
A hand reached out and stopped me.
"You're going to need that," a voice whispered in my ear, and my heart jumped.
What was wrong with me?
I was a forty-four or so year old in a twenty-four years olds' body. It had to be something with the veil, or so everyone thought.
I never really knew what or where I was when I was I there—to me it seemed that time had stopped.
Or was moving backwards.
It has something to do with time travel, Remus had said, and how time would never stop; just continue in a never-ending circle, in the "Real World" moving forwards, and in the "Veil World" moving backwards.
He continued on by telling us, Harry, Hermione, Ron, Ginny, and me, that is, that time would move faster backwards in the veil to catch up with the past. Five years fast, if my reckoning is correct.
Which is why I came out of the veil at age twenty-four, instead of forty-eight. I was twenty years younger than I was four years before.
Now why I came out, no one knows. All we know is that I ended up at the end of what we have come to call the "Last Battle", in time to see Hermione send the killing curse at Voldomort with Harry's wand.
You see, the prophecy wasn't complete. No one had seen the complete prophesy, and no one really knew what it fully meant.
It had something to do with the brother of the Dark Lord's wand killing its sibling. It had nothing to do with who killed the Dark Lord, but with which wand they killed him with, which is why Hermione could destroy the one who caused so much pain in everyone's lives. It was her, the one who was least likely to lose her temper, the one who was more likely to plan the battle, rather than finish it. But, lo behold, it was her that ended it, and by watching her friends dying, lost her temper.
It had started when the Creevy brothers fell, two of the youngest participants in the battle, and her temper started to fray.
Although they were not the last to fall, they were the first. The Last War Children, as they called themselves, had started to die. They were the ones who had given the rest of the magical warriors so much hope, and they were the ones on the front lines, falling so fast, fading so quickly.
Lavender was next, screaming curses at the Death Eaters who were steadily approaching Ron, who was locking in a duel with Macnair, the man who was once the executioner of Buckbeak, who was currently leading the remaining Hippogriffs on an attack from the sky. She took down three of them before another hit her in the back.
Then it was the Patil twins, who were dueling Draco and Baise who were next. Pansy Parkinson attacked the two girls, and they followed their friend into the realm of the dead.
For Hermione, that was the last straw. Watching her friends die was one thing, but watching them die and doing nothing about it was another. For her, these two choices were not options.
From accounts of others, she went on a organized rampage, killing and injuring as many of the other side as she could get her hands on. I heard from one witch that she took down three giants and a werewolf, but people can exaggerate.
Whatever she did, people can tell. From then on, her eyes no longer held any innocence that she had as a student at Hogwarts. She had required a sense of steel in her aura, and was as straight backed as an iron rod.
Her hair had straightened out, by fright some say, and she had slimmed down. She was a rival beauty for all woman, and many hearts were broken in her dating process, of which there was none.
She was the angel of my dreams, and she was always happy. At least, that's what everyone thought.
No one knew the real Hermione, the one who screamed in the night, the one whose dreams were haunted with her dead friends. The one who feared the night so much, who was afraid of hurting the ones who loved her so much.
In the process of her mind, letting people know what was going on in her mind was not an option. In all of out eight-month relationship, I broke through that barrier and forced her to confront herself in a way that would hurt no one, and help her in a way that no one else could. I forced her to admit that she had a problem with hunting down the remaining Death Eaters, and told her she had to stop, to take a break. That was when she confronted him about he is feelings.
'Why are you doing this?' she had asked me during on of our nighttime talks, and I had turned away from her, my face burning like it never had know it could. It was then that I told her that I loved her, and it all went uphill from there.
But now was not time to dwell on the past. It was time for the future.
There is no going back in the game of time.