The night was brilliant these days. She gazed up at the stars, reveling in their beauty. Those brilliant specks of light that made everything seem a little more hopeful. Hope was something they needed a lot of now.
It had been almost a year now since Dumbledore had been murdered. Harry had been destroyed. The hate that brewed and seethed inside him then had quieted only a little since. He was calm through each day, but in the night-she knew because she had watched him often-he fell to watching the sky, seemingly hoping that if he wished on every shooting star that whizzed across the dark void, he might wish back the life he lost. She knew that she could not possibly understand the pain, the suffering that grieved his soul.
She felt drawn more and more to his pain these days, seemed to find herself fumbling that oh-so-precise vocabulary whenever he said hello or looked at her with those piercing green eyes anymore. She couldn't explain it. Maybe it was because of something in her own past, tugging, pulling, reminding her that she was once lost like that too….wait. What? She seemed momentarily lost in her own mind, trying to focus back on her original train of thought.
Either way, she understood now that all those years of fawning after one boy or another and hoping that she might fulfill a desire deep inside her had simply been a diversion. She knew what she wanted now, lying in her tent in that cold evening. She told Ron months ago, and he was predictably crushed. There was nothing she could do about it. Besides, she was beyond him now. She understood that. While Ron had remained the young, peevish youth that she had always known, Harry had evolved.
She no longer saw the scared little boy from school when she looked at him anymore. Years of pain and struggle against the odds, against hope had forged the little boy. The weak shell had been shattered over and over again, heated by battles to the death with Voldemort's minions and constant exile from most of the world. He was no longer a boy. What is left when you purify iron? Steel. And that is what he had become. Cold, hard, unemotional to the outside world. He had become detached from the rest of the universe, content to simply look up at the stars by night, and search relentlessly for vengeance by day. He would not stop.
Many times, she had tried to make him sleep longer, eat more. He simply had no need for these things now. He seemed driven by some other force. Food, sleep, these were things in iron, impurities. He was steel. On and on he drove. They went from town to town, day after day in search of something to help them defeat Voldemort, and they had had a few encounters that left her wanting to sleep for days. But always, he pulled her on with him, not by force-for, he always and continually asked her to stop following him-but by the sheer draw that he now possessed over her. Forever, it seemed, he marched into the unknown, content with the knowledge that his vengeance would know its full course.
Only now, in the dark night, with the bright stars above, was he human. Spells had nothing to do with it. It was only now that Harry was free to be a real man, not the monster that life had made him. Here, alone with the heavens, he was at peace. Peering from her tent as though through a crystal ball, she saw who he really was.
"Hermione", he called from across the hill. "Could you come out here for a minute. I know you're up. I have something to tell you."