Ginny, from the back seat of the rental car
It's been deadly silent since Mackay. This is partly because we're heading inland, and we're all terrified we're going to get axe murdered on the lonely highway heading west, or eaten by some ancient unspeakable Australian creature with glinting orange eyes; partly because me and Harry had a late night and have been napping in the back seat; and partly because Hermione lost the absolute run of herself yesterday and nearly burnt the hair off some café waitress who had the temerity to flirt with Ron.
Honestly, it's embarrassing the way she is with him.
She knows it too.
She was mortified, had a screaming match with Ron, then stalked off and flatly refused to talk about it. She went all purse-lipped and more up-tight than usual and avoided all of us the rest of the day.
I don't know where Ron slept last night. I kind of booted him out when it became apparent that sharing a room with Hermione was going to be the equivalent of sleeping on the rim of an active volcano.
She's making out like she lit that girl on fire on purpose, but I really don't think so. She's hard-core, but no-one's life was in danger so it doesn't make sense that she'd do it.
I think it was an accident.
I think she needs to get her feelings out before she explodes, and we all end up as collateral damage.
I do understand that it's not all about Ron. Like, she had to obliviate her parents and may have screwed them up for good, and it's all morally grey, and she's done this thing where she's kind of orphaned herself? It's an ambiguous loss: her parents are alive, but does it really count if they don't know her? Is it a kind of murder, to take someone's mind like that?
So I'm sympathetic, but we're all walking on eggshells at the moment, which manifests as long, silent stretches, on the long straight highways that are a kind of nightmare I didn't think I'd have. I have enough nightmares to be getting on with.
At least it's overcast today.
Scraggly trees, and endless bitumen, with the bruise-grey sky hanging low over us, and terrifyingly huge trucks that rush past and make me want to put cushioning charms on the car. Australia has funny rules about apparition in regional and remote areas; apparently, dehydration and heat exhaustion, and people getting horribly irretrievably lost are serious issues here. So we're on an endless car trip, a wild goose chase, searching for people who don't even know they're missing.
I've got Harry's glasses perched on my head. He's still napping, poor darling. Curled around a pillow, leaning up against the window.
I think the hum of the car helps him sleep.
The landscape is flat, flat, flat. Except where these massive chunks of rock stick up- can you call them mountains if they just look like ginormous rocks? Volcanic plugs or something, I think. They're big and orange and ominous.
Ron doesn't even have the radio on. He's just driving.
"Ron, when you get a chance, could you pull over please,"
It's Hermione. But she sounds calm. Calmer than yesterday, at least.
I pull my gaze away from the rushing, alien landscape and watch as Ron glances over to her. I've seen this side of him from time to time; it's a version of him that only surfaces with her, when they think no-one's looking.
It's assessing, concerned.
He can be such an idiot sometimes, but I can see the crow's feet, and the scars, and the way tension sits in his neck, and I think maybe he plays it up. He's smarter than he lets on.
Well. Maybe.
He just nods, and he doesn't even wait for the next stopping bay, just pulls off the road when there's space at the verge, and we're crunching and bumping over tufts of grass and scattered rock.
I know he's going to check.
I think… look. I don't know why I do it, but perhaps it's habit? Borne out of years and years of being the sneaky youngest, and then cemented in place last year at Hogwarts with the world turning to madness and the desperate need to use whatever survival instincts could serve me?
I close my eyes before he turns to check, and pretend I'm still sleeping. But I can see the glance he flicks our way through my eyelashes.
He's worried about her.
He's worried she won't say it, whatever it is, if we're awake.
He's worried we'll see them.
For people who hotly deny the possibility that they might maybe have feelings for each other, they sure as hell carry on like they're having a secret affair.
I suppose people who have affairs probably do hotly deny it.
But they're not shagging. They're not anything.
If he slept in the room with her last night, it will have been in the other bed, and I don't think they've spoken since all the yelling yesterday.
I think they both have public personas that they wear like armour.
I think we all do.
Harry loves being cuddled. Loooves it. And it's not that he's embarrassed by it, but it doesn't exactly fit with his scrappy, underdog, chosen one, saviour of the universe image, so it's very much a thing that only surfaces when it's just us. And I guess I don't normally let anyone see how profoundly fucked up I am about what happened in first year. Even Harry has only seen the tip of the iceberg on that one.
I haven't told him the part where I'm scared that maybe I was drawn to him because of Tom. Because I gave Tom so much of myself, and there was this piece of Tom in Harry. So like, there's this tiny paranoid part of me that thinks maybe I'm doing the equivalent of going back to an abusive ex.
It's bullshit, I know it is, but.
Sometimes I get very tangled up.
Anyway.
Ron's just waiting for her.
We all just sit for a while, and then I'm straining to hear her. She's speaking very quietly.
"I'm sorry about yesterday."
There's a long pause. It's a bit uncomfortable. If she was doing this with me, I'd've said something by now, but when I sneak a peek, Ron's just looking at her, waiting.
Like he's ever been a patient person. It's weird.
"I'm not really coping with this trip," she says it so calmly, so quietly, it's like she's detached from it. "I thought I was ok, but I'm not. I think… I've noticed things tend to go badly when…" she lets out a small, frustrated breath.
"It's ok."
"It's not. We're friends, and we've been through a lot together, but the missing piece of this puzzle is that I'm more than half in love with you. I ignore it most of the time, but when beautiful waitresses are slipping you their number, I just… apparently, I spiral out of control," She sounds a little bitter.
I'm surprised to hear my own heartbeat pounding in my head.
Why am I nervous? This is her mess.
Ron doesn't say anything for a moment.
I can hear the air conditioning. It's somehow the only thing that's happening now.
Then there's rustling, and movement. Ron's awkwardly twisting and stretching to jam his fingers in the top pocket of his jeans, and for a moment I think it's going to be the napkin from yesterday, with a phone number scrawled on it, but it's not.
It's the photo.
He doesn't know that I know about the photo.
But see, I was friends with Col.
Col told me all about it. He got weird and anxious about it, like maybe he'd done something wrong, in letting Ron have it. Wanted to know if he should tell Hermione. Showed me a copy.
But it's just a photo.
She's sat in the library, bent over a huge book, and she's got ink on her hands, and her hair's a mess, and she looks so completely Hermione.
Ron's charmed it, over and over again, so it folds down into a tiny multi-sided wad, the size of a coin. Who knows what other magic he's done to it. He always has it. It's always with him. It took me a while to realise that the thing he keeps in the top left pocket of his jeans was the photograph. I actually saw him pause on the beach on the Gold Coast, like he couldn't quite bring himself to leave it while he went for a swim.
I think it's probably accrued talismanic magic, by this point.
It's hard, if you imbue things like that, to let go of them.
Dangerous.
He's sitting there now, hands braced on the steering wheel, eyes downcast, waiting, while she unfolds it.
Hermione doesn't say anything, and I can't see her, so I've no idea what her reaction is. She's seen it though, because Ron throws her this sort of apologetic half-smile, sits back in his seat and starts the car up again, turning over his shoulder to check before pulling back out onto the road.
I can feel it in the movement as he shifts up through the gears. Then we're hurtling through this sparse landscape again, following the dark grey line of the road that stretches on forever, and I can't believe she told him she loves him and they're both acting like nothing's happened.
I've given up pretending to be asleep. I know I'm staring at Ron. It's one of those moments where he really feels like my brother, in that way that brothers are strangers you happen to have grown up with.
I know him so well, and not at all.
Hermione's got this piece of him that's unknowable to me. I know I have a piece she'll never see too, not fully, but there's a way that the bit she's got is bigger, deeper, more profound. It's like… I don't know what it's like. There's almost a darkness to it. Like, despite the fact that they clash half the time, and irritate the crap out of each other, there's this big area of their relationship that is functional, and complicated, and off limits to anyone else.
Like they're deep-sea diving together, and no-one else has a permit.
The whole interchange was so… made of nothing, and made of everything, and part of me wants to ask Ron what the hell he thinks he's playing at, to say nothing when she basically just told him she got so jealous she set a woman on fire.
He's taken his big freckly hand off the gear stick now, and he's holding it out, and she doesn't give him back the photograph, she just takes his hand. His arm is relaxed across the console, like she's holding his hand in her lap. In my head, I can't help but imagine she's wrapped both hands around his. Because they're so big, his hands. They never used to be, when we were kids.
He's not the person he was.
None of us are.
I think the trick of it all is going to be working out how to be something new. I've had to do it once already, but I don't know if that will give me an advantage.
Probably not. Hurt just accrues interest.
I hear a shaky breath.
I think she's crying.
He looks at her, and he grins that daft lopsided grin of his, just for a second, and then his eyes are back on the road, and nothing much happens now, except that sometimes he has to change gear and reclaims his hand temporarily.
I realise Harry's been watching me in a fuzzy way. I'm not sure when he woke up, or what he's heard. I pass him his glasses, and smirk back at him when he pulls the kind of eye-brow based expressions that let me know he's noticed the hand holding. One of the faces tells me he's a little worried about it.
But I think it's going to be ok.
We pull up at the twenty-four hour fuel stop on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, and stagger out of the car like we've forgotten how to use our legs. Everything resets. It's back to normal, with Ron's dumb jokes, and Hermione compulsively checking her travel notes, and Harry gravitating towards the snack foods, those green eyes darting about, in case of danger.
I still feel like I've seen tigers in the wild, or something.
I doubt I'll ever talk to either of them about it. I think it's just one of those things.
She's standing closer to him now. He touches her elbow lightly. They're talking about the plan. He's tracing a line on the map she's holding.
I feel a well of anxiety build as we head back to the car.
We're heading further and further inland, and despite the maps it feels like uncharted territory, and something tells me that Hermione's travel notes aren't going to be enough.
Ron passes me the keys, and grimaces at the back seat. It's really too cramped for him back there but we all agreed that expansion spells are too risky with a muggle rental car.
Hermione stops me before I climb in, and her eyes are a little defiant.
"I'm really sorry about yesterday," she says, and it comes out blunt.
I don't mean to glance over at Ron, but I do.
"I'm not really coping," she says, and she gives me this look. I don't know for sure if she knows I was awake. It almost sounds like telling Ron was a rehearsal for this conversation. Like she had to practice her lines first. Like maybe she always tells him things first… "I think we should stop in Longreach for a few days. Take a break."
"Good idea."
As I pull out of the fuel stop, I can't help but feel lost. I don't know where we're going, but I do know that I've seen the raw edges of their relationship now, and I think I do understand why they've never dated, why they've always resisted being anything but friends.
Much like Australia, there's immensity there that's frightening.
I exchange a look with Harry, and glance in the rear-view mirror, but there's nothing to see of note. They're just sharing a bag of crisps like nothing's happened.