CHAPTER 3
IT'S A FIRE
"This life is a farce, I can't breathe through this mask like a fool, so breathe on little sister, breathe on."
The morning that followed that first night had felt to Hermione imbued with new light and new possibilities. As hard as it was to push all of those feelings of loneliness away, she knew that she simply couldn't maintain such a state of abject depression. Her melancholia came in waves, hitting her suddenly and unexpectedly in a moment of weakness and passing as soon as she found an adequate distraction. Hermione tried her best to keep herself distracted and stocking up her new flat with everything she needed and wanted certainly provided that.
She had filled her cupboards with pots and pans, crockery and cutlery, stocked up her pantry with all the food she could desire, even bought herself a small owl that she had christened Sev because he was all black and wore what looked like a permanent scowl.
Every morning she sat herself contentedly with toast and tea on her balcony where she hungrily devoured page after page her recently acquired school books, as well as the few interesting tomes Mr Flourish had given her in a burst of congenial generosity. Every night she would cook herself a nice meal and read more whilst exploring Lupin's records. All in all her days mostly consisted of reading, she found there was little else to do outside of actually leaving the house and she felt that the trips out to buy supplies had thus far proved to be quite enough for her.
It was in the afternoon of her fourth day at her new flat that she decided to finally reply to George's letter which had been glaring at her expectantly from the coffee table. Though the possibility of seeing him frightened her slightly, she also found herself craving some human contact and conversation after four days of total solitude.
Hey George,
Sorry it's taken so long for me to reply. It was just nice to be alone for a few days.
I'd love to have dinner with you though. How's tonight? Around seven?
Hermione
She stared down at her note for a moment before using her wand to replace love with like. She walked over to Sev's cage and tied the note to his leg.
"This is for George. He lives a few doors down in the shop with the ridiculous decor, ok?"
Sev hooted indifferently and took off through her open balcony door.
Hermione then threw herself in the shower wherein she fought in vain to comb the tangles from her hair. After dressing she wandered into the kitchen and begun to rifle through her cupboards for the required ingredients to make George and herself a stir fry.
At ten past seven Hermione was startled by Sev soaring through her balcony door and landing on the tiles at her feet, a note attached to his leg. It had a single line of writing.
Hermione, how the hell do I get up to your flat?
She rushed out onto her balcony to see George standing in the street, grinning up at her.
"Oh! Sorry! I'm sorry!" she cried, "I'll be down in a sec!"
She scooped her keys up off the coffee table and heaved open her door, flew down the spiral staircase, through the cavernous storage space and into the darkened shop. She opened the front doors and George stepped in.
"Sorry George! I completely forgot about that!"
He grinned at her and threw an arm around her shoulders familiarly as they headed back through the shop.
"You must be beside yourself, living above a bookshop," he said with a grin.
Hermione shrugged and returned the smile. "It does have its advantages."
George laughed.
She led him back up the spiral stairs. "Someone from the ministry is supposed to come and set up an apparition point on the landing, I'm not sure when though, I haven't heard anything. I didn't know they could do that, but I suppose it makes sense," she rambled nervously as she heaved open her front door and led him into her flat.
George was nodding and looking around. "Yeah that's what we've got for the flat above the shop," he said absent-mindedly.
She noticed his use of the word we instead of I.
"Feel free to look around," she told him, "I'll make us some tea."
Hermione left George in the lounge room and set the kettle on to boil. It was only then that she noticed her hands were shaking.
Seeing George again was proving to be an entirely different experience to what she had expected. She felt vaguely aware that his scent, so like Ron's and yet so different, had swept over her in their greeting and that had made her stomach churn. Having a man touch her after what she suddenly realised was much more than four days of no human contact had added to that sensation. But above all, George's general demeanour made her nervous. Seeing him at the Burrow over the last months had always left her with a feeling of hopelessness, he seemed so hollowed out, so bereft, so totally and devastatingly sad. Yet this person she had just allowed into her flat was none of those things. She could certainly still sense the heaviness of grief around him but it was nowhere near as dense as it had been.
All those times she had passed him at the Burrow over the last months, Hermione had not seen him smile once yet now, he seemed to find smiling easy.
"Maybe he's on drugs," she said quietly to herself with a wry grin, "Maybe you should be encouraging him to share."
When she returned to the lounge room, two steaming cups of tea in hand, Hermione found him thumbing through her record collection. He glanced at her over his shoulder.
"This is a really neat collection, Hermione. I didn't know you liked half this stuff."
She sat down on the couch. "I don't. Well, I mean, I don't know yet. I haven't listened to most of it. It was Lupin's. He left it to me, remember? You can put something on if you like."
He nodded and pulled a record out of the pile, rubbing his sleeve over the disk before placing it on the player.
George turned to her and smiled, "I hope you don't mind this? I love Bob Marley."
Hermione shook her head as he sat down on the couch beside her and picked up his tea, taking a sip.
"I always thought it was funny Lupin left you that," he said lightly, nodding towards the gramophone
Hermione nodded and shrugged. "Yeah, I know. I sort of thought if he was going to leave me anything it would be his defence books. But Harry got those."
"I guess he figured there's probably not much in them that you don't already know," he smirked.
She laughed. It was probably true.
"So you're going back to Hogwarts for this year?" George asked.
She nodded, feeling like her tongue was heavy in her mouth, as if conversation was something she had left behind, something she had forgotten how to do. "Yeah."
He grinned at her, misinterpreting her expression of discomfort. "I bet you're champing at the bit to be back. Only you, Hermione could see three more days of holidays as a bad thing," George chuckled, "Where's your shiny prefect's badge anyway? Shouldn't it be displayed in a crystal cabinet?"
Hermione let out a shy giggle. "No! I'm not a prefect anymore."
"Oh ok, so where's the safe you're keeping your Head Girl badge in? Is it behind the bookcase?"
Hermione laughed. "No, I'm not Head Girl either."
"A scandal!" exclaimed George in mock horror.
She waved it off good naturedly. "No, it's fine. I'd prefer to keep a low profile and just focus on my studies this year."
"Yeah like you've ever had a problem with that!" he grinned at her again and raised his tea to his lips.
Hermione felt a rush of unease, caused not only by her finding the act of conversing difficult, but also at George seeming to find it so easy. He was just so thoroughly changed, she could hardly make sense of it.
The smile fell from her face as she leant forward and placed a hand on his arm. "George, are you ok?"
He adopted a confused frown. "Yeah, why?"
Hermione retracted her hand and clutched at her cup of tea despite the fact that it was burning her hands, her stomach knotting as it dawned on her that she had inadvertently driven the conversation into potentially risky or upsetting territory.
"It's just..." she began haltingly, "At the Burrow, you seemed really down, which was totally understandable of course, but you're so different now. I mean, I didn't see you smile the whole time you were staying there. I don't get it."
He shrugged noncommittally, but Hermione could tell he was uncomfortable. "Neither do I to be honest. When I was there I felt like shit, and every time I go back it's the same. I just get… I get really tired and numb, it's horrible. But then I leave and after a bit I feel fine."
"It must trigger something…" Hermione suggested.
"I guess so," he responded, shrugging.
They sat in silence for a moment, the light heartedness that had hung around them slightly dissipated and heavier.
Hermione took a deep breath and sat up a little straighter as if she was steeling herself against something, without quite knowing what.
"It's been different for me too," she said.
"Yeah?" George said, his tone interested and serious.
She nodded. "Yeah. It's like… everything was so confusing there, it all felt kind of, I don't know, foggy? I always felt anxious and like I couldn't manage anything."
"Like you were always tripping over? Like every conversation, everything you tried to do was sort of a failure?" asked George, looking at her intensely.
"Yeah! Exactly! Like, I didn't feel sad or depressed or anything, it was more I didn't really feel anything very strongly at all when, now that I think about it, there were sort of lots of things to feel strongly about."
"That's exactly how I felt," George told her.
Hermione could feel her nerves trembling, could feel the pressure that sat on her chest as she opened up. It frightened her, but it also felt pleasurable. She could physically feel herself releasing.
"Then when I left and stayed at the Leaky Cauldron it was like everything just sort of fell on me!"
George shook his head, looking amazed. "Seriously, that's exactly what happened to me the first time. And it sort of happens every time I go back. The moment I apparate out of there it's just like suddenly everything becomes sharper and more intense. And fresh. Everything feels fresh again."
A look of incredible pain crossed his face and silence fell on them. Hermione didn't know what to say.
After a few heavy moments, words fell out of her mouth before she could stop them.
"How do you fix it? How do you start to smile again?"
She asked this because she didn't know the answer herself, because despite all the distracting she'd been doing, every day still felt like a burden, a struggle. She hadn't been smiling. She hadn't been crying either, not since that first night, but she realised then that not crying wasn't quite the same as possessing enough happiness to be able to smile properly, with her whole heart.
George shrugged at her question and it seemed as if a grate had fallen over his eyes. "I dunno."
The conversation had come to a close, Hermione could sense that. And if she were honest with herself, she felt almost grateful. The brief glimpse she'd had of lightness and release was enough and felt close to overwhelming.
She sipped her tea.
"Have you been back since you left?" George asked after several silent seconds had passed.
She shook her head. "No. Have you?"
"Yeah, a few times. I was there last night," he responded and his expression was suddenly worried and anxious.
Hermione frowned. "What? Has something happened?"
George looked unsure. "Well... I don't know. Not really… Sort of."
"What does that mean?" she probed, her heart thudding a little harder in her chest for a moment.
"Nothing's changed really it's just… It's Harry, I guess," he said, sounding unsure.
"What do you mean 'you guess'?"
George looked uncomfortable. "I don't want to worry you Hermione, but he's just gone a bit... odd."
Hermione relaxed a little. "Well that's nothing new. He's been 'odd' since the final battle."
George narrowed his eyes and stared fixedly at the cup of tea in his hands. "Has he though?"
She opened and closed her mouth a few times in total bemusement before saying, "What do you mean? Of course he has."
George shrugged, still staring at his mug as if intent to avoid her gaze. "I suppose… Honestly, I just don't know if that's true though. If you think about it, he hasn't been like this the whole time. He seemed pretty ok for the few weeks after the final battle, he actually seemed like he was on the up, don't you think? Then he just sort of… stopped."
Hermione cast her mind back to the memories she had been so intently avoiding, the memories of the war's immediate aftermath. When she thought for a moment, she could see the truth in what George was saying. Harry had seemed happier and getting better. He'd been talking about going into Auror training, about travelling around the world with Ron, Ginny, and Hermione. They'd been friends still. Then he'd started having those melancholic episodes, times when he seemed incredibly tense and irritable, quick to anger, or sad and thoroughly without hope. At first those episodes lasted an hour or so, then it had stretched into days.
The final conclusion was that George was right. Something had gone wrong somewhere with Harry. Hermione's view of him had been so coloured by the way he'd been most recently that she'd completely missed it.
"I can see your point," she conceded, "But you make it sound like he's gotten worse…"
"I don't know, worse might not be the right word for it," said George, "He's started leaving the house."
"Oh well… that's a good thing isn't it? He hasn't left the Burrow in months…"
George looked unconvinced. "Well maybe... But he's leaving in the middle of the night. And he won't tell anyone where he's going. Not even Ginny."
"Ah," Hermione nodded. A whole conflicting array of emotions were rising up her throat. She felt powerless and confused, and so worried that she felt sick to the stomach. But she also felt abandoned. Harry was her best friend in the whole world, only he wasn't anymore.
'Well," she said with a sigh, "There's not much I can do about it, is there? I mean, Harry's made it quite clear that he doesn't want anything to do with me. I… I don't think there's anything I can do."
George grimaced. "I wasn't saying you should do anything, Hermione."
She did not respond and instead got to her feet, making her way into the kitchen where she began to prepare their dinner.
As her knife sliced cleanly through a brilliantly red capsicum, thoughts whirled around in her head like a storm. On the one hand, despite her words to George, she was feverishly trying to find some sort of solution, some way she could help Harry. This proved fruitless. On the other hand, over and over again Hermione kept trying to tell herself that Harry was fine, he was totally fine, he was just a little messed up, but he'd get through it. They were all messed up and they all had to get through it. He was fine. He had to be. She couldn't do anything!
She slammed a cupboard door closed with unnecessary force and the clap it produced echoed around her kitchen and jarred her ears.
For all she knew he could be saving small children from the clutches of escaped death eaters, but he could also be suicidal or hurting himself in some way. She had no way of knowing and no way of finding out and the overwhelming powerlessness that she felt made her furious with Harry for putting her in this position yet again.
In her first year she and Ron had helped Harry through the protections surrounding the philosopher's stone. On the outside it had all looked so very heroic and valiant and brave, but Hermione had had to sit alone in that chamber full of eight foot high chest pieces, with no way out, for hours before Dumbledore showed up. Ron was unconscious and so cold Hermione thought he might be dead.
In her second year some unknown entity had been moving through the school picking off muggleborns one by one, every corner she'd turned had been frightening, every time she left her bed she had felt afraid. For a whole year she was terrified.
In her fifth year she had followed Harry's whim, his intuition to go to the department of mysteries, had been seriously injured when she fought beside him in the battle, had taken weeks to recover from her wounds. In her sixth she had attempted to protect the school from Death Eaters, trained killers, while Harry had gone off with Dumbledore. Only last year she had gone into hiding with him, giving her whole life and safety over to searching for the Horcruxes, endured innumerable traumas as a result, stuck by him when Ron left and broke her heart, saved his life from Nagini in Godric's Hollow, been tortured for forty excruciating minutes by Bellatrix Lestrange, had ridden on the back of a dragon out of Gringotts and into the Final Battle… and not once in all the years she'd sacrificed for him had Harry asked her if she was ok, not once had he seemed remotely worried about her. She was always the one who worried, the one who looked out for him.
For him, she had sent her parents away. She had purposely damaged their minds in order to stop them being added to the list of people who died for Harry Potter.
She could see Thestrals now.
Abandoned was how Hermione felt right then. Abandoned, worried, and resentful. She felt powerless knowing that there was finally nothing she could do after eight years of always trying to do something. Harry had shut her out, but that was not the only reason for her helplessness. She also knew that she herself had nothing left to give, that she could not abandon herself again for him. Yet she still felt thoroughly obligated to do so.
In her mind was a tug of war and Hermione could not decide which side was right and which was easy.
George found her in the kitchen then, furiously slicing vegetables. He squeezed past her and deposited their empty mugs in the sink.
"Hermione?"
She didn't trust herself to respond. For all the anger and confusion boiling away inside her, she also felt that it wasn't actually ok for her to be having any of those emotions. She felt ashamed that she wasn't moved only to seek Harry out and help him. With George staring at her so intently, Hermione felt thoroughly self-conscious in her rage.
George leant past her and carefully took the knife out of her quivering hand. She let him.
"Hermione, I know you can't do anything. That's alright. I wasn't trying to say you should. It's not your job to do anything. Harry's a grown man, he needs to learn to look after himself."
"Which he's clearly not doing," Hermione spat, her voice shaking.
George nodded. "I know, but you've got to let it go. What's the point? We both know you're not going back to the Burrow, you're not going to try to see him or talk to him, because for some reason you just can't bring yourself to do it."
Hermione looked at up at him, knowing that his uncanny insight into her feelings must be because he shared them.
"So just let it go," he finished, "Why torture yourself?"
This was all very logical, Hermione thought, but it was easier said than done. It often seemed to her like men had an easier time of pushing things away than she did. The knowledge that she needed to let it go was all very real and very much present in her mind, but that didn't translate to that deep understanding that would fix her feelings on the subject.
"You're not having a very good time, are you?" George said suddenly.
Hermione looked at him. Her tongue quivered on a response, her breath hanging in her throat ready for it. But which response? She could go either way. Her face could fall into sadness, her head could rock side to side as she acknowledged that no, she wasn't having a good time and she found it hard to believe that she ever would again. Or she could shrug her shoulders, she could laugh, she could uttered that most hallowed of phrases I'm fine.
Her breath hung in her throat.
Then, in a split second, it rushed out, then back in, quick and sharp, and again. Not because she had settled on her response, no, but because George was very close to her in that tiny kitchen, close enough that she could see the freckles on his nose, the dark flecks in his blue eyes.
The record in the lounge room scratched and stopped, plunging them into a silence that seemed to stretch, warp and twist around Hermione's reality.
She just wanted to reach out to him, just wanted to touch him, because it had been so long since she'd been touched properly, lovingly. She wanted to be loved. Her loneliness was so complete all over her life the past few days, like she wasn't herself anymore, because herself had always been defined by the people around her, the people that she cared about who cared about her. It had felt for a long time like there was no one like that for her anymore. She was just alone.
And George's chest, an arm's length away, promised all the warmth of another person's skin, warmth that could travel along her nerves, up through her muscles and into her brain and tell her she was being loved.
Hermione just wanted to be loved.
In the silence, they stared at each other. There was something in the way George was looking back at her that didn't seem to be only concern or ambivalence or, if she were honest, particularly platonic. The reaction she had to that image was so fleeting that thought played no part in it. Fear and a strange feeling of elation welled in her heart and up her chest, making her heart palpitate whilst an inexplicable jolt shot through her abdomen and a sweat broke out on her palms.
Her breath seemed to thud in and out of her body.
Then, she turned away, shaking her head, and put it all down to a loss of control, a moment of insanity. "I'm such a mess."
She couldn't look at George like that. It wasn't right.
Her fingers found the knife again and busied themselves with cutting up more vegetables. She heard George let out a scoff behind her, and it sounded as if it came more from nervousness than anything else. The atmosphere felt incredibly tense and Hermione knew very well why, felt sure that George knew too, but could not think of a single thing to say to lighten it again.
Her mind could make no sense of the past few moments.
George appeared by her side and took up a knife of his own to help. Without a word they stood side by side, shoulders almost pressed together and prepared dinner.
For the following half an hour they spent in the kitchen, the only words that passed between them were trivial and unsubstantial and Hermione felt almost as if she were anticipating the moment when they had finished eating and he would leave. It had all just been too hard, too uncomfortable. She wanted to go back to being on her own.
She felt afraid that she might look at him again and see what she had seen before, George as a man, with a man's body that could make her feel loved.
They sat down to dinner at her coffee table. Hermione put on a record quietly to break the silence.
"This is really good," George told her as he shovelled the food from the plate to his mouth in a way that reminded her painfully of Ron
"Thanks," she responded.
The atmosphere had become agonizingly uncomfortable. She found herself questioning why she had even agreed to this dinner. The two of them had probably never even been alone in a room together before tonight, if they were friends it was only really by association in that they were close to the same people, or because they so frequently shared living spaces.
The bottom line was that Hermione was not now, nor had she ever been close to George. They knew next to nothing about each other. They had nothing in common.
She supposed the best way to disarm the uncomfortable silence around them would be to simply begin to ask him about himself, but where could that lead to aside from a place of pain? He and Fred more or less shared a life, what questions could she ask him that didn't directly or indirectly involve Fred or the war?
Hermione cast around inside her head for something, anything, to ask him that would steer the conversation into easier territory.
Finally her mind landed on something, a topic that could not possibly lead back to the war or their collective grief.
"Are you seeing anyone?" she asked lightly.
George paused in the midst of chewing and looked at her bemusedly. "What?" he responded, cheeks bulging.
"Are you… you know, dating?"
He made a sound that was half choking and half laughter. "Why?"
Hermione shifted uncomfortably in her seat. "No reason, just making conversation."
He shrugged. "Well, yes and no, nothing serious."
She nodded.
"What about you?" he asked, grinning, "Any irons in the fire?"
She rolled her eyes and snorted cynically. "Oh, you know me, beating them off with a stick…"
He grimaced, "That probably doesn't feel too great."
"What?"
"Being beating off with a stick. I find that hands are so much gentler and probably less likely to draw blood."
Hermione let out a laugh that filled her whole belly before saying, "Well, I guess it depends how you're doing it!"
"Oh no!" George cackled, hands clutching at his sides, "No! Don't even go there!"
Their laughter filled the room for a moment and it seemed that once they had begun, they could not stop. Their humour felt uplifting and easy, there was nothing difficult about laughing and joking and Hermione felt thoroughly in love with that moment. Her body felt lighter than it had done in a long time, like it had been craving this, just a simple joke to bring out a release of sound and feeling that wasn't sad or heavy.
She allowed herself to laugh.
And from that moment, the conversation flowed freely. For almost an hour they talked of nothing important, nothing of consequence. More than anything, they laughed at themselves, at the silly places their minds took them. They laughed at their own human frailties. Really, they laughed at their own suffering, which felt at once counter-intuitive but also freeing. It felt good to acknowledge that in their pain they did, said, and felt some strange and ridiculous things. And that was ok, if looked at in the right light, it was funny.
Hermione knew that it didn't mean that she'd always find it funny, it didn't mean that when she was in those moments of pain she would be able to smile at it, it just meant that for this short period of time she could take a step apart from it and make it light.
"So there was one night," George was telling her as they reclined on the couch together, nursing cups of tea, plates empty and abandoned on the coffee table, "There was one night I was out walking in London feeling totally sorry for myself and I went into this seedy pub and I saw this thing, I think it's called a tevelision?"
"A television," Hermione corrected him.
"Yeah, that. Box with sound and pictures and stuff. Anyway, there was this woman on the box wearing pretty much nothing saying that I should call her and… I don't know! It seemed pretty obvious that it had something to do with… making sex…"
Hermione hooted with laughter, shaking her head, already guessing where George was going with this.
"So at first," he went on, "At first I thought it was directed specifically at me, but the pub was full so, I don't know, I got all confused. Anyway, I was feeling so shitty I just thought, fuck it, I'm up for trying something new…"
"Oh no…"
"Oh yes, Hermione! She kept saying 'call me', and I guessed I connected that to those telephone things, I mean, I did pay a little bit of attention to muggle studies, so I wrote down the number on the box, totally determined, and went and found one of those little houses with the phones in them… what are they called? Phone house… thing…"
"You're thinking of a phone box," Hermione told him, chuckling, before realisation dawned on her, "Oh no… you didn't call a phone sex line from a phone box, did you?"
"Well, yeah, but you're getting a bit ahead of me here because I had to work out how to us it first! I kept trying to just dial the number but nothing happened, so I looked at the heavily graffitied instructions which said I needed to put money into it to make it work, but I didn't have any muggle coins. I swear I stood in that thing for over an hour with my wand trying all different charms to get it to work and nothing did. In the end I pulled out a galleon and shrunk it so it would fit in the little slot…"
"And did it work?" she exclaimed, rapt in his story.
He nodded smugly, "Yep. It did. I spoke to a lovely woman named Destiny who moaned a lot and talked about doing a lot of quite lovely things to my nether regions."
Hermione covered her face in a mixture of embarrassment and amusement. "Oh no! That's crazy!"
"You're telling me! I don't think I've ever felt more pathetic in my whole life!"
Together, they fell about in a fit of laughter. Hermione knew that the aftermath of that experience had probably felt quite bad for George, that he'd probably felt down and ashamed of himself, but right then that didn't matter. It felt important that they both take that moment to laugh at these things.
"Talking about pathetic," she hiccoughed, "Get this. When I left the Burrow and I was staying at the Leaky Cauldron, I would literally spend hours walking backwards and forwards talking to Ron as if he were there. Like, I'd have full on arguments with him."
George guffawed gracelessly, "I've so been there."
"Seriously! I don't know how I managed to find that much to say! But it was like it was the only thing I could do that would keep me from going absolutely insane!"
"One might argue that doing that meant you were already insane!"
Hermione giggled, "Anyway, so there was one morning when I was in full swing, having an intense and impassioned discussion all on my own when there's a knock at the door and it's the cleaning lady. She tells me that she's been round the past few mornings but it always sounded like I didn't want to be interrupted, so she let it go, but she really did have to come in and clean the room now!"
George nearly fell off the couch laughing.
"You should have seen the look on her face when I let her in and she saw I was the only one in there! I've never seen anyone clean faster!"
"I can imagine," he chuckled.
She grinned and looked down at her empty cup. "More tea?"
He nodded and handed her his mug.
Hermione felt relieved that everything was going smoothly between them again, but this was partially because she was refusing to think about the conversation they'd shared when he first arrived and certainly refusing to think about the moment in the kitchen that followed it. She was quite literally keeping her thoughts as far away from it all as possible, choosing instead to let herself be thoroughly in the moment because in that moment she felt happy, she didn't want to talk herself out of that feeling.
She set the kettle on to boil just as George appeared in the entrance to the kitchen.
"Have you heard from Ron?" he asked and Hermione almost visibly shuddered.
The feeling that fell on her then was almost like whiplash.
"No," she responded tightly.
"Sorry," said George sympathetically, "I didn't meant to upset you…"
"It's ok… I'm just trying not to think about it."
"You can talk to me, if you like," he said, looking concerned.
Hermione turned and leant on the counter, arms folded. She sighed.
"I wouldn't know what to say, really. Honestly, sometimes I don't even know if I really feel hurt by it, by him. Sometimes I think it's just the rejection that stings rather than any real kind of love… I mean, it was the heat of the war, you know? Maybe we just got sort of… swept up."
"I never really understood it to be honest."
Hermione stared at him. "What do you mean?"
"You and him… it just always seemed so unlikely."
She shifted uncomfortably, feeling a little defensive at George's honesty. "In what way?" she asked, somewhat sharply.
"Well… he was never very nice to you all through school. Sometimes it looked like you only liked him because he was so unavailable."
Hermione spluttered ungracefully. "Well that's… I mean… He wasn't that bad… I just…"
George looked apologetic. "I'm sorry, I know it's not my place to comment. He's my little brother and I guess I'm sort of fond of him," he smiled, "But he's shallow and stubborn and… well… he's nowhere near as smart as you, not just school wise but emotionally, and he hasn't ever seemed to really value you."
Hermione could think of nothing to say. The information George was laying in front of her shocked her as it felt at once unequivocally true but also far too painful to even confront.
"I reckon," George went on, "I reckon that the person you're in a relationship with should challenge you and make you uncomfortable sometimes because they're getting to you in a deep way, but they should also be your best friend. Does that make sense? Like, relationships shouldn't be easy, I think if it's easy, you're not doing it right, you're not going deep. But with Ron it always looked like there was a lot of challenging stuff without much friendship. He just wanted you to look after him."
Again, she said nothing.
He shrugged and scoffed, "What do I know, anyway? It's not like I've ever had a long term thing myself…"
"I had no idea you could be so erudite," she told him, her shock still evident in her tone.
He raised an eyebrow. "I don't know the meaning of the word."
Hermione laughed.
That silence was there again then. She turned away to keep making their tea, but again the atmosphere had turned tense and awkward.
She had never considered any of the things George had put to her, never considered that perhaps Ron was just not right for her. There was an understanding in her then that stepped aside from anger; it wasn't that Ron was a horrible human being not right for anyone, but that maybe, just maybe, he wasn't right for her. What was it in her that had always liked him? That had always wanted his approval? Growing up at Hogwarts had meant she was surrounded by boys, many of which were very nice to her and whom she got along fairly well with, so why was the one she picked the one who rarely treated her nicely? It was almost akin to her having a crush on Draco Malfoy or Crabbe or Goyle, which was ludicrous.
She could almost sense the understanding coming upon her. What made one ludicrous and the other desirable? Was it the fact that someone like Malfoy had been consistently horrible to her, making him easy to hate, whilst Ron had almost opened to her then closed over and over all the years they'd known one another? When she thought about it, it felt like Ron would be nice and friendly and she'd begin to feel at ease in his company, then something would happen and he'd push her away and be angry. She had never been quite sure where their friendship stood, it was so frail.
What was it in her that translated that into a craving that still lived on inside her? She just wanted Ron's love, his approval. When she thought about it, she just wanted him to tell her he loved her, that she was beautiful, that she was good enough.
A realisation hit Hermione then, like an oncoming train.
She had inadvertently made Ron the vessel in which she poured all of her insecurity, all of her not-good-enough feelings. She made him the holder of that, made him the cure.
Because really she had set it up in her mind, slowly over time, that when Ron chose to love her, it meant she could love herself.
She suddenly felt very dizzy.
"Are you alright?" said George, concern etching his words.
She didn't reply, but her body wavered.
George stepped forward and took her by the shoulders, leading her back into the lounge room where he deposited her gently on the couch.
"Just sit down for a moment, I'll get you a glass of water."
She sunk back into the cushions.
All of this felt so huge within her, this realisation, and she felt frightened. The fear came from the fact that though she now had the knowledge, she didn't know what to do with it. That craving was still there, the feelings themselves remained unchanged. She expected the knowledge to fix it but it didn't. What could she do?
She felt ashamed.
George reappeared and handed her a glass of water which she drank.
"Are you alright?" he asked again, sitting next to her.
"Yes," she responded in a cracked voice, "I've just… I've just realised something and… I don't know…" she trailed off.
He looked confused.
The feeling of dizziness and overwhelm began to ebb away and she felt, more than anything, tired. Hermione let out a sad chuckle. "Sometimes I wish that I didn't have to think about sex or love. Sometimes I wish I could be immune to it."
He nodded knowingly. "Me too."
"Tonight has been… intense," she told him, smiling, her expression exhausted.
He laughed. "Yeah, it has."
Hermione sipped her water, letting the silence wash over them for a moment. Then, she looked at him, her face full of all the sincerity she possessed.
"Thank you."
She said this because even though it had all been hard, and there was a large part of her that felt like she'd rather not have done it at all, she also knew, deep down, that this is what healing looked like sometimes. It was often veiled behind difficult conversations and feelings. But what George had said before was right, having relationships with people could be hard sometimes because they took you to a deeper place that you perhaps were not comfortable enough to go on your own. They pushed you there. That was what George had done for her that night.
But she also felt lost, bereft, as if something had been torn out from underneath her. She felt terribly lonely.
Hermione let out a sigh that came both from exhaustion and a tiny sense of hopelessness.
"Come here," said George, his voice full of kindness and understanding. He opened his arms.
She hesitated a moment before folding forward onto his chest and George embraced her. For a moment, her whole body slackened into him, almost went limp with relief. She couldn't remember the last time she'd been hugged. It felt so gentle and warm, so safe.
Then, a feeling of unease began to creep up the back of her neck. She suddenly became very aware of her hands on him, and his on her. She suddenly became very aware of what lay beyond the innocence of a hug, the simple touching and intimacy it involved. The exchange of warmth and heartbeats, the nerves that engaged in it, and the parts of her body that responded to it.
But she couldn't hug George like that. It wasn't right.
Before she could pull away, his hand was in her cheek, then under her chin, drawing her face upwards. Hermione thought very much that she wanted to pull away but thought was not the thing driving the vessel of her body right then.
George dipped his head and kissed her and it was like a car crash, jarring and extreme and terrifying.
Unlike a car crash though, it was exhilarating. The jolt she had felt earlier tore around her abdomen and between her legs like someone was punching her repeatedly in the stomach, a sensation that was at once like pain but also addictive and explosively pleasurable. Hermione kissed him back.
Together, the strength of their arms wrapped around one another pulled their bodies closer from their lips to their chests to their legs. They intertwined. They crushed themselves against one another.
After a moment of tangled writhing George pulled his lips from hers and whispered hoarsely, "Bedroom."
Hermione nodded and they stood up together, hand in hand, and almost ran into her room. For that brief moment that the contact was broken, thought began to hammer loudly on the door of her mind but she ignored it. They fell onto the bed.
She found herself on her back, all the power with him. He tore off his shirt, bore his torso, her breath hardened in her lungs, pounding up her throat. He wrenched at her pants and then they were slipping from her ankles, her feet pushing them away. He kissed her and kissed her, their bodies pressed so hard against each other she found it hard to breathe. She wanted to dig her nails into his back.
She knew they shouldn't be doing this, knew that the consequences wouldn't be good, yet the consequences didn't seem to matter. They were grey, foggy ideas that had nothing to do with what was actually happening. She was driven by lust, it had taken over everything within her, but underneath that was the fierce yearning for love and attention, for validation.
Hermione just wanted to be loved.
George's hand flicked over her bare thighs, pushed aside her underwear and his fingers slipped and slid inside her. She let out a set of short, sharp moans and her body buckled around his arm. He breathed heavily and groaned in her ear, on her face, thumb rubbing, fingers wriggling.
It went on and on, this writhing, snake like dance on her bed and pushed her closer and closer until suddenly his weight on her was gone, her body felt light, and his head was between her legs. Those short, sharp sounds kept jolting from her throat louder and faster.
Then, the explosion. Her body curled around her orgasm, the hardening hit her muscles, blood pulsing, sound gone from her throat, from the room, her senses died and returned and ebbed and flowed.
Her mouth bent around noises that descended from ecstatic keening into soft, humming, musical breaths.
George's body landed next to her, his panting, wet face pressed into her neck, his erection denting her thigh.
Hermione's whole body softened and the silence of it cocooned them for a moment.
Then thought broke down the door, flooded her mind, her whole body filled to the brim with a black and bottomless shame. The lust had been driven from her body with his fingers and what it left behind was clarity. The consequences loomed on her, casting deep, dark shadows on her mind.
What had she done?
She couldn't be with George like that. It wasn't right.
"Oh fuck. Oh god. Oh this is so wrong," her voice sounded high and childlike in her ears, full of pain and humiliation.
He grinned at her smugly, eyes still alight with arousal, "I know."
She shook her head and shrunk her body away from him, only then did he seem to understand.
"Shit," he whispered, his hands flying up to cover his eyes.
"You have to go," she told him, sliding down to the end of the bed and retrieving her jeans. "I'm so sorry, we can't do this. This is wrong."
He sat up. "I know. It's ok. I understand. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have…"
"It's alright," she said tightly.
He pulled on his shirt as she buckled her jeans.
"Should we talk or…?" he asked, face crumpled in what she interpreted to be the same shame she herself was feeling.
"No," she said bluntly, "We will it's just… not now… I'm sorry."
He nodded and stood as she sat on the end of the bed, her head in her hands.
"It's ok… I'll let myself out… I'm sorry, Hermione, I didn't mean… I'm sorry."
He trailed off and then took himself out of the room. Hermione jumped as the front door closed with a bang.