Later – days, weeks, hours, – they would talk. Someone should have been there. Someone should have watched her. Someone should have taken care of her, made sure she was okay. In a perfect world, someone wouldn't have had to. In that world, she'd be lying on the floor of Gryffindor Tower barricaded by textbooks and warmed by the fire. Her hair would fall into her eyes and she'd tuck it behind her ear impatiently as she glared at the boys, but there would be mirth lurking behind the disapproval in her eyes.
This world wasn't perfect. This world was fucking real.
In the beginning, she'd been aware of the duration of the war… but days became weeks, and time was meaningless. The Order was ragged, handicapped, tired. It was trial-by-fire, and if you lived, you dealt with whatever happened because someone else died for you that night, and you had to fight the next day in their place and for their memory. In the beginning, she would sit with them when they came home from missions. Harry lit his pain on fire and smoked it with the nicotine in his cigarettes; Ron found solace in cheap whiskey because pounding in his head distracted him from the parting of his soul.
She shouldn't have been there. She was an amateur healer, she was soft hands and comfort when someone else came home. This battle hadn't gone as planned. Violently surprised and desperately outnumbered, the plea for help from Harry's stag echoed through Headquarters. Kingsley put his head in his hands and told Hermione to go. He could see in her eyes that she was terrified but grimly resolute, and in the faint crack of her Apparation, he told her he was sorry. She hadn't heard - he knew this - but poorly-timed apologies made it harder for him to fall asleep at night, and he knew he deserved it because he would wake up in the morning and do the same thing again.
She appeared in a battle where spells hit the ground almost as thick as the rain. She caught a flash of green from the corner of her eye and felt the air crushed from her lungs as Ron covered her, pressed her to the earth. The curse struck wildflowers in a magnificent explosion of sparks and petals, and as she fought for breath he rolled and yanked her behind what remained of an oak tree. There wasn't time to ascertain if she was okay – her heaving chest assured him that she was breathing and right then, it had to be enough, and he left her to rejoin the fight.
On her feet, she trembled and adrenaline surged, and she leapt into the crossfire with curses and hexes spat awkwardly from her tongue and her wand. Bill Weasley saw this and he roared RETREAT and they did. She moved forward to grasp a still-warm hand from the mud and raked her eyes across the battlefield. From the Death Eater side there was a victory shout, and Hermione locked eyes with a face behind a mask. His lips twitched and his wand flashed—and then it fell because it's owner fell, and Hermione's heart stopped beating, and her stomach heaved, and then Harry caught her hand and she was yanked in Apparation even as she vomited.
Remnants of potato and cabbage littered the lawn of Grimmauld Place as she retched again until her stomach ached and her throat burned. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand (murderer's hand) and heaved again before she stumbled up the stairs. Bill, Ron, Seamus, Harry, Lavender, Pansy, Colin, Luna, and Remus, who carried the body of Mundungus Fletcher. They were bruised, battered, bloody, broken, they were vacant eyes and pain. It was a mark of the state of the Order of the Phoenix that they didn't notice (care?) when Hermione didn't follow them into the makeshift hospital room.
Her heartbeat hurt her chest, and the echoes of someone else's scream hurt her ears, but she didn't feel the door frame knock against her shoulder when she stopped to catch a breath, a murderer's hand pressing against her ribs where Ron had crushed her to the ground. She shook her head and swept her muddy hair into a knot held together by her wand. By chance, Kingsley's office was on the way to her room. His door opened and the foreign man turned to walk away. She let him take five paces before she shoved him against the wall. She was small, but she was fire and ice and pain and raw, and she growled as she drove into his body with her hands on his throat. He could have thrown her away (maybe), but he didn't fight her, and she lifted one hand and yanked his hair and his lips crashed on hers and she growled and he threw them both into someone else's room.
She drew her wand from her hair and threw silencing and locking spells at the door. She was rough and she was cruel, but he didn't mind when she drew blood from his back or left handprints over his trachea. He didn't know that he was her first, or that she lost her innocence when she took a life, or that she had chosen to throw the last of it away before she could "lose" her virginity too.
She came, and then he did, and he groaned and sank into the bed. They were still - she was rigid and unfeeling, and he was boneless in his afterglow. While he slept, she dressed and left him, returning her wand to the knot in her hair.
Somewhere below her, Harry sat with Ron on the back porch and threw his third cigarette into the mud. He smoked one cigarette for every life he took, and then he smoked for himself until his hands quit shaking. Ron drank straight from the bottle, and neither had to speak. It was eerie and it was sad, the grace with which they held their vigil - the kind of grace that is only achieved through hours, days, weeks, and sometimes years of repetitive motions. Harry took a deep breath and he lit a fourth and the fog began to lift from his mind.
"Hermione,"
and his voice cracked, and something flickered in Ron's eyes.