Disclaimer: It's all JKR's.
A/N: I want to thank everyone again for your continued support and reviews. They mean a great deal to me, and I especially appreciate the detail you put into them. Thanks again- and now for a change in perspective. Here's hoping it works.
VIVAASA
by: carpetfibers
One year, Day 41
The chocolate is lukewarm in her mouth, the liquid thick and heavy. She swallows without consideration, barely tasting and hardly thinking. She is studying, and the cafe has only witnessed her turn the page once. Her highlighter has bent to the paper only twice, and she had read the same two paragraphs thirty times. She is not focused, and once upon a time, this was her favorite subject. She loves the mystery, the intrigue, the flagrant politics and affairs; she loves the fiction, the lack of truth or reality. She loves that when she closes the book and sets it aside, there is nothing to feel guilty over. She does not need to worry for the people written of; she does not need to feel concern for their plight.
It is all make-believe, fairy tales, happily-ever-afters, and she used to love it.
She closes the novel and watches her chocolate, neglected and now room-temperature. She recognizes the feeling as lethargy; it's apathy she feels when she wakes and considers the new day before her. The monotony of before compared to the monotony of now is suffocating, and she spends each minute of it with a stilled, muted scream sitting on the back of her tongue. She misses him, but-
He made his choice, and she was dedicated to hers.
"Hi."
The man has brown eyes and blond hair so dark it nearly convinces her otherwise. He smiles and his cheeks crease from the much practised movement. "I see you here most Mondays, and some Fridays- you're a student, right?"
She nods, her throat sticky and heavy; words feel impossible when so cleanly confronted. He sits across from her, not minding her stack of books and pens. "I thought so; you're always reading and jotting down notes. I'm J--- by the way; and you?"
She busies herself with tucking hair behind her ear; she doesn't hear his name. James or John or Jack- it doesn't matter, they're all the wrong name, and so she replies with unhappiness in her voice and regret in her eyes, and a wish for something she stubbornly refuses to hope for. "Hermione; I'm Hermione."
The man with the wrong name talks and jokes, and she laughs once. He's smooth and sincere and interested, and for a short moment, she forgets about the scream in her throat and the stone in her chest. She forgets until he asks the wrong question, and then he is everything wrong and incorrect and missing.
"How about dinner on Friday? Do you like curry- I know this great place just a short ways from here."
But she is already shaking her head sorry, and the words spill out after. She apologizes and declines, and the phone number he gives her is dropped in her emptied cup. She finds a new cafe the next day and spends her afternoon reading the same paragraph of intrigue and mystery over and over until she can pretend to love it again.
End Day 42