A/N: Second to final chapter.
- Chapter 9 -
When the anniversary comes, Luna wakes her up gently at seven in the morning, and helps her dress in cool clothes that will still cover Hermione from head to toe, the way she likes to dress when she has to go out in public.
Hermione is wide awake, but scared, because she doesn't want to be in the way. She doesn't want to be an annoyance in Luna and her mother's reunion. She wants to be what Luna has been to her the past month; someone there to comfort her when the pain gets to be too much.
But Luna looks happy, rather than morose or somber, the way Hermione would expect her to look. She looks happy to be seeing her mother, calm in the light of whatever she might have to see today when they get outside.
Hermione doesn't know if Luna's last memory is of her mother being blown to pieces in the explosion she knows Mrs. Lovegood died in, or if her last memory is of something bright and happy. She doesn't know if the last memory this world records is of her death, or of what Luna remembers most strongly.
She hopes it's the latter. She wants what Luna used to see all the time to be happy, and not sad and heartbreaking and terrible like the last moments of Ron's life.
Hermione can see the sadness in Luna's expression though. If she really looks, she can see it in the corner of her eyes, and the tiny pull at the corners of her mouth.
Luna takes Hermione's hand when her mom appears, and it's just as Hermione had hoped. Mrs. Lovegood isn't being blown to pieces in an explosion, or screaming in pain.
Luna's mother is working in her garden, wearing a beautiful flowered dress, with a green smock wrapped around her waist and gardening tools filling the pockets.
It's a happy memory, and Luna is smiling, but there are tears spilling down her face, and Hermione lays her head against Luna's shoulder and holds both of her hands tightly in her own, comforting silently as Luna's mother begins to sing.
She sings the same song Luna sing's to her, and it makes Hermione want to cry just from the sentiment of the action, and suddenly, all Hermione wants to do is bury herself inside of Luna and live there forever, cradling her heart and keeping it safe from sadness and danger.
They stay there all morning and afternoon, siting at the bottom of Hermione's steps watching Luna's mother garden and sing, garden and sing, the same song, the same scene, over and over again.
Luna buries herself into Hermione's chest when they go to bed that night, cuddling with Hermione for the first time ever, and Hermione's heart sings at the pleasure and the comfort that simple action brings. She hugs Luna close and drags the covers up over them, and they sleep early, seven o'clock, for the first time in weeks, and Hermione hopes they can sleep late.
She's been wanting Luna to hold her, so badly it's made her body ache, but she hasn't wanted to ask. That night in her room, when she'd gotten caught, had seemed like a fluke. Hermione hadn't thought it would happen again. And so far it hadn't, but it didn't even matter anymore, because for tonight, she had Luna in her arms, and she couldn't ask for me.
Hermione takes a leap.
In the morning, she wakes up before Luna does, and lays there cradling her in her arms for as long as she can take it, and then she leans down and presses her lips to Luna's in the softest kiss, and her world blows apart again.
Luna wakes up to Hermione sobbing again, and Ron is laying on top of them, screaming and burning and breaking Hermione's heart, because suddenly she feels like she's betrayed him, and it's a worse betrayal than surviving when he had not.
It doesn't stop.
The crying, the burning, the screaming…it doesn't stop. All day long Hermione lays there, and sometimes she's screaming too. Sometimes, she tears at her skin, and it takes all of Luna's strength to hold her down when this happens, because Hermione just wants to die, just wants to bleed and break and fall apart.
She can't believe what she's done, can't believe the pain she's caused Ron, again, and again, and again, and part of her want's to throw Luna out, but the other part of her never wants to let go again.
That final desire just makes it all worse.
Hermione wakes up, and there's a Kneazle on her chest. Luna is gone, missing, and part of Hermione is relieved, but the other part of her is tortured by this fact.
She reaches down and pets the Kneazle, staring blankly at her ceiling, and wonders why she isn't dead yet. If not from the fire, then from the two years of malnutrition and wasting away, and if not from that, then from the betrayal that she feel's reverberate throughout her heart.
Because at first, it had just been a need for companionship, and then it had been one night of sex. But the kiss had broken it, because it had been a kiss of adoration and love, and it meant so much more than anything else.
"He doesn't want you to never love again," the Kneazle says, licking its paw and cleaning behind its ears.
Hermione looks down, for a moment thinking that she's gone crazy, but she accepts it, just as she's accepted everything else this world has shown her. It's not such a far reach, from Luna's mother singing, and it was never a strange thing for a Kneazle to talk.
She'd just assumed the creatures would never interact with her directly.
"How could you know? I left him…I let him die without me, and now…and now I've even taken away my heart."
"You still love him, don't you?" the Kneazle asks, and Hermione starts to cry again, because of course she does. "Then you didn't take your heart from him. You just chose to share it with someone else as well."
It takes some time, but Hermione starts to understand again.