Chapter 8

Hermione lay awake staring up at the faint outline of the ceiling that she could see in the dark bedroom, illuminated only by the faint light of the stars and the partial moon in the night sky outside her window. After nearly a week at Grimmauld Place with no unwelcome guests, they had finally decided that they were safe enough there to sleep in their own rooms. Hermione had been grateful for this, as she hadn't been sure how much longer she would have been able to hide her newly acquired and highly erratic sleeping habits from Harry and Ron. They now slept in their own rooms right across the hall from hers.

She had spent the better part of the night tossing and turning in bed. She should have been exhausted, but her nights were still too…haunted for much sleep. She found herself thinking of her parents any time she was left alone with her thoughts. Were they safe? Had the spell worked to protect them, or had they still been hunted down and killed in spite of her sacrifice, and theirs? She hoped that they were safe and happy, even if they were living a life in which they didn't know their daughter even existed. The reminder still made her breath catch in her throat every time it popped into her head.

Her thoughts had inevitably turned to Draco, instead. She reached up to grab ahold of the heart-shaped pendant that hung from the chain around her neck. It had been warm against her chest for nearly a week now. She knew that it meant that Draco had left a message for her but, perversely, she had waited as long as she had been able to stand before listening to it.

She had wanted to wait until the memory of his voice had dulled, hoping to use the message to strengthen it inside her head again. Now that the echo of his words at the wedding was fading from her mind, and she could no longer recall the sound of his voice speaking the words, she found that she couldn't wait any longer to listen. She knew that she shouldn't have waited this long, anyway: what if it had been an emergency and she had ignored him?

She reached beneath her pillow for her wand and, gripping it tightly in her right hand, whispered quietly:

"Expecto Nuntio."

Her breath caught in her throat at the first word: the sound of his voice sounded slightly gravely as he spoke the words in a near-whisper. A small smile tinged with longing and sadness lifted the corners of her mouth at his words.

"I love you." Her three favorite words to hear in his melodic voice. "Please stay safe, for me. I couldn't bear to lose you."

She felt a tear slip down her temple and into her hair. Godric, how she missed him! It was like a physical ache and was compounded even more by the guilt of what she had done to her parents with neither their knowledge nor their consent. Between her inability to save him from his fate and her choices that she had made in her parents' steads, she felt the weight of it bearing down upon her, like a physical object crushing her chest.

She wished she could just lay in his arms at that moment; her safe place had, at some point over the past almost-year, become the shelter of his strong arms, and she needed that right now more than ever. Her tired heart felt like a porcelain doll, dropped from a great height and shattered into a thousand tiny pieces, but she somehow knew that Draco would be the glue that could put at least parts of her back together.

Tired of staring up at the ceiling above her, she tossed the covers back and climbed out of bed. Striding over to the window that took up a large portion of the wall opposite her bed, she moved aside the sheer curtains to look out into the night sky. The blanket of darkness was broken up only by the light of a few stars that shone bright enough to pierce through the London skyline's haze, along with the faint sliver of the moon that was visible from her current vantage point.

Even when she had been a little girl, she had always loved looking up at the night sky. The vastness, the sheer…bigness of the sky, and the thought that the stars she had been able to see so clearly had been so incredibly far away from them, had been so hard for her young mind to grasp. So, in true Hermione fashion, she had delved head-first into research, bemusing her parents every step of the way. She had found the canopy of lights, a portal to another universe, comforting.

Tonight, however, there was no comfort to be found in looking out of her window. Tonight, that vast dark sky felt like a black hole that was ready to suck her inside and never let her go.

She made her way back over to the bed, stopping to grab one of the spare pillows that she had thrown earlier that evening into the chair that sat in the corner of the room. Crawling back into bed, she burrowed once more beneath the covers, then pulled the pillow tightly against her chest until it rested just beneath her chin.

Laying there in the dark, cold room, she tried her best to fool her highly logical brain into thinking that the too-cool pillow in her arms was her wizard. Finally, exhausted, she fell into a fretful sleep, tears continuing to track down her cheeks as she slept until the pillowcase beneath her head was drenched in them.

Song Inspiration: Lay Me Down – Sam Smith

Our poor girl is having a hard time coming to terms with what she had to do to her parents...and the idle waiting around Grimmauld Place isn't helping to distract her from her emotions...