The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer ~ Oliver Wendall Holmes
~*~*~*~*~
Amidst the fear and sorrow that rules all their lives, there is one truth to which Hermione Granger has always clung. For the last ten years, this fact has been her touchstone. Whenever she has doubted herself and her place in the order of things, it has been her mantra.
She knows Harry Potter.
She knows Harry perhaps better than she knows herself. She knew the story of his life long before she became part of it. She studied his past long before she became entwined in his future. From the very first moment they met as children, she has prided herself on her ability to look into his eyes and see his heart. But now, as she sits in the kitchen of 12 Grimmauld Place, her pulse pounding in her ears, she is suddenly afraid that this is no longer the case.
Perhaps I just misheard him. "I'm sorry, what did you say?"
Harry looks at her with a stranger's eyes. "I said that this isn't your battle any more, Hermione." His voice is as flat and emotionless as his gaze.
No, she hadn't heard wrong, and she isn't imagining the way he is looking right through her, rather than at her. She stares at him, her eyes frantically searching his, but there is nothing there to be found. His eyes are empty, almost hollow. For the first time in their friendship, she truly has no idea what he is thinking or feeling, and the realisation shocks her into a horrified silence.
As though from a long way away, she hears a throat being cleared. Turning her head towards the sound, she sees that Ron is frowning, his gaze darting from her to Harry and back again. "Hermione, you can't say that we weren't expecting this to happen one day."
Grateful for the excuse to look away from Harry, she fixes Ron with a piercing glare. "So, you're perfectly fine with Harry going off God-knows-where by himself?"
Ron looks puzzled. "He won't be by himself, Hermione. Moody and Remus are…"
"You know what I mean, Ron. I mean going off without us." Her voice cracks on the last word, but she doesn't care. Harry is watching her - she can feel the weight of his gaze as surely as she can feel the worn tabletop beneath her fingertips - but she keeps her eyes trained on Ron. "I can't believe you're going to let him do this!"
Ron reaches across the table, perhaps to take her hand, but she quickly leans back in her chair, folding her arms across her chest. He sighs, then shakes his head. "It's not my decision to make." He glances quickly at Harry, his normally bright blue eyes dark with apprehension, reminding her that Ron never did master the art of hiding his feelings. "It's not yours either, Hermione."
"But I…"
"When you've both finished discussing me as though I'm not here," Harry interjects coolly, "I might actually be able to finish telling you what's likely going to happen?" Despite the harshness of his words, his expression is calm, almost blank. Unlike Ron, he has learned to mask his feelings all too well.
Ron shoots him a rueful look. "Sorry, mate."
Hermione says nothing. She can hardly bear to look at Harry, let alone trust herself to speak to him. She uncrosses her arms and presses her hands flat on the kitchen table, splaying her fingers wide. She stares unseeingly at her unpainted fingernails as Ron and Harry continue to talk, the sound of their voices weaving haphazardly around her, fading in and out like an badly tuned Muggle radio. Taking several slow, deep breaths, she stares at her hands and tries to make sense of the riot of emotions whirling around inside her heart and her head.
It's being in this room that's making me feel like this, she thinks desperately. That must be it. Five years previously, it had been here in this kitchen that her relationship with Harry had been irrevocably changed by a kiss. And two years ago it had been here, in this very same room, that she'd been confronted by the very real possibility that that kiss had meant an awful lot more to her than it had to Harry. This room obviously holds far too many memories, that's why I can't think clearly. That must be it.
"…might have to leave tomorrow morning, but I won't know for certain until Moody hears from Dumbledore."
The word tomorrow rudely jerks her back to awareness. She looks at Harry, a sense of panic tightening her chest. "Tomorrow? You might be leaving as soon as tomorrow?"
It seems to take him an eternity to reply. When he finally does answer, she wishes that it had taken much, much longer. "It's possible, yes."
Hermione opens her mouth to speak, but no words will come out, although her mind is howling like a banshee. He's going somewhere I can't help him, somewhere I can't protect him. Something inside her feels as though it's crumbling away, smashed into a thousand little pieces. Somewhere he doesn't need me any more.
"Surely you remember what happened last time you went off gallivanting with Moody?" It's a cheap shot and she knows it, but desperation has made her reckless.
Harry shrugs. "That was two years ago." His gaze locks with hers for a fleeting moment, then he looks away, as though he can no longer bear to meet her eyes. "Things change."
Her heart gives a painful lurch and, almost before she knows what she's doing, she abruptly rises from her chair. Her eyes are burning. Her stomach feels as though she's swallowed a handful of baby snakes. She has to get out of this room before she throws something or screams at the top of her lungs. She has to get away from a Harry who looks at her as though she is nothing more to him than just another member of the Order.
That was two years ago. Things change.
She pushes back her chair almost violently, the legs scraping against the hard floor, scarcely aware of Ron's surprised exclamation of, "Hey, steady on!"
"I'm going home." Her voice is shaking almost as much as her hands.
"What?" Ron gets to his feet. "You can't go home, not yet."
"Why not?" She is looking at Ron as she speaks, but his answer is not the one she needs to hear. Please, Harry. Please ask me to stay. Please tell me you still need me. Please tell me that you remember. But Harry says nothing, and his silence is like a knife in her heart.
Ron is staring at her as though she has lost her mind. "Why not? You heard Harry! He might have to leave tomorrow!" He lifts his hands, then lets them drop to his sides. "We should be here if he -"
"I'm tired, Ron." It pains her to realise just how true those words are. She is so tired of pretending that she and Harry are just friends, tired of pretending that nothing has ever happened between them. At twenty-one years of age, she's tired of waiting for her life - for their lives - to actually start.
Bewildered, Ron glances imploringly at Harry, as though asking for backup, but Harry just shrugs. "It's okay, Ron." He lifts his head, his eyes meeting hers as he speaks, his tone offhand. "I don't mind."
His words are softly spoken, but they hit her like a slap in the face. Feeling the warm sting of tears pricking her eyes, she forces herself to smile at Ron, resolutely not looking at Harry. "See, Ron? Harry doesn't care if I'm not here or not."
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Harry's head jerk up as though he's been hit with a Stinging Hex. "That's not what I said," he shoots back swiftly.
She picks up her wand and slides it into her hip pocket with a slow, deliberate movement, then turns to give him a cool look. Her heart is pounding. "Close enough." His gaze narrows as the sting in her words hits home, but she quickly turns back to Ron. "I really am tired, Ron. I'll talk to you tomorrow, okay?"
Ron glances from her to Harry, his brow furrowed, and she can't help thinking that he couldn't look more bewildered than if she and Harry had spent the last five minutes speaking in a foreign language. Finally, he simply nods unhappily. "Sure."
Turning on her heel, she walks out of the kitchen. No one calls after her. No one comes after her, and the silence only makes her feel worse. She knows that running away is foolish, that she is letting her emotions get the better of her. She knows that she should just take a deep breath and go back to the kitchen. She should go back and let Harry tell her more about how he and Remus and Moody intend to temporarily vanish from the face of the earth to implement The Order's latest plan. She should go back and smile bravely and pretend that she is supportive of a plan that might take Harry away from her as soon as tomorrow.
But she can't, not tonight. Tonight she feels wrung out, as though the strain of the last ten years has finally caught up with her, her energy totally spent. She knew this she has no right to feel this way, not when it's Harry who has always shouldered the heaviest burden imaginable, but tonight, she feels as unwanted as the friendless eleven year old girl she once was. Tonight, she has given as much as she has to give.
She walks swiftly through the house, instinctively avoiding the living room, knowing that Remus and Authur Weasley are deep in conversation there. One look at her face would announce that something was wrong, and she simply doesn't have the energy to duck any pointed questions. As she grabs her coat from the hall cupboard, she thinks again of the way Harry had looked at her, his eyes cold and empty. As she Apparates back to her flat, a new mantra begins to taunt her.
She doesn't know him anymore.
~*~*~*~*~
The ancient art of Apparation requires discipline and concentration, and that one of the golden rules is that the witch or wizard attempting said Apparation needs to be focused on the task at hand. They shouldn't be bristling with anger, and they definitely shouldn't be on the verge of tears. Such distractions can make for disastrous results, as evidenced by many unpleasant and thoroughly chronicled incidents in the records of the Department for Magical Mishaps.
Hermione knows all this. So when she unexpectedly kicks her toe on the coal scuttle next to the fireplace, having missed her intended mark by almost two feet, she doesn't know what makes her angrier - the fact she has just ruined her perfect Apparation record, or that she knows exactly why she ruined it.
"Damn and blast!" Her toe throbbing, she takes a hobbled step away from the fireplace, only to find herself staring into the reproachful gaze of her cat. Crookshanks is stretched out on his usual chair in front of the fire, his disgruntled expression making it quite clear that her noisy arrival has disturbed a particularly enjoyable nap.
"Sorry," she says flatly, "but it's been a bad night." Crookshanks' yellow eyes glow briefly in the dimly lit room, an almost-human expression of sympathy softening his flat little face, then his striped eyelids flutter shut once more.
Hermione looks around her flat. It is, rather depressingly, exactly how she left it this morning. Shrugging out of her coat, she flings it over the back of the nearest armchair - earning herself another disapproving look from Crookshanks - before heading for the kitchen to make some tea. She isn't pinning much hope on her mother's old adage that a 'nice cup of tea always makes you feel better', but it will at least keep her busy for a few minutes, particularly as she always makes tea the Muggle way, something that never fails to amuse Ron and Ginny. They don't quite understand why she doesn't just use magic, and Hermione has given up trying to explain that she finds the ritual of boiling the kettle and steeping the tea leaves strangely soothing.
Harry understands, though. He knows what it's like to live between the Magic and the Muggle worlds, to feel though you're living two lives at the same time. He understands that every time she visits her parents' world, even if it's just by making tea the way her mother taught her, it makes her feel closer to them. Hermione shakes her head, both irritated and dismayed that she is once again thinking of Harry, then halfheartedly begins to go through the mechanics of making tea. Not surprisingly, however, she finds no comfort in the familiar ritual. There's nothing she can do to banish Harry - and their last conversation - from her mind.
Tonight Ron had looked at them as though they were speaking another language, and Hermione can't say she blames him. After all, there is one rather important thing that she and Harry have neglected to tell Ron. One rather important thing? Sinking into the nearest chair, she puts her elbows on the kitchen table and buries her face in her hands. More like one bloody great big secret, one that is slowly but surely suffocating her.
She tries to swallow the sudden lump in her throat, telling herself that no good can come of wallowing in self-pity, but it's too late. A vivid flood of images and sounds and sensations has already begun to seep through the cracks in her carefully constructed denial, and she is suddenly swamped by an almost unbearable longing to remind herself that it did actually happen, that she didn't imagine it. She has spent the last two years trying to stop herself from doing this very thing, but tonight her resolve is depleted, her willpower on shaky ground. Taking a deep breath in a vain attempt to steel herself, Hermione closes her eyes and lets herself remember what happened the night that Harry and Moody returned from the dead.
~*~*~*~*~