A/N: Hello, everyone. Obviously, this story has some DH spoilers, and what I wrote is pretty much canon, but I'm disregarding the epilogue for now. Enjoy your read and please review!
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The sky was reddening over the distant mountains, tingeing the darkening window with a brief spell of brightness. The colors danced and sparkled on the glass, reveling in their last fleeting moments of life, blissfully unaware of the young woman huddled under her bedcovers nearby, shivering in a nonexistent chill. She was holding the sheets close to her face, and her bushy brown hair was spread inertly over the pillow.
A gust of wind flew past the window with a shriek, leaving the barren trees wildly swaying in its wake. The girl on the bed gasped sharply, as if the moving air outside carelessly left its debris to snake through the panes on the sill and stab her body with its harsh coldness. In her suffering she did not hear the wooden door to her left suddenly opening, revealing two men, both looking troubled. One of them wore glasses, and his jet-black hair barely covered the odd lightning-shaped scar on his forehead. The other, with tousled ginger hair and a lanky frame, was clutching a brown paper bag.
"Hermione," the latter said, his voice affectionate and seemingly stricken with hidden emotion. His blue eyes swept the sterile white room before striding across it to the bed, opening the bag along the way. "Here, I brought you a snack. Mum made it."
"Thank you, Ron." The girl called Hermione sat up a little and took the bag with shaking hands. She reached down and pulled out a pastry.
The ginger-haired young man looked over his shoulder and eyed the man with the glasses meaningfully. "What're you waiting for, Harry? Come on."
The man with the glasses, Harry, tried to smile reassuringly and took a step from the doorway, but as he entered the room, the air suddenly seemed heavier, as if he and Ron just brought extra pounds of despair with them from the hall. Three beds occupied the hospital room, each with a chair and a small dresser next to them, but the bed nearest to the door was empty and the other one had a curtain drawn around it. Hermione's bed was next to the window. Ron was stroking her hair and whispered something in her ear, to which she smiled a little. She nibbled on the pastry.
Harry turned his head away from her quickly; he felt a sharp stab of pain every time his green eyes alighted upon her thin face and wispy hair. He stared out the window towards the sky, which was still red with the lingering sunset. His lips curved upward very wistfully. It was just a couple months ago when he, Ron, and Hermione were lounging under that same reddening sky, laughing on the grass that was nestled in the mountains, the blind dragon wandering around in the hills across the lake, the breeze caressing their bodies. Harry closed his eyes. He could still hear their lighthearted laughter and that soft breeze whispering a lullaby of air, a momentary intermezzo amid the anguish of their mission. Now it seemed like a distant dream, a passing apparition that was not even real.
Despair filled him up like poison; Voldemort was gone, yet death continued to hover over their heads like a malevolent shadow.
An awful retching sound jarred him from his thoughts. He whipped around quickly to view the girl before him, her head bent sharply over the bucket she was holding in her bony fingers, as horrible splattering echoed across the room. Ron was hunched over on the wooden chair beside her bed, staring at the bedcovers blankly, clutching the brown bag to his chest again. The pastry Hermione had attempted to eat lay forlornly on the nearby dresser.
When Hermione looked up again, Harry saw that a few tear tracks were glazed upon her cheeks. "I'm sorry," she whispered shrilly. She grabbed her wand from the top of the dresser and cleared the bucket with a wave. After dropping the empty bucket to the floor and replacing her wand, she put her hands to her face and started to sob quietly. Feeling his throat tighten, Harry begged her to stop in his mind for fear that he might start crying too.
"It's okay, Hermione," Ron said, though his voice started to crack. "You're going to be fine. The Healers know what they're doing."
"Yes," Hermione replied shakily, collecting herself. But Harry knew that she did not believe what Ron had said. Desperate, Harry racked his brain for something, anything, to say that would hopefully comfort her, but it was as if a dementor had invaded his spirits; his dry mouth opened and uttered nothing but absolute silence. The sparkling lights from the setting sun were starting to fade away from the windowpanes.
"Well, the pastry was definitely a good choice," Ron said, as he wrapped up the bag and placed it under his feet.
"It's not your fault," Hermione replied. "If anything, it's mine, for being so weak." She gazed down at her hands that were resting facedown on the quilt on her lap.
"You're not weak," Harry croaked out abruptly, his eyes fixed upon the window again. His voice was hoarse from a lack of use. "You're the strongest girl we know." The constricted feeling within his throat only tightened all the more, and despite his best efforts to keep his face averted, he turned around towards Hermione and attempted an encouraging grin. By now the scarlet lights on the window had died away, leaving only a plain silver glass reflecting the darkness outside.
"I'm surprised the Healers haven't fixed you up already," Ron was saying. "I mean, it's a Muggle disease, innit?"
"It's more complicated than that, Ron," Harry said, slightly irritated at him for apparently not grasping the seriousness of the situation. "It's leukemia. It's cancer."
"Harry-
"All right," Ron responded. Normally he would have said something more back, but instead he just gazed down into Hermione's lap, biting his lip. A buzzing silence hung in the air. Harry had been staring vacantly at the white wall above the bedpost for what felt like an hour before Hermione's voice rang through the room with an excitement that seemed out of place.
"Look, it's snowing!"
Ron jerked upward from his place on the wooden chair and squinted in the direction Hermione was pointing, where tiny snowflakes were indeed drifting down lazily from the ever-darkening sky. "Bit early this year," he said, his eyes following the trail of snowflakes downward, as if he was trying to seek out comfort from their intricate patterns of compact water. More snow continued to float past, making their descent with deliberate rapture, determined to dance as much as they could in the night air before dissolving into the asphalt below them. As Harry watched, he could not help but remember the graveyard at Godric's Hallow, how it had received into its bosom snowflakes that flickered in the light of the church's stained glass, dancing so similarly to the ones outside that hospital window. His heart started to beat faster. With another tightening of his throat, he also remembered the wreath of Christmas roses Hermione conjured with her wand, gliding down upon his parents' resting place, while he and Hermione walked away silently, holding on to each other tightly, as if they were the only two people that existed in the entire world. He glanced at her on the bed; she turned her head from the window and gave him a smile, and affection surged into him like a flood.
Ron rose quickly onto his feet. Harry gave a start and checked his watch. It was six o'clock; he and Ron were supposed to eat dinner at the Burrow…
"Better hurry, Ron," Hermione was saying a little regretfully. "Mrs. Weasley's still paranoid about how you and Harry might get captured by Death Eaters. It won't help to be late."
"I'll see you around, okay?" Ron said, ruffling her hair kindly. "Let's go, Harry."
"Stay healthy," Harry murmured. He grabbed her hand and squeezed it tight. Her brown eyes looked up at him sadly.
Harry and Ron walked back across the white hospital room and opened the door. The hall was empty, all was quiet. Before closing the door behind him, Harry caught a glimpse of Hermione's figure near the window, staring at them from her bed, her hair hanging limply past her shoulders. Harry could feel his heart wrench upward a little, but he nevertheless turned his back and strode down the hall with Ron.
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