Hermione's Dream

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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A/N: Hi again. Here's the second chapter in what I'm planning to be a three-part fic. Enjoy your read, and feedback and/or suggestions would be very kindly appreciated.

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Hermione was standing in a wide, empty corridor, where sunlight was glinting off the high windows. The bright beams bounced jaggedly off the walls and left pools of white to scintillate on the wooden floor, as if heaven itself had opened up from the ceiling. Hermione closed her eyes, enjoying the light washing over her like water, filling her up with a warmth that had previously been forgotten. But she knew she had something she needed to do, even though she wasn't quite sure what, so after a minute her eyes snapped open with purpose, and she took a step forward.

She inhaled sharply, feeling as though she was suddenly exposed, vulnerable. Confused, she looked downward at herself and realized she was naked. Embarrassment swept through her with the intensity of a fire, and although the corridor was deserted, she instinctively covered her chest with her arms. As if realizing her shame, robes suddenly appeared on a nearby suit of armor, and Hermione gratefully put them on.

She caught her reflection in the silver of the armor and froze. Even though her view was distorted, she could see that her face, previously sunken and thin, was now full and healthy, like it used to be. Her hair cascaded down her shoulders and gleamed in the sunlight, no longer lank, but strong and beautiful. Hermione would have normally questioned this sudden change in her appearance, but time seemed to be running out; she had to hurry down the corridor, for someone important was waiting there at the end.

Hermione looked back as she walked. There the inert suit of armor stood behind her, shining with the reflections of a dozen light beams.

As she continued to stride down the hall, she could make out a dark figure at the end, standing there, waiting. Her heart started to pump faster as her brisk walk dissolved into a jog, and the jog into a run. Gasping with excitement, she saw a pair of glasses, with the light from the outside sun reflected off its frames, and without meaning to, she laughed and flung out her arms as she ran. The young man waited at the end of the corridor, the entrance hall visible behind him, the corners of his mouth crinkling into a grin, and he opened his arms as well. Hermione cried, “Harry! Harry!” and she bounded up to where he stood at the arched doorway and jumped—

And he was gone, and Hermione found herself land painfully on her knees. She looked up wildly and found a deep fog before her; she whipped her head around for the arched doorway, but the only thing in her view was thick whiteness. She got up quickly with desperate, searching eyes, calling out Harry's name repeatedly, a terrible anguish overtaking her for a reason she did not completely know herself, ignoring the prickly pain shooting through her knee. The fog curled around her, thicker than ever. She would die there, she thought, with the white wisps as her only companions.

Hopeless, Hermione sunk down again onto the hard floor. As long as Harry wasn't there, it seemed that nothing in the world was worth living for.

***

Harry woke with an abrupt start. He could swear he had heard Hermione's voice calling him. Her voice was ringing with desperation and longing, as if she had just lost something very important to her and was futilely calling it back. Fear suddenly washed over him. What if Hermione needed him? What if something bad had happened to her?

He bounded off the cot in Ron's room and grabbed his wand. As he opened the door, he glanced back at Ron's sleeping form and considered waking him up too; he would definitely want to know what was going on. However, for some unknown reason, when Harry opened his mouth, nothing would come out, and the auburn-haired boy carried on in his light snores a few feet away, lost in another world. The snowflakes that started falling a few hours ago continued to dance outside the window. Harry whipped around and closed the door behind him. He felt, in his innermost being, that Hermione needed him alone. He slunk down the creaking stairs and out the door as quietly as possible, concentrating with all his might on the towering figure of St. Mungo's in his mind, and turned on the spot into the suffocating darkness.

***

“I say, Miss Granger,” a voice suddenly called out from nowhere in particular. “I was not expecting for you to show up here out of all places.”

Hermione squeaked and peered through her hands, but her eyes only alighted upon more whiteness. “Who are you?” she said loudly, squinting into the mass. “Where's Harry?”

The mysterious voice did not answer immediately, but instead the engulfing fog began to thin and curl away. Footsteps echoed in Hermione's ears, and a tall figure unexpectedly drifted out of the mist before her eyes.

“P-Professor Dumbledore?” Hermione breathed, letting her hands fall to her sides in disbelief. “That's impossible. You're dead.”

“Ah,” Dumbledore replied. His piercing blue eyes were twinkling behind his half-moon spectacles. “But beyond death lies another journey that will take you to places you can scarcely imagine.”

“Then this is a dream,” she said, her voice trembling a little. “Either that, or I'm dead, or in some sort of limbo.” Willing herself not to think about that, she gazed upward at the rapidly thinning vapor and could detect a vast, clear dome hundreds of feet above her, overlooking a sea of chairs spread across the floor, almost as if she and Dumbledore were inside a train station.

With a jolt of recognition, Hermione almost snorted in astonishment. “Is this King's Cross?” she inquired, her eyebrows arched.

“Funny you should ask that, Miss Granger,” Dumbledore said. “I have had the pleasure of talking to Harry in this very place about…ah…four-and-a-half months ago, I believe.”

Hermione gasped. “But that—that means—then he came back—?”

“Oh, for various reasons,” Dumbledore said airily. “He still had important matters to fulfill.” His blue eyes clouded over for just a second with reminiscence, before turning back towards the girl squatting in front of him and saying, “Miss Granger, I am very proud of you. If it were not for your help, Harry would never have succeeded in his task.”

Hermione opened her mouth to thank him, but before she could do so Dumbledore continued. “As for your unlikely venture into this place,” he said, waving his right hand towards the nearest row of chairs, “your case differs with Harry's just slightly. At this moment, you are not dead.”

Hermione sighed with relief, an enormous weight seeming to lift off of her and vaporizing with the mist into thin air. She could now clearly see the intricate pattern etched carefully onto Dumbledore's robes, billowing about him in an absent breeze. Although the fog was nearly all gone, the air surrounding them at King's Cross still had a drowsy, hazy feel to it, as if it was of a different world.

“I don't have very much time, so please listen carefully,” the old wizard said, a bit of sadness inflected within his warm, tremulous voice. “You are very near death. But a part of you has been left over in the previous world, a part of you that is at this very moment being desperately clung onto by a certain person sitting next to your bed at St. Mungo's.”

A sort of strange hope suddenly flared within Hermione like a lit candle. Struggling to keep her voice even, she asked, “And who is that person?”

At first glance she knew that the aged man before her would not offer an answer, at least directly. To Hermione's disappointment, the fog that had been receded into nothingness a few minutes earlier was now circling back around them yet again, whispering an unintelligible stream of mist.

Dumbledore's lips bent upward in a pensive smile. “Sometimes,” he told Hermione, “one doesn't realize how much he loves someone until that person is about to disappear.”

“What do you mean, Professor?” Hermione's heart was pounding against her chest with such intensity that it almost felt as though someone was hitting her on the back with a hammer. She could not help but feel irritated at him for skirting around her question. “Whom are you talking about?”

“But that latent love,” Dumbledore went on as though he had not heard her, “will surely blossom into something that will last beyond death.” His eyes were closed, and he seemed deep within the bowels of thought.

“Please, Professor,” Hermione pleaded, crawling forward a couple of inches. She was so desperate she almost grabbed the front of his robes. “Please tell me who it is that's keeping me alive. Please.”

Dumbledore's eyelids opened slowly, and his piercing blue eyes gazed down at Hermione with an expression that seemed to have been drawn out of a bottomless ocean. His mouth opened, and he said, with a voice almost of wonder, “Someone who values you deeply, who unknowingly treasures you above all else. Someone who loves you from the very depth of his soul. Love of such capacities that I cannot even begin to imagine.”

“Professor, who….?”

“The question is not who,” Dumbledore said with that same air of benign wonder, his eyes twinkling, “but how…”

Hermione was quite confused, but she did not have time to react, for the fog was thickening around her swiftly, and the tall figure before her was melting into the mist.

“Professor—!” she cried out again, but her voice was stifled. She squinted through the heap of white and almost gasped. For a moment she was sure she glimpsed a single glossy tear, slipping slowly from Dumbledore's twinkling eyes and running down his face, clear as a pure droplet of water.

Then he was gone, like a breath in the wind.

***

Harry was perched over the bed with a fear he had never known in his life.

“Hermione,” he was whispering over and over again, his trembling hand on her shoulder, shaking her gently. “Please wake up. Please wake up, Hermione.” His breathing was ragged and coming out in what sounded like dry sobs, yet Hermione continued to lie on the bed, her eyes closed almost peacefully, oblivious to Harry's unbearable anguish.

With wild urgency Harry grabbed her wrist, and he felt her pulse feebly thumping against his index finger, ringing through his own body like the chirps of a dying bird. “Hermione, please wake up.” He did not want to imagine what would happen if she didn't wake up, if she just laid there forevermore, captured within the world of dreams for the rest of eternity. He would lose himself; he would go mad. His throbbing heart was sending waves of despair coursing through his veins, leaving him with an awful tingling sensation burning through his skin—he was on the verge of insanity already—

She wasn't waking.

She wasn't waking.

Oh God…

“Hermione! HERMIONE!”

And with that Hermione's eyes snapped open abruptly in the darkness, and Harry felt the entire world come crashing down around him as he swooped downward and captured her thin body into his crushing embrace.

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Harry clenched his eyes shut with passion. If there was anything at all in the world, it was the feeling of Hermione's body pressed against his.

She was thin and weak, with dry brown hair hanging down her shoulders in frail clumps, but to Harry she was the most wonderful sight his vision could behold. Pale moonlight shone upon their two figures, and in its white shadows the ornate patterns of falling snowflakes could still be seen twirling and frolicking in the air. Everything else was darkness.

Harry buried his face into Hermione's hair deeper and felt his glasses tilt askew, but he just wrapped his arms around her even more tightly. He and Hermione were the only two that existed; the rest of the world was mere black ink, smudged meaninglessly across a blank canvas. The snowflakes, flickering like fairy lights in the silver beams of the moon, twirled faster outside the frosty glass, vying for attention, but Harry ignored them. Hermione was all that mattered. She was everything to him.

Suddenly loud coughs burst through the stillness, its sharp, raspy edges cutting into Harry like a knife. He let go of Hermione and felt waves of dread quickly filling him up again as he watched her bent body convulse in harsh spasms. The coughs continued ruthlessly, and Harry saw, to his horror, specks of scarlet already scattered across the plain white sheets.

“Stay right there, Hermione,” Harry yelled, jumping to his feet, while the girl shook and gasped before him. “I'll get some water—

“Don't leave me—please—

“Just hold on!” Harry almost felt like crying. “I'll be right back, all right?”

So he spun around and hurtled across the room, with Hermione's coughs pounding against his ears like grinding gravel. He wrenched open the door and looked around the empty hallway wildly for the nearest water fountain or bathroom; in a blind panic he turned to the left.

He ran and ran, passing door after door, his throat burning with each ragged breath, but no fountain appeared in sight. Harry heard himself swear loudly, and in his anguished desperation, he wrenched open the nearest door and shouted to its sleeping occupants,

“Does anyone know where any water is?”

The dim figures before him shifted around in their beds and groaned, but Harry's eyes caught an empty mug perched atop one of the dressers. He lunged at it, seized it by the handle, and dashed back to the doorway. Time was running out. Smacking his forehead and inwardly cursing his stupidity, Harry turned to the right towards Hermione's room again. His wand was still lying on the bedside table next to Hermione; he could have just used the Aguamenti charm…

Harry pushed open the door to Hermione's room. To his relief, the coughs seemed to have died down, but terror quickly seized him again when he saw her body sprawled out upon the bed, her arms hanging limply off the sides.

“Hermione!”

He rushed to her side, grabbed his wand, and clumsily filled the mug with clear water. Thankfully, he could still hear her breathing very quietly, and he dropped into a chair and lowered the mug to her parched lips. Silence ruled over the darkness yet again as Hermione drank slowly, the mug shaking in Harry's fingers. After a minute she shook her head, and Harry placed the half-empty mug upon the dresser next to his wand, illuminated brightly by the soft moonlight. The snowflakes had now faded away into the black night, leaving only a pale white moon to burnish through the windowpanes.

“Harry,” he heard Hermione almost whimper. He gazed down at her and saw tears sliding from her eyes and soaking the pillow beneath her head. “I don't want to die. I want to be with you.”

Harry could feel his heart skip a beat. Before he knew what he was doing, he bent down and pressed his lips tenderly against her forehead. “I'm staying right here,” he murmured against her skin. He could feel her sharp breaths upon his neck like a winter wind.

Tears continued to stream down Hermione's temples. They were glistening in the light of the moon.

“I'm so sorry,” she whispered. She sounded as if she was in pain.

“For what?”

“If I just got better, everything would be alright. But right now I'm just a burden.”

“You're very important to me,” Harry replied quietly. “None of this is your fault. It's me who should be apologizing.”

“Why?”

Harry straightened up on his chair. He scratched his head absentmindedly, searching for the right words to explain. “After Sirius died,” he said after a minute, staring at the dim shadows that were his hands, “I was in Dumbledore's office. I was really angry. I remember screaming at him that I didn't care about anything anymore. You know what Dumbledore told me after that?”

He glanced briefly at Hermione, who continued to lie on the sheets, staring up at him with an odd unreadable expression.

Harry went on. “Dumbledore told me that I did care, no matter how much I refused to believe it. I cared so much that I could bleed to death with the pain of it.” He could feel the waves of memory wash over him, and the corners of his mouth twitched upward in a mirthless smile. “Well, right now it seems as though I'm bleeding to death with the pain of almost losing you, Hermione. And I'm apologizing for not realizing it sooner.”

The bushy-haired girl looking up at him opened her mouth anxiously, perhaps to contradict him, but Harry held up a hand. For some strange reason he could not breathe very properly, as though his heart had been tugged upward and was blocking the air passageways in his throat. There was an unnatural pressure behind his eyes.

“But this pain I'm going through,” he plowed on, “is very, very important to me. It's my way of telling you…that I do care. I care so much that I'm bleeding to death with the pain of it.”

In the white light shining from the window, Harry could see Hermione lift up a hand towards him, and he grabbed it.

“Don't you see?” His constricted voice was starting to crack like glass. The pressure behind his eyes was becoming more unbearable by the second. He could already feel the tears welling up behind his eyelids.

“Harry…”

“Don't you see?” Harry repeated.

Hermione shook her head.

And then the tears came. They dripped from his emerald green eyes and spilled onto his face, but he sat there next to the bed, clutching onto Hermione's hand and laying his cheek upon it like a pillow. This moment was all he was living for now. And he said finally,

“I want you to see my pain. I want you to see my pain so that you can know how much I care. I care so much, Hermione.” He was holding her lifted hand in both of his, and in his passion he kissed it. He was dying with the pain, it was true, but he wouldn't trade it for all the Galleons in the world.

He looked down at her, and tears of her own were clinging to her eyelashes like the morning dew on a grass stem. But she was smiling. It was for the first time in months.

“Hermione, I will never, ever leave you. I'll stay with you wherever you will go.”

“That's good.”

Harry's hand was still clasped tightly over Hermione's. Outside the window he could hear the first feeble stirrings of the wind, whispering groggily in the slowly brightening air, while the light from the moon was receding behind faint indigo shadows.

“Harry?” Hermione's brown eyes were wide open. “Where are you?”

“I'm right here.”

“I can't see anything.”

Then he knew what was happening, and renewed tears blinded his vision in a seeping rush. He promised that he would stay with her, but she was drifting away to a place he could not enter. “Hermione,” he choked out, wrapping his fingers around her hand even tighter, “Please…”

“Where are you, Harry?”

And Harry, harboring no more strength to sit up, collapsed onto the bed by her side. He wrapped his free arm around her waist, and then murmured, with a love that seemed to be drawn from the highest cloud, “I'm here, Hermione. I will never leave you.” Her body was slackening, and she was getting colder underneath his arm.

“I'm glad,” Hermione replied, her voice barely a whisper, and she smiled again with a serenity that appeared impossible. And then her eyes closed.

Harry watched her, his mind strangely blank. She was laying next to him, completely motionless, a ghost of a smile lingering upon her lips.

And for a mysterious reason that would never be known, he suddenly felt his eyelids becoming very heavy, heavier than he had ever felt them, and with a small sigh, he fell asleep in the darkness. The door creaked open behind him, but he did not hear. Everything had dissolved into nothingness, and he was sinking and sinking, down, down, down into the dark depths of an eternal sea.

He would never leave Hermione.

Never.

***

“Miss Granger? It's time for your early morning medicine.”

The Healer cautiously entered the room and waved his wand with a single sweeping gesture. The plain lamp hanging from the ceiling flickered for a moment, and the entire room was suddenly engulfed in bright yellow light.

“Hermione Granger? Are you still asleep?”

He abruptly stopped short. His eyes grew as wide as saucers, and the medicine bottle he was carrying slipped from his fingers and fell with a plunk upon the tiled floor.

Hermione was there, as he could see, but something else caught his eye. There was a boy, a handsome, bespectacled boy, with jet-black hair and a lightning-shaped scar on his forehead, lying on the mattress next to her, holding her in what looked like a tight embrace. Both of their eyes were closed.

The Healer cleared his throat loudly, hoping they would wake, but the boy and girl continued to lie there, undisturbed, as if they had gone off to a distant place and could not hear him. He leaned forward confusedly and then gasped.

Their bodies were not moving. They were not breathing. Instead, an odd sort of contentment seemed to have stolen over their faces, as visible as the deep indigo sky outside the frosted window.

Panic-stricken, the Healer dashed back across the room and disappeared through the doorway, searching for help.

But it was useless, for Harry and Hermione had already left the world together. They had each other, and that was all that mattered.

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A/N: Thank you so much for sticking with this to the end; it means a great deal to me. I would greatly appreciate it if you let me know how I did. Once again, thanks.

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