Bound

A/N: This fic was written for Paracelsus in the Dearsanta exchange on livejournal. He asked for fic that ignored the epilogue; this maybe lets you imagine a different one, if you want.

It's a bit short and a bit odd - I feel like I should warn for that up-front - but it was what I found I had to say. :)

Bound

Parts of the library were still smouldering.

It had been a battlefield recently, and it showed. Bookshelves leaned against one another, precarious. Books lay everywhere, torn, scattered, broken. A table that had been blasted to smithereens still hung in the air, frozen, a thousand tiny splinters held up by some spell no-one had got around to investigating yet.

Harry skirted it, and moved on. The corridor just outside the library had been all noise and activity, but in here was only quiet. That wasn't why he'd come, but he certainly didn't mind. He kept going down the aisle, his ears adjusting to the hush, stepping over books and ducking under upturned shelves every so often. All the while he turned his head back and forth, glancing down every row he passed, and for all the destruction there was a small, warm familarity in that action.

He found her by the top of her head. All he could see was brown hair parted down the middle, but that was enough; he felt himself smile as he squeezed round a jumbled pile of books and papers and he plopped down in front of her.

"Hi," he said.

"Hi."

Hermione's smile was a little worn round the edges, but then he supposed his was too. That didn't worry him, but what he saw in her eyes did, a little hint of something lost. "What is it?" he asked. "What's wrong?"

That was familiar too, but turned around, a backwards echo. Words like that were usually hers. Hundreds of times they'd been hers.

He'd spoken softly because the quiet around them invited it, but when Hermione spoke her voice was a bare whisper, like she was afraid of Madam Pince overhearing and throwing them out forever. "The books," she said.

Harry nodded, because he understood what it was like seeing things you loved in pieces. Not only that, but after everything, after where words written and bound had taken him, he could sit beside her in this place and feel like he was actually starting to get it.

"I need to talk to you," he said. He even knew what he was going to say, which was more than was true when it came to several other conversations he still needed to have. This one, though, this one was easy: she'd stood beside him in Godric's Hollow and he would stand beside her in Australia, and that was really all there was to it. Whenever she was ready to go, he would be ready too, and any other opinion on the subject anyone else might have was irrelevant, because this was between the two of them.

"They're screaming," Hermione said. She was still whispering, and Harry realised that it was in her voice, too, that thing that was lost. "The books are actually screaming, can you believe that, Harry?"

"I can," Harry said. There was a loose page lying near his knee, its letters turned to rivers of ink, and even though it probably wasn't the smartest thing to do he touched it gently. "They bled too."

"And burned," Hermione said.

Quiet screams, dry and whispery, there they were, slipping into the back of Harry's mind and murmuring what words they still had, litanies of fear and agony. "They think they were supposed to last forever," Harry said. "That's what they're saying."

"You hear them?"

"But they were wrong," Harry said. No longer speaking softly but at normal volume, loud enough to be heard. "Nothing does."

"Oh I'm so glad," Hermione said. "I'm so glad you hear them."

Harry looked at her hand, fingertips resting on the cover of something dusty and old. It was shaking, and Harry remembered that she was not used to such things, her mind was always her sanctuary, and he reached out and slid his palm under hers. Curled up her fingers and covered them, kept them tight. "I do," he said. "I really do."

"I thought it was because they didn't remember their endings anymore," she said. Sounding more like herself now, trying to get the details right.

"Maybe that too," Harry said. "They'll need new ones."

"They will," Hermione said.