A/N: So, I've pretty much posted endless fluff up to this point. And yes, I usually only write pure, shameless, violently pink fluff. But I can write angst too, when I feel like it. Here is the one and only example of that angst; hope you enjoy.
(Also, Hermione is definitely not going to be doing any 'moving on' anytime soon, so this is still pure H/HR, in case anybody was worried.)
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To most of the world, it was just another dark, wet day in March. Outside, the rain came down in sheets, drenching and half-deafening any poor soul who happened to have had the misfortune of getting himself or herself stuck outdoors. Every once in a while, a boom of thunder or flash of lighting might split the sky, but for the most part, it just rained. Endlessly.
Hermione Granger had the good fortune of not having to be outside. She had the pleasure of being warm and dry in her small flat. But she didn't even notice, for to her, the weather outside might as well have made its way into the warm, cozy space of her flat.
She sat alone on her bed, listening to the rain pouring down outside. She always enjoyed it when it rained, finding the sound soothing, almost hypnotic.
Well, she used to.
Harry liked the rain too, she thought to herself. He always said that it gave us an excuse to do nothing but waste the day lounging around together. And that was usually exactly what we ended up doing. Such a terrible waste of valuable time. A small, humourless smirk tugged at the corners of her lips, only to die a moment later. Not that I minded a little wasted time, when we wasted it together.
There would be no wasting time with Harry today, though. Nor would there be any tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the next.
Hermione glanced down at her lap, where a large, heavy book lay closed, its slightly dusty cover looking back at her emotionlessly. Well, of course it seemed emotionless. It was a book, for Merlin's sake. A book with "Webster's Dictionary of the English Language" written in shiny gold letters on the front, their lustre slightly dulled under the thin layer of dust that covered the huge brown tome.
Slowly, almost robotically, Hermione lifted the heavy volume to her lips and blew across it, making some of the dust float away, catching the rays of dim, gray light that forced their way in through the window near the bed. Setting the still-dusty book back down on her lap, Hermione located the small notch on the right side that read 'EFG' and used her index finger to carefully push the book open, the cover and all of the pages before 'E' falling onto her thigh with a soft thump, muffled by the fabric of the faded black track pants that she had blindly put on earlier that morning, deciding that it was about time to change out of the nightgown that she hadn't taken off in three days. Not that it really would have mattered if she decided to wear that nightgown for the rest of the week. It probably wouldn't even have mattered if she hadn't changed in a month. The only person around to see her was her, after all. But she had decided that it was about time to drag herself out of bed and clean herself up. Three days of staring blankly at the ceiling was quite enough.
She glanced down again and thumbed through the pages until she came to the definition she was looking for.
Empty, she read. Adjective.
1. containing nothing; having none of the usual or appropriate contents: an empty bottle.
She shook her head. That wasn't right. She had all of her 'appropriate contents', as far as she knew. Her lungs were still intact, for she could breathe. She was quite sure that her stomach was still in one piece, having emptied it quite thoroughly after reading the letter that the Ministry had sent three days ago. And, unfortunately for her, she still had a heart. Damn.
Turning back to her book, she read the next definition.
2. vacant; unoccupied: an empty house.
That wasn't right either. The house wasn't empty. After all, Hermione was still inside, cooped up by both the rain and her desire to never see anyone again. But the house did seem to change sizes every now and then, feeling almost painfully huge at times and then crushingly small at others. Most of the time, the flat felt huge when she found herself calling to Harry, tricking herself into believing that he was still there, but hearing nothing but the infinitesimally short echo of her own voice, followed by an almost deafening silence. The place felt terribly small when she found that no matter where she looked, she found something that reminded her of him, be it a picture of the two of them, a book he had been reading, a shirt of his at the bottom of the laundry hamper, or even something as small as his toothbrush, still nestled next to hers in the small blue cup on the edge of the bathroom sink. The damn thing had made her cry once she had finished brushing her teeth that day, her automatic response to her recently emptied stomach. A second's glance at the silly bit of plastic had left her sobbing for at least a quarter of an hour, sitting uncomfortably on the hard, chilly edge of the tub, cursing herself for getting worked up over something as stupid as a toothbrush.
3. without cargo or load: an empty wagon.
Oh, how she wished to be 'without cargo'. Most of the time, she found herself feeling so light that she worried that she had ceased to exist, just disappeared from the face of the Earth, but there were moments when the weight of her loss seemed to crush her, pinning her to the bed and causing her to lie unmoving for several hours, waiting for the sensation of non-existence to return.
4. devoid of people or human activity: We walked along the empty streets of the city at night.
Maybe that one got a little closer to being right. The flat was devoid of people, except for Hermione. She hadn't told anyone about the letter, hadn't wanted to tell anyone about Harry, for she knew that she couldn't bear to hear their sympathetic voices telling her that she would be all right. She wouldn't. Not without him. Spending nearly ten years of her life with him had joined her to him in a way that she couldn't explain, and without him around, half of her soul felt like it, too, had died. She wouldn't be all right, of that she was completely certain, and she couldn't bear to let the Weasleys, her closest friends, watch as she broke down over things like shirts and toothbrushes, just because they reminded her of him.
5. devoid of some quality or qualities; devoid (usually followed by 'of'): Theirs is a life now empty of happiness.
That was much closer, but still didn't quite describe the sensation that Hermione had been grappling with for days. She was devoid of happiness, yes; devoid of joy and laughter and all of those nice little things that she had felt before the letter had come. But the definition still didn't seem right. It did not feel like her life was missing something; it simply felt as though there was nothing there at all.
6. without force, effect, or significance; hollow; meaningless: empty compliments; empty pleasures.
That certainly defined how her life felt at the moment, Hermione realized as she stared down at the dictionary, which she had turned to in a numb sort of desperation, trying to find some word that could describe whatever process she was going through. Her life felt completely insignificant, like one of those minuscule bubbles of paint that she had counted so many times while staring up at the ceiling. How was it that someone so good, so pure and wonderful and good, could just be ripped away from the world without warning? How could someone like Harry, who had saved the world with a single spell and had worked harder than Hermione could have imagined in his quest to make the world he had saved better, be torn away from everyone he loved (and everyone who loved him) by a cowardly Death Eater rebel and one well-cast Reductor?
Hermione's stomach lurched a little at the thought. The letter from the Ministry hadn't been anything close to graphic in its description of what had happened to Harry, but it had still made her throw up after reading it, her mind playing nasty tricks on her by throwing the most horrible kinds of pictures into her thoughts. The letter had been very vague about the details of Harry's death, but that hadn't stopped the pictures from coming, bombarding her with hellish images of Harry (or what was left of him after that Reductor), lying on the grass as the cowardly Death Eater who had murdered him ran for it, afraid to deal with the consequences that he would surely face once Harry's fellow Aurors showed up.
Her stomach lurched more forcefully as her mind was cruel enough to repeat the sentence that had been haunting her for days: It pains me to inform you that Ministry officials could not, unfortunately, recover any part of Mr. Potter sufficiently intact to return to you for burial.
There had, however, been a small box enclosed in the envelope that had delivered the terrible news to her. After having read the letter, dashed to the bathroom to empty her stomach, and cried for a good while, Hermione had finally returned to the box (dropped to the kitchen floor as she sprinted for the toilet) and had emptied its contents into her palm. More tears had gathered in her eyes as the cold, broken bits of gold had tumbled into her hand, clinking softly as they banged into each other. Hermione had recognized them instantly as the remains of the gold bracelet that she had bought Harry years ago, in celebration of the completion of his Auror training. It hadn't been anything fancy, just a band made of simple gold links, holding a small golden Snitch in the middle. Harry's fellow Aurors had laughed at him for wearing it, calling him 'whipped', but Harry had assured her that he liked it very much. He had never taken it off since the day she had given it to him, swearing that it granted him good luck.
Not that it worked so well when he was getting blown to pieces, Hermione thought numbly. Slowly, almost subconsciously, her right hand went to her neck, where she had slipped the small Snitch onto another chain and made it into a necklace, hoping that having something of Harry's with her all the time would provide a little bit of comfort. She still hadn't decided whether or not it helped.
Glancing back down at the dictionary, she found one of the definitions to be completely unrelated to her situation (no, she wasn't null or void) and two of them to be somewhat true (no, she wasn't employed in useful activities or work, and yes, she was a tad hungry, not having eaten anything for days), but they still couldn't seem to explain anything to her.
Tears came to her eyes, a regular occurrence nowadays, though she felt nothing close to sadness when her eyes welled up. She didn't understand why all of this had to be so complicated. She had read books on loss and grief before, and they had all had a very clear-cut set of steps that people followed while grieving. So why couldn't she even start to follow those oh-so-simple-looking steps? For once in her life, Hermione Granger couldn't follow instructions.
Propping her elbows on the open dictionary, Hermione put her face in her hands and let herself cry yet again, her tears making wet spots on the white pages of the book. Why did this have to be so damn hard? Life had played its sick little games with her before, making her think that Harry was gone for good, and she had never even come close to reacting like she was. She had always been in shock, or denial, or one of those stages of grief that people were supposed to go through. It hadn't been like this. Never like this.
A good few minutes of crying later, Hermione wiped her eyes, more out of habit than anything else. As she brushed her left hand over her cheek, wiping away her tears, she felt the now-familiar smoothness of the gold ring around her third finger. She and Harry had been engaged, after being together for more than two years.
She put her face back in her hands as she remembered, as she often had, the night that he had asked her to marry him. He hadn't taken her to dinner, nor had he had a blimp fly by, a proposal in bright yellow lights on the side, but to Hermione, it seemed like it had been nothing short of the perfect way for him to propose. They had merely been lying together in semi-darkness, the room dimly lit by a lamp on the nightstand, wide-awake at some ungodly hour of the morning and clinging to the last few hours of time they had left to spend together before Harry got carted off to some top-secret location, in hopes of disbanding a group of Death Eater rebels that had holed up in some forest somewhere. Hermione had been beyond worried, not wanting him to go, but she had known that he had to go or he would lose his job, and she had known that she could never ask him to do that, not after he had worked so hard to become what he was: a highly-skilled, highly-trained and highly-valued Auror. Hermione could still remember everything that had been said between them that night, the memories etched into her mind after having been relived so many times.
"Harry?" she asked quietly, her head resting on his chest as she lay snuggled in his arms.
"Yes?" he replied.
She hesitated, wondering if her question would sound silly, but decided to ask it. "Do you love me?"
She sensed his confusion as he gently shifted her in his arms, putting her in a position where he could look at her properly. "Of course I do, 'Mione. You know I do."
She nodded slowly against his shoulder, which had replaced his chest as her pillow. She didn't reply, further confusing Harry.
"Why do you ask?" he asked, studying her carefully, trying to figure out what was wrong.
She sighed. "I'm scared."
"Of what?" he asked gently.
She bit her lip for a moment, trying to stay calm when she really wanted to cry. "I'm afraid that you'll leave me," she told him, not quite able to look him in the eye.
If anything, Harry was more confused by that. She could tell.
"Why on Earth would I ever want to leave you?" he asked. "Hermione, I love you more than anything in the world. I've told you that, haven't I?"
She nodded again, biting her lip a little harder before she replied, doing her best to fight down her tears. "I don't mean that I'm afraid of you choosing to leave me," she told him. "I know that you wouldn't," she assured him. "I know that you love me, and I love you too, but… What if something made you leave me?" she asked quietly, trying to be delicate in how she phrased that.
"Oh," Harry said understandingly, the confusion gone from his voice. "You're afraid I'm going to die," he clarified.
Though she tried her best to resist, his bluntness made her cry, tears sliding down her cheeks as she nodded in response.
"Hey…" he said softly, brushing a few tears from her cheeks with his thumb, the golden Snitch on the bracelet that he never took off trailing across her cheek for a moment. "I hate it when you cry," he said, a frown on his lips but sympathy in his eyes.
She sniffled quietly, wiping her tears away with one hand. "I know. I don't like it much either, but…" She snuggled a little closer to him. "I can't help it," she murmured. "I'm so scared that something's going to happen to you. I don't think I could stand it if anything did," she confessed, burying her face in his neck.
"'Mione…" he said, linking his hand with hers, which he found was still a little damp with tears. "You could stand it, I know you could. You're strong," he reminded her, the hand that wasn't linked with hers rubbing her back soothingly.
She wasn't all that comforted, though the rhythmic motion of his hand on her back did help her relax a little. "I don't feel very strong. Even the thought of you… dying," she said, forcing herself to say the word, "makes me cry."
"That's OK, sweetheart," he consoled her. "I'd probably be a little hurt if it didn't," he told her. A small smile crept onto his lips. "It shows you care about me."
"Of course I do," she replied. "Honestly, Harry, sometimes I love you so much, it hurts."
Upon hearing that, he gently put two fingers under her chin and tilted her head enough to press his lips against hers for just a moment.
"I know," he said when they separated. "And that's why-" he had started, detaching his hand from hers for a moment as he reached out to catch a small box, Summoned from the drawer of the nightstand by way of the wandless magic that Harry was becoming so skilled at performing.
Her breathing hitched and her eyes widened upon seeing the box. "Harry-"
"Shhh…" he said, gently placing a finger on her lips. She quieted and he removed it, opening the box with one hand and revealing its contents to her. He smiled.
"'And that's why-" he repeated, "-I fully intend to make you my wife the moment I get back."
She blinked in surprise, letting that register, before she seized him around the neck with both arms and pulled him as close as she could. "Oh, Harry!" she exclaimed, kissing his cheek (for the sole reason that she couldn't reach his lips, given their position).
Harry smiled and hugged her back, carefully balancing the small box all the while. "Shall I take that as a yes?"
She loosened her hold on him again. "Of course it's a yes!"
In response, Harry carefully slipped the ring - a simple thing, just a gold band and a medium-sized diamond (Hermione knew that he knew that she wouldn't have wanted anything fancy) - onto her finger and placed the box on the nightstand. As soon as his hands were free, Hermione hugged him again.
"Oh, Harry…" she said softly. "You're going to make me cry again."
Shifting so that he could face her properly, Harry kissed her again in response. "That's OK," he said with a smile. "I don't mind happy tears."
Holding him to his word, Hermione proceeded to cry happy tears all over him. Harry simply smiled.
As she wrapped up the memory, sniffling for no reason other than the fact that her nose was running, Hermione found herself back in the empty room, sitting all alone, as the rain poured down outside and a clap of thunder boomed. She had been so happy that night, so happy that it had made her forget her fears, if only for a moment. Harry had kissed her goodbye later that morning, promising to marry her as soon as he came home and assuring her that he would dig up his dress robes and make her his wife the very same day, if that was what she wanted.
But he hadn't come home. After a battle against a group of Death Eater rebels, hiding out in a forest in Albania (oh, the irony was sickening), Harry had been making the journey back to the Aurors' small camp when a cowardly Death Eater, not enough of a man to take Harry in a real duel, had shot a Reductor at him from behind a tree, effectively reducing Hermione's soul mate to pieces. Her only consolation was that he had felt no pain. Now, she was left without the man she loved, without even a body to bury, without the smallest shred of closure. She cried but didn't feel anything when she did. She called Harry's name when she knew that he wouldn't answer. She was left completely and utterly… well, she still hadn't figured out if 'empty' was quite the right word.
Glancing down at the dictionary one last time, Hermione put a hand over her mouth, willing herself not to burst into fresh tears.
11. completely spent of emotion: The experience had left him with an empty heart.
Yes, she thought to herself as her tears slowed, sure to start again later, once she had returned to bed after another day of her unfeeling, pointless existence. 'Empty' was, in fact, just the word she had been looking for.
THE END