A/N: You guys want angst? Here, go crazy. This is the result of reading "The Lovely Bones" by Alice Sebold and from listening too much to Blue October. Okay, now on to Hermione's point of view-sort of. It seems to me that we focused on Ron for the past two chapters. So, now, I feel the need to show you a bit of Hermione's miserable life without her best friends.
The bold and italicized parts are flashbacks-memories, if you will-from Deathly Hallows and this fic's first chapter.
FAR FROM A FLUFFY CHAPTER. MAJOR DH SPOILERS. A bit OOC for our dear heroine. Don't say I didn't warn you. R&R please.
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She stands at the edge of a rocky cliff. That is what it feels like - a rocky cliff which she is more than tempted to jump from, which leads her to where she is right now. She had been driving for miles, never stopping, never turning back. That is until that moment she stomped on her brakes and glanced around only to find herself in a deserted road, looking over a cliff. She stepped out from her car-a red sedan, nothing fancy-and, as if on a trance, approached the edge of the cliff slowly, looking straight out to the black sea below it.
For a while, she does nothing. The wind, which once was placid and warm, now picks up pace and plays merrily between her tresses, her thin clothing, and the jarred memories that clang inside her head like a bell resounding inside an empty campanile.
She looks down at her feet; they're clad in her simplest, ugliest, and yet most loved pair of shoes. She fingers her scarf, making sure it is still wound up securely around her neck. Her eyes stray from her shoes to the unfathomable waves slapping angrily and brutally at the rocks below, suddenly becoming hypnotized by the rhythmic sounds and movement.
She can taste the ocean, salty and tangy and divine, the otherwise sweet pungent air bringing the onslaught of taste to her chapped and blue lips.
She closes her eyes and she feels herself falling into that quivering sea, filled with her memories-static fragments of her confused and worn-out mind, all broken, misplaced, and disconnected from everything else. Are they real? Did they really happen?
Perhaps Hermione knew how he was feeling, because she reached for his hand and took the lead for the first time, pulling him forward.
She and Harry grasped hands and Disapparated, reappearing on a windswept heather-covered hillside.
They were standing hand in hand in a snowy lane under a dark blue sky in which the night's first stars were already glimmering feebly.
Cold. She feels so cold and yet, so light. Is she floating, she does not know. She does not really care. She likes the feeling of… whatever this is. Oblivion, she thought. She likes the feeling of sweet oblivion. She lets it carry her far away from the twisted reality she often finds herself secluded in.
"Harry, did you ever even open A History of Magic?"
"Erm," he said, smiling for what felt like the first time in months. The muscles in his face felt oddly stiff. "I might've opened you know, when I bought it . . . just the once . . ."
She is miles from where she was. She does not know how she knows this. She just… knows. Opening her eyes, she sees darkness. She draws in a long breath and it hurts. She flails her arms wildly until they catch something soft and silk - it is her hair, she realizes. Since when did her hair became silky?, she asks herself and found no answer.
He put his arm around Hermione's shoulders, and she put hers around his waist, and they turned in silence and walked away through the snow…
She picked up the book and then walked back past him into the tent, but as she did so, she brushed the top of his head lightly with her hand. He closed his eyes at her touch…
Hermione had taken his hand again and was gripping it tightly. He could not look at her, but returned the pressure…
She gasps and trembles, feeling the tears once again welling in her eyes. She chokes back tears and everything else all at once; her throat constricts with brutal pain and a dull ache. She is drowning from painful memories threatening to strangle her and rob her of her life.
Then, another round of torture comes.
"I get it. You choose him."
Each memory slapping her body like the waves-devastated, unforgiving, hungry.
"Because that is the way it is. Because we both know it is a choice between me and him."
"I've made my choice, too, Hermione. I choose not to be on the sidelines any more. So, now, I'm offering you a way out. We cannot pretend any more like we are the perfect happy couple. Maybe once we were. We were. I want all of it, Hermione. Not just part of it."
The new outpouring of memories, she notes, are in perfect order.
One rapid gush and she is there-in that clear and waist-deep pool of uncertainty and depression. She tries to make sense of it all. Why did everything happen the way they happened? Why everything that happened did happen?
She was finally living a normal enough life with her two best friends. Restored was the old glimmer and shine of the Wizarding world. She looks at it in a different way now. Gone was the appeal of it all to her. Her best friend ran away, leaving her to her own misery and despair. Her other best friend and ex-boyfriend tried to be there for her but she mucked it all up. Now, she is alone, drowning in her own misery. The Golden Trio are no more-a mere whisper floating at the back of her diffused mind like a strand of glowing, lifeless hair, cut from its origin-lonely, lost, forgotten.
She wants him. She longs for him. A year, three months, twelve days, three hours, and forty-eight minutes-time, the words hammering themselves endlessly within the recesses of her mind. How long has it been? Please… please, come back.
"Harry," she whispers and it turns into bubbles, eagerly rushing away from her and into the surface that is her cage.
She is drowning. In her tears, it seems. She cannot breathe. Her lungs feel like a balloon filled with air and water sloshing wherever she moves, waiting to explode from her aching body. She feels a million of pinpricks lodge themselves at every part of her being-flesh to fire.
"Hermione." She hears someone whisper.
She reaches for that voice, but she is unable to.
"Open your eyes."
I can't.
She breathes in but finds it difficult, almost painful. She feels something…lips? Lips pressed tightly to hers. Air, pressure, and then something bubbles from inside her.
"Harry," she chokes; water, tears, and hurt spill from within her. Again, a pair of lips press at her slick forehead.
A minute? An hour? A lifetime passed before she opens her eyes and finds herself lying on her back, staring into the darkening clouds. Her breathing, shallow, then turns relaxed. Though it was only minutes, she felt she had stayed that way for forever.
Finally, she sits up and notices she is wet all over. Why is she wet? Her eyes trace her shaking, pruned-up hands, hands that went up suddenly to her lips-blue and bruised from the cold. She swallows and surveys herself. She is dripping. Her clothes are torn in some parts and there is a particularly nasty gash on her elbow, bleeding profusely. She tastes blood and her fingers touched something sticky. She belatedly realizes that her cheek is bleeding.
She tries moving but her legs are numb and her arms are hurting. She looks around and she sees she is still on the rocky cliff with her car parked a few yards away.
She closes her eyes and breathes in and out slowly. What happened? Did she fall? It seems like it. How did she get here? Her eyes snap open when she cannot feel the fuzzy warm comfort her scarf provided. Her hand clumsily roams her neck and chest before blindly, and desperately, searching the ground.
Where is it? Where the hell is it?
Hearing the waves below, she is suddenly hit by a realization. She looks towards the end of the cliff and into the grumbling sea. Trying hard to concentrate, she moves her legs infinitesimally, trying hard to ignore the bone-crushing pain it felt.
Adjusting to the pain, she stretches her legs farther out before trying to stand up. She takes a few steps towards the edge of the cliff before collapsing into a heap of tears, blood, and excruciating pain, near the brink.
She crawls her way towards the sloping rocky edge and more cuts appear across her skin. Her gaze roams the sea, desperation etched in her tear-filled, blood-shot eyes. She sees the scarf relentlessly hanging onto the spiky, beaten-up rock of the shore. She feels rather than sees her tears fall and add up to the angry sea below.
A sob escapes her as she reached her hand out as if by that she will reclaim her scarf.
"A-Accio sc-"
The scarf lets go from its death-grip clutch and willingly went with the waiting sea much like what she had done earlier.
That scarf was from Harry.
The pain is too much. Her gaze looses focus before blackness swallowed her.
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A/N: Is it just me or does this chapter looks like a scene from New Moon? Haha. Anyway, what do you guys think? I won't give any teaser for the next chapter. I haven't written it, yet. But rest assured that it is going to be THE moment for our favourite couple. Oh, and questions regarding the past and present chapters will be answered by the next chappie. ;)
`Til then.
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