A/N: I'm going to stick with naming chapters after whose perspective we're using. Cheers!
As always, I don't own anything of the Harry Potter universe, etc.
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Watching the other people their age was the worst. It was a reminder of just how unbelievably unfair it was. They were seventeen, eighteen years old. They should be frolicking on a beach somewhere just like the young people in front of them.
They had never really had that opportunity. Ever since Voldemort returned, ever since Harry had come out of the maze clutching a portkey and the dead body of a fellow student, they had rarely had a moment where they could simply be the teenagers they all were. It was all prophecies, dreams, nightmares, battles, death, and destruction. What moments they could grasp had always been swallowed up by the omnipresence of the greatest threat the wizarding world had ever seen. One that had a keen interest in a particular member of their party.
Voldemort would have always come after Harry. That couldn't be denied, but why did that mean that the fate of their whole world had to be placed upon him?
Hermione had never been much for divination. Cold, hard logic was more useful in the real world than the ethereal "knowledge" of a crystal ball. A crystal ball kept in the Department of Mysteries said that Harry could be the one to conquer Voldemort. He had the power; he had certainly proved that, but why? Why did everyone take what could have been and make it into something that had to be?
Why had it felt for two solid years like she was the only one who thought it unfair for everyone to place their complete hope in a seventeen year old Harry Potter? Hadn't he done enough? Hadn't been Harry who not only forestalled Voldemort's return for four years, but had also dueled him and lived to tell the world of his return? Had that not been enough? At what point would it have been too much to ask of Harry? Did anyone even care? Why was it that older and supposedly much wiser men and women only came to fight when there was no choice left, instead of taking the reins from the hands of three Hogwarts dropouts and taking responsibility for their own lives?
What about her? She had had a bright future ahead of her. She was going to be Head Girl, graduate top of her class, enter the Ministry and make the world a better place…..instead, she had had to erase herself from her own life, drop out of school, and spend an entire year as a wanted fugitive desperately trying to keep Harry and Ron alive while they hunted the tainted objects bearing the Dark Lord's soul. There were times when the reality of the past year threatened to press in on her from all sides and completely smother her. There were times she wanted to scream in agony that none of it had been fair and why did it always have to be them? Why did it always have to be him?
It had been Harry's idea at first. He tossed it into conversation, hoping to scope out how his friends felt about it. Hermione had known better, her and Ron both knew better. He wanted to get away, to get away from these people who insisted on making him the hero he had never once wanted to be.
They hadn't really talked about it. After two months of dodging the press and the smothering sorrow of funeral after funeral, they had reached a silent agreement: they were leaving. They had simply packed their bags and left. No note or letter. No sort of explanation why. The three of them simply left.
There had been owls. Mrs. Weasley had wrote them daily for a week, finally sending them each a howler to tell them how irresponsible they were. Ginny, Neville, McGonagall, Shacklebolt….they had all written. They all asked the same questions:
"Why?"
"Don't you care about us? About your family?"
"Where will you go?"
"How long will you be gone?"
They hadn't answered any of them. The thought that anyone could think they were owed an explanation….after all that they had been given by Harry, Ron, and herself…..was simply absurd to Hermione.
They didn't owe them anything else. They had given everyone else their lives, their whole world back. They didn't owe them one more cent, one more word, one more drop of blood.
So they had left. They had no particular direction, nowhere really for them to go. They had pooled together the money they had and put it all in Harry's Gingott's vault. Not that they were using much money. They used their old tent from the horcrux hunt as their shelter. Food was the only thing they paid for, but none of them were eating much. They primarily stuck to the fringes of society: places like the Alps, Tibet, the Russian steppes….places where the emptiness of the land seemed to match the emptiness they each felt in their chests. A soul sucking emptiness that threatened to eat away at the fiber of their beings.
She could see it in both of them. None of them talked much, but she knew them too well and cared too much about them not to be able to see it in their eyes. Harry in particular. She had read somewhere about the "million mile stare" that soldiers sometimes had in war and while she had never seen a picture of it she certainly thought she could recognize it in the vacant expressions on Ron and Harry's faces.
Empty, like everything else.
It was while they were in Alaska that she noticed something else: that they had each begun to spend large amounts of time alone. They would wake up every morning to tea or coffee together, but then they would split up. They never told each other where they were going, it was a simple crack of disaparrition or swoosh of a broomstick and they were gone. At first, it was only for an afternoon or maybe an evening; but then they began to disappear for days at a time, the others waiting to move places until everyone was together again.
Hermione knew what was about to happen, which was why she finally spoke to Ron over a dinner neither of them had touched.
"Ron?" her voice sounded strange to her, like it was smaller from disuse.
"Yes, Hermione?" he sounded course and every word took visible effort.
"We're about to split up aren't we?" it wasn't really a question, more a statement of fact. Ron didn't answer, but she could see by the way he slumped his shoulders and let out a sigh that she was right. "What about….what about us Ron?"
Again Ron was silent. Strangely, she wasn't really looking for a particular answer. It seemed to her like she was asking more for the sake of knowing than because she particularly cared about the outcome. What had happened to her? Why didn't she care anymore?
"I….I don't know. I just….I need some time." Ron wouldn't look at her, whether because it would hurt too much or because he felt as empty as her she couldn't tell. Hermione simply nodded.
"I saw this coming, I have something…something to take with you." She held out what looked like a lighter.
"The Deluminator?"
"Yeah, I…I borrowed it awhile back. I managed to copy the spell Dumbledore put on it, the one that led you back to us? So we each now have something to lead us back to each other. When…..when we want to come back." She had almost said "If we come back." But she couldn't bring herself to acknowledge that possibility. Not yet anyways.
"Oh, okay." Was all Ron said.
She knew this day had been coming; she often was the only one of the three that saw the shifting in the winds. It wasn't that they didn't want each other around or cared about one another any less. They hadn't talked about it, but somehow they had all reached a sort of silent understanding that they all needed some time alone. How long that would be, none of them really knew. It was exactly like when they left England: they hadn't known if they would be gone a day, a week, a year….they had simply left. They would figure the rest out as they went. It was the same principle at work here. They had no idea how long they needed to be alone, they would figure it out as they went, which was exactly why she had made the trackers. Whenever, if ever, any of them decided to find one another, they would be able to.
She left a small snitch on the table, it was Harry's tracker, and she placed a small locket in the shape of a book around her neck that was hers. She was going to be the first to go; she wasn't even going to wait for Harry to return. She had to go give her parents their memories back. After that, she wasn't sure where her feet would take her.
She looked across the table at Ron, his sullen face and empty eyes staring at the table unseeingly. She groped desperately within herself to find something, anything to tell her not to go; any sort of feelings that might tell her that it was more important to be by his side…
Nothing.
She was as empty as she had been for four solid months now. Even her love for Ron had been stolen from her, the feeling of being wrapped in his arms and the taste of his tongue dancing delicately with hers a memory so far gone as to have been a part of another life.
What had happened to them? They had all felt it: the joy of seeing Voldemort's demise. They had all felt a sense of relief in knowing it was over.
Except, it wasn't over. Almost as soon as the dust settled, the nightmares started. They had all three slept together in Harry and Ron's room at Grimmauld Place in the immediate aftermath, holding whoever it was that woke up screaming in the depths of the night, taking it in turns to assure one another that Voldemort truly was gone and that they were indeed still alive and still together. It was during those initial days that the injustice of it all had finally begun to sink into them. They had fought for so long that they had completely blocked from their minds any thoughts about why they fought. They had never had the luxury of wondering why, in a world full of those who were supposedly older and wiser than them, why they had to be the ones to finish it.
They had had time now, enough time to know that everything was different now. They had all lost so much, had carried such a heavy load for so long….
But Hermione was getting ahead of herself. What was important now was ensuring that they could see one another again and going to give her parents their memories. With one objective accomplished, it was time to fulfil another one.
She looked at Ron one more time, feeling again the gaping hole in her chest where her heart should be feeling sorrow at leaving.
Empty.
With a light pop, she was gone.