A/N: At least one of you has been waiting awhile on this one. J For those of you who are reading "The End of the Beginning" know that I'm in the process of redoing some chapters and that chapter six is redone and posted. Just an FYI for my lovely readers. Cheers!
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She was never one to believe in a higher power, but Hermione often wondered if magic itself could be a kind of providence.
If she had not stuck her head in a particular compartment her first year on the Hogwarts Express she might have never known either of them.
If she hadn't gone running to the bathroom crying then she might have never befriended them.
If neither of those things happened she wouldn't have grown to love them.
Most importantly, if she hadn't decided to come back when she did…she might have lost one of them.
She aparrated into a small, snow covered clearing. Somewhere in the Baltic she thinks. The first thing she notices is the tent. Though the aparration wards were supposed to let the three of them in, she shouldn't have been able to land so close. Ron had been getting sloppy. The second thing she notices is a small patch of fiery red hair nearly buried in snow.
She immediately levitates him inside, hitting him with a warming spell and throwing some blankets around him. His skin is tinged blue and his lips are purple. His nose had been bleeding, probably from hitting the ground. He had been drunk, the empty bottle of firewhiskey said as much.
He looked awful. His eyes were sunken and dark circles ringed them. He was paler and thinner than she remembered and he positively reeked of alcohol. She decided the best thing for him now was something warm inside of him and rest. She manages to wake him long enough to retch and splutter down some warm soup she threw together before knocking him out with some sleeping drought. She sits on his bed watching him slumber underneath every spare blanket she could find. She shudders to think what may have happened if she hadn't come back when she had. As it was he had clearly been there for a while, if she had waited any longer….
She pushes the thought from her mind. She got here in time and that's what matters. Merlin, what had he been doing all this time? Had he really been trying for two years to drink his pain away?
Was what I did any better?
While she certainly hadn't avoided alcohol during the time she spent away, she could only count on one hand the number of times she had been truly drunk. Then again, it wasn't alcohol that she turned to when she hadn't been able to stand it.
She began settling her own possessions into her room. She hadn't been sure how long she was going to stay, but clearly Ron needed her help so she was going to be here awhile. When she was squared away she began looking around to piece together what Ron had been doing. From the few newspapers she found strewn about she deduced that he hadn't moved around quite as much as she had. He had stuck mostly to northern Europe from the looks of things. One paper was from Amsterdam and she shuddered to think what he may have been doing there.
She couldn't find any evidence that anyone else had been here in some time, so Harry hadn't come back yet. That worried her. She hadn't seen Harry in over two years. What if he had ended up like Ron somewhere without either her or Ron to help? He had been the most effected by the war, if Ron was this bad off how bad could he have gotten? The idea of splitting up that she had so easily accepted two years ago now seemed downright foolish.
She went to check on Ron. His color had improved and his loud snores told her that he was in a deep sleep. He would be alright; she was just going to have to get him off the creature. She fondly tucked a strand of hair behind his ear. She had come to some realizations about the boy lying in the bed, though she wasn't exactly sure what it meant yet. That was going to complicate things.
"I wish Harry were here." She whispered out loud. Seeing Ron again reminded her how much she had missed him…and how much she had missed Harry. She had thought about both of them nearly every day while she had been gone. Wondering where they were, what they were doing.
"I know you can't hear me, but I thought about you Ron. Both of you."
She heaves a great sigh. By her fourth year of Hogwarts she had begun to wonder if the two boys that rescued her from the troll that night where the worst things that could have happened to her. She had broken more school rules and gotten into more trouble than she had planned on for a lifetime. But she thinks about Ron's smile and sense of humor and Harry's eyes and caring spirit and she knows that there is nothing better she could have asked out of life than to have them by her side.
"I just want to see him again, to know he's safe. I know you do too Ron. Oh, Harry…"
Something about saying his name and the quiet that greets it brings tears to her eyes. Something inside of her screams that something is wrong, that if she was here talking about wanting to see him and he wasn't there…..then something must be terribly wrong. She closes her eyes and pictures him as she had always chosen to remember him: his hair windswept, the rare sparkle his eyes had when he was truly happy, a goofy grin stretched across his face.
"Harry." She sobs. Tears rolling down her face. She's not sure why she feels like she's losing him, but she can't help the knot in her chest or the way her hands were shaking.
It's just then that there's a loud crack in the sitting room. She bursts out the door with her wand drawn, only to scream at the sight that greets her.
It's Harry, but if Ron had looked bad then Harry was downright dreadful. He looked more like a corpse pulled from the grave than a live human being. His eyes were shrunken back into their sockets and were heavily bruised from lack of sleep. His skin seemed stretched over his skeleton and there seemed to be clumps of his hair missing. He was deathly pale and his hands too were shaking.
He opened his mouth as if to say something, before he pitched forward and Hermione lunged to catch him. She was alarmed by how light he was. She was able to get him into his own bed and settled while she started brewing three potions at once in the kitchen. One was full of vitamins and essential nutrients to treat malnourishment, one was another sleeping drought, and the final one was a basic healing potion meant to counter most infections. She had no idea if he even had one, but in his state she wasn't taking any chances.
She returned to his room just as he woke up coughing.
"H-Harry? I need you to take some potions." Her voice was shaking but she forced her hands to steady.
"Hermione?" Harry's voice was cracked and barely audible. She felt fresh tears building in her eyes to hear it.
"Harry p-please, take this." She lifted his head up and managed to help him down both the potion of essentials and the healing potion. When she went to give him the sleeping potion, his eyes registered what it was and he tried to push her hand away, shaking his head violently.
"Harry, please. You need some sleep. It's a dreamless sleep potion I swear." His eyes were still wide with fear. She knew what nightmares awaited him in his dreams, but she was telling the truth. They wouldn't reach him if he took the vial in her hand. She put her hand on his cheek, flinching at the cold skin beneath rough patches of facial hair. "Please Harry, for me?"
She saw his eyes soften and he nodded his head. When he had downed the entire vial and sank into a deep sleep, she gently laid his head down and covered him with blankets. She watched him sleep for a few minutes before retiring to the kitchen. She poured herself a single shot of firewhiskey and downed it before collapsing into a chair, sobbing so deeply that her whole body convulsed.
She had had a hard two years. There were moments that she wasn't sure if it was worth the struggle of putting one foot in front of the other, days where she hadn't left the safety of a bed or a sleeping bag and wished more than anything to slip into sleep and never wake up.
She had also fought through it. She had learned more about herself in two years than the rest of her life combined. One of the things she had learned was that she loved both Ron and Harry more than anything or anyone else in life. To see them both falling apart at the seams just destroyed her.
Nothing had prepared her for this. She knew this type of thing could happen. She had read the books and studied the courses. But never in her worst nightmares had she been prepared for the sight of Ron's figure in the snow or Harry's skeletal frame standing in the sitting room. She thought of her own journey, of how she must look. She walked over to a mirror, curiosity taking hold. She couldn't remember the last time she really looked at herself.
She looked largely the same. Her eyes too had dark circles underneath them, but they were a much lighter shade of purple than the black surrounding Harry's. Her skin was tanner and hair lighter than it had been before, probably due to the large amount of time she had spent in Australia. She was thinner, but in a more athletic way rather than from lack of eating. She had taken up running over a year ago and now she did three miles four days a week. She couldn't suppress the guilt that flared up in her heart. While Ron and Harry looked like they had been to the deepest ring of hell, she looked positively healthy in comparison.
She reminded herself that she had gone through the wringer much the same way they had. She had just found a different way to cope. Her outward appearance belied that fact that mentally and emotionally she was no better off than they were and feeling guilty over the decisions they had made wasn't going to get her any closer to moving past any of it.
This is the moment we can turn the page.
She felt a familiar determination surge through her veins. Voldemort hadn't been the end of them then and he sure as hell was not going to end them now. She let her fingers run across the skin of her forearm. And neither will that bitch.
Hermione changed into her dressing gown, crawled into her bed, and for the first time in years, she wasn't afraid of what might lurk behind her eyes when she closed them.
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A/N: A bit of filler I know, but necessary. Some important little things hidden in there that we'll explore later…..