Under the Gypsy Moon by apricot_bath [PG-13]
Valentine For: blurred_reality
Title: Under the Gypsy Moon
Author/Artist: apricot_bath
Type of Valentine: Fic
Disclaimer: Harry Potter belongs to J K Rowling. No profit is being made.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Character death.
Notes: Thanks to M, my fantabulous beta, who knows how much I struggled with this one. blurred-reality - you wanted ‘angst’ with a ‘sad, cry-your-heart-out ending’, and I’m really not sure if I delivered, but I hope you do enjoy this!
Summary: Malfoy’s face is still, and he is so quiet that Hermione waits for him to move, her hands trembling with pity. The teacup in his hand disappears in a wink of bluish light, and Hermione feels his accidental magic burn her elbows. A war-time love story.
UNDER THE GYPSY MOON
The day Hermione leaves Hogwarts, the castle goes into hiding.
The walls quake before giving way to autumn winds, and the turrets leave echoes of brick in their wake. With the rising pillars of sunlight, the shadows are buried, and the castle has gone.
Hermione wonders what Dumbledore would have said, Dumbledore whose body hasn’t fled with the castle, whose skin seemed to extend to the dungeons, the bridges and courtyards of Hogwarts.
“He knew you would leave,” says Luna, whose eyes are always shut now, face turned toward the white tomb. “He knew you would leave them.”
Hermione looks at the flood of weeds that lies where her castle, her last surviving home, had been, where the grass seeps over the wreckage and cannot be dammed.
Guilt sticks to her throat, as she murmurs a thin prayer skyward. A first-year had asked her for Charms help at breakfast, and Hermione had promised it to him after supper.
“Oh, it’s alright,” Luna whispers, dawn-light bathing her face in gold. “They knew you would leave them too.”
Sometimes Hermione sees things too clearly. Never would she live without it, but empathy binds her organs together too closely, and the way Luna’s eyelashes are sewn into her face hypnotizes her, but it is compassion which clutters her words.
Hermione’s eyes flutter closed, and she wonders if the sunrise is only a tide of warmth for Luna. Even with her eyelids draped between her and the world, light plucks Hermione’s limbs and trickles over her spine, knotting her in consciousness.
“I see the sun always, now,” Luna tells her, amusement softening her voice.
The surface of the lake is in sheets of rose, and Hermione cannot hook her eyes onto its shuddering face.
“How does the sun look?” Hermione asks, her words fumbling in the caverns of her throat. Her voice is wretched with heaviness.
“Like blindness.”
&&&
The first five months of horcrux-hunting are full of books and nights in Mr. Weasley’s kitschy tent.
Hermione keeps a checklist of horcruxes. Organization is anchoring her, routine stabilizing her.
With months, the list is reduced to Nagini, Slytherin’s locket, and Voldemort himself. They must attack Nagini in their attack on Voldemort, says Ron, and Harry agrees. They have spent days at the Gaunt House and the orphanage, at Godric’s Hollow, every place they can think of.
And now Hermione’s palms scrape the walls of the cave, and the rush of bodies under green water fixes her eyes straight ahead. Behind her, Harry is silent, and Hermione can feel him reliving this cave, his kamikaze mission.
Hermione allows herself to mourn Dumbledore for a moment.
She finds the Order reeling, crumbling and colliding amongst themselves with Dumbledore absent. Lupin has been missing (Fenrir has him, I’m sure of it, Tonks told her) and Mrs. Weasley cries every night, more so on Thursdays, when Ron’s letters arrive, for the strength of her luck. As Voldemort preaches massacre stronger, the Orders numbers are subdued.
It’s terrifying, and Hermione has resolved to ignore these neighboring destructions, and concentrate on the task given to Harry, and so given to her. Eyes on the prize.
When they emerge from the smothering warmth, that bright decay that fills the cave, Draco Malfoy stands at the entrance. His robes are dusted with grime, and when he sees them, he raises a fist holding a necklace with an S on it, and when Harry raises his wand, he says: don’t kill me.
Harry doesn’t, and Draco Malfoy awakens to Veritaserum on his tongue, blindfolded within the peeling walls of Grimmauld Place.
&&&
“I’m sorry about your mother.”
“What do you mean?”
“I just - well, I heard only two weeks ago about it, and, well, I’m sorry.”
“Granger, what do you mean?”
“Oh god. Oh god, do you really not know?”
“Granger, I swear, if you don’t explain yourself-”
“He gave her to the giants. Voldemort. He was angry, angry with your father, and he was, oh, I’m sorry, Malfoy.”
Malfoy’s face is still, and he is so quiet that Hermione waits for him to move, her hands trembling with pity. The teacup in his hand disappears in a wink of bluish light, and Hermione feels his accidental magic burn her elbows.
“She told me how to destroy the locket,” he says finally.
Hermione’s compassion meets fury in her mouth, and a hurricane of mute tears charges over her face, salt on her cheeks.
Malfoy says nothing, but sits with her until the sun rises.
&&&
The first time he kisses her, it is the night of her mother’s death.
Massacre, said Shacklebolt. Vengeance, said Moody.
Hermione is sitting at the heart of the wreckage, and as the MLEs swarm the blazing fences of her neighborhood, she coils her fist in her hair, her legs stretched out in front of her, her sleeves singed. Shock throttles her, and she does not see him until he is seated beside her, following her gaze.
“I’m sorry about your mother,” he says.
“Thank you,” Hermione whispers, with an ironic laugh that becomes a hiccup. She lets her head fall back, paining her neck. The fires are being extinguished quickly, and ash fills the air. The street is a twelve-house funeral pyre.
Hermione leans against the columns of brick that were the fireplace (Christmas gifts, says Hermione’s mind, finding refuge in absurdity: Christmas gifts and yule logs and the perfume of smoke) and her eyes skim over the scene. Twilight layers the aftermath in its luminous touch, and they are surrounded by the roar of thirty-five wizards armed with Obliviate.
There are no other voices; Voldemort does nothing by halves, and erasing her childhood is worse than seeing it shipped to the hospital.
“I am sorry,” repeats Malfoy, who is peaceful, if mildly perplexed by this reversal.
“Yes,” agrees Hermione, nodding. She finds herself gripping the skin of his arm, and his mouth is grim against hers, soft as sea-glass.
Hermione closes her eyes, and with her feet rolling in debris, despair keeping vigil over them, leans into the kiss.
&&&
“Do you think it would speak to Harry?”
Malfoy looks at her, skepticism twisting his lips perversely. Her fingers are cold where they sit on his arm, tracing the black skull that swallows the serpent.
“It doesn’t speak to me. Have you ever heard a sound from it? Because it certainly hasn’t been singing me any lullabies,” he says acerbically. Hermione knows that he hates the mark. He lies on his left side so that it is buried into the mattress. He never glances into the mirror when it can glance back at him.
He is so fearful of it that Hermione wonders why she continues to discuss it.
She likes his discomfort. His anxieties sooth her in their weakness. He is feeble, she is strong.
These are the things Hermione is willing to admit to herself, even as her breath withers in her throat when his hand rests on the small of her back. These are the things to be believed for her to win this war, and win it a Survivor.
“I think it would be worth a try,” she says stubbornly, and Hermione coughs, because the bed is heavy with dust, and hates her blood enough to stop her from cleaning it.
“I don’t want Potter talking to my arm.”
Hermione puts her palm over the blazing heat of the Mark, and pulls his mouth beneath hers. She kisses the worn flesh of his cheeks, the angle of his jaw, his jutting collarbone, and she raises her quivering hand slowly, where the inky skull meets her stare.
Hermione brings her mouth beside it, and bites the Mark, her teeth cold as they meet his skin that is warm, always warm. Malfoy’s heartbeat is a steady whistle, his blood hums under his muscles, and Hermione worries because his left arm shudders so much that it is hard to keep her eyes on it.
Smoke spills into the room from the Mark, smooth as honey, cart wheeling through the air, between the rafters, and the scent of blood is never extinguished.
Hermione is sure the skull grins at her.
&&&
“After the war, are you going to marry Weasley?”
“Oh yeah, Ginny and I have already found a chapel in Vienna.”
“You’re hilarious. Truly.”
Hermione smiles at him, her legs swinging over the arm of the loveseat, warm by the fireplace. This safe-house is like Malfoy, marble and heat.
“I’m not going to marry him.”
“Why not?”
“He’ll never love me.”
“And you love him?”
He’s never been this frank. Hermione is worried, but continues to lie in the smooth fabric.
“I don’t think so.”
Malfoy nods, looking pensive.
“What about Potter?”
“Our love exists only in the Daily Prophet, Malfoy.”
“Hmmm.”
“You know-”
Hermione pauses, because Malfoy’s frankness inspires her own.
“You could be as selfless as he is. Sometimes I think you are.”
Sometimes I think I could love you, is what she thinks.
&&&
It’s the edge of the world. The brink of existence, beyond which lies banality.
Hermione had studied Christopher Colombus as a girl. She had wondered at the maps, the yellowing maps which had the end of the world drawn beyond the sea serpent.
This is the end of the map, she thinks. This is where the ships sail into nothingness.
“Don’t be so melodramatic,” Malfoy chides.
Hermione frowns at him. “I’m looking. You’re looking. There is no melodrama.”
“I can tell you’re building it up there,” he says, tapping her forehead.
Hermione sighs. The archway is powerful with memory, with the kind of strength that sculpts pipes from the air.
“This reminds me of something my father used to say,” Malfoy remarks, and Hermione knows he is frightened, he wants to fill the air with his voice because there is nothing here, and they must wait for the right moment. Hermione wonders if this is the kind of cavity that lies in Voldemort’s sliced soul.
“Blood is thicker than water, and magic is thicker than both?”
“No, that was the Black family motto, before we all went French, and they took toujours purs from us.”
“Took?”
“I thought of it myself. Proudest day of my life, Granger, I had it embroidered on my pajamas and everything before crazy Aunt Bella decided that it was hers.”
His humor is odd, nervous. Hermione thinks he is too tired, too hopeless.
“What is the Malfoy one, then?”
“Après nous, le deluge.”
“How vain. And yet, unsurprising.”
They do this so often, this absurd small talk in the face of great uncertainties.
The moonlight spills through the panels of the ceiling. Ancient magic cannot be controlled, only directed, remembers Hermione, and when the brightness traces the archway, Malfoy thrusts the locket through the fluttering curtains and Hermione awakens in St. Mungos, legs bandaged, skin still rippling, with Malfoy napping at her bedside.
&&&
“I didn’t want to ask you to do this, Malfoy. I didn’t. This is the last resort. This, well, months ago we agreed that if it came to this, we would win the war by-”
Draco nods, his eyes dark, shadowed with insomnia. Potter is clawing at his hair, a tangle streaked with mud and someone’s bright blood (it has been months, maybe years, maybe his lifetime, his family’s lifetimes, full of war), and when he looks at Draco it is with agony. This is something Potter would give without a thought if he could.
Draco gives it a thought.
He’s not sure how time has passed. The days spin by, surreal like a carousel. This is an end to these things.
You could be as selfless as he is. Sometimes I think you are.
They are in a warded cellar in Glasgow, and the stairs whine with the tremors of security.
“I’ll do it.”
Harry’s hands leave filthy prints on his elbows as his face, full of awe, turns to Draco.
“Thank you. Thank you. Thank you,” he says, sotto voce. He pauses, before saying: “you are the bravest man I know.”
Sometimes I think you are.
His gratitude fills the room in tides of magic, and Draco finds himself sighing. Potter begins.
Exhaustion threads his bones. Magic soars away from him, mortality knots around his ankle like an anchor. Draco sinks and sinks in the roar of dark magic, and the serpent rises from his scab-ridden skin to surround him. He sits in a hurricane of sputtering magic, and Harry meets his eyes with gratitude.
The wreath of power falls on him, and Draco thinks after us, the flood.
&&&
The wind wrestles with her bouquet of calla lilies, August breezes hoping to wrest the flowers from her.
Hermione isn’t willing to release them, and she covers her flowers with the white linen of her robe. The sky is kneaded with flat clouds, and the path of coppery dirt leads her to the stone that reads Draco Malfoy. The war has been enough to merit its own cemetery, rows and rows of stones. Ron is buried ten plots to Draco’s left, and Hermione sees a Cannons pennant she knows Harry left there, and smiles.
Hermione’s hair is tightly braided, and a scar runs between the arc of her ear and the edge of her lips, a cut with magic she cannot negotiate with, and cares nothing for. Harry’s scar has begun to fade.
Peace surrounds her like a lullaby, and Hermione lays the pile of lilies beside the tombstone, where the petals reach for the wind.
“I could have loved you,” Hermione says conversationally. The sky’s blue today, that’s how she says it.
Hermione shuts her eyes, willing herself to be blind to drowned possibilities.
When she opens them, she can hear Luna’s lilting voice, saying oh, it’s alright. He knew.
&&&
“Under the gypsy moon,
all things are watching her
and she cannot see them.”
-Federico Garcia Lorca, Romance Sonambulo (Sleepwalker’s Ballad)
Final Notes:
REQUEST
Would you prefer an art or fic valentine? fic
Describe your ideal valentine in as few words as possible: Angsty, bittersweet. I like sad, cry your heart out endings.
Title: Under the Gypsy Moon
Author/Artist: apricot_bath
Type of Valentine: Fic
Disclaimer: Harry Potter belongs to J K Rowling. No profit is being made.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Character death.
Notes: Thanks to M, my fantabulous beta, who knows how much I struggled with this one. blurred-reality - you wanted ‘angst’ with a ‘sad, cry-your-heart-out ending’, and I’m really not sure if I delivered, but I hope you do enjoy this!
Summary: Malfoy’s face is still, and he is so quiet that Hermione waits for him to move, her hands trembling with pity. The teacup in his hand disappears in a wink of bluish light, and Hermione feels his accidental magic burn her elbows. A war-time love story.
UNDER THE GYPSY MOON
The day Hermione leaves Hogwarts, the castle goes into hiding.
The walls quake before giving way to autumn winds, and the turrets leave echoes of brick in their wake. With the rising pillars of sunlight, the shadows are buried, and the castle has gone.
Hermione wonders what Dumbledore would have said, Dumbledore whose body hasn’t fled with the castle, whose skin seemed to extend to the dungeons, the bridges and courtyards of Hogwarts.
“He knew you would leave,” says Luna, whose eyes are always shut now, face turned toward the white tomb. “He knew you would leave them.”
Hermione looks at the flood of weeds that lies where her castle, her last surviving home, had been, where the grass seeps over the wreckage and cannot be dammed.
Guilt sticks to her throat, as she murmurs a thin prayer skyward. A first-year had asked her for Charms help at breakfast, and Hermione had promised it to him after supper.
“Oh, it’s alright,” Luna whispers, dawn-light bathing her face in gold. “They knew you would leave them too.”
Sometimes Hermione sees things too clearly. Never would she live without it, but empathy binds her organs together too closely, and the way Luna’s eyelashes are sewn into her face hypnotizes her, but it is compassion which clutters her words.
Hermione’s eyes flutter closed, and she wonders if the sunrise is only a tide of warmth for Luna. Even with her eyelids draped between her and the world, light plucks Hermione’s limbs and trickles over her spine, knotting her in consciousness.
“I see the sun always, now,” Luna tells her, amusement softening her voice.
The surface of the lake is in sheets of rose, and Hermione cannot hook her eyes onto its shuddering face.
“How does the sun look?” Hermione asks, her words fumbling in the caverns of her throat. Her voice is wretched with heaviness.
“Like blindness.”
&&&
The first five months of horcrux-hunting are full of books and nights in Mr. Weasley’s kitschy tent.
Hermione keeps a checklist of horcruxes. Organization is anchoring her, routine stabilizing her.
With months, the list is reduced to Nagini, Slytherin’s locket, and Voldemort himself. They must attack Nagini in their attack on Voldemort, says Ron, and Harry agrees. They have spent days at the Gaunt House and the orphanage, at Godric’s Hollow, every place they can think of.
And now Hermione’s palms scrape the walls of the cave, and the rush of bodies under green water fixes her eyes straight ahead. Behind her, Harry is silent, and Hermione can feel him reliving this cave, his kamikaze mission.
Hermione allows herself to mourn Dumbledore for a moment.
She finds the Order reeling, crumbling and colliding amongst themselves with Dumbledore absent. Lupin has been missing (Fenrir has him, I’m sure of it, Tonks told her) and Mrs. Weasley cries every night, more so on Thursdays, when Ron’s letters arrive, for the strength of her luck. As Voldemort preaches massacre stronger, the Orders numbers are subdued.
It’s terrifying, and Hermione has resolved to ignore these neighboring destructions, and concentrate on the task given to Harry, and so given to her. Eyes on the prize.
When they emerge from the smothering warmth, that bright decay that fills the cave, Draco Malfoy stands at the entrance. His robes are dusted with grime, and when he sees them, he raises a fist holding a necklace with an S on it, and when Harry raises his wand, he says: don’t kill me.
Harry doesn’t, and Draco Malfoy awakens to Veritaserum on his tongue, blindfolded within the peeling walls of Grimmauld Place.
&&&
“I’m sorry about your mother.”
“What do you mean?”
“I just - well, I heard only two weeks ago about it, and, well, I’m sorry.”
“Granger, what do you mean?”
“Oh god. Oh god, do you really not know?”
“Granger, I swear, if you don’t explain yourself-”
“He gave her to the giants. Voldemort. He was angry, angry with your father, and he was, oh, I’m sorry, Malfoy.”
Malfoy’s face is still, and he is so quiet that Hermione waits for him to move, her hands trembling with pity. The teacup in his hand disappears in a wink of bluish light, and Hermione feels his accidental magic burn her elbows.
“She told me how to destroy the locket,” he says finally.
Hermione’s compassion meets fury in her mouth, and a hurricane of mute tears charges over her face, salt on her cheeks.
Malfoy says nothing, but sits with her until the sun rises.
&&&
The first time he kisses her, it is the night of her mother’s death.
Massacre, said Shacklebolt. Vengeance, said Moody.
Hermione is sitting at the heart of the wreckage, and as the MLEs swarm the blazing fences of her neighborhood, she coils her fist in her hair, her legs stretched out in front of her, her sleeves singed. Shock throttles her, and she does not see him until he is seated beside her, following her gaze.
“I’m sorry about your mother,” he says.
“Thank you,” Hermione whispers, with an ironic laugh that becomes a hiccup. She lets her head fall back, paining her neck. The fires are being extinguished quickly, and ash fills the air. The street is a twelve-house funeral pyre.
Hermione leans against the columns of brick that were the fireplace (Christmas gifts, says Hermione’s mind, finding refuge in absurdity: Christmas gifts and yule logs and the perfume of smoke) and her eyes skim over the scene. Twilight layers the aftermath in its luminous touch, and they are surrounded by the roar of thirty-five wizards armed with Obliviate.
There are no other voices; Voldemort does nothing by halves, and erasing her childhood is worse than seeing it shipped to the hospital.
“I am sorry,” repeats Malfoy, who is peaceful, if mildly perplexed by this reversal.
“Yes,” agrees Hermione, nodding. She finds herself gripping the skin of his arm, and his mouth is grim against hers, soft as sea-glass.
Hermione closes her eyes, and with her feet rolling in debris, despair keeping vigil over them, leans into the kiss.
&&&
“Do you think it would speak to Harry?”
Malfoy looks at her, skepticism twisting his lips perversely. Her fingers are cold where they sit on his arm, tracing the black skull that swallows the serpent.
“It doesn’t speak to me. Have you ever heard a sound from it? Because it certainly hasn’t been singing me any lullabies,” he says acerbically. Hermione knows that he hates the mark. He lies on his left side so that it is buried into the mattress. He never glances into the mirror when it can glance back at him.
He is so fearful of it that Hermione wonders why she continues to discuss it.
She likes his discomfort. His anxieties sooth her in their weakness. He is feeble, she is strong.
These are the things Hermione is willing to admit to herself, even as her breath withers in her throat when his hand rests on the small of her back. These are the things to be believed for her to win this war, and win it a Survivor.
“I think it would be worth a try,” she says stubbornly, and Hermione coughs, because the bed is heavy with dust, and hates her blood enough to stop her from cleaning it.
“I don’t want Potter talking to my arm.”
Hermione puts her palm over the blazing heat of the Mark, and pulls his mouth beneath hers. She kisses the worn flesh of his cheeks, the angle of his jaw, his jutting collarbone, and she raises her quivering hand slowly, where the inky skull meets her stare.
Hermione brings her mouth beside it, and bites the Mark, her teeth cold as they meet his skin that is warm, always warm. Malfoy’s heartbeat is a steady whistle, his blood hums under his muscles, and Hermione worries because his left arm shudders so much that it is hard to keep her eyes on it.
Smoke spills into the room from the Mark, smooth as honey, cart wheeling through the air, between the rafters, and the scent of blood is never extinguished.
Hermione is sure the skull grins at her.
&&&
“After the war, are you going to marry Weasley?”
“Oh yeah, Ginny and I have already found a chapel in Vienna.”
“You’re hilarious. Truly.”
Hermione smiles at him, her legs swinging over the arm of the loveseat, warm by the fireplace. This safe-house is like Malfoy, marble and heat.
“I’m not going to marry him.”
“Why not?”
“He’ll never love me.”
“And you love him?”
He’s never been this frank. Hermione is worried, but continues to lie in the smooth fabric.
“I don’t think so.”
Malfoy nods, looking pensive.
“What about Potter?”
“Our love exists only in the Daily Prophet, Malfoy.”
“Hmmm.”
“You know-”
Hermione pauses, because Malfoy’s frankness inspires her own.
“You could be as selfless as he is. Sometimes I think you are.”
Sometimes I think I could love you, is what she thinks.
&&&
It’s the edge of the world. The brink of existence, beyond which lies banality.
Hermione had studied Christopher Colombus as a girl. She had wondered at the maps, the yellowing maps which had the end of the world drawn beyond the sea serpent.
This is the end of the map, she thinks. This is where the ships sail into nothingness.
“Don’t be so melodramatic,” Malfoy chides.
Hermione frowns at him. “I’m looking. You’re looking. There is no melodrama.”
“I can tell you’re building it up there,” he says, tapping her forehead.
Hermione sighs. The archway is powerful with memory, with the kind of strength that sculpts pipes from the air.
“This reminds me of something my father used to say,” Malfoy remarks, and Hermione knows he is frightened, he wants to fill the air with his voice because there is nothing here, and they must wait for the right moment. Hermione wonders if this is the kind of cavity that lies in Voldemort’s sliced soul.
“Blood is thicker than water, and magic is thicker than both?”
“No, that was the Black family motto, before we all went French, and they took toujours purs from us.”
“Took?”
“I thought of it myself. Proudest day of my life, Granger, I had it embroidered on my pajamas and everything before crazy Aunt Bella decided that it was hers.”
His humor is odd, nervous. Hermione thinks he is too tired, too hopeless.
“What is the Malfoy one, then?”
“Après nous, le deluge.”
“How vain. And yet, unsurprising.”
They do this so often, this absurd small talk in the face of great uncertainties.
The moonlight spills through the panels of the ceiling. Ancient magic cannot be controlled, only directed, remembers Hermione, and when the brightness traces the archway, Malfoy thrusts the locket through the fluttering curtains and Hermione awakens in St. Mungos, legs bandaged, skin still rippling, with Malfoy napping at her bedside.
&&&
“I didn’t want to ask you to do this, Malfoy. I didn’t. This is the last resort. This, well, months ago we agreed that if it came to this, we would win the war by-”
Draco nods, his eyes dark, shadowed with insomnia. Potter is clawing at his hair, a tangle streaked with mud and someone’s bright blood (it has been months, maybe years, maybe his lifetime, his family’s lifetimes, full of war), and when he looks at Draco it is with agony. This is something Potter would give without a thought if he could.
Draco gives it a thought.
He’s not sure how time has passed. The days spin by, surreal like a carousel. This is an end to these things.
You could be as selfless as he is. Sometimes I think you are.
They are in a warded cellar in Glasgow, and the stairs whine with the tremors of security.
“I’ll do it.”
Harry’s hands leave filthy prints on his elbows as his face, full of awe, turns to Draco.
“Thank you. Thank you. Thank you,” he says, sotto voce. He pauses, before saying: “you are the bravest man I know.”
Sometimes I think you are.
His gratitude fills the room in tides of magic, and Draco finds himself sighing. Potter begins.
Exhaustion threads his bones. Magic soars away from him, mortality knots around his ankle like an anchor. Draco sinks and sinks in the roar of dark magic, and the serpent rises from his scab-ridden skin to surround him. He sits in a hurricane of sputtering magic, and Harry meets his eyes with gratitude.
The wreath of power falls on him, and Draco thinks after us, the flood.
&&&
The wind wrestles with her bouquet of calla lilies, August breezes hoping to wrest the flowers from her.
Hermione isn’t willing to release them, and she covers her flowers with the white linen of her robe. The sky is kneaded with flat clouds, and the path of coppery dirt leads her to the stone that reads Draco Malfoy. The war has been enough to merit its own cemetery, rows and rows of stones. Ron is buried ten plots to Draco’s left, and Hermione sees a Cannons pennant she knows Harry left there, and smiles.
Hermione’s hair is tightly braided, and a scar runs between the arc of her ear and the edge of her lips, a cut with magic she cannot negotiate with, and cares nothing for. Harry’s scar has begun to fade.
Peace surrounds her like a lullaby, and Hermione lays the pile of lilies beside the tombstone, where the petals reach for the wind.
“I could have loved you,” Hermione says conversationally. The sky’s blue today, that’s how she says it.
Hermione shuts her eyes, willing herself to be blind to drowned possibilities.
When she opens them, she can hear Luna’s lilting voice, saying oh, it’s alright. He knew.
&&&
“Under the gypsy moon,
all things are watching her
and she cannot see them.”
-Federico Garcia Lorca, Romance Sonambulo (Sleepwalker’s Ballad)
Final Notes:
REQUEST
Would you prefer an art or fic valentine? fic
Describe your ideal valentine in as few words as possible: Angsty, bittersweet. I like sad, cry your heart out endings.