so slow on the split (ron/hermione, harry/hermione, harry/ron/hermione)
Title: So Slow on the Split
Pairing/Characters: Ron/Hermione, Harry/Hermione (not so subtly alludes to Harry/Ron/Hermione)
Summary: War taught her many things.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~2,000
Spoilers: All of Deathly Hallows, I guess.
Disclaimer: I own nothing. Because if I did Harry Potter would have been very different. Title comes from Bon Ivar's Skinny Love.
The wind howls against the Burrow.
The war is over. The dead are buried. But the wind still howls, echoing over the silence.
Hermione’s legs are curled against her on the chair, her hands gripping a mug of cold tea as she stares at the crackling fire, the blue flames licking the bricks. She can feel Ron’s eyes staring at her empty ring finger-and it does, feel empty. Not because she wants a diamond on it, but because each time she walks in the door with Ron, or apparates into the living room, Mrs. Weasley grabs her hand, runs her thumb over the spot where a ring would go, frowns, a flash of disappointment, and then smiles, pulling her into a hug. As though she’s reassuring Hermione it’ll happen soon.
“I’m going to bed,” Ron whispers, running a hand through his disheveled hair. Hermione nods, watches him walk out of the room and up the stairs.
Some nights she crawls into bed with him and he wraps his body around her. There are times when it’s like she can’t breathe unless he’s there, wound around her, hot breath sweeping over her neck and warm hands trailing over her stomach. There are times when it’s like he’s suffocating her, when’s she’s gasping for air and she wants to run.
She’d sigh if she had the energy.
Hermione swishes the wine around her glass, watches the hustle of London at night. There are so many people, people who don’t understand, people who’ll never understand, people who try, people who don’t, people who do.
Harry scratches his scar. Hermione knows he’s waiting for it to burn again. She’s waiting, too.
“How’s Ginny?” he asks, moving some food around his plate.
“Shouldn’t that be something I ask you?” Hermione sleeps in the same room as Ginny sometimes; they talk in pleasantries: how are you and did you sleep well and I'm fine.
Harry presses his lips into a thin line, blinks. “Hermione,” he says, his voice cracking on the last syllable.
She looks out the window again. Lights are shining and the air still feels warm from the afternoon. She squints. It’s too bright, even without the sun. She looks back at Harry, reaches across the table and grabs his hand, lacing her fingers through his and squeezing. He presses his fingers into the back of her hand and exhales, finally meeting her eyes.
She takes a sip of her wine. It tastes like blood on her tongue.
Hermione never dreamt of her wedding when she younger, before Hogwarts and magic, when her best friends where her parents and characters in books. She never pictured herself wearing a white gown and slipping a ring on somebody's finger and saying, “I do.” Instead she imagined herself graduating from university, the tassel on her cap waving at her classmates in the wind. She’d get a doctorate in history or political science or biology. Or all three. When she closes her eyes now, tries to see herself standing in front of everyone and holding Ron’s hand, she panics. When it happens--she thinks in when’s now. It’s a habit that took root during the war, when every when was an if despite how much she tried to convince herself otherwise--she wants to be happy. She wants to feel whole. She wants to feel something, feel anything other than dread and fear.
She can’t imagine ever feeling whole again; she can’t imagine ever being happy again.
Harry has a scar on his forehead; Hermione has a scar on her wrist; Ron’s eyes have lost their spark.
And everyone keeps telling her the war is over.
Ron takes her dancing. There’s something comforting about his hand splayed over the small of her back, secure but hesitant, not willing to pull her any closer, scared of her pulling away. They sway, a little out of sync, he’s moving too fast and she’s moving too slow. But still, it’s kind of nice. Hermione closes her eyes and allows the darkness and the song to take over, allows herself to forget.
There’s a hole, a figure looming just beyond her reach. Nothing quite the way it’s supposed to be. She keeps her eyes closed and pretends.
Harry tells her he had a fight with Ginny. He’s had a lot of fights with Ginny, actually.
“About what?” Hermione asks, scarf blowing around her in the wind. Snow is falling, sticking to her hair and on her cheeks, melting and causing her to shiver. The cold seeps beneath her skin and into her bones.
“About,” he pauses, reaches up to clean his glasses. “About everything.”
Hermione flexes her fingers, wants to reach out and touch him, make him feel better. But she doesn’t. “I’m sorry, Harry,” she says instead, as if that’s enough.
“I don’t understand-I want to…She doesn’t, I…” he starts and stops a few times before looking at her, his eyes filled with desperation.
She waits.
They reach the train station in silence, buy tickets and sit on a bench. Harry offers her a cigarette and she takes it, feels the smoke swirl around her lungs when she inhales.
“She thinks I’m a hero,” he finally says.
Hermione exhales, watches the smoke and her breath mix and condense. Her knee touches his and it’s all she can do not to start crying.
She doesn’t go find her parents and restore their memories. There are days when she wants to, days when the ache in her heart is too much, and her headache is too sharp for her to do anything but miss them. But no matter how much she wants to go back, she can’t.
Even if she undid the spell, they still wouldn’t know her .
“Mum keeps asking me when I’m going to propose,” Ron says.
Hermione gulps, feels her throat grow dry. She blankly responds, “Oh.”
She can’t bring herself to look at him although she feels his eyes on her, intent, almost as though he’s seeing her for the first time since the war ended. She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear and thinks about how she should be tired of running.
Instead she never stopped. She was good at it.
“When are you going to propose?” She tries to make it sound like a joke, like she should be quirking her eyebrow and smirking, but instead it sounds flat and shaky.
“When you’ll actually say yes.” A beat. “When I actually want you to say yes.”
Biting her lip, she listens to the fight going on in the next room. Ron’s hand soft against her knee, his thumb rubbing soft circles into her skin as though he’s trying to tell her that no matter how bad it gets between them--all three of them--it’ll never be like that. It will never come to yelling at each other at a family dinner.
Hermione wants to tell him it’s already worse.
Ginny’s crying. Harry’s telling her she doesn’t understand.
“You won’t let me understand!” Ginny screams. “I ask and you shut down. Do you tell Ron and Hermione? Do you explain it to them?”
“I don’t have to. They know.”
Everything goes silence.
Ron squeezes her knee, and when she finally looks at him, there are tears staining his cheeks.
She runs away with Harry. They carve a space for themselves in the muggle world, where they’re allowed to be anonymous. Nobody knows their names or stares at them in awe. It’s normal; it’s familiar. They take trains, they rent a hotel room, and they do their best to disappear.
Hermione spent so much of her life trying not to be invisible, but that’s all she wants now, to go unnoticed.
“Do you miss him?” Hermione asks, sitting on the hotel bed, her eyes tracing the pattern in the wallpaper.
“Every day.” He looks at her, his hair hanging in front of his eyes. He comes over and sits down next to her, takes a breath like he’s going to ask her the same thing. But then he stops himself. He already knows the answer.
She leans over, rests her head on his shoulder, tries not to think about it what it means when she turns her head and presses her lips to his neck.
Everyone thought Ron was the first to start smoking, as if somehow it was a sign that he was the weakest. Truth is, he was the last. The truth is Hermione’s the one with the nicotine addiction. Now both Ron and Harry taste like ash.
She spends her days reading in coffee shops and diners and cozy bookstores, inhaling the scent of books, running her finger along their spines, making up for all the time she lost during the war. Her nights are skin against skin, warm breath against open mouths and mutual destruction. They don’t need explanations; they know what they’re doing.
When he wipes away the tears on her cheeks she yanks his hips towards her. Lather, rinse, repeat.
It’s exactly the escape she wanted.
Except when it’s not.
They both know this is not the choice they made. They both know the choices society affords them aren’t the choices they want.
“We should go back,” Harry says, running his thumb over the hickey on her shoulder.
“I know,” Hermione whispers, her eyes fluttering closed. She’s always known.
They both miss him. His presence attempting to fill every empty void, expanding the space, forming cracks where he should be. Ron’s in every syllable they don’t speak, every movement they start and then stop, abrupt and unsure.
War taught her many things.
It did not teach her enough.
She’ll never know what Ron and Harry were like without her after the war. If the time they spent going to Quidditch matches and whispering in corners was happier than their time spent with her.
But she knows they wouldn’t give her up.
That’s the problem.
She can’t give them up either.
When she shows up outside the Burrow she drops her bags, not knowing what to except. She knows all eyes are on her. She knows all she sees is the way Ron’s jaw clenches. She knows there is no way to fix this.
“Hermione,” he says. And when he walks out of the house, brushing by her, she knows she’s supposed to follow.
He’s quiet. His breathing sounds shallow, the sunset turning violet behind him. “I,” she begins, but she doesn’t know what words come next. Despite all the reading she did, words are still failing her.
“You left me,” he whispers, his expression isn’t angry or jealous, just hurt. “You both left me.”
“I love you.”
It’s the truth.
She doesn’t say she loves Harry, too.
But Ron knows. He’s always known.
“I don’t want to know.”
The way they’re standing it looks like a triangle. Hermione knows, it is not.
“This war ruined us,” Ron says. He is not just talking about Voldemort and the Death Eaters and the final battle--the only battle. He is talking about the war they are still fighting. His face is flushed, his eyes are downcast and angry.
They’re all so fucking angry.
“We can fix this,” Harry assures, dark circles under his eyes.
“No,” Hermione says, shaking her head. “No we can’t.”
Thunder claps outside and she reaches out, grabs Harry’s hand, grabs Ron’s hand, and holds on.
Nothing is perfect. They fight. They scream. They buy more whiskey and butterbeer than they should. They mix their alcohol just like they mixed their lives.
There is a ring halfheartedly sparkling on Hermione’s finger. Ginny has one that matches.
They’ve given up on happiness, on ease and effortlessness. Sometimes Ron whispers something in Harry’s ear and Harry squeezes Ron’s elbow, sometimes Hermione runs her nails over the back of Harry’s neck and remembers his mouth on her clavicle, and sometimes Ron and Harry both twirl her on the dance floor, laughing as she gets dizzy. And each time Hermione thinks of the life she could have had.
But this is the solution--if it can be called one--they are forced to take.
Everyone else does not see it as settling. Ron knows, Harry knows, and oh. she knows. All too well.
But nobody else knows.
War taught them many things.
They do not remember how to live in twosomes.
Pairing/Characters: Ron/Hermione, Harry/Hermione (not so subtly alludes to Harry/Ron/Hermione)
Summary: War taught her many things.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~2,000
Spoilers: All of Deathly Hallows, I guess.
Disclaimer: I own nothing. Because if I did Harry Potter would have been very different. Title comes from Bon Ivar's Skinny Love.
The wind howls against the Burrow.
The war is over. The dead are buried. But the wind still howls, echoing over the silence.
Hermione’s legs are curled against her on the chair, her hands gripping a mug of cold tea as she stares at the crackling fire, the blue flames licking the bricks. She can feel Ron’s eyes staring at her empty ring finger-and it does, feel empty. Not because she wants a diamond on it, but because each time she walks in the door with Ron, or apparates into the living room, Mrs. Weasley grabs her hand, runs her thumb over the spot where a ring would go, frowns, a flash of disappointment, and then smiles, pulling her into a hug. As though she’s reassuring Hermione it’ll happen soon.
“I’m going to bed,” Ron whispers, running a hand through his disheveled hair. Hermione nods, watches him walk out of the room and up the stairs.
Some nights she crawls into bed with him and he wraps his body around her. There are times when it’s like she can’t breathe unless he’s there, wound around her, hot breath sweeping over her neck and warm hands trailing over her stomach. There are times when it’s like he’s suffocating her, when’s she’s gasping for air and she wants to run.
She’d sigh if she had the energy.
Hermione swishes the wine around her glass, watches the hustle of London at night. There are so many people, people who don’t understand, people who’ll never understand, people who try, people who don’t, people who do.
Harry scratches his scar. Hermione knows he’s waiting for it to burn again. She’s waiting, too.
“How’s Ginny?” he asks, moving some food around his plate.
“Shouldn’t that be something I ask you?” Hermione sleeps in the same room as Ginny sometimes; they talk in pleasantries: how are you and did you sleep well and I'm fine.
Harry presses his lips into a thin line, blinks. “Hermione,” he says, his voice cracking on the last syllable.
She looks out the window again. Lights are shining and the air still feels warm from the afternoon. She squints. It’s too bright, even without the sun. She looks back at Harry, reaches across the table and grabs his hand, lacing her fingers through his and squeezing. He presses his fingers into the back of her hand and exhales, finally meeting her eyes.
She takes a sip of her wine. It tastes like blood on her tongue.
Hermione never dreamt of her wedding when she younger, before Hogwarts and magic, when her best friends where her parents and characters in books. She never pictured herself wearing a white gown and slipping a ring on somebody's finger and saying, “I do.” Instead she imagined herself graduating from university, the tassel on her cap waving at her classmates in the wind. She’d get a doctorate in history or political science or biology. Or all three. When she closes her eyes now, tries to see herself standing in front of everyone and holding Ron’s hand, she panics. When it happens--she thinks in when’s now. It’s a habit that took root during the war, when every when was an if despite how much she tried to convince herself otherwise--she wants to be happy. She wants to feel whole. She wants to feel something, feel anything other than dread and fear.
She can’t imagine ever feeling whole again; she can’t imagine ever being happy again.
Harry has a scar on his forehead; Hermione has a scar on her wrist; Ron’s eyes have lost their spark.
And everyone keeps telling her the war is over.
Ron takes her dancing. There’s something comforting about his hand splayed over the small of her back, secure but hesitant, not willing to pull her any closer, scared of her pulling away. They sway, a little out of sync, he’s moving too fast and she’s moving too slow. But still, it’s kind of nice. Hermione closes her eyes and allows the darkness and the song to take over, allows herself to forget.
There’s a hole, a figure looming just beyond her reach. Nothing quite the way it’s supposed to be. She keeps her eyes closed and pretends.
Harry tells her he had a fight with Ginny. He’s had a lot of fights with Ginny, actually.
“About what?” Hermione asks, scarf blowing around her in the wind. Snow is falling, sticking to her hair and on her cheeks, melting and causing her to shiver. The cold seeps beneath her skin and into her bones.
“About,” he pauses, reaches up to clean his glasses. “About everything.”
Hermione flexes her fingers, wants to reach out and touch him, make him feel better. But she doesn’t. “I’m sorry, Harry,” she says instead, as if that’s enough.
“I don’t understand-I want to…She doesn’t, I…” he starts and stops a few times before looking at her, his eyes filled with desperation.
She waits.
They reach the train station in silence, buy tickets and sit on a bench. Harry offers her a cigarette and she takes it, feels the smoke swirl around her lungs when she inhales.
“She thinks I’m a hero,” he finally says.
Hermione exhales, watches the smoke and her breath mix and condense. Her knee touches his and it’s all she can do not to start crying.
She doesn’t go find her parents and restore their memories. There are days when she wants to, days when the ache in her heart is too much, and her headache is too sharp for her to do anything but miss them. But no matter how much she wants to go back, she can’t.
Even if she undid the spell, they still wouldn’t know her .
“Mum keeps asking me when I’m going to propose,” Ron says.
Hermione gulps, feels her throat grow dry. She blankly responds, “Oh.”
She can’t bring herself to look at him although she feels his eyes on her, intent, almost as though he’s seeing her for the first time since the war ended. She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear and thinks about how she should be tired of running.
Instead she never stopped. She was good at it.
“When are you going to propose?” She tries to make it sound like a joke, like she should be quirking her eyebrow and smirking, but instead it sounds flat and shaky.
“When you’ll actually say yes.” A beat. “When I actually want you to say yes.”
Biting her lip, she listens to the fight going on in the next room. Ron’s hand soft against her knee, his thumb rubbing soft circles into her skin as though he’s trying to tell her that no matter how bad it gets between them--all three of them--it’ll never be like that. It will never come to yelling at each other at a family dinner.
Hermione wants to tell him it’s already worse.
Ginny’s crying. Harry’s telling her she doesn’t understand.
“You won’t let me understand!” Ginny screams. “I ask and you shut down. Do you tell Ron and Hermione? Do you explain it to them?”
“I don’t have to. They know.”
Everything goes silence.
Ron squeezes her knee, and when she finally looks at him, there are tears staining his cheeks.
She runs away with Harry. They carve a space for themselves in the muggle world, where they’re allowed to be anonymous. Nobody knows their names or stares at them in awe. It’s normal; it’s familiar. They take trains, they rent a hotel room, and they do their best to disappear.
Hermione spent so much of her life trying not to be invisible, but that’s all she wants now, to go unnoticed.
“Do you miss him?” Hermione asks, sitting on the hotel bed, her eyes tracing the pattern in the wallpaper.
“Every day.” He looks at her, his hair hanging in front of his eyes. He comes over and sits down next to her, takes a breath like he’s going to ask her the same thing. But then he stops himself. He already knows the answer.
She leans over, rests her head on his shoulder, tries not to think about it what it means when she turns her head and presses her lips to his neck.
Everyone thought Ron was the first to start smoking, as if somehow it was a sign that he was the weakest. Truth is, he was the last. The truth is Hermione’s the one with the nicotine addiction. Now both Ron and Harry taste like ash.
She spends her days reading in coffee shops and diners and cozy bookstores, inhaling the scent of books, running her finger along their spines, making up for all the time she lost during the war. Her nights are skin against skin, warm breath against open mouths and mutual destruction. They don’t need explanations; they know what they’re doing.
When he wipes away the tears on her cheeks she yanks his hips towards her. Lather, rinse, repeat.
It’s exactly the escape she wanted.
Except when it’s not.
They both know this is not the choice they made. They both know the choices society affords them aren’t the choices they want.
“We should go back,” Harry says, running his thumb over the hickey on her shoulder.
“I know,” Hermione whispers, her eyes fluttering closed. She’s always known.
They both miss him. His presence attempting to fill every empty void, expanding the space, forming cracks where he should be. Ron’s in every syllable they don’t speak, every movement they start and then stop, abrupt and unsure.
War taught her many things.
It did not teach her enough.
She’ll never know what Ron and Harry were like without her after the war. If the time they spent going to Quidditch matches and whispering in corners was happier than their time spent with her.
But she knows they wouldn’t give her up.
That’s the problem.
She can’t give them up either.
When she shows up outside the Burrow she drops her bags, not knowing what to except. She knows all eyes are on her. She knows all she sees is the way Ron’s jaw clenches. She knows there is no way to fix this.
“Hermione,” he says. And when he walks out of the house, brushing by her, she knows she’s supposed to follow.
He’s quiet. His breathing sounds shallow, the sunset turning violet behind him. “I,” she begins, but she doesn’t know what words come next. Despite all the reading she did, words are still failing her.
“You left me,” he whispers, his expression isn’t angry or jealous, just hurt. “You both left me.”
“I love you.”
It’s the truth.
She doesn’t say she loves Harry, too.
But Ron knows. He’s always known.
“I don’t want to know.”
The way they’re standing it looks like a triangle. Hermione knows, it is not.
“This war ruined us,” Ron says. He is not just talking about Voldemort and the Death Eaters and the final battle--the only battle. He is talking about the war they are still fighting. His face is flushed, his eyes are downcast and angry.
They’re all so fucking angry.
“We can fix this,” Harry assures, dark circles under his eyes.
“No,” Hermione says, shaking her head. “No we can’t.”
Thunder claps outside and she reaches out, grabs Harry’s hand, grabs Ron’s hand, and holds on.
Nothing is perfect. They fight. They scream. They buy more whiskey and butterbeer than they should. They mix their alcohol just like they mixed their lives.
There is a ring halfheartedly sparkling on Hermione’s finger. Ginny has one that matches.
They’ve given up on happiness, on ease and effortlessness. Sometimes Ron whispers something in Harry’s ear and Harry squeezes Ron’s elbow, sometimes Hermione runs her nails over the back of Harry’s neck and remembers his mouth on her clavicle, and sometimes Ron and Harry both twirl her on the dance floor, laughing as she gets dizzy. And each time Hermione thinks of the life she could have had.
But this is the solution--if it can be called one--they are forced to take.
Everyone else does not see it as settling. Ron knows, Harry knows, and oh. she knows. All too well.
But nobody else knows.
War taught them many things.
They do not remember how to live in twosomes.