WIP: The Moment That It Stops (T+) - Draco/Hermione, Others
Notes: Takes place four years after the War, relatively non canon-compliant. Pictures courtesy of free image-based websites, most notably WeHeartIt. Songs by various artists. Edited and added content from condensed version at dmhgficexchange.
Pairing(s): Draco/Hermione, Others
Chapter(s): 1/?
Summary: It's like they're almost friends, almost ex-lovers finally meeting for the first time after a break-up. It's much more complicated than that.
THE MOMENT THAT IT STOPS
sidewalks : the morning paper
It is a crisp and blue evening with dusty stars and slow-moving clouds when Hermione stands at the open doorway to her newly rented flat. The walls are an off-white colour with black trim, wooden flooring with a varnished finish, one large window in the sitting room. Vacant and drafty and too big of a space. With only a small bag to her name, she enters her new home with caution and shuts the door, swiftly locking it behind her.
By the end of the week, she settles herself in dreary monotony, lethargic and somewhat dazed. Her bedroom is decorated with a mattress barely slept in, blankets folded neatly at one end, an unplugged Japanese-inspired floor lamp, and several, carefully selected books she reads over and over again when nothing else suits her anymore; in the sitting area, there are two mahogany chairs and a matching table with a slim, white China vase in the centre with a single crimson cyclamen she replaces every three days out of habit; there is nothing in her refrigerator except cheese, grapes, and white bread she occasionally forgets, and her kitchen setup is as bare as it was when she first rented the space.
On the second Monday of a cold January morning, four months after moving in and having woken up from a sleepy stupor at the sitting room table, she forces herself upright and staggers to her windowless bedroom. There, he is sitting at the edge of the mattress, shirt unbuttoned and trousers wrinkled, flipping through the pages of one of her books. His hair is disheveled as always, his glasses forgotten at his side, and his skin is pale and the green of his eyes the only colour of her room.
"Harry?" she addresses lightly, and her breath is caught in her throat the way he looks, the way sorrow and beauty go together hand-in-hand.
He looks up and smiles a weak, lopsided smile at her. Barely there. Unsure of how to make of it, she crawls onto the empty space behind him and huddles beneath the covers she has laid out, and only closes her eyes when she is certain the light is working well enough so he can read, and her hand resting a mere distance away from his own.
She is conscious for fifteen minutes and twenty-seven seconds, inhaling and exhaling slowly like every butterfly breath counts - two hundred and ten and a half or a fourth - listening to the endless sound of silence before she opens her eyes. Empty. With a halfhearted stretch of her arm, she severs the power of the lamp and buries herself beneath her blankets again, turning to face the blank wall and cocooning herself so tightly that she can barely breathe.
Hermione watches his silhouette pacing one way to another outside, how he pauses and tenses at the slightest breeze. He thinks she's asleep, but she remains conscious. She has to stay awake because she can't afford to lose another and she might if she is distracted even for a second. Her heart is burdened, struggling with gravity and forcing its way down as if there's a hidden space in her stomach to settle. She counts to three, murmuring fractions in between the seconds and her breaths as if all the numbers must be accounted for before settling on a whole figure. On two, another silhouette stops in front of Harry, and she can see the both of them gesturing to one another and whispering like their soft voices will be the ones to wake her instead of the sporadic blasts of light and sound in the distance.
She holds her breath when one of them move towards the opening of the tent, and shuts her eyes. She feels his presence beside her bed and when he holds her hand, she sighs and exhales.
Draco manages to unlock the door after three minutes of verbal coercion and gentle pleading for her to open the door. She's sitting at her favourite table on the terrace, legs tucked underneath her and hands folded in her lap, staring into the dense, grey mist. Her eyes are bloodshot, but she looks as pretty as she did yesterday and the day before that and the day before that. Her grief is desperate and more palpable with each passing day, like a brick weighing her down until she runs out of oxygen.
He pulls up a chair next to her and sits down, reaching out to hold her hand, fighting through tired eyes. He hasn't slept for days. Fresh tears fall and land on his skin; it burns him, and he wishes he could have been more than this.
Pansy, I'm sorry, he thinks. He apologises over and over but it doesn't come out, conveniently stuck in his throat. He grazes his fingers across her knuckles over and over, and he thinks that maybe the more he does it, the more he'll put colour back into her skin, and she'll be brighter and happier than the day before yesterday. Maybe.
She is slow to look at him but when she does, she forces a smile that's hypnotic yet lacking a sparkle, no emotion fusing her moods together. There is nothing but a distant sadness in her expression, but she insists that she's fine, just fine, I'm fine, Draco. Pretending. And then he looks away and when he does, like the sudden flick of a light switch or a wand, she grips his hand tighter and she cries until she's nearly breathless.
"They said it was a boy ..." And she repeats this until her voice fades, until she becomes unresponsive to him and his hand brushing through her hair, in her own world forever, and Draco can no longer look at her without feeling like he's shattered into a million, irreparable, glass pieces.
She sits in his lap, face buried in the crook of his neck, and he holds her hand. She's much smaller than she's supposed to be right now, but it all makes sense now. If there is one thing he knows, he hates doctors, Muggle or magical. They give you hope in the form of potential baby boys or girls and take it right back just because - just because ... He knows better. But for now, the doctors can afford to shoulder the blame; they're too heartstricken to accuse themselves of not amounting to enough.
It's well past midnight, and he continues to walk down the pavement, avoiding couples his age murmuring musical lovenotes to each other, skipping past him. Everyone else is snug in their coats and mittens, and he has on a damp oxford and a scarf wrapped around his neck. He can see his breath - frosty, as he exhales - and he can barely feel anything else, just the cold nipping at his cheeks and the heaviness of his eyelids. He walks and he walks until he stops in front of the building he saw her enter many months ago. He doesn't know why he remembers, why he bothers, why it even matters where she lives and what she does, but he hasn't seen her since they parted after the War despite being aware of her very presence everywhere he goes.
Seeing him standing in front of her, outside of her front door, is neither pleasant nor unpleasant. It just is, and their existence is, in itself, a wonder and a curiosity. She still fancies living on the notion that there is no one else in the world but her; it makes the missing spaces in her life a little more bearable. He mumbles a greeting, and he's shivering, so she steps aside and lets him in, not really knowing what to do. Instead, she makes her way to the kitchen and prepares a tea kettle. She doesn't know what to do with visitors, most especially him.
"How are you?" he asks. It's like they're almost friends, almost ex-lovers finally meeting for the first time after a break-up. It's much more complicated than that. Hermione shrugs, concentrating a little too hard on the kitchen counter.
"I don't have much. I'm sorry."
It doesn't matter. It's her home, but she feels like she needs to apologise for not having anything better than white walls and no heat. She's cold but he looks colder, and she regrets her lack of provisions. She excuses herself for a minute and reappears before him and wraps the blanket she's used all day, every day, around him. He says it smells like limes, that it's oddly nice.
Hermione pours the tea into two chipped teacups and carries it to the table where they both sit across from each other. She looks at him for a long while and says, "It's Harry's."
And he doesn't blink, doesn't look at her, just takes a sip from his cup and nods.
"I know."
Time is unseen in her room. It wraps around, and there's nothing but darkness, and they both prefer it. He's lying down on his back, breathing heavily, and it's the first time he's slept in a while; she sits on the floor and rests her head on the mattress, listening to the synchronicity of their breaths, and it's the first time she's fallen asleep without a light to help her.
When she opens her eyes to darkness, her hand is holding his, and she curls her fingers and refuses to let go. It feels nice, her veins are pulsing, and the familiarity is comforting. He sleeps for half the night or day, and she completes the rest, and it does not go unnoticed that they're taking shifts again. This is how they were, and this is how they are.
He kisses her forehead, trails down to her chin, across her collarbones until she sighs deeply and loosens her grip on his shirt.
They settle into a pattern. They barely talk. They exist as two entities united for something, for each other. Maybe not. He observes her, though doesn't mean to. She moves around and eats to sustain herself, and there is little pleasure in her eyes. Every day is a struggle, sometimes getting better, sometimes getting worse. Her mood fluctuates frequently from extreme sadness to extreme madness, and he likes it better when she settles somewhere in the middle of functionally sane. And she's always outstretching her arm, reaching for something or something that isn't there. She has rituals, including leaving the lights on sometimes, or making tea or food for two people even after he says he's not hungry, and he knows it's not for him.
She observes him, wary but slowly accepting of his presence. She still thinks it odd how they came to be like this. Together but still separate. When they're outside, she notices him looking sadly at children who cross them, who sometimes smile at them when they walk past. And sometimes he turns inside himself, lashes out at unassuming little boys who get in his way. Sometimes he drags her to carnivals in towns like this one and buys three balloons. That's all, nothing more and nothing less. He always buys for three, like the number constantly haunts him or needs to be with him.
One day she comes into her flat and finds him sitting at her table in the same manner she adopts when she's there. In this room, there's a pressing need to be alone, and it's consuming and peaceful but not. She likes to believe there are spirits in the room. She doesn't say anything, simply walks up to him from behind and innocently presses her lips to his crown, finally retreating into the safety net of her bedroom.
"I have a kid."
"How old?"
"He isn't."
And she understands.
When she walks into the bedroom, they're asleep. Draco sleeps on his back and Harry on his stomach with his face turned to the side, arm hanging off the mattress. She changes out of her clothes and into a familiar shirt that's two sizes too big for her, and she crawls in between them. She likes the feeling of three that evens out like symmetry cut down the middle.
Draco is alert and opens his eyes, briefly looking beside him. His eyes grow accustomed to the darkness, and he sees Hermione on her side, her bare legs touching his trouser-clad ones, and her right hand is clutching tightly at air. He nudges her awake until she shifts and looks over her shoulder at him.
"You have too much space on the other -
And before he can finish, she's turned over with minimal effort and cries into his shirt.
"Sometimes I see him."
"You see him all the time."
"He's alive."
He nods. "Just not here."
It sometimes feels like they're eighteen again with one less person:
Someone is always outside, awake and watching, and the other two are inside and huddled underneath the same covers. Neither of them can really sleep; they either worry for each other and mostly for the other on guard. And they take turns until it starts all over again. Out there, at least one person is killed every night, so they depend on each other like they're safety nets, blocking out the screams and the chaos with their own sounds and song until everything else becomes nothing more than background noise.