She measures her life in cups of coffee [PG-13] for pencil_gal
Title: She measures her life in cups of coffee (three sugars, no cream).
Author/Artist: dysenchanted2
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Sadly the characters are not mine.
Warnings: Character Death
Summary: She fought in the first war because she believed in it-back when she still believed in things like truth and goodness and love. She fights in the second war to survive.
Notes: I hope you enjoy it! It’s been a tough ride. I know it might be a bit confusing, but it’s meant to be like that; hopefully the pieces will have fallen together by the end. I tried my best to incorporate the prompts. Thanks to the mods for being so patient!
She measures her life in cups of coffee
(three sugars, no cream)
BEFORE
She falls in love with an idea first (magic: unreal and intangible and yet she feels it around her, touches it, smells it, tastes it; it lives inside of her for eleven years and she has no idea, no fucking clue until one day it explodes out of her-sometimes Hermione wonders if she could call her life before magic living).
--
you never forget your first love
--
Hermione stands on the platform saying goodbye to the Muggle world six times. Her mother packs up a trunk full of clothes and books and love. She is small in the distance, disappearing into the wind. Hermione closes her eyes. The train pulls out of the station. The noise dims.
(Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye).
--
The train stays the same. She counts on the soft benches, the creak of the compartment doors, the squeak of the trolley; Harry and Ron, she counts on them, too (but in a different way). When it rains, she fogs up the window with her breath, counts the number of people that pass by their compartment, reads the last chapter of her books first. She keeps these habits hidden (because for a long time she thinks they are things to be embarrassed by, and there is already too much ammunition for all the other children).
In the woods, she counts the stars. Stares up at the bright moon above and pretends she can still fog up the window of a train compartment. Magic feeds her imagination; the possibility of everything lives inside her. At the same time, she loses something (the innocence needed to pretend everything will be alright disappears from underneath her).
Hermione becomes a different person when she emerges from the forest.
--
--
007
Hermione Granger hates Draco Malfoy. (correction: hated).
Nowadays it’s more of an indifference. She notes this when he makes the papers: Is Malfoy the true savior in this war? A subscriber from Hogsmeade writes: He funds our efforts against the enemy, so of course he must be--(this is where she stops reading)
She never forgives him (on the record) and when the new reporters show up for her quote, she tells it like it is: racist millionaire boy selling himself for personal gain.
Later, when he saves her life and breaks her wand (when he does this all in some grandly heroic gesture), she decides indifference isn't enough, so she chooses to hate him again.
--
014
Between the first war and the second war, Malfoy finds her. She buys a flat in Paris, eats baguettes and drinks coffee (three sugars, no cream), and speaks French like it is her mother tongue.
She presses the telegram he brings into her handbag and gives him a wry glance before walking away. Three days later, the second war starts (Paris is bombed first).
Malfoy is in Switzerland when it happens, pressing another telegram into someone else’s hand.
--
016
Her mother dies the next spring. (Three-hundred-and-twenty-two blown to pieces in central London). The second wave of bombings hit home with no warning. The train ride back home feels like childhood. Hermione packs light: a black dress and a toothbrush and a broken heart.
It is a quiet funeral. There is no rain (no tears).
She walks away feeling emptier than ever.
--
011
Ginny shows up in Paris the summer between the wars. They eat croissants and drink cafés and act snobby in restaurants. (Hermione’s forgotten the feel of having a friend, the sound of English against her tongue, it is wonderful).
Later, Ginny cries in her arms, confesses she suspects Harry is having an affair and then cries some more. She comforts the other girl the best she can.
Ginny is finally discovering what Hermione had realized years ago:
(Loving someone doesn’t stop the sky from falling, doesn’t stop them from turning away, doesn’t stop pain or hatred or insecurity, doesn’t stop the wars from coming, doesn’t stop their lies from breaking your heart, and it certainly does not stop the man you love from being crushed like a bug beneath a pile of rubble that you are not meant for but wished upon yourself after).
Hermione does not say any of this.
--
005
After the first two years, she finds herself believing there can be peace (compromise, resolution). The death toll is not high yet, and she thinks it could stop. The world is a tape recorder; just pause and rewind to the day before it starts.
(Or the day before that).
The war starts for too many reasons. She counts to ten in her head but it is not enough. Exposure of magic, one careless person leads to two, leads to three and four, leads to hundreds and thousands, and suddenly the muggle world wasn’t safe. It starts with one day and one stone and one angry person, and builds and builds until Ron’s flat becomes debris.
Then more important people start dying. Speeches are made. Troops are rallied. Wands drawn.
And still, she believes there is hope.
--
004
Two springs before her mother’s death, a tree falls in their front yard.
(She does not know it then, but it is a sign; later, she wills herself to believe in divination again).
Hermione fixes Nature-props the tree back up (magic thrums through her with excitement).
It doesn’t work. The tree dies in fall; wilts as its leaves turn red, wilts as they turn brown, wilts until it cannot wilt anymore.
She sprays a hand upon the trunk and listens to its last breath.
--
022
It snows on the last day of December. It takes her three hours to hook her fireplace into the floo network. Ten minutes later, the fireplace glows red, then green (like Christmas lights in the distance), and she stirs her coffee in anticipation (three sugars, no cream).
Malfoy appears in sooty boots and a sooty coat. “Mind the carpet”, she scolds. He smirks an infuriating smirk as ash gathers in his footsteps.
He presses a telegram into her hand, and she takes it without a word.
“What no kiss?”
She tilts her head up and stares at him, scrutinizing his every feature.
“It’s New Year’s Eve, Granger. I thought you enjoyed traditions.”
At her silence he softens. “You can’t always be the strong one. Sometimes you need someone to take care of you.” She turns away; it is too painful to look at him when he is saying the truth. “Not that I’m offering, or anything.”
“Not that you’re offering,” she echoes in response.
In the end he leaves (does nothing) even though her heart is drumming a song against her ribcage. She remembers the warmth of Harry and Ron around her at Christmastime as she opened presents before a roaring fire; she does not want to think of the days before that (or the ones after). She’s not cut out for this type of life, this type of loneliness.
(But it’s okay because she figures out in the world, there is one less lonely girl waiting for no one to show up on her doorstep and give her the happy ending she deserves).
--
002
She kills a man on the twenty-seventh of April.
--
001
Five days after the start of the first war, she finds Ron’s body. Even under a thick pile of rubble she feels the residue of his magic.
When they pull out the crushed, disfigured body, she turns away (tries hard to conjure up the last image of him kissing her goodbye instead). It’s funny how one singular event can spark an entire war. It’s a tiny speck, smaller even, out of all the lives lost in that first war.
(But it is important to me).
They bury him later. Harry will give a speech at the funeral. Heads will turn, crowds will cry.
Hermione is on a train to Italy when it happens, fighting in the only way she can.
--
010
Tension bubbles underneath the surface. The world scrambles to become normal again, to return to the pre-war days and forget the post-war ones. It fails miserably (she sees it failing out of the corner of her eyes). She tries to tell Harry this on three different occasions.
On her third try, they part with bitter words, ones that still burn against her skin.
“You of all people should know, Harry. This isn’t over. Just like the war against Voldemort wasn’t over when your parents died.”
“DON’T SAY THAT NAME!” he roars back.
He apologizes after. Says he understands (pretends it at least), but it does not matter. She can’t look at him in the same way.
She quits her job a week later.
It’s a spur of the moment thing-completely un-Hermione like.
And then, she does something so unexpected it changes every preconception of her: She moves to Paris.
--
003
The Italian gives her the information she needs (but she still kills him; the first time, the man she allows to go led to an ambush she barely survived. Even with a shaky arm, Hermione knows not to make the same mistake twice). There’s something that comes with the willingness to go all the way, to say those spells; something beautiful and horrific. It’s different after-the way her wand sits in her hand.
She does not have time to dwell on it.
Soon the second kill comes (and the third and the fourth and the fifth) and then she’s too busy trying to stay alive to keep counting. When she’s back in the comfort of her London flat, she can’t help but think of the way the light glowed against his face. Bombs go off in the night, miles away (boom, boom, boom). She misses when sirens didn’t fill the streets.
(She misses a lot of things).
--
020
This is how it happens: three minutes and twenty seconds after she leaves London behind, the assistant to the assistant of the German Ambassador to England dies (missing are the three dozen classified files in his possession).
It takes the technicians twenty days to figure out that the arson was in fact arson, thirty days to recreate the broken residues of a magical imprint off the scene of the crime, and never to catch her.
When she returns to London two months later, it is all over the news:
Former Gryffindor Charged With Murder.
Lavender Brown’s grin-less face sneers up at her on the cover.
Somehow, Hermione can’t find it in her to feel guilt.
--
018
Harry pulls strings to get her out of prison twice. It is the type of deeply corrupt action that they both would have hated once upon a time.
Hermione has no pretenses about morality-not anymore.
The last cigarette remains on the table between them (so close and yet so far).
It’s not the same without you, Ron.
She takes it; takes everything that’s left, and lets it burn (ash, cinder, smoke).
--
021
Malfoy kisses her in autumn.
Three-hundred-and-sixty-five-days in a single year and he chooses the anniversary of her boyfriend’s death.
Hermione’s not surprised. Draco Malfoy has always been an asshole.
--
024
The body count rises yet again. She keeps track, the clippings of each casualty tacked to the wall of her study (a mural of deaths).
It reminds her of why this war must end.
(On some days, she forgets this, the booms become like a heartbeat, necessities; on some days she forgets what it’s like to not live in fear, to not wait for assignments on tiny slips of paper: places to be, people to kill, possessions to steal).
It never lasts because she has been ready for the war to be over for the past five years (even when she was waiting for it to begin she was ready for it to end).
The blizzard rages on outside the alliance’s cottage in Poland.
Perhaps things will change in the new year.
(Perhaps).
--
019
There is an affair. Not physical, never consummated, or touched. But there is an affair nonetheless; Harry and Lavender Brown meet three times a week in a coffee shop in the middle of nowhere. They do this for four fucking years and Hermione lets it go; until one day Lavender Brown kills Luna Lovegood in Florence.
Later, when Hermione is scattering the bits and pieces of magic she found at Harry’s loft, she convinces herself she’s doing this for Ginny and Luna. (In reality, it’s for all the people who are killed, for all those who aren’t, for herself, and mostly, for Ron).
Harry breaks her heart the day Ginny confesses his sins.
Hermione misses Ron more than ever.
--
017
They find Malfoy in Germany.
It takes Hermione five weeks and blackmail to get him out of jail.
“This is the last straw,” she says as she places a cup in front of him (coffee, three sugars, no cream).
“You’ve forgotten, sweetheart, that not everyone likes their coffee the way you do.”
The next time he gets caught, she lets him rot in jail for an extra week.
--
023
She fought in the first war because she believed in it-back when she still believed in things like truth and goodness and love. She fights in the second war to survive.
--
006
If Hermione closes her eyes, sometimes she can almost find the feeling again; the sense of love and awe and happiness-everything that came when she discovered something special inside her.
Years later, when Draco Malfoy rips her wand (her second wand) out of her hands and snaps it in half, she’ll feel a painful crunch inside-a part of her is destroyed with it.
--
027
“I fucking love you,” he confesses over a cup of coffee.
She tips her cup, lets the rest of the hot coffee burn her throat and wishes it would take her voice away.
--
009
The war ends in September (it feels like a strange birthday gift when a war you thought would last forever suddenly stops).
There is a faux treaty-compromises, agreements, pretenses; false hope, she calls it. The world makes her a promise on her birthday that she is sure it will not keep.
The animosity between magical and non-magical crackles in the air around her.
(She’s learned from that first war, seen so many things, done so many things, and so she knows: this is not the end).
--
012
The alliance starts on a cold winter’s night (when it was difficult to tell who was an ally and who was an enemy). Hermione doesn’t trust Malfoy-never has and she doubts she ever will, but the others do, and for now that is enough.
In the background, she hears the sirens of air raids, feels London tremble beneath her feet, before she is pulled back into the present (after all, no one is bombing Poland-not yet).
The Russian boy speaks quickly in his haste and Hermione barely understands two words (squints hard to remember that she is fluent in five languages without magic and hundreds with it). When he leaves, she leans against Luna’s shoulder and wonders if this war would ever end.
Malfoy’s cool voice drifts into her mind, “So, tomorrow morning? France. We’ll have to head to France. They’re striking Lyon next.”
Paris. At least it isn’t Paris again.
It is a cruel thought and she is ashamed to have thought of it, but the moment passes and she finds herself wishing harder-for what? She’s not sure.
--
025
She kisses the corner of Harry’s lips before she boards the plane. The second war is finally ending. (She misses the warmth in his eyes, the honesty, the belief-she once could trust the world in those eyes and now… she’s not sure of anything anymore).
Ginny wraps an arm around Hermione’s shoulder and pulls her down into a hug. “I’ll write,” she promises as the air is swept from her lungs, even as she realizes these are false words, false promises. “I’ll write you.” Ginny smiles at her like she knows the words are not true.
Her heart thumps with anticipation. Boom. Boom. Boom.
In Paris, Draco Malfoy receives a telegram for the first time, her name curled against his fingers, and then sets out to meet her.
--
015
There is a party before the alliance members head off for their assignments. A chance to drink their last hurrahs away-the war looms in the distance threatening to explode. It is a dangerous kind of gathering, perhaps the stupidest thing they’ve ever done, but they are protected by blood magic (dark magic), and it is disgraceful and idiotic at the same time; yet, she cannot bring herself to care.
Later, she’ll stumble out into the night air with Malfoy and pretend as if she’s not drunk at all. (I don’t hate you even though I do, she thinks. What does this mean, Malfoy? Can you tell me what it means?)
When they are halfway down the streets, she stops abruptly, catches her breath while the cold April air whips around them. “So tell me,” she says, too drunk to remember she should hate him, “how exactly do I like my coffee?”
Malfoy stops, raises an eyebrow, then proceeds walking away. Hermione races up after him, all giggles (later, she’ll blame this moment on her drunken state), and tucks an arm around his.
“Granger, you’re completely sotted.”
“No, I do not think that is true at all, you ridiculous little man.” (And if this were the actual sentence that came out of her mouth instead of handful of gibberish, he almost might have believed her).
They walk two miles as she leans against his shoulder.
She’s closing the door to her cottage when she hears it: words against his mouth. “Three sugars, no cream.”
“What?” she screeches in response (it is one reason she doesn’t like drinking). The volume of her voice becomes abnormally high when inebriated, and it’s too much like Lavender and Parvarti’s shrill shrieks from those years (the ones she tried hard not to remember because they were too good-you can’t live in the past forever, Hermione; she reminds herself to forget).
“It’s how you take your coffee, Granger.” His lips are dangerously close to her ears, and if she weren’t half drunk, she would know what this feeling thumping against her chest means. “Three sugars, no cream. That ridiculous sweet tooth of yours.”
She smiles against his shirt-I will never smile against your shirt again like I am doing in this moment.
(Sometimes she wonders if things were different, maybe she would’ve… it always passes).
--
028
Life isn’t supposed to make you live through two wars (live through the pain and the damage and the death and destruction). All this hurt bubbling up inside, it can drive a person mad.
At night, she dreams about the war ending (even when it’s over). And sometimes of Ron, too. Her worst fear is forgetting him; the way his lips curled when he smiled, the smooth tone of his laughter, the way he hated coffee and loved tea, the way he said her name-Hermione, Hermione, Hermione-just to say it.
It was always easier during the war; more to think about, less to remember.
--
026
Somewhere in Paris a plane lands.
(The war ends, people cheer, soldiers return home, there are banners and parties and parades, tears and happiness, reunions, kisses, words, lots of words coming from each direction, there is dancing, there is singing, celebrations, weddings and funerals (all at the same time), there is life as usual, there is life shaken, changed, there is hope (always hope); he runs down the street, past each of these things, each of these emotions, he runs and runs and runs, holds his breath until he sees her).
Somewhere in Paris her plane landed.
--
029
“I won’t ever love you.”
“I know.”
“Not like you want me to.”
“I know.”
“This isn’t a good idea.”
“I know.”
“You don’t actually love me.” (You can’t say things just because I’m the only one left).
“I know,” his voice is soft, but firm; his fingers reach out to touch her cheek. “Now will you just let me kiss you?”
“Okay.”
--
013
Why can’t anyone else see this?
She’s a young child, the only one who can see things, hear things, know things about people, places, events, impossibilities. She holds it all inside of her, believes in them, knows they are real. (But no one else believes; the older kids point and the younger kids laugh and she sits alone at lunch every day for three years before the letter arrives).
The same feeling returns after the first war. She wonders how everyone in the world can simply walk and forget (not see that elephant in every single room, filling every single space). How can they all move so easily, so freely, when she is suffocating on the inside?
The alliance helps, but not much; it is the only spark of hope she has, but even she knows thirty in a billion cannot change things (not at first). There is a second storm brewing in the distance and only thirty who see it.
The ghost of the past lingers in the streets (follows her down crowded hallways and empty spaces). She feels his breath sometimes in the night (Ron, Ron… he does not want her to forget this).
The world is slowly crumbling. She’s not going to let it happen. Not again.
--
008
On the record: he buys her a new wand later. The purchase (each and every zero) is scribbled carefully inside a receipt book somewhere.
Off the record: it works perfectly fine, and yet she still feels as if her arm had been amputated. She doesn’t sleep much during the second war because of this, reaches out to grab her wand, and feels only air instead.
Something she’d never say: she does forgive him, even if all the heroics were for publicity and personal gain. She forgives him because later on, she sinks into the same corruption, she forgives him because she has to (otherwise how could she ever forgive herself?)
--
030
In the end, she doesn’t push him away.
She lets him linger in her house, in her heart, in her soul.
(In a fucked up world, somehow they survive two wars-count that, ONE and TWO-and somehow he understands because he spends six years going from country to country delivering telegrams while she sits and dreads them).
“I know,” he mutters against her hair, against her heart, against her soul.
What he means is this: I know how you feel because I kept clippings of the war on my office wall, because I remembered hope and I felt nothing, because I got caught on purpose in Germany (just to get caught), because I had a death wish (ten death wishes) but I survived them all, because everyone else in the alliance is gone (dead or missing or buried, and none of those three words mean the same thing), because I woke up one day and realized I could trust no one (not even the ones writing the messages) but knew I had to trust them because there was no one else left, because the moment the first war ended I knew there would be a second one and it made me cry for the world, because I hated you and loved you and then hated you some more, because I still have nightmares about the war (but not just that, about Voldemort, about magic, about people I killed, about people I should have killed, about the ones who escaped, about the ones I saved, about anything and everything), because I hate coffee with sugar and you love it and when you place the mug in front of me I still drink, because I’m scared as hell that the real world is rolling around, because I’ve forgotten how to live when there isn’t war, because it’s three sugars and no cream and it will always be that whether you ask me when I’m drunk or when I’m sober, because I’ve lost it all, all except for this little sliver of something that twinges in my heart when I walk through that door and see you standing there looking at me like I’m crazy.
What he means to say is: I really fucking love you.
(He lies a little, but then so does she).
ferretbush_post is the account the mods use to post the gifts. It has not authored or created any of the gifts.
Author/Artist: dysenchanted2
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Sadly the characters are not mine.
Warnings: Character Death
Summary: She fought in the first war because she believed in it-back when she still believed in things like truth and goodness and love. She fights in the second war to survive.
Notes: I hope you enjoy it! It’s been a tough ride. I know it might be a bit confusing, but it’s meant to be like that; hopefully the pieces will have fallen together by the end. I tried my best to incorporate the prompts. Thanks to the mods for being so patient!
She measures her life in cups of coffee
(three sugars, no cream)
BEFORE
She falls in love with an idea first (magic: unreal and intangible and yet she feels it around her, touches it, smells it, tastes it; it lives inside of her for eleven years and she has no idea, no fucking clue until one day it explodes out of her-sometimes Hermione wonders if she could call her life before magic living).
--
you never forget your first love
--
Hermione stands on the platform saying goodbye to the Muggle world six times. Her mother packs up a trunk full of clothes and books and love. She is small in the distance, disappearing into the wind. Hermione closes her eyes. The train pulls out of the station. The noise dims.
(Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye).
--
The train stays the same. She counts on the soft benches, the creak of the compartment doors, the squeak of the trolley; Harry and Ron, she counts on them, too (but in a different way). When it rains, she fogs up the window with her breath, counts the number of people that pass by their compartment, reads the last chapter of her books first. She keeps these habits hidden (because for a long time she thinks they are things to be embarrassed by, and there is already too much ammunition for all the other children).
In the woods, she counts the stars. Stares up at the bright moon above and pretends she can still fog up the window of a train compartment. Magic feeds her imagination; the possibility of everything lives inside her. At the same time, she loses something (the innocence needed to pretend everything will be alright disappears from underneath her).
Hermione becomes a different person when she emerges from the forest.
--
--
007
Hermione Granger hates Draco Malfoy. (correction: hated).
Nowadays it’s more of an indifference. She notes this when he makes the papers: Is Malfoy the true savior in this war? A subscriber from Hogsmeade writes: He funds our efforts against the enemy, so of course he must be--(this is where she stops reading)
She never forgives him (on the record) and when the new reporters show up for her quote, she tells it like it is: racist millionaire boy selling himself for personal gain.
Later, when he saves her life and breaks her wand (when he does this all in some grandly heroic gesture), she decides indifference isn't enough, so she chooses to hate him again.
--
014
Between the first war and the second war, Malfoy finds her. She buys a flat in Paris, eats baguettes and drinks coffee (three sugars, no cream), and speaks French like it is her mother tongue.
She presses the telegram he brings into her handbag and gives him a wry glance before walking away. Three days later, the second war starts (Paris is bombed first).
Malfoy is in Switzerland when it happens, pressing another telegram into someone else’s hand.
--
016
Her mother dies the next spring. (Three-hundred-and-twenty-two blown to pieces in central London). The second wave of bombings hit home with no warning. The train ride back home feels like childhood. Hermione packs light: a black dress and a toothbrush and a broken heart.
It is a quiet funeral. There is no rain (no tears).
She walks away feeling emptier than ever.
--
011
Ginny shows up in Paris the summer between the wars. They eat croissants and drink cafés and act snobby in restaurants. (Hermione’s forgotten the feel of having a friend, the sound of English against her tongue, it is wonderful).
Later, Ginny cries in her arms, confesses she suspects Harry is having an affair and then cries some more. She comforts the other girl the best she can.
Ginny is finally discovering what Hermione had realized years ago:
(Loving someone doesn’t stop the sky from falling, doesn’t stop them from turning away, doesn’t stop pain or hatred or insecurity, doesn’t stop the wars from coming, doesn’t stop their lies from breaking your heart, and it certainly does not stop the man you love from being crushed like a bug beneath a pile of rubble that you are not meant for but wished upon yourself after).
Hermione does not say any of this.
--
005
After the first two years, she finds herself believing there can be peace (compromise, resolution). The death toll is not high yet, and she thinks it could stop. The world is a tape recorder; just pause and rewind to the day before it starts.
(Or the day before that).
The war starts for too many reasons. She counts to ten in her head but it is not enough. Exposure of magic, one careless person leads to two, leads to three and four, leads to hundreds and thousands, and suddenly the muggle world wasn’t safe. It starts with one day and one stone and one angry person, and builds and builds until Ron’s flat becomes debris.
Then more important people start dying. Speeches are made. Troops are rallied. Wands drawn.
And still, she believes there is hope.
--
004
Two springs before her mother’s death, a tree falls in their front yard.
(She does not know it then, but it is a sign; later, she wills herself to believe in divination again).
Hermione fixes Nature-props the tree back up (magic thrums through her with excitement).
It doesn’t work. The tree dies in fall; wilts as its leaves turn red, wilts as they turn brown, wilts until it cannot wilt anymore.
She sprays a hand upon the trunk and listens to its last breath.
--
022
It snows on the last day of December. It takes her three hours to hook her fireplace into the floo network. Ten minutes later, the fireplace glows red, then green (like Christmas lights in the distance), and she stirs her coffee in anticipation (three sugars, no cream).
Malfoy appears in sooty boots and a sooty coat. “Mind the carpet”, she scolds. He smirks an infuriating smirk as ash gathers in his footsteps.
He presses a telegram into her hand, and she takes it without a word.
“What no kiss?”
She tilts her head up and stares at him, scrutinizing his every feature.
“It’s New Year’s Eve, Granger. I thought you enjoyed traditions.”
At her silence he softens. “You can’t always be the strong one. Sometimes you need someone to take care of you.” She turns away; it is too painful to look at him when he is saying the truth. “Not that I’m offering, or anything.”
“Not that you’re offering,” she echoes in response.
In the end he leaves (does nothing) even though her heart is drumming a song against her ribcage. She remembers the warmth of Harry and Ron around her at Christmastime as she opened presents before a roaring fire; she does not want to think of the days before that (or the ones after). She’s not cut out for this type of life, this type of loneliness.
(But it’s okay because she figures out in the world, there is one less lonely girl waiting for no one to show up on her doorstep and give her the happy ending she deserves).
--
002
She kills a man on the twenty-seventh of April.
--
001
Five days after the start of the first war, she finds Ron’s body. Even under a thick pile of rubble she feels the residue of his magic.
When they pull out the crushed, disfigured body, she turns away (tries hard to conjure up the last image of him kissing her goodbye instead). It’s funny how one singular event can spark an entire war. It’s a tiny speck, smaller even, out of all the lives lost in that first war.
(But it is important to me).
They bury him later. Harry will give a speech at the funeral. Heads will turn, crowds will cry.
Hermione is on a train to Italy when it happens, fighting in the only way she can.
--
010
Tension bubbles underneath the surface. The world scrambles to become normal again, to return to the pre-war days and forget the post-war ones. It fails miserably (she sees it failing out of the corner of her eyes). She tries to tell Harry this on three different occasions.
On her third try, they part with bitter words, ones that still burn against her skin.
“You of all people should know, Harry. This isn’t over. Just like the war against Voldemort wasn’t over when your parents died.”
“DON’T SAY THAT NAME!” he roars back.
He apologizes after. Says he understands (pretends it at least), but it does not matter. She can’t look at him in the same way.
She quits her job a week later.
It’s a spur of the moment thing-completely un-Hermione like.
And then, she does something so unexpected it changes every preconception of her: She moves to Paris.
--
003
The Italian gives her the information she needs (but she still kills him; the first time, the man she allows to go led to an ambush she barely survived. Even with a shaky arm, Hermione knows not to make the same mistake twice). There’s something that comes with the willingness to go all the way, to say those spells; something beautiful and horrific. It’s different after-the way her wand sits in her hand.
She does not have time to dwell on it.
Soon the second kill comes (and the third and the fourth and the fifth) and then she’s too busy trying to stay alive to keep counting. When she’s back in the comfort of her London flat, she can’t help but think of the way the light glowed against his face. Bombs go off in the night, miles away (boom, boom, boom). She misses when sirens didn’t fill the streets.
(She misses a lot of things).
--
020
This is how it happens: three minutes and twenty seconds after she leaves London behind, the assistant to the assistant of the German Ambassador to England dies (missing are the three dozen classified files in his possession).
It takes the technicians twenty days to figure out that the arson was in fact arson, thirty days to recreate the broken residues of a magical imprint off the scene of the crime, and never to catch her.
When she returns to London two months later, it is all over the news:
Former Gryffindor Charged With Murder.
Lavender Brown’s grin-less face sneers up at her on the cover.
Somehow, Hermione can’t find it in her to feel guilt.
--
018
Harry pulls strings to get her out of prison twice. It is the type of deeply corrupt action that they both would have hated once upon a time.
Hermione has no pretenses about morality-not anymore.
The last cigarette remains on the table between them (so close and yet so far).
It’s not the same without you, Ron.
She takes it; takes everything that’s left, and lets it burn (ash, cinder, smoke).
--
021
Malfoy kisses her in autumn.
Three-hundred-and-sixty-five-days in a single year and he chooses the anniversary of her boyfriend’s death.
Hermione’s not surprised. Draco Malfoy has always been an asshole.
--
024
The body count rises yet again. She keeps track, the clippings of each casualty tacked to the wall of her study (a mural of deaths).
It reminds her of why this war must end.
(On some days, she forgets this, the booms become like a heartbeat, necessities; on some days she forgets what it’s like to not live in fear, to not wait for assignments on tiny slips of paper: places to be, people to kill, possessions to steal).
It never lasts because she has been ready for the war to be over for the past five years (even when she was waiting for it to begin she was ready for it to end).
The blizzard rages on outside the alliance’s cottage in Poland.
Perhaps things will change in the new year.
(Perhaps).
--
019
There is an affair. Not physical, never consummated, or touched. But there is an affair nonetheless; Harry and Lavender Brown meet three times a week in a coffee shop in the middle of nowhere. They do this for four fucking years and Hermione lets it go; until one day Lavender Brown kills Luna Lovegood in Florence.
Later, when Hermione is scattering the bits and pieces of magic she found at Harry’s loft, she convinces herself she’s doing this for Ginny and Luna. (In reality, it’s for all the people who are killed, for all those who aren’t, for herself, and mostly, for Ron).
Harry breaks her heart the day Ginny confesses his sins.
Hermione misses Ron more than ever.
--
017
They find Malfoy in Germany.
It takes Hermione five weeks and blackmail to get him out of jail.
“This is the last straw,” she says as she places a cup in front of him (coffee, three sugars, no cream).
“You’ve forgotten, sweetheart, that not everyone likes their coffee the way you do.”
The next time he gets caught, she lets him rot in jail for an extra week.
--
023
She fought in the first war because she believed in it-back when she still believed in things like truth and goodness and love. She fights in the second war to survive.
--
006
If Hermione closes her eyes, sometimes she can almost find the feeling again; the sense of love and awe and happiness-everything that came when she discovered something special inside her.
Years later, when Draco Malfoy rips her wand (her second wand) out of her hands and snaps it in half, she’ll feel a painful crunch inside-a part of her is destroyed with it.
--
027
“I fucking love you,” he confesses over a cup of coffee.
She tips her cup, lets the rest of the hot coffee burn her throat and wishes it would take her voice away.
--
009
The war ends in September (it feels like a strange birthday gift when a war you thought would last forever suddenly stops).
There is a faux treaty-compromises, agreements, pretenses; false hope, she calls it. The world makes her a promise on her birthday that she is sure it will not keep.
The animosity between magical and non-magical crackles in the air around her.
(She’s learned from that first war, seen so many things, done so many things, and so she knows: this is not the end).
--
012
The alliance starts on a cold winter’s night (when it was difficult to tell who was an ally and who was an enemy). Hermione doesn’t trust Malfoy-never has and she doubts she ever will, but the others do, and for now that is enough.
In the background, she hears the sirens of air raids, feels London tremble beneath her feet, before she is pulled back into the present (after all, no one is bombing Poland-not yet).
The Russian boy speaks quickly in his haste and Hermione barely understands two words (squints hard to remember that she is fluent in five languages without magic and hundreds with it). When he leaves, she leans against Luna’s shoulder and wonders if this war would ever end.
Malfoy’s cool voice drifts into her mind, “So, tomorrow morning? France. We’ll have to head to France. They’re striking Lyon next.”
Paris. At least it isn’t Paris again.
It is a cruel thought and she is ashamed to have thought of it, but the moment passes and she finds herself wishing harder-for what? She’s not sure.
--
025
She kisses the corner of Harry’s lips before she boards the plane. The second war is finally ending. (She misses the warmth in his eyes, the honesty, the belief-she once could trust the world in those eyes and now… she’s not sure of anything anymore).
Ginny wraps an arm around Hermione’s shoulder and pulls her down into a hug. “I’ll write,” she promises as the air is swept from her lungs, even as she realizes these are false words, false promises. “I’ll write you.” Ginny smiles at her like she knows the words are not true.
Her heart thumps with anticipation. Boom. Boom. Boom.
In Paris, Draco Malfoy receives a telegram for the first time, her name curled against his fingers, and then sets out to meet her.
--
015
There is a party before the alliance members head off for their assignments. A chance to drink their last hurrahs away-the war looms in the distance threatening to explode. It is a dangerous kind of gathering, perhaps the stupidest thing they’ve ever done, but they are protected by blood magic (dark magic), and it is disgraceful and idiotic at the same time; yet, she cannot bring herself to care.
Later, she’ll stumble out into the night air with Malfoy and pretend as if she’s not drunk at all. (I don’t hate you even though I do, she thinks. What does this mean, Malfoy? Can you tell me what it means?)
When they are halfway down the streets, she stops abruptly, catches her breath while the cold April air whips around them. “So tell me,” she says, too drunk to remember she should hate him, “how exactly do I like my coffee?”
Malfoy stops, raises an eyebrow, then proceeds walking away. Hermione races up after him, all giggles (later, she’ll blame this moment on her drunken state), and tucks an arm around his.
“Granger, you’re completely sotted.”
“No, I do not think that is true at all, you ridiculous little man.” (And if this were the actual sentence that came out of her mouth instead of handful of gibberish, he almost might have believed her).
They walk two miles as she leans against his shoulder.
She’s closing the door to her cottage when she hears it: words against his mouth. “Three sugars, no cream.”
“What?” she screeches in response (it is one reason she doesn’t like drinking). The volume of her voice becomes abnormally high when inebriated, and it’s too much like Lavender and Parvarti’s shrill shrieks from those years (the ones she tried hard not to remember because they were too good-you can’t live in the past forever, Hermione; she reminds herself to forget).
“It’s how you take your coffee, Granger.” His lips are dangerously close to her ears, and if she weren’t half drunk, she would know what this feeling thumping against her chest means. “Three sugars, no cream. That ridiculous sweet tooth of yours.”
She smiles against his shirt-I will never smile against your shirt again like I am doing in this moment.
(Sometimes she wonders if things were different, maybe she would’ve… it always passes).
--
028
Life isn’t supposed to make you live through two wars (live through the pain and the damage and the death and destruction). All this hurt bubbling up inside, it can drive a person mad.
At night, she dreams about the war ending (even when it’s over). And sometimes of Ron, too. Her worst fear is forgetting him; the way his lips curled when he smiled, the smooth tone of his laughter, the way he hated coffee and loved tea, the way he said her name-Hermione, Hermione, Hermione-just to say it.
It was always easier during the war; more to think about, less to remember.
--
026
Somewhere in Paris a plane lands.
(The war ends, people cheer, soldiers return home, there are banners and parties and parades, tears and happiness, reunions, kisses, words, lots of words coming from each direction, there is dancing, there is singing, celebrations, weddings and funerals (all at the same time), there is life as usual, there is life shaken, changed, there is hope (always hope); he runs down the street, past each of these things, each of these emotions, he runs and runs and runs, holds his breath until he sees her).
Somewhere in Paris her plane landed.
--
029
“I won’t ever love you.”
“I know.”
“Not like you want me to.”
“I know.”
“This isn’t a good idea.”
“I know.”
“You don’t actually love me.” (You can’t say things just because I’m the only one left).
“I know,” his voice is soft, but firm; his fingers reach out to touch her cheek. “Now will you just let me kiss you?”
“Okay.”
--
013
Why can’t anyone else see this?
She’s a young child, the only one who can see things, hear things, know things about people, places, events, impossibilities. She holds it all inside of her, believes in them, knows they are real. (But no one else believes; the older kids point and the younger kids laugh and she sits alone at lunch every day for three years before the letter arrives).
The same feeling returns after the first war. She wonders how everyone in the world can simply walk and forget (not see that elephant in every single room, filling every single space). How can they all move so easily, so freely, when she is suffocating on the inside?
The alliance helps, but not much; it is the only spark of hope she has, but even she knows thirty in a billion cannot change things (not at first). There is a second storm brewing in the distance and only thirty who see it.
The ghost of the past lingers in the streets (follows her down crowded hallways and empty spaces). She feels his breath sometimes in the night (Ron, Ron… he does not want her to forget this).
The world is slowly crumbling. She’s not going to let it happen. Not again.
--
008
On the record: he buys her a new wand later. The purchase (each and every zero) is scribbled carefully inside a receipt book somewhere.
Off the record: it works perfectly fine, and yet she still feels as if her arm had been amputated. She doesn’t sleep much during the second war because of this, reaches out to grab her wand, and feels only air instead.
Something she’d never say: she does forgive him, even if all the heroics were for publicity and personal gain. She forgives him because later on, she sinks into the same corruption, she forgives him because she has to (otherwise how could she ever forgive herself?)
--
030
In the end, she doesn’t push him away.
She lets him linger in her house, in her heart, in her soul.
(In a fucked up world, somehow they survive two wars-count that, ONE and TWO-and somehow he understands because he spends six years going from country to country delivering telegrams while she sits and dreads them).
“I know,” he mutters against her hair, against her heart, against her soul.
What he means is this: I know how you feel because I kept clippings of the war on my office wall, because I remembered hope and I felt nothing, because I got caught on purpose in Germany (just to get caught), because I had a death wish (ten death wishes) but I survived them all, because everyone else in the alliance is gone (dead or missing or buried, and none of those three words mean the same thing), because I woke up one day and realized I could trust no one (not even the ones writing the messages) but knew I had to trust them because there was no one else left, because the moment the first war ended I knew there would be a second one and it made me cry for the world, because I hated you and loved you and then hated you some more, because I still have nightmares about the war (but not just that, about Voldemort, about magic, about people I killed, about people I should have killed, about the ones who escaped, about the ones I saved, about anything and everything), because I hate coffee with sugar and you love it and when you place the mug in front of me I still drink, because I’m scared as hell that the real world is rolling around, because I’ve forgotten how to live when there isn’t war, because it’s three sugars and no cream and it will always be that whether you ask me when I’m drunk or when I’m sober, because I’ve lost it all, all except for this little sliver of something that twinges in my heart when I walk through that door and see you standing there looking at me like I’m crazy.
What he means to say is: I really fucking love you.
(He lies a little, but then so does she).
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