Harry Potter Fic: when we were young (and ageless) 3/5
notes: For anythingbutgrey. You’re most definitely responsible for this. ♥
when we were young (and ageless)
harry potter ; harry/hermione ; 3,670 words ; unrated
they say it’s just that simple. nobody comes and asks them: if the kids are just alright. spoilers for the deathly hallows. au.
-
3
The photos are hidden in a book. Harry takes the bag from her hand and passes her a bit of bread they took from one of the shops in the last village.
“Notice,” he says carefully, “how neither you nor I have used any bit of real magic - other then, well, the obvious.”
Hermione blinks. “Of course.”
She doesn’t really eat the bread either. Crumbs brush back over her fingers, against her skin and into the grass as they wall. There are too many dead leaves. Fall, she thinks. Spring, she corrects herself. They are neither here nor there; she supposes she’s lost count of her days today.
But in the back of her mind is Godric’s Hollow, and in her bag, and on a map she’s marked off the five villages that they have to pass before they head back into the woods. Then, she thinks, it’s a day and a half to Dumbledore’s resting place, where she does not want to think about what the two of them may find there.
“Are you all right?” Harry catches her gaze, and she blushes immediately, ducking and slipping a piece of bread into her mouth. Her teeth skim her lip light and she shrugs, forcing herself to clear her mind. “I know it’s been - it’s okay if you have something on your mind,” Harry finishes.
It’s awkward and almost sweet; she lets her fingers curl around the strap of her bag in his hand.
“I’m fine,” she says.
Harry is a pace in front of her and when he stops, she sort of half-stumbles into him. A soft laugh slips between them.
“Really,” she adds. She lets go of the bag, her hand jerking back. The bread is in the grass between the two of them. She makes no move to pick it up. “Suppose I’m still waking up.”
Harry snorts. “Yeah, of course. You’re never this quiet.”
“There’s only two of us,” she says, and isn’t thinking, “and there isn’t much I can say. We’ve been walking - what? A few hours, since our last stop? I know we’re off to Dumbledore’s - I just, sometimes it’s hard to be rational and so bloody terrified sometimes,” she breathes and it’s all so odd how suddenly, and too soon, some of this is managing to slip, “and sometimes I can feel and sometimes I can’t and I don’t know what to do, Harry, so honestly, I’d rather just let it be.”
Harry stares at her. He’s calm, and maybe he’s entirely too calm, calmer than he’s been in days. There’s something about the way he looks at her that scares her; she’s not entirely sure if she should be okay or just let it be, but it’s there and he knows it’s there.
“What’s wrong?” he asks, and gently. He steps forward and her gaze drops. She watches his heel sink into the grass and the leaves. They make a wisp of a sound, cracking like paper and making Hermione just long for anything different.
“I just -”
She can’t tell him, she thinks. Not everything; maybe that’s it, maybe that’s what’s holding itself against her. She stares hard at the bag in his hand and then at his boots. The bread is gone. The dirt, she thinks.
When she shakes her head, her hair whips over her eyes. It’s half-straight, curled and tangled lightly at the ends. Her hands move, but she doesn’t touch her face yet.
“S’all right,” she says. “I’m fine.”
Right now, she lets this be.
(The attic in the old Potter home was nothing more than a strange sight; there are boxes and boxes, some opened, others closed, other sinking into half-rotten floors and bits of dust and spiders. Hermione’s fingers worked on their own, even though she tried to muffle her coughing from the dust and from Harry, somewhere outside. There were cracks in the ceiling to and the sky watched as she pried open box after box, sometimes just looking, other times just trying to find something to make this better, briefly or not. She found the pictures of Lily Potter first, smiling and laughing and wrapped around her husband and then Harry as if it were the only way she needed to be seen, at glance and with secrets. The Christmas decorations she found underneath Lily’s photos, hidden even as Hermione took some of the photos for her pockets; underneath the pine, dried and browning, the dull glass balls and a few, odd and unremarkable bits of paper is where she found it.
It’s the wand that Hermione cannot explain.)
“I’m not mad, you know,” Harry says after they stop again. They are miles from the next village and it’s half-past an afternoon, chilly under the shade of the accompanying woods. They have been off the road for awhile now too and Hermione keeps them close to the promise of one, best for the right kind of escape.
“I know,” she says too. She glances back at him. “I’m not purposely avoiding any sort of conversation with you.”
He shrugs.
This is one of those moments where she wonders if he misses Ron more. She tries not to think about it. Turning away from him, she moves to set up the protection charms around them.
The tent is a ways off, tucked between an evergreen and bits of birch. Hermione studies it. No one will see, she thinks. Her hands are moving in front of her too, her fingers stretched and straight, cued over her wand; there’s a part of her that thinks that if she really were to practice, and practice properly, she may be able to keep it away for emergencies.
Silly girl, she tells herself. “Harry?” she calls, and turns, watching him as he stands in front of the tent. He stops and stretches out. Her brows furrow and she’s caught him at the oddest of angles; it’s the first time she thinks of him as older, maybe wiser and all too sad.
He moves towards her then. His hands dig into his pockets. Her wand slips lightly from her fingers and she keeps it at her side. She catches her bag at Harry’s side too.
“All right?” he asks.
She nods. “We’re set,” she manages. “I - sorry about earlier. I wasn’t.” She pauses, shaking her head. “M’a bit tired with the early start.”
“You don’t have to lie to me,” he murmurs.
She looks up at him. She swallows. She wants to explain: I’m not okay, you’re not okay, I’ve got a wand for you and I don’t know how to tell you. It seems entirely too easy.
“Sorry,” she murmurs.
“Hermione -”
Her eyes close, just as he stops. Don’t, she thinks. But he doesn’t continue either, he seems to just stand there, in front of her, waiting. Maybe he’s watching her. Maybe he’s not.
It’s sudden then, the way his hands sort of just rest against her face. It’s his palms to her cheeks. They’re cold and she shivers. His thumbs drag lightly against her jaw, just under it, and she’s not going to look, she tells herself. She’s not going to look.
“Hermione,” he says.
“Harry,” she sighs. Slowly, her eyes open. He’s almost hovering; she feels small and it’s all unwarranted, but she can’t help but wonder if this is all happening too fast for a reason. “Don’t,” she says quietly.
“Don’t?”
“Whatever’s in your head,” she manages. “Don’t. Don’t think it. Don’t do it. Don’t make me apart of whatever it is you want to regret. Or change. I don’t know. It’s just you and here, out here alone, and maybe this is all that there is - you and I wandering hopelessly for some sort of answer, some kind of promise that is sensible with understand, with a necessary understand that I just -”
Harry kisses her. They stand still.
Her head is spinning with a million different thoughts, and thoughts of thoughts, answers to questions and then a few more. It’s entirely too impossible as her mouth just freezes against his, half-opened, too dry, and still willing to taste the bits of bread and that soft, almost understated sense of Harry that she knows. His hand moves away from her face too, slipping along her jaw and then her shoulder; his fingers brush under the collar of her jacket, then the back of her neck. They nuzzle her skin and shoot into her hair, just as he sighs into her mouth.
“Sorry,” he breathes, “sorry,” he says again, and it’s almost as if he doesn’t mean it. Her lips feel dry. “I just - I don’t know what I was thinking.”
She tries to shake her head. Her eyes open.
“I found a wand.”
His hands drop. “What?”
She takes a step back. She needs to create space. The leaves under her shoes rustle and crunch. She is suddenly too aware of where she is. The woods, she remembers, and looking up, she watches as the branches weave over their heads. She cannot look at Harry.
“I found a wand,” she says.
He says nothing. She reaches for the bag; somehow, it’s fallen between them and when she kneels into the grass, she picks up the bag with a few leaves clinging to the bottom.
“It was upstairs,” she murmurs. She says it carefully. “In a few boxes,” she tells him. “I didn’t know - I wanted to tell you, earlier. I suppose it was just - I didn’t feel right going up there.”
“So why did you go?” Harry snaps. She looks up and his eyes are narrowed The bag swings in her fingers. “Hermione -”
“I wanted to help,” she says.
Her eyes are wide. They burn and she’s digging into her bag quickly. The book is the first to fall out - it’s one of hers and a few of the photos spill by Harry’s feet. He looks at her and then back at the photos. He doesn’t kneel or pick them up.
Then her hand curls around the wand. Her finger slide around the wood and she pulls it out, holding it out for Harry to take.
“It was in one of the boxes,” she murmurs.
He stares and says nothing. He doesn’t seem to know to move. She tries to keep his gaze too, but hers drops, and she catches her wand on the ground, half-hidden by leaves. Her stomach twists into knots.
She says nothing more too. She doesn’t know what else to say. Is there anything to say, she wonders. They’re quiet then, and the woods seem to come alive: it’s each sound that seems to swallow them, from the leaves under them to the trees that continue to cover them. There is nothing safe about this kind of awareness, every bit of it very close to some kind of madness.
There is a sinking feeling too, that comes with it, the idea that they’re getting further and further away from everything else that they know. She is more aware of how important she is and how important Ron was. The balance is what scares her.
“Thanks,” Harry finally says. He shuffles forward with no questions. His fingers curl around the wand and then it hits her: he kissed her. When he steps back, it’s as if it’s never happened.
Harry turns back to the tent.
Later she hears him outside again, his voice halfway to the other side, as if he were talking and muttering. Spells, she thinks.
Hermione is sitting on the bed. Her boots are off to the side. Their bed; they continue to switch, off and on, and if she were to think about it, neither of them have come close to anything but that kiss. She doesn’t know how to think about that either. The photographs have been tucked back into one of her books and she hasn’t brought herself to move it from the table either, just in case.
“Oh Harry,” she manages to breathe. Her face drops into her hands and she rests them against her knees. She tries to remember where she’s gone and put the radio.
Her heels start rocking into the floor. The wood creaks and it’s just like Ron’s bedroom, back at the Burrow, which she did for the both of them - something from home, she had tried to say. Neither of them had listen, Harry and Ron, and it was exactly that.
“I don’t know what to do,” she says too. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do - I found Harry a wand, don’t even bloody know where Ron is - I’m trying not to be sick with worry and then in a few days - a day? We’ll be right at Dumbledore’s grave. What are we supposed to do?”
But there’s no answer, there’s never any answer, and there’s something so desperate about that feeling, the one that just sits with her. It’s hard to really settle with.
“What am I supposed to do?” she asks.
Hermione, for a moment, thinks about her parents.
The map is not a safety. They are moving further into the woods again.
There is nothing to hold to memory. The trees are still trees. The leaves still clutter the floor of the forest; there may or may not be green peeking out, some under the few, coy-colored branches.
“I’m not that clever, you know,” she calls out to Harry. Her voice is too loud and she flinches. He doesn’t stop either. “Not in the slightest,” she murmurs. She doesn’t feel like it either, she doesn’t say.
Harry says nothing. She tries not to sigh, but it’s hard enough, already pursing her lips and rubbing her hands over her arms. She keeps her gaze forward and over him, waiting, hoping, wondering if even the slightest of sounds may or may not force him to look at her. She’s all right with not speaking, she tells herself too.
For a moment.
“I mean,” she continues, “I wonder if you’d fair - god, listen to me. It’s making me mad, you know, talking and talking and having some listless, senseless need to fill the silence of you not saying anything and me, well, not knowing what to say to you. It’s awful, all right, awful -”
“Hermione,” Harry cuts her off; he’s turned and stopped, and she’s barely noticed. Her cheeks warm. “It’s all right,” he says tiredly.
Neither her wand nor his are in sight. She wonders if he’s tried and looked at the photos. It’s not her place to ask.
“I need you,” he says too. “I don’t need you to be Ron.”
She nods.
It’s been hours, she realizes, since they’ve last stopped. She no longer cares if that’s okay anymore. There’s a part of her that knows that she should and that she needs to, but it’s more about going to a place now and making sure it means something, anything that can help the two of them.
“I am sorry,” she offers quietly.
“I know.”
She looks down. “I didn’t - I wish I had an answer.”
Harry moves to her. She watches him fold the map. When he reaches forward, his fingers pull the bag away from her hip. She forgets that she’s been wearing it all this time.
“You’re not the right one to ask,” he says.
“It doesn’t make it any easier.”
The words leave her mouth before she thinks about it. Harry looks at her in surprise and then slowly, his mouth curls. He shakes his head and slides his map into her bag.
“I know.”
Her lips curl slightly. “Yeah?”
But Harry’s smile is fading, and there’s this sense of hopefulness that is dangled right there, right in front of her, that she doesn’t know how to take. Maybe she’s says something wrong.
“Ginny,” he says slowly, “is - Ginny is special.”
Her mouth opens. Then it closes. Oh.
“I - I’m not Ron,” he says, “and you’re not her and I don’t know what that meant back there. I don’t -” he pauses, rubbing his eyes. “I don’t even know if I’m supposed to feel anything, if anything makes any sort of sense anymore. We’re, you and I we’ve been here too long.”
Something inside of her stops short. A reaction. A flash of a moment. Her gaze darts off to the side and she just watches the open space. Her eyes want to close and she thinks about home, her mother and father, and the two of them being long gone by now. From all of this, she thinks.
“Don’t patronize me,” she says softly.
“I’m not.”
“No?” She scoffs, meeting his gaze. “If you didn’t want to kiss me, you should’ve - you should’ve keep whatever feelings to yourself, Harry. I’m not Ginny either and while I reckon it’s so wonderful for you - god, what are we doing?”
Her voice splits and ends as an echo, loud and on the brink of some kind of hysteria. There’s a taste of something sharp, crawling into her throat. She almost continues on, wanting to tell him how utterly wrong he is, how this is no longer about what was outside, back at Hogwarts or at home, waiting for him and her and the two of them separately.
The trees are rustling hard. There is a shrill swoop, and a row of birds slip from the trees, fluttering deeper into the woods. Suddenly, she remembers that they still have a few more villages to go through.
Hermione straightens. “Please,” she says. “Don’t, all right?”
“You’re my friend, Hermione,” he tells her, and his voice is filled with something that she understands, need and the promise of need, that sense of stability that they’ve kept alive, wordlessly and loudly. It’s just the two of them, she reminds herself.
“I know where I fit,” she says.
“That’s not what I meant,” he says.
She steps forward, her fingers curling around the bag again. It’s moved to her hip, slipping against her jacket. She looks down, almost carefully, to see that it’s been caught in a button.
“I’m too tired,” she murmurs, “to try and figure it out - I want to talk to you like a real person again, you know? I don’t want - I don’t know how to talk to you this way and that scares me.”
“More than the kiss?”
Her eyes widen and she looks up. He’s completely serious and she’s not entirely sure what to make of this. His eyes are dark and there’s this slight, almost unfocused arch to his mouth; it happens when he’s shy, almost always, and this is all part of the things that she notices about Harry. She just never has to share.
“That scares me too,” she admits.
He rubs his face. “I won’t explain it,” he says.
“I haven’t asked.”
“I know.” There’s a pause. Harry laughs then, low and even warm. It makes Hermione straighten. “I’ve been waiting,” he teases shyly.
She says nothing, but manages some kind of a smile. Her mouth catches itself before it turns into something bigger, something that feels completely inappropriate to her. This is all new, she thinks.
But she moves to Harry again, resuming whatever strange, even angry strides to him that were going to help with her point. Instead too, she touches his arm and then lets hers loop through his.
“Come on,” she says. Everything is not okay and Hermione is still very aware of this. She leans into Harry too and presses her lips against his shoulder, only wanting to rest her forehead against his shoulder anyway. She lets that go too. For later, maybe.
Between them, most things are implied. They start walking again.
Harry has one of the photographs in his pocket. It sticks out of his jacket, as if it were peeking out at the both of them, pulled by the wind as they get closer and closer to the road.
The air smells like smoke.
They say nothing and Harry pulls his hand around her arm, tucking it back through his. It’s not instinctive, but she understands and fits herself closer to him as they continue to walk.
Through the patch of trees, she can see the road. It’s narrow within the view, dark and lazy and not nearly as distracting as the photograph that she keeps trying to ignore. Hermione can feel her boots begin to keep up stones from the ground too; she changed earlier, somewhere between Harry’s silence and her confession and the next couple of conversations that they’ve tried to have.
“Do you hear that?” Harry stops and she jerks them back. Her eyes narrow and she tries to listen to whatever he’s hearing. But it is all the same to her: it’s the trees, the weight of her boots and his boots, and the way the two of them walking.
Her mouth opens and closes and Harry seems to pull himself closer to her. She tries to take a deep breath and pay attention, but she’s exhausted too. It’s getting harder to forget.
“That,” Harry says again. “That-”
He is not cut off. His mouth stays open and the sound of his voice stops short as the smell of smoke becomes thicker. They’ve started to walk again and she hasn’t noticed, blinking and then catching the sky as it lights up through the trees, a shot of light breaking through the clearing up ahead. It grows bigger and bigger as they come closer.
Then Harry stops again. Hermione hears the scream, and then a second, shrill and something completely violent, shuddering and snapping. Her ears are ringing and her eyes are glued to the sky. She doesn’t let Harry pull them closer, but is seeing enough. Slowly, a dark mark sneaks into the sky.
The mudblood itches back against her skin.
(When it gets too dark, they have to stop. It’s an agreement.)
PREVIOUS | NEXT
when we were young (and ageless)
harry potter ; harry/hermione ; 3,670 words ; unrated
they say it’s just that simple. nobody comes and asks them: if the kids are just alright. spoilers for the deathly hallows. au.
-
3
The photos are hidden in a book. Harry takes the bag from her hand and passes her a bit of bread they took from one of the shops in the last village.
“Notice,” he says carefully, “how neither you nor I have used any bit of real magic - other then, well, the obvious.”
Hermione blinks. “Of course.”
She doesn’t really eat the bread either. Crumbs brush back over her fingers, against her skin and into the grass as they wall. There are too many dead leaves. Fall, she thinks. Spring, she corrects herself. They are neither here nor there; she supposes she’s lost count of her days today.
But in the back of her mind is Godric’s Hollow, and in her bag, and on a map she’s marked off the five villages that they have to pass before they head back into the woods. Then, she thinks, it’s a day and a half to Dumbledore’s resting place, where she does not want to think about what the two of them may find there.
“Are you all right?” Harry catches her gaze, and she blushes immediately, ducking and slipping a piece of bread into her mouth. Her teeth skim her lip light and she shrugs, forcing herself to clear her mind. “I know it’s been - it’s okay if you have something on your mind,” Harry finishes.
It’s awkward and almost sweet; she lets her fingers curl around the strap of her bag in his hand.
“I’m fine,” she says.
Harry is a pace in front of her and when he stops, she sort of half-stumbles into him. A soft laugh slips between them.
“Really,” she adds. She lets go of the bag, her hand jerking back. The bread is in the grass between the two of them. She makes no move to pick it up. “Suppose I’m still waking up.”
Harry snorts. “Yeah, of course. You’re never this quiet.”
“There’s only two of us,” she says, and isn’t thinking, “and there isn’t much I can say. We’ve been walking - what? A few hours, since our last stop? I know we’re off to Dumbledore’s - I just, sometimes it’s hard to be rational and so bloody terrified sometimes,” she breathes and it’s all so odd how suddenly, and too soon, some of this is managing to slip, “and sometimes I can feel and sometimes I can’t and I don’t know what to do, Harry, so honestly, I’d rather just let it be.”
Harry stares at her. He’s calm, and maybe he’s entirely too calm, calmer than he’s been in days. There’s something about the way he looks at her that scares her; she’s not entirely sure if she should be okay or just let it be, but it’s there and he knows it’s there.
“What’s wrong?” he asks, and gently. He steps forward and her gaze drops. She watches his heel sink into the grass and the leaves. They make a wisp of a sound, cracking like paper and making Hermione just long for anything different.
“I just -”
She can’t tell him, she thinks. Not everything; maybe that’s it, maybe that’s what’s holding itself against her. She stares hard at the bag in his hand and then at his boots. The bread is gone. The dirt, she thinks.
When she shakes her head, her hair whips over her eyes. It’s half-straight, curled and tangled lightly at the ends. Her hands move, but she doesn’t touch her face yet.
“S’all right,” she says. “I’m fine.”
Right now, she lets this be.
(The attic in the old Potter home was nothing more than a strange sight; there are boxes and boxes, some opened, others closed, other sinking into half-rotten floors and bits of dust and spiders. Hermione’s fingers worked on their own, even though she tried to muffle her coughing from the dust and from Harry, somewhere outside. There were cracks in the ceiling to and the sky watched as she pried open box after box, sometimes just looking, other times just trying to find something to make this better, briefly or not. She found the pictures of Lily Potter first, smiling and laughing and wrapped around her husband and then Harry as if it were the only way she needed to be seen, at glance and with secrets. The Christmas decorations she found underneath Lily’s photos, hidden even as Hermione took some of the photos for her pockets; underneath the pine, dried and browning, the dull glass balls and a few, odd and unremarkable bits of paper is where she found it.
It’s the wand that Hermione cannot explain.)
“I’m not mad, you know,” Harry says after they stop again. They are miles from the next village and it’s half-past an afternoon, chilly under the shade of the accompanying woods. They have been off the road for awhile now too and Hermione keeps them close to the promise of one, best for the right kind of escape.
“I know,” she says too. She glances back at him. “I’m not purposely avoiding any sort of conversation with you.”
He shrugs.
This is one of those moments where she wonders if he misses Ron more. She tries not to think about it. Turning away from him, she moves to set up the protection charms around them.
The tent is a ways off, tucked between an evergreen and bits of birch. Hermione studies it. No one will see, she thinks. Her hands are moving in front of her too, her fingers stretched and straight, cued over her wand; there’s a part of her that thinks that if she really were to practice, and practice properly, she may be able to keep it away for emergencies.
Silly girl, she tells herself. “Harry?” she calls, and turns, watching him as he stands in front of the tent. He stops and stretches out. Her brows furrow and she’s caught him at the oddest of angles; it’s the first time she thinks of him as older, maybe wiser and all too sad.
He moves towards her then. His hands dig into his pockets. Her wand slips lightly from her fingers and she keeps it at her side. She catches her bag at Harry’s side too.
“All right?” he asks.
She nods. “We’re set,” she manages. “I - sorry about earlier. I wasn’t.” She pauses, shaking her head. “M’a bit tired with the early start.”
“You don’t have to lie to me,” he murmurs.
She looks up at him. She swallows. She wants to explain: I’m not okay, you’re not okay, I’ve got a wand for you and I don’t know how to tell you. It seems entirely too easy.
“Sorry,” she murmurs.
“Hermione -”
Her eyes close, just as he stops. Don’t, she thinks. But he doesn’t continue either, he seems to just stand there, in front of her, waiting. Maybe he’s watching her. Maybe he’s not.
It’s sudden then, the way his hands sort of just rest against her face. It’s his palms to her cheeks. They’re cold and she shivers. His thumbs drag lightly against her jaw, just under it, and she’s not going to look, she tells herself. She’s not going to look.
“Hermione,” he says.
“Harry,” she sighs. Slowly, her eyes open. He’s almost hovering; she feels small and it’s all unwarranted, but she can’t help but wonder if this is all happening too fast for a reason. “Don’t,” she says quietly.
“Don’t?”
“Whatever’s in your head,” she manages. “Don’t. Don’t think it. Don’t do it. Don’t make me apart of whatever it is you want to regret. Or change. I don’t know. It’s just you and here, out here alone, and maybe this is all that there is - you and I wandering hopelessly for some sort of answer, some kind of promise that is sensible with understand, with a necessary understand that I just -”
Harry kisses her. They stand still.
Her head is spinning with a million different thoughts, and thoughts of thoughts, answers to questions and then a few more. It’s entirely too impossible as her mouth just freezes against his, half-opened, too dry, and still willing to taste the bits of bread and that soft, almost understated sense of Harry that she knows. His hand moves away from her face too, slipping along her jaw and then her shoulder; his fingers brush under the collar of her jacket, then the back of her neck. They nuzzle her skin and shoot into her hair, just as he sighs into her mouth.
“Sorry,” he breathes, “sorry,” he says again, and it’s almost as if he doesn’t mean it. Her lips feel dry. “I just - I don’t know what I was thinking.”
She tries to shake her head. Her eyes open.
“I found a wand.”
His hands drop. “What?”
She takes a step back. She needs to create space. The leaves under her shoes rustle and crunch. She is suddenly too aware of where she is. The woods, she remembers, and looking up, she watches as the branches weave over their heads. She cannot look at Harry.
“I found a wand,” she says.
He says nothing. She reaches for the bag; somehow, it’s fallen between them and when she kneels into the grass, she picks up the bag with a few leaves clinging to the bottom.
“It was upstairs,” she murmurs. She says it carefully. “In a few boxes,” she tells him. “I didn’t know - I wanted to tell you, earlier. I suppose it was just - I didn’t feel right going up there.”
“So why did you go?” Harry snaps. She looks up and his eyes are narrowed The bag swings in her fingers. “Hermione -”
“I wanted to help,” she says.
Her eyes are wide. They burn and she’s digging into her bag quickly. The book is the first to fall out - it’s one of hers and a few of the photos spill by Harry’s feet. He looks at her and then back at the photos. He doesn’t kneel or pick them up.
Then her hand curls around the wand. Her finger slide around the wood and she pulls it out, holding it out for Harry to take.
“It was in one of the boxes,” she murmurs.
He stares and says nothing. He doesn’t seem to know to move. She tries to keep his gaze too, but hers drops, and she catches her wand on the ground, half-hidden by leaves. Her stomach twists into knots.
She says nothing more too. She doesn’t know what else to say. Is there anything to say, she wonders. They’re quiet then, and the woods seem to come alive: it’s each sound that seems to swallow them, from the leaves under them to the trees that continue to cover them. There is nothing safe about this kind of awareness, every bit of it very close to some kind of madness.
There is a sinking feeling too, that comes with it, the idea that they’re getting further and further away from everything else that they know. She is more aware of how important she is and how important Ron was. The balance is what scares her.
“Thanks,” Harry finally says. He shuffles forward with no questions. His fingers curl around the wand and then it hits her: he kissed her. When he steps back, it’s as if it’s never happened.
Harry turns back to the tent.
Later she hears him outside again, his voice halfway to the other side, as if he were talking and muttering. Spells, she thinks.
Hermione is sitting on the bed. Her boots are off to the side. Their bed; they continue to switch, off and on, and if she were to think about it, neither of them have come close to anything but that kiss. She doesn’t know how to think about that either. The photographs have been tucked back into one of her books and she hasn’t brought herself to move it from the table either, just in case.
“Oh Harry,” she manages to breathe. Her face drops into her hands and she rests them against her knees. She tries to remember where she’s gone and put the radio.
Her heels start rocking into the floor. The wood creaks and it’s just like Ron’s bedroom, back at the Burrow, which she did for the both of them - something from home, she had tried to say. Neither of them had listen, Harry and Ron, and it was exactly that.
“I don’t know what to do,” she says too. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do - I found Harry a wand, don’t even bloody know where Ron is - I’m trying not to be sick with worry and then in a few days - a day? We’ll be right at Dumbledore’s grave. What are we supposed to do?”
But there’s no answer, there’s never any answer, and there’s something so desperate about that feeling, the one that just sits with her. It’s hard to really settle with.
“What am I supposed to do?” she asks.
Hermione, for a moment, thinks about her parents.
The map is not a safety. They are moving further into the woods again.
There is nothing to hold to memory. The trees are still trees. The leaves still clutter the floor of the forest; there may or may not be green peeking out, some under the few, coy-colored branches.
“I’m not that clever, you know,” she calls out to Harry. Her voice is too loud and she flinches. He doesn’t stop either. “Not in the slightest,” she murmurs. She doesn’t feel like it either, she doesn’t say.
Harry says nothing. She tries not to sigh, but it’s hard enough, already pursing her lips and rubbing her hands over her arms. She keeps her gaze forward and over him, waiting, hoping, wondering if even the slightest of sounds may or may not force him to look at her. She’s all right with not speaking, she tells herself too.
For a moment.
“I mean,” she continues, “I wonder if you’d fair - god, listen to me. It’s making me mad, you know, talking and talking and having some listless, senseless need to fill the silence of you not saying anything and me, well, not knowing what to say to you. It’s awful, all right, awful -”
“Hermione,” Harry cuts her off; he’s turned and stopped, and she’s barely noticed. Her cheeks warm. “It’s all right,” he says tiredly.
Neither her wand nor his are in sight. She wonders if he’s tried and looked at the photos. It’s not her place to ask.
“I need you,” he says too. “I don’t need you to be Ron.”
She nods.
It’s been hours, she realizes, since they’ve last stopped. She no longer cares if that’s okay anymore. There’s a part of her that knows that she should and that she needs to, but it’s more about going to a place now and making sure it means something, anything that can help the two of them.
“I am sorry,” she offers quietly.
“I know.”
She looks down. “I didn’t - I wish I had an answer.”
Harry moves to her. She watches him fold the map. When he reaches forward, his fingers pull the bag away from her hip. She forgets that she’s been wearing it all this time.
“You’re not the right one to ask,” he says.
“It doesn’t make it any easier.”
The words leave her mouth before she thinks about it. Harry looks at her in surprise and then slowly, his mouth curls. He shakes his head and slides his map into her bag.
“I know.”
Her lips curl slightly. “Yeah?”
But Harry’s smile is fading, and there’s this sense of hopefulness that is dangled right there, right in front of her, that she doesn’t know how to take. Maybe she’s says something wrong.
“Ginny,” he says slowly, “is - Ginny is special.”
Her mouth opens. Then it closes. Oh.
“I - I’m not Ron,” he says, “and you’re not her and I don’t know what that meant back there. I don’t -” he pauses, rubbing his eyes. “I don’t even know if I’m supposed to feel anything, if anything makes any sort of sense anymore. We’re, you and I we’ve been here too long.”
Something inside of her stops short. A reaction. A flash of a moment. Her gaze darts off to the side and she just watches the open space. Her eyes want to close and she thinks about home, her mother and father, and the two of them being long gone by now. From all of this, she thinks.
“Don’t patronize me,” she says softly.
“I’m not.”
“No?” She scoffs, meeting his gaze. “If you didn’t want to kiss me, you should’ve - you should’ve keep whatever feelings to yourself, Harry. I’m not Ginny either and while I reckon it’s so wonderful for you - god, what are we doing?”
Her voice splits and ends as an echo, loud and on the brink of some kind of hysteria. There’s a taste of something sharp, crawling into her throat. She almost continues on, wanting to tell him how utterly wrong he is, how this is no longer about what was outside, back at Hogwarts or at home, waiting for him and her and the two of them separately.
The trees are rustling hard. There is a shrill swoop, and a row of birds slip from the trees, fluttering deeper into the woods. Suddenly, she remembers that they still have a few more villages to go through.
Hermione straightens. “Please,” she says. “Don’t, all right?”
“You’re my friend, Hermione,” he tells her, and his voice is filled with something that she understands, need and the promise of need, that sense of stability that they’ve kept alive, wordlessly and loudly. It’s just the two of them, she reminds herself.
“I know where I fit,” she says.
“That’s not what I meant,” he says.
She steps forward, her fingers curling around the bag again. It’s moved to her hip, slipping against her jacket. She looks down, almost carefully, to see that it’s been caught in a button.
“I’m too tired,” she murmurs, “to try and figure it out - I want to talk to you like a real person again, you know? I don’t want - I don’t know how to talk to you this way and that scares me.”
“More than the kiss?”
Her eyes widen and she looks up. He’s completely serious and she’s not entirely sure what to make of this. His eyes are dark and there’s this slight, almost unfocused arch to his mouth; it happens when he’s shy, almost always, and this is all part of the things that she notices about Harry. She just never has to share.
“That scares me too,” she admits.
He rubs his face. “I won’t explain it,” he says.
“I haven’t asked.”
“I know.” There’s a pause. Harry laughs then, low and even warm. It makes Hermione straighten. “I’ve been waiting,” he teases shyly.
She says nothing, but manages some kind of a smile. Her mouth catches itself before it turns into something bigger, something that feels completely inappropriate to her. This is all new, she thinks.
But she moves to Harry again, resuming whatever strange, even angry strides to him that were going to help with her point. Instead too, she touches his arm and then lets hers loop through his.
“Come on,” she says. Everything is not okay and Hermione is still very aware of this. She leans into Harry too and presses her lips against his shoulder, only wanting to rest her forehead against his shoulder anyway. She lets that go too. For later, maybe.
Between them, most things are implied. They start walking again.
Harry has one of the photographs in his pocket. It sticks out of his jacket, as if it were peeking out at the both of them, pulled by the wind as they get closer and closer to the road.
The air smells like smoke.
They say nothing and Harry pulls his hand around her arm, tucking it back through his. It’s not instinctive, but she understands and fits herself closer to him as they continue to walk.
Through the patch of trees, she can see the road. It’s narrow within the view, dark and lazy and not nearly as distracting as the photograph that she keeps trying to ignore. Hermione can feel her boots begin to keep up stones from the ground too; she changed earlier, somewhere between Harry’s silence and her confession and the next couple of conversations that they’ve tried to have.
“Do you hear that?” Harry stops and she jerks them back. Her eyes narrow and she tries to listen to whatever he’s hearing. But it is all the same to her: it’s the trees, the weight of her boots and his boots, and the way the two of them walking.
Her mouth opens and closes and Harry seems to pull himself closer to her. She tries to take a deep breath and pay attention, but she’s exhausted too. It’s getting harder to forget.
“That,” Harry says again. “That-”
He is not cut off. His mouth stays open and the sound of his voice stops short as the smell of smoke becomes thicker. They’ve started to walk again and she hasn’t noticed, blinking and then catching the sky as it lights up through the trees, a shot of light breaking through the clearing up ahead. It grows bigger and bigger as they come closer.
Then Harry stops again. Hermione hears the scream, and then a second, shrill and something completely violent, shuddering and snapping. Her ears are ringing and her eyes are glued to the sky. She doesn’t let Harry pull them closer, but is seeing enough. Slowly, a dark mark sneaks into the sky.
The mudblood itches back against her skin.
(When it gets too dark, they have to stop. It’s an agreement.)
PREVIOUS | NEXT