His Very Absence...

He watches her.

He watches her constantly: the way she moves, the way she smiles, the way her hair ignores her attempts to fix it, the way she doesn't even care.

He doesn't mean to. Doesn't even know where it came from or why he can't seem to stop. But he finds himself falling silent, when she speaks, listening intently because he knows what she has to say will be important. She was always an important kind of person, even when she was just sitting across from him silently, watching the rain with a wistful peacefulness he could easily have envied but decided to admire instead.

Such a pretty girl, so tragically ignored and so often shunted to the side. And so very unhappy now that it makes him ache too. So sad, that he's the only one that can see it. She's intelligent enough to hide it, even if he doesn't quite understand why.

She's just enough of a mystery to make him wonder. And entirely too young, both for him and for the flashes of tired grief he sometimes sees in her face, when no one watches. When only he watches.

Sometimes, very rarely, he grows tired of watching, of seeing and being able to do nothing because of who he is, what he is. It's usually when she breaks down, when she herself grows tired of it. When she sits alone at night, staring into the fire and wondering why she keeps trying when everything's so obviously falling apart. When he wants to comfort her, but can't.

She's so very fragile, when no one can see. Pale and wispy and shivering in the cold. Things keep slipping through her fingers as he watches, and he finds an odd kind of empathy with it. Just like him, she watches, but can do nothing.

It's one night, late at night, when she cries herself to sleep, that he tries to touch her.

Just touch her.

But he can't.

She stirs unhappily in her sleep as his fingers pass right through her. Her mouth curves farther downward yet, and he retracts them quickly, as though burned.

Sirius can never touch her, ever, because he is dead.

So when she composes herself in the morning, and goes to talk cheerfully to his godson, who rebuffs her coldly, secluding himself from his dedicated friend, she smiles and bears it painfully, happily. Because she could scream at him or yell at him, try to make him see reason - but then he would lose the only friend he has left.

And as she leaves him again, waiting to huddle herself before the fire again, to turn crestfallen once he's out of sight, he decides that he's not worth it. Had never been worth anything like this.

"I'm sorry," he tells her. But of course, she can't hear him. Hermione just stares into the fire with a drawn face.

"So full of artless jealousy is guilt," she whispers to herself, and he recognizes that she is quoting something, though he doesn't know where it's from. Hermione puts her head in her hands and sighs.

She sits there, alone in the den of his old, evil house, for a long time. And then, at no particular instant, she shoots to her feet, fists clenched, face tear-streaked.

"I hate you!" she yells into the emptiness of the house. She kicks at the couch, her body trembling. "It's all your fault- you and this stupid house and that stupid house elf!"

Her lip begins to tremble, though, and she sits down again. Soon, she's merely a crumpled figure on the couch, curled into a desperate ball against the arm.

Sirius almost feels guilty before remembering her own quote. He smiles then, ironically, and sits down next to her uselessly as she cries.

"There now," he says, as though she can hear. "At least you're not dead."

It's occurred to him that he could do anything he wanted - say anything - call her a mudblood, insult her parents - and her reaction would always be the same. And despite the fact that he really does care about her, he does it, just to see if he can get her to talk to him. She doesn't.

She gets up after time passes, and puts out the fire, going tiredly to bed before the adults can come back. She always avoids them now, and it's so easy to do when they come home late from their missions, which themselves span weeks. There's a war going on, after all, and she's not a part of it, and neither, apparently, is Harry.

He follows her, turns away as she undresses for the sake of his own strange tendencies from when it mattered. And he continues to watch her as she tries to sleep and fails.

Then, as the clock strikes some morning hour, Hermione trembles in the darkest part of night.

"I don't hate you," she tells him, though she can't see him, doesn't even know he's there.

Her revelation has come to her, and she tells him truthfully, in a heavy-hearted, resigned 'I-knew-it-all-along' tone of voice:

"I hate myself."

It's this that makes him try to touch her again, to put a hand to hers, to make her feel anything at all to know he disagrees with her self-conception. And again, he finds he's helpless in the face of her despair. Unable to do something so simple.

"Nothing will come of nothing," she says to herself wearily. And then, staring off into the night, she asks, "Who will it be next, Sirius? Who won't be here, in two weeks, in a month? Who will I be missing then?"

Eventually, she does sleep. And he watches, every moment, certain that he has failed in some way as she tosses and turns uneasily, crying out for a past that has disappeared, for a boy and a man who both died when she needed them. He finds he wants her to forget about him.

"I would help if I could," he tells her as she sleeps, feeling utterly useless. "I would."

She quiets, soon, and sleeps the night through.

It rains the next day, and he learns why she finds some measure of peace in it. She stares out the window at the falling drops and ignores the world as she gives a faded smile and says Ron's name to herself in remembrance. It was raining, the day he died. And he told her he didn't want her to be sad, made her promise for his peace of mind - so in an act of supreme human will, she makes herself happy.

Sirius scowls at the window and wishes irrationally that the sun would appear from behind the clouds.

"If I could come back," he tells her fruitlessly, "I'd make you happy without empty promises." He sits next to her as she continues to stare at nothing. "I'd fix it all."

She ignores him, as always.

But then, she says to herself wistfully, "Hereafter, in a better world than this, I shall desire more love and knowledge of you... if I could do it in this world, I would."

And he realizes she's been listening, with some part of her, all along.

Suddenly, Hermione frowns, and sucks in her breath. "Yes. Yes."

She rushes up the stairs, suddenly finding her energy, moves toward the door he always kept closed... and Sirius wonders what in hell she's going to do in a library of dark texts.

But she reappears, soon, a large stack of books in her arms. Hermione sets them down by the window seat - she closes the blinds to the gentle rain and she sets herself down to study. She is who she is, and she can solve anything - she seems amazed that she had forgotten this.

He tries to read over her shoulder, but the words blur to him. The world isn't quite as clear as it had been, and he finds that all he can do is sit next to her while she makes little sounds of discovery or disappointment, wasting away the day with her nose near touching obsidian, blood-stained pages. He thinks perhaps he ought to be worried for her. But he's only very proud.

There are sounds from the entry way at some point late at night - he notices them before her and feels an obligation to tell her, even though she can't really hear. "Remus is coming," he tells her.

Strangely, she blinks, as though hearing some slight noise, and turns to look at the entry way.

She runs upstairs, faster than he's ever seen her go - and when she comes back, invisibility cloak in hand, she throws it over the books and shoves them under the couch, sitting down to look flushed and slightly panicked - just as though she'd been crying.

The older man's expression is weathered and tired as he stumbles in - he has some kind of curse wound on his side, as evidenced by a slight limp in his walk. But his face melts into desperate concern as he sees her still awake.

"Hermione," Lupin says, "You should be-"

"In bed," she finishes weakly. "Yes. But I'm not."

He shrugs - perhaps the fight has taken too much out of him to argue over something so silly as curfews. Instead, he sits down next to her and sighs.

"I wish I could be here more," he offers tiredly, but his eyes are already drooping shut. "I wish I could help you and Harry... you've been through so much..."

She seems inordinately touched by his concern, even as he drifts off to sleep - and Sirius sees her take on a role she was always very good at; the adult, the mother, the strong pillar of support.

"I'll be fine," she tells the man, moving to slip a pillow beneath his head. "And Harry will get over things eventually too." She pauses as she watches his breathing slow slightly, his figure struggling to stay awake.

"Do you know what I wish?" she asks him suddenly.

Lupin smiles slightly. "What?" He's obviously expecting some kind of childish hope, some sugar-coated fantasy, like world peace or reversing time. It's always been the difference between him and Sirius - because Sirius can see that no one is ever really a child in their own view, but Lupin can only see the present.

"I wish," she says quietly, "that I could take your place. Everyone's, somehow... I wish I could take it all away, put it on myself instead."

And there it is, the understanding in his face - Remus opens his eyes in surprise, looks at her differently, sadly.

"Don't you see?" he asks her. "That's what we're trying to do as well."

She smiles back. "Yes. I knew that too." And she closes his eyes for him and pulls a blanket from the back of the couch, setting him to sleep. Once his breathing steadies, though, she sighs. "Small to greater matters must give way," she says with a sad quirk of the mouth, turning her gaze to the books, hidden beneath the couch.

He can see it in her eyes. She's not any better, but she's determined. It makes him wonder, just for a moment, whether it might indeed be possible for him to come back.

By the time Remus wakes in the morning, she's taken her books upstairs and started reading. This is because she hasn't actually slept at all.

Remus leaves after only a short, curious look at the blanket, and Sirius watches as she brings her books down again into the light.

Harry walks down the stairs once that day, to get himself something to eat. Hermione smiles for him, but as he goes upstairs again without acknowledging her, the smile fades again. She looks back at her book, and suddenly looks much more tired than she was before he came down.

When she falls asleep on top of the stained book, Sirius feels a deep-seated wish that it was possible for him to settle the blanket on top of her. She deserves at least the same courtesy she's given others.

She wakes later, some time later, and seems unhappy that her research was interrupted by some annoying bodily necessity like sleep.

There are other days like this, many of them. Some of them, she loses her intense focus, begins to cry at something or other he can only imagine. Others, she stares out at the rain as though it holds the answers to everything she's ever looked for. Sometimes, she talks to the air, drinks something out of a mug and whispers to him as though he were there.

"What am I looking for?" she asks him, staring in the place he isn't. He follows her gaze, and then, just because he can, he sits across from her where she's looking.

"Why am I even talking to you?" she asks no one and him in particular. "Why shouldn't I talk to Ron, instead?" The name comes hard to her lips, and her breath intakes sharply, but it seems to answer her question to some extent.

Then: "I can remember you still. The way you walked, the way you frowned - even the way you smelled, though I don't know why I should. But you know... it's fading." A pause, as her eyes fill with those tears he still hasn't grown used to seeing. "I don't want it to," she tells him.

She opens a book, abruptly, and he continues the conversation as though she were listening as she reads. "I always thought you were a good person," he tells her. "Intelligent - pretty, even. But the thing I admired most was your heart..." He reaches over to put a hand to her breast, where the heart beats, and she shudders as though chilled. He pulls it back.

"So may he rest," she whispers in a choked voice, and he hears the tears in it, "his faults lie gently on him."

And when she turns a page quietly, she looks up directly toward him, as though on instinct now. "I think I loved you," she says with a trembling voice, but as though she's just realized this herself.

And Hermione goes back to reading, not knowing that she's just managed to render him speechless.

Lupin comes again, that night, looking even worse - he's bleeding freely from the shoulder. Hermione lets him down to a chair in the kitchen and pulls something from the cupboards.

"I can't do magic at my age," she tells him quietly, "but I know how to fix it the muggle way. It's going to hurt."

Remus nods, his eyes closed, his breathing harsh. He doesn't even flinch when she puts that awful stinging stuff on the wound, doesn't hesitate when she binds it tightly with bandages. But Hermione gives him the little bit of magic she can, pulling some helpful potions down from the cupboards where they're stocked, and she helps him back to his usual bed upstairs this time, since he can walk.

Sirius watches him with a heavy sigh, knowing some of the extra gray in his hair is because of him.

"I'm sorry, old friend," he says.

As she leaves him in the darkened room, though, Lupin says hoarsely: "It won't work, Hermione."

She swallows, and stops for a moment too long. "What won't work?" she says innocently.

But he's asleep now, and she can't even pretend to innocence without waking him up.

Sirius isn't prone to disagreeing with his friend these days, but he knows this is doing her too much good. "It has to work, Hermione," he tells her. "Don't give up."

Remus leaves without another protest the next day. It is as though he never suspected a thing.

Her mouth curves upward sadly as she watches him leave pensively. "Nothing emboldens sin so much as mercy," she says quietly. But she doesn't give any other hints to what her sins might be - she merely goes back to her books.

He realizes one night that she's ready, continues to watch with a kind of half-belief. Death is insurmountable - but so is Hermione Granger.

"I can't screw this up," she's muttering fervently to herself as she sits down and looks up numbers and figures. "I'll only get one chance..."

Sirius is holding his breath as she sets up angles and rechecks her incantation. He only begins to understand what she's done when she pulls the knife, stares at it with a swallow, looking slightly nauseous.

He moves to stop her futilely, but she pulls it across her forearm with her fist stuffed in her mouth and lets it drip in rivulets down into the cauldron.

And now, she waits, clenching her teeth, staring into the liquid.

"Do you know," she gasps to the empty air, "this'll probably kill me... 'the sands are number'd that make up my life,'" she laughs almost incredulously.

She doesn't seem too worried. He doesn't know whether that's a good thing.

But suddenly, she turns to look at him in mild surprise - she sees him.

"It's not as bad as it looks," Hermione says almost cheerfully, but there's a slight strain in her voice. "Would you mind coming over here for a moment?"

He has no choice but to comply. It sickens him to think that any delays on his part might kill her. He remembers when he said he wasn't worth it. He still isn't.

"Hermione," he hisses, "you can't do this-"

"I already have," she says testily, and he sees that part of the unhappiness in her face has already smoothed away at the prospect of success. "Now come here."

And before he can protest, she grabs him by the collar - he has a collar? - and pulls his down to her with her other arm.

He only realizes a moment later that she's kissing him.

It shocks him motionless for a moment before he begins to wonder why. And by then, she's pushing something into him, giving him something of hers that was never his to take.

"You're caught between worlds," she murmurs against him as though she hasn't just crossed a line that shouldn't have been crossed. "I'm giving you what you need to pull out. You're going to have to get back, Sirius, understand?"

He feels himself fading, and part of him is holding on fiercely to the sensation of her despite the fact that it's utterly wrong. Part of him is aware that he's going to forget things, important things...

Let me remember, he begs someone. Let me remember the important ones...

And he wakes up.

~*~

Hermione can see him now. Can feel him, touch him, even carry out the last and most embarrassing part of the procedure as she pulls him down to her. And, god help her, she can smell him and taste him, and it's exactly as she remembers and imagines.

She thinks she may be going mad.

But she finds she doesn't care.

It was almost reassuring to think he was still there, helping her (Her and not Harry? What an impossible idea, but it made her feel a little better). And she talked to him as though he really were there, told him things she never would have been able to admit to him in life. Told him she admired him, once, maybe even loved him.

She continued her research doggedly, not really expecting to find anything, but determined to do her best, more so every time Harry shook his head tiredly and ignored her. She knows it's not her. It's not even him. It's the way he lays awake at night, just like her, and wonders why things happen the way they do, wonders if more people are going to die, when the world became quite so broken between childhood and adolescence.

She knew the answers to a few of those questions. But they'd just make him more unhappy, so she took the other route and decided to give him back his innocence.

Lupin suspected, but she's not sure if he suspected the truth. It's likely, the way he only put up a token fight. He wants him back just as much as they do.

If he knew what she was looking up while he was gone, the methods she was researching, he might not have been so easily swayed.

It requires blood, she's found, and it has to be willing. This is the easy ingredient, because she's more than willing, and she doesn't think she could have managed it if it had been unwilling. This isn't the frightening part, the part that should make her discontinue it altogether. Because some part of him has to have remained, or she'll bleed herself to death.

It doesn't scare her as much as it should.

It requires other things, of course - things no seventeen year old should even think about let alone go cloaked into Knockturn Alley to buy. She found that fewer people bother you when you're masked like them. They assume you've got something to hide, and it's fine with them as long as you don't unmask their own faces and intentions.

Ridiculously easy, to set it all up away from everyone's eyes. But she knew what she was getting into anyway - has always known - and as long as she's not risking anyone else, it shouldn't matter.

Some important part of her is being given to him now, through a happy medium, and she doesn't mind it. Even as he fades from view and everything becomes some kind of dream, and her head spins and her vision is encroached upon by black, she doesn't mind. "This might be my last chance," she tells him weakly, even as he fades from her, and she feels her support disappear.

Her fate is tied to his, now. If he doesn't make it, she won't either.

~*~

It's like gasping for breath at the bottom of an ocean.

The black and the cold are numbing and drowning, but he pushes desperately against them, knowing as he does that someone else is dependant on his success.

There's a warmth on his lips that helps him forward, and he uses it viciously to remind himself what living was like.

And then...

~*~

There's someone waking her up, now, shaking her.

"Hermione? Come on, you have to drink this - you're still weak-"

She winces at the sudden pain in her arm as it's moved. Her skin is probably ashen, from lack of blood. She coughs, and someone takes the opportunity to force something down her throat. It burns as it goes down...

"Sirius?" she asks in surprise. "It- it worked?"

"Yes," he says shortly. "And I suppose that means I'm not supposed to be angry with you, but I am."

She remembers something vaguely, then. "You're supposed to have forgotten everything," she murmurs heavily. "But how much..."

He stops short.

"Enough," he says softly.

And he tells her Shakespeare, because he remembers her quotes now and can finally place them.

"Love is too young to know what conscience is," he tells her as he kisses her. "And on a less poetic note, if you live through this, you're never doing something this stupid ever again."

She smiles dazzlingly as he helps her to a bed, and he wonders who she did it for. Then, he realizes it really doesn't matter - he walks to the bottom of the stairs, where a boy sits up late at night, awake and wondering, while a man with grey in his hair sleeps on the couch...