Into the Rose Garden

Author's Notes: Fits loosely in the same universe as some of my other stories. Feedback: more precious than gold.

*****

The first time it happens, she knows it's wrong.

Neither of them mean for it to happen, really, but it does anyway. On a cool April night, they are at his flat, planning and strategizing, and she breaks under the stress, crying into his shirt. He kisses her forehead, then her cheek, then her lips -

Her lover is two months gone and his loss is still measured in weeks. They shouldn't be doing this, she thinks, not now, not so soon . . . but he understands what it's like to have the hole in the bottom of yourself where someone else used to be. He understands the emptiness and the loneliness. He's the only one who understands the deep and inconsolable grief. Others are sympathetic, certainly - Molly Weasley has been wonderful - but he is the only one who knows what it's like.

So they fall together, struggling for a mutual release and a moment of peace. Afterward, apologizing profusely, she lets herself out of his flat and goes home, feeling old and sad. She hunches herself into a ball on her bed and watches the dawn in, agonizingly hollow and unfilled.

She visits Ron's grave the next afternoon, sniffling and asking him to forgive her for her trespasses. He of course is beyond making answer, and feeling stupid and ashamed, she goes back to her business. The world does not stop just because her life has tilted drastically on its axis; there are still battles to plan, a war to be fought and a dictator to defeat.

She goes back to his flat that evening, another strategy meeting, and aside from his rather sheepish smile as he opens the door, nothing is said of the previous night. They read field reports on Death Eater movements, pretending they're not both desperately on edge, and she is gloomily amused by the way their movements skirt each other, careful not to touch. Words stretch unspoken between them, the conversation they need to be having, and finally around midnight the tension in the room drives her to put her work aside. She stands, saying, "I've got to go."

He half-turns from his seat at the desk. "All right. But -"

"But?" she says, stuffing her stack of parchment into her bag.

He runs a hand through his hair and stares at the rug. "Come back."

"Come -" She rubs her eyes. "We shouldn't be doing this."

"I know." He doesn't look up from the floor, but she can still see the misery and aloneness on his face. The hollow place inside her echoes.

She goes to him.

*****

Inevitably, she ends up in his bed over and over during the next months. Later she remembers this part of her life as indistinct and surreal, divorced from reality. Some part of her understands that this is not something she would do under any other circumstances. Other, emptier parts of her ache to be filled, and so she goes back.

And yet they are still as separate and isolated as they were before April. He is withdrawing into himself, pulling away from her and from his duties to the Order. Increasingly she finds herself covering for him, making reports and going on raids. When she does, the looks the other Order members give her have shifted from infuriatingly knowing to sympathetic and worried.

She worries as well. It's not right, any of it. This is not how my life was supposed to go, she finds herself thinking at times. Voldemort was never supposed to rise again, Dumbledore wasn't supposed to die, her friends weren't supposed to be killed one by one, she wasn't supposed to end up sleeping with someone just so she wouldn't feel alone. This is not my life, she thinks, and she stares unhappily at the drawn face in the mirror.

*****

Summer burns by in a haze of fights, meetings, and strange disconnected sex. He doesn't touch her any more than he has to, doesn't say more than he needs to. She understands; this, whatever it is they are doing, is numbing the pain, but it's numbing everything else along with it.

Still, it continues. She has all but moved into his flat, all but taken over for him when it comes to the running of the Order. This is doomed - both of them know it - but they cling to it as if to a life preserver.

"We don't talk," she says one night, when they are lying together, ostensibly cuddling but really just marking time until falling asleep. "We never talk anymore."

"There's nothing to say."

She looks over at him. He stares at the ceiling, avoiding her gaze. "What's happened to us?" she asks plaintively.

"This is what it is to grow up, Hermione," he says, and then he rolls over, away from her.

*****

Together, they drift through the end of summer and into autumn in this state of suspended animation. Her mother has taken to calling her weekly, aware that something is wrong with her daughter but unable to understand what it is. She issues regular denials that anything's wrong, trying to reassure her mother as best she can.

She finally breaks again on a breezy October night, full moon hanging in the sky, one of the few nights she spends at her own flat anymore. She spends an hour crying into Ron's pillow, weeping out her grief and desperation. Everything is all wrong; nothing is right; and she can't keep living like this. The holes inside her are deepening, widening to the point where she feels as if she's more air than substance.

The next morning, she goes to his London flat. The shadows under his eyes when he greets her speak of a hard night. She bites her lip in nervous anticipation of what she's going to say to him.

"We can't keep doing this," she says as soon as he closes the door behind her. "It has to stop. We have to stop."

He looks at her passively and then rubs his forehead. "I know."

"I think -" she starts, and then hesitates, rephrases. "I'm going to go away for a while. A few months, maybe. My parents have asked me to go on an overseas trip with them. And then maybe when I come back things can be - all right again. But they're all wrong right now. I've got to go."

She waits for him to say something. He stares at the floor. "All right," he says after a few minutes.

"I'm sorry," she offers.

"Don't be. It wasn't your fault."

"It could have been - I could have handled this better."

"Well, all right," he says, and she sees a tugging at the corners of his mouth. "It could have been that. But I was in this just as much as you. I could have -" He falls silent. "No, I'm the one who's sorry, Hermione. I've made you miserable these past few months. I've got enough perspective left to see that. I suppose . . . I suppose I thought you were what I needed. But it turns out you were only what I wanted."

She blushes and looks away.

"Go your ways, Hermione," he says. "Put yourself right. It'll all be here when you get back."

She leaves his flat and feels that finally, she is starting to heal.