Steadfast

Steadfast

It's the calm before the storm, and Hermione watches Harry.

He sits on the floor with his knees drawn up and his arms wrapped tightly round them, staring into the middle distance with a gaze that is not so much empty as still. Night has long covered the sun's brightness, and the hours creep slowly toward dawn. Dawn and the coming tempest.

Hermione is used to worrying about Harry. Sometimes it feels to her as if that's all she ever does, at moments when he's so unreachable to her, so... absent, even when he's right in front of her. She feels at these times as if she's failed him somehow, as if it was her duty to keep him moored to the world and she's fallen short. Because Hermione is an only child, but she knows that if she'd had a younger brother, this is how it would feel.

She doesn't understand him sometimes. Hermione is by no means as free with her emotions as the Weasleys, but compared to Harry she's an open book. He has learned to shut himself tighter than a locked trunk, to close his emotions more securely inside himself than the Dursleys ever did him in that loathsome cupboard.

That cupboard. The very thought brings Hermione to a boiling rage whenever she thinks of it, so most of the time she doesn't. But when he shuts himself away like this, she wonders: is the damage those people did him in his early years irreparable? Can he ever break free of the mould they tried to fit him in? True, he has left them behind, never speaks of them anymore even to Ron and Hermione, has dismissed them from his life. But at times she imagines they are present in the shadows at the corners of his eyes, in the way he reacts to shocks - going absolutely still and quiet, or the way he stiffens when she hugs him, almost as if he's afraid of the contact. In the way he pushes everyone away when he needs them the most.

The way he stands alone, when Hermione can clearly see it's breaking his heart.

She knows that Ron is closer to Harry than she'll ever be, because though she sees Harry as a brother, Ron is his brother. It's as simple and devastating as that. Still, even Ron gets shut out sometimes, and being the bluntly affectionate person he is, cannot comprehend why Harry does this, and retreats into baffled hurt. He does not have the perception - and the detachment, Hermione admits - to understand why Harry acts this way.

But she knows one thing; however and wherever Harry goes, she and Ron will be there beside him. They will all three stand together as the sun rises, and face the coming battle with a strength born of unity. Link hands in the forging of a gleaming new world from the battered old one.

She will be there with love in her heart and her wand in hand. Her aim will be deadly and true in his defence. And this time, she will not let him push her away.