Thirst

- thirst -

Ron doesn't make any sense anymore.

Hermione doesn't try to make him. Some things have become luxuries, and attempting to bridge the gap between them would take more energy than Hermione has. Ron still has too much pent-up energy, too much drive and ambition and zeal, and no idea which direction to throw it. She has to find them both a direction. That is her task, and she won't be swayed from it. Ron is going to have to wait, but Hermione knows he can't. He may be telling himself he's waiting, but he's really only waiting for the right moment to turn the world over, looking for his own answers, burning his own path to hell if he had to. When the time came, Ron would stand in her way and tell her he knew what he had to do, what Harry would want him to do, Hermione was certain.

He'd burn up her words and set her books on fire if he had to. He's incendiary, loud and brash and he doesn't -understand-, doesn't see what she has to do, what she'd always had to do. Hermione's work is cut out for her; cut and dry and can't he -see-, can't he see, he's blocking her light, the candle's growing shorter and there's not much time left.

Ron sits next to her in the library after Harry disappears, watching her and not saying a word. He watches as if he were frightened of her dry strings of words, her silences and the dark between them. Ron doesn't like the dark the way he doesn't like spiders-- with an instinctive, feral terror. Hermione wonders if his fear of the darkness is related to the fear of actually -saying- anything, because everything is shrouded in the unknown. Ron thinks the unknown is something to brave, to conquer. Hermione knows the unknown dissipates easily, so easily, if you can find the right combination of words to form the basic, irreversible spell of knowledge. To banish fear, one must understand its source and its nature, one must become its weakness themselves, by knowing it.

Hermione thinks she isn't afraid as long as there are still more places to look. The library is larger than any of them fully realize. Somewhere out there, she has to find them: the words that will banish her fear. Somewhere out there, its weakness is written in a language Hermione can understand.

When Ron screams, he doesn't scream in any -words-, he doesn't make sentences Hermione could understand. He tears at her fingers, pulls at her sleeves, tugs her after him, but she can't go. Not yet. She has to find out the answer she knows is waiting for her, there in the dark. She knows he couldn't understand, and she understands that, she does.

Ron is Ron. She is Hermione. They had been Ron & Hermione, and Harry. Now it's just Hermione, and she's alone here, in the dark.

Eventually, of course, the dark would silence him completely. Hermione doesn't wait for it, but she realizes the day will come. For now, he whispers to her occasionally, complains of the drafts, the bitter cold at night, the lack of entertainment. He plays cards with himself and whistles tunelessly, trying to distract her. He wants to make her smile, and Hermione inclines her head to show she understands.

"Can't you just--"

He never finishes his sentences anymore, falling into sullen silence.

Hermione doesn't look up, wets a finger and turns a page, barely registering when Ron tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. She shakes her head, making Ron growl in frustration and threaten to leave.

"Is that what you want? Is that it?" he shouts, and she doesn't know what to tell him. "I miss him too!" he's yelling, thumping the table. "Bloody fucking -hell-, Hermione, he's my friend too!"

"I know," she says, and her voice is hoarse with disuse.

Ron shuts up, expelling a loud breath and throwing himself into his straight-backed chair, pushing it away from the table.

"You'll never help him like this, you know," he mumbles, but he doesn't expect a reply, by now. He takes out a queen, some knights and some pawns from his bag, starts moving them listlessly on the table. He doesn't bother with a chessboard, since there's no one to play with. She sighs, wishing she didn't have to sleep in about two hours. She must get at least three hours of sleep in order to be functional, she knows that.

She only wishes it went -faster-. She only wishes it wasn't -skin- that covered her fingertips but some absorbent layer that soaks things up and changes her, little by little, into a reflection of the words. Hermione knows she must be getting too sleepy now, her mind too restless, that she would entertain fantasies where she descends into words until they imprint themselves on her and she -has- no skin, no self, even. Only dry knowledge that one could drink and drink and only get more thirsty, until one is merely skin and bones and words.

Ron must wish he could burn her, wake her up and set her loose as ashes on the wind, somewhere free and impossible like the places Harry always felt so comfortable exploring. Somewhere where no rules or words or theorems apply.

He touches her tentatively, when everyone had gone from the Common Room and Hermione is mostly asleep by the fire, or when they sit together in another of their soft silences at breakfast, Hermione remembering not to nod off into her porridge. Ron finds her hand, wraps his own hand around it, sighs. He doesn't look at her, doesn't wait for her to say any of the things he knows she won't. They don't have time for this, she'd say. He just has to wait, she'd say. It's no one's fault, she'd say.

Ron just wants to forget all that and remember the way her hand feels in his, the way it feels to rub his thigh against hers when he sits next to her during Potions, content to follow her instructions and to watch her, still. Always, to watch her.

"Do you want me to leave you alone?" he says eventually, tentatively. His knight has stopped by the queen, not moving and seeming to hesitate before knocking her over, the game over without ever having begun.

"What?" she breathes, voice husky. "Can you get me some water?" She is reading long strings of words without understanding them, cursing her increasingly poor vision and the charms that seem to not be working as they should anymore. What was that about finding missing people by lighting candles for them to light their way? Seems like some kind of fairy tale, she thinks. Her head begins to ache, and she rubs dry, bony fingers against her eyes, sighing.

She'd thought she'd be living in a fairy tale, when she was eleven. She'd thought it would be such an opportunity to see what magic was really like in those stories, without the happily ever afters, because she'd just keep living past them. She'd be a part of them, could peel away the layers of words until she found the mechanisms that made them move across the pages.

Or perhaps that's just what she tells herself these days; Hermione doesn't quite -remember- being eleven. It seems to her as if she had been seventeen all her life sometimes, and Harry had always been gone, and the neverending line of books empty of the knowledge she sought had always stretched out like this, to the horizon.

"Sure, Hermione. I'll get you some water, but you should stop. We can come back tomorrow, and the day after that, for however long it takes, but you should stop now. It's late." His voice was soft, far away. She could barely hear him.

Her throat parched, she lifts a hand to cover up a yawn. "You go on. I'll be up in a bit," she says, swallowing thickly. All the moisture had apparently gone out of her, and she'd lost the desire to move to replenish it somewhere along the way. No food or drink in the library, she remembered. What was she thinking?

"All right. You promise?" he says, hand on her shoulder. It feels good, there, warm almost to the point of being burning hot. It spreads little tendrils of heat through her body, and Hermione feels herself melt deeper into her seat.

Perhaps a little nap wouldn't be so bad. "I promise," she says, eyes blurry and unseeing.

She wakes up with her mouth pressed to the thin parchment, saliva running harmlessly over the charmed ink. At first she thinks it's just a dream, yet another one where she's alone in the library and looks up to find Harry there, sitting next to her where Ron had been, smiling like he'd never left.

The light never changes in the library, and Hermione never knows if it's morning or evening in her dream, only that Harry is smiling again, and she knows they'd find Ron fast asleep when they went up to Gryffindor Tower to wake him, because Harry was here, and it was all right. Everything was all right now.

Walking to the window, she peers out. It is still dark, and when she looks closer, she realizes it's raining. She can hear the thunder, too, the hurried whispering of the rain on stone and the water droplets sliding furiously down the glass window. Hermione can't see very far beyond the window, and she supposes that's all right, too. There's really nothing to see. There's nothing out there but the wind and the rain, she knows that just as she knows she's alone here, in the flickering half-light of this large, echoing chamber.

She stands motionless by the window until morning, as if waiting for something she knows won't come. The words she hadn't quite read had seemed to seep into her during the night, and she's running them through her mind, memorizing their shapes and sounds, sifting through them patiently, her eyes wide open and staring into the night even as it shifts slowly into day.

"This is hopeless, Granger. Get this straight: Potter isn't coming back. The Dark Lord doesn't release his prizes."

There's no sneer in that voice, only certainty. Hermione's back is to him, and she's glad of it, so that he doesn't see her face twist and her composure shatter briefly into a million tiny pieces. She wants to -kill- him at that moment, strangle him with her bare hands. It is his fault, his and his father's and everyone who's like them and who ever had been. It was them who should disappear as surely as the night gives way to the feeble grey of the dawn.

Her fists are clenched by her sides, hard enough to have shattered glass if she'd swung them fast enough. She could have calculated the exact velocity and angle needed in under a minute, but she can think of nothing to say to Malfoy that would make any difference at all.

Hermione closes her eyes, visualizes the book still open on her habitual table, thinks that the answer could be hiding on just the next unturned page. And the next, and the next. Still, it is now time for breakfast, and it is important to keep to a schedule, to get to her classes on time, to keep up appearances. Shower, eat, walk, sit and try to listen in every class even when her time would be better spent in solitary study, right here, where she has everything she needs.

She turns around, looks Malfoy in the eye steadily. He looks startled. Malfoy's tired too; there are circles underneath his eyes, and his skin is almost as paper-thin as hers. He's carrying darkly-bound, heavy books under his arm and scowling, looking impatient. Hermione stares at him, and for one brief, impossible moment, she sees herself.

"Well?" she says briskly, her sudden leap of intuition leaving her feeling a bit winded. It had been a while since the last time she'd forgone common sense and just -understood- something important like this. Hermione's mind feels clearer all of a sudden, sharp as the sunlight slicing through the glass behind her. She could see through Malfoy and he couldn't. That was power. "What are you waiting for? Tell me what you know."