Another Time

Hermione, unraveled, and all the things that come with her, waiting for him when he gets out of another of those insufferable meetings. Plan this, strategize that, analyze and plot and reconsider. At the beginning he'd taken notes, in a desperate attempt to organize it all. Had started the day a foolish schoolboy, and now comes home late at night to the life of man. Dazzled by it all, too, the woman who's poured herself into his bed, made herself at home, is tucked tight in his blankets with mostly just a furze of dark hair showing, and her cat curled up in the warmth at the back of her knees, blinking at him in the dim light. Has she committed a great sin, and fallen asleep with candles still burning? It seems so, her breath rasping rhythmically in her throat, an almost-snore in counterpoint to the cat's purring.

Ron shuts the tent flap, cold-numbed fingers fumbling at the loops and buttons. Sighs heavily when it is secured and the universe therefore stopped at his door, and the world spiraled down into the tent and the woman and the cat and himself. His posture goes all to hell and he divests himself of every single weapon and tool of office: knives, cloak, Auror's badge...even takes off his overshirt, which has a razorblade sewn into the hem. Boots next, propped close to the brazier in hopes the leather will dry. Stocking feet are silent on the thick rugs, but Crookshanks tracks him with his inscrutable gaze. The cat is maybe jealous of him, he's decided, though they get along well enough, and he will chase a string if Ron drags it along...but the cat becomes a bit petulant when Ron curls up around Hermione in the night, and displaces the beast so he can get as much of his skin on as much of hers as is humanly possible.

She looks exhausted, the moon-curved line of her jaw taut even as she dreams. He casts himself down into the one chair and stretches his feet out to the brazier, feet next to boots, which is an odd visual that prompts him into a half-smile. Feet and ghost feet, maybe. Sitting like this he feels like an old man, like his father, propped in his armchair after yet another gut-stretching Weasley feast, reading the Muggle broadsheets while Ron and the twins scheme with their tin soldiers beneath the table. He runs his hands through his hair, fussing with the choppy haircut that looks as though it was done by a butcher. A blind butcher. Hermione says it's charming but there's a smile in her voice when she says it that tells him she is being the tiniest bit dishonest with him.

"When did you get in?" she asks behind him, and he turns to see her draw herself up, dislodging the cat, who butts his head into her forearm, desperate for attention. She scratches under Crookshanks' chin absently.

"Oh, a minute ago." He pauses, wonders if he should bring up the matter of the unattended candles, which gutter now in their slicks of wax, the wicks in need of trimming. Decides he does not want to pick a fight, not with both of them so tired. Decides he does not even want to get up any time soon, because the angle of the chair is doing lovely things to his back. All those little bones are slowly returning to their proper places, making tiny pops as they go.

The cat tries to crawl into Hermione's lap, but she is sitting sort of sideways with her legs to one side, so she doesn't really have a lap, and Crookshanks settles for sprawling on her folded knees. Ungainly thing, he is, with a gut and a pugnacious face, and attitude for miles. He purrs louder under her continued petting.

"Long meeting," she says, and he knows that beneath that is her old complaint, that all his meetings are long, and they never have any time together anymore. But she has her own meetings, and even if most of them are with books, they are still important. She is researching, she is excavating, she is disappearing into the history of wizards and witches, and damn, how he misses her.

They have been fighting a lot lately. He thinks it is just the war stretching them thin, and familiarity breeding contempt in them, the tiniest bit. Their relationship is a knot, drawing all its strength from tensions. He has sworn to himself that he will never take her for granted, as he had a tendency to do with all the girls he dated after Hogwarts. He realizes now they were all just practice, just preparation. A stretching of muscles before the toughest Quidditch match of his life. And he now also realizes that, since the car accident that took her parents, she is taking a chance on him, taking a chance on love again, and she is taking it very slowly.

"Aye," he says. "So long I even took notes." He shows her the one page of parchment covered in his dense, scrawling hand, then crumples it and tosses it in the little vent on the top of the brazier. It disappears into the glow and then is gone.

"Was anything accomplished?"

"Well, if you call my ass falling asleep an accomplishment, then, yes."

She grins, uncurls herself from the bed, steps barefoot onto the cold rugs. In her nightdress she's a ghost, all pale skin and dark hair. The garment's sleeveless and she shivers before finding a fuzzy shawl to wrap up in.

"I got a letter from Her Majesty," Hermione says, which is a nickname for her mother's imperious sister, Emma, a Muggle of stout mind and stouter body, who has no patience for this gallivanting about, this nose-buried-in-books, this sharp mind dulled (she says) on the workings of the wizard world. Hermione rummages among the mingled debris of their growing life together. They pile things on his table, his maps are buried beneath bits of flotsam and jetsam that ride the various tides on into their shores. They are both packrats and scavengers, which is fortunate, because they never need to argue about the clutter. They just live with it, reorganize it every now and then, each with their own arcane and impenetrable-to-the-other-system. But it works for them. She finds a letter, holds it up so he can see.

He recognizes the fine parchment, the bright wax seal, and his heart thrums up in his chest, unbidden. She folds back the flap on the envelope--true luxury, that, all that creamy paper mostly blank except for the address, which is just Miss H. Granger, in care of the Seventh Battalion--and takes out the letter, which is only one sheet of paper, covered on both sides in her aunt's spidery scrawl.

"And what does your dearest relative have to say?"

Hermione sighs, and beneath the yarn and silk her spine turns into a column of iron. "She threatens me, and calls it advice. The same as always."

Nothing makes Emma happy, and what makes her the most miserable is the fact that her niece is living in sin. Or, he could be presumptuous in thinking that it's Hermione's choice in lovers that the Emma is most displeased with. It could be anything. Could even be something as minor as the cut of a gown or a style of hair...she's dispatched letters about such trivial things before. Owls die in the frigid winds, so Emma can deliver her cutting barbs from half a thousand miles away.

He knows Hermione wants to burn the letter but he also knows she can't. Mother figures torture her. She will fold it back up, slide it inside the envelope, stash it with its sisters in the bottom left drawer, which she's claimed as her own, and is as organized as anything in that battered desk has ever been. But for now she just sets it back down among the papers and photographs (Muggle and wizard, moving and non-, their lives, this juxtaposition) and a broken knitting needle she asked him to fix some time ago. The damn thing just snapped, out of nowhere, and he has no idea how he might get it back together, outside of finding a minuscule nail somewhere, and then the patience and dexterity to deal with it. It's the sort of challenge to which his father would rise with admirable aplomb. But he is, he is increasingly coming to realize, less and less like his father ever day. Is, he imagines that means, becoming a man, and it is terrifying. Everything is unknown, and in this ever-expanding universe of uncertainty, Hermione has become his Fixed Point. The true north of the compass of his soul. He still can't believe they are each the one the other comes home to. Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, he wishes Harry was here to talk to.

He sits up and stirs the brazier, blowing on the coals to give it a little pep, then sets about making tea. By the time he's got the pot filled and on to boil she's gone back to bed and is reading halfheartedly. The light is so terrible back there, and he worries about her eyes...he recognizes the cover, it's an ancient volume of folktales, meant for children. She told him about it earlier: it's a Muggle thing, written in some obscure dialect, but she thinks it might give them a clue to the beginnings of witchcraft...the sorts of things that have shifted into legend, which she must drag back, kicking and screaming, into the territory of things they can understand.

"Read me a story," he says, settling back in the chair. He hears her shift, imagines she is looking at him in one of those particularly-Hermione ways, her eyes saying that he's crazy and that she loves him. It puts a frisson in his belly and low in his groin. Later, he tells himself.

So she reads to him, going slowly because she is deciphering the sentence structure. She acts the story out, as if he is a child, her voice broad and clear. Outside the world is all snow and doom but inside it is just them, and it is perfect. He's not sure if he listens more to the story or just to her voice, and shuts his eyes, content and tired. He conjures her a little witchlight, for her eyes... whenever she gets a letter from Emma she does less and less magic. Mudblood guilt, she's called it, self deprecatingly. Watching her do things the Muggle way exhausts him, and he can barely begin to comprehend what the decade of her life before she could magic things must have been like.

Somewhere dogs bark, snapping their teeth at the cold, and distant voices call out, cursing the noise. Hermione pauses and looks up at the door, as if she is expecting the enemy to charge in and the dogs to be at their throats. Since her parents died, and then Harry, she has been riding this edge, has become the edge, from time to time. She's woken herself up screaming, but never speaks about those dreams, instead chooses to burrow into him, and touch him, distract him. He knows he shouldn't let her get away with those kinds of things. But he needs the distraction, too, and she is, ultimately, his best distraction, and his purpose, all in one.

She goes back to the story. The water is boiling and he makes tea. No sugar, no cream...war-time tea. But there are calming herbs in the mix, and it smells like grass hot beneath the summer sun. He gives the brazier a last stir and blows out all the candles except for the ones by the bed, and then splashes his face with the bitingly cold water from their washstand. In the morning there will be a filigree of ice in it, which he will break with a bent knuckle... He supposes he could just use a spell, but this little ritual, this early-morning shock, has become something of a comfort. He supposes it must be grounding, or maybe it helps him feel useful. The great living brain he's latched himself onto can be neglectful of the practical things. She will disappear into her pages, if he's not careful.

Finally he brings two cups over to the bed, and she scoots aside to let him in. He has to juggle cups and cat, and she peers over the top of the book to watch him, amused.

"You could help, you know," he says, while the cat struggles to get at the tea, and he struggles not to spill it.

"I could, or I could just watch you."

He frowns very quickly, just a quirk of the face to let her know he's mildly irritated. Not for the first time he curses the fact that he hasn't had the time to cobble together some sort of bedside table, a place where they could pile the empty cups and dog-eared books and half-finished pieces of knitting that have accumulated around the bed. More than anything else he wishes that they could have more than four hours together in the bed. He wishes that patrols and meetings and emergencies and dawn and dusk could be suspended, pushed aside like dirty clothes or bad habits.

Finally he gets himself under the blankets, with his left side touching her right at shoulders and elbows and knees. Of course he's taller and their parts don't line up exactly, but still. It's something. She takes her cup of tea and laughs as the cat sidles his way into Ron's lap, all purrs and charm and desperate need to stick his nose into anything that even remotely resembles food.

"Keep reading," he says, petting the cat with one hand and lifting his tea high in the air with the other.

"If you insist." There's laughter in her voice but she goes back to the story.

He sits there with the cat rumbling in his lap, listening to her but his mind wandering, as it always seems to do, to matters of war: supply and demand, how to feed soldiers, how to care for them when they are wounded, how to bury them when they die. He is a veteran, and in this army that is a rare thing. He's lasted over a year, and sometimes he feels like his days are numbered, because he has a streak of his mother's fatalism, and now that he has found Hermione, that fatalism says he will soon be deprived of her, by some calamity or accident or pure bad luck. Or maybe he'll get his head cut off.

He finishes his tea, and leans over to set the cup down on the floor. The cat flees at the movement, goes and sits in the chair, its eyes gleaming. Ron scoots down beneath the sheets, rolls onto his side and wraps one arm about Hermione. It is a very strange posture, his head resting on her left hip and his right leg hitched possessively over both of hers. This is where being so tall comes in handy: she's all wrapped up. And she's very warm.

"Ron," she says, with a laugh in her tone. "You aren't cold or anything, are you?"

"Who, me? Oh, no, not at all." Airily, even as the fingers of the hand resting on her far hip burrow beneath the blankets, seeking out her skin.

She leans over so she can put the book down on her side of the bed, and then burrows down beside him. She's got his shirt half off when an alarm bell off to the north starts tolling. Long, short, short, long.

"Bloody hell." Bells at this time of the night can only mean one thing: there's been another attack. He needs to go clean up the wreckage, and there will be refugees for her to attend to. He pulls himself away from her, struggles back into his clothes, throws on boots and cloak and knives while she dresses for her own duties of triage and management. Even scholars get bloody, in this war. Already he can hear feet pounding toward them through the snow, and in a quick, desperate move he grabs her about the waist, kisses her until they've both lost their breath and have to pull apart, gasping. Crookshanks is still watching them, and Hermione rubs the top of his head on their way out the tent flap.

Outside is cold and dark and blowing snow, the wind snapping at everything that's not tied down. They bump elbows and she walks away from him and her stomach does this little fillip, and she's become her mother in more ways than one. Has become a mother, to make the narrowest of distinctions. Has intuited it for a while now, but not acknowledged it, until the second month passed, and her breasts ached all out of schedule, and lately she's had to fight to keep the breakfast tea down in the mornings.

So. Unmarried and pregnant and stuck out here only a few hours back from the front lines. What will Emma say to that? And her heart breaks a little bit, because what she really wants to know is what her mother would say, though she has a feeling that her mother would be all smile. Ear to ear and floored with happiness.

What will Ron say, she wonders, ducking laundry frozen on guy wires and hippogriffs tethered where the snow is most sparse. They paw at the icy grass, breath steaming. How will he react? And what will happen to this child, whose parents are caught up in something larger and more dangerous than even their wildest dreams?

She scrabbles up the slight slope that leads to the medical tent, a great sprawling thing that stinks of wet wool and infection and sage smoke. She moves in a daze, taking orders, glad as always that the healers have accepted her as a person rather than as part of the Golden Trio...wonders absently if they are now referred to as the Golden Duo, then chides herself for the morbid humor. There a bigger things to think about now, bigger things than her dead friend. There are refugees from the attack. They are young, mostly women and children. All the men are dead and gone. There is an older man with some kind of head injury who is almost uncontrollable. He screams, ceaselessly. They have to tie him down, force-feed him something to make him sleep. Hermione doesn't want to get involved in that but everyone else is busy and she is swept up in his madness, she is holding onto one of his feet, which is bare and filthy and bleeding and kicking.

One of the women is screaming, "Help him, help him, please help him!" Hermione glances over at the woman, who is young, dressed in tatters, with a little girl clutching at her robes, almost disappearing in them. The girl has the strangest eyes Hermione's ever seen, they are an incredible turquoise-and-seawater color, so bright it is startling even blurred by tears and distance. Hermione is wrapped up in that color, is leaning away to get a better look, and her body twists, and fate twists, and the crazy old man kicks her in the stomach, so hard she loses her air, and falls, gasping.

She's only down for a second, knowing he needs to be controlled before he hurts someone else, and this time they manage to tie him down, and by the time she lets go her spine has turned into a column of fire. "I have to go," she murmurs, one arm crossed over her body instinctively, and almost runs back to the tent.

It is dark now, the night is absolute and smells of wood smoke and snow, and the aurora above her head is violently beautiful. Cramps spike into her, belly and thighs and abdomen, and she falls in the snow, lies there for a long moment with the cold seeping in and her child seeping out, a sticky warmth between her legs, soaking her clothes. Lies there and looks up at a wretched quarter of moon, veiled behind the emerald and amethyst curtain draped across the sky. It does not take very long, or maybe it takes the rest of her life. Who can tell? She cries out for her mother, steels herself against the pain, and gets to her feet again.

Blood in the snow, dark. A lure for wolves. More of it dripping down her skin. She covers most of it with more snow. Always cleaning up, always making sure everything is safe...she has become her mother.

By the time Hermione gets to the tent she is practically useless from the waist down. There is Crookshanks in the chair, all eyes, there is the rubble of their life, mute testament to what they have become, each a jury-rigged refuge for the other.

Water, she needs water, and clean clothes, and a strong drink. Needs something. They always leave a big kettle near or on the brazier...the water in there will be warm enough, she hopes, pouring it out into a little tin tub they keep stashed under the bed. Kicks out of boots, socks, leggings...the leggings are ruined. That stain will never come out, and it will always break her heart. She sobs as she steps into the water, the warmth of it searching out the winter-cold that's gotten into all the small bones of her feet. She's slimy with blood, soaked with it, and tears.

When Ron comes in she is all twisted up, and he thinks she is just beautiful: chemise hiked up under her breasts, her back to him, candlelight glimmering along the curves of hip and buttock and thigh. Her hair is loose, and there is something odd about her posture, something stiff-legged and pained. "What?" he asks.

What can she tell him? There are no words. She flashes back to the day he told her about the accident... the night, rather, rain washing the windows, her head aching from the written word, and then his spoken ones stabbing into her heart, a needle, an insistent divider. Her life has become Before and After.

"Hermione." In the half-light her eyes are bruises. They scare him.

She lets the bunched chemise drop as she steps out of the tub, sliding her feet into felted slippers. "I'm fine," she says, though he hasn't asked it aloud, and goes over to the largest pile of her things. She rummages in a trunk for the soft rags she uses for her cycles. "The surgeons said they didn't need me anymore, they had everything under control." She unfolds and refolds a length of flannel, tucks it between her legs, which want, desperately, to tremble. She reminds herself she needs to be strong for him. Maybe he will never know. Maybe she will never tell him.

Too late. While her back has been turned he's gone to the tub to see if the water might still be warm enough for a wash up, but even in the bad light he can tell there's something in the water, more than dirt and soapsuds. He has been smelling blood the whole time he's been gone, but this is very different.

He's had a suspicion. Has felt the tiniest bit insulted, that she would think him so naïve that he wouldn't know she was off her cycles, that her body feels different beneath his hands. Blood swirls in the water, slowly, and here and there is a larger clot. The biggest is the size of his thumb. He shuts his eyes, breathes slowly in and out, turns around to look at her.

"I don't want to talk about it," she says, coming close, bending to pick up the tub. But the bending is too much, and she half-straightens, then has to lurch awkwardly onto the bed.

What can he do? She's stubborn as hell, he's never known anyone so bullheaded. Never known anyone who infuriates him so, or inspires in him this overwhelming desire to shut out the rest of the world. He is remembering, inevitably, every spat they've had, every angry word, the years and years of verbal sparring that eventually led them here, lovers, childless parents...still children themselves, for all that they are growing. And here the world has shifted again, and she is getting into bed, lying on her side with her stiff back toward him. The lump in his throat is suffocating.

What can he do? Can do what he's always done: be competent, be practical. Picks up the basin and has to struggle with the tent flap to get outside. He's never been squeamish but he really wants to vomit now, pushing his way through wind-carved drifts that reach halfway up his thighs. The problem is they are both so stubborn and so practical. In many other ways they complement each other: his strategies and her emotions; his focus and her vision. But oftentimes they are far too good at pissing each other off.

He spills the basin out into the snow and the moonlight. Wants to say something but can't, wants to cry but can't. The only thing he wants to do, and can do, is go in and see Hermione.

She hears him fastening the tent flap behind him, tying all the complicated knots that come as close to approximating a lock as anyone can get out here, so far from four walls and a roof. He has this way of drawing all her attention, and even though she is not looking at him, even though the pain is settling in now for what she can tell will be a long, slow burn, he distracts her. Moving about in the dim light. Shuffling papers, touching things. She shuts her eyes, crosses hands over her belly. She had thought, vaguely, about the usual nonsense: names for the child, and what would be more practical, knitted booties or a pair fashioned from old furs. Had stood sideways in strong afternoon sunlight, and plucked her shirt out away from her body, so that her shadow looked like the future.

The memory of that foolish action clogs her throat, and then when Ron climbs into bed and starts rubbing at the knots in her lower back she loses it completely and just sobs for what feels like hours. He never stops touching her but he doesn't say anything either. His breath is harsh in his throat and she knows that he is crying.

"There will be another time," she says, which is the most foolish, most extravagant luxury: to imagine the future. To imagine that they will survive, and the war will end, and they will surmount every obstacle that stands in the way of there being another time. And she goes on to tell him, in her broken voice, about the man, and the eyes of the girl, and how she lay in the snow while the stars wheeled overhead. And it all seems so impossibly unfair, her life does, of a sudden. Her parents and best friend and now her child, all these people ripped away from and out of her, and in the middle of all this heartache Ron has buried himself, deeply, like a wound that will scar.

He hitches them closer together, a twining of limbs. He is so much bigger than she is that it's sometimes astonishing, sometimes annoying...now he wraps around her as if he can keep the rest of the world away, which is what he desperately wants to do...escape everyone, everything. He can't say anything about the future, does not even want to acknowledge that her bringing it up has stirred something inside him. He rests his mouth on the nape of her neck, more of a touch than a kiss. Breathes into her hair, just breathes. Murmurs "I love you."

After a while she gingerly turns over, so their foreheads touch, and when he drapes an arm across her waist it doesn't hurt so she moves a little closer, puts her arm across his waist in turn. His warmth is always stunning and visceral, something felt body-deep, and somehow it soothes the simmering pain. She knows that this night they will sleep surrounded by ghosts, her parents and Harry and the uncountable, unnamable, unnamed others who have left them behind. She knows the ghosts will be with them until the end of time. She has trouble with the next breath then, and the one after that, thinking of those ghosts and the little bits of her soul they've taken with them.

But here, this warmth, this is Ron, still here, in this moment. His heartbeat beneath her hand. His body that joined with her body and made a new one. And she knows in her heart that there will be a future, and there will be another time. And in the darkness, which is less complete now, which in the east will be turning into dawn, she rests her mouth against his and whispers that she loves him.