Fallen from the Sky

Brown eyes woke but did not welcome the vicious sunlight that crashed to the floor of his bedroom; the wooden planks below were lit dully, scuffed beyond shine, dusted in places though his room had been very considerably well lived in. At times, it was difficult to fully embrace the general cheer each cloudless morning brought: perhaps it was one too many years of thinking competitively, but he couldn't help but wonder sometimes if the whole world was to be falling into some false sense of complacency - that he was not entirely gone, merely put on yet another a thirteen-year absence from life itself. But he had been there, a twenty-two year old on the trenches of war, defending a school that was full to the brim of so many memories, trophies that bore his house's name - and his own.

He had been there, had seen the destruction, the panic, the inevitable grief, and in this way he felt, by a handful degrees, much older than he truly was or should feel. He had stood ankle-deep in rubble, wielding wand and true Gryffindor courage, he had dueled and been dueled, had done his fair share of mourning over the losses of Fred Weasley and others; he remembered it as it was, recalled this memory far better than the blur of red and green that had been wizarding combat. The Great Hall was lit, yes, but without the characteristic warmth he had come to associate the stone walls with. It had been four years since he had set foot here, and where every table celebrated each day like a feast, that night it had felt more like a womb, where safety and comfort presided, where friends and family alike were being mended - others broken - some never to be returned.

Voldemort's ominous voice overhead, he had come from the second floor, stepping over fallen statue and wizard alike. Their red hair had blazed in the corner torchlight, like beacons, and he was drawn to them, the way their heads were hung and the way the mother's shoulders shook; in his stride he could almost feel the waves of grief and loss lapping at his feet, and the closer he got, the higher the tide swelled until he had managed a look at the person laid between them and he, too, was consumed, swallowed hole, the reality of it like a blunt edge of a knife. Fred Weasley was dead, just another name in the Daily Prophet memorial, his unrelenting humor unbeknownst to most. In the unfairness of it all, Oliver Wood, overcome and with naught a proper idea of what would be the right words to say, had saluted his fallen teammate.

As of late, mornings found him at the corner coffee shop, vaguely scruffy around the jaw line and tired everywhere else. The sound of percolating magic filled the room with whirring noises, noises that allowed no space for silence, and aside from a steaming mug to get him going, this very fact made the place a godsend, too.

"Morning, Jasper," came a voice from the front counter, always buoyant but with a tiniest ounce of distraction imbued within. It was lilting, sure, but at the same time politely distant; the greeting was delivered promptly by nine o'clock with a chiming of tin bells as she emerged through the creaking door serving as a most reliable preamble.

Though he much preferred the comfort of hiding under his rock of self-denial, Hermione Granger was, for all intents and purposes, the reason Oliver had become a regular himself. He had never once drunk coffee before all of this. Ducking into Jasper and Sons one morning on his way to oversee the construction of his very first customized broom, he had stood by the great shop window, its glass streaked with dust and rain, a sopping wet figure that had run knee-first into her table. She had nearly spilled the steaming liquid down her front from the sheer collision of hurtling git into dilapidated table and he didn't know what would have been worse - burns of the third degree or a protuberance in his right leg.

"That you, Oliver?" she had said, briskly trying to recover.

She would prove to be faster at it than he.

For reasons excruciatingly beyond him, Oliver had found it quite difficult to form a single, coherent sentence. Dimly, he suspected that cruel embarrassment had bound and fettered his tongue, or else his body had gone into total shock from that knee-shattering blow - or even, because he had always had a penchant for playing the victimized, an unidentified somebody (probably hooded and hidden away in some faraway corner) had pointed his wand at him and said, sinisterly, "Petrificus totalus!"

Not once did he consider the notion that, since Oliver last glimpsed her in her third year, arm in arm with that Potter and that Weasley, Hermione Granger had grown by leaps and bounds -- and rather prettily so, too.

When dignity proved to be much harder to muster, he instead turned to words.

"Hermione, isn't it?"

He knew who she was, of course. By then her face had been in the paper countless times, depicted as Potter's loyal sidekick and therefore wizardry's most recently beloved heroine; in pictures she seemed genuinely baffled by all the attention, but here? Here she could be deemed as plain in the nicest sense of the word, an ordinary caffeinated pro who knew her way around both Muggle and magical lore if the books she had with her on the table - some authors he knew, others, like Joyce and... Dostoyevsky, was it? he thought sounded more like some treacherous ailment or condition - were to be of any indication.

"Sorry," he added, ignoring the throbbing pain in his leg in an effort to appear somewhat intelligent enough for conversation, "about your table."

She seemed surprised. Oliver was suddenly struck with the idea that he had apologized for the wrong thing. But she smiled, almost wryly, almost like a secret. "It's okay. No hard feelings."

There was a beat of silence before he realized she had been cracking a joke.

He grinned, but before a delayed laugh could be expelled from his lips, her wand was raised and pointed at his chest, dead-center, and behind his sternum, his heart got ahead of itself.

A swish, a flick, and his clothes had dried.

Oliver didn't know what he had been expecting; only that he very well could have done this himself if she would only give him space enough to think. He wasn't thick. Did she think he was thick?

"Right, well, thank you," he had said, tripping over his own words as he said them before turning a cheek to glance outside the window. The rain had ceased. He needed an out of this conversation before his IQ level dropped any lower than it inexplicably had in the damned nearness of her. He could feel her eyes on him, studying him, perhaps taking in the number of ways he had changed. His hair was short, boyishly untidy, brown strands framing the shells of his ears, and he was taller, broader at the shoulders but thin and lanky just the same. He was the spitting image of his seventeen year old self to be quite honest, but not without the rugged handsomeness of a young man beginning to grow into his face. His eyes, watery as they were from the initial pain moments ago, were bright as before, devoid of the manic gleam Quidditch usually brought to them but this was the off-season, during which his soul could repossess itself. He thought fast, wrenching his attention back to her, and started a backwards path to the door. "I have to be off -- new broom and all that, better be on my way to check it out. Was good seeing you, Hermione." The words came out clear and concise, but for all the shorthand he was giving her, they should have come out rushed and clipped, like staccato on a verse.

"Oh, okay! Bye, Oliver."

Later he would wrestle with the argument of whether or not she was genuinely put out -- or put out, in his mind, because he somehow wanted her to be. But for the time he spent turning the knob and letting the door close behind his back, he had to wonder, with a hefty mental kick to his brain: What happened in there?