Grey

Everything is grey now. London was always grey from the constant rain, yet now everything has lost its color. Everyone she knows walks around in a cloud of guilt or shame, the ones that still remain, at least. He is gone now.

She remembers.

She remembers helpless loss, the anguish of simple nothingness. The void she has tried desperately to fill by creeping into Harry's bed at night in Grimmauld Place. Her face crushed against the pillow as the savage thrusts pounded from behind. Even the physical pain he forced upon her could not shake the emptiness from either of their eyes. Each time he bruised her soft thighs and drew welts on her pale skin, she hoped the scars he left on the outside would distract from those within. Each time she stood shakily from his bed, leaving his restlessly sleeping form behind, she would pull the nightgown over her head. The silky softness skirted over purples, blues and greens of fresh bruises. Yet, underneath, the nothingness still remained.

So, this is why, when Remus pulled her aside after yet another silent breakfast and suggested that they leave for a spell, Hermione readily agreed. She could no longer face that haunted look in Harry's eyes. The raw, unhealed wounds chafed her spirit each time she saw something that reminded her of him. In his old home, everything held on to his presence.

She packed her clothing tidily into a small bag. Not even bothering to use magic, her possessions are so few now, she completed the task quickly and then it was time for them to leave. Remus walked ahead and Harry's door was closed. Another wall Hermione has forged.

She wore her silence wrapped about her body like a cloak. She has learned not to hope now, to hope that anything might bring a respite from her daily confrontation with grief.

*

This is where he finds her. She is seated listlessly at the kitchen table. Her palms are splayed on the dark wood, pale fingers pressed against the grain, so strongly they are white around the edges. He follows the soft curve of her neck with his eyes, tracing from the nape to the thin wisps of hair curling around her small ears, across her high cheekbones and finally following the direction of her stare. She is looking though unfocused eyes out of the cold window to the freezing waves crashing against the craggy rocks. A cup of tea is placed casually by her left hand. Remus notes that it lies in exactly the same position it had been the evening before when he, himself, had placed it there.

"Your tea's gone cold," he states as he reaches delicately to take the cup and saucer from the table. He turns to place them carefully into the sink and silently turns on the tap. Behind him, she speaks quietly.

"Everything's gone cold."

He lets the silence following her words stretch long between them. He turns and studies the firm line of her jaw and the slow rise and fall of her chest for a moment.

"So it has," he replies lamely. The tap is still running in the background, a soft hissing stream of water. He turns it off and backs soundlessly out of the room.

Somehow it grates on him. These insurmountable silences, meal after meal spent as if he is sitting across from a stone pillar.

Remus had loved him, after all.

*

Remus is in the garden. She watches from her familiar spot at the kitchen table as he climbs the path. Hermione takes a vicious sort of pleasure in haunting this spot, in displaying her pain so openly. Remus mourns him, she knows, but he could never understand the depths of her anguish. He could never understand the misery of perpetual standstill motion. How it feels as if there is an invisible thread attached just below her navel to a place unknown, a place beyond the veil. Something that is constantly pulling her forward but never does she move.

A life bereft of his touch is no life at all. For days now, she has been contemplating this, filling her thoughts with visions of the room at the Ministry. Horrible, shattered vignettes cloud her sight: the screams, curses hurled, death eaters, her voice and his fall.

She did not hear Remus quietly snap the door shut or see him set down his tattered coat on the dusty banister. He came to rest one bony shoulder against the door frame leading into the kitchen. Still, so lost in her own morbid memories, she did not notice him.

Hermione starts when he begins to speak low, "You were not the only one to care for Sirius." She tenses when Remus speaks his name. Sirius. She has not spoken it since he fell. "You are not the sole human being to feel his loss, surely you must see that."

Remus is still leaning his thin frame against the door-jam. The sight of him standing there - so casually speaking of the one person who ever brightened her days, who was ever able to make her feel like this - the sight of him infuriates her. She wants to make him hurt, to slap those smirking cheeks and bloody his nose, she wants to make him feel as she does inside.

Hermione gathers her composure somewhat and spits out at Remus; "What would you know about loss, dear Remus?"

His eyes blaze and something cold and hard settles in Hermione's stomach. He speaks louder now, enunciating every word; "Don't be stupid, girl. You were not the only person Sirius ever romanced," he grins cruelly, "You were but another notch on his bedpost." Almost to himself, he adds, "We all were."

He sees her back stiffen, knuckles clenched to white, and a small vein pulses at her temple. "You are nothing but a jealous, old man," she says finally. However, this time, he can see a flicker of doubt shadow her eyes for a moment as he barks out a short and wicked laugh.

"You really think that's it? You really think that you are the only one he ever loved?"

Remus strides up to Hermione and fixes her with an icy cold stare. He continues bitterly, "I thought that too, once. I thought that the world was only him and me, and that we would always be 'us'. I thought that he would be my hero, that he would somehow ease my suffering. That he could somehow erase the monster within."

Remus kneels in front of her and places his hands on her shoulders, staring at her with an intensity that is almost terrifying until she notices the tears pricking the corners of his eyes. She studies the silvery scars that cris-cross his face, the soft curve of his trembling lips and the never-ending deep pools of his grey eyes. All at once she understands.

"You- you two were together, you were together the whole time, weren't you?" He nods solemnly and she continues, "The whole time, I loved him - you loved him too. But he never loved either of us, did he?"

Suddenly it feels as if the weight that has been bearing down on her since Sirius dies has been readjusted. All her sorrow, in one sudden flash, turns to ire. Hermione feels her face go hot red and she turns her head away from him, a cascade of her hair forming yet another wall between Remus and her coursing tears.

Consumed by her sorrow, she is only able to choke out one phrase:

"He never loved me."

Remus shakes his head slowly side-to-side, and the look in his eyes makes her spirit recoil in pain; "You and I, we were all a game to him, people to occupy his nights and never his heart."

Now they sit there. Both Widow and Wolf, locked in their silence as the night deepens. Now, everything is grey.