fic: The World Doesn't Matter (2/2)
Title: The World Doesn’t Matter (2/2)
Rating: T, implicit sexual situations
Character/Ship: Harry, Harry/Hermione
Disclaimer: I don't own anything.
Summary: They’re twenty-one years old, and though he doesn’t know it yet, tomorrow is the beginning of their end. Post DH.
PART 1
Author’s Note: Turned out longer than I'd hoped for, but hope you enjoy regardless! Done for this prompt @ mondmagique's comment ficathon. Harry (and Hermione) Post war, He thought he'd be relieved after Voldemort fell, but all he feels is a bone deep exhaustion and the desire to run.
He wakes up to the sound of a nearby pop.
A rush of annoyance overpowers him, forcing Harry to clutch his wand tightly in his hand. If he suspects correctly then someone has managed to find him in the forest; immediately something primal inside him convinces Harry that he’s done enough for the world and that being left alone for a while seems more than reasonable.
But another part, a tiny fraction of a portion whispers maybe, just maybe, no one really came to find him.
Maybe Hermione just left.
Harry sits up in his bed and stumbles to slip on his shoes, throwing back the flaps at the entrance of the tent just in time to see Hermione hauling a bag behind her.
He blinks once, then twice, and then sees a slight frown form on her face. When he reaches her, she stops, and Harry wonders if in her haste she had managed to horde everything in sight, or if she had her bag already packed the entire time, ready to accompany him had he asked her.
“I’m not leaving you out here by yourself,” says Hermione.
She chooses to stay with him, again, and Harry’s not too certain what he should do with this aching recollection of history.
It’s only hours later when Harry learns that Hermione had left Ron a note explaining to him that she was safe and had left to spend some personal time alone and no she didn’t know where she was headed or when she’d be back.
Harry doesn’t know if he feels guilty because she’s lying about her whereabouts or because she’s lying about being with him.
He’s running.
His throbbing legs are thrusting as fast as they can, arms swinging to gain speed. They’re chasing him again, yelling unforgivables, making Harry sweat and scream and tear.
He falls over, tripping on a dent in the ground, propelling him a few feet forward. The impact knocks the wand from his hand and the glasses from his face.
The shadow closest to him, the one with the dark hostile eyes, peels off the shining mask and pushes the hood back from over his head revealing dirty matted hair and blood-soaked clothing.
Harry doesn’t need his full vision to know that the Death Eater is him.
He awakens to a cold wet rag pressing into his forehead and a concerned Hermione peering down at him, an unreadable expression glazed over her face.
It takes time for Hermione to readjust to living in the woods. She’s clumsy when she carries the firewood, absolutely refusing to engage with magic just because. She’s awkward in their sudden silences and a whole onslaught of uncomplimentary words in their day to day activities of hiking, gathering food, and watching the sun travel across the sky for hours at a time.
However not once does Hermione question him. Doesn’t ask, doesn’t poke and prod into his quiet thoughts and struggles, and it’s a little unnerving at first because this isn’t the same relentlessly curious girl Harry has grown up with.
But then Harry reasons, because the war has changed everyone, including her.
And when they sit across each other every evening in the dark, the crackling of the fire casting a vivid glow on their faces and hunched postures, all Harry can think is that none of it really matters because Hermione’s here and she’s all his.
Harry realizes that a part of him has stayed behind to age in the forest after all.
He wakes up to the sound of screaming and it takes a while to register to Harry that it’s not his.
His heart slams into his ribcage making it almost impossible to breathe as sheer fright encompasses him, compelling Harry to reach underneath his pillow and pull out his wand.
“Hermione,” he rasps. His voice is weak from exhaustion and worry and when he throws back the curtain separating his area of the tent from Hermione’s, his knees nearly give out from relief.
Except not really.
The fact that there is no intruder, no Death Eater or Voldemort, doesn’t stop Hermione from crying in her sleep. Harry freezes and observes the tears escaping from her closed eyelids, treading over the sunken hollow of her cheek and disappearing underneath her.
The feeling in his chest is unbearable now; the tightness of it makes Harry consider how his heart is still pumping blood. In front of him Hermione is screaming, perhaps even speaking, pleading something, in between her yelps, but Harry just doesn’t understand and doesn’t really want to hear it either.
He already knows what she’s saying.
Please. Don’t do this. Please. Stop.
“Hermione,” Harry says her name again with an unforeseen amount of resolve, before moving to sit beside her on the cot, hands gently shaking her already withering frame, “Hermione, wake up.”
When she opens her eyes, blinking back tears, her throat hoarse and chest wheezing, Hermione looks at him with a stare harboring fear before it quickly dissipates into fatigue and shame.
They sit there and don’t speak a word to each other, listening to the noises of the sleeping forest until dawn breaks over the horizon.
Despite it all, Hermione is the immovable shade of himself that represents the part of him willing to breathe and hope and live. If he listens closely Harry can almost make out the reverb of her heart beat echoing his.
“I wish you’d have told me,” she says one morning.
Harry finds it kind of funny how her vague phrase can only point to one thing and one thing only, because the rest, she already knows or has figured out on her own.
But all Harry really hears is I wish you could forgive me and I wish I knew what to do, and strangely enough he hears these words in his own voice.
“I didn’t tell anyone,” answers Harry, fighting off the urge to close his eyes, and instead lets his thoughts reach a position of clarity.
In a moment, he is able to recall every subtle instance after the war he has seen Hermione graze her arm. Mudblood. He recalls how her head hangs and she winces when strangers touch her. Worst of all, Harry can remember himself in those situations, looking and being too absorbed in his own self-pity to do anything. It only brings about a new wave of agonizing memories.
“I’m here for you,” Hermione whispers and Harry can’t help but remember.
He remembers Malfoy Manor, the night Bellatrix Lestrange had straddled Hermione, spewing venom and hate for what she was in her face and using the Crucio on her. He remembers standing and watching helplessly as Hermione had shriveled away, a part of her disappearing and never truly coming back afterwards. Harry remembers her screaming, and has to fight off the nausea threatening to overwhelm him, because it had been identical to the screams in her sleep.
Sometimes, late at night, when Hermione is sleeping restfully and his own demons are at bay, Harry can close his eyes and imagine that he’s sixteen again, and he and Hermione are dancing inside the tent. This time though, the mutual pain over Ron’s departure slowly but surely begins to fade away.
“What happened?” Harry enquires, eyebrows shooting up in amusement as Hermione walks out from the mesh of trees, dripping wet from head to toe.
She scowls when she sees his attempt at controlling his grin, but it falters immediately when he can no longer hold back his laughter, and her own chuckles soon erupt to join his.
“I fell into the pond,” she explains, eyes squinting against the sunlight as her hand comes up to her forehead to shield her face.
“That much is obvious,” he muses, and listens patiently as Hermione describes her rather embarrassing escapade. It isn’t long before Harry catches himself eyeing her lips, and before he knows it, Hermione’s voice starts to waver and then it trails off completely.
Harry takes the time to look over her through the soaking clothes that stick to her frame. He notices her thin figure, and can’t help but think that she’s just not taking care of herself. She’s too busy taking care of me.
Something vast and void opens up inside him at the thought, but Harry carefully brushes the feeling off. It shouldn’t come to him as a surprise, Hermione Granger has been taking care of him her whole life. When they were children, she had fussed over him, made sure he adjusted to fit the demands of Harry Potter, the Boy-Who-Lived.
In spite of her physical frailty, she is still Hermione. She had been there when the goblet spat out his name, when Sirius died, when Snape practically begged him to take his memories, and she’s with him now, when he’s on the verge of losing himself entirely and finding himself once again.
That evening he stares at Hermione’s silhouette on the curtain dividing their halves of the tent. He sees her shred her clothing as the soft glow of the lantern emphasizes her delicate curves, the swell of her breasts, and the long lines that shape her body.
Harry’s heart lodges itself in his throat and never really goes away.
Even in hindsight, it’s difficult to pick apart which transgression led to this exact moment; his hand is buried her hair and his lips are placed hesitantly over her own.
All Harry can remember is the tipping point: Hermione’s warm breath rushing past his cheek and her brown eyes searching his own, trying to find something, anything, before he had given it all up to her freely.
“You love Ron,” he mutters, pulling back but keeping a firm hold on her, lips tingling with desire.
He hopes she doesn’t say he loves Ginny. Harry’s emotional armor has rusted through with blood, with dirt, with unshed tears, and there is nothing left in him to continue to rescue anymore damsels-in-distress.
He doesn’t voice this out loud; he doesn’t want to see what it will provoke in her.
But Hermione is painstakingly intelligent, if anything, so naturally, she says something far worse:
“You do too.”
There’s a remote look in her eyes as she presses herself against him.
The campfire dies out with a small hiss, leaving behind a thin trail of smoke.
When Hermione comes it is with little more than a stifled moan, a grunt really. It’s throaty, runs deep and almost guttural, so that Harry can feel it vibrate across her skin and trickle into his own.
He thinks it is the most beautiful sound he has ever heard.
Harry waits for the regret to conquer him, waits in a place where he is suspended without time, without seasons, without anything except the feel of Hermione’s slick skin next to his. He waits at the place where he begins and where she ends.
He waits for a small eternity and it’s not nearly long enough.
They both go a week without a nightmare.
Things are different; there’s an impermeable shift that comes after the after, and Harry is not surprised. He’s been expecting it. He’s been anticipating the adjustment to permanently change the way he sees Hermione and the way she looks back at him.
But the only alterations he can understand are the subtle changes of Hermione. How her laughs sound louder and how her smiles are wider, but there’s a tiny nagging part in Harry that asks over and over again why doesn’t she feel that impending guilt, too?
Hermione turns to him on the bench and reaches for his hand, face flushed and her soft brown eyes dancing in the recessing sunset. The first snowfall of the season looms overhead, but his warming charm protects them from the forthcoming blistering winds.
She looks a little tired and Harry can not help but feel a little happy that she still chooses to sit out with him.
This woman who has taken him by the hand, has tried her hardest to guide him through his personal process of recovery, has made a sacrifice near to death. She has led him to something close to peace, tranquility, nirvana or as next to it as Harry can get anyway, or perhaps it’s even completion... no matter how fleeting the feeling seems because he doesn’t have that much hope yet.
Because there is something Harry is still hesitant to name, someone deceptively frail but impossibly strong, and he refuses to name him.
He thinks it could be very easy to fall in love Hermione.
He thinks a part of him already has; maybe it’s been in love with her all along.
For the first time Harry finds it painless to eradicate his looming thoughts about the future, because for a moment, none of it feels wrong.
Not at all.
That’s what scares him the most.
He knows he should walk away from her or send her home now before it hurts too much later, before the guilt eventually catches up to him, to them both. But for all that the professors at Hogwarts and the press rave about when it comes to his quiet intellect and bravery, Harry is undeniably selfish. So he’ll keep Hermione a little while longer, he decides. Besides, her eyes are on him now, having been plastered to him since that night, watching and waiting.
So if he has to say goodbye, Harry would rather do it when she is not looking.
“Come back with me,” Hermione murmurs, fingers softly curling around his neck, her body molds against his as they lie in his small bed.
“I can’t,” he murmurs back.
It is then, when she removes herself from his arms and leaves with hurt in her eyes, that Harry knows, with a chilling certainty, that he has lost her.
Later, after Harry makes sure that she has fallen asleep; he takes small careful steps towards her bed and watches her even breathing for a while. Her face is tearstained and he knows he has caused it.
For a minute, Harry indulges himself and imagines a life without worries of betrayal or never being scared.
He imagines a life with her.
Harry knows what Hermione is asking of him when she had implored him to come back. To be with her. And he just can’t do it, and even if he were to change his mind, it’s too late now.
Too many lives rest on his commitment like the lives that depended on him during the war. Harry only wishes that he could break the chains around them both.
Early the next morning Harry approaches her again, leans over Hermione’s sleeping form and places a steady lingering kiss on her forehead.
It tastes like the lifetime of memories they’ll never share and all the moments that could have been. This, Harry believes ruefully, this tastes like regret.
“I’m sorry,” he croaks, eyes numb from his lack of sleep for he has stayed up all night thinking about her and her only.
Because Harry refuses to leave her with bitter and painful thoughts about him. He won’t keep Hermione, he can’t, because she’s better than that, and she deserves a chance at her own happiness. Maybe one day, Harry counters, she’ll forget him on her own and she can resume her life. But he will not risk it.
Harry ignores the roaring in his ears and the sudden prickling of his skin at a thought: he’ll have to forget her too.
He turns back to Hermione, brushes a hand over her smooth skin and gently pushes the wayward strands away from her face. He reaches into the pocket of his torn jeans and raises his wand with trembling fingers.
“Obliviate.”
And then he is gone, haunted by something he knows will be there, but always be out of reach.
Harry sends Hermione home under the pretense that she had spent the last couple of months in France. That she hadn’t heard from him since his departure. That she is as upset as only a caring friend can be.
Harry knows when he returns home he will have to face many angry people, an angry Hermione, because she won’t remember him, won’t remember their peaceful nights in small beds, won’t remember their endless days spent together in the wilderness, at least, not for the second time.
But he knows she will forgive him eventually, they all will.
He only wonders if he'll ever be able to forgive himself.
On a cold December morning Harry stops running.