100quills Prompt 17, Fred/Hermione, G
TITLE: Grave
AUTHOR: Myself
DISCLAIMER: JKR owns all HP
PAIRING: Fred/Hermione
RATING: G
A/N: Written for 100quills Prompt 17: Grave. CONCRIT MUCH APPRECIATED, because this is depressing fic, featuring grief-stricken!Hermione, unlike the usual romantic happy stuff I do. So I'm wondering if I got it right. Oh yeah-MAJOR DH SPOILERS!!!!! (Though you really should have read the book by now.)
Hermione Granger had learned how to hide her feelings.
When Malfoy called her a Mudblood, she knew it meant something awful. And she suppressed the sting of the word with the love of her friends and the knowledge that she was “worth twelve of Malfoy,” as Harry would have put it. So though she would have liked to cry and maybe punch him, she stifled that urge and forged ahead.
When she started to notice Harry, the way his eyes lit up when he’d mastered a spell, his passion when he was angry, she put aside those feelings, because his friendship was worth so much more to her. Besides, when there were girls like Cho Chang and Ginny Weasley around, who would notice her?
In the midst of everything there was Ron, who loved her in his awkward way, floundering and shouting his way through the hormones clouding his judgment. She felt something for him for a time, but she wasn’t sure what it was, and it faded all too quickly when it became apparent that Ron couldn’t even sort out his own feelings, much less do something about them.
Then, unthinkably, she had fallen for Fred Weasley. It took her completely by surprise and swept her up like a tidal wave, paralyzing her. She couldn’t speak or breathe in his presence, yet when he wasn’t around she felt his absence like a hole in her heart. But he was Ron’s brother, and she couldn’t bear to hurt Ron, and so for the first time she kept a secret from her two best friends.
And now, here she was. The long rectangular hole stretched into the ground at her feet, pebbles in the bottom and roots poking out of the sides. She stared at the coffin as it was lowered through her line of vision and into the gaping grave below. Harry was on one side of her, Ron on the other, and across she could see the rest of the Weasley family. Behind her she knew there were members of the Order and classmates from Hogwarts. Muffled sobs and sniffling filled the air, but Hermione herself could not cry.
She stared numbly at the coffin as the first clods of earth were shoveled onto it. The sounds around her faded until all she could hear was a ringing in her ears. She was frozen to the spot, her hands clenched to fists inside her jacket pockets. It was impossible that Fred was dead. That there would be no more Fred-and-George, no more of his wicked smiles and even wickeder pranks. He would never invent another joke item, and she would never again have to yell at him for testing it on some unsuspecting person. Her throat constricted and tears blurred her vision-her walls were cracking, and she had to get out, get away from the grave and the crowd, out where no one could see her cry.
Then without thinking she was rushing away from the grave, unable to see the puzzled faces glancing at her through a haze of tears. Sound returned and she could hear the minister droning behind her and people crying and her own ragged breathing as she ran, ran away through the graveyard.
She went over a low hill and stopped finally in the shade of a huge tree, well away from the funeral, bending over and gasping for breath, choking on her sobs. She made little noise as she cried. She had passed beyond that realm of explosive sadness and into a kind of numb sorrow, where her sobs came in giant heaving gasps and she could only rock back and forth on her hands and knees in the dirt, mouth open in a silent wail, tears pouring down her cheeks.
She remembered Bill and Fleur’s wedding and how she had come out of Ginny’s room in her dress at the same time Fred was leaving his own room, and how he’d stopped and told her she looked like a vision of paradise. She’d laughed it off, thought he was only being gallant and ran out to get a seat, but now she recalled the way her stomach had fluttered when he had met her eyes, because his gaze had said it all.
She was stupid, so stupid. She’d never believed he could love her, never really believed anyone could, because she was Hermione and she had bushy hair and a bossy voice and was kind of a know-it-all. And this realization made her cry more than anything else, because it meant that she had only herself to blame.Images flashed through her mind, disjointed memories of different times. She remembered crying in the bathroom at the Yule Ball after Ron had shouted at her, telling her she was fraternizing with the enemy. How she had come out when the ball was nearly over and ran into Fred, and somehow he’d made it all right, told her she was beautiful and Ron was a git. She remembered this and cried even harder, because she knew somehow that Fred had loved her then, had always loved her.