FIC: Seven Veils (R/Hr)

Look! Fic!

Title: Seven Veils
Author: Me
Pairing: R/Hr
Rating: Tame, teenish
Summary: Hermione had never believed in miracles, not even as a little girl. It had been hard enough for her to believe in magic. Post-HBP
Length: 1880 words
Notes: This is the second part in the "Seven" series, following Seven Fortunes. An earlier version of this was beta'd by the fantabulous duo, ant_power and sandy_phoenix. I'm still not entirely sure about it. Anyway, the title refers to the Veil of Maya and general questions about reality.





Seven Veils

In Wales, there was a rainbow. It cut clean across the sky in a perfect arc. She saw it only for a moment: they were between Apparation points and needed to hurry. Nowhere was safe, as everyone kept reminding them, and when Hermione looked at the rainbow, she didn't see leprechauns and pots of gold. She saw only her perception of color: light being refracted from the moisture in the air, grouped into bands with sharp borders. It wasn't real. It was arbitrary. Her red was different than Ron's red, her violet different than Harry's violet, but when they looked at the sky, they could all come to the consensus that yes, there was red and there was violet. Seven colors in all.

* * *

In her dreams sometimes she fell. It was always slow and she weightless, sifting down to earth like gentle snow or a plucked feather.

This night, she awoke with a start, breathing fast. The candles were still lit on the dirty wooden table, Ron and Harry awake, planning. She could hear them from her cot on the other side of the room. Rain rushed down the grimy windows. She hated Albania most of all for this reason. It never quit raining.

"I don't understand," Ron said. His voice was tired, sounding, at this late hour, like the voice of a much older man. "I don't know what you mean."

"It's really quite simple," Harry said testily. "A moron could figure it out."

"Well, if that's how you really feel, you should have just left me back in England."

"For the millionth time—"

"Everything all right?" Hermione interrupted hoarsely.

"Yeah," they said in unison.

They were all exhausted and frustrated and sick of this. Hermione wanted to go home more than anything, but she'd never let them know. "You should get some sleep," she said, turning over in her cot and pulling her cloak tighter around her body. "We've got loads to do tomorrow."

She heard the chairs scrape away from the table and the sound of the candle being blown out. Everything went dark then, and she heard them mumble apologies, and then the creak of two cots as they lay down to sleep.

Another night.

* * *

The day Professor McGonagall had come to tell Hermione's parents that she was a witch, she had been lying on the living room floor in her school uniform, reading the newspaper. She did it every afternoon. That day, she remembered there was a big write-up about a new exhibit at the London Zoo.

It's funny, the things she remembered.

She could remember buying her wand, buying her schoolbooks, and being on the train, but she couldn't remember the ride to London on either of those days. Nor could she remember the first time she ever did magic, her first movie star crush, or her first erotic dream.

Other girls remembered these things, she would tell herself. Other girls had dreams of getting married in big stone churches on bright sunny days wearing flowing white dresses.

Hermione, on the other hand, dreamt of great things. Great mysterious things. Beasts that rose from water, planets that fell from the sky, the burning of Alexandria.

Lately, everyday she was reminding herself that she was not like other girls.

* * *

The day they met Remus in Edinburgh was a very bad day. It stuck with Hermione for months.

She and Ron had been arguing, which was nothing new or spectacular. One of them had misplaced a memory that Harry had gone to a lot of trouble to get. It had cost them days.

"I don't know where it is, all right? Last time I saw it, you were stuffing it in one of those big bags you insist on carrying with you everywhere," Ron said hotly, gesturing wildly at the shoulder bags Hermione was carrying. In them were books and documents, artifacts and notes. Important things.

"I handed it to you to keep safe," Hermione countered. "You were the last one to have it."

Ron's face was red as he turned out his pockets. "See? I. Don't. Have. It. Get it through your thick skull."

"I am not thick," Hermione said, pulling open one of her bags to begin looking. "I just don't know where it could be."

"Well, I certainly don't know. I never know anything, do I?"

Hermione stopped digging in her bag and looked up at Ron, standing there with his arms folded over his chest and looking surly. "What do you mean by that?"

"What do you think I mean?"

"I don't know," Hermione answered honestly. She was tired.

"Funny. I thought you knew everything," Ron spat.

"Ron—"

"Sometimes, Hermione, I just…" He threw his hands up in the air and turned on his heel.

Hermione stared after him stupidly for several minutes before following. She found the memory the next day, at the bottom of the bag, exactly where she had put it with a letter she had been writing to Ginny. They never told Harry that it had been lost.

* * *

It happened in December, right around Christmas. It was either a Tuesday or a Wednesday. They were bouncing around from village to village up and down the coast, learning everything they could about a rash of Death Eater attacks in that area twenty years ago.

That night they spent in a small cottage. Only one room was secure. They slept there on conjured cots.

In the middle of the night, a sound woke her from an already restless sleep. She listened hard, focusing all of her attention on the noise, trying to place it. Her heart pounded and her fingertips tingled with anxiety. For a moment, she was in vertigo, the black colors of the room's darkness spinning around her like a kaleidoscope on permanent tilt. Grinding her teeth and gripping the metal edge of the cot, she slowly forced the room back into focus.

She lay perfectly still for several moments, taking shallow breaths and trying to think of what to do, her eyes wild on the shadows. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw a movement in the corner.

It moved again, came closer to her. Her breath hitched as it slunk out of the corner, golden eyes reflecting what little moonlight coursed through the crack in the window coverings.

It was a cat, only a cat.

She let out her breath. "Harry," she said, only barely audible. "Ron."

"I know." Harry's voice returned to her out of the darkness as he rose from his own bed. He caught the cat up in his arms and left the room.

She shook as she heard a door open and close.

"He's killed it, hasn't he?" Hermione asked. She tried to stop the quiver in her voice, but it was hopeless.

"I dunno," Ron said. His voice was deep with sleep. "We can't be too careful."

Hermione shivered violently and put her hands over her face. She took a deep breath and tried to calm herself. Her nerves were shot. Had been for weeks.

"All right?" Ron asked, concern cutting through his sleep-husky voice.

"Yes," Hermione said, just as Harry came back into the room and shut the door. She imagined she could smell death in the house, the way she'd come to recognize it so easily. That smell followed her everywhere—trace amounts in every house in every village in every country they'd traveled. Magical death. It smelled vaguely of boiled potatoes. "No."

Two strong hands cupped her upper arms, and Ron pulled her into a tight hug. "I'm scared, too," he said softly. He was kneeling on the floor, and she tucked her face into his jumper, clutched her hands against his back. He smelled warm and dirty, like sleep sweat and cleaning charms, the way they never really smelled clean, only slightly citrus.

Harry's weight joined hers on the cot. She turned her head on Ron's chest to look at him. He was a lighter shadow against much darker ones. "Soon," he said. "We'll be out of this soon."

Oh, how she wanted to believe him. Her breath broke, touched the edge of a sob.

"Shhh, Hermione," Ron hushed, one of his large hands moving slowly, unsurely, up and down her back. "You know, at the Burrow tonight, I bet there's a fire going in the kitchen, and Ginny and Fred and George and Charlie and Bill are all drinking tea or cocoa or some of Mum's red currant wine and…"

Ron trailed off on another one of his monologues about the Burrow. He missed home, and she wondered if he felt the same as she did, that it would be a miracle if they ever made it back alive.

She looked up into his face. It had become more chiseled over the past few years. In the shadows, he looked diluted, worn, wan. Not quite real.

Hermione had never believed in miracles, not even as a little girl. It had been hard enough for her to believe in magic. But as she looked at Ron as he talked on and on about Christmas memories from the Burrow, the edges of her life blurring, breaking apart, deconstructing, she realized with a pang of relief, actual relief, that it was easier to live as though she was dying than to go on as if she wanted to live forever.

As it turned out, replacing hope with fatalism was a lot easier than she had originally thought possible.

* * *

She and Ron each kept one scar. Hermione's was on her upper thigh; Ron's in between the second and third knuckles on his right hand. They had spent the afternoon along the Dorset coast, in and out of caves. It had been gentle and clumsy. She had cast warming charms, and he had whispered into her hair a thousand nonsense words of wishes and dreams.

* * *

They sat in the kitchen at Grimmauld Place, side by side on the bench. What was left of the Order sat around them, planning.

Harry was upstairs, saying goodbye to Ginny.

No one paid attention. They were talking strategy, but it was not the time for that. She and Ron knew now what needed to be done, and Harry would destroy everything in his path, if that was what it took. She felt it, deep inside of herself, past the places where Ron and Harry ended, deep inside the place that was hers, and hers alone. Bone deep and absolute. It was time for an ending.

Ron's shoulder slowly bent to touch hers, and then his arm came up, rested across her shoulders. He whispered in her ear, "It's like coming home to a different world."

She reached up and twined her fingers with his, feeling along the smooth valleys between his knuckles, seeking out the small raised scar. Saying it now would spoil it, so she tilted her head back onto his shoulder and breathed in his scent where it lurked around his collar. Something autumn, something citrus, something warm. His skin at night was an ocean without waves, a sky without clouds, a purpose without assumption.

Soon.

She breathed him in.







Comments are love!