Work Text:
καὶ γὰρ αἰ φεύγει, ταχέως διώξει,
αἰ δὲ δῶρα μὴ δέκετ' ἀλλὰ δώσει,
αἰ δὲ μὴ φίλει, ταχέως φιλήσει
κωὐκ ἐθέλοισα.
—
For if she flees, soon she will pursue.
If she refuses gifts, rather will she give them.
If she does not love, soon she will love
even unwilling.
—
Sappho, Fragment 1
***
She had been told the island should not have existed.
That its very presence on a supposedly empty stretch of sea was proof enough of the curse seeped into it, the godless darkness that would no doubt grip the heart of any foolish enough to approach it.
It had appeared on the horizon all pale and blurry, melting forth from a curtain of mist as though welcoming them into its embrace. Like they had always meant to be there, not ashore, stepping foot on those unblemished sands—no that didn’t seem right—but close to it. Close enough to see.
Close enough to be seen.
The maps had been consulted—twice—heads shaken, voices raised in alarm and bewilderment. After all, mystery was seldom a welcome omen, and certainly not to a merchant vessel with a set trajectory, a schedule to abide by. “Mystery is nothing if not peril” she had heard the first mate muttering. “—Peril to a man’s purse and peril to his mind.”
It had not been long before the hysteria had descended.
It had started with the captain locking himself in his cabin with a dozen bottles of brandy, babbling something about demons and evil eyes and the divine providence of God. But the fighting had not come until much later, working its way through the lower ranks like a sickness, a desperate attempt to take control of the ship and get away, we got to get away before it’s too late, don’t you see—
Because they could not have afforded the delay in cargo and because they desperately needed the freshwater and because there had been a hundred other reasons, all logical, that could not have them turning away from the island just yet, regardless of how much the sailors grumbled as they laid the lines, or how many dark looks were passed over the evening card table.
Hermione had been operating under disbelief when she volunteered to fetch the water—a job that would never have gone to a lowly deckhand had it not been for the fear—tangible, frenzied, hysterical—clouding everyone’s minds. Turning a crew of able-bodied sailors and business-minded merchants into a motley of superstitious fools.
She had thought the whole thing ridiculous. Myth and fable and the fruits of a deranged, irrational imagination. By all reason it should not have been possible.
It should not have—
“Are you frightened?”
She watches him, wide-eyed and frozen as he slowly circles a path around her boat, the clear waters rippling silently, gracefully, around him.
But she can hardly process the question the way the blood rushes to her head, the way her heart throbs painfully and her muscles tense, prepare to flee—
Because it made no difference whether or not there was more to the stories. No one should have been able to survive in these waters, on this island. It was not right, not natural—
Her nails dig into the wood of her boat, oars lying forgotten at her feet as she studies him. Lips the colour of red, red wine stained on skin as pristine as fresh snow. There is a symmetry about his features that suddenly brings forth the image of an angel she had once come across in a volume on some long-dead Italian master. Tucked away in the background, almost hidden, a disturbing presence looking on the scene afore him with an air of what can only be described as divine assurance. As though nothing could touch him.
He watches her, hardly blinking, lips parted ever so slightly, and with a start she realizes it is her that’s the novelty.
“This place is nothing to be frightened of, you know” his voice reverberates on the cliff-face looming large over them. It throws a cloak of shadow over the boat. Coolness suffuses out of the mouth of a cave gaping at the water’s edge. She shivers.
“I have lived here for years beyond count. Dwelled in the depths…Sung ancient songs set to the thrumming beat of time.” He pauses, meeting her still dazed gaze. “I will not hurt you.”
But she cannot believe him. Because Hermione Granger knows what hunger looks like—used to see it every day in the faces of street urchins as she passed through the London streets in gilded carriages, parting the silk curtains with a dove white hand. Gaunt-faced and wandering masses that were a testament to the failure of the very laws that should have protected them. She remembers with no small anger how the society women would look down on her charity work, citing some brawl or other at the marketplace as evidence of the depravity of the lower classes— “The nerve of them, attacking shop-keeps now! Their kind really must be kept in check—”
None of them had understood what hunger did to a person. And if she were to be honest, neither had she—not really. Not until she lost everything. Until she found herself at the edge of the world, face to face with something, someone, that defied all reason—
“What are you?” Hermione hears herself asking, hating the slight tremble in her voice as she says it. She knows now she should not have wondered, she should not have leaned over the stern, her eyes following his pale body, the magnetic pull of his dark eyes, the unmistakeable glint of something below the surface of the water, something that almost looked like scales—
“—a mortal once. But that was a long time ago. Now…I am a mere memory.” And his eyes actually glaze over with something close to sadness. “I am bound to these waters for eternity. It is a…difficult existence.”
“But how is that possible?” She insists desperately. “How can you be…Trapped? That makes absolutely no sense!”
“And why ever not?”
“Because—” she sputters, the strangeness of the conversation not escaping her as she continues. “Magic and monsters are things of stories—myths, in truth. Even if they did exist, which they don’t, there would be no place for them in the modern world.”
“Modern world.” He lets out a small huff of breath, his lips quirking in the process as though she has uttered an altogether amusing joke. It makes the conviction in his next words all the more chilling.
“You’re wrong.” He says. “There is always a place in the world for the ones that carve their own thrones. My people once thought themselves modern—undefeatable—but they too became blood and bones in the face of time until others rose to replace them—stronger, hungrier, better. Your modernity…”
A pause.
“…Is a desperate illusion. And it too will become rubble and rotten foundations until the time for carving comes again.”
When she doesn’t respond the hardness in his eyes seems to melt ever so slightly and a hint of amusement flashes across his face.
“Will you stay with me? It’s terrible living out here alone, without a single soul to talk to. I fear lack of companionship has made me so…Impolite.”
And before she knows it she finds herself reaching out—her hand frozen in mid-air.
Even looking back now, she is not quite sure why she did it—perhaps it was some dark curiosity, an uncharacteristic recklessness borne of the recognition of the opportunity infused in that moment— a fleeting opportunity to experience something greater, to see for herself the breadth of space that stretched between her and that mysterious, hypothetical other. It was a recklessness borne of the state of her life, the uncertainty, the grief that had hollowed her to the core. She would have once given everything to see the wonders of exotic lands, but now that she finally stood on the edge of the world she was shocked to find it meant nothing.
She was exhausted. And there was…certainty. In his eyes.
He draws his hand out of the water and closes the space between them. Her creamy skin on his smooth alabaster, his long fingers draw out and slowly… Trace a path across her palm and she suddenly feels—
Flames.
She feels like she’s been lit on fire, ablutions of heat washing every inch of her body, filling her to the brim in an intense energy—It should have been painful. It should have consumed her.
It should have burned.
His touch—
She gasps and jerks her hand back, but when she looks at him he is still looking at his own outstretched fingers with an expression she can’t quite read. As if he too did not know, did not expect—
When he draws his eyes back towards her it is slow, deliberate. Ravenous.
His touch—
His touch is lethal.
And she is terrified.
***
He finds her after one thousand years of solitude. He immediately recognizes she is an impossibility. A contradiction to everything he knows.
And he knows he must have her.
The sentiment feels foreign—a reminder of how long it truly has been since he felt anything but maddening, unceasing boredom.
The gods had left him this existence of cold depths and silence, without even a single creature to keep him company in the days and nights that melded into each other like waves, rolling and retracting but returning, always returning…
Hubris, they had roared, is the greatest sin of a mortal! You will be punished for this! You will be nothing but a shadow, damned and forgotten to the currents of time!
One thousand years. Cursed with immortality. How ironic.
As a mortal he had done nothing but dream of an existence without death. He had written his name on mountains and stone, on man and beast. On the living and the lifeless, in blood and ink.
It had been a promise to himself and a curse at the gods at the same time—because they had forgotten in their eons of inaction that power is not permanent or guaranteed. Power is daggers and war. Fire and ash mingling in their cycle of birth and rebirth until you could not tell where one ended and the other began—
What was a god if not something to be overthrown?
The ritual had not been easy.
He remembers the screams that had cut through the air, all other noise stifled as though the night itself had sensed the holiness between each beat. The air had shimmered thick with heat when the blood had soaked into the rich earth of the olive tree. He remembers the flames, flickering over his soul, washing it anew for a moment, just a moment, before the whole thing had been cut short—
Of course, this was all memory now. He was stuck here, in this stunted island for eternity. Left a pitiful shell of his former self. Immortality to squander away, fashioned with a voice for luring and not a single creature to listen.
Cruelty was the true invention of the gods.
But they had been mistaken from the beginning in believing such a punishment could crush him. That he would meekly fade out of existence without paying them back their due a thousand fold.
And the girl was the way.
He had known she was a trick by the gods the moment he set eyes on her—An odd vision of ill-fitting clothes and, as he later learned with amusement, an ill-fitting name. She had cast off upon the seas from a strange land knowing not even herself. No—He did not expect her to understand just how deeply fate had played a role in ushering her afore him, did not expect her to know she—and her damned ship both—were meant to be nothing more than a fresh jest by the gods. A reminder of his punishment, his worthlessness, the freedom that was denied him because he, a mere mortal, had dared—
He watches now as she makes her way back to her ship, a mere speck on the horizon, hidden by the rocking waves. Golden from the setting sun.
And then—He laughs. He laughs and laughs and laughs because it is remarkable, unprecedented truly, how fully, fatally the gods still underestimated him and it was amusing how much was said about mortals and fatal flaws when no mortal could match the blind stupidity, the reckless self-importance, the arrogance of those oh-so-divine-graces—
They had not thought he would claim her.
That would be their undoing.
***
The sea haunts her.
It makes a home in her dreams, settles there into the unfilled corners like it had always been, and always would be.
Hermione could not say she was a stranger to nightmares that left her drenched in sweat, with tears half dried on her face and a wild inclination to do anything should it mean even a small reprieve from the memories. She wanted to curse wherever they came from. Scream that if she must relive them let them be the ones before. Before the drawing rooms filled with the sickly sweet smell of death swirling in the air. The physician with his head bowed, quick step, slipping out as though he were never there in the first place. Doors shut stiff. A house of stale silence and suspended waiting interrupted only by the incessant ticking of the clocks.
As much as she dreaded the nightmares they were familiar to her. She had the conviction that they could give her no fresh hurt she hadn’t already given herself for her failure. Death had taken and taken from her and she had been powerlessness to do anything but watch.
And yet, despite it all—
Nothing could have prepared her for dreams like this.
She sees emerald coasts and waves lapping against her skin that turn into a lover’s caress. She dreams of cool depths, the only sound in that echoing silence the dull one her heartbeat makes. She dreams of gleaming sun soaked sands and much more—they flit by so quickly that they blur into one another—a miasma of colours and sounds that repeats one after another, the sounds layering heavy and fading one by one just as quick. Most often though, she dreams of a voice, melodious and doused in memory. His voice. It swells in her mind, resonating through every crack and crevice until there is no room for anyone, anything, but him, whispering of a city with white columns and marble balconies facing the open sea. An olive tree grows twisted and stunted there, against all odds where it was not planted—where it was not wanted—but the image flashes past before she can get a good look.
He whispers of promises and death. Blood and life. And each time she wakes up it takes her a little bit longer to remember herself.
The sea haunts her.
It calls to her with the voice of her father—no, Ron, no, Harry—promising her home is not forever out of reach as she had come to believe, indeed that it lay just ahead if only she let the tides take her. And perhaps it wouldn’t be so terrible, really, to take the plunge to sink down and down and down…Into a pair of arms that would catch her—promises to catch her—and why should she not trust in such a promise when it spills over just as it swells marries thrumming sea and shivering sky in its conviction?
She blinks and the song ceases.
She climbs down from the ship railings shaking.
***
The wind blows, violent and unforgiving, making the ship quiver like a leaf. The wood groans and creaks as the waves crash into it over and over, black as tar in the darkness of night. Hermione has never seen a storm like this. The rocking alone threatens to split the hull apart—a possibility that sends the panicked crew scurrying on board, trying to secure errant lines, keep the silks and spices in the cargo from getting wet. As she climbs up the shrouds she even spots the captain hobbling out of his cabin for the first time in a week, cursing at a lanky deckhand who grasps the railings praying with singular fervour.
“Ain’t no time for prayers, boys! All hands on deck! Save the ship before you save your souls, damn it!”
He yells something she does not catch over the noise but the hands of the crew start working the ropes quicker in response.
A strong gust interrupts her thoughts and she clutches the ropes white-knuckled to brace herself. The salt water is an ice cold slap on her tanned cheeks. Not at all the balmy bath water of just a day ago—remarkable how quickly it all could change.
Another gust crashes into the sails and makes them whip in wild abandon. The sound of screams suddenly cuts through the noise followed by more shouting. Hermione’s eyes roam over the surface of the frothing currents for some sign of the sailor no doubt fallen overboard but to no avail.
—gone! Gone the lot of them! —God save us all!
In her haste to secure the lines she almost misses the expression that flits for a split second on the face of the sailor opposite her.
An expression that almost looks like—
Terror.
He catches her eye as he struggles to collect himself. “Th-that was Robbie—” she hears him choke out. “He wasn’t even supposed to—he shouldn’t even have been on deck! I swear—I swear I saw him jump! He—he just walked to the railings and—”
He stutters, unable to go on as his body shakes uncontrollably and Hermione feels something heavy settle into the pit of her stomach.
No—no it can’t be—
But before she can attempt to ask the man what he means her attention is drawn back on deck.
“Smithie! Smithie!”
A man lingers at the cargo hatch with a sickly green tinge. He flails wildly to get her attention. “Fetch the rope from the cargo hold! The cargo—ah blast it! The cannons are loose!”
She manages to understand the meaning and rushes down the deck, almost running into a man carrying a large bucket of water and avoiding a group of people retching over the side.
Where’s the bloody captain?! Someone shouts behind her.
She digs through crates of musket shots and spare sail cloth. The ship groans under her feet and the light from the oil lamp in the corner flickers and almost goes out. She pushes aside another crate and barrel before the frayed edge of a rope falls on the floor from between. She quickly snatches it and bolts up the stairs two steps at a time and suddenly feels the ship tilt under her feet.
She does not even have time to grab anything before she lurches to the side, air under her, and then—a shock of ice cold water. The currents pin her down immediately like an anchor around her feet and she struggles against them, kicks her legs with as much force as she can muster even as the light of the surface grows further and further away. She kicks and thrashes against the water, desperate to fight the weight, feeling her lungs split, sputter, burn at the effort so close, just a little more, so close! Just as she is about to break the surface and breathe in the sweet air her lungs are begging for the currents crash into her again—a band of translucent silk that ripples opalescent through the column of water over her. Hermione flails desperately towards the light of the moon even as it dims and slowly goes out, as her vision swims with dots before failing all together. It is just as she teeters on the edge of unconsciousness that she hears the sound.
It makes her blood run cold.
It sounds like—
It sounds like the weight of tectonic plates scraping the ocean floor. Like wind beaten ancient towers caving under the pressure of the storm front. It sounds like—
But no. That’s impossible. Her mind somehow manages to sputter.
It sounds like the crew is singing—a chorus of voices suspended in a terrifying, immobilizing bass like the culmination of some terrifying otherworldly ritual.
The voices rise one by one, melt together until they are indistinguishable. The melody is lost. The final offering is a scream.
She loses consciousness.
***
Once, Hermione had been caught in a downpour.
A summer storm that had simmered all static for days before finally deciding to pierce the column of clouds and let the torrents crash through. Somehow, she had not heard the low grumbling like cannons in the distance, awakening to the winds beating her cheeks, the quivering branches of the willow tree she had fallen asleep under dousing her with rain.
Ron, nothing but dimples and wild hair, had laughed at her sudden confusion before turning away to follow Harry in a sprint back to the house. When she had tried to run after him her feet had slipped over the muddy meadow and the long grasses had brushed her hips with their rustling, the wet fragrance of earth beating into the air with every step. She’d hardly paid attention at the time—she had to keep her eyes on Harry and Ron’s retreating figures. If she got lost now—
“Come on, Hermione!” the echo reverberates around the meadow before being pierced by a laugh like the clap of a hunting rifle. Icy fingers of rain descend with the fog and trickle down the back of her neck. She can still distinguish Ron’s soft outline melting through the fog, so faint it’s nearly an apparition.
“Hermione! Hermione!Hermione!Hermione!” All strung together now, the sound rocking like waves around her. She is so close that she feels the laughter bubble up her chest and she nearly breaks into that half amused half irked smile she saved for the two. Did you think could leave me behind? I’m quite as fast as either of you, you know—
She only vaguely registers the way her ankle twists before the horizon is suddenly tilting, spinning, rushing all around her and she cannot stop falling no matter how much she wants to, falling falling she’s always falling her name fading fast through the mist even before she hits the ground—
The silence is deafening.
***
She startles awake under the blinding light of the sun, rolls herself over on the sand and chokes out what feels like a gallon of water from her lungs. It takes a few minutes before the spasms in her chest cease and even longer before her thoughts become semi-coherent again.
Where—a pain shoots through her as she tries to stand up and she collapses back into an ungraceful heap on the beach.
The ship! She scans the horizon, desperately searching for a speck, some sign of movement, debris, but there is nothing but an endless stretch of sea. No. Nonononono—how, what—
She wracks her brain, trying to remember something, anything, that would stop in its tracks the weight of reality sinking into her with every passing second.
Think!
Falling. The cold bite of water. She had tried to swim upwards and that was when she’d heard—
Hermione frowns.
She had heard—
A blank.
But no, that couldn’t be right. There had definitely been something. Something important enough to justify the way her stomach was twisting at the very thought of it.
How had she not been blown to pieces against the rocks? She had been tossed about like a rag doll, powerless in a way that would have frightened her more had she been in the right mind to comprehend the feeling. But there had been nothing on her mind then besides the straining of her lungs, the ache of her muscles. The instinctual struggle of all creatures on the rift between life and death.
It was not logical. It was not logical for her to be alive. She should be in the bottom of the sea by now.
It suddenly occurs to her that she knows the answer.
Perhaps that’s what this was—perhaps that’s what he was. Not a monster at all, no—
A miracle.
A saviour.
She whips her head around to assess her surroundings. Was he with her now, then? She sees nothing but weathered cliff rock behind her, gently sloping upwards to a tree dotted hill.
Was he watching, silent and amused? Waiting to see how she would react to the fact she should be dead and drowned without him? She fights back tears. She will not give him the satisfaction of witnessing them.
There was nothing to trust about a saviour.
Saviours were the most dangerous of them all.
***
Hermione climbs up a sloping trail, parting prickly bushes out of her way. They snag at her tattered breeches and scratch her skin. She catches her breath as she reaches the top of the cliff and finally gets a good look at her surroundings. The coast is longer than she’d thought—extending about a kilometer to the west and lined with nothing but the occasional tree among long billowing grasses.
She pauses to listen for birdsong, the sound of cicadas, for the indication of any living creature at all besides herself.
Nothing.
There is nothing but the crash of surf on the rocks below.
It makes her uneasy.
Calm down. She tells herself. Calm down Hermione.
A perfect sunset paints the hilltops in hues of orange and pink. A timeless scene. Peaceful.
She sits down amongst some wildflowers and stares at the horizon, all the while trying to push down the panic rising in her chest, the realization she was alone, completely alone and stuck on some godforsaken crop of rock in the middle of nowhere —
A sob escapes her lips. She immediately takes a shaking breath to collect herself. There was no guarantee in stopping if she started crying now. No guarantee she wouldn’t simply lie down and wait for hunger or thirst to take her—whichever came first.
Could the ship have weathered the storm? Surely they would have noticed her missing. They would have searched for her! Unless—
How many sailors had fallen during the storm? She could not remember. She could not remember anything—
They would have assumed her dead. There was no doubt about it.
Hermione had never been religious—she’d always scorned the thing she could not see; the open ended question. Stark and infuriating without the solution to make it whole. She had been a staunch believer in the fact there was nothing to believe. No ghosts behind the curtain, no watcher from the clouds. Just a finite world of even more finite mortals.
Are you frightened—Are you frightened—Are you frightened—
She closes her eyes.
For the first time in her life Hermione Granger prays.
***
He lies on an outcrop of rock, head tilted towards the sky, letting the warm breeze wash over him. Scent of sea grass sweetens the air. No currents today. A pure, glassy sea stretching on and on.
“Surely there are more entertaining ways to waste your time” he calls towards the beach below, where a girl can be seen sweating stubbornly under the sun. She shoots him a dark look before her rough hands resume their whittling of the fallen log in front of her.
“And what?” A rough jerk of the rusted knife. “Allow myself to be stuck here? No thank you. I would much rather be—Dammit! —On my way. As soon as possible.”
He quirks an eyebrow in her general direction before deciding to let the subject drop. Weather really was too pleasant today to waste it arguing over the absolute futility of her task. Not that she would be one to appreciate that fact, given how she had not shied away in the least from dragging that stupid log all the way from the hilltops. Any other mortal would have succumbed to the despair of her situation—may even have ended it altogether. But she wasn’t like any other mortal—she still believed she could save herself.
It takes courage for a thought like that. He muses. He had counted on that courage, even from the beginning.
“You never did answer my question” she accuses.
“And what was that, exactly?” He mutters, unwilling to disturb his comfort.
Her gaze is hard.
“Why did you save me?”
“Should I have let you perish?” His tone is desert-dry.
“You know that’s not what I mean.”
He studies her carefully, cataloguing the bruises under her eyes, the tell-tale signs of the exhaustion she stubbornly, stupidly, refuses to admit and feels a pang of something—worry? — stir within him. He does not know what that means—had not expected there would be anything other than desire and the logic of survival to colour their future together. Because he is certain that ultimately, she will choose him. They were the same, in that regard; they would do anything to keep living.
The question escapes before he can reconsider.
“Why do you not trust me?”
It was obvious, of course, almost from the moment he pulled her half-drowned body out of the water that there had been a void between them—words clipped short, a pointed gaze when she believed he could not see, an instinctive drawing away that had only become more apparent when he had revealed his form for the first time.
“It’s a…Fin? Like a mermaid?” He’d smiled at the juvenility of the remark.
“‘Siren’ is the more appropriate term, if you wish to be exact.” She had tried to disguise her shock, unslackening her jaw and looking away with the shame of having been caught staring. But he knew she had been more affected than she let show—knew that his existence had introduced into her world ambiguity of a wholly different nature than what she was accustomed to. And yet, in spite of it all, he also knew her eyes drifted to the waves, searching for him in the depths.
And the searching—
That was critical. It always began with searching.
“I—” She falters only for a split second. “I don’t know you” she says, like it’s suspicious he should even ask. “I hardly understand what you are or what you’re gaining from this…Arrangement, shall we say, of hanging about me, nor do I understand the cryptic little remarks you seem so fond of. So if you can condescend to tell me, plainly, this time. What. Am I doing here?”
“Do you believe in fate, Hermione?” He cuts in bluntly.
“Fate.” She repeats, confused by the turn in conversation.
“Quite. Fate.” He allows himself to shape the word, savor its taste on his tongue before letting the full weight of it settle between them.
“That delicate string spun out the moment of our birth by forces beyond our reach, knotted and woven and ultimately…Cut. Fate is, by definition, predetermined, unknowable—”
“—Convenient” she interrupts, unimpressed.
His smile is deadly.
“Oh, it very much can be. You see—most don’t realize how simple fate truly is. Nothing but a clambering crowd of actors, each awaiting their turn to walk onto stage, act your part in your stead. Of course—” He pauses.
“Perhaps you will want them to. After all, it can be rather comfortable simply watching from the audience, and sometimes fate will drop quite the pretty prize in your path—the purged city, the brush of glory, a lover. Those who have known nothing but the taste of honey hold the names of the deities aloft in praise while the unlucky others curse with the same fervour. It makes no difference what one has been given, for the truth still remains: it was not in their control.”
“How can you be so certain that we are all powerless creatures on the whim of some—some ludicrous heavenly construct?”
He throws her an impatient glance.
“Tell me, why do you think you are here? Have you ever thought how an island that has not seen the light of civilization for a thousand years happened to materialize in front of you by sheer power of accident? That there is anything ordinary about these circumstances? Please.” His voice is venomous. How could she still not see—
“You were always meant to be here.”
It is exquisite to watch the doubt enter her mind then—a sulfurous vapour working inward through layers and layers of cold-blooded self preservation she had wrapped herself up in.
He does not tell her there is more to it in truth, that although fate may have brought her it had not been fate that had her stay.
She did not remember the chorus.
Perhaps it was for the best.
After all, he had known from the beginning she wanted the enigma of him—the intoxicating puzzle, pieces strewn about the unfilled corners of the map or lost altogether in the centuries that sat silent guests between them. He would give her that gift.
He had never been one to deny the truly worthy. Even in the past.
So he lets her watch him with her soft doe eyes. Lets her puzzle over him a while longer.
It won’t be long now.
***
It takes her five days to find the ship.
Five whole days to comb the island from top to bottom, checking every crevice, every beach and inlet hoping—all the while hoping she was wrong. That there would be nothing to find after all.
She stands a solitary figure among the endless wreckage the waves are still washing up against the rocky coast. Shredded bits of sail cloth, empty and bobbing barrels, splintered chunks of mast, tangled lines, the hull and its chipped varnish still clinging stubbornly to its surface.
It looks as though it did not so much sink as was blasted apart. How could a storm have done so much damage?
Now that every piece is laid out in front of her, she can see the ship for what it truly was.
It had carried her between oceans, distant and hazy continents where the novelties had stood out in her mind like lone monuments in an endless desert of apathy. A fresh distraction wrapped in days of sickening vibrancy.
She had not seen Harry and Ron buried.
She had not been there to watch the procession—the caskets laid out next to each other, the matching shrouds. Had not been there to hear the final words on the lips of the priest—the same he would have uttered in front of her father’s casket. The suddenness of the illness. How woeful a tragedy. And yes that was a nice word wasn’t it? Tragedy. A voice that rings false fullness in an empty chamber. As though there was nothing to be done—no one to blame. A predetermined and wholly unpredictable culmination of events.
She had not been there.
At some point she had forgotten she was running. Had gotten lost in the motions and forgotten there had never been a Harry Smith. Only Hermione. Always Hermione. Cowering and solitary in the center of an endless ocean. Repeating to herself all the while that there was no other way. She had not wanted to believe in fate but oh—wasn’t that the greatest joke of all? She had been under its heavy thumb all along.
Fate was her powerlessness.
It was her shadowy figure standing by next to a sickbed of misery and decay while death looked back and smiled.
She thought she had been running from it but that hadn’t been true, had it? Fate, tragedy, call it what you will. It had followed her to the ends of the earth. Had once again made her the bystander to her life.
She is done deceiving herself. Done running away. She is simply done.
She kneels down amidst the wreckage and starts searching for food.
***
Fear dissolves on her tongue as the days flit past until one day she wakes up, unable to remember what it tasted like.
She spends her days by the water, as close to him as possible. He has begun to invade her dreams again, morphing them to his will, until her days become his thoughts, his memories. There was a recognition between them she could not explain. The same strange understanding she had felt an eternity ago when she had reached for him against all reason.
That was how it had begun.
She walks through the streets of a not yet ancient city with him by her side, the hint of a smile lingering on his lips. All around them—blinding white marble streets, temples dappled with sun—magnificence and power at every turn. A thousand gleaming memories of a life cut short.
People step aside as they cut their way through the crowds, but they only stare at him, call his name in reverence, grasp at the gold threading of his tunic.
She watches him brush them off with nothing but distaste. “Was this not enough for you?”
His gaze is unapologetic.
“I wanted more.”
A starlit lane now, tracing the edge of a wine red sea. Scent of honeysuckle hangs luscious in the air. It’s easy to get lost in a world like this—to get lost in him. No pain sullies their souls here, forces them to turn around and keep running. It is a world of shadow and light borne of dreams where fate may drum against the fabric but can never pierce through.
She takes his hand first.
And this is how it will end.
***
The food runs out by the eighteenth day, but by then she knows what she must do.
The waves swirl around the rock under her bare feet, an inky, frothing surface she can only get a glimpse of in the darkness—a darkness that seems to melt together the sea, the sky and everything in between. Breathing softly, blooming luscious all around her.
New moon.
A new beginning.
A transition.
In another reality she would have lied to herself. Claimed what she was about to do was only survival instinct. But she understood what he was offering her now, and immortality was not a gift to be taken lightly. Immortality was life, but above all, it was possibility and Hermione Granger had never been one to dismiss possibility. She would have been lying if she claimed blindness to his hunger for vengeance—his desire to reclaim all that had been taken from him by forces beyond prediction, beyond any semblance of logic or control. But there was one thing he had not counted on.
She was hungry too.
And she was done running.
There is singing below the surface of the water—a low, sweet sound like the richness of summer nights, a strength like the turning of tides. But it is no longer the emptiness of memory. It’s fullness. Something that shines through the dark.
It is a promise.
She decides she will hold him to it.
The sea is warm when she jumps, and when arms wrap around her she feels fire—She feels eternity—
The music swells.
It arrives at the crescendo.