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Hermione’s body woke her before the sun rose. She laid in her dark bedroom for a few minutes, noticing. The slip of her silk pillow against her cheek. The sturdy softness of her flannel sheets. The birds chirping their pre-dawn song, somewhere outside her window.
There was no rush; she had nowhere to be. She laid for a long time, feeling and listening, not thinking much at all.
It was her bladder that roused her from the bed eventually. She shuffled her body over to the edge of the bed, and carefully shifted until she found solid ground. She used her arms to leverage herself the rest of the way out, and then slipped her bare feet into her slippers. They’d been floral-patterned and fluffy when Ron presented them to her as a Christmas present. Now they were a uniform grey, the inner stuffing matted flat.
“Good morning,” she said to the two photos of Ron on her nightstand. The first was the Muggle wedding photo she’d insisted upon, the two of them posed in a classic, romantic way. Her natural hair was recently shorn for the first time, a style she’d adopted thereafter, and she was so young, nearly childlike with her smooth skin and narrow arms, but she barely looked at herself. Instead she pressed a finger to the print of Ron’s freckled cheek. Nineteen, flushed with pleasure, his red hair neatly parted and gelled back.
After she had her fill of their wedding photo, she picked up the second one. It was a close-up portrait of Ron only a few years before his death. Bare head, nose so furry it looked like he was trying to grow a moustache from his nostrils. Wrinkles and folds and liver spots nearly obscured the face she’d loved so well, but not entirely. And his eyes. Always warm and brown and happy.
The photo-Ron waved at her, and she pressed a kiss to his cheek.
“I love you,” she said, and set the photo back down. “Miss you. Can’t wait to see you.”
She relieved herself in the ensuite bathroom, and then drew her dressing gown off the chair at her vanity, belting it around her waist. She hadn’t sat at the vanity in years, but it was a gift from Rose, her design and her husband’s assembly, and she didn’t have the heart, or the means, to get rid of it.
Her entire body protested every step out of the bedroom and down the hall. Her right hip, her left knee, her fingers, her shoulder blades. It was a wave of pain, building and releasing, never constant agony, never a full minute of comfort. The slippers helped, cushioning her falls against the hardwood. She should install carpet. She should buy new shoes. She never seemed to have the energy to arrange either.
Hermione crossed the kitchen to the electric kettle and plugged it in. She leaned against the counter to wait out the few minutes it took to boil. She barely noticed the kitchen around her, having seen it every day for over two decades now. The white tile floor, the grout in need of cleaning, the one cabinet door hanging off its hinges. The house was generally tidy; she did what she could, and she paid a housekeeper to tend to the rest. But it had always been Ron that scheduled the big projects.
A loose cabinet wasn’t really a big project. She could fix it with her magic quite easily, but most days picking up her wand seemed a bigger burden than she dared take on. Her wand meant Hogwarts, school, Ron, Harry. Her classmates, her professors, her friends. Almost all dead, now, living in her memory and their children’s memories and in wherever came After.
When Hermione was younger, she hadn’t thought After existed. She learned in primary school and spoke with her parents and read books. She thought she understood. Humans were born, they lived, they died. It was simple, if a bit sad, though she was never too fussed about it, really.
Then came magic. Hogwarts. Ghosts. Horcruxes. Harry dying and coming back to life with a story about a train. After all that, it seemed illogical to believe when her body stopped working, she would entirely cease to exist.
It made her question Voldemort all the more. Why do so much to avoid death, if death was merely another stage?
Not that she didn’t have doubts. Not that she wasn’t, at times, scared. Maybe Ron’s train took him somewhere she couldn’t go. Maybe Ron and Harry boarded a train, and she would be herded to a boat. Maybe…maybe…maybe…
She tried not to worry about it. Compartmentalisation was actually something she’d always been rather good at. She read books, she spoke to other wizards, she found what answers she could. Then she put it away, a puzzle to be later solved.
When the kettle whistled, she unplugged it, and made herself a cup of tea. Strong, the way she liked it now, because her tongue didn’t seem to taste much anymore. Just as her eyes saw most things as fuzzy, darkened shapes, even after vision-corrective spells and glasses. Just as her arthritic fingers trembled and struggled to hold onto the mug.
Hermione drank her tea, then made and ate a slice of toast. She looked out her window. She sat down with a book on theoretical jinxes, though her focus drifted after a few pages. She picked up a quill and tried to write to Rose and Hugo, but the letters came out spindly and quickly descended into unreadable. She dug out her wand to cast a quick dictation charm, and then she tucked it back into the bathroom drawer where she usually kept it.
When she’d been a student at Hogwarts, she’d rarely written to her parents. It seemed too complicated, sending owls to their orderly Muggle home. And truthfully, it seemed too pointless. Why recount adventures they could never understand?
She’d always felt a certain detachment from her parents. It was why Obliviating them and sending them away felt easier than putting them into hiding. She barely remembered that time: the war, the months starving in the woods, the burning need to defeat Voldemort, her parents bumbling around in Australia all the while.
She’d restored their memories, and they’d never spoken to her again. She’d come to regret her choices, mostly all things she'd chosen not to do. Not sending them letters, not spending more holidays together, not asking them if they’d rather hide or run. She tried to do better with her own children. She read parenting books—so, so many books, Muggle and magical alike. She interviewed Molly and Andromeda. Whenever another witch her age became pregnant, she sought them out. The more connected she was to others, the more her children would be connected to her. Positive modelling. She believed it at the time.
She saw it now as the inevitable cycle. Children were never as attached as the parents needed. Life was never as fulfilling as you wished. Rose and Hugo went off to Hogwarts, and barely answered her letters. They came home each summer taller and more sullen. It was harder with Rose. Hard with Hugo, but by then she knew what to expect. It had been a pleasant surprise when Hugo, unlike Rose, moved back home after graduating, though he only stayed two more years.
They were always closer with Ron. He was funnier; he was more playful. He had exciting stories from work, and scars to brag about, and he was best friends with The Chosen One. The children didn’t believe, or maybe Hermione had never properly explained, that she’d been his friend, too. They’d all been friends, equally. But her kids didn’t see her that way. Even at the height of her career, she was only ever their mother, the woman that wiped their faces and yanked them out of danger and scolded their poor decisions.
Ron was their father, and their hero, and their friend. Hermione didn’t begrudge that. He was all of that to her, too.
His funeral was sharper in her mind than the war, or her children’s early years, or her parents. Sometimes, she remembered his body, stiff in death and chilled with preservative charms, better than she remembered his smile.
She didn’t like that. That was an unhelpful thought. She’d been idle too long.
Hermione sent off the dictated letters. Then she cleaned up her breakfast and walked back to her room. She dressed in wool leggings and a warm, oversized jumper. She put on her glasses, which did help a little. As she approached the door, the doorknob was a defined circle rather than a blobby spot of bronze.
She went outside into the autumn breeze. Ron had resisted a fully Muggle neighbourhood for the first decades of their life. They’d raised the children in a house not far from the Burrow. Rose and Hugo spent so many days romping the countryside with other wizarding children. At the time, she’d been annoyed. Why do you need to be so close to your mother? We can Apparate to her no matter how far away we live!
Molly died thirty years before Ron. It had been a long time since they’d had to argue about her.
Hermione walked down the pavement, her shoulders in a permanent hunch, her steps unsure and slow. She’d considered a cane more than once, but it reminded her too much of Lucius Malfoy. Some memories, even the ones faded nearly to nonexistence, were better left undisturbed.
She passed a young man working on his motorbike, a trio of children scampering in and out of their garden gate, a middle-aged couple walking in matching shiny trainers. All with so much more life left in them than her.
She turned around and went home. She sat on the sofa and turned on the telly. She managed a few minutes of the news before the horrors of the world got the best of her, and she flipped through the channels to find something lighthearted. She settled on a comedy programme about four roommates finding out they all shared a father. It was a bit old; Ron had enjoyed it. Hermione barely let him watch it if she was around. She found the laugh track grating, and the content matter trivial.
She watched it now, and pretended Ron sat beside her. He’d have his hand on her knee. It used to be an arm around her shoulder, but they’d lost that flexibility in his last few years. His hand had been comforting enough. She would give up every remaining day of her life to feel his hand on her again.
She would, and she knew she could, if she truly wanted to. There were a lot of options. Maybe she’d researched them more than strictly necessary. But she put off the idea. She didn’t want that to be the final footnote of her life. Hermione Granger-Weasley, wife, mother, war hero, suicide victim. It didn’t fit; it wasn’t her. And she didn’t want the first thing Ron said to her in the After to be something angry or disappointed. She wanted their reunion to be soft and lovely and heartfelt. If they still had something like a body, if they could touch each other, she wanted to fall into his arms. She hoped that she could.
Hermione watched the programme. She ate a sandwich for lunch. She went for another walk. Rose answered her letter, a quick but sweet response. Rose was busy, mothering five children, though her youngest was…had to be…in his sixties? But Hermione had been busier twenty years ago, when she was one-hundred. She didn’t blame Rose for being more present among the fully living.
Or maybe she did. Maybe she sometimes wept from the strength of her longing for her children. Maybe sometimes she wanted to send them angry questions about why she couldn’t live with them, when she was widowed and lonely and suffering. Didn’t they know it would happen to them, too? Did they think Hermione deserved solitude, or did they simply think they would handle it better when it was their turn?
The anger was so unproductive. The resentment. The fear. She tried to keep it all at bay. It got harder the more pain she was in, the less she could see, the more tired she felt.
Hermione wasn’t hungry that evening. She read a few more pages of her book. She watched hours of telly. Then she walked to her bedroom.
She made it halfway down the hall, and collapsed.
There was a splitting pain in her chest, the kind of agony she hadn’t felt since she was seventeen and on the receiving end of evil curses.
She meant to scream, but only a tired gasp slipped out.
The world went black.
When the colour returned, it was with a startling clarity. It was almost overwhelming how crisp it all looked: the cloudless bright sky, the scarlet engine, the puffs of smoke, the squeal of applied brakes.
Hermione was at the platform. She could have wept with relief, except she had the odd, innate knowledge that she’d never cry again.