BACK to GRIMMAULD
the-roaring-weasley
Hermione stared at the drawing room without really seeing it. The burned tapestry, the tall glass cabinet, the moldering old velvet chairs...everything was the same but somehow, everything was different too. Felt different. Like nothing -- nothing -- would ever be the same again. The last time she had been here in Number 12, Grimmauld Place, she had been expecting to return by that evening and instead nearly eight months had passed -- eight months during which she had assumed she would never see this place again, and yet here she was, now, again.
Without Harry. Without Harry, forever.
She wasn’t alone, at least -- Hermione didn’t think she’d be able to go on if she were alone -- but she felt alone in this house, without him. Without even the hope of him.
The sound of her own sniffle surprised her and Hermione hurriedly raised her arm to wipe her tears away -- not that she knew why she was bothering to hide them, really, since everyone here was grieving for Harry. Even Kreacher, who had assured them that they were safe in this Noble and Most Ancient House of Black, safe in the Name of Harry Potter; assured them that he had not had orders to stop the Death Eaters that Hermione had inadvertently Apparated to their doorstep and had thus been powerless against them, but now, at least until someone else with a claim came in to take the house -- and thus its attendant elf caretaker -- away, Kreacher had decided to consider himself bound to their orders in Harry’s name. “It’s what the Master would have wanted, “ he had said, and apparently that was all it took to make the house secure against their enemies, broken Fidelius Charm or not.
(Apparently House Elves had a little more control over their lives than it seemed on the surface -- a little more choice in the ways they interpreted their own rules, at least. If she hadn’t been so weighed-down with grief, despair, and the hopeless question of what next, Hermione supposed she would have been fascinated. As it was...)
The creak of the door opening behind her didn’t startle Hermione; she was too absorbed in the looping replay of those last few moments of the battle across the backsides of her own raw, red eyelids. The chaos of Harry’s return from the dead, the surge of hope that had filled the defenders of Hogwarts as dawn broke upon such a miraculous, impossible sight -- the battle they’d thought lost, resuming... And then Harry again, throwing off the Invisibility Cloak just tin time for a spell to catch him right between his shoulder blades, going down, down... Ginny screaming, her spell knocking Bellatrix flat off her feet and out of sight somewhere in the rubble; Voldemort’s agonized shriek, the Dark Wizard freezing at the sight of his foe falling by someone else’s hand, Neville running forward with the sword...
Hermione shuddered, ducked her head; realized that the footsteps she heard were coming from now. “Oh, uh, Ron,” she stammered, scrubbing at her eyes. “I was just, uh -- just checking to make sure the doxies hadn’t resumed nesting in the curtains while we were gone. N-no sign of them, though. Everything’s....” The word caught in her throat, has to be forced past a lump that felt as hard and cold as an iceberg. “Everything’s fine.”