Forever Knight [Harmione]

Chapter 11: Funeral

Harry looked up from his seat on the couch and peeked furtively at Hermione who was scribbling something on the coffee table.  At the other end of the couch was Ron, slouched over in his sleep, mouth hanging half open.  The fireplace was alive and the flames flickered to fight the shadows cast by candles lighting the room.  In the last week, he had somehow managed to shift his sleeping time to four in the morning, onwards.  Sometimes he woke at ten, sometimes eleven, and on one occasion, twelve.  He had, in essence, rearranged his internal clock.  It was something he had planned to do, anyway.  He wanted to spend as much time with her as he could, and he couldn’t very well do that if they were awake and asleep at different times. 

He tried to watch for changes in her expression.  She was writing in her journal again and he was terribly curious as to what she wrote in it.  She took turns, writing in her journal and on a separate, beaten up notebook for research.  He could tell she wasn’t making a copy of her research notes because he observed that she wrote in her journal after bouts of silence and inactivity, which she thought no one noticed. 

But Harry noticed.  He was noticing all he could of her lately.  Last week, he had found Hermione in tears on her bedroom floor.  He had held her and she cried against him for quite a long time.  It was as if the loss of her parents had finally come crashing down on her, and the impact of it shattered the walls she had built around it.  After she had settled down and cried everything she could, she spoke some about it, telling him that in the last three years, her parents had felt very much separated from her, that she had inadvertently pulled away from them because she was so caught up in her wizarding world.  The gap between her and her muggle parents widened continuously, and looking back, she wasn’t even sure if the chasm could have been bridged.  She was going to try, anyway; on her birthday.  But they had died, and now she couldn’t even attend their wake.

He had listened, and he really didn’t know what to say, but it didn’t look like she needed him to say anything.  When she was done talking, they were silent for a long time until finally, she sat up, wiped her tears away and apologized for ruining his shirt.  That was the last time she spoke of it.  In fact, that was the last time she spoke about any of her feelings at all.  She hadn’t told him all that much afterwards. 

She told him she loved him, constantly, and she said so with such quiet emotion that her words always pulled him in, but these last couple of days, he was beginning to think that she said it to distract him from asking the more significant questions.  Of course, he knew she meant it when she said she loved him, but it bothered him that she saw it as an opportunity for a diversion.  She didn’t want to talk, period.  That probably meant she needed to.

He’d told her off-handedly, once or twice, that sometimes, people needed to talk to someone to come to grips with certain things.  She had understood exactly what he was telling her, because both times, she said, “Oh, yes.  That’s what Cicero tells me all the time, so that’s why I think a therapist is so important.”

It didn’t escape him that she had evaded the topic altogether.  Maybe she hadn’t been lying, but he knew she wasn’t talking to Cicero at all, at least not about the things eating away at her.  He wished she would say something.  He couldn’t bear the thought of having her breaking from the inside while trying to put a brave front on the outside.  Listening to her cry the way she did in her bedroom was like listening to her soul shattering.  At that point, all he could do was hold her.    

Every night, she would rise from sleep and leave the house, presumably to go to Cicero’s office and perhaps even to feed.  He had managed to learn not to be so bothered by this.  It was necessary, after all.  Then she would return, acting mostly like her old self and showing him, and even Ron, her usual affection.  Just a few hours before the coming of dawn, she had, on two occasions, popped open a tiny vial and consumed its contents.  When he asked her about it, she readily explained that it was a synthesized form of blood, to sate her hunger when it became unbearable.  She said it wasn’t nutritious at all, and that it’s only purpose was to curb her vampire instincts until she could feed again.  She also explained that Cicero told her to use it sparingly so that she wouldn’t grow dependent on it. Apparently, she was training herself to need blood less frequently.