Nightmares and Nocturnes

The Trials of Separation

Chapter 23: The Trials of Separation

. . . . . . . .

2001

. . . . . . . .

She let the conversation replay in her mind, trying to remember how they'd gotten here.

You can't just sit here and mourn, Hermione - they won't stop for his death, and neither can we -

How dare you? How dare you discard him like that?

Discard him? You think I am capable of discarding my own brother?

You already have!

Bill turned towards her, the sheets rustling around them. Hermione was lying on her back, coiling a long brown curl around her finger and trying not to stare at him, at the two faces she saw when she looked at him; at the familiar glint of red, the same blue eyes, the colors and features that were exactly the same and yet hauntingly different, buried beneath layers of scars and grief.

He's gone, isn't he? she demanded. And you want me to just -

I don't want you to do anything, he interrupted. I don't want anything from you, Hermione.

She blinked. You don't?

Liar. He'd kissed her to prove it.

He cleared his throat before speaking, breaking the silence. "Maybe I should apologize," he began, and she shook her head, forcing a smile.

"No, I - " She paused, licking her dry lips. "I wanted it. I'm just surprised - "

She trailed off again and he reached over, her chin suddenly caught in a trap of his fingers as he drew her face towards his. "Tell me," he said quietly, and she let the curl she'd been toying with untwist from her finger as she turned on her side to look at him.

"I'm surprised you wanted me," she confessed, fighting a tremor of something indeterminable at the memory, at the flashes of his touch, at how he had been urgent and desperate but still sure, certain, knowing. How his hands on her had been a mix of experience and a poorly suppressed want.

The experience was his alone. The want, however, had been mutual.

Whatever she'd had with Ron - the innocence of affection, the schoolgirl crush - it had been nothing like this. She'd imagined sex before; thought about it, toyed with it, treated it like a subject for objective scrutiny, like an inevitable end-of-term exam. She'd determined sex to be largely uninteresting, at first, and then there had been Bill and his face and his eyes and his mournful darkness, and then she'd swallowed her curiosity and determined it impossible. Inadvisable. Out of the question.

But the way he looked at her . . .

The tide of pain had receded, if only temporarily. Very temporarily. Perhaps she should have already known that about sex; that it wasn't ever magic. Just a trick of the light, a flood of something primal; a breathless escape, to start, but once her pulse caught up to her it could only ever devolve to a muted suffering. A hollow festering.

Again, she thought as soon as it was over, even as she knew it wouldn't last. I found your lips in my anger, she thought, and I met your hips in my grief.

It wasn't real; pain remained. And yet -

Again.

Her breath caught at the memory, and then Bill seemed to catch something in her eye, his hand sliding down; his thumb glided along the slope of her neck, digging into her clavicle, tightening around her shoulder.