Chapter Text
I should have known better.
That’s what I keep telling myself while I wrap my arms around myself in the darkness of the small room where we’ve found shelter tonight, but it doesn’t help. Nothing helps. The cold seeps through anyway, settling into my bones like it belongs there.
I should have known better.
My eyes stare into the shadows, searching for something, but there’s nothing. Just emptiness. Just this suffocating silence that’s consuming me from the inside out, eating away at everything I thought I was until there’s nothing left but this aching, gaping hole where my heart used to be.
I need his warmth. God, I need it so badly it physically hurts. I need his arms around my waist, his chest rising and falling beneath my cheek as I drift off to sleep. I need that peace I always found in him, that impossible, inexplicable sense of rightness that I’ve never felt with anyone else.
But he’s not here. He is not coming.
Was he ever really there at all? That’s the question that’s slowly driving me insane. Sometimes he seemed so close I could barely breathe from the intensity of it. His hands on my skin, his voice raw and desperate in my ear, his eyes looking at me like I was the only real thing in his entire world. Other times he was so distant I couldn’t reach him even when he was right beside me, running from me, from us, from everything we had that was real and terrifying and impossible to name.
Every promise faded before I could hold onto it. Every touch became a memory that hurt more than it healed. Every apology dissolved into nothing, like words written in sand, washed away before they could mean anything.
I can’t chase him again. I don’t have the strength. I don’t have anything left.
I squeeze my eyes shut and the tears come, so hot and angry I feel like I’m drowning in them. They soak my cheeks, dampen the thin pillow beneath my head, and I don’t even try to stop them anymore. What’s the point? My sobs fill the small room, muffled and broken, my chest so tight I can barely breathe. Every memory crashes over me like a wave: every kiss, every argument, every moment of perfect understanding followed by walls slamming down between us. It all mixes together in my mind like a fire I can’t extinguish, burning through me, destroying everything.
The pain is unbearable. It’s a living thing inside me, tearing me apart with claws I can’t see, can’t fight, can’t escape.
“If two people love each other, there can be no happy end to it.”
The Hemingway quote echoes in my head, each word a knife twisting deeper. Love. Betrayal. Pain. They’re all tangled together now, inseparable, impossible to untangle, impossible to ignore. The morning light is starting to seep through the gap in the tent flap, grey and weak, but I don’t notice. I don’t notice anything except this storm inside me that won’t stop, won’t calm, won’t let me rest.
I take a deep breath, trying to steady myself, but it’s useless. Each sob leaves me more exhausted, like it’s draining something vital from inside me that I’ll never get back. I try to tell myself I can be strong. That I don’t need anyone else to feel whole. That I’m Hermione Granger, and I’ve survived worse than this.
But I know I’m lying.
I need him. God help me, I still need him, even after everything.
The pain doesn’t stop at my heart. This slow and steady aching spreads through my hands, my shoulders, my chest, every fiber of my body remembers him and aches for his presence, his touch, his warmth. The kind of pain that comes when you have been hurt repeatedly by the same weapons. Every breath is a cruel reminder. Every heartbeat screams his name. Without him, my whole world is broken, shattered into pieces so small I’ll never find them all, never put them back together.
The entire world feels like a terrible collection of memories confirming that he existed, that what we had was real, even if it was built on lies. And without him, everything is empty. Irrelevant. Condemned to remember him forever while trying desperately to forget.
I should have known better than to trust him. I should have known better than to think I could be the exception, the one girl who could crack through that armor of cruelty and privilege he wears like a second skin.
But I didn’t know better. And that’s the worst part... I chose this. I chose him.