Tacet
She has always lived in words. Books, thoughts, learned discourse -- with these things she feels truly alive. She paints her conversations through the air, taking care with the shape of each phrase, each accent.
She has never quite mastered the way the others seem to speak with their eyes. A tilt of a head and a raised eyebrow speaks as loudly to them as a cry. A brief clasp of the shoulder is as comforting to them as a midnight conversation, and she smiles and nods and pretends she understands.
When she was small she never had time to play tag with the other children at recess, curls streaming and clinging to the back of her neck in the hot afternoon sun. No time for fox and geese after school, grass scratching her ankles and shouting as she ran.
Nose buried in a book, she would make her way home, occasionally catching the toes of her smartly polished shoes on cracks in the sidewalk. In their long halls and pale-painted rooms she would dream, spread words through the house until the air was thick with them. She never had time to learn to knit or kick a football, to whittle or sew.
She learned to knit when her words would not work, when they fell to the ground around those who refused to see them. She learned to knit, and took a certain grim pleasure from it, from cramped fingers and brightly coloured threads clinging to her robes.
She learned to sew because there were times when there just were not words -- she, who loved them could see this. Others scrambled with various combinations, vain and shallow, searching still not for the words to fix the ills, but the words to prove to themselves it was not futile.
Hermione had taken slowly to knitting, producing lump after indistinguishable lump. She found she was forced to take less slowly to sewing, though she hated it from the first stitch. At first, she would prick her trembling fingers with the needle, turning silver to scarlet and spilling her blood across her work.
She learned quickly that this was inadvisable.
Ron, always quick to mock her knitting, would watch with white and silent eyes while she quickly pulled the stitches through. He would never lift a hand to help her. Perhaps he remembered his mother, his sister, and could not bring himself to wield a needle; but he would slip thread through the eyes for her, press a pair of scissors to her palm when she was done.
He would always be there, as she meticulously neatened away her work at the end of the day, or night, or whenever her task was finished. There with his eyes saying something that she couldn't understand, and a hand low on her back, leading her away from the sewing room and its haunts.
Ron understood, perhaps, that she had never understood languages without words, but could not find another way to speak to her of these things. He understood, perhaps, that words had been rendered so shallow that to use them would have been a blasphemy.
She had never had time to run through cornstalk mazes in her mother's garden. To chase after insects with iridescent wings, hunker down in the berry patch, bloating her belly with fruit. She knew the optimum depth for a thousand seeds to sprout, but had never crouched over a shallow trench and pressed them into the dark, moist soil.
Harry understood something, perhaps, of the way soil shrunk in on itself, so that no matter how careful you were, you would always be left with a sunken hollow. He would drift along behind her to the garden as she tended to the plots, but he was dying by degrees and could only wipe the dirt from her face.
As a child, she never placed much stock in dolls. Pale imitations of people and animals, ones that never spoke with words; and one was expected to love them unconditionally. Never mind the wide and staring eyes that glittered dully. Never mind painted on noses on too-flat faces and hair that was either rough and abrasive or silky-slimy. Rigor mortis fingers and joints; 360-degree exorcist heads.
Hermione would come to understand something, perhaps, of the work that went into each part, even if she could never love the whole. She would learn the precision necessary to turn an arm, thread the hair. The care it took to brush paint to the skull to ensure that the doll was a reflection of its model. It would not satisfy if it were anything other than an exact replica of the donor of the hair.
She had never had the time for gleaming floors or spotless windows, and found that she did not much care for them now. She could have, with a flick of her wrist and another set of shallow words, set the pots in their racks on the wall, chased dust from the tiles; but she finds herself loathe to speak words without meaning.
It doesn't matter much. When she has a visitor they will bring her a bit of mending, and in exchange they will sweep the floor and neaten away the cobwebs. Make her a bit of soup, perhaps, or help themselves to her oven and bake her a casserole, store it neatly in her freezer. She works in the garden, but nothing ever grows.
The visitors are for her, always her. Never for Harry or Ron, though they may speak of them with shallow words in reverent tones. Always for her, because Harry and Ron are dying by degrees and from day to day they forget how far along they are.
Today is a good day. She thinks it may be a good day, but she can never be completely sure when the other days are nothing more than blurs of needle and thread, and shrinking piles of earth.
A bad day is one where she recognizes the eyes she sews shut.
A final, fierce battle; a battle to end all battles. One showdown with all the cards on the table and all the warriors standing proud in their gleaming armor, wands held high, facing down the forces of evil.
This is how it was supposed to be.
Not a prolonged scuffle, a long and dirty skirmish, lovers falling in fisticuffs. Not years of land mines and booby-traps, dirty robes and broken wands. Glorious deaths or none at all, no lying and dying on the grass with your insides leaking out because your best friend's spell went wrong and all that's left of them is their right foot.
No slow and steady extermination of the enemy, hunting and putting them down like mongrel dogs with rabies. No long and bloody hunt for Voldemort, running through informants and leaving them in a broken trail.
And, then, in the end, something definite.
You should be able to tell if you've won or lost. Rules of engagement, common sense, a list of things won and lost.
Losing is bad. This was worse.
There was not supposed to be this lingering death, for all of them. Voldemort's goodbye kiss, left to linger on long after he was gone. Half-life, no life, spreading, minds gone sour in bodies that don't know enough to stop living.
You should be able to tell if someone is alive or dead.
Dead is bad. This was worse.
Her sewing room is neat and tidy. Always neat and tidy, and never (always) empty. She doesn't know if she'd be able to stand it if she were alone in there, with needle and thread and nothing but a job to do.
The window is small, and sometimes when her visitors come there is still fresh blood on the mending. She is careful, always careful, not to mix her own with it. At first, at first when she didn't know what to do and was trying anything to stop the screaming in her head, she would prick her fingers and spill her blood.
Ron pulled it off of her, the thing that used to be Ginny, when she spilled too much and it mixed with her work. She has the scars, from that time and others, and with Ron watching her silently from the corner as she sews, she is careful. Today, there is blood along his neck, like he remembers something she can almost recall.
She will not ask him to save her again, and he will not have to tell her than he cannot.
Finishes off her knots and appraises her handiwork. The eyes are shut tight, and she's gotten quite good (though she rarely has any visitors bringing her mending these days).
Settles the effigy into rigid arms and hides each sunken eye beneath a coin, shuts the mouth (her fingers are covered in scars from when they paused for silly things like funerals and wakes and didn't bring her mending quickly enough) and picks up needle and thread again. She misses when Ron would thread it for her, press it to her shaking palm, but all he can do now is watch.
And she hums a lullaby as the deadwinds howl outside her window.
"Hush little baby, don't say a word, Momma's gonna buy you a mocking bird..."
When she was little, she used to sit outside on the back porch and pretend to read a book. She'd flip a page every thirty-seven seconds, sigh occasionally or laugh. Ask her mother if she was aware of a small tidbit of information in a distracted manner, all the while watching her as she tended her garden. Watching her turn the soil to unearth the dark loam, water the plants (drops of water sparking in the sun, refracting rainbows as they fell), nurture the flowers until they bloomed in a way she never would.
She'd have her head ducked and eyes on the page whenever her mother looked up, but she rarely turned her attention from her plants. Hermione kept up the act anyway, because maybe, someday, her mother would glance up and see her.
So Hermione knows she's supposed to love her garden.
Love the fresh smell of earth and the way the rain darkens the soil. Once she spent an afternoon in her kitchen, with the dust and withered herbs, neatly labeling stakes. But she ran out of room for the names and dates and everything she wanted to say, and she stood in the rain in the dirtmud with an armful of markers and realized that she didn't remember what she'd planted where anyway.
She's supposed to love her garden, but there's never enough dirt when she puts it back and she can't get the soil off her and the smell out of her hair.
And no matter how much she plants, she can never make anything grow. (She hasn't seen anyone other than Ron and Harry in weeks.)
The charms she's hung in the bare branches of the trees chime in the breeze, in the deadwind that blows through and she thinks she hears the ground (the things beneath the ground) moan.
She's Mary, Mary, quite contrary, and how does her garden grow?
With silverbells and cockleshells and PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW.
She laughs (because she's the one who's cursed) and sings and digs her fingers into the soil.
And Harry holds her hand, though he's beneath her feet and growling with the rest.
It's spitting and she's standing under a grey sky in a white shift she found in a drawer in the sitting room. Her hair is loose and long, curls fighting each other in the deadwind. The charms in the trees are dancing a dissonant elegy.
They came to her slowly, at first. A trickle here and there, with haunted eyes and shrouded loads. They'd sit in her kitchen and put tea on to boil as they spoke of Harry and Ron in low voices, and she'd grit her teeth and tell herself she didn't recognize the faces.
Faster then, more. Hardened eyes and harder faces, and those that had borne in burdens were borne in themselves; a steady stream until the dead grass to her door was stripped to earth. And they would stay and bow their heads in her garden and speak shallow, reverent words without meaning.
Slower, again. Famine eyes and gaunt faces and shuffling steps, and they no longer stayed to say anything at all; looked at her with empty eyes and cursed her for their own mortality.
Too late, she wants to tell them. Would tell them if they'd only come again that she's already cursed and dead by degrees. That she envies them as she stands in her garden with the stillness of the grave heavy on her tongue, and waits.
That she's waiting for the rain that will come and set her work to bloom and bud from the earth; disturb the stillness so that she may speak and break her curse.
And she waits, as the skies whimper and can't bring themselves to cry, for her garden to bloom and Harry and Ron to take her hands again.
The dirt beneath her bare toes has turned dry and hard, and she hopes that this might be the rain to bring about the spring.