Foolish
Ginny had never kissed Hermione fully on the lips. Nor was it important now for her to do such a thing. It was no longer a matter of love or hate, or any sensations along that thin line, but an imperative desperateness that compelled her.
It came to be that, on a noiseless and heavy summer afternoon, the two of them discovered the single most powerful human emotion; it was a relentless and wearisome chaos, insatiable and empty in itself, an annulled but powerful desire that threatened to devour itself like a blackhole. But the quiet drone of the world outside told them something entirely different, because the world was still slow and easy, without any of the dread that was present in their damp smelling, cramped bedroom.
Part of it was purely sexual, Ginny admitted, innate within the body and mind and undeniable. As instincts they fumbled ecstatically over other's body, writhing under the dimmed light that leaked through the leaden curtains, with lowkey motions they moved, and groped.
Sex was far more animalistic than she had ever imagined, with two people moving in a rhythm until they got it right, and staying on it until they come gracelessly. It was nothing enigmatic, nothing profound, nothing as dreamy as when it was still impregnable within one's imagination. It wasn't about the speed or the rhythm of their movements, or the rising of their fleshy breasts, or the secure scent of warm fluids, or the quickening of one's breaths; but rather it was about the need for another's presence. It was the most vulnerable feeling, really, since its entire entity was dependent upon the actions of another and one could do naught about it. It was loneliness at its uttermost extreme, being bond to another soul as if oneself was completely dependent, completely compelled on by an unquenched thirst that was only sated within the very first moment when it began, like the fleeting but forceful orgasmic force.
And so she came in that soggy room, with Hermione's fingers deep in her, when the wind outside only began to breeze weakly and dusk just fallen ember-like, and she loved Hermione with every fiber of her being and mind, even though Ginny had never felt the rough corners of her chapped lips, she loved her still and more so.
They were foolish little girls.
If Ginny's mother was alive, she would have certainly told them so. But Ginny no longer cared and wouldn't have listened anyway, because death was coming up and it was inescapable. The old say that death is a milestone in life, but both of them knew that it was a lie; death was the end, the utter end. It wasn't the end because of its nature, but purely because nothing followed it, so death was an abrupt end to everything and anything in the unfinished fabrication that was one's life.
When Ginny woke up at midnight, she saw Hermione's face. It was white, white as the bone-ashes of her forefathers and brothers, silvery and peaceful, with hands clasped loosely above her stomach and her eyes closed. Her flesh floated in the blackness of the room, lit by a frail ray of moonlight that trickled from the window, and within in that empty expanse, that endless darkness, Ginny cried. She cried herself asleep because she kept picturing Hermione, in that same morbid position, being lowered into the indefinite depths of the ocean amongst the blue-green waters, still breathing and desperately alive. And Ginny dreamt about her face, her beautiful face drowned with a watery death, her beautiful hair soaking up the salinity as it glistened in the blackness.
So it was with an unfathomable force that Ginny tried to pull Hermione's body as close to herself as possible, no longer in need of reassurance, no longer foolish; but it was a grand and powerful gesture all within itself, an ineffective motion though it was in a fearful world. And long they stayed, amid the tangled and damp sheets, clinging desperately onto each other. It was not only the vague aftertaste of sexual urge, but an infallibly impossible and desperately stupid thing that they hung onto. And because of it, whatever it was, they lied there and did not move, not even if one's limb got numb from the weight of another's torso. And they said nothing because they needed to stay that way, with noses buried into the darkness between another's necklines.
It meant something, the instinctive gesture of hopelessness, because it was a proof that they were in their own fearless world where there was still chances for love, still chances to grow up. Like daydreams they were, yet-it was something that one held onto, no matter how obsolete it had become because it was still something good, something incredibly rich and lovely that, for the tiniest fraction of a second, one who lived in that dream was not so afraid.
Yet they feared for this death that was inescapable.
They were fighting a lost war, although no one dared saying it aloud. So they lived in that fugacious unconsciousness, if not comfort, knowing though they were. And it was a necessity now, for one to lie to her own self so that she is caul-blind and saw the end farther than it really was. It mattered little and served no condolence that they were on their bed assimilating to another's muted heartbeats. And one would be soon dead, whichever of the two she would be, and the other would feel nothing but the slow breeze on her drying face and the strange and surreal sensation of being cheated somehow, not just by the dead but by the very intent of the very earth; a fleeting melancholy and an uneasy sourness in her mouth, standing somewhere under the checkered shade of a clouded sky, silent and lonely and knowing that her own death loomed on.
When the morning came, they buttoned on their cloaks and rode to their deaths.