Lunar Eclipse
The hooded figure before him bellowed a curse his way. He swerved, avoiding it by mere inches, but tripping over a fallen figure in the process and crashing to the ground.
The man stood over him, his wand pointed directly at Ron’s face. He could hear the vile laughter through that horrid mask. He could hear his end rushing in his ears but could not muster any real sense of fear. The figure began to mutter something…
“Avada Kedavra!” yelled someone behind the figure. The black-hooded man crumpled to a heap upon the ground, over Ron’s feet. Ron hastened to get up and away.
“Ron!” Hermione screamed shrilly, throwing herself into his arms. “Oh, Merlin, Ron, I thought he’d killed you! I thought you were gone! I thought…”
“Shh, Hermione, quiet! I’m fine, it’s alright,” Ron hushed her quietly, leading her away from the battle raging out before them. He still had his wand out in one hand while the other held Hermione. His eyes were alert, darting every which way as they avoided misguided curses. Making sure there had been no one who’d seen and followed them.
“Ron, have you seen anyone?” asked Hermione, now calmed slightly, hanging onto his hand as if she would float away if she let go, back to whispering. “I saw the twins just a while ago, and I think someone got Kingsley, but I’m not sure if he’s dead.”
“I saw my Mum and…they got Charlie…injured, at least…Where’s Harry?” Ron choked. They’d just stepped over the mutilated corpse of an Auror and he wondered, feeling nauseous as he did, whether his brother looked anything like that.
They’d managed to reach the outskirts for a clearer view unnoticed. He could see the figure of the Death Eater Hermione had killed lying all alone on the ground far away. He could see Fleur attempting to lift Bill inconspicuously. There was Mad-Eye, firing hex after hex at a figure that looked suspiciously like Lucius Malfoy. There was Remus standing over Bellatrix’s body…But there was no sign of Harry.
He glanced at Hermione, noticing as he did the glistening trail that ran down her face from her eyes, eyes filled with a horror unnerving to behold.
“I haven’t seen him and…Ron…I feel horrible…I killed someone, Ron! I’m a terrible person, I-” She broke into horrible, heart-wrenching breaths and moans. Her hold upon his hand became painful. Her eyes were clouding over, losing the determination they’d held not long ago.
Ron grabbed her arms roughly and turned her to face him, whispering in a soothing yet forceful voice, “You did what you had to do! You saved my life. That man didn’t care about anyone else’s life, so why do you think he has the right to live himself? This is war: you fight for who deserves it; you don’t stop to consider the rest. You do what you have to do… You saved me…I won’t let anything happen to you.” Ron glared into her eyes with such a fierce force that they seemed to burn, as though he wanted the fire to spread and set her eyes alight once more.
She merely breathed deeply for a while, keeping her eyes on his as though they would give her more answers that she longed to hear. Then Hermione glared right back; the fire had spread and burned the fear and uncertainty. There was a trail of blood running from her left eye; it seemed to reflect the red in her eyes and her wild hair was singed at the ends. But never had she looked more beautiful to him.
“We have to find Harry, Hermione,” he said in urgency. Before he could move she hugged him, but he was still watching the battle.
“I know. We have to go,” she murmured.
“Hermione,” he whispered, trying to pull her arms from around him, “we need to find Harry. Now.”
She didn’t let go of him. “I love you, Ron. I love you so much,” she whispered into his bruised and bloodied shoulder, a constricted note to her desperate voice.
“I love you too, but right now we have to go,” Ron stated firmly pulling away from her, trying to contain his building impatience. The seriousness, the danger that surrounded them so effectively didn’t permit his mind to dwell upon such a confession, upon a moment that should have been beautiful and eternal. He kissed her hastily and sloppily, not even realizing he had begun and ended anything significant. Then, holding her hand with their wands both out, they made their way back through the battlefield.
Twice they were attacked. The first time by Malfoy, who leered at them as they fought back to back, never to be parted. He stopped leering though when Hermione stunned him, and then used a curse to throw him across the field. The second time Hermione was hit by something, but though in pain she said she managed to hold herself up just fine. They had not left each other’s sides.
And then they saw him. Harry was battling a tall, skeletal figure just ten feet away from them. He was severely injured: his left arm hung limply at his side, and blood streamed freely from his head, spilling over his eyes that looked somehow dulled.
Ron and Hermione watched in a horrified trance. All of the other voices and deadly flashes of colour fading into unimportance as Voldemort fired another curse at Harry and he crumpled to the ground, screaming in pain. Just as they were both running toward their fallen friend, insanely, three Death Eaters stepped before them. Ron lashed out at the first and didn’t even bother with a wand, but swung lethally violent punches. The man said not a word as he fell and his companions seemed slightly stunned. Hermione took out her wand and mumbled something then the second Death Eater was thrown away, knocking into the one standing over the stumbling Fleur and Charlie.
They could see over the shoulder of the last Death Eater that Voldemort was standing over Harry, talking to him. They could not hear what was said, there was too much shouting and screaming and the rushing of spells. Voldemort was, fingering his wand hungrily. Harry looked as if he could barely even see through the stream of blood from his head. Then a Death Eater moved toward them. He sent Ron hurtling backward with a stunner, but missed when he’d aimed at Hermione just afterward. She once again flung a hex at the man and he crumpled to the ground, clutching his eyes. She began to run forward.
Ron screamed out to her. He fought against the curse binding him he used every single ounce of strength and he began to move but only feebly. It was not enough. He forced himself off the ground, slowly, and he watched as Voldemort raised his wand into Harry’s face, as the green began to come from it, as Harry closed his dull and miserable defeated eyes…as Hermione pushed herself before Harry…as the green hit her in the chest.
Ron did not notice when the curse placed upon him shattered away. He did not notice how both Voldemort and Harry stared at her once she’d fallen, shocked. He did not see Harry’s face begin to fill with an unimaginable pain and fury. He did not see Harry stand, filled with a new and horrible furious life, and bellow incomprehensibly into the sky as the very earth seemed to shake, as if it were cowering. Or Voldemort, suddenly alight with fear, send that haunted green flying at Harry again…Or how it rebounded off of Harry as he raised his own wand…How the green collided with Voldemort’s face…How Harry had then screamed heart wrenchingly and dropped to his knees, clutching at her hand as his opponent fell…Ron noticed none of these things, but he noticed, as if in a slow mode, as Hermione sent him her last look.
The curse had almost hit her. A look of fulfilling grandeur came upon her face as it lost all vestiges of fear and desperation and she smiled. She turned her head, the blood on her face gleaming in the sun as it set tragically behind the tall border of the forest, filling this death stained earth with a different kind of red. Her gaze was solemn yet content in a way as it landed upon him and remained there. That fraction of a second before the green met with her heart lasted more than any other moment of his life. It conveyed more to him than a million words ever could. She was smiling. Eternity dwelled in that look. All of those things that should have been…He was aware of them somehow as she smiled. All of the things that were not said...they filled the unearthly connection of their eyes for a moment in time.
And then the green reached her skin, seeped into her heart and took it away. But it could not take with it that look. Even as she slowly fell to her knees, then with her face against the ground, her eyes, even if in a literal sense they were now empty, never left his…never were they parted…
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Ron heard the stairs creaking as someone made their cautious way up. His eyes flew open in horror. He sat up in bed and frantically began to wipe them on the back of his hand, stuffing the picture under the bed he lay on. He knew it would look suspicious; he’d not gotten up all morning and his face was surely red and puffy. His eyes felt gummed together by very strong glue that stung incessantly.
“Ron?” his mother asked him tentatively, poking her head through the door. Once she saw he was awake she stepped in. “Ron, you haven’t been downstairs all morning, I was wondering when you’d show. Oh, we’re so late already; everyone is probably already there at St. Mungo’s. Merlin’s beard, they’ve probably already seen the baby…”She bit her lip uncertainly. “I did tell Ginny I wanted to be the third to hold that baby, I hope she remembers her promise…a grandmother has every right…” And she continued to mumble on about how and why the right to hold Ginny’s baby third was reserved solely for her. Ron sat praying she would continue in her state of great distraction so as not to see his face that bore the unmistakable signs of grief.
“It’s probably got black-hair…Sirius and James both have black-hair…but then, they are twins, perhaps the chances of having a red-headed baby are just the same…after all, Harry’s mother was red-haired…oh, Ron, isn’t it wonderful! And you’re godfather! Why, you...” Her voice trailed off. She’d noticed his face.
She seemed to deflate before his eyes. She went from careless, blissfully joyful to heavy, miserable and anxious so quickly it was startling. After staring in quiet horror for a while she moved toward him slowly but determinedly. She gazed at him intently as he watched the ground. The wind that blew in from the window whipped her hair into her face but she ignored it completely.
“Ron…”
“I’m fine, Mum,” he croaked, still staring at the ground. There was a little stain of red over near the corner. He wondered what it was from.
She bent down to pick something up off the floor. He watched out of the corner of his eye in silent and somehow numb anguish as she took the photograph from under the bed by the little corner of it that was unhidden. She then sat down next to him but thankfully made no move to touch him. She merely handed back the photo. He took it without looking at her. He glanced at it: there she was. Her brown hair was as wild as ever, her smile as bright, her eyes as dark and indefinable as the night that they, so like it, would never see again. She waved at him. She smiled. He felt his throat clench.
His mother had stood and moved toward the dresser in the corner, picking up a tall glass that sat there. She turned to him, pretending, he knew, to look reprimanding. Her eyes were much too moist for someone trying to seem severe as she said, “You brought this up yesterday morning.”
“Sorry,” he mumbled to the stain, although he knew she wasn’t obliging him to explain or even answer at all. People never demanded much of him anymore.
He could tell that as she stood there holding the dirty cup she was struggling. It was of her nature to comfort, to become rid of her child’s grief even if it were provoked by a nature much more powerful than a mother’s. Even if it were inerasable, she’d try. He admired her for her strength, unconsciously, but was grateful, consciously, that she sensed his needs. At that moment his need was to be alone, to give into pain as it was far more welcoming than light, reason and beauty…those all hurt too much, perhaps even more than acceptance. He wondered how such things could still exist at all to everyone else…Didn’t they remember?
“You are coming, aren’t you?” Mrs. Weasley asked. Once he nodded his head she sighed and walked toward the door, the cup in hand.
Before she could leave him to himself and his immitigable pain, she whispered, “She wanted you left behind, you know. She wanted us all left behind so that we could keep on living, and laughing. That was her wish. Grant her wish…and Ron?” She waited for him to look up until she continued, “You are the godfather. Make sure you’ll be there.”
Once Ron had nodded she left quietly leaving him feeling, if possible, even worse than before. He felt now, on top of everything else, bad about emptying his mother’s happy balloon at being a grandmother for the fourth time, the second time in one month, as Bill and Fleur had had their first child not too long ago, Lucy. But he did not at all feel like going to St. Mungo’s and dampening Harry and Ginny’s sure to be jubilant moods. Not, of course, that he’d ever intended to…he just couldn’t help it.
He wasn’t always this moody and depressed. He normally managed to escape the particularly painful torture that was memory. He only got this way whenever he was somehow reminded of how his life ought to have been. If Hermione were still there would they maybe be having children? Would they be married yet? It would have been four years since the end of the war, which was enough. Or would she want to wait? They would be married of course, wouldn’t they? They would be happy. Maybe they would have stopped bickering. Maybe…
Another blow of grief hit him as he pictured in his head a little boy, or a girl with her big brown eyes and his bright red hair as bushy as hers had been, running around a house, calling, ‘Mummy’!
It was spring in his mind, even if the warm summer’s night seeped in through the window. Spring, the time when hibernating animals awake from their slumber. The time when the ice of numbness is chipped away by that overwhelming, unnameable feeling, the return of life into an empty, torpid cave. Spring, when eyes open to see that the sun still rises from the East and sets in the West, that its presence is still day and its absence is still night. But what difference did it all make? The only change he felt from night to day was the ease with which he fell asleep when the light departed. Every year had been a blank page, as if his book had been put on hold, or tossed away, since the permanent ink didn’t allow a do over. His parchment was irreversibly stained by useless words. The flowers that bloom in the spring are merely the tormenting reminder that there is no life in winter, and will never be.
He couldn’t stand it anymore. He leapt to his feet, flung the picture away and marched from the room, thundering down the stairs of the empty house. He was staying at the Burrow to help his mother and father. His father had been severely injured in the war, losing a leg and injuring the other. He now rolled himself around the house delightfully in a Muggle wheelchair Harry had gotten him Christmas before last.
Ron landed in the kitchen and hurried through the door, not even noticing the newspaper that lay upon the table, with a short little announcement about Harry and Ginny’s baby and a picture of the couple, Ginny looking as round as a beach ball. Ron wondered at how Harry had changed after the war. He was, of course, so much more at peace. And he seemed to take Hermione’s sacrifice as reason to live like no one else had ever lived before. Just the other day he had been discussing plans to take the family to Alaska the next year to see the Northern Lights. And then he wanted them to explore the depths of the ocean. Or else they were all going bungee jumping, some mad Muggle sport. Or perhaps he was just making his kids a chocolate Easter egg that was bigger than his pregnant wife. No one lived like Harry. Life actually seemed to make sense to him. Or perhaps it was the lack of sense that made sense.
And neither did he notice the larger article above it, with an image of the moon hidden by a black shadow and the caption, ‘Get Your Wish Granted during the Lunar Eclipse’.
Ron took the path he knew by heart, as his mind visited it every night, against his will. To go there willingly felt strange, as if he were a child who had listened to his parents tell him endlessly to eat his vegetables and had finally realised they had reason to say it. He made his way through the field across from the Burrow, kicking at shrubs, refusing to feel when a thorn cut through his jeans. He felt slightly surreal, walking this path again, after four years, under the moonless sky. The last time he had walked this path he had been carrying her body, shedding painful, soundless tears. It was the first time he had cried again since that day. He had even forgotten what it felt like.
He walked on until he had made his way through the small wood that divided the field in two. He stepped into the field of green, at places grey where there were tombs. And there it was right in the middle, the tallest of all: a giant polished stone upon which stood a sculptured angel, its arms reaching toward the sky, as if there was actually something more than clouds up there. He glanced up: there were no clouds that night. Even the moon had deserted him.
He made his way over and stared at the stone. The words ‘Our Heroine’ were etched into her tomb, as if those empty carvings could actually hand out some sort of glory. Ron knew very well that after the end of it all Harry had made absolutely sure the world knew just how much they owed their lives to Hermione Granger. He knew that one day every year millions of people raised their glasses, mumbling ‘to Hermione Granger, and all of our heroes’, then said nothing else for a minute, as if those words needed time and silence to reach…to reach what? What was there to be reached, if there was really nothing at all? He knew that every night Harry closed his eyes and turned his head toward the sky, as if there were something to be heard. Didn’t he get tired of hearing the silence? No one ever answered. There was no one there. He knew she was glorified. But where was the glory in death? He did not see it. What was the difference; murder, sacrifice, they all ended the same way. One forsaken, rotting corpse was no different than the other. There was no glory, beauty or good left in the world. All of those things had left with her four years ago.
He let the helplessness wash over him, as his knees gave in and sank to the moist grass. His head hung and a single, lonely drop of water fell from his chin. He closed his eyes, allowing himself to be truly miserable, as he had denied himself any sort of feeling for so long. He imagined she was just behind the stone, looking through it at him…and then he remembered she was not. She was nothing at all anymore.
A creature watched him as he cried. A very small little creature; of an unnaturally bright glow that seemed hidden behind a veil of shadow. Ron did not notice the shadowy glow of the little thing, not even as it landed upon the angel’s head. Even if it had made a sound he wouldn’t have heard. And he couldn’t feel the light emanating from it, as feeling had become something truly obscure to him. He had his eyes closed and in his palm. He was murmuring quietly, not even aware he’d been speaking aloud, “I wish you’d never left my side…I wish it …that’s what I wish…you’d never left my side…”
The creature, unbeknownst to him, rose into the air, in such a fluid motion that denied his belief in the world’s lack of grace or beauty. It floated upward until it aligned with where the moon should have been. Its glow still not appearing from behind the unseen veil, it appeared to look down at him, so lost in a world that didn’t wait. A world that began to change, as if years had passed. The trees were emptied of life, the grass lost its green, and the stone angel faded, as did all the other graves. Only the moon remained as it was, hidden in shadow. Only one thing seemed to bloom as everything else died away: a woman, with eyes as indefinable as night, standing where the angel had been, looking curiously down at Ron.
Ron sensed the chilling change to the air. He opened his eyes. He took in the image of a human foot just before him. His heart seemed to stop. His eyes wandered upward and beheld the figure looking down at him.
“Hermione…”
Lunar Eclipse by Gin_Drinka
Chapter Notes: I am Gin_Drinka of Hufflepuff writing for the What You Wish for Prompt. And thanks to Hermione Rocks for betaing for me! Hehe, you rock!