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It’s been a few weeks since the appointment, but Hermione still hasn’t gotten over it, and apparently neither has anyone else. The healer had just shaken his head and looked at her with poorly-disguised pity, and Ron had taken over the obligatory thanks as Hermione sat there and tried to process the diagnosis. In the days after, the pitying looks had just kept coming. Harry and Ginny had arrived with a bottle of good wine and exchanged loaded glances whenever Hermione said something too happy, as if they’d expected her to just crumple and start sobbing at the slightest reference to the appointment. Her coworkers at the Ministry had sent a fruit basket and a card that had been so carefully inoffensive in its wording that it hadn’t really said anything at all. Molly had come over nearly every day and tried to talk with her; Hermione had had no qualms about pretending to mourn so that she wouldn’t have to keep enduring the pity.
It all came down to the battle at the Department of Mysteries. After she’d woken up in the medical wing, Madam Pomfrey had said that the curse Dolohov had hit her with had eviscerated her inner organs; Hermione hadn't bothered to ask which organs he’d hit. The healer had called the curse ‘evil’. Hermione hadn’t quite been in the right frame of mind to respond to him.
She still doesn’t feel like she’s in the right frame of mind for much at all. Autumn is creeping over the windowsill, but she keeps summer writhing in her cupped hands. When all she feels is a cold numbness, she longs for its warmth.
Hermione has taken to staying upstairs in the library whenever well-wishers or family came over to do their part in drowning her in pity. Ron, to his credit, was trying his best to be gracious about it; nevertheless, he was not known for his endless patience.
“I don’t know how to help her!” she hears Ron’s voice from downstairs. “I just- she cries all the time, but every time I try to talk about it, she acts like nothing’s wrong! I don’t know what she’s feeling!”
Hermione doesn’t know what she’s feeling either. She feels like perhaps she should.
“Oh honey, I was the same way after I lost Fred,” Molly says kindly. For some strange reason, Hermione finds herself growing angry with the words. They aren’t the same. Molly has loved a child and lost him too. Hermione hasn’t lost a child because she’ll never have a child to lose. They are feeling entirely different things. For Hermione, there’s no great feeling of loss nor sensation of hollowness, just a vague tingling in the back of her mind that she can’t pin down as any particular feeling.
She backs away from the door and sits back down on the couch, fists clenched. She picks up the teacup she left there on the table when she got up to eavesdrop and takes a sip. It’s terribly bitter; she makes a face but takes another long sip. The pot of sugar is too far away to reach and she can’t be bothered to get up, even if it would make the tea far more palatable. She just keeps drinking, and it doesn’t get any less bitter.
When she’s done, Hermione looks at the dregs on the bottom of the cup. They’re making a distinct splotchy shape that she can’t quite identify. She gets halfway off the couch before she realises that she’s going to the library to find her old divination textbook. For some reason, that’s enough to set her off. Hermione laughs, and when she can’t laugh anymore she gets mad and throws the teacup across the room, and when she can’t muster up the energy to be angry anymore, she just sits there on the couch feeling nothing at all.
The tea leaves are probably staining the carpet right now. Hermione can’t find it in her to care. The tea is bitter and useless and so is she.
She hears clattering and thumping as Molly leaves through the floo and Ron comes up the stairs to find her. In a bid for the facade of normalcy, she summons the pieces of the teacup back to her and repairs it. He opens the door, and pales as he takes in the sight that she makes.
“Hermione, are you… okay?” he asks, distress colouring his tone a frantic shade. “You’re crying– are you hurt?”
She reaches up to touch her face and is surprised to feel wetness on her cheeks. “Oh. I hadn’t realised.”
Ron reaches forward and brushes a gentle thumb over her face.
“Do you want to come to bed now?” he asks softly, a slight smile on his face. For some reason, that infuriates her.
“Leave me alone!” Hermione finds herself snarling, eyes flashing. She bats his hand away and he snatches it back as if burned. “Stop being so bloody gentle! I’m not going to shatter.”
“I’m just being a good husband!” he retorts, voice angry but controlled as he forces himself to take a deep breath.
“–no, you’re being overbearing!”
Ron throws his hands up in frustration. “Hermione, why are you being like this?”
“–what, why am I so annoyed?–”
“No, why aren’t you sad!” he interrupts, face drawn in a strange mix of anger and concern.
That stops her short in shock. “What?”
“Every time I talk to you, you get mad at me for suggesting that everything isn’t totally fine, and then I come in to check in on you and you’re crying!” he exclaims, sitting down heavily on the couch next to her. “Weeks of this! Weeks and weeks and you can’t handle the idea that I’m trying to be gentle to you because I feel heartbroken and I know that you do too!”
“I’m not heartbroken,” Hermione says in response. It’s the only thing that comes to mind.
“I– what?”
Hermione looks up from her tea and stares at her husband, trying to gauge his mood. “I don’t know if I would’ve liked to be a mother. The diagnosis wasn’t… heartbreaking.”
“I would’ve liked to be a father,” Ron says neutrally. He’s not looking at her; instead he’s staring at his hands as he picks the skin from his knuckles. “But it’s not in the cards right now, I suppose.”
Hermione bites her lip to keep from responding. She doesn’t want to point out that ‘right now’ may well be ‘ever’. She reaches up to rub at her eyes again; they’re sore from crying. The tears on her cheeks are long dry by now.
He looks up at her after a few seconds of silence. His hand is bleeding a little. “Would you like anything?”
“Could you just… leave me alone for a while, please?” Hermione responds. “I’m tired.”
He nods, and leaves without saying a word more. As he leaves, she reaches for her wand and waves it at him. He jolts a little at the feeling of magic and wipes the blood off of his newly-healed knuckles, shooting her a surprised look.
“Thank you.”
She hums in response — a low tired thing that doesn’t communicate much at all — and he closes the door behind him. There’s another few seconds before his footsteps start down the hall and she hears him go into their bedroom.
She lies down and tries to relax. Sleep doesn’t come quickly. When it finally does, it is fitful and restless. Her dreams focus around the same thing they have for these past few weeks.
She’s in a nursery — plain, with cream walls and a hand-painted cradle — and Ron is there. He’s holding a baby; a little pink, squirming thing with wide brown eyes that look just like Hermione’s. On the baby’s head is a smattering of auburn hair. Hermione knows with as much certainty as she’s ever felt that this is their child.
“I love you,” coos Dream-Ron to the baby in his arms. Hermione closes her eyes and tries to pretend he’s saying it to her too, but the image of her husband smiling down at the child she’ll never be able to give him is still firmly stuck in the forefront of her mind.
The tingling in the back of her mind has solidified and found a place as a lump in her throat. She swallows desperately around it, but it doesn’t relent. All she can do is struggle to breathe and hope it goes away.
She thinks she may have finally pinned down what she’s feeling.
Grief.
It’s curious. Hermione Granger has never been the motherly sort. She’s scoffed at tired parents before, thinking but not saying aloud that their struggles were the result of their own choices. She’s rolled her eyes when her classmates have cooed over lists of baby names. She has looked at her husband’s big happy family, who have always been so kind to her, and thought ‘too much’, ‘too many’, ‘not for me’. She has known since the very moment she knew what a mother was that she would be terrible at it. Hermione does not want to be a mother.
She has no logical reason to grieve, and yet grief is a terrible, illogical thing regardless.
Motherhood is a Pandora’s box that Hermione will never be able to open. All she can do is wonder whether unleashing all of the horror within would be worth the tiny spark of goodness that remains inside. All she can do is imagine the feeling of watching her child grow before her eyes and feel an echo of that impossible goodness. All she can do is lie here on this couch, tears long dried on her couch, as she listens to her husband getting ready for bed through the walls, wondering if they’ll ever be the same again.