Chapter Text
The silence in the living room of the small house on the outskirts of London was not the silence of peace, but that of a fuse burning down before an explosion. The magical lights flickered dimly, casting long shadows on the walls covered with bookshelves that Hermione no longer visited. The air smelled of rain, ozone, and the metallic trace of the firewhisky Ron had been drinking throughout dinner at Harry and Ginny's house.
Hermione mechanically removed her coat, feeling as though her bones weighed a ton. Every step was a battle against gravity, every breath a reminder that Jean Granger was no longer there. It had been a year since that accident on the motorway, since the twisted metal and wet tarmac had taken away the last of her civilian life, her childhood, her home.
"Are you going to do it again?"
Ron's voice came from the kitchen, slurred, thick with alcohol and laden with a hostility that had been brewing for months. Hermione didn't answer. She just closed her eyes, resting her forehead against the cold wood of the door.
"I asked you a question, Hermione!" he shouted, staggering into the living room. His hair was tousled and his robe was rumpled. His usually warm blue eyes were bloodshot and clouded with irrational rage. "All night at Harry's house, you were like a ghost. Not a smile. Not a word. Ginny made your favourite food, and you just stirred your mashed potatoes like they were poison. Don't you realise how ridiculous you look?"
Hermione turned slowly. Her face was pale, almost translucent, and her eyes had dark circles so deep they looked like bruises. "I was tired, Ron. I just wanted to go home."
"Home! You've been home for months! You've been mourning something that's already happened for months!" Ron let out a dry, bitter laugh as he poured himself another drink from a bottle he had brought with him. "Your mother died in an accident. It was tragic. It was horrible. But my brother died in a war, we lost Fred, we lost Lupin, Tonks... and we got back up. I got back up. But you... you revel in this. You like being the victim, don't you?"
The impact of Ron's words was like a physical slap. Hermione felt an icy chill run down her spine. "Revel? Ron, I can barely get out of bed in the mornings. My mother was all I had left of my world before magic. My father died years ago, and now she... she's gone alone, in a world I abandoned to fight a war that wasn't even hers."
"Oh, please! Always the same intellectual drama," Ron snapped, moving closer to her until he invaded her personal space. The smell of alcohol was suffocating. "The great Hermione Granger, the brightest witch of her generation, defeated by a little sadness. You embarrass me. I'm ashamed to take you to meetings. Everyone asks, 'How's Hermione?', 'Is she still the same?', and I have to put on a stupid face and say yes, my wife still prefers to stare at the wall rather than fuck her husband or have a normal conversation."
"Is that all you care about?" she whispered, her voice breaking. "Your image? Your satisfaction? I'm broken, Ron. My mother died six bloody months ago and I couldn't say goodbye because I was busy trying to rebuild this magical world that now seems so empty."
"I'm sick of your mother!" Ron roared, slamming his fist on the coffee table. The vase containing dried flowers, ones Jean had given Hermione on her last birthday in memory of her, fell to the floor and shattered. "I'm sick of this graveyard you've turned our life into! Do you want to know why I don't care anymore? Do you want to know why I find it so hard to feel sorry for you?"
Ron staggered towards her, his fingers clenching the glass so tightly that his knuckles were white. "Because while you were here, crying over old photos and refusing to come out of the darkness, I found someone who does know what it means to be alive. Someone who doesn't look at me as if I'm to blame for the existence of gravity."
Hermione's heart stopped. The sound of rain against the window seemed to amplify, filling the emptiness in her chest. "What are you talking about?"
"I'm talking about the fact that I'm no saint, Hermione. And God knows I tried. I tried to put up with your silences, your crying at three in the morning, your lack of interest in anything but your own misery. But a man has needs. A man needs to be seen." Ron took a long sip of his drink and smiled with a cruelty Hermione never thought possible in him. "Lavender always knew how to make me feel special. Even after all these years."
"Lavender?" The name came out of Hermione's mouth like a wounded sigh. "Lavender Brown died in battle, Ron. What madness are you talking about?"
"She didn't die, Hermione. She was scarred, yes, but she's very much alive. And unlike you, she's grateful for every day she is. We've been seeing each other at the Leaky Cauldron... and at her flat in Diagon Alley. While you were drowning in your tears, she reminded me what it was like to laugh."
Hermione felt the ground disappear beneath her feet. The pain of her mother's death was already an open wound, but this... this was pure salt poured onto raw flesh. "You've been deceiving me... for how long?"
"What does the time matter?" Ron shouted, his anger rising. "Months! Since before the summer. And I don't regret it. Do you know why? Because with her, I don't have to walk on eggshells. With her, I'm not 'the husband of the depressed woman'. I'm Ron Weasley. I'm the hero. She wants me, Hermione. She seeks me out. She touches me. You, on the other hand, are like a corpse that forgot to bury itself."
"I gave you everything," Hermione said, and for the first time that night, her voice didn't tremble. It was a dead voice, flat, stripped of all hope. "I spent years taking care of you, Harry, everyone. I sacrificed my relationship with my parents, I erased their memories to protect them, and when I finally got them back and tried to heal that bond, my father dies and then she dies. And you, who was supposed to be my rock, who swore to be with me through the worst... you slept with someone else because my grief was 'boring' to you."
"It's not boring, it's suffocating!" Ron threw the glass at the fireplace. The glass shattered into a thousand pieces. "Look at yourself! You haven't combed your hair in days. Your clothes are too big for you. You don't even use magic to clean the house. You're disgusting, Hermione! You're disgusting with that beaten dog look on your face. Do you think you're the only one who suffers? My family lost everything and we moved on! But you always have to be the most special, even in pain."
"It's not a competition, Ron," she replied, feeling a strange clarity emerge from the fog of her depression. It was the clarity of someone who has reached the bottom of the abyss and discovered that there is nothing left to lose. "Depression is not a choice. I didn't choose to wake up every morning wishing I hadn't. I didn't choose to feel like the air is burning my lungs. But you did choose. You chose to lie. You chose to betray. You chose Lavender."
"Yes, I chose her! And I'd choose her again a thousand times over," Ron spat, leaning so close that she could feel the heat of his drunken breath. "Because she's light, and you're a black hole that swallows up everything good around you. Do you know what she said to me last time? She told me to leave you. That there was nothing left of the Hermione I fell in love with. And she's right. You're an empty shell. A constant reminder of death. And I've seen enough death for three lifetimes."
Hermione stared at him. She saw the freckles on his nose, the mess of his hair, the cowardly arrogance in his eyes. She saw the boy she had met on the Hogwarts Express and the man who had just murdered the last of her heart.
'You're right about one thing, Ronald,' she said in an icy whisper. "There's nothing left of the Hermione you fell in love with. That Hermione would have tried to fix this. She would have cried and apologised for being sad. She would have looked for a logical solution to your infidelity, blaming herself for not being good enough."
She paused, and for the first time in months, a spark of fire flashed across her brown eyes. "But this Hermione... the one who survived a war, the one who was tortured at Malfoy Manor, the one who just buried her mother... this Hermione has no time for trash like you."
"Are you calling me trash?" Ron raised his hand, the gesture violent and charged with a frustration that threatened to turn physical. "After everything my family did for you! We took you in when you had no one! My mother loved you like a daughter!"
"Don't bring Molly into this!" Hermione shouted, suddenly regaining the full power of her voice. "Molly is an incredible woman who knows what sacrifice is. You know nothing. You're a spoilt child who can't stand that the world doesn't revolve around you. It hurts you that I'm depressed because I can no longer serve you, because I can no longer do your life's homework for you, because I can no longer inflate your ego while you sit back and watch the rest of the world struggle."
"Shut up!" Ron pushed her against the wall. The blow was sharp, dull. "You have no right to talk to me like that! I'm the one who's been sleeping with a real woman while you've been rotting away!"
Hermione didn't flinch. The physical pain of the impact was nothing compared to the emptiness she felt. "Get out of here, Ron."
"What did you say?"
"I said get out. Right now. Take your things, go to Lavender, go to the Burrow, go to hell if you want. But you will never touch me again, or speak to me, or breathe the same air as me."
Ron let out a nervous laugh, his bravado beginning to crack in the face of her utter coldness. "This is my house too."
"Oh, is it? The lease is in my name, Ron. It was my parents' house. I put the protective spells on it. And if you don't walk out that door in the next ten seconds, I'm going to use every spell I learned in the forbidden books to make sure you can never walk unaided again."
Hermione's wand appeared in her hand with a speed that reminded Ron why Bellatrix Lestrange feared her. The tip glowed with a white light, unstable, dangerous.
"You're mad," Ron muttered, taking a step back. The alcohol seemed to be losing its effect in the face of shock. "You've really gone mad over the death of that woman."
"My mother had a name," Hermione said, her voice vibrating with an ancient strength. "Her name was Jean. And she was ten times braver than you will ever be. She didn't need magic to face the world. You need a bottle and another woman's body to not feel small."
Ron looked at her with hatred, but also with growing fear. He saw that there was no turning back. He had crossed a line that could not be blurred with an apology or a bouquet of flowers. He had used her deepest pain as a weapon, and she had taken it away from him to destroy their relationship.
"Fine," he spat, walking towards the door. "Stay alone in your castle of shadows. Enjoy your depression. When you realise that no one else will put up with you, don't come crying to the Burrow. Because for me, Hermione Granger, today you died too."
He slammed the door so hard that the pictures on the wall rattled. Hermione stood there, in the middle of the ruined living room. Silence returned, but this time it was different. It wasn't the wait for an explosion, but the silence after a fire.
Her legs gave way and she finally collapsed on the floor, surrounded by the fragments of her mother's vase and dried flowers. She cried. But it wasn't the silent, desperate crying of the previous months. It was a cry of liberation. An agony being expelled from her body.
Ron was right about one thing: the Hermione he knew was dead. But from the ashes of betrayal and grief, something new was beginning to form. A woman who no longer had to carry the weight of a man who didn't know how to love in a storm.
Outside, the rain continued to fall on London, washing the streets, hiding the tears of the brightest witch of her generation, who that night had finally begun to understand that in order to heal, you must first let everything that is rotten burn away.
Hermione crawled over to the broken vase and picked up one of the dried petals. She pressed it to her chest. "I'm sorry, Mum," she whispered. "It took me a long time to realise that I was surrounded by people who only loved me when I was useful. But not anymore."
She stood up, wiping her cheeks with the back of her hand. With a fluid movement of her wand, the glass on the floor was repaired, but not the vase. Instead, she transformed the fragments into small glass beads, which she put in her pocket. The house felt bigger, colder, but also more like her own.
That night, Hermione Granger did not sleep. She sat in front of the fireplace and watched the embers die. She knew that the road to recovery from depression was long and that the pain of losing her mother would not disappear tomorrow, or next month.
Hermione remained on her knees, bearing the double burden of loss: her mother, and now, the devastating and swift betrayal of a man who never understood the depth of her soul.