#romionesquad

“Hermione, it’s almost two o'clock,” he says quietly, as if she doesn’t already know. As if she hasn’t been deliberately ignoring this fact for the past half hour.

“You should try and get up, love.” He says, not unkindly. There’s a little bit too much understanding in his voice for her liking, so she responds by cocooning herself further into the covers, hiding away.

Another sigh. “We’re having a picnic out in the garden. Ginny’s idea. Thought you might like to join us.” Here he stops, and there’s a pause so long it can’t really go unnoticed. “Mum’s making sandwiches, and Ginny’s set a table out, should be good. It’s a nice enough day too, sun’s out- for once.” She briefly wonders if that last comment was supposed to make her laugh.

It doesn’t.

She thinks, not for the first time, how easy it would be to simply turn around and face him. Have a conversation. Get up, get dressed, go outside.

Be happy.

It all seems so easy. But she can’t. She’s too tired.

“You’re just having a bad day, right?” he asks, as if the answer isn’t completely obvious. She tries to block out the worry in his voice by focusing on the wall in front of her. Ginny had obviously gone through a decorating stage as a kid, for there were pencil lines she assumed to be attempts at the alphabet. Drawings she can’t quite decipher. Marks where stickers had obviously been placed before they’d peeled away.

“’S'okay, I have them too. We all do.”

There’s a stain near the headrest of her cot bed that she thinks may have been nail varnish at some point. It’s hard to tell in the dim light.

“Just- try and get out of bed later, okay? I’ll be outside if you need me, yeah? Just… Just come and find me.”

If she squints, one of the drawings kind of looks like a rabbit. She can make out ears, a head, something that could kind of resemble a tail. Definitely a rabbit, she decides.

“Okay, so I’ll just… go. You can come out, well, whenever you want really.”

The bed moves as Ron gets up to leave, his footsteps move back the way they came, yet pause at the door. Hermione carries on staring at the wall, at an object she thinks she’s identified as being a horse.

“Hermione? It’ll be okay.”

The door closes.

She wakes up a while later with no recollection of having gone back to sleep in the first place. She’s not sure if it was really sleep or rather just time passing without her knowledge- but either way she feels even worse than earlier.

Not knowing what time it is but too scared to look, Hermione turns over and observes the room.

The curtains are still drawn and it’s still dark, just as before. She has a fleeting second where she wonders if Ron or anyone else had come to check on her again, but she pushes it away. It feels selfish, wanting them to worry about her when there’s nothing wrong.

Well.

She tries to pinpoint what went wrong; where the horrible ache that’s settled in her bones and made her numb originated from, but she can’t.

There’s no reason for it and it angers her because this isn’t her. There’s nothing she wants do more than scream in frustration at her own inability to do the most fundamental task, but it’s almost like she can’t.

She’s detached from the world around her; as if she’s experiencing everything second hand. Her emotions don’t seem to belong to her, they’re just kind of… there. Vague and unclear, more like memories of feelings rather than the feelings themselves.

She feels trapped. Even more so with the knowledge that she’s not trapped, not at all- the only thing stopping her from getting up right this second is herself.

She’s had bad days before, of course. But not like this.

The thing with categorising your days into ‘good’ and 'bad’ is that every bad day seems worse than the one before it. Every time she feels like she’s made progress she’ll come crashing down, right back to where she started.

She thinks back to what Ron said, however many hours ago. It’s true that they all have days that are slightly worse than all the others, and it’s also true that they pass.

It’ll pass, she tells herself, tomorrow will be okay.

Once the topic of Ron enters her mind it doesn’t leave. She thinks back to their earlier encounter and feels a churning in her stomach at the way she ignored him. He’ll understand- of that she’s one hundred percent certain- but she doesn’t want him to have to. He’ll be worried about her the way he always is when something’s wrong, wanting to give her the space he thinks she needs, not realising the only thing she really needs is him there, next to her through it all.

It’s such a selfish thought that her throat strains as she tries to hold back the flux of tears behind her eyes, making her aware of just how thirsty she is.

And then, in one quick movement, she grabs the clock from the bedside table.

Five o'clock.

Her eyes sting and blur the clock face from her view.

They’re laughing and smiling, deep in conversation, when her unsteady feet make their way down to the end of the garden.

She looks for Ron and finds him sat with his back against a tree, nodding along but not looking as though he’s really listening.

She tries not to draw too much attention to herself- she doesn’t want anymore questions or concerns, however inevitable it may be.

George catches her eye and grins, nudging Ron with his elbow to get his attention. Hermione feels her cheeks heat up as he whispers something to a disgruntled Ron- the latter’s eyes widening as he spots her stood there.

Suddenly, it’s like she can’t move. Ron gets to his feet and heads towards her and she has the slightest impulse to turn away, go back to the house, to the comfort of her room.

“Hey,” Ron says as he reaches her, “I didn’t think you were coming.”

Hermione shrugs. It’s getting late- around six, she guesses. The sun is starting to set, casting the world beneath it in an amber glow.

He pauses for a second, like he’s not sure what to do next. She should say something really. Anything.

Ron moves closer towards her, offering his arms for a hug. She leans into him without hesitation, resting her head on his shoulder as his hands travel around to settle on her back. “I’m glad you’re here.” he mutters to a spot above her ear. It makes her tear up, although she can’t say why. Forcing a smile onto her face, she pulls apart and squeezes his hand. Ron smiles back, strained.

“We should get you something to eat,” Ron says all of a sudden, “You must be starving, come on, Mum set out a table earlier- if it’s not all been eaten that is, I think George might’ve-”

“I’m not hungry.” She interrupts, fully aware that it’s the first thing she’s said to him all day and hating herself for it.

Ron nods, as if it makes perfect sense for her not to be hungry even though she hasn’t eaten the whole day. “Still though, you should try and eat something.” He says, almost insistently.

Realising it’d be futile to try and argue otherwise, Hermione lets Ron lead her to the table of food Mrs Weasley had prepared for them all.

Ron offers her a plate but she shakes her head. With a sigh, he takes it himself and starts piling it with a variety of foods. She watches with something akin to guilt in her heart as he carefully avoids the things he knows she doesn’t like and pile on the things she does.

“You wanna sit with the rest of them?” he asks softly when finished, gesturing vaguely to the cluster of people underneath the tree. Hermione hesitates just long enough for Ron to get the point. “Okay, that’s cool. We’ll just…” he trails off, pointing to a spot nearer to the house.

They sit with their backs against a tall oak tree and Hermione rests her head against Ron’s shoulder as he lays the plate of food down in her lap. Overwhelmingly, the urge to push it away grips her. She’s not hungry, and the thought of eating actually makes her feel sort of queasy.

“Hermione, please, you’ve got to eat something.” Ron says after the five solid minutes of silence in which she’d ignored the plate of food sitting in her lap. “Please.”

If she didn’t know better, shed’d swear that it wasn’t blood, but guilt that was being pumped around her body and flowing through her veins. Ron is trying so hard. He’s trying so hard for her. Surely she owes him this. Surely she owes it to him to prove that he’s not wasting his time trying to help someone who refuses to be helped.

So she takes a small bite out of a cheese sandwich cut into quarters, the bread tasting more like dough in her mouth. She chews for much longer than is necessary, and when she finally swallows it’s with the sickening awareness that she’ll have to take another bite. She can’t bear to see Ron’s face as she eats. All the worried, concerned side glances and eyes that hold too much unconcealed pity. She hates it. She finds everything about him irritating in this one moment, and she struggles to comprehend how that can be when only mere minutes ago she’d craved his presence unlike anything else.

He was supposed to make her feel okay, yet here she is, feeling worse.

Hermione pushes the plate away from her, a wave of nausea knocking her out with the tide it brings. She itches to crawl back into bed where she doesn’t have to deal with any of this- with Ron, with food, with trying to force herself to function, with life. It’s all too much and in that moment Hermione lets herself be swept away by it all. She feels like she’s drowning.

She doesn’t even realise she’s crying until she hears the sobs coming out of her own body in ragged bursts. Ron rubs a hand in circles on her back and she squeezes her eyes shut against the touch.

Helping her to her feet and half carrying her through the Burrow’s garden, Ron sits her down on the sofa as soon as they’re inside and instructs her to wait there. The sound of a kettle boiling fills her ears a few minutes later, Ron returning with two mugs of tea and a forced grin on his face. “Here,” he says, threading the warm mug through her cold fingers. “Chamomile. Mum’s favourite.”

Hermione sips the tea slowly as she tries to sort through the fog in her brain. It’s not as bad as eating had been, but it still leaves her with an empty feeling in her gut. Tears swim across her vision once more, so she buries her head in her hands and digs the heels of her palms into her eyes.

“I want to be alone.” she tells Ron. He’s sitting next to her with the mug cradled between his hands and looks genuinely hurt at her words.

Oh well. Just another thing to apologise for later.

“Are you sure?” he asks in a small voice. “I don’t mind staying.”

“I’m sure.” Hermione all but snaps at him. She can’t find better words to express herself; all she knows is that she wants to be left alone.

“Okay but… You know where to find me, yeah? Or, you know, anyone. It doesn’t have to be me just… Anyone.” he blunders off awkwardly. Hermione assumes he’s getting up to leave when she feels the sofa shift, but instead there’s the light pressure of lips against her temple before she hears footsteps trail out of the room.

When Hermione looks back up she’s alone. The thoughts that plague her mind seem to intensify with Ron’s absence- why did he leave? Because you told him to, the rational side of her brain argues whilst the other side screams because he doesn’t care.

Hermione is so tired.

Dragging her weighted limbs up the Burrow’s many staircases, Hermione gets back into bed without changing out of her clothes and pulls the quilt up to her chin, letting the warmth settle into her bones.

She just wants to sleep.

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