A/N: this is ridiculously short, but i had an inkling to write, and so here we have this mess of prose. it's a different style than other chapters (and honestly, the style's gone schizophrenic on me), but i feel it makes a point of where Hermione is in all of this. here's a bit of character development for her (possibly out of character, but in the midst of war, insanity prevails).
...
Because somewhere in this mess (war, she knows), she becomes lovesick. There may be the storm of certain demise nipping at her heels, but all the incessant reading's gone to her head and she decides it's her turn to put pen to paper.
It's irrational, so very irrational it baffles and infuriates her, because she should be fighting the world, because it's begun to feel like that, that it's them and the world separately by a line in the sand beneath their feet, waiting (just waiting, that's all they do, are doing) for the water to wash and push the grains into the tiny crevice. If there is one thing that grounds them it's her rationality.
But what rational person sits in the middle of a war writing poetry?
…
Absurdity runs her life now. Slow and steady, her sanity seeps out her skin as his hands run invisible battle lines on her flushed flesh – since when did she stop fighting?
Every night she surrenders. Every night he wins. They're not really a battle, but they're living in a war.
...
She hears the bells, loud and present, and they ring her into some new reality. Because for him, this (this unmentionable thing) is so not a priority; she could make a list (the old her would have already) of everything that comes before this, and it would stretch beyond her eyes.
Because it's all just heartbreaking really, watching him run his fingers over their names brushing away the snow that sits in each dip of the carvings; his fingers, seventeen and all, should only run over flesh, warm and alive.
Death lives in a permanent residence on his fingertips, and she lets out some half-silent sob as a small piece of her soul is swallowed by his pain, by this war.
…
That absurdity that she swore only lives within her in the confines of that godforsaken tent has swarmed her, because she should (and she always does what she should) be comforting him with a carefully placed hand on his shoulder, a comforting word, just something. But frozen feet trudge on through thick shining snow to nothing. A sparse area blanketed by a canvas never touched by a single brush, pure white rolling out for meters.
It must have been beauty that caused the scene to unfold as it did. Her appreciation for this untouched (as she once was) beauty. It was too perfect – too pre-war Hermione.
She feels engulfed (she thinks by absurdity, but anger's in hot pursuit).
…
He finds her later curled inside an angel drawn in the snow.
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"Happy Christmas."
He (still) can't wrap, and it's nice to now reality's still controlling some things. It peels apart all the same revealing a thin black leather-bound book.
"I've noticed you've been writing recently, thought you could use something better that scraps of parchment." He answers her question before she asks it (nothing new now), because he's become good at seeing her better than she can see herself. She swears her image in the mirror has become foggy.
She says thanks, embarrassingly because her mind's been somewhere else the thought of presents never occurred to her. And so she makes it up, in the only way she can (knows) now.
She lets a faint "happy Christmas" pass her lips against his ear as they tumble backwards on to the cot.
…
She's only seventeen.
She thinks if her parents could see her now, they would be horrified and ashamed that their strong, rational, virtuous daughter has become this loose girl (she can't quite bring herself to say slut), that her virtue became nothing but a casualty of the war.
Then again, if her parents could see her now, they would only see a stranger.
...
She doesn't know what's happened to her, but slowly watching him become more ancy, less patient, completely overwhelmed, has dragged down her soul. And he doesn't mean to, but he'll be the death of her.
If there's one thing her absurdity brought was an abrupt clarity to their future. Her rationality, the security blanket to which she clung so desperately, blinded her, because she could rationalize all she wanted about the likelihood of them coming out of this alive, but it never allowed her to see them not. She knew (so deep in her being that it frightened her) how unlikely it would be that she would ever see eighteen, but she could never see it.
Whether she liked it or not, her rationality was born from her innocent childhood self and believed intrinsically in happily ever after. Because good beats evil, every war, every time.
And in the haze of her slowly slipping sanity, dying soul, she could herself on the ground, eyes absent of light. And the war would press on, because it wasn't her war, her fight, her anything, yet she'd given her everything.
It is then, as she lies on the dry ground meters from the tent, on watch, that she concedes. Her life may be as absurd as humanly possible.
…
She makes up her face every morning so he does not see her crumbling. Because this lovesick, self-sacrificing, soul crushing path she's following leads to only one ending.
So she smiles and apparates away with him every time, a tiny fleck of her soul gracing each patch of earth they've slept on.
He repeatsrepeatsrepeats something about knowing in his gut, his soul, that they'll find them there – in every new spot, like the newness washed away (just for a moment) his frustration and lack of hope. Because they have to.
…
She leaves one of her (god-awfully bad) poems behind when they apparate the next time right next to her sanity.
...
A/N: so angsty and probably a tad pretentious, but alas, one of those moods. please review (although possibly skirt around my very liberal use of punctuation, the rules of such I've never cared for).