The Last Time

[ - ]
Printer ePub eBook
Table of Contents | - Text Size +
Story Notes:
1/2/09
This is the last time that Hermione will visit this room.

She has made that promise a dozen times during the last six months, but, this time, she intends to keep it. It’s become something more than merely fascination and curiosity. Now, it’s bordering on mania, and she knows that she needs to end it. She leaves school tomorrow, so it’s going to stop even if she feels the need to come back. She doesn’t want to leave without saying goodbye, though.

Since she discovered the mirror after returning from her winter holidays, she has visited it several times a week. It isn’t easy being back at Hogwarts, not after the war and a year away fighting for her life. There is still damage to the castle, still repairs being made more than a year after the final battle of the war was fought, but life goes on and people continue with their routines. When she had the opportunity to return to Hogwarts to complete her schooling and take her NEWTs, she never hesitated. Harry and Ron did. They accepted an offer from the Ministry and still can’t really understand why she insisted on returning.

There are times when she wonders that herself. It’s lonely here, without them and with so many others in her proper year not returning. Not even Ginny and Luna being around helps the loneliness and distance she feels between herself and her classmates. The worst part is that there’s now distance between her and Harry and Ron, too. Christmas was awkward, with them talking about people she didn’t know and telling her about their jobs and training with the Ministry. When she returned to Hogwarts, she felt as if she no longer belonged anywhere.

That’s when she discovered this room. Hidden away on the sixth floor, somewhere she had never noticed even during her many prefect rounds, and it’s become her refuge from reality. Too much so. It’s not good for her to have an obsession with something that can never be, but she can’t help herself. He’s unlike anyone she’s ever met, yet he also reminds her of the past, of comfort and safety and a place where she belonged.

The mirror is a mystery. She’s researched in the restricted section and even managed to sneak into the archives, but she hasn’t been able to find out what it is, what it means, or how it works. It’s not like the other magical mirrors that she’s familiar with, and she can’t figure out how it allows her to communicate with the past. It doesn’t make any sense, and there are sometimes in the darkest hours of the night when she wonders if it’s even real. How can it exist? How can she sit on the cold stone floor and converse with a man who has been dead for nearly two decades? It isn’t her imagination, but she almost thinks it might be better if it was.

When she steps closer to the mirror, she sees that he’s waiting for her. It’s his last day of school, too. Soon, he’ll be married, she knows, and then he’ll have a son, a wonderful son who means so much to her. She doesn’t think about what awaits him after that, doesn’t want to mourn for a man that she’s never even met. But she has met him. He’s become a friend, a confidant, a crush. She regrets that this is the only way that she’ll ever know him, that Harry will never have the chance to meet him.

He looks up as she kneels before the mirror, and she sees an expression on his face that she thinks must be on her own. She touches his face, feeling the cool mirror beneath her fingers, and she bites her lip as she listens to him telling her about his plans now that he’s finished school. He mentions his friends, all of them dead now, and talks about helping to fight a war that’s been starting. When he mentions Lily, he looks guilty and touches the mirror before he looks away. She wonders if she has a similar look of longing whenever she stares at him.

He always talks more than she does, and she enjoys listening. She likes learning about him, and she feels closer to him whenever he reminds her of Harry. She talks about school and herself, but she can’t tell him many things. She doesn’t tell him when she lives, doesn’t give him any information about the future because she knows even the smallest thing could change everything, and it’s too great a risk. It hurts when she realizes that it’s time to say goodbye. Neither of them understands how this has happened, how they’ve found each other, but they both know that this is the end.

She kisses the mirror, closes her eyes and presses her lips against it as a tear slides down her cheek, and she whispers his name before saying goodbye. She stands up and looks at him one last time before she turns her back on him and walks towards the door. Before she reaches it, she turns to warn him, to tell him not to trust so blindly, to be careful, but the mirror is gone.

End