Disclaimer: Nope, I don’t own anything.
Dedication: Snowaltz, who’s reduced me to tears at many occasions with her kind comments.
A/N: For fic notes, alerts and my nano story, please go to my livejournal (link in bio). A huge thank you to my beta, Sarah who made this fic what it is now.

Difficult

The funeral had been the hardest part.

Letting go of her hadn’t been easy, but in a sense, he had been happy that she was as all right as it was possible for her to be.

She wouldn’t be able to be hurt ever again, now.

And that was what mattered to him.

He had thought that the uncertainty had been the worst. It had overwhelmed him—when she had been captured, he had been distracted out of his mind, not even knowing whether she was alive, or whether she was hurt.

Missing. Captured in action. Please wait, Mr. Potter. The moment we get more information, we’ll contact you.

If she had died, he would have known, right? But then there was still that underlying uncertainty—he was wrong, that he didn’t know, that she was dead, dead, dead, and she was never coming back.

But he had had his work to distract him. Strategies, attacks, maneuvers, it all to be perfected until there was no room left for mistakes. With the general chaos all over the place, it had been a relief to throw himself into something, anything, whatever it was.

He could find himself almost tuning out the death toll that was mounting as each day went by.

The niggling feeling at the back of his mind was just that—a niggling feeling. He had been worried about her, but they had made a promise, and a promise was a promise, and it wasn’t ever supposed to be broken. And he knew that she would never break a promise, no matter what.

Then, there was the news. She was alive. A freed prisoner had seen her just a couple of weeks ago, and told him that she had been disheveled, perhaps a bit hungry, but then, they’d all been. She would be fine, he had said confidently to the hero of the wizarding world. She was a survivor, wasn’t she?

And she was. She was a survivor, and they had promised each other countless things, of staying alive, then getting married, then having a beautiful house, visiting France, everything and anything. He remembered the whispers against his skin in the dark of the night when they had pretended so, so hard that there wasn’t a war going on, and that they weren’t going to have to get up and leave early in the next morning to kill.

But they had gotten up the next morning, put on their clothes and armed themselves with their wands.

And then that had been hard, knowing that she was alive, but that he couldn’t be able to see her.

He had found her, eventually, sitting in a dungeon, looking carefully at the ground, and she was balled up in a corner.

She had lifted her head up to look at him, and even when he had told her soothingly that it was him, that he had come for her, she still shied away from his touch.

It’s me, he had said, desperately and fearfully, but she had only looked at him with those clear brown eyes and not said anything. He had carried her in his arms, and it killed him because she hardly weighed anything at all.

The Mediwitches had said that she had blocked herself from the pain, and in doing so, she had blocked out the rest of the world. It’s quite normal, they had assured him. It happens all the time. Just put her in places she’ll recognize, and she’ll be as good as new.

So he had. He brought her back to her old home, and placed her in her old bed, surrounded her with her old stuffed animals, brought her the old robes she used to wear, tried to cook the same food that her mother used to cook.

She still had looked at him with those same, uncomprehending eyes, and he had tried to tell himself that she was alive, and that was all that mattered. Anyway, she would regain her memory in no time, and then they could be just as they had planned.

The funeral had been unbearable. The day was overwhelmingly hot, the night was too cold.

That had been the night when he realized that all his hopes, his dreams, his everything had gone with her the moment she had been taken.

It had taken him until the night of her death for him to realize it. He had known that she wasn’t getting any better, that she wasn’t able to eat all of her food, that she was listless and unable to grasp real life. Her dreams became worse, and he would sometimes find her crying and sobbing, yelling for it to stop, just stop, because she couldn’t take it anymore.

He just had to keep hanging on, because she was the only link he had to happiness, and he couldn’t give her up.

Hearing the clods of earth being dropped into the hole was finality in itself. He had never known that he could feel so much anguish, because even though her essence and spirit had been gone, it hadn’t been as final as this. Then, he could still hope—now, there was nothing.

Friends came up to him afterwards and told him that they were extremely sorry, and if he ever needed to talk, they would always be there to listen. He nodded and told them that he appreciated it that they were able to come, but he knew that if he could have had his way, he wouldn’t have done it this way at all.

But he accepted their condolences and grievances and went home as soon as he could to try to escape from everything.

He found himself still waking up at three in the morning at times and reaching out for her warmth, but then, he had always heard that old habits were hard to break.

The funeral had been the hardest part, but then, it hadn’t been the hardest, because just breathing and living without her had then become the hardest. And then it had been looking at his best friend’s kids and wondering what might have been. And then it had been trying to imagine what they would have named their own kids had she been alive. And then…

-fin