Parts of this story were posted on my LJ some time ago if you recognize it….tweaked and added a lot, so…

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 This is How the World Ends

Summary: The world was spinning so fast now, it has been almost a month and the magical community was still somber from its losses. Its only heroes left were locked away in two blindingly white rooms, one half out of her mind with grief and the other still lost in his own nightmares.

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“And this is how the world ends,

Not with a bang but with a whimper.”

The Hollow Men -T.S. Eliot

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She had always thought something drastic would occur, like the world would simply stop when it happened. But not this, it wasn't supposed to happen like this. Not with half the world she knew dead and the other half only empty shells of what they had once been with broken shards of souls left inside them.

No, it wasn't supposed to happen like this.

They were supposed to live happily ever after. All three of them were supposed to be together when it all was over, not just the two of them. How could they be a Trio with the third member dead and the other one on the verge of death himself?

It was quiet now, the quietest it had ever been in her memory and the white walls around her stared back in unaffected silence, yielding no answers to her. She whimpered to herself drawing her legs to her body to draw whatever warmth she could from her self in the cold, empty room.

Alone with her own disturbed mind, she had been replaying every horrifying image from the Final Battle over and over like a sick slideshow before her eyes. It came in deceivingly colorful bursts that savagely tore at the edges of her mind, leaving her crazy with no one to turn to besides the medi-witches who only cared about the fact that her body was healing in every physical sense but they couldn't even understand that her mind was slowly ripping apart her last shreds of sanity a little more with every night…and then there was Harry, who had yet to wake from the fitful sleep that his final effort had caused him.

She wondered sometimes if the same pictures and memories of their closest friends' deaths played in his mind like an old broken Muggle record too. Is that what made his sleep so disturbed? Is that the reason he did not want to wake to face the world, because he was afraid it may all be true? Was he too scared of the fact that in one night they had lost everyone who mattered to them except for each other?

The world was spinning so fast now, it has been almost a month and the magical community was still somber from its losses. Its only heroes left were locked away in two blindingly white rooms, one half out of her mind with grief and the other still lost in his own nightmares.

She rarely slept now, trying to keep her mind from the Final Battle, and chase away the nightmares that plagued her. The screams and curses that ripped the air that night ate away at her rational thoughts until all she could do was stare at the endlessly white paint that stained the walls and wait. Wait for something to happen that would slow the world from its crazy spree. Didn't it know it was supposed to stop when this kind of tragedy happened?

Soon, she began to sneak into his room, watching him shift and moan as he slept. She wondered again what he was seeing, if he knew what was going on without him.

There was no reconstruction movement happening within the wizarding community, there was only a deepening sense of loss as they counted the numbers of those that had been lost in the war that was meant to set them free of their sadness. Their supposed glorious hero showed no sign of recovery and the world still refused to stop spinning.

She began to wonder if this was how the world was supposed to end instead the big bang they all expected. It would just keep spinning and spinning until all its inhabitants simply whimpered in defeat.

He began to become more and more distressed in his slumber and she started to spend more of her time in his room, sitting by his bed. In the back of her mind somewhere, she knew that it comforted her with its familiarity of their school days when she would sit by his bed after he was injured and wait for him to awake. To everyone who watched her, she only sat there, occasionally murmuring unintelligible questions to the man before her.

One night, as she sat curled up alone in her bed, the images she had become so accustomed to, flooded through her mind once more, assaulting her senses.

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The grounds were eerily quiet that night, the trees barely whispered as the wind blew through their leaves and all the students were inside, unwilling to wander out into the still, chill-ridden air. The sky was broodingly overcast but nothing of this night seemed peaceful to her. Every little sound started her and every little movement drew her darting eyes. Her breathing came ragged and quick, her heartbeat raced.

He was gone without a word and she was terrified for him. They had agreed that no matter what they would be there by him when he did this. Why did he leave without them? He would have never left without them.

She soon realized couldn't find Ron anywhere, either. She looked in all his usual places, even running up to the boys' dorm and flinging apart his and Harry's beds in her frantic state. Had Ron left her too? Would he do that to her, leave her here all alone?

The backs of her eyes burned, threatening to spill over with the tears that had been gathering there for hours. Why would they leave her? Was she not important to them anymore?

The window in their room's curtain fluttered in the frosty breeze that sifted the air and caught her eye. She walked shakily to the window, hearing nothing from the enveloping night sky that lay beyond the billowing curtain.

She willed the tremors in her hands to calm before she reached to pull the curtains aside and looked out into the darkness that had fallen so early that night. Everything was still. The night was so opaque that not even the lights from the village of Hogsmeade could be seen in the distance.

Her eyes scanned desperately for any retreating form, any movement but none came to her attention. Silence was the only thing that was on the grounds that night.

She ducked back into the room when something rustled behind her and she spun to see Neville standing behind her.

“They've gone,” he said quietly, his usually plump face looked gaunt and aged.

“I know.” She nodded, wiping away the tears that were on her face. She had to be brave for them. They wouldn't want her to turn into a pile of useless tears now.

Before he could say anything more, a shrill, chilling scream shattered the silence that hung in the air over Hogwarts. She swung around to stare wide-eyed at the window in shock. It was beginning.

Her hand parted the curtain cautiously to reveal a glowing green emblem of a skull that had become all too familiar to her in the last years, hanging in the distance. She began shaking again, her eyes fixated on it for minutes before Neville spoke again.

“We need to go help them, they can't do this alone,” he stated as firmly as could, although his own voice betrayed him when it quavered as he spoke.

She nodded slowly, her eyes still glued to the distance. Tonight would be the end of this, she knew.

Almost in a daze, she raced down the flights of stairs toward the entrance of the familiar castle, blind to all of its beauty that had once amazed her. She pushed the massive entrance doors open without effort, not even pausing to think why they were unlocked at this hour, and she rushed across the ground with her feet pounding loudly on the ground and her heart jumping in her throat. Vaguely, she heard Neville wheezing behind her.

She didn't know how long it took them to reach the village, her sense of time was completely distorted now. Before they could even see the figures of the buildings that stood there, they heard the shouting, the curses. Flashes of light of all colors were thrown on the horizon, starkly contrasting the stygian night.

Faster, she had to run faster or she would never reach them in time to help. Her pace increased to a break neck speed, her wand clutched in her sweaty palm and the tears that had been wiped away now were flowing once again.

She broke into the fray of the battle sooner than she thought, completely losing track of Neville, and soon spells were being thrown viciously all around her. She heard herself shouting every curse and counter-curse she knew, blocking the terrified screams from her ears with only one objective in her mind. Find Harry or Ron and help them.

A blur of contorted faces flashed in and out of her vision, the pain drenching the air with shrieks of terror. She couldn't find them, all she saw was faces of people that she didn't know and some of ones that she did. None of it deterred her.

After what seemed to hours of constant spell-throwing, there was a strange lull in the fighting. The Death Eaters had all paused in shock to stare at a hill in the distance on which two lone figures stood, wands at ready.

Her heart skipped a beat.

Harry.

She felt herself running towards him and subconsciously realized that everyone around her was doing the same. She paused at the crest of hill to watch what would happen, forgetting the war behind her.

All that mattered now was the outcome of this duel that the world had been waiting for 18 years to come.

Just as they began to fight, a terrifying feeling gripped her and she convulsed in pain. She heard herself scream from far away and toppled to the ground in agony.

She had been hit.

“Hermione!” She heard someone scream from somewhere so remote she couldn't even make out who it was that yelled for her but instead just gave herself to the blackness that had settled itself so powerfully in her senses…

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She woke with a start, her heart beating painfully inside her chest. She grasped at her collarbone, digging her nails into the skin frantically. The room around her was full of shadows and unseen specters left over from the haunting dream she had slipped into.

Swallowing, she looked around at the ghostly white walls around her suspiciously, as if expecting a demon to pop out and remind her of what else had passed that night. What other desperate events she had witnessed that night that lay embedded in her mind forever it seemed.

She sat, wrestling with her mind for a long while before she finally slipped from the bed and away to his room. She stood in the doorway for a moment, on the verge of tears for the first time in weeks. She stared at him silently until he made a movement so unfamiliar to his sleeping patterns of the last month and a half it caused a small squeak to come from her.

He had moved his hand to his face. Before the only thing he had ever done was twitch and roll around miserably, but she was sure she had seen him move his hand.

“Harry?” Her thick voice drifted from her throat to cross the room, barely a thread of hope laced into it.

A soft guttural sound was returned to her and she rushed to the side of his bed, reaching out to his face. His calloused, painfully familiar hand met hers on its way there and he squeezed it carefully.

“Hermione?” he asked his own voice heavy from sleep and scratchy from lack of use. “I thought you were dead…I saw you fall…” He continued, his words heavy with emotion.

“No, I'm here, Harry. I've always been here,” she responded tearfully, leaning over further so she could see his face more clearly in the shadows of the room.

His other hand reached up to trace along her face the lines he had memorized over the years. She bent further over until she could easily climb in the bed next to him, curling up to his familiar warmth with a need so desperate she barely recognized it in herself.

Grasping onto him, she pulled herself as close as she could to his body, as if to reassure herself he was really there, and his arms wrapped around her, hugging her to him in the same manner of despair. Her tears were leaking out of her eyes unchecked onto both of their hospital shifts, but neither one even seemed to notice as they just clung tightly to each other.

“Oh, Harry,” she finally whimpered after some time, “it wasn't supposed to end this way.”

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I'm thinking of making this into a short fic in about 5 parts, but I don't know. I like it as a one-shot too. Opinions?

Reviews are appreciated.