Chapter Text
September 9th 2010
In her almost 31 years of living, Hermione Granger had experienced some very bad weeks. Weeks of loneliness and painful rejection. Weeks of sleep deficit and jittery caffeine overload. Weeks of icy weather and empty stomachs. Weeks of fear and an endless yawning pit of grief.
Even with all those weeks to compare to, all in all, it had been a very bad week.
Presently, Hermione's eyes were both dry and stinging viciously. Each unfocused blink seemed to scrape slowly over her eyeballs. Blink, blink. Blink.
Leave to appeal granted under Section…
…Submitted by…
…Notwithstanding…
The neatly printed jargon seemed to crawl across the parchment, becoming untidy, sloped handwriting. Almost as familiar to her as her own.
You're brilliant
I'm sorry
“Hermione…”
Blink.
“Hermione.”
“Hermione!”
She inhaled sharply through her nose, snapping her head up from the pages laid across her desk next to an ice cold cup of Earl Grey tea.
“Oh. Susan.” Hermione peered up at the concerned face, under a thatch of red hair. A different shade, a different person and yet… she dipped her attention back to her work and her dove feather quill. “Can I help you with something? I was just—”
“Marchbanks wants to see you.”
“Oh er—okay.” Hermione smoothed her skirt unnecessarily and rose, both knees popping as she did. Without noticing, she hadn't moved in hours.
“Are you alright?” Susan surveyed her with concern. “You look—”
“I'm quite alright, thank you,” Hermione replied briskly, cutting her off. She didn't want to hear about what she looked like. Early this morning, her reflection in the bathroom mirror had suggested she and her hair had gone several rounds with a Blast-Ended Skrewt.
Hermione knocked on the dark door bearing the nameplate Boudica Marchbanks.
“You may enter.”
Madam Marchbanks, much like her celebrated mother, was a tiny woman. What she lacked in stature, she made up for in bosom and the ability to intimidate grown men three times her size.
“Madam Marchbanks, if this is about the appeal papers I am in the process—”
Marchbanks held up a hand ending in short plum nails. Nails which exactly matched her purple robes and angled pillbox hat.
“Granger, take a seat.”
Hermione sat on the very edge of one of two antique chairs, garishly upholstered in tiger print. She tried to meet the knife sharp gaze across the desk and when she found she couldn't, she pulled at a loose thread on her skirt. Pulled and pulled.
“I am not one to mince words, so allow me to save us both time—you look simply awful,” said Marchbanks bluntly.
Hermione blanched. What on earth was she supposed to say to that?
“One hears rumours about the personal lives of one's underlings that it would be highly inappropriate to speculate on, but one also respects Ministry initiatives to improve morale and wellbeing amongst employees.” A sigh. “Granger, you have been in this office for seven days straight, first in, last out. You will work yourself to death, girl.”
‘Girl’. Hermione wanted to snort at the word. She was practically 40 years old when she was a toddler and presently, with creaking bones and several white hairs appearing on her head, she'd never felt older.
“I—that is to say we—are in the final stages of presenting the proposed Amendments to the Statute—”
“Yes, I am quite aware. I am also aware that while you have been pivotal in this process, Robins, Jeong, Bones, and Clearwater, not to mention Byrne in the Dublin office and half of the DMLE are also working on the articles.” Marchbanks leaned back in her chair, her face set in the exact same expression as her mother's, as she loomed large in the portrait behind the desk. Double Marchbanks. “All this is to say, I am encouraging you to take leave.”
Thunderstruck, thinking of an empty, empty, empty cottage and the little grave and the stupid note, Hermione said tremulously, “I couldn't possibly. The hearing is in less than a fortnight!”
Another deep sigh expelled out of her superior. A kind woman, underneath all the purple, but not a particularly patient one.
“Permit me to rephrase. You will take a week off or I will remove you from the Statute case.”
Hermione couldn't respond, for it was unthinkable. For her months, years of work and dreams of a better world to be dashed before the last hurdle. Yet Boudica Marchbanks was not one for idle threats, and it was clear to them both Hermione had been roundly and quickly defeated.
She now felt 12 years old, rather than 40. “Yes. Yes, alright.”
“Splendid.” Marchbanks brightened, but not to the point of smiling. “This isn't a punishment Granger so you needn't look at it that way. Besides, when was the last time you took a holiday?”
She thought about this. She and Ron had gone to Snowdonia two years ago. Hermione had been excited to explore the rumoured home of Arglwyddes y Llyn — the famed Lady of the Lake. Another painfully obvious example of ‘myth’ being a faithful recounting of a Muggle's encounter with the magical world. But, being Wales, it had rained incessantly the entire time. Ron had caught a minor cold and refused to leave the tent.
Come to think of it... that had been three years ago.
As she struggled to come up with the answer, Marchbanks tilted her head, in pity. Hermione hated pity.
“Aren't you the International Magical Office of Law's Union Delegate?”
“Yes.” Hermione had been elected unopposed as the Department's MOMWU (Ministry of Magic Worker's Union) Delegate. She was well aware this question was rhetorical and meant to remind her of her public commitment to better working conditions at the Ministry.
Marchbanks smiled like the Cheshire Cat. Game, set, match. “See you in a week.”
Hermione stood, thinking again of the emptiness awaiting her on the other end of the Floo.
Just before she closed the door she heard a stern parting shot, “And do not be tempted to take any work home with you, or I shall be forced to come and retrieve it myself.”
When Hermione emerged, Susan looked at her from behind a leaning tower of arbitration. It was clear she knew what was said in the small office. Office gossip was thin on the ground on level five, ever since Penelope's affair with a septuagenarian Muggle politician ended in a disappointingly amicable fashion.
“Alright, Hermione?” Susan asked gently.
Hermione nodded stiffly. Then realised she'd continued nodding robotically, even as she collected her bag and walked towards the lifts. The atrium, mercifully, was quiet.
*
2 Twayblade Lane, Upper Flagley was silent when she stepped out of the emerald flames into her kitchen. The cottage was cosy on good days and cramped on bad days. Today was a cramped kind of day. A bay window over the sink looked out to Flutterby bushes—a gift from Neville Longbottom—and dying lavender, under a flat grey sky.
The silence in the space was not unusual for a Thursday afternoon, but there was no peace in it. It was a different beast. It was the end result… a thing a long time in the making.
The note was still on the scrubbed wooden table.
You’re brilliant
I'm sorry
She could imagine his face as he wrote it. Agonising over writing those words as if it was an imminently due Potions essay. As if he were composing iambic pentameter. Except if it was a Potions essay or poetry he would've asked for her ‘help’, and she would have dutifully done it for him.
Can't exactly plagiarise your own break up note, she thought darkly.
With a sudden stab of her wand, the parchment was devoured by flames the colour of bluebells.
Perhaps this was the proverbial rock bottom. If that was the case—bar Voldemort's unexpected resurrection—it couldn't get much worse. Hermione knew she tempted the fates with thoughts like that, but she was in a place beyond care. Her care had curled up into ashes along with that bloody note.
Wordlessly, she summoned a dusty bottle of merlot from a high shelf. An anniversary bottle — ha! She did not deign to summon a glass.
Wine in hand, she trudged up the narrow stairs and plopped herself into bed, pausing only to remove her shoes.
*
The wine was spicy and full-bodied, brimming with the flavour of black cherries. It might as well have been water.
The autumn light gradually dimmed as the bottle steadily emptied. Eventually, with a wand tap, it was refilled, the resulting wine somewhat flatter tasting than before. Still, it was wine. The original batch had been bottled in Bordeaux in 1996. She imagined the vintner working away in the French sunshine, whilst over the water and beyond the White Cliffs of Dover she and Harry had huddled in a cold tent, fearing for themselves and their world.
Then the bottle had sat on a shelf for 14 years, awaiting the perfect occasion. A wedding, a promotion, a coming-of-age—
Or a fucking terrible week.
Hermione saluted to no one with her wine and down the hatch it went. As she guzzled, her eyes caught on an ugly crocheted blanket. The misshapen daisies were vibrant yellows and pinks, nestled amongst black mohair, and all of it was absolutely covered in orange hairs.
A jolt of pain hit her in the solar plexus, and with another wave of her wand, she banished the blanket into nothingness.
When she could no longer ignore nature's call, Hermione took herself on wobbly legs across the hall. She sat for much longer than necessary, assessing her intoxication and the general state of the problem. For Hermione Granger, relentlessly logical and pragmatic to a fault, was a problem solver.
But how does one solve a problem when all signs pointed to the fact that one was the problem?
The tell tale crack of Apparition shook her out of her daze.
Ron, she thought. Somehow, after everything.
But a knock at the front door dashed her hope—or was it dread? Ronald did not knock.
Hermione quickly splashed her face and pondered several glamours to blur the disaster of her visage, before giving up and descending the stairs.
Through the frosted glass she saw a head of untidy hair and knew exactly who waited outside her front door. Her stomach tied itself into a complicated nautical knot. She should've known he would come. With only the barest of hesitations, she opened the cottage door.
“Hi Harry,” Hermione said, trying and failing to sound breezy.
“Hi.”
She took her friend in, bespectacled, bedraggled, beloved. He had dark circles under his eyes and rather more stubble on his chin than he usually preferred. Even so, he carried himself with the air of one still eminently surprised at his own good fortune. Gratitude dripped from him. If it wasn't so endearing it would be infuriating.
“Can we come in?” Harry asked.
“We? Oh.” Hermione hadn't noticed the sleeping toddler strapped to Harry's back. Soft red curls and fat cheeks peeking over a backpack. A Weasley, plain to see. “Of course.”
Harry followed her into the sitting room, helpfully lighting lamps and candles along the way. As they sat, a merry fire started crackling in the grate. The warm light tumbled over them both, and illuminated the golden writing on the spines of the many books set on bookshelves that wrapped around the room. There was at least one overflowing shelf in every room of the cottage, she had seen to that.
“I'll have some of that, if you're offering.”
Following the tilt of Harry's head, she grimaced. She hadn't realised the bottle of wine was still clutched tightly in her hand. It must've made the journey to the bathroom with her. If she wasn't already flushed from the wine, she would have blushed scarlet.
Taking silence as assent, Harry lifted his wand and said, “Accio wine glasses.”
Two vessels obediently sailed into the room and set themselves onto the octagonal side table. Harry filled his with wine and the other, pointedly, “Aguamenti”, with water from his wand.
He sat sideways so as not to disturb Lily's slumber and set emerald eyes on her. When at length she didn't speak, he did.
“Ginny's at an away match, otherwise she'd be here. Albus and James are at Molly's. There are about 17 children there right now, I don't even think I know half of them. I'm supposed to be on a stakeout tonight but this one—” He jerked a thumb at his daughter. “—Will only sleep if I fly around and around in circles all night.”
Hermione only nodded.
“Truthfully, I don't think I've slept in seven years.” He looked thrilled about this, and only slightly manic, but his expression morphed back into familiar Harry Potter-brand concern when she still didn't speak.
“Hermione, you look—”
“I have been informed several times that I look like a troll, thank you,” she said briskly.
“I was going to say ‘exhausted’.”
“Yes, well.”
Harry shuffled his body closer, but stopped short of touching her.
“You know I'm not very good at this stuff.” Harry’s expression was serious. “I want to say something comforting, but I know I'll mess it up and end up with projectile canaries zooming into my face.”
“I would never—” she began hotly, outraged that he would choose to pick at that particular scab.
Harry held up his hands. “See? Wrong thing to say. Foot, mouth and so on.”
Hermione calmed. It had always proved very difficult to stay cross at Harry. The wine, she found, had loosened her tongue. She spoke the fear out loud.
“Please don't choose him.”
Harry stilled. At the tension, Lily stirred on his back and then settled again with a contented squeak.
“Listen. Look at me. There are no sides.” His eyes were wide behind those round glasses, imploring her. “There is no choosing. That's like asking me to choose between my left bollock and my right.”
Despite herself, Hermione felt an incredulous smile spread across her face. “Did you just compare Ronald and I to your bollocks?”
A flush painted itself across his cheeks. “Merlin. Don't tell Ginny, she'll skin me alive. See what I mean?”
Finally picking up her water, Hermione downed half of it in one go.
“Where is he?” she asked casually. She knew he knew and she thought she probably knew too. Ron was nothing if not predictable.
“Are you sure you want to know?”
And with that, she had her answer but nodded anyway.
“In Lille—”
“With Gabrielle,” she finished for him.
“Yes, but they are truly just friends. He has sworn it to me.”
Oh, Harry, so loyal and so naive.
“For now.” Ron needed to be adored and Gabrielle could oblige. Gabrielle, with her glowing, Veela blood and girlish giggles and honey smooth accent. Next thing, Harry would be telling her that Ron had not noticed the deep cleavage Gabrielle delighted in displaying. Truthfully, Harry probably hadn't noticed. Ginny was so thoroughly it for him. Another notion so genuine, it was on the edge of nauseating.
Angry at her deeply unfeminist thoughts, Hermione pulled again at the thread in her skirt. The woven material frayed obligingly.
“I don't know what to say,” Harry admitted.
“It's alright. You're here.”
“And Lily,” Harry grinned.
“And Lily.” Lily was Ron's favourite. A delicious, bonnie, redheaded baby. Sometimes, Hermione couldn't look at her without feeling that old pain in her stomach. She felt like a Dementor amongst everyone else's effusive ginger contentment. She did not begrudge Harry his joy, and she would not. Not now, not ever. If happiness was earned, through Karma or other divine means, Harry was cashing in. Harry deserved the world.
The fire hissed and spat between them. Harry may not have known what to say, but he knew when to sit quietly and she loved him for it. He did not comment when she refilled her glass to the brim with wine. Nostalgia washed over her, the moment reminding her of times long past, being the last ones awake, safe in their favourite spot next to the fire in the Gryffindor common room.
At length, she said the other thing. The terrible thing. The small, giant, crushing thing.
“Crookshanks died.”
And Harry was hugging her and she was sobbing, splashing tears and snot all over his shirt. He smelled so familiar and lovely and she opened herself up to the tiny occasional wish that had sparked within her over the years; the wish that she had fallen in love with that steadfast, constant boy. The kind, honest man.
Yet she knew he was not for her. And now Ron wasn't either. She would not ask herself whether he had ever been.
Harry did not let go until she moved away from him, sniffing loudly. She picked up her wand and vanished the various dampnesses on his shirt.
“Do you want to talk about him?” he said carefully.
“Ron?”
Harry shook his head with a small smile. “Crookshanks. The dark wizard detector.”
A new tear rolled down her cheek and she thought of the long, bottle-brush tail and squashed face, wiser with age. He had been her friend and her familiar since the day she first saw him at the Magical Menagerie and Ron had called him a monster. Like her, he was judgemental and astute and devoted.
“Not today,” she whispered.
Harry held her hand. “I need to go and try to put Lily down at the Burrow and get back to work, or Stephens will send that bloody Patronus after me again.” The new Auror head looked like a housewife from the 1950s, who also happened to sport a black piratesque eyepatch over her left eye. In case the eyepatch did not betray her ruthless nature, her Patronus was an enormous, screaming lappet-faced vulture. Hermione had seen it lecturing Ron once and had no idea how such a terrifying thing was supposedly made up of happy thoughts.
“But I'll be back tomorrow, yeah?”
“You don't have to,” she replied.
“Sod that, I'm coming. You'll have to ward me out.”
“I could, you know.”
“Of course you could. If you told me you invented a new Philosopher's Stone I'd be like ‘yeah fair play, must be a Monday’.” Harry shrugged his shoulders theatrically. “You're brilliant.”
You’re brilliant.
It was the wrong thing to say, but he wasn't to know that. Her smile was false, painted on.
“What are you staking out?” she asked, as a distraction.
Harry made a face. “A brothel—don't ask.”
Hermione most certainly wanted to ask, and on any other day she would have, and Harry would have indulged her with a thrilling or disgusting tale. She might have even given him suggestions on possible lines of inquiry, but she was so very tired. She sipped her wine instead.
“So er—just because they're going to ask and I—that is, what would you like me to tell the others?” Harry was sheepish as he posed this question to her.
The others. Their extended circle of friends, consisting of more than a few Weasleys.
Her exhale came from her soul. Marchbanks had suggested there were already rumours. For once, she didn’t feel the need to correct them, even though it was probably a matter of time before the Daily Prophet published something about her murdering Ron, or shamelessly betraying him with the Muggle Prince William. Sorry Kate.
“I need some time, I think.” Time she would have filled with work, but now would probably fill with walking from room to room… to room. Perhaps also drinking.
“Done,” he said.
Harry stood and dug around in his pocket, producing a crumpled piece of parchment.
“Er sorry, almost forgot, that's from Gin.” He handed the letter to Hermione before bending to kiss her softly on the top of the head. “See you tomorrow.”
Hermione said nothing as Harry strode out of the room, through the front door. Without the warmth of his presence, the reality of her solitude crept back into the room. She didn’t notice when the ruinous feeling within her extinguished the fire in the grate with a snake-like hiss.