Chapter Text
NOW:
The snow stops.
Harry is gone when her eyes open. She isn’t surprised. This is adulthood, she tells herself. Maybe to feel better. But she packs up her things, grabbing a few files that she really should start cataloguing and annotating for her records. She says goodbye to some nurses, greets the rest of the shift change, and heads out to go home. She holds her phone in her hand, maybe out of habit, maybe because it reconnects to the rest of her everyday life. Harry being back changes everything and then it doesn’t – she isn’t that Hermione Granger anymore. She is older, maybe harder, but just as lost. Time isn’t kind, but it does move faster.
Outside, the city is still moving. She is too aware of the ice that is starting to gather along the cracks in the sidewalk. She ends up stopping for a coffee, only to check on her snow boots. She thinks about Christmas. She ignores the sights and the window displays, thinks about how easily she could just take a vacation and go visit her parents on the coastline. It isn’t until she’s back at home, at her townhouse, that she reaches for her phone and calls her mother.
“Everything okay?”
Her mother’s voice is breathless. Hermione closes her eyes. She can imagine her just coming inside from the garden. She wonders if she’s finally put in new flowers. The last time she was in Australia was nearly a year ago.
“Yeah.” Hermione pauses. “No,” she corrects herself. “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.” The confusion in her mother’s voice is loud. “Of course,” she repeats. “You know you can ask me anything.
It’s funny, she thinks, that she is here, revisiting things that she had just swept under the rug. Would life have been different had she stayed? Yes, of course. But Harry, Harry here, Harry reopens a lot of things that she’s kept tight and close to survive.
“Why didn’t we go back?”
The question is crass, maybe even elementary. She cannot recognize the sound of her own voice, low and grainy. She clears her throat a little. She doesn’t know how to ask this. It’s more about the answer though.
“You were in danger,” her mother answers easily. The response is rehearsed. Or it feels like it is. “I think a lot of it was shame,” she says too. Her voice softens. “We barely understood you. We knew you were brilliant. We knew you were different. Your dad and I used to sit around, long after you went to bed as a little girl, and marvel just how wide the world was for you. But then everything changed when we sent you to that school.”
Hermione frowns. “I don’t understand.”
“Taking you out, darling, was the only thing we could do. We weren’t the Weasley family. We weren’t even your professors. Logistics aside, our job as your parents was to prioritize you and not the collective and seeing you that night, in that hospital bed, confirmed a lot of our fears.”
It’s not the first time her mother has said this aloud, but it feels like the first time she’s listened. The wavering in her voice unsettles her. Hermione finds herself leaning against the doorframe of her kitchen, still gripping her work things.
“And that night,” she corrects finally. “There was that night too.”
“And then that night,” her mother agrees.
It’s too hot in the townhouse, she thinks. Her skin feels flushed. It could be her anxiety. She finally throws down her bag, over a bar stool. She reaches for a water glass, listening to her mother move around in kind. There’s a muffled voice. Her mother seems to shut a door and Hermione manages to find her way to sit at her kitchen island.
“Why do you ask?”
Hermione hesitates. “I ran into Harry,” she says quietly.
The silence on the other line is an answer. She doesn’t know what she expects. The few times her parents had met Harry, they had been nothing but kind and cordial but distant. Harry came with the Weasleys and Molly Weasley had always been too much for her mother. Instead, it had been Neville’s grandmother that really was more of a go-between, much like Professor McGonagall, stern but kind, honest but unapologetic.
“I suppose I knew it would happen eventually,” her mother finally says. “I wish I knew what to say,” she says too, and that does nothing to quell the unease in Hermione’s stomach.
“I don’t think there’s anything to say.”
When she feels herself start to settle, she finally shrugs out of her jacket. Her fingers are still curl around her keys and she plays with an Empire State Building keychain, an awkward joke her parents had given her one year on her birthday.
“One day, you’ll forgive us.”
Hermione closes her eyes. Her throat tightens. One day, she thinks. She’s only ever thought about forgiveness outside of them. It’s complicated, of course. To forget all that she is, was, was never the intention, but she’s guilty of being complacent. It’s hard, she thinks too, because she never once thought she’d be in this place. Outside Harry, the explanation that she was different, that there were more than just the strange things that happened around her when she was little, that these little bursts of energy, of magic, where just more than how she saw the world, it was the world. She understands why her parents did what they did. If anything, she has no idea what she would done in that situation – if she is ever a parent. But what happen will loom between them, weave in and out and pull them further away from each other. That much is still very, very true.
There’s a lump in her throat. “Today’s not that day,” she says.
-
THEN:
The school uniform is green.
Plaid is just a caricature of this whole experience. Her new school requires a blazer, hair neatly pulled back, stocking in the winter and white socks with loafer or non-descript trainers in the warmer months. It’s rigid enough for her to hide and whether or not she fits into the school climate, Hermione doesn’t know. She tries not to think about it.
“Were they just as serious as you at your old school?”
Hermione blinks.
The library is much smaller, tighter with a cluster of tables that she and her group for history have taken over. Most of the girls she sits with are nice, polite. They have known each other for years, growing up and combing through the school system. They have all partnered off to tackle various pieces of the project.
Her partner has a name. It’s Nancy or Stella. There’s been three or four Beatles jokes at her expense, none of which is funny. Hermione still practices her smiles. Not too wide. Not too hard. Distant enough to remain genuine, or at least, to give the promise of her trying to be genuine around her new reality.
“It was complicated,” she manages, nearly apologetic as the other girl blushes. Saying that to someone always makes it feel like the truth. “Classes moved quickly,” she says carefully, “so you only had time to be serious.”
“Do you miss it?”
Hermione feels her skin start to crawl. Her stomach drops a little. She’s still angry. And sad. She is not naïve enough to believe that she will return, living underneath her parents’ roof. Part of her knew she’d be here at some point – forced to decide, address, and wonder how to carve her own space in the uncertainty of being a Muggleborn.
But you don’t even have that now, she tells herself.
“Hermione.”
Nancy or Stella leans in, gently touching her arm. She flinches.
“Sorry,” she manages. She offers a tighten, unconvincing smile. There’s a tightness in her chest again. Her eyes focus on the papers in front of her. Alexander the Great, she reads. Then again, how would you rebuild — but can only bring herself to stop because these days, too, everything else somehow ends up being a trigger.
“You know,” her partner says, “it’s okay to miss a place. It’s not like you moved here from Jersey. I guess I’m just trying to say –”
You need to try. In her head, she sees her mother desperate with tears. Her father can barely look at her. Some of it is guilt, of course.
“I understand.”
The pen in her hand feels a little odd. She starts to spin it in between her fingers. Keep yourself in check. Try not to overreact. In her head, she sees Professor McGonagall standing in front of her. She has to learn some control.
“It wasn’t my choice.”
The girl’s eyes are huge.
“I think,” she murmurs, and the necklace at her throat starts to burn against her skin, in tandem with a warning. “I think it was the way it happened,” she manages. “I understand they’re my parents and they want what’s best for me –” This is the easiest story, she thinks. “But I suppose I expected more of a warning or –”
“Care?” The girl supplies.
“Yeah.” She sighs, reaching up for her necklace. Her finger curls around the charm. “Care,” she says too.
It’s unsettling how easy this is as a new normal.
This is how she learns control.
-
NOW:
The buzzer is nearly muffled by her television.
Harry is waiting on the other side. His jacket is wet. He offers a sheepish smile. There’s a dusting of snow on his shoulders. It’s picked up again. The weather channel said something about flurries and sleet, both off and on.
“I’m not stalking you,” he says dryly, and she steps back to let him. When he follows, he looks around first. His shoes dig into her carpet. He nods to the charm around her neck. “There’s some sort of signature there,” he murmurs. “I kind of just followed it – I guess.”
“I was going to say.” She smiles awkwardly. She watches him look around, finally shrugging out of his jacket. He kicks off his shoes too, placing the neatly by the door. “I didn’t even think to tell you where home was,” she says.
He meets her gaze. Studies her openly. He starts to say something. Then he stops. Then he laughs too, shoving his hands in his pocket. His jacket is tucked under his arm. “Is it mad that I want to say that this is exactly what I expected?”
She takes his coat, if only to watch him look around so more.
The entrance is nothing spectacular. There are a few pieces that she’s picked up from antique stores with friends. There are photos of family members she doesn’t see. A painting that she bought at the farmers’ market years ago of a brightly colored vase of flowers, only because she was tired of not having some color in the entrance.
“Of what?” Harry picks up a photo. She slides his coat over a hook. “My home?” she asks, for lack of anything else to say.
“Yeah,” he admits. He shrugs, shoving his hands into his pockets. “I suppose it’s easier to imagine you in some sort of office setting, you know? It’s impersonal and I can sort of fill it with things that I would expect you to have.”
Hermione laughs, despite herself. “That’s a little silly.”
She’s nervous. This is largely more intimate than her office. Home is home and she’s suddenly terribly shy. Half of her space is lived in out of necessity, out of old habits of wondering when and how she’d go back and the other half of her space is lived in out of acceptance. It’s the colors, the photos, even the small Christmas tree that one of her nurses had gotten her as a gag gift years ago. It’s like everything she is, but split in two.
“Why Minerva?”
Hermione stills. She looks back at him and he flushes. She takes over leading though, guiding them down the hall.
“Sorry,” he says too, and she cannot tell if he is really. He still follows her into the kitchen. “I just – you know, we’re going about this in every which way.”
“You did kiss me,” she says dryly.
His eyes are bright. “And I plan to do it again,” he says. “I just want to talk a little more, you know?”
He’s right, of course.
But she takes a moment to reset herself. She offers him a coffee, which he takes – maybe he’s being polite, maybe she needs him to be polite. She offers him half of a donut because there’s nothing here to entertain and she was only going to order some delivery, so that she could avoid the grocery store another day.
“I don’t remember,” she admits. “I’ve blocked a lot of those days out of my head. I was so angry, you know? And scared and confused and convinced that a miracle would let me go back to school and subsequently, to you.”
“But then your home…”
“Yeah.” For the first time, in a really long time, her ears are starting to ring – she can see the glass exploding, then and in her childhood home, feel the sound of Bellatrix Lestrange’s laugh. “It went up in flames,” she says tiredly.
“They didn’t tell me.”
She looks up and he’s standing in front her. His fingers graze her waist. The coffee she gave him is next to her on the counter.
“Tell you?” The sound of her voice is soft now. She awkwardly places her drink next to his.
“They didn’t tell me,” he repeats, “not until much later, the night Bill and Fleur got married –” Her eyes widen and he laughs a little. “Yeah,” Harry says, “they got married.” He runs a hand through his hair. “Arthur had accidentally let it slip – we had stopped wondering, by then, if you were coming back, if you could come back.”
Her jaw drops. “Harry –”
“Wait,” he says, gently even, “I just need to get this off my chest. I used to think a lot about what might have happened if you stayed. What choices I would have made. What I would have done differently. Then I realized that I shouldn’t. Because if you weren’t there then, you could be here now and now, the me now, does not need you any less. You don’t need my permission to forgive yourself, Hermione. You were just a kid. We all were.”
At this point, she folds. A sob wrenches out.
It hurts, it hurts terribly. It comes from a place in her chest that feels like it’s exploded, but only halfway as if it were trapped inside of her still. The room begins to spin a little and Harry reaches for her, folding him into her arms. Her eyes squeeze shut and she can’t stop thinking out loud I’m crying, I’m crying because she can’t remember how long she’s been holding onto this.
She tries not to think about how different this conversation might have been in the hospital. There’s safety in being in a professional space. She doesn’t know how to admit that out loud that she still really hasn’t processed what happened to her or dealt with the aftermath. He was always going to be fine without her, but she carries a deeply seeded sense of guilt that she could not show up for him, that she could not lend herself out because she could not bring herself to separate from her family either. That does something to someone. Had it not been that night, that outcome from the Department of Mysteries, it might have been later, or even years later. Maybe she was always going to have to choose.
“I didn’t know to come back,” she murmurs into his shoulder. The fabric of his shirt is wet. His fingers are in her hair. “It was like everything stopped for me, once I left.”
His hand is steady. His fingers climb into her hair. He drags them through carefully, lightly as if to make sure he was more of an anchor for her than anything else.
She hasn’t thought about any of this in a really long time. Not in this way. It’s different, facing her parents. She’s able to compartmentalize and separate so that she can stand next to them or at the very least, try to. But here, now, she doesn’t want to think about this. Now, there’s no noise. Now, there’s no sense of obligation.
Now, it’s just Harry and Hermione. Then she kisses him.
His fingers hook into the beltloops at her waist. She kisses him hungrily, opening her mouth underneath his as he sighs and slides his tongue inside. He tastes sweet, a little less like the coffee she had handed him and more so like a pastry – does he still like sweets like that, she wonders.
“Do you know what’s crazy?”
He’s slightly muffled. His fingers are at the nape of her neck. She pulls back, just slightly, to look at him. They’re both breathless. Harry, suddenly, seems like he’s aged backwards.
He doesn’t wait for her to reply. “I think a lot about how I might have missed you too,” he says, “right in front of me, how maybe this was the universe’s lesson in letting me know that I may not mean to, but I still can take things for granted.”
“Stop,” she says, and she cannot say anything more. She does take his hand, linking their fingers together. She doesn’t know who is leading who, but it doesn’t even matter.
It’s true.
Her living room is cold, but she pulls him to the couch. He finds her mouth first, kissing her deeply again. She swears she might even hear him say her name. They tumble forward – Hermione in his lap, Harry’s eyes are wider, wilder, and a slight grin on his mouth feels like some kind of prize. Everything feels hot and wet and when his hand slides between them, his fingers grazing over her clit, her hips buckle and jerk as if to settle, as if this were her first time and not the last of it.
He takes care to peel off her shirt.
Harry’s hands on her breasts, the way his fingers cup and knead, is something that changes her. His hands are everything, everything in a way that causes her thighs to clench just a little, her mouth to concede and beg and murmur into his throat just be inside of me because she cannot think of anything to say.
When she comes, she’s still on top of him, still aware of being on top of him, her knees pressing into the cushions of the couch. His palms flush against her thighs, his fingers spreading into her skin. He’s real, she thinks. And even with him still inside of her, now flaccid and insides all achy, she can only think that all over again – he’s real, she’s real, and right now, this feels a lot more like being alive.
“Thank you,” he says, “for still being here.”
Forgiveness is funny like this.
-
THEN:
It’s snowing when the letter comes.
Christmas in Australia! Or so her dad says, her second year of residency. She’s exhausted. They have decided to have Christmas in New York apartment.
“I almost didn’t give this to you.”
It’s late and she is the only one left – or so she thought, her dad coming from behind the couch. She is older now. She is starting to notice things like how her parents are aging, how their secrets and decisions are no longer able to hide. The grays in her mother’s hairline are present enough to soften her face and her father limps a little more, every time they visit and walk around Central Park because they now have touristy traditions.
“What?”
Her father holds out a shoebox. Her eyes widen. It has seen better days. She still knows exactly what it is, exactly how many letters live underneath that lid, exactly why her parents took it away and why she had decided to pretend that she had no idea that they did.
“Dad.”
“It seems so small,” he murmurs, “given what happened. I know you say you’ve moved on. I know you say you’re not angry –”
“Dad.”
“Right or wrong, Hermione, we made a decision because we love you.” He sits by her. The wire frames that cover his eyes make her pause. The wrinkles around his mouth should feel like laugh lines. She doesn’t know what to call them anymore. “I understand that it might have done more harm –” Hermione chokes, unable to help herself, “— than good,” he finishes, “but as your father, I made a decision to keep you alive.”
She’s quiet.
“You’re alive,” her father repeats.
Hermione cannot bring herself to open to the box.
“Barely,” she says.
For the first time, in a really long time, she looks up at her father and does not hide any expression on her face. Her mouth drops. Her eyes harden. They burn too – maybe it’s tears, maybe not. Her stomach, however, dives into knots, churning as she struggles to hold onto the shoebox. She doesn’t need to read them. She knows what they say.
Harry, I’m sorry. I hope that you’re not charging into your decisions. Remember to trust your instincts, remember that Ron is really wonderful at strategy, remember that Ginny can be trusted, that you should ask her for help – she’s incredibly creative at her hexes, really great at stepping into lead when you, maybe cannot.
Harry, I hate that I don’t dislike school here. I think the charm is making me sick – I feel disconnected. I begged my parents to let me reach out to McGonagall. I think they made adjustments. It’s complicated. It’s rather odd, I suppose. I know they used to call me the Brightest of our year, but I don’t feel like I am – had I been, wouldn’t I have figured out a way to move around my mum and dad? But then again, I understand why they pulled me, I understand why they decided to move us. It’s a luxury, in the end, where as they have the time and the space to make these decisions, what if they didn’t? I’m not making any sense. I just think a lot about what would I have done had I had access to the right information. Would I be here? Could I have continued to lie to them. I don’t know.
“Did you read any of these?”
“No,” her father says quietly. “It did cross my mind,” he admits.
Hermione nods. It isn’t her letters that stop her though, it’s the single white envelope that sits atop the piles of letters she’s written through the years. She recognizes the letter. She recognizes the sharp lines of Harry’s handwriting too.
“He wrote me.” She’s numb. Her eyes close. “He wrote me.”
“No. He gave a letter to Minerva.” Her father clears his throat. “Minerva sent it to us. We asked her to,” he confesses. “We thought it best.”
Her eyes widen. “You kept this from me?”
Everything stills. The guilt on her father’s face is something she’ll never forget – the furrowed brows, the slight twist of his mouth.
“To keep you safe,” he repeats.
This will not be the first holiday she stays in New York.
-
NOW:
Hermione brings out the box. She hands it to Harry. She is wearing his shirt. Harry has piled on blankets around him, for them, just so that they could sit together. Her delivery has arrived already, but now it’s cold – they haven’t stopped talking.
It’s surreal enough as it is.
“What’s this?”
“Everything,” she answers simply, and watches as he takes the box from her hands. He weighs it carefully, looking up at her, then down at the box again.
She knows that his letter still sits on top of her own.
“Before –”
She stops herself. Her throat is tight. Harry’s knuckles whiten.
“It’s a mix,” she says. She shrugs. “I’m sure it’s utterly chaotic.” Hermione laughs a little. “Sometimes I’m sad. I don’t remember when I stopped writing. I think I just tried to fill my plate with everything possible.”
“Like usual,” he says dryly.
Her mouth curls wistfully. “Yeah,” she says, “I suppose.”
His hands remain tight around the box. He doesn’t move to open it. She doesn’t need him to. If he wants to, she thinks, she’d even given time to read alone. But the box has aged, maybe not well – the brand lettering has long since faded. She thinks its color was either some sort of blue or blue-green.
“The thing around your neck –”
“The charm,” she supplies.
His gaze is heavy. “The charm,” he repeats. “Does it hurt you?”
Hermione shrugs. “It’s like an electric collar for a dog.” The words are out of her mouth before she stops them. Harry laughs, startled. Her face feels hot. “I think Flitwick created the charm as a way for me to regulate my emotions – Minerva explained it to me exactly as that, that my magic would only fly out of handle should have those big, explosive bouts of feelings.”
“What if they had found you?”
“They didn’t.” Her head tilts to the side. His fingers are pressing into the box. “You did,” she says simply. “On accident, no less.”
“And some badgering,” he says. He’s sheepish.
The right question would be why now – to unpack years away from each other seems to be on par with her resentment of her parents, of herself for not doing anything more. She should care about those answers, about answers that she’s going to have to face. Already, she’s thinking of the time she’s going to take off of work, maybe to make peace with all of this. There’s so much to unpack. Her parents. Professor McGonagall’s role in trying to protect, maybe to even allow her to have some remaining tie.
She thinks a lot of this has to do with her own grief as well. Harry, of course, returns into her orbit, not just as a lifeline but as something that has always made sense. Maybe she’ll work up the courage to tell him too.
“I think,” she says, rubbing her hands over her knees. “I think,” she repeats, “it’s going to take us awhile to sort through this stuff, you know? Or at least me. Part of it is that to cope from being pulled away is that I shut down. I had to.” Her eyes feel wet. “I know a lot of people will say things like – she would have never left you and maybe, maybe had I hidden things from my mom and dad better, maybe had just a little more time –”
“Hermione,” he says quietly, “stop.”
She does.
When she sighs, her shoulder drops. Her fingers immediately rise and curl around the necklace charm. Still a safety net, even now. Her thumb travels over the charm.
“Sorry,” she says, after a moment, “it’s hard not to get upset.”
He puts the box down. He reaches forward, grabbing her hand. He tugs her forward.
“I forgot how your brain works.” He pulls at her again and she laughs, coming to stand between his legs. “It’s like a thousand things present themselves and you can barely find how to sort all of it out,” he says. She thinks he’s teasing him.
“I panic,” she admits.
“I remember.”
Her eyes close. His fingers brush over her face.
“This isn’t about solving everything now,” he says. “I didn’t come to find you because I wanted to send you spiraling. I came to find you because I missed you.” He wears a wistful smile, much like her own from earlier. “Everything else,” he murmurs, “we’ll take it on a day at a time. Selfishly, I’d just be happy to take you back – but it’s not about where you should be, it’s where you want to be and wherever that is? That’s where I want to be.”
It isn’t perfect. It shouldn’t be.
“Okay,” she says. “Okay.”
It feels a little easier to mean.