Chapter Text
Professor McGonagall turned on her heel and carried the Firebolt out of the portrait hole, which closed behind her. Harry stood staring after her, the tin of High-Finish Polish still clutched in his hands. Ron, however, rounded on Hermione.
“What did you go running to McGonagall for?”
Hermione threw her book aside. She was still pink in the face, but stood up and faced Ron defiantly.
“Because I thought — and Professor McGonagall agrees with me — that that broom was probably sent to Harry by Sirius Black!”
*
Harry knew that Hermione had meant well, but that didn’t stop him from being angry with her. He had been the owner of the best broom in the world for a few short hours, and now, because of her interference, he didn’t know whether he would ever see it again. He was positive that there was nothing wrong with the Firebolt now, but what sort of state would it be in once it had been subjected to all sorts of anti-jinx tests?
Ron was furious with Hermione too. As far as he was concerned, the stripping-down of a brand-new Firebolt was nothing less than criminal damage. Hermione, who remained convinced that she had acted for the best, started avoiding the common room. Harry and Ron supposed she had taken refuge in the library and didn’t try to persuade her to come back. All in all, they were glad when the rest of the school returned shortly after New Year, and Gryffindor Tower became crowded and noisy again.
*
Hermione sniffed, pushing away another book full of centuries-old legal precedents – magical creatures, magical beings, court rulings and honoured old laws – in favour of pulling yet another towards her, and pretended that the tears she was blinking from her eyes were simply caused by the dust.
Unfortunately, as a logical sort of witch, she wasn’t very good at lying to herself.
She missed the boys.
She missed the chance to talk to them, to share the strange and interesting things she’d read with them, to have them laugh or listen. The company they gave her so freely, the way she was never alone with them, or lonely. They didn’t always understand the things Hermione read to them, but they were happy enough to listen all the same, happy that she was having fun learning, even if they couldn’t quite share in her joy.
She missed their warmth, the arms slung casually over her shoulders, the playful bumps to her elbows in corridors, the solid weight of them leaning against her in the Common Room’s chairs. They were such physical creatures with each other; even if Harry generally shied away from other people, eyes wary and muscles tense, his whole being seemed to lean into Ron’s hands, relaxed and happy for the contact. That they kept reaching out for Hermione in their turn had always felt like such an honour – the sharing of such a gift all the more precious for how few people Harry allowed close enough to do so.
She missed the sound of them, grumbling over their homework, teasing each other over their meals, sniggering over their Quidditch jokes…
Bloody Quidditch…
It wasn’t fair! Hermione only had two friends in the whole world, and because she’d been terrified of losing one of them, she’d ended up losing both! She’d only wanted to help!
It smarts that some part of her just knows that Harry would never have been so angry if only Ron had voiced his concerns instead. Harry listens to Ron in a way he never listens to her, and it isn’t fair! Harry always chooses Ron over everyone else, and sometimes, Hermione is sure that Ron can’t even see the way that Harry turns constantly towards him, like a sunflower turns to the sky. Harry’s trust in Ron is so implicit, so complete that Ron can predict which way Harry will jump, which fear he needs to soothe, without so much as a thought. Hermione knows they like – liked – her just fine, that she is a part of them both, but she was the last addition to their little group, the third place. Harry arranges his life so much around ‘Will Ron be there? Will Ron like this?’ This past week has proven to her more strongly than ever that without her, Harry and Ron can manage just fine between themselves, but without Ron, Harry would likely be cast adrift. She remembers the look on Harry’s face, at the end of their first year at Hogwarts, when Ron sacrificed himself for them both on that chess board…
Hermione, for all her books and cleverness, doesn’t know if she will ever matter to her friends the way they matter to her.
But, oh, how she wants to… Wants to be a part of their chaotic, warm world where failure is possible without despair, where laughter is more important than lines. The cold of the past week – a door being slammed shut in her face she hadn’t even realised had been opened in welcome until it was too late.
She was so tired… Always tired these days, she hadn’t thought it would be so hard to keep up with all these studies…
The days were merging into one; Hermione had been warned of the dangers of misusing her Time Turner, of course she had. Professor McGonagall had spoken not only of the legal risks, but also of other, more existential things. The way some wizards ended up losing themselves, losing their understanding of what was real and what was not, losing their sense of consequences and (ironically) time.
Hermione had thought she understood…
Perhaps even Professor McGonagall had not entirely understood what living for months upon months of time-turned life would do to a person? Hermione wonders, sometimes, if such a thing has been done before, and – if it had – what the people who tried it were like by the end?
It wasn’t as if she felt she was forgetting what was real, not yet anyway. She knew where she was, who she spoke to, she remembered her lessons, tracked her notes meticulously, always… But when she was? That much Hermione feared she could lose far, far too easily. If today were Tuesday, but yesterday had been Tuesday also… what day was tomorrow? Was such a thing as ‘yesterday’ still true, if there were three of them? In the early days, she had tried to keep a track of how much time she had truly lived, watched as the days mounted up and up, eking her out further and further ahead of her peers in hours and days and weeks of time. She stopped once she realised she had lived a whole additional month more than everyone else; the implications too much for her as the nights grew darker and longer, the sensation of time already sent askew by the changing season.
Hermione tried not to think about it too much – a coward’s response, she’d have scolded the boys for avoiding a difficult issue like this. Like a child peeping out at a monster through their fingers, hiding from hard topics did not make them go away, of course it didn’t. But Hermione just couldn’t bring herself to face anything harder than classwork right now. It was all too much, she was unravelling at the seams, pulled in too many directions for too long, trying to make her way through three days on one night’s sleep…
So tired… and now she was so alone…
Hermione had grumbled at the boys so many times, about their noise, about their joking around, about their mess and their lack of focus. They mostly pretended some small measure of penitence for her, before tumbling right back into the same loud, chaotic rhythms… Hermione had no idea how badly she had needed them there, staving off the frightening implications of her choices, filling up the emptiness around her with light and sound and warm touches, teasing and pulling her until she remembered that there was more to magic, more to life, than dry books and the flick-flick-flick of wooden wands…
Until they had stopped.
She blinked and realised that her tears were dripping down onto the dusty parchment of the book, and hurried swiped them away. This was hopeless, she’d never get anything done tonight, moping about like this.
She just… she hadn’t thought they’d react like this. Like Hermione had betrayed them somehow, like she’d deliberately set out to hurt Harry, rather than help him.
They didn’t even want to listen to her…
Hermione swiped away more tears, angry with herself, with Ron and Harry, with everything. It wasn’t fair, and they were being … They were being unreasonable asses!
Suddenly resolute, Hermione stood up, piled her books into a tower and shoved them to one side. She wasn’t putting up with this anymore. Hermione Granger wasn’t some simpering little wisp of a witch, weeping and pining away in dusty corners because her friends were in a snit. They didn’t get to shut her out like this when she was right!
She was going to get this sorted. Now. Tonight!
*
Hermione pushed the portrait-door open and slipped inside, thankful that the late hour, so soon after the Christmas holidays, meant that the place was empty. She took one more breath, braced herself, and ran up the stairs into the Third Year boys’ dormitory.
Blinking a little in the dim light, she pushed the curtains around Ron’s bed open, grabbed him by the collar of his pyjamas and hauled him with more determination than strength across to Harry’s bed, yanking the curtains out of her way as she did so.
“What the-? Who? Hermione?!” Ron spluttered, flailing around with gangly limbs made even more uncoordinated by his rude awakening.
Hermione shoved him onto the bed, startling Harry awake as pointy elbows and knees hit – judging by the explosion of yelps and hisses – several tender spots for both boys. She gave them a moment to catch their bearings, Harry sitting up and swearing as he found his glasses, Ron muttering – half curses at her, half apologies to Harry – and struggling up from his ungainly sprawl across Harry’s chest. Then she shoved Ron a little more to make space for herself and climbed on in after him, closing the curtains behind her.
“Hermione, what the -?” Harry began, after finally finding his wand and muttering Lumos.
She ignored him some more, pulling out her own wand to spell the bedcurtains soundproof both ways, thereby cutting off Dean and Seamus’s own disorientated cursing and questions – the commotion Ron had made waking them from a sound sleep.
In the sudden silence, by the conjured light, Hermione turned at last to her friends and lifted her chin up, trying to look more confident than she felt. She was a Gryffindor, she could be just as bold and daring as they, could push and push and grasp for what she wanted, not wait for it to come to her.
She’d rehearsed these words over and over on her way up from the library – trying to get them right. There must be, she was sure, some special, some magical, combination of words to say, and then everything she had wanted, everything she had feared, will become so obvious to the boys as well, and they’ll be able to understand each other again…
“I have decided,” she began, so firmly that they both fell silent, “that you two don’t get to do this to me anymore. We’re friends and we look out for each other, and you don’t get to stop being my friends because I wanted Harry to be safe.”
There, she’d said it. Hermione took a breath and realised she already felt better, just to have said that much. A first step. The ball back in their court.
Harry, still blinking himself awake, snaps before he can think about it. “Yes, Hermione, you’re our friend. Not our mother. You can’t just make decisions about our lives without our input and then get upset when we tell you off about it. Either you’re our friend or our supervisor, but you can’t be both.”
Hermione shakes her head, wants to shake him, the prat. Won’t back down, she’s right, she knows she’s right, she just has to-
“Well clearly someone has to take care of you! No one else is doing it, and you’ve got the instincts of a concussed pixie!”
Irritated as he might be, Ron snorted.
“Shut it.” Harry threw at him, not unkindly. Hermione sighs a little, of course Ron gets to poke at Harry however he likes. Still the look that Harry throws at her has gone… soft, and a little shy. As if, maybe, he thinks knowing someone cares about him is sort of … nice. But that may just be her own wishful thinking… “But that’s my point, Hermione! I’m not your child –“
She cuts him off. All of a sudden, Hermione finds that she can’t stand it, can’t stand the way Harry just assumes full responsibility for himself, won’t, can’t so much as entertain the possibility that someone else might be able and willing to share the load, and she snaps,
“You are a child, Harry! You shouldn’t act like it doesn’t matter if you get hurt!”
“-and you’re not responsible for me like that.”
“Well, who exactly else is responsible for you?! That’s what I should like to know!” The words burst out of Hermione, harsh and tearing at her throat as they forced their way out of her heart in a rush.
The three of them froze, eyes suddenly wide and shocked. They stared at each other for a long moment, each feeling as if they had been running head-long through a field and found themselves teetering suddenly upon the edge of some sheer drop.
Some things, once said aloud, can change the world for those who hear them.
“I…” Harry began, then stopped, looking pale and suddenly uncertain. “I don’t know what you mean. Hermione, what-?”
She flushed under the scrutiny, groping desperately for her thread of logic, for what she had meant to say, had wanted to say, she was sure she had known, had planned her arguments…
The words tumbled out of her, faster than her mind could catch them, reckless in their rush;
“You hardly mention your relatives, Harry, except to reassure us that they won’t care – don’t give me that look, you said they’d be furious that you’d had all those chances to die and didn’t manage it. Harry, that’s not how families should react, and you know it! There’s… there’s no one waiting for you at home, is there? No one worrying about you, hoping you’re having a good time at school, learning lots, being well-fed and cared for… Is there?”
“I…” Harry’s eye turned huge and pleading. He shook his head, less an answer, more a silent plea for Hermione to stop talking, stop pushing, stop coaxing the huge, terrible ache inside of him out into the open. “Hermione, please. Don’t.”
She took a breath, deep and warm with their shared heat in the small space guarded by hanging velvet. Her mouth closed, teeth clicking against everything she wanted to say, all the questions she wanted to ask, all the worries she wanted to pull out and be reassured of. This… this wasn’t what she had meant to talk to them about, either of them.
She took another breath.
Then she began again,
“You might not be used to people caring about you, Harry, but we do, Ron and I, we care about you, so much. And I don’t care very much what you think or say about it, caring about you means wanting to keep you safe and sometimes, yes, that means stopping you putting yourself in danger like this!”
The tension was still there, still spooling out and ready to catch light again at the merest spark. One wrong word, it seemed to whisper, one false move, and the ground you’re standing on will give way… Something’s coming up behind you, waiting for the right moment… Are you ready?
Wary, uncertain of the shift and spark in the air, Ron made a show of yawning, stretching out his arms – carefully, all his limbs constantly seemed bewilderingly longer than he expected them to be these days – and remarked as nonchalantly as he could,
“And you decided that you had to come and wake us up in the middle of the night to say so?”
Hermione sniffed, her eyes still flashing; she wasn’t giving him quarter, not now.
“You’ve both had a week to come and talk to me about it, and you haven’t and, frankly, I’m tired of you both cutting me out. Either we’re still friends or we aren’t, but I’m not letting you pretend I’m not there anymore.”
Harry sighed, and reached across to wrap a warm hand around her wrist. Sometimes, Harry wished that he could just touch people and have them know the things he wanted to say, what he wished they knew, without all the mess of his clumsy efforts in finding the right words. At the Dursleys, you didn’t need words - Don’t ask questions. Don’t make a scene. Stop being a bother. Stop distracting people. No one wants to hear what you think, freak – Harry knew how to stay silent very well. But at Hogwarts, he had friends, friends he found he wanted to talk with, to really say things to, to tell them things, and suddenly…
Words were so much harder than they had always looked.
Why couldn’t Harry just… just think really hard at Hermione, and have her understand him? Why did everything seem so complicated, when they felt so simple inside Harry’s chest, kept safe behind his ribs? It had seemed so much safer to stay quiet, to simply avoid Hermione for a while until Harry somehow managed to find the right words, or hope that Hermione somehow managed to trip over them all on her own in a book somewhere, hear what Harry was thinking from ink and parchment, without all the hard part of Harry having to speak.
Harry shivered, side-tracked briefly by the last book he had encountered which magically provided the words of another person’s thoughts.
Never trust anything that can think for itself it you can’t see where it keeps its brain.
Alright, fair enough, not doing that again.
So, in the absence of magic, Harry was going to have to find words of his own. He bit his lip, but putting this off so long had hurt Hermione badly, and Harry didn’t want to hurt Hermione…
“That’s not – I haven’t – I, Hermione, we’ve not been pretending anything. Of course, we’re friends, we’ll always be friends, that’s not, that’s not what we meant, I promise.” He took a deep breath and fought to get his words into the right order, the churning in his chest feeling like he really was wresting with his thoughts to say this properly. “I just… I just didn’t, I don’t like how you went behind my back like that. You never even gave me a chance to go and speak to someone about the broom for myself. Didn’t give me a chance to think, to decide what I wanted to do. What might have been best to do. It’s like you don’t trust me to be able to think for myself, and you might be the cleverest witch I’ve ever known –“ Hermione’s eyes shot up to meet his at last, wide with surprise and he gave her a small smile in return, “- Hermione, you’re so, so clever, but sometimes you give even less thought to other people’s feelings than Ron does.”
“Hey!” Ron protested, reaching across the thump Harry’s shoulder.
“Hey!” Hermione frowned, pulling her arm away before swatting at Harry’s other arm.
Harry rolled his eyes at the pair of them. So different, his best friends, but so alike too. He knows that everyone else, they see the three of them together and they wonder how three such different people could possible ever fit together, work together so well – Harry feels something inside of him pang a little that perhaps these past few endless days have proven such doubts correct, though Harry himself prefers to think that this mess has been the exception which proved the rule – Harry looks at his friends, though, looks at himself, and he can only see the things they have in common. The intense loneliness they are all too familiar with, being overshadowed, being forgotten, being too much trouble to manage, too much effort to talk to, left and left and left again.
Until they found each other.
He remembers them all becoming friends, always being in each other’s orbit, sharp edges grating and scratching at each other until a troll’s club and a destroyed bathroom and a barefaced lie told to their Housemistress…
Looking back, Harry thinks that perhaps he should have known then. Perhaps he did. They’ll always come through for each other in the end, no matter what. Harry and Ron had barely thought twice before turning back, away from the Common Room, away from safety, to run for Hermione. They’d not thought twice at all about running into that bathroom to take on a troll to keep her safe. And she in her turn had not thought twice about risking the ire of a professor she had looked up to, spinning a story from the air to render Harry and Ron blameless heroes at the expense of her own reputation for good behaviour and logical thinking. They each have their strengths and differences, sure, but they know, deep down, that they will always be whatever the other ones need.
Perhaps they have forgotten it lately, but Hermione has taken the brave first step to reach out, and Harry won’t let the moment pass them by.
“’S why we belong together, I reckon,” he grinned some more, lips quirked up to one side like he’d not had much practice at smiling, but he’d read about it, “no one else can cope with us. Or wants to.”
Something about the words strike at Ron, deep down inside his chest where the aches lie. We belong together… we’re alike, all of us… we belong…
Ron knows he’s inherited many of his family’s worst qualities; stubbornness, anger, grudge-holding. It’s exhausting, he hates the way his chest burns and the sour feeling he gets afterwards, heat slowly ebbing into a cold discomfort.
But he can’t help himself, not when the people he cares about are hurt. Ron eyes Hermione again, and something twists again in his guts, that dreaded cold creeping up to chill whatever anger he might have held against her.
Ron remembers Christmas Day, remembers Harry’s breathless, wide-eyed excitement at his new broomstick, so suddenly and inexplicably come into his life – Ron remembers Harry fumbling to try to explain Muggle stories of Santa Claus to him, struggling, Ron suspects, because if the Muggles never gave him presents, then probably neither did Santa. Harry had sounded more like a researcher in a foreign land, bringing back secondhand tales for studying, than a boy who had lived all his life in a Muggle family – Harry’s delight in having something new to share with Ron, too, offering to go out flying together the next day, while the Quidditch Pitch was quiet, just the two of them, unless they could pull Hermione from her thousands of books…
And then Hermione coming in through the portrait, bringing McGonagall with her, and suddenly… gone. Harry’s face, shocked and breathless, but far less fun, not wonderful at all, and Ron couldn’t stand it. Harry’s anger may be loud and hot as a Weasley’s at times, but his pain and hurt is a silent thing, curled in on himself, and Ron doesn’t know, other than the disappointment of a delay to his flying practice, of course, but Ron doesn’t know why Harry had looked like he were bleeding and trying to hide the wetness, but Ron couldn’t have stopped himself from turning and tearing into Hermione if his own life had depended on it. He had wanted her to understand, to feel some of the hurt that had welled in Harry’s eyes, had wanted, if he could not prevent Harry losing his broom, to at least avenge his friend for the loss.
Ron bites at his lip.
It wasn’t fair, though. Not really. Gryffindors should try to be Just, especially to each other – it had been something Ron remembered Bill telling him, over and over when Ron had been little, begging his oldest brother for stories of Hogwarts and Gryffindor House and the adventures Bill must surely be having.
“Gryffindors are brave, aren’t they Bill? They save the day and protect people, and, and-“
“Gryffindors are brave, Ron, but they have to be sure that they’re being brave about the right things. If you hurt people because you don’t think about them too, then you’re not being brave at all. You’re just being a pain in the arse, and a prat.”
Alright, so Hermione’s a pain in the arse herself, sometimes. Always has to be right, always has to know, never thinks that someone else might be right as well, just in a different way. She sure talks a lot, but it’s all just quotes from books she’s swallowed whole, you never know what she’s actually thinking until she’s good and ready to share it, formed an argument she knows is unassailable. She complains sometimes about Harry hiding secrets, but catch Hermione letting you see her stumbling around, trying to put a chain of thoughts together.
But perhaps… Ron thinks about Hermione, about being so completely new to this world of magic, a world to which she belonged absolutely, but which was also utterly unknown to her. Ron might envy her the newness sometimes – whatever she does, she’ll always be the first in her family to do so, no one’s shining, golden example to live up to, no one to do it better than her before she could even try, no chance to disappoint anyone – but he can’t imagine… Ron thinks of the things his dad brings home from work, the object and books tucked away in the shed, how unfathomable they are to him.
“We could have been killed,” Hermione had once said, late at night, still panting for breath, fear still running through all of their veins, “or worse, expelled.”
Hermione might try too hard to be perfect, to never make a mistake, might dismiss anything she cannot immediately understand and manage on the first try… But Ron realises abruptly that for all her books and timetables and plans… she is missing something which Ron has held for so long he’s never been aware of it.
A sense of perspective.
Harry’s right – that’s why they fit, that’s why they’ve always fitted together. Because for every gap and flaw they each have, there’s always another one to fill it. They have so much in common as well, even if no one else might see as much – each of them equally impulsive, stubborn, and far too inquisitive for their own good, of course – how could they not have become friends?
Ron takes a breath and reaches out, takes Hermione’s other wrist in one of his hands – his father’s hands, he thinks, idly, something about this strange evening, the late hour, encouraging Ron’s mind to reach out further and further down, into the heart and root of himself. Big hands, long fingers, broad palms. Prewetts are all stocky of form and nimble of finger, the twins take after Mum’s family in every possible way, but Weasleys are lanky and stronger than they look – and brings her wary eyes up to meet his tired ones.
“Alright then,” he begins, evenly, “so you were worried about Harry, and you were worried about the broom, so you talked to McGonagall about it. Ask her to take it away and-“
He doesn’t quiet get the chance to finish, Hermione bursting with indignant frustration;
“I didn’t! I just think Harry should have got it checked! Expensive brooms don’t come out of nowhere! Someone must have sent it, and Harry’s got at least one very dangerous enemy out there, right now, wanting to kill him! Why am I the only one who cares about that?”
All Ron’s good intentions fly out of his head at the implication – the idea that Ron wouldn’t care if Harry is safe or not too much for him to stand.
“Don’t you dare say I don’t care about Harry! I care just as much as you!”
“Oh, really?" Hermione spat. "So that's why you’re quite willing to send him off, spinning around a hundred feet in the air, on a probably-cursed branch of twigs so he can go and fall to his death all over again, is it? Was seeing Harry in the hospital ward before Christmas not enough for you? D’you want to bury him afterwards this time, is that it?”
“Hey, hey, stop it.” Harry broke in, hands reaching to gently cover his friends’ mouths. “Stop it. This isn’t helping, and neither of you means it. Just stop it.”
He looked at them then, both as tense and unhappy as he was, all together miserable and hurting. This separation had been painful; he might have had Ron by his side, but he’d missed Hermione’s presence like he’d missed the bones in his arm after Lockheart had finished with him. Ron might have pretended all he liked, but Harry knew that he’d missed their friend badly too. Deprived of both of them, it must have been even worse for Hermione.
Harry wasn’t good at giving comfort, hadn’t ever been shown how, but he always did his best work when he didn’t know what he was doing, didn’t he?
“C’mere, both of you.”
He took hold of Ron and Hermione’s shoulders and pulled them down, right down onto the bed so they could all curl up together. ‘Like puppies in a basket,’ Harry thought with a smile, remembering a line from a book he’d read in school once.
Maybe if Harry just curled up close enough to them, maybe he really could push the words through skin and into their hearts? His own thumped painfully in his chest at the idea, and he pressed closer, wriggled briefly to get comfortable, and took a deep breath.
Wishing people understood you was no use; sooner or later you had to say something, even if it was messy.
“Ron,” he said at last, carefully. “Hermione meant well, and even if we didn’t like what happened, we should listen to her properly, since she came to talk to us. That must have been scary for her - to make the first move - and she came all the same, so we owe it to her to hear her out. Hermione, don’t accuse Ron of not being just as much of a mother-henning worrywart as you are. I’ve had it right up to my neck in worry from both of you all year so far, and I can promise you that from where I’m standing, you’re both as big fretting worriers as each other.”
From both sides of him there came rather wet-sounding chuckles, followed by sharp pokes in his sides. Harry fought not to giggle, but he twitched madly to try to get away from his tormentors.
“Prat.” “Idiot.”
“You both know you love me.”
“Just as well we do, really.”
On his left-side, Harry heard Hermione take a breath, but he squeezed her closer a little and took a breath of his own. Hermione had given him her own reasons for what had happened, it seemed fair for Harry to tell her his own side in return.
“Did I ever tell you, Hermione, Ron, about what growing up with the Dursleys was like?”
They both went abruptly, unnaturally still beside him.
“You’ve given us hints, mate.” Ron spoke at last, tentative. "And, well... the bars on the window. Summer before last. They starved you."
Harry hummed. “It… It was pretty awful, but… the thing I wanted to, what I mean is… I didn’t have toys, when I was little. Never anything that wasn’t Dudley’s first, and only after he’d broken it. Sometimes Dudley would pretend something was for me, hold it out for me to take it, then snatch it away again and laugh, before he’d go running to Aunt Petunia and pretend to cry and say that I’d tried to steal what was his. And then I’d really catch it. Freaks don’t get presents. Don’t get to have toys.”
Ron curled in closer to Harry’s right shoulder, breathing all manner of curses that Harry was pretty sure Mrs Weasley would have washed his mouth out with soap for if she’d heard them. Hermione’s eyes were wet when Harry met them.
“Harry, I –“
He shook his head, he had to get all of this out. Had to finish this before he had a chance to really think it through and back out. “And then Hagrid came and delivered my Hogwarts letter, and I came here, met you two, had a few adventures –“ they both snorted then, ‘a few adventures’ was certainly one way to put it, “- learned about wands, and potions, and stars and... and I learned to fly. And that was, that was what real magic felt like, to me. The only thing about Hogwarts that felt natural, no thinking needed, just that feeling of freedom, like no one could catch me, never again. Not if I didn’t want to come back…”
Harry turned a little then, shuffling to face Hermione properly, and Ron shuffled over into the gap he’d left to curl around Harry’s back, a solid, warm weight of reassurance.
“When you, when McGonagall came, and she took away the Firebolt I’d only had for a few hours… it felt just like those days, with Dudley and Aunt Petunia, and… Hermione, why? Why not just talk to us?”
“I tried,” she protested, softly, “I tried to talk to you, and you thought everything would be fine, and Ron didn’t think anything was wrong either and I just… Harry, you can’t die, you just can’t.”
Harry’s voice had become painfully stuck in his throat, and giving up on words altogether he pulled her close and hugged her, and Ron’s arm came reaching across his back to wrap around hers too, and for a long moment they just lay there, hugging each other and crying and trying to speak between the tears and having to give it up again.
At last, the tears ebbed away again, and Ron coughed awkwardly and Hermione sniffed and tried to find a tissue to blow her nose. Harry passed them each one of his, before drying his own eyes on the sleeve of his pyjamas.
“I…” Hermione finally broke the silence. “I didn’t actually think she’d take it away from you, you know. I just thought – Professor McGonagall’s such a big Quidditch fan herself, and she’s a prestigious figure, she probably knows plenty of people in the profession, I thought, well, I thought that she would be able to write to them, ask if any of them could come and take a look at it themselves. They build broomsticks, after all, so they’d be able to tell if someone had tampered with it, surely?”
Ron sighed and spoke before Harry could. “That would have made more sense, yeah. Pity it didn’t work – no, no Hermione, that’s not on you, that’s not a dig – I don’t know what McGonagall was thinking, trying to do it in-house.”
Hermione tucked herself in tighter, trembling and penitent. “Harry, I only wanted you to be safe, I promise.”
Ron’s mind was still turning over the repercussions of such a mis-step.
“Yeah, but now her and Flitwick are having a go at it themselves, instead. And maybe the broom wasn’t unsafe before, but I bet they’ll have messed with some of the charms on it while they look, and it might be that Harry gets back a broomstick that’s even less safe than it was before.”
Hermione looked ready to burst into tears all over again at the thought.
“Well, it’s done now,” Harry said before she could. “And Hermione was only trying to help, and Ron is right to be worried about what shape the Firebolt will be in when, if, I get it back, and we’ll manage from there. And I’m sorry we made you feel that we weren’t listening, Hermione.”
Ron sighed and muttered a little under his breath, but finally he nodded. “Yeah. ‘M sorry I shouted at you like that.”
Hermione offered a rather watery smile in return. “It’s alright. I should have tried again to talk to you both after dinner instead of going to the professor like that. It isn’t as if Harry was going to take it out overnight, is it?”
Harry grinned. “Of course not. That would be the action of a very foolish person, and I am a man of great wisdom and sound judgement and- Mmumph!”
Ron and Hermione, sealing their reconciliation, had hit him from two directions with pillows.
“Oi!”
“Prat.”
In the silence that followed, Hermione sighed.
“I over-reacted.”
“Only a little,” Ron hummed, generously. “It’s Harry, I get it. If you wait too long to pull him away from trouble, he’s already neck-deep in it by the time you’ve opened your mouth.”
“You’re both terrible friends. I’m hanging out with Neville from now on. Neville’s never mean to me.” Harry pouted, which was almost effective, except for how he was still happily tucked down between them and making absolutely no move to extricate himself.
“Neville is just waiting for the chance to keep you safe and well-fed, Harry Potter, I don’t know why you think he’d be any better than us.”
“Really? Drat.”
“He’d keep you very well-watered though?” Ron offered, “and make sure you get plenty of sunlight. It might be good for you, you know?”
And that might have been it, argument over, making up done, everything alright again, but before Hermione could sigh and sit up, drop the charm and clamber off Harry’s bed, something inside Harry’s gut prodded him to stop her.
“But it’s not really fair, is it?” Harry mused, aloud.
“What isn’t?”
“What’re you on about, mate?”
Harry shook his head. “If you get to worry about me and do things to keep me safe even when I don’t ask you to, and I don’t get to worry about you. That’s not fair, is it?”
Hermione blinked. “Harry, I, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Harry sat up properly now, Ron barely a second behind him.
“Hermione, we’re not stupid, you know. We can see you. Something’s wrong, isn’t it? You’re always tired, and you keep missing mealtimes, and we can barely get a moment with you when you’re not buried behind at least fifteen books. If you were me, and I was like that, you’d have tied me to a chair until I told you what the matter was, wouldn’t you?”
Ron sniggered. Harry elbowed him in the stomach and he sobered, slightly. Harry’s right, again, and something at the back of Ron’s mind tells him that if they don’t talk about this now, tonight, then the moment will be lost, and they’ll be left to wondering and worrying about each other, but never quite able to just ask.
What is it about this night that feels so… Ron sighs and tucks himself closer to the others, shivering with some strange feeling.
“C’mon, Hermione,” he prompts, “how do you keep disappearing from right behind us, and where do you keep going to? Harry and I, we can barely keep track of you these days!”
“I…” Hermione looked very torn, and a lot guilty, and Harry waited, stilling Ron when he might have spoken.
“It’s… Professor McGonagall made me promise I wouldn’t tell anyone. It’s… we’ll get into trouble.”
“Never really stopped us before, has it?” Ron said, tone mild.
“I suppose not.” Hermione gave him a small smile. “I… I suppose if either of you looked as tired as I feel, I’d be pretty worried about it, though.”
They waited another moment. At last, Hermione sighed and reached down the collar of her robes to pull out a chain that flashed gold in the light, and dangling from the chain was a –
“Blimey! Is that a Time Turner?!” Ron gasped.
“A what?” Harry asked, feeling a bit lost.
“A Time Turner! You know, for going back in time?”
“The clue was in the name,” Hermione teased him, and Harry thumped her with a pillow this time.
“Shut it, Hermione. I just, I didn’t think that was possible.”
“Harry, mate,” Ron sighed, looking at Harry as if his friend was very stupid, but Ron intended to keep him anyway. “Harry, we are wizards. We go to a school for witchcraft and wizardry. Yes, there are spells to let people go back in time.”
Hermione took pity on him. “They’re really rare, Time Turners. Professor McGonagall had to write off to the Ministry specially to get me one, and I had to promise that I’d only use it so I could get to all of my lessons, and they only let me have it because the professor wrote to tell them that I was the best student in the whole year and it would be a crying shame to make me drop a class, and-“
“And that’s how you keep being in two places at once.” Harry finished, still shocked by the possibilities of magic.
Hermione nodded.
Ron stiffened abruptly, struck by a thought, eyes flashing sharp and bright at her. “Hang about, though. Why aren’t you using it so you can sleep properly?”
“Ron!” Hermione reached out to shove him. “It isn’t for that, is it? It’s for getting me to lessons!”
“Not lessons and homework even?”
Hermione shrugged. “Well… That is, I… I mean, no one said so.”
“They probably thought they didn’t need to.” Harry sighed. “Hermione, you can’t keep going like this for the rest of the year. You look awful already.”
“It isn’t so bad, really. I just need to –“
“You need to let us help you more, is what you need.” Ron broke in, decisively. “Harry’s right, Hermione, you’d pitch a right fit if either of us looked this bad. And if I suggested that going to class and doing homework weren’t part of the same thing, you’d, you’d, you’d turn me into something horrible and send me off to live in the Forbidden Forest forever!" He shook his head, huffed. "You keep this up, Hermione, and you’ll never reach the end of the year, never mind sit the exams! At least you’ve got to let us make sure you get enough to eat.”
“A project from your very heart.” Hermione joked softly. She looked a little startled by their concern, and Harry reached out again to pull her firmly into another hug.
“Thanks for trusting us though,” he murmured softly into her curls. “I know you promised you wouldn’t tell anyone, and you don’t break your promises very easily.”
Hermione hugged him back, tightly enough Harry was a little worried about his ribs, but mostly just glad she was here, and willing to let them both help her.
“I’m glad I told you, though,” she whispered. “I hated keeping secrets from you like this.”
“No more secrets,” Harry promised, “not from each other. You two are the most important people in my life; I’d have been dead plenty of times before without you.”
“You’re both the most important people to me too,” Hermione promised.
“And me,” said Ron. Being the tallest of the three of them, with the longest arms, he managed to stretch around to hug both Harry and Hermione tightly to his chest. “Mum and Dad, they mean well, but there’s so many of us, Dad can barely tell which of us he’s talking to, and Mum can’t remember that I hate corned beef and every year she makes my Christmas jumper maroon, even though I hate it, and I… You’re the only people who see me as myself. As Ron, not just another Weasley.”
“Oh, Ron…” Hermione said, softly.
Harry thought back to their first year, to the Mirror of Erised, to Ron feeling so overshadowed all the time by his brothers, feeling constantly over-looked and forgotten in the crowd of brothers achieving everything before he had a chance to - "I'm the sixth in our family to go to Hogwarts. You could say I've got a lot to live up to. Bill and Charlie have already left- Bill was head boy and Charlie was captain of Quidditch. Now Percy's a prefect. Fred and George mess around a lot, but they still get really good marks and everyone thinks they're really funny. Everyone expects me to do as well as the others, but if I do, it's no big deal, because they did it first" and suddenly Harry just couldn't stand to let Ron keep on thinking that he wasn't everything to Harry –
He wriggled around until he could look Ron squarely in the eye to declare,
“You might be the sixth Weasley to everyone else, mate, but you’re the only Weasley for me. I'd never have another one for my best friend.”
“Aw, Harry…” Ron muttered, blushing as red as his hair.
“Nor me.” Hermione said firmly, tilting her chin up. “I wouldn’t want any other Weasley, not ever, Ronald Weasley. You’re our Weasley, the only one we need.”
“No substitutes accepted.” Harry added, grinning.
He wriggled down a little further between his two best friends, feeling warm and comfortable - safe.
“I know it’s been a horrible week for us all, but… I like this,” he admitted, voice gone suddenly shy.
“Like what, Harry?”
“This,” Harry repeated. “Us all here together, talking things through properly and sharing stuff and just… Us. Together.”
“It’s nice,” Hermione agreed, and Ron nodded.
“I wish…” Harry paused, feeling a bit silly, wishing was for little children, and Harry’s never really been a child, not that he could remember – none of his other wishes ever came true, for his parents to be alive, for someone to take him away from the Dursleys, for food, and toys, and, well, just anything. But something... something about the evening they'd all had, something about the quiet warmth of the three of them, together... The words just seemed to tumble out of Harry before he'd really thought to stop them. “I wish we could be like this, for always. Together like this.”
On his left side, Ron’s frame goes a little tense, not from fear, Harry thinks, more like anticipation, but to his right, Hermione only hums.
“I wish we could be like this always too, Harry. All of us together.”
“Yeah…” Ron breathes, sounding a little puzzled, as if he’s not quite sure what he’s doing, but he’s willing to do it regardless. “I wish we could all be together forever too.”
The coiling tension that had been hanging in the warm dark of Harry’s curtains for so long they’d all but forgotten about it finally unspooled - not snapped, nothing so sharp and final, but it... eased, somehow. Relaxed and uncoiled and sank into the bundle of tabgled limbs, and they each of them sighs in relief, as muscles that had been tense finally lose all their tension at once.
Ron looked from one face to the other and blinked very rapidly for a long moment. The he took a sharp breath and said,
“If we’re, you know, exchanging our big truths and secrets tonight, and everything… I, I guess this is the closest I’ve got to one.” He casts them both a sideways look, but far from looking sceptical that he might have a secret worth knowing, or betrayed that he hadn’t disclosed such a thing to them before, both only looked curious and a little worried for him. “It’s not anything bad, I promise! It’s… well, it’s just that it’s not something that you’d know to ask if you didn’t grow up with magic, and it’s not really common to talk about it at Hogwarts either, because of all the old loyalties and there used to be a lot of, well, you know how Malfoy is. But, the thing is… We… my family, we didn’t always used to go to Hogwarts, you know.”
Hermione shot Harry a look, but he was just as confused.
“Really? Where did you go to learn, then?”
Ron shrugged. “’S plenty of other schools. Not as famous, not as big. Different schools teach different magic, see? Blimey, can you imagine, every wizarding child actually fitting in Hogwarts? We'd be sleeping on the ceiling! But Hogwarts has the scholarships, and the connections; if you want to go work for the Ministry or something like that, you’ve gotta go to Hogwarts. And Dad, he, well, my grandad wanted him to go make his fortune, so he went and won a scholarship and after that Bill came here, and Charlie, and then, well, here we all are. But there’s loads of different places, see? And our family’s magic? It’s… it’s not like the stuff we learn here at all. No books and wands and stuff. Still got potions, mind.”
“Ron, that’s fascinating!” Hermione gasped. “Why didn’t you say so?”
“It’s… it’s not something you talk about, really. Not outside of family circles.” Ron looked very uncomfortable, but he met their eyes bravely. “But you’re right, you’re both right. We’re… we’re closer than family. And if we’re sharing truths and all… I wanted you two to know.”
Hermione looked at Harry for a second, and Harry nodded. Maybe this was something the three of them could ... share?
“Ron, mate… would you teach us? Is that alright? What you know.”
Ron scratched his head a little. “Not meant to, but I suppose…” He trailed off and then looked at Hermione, “if Hermione uses the Time Turner to get proper rest and sleep more often, and if Harry doesn’t go sneaking around without us knowing where he is, then… we’re together right? Forever. That’s better than brothers.”
“Definitely better.” Hermione agreed, and Harry couldn’t say anything because his throat was too tight, but he nodded sharply and hugged Ron close, and nothing more needed to be said.
After all the excitement, the three friends yawned and yawned and finally Hermione mumbled something about needing to go to bed at last. She dropped the silencing charm and through the curtains came Neville’s voice,
“- sure it’s alright, we should probably just leave them alone.”
“We can’t leave them alone in there!” Seamus sounded shocked. “We’ll never get any sleep!”
“Why not?” Harry asked, poking his head out between the curtains.
Dean, Neville and Seamus were all sitting up and looking at his bed, faces in varying degrees of surprise, horror and amusement.
“Seamus here thinks it’s ‘indecent’ to sleep while there’s a lady in the room.” Dean explained, snorting a little from the laughter he was barely holding back.
“It is indecent!” Seamus protested, clutching his blankets to his chest, before he demanded, “What on earth are the three of you doing in there?”
“Just talking,” said Ron, sticking his head out next to Harry’s. Behind them the sound of Hermione’s giggles could be heard, even if she did try to stifle them a little.
“Oh, is that what we’re calling it these days?” Dean asked, raising an eyebrow and trying to look very serious. The sly grin he sported rather ruined the effect.
“Shut it, Dean.” Ron shot back, and Harry smiled.
“Sorry to wake you all,” he offered. “We just needed to sort a few things out, that’s all.”
“Is she leaving then?” Seamus pressed, not letting go of his blankets.
Harry was just opening his mouth to say that Hermione was indeed just about to leave, when Ron spoke over him.
“’Course not! At this time of night? She’ll wake up the girls coming in and then there’ll be two dorms of people with no sleep. Dunno why you all stayed up, mind, but that’s your own business. She can sleep in here with us, what’s the matter with you, Seamus?”
Seamus really did look properly scandalised now. “This is the boys’ dorm!”
“Oh, honestly!” Hermione exclaimed crossly. “What do you think I’ll do to you, Seamus? Tell Parvati which ones of you snore?”
“It’s Ron,” Harry told her, grinning as Ron nearly shoved him off his own bed. “And Neville.”
“Oi!” Neville objected, before eying the three of them up carefully for a moment and nodding. “Alright, so long as you three are fine again, we should all go back to sleep. It’s the middle of the night, after all.”
“Sorry,” Hermione offered, looking a little abashed at having woken the whole dormitory up.
“No problem, Hermione.” Neville said generously, smiling a little. “Just don’t have another argument for a while, if this is how you’re all going to sort things out afterwards.”
They laughed and ignored Seamus’s scandalised mutterings about how it wasn’t right for girls to sleep in with boys, and Ron pushed Harry and Hermione back inside the curtains and respelled the bed to silence the space once more.
“Right, don’t know about you two, but I’m tired. Strangest thing, you’d think some mad woman pulled me out of bed and halfway across the room or something.”
“Oh, don’t exaggerate, Ron!” Hermione muttered, but she looked a bit unsure. “Is it… is this really alright, do you think?”
“Hermione,” Harry answered, as firmly as he could. “It’s late, we’re all tired, and you’ve been tired for ages before tonight even. Just lie down and get some sleep and we’ll deal with everything else in the morning.”
Ron, who needed no such persuasion, was already making himself comfortable in the mess of tumbled blankets and pillows, yawning. Harry lay down next to him, leaving a space for Hermione to fit if she wanted to.
“C’mon, Hermione. Get some sleep.”
She looked at them and hesitated, but a yawn of her own decided matters. “Alright, since you’re sure.”
They were asleep in minutes, warm and together once more. A united group, who could face anything the morning would bring them, from angry professors, to escaped murderers who it turned out were innocent the whole time, to real murderers who had been hiding beside them all along.
They faced it together, as they always did.