Work Text:
In the thick of the battle, spells flying overhead, screams filling the air, it was easy, so easy to lose sight of the details. Spurred on by instinct, a steady thrum of stun, hide, shield, defend, Hermione almost feels relief that she doesn’t have to think for once, just listen, and it will be okay.
So when she sees Yaxley points his wand at Ron’s back, a manic smile with evil glittering in his eyes, she doesn’t second-guess that instinct, not when it had served her well thus far. A green jet shoots out from her wand, arcs into the sky, and finds its mark. He falls, falls, falls, smile still frozen, hand outstretched in the exact same way hers was.
And when, just moments later, she sees another Death Eater fall, her eyes retrace the path of the spell back to Fred Weasley and his familiar bright blue eyes, slightly widened in shock, she recognises the same relief in the grim set of his mouth, a mirror of what she feels in her bones.
But the recognition only flares momentarily, before instinct takes over again, and she moves away from him, her body ready to battle, even as her brain is too tired to think.
Maybe she should have known then, that things would never be the same.
—
She feels changed, like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, when the dust settles. Maybe a butterfly is not the right metaphor, because Hermione doesn’t feel bright, nor colourful, nor comfortable in the sunlight, dazzling bright, enough to blind. She decides instead that a moth is more fitting, dull and drab, not quite sure what the struggle of pupating was worth.
At first she chalks it to the sudden stillness in the world, her body not yet catching up to the tentative peace, still ready for a fight.
Ron provides a fight, easily. You’ve changed, he insists correctly, but not for the reason he thinks, his eyes darting to land anywhere but her face, I don’t know you anymore.
She tries to understand him, knowing that he never had to face a choice of killing or watching someone you loved be killed. But she also thinks, you’ve never had to make that choice, her bitterness lacing into her thoughts.
She’s too tired to fight, so she lets go of what could have been for them. (Two ginger kids, Rose and Hugo, only laughter in their house, no sadness, no bitterness.) She lets it go, and lets them settle into the comfortable rhythm of friendship.
She watches as he falls in love, again, with Lavender, and she thinks tiredly, you would have changed too.
—
She’s still welcome at the Weasley’s, but instead of sitting in the living room, warm next to the too-hot fire, comforting chatter filling the silence, she realises all she wants is to be alone. She wants to be alone to think.
She wants to reclaim the hard work of analysis, of noting the changes around her, to break them down into its component parts, to figure out what her next step should be, carefully considered, meticulously planned.
(She doesn’t want to get comfortable in the warmth, to lose herself to the flurry of action, to give in to barely understandable instinct. She needs to think.)
She finds herself in the small field behind the house, trying to puzzle out the difference between transfiguring a leaf into a ribbon versus into a string. She finds herself in the small broom shed, her mind trained on the ingredients of a calming draught, breaking down each component, each step, ruminating on how to strengthen or weaken it.
And, she finds herself only relaxing when no one is around, no one she can implicate, no one she can hurt, when she finally lets her brain rest, headache coming on with the uselessness of her mental exercises, just thinking and thinking and thinking but no more doing.
—
It doesn’t escape her attention that the whole house (or just one person in particular) seems to breathe a sigh of relief when she slips away. On bad days, she almost hears the house whispering murderer at her. She wants to protest I was doing it for love, but she is scared it sounds too much like a mitigation, a last-ditch attempt at leniency.
On worse days, it sounds hollow even to her.
But she hears Ron’s laughter, bright and too loud, and she remembers.
She’s willing to bear this burden, if just to hear it over and over again.
—
When Fred stumbles upon her, under the shade of the wizened tree, steady and sturdy through the years, she can’t help but tense.
“What do you want?” She tries not to sound defensive as she wills her mind into action, thinking through all the potential replies, formulating her own.
The smile that accompanies his reply is small, but warm like the rays filtering through the leaves. “You’re in my thinking spot.”
She flushes hot, and makes to get up, intending to seek refuge somewhere.
“You can stay,” he says lightly, “we’re just thinking, aren’t we?”
Something about the way he says that gives her pause. It sounds eerily similar to the thoughts that cross her mind, just think, don’t do, and she relaxes fractionally.
She glances at him carefully, settling back down, and when his expression doesn’t change, she picks up her book, hoping to surrender her brain to the complicated (but orderly) workings of Arithmancy.
But she has already worked through the complex theorems, and her brain can’t focus and she starts to panic. The words come out before she can help it.
“What are you thinking about?”
He startles, jerking a little in response, and she’s almost sorry to disturb him. She’s even more sorry that she had given in to an impulse, and she’s on the verge of taking her words back, waving the scene back to normal.
Before she can do that, he saves her with his reply, “anything. Everything.” His eyes meet hers, and she’s reminded of that day, that curse, that moment that bisects her life, splitting it down to before, and after.
And she remembers he also had a before and an after, just the same as her.
Which is probably why she lets out a loose sigh and murmurs, “to avoid doing?” Her mouth twists on the last word, choking it out like a dirty word.
The yes he breathes out feels like absolution, washing over her. Her hand unclenches, loosening its grip on the grass, and she finally allows herself to relax.
—
The interaction lingers in her mind, and she starts to observe him from the corner of the room. She notes the easy smiles, the careless interaction between him and his twin, and her heart tightens, wondering why?
The people they condemned their souls for were brothers, but how could one be so forgiving, but the other so withdrawn?
Then she clocks the way George flinches, ever so slightly, when Fred reaches by him to grab the salt shaker. And the way Fred’s lips tighten, and then quickly relaxes but not quite, pretending he didn’t notice.
Ah.
—
She finds it easier to be around him after that revelation. It feels like a bond blossoming between them, almost, tied together by instinctive action, wrapped up in rejection from the ones they tried to protect.
They spend afternoons together under the tree, thinking out loud together, debating the merits of fluxweed as an accelerator in colour changing ink, she thinks yes, he insists only for certain colour combinations.
“So Granger, you see, it’s too much if you’re trying to turn yellow into green, but yellow into purple, that would be perfect.” He ends with a flourish, and she pauses.
Then admits, “you’re right.”
The pride on his face is unmissable, fierce in its joy, and he laughs, “did you just agree with me? Well, of course you did, a lot of research was done when George and I -“
He cuts off abruptly, a thin mist of sadness rolling in, and she winces.
The silence thickens, and she is caught, debating whether to move on like nothing happens, or to pry.
In the end, she does a bit of both, reaching out to place a gentle hand on his wrist, her vision doubling, blurring, before it rights itself again. “I think Ron is proposing to Lavender soon. I… I overheard him the other day, but… he hasn’t mentioned anything to me, so I can’t be sure.”
Fred exhales, slow and shuddering, and he adjusts his hand, his fingers curling around hers. “Georgie feels like a stranger.”
She allows her fingers to relax into his, and tentatively leans her head against his shoulder. “Do you think it gets easier?”
“I don’t know. But I’m tired of just thinking, and staying still.” His fingers tighten around hers, and she wonders if he is aware.
They stay like this for a while, fingers tangled together like vines, rooting into each other.
Suddenly he jerks, and she can feel the energy emanating from him. “Granger, do you want to run the shop with me?”
Her mouth falls open. “What?”
“I’m serious. We can experiment together, put our brains to actual use, rather than thinking and theorising and shit.”
Hermione closes her eyes, probing the idea in her mind, and she finds… she finds that she may actually not dislike it. But…
“What about George?” She whispers, her voice loud enough to carry through the wind, but soft enough for him to ignore it.
He deflates just a little, and if it was before the war, before she spent afternoons upon afternoons with him, before her brain had learnt him for want of just something to do, she may not have noticed it.
But things are different from before the war, they are different from before the war, and she knows him, at least this bit of him, and she recognises the defeat in the slump of his shoulders. And her heart aches for him.
“I’ll talk to him,” he says decisively, “but regardless of whether he wants to do it, I think we should do it. With or without him.”
“Okay.”
—
She isn’t sure how the conversation between the twins goes, but she figures probably not too well. After all, she never sees George at the shop, but then again, they never open the shop.
They just experiment and prototype, but the ideas never lend itself into a finished product. She feels antsy, a lingering itch that remains unscratched, when she thinks about wanting to do some good, but wondering if it’s enough.
And then she notes the way Fred relaxes almost completely, discarding the too-false, too-bright, too-jovial demeanour he holds in front of his twin, the way his shoulder relaxes as he takes in her, and only her, and the sight of only the two of them in the safe cocoon of Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes, and she thinks.
Maybe it could be enough.
—
“Fred?” She asks one night, her voice soft and hushed against the cotton of his jumper. Her voice is thick with the tears she shed at the sight of cherry-red stains on her hands.
(She remembers the blood on her hands.)
His hand is a comforting presence against her back, the smoky smell of experimental fireworks against her nose, and she is struck with a sudden sense of loss, that in a different world, a different ending, she might not have known him the way she does now.
“What if,” she attempts to put into words what she has been feeling, “on that day, when our souls split, we ended up with pieces of each other?”
He doesn’t say anything, makes almost no indication that he’s heard her, except for a soft smile curling against the side of his face.
“You feel it too?” He murmurs, the soft words a soothing balm against her chest.
She nods into his shoulder, wanting to put into words the feelings she’s been having, the way her mind feels clearer when he’s near, the way her body feels livelier at his smile, the way she feels whole in his arms, when the pieces of her soul are closest together.
He pulls away from her, just enough to tilt her head up to look into her eyes, and she knows. She doesn’t have to say it, because he knows. Because even if her theory of them holding each other’s souls isn’t true, her heart is lost to his care, and the warm thuds in his chest belongs to her.
And when she leans up, tiptoes to meet his height, and when he bends his head to meet her halfway…
Four halves of two wholes meet.
And it is enough.