Chapter Text
and it would've been sweet
if it could've been me
MARCH 17
Set between chapters 10 and 11
Lily watched Marlene storm off in an elegant fashion, so graceful and eerie that it couldn’t possibly be categorized as storming off or even walking off. Instead, it felt like she simply evaporated into thin air, her signature smile plastered across her face as she left a trail of bittersweet perfume, betrayal, and destruction behind.
Something ached in Lily’s chest as she watched Hermione shoot lasers into Marlene’s back, her fists balled up, as if she considered chasing her and throwing a punch or two any. There was this unfamiliar sort of energy around her, something that Lily dealt a lot with during her career—that was the bittersweet realization of your own failure, of not living up to your own expectations. Has Hermione ever felt like that before? Lily couldn’t be sure, but a part of her that knew Hermione oh so well, better than the most, realized that this would be one of many ‘firsts’ the younger woman would experience while mingling with high-scale politics in Washington. It was a constant cycle of victories and failures, a never-ending game of tug of war. It seemed that this round of the game went to the Black campaign, with Marlene as the face of the game and with Narcissa as the mastermind behind the scenes.
Lily quickly closed the distance between them, gently placing a hand on Hermione’s lower back. It still made the younger woman flinch as she whirled around, a fire in her eyes slowly dying down as soon as she registered her. Her shoulders slowly fell. While her composure stayed air-tight and unbreakable, Lily dived into warm hazel eyes and watched Hermione crumble from within.
“Oh, honey,” Lily muttered, pulling her into a tight embrace. Hermione immediately melted into it, and it felt like all the fight left her, the bristling energy Lily witnessed only moments ago evaporating into thin air, much like Marlene did. “Do you want to leave?” she asked tentatively, pulling away and glancing at Hermione’s face. She tucked a strand of hair behind the younger woman’s ear, unable to help the gentle gesture even if she tried. Lily heard plenty about the way Hermione’s boyfriend was treating her lately, and she knew that Hermione probably wasn’t getting any tenderness at all.
Hermione seemed to melt at the gesture, briefly closing her eyes and nodding. She whispered something so quietly that Lily, distracted by the soft movement of the younger woman’s eyelashes, didn’t quite pick it up.
“What was that, sweetheart?”
Hermione let out a little laugh, shaking her head, as if how distracted Lily could be at times was actually cute. “I said,” she mock-whispered, “let’s get out of here before I murder someone.”
Lily had to bite her lower lip to keep herself from laughing. “I wouldn’t particularly mind it if the whole murder thing didn’t mean I wouldn’t be able to work with you anymore.”
Hermione’s shoulders fell once again at the mention of work, and Lily sighed, pressing her lips together. “Come on,” she said, tugging at the younger woman’s wrist and nodding towards the exit. “I know exactly what you need. And we can talk on our way there.”
They left, Hermione’s hand settled firmly in hers. Lily couldn’t help but think that while Marlene, as beautiful as she was, only left destruction in her wake, Hermione wasn’t leaving anything behind at all. She was only moving forward.
As they got into Lily’s car and drove away from a tall, imposing skyscraper with glass walls and broken expectations, Lily could see new plans slowly forming in Hermione’s head, for the younger woman was intent on taking back what was rightfully theirs, rightfully Andy’s. That fire, that determination burning bright in not just warm, but scalding hot hazel eyes, was one of the things she admired most about Hermione.
She still remembered the first time she truly saw it, two years ago, in a third-year Stanford student who spent the entire week of her autumn break working on her political communication paper instead of hanging out with her friends downstairs. Lily remembered joining that young girl for lunch breaks, marveling at the hard work she was doing and thinking to herself that maybe, one day, hers and Hermione’s paths would cross as something more than Harry’s best friend and Harry’s mother. Now, two years later, she remembered this one week in November with unbearable fondness, realizing that all her what-ifs and could-have-beens regarding Hermione’s future in politics were slowly but surely morphing into reality.
Lily looked at Hermione as the younger woman rambled and positively fumed, and she couldn’t help but smile at the sight, her heart suddenly so full for no reason at all.
They stopped by McDonald’s drive-through before heading towards Hermione’s apartment building in downtown Washington. Lily killed the engine in the middle of a mostly deserted parking lot and was fully prepared to take her takeout bags home to watch another episode of Grey’s Anatomy or Body of Proof— she was quite enjoying medical dramas lately. Instead, Hermione reached for the bags in the backseat and handed Lily’s order to her with a tentative smile on her face. The nervousness, the anger, and the feeling of having failed seemed to seep out of her in an instant, and only tenderness remained, all soft edges around Lily and no desire to leave at all.
Lily would be a fool to refuse Hermione’s company when she kept craving it so much, so she opened her cheese sauce and offered some to Hermione as she chewed on a couple of lukewarm fries.
“You’ve been quiet for a while,” she commented.
Hermione sighed, dipping a fry into cheese sauce with a kind of melancholy that had nothing to do with takeout. She chewed unbearably slowly, most definitely using herself good manners to give her some extra time to think.
Lily didn’t mind. She kept eating, and while she wasn’t always the most patient person (at least according to Nymphadora), she has always had all the patience in the world when it came to Hermione. Her eyes would fall on her wristwatch as she reached for yet another fry time and time again, and that was how she knew at least seven or eight minutes had passed before Hermione finished her fries, took a few sips of her orange juice, and finally spoke up.
“I just can’t help but go back to every interaction I had with her, you know?” Hermione let out a loud sigh, looking away, as if she couldn’t bear to look at Lily right now, clearly afraid of something. “I know I fucked this up. There were signs, and some of them were so subtle that none of us noticed them— not even you or Andy, with all your years of experience in politics and years of knowing Marlene. So I can’t exactly blame myself for not picking up on the manipulation techniques that seem so obvious now, but felt like sincerity in its truest of forms back then. But I keep thinking—what if I just—what if I looked harder, or—”
“Hey, hey, hey,” Lily muttered, shaking her head. “None of that, do you hear me? You didn’t know what to look for.” She leaned forward, reaching for Hermione’s hand and slightly squeezing it. She wanted there to be a firmness to her touch, to her gaze, but there was only softness in them as she lightly caressed the younger woman’s skin.
Hermione shook her head in response, as stubborn as ever, but didn’t pull her hand away. “I didn’t tell you, because I didn’t think much of it when I first heard it—but now, I just keep thinking…” She let out a long sigh, rubbing her right temple with her free hand. There was so much weariness in this gesture and in her voice that she suddenly seemed to be well over forty, and not like someone who graduated university not so long ago. “So, I’m most definitely breaking the NDA I signed by telling you this, but when I went to Marlene’s office to deliver the invitation to dinner, I overheard her talking on the phone. She said she was working on it, and she didn’t forget what was done for her, and that the person she was talking to would get what they wanted, like they always did,” Hermione rushed to say, glancing at Lily, as if afraid to meet her eyes for longer than a few seconds. “And now, with how everything went down today… I’m almost entirely sure Marlene was on the phone with Narcissa.”
“Mione… Even if she was, you couldn’t have known it. From what you told me you heard, I would assume a million different people other than someone from the Black campaign. Especially considering the kind of business Marlene runs—” she stopped abruptly, noticing that Hermione wasn’t really listening to her. She squeezed her hand once again, hoping it would draw her attention. Thankfully, it did. “Listen to me, honey. Andy and I had known Marlene for years, and we weren’t able to call her bluff. Even if you told us about that overhead conversation, it probably wouldn’t have made a difference, and you know why?”
“Why?” Hermione whispered.
“Because of context,” Lily replied easily, her lips twitching in a small smile. “You were able to put all the pieces together into a complete picture, connect all the dots because now you know that Marlene worked with the Blacks. That overheard phone call fits into this picture because of that context. But without it? Anyone would see it as nothing suspicious. A simple conversation.”
Hermione shrugged reluctantly. “I suppose you’re right.”
Lily gasped mockingly, leaning forward. “Come again? I just love hearing it.”
Hermione rolled her eyes, unable to stop herself from smiling, and to Lily, it felt like a personal win—even more of a win than the younger woman’s admission of her being right, which followed seconds later.
The comfortable silence settled between them, post-admission, and Lily hoped Hermione knew that it wasn’t her fault (she most certainly didn’t, but Lily would spend weeks, if needed, proving her that it wasn’t). Come to think of it, it was more her own fault and Andy’s fault—they were the one who had known Marlene for ages and were aware of her background with Narcissa. It would be nice to say that they should have predicted it, should have seen right through her and used her intentions against her, but can anyone outsmart a professional con artist? After all, Marlene had always been exceptional in the game of pretend, second to Narcissa Black.
But, most importantly, how can you fix things when a political fixer fucked you over? Lily had no idea, but she knew that by the time of the morning briefing tomorrow morning, she was supposed to have dozens, with step-by-step instructions and clearly stated outcomes, and so was Hermione. Andy made clear she expected it from them.
The sharp ringing sound made Lily jump in her seat as Hermione fumbled for her phone. An annoyed sigh escaped past her lips as soon as her eyes settled on the screen before she put her phone on mute and turned it screen down. Suddenly, she seemed more exhausted than ever.
“Was it Ron?” Lily asked, making an educated guess.
Hermione huffed. “Am I that obvious?”
“Just a little,” Lily mock-whispered, giving her a small smile. “Wanna talk about it?”
“I don’t know if there is anything to talk about at all,” Hermione admitted, shrugging, as if intent on making it seem a much lesser deal than it actually was. “He is still being awfully unsupportive of my career choices, and I’m—I’m just not sure I can handle it right now.”
Lily could see all the things Hermione couldn’t bring herself to say: how exhausting it was to fight with Ron all the time because she suddenly had to advance in her career; how disappointing it was that her boyfriend wasn’t the person supporting her most of all; how unfair it was that Harry was taking his side, and not hers. And at that very last thought, something burned in Lily’s chest, hot and ugly, because she knew that wasn’t how she raised her son. He was supposed to respect women, and support women who had big career aspirations, just like Lily had when Harry was growing up. But it seems that all the work she had done was quickly getting undone by Ronald Weasley, the typical picture of a midwestern unsupportive boyfriend. Yet, it wasn’t the most infuriating thing, as Lily half-expected it to be.
The most infuriating thing was the way Ron kept hurting Hermione whenever he refused to support or understand her. Lily was many things, but she wasn’t an idiot (at least, according to pretty much everyone but Nymphadora). She could hear Hermione’s hushed, distressed whispers as she lingered in the hallways of almost-empty campaign headquarters during their late evenings for far too long. She could hear exasperated sighs and almost-even pleas for understanding, or the way Hermione’s voice would, quite reasonably so, go from softly pleading to gradually irritated. As she peeked out of the briefing room or her office, she could see Hermione’s knuckle-white grip on her phone or the way she would sit down on the nearest chair and drop her head into her hands right after hanging up.
Each and every time Lily witnessed an instance of Ron being an unsupportive asshole (that was how she labeled these occurrences in her head, anyway), her heart ached with the desire to do something nice for Hermione, something to make her smile, washing away the deep-rooted sadness that seemed to be ever-present in the past two weeks. Of course, her heart also ached from the desire to punch Ron, but there was her reputation to think about—she was a part of a presidential campaign, after all. Plus, she wasn’t exactly sure Hermione would appreciate it, and Harry would most definitely stop talking to her for a while, so punching Ron Weasley in the face had to be a hard no.
She remembered Hermione’s second year in undergrad, the right hook Draco Malfoy gifted Ron for his birthday, and briefly entertained the idea of phoning Narcissa Black and asking if her son could pretty please punch Lily’s friend’s awful boyfriend. Then, of course, Lily realized that Narcissa would probably find a way to use this against them later on, so that plan had to go, too.
So, all she could do was try and counterattack every one of Ron’s absolutely childish behaviors. Lily liked to think she was quite successful: she would bring Hermione warm Earl Gray tea right after her conversation with Ron ended, lead her to her office, and both of them would take five or ten minutes to settle comfortably on Lily’s couch and just talk. That was something Lily absolutely adored about Hermione—the younger woman liked talking, at all times. She rambled incessantly, sometimes ranted, and, less often, even full-on vented (mostly, the ‘venting’ part was reserved for anything that included Narcissa Black, one way or another).
Hermione liked sweets more than anyone Lily had ever met. She wasn’t sure that much sugar was healthy, but it improved Hermione’s mood drastically, so she kept providing; just little things she could always run out and get from the snacks machine right by the entrance—M&M’s, KitKat, snickers, lots of sour worms, basically anything she could get her hands on. Lily would stop by Hermione’s office, knock on her door and barge in with a handful of snacks. Hermione’s face would always light up at the sight of her—though the snacks were probably responsible for such a joyful reaction, come to think of it—and let her sit down on the edge off her wooden desk and chat a bit while Hermione devoured an orange sour warm (her favorite) or anything chocolate-covered. And sometimes, Lily would drive up to a grocery store after work, despite how much she wanted to just go home and slip under the covers, and find the most exquisite box of chocolate they had to offer, only to leave it on Hermione’s desk the following morning.
It was quite easy to pick up on Hermione’s basic moods and needs, and Lily was quite proud to say that she almost even excelled in it. And the fact that right now, the last thing Hermione wanted to do was go back to her apartment and face Ron and maybe even Harry, wasn’t exactly rocket science.
“You could stay over at my place, if you want,” Lily offered, shrugging with an air of feigned nonchalance to it. The words left her mouth before she could really think them over, yet it felt like something that made the most sense. After all, she had already extended an invitation the night before, and—God, she really hoped her apartment wasn’t a fucking mess. Lily really needed to start cleaning up a little in the morning instead of putting everything off until late evening.
“Oh?” Hermione asked, straightening up in her seat and looking at her with something closely resembling hope.
She looked beautiful like that, Lily thought; exhausted from a full work day and a regular Wednesday betrayal from someone she thought she could trust. Her eyeshadow faded a little, not as bright as it was in the morning, and there were bits and pieces of mascara under her eyes. Hermione’s lipstick, a calm shade of coral, wasn’t really there anymore because of all that nervous lip-biting Hermione did at CNN and on their way to McDonald’s. Her fingers were stained with grease and salt, and Hermione had to use the back of her hand to ‘scratch’ at her nose when it itched. She smelled of a strange, truly baffling mix of the latest newspaper, more–expensive-than-the-average floral perfume, and cheap takeout eaten in the front seat of someone else’s car. And yet, despite what most might see as imperfections, Lily couldn’t quite remember ever seeing a more beautiful woman than Hermione Granger was at that very moment.
“Come stay with me. Please,” Lily said, a little bit breathless. She reached for a couple of napkins and cleaned her fingers, because she desperately needed to fidget with her jewelry and she was not about to touch real gold while stained with the grease from McDonald’s fries.
She felt calmer as soon as her fingers found her wedding band, the one she only kept wearing for appearances now—Lily was sure some nosy blogger would notice it if she took it off for more than a few hours.
“I mean it, Mione,” she said, firmly but softly, and she couldn’t help a small smile tugging at her lips. “You don’t even have to go up to your apartment for the clothes—you can borrow mine. And you have your Mac, your chargers, and your planners and notebooks with you, so really, why would you go back?” Lily chuckled lightheartedly, meeting Hermione’s eyes head-on.
She felt dizzy and had to swallow past the lump in her throat at the realization that her words were laced with the faintest of double meanings, and that Hermione probably noticed it, too. There was an unmistakable ‘why would you go back to him? ’at the periphery of Lily’s mind as she asked her question just a few seconds earlier, because how could there not be something like that? Ron was so out of Hermione’s league, and everybody who ever met the two of them knew that perfectly well.
Hermione was driven, ambitious, very goal- and achievement-oriented, and she strived for perfection in more ways than one. Yet, her determination never quite had this cutthroat quality to it, she was never malicious, and her recognition of her self-worth never became arrogance even for a millisecond. Hermione was benevolent, incredibly goofy under her professional attire and long discussions on political philosophy, and she loved with everything she had—Lily knew it perfectly well. And for a love like that, an incredible, exquisite person like Hermione to be spent on some who not only didn’t deserve it, but could never match it, match her? That was something Lily never understood.
Because she knew Hermione. She knew that Hermione needed a boyfriend—a partner who would be equal to her, just as driven as she is, but secretly soft under the carefully crafted surface. She needed and, Lily knew, wanted someone who would support and understand her desire to advance her career; someone who could understand missed dinners and late nights after taking over a new job, doing tasks of at least four people, and partially running a presidential campaign.
And if something in the back of Lily’s mind told her that she was that person, that she understood and supported, and that she was just as driven and ambitious as Hermione, yet still incredibly gentle and loving—she chose to ignore it. Because Hermione looked at her and smiled oh-so-brightly, the first real smile this evening ever since the stunt Marlene pulled, and asked Lily if they could leave right now, because she really wanted to curl up under a blanket, drink some wine, and talk for hours about plans and strategies before falling asleep.
She immediately said yes.
It was Hermione , after all; what other choice did Lily ever have?