Chapter Text
When the train leaves Platform 9 ¾ on September 1st ‘98, it is hard to avoid the memory of all the other times they rode it together. Like all the good things that have a premature end, Ron had not known his last journey in Hogwarts Express was the actual last. Perhaps, he should have. Certainly, he had more information on the future threats than most wizards in Britain then – enough that a part of his mind suspected it. The key difference between intuition and cognition is that the second is most usually attainable by hindsight.
But never in a thousand years, Ron would have imagined that Hermione, Harry and him could have taken the journey without the other. It is odd that he is not boarding this time. Not as odd as the fact that Hermione is, on her own. This was not a decision they came easily to. When she first announced she was going back to the school, Ron considered joining her – that’s what they do, isn’t it? Support each other. Even Harry, Merlin knows, made a show of deliberating on the matter, though they all knew he never truly entertained the possibility. Ron, however, he could have done it. Walked the halls where his brother was killed, pretended to have any interest in having an education. For the love of his life, he could have done it. Maybe. The thing is: the cost would be too high. Not even the strongest relationship can survive ultimate sacrifice – and then, their relationship was as fragile as glass.
To him, that chapter of their lives was closed aeons in the past (one year, more precisely), lost in the fight for what truly matters. For Hermione, who grew up thinking herself a future scholar well before knowing about magic, school was unfinished. So, they take on different paths, promises of letters and dates on their lips.
Their first months apart are surprisingly easy. During the week, they work themselves to exhaustion – Ron picking up extra patrol shifts, Hermione taking as many extracurriculars as possible. And on the weekends when she visits, they have countless subjects to talk and nag each other on.
Public outings become something to be avoided. The media has yet to tire of them, swarming around like flies around pumpkin pie – a novel concept that soon becomes tiring when Ron realises the press has no interest whatsoever in telling the truth about them. The consequence of that is that they spend a lot of time snuggling on the couch, sometimes alone, others in the company of Harry or another of their housemates.
Around November, nonetheless, her replies to his letters start to decrease, first in size and then in frequency. By December, she finds excuses to arrive on Saturday afternoon, instead of Friday evening, and once, she entirely misses out the weekend, some half-hearted excuse at her tongue.
When he talks Harry about it, his best friend shrugs and comments something like: well, mate, it's the exams and Hermione. You won’t ever replace her first love – which, admittedly, might be true, but also utterly unhelpful. Harry proceeds to ask him about Ginny and Ron decides his best friend is distracted and entirely useless at the matter. Neither of them are good at advising on romance and it will take them many years to become somewhat passable on it.
Then, Ron goes to his sister, hoping to rely on her observation skills and presence in Hogwarts to give him reports. Ginny remarks that she is swamped, sure. I’m too, with Quidditch and all. Though, you’re dating Hermione, so I guess her thing is more studying. In sequence, she proceeds to ask: say, how’s Auror life treating you and Harry?
By the manner she pronounces her ex-boyfriend’s name, Ron understands she is not really asking about himself. He is glad when his moronic best friend and his arsehole sister start dating again at the end of the year. He wouldn’t be able to cope with any more pining of either of them, really.
His situation with Hermione is way more difficult to make sense of. They are still dating and, on the surface, they seem fine together. In the past, he would have gladly taken their relationship as it is. But, they are adults now, are they not? He is not supposed to ignore the faults and hope they work out on their own. That winter is a cold and lonely one, as Hermione does her best at avoiding him and Ron tries to understand why. She said once that he had the emotional range of a teaspoon. He thinks he might have missed something everyone else would find obvious.
Fear is a complex thing. Last year by December, he feared that he would never find his friends again, that they would die in a ditch and the world would fall under Voldermort’s rule. He feared finding out his family was dead, months after the deed was done. Now, he fears that his girlfriend is just not in love with him as he is with her and that she is waiting for the right moment to break up with him. Perhaps, she realised she doesn’t want to be with the coward who abandoned her and their friend in the woods at the first sign of hardship, with the fate of the world in their hands. He can not blame her, if that is the case. Ron thinks it might be easier to confront his fears when the stakes are life and death, than when the stakes are just pain. So, he stays silent. Takes what she can give him and even tries to provide her the opportunities to avoid him, if she needs it.
Of course, all hell breaks loose on the eve of St. Valentine’s Day.
Sometimes it baffles Hermione, how much of her life was decided by fate tossing a coin to determine her future. When one considers the probability of her ending up on where she is, astonishment is a foregone conclusion.
Edgar and Beatrice Granger met in dentistry school. He had always dreamed of fixing smiles, but Beatrice had a calling for architecture as a girl. The summer before their first meeting, a failed internship in an interior design firm had spoiled her excitement for the profession. Had Beatrice gotten a job somewhere else, or not done it at all, Hermione’s may have never even known each other. Edgar had been nearly engaged with his then-girlfriend. Odds of that relationship not working out had been pretty low, according to her mum herself. Had her dad’s ex not been forced to move to the U.S. to take care of her great-aunt, Edgar and Beatrice would have never had a chance to be together.
The Grangers are both Muggles with no magical ancestors whatsoever, which made the likelihood of a witch being born out of their union infinitesimal. And yet, Hermione is one. When she was five, a teaching opportunity had nearly moved their family back to Jamaica and, to this day, she never found out why it had not worked out. Had they moved, she would have attended Ilvermorny instead of Hogwarts (isn’t that a strange idea?). If Hermione had never been enrolled at Hogwarts, she would not be sorted into Gryffindor, nor would she have met Ron or Harry. How would that have impacted the war? Harry had said oh, we would’ve lost for sure one time they’re talking about it, but she had her doubts. Perhaps, he and Ron would have rescued Lavender Brown from a troll in their first year and turned best friends. Then, one day, when Hermione Granger returned to her country of origin, the headlines of every tabloid would be about Ravender , everything you need to know about the romance of the Chosen One’s best friends .
Perhaps, if all that had happened, she would not feel as if a wall had been slowly built, between her two worlds, Muggle and Magic. It is a wall of her own making – omissions as bricks, white lies as mortar. Having struggled all their lives against racism, her parents had always wanted to protect her from it – and, at eleven, she had feared they would take her out of school, if they knew how much prejudice she faced for her origins. So she lied. And, once started, it was impossible to let the deception go. It was so easy to justify it. Her parents would never truly understand it – how could they, when they were not part of the world? – so she might as well spare them the worry. They would never be able to protect themselves from magic too, so it was her responsibility to make sure they were safe.
Then, while she was making these decisions, Hermion could not picture the severity of her deceit. But, it is undeniable – she stood on one side of the wall and her first family on the other. The gap is there and it might as well be a valley, with how unbridgeable it insists to be.
Hermione believes that divination is, ninety-percent of the time, a hoax. Yet, at times, she wishes there was a way to reign fate in – that a bargain could be struck and confirm a bearable future at the end of it all. There is no future without the actions of the present, though. Those are inescapable.
‘99 starts badly. They had done Christmas at the reconstructed Burrow and that had been fine, albeit depressing. New Year’s Eve, though, takes place on 12 Grimmauld Place. The adults were supposed to come for dinner and then leave the young people to party, but they all end up staying. Firewhisky and gigglewater is broken out of the topshelf and someone enchants all the lamps to blast out rock and blues. The portraits have all been thankfully muffed, so there is nobody to complain about them being loud, celebratory and drunk. Hermione watches the window every other moment, but her parents never swing by, despite promising to do so. They do not come for late lunch on New Year’s Day, either. Instead, they call her on January 3rd and ask to have tea in the British Museum, alone.
Her first encounter with her parents in months is terse in conversation and, she is sure, they are all glad to have the museum as a topic to gloss over the awkwardness. They do not ask her about school and she is also very reluctant to talk about Australia. When she gets back home, Ron is waiting for her with an expectant air. She kisses him all the way to bed and then proceeds to remove their clothing. In the morning, she is on her way back to Hogwarts. She throws herself immediately back at work.
She knows she is not being fair with him, even as she proceeds to deliberately ignore his letters for days and pen the most brief replies she can think of, when the letters are inevitably open. Years after and she is still ashamed of her behaviour during those weeks. Control – it will take many years for her to realise how deeply she craves it. But to love someone, one has to accept that they cannot control others’ feelings, or actions. It is a risk one has to be willing to take – and it takes her a little while to realise the payoff of that particular bet.
St. Valentine’s Day falls on a Sunday that year and Professor McGonagall, in the spirit of young love, calls for a Hogsmeade weekend. Not that anyone above the age of seventeen actually stays in the village – choosing to evade the huge queues that would inevitably form in front Madam Puddifoot’s and even Three Broomsticks over more private encounters with their significant other. Thus, when Ron Weasley apparates into the village to search for his girlfriend inside Hogwarts, he has to rush against the flux of couples going out of the castle, half of which seem to be gawking at him. Why on Earth could not Hermione Granger have saved her boyfriend the hassle and gone to meet him somewhere else, one might ask? Well, that had been the plan, an exasperated Ron ought to point out, until she had sent him a note cancelling their plans for the day, alleging the need to finish an alchemy project.
It must be said in her defence, that Ron does find her inclined over a copy of Ostanes’s Universal Grammatica – not in the library, for she had taken to hiding in the clock tower since the beginning of the year. However, it is not her love of studying that he objects to, but to her complete dismissal of him. Therefore, by the time he finds her, any ounce of control he has over his temper has already been vanished by the effort. What follows is a shouting match that neither party could have recalled afterwards.
After, when they no longer have any breath in their lungs to continue shouting, Hermione tries to remember what she had been thinking when she wrote the letter. She had a reason then, she is sure of it, though nothing comes to mind at the moment. Under her boyfriend’s wrathful glare, she sees the hurt she had caused – has been causing – and she wonders why she had not just gone on with it. It would have been easier. But that is not really fair to them either, is it? She never wishes to pretend with him and so far, she has never needed to.
“– you want out, is that it?” Ron says, after some time. Immediately, she screams no to herself . For a long time now, her heart has been set on him, much longer than her mind knew. Before she can answer, he continues: “You know you gotta use simple words, right? I don’t do cues .”
“Ron –,”
“– who am I kidding? Of course you know that about me. You know everything about me. So why don’t you say it? Please, don’t hold back to spare my feelings. I can take it.”
“Ron –,”
“ – or maybe I can’t. Still, it’s better than being stuck in this limbo. So say it.”
“Ron –,”
“Is this payback? I know I was shitty, but I don’t deserve this. And you’re not a bad person, so I don’t think you’d do this.”
“Ronald Weasley, for once in your life will you listen to me?!”
Her boyfriend goes silent. This is one of the few times she will ever raise her voice in a discussion, but, like in the other occasions, she only does so because her head is full of thoughts, refusing to line in a sensible order like she could usually count on them to do. She opens her mouth a few times, trying to come up with words. Ron, seeing her struggle, offers:
“Now, for a minute there, you sounded like my mother. I’m not sure I like it.”
She chuckles tentatively.
“First, there’s nothing wrong with you – with us,” she explains, when she realises this was his foremost concern. “Or, there is plenty wrong with us, but it is not your fault.”
He is keeping his distance, now, like a scared animal. She does not like that, so she grabs his hand. An apology, perhaps. The gesture quickly turns into one of reassurance – fingers caressing the skin gently, the rhythmic fashion allowing quietness to settle in between.
“I don’t wanna break up. That’s the last thing I want, actually. This is it for me.”
Ron smiles a little. “I’m glad. This is it for me too. But there’s something wrong going on, though.”
She feels some tears warm against her cheek and she kinda hates herself for crying. “There’s too much going on. I feel like I’m losing control. Actually, I feel like I’ve lost control years ago and I’m just now realising how much.”
“I don’t know who I am anymore,” she confesses some time later.
Ron has little experience in comforting someone. He does not have the words that would settle her mind. She doubts he really got her meaning – the control part, at least. Ron Weasley had never felt the need to control anything in his life and that is good, she supposes. She can learn with him how to leave with the chaos. Still, his thumb rubs the back of her hand when tears flood her face. That he tries means something – she had chosen right.
They fight a lot more, Ron and Hermione. They had been fighting since before they were friends, which suggests they will continue to fight into their romance. Quarrels have a different connotation for them than they do to Harry, who grew up in a hostile environment. To him, every confrontation would lead to punishment, but Ron and Hermione were raised in loving households, despite the detriments that came after. To them, conflict is also trust – that they can get past whatever the matter. It is something that they choose to carry over their identities, as they shape them into adults.
The building of someone’s identity is not a finite process – this, Hermione learns as she gets older. It is part of one’s journey to change views, interests, aspirations and relationships. In this process, loss is something constant – one must learn to mourn these partitions of the self and let them be filed away in one’s biography.
Hermione had the opportunity to be acquainted with this process early on, when she left a Muggle existence for a Wizarding one. Later, she finds these mundane fragments of her past and chooses to leave her magical world for a mixed one. This new world has aspects of both her past experiences, but they’re modified by choices she made. Her parents, who had been central figures in her childhood, become secondary characters in her adulthood. This is part due to the mistakes of her making, but mostly a part of the natural process of life. She adds other character to her biography, some have nothing to do with the war and their adolescence at all and others who had been there through thick and thin. Her education, such a pillar of her childhood identity, becomes an afterthought, as she pursues a better world through other means. A bigger goal than just knowledge begins to appear – one that involves applying all her strengths for good.
They have children. In them, she finds the immutable. She discovers herself unable to die for her friends and even for her lover, if that will ensure the misery of her children.
A process of losing and winning, this is what Ron calls it, when they are too old and brittle to do anything but play chess, read and bicker.