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Hermione, Third Year, the library
I used to believe the library could save anyone—if you were only willing to stay long enough among the spines and the dust. Justice was the neatness of a footnote, the clarity of a citation. If something was unfair, it must be because we hadn’t found the right book yet. That’s what I told myself as I copied statutes until my knuckles ached and the oil lamp made my cheeks burn. Somewhere, surely, someone had already written down the right words to keep a Hippogriff from dying for a boy’s pride.
I was on my sixth book of the evening, and the parchment had gone soft at the corners from my handling. I was trying not to think about Hagrid’s shaky smile or how Buckbeak had blinked at me with the mild and ancient eyes of a creature that assumed the world would be fair if you only bowed correctly.
He moved into my periphery as if the lamp had conjured him—long limbs and uncertain shoulders, the familiar rustle of a jumper that always seemed to belong to another brother before him. “All right?” Ron asked, and I wanted to say yes because it’s easier to be all right for someone else. Instead, I lifted the quill and managed a sort of nod, more of a flinch than an assent.
He stood there, not quite brave enough to sit, ruffling his hair like he always did when he was nervous. “I’ve been thinkin’,” he said, which made me glance up.
“Yes?” I asked, and hated the breathless hope in it.
“I’ll help,” he said.
Just that.
It should not have undone me. Help was an obvious conclusion; any decent person would offer. But the law books were cold, and my hands were colder, and I had been so alone inside my head. It felt as if someone had opened a window in a stale room. My chest expanded against invisible bindings, and before I could think of all the reasons to remain at the table—decorum, dignity, the library rules—I was already up, already moving.
I hugged him.
I didn’t plan it. I didn’t even think I would do it, but my arms had their own logic. His jumper scratched my cheek, familiar and earnest, its scent blanketing my anxiety in an instant. He went perfectly still, then somehow even stiller, which is a feat for a boy who is mostly restless angles. I could feel the surprise ricochet through him, and my face burned as bright as the lamp on the library desk.
I quickly released him, as if hugging him was a transgression that would be punished if prolonged. Back at the table, I pretended to search for a page that wasn’t there, turned paper with fingers that weren’t steady. I tried to imagine my way back to the comfort of rules, but the words were suddenly shy; they avoided my eyes.
“Right,” he said, and I heard the swallow in it. “Er—right. We’ll… we’ll figure it out.”
We. Why did the word sound different when it came from him?
When I finally made it back to the common room, I put the books neatly in a stack and sat by the window, watching the black lake shudder at the shore like a creature thinking its own thoughts about the storm approaching in the distance. I told myself it was just relief that had made me hold on to him. I told myself it was gratitude.
But later, under the curtains, the hush of my breathing seemed louder than any storm, and my skin remembered the shape of someone who had surprised me by simply deciding to stand inside the same fear. A single, unremarkable hug—as brief as a candle flicker, as ordinary as toast—and the axis of my small, stubborn universe had shifted half a degree toward a boy who hadn’t meant to be remarkable at all.
I dreamed of feathers and chains, and of warmth where there had only been cold.
Ron, Fourth Year, Great Hall, bottom of the staircase
The castle swallowed her footsteps one by one, each sharp tap cracking up the stairs until even the echo got fed up and vanished. What rushed in after wasn’t quiet — not really. It was the sort of silence that made your ears ring, all sharp edges and nowhere to look. It sliced the space between me and Harry like someone had taken a bloody Severing Charm to the air itself.
I stood there at the foot of the staircase, hands still half-curled, useless, like they couldn’t decide whether they were meant to punch a hole clean through the wall or not. Anger buzzed through me, raw and unfiltered, fizzing at the ends of my nerves like I’d stuck my fingers somewhere I shouldn’t have. It made my hands twitch, made my breathing go wrong, made my heart thump too hard and not quite in time.
Hermione had been right there — cheeks flushed, eyes bright and furious, every bit of her drawn tight like she was holding herself together by force — and now she was gone. Vanished. Harry stood next to me, silent, looking like he’d taken a Bludger to the chest even though he hadn’t said more than a couple of useless words the whole time. I didn’t look at him. Couldn’t. The spot on the staircase where she’d shouted back at me held my eyes like a curse.
The anger was the easy part. Familiar. Like an old coat you don’t even think about putting on because it’s always there, hanging within reach. She’d glided into the ball with Krum on her arm — Viktor bloody Krum — the world’s favourite Seeker, the sort of bloke people plastered on posters and whispered about in corners like he was something holy. And she’d smiled. Properly smiled. The kind that made something ugly twist in my gut.
And she hadn’t said a word beforehand.
Not to Harry.
Not to me.
Especially not to me.
When I’d confronted her — her chin up, her voice shaking, fire shooting out of every bloody syllable — something in me had gone sideways. Snapped wrong. I’d heard myself accuse her of rubbish I didn’t even believe, because believing the real thing would’ve hurt too much. It was easier to shout. Easier to be furious. Easier to pretend I had some kind of right to be.
But now the fury, so quick to flare, started to sputter like a lamp running out of oil. Behind it came something slower. Colder. Something that didn’t shout — just crept. Slid. Wrapped itself up my spine.
Jealousy.
I’d felt it before — plenty of times, if I was honest — but never like this. Never with greedy fingers tightening around my ribs, slow and deliberate, like it was taking its time deciding where I’d crack. Jealousy wasn’t a coat; it was a bruise. The sort that doesn’t just show up by accident, but darkens because you keep bloody pressing it.
Not because you forget where it hurts—but because you know exactly where to hit.
Because some miserable, thick part of you wants to check if it still aches. Wants to feel it again, just to make sure it’s yours.
And then my head, traitorous thing, started throwing images at me like it had a personal grudge.
Hermione hugging Harry after the First Task — her smile warm and relieved in a way I’d never seen aimed at me. Those weeks after his name came out of the Goblet still clung on, no matter how much I pretended they didn’t. How we hadn’t spoken. How I’d stomped around acting like I didn’t care while secretly waiting — stupidly — for him to look back at me and say it was all a joke. We were fine now, yeah, but that silence still stuck, like soot you never quite scrub off. And Hermione had been there for him. Always there. Hugging him like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Harry never meant any of it. I know that. I’ve always known that. But knowing doesn’t shut the feeling up. It’s daft and selfish — Mum would’ve told me off straight away — but when your whole life’s been elbows and hand-me-downs and fighting to be heard over six siblings, being best mates with the Boy Who Lived sometimes feels like trying to be noticed in a bloody snowstorm.
I know I should be proud.
I am proud.
But some twisted bit of me keeps whispering that I’ll always be standing just behind him in every picture anyone remembers.
Maybe that’s why the tightness got worse when I saw her laughing — actually laughing — the kind that shook her shoulders, made her hair catch the light like it never bloody had for me. And there was Krum, of all people, twirling her around like she belonged there. Like she belonged to him. She looked happy. Happier than she’d looked in weeks of nagging me about homework or rolling her eyes when I said something thick.
It was stupid, wasn’t it? To feel something inside me unravel just because she smiled at someone else. Because someone else had seen something brilliant in her — something dazzling — and gone for it without hesitating.
I hated it.
I hated him.
I hated that she’d said yes.
I hated that she looked damn beautiful tonight.
I hated that I’d noticed.
Mostly, I hated the bit of me that already knew this had sod all to do with Krum.
Harry shifted beside me — barely anything — but it dragged me back just enough to notice my breathing was off and my nails had carved half-moon marks into my palms.
“Ron…” he said, quiet, careful.
I didn’t answer. Couldn’t. If I opened my mouth, everything tangled up inside me might spill out, and I had no desire to hear it said aloud. Words were dangerous. I’d proved that already.
So I stared at the staircase instead and let the jealousy sit there, filthy and pathetic, making me feel like the youngest kid again — scrapping for attention no one had ever promised me.
Krum got a smile, a dance. Harry got a hug.
What did I ever get?
A glare.
A shouting match.
A girl running away from me like she couldn’t stand to be anywhere near me.
Then something else crept in—not guilt. Not exactly. Something heavier.
It felt inevitable. Like, of course, this was how it ended. Of course, she’d run. Of course, I’d wreck it without even knowing what it was.
The feeling settled in without fuss, without needing a name. It just dug in, familiar and solid, rooting itself under my ribs.
Hermione was upstairs now. Gone from the place I couldn’t stop staring at. Gone from the argument. Gone from the air that still tasted like her anger.
And me?
I was right where I always ended up after everything went to hell — standing still, staring at the space someone else had just left, telling myself not to wonder what I’d done wrong, telling myself even harder not to expect I deserved anything better than this.
The silence didn’t soften.
It pressed closer.
I let it.
Hermione, Sixth Year, the stairs leading to the girls' dormitory
The common room was still humming faintly with the remnants of laughter — Lavender’s laughter most of all — and it clung to the walls like intense perfume. I’d escaped before anyone could see my face, but I hadn’t made it far. Just to the narrow landing of the girls’ staircase, where the torchlight didn’t quite reach, and the bannister felt cool against the side of my shaking hand.
I sat, letting the tears fall quietly, carefully, as though noise might make everything worse. Crying never solved anything; I knew that. But I couldn’t get the picture out of my mind — Ron’s hands on Lavender’s waist, fingers splayed with a confidence he had never used on anything delicate in his entire life. Lavender’s arms looped around his neck. Their ridiculous, eager silhouettes pressed together in the corner of the common room as if the whole world had been waiting for this moment.
As if I had not been waiting there at all.
I tried to tell myself I was being irrational — that I was overreacting, misinterpreting, personalizing something that had nothing whatsoever to do with me. But the words sounded like they had been copied from a book written for someone cleverer, calmer, more reasonable than I was.
It shouldn’t hurt this much.
It shouldn’t feel like something inside me had been pressed to the point of suffocation.
But watching him kiss her—his face so open, so hungry, so happy—had been like mistaking a wound for a scratch.
Lavender Brown.
Pretty, golden, enthusiastic Lavender Brown. With her glossy curls and her warm, easy laugh and the way she made a room feel like a party you hadn’t been invited to but desperately wished you could attend.
Of course, Ron would kiss her. Of course, he would choose someone like her. Someone who didn’t correct his pronunciation of Wingardium Leviosa, someone who giggled instead of arguing, someone who looked at him like he was extraordinary instead of exasperating.
Next to her, I felt like a school book—something useful, perhaps, but hardly what anyone would pick out and admire.
I dragged my sleeve across my cheeks, impatiently.
This was ridiculous. I was being ridiculous.
Harry didn’t make me feel like this. Harry was steady, constant, uncomplicated in his affection. He never forgot I mattered. He didn’t have to be reminded. Our friendship fit neatly into a category I understood—loyal, necessary, anchored by shared battles and mutual trust. I love him dearly. But the shape of that love had never confused me.
I pressed my knuckles to my mouth as if that would help my thoughts from spiralling further.
Ron was different. Infuriatingly, disastrously different.
One moment, he was oblivious, childish, loud—the next he was unexpectedly kind, unexpectedly brave, unexpectedly… warm.
He had warmth.
Ridiculous, clumsy, lopsided warmth that could fill a room or break it entirely.
When I’d invited him to Slughorn’s party, I thought—well, I don’t know what I thought. Only that it felt like handing someone a page torn from your own diary and waiting to see if they recognized the handwriting. I’d given him an opening, hadn’t I? A hint. A beginning. Something.
But he hadn’t taken it.
He’d barely looked at it.
And then tonight—Lavender’s arms around him, his face buried in her hair—as if my invitation had been just another homework question he meant to ignore until it expired.
A fresh wave of something—jealousy or fury or grief, I couldn’t tell—surged through me, hot enough to make me curl forward on the stairs. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that he could wound me so deeply without even realizing he held a weapon.
Why did it hurt like this?
Why did it feel like betrayal when he had promised me nothing?
Why did I keep comparing myself to girls who didn’t care about grades or House Cups or whether their socks matched, girls who floated through life on charm and curls and smiles I could never quite replicate?
Why did he kiss her like that?
Why not—
I shut the thought down before it could finish shaping itself.
The common room below had grown quieter now. I felt the loneliness spread, slow and spacious, taking over every inch of me. The staircase around me seemed too big, too hollow, as if my small sorrow echoed in its gaps.
I wrapped my arms around my knees, pressing them to my chest. The tears had stopped, but the tightness remained, lodged somewhere deep, somewhere I didn’t have the vocabulary to name.
I wasn’t angry anymore.
Or jealous.
Or even hurt in the sharp, immediate way I had been moments ago.
I was simply… alone.
A girl sitting halfway between where she’d come from and where she was meant to go next, suspended on a staircase that led only upward when what she wanted—what she feared she wanted—was something downstairs she could no longer reach.
I rested my forehead on my knees, breathing in the dim, dust-scented shadows.
Somewhere behind me, a door clicked shut.
Somewhere above, the dormitory light flickered.
No one called my name.
And for the first time all evening, I let myself feel the weight of that truth.
Ron, Seventh Year, the Burrow garden
I didn’t think about her when we were in the air. I couldn’t, not really, not if I wanted to keep myself and Tonks alive. Thinking about her would make the sky tilt, make my aim go wide, make me lean into a curse I should’ve leaned away from. So I didn’t. I thought about the turn of the broom, the bruised taste of the wind, the thrum that ran from the wood into my bones like the broom was a living thing and I was borrowing its pulse.
But when I hit the ground at the Burrow—legs wobbling, hands numb, heart like a Snitch in a fist—the quiet after the noise felt wrong. There were too many gaps where people should be. Too much shouting that hadn’t found its names yet.
I hadn’t realised I’d been keeping track — heads, voices, the exact way each person fills a room — until she wasn’t there.
And then she was.
Hermione came at me out of the doorway like a madwoman, hair wild and eyes too bright. I’d never seen her look like that without a book in her hand. She didn’t say anything—just hit me in the chest with a hug so fierce it knocked me back a step.
I didn’t mind. There are worse ways to lose your balance.
For a second, my arms did nothing, useless as fenceposts. I’d never quite hugged her like that before, and it felt like walking into a room you thought you knew and finding a door where you thought was just brick. Then my hands found her — one at her back, one behind her head — and the way she fit against me made a kind of sense I didn’t know I’d been missing. Her face pressed into my shoulder; her breath was uneven. Something wet hit my neck, and I couldn’t tell if it was rain or her or me.
“I’m all right,” I told her, voice scraped raw by the wind. “I’m—Hermione—I’m all right.”
She made a sound that wasn’t a word—fear coming undone—and I felt it shake straight through me. I’d been hugged before, obviously, but never like this. Like if she let go, I might vanish. I knew that wasn’t true—the world’s cruel, but it’s not theatrical—but I didn’t say it. I held on harder. I wanted her to feel the solid, ordinary fact of me: sweat, broom dust, the dull throb where a curse had skimmed my sleeve.
People were talking. Someone started counting again. The Burrow’s kitchen smelled like singed pastry and potion smoke. All of it stayed at the edge of the hug, like scenery trying not to interrupt. In the middle, there was only her. The witch who writes the world down until it makes sense.
She pulled away eventually, apologising to nothing in particular, as if the air had been inconvenienced. She shoved her hair back, wiped at her face, tried to smile. I felt a stupid rush of relief that she still cared about looking put together. If she’d stopped caring about that, it would’ve meant the war had got her too.
I wanted to say something clever. Or brave. Or at least convincing. Something that would make her laugh and then scold me for it, because she wants to be furious and it never quite sticks. But all I had was a breath that wouldn’t go in properly and a heart doing whatever it liked. So I reached out — awkward, almost— brushed a tear away with my thumb, and let my hand drop before it could be mistaken for courage.
That night, in my old room with the ceiling that still remembered my childhood, I didn’t sleep. The house was breathing the way the Burrow does—boards settling, pipes gossiping, portraits tutting when they think you can’t hear. I lay there and kept finding the shape of her against me. The fact of her had stamped itself onto my skin.
I told myself it was fear. You hold people tighter when you almost lose them. But that wasn’t all of it. There was something else — something that made my chest ache in a way that wasn’t a wound. A deep, inconvenient rightness. Like a key you didn’t know you had, finally meeting the lock in a door you’d always assumed was just for decoration.
Hermione, Malfoy Manor
Pain at that level becomes geography. There’s a country under your skin you’ve never visited until someone drags you there, and the roads are made of nerves, and they all lead to the same burning capital. I lost track of language. I lost track of my name when they spat it out like something ugly. I held on to nothing except the idea of not giving them more than I had to. It turns out “more than I have to” is a concept that stretches.
The chandelier creaked above me, and even through the pain-haze, I understood it. It spoke a language I recognised — the grammar of catastrophe, the syntax of the final straw. I translated it without thinking: soon.
I heard him before the chain sang its last note. He tore my name out of the air as if the syllables themselves could be a net.
“Hermione!”
The sound was fire and plea and something raw enough to hurt. It made me want to answer — I’m here, I’m here — even though I wasn’t certain where here was anymore.
Then the world fell. Bright. Hard. Indifferent.
There is a moment when the body understands the physics before the mind does. The stomach drops. The spine forgets its purpose. The eyes turn into useless mirrors.
And then: arms.
They locked around me with a force that almost hurt, real and shaking and alive. I smelled smoke and the familiar rough wool of his jumper. I felt his breath stutter beneath my cheek, the frantic metronome of his heart tapping like a teacher calling for order in a classroom.
“Got you,” he rasped, and there was more power in it than I would have thought possible.
I made a sound that wasn’t a word. My fingers found the weave at his shoulder and clutched like a climber with nothing between them and the ground. My body remembered what safety felt like, and for a moment, it confused safety with him—or perhaps that wasn’t confusion at all. Pain was still shouting, but relief had entered the room, and it wore his voice.
I wanted to tell him that I heard him calling me back. That I had heard his voice not as panic but as proof. That even in the darkest of rooms, there are cracks of light if someone says your name like a prayer. But my mouth was thick with ache, and my throat tasted like iron, and all I could do was press closer until his arms tightened and the world narrowed to the small, stubborn fact that we were, against some odds, two people still capable of holding on.
Hermione, The Battle of Hogwarts
Hope sounds like a lie in a burning castle. It stands there — smoke-voiced and patient — insisting that survival is not arbitrary even as debris keeps choosing people at random. I kept trying to impose order on the chaos in my head the way I always have; I kept moving, kept chasing what needed doing. I am not brave in the way that ends up on posters. I am brave in the way that keeps lists.
By dawn, the lists had dissolved. There were only names and prayers and the unsteady arithmetic of survival. And in the middle of it, Ron’s hand found mine.
It wasn’t romantic. That’s what made it holy. Our fingers collided, clumsy with grime and adrenaline, and then, without conversation, they stayed. Every almost we had ever collected—glances dropped like quills, hands lifted and lowered, the soft unspoken just after a laugh—rose up around us like ghosts and watched to see if we’d try again to pass each other like trains at night.
We didn’t. We stopped. We turned.
The room slowed the way a dream does when it decides it has been noticed. Spells screamed like comets; the stone floor shook under the tantrum of a living castle, and I could hear someone sobbing behind a tapestry as if grief could stitch itself out of sight.
His face was dirty and dear. The boy from the library had become a man who knew how to lift a friend’s weight and carry it. He was talking — breathless, earnest, unpolished — about the house-elves. About choice. About how bravery shouldn’t be something you conscript from the small and the loyal just because they’ve always been taught to say yes. He wasn’t eloquent. He didn’t cite precedent or build an argument. He simply meant it, with his whole, battered heart.
And something in me gave way.
I had spent years believing that if I could only find the right words — the right framing, the right evidence — the world might be persuaded to be kinder. But standing there, listening to him speak with no footnotes at all, I understood that there are moments when reason is not the sharpest tool we have. Some truths don’t wait to be proven.
There is an art to not overthinking, and I have studied it in secret. It requires a surrender that feels like casting a spell without a wand. I let the sentences go. I let the arguments, the categories, the footnotes go. I let it all burn into thin air.
I moved.
Ron, The Battle of Hogwarts
I’d always thought a moment like that would announce itself. Fireworks, maybe. A pause in the fighting. Something that said this matters before it happened. Instead, it turned up knackered and out of breath in the Room of Requirement, surrounded by broken furniture, frightened people, and the sort of mess you only get when everyone’s been making the worst decisions of their lives all at once.
I was talking. Of all things, I was talking about the house-elves—about how they shouldn’t be sent down into the kitchens, about how they deserved a choice, about how it wasn’t right to ask them to die just because they’d always been told to say yes. It came out rough and rushed, like most things do when I care too much and don’t know how to sound clever about it.
Hermione stopped dead.
I remember thinking I’d said something wrong. Wouldn’t have been the first time. I was halfway to bracing myself for a lecture — something brisk and brilliant and just — when she turned on me, eyes bright and fierce in a way that made my stomach drop.
She didn’t argue.
She didn’t explain.
She grabbed the front of my jumper and kissed me.
Bloody hell.
That was my entire thought. Not poetic. Not heroic. Just shock, pure and ringing, like someone had boxed my ears from the inside. For half a second my brain simply… left. Packed up its things and went somewhere quieter.
Then my body caught up.
Her mouth was warm and sure and completely unapologetic about being there. It wasn’t careful. It wasn’t planned. It was the sort of kiss you throw like a punch because there isn’t time to ask permission. I made a noise—absolutely humiliating, probably—and my hands came up on instinct, like they’d been waiting years for instructions they finally understood.
The world lurched. Not metaphorically—properly lurched. Everything blurred: the shouting, the crashes, the war banging on about its business outside the door. All of it fell away, and there was just her, close and real and choosing me like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
I don’t know who kissed who harder. I only know it wasn’t graceful. We bumped noses. I stepped on something that crunched. Grace can sod off; grace has nothing to do with this. This was the heat and stunned relief of finally understanding what all those almosts had been queuing up for.
When she pulled back—because she did, eventually—she looked a bit breathless and a bit wild and exactly like someone who’d made a decision and wasn’t about to apologise for it.
For once, I didn’t say something stupid.
I just looked at her and thought, Right. This. This is it.
The castle was still falling apart around us. People still needed help. The war hadn’t paused for our benefit, and it wasn’t going to. But something had shifted anyway—something small and solid and stubborn.
We weren’t done.
We were just no longer doing it alone.
Hermione
I pressed my forehead to his for the span of a breath and closed my eyes. It is foolish, perhaps, to want words at a time like that, but words have always been my scaffolding, and I could feel the structure sway. I searched for something solid enough to brace the moment and found that nothing held except the simplest, most indecent truth.
I don’t know whether I said it aloud or only felt it scorch the back of my throat, but it has lived in me like a candle ever since: I have been walking for so long, and this is the first door that did not make me feel as though I was trespassing.
We moved again, because we had to, because the world does not pause even when it ought, but something essential had shifted. The map had gained a new mark. The long corridor of almosts had opened into a room with light.
I remember the heat of his palm at my back as we ran; the rough certainty of our fingers finding each other again when we were torn apart; the way he said my name now—not like a shout hurled into the void, but like a promise already kept. There were still terrors ahead, and after. There always are. But sometimes your spine is not the only thing holding you upright.
Ron
Later—much later, after the smoke and the counting and the math of who remained—I sat with her on a step where the stone was still warm. The castle groaned as if it had a back that ached. She leaned into me and pretended not to; I leaned into her and didn’t pretend at all. We didn’t talk. Not because there was nothing to say, but because words are for building bridges when there’s a river between you, and we were, finally, on the same bank.
I thought about the times she’d crashed into my life like that, and how each one had built a room inside me. The library, where I learned I could be more than a joke. The Burrow, where I learned fear sometimes wears relief as a disguise. The manor, where I learned that catching someone is a kind of prayer; and now, this—where I learned home isn’t a house.
Her hand found mine in the rubble and held on—not tight, not desperate, just certain. I don’t know who we’ll be when the shouting fades, and ordinary life comes back, asking its small, persistent questions. I only know that she chose me; her hand is exactly where it needs to be.
Ron and Hermione
We stood. The day kept happening. People asked for things, and we gave them. The dead did what the dead always do — taught the living how to carry on. We walked the corridors as though we had always been walking together, and in a way, we had.
The hugs turned out to be milestones we hadn’t known we were setting down for our future selves. You were here, they said. You were here, and you didn’t run. And now you are here again. Each one had been brief — life rarely allows more — but their echoes stretched when we listened closely. We could have lived an entire life in the aftersound.
When the world finally softened enough to let us be foolish, we kissed again. Not to prove anything, not to seal a victory, but because desire is a form of gratitude, and we were grateful to still have bodies that answered to us. We laughed into each other’s mouths — ridiculous with relief, solemn with love, untidy in the way only survivors are allowed to be.
And then—quietly, like a truth that doesn’t need witnesses—the words came.
They weren’t clever.
They weren’t polished.
They were simply true.