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Harry dreamed of summer.
Warm, golden, painfully real.
The Burrow smelled of apple pie and sun-heated wood. Somewhere upstairs George was shouting about something exploding, Mrs. Weasley was yelling back, Ginny was laughing outside.
And Hermione sat across from Harry at the kitchen table, reading.
As always.
He had noticed long ago that happiness, for him, almost always looked exactly like this.
“You’re staring again,” she murmured without looking up from her book.
“What else am I supposed to do?”
“Get a life?”
“Sounds exhausting.”
A quiet laugh escaped her.
And it felt so natural, so terrifyingly right, that Harry never stopped to wonder why every beautiful moment carried the ache of something already lost.
As though the world itself knew this couldn’t last.
After the war, Hogwarts felt different.
Too quiet.
Too old.
The returning eighth-years were no longer really students. Not after the Battle. The professors treated them less like children now and more like survivors trying to assemble lives from ruins.
Ron and Hermione lived together in the Head Boy and Head Girl suite.
Their lives had folded together so naturally neither of them could have said when it happened.
Hermione’s books covered half the common room.
Ron’s Quidditch magazines and chess sets spread across the other half.
Her mug appeared beside his bed every morning.
His jumpers somehow ended up draped over her chairs.
They studied together, argued together, fell asleep beside the fire together.
Sometimes Ron would wake in the middle of the night and find Hermione curled against his side, one hand tangled in his shirt in her sleep.
It felt safe.
Solid.
Almost like a marriage they had accidentally wandered into too young.
And every evening after dinner, Hermione left.
Always at the same time.
Always carrying another book.
Always going to the hospital wing.
To Harry.
At first, Ron had understood.
Everyone had.
Harry Potter had defeated Voldemort — and never woken up afterward.
Of course Hermione visited him.
Of course she sat beside his bed reading aloud for hours.
Of course she refused to let him lie there alone.
The first few weeks, Ron had even gone with her sometimes.
But weeks became months.
And still Hermione disappeared into the hospital wing every single night.
One evening Ron finally said it.
“You know he can’t hear you, right?”
Hermione paused near the fireplace, clutching a book against her chest.
“You don’t know that.”
“Hermione...”
“When I was Petrified in second year,” she interrupted softly, “Harry came to visit me every day.”
Ron fell silent.
“He sat beside my bed and talked to me even though everyone said it was pointless. He brought me homework. Quidditch scores. Ridiculous stories about Hagrid.”
A faint smile flickered across her face.
“He hates hospitals. He hates sitting still. But he came anyway.”
Ron looked down at the fire.
“That’s different.”
“Is it?”
“Yes,” he said quietly. “Because I think somewhere along the way this stopped being about paying him back.”
Silence filled the room.
Hermione didn’t answer.
And somehow that hurt more than if she had.
Autumn arrived without warning.
Now Harry and Hermione lived in a small flat above a Muggle bookshop. Rain tapped softly against the windows.
Harry woke in the middle of the night and watched her standing by the window.
“Why aren’t you asleep?” he asked sleepily.
“Thinking.”
“Dangerous habit.”
She smiled faintly, but there was sadness in it.
“Harry…”
“Mhm?”
A long silence.
“If things had been different… would you have told me sooner?”
Harry frowned.
“Told you what?”
But she had already turned back toward the rain.
And suddenly something felt wrong.
He couldn’t remember moving into this flat.
Couldn’t remember a single day between the war and this moment.
Entire years seemed blurred at the edges.
Like pages torn from a book.
“You went to see him again.”
This time Ron didn’t sound angry.
Only tired.
Hermione froze in the doorway of their suite, still holding her books.
The fire had almost burned out.
“Yes.”
“You were there three hours.”
“I was reading to him.”
Ron laughed softly.
Without humor.
“He’s in a coma, Hermione.”
“I know.”
“Then why?”
She slowly removed her cloak.
“He shouldn’t be alone.”
“And what about me?”
Her head lifted sharply.
Ron looked at her for a long moment.
At her exhausted eyes.
At the way she always returned from the hospital wing looking softer and sadder at the same time.
At the expression on her face that belonged to no one else.
And suddenly he asked quietly:
“Do you even realize we practically live together?”
“Ron...”
“No, seriously. It's mental! We wake up together. Eat together. Fall asleep together. You steal my jumpers. You yell at me about socks like we’ve been married for ten years.”
Despite herself, Hermione smiled.
And somehow that made it worse.
Because for one horrible moment Ron could see the life they might actually have had.
And every night she still walked away from it.
Snow.
Hogwarts again.
Hermione walked beside him across the courtyard, talking quickly about Ministry reforms, pink-cheeked from the cold.
Harry barely listened.
He watched snowflakes catching in her hair.
Watched the easy familiarity of her beside him.
As though she had always belonged there.
“Are you happy?” she asked suddenly.
Harry blinked.
“Yeah.”
“Really?”
“Hermione…”
He smiled.
But she didn’t smile back.
She only looked at him with unbearable sadness.
“Then why does it feel like you’re leaving?”
The wind struck his face.
And with it came another sound.
“…can’t keep living only for him!”
Ron’s voice.
Distant.
Muffled.
As though through walls.
Hermione flinched.
And the world tilted.
“I am not living only for him!”
“Then why are you there every single night?!”
Ron stood barefoot in the middle of their common room, disheveled and exhausted.
So heartbreakingly domestic that Hermione’s chest tightened.
“Because he’s my best friend!”
“People don’t look at their best friends the way you look at him!”
Silence.
Heavy.
Ron dragged a hand down his face.
Then, more quietly:
“You come back from the hospital wing looking like you left part of yourself behind.”
Hermione turned away.
Because that was exactly what it felt like.
Spring.
Sunlight stretched across the grass beside the Black Lake.
Hermione sat beside him with her arms wrapped around her knees, staring out over the water.
And suddenly Harry realized he didn’t know what year it was.
Didn’t know how old they were.
His thoughts drifted apart like smoke.
“Hermione…”
She turned toward him.
And his heart clenched painfully.
Because her eyes were red from crying.
“What happened?”
She smiled — tender and hopeless all at once.
“Nothing.”
“You’ve been crying.”
“A little.”
“Why?”
Hermione looked at him as though the answer should have been obvious.
“Because you still won’t wake up.”
The world froze.
White walls bled through the sunlight.
The sharp scent of potions.
A hand gripping his tightly.
“Harry.”
Her real voice trembled.
“Please.”
And suddenly he understood.
There had been no flat.
No peaceful future.
No years together.
Only Hermione’s voice beside his bed.
Only fragments of arguments slipping into his dreams.
Only his desperate need to remain wherever she was.
“Don’t go,” he whispered.
And for the first time, he didn’t know which of them he meant.
Hermione closed her eyes.
“Then come back to me. Wake up!”
The world shattered.
Harry gasped awake.
White ceiling.
Hospital wing.
The crushing heaviness of his body.
And Hermione jerking upright so quickly her book crashed to the floor.
“Harry?”
He stared at her, trying to reconcile the two versions of the same person.
The girl from his dreams.
And the real Hermione — exhausted, tear-stained, alive.
“You…” His voice broke.
She covered her mouth with trembling fingers.
Then suddenly she was leaning over him, desperate and terrified, kissing him as though she was afraid he might vanish again.
The kiss was wet with tears and completely imperfect.
Real.
At that exact moment, the hospital wing door opened.
Ron stopped in the doorway.
Saw them.
Their clasped hands.
Hermione’s face.
The way Harry looked at her.
And slowly let out a breath.
There was no anger left in it.
Only the exhaustion of someone who had spent too long trying to fight something inevitable.
Hermione pulled away abruptly.
“Ron...”
But he shook his head.
And for the first time in months, he smiled without bitterness.
"I’m leaving, but I’ll be back later. My friend has woken up!"