Unexpected

Hermione:
Days later Hermione sat in her room doing something she hardly did these days: she stared at herself in the mirror. Despite Dracos’ best efforts she wasn’t gaining weight, the residual anxiety from the war wasn’t ideal for regaining the weight she had lost while on the run, she had sacrificed many things during those months. Food was one of them. Harry and Ron were larger, they needed more.
As she sat there she took in her reflection, she was skinny, maybe too skinny, she wasn’t sleeping well and her hair now hung just above her shoulders. She knew she’d have bad days, she knew the guilt over muggle-borns who had died during the war, who had been so depressed in Azkaban for the crime of simply existing, they didn’t leave the prison alive. The muggle-borns who felt so strongly that they too were a witch or wizard as important as anyone born into the Wizarding world, they had laid their lives on the line and lost them, the guilt she felt from obliviating her her parents, turning her wand on two people who raised her, and learned what they could about a world they didn’t know existed but were thrown into, the guilt crushed her.
She knew Ron had needed her, Fred had died and although she didn’t understand sibling bonds, not having any herself, Harry-the closest thing she’s come to having a brother-was still alive. So she sat with him as he cried and mourned and supported him as he and George re-opened the joke shop. She even made her letting him know that she couldn’t feel anything but friendship for him an extremely gentle affair.
She sat with Ginny as she mourned her brother, and the loss of a what she thought a blossoming relationship with the boy who lived. She was a shoulder to cry on. She provided a shoulder to George as he dyed his hair, much to his mother’s chagrin, using a muggle box dye to turn his once fiery locks brown. She had made sure the back wasn’t patchy. She brought new muggle devices for Arthur when he would go silent after seeing Fred’s empty chair, and even attempted to learn household care for Molly so she could have something to do rather than notice the lack of noise from the twins laughter.
She was a shoulder until the letter from the Australian ministry came and told her that having a child makes up so much of who someone is, and returning those memories would do more harm than good and would likely result in them being long term patients at St. Mungos. So she left them alone and decided to act as if her parents had peacefully passed on. She tried to turn to Ron but received an insincere “at least they’re not actually dead.” George had been helpful and sat with her as she sat in her favourite public library from her childhood. She didn’t feel as if the Weasley parents needed this burden and she didn’t feel as if Ginny liked Hermione all that much, regardless of the comfort she provided the redhead. So she dealt with it alone.
Now as she sat in her room, Draco and Pansy allowing her some much needed alone time with the exception of anything she could harm herself with being taken she let the tears flow freely. She didn’t exactly know why she was crying, it could have been the Weasley’s, so overcome with grief that they were hardly the functioning, happy family that they once were, Ron who she thought she could have loved but didn’t like who he was after the horcrux hunt, her parents who have no idea that this is what their daughter had become, Harry who was so overcome with survivors guilt that he didn’t know that he was a victim as well, or Pansy and Draco two people without a choice yet when given said choice, they began taking care of two people they once thought of as enemies.
She was so caught up in her tears she didn’t hear Draco slip into the room until she felt his arms wrap around her and he began whispering “it’s okay to hurt, it’s okay to grieve.” repeatedly in her ear until they both fell asleep.

Draco:
He knows, deep down he really does know that maybe he’s repressing his emotions. He just doesn’t know how to feel those emotions, but right now, in a dark hallway listening to Hermione as she cries, yet still wanting to give her the space she needs maybe he can allow himself to reflect on his emotions from the last two years. They’re going to be a bitch after the amount of occlumency he’s been using but, whatever.
He didn’t want the mark, not really. His skin reacted so badly he was afraid it would fall right off taking the skin with it. After the Death Eaters had paraded those muggles around as a form of celebration, muggles who did nothing but exist, he began to question his upbringing. Further questioning began when he realised that Hermione knew what he assumed were wizarding dances almost by heart. That was until Theo, who was never one to conform to ideology no matter how many times his father tried beating it into him informed him that the dances were something shared between muggle and wizard culture. Yet as he stared at Hermione as Viktor lifted her into the air all he could think was ‘how could something be assumed was muddy, sparkle so much?’
He quit being so nasty to Hermione after that.

By sixth year when he was tasked with killing Dumbledore, he knew he wasn’t cut out for this. He knew it, but his mother wasn’t safe and he knew she wouldn’t runaway with him. So he stayed. The torture, the nightmares, the dead, the innocent, everything was burned into the back of his mind, he would never forget, he would never stop the guilt that seeped into him as he thought about them, as he walked into muggle studies and realised every day that he watched Charity Burbage die.

He was retreating further into his own thoughts when he heard the most gut wrenching sob he’d ever heard. It surprised him that someone so small could feel something so large. But that shouldn’t surprise him, when Hermione Granger did something she gave it her all, why should this be any different. With those thoughts in mind he slipped into her room and wrapped himself around her, “it’s okay to hurt, it’s okay to grieve.” He kept repeating into her ear. He didn’t know if the words were for himself or her, but he knew it was what they needed, what he needed, he needed her. He hoped she needed him just as much when she became Hermione again.

Harry;
You win a war and you think it’s over. No one tells you survivors guilt makes you physically sick. The Muggle stories I’d heard Petunia tell Dudley left this part out after the hero saves the world. He wondered about his aunt and uncle and cousin sometimes, did they survive? Were they safe? Did they die and was it his fault?
Tonks and Lupin? Was it his fault. Was Teddy an orphan because of him? Did Colin die because of him? Did Lavender? Was Hermione experiencing anxiety because she was concerned she’d wake up in Azkaban because she simply existed and didn’t know that befriending him would be laying her life on the line for a world that hated her? Did Ron and the Wesley’s resent him because of Fred? Did Ginny hate him, not because he doesn’t like her as anything other than someone who has a celebrity crush, but because he was her first crush and he rejected her? How was she going to take whatever he had going on with Pansy? How was Ron going to take the fact that Draco cared so much about Hermione that he’s sitting on the floor in front of her bedroom door until he can hold her again? What about Draco and Pansy? The boy who didn’t believe he had a choice and the girl who was so terrified she believed turning him in to Voldemort would save them all?
He forgave her, but he hated himself for putting her in that position. And Hermione, his sister, the first person he’d ever come to love as family, the first person who showed him that love didn’t require anything in return. She got skinny during the hunt, stress of not knowing what would happen to her if they were caught, I would die surely, Ron was a pureblood, he could be spared, but Hermione was a muggle-born on the run with The Boy Who Lived, she would have gotten so much worse than death. She gave up a lot of her food, seeing Ron eyeing our plates as a silent plea that he was still hungry. Hermione handing over her plate simply saying “I’m too full.” Sometimes he would mix the plates up, giving Ron and Hermione more than he would give himself, if there’s anything his aunt Petunia and uncle Vernon taught him, it was how to survive hungry.
“Harry.” A soft voice says from above him, he had his head on Pansy’s lap while she ran her nails through what she called ‘the most ghastly head of hair she’d ever seen’ she didn’t seem to mind it all that much though. “You’re thinking too loud. Just remember, it’s not your fault, you didn’t ask for this, you were tricked.”
Pansy had the habit of reminding him that Dumbledore had raised him to fight a war he had no business being a part of, it was a reminder he needed.

Pansy:
The perfect pure blooded wife. That was her future, she was never marked as a Death Eater, but her future with one was set in stone, she and Draco had tried to get a marriage contract set for the two of them but his parents had their sights set on the Greengrass sisters and hers had promised her to one of the Lestrange brothers.
They thought it would work since Pansy was the only one who knew he fancied a certain curly haired witch, but of course her luck would have her wed to an old sod the minute the war was finished.

She was able to keep in the background, until she was ordered to crucio her classmates, she never made it hurt, she just hoped they had the sense to pretend.
Then she tried turning Harry over to the Noseless Tyrant, a half-blood, who lost a game of ‘I got your nose’ to a toddler leading a bunch of blood purists. She was the singular most hated witch in Wizarding Britain. Yet, here she was with Harry’s head in her lap, he was thinking too hard. He always did. Ginny hated her and Hermione for the crime of taking Harry’s attention but in all honesty if he had a thing for her you’d think he’d mad made a move.
She glanced at Hermiones door, Draco still sat next to it. He was falling hard for her, and he didn’t even realize it.
“Harry, you’re thinking too loud, remember, it’s not your fault, you didn’t ask to be the chosen one, you were tricked.” She had to remind him that Albus Dumbledore was really the one at fault for this.
“Pansy, I don’t blame you for any of it. You were scared.” He didn’t realise that he said the words she needed to hear.

Hearing Hermiones door click and looking back to see Draco in her room, Pansy led Harry to his room, “Let’s go get some rest. I don’t want cushion face tomorrow.”