Chapter 1
The first night after Ron left they got drunk.
“I don’t want us to do the thing again,” Hermione said, picking at the sofa. It was the comfortable woolly one. Big bits of its innards tufted through the upholstery where something large and angry seemed to have clawed away great strips of the fabric. Harry was facing the fireplace and Hermione’s bare feet were on the cushions between them. The tips of her toes nudged their way under the edge of Harry’s thigh. They were cold.
“What thing?” he asked.
Hermione’s feet were always cold, and that piece of information felt vaguely forbidden to Harry. Like he’d picked it up despite knowing it wasn’t meant for him, tucked it away somewhere secret. A long time ago he’d done that with bread ends and old apples in the cupboard where he slept. These days he was hungry for other people’s intimacies. Like: there was a spot on Ron’s back, just between his shoulder blades, that Ron always forgot to dry after showering. Harry knew the way water droplets softened the edges of the freckles there. There was probably something wrong with Harry for knowing that.
Hermione wiggled her toes. He slid his hand under her heels, which were small enough that they just fit side-by-side in his palm, and lifted them onto his lap, covered the chilly tops of them with his other hand.
“The thing where we don’t say his name,” she said. “Where I cry and you pretend you don’t see it and you break things and I pretend I don’t see it, and we both pretend he never existed. He existed. He’s still existing. Just…”
“In Romania,” Harry said, and he did his best to say it without any intonation at all. He was trying pretty hard not to break things at all these days. They’d taught him breathing exercises in auror training, to control his temper; he and Ron had practiced them together, though now of course he would have to work with Dixon…
Hermione made a little noise. Not pain, not yet, but close enough to make Harry relax his hand, exhale carefully through his mouth. He concentrated on her feet, on the bones of them beneath his fingers, on how fragile they were. He inhaled through his nose.
“In Romania.” Hermione said softly. She was staring into the fire now. Her eyes were a little bit glassy from the wine, and she looked exactly the picture of coziness; and of misery. Harry’s chest hurt, probably from the breathing exercises. “I don’t want to pretend anything,” Hermione said. “I just want things to be normal.”
“Ok,” Harry told her. He took her empty glass and leaned forward to set it on the sharp-footed coffee table. Grimmauld Place was still so full of ugly, broken things, but these days they looked like home. And he’d always liked this table, the way it looked so scrappy, so ready to attack. If Mad-Eye Moody had been a table…
Harry figured he could be normal. Maybe.
One week after Ron left, Hermione got a promotion and a special assignment from the head of her department. Harry kicked a hole in the bathroom wall.
“Sorry,” he muttered when she stuck her head in the doorway. He was kneeling down, poking at crumbling plaster with his wand. “I’m fixing it.”
Hermione didn’t say anything. She just stood there, calm and matter-of-fact as always, and Harry wanted to put another hole in the wall. He let his forehead fall against it instead. Hard enough to make a distinct thump, but still not as hard as he wanted to.
“Sorry,” he said again.
Hermione put her hand on the back of his neck. She didn’t say, “It’s alright.” Which. It probably wasn’t. Shouldn’t kick holes in the house. Objectively speaking. But she kept her cool, small hand on the back of his neck while he practiced his breathing.
Two weeks after Ron left, they got a letter and Hermione cut all her hair off.
The letter said: Bit weird here without you two. Charlie reckons one of the Ukranian Ironbellys is pregnant, says we’ve got to get her off on her own before she starts trying to roast the others. But she doesn’t want to be moved, so she tries to roast us instead. It’s mad. At least the blast-ended skrewts never got broody.
It was a friendly, chatty letter, and it reminded Harry more of the boy he’d once known at Hogwarts than the tired, grim man Ron had turned into over the last five years.
Harry took several deep breaths. Then he lit the letter on fire.
“Shit,” he said. “Sorry.”
He extinguished the flames, which had already singed the floorboards.
That night Hermione went to the upstairs bathroom – the one that still had a hole in the plaster beside the sink – and didn’t come out. Harry stuck his head through the open door to find her sitting shorn on the tile, fluffy tufts all around, and his first thought was that whatever dark creature had once savaged his sofa had struck again.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said sharply. “I know I’m a cliché. It’ll grow back.”
Harry didn’t say anything. He put his hand out and ran it over the top of her head, through the wild inches of curl she’d left. Not even enough to tuck behind her ears.
“It’s messy,” he said. “I hate it.”
She snorted. Then she leaned her head against his leg. He stood there a long time, running his fingers gently through her hair.
The trouble was, she had a very vulnerable neck. Harry’s chest hurt every time he saw it, even though he’d almost completely stopped bothering with his breathing exercises. Hermione was not usually a vulnerable person, so the back of her neck confused him. Seeing it made him want to wrap scarves around her like he was Molly Weasley. Scarves, or blankets, or the sleek softness of his invisibility cloak. Anything to hide how small she suddenly seemed.
That was the first thing he brought home: a long green scarf he’d seen hanging in the window of a muggle shop. The woman there had said it was cashmere, but all Harry knew was that it felt warm and mellow under his fingers, and he took it home for Hermione. She smiled her funny little smile and wore it nearly constantly, and that was good. That was better. But his chest still hurt.
After that he brought something back every day. Mostly little things to make her smile again: a mechanical bird for Crookshanks, a bag of Bertie Bots with only the licorice beans, no toffee or liver. Sometimes practical things: a better set of quills, a self-warming coffee mug.
“Harry,” she said when he came home with the flying bicycle, “you can’t keep buying me things.”
“I got it at a jumble sale,” he told her, which was the truth. “And if I hadn’t brought it home they’d have chucked it. You’re the only person I know who hates brooms.”
But her smile this time was reluctant (even though she rode the bike to work every day) and he took the hint.
Sort of.
Mostly after that he brought home distractions. Tricky little spells he’d found in the library at work, questions about the legality of inheriting magical creatures. He liked to see her sink into things, liked to see the straight, deep wrinkle in her forehead scrunch into existence as she bent over a borrowed book or a broken charm.
It was in basically this vein that Harry found himself bringing her Draco Malfoy.