"What If?"

Mystic25

Summary: A continuation of the conversation at the frozen lake after Harry and Hermione escape Bathilda Bagshot's house in "Deathly Hallows Part One."

Disclaimer: Jo Rowling owns Harry Potter, as does Warner Brothers. If I did, this entire story would be printed in solid gold letters on the wings of Maltase Falcons carrying jewel encrusted goblets filled with Godiva chocolates in their beaks to dump on all the fans. But since I'm poor, just close your eyes and pretend all that stuff…

Rating: PG for mentions of violence.

A/N: I just got "Deathly Hallows: Part One" on DVD the other day, and there was this line that Hermione said to Harry that I never heard before, not after watching it three times previously. And, it was something that really got me thinking, wanting to write about it. This will be a backdrop of Harry/Hermione, playing with the notion of Rowling herself saying this was one of the "charged moments" between the characters. So if that doesn't float you, then get another raft, and float away.

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"Once you want something, everything changes. Now I want everything, more and more and more."

Ally Condie Matched

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"We could just stay here Harry, grow old." Hermione looked out over the stillness around her; the fallen snow that hung like white coats over the branches of sleeping trees, the gentle calling of birds, their mates echoing their song in the gray winter air, the peaceful hush of the forest in winter, sleeping long and deep before spring awoke it with a yawning warmth.

It was beautiful. She hadn't been here in ten years; not since she was a giggling 7-year-old, going camping with her parents for the first time. It had been spring, that last time, and she had run barefoot through fields of wild yellow daisies and fragrant white honeysuckles, chasing after elusive squirrels and chipmunks, damning up part of the lake with sticks and leaves to watch schools of colorful minnows swim around and nibble on her fingers. And, at night there was a warm, crackling fire to roast marshmallows on until they melted to goo in her hands, much to her delight, and her mother's amused scolding.

She blinked, and that memory turned cold. Bitter ice and snow covered up the flowers; the lake froze over; the warmth of the fire was replaced by the wind tearing at the scratches on her face that she had gotten fighting her way out of Bathilda Bagshot's house. The happy, carefree smile of her mother became the face of Harry, watching her, absorbing the words that no doubt sounded absurd to him.

Growing old was something that was now almost like a dream, a wish blown into a dandelion and carried off into the sky. At 17, Hermione had already lost so much, seen so much pain and horror that she had begun to measure her life in days not years. If she managed to survive today, then she would have that memory, and see if would be the same tomorrow.

Harry still sat watching her, studying the faraway look in her eyes. He found himself wearing that same mask as of late. The haunted look of someone who dreamt of blue skies while the bombs turned everything around them black and gray, who couldn't live life in anything but moments.

"You'd have a house, just there." Harry pointed off into a small clearing surrounded by a circle of Birch trees wearing heavy coverings of snow. A few birds had settled in that emptiness, pecking at the frozen ground for something edible. "Something stately no doubt, even though you wouldn't have any neighbors to show it off to. But, you'd be prepared for any lost hikers."

Hermione smiled at him, a quiet whisper of a smile. "You're wrong Harry. I don't do 'stately' It would be a cabin." It was a children's game, to play "What If?" But, she played because she wanted to remember what dreaming was like. "Made of some sweet smelling logs, nothing extraordinary, just comfortable."

"Still, there'd be a library," Harry said. "You'd go mental if you didn't have books about."

This time Hermione laughed, it sounded as dry as the dormant leaves at first, but then it became warmer, something called up from the basement that hadn't been used in a long time. "With a big picture window, to read by and watch the rain when it fell in summer, and the snow in winter."

"To spy on everyone coming up the drive," Harry added. "In case you were too trapped inside your studying to be bothered with anything."

"And to see friends walking up too," Hermione defended. "Honestly, Harry; I don't love books so much that I'd neglect people."

"Really?" Harry raised an eyebrow at her. "I thought I was talking to Hermione Granger."

"Piss off Harry!" This time Hermione found herself laughing loud and full at a curse that would have normally come out of Ron's mouth, not hers. But, their game had become so silly that she couldn't help it.

Harry found himself laughing with her at her outburst, it was like a part of Ron had suddenly filtered back into the woods and decided to set up residency inside Hermione just to give them both a rile.

"What about me?" Harry asked. "Am I to be included in those friends you see walking up to your future home?"

"You were, until you insulted me," Hermione responded teasingly. "Now I'm afraid, I'm too wounded Harry James Potter to even bother with you anymore."

"What if I had flowers or something?" Harry offered. "As a peace offering?"

"What kind?" Hermione asked him, in a voice that was testing him, and teasing him.

"Daisies," Harry threw out, then seeing the look on her face, one that said "daisies grow everywhere Harry, think a little more about something you can't just run outside and pick." "No, wait, Dragon Lilies, that's your favorite flower right? At least when you were 12."

"Well spotted," Hermione praised him. She had actually stopped liking Dragon Lilies in favor of Orchids a while ago, but she was impressed that he had remembered something from so long ago whispered to him behind a shielded hand in Herbology Lessons.

"Okay then, what if I had some Dragon Lilies and I came walking up to your house?"

"I'd let you get up five feet of cement, enough to see me wave at you," Hermione said. "But, remember, I'm still angry at you for telling me I don't have any friends."

"I never-"

"What if you had a signed copy of Beatle and the Bard instead?" Hermione interrupted him.

"I don't think you're going to find a better copy than the one you're reading Hermione," Harry said. "What if I started singing you a song?"

Hermione snorted. "Ginny told me you're tone deaf Harry."

"Right, I'll have to thank her for that later," Harry returned, sounding rather put out.

"It's true," Hermione said, not being able to help the smile that came at the look on his face. "I heard you once at breakfast before a Quidditch Match. Believe me; no one would've been clamoring for a recording Harry."

"You're a true friend Hermione you know that?" Harry told her, watching the bemused smile creep on her face at him being so indignant about his lack of singing skills.

"Just don't sing a song about it Harry." Hermione thre back.

Harry was too far away to throw a good enough sized snowball at her; so instead, he just shot her a 'this-is-me-throwing-a-very-big-snowball-at-your-head' look, watching her smile grow larger. "What if I had a puppy? One that was so cute it'd melted a Death Eater's heart?"

"Death Eaters don't have heart's Harry," Hermione stated this as fact. "It'd have to bea very cute puppy to even get within five feet of a Death Eater without being blasted on the spot."

"You're a ray of sunshine you know that?" Harry threw back. "Okay, a baby, are they are any objections about me bringing babies to your pretend house over there?"

"Where would even you get a baby Harry?" Hermione questioned. "It's not like their available for loan."

"Hermione, really? Does it matter?" At the look on her face that said 'yes it does, you aren't stealing someone's child so I'll let you in my fictitious cabin.' Harry added. "Fine, what-"

"What if we had babies?"

The words Harry were about to say stopped before they reached his mouth. The joking emotions vanished like smoke clearing after a fire. He saw the teasing look shift from Hermione's face into something else entirely.

"What if we had babies Harry?" The shift in her eyes had now made them wanting, dreaming, sad.

There were tears trapped behind her eyes, locked behind a gate that was slowly staring to open. "What if they were beautiful? What if we watched them play at that cabin in the clearing, just laughing in the snow, untouched by all of this?" A warm trickle fell down her face, melting through the cold wind blowing on her skin. She wanted something normal so badly that it ached.

She still loved Ron, she would always love Ron. But, seeing Harry, her best friend watching her, someone who hadn't left her-it would be very easy to love him too. She did love him; there was a part of herself that would always belong to him. Some part she had given to him a long time ago when she had decided to be his friend.

"It wouldn't be 'what if?' Hermione," Harry said. He knew the tone of their conversation had shifted dramatically, but he couldn't deny the feeling of where it had taken them. "They would be beautiful, because they would look like you," he watched tears dropping down her face silently as he spoke, feeling the door of this world open up, letting him see into things that were so wondrous because they were unborn dreams, things that hadn't been taken away by reality yet.

"And you'd love them to the point of suffocation," he listened to her laugh, but it sounded as sad as his words, and he hadn't even been aware that they had become sad until that moment. It wasn't that he didn't love Ginny, he dreamt about her every night; he wanted to have her here with him. But the love of 7 years didn't just go away, she had never gone away. She was sitting here watching him with such sweet longing.

To hear him talking about wanting to have children with her, it made that ache inside her grow more painful, to want to have that with him so badly that it hurt to breathe. There wasn't this life taking war in her dream, it was something simple, something you wanted to live not just for a moment, but everyday. "We would have been happy."

But the simple and everyday things were always the ones they could never have.

Harry had the same lonely, sad look on his face. "I know." He didn't deny anything she had said. He didn't deny the existence of a war that was so bloody he could smell it in his dreams, ignore the reality that this forest would most likely be reduced to burning tinder by Voldemort and his followers in days. Nor did he deny the existence of what he was to Ginny, or what Hermione was to Ron. But, Ginny was fighting elsewhere, Ron had left. And right now, the forest was still here, still accepting their dreams. Hermione was here.

And Harry couldn't deny what they were to each other either.

"Harry-" Harry's simple statement made a quiet, hiccup of a sob escape Hermione's mouth. It was meant to be a laugh, but, she was beginning to realize just how broken she really was.

She closed her book so that the pages wouldn't be marred by her tears. The 'thump' of the volume shutting brought out the memory of her father telling her to close her book for the night and join him and her mother for smores by the fire. It made her hug to her knees, aching to hear the real thing instead of just a memory.

"Harry, what if we won this war?" Her words were the sadness of someone who had lived for so long in the dark that they were beginning to forget what the light looked like.

Harry pulled himself up to a standing position using the blonde colored Birch tree trunk he was leaning against as a support.

Hermione raised her head from her knees, watching him walk over to her, his shoes crunching softly in the snow.

Harry offered her his hand. She took it and allowed him to pull her to her feet, draping the blanket over her arm.

"Go inside and get warm. I'll take the next watch. Just leave me my wand-"

Hermione's look suddenly changed became guilt ridden. "Harry-"

Harry saw that look. "Where's my wand Hermione?"

She released his hand, kneeling back down behind where she had laid the book. Underneath the leather bound volume, nestled in a cold piling of snow, was his wand. It had been severed almost completely in half, only a sliver of wood the size of a single strand of hair attached one part of the wand to its broken half.

Harry looked at it with the same pained expression someone would give to a broken limb held up before them.

"When we were escaping Godric's Hollow I cast a curse and it rebounded," Hermione looked up over her shoulder at him, seeing him watch her like she was explaining the death of a friend. "I'm sorry, I tried to mend it, but wands are different."

"It's done." Harry cut her off, his words sounding clipped, like he was trying to keep anger from her down. "Just leave me yours."

Hermione rose to her feet on her own this time, not looking Harry in the eye as she handed him her wand and the broken pieces of his. A wizard's wand was one of the most important parts of them. Hermione might as well have broken one of his bones; the pain from it would have been the same. "Harry, I'm sorry-"

"Hermione."

Harry's voice made her draw her eyes up to his finally. There wasn't anger in them, there was something unnamed.

But, the emotion didn't need a name; it just needed the feeling behind it. "What if we had babies? We would watch them mess up, and fall down. But, we'd tell them to pick up and go on, because you can't be strong until you've broken a few times."

Hermonie didn't know what to say. What did you tell someone who let you dream even if you could never take that dream to the waking world, could only watch it while it floated away in front of you? What if there was nothing you could tell them?

She placed her hand softly on the back of his neck, feeling the warmth of his skin beneath her palm, watching him watching her back.

The kiss that came next was brief, but beautiful, sweet, achingly tender. It left a bruise that neither one of them would allow to let heal. It would be a part of the moments that they would remember when they recalled what made them survive this war.

When the kiss ended, Hermione pressed her forehead to his, feeling him reciprocate her action, her hand still on the back of his neck. They remained that way for countless moments, listening to each other breathe.

Hermione finally pulled away, her breath creating a cloud of smoke in the frigidly chilly air. She handed him the blanket, giving one last caresses to the side of his face.

Harry closed his eyes at her touch, and when they reopened, they shared one last look before she began walking back towards the tent, the snow falling down around them.

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When I heard Hermione saying that line about growing old to Harry, it was one of the saddest, sweetest things I'd ever heard. Because they were both so lonely, but they were lonely together. I know that Ron/Hr people may view this as just a "passable moment" but this was one of those times that I think that they could have very easily fallen for each other, because they already loved each other, and you can't help what you feel.

Anyway, bash, or like. Let me know. I'm not changing my opinion as a "delusional Harry/Hermione Forever" Shipper, lol.

Peace

Mystic