"Oh, well, I'm going upstairs to try and finish this essay upstairs, too much noise here," Harry said, picking up his things grudgingly." try to see if I can at least scrape an "A" on it"
"I'll go with you" Hermione said, rising from her armchair "I can check if you'd-" she stopped in mid-sentence as Harry turned around, his eyes wide, and she realized what she had said. As they stared at each other, time seemed to have stopped and Harry was transported back to that night, he remembered it very clearly.
"What is it, Harry? What is it you know?" Even when they were in the middle of a war, even when he was going to walk to his death, Hermione was still able to read him like nobody else.
"There's a reason I can hear them. The Horcruxes. I think I've known for a while-"He looked at Hermione, green met brown and this...this 'goodbye', as Harry decided to call it, became 1,000 times more painful. "- And I think you have too."
"I'll go with you!"
She said it without hesitating, without even stopping to think about what she said, what it meant, her voice breaking, her…her heart breaking, because this- this hurt too much, Bellatrix's torture was nothing –nothing- compared to this.
"No. Kill the snake. Kill the snake, and then it's just him." He said right away, he would never let her come with him, too many people were already dead because of him, too many….Fred, Tonks, Lupin- It was too much. She flung her arms around him, holding him tight as tight as he could, dreading the moment she would be forced to let go, her body trembling with sobs. But no, Harry would never willingly let Hermione walk into Death's arms with him; Voldemort would never let her walk away, and even though Hermione knew that, that was the moment Hermione realized that she'd rather die with Harry than have to live in a world without him, for Harry was her world.There we so many things Harry wanted to tell her, so many things Hermione wanted to tell him in turn, but, in that embrace, Harry and Hermione said everything that they needed to say without words.
And Harry, summoning all with the power left in him, let go of Hermione, turned around and walked calmly and slowly down the staircase, into the Forbidden Forest, were death was awaiting him.
A loud BANG seemed to bring them back to their senses.
"Uh…er- I mean, I'll go to help you…um, with-"Hermione stammered, flustered.
"Yeah, I mean- you'd know. Right…" Harry said, also at loss of words. "Let's go then," And they both set off to the boys' dormitory.
Ginny turned around to Ron, who, she hoped, would be able to make sense of what they had just witnessed. Once again, Harry and Hermione had been sent off to their little world, where only they existed, and the ones that were outside of it were left to ponder in silence what the hell was going on inside the brains of those two. "What was that all about?"
For a moment, Ron looked a little pained, he, like Harry and Hermione, also remembered what those four little words really meant. "Those were the words she last told him. Before he went to the forest." He said feigning nonchalance. Ginny was stunned; it took a while for her to understand: Hermione had offered herself to die. "She- she really said that?" she asked in awe. Ron nodded.
"Wow"