It is probably for the best that they don't handle Muggle business. Their regular Muggle Relations correspondent, Dewy Jr., scared the office once with articles on pesticides, but mostly with the economic reports. Wizards cannot imagine all the fuss Muggles make about numbers.
Dewy wonders sometimes though, if Spiderman and his team of writers' wisdom were right, if wizards should actively involve themselves, what with the great power great responsibility gimmick. He tried to phrase this tactfully to Granger from Legal, but she thought he was hitting on her. Johnson from HR balked at the implications. He forgets about it the next Monday.
oOo
Ginny always preens at her hair at the mirror every morning because it is possibly the thing she loves most after her family. She loves how it cascades, light spilling over, how it glints and then suddenly red, overwhelming. How Harry buries his hands in the strands and kisses her reverently. You either love it or hate it, nothing ever halfway. That's why she winces at Hermione's bushy, dirty, plain brown hair. Of course she doesn't hate Hermione for it. She likes her enough. But appearance is one thing you convince yourself that you don't form bias over, time and again until you almost believe it. But you still do. Like when the person you like rejects you, and your legion of girlfriends tells you that doesn't determine self-worth, or anything, but it still sucks, and you still feel terrible about yourself, and the platitudes become like greetings, meaningless and perfunctory.
Hermione has a thing for meaningless pursuits. Secretly, Ginny badmouths the Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare in the coffee break room where she cites the numerous heroic streaks that prey on Gryffindors at every turn. It boils down to frightening ignorance, to bossy, imposing nature, to single-minded ideals.
Harry doesn't think about the greatest good for the greatest number of people, about goblins' rights or the educational crisis. He skips right over the Politics sections in the Daily Prophet to the jokes. At get-togethers his groan joins the rest's whenever Hermione so much as breaths about the demonstrations which even fewer elves attend than wizards and witches, and that's saying something. They went to the France and England game to laugh at the dainty way their beaters swung instead, leaving Ron to deal with Draco Malfoy's lackeys' pranks. So she and Harry haven't seen Hermione in weeks.
oOo
Harry stops by Lorene's on the way home and takes an entire New York cheese cake to send to the kids. He remembers getting sick of pumpkin by third year. He floos to London's China town for takeouts.
Ginny doesn't cook because she doesn't know the recipe for mashed potatoes. Harry fries eggs and bacons for breakfast on odd days because they think the kids need some nutrition. They'd really rather just lie on the hundred-galleon couch, tangled all day, and watch endless replays of the semifinals in China. That's why they moved out of the Burrow.
Not everyone can be as responsible as Hermione. The stove is always hot whenever they come over, and Ron slaves over it as frequently as his wife. If you want Rose to be healthy, Harry.
oOo
Hermione's heart breaks every day, but you wouldn't know it by looking at her. Ron knows. She shakes next to him silently until dozing off, fitful. She pours her heart and endless hours into work, cries over articles about cancer patients, fusses about goblins and more recently, dragons.
"Must everything out of you be so bloody politically correct all the time?" George scowled at Hermione once, to which she retaliated by pulling his dangerous substances license for two weeks. Ron was so proud.
Actually, he was more relieved. Hermione seemed to be going through midlife crisis at the time, and whatever peeks he managed into her diary revealed words like 'helpless' and 'salvation'. It is a monster of a thing, her diary, gold plated pages with frilly edges; she dips her quill so delicately in this concoction out of their basement when she writes, flourishes in neat lines, and it is the only time she does anything so posh. Everyone said she needed an outlet.
Ron thinks he is witnessing something important, a process, someone he loves withdrawing into herself, collapsing upon herself. Hermione doesn't mention SPEW at dinners, now. She always wears her hair in a bun, now. She keeps ideals to herself, now. If he were smart like her, he could assign meaning to the little things, but he isn't, and he feels helpless, too.
He has always known this, back at school, before he married her, before they had the kids, now that life seems complete, that she has a heart too big and so much love to give she cannot belong to any one person. He also knows this: that her love is nothing like charity.
oOo
Shacklebolt doesn't get it. She can shout until she is hoarse, but the man doesn't listen. Being a wizard is inherently political. Wizards no longer think they can rule over Muggles, but they don't help them either. Not employing house elves and treating them kindly isn't the same as caring. (People think being Hermione Granger gives her a voice but it doesn't. Not enough anyway. Not from those who matter.)
These people are decent-good-great people, she knows. Well, of course she knows. They contribute to society and give to the less fortunate. They love her and take care of her. But. But. But.
She sat from 9 to 11 in her home office in front of crisp parchment trying to write to them what she couldn't say.
Last Thanksgiving she snapped at Percy.
"Who on Earth, who in their right mind would promote you Percy? You, who wants power for the sake of power."
Later she realized it happened in her head.
Hermione is tired. Hannah Abbot manhandled her into Shacklebolt's office to talk about vacations; Lavender Brown misguidedly slipped her some number of some lonely devastatingly handsome guy because of course she would learn the Muggles' telephone eccentricity; Harry and Ginny dragged her to Winky's first concert which she could honestly say she didn't get while Ron kind of rocked to the high-pitched wails. Only Ron doesn't treat her like a ticking time bomb and she wishes she has enough time to tell him how grateful, how very grateful she is.
Mostly she just clings to him. Big frames, big hands, soaking her grieves, her worries, until she melts, dissipates, feels safe and feels home. His is the kind of simplicity that's none of simplistic.
She never told him this, that when she came by Hogwarts for curriculum approvals she sobbed for two solid hours onto Forbidden Forest grounds, thinking of times when life was happy and simple, when the world consisted of homework and square meals and rivals and Quidditch.
The next day she visited her parents for a number. Two weeks later she says nonchalantly over dinner while Ron's eyes are still glued to Daily Prophet's gossips.
"It's called therapy, Ron."
"What now?"
"You didn't listen. Therapy is just something Muggles do to relieve stress. You told me I needed something like that."
Ron mercifully skips the sex joke. "I meant you taking a few days off, or going to a game, or to one of Ginny's beauty things, or something. You know what I meant." He sets down the soup, "And what do they do in the-ra-py?"
"They talk about problems until they are resolved." At which Ron blanches and mumbles something about good luck with that.
Which is why Harry manages to totally blindside her, waylaying her Tibet trip in a gross abuse of Auror resources.
"Hermione, you can talk to us." He says while interns prowl out of earshot. "Well, you can talk to Ginny and Mrs. Weasley and maybe Luna." And to Hermione's raised eyebrow he adds, "Please talk to us."
Harry's still Harry though, so she pulls out her wand and hexes his legs together in a slick move, apparating before his hired help can react. It cracks her up what magic can solve and what it cannot.
When she gets back, sneaking in and trying to slip between the covers because it's 4 bloody 30 in the morning, Ron catches her wrist and squints blearily at her.
"I've been thinking, and I know how it's outside of a chess game and signals apocalypse, but I've been thinking you shouldn't stop trying."
Hermione flails helplessly, "Trying to do what, Ron, I,"
Ron gestures vaguely around, "The house elf society, the petition for regulated Muggle assistance, the, everything. It's not pointless. You aren't wrong; they are."
And then, remembering, "Please don't change. Not for them."
"Okay, okay," she collapses into his arms.
Every so often Hermione would underestimate her husband. Maybe Ron got it out of a book, or a movie, but it is honest and from heart, and means something in the saying itself. She can head butt something until it moves, Gryffindor-like, she knows, but she needs him to tell her it works, that it's not pointless. Like she needed him to tell her he loved her, even though she knew.
She laughs into his chest, shedding a weight she did not notice she was carrying.
A/N: so like an idiot I didn't realize ffn didn't keep symbols. So my breaks were screwed and I deleted the first version and had to post a new one.