When Hermione woke up she had no idea where she was and fought her instinct to bolt upright shouting hexes. No need to give any enemy the advantage of knowing she was awake. Instead she felt around for her wand gently and tried to listen for clues. She could hear the snores of Harry and Ron so they were together at least. Gradually, very gradually, as if through a fog, the events of the final battle came back to her. Fred, Snape, Lupin, Tonks: the full force of all of their deaths hit her again after the oblivion of sleep. It was when she remembered the entirely senseless death of Colin Creevey that she lost it. Although she had already curled herself into a comforting foetal position it was thinking of Colin that she started to weep. It was such a waste. She remembered him as a hero-worshipping child. She didn't stop to think how many times she'd risked her own life by the same age.
She tried to sob quietly. Harry and Ron were still sleeping and she wanted them to stay that way. For all the ways in which she wanted their company in her grief she didn't want to be the one to wake them up to this reality, however victorious, any sooner than necessary. Besides they needed their rest.
Molly Weasley has fussed them into bed from the depths of her denial that her son was dead. She hadn't even objected when Hermione led the way to the Gryffindor boy's dorms, her hand entwined with Ron's, as it had been since the end of the Battle. It hadn't occurred to any of the Trio that Hermione sleep somewhere else. The time in the tent had been too long and too intense to make concessions to propriety now. There had been a n interesting moment when they got to the dorm. She had assumed she would sleep with Ron, in his bed but without any discussion he had turned down the covers of Dean's bed for her, kissed her on the forehead and shuffled sleepily back to his own four poster. He was such a gent.
Through her tears it felt wrong to be thinking of how lovely Ron could be and how much she loved him. Her guilt at this momentary lapse galvanised her, as did her rumbling stomach. As she quietly dressed it dawned on her that she wasn't sure what time, or even what day it was. It seemed dark outside, with this in mind she padded softly down the dormitory stairs to the Common Room. There were camp beds on every spare inch of floor but they were unoccupied so it couldn't be too late. On the couches near the fire she could just see some red hair poking over the back. She made her way through the maze of beds to the Weasley who sat there, unable to tell from there who it was.
It was George. Hermione felt her heart splash into her stomach as she realised her eyes were scanning the room for Fred. The words 'Where's Fred?' had been just behind her teeth. She thought she might be sick. All ability to start a conversation with George had just left her. She stood there like an idiot and wished she could simply run away.
"Sit down Granger" said George, without looking up.
She obeyed him. "George" she started tentatively not sure where she was going with the sentence.
"I hear you snogged my brother" said George breezily. She snapped her head up. He waggled his eyebrows at her.
"George" she started again more softly.
"And what I want to know is" George pressed on over her in his usual comic tone "what does he have that we don't?"
"George, you can't seriously want to talk about this, now." Hermione remonstrated.
"Please Hermione" he said, almost inaudibly "I need a distraction, I have to talk about something else, think about something else before I decide to take a long walk off the astronomy tower." He said the last bit with a watery smile.
She gave a loud theatrical sigh, as if irritated by his prying, to indicate that she would play the game of ordinary Fred's-not-dead day with him. "What do you want to know?"
"You've been asleep for a day and a half! The wizarding world is starved of gossip and has had to resort to wild speculation. Is it true that he snogged you after saving you from Malfoy, while escaping Fiend Fire on a broom?"
"No!"
"Then was it the version where Ron saved you from Bellatrix Lestrange before snogging you standing on a table in the Great Hall?"
"No! Your Mum saved Ginny from Bellatrix!"
"Well then was it after he saved you from the huge snake and pulled you up onto the back of a unicorn?"
"Who is making up these stories? A hormonal twelve year old girl?"
"Well Lavender told me the bit about the unicorn, so yeah, pretty much" George grinned.
"Why do they all feature Ron saving me and Ron snogging me? If you must know I kissed him and no-one was in immediate peril at all!"
"You kissed him? How does he do it? Fred and I could never figure that one out."
"How does he do what?"
"Get good-looking women to throw themselves at him? All he has to do is catch. It's bloody unfair, some of us are much better looking and yet have to put some bloody effort in! Women just fall out of the sky onto Ron and there you go; he has a cracking girlfriend." George ended his rant and noticed that Hermione looked as if someone had just told her something terrible had happened to the Library.
"You are his girlfriend now aren't you?" he asked, wondering how on earth Ron could have arsed things up so quickly.
"I don't know" she replied with the same look on her face.
"How can you not know?" neither Fred nor George has ever been prone to ambiguity and had a tendency to be baffled when people they liked tolerated it.
Hermione's mind was racing. She had kissed him. Granted he'd responded enthusiastically but they'd been likely to die. It wasn't the time to gently let down a friend of seven years standing. She thrown herself at him, and George was right, all he'd done was catch. How had she missed that? She'd assumed they were together now, after all that had happened in the tent, surely they were. They were, they were together. The deluminator had her voice, he'd helped her recover after Malfoy Manor, he'd asked her to dance.
But maybe the deluminator was waiting for anyone to say his name. What sort of friend wouldn't help her recover? Fred, George and Harry asked her to dance too and she didn't think any of them were her boyfriend. And he'd offered her another bed last night. He didn't want to share a bed with her. How much clearer could he be?
"Earth to Hermione" George was saying, waving a hand in front of her dazed face.
"Oh my giddy aunt I'm Lavender!" was all the response he got. Hermione had gone from alarmingly vacant to curled up in a shaking ball, her head on his shoulder in a matter of seconds.
"What was that about your aunt Granger? Have you suddenly gone mental? Not that I object to being aggressively cuddled you understand, I'm just a little baffled as to how I ended up comforting you. Good distraction though, I'll give you that." George patted her shoulder awkwardly.
Hermione's reply, through gulps of air, said mostly into his shoulder was largely unintelligible.
"Ok all I got was Lavender. You're upset about Lavender? But she'll be fine. She's scarred and scared but Bill and Fleur are helping her. She's half in love with Fleur. I've seen her myself, she's sitting up and gossiping and everything. She told me the version with the unicorn so I think we all know the old Lavender is still in there." This effort at calming her seemed to make no dent in Hermione's distress.
She took several deep breaths and said "No I'm...I'm like Lavender. I th-threw myself at Ron and now he won't know how to get rid of me." She had to try really hard not to have her statement end in a wail.
"Ok well that answers one of my questions: you have gone mental. What are you talking about? Why would he want to get rid of you? He loves you. I mean he might have been a bit slow on the uptake, Yule Ball and all that, but even he must see it if you kissed him. Give him some credit!"
"I am giving him credit" hiccoughed Hermione "for being a friend and a gentleman."
"Gentleman? Are we talking about the same person? You've seen him eat, how did you come to that conclusion?" George was seriously considering taking her temperature. "In none, of all the versions I've heard since...while you were asleep, did I here that he seemed anything but all for the whole thing. He kissed you back I assume?"
Hermione was coming out of her shock now and was beginning to get angry. Whether it was at herself, Ron or George remained unclear but she was more composed when she picked up her head and said "Adrenaline."
"That's your explanation for three years of pinning is it? I thought you were supposed to be clever. It went on so long that we stopped finding it funny and started bloody helping. Fred will turn in his g-grave, when he gets into it, if you even kissed and this still doesn't work out." George was completely drained by this effort to be funny.
Hermione once again felt like she'd been hit with a dark curse. She had forgotten again, in her bloody trivial distress. What did it matter? Ron was alive. He mightn't love her but he was alive and so was she. She'd get over him, it would take a while, but she would. George would never get over this.
"Oh George I forgot" she said going to hug him again.
"Lucky bloody you! Get off me Granger! You're supposed to be distracting me and you were doing an ok job of it too. Let's get back to your disastrous love life."
Hermione looked sceptical. His face was wearing an annoyed grimace but his eyes were pleading with her.
"So how did Ronniekins mess it up if he's been asleep nearly all of the time since the battle? Wait, he was asleep wasn't he?" alternative possibilities had just occurred to him, apparently grief slowed down his suggestive mind.
"YES!" she exclaimed indignantly.
"Good because us older Weasleys, and even Ginny, have worked hard at building up the family reputation as excellent lovers. Can't have Ron ruin it." Hermione made no comment.
"So?" George pushed.
She sighed, screwed her Gryffindor courage into a ball and said "I slept in Dean's bed."
"Are you telling me you've moved on already?"
"No! I mean Ron put me in Dean's bed and then slept in his own."
"Oh"
"Yes"
"Hmmm"
"Exactly"
"Goodnight kiss?"
"Forehead"
"Urgh, kiss of death!"
"Indeed."
"I'll have to rethink your gentleman theory. It may be the only explanation."
"No, the explanation is that he isn't interested" said Hermione forcefully.
George opened his mouth to contradict her and closed it again. He had no idea how to excuse Ron's actions. They sat there perplexed and fuming respectively.
Suddenly there was a noise like someone was bouncing bowling balls about the Gryffindor tower. The cacophony continued and seemed to move towards them. Hermione, her senses still on high alert stood, drew her wand and turned to face the direction of the noise.
Ron barrelled into the room at top speed, his wand also out and his eyes searching the common room desperately. He saw Hermione standing the other side of the couch and ran on top of the camp beds toward her, vaulting over the back of the sofa to land impressively on his feet beside her. He grabbed her shoulders, starring at her from arms length. She opened her mouth to question him but he knocked the wind out of her completely by roughly pulling her into a hug and squeezing her for all he was worth.
"You ok brother dearest?" asked George from the couch. He got no response.
Ron's hands were moving up and down Hermione's back and arms as if to reassure himself that she was solid. His eyes were closed and he was breathing hard while murmuring into her hair a repetitive litany of "You're ok. You're fine. Oh Thank Merlin."Hermione, trying and failing to repress a smile, looked questioningly at George who shrugged back and mouthed the words "barking mad" at her.
"Don't you ever do that again Hermione Granger!" Ron shouted when he had firmly planted her on her feet at arm's length again. He looked as if he was scolding a small child.
"Do what?" asked Hermione and George in unison.
"Are you bloody kidding me? After a year on the run fighting people who think you've no right to live we finally win and I can sleep properly for the first time in ages but I wake up and you're gone! Do you know how many wards I put on Dean's bed last night? Every single one you used to put on the tent. What was the point in putting you in the furthest bed from the door so that any nutter would have to get past me and Harry first if you're just going to get up and wander around a bloody war-zone? Are you trying to kill me?" Ron was nearly purple with rage at this stage.
During all this rant the smile on Hermione's face had changed from an amused smirk to shocked joy to a beatific grin. She stared at him with this expression and just as he opened his mouth to demand she answer him she launched at him, throwing her arms around his neck, covering his face with kisses. Soon they were completely entangled in a heated snog.
"Oh yeah, now I see the resemblance to Lavender" George commented earning a rude hand gesture from Ron.
Harry arrived onto the scene, his hair even messier than usual and his glasses slightly askew. "What's going on? What was all the noise?" he asked George, flopping onto the couch beside him and ignoring the amorous couple in the middle of the floor.
"Well to sum up: Hermione was panicking that she'd thrown herself at a too-much-of-a-gentleman-to-rebuff-her Ron" Harry snorted at this "he woke up and saw she was gone, came in here like a rampaging hippogriff, shouted at her for disappearing at which she threw herself at him again. That's you up to speed."
"How does he get women to just jump on him like that?" pondered Harry.
"I think they know anything more subtle is doomed to fail. Anyway you're one to talk I hear Ginny did the same" said George with the trademark Weasley twin cheeky grin.
"Yeah but mate, Chosen One" said Harry pointing at himself. After a pause George and Harry broke into hysterical laughter of the kind that only grief, exhaustion and surviving trauma can bring. When they calmed down, with tears running down their cheeks they heard a typical Ron and Hermione row going on.
"Will I never get to kiss you first woman?" Ron grumbled.
"Are you seriously complaining about that little brother?" George interrupted with a raised eyebrow.
"Well...no I suppose not" Ron replied with a smile he couldn't keep from his satisfied face.
"Good. Anyway I'm glad the rumours aren't true. Charlie and Bill lost the bet, we said Hermione would crack first. We can spend it on..." George's voice just stopped. They all sat there in silence as Fred's death hit them anew. None of them were ready for George to refer to himself in the singular.
"Developing something that will make girls you like throw themselves at you" said Ron as if there had been no pregnant pause. "Fred would like that."
"You can't use us as guinea pigs though" said Harry gesticulating at himself and Ron. " We already have that power."
"Yeah we can use them for research, eh George." said Hermione with a wink.
George didn't respond for a moment and then he said somberly "That's enough distracting Hermione. It's time for it to be real again now." At this point Ron's stomach gave an almighty growl.
"Let's go eat" said George "let's show everyone that you three, at least, are still alive" and all four of them got up and moved towards an entirely new world.
A/N: Thanks for reading everyone! I'm still very new to this whole fanfic thing so I'm not sure if this story should be categorised as Hermione and George. What do you think? I categorised it as Hermione and Ron because they are the romance but perhaps that's misleading as Ron is in so little of it. Thanks once again to my fabulous and encouraging beta whytejigsaw who writes excellent Sherlock fic. As always, feedback is greatly appreciated by this novice.