Title: Path of Thorns
Disclaimer: Harry, Hermione, and all other characters and the world they inhabit belong to JKR, not to me. I'm just playing in her sandbox.
Summary: Some sacrifices are left unspoken.
It was her own struggle, her path of thorns to travel.
She tried to put a good face on it. Harry and Ron needed her. So what did it matter if she had to forgo the last year of her education? Others had made far greater sacrifices. Others had died, and she wanted to complain about not finishing out a year of tests and studying? She could just hear Ron's disbelieving rant if she'd mention it. "You want to go back to school? You want to spend hours writing twelve-foot long essays on potions ingredients and transfiguration spells? You're insane. Harry, tell her she's gone nuts." She couldn't talk about this to him, no matter how much of a confidant he'd become about her other worries over the past month.
Harry, on the other hand, would take it far too seriously, and try to order her to go back. He wouldn't understand wanting schoolwork any more than Ron would, but he'd blame himself for her not being there anyway. She couldn't put another burden on him, not with everything else the Wizarding World and Voldemort and that stupid prophecy had already placed on his shoulders. If she didn't already hate Trelawney for her inability to teach, she'd hate her for having made that prophecy so many years ago.
And outside of the two of them, who could she turn to with it? Her teachers? If they were in the Order, they knew far too well that sacrifices were demanded by this war. If they weren't, how could she trust them enough to tell them? It had taken her far too many betrayals, but with this last one, with Snape, she'd finally learned that a teacher cannot always be trusted. Her other friends? It was the same there as with her teachers. Those who she knew could be trusted knew as well as she did what sacrifices really were.
No one else understood. It wasn't so much the material, she could learn that on her own. She had already started learning it, even before the end of the year. Even before Dumbledore had died and turned Harry into this hollow-eyed man determined to destroy Voldemort for good. No, what hurt was realizing that she was giving up her chance of proving to herself and to anyone else who'd questioned a Muggle-born having a place in the Wizarding World that she was good enough. She wouldn't have those N.E.W.T.S. scores to show to everyone that she'd done it, that she'd succeeded where people born to this world hadn't. She'd have proven to all those pureblooded bigots that she was just as good, if not better, than they were.
But when Harry had told them what he was facing, after Dumbledore's death, she couldn't let him go alone. She couldn't stay behind, not when she knew that he and Ron would need her help. If it came down to a choice between her desire to prove something to herself and the world, or Harry's life, well, that wasn't even a choice, now was it?
So she kept the death of that dream as her own personal sorrow. One more struggle to get through, one more briar-patch in their journey to find and destroy Voldemort's horcruxes and end this war for once and for all. But this one she walked through alone. This one, no one else would suffer through.