Disclaimer:- The genius is JK's. Without her, these guys wouldn't ever have existed!

She stood, stock still, beneath the jet of burning water. The temperature was too much, she knew, but she welcomed the sensations it played out on her skin. Beating down on her scalp and shoulders, not only did it warm her considerably, she couldn't help but feel her tension chasing the water down the drain. Tension that had built up over months and months until she didn't know how to control it, until it began to take over and there seemed to be no escape.

The sound of a knock on the bathroom door had her flinging back the curtain and making a grab for her wand, which she'd balanced on a nearby shelf. She had it pointed at the wood before he even had a chance to speak,

"Hermione, are you alright in there?"

It was Harry, and she felt slightly ashamed for reacting so brutally. Realising that she'd been holed up in there for the best part of forty-five minutes and had long since removed the stench of burning from her hair and skin, Hermione replaced her wand and turned the taps off, immediately missing the heat and comfort it had provided.

"Yeah, I'm almost done. Be back out in a minute." She replied, in a voice that they both knew was way too cheerful and most definitely forced.

"Alright then, so long as you're okay. I'm going down for food, you want anything?" he asked, obviously thoroughly unconvinced by the front she was putting up.

"No thanks Harry. I'll come down later if I get hungry." And, sensing that he was about to leave for the stairs, called, "be sure to sort things out with Ginny whist you're down there."

Smiling for the first time in what felt like ages, Hermione stepped carefully out of the tub, reaching for the nearest towel, and wrapped it tightly around herself. She peered through the haze of steam that she'd created, watching her reflection in the mirror. There were several large bruises covering one side of her face, still unfaded, the mark of where Bellatrix had taken her anger out on her several weeks earlier. Glancing down at her arms, she saw scorch marks covering them and vaguely wondered if they'd ever completely heal.

If she'd been Ginny, she might have tried covering the bruises up using make-up or something, but in all honesty, not only was she highly unskilled in that sort of thing, but she couldn't really see the point. Why pretend that it never happened? What was she supposed to do, paint herself up and leave the room pretending that none of it had been real? That they hadn't just spent months chasing both Horcruxes and then Hallows, that they hadn't been captured by death eaters, herself tortured by the most painful curse in existence?

It wasn't as if they were hiding the fact either, as short a time as it was from the end of the huge battle, the three of them were already widely known as 'The Three Who Saved Them', a title Hermione felt they didn't entirely deserve. Sure they'd been the ones who hunted the horcruxes down which had, admittedly, eventually contributed to Voldemort's demise, but what people failed to register was the fact that they'd been caught out time and time again, relying on others to come along and rescue them. If nothing else, at least the presence of her bruises proved that she wasn't quite as perfect as she was made out to be.

It was only as she gathered her things and unlocked the door, making to leave the relative warmth of the bathroom, that she suddenly realised she had no clothes to wear! As soon as they had arrived at the burrow earlier that evening, Mrs Weasley had whisked away Hermione's beaded bag, pulled all of their clothes out and stuffed them into the washing machine, complaining loudly about their state of cleanliness. It was evident that she was delaying her grief for Fred by attempting to occupy her mind with meaningless tasks, and Hermione had thought it best to leave her to her own devices; it would be wrong of her to intrude on such a deep family loss.

For a moment, Hermione considered simply borrowing some of Ginny's clothes, but not only did she feel bad at the thought of borrowing them without asking – and she wasn't about to interrupt whatever was going on between her and Harry – but also Ginny's clothes were all slightly more revealing than Hermione would have cared for. On Ginny, they looked perfectly respectable, but Hermione's bust was larger enough than Ginny's to make the clothes look uncomfortable, not to mention tight.

Failing to come up with a better plan, Hermione resigned herself to ascending the topmost flight of stairs, heading for Ron's room, figuring that at least his clothes would cover her up nicely, and that he'd most likely be downstairs stuffing his face with food right about now.

As she pushed open the door to his room, she nearly dropped the towel in surprise. Ron glanced up from where he sat on the bed just in time to see Hermione regaining control on the towel. She blushed scarlet at putting herself in such an embarrassing situation, before noticing how bloodshot and red Ron's eyes were.

She made as if to back out of the room, feeling bad that she'd caught him crying and knowing he wouldn't want her seeing him like this, but he said,

"Hey, it's alright, you can come in you know. I won't cry on you or anything," he said, in the feeble attempt at a joke, grimacing at himself.

She went back in, closing the door behind her, and still holding on tightly to the towel, determined to keep her dignity intact.

"Sorry," he said.

Hermione frowned,

"What?"

"The towel." He motioned towards the one she was currently wearing, "If it was a bit wet, you know. Its mine, I used it earlier."

"Oh." She said, not quite sure what else she could say to such a statement.

There was a brief pause whilst they both stared at each other. Hermione was desperate to make him open up about Fred, but a memory of Ron himself telling her off for doing exactly that to Harry two years previous right after Sirius' death made her hold her tongue.

"You want some clothes?" He asked, pulling himself up off the bed and starting towards his wardrobe.

Hermione stared at his back, not finding her voice until he turned around holding out fresh jeans and t-shirt,

"How did you know?"

"What, that you needed clothes?" although his face was still tearstained, she saw a slight smile breaking through.

She nodded.

"Well, for a start, you can't exactly go downstairs wearing my towel now can you?" He held out the clothes for her to take. "Also, I noticed that Mums on the cleaning warpath again and you'd never be caught dead in anything of Ginny's."

She smiled, caught out, realising for the first time that he noticed a hell of a lot more than he was letting on.

"Thanks."

"I'll turn around whilst you change, okay?" Ron said, blushing slightly, before spinning himself to face the opposite side of the room and putting his hands over his eyes.

Mere seconds later though, a tentative voice said,

"Ron?"

He wasn't sure whether or not to turn around, so he stayed with his back facing her.

In hindsight, Hermione thought that perhaps she should have just put the clothes on and kept quiet; after all, he would've been none the wiser.

"Erm, Ron?" She said again, voice still tentative, towel still wrapped firmly around her. "You haven't given me any underwear."

That got his attention. His head snapped around so fast it was a wonder it didn't take off of it's own accord.

"You only gave me these." She continued, holding up the t-shirt and jeans that he'd provided her with.

Ron's entire face was tinged with pink now and he blurted,

"You want my underwear!"

"Well, unless you've just invented a spell to conjure some of my own, then yes because I don't have anything else."

Ron ran a hand over his eyes, clearly not sure what to make of the situation at all. Then, crossing to the chest of draws by which Hermione was standing, he pulled out and handed to her what must have been the brightest pair of orange boxer shorts in the world.

She took them, raised an eyebrow and, grinning slightly, said,

"Cannons I take it?"

"Hey, they're lucky they are!" Ron said, turning back to his corner.

Hermione laughed as she began to change.

"Your lucky boxer shorts?"

"Yes." He said, a little defensively, but she could hear the smile in his voice. "Every Quidditch match I played in."

Hermione couldn't help snorting in laughter, and Ron whipped his head around again, causing Hermione to shriek: She was stood there wearing said boxer shorts and had only just pulled his t-shirt over herself, which, admittedly, was so long it skimmed her thighs.

She saw his eyes flicker down to where her skin appeared beneath the hem, and then back up to her own eyes. He blushed again at being caught, and she couldn't help but grin.

Pulling the jeans on too seemed to break Ron's spell, as it were, and Hermione laughed again as he said,

"Well, I have to say, they look a damn sight better on you than they do on me."

"Hmm, that may be so, but they won't look good if they fall down will they?" She retorted, pulling on one side of the waistband so as to prove just how big they were.

"Oh I don't know," he commented, now grinning. "I wouldn't be complaining."

She gasped in mock outrage and smacked him on the arm as he turned to retrieve a belt that was hanging on the back of his chair.

Hermione wasn't sure whether or not he made a conscious decision to, but when he returned to her, holding the belt, he didn't hand it over. Instead, her breath caught in her throat as he began feeding it through the belt loops himself.

"I can dress myself you know." Hermione muttered, although she wasn't sure why she was protesting.

He'd worked his way round to the loop at the back, and he chuckled, tugging her closer and sending shivers down her spine.

"I'm sure you can, but it'd be nice if you just accepted help every once in a while," he said, his azure eyes meeting her chocolate ones for a split second, before continuing with the belt.

When he was done, Ron made a point of pulling down on the jeans, and said,

"There you go. They're not going anywhere those aren't."

Hermione squirmed a little, trying to stop the jeans from ending up round her ankles. By the time she'd twisted round a couple of times, evading Ron's new attempts to tickle her – incredibly ticklish – sides, she was stood flush against him, his hands on her waist, her hands splayed out on his chest.

He was rubbing tiny, tingly circles over her stomach with his thumbs, and simply because she thought that there was no time like the present, decided to bring up the subject she knew they were both skirting round.

"Ron," she hesitated. "About what happened earlier."

His head snapped up to look at her and the tingly circles stopped. For some reason he looked worried, and momentarily Hermione wondered if maybe she shouldn't go on, maybe she'd got it completely wrong when she thought he wanted the same things that she did. What if, when she'd kissed him earlier, he hadn't really been all that bothered…that he was simply reacting the way any red-blooded male would do when presented with a girl, flinging herself at him, mere moments away from an almost certain death?

And suddenly, everything she'd been about to voice, from feelings about her intuitions about him the first time they ever met, to when she first realised there was more to their relationship than just friendship, and what she'd been thinking to make her kiss him that very afternoon, all of it, caught in her chest. She felt as if she was about to burst in to tears right there against his chest. And she didn't have a clue as to whether she wanted to run from him for making her feel this way, or cling to him, knowing no-one else could possibly provide enough comfort.

She settled for attempting to gulp down her tears whilst twisting around great fistfuls of the t-shirt Ron was wearing.

"Don't you dare say you didn't mean it." He said, more forcefully than Hermione had ever heard him say anything in his life.

But then as she glanced up at him, out of surprise, he saw the unshed tears glistening in her eyes, causing his voice to soften once again.

"Hey, come on, what's wrong?" Ron murmured just above her head, taking her hands and prising them gently from the havoc they were wreaking.

He didn't let go of her hands, but she fixed her gaze on a cloud-shaped stain on his carpet, unwilling to admit to half the things she'd been about to moments before.

"It's no good admiring my muddy carpet," he said, crouching down so that he was below her head height. "It won't argue back you know. Won't tell you that you're too clever for your own good."

Hermione couldn't help the slight twitch her mouth made in the direction of a smile, despite the doubts that still shrouded her brain. But she stayed silent.

A huge part of her was telling her to just talk to him; what was the worst that could happen? It might put their friendship in a bit of a messy place, but in all honesty weren't they half way there already?

"Mione?" He was frowning up at her and she was having trouble avoiding his eyes. "Come on, you're scaring me now."

But there was that tiny, niggling feeling, that told her she'd got it wrong.

She pulled her hands carefully out of his grasp, breaking all contact and leaving him wobbling slightly on the carpet. If she was going to try and think straight, it would serve no purpose to have him clouding up her mind.

Beginning to pace the length of his tiny attic room she sniffed slightly,

"I can't think."

"Well there's a first." Ron muttered, shifting himself to sit on the edge of the bed and looking utterly perplexed.

Hermione turned to face him, making eye contact at last, but only for the purpose of glaring at him.

It was as if his sarky comment had pushed her back into her old self slightly, suddenly finding her voice and starting to talk at him, even though she didn't have a clue what she was saying.

"I can't help it if you mess my head up! How's it fair that you have that much control over me? What about being clever, hey? At least I used to be the clever 'insufferable-know-it-all' best friend, now I can't even manage that when you're around! I fell to pieces when you left you know." She'd started and now she couldn't find the willpower to stop and actually think about what she wanted to say.

Ron had a strange expression gracing his features; one of hope, but that could easily have been compared to a rabbit caught in the headlights of a very fast moving car.

"Hardly ate or slept the whole time. Kept breaking down all over the place, crying, hardly able to muster the strength to set the protective charms up. Harry didn't know what the hell to make of me. I was supposed to be helping him, and instead, as soon as you disappear I turn into this huge burden for him to drag around wherever he went. It's pathetic!"

And she did look truly disgusted with herself.

"No it's not," Ron said softly.

"Yes it is!" She shouted, not really caring who else could hear her. "I need to be able to think straight. If I don't have that, I have nothing. I'm not pretty or girly, I don't even play Quidditch. I'm nothing like any of the others in school who could wind you around their little finger simply by smiling at you. I said to Harry once, it was when you got knocked out by that queen, remember, that there was more to life than books and cleverness. For so long, I've stuck by that, I mean, it was Harry's mum's love that saved us all after all, but now I'm not so sure anymore. Not for me anyway! I mean, how is it fair at all that I'm rendered incapable of the only things I'm supposedly good at just because I fall in love with someone who quite blatantly doesn't reciprocate my feelings?"

Standing there, facing the wall in absolute shock of what she'd just revealed, Hermione sank to her knees, finally releasing the tears that had been threatening to spill right through her rant.

It was no surprise that Ron didn't move immediately. He sat in the same position, with the same expression, for a fair few seconds before sliding off the bed and crawling the short distance to where Hermione was quietly sobbing.

She felt an arm creep tentatively round her shoulders, and more because she was trying to avoid any more feelings surfacing, she shrugged him off quite forcefully.

But then, just when she expected to feel him retreat, his body heat was pressed right against her, his arms wrapping tight around her form, one hand stroking up and down her back.

"So," he said, "do I not get a turn?"

When she didn't speak, Ron took it as a sign to go on,

"For a start," he said softly, " You might like to know that you've had me wrapped round your little finger since the first time we met. Remember how you told me I had dirt on my nose? I've washed my nose religiously every day since."

If she'd looked up, Hermione would have seen just how much he was blushing, but he was still rubbing his hand up and down her back. The other had found it's way into her hair to gently massage her head, and she could tell from just the tone of his voice that he meant every word he was saying.

"And, I don't want to hear you say that you're 'not pretty' ever again. As far as I'm concerned," he said, dropping his head so that his lips were millimetres from Hermione's ear. "You're the most beautiful girl I ever met."

Huh? Hermione shivered slightly at the near-contact and did a mental double-take. Surely that couldn't mean what she thought it meant...could it?

"You fell in love with someone who does return your feelings."

She pulled her head up slightly and looked at him; considerably red in the face, and taking a deep breath. Then as his eyes met hers, he spoke again,

"I love you too."

It was at that exact moment that Hermione burst out laughing. She didn't chuckle or giggle, but grinning ear-to-ear, laughed as he had never heard it before. A loud, side-splitting laugh that she knew they could probably hear all the way down in the kitchen. And Ron, of course, looked more bemused than ever. This only made her laugh harder, burying her face in his chest once again and hugging him around his middle.

To his credit, Ron stayed put. Right through until ten minutes later when Hermione eventually resurfaced and breathed,

"I'm so sorry Ron."

He looked quite alarmed, and the thought crossed Hermione's mind that she wasn't handling any of this 'confessing her feelings' thing very well at all: Yet another side effect of being in love with Ron, it seemed.

"Oh, no it's nothing bad!" She cried, sitting up slightly straighter but unwilling to break the contact with Ron's hands, which were still running up and down her back. "I just thought how silly all this seemed. Like how we've been best friends since we were eleven but it's taken us this many years to admit our feelings, or so much as accept them for what they are, for that matter. And then, even now, even after I kissed you earlier, we're still so worried about messing things up and I actually thought just before that I'd damaged our friendship irreparably and that you'd never want to speak to me ever again…"

And then he kissed her.

She was so busy concentrating on her monologue of thoughts that she never even saw it coming. In a split second, one of Ron's hands had slid up her back and buried itself in her hair, pulling her head towards his.

It took her a second to respond, considering that she had been thinking about something entirely different a moment before, but after a moment, she began to kiss him back.

His lips were soft and he was showering her in small, gentle kisses. It was a world away from the heated grasp they'd found themselves in earlier, but Hermione was getting a bit frustrated with the way Ron's lips kept disappearing only to return for a split second, and then do the same all over again.

"…And I'd hate for that to happen," she murmured, against his lips.

"You what?" He asked, pausing in kissing his way down her jaw-line.

Hermione wriggled and leaned back a bit, freeing her arms from where they were still hugging Ron's waist, and bringing them up to loop around his neck. Playing with the hair at the nape of his neck, Hermione surveyed him for a second; He looked a little flushed, but nowhere near enough, she decided.

"Never mind."

She tugged his head towards hers, planting her lips firmly on his and proceeding to nudge the bottom one with her tongue.

He took the hint rather nicely, opening up to her and engaging in a ferocious war of the tongues, and she decided there and then that this was undoubtedly the best fight they'd ever had.

Somehow, and she genuinely didn't have a clue, the pair of them had ended up sprawled across Ron's carpet, herself half on top of him and still locked in a passionate embrace.

Hermione was just beginning to be aware of something digging into the outer of her left thigh, when the door opened.

But of course, the two of them were so engrossed in each other that they didn't react quite as fast as they should have done.

In fact, they didn't look up until Mrs Weasley exclaimed,

"Thank Merlin! At last, it's about bloody time!" before pulling the door behind her and heading back down the staircase, hands still full of their clean washing.

Suddenly, the thing digging in the side of Hermione's thigh wasn't digging so intently anymore.

Rolling off of Ron, she spoke quietly,

"Erm, maybe we should head downstairs. I told Harry I'd go down when I got hungry, and I'm sure you're pretty much starving, and I…think your Mum wants us to go down there."

Ron sat up and his hand found her cheek, pulling her head round to face him.

"I don't care who knows, alright. Not my Mum or Dad, nor any of my brothers," he gulped.

Pecking him on the lips, Hermione said,

"You forgot Ginny."

Smirking, Ron stood up and held out a hand for Hermione to do the same.

"Somehow, I think she'll be too preoccupied to care anyway. And," he added, "Once your Mum and Dad have come back, we can tell them too, and hope your Dad doesn't kill me, otherwise this whole 'surviving Voldemort' thing will have been pretty short lived."

"Ron, what exactly are we telling them?"

She couldn't resist, just to see the confusion on his face, and really because she felt they needed this sorting once and for all before they left the room. She took his outstretched hand and stood up.

"Well, erm…we're telling them that…w…we are…erm thatyou'remygirlfriend." He finished, rushing over the last few words.

"Oh really," Hermione teased, grinning up at him, entirely amused by his unease. "and what makes you think that I'll agree to being your girlfriend, mister?"

He leant down and kissed her smiling mouth, and acting on impulse, she poked her tongue between his lips, withdrawing it before he could join her, and then bit playfully on his bottom lip.

In return, he moved round and nipped at her right earlobe.

"That." He whispered.

"Well, I think you might just have persuaded me," she said, kissing his exposed neck and enjoying the feel of him shudder against her.

He withdrew his head and pressed a kiss to her forehead, squeezing her hand slightly, and said,

"Come on, we'd better go and see what the others are upto."

"And find some food, right?" Hermione asked hopefully.

Ron grinned at her,

"I thought it was me that was supposed to be obsessed with eating."

"Yeah, well maybe you're rubbing off on me already."

He raised an eyebrow at her, grinning like the proverbial cat who got the cream, and she realised how her comment had sounded.

"Oh shut up, Ron." She scolded, pulling him towards the staircase by the hand.

"I didn't say a word, Hermione." He chuckled, "Didn't say a word."

A/N:- Okay, so what did you think? Leave me a review to read cos I'll take it all on board…and I can take criticism…so long as its constructive :D