I saw them, again. Snogging like this was the last chance they had. They didn't care who saw them or how those people felt about their public display of affection. As always, I ran away and found an area of the castle that no one would intrude on me crying my heart out. And, as always, Harry found me there crying. It hurt that he had to sit there and comfort me while I cried, which seemed to be more frequent now than ever. He put his arm around me and I lent into his silent embrace.

After what felt like years of crying, I poked my head out and exclaimed "I loved him Harry, and what does he do? He goes and snogs another woman! A skank named Lavender! Will the teachers know it was me if I go and kill him?" I said as my heart-broken ravings turned into murderous rants. "Oh I don't care, he's going to-"

"Hermione, listen to yourself, do you really want to kill him? Wait, let me rephrase that. Will you regret killing him?" Harry interrupted me with something that made me think about the consequences of my planned actions.

"No, no I won't" I proclaimed.

"Hermione..." He cautioned, making me think with my head instead of my broken heart yearning to take revenge on the one who had put it in this state.

Fine," I said finally coming to a conclusion. "Come on, we're going to be late for dinner."

"No spells involving Ron choking on food, ok?" Harry cautioned, leading my brain off on an entirely different course as he helped me up off the floor.

I really do wish Ron would get over his habit of talking with his mouth full of food. Even if he wasn't I wouldn't answer his pathetic attempts to try and talk to me, although with him I'm not to sure if he even noticed that I haven't gone off at him for eating while talking. When Ron shut up for a second to shovel more food into his over-sized mouth, I took the opportunity to find out if Ginny needed any help on any subject's homework and what Luna had done with herself today. And then, of course Ron had to start talking about Lav-Lav, and spoil our lovely dinner by making us want to vomit. I glared at him and Ginny's fork was angling itself in Ron's direction. Luna started swatting some nonsensical creature away from her head, and Harry dazed off to some other world, most likely involving Quidditch. And Ron had to say something about certain types of light making 'Lav-Lav' look like an angel.

I suddenly remembered a spell I had read a few years back, and decided to put it into practice, as well as the wordless spell casting I had been practising in the last couple of weeks. After a successfully cast spell, Ron was wearing what had been my food, Ginny and Luna were trying to hold back laughter, and Harry looked like someone had just dropped their dacks in from of him. "You only said no spells involving Ron choking on food." I said as I got up and ran out of the Great Hall, wiping what I knew would be the first of many tears to come that night as I got to the stairs.

I went to the only place I could think of and though of a room with dartboards made of printouts of Ron's face.

Soon enough I had Ron's face covered in darts, so I headed over to the corner of the room and slid down the walls and hugged my knees while I cried for what could have been 5 minutes or 5000 years, Harry came into the room wordlessly and sat next to me and pulled me into his embrace, and he didn't seem to care that I was crying into his shirt. We stayed intertwined long after I had run out of tears.

"I always wondered what the feeling was I had, but now I know that it was a feeling of abandonment, aloneness." I confessed to Harry.

"You're not alone Hermione, you've got me, and you always will." he said in reply. And as he said that another tear slipped out from somewhere after a given-up game of hide and seek, and as it did he pulled me closer, setting what he had said in concrete.

And after all that we had gone through together, all he could do now was hold me.