It was a sweltering summer night. Hermione and Ron lay sleeping peacefully beneath a thin sheet in the bedroom of her London flat. Although Ron had his own place on the outskirts of London, where there was a bit more fresh air, the two spent enough time at hers that they might as well live together in her place. It had been a few weeks since the trio had gone to lunch together and things between her and Ron seemed to be getting better. The night terrors he had been experiencing were fewer but still happened frequently enough to worry Hermione.

As the small hand on the clock on the wall ticked closer to the three, Ron began to stir. He rolled onto his side, facing Hermione, and mumbled something under his breath just loud enough to make her wake up a little. She moved towards him and slipped an arm over him so she could sleepily rub his back and soothe him back to sleep, which had become her automatic response to his sleep mumbling. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. This time it did and Ron seemed to calm down and they were both back to sleep, a slight sweat on each of their brows, without ever realizing that they had even woken up.

The small hand on the clock inched closer to the five, and Hermione shivered and pulled the sheet tighter against herself. She was so cold that her teeth were chattering and she couldn't stop shivering. As she rolled over to move closer to Ron's warmth she felt something wet on her face. She sleepily brushed it off. She felt it a second time and brushed it off again. It took two more times before it was enough to wake her up. She sat up in bed and rubbed her eyes, her body still feeling the effects of the freezing cold air around her. When she finally opened her eyes wide enough and looked around her she gasped.

"S- s-sn- Snow?" She barely uttered through chattering teeth as her whole body shivered. She looked around and there was a light dusting of snow throughout the room. Above her, she saw thin, wispy clouds swirling above her as the tiny snowflakes fell upon her face. Reaching for her wand, she grabbed it off the nightside table.

"F-f-f-fin… Finite Incantatem." The snow stopped falling almost instantly and the freezing air had begun to warm slightly. She rubbed her arms to attempt to warm herself up a little when she heard Ron, mumbling something incoherently in his sleep. She leaned closer to him to try and hear what he was saying, but just then she felt it again. Another snowflake landed on her bare arm as her skin got goosebumps from a new blast of cold air moving against her, a thin tank top for a hot summer night doing nothing to keep her warm. There were new clouds above her, same as the first ones. Looking back at Ron, she had finally figured out why there was snow in the first place.

"R-r-ron…" She shook him a little bit. "You have to w-wake up…" She shook him again, a little harder this time, but apprehensively.

"Ron!" She all but shouted at him, finally forcing him to wake up and sit upright. She looked up and the cloud disappeared and the air once again began to warm just a little bit. She wrapped her arms around him, but was still shivering, not at all dressed for the arctic tundra Ron was inadvertently creating in his sleep. She pulled him tighter, both for warmth and out of worry.

"You're d-doing it again, Ron." She waved her wand to light the room and motioned to the dusting of snow covering every inch of it, including the bed. "W-wandless magic. In your sleep."

"What? I…" Finally completely awake, Ron looked around. Just as he realized how cold his skin felt, he could see the snow all around him. He saw his wand on his nightside table, also covered in completely undisturbed snow. He felt Hermione still shaking next to him. Picking up his wand he summoned them both their own blanket from across the room. He wrapped one around Hermione first before wrapping up himself too.

"Sorry, Hermione." He stifled a yawn. "I'll clean it up. Evanesco." The snow was gone, vanished into nothing by his spell, but the bed sheets were damp from whatever had melted on top of them, and the air was still freezing.

He looked around, intentionally avoiding Hermione's gaze, knowing for a fact that she was going to want to talk about this, and also knowing for a fact that talking about it was the last thing he wanted to do. He knew something was going on with him. He knew Hermione knew. She even tried to get him to open up about it a few times, and he almost did, but something was holding him back. Life was simpler for him when his life and lives of the people around him were in constant mortal danger. What to do next and how to do it was the easy part. He never had time to stop and think about himself or his own needs and emotions. This was especially true in such a large family. As the second youngest, he was frequently left on his own to figure that out, and it was always easier for him to just ignore it all. He learned to use the shroud of constant threats surrounding him to distract himself from whatever was bothering him and eventually he would feel better. That was a difficult way of life when the woman he loved for nearly half his life wore her emotions on her sleeve.

He knew they had been silent for a long time and that soon she would want answers and he didn't really have them. She would go completely mad if she knew he was suddenly sleeping better because of the small bottle of Sleeping Draught he had been taking almost every night. If only he could have made it through one night without it, he could have brewed another batch and this never would have happened. He could feel a pit in his stomach the more he thought about it. That pit kept growing until finally, he couldn't take it anymore. He saw the clock read almost six in the morning. He saw his way out.

"I guess it's a little early to get ready for work, so how about I make us some breakfast?" He smiled at her as if nothing at all had happened and slid out of bed, pulled on his robe, and was almost out of the room when he heard her.

"What!?" Hermione was completely flabbergasted, shaking her head in disbelief. "Breakfast!? How can you possibly be thinking of breakfast right now?"

"Oh, come on, Hermione. It's not a big deal-"

"How can you say that? My toes," She pulled her feet out from the blanket to show them to him. "Are still completely numb, and they've almost turned blue! I'm lucky I didn't get hypothermia, that neither of us did!"

"We're both fine! It was just a little snow. It's not like I set the rug on fire-" He cut himself off, wincing, and immediately regretting what he had said. He tried to recover, but it was too late.

"No, Ron, you didn't do that this time. That happened while Charlie was visiting when you very nearly burned down The Burrow!" Hermione was on her feet now and breathing heavily, still several feet away from Ron. She took a few deep breaths to calm herself. She knew if things escalated further that Ron would just retreat and bury his feelings deeper than he already had. When she was ready, she stepped toward him, wrapped her still-cool hands around his warm one, and looked into his eyes, pleading.

"Ron. I love you. So, please, just talk to me." She gave his hand a slight squeeze as she looked up at him. She could read him so well. She saw the torment inside of him. She knew there was part of him that wanted to talk about it, but there was also the part of him that would rather pretend none of this ever happened and would just like to move on. She thought, maybe, he would grow out of that as he got older, but she was still waiting for it. Perhaps she always would be.

"Okay. Fine..."

"Thank you." Hermione felt a huge relief wash over her and she pulled him down into a brief kiss before getting right down to business. "So, I've been doing some research into-"

"Well, maybe not right now?" He interrupted. "I mean, I haven't been able to stop thinking about breakfast and I'm starving." He let out a weak laugh, knowing what he was about to say would probably not go over well. "How about we talk tonight?"

With those words, Hermione immediately dropped his hand and took a step back from him.

"No. Not this time. That won't work this time." She could feel her heart beginning to race. It was taking all of her effort to not grab her wand and hex him right this instant. "That has worked far too many times than I would like to admit. You will not make me think we will finally talk, and then it never comes up until something like this happens again. You are doing WANDLESS magic in your sleep, Ron! Do you have any idea how dangerous that is?! It's one thing when it's a child making their toys levitate, or their hair change color, but this…We can't keep ignoring this!"

Hermione's fear came true. She was so hurt and worried that her frustration took over and she escalated the conversation to one where she was trying to plead with him, but it came off as yelling at him. She didn't mean to, but years of trying to help him open up to her when things got really tough felt like they were all for nothing in that moment. She briefly remembered telling Harry at Christmas how she missed the little fights she would have with Ron, never about anything too serious and neither of them ever walked away feeling hurt. But now, whenever they actually did fight, it was almost too painful for her to bear. She knew what was coming next. She braced herself.

The fight went exactly how she thought it would. She pleaded with him to just be honest with her and to let her in so she could help him. He deflected and retreated further into himself. It went back and forth for over an hour until, finally, they were both too exhausted from going in circles and having the same arguments over and over again. Ron eventually left, claiming he forgot his Shield Cloak at his place and he needed it for a raid before he stepped out the front door and apparated away. The second the door closed, Hermione wanted to just collapse in a heap and cry, but she was so emotionally exhausted from their fight that she didn't even have the energy to do that.

Her mind shut down and she drifted around her flat, getting ready for work in a total haze until all she had to do was her hair. It was then that she heard a knock on the door. Her heart froze, and she begged to Merlin that it wasn't Ron. She didn't want to keep fighting. Her heart resumed beating again when she heard her younger coworker's voice.

"Miss Granger? Are you home, Miss Granger?"

"Hello, Mona." Hermione opened the door and feigned a smile at her. She had explained to Mona numerous times that she could just call her Hermione. She wasn't that much older than Mona, and she wasn't even her boss, just her mentor, but still, she continued to do it, and Hermione was too exhausted to try and explain it to her again.

"Err… Good Morning, Miss Granger." Mona was caught off guard at the sight of her mentor's bushy brown hair being an unkempt and tangled mess. Hermione had gotten good at taming it over the years, so this was quite the shock for Mona. "Are… you ready to go? We have the meeting with the wizards from Luxembourg today and you said they like to do things the muggle way, so you wanted me to pick you up this morning at precisely eight o'clock so we could take a taxi to the meeting. Is that still what you would like to do today, Miss Granger?"

"Yes, Mona," Hermione replied lazily as she summoned her bag and shut the door behind them. She caught sight of herself in her reflection in a piece of artwork hanging in the hallway of her building. With a flick of her wand, her hair was once again manageable and under control. She did her best to push down what had happened with Ron, but every second her mind wasn't on her work, it was on him. Mona provided a nice distraction for their ride to her meeting, but she couldn't help but wonder when this day would end.