Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter.
Warnings: None.
Pairings: Harry/Ron/Hermione
Note: This one's a little different. There are four little fragments in here because they're all connected.
Hermione
Hermione closed her eyes and thought. She was good at thinking. Incredibly good at thinking, in fact. They called her the most clever witch of her age. She'd worked hard to earn that title, and she would continue working hard to earn that title. She was a good person, a moral person, and she was a clever person too.
So she should be able to think of a solution to this mess. It was a logic puzzle, really. Her emotions needed to stay the hell out of this, thank you very much. She needed to make a choice, and her choice would affect them all. But it should be a choice driven by logic and fact and sanity, not ruled by the wild emotions that screamed and begged and roared inside of her.
Logic would save them from this, not emotion. She could use her cleverness to be logical. She absolutely could.
Fact one. Ron was a good man. He was poor, he was a little bit rude, and a bit of a coward, and occasionally jealous, but he was a good man. He would make a good husband. He was already a good friend.
Fact two. Harry was also a good man. A very good man. He had money, he had fame, and he had an insanely huge hero complex that would undoubtedly drive him into an early grave without people to check him from doing stupid things. He was rash, mischievous, and a little bit lazy academically. He was also, she was pretty sure, hiding something about his past with the Dursleys. LIkely some form of abuse, and she wasn't entirely sure that she was equipped to handle dealing with that.
Fact three. Both of the boys were academically lazy. She couldn't hold that against either of them. They both didn't necessarily see the importance of studying until the test was directly upon them. But she could work with that. Laziness was something that they could be trained out of, or so she thought.
Fact four. She loved them both, so very much that it hurt. She adored them. She would have been glad to spend the rest of her days with either one of them. With both of them, if she'd thought for a moment that it would work. But it wouldn't.
Which lead her to Fact Five. She had to make a decision. Triangles were fun for a once in a while kind of thing, but they didn't actually work in real life. There were too many emotions, too many… too much. It would never work. Ron was too jealous. Harry would be too uncertain of himself. And she was too damn logical for this.
What was she supposed to do? She'd never counted on falling in love. She'd never wanted this. She still didn't want it.
"Hermione?" they called together, and she broke.
Harry
"You can't go!" he screamed.
Ron didn't listen. Of course Ron wouldn't listen. He believed that leaving was the best choice. Harry knew exactly what was going through Ron's head, and he didn't know what to do about it. He only knew that he couldn't let Ron go. Somehow, Harry knew that if Ron walked out that door right now, he would never see him again. Ron would be gone forever, and Harry would lose his best friend.
"You can't," he continued, and lunged forward to grab Ron's hand.
Ron shook him off. "Why not?" he asked bitterly. "Why can't I go? I'm tired, Harry. I'm tired of fighting with the two of you. I'm tired of running. I'm just… I"m tired. Of not being enough. I'll never be enough. Of.. everything, actually. I'm just tired."
Harry broke. He cried, and he wasn't at all ashamed of his tears. If his tears might sway Ron from leaving, then he'd cry them all. He couldn't stop himself. "Please, Ron," he begged. "I need you. You're my best friend. You're our best friend. We'll die without you, Ron. We need you."
Hermione came out of the tent, then, joining them in the cold and the wet and the muck, in only her nightgown. She looked like she was freezing. She also didn't seem to feel it at all. "Please, Ron," she said, and her voice was light and gentle and warm and accepting, and Harry knew.
The idea hit him like a ton of bricks. "Ron," he breathed, because he'd missed it. How could he miss it? How could he not have realized that they were all three wrestling with the same thing? Because they were. He loved Ron and Hermione, and Ron loved Hermione and him, and Hermione loved them both.
And there was nothing wrong with that. He'd thought there was, had been so sure that there was something wrong with him for loving both of them, but it was okay. It was absolutely okay. "You don't have to go," he said quietly, certainly.
The Dursleys would never have approved of this, and maybe that was a good thing, that they would have hated him for this. He certainly hated them most of the time, after all.
"I have to go." Ron's voice was broken and shaking and he was crying.
Harry pulled on his arm, and Ron came into his arms easily, without protest. "You don't have to go," Harry said quietly, assuredly. "Because we love you, Ron. We both do. And we know that you love us, too. So you don't need to leave."
Ron
Ron had never imagined. He'd never believed that this would be his life.
He'd known, of course, that making friends with the Boy Who Lived would do something to him. How could it not? Harry Potter was so famous in their world, and it was so clear that he'd had no idea of the power his name held. And Ron had adored him for that. For not knowing or caring about his fame, even as he'd hated him a little bit for it. It was easy to not care about standing out when you couldn't help but do so.
But he'd grown. He'd gotten over it, and he'd gained the two most important people in the world because of his growth. Harry and Hermione had been everything to him. They'd been his friends, his family, his… everything. His first crushes, even. And he'd been pretty sure that they would end up together, and he was happy for them. Really, he'd been happy for them.
But they hadn't let that happen. They'd accepted his happiness, and then they'd done something he absolutely hadn't expected. They'd refused to let him leave that cold night during their Horcrux hunt. They'd come after him, both of them, and Harry had told him the truth, that they loved him as much as he loved them.
And how could he leave them while knowing that? He couldn't. He loved them too much to leave knowing that he would be hurting them as much as he was hurting. He didn't want them to ever feel like he'd felt. So he'd stayed, not knowing where things were going, and he'd never regretted it. Never.
And now… now, with the war over and everything settled down and Fred buried and… and now it was time to be happy. He could be happy now. They could be happy now.
And how could he not be happy, on this the day of their Bonding Ceremony? He was pretty sure that he'd never been happier in his life.
Damsel in Distress
Hermione Granger was no man's damsel in distress, and perhaps these idiots should realize that. She understood why she'd been kidnapped, of course. She was Harry Potter's Bonded, and Harry Potter was the Defeater of the Dark Lord. He was a hell of a person to try and bait like that, especially considering that they were both Bonded to Ron Weasley, who was Head Auror.
So yes. If they were trying to bait two very powerful men into coming here, well, they'd chosen a good victim. But Hermione Granger was no victim. Yes, she was a researcher and a politician now, but most people tended to forget that she'd been with Harry when he'd defeated the Dark Lord. She'd been by his side, with Ron, and she'd fought just as much as the two of them.
So if these idiots were expecting her to just sit quietly in her rope bindings and wait for Harry or Ron or both to come and get her, well, they were going to get exactly what they deserved. Sometimes, she mused as she wriggled out of her bonds, she wondered if the Dark Magic these idiots all used rotted the brain. Or maybe it was magic in general that seemed to eliminate the need for common sense, which meant that most wizards didn't have it at all.
She got herself free and walked across the empty room to her wand, which really, they'd left in the same room as her? Idiots. Just because she was tied up, and not very well mind you, they thought it was safe to leave her wand right there?
She waited until she heard the shouting start, and then she left the room and hexed everybody in between her and her boys. "Gentlemen!" she called, and watched as they both grinned, wild and bloodthirsty. Together they wiped the floor with these dark idiots, and when they were done, Hermione took great pleasure in lecturing the idiots on all of their mistakes.
"'Mione, don't you think you maybe shouldn't be giving them tips, in case they get the chance to try this again?" Ron asked worriedly.
Hermione glowered at him. "Perhaps these idiots will spread the words, and the next ones who try to kidnap me won't make the same exact mistakes their predecessors did. You know, like the ones before this. I'm getting bored with all these kidnapping attempts, anyway. I'd really like it if they would try something new."
"Yes, but if they learn something new, we might have trouble getting you back next time," Harry pointed out, his brow furrowing in concern.
Hermione's grin was reassuring as she said, "I have all the faith in the world that the two of you would track me down no matter where they took me, or how they did it."
That put an end to their protests, and she happily returned to her critique of her captors' techniques.
