A red haired boy turns on his side and stares across his orange room, wide awake. His chess board shines in the moonlight, and he moves to sit in front of it. He studies the pieces and begins to make moves to try and trick himself. Night turns into morning and he sits in the moonlight playing, imagining each adversary as a different brother, determined to be the absolute best at something.
A little girl sits in a fort made by a blanket, two hands holding up a heavy flashlight and a book held in place between her feet. Each page she turns holds a world of pictures and things she never knew before. The thought overwhelms her- how she wants to know everything there is but she just doesn't have enough time- and so she sits up and reads until her parents find her crumpled forward on the open book in the morning.
A skinny boy sits up quietly on his mess of blankets, careful not to wake anyone. He gropes in the darkness for a soldier, and then for his steed. His small hand lands on another soldier dressed in different paint, and his scratchy blanket becomes the ocean, and his shelf becomes a castle. By shape alone he feels his way along the story (his favorite one to play) and the blackness leaves gaping spaces for his imagination to fill in. There in the darkness he plays pretend, where sometimes he wins and sometimes he drowns but he is always the hero.
"Where should we go next?"
Her voice is strained and there is a smile on her mouth but not in her eyes; Harry thinks it looks pathetic.
"We aren't on holiday." Ron mutters grumpily, and Hermione looks so deflated that Harry blurts out an answer.
"The mountains."
It's far, he thinks. Far from anything and secluded and almost safe there.
"The sea." Ron immediately says, just to disagree. They all know it, but Hermione pretends to consider it for a moment.
"Hmm. Yes, I've always liked the sea," she says, and Ron's face remains blank. "but the mountains do seem a bit safer-"
"And why is it that you get to decide?"
Harry sighs and gets up, trying to find something to do with his hands, and leaves Hermione there sputtering. "Well, well I... I wasn't deciding, Ron, I was just, just thinking-"
Ron angrily gets up and begins to pack his things by hand; they've taken to doing things like that just to stay sane. Once everything is prepared Hermione reaches a hand to both of them and holds on a bit more tightly than is maybe necessary. Ron stares at her hand in Harry's, and the next thing Harry feels is a sharp tug under his navel, and the slap of the cold ocean breeze on his face.
The first time Hermione goes back to her old house after the war, she sits on the porch and stares at the street she grew up on. She wonders if, maybe, that horrid tent is her real home now because although this is the place she lived for most of her childhood, that is the place where she really had to grow up.
Her elderly neighbor looks over a freshly trimmed rose bush and smiles politely. "How've you been?"
Hermione almost laughs at the simple question that she cannot answer. For a moment she wants to say, 'I saved your life. I saved the world.' but instead she just nods very sweetly.
The old woman smiles and turns to go into her house. "Tell your parents hello for me." she says from her doorway.
Hermione almost calls back "But haven't you noticed, they've been gone for months!" but the woman has already disappeared into her safe Muggle home where she won't see anything and won't hear anything and won't know anything about everything.
And then Hermione thinks 'That was almost me.'
My sister is a freak, she says. My sister goes to a boarding school for freaks all like her, with burning red hair and weird books and no T.V.s there at all.
And all the girls oo and ahh and open their magazines, cross their feet with their little painted toenails.
My sister is so dumb. They hardly even teach her anything at that freak school, she says. My sister won't even do anything sensible at all.
And they all pile their dark hair onto their heads and blow on their nails and brush colors across their pale pale eyes.
Your sister doesn't know anything, he tells her. She doesn't understand.
And the little girl with the burning red hair and the shocking green eyes looks at him, hopeful.
Your name is a flower, he tells her. You're aren't a freak, you're a witch.
The little girl peeks through the crack in the doorway, stares longingly at the girls with the dark dark hair and the colorless eyes. "They burn witches." she says, so small.
A sliver of light falls onto her through the doorway and her hair shoots fire along the hallway. He knows.
Hermione scrubs even harder at a stain on the floor of Grimmauld Place. George slides across the waxy floor with Ron's prefect badge in hand. "What was Dumbledore thinking?"
"I don't know!" Hermione snaps, scooting over to polish over the section that George had mussed up.
Ron looks up, slightly offended. "What do you mean you don't know!" he exclaims, tossing a dirty sponge at her and missing on purpose.
"I didn't mean- Ron, you know, ugh! Just that- I've never been old."
"I have!" Fred shouted as he appeared in the doorway and slid across the same path that George made.
"Growing a beard last year for breaking the rules doesn't make you wise."
"Hmm," said George, looking at Fred, "If breaking the rules doesn't make you wise, then what do you suppose does? Books?"
"No no no, that'll just make you a prefect- oh, wait..." Fred responded, pausing to look at Ron with fake confusion.
Hermione threw a sponge as hard as she could at their heads, but they both ducked at the same time. "Must be the wisdom one gets from old age."
Hermione sighed and smacked a soapy hand to her forehead. Even she joined in on the laughter as the bubbles ran down her wrists and nose.
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