Hermione took a deep breath as she left the psychological healing ward at St Mungo's after her first session of talking therapy on the Monday six weeks after the battle of Hogwarts. She had been the first patient on the newly established ward and had been seen by a muggle counsellor called Julie Walters and a magical healer, Gracie Lee, who was learning the field and setting up the ward.

They had talked a lot about the battle, and they had only scratched the surface of course, but she didn't only have the battle to work through and in time they would discuss the other suffering she had endured during her time at Hogwarts, her year on the run, obliviating her parents to keep them safe, being tortured physically and mentally, watching Dobby die as he saved her, being hunted not just for her choice in friends but also for being a 'mudblood'... she couldn't avoid that term however much she hated it. The scar on her arm wouldn't let her.

She had tried to hide the scar with healing and glamour charms, tried healing it with potions and salves from both magical and muggle medicine but nothing seemed to work. It wasn't only her physical scars that needed healing though and she became more and more confused as time passed since the end of the war yet she felt like she was falling more and more apart. She rarely slept as the walls her mind had built to keep her safe and sane were no longer deemed necessary by her brain which instead of continuing to protect her sanity allowed the walls to crumble down inside her. Her waking moments were beginning to fill more and more frequently with flashbacks and her sleep was broken with nightmares from all of her traumatic experiences seeping through at any moment when she wasn't entertaining her mind.

Despite living at the burrow rather than being at school she was learning and improving in certain areas very quickly. She shared a room with Ginny and had become an expert in holding silencing spells through her single hour of sleep a night and not letting those silencing spells fall even during her worst nightmares. Her healing skills had also improved as she tended to her own and her unofficial family's war wounds, St Mungo's was overrun with patients following the end of the war and none of the Weasleys wanted to add extra strain for the healers, especially as Fred was still in the hospital in a coma following the final battle. She had also improved her cooking, magical cleaning, gardening and knitting skills under the family matriarch's guidance.

Molly had only allowed Hermione to help around the burrow after she had found the young woman rocking herself in front of the fire early one morning with tear stained cheeks and puffy eyes. Hermione had kept her glazed over eyes fixed unseeingly on the fire as she explained that she just couldn't keep all the thoughts at bay when she wasn't busy. Following her ordeals in the war Molly had wanted to pamper and care for the young woman she thought of as like a daughter so had been rebutting her attempts to help until then, but Molly loved Hermione far more than her own pride and if helping around the house was what she needed to keep her dangerous thoughts at bay then it was what she would get.

An added bonus for Molly had been that she now had more time to go to see Fred during hospital visiting hours. St Mungo's had put him in a private room due to the regular presence of the golden trio at his bedside, they caused such chaos in their wake wherever they went in the wizarding world now that the hospital found it much easier this way. That was also why Hermione's therapy sessions were booked outside of the usual hospital appointment hours and late in the evenings, after visiting hours finished and the hospital would be as empty as possible.

Hermione walked aimlessly through the quiet corridors not really feeling ready to go back to the burrow yet, she thought her first session had been helpful but she felt very fragile and worried about how she would react to the noise and commotion of the large family home so soon after recounting tales of death and destruction in battle. As she continued to wander aimlessly around the hospital corridors she noticed the entrance to the intensive care ward that Fred was in, she knew it would be only him and George in his room at this time of night so gently pushed her way through the doors after rubbing the cleansing potion over her hands and padded along the empty corridor to his door.

"May I come in?" She asked quietly as she poked her head around Fred's door to see a sleepy George curled up in bed next to her favourite twin.

"Hey Hermione" George replied equally softly, as though his twin were asleep and he didn't want to wake him. George always spoke loudly during the day but quietly at night, he strongly believed that Fred could hear him and wanted to keep a normal noise pattern for him. This was probably more for George's benefit than Fred's though as he needed to hold onto hope somehow. The war may have finished but the same shadows and darkness still hovered in the eyes of all affected, including the happy go lucky Weasley twin who feared for his brother's life daily.

Padding across the room Hermione sat down in the soft armchair on the other side of Fred's unmoving frame with a sigh. She had had a crush on Fred since first year, he and George had been so kind to her before she had made friends in her own year and she prided herself on quickly learning to tell the difference between them in return, that crush had then blossomed and developed through her teenage years but she had always pushed it aside as she knew he would never look twice at a bookish prefect like her. Ron and she had chemistry so she chose to pursue that instead which culminated in their kiss during the final battle but over the following few days they realised that, however much they loved and adored each other, they were just not right together romantically.

It had taken an intervention by all of the burrow's residents to make them voice this to each other though. They had each been confiding in various family members as they didn't want to tell each other and cause any more pain so soon but, as those same family members pointed out, they were already causing each other pain by being together when they both knew it wasn't right for them. Love came in so many different forms and they would always be exceptionally close, just not romantically.

When Fred had been injured in the battle the world had slowed terrifyingly and Hermione had felt like her lungs weren't working and her vision had gone black around the edges. She had only managed to breathe properly again when she had arrived in the great hall to hear Ashlynn, the muggle born healer working alongside Madam Pomfrey in the great hall, briefly explain that she had repaired Fred's brain injury using something that Hermione thought looked rather like a miniature muggle CT scanner and that he was still alive before moving on to another patient in an equally life-threatening condition. Ashlynn had in fact used her own magical friendly version of a CT scanner to diagnose Fred's brain injury after a wall collapsed on him and had subsequently performed magical surgery on him with the images from the CT scanner to guide her. He had since been moved to St Mungo's intensive care unit but was still in a coma that there was no guarantee that he would ever wake up from.

"Come to visit your favourite Weasley?" George teased puffing up his chest slightly, he really did try to keep up morale.

"Yeah" came Hermione's reply with a gentle laugh, her soft gaze wandered unconsciously to Fred's bruised and scarred form.

This look didn't go unnoticed by the awake twin who promptly stood up from the bed.

"Well I'm going to have a shower and grab something to eat if you're happy to sit with him?" George announced as he collected a few items from the overnight bag the rest of the family topped up for him during their daytime visits and walked into the en-suite shower room.

With a confused expression Hermione watched the door close and lock behind him, as far as she was aware George hadn't left Fred's side without being coerced, other than to nip to the loo, even once since Fred had arrived on the ward. His brothers and father managed to persuade him to shower every other day with great difficulty and his mother and friends brought him food and drink to keep him going, even though he seldom ate it and they often had to throw it away at the end of the day or next morning.

"Perhaps he's starting to cope a little better" she mused out loud "he's been really worried about you, you know. We all have but it's been especially hard on George."

Hermione told Fred all about her therapy session feeling safe with Fred as she always had done, while George showered, before starting to go into detail about her day at the burrow when he popped outside the room to grab some snacks from the vending machine. He may have been content being out of sight of Fred's body when his twin was alone with Hermione but he still didn't want to be out of sight of the room, so he soon returned with a bag of Bertie Botts Every Flavour Beans and two cans of fizzy pumpkin juice for them to share as they chatted for the next few hours.

…

Hermione visited Fred again three days later following her next session at the psychological healing ward later that week, she came during visiting hours once a week too with Ron and Harry but even though they were her best friends she didn't feel as comfortable talking as openly with them around. The hospital staff seemed okay with her visiting outside of the official visiting times when she was alone if only because they saw how much it helped George, they had all developed a soft spot for the prankster turned resistance fighter twins and war heroine.

Hermione loved spending time with the twins just like she had during her first term at Hogwarts and mentioned it at her third session with Healer Lee and Julie, the muggle counsellor.

"I hear you saying that you find the time you spend with the twins to be therapeutic. How was your sleep afterwards?" Julie asked at the end of the session, she had a magical child so she already knew about magic and could understand, to some extent at least, Hermione's feelings of belonging to two worlds.

"Better but that could have been because of our sessions together though" Hermione replied with a slow nod "they were on the same day."

"Yes, but the only way to find out is to isolate one or the other and seeing as it is a positive experience I would recommend adding additional visits in the same vain rather than skipping or altering your existing ones." Julie finished the session with a small smile as she walked Hermione to the door.

Armed with a book called Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Hermione followed the instinctive path to Fred's room again and settled herself into the armchair next to Fred's bed. As George showered and fetched snacks she told Fred about her therapy session and her day learning about summer flowers from Molly in the burrow's garden.

"I'm becoming quite domesticated now," Hermione said proudly after listing the names and features of the plants she had tended that afternoon "your mum had me cutting lavender flowers for us to make scented fabric bags and soaps tomorrow. In the muggle world it would take weeks for them to dry enough to use but your mum has an overnight spell which I also learnt today. Lavender and forget-me-nots are definitely my favourite flowers, they might not be as fancy as a peony or as eye-catching as sunflowers but they are far more beautiful to me."

George had caught Hermione's last sentence as he re-entered the room with tonight's box of every flavour beans and cans of fizzy pumpkin juice from the vending machine and repeated it to himself in the hopes he would be able to tell Fred what Hermione's favourite flower was when he woke up. He told everyone that he was sure his twin could hear their voices, but after seven weeks in a coma he wasn't really as optimistic as he portrayed himself to be. Having Hermione there really did help him though as he knew from the way she looked at his twin that he wasn't the only one who loved him so intensely.

"What's the book Mione?" He asked as he popped a bright yellow bean into his mouth before puckering his lips at the sour taste of raw lemon, unlike muggle jelly beans Bertie Bott's weren't sweetened to make the taste more pleasant.

"Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" she replied laughing at his expression before digging through the box and finding a particular shade of green she was sure would be either grass or apple, either of which she could live with "it's by an author called Roald Dahl and was one of my favourites as a child. I brought it to school with me in first year and McGonagall saw me reading it one day when I was homesick. Apparently Roald Dahl had a favourite cousin called William who was a muggle-born wizard, but he returned to the muggle world during the global wizarding war and opened a chocolate factory to which he invited muggle-born witches and wizards before they were old enough to get their Hogwarts letters. When the war was over he let wizarding children attend too but kept special days for muggle borns to attend and get a taste of our world." She smiled fondly as she stroked the cover of the well loved, old book. "I thought Fred might like to hear the story, I think you both would have enjoyed going to visit his factory if he were still alive today."

At George's smile and encouraging nod Hermione began to read.

Over the next fortnight of evenings she continued to read the book aloud and by the end of the last chapter George had filled several pages in Fred's product ideas notebook, which George had placed on the bedside table in case his twin had a stroke of genius which needed to be recorded as soon as he woke up from the coma. It quickly became a habit for Hermione to finish her evenings with a trip to St Mungo's and the bags under her eyes began to lessen as the visits helped her to sleep soundly for a few hours rather than only one before the nightmares tore the screams silently from her throat again. Not even Ron's inquisitive nature questioned her intentions behind going alone when he saw the good it was doing her.

Hermione however was thoroughly confused. She had buried her crush on Fred so deep down that even she couldn't see it anymore and she really couldn't understand why her time with him made her feel any better. 'It must be the peaceful environment' she convinced herself as she allowed her gaze to linger on Fred's freckled face.

...

Author's Note

Hello! Welcome to this Fremione tale following the end of the seventh HP book.

This story runs in parallel with my story 'Falling Apart With You', you do not need to read both but if you want to know more about the circumstances of Fred's survival of the final battle and the healer who made it possible then please check that out from my page :)

Have a great day and please leave me a little review/follow/favourite etc. to share the love,

Wishin' Girl x x x