A/N: A short oneshot I wrote while I was bored:) I've always liked the Harry/Hermione pairing but couldn't think of a plot strong enough to last chapters:(
Hermione Granger knew she should have said yes. When Harry Potter had confessed his love for her, presented her with a bouquet of singing flowers ( and a limited edition copy of Hogwarts: A History), and asked her to go out with him, she should have said yes. She should have nodded her head vigorously till it almost fell off, squealed in excitement, leapt up in joy and clasped his hands in hers while shouting "YES YES YES!"
But, no. Hermione Granger had not done any of these perfectly right and sensible things. Instead she had turned away embarrassedly and mumbled, "This isn't going to work out, Harry". She had seen the hope in his eyes get crushed into smithereens, watched his face fall, before she walked away, not knowing whether she had done the right thing. It took her two hours, two bloody hours to realize that she had just committed the biggest mistake of her life. By then, it was too late.
Or maybe, it had always been too late. She had known it was impossible between the two of them. Ginny was in love with him, for Merlin's sake! Ginny! One of her closest friends! She couldn't just take him away from her, not when the younger girl had spent a huge proportion of her life pining for the affections of The Boy Who Lived.
Moreover, her parents would never agree to them dating. They already found the idea of their ordinary, sensible daughter attending a wizarding school hard to believe, and it was a miracle they hadn't forced her to leave Hogwarts when the Monster Book of Monsters nearly chewed off her father's toe. They would never have agreed to let her date Harry, the target of most of the murder attempts that took place in the wizarding world. Hermione shuddered at the thought of her dentist father, a cleanliness freak, meeting Harry with his worn out baggy Muggle clothes, Sellotaped glasses and unruly hair. Oh, the horror.
The days after she rejected him felt like a never ending hell. On one hand, she hoped with a sort of quiet desperation that he would continue his pursuit of her, like she had never said those cruel words to him. She liked being loved, even if she wasn't sure whether she could love him back as much as he did. The subtly sweet messages he left for her, his little gestures, his gawky teenage-boy awkwardness…God, she liked everything about him.
On the other hand, she hoped he would give up because she knew it was a hopeless pursuit. She could never say yes because there were a thousand and one things in between them, and what were her feelings compared to their future, her parents, her best friends?
Even so, she wept quietly when she realized he had given up.
A terrible darkness seemed to have sunk over her world and the only way she could think of to get rid of it was to drown herself in what she did best. So, Hermione Granger drowned herself studying. Her hand shot up twice as fast during lessons, her essays became twice as long, her spells twice as amazing. A rumor went round the school, speculating that the number of points Hermione had won for Gryffindor by answering questions alone hovered in the high three hundreds – a record no student had achieved in the history of Hogwarts.
Hermione remained unaware of all this. She was only conscious of the gaping hole in her life that had been Harry's relentless (or not so relentless, it seemed) pursuit. And no matter how much she tried to fill that void, it remained a yawning chasm through which her entire soul seemed to have leaked and flowed away.
Harry was still her friend, of course. They were still the Golden Trio and they would stay forever that way. He seemed to have forgotten everything, and so did everyone around them. Selective amnesia, thought Hermione one night as she lay in her bed, wondering what Harry was doing on the other side of the wall. She could never forget him, and lived each day being painfully conscious that once upon a time, they had been more than just friends.
Jealousy took root inside her when she found out that Harry was dating Ginny. She did, of course, say the necessary blessings and congratulate the happy couple, but in reality, she wished they were never together. It was a sadistic and wicked thought, she knew, but she could not control her heart, as much as she could not control the bitterness that welled up inside her mouth when she saw them with their arms around each other. The jealousy and frustration ate at her from within, torturing her, but she knew there was no one else to blame other than herself. It was only in rejecting Harry that she realized how much she loved him, and in a way, she had brought this upon herself.
When they broke up after Dumbledore's death, her heart leaped. For days, she lived in hopeful optimism that she would stand a chance now, a chance to walk into his heart again. She had comforted him, as a friend would, asking if he'd be alright. She had lent him her shoulder to lean on when he confessed that Ginny haunted his dreams at night, all the while wishing that it was her who lingered in his memory and not the red haired girl. She'd handed him Chocolate Frog after Chocolate Frog as he mourned the end of his first romance while trying hard to mask the tingles that went up and down her spine every time his hand brushed against hers.
Eventually, thought, she'd gotten used to the idea that she never stood a chance, and she never would. Ginny was his one true love, and she was just something he had once taken a fancy to, only to forget after his affections faded.
She turned her attention to Ron instead. The silly bloke had fallen madly in love with her and she saw in him a kind of jovial, comforting warmth that Harry did not have. She figured that one broken heart was better than two, and dived headfirst into her relationship with Ron. She learnt to love him – loving Ron was admittedly easier than loving Harry. He was always unsuspecting and readily accepting. He never noticed why she sometimes became eerily silent in Harry's presence or heard her whisper Harry's name in her sleep. Even if he did, he never questioned her feelings. He loved her with a childlike innocence, and she tried her best to love him back as much.
We all tend to become things we are pretending to be.
And so, Hermione became Ron's wife and remained Harry's friend. But there would always be some things she could never forget, even if the world pretended they had never existed. These memories hovered on the edge of her subconscious, blurred out by the more important things in her life, and she never made an attempt to recover or relive them.
Still, years later, even when they were all grandparents, Hermione Granger could never walk past Harry Potter in the corridors of the Ministry without feeling that familiar flutter in her heart.