27 July 1997
The hours following the battle passed in a blur. There was a heaviness in the air that seemed to sink into each of them and, despite everyone insisting that he not, Harry of course took it upon himself to shoulder the responsibility in a despondent silence that radiated through the house.
It was perhaps two or three in the morning when Kingsley's patronus finally came, bursting into the quiet den where they all sat vigil, clutching mugs of firewhiskey and tea. George, under the influence of numerous pain potions, slept through it without stirring.
"Alastor was injured," Kingsley's deep voice resonated while they all squinted against the sudden flash of silver-blue light. "He's stable but unable to move. We will remain at Caradoc's tonight and send word in the morning."
As the charm dissolved into a silver mist there was a collective sigh.
"We're going to head up to bed," Bill said, speaking first and pulling a half-asleep Fleur to her feet beside him.
Tonks and Remus murmured their goodbyes and left for the apparition point with Hagrid in tow.
"We should go to sleep," Hermione said quietly from where she was tucked beside Fred in an oversized armchair. She knew there wasn't any way he'd want to go back to the flat that night, so far from George, but he looked nearly ready to pass out.
Fred nodded, not having spoken much since they'd come inside, and helped her up.
Though Molly had glanced at them interestedly a couple times since the garden, she hadn't said anything yet and, as Hermione and Fred made their way to the stairs, she busied herself with making up a bed for Angelina.
There didn't seem to be any question about sleeping arrangements. Ginny parted with a succinct goodnight and Fred led Hermione to his old bedroom while Harry and Ron continued up to the next floor, the latter looking back with a troubled expression.
Frankly, Hermione couldn't bring herself to care about it just then.
"Bathroom," Fred murmured, depositing her at the door and heading for the loo. Through the adrenaline crash and bone-deep exhaustion, unease still found the energy to niggle into her head at the slope of his shoulders and weariness of his eyes.
Her things were in Ginny's room but, rather than retrieve them, Hermione opened the dresser against the wall and extracted an old t-shirt and a pair of long-forgotten shorts, quickly pulling them on and finger-combing her hair before giving up and throwing it into a messy plait. She'd just sat on the edge of the bed when Fred reappeared.
He shut the door with a quiet click and stood in front of the dresser, his back to her, and after a moment she got to her feet again and stood behind him.
Wordlessly, she wrapped her arms around his middle and rested her cheek between his shoulder blades. He smelled faintly like sweat and ash.
Eventually he turned in her arms and she pulled back a little, looking up into his face, but when he opened his mouth to speak, she shook her head and hushed him.
"Tomorrow," she entreated softly, slipping her fingertips beneath the hem of his shirt and guiding it up and over his chest. Fred raised his arms, letting her pull the garment off. She leaned forward and brushed her lips against his bicep, smooth and unmarred, letting the fear from earlier claim her for just a second before pushing it away again.
For the time being, fear was in the past. And while Hermione had a feeling that the rising sun might bring with it a different sort of heartache, it wasn't morning yet.
"Tomorrow," Fred echoed hoarsely as her hands went to the waist of his trousers, unfastening and pushing them down so he could step out, still in his pants and socks. Then she took his hand and led him to the bed across the room. It was far too small for the both of them but, though either could have charmed it to be larger, neither seemed keen to let the other go.
They lay down and Fred pulled her into his chest. Hermione thought she might not be able to sleep, but it only took moments before she drifted into wearied unconsciousness, cocooned beneath blankets with the steady thrum of his heartbeat beneath her ear like a lullaby.
Or a ticking clock.
oOoOoOo
Fred woke first – woke being a generous term for someone that had slept only in fits and starts through the wee hours of the morning. The sky outside the window told him the sun hadn't quite risen yet and Hermione's breathing, steady and even, told him that she hadn't either.
She'd passed out promptly upon laying down and, if he were being honest, Fred felt some relief at that. Between him and Harry and Angelina, she'd worn herself thin trying to hold everyone else together. She hid her exhaustion well, she always did, but it showed in little ways.
Gaze trained on the ceiling, he watched a spider slowly spin a web in the far corner of the room while his own brain tangled and untangled a million thoughts before knitting them together into a tapestry that he was a little afraid to look at too closely.
Hermione eventually stirred awake, moving away a little to stretch as best she could in the cramped space between him and the wall. Huddling down into the blankets, she rolled back onto her side to face him, and he did the same, their heads cushioned on opposite ends of the pillow.
"We have to talk about it, don't we?" she finally asked in a whisper. He nodded and she sighed. "I killed three men last night."
"Yeah, you did," he said, reaching out to trace a thumb across her cheek. She shut her eyes and leaned into his touch.
"I killed three men, and I'm – I'm not sorry about it."
"You shouldn't be. They would have done the same to us without a second though. They tried to."
"For every idealistic peacemaker willing to renounce his self-defence in favour of a weapons-free world, there is at least one warmaker anxious to exploit the other's good intentions." Her eyes opened and searched his face in the grey morning light of his childhood bedroom, like it might hold some sort of answer to the existential query of killing in order to preserve life. "I suppose it wasn't very likely that I was going to walk away from this without blood on my hands, was it?"
"I doubt that anyone will," Fred said honestly. He wasn't sure if he'd killed the man who'd attacked her the night before, but he found he didn't much care either way. That heart-stopping moment where Hermione had started to slip off the broom behind him had assured that.
After a night of lost sleep Fred had realised that there was regretting the act of killing, which neither of them could seem to do given the circumstances, and then there was grieving the raw, simple loss of life itself. That was the part that was more difficult to reason away.
It was quiet for a long while, just the sound of their breath in an otherwise silent house.
"After last night," Fred started, the knot in his chest demanding to be addressed before it strangled him, "After what happened with George… Hermione, I don't know if I can –"
"You need to stay," Hermione finished succinctly. He pulled back in surprise, but as Fred searched her face, he saw that she wasn't surprised, not at all. There was only a sort of sad resignation and something else undiscernible, simmering just below the surface. It was the same look she'd worn the night before, only now he was beginning to understand it.
"I'm not sure," Fred admitted quietly, feeling like his emotions were being held together by a sheet of cellophane, a spectacle for all to see. Except it wasn't all, it was her. Just her. Always her. "When we walked in and I saw him on the sofa, so fucking pale and with all of the blood, I didn't… I thought that he was dead, and it was like seeing a piece of myself. I don't know if I —"
"Fred?" Hermione interrupted his disjointed babbling again gently, reaching out to tip his chin back up and look him in the eyes, something he hadn't noticed he'd been avoiding as he spoke. "I need you to stay."
His confusion must have shown on his face because she immediately began to explain, that same heaviness in her mien.
"Something became extremely clear to me last night. A few things, really, but chief among them, I realised that I would do anything to protect you. Anything. Beg, borrow, steal, kill… die. I knew that before, in a cerebral sense, but I hadn't fully comprehended the depth of it until I thought I was about to lose you and quite literally threw myself off of a broom."
"I don't understand why that changes anything," Fred confessed. They were intense declarations with even graver implications behind them, but he would be a fool to deny that he didn't return them. That he wouldn't willingly lay down his life in exchange for hers.
"Under any other circumstances it wouldn't," Hermione said, her voice catching in her throat as she choked out a cynical laugh that, for whatever reason, affected him more than anything else thus far. "If our lives were remotely normal, it would be a given. It would be natural for me to put you first. But as it is, with what we're setting out to do…
"It's not about me. I'm not so naïve as to think that I'm irreplaceable, that my role in this war is as important as that. But if we ended up in a situation where I had to pick between saving you or saving Harry? Fred… I'd pick you. Without a second thought, I wouldn't be able to stop myself. I would — I would let him die. And you would too.
"We don't understand the sodding prophecy, nobody does, but Harry is the key at the middle of this. I can feel it. And for everybody's sake, for George and Angie and your parents, for the innocents in the crossfire who have no idea what's coming for them and the people that they love, that can't happen. I can't risk that happening."
As tears painted quiet tracks down her cheeks and over her nose, Fred finally understood what that undiscernible thing was: it was guilt. Unwarranted and undeserved, but guilt nonetheless.
He didn't know if it was the confession about Harry or her asking of him the very thing that she said she wouldn't. It didn't matter either way because the outcome was the same, and their promises, however well-intentioned when they were made, were unraveling.
So, although it took everything, every scrap of faith that he had in her and in them, his voice remained steady when he said, "Then you go. You go with Harry and Ron, and I'll stay."
His words stayed suspended in the air between them until Fred pushed them aside and pulled her back to him as she cried and he felt like something in his chest, something vital, splintered.
Cradling the back of Hermione's head and rubbing a thumb along her neck, he stared at the spiderweb in the corner again and tried not to let his own feelings in that moment pull him under, that stifling cocktail of relief and fear and shame.
Because she wasn't the only one going back on her word. After vowing not to, after swearing to any and all deities that he wouldn't, he was watching her walk into danger without him. Again.
"What do we do now?" she asked in a small voice some time later, swallowing hard and swiping futilely at her eyes.
He wanted to say that they stayed there, hidden under the covers from the world and the war and the looming presence of yet another impending goodbye. But he didn't.
Instead, Fred turned and reached over the side of the bed, pulling himself back up when he found what he'd been looking for and pressed it into her hand.
"Only take the things that could put you in danger, okay? And promise me that someday, when all of this is over, you'll explain everything again."
She was visibly confused at first, staring at the wand in her hand like she'd never seen it before, but he saw the second she realised what he was telling her to do.
It looked like it killed her when she nodded, and he knew it fucking killed him to ask it of her, but she was brave, his witch. And if she was, he could be too.
Even if that bravery had to live in the dark for a little while.
Hermione steadied herself and then leaned forward and pressed a gentle kiss to his lips, the taste of sorrow on his tongue as she broke away just enough to exhale.
"Obliviate."
oOoOoOo
The sun was barely beginning to creep over the hills behind the orchard when Hermione finally made her way downstairs with puffy eyes and a heavy heart. Though the talk with Fred burdened her beyond what should be humanly possible, there was a silver lining in knowing that, while an impossibly difficult one, they had still made their choices together. He would remember that much, if not the exact details of where she would be and why. She'd been thorough for both of their sakes.
She peeked into the den to find George, still fast asleep on the sofa and snoring with his head propped and heavily bandaged. Molly was in an armchair to the side, nodded off as well, but the makeshift bed that Angelina had occupied near the fireplace was rumpled and vacant. Hermione checked the loo and then the kitchen but couldn't find her. It wasn't until she looked out over the garden that she saw a lone figure in the mist, seated in the grass with a blanket wrapped around its shoulders.
Grabbing her own, dark green quilt off of the rocking chair, Hermione quietly crept to the back door and let herself out. She didn't know if the other witch wanted company or not, but she decided that under the circumstances it was better to ask than wonder.
She didn't say anything at first when she sat down beside Angie. Just tucked her knees to her chest and wrapped the blanket around her shoulders, chasing away the early morning chill.
"Do you want to talk about it?"
Angelina glanced sideways at her, assessing, and then nodded, but she still didn't speak for a while. Somewhere in the distance songbirds began to sing in their morning chorus.
"We hadn't even been in the air for a minute when the spell hit him," she began. Hermione recalled the scream she thought she'd heard through the chaos and nodded. "I thought – I didn't know if he was alive or dead. I had no way to know, it was dark and there was so much blood… but we had to move. We couldn't stay there."
Hermione just reached out and took Angelina's cold hand in her own, remaining silent and listening with a genuine empathy that she was uniquely positioned to feel.
"There were… pieces hanging there that I tried to—to…" Tears began to track down Angie's cheeks, but she quickly brushed them away with her sleeve and took a deep, shuddering breath, continuing with a stubborn set to her jaw. "I had to keep him on the broom, so I bound us at the waist, cast a sticking charm, and kept a hand on him when I could, then I just… flew. I flew as fast as I fucking could, I didn't stop. Two of them followed us and I hit one of their brooms with an exploding charm. I think the other one went after him because he disappeared after that too.
"It was around then that I realised George was starting to go cold and we weren't going to make it all the way to the safehouse. So, when I was as sure as I could be that we weren't being followed anymore, I landed us in this empty field behind an abandoned petrol station and apparated to the edge of the wards here. Bloody miracle that I didn't splinch us both, thinking back on it now. Then I bandaged him up as best I could and ran. Ginny met me at the edge of the garden and then Alicia came out with Molly and Katie and I… I don't remember much after that."
"You were in shock," Hermione explained gently. "Anybody would have been. You did good, Angie. You kept him alive."
Angelina sniffed loudly and nodded. "Thanks for that, by the way. The calming draught and everything last night."
Hermione just shrugged. "It was far from my first traumatic event."
"Who's been through a traumatic event?" A new voice asked from behind them. Hermione turned to see Ginny, wearing a faded Hogwarts jumper and clutching a steaming mug of tea like her very life depended upon it.
"All of us," Angelina said with a wry twist to her lips that contrasted the tears that were still drying on her cheeks. Ginny snorted and flopped unceremoniously to the grass on Hermione's other side, predictably unflapped.
"Too right," she agreed grimly, shivering and folding in on herself.
"So…" Hermione started, training her gaze on the horizon in front of them and fighting to keep a straight face. "I could have sworn I heard a door across the hall last night. One might wonder if you didn't take advantage of having your room all to yourself."
Ginny squinted sideways at her with a scowl. "Mind your business, nosy witch. I'm sure my brother wasn't lacking for company. Sleep in separate beds, did you? One foot on the ground all night?"
Hermione smiled before her teasing tone dissipated. "He's blaming himself, isn't he?"
"Of course he is," Ginny sighed wearily, swirling her tea. "He's Harry. Self-flagellation is what he does best. Well, that and disarming charms."
"We didn't lose anybody, though. Besides Hedwig, that is."
"It's partly mum and dad. They've always been really welcoming to him, with the Dursleys being how they are. After what happened to Bill in the spring, and now George… he feels like he's repaying us by putting our family in danger. Little does he acknowledge that we've done a fine job of that ourselves, notorious blood traitors and all. Hell, look at Fred and George's anti-war merchandise. They're begging for trouble."
"Don't remind me," Hermione grumbled, with regards to both the ever-present danger hanging over them and the astoundingly immature series of products the boys had just launched mocking Voldemort. Personally. By name. Angelina made a quiet sound of agreement.
"Speaking of which," she asked, cutting in and looking to Hermione, "Did Molly say anything to you?"
"No, but I expect I'll hear something about it sooner than later. There's no way that goes unaddressed for long."
"That's entirely on the two of you and your little self-spun web of secrets," Ginny said without even a hint of sympathy. She paused consideringly and then admitted, "Though I don't blame you. My mother can be a bit overbearing."
"At least she doesn't 'ate you," Fleur chimed in, floating over to them across the garden, far too graceful to be entirely human. Her perfectly curled gold hair and silk dressing gown were a truly absurd contrast against Ginny's messy bun and rumpled joggers. "It's better than 'ow I began my relationship with 'er. Am I interrupting?"
"Actually —" Ginny started.
"Not at all," Hermione interjected quickly, cutting Ginny off before she could think of something rude to say and subtly elbowing her in the ribs for good measure.
"They were just making sure I wasn't falling apart after last night," Angelina clarified as Fleur settled beside Ginny, completing their crescent moon arrangement and positioning her skirt just-so on the grass.
"And are you?" Fleur paused and quirked a groomed brow. "Falling apart, that is."
Angelina looked at Hermione and then Ginny and shook her head. "No. No, I think — I think I'm going to be okay."
"Good." Fleur said, nodding crisply. "You are a strong witch. Give your pain its due respect, but do not linger in it."
"Uh… thank you?" Angelina looked at Hermione, who just shrugged.
Fleur narrowed her eyes briefly in thought before continuing.
"All of you were in 'ouse Gryffindor at 'ogwarts, no? Like 'arry?"
"Yeah," Ginny confirmed, obviously curious in spite of herself. "Like 'arry. What of it?"
"They say that among lions it is the female that is dominant, not the male. They are the protectors and the predators, the backbones of their prides." Fleur glanced sideways at each of them in turn, before shifting her gaze back to the slowly lightening sky. "They hunt in groups, and they protect each other's mates and cubs as if they were their own."
"And?" Hermione prompted, intrigued as well. She thought it might be the most Fleur had ever spoken to her.
Fleur smirked, looking down at her folded hands and then back up. "It seems more than likely that I will call each of you my sister one day, and perhaps... perhaps there is something to be learned from the lions."
As she finished speaking, the sun fully crested over the far hill, painting them all in hues of gold and sparkling through the mist, still tucked and lingering in the low points of the orchard.
"Damnit," Ginny groaned loudly, setting her tea haphazardly in the grass like she couldn't stomach finishing it. All three women looked at her in alarm at the outburst, but she was staring directly at Fleur beside her with undisguised dismay. "I need to stop calling you Phlegm now, don't I?"
It was dead silent for a second until, the first to react, Angelina snorted loudly and clapped a hand over her mouth, followed closely by Hermione and then Fleur herself, whose laughter carried on the breeze like the tinkling of windchimes.
They laughed until they cried and then they laughed some more, because what else is there to do when you're standing in the eye of a hurricane? There isn't a way out that doesn't involve delving back into the storm, so you take the reprieve, however fleeting it might be. And if you're lucky enough to have people that you can stand beside in the interim, all the better.
Their lives, like most lives Hermione supposed, were as painful as they were beautiful, and they were messy. Horribly, excruciatingly, wonderfully messy.
What could possibly better encompass all of that than a bit of laughter through tears?
"Yes," Fleur finally said, reaching out and putting an arm around Ginny, who was smiling ever-so-slightly and shaking her head. "Yes, I think that would be best."