There was enough to be getting on with, but the plans were pretty much sorted. Ron was with Bill, he imagined, as he sat alone in the living room at Shell Cottage with a book in his lap. 'A bit of light reading,' he quipped, when Hermione approached him, eyebrows raised.

"I know you're still angry. But stop reading that. Dumbledore was still a kid, Harry, with Grindelwald. He was just seventeen."

"I'm seventeen. You're not that far past it."

"He wasn't ready yet, to do what he did later. He just wasn't ready yet to make hard choices and take stands and live with…live with what happens. He got there, in the end."

He spat his words out before she finished her own. "Were you? Were you ready? With your parents?"

She flushed.

"And not just that." Gently, but with determination, he reached out his finger and hovered it over the scars Bellatrix had left on her. She shivered a bit, but did not look or pull away.

"I was. I am."

"We're still kids, too, Hermione. If you're gonna use that argument."

She considered his point.

'All we can do is make the stands we can make. And they…mark us, sometimes. Maybe forever.' This time, her finger raised, tracing his forehead, then down to his wrist where faint writing was still visible just on him if one looked hard enough, because he had had more sessions with Umbridge than the rest of them. 'But we keep going, if we can. You taught me that, when we really were kids. You taught me things Dumbledore didn't know back then.'

She kept talking. "I remember being kids. It was ages ago."

A small, dark, wistful smile.

"I wasn't very good at it, anyway."

He spoke up. "You were, too." He remembered her bushy, untamed hair and insatiable curiosity, the way she giggled, sometimes, when she mastered a new spell without a teacher watching to perform for or answer, simply delighting herself in the magic and her ability to do it. How her eyes grew wide like saucers when they set on Hagrid's hatching dragon. The way she felt things, uninhibited, with her whole mind and body, when she felt them for the first time.

"When we're done being grown-ups…you can be a kid again."