It was late, but neither felt like sleeping. The day had been another loss–no real lead to follow, no actual thing to do. The usual conversations, the plans that weren't plans yet, reminding him of lines in plays Muggles used to entertain themselves. He released the Snitch and caught it, again and again, in the tent that was really too small for the two of them to live in comfortably but recently had felt a good deal too big.
She was fiddling with the radio. It buzzed and whined as she turned the knobs, and there was a few seconds of a droning, impassive voice, still too garbled to make out each word. A list of the missing, again, he suspected. After trying and failing to get the signal clear, she turned it off and sighed heavily. There had been time for awhile to do it, he realized, but now finally felt like the best time he'd get. The horcrux dangled around her neck, a pretty and terrible adornment, unhidden when she wore it in contrast to when the boys did. He always wanted her to tuck it under her clothing, both to keep it safer and so he didn't have to look at it, but would not presume to ask. He knew that, while it colored her moods a significant amount, it still impacted Hermione the least of them all. He approached her and sat on the other side of the radio. "Got a minute?"
She almost laughed, mirthlessly, but stopped herself when she looked at him. "What's on your mind?"
'I'm….Hermione, I'm sorry. Sorry to put you through all this. All this danger, and boredom, and hopelessness, and…isolation. You shouldn't have to be with just me. You shouldn't…you shouldn't tie yourself to me. He was right to leave, I think. He knew where this was going. I'm in danger, always, and I'm putting you in danger.'
'Harry. You didn't do this to anyone, not even to yourself. I know that. Ron knows it, too, wherever he is.' It was the first time she had said his name in days.
'And I'm staying, and going to the next place with you, and the places after that, once we figure them out. I know what you're saying, even the part you're not really saying out loud, and…I already made my mind up about it. Even about that part. It's a calculated choice, really.'
'It is?'
'I decided I'd rather die in the world we're getting on with, now, than live in whatever the world looks like where they killed you like they mean to and I let it happen.'
His heart caught, and seeing that was what brought her to tears.
'Hermione.'
'I chose. It's done. We're in this.'
Usually, she was the one to reach for him, the one who, despite all the demonstrations and declarations regarding her cold logic, was frank enough with herself and those around her to let her body speak and make connections with others. He wasn't sure, really, how to do it, after ten years of a childhood without nurturing physical contact, but the same impulse lived in him. She was smaller and somehow more complicated than Hagrid: he put a tentative hand on her shoulder first and felt her lean into it.
It wasn't clear, as they held their embrace, who was trying to soothe who. Her body shook a bit, inaudibly, then regulated. Tears fell from his green eyes and he reached quickly, once, to wipe them before putting his arm back on his friend. There was nothing, Ron's jealousy be damned, romantic in any of it: it was maybe like a parent bringing comfort to a child, except, he felt, he and Hermione were neither and both. By mutual unspoken consent, they separated.
'We're in this. Don't apologize. Okay?'
'Okay.'
