Ron's talking about crups again.

"What about after you're done at Hogwarts?" he asks Hermione. She's lounging on the sofa next to him, her toes tucked under his thigh, Standard Book of Spells, Grade 7 open on her legs. He's meant to be playing chess with me on this quiet Saturday night, but his main priority, clearly, is angling for a puppy. "Can we get one then?"

"We can start talking about it again," she replies, never lifting her eyes from her book.

"Do you think you'll have changed your mind by then?"

"Honestly?"

Ron gently nudges his pawn across the board. "Yeah."

"I really don't think it would go over well with Crookshanks at all."

"We could work with him on that," says Ron. "Maybe we can start talking to him about it now, so that he's not surprised, or - or angry, once it actually happens-"

Hermione bursts out into warm, affectionate laughter. "That's what you do for little kids when there's going to be a new baby in the house. I'm not sure it works the same with crups and kneazles-"

"Half-kneazles," Ron counters. "And Crookshanks is smart, right? I'm sure he can be reasoned with-"

His voice breaks off as a large tawny owl wings its way into the drawing room, drops a scroll onto Ron's lap, and then soars right back out again. Hermione closes the book on her lap and sits up straight as he breaks through the red wax seal and unfurls the parchment.

"Fuck," he mutters, eyes scanning back and forth as he reads. "I fucking knew this would fucking happen-"

"What?" asks Hermione urgently. "What is it?"

"It's my training mission." He turns towards her, crestfallen. "I've got to be there in an hour."

"Oh." Hermione bites her lip. "Does it say how long?"

"Course not." He tosses the letter aside and stands up. "Guess I'll go pack."

"I'll go with you," Hermione says at once, and together - all talk of crups and half-kneazles forgotten - they leave me alone in the drawing room.

It's not as if he doesn't know what he signed up for, but I understand why he's not exactly jumping for joy. He'd rather soak up his last few weeks with Hermione than spend days on end in a tent with people he barely knows.

I wonder if he'll love it like I did.

Some time later, he appears in the doorway of the drawing room with his rucksack in his hand, apprehension plain on his face. Hermione hovers around behind him, not bothering to hide her own anxiety. "Any tips before I go?"

After considering this for a moment, I shake my head. "You'll be fine."

"That's helpful, cheers," he says dryly. "All right, well, I'll see you… soon, I s'pose. Unless I die," he adds with a shrug.

Hermione gasps, horrified, and swipes her hand against his shoulder. "That isn't funny!"

They head into the hallway to say goodbye to each other privately - they don't need me gawking at them while they kiss and say their 'I love you's - and as the front door clicks shut, Hermione returns to the drawing room and wordlessly picks up her textbook. Her lips are pressed very tightly together, and I get the sense she isn't reading anything at all anymore.

"Care to finish the game of chess?" I ask, hoping to lighten the heavy silence.

She doesn't look up. "Not particularly."

"He really will be fine, you know."

"I know that."

Truly, I love Hermione - after Ron, she's my best friend - but I've never really understood her the way I understand him. She is so often driven by logic and reason and the sheer power of her own mind, but when emotions rule, as they are right now, I almost always find myself at a loss for anything to say or do to help. With no other recourse, I begin gathering up the chess pieces.

"I'm going to bed," says Hermione as her book closes with a thud. "I think…" Her bottom lip goes between her teeth again. "I think I'll still stay here tonight, if that's okay. Just because I already planned on it, so my parents aren't expecting me home," she explains in a rush, "and I'd have to explain about the Auror thing - and of course they know what an Auror is and what Ron's in training for and everything, but I'm not really in the mood for the conversation-"

"It's fine," I interrupt, knowing that if I don't, she'll never stop. "You can stay here anytime."

"I'll just be in Ron's room."

"I figured."

She stands, book in hand, and is halfway out of the room when she suddenly turns on her heel. Her sullen mood, for the moment, has vanished. "Are you excited to see Ginny tomorrow?"

I look at her like she's suddenly sprouted a second head. "What?"

"At the Burrow."

"Oh. I wasn't planning on going anymore-"

"Why not?" Hermione asks this like I've done her a great personal wrong. "Just because Ron won't be there doesn't mean that you can't. I'm sure Mrs. Weasley would still love to see you."

On the surface, this makes perfect sense - Mrs. Weasley has never turned down an opportunity to feed me - but it just isn't that simple.

"Are you going?"

"No, but I never was," she says briskly. "I'm going to the theatre with my parents tomorrow, they've got us tickets to-"

"Right, well, I can't go by myself."

"Sure you can." She nods encouragingly, but I bristle at this, at her intrusion, at her assumption that this is at all her business. "Just go for dinner and that way you can spend time with Ginny without pretending that Ron and I have brought you-"

The irritation that's been quietly brewing bubbles to the surface. "Give it a rest, Hermione."

Her eyes go wide. "Excuse me?"

"Quit playing matchmaker with me and Ginny," I snap, jumping to my feet. "You are the most interfering person I've ever met, it drives me mad - I don't know if you know this, but my relationship with Ginny has nothing to do with you-"

"What relationship?" she cries. "If hadn't been for me, you'd still be avoiding her completely and lying around here all the time feeling sorry for yourself-"

"You locked us in a scullery against our will." My voice swells and rises with every word. "Don't you see how fucked up that is?"

Hurt crosses her face. "I just want you to be happy, Harry - I'm just trying to help-"

"I didn't ask for your help."

"Do you want it to be like this forever?" she asks, and the empathy in her voice should probably calm me down, but it only makes my hands shake with pent-up adrenaline. "Because it was like that with me and Ron for a long time, we were just friends but we both knew there was something more-"

"Good for you!" I fire back. "So you've got your little happily-ever-after. It doesn't work out like that for everyone."

Her mouth forms a tight, angry little line across her face, and then she snaps, "fine. Be miserable forever," and stomps out of the room.

•••

At some point in the morning, Hermione leaves. Or rather, I assume she does, because I don't see her at all, but by the time I get out of bed around noon, I am very much alone in the house. It feels weird and cold, like some of the darkness from when the Black family inhabited it has returned without the warmth of Ron and Hermione to drive it away. I eat beans on toast as both a late breakfast and an early lunch, and then spend several hours of the afternoon on the sofa in the drawing room with the wireless broadcasting the first matches of the Quidditch World Cup, where it's being held this year. While munching on slightly stale crisps, I listen as Peru absolutely demolish the United States, and then as Bulgaria defeat Sweden with a margin of over two hundred points. As I'm laughing to myself about how Ron will cope with this news when he's back, I remember why he's gone, and my subsequent row with Hermione, and I suddenly feel like I've been punched in the stomach.

Because Hermione, damn her, is right. I am doing exactly what she said: lying around this big empty house, wasting my time feeling sorry for myself. Though she's incredibly, annoyingly interfering, and she has been since we were eleven, it's all out of love. Where would I even be if she hadn't figured out that it was a basilisk living in the Chamber, or if her Time-Turner hadn't allowed us to save Sirius and Buckbeak? Was she interfering then?

And all those little nudges, those steps forward that I've taken lately… they've been good. I'm quite glad to have my new owl, nameless though he may be, and I might have waited years on it if not for Ron and Hermione's gentle encouragement. I suppose that I could go on hiding out here forever, pining and wondering about what could have been, coasting along and settling for what I've already got. I've approached the entire summer with the attitude that I was destined to die in the Forbidden Forest, so I'm lucky just to be alive and everything else is icing on the cake.

But then again... I'm alive. I've been given a second chance (a third, if you consider that I was actually supposed to die at fifteen months old). Wizards commonly live to be over a hundred years old, which means I've probably got ninety of them left. Shouldn't I do something with all of that time?

I stand up and brush the crisp crumbs from my t-shirt. I'm that odd, bloated sort of full that comes from slowly ingesting greasy carbs all day, but that doesn't mean that there isn't still room for Mrs. Weasley's cooking. Heading into the bathroom, I give myself a thorough appraisal. My hair is a wreck, as it usually is, but there's really nothing I can do about that. Even without crumbs sprinkled over it, this shirt has seen better days, and these jeans have a frayed hem... but better to be there, looking like a disheveled slob, than not be there at all.

So I go out to the front step, ragged jeans and messy hair and all, and turn on the spot.

Dodging gnomes and chickens as I go, I traipse through the garden towards the house. Perhaps I ought to be nervous, but I have the sense that this is exactly where I should be. As I approach the back door, the Weasleys are just sitting down at the table, so I knock to announce my presence, but then turn the knob to enter without waiting for an invitation.

All eyes are immediately on me. It's a smaller group today - just Ginny, Bill, Fleur, and the parents - but I still feel quite gawked at.

"Sorry," I say. "Am I too late?"

"Not at all, dear!" Mrs. Weasley sets down a large bowl of roasted parsnips and ushers me over to a chair next to Fleur, right across from Ginny. "You're always welcome, you know that."

As she bustles over to the cupboard for another place setting, I look up and find Ginny's warm, intense gaze upon me. "Didn't know if I'd see you today."

Her voice is low and even, betraying no emotion. But I think - I hope - that perhaps my presence is a pleasant surprise.

I meet her eyes with my own. "Neither did I."

She smiles, then picks up her fork and begins to eat.

•••

"So." Ron leans back against the wall of the lift and folds his arms over his chest. He's doing his very best to look stern, but amusement twinkles in his eyes. "I heard there was a bit of a… spat."

He's been back from his training mission for maybe eight hours, tops. I hadn't even realized that he was home at all until I got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and heard the telltale thumping of his headboard against the wall, but apparently, at some point during his reunion with Hermione, they managed to have a conversation.

"There may have been," I reply warily, before relenting. "All right, I didn't mean to have a go at her like that. I'm going to apologize next time I see her."

"That'd be good," he says. "She doesn't mean to be pushy, she's just… enthusiastic."

"Yeah, I know."

Ron laughs and shakes his head. "I shouldn't have left you unsupervised. Next time, I'm sending you round Mum and Dad's."

"I actually did go over there," I say as the metal doors to the lift jangle open and we head into the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. "On Sunday. Just for dinner."

Ron nods with satisfaction, and I am, not for the first time since summer began, struck by the depths of his loyalty to Hermione. Gone is the Ron of sixth year, who used to grumble about revoking my 'permission' to date Ginny and turn away when I would kiss her. Hermione, in all her beguiling ways, has drawn him completely over to her side.

I suppose that's what regular shagging will do to a guy.

"So how was it?" he asks, sidestepping a cart stacked with files as we proceed down the long, winding corridor to the classrooms.

"It was good. I didn't stay all that long."

But I'd talked with Ginny about Quidditch, because she was listening to the matches all day too, and we took turns imagining Ron's reaction if Bulgaria were to win the entire thing this year. Exchanged incredulous glances when Fleur, apropos of nothing, began explaining all the shortcomings of English pastries as opposed to French ones. Cut ourselves massive slices of banoffee pie, then moaned about being uncomfortably stuffed once we finished them.

It was nice. Really, really nice.

"No, I mean the food," says Ron, like I should have understood this all along. "I was eating plain chicken out of a tin on Sunday night. Let me live vicariously."

I laugh and hitch my rucksack higher up on my shoulder. "The food was good too."

"What'd Mum make?"

As we round a corner, I open my mouth to answer only to close it again: Kingsley Shacklebolt is striding towards us. It's not often that we see him, since he's usually off doing whatever interim Ministers do when they're trying to piece a society back together following a devastating war.

"Potter," he greets me in that deep, sonorous voice of his. "Just the man I've been looking for."

"Oh?" is all I can manage in response. Even though I've known him since I was fifteen, when he was an Auror and a member of the Order, he's infinitely more intimidating now.

"And Weasley," he says, unfazed by my awkwardness, "I heard you did quite well this weekend. First mission, was it?"

"Yes," Ron nods, standing a little taller now. "Yes, thank you."

"You know, as Minister," Kingsley goes on, his attention back on me, "I've been offered my own box at the Quidditch World Cup final this year, but I have too much going on here to have the time to attend. I was hoping you could take the tickets off my hands."

From the deep pocket of his robes, he extracts four brightly-colored slips of parchment.

"Really?" I blurt out. "I mean - there's no one else you want to give them to?" Beside me, Ron stiffens, and I have the sense that he's trying to send me a telepathic message to shut the hell up. "I mean, not that I don't appreciate-"

Kingsley chuckles and claps me jovially on the back. "You've earned it. It's being held in Iceland this year, so I'll have a Portkey arranged for you and your guests."

"Oh - well - great," I stammer out as he hands me the tickets. "That's really - thank you."

"You're absolutely welcome."

He steps past us and continues on his way, and Ron and I turn to stare at each other in disbelief. "We're going to the World Cup," he says, a slow grin spreading across his face.

"Yeah." His excitement is contagious, flooding through me as it starts to sink in. "Yeah, we really are."

"All right, so," begins Ron as we start off towards our classroom again. "There's four tickets, right?"

"Yeah, so I've got three spares, haven't I?" I joke, erupting into laughter when Ron shoves me and I almost trip over a box of evidence. "Reckon Percy'd want to go?"

"Oh, fuck off," Ron chuckles. "So obviously me, you, and Hermione. Right?"

"Obviously. And then the fourth…" I hazard a glance at him. "Reckon Ginny'd want to go?"

"Nah," he replies, deadpan. "She's not that into Quidditch."

I shoot him a withering look. "I mean because it's with me."

"I'm not sure if you've noticed, but she actually doesn't hate you anymore."

"Right, but it's one thing to hang out at the Burrow together and another to… to invite her to a foreign country for the weekend."

"But it's the World Cup final, Harry. She'd be mad to turn that down."

He has a point. Plus, I figure that if Ginny does turn down box seats to the most important Quidditch match of the last four years, I'll definitely know where I stand with her and can return to my previous life of wallowing in my own patheticness.

"All right, but…" We reach our classroom, finally, but the door is still locked - we're always early, which shows what an effect Hermione has truly had on us - and Ron leans against the wall to wait. "Don't tell her about it. Let me ask her myself, all right?"

Ron runs his hands down his face, suddenly weary. I can't tell if he's exhausted from his recent mission or from watching me pine after his sister. "Yeah. All right."

"You know Bulgaria are in the quarter-finals, don't you?"

He nods glumly, eyes downcast to his shoes. "Yeah, I know."

•••

It's Sunday, again, finally, and we've arrived at the Burrow just a bit early. Just enough that I won't have to do what I want and need to do while sat around the kitchen table with her whole family watching. Since Thursday morning, I've been mulling it over, trying to come up with the right words and the right place and the right time, and I've made woefully little progress. It turns out that while I'm eighteen and I've won a war and destroyed Horcruxes and done all sorts of things that people tell me will be in history books, I've only ever asked a girl out once - Cho - and it didn't go all that swimmingly. I never actually asked Ginny out at all. We kissed, and that was it. We fell right into it, and we didn't need any of those formalities, because we both just… knew. It's funny, really, that when you've had all of these big accomplishments when you're young, you're expected to be able to navigate the normal bits of life, but it doesn't work that way. I spent so much of my life focusing on survival that now I'm behind on everything else.

In the meantime - because nobody wanted to humor Ron and play yet another round of chess - we're all sat on the floor of the sitting room, a precarious house of Exploding Snap cards in front of us. Ginny's lying on her stomach, chin propped up on one hand, a card in the other, as she considers her next move. At any second, the entire thing could blow up in our faces, which feels more than a little apt.

Hermione has on her very best poker face. To her credit, she has managed to dial down her exuberance over my fledgling relationship with Ginny, and I know her well enough to know this means she's positively bursting on the inside, but at least she's managing to contain herself.

"I'm sorry for meddling," she had said on Thursday evening when we'd reconciled under Ron's watchful eye. "I just want to see you happy, and you two were such a great couple, and-"

"It's all right," I'd said quickly before she could really get going. "I'm sorry I shouted."

She'd smiled and said thank you, Ron had declared a craving for pizza, we'd argued over who had to go out to pick it up, and that had been that.

Mostly. The gears are quite clearly still turning in her head, which means that she hasn't given up on it, she's just concocting up more subtle tactics.

The problem is, she's about as subtle as a Blast-Ended Skrewt.

"Oh, Ron," she says, unfolding her legs and getting to her feet. "I think I left something upstairs in your room."

Carefully balancing two cards against each other atop the house, Ron doesn't even look up. "All right."

"Can you help me look?" she asks, brows arched meaningfully at him. "Your room is rather… messy. It could take a while."

He looks up, and understanding dawns on his face. "Right, of course. Sure."

As they head up the stairs, Ginny turns to me, perplexed and biting back laughter. "What the…"

"Yeah, I don't know," I reply with a shrug. "I don't ask questions anymore."

"That's probably for the best."

This is the only opportunity I'll have all day. Even with Ron and Hermione out of the way, there's really no such thing as privacy at the Burrow, and an interruption could come along at any minute. If it's now or never… then it's got to be now.

"Hey, so…" I clear my throat. "Are you busy next weekend?" When her head snaps over to look at me, my stomach drops. Why would I open like that, with a question that sounds like nothing so much as an invitation to some sort of candlelit dinner followed by a romantic stroll along the Thames? Of course she's going to look at me like I've sprouted a second head. "It's the World Cup final," I add hastily, "and I've got tickets - the Minister's box-"

I am so, so bad at this. It's a wonder I got the few weeks I had with her last year.

Her brown eyes go wide. "You've got tickets?!"

"Kingsley gave them to me, and, erm - I wanted to know if - I'd really like it if you came along." The words tumble quickly from my lips. "Ron and Hermione are going too."

"Oh." Eagerly, she nods. "Yeah, definitely. That'd be brilliant."

"Brilliant." I can't stop myself beaming at her, but to my absolute delight, she smiles broadly right back. "Er, there'll be a Portkey and everything, I'll let you know once that's arranged. I'll send a letter over with-" I quirk my head at her, and spots of color appear on her cheeks. "Has my owl got a name yet?"

Her expression turns sheepish. "I'm still thinking about it."

"If it's too much responsibility," I say teasingly, "Ron would be happy to step in-"

"That's exactly why you can't let him do it," she says earnestly. "He isn't taking it as seriously as he should - honestly, Agamemnon? You can't let that happen."

"He also suggested Roger-"

"That's even worse."

"All right," I laugh. "I trust you."

"Good."

Naturally, the topic arises over dinner, and the discussion soon turns to logistics. I recall all too well Mrs. Weasley's panic-stricken face when we returned from the disastrous World Cup before fourth year, so I can't blame her for wanting to know every single detail now. Perhaps I've been too preoccupied by the Quidditch and the anticipation of inviting Ginny, but it's the first time that I realize: we'll be staying in tents.

It's different. It's obviously very different than living in a tent in the wilderness with no food and no hope and prices on our heads. It's one night, for Quidditch, and Mrs. Weasley is already talking about sending us with enough snacks to last a week, "just in case the match runs long." There are no Horcruxes and no dark wizards. Even so, I wasn't planning on staying in one again anytime soon.

Maybe it's another thing I need to push through. Another way to firmly declare the war in the past, once and for all. It already ruled our lives for years and it took so much from us. We need to take back as much as we can.

"We've still got Bill's tent," Ron says thoughtfully, a wedge of roasted potato speared on his fork. "But we, erm… we lost the Perkins' one."

I know he's thinking, like I am, of the exact circumstances under which we lost said tent, and the horrific events that unfolded thereafter.

"Well, you'll definitely need two," says Mrs. Weasley briskly in response. "That way you and Harry can stay in one, and Hermione and Ginny can stay in the other."

"Mmm," Ron nods his agreement, wiping his face with a napkin to hide the grin threatening to burst forth. "Definitely."

Beside him, Hermione goes pink, demurely eating a parsnip without a single word. As I'm left to ponder just how deeply entrenched Mrs. Weasley is in her denial, the conversation turns to the odds of Bulgaria making it to the final, and all talk of tents is dropped.