14 July 1996

Fred was going out of his mind. It had been almost three full months since he'd spoken to Hermione. Since he'd kissed her. Since he'd made her laugh. Since he'd done anything beyond holding her unconscious hand while she laid in a cold, sterile hospital bed.

He'd seen her though. Confirmed that she was alive, breathing, walking about. He'd been by The Burrow nigh on a dozen times in the week she'd been staying there. Excuses ranged from Sunday roast to asking his mum how best to repair a rip in a pair of trousers.

And every single time, she'd been attached at the hip to Ron or Ginny. Never attempted to sneak away, never tilted her head toward an empty room or slipped him a note or even really looked in his direction beyond a passing glance. A year ago it would have been depressing, sure, but not really of note. Now though… now it was the definition of agony.

Her smiles were different too. Not just with him, but with everyone. They weren't warm or genuine in the way that they used to be. They didn't light up her eyes or crinkle her nose. It was nothing more than a compulsory rearranging of muscles.

And when something funny happened, she didn't laugh. She just offered that hollow, imposter of a smile, and everyone believed it. Nobody questioned it. Not one sodding person noticed that something was really, very wrong.

oOoOoOo

George walked into the living room of their flat to see his brother hovering over his favorite grey jumper with a small bottle of dark blue ink.

"Oi!" He shouted, summoning it from Fred's hand just as it began to tip. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

"I need an excuse to go to The Burrow," Fred said hollowly. He looked terrible. They were meant to open in a little over two weeks and his twin had become scarcely more than a shell of a man since visiting the hospital wing after The Ministry incident. It looked like he hadn't shaved in that time either, and his shirt was rumpled and misbuttoned.

"No, you don't," George replied patiently, walking over to grab the stopper to the inkwell and replacing it.

"What if – what if she's ready to talk and I'm not there?"

Fred said it quietly, voice tight and eyes focused somewhere distant, and George desperately wished that he had some sort of sage advice to offer. Some words of wisdom or, lacking that, comfort. But the fact of the matter was that he didn't. He didn't have any more experience than Fred did with this sort of thing.

Few people their age did.

No person their age should.

It reminded him of when they were little, perhaps five or six, and their mum let them bring a small rabbit into the house whose mother had been killed by a fox. The other babies had already died, but there was one left that survived. They tried to nurse it with goats' milk and a dropper, keep it warm, but ultimately it perished within a day or two, still too young to be without its mother.

Both of the twins had been devastated, but George distinctly remembered wanting more than anything to know how to make Fred feel better, even though he didn't yet know how to feel better himself.

"Mate, it's Hermione," he said slowly, gently. "When she's ready to talk she'll figure out a way to tell you."

Fred sank into one of the seats around the dining table, propping his elbows and letting his head fall into his hands. He squeezed his eyes shut, pulling and accentuating the dark circles beneath them.

"I just want to help. She… we have this sort of running joke, that we console each other when something bad happens. But I can't do that if she won't let me in."

"This is different though, Freddie. None of those other things happened to her. Cedric, Percy, Dad's attack, Sirius… adjacent to her, to the people she cares about, but not to her. You heard what Ron said, she was really hurt. She almost died. Shell, she probably would have died if she were anybody else. Hermione's tough as nails, but that's… that's bound to take some time to work through, even for her."

George didn't know if it was the right thing to say, but Fred nodded anyway and pulled in a shaky breath. It was quiet for a long moment before he sighed and got to his feet. "Did that shipment come in from Peru this morning?"

oOoOoOo

It was another three days before George's prediction came true.

Fred was sitting in the garden behind the house after dinner, watching a few gnomes in the distance chasing one another. He'd always been entertained by the little buggers, ferocious as they might be. Crookshanks was weaving around the legs of the bench he was sitting on and he reached down to give him a scratch behind the ears only to look up a second later and see Hermione had come outside and was standing over them.

He glanced around to find that they were finally, blessedly alone. Ron and Harry had been outside a moment ago, but they'd since disappeared.

"Hi," he said, a bit of surprise colouring his tone.

"Hi," she replied, offering a ghost of that hollow smile before taking a seat next to him, dusk slowly fading into night around them.

He wasn't going to speak first; if she was ready to talk, he'd allow her space to do just that. Several seconds passed in which bugs chirped and various critters rustled in the foliage nearby.

"Did you know that – that when you're drowning, you don't actually inhale until right before you black out?"

"What?"

"It's called voluntary apnea," she pressed on, hands balled tightly in her lap and eyes focused forward. Her voice was detached, like she was hardly speaking to him at all. "It's like, no matter how panicked you are, how much pain you're in, the instinct to not let the water in, to survive, is so strong that you won't open your mouth, won't inhale, until it feels like your head is about to burst and your lungs are collapsing. Then, when you finally do let it in, that's when it stops hurting. Stops being scary. Just… stops. I suppose it's probably kind of peaceful."

Now Fred wasn't sure that he could speak, fairly certain that if he opened his mouth, he was going to be sick. This wasn't how the conversation was supposed to go. This wasn't how she spoke to him. This wasn't how she spoke, period.

She sounded like a stranger, and he tried to wake himself, certain that it was a bad dream. He was convinced that if he just pinched hard enough, they would be back on their balcony and she'd be in his arms again. Before the ministry, before Sirius, before Dolohov, before… this.

"Hermione -" he croaked, weakly.

"I was right there." She finally turned her head to look at him. Her eyes weren't wet, as might be expected given what she was saying. But they were tired and maybe a little broken. It was like something in them, that spark that he loved, was gone, snuffed out, and he couldn't get through the barriers she'd created to do anything about it. "I was ready to inhale. It hurt so much, I just… just wanted it to stop hurting. Even if that meant giving up. I didn't though. I never took that breath. I still haven't."

She turned away again, but this time she looked at the ground rather than the horizon. "I'm fine. I'm really, I'm… I'm fine."

There was a bang from inside, followed by someone laughing loudly, and she flinched and squeezed her eyes shut. It was quiet for another few beats and Fred could hear the blood rushing in his ears, cold sweat blooming in his palms.

"Please don't do this…"

It was coming, he knew it was coming, but it was like a train wreck. Two locomotives on intersecting tracks, about to crash. He couldn't prevent it, couldn't intervene. All he could do was watch.

"I love you, Fred. I love you so, so much. But I… I need to figure out how to breathe again."

The words left her mouth and hung in the air, steeped with implications.

Before he could stop her, before he could even comprehend what she'd said enough to form a sentence, she got off the bench and turned to quickly head back into the house.

He just stared.

He didn't say anything.

It was like he was numb, everything was dull and fuzzy.

And then he snapped out of it. Because this wasn't how they ended. This wasn't how this went. If he needed to fight for them, for her, because she couldn't, he would do that.

Fred had just gotten to his feet, intent to follow her, when a glint caught his eye and, as he looked down, he felt like a bucket of cold water had been dumped over his head.

There, on the bench beside where she'd been, was a small silver key.

oOoOoOo

"You two finally talk things out?" George asked Hermione, smiling and shaking his head. He'd just walked into the kitchen to refill his glass. Everyone else was still in the living room, chattering and laughing loudly.

She'd stepped through the back door while he was at the counter and, when a second passed and he didn't get a response, he looked up.

When he saw the look on her face the glass in his hand slipped, hitting the bottom of the sink and shattering.

"What's wrong?" he asked, instantly alert and looking through the kitchen window to see Fred standing beside the garden bench. He appeared to be staring at his hand.

"T-take care of him," Hermione entreated, voice barely above a whisper before she clapped a hand over her mouth and ran from the room, straight upstairs. He heard the door to the loo slam shut and looked between the direction she'd gone and the direction she'd come from.

Suddenly, a crack sounded outside, and Fred disappeared.

oOoOoOo

A/N: Trust me.