A/N: If you're into a little spicy lady-love, I have a Pansy/Ginny one shot that dropped on my AO3 Works page this week.

oOoOoOo

28 July 1996

"Are you sure you want to go over there?" George asked Fred, staring at him as he made notes on an inventory clipboard. This marked the fifth time he'd posed that question in the past 24 hours.

"Yes," Fred replied tiredly, "it's really fine."

"Lee said you can stay at his place, even with him being gone on holiday."

"I know what Lee said, he said it to me, and I'm saying that it's fine. She didn't break up with me, we're just… I don't know what we are."

Since that night at The Burrow, nearly two weeks prior, Fred had managed to get himself black-out drunk, spent nearly two days with a hangover that no potion could remedy, and then he'd thrown himself headlong into getting the shop ready to open.

Into the dream that was still solidly in front of him and begging for attention rather than pushing him away.

"Angie said she doesn't mind going out –"

"George," Fred sighed, "I'm going to hex your bollocks off if you don't drop it."

His counterpart finally relented and went back to packaging on the worktable across the room.

It was just one night. One night at The Burrow so George and Angelina could have the flat to themselves for her birthday.

He could handle one night.

oOoOoOo

He could not handle one night.

For nearly a year, he'd become accustomed to Hermione looking up when he entered a room. To searching for her face, her reaction, when something happened, or someone made a joke. Not having that now was like a ladder being pulled from beneath him just as he hit the top rung, left floundering fifty feet in the air before plummeting to the ground.

He'd found out from his mum over dinner that she'd received ten OWLs. Ten. And all she'd done was shrug and thank him when he congratulated her.

Fred rolled over before finally sitting up and looking at the clock beside the bed. It was nearly one in the morning. He stood and pulled a shirt on before leaving his and George's old bedroom to go downstairs and make a cup of tea.

Just as he hit the second-floor landing to descend into the kitchen, he heard a faint whining sound. He thought it might be Crookshanks, but as he listened more closely, he determined it was distinctly un-catlike and it was coming from the same direction as Ginny's deafening snoring.

His heart dropped as he stepped toward the girls' bedroom door, slowly turning the handle and opening it just a crack. Ginny was, predictably, asleep and dead to the world on the far side of the room.

But nearest to him was the second bed. The one that held Hermione.

She was wearing cotton shorts and a vest, her limbs tangled in the sheets, and she'd left the lamp beside her dimly lit. She must have been reading because a book had fallen to the ground, still open.

Legs jerking, she whimpered again, and Fred was, unsurprisingly, powerless to do anything but go to her side. He shut the door behind himself quietly and put up several layers of silencing charms around the bed to both prevent waking Ginny and quiet her snuffling.

First, he bent down and picked up the book, smoothing a crumpled page before placing the bookmark in it, the one he'd given her, and putting it on the night table.

Then he dropped to his knees beside the bed and looked at her. Really, truly looked at her.

Her hair was matted to her forehead with sweat and there were dried tear-tracks on her cheeks, eyes red-rimmed. Her breathing was unsteady, coming in arhythmic starts and stops, punctuated by the occasional soft sob.

But he looked past that, looked past all of it, to stare in abject dismay at her chest. Perhaps two inches above where her shirt began, just over her right breast, there was a thick, raised purple welt, slashing downward at an angle and disappearing beneath the fabric.

He shut his eyes and tried to take a deep breath, but it was like the air had been sucked from the room. His hands were shaking and he balled them into tight fists, nails digging painfully into his palms. After a second, he steeled himself and opened them again, reaching out to gently push her hair off her face.

"Hermione, wake up. You're having a nightmare."

"No, don't," she mumbled, lurching away from his touch. He tried to swallow but his mouth was too dry.

"Love, wake up. It's just a dream."

He repeated variations of this twice more before she finally jolted awake and blinked her eyes open, squinting against the light and into his face.

"F-Fred?"

He nodded, ignoring the swooping in his stomach at hearing her say his name again. "I heard… I just wanted to make sure you were okay."

She nodded shakily, disoriented and looking around the room.

Not sure what else to do, he was preparing to stand and take his leave when out of nowhere Hermione suddenly, violently began to cry. It was the most gut-wrenching, broken weeping he'd ever heard in his life, worse than even his mother when Percy left.

Her hands braced on the mattress and her shoulders caved inward, shuddering and shaking.

"Fred," Hermione repeated again, barely audible this time. And then she reached for him, closed her hand around his wrist like a vice and held on hard enough to bruise.

Knowing that it was a gamble in more ways than one and not caring a wink, Fred moved to sit beside her and carefully pulled Hermione into his lap, cradling her quaking frame to his chest. She was noticeably lighter than she'd been the last time he'd done this, the last time he'd held her.

She balled her hands in the fabric of his shirt and buried her face in his shoulder, muffling the sobs.

"You're okay," he whispered, running his hand in a soothing circle between her shoulder blades. "You're safe."

He let his head fall backward against the wall and held her as tightly as he could, as if his arms alone might somehow be enough to put the pieces back together.

Perhaps a minute passed, and then Hermione choked out the three words that would haunt him for nights to come. The three words that he hadn't admitted to himself consciously. The three words that had made him crawl into a bottle of firewhiskey and get so drunk, George had found him attempting to burn the shop to the ground.

And they would haunt him because they were true.

"You left me."

For one fleeting second, he thought that she was talking about the dream, but reality came and ripped that theory away, taking a small piece of him with it.

"I thought – I thought that I was going to die, and you weren't there," she whispered, hiccoughing around the words. The shoulder of his faded Gryffindor t-shirt was thoroughly soaked through with tears by that point.

She didn't say it maliciously. It wasn't an accusation meant to hurt him, but if he'd thought her not speaking to him was agony, this was an anguish like he'd never felt before.

And what made it so excruciating was that he couldn't deny it. He had left her, and he wasn't able to pretend that it wasn't the case, because it was. Even if she'd told him it was okay, even if she'd smiled as he flew off, kissed him goodbye and wished him well, it was still his decision to make. And, ultimately, he'd decided wrong.

If Fred and George hadn't departed Hogwarts when they did, if they'd stayed to finish out the year, they almost certainly would have been at The Ministry with Ron and Ginny. With Harry and Neville and Luna. With Hermione.

With two more wands on their side, skilled wands no less, she might not have gotten hurt. Might not have almost died. Hell, they could have apparated straight to Grimmauld Place that night and prevented the whole thing. And it was the "might" of it all that plagued him.

"I know," he said unevenly, not realising until that moment that he'd begun crying too. He pulled in a shuddering breath and released it again, raising a hand to cup her damp cheek. "I know. I'm sorry, Hermione. I'm so fucking sorry."

He felt her nod and he leaned forward, burying his face in lavender-scented curls and clinging to a silent absolution that he wasn't sure he deserved.

oOoOoOo

Hermione woke the next morning to find her eyes red and swollen. Fred must have left sometime in the night because she was carefully tucked beneath the blankets, and he was nowhere to be found.

She hadn't cried since The Ministry, not one time. Not from the pain or the emotional trauma or the penetrating, directionless anger. But upon seeing Fred leaning over her, concerned and clearly hurting himself, it all came out at once. Like a dam breaking, messy and utterly overpowering, but inevitable.

Despite what the darkest corners of her mind tried to whisper to her, she didn't blame him. She knew logically that the twins being there might not have changed anything. Hell, things could have gone even worse, and they might have lost more than Sirius.

As she sat up, noting Ginny was still asleep, she realised she felt more herself than she had in weeks. Her head was a little foggy, and she was most definitely dehydrated, but it was like the cracks, all the little broken pieces of her, had started to find their way back together; to seal again.

And she also realised that she could finally breathe.

It was still hard, still terrifying, really. And she couldn't help but wonder if some small part of her had died that night in the Department of Mysteries; the girl that she'd been, left lying on the floor while the other harder, more durable fragments of her were whisked away to be glued back together. But even without that part, she was still her. Still Hermione. And if last night proved anything, it was that Fred was still Fred.

Now all she could do was hope everything else wasn't beyond repair.

oOoOoOo

Hermione came down to breakfast late, the same time as Harry and Ron. Fred was leaning against the counter with his teacup, idly talking to his mum about the store opening while she fried bacon and pretended she hadn't spent the previous two years trying to quash his dreams.

He'd stayed in Hermione's bed with her until dawn, holding her while she cried, dissolving into tears himself more than once, and then continuing to hold her after she fell asleep. For hours and hours, he just sat and held her. Now, the next morning, his back was sore, he was completely knackered, and he had no idea what to expect.

Until he heard her laugh.

It wasn't quite there yet, didn't sound exactly the same as it had before, and perhaps it never would, but she laughed nonetheless, and Fred closed his eyes and reveled in that pure, simple sound.

His mum turned to do something at the sink and Fred took the opportunity to head for the breakfast table. He stopped short and leaned against the wall beside the clock, silently watching.

Ron and Harry were facing away from him, piling food on their plates like they were victims of a hunger crisis. But Hermione… her cheeks were still a little puffed, but something had shifted in her demeanor.

It was her eyes. They weren't hollow anymore. There, shining back at him, was that spark. Subdued, tucked away, but irrefutably present.

She looked up to see him staring and offered a tentative smile, a real smile. She glanced at the boys, who weren't paying attention, then back to him and slowly mouthed the words, "Thank you."

Fred swallowed hard and dropped his gaze for a second. Then he looked up again. He twisted one side of his mouth into a smirk, inclined his head, and raised his cup, dipping into the subtlest of bows.

Her gaze lingered on him for second before she turned her attention back to her breakfast, rolling her eyes at something Ron said and interjecting about their trip to Diagon Alley the following week.

She smacked his brother's hand when he tried to grab a sausage from her plate and Fred had to stifle a chuckle.

He turned back toward the kitchen and said quietly, under his breath, "There's my girl."