"Save me," Hermione thinks, her tongue paralysed by fear as she meets the wide, vivid green eyes of the boy who had just burst inside the bathroom. Then the troll raises its club and she screams, uprooting herself to dive for cover as glass shatters and wood splinters.
"Save me." Her last thought before an enormous pair of yellow eyes in the hand mirror causes her body to seize and her eyes to glaze over. Her hand tightens around the crumpled page as she falls.
"Save us," Hermione whispers as her vision tunnels and an icy cold claws its way into her chest, the last attempt at a useless Patronus dying on her lips. Her eyes find their only hope, a blurry outline of untidy black hair still standing against the swirling mass above them, before everything fades to black.
"Save me," Harry's eyes plead with her as Dumbledore and the entire Great Hall wait for him in stunned silence.
"Go on," she whispers, nudging him gently and watching him leave to join the other champions with smothering dread in her heart.
"We're the only ones who can save him!" Harry had shouted before they'd dashed off to the Ministry on an ill-advised rescue operation.
Now, as she opens her eyes to find his crumpled form sleeping in the chair next to her bed in the hospital wing, she wonders why she can never save him, even from himself.
"I couldn't save him, either," Harry says quietly, a single tear rolling down his cheek.
Hermione blinks back tears of her own against the blinding afternoon sunlight where it reflects off of the pure white marble before them. Though the lament of phoenix song has long stopped filling the air, it still fills her heart.
She reaches for Harry's hand and he squeezes her fingers.
"You'll never save him," she thinks with despair, the locket heavy around her neck and exhaustion a permanent fixture in her bones. The more she's watched Harry these last few months, the more she's certain that the connection between him and Voldemort only has one cure.
She's proven right in the end.
"Save them, please, save them," Harry mutters in his sleep, lost in the throes of another nightmare. Hermione rushes to his side, forever glad that she'd insisted on staying with him as he spends his first few nights in Grimmauld Place after the end of the war.
Using gentle fingers to sweep the damp hair from his forehead, she murmurs into his ear, "You're okay, Harry, we're okay. It's all over now."
He awakens with a gasp, a violent sob ripping from his lungs as she cradles his head to her chest. He returns the favour less than twenty-four hours later when her slumbering mind is trapped beneath the wand of a dead woman on an opulent drawing room floor.
They resolve to never spend a night apart after that.
"You saved me," Harry whispers into her ear, holding her close and stroking her hair softly.
Hermione nuzzles her nose into his bare chest, swallowing heavily against the barrage of emotions threatening to overcome her. His hand leaves her hair to trace gentle patterns along her spine and she tips her head back to capture his lips in another searing kiss.
"You saved me, too," Hermione says, tears streaming down her face as she places the ring on his finger.
Harry smiles brilliantly, pulling her in for a kiss without waiting for the announcement to be made.
"We saved each other all along," he replies when they break apart and she laughs, thinking that maybe they truly had, after all.