Chapter Text
Well, shit.
Hermione huffed and slumped into a chair in the corner of the sitting room, papers scattered across the floor and her wand discarded on the coffee table. It was nearly 11am and she was still dressed in her pyjama bottoms, a Weasley jumper that Ron had left at Grimmauld Place some years ago and mismatched pygmy puff slippers, one of which she can only assume belongs to Ginny. All in all, it was fair to say that her outfit matched her scattered mind this morning.
Shit, shit, shit.
Impatiently, she scraped an untidy curl out of her face and cast a wary eye around the room.
She was meant to be clearing the house of the slightly insane-looking state that it was currently in, but she’d gotten herself distracted by finishing off some work and had spent the next 3 hours creating more, not less, clutter. Unfortunately, she’d had to eventually concede that she couldn’t procrastinate from the room around her any longer and found she was back where she started, if not a little further behind because now she was frustrated, tired and wanted desperately not to have to move her organised chaos.
Hermione was meant to be packing. Meant being the operative word as that certainly wasn’t what she’d spent the weekend doing and Harry and Ginny we’re due back this afternoon - in a matter of hours, she realised with an uncomfortable flip in her stomach.
She stood and wandered over to the large bookcase at the far wall, sighing as she toyed with the spine of a particularly worn copy of Wuthering Heights. Come on, Hermione. You can do this. It’s just moving out, not leaving them forever. They’re not going anywhere.
Taking a moment to refocus, Hermione cleared her throat and resolutely told herself to stop faffing about. She’d intended to get up early in the morning and finish packing her essentials before moving to her new flat. The flat was somewhat of a surprise engagement gift of privacy for ‘The Potters’, as they would soon become now that Harry had popped the question to an excitable (and not at all surprised) Ginny Weasley.
Hermione had been living at Grimmauld Place since the end of the war 6 years ago. With her parents deciding to stay in Australia and Ron’s determination not to return to his bedroom at The Burrow, it had been the ideal solution for them to return to the old Black house with Harry. She also silently suspected that Harry was grateful he hadn’t had to return alone whilst Ginny went back to finish school.
Aurors had been in high demand and, much to Hermione’s chagrin, Harry and Ron had taken Kingsley up on his offer to begin Auror training without finishing their NEWTs. Harry had often come home none-too-subtly suggesting that she join them in the DMLE but Hermione decided that she had done enough Dark Wizard chasing to last her a lifetime. Maybe two.
Hermione had considered returning to school with Ginny but ultimately she hadn’t been able to face Hogwarts so soon, especially without the boys by her side. It wasn’t as though she didn’t have other friends, it was simply too strange to leave them after trekking around England together in a tent for the better part of a year. Staying together felt like the safest way to be.
At first, very little had changed between them all. Hermione would spend her days over-studying in preparation for finishing her NEWTs remotely and her evenings would be spent helping the boys with the more academic elements of Auror training. Weekends were filled with entertaining friends or various Weasleys at Grimmauld Place, which meant that there was rarely a Friday or Saturday night that the bedrooms were not filled.
It seemed to Hermione that no one really wanted to be left alone with their thoughts during that first year and Harry’s home had become the unofficial refuge for those that had been children of war, not that he seemed to mind.
Over time, they’d settled in and transformed the house into somewhere fitting for the Golden Trio. The reception room on the first floor had become something of a refined version of the Gryffindor common room with warm tones, comfy armchairs and a roaring fire. They’d made it their home and she was incredibly grateful for the years they’d spent together finding their feet into adulthood.
After completing her NEWTs, Hermione had eagerly accepted a research position within the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, though if she was entirely honest, she wasn’t finding it to be as fulfilling as she’d hoped it would be. It appeared that Ron was having his own doubts, as it transpired that following Harry into his Auror career wasn’t exactly what he’d envisioned either. Truth be told, Hermione had never quite thought that it was the right choice for him, but following Harry had become second nature to them both by that point and it was a hard habit to break.
During the evenings that Harry and Ginny spent otherwise occupied, she and Ron would drink away their work frustrations, wondering how it came to be that they could complain about something as mundane as being stuck in a promising job that left them unfulfilled.
A few years after leaving Hogwarts, Ginny finally moved in - officially at least, she’d been sleeping at Grimmauld Place 4 or 5 nights out of the week since she had been home, sneaking back through the Burrow’s floo most mornings so as to avoid her mother’s lectures. Ron had taken this as an opportunity to move in with George, taking the spare room in the flat above Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes in Diagon Alley.
After a few months of trying to resist tinkering with George’s newest inventions, Ron had decided to leave the Ministry and instead focus on the shop with his brother. Which, Hermione had to admit, had been the best decision that Ron had ever made. She couldn’t deny the confidence he gained from doing something just for him and the occasional green eyed monster that had followed him around all his life appeared to have finally left for good.
Remaining in Grimmauld Place meant that Ginny and Hermione had only become closer in the last few years. They spent most mornings chatting over coffee which would often be reduced to throwing biscuits at Ginny until she was covered in crumbs and too busy laughing to talk about her and Harry’s sexual exploits. She had no doubt that Harry would be mortified if he knew exactly how much Ginny shared over her breakfast. Hermione relished the change from her relationships with the boys, even if she occasionally had to result in flinging baked goods in Ginny’s face to avoid mental scarring.
Despite this, Hermione had realised that she was now the guest in their house. Grimmauld Place was Harry’s and he planned to transform it once again to become their family home. She’d overheard Harry and Ginny talking over dinner and wine about their plans for the future and she had no intention of making it awkward for them to ask her whether she would be looking for her own place.
Ginny had already started making subtle changes around the house and the piles of books that Hermione had been unable to resist, despite no longer having space in any of the bookcases, were clearly not a part of that vision.
Sheepishly looking around at what could only be described as an overly cluttered space, Hermione chewed her lip and silently thanked Ron for convincing her that she should get a 2 bed flat despite moving on her own. She’d already bought floor to ceiling bookcases to go in the spare room in addition to the shelves that were built beside the chimney stack in the lounge. It might be just enough space to house them all… for now, at least.
The sound of the front door shutting downstairs snapped Hermione out of the daze she must’ve been standing in, the colour draining from her face as she panicked that Harry and Ginny had come back early.
“Hermione!”
Ron’s bellow came from the hall downstairs and she sighed with relief, swiftly followed by no small amount of shame as she remembered that Ron had agreed to arrive late morning to help her move her packed boxes. The boxes that were currently sat stacked in the corner and undeniably empty.
“Up here! Ron, I’ll... I’ll be out in a second, one minute!” Hermione yelled as her hand whipped to her pocket only to find that her wand wasn’t there. Bugger.
With a frantic scan of the room, she spotted her wand on the coffee table and began climbing over the back of the sofa to grab it as Ron walked into the room carrying muggle take-away coffees and gave an undignified snort. “You’re not ready at all.”
She could hear the smugness in his voice as she over-reached and rather ungracefully stumbled into the coffee table with an “oomph”.
“Yes, I know, I know. I got carried away and didn’t see the time,” she groaned and looked back to him as she stood with her wand in hand, flicking it absently to return the cushions she’d dislodged back to their positions on the sofa.
“Hermione, have you even started packing?” Ron sighed as he looked about the room, eyes lingering on the all too familiar pile of work covering the coffee table.
“Ron, I can do it in 5 minutes. Not everyone has to spend an entire day reminiscing over everything they’ve ever owned,” Hermione gave him a meaningful look, no further words needed to remind him exactly how long it’d taken him to finally move all of his belongings out. She was pretty sure that there was still a box containing some of his Hogwarts quidditch robes upstairs.
Hermione tried to appear unphased as she charmed her books to pack themselves in the quickest way possible, not organised at all in the way she would have wanted, but there was no way she’d be telling Ron that as he stood there looking far too pleased to find her unprepared.
“Alright, keep your hair on. I can very easily bugger off to enjoy my Sunday morning in peace…” Ron’s voice trailed off and he wafted the coffee towards her as he walked across the room.
His voice lilted, “and I can take this flat white from the fancy coffee shop with me.”
She turned, catching the whiff of perfectly roasted coffee and eyeing the takeaway cups.
“The place with the salted caramel brownies?”
He grinned, shifted both cups into one hand and pulled out a slightly crumpled paper bag from his coat with the other. “You mean these salted caramel brownies?”
“Ron, you are an angel and I do not deserve you,” the words tumbling out of her mouth in quick succession, eyes tracking the paper bag.
Ron pushed a coffee and the bag of brownies into her hand and pulled out his wand to help her pack, “I probably still owe you from all the times you’ve saved my arse over the years. But I swear, with these brownies... I’m catching up.”
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A couple of hours, several more cups of coffee and a sugar rush later, they were sitting on the floor in the lounge of Hermione’s new flat, surrounded by boxes whilst Ron laughed and looked through the nearest one.
“I’d forgotten that Harry had this framed!” he gushed, pulling out the framed textbook page on Basilisks, her small writing at the bottom of the page clearly visible.
Hermione grinned and took the page, “too weird to display, do you think?” she asked, using the sleeve of her jumper to wipe away his fingerprint on the glass.
“Nah. You know that George turned one of its teeth into a shot glass, right?” he replied, absently peering back into the nearest box.
Her jaw dropped and she put the frame on the mantle, turning to look at Ron incredulously.
“What do you mean, George turned it into a shot glass? Where’d he get one in the first place?!”
Ron shifted uncomfortably and cleared his throat with an uncomfortable cough. “Well, I’d kept one that I found in my jacket, y’know, as a keepsake, and George thought it’d be cool…. Which it is! It’s sort of become the unofficial shot glass of lost bets.”
Hermione snorted and rolled her eyes, dropping back to the floor with her legs crossed. Only a Weasley would take a highly dangerous item like a basilisk fang and turn it into a sodding shot glass.
They continued this way, slowly unpacking her life from boxes and laughing at memories. Hermione found herself thinking that in these moments it was easy to see why she and Ron had considered that they would work well together. They were completely at ease around each other and she wouldn’t be shy to admit that he’d really come into his own in his 20s - no longer lanky and awkward, he’d filled out and had an air of easy confidence. According to Witch Weekly, he was considered quite the bachelor. But in the end, it had just never felt quite right for them, no great romance and no great loss either, it seemed they missed the window of opportunity and neither of them were particularly torn up about it. They’d agreed long ago that they would be each other’s plus one whenever the need arose but they wouldn’t try to force a relationship and ruin the friendship, they’d been through too much together to allow it.
Hermione’s thoughts were immediately brought crashing back as she caught Ron pouring the remaining brownie crumbs from the bag into his mouth, getting tiny bits of chocolate caught in his 2 day old stubble. Sighing and rolling her eyes, Hermione sent another empty box zooming into the corner, flattening itself as it went.
“Well, I think it’s time for a drink, don’t you? I’m not letting you anywhere near the books so discounting those boxes, we’re almost done!” Hermione waved her wand gracefully and the majority of the remaining boxes piled themselves neatly in the corner by the bookcase, she then stood and sent several more flying into her bedroom down the hall.
This left just a few boxes piled on the breakfast table that divided her kitchen and lounge. She tore into one and pulled out a bottle of Ogden’s, gently shaking the bottle at Ron so that the liquid sloshed inside.
“I got in your favourite as a thank you for helping me today,” said Hermione, pleased she’d remembered to pick it up when she’d popped out to grab dinner yesterday.
Ron wiped his mouth on his sleeve and bounded over to her like an overgrown Labrador, planting a rushed and chocolatey kiss on her head as he tried to wrench the bottle from her grasp. Not one to be beaten, Hermione stretched herself over the counter and held the bottle out of his reach, which was exceptionally difficult given that he had a good 6 inches on her.
Hermione had grabbed a tea towel and was still trying to beat him back when the fireplace flashed green and Ginny stepped into the lounge with her hands on her hips, an eyebrow raised in a perfect vision of Molly Weasley.
“Just what do you two think you’re doing?”
Hermione and Ron froze, his overly large frame pushing her up against the counter and the bottle held high over her head. They caught each other’s gaze and simultaneously seemed to realise their proximity. Hermione coughed and Ron instantly jumped away with his hands up and ears pink as Harry followed through the floo into the lounge.
After a few beats of awkward silence, Hermione started first, “Gin, it’s really not what it looks like-”
“Hermione was hogging the booze!”
Ron was cut off as Ginny broke into a fit of laughter, holding onto Harry’s shoulder to remain upright as he cleared his glasses of soot and peered at them both in confusion.
“You should-... you should’ve seen your faces!” Ginny gasped, still laughing as she hung off her fiancé. Ron groaned loudly to Hermione’s left before giving his sister a firm shove.
Harry rolled his eyes, knowing better than to get between Weasleys and stepped forward, embracing Hermione before pulling back to catch her eye, his careful gaze searching hers as he started, “so…”
“-so, I see you got my note with my new address,” she interrupted and grinned at him, “happy belated engagement!”
Harry’s eyebrows pulled together in a small frown, lowering his voice so that only she could hear him, “you know that you didn’t have to leave the house, I hope you didn’t think we wanted you gone?”
Merlin bless Harry Potter, she knew that he was sensitive to making anyone feel unwelcome in his home after his years with the Durlseys and he wouldn’t be able to cope with the guilt that he’d pushed someone out.
“Harry, I have absolutely loved living with you but if you and Ginny forgot one more silencing charm I was-”
She was stopped abruptly by Ron loudly slapping his hands over his ears as he glared at her and hummed obnoxiously over them. He may have accepted his best mate and his sister being together but unsurprisingly, still wasn’t keen on the details. Hermione pulled one of his hands down and handed him the bottle of Ogdens, which seemed to brighten his mood considerably.
Perched on a bar stool at the counter, Hermione smiled at Harry and gestured around with her other arm, “what do you think?”
The flat was remarkably smaller than Grimmauld Place but she’d loved it from the moment she stepped inside. It was open-plan with light colours throughout and, most importantly, it felt like it could really be home.
The flat was based in a fairly mixed Magical and Muggle area of London near Farringdon and whilst the flat itself was beautiful, the clincher had been the secluded roof terrace accessible through her spare room. Evenings spent up there with her nose in a book and a mug of mulled wine, perhaps a warming charm until the temperature had less of a bite, sounded like the perfect way to wind down.
Ginny hopped onto the stool next to her, linked her arm and rested her head on Hermione’s shoulder. “It’s lovely but honestly, it won’t be your flat until I’ve spilled at least one drink tripping over a pile of books.”
At that, Ron appeared on the other side of the counter, placing down 4 glasses of firewhisky with a dangerous grin.
“Everyone ready for a Monday hangover?”
Hermione groaned as Harry and Ginny raised their glasses, the first of many that evening.
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There was a horribly loud ringing coming from a box in the corner of her room, wrenching Hermione from sleep. By the sounds of things it was also vibrating obnoxiously as well, clearly with absolutely no notion of the way her brain was spinning.
Groaning as she pulled herself far enough over the side of her bed to rummage in her handbag for her wand, Ron burst into the room, his wand held out in readiness. He was sporting one sock, Chudley Cannons boxers and a much more crumpled version of the shirt that he’d been wearing yesterday from crashing on her sofa.
“Hermione!”
“Ron it’s fine! I’m sorry, it’s just- Oh, where is it...” she yelled over the noise, which was sounding increasingly irate. Finally finding her wand, she whipped it round and pointed it at the offending box.
“Accio alarm!”
A small bedside clock flew out of the closest box and landed in her outstretched hand. Hungover and too unco-ordinated to turn it off, she flipped it over, wrenched open the panel on the back and shook out the batteries, sighing with relief as the noise abruptly died.
“Christ ‘Mione, you couldn’t have used your enormous brain to remember to turn that thing off?” Ron yawned at her, one hand running through his hair.
“As much as I really wish I had, I’ve got meetings all morning and I need to be presentable,” she mumbled through the arm that she’d flung over her face and slumped back into her pillows.
Feeling the bed dip, Hermione lowered her arm to see Ron perched on the edge, a smug smile pulling at his lips as he reached out to pat her leg over the duvet.
“There, there,” he said warmly before beginning to stretch, “I’ll be thinking of you whilst I get to lounge around on my day off and eat toast in my pyjamas.”
She frowned and used her foot to push him firmly off her bed.
“Git.”
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Half an hour later, Hermione had showered, dressed and felt remarkably fresher than she had on waking up. The smell of coffee was wafting pleasantly down her hallway as she entered the lounge, pulling her hair into a high and messy bun. She could hear the bubbling from the stove top espresso maker and sounds of what she assumed came from Ron trying to remember where they had put her mugs before they started on the firewhisky. She shuddered at the thought.
“Thanks Ron, but you didn’t have to stay,” she called to him as she took a seat at the counter and began tidying her notes on the first few meetings that she had that day.
Ron shrugged and placed a mug of black coffee in front of her. “S’no problem, but you’ve not got any milk yet so you’ll have to choke this down. There’s a smidge of pepper-up in there as well.”
“As much as I appreciate your new found domestic charms...Out with it, why are you still here?” Hermione asked as she eyed him suspiciously.
Ron’s hand shot to his chest in mock offense. “You wound me! Can’t I just want to support my best friend with...with her,” he trailed off as he clearly had no idea what meetings she had today or whether they were of any importance. The tips of his ears went pink as he cleared his throat.
“George has a new girlfriend…”
She rolled her eyes, of course it was about a woman. “Right, do you not like her?”
“No, I wouldn’t say that,” Ron shifted and looked pointedly down at his own mug, “technically George hasn’t even introduced us yet, but-”
“You’ve already slept with her, haven’t you?”
His face flushed and he winced as he replied, “only in the literal sense.”
“Ronald!”
“It was 2 years ago, ‘Mione! I’m not even certain it’s her, but her name isn’t exactly common and from what he’s said so far, he really likes her and I just don’t want to fuck it up for him,” he poured out, words running together as he made his excuses.
She gave Ron a gentle smile, patted his arm understandingly and abruptly clapped him around the back of the head.
“Go talk to George,” she instructed and returned to her coffee.
“But I haven’t even had breakfast yet!” Ron protested, clearly hoping to use her flat to hide from George for as long as possible. Suddenly Ron’s insistence that she get a flat with a spare bedroom felt like it may not have been as selflessly suggested as originally thought.
Leant forward with her elbows on the counter, Hermione rubbed her forehead with her fingers, trying to fend off the headache that she’d only just gotten rid of as she carefully considered how to crowbar Ronald Weasley out of her kitchen.
“Ron, just talk to him. He’s hardly a prude and if you tell him now I’m sure he won’t even think of it,” she paused and eyed him warily, “you didn’t do anything awful to this poor woman did you?”
He blanched, “oh god, no! No! It was just when I went to watch Gin play that away game in France, there was a lot of drinking and it was nothing really. Honestly, I don’t even know if she knew who I was.”
Hermione rolled her eyes, silently suspecting that Ron hardly remembered much of his encounter with the woman other than her name.
“Then bugger off Ron, I have to go to work and you can’t hole up in my flat all day. You work with your brother, just talk to him, you know he’ll be fine.”
Ron dragged a hand down his face, downed the rest of his coffee and put the mug in the sink. “Fine.”
He walked into the lounge and was forcing his feet into his shoes when Hermione snorted into her coffee with a laugh, there was no way that George wasn’t going to take the ever-living piss out of Ron for this.
Ron’s voice came cautiously from lacing his shoes on the sofa, “...what?”
“He’s going to think this is hilarious, you know?”
Ron groaned, “I know. I’ll never hear the end of it, he’ll be insufferable.”
With that, he smiled grimly at her and disappeared into the floo with a flash, leaving her alone in her flat for the very first time. She breathed deeply and looked around, suddenly very aware that this was different to when everyone was just out of the house at Grimmauld Place. She lived here. Alone.
Feeling a pang in her chest, she shrugged it off and decided to take her coffee to the roof. Reading her notes in the morning sun above the bustle of rush hour London felt like the perfect way to steel her nerves for the day.