Chapter Text
There’s the way it does go.
In that world, they meet at the beginning-of-year feast and don’t think much of each other. To Fred, she’s just a wide-eyed first year (if a sight more irritating than the rest): Hermione Granger, the swotty Muggleborn. She can’t seem to help chattering throughout the feast in a rapid-fire pitch about what she read in Hogwarts, A History. She takes up very little of Fred’s brain space: he takes a moment to wonder at her lung capacity and make note of the fact that she’d probably make a great target for a joke or two. Then, he moves on – swiftly.
Certainly, Fred is nothing very special to Hermione, either – she can’t even tell the twins apart, at this point in time. He’s just one half of Fred-and-George, Gryffindor’s troublemakers-in-chief that are, at this very moment, discreetly spiking Ron’s pumpkin juice with Pepper-Up Potion. Hermione decides she should avoid the likes of the Weasley twins, if she’s going to succeed at Hogwarts, and goes back to her far more civilized discussion with Percy about Arithmancy.
Those opinions do change, of course. As Hermione becomes a semi-permanent fixture at the Burrow over the holidays, Fred likewise becomes a part of her cobbled-together magical family: they are comrades and classmates, brothers-in-arms, faux-siblings of a kind. Even their clash in Hermione’s fifth year over Weasley’s Wizarding Wheezes is a mere blip in what is a genial, casually affectionate friendship. They think nothing of each other beyond what’s there: empty bickering in the Gryffindor common room, lazy summer evenings in the Burrow, surprisingly intellectual conversations about the spell-work involved in their jokes.
When Fred dies, Hermione feels the appropriate amount of devastation: grief for the smiling boy who lit up many lives, including her own, in the darkest of times. Sorrow, for the deaths of all their innocence. And anger – so much anger – at the cost of this violence, the senselessness of it.
But it’s wartime, and there’s work to do. Hermione mourns him, cries, comforts his grieving family — and then she charges right back in. The world Fred left behind, while rid of the Dark Lord, is an uncertain one, emerging from the shambles of a divided society. Because she’s the brightest witch of the age, she seizes the chance to do the extraordinary and achieve her dream: to build a better wizarding world, the one she saw at age eleven, and still believes in now, at seventeen.
Like so many foresaw, Hermione Granger’s rise through the ranks of the Ministry is rapid, unprecedentedly so. She works non-stop, pulling together every resource she has — her knowledge, her friends, and, in true Gryffindor fashion, every available ounce of bravery — to equalize the wizarding world, to erase the kinds of injustice that led to the Wizarding Wars in the first place. Long after she is gone, wizards will speak of the first Muggleborn Minister for Magic in hushed awe, amazed that one person could have accomplished so much – and that too, they will marvel, without a Time Turner!
The other things fall together, too. Life things. Hermione grows up and marries Ron, Harry marries Ginny, and it’s everything she could have hoped for. They lead a full life with children named for their heroes, perfect mixes of their parents before them, reflections of all the things they fought for, and everyone is so happy, so deliriously happy and content and right, that none of them stop to consider that there was another way things may have happened.
But there’s two paths in life: the way it goes, and the way it doesn’t.
In one world, Fred dies suddenly. He dies a martyr, a war hero, the brother-in-law-that-could-have-been for the Chosen One. His tombstone is never visible, beneath the constant shroud of flowers from well-wishers and mourners and admirers. He goes down in history as a lover of life, a champion of creativity and passion and skiving off lessons.
In another world, it goes rather differently, and that is where the stories diverge.