Like any child her age, Hermione had imagined living out one of her favourite books before. Taking on the role of the hero or heroine and going on amazing, magical adventures. That was one reason why coming to Hogwarts had amazed her so, because she’d felt that it was her chance to actually live out a magical adventure like the children in the books she read.
But now, standing here, in front of Harry, and having him tell her, that yes, she actually was living out a magical adventure? Well, it was a hard pill to swallow.
And what made it all worse was that this was just one of the many, many impossible things that had just been dropped on her lap.
She almost wanted to say that this was like when Prof. McGonagall came to tell her about magic, but really, this was a thousand times bigger than that.
Her life being a book series, her best friend being a—what was the word?—isekai’d fifteen-year-old, the piece of Voldemort’s soul Harry had just killed, Defense Against the Dark Arts being taught by the Voldemort himself, Death Eater teachers, Dumbledore and McGonagall knowing and doing nothing, and all of this before she considered the being who was so powerful that they could apparently just buy a million people and toss them across realities like they were playthings.
If she hadn’t been sitting already, she probably would have collapsed.
“Hermione, are you okay?” Harry asked, then he shook his head, “sorry, stupid question, of course you’re not okay.”
Hermione looked at Harry. He was standing, looking worried for her, but hesitant to approach.
Hermione looked at the boy she called her friend, the boy in the T-shirt with the insane words. The boy who had smiled, and laughed, and joked, and tried to console her while bearing the weight of this knowledge that she could barely comprehend. The boy who even now was still saying, “I—I’m sorry, Hermione. I shouldn’t have told you, I just... I needed someone to know. I just couldn’t—”
It was a good thing Hermione’s hugging skills had gotten a fair bit of practice recently, it made the one she gave Harry then that much more effective.
*****
Calming Harry, and herself, down, took a while, and by then, it was getting near 7:20, so Harry suggested they should head down for breakfast first (to give Hermione a chance to clear her head if nothing else), and Hermione agreed after Harry reminded her that he would still be here to answer all her questions.
Before they left the Room of Requirement however, Harry had one last thing to tell her, “oh, right, before I forget, Dumbledore, Snape, and Quirrel can all read minds by looking in your eyes, it’s called legilimency. I don’t know if Dumbledore would actually do it, but better safe than sorry. Just try not to make eye-contact with any of them if you can.”
Hermione stared at Harry for several seconds, then with an admirable force of will, she pushed all the questions and terror that statement brought forth as far back as she could manage.
“Okay,” she said finally.
Breakfast was... light. Hermione had no appetite, but she made herself eat the little that she could stomach, because she felt she would need her energy for what was to come.
As soon as she was done, she told Harry she would meet him later, then went up to her dorm, where she sealed herself in her bed with a pen and one of the many notebooks Harry had given her, and tried to put her thoughts in order.
The first three pages ended up with an almost rabid outpouring of the sheer existential dread that the events of the morning had filled her with, and on the fourth page, in large, bold letters, written over and over onto themselves, were they words: WHAT CAN WE DO?
Because that was the question. The only one that truly mattered anyway. What could they do?
What could they do about ROB? About Voldemort and his Death Eaters in the school.
What could they do about the four year deadline?
And Hermione sat staring at those words for a very long time as she realised that she had absolutely no idea.
*****
It was Lavender and Parvati who finally pulled Hermione out of what was probably a steady breakdown.
“Hermione,” Lavender called, sliding the curtains around her bed wide open, and causing the girl within to blink owlishly at the light.
Parvati’s eyes tracked down to the open page on her notebook, and the giant words on it that she’d been mulling over, and Hermione quickly shut the book.
“What is it?” She asked, more curtly than she’d intended.
Lavender either didn’t notice or didn’t take offense, because the girl asked, “are you and Harry having a fight?”
Hermione was stomped. Of all the words she could have imagined Lavender saying in that moment, those were nothing close. “What? Why would you think that?”
“Well, the two of you were acting weird when you came down for breakfast this morning,” Parvati said.
“Yeah, and then you ran up here, while Harry has been moping around like someone broke his favourite broomstick,” Lavender added.
“Oh. Well, no, we’re not fighting,” Hermione said.
The girls clearly didn’t believe her. “Really?” Parvati asked.
“Yes, really, we’re not.”
“Then why are you up here then?” Lavender said, trying to catch her in a lie. “Because you and Harry are always together, and now you’re not.” A pause. “Actually I think this is the first time you and Harry weren’t together when it wasn’t time for bed. Are you sure you really aren’t boyfriend and girlfriend?”
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Hermione only just barely refrained from pointing out to Lavender that she and Parvati were always together.
Heck, it was so bad that Faye had had to switch beds with Lav, so that she and Parvati could have beds next to each other.
“Yes, Lav, I’m sure. And we aren’t fighting either, we just—” Hermione paused as she came to a realization “—we just need to talk about some things.”
She rose. “Thanks,” she told the two girls. She began to run off, but then stopped. “Where’s Harry?”
“He went up to the boy’s dorm some time ago,” Parvati said, and Hermione was off.
She found Harry sitting at his dorm room’s window looking melancholic. Hedwig sat with him, and though the boy’s fingers were running through her feathers, he didn’t really seem to notice it.
He didn’t seem to notice much of anything.
The owl spotted her as soon as she walked in, but Harry didn’t until she walked right up to him and called his name.
He turned to face her, and Hermione had to admit that Lavender had been right, Harry did look like someone broke his favourite bike.
“Hey, Hermione,” he said.
For one odd moment, Hermione caught herself listening for something different in his voice, searching for some change in his face and familiar eyes, some trace of the other boy he had apparently been. But even as she did it, she knew she would find nothing. Because Harry had never been anyone but the boy she saw before her now.
“We need to talk, Harry,” Hermione said.
Because if they were going to figure out what to do, she had to know everything. Right down to the last detail.
*****
Their second walk to The Room of Requirement was quiet, much like the one prior to it.
At the blank stretch of wall, Harry stepped back and said, “do the honours.”
Hermione stared at Harry, then at the wall. “How do I make it work?” She asked. She felt like she may know how, based on her memory of what she saw Harry do, but she wanted to be sure.
“Oh, right. Uh, you walk back and forth in front of it, while thinking about the kind of room you want it to be.”
“Any kind of room I want it to be?” Hermione asked, and Harry smiled, his expression brightening a little for the first time today.
“As far as I know, yeah.”
Taking Harry’s instructions to heart, Hermione focused. “I need a room where Harry and I can comfortably discuss everything,” she muttered, pacing to and fro.
On her third pass, the door appeared, looking exactly the same as it had when they went into The Room of Forgotten Things, and for a second Hermione thought that she’d done it wrong.
Opening the door proved that false.
The room within was a little slice of the Gryffindor common room, but not just any slice, it was the little corner that the first-years had claimed for their own, complete with the painting.
There was a slight difference however, instead of the many chairs arranged in a wide C that the first-years had around their actual fireplace, this one only had two chairs, with a small table in between.
It looked wonderfully cozy.
“Huh,” Harry said as they entered. “I had no idea it could copy real places. I suppose it kinda makes sense though, just use what’s already in our heads and build on that.”
That made sense, Hermione agreed. Something had to guide the design of the room after all.
She wondered what kind of enchantments the room had. How difficult would such magic be? Would she be capable of it someday?
Hermione shook away the thoughts; there was something else to focus on right now.
Harry settled into one of the chairs, and Hermione mirrored him, then she set the notebook she’d thought to bring down on the table.
Harry chuckled. “Of course Hermione Granger would bring a book,” he said, unwittingly setting the stage for Hermione to ask her first question.
“How well do you know me? From the books I mean. The letter called this the Harry Potter universe, and, well, you were put in Harry’s body—” wow, did that feel bizarre to say “—so I’m certain enough you, or I guess Harry, was the protagonist. But you clearly know me. So, who was I?”
She had a suspicion, a very strong one actually, but she wanted to hear it from him.
Harry said nothing for some time. “Hermione, are you really sure you want to do this?”
Sure? Hermione wasn’t sure of anything. She wasn’t even sure how she knew that Harry was telling the truth; she simply did. She knew he wasn’t lying. She knew the contents of that letter were very true, and she knew that if she didn’t get the answers to these questions, for good or for ill, she would obsess over them until she couldn’t sleep.
So, no, Hermione was not sure whether she wanted the answers to these questions. But she was going to ask them all the same.
“Tell me, Harry,” she said, and Harry sighed, then readied himself.
“You were the best friend,” he said. “My—” a pause “—Harry’s best friend. You and Ron.”
Hermione nodded. Her suspicion virtually confirmed. “Just your friend?” She asked.
It took Harry some time to understand what she was asking, and surprisingly, he laughed. “You weren’t the love interest or anything like that, Hermione. Actually, you—well, book-you, ended up with Ron.”
Hermione blinked. “What?”
“Yeah,” Harry said, clearly enjoying himself. “You guys even got married and had kids and everything.”
“Married!? To Ron?”
“Oh, come on, he’s not that bad,” Harry said.
“Well, no, but, it’s Ron. All he does is talk about quidditch and complain about homework.”
“Hey, that’s not true, he also talks about how great Gryffindor is,” Harry said, but his eyes made it clear he was simply goading her.
Hermione on the other hand, wasn’t really having the best time. Sure she hadn’t been expecting a Prince Charming to come sweep her off her feet, but Ron? He was just so, so Ron. So ordinary.
The girl didn’t really know what kind of man she wanted to marry, but Ron would have been the last thing on her mind.
Harry, having had his fun, rolled his eyes. “Relax, Hermione, it’s not like it actually happened.”
“But it did,” Hermione countered, staring right at him.
“Well, yeah,” Harry agreed, “but in the books. And I have no idea what kind of trans-dimensional shenanigan took place to feed all of this—” Harry gestured wildly at the world around them “—into J.K Rowling’s head, but Hermione, this was a woman with her own biases and ideals that she injected into her work; we can’t live our lives based on what she wrote. You’re a real person, Hermione.”
A beat passed in silence.
“But you do,” Hermione said finally, not argumentatively, merely stating a fact. “You did it with Draco. You did it with Daphne and Tracey. You did it with Rita Skeeter and Scabbers and Quirrel and even Snape. It’s probably why you treat Percy the way you do.”
The words were all said with a quiet simplicity that was more effective than screaming probably would have been, and by the end, Harry was just sitting there, staring blankly with a complicated expression on his face.
And Hermione worked up the courage to ask the question she really wanted to.
“Was that why you became my friend?”
Harry’s gaze sharpened at those words and his eyes trained on her. He seemed to actually think about the question before he answered. “No. Because as egotistical as this might sound; Hermione, you befriended me.
“I was sitting in that train, by myself, scared and alone, and avoiding everyone, because I’d convinced myself that it was best. And then you came in. And I tried to be curt with you, but somehow... you were just so easy to talk to. And you were a thousand times more than I ever thought you could be, and it...”
Harry petered out, clearly at a loss for words, and Hermione had nothing with which to fill up the sudden silence because she too was currently so overwhelmed her mind could barely string thoughts together.
After several seconds, Harry finally took a deep breath and gathered himself again. “No, Hermione,” Harry said. “Some book is not why I became friends with you. It may be why I’ve done everything else that I have since I came to this blasted place, but it is not why I became friends with you. That was all you.”
In that moment Hermione realised two things: one; Harry had a habit of making her speechless, and two; she didn’t really care about those books all that much.
The conversation carried on for much longer after that, and Hermione asked many more questions and took a lot of notes. By the end, it was long past lunch, and Hermione finally knew what they could do.
They could fight.
They just needed to figure out how.