Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The first proper signs of spring had appeared sometime in the second week of March, tentative and unconvincing — a few crocuses in the park, slightly longer evenings, the cold losing some of its mean edge. Harry had noticed mostly because he and Hermione had started taking the long way back from lunch, and the long way was more pleasant when it didn't feel like walking into a wall of frozen air.

They'd been doing that a lot, lately. Taking the long way.

The Tuesday of the second week, they had lunch at a small Italian place halfway between St. Mungo's and the Ministry — Hermione's suggestion, which Harry had agreed to immediately on the grounds that anywhere serving proper carbonara was worth a twenty-minute walk in either direction. They'd started meeting for lunch in January, just the two of them, on the days their schedules allowed. By March it was less a scheduled thing and more simply what happened at lunchtime, a gravitational pull they'd both stopped questioning.

Ron was busy. He was always busy these days — he'd left the Auror force the previous year and thrown himself into helping George with the shop, which apparently involved a level of administrative chaos that kept him occupied most evenings and a fair number of weekends. Harry didn't begrudge him it. He just noticed, with a quiet sort of gratitude, that Hermione always seemed to be available.

“You've got sauce on your chin," Hermione said, without looking up from the menu she was consulting for reasons Harry couldn't fathom, given that she'd already ordered.

Harry wiped his chin. “I don't know why you're still reading that."

“I'm checking whether the tiramisu is the same as last time. It wasn't, the time before."

“The tiramisu is always good."

“It was different, Harry, that's not the same as—" She looked up and caught his expression. “Don't make that face."

“I'm not making a face."

“You're making the face you make when you think I'm being unreasonable."

“I would never."

She gave him a look of profound skepticism and set the menu down. Outside the window, a pair of pigeons were engaged in some territorial dispute on the pavement, and Harry watched them for a moment with the particular enjoyment of a man who had nothing more pressing to deal with than lunch.

This was the thing about Hermione lately. Time with her had a quality that time with almost anyone else didn't — it was easy. Not in the sense of being shallow or unconsidered, but in the sense of being effortless. He didn't have to manage himself around her. He didn't have to think about what he was saying before he said it or monitor how he was coming across or brace for something. He could just be in the room with her.

He hadn't had that with Ginny. He wasn't sure he'd ever had it with anyone except her and Ron, and Ron, lately, was busy.

“Draco got a breakthrough with the research paper today," Hermione said, reaching for her water glass. “The one on curse degradation in organic tissue. I think we're close to something."

Harry felt the familiar, completely disproportionate spike of irritation at the mention of Malfoy's name, and suppressed it with effort. It had been happening since February — the way she talked about him easily, casually, Draco this and Draco that, like he was just a normal person she worked with and liked, which was technically entirely accurate and somehow still maddening.

“Good," Harry said, with great neutrality.

Hermione looked at him.

“What?"

“Nothing," Harry said.

“You did the jaw thing."

“I don't have a jaw thing."

“Harry, I have been watching you clench your jaw at things you don't like since you were eleven years old. You absolutely have a jaw thing." She tilted her head. “What is it about Draco that bothers you so much?”

“I've explained this before—"

“You said you don't like him in your vicinity. That's not an explanation, that's a preference."

“Some people just rub you the wrong way," Harry said. “It doesn't have to be more complicated than that."

Hermione looked at him for a moment with the particular expression she wore when she didn't believe a word someone was saying but had decided not to press it. Harry found this expression considerably more uncomfortable than being pressed would have been.

“Right," she said, and let it go, and Harry experienced the specific relief of having gotten away with something and the specific guilt of knowing he hadn't, really.

Their food arrived. Harry's carbonara was excellent. The tiramisu, Hermione reported after careful analysis, was back to its original standard.

“Can I ask you something?" Harry said, when they were nearly done.

“You're going to regardless."

“Fair." He turned his fork over in his hand. “Do you realize we've spent nearly every day together for the past two months?"

Hermione considered this. “Have we?"

“Yesterday we got groceries together. Groceries, Hermione. I came with you to Tesco because you said you needed help reaching the high shelves."

“I'm five foot four!"

“I know that, which is why I came. Still, my point is—" He stopped, and gestured vaguely between them. “This. We do this all the time now. Have you noticed?"

Hermione looked at him with a small, thoughtful expression that he couldn't fully read. “I've noticed," she said. “Does it bother you?"

Harry looked at her across the table — at the afternoon light coming through the window and catching the edges of her hair, at the small smile she was trying not to show, at the very ordinary and somehow entirely extraordinary fact of her sitting across from him and asking if this bothered him.

“No," he said honestly. “That's sort of my point."

The smile she gave him then was warm and a little unguarded, and she looked away toward the window quickly enough that he might have missed it if he hadn't been watching.

They took the long way back.

The following Friday, Thompson asked to see him again.

It wasn't a scheduled session — Thompson had rung through to the Auror office on Thursday morning and asked, with the gentle firmness of a man accustomed to being declined, whether Harry might be available the following afternoon. Harry had said yes before he'd properly thought about it, which he suspected had been Thompson's strategy.

He'd known, when he walked out of Monday's session, that they weren't finished. He'd felt it — the specific, precarious quality of something that had been opened and not yet closed, like a wound being treated in stages. He'd spent the four days between feeling the shape of it without looking at it directly, the way you were aware of a sore tooth without constantly pressing it with your tongue.

He'd also been hearing Hermione's voice in his head with some regularity.

One day I'm going to get a Patronus telling me it went too far, and I—

She'd stopped there. The sentence had just — stopped, and she'd pressed her lips together and composed herself, and Harry had hugged her and let it go because she'd let it go, but he hadn't stopped thinking about what came after the and I. He'd been turning it over for weeks now, the unfinished sentence, the thing she hadn't said. It was driving him quietly mad.

He was thinking about it, in fact, when he walked into Thompson's office on Friday afternoon and found the storm already properly underway — the March sky bruised and violent, rain coming sideways at the windows with a ferocity that made the glass shudder in its frame.

He sat in the chair.

Thompson waited while the quill prepared itself, while the clock settled into its rhythm, while Harry arranged himself into the version of himself he usually brought to these sessions — contained, manageable, approximately fine.

“There's something you've been thinking about," Thompson said, without preamble. “For a while."

Harry glanced up. “You could tell?"

“You walked in here already halfway through an argument with yourself. Yes, I could tell." Thompson settled back. “What is it?"

Harry turned it over for a moment. “Someone said something to me last month," he said. “A friend. She was — I'd been hurt, at work, nothing serious—" The slight shift in Thompson's expression reminded Harry that Thompson's definition of nothing serious probably differed from his. “I'd been injured," he amended, “and she was treating me, and she got angry. Not — not properly angry. The kind of angry that's actually scared." He paused. “She said: one day I'm going to get a Patronus telling me it went too far. And then she stopped. She didn't finish the sentence."

Thompson was quiet.

“I can't stop thinking about what comes after it," Harry said. “The and I. What she was going to say."

“What do you think she was going to say?"

Harry looked at the whirling instrument on the shelf. “Something that would've been hard to hear," he said. “Or hard for her to say. One of the two."

“Why would that be hard for her?"

“Because she—" He stopped. “She doesn't like showing that she's scared. She's competent at everything, and being scared makes you feel incompetent, I think. So she covers it up." He paused. “Usually with being bossy."

“She sounds like someone who takes care of people," Thompson observed.

“She's the best person I know," Harry said, without hesitation or qualification, and the simplicity of it surprised him a little.

Thompson noted something. “How does it feel," he said carefully, “knowing that she's frightened for you?"

The question sat in Harry's chest in an uncomfortable way. “Bad," he said. “I don't want her to be frightened."

“And yet you continue to put yourself in harm's way."

“I know." Harry exhaled. “That's — yeah. I know."

Thompson let that sit for a moment. Then: “I'd like to go back to what we talked about on Monday. You said you felt like a weapon. That you'd been shaped into one." He held Harry's gaze. “I want to understand where that started. Not at Hogwarts — before that."

Here it was, then.

Harry looked at his hands. The rain hit the window hard enough to rattle it.

“Before Hogwarts," he said, “I lived with my aunt and uncle." He'd said this Monday. He'd said it before, in this room, in fragments. Today felt different — like the Monday session had loosened something, made the door easier to push. “Vernon — my uncle — he was violent, when I was very small. Before I knew I had magic. He had a temper and I was—" He stopped. “I was convenient. Small and convenient and unable to do anything about it." He said the next part quickly, like ripping something off. “Around five or six my magic started coming out on its own. Protective. After that he kept his distance, mostly."

“Mostly," Thompson noted.

“Mostly," Harry confirmed. “But the other things — what they said, what they did, the way they— " He exhaled slowly. “They made me sleep in a cupboard. Under the stairs. Until I was eleven. That was my bedroom." He said it flatly. He'd learned, sometime in the last three sessions, that flat was the only way he could say certain things. “My cousin got two bedrooms. One for himself and one for his toys. I had a cupboard."

The quill scratched. The clock ticked.

“My aunt," Harry said, before Thompson could ask. He felt the familiar shift in his chest — the sharpening of something, the way Petunia always felt different to Vernon. “She was my mother's sister."

“Tell me about that."

“My mother was — everyone who knew her said she was extraordinary. Warm, brilliant, the kind of person who lit up a room just by being in it." He turned a heavy Galleon over in his fingers—running his thumb rhythmically across the raised, cold metal ridges of the edge. “Petunia grew up next to that. She knew what my mother was. She knew what love looked like, because she'd been watching it her whole life." He set the coin down. “And then my parents died. And Dumbledore left me on her doorstep, and she looked at a one-year-old boy whose parents had just been murdered—" His voice stayed flat. He needed it to stay flat. “And she decided that she was going to choose cruelty. Every day. For ten years. She chose it."

“You draw a distinction," Thompson said, “between her cruelty and your uncle's."

“He was ignorant," Harry said. “He didn't understand the magical world, didn't want to, was frightened of what he didn't understand. That's still not an excuse, but I can — I can follow the logic of it. Petunia knew." His jaw tightened. “She couldn't claim ignorance. She'd spent her whole childhood watching her sister love people, and she—" He stopped. Breathed. “I used to think, when I was very small — I used to think that if I was good enough, quiet enough, didn't take up too much space, she might—"

He stopped.

“She might what?" Thompson asked.

“Love me a bit," Harry confessed. “Or even just — not hate me. I would've settled for not being hated." He heard himself say it and felt the particular, exhausting sadness of it — not sharp, just heavy. “She never did. Not once."

The room was very quiet except for the storm and the clock.

“Dumbledore knew," Harry said then, unprompted. It came out of its own accord, like something that had been waiting for space. “He knew what I was going home to, every summer. He'd placed me there. He was watching — he had people watching. He knew."

“Yes," Thompson said.

“And he left me there anyway." Harry looked up. “For eleven years, he left me there. And then he brought me into his world and he was — he was everything I described. Kind and warm and the first person who ever made me feel like I was worth something." He stopped. “And I loved him. I really — for all that it's worth, I genuinely loved him."

“I know," Thompson said.

“And he knew," Harry continued, very quietly, “from before I was old enough to understand what a prophecy was, that I was going to have to die. He knew the whole shape of it. And he chose—" His voice had gone rough. “He chose to let me love him. He let me build something on him, anchor myself to him, and he never— he let me do that knowing that he was going to send me into a forest to be killed. That the love I was building was being built on something he knew was going to be taken away."

The silence that followed was a particular kind.

“Both things are true," Harry said, into it. “He loved me. And he used me. And I don't know what to do with that, because I've tried to pick one or the other and I can't, because they're both completely true and they don't cancel each other out and it's—" He stopped. “It's a lot to carry."

“It is," Thompson said simply. “It's a great deal to carry, and you've been carrying it alone for five years."

Harry said nothing.

“There's one more thing I want to ask you about today," Thompson said. “And then I want to say something, and I want you to let it land before you deflect." A pause. “Voldemort."

Harry let out a long breath through his nose. “Right."

“You knew his history."

“Yes."

“You understood, intellectually, how he became what he was."

“Yes." Harry tapped his fingers against the chair. “His mother used a love potion on his father. He was conceived without real love on either side. He grew up in an orphanage — conditions not entirely unlike—" He stopped. Started again. “He had reasons. I understood the reasons."

“And yet?"

“And yet I can't—" Harry pressed his free hand briefly to his sternum, an unconscious gesture. “I can't comprehend him. I know the story. I can follow every step of it. And I still cannot understand a person who simply never loved anyone. Not one person, in his entire life." His voice had gone quietly, genuinely bewildered. “I have been starved of love my whole life and I never stopped wanting to give it. It never — the capacity never went away. So how does a person just — not have it? How does that happen to someone and not to someone else?"

Thompson was very still.

“That frightens you," he said.

“Yes."

“Why, specifically?"

Harry looked up. “Because if it can happen — if a person can be emptied so completely, by the absence of love, by bad circumstances, by the wrong start — then it wasn't inevitable that I didn't become that." The words were coming slowly and carefully, like things being lifted out of somewhere deep. “I was lucky. I had Ron and Hermione. I had the Weasleys, small kindnesses here and there, things that kept me — human. Kept me wanting to be." He stopped. “But it could have gone differently. A few things moved slightly and it could have gone the way it went for him. And I don't know what that means about me, or about people, or about — I don't know what to do with that."

Thompson nodded slowly. He was quiet for a long moment, and Harry had learned by now that Thompson's long silences were not empty ones.

“I want to say something to you now," Thompson said. “And I need you to hear it without immediately constructing a reason it doesn't apply to you."

Harry stopped tapping the chair. “All right."

“Everything you've described to me — across all sessions, and today — follows a single, consistent pattern," Thompson said. “Your uncle, who was violent and told you through his actions that your body was not worth protecting. Your aunt, who knew better and confirmed his cruelty with her own. Dumbledore, who loved you genuinely — I believe that, and I think you do too — and who also made the deliberate calculation that your life was an acceptable cost. Voldemort, who tried to kill you on multiple occasions because you were an inconvenience to him." Thompson paused. “Every significant adult in your life, Harry, either told you directly that you had no value, or demonstrated it through their choices. And you were a child. Children cannot argue with that. They don't have the framework. So they do the only thing available to them — they internalize it, and they build their understanding of themselves around it."

Harry's hands were still in his lap.

“You don't throw yourself at cursed daggers because you're brave," Thompson said, quietly and precisely. “Although you are. You do it because some part of you — a part that was formed a very long time ago, in a cupboard under some stairs — believes that your body is a resource to be spent. That you are not a person with a life to protect. You are a function. A purpose." He held Harry's gaze. “You don't think you have value unless you're useful. And you don't think you're useful unless you're dying."

The room went completely silent.

The storm pressed against the glass.

Harry sat with it. He didn't deflect. He didn't look at the instrument on the shelf or reach for a sarcastic remark or find a way to make himself smaller inside the moment. He just sat with it, with the complete and devastating accuracy of it, with the fact that two sentences had just organized twenty-two years of his life into something that finally, horribly, made sense.

“Yeah," he said, eventually. Very quietly. “Fuck."

Thompson nodded. He didn't follow it with another question. He let Harry have the moment without trying to fix it.

The clock struck the hour.

Harry stood up slowly. His legs felt strange. He picked his coat up from the hook by the door and shrugged it on and stood with his hand on the door handle for a moment.

“Healer Thompson."

“Yes."

“The thing you said." He stopped. Outside, the storm was still battering London, rain and wind and the low complaint of March thunder. “Can it be fixed? The — the belief. About not having value unless you're useful."

Thompson was quiet for a moment. “Yes," he said. “It's some of the hardest work there is. But yes."

Harry nodded once. He opened the door.

The lime-green corridor of St. Mungo's stretched out before him, indifferent and antiseptic and entirely unaware that he'd just had twenty-two years of himself laid out and organized into something that made a terrible kind of sense.

He walked to the end of the corridor. He pushed through the doors into the grey, howling March afternoon, and the rain hit him immediately — cold and sideways and thorough — and he stood on the pavement while the city moved around him, umbrellas and headlights and the hiss of tyres through puddles, all of it completely unaware.

He thought about his flat. The quiet of it. The specific quality of silence in an empty room when something in you has just been cracked open and you're not sure what's supposed to go in the space where it was.

He couldn't go back there. Not tonight.

He reached into his coat pocket.

He didn't decide, exactly. It wasn't a decision.

He apparated.

The door opened before he'd even raised his hand to knock.

“Harry." Hermione stepped back to let him in, and he crossed the threshold the way he'd apparated here — without quite deciding to, his body having apparently taken over from his brain somewhere around the pavement outside St. Mungo's.

He was soaked through. He registered this belatedly, standing in the warm light of her flat, dripping steadily onto her doormat.

“I — hi." His thoughts were still scattered, still raw at the edges. “How did you know I was there?"

Hermione looked at him with an expression he couldn't entirely read. “I had a feeling," she said simply. “Come inside properly, you're making a puddle."

He stepped further in and saw, over her shoulder, the books spread open on the coffee table, the lamp angled for reading, the clear evidence of an evening interrupted. He stopped.

“You were studying." He ran a hand through his soaked hair. “I'll go, I don't know why I — I should've—"

“If you reach for that door handle," Hermione said, with complete calm, “I will hex you."

He stopped.

She crossed the room and took hold of his wrist — her fingers wrapping around it firmly, not roughly — and the cold that had been sitting in his chest since Thompson's office receded, just slightly, just enough to breathe around. He looked down at her hand. He looked up at her face.

“You're staying," she said. “Stop arguing before you've started."

“I'm fine," he tried.

She reached up with her free hand and touched his face — her fingertips light against his jaw, tilting it slightly toward the lamp — and looked at him properly. His glasses were crooked. He was soaked. He probably looked like something the cat had dragged in, if the cat had dragged it through a philosophical crisis first.

Her thumb traced gently over his cheekbone.

Harry closed his eyes. There was a knot in his throat that had been there since the session, sitting just below speech, and her touch made it worse somehow — not painfully, but the way kindness always made it harder to hold things together, the way warmth made you feel the cold you'd been carrying without noticing.

“Stay," she said softly. “Talk to me."

He opened his eyes. “I'm fucked up," he said. The words came out rough and very quiet. “I don't think Thompson can fix it. I don't think—"

“Why?" Her voice was firm but not sharp.

“I'm too damaged." The words caught. “There are things I — I can't even—" He stopped. He could feel the shapes of what he was trying to say and couldn't find the route from the inside of his head to the outside, and the frustration of it sat on top of everything else like a stone.

Hermione didn't rush him.

“Is this about Ginny?" she asked.

“No." Immediately, and with a smaller adjacent thought that came out before he could stop it. “That's probably another reason I'm fucked up. I ended a five-year relationship and I don't think about her. Barely at all. What kind of person doesn't—" He exhaled sharply. “Bloody hell."

“A person whose relationship ended long before the actual ending," Hermione said. She reached up and pushed his soaked fringe back from his forehead with the same matter-of-fact tenderness she'd touch a wound with. “You stayed past the point you should have left because you didn't want to hurt her. The grief happened in real time, while you were still in it. There was nothing left to grieve when it ended."

He felt some of the stone in his chest shift. He reached up and took hold of her hand — not her wrist this time, just her hand — and she let him, her fingers curling slightly around his.

“I saw Thompson today," he said. “A second session this week. He asked to see me again today."

“I know — well. Not that he'd called a second session, but I know it's been—" She looked at him carefully. “Has it been bad? This week?"

Harry thought about the unfinished sentence. One day I'm going to get a Patronus telling me it went too far, and I—

“I've been thinking about something you said," he admitted. “Last month, at the hospital. You were angry with me about the dagger."

She tilted her head slightly.

“You said — you said one day you'd get a Patronus telling me it went too far. And then you stopped." He looked at her. “You didn't finish the sentence."

Something moved across Hermione's expression — there and then carefully set aside.

“Harry—"

“I'm not asking you to finish it now," he said. “I just—" He stopped. “Thompson said something today about why I keep doing it. The self-sacrifice thing. And I realized that I've been hearing that sentence of yours in my head for three weeks, and I think—" He paused. “I think I need to do better. I'm going to do better."

Hermione looked at him for a long moment. Her expression was very still and very open, and there was something in it that she wasn't putting a name to, and neither was he, and that was all right.

“Do you want to tell me what he said?" she asked. “Thompson."

The knot in his throat tightened. He thought about saying yes. He thought about putting it into words — the weapon, the value, the cupboard, Dumbledore's calculated kindness, all of it organized into two precise sentences — and he thought about Hermione's face while she listened. He thought about the pity that might come into her eyes, the particular way she might look at him, and the thought of being an object of Hermione's pity was enough to turn his stomach.

“Not tonight," he said quietly. “I can't. I'm sorry."

She looked at him for a moment — that way she had of looking, several layers deep — and then she nodded, and pulled him into a hug.

His arms went around her immediately. His cheek found the top of her head. He closed his eyes, and the warmth that flooded through him was so complete and so instantaneous that it almost undid him. The golden hum in his blood, the cold entirely gone, the terrible lightness of being held by someone who knew the worst of you and showed up anyway.

He felt lighter. Still hollow, still raw — but lighter. Like whatever had been pressing down had distributed itself somehow, become manageable, now that there were two of them under it.

He took a slow breath. Her hair smelled of parchment and something faintly floral and underneath it all just herself, and he held on and breathed and tried not to think too carefully about any of it.

His eyes were burning.

Don't, he told himself firmly.

Hermione rose onto her toes and pressed a kiss to his cheek — soft, brief, simple, the most natural thing in the world — and the burning got considerably worse. He blinked hard.

She pulled back just enough to look at him, and reached up with her thumb and caught the two tears that had escaped before he could. No fuss. No pity. Just her, steady and unhurried.

“Right," she said, with great deliberateness. “I need to tell you something."

“Okay," he managed.

“Today at the hospital," she said, “we had a patient come in who had gotten his wand stuck up his arse."

Harry stared at her.

A beat of silence.

“I'm sorry — what?"

“Completely stuck," Hermione confirmed, entirely straight-faced. “He told us he'd accidentally fallen on it."

The laugh that came out of Harry was loud and involuntary and probably undignified, and it didn't matter at all. He felt it physically — the knot in his throat, the weight in his chest, all of it briefly, mercifully displaced by the image of a grown man explaining to a Healer's reception desk that he had accidentally fallen on his own wand.

“You're joking," Harry said.

“I am not." Hermione's composure was cracking at the corners. “The wand had started reacting to his magic. Burning him from the inside. Healer Jones assessed the situation and determined the most appropriate course of action was to assign the case to Draco."

Harry laughed again, harder. “Malfoy?"

“Draco Malfoy. Top of his cohort. Healer apprentice." She said it with great dignity. “Jones told him to do it manually. Said a Summoning Charm might bring it out too fast and rupture something on the way."

“He did it?" Harry asked, somewhere between appalled and delighted.

“He did it." Hermione pressed her lips together, visibly fighting her own smile. “He had the expression of a man reviewing every decision in his life that had led him to that particular moment. Which, to be fair, is quite a journey."

Harry was laughing properly now — the deep, genuine kind that came from somewhere real — and Hermione was laughing too, her composure entirely abandoned, her eyes bright. The sound of it filled the flat.

“You did that on purpose," Harry said, when he could speak again.

“Did what?"

“That story. You told it on purpose."

“It was objectively one of the funniest things I've witnessed in my career," Hermione said primly.

“Hermione."

She met his eyes. The smaller smile she gave him then — quieter than the laughing one, more considered — did something to his chest that he was setting firmly aside for later.

“Sit down," she said. “I'll put the kettle on."

The storm settled into something steadier as the evening wore on — a low, constant rain against the windows, less aggressive, almost soothing. They sat on Hermione's sofa with mugs of tea and talked about nothing consequential for a long while, the way they'd gotten very good at doing. Hermione told him about the curse-degradation research she and Draco — Harry's jaw did the thing but he kept it contained — were close to publishing. Harry told her about Proudfoot's nephew and the filing cabinet and the missing eyebrows. She made him eat most of a plate of biscuits with the seamless, practiced ease of someone who'd been making sure he ate things since they were eleven years old, without ever appearing to notice she was doing it.

“Ron rang me on Saturday," Harry said, at some point. “He and George are opening a second shop. Somewhere in Hogsmeade."

“He mentioned it to me too," Hermione replied. “He seemed excited."

“He's found his thing," Harry smiled. There was something warm in it. “I didn't think the shop would be his thing, but it is. He's good at it."

“He's always been better with people than he let himself believe," Hermione said.

“Yeah." Harry turned his mug in his hands. “He said to say hi, by the way. Apparently he thinks we need to all get together soon, the three of us. He said, and I'm quoting, 'tell Hermione I know she's still alive because you talk about her constantly, but it'd be nice to see her in person.'"

Hermione looked at him. “He said that?"

“Word for word."

A slight flush crossed her cheeks that she directed toward her tea mug. “I'll owl him."

Harry smiled into his own mug and said nothing.

The tea went cold. Neither of them moved. The rain kept up its steady conversation with the windows, and the lamp cast a warm circle over the books on the coffee table and the sofa and Hermione's handwriting on a piece of parchment she'd abandoned when he'd knocked, and Harry was aware, in a dim and not-yet-examined way, that he could not think of a single place he would rather be.

His eyes had been getting heavy for the last twenty minutes.

This was unusual enough to notice. He didn't fall asleep easily anywhere — not his own flat, not hotel rooms, not the Burrow. His body had spent too many years in a state of low-level vigilance to switch off cleanly, and sleep, when it came, arrived as something fractured and provisional rather than a surrender. But here, in the warm lamp-lit quiet of Hermione's flat with the rain at the windows and her a steady warmth beside him, the edges of things were going soft in a way that didn't frighten him.

He thought about Thompson's two sentences. He turned them over slowly, the way you might handle something sharp — carefully, to understand its shape, not to hurt yourself with it.

You don't think you have value unless you're useful. And you don't think you're useful unless you're dying.

He thought about the fact that he was here right now, not being useful. Not dying. Not doing anything in particular except existing in a warm room beside someone who mattered to him — and that the cold had been gone from his chest since she'd taken his wrist in the doorway, and that he felt, doing absolutely nothing, more like a person with a reason to exist than he had in longer than he could name.

He didn't know what to do with that yet.

He was almost entirely asleep when he became aware of Hermione saying his name.

“Mm," he managed.

“You're falling asleep on my sofa."

“'m not," he said, without conviction.

A pause. “Harry." Her voice had gone quieter. “When did you last sleep properly?"

He thought about it genuinely. “Define properly."

“More than three hours. Without waking up."

He considered lying. “Can't remember," he admitted.

Hermione was quiet for a moment. “Stay tonight," she said. “Sleep here."

The automatic refusal came up immediately, the one he'd rehearsed so many times it lived in his mouth without needing to be thought about. “I'll have nightmares. I'll wake you up. I move around, I sometimes—"

“I know," she said. “Stay anyway."

He turned his head to look at her. She was watching him with an expression that was open and steady and entirely decided, and he could see that she'd already thought about the nightmares and the thrashing and the occasional screaming and had arrived at stay anyway regardless.

“Hermione," he said.

“You're not an imposition," she said, quietly and precisely. “You have never been an imposition. I'm asking you to stay because I want you to, and because you haven't slept, and because—" She stopped. “Just stay."

He looked at her for a moment longer. Outside, the March rain fell steadily on the city.

“Okay," he said.

Her bedroom was warm and small, books on every surface, the particular organised chaos of a person who read in every room and never quite finished returning things to shelves. She found him a spare pillow and a blanket without making a production of it, and turned the lamp off, and lay down beside him in the dark.

Harry stared at the ceiling.

“Thank you," he said, to the darkness.

“You're welcome. Now shut up and sleep."

He heard the smile in it. He closed his eyes.

He should, he thought distantly, examine certain things at some point. The way the cold in his chest had been absent for the entire evening. The way being here felt like something he didn't have a clean word for — not comfort exactly, not safety exactly, something that contained both of those and had something else in it too, something warmer and less categorizable. The filing cabinet in the back of his mind, where he kept the things he wasn't ready to look at — the cheek touches, the way she laughed at things he said, the and I— at the end of an unfinished sentence, the fact that she'd opened the door before he knocked because she'd had a feeling.

The filing cabinet was getting very full.

He'd look at it later. He'd think about all of it later, properly, when he wasn't hollowed out and rain-soaked and warm for the first time in what felt like months.

Later.

He fell asleep to the sound of the rain, and Hermione's quiet breathing beside him, and he didn't dream of anything terrible.

For the first time in years, he didn't dream of anything terrible at all.