Chapter Text
“This isn’t working.”
Ginny said it quietly, which was almost worse than if she'd shouted it. She pressed her hands flat against the kitchen island and stared down at them, and Harry watched her fingers splay out against the marble like she was trying to hold herself up.
He didn't say anything for a moment. Just set his spatula down against the counter with a dull, hollow clack, and turned off the stove. The gas hissed and died, and the silence it left behind was the particular kind that filled a room completely — the kind with weight to it.
Another dinner ruined. He stared at the lobster. For fuck's sake.
He was so tired. Not the kind of tired that sleep fixed — he knew that kind well enough to tell the difference. This was bone-deep, ground-down exhaustion from having the exact same argument every single week for longer than he cared to count. You don't care enough about me. You love Ron and Hermione more than you love me. I'm not ready to move in with you. I'm tired of this.
Every damn week. On rotation, like a broken record player he couldn't switch off.
Harry pulled his apron off over his head and turned to face her, making a concerted effort not to roll his eyes. A sharp, throbbing ache was already blooming at both temples. Brilliant.
“What is it now, Ginny?"
“You were promoted." She looked up at him, jaw tight. “And I had to find out through Hermione. What the fuck, Harry?"
Harry clenched his jaw so hard his back teeth ached. Every bloody time.
“Hermione is my best friend," he said, keeping his voice very carefully level even as his chest tightened with frustration. “And I was going to tell you tonight. Why d'you think I'm standing over this stove cooking a lobster I don't even like? I wanted to do something nice, for a change!"
Ginny scoffed — a short, dismissive sound — and crossed her arms over her chest. It annoyed him beyond reason.
“Well?" Harry asked, leaning his weight forward against the counter's edge. His knuckles had gone white. “If you've got something to say, just say it. I'm tired of going round in circles with you."
“You always put Ron and Hermione before me," Ginny said, her voice rising. “Always. Every single time."
“They're my best friends, Ginny. I'm not hiding things from them."
“But you're perfectly fine hiding things from me! Your girlfriend, by the way. In case you'd forgotten."
“I wasn't hiding anything from you! I was going to tell you right now, tonight, over this bloody dinner that you're currently ruining—"
“How come I'm never the first person you come to?" Her voice cracked on the last word, and the fierce expression she'd been wearing suddenly splintered. Her eyes filled with tears. “When something's wrong, you never come to me. When something's good, I'm always the last to know. I'm supposed to be the person you love most, Harry."
Harry took a slow breath and looked down at the spoiled dinner. He could feel the words sitting right at the tip of his tongue — Because you don't listen. Because you don't know how to make things better, and I stopped expecting you to — and he pressed them back down, hard.
“They've been through things with me that you wouldn't understand, Ginny."
“I want to understand! But you never let me in—" She stopped. Her shoulders dropped. She let out a long, exhausted breath, and for a moment she just looked as tired as he felt.
Harry let his head tip back. He stared up at the ceiling, at the warm kitchen light he suddenly found unbearable, and when he looked at her again there was a dull, aching sadness sitting behind his ribs that had nothing to do with anger.
He was angry, yes. He was always angry by the time they got to this part.
But underneath it — quietly, guiltily — he was mostly just relieved that it might nearly be over.
He hated himself for the thought the moment he had it.
During the war, in the coldest and darkest stretches of those months in the tent, he'd kept himself going on one single thread of a promise.
‘One day, you're going to have the family you always dreamt of. You'll raise your children with nothing but kindness and love. You'll give them the childhood you never had.’ He'd repeated it to himself like a charm, like something that might actually work if he said it enough times in the dark.
He'd thought he'd build that family with Ginny. It had seemed so simple, back then — so obvious. She was Arthur and Molly's daughter. By marrying her, he'd become an official, legal part of the only family that had ever truly wanted him. No more wondering if he was loved out of pity. No more hollow birthdays. His children would have doting grandparents, and he'd finally have the warmth he'd been starved of since before he could properly remember.
But Ginny wanted to wait. So he waited. He kept waiting. He was still waiting now, five years on, and every time he'd thought about getting down on one knee she'd drop some casual comment that stopped him cold. I'm not ready for marriage. I don't really like children. If Teddy's staying the weekend, I won't intrude.
He'd started to feel like a selfish piece of work just for wanting things. Ginny was unapologetically herself, and in another life he might have admired that. But he was suffocating in the silence of his own future, unable to say his dreams out loud without feeling like a burden, like he was trying to force her into something she'd never asked for.
He'd always known relationships weren't easy.
But he hadn't expected them to be this hard either.
Standing across the kitchen island from her now, watching her wipe at her eyes with the back of her hand, he felt the truth settle low and heavy in his stomach. They were incompatible. They'd always been incompatible. He'd just spent five years being too frightened of the alternative to admit it — too terrified of letting go of his one constant anchor since Voldemort had dropped dead.
He didn’t want to be alone. He hated the dark, quiet corners of his own mind.
But as the January wind rattled the kitchen window hard enough to shudder in its frame, Harry thought — clearly, for the very first time — that being alone had to be better than standing in a warm room and feeling this miserable.
“I can't keep having the same argument every week." The fire had gone out of his voice. What was left was just tiredness. “It's doing my head in, Ginny."
“Well, something's got to change! I'm going mad too, you know," she shot back, pulling her arms tighter around herself.
This is it, Harry thought, watching her. Put the final nail in.
“You were right before," he said. “This isn't working. We don't work, not as a couple. I think…" He exhaled slowly. “I think we should end it. Properly, this time."
Ginny went very still.
He watched the words land. Watched her process them. This wasn't their first breakup — they'd done this so many times he'd genuinely lost count — but she had always been the one to walk out, and he had always been the one to swallow his pride and go crawling back. She knew that. They both knew that.
This felt different.
The kitchen air had gone cold and terribly, irreversibly final, and neither of them tried to argue with it.
There was no coming back from this.
After a long minute — broken only by the low hum of the enchanted stove and the wind battering the glass — Ginny took a ragged breath.
“I…" She stopped. Tried again. “I agree." Her voice had gone very small. “I think it's for the best. If we still want to be… if we want to stay friendly, one day, then we need to do this now, before it gets any uglier."
Harry smiled — a small, sad, involuntary thing. “I'm sorry."
“No." She shook her head, wiping at the tear that had traced a clean path down her flushed cheek. “You were right. One of us is always miserable. I don't want that for you."
“I don't want it for you either."
He exhaled properly for the first time all evening, and felt something loosen in his chest — something that had been wound tight for a very long time.
"I'll head home, then," Ginny murmured, her voice catching just slightly on the last word.
Harry stepped back to give her space. "Yeah. I'll send your things on. I'm really sorry, Ginny."
She crossed to the fireplace and reached into the pot of Floo powder on the mantelpiece. She looked back at him one last time — a small, melancholy smile — before the green flames leapt up around her.
“Don't apologise. It's been coming for a long time."
“Goodbye, Ginny."
“Goodbye, Harry."
The flames roared emerald and then vanished, and the kitchen fell into a deep, still silence. Harry stood alone with the smell of burnt lobster, the howling wind, and the strange, terrible lightness of a grief that felt more like relief.
He didn't sleep. That wasn't unusual.
His nights had followed the same pattern for years — shallow and fractured, full of nightmares that left him sitting upright in the dark with his heart slamming against his ribs and his scar throbbing like something that remembered being a wound. Phantom sounds. The feeling of being watched. The specific, visceral terror of being hunted that his body hadn't managed to forget, even now.
He was used to it. Or he'd learned to function around it, which wasn't quite the same thing.
It was part of the reason Ginny had never liked stopping over. He didn't hold it against her. He tended to thrash, and on the worst nights he woke up shouting. That wasn't exactly restful for the person on the other side of the bed.
So he lay on top of his covers in the grey January morning, drifting in and out of something that was more like suspended consciousness than actual sleep, and tried to find something good about the fact that it was Saturday and he didn't have to be anywhere.
He'd almost managed it when, just past noon, the Floo flared to life in the sitting room.
Harry went still. His stomach dropped.
If it's Ginny, he thought, staring at the ceiling, I am going to have to say no, and whatever's left of both our dignities is going straight out the window.
He dragged himself up, pulled on the nearest pair of sweatpants, and shuffled towards the sitting room at the pace of a man approaching something he'd rather avoid.
He smelled her before he saw her.
It stopped him in the doorway. Just for a moment — just a half-second where his brain went quiet and the tightness in his chest eased off completely, the way it always did, without his permission, whenever she was nearby. Something warm and familiar and almost unbearably safe; old books and something faintly floral and underneath it all just Hermione, and Harry had stopped questioning why that particular combination did what it did to him a long time ago.
He'd barely opened his mouth when a sweatshirt hit him directly in the face.
“Merlin's sake, Harry. Put something on." Hermione was already setting a brown paper bag down on the coffee table, not looking at him, her hair piled up messily and her coat still buttoned. “Time to crawl out of whatever hole you've dug for yourself."
“Well, good morning to you too," Harry grumbled, pulling the sweatshirt over his head and giving her his best wounded look.
She turned around and smiled at him, and despite everything — the lousy night and the breakup and the burnt lobster — he felt the corners of his own mouth pull upwards before he'd made any decision to let them.
Damn her and those smiles.
“It's half twelve, actually," Hermione said primly, pulling takeaway containers out of the bag and setting them on the table. “Afternoon. Technically."
The smell hit him a full second later. Harry crossed the room in four strides and pulled the nearest container open before she'd even finished unpacking.
“Fuck yes. Is that butter chicken?"
“Language, please—"
"Oh, that is brilliant." He'd already got a plastic fork in it. The first bite was extraordinary. He made a sound that was probably embarrassing.
Hermione rolled her eyes, but the smile had gone fond. “I got it from the little place next to the hospital. Draco recommended it, actually."
Harry paused mid-chew. “The ferret eats at Muggle restaurants?"
“He's not so bad anymore." She plucked the container out of his hands and handed him a plate instead — a proper plate, summoned from his kitchen with a flick of her wand, because of course she had. “And yes, he does. Healer apprentices don't get much choice — we barely get a lunch break, and the hospital canteen is genuinely awful."
She sat down at his small dining table and fixed him with a look that clearly communicated she expected him to sit across from her like a civilised person and not continue eating standing up like a dog.
Harry sat down.
“Bossy," he informed her.
“It's part of my charm." She tilted her head slightly. “Now. I heard from a certain someone that—"
“That someone being Ginny, and yes, it's true." He speared a piece of chicken. “I'm single."
“Properly single?" Hermione raised an eyebrow. “She rang me sounding quite serious."
“Yeah." He took a sip of the can of Coke she'd produced from somewhere and felt the sugar hit his blood like a small mercy. “It was me, this time. I called it."
Hermione was quiet for a moment, watching him. “Was it?"
“We just… weren't working, 'Mione. Same rows, every week. I was losing my mind."
“I know," she said simply, opening her own can. “You two have been complaining about each other to me separately for about two years now. I've just been waiting." She paused. “What finally did it?"
“The promotion thing." Harry exhaled. “She found out from you before I'd had a chance to tell her myself, and the whole thing just… kicked off again. The usual." He waved his fork vaguely. “I just thought — I can't do this anymore. So I didn't."
Hermione nodded slowly. “I’m sorry about that. How do you feel?"
Harry was quiet for a moment. He thought about the strange lightness that had settled in his chest in the silence after the Floo went dark. He thought about how he'd lain in bed last night not crying, not grief-stricken, just — quiet.
“Awful that I don't feel worse," he said honestly.
Something shifted in Hermione's expression. She reached across the table and put her hand over his — warm and steady, the way she always was, the way she'd been since they were eleven years old — and Harry felt the last of the cold chill in his chest simply dissolve.
“You're not a bad person for feeling relieved," she said. “It means the relationship had run its course a long time ago. You just both needed to be brave enough to say so."
“Very therapeutic of you, Dr Granger."
“I'm a Healer, not a muggle therapist. Though frankly, right now I'm not sure there's much difference." She squeezed his hand once before letting go. “You're allowed to be sad and relieved at the same time, you know. It doesn't have to be one or the other."
Harry stared at his plate. “You know what this reminds me of? Fourth year. The morning after my name came out of the Goblet. I was furious and scared and absolutely certain everyone hated me, and you turned up with a pile of toast and just… sat with me." He looked up at her. “You've been doing that my whole life, you know. Showing up."
Hermione's cheeks had gone slightly pink. “That's just what friends do."
“Maybe." Harry pointed his fork at her. “But you're particularly good at it."
She made a dismissive sound and looked down at her food, which didn't fool him in the slightest. He could still see the colour in her face.
“Right." She straightened up with the brisk efficiency she deployed whenever she wanted to move past something. "Are you sleeping?"
Harry put on his most convincing expression of total innocence.
Hermione looked at him for exactly two seconds. “You're not sleeping."
“I have a naturally tired face—"
“You have the face, Harry. The specific one. I'd recognise it at a hundred paces." She set her fork down. “You need to do something about it. Properly. Not another potion."
Harry sighed and dragged a hand through his hair. It needed cutting. Everything in his life needed attending to, he was beginning to suspect. “I've tried everything. Potions, spells, Muggle remedies — none of it touches it."
“You haven't tried everything. You haven't seen a Mind Healer." She held his gaze steadily. "Like I've been asking you to do for approximately four years."
The word sat uncomfortably in his chest. He thought about the things stacked up inside him that he'd never said out loud to anyone — not properly. The Dursleys. The cupboard. The particular way his uncle's voice had sounded through a closed door. The nightmares that came with such precise and vivid detail that he sometimes couldn't be certain, on waking, whether he was still in them.
Ron and Hermione knew fragments. They knew it had been bad. They didn't know how bad, because he'd never wanted to see the look on their faces when they found out, and because some of it — a lot of it — he'd really rather not have to say out loud at all.
“I've got quite a lot to unpick," he said carefully. “I don't want to— I don't want to make anyone else carry it."
“A Mind Healer is trained to carry it," Hermione said. Her voice was patient and very firm. “That's literally what they're for. You wouldn't be burdening them." She hesitated, then added more quietly, “You'd be burdening me considerably less, actually, if you went. Because I'm almost driving myself sick with worry about you."
Harry looked at her. She was watching him with an expression he didn't have a name for exactly — somewhere between concern and something more complicated, something she'd blink away if he looked too long.
He thought about saying no. He always thought about saying no.
“All right," he said. “I'll give it a go. Promise."
The relief on her face was immediate and genuine, which made him feel guilty that he'd put it off this long.
She began gathering up their empty plates and sending them off to the sink with her wand, where they started washing themselves with efficient little splashing sounds.
“Good." She reached into her bag and produced two VHS tapes, holding them up. “E.R. or Friends?"
Harry's face broke into a proper grin — the first real one since before yesterday evening, he thought. He reached across and plucked Friends out of her hand.
“Not even a question."
Hermione laughed, and settled back into her chair, and outside the January wind kept howling against the glass, but inside Harry's flat it was warm and quiet and, for the first time in what felt like a very long while, entirely all right.