"Honestly, she's a nightmare. No wonder she hasn't got any friends!"

In another world, Hermione Granger hides in the girls room. She skips dinner, misses the orderly evacuation, and two boys and a troll set the path she'll walk for the rest of her life.

In this one, though, she's safely tucked away in the Gryffindor common room when her housemates pile back in, scrubbing tear marks from her face as the first years cling to each other, falling into the frightened mass of them.

"I'm definitely not telling mum there was a troll", one says, they'd talked briefly in those first few frenzied weeks, he was a muggleborn too and they'd shared smiles over missed references and cultural lapses, "she'll never let me back on the train at Christmas if she knows!"

Their class isn't so big that she hasn't learned all the names, and Dean is kind and Seamus is garrulous (and he laughs when she defines the word, rather than sneers, which is another point in his favor) and soon she finds herself falling in with them more often than not when she's finally shooed from the library.

They're not best friends, exactly, the boys are a matched set she's happy to orbit, but they save her a space at dinner and help carry her books when her bag tears, and that's plenty for now.

It's still the Boy who Lived who pulls the scrap of paper from her marble-stiff hand, but Dean's the one sitting there when she wakes up, and Shay saves them both spots at the end of the year feast, and it's nice having friends with real addresses over the summer, rather than sporadic access to birds.

A serial killer breaks into the tower, and Hermione spends the night in the Great Hall between her best friends. They don't quite notice she's exhausted, but she works hard to make sure of that.

Crookshanks still tears after the rat, and Ron Weasley still picks fights over it for weeks after the little rodent disappears. But there's a difference, isn't there, between fighting with your best friend and fighting with an acquaintance you happen to share school colors with?

They all three still wind up in the shack, on the night of a full moon, and she's not so selfish as to let an innocent man die, not when she can do something about it.

Potter catches her on the train, her arms full of robes she's discarded in favor of jeans and an oversized West Ham tshirt, and thanks her. It is, quite possibly, the first time they've ever spoken one on one, and she tries to handle it gracefully.

Shay spots the remnants of her blush immediately, teasingly. Dean just continues scratching Crooks in that spot he likes, right behind his left ear.

They spend half the summer together. Seamus makes it down too, once in a while when his mum will let him floo to the Leaky on his own to meet them, but for the most part they bounce between living rooms and backyards, cinemas and family dinners. He gets in friendly arguments with her father over football and she lends a childhood's worth of fantasy novels to his sisters and as far as she's concerned it's about as perfect as a summer can be.

Harry's name comes out of the goblet, and Ginny Weasley punches Skeeter's photographer (pictures of her swinging fist litter the common room for weeks), and Hermione doesn't bother to correct Viktor's pronunciation when he asks her to the Yule ball.

Seamus whistles when she glides through the common room, flanked by her triumphant roommates/stylists, and Dean bows gallantly over her hand as he helps her over the ledge of the portrait hole, and she saves dances for both of them, and Neville too. Harry doesn't ask, and she feels like that should bother her more than it does.

She's petrified through the second task, and reads through the third, and then Cedric is dead and the teachers are only acting unafraid and nothing feels quite steady anymore.

It's not until she's standing with her parents, and he's walking back to his, that she realizes Dean hasn't let her out of his sight more than absolutely necessary in three days.

They spend half the summer together, and Seamus comes into town once or twice, and they all pretend things aren't as tense as they are. Hermione reads the Prophet obsessively, and Dean gets a job at daycare, and they find themselves avoiding the casual touches that had seemed so innocent a year ago.

"Christ, Shay, would you shut the hell up?" She never sounds more muggle than when she's cursing. Seamus has been rambling for most of dinner, repeating every bit of garbage the prophet has been spewing as though it's not obvious propaganda. Hermione finds herself wishing, not for the first time, that Hogwarts had proper history classes covering actual events, rather than a fawning account of "rebellions" any reasonable person would recognize as borderline genocide.

She called Voldemort "wizard Hitler" to a few pureblood classmates and received nothing but blank stares in return. Honestly.

Umbridge is awful, and it's probably only the fact that she seems to have pissed off everyone equally that keeps them all from getting detention. Whispers get around that Potter is planning a study group, and if they were false in the beginning they aren't after Hermione pins him down and bullies him into agreeing to run them.

Her otter and Seamus' fox loop around each other cheerfully for a few minutes before Dean's stout ram joins them. She slings her arms around his waist, and it's fine that he only returns it for a moment. When she goes to bed late that evening he's still up, gazing at Ginny Weasley like she hung the stars while they discuss quidditch. It's sweet.

Shay stays behind when they leave for the ministry, an apologetic lookout, and they wind up separated in the hall of prophecies. It's not the first time Hermione wakes up in the hospital wing to see Dean at her bedside but it is certainly the most painful one.

The Burrow isn't where she expected to spend her summer afternoons, but it's easy enough to get there once her parents agree to hook up the floo, and so she reads in the orchard and lies to Mrs Weasley's face about Ginny's whereabouts and tries to pretend it doesn't bug her a little that her best friend is too busy snogging his girlfriend to spend time with her like they used to.

Not that she's entirely abandoned, the twins have moved out but they're always back for Sunday dinners. Viktor had been so excruciatingly respectful, but Fred Weasley has no such qualms, and very clever hands.

She drops herself onto the sofa, just distant enough to be appropriate. He lets the distance sit there, as the party rages around them.

"It was a good game, you did really well, yeah?" She offers, picking at the label on her butterbeer.

He snorts, reaching out to snatch a bottle of firewhiskey from Seamus' gesticulating hands, and takes a swig, "Thanks. That means nothing, because you have no idea what a 'good game' looks like, but thank you."

He offers the bottle, and she accepts the challenge with a ladylike cough.

Halfway across the common room, Ginny and Harry seem to be rapidly evaluating each other's tonsils.

She leans a little towards him. He leans a little towards her.

They sit, pressed together, and watch the commotion.

She lingers one day, as the rest of their transfiguration class files out. Dean stands at the end of his row and waits for her.

"Is there a plan for people like us, professor? For the younger kids?"

Professor McGonagall doesn't seem to catch her meaning, and so she continues.

"They'll come after us, history has proved that, I'm an adult, I can take care of myself but is there a plan for the Creevys? For Sara Winthrop and her family, if she's not allowed to come back for her second year?"

"Muggleborn students and their families will be easy to track, ma'am, and even the best case scenario isn't very good." His voice is solid, firm but kind.

Their professor, always the picture of dignity and strength, seems to sag into her chair. "No. We never wanted to cause a panic, not until it was warranted."

There's something in her voice, a hint of stubbornness, as though she's repeating an argument she disagrees with and doesn't want that to be obvious.

"It'll be too late by then."

Minerva nods.

The door to their compartment slams shut, and Hermione notices his split lip but Seamus sees the bloody knuckles first and asks about it. "Who'd'ya punch, then?"

Dean doesn't meet her eye, not quite, "Doesn't matter. He deserved it."

They don't keep the compartment shut for too long, too many friends want to stop by and chat. McLaggen pauses at the open door, and scuttles (truly, scuttles, no other word for it) past before he can make eye contact with any of them.

"Huh," Hermione muses, turning back to her book, "someone must've healed his black eye."

There's not enough space at his place, so they spend most of the Christmas break in her parents' dining room. He throws himself into the fledgling internet for every scrap of information on how to make fake IDs and she writes to Viktor, to Fleur, to everyone they suggest as possible allies. Everyone, everywhere, who might be willing to take in refugees.

When Dean has gone home for the evening, and her parents are in bed, and the house is silent, she studies memory charms.

The party is at its peak inside, his sisters and a handful of cousins are asleep in a pile and his parents' guests (her parents too) are finding spouses and loved ones for the countdown. They're alone on the dark stoop, bottle of champagne and no glasses and sitting closer than they have since they were kids.

Ten

"I wish I could be excited." she whispers.

Six

"Yeah. We'll face it together, though, yeah?"

Two

"Yeah."

She's looking up at him and when did he get so tall and when did his eyes start sparkling like that and

He catches her jaw in a warm hand, kisses her soft and sweet, and for a moment that's all that matters. Whatever it is, whatever horrors they'll see, they'll see them together.

They rent a shitty flat together, one bedroom, one bath. Their parents, all, think they're still at school, and that's probably for the best.

She gets a job at a newsstand, and he picks up shifts as a courier. Neither of them use their wands, just in case. They keep them holstered all the time, just in case.

"I'll take the couch, then?"

"That's silly, it's a terrible couch." she stacks her moving box carefully along the wall, shrugs, "I'm sure we can handle sharing a bed."

They last three months. Three months of shitty jobs, of forging papers, of coordinating with muggleborns and spreading themselves further and further away from their home base. Most of the Order is uncomfortable making direct contact, but they build up their own network. She scoffs at the shoddy codenames on the wireless and he grits his teeth through issues of the Prophet.

It takes three months for them to give in. "That's silly", she'd said, so long ago.

She's tossing and turning, and she hates it. He's not, and she hates that more. "River" had spoken in solemn terms of the Finch-Fletchley family's murders, and she'd created their IDs herself, and four lives weigh heavy on her conscience, and she can't-

He grabs one wrist, then the other, and pins them above her head. She was stupid to ever think sharing a bed with this boy man friend Dean would go any other way.

He watches her, for a long moment. She could pull free, he'd let her, but she doesn't quite want to.

"I fucked up"

He sighs, presses his face against the place where her neck meets her shoulder, "You did what you could."

Later some part of her will judge herself. The way her hips bucked against his. The way she keened, without a silencing spell. The way she relied solely on her regular old muggle birth control and manners in a way witches probably shouldn't.

One free hand roams, down her ribs, across her stomach, tracing her scar from the bottom left corner of her abdomen, up between her breasts. He'd told her to hold her hands there against the headboard, but nothing was really stopping her from moving them, so why didn't she?

His broad, generally smiling mouth wrapped around one nipple. Nobody challenged him.

His glinting, less smiling teeth work their way across the other breast. She shivers, muscles taut as a bowstring.

They don't kiss. They have, once upon a time, but this isn't the place for tenderness, and this needy intimacy doesn't quite allow for vulnerability.

She bites deep into the meat of her hand as she peaks on his fingers

He buries his moans into the space between her shoulder blades as they curve against the edge of the mattress.

It's the first time, but not the last, and they never mention it in the light of day.

She's just back from a supply run when their DA galleons burn hot in their pockets.

Hogs head asap

They haven't been without their wands for a moment since the day they got off the Hogwarts Express, and in an instant they're standing in a dark corner of the grungiest bar in Hogsmeade. Aberforth guides them through the tunnel, and Seamus is wrapped around their necks before they can even get their feet under them in the Room of Requirement.

It's the end, everyone says. One last battle, do or die, kill or be killed.

They try to stick together, all three of them, and for a while they succeed. Espionage and resistance aren't quite like a real battle, though, and one by one they're driven in different directions.

Dean casts a slicing jinx just so, and Greyback falls.

Hermione casts a sectumsempra at the right moment, and down goes Dolohov. Elsewhere, Parvati Patil scans the room for threats, and misses the one that fells her.

Harry goes to the forest, and the battle pauses, and two figures converge on one pale body among dozens. He'll be fine, Madame Pomfrey insists, just down a leg. As these things go, it could be worse.

Harry went to the forest, and came back dead, and every member of Dumbledore's Army stands ready to fight in revenge.

Harry went to the forest, and stands up alive, and suddenly it's over.

She should feel guilty, but she doesn't. She stole the memory of a year from seven people's lives, but they're all alive and well and standing on the train platform, and they all believe it's really her seventh year at school, and maybe that's okay all things considered.

Dean squats, turning from sister to sister as they sob and weep against him. His mother pets his hair, his (step) father smiles with pride, and they love each other.

Eventually he stands, collects her from her parent's strong embrace, and together they clamber onto the train.

Potter and Longbottom insisted they get the accolades they were supposedly "due". Headmistress McGonagall has plans to put them in charge of muggleborn integration. The ministry, however many bigots remain, want to put them up as poster children.

That's all nice.

The 8th year students are to be put in a common dorm, all with their own rooms. No trick staircases, no nosy roommates.

That's nicer.