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They didn’t realise how used to things they'd gotten until they returned to the Burrow. Like many others, Harry, Ron, and Hermione had spent the days following the battle helping to clear rumble and tend the wounded yet to be moved to St Mungo’s. But eventually everyone really started to believe that no second assault was coming, and they all began to disperse. Brief days of climbing back up familiar stairs to crash in any dorm room that had space, and of falling down here and there and everywhere amongst friends, family, and acquaintances, were over. Higgledy-piggledy, and nobody thinking anything much of who landed where.
But once the familiar walls of the Burrow welcomed them home a little battered and a lot bruised, the return to reality was sudden and abrupt. Mrs. Weasley ushered Hermione into Ginny’s room, just like usual, and then fluttered around Ron’s room making up a bed on the floor for Harry, also just like usual. Then she left Ron and Harry standing beside all the bedding and looking at each other with flummoxed expressions.
“Right,” Ron said gamely after a long silence. “Right, this is. This is fine.”
“Totally normal,” Harry agreed, avoiding Ron’s eyes as he bustled to find his night things. “Just fewer… people.”
“Makes sense. Smaller in here than the tent, I suppose,” Ron said thoughtfully. He bounced on the end of his bed for a moment, as if testing a strange, new mattress, rather than a bed he’d spent most of his life sleeping on. Then, as he stared at the bedroom window that still refused to open and shut properly, he said mournfully, “bit draughtier than the tent, though.”
Not long after that, they went to sleep. Or tried to. It had been another long day before they’d left Hogwarts, yet Harry could hear Ron tossing and turning and he kept catching himself watching the Quidditch players on Ron’s posters whizz about. Just like old times, really. He must have drifted off at some point though, because he was awoken in the early hours of the morning by the squeak of the door.
“It’s just me,” whispered a familiar outline in the dark. Harry fumbled for his glasses and relaxed again as the figure turned into Hermione. She promptly curled up on the floor beside him, wedging herself down between him and the side of Ron’s bed.
“Couldn’t sleep?” Harry asked. He only knew Hermione’s answer from the shift of her body as she shook her head, and then yawned.
Above them, Ron groaned and rolled over. Then he came awake with a squeak of his own as his hand slipped over the side of the bed and collided with Hermione’s hair.
One eye emerged, blinking, into a faint ray of moonlight. “Harry? Oh, ’Mione,” he mumbled as he stared down at them for a moment. Then he scrunched his nose, scratched an eyebrow, and disappeared again in a puff of covers. “Just don’t let Mum catch you,” he said, his voice muffled.
Hermione giggled at Harry’s side, and burrowed closer for warmth. “I won’t,” she reassured Ron. But her words were only met by a snore.
Harry smothered a laugh over how fast Ron had fallen back sleep. He wished Hermione good night as he closed his own eyes. He didn’t even get a chance to imagine the Cannons looping circles on the back of his eyelids to lull himself, before the warm nothingness of sleep rose up to claim him.
*
“I was thinking,” Hermione said quietly over breakfast as soon as Molly had bustled back to her stove. Even the house itself seemed somber in the dim morning light, despite everybody’s attempts at normalcy. “Perhaps we should go and check on Grimmauld Place? Yaxley was captured, but we don’t know what he might have done to it with the enchantments broken. It might take us awhile to help you fix it back up again, Harry.”
Harry blinked at her over his toast for a moment. But Ron didn’t seem surprised. He just beamed, and kissed her soundly on the cheek with a smacking noise so loud that she blushed.
“She’s brilliant, isn’t she?” Ron asked Harry happily as he chewed on a sausage, and Harry could only nod and smile faintly in relief as the idea sunk in properly. Fixing up Grimmauld Place, just the three of them. That did sound brilliant.
It wasn’t until they were packed again and carting their meagre possessions out the door (without the use of Hermione’s beaded handbag this time, the better so that she could stuff a few more books into it without toppling everything over) that Harry realised the obvious. Mostly because Ginny was waiting outside the kitchen door for them. Her arms were crossed tightly across her chest and she was tapping her foot impatiently, but she seemed to relax slightly when they came into view.
Hermione gave her a hug goodbye and got a grim sort of smile in return. Then Ron took a minute for a quiet farewell while Hermione headed toward the gate and Harry lingered awkwardly inside the door, just out of earshot. But eventually he, too, got a grim smile and hug.
Then it was Harry’s turn. With a gulp, he stepped forward. Ginny just eyed him warily for a moment.
“We always seem to be saying goodbye, don’t we,” she observed at last. He shuffled his feet and opened his mouth, then grimaced and shut it again. With a sigh, Ginny kissed him on the cheek and then brushed past him.
Her warmth was gone before he could really register it, just leaving him with a sad smile and a quick, “be happy, Harry.”
When Harry reached the gate, he found Ron nodding along in a rote sort of fashion while Hermione expounded on the value of a good colour scheme for bringing more light to a space and improving the mental health of the inhabitants. “Alright?” he asked distractedly, and Harry just shrugged.
“I guess,” was all Harry said in reply.
But Hermione quickly bustled them closer together and grabbed them both by the hand as she continued to discuss the value of wallpaper versus painting. Whatever weight Harry’d thought he could feel lingering around his shoulders suddenly seemed to lift. He even caught himself chuckling at the familiarity of it all as Hermione side-along’d them into London.
*
They trooped through the front door in single file, with their wands at the ready. Harry was in front, and he couldn’t help but breathe in sharply as he was confronted by the devastation. Vaguely, he registered Hermione gasp behind him before she hurried to set up the perimeter spells and scan the building for any remaining intruders.
But the spells all quickly came back with the declaration that the house is empty - that it was safe - and with that they seemed to collectively make a decision to spend a moment taking it all in before saying a word.
Devastation really was too small a word for the chaos before them. Slowly they began to wander from room to room, always close to each other just in case. Curtains had been ripped from their rods, walls had gaping holes in them, and Harry was getting the distinct impression that not so much as a stick of furniture had been left intact in the entire house.
Everything seemed to bear some mark of a person - or persons - fury. It wasn’t until they were ready to head upstairs that they even realised that Mrs. Black was suspiciously silent. Closer investigation revealed long tattered strips of canvas on the floor, and the frozen, screaming face of a portrait who apparently had been as stuck in her frame as she’d been to the wall.
“It’s-,” Hermione started to say, face apprehensive as she watched Harry.
“Brilliant,” he breathed and headed for the stairs. Hermione’s eyes went wide, and she exchanged a wary glance with Ron. Harry ignored them and stepped around the disgusting remains of crushed house elf heads to take the stairs two at a time.
“You feeling alright, mate?” Ron called as he started after Harry, with Hermione close on both of their heels.
“Yeah, of course,” Harry called back. He paused to glance into the drawing room and grinned wider when he spotted the Black Family Tapestry, also in tatters in a corner.
“It’s just-,” Hermione said, as she and Ron caught up. She was wringing her hands together as she spoke. “Oh, Harry, but it’s all ruined.”
“I know. Every last stinking, horrible thing,” Harry agreed happily.
Ron, at least, seemed to be finally catching on. “Some of these repairs are going to be a right pain, but it’ll certainly simplify stuff,” he said thoughtfully, as he stared past Harry’s shoulder at a bedroom full of yet more broken furniture.
Hermione looked between the two of them. “You’re both happy about the state of the house?” she asked cautiously.
Harry shrugged a shoulder. “I mean, I’m a little worried about what we’re all going to sleep on this time-“
“Maybe we could clear a big enough space to pitch the tent?” Ron suggested, his gaze back on the drawing room with a speculative gleam.
“-but it means we don’t have to keep trying and failing to rip down all that stuff Sirius hated before we fix it back up. It’s already pretty much torn down for us. They’ve inadvertently done us a favour, I reckon.”
Hermione just stared at them both a little while longer, before she suddenly flung herself at Harry with a cry. “Boys!” she said in exasperation after she released him. “There clearly isn’t going to be a ceiling high enough the accommodate the tent, so come on. We’d better check the rest of the bedrooms.”
Not unexpectedly, all of the remaining bedrooms were in much the same shape as everywhere else. Ron sadly remarked that nobody was going to get a decent lie in as he poked the snapped curtain rods, while Hermione determinedly cleared a space in one room and then started gathering bits and pieces of wood in the centre of it. Harry couldn’t quite puzzle out a rhyme or reason for her choices of some bits of scrap over others, until she cast her first reparo and the unsteady frame of a bed rose up in the air.
“Do you see any fragments of pale wood in here that I might have missed?” she huffed as she poked at the frame with her wand. Ron and Harry peered around, and then shrugged helplessly at each other while she continued to mutter. “The grain should be running- Oh, never mind. Transfiguration it is then, I suppose. It should tide us over for a few days at least, anyway.”
Carefully backing out of her way while she worked, Harry and Ron left her to it and went to stick their heads into the next room. And the next, and the next.
“Blimey, Harry. This might take us awhile,” Ron muttered eventually. Harry just shrugged and summoned a sweeping broom. It arrived in two pieces with distinctly plucked looking bristles, so he found himself casting a few mending charms of his own before he set to work.
“I don’t think I mind,” he admitted as they started. They swept together piles of as much of the rubbish in each room as they could, until they were all, if not clean, at least fairly tidy. Just as they finished the last one on the second floor, Hermione burst through the door in a whirlwind. She faltered a little at the sight of their latest small mountain of broken wood and cloth, and smiled softly before she began to speak urgently.
“I got so distracted thinking about beds, I forgot entirely that we need to set new wards! We still don’t know exactly how badly I compromised the Fidelius Charm when I brought Yaxley here, and whether he’s the only Death Eater who can enter now or if he was able to share the secret with anyone. Oh, how could I be so stupid to worry about the furniture? Here,” she said, shoving her bag at them. “Can you summon out my books on wards and shields while I put together a bed for Harry?”
*
Harry tossed and turned for hours in his new bedroom. The room was too silent, and the moon was too bright through gaps in the material they’d patched together into a sort of makeshift curtain and then stretched across the window with sticking charms. Occasionally the house would creak and settle, and even though those noises at least were familiar they still made him jump.
Eventually, he hopped out of bed with a sigh and fumbled, shivering, for his shoes. Before he left the room, he aimed a muffling spell at the floor and then gave a hearty kick to one of the bed legs. He watched with satisfaction as the wood buckled with groan, and the mattress slid half onto the floor. Then he left, and crept across the hall.
Ron’s hair was the first thing Harry saw when he pushed open their bedroom door. He was curled around Hermione, facing her, but he’d started to struggle upright at the sound of Harry’s footsteps.
“Oh, it’s just you, Harry,” he said. “You startled me half to death, what are you playing at?”
He didn’t appear anymore sleepy than Harry felt, and neither did Hermione when she rolled over to look at him.
Harry gave them a sheepish look. “My, uh, bed didn’t stay together very well,” he said, scrubbing a hand across the back of his neck. Hermione frowned at him and looked like she wanted to argue over the likelihood of her spellwork failing so soon, but then her expression abruptly cleared and she flipped back the covers.
“Of course it didn’t,” she said with an arched eyebrow, and beckoned. “You’d better sleep with us, then.”
Ron chortled. “That’s not like you to mess up basic mending charms,” he teased Hermione. She turned her arch expression on him as he continued, but still let him tug her closer to make space for Harry. “Guess you can’t be perfect at all your spells, after all.”
Harry gave Hermione a grateful look when she didn’t correct Ron, and slipped in beside them. He felt Hermione settle the covers across his shoulders, and how they both kept shifting around for awhile to get comfortable again now there was another body to accommodate. The house still creaked, and the light still snuck through a similarly patched curtain. Yet Harry didn’t feel the need to toss so much as an inch on this mattress, and he just drifted straight to sleep.
*
It only took them a few days to exhaust what repairs they could manage with spells. Eventually Hermione declared the damage too extensive (and the furniture too old and rickety to begin with) to be salvaged. So they began to plan an assault on the shops of Diagon Alley for supplies.
Or rather, Hermione began to plan the perfect shopping list. Ron and Harry just set themselves up on a rather ragged rug in front of the fireplace with a chessboard to await instructions and most likely a very detailed set of notes.
“We might be able to get some things owl delivered to the Burrow,” Hermione mused aloud as they all pulled on their shoes. “I imagine we’ll be going back to see your family fairly regularly, Ron. It would be simpler than any of the alternatives, or than just crossing our fingers and hoping the Fidelius is compromised enough to allow delivery charms to get through.”
“Could Kreacher pick some stuff up for us if I call him back from Hogwarts?” Harry asked, and Ron brightened at the idea.
“I don’t see why not. A house elf can run all kinds of errands,” Ron enthused. “And then we don’t have to figure out how to lug it all home! We can, ah, that is….”
He hunched a little at Hermione’s glare and gave Harry a helpless look. Harry looked between them for a moment, and then shook his head. “I guess we can try and carry it back ourselves today?”
Hermione sniffed, and raised her head. “I’m sure we can manage just fine,” she said, and shook her beaded bag at them. “Extension charm, remember? I emptied it out just this morning so we’d be prepared.” Then she strode off out the front door without them, chin still firmly in the air.
“Well, that’s done it, hasn’t it,” Ron muttered as they followed. But Hermione didn’t seem upset anymore by the time they appeared in the Leaky Cauldron. It was only the work of a moment to tap their way through the brick wall, and the now tarnished glory of the alley was laid out before them.
“I suppose it looks a little better already,” Harry ventured, as they stared. The long length of the street still looked grimmer than they remembered from happier days, but a sense of peace seemed to have descended.
For every boarded up shop window, there was another with the boards being pulled down by a smiling (or sometimes, swearing) shop attendant. Glass panes were being polished in every direction, and every few steps someone else would wave at them from behind a partially arranged window display - and then freeze, craning their heads to stare at Harry as the three of them walked past.
“Right,” Hermione announced suddenly, coming to a stop. “I’m going to the apothecary to get ingredients for more cleaning solutions and something to strip those old floorboards in the dining room. You two go to Madame Malkins. I’m sure I remember seeing a catalogue in there once for a home furnishings and linens range. Make sure you check whether she’s doing owl order again yet when you grab one. We’ll meet back here in ten minutes.” Then she bustled off.
“I’m amazed she thinks we need both of us just to grab a catalogue,” Ron huffed as they kept walking.
“Uh, I think she wanted you nearby to help me fend off any autograph seekers,” Harry said, eyeing yet another shop window where the staff had stopped working to stare.
Brow furrowed, Ron followed Harry’s gaze and frowned. “Ridiculous, the lot of them,” he muttered. But before he could get very far with his complaints, he was interrupted when Harry yelped.
“You’re Harry Potter,” a breathy sort of voice said from behind them. Harry and Ron spun around to stare at the stranger, while Harry rubbed in shocked outrage at his pinched bottom. She was a few years older than they were, and very pretty except for the drooling sort of leer currently gracing her face. “I never thought I’d see you here today, but I’m so glad I did! Do you know how grateful we all are? That you saved us? You deserve so much-“
She’d steadily inched closer as she spoke, eyes wide and fixed on Harry with no regard for Ron. So when Ron stepped smoothly between them and grabbed her by the wrist before her hand could make contact with Harry, she simply gaped at him in surprise.
“You leave Harry alone,” he said. He tugged Harry closer to him with his other hand as he spoke, shouldering his body more firmly between them.
“Oh,” she said in surprise, her eyes losing a little of their intensity. “You’re Ron Weasley! Sorry, I didn’t… but I thought you were with Hermione Granger?”
“I am!” Ron cried, outraged.
“Oh. Oh!” the girl repeated. “The Prophet never mentioned any of you were that traditional! Gosh, it’s been awhile. I mean, that was all the rage when my great-great-grandmother was at Hogwarts, but I suppose… well, anyway. Um, thank you for saving all of us, Mr. Potter,” she said. Harry just blinked as she smiled in a perfectly normal and not at all unnerving fashion. Then she departed, as calmly as if she’d never tried to grope a stranger in a public street in the first place
“It’s just not right, is it,” Ron was still ranting when Hermione found them. “Haven’t we been through enough? You don’t need nutters chasing you down Diagon after all that, now do you?”
She raised inquisitive eyebrows at both of them, and Harry shrugged at her from behind Ron.
“Some fan wanted a piece of Harry,” Ron explained. But to his apparent increased outrage, Hermione didn’t look all that surprised by the news. “Literally, a piece!” he continued, miming a pinching motion with his fingers while Harry blushed. “So I, um, I may have tried to scare her off and, ah, well she may have accused us of being traditional.”
Hermione continued to stare at them curiously. “I don’t understand,” she said slowly.
“I don’t think she was accusing us of anything, exactly. I mean, she didn’t sound accusatory,” Harry pointed out, then hurriedly stepped back when Ron’s eyes nearly bugged out of his head.
“Traditional!” he just cried at Harry. Then he turned back to Hermione. “She thought the three of us were traditional!”
Hermione blinked a few times in quick succession, and then clapped a hand to her mouth. “Oh! Traditional?”
“Yes!” Ron said in obvious relief, throwing his hands in the air.
“I still don’t know what either of you are talking about,” Harry observed flatly as he smiled grimly at another staring passerby.
“Did she really…?” Hermione asked, trailing off to make a pinching moment of her own. Harry spluttered, but Ron just nodded emphatically and described - despite Harry’s protests to the contrary - how Harry had bellowed in pain. “Well,” she said, taken aback. “That just won’t do at all.”
Then she looped one arm through Ron’s, and the other through Harry’s, and started walking. It left Harry with no choice but to follow, or get his arm tugged clean off.
“Perhaps we have time in the schedule for Fortescue’s after all,” she said with a determined glint in her eye.
*
After that, every morning shopping trip was concluded with a lengthy break for ice cream before they headed home to start working. People still stared, of course. Some even stopped to try and shake his hand, or sometimes tearily hug him. But Ron and Hermione had taken to bracketing him safely away from the world by walking either side of him with their arms looped over his shoulders, or by offering him tastes of their ice cream as a polite distraction from people trying to talk at him.
It was nice, he’d started to admit to himself. Just as cozy, and as familiar, as sleeping together in the same tent had become. Or the same bed.
They’d also slowly started to re-fill Grimmauld Place with new furniture, all safely delivered to the Burrow by owl order and promptly examined and then re-shrunk to be carried home in Hermione’s bag. New curtains had been hung in all the rooms, and they’d spent a lovely, sunny week throwing all the windows and doors open so they could re-paint the house from top to bottom the Muggle way.
“Totally loony, the pair of you,” Ron had declared when they’d first suggested it. But the first time painting had descended into a shrieking, laughing paint fight, he’d been won around on the idea.
“It is nice to see you all ‘appy,” Fleur informed Harry cheerily before dinner one day. The good weather had continued, and the older Weasley children had banded together to set up a long table in the garden and shoo Molly out of the kitchen. Ron and Ginny had both been suckered into helping peel the vegetables, which apparently left Hermione to fuss over the table settings and Harry to be cornered by the punch bowl.
“Oh, er,” Harry said, but Fleur just continued talking with no apparent need for input from him.
“I know my wedding was quite, ‘ow do you say, modern,” she said with a happy sigh as she stared across the garden to where the wedding tent had once been pitched. “But zat was a necessity of the times, of course. We didn’t want to wait and see if we found the right third, when everything was so ‘angerous. But ze three of you, you are perfect together, yes? It is a lovely sight for ze rest of us to see.”
Then she patted Harry on the shoulder and wandered off, leaving him to gape after her in confusion.
“Alright, Harry?” Hermione called from the table, waving him over when he turned towards her voice.
“Yeah, I just. I think Fleur’s gone barmy or something. She was just talking about her wedding, and how nice it is to see us happy, and something about her and Bill looking for a third? I dunno….” Hermione’s eyes went wide as Harry spoke, and he trailed off suspiciously. “Hermione?” he asked, narrowing his eyes. “Do you know what Fleur was on about?”
Hermione swallowed hard, twice, and then put down the stack of plates she’d been laying out. “There’s something that maybe you should read,” she said slowly, and started poking around in her bag. Finally she fished out a very small, slim book. “Here,” she said, brandishing it at him. “They’d barely even gotten the meat started last I looked. You’ve got plenty of time.”
Then she ushered him away from the house and further into the garden with a confidence that faltered when he stared at her. But finally he was far enough away for her satisfaction, and she pushed him gently down onto the grass with an admonishment to read, before she disappeared back inside.
Puzzled, Harry watched her leave. There’d been a blush on her cheeks, which he didn’t understand in the slightest. But then he finally looked down at the book and blinked in surprise at the title instead. Wizarding Triad Courtship Rituals Through History stared back up at him until he cracked it open, still in shock, and began to read.
*
Despite Hermione’s dire predictions about dinner, Harry was only halfway through the tiny book when he heard his name being called. He looked up in a daze, mind still elsewhere, to find everybody already seated at the table and more than one person gesturing wildly for his attention.
“Hurry up, Potter,” George yelled. The smile on his face was still smaller than usual, but his tone was a little more boisterous than it had been for the last few months. “You’ll ruin the dinner we’ve slaved over by making us all wait like this while you lollygag!”
Harry scrambled to his feet, shoving the book in his pocket. As he approached the table, he noticed Ron and Hermione were both refusing to look at him. But they had left a space between them at the table just the same as they had been doing for weeks now.
He grabbed the empty chair with a smile, bantering with George as he got settled and reached immediately for the potatoes. Everybody else had already started to tuck in while he’d walked over. Harry took the chance to sneak looks at Hermione and Ron amidst the chaos of moving dishes and loud requests for particular things.
Hermione was, if anything, blushing even harder, and Ron couldn’t seem to stop fidgeting.
“Could you pass the gravy?” Harry asked Hermione calmly. She darted a look at him, and then hurried to grab the tureen before anybody else could. “Thank you,” he said as he accepted it from her, and then leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.
Then he turned to Ron, who was staring at them both with wide eyes.
“Could you grab me one of those butterbeers?" Harry asked him. Ron just continued to stare, until Harry nudged him and pointed at the small cluster of bottles in the centre of the table. Ron finally fumbled for one in silence, and Harry also kissed him on the cheek in thanks. When he turned back around, Hermione was beaming at them both.
“Really?” Ron finally asked. His voice was pitched as quiet as he could get it without being totally drowned out by the cacophony that was Bill and Percy fighting over who was better at carving a roast. Ron’s voice cracked over the word, and Hermione reached across Harry’s lap to take him by the hand.
Harry ducked his head, feeling his own cheeks warm as he exchanged a tentative smile with Hermione. “Yeah,” he said to Ron, as he settled his own hand over the top of both of theirs.
“Brilliant,” Ron breathed, as he finally broke into a grin of his own. Then they all jumped as a bread roll was lobbed at them, bouncing off Harry’s forehead.
“Can you plonkers pass the potatoes, already?” Ginny asked. But she laughed and winked as she spoke, and before long they and the rest of the table were joining in with her.