Hero of the Story || James Potter x Hermione Granger Fanfiction

37 | we will call this place our home

xxxvii.

we will call this place our home

(North by Sleeping at Last)

__________

January 4, 1979

Hermione tried her very hardest to sleep after such an exhausting night, but frustratingly, every fibre in her body was still very much awake.

Madame Pomfrey had told her that the dark potion wouldn't have any long-lasting effects on Regulus anymore, but he was still unconscious and needed to rest. Hermione insisted that she wanted to stay beside him and wait for him to awaken, but the others were firm in their decision of making her rest first. James brought her to the bedroom she'd slept in before, when she had visited the Potter Manor during her school break. She had no choice but to trail behind him, mechanically slipping inside the soft mattress and letting him tuck her in.

He had long since left, promising to fetch her for breakfast later that day. Hermione merely told him a soft thank you and watched him leave.

Since then, she had waited for the elusive sleep to come, her eyes trained intently on the vast window inside the room. Hermione watched unseeingly as hints of yellow and orange started to paint the sky.

She blearily glanced away from the window when she heard her door creak open. Peter silently slid inside, slowly closing the door behind him, before turning around to look at Hermione.

"You're still awake?" he asked, surprise on his face.

"I can't sleep," she confessed. "What are you doing here?"

"I can't sleep either," he said. Peter padded across the carpeted floor and pulled an elegant chair beside Hermione's bed. Almost immediately, his hand found hers and his eyes grew worried. "How are you feeling?"

Hermione softly laughed. "To be honest?" she started. "A lot of things. But... but above all, I think... I think I'm relieved."

His blue eyes glistened with unshed tears as his hold on her hand tightened. "You really gave me quite a scare back at the cave, Hermione," he softly said. "When you were dragged inside the lake by an Inferius, and you didn't resurface, I thought—" He choked up as the tears slipped down from his eyes. "It was — for one, horrible minute, I thought I'd lost you forever. I didn't realise that Kreacher had heard your plea to come and had arrived just in time to save the day."

"I'm sorry, Petey," she whispered, because it was honestly the only thing she could think of saying right now.

He brushed a few tears away from his eyes and smiled sadly at his sister. "I didn't know you'd been through so much," he said.

"I wasn't really planning to reveal everything," she pointed out with a wry smile. "It was... it was a complicated past. I told Regulus once that I sometimes thought Hermione Granger was a distant, elaborate dream – a nightmare, really – because I've grown accustomed to being Hermione Pettigrew for seventeen years already." She snorted in disbelief. "I'm even referring to her as a she instead of a me."

"Tell me," he continued, "was she a Gryffindor?"

"Does that even matter?" she asked with a chuckle. When Peter pointedly stared, she sighed, "Yes, she was."

"Of course she was," Peter fondly said. "After everything she went through, she seemed like a brave warrior."

"Brave," Hermione dryly echoed. "Running away from everything doesn't seem like the bravest thing to do."