Come up with a plan. Give people something to focus on. Problem-solve. It’s Hermione’s way; it’s how she handles work, it’s how she handles interpersonal tensions, it’s how she handles her own various personal crises. She uncaps the pen and flips to a clean page, writing GINNY at the very top in her neat, symmetrical hand.
“It’s sort of a Muggle thing.” She finds that things like logic and asking for help with your problems seems to be a Muggle thing more often than not; magical self-reliance is interesting, but oftentimes a bit ridiculous. “Flow charts show you your different options and act as a map. So here, right at the top, we’ll put the initial problem.” She writes Unexpected Pregnancy at the top center of the page. Perhaps it’s a bit clinical, but it’s direct. They can deal with the emotional part as it happens.
“Now, there are options, here. Termination is an option. So is adoption, and so is keeping it.” She writes out all three, connecting them to the initial problem. “And we plot everything out from there. Pick where you want to go first, and we’ll see that through to the final stages.”
Ginny leans forward to watch Hermione sketch everything out. It’s startling and somewhat frightening to see it all laid out on the page, but better to face it head on ( and how grateful she is to not have to do it alone ).
“A map,” she repeats as she shakes her hair out again. “Okay.”
It’s all very clinical, which is . . . somewhat comforting? But she’s caught between abject terror and an emotional tugging that’s so much larger and nebulous than she can articulate. She’d sat in a bathroom stall for twenty minutes before leaving St. Mungo’s, not crying yet, just stunned, when suddenly she’d gotten the uneasy idea that she wasn’t alone in the empty loo. And she wasn’t, in a sense. When she carefully places her palm on her belly, she’s covering something.
Focus, she thinks, and firmly returns to the map.
“Let’s do adoption first,” she suggests. It’s the least likely of the options, to be honest, so they can get that out of the way without too much trouble. She gives Hermione a brief flicker of a smile.