This Lethal Game

But mind your mood, Gawain,

lest dread make you delay,

or lose this lethal game

you've promised you will play.

(Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 487-90, translated by Simon Armitage)

Chapter One

"fine folk with their futures before them"

It was a sunny but windy day on the grounds of Hogwarts, and they had to raise their voices in order to be heard. The topic of conversation was one which had become increasingly frequent, though each were not equally invested—it was nostalgia for the world of the Muggles and all that had been left behind by two of the party. Hermione, obviously, was the most heavily invested, having left both her parents, all of her friends, and a great deal of worldly success behind when she had received her letter five years ago. Ron was definitely not invested as he had been raised from birth in the full Wizard family to which he rightfully belonged in every sense, but he had been raised around Muggle "artifacts" and this, combined with his rapidly growing admiration for Hermione, let him play a varyingly enthusiastic and abashedly inquisitive role in the talk.

Harry was, more often than not, the least talkative member of the group during these conversations. Though he, like Hermione, had been raised firmly within the Muggle world, he was able to remember few things about it with any degree of fondness, and even those few things he did miss—Muggle history of epic wars stretching across centuries of time, the tired but fulfilling feeling of having completed a task of manual labor without the use of magic to lighten the load, the simple satisfaction of being able to eat a chocolate without double checking against the possibility of enchantments—for the most part, Harry was comfortable describing himself as 300% happier on the most common of days at Hogwarts than he had ever been, even during the greatest of moments, while living at 4 Privit Drive with the Dursleys, decidedly Muggle in every way.

Hermione's excitement at the current object of nostalgia—Arthurian legend—caused her voice to naturally lilt above the growling whooshes of the wind all about them. "Oh, and Guinevere!" she exclaimed now; "There simply isn't anyone like her in the history books here!"

Harry, who was walking a few steps ahead of Ron and Hermione, looked briefly over his shoulder to acknowledge her words and noted well the flush—not simply an effect of the breeze or the sun—that sprawled across her face, and the laughter that threatened at the edge of her lips. Her excitement about these Muggle memories lit up her whole being like a mad-woman's, and even Harry had to admit that there was something particularly appealing about Hermione when she was like this. It was clear that Ron noticed this, too, though he seemed to feel the effects much more strongly than Harry ever had. His face, too, was red, though that was common enough with Ron. His green eyes were twinkling more than normal; the effect contrasted strikingly with the solemnness of his features as he focused intently on each word and glance issuing from Hermione as she continued on and on in praise of the Queen Guinevere of whom he had never before even heard and with whom Harry was only glancingly familiar.

Harry turned back around to watch where he was going and because he was wary of it seeming as though he were staring. Only last week, Ron had pulled him aside after breakfast in the Great Hall to question him about whether or not he had any feelings for Hermione and whether she had ever expressed any feelings for him. Though Harry had tried desperately to deflect the questions with warnings about their being late to Transfiguration (this tardiness had, indeed, transpired leading to an extra foot being added on to the length of their essays on the difficulties of transfiguring photographs into completely stationary objects), Ron would not be put off. Now, somehow, on top of everything else Harry found himself fretting about for most of his waking hours, and several sleeping ones as well, Harry worried that his friendship with Ron was at risk of sloughing off because Ron might perceive a romantic attachment between Harry and Hermione when such an idea could not be further from the true state of affairs.

'And what is the true state of affairs?' Harry mused to himself as he walked on, only half-listening as Ron posed to Hermione several questions at once about the ideas of chivalry and knighthood and the concept of historical fiction as a past-time that could amuse anyone for more than a few minutes. "It's been amusing you for over a quarter of an hour, now!" she chided him in response to this last query, laughing out loud.

'I don't like Hermione as anything more than the best friend I've got after Ron. And I need them both—they must realize how much I need them. I need them too much to ever actually love either of them. Which is terrible...'

Lost in this horrifying train of thought, Harry tripped over a pack of enchanted playing cards someone had left on the lawn. "It's too terrible to actually be true!" he blurted out as the bodies of the Quidditch players pictured on the cards rose up to levitate in the air around the cards his toe had scattered into a messy circle in the grass.

"Five points!"

"There's the snitch!"

"Beware of that Bludger!"

The voices of the internationally famous Quidditch players rose faintly from the ground in response to his outburst while behind him Ron and Hermione stood silent, staring curiously at him. It wasn't as though he hadn't been saying strange things lately, or even saying strange things that oftener than he had practically from the day they first met him. They'd both thought that he'd been following along with their conversation, though, and they had been too engrossed in their own parts in the talk to notice that it had been quite a while since he'd actually contributed more than a nod or a smile. So, they thought he was responding to their debate over the true nature of Sir Gawain's character, and now they waited to hear his explanation as to why an interpretation of Sir Gawain as noble though flawed was too terrible to actually be true.

Harry blushed. "I reckon we should bring those in, see if we can find their owner, eh?" he said.

Still looking curious, more curious even than before, Hermione and Ron nodded and crouched down to help him pick up the playing cards and shove them back into their case.

"Oh shut up," muttered Ron to one particularly enthusiastic Quidditch team captain who refused to stop roaring for a rematch even after the lid of the case come down over his face.

"What's terrible?" Hermione asked. They returned to their casual pace, all three of them in a line now as Ron and Hermione waited to hear more from Harry. A particularly strong gust of wind shuttled the handful of puffy white clouds in front of the sun and the view of the grounds became temporarily overcast.

'Pathetic fallacy," Harry thought with a tinge of anxiety. 'That's something I remember from Muggle school. So useful.'

"I was just thinking about something else," he finally said in reply to Hermione's question. "Sorry; I just can't seem to care about literature today."

Hermione nodded and gave Ron a glance of significance out of the corner of her eye. Harry would have missed it if he hadn't deliberately forced himself to maintain eye contact with her to avoid the appearance of insincerity in his response. Now he just tried to ignore the implications of that side glance, telling himself that it was a marker of the increased mutual affection between his two friends and nothing more. He allowed himself to speed up a bit, bringing him back to his former place a few feet in front of Hermione and Ron. The tricks failed to work this time, however.

"Do you not care because of what's happened with Sirius? Or Cedric?" Hermione asked from behind him, purposefully raising her voice over the wind now because all excitement and genuine cheer seemed instantly gone from her. The feelings of only seconds before had been replaced by a seriousness and almost maternal outpouring of care and concern. 'Weird to think of Hermione as maternal,' he thought, momentarily overwhelmed with embarrassment as he realized this source and goal of those feelings was him and his inexplicably strange behavior of late.

The silence grew awkward. "Or...or...because of anything else, Harry? I know—we know—there's been so much lately, so much terribleness..."

Knowing he was being cruel, unnecessarily so, Harry looked back over his shoulder and rolled his eyes. "I'm fine," he said shortly. "I can't even remember what I was thinking about, but I expect it had more to do with how awful some Quidditch team did recently than with stuff that happened over a year ago."

Hermione's eyes widened slightly, but she nodded and offered him a careful smile. 'I'm horrible,' Harry thought.

"That stuff with Sirius didn't happen over a year ago, mate. I'm just saying."

'Shut up, Ron,' Harry thought. He made no reply.

For another ten minutes the three of them continued to meander around the grounds. The clouds passed with another helpful blow of the wind, and the air seemed light and full of spring promise again, but there was no more conversation, not even any pleasantries or idle chatter about dinner or homework. Harry knew the silence and the hard feelings which seemed to have gripped the group were entirely his fault, and he did feel bad. Horrible. Terrible. Ron was caught fast and tight in the hold of his first fully recognized crush, and Harry had ruined what had been a good exercise in the testing of the potential for Hermione to return those feelings. Hermione, meanwhile, whatever her feelings for Ron (and these feelings were indeed a mystery to all of them), had been homesick for ages, consumed in worry for her parents as the future for Muggles became increasingly entwined with the future of Lord Voldemort and his nefarious and oblique plans, and Harry had likewise ruined her chance to vent these feelings and experience some relief from them.

'Well at least they know what their feelings are,' he thought. 'I've no idea what I feel about anything at all, except that I need Ron and I need Hermione and every day I'm pushing them further away and making them want less and less to be needed by me. Not that it was ever such a great position I've put them in.'

In the back of his mind, he knew there were other feelings working themselves out, and if he had tried hard enough he likely could have consciously recognized them then, too. He didn't particularly want to try hard, though, not then, not when he had so much else to struggle with. Sirius was trapped in Snape's snares, half the school hated him because they blamed him for poor handsome, innocent, talented, brilliant Cedric Diggory's death in the Tri-Wizard tournament last year, Voldemort was on the loose... Now was not a time for feelings. Now was a time for plans for the future, strategic assessments of the past, carefulness and guardedness in the present.

At the same time, it was so much easier to just walk and walk and walk, to loose oneself in the feeling of late March winds across one's face, the sounds of one's friends heady in hopefully blossoming love, the promise of a trip to Hogsmeade in just two days, and, very likely, a fine rabbit stew for dinner tonight. Harry paused in his walk and turned to face Ron and Hermione whose faces still bore the traces of solemn composure they'd donned at his previous outburst.

"Who's looking forward to Zonko's this weekend?" he asked with forced cheer. Ron, ever eager for normalcy, grinned broadly and immediately took up the notion with a relieved vigor. Hermione was mostly silent, though she smiled and nodded in all the right places; her eyes darted between the two boys as all three of them turned their feet back toward the castle. The grounds were emptying in anticipation of dinner time. Harry strained but was able to keep up the conversation until they had seated themselves at the Gryffindor table and the distractions of food and other members of their house with stories of their own days allowed him to lapse into silence without anyone noticing.