Prefect Love
By
Megawacky Max
-o-
Author's Note:
First, you don't need to toss rotten fruit at me for the horrible pun in the title. I like puns, and that's all.
Second, in my repertoire there's already Comedy and Drama. It occurred to me to take a chance with Romance. I don't know if I'm good at it, so you'll have to critique for me.
Third, and apart from the first two, this story is rated R due to spicy scenes that will increase up to Chapter Four (which is the last one). I don't think It's a serious matter, but anyway I'd suggest you should not read the story if you don't have the proper age.
Lastly, special thanks to my beloved Eve, who kindly corrected my grammar in this story.
I'll leave you with the story. Enjoy it.
-o-
Chapter 1
Walking by the hall of memories
Hogwarts slept.
At least, most of it.
Night covered the horizon. The moon smiled in its crescent quarter while the stars blinked in the heights. A red star, most likely Mars, gleamed more brightly than the others.
It all was silence in the school Houses. Especially in Gryffindor House. Silence was so complete that even the delicate steps of the house elves, creatures whose only target in life was to serve others, resounded with rumbling restlessness.
Meet Nugg.
Nugg had worked at Hogwarts ever since he could remember. His parents had worked and lived there and so did their parents. Nugg was the kind of house elf that learned the chores as he grew up, and the chores in Hogwarts were abundant. That always pleased the house elves.
Now Nugg had Gryffindor Tower all for himself. The other elves had decided to avoid working there during classes, because over the past year they had found hundreds of little wool caps and gloves hiding everywhere. Giving clothes to a house elf meant freeing him from his slavery as servant, and that was something house elves hated and loathed.
And that's why they no longer frequented Gryffindor Tower during the school period. Only that silly elf, Dobby, took the clothes. How disgusting, thought the others.
Nugg carefully raised the remaining scrolls that had been tossed to one side of the fireplace. Students used to leave the remaining scraps anywhere as soon as they finished their homework. Nugg would have scooped it all up in one sweep, but he had long ago learned not to fall for the same trick twice.
He moved a piece of scroll. A wool sock with amusing and smiling house elves boarded on its sides peeked from under the pile.
Nugg sighed. He wished that whoever was bothering to knit the presents would stop it at once. Now he would have to use the handle of the feather duster to pick up the sock without touching it with his hands and...
Crik...
Nugg's pointy ears perked up. He turned his head and looked over his shoulder with his huge eyes.
No one in sight. Nugg gave a paranoid little giggle and grabbed his feather duster.
"Come on..." whispered a voice Nugg wasn't quite able to hear.
"Don't be stubborn," replied another whisper.
"Maybe he'll take it... I made a few yesterday and..."
"And perhaps I'll begin to spit Galleons," the second voice replied, whispering exasperatedly.
"Fine, okay... Let's go..."
There was the faintest of murmurs. Nugg froze, the hand holding the feather duster one inch away from the sock. He turned his attention to the back of the Fat Lady's portrait.
The portrait opened.
The portrait closed.
Silence filled the room like anchovies in a can: struggling for more space.
Nugg blinked, giggled again and hurried to remove the sock with the feather duster.
It was the best-kept secret. They always told him everything except that. It was dumb to hide it, because he wasn't affected by it... and, despite that...
"Ow! " someone yelped, in low voice, somewhere in the halls of the seventh floor.
"What?" whispered the second voice.
"You stepped on my foot!"
"Sorry."
"Look where you're going..."
"It's dark. What did you want me to do, yell lumos and let Filch catch us in less than three seconds?"
"Sshhh!" hissed the first voice with notable fright. "All right, all right... But don't say that... I mean... uhm... I'm still not sure we should... eh..."
"Break the rules?" said the second voice, the owner letting the smile on his face slip into the words. "Hermione Granger is about to break the..."
"Ron!" she yelled, and they stopped.
The yelp bounced on the walls. Several portraits woke up, looked around with curiosity and returned to their respective slumbers. After a few seconds, Ron spoke again.
"Don't repeat that."
"Don't make me, then," she got angry. "I can't believe you convinced me. I can't believe it, really."
"We can go back, if it'll make you happy."
Hermione thought on the offered option. To return to the bedroom, undo the appearance spell she had cast on her bed so it wouldn't appear empty, go back to sleep and forget about what could have happened that night.
Something unknown and strange shot through her mind like an arrow. The rebellious nature of sweet sixteen forced her to re-think the situation.
"Let's move on," she said, though she seemed worried. "But if we are caught, I swear you'll regret it every day of your life."
"Good. Go. Carefully."
The prefects of Gryffindor moved as one under Harry Potter's invisible cloak. Ron managed to borrow it from his best friend. All he had had to do was simply wait until Harry closed his eyes and started snoring, then sneak next to the storage chest, open the lid, realize Harry had cursed the lid with security spells learned from Moody (Ron swore doomful revenge on Mad Eye, somehow), wait until the jelly-finger effect -literally jelly- stopped, cast an anti-spell on the chest, finally open the lid, and get the invisible cloak from inside.
"Why do you shake your fingers like that?" asked Hermione while they made their way through the corridor.
"You'll laugh if I tell you... But not now. We turn down this way."
"Okay."
While Ron guided Hermione he couldn't help thinking on the past years. He couldn't believe it had been kept a secret for so long. Since fourth year. Third, if you counted those brief moments together.
There had been something between them, and it hadn't happened until the first time Hermione visited The Burrow, and a quick exchange of glances said more than a thousand words.
Of course, she still hated Ron for having seen her in her underwear but, how could she blame Ron? He had thought there was nobody in Ginny's room and walked in to look for his new wand.
Luckily there was nobody else in the house, except for Ginny and the twins. Hermione's yell (nearly on par with a Howler's, but full of surprise and embarrassment instead of anger) nearly managed to drown out Ron's own squawk of shock and mortification, and by the time the other three Weasleys arrived to the room the young friends were properly dressed, blushing red and inventing all kind of excuses.
Neither Ron nor Hermione were sure that they had been believed, but the topic was soon forgotten by the rest.
Not by Hermione, of course. Ron, carefully walking under the invisible cloak, scowled when he recalled the red-hot cheeks of his partner when she trapped him against a corner of the house when everybody else were paying attention to their own chores and let him have it because of "his low ethics...blah, blah, blah...what a rude, bad friend...blah, blah, blah... and possibly even being slightly perverted...".
And then Ron had replied that he had knocked first, that she haven't heard it, that he didn't recall she was within five hundred miles of the house and several other dumb excuses.
She replied to the excuses with accurate comments on Ron's low ethics, which has been already been exposed as critique but she anyways managed to bring new material to the cause.
And it was right then when Ron spoke before thinking.
"You say it as if you were ugly," he had said in an attempt to contradict her during the argument. He didn't achieve that, but he had turned her attention to something else.
Hermione had never really asked herself about her own beauty, if she ever had one or what the others thought about it. For a moment she realized that her studies had taken first place in her personal horizon. And what if she could think a bit more about the way she looked, for a change?
The faces of Parvati Patil and Lavender Brown popped up in front of her thoughts. She got angry again and resumed critiquing Ron.
But she had changed. Since that moment something had changed. Ron could sense she talked to him in a sort of more delicate way when being alone, but there haven't been many moments like those...
Wrapped up in his thoughts, Ron stumbled against a statue.
"Look out!" Hermione whispered.
"Sorry... Let's go."
They resumed their path. Ron remembered what it had been that distracted him. He had remembered Viktor Krum.
Ah, what a good jealousy attack can perform. Why hadn't he invited Hermione to the Yule Ball? During the school period he never thought of her as a woman, but as some kind of muggle question-answering machine. Not for nothing had his jaw hit the floor when he saw her appear, elegant and beautiful, holding Viktor's arm.
That had been the jealous attack that brought the spark.
That had been the real reason behind the strong argument at the end of the Yule Ball, which Harry hadn't understood at all. It was that night, when they returned to the tower, that Ron confessed to Hermione that she was prettier than it seemed.
And he never understood why it had made her so angry.
But now she also knew. She knew it, yes, and when she arrived to number twelve in Grimmauld Place, she began to understand the gravity of the whole business with Voldemort. She, Hermione Granger, had become scared for the first time in years.
He heard her crying one night. She must have walked by the door of his bedroom when Ron just barely managed to hear weeping. Of course, Ron was testing the twin's extensible ears, otherwise he wouldn't have ever heard it; but the thing was that he did hear.
He climbed down the stairs, carefully, and tip-toed across the corridor, being careful to the point of paranoia not to wake Sirius' mother. The last he wanted was to have that foul witch (literally foul and literally witch) up and cursing. It was barely three in the morning when he walked into the kitchen. It was two past three when he approached Hermione and sat next to her. It was ten past three when she began to confess her fears, and it was eleven past three when she hugged him involuntarily.
Twelve past three, he hugged her in return.
Quarter past three, somehow, they were kissing...
"Ron, look where you're going!"
Ron got the hard blow of Reality. Real, because it was the present, and hard because it was a locked door.
"Are you all right? Maybe we should go back to the tower and..."
"No, no... I'm fine..." he said, rubbing his nose. "Just a bit distracted; nothing else. ...Maybe a little nervous, too. Maybe."
"Yes... Me... me too."
There was a moment of uncomfortable silence, and then Ron said:
"Shall we go on? It's through here."
"All right. But watch where you're going."
No one knew anything about it. Not even the twins and their restless curiosity, or Moody and his roving glass eye, could have guess something like this: Hermione and Ron, in love.
Harry was going to have been the first to know; he was their best friend and deserved the exclusive. They had waited for his arrival at Sirius's house and were going to tell him everything. He should have felt good for them.
How could they not blush? Harry had arrived in a mournful mood, and the young lovers had a disgusting surprise when Harry guessed, without thinking, what was going on; "while you two were here, together and having a great time". No, they couldn't tell him, not at that moment. Harry would either blow up something physically or himself emotionally and it wouldn't be his fault. They'd wait until the appropriate time, and then he would know it first... and then, the others.
But that moment never came. That last year had been a real nervous breakdown for the Boy Who Lived. Not even counting the O.W.L.s; which had Hermione having her own nervous breakdown. And Ron and his initiation into Quidditch.
A really powerful-and draining-year.
But even then, there were chances. Ron and Hermione were prefects, and as prefects they had to patrol the corridors. Those were their moments alone, it didn't matter whether they where few and brief.
But they had had enough of that lack of privacy. Ron and Hermione, after a long debate, had decided to have some long overdue private moments on their own. That's why there were stalking the castle in the middle of the night under Harry's Invisibility Cloak; because behind a certain door hid a most relaxing and intimate area of the castle.
"We're here," said Ron, his voice trembling. "This is the place."
Hermione vaguely nodded. Ron put his face near the door in front of him and whispered a couple of words:
"Mint scent. "
There was a snap. The door opened. The teenagers crossed the doorframe and closed the door after them. They removed the cloak and looked around.
"Say... it's as pretty as ours," nodded Hermione.
"Yes, Harry already visited it during the Triwizard Tournament," smiled Ron. He sent a nervous glance at Hermione. "He had no problems that time. Neither will we."
They smiled with a pinch of nervousness and looked around again. The prefect's bathroom was sublime, spotless, very roomy and, above all else, private.