Hogwarts Assignment 12 - Ancient Runes: Write about someone discovering a musical talent. Prompt used: Air
Night had fallen long ago, but Hermione could not sleep.
She lay in her night clothes in bed, palms up on either side of her body, and her legs pressed together under the covers. Around her, the house was silent except for the ticking of the grandfather clock outside her bedroom.
Hermione expected that Harry and Ron were asleep by now in their room down the hall - it was very late, after all. But then again, she reasoned, she herself was awake at - what was it? - three o'clock in the morning.
And she was going to stay up quite a bit later than that.
Hermione crawled out from under the covers and slipped her feet into socks, standing carefully as to avoid the creaky board by her bed. The first place she padded to was Harry and Ron's room.
There were many other rooms in Grimmauld Place Number 12 that were unoccupied, including Sirius's room, his brother's, and the old room Hermione and Ginny had shared two summers ago. But it had been a mutual, almost unspoken decision within the trio to stay close together; Hermione in fact would have preferred to stay in the same room as the boys if it weren't for that they couldn't all three fit into a one-person bedroom.
Now, she peered in the half-open door to see Ron, arms dangling off the side of his bed, red hair just barely visible with the light from the lamp in the hall. Harry lay in the other corner of the room, all twisted up in his blankets as if he had fallen asleep in agony. He was breathing evenly though, and Hermione sighed in relief - tonight was a good one for him.
Hearing the boys' snores made her snort fondly. With an approving nod that they could not see, she left the doorway and made her way in the dark to the drawing room of Sirius's old house.
She lit her wand then, and set it on a little table next to the piano.
The piano was made of dark wood, and apparently was custom-made for the Black family, for the motto ("Toujours Pur", which she found decidedly ironic, considering that she was, by pureblood definition, not "pure") was carved across the scratched cover. Hermione wasted no time in lifting said cover up, revealing the row of black and white keys beneath.
She had taken piano lessons when she was younger, for a year and at her father's insistence. Hermione had always admired the great musicians (whom were, she later discovered, also wizards) - Beethoven, Bach, Debussy - and marveled at their patience for composing and ability to do it in the first place. She herself hadn't been the most aspiring young pianist, practicing because she had to, not because she was inclined to. Her nine-year-old self would constantly argue with her parents that finishing her book was more important than practicing the piano, "which could wait while book characters could not".
Yet now she sat at the piano and not with a book, because she had found something in hearing the music that even books could not give her.
It was true that she only remembered a couple of songs - "Fur Elise" and a minuet by Merlin knew who. But as Hermione placed her hands over the keys, struggling to find the correct position, she felt lighter and more relieved than she had felt all day.
It was an inside joke between the Gryffindor boys of Harry and Ron's year that Ron could sleep through just about anything; his own dreams and snores would prevent him from hearing anything happening outside his sleep.
But as many times as that was proven true, it wasn't true when he was the first to wake to Harry's choked screams in the night. It wasn't true when the change in Harry's breathing to loud, ragged gulps of air had Ron springing out of bed before anyone else, pail and cool cloth ready to take care of his friend.
It wasn't true when Hermione's bloody piano playing woke him up at three or four in the bloody morning - and for practically twice a week for all the time they remained at Harry's godfather's (technically just Harry's, now) house!
Ron could admit that Hermione wasn't bad at the instrument - and that wasn't surprising considering that she was good at everything, except maybe for Quidditch and also for noticing how he felt about her. (But, as Ginny had once informed him ruthlessly and matter-of-factly, he hardly understood his own feelings so he couldn't blame Hermione for not knowing either.)
She could carry a tune on the piano much better than he could hope to ever, but - well - Ron wanted to sleep. Not listen to music, however softly he could tell Hermione was trying to play. He would have been alright with listening to her play during the day, maybe in the evening when often only the rustles of old newspapers could be heard in all of house; yet Hermione never so much as seemed to look at the instrument when they convened in the dining room. She never indicated that she knew how to play.
Normally, Ron would not hesitate to yell for her from his bed to stop playing, or at least confront her about it in the morning. But the first night, he'd fallen asleep and then forgotten what had happened. The second, Hermione seemed in a particularly bad mood in the morning (later it was learned from a disgusted Kreacher that Hermione was having her…feminine-issues week).
By the third night that Ron woke to Hermione's playing, he didn't feel the need to confront her about it anymore. Yes, her playing dragged him from sleep - but his dreams, already naturally vivid, were getting worse by the night. He wanted to sleep - but music wasn't so bad either, especially since her songs somehow reminded him of Bill and Fred and George and the rest of the family.
In truth, it was that Ron never got around to asking Hermione about the piano that he didn't say anything about it. But it was also because he was content to let the notes fill the air, take up the empty space that silence and darkness occupied, and allow him to understand Hermione a little better.
Those notes which she played he could listen to as he lay in bed pretending to sleep. And all seemed calmer, more bearable, for it.
Some nights, Harry woke to the sounds of the old piano in the drawing room.
Sometimes he liked it because it kept him awake, away from the nightmares he dreaded; other times he liked it because it made him sleep, distracted him from his frequent and painful headaches.
The first time it'd happened, he nearly killed the shadowy form in the dim room before realizing from the terrified squeak that it was only Hermione. (In his defense, it had been four a.m. and only their second night in the uncomfortably empty Grimmauld Place Number 12). But since then, he had come to appreciate the notes that wafted into the bedroom long after Ron had succumbed to snores.
It wasn't that Hermione was a magnificent pianist, exactly - though by no means was she terrible. In fact, she seemed to be improving the more nights she played, though it was also true that Harry only heard her practice the same two songs over and over again.
But it was the way she played that relaxed Harry. She played with a calm but frank tone, nothing less than what Harry would expect from Hermione; but beneath the brevity of each note she played was a softness, too. Harry - and Hermione, he'd thought - had never been particularly affected by the arts like Luna Lovegood was or his mother (so he was told) had been.
But he found that the nights he could hear Hermione plinking away on the piano, he could breathe more easily. Her music was soft and clear and tranquil, and it had a way of clearing his mind in the late hours of the night.
Harry wanted quite badly to ask Hermione about her playing, and decided he would, if it weren't for the fact that he knew Hermione checked his and Ron's rooms before and after she played. Harry knew that if she so much as suspected that her playing woke him up (never mind that he liked being woken up by her music), she would cease to indulge herself at the instrument.
So he never did tell her that he loved her music. He didn't want that to take away the air of the musical night and replace it once more with the dreary dark of his and his friends' future.
Three years later, Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Ron Weasley returned to Grimmauld Place Number 12. And when Hermione sat once more at the piano that she'd played in the dark hours of the night, she smiled at the memory of the music that had brought her calm.
Those same two tunes that had been played three years ago - Merlin-knows-who's minuet and "Fur Elise" - drifted into the air, their lovely notes a reminder of the warmth that the trio (though unaware of it themselves) had once shared.