so i've done a few ron&harry friendship fics, as well as a few trio ones, yet i realized that not once have i done a harry&hermione friendship thing. so this is it. as always, it managed to turn into something i didn't set out to write. oh, well. enjoy. :)
Hermione doesn't remember much of her life before Hogwarts. Thinking back, it was just a meaningless blur of orthodontist appointments and pages and lonely Saturdays. It was one of those routine Muggle lives, where she could predict what she would do six weeks in the future (reading, in her case).
Then she got the letter, and her life veered off course onto some completely different road. She lived with a few other girls, like a permanent sleep over (she had only been to a few)—they were nice, but the two of them clicked much more than they did with her. If anything, this didn't surprise her. Every third Wednesday, Hermione would go up the same staircase and would end up someplace different (until she learned better). No one would make fun of her braces; three-quarters of them didn't even know what they were.
She happened to be in the same year as Harry Potter, and felt important because she'd read a few books on him and thought she understood him.
Was she ever so wrong.
Had he not been famous, she suspected it wouldn't have changed him a bit. For the most part, he tried to play it down. He was small and skinny, not exceptional magically nor physically. He seemed confused most of the time, looking exactly as she felt. Wary. Perplexed. Awed. Yet not scared nor did he seem to have the drive to be accepted, both of which Hermione felt acutely.
It confused her.
Even after they became friends, his bravery and force of personality were unreal. She would look over his homework, and correct his shabby grammar, but would still look at him and think Harry Potter and not Harry. She would look at him and Ron, and it always frustrated her to see that Ron seemed to know something that she didn't know, a secret, a trait, and she was unable to figure it out.
It was her second year, and it was before that horrible mistake she made with the potion yet after Harry's incident at the dueling club. He had fallen asleep on the couch doing homework and Hermione, preoccupied and worried, had paused in her furious essay writing. Her eyes drifted off, and she stared at nothing, thinking of everything.
He was snoring, the book fallen against his chest, a quill dangling precariously from his fingers. It took Hermione a moment to realize what she was looking at. His eyebrows were creased in sleep. His chest rose and fell with each breathe, filling his lungs with air. She watched the book rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and fall, and all over again.
It struck her then how very human he was.
That was something no book ever bothered to point out.