It was different, much different than the kiss I had had with Ron. That had been frenzied, needy, messy, rough.
This kiss began soft and delicate. It took a while for Neville to begin responding.
He tentatively - very, very tentatively - began to kiss me back. I brought my hands up to his neck and pulled him closer, deepening the kiss.
He broke it what might have been a few minutes - a couple hours - maybe several weeks - later, staring at my glowing face.
"We should go inside," I whispered softly.
"Yeah," he responded.
I Conjured a large blanket and threw it over both of our shoulders, keeping us warm for the walk back.
As we trudged through what first was snow and then became grass, I leaned into him, wrapping my arms around his waist.
He smiled and gently placed his head on top of mine.
"Dinner's ready," Miss Longbottom said when we walked through the front door, having gone around the Warren. She shot us a glance. "Without any help from either of you, might I add."
"Gran, we have to get married in a couple of months!" Neville protested good-naturedly. "We have to get to know each other."
"Oh, I suppose," she muttered irritably, but I thought I saw a hint of a smile lift her lips.
She had made a delicious noodle soup.
"This is a Muggle recipe!" I said in surprise. "Chicken noodle soup."
"Ah, but this is diricawl noodle soup," she said slyly. I choked on a piece of meat.
"Diricawl?" I whispered. "I'm eating a dodo bird?"
"Oh, come off it, they're overpopulated anyway," she said dismissively.
"But, I've always been taught that they're extinct…" I murmured. "It's so weird."
"It tastes good, though," Neville added.
We continued to talk, eating at a wooden table next to the fireplace. All of us had blankets on our legs, the house still freezing.
"Well, I'm heading to bed," Miss Longbottom announced. "Hermione, I'm on the third floor if you need anything. Good night, Hermione. Good night, Neville."
She kissed us both on the tops of our heads and walked away.
"So, 'Mione," Neville began. I stifled a giggle.
"What's so funny?" he asked indignantly.
"I never thought I'd hear you call me 'Mione," I laughed. He chuckled too. It was a good sound, low and deep.
To my embarrassment, I yawned. Mortified, I stifled it as best I could.
"I'm so, so, sorry, Neville," I began. He held a delicate finger to my lips.
"No need for apology," he told me. "You're tired. C'mon."
Sleepily we climbed the stairs, one after another, until we got to our floor.
"Well…" I said, blushing. "Good night."
"G'night," he replied, then said suddenly, "It was fun, today, skating. I've never had someone else to do it with."
"Me neither," I confessed. "I've… I've always wanted a sibling. I didn't like being an only child at all."
"That's why I was so glad to go to Hogwarts," he said. "It was like having a family."
"One, big, Gryffindor family," I said, smiling.
"Gryffindor families are the best," Neville reasoned.
He grinned at me, and we walked to our bedrooms.
I awoke to orange fur.
Spluttering, I dragged my head out from beneath Crookshanks and went to the bathroom to wash the fur off. Once again, I was wincing at the cold of the Warren.
"Oh, honestly," I muttered. The water was freezing cold. "Aestus." Instantly, the pipe began to heat, and the water jetting out now was much warmer.
As far as I could tell, the pipe just went into the ground, but I knew that there wasn't any Muggle plumbing…
I'd investigate it later. For now, I was going to fetch breakfast.
I turned to start the long descent of the stairs, then saw that from this floor down, they were all lined up. This gave me an idea.
"Glisseo. Glisseo. Glisseo," I said excitedly, and soon I had a seven-floor ramp in front of me. "Spongify," I added, softening the wood at the bottom.
Without another thought I jumped onto the ramp, and slid down to breakfast.
Miss Longbottom gave a little shriek when she saw me fly into the room and bounce of wood. I barely had time to say, "Aresto Momentum," to stop myself from breaking a bone.
"Keep on doing that, Miss Granger, and you will give me a heart attack," she admonished, but her eyes twinkled. "Now, you best undo that Slide Charm before my son gets out of bed."
I laughed lightly and turned all of the slides back into stairs.
"Now, I've already taken care of all the morning chores," she began. "And it's Neville's job to do the animals. But I do need someone to make the trip to Ottery St. Catchpole and get me some fruits and some paper. Then we'll all head over to the Burrow for lunch."
"Do you think that Neville and I will be fine so far apart?" I asked with a frown.
"Hmm…" Miss Longbottom said, her eyebrows creasing magnificently to from a single unibrow. "Well, I'll do the animal chores. Take Neville into town with you."
"Thanks, Miss Longbottom," I said gratefully.
"Call me Augusta," she said. "Miss Longbottom makes me feel old."
"But you are old, Gran," a familiar voice said cheekily from up the stairs.
"Why you-" she began, turning red, but then she turned to me and mouthed Glisseo?
I grinned and pointed my wand up the stairs. "Morning, Neville," I said cheerily. "Glisseo."
"WOAAAH!" he yelled, the stairs he stood on explicably becoming fused together.
Both Augusta and I laughed as he slid down all the stairs, building more and more momentum.
At last he reached the bottom where, to my surprise, he grabbed onto my shoulders and took me to the ground with him.
"Not fair!" I protested weakly from the floor.
"Morning, 'Mione," he laughed, and kissed me on the cheek.
"Kisses will get you nowhere," I grumbled, but, alas, they had. I pulled myself up and then helped him.
"You know, I've always thought it's been too easy to get to the top of the Warren," Augusta said seriously. "Maybe I should put a Permanent Slide Charm on all of the stairs."
"Oh Merlin, no," Neville mumbled, and we all broke out into laughter.
Thirty minutes later, Neville and I, dressed in winter clothes with Warming Charms on everything, set out for Stoatshead Hill, crossing the farmland and passing where Augusta was milking a goat. She waved at us, and I could have sworn that the goat flapped it's ear politely as we passed.
The sun was still rising in the dull gray sky, and the clouds were wispy and colorless.
"It's beautiful out here," I said happily, then shivered. Beautiful, but cold.
"Are you alright?" Neville asked worriedly, and I saw him beginning to take off his jacket.
"No, no, I'm fine," I insisted, then leaned into him. As soon as our bodies came into contact with each other, I felt much warmer. He put an arm around me, heating my neck.
The climb up Stoatshead Hill was even steeper than I remembered, but we finally got to the top. Below us on the other side was St. Catchpole Valley, and on the other side the sprawl of the Warren could be seen from a bird's-eye view. If I looked beyond Warren Hill, I could see the trees lining the frozen lake's shore.
"Can you do the Quick-Step for me?" he asked.
"Sure! Double Time," I said, at both of our feet, and soon we were walking briskly down the hillside.
We walked through the quaint village of Ottery St. Catchpole. By now the sun had risen feebly through the clouds, shining a bit of light on everything.
We stopped at a witch's grocery. Mrs. Fawcett, the mother of a girl one year my senior, sold us the fruit, which she enchanted to be as light-weight as possible.
After we fetched the paper that Augusta needed, I darted inside Mrs. Fawcett's house and cast a dozen Disillusionment Charms on the bags. Neville and I used the Pinpointed Banishing Charm, sending the bags back to Augusta.
"Let's head to the Burrow now!" I said excitedly. I would be surprised if Harry, Ginny, and Ron weren't there.
The pace increased as we left the outskirts of Ottery St. Catchpole. As the Burrow came in sight, with a laugh both of us began running for it as fast as we could, like nutters. As we came to the door, I thought about the disconnected, twenty-three floors of the Warren. I loved the Warren, but the Burrow was also special to me.
"Hermione!" Mrs. Weasley cried when she opened the door. "Neville! Come in, dears, everyone's here."
I grinned nervously as I stepped through the threshold, warmth enveloping me. I barely had time to get my coat off before Ginny ran down the stairs and caught me in a bone-crushing hug.
"Hello, Miss Longbottom," she greeted with a wicked smile. Neville turned beet red and looked away.
"Hello yourself, Miss Potter," I replied. "Where is everybody?"
"Right here!" a familiar voice rang out. Dashing down the stairs came Harry, followed by Ron and Luna, who looked suspiciously mussed up. Judging by their facial expressions, the two had just enjoyed a snog.
It didn't hurt me, to my surprise. There was absolutely no way around getting married to Neville, and I was perfectly fine with it. If he kept up kissing the way he had done on the lake, I was more than fine.
We were surrounded by a mass of red hair as the Weasley family led us to the fireplace to warm up. Less than a minute later, Fred - looking slightly bruised still, but not hurt - and George offered a game of Quidditch to Ron, Harry, and Neville.
"I'm referee," Neville said immediately. "You all know I can't fly for a sack of Galleons."
As the boys left outside, Ginny and Luna pulled me upstairs into Ginny's bedroom, where they shut the door and locked it with some spells I had never even heard of before. Ginny warned me that there was a Bat-Bogey Hex rigged on the door for anyone who thought of trying to leave it early.
"Now, spill," Ginny demanded once we were situated on the bed. I cast a Warming Charm on a quilt and pulled it around my shoulders.
"Spill what?" I said innocently.
"You and Neville!" she snorted.
"Yes, do tell. Ever since my fifth year he's been incredibly attractive," Luna said in her trademark dazed tone. I blushed deeply.
"Well, yesterday was our first day out of the hospital," I began.
"Ooh, you two have even less time to get to know each other," Ginny said sympathetically.
"And we're living in the Warren. The bond makes it so that if I'm not near him, I get incredibly lonely. It was really powerful when I first woke up, but now I think that it's worn off a bit."
"I love the Warren," Ginny said happily. "The farmland and the house."
"It kind of reminds me of the Burrow," I said. "Except there are way too many stairs to climb. I used the Slide Charm on some of them to get to breakfast today."
Both laughed.
"So we climbed all the way to the top of the Warren, then raced down to the other side, where there was a lake that Neville's grandmother had frozen nine years earlier-"
"She is a powerful witch," Luna interrupted. "One time, Father wrote an article in the Quibbler that proved one of her theories wrong, and she enchanted all of them to say, 'I'm a load of rubbish'."
Ginny and I exchanged glances. If anything, Augusta was the one who was correct here.
"Well, we went skating on the lake," I continued. "And then we… slow-danced, I guess, across the water. And then he kissed me."
Despite herself, Ginny squealed. "What was it like?"
"Very - very tender," I said, my mind warming at the memory. "Passionate, but delicate and careful."
"I want to see," Ginny demanded, and I arched my eyebrows at her.
"See?"
"Memoria imaginis," Luna said by way of explanation, and a strand of silvery thread left my temple on the tip of her wand.
"Accio Pensieve!" Ginny called, and a stone bowl decorated with rhinestones flew from her closet and onto the bed.
"This is our Girl Pensieve," Ginny explained. "We take all the memories of our time leading up to getting married, and split them in half - I'll do that soon. One half goes back into your mind so that you can keep the memory, and the other goes in the Pensieve."
Ginny carefully ran the tip of her wand over the center of the strand of thought, and Luna took one and placed it back in my mind. Ginny place the other into the Pensieve, while Luna took out three bowls and a small pitcher.
"Watch and learn," Ginny said. She swilled the Pensieve until my memory surface, of skating on the lake. Ginny poured some of the thoughts into her and Luna's bowls, and they plunged into it.
I wondered what else was in here. Despite my better instincts telling me not to, I swilled the contents some more, didn't bother to see what was happening, and plunged my face into the memory.
I was at the lake next to the Burrow, this one unfrozen and burbling slightly. With a sickening lurch I realized that the two figure across the lake were Ron and Luna.
I dashed over to the other side. Could this have been their first kiss?
Luna was sitting with her legs crossed, her hair blowing in the wind. She was pretty, I thought, in her own way. Her hair, untamed from the months of captivity in Malfoy Manor, was beautiful.
"Okay, my turn," Ron said. "Hmm… What's the worst thing that's ever happened to you in your whole life?"
Insensitive git, I thought immediately. Honestly, didn't he see the pain in her eyes when he said that.
"Either when my mother died or when I was being tortured at Malfoy Manor," she whispered.
Tears began to fall from her eyes as she looked away. Wasn't Ron going to say anything to her?
Then, to my surprise, he cupped her chin in his hand and brought her face to face with him. I waited for him to say something comforting.
Instead, he kissed her.
I had seen enough. Turning away from them, I jumped into the air, and instead of falling back down, flew high into the sky, and the memory melted away.
When I arrived back in Ginny's Room, the others were back.
"Which did you see?" Luna asked happily.
"Er - Ginny and Harry's," I invented quickly. Ginny looked at me - she could tell, of course she could.
"LUNCH!" Mrs. Weasley bellowed from downstairs. Just as Ginny and Luna were getting up, I called them back.
"I want you both to know that no matter what, we're going to get through this. And next year, I'm going back to Hogwarts, so I get to be in your class."
Ginny squealed again and gave me an excited hug, but Luna just smiled gratefully at me. She knew which memory I had seen as well.
And she realized that I accepted it.
That was a fun one to write! So, the date of when they visit the Burrow is May 16th, for those who are keeping track. So Hermione and Neville woke up from the Osculum coma on the 15th. Please leave a review and keep enjoying!
