Author's Note: Umm..
Don't know what made me want to do this now, after a year hiatus. :)
It's a quick one, just another filler, but I needed it before I ever move to OOTP. Thanks for still following.
Fred blinked; his vision was fuzzy, his mouth full of cotton. He smacked his lips. His bed had never felt so uncomfortable before…had he fallen off it in the middle of the night? That made sense. He was on the floor.
No, that couldn't be right. The floor was carpeted.
Sitting up and running a confused, dull hand through the roots of his cropped red hair, Fred glanced around to gain his bearings, and the night before came flooding through his mind as though someone had flipped on a light. The certificates and ribbons hanging in neat array on the wall, declaring "First Place", "Top Student", and "Winner" glittered at him, reminding him just whose floor he was strewn across.
His gray eyes shifted to the bed at his left. Already made. Empty. The clothes that had been littered all over creation the night before were stacked in neat squares against the wall.
"Hermione?" Fred called, voice hoarse. He rolled his tired eyes to her petite oak nightstand, and his attention zeroed in on the blinking red letters of her rather strange clock. It was…what would dad call it? Digital? Something like that. The obnoxious numbers screamed at him, pulsing, 10:39, 10:39, 10:39, 10:40.
Leaping up with a strangled curse, Fred tripped across Hermione's room, searching blindly for his shirt and jacket. It was gray and drizzly outside. Bleak…and most certainly foreshadowing Molly Weasley's relentless wrath when he came home. Tomorrow morning was his apparition test- and though studying had hardly been on his agenda for the day, that's what he had told her.
"Bloody…Hermione!" Fred hollered, now desperate. Half dressed and disoriented, he pushed into the modern hallway, thrown even more by the unfamiliarity of its vacuumed beige carpets and its flowery smell, and tumbled right into the wall.
"Oh- oh, good morning!" Hermione shouted from somewhere downstairs. "I was just cooking some breakfast, would you-"
"No time for breakfast!" Fred took the polished stairs three at a time with his long legs and slid a good four feet on the rug at the stairwell's bottom. He twisted about to face her voice and stopped, dumbstruck, to see her wielding a long glass dish full of some sort of savory breakfast casserole in oversized oven mitts. The glass-topped dining table on the other side of the kitchen counter was arranged for a full meal. The glasses full of orange juice were still streaked with beads of fresh condensation. "Oh," was all Fred could say to Hermione's downfallen face.
Hermione quickly drew herself up and set the casserole back atop of the oven, "No, no, don't worry about it. I should have known. You-"
"I have my apparition test tomorrow," he told her simply.
He should have known better than to go that route. Hearing this news, Hermione's lovely brown eyes widened dramatically, and she gasped, covering her mouth with one of her ridiculously huge mitts. "You should have told me!" she scolded. "You should be studying! I would've woken you or, no, better, I would have sent you home! I'm so sorry Fred!" By the scandalized sound of her voice, she would feel personally responsible if he passed his test with less than high marks.
It was this adorably ridiculous side of Hermione that made Fred pause, shirtless, to stare at her. He wanted to breathe her in, taste the loveliness that was her personality, just sit with her on that porch swing he had spied in his ascent to her room last night, anything. He leaned an elbow against the doorframe and smiled as she tried in vain to untie the apron laced around her waist without the use of individual fingers- why she didn't just take the mittens off, he didn't know. It might have something to do with that flustered look she sometimes got around him. He liked that he had that affect on her. Things would hardly be the same if he wasn't keeping her on her toes…after all, that had been his promise to her, in a way.
"Oh, um," Hermione finally met his gaze again. Her face flushed. "Your clothes are in the dryer."
"The huh?"
"In the pantry. Oh, here, I'll show you."
Finally yanking off her mitts, Hermione slid by Fred, careful to avoid any and all contact with him, and opened a sliding wicker door at his back. A large white square device rattled and hummed in the small closet's corner. She stepped to it, pushed a button that paused its noise, and opened a door to reveal his red and gray striped shirt and his jacket, dry and fresh as if his mum had just pulled them off the charmed clothesline with her wand.
Feeling a faint- very faint- trace of guilt, Fred took his clothes from Hermione and with one hand, jerked his shirt down over his head. "Will everything be alright? With your mum and dad?"
"Fine, Fred, just fine," Hermione snapped as she pressed by him, seeming less averse to him now that his bare chest was covered. Fred chuckled when she added, "Now you should hurry. If I had known your test was tomorrow-!"
"Hermione," Fred snatched up her wrist, delighted when her cheeks turned pink again, "you know I'm not going to study. I just don't want mum thinking some Death Eater found me and-" he let his voice wane when the pink of her face lightened to white, and her eyes tightened around their edges, as they only did when she was frightened.
They stared at each other for a long moment. The mention of Death Eaters, the reminder of what was hanging over their heads, a storm cloud waiting to break, was sobering, even to Fred. Not because he worried for himself…in fact, more than anything, he worried for the person about an arm's length away from him. The only one in this moment he could protect.
And yet the moment he walked out her front door…he would have to pretend that that wasn't the case. That Hermione Granger didn't have him completely and totally wound around her wand. Until they returned to Hogwarts and found secret corridors to stroll down again, this was it. He didn't know why, but that thought made him frown. He was rarely a pessimist; he and George were both choosers, they chose to see the best in things, to make light of the dark.
But right now, in his mind, things were very dark. He felt…call him superstitious, but he felt like something was going to happen soon. This year at Hogwarts, things would be different. He didn't know why; maybe it had to do with his and George's booming joke shop business, so promising, making the remainder of his Hogwarts education almost moot. He'd rather it that, than it be something to do with Hermione. With losing her.
In the long pause, he hadn't even realized how close she had scooted to him in her innocent, unassuming way. He could smell her, almost graze the top of her head with the bottom of his chin.
"Friday?" she said quietly, and raised a very hesitant hand, laying it over his heart.
Fred grinned. "Friday." Then, acting on a whim (why not? He and George were good at whims. Weasley Wizard Whims? It had a certain ring to it…but still need tampering before they patented it…), he leaned down, tilted his head sideways, and gently placed his lips to hers, his eyes still open, watching hers for a reaction. Like she was one of the joke shop experiments.
The not-quite-scientific result was…surprising. Hermione's eyes flickered closed, and then her arms were wrapped around his neck, pulling him down to her so quickly that he almost lurched forward. He put his palms on the counter at either side of her and started laughing into the kiss before she could let herself go any further.
"Well well," he said as she embarrassedly pulled back and straightened out the front of her shirt, her face on fire, a bright beacon red. "That does beat studying."
Hermione scowled at that. "It was just...to say…goodbye." Fred felt his face go slack as he registered her words. "I mean, just for a while, Fred. Until we figure things out for good."
"Right." Again with the changing mind thing. Kiss him, then remind him they were waiting. Kiss him, then say goodbye. The girl was like a love potion with a serious looping defect.
"I'm sorry I did that."
"No you aren't."
"I-I guess you're right. But I'm sorry if it hurt you."
"Hurt me? You didn't kiss me that hard."
"You know what I mean, Fred!"
Grinning lopsidedly, Fred shrugged, snatched up a muffin from a basket on the Granger's counter, and jogged out the front door without a backward glance at Hermione's final flustered, "Goodbye, then!"
But this wasn't goodbye, he swore to himself as he headed for the terminal a mile south of the Granger's done-up lot, blinking against the drizzle. He chomped into the muffin before it could get soggy. This was just a warm up in preparation for a full-bodied year of George, the joke shop, and the accidentally-coy Hermione Granger.
And yes; she did have him wrapped completely and totally around her wand.