• CHAPTER II •
Entrapment
"How should I know?" Hermione replied a tad defensively. Everybody always expected her to know everything, and nobody liked it less than her whenever it turned out that she did not. "I didn't get the memo about doors in here being able to go anywhere!"
Harry by then had stepped past Hermione up to the spot that had been their entrance about three hours before and should now function as their exit in much the same way—just in reverse, of course. The sturdy walnut frame of the door in question strikingly remained in place, yet the door it should have held was demonstrably absent. The entire area within the rectangular frame now consisted of perfectly solid stonework, almost as if the former door had been secretly bricked up by a highly professional albeit uncommonly mean-spirited mason while no one was looking.
A highly focused Harry moved his investigative hands over the surfaces of stone and wood alike: probing, testing, trying various things in several spots. He pushed against the rigid, unyielding wall with his palms, knocked on the frame with his knuckles as he leaned in and listened closely, repeated the process in three different spots on the stonework, then hammered on the wall with his fists a couple of times and finally gave the wooden frame a halfhearted kick with the tip of his shoe. Then he turned to Hermione, who had wordlessly been witnessing his efforts with one most skeptical eyebrow arched up high.
"Well," he assessed, "guess that's that."
Rolling her eyes at him, Hermione procured her wand and deftly pushed herself past Harry, which was hardly necessary for he was fully willing to step aside, but since the maneuver nevertheless fulfilled its dramatic purpose everybody was okay with it. She straightened herself, closed her eyes as she took a long, deep breath which she sharply blew out through puckered lips, then promptly and proficiently proceeded to cast one spell after another at the wall in front of her, more than half of which Harry had personally never even heard of.
Sometimes there appeared evanescent tendrils of variably colored light at the tip of the wand, fizzling out in the air before really getting anywhere. Other times a few sparks could even be seen bouncing off the markedly unimpressed wall, but for the most part there really wasn't anything at all to write home about. After multiple attempts at a handful of spells, Hermione's commendable composure slowly but surely began to deteriorate. After a dozen increasingly obscure incantations that followed her initial array, at the midpoint of which the last vestiges of said composure had finally given way to a dour flavor of determination, she was left only with the decidedly un-magical version of disenchantment that even Muggles are all too familiar with.
In conclusion to her fruitless efforts, Hermione weakly breathed a glum little whiff of sigh that quite expressively was half exhaustion and half frustration. Crestfallen, with fittingly drooping shoulders, she stated in a dejected monotone, "This is an exceedingly sobering development."
Harry gave her sad-looking shoulder a gentle little squeeze. "There, there," he intoned with unconcealed merriment in his demeanor. "We both tried our best."
Despite her sour mood Hermione gave a small chuckle, a bit pitiful in both volume and duration, but not in the least insincere.
"Maybe we should try something a bit more persuasive, in case you haven't done so already," Harry eventually suggested after a thoughtful pause. Hermione gave him a questioning look, and upon catching it he felt compelled to elaborate, "A taste of the more violent variety of magic, perhaps. Uncivilized, I know. But I doubt the Gandhi approach is going to get us very far in this particular case. If anything, it's the wall that's pulling a Gandhi on us."
"Are you suggesting something like an explosive spell?" Hermione ventured to infer. She slowly shook her head even as she was still mulling over the idea. "If we go all Bombarda Maxima on that flipping wall... assuming it even works at all, which is virtually impossible to say with this Room... if we end up blowing the actual outer wall into a pile of dust and pebbles, not only would we be declaring open house for the Room of Requirement to the entire school, we'd be handing it over to Dolores Umbridge and her happy little Gestapo fan club. Assuming, once again, the Room wouldn't simply stop working or even cease to be entirely."
"And so much for the D.A.," Harry concluded gloomily. "You're right, we can't risk that. Not unless we start starving in here, anyway."
Hermione stared at him with circular eyes, a trifle horrified at this unsettling prospect so casually uttered.
"Hypothetically speaking," he hurriedly amended. "I'm just saying controlled demolition should be our last resort. Obviously. So I'm basically agreeing with you. Right? Seriously, nobody is starving in here, of course. Who even brings up this kind of nonsense…" He awkwardly cleared his throat and switched his attention back to the wall that should be a door, absently scratching one of the large dark gray bricks with his thumbnail.
"What about the good old-fashioned Muggle way?" he asked almost incidentally, if only to veer off anything starvation-related.
Hermione's left eyebrow once more spoke of politely understated disbelief. "Are you saying you want to dig your way out of here?"
Harry noncommittally shrugged his shoulder and mumbled, "I dunno," as he abashedly kept scratching away at the wall, a well-wrought operation through and through which had so far resulted in exactly zero measurable effect on the stone but already a tiny dent of abrasion on the nail of his right thumb.
"Well, be my guest and grab a spoon," Hermione told him as she turned away from the hopeless scene. "In the meantime, however, I shall keep looking for a way to get us out of here before my eleventy-first birthday, if that's all right with you."
"In the library, I assume," Harry quipped quite innocently.
"D'you have a better idea?" Hermione snapped at him as she whirled around on her heels. Her expression softened even in the split second it took for Harry to raise his hands in a pacifying gesture. "Sorry," she ruefully offered. She rubbed the bridge of her nose with her fingertips and took a deep, calming breath. "I think I'm a bit on edge here. This is just a very perplexing turn of events and right now I don't even have the foggiest idea what's going on, which, as you know, is a state of affairs I'm generally not too fond of."
Harry smiled at her sympathetically.
"And frankly," Hermione added with her hands stemmed into her hips, "I'm a bit alarmed. This is an alarming situation, wouldn't you agree?" She scrutinized him for a moment, switched her hands to her elbows and then right back to her hips. "You don't look very alarmed to me."
He laughed, therewith unintentionally emphasizing the impression. "Well, so far I'd argue that we've found ourselves in a couple more alarming situations before. Now, if I had only Ron for company I might be a bit more worried, but since it's you I'm stuck with in here, I can't help but feel fairly optimistic about our chances of finding a way out of this pickle eventually."
At that she too had to smile, with a coinciding dash of color on her cheeks. "Your trust in me is flattering," she said, though already her expression darkened. "I only wish I could share it." With a sigh she turned away and set off for the library. "I'll see what I can find."
"Yeah," Harry mumbled with Hermione striding down the corridor. "I'll just..." He halfheartedly gestured towards the wall behind him. "Keep digging, I guess." He gave the cold, hard stone another two or three alibi scratches, then shook his head at his own silliness and instead elected to follow Hermione on her habitual quest for literary enlightenment.
~•~
Enlightenment proved elusive. The hours had ticked on by largely unnoticed as the last color of day seeped out of the rapidly darkening sky, with what could only be presumed to be a fake winter sun setting early on a sham horizon way beyond the phony windows. Eventually Harry had lit candles, oil lamps and chandeliers in the library and the study with a few flicks of his wand as Hermione kept poring over tome on top of tome and perusing scroll after scroll, her weary mind staunchly rejecting surrender, her tired eyes refusing to lose focus. He did his part in the research, too—whenever he didn't get distracted by funny book titles, that is.
The first couple of hours had in waning daylight been spent reordering all the books that could be found on the many shelves in the library, the living room and the study—Harry had barely been able to keep Hermione from including the handful of cookbooks from the kitchen as well ("But my system!")—into two primary categories: those to which Hermione ascribed little to no probability of containing anything pertaining to the Room of Requirement or their inconvenient predicament therein, and those that—if they were lucky (which they were not)—just might.
So for the most part they were really just separating fiction from nonfiction, although a considerable number of textbooks covering fields deemed altogether unrelated to their problem—such as botany, human sexuality and Muggle artifacts—ended up contributing to the growing volume of the venerable piles of Lewis Carroll, Victor Hugo and Fyodor Dostoevsky as well.
As it turned out, however, when it came to information about the Room of Requirement there really was little to no discernible difference between Devices of Magic: An Encyclopedia of Practical Enchantments and The Importance of Being Earnest. Disappointment peaked when even Wilbur Pipkin's semi-seminal Everything You Didn't Need To Know About Magic left them without answers to any questions they would ever have thought to ask.
The clock's shortest hand was approaching VIII when Hermione collapsed—much to her credit for the first time, yet with grave finality—somewhere atop the 1753 pages of Ancient Secrets of the Arcane: All of Them.
"Persistence is futile," she groaned into her crossed arms, her exasperation muffled but nonetheless unequivocal.
Harry, roused from an uneven doze by the sudden commotion, his elbow adequately supported by the soft leather binding of The Many Misadventures of Walpurga the Wanton Witch, blinked himself back into a state of rudimentary mental presence. Incidentally becoming aware of the title of the book that had served as his makeshift armrest, he was at first thoroughly confused and then, once realization truly set in, embarrassed enough to freeze mid-yawn. As he inconspicuously shoved the potentially incriminating reading material aside, he turned his sluggish attention to the rather voluminous entanglement of hair that currently was most of what he could see of Hermione.
"Nothing?" he asked her while involuntarily finishing his earlier aborted yawn.
"Absolutely nothing," she enunciated in affirmation, coming back up to look at him with a dozen wayward locks of hair dangling in front of her face and sticking out around her head in the most haphazard knots, crooked angles and frazzled ringlets. "Not even the tiniest, most minuscule mite of information. In hundreds of books, notes and records spanning centuries of magical studies and arcane theory... not so much as a single, bloody word even remotely connected to anything that could possibly be of any help to us in this inconceivably ridiculous situation."
Harry nodded away pensively as he listened to her string together all those pretty syllables, his eyes wandering over the countless heaps and clusters of books and scrolls already discarded or yet to be picked up, surrounding them not just on the desktop but the study's limited floor space as well. It was a bleak, bloodless battlefield devoid of any victor.
"So who's hungry?"
Hermione frowned at him, her brow crinkled sternly. "This is not funny, Harry."
"I know," he readily agreed. "I'm famished!"
She regarded him with her head tilted to one side, supporting it with a loose fist at her cheek. "You sound like Ron."
"He's not the only one with a stomach, you know?" Harry had her consider. "Though he might be the only human being with two or three."
That at least earned him as much as a vague hint of a wan sort of smile in the smallest part of a corner of Hermione's lips. A success if there ever was one.
"Maybe we have to think outside the box, here," he tried a different approach to cheering up his dejected friend.
"I am so tired of that damned box I just wanna burn it to ashes at this point," Hermione grumbled into a beard she'd never have.
"Yeah, uhm, before we do finally try our hands at advanced pyrotechnics," Harry kept maneuvering through the human minefield in front of him, "maybe we just have to expand our search a little. Dare to tread off the beaten path, so to speak."
"Harry, dear... I'm lucky my brain has managed to retain its basic capacity to compute language right now, so will you just please get to the point already? Assuming there is one."
Harry cleared his throat. This was one exceptionally stroppy Hermione Granger he was dealing with. "Well, I mean... so far we've limited our research to proper textbooks, right? Strictly nonfiction. The serious stuff. Cold hard facts, formulas and diagrams, and—" Noticing Hermione's torpid, half-lidded eyes on him made him squirm in his seat. Again he cleared his throat. "Well, what I'm trying to say is that perhaps, since apparently there's simply no textbook in the world mentioning the Room of Requirement or anything of a similar nature in as much as a parenthesis—"
Was she even still awake? Judging by her expression and the way she was glaring either at or through him with rigid eyes, she was either halfway off to dreamland or plotting his untimely demise. One of the two, surely. "Well, what about fiction by wizarding authors that revolves around roughly comparable situations?" No reaction. Except for that one strand of hair that slipped and tumbled from a whole disheveled bundle of hair at the side of her head. "Like that one novel that Ginny told me about a couple of weeks ago? I'm pretty sure I saw it around here somewhere."
He looked around for a moment. The book in question did not spontaneously pop up, oddly enough. "About this poor sod, you see, wrongly convicted for the murder of his wife... wait, that's actually a bit of a major spoiler right there. But you know Ginny, eh? Can't talk about a book without giving away every last detail, right?" He ejected an awkward bark of a laugh that got stuck somewhere at the back of his throat. Hermione just kept staring at him, her face a mien of ebullient catatonia. "Much like myself, apparently."
Some additional throat-clearing was in order. "So, anyway... the bloke gets a life sentence and is thrown into Azkaban, but eventually he manages to escape. Another... spoiler right there. He, uh, doesn't do it like Sirius, I think, though I suspect that's where the author got his inspiration." Hermione took an audible breath and chewed on her bottom lip for a bit. Not much to work with, but at least something. "So... long story short, uh... the book's basically about escaping from a magical prison." He paused. Waited. Nothing. "As in... a place without any obvious way of... exiting. The place." Some gesticulations for the purpose of illustration. "If you... if you take my meaning."
For a moment longer Hermione didn't move a muscle, probably not even to breathe, and just when Harry was on the verge of blabbering himself even further into his embarrassment she took a really deep breath in preparation for some long-expected verbal expression. "Even though I can't help but doubt," she stated, "that David Kellan's newest bestselling piece of literary nonsense is going to get us out of here—and I would be somewhat insulted if it did—the underlying idea isn't entirely awful, I suppose."
"Well, that's... nice to hear," Harry abashedly mumbled, at which genuine emotion within an instant returned to Hermione's fatigued features as she put a consoling hand lightly on his arm.
"It's honestly the best idea we have right now," she told him in earnest, then paused for a contemplative moment. "Though truth be told, it's also the only one."
They shared an unnecessarily subdued bout of laughter, as if there were anyone around they had to take care not to disturb with all their vespertine ado. "I know it's not great," Harry admitted, "but right now I really can't think of anything else."
"Me neither," said Hermione, her eyes momentarily fixed on Harry's hand on top of her own, slightly yet noticeably bigger and certainly stronger than hers, but warm and soft and gentle too, resting there with his thumb moving slowly back and forth above her wrist...
She cleared her throat and discreetly retracted the affected hand, adroitly proceeding to use it for an alibi scratch of her completely itch-free neck. When via touch she suddenly became aware of the wildly protruding parts of that unmitigated disaster on top of her head, and being reasonably horrified at the discovery, she even found an honest use for aforementioned hand and ran it through her hair twice or thrice in lieu of a proper comb or maybe a lawn mower.
"Let's get to it then, shall we," she then announced, her enthusiasm perhaps exaggerated, but her single-minded determination to study, glean and cogitate even more unquestionably sincere. Disturbingly so.
"Hey," Harry made her halt midway through her standing up, putting his hand gently on her arm in an almost perfect reciprocation of her previous gesture. Dropping back down onto her seat her eyes went first to his hand and then along the length of his arm to his face, puzzled but expectant. "How about... tomorrow?"
Whatever transpired on her face in response was evidently sufficient to prompt him to continue, "You need some rest, Hermione. And something to eat. We both do. I'm not sure if you remember at this point, but my first great idea of the day was the one that got us into this place with the intention of providing us with a sort of retreat in which to kick back and unwind. And now look at you."
He laughed softly as he was indeed looking at her, and in its entirety his demeanor struck Hermione as well-nigh overwhelmingly... affectionate? No, that couldn't be it. He could barely refrain from laughing, that was it. She couldn't help but fear that her improvised hair-combing hadn't really helped at all and was most likely even contributing to his amusement. "You're even more knackered than before," he concluded, still smiling with that strange and yet simultaneously so familiar look in his eyes. "Mission accomplished, Mr Potter. Fantastic work, as always."
Her lips spread into a smile of their own. "Don't be so hard on yourself. Neither of us could've foreseen this. And I'm fairly sure we specifically asked the Room for a vacation, not for incarceration."
Harry chuckled. "Eh. Diagon Alley, Knockturn Alley... these arcane devices really seem to have a hard time telling one word from the other." A sudden, subtle little spark in his eyes seemed to be the harbinger of another one of his phenomenal ideas. "Say, why don't you give that bathtub a try that you've been secretly daydreaming about this whole time while pretending to do your research here—" She gave his upper arm a feeble but well-deserved slap, "—while I see what I can put together in the kitchen for us. I think I've got a couple of decent dishes in my repertoire, if I do say so myself. The unexpected upside of years of child labor at Privet Drive."
"I could help you with that," Hermione offered on the spot.
He looked at her appreciatively. "I have no doubt you could," he assured her. "But in this particular case I'd really like you to let me do this while you... relax, Mione. Just please allow yourself some rest. I know you're worried, but we'll figure this out soon enough. We'll need some energy for it, though. So... come on. Let's rest for a little while and tomorrow we'll get right back to it." He looked at his vacillant friend beseechingly, then gave her a start when all of a sudden he grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her playfully with some well-measured force. "Will you just relax already, woman! The power of Merlin compels you! Relax!"
Hermione giggled and laughed out loud as she tried to wriggle herself out of his grasp with something of a faux effort. "Okay, okay," she finally gave in to all the violent coercion. "I'll do it!" Then she assumed the grave appearance of some poor, forsaken soul who's about to take on the most unendurable of burdens, and carried on a sigh of unadulterated misery fatalistically exhaled, "I'll take a nice hot bubble bath, if I must..."
They grinned at each other, rather satisfied with their own spontaneous comedic routine. When Hermione went on to stretch her limbs and torso with a squeaky sort of noise somewhere at the back of her throat, her back arched and her arms long and straight above her head, Harry—after a moment of significant struggle—forcefully tore his eyes away from the shape (and shapes) of her general chest area that was thereby accentuated in all the right ways, which was so very wrong for him to notice. Unfortunately it was the front cover of The Many Misadventures of Walpurga the Wanton Witch that his fugitive eyes ended up on instead, and pursing his lips he closed his eyes and fended off all the unbidden thoughts that for some annoying reason insisted on coming his way, none of which revolved around a wanton witch named Walpurga...
"Tomorrow then," Hermione's voice delivered him from his inner quandary. She yawned against the back of her hand. "So we're really spending the night in here, huh? This is so ridiculous..."
Harry gave a shrug as he rose from his chair at the side of the desk, its backrest turned towards the window which with night's darkness now unfolded beyond seemed almost like a mirror to the world contained inside. "Doesn't look like much of a matter of choice, does it?"
Hermione nodded her head, her expression careworn. "We're going to be in big trouble once we get out of here. If we ever get out of here..."
"Trouble, shmouble," Harry waved her concerns off, holding out his hand for her which after a second's bemused delay she somewhat sheepishly took. "When we get out of here," he said as he helped her to her feet, "it's going to be that nasty she-devil in pink who's going to be in trouble."
He followed Hermione as she deftly navigated the labyrinth of stacked books and piled scrolls on their short but serpentine and surprisingly difficult journey to the door, listening to her lament about missed classes, failed assignments and abysmal grades.
"I don't think missed classes amount to very much when your school has largely devolved into a totalitarian re-education camp," Harry reminded her as he stepped past a knee-high pile of books deemed by Hermione to be extraordinarily unhelpful but nevertheless potentially interesting in an unrelated sort of way.
"Indeed," said Hermione. "I believe the only thing I learned all year is that common sense is an oxymoron."
She stopped abruptly on the threshold and turned on her heels, almost bumping right into Harry—or having him bump right into her, or whichever way around all the bumping had almost transpired. Flustered, it took her blundering tongue a moment to get the proper words rolling that her brain had sent its way.
"W-we should really, ah, clean this mess up a bit, don't you think—"
Harry took a rather expressive sort of breath, all but rendering his following words superfluous. "Tomorrow, right?"
Hermione hesitated, still railing against her tragic fate. "Right," she agreed at last, crossing the hallway in a purposeful stride. "Alright, alright. Some serious recuperation is in order. Time to witness a true master at the art of procrastination at work, folks." She turned around to face him again after she had made about two decreasingly determined steps into the bathroom, biting her bottom lip. "And... and you're sure you'll be fine making dinner while I'm in here being completely useless?"
Harry perked an eyebrow. "Will you be fine being completely useless for just a little while?"
Standing there with one hand still holding onto the door, Hermione's strife was written plainly across her face and the last remaining word in the once copious vocabulary of her body language was indecision.
Laughing with sheer disbelief, Harry stepped towards her and gently shoved her farther into the bathroom. "For the love of Merlin, girl, will you just take that bath andrelaxalready?!"
"B-but—"
"No buts but your butt in that tub! Shoo! Shoo, I say!"
Hermione naturally protested in this way or another, which Harry pointedly ignored on his way out until she finally succeeded in making him pause with a simple but effective, "Harry, wait!" He narrowed his eyes at her with only his head sticking through the gap of the door. "How long should I—"
"Take your time," he told her much in the manner of a psychotherapist in session. "An hour at least. Longer if you like. I'll call you when dinner's ready. Just... just re—"
"Relax," she completed his mantra with a sheepish smile. "I get it."
"Took you long enough," Harry mumbled as he pulled the door shut.
"I beg your pardon?" was the last indignant utterance he heard from her.
"Relax!" he yelled as he jauntily made his way down the corridor towards the kitchen, grinning at the mostly unintelligible rejoinder she sent his way. With one leg in the kitchen a thought entered his mind, and he leaned back to throw a glance down the hallway into the dimness at its far end to see whether the exit by now had perhaps reappeared of its own acco—no, no it had not. Very well, then. The kitchen it was. If the Room of Requirement was set on becoming their own personal Room of Retirement, he had better learn his way around the kitchen.
He unhurriedly looked around for a while, scouring shelves, cupboards and compartments for promising ingredients and the required utensils, taking his time to find his bearings in this as yet unfamiliar workplace. Taking inventory he found that starvation really wouldn't be a problem for them for quite some time. He had likely never seen this much food in one place outside of a grocery store, which made him wonder somewhere at the back of his mind where exactly the Room even got all this food or whether it created it all itself. Was that possible? Or did it just steal it all straight from the Hogwarts kitchens? Could it do that? And what would Dobby have to say about that?
With a glance at his watch—it was now quarter past eight—Harry decided to settle for something quick and simple, though what exactly that would entail he did not yet know. Pasta was always good, and thereby inspired he soon had gathered olive oil, garlic and onions on the center counter. When in search of something meatier (like, say, meat) he was rummaging through the frozen foods—which in the wizarding world often came in special spell-retaining packaging which kept the contents frozen for days before an average run-of-the-mill freezing spell would have to be reapplied—he realized something was amiss. Where indeed were his glasses?
While his myopia certainly posed less of a problem for this kind of activity compared to the alternative hyperopia, affected by which only the far end of any given noodle would appear sharp and clear to him, doing any kind of handiwork—especially the kind involving sharp objects—with impaired vision was hardly ever advisable.
Surmising he had probably taken off his glasses somewhere around Walpurga the Wanton Witch (and on some distant tangent he wondered whether that specific book might by any chance be illustrated), Harry left the kitchen and made a beeline for the study. Swiftly down the hallway he strode, heading right for the door to his left, which unlike the one to his right was obviously the right one to go for.
Only it really turned out to be not at all the right one in the most momentous way imaginable, which is why Harry's entire body—from the first sinew to the last and tiniest of bones—froze suddenly and utterly with one foot on the threshold and his hand still on the curved silver door handle, his eyes dangerously close to popping out of their sockets and his lower jaw helplessly relenting to the combined forces of gravity and incredulity.
~•~
"Yeah, you... you watch it, mister!" Hermione clumsily yelled after him, then shook her head at herself. Fortunately there was a good chance Harry hadn't even been able to clearly make out any of that, so to him her pitiful retort had most likely sounded very impressive and intimidating. Which was obviously why he was retreating. She sure showed him!
With her fingers pressed lightly against her lips Hermione cleared her throat, self-conscious and embarrassed despite being all by herself. One of her more impressive talents, surely.
Silence descended heavily around her as she stood there almost right in the very center of the room, still riveted to the exact same spot Harry had left her in like she was now some ornamental part of the furnishing, which was probably not quite in line with his intentions. With her hands loosely entwined in front of her, Hermione warily glanced about her surroundings like an introverted kid left at kindergarten for the first time by its inexcusably neglectful parents. It took her a couple of seconds to become self-aware enough to feel appropriately silly about it, too.
It might in her defense be said that the room did possess a somewhat peculiar aura, which indubitably contributed its part to that subliminal sense of discomfiture Hermione couldn't quite shake off. While it was by no means a cold or uninviting environment, although the air was indeed a bit cool despite all the candles illuminating it so warmly, it all nevertheless seemed a bit strange somehow. Not unsettling, per se, but strange.
It was difficult to put her finger on what precisely it was. To a certain extent her latent unease could surely be explained with the simple fact that she was in an environment she was as yet unaccustomed to and which lacked the reassuring comfort of the familiar and the known—something Hermione had always struggled with more than most. But now that she came to think of it, virtually the same could be said for pretty much the entirety of the accommodations the Room of Requirement had come up with at their request. It all seemed to be comprised of more or less familiar things which had merely been rearranged in an unfamiliar manner. It was all so oddly eclectic, and yet... not.
From one second to the next Hermione's full attention was drawn to the bathtub, the glorious sight of which alone was enough to whisk her away from her fruitless ruminations and all that bothersome trepidation. It almost seemed to call out to her in a decidedly figurative, non-eerie sort of way, which was not exactly a matter of course at Hogwarts, and Hermione had to admit to herself that the prospect of making herself comfortable in that sloping ceramic embrace was an immensely appealing one.
Much to her surprise she found all the items and accessories she could possibly require for the whole endeavor—towels, sponges and brushes of various shapes and sizes as well as a nice selection of bath additives—neatly arranged on a small round side table positioned next to the head end of the tub itself for easy access from within. To this minor mystery at least she got an answer as soon as she noticed the book waiting for her on top of the two white towels—The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, which she had been reading in her leisure time for a couple of days now—and, even more tellingly, the piece of parchment sticking out from between its pages. Her face spread into an absolutely irrepressible smile the moment she held the note in her hand, reading:
This better be a relaxing book, missy. Nipples on the front cover are always a good sign, of course, but the blurb is a bit suspicious. Please don't tell me this is even more cerebral stuff with which you choose to take a break from school and all that other cerebral stuff you read all day. Remember: when your eyes get tired, closing them for a little while may not be the worst course of action. Give it a try sometime, will you? By the way, I wrote this entire note while I was sitting right next to you and you didn't even look up once to ask what the hell I was doing. Ha, you just glanced at me and still didn't catch it! And yes, all of this was my plan all along. Except for the part where we got trapped in here, that is. But that's neither here nor there. Just a minor detail, really.
Anyway. Let's forget about all that for a while, shall we? Just get in that tub and... enjoy. We'll be fine, you and I. That's a promise.
See you at dinner,
Harry
If possible Hermione's smile was even wider when she finished than it had been when she had started. She couldn't remember taking a breath and yet her lungs were filled with air. Her heart seemed to be dancing inside her breast. She absently shook her head as her eyes flickered back and forth from one line to another, in her mind incoherently repeating this segment or that—his valediction alone three times over. An airy, quiet giggle escaped her nose. With her face still aglow she carefully put the note back between the pages of the book, this time in the spot where she knew she previously had left off. She didn't normally use bookmarks for her pleasure reading since she rarely had trouble remembering her progress even while still in the middle of multiple books, but this one she'd gladly be reminded of every time she opened it back up.
"Okay, then," she thought to herself with a freshly kindled sense of purpose, "let's forget all about the fact that right now we are trapped in a magical holiday chalet, push away the anticipation of the potentially dire consequences that await us on our uncertain return into the outer world, and just get started on all this relaxation business. How hard can it be, really? Just turn off that buzzing mind of yours... for which in sixteen years you've never found the corresponding switch... and off we go to Lazy Land."
Step one, she thought, should be to decide on one of the three additives Harry had chosen to present her with. Again she had to smile, then blush a little and finally eject a snort while looking through the assortment of glass bottles. The first two candidates turned out to be Carnal Caress and Silken Seduction from the popular L'élégance d'Emmanuelle line of cosmetics, initiated over four decades ago by illustrious Beauxbatons alum Emmanuelle Beaumont, ze most voluptuous vitch of 'er time. Their bottles were artfully sculpted in subtle curves vaguely reminiscent of the female physique, humbly promising in their own words not merely a sensually fulfilling bathing experience but nothing short of a woman's rediscovery of the infinite vastness of her own sexuality. Hermione peripherally mused if by any chance Miss Beaumont might also have a corresponding toothpaste on offer. Lastly, to slickly round things off, there was an in comparison strikingly ungainly, almost globular little bottle of Bertie Bott's Bombastic Bubble Bath, which sported laughing toddlers floating on enormous glittering bubbles around the brashly colorful logo.
While the frisky toddlers were the obvious front runner at first glance, Hermione—despite her initial reservations—found the heady aroma of Silken Seduction rather tantalizing, in an I want to smell like that sort of way. Surely she, Hermione "Plain Jane" Granger, could hardly be considered the target consumer of L'élégance d'Emmanuelle, but she simply could not help herself: she really wanted to smell like that!
Step two then, reasonably enough, was probably to take off her clothes, which she went on to do in a perfectly natural and casual fashion, just like any normal person would. She got to the third button of her white school uniform shirt before her mind resumed its buzzing. Why did it feel so weird to doff her things and expose herself like this in the striking absence of anyone she could possibly expose herself to? She couldn't remember the last time she had felt this self-conscious during the entirely mundane act of undressing, disregarding her general propensity for unceasing self-consciousness. She was alone in the room, everything was fine, there was nobody there. There was just Harry on the other side of the wall, a couple of meters away from her as the owl flies, and that thoughtful, wonderful note of his right next to her, which said, 'Hey you,' and, 'I like you,' and, 'I think about you... in that bathtub...'
"Oh, stop it!" her mind angrily buzzed away. "It doesn't say that anywhere in there. I know because I've actually read it. What's gotten into you, anyway? Nothing's changed. Everything's normal. And it's a bit early for a case of cabin fever. Get a hold of yourself, girl! You're behaving like some hormonal teenager. Which you're obviously not. No hormones in this cutting-edge organism right here. Nuh-nuh-nuh—no, sir!"
To her credit the sheer lunacy of her own demonstrably derailed train of thought gave Hermione sudden pause.
"I need help," she concluded out loud and immediately set forth to proceed with the proceedings, determined to be deterred no longer. This laughably trivial relaxation endeavor would pose no challenge to some trademark Granger focus. And that was really all it took, wasn't it? Leisure was an act of will, is what it was.
One, two, three, away with the shirt; hips to, hips fro and down went her trousers. Right foot, left foot—feet freed from socks; ob-la-di, ob-la-da, gone was her bra. At this point her knickers were little more than an afterthought, so away they went in one fell swoop. Daredevil that she was, she grabbed her discarded clothes and marched over to the door that connected the bathroom to the bedroom without wrapping a towel around her body first. Through it she went and soon thereafter all of her things came to rest—tidily arranged and properly folded, of course—on the smooth duvet of the four-poster bed.
Back to the bathroom she went, by now skipping from tile to tile on tiptoe since the floor was rather cold and things were getting a bit chilly around here in general with all the reckless nudity. Maybe step two would have made for a better step three, all things considered. Then again, she had always preferred to let most of the water into the tub only after stepping into it herself, relishing the sound of the running water and its warmth slowly rising to engulf her, gradually banishing the goosebumps on her skin. Her mother called her a masochist for that alone; she in turn called her mother a bathroom bigot. Her father preferred a quick shower; both women in the Granger household had in female unanimity branded him a philistine.
As Hermione grabbed the bottle of Silken Seduction to check the instructions on the back for the recommended dosage, she absently started humming the bass line of Take My Breath Away for no reason apparent to anyone in attendance. Still scanning the back of the bottle for some actually useful information she leaned over the tub and reached for the two taps, adjusting them back and forth a little until the water temperature seemed right to her experienced bath-taker's hand. Still humming away and wondering with the Muggle-part of her brain just how exactly the plumbing would work in a room that could change its entire configuration at a moment's notice, she pushed the stopper into the drain and finally poured exactly two bottle caps filled with Mademoiselle Beaumont's preposterously overpriced additif pour le bain into the rising water as per instruction, finishing with a sweeping flourish truly worthy of sensually silken sexuality nonsense.
"Turning and returning, to some secret place to hide..." Hermione started to sing under her breath as she watched the last couple of drops of the additive hit the turbulent water and spread like plum-colored clouds in a translucent sky, soon blending into all the other clouds of color until the liquid sky was spotlessly painted in pastel purple. Then she raised one leg over the tub's curved rim to cautiously dip-dip-dip her toes into the hot water, and satisfied with her findings stepped inside in earnest, one leg after the other.
"Watching in slow motion as you turn to me and say..." she continued singing, her voice now growing bolder against the constant rushing of the water. With her eyes still scanning the ingredients printed in tiny letters on the bottle in her hands, she slowly turned around, lost in song and sensation, with the intention of putting said bottle back onto the side table next to its kind.
And she inhaled deeply all the air required to properly intone the chorus, which was obviously the right thing to do at this precise point in time. It did, however, not go quite the way songwriter Tom Whitlock had originally intended it, as what she actually ended up singing—screaming!—was, "Take my breath a-WUUUAAAAAAH!"
~•~
The high-pitched shriek bursting from Hermione's throat, further amplified by the considerable reverb in the marbled room and the domed ceiling above, was so ear-piercingly loud and shrill that Harry's brain went rattling as if somebody had just hit a pair of clash cymbals right between his eyes, which at the very least served to jerk him out of his prolonged stupor. He opened his mouth—no, wait, that was already agape—clonk! The bottle of Silken Seduction that Hermione had inadvertently sent flying high after a brief but tumultuous journey made landfall on the crimson chenille bathmat in front of the tub, miraculously surviving the impact unscathed. Harry shut his mouth with the honest intention of opening it right back up in order to speak, but it all happened so fast there was hardly any time to complete even one of the tasks.
"Harry, no!" Hermione leapfrogged any desperate attempt at verbalization he could have undertaken, still about an impressive octave or two above her usual pitch. "What are you doing?!"
Her face, turning scarlet faster than the water had been tinted purple, was contorted with rivaling amounts of sheer dismay and utter disbelief. "What the—bloody—oh my—" Her panic seemingly doubling by the second, Hermione struggled to cover her shame with one arm across her breasts and the other seeking the best angle to cover the entire rest of her body while her legs were close to morphing into one, but she soon found that there was simply too much shame to cover for one person and she sure as hell wasn't going to ask anyone for help!
"What am I doing?!" she wailed despairingly in between uncoordinated readjustments of appendages, finally dropping down into the tub with her knees wrapped in her arms and drawn protectively up to her chest. She put her chin on top of them just to be sure.
Harry, meanwhile, was still staring, standing there like fated Actaeon happening upon Artemis laving her unblemished self. Hopefully with divergent and slightly less fatal consequences, but at this stage of the unfolding calamity it was anything but certain. Why was he still staring? Where was he staring? Right now his eyes appeared to be fixed on that violently discarded bottle on the bathmat for some obscure reason. What kind of idiot was he? Hello? These were among the forefront of the many questions he should have been asking himself at that particularly peculiar moment in time, if his brain had only been capable of assembling even a single string of coherent meaning.
"Why are you still standing there?" Hermione practically screamed at him, adding another solid question to the list. "Get out already!"
Harry at last managed to find something resembling his own voice and forthwith sent his tongue tumbling over itself, "Ahdidnmeanto—"
"GET OUT!"
"Okay, okay!" Retreat, retreat! "I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" Redundancy, redundancy!
He swept out of the room and pulled the door shut more forcefully than intended, which made it sound kind of angry the way the nuanced language of doors is widely understood.
"Sorry!" he yelled, leaning against the door with both his hands. He exhaled a long, noisy breath through puffed cheeks as his forehead also met the wood between his hands with a thud not quite as soft as hoped. He wasn't sure he had ever seen her so furious with him...
"I didn't do it on purpose, Hermione," he added. "I have no idea what happened, you have to—"
"I really don't want to talk about it right now," Hermione's reply cut him off. "Please just leave me alone for a while, will you?"
Harry grunted with frustration, pulling at his hair with both his hands until it hurt a little. Usually when he messed up this badly he preferred to have at least some faint clue of what exactly had happened. "Okay," he said and, "I'm sorry," he whispered against that most treacherous of doors. He at least believed himself...
With an exasperated groan he pushed himself off the door—that stupid door!—and crossed the hallway with a couple of grimly determined steps. He would simply get his glasses, get back to the kitchen and get working on those noodles. It was all about getting, apparently.
He angrily flung the door open with his mind more or less focused on the task at hand and not at all on naked Hermiones, and he headed straight for the desk where he was sure he had left his gla—
"ARE YOU FUCKING INSANE?!" Hermione screamed at him like a foul-mouthed banshee unleashed, stumbling dangerously, sliding squeakily, almost falling back into the tub she had just been leaning out of to grope for the bottle on the bathmat, which was now sent flying across the room into a wall-mounted cabinet containing stacks of towels that made for another most probability-defying landing. "WHAT THE HELL HAS GOTTEN INTO YOU? THIS IS NOT FUNNY, HARRY JAMES POTTER!"
Uh-oh! First advanced expletives and now the middle name...
"But I—I—" Harry James Potter swiveled round and round, back to the door through which he had actually left the bathroom just a moment ago and which he could so clearly see through the door through which he had just reentered the very same room, back to Hermione, pointing, flailing, gesticulating. "I don't know what's going on! I went through the other door! The one that should've led into the bathroom before but didn't!"
"BUT YOU'RE IN THE BATHROOM! AGAIN!"
"Yes, I'm keenly aware of that, but what I meant—"
"DON'T YOU DARE GET FLIPPANT WITH ME NOW! I SWEAR, IF I HAD MY WAND AT HAND... !"
Harry gulped. "It's not my fault! If all the bloody doors in this place suddenly lead into the bathroom, there's nowhere else for me to go!"
"What. Are. You. TALKING ABOUT?!"
"I've been trying to get into the study but—"
"WILL YOU STOP LOOKING AT ME AND TURN AROUND ALREADY?!"
"Well, it's not like I can actually see a whole lot," said Harry, pointing at his eyes. "I'm still myopic, you know?"
"TURN AROUND!"
"Okay, okay. I'm turning!" Harry complied with his hands raised into the air as if forced at wand-point. "I have turned. I'm all turned over here. Can I now explain myself, please? Will you listen to me for just a moment?"
An intermission of uncertainty ensued. He thought he could actually hear her agitated breathing even against the backdrop of the running water. Probably not, though, realistically speaking.
"... fine," it eventually came from Hermione at a more moderate volume. "This had better be good, mister."
Harry nodded his head, more than a mite relieved. "All I'm trying to tell you," he began calmly, much like an attorney on a mission, as he stepped back into the hallway and approached the door on its opposite side, "is that when I first entered the bathroom a moment ago, I had actually stepped through this door right here, that—as we both know—used to be the one leading into the study. And now—"
He gave the door in question a dramatic push as Hermione observed him and his presentation skeptically from her bathtub hideout. The door swung open, slowed with a soft creak and eventually came to a halt at one-hundred and thirty degrees, give or take. Disturbed by the initial force of motion, some of the parchments strewn and stacked across the study floor jittered and rustled in the dimness, while a few single pieces of paper even swooshed through the air a bit and floated lazily back to the ground in various other spots outside the illuminated area.
A motionless Harry watched the whole scene unfurl with his arms akimbo. "Well, this just doesn't help my case at all."
He couldn't see it, obviously, but he knew exactly what kind of look Hermione was sending his way right then. He could almost feel it drilling sweetly into the back of his head. Almost.
"What did you expect to find?" she challenged him sarcastically. "A second livid Hermione fuming in a bathtub?"
Purest obstinacy made Harry shake his head, and purposefully he set about pulling the door to the study shut again. "Wait a second."
Hermione sighed with exasperation. "For once I'm really not in the mood for any further research, Harry..."
Already he reached for the handle of the bathroom door, making a point of not even looking into her vague direction with one of his hands raised to block the potential line of sight; still the headshaking continued. "Just gimme a moment here."
Hermione massaged her temples as the water kept rising over her shins. This was some exceptional relaxation, truly. Unprecedented heights of comfort were being achieved. She faintly heard him knocking on a door out in the hallway.
"Nope," she shouted with half-hearted effort. A handle was pressed and a door opened.
"What the hell?!" Harry's voice reached her from outside.
She was this close to being able to laugh again despite the objectively catastrophic circumstances. Three knocks on the bathroom door. She scrunched up her nose and rubbed its bridge with wet though not yet shriveled fingertips.
"Are you in there?" the cautious inquiry came her way.
Hermione rolled her eyes. "Yes, I am indeed in here," she informed him in oh so dulcet tones. "Surprisingly enough."
"Great, now it's all back to normal." A grunt of discontent, after which he yelled, "Thanks for nothing, you poxy Room!"
Hermione shook her head at the immedicable insanity of just about the entirety of the world. Or maybe just her life. One of the two, at least. "D'you have your glasses now?"
A pause. "No?"
She clicked her tongue, which he of course couldn't hear, and pursed her lips, which he of course couldn't see. "Is the door to the study still open?"
Another pause. "No..."
Hermione grated her teeth, inwardly calling upon the better angels of her nature. "Then open the bathroom door slightly before heading back into the study. Get your glasses and then close my door back up. And leave the study door ajar while you're at it, just in case you should later wish to retrieve your copy of Walpurga the Wanton Witch."
A silence held for a few seconds that pithily said everything that any number of words might in its stead have failed to express. "That—that's a very neat plan."
"Yes, I'm very proud of myself right now," Hermione grumbled, caring not whether he could hear her.
"I'm gonna do that now," he haltingly informed her, then waited. "Okay?"
"Yes, Harry," she replied in a strained monotone. "Proceed with the neat plan."
Hermione watched as the silver door handle tentatively was pressed down. Slowly, half an inch by half an inch it wen—
"PROCEED FASTER!"
"Okay, okay," Harry mumbled, and leaving the door open just wide enough for an arm to be stuck through he retreated to finally retrieve his glasses from the uncommonly vagarious study.
"It worked," he told her proud as a peacock when he came back barely ten seconds later.
"Doesn't that just make my day," Hermione answered flatly.
He cleared his throat. "Well... I suppose I'll leave you alone now."
"A laudable consideration."
"Let you get back to your relaxation, right?" An awkward laugh, stifled halfway through.
"Totally."
"I'll be in the kitchen and... stay there. Just gimme a holler if you need me to ruin anything else, eh?"
"Gotcha."
Harry hesitated a second longer, regretting everything he had just said and the entire life that had led up to it, then pulled the door to behind him. As soon as she heard the mechanical click of the latch, Hermione exhaled loudly as the tension left her muscles, and she turned to stretch her legs out in front of her with the water level by now high enough to engulf them completely. With her cupped hands she splashed hot water into her face and rubbed it extensively in circular motions. Then she slowly leaned back with her face still buried in her hands, letting herself slip deeper into the rising water as her heart kept thumping against her ribcage from within.
She tangentially considered drowning herself in her richly aromatic, plum-tinged bathwater, but ultimately decided against it. Silken Seduction was just no way to go. That was clearly a job for Bertie Bott's Bombastic Bubble Bath.
Hermione groaned into her hands, which she was half-inclined to never remove from her face again. "Could I have my breath back now, please?"
~•~
In summary: the evening was a bit of a disaster, but at least the food was good. The former of these two observations both Harry and Hermione were in implicit agreement over; the latter was the only thing Hermione voluntarily commented on over the course of the fifteen minutes they spent sitting across from one another in the dining alcove in most unusual silence, each of them focusing their full attention on Harry's tasty do-it-yourself pasta dish. He was certainly glad to hear it, for he had taken extra care to get at least that much right for her after the day had started badly and then made a turn for the worse.
"You... do believe me though, right?" He queried with some hesitance an increasingly unbearable, wordless minute after they had both put down their forks, which had threatened to become the last sound in the universe.
She looked up from her empty plate at him with her brow quizzically creased. Perhaps she had been too absent in her mind to understand him fully, or perhaps she was trying to discern the connection between his question and the pasta.
"Well," Harry set out to expound, "firstly that I'm sorry for what happened, of course. Secondly that the rooms did in actuality switch places the way I said they did, and thirdly that I would never have done something like that to you on purpose."
Something intangible changed about her demeanor just then, and the warmth in her eyes and the curl of her lips made it clear before she spoke that her answer couldn't have been anything else but, "Yes. On all three accounts, yes."
Harry heaved a sigh of relief that by the sound of it had been waiting for release for quite a while, and it wasn't even exaggerated. She laughed without making a sound, her chest shaking with a chuckle kept inside.
"In fact," she added, "even if we weren't currently in what might just be the craziest part of the craziest place in the world, where rooms spontaneously changing places is just one of the innumerable things defying the apparent laws of nature that happen on a daily basis, I would still believe you on all three accounts. Quite simply because you're you."
Harry stared at her, finding himself at a loss for words. He really liked the way her hair looked after her bath, but he kept that to himself. He averted his eyes and scratched the back of his head a little, which was always a good thing to do in such situations.
"My only problem," Hermione picked up a different and regrettably less pleasant train of thought, "is that, despite all that, I'm still left feeling shamed, embarrassed and uncomfortable... around you. After having been... exposed like that. To you. I don't want to feel this way, but I can't help it. I just do. You know how... particular I am about these things. Maybe it's silly, maybe it wouldn't be a big deal to others... but I am me, and to me it's a big deal. It's like there's this imbalance between us now, you know? We've always been on this same level, you and I. Symmetrical, in a way. Equal. At least that's how I've always seen it."
Catching the implicit question in her words, hovering between them as she paused, Harry gave a firm nod of agreement.
"And now it's skewed somehow," she continued. "Off balance. Like you suddenly leaped ahead by a mile and know me better, far more intimately than I know you. I'm not saying, 'I showed you mine, now show me yours.' Of course not. All I'm saying is... I didn't even willingly show you mine, and that's not a very good feeling. Don't misunderstand me. I do not blame you. I meant what I said. I believe you. And I still trust you completely. It's not you I feel violated by. But I kind of feel violated by the situation. Just by what happened, without anyone's intent. Does that make any sense?"
Harry, gaze lowered, nodded his head with a heavy lump in his throat. "I think so," he croaked, then cleared aforementioned throat. "I think I understand. I mean, I wish you wouldn't feel that way, ashamed and all that. I don't want you to feel like that around me. You don't have to."
"I know," she assured him. "And I'm sure it'll pass in time. Maybe even after a good night's sleep. I don't know. But right now I can't simply switch it off. I… I feel naked just sitting here. Again, I am not angry with you. I was, let's not mince words here. And I'm sorry for my... expletive-filled outburst. But I hope that much can be forgiven considering the rather stressful circumstances. Right now, however, I'm just extremely self-conscious and tired and altogether done with this day, and maybe it would be okay with you if I went to bed now? Normally I'd fight you over who gets to take the couch so that the other may have the bed, but in this instance I'd really appreciate the privacy of the bedroom, if that's alright with you. Just for tonight."
"It's okay," Harry immediately said. "You go ahead. I wouldn't have it any other way."
She looked grateful. "Well, let's at least do the dishes first," said Hermione, rising from her seat and gathering crockery and cutlery. Harry gently put his hand on hers as she reached for his plate, then quickly retracted it as soon as her eyes met his.
"I'll take care of it," he told her. "Get some sleep. It's fine. Maybe I'll cheat and use some magic. I don't think the big bad inquisition will come for us in here."
Hermione opened her mouth as if to protest, as tradition would demand, but instead she closed it and mustered a smile, small but sincere. "Thank you," she said. "And good night."
"Good night," Harry softly wished her as he watched her go. He exhaled a burdened breath as he sank back into the cushioned backrest of the bench, and alone with his thoughts remained like that for quite a while before he moved again. He ended up doing the dishes Muggle-style. He wasn't feeling the magic.
~•~
Sleep wouldn't come. Somewhere between the sights he had so fortunately seen and the unfortunate things him seeing those sights had caused, his mind seemed incapable of slowing down. Hermione's words haunted him as much as the hazily glimpsed curves of her nude body did, if not more so. They haunted him because they came from a place of hurt, and that place was the very core of her being. Others, as she herself had remarked, would likely care far less about such an incident. Many had no problem sharing a shower room with total strangers, and Harry himself was perhaps not quite as self-conscious and insecure in these matters as her. To some extraordinary specimens of our species the very concept of shame itself is fundamentally unknown, much to the dismay of those who feel it not only for themselves but vicariously for those blessed ones as well.
But none of that mattered. What others felt or didn't feel about their lavatory arrangements was of no relevance. The only thing that mattered to Harry was how Hermione felt, and he simply couldn't leave it like that. Everything she had said about imbalance and asymmetry and a sense of violation? Completely unacceptable, the lot of it. He wouldn't suffer any such disparity between them, and the way he saw it—shortsighted as he indisputably was—there was really only one way of putting things right. One way of getting them back on the same level, where they belonged. It was the only logical thing to do. Hermione had pointed out as much. More or less.
He pushed the wool blanket off himself with a mind filled with purpose and hopped to his feet in the faintly moonlit dimness of the parlor. He didn't forget his glasses this time, just in case. Clad in naught but his checkered boxers he marched through the dark hallway, his footsteps softened by the rug that almost reached from the vanished front door to the arrowhead-end where library and bedroom were accessed, assuming the doors would demean themselves to behave this time around. He reached his target, where a touch of hesitance briefly gave him pause. Perhaps a more extensive examination of his plan was in order, but then again… perhaps not.
He knocked gingerly on the bedroom door and waited, leaning in and listening.
"Uh, yes?" he heard Hermione's voice from inside, muted but still quite easily discerned.
"It's me. Harry."
"Well, I should very much hope so."
"Can I come in? I, uhm... I thought of something. It'll only take a minute."
A short pause. "Okay, sure."
He entered, left the door minimally ajar behind him and then allowed himself a moment to appraise his surroundings. The bedroom, as he had only been able to imagine earlier in the day, had indeed a really calming atmosphere during nighttime, with a single candelabra on the nightstand next to Hermione's side of the bed as the only source of light, which was enough for her to read and enough for him to see her in the warm glow of five lazily flickering flames. Everything was red and warm and cozy, and even the shadows were made for sleeping and not for fearing.
"Hi," he said in that suave way of his. At least he refrained from waving at her.
She threw an indirect glance his way, pursed her lips and nodded, then busied herself with running a fingertip across the top of her book to distract herself. Back and forth it languidly went a couple of times before Harry spoke again.
"Right," is what he said next. "So, uh, I've been thinking about what you said after dinner. At great length. Couldn't really get a wink of sleep, to tell you the truth."
"Me neither," Hermione admitted with a sigh.
Harry nodded. "Good." The nodding turned into shaking. "I mean, not really of course. But… but you know what I mean."
"Absolutely," she said, which wasn't quite the opposite of what she thought and therefore just about true enough.
He cleared his throat with a loose fist at his lips. "Hermione," he stated quite seriously, and she raised her eyebrows in surprise. She suddenly felt severely underdressed for such a solemn occasion. "I can't have this imbalance between us. I just can't allow it. I need things to be equal between us, just like you said they were. I need you to be comfortable around me. I need you to know about me everything I know about you. And let's face it, there's really only one way to achieve that at this juncture."
Hermione's eyebrows came back down and almost shook hands above the bridge of her nose while her puckered lips shaped a small open O, but nothing audible came of it.
"So here it goes," Harry went forth in the meantime. "Tit for tat." Inhaling as much air as his lungs allowed and keeping it there, inwardly, in the depth of his heart, he invoked the lion's creed: Where dwell the brave of heart...
… As he bent forward with his thumbs on the inside of his boxers' waistband, before quickly coming back up again with all the cotton that was on him now pooling loosely around his ankles.
The last motion to be witnessed of Hermione was her eyes turning almost wide enough to rival little Dobby's enormous counterparts. Then she froze in her entirety and moved no more, even as her book dropped into her lap with a graceless thud.
"Since I saw you twice," Harry commentated his own performance as soberly as he possibly could, "and from... multiple angles, I think it's only fair if I..." And he proceeded to make one full turn, from front back to front with his naked butt in between, all of it, all of him so tenderly touched by the pulsing glow of candlelight, with softest shadows, cast by swell and slope of flesh and muscle, sweeping across his skin as he kept on turning, turning in the candlelight...
When the presenter deemed the presentation complete, he pulled his boxers back up to his waistline with well-concealed haste. His heart was racing as if to out-beat itself, but on the outside he conducted himself with astounding composure.
Hermione certainly looked astounded.
"So now we're even again, right?" Harry asked her anxiously, chafing his hands just to have something to do with them. Other than stripping, that is. "I mean, now we can be embarrassed together. O-or maybe, alternatively… not be embarrassed at all? Together? Since we've now both seen... equally much of each other. Which is a good thing… right?"
Hermione's eyes, though now markedly unfocused, were not reduced in roundness in the slightest. Her lips moved as if to speak, but not a pip popped past them.
"Right?" Harry repeated with increasing worry.
Hermione strained to croak something resembling a positive response, which he just so managed to interpret correctly.
"Are you sure?"
"Yep," she yepped. "Yep-yep."
"Okay," said Harry, and no two parts of his being were in agreement over where they should all be just then. "Then I... I'll let you sleep now."
"Pruhciatid."
He turned halfway to the door, his hands vaguely pointing out his designated course. "I didn't mess things up even more, did I? I-I really thought—"
"Nooo," Hermione articulated. "No, no."
"And you're sure..."
"Positive," she replied, her head bobbing up and down with her eyes still round as saucers under eyebrows trying to mingle with her hairline.
"Okay," said Harry, retreating backwards through the doorway. He drew his lips into an abashed half-smile. "Good night then."
"G'night," Hermione managed, and three agonizingly awkward seconds of general inertia later he was gone. And she sat there staring into a galaxy far, far away. Seconds came and went. Eventually, for the first time in what felt like ages to her dry eyes, she blinked. Then she picked up her half-forgotten book, closed it with Harry's note still between the pages and put it on her bedside table. She doused the candles with a single torpid swish of her wand and caught the tendrils of smoke with another. She then put down her trusted instrument parallel to her book. She readjusted first her pillows and then herself, moving like a car stuck in neutral. She lay down with her arms above the duvet and her hands clasped over her abdomen.
Eyes still open wide, she stared into the darkness above, barely aware of any difference between the before and after of her surroundings, or whatever else there was to be aware of. And she stared. And stared. And stared some more...
"Goodness," she whispered into the dark.
~Ω~
A little note of appreciation: I thank you all for the warm welcome. After seemingly returning from the dead like this, I wouldn't blame anyone for not even recognizing me anymore, or for caring precious little even if they do. But seeing several familiar faces among the crowd (of millions) is honestly great. Glad to have you, always.
The Trivial Trivia Section
• Counting, the Hobbit way: Eleventy-first birthday is a reference to The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, first published in 1954. It's when you're eleven, but also a hundred.
• Books: Real-world works of literature explicitly mentioned are firstly The Importance of Being Earnest, a fabulous play by immortally fabulous Oscar Wilde, first performed in 1895 at the St. James's Theatre in London, which was demolished in 1957. Enough time at least to get through The Importance of Being Earnest. I dare say it's required reading for anyone who considers themselves a serious person.
And secondly, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony by Italian writer Roberto Calasso, first published in 1988. I had a lot of fun reading Stephen Fry's more recent retelling of the Ancient Greek myths, often facetious in tone but always deeply genuine in enthusiasm for the material, but Roberto Calasso's work is something else entirely.
• Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da: That's a little nod to a very serious song about some very serious things by an obscure English band called the… the Beagles? The Bogeys? The Badoodles? Anyway, it's from a 1968 album of theirs that was officially named after them, whatever they were called, but is also known as the White Album for some reason. Probably because they didn't even have enough money for a proper cover, those poor bastards. If only Kanye West had been around to help them out.
• Take My Breath: … phew… Away. 1986 song, written by Giorgio Moroder and Tom Whitlock, performed by American band Berlin. Two words: Top Gun. That's the epitome of western civilization right there. Get with it.
• Additional references: So we've got Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, an Indian man who could've gone down in history as the worst MMA fighter ever, but didn't. Instead he became an actor, most famous for his role as Ben Kingsley in the 1982 film Ben Kingsley. I'm sorry, sometimes I just can't help myself...
We've also got the Gestapo in here, as every romantic comedy should. The Geheime Staatspolizei, Secret State Police of the Third Reich. Seeing how practically everybody knows about them, just how serious do you think they were about all their secrecy? Boggles the mind.