Meeting Requirements

by Stanrick

Amidst the political turmoil and ubiquitous madness of their fifth year at Hogwarts, Harry and Hermione are about to discover that sometimes in life, in order to find the right way to go you first need to get properly stuck. Apparently.

4. Entanglement

• CHAPTER IV •

Entanglement

There was rather striking a similitude to be noted between Harry in the kitchen, staring at Hermione, and an antique marble bust immortalizing a Roman general's expertly captured mien of befuddlement during his late summer vacation in the Teutoburg Forest.

"The... the Room..."

"Yes."

"Wants us to—"

"Have sex, yes."

"The Room wants us to have sex."

"Correct."

The cogs and gears in Harry's head rattled merrily, merrily on. "Is... is that an actual sentence?!"

"Think about it," Hermione seemed to instruct him.

"Oh, I am," Harry assured her.

"Everything that's been happening to us in here," she was not to be sidetracked, "beginning with the vanishing of the door. All these little predicaments we keep finding ourselves in." She wiggled her fingers about in the air, vaguely illustrating all those little—

"Predicaments," Harry uttered lamely.

"Don't pretend you don't know exactly what I'm talking about," Hermione snapped at him, making him wince so hard at the sudden shift of tone that some of the water in his glass splashed up into his face. "All of these precarious situations we've had in here, which could easily be a prelude to... all kinds of... of certain activities. And truthfully all too often are in... you know, stories. Novels. Movies. And life, I suppose. Of other people."

Harry was wiping his face with the back of his hand. "Uh-huh..."

"Are you trying to tell me that you don't find them even a tad suspicious?"

"Other people?"

"The things that keep happening to us, Harry!" she exclaimed, throwing her arms up in exasperation and prompting Harry to recoil and blink his eyes thrice per second and twice as much in total, perhaps in an attempt to wake up all over again because so far this day really wasn't doing it for him. "Even when looked at as isolated phenomena they hardly seem random, but once you begin to see the pattern mere coincidence just becomes less and less convincing an explanation. You just have to connect the dots!"

"The dots, for sure..."

"The bathroom incident," Hermione talked all over his nugatory interjection, "first the sweltering heat and then the freezing cold, our clothes disappearing... and the books! The books, Harry! Those are not knitting guides, in case you weren't aware." She kept shaking her head as she warily squinted about, over her shoulder and up at the ceiling, and into what evidently were the more suspect corners of the kitchen. Her voice had dropped to a furtive whisper when in conclusion she declared, "It's the Room that's doing all of this. Purposefully."

"Because... it wants us to have sex."

Hermione sharply turned back to him. "Maybe you should switch to coffee in the morning," she advised him with that snobbish edge in her voice. "Water doesn't seem to be doing the trick."

"Cut me some slack here, will you? I'm still in my swimming trunks." He rubbed his eyes and exhaled noisily with about half a residual yawn squeezed in there. "Please don't expel me in my sleep for saying this, but I don't think you're making as high a percentage of sense as you think you're making."

"Oh?" Her chin went up a notch as she crossed her arms. "Let's hear your explanation then. I'm all ears."

He raised his hands in a pacifying gesture. "I'm not saying I have one," he calmly elaborated. "All I'm saying is that just yesterday you seemed fairly certain that the Room doesn't actually have any kind of consciousness whatsoever, right? And now you're claiming what sounds to me like the exact opposite, informing me we're in a sentient room that also happens to be a bit of a sexual deviant whose primary concern is to incite people to get shagging in it. I'm just trying to keep up with the paradigm shifts here. Without the benefits of a fresh dose of caffeine in my bloodstream, mind you."

Hermione was pointedly looking elsewhere, nose raised pridefully. "I constructed that original hypothesis before all the events that followed. Gotta go wherever the data leads you."

"Okay," Harry agreed. "So now we've more or less turned the entire concept of the Room of Requirement on its head. Fine by me. Instead of giving us what we require, it's the Room that requires something from us. Not mutually exclusive though, is it? Some good old-fashioned quid pro quo, perhaps. Great! I mean, why the hell not? Does make a certain kind of sense, I reckon. So... taking all of that into account, it doesn't strike me as extraordinarily far-fetched to infer that having sex might actually be what gets us out of here."

Hermione's eyebrows went for a little stroll across her forehead. "Beg your pardon?"

"Well, first the exit skedaddled and now we understand the Room wants something from us," Harry neatly laid it all out for her consideration. "The solution that suggests itself: giving it what it wants will make the exit reappear, no?"

Hermione's pupils slowly rolled from one corner of her eyes to the other. "Surely that can't be it."

Harry furrowed his brow. "Are you saying the missing door is entirely unrelated to what by your own words the Room wants from us?"

"No, b-but... but..."

"I'm just following the data here, you know?" And with that he picked up one of the numerous books on the counter and began flipping through a few pages.

"But that can't possibly be true, can it?"

Harry gave an insouciant shrug, his eyes most attentively fixed on the highly educational literature before him. "Proper bollocks when the data doesn't lead where one wants it to go, innit?"

Hermione snorted disparagingly. "What're you so chirpy for, anyway?" she challenged him. "You do realize that if what you say is true then we're never getting out of here, right?"

He sniffed. "That's one way to look at it."

"That's the only way to look at it," she corrected him sternly.

Harry loudly slurped the last of his water. She eyed him skeptically, drumming her fingertips on her upper arm until he finally put his emptied glass back down on the counter. "You aren't actually, seriously proposing we do this and... and have sex with each other based on the remote chance that it'll persuade the Room to let us out of here, are you?"

Harry cocked his head from side to side with a funny sort of expression. He turned to the next page in his eminently absorbing reading material.

Hermione shifted her weight from one bare leg to the other. "What kind of screwed-up reason to have sex is that?"

"When it's the only apparent escape from what appears to be a sexually misguided sentient magical prison?" Harry replied, then puckered his lips for a moment of reflection. "Not the worst one, I reckon."

Hermione gaped at him. "And you could actually do that." It wasn't as much a question as it was a statement of complete and utter disbelief.

"Have sex?" He threw a cursory glance down at his crotch. "Well, I should hope so. It's never given me any reason to doubt its basic serviceability."

Her brain dutifully scolded her eyes for that reflexive, almost imperceptible twitch down towards that area of his body he had so facetiously been referring to. She blinked, and on their way back up her eyelids failed to get past the midpoint. "What I meant," she enunciated, "was... under these particular circumstances. You could... be intimate... in this weird, creepy sex dungeon masquerading as Bag End... as a mere means to an end. To trick the Room into letting us out."

"Well, it doesn't have to be our only motivation, now does it?" He looked up at her while casually flipping to page 69 of Carnal Knowledge. "How about the sex itself? Supposedly it's this rather decent experience that's got everybody in a bit of a craze lately."

"Right, yeah, sure," Hermione overtly disagreed by stringing together several expressions of agreement. "You're a boy, I'm a girl. Penis? Check. Vagina? Check. What else is there to it, really? Let's just all get our end away with each other because, hey, we have the equipment, right?"

"Your dirty talk is already on point, I see," Harry blithely remarked.

"Harry. James. Potter."

"That bad?"

"How can you take all of this so damn lightly?"

"Mmmaybe because I see a potential win-win kind of situation where you only see the greatest calamity since that one time in Transfiguration when McGonagall was sure you'd be the only one to know the answer to her question but then you weren't, because you didn't."

Blossoms of crimson spread like wildfire on Hermione's cheeks. "Must you remind me of that awful day?" She bowed her head in abject shame and dishonor, about ready for her well-deserved seppuku rite. "And I actually knew the answer! I did! I just... forgot to remember it for a moment. It came to me two minutes after class, as indubitably you recall. You do, don't you? It's an important detail. Oh, to this day the memory haunts me, it torments me, it—wait. What did you just say?"

"Hm?"

"What do you mean with that... win-win kind of situation?"

Harry was profusely puzzled by Hermione's puzzlement. "Getting out of our cozy prison by having sex with each other, is what I meant. Obviously. We win by solving our problem, and we win by... having all the sex. Like hitting two Bludgers with one bat, no?" He vaguely implied swinging one such imaginary bat at what presumably were two invisible balls.

Having witnessed his demonstration, Hermione turned and canted her head ever so slightly to the side, scrutinizing him intently for a few seconds. "This is a boy thing, right? Where you're basically gonna shag everything that isn't up in the trees at the count of three, and in case everybody makes it out in time you'll just shag the tree instead and call it a win?"

Harry was now flummoxed in earnest. "I'm not even sure whether that's more insulting to me or to you," he mused aloud. "Are you equating yourself with a tree right now?"

"I—" Hermione began quite optimistically, then however faltered. "I'm not entirely sure. But the point is... the point is that you don't truly want to have sex with me. Let's stick to the facts here. That... that's a fact. … Right?"

Harry put the open book down on the counter, then turned on his stool to look straight at her with his hands loosely entwined in his lap. "Is it?"

Her eyes for the beat of one second met his as he uttered that question, then quickly hid underneath her lashes. "Don't play with me, Harry. I'm not being willfully obtuse here. I know you like me, and I know you appreciate me. But you don't want me. Not like that, surely..."

"If you could see yourself through my eyes instead of yours for once," answered Harry, "you wouldn't be saying that."

"What..." it aimlessly fluttered across her lips. Again she looked at him, her eyes inadvertently getting entangled in his in some strange inertia of elusive meaning, then suddenly regaining autonomy, which she immediately used to move them far away from that most dangerous emerald gaze... "Wuh-what's going on here? Wuh-when did this turn into a discussion about us having sex?"

Harry couldn't contain the chuckle that rose in his chest. Not that he really made an effort or anything. "Roughly around that moment when you declared that the Room wants us to get it on, perchance?" he speculated. "Just to venture a wild guess here."

She vehemently shook her head, and it didn't look as if she would stop anytime soon. "This is clearly just the Room talking."

"The Room talking?" Harry laughed out loud at that. "Oh, so it's a possessive room now, too? Is that it? Oh, no! Help me, I'm possessed! The Room is taking control of me and turning me into a sex fiend! It's making me want to get sweaty with my favorite person in the world! They are coming to get you, Granger! Must... mate... with Hermione... rargh..." He did the classic zombie routine with his arms stretched out before him and his face contorted into a dull and drooping grimace, vaguely reminiscent of Syltherin's finest, Vincent Crabbe and Gregory Goyle. Or zombies, of course.

Hermione's face, meanwhile, was contorted into a mien of indignation, strikingly reminiscent of Hermione Granger. She clicked her tongue and ran it once round the inside of her cheek. "This is ridiculous."

Harry for his part remained quietly amused as he watched her pacing in counter-clockwise circles on what was barely more than a square meter of kitchen space. "You don't say."

Hermione kept pacing, rubbing her forehead with her eyes on the ground, occasionally muttering unintelligible fragments of jumbled thoughts. "So you... you're saying you actually want to have sex with me, regardless of the circumstances? Am I getting this right? I mean, let's say we weren't stuck in here right now. You'd still... you'd wanna... I mean..."

"I'd rather be stuck in here with you than... not be stuck with you out there," said Harry. "Or be stuck anywhere without you. Or not be stuck at all, with you being either stuck or not stuck elsewhere. Uhm... meaning our state of stuckness really has no bearing on what I want to do with you. I think. Here's an interesting question, though, which hasn't already been answered multiple times over: what about you?"

She came to an abrupt halt halfway to nowhere and looked at him. "Me?"

"We have established that I want to have sex with you," Harry obligingly summarized. "We have established that the bloody Room wants me to have sex with you, apparently. But what about you? Do you want to have sex with me?"

"No?!" a thoroughly scandalized Hermione at once replied, that rosy tint on her cheeks reappearing with a vengeance. "I mean, don't take this the wrong way. I've always considered you fanciable—very much so, in fact—and... and I suppose I wouldn't necessarily rule out the faint possibility that... on some subliminal level, as it were... that I wouldn't be entirely opposed to... to the... the general concept... psychologically speaking, of course... on a strictly analytical level, you see... but in actuality, really, when fucktoring—I mean factoring in all the, ah... the factors—"

"You do want to have sex with me!" Harry exclaimed triumphantly. "You do!"

"I didn't say that!"

"Oh, but you did!"

"I most certainly did not! I was in the process of denying it and—"

"Failing miserably."

"You've confused me!"

"With my irresistible charm?"

"With your disturbingly forward declaration of your sexual interest in me!"

"Well, excuse me, lady, but must I point again to the inconvenient fact that you started all of this outrageously obscene sex talk?"

"I stated the simple observation that the Room wants us to have sex," Hermione asserted with some highly elaborate hand gestures. "I didn't say anything about my personal inclinations on the matter. You started all of that kerfuffle. Completely out of nowhere, as I might add."

"Riiight," said Harry with a comic sideways glance at the two dozen books on the counter, which as someone had pointed out earlier were definitely not knitting guides. "I really don't know where I always get these silly ideas of mine."

With her arms akimbo Hermione looked at the books and then at him and then back at the books. Then she shook her head, decidedly dismissing the all-encompassing entirety of approximately everything. "Well, be that all as it may," she sought to unfluster herself, "I for one am not going to let myself be coerced into having sex by this filthy degenerate of a room."

Harry gave a decisive nod. "Admirable attitude, Miss Granger. Ten points for Gryffindor."

"Whatever," Hermione huffed as she whirled away and stomped out of the kitchen.

Harry, marooned on the lonely kitchen isle all by himself without either nurse or plumber there to help him, puffed up his cheeks and exhaled noisily with his lips flapping about. He turned in his seat and with his cheek squished against his fist idly scanned the two pages of Carnal Knowledge that ended up under his nose. Something about the turbulent arcane fluctuations within the reproductive system during intercourse, and how a comprehensive understanding of the interplay between the magical energies of sexual partners could profoundly intensify the coital stimuli, or something along those lines.

"Fascinating," Harry grumbled.

This, he thought, would likely be the zenith of his sexual excitement for the day. Or all his days, possibly.

~•~

"The door. The door. The door. It's all I want, all I need, all I require. Just the door. That's all I ask. An exit from this place. To get back into the castle proper. That's what I wish. I need the door to come back. It was here before; it must only show back up again. That's not too much to ask now, is it? I really, really want this. Like Harry's naked body in the candlelight, turning... turning... and turning ever on... the dip and swell of his youthful musculature casting softest sweeps of shadow over his smooth sk—the youthful dips of what now?! The door! The door is what this is about! Bring back the door, please! I want the door, the door, and to dig my fingers deep into that firm, delicious derrière and to run my wet tongue all over his... his everything, and—hey, whoa, stop changing the subject! Focus, Granger. Just focus on the door. We need the door. We need to get out of here. And that's the extent of our needs, you got that? Speaking of which,does he really want to have sex with me, I wonder. He said so himself, didn't he? And the way he looked at me? Wow… ! Where did that come from? But he probably wants to have sex with lots of girls, if not all of them. Yeah. It's basic biology. Nothing special about this. It's just because of our situation, really. Everybody starts having sex in prison sooner or later. Ew, what's wrong with me? Whose brain is this? Focus, dammit! The door. I. Need. The. Door. Is anybody writing this down? Seriously, though. If I were to tell him I'm ready, would he just take me here and now? Like, just grab me… firmly… vigorously… yet also gently... and... and get right into it? Figuratively? And literally, I suppose. God, I'm hopeless. I wouldn't even know what to do. This is all hopeless. We're never getting out of here. I only wish I could've said goodbye to my parents. Could I please have my door back now? Please? Hello? Room service?"

"Hey, uhm," a male voice disrupted her state of positively peerless concentration. She immediately recognized it as belonging to a person she hadn't thought about in ages. "Don't mean to bother you," the passing acquaintance said, "but what exactly is it that you're doing down there? You look astoundingly busy for someone who's sitting on the floor in front of a blank wall."

"Well," Hermione answered without either opening her eyes or altering her meditative posture, "we both know this particular wall isn't supposed to be blank, don't we? And I'm trying to bring back what's missing from it."

"With the... power of the mind?"

"Something like that," she said, her voice neutral. "I know it seems a bit Trelawney, but we can't be sure how exactly the Room reacts to its caller's needs. I thought that consciously focusing on our missing egress as the one thing we require might actually work. Worth a shot, at the very least. It's not like I've got much else left to do in here, anyway."

"Yeah, uh... couldn't think of anything else either," Harry mumbled, then clapped his hands as if to interrupt himself. "Shall I give it a try, too?"

"Be my guest." She shuffled a bit to the side and gestured vaguely at the spot on the rug next to her. "Maybe the Room only ever answers to one temporary master, which would likely be the one to originally call upon it. That could be either one of us, judging by the way this whole mess got started."

"I've yet to find a single troll todger in here," Harry remarked as he sat down in the spot she had offered him, mirroring her Indian style with his knee lightly grazing hers. "So I don't think I'm the master, if there truly is just one."

Hermione stifled her giggle. "No jokes now," she scolded him as she stowed away her smile. "You need to focus your mind completely on the one thing we truly want." An odd pause if there ever was one. "Which is for the door to return, of course. Try to repeat certain patterns of thought. Verbalize the requirement. Try to visualize the exit. On a more abstract level, think about—no, scratch that. Try to actually arouse… o-or rather, ah… generate, yes, the actual feeling of what it would be like to finally get out of here. Maybe throw in some of the things from out there that you miss, like flying and playing Quidditch and mucking about with Ron. Fill your mind with everything that revolves around getting out of here, and block everything else out. Okay?"

Harry gave a determined nod. "Got it." He stretched his neck a little, flexed his shoulders and then closed his eyes. Two seconds later he reopened one eye to peek at Hermione. "Are you gonna give this another go as well?"

"Absolutely," she confirmed, her own eyes firmly shut.

"Okay." He took a deep breath, opened his palms and relaxed his body, then calmly, gradually—one with the currents of the cosmos; ataraxia personified—let himself drift into it, whatever exactly it was supposed to be...

"Right. Here we go. Focus, eh? That's the name of the game here. Focus, focus, focus. Hocus focus. Steady breathing. Empty your mind of nonsense. Whew, there's a lot of it. Never mind. Let's focus on that empty wall in front of us. Visualize, she said. I can do that. I'm good at that. I see it. I can really see it right before me. Whoops, I peeked. Stop it! Empty wall. Empty frame, to be exact. Well, there are bricks within the frame, of course. So not technically empty, but... seriously. Empty wall. Okay. And now for that door. The door that belongs on that wall. That's all there is. I can see it reappearing in its frame. I see myself reaching for the handle. I open it without a sound. And I step outside, back into the bathroom. The hot, steamy bathroom with hot, steamy steam rising from the gigantic bathtub. And standing in it is the most mesmerizing sight my myopic eyes have ever strained to behold in perfect clarity... wait, what?! No! I'm talking about the door that leads back into the seventh floor corridor, which is not hot and steamy at all! Flying! Flying is nice. Flying is great. Flying is the best. Yes, nothing better than flying. Except perhaps for the way Hermione felt in my arms last night, and that unique scent of hers that always so alluringly permeates whatever shampoo she uses. Catching a waft of it right now, actually.I feel like I could track it from a mile away. But she's sitting right here at my side, of course. In that sexy swimsuit of hers. She genuinely has no idea how unbearably sexy she is, does she? Merlin, I could just… just grab her right this very moment… politely… and… and—why are we sitting on the rug in the hallway again? Oh, right! The door! We're focusing. Focusing all our mind on that door. The door that we need, the door that we want. Frankly, I'm not sure why I would even want out of here while Hermione is with me, who so blatantly wants to have sex with me. Right? I mean, come on. Unless… unless she doesn't? Anyway, I kinda need to be out of here for the match against Ravenclaw in a couple of weeks. That would be nice, Mr Room of Requirement, sir. But until then I'd really like to find out just what exactly she wants—hold up, no! Give us our door back right now, you sodding piece of Snorkack shite!"

"I'm not—" Harry croaked, then struggled to clear his inopportunely dry throat. "I'm not sure this is working... "

"Me neither," Hermione readily agreed, already rising from the floor and swatting and plucking the lint off her legs. "I mean, I was totally focused—"

"Me too, yeah."

"Like, so focused?"

Harry nodded eagerly as he stood beside her, leaning ever so slightly forward and tugging at his swimming trunks this way and that way so as to conceal some internal conditions of no importance.

"But clearly this is not how the Room works," she blabbered on, "because otherwise this kind of focus would obviously have done it."

"Exactly," he concurred. "The Room's just not an active mind reader like that, right? Because if it would've read my mind just now, I mean... we—well, we'd have a door right there, you know?"

"Oh, things would be opening up around here, for sure," said Hermione.

"Yeah, yeah," Harry added astutely.

Nodding their heads in unwitting unison they both ended up staring at the commendably neat masonry within the walnut door frame. The nodding slowed, lips were pursed and two pairs of eyes drifted off into opposite directions...

On one side, Hermione's gaze soon ended up on a painting on the wall, framed in daedal gold, Victorian style: Gustav Klimt's Der Kuss, or Das Liebespaar when it was first exhibited in 1908 in Vienna during the height of the artist's 'Golden Period', she at once identified. Had that been there before, she wondered. Could she have missed that? And more importantly, why would that even be there at all? Of all the paintings in the world, why this one? What an oddity, what an enigma.

On the other side, meanwhile, Harry's eyes had wandered on until they too were caught by a painting on the wall in a golden ornate frame: Il bacio by Francesco Hayez, 1859, as Harry pathetically failed to recognize regardless of how long he stared at it. The woman's dress looked nice, though, and reminded him of something.

"Huh," is what he thought about all that. He turned around and found Hermione's half-covered backside right in his view. Again. It's like the girl had no other way of greeting him anymore, honestly...

"I'm gonna take a quick cold shower, I think," he announced incidentally. "Cold-ish." He gave an extra-nonchalant shrug. "Reasonably temperate. That all right with you?"

Hermione inhaled sharply at the sound of his voice as she too whirled around to face him. "Of course, yes. Have fun!"

"I, uh—I'm just taking a shower," he told her with a completely un-awkward chuckle, reddening merely because of the tropical climate that had obviously returned. "I'm not having any fun in there. That—that's just basic hygiene."

"Naturally," she was quick to agree, nodding hectically. "Didn't mean to imply—"

"Yeah, no." Harry coughed into his fist. "No, I know of course. You were just... and I was simply... you know?"

"Absolutely."

"Right."

They stared precisely past each other, momentarily confused by the paintings they spied over the other's shoulder.

"Cheers," said Harry, then strode quickly down the corridor and disappeared into the bathroom.

At the click and thud of the door down the hallway Hermione exhaled more air than she had thought her lungs could hold. Her face sought refuge, solace and support in the palm of her hand, which quite frankly was a lot to ask of a single palm.

~•~

Not quite half an hour later, after taking his reasonably temperate shower and then spending a few minutes in the bedroom pacing restlessly hither and yon, his entire being—right down to his motor functions, by the looks of it—at strife with itself, Harry set about looking for Hermione with a mind more or less made up. Unaware that she had entered the bedroom via the bathroom door just a second after he had stepped out into the hallway through the other door, he wasted some decent amount of time scouring first the living room and the kitchen, then the study and the library without success. Unknowingly following her trail he eventually came back into the bedroom through the bathroom.

With more than one question spelled out in the high arches of his eyebrows he watched Hermione standing at the far wall, centered between the two windows with her back turned towards him. As his eyes wandered admiringly from her shoulders along her waist, and all the way down to her thighs and that gap between them, he soon caught a glimpse of the wand in her right hand, then heard her muttering something under her breath. She proceeded to raise her right arm straight into the air, paused, and then began moving her wand in sweeping, circular motions over the wall area immediately in front of her, its tip surrounded by some swirling bluish glow that left quickly dissipating traces in the air behind it as it moved on and on.

The sight of a proper witch conducting some occult ritual as if straight from a spooky bedtime story, foregoing the stereotypical long dark robe and wide-brimmed hat in favor of a formfitting periwinkle swimsuit and black-and-white flip-flops, was a surreal one, to say the least, but certainly not an unwelcome one. Au contraire...

"Dare I even ask what it is that you're doing now?" he dared asking her when her arm came to rest at her side again, the scintillating glow fading gradually from the tip of her wand.

Evidently still concentrating to some extent, Hermione didn't turn his way as she answered in a level voice, "I'm probing the outer walls for hidden pathways. Maybe, I thought, our dear front door didn't actually vanish, but having turned invisible merely switched to a different spot. The Room of Requirement could conceivably have changed its orientation, assuming once again—contrary to my suspicion—that it actually exists in a physical sense within the confines of the castle."

"You know," said Harry, "even after almost five years at a school of magic I'm still having trouble wrapping my head around sentences like that actually making sense sometimes."

At that she did turn around, smiling. "I know what you mean."

He had come around the foot of the bed and was now standing a couple of steps away from her with his hand high around the bed post. The striking confidence the pose evinced was entirely accidental. "Any progress?"

"None," she admitted dejectedly. "I've gone through various basic revealing spells, of course, like I did at the front door's spot immediately after we discovered that it had scarpered. Now I'm trying a rather obscure invocation that in a handful of variants can supposedly be used to either hide or reveal secret passages of a specific kind. It's a long shot, I guess. I learned about it during our research in the study. Might've been just about the only potentially useful thing I found. It's impossible to read up on it now for obvious reasons, so I can't even be sure I'm doing this right. Urgh... neither Walpurga the Wanton Witch nor Sybill Trelawney's delightfully disturbing Kama Sutra are going to be of much help in this regard. Or any other, for that matter."

Harry seemed impressed. "You're really pulling out all the stops here, aren't you?" She gave a somewhat despondent shrug, and he stifled a chuckle at his own train of thought. "You must be more appalled at the prospect of seeing me naked again than I feared."

Hermione dropped her head. "Now that's just all kinds of silly," she sheepishly mumbled. She heaved a sigh thereafter that expired into a lingering silence. "I just—I was probably just trying to do something useful. Take my mind off of things."

Harry gave a knowing nod. "I've been trying that as well," he said, "but I soon realized that every last thing currently on my mind has your name written all over it, so there really isn't anywhere else for it to go."

Her eyes flashed briefly his way. "Is... is that so?"

The look he gave her had a downright apologetic quality about it. "I'm afraid it very much is. So."

"Mh," Hermione made as she slowly ran her fingertips down the rustling window curtain. "It's certainly interesting how at present our minds appear to be similarly preoccupied."

A lopsided smile slanted his lips. "Surely a phenomenon that warrants further investigation."

Hermione's chest expanded as she inhaled deeply; its subsequent exhalation was a soft, quivering flurry adrift on underlying meaning. "What's happening to us in here, Harry?"

There was genuine rumination in his eyes as he all but imperceptibly began to shake his head. "Maybe nothing that shouldn't, wouldn't happen to us out there either."

She caught his gaze. "Do you really believe that?"

He held hers, steadily. "As a matter of fact, I do."

She gulped.

They stood in silence, eyes locked and never leaving, chests rising and falling with hidden hearts wide open, running wild inside. Crumbling between them were the last remains of that invisible barrier which for years had so comfortably defined their friendship as what they had always thought it ought to be, never quite ready to face the fathomless immensity of all that it could be.

As Hermione came to him, that novel implication and sheer significance of every step that brought her closer to him sealed that barrier's fate with irreversible finality. When she came to a stop, mere inches of nothing were left between their yearning bodies.

Then she looked up at him, an eager glimmer in her dark eyes as they kept flitting back and forth between his emerald counterparts. "Are you sure about this?"

She felt her whole being tremble when his hands in tacit answer came to lightly rest against her bare hips, felt uncharted parts of her stirring with his eyes so effortlessly reaching deep into the truest core of her. His low voice was like a whispered caress on the strings of her heart: "If ever I've been sure of anything—"

And suddenly his words and thoughts and senses were lost between her lips, and within the blink of an eye his initial shock was overwhelmed by the kaleidoscopic scent and sound and taste of her. Instinctively he pulled her closer with his hands running up her back, around her shoulders and down again along the tantalizing curvature of her sides. At the increasing urgency of his touch she moaned into his mouth as she pressed herself ever harder against him with her arms winding their way around his neck. Harry stumbled backward, refusing to remove his lips from hers, yet amidst his struggle to keep his balance she with other plans in mind pushed him sideways onto the bed and in the same motion let herself fall right on top of him, her flip-flops flipping through the air and flopping to the ground at the foot of the bed. Having lost hold of her wand somewhere in the middle of all this, and not even being aware of it, was, as she would later reflect upon snatching it up from the carpet, perhaps the most reckless thing she had ever done. Top three, for sure.

"Hermione..." Harry groaned unwittingly, for there currently was little wit left between his ears. The pure desire in his husky voice was only equaled by the coinciding disbelief at life's most beauteous turns.

This deceptively simple utterance of her name, carried on that fervent tone of voice, threatened to drive Hermione beyond that point of no return, and much as one would expect she... recoiled? With a coinciding gasp, too? One second Harry thought their lips and tongues were about to completely melt into each other, the next all that feverish delight was suddenly disrupted with her mouth so agonizingly torn away from his. Surely this wasn't legal?! With his hands hovering uselessly in the air he stared at her as she sat upright and stock-still astride him, her own eyes wider even than his.

"What is it?" he asked her, frozen in anxious inactivity.

"I think I'm having a nervous breakdown," she stated as if in a trance.

Still staring at her, Harry choked on his own aborted laughter. "Are you serious?"

"I think I'm going mad," Hermione either revised or expanded her self-diagnosis.

He couldn't possibly have stopped staring at her even if he tried, which he didn't. "What are you talking about? What's going—oh, you are going. You are actually going right now."

"I just don't know, Harry," she babbled on her way into a more or less specific corner of the room. Unexpectedly finding nothing of relevance there she turned on her heels and went the other way instead. "My nerves are stampeding right now and I can kind of see the cliff they're heading towards, you know? This is insane! Dear Lord, we're actually kissing! Harry Potter and Hermione Granger—kissing! How crazy is that?"

"Almost as crazy as them not kissing right now..."

"I honestly can't make any sense of anything anymore. Who even am I? I-I-I need my pills."

"Pills? What pills?" Harry asked with a touch of derangement in his voice, somewhat clumsily pushing himself back into a sitting position with his head turning slowly over his shoulder as his round eyes followed her marching straight past him underneath the chandelier. "Are you taking any pills?"

"Well, no," she answered, by then halfway to the bathroom door. "Which is precisely why I need some."

"You must be joking right now," Harry said with a halting chuckle, yet where his amusement was so clearly indecisive her stride remained perplexingly determined. "Muh-mione?"

"I don't even know what I'm doing right now besides ruining my entire life." Despite herself, or maybe not, she opened the door and stepped on through. "Maybe I just need a moment to—"

She stopped abruptly, and with her voice having all of a sudden come out of a different direction on those last few syllables of her rambling monologue Harry's head automatically swirled around to its source.

"Hah?" An utterly flabbergasted Hermione was standing four steps away from the door that connected the bedroom with the hallway, and just about as many steps away from the poor bloke with the forlorn and slowly receding erection which nobody was paying even a modicum of attention to at that unfortunate point in time.

She looked over her shoulder and through the door frame saw where the long hallway should have been a curiously distorted version of the head of the four poster bed and one of the windows beyond. It strained her eyes to look at it for too long, as her brain tried to make sense of what was so fundamentally lacking it. She shook her head; it didn't help. She threw Harry a questioning look; he by all disheveled appearance was perfectly clueless. She retraced her steps and cautiously leaned forward through the doorway. Harry's head sluggishly turned back to the other door, from where Hermione was now looking at him. Then his eyes wandered again to the door where Hermione's semi-swimsuit-covered posterior still remained, which is where they got a bit stuck somehow. It's not that her face was less appealing a sight than her buttocks, really. It was only a matter of having so far seen a lot more of the former than the latter, and he was only human after all.

"I can see you ogling my bum, you know?" she informed a seemingly hypnotized Harry from the other end of the wall. Harry, by now most thoroughly flustered, scratched the back of his head as he averted his eyes from that captivating vision, mumbling mostly unintelligibly about unfairness and various philosophically comparable matters.

"Huh," Hermione then exhaled contemplatively as, presented with the unexpected opportunity, she set about ogling her own bum. "So that's what it looks like." She twisted her lower body a bit, first this way then that way, so as to get a better view of her own backside, which was about four meters away from her head. She glanced over her shoulder where her backside also was. She met Harry's eyes, who looked utterly lost between the multiple sources of bewilderment he was currently dealing with. She turned her head and met Harry's gormless gaze again, just from a different perspective.

"You know," she said as she waved at her posterior with her right arm while her posterior waved back at her with her left arm, "I think I find it much easier to appreciate the art of M.C. Escher when I'm not actually in it."

Cross-eyed she shook her head once more to no avail, then moved the entirety of her body safely back onto one side of whatever exactly was going on with the bedroom.

"Guess my nerves aren't stampeding out of here anytime soon," she quipped in what she herself deemed a rather pitiful attempt at levity. Neither seeing nor hearing any reaction from a properly bumfuzzled Harry, Hermione with drooping shoulders heaved a burdened sigh.

"I'm sorry," she said with her eyes cast downward. "I've made an utter mess of things, haven't I? Completely ruined everything and—"

"Hey," he interrupted her softly, and on this occasion Hermione found she was rather grateful for it. He waited for her to meet his gaze. "Come back to me?"

Hermione struggled with an acute lump in her throat. "I, ah—I can definitely do that." And with some freshly rekindled timidity in her stride she did just that. Inwardly she was cursing herself: how could she possibly be worse at this the second time around? Fortunately her brain lost its ability to string together coherent thoughts of self-flagellation once Harry put both his hands on her waist as she stood there between his legs. With her head still lowered and practically nowhere else to look, she didn't even realize she was pretty much gawking right at his crotch as if her entire upbringing had been one big failure.

"I'm sorry," she repeated ruefully, and hastily went on to try and explain herself, "My stupid nerves just got the better of me. I was so overwhelmed all of a sudden. By... by everything. Myself, even. My scarily unrecognizable self. And the sheer scope and scale of what's happening here, with you and me. It frightened me a bit. A bit much, if we're being candid. I... I'm just sorry for ruining that... rather perfect moment. That most ridiculous part of me made me do the one thing the entire rest of me wouldn't even want to consider doing. Which is to stop kissing you. Ever."

He was looking up at her, seeking to catch her evasive eyes. Eventually she let him.

"Nothing's ruined," he said to her. The mischievous twitch of a smirk appeared at one corner of his mouth. "And there's nothing keeping us from continuing right where we left off, you know? Especially now that we're apparently not getting out of the bedroom anymore."

Half a giggle escaped her like a hiccup. "Yeah, what's that all about now?" Her expression turned into one of nascent concern. "Should we be worried about this newest confinement?"

Insouciance most imperturbable manifested itself on Harry's face. "Nah," he waved all worries away before they could take root. "I have a pretty good idea what's going on here."

With her arms loosely wrapped around his neck Hermione coyly affected surprise. "Oh, do you now?"

"It's like you said," he said with a most casual shrug, his hands roaming more boldly around her slender midsection. "Except for that most ridiculous part of yours—your words, not mine—you don't have any desire to get out of here."

"I don't?"

"None whatsoever."

Hermione made a pensive sort of sound with her fingers circling round and round at the back of his head amidst his ever unruly hair. Losing all focus of mind and vision both, Harry closed his eyes at her continuous touch and after inhaling deeply half-sighed, half-moaned in a chesty sort of way that had various effects on Hermione she would fain not talk about in public. The way his exploratory fingertips had stealthily sneaked beneath the seam of her swimsuit on both sides of her hips didn't exactly help with that pitiful vestige of her self-control she was—for some reason Hermione herself could not quite grasp—still clinging to.

"God, I hate my brain sometimes."

Harry's own slightly delayed chortle jerked him out of his increasingly dizzy relish. "I'm sorry, did I hear that quite right?"

"It just won't shut up," Hermione went forth to lament. "I want to experience this, dammit! Just once I'd like to be fully in the moment, the way everybody always goes on about. But that silly mind of mine flat out refuses to quiet down even when there isn't really anything else for it to productively do. The thoughts just keep coming and going, back and forth and on and on. It's annoying. It's exhausting. And right now it's bloody infuriating."

Harry mulled that over for a bit. "Were you not at all 'in the moment' before your nerves took you for a roundabout trip from the bedroom to the bedroom?" he asked. "Not even a little bit?"

She bit her bottom lip as her affection for him welled up inside of her at that subtle note of worry in his voice and the hopeful look in his eyes. "I... might have been in that particular moment. A little bit," she teasingly allowed, on a tangent wondering where this side of hers had emerged from. She wasn't nearly confident enough to be so overtly flirtatious, was she? "But we both know how that turned out, so..."

"I can work with that," a grinning Harry declared. "We'll just have to get you back into that moment. You know, by resuming the exact activities we were engaging in..."

A jittery breath surged in and out of Hermione's chest, her whole body aquiver in Harry's firm grip. "An enticing idea," she had to admit.

Harry watched her face closely, which was rather impressive a feat considering that plunging neckline of her swimsuit, framed by the luring contours of her breasts, was right in front of him. Her ongoing internal struggles were almost comically obvious. "So what's going on in that beautiful mind of yours?"

"You don't want to know."

"Hence the question, yes."

Eyes rolling upward Hermione heaved a sigh. "It's just all this girly stuff..."

Harry furrowed his brow. "What, like shoes and dresses and ponies?"

She laughed. "Not quite that particular brand of femininity, no."

Judging by his facial expression, that didn't really narrow it down a whole lot.

"For once in my life I'm less about ponies and more about record-breaking levels of neuroticism," Hermione elaborated. "Fear and anxiety. Rampant self-doubt. Infinite insecurities. You know, the good stuff. Just to keep things fresh."

"I'm not sure I'd deem it preferable for you to be thinking about ponies while we're half-naked in the bedroom together," Harry assessed, "but this doesn't sound convincingly better, either."

A fainthearted smile crossed her lips. "Sorry," she spoke softly, running her fingers through his hair more thoroughly than before. His eyes kept losing focus and drifting off into random directions, but he tried his best to keep his attention all on her. The effects her absentminded scalp massage was having on him seemed to elude her completely.

"Wha—" he barely managed to eject, but those sorcerous hands of hers just wouldn't stop putting their bewitching spell on him... "What're you 'fraid of?"

"Well, this is you and me," she replied thoughtfully. "This is big, right? It's huge. It's unfathomable. It's the one thing in my life I know I absolutely must not mess up, and I have a well-nigh pathological need for this to be perfect. Precisely because it's you and me, you see? Anything short of perfection simply won't do. Which is a tad intimidating, to say the least."

Harry with some effort blinked himself out of his woozy delirium to the best of his ability. "Will you stop driving me crazy for a moment, please?"

"Huh? But you asked me to explai—"

"Your hands."

"Oh." She retracted them with an apology, but Harry caught them gently between his own before she could awkwardly fail to decide where to put them. When tenderly he kissed them thrice—first the dorsum and the wrist of her one hand, then the palm of the other—Hermione momentarily was sure against all reason that she would be turning into a pool of jelly shortly and then that would be it for Hermione Granger. Maybe Hagrid would present her to a class as the first specimen of human flummery.

"I agree with you," he said, looking up into her eyes. "Partially. Where you say it must be perfect because it's you and me, I'm convinced it will be perfect by the same token. It can't be anything else, no matter what it's gonna be, as long as it's you and me." He paused with his eyes turning sideways. "That rhyme wasn't planned."

A quiet chuckle passed her parted lips. "Aren't... aren't you nervous at all? You seem so calm, so… so bloody equanimous."

"Of course I'm nervous," he assured her. "But not necessarily in a bad way, I think. I'm excited, too. Despite the fact that I'm the one who's under performance pressure here, while we're talking fear and anxiety." Her snorting response to that compelled him to grin. "But with you... how could there be fear? What could possibly happen that we wouldn't be able to tackle, hm? If I should... I don't know... suddenly develop an erectile dysfunction or whatever, I have no doubt you'll know more about the condition than I do. And then we'll deal with that. If right in the middle of it you should declare that you aren't quite comfortable or something like that, then we'll stop and try again some other time. You know what I mean? There's simply not a single reasonable scenario that I can imagine where this turns into some horrible copulatory fiasco of unprecedented proportions, irreparably damaging our relationship and scarring us for life."

Hermione rolled her eyes at this minor exaggeration, though her simultaneous smile soon broke into honest laughter. "I'm sorry," she repeated once more with her face buried in her hands. "You're right, of course. Ugh, this is the Devil's Snare all over again. I'm just no good in stressful situations." She noticed the look he was giving her, and as soon as he opened his mouth she forestalled him. "And don't you dare tell me to relax again!"

He laughed and raised his hands in a gesture of innocence. "I wasn't going to."

"As if!"

"It's the truth!" he insisted. "I was merely going to ask you to stop apologizing, first of all."

"Fair enough," she said as she once again wound her arms around his neck for the simple reason that it was impossible to resist the unceasing urge to do so. "And secondly?"

He hesitated as his eyes roamed her face before coming back to meet hers, and in his hesitance she caught a glimpse of his own nervousness, the sight of which on some subconscious level assured her that all that was happening to them truly meant no less to him than it did to her, and it was this visceral awareness of the symmetry between them that became the well from which her own calm could spring.

"I was just going to say how unbearably adorable you are, is all," Harry muttered abashedly, and now for once it was him who was unable to keep eye contact.

Hermione blushed with instantaneous effect and pursed her lips to hide the smile that insisted on coming to them, for she was as deeply touched by his words as she was amused at the sheepish way in which he had offered them. Being who she was she should have immediately taken it upon herself to dispute this demonstrably nonsensical compliment, but to her own surprise she found she couldn't. This was Harry after all, and his sincerity was one of only a few things in the world she could never bring herself to doubt.

"May I have a seat?" she thus asked instead, her voice subdued but not unsteady.

His eyes came back up from her navel area, but she had already decided that it was unnecessary to wait for a verbal response. He wouldn't be sitting there like a perfect seat if he didn't mean for her to take it. So with her knees placed on either side of him she moved onto the bed, then slowly lowered herself into his lap with her arms on his shoulders. She minimally readjusted her position with a smooth and subtle rotation of her hips, until she could feel him pressing against her down below, light as a hint, hard as a promise.

Harry swallowed. He noticed by the motion of her throat that she was doing the same in almost perfect synchronicity. If he hadn't been right in the middle of the most arousing moment of his life, he might have laughed. Too bad.

"Are you sure about this?" Harry asked her in a whispered tremor of a voice.

A smile and look the likes of which he had never before seen on the features of Hermione Granger almost made his nerves stampede. "If ever I've been sure of anything," she quoted a precocious boy she knew quite well.

And finally—finally!—they were kissing again, as surely the cosmos itself solemnly ordained they should be, always and unceasingly for all ephemeral eternity. Tongues were darting greedily across the slippery swell of glistening lips, the heat was rising in youthful bodies burning brightly with passion and delight at innocence's imminent departure.

Until suddenly Harry felt resurfacing hesitance halting her desire. Her tongue retreated; her lips remained motionlessly pressed against his.

"What is it?" he asked her with a hint of desperation, his madly pounding heart putting a jitter in his voice. "Please don't go running in circles again. It'll be the end of me."

Grinning she gave him a brief but sufficiently reassuring kiss. "Couldn't be further from my mind."

"But... ?"

She inhaled deeply as she bit her bottom lip. He looked at her expectantly. "It's just... I mean, this broad bright daylight really isn't the most optimal sort of lighting for first… or strictly speaking second time full frontal nudity, wouldn't you agree?"

With her face still so close to his, Harry turned as much as her warm and fragrant proximity allowed to throw a glance at the windows and much to his dismay had to squint against the harsh light's glare, most likely emphasized by either sand or snow. Whichever of the two it currently was. Perhaps she did have something of a point, although truth be told his own priorities would still have been differently configured at that particular point in time...

"I'll just take care of this real quick," said Hermione, and already having hopped out of his lap proceeded to pad over to the windows and one by one drew the curtains shut. "There we go," she commentated the proceedings. "You should know my sexual confidence increases considerably in low-light situations. From verifiably non-existent to infinitesimal. Better prepare yourself."

Mirroring her smile Harry shook his head at her as she turned around, his ever-vagrant eyes darting from the middle section of her physique up to her face within an instant. "That's not the swimsuit of someone with zero confidence," he remarked.

"I'm actually wearing this for the first time," Hermione imparted to him as she reclaimed her seat in his lap. "I bought it last summer in a spur-of-the-moment sort of defiance of... myself, I suppose."

"I don't like to ever take sides against you," said Harry, "but I must admit I'm rather happy to see that you successfully defied yourself like that."

He got a peck on the tip of his nose for either that or no reason in particular. "I take it you like it then?"

"Quite," he affirmed as he ran his hands over the thin fabric covering her lower back, and he ventured a rather brazen glance down her chest where there was very little actual swimsuit to admire.

"Well, that's just too bad," Hermione commented with that novel coyness, smiling roguishly at his bemused expression. She leaned forward, and cheek against cheek whispered into his ear, "Because I was planning on getting rid of it right about now." She nibbled on his earlobe a bit, just to make sure she got her point across.

Harry, in the meantime, had absolutely no idea when or how exactly he had unlocked this particular part of Hermione—assuming (and very much hoping) he had at least something to do with it—but that gray blob of gooey uselessness some would call his brain was in no state to ponder matters of such complexity. Want and need were about the last two thoughts it was still able to recognizably put together, as well as: How the hell am I supposed to get her out of this thing? There's neither a zip nor a button to be found. Which way would it actually go? Down, no? Or up? Wait, that's anatomically impossible, isn't it? Where would the—yeah, no. Definitely down.

"I don't have... the faintest clue... of how to... go about... peeling that tight... tight... swimsuit… off of you," he confessed to her in between the kisses he was planting on her shoulder, up the side of her long neck, which she most willingly presented to him, and along her jawline. Her wispy moans of pleasure were conquered by a fit of giggles at the time he finally reached her mouth for the final kiss in this rather elaborate sequence.

"That's—hoo!—that's actually a good point," she, struggling to catch her breath, opined. "Would you mind closing your eyes for a moment?"

He gave her a questioning look.

"Harry, the last thing my metastable nerves need right now is for me to make an utter fool of myself while trying to wriggle my limbs out of this thing in even remotely sensual a fashion."

He smiled. "If you insist. I still feel like I'll be missing out, but all right. Should be a lot easier on my end, at least."

"You appear to be trying to poke your way out of those trunks as we speak," Hermione huskily observed, sucking in his lower lip between her teeth as she pushed herself just that little bit harder against him. "Anyway," she then warbled as she leapt off the bed, and Harry was about ready to join any religion whose favorite deity would grant him even an iota of mercy. "First things first." Three steps away from the bed she had turned on her heels to face him. "Close your eyes for me?"

"Should I turn around?" He implied the maneuver with a half-tilt of his torso, but already Hermione shook her head, her chestnut locks bouncing off her bare shoulders.

"I trust you."

Well, that was awfully nice of her and all, but eyelids are, as everybody knows, such fluttery little things...

Harry took a steeling breath. "My eyes are sealed," he said and did as instructed, willing his eyes to heed his words and behave.

"Only open them when I tell you to, okay?"

"Okay."

For a few seconds the world remained as quiet as it was dark to Harry. The first sound his primed ears picked up his mind immediately associated with a shoulder strap gliding slowly down an arm, guided by fingertips so tentative. He could hear the fabric slipping off her every inch of skin, could almost feel the silken friction between the parting surfaces as that periwinkle peel revealed the luscious fruit within. He caught the faintest, trembling intake of breath, and knew with keen intensity her swimsuit now, bundled in both her hands, was moving smoothly down her legs. He could tell the exact moment when she carefully raised first the one slender foot and then the other, as the last small bit of what once had covered her slid off her toes...

At least he thought that's what it all sounded like. But perhaps it was merely the mostly reptilian part of his brain that was conjuring these alluring associations...

"Are you really stripping naked right now?" he asked her. One could never be too sure about these things.

"No," it came from Hermione. "I'm actually cleaning the carpet right now."

"Sensually?" he asked with a chuckle.

She echoed his amusement. "I don't know of any other way."

And so she stood there, three steps away from Harry sitting at the edge of the four-poster bed in his black swimming trunks that currently were shaped a bit like a tent. Bit by bit she loosened the grip on the shapeless polyester bundle in her hand and let fate and gravity do the rest. When eventually it dropped to the carpet beneath her feet with the softest of rustles, Hermione took a deep breath as she saw Harry's Adam's apple bobbing up and down at that unmistakable sound. Yet his eyes remained shut.

Never before had she felt this vulnerable; never before had she been this electrified with anticipation. She was nude, yes, but felt exposed far beyond her uncovered skin. Savoring what struck her as the most intensely erotic experience of her young life, she let the seconds pass as she stood there with her eyes all on the human being in front of her: the only one with whom she wished for this to happen; the one and only she could simply not believe this was actually happening with.

Emboldened by this strange privacy she let her eyes peruse him and every part of his body. That vague jutting shape, half-concealed between folds and creases of fabric, which from the inside strained against his swimming trunks sent rippling tingles through her loins. The way his chest kept rising and falling, hastened by sensations surely so similar to her own, compelled her to wet her lips. And that most familiar of all faces, calm and gentle and beautiful, made her heart flutter, glow and burn. Still his eyes were closed behind his glasses; still he was waiting for her word. There was magic at work there that no wand could cast.

Hermione opened her mouth to speak, but only then, conveniently enough, did she realize that she didn't know what to do with her arms. Always those stupid arms! Folding her hands in front of her seemed like a last desperate attempt at concealment, defeating what struck her as the entire point and purpose of the operation. Letting her arms dangle idly at her sides surely made her look like a mannequin. Folding them behind her back, however, made her feel like she was standing at attention in front of her superior officer, so she modified the pose by loosening one knee, lifting her heel minimally off the ground and shifting her weight onto the other leg with her hip pushed slightly outward. Naturally casual. Casually incidental. Very casual, surely.

"I have, in fact, no idea what I'm doing," she thought.

"I'm ready," she in stark contradiction spoke out loud, her voice weaker and meeker than she would have hoped. She realized her sudden bout of posing panic had made the heat of shame and desperation rise to her face, indubitably leaving its signature mark of color on her cheeks.

"Smooth, Miss Granger. 10 points for every house you're not in."

Harry, quite literally blind to her struggles, had jumped off the bed and was now standing upright directly vis-à-vis. Not yet opening his eyes he said, "I, uh... still have something of a semi-erection going on down there, don't I?"

Hermione almost choked on the burst of laughter she tried to suppress. Against her noblest efforts her eyes flickered flagrantly, repeatedly to the area one would have to examine to either confirm or refute such a claim. In conclusion to her investigation she delicately cleared her throat. "It would seem that way, yes."

"Splendid," said Harry. "On a scale of one to ten, how ridiculous do I look right now?"

"Well," Hermione pensively replied as her seditious eyes went promenading some more, "perhaps wearing swimming trunks in the bedroom contributes a point or two..."

"That a suggestion?"

"Maybe."

With his shoulders set his hands slowly moved to his trunks' red-and-gold waistband on both sides of his hips, but with his thumbs stuck inside hesitation made him pause. "I'll open my eyes now, too?"

A quiver went through her chest mid-breath. "Go ahead."

"I'm wearing my glasses this time," he reminded her. "So unlike before I'll be able to... see you quite clearly."

Hermione swallowed. "Seeing how I've been standing starkers here for what feels like half an eternity by now, you might be well-advised to consider the possibility that I want you to."

Harry didn't move a muscle.

"Are you considering the possibility?" Hermione inquired.

"Actively," he answered, his voice a bit thin. "I'll just... get this over with here now." And just like that he pushed the swimming trunks down towards his knees in one quick and unceremonious motion, from where they dropped the rest of the way without his help. He stepped out of them with one foot, then slung them aside with the other. Only then did he finally open his eyes.

Two bodies tensed all over with a sudden inrush of air stuck in expanding chests, and two wide-eyed gazes desperately clung to each other with all that hazardous nudity just outside the tiny circle of focal clarity the fovea on their retina granted them.

"Hey," Hermione cheeped with what little voice she managed to scrape out of her constricted throat, round eyes still unmoving.

"Hi there," Harry politely returned the greeting, blinking once but keeping his pupils firmly fixed on her equally dilated counterparts.

Then both emerald green and chocolate brown for one audacious second darted southward, where only the most intrepid of wayfarers would dare to tread. Just as quickly as they had departed they returned to reconvene up above. Eyes, if possible, were even wider than before, wordlessly telling tales of things most incredible that on their journey they had seen. Lips on two faces were pursed to the extreme; smiles, as if directly mirroring one another, were burgeoning among their curving lines. And after another long moment's petrifaction air was finally released from straining lungs through O-shaped mouths.

They shared a shaky, wonderfully awkward little laugh that smoothly transitioned into a wonderfully awkward little silence. Their indecisive eyes, trying their pitiful best to stay somewhere up above the other's neckline, repeatedly risked to glance, but never dared to stare.

"Aren't you getting a bit cold all alone over there?" Harry at some point asked—just to get a bit of a conversation going, of course, renowned socialite that he was.

A frisky flicker of amusement crossed her features. "That an offer?"

"Possibly."

With a twinge of pudency she lowered her head, and as she slowly came to him, taking six small steps where three proper ones would have sufficed, she kept her eyes on her toes and the pattern of the carpet around them. Having reached him, there was little space left in between for both their bodies' heat to mingle in, and her eyes roved over his chest, up his neck and past his chin and lips and nose, until they became willing captives of his emerald refulgence.

"I've never noticed," in a whisper he revealed, "those rings of amber 'round your pupils. Like the sun's corona during a total eclipse."

The tip of Hermione's tongue left a moisture's luster on her rosy lips. "Perhaps you've just never been close enough."

"I reckon I'm close enough right now," Harry replied as he ever so subtly leaned into her with his hands once again laying claim on her hips.

"Not nearly," Hermione breathed across his parting lips, their naked bodies now flush against one another. "Not ever."

Their lips touched again at last, and with his pelvis grinding against hers and her breasts bulging against his chest as they sought a closeness that matter itself seemed to deny them, their kiss was now, even more so than before, driven fiercely by some savage craving that would not soon be satiated. That hitherto unknown sensation of skin upon skin, of bodies undraped clinging together in maddening need for utter coalescence, released some primal noise that low in Harry's throat had been building: less tenuous moan than coarse and heedless growl, more animal ferocity than human's refined civility.

It was that sound, that voracious, wanting noise thrust off his tongue straight into her throat that made Hermione's knees buckle precariously. So firm however was the grip of his arms wrung tightly around her waist that instead of tumbling down she felt herself being lifted up, off the ground and to the stars, weightlessly soaring with cottony clouds blowing airy kisses at her dangling feet. And when she fell, she fell with him, safe in his arms and with no dark phantoms in their world to fear.

Considering how they were experiencing all of this for the very first time, it may with some due leniency be deemed understandable that sprawled amidst the pillows on the bed they soon found themselves in need of a bit of a breather. Just to get their bearings, really; to reassure each other of who and where and what they were.

"Wow," Hermione tremulously exhaled.

"Yeah," Harry agreed with his forehead resting lightly against hers. They both kept panting for breath. Harry's hips were lodged between Hermione's thighs, and he supported his torso on his arms so as not to squash her underneath his famously tremendous weight.

"I hope this isn't indicative of how woefully out of shape we are," Hermione found the energy to jest.

Harry's next labored exhalation was shaking with a chuckle. "I'll get kicked off the Quidditch squad if that's the case."

"I'm afraid we'll have to keep going then," Hermione reasoned quite reasonably. "You know, to get you game-ready. Can't risk a Gryffindor embarrassment on your account."

Grinning he planted a kiss on her forehead, inhaling the infatuating scent of her hair as he ran his nose towards her ear, which he also kissed. "You're amazing, you know that?"

"Oh, I do," she said, and her nodding turned into a most afflicted shaking of the head. "The sacrifices I make for you..." He came up from the side of her head and looked at her, found her smirking. "Well, go on then. Get back to snogging me senseless. Gotta keep that heart rate up."

He shook his head at her with a lopsided smile on his lips, his eyes filled with affection unconcealed. Hermione within an instant forgot all about her playful affectations, gulping at the casual intensity of his gaze, its unguarded openness and that self-evident truth laid fully open in clear emerald. Sheer disbelief welled up from deep inside of her. Was that really her Harry, looking at her like that? Truly?

"I don't want to seem ungrateful or anything," she said, in part perhaps to calm herself and keep her heart from bursting, "I mean, it's certainly a gorgeous bedroom and all, but right now I can't help but feel that we'd really be deserving of that picture-perfect Hollywood cliché. Silver rays of moonlight slanting through the windows. Some candles perhaps. Rose petals scattered over the sheets, definitely. A fitting soundtrack, of course. You know, the full monty."

Harry grinned. "Well—" was as far as he got before from one fraction of a second to the next several things happened in instantaneous simultaneity: the curtains Hermione had drawn together just minutes before were all of a sudden wide open again, along with the windows themselves, revealing a moonlit night over that tropical beach from the day before. To their left and to their right, strewn all over the sheets, there now were red rose petals, delicate and fragrant, and around the bed itself two or three dozen white candles were floating in the air. And last but certainly not least, the record player from the living room had popped into being on the nightstand and immediately started playing Unchained Melody by the Righteous Brothers.

Harry and Hermione, having lamely turned their heads to the windows and the silver moon's rippling reflection on the vast calm ocean, stared at each other as equals in their considerable bafflement.

"Well," Harry picked up where he had left off, "there you go."

Hermione narrowed her eyes as she nervously nibbled on her bottom lip. "Harry," she said, her voice once more a furtive whisper, "are we sure the walls aren't listening in here? And that the Room isn't doing these things deliberately, schemingly?"

Harry looked her in the eyes as the Righteous Brothers commendably kept going about their poignant business, and he gazed into them with such idolatrous adoration that Hermione all but forgot what she had just asked him. "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a toss," was his answer at any rate. "I couldn't care less what the Room wants or doesn't want. All that matters to me right now is what I want, which I know is you, and what you want, which I hope I know."

Hermione stared at him a little while longer, then blinked. "Yeah, okay," she breathed, and consciously or not she had already pulled those most kissable of all lips back to her hungering own with a hand at the back of his head, gentle yet insistent.

"Wait!" she exclaimed practically right into his mouth twenty seconds into another increasingly wet and sloppy round of kissing, licking and even a naughty bite or two.

"For what?" a befuddled Harry asked, struggling to keep his mental faculties at work.

"Contraception!" Hermione well-nigh yelled at him.

Harry engaged in some rapid blinking against the sudden ringing in his head. "Oh, right," he found some timely cognizance. "Uhm... I don't—"

Without as much as a dramatic plop, regrettably, a heart-shaped flask appeared on Hermione's chest, right between her clavicles. One of its two separate chambers was filled with a clear bluish liquid, the other with a pink one.

"What's that?" Harry managed to verbalize his befuddlement, most of his muzzy mind still dwelling on all the kissing and the licking and, oh, the biting, Miss Granger?!

Hermione picked up the little flask, turned it once between thumb and finger and had thus sufficiently examined it. "Contraception," she concluded, her voice small.

Harry seemed skeptical. "Will that work in time?"

"Unless you were planning on getting this over and done with in under five minutes," said Hermione, "we'll be fine."

"Is that a challenge?"

"I certainly hope not."

She giggled gleefully at the face he made. "Here," she then said with some appropriate composure, uncorking the half of the heart-shaped flask that contained the bluish liquid. "You drink this, and I'll drink the other half."

Harry eyed the flask she was holding up for him between three of her fingertips, then took it from her with two of his. With an indifferent shrug he downed it in one swig. Minty. "So what does it actually do?"

"Great question to ask after ingesting it," Hermione amusedly observed.

"Oh," Harry had to say to that. "It's going to kill me, isn't it?"

"Yes," Hermione confirmed with a single nod. "Both of us. Highly effective method of contraception, you'll have to agree. Rather Shakespearean, too." They kissed with both their lips spreading into toothy smiles. "Mine," she then set out to explain in earnest as she uncorked the other chamber, "will make my ova—my eggs—practically impenetrable." She swallowed the pink liquid, then gave the flask back to Harry who with some overstated effort reached across the bed and put it on the night table, right next to the record player which by then was blaring Foreigner's I Want To Know What Love Is. "While yours," Hermione continued as she almost shamelessly (yet still quite secretly) appreciated the view of his stretched torso above her, "will make your sperm sort of lethargic. Imagine Ron's scholastic motivation combined with your dear cousin's athletic prowess."

Harry laughed. "My poor lads." He shook his head in abject melancholy. "And it's reliable?"

"Unless you've got some kind of super-sperm—"

"I'll have you know that every last one of my sperm cells wears a tiny red cape to work."

"—even the draught you just had would on its own have a higher rate of success than most Muggle alternatives," Hermione went on despite staccato snorting at that particular mental image. "In combination with the women's equivalent it's not known to have ever failed. And it doesn't mess with your hormones, either. Pretty neat, if you ask me. Doesn't work if you don't have our genetic mutation, though."

Harry gaped at her, not merely clueless but slightly alarmed on top of it.

"Magic, Harry," Hermione helped him along. "Witches, wizards, wand-swishing. Remember?"

"Well, excuse me for a being a bit distracted here," Harry defended himself with a pointed glance down at the undulating parts of Hermione's thoracic region. She thought it a suitable moment to take a very, very deep breath and arch her back a little, for reasons.

"Sooo," in a musing tone she then began, running a finger down his sternum, "now that a last-minute interlude of responsibility has successfully sucked every last residual mote of romance and eroticism out of the affair, shall we..." she rolled her hips a little and felt that fifth appendage of his twitch at her beckoning touch, sending the most tantalizing of shivers running down her spine, "... get back to it?"

Finding the invitation thus expressed in words and motion articulated even clearer in her dark eyes' siren call, Harry wasted not a second before replying with a fervid kiss, and she agreed with him fiercely.

"One last thing," Hermione's voice reverberated in his oral cavity eleven glorious seconds later.

Harry's head plopped down into the pillows underneath her. "Mother of Merlin, deliver me from misery..." one could hear his muffled obsecration amidst the countless locks of her curly mane of hair. Hermione laughed with all her heart, as joyous as embarrassed, rocking him to and fro with her arms wrapped around him.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," she giggled. "It's just... I mean, it's not like I don't appreciate the tracklist—"

I WANNA KNOW WHAT LOVE IIIIIIS...

I WANT YOU TO SHOOOW MEEEEEEE!

"—because I really do, but... it's a bit much, isn't it? The music is. Wee bit much." She peppered his shoulder with some self-exculpating kisses.

His head came back up from the pillow in which it had been buried; his deadpan expression was rather priceless. Hermione staunchly refrained from laughing and instead batted her eyelashes at him in immaculate innocence, and already he didn't look quite that miserable anymore. No need for Merlin's mum to deliver him from anything, really. Gosh, his hair was such a bonny mess! It always was to some extent, true, but this one was her doing in more ways than one, and that's what secretly made it her favorite.

"It's just that this song has been a bit of an earworm of mine this past week, and I was just getting rid of it, I thought," she further explained. "And also, more importantly, I don't want anything to distract me from... this." And not solely for clarity's sake she let her eyes soak in every last detail of his face as her hands freely roamed his back.

"Well—" Harry began.

The music stopped mid-song, and so did Hermione's hands about halfway on their merry voyage towards Harry's butt.

He skimmed his cheekbone with his knuckles. "Well, there you go."

Hermione chortled. "You know," she said, "I won't lay my suspicions concerning the Room of Requirement to rest anytime soon, but I'm beginning to genuinely appreciate its overall service package."

"Are you all provided for, then?" he asked with a suggestive undertone, smacking his lips with a frisky glint in his eyes. He swallowed, gathering his courage. "Or could there possibly be anything else you want?"

Her smile faded then as she grew quiet and thoughtful. Her lambent eyes like in a waking dream wandered over his features, which in their sharper angles hinted at the man the Boy Who Lived would someday soon become, and slowly down that hollow twixt their chests, down to where cast in shadows their warm bodies joined. There her gaze lingered as she breathed in the pregnant silence, feeling him against her, feeling him being, and being with her. She listened to the frantic drumming of her heart, crying out for him with every single beat, yearning to be nearer, closer, one with him, and she knew beyond all doubt that it was his, and his alone.

She moved her left hand inch by inch back up to his shoulder blade, then around the side of his ribcage just below his arm and onward to the front of his chest, where it came to rest right above his heart. She felt it throbbing hotly underneath her fingertips, heard thunder in its roar, and thought that maybe, just maybe it was hers, and hers alone.

For once she wished not to calm it in its fury. Not this time—not just yet.

Through her lashes she looked back up at him, found his features set and even, and his eyes fixed on hers. His pupils were dark and endless pools of longing, piercing right into her ever so effortlessly, so gently, so deeply. Her eyes darted to his lips, though not by accident, and his felt equally drawn to hers. As he slowly lowered himself onto her as if compelled by some force beyond both their understanding, Hermione's hands came around his shoulders to his neck once more to guide him ever closer, and the longer it took his mouth to reach her expectant own, the more urgently she guided him.

When one seemingly eternal second later she decided that even this did not suffice, she raised her head from the pillows below to meet him halfway in a wuthering rush, then pulled him down along with her in her backward fall. His deep-set groan at the hunger with which she received him made her hormones run amok, and her own moaning response rolled along the twists and turns of their dancing tongues right into him. She was the air he breathed; his was the fire that set her heart ablaze.

There was that touch of caution in their tempestuous desire for one another, their lust reined back solely by profound affection's kind restraint. What they lacked in experience they made up for tenfold in purest devotion, and it was ever the other's surging pleasure, and that inscrutable wonder of being its cause, that exhilarated each of them the most. Everything was action and reaction, instinctual and raw. It was all eloquence of motion and senses set alight. It was need at its most primordial, and tenderness at its most refined.

And at the weltering conclusion of their feverish dance there came that mellow spell of transient satisfaction, spreading into every last fiber of their beings merged as their muscles relaxed and their heart rates gradually eased off. But more and far beyond all that, there was meaning, truth and deep fulfillment in their union, and while the ebb and flow of passion would always come and go, these gifts of permanence would forever be their source of certainty.

Thereafter their bodies lay entwined in the soft shimmer of blending moon- and candlelight, skin bedewed with the pearlaceous sheen of exertion at its most ardent. Their eyes were closed, their faces cast in a blissful calm. Her head was nestled under his chin, her long hair, damp and darkened around its tips, spread over his chest in a hundred twirly strands. She listened to his heart and felt her own fall into step; their soothing synchronicity lulled her gradually into a sort of half-sleep. This, she was sure, had to be what perfection made palpable felt like. Never before had an hour on the clock seemed so long ago; never before had a change so profound turned one thing into another so profoundly the same.

Minutes uncounted of consummate comfort had passed when Harry felt her stir in his arms. A sound of complaint rumbled up his throat, but the girl would not desist.

"Where're you going?" he slurred more sleepily than he had the mental capacity to realize, and he relieved his embracement of her with some reluctance but little strength left to him to do anything about it.

"To the bathroom," she softly replied, regarding him with the warmest of smiles from atop his chest. "I'll be right back, so don't go anywhere." And with a tender parting kiss she skipped off the bed. "I'm gonna check something, too," she added as she went her way.

"Mmmh," was all that came from him, and already he missed her dearly. That weight and warmth and tangibility of her. Her scent lingered, clung to him like unbeknownst to Harry a few of the rose petals in various spots did as well, some perhaps more flattering than others. He could still taste her on his tongue, and the shape of her remained like an imprint on the sheets and his body alike. Even in its incompleteness her absence struck him as fundamentally unacceptable.

"The baaathroom," it sluggishly hovered amongst various snippets of inarticulate thoughts, there in that thick haze between his ears. "The bathroom?" He wondered about that in his muddled mind, a mind so filled with her. Just her, and all of her. Hadn't the bathroom gone somewhere? He didn't hear her complain, so he assumed everything was in order again. He heard water running. The lights of the candles flickered above, bright and blurry in the deep blue dark. When had he gotten rid of his glasses, anyway? And where were they? And more importantly, who could possibly care?

Then they were suddenly gone, those spots of light in the air. From one moment to the next, and broad daylight fell through the windows again. Oh, well. Nothing peculiar about any of that. Everything was as it should be. His eyes wearily fluttered shut again with a lazy upward curl on his lips, and he breathed inexhaustible contentment in and out of his breezy lungs as his mind drifted idly over the endless plains of dreams and memory, which at this point in the life of Harry Potter for once appeared to be in perfect congruence with one another.

Then, from out in the hallway, which evidently had made its reappearance along with the bathroom, Hermione's voice reached him in his Elysian bliss, and his eyes within an instant shot wide open as she yelled,

"Damn it, it didn't work!"

~Ω~

---

The Trivial Trivia Section

• Things, and three of them: Teutoburg Forest is what happens when you waltz through old Germania with your three legions like you own the place, only to get completely decimated by a bunch of hairy, unkempt barbarians who put sauerkraut on their pizza. Seppuku is the traditional Japanese version of what Publius Quinctilius Varus did upon realizing that he kind of messed up a little bit. And ataraxia is the opposite of what Emperor Augustus experienced upon hearing those spiffing news from up north.

• Cinema & Literature: In addition to Bag End being another reference to The Lord of the Rings, there are also allusions to a couple of movies in the form of two slightly modified quotes. First there's one to George A. Romero's 1968 horror classic Night of the Living Dead, where of course it's not Granger they are coming to get, but Barbara. And then there's Gone with the Wind, 1939, with the entire context and implication of Rhett Butler's famous last line completely altered here, of course. Sometimes there's a positive side to not giving a damn, isn't there? And this is, in fact, a reference to the film specifically, and not Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel, because in the latter the line reads, "My dear, I don't give a damn." The difference a single word can make, huh?

• Art: First there are Klimt and Hayez, with two paintings whose names both translate to the Kiss, and then there is (once again) Maurits Cornelius Escher, whose art never ceases to tickle the brain and twist the mind around itself.

• Music: The two songs mentioned in the chapter above are Foreigner's most successful hit I Want To Know What Love Is, released in 1984, and Unchained Melody as performed by the Righteous Brothers in 1965. While many if not most people will associate it with the 1990 movie Ghost, starring Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore, it was actually written all the way back in 1955 by Alex North and Hy Zaret for an unironically obscure movie called Unchained. Now doesn't that just make things click?