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.

1. Abscondence

Disclaimer: I'm not the lucky devil who once upon a time came up with all this rather lucrative Harry Potter kerfuffle. I merely strut around like I own the place sometimes, even though I can't even afford to rent its tiniest cubbyhole.

Introduction: Ten years ago, folks. Ten. Whole. Years. That's when I first started sharing my fanfictional delusions with you. On this very website right here. Yeah. So here we are. Still.

Moving on.

Your reading material, should you choose to accept it, has 99% of the volume of Prisoner of Azkaban, and approximately 1% of its plot and pace. Nothing will happen, and it will do so very slowly. If that sounds like something you'd willingly wish to spend your limited time with, I honestly don't know what's wrong with you.

As for me, the fool who actually wrote all this, well… I basically just felt like paying these two favorite dorks of mine another visit after all this time, and this is very much the partially unexpected result of that. You see, I originally expected it to turn out similar to Favorite Things both in length and in structure, but then it inexplicably ended up [three] [four] five times the size of that. And then it was suddenly the [third] [second] longest story I've shared with you fine people here. I [may] have gotten carried away a bit.

A sizable chunk of what now makes up its first couple of chapters was actually written years ago. Four or five, maybe even six? I don't rightly recall. Then earlier last year, once more in the mood for some H&H, I brushed off the accumulated dust between its bits and bytes and had a good look at it, and concluded that it may just be worth the effort of finishing it. Which another eighteen months later I have actually accomplished. Admit it, you're as impressed with me right now as I am on a daily basis.

Just between the two of us, getting to spend some quality time with my usual versions of Harry and Hermione was more or less the sole motivator in this particular writing endeavor, and the final product reflects that quite extensively, I believe. I kept coming back to it whenever I felt like looking in on them, to find out what they're up to, how they are doing, what kind of tea they're having. That sort of thing. It's fully focused on the two of them, not caring for much else. It dwells and it lingers, it indulges and it revels, and it does so almost unapologetically. Oh, the cheek of it!

So basically more of the same, you'll say. Guilty as charged.

Well, take a gander if you feel like it. If not, well you'd better leave that gander right where you found it, pal!

---

.

Hogwarts castle, school of old,

Some odd secrets may yet hold...

A Room there is unknown to most—

'Tis quite mercurial a host!

.

So ye who seek to enter be advised,

Lest your own heart's truth merely be surmised:

.

Oh, be careful what you wish for

Before you dare step through that door,

For that Room inscrutable may yet lay bare

Secrets of which even you were unaware.

.

Meeting Requirements

• CHAPTER I •

Abscondence

Hogwarts. You know the place.

"I think I need a vacation," Hermione declared on a plaintive sigh.

"From school?" Ron at once voiced disbelief. "That's like that pope bloke saying he doesn't feel so sure about the Bible anymore."

Hermione rolled her eyes, though not entirely without humor. "Well, this isn't really much of a school anymore, is it? If I'd had any reliable, non-Divination-related way of knowing in advance that this place would get wrapped up in an amateur reenactment of Nazi Germany this year, I wouldn't have bothered to make the return trip from France in the first place."

"What, like never?" Harry asked her, a tad insulted at the thought. "Not even to visit me?"

Hermione flashed rather radiant a smile at him, her locks swirling round her shoulders with the turning of her head. "Only to visit you."

Meanwhile, Ron scrunched up his face at the exchange. "Don't even acknowledge I'm here, folks. I too prefer to pretend I don't exist at all. More so during class than during mealtime."

"Aaaw," Hermione intoned her exaggerated pity, throwing an arm around Ron's lanky frame and giving his shoulder a squeeze of consolation, all the way up there where even Reinhold Messner would run out of air. "Don't be sad, Ronnikins. I'd be sure to send you one of those tacky, generic postcards from the next best gift shop at least once a decade or so."

Harry let out a guffaw while Ron tried his best to keep up the pretense of sincerest hurt even against the toothy grin that insisted on spreading his long features wide. "This wicked witch right here needs neither wand nor weapon to wound a man," he observed dramatically, his hand clutching at his chest. Walking backwards a few steps ahead of them a moment later, he looked at his two friends with little mirth left in his blue eyes. "I'll catch you two later, eh?"

"Hey, it's just detention," Harry told him encouragingly. "It's the best-attended class in school these days."

"Just don't do anything that nets you even more detention while still in detention," Hermione advised him, "like you so inimitably managed to do last time, okay?" What her expression lacked in optimism it made up for in genuine sympathy.

"I'll try," Ron, with a crooked smile sneakily reappearing on his lips, made no promises. "But you know how it goes. As a certified pure-blood who refuses to join the club, my every breath is an offense."

He departed with a wink of his eye and a wave of his hand, and together Harry and Hermione watched him traipse away, his bright shock of copper hair being the last thing to vanish from sight as he descended the curved stairs at the far end of the corridor. They remained quiet for a moment as the faint echo of Ron's dispirited footfalls faded, standing there shoulder to shoulder in the middle of the intersection of two equally empty and silent hallways.

Again Hermione heaved a sigh, though this audible lung's emission was noticeably longer, wearier and imbued with far more despondency than the one that preceded it had been, which hadn't exactly been a happy sigh either. Harry turned his head sideways to look at her, scrutinizing her profile as she gazed in abstraction at the narrow, high-arching windows above the stairs ahead of them, out into the bright cold light of day and someplace far away.

"Hey," he whispered gently, giving the back of her hand a small nudge with his own and thereby violating no fewer than four of the Ministry's perfectly sensible Educational Decrees at once. She faced him with a smile that, while certainly not insincere in its appreciative quality, lacked the lifting touch of levity to mask the manifest exhaustion underneath. There was something in the way she looked at him, with a listless dullness cast over eyes made to always sparkle with scintillating wit and deep reflection, which had him feeling that he had never seen her quite like this before, and it took him aback at first sight. "You really are quite tired, aren't you?"

"Yes," Hermione conceded with some reluctance, "I suppose I am." She remained in a pondering silence for a few seconds as her eyes wandered over the old and persevering stonework surrounding them, the numerous paintings and tapestries on the walls immortalizing days of yore and deeds of yesteryear. The authoritarian reach of Dolores Umbridge at last had extended even to these remote and scarcely frequented areas of the castle and most of its countless nooks and crannies, all of which—without exception—students were by now expressly prohibited to occupy, let alone congregate in.

Even up there on the seventh floor, despite having largely (and impractically) been declared a forbidden area, her outrageous proclamations were nailed to doors and pasted on pillars, and a number of the yet remaining paintings and tapestries adorning the walls were marked with floating letters that in glowing scarlet read: REVIEW PENDING. Throughout the castle most art created either by Muggles, wizarding kind of Muggle descent, or wizarding kind indulging in ill-defined undue reverence for Muggles had, at the behest of the recently appointed headmistress, been taken down, while all remaining pieces were one after another checked for ideological conformity.

"This place used to be like a second home to me, you know?" Hermione eventually spoke as her eyes found their way back to Harry, who glimpsed a somber sort of contemplation in them. "But of course you do. To you it was the very first place you could ever call home, wasn't it? And now look at this twisted monstrosity it's being transformed into under the likes of Cornelius Fudge and Dolores Umbridge, ever driven onward by that most dangerous combination of ignorance and conviction.

"And just like that a place of education is turned into one of indoctrination. The exchange of ideas is replaced with the dictum of obedience, examination supplanted by orthodoxy. Where curiosity, inquiry and critical thought ought to be encouraged, dissent is now punished. Students are being segregated based on what they were born as. Words arbitrarily regarded offensive are banned, while voices deemed unsavory are silenced. Books unilaterally considered problematic and of Un-wizarding Spirit are confiscated and before long, I have no doubt, shall be cast onto a pyre in the courtyard while Pansy Parkinson and others of her dimwitted ilk will all too gleefully be roasting marshmallows over the flames of knowledge lost."

Hermione exhaled a shuddering breath, then clenched her teeth with the force of frustration deep and never vented.

"I'm just so bloody tired of it," she went on, the hardness in her voice barely concealing underlying fragility. "All of it. The boundless hatred, the pompous self-righteousness and that sense of entitlement they seem to carry like a badge of honor these days, and of course the ever ubiquitous hypocrisy. Stupidity appears to be spreading like a virus these days, mutating at every turn. Day after day the Great Hall is all atwitter with whispers of defamation and cries of condemnation, and as the world's turned topsy-turvy yesterday's vices have become the virtues of today.

"People with a salient propensity for thinking first and foremost of themselves suddenly arrogate to speak for everyone; opinions most vehemently championed abound in minds lacking even a single principle firmly upheld. Under the guise of unity, division is sown. Denouncing and betraying your fellow student for their apostasy nets you a decent score of house points these days, ever in the hallowed name of the Greater Good, that alibi of tyrants. And thus a line is drawn in Manichaean sands, and as the pawns of black and white fall at each other's striking hand, they celebrate their own demise in some mad delirium of holy righteousness.

"The only thing I can still appreciate in this whole ethical and intellectual fiasco is the general irony suffusing it all. Everyone is accusing everybody else of the very deeds they themselves are committing. The most sanctimonious of cretins are ever busiest pointing fingers. Nobody can keep up with these escalating standards of purity, least of all those that presume to set them. And as the plump little cherry on the cake: a literal witch has been appointed High Inquisitor at a school of magic! Bring Heinrich Kramer back to life to see this and the slimy git would promptly drop dead again from a lethal mixture of black and yellow bile. And I swear, one of these days I'm going to prove that that humanoid toad is herself not as pure-bred as she likes to pretend. Oh, and have I ever had enough of these dreadful armbands!"

With an exasperated groan she furiously ripped aforementioned red armbands, which in two bold capital letters marked them as Half-Blood and Muggle-Born respectively—and surely no one would ever misconstrue the meaning of the abbreviation MB as anything more derogatory—first from Harry's arm and then from her own, tossing them to the ground with grim determination as if to show them just where precisely they belonged.

When looking up from the two discarded bundles of cotton on the ground he saw the tears beading in her eyes, her whole body trembling like some lone sapling in that flurry of April snow out there, making spring quail with a shudder running through the early petals, Harry hesitated for a mere fraction of an uncertain second before enfolding her in his arms. "Hey, hey, hey," he breathed soothingly into her chestnut locks of hair, sounds of comfort more than words of meaning.

"It sickens me, Harry," she muttered against his shoulder, trying her best to stifle the sobs that were stirring in her chest. "It sickens me to the very core of my being, and for once I recoil from what I find there. I don't think I've ever been this filled with hatred and contempt before. And I... I hate that, you know? I hate what they are doing to Hogwarts, I hate the nefarious politics behind it all and I hate Dolores Umbridge like I have never hated another human being before, but most of all I hate the hatred within myself. That vile, corrosive thing—like a festering growth in the midst of your own heart. Does the ugliness in the world beget the ugliness in ourselves, I wonder, or is it the other way around? Oh, I'm just tired, Harry. So awfully tired..."

"Hush now," he told her softly, holding her closer still. "It's okay. We're okay. We will be, anyway. We'll get through this. We'll beat this. We'll beat her. Hermione Granger and Harry Potter... and that goofy Weasley fella... will not be defeated by a woman the size of an Ewok whose greatest passions in life are the color pink, Frolicsome Feline crockery and Sunday afternoon torture."

Her muffled giggle, frankly still half a sniffle, tickled the skin of his neck, and it brought the most pleasant of smiles to his face and reassuring lightness back into the windings of his worried heart.

"You know," she said in a musing tone, "I have honestly no idea what I would do without you, and I wish to never find out."

Harry's smile grew a bit wider at that, and in a whisper he returned, "Right back at you."

And for a little while neither of them spoke another word as they remained in the comforting quietude of their embrace. His mind wandering aimlessly, Harry caressed Hermione's back in slow circular motions and inhaled the fresh scent of her hair with every breath he took, barely conscious of it, yet positively inebriated by it.

"I wonder..." he eventually murmured, trailing off even before becoming aware that he had spoken at all.

"Huh?" Hermione inquired somewhat dizzily, leaning back to look at his face in search for clues as to his meaning. Harry, however, was staring straight past her and down the length of the adjoining corridor.

"A vacation indeed!" he all but exclaimed, and the sudden burst of excitement resounding in his voice and dancing coltishly in the glint of his eyes did nothing to lessen a wincing Hermione's perplexity.

With Harry taking her by the hand, Hermione was swirled around on the spot and already stumbling helplessly after him without really getting much say in the matter at all. Then again, not knowing what the matter even was she didn't exactly have a whole lot to say about it. Coming to a rather abrupt halt halfway through the corridor just seconds later, Hermione found herself standing at the midpoint between two stone archways and staring at the old and all too familiar tapestry depicting Barnabas the Barmy and his ill-advised (and consequently ill-fated) attempt to instruct a band of trolls in the Terpsichorean art of ballet. To this day the historicity of the piece was a subject of heated debate in academic circles.

"What d'you think?" Harry asked her, his excitement audibly unabated, and both the question as well as the particular manner in which it was asked further contributed to Hermione's general puzzlement at the moment.

"Well," she purposefully set out to do her best even under these most adverse of circumstances, "personally I've never given it much thought, to be perfectly honest. There are some scholars who hold that, while the bludgeoning itself may very well have taken place more or less the way it is widely recorded, though surely not quite like in this rather whimsical depiction of the event, it's highly unlikely that it involved ballet at all.

"Not only do they point out the general lack of evidence to corroborate the questionable assumption that trolls would show even the most superficial interest in the performing arts before remembering that they generally prefer to club everything that moves, but also adduce the fact that ballet barely even sprang into being during his lifetime in the late 15th century. There are multiple allegedly independent sources that do indeed link him to a lifelong pursuit of various forms of dancing, though its true extent and whether it ever encompassed ballet specifically, largely remains a mystery. It's a whole lot of conjecture with a generous sprinkling of half-truths, if you ask me."

She took a little breath, strictly out of necessity. "And then there is Eudoxia Wimpleson—or Wimplesdaughter, as she insists on being called for some undoubtedly compelling reason. I've met her myself, actually. She got a degree in troll studies at Ilvermorny, over in the States. There appears to be a sufficient number of people so profoundly interested in the subject matter to warrant its own field of study, bizarrely enough. Judging by Eudoxia it's virtually all they think about, too. She works at Rosie Lee's tea shop in Diagon Alley, if you're ever in the mood for a richly opinionated cup of tea.

"Anyway, she takes the view that the real reason for his fate was that the chieftain of the troll tribe mistook the man's dancing routine for a mating ritual directed at one or more of his fertile females. In her master's thesis Fabulous Creatures and Where to Find Them Mating she goes on to expound in great detail that no wooden clubs were actually used during the subsequent beating, since male trolls have their... rather idiosyncratic way of dealing with rival males, apparently. Our dear Miss Wimplesprogeny was way more into it than I could ever wish to be. Aaall the way in there."

A shudder went through her.

In the copious meantime, the lines on Harry's brow had increased in both depth and number throughout Hermione's informatory monologue, until they had reached a point at which it was no longer feasible for them to multiply or deepen any further within the physical confines of his forehead. Then, about five and a half seconds into the whole affair, amusement had blossomed on his face to replace all the momentary disarray thereon.

"What?" he finally asked, although it was a rather rhetorical what as he already knew exactly what, of course, and so instead of waiting for any sort of what-related elaboration he spun around, grabbed his evidently disoriented companion by the shoulders, turned her by precisely one-hundred and eighty degrees and then waited expectantly for a more pertinent response hopefully not involving trolls and clubs and some dotty Euphoria Wimbledon person.

"Oh," Hermione firstly commented on her newfound perspective. "Right." Naturally she knew exactly where they were and what secrets lay hidden behind that downright conspicuously unremarkable wall now right in the center of her vision, but as for Harry's exact meaning... "Please accept my currently extraordinary level of exhaustion and my rather frail state of mind as a suitable excuse for this mental lapse, but... I'm afraid I'm not quite following you."

"You said you need a vacation, right?" he asked her with a mischievous little grin trickling over his lips.

"Yeah..." Hermione warily answered, looking back and forth between her friend and the wall, unable to decide which one of the two she currently found more suspicious.

Harry's grin widened, which as far as Hermione was concerned put the wall in a distant second place. "Might one not also say that you... require a vacation?"

Staring blankly at the equally blank wall in front of them, Hermione furrowed her brow. Then she looked back at Harry, and brow still furrowed said, "Are you suggesting we use the Room of Requirement as some kind of... of spa or holiday resort? A Copacabana beach hotel, perhaps? I can already hear the tremendously relaxing electronic dance music. My hips can hardly contain themselves."

Harry screwed up his face at that, though his amusement at her little hip-wiggle ruined the intended mien of disapproval a bit. Despite the obvious irony in it, it had almost been a little sexy, that wiggle of hers. "You don't have to make it sound so silly, you know? That's not quite what I had in mind."

Even before she spoke up again he had to smile, for he could tell from the changed expression on her face alone that he had finally piqued her curiosity. Granted, it wasn't exactly the most difficult of feats to pique Hermione Granger's curiosity, but he rather enjoyed being the one to do it nonetheless.

"What did you have in mind?" she asked him—curiously.

Harry thought for a moment, and she watched him intently. "Just... everything that Hogwarts used to be," he then revealed. "A pleasant place. A warm place. Well, technically speaking, what with being an old draughty castle in the middle of the Scottish Highlands and all that, Hogwarts has never been much of a warm place in the most literal sense..."

"Tell me about it," Hermione readily agreed, hugging herself against an incidental chill that in rippling shivers went through her body just then.

Harry looked at her sympathetically. "But you know what I mean, right?" His eyes went back to that solid, deceptively impenetrable stone wall between the two archways. "A place to relax, to retreat to. A place to breathe, to live and to be in. To be ourselves, just as we are. Nobody else to define us. No armbands, no labels, no pretense. Just us. A place where the Earth doesn't seem to be spinning quite so hastily and ever more out of control, and where you don't have to run like crazy to keep up all the time. A peaceful place. A place to call our own. A place like—"

"Home," Hermione completed softly.

He turned his head to look at her, and was glad to find that same sense of longing that he felt within himself mirrored so openly on her face as well. "So?" he prodded her again, his playful demeanor returning. "What do you think?"

"Well," said Hermione with profoundest rumination in her eyes, "in conclusion I would have to say that pondering whether Barnabas the Barmy was beaten to a pulp with a bunch of troll penises over ballet or something else entirely is not really the kind of intellectual pursuit I like to spend my limited time and energy on."

She began giggling even before Harry had much time to look properly miffed, and reasonably enough he soon gave up the pitiful attempt in favor of joining her in her persisting laughter.

"I must admit," she eventually spoke with regained composure, "I never really thought about the Room of Requirement in anything but the most practical terms. Like training grounds for secret orders or the provisional hiding place for Dolores Umbridge's rotting corpse... you know, that sort of thing."

"Strictly reasonable."

"Exactly."

They nodded their heads in blissful unison.

"So, you wanna give it a try?" he then asked.

"Absolutely," she replied on the spot, by now enthused in earnest. "Would you like to do the honors?"

Harry considered that, then shrugged his shoulders in an inconclusive sort of way. "Why don't we try it together? You think that'll work?"

"I honestly don't know," said Hermione. "Don't forget that this is the one room in the entirety of the castle that Hogwarts: A History has nothing to say about. I frankly wonder if even Dumbledore himself is aware of its existence, though I'm inclined to suspect as much."

"Let's just have a crack at it, shall we?" Harry proposed quite eagerly. "I think we're standing close enough already, so we'd better stop talking about Umbridge and troll genitalia, or we might be in for one hell of a surprise."

"Oh dear," Hermione exhaled.

"Exactly. So, what are we going for here, specifically..."

"Harry."

"Do we even need to think about it consciously, or do you think the Room can actually read the mind of anyone standing in front of it? I never quite figured this out."

"Harry..."

"Yah?"

"The door."

"Huh?"

"The door, Harry," Hermione repeated more emphatically. "It's already there."

Harry turned to look at the blank stone wall and much to his dismay found it no longer blank at all, so he swiftly turned back to Hermione with no less than an appropriate amount of shock stuck to his face. "How did it—when did it—"

Hermione looked back at him uneasily, her fingertips pressed to her lips. "I think it appeared roughly around the time when you were mentioning Umbridge and..." Her eyes fluttered shut. "Troll genitalia."

Harry stared at her with his mouth hanging loosely agape. "Oh no," he breathed, then repeated it three times over as he anxiously stared at the strikingly nondescript door that now dominated the formerly empty wall. When he looked back at Hermione there was an unsettling hint of horror in his eyes. "This room can't... it can't create... living things, can it?"

Hermione's eyes widened to rival the already remarkable roundness of his. "I don't think so," she replied with the most ominous kind of uncertainty in her voice. "But there's really no way of knowing with this one. Except for trial and error, of course. Lots and lots of potential error..."

He stared at her a bit longer, though his eyes had lost all focus by now and she probably may just as well have not been there at all. "I'd like to think I don't get scared all that easily," he stated matter-of-factly. "Having said that, I'm a bit scared right now."

"Uh-huh," Hermione succinctly concurred. "We might have to test how quickly the room is able to reset next..."

"Nothing created by the Room can leave it though, right?"

"Again, Harry... I think so, but I don't know for sure whether that's a general rule or not", she explained. "I did try to take two or three of the books from the D.A. training facility with me once—"

"Of course you did."

"—and they collectively vanished the moment I stepped on the threshold. Much to my disappointment."

"Okay," he said, apparently heartened afresh by all their inconclusive evidence and thorough guesswork. "Okay. Let's just agree that the Room cannot create anything alive and that nothing that isn't brought in from the outside can leave it."

"Agreeing on things doesn't necessarily make them true," Hermione stated automatically.

Harry pursed his lips and raised an admonitory finger at her, said, "Not the time, Mione. Not the time," and then ended up watching the door to the Room of Requirement with rising apprehension, perhaps half-expecting some monstrous kind of Umbridge simulacrum to come bursting through it at any moment, pursued by a band of rowdy trolls with their sure to be enormous clubs in their hands...

"So... you wanna take a look?" he at last asked Hermione.

She gave a curt nod of affirmation. "Yes, I would very much like you to take a look."

He made a face as she smirked at him just a tad impishly.

"Fine," he conceded glumly. "If it's some messed up phallic phantasmagoria in there, I suppose I'm the one to blame."

"Yes, yes," Hermione agreed as she shoved a chuckling Harry ahead of her, straight towards the balefully awaiting door. "You and your weird obsession with troll clubs."

Offering only playful resistance, Harry reminded her, "Technically speaking, you were the one who first brought up all that confusing meat stick kerfuffle, you know..."

"Not the time, Harry," Hermione retorted with some well-measured smugness. "Not the time."

Now finding himself right in front of the door with Hermione's hands patting his back in what felt like an ambiguous mix of encouragement and mockery, Harry put his right hand on the unassuming brass handle, took one last steeling breath, muttered mostly to himself, "Here we go," and finally, carefully pulled the door open just far enough to enable him to put his head through the gap and catch a cautious glimpse of whatever might lie in wait beyond...

"Huh," he assessed after a deliberative moment's pause.

Raising herself on tiptoes right behind him, Hermione tried to peek over his shoulder, but the view left a lot to be desired. Mostly because there was very little in it besides wayward strands of black hair. She liked it a bit longer like that, but it clearly had its disadvantages too. "What is it?" she asked him a bit impatiently, her mouth not far from his ear. "Is it bad? Is it awful? How horrible is it?"

The suspense was figuratively killing her.

"Troll knobs," Harry at last whispered in a portentous voice that would have made Professor Trelawney either swell with pride or turn green with envy. "Troll knobs everywhere."

"What?" his companion hissed, her fingers digging into his shoulders. "You're having me on!"

Harry turned his head to look at her and Hermione was sure she caught a flicker of amusement in his eyes despite his expression remaining otherwise neutral. "See for yourself, if you dare."

He held the door open for her in a gesture of invitation, and ducking underneath his arm after a second of hesitance she threw a suspicious look his way through narrowed eyes, at which he pursed his lips as if to hide a smile. With Hermione tentatively stepping forth into the unknown, Harry swiftly checked the hallway for unwanted bystanders. Finding none he followed her inside, shutting the door behind him without noticing anything out of the ordinary.

"This is extraordinary," Hermione observed in awe as Harry positioned himself next to her with his hands buried deep in the pockets of his blue jeans. "Incredible, actually. How is this even possible? It's different from the D.A. facilities in virtually every way. Even in dimensions! How in Merlin's name does the Room do these things?"

Harry gave himself a moment to properly take in these new surroundings. Although they were technically standing in yet another hallway, this one was decidedly different from the ones they had just come from in both style and atmosphere. Via two wide, sweeping archways framed with treated walnut to either side of them, the corridor opened up into two rooms that instantly struck both Harry and Hermione as that rare, so perfect balance between spaciousness and coziness. There was not a spot that seemed wasted or unused as even the empty spaces between all things both big and small felt like they were filled with the very essence of comfort. Every distance was exactly what it should be, no color clashed with another and every last angle seemed right—even those that were not.

To the left there was a living room dominated by a large fireplace with an ornate wooden mantelpiece, a crimson suede couch large enough for three and, to Harry's tacit surprise, an old but venerable piano standing obliquely in a corner. Perhaps even more surprising than the slightly antiquated musical instrument, however, were the two large windows to either side of the fireplace looking out on rolling hills and snow-covered meadows speckled with small clusters of leafless trees and hardy conifers held firmly in the chilling grasp of winter.

On the right-hand side there was a strikingly rustic kitchen that, as Harry could not help but think immediately, Aunt Petunia would have scowled at with her aquiline nose all crinkled up in disgust. From the tiled travertine floor to the vaulted brick ceiling, from the convenient center counter to the numerous drawers and cupboards, from the candle chandeliers to the old-fashioned cast iron stove, earthy tones of brown and black, and faded red and green, made the entire room look like it was as old as Hogwarts itself and a part of the very land it was surrounded by. At the far end of the kitchen there was an arched alcove which underneath another inherently perplexing window snugly contained a small dining table with cushioned benches to either side of it.

And finally, on a cursory glance straight ahead and down the darkening length of the corridor with its walnut wainscoting and a long rug on the flagstone floor that admirably managed to combine all the colors of the four houses of Hogwarts without looking ridiculous, Harry thought he spotted four closed doors in total: one to either side about halfway through and two on the oblique walls at its arrow-shaped end.

"Yeah, it's pretty neat I s'pose," Harry in conclusion elaborated his view on the matter as he languidly scratched his left cheek, making a mental note to shave the pitiful stubble thereon at the next given opportunity.

"Pretty neat you s'pose?" Hermione mimicked him with some considerable derision mixed into the incredulity. "This is utterly marvelous, you muppet! Just look at this place. There are windows, Harry. Win-dows!"

"I'm looking," he assured her as he amusedly watched her spinning round and round, unable to focus her bubbling admiration on any particular point for much more than a second at a time. "And I'm li-king!"

She whirled around to glower at him with her eyes turning into distrusting slits. "I'm not feeling the sense of wonder here."

With a soft chuckle Harry made a step past her into the living area. "Well, there is only one armchair," he remarked after a moment of judicious appraisal, pointing it out with a jerk of his head.

Hermione padded to his side and briefly examined the situation. "So?"

He shrugged. "We might end up fighting over it."

Hermione gave a dismissive kind of snort. "Yeah, that totally sounds like us. Fighting over an armchair. Please! Where do you even get these id—oh, that piano! Oh, it's beautiful! Wait, isn't this the exact same one that Professor McGonagall has in her study..."

With a smile lingering on his face, Harry sauntered off into the nearby kitchen with the sounds of Hermione's well-nigh interminable excitement following him. Apparently she had now discovered a book shelf. That would likely demand her attention for at least a little while.

Harry, meanwhile, leisurely circled the center counter with one hand gliding over the thoroughly scuffed wood of its much-used working surface. Casting glances left and right over pans, pots and ladles made of copper, glass and cast iron, and the ancient black stove that looked a bit like a repurposed engine of a steam locomotive, Harry quickly decided that this was the nicest kitchen he had ever seen. The sleek and sterile counterpart back in Privet Drive, for all its modern luxuries, was simply no competition when it came to wordlessly extending an invitation to spice and slice and eat and relish the culinary side of life in there. The richly idiosyncratic kitchen of the Weasley's home, on the other hand, with all its skewed and cluttered charm, was of such a fundamentally chaotic kind that one could never be quite sure whether one was salting the soup or sweetening it, or if it even was soup to begin with.

The air in the room, however, Harry found a bit stuffy, and so much like a merman takes to water Harry walked over to the window in the small alcove, pausing only when he was leaning over the table and his hand was already reaching for the metal handle. Surely this couldn't be an actual window? They were in the middle of the castle, were they not? Unless, of course, they weren't. Who could honestly tell with this Room? The weather and evident time of year didn't seem right, either, but magic was a thing, so…

He shook his hesitation off, proceeded to open the window and then was completely baffled when within an instant a refreshing breeze of crisp winter air came gusting in and blew coolly over his face.

"What," he uttered somewhat obtusely even as he enjoyed this familiar sensation. A sensation which in this instance certainly had no right to be real, right? Could a sensation clearly felt reasonably be deemed unreal? Either way, invigorated by the playful stir of wind in his hair Harry felt compelled to stick his head outside, so as to be able to fully appreciate both the wind and the view. And so as a matter of course he did just that. Or he would have, rather, if his head hadn't had a forceful encounter with some invisible, thoroughly unyielding barrier within the window frame.

"Ow!" he exclaimed half in protest, half in pain. "What the—bloody—stupid—" Rubbing the throbbing top of his head while sulkily eyeing the inconveniently solid emptiness above the window sill he called for Hermione, who promptly came hopping from across the hallway.

"I was just doing the same thing in the living room," she told him excitedly the moment she saw him with the open window behind him.

"Did you hurt your head, too?" he asked her with a grumpy face.

Quizzical creases appeared on Hermione's brow. "No?"

Harry cleared his throat and dropped his hand from aforementioned head. "Yeah, me neither."

Shooting him a dubious look, Hermione turned her attention to the window. "I was just about to try to carefully move my hand outside when you called me."

"That would be one approach," Harry muttered while gnawing at his lower lip.

Already Hermione was right in the middle of it, and the palm and spread fingers of her hand ended up firmly fixed in place mid-air, pushing seemingly against nothing. "Fascinating," she commented in her best unconscious Spock impression.

Harry, eventually overcoming a hesitance born of proverbially burnt fingers, put his own hand right next to hers, cramped as it was with the both of them ducking underneath the alcove.

"This is odd," he observed. "It doesn't feel like glass, it certainly doesn't feel like air... it doesn't really feel like anything I've ever felt before. It's solid, somehow, but... strange. There's zero feedback. No tingling, no buzzing. And no sort of texture, either. Nothing. Just... numb resistance. It's totally different from those invisible barriers that protect the girls' dormitories from the uncontrollably lecherous sex."

Hermione looked at him askance. "Just how familiar are you with that particular barrier?"

Harry made a face at her. "I keep bumping into it night after night, you know? I'm a boy and I can't help myself. Am stupid. Want sex. Hurr durr!"

Hermione chortled so hard she had to abort her empty-air-touching exercise and retreat from the alcove.

"I'll have you know," Harry set out to inform her quite seriously, "that my one and only encounter with that barrier was actually all the way back in first year, the night after Halloween. I couldn't sleep; my thoughts kept spinning through that whole troll-in-the-bathroom experience. Which in retrospect may have been slightly traumatizing for a child, but back then was just one big wild adventure, wasn't it? At least for Ron and me.

"Well, eventually I got out of bed and made my way to your dorm room, feeling like maybe I should check up on you. Make sure you were okay. It had all happened so fast, right? I didn't even really know if you had gotten hurt or something. Long story short, since somebody apparently thought invisible force fields would be preferable to good old-fashioned locked doors and a simple Anti-Alohomora, I ended up hobbling back to bed with an aching wrist and a sore bum."

Hermione, though genuinely moved by this hitherto unfamiliar anecdote, momentarily was mostly shocked. "You were thrown to the ground by the force of that barrier?"

"Not exactly," he mumbled while looking at his sneakers. "That strange push-back I felt in my wrist when I tried to open the door caught me completely off-guard and I... I just fell backwards. On my bum. Like a sack of potatoes. With a scrawny bum."

Hermione bit her bottom lip. "Well, I'm touched by your younger self's concern for my younger self," she gracefully skipped past his embarrassment. "Despite your ever-prurient inclinations."

"Oh, especially at the age of eleven," he answered jocularly. "I mean, I hardly knew what a penis was good for besides peeing back then, but boy, was I ready for some post-traumatic action that night, let me tell you."

Grinning, and with Hermione snorting with laughter behind him, Harry left the kitchen to continue his exploration of this most mysterious of establishments, weird pseudo-windows and all. Halfway down the corridor he heard Hermione yell after him, "Harry, there's actual food in here! And lots of it, too!" The sound of her voice strongly suggested that she had now stuck her head into a pantry.

Shaking his head Harry opened the first door to his right and a second later found himself standing in a spacious, sparkling bathroom, shaped like an oval all in tiled black and white marble, and accentuated with golden tapware, knobs and handles on all the fixtures, basins and towel racks. Centered near the opposite end of the room underneath a wide curved window, a huge free-standing tub resting heavily on massive golden claw feet shaped like a lion's imposing paws immediately commanded all the attention upon entering. Hermione, Harry had no doubt, would absolutely love it. But who could tell where she had stuck her nose now?

Rather impressed with the equipment Harry ambulated on, and via another door soon came into an adjoining bedroom containing a huge Victorian four-poster bed. Red and gold were the primary colors around the room, found in the fabrics of the large afghan rug that covered most of the wooden panel floor underneath and around the bed, the long crimson window drapes bound with golden cords and the upper trims of the otherwise white walls, as well as the sheets, the thick duvet, the countless pillows and the tassel curtains of the strikingly opulent bed, kingly not in size alone. The wood of choice here was mahogany for bed frame, gigantic wardrobe, chiffonier, vanity and nightstands alike. In the space between the foot of the bed and the wardrobe a chandelier promised to be the foremost source of light after nightfall, with what had to be at least a hundred little candles idly resting in their sockets waiting to be lit at a single wand's flick.

Despite the daylight—puzzling as it still was—falling through the two large windows on the wall opposite to the one shared with the bathroom, the room had a slightly darker quality to it than the parlor, but in a warm and inviting sort of way. Darkness, after all, is not solely the bearer of humans' most primal fears, but just as much the invitation for a good night's sleep, and it was the latter of these two rather disparate aspects the room exuded to the fullest. To Harry it basically looked and felt like a more luxurious single-bed variant of the Gryffindor dormitories, and perhaps, he mused, this was not a case of mere coincidence.

Through a second door in a diagonal corner of the room Harry in accordance with his expectations stepped back out into the arrow-shaped end of the hallway, and without much deliberation he proceeded through a door to his immediate right. There he couldn't help but greet the sight of a small but fully stocked library with a chuckle. The Room of Requirement evidently knew exactly what was required from all its visitors. From the far end of the room the space between the ceiling-high bookcases, filled to the brim with books upon books, and an expansive collection of paperback novels as well, was flooded with the bright light of day. Similar to the bed- and bathroom on the other side, the library was connected to another room via a second door, which is where Harry finally rediscovered Hermione.

She was sitting at an old, dark desk underneath a bay window, her legs crossed at the knees. With one arm in her lap and the other supported on the sturdy tabletop, her hand resting lightly against her temple, she sat there leaning over the thin pages of an enormous, leather-bound tome opened before her. A silent chuckle rolled through Harry's chest as he noticed the briefest jolt go through her body at his sudden entrance, like a hiccup; yet her mind remained too focused on her reading to join the rest of her body in being properly startled.

The scene struck him as quintessentially Hermione, and a secret little smile insisted on tugging at the corners of his mouth. Without conscious intent he watched her for a moment longer, that shape of her, that being of her. All of it so deeply familiar, and yet...

A surge of warmth welled up in his body, and the sensation caught him by surprise. What was he so embarrassed about all of a sudden? There was absolutely no reason to be any such thing, and not exclusively to prove as much did he quickly get back to his usual easy-going self, famous as it was.

"The scent of books lured you away from the boring foodstuff quickly enough, I see," he quipped quite competently.

Hermione raised her head to look at him. "This is really interesting," she said. "I've heard of the concept before, but only just now, at first glance, basically, discovered a book about it in that shelf over there and remembered that I've been meaning to look into it for a while now."

"What concept?"

"Arcane affinity, is what it's known as."

Harry gave a semi-sage nod at that. He had never before heard of any such concept. Frankly sounded a bit too much like Trelawneyesque codswallop to him. "Well, I'm glad both quantity and quality of the reading material in here appear to be to your satisfaction. It wouldn't really be much of a vacation for you otherwise, now would it?"

"Hmmm," made Hermione. "I'm sure there's some more intriguing stuff to be found around here, but it honestly isn't all that much. Not to seem ungrateful or anything."

She looked around apologetically, as if communicating with the Room of Requirement itself. "What?" she asked when she found Harry staring at her with a suspicious glint of mirth in his eyes.

He clicked his tongue quite meaningfully, inhaled loudly, then paused with some deliberation before exhaling in one go, "There's an entire library right this way." He pointed at the door behind him with a thumb over his shoulder.

Almost immediately Hermione's eyes widened to all but perfect circles, and with a dramatic second's delay she catapulted herself from her creaking chair and bolted right past Harry like a human ball lightning of excitement, and laughing aloud Harry turned on his heels and followed behind at a much more leisurely pace.

~•~

Later, back in the living room, Harry applied his full attention to that old record player which had already caught his eye on their first round trip through the premises. It wasn't quite as old as the Headmaster's trusted phonograph with its gigantic brass horn, which may or may not have actually been assembled by Thomas Edison himself, but it was by Harry's best estimation at least a 1970s sort of relic, and as such venerable in its own right. Its built-in speakers would stand no chance of rivaling Dudley's state-of-the-art sound system back at Privet Drive, but as long as they would at least get to emit some actual music from time to time, Harry was very much inclined to consider it an improvement nonetheless. A single tap with a competently wielded wand would yield enough electricity to let that product of Muggle ingenuity run for a couple of hours.

"Where do you think the Room got this one from?" he asked Hermione when coming from the kitchen she rejoined him with a steaming cup of tea in each hand. "If everything in here is indeed a sort of duplicate of something within the confines of the castle."

"That's Professor Burbage's," her succinct response came as soon as she dared to glance his way while carefully setting the cups down on two woven coasters on the coffee table.

"Huh," he had to say to that as he sat himself down on the hardwood floor. "Well, let's hope she's got a decent taste in music then." He got busy with flipping through the respectable assortment of records filling the small shelf beneath the device. "A-ha!" he exclaimed triumphantly.

"What is it?"

"Well, it's..." He held up a record for her to see. "It's A-ha."

With a soft chuckle Hermione shook her head at his shenanigans. "Walked right into that one, didn't I?"

He gave her a playful grin, then eagerly went back to his flipping. He was mumbling names and dates and occasionally even little fragments of trivia to himself as the vinyl records kept going flip-flip-flip from right to left between his fingers. Sometimes he threw them Hermione's way, too. The fragments of trivia, that is, not the records.

Hermione watched him with a smile lingering faintly on her face, lost in thought a bit with both her hands wrapped around her warm cup, ere her gaze idly wandered over to the piano in the corner. After repeated glances and a final moment's hesitation she yielded to its wordless beckoning and arose from the couch, quietly walked over to the familiar instrument and seated herself on the small leather-padded bench in front of it. Having raised the fallboard she deliberated with herself for a moment, then straightened her back and brought her hands into position with her left thumb hovering a fraction of an inch over the second lowest G.

The first keys were gently struck, and soon a melody soft and somber rose into the air, filling the room without pretension, caressing the senses like a light autumnal breeze at the close of a late summer day.

Harry, first curious then fully entranced, forgot all about his records even with one remaining clasped between his fingers, stood and five steps later halted at her side, found himself at last entranced not merely by the melodious sounds that were maundering dreamily through his mind, but by the sights his eyes beheld. His gaze was fixed on her nimble hands in motion, then darted to her face, so calm and yet so focused. Suddenly she noticed him, looked up from the keys underneath her fingertips and in her surprise hit two wrong notes in a chord of three, making them both first cringe at the dissonance then laugh in mutual embarrassment.

"Sorry," he hastily sputtered, "didn't mean to disrupt you."

"Sorry," she babbled in simultaneity, "didn't mean to disturb you."

They both mumbled, "Nonsense," then laughed again. Hermione's eyes wandered aimlessly over the length of the piano while Harry's were stuck on the deeply fascinating grain of the wooden floor.

"That was, uhm... beautiful," muttered Harry, pointlessly scratching the back of his head. "Really, quite... quite beautiful. Would you mind starting over? I hate that I cut it off like that."

Hermione seemed even more abashed than she already had been, which she herself immediately deemed stupid. Had she not started playing just a moment ago with him right there?

"I'm not used to playing for an audience," she heard herself explain, which surely was truthful enough a view of things. If, that is, one were sympathetic to ignoring the numerous occasions on which she had played for her family—her extended family, too. And some neighbors and acquaintances of her parents once. Or twice. She shook her head in disagreement with herself. "But of course I—I can play it again, if you want me to."

"Great," was Harry's eager confirmation as he regarded her briefly with a sheepish smile, then looked expectantly at the instrument in front of her as if at any moment it were about to burst into song all on its own. Which in these peculiar parts of the world was actually not a thing unheard of.

Hermione, rendered hesitant by lingering inhibition, somewhat jerkily brought first her body then her hands back into position, then inconspicuously took a deep breath. At her exhalation's end she once again struck that G and held it with her left hand's thumb, then followed with thumb, middle and ring finger of her right hand hitting B, D and F sharp. Then her left hand's middle finger struck and held the D to the left of the opening G, followed by a minimal readjustment of her right hand and another chord. She repeated the sequence once, and that was about as far as Harry's brain managed to follow the happenings. When her left hand suddenly started jumping—gliding, truthfully, with such elegance and precision both—back and forth to do alone what had so far been done in two-handed collaboration because her right hand was now busy playing even higher notes, he really had no idea anymore how she was doing what she was doing.

The tune was so mild and sweet, suffused with that touch of melancholy that comes with looking back, yet the way in which it was produced boggled his mind in ways it likely hadn't been boggled since that midsummer day all those years ago, when Hagrid had taken him on his first trip to Diagon Alley. Once he realized that Hermione was also working a pedal down below with her foot for some reason—and there were three of them?!—while both her hands moved as if controlled by separate brains entirely, his own gray goo felt like it couldn't even tell left from right any longer. This, it struck him hard as the keys were struck so softly, was magic!

It should, in his defense, be considered that Harry had grown up in what likely was the least artistically inclined and most uncultured household to be found on the British Isles. He had heard classical music before, but never really seen it. Not like this, at any rate. Not up close. Not so tangibly. And most importantly, not crystallized so clearly at the soft command of Hermione's fingertips.

When about three and a half minutes after that first tender keystroke Hermione's fingers slowly left the seven keys they had held all at once, she sat motionless with her hands folded in her lap and waited for a moment. And then another moment. Her audience of one remained dead silent, which most performers would hardly call a good sign. With a twinge of trepidation she turned halfway to him. "Well, thuh-that's it," she haltingly informed him. "That's all of it. I mean, strictly speaking that's just the first of the three parts there are, but... but that's the first part. All done. Yep."

Harry was still staring at the black and white keys of that fundamentally incomprehensible arcane device. Hermione's eyes bounced from corner to corner. Neither of these ocular activities helped either one of them a whole lot.

"Wow," it then came wafting out of Harry.

"It's really not that impressive," Hermione at once set out to relativize. "It's not a particularly challenging piece to play, technically. You really just have to go... slowly and painfully, as it were. Lent et douloureux."

"But!" Harry ably contradicted her, then paused to give everybody time to let that sink in. "I—I had no idea you could do that."

Confusion materialized on Hermione's features. "I told you when I was off to play in Professor McGonagall's study on likely a hundred occasions over the years," she thought it sensible to remind him.

"Sure," Harry conceded as much, "but I didn't think you'd be playing like that!"

She arched an eyebrow. "Were you envisioning me playing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star with my index fingers all day long?"

"No, but I... I don't know," he gave up whatever he was attempting with sagging shoulders. He raised that thing he was momentarily puzzled to find in his hand: David Hasselhoff met his eyes with a smoldering gaze of his own. Harry, however, was not in the mood. "I'm a bit at a loss for words, I suppose. In case that wasn't already bloody obvious. I didn't know this about you. At all. And all this time it was... right there, you know?" He heaved a disconsolate sigh. "I hope you don't think that I wouldn't be interested in something like that. Or in you, generally. Or specifically. I should've asked about it sooner. Given you some... some bloody attention for once. I just... I didn't know. Didn't think."

Hermione was taken aback by his most evident dismay, having expected no such serious development. "Harry, you don't need to apologize for—"

"I should know these things about you," he insisted, his harsh reproach directed solely at himself. "You're always there, every step of the way. Caring, listening, worrying. Carrying my burdens. And what do I do? I completely miss this... this huge part of you for years. This is obviously important to you."

"It's really no—"

"You don't get to play like that unless the playing actually means something to you," knowing her intention he forestalled her. "So don't... play it down. What the playing means to you."

Hermione breathed a sigh of her own. "It's just this thing in my family," she laid out. "Music and literature, those are our things. And medicine, I suppose. And science in general. The usual hotchpotch, really. My mother was always a bit more about the music, my father a bit more about the literature. But she kept reading his books in addition to her own, and he learned to play the piano to be able to accompany her when she's playing the violin. And I, being thrown right into that particular mix, somehow didn't manage to fall very far from the tree. Surprisingly enough. Not that I made a conscious effort to do so, but... yeah. Here I am, my parents' daughter. Pity, but it is what it is."

With an unbidden tug of amusement at the corners of his lips, Harry narrowed his eyes at her. "I know what you're doing," he informed her. "Don't you try to alleviate my entirely justified self-loathing here, missy."

She gave him a telling look. "I think you're severely underestimating the levity of the situation." Again he exhaled so laboriously. "Hey," she gave him a verbal nudge, "wanna see me play another little piece?"

He started nodding even as he was still struggling to lift himself out of his ill musings. "Yes," he said. "I'd love to see you play... everything there is to play."

She laughed with an almost imperceptible tinge of rose on her cheeks. "Well, that's a tall order. For now..." And she resumed her posture at the keys. "Are you perchance familiar with a man who went by the name of Franz Liszt?"

Harry shrugged his shoulders. "Might've caught it somewhere before."

"He was this moderately competent Hungarian piano chap," Hermione imparted to him with an odd little smile hidden away in subtlety, "famous for composing all these nice little entry level pieces. Great material for every age to get started with."

"Huh," Harry acknowledged.

"Just keep your eyes on my hands and you'll have this memorized in no time," Hermione instructed him, biting away that secret smile of hers. "This one," she added, composing herself with a deep breath, hands in position taut and ready, "is called La campanella."

He nodded; she began.

Bup-bup-bup, bip-bip-bip, bup-bup-bup, bip-bip-bip...

"Okay," an attentive Harry commented. "This doesn't look too bad."

… bup bip-bip, bup bip-bip...

A silence briefly afloat on the air, a controlled intake of breath; she continued.

"Wha—?!" Harry ejected. "How the—what the—bloody hell!"

Hermione struggled to keep her desperately required focus and composure with Harry's hilarious antics next to her, but within a minute began first to squeal and then to laugh as inevitably her flitting, darting, oscillating fingers ended up tied into a luckily strictly figurative knot.

She broke into laughter all anew when she turned around and saw the priceless expression on Harry's face. "I'm sorry," she said, ablush with both delight and a commingling pinch of shame. "I allowed myself a little prank at your expense, I'm afraid. I can't actually play that piece in its entirety. Not even close. I just wanted to see your face."

His thoroughly flabbergasted mush turned her way.

"Yeah, that one."

He blinked his bulging eyes back into their sockets and retrieved his lower jaw from wherever it was presently hanging out. "I don't even know what just happened," he exhaled in a daze. "How can your fingers all move independently like that, as if each and every one of them had a brain of its own?"

"Can't be very impressive brains if that's the case," Hermione casually dismissed the flattery. "Did you not notice the three gross mistakes I made even before I completely bungled the whole thing? My phrasing was a bit stiff, and I didn't keep the tempo either."

"Oh, absolutely," Harry said quite sternly, shaking his head with his hands stemmed into his sides. "An atrocious performance, Miss Granger. I was completely enthralled by your glaring incompetence."

She rolled her eyes with a little smile on her lips. "My papa gets through it quite impressively, but he's been playing for thirty years or so. I just dabble in it sometimes. This piece, I mean. Though ever since coming to Hogwarts my weekly hours have dropped considerably, and I've never had a professional tutor or anything. It's just a little passion of mine. And I will make no excuses for generally preferring the slower pieces, all dreamy and evocative. The kind that whisks you off your feet and then far and away. It just... helps me escape sometimes."

Harry's brow creased ever so faintly. "Escape?"

"You know," she said, bowing her head. "From all the madness and the noise."

"Of the world?"

"Oh, that too, definitely. But just as much of myself. From the bedlam up here." She twice tapped her temple, then ran her finger through her hair and around her ear. "It quiets things down, you know? Makes the noise recede. Casts a spell of calmness over my heart and banishes my demons like a sort of musical Patronus. For a little while, at least."

Curiosity had fluidly morphed into concern on Harry's features. "Demons?"

"Forgive me, I'm being a tad dramatic," Hermione said with a wave of her hand, her eyes on the black and white keys. "But we all have our little angels and demons on our shoulders, don't we?"

Hermione missed the look he was giving her completely. "I suppose we do."

"The piano makes it all gently fade away," she went on. "When I'm playing, the music and the energy that creates it becomes all there is. When I'm truly in it, which doesn't always happen and which I cannot force, I feel like some kind of conduit between the universe and the act of creation. There's a force running through you that you cannot truly grasp or control. It takes hold of you, not the other way around. You act, you do, but you do not think or decide. Consciousness itself is temporarily suspended in something more... pristine. There's a purity to it. Something meditative. Perhaps even transcendent." She paused. "I sound like a missionary. Or a drug peddler."

Harry's ruminative attention was disrupted by his own chuckle. "I think I know what you mean, though. At least I think that's how I feel when I'm flying. Maybe it's a stupid comparison. I don't know. There's nothing creative about what I do."

"Hey, don't denigrate it like that," she exhorted him. "I think it's a perfectly valid comparison to make. The experience isn't limited to one specific means of attaining it. There are lots of different drugs!"

Harry laughed out loud, and she regarded him with a warm smile.

"I believe it applies just as much to the state an athlete attains when he's, how do you players like to call it, 'in the zone'," she continued. "You don't pull out your clipboard in the middle of a game, and consciously conduct some calculations about the Snitch's velocity and trajectory relative to your own to then ascertain what exactly you have to do in order to catch it. You simply do it. It's all instinct, drive and implicit knowledge. Some have it, others don't. It's innate. You can to some extent refine what you've been given through diligent practice, but you won't make a Viktor Krum out of a Cho Chang with all the training in the world. Or a Harry Potter out of a Draco Malfoy. The one is decently talented, maybe even formidable. But the other is an artist of the skies."

Harry stared at her, his cheeks painting themselves red even as his brain was still working its way through all the layered meaning of her words. Then he quickly averted his face, started shuffling his feet on the ground and shaking his head, and, "What nah that's like silly talk no way you're just that's not even I mean come on," became a sentence, apparently.

Hermione humorously rolled her eyes, the line of her lips slanting upward. "I mean it, Harry. I'm utterly mesmerized every time I witness you up in the air. Scared out of my mind, sure, but also mesmerized in earnest. For myself I'm always relieved once I've got you safely on the ground again, I admit that. But for you... for you my heart rejoices whenever I see you up there, free and unbound and dancing... well, like an artist of the skies."

With a hand in the hair at the back of his head he glanced up at her, found her just then averting her face with a faint bloom of color cast over her cheekbones. "All I'm saying," she was saying, "is that it's very much comparable. Your experience in the air and mine at the piano, I mean. Mine's considerably less dangerous, so I've got that going for me, but yours I'd deem far more impressive."

"Rubbish," Harry promptly disagreed.

"How exactly is my piano supposed to kill me, huh?"

For once it was Harry's turn to roll his eyes at her, if only in jest. "I wish I'd realized sooner what this means to you," he said with a sigh that ended a moment's introspective quietude.

"It's a very personal thing for me," Hermione answered, then hastily added, "Not that I wouldn't want to share personal things with you! It's just—it's not your fault, is what I'm saying. At any rate, the piano is the only thing that makes me feel like that. So deeply at peace. Well, except for one other thing perhaps."

He looked up at her from wherever his eyes had been idly adrift. "Reading?"

She smiled. "One would think, wouldn't one?" she said. "But actually... it's quite different. Reading is a much more conscious process. You actively absorb what you read, you reflect upon it. Your brain is busy processing the input, and you're aware of it. Language is deliberate, and instantly conveys explicit meaning while teasing you with what more subtly it implies. It makes you pause and think. I love books. I do. But they also are a constant reminder of something I don't like at all about myself."

Harry was disconcerted to hear Hermione speak like that of the one thing everyone associated with her the most, the one thing which had always seemed to be her greatest passion in life. Hermione with a book in her hand was one of the most natural sights in the world, wasn't it? "What do you mean?"

Her answer came after a thoughtful pause. "My hubris, I suppose?"

He furrowed his brow deeply, his eyes never leaving her face even as she once again averted it from his attentive gaze.

"I've never felt superior to anyone on account of my spectacular looks or one of these myriad talents of mine," Hermione went on to reveal, "or my parents' money and being dropped off at school in the newest Mercedes or Aston Martin. But intellect and knowledge, I'm afraid… those I've too often used not as a tool but as a weapon. That's what my ego feasts on. That's the source of my arrogance and condescension, my two most ingratiating attributes which always have reliably made me the most popular girl at school."

She made a contemptuous sound, shaking her head. "And that's the root of my troubled relationship with literature. I love reading, and I do it gladly and willingly. Purely for pleasure, often enough. But there's compulsion in it, too. Obsession, even. Too much of it is born from this well-nigh pathological need to absorb knowledge. To gain a deeper understanding of things—including myself, yes. The how and why and wherefore of it all. Very noble. Very Socratic. But also… also to throw all those maniacally memorized facts at people so that I can feel better about my pathetic self."

"Hermione…"

"Oh, listen to me and the drama again," she uttered with a wan smile, then heaved a shaky sigh. "That's what it is, at any rate. Reading is complicated. I love it; I hate it. There's baggage there. Vices at work behind the curtain. I actually get anxious when I spend too much time reading novels instead of 'serious literature', can you believe it? I need to learn, learn, learn. Must know everything. I'm like The Blob of education, devouring facts instead of people."

The weakest, saddest and most distant relative of a chuckle came from Harry as he looked at her. She seemed smaller somehow than before, when she had been playing that hauntingly beautiful piece of music.

Hermione shook herself, exhaling loudly with her eyes on the instrument. "Music is different," she said, her voice stabilizing. "It's purer, somehow. At least for me. It's totally free and unburdened. I have no pretensions when it comes to the piano. I know I'll never be a concert pianist and have no such ambitions. I don't play to prove anything. I don't care how well I do it and that I'm not even close to being the best at it. I don't compare myself to anyone. I don't care about competition. I don't want any grades for it, and I don't want anyone to constantly tell me how to do it. I simply do it for the pure, unsullied joy of it. There's no goal, no external reward. It's a purpose unto itself. Music just is, and when I'm the one that makes it… so am I."

Her words faded into a silence that left Harry stunned to the very core of his being. Feeling as if he were meeting his truest of friends for the first time, for a moment he even forgot to breathe, and it took a conscious effort to properly pick it up again. Finding his throat constricted, he swallowed hard. "I… I had no idea."

"It's not your fault, Harry," she again assured him. "I never talked about this with anyone, except for my father once."

"And I never asked," Harry uttered bitterly.

"Don't do that," Hermione implored him, her voice imbued with emotion. "There's no blame here. I don't know everything about you, either. Not for a lack of caring, I would insist, but simply because some things have not yet had their moment to come to light. It's a constant process, isn't it? And we both have a strong tendency to keep our hearts firmly closed, don't we? Because we both know the world to be a cold and cruel place at times, in which hearts susceptible to scarring need to be well guarded if they are to keep on beating."

Harry stood there with his head bowed as he listened to her. "I guess I'd just prefer to be the one to do the guarding," eventually he spoke. "For your heart, I mean. You don't need to guard it against me."

That heart of hers skipped a beat or two at his words, and Hermione inadvertently clutched at her chest. "I-I know," she answered with a hitch in her voice. What a wonderfully ironic moment to be caught off-guard. "It's not a conscious thing. It's not you I'm guarding myself against. Never you. Only—"

"Wounds," she heard him say as she watched her fingers softly gliding over the keys.

Hermione swallowed and with what little voice she found weakly breathed, "Yeah."

With a silence alighting between them Hermione soon deemed oppressive, she at some point risked an upward glance and found him gazing through the window at that scenery unreachable, lost in abstraction. "I should've played Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," she nervously ventured, afraid it would backfire. She was so very relieved to see him turning her way with a chuckle.

"Will you play for me some more?" he asked her, a bit like that eleven-year-old boy she once knew. "I feel like I've got a lot of catching-up to do."

"Sure," she answered with a sheepish smile, pivoting on the squeaky leather to properly face the instrument once more. "Did I ever tell you about my little cousin Jack? He just started speaking earlier last year and he always calls me Herry. Don't get any ideas, and don't let Ron hear about this either." Harry pressed his lips tightly shut. For his own sake, mostly. "From the moment I made his delightful acquaintance, I could reliably make him laugh by playing the following piece. I may have engaged in some silly yet certainly not at all embarrassing antics as well while doing so, but shall refrain from acting those out at this particular point in time."

"Wouldn't feel right without little Jack in attendance," Harry soberly voiced his understanding.

"Exactly," Hermione attitudinized with a dignified nod, then cleared her throat and a beat thereafter struck the first note. As she made the Sugar Plum Fairy pitter-patter lightly across the keys, she soon commented, "Kind of evokes images of little Harry sneaking into Dudley's entertainment center in the middle of the night to play some more Secret of Mana, doesn't it?" The not-quite-so-little Harry next to her chuckled at that. "While this," she said, and fluidly switched into the Hungarian Dance No. 5, "is little Harry hearing the door to Dudley's adjoining bedroom opening…" He laughed out loud.

As Hermione continued playing, eventually some Chopin here and a little Debussy there, Harry sat down on the floor underneath the window, with his head tilted back against the wall and his arms supported on his knees, and he watched her as she played, watched her closely. More so, perhaps, than he had ever done before.

~•~

The progressing afternoon was spent mostly in the welcoming upholsteries in that circle of comfort around the fireplace, reading, relaxing, relishing their secret hideaway. Hermione was stretched out on the couch underneath a Gryffindor crochet blanket with that huge old book she had found in the study levitating above her face, occasionally flipping its yellowed pages with a lazy twitch of her wand. Harry, meanwhile, had brewed some more tea for them and then made himself comfortable on that armchair he had commented on before, and which they had so far not ended up fighting over, surprisingly enough. Both pieces of furniture appeared to be exact replicas of the ones found in the Gryffindor common room. At least they hoped they were indeed such copies, for otherwise their fellow house mates would be in serious want for sitting accommodations while the two of them were indulging the supine side of life like nobody's business.

They were both still on some level puzzled at the astounding capabilities of the Room of Requirement, of course, which far exceeded anything they would have thought possible even in the ever-wondrous realms of magic, but the fact that neither of them found the will and energy to actively concern themselves with the matter was, especially in Hermione's case, testament to their accrued exhaustion. For now, comfort and privacy away from the iron fist of Dolores Umbridge and her zealous lackeys were enough to trump any investigative ambitions they may otherwise have harbored.

Eventually, however, and far too soon for both their tastes, the afternoon gave in to the ineluctable onset of a fake winter's early evening, as the quickly setting sun out there over what may or may not have been an actual horizon announced quite unequivocally.

"I really think we should get going, Mione," Harry told her as gently as possible about ten minutes after first remarking on the woeful matter, seeing the reluctance so plainly written on her features.

"Do we have to?" Hermione asked him with a moue of disappointment, and the sight and sound of her made him unsure of whether he should burst out laughing or mourn his breaking heart. He played it safe and refrained from doing either.

"It is getting a bit late," he informed her with a pointed glance at his wristwatch as he rose from the warm embrace of the armchair. "And you know what happens when students are as much as a minute late for supper these days."

Hermione's answer was presaged by a pointed harrumph as she got up from the couch, folding the blanket against her chest before putting it aside. "Don't even remind me of all that," she mumbled grumpily, then firmly, stubbornly crossed her arms. "I don't wanna go."

Harry couldn't help it: he laughed.

"Surely you weren't actually planning on making this our permanent residence?" he asked her, and it was intended to be a strictly rhetorical question, yet to his surprise Hermione seemed to be genuinely tempted by the prospect, ludicrous as it was.

"It's so lovely, though," she whined, yielding to reason with uncharacteristic difficulty as her gaze once more roamed hither and thither until the light in her eyes suddenly faded at a thought not yet voiced. "And out there it's all... Hogwarts School of Bitchcraft and Bigotry."

Harry heaved a sigh of commiseration as they slowly headed for the hallway. "We'll have to face it eventually."

"I know," she relented. "I can only hope this place will be exactly what it is now when we come back."

"The D.A. room has never changed so far," Harry tried to allay her worries a bit.

"How does it do that, anyway?" Hermione wondered. "Does it have an actual memory of its own? Connected to the people that called the individual rooms, perhaps? Or does it retrieve the memory directly from a person's mind? Could that possibly bear such flawless results?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "Maybe it's like a video game cartridge and you get a couple of save game slots. Man, I wish we'd got a Super Nintendo in here. Would really tie the place together. Dudley's got a PlayStation now, of course. So weird seeing a home console from the Walkman company. Not sure it'll catch on, frankly. It's like Apple suddenly deciding to make phones or something."

"Well, if anybody overwrites our save game," Hermione told him gravely, "by the gods of magic I shall make the Unforgivables look like first year prank spells."

With a soft chuckle and a shake of the head Harry gently guided Hermione towards the exit, his hand lightly touching the small of her back, just a tad afraid she may yet strike roots of defiance if he didn't make her move in time. Yet even as he did so his eyes, quite of their own accord it seemed, wandered off and got stuck on that awfully inviting living room: the lone armchair and the fireplace and the unburnt logs therein promising hours of warmth and comfort even through the most chilly of white winter nights. And just like that it now was him who got transfixed to the spot while Hermione unwittingly moved ahead. It really was hard to say goodbye to this place and step back out into the cold, the figurative one as much as the literal one.

"Wait, where's the door?" he vaguely heard Hermione speak as if from some great distance.

"Huh?"

"The door, Harry. It's gone."

With some mental effort he fought his way back into the here and now, or rather the there and then, and tore his eyes away from the silent beckoning of the living room to look at Hermione in search of insight. He found her standing there with her back turned towards him, which really didn't help anyone when it came to understanding anything. In fact, the appealing view of her denim-clad backside momentarily distracted him even more.

He shook himself back to decency. "Sorry, what was that?"

Hermione swiveled about with an exasperated look on her face. "Hermione Jane Granger to Harry James Potter," she enunciated. "The door." And she drew an invisible rectangular shape in the air with both her index fingers. "Through which we entered." She made a silly rapid walking motion with index and middle finger of one hand. "Is not." She shook her head emphatically, made a step to the side and then did an ironic ta-da! sort of motion with her hands pointing at the wall behind her. "Here."

Harry, eyes unblinking circles, stared first at her, somewhat baffled by her impromptu performance on top of everything else, then, his expression unchanged, at the wall behind her that sans a door to speak of looked kind of strange and out of place, like a staircase in a one-story building or a dead end street sign halfway to the moon, and then back at Hermione with a face so profoundly flummoxed it could have given Ronald Weasley's famed countenance of perpetual incomprehension a serious run for its Knuts.

"Well, where did it go?"

~Ω~

---

The Trivial Trivia Section

• Precious propaganda: Un-wizarding Spirit is a rather straightforward alteration of the term Un-German Spirit (Undeutscher Geist), embedded in an allusion to the Nazi book burnings of the 1930s, especially the one conducted by the German Student Union in Berlin on May 10, 1933.

• Just tyrant things: In Hermione's monologue about the sorry state of Hogwarts, her calling the idea of the greater good the alibi of tyrants is an allusion to the following words by French writer, philosopher and journalist Albert Camus:

"The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience. […] But, in truth, the very ones who make use of such alibis know they are lies; they leave to their intellectuals on duty the chore of believing in them and of proving that religion, patriotism, and justice need for their survival the sacrifice of freedom."

Originally a speech held in 1955 at a banquet in honor of former Columbian President Eduardo Santos, who, as a journalist and editor of Bogotá-based newspaper El Tiempo, had been driven out of his country by the dictatorship of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, it could later be found in print in a 1960 collection of Camus's essays titled Resistance, Rebellion, and Death.

• Witches be crazy: Heinrich Kramer, also mentioned by Hermione, was a German Catholic clergyman, industrious member of the Dominican Order and, most importantly, an inquisitor before it was cool. Author of the delightful Malleus Maleficarum, first published in the German city of Speyer in 1486, called Hexenhammer in German, Witch hammer or Hammer of witches in English, he contributed perhaps more than any other individual to witch-hunts becoming a yet-to-be-enlightened Europe's new favorite pastime.

He died in 1505 and left behind a world that was even stupider than it had already been before him. Now if that's not an achievement, I don't know what is.

• Humor me: Aforementioned Henricus Institor potentially dying of a lethal mixture of black and yellow bile upon being confronted with High Inquisitor Dolores Umbridge, is a reference to humoral theory, or humorism, which is about as funny as it sounds. Unlike that germ nonsense popularized by Pasteur and Koch in the second half of the 19th century, humorism is the actual explanation of how all that bodily kerfuffle works.

You see, there are these four icky substances in us—blood, phlegm, black bile, yellow bile—and they—what do you mean, "What about water?" Get outta here! No, it's blood and bile and phlegm. There's some water in phlegm, obviously, but not in blood and bile. Blood is filled with air and yellow bile with fire. And that's literally all we are, okay? Just animated clusters of icky stuff. Search your feelings. You know it to be true. You're disgusting, I'm disgusting—deep down, underneath all this deceptive skin of ours, no matter how much lotion we slather on it, we're all disgusting.

And so these icky liquids, they make all kinds of stuff happen. Like, when there's a whole lot of blood in you, you're basically, like, warm and moist, right? Aren't you warm and moist right now? Well, then maybe you are suffering from too much black and yellow bile in your system, which will make you melancholic and choleric, respectively. Or in other words: Hermione is saying that Heinrich Kramer would die from a combination of sorrow and rage upon seeing a witch doing his former job of witch-hammering. So there. That wasn't too complicated!

• Connaître la musique: The pieces of music expressly mentioned to have been played on the piano by Hermione are the following: the first part of Erik Satie's Gymnopédies, completed in 1888; La Campanella, the third of Franz Liszt's Grandes études de Paganini, 1851; the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker, 1892, based on the fairy tale The Nutcracker and the Mouse King by E.T.A. Hoffmann, 1816; and the fifth of overall twenty-one Hungarian Dances by Johannes Brahms, completed in 1879. Phew!

• The Blob: That's a movie. Two, even. There's a 1958 version starring Steve McQueen, which hasn't aged quite like milk, but certainly not like wine either. While it does have its charms, I'm gonna go right ahead here and contend that Chuck Russell's 1988 remake is the better film. Great practical effects. Some genuinely disturbing images. Good genre fare right there.

• Additional references: What else did I throw in there? Let's see…

Reinhold Messner. Guy sure has climbed some stuff. Gotta give him that. Today, I successfully climbed out of bed. So there's that.

The phonograph! Thomas Edison. 1877. "Alexa, play Despacito." - Edison, probably. (I have never actually heard that song, by the way. I only know of it as a meme. That's the future right there. We're living it.)

Jurassic Park, in a fashion. 1993 film. Steven Spielberg. Might've heard of it, unless you're five years old or something. Kudos for your reading skills if you are indeed five and still going strong all the way down here, by the way. At any rate, whenever I mention the world turning, changing so rapidly, so radically, that we all have to run to keep up, I think of Alan Grant.

Star Trek, definitely not for the first time in my Potter stories. Too bad Trek's been dead for almost 20 years and nothing new has been done with the IP. But hey, at least it wasn't ruined like just about every other once beloved franchise out there, right?

...

Sometimes, I'm almost tempted to literally try living under a rock. Its numerous benefits are becoming ever clearer to me the older I get.