Harry Potter and the Fifth House
Christine Morgan
christine@sabledrake.com / http://www.christine-morgan.org


Author's Note: the characters of the Harry Potter novels are the property of their creator, J.K. Rowling, and are used here without her knowledge or permission. All other characters property of the author. 53,000 words. January, 2002. Adult situations, mild sexual content and violence.
****************************************

Chapter Twelve – Midnight Rendezvous.

"That was just nasty," Ron said as they rushed, late, to the Gryffindor table. "Snape of all people. Yuck. I'd rather catch my parents doing it."
"Doing what?" Hermione asked.
Ron's face went as red as his hair. "Nothing," he mumbled.
Just then, dinner was served. Harry and Ron had only just made it, and of course there was no sign of the teachers they'd been spying on. Probably naked on Snape's desk by now … Harry grimaced at the mental picture.
Conversation at the table centered mainly around the health and well-being of Professor McGonagall, who was not present either. True to their words, none of the sixth-year boys voiced what they knew. Hermione, Harry saw, looked thoughtful and secretive.
Later, as they returned to the common room, Ron yawned and stretched, making an exaggerated show of it. "I'm all-over aches from Magical Combat class. Going to get a hot shower, and then bed."
"Hang on," Harry protested. "What about tonight?"
"Tonight?" Hermione marked her place in the book she'd just opened. "What's up tonight?"
"Oh, come on," groaned Ron. "Can't we sneak out some other time?"
"Will one of you please tell me what's going on?" demanded Hermione sharply.
"It's Professor Winterwind," Harry said. Seeing that suspicious tilt begin at her eyebrow again, he hurried on. "She's approved an overnight pass someone in Slytherin, and I want to know what they're up to. Did it without Snape's permission, and everything."
"That's funny," she said. "As we were going in for dinner, I heard Malfoy and Pansy Parkinson talking, all hushed, about some meeting tonight in the garden."
"Should have known," Harry said, oddly disappointed – he'd expected better of Ophidia Winterwind than to be in on anything with Malfoy, though there was no earthly reason why he should have; she had been a Slytherin too, and if even Snape didn't trust her …
"Well, I'm game," Hermione announced, closing her book entirely. "When do we go?"
"Huh?" said Ron. "Who said you were going?"
"Who said I wasn't? And never you mind anyway, Ron Weasley. You were just going on about how worn out you were."
"I only want to know what's happening," Harry said. "I can go alone if nobody else wants to."
"I just said I would, didn't I?" Hermione said.
"I'll pass," said Ron. "It's been too long a day already."
"We can't go yet," Harry said to Hermione. "I don't think they'll head out while everyone else is still up. Might as well get a little homework done first."
"Suit yourself," she said, returning to her book. "It's about time you started paying more attention to your schoolwork."
"I get by."
"Getting by won't amount to much when it's time for your O.W.L.s," she said.
"Well, g'night, then," said Ron. They returned the sentiment and he wove a path through the other Gryffindors, about half of whom were studying and the other half of whom were playing either wizard chess or wizard war, a card game legacy from the previous year.
"How's McGonagall?" Harry asked after a while. "Lavender said you stayed with her through lunch, but I didn't hear you say anything about it at dinner."
"She's upset, and no wonder." Hermione looked somberly at him. "I suppose you know what made her faint."
"Do you?"
"She told me."
"Dumbledore doesn't want us talking about it. Word of honor and all."
"Yeah, same here. I promised."
Somehow, although the exchange didn't convey much in words, it conveyed a lot in meaning, and Harry nodded, willing to leave it at that. He was surprised that Professor McGonagall had confided in Hermione, for whether she was or wasn't teacher's pet (as Lavender also said), it was still hardly the sort of thing one might think a teacher would confess to a student.
"I'll tell you one thing, though," she added in a whisper after a while. "He's going to answer for it."
"Stratford?"
"Mm-hmm. Dumbledore sent Hagrid to Hogsmeade, to bring him up here so they could give him a good talking-to."
Harry remembered Hagrid's absence from lunch, and the way he'd poked his head in to signal Dumbledore. "Poor bloke. I don't envy him being caught between the lot of them."
"Poor bloke nothing! He deserves whatever he gets, the sneak. Using someone's personal, private pictures like that. I hope Dumbledore has Hagrid pull his arms off. See him use a camera then."
Such venom from Hermione was unusual, and Harry wasn't sure what to say. He settled for a noncommittal grunt and went back to his studies.
The common room gradually emptied. Harry had gone upstairs at one point long enough to get his Invisibility Cloak from his trunk – he kept it locked now, hating to have to do it but knowing that if Ron gave in to temptation again, the girls might kill him next time. Ron had already been snoring.
When all was quiet, Harry and Hermione slipped out of the portrait hole and covered themselves with the cloak. They had to huddle very close together, and Harry found himself exceedingly conscious of the strawberry scent of Hermione's shampoo, and the occasional warm brush of her shoulder against his. It made it hard for him to concentrate fully on their mission.
They worked their careful way down the staircase. The Slytherins slept in a dungeon dormitory, which probably contributed to their gloomy or mean ways. Being closed away in the dark and the dank, with barely any windows and the whole great oppressive weight of Hogwarts castle seeming to bear down on them would do that to a person.
Harry didn't know the exact way to the dungeon, but he and Hermione staked out a spot where they'd have a good view of all the approaches. They didn't have to wait long before two dark-cloaked shapes came stealthily down the corridor. As they passed through a patch of moonlight falling in from a high arrowslit of a window, Harry saw the white-blond hair of Draco Malfoy, as expected.
Draco and Pansy eased open a side door and went out into the cool October night. Waiting a few moments to give them a head start, but not too long lest they get out of sight, Harry and Hermione followed.
The two of them, barely visible against the blackness of the grounds and sky, chose a path that went from shadow to shadow but otherwise headed steadily toward the greenhouse. Harry was close enough to see Draco take out his wand and unlock the door.
"The loft," Hermione whispered, her breath pleasantly tickling Harry's ear.
"Good idea."
They went around back. The window-walls of the greenhouse were humid and fogged, the indistinct shapes of plants pressing here and there against the glass. At the rear of the long building was a ladder leading up to a door, which gave onto a loft that ran half the length of the greenhouse. It was where Madame Sprout kept sacks of fertilizer, spare pots and tools, and other brick-a-brack.
The ladder was too narrow to let them climb together, so Hermione went first with Harry right behind her. The Invisibility Cloak couldn't cover all of him. An observer might have done a double-take at the sight of a pair of disembodied legs going up one rung at a time.
Inside, the air was warm and moist, redolent with the earthy, green smells of plant life. The twinkleberry bush, from which Snape had gotten the fresh leaves they'd been using in Potions that afternoon, shed a dim, shifting light that cast everything else into monstrous shadows.
What with the strange lighting and all, Harry almost walked right into Crabbe before realizing that the hulking figure wasn't a stack of barrels draped with a dropcloth. He froze, Hermione blundering into him, and put his hand over her mouth before she could ask what was the matter.
Guiding her, he inched away. There was Goyle, too … the pair of them lurking in the dark like thugs in an alley. Not speaking. Not moving. Looking down with identical greedy expressions and a sort of greasy gleam in their eyes.
Harry and Hermione moved with painstaking silence as far from them as they could. If they thought they could have gotten back out unnoticed, they would have gone, but it was a clear wonder that neither of the brutes had heard them climbing in. Whatever was going on below had fascinated them.
"Slower," said Draco Malfoy from somewhere beneath them. "Yes. Like that."
Beneath the translucent silkiness of the cloak, Hermione looked quizzically at Harry. Together, they crept to the edge of the loft and peered down.
They couldn't see Malfoy, but his shadow was cast onto the floor by the twinkleberry bush. His shadow, and a short, somehow bent and bulgy one that Harry couldn't identify. Then he understood. It was Pansy's shadow, and she was on her knees. On her knees in front of Malfoy.
His guess was confirmed a moment later with her peevish, whining voice. "You never do me like this."
"So?" Malfoy sounded annoyed.
"So it's not very fair. I do it for you. It's supposed to be reciprocal."
Barely more than breathing the words, Hermione said, "I think we made a mistake. This has nothing to do with Professor Winterwind. This is …"
"Yeah," whispered Harry, wrinkling his nose.
"How about a shag, then?" suggested Malfoy with a sneer. "That's reciprocal."
"I don't know, Draco," whined Pansy.
Crabbe and Goyle, their tongues practically hanging out, leaned over to see better. If they didn't watch out, they'd fall and crash right into the soil-filled planters of henbane and cinquefoil. Harry would have bet anything that Malfoy knew they were there, and Pansy didn't. A fresh dislike for Malfoy shot through him. Not that anything low and disgusting from Malfoy could have surprised him anymore.
"We have to get out of here," hissed Hermione.
Harry couldn't have agreed more. He would have sooner been back in the dungeon spying on Snape.
"What's there to know?" said Draco. "You're my girlfriend, aren't you?"
"Of course, but …"
"So are you going to or not? I can always find some other girl who will."
"Don't say that, Draco!"
"It's up to you, Pansy. Make up your mind. I haven't got all night."
"Okay, then. I will. But not here."
"Why not?" Now Draco sounded fiendishly eager. "We'll just throw down those empty burlap sacks …" at a swipe of his wand, a pile of them spilled over and spread across the floor.
"Now," Harry said, and began edging away.
But Crabbe and Goyle, keen to see, had moved. They had the invisible Harry and Hermione cornered against the rail of the loft, and to make matters worse, one of Goyle's big feet was on the cloak.
He could see Hermione's wide, alarmed eyes and tried to soothe her with a smile. He couldn't even whisper because surely, as close as Crabbe and Goyle were, it would be heard. Below, cloth rustled and Pansy mewled something about not being sure she was ready for this.
"Too late now," said Draco. "Or do you want everyone to know what a tease you are?"
Harry thought that if he yanked hard on the cloak, it might unbalance Goyle and make him fall over the edge. But the risk of exposing some part of himself or Hermione was too great. He suddenly knew that if they were found up here, it would be the worst fight yet. There wouldn't just be hexes thrown back and forth, but combat spells … and if he lost, Draco would probably kill him outright.
But – and the thought was so horrible his mind almost couldn't complete it – they might have something else in mind for Hermione. The atmosphere in here was charged with lust. He could all too easily imagine Draco giving Hermione to Crabbe and Goyle, and in that instant he could have fried the lot of them on the spot.
By the bleakly horrified look in Hermione's eyes, much the same thoughts were going through her head. Harry groped for her hand and squeezed it, trying to reassure her. As long as they weren't discovered, they'd be all right. It just meant having to stay where they were.
They could close their eyes to the scene below, but they couldn't close their ears. It seemed to take forever, though later, when Harry checked his watch, he found that the entire session had lasted a mere matter of minutes. The wet slap of flesh, Pansy's initial pained complaints that turned into encouraging groans and gasps (and ended in a petulant bleat of complaint when Draco evidently finished before she was done), Draco's own harsh commentary ("You like that? Move your arse, bitch, there, that's the stuff. Oh, yes, you love it, don't you, you little slut?") and the heavy breathing of Crabbe and Goyle were awful to hear.
The worst part was that, as gross as it was, there was something darkly exciting about it. Harry's pulse was beating, his hands had gone sweaty, and lewd pictures – like those from Cliffton Stratford's book, say – kept dancing through his mind.
But finally, it was over. Pansy apparently wanted to talk about it after, but Draco didn't care to bother with conversation. They left, and moments later Crabbe and Goyle went out via the ladder.
"Did you see what they were doing?" said a pale and shaken Hermione once the greenhouse was silent again.
"I didn't look. Did you?"
"Not them. Crabbe and Goyle." She looked like she might throw up. "They were … never mind, it's too vile."
Harry could guess. He'd heard those sounds too, the fleshy rubbing sounds of boys taking matters into their own hands. It was a noise he was familiar with from long nights in a dorm where five of them slept, and sometimes when one thought all the others were asleep … but he wasn't about to tell any of that to Hermione.
"Let's go," he said. "I need some air."
The air was indeed very welcome. Crisp and cold with a hint of the nearing winter, it seemed all the fresher after the damp and biological scents of the greenhouse. At the bottom of the ladder, they stopped and drew deep breaths, the Invisibility Cloak slung over Harry's shoulder.
"It wasn't them," Hermione finally said. "We were wrong. What a mistake, oh, I can't believe they did that!"
"Doesn't surprise me at all," said Harry. "Malfoy is scum."
"And that we had to be right there hearing it …" She shuddered. "Let's walk for a while, Harry, because if I tried to go back and sleep now, I'd probably dream of it."
They walked, down by the lake which was inky and rippling whenever the giant squid surged past. The water lapped at the shore. They passed Hagrid's cabin, its windows dark but for the muted burnt-orange glow that told of banked coals. Fang the boarhound was probably splayed out in front of the hearth, snoring just as gustily as Ron had been.
Extending into the lake was the dock where the Durmstrang ship had been moored during the Triwizard Tournament. Harry and Hermione went out to the end of it and sat, feet dangling.
"It's certainly not like in the books," Hermione said pensively after several quiet minutes had passed. Minutes in which her mind, like Harry's own, seemed to have inevitably drifted to the scene they'd just witnessed.
"What do you mean?"
"That. Sex. Not much like I thought it would be."
"D'you think about it?" Here was something that hadn't really occurred to him. He knew boys did, sure, nearly all the time once they turned fifteen or so, but girls?
"Sure, I do," Hermione said, with a giggle that was half a sigh. "I've read all about it."
"What did you call them? Spanky-governess books?"
This time, the giggle was only a quarter-sigh. "Not those. Well, not just those. Medical books. Anatomy. Things like that. And my mother reads a lot of romance novels. You know the sort?"
"Yeah," said Harry. He'd seen them before. Covers with pictures of women whose dresses seemed about to slide off their bosoms, men with no shirts and pants so tight you could have counted the coins in their pockets. "Aunt Petunia reads them sometimes. But I didn't think there was anything in them except kissing, and then it's the end of the chapter."
"Some of them," Hermione said. "But some are racy, really racy. Though not as much as those horrid letters in Squire magazine, the ones that always start out 'Dear Squire, I never thought this would happen to me …' and go on to tell about twin blondes or something."
Harry was absolutely flabbergasted. "You read Squire?"
"No! Ick, why would I?"
"Then how do you know --?"
"Well, I did see a copy once. The cartoons were kind of funny, actually. But all that stuff, the books, those letters … I think they just give everyone the wrong idea. False expectations. I know when I was a little girl, I always used to daydream about what my first kiss would be like, and look how that turned --"
She stopped, coughed, and found the piling at the end of the dock suddenly of great fascination. Harry was flabbergasted again. And jealous, far more than he ever would have suspected.
"Was it Viktor Krum?"
"It's really not all that --"
"Did you go and visit him that summer? I thought you decided not to!"
"I didn't! My parents weren't about to let their fourteen-year-old daughter go off to Bulgaria to meet some eighteen-year-old. It's not as bad as if I'd wanted to run off with a middle-aged man I'd met over the Internet --" as they were both Muggle-raised, she knew he'd know what she meant by that, "—but they still said no."
"When … was it at the dance?" He didn't know why he was torturing himself like this.
Hermione sighed a sigh that was no giggle at all. "It was just before he left. No big deal. It wasn't at all like I thought it would be. He was scratchy with stubble and his lips were too wet and his nose nearly dislocated mine."
Oddly, or perhaps not, this pleased Harry. "Well, what did you think it would be like?"
"The way it is in the books, I guess." She gazed off across the rippling black water. "That I'd be standing there with a handsome boy, and he'd gently take me by the shoulders or the upper arms and turn me toward him. That I'd see it first in his eyes, the intention in his eyes. And then he'd touch me under the chin and raise my face toward his as he leaned in. It would be gentle at first, his lips just brushing on mine, but then we'd be overcome and he'd pull me close as I put my arms around his neck …"
She broke off, laughing. "Oh, stop, listen to me, I sound silly. Never mind. We'd better go back before we're missed."
"Probably should." Harry got up, and as Hermione stood up too, he couldn't help himself.
He took her gently by the shoulders and turned her toward him. She looked up, puzzled, and then must have read it in his eyes, the intention in his eyes, because hers widened with comprehension. He touched her under the chin and tipped up her face, and brushed his lips tenderly on hers.
The sensation was electrifying. Harry trembled, suddenly wanting to crush her against him and seal her mouth with a deep and exploring kiss. If he did, she'd probably slap him and push him into the lake to cool off –
He was just thinking that when Hermione, with a soft cry, threw her arms around his neck. Startled, he took a step back and they both almost went into the lake, but he recovered and pulled her close and kissed her just as deeply, just as exploringly, as he'd wanted to. The breeze blew her hair in feathery wisps against his face.
They parted slowly, unsteadily. Harry could not believe what he'd just done, nor how much he'd liked it. Worth a slap, if she decided to slap. Worth a dunk in the lake, even worth the pneumonia that would surely result.
"Oh," Hermione said in a small, stunned way.
"Was that … was that all right?" Harry wasn't sure if he was asking her opinion on the quality of the kiss or whether it was all right he'd presumed to do it at all, but either way, her only answer was a starry-eyed nod.
Out in the lake, the squid surfaced with a splash, and they both reacted like people wakened abruptly from a dream. All at once it was hard to look at Hermione, and Harry's face felt hot. His lips still tingled.
"We, um, we should go back," he said in a hoarse voice that was barely his own.
"Right," she said in a voice that was similarly light-years from her usual.
They said nothing more, perhaps because neither of them quite trusted themselves to speak, as they left the dock and headed for the castle.

**



page copyright 2002 by Christine Morgan / christine@sabledrake.com