Sometimes you don't have to be a mad-eyed, wooden-legged badly scarred retired Auror to feel a bit, well, paranoid. There are times when you just can't help feeling life is out to get you with its annoying habits and rules just for the sheer sake of being obnoxious. A very good example of this would be the infuriating patterns time chooses to work in - shooting off at full speed ahead like a Firebolt under a powerful Banishing Charm when it knows you're dreading the future or snailing by like a ancient Oakshaft79 going backwards when you're desperately looking forward to something.
Harry Potter was suffering from the latter, dying for the afternoon to hurry up and make way for the evening when Hermione was supposed to come round for their first date. He'd spent the afternoon pacing his room, checking himself in the mirror, trying unsuccessfully to make his hair behave and, just to keep his mind busy, debating whether he should tell the Dursleys about Hermione's arrival or not.
Eventually, at six thirty when he could pace his room no more, Harry went down to the living room where he found the three Dursleys with their backs to him, watching a particularly soppy soap opera on television. Not one of them gave the slightest sign of recognition of his presence and normally Harry would have liked to keep it that way, quiet and relatively friendly, but this time he had to break the silence...
He cleared his throat tentavely. Uncle Vernon's moustache bristled and Aunt Petunia narrowed her eyes, but other than that there was no response.
"Um, Uncle Vernon? Aunt Petunia?" Harry tried timidly.
Uncle Vernon gave a grunt as through it wasn't his fault his ears were exposed to what Harry had to say.
"I've, um, invited one of my friends round for the evening," Harry said nervously. "Um, hope you don't mind."
The Dursleys' reactions were almost exactly the way Harry had predicted them; Aunt Petunia's narrowed eyes snapped to their widest extent in horror, Dudley let out a yelp and quickly grabbed his bottom with his fat hands, while Uncle Vernon turned around in his armchair like a great bulldozer doing a U-turn, his purple face turning a deep maroon colour.
"You did WHAT?!!" he thundered, making the china ornaments on the mantlepiece rattle.
"I invited a friend round," said Harry more firmly. He wasn't going to let the Dursleys stop Hermione coming round, not after everything else that had come in the way of their first date until now.
Uncle Vernon grabbed the front of Harry's baggy blue T-shirt and pulled his face nearer his. "HOW DARE YOU INVITE MORE ABNORMAL...MORE...MORE OF YOUR LOT AROUND HERE AGAIN?!"
His tiny sharp eyes darted to the now repaired fireplace the Weasleys had blasted apart two summers ago when they'd come to pick Harry up for the Quidditch World Cup.
"This is a different friend!" said Harry quickly. "They're from a Mug- I mean, normal family...they'll dress properly and...."
"I COULDN'T CARE LESS WHO THEY'RE FAMILY IS OR WHAT THEY'RE WEARING, THEY'RE NOT SETTING FOOT IN MY HOUSE!!!" Uncle Vernon bellowed, spraying Harry with spit. "YOU CAN JUST PHONE THIS...THIS FRIEND OF YOURS AND TELL THEM THAT FOR ME!"
Harry opened his mouth furiously to say he'll do no such thing and that he didn't have Hermione's phone number anyway, when a tremendous bang outside interrupted. The Dursleys, oddly enough didn't seem to have heard anything because not one of them had even blinked; they just kept staring at him with either furious or (in Dudley's case) fearful eyes.
Harry glanced curiously out of the far kitchen window in time to see several lampposts and dustbins jumping out of the way of the triple-decker Knight Bus. Fighting a grin down, Harry turned back to his uncle's plum-coloured face, doing a mental countdown. Three...Harry thought...two..one...
The doorbell rang.
Harry wrenched his T-shirt out of Uncle Vernon's fist and raced out of the room and down the hall to the front door. He could hear the Dursleys scrambling frantically from their seats and chasing after him, but Harry had turned the lock and opened the door.
"Hi Hermione, I'm..." he began breathlessly but was unable to say anything more when he saw her.
The girl standing in the doorway was beyond mortal beauty. She was wearing a dazzling sleeveless dress of deep reddish-pink, sparkling with a magical perfection that Harry could only guess had come from Madame Malkin's Robes for All Occasions in Diagon Alley. She'd obviously used the Sleekeazy Hair Potion she'd used before the Yule Ball two years ago because her normally bushy hair was pulled back in a long gleaming nut-coloured ponytail which snaked magnificently down the back of her neck and rested on her bare right shoulder, though her glossy fringe was sweeping to the left as usual. But easily the most astonishing part of her were her bright caramel-coloured eyes, which twinkled in wordless greeting when Harry opened the door to her.
"Good evening, Harry," said Hermione in her beautifully soft voice.
Harry managed to jerk his tongue into life. "Hi Hermione. You...you look stunning."
Hermione smiled her godly smile and Harry's heart gave an enormous leap.. "Thank you."
Their eyes locked on each other for a moment until Hermione cleared her throat and indicated they were not alone.
"Oh, are these your relatives, Harry?" she asked, even though she'd seen them before at King's Cross every year.
Harry glanced over his shoulder at the hall behind him and had to fight down a laugh. The three Dursleys were gaping at Hermione with the same disbelieving expression everyone in the Great Hall had worn at the start of the Yule Ball when she'd walked in with Krum. Dudley, Harry saw, was eyeing her with even more interest for obvious reasons.
"Yep, that's my Uncle Vernon, Aunt Petunia and my cousin Dudley," Harry said brightly, grinning at the looks on their faces. "Imagine, at first they didn't even want you to come round."
"No!" Hermione said in mock horror.
Uncle Vernon cleared his throat vaguely and said, "This...this is your friend then, is it?" in a tone to match his expression.
"Oh, yeah, this is Hermione," Harry smiled. "I told you she wasn't that bad."
Harry held the door open for Hermione and it wasn't until she'd stepped into the house that he noticed the Knight Bus parked across the road in number five's rose garden.
"All right there, Neville?" a cheerful Stan Shunspike called across the road before Harry hastily closed the door, praying Hermione hadn't heard that.
"Neville?" Hermione repeated, her eyebrows raised in surprise at Harry who felt himself going red.
"Long story," Harry muttered, leading her up the stairs to his room, with one last cheerful wave at the dumbstruck Dursleys.
Harry closed his bedroom door and turned to look at Hermione, who was sitting on his bed wearing an expression of concern on her pretty face.
"I'm sorry, Harry, did the Dursleys give you a lot of trouble about me coming?" she asked.
"Nah, not really," Harry smiled reassuringly. "A bit of shouting, a bit of screaming…but I wasn't going to let them stop you."
Hermione smiled back, and Harry felt the whole room glowed with her smile too. "Yeah, we've let Snape, Dumbledore and You-Know-Who come in our way," she laughed, "it would be a bit embarrassing if we let a load of Muggles stop us as well."
Harry gave a small confused frown at the word "Muggles"
"We're about as much Muggles as they are during the summer, aren't we?" he pointed out.
"What d'you mean?"
"Well, we're not allowed to do magic outside school, are we?" Harry shrugged.
Hermione smiled and shook her head making her gleaming ponytail sway magnificently. "You're so out of touch, Harry," she said affectionately and from a very tight pocket in her dress Harry could hardly see, she pulled out newspaper cutting.
"There you go," she said handing the cutting over to Harry. "That announcement appeared in the Daily Prophet last week – apparently they've cancelled the Decree of Underaged Wizardry for security reasons. You know, now that You-Know-Who's up and about the Ministry's got to have all hands on deck and everyone has to be alert and ready to face him, so even underaged witches and wizards have to walk around with functioning wands…there are Wand-Weighing tests going on all over the place…"
A huge grin grew on Harry's face as he read the announcement. "Can you imagine the look on the Dursleys face when they see this?" he laughed as he handed it back to Hermione, who giggled as she put it in her back pocket.
Hermione glanced around the room. "You've got a nice room," she commented when a small silence followed their laughter.
Harry tried looking at it objectively, but it still looked a mess to him. "I'm sorry, I know it's not the ideal setting for our first date, but Dumbledore…"
Hermione shook her head again and Harry was once again entranced by the smooth way her very long ponytail swayed. She pulled out her wand and closed her eyes as she pressed it to her heart, then asked Harry to do the same. Then she placed the tips of the wands together and muttered some words Harry couldn't make out. A shower of gold sparks burst out of the wands and a moment later, Harry was gazing in disbelief at what a moment beforehand had been his room.
His bed, desk and wardrobe had vanished and instead he and Hermione were standing in a beautiful classroom-sized room decorated from floor to ceiling with climbing plants and tropical flowers that would have looked very much at home in an Amazonian rainforest. A small waterfall trickled from the wall where Harry's bedside table should have been and the soft twittering songs of tiny exotic birds could be heard softly in the background. But the truly remarkable thing sat right in the middle of room, in some sort of spotlight; at the bottom of a shaft of bright yellowish-moonlight was a small round table set for two with a snow-white tablecloth, white-and-gold china plates and a crystal vase that stood right in the centre of the table holding two ruby-red roses.
"Wow!" was all Harry could say. "Hermione, how did you do that?"
Hermione smiled again, her perfect teeth glinting in the moonlight. "That was the Erised-Heart Charm. When two loving hearts want something for each other or for the two of them together, the spell makes a compromise between the two wishes and places the lovers in it. In our case it was the ideal setting for our first date you were talking about."
Harry could only grin in amazement. "Two loving hearts…" he muttered as he glanced around the room, "that would be us, all right."
He and Hermione seated themselves at the table and the china plates magically filled themselves with food. Harry was impressed.
"This seems like an extremely complicated spell," he commented.
"Well, it only works if the love between the two conjuring it is genuine and pure," Hermione replied, getting started on her food. "No wonder it's working so well for us," she added quietly.
Harry gave her a very warm affectionate look before picking up his fork and spearing a roast potato.
They ate in silence for a while, their hearts saying what words could never express, singing their happiness for just being together, then Harry voiced something he'd been pondering for a while.
"Hermione, you know you said you'd dropped me loads of hints over the past five years about how you loved me? Well, what kind of hints did you drop? I mean…."
Hermione swallowed the slice of pie she was chewing and said, "oh, loads of them. I can't even remember all of them…I gave you that hug down in that chamber with Snape's potion riddle in our first year because I wasn't sure I'll ever see you again and I told you you were a great wizard and what I thought of you because I didn't know if I'd ever get the chance if anything happened to you…. Let's see…I sent you that Valentine's poem with one of Lockhart's cupid dwarves…"
"That was from you?" Harry exclaimed. "I thought it was from Ginny!"
"No, it was from me," Hermione shook her head. "Just to show you everything I pretended to adore about Lockhart I really loved about you…I can't believe that went wrong. I dunno, I wasn't there, but trust Malfoy to make you think that was from Ginny! Um, let's see, after that…oh yeah I sent you the Broomstick Servicing Kit for your thirteenth birthday…I signed my letters 'Love from Hermione'…all those walks we took around the lake last year when you and Ron weren't talking…I kissed you at King's Cross last summer, I mean come on, Harry, how much more obvious can you get?"
"Don't make me feel worse," Harry groaned.
"It's okay, sweetheart," Hermione smiled, reaching over and taking his hand, "I was only teasing you. Now let me ask you something. If you loved me for four and a half years, how come you never dropped any clues? Or did you?"
"No, I didn't," Harry admitted. "Mainly because you and Ron were my only two friends in the world and I really didn't want to destroy our friendship. I loved you too much as a friend to risk anything. Then, as I loved you more and more I kept having to work harder to keep my mouth shut and not to let anything slip. I sort of got a lot of your hints but I didn't want to get my hopes up or let them lead me to say or do anything stupid. Then I thought, if ever there was a good time to tell you what I felt for you it was the Yule Ball, but that was when Ron's little crush on you developed -"
"Ron?!" Hermione exclaimed.
"Yeah, Ron. He told me he had a crush on you just before the Ball – why do you think he was so jealous of Krum? – and that was when I really decided to back out before the three of us fell out….it was pretty painful I can tell you. But then after the second task, he and Padma gave each other a second chance and I felt you were…"
"Off the hook?" Hermione smiled.
"Yeah," Harry grinned. "But then Rita Skeeter spread that rumour about Krum breaking your heart over the summer and I didn't want to ask you about it in case it was a sensitive subject and I sort of gave up after that. I didn't want to hurt you like I thought he did…I wanted you to feel I would never let you down as a friend and I couldn't do that if I told you I love you when you seemed vulnerable, could I? Besides, by that time I just felt, you know, 'Give it up, Harry, she's too good for you…'"
"Funny, that's exactly what I was thinking about you," Hermione admitted. "I think we're too good for each other."
"No, I think we're just right for each other," said Harry. "I think it's been well worth the wait and I don't know about you but I feel like there's always been a chunk missing out of my life and now…well, now I just feel whole. I feel like…like I've found what I've always wanted…like a sort of goal I've been dying to reach…an impossible dream that could never come true…and it just has. I always thought this love I have for you…I always thought it was one-sided, like I was never meant to be loved by anyone, let alone you…and now, Hermione, you've just made my world…wonderful. And believe me, Hermione, I couldn't love you more."
Hermione was always one for getting emotional and bursting into tears at the strangest of times, but in this case only a single tear trickled silently down her beautiful face as she gazed at Harry with all the love and affection in her heart glowing in her eyes.
"You know I love you too, Harry," she said quietly. "And much as I loved you in previous years, much as I dreamed about you telling me you shared my love and asking me out and just…being mine…I never really thought it would happen. But I still waited for you. That's the only reason I turned Neville down when he asked me to the Ball, because I was waiting for you to ask me to go with you and I was so heartbroken when you asked Parvati, I took the first offer I got, which happened to be Krum. But I never felt a thing for him. Because I've always loved you and I know it sounds pretty cheap and corny now when we're just teenagers – and teenage romances never last too long- , but I really feel like I'll always love you. Like what we've got right now…"
"…is powerful enough to last forever?" Harry finished for her, voicing what his heart had been telling him since that fateful detention all those weeks ago.
Hermione nodded silently.
There was no more to be said. They'd gone as far as words could take them and now it was time to follow their hearts' instructions. The two faces leaned slowly closer, the eyelids drooped, the lips outstretched and finally touched. For perhaps a second, the mouths remained frozen before jerking into life and closing in on each other, connecting the two halves into one whole body. Their lips felt as warm as their hearts as Harry placed a hand on the back of Hermione's head and pulled her closer, Hermione wound her arms around Harry's neck and Harry placed his other hand on her back pulling her to him. The two lovers held onto each other like the world would end if they ever let go, both still unable to believe they were in each other's arms, sharing the same love for each other…and the same heart.
When they eventually broke apart, Harry's dazzlingly green eyes gazed into Hermione's twinkling caramel-coloured ones and he felt he had to say it. He'd said it countless times before, but something about those eyes made him feel he had to say it every time he looked into them It was certainly what he felt….
"I love you, Hermione Granger," he whispered.