It was some time later when Hermione, Ron, Ginny, and Neville again returned to the Common Room—all groggy, irritable, and confused as to Harry's whereabouts, but willing to believe he'd slipped off some time in the night in favor of his own bed, without waking them. They stumbled half-heartedly through the portrait hole, disheveled and heavy-lidded, and looked around for evidence of their companion.
"Must've skived off and gone to bed," Ron said, glancing about and not seeing Harry. He yawned and flopped down on a squashy chair beside the fire, ignoring the looks shot at him by the Common Room's few occupants. In all, only about twenty-five Gryffindors had remained behind, mostly fifth, sixth, and seventh years from half-blood or Muggle families. It was the these kinds of silent moments in Gryffindor Tower that made everyone sorely miss the Weasley twins and their boisterous antics—what any of them would give to see Fred vomiting exuberantly into a bucket, or fireworks chasing the caretaker about the castle, just one last time.
Hermione busied herself to a table. "I can't believe myself, with a Transfiguration essay due the day after holiday on the dynamics of object-to-animal spells, I should have started yesterday…"
Ron and Ginny let out a collective snort.
"C'mon, Hermione," Ginny entreated. "Relax. It's Christmas time, you ought to be… eating chocolate—and peppermint sticks! And sneaking off to Hogsmeade for hot butterbeers—"
"No more butterbeer." For a moment, Hermione had the still, snarling visage of a tiger, before settling down to one of the creaking tables, which had been covered for many weeks with her books and some of Harry's—no one had dared to touch them, and with good reason. "As for chocolate, I think I've had enough to last me until a mid-life crisis, thanks."
"You were so much more cheerful yesterday, Hermione," Ginny continued, falling down before the fire, where her dazzling hair sought to compete with its roaring flames. "We should get Harry up here—he'll cheer you up again."
"If you're making another joke about that kiss—"
"It was funny, Hermione!" Ron cut in, his eyes closed, facing the ceiling in a rather slothful position. "Especially Harry's expression…"
"Yes, well, did you ever think that Harry's feelings might not be a joke, Ron?" Hermione asked; Ginny grew very silent, her eyes suddenly wary.
"Look, I get you were trying to prove something—"
Hermione threw her quill down in frustration; her normally cool demeanor was gone—she seemed to have not heard what Ron had said.
"Did you ever think that what I did wasn't a joke, Ronald Weasley?"
Ron was very silent for a moment, his eyes now fully open and staring at her. "Yeah. I did, actually. And you know what I found out, Hermione? That I don't care. I'm going to bed."
And, without further words, and despite it being midday, Ron got to his feet and trod purposefully up the stairs, each deliberate stomp heard upon the wood floor and a final slam when he reached the top. Ginny licked her lips and opened a chocolate frog; she was soon joined by Neville, who had opened a small book on mountainous magical Greek plants and was reading without looking in Hermione's direction. The common room was uncomfortably quiet.
The hours drifted on, and Gryffindors steadily drifted out, to dinner and evening snowball fights, and eventually Hermione was left alone to the sounds of her own scratching quill upon parchment, her brow furrowed as she studied the page, her nose an inch from the table. Her eyes had filled with the words of her paper, opaque to all else; she did not want to think, not in the way that existed in an uncontrolled world beyond the borders of books and their comforting spines, which seemed to hold the world upon their shoulders, like Atlas yet graceful, untroubled by the burden, for all could be remedied by knowledge. Books did not have to face emotion. They may have evoked it in their readers, but ultimately the words were the same every time—facts, in their own right. They didn't dream of an ephemeral kiss shared with a best friend, a kiss which should never have happened…
The ink was suddenly smeared.
Hermione blinked, realizing her cheeks felt wet and hot, her hair oppressive around her face. She swept it away and looked up, sniffing, still blinking eyelashes heavy with sparkling moisture. There was a soft, feathery brush past her shoulder, like a warm castle draft; a rustling sound, ever so faint. She froze, looking at the table before her.
Nestled between A Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi and The Standard Book of Spells, Grade Six, were seven roses, blue with purple tips—not yet opened, of a deep color so rich it battled August afternoon skies, the petals touched by bright beads of melted snow. Their long stems had been tied together by a thick, white ribbon, and, threaded on this ribbon, was a note in that familiar scarlet ink:
My apologies—I couldn't quite wrangle the wine with strawberry cordial, not even house elves would oblige me with champagne, I nearly blew myself up trying to make a rainbow appear above stroganoff, Hagrid's hippogriffs are being seen to near Edinborough by a friend, and sunflowers are regretfully out of season. In other words, I would be quite honored if you'd accompany me to the dance, Hermione. You know where to find me.
Hermione laughed aloud, and her cheeks seemed to only get wetter. She felt half-hysterical—her stomach was leaping and dancing and spinning about within her—her legs were twitching and shivering with energy, longing to run and jig and jump high towards the heavens—her hands couldn't sit still, she couldn't sit still. She was standing, clenching the roses despite the pain—as though her very life depended on it, she ground the thorns into her fingers as she hugged them to her, treasuring the sensations, the feeling in the pads of her hand, the slight, warm ooze of blood, sticky and satisfying. A sob escaped her smiling lips and, in a mad dash, she ran towards the portrait hole, forsaking her books and quills and scrolls in a flight of transcendent madness, tears running down her cheeks in wonderful rivulets.
The writer had been right in saying Hermione would know where to find him. In fact, her feet alone seemed to know it by simple intuition, and as she entered the gently-lit Room of Requirement—now nothing but a small, cozy library of defense and charms books, heroic tales and novels, an unimpressive fireplace and squashy chairs, an invisibility cloak folded over a cushion, the room sporting a single window—her eyes alighted on Harry staring out on the blinding white of the grounds below, his back to her. The bottom of his robes was sopping wet, his hair a windswept, sodden disaster, his fingers pallid from cold. He seemed to know she had entered, because he didn't turn immediately, only gestured to her with his left hand, and she joined him before the window, silent.
The world outside was a white flurry, gentle madness of falling snowflakes, soft, pelting towards the ground, spinning and weaving and sticking to one another—beyond them a purely blanched sea which reached the dark borders of the Forbidden Forest, where a line of black shadow appeared a smear of charcoal on crisp new paper.
"You went out into that—" Hermione started, half in admonition, half in touched awe, before Harry put up a hand to stop her; she espied the hint of a smile lingering about his lips.
"Sorry," he said, his voice hushed and a bit gruff, quiet in its candid sincerity. "I'm afraid I'm not too good at these kinds of things—I mean, look how I was with… well, I don't want to talk about that necessarily… But I figured, since Ron and Luna are going 'together', and Ginny and Neville are going 'together'… well, if we're going to be alone in this, we might as well be lonely… together. Instead of sitting at a table chugging butterbeers—reckon we've both had enough of that, right, mate?"
Hermione swallowed hard, still clenching the roses; Harry had never referred to her as "mate" before—it seemed something reserved only for Ron, for male camaraderie—and in this one utterance, it was amazing how easily its definition could be changed. It suddenly meant a kind of equality—meant that she was not merely a troublesome girl whom he could never be quite as close to as with another boy. The roses said he knew she was a girl, and appreciated it—but "mate" said that, at the same time, she was just as dear a friend, not to be constantly side-stepped and misunderstood and protected. Hermione trod closer, wrapped her arm around his, and leaned her head sideways against his cheek. They'd always been the same height until a bit into sixth year, when Harry had, at long last, overtaken her by two inches, which he claimed triumphantly—though they still brought him a bit short of Ron, still an inch taller. To her surprise, Harry did not go rigid at the touch, or appear startled by the physical contact, as he was prone to doing; he instead melted slightly into it, his eyes wavering as they studied the many trails of snow as they raced each other towards the ground.
"You know, I don't think I'd have fun if I went with anyone else," Hermione said, gazing out, trying to watch the trails as he did, searching for whatever meaning he seemed to see there. "I can say anything around you—well, unless it's something bad about Hagrid or about you needing to study more—I'm comfortable with you. I could spend years with you, and I'm pretty sure I already know that nothing would ever be unexpected or strange about it—things outside would, but you… you'd be Harry. You'll never fade away. I know this castle is home for you—but you're home for me. I'd be happy to be lonely with you."
"Ron's not gonna be pleased," Harry said with a note of warning; Hermione could now see their reflection in the glass; the white had begun to dim into gray as the light faded—but as it did, the reflection of two sixteen-year-olds clad in robes grew sharper and sharper. Harry's eyes were sparkling a bit, over-bright jewels of viridian and emerald, uncut, unrefined, concealing so many mysteries—but not from her. She had sliced through their depths as through butter—and a ghost of two eleven-year-olds visited Hermione at that moment, scared and streaked with dirt and dust, deep beneath the castle, a step away from Lord Voldemort, embracing in the darkness.
"I don't live to please or anger Ron," Hermione said simply. "Besides, it's not really a date. It's not a date if you go alone together."
Harry snorted. "D'you still want stroganoff?"
Hermione started laughing. "God, no! Do you still want ten children?"
"I don't want any children. Imagine them having us as parents—your obsession with schoolwork, my magnetism for danger, they'd be a psychiatrist's dream."
"What about knocking me up in the kitchen?"
Harry suppressed a snort. "Well, now that you mention it…"
Hermione thumped the back of his neck. "Animal."
"Ow! Obsessive compulsive—"
"Alright, you win the insult game. Am I going to have to force you to dance?"
"Under threat of death or drinking Skel-o-Grow."
"Wonderful. Should be a real treat—I'll make sure it's a lovely, sentimental song."
"As long as it's not the Weird Sisters."
"What? Do you and Parvati have a 'song' now? They were playing at the Yule Ball, weren't they?"
"Yeah, but we danced once. And it was such a humiliating experience that I didn't even hear what they were playing."
"I swear, looking at you and Ron, I'd have thought you two were the ones there on a date."
"Ho-ho, very funny," Harry said dryly, smiling ruefully.
"Well, you did disappear into the rose bushes…"
"That's just wrong, Hermione. Just wrong."
"Yes, I don't think the butterbeer has completely left my system."
"Nice try. Next time, when I make a joke about you and Ginny or some such thing, just blame it on the butterbeer."
"Hmmm. Good old butterbeer—what do you say we not drink it 'til you're an Auror and I'm a Healer?"
"You want to go another four to five years of study without drinking? Are you insane? 'Course, there's always firewhiskey… we could slip into the One-Eyed Witch and give that a try…"
"I'm just glad you're not an angry drunk, Harry. In fact, you're nicer when you're tipsy—but I don't want to see you completely sloshed."
"I could just imagine you. Instead of rainbows over the stroganoff, it'll be kneazles on the moon and Ron and Ginny trying to get us to snog each other senseless. Honestly, those two…"
"Oh, it was fun, though. I felt like I was in Primary School again, with all my friends and playing with dolls, talking about our Prince Charmings…"
"Ugh, Primary School. I used to accidentally turn my teacher's wig blue and jump up on the top of the kitchen roof."
Hermione chuckled. "I can imagine the Headmistress phoning your Aunt about that one. 'Your nephew somehow managed to appear above the kitchens! He must be climbing school properties!'" She waved an invisible cane or meter stick.
"Yeah, that's pretty much it. I can't picture you with a 'Prince Charming' though. Or dolls and giggling girlfriends."
Hermione let out a short, amused breath of air. "Neither could I. All I wanted was to be friends with the boys—play football if I had to. They pushed me in the mud until I learned a good uppercut."
"Haven't changed much, I see," Harry said wryly, grinning lopsidedly. "I used to be a fair punching bag for good old Dudley—'til the day I got a wand, that is."
Hermione beamed. "Shame we didn't go to the same school. I'd have punched him for you, then you could come play football with me. And you'd be turning the teacher's wing blue while I was making the board erase itself so we wouldn't have homework."
"Sounds good. Let's just say we did, yeah? I like it better that way."
The white was now the dark gray of wet sidewalks in April; their reflection was becoming clear as crystal. Hermione blinked—the ghost of two five-year-olds in the bottom form glanced across it, running down a shady muggle street, drawings and times tables clutched in their hands—another of seven-year-olds, kicking a football around a dilapidated playground—nine-year-olds pumping their legs on creaky swings, higher, higher, higher…
And there they were again, young, lithe, sweet sixteen, reflected in a snowy window of gingerbread dreams.
"Me too."