Good Friends, Bad Habits
Chapter Three: Who Do You Think About?
Hermione arrived to the assigned Ministry classroom ten minutes early, and she was glad to see that no one else was there. It was going to take a moment to control the waves of humiliation washing over her at the moment. Hermione had only told one person of her court sentence- Ginny Weasley. She wasn't exactly surprised when Ginny laughed and shrugged it off as no big deal.
"Please, Hermione. I'm a Weasley- this sort of thing happens to us all of the time," Ginny had said airily, rolling her eyes at the concerned look on Hermione's face.
Hermione frowned slightly. "Well…well, I suppose that's true. Fred and George were on trial for the same thing."
Ginny had laughed even harder, turning bright red. "Ooooh wait til I tell Mum! She'll have their hides for this. It's the third time this year for Fred, and the fifth for George!" When Hermione failed to laugh at this, Ginny had sighed and patted her shoulder comfortingly. "Don't worry, the class is pretty easy to get through. You'll just have to talk about your feelings and all that sort of mess."
Hermione was quite sure she didn't want to talk about her feelings and all that sort of mess with a room full of strangers and the Weasley twins. She took a seat at the front of the classroom, simply out of habit, and looked around at the rather disturbing interior. The walls were plastered with posters bearing ridiculous slogans about contraceptives ("Muggles aren't being silly, you should really wrap your willy"), magical control ("Turn your magic down low before you blow!"), and magical sexually transmitted diseases ("Troll Fever turns the genitals blue, have unprotected sex and it could happen to you!"). It was a very uncomfortable classroom for Hermione, because it reminded her very much of the awkward health classes she had been forced to take in Muggle school.
Shaking off those very uncomfortable memories, she set her briefcase on the desk in front of her and took out the new casework she'd been assigned. It was something about Muggle baiting, her first really serious piece of work. The least she could do while stuck in this terrible class an hour and a half a day was to try and get some of her realwork done. She had just reached a rather interesting paragraph in the report about how the Muggle being baited had gone completely bald due to the hat the offending(allegedly) wizard had sold him, when the classroom door banged open loudly and caused her to drop the several-page report on the floor.
"Bloody hell, Verity's going to run the shop dry without us there," complained a familiar voice.
It was answered with a light chuckle. "Honestly, every half-way decent-looking bloke that walks in the store gets half-off the price when she's at the register."
"It's a damn shame."
"A right travesty."
"A- Hermione?"
She slammed her head into the desk in her haste to stand up from her kneeling position on the floor where she had been trying to gather her papers. The twins let out identical barks of laughter as they came to lean against her desk on either side of her.
"Honestly," said George, grinning broadly. "You can't keep a hold of anything when we're around, can you?"
Fred nodded in agreement, waving his wand and sending her papers into a messy pile on her desk. "I know we're attractive and all, but there's no need to get so antsy around us. We are, believe it or not, mere mortals like yourself."
"Most of the time," George amended thoughtfully, fingering through the papers with little interest. With his other hand, he ran his fingers through his hair, pausing a fraction of a second too long over the place where his ear should have been. If Hermione didn't know him better, she might've thought it was a self-conscious gesture. As it was, she was having a bit of trouble concentrating on the twins teasing her- between the awful pain in her head and the fact that their crotches were uncomfortably close to her face, it was commendable that she was able to think at all.
Hermione huffed, glaring at the two of them, trying to ignore the heat of embarrassment in her cheeks. "My dropping things has nothing to do with how attractiveyou are," she began angrily, trying to straighten her robes even though they were quite straight already.
"Ah, it's our charm then," George said sympathetically, giving her a comforting pat on the shoulder. She shook his hand off, glaring at him balefully.
"Gets them every time," Fred agreed with mock sadness and an apologetic grin. And there it was- that smile. Hermione could never stay mad at them when they smiled. Instead, she became quite irritated with herself.
"No," Hermione said through gritted teeth, finally managing to struggle to her feet. "If you two weren't so loud and obnoxious, I wouldn't have dropped my papers. It has nothing to do with charmor how amazing you look." Honestly, no one could rile her up quite like Fred and George.
They were now grinning from ear to ear, arms crossed proudly across their chests as they propped themselves on her desk.
"Hear that, Gred? She thinks we look amazing," George proclaimed loudly enough that everyone within the Ministry would easily hear him.
"Why, I'm flattered! We've been called a lot of things by Princess Granger, but amazing?" The twins let out a long, low whistle in unison.
Hermione felt her face burning red again, and she attempted to hide it by opening her briefcase and shuffling her papers about. It wasn't long though before she felt the breath of one of the twins on the side of her neck, and she stopped moving entirely, confused and dizzied by the unexpected too-close proximity.
"So," George asked in a low, husky voice, right in her ear, "what landed you in here, Granger?"
Hermione nearly fainted from the feeling of his warm words tickling her ear, but she took a shaky, steadying breath and tried to ignore him.
Too bad the twins were, as already mentioned, the only ones who really knew how to get her going. Fred was now pressing his lips just barely to her other ear, and his breath made her shiver as his words fluttered across her sensitive skin. Her skin caught fire when he brushed his fingers across her cheek, brushing her hair aside to get his lips closer to her earlobe.
"What was going through that brilliant mind of yours when you lost control?" he murmured. Hermione's entire body felt hot, and she tried to hide her shaking hands in the sleeves of her robes. An all-too-familiar tightness was forming in the pit of her belly, and if the twins didn't stop soon, Hermione was quite sure she would end up with another week in this damned classroom.
"T-t-that's none of your b-b-business!" she gasped, shaking her head so that the twins were forced to back off a few inches. She knew she was failing to sound calm or collected in the least, but there wasn't much she could do about that as her heart threatened to jump straight out of her chest. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to ignore the presence of the only two people in the world that could make her heart pound like the bass drum of a marching band.
She felt the removal of their heat as they leaned away from her, and nearly dropped her entire briefcase when the door to the classroom opened again. Her eyes flew open and she turned to see who else would sit through this humiliating experience with her.
As it turned out, quite a few people. It seemed that every other person to walk in the room had been in Hufflepuff around the time Hermione was at Hogwarts. She didn't meet anyone's eye, and they all seemed equally determined not to see her either. The twins, however, were not to be put off their cheerful behavior.
"Oi, Ernie!" Fred called loudly, waving at the blonde man that had tucked himself into the farthest, darkest possible corner.
"Hannah, dear!" George yelled sweetly, waving energetically at a witch who was hiding her face behind a Daily Prophet. "Oh, Tiffany, darling! What a reunion!"
When they were quite done calling everyone in the room out by name, the twins dragged chairs up to Hermione's desk and sat on either side of her, which she really wished they wouldn't.
"I'll be damned," George whispered, grinning at Fred and Hermione(though she was steadfastly staring at a spot on the ceiling), "I guess we finally found out what Hufflepuffs are good at, yeah?"
Fred snickered, casting a sidelong glance at a pretty girl who'd been in his year. "Hell, we knew that already."
The twins exchanged an amused, meaningful glance, and seemed ready to go into more detail (which Hermione very much did not want to hear), when the door opened slowly. The entire room turned to watch the teacher enter, and Hermione, for once in her life, could not force a single thought into her brilliant mind.
"I'll be damned, again," George said, eyes wide.
"I'll be damned with you," Fred agreed.
"Hello, everyone," Luna Lovegood said airily as she drifted up to her place at the head of the classroom.
Hermione, for her part, felt that the twins needn't ask to be damned at all. They were all, clearly, already in hell.
A/N:Thanks for the reviews, everyone! You're all wonderful! Now that we're finally getting into it, hope you like it!
