tru and dollhouse fan: "How did Hermione make Polyjuice potions so quickly? doesn't it take a month make?" You are right, I had not exactly thought of that. Let's just say she bought it somewhere or already had some as an iron ration.

Pansy

I sighed. It had been two days now since Hermione and I's friendship broke. It was odd, really, if you thought about it. Before our fight I would not even have thought about us as friends, but now I missed the friendship we had had. Maybe it was because I did not have many friends at Hogwarts since the new year started. I had been able to become friends with some of the girls two years below me, but as they were quite a bit younger they were rather immature sometimes. With Hermione it had been something else: Not only was she my age and therefore a much more appropriate conversational partner, but she was also quite similar to me in many things. She was intelligent, witty (though sometimes also extremely annoying in her constant berating), and an overall nice person. Not so similar to me in this point, still. There was something about her that drew me towards her.

H/P

She had avoided me as good as possible, but today we had to meet up for our potions project again. Maybe I could somehow use that opportunity to clean the air a little, maybe even apologize? Certainly not! I was a Parkinson, after all. There was no need for me to apologize to a mudblood. I would simply show my best side. That had to be enough. After all, she did not even know for sure I had been playing a prank on her. Though, I had to admit, I would not go on with my plan and tell her everything in the letters was correct, and then date her, and afterwards drop her. I wanted her to be my friend, so I had to be honest. Maybe I should really just tell her what it really was like? That at first I had intended it to be a nasty joke and lately stepped away from it? I felt slightly lost. I had no idea what to do.

She came around the corner suddenly, startling me out of my thoughts. With a huff, she sat down across from me. She was still angry, and I instantly got the feeling this time it was not something I could play off easily.

"What are you waiting for?", she asked, glaring at me. "Let's get started. And one more thing, Pansy", at this her pupils dilated dangerously, "just shut up." So we worked in silence. Not a silence of the comfortable, but of the oppressive kind. It seemed to hit me with a ton of bricks over and over again. I wanted to say something, anything, whatever I said could not make this worse than that oppressive silence we faced right now, but my pride forbade me. She had told me to shut up, so she had to make the first move, she had to say something first. But she did not, and I did neither. So the silence stayed.

I was, for the first time in my life, truly happy to see Potter. I disliked him because of all the attention he got (Little did I know then he would have been more than happy not to be so famous.), but right now I was glad he came by to ask Hermione for some advice. The silence lifted, and I could add something to what she said to Potter. She was angry at me still, but we talked at least a little bit now. I was happy I had obviously not lost all of the friendship we had built up during the last weeks. She still seemed to like me as a friend, even if she did not trust me anymore.

"Why?"

"What?", I replied, dumbfounded. The question had clearly startled me.

"What did you hope to achieve by sending me those letters and with those… meetings?", she précised, growing slightly red in the process. I did, too, thinking back to our "meetings" as she had called them. A shiver shot up my spine, but I repressed it, and instead answered. I considered briefly telling her it was all true what I had written, then wondered why I even considered it, because if I did that I could not back out any more, then I would lose her friendship completely. And even if I liked Hermione as a friend, I certainly would not want to be in a relationship with her?

Why am I even asking myself that?

I decided to simply tell her the truth. "At first I wanted you to break up with Weasley, then make you fall in love with me, then break your heart. And somewhere along the way we became friends, so…", I smiled a nervous smile, "seems rather silly looking back now." She smiled at me, genuinely for the first time this day. Then a mischievous glint appeared in her eyes, and immediately I knew she was up to something.

"Now was it?" Her smile quickly changed into a smirk. She moved closer to me, running her hand up my tight. I did my best to repress the shiver that rippled through my body, but she noticed anyways. Her smirk intensified. "It seems you like the idea quite a bit, Pansy", she purred into my ear. "Aren't you?" She quirked an eyebrow at me. Then she turned around, leaving the library silently, as if nothing had happened.

I took a few deep breaths to calm my raging heartbeat down. She was wrong of course. It meant nothing. I could still feel her hand on my tight, sending small earthquakes through my body. But it meant nothing.

'Yeah, right, keep telling yourself that.'

Hermione

I grinned towards myself as I left the library. It was nice to see that I could intimidate Pansy just as much as she could intimidate me. I knew right now that everything would be okay between the two of us. Even though Pansy had not exactly excused herself, I held not that big a grudge against her. I was not pleased by her behavior, sure, but that was just her. We would stay friends, and I would even be able to trust her again, like I had. How weird that sounded, looking back. A year ago, or even two months, I never would have thought of Pansy as trustable, but now not so much. I realized that indeed I already trusted her, despite the letters. I could not even really explain why, I just did. Maybe it was because of how she acted towards me outside class and away from the others. While at first she had been forcing herself to be nice to me (yes, I had noticed), later she had opened up a bit. She had started her teasing again, but while some while ago it would have been with the intention of hurting me, now it was nothing more but a bit of playful banter.

"Penny for your thoughts", Harry said. I flinched. I had not heard him approaching me at all, and during our flight from the death eaters my senses had certainly keened. A clear sign I had been in deep thought.

"Oh… nothing particular", I said. A blatant lie, that much was clear. I had definitely been thinking about something, namely my friendship with Pansy. A friendship that everybody but the two of us was oblivious to, it seemed. Harry of course saw that I was lying directly. We had been friends for years now, after all.

"Come on, Hermione, I know you're thinking about something. Is it your new crush? Who are they, anyways?", he asked curiously. I was glad I was not eating anything, or else I would have choked on it.

"What? I haven't crushed on anybody", I said, surprise evident in my voice. Not so evident though, obviously, that he could not think I was faking my surprise and interpret it as shock.

"You are telling me that you're spacing out all the time for no reason? You've been moping around the last few days, and now you're grinning like a Cheshire cat. You get all moody on us, and now suddenly everything is peachy again. Honestly! Even Ron noticed!" He laughed. "I can wait. But when you get them", he paused for a moment, "or have you already? Anyways, when you're together with whoever they are tell me." He smiled at me reassuringly, then walked off, leaving me alone to sort out my thoughts.

Why had he said what he had said? I could not come up with a reason. I had been thinking about Pansy, nobody else. Surely I did not act like a lovesick teenager because of her. Or did I?