This is a series of drabbles, ficlets and one shots following our dear Fred and Hermione from June of 1995 (shortly before the third task of the Triwizard Tournament) to an as-of-yet undetermined point post-war.
Let's just call it the bastard love child of Alternate Canon and Fix-it Fic and leave it at that.
**TAGS AND CHARACTERS WILL BE CONTINUALLY UPDATED AS NEEDED**
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A/N: Hello lovelies! I haven't left an author's note in a hot second, but I hope you're all having as much fun with this series as I am. You'll (hopefully) be pleased to know that, though I am still deep in the editing phase, I have the next SIXTEEN chapters more or less completed. Bully for me.
That's not important though. What is important is that you get your first song this chapter! Go listen to "Geronimo" by Sheppard if you want the vibes.
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25 September 1995
It was nearing two in the morning and Hermione was sitting in the common room by herself, studying material that she already knew, for exams she wouldn't be taking for a number of months.
After finishing one particularly dry passage regarding the many uses of lacewing flies, she got to her feet and stretched, fingers interlocked over her head and shifting her weight back and forth between her stiff hips. She turned slightly to her right when she heard a quiet squeak and saw a glimmer of silver magic out of the corner of her eye, moving like a wraith between the dormitory stairs and the portrait hole.
"Hold it," she said, leaning over to grab her wand from the coffee table. "Revelio."
The disillusionment dropped like a shimmering curtain to reveal Fred, George and Lee, hunched over in a row and frozen like deer in headlights.
"Just where do you think you're going at this hour?" she asked, lips pursed and hand on hip.
"I told you she was going to see us," Fred muttered, receiving a swift elbow in the ribs from his twin and letting out a small "oof."
"Just out for a midnight stroll," George hedged. "Lovely night for it."
"Uh huh," she intoned, unimpressed. "It's well after curfew. You couldn't honestly have thought that I was going to let you go, did you? Umbridge has been on a war path all week."
"Precisely," Fred piped up. Lee was still standing frozen, as if not moving would somehow render him invisible. "We thought it an ideal opportunity to exact some karmic revenge, you see."
"And what exactly do you mean by 'karmic revenge?'"
The three boys looked between one another, nodded, and Lee straightened and extracted a surprisingly large satchel from the inner pocket of his robes. Fred took it, opened it, and with two fingers removed what appeared to be a great rotting fish, making as little contact with the thing as possible.
"Oh, bloody hell!" Hermione gasped, horrified and stepping back in revulsion. The thing's eye unceremoniously fell out of its head and dropped to the floor where they all stared at it for a second.
"Yeah, I'm not going to take the stasis charm off," Fred said, replacing it and re-cinching the top of the bag. "Trust me, you don't want to smell it."
"What exactly were you going to do with it?" Hermione asked, allowing her curiosity to get the better of her. She vanished the eye, which was still looking up at them, with a muttered spell and swish of her wand.
"Fix it to the underside of Umbridge's desk with a permanent sticking charm," Lee admitted, having returned the bag to his pocket.
Hermione gaped and then slowly raised a hand to her mouth, nibbling at the edge of her thumb nail while she considered their plan.
"What are you –" George started.
"Hush, I'm thinking," she bit out, waving him off.
On one hand, it was past curfew, she was a prefect, and she'd knowingly be allowing them to break at least fifteen different school rules and risk expulsion. On the other, she really, really loathed Dolores Umbridge. The image of Harry's carved hand soaking in murtlap essence floated through her mind and she stood up a bit straighter, resolved, and released her fingertip from between her teeth.
"Stay right there. If you move so much as an inch, I'll sic Filch on you so fast that it'll make your heads spin."
She left the boys looking thoroughly baffled and dashed up the stairs to her dorm. Thankfully, Parvati was sleeping soundly, and Lavender was snoring like a mountain troll. She bent at the foot of her bed, opening her trunk and extracting a jumper and her trainers. Her prefect badge twinkled at her from the night table beside the bed and she withered a bit under its stare.
"Must be out of my mind…" she muttered to herself, stuffing it in her pocket and then tying her shoes and heading back down to the common room.
Fred, George and Lee were standing exactly where she'd left them. George was the first to notice she'd changed and opened his mouth to speak, but she held up a finger.
"If any of you breathes a word of this to anyone, it will be the last thing you ever do. And if we get caught, I'm saying that I happened across you while on a late night round after someone tipped me off that there might be trouble. Is all of that clear?"
It didn't appear to be. In fact, all three looked profoundly confused.
"What do you mean, 'if we get caught?'" Lee finally asked.
In answer, Hermione brandished her wand at all of their feet and muttered, "Silencio."
"Your left shoe has a bit of a squeak to it," she explained, looking at Fred accusingly. "Honestly, it's a miracle you get away with anything."
"You're coming with us?!" George blurted, having finally caught up.
"I mean…" she drew in a heavy breath and sighed, neither willing nor able to justify her actions. "Let's just get on with it."
George's eyes were so wide they threatened to pop out and roll across the carpet, much as the fish's had, Lee appeared as though he might faint, and Fred looked like he'd just found out it was Christmas and his birthday all rolled into one.
She rolled her eyes and stepped past them, silenced feet not making a sound, then slowly pushed the portrait hole open. Looking either way, she found the corridor empty and motioned for them to follow. They all paused to disillusion themselves, the boys looking mildly impressed that she knew a seventh-year spell, before proceeding onward.
Their party made it all the way to the stairs without being noticed, at which point they were forced to stop and wait for the staircase to swing across.
Though she couldn't see him, Hermione could feel Fred standing behind her left shoulder. His jumper brushed against her and she smelled a rather heady combination of warm spices; cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves.
"Do this sort of thing often, Granger?" he asked in a whisper.
Hermione allowed herself a secret smile. "If you knew half the things Harry, your brother and I had gotten up to over the years, this wouldn't be all that surprising."
True, she'd always justified her rule breaking as being for one greater good or another, but given the intended target of this particular caper, she'd decided to let her moral compass waver ever so slightly. Really, tormenting Dolores Umbridge must serve some sort of higher purpose.
The stairs swung over, and they headed down to the next landing. Hermione made to turn left, toward Umbridge's office, but the boys moved in the opposite direction, toward the steps that continued downward.
"What are you doing?" Hermione hissed.
"She's started warding her office door," George explained, "we have to float it in through the window."
"Oh, right," she nodded, though they couldn't see her. Hermione suddenly felt much less sure of the plan, though she supposed breaking into a professor's private quarters from the inside was no better than doing so from the outside. She followed them downstairs, past the entrance to the dungeons and through a lesser-used side passage onto the moonlit grounds.
Stepping into the cool autumn night, Hermione pulled her jumper tight around her shoulders. Another thought occurred to her as they skirted the edge of the building, staying concealed in the shadows.
"I get that you're going to float it into her window, but how exactly are you going to stick it to her desk? Her office is on the third floor."
She had her answer a moment later when they arrived in front of the storage shed that housed the quidditch teams' brooms.
"Oh no," she said obstinately, jerking to a halt so quickly that she rocked in place like a bowling pin set to topple.
"C'mon Granger, where's your sense of adventure?" Fred asked, while the glimmer of magic around the other two disappeared into the outbuilding.
"I don't fly," she said, vehemently shaking her head. "I'll just stay on the ground and play lookout."
She couldn't really see him, but she could feel his eyes fixed on where she stood.
"You've come all this way and you're going to miss the best part?" Fred asked dubiously.
"I hardly think smelling that thing will be the best part," she reasoned acerbically.
Lee and George reemerged, their disillusionments slightly distorted by the brooms they were now carrying.
"I got her Ron's Cleansweep," George relayed to his brother.
"You can go ahead and put it back," Hermione cut in. "I'm more likely to crash into the building than I am to get it off the ground properly, anyway."
She could feel a hint of disappointment sweep over the boys, but George graciously returned to the shed without comment and deposited the broom, shutting the door behind him.
Their assemblage returned to the base of the towering stone edifice and followed it around until they were nearly below where Umbridge's window would be. It was on the far west side of the school overlooking the forest and angled away from the rest of the building and any potential prying eyes.
George and Lee wasted no time mounting their brooms and pushing off the ground, floating into the night sky, but Fred dithered.
"Go on, then," she shooed him, looking nervously over her shoulder toward the direction they'd come. She suddenly felt a warm hand fumble and then close around her forearm. "What are you –?"
"Come here," he said, tugging her toward him. She glanced up and saw Lee and George floating overhead, the shimmering silver of their concealment charm barely visible against the stars.
"Fred, really, I – "
"This may be the only proper prank you ever allow yourself to take part in. Do you really want to remember that you stayed on the ground and played lookout?"
Her chest tightened with anxiety at the thought of floating fifty feet above the earth with nothing but a charmed branch and some twigs to hold her up, and the weight of Fred's gentle grip on her arm wasn't doing anything to help matters.
"What if I fall off?" she finally asked quietly, apprehension colouring her tone.
"I won't let you fall," he replied simply, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. And, nervous though she might be, she knew for certain that he wouldn't.
Seconds later, she found herself swinging a leg over the broom with Fred at her back, gripping the handle so tightly that the small bones in her hands ached in protest. Fred kept a polite distance as they mounted, wrapping a long arm around her to steady the broom, but the moment he pushed off the ground and angled them upward, she slid back against him and he let out a soft grunt.
Had silence not been absolutely crucial, she's fairly certain she would have screamed as they rose, but instead she just let out a pathetic whimper and nearly bit a hole in her lip.
"Breathe, Hermione," he instructed her softly, his mouth much closer to her ear than she expected it to be. She instinctively inhaled and let out a shaky breath, doing this twice more before she nodded, and he propelled them forward to where George and Lee were hovering outside the window.
"We have a problem," Lee explained as George muttered a string of expletives under his breath, apparently brandishing his wand at the glass pane that was still conspicuously shut. "It's locked."
"Damn," Fred breathed. "She must have gotten wise after the dung bombs last week."
Hermione could overhear George attempting a variety of common unlocking charms, as well as a couple that she'd never heard of. The window stayed adamantly closed each time he tried it.
"May I?" she asked when he started saying spells that were more likely to break the glass than open the window, which would be far too conspicuous should it work.
George made a startled sound upon realising she was up there with them, but backed up while Fred shifted so they were floating beside the sill. Hermione went to grab her wand but found she couldn't make herself loosen her grip on the broom handle to do it.
Sighing in frustration, she turned back to Fred and said very quietly, "Put your arm around my waist."
"What?" he asked sharply, surprise evident in his whispered tone.
"Put your arm around my waist," she repeated. "My stupid brain won't let me take my hand off the broom."
Fred hesitated for a moment and then she felt him loop an arm around her midsection and tighten it like a seat belt beneath her ribs until she was firmly secured against both him and the broom. She suppressed a shiver, trying to ignore the way her stomach flipped at the contact. Though there were several layers of fabric between them, she could feel his warm chest sturdy and solid against her back. She shuffled her hips forward from between his thighs just a bit in an effort to save them both from a potentially embarrassing experience. Pyjama pants weren't terribly thick, after all.
She then released her right hand from the broom handle, wiggled her stiff fingers, and extracted her wand from her pocket. Raising it, she tried, "Aberto." The window stayed stubbornly shut.
Chewing her lip, she reangled her wrist and attempted a much older variation of the spell. "Portaberto."
Rather than unlocking the window, this charm was intended to splinter the inner mechanism of the lock itself, which is precisely what it did. The pane swung outward with a quiet squeak and the boys broke into the quietest celebration she'd ever heard; it sounded like the rushing noise when you place a seashell over your ear.
Awash in a flash of triumph, she forgot to hold herself away from Fred and sank back against his chest, laughing quietly at the absurdity of the whole ordeal. He skillfully floated them backward and George and Lee went about the unpleasant business of levitating the fish into the window and fastening it to the desk.
Fred hadn't removed his arm from around her waist and, rather than doing so, proceeded to lean forward and rest his chin on her shoulder.
"You really are remarkable," he breathed softly right beside her ear, a hint of wonder in his tone. She let out another shaky exhale, this one having nothing to do with the height. In that moment, pressed against him, she was incredibly grateful that nobody could see her face.
Their reverie was broken when George released the stasis charm and the smell of rotten fish assaulted all of them.
"Oh God, let's get out of here," she said quickly, clapping a hand over her nose as they shut the window and repaired the lock. Fred didn't dally, guiding the broom in its slow decent until their feet were planted on the ground once more.
They returned to the shed and replaced the brooms without incident. Hermione shuffled her feet a bit more than necessary, as if she were confirming that the earth was still where it was meant to be.
In fact, they made it all the way back to the second-floor landing without any threat of being caught. It was there, however, as they were rounding the bend to the stairs that they spotted a lit wand tip about to emerge from around the corner.
Hermione's breath caught in her throat, but the boys didn't hesitate.
"Run!" Lee whispered. Rather than continuing to the staircase, which would leave them completely exposed, they all four turned and sprinted down a side passage. Her heart pounding, she counted herself exceedingly thankful for the silencing charm she'd placed on their feet, otherwise their escape would have been an extremely noisy affair, akin to a stampede.
Just when she thought they'd evaded whatever teacher they'd almost come face to face with, there was a whistling sound carrying down the corridor from in front of them. They all skidded to a halt.
"Oh great, Peeves," Fred groaned. "Split up."
Despite the vague directive, George and Lee promptly ran off in one direction and Fred grabbed Hermione's hand and tugged her in another. Unfortunately, the way they went seemed to be Peeves' chosen path as well, the whistling following them down the hall and gaining on them.
Realising they couldn't outrun him, and not seeing a single door in the vicinity behind which to take cover, they slowed. Hermione panicked, her plan to sell the boys up the river should they be caught long forgotten. After all, she was no longer just an accomplice; she was a perpetrator herself.
While they were mostly invisible unless one knew what to look for, the poltergeist was always too observant for anyone's good, centuries of harassing students in the halls having honed his senses. There was no way he wouldn't notice them.
"What are we going to –"
But before she had time to finish her sentence, she was abruptly pulled back and to the right, into a small alcove behind a tapestry and a suit of armor.
The space was barely large enough to fit one person, let alone two, and Hermione was acutely aware of how tightly she was pressed against Fred's body, both of them breathing hard from the running and the adrenaline. She couldn't see him, but she knew for a fact that her own cheeks were flushed.
Facing one another this time, lean muscle that she'd only ever seen once on accident was discernable beneath the fabric of his shirt. She tried to pull her shoulders in to limit the contact between them but was met with a cold wall at her back. He shifted slightly as well, and their hips bumped together in a rather intimate way; Fred let out a soft huff and tipped his head up to look up at the ceiling while she squeezed her eyes shut.
They both stilled, not even daring to breathe as Peeves floated past, still whistling to himself and throwing what sounded like clumps of sodden toilet paper at the walls and floor. It wasn't until he had completely disappeared from earshot that they dared to exhale again.
Hermione was so on edge that she was mere seconds from a major coronary event, but she pressed pause on her anxiety attack when she noticed Fred's shoulders shaking. It took her a second to realise he was trying not to laugh.
"Have you lost your mind?!" She breathed, flabbergasted. "That was almost a complete disaster!"
"I know," he wheezed. "Wasn't it fun?"
Apparently desperate to see the look on her face, and still hidden in the alcove, Fred lifted his wand and dropped their disillusionments, nearly falling over as he took in the expression of horrified astonishment in the dim light that was filtering through the tapestry.
"You're barking mad," she declared, shaking her head and searching his mien in the near-black darkness for any semblance of sanity. Finding nothing but childish mirth and exuberance, she choked out a disbelieving laugh in spite of herself. Never in her life had she met someone so utterly unbothered.
Fred shifted his weight a little and their chests brushed together again. The laughter slowly faded from both of them and she saw his Adam's apple bob as he swallowed. She tentatively placed a hand on his rib cage, just above his still-racing heart, and felt him shudder beneath it.
"I, uh," she started, pausing to inhale, "I think we're probably safe to –"
The thought evaporated when Fred leaned forward. The motion was infinitesimal, barely visible to the naked eye, but his gaze was locked on hers and the intention behind the movement might as well have been glowing in giant neon letters over their heads.
"Safe to what?" he breathed, still grinning at her and placing a knuckle gently under her chin to tip it up. Without thinking consciously about what she was doing it, she looked from his eyes to his mouth, fixating on the swell of his bottom lip. Then she pondered inwardly, for the briefest of seconds, what it might be like to run her tongue across it.
Just then, there was an urgent whisper from somewhere outside the tapestry. Their feet still silenced, Lee and George had approached unnoticed and were standing maybe ten feet away on the other side of the fabric.
Fred jerked back like he'd been burned, and Hermione shook her head ardently in an attempt to clear it. He raised his wand, recasting the disillusionment on both of them, and stepped out of their hiding spot with her in tow.
"There you are," George exclaimed in whispered relief when he saw the hint of magic shimmering in the air. "We thought you'd been caught."
"Nope," Fred said, still sounding a little out of breath. "Nearly though. Let's get back to the tower."
They trooped up the stairs silently, not encountering anyone else along the way. Lee woke the Fat Lady, who was none too pleased, and just like that they were back in the entrance of the common room where the affair had started perhaps an hour earlier.
"Best get to bed," Hermione said, dropping the concealment charm on her person and breaking off to retrieve her books, still strewn about the table where she'd left them.
She followed the boys to the base of the stairs.
"Granger," George said in parting, nodding at her with newfound respect. Lee gave a salute, still looking as though he couldn't believe she'd actually taken part in their crime.
"Goodnight," she said. It was directed at all of them, but she was looking at Fred when she said it.
"Goodnight," he replied, an admiring smile playing at the corners of his mouth. He then turned and followed his brother up the stairs and out of sight.
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The next morning Hermione was settled across from Harry and Ron in the great hall, clutching her coffee and trying desperately to keep her eyes open. She stole a glance down the table to see that Lee and the twins weren't much better off.
"Why are you so tired?" Ron asked over a mouthful of beans on toast. Harry looked a bit concerned as well.
"Up late studying," she muttered; it wasn't actually a lie. Not the least bit shocked, because it was perhaps the most predictable thing that she could do, both boys shrugged and went back to their breakfast.
Not five minutes later the faintest echo of a furious scream carried down the grand staircase from the third floor and Hermione snorted into her mug.