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Author: Antosha Story: The Wisest Course Rating: Mature Setting: Pre-DH Status: Completed Reviews: 10 Words: 142,408
Boy and bird blink; both look at her. “Yeah?” Harry answers. “Um, Firesong, do you mind? I… I want to talk with Harry.” The phoenix cocks his head, tips his beak and disappears in a flash of flame. On her perch, Hedwig stirs, blinks, and goes back to sleep. Harry’s green eyes focus on Hermione and she can’t help but shiver. “Harry,” she says, “you’re not using Legilimency now, are you?” His eyebrows arch. “No. No, of course not. I wouldn’t do that, not without asking. Besides, I couldn’t. I’m not good enough yet. I’d have to use my wand and the incantation, and you’d have me disarmed and in a Full Body-Bind before I could manage.” “Oh.” Hermione draws herself up, considering what he is saying. “You didn’t ask Fawkes—Firesong, that is.” “No,” Harry answers with a smile. “No, he sort of… invited me in. Reached out to me. I didn’t have to initiate the contact.” Hermione nods; this fits with what she has seen Professor Lupin teaching Harry, and with the books on Legilimency that she’s read. Few ever reach Professor Dumbledore’s proficiency, or Voldemort’s. Even so, it is more than a bit disconcerting to imagine Harry being able to see her thoughts. Especially at the moment. “So… was there something you wanted to tell me, Hermione?” Harry prods. “Or ask me?” Hermione grips her hands together to stop from wringing them. “Are you sure you’re not reading my mind?” she says with what she hopes is more a smile than a grimace. “Well, even a dunce like me can read your body language just now, Hermione.” They share a smile, but still Hermione cannot simply speak her mind. Harry leans forward. “What is it? Something you found in one of your books?” She shakes her head. “Is it… about the Horcruxes?” Again, she shakes her head. “Oh.” He chews his lip. “It’s some… personal thing, is it?” She nods. He scowls at her. “You’re going to make me guess, aren’t you?” Hermione shakes her head, takes a deep breath and lets her hands wring as they will. “Harry. Am I…? Do you think I’m… pretty?” Harry’s eyebrows shoot up above his glasses and his jaw drops. “I… What? Of-of course I do!” “Not that physical appearance is that important, of course,” she blurts. “Yeah, come on, of course you’re…” He is pushing frantically at his hair. Suddenly the posture of maturity with which Harry has been carrying himself all summer shatters and he looks as fidgety and uncertain as the skinny boy she first met on the Hogwarts Express. “Bloody hell,” he mutters. He and Ron have both been using far too much questionable language around her of late, but it seems silly to point that out in this moment. “Come on. You know… Do you want to know if I think…?” “Well,” Hermione murmurs, staring down at her dancing hands, “that is what I asked.” Buck teeth and frizzy hair and... And if Ron really cared for me... “Erm,” Harry mutters. “Well. Yes.” Yes? “Yes?” “Yes.” “Oh,” she says, her voice sounding very high to her own ear. “Thank you.” A feeling of mixed relief and unfulfilled longing flows through her; her hands stop moving. “You’re welcome.” He starts to fidget again, staring at her. “Not, you know…” Hermione cannot help but smile. “I know what sort you fancy, Harry.” “I…” Harry gulps. “Oh?” “Athletic. Freckles. Ponytail.” At first Hermione worries that she has made a mistake, referring to Ginny or to Cho in even the most oblique terms. Blinking madly, mouth working, Harry seems to be struggling to find some argument against her observation. Finally, his shoulders droop. “I… Oh. Damn.” Then, miraculously, he grins. “Guess I should warn Fleur to keep an eye on Bill, then.” “Harry!” Hermione snorts in shock. Harry snorts back, and very soon, both of them are giggling madly like the school children they have never somehow been. She finds herself thinking of old Archie at the Quidditch World Cup—of the three of them giggling all of the way to the tents, of Ginny quietly joining in… Crying in the tent with her that evening; boys... There have been some wonderful times in the past few years, but she doesn’t remember laughing like this with either of the boys since then. Well, there was the whole tattoo thing, but that was with Ginny… “That’s not the only kind of girl I like,” Harry says very quietly. “Maybe not,” Hermione answers, torn between trying to be kind and taking pleasure in the rare opportunity to tease—not to mention avoiding her own dilemma. “You do seem to lose yourself in that particular model, however. Well, let’s see—we know you don’t fancy swotty and bushy-haired—” “Hey!” he says, pouting again, “I said…” “Can you see yourself fancying me, Harry? Come on.” His eyes take on their preternaturally fierce focus. “Yeah. I can see that. It would be weird, and it probably wouldn’t work out terribly well and it wouldn’t be either of our first choice, but yeah, I can see it.” “Oh.” Hermione waits for her throat to stop fibrillating. He is right, of course, but it's one of those possibilities that she has always felt it easier to tuck away on a back shelf. For exactly the reasons that he pointed out. And because she wouldn't want to hurt Ginny. Or Ron. It always comes back to... If Ron really cared for... “Well. Swotty with bushy hair is in, after all. Fancy Luna?” His hunter’s eyes narrow. “Go easy on Luna. She’s nice. You shouldn’t tease her.” “She is nice. I wasn’t teasing her,” mutters Hermione. He cocks his head in a manner quite reminiscent of Firesong and shrugs. This is getting her nowhere. Hermione tries another gambit. “We talk about that sort of thing all of the time, we girls—who thinks which boy is cute, or nice, or smart or... Who we like, you know? That way?” Unfortunately, he doesn’t take the bait; he shrugs again, his gaze still fixed on her. “Do… Do you boys…?” Ron's perfume, so sickly sweet she could barely stand to open the bottle, but she still keeps it... Now he smiles, and once again Hermione has the strange, unfamiliar sense that she is the young one. “Oh. Thought that’s what this was about.” “What?” she blusters, though she knows it’s a losing game. “I love you, Hermione...” The smile broadens without quite reaching his eyes. “Didn’t think you’d care much whether I thought you were pretty or not.” “That’s not true!” she harrumphs. “I do care!” Physical appearance isn't... Unless you're a hag like I am. “Yeah,” he grins—the sardonic Harry-and-Ginny grin so unlike Ron’s. “I’m sure you do. But not as much as you’d care if it was our roommate.” Hermione doesn’t wish to dignify that with an answer. She doesn't wish to, but her skin manages it for her. His face softens and saddens. “Sorry, Hermione. I can’t help. I know he thinks the world of you. He does, anyone can see it. But we don’t talk about those sorts of things.” He thinks the world... “I thought boys always did?” she says, abandoning pretense. Again he shrugs, and his face grows even sadder. “Seamus and Dean, sure. Neville even, sometimes. But not me and Ron. ‘Cause if we were to talk girls, you know… We’d have to end up talking about you…” “And Ginny.” He winces. “Yeah. And Ginny. And that would be…” Again a shrug. “Weird.” This too is an impasse that needs to be dealt with. “Harry,” she murmurs, crossing and sitting on the bed beside him. “You need to talk to her.” He stiffens, glaring down at his hands. “She’s worried, Harry, and she’s hurt,” Hermione says, though she promised herself and her friend that she wouldn’t. “Hurt?” Harry grunts. Hermione has seen him poised like this before battle. “She… She understands. She said she understood.” “She does Harry, I know she does, but…” She finds herself biting her lip. “It can’t feel good to know that she’s being asked to stay behind because she’s younger and less experienced, and because she would only distract you—” “She thinks that’s why I put things on hold between us?” He is blinking at her now, mouth hanging open. “Well… isn’t it?” “NO.” His hands riffle madly through his hair again. “Bloody… Hermione, is that what you think? That I didn’t think she’d be up for it? That she’d get in the bloody way?” “No, Harry,” Hermione says in as mollifying a tone as she can; he is quite frightening when he is angry like this. “But that you needed to concentrate—” “Hermione!” he snaps, grabbing her wrist, and her mouth pinches closed of its own accord. “Bloody… Don’t…? It’s not that at all. Hell. I… She understood, Hermione.” “Well,” Hermione says, working hard not to pull her arm from her friend’s grasp, “perhaps I don’t understand, Harry. If that wasn’t why—” “It wasn’t.” His grip relaxes; she puts her hand over his before he can pull it away. “It was… three things, really. First, it’s about the fact that I’m pants at Occlumency and I always will be. I mean, I think we may be on to something with this Legilimency thing, but honestly…. The way it works is that if Voldemort or someone else tries to look at my thoughts, what they’ll see at first is the surface stuff—whatever’s floating there. And they can work their way further down, but the further from the front of my brain it is, the harder it’s going to be to see.” He looks at her, and when she nods he continues, “So I don’t want her to get… hurt or, you know, because I can’t somehow be arsed to manage well at Occlumency. Then there’s the…” He takes a deep breath. “You saw me when I thought that bastard had Sirius. I wasn’t… I didn’t make the best strategic choices, I wasn’t seeing the whole board, like Ron would say. If he used Ginny, I… Well, you saw what happened when he took her second year. And she and I hadn’t even exchanged a dozen words then. I didn’t….” He shakes himself. “And the last thing—and I don’t know if she knows this, and I’ll never say it to her, because I know she’d bite my head off, but it’s true: if I’m not around, she might find someone else.” His hands fly up. “I know she says she never gave up on me, I know she… But she saw Michael and Dean. And maybe she’ll start seeing someone else, and maybe that would make it okay if, you know, something happened…” He grips her arm hard again, and sighs. “I’ve spent my whole life missing the people who loved me. I couldn’t do that to her.” “Oh,” Hermione says. “Oh, Harry.” For the thousandth time, she tries to imagine what it must be like to be Harry Potter, to have lost so much, so often—the raw ache of it floods through her like acid. But she knows that trying to run away from loss is no way to live. They sit there for a minute or three, each lost in thoughts far too fustian to verbalize. When her own breathing and his seem to have stabilized, she says, “Harry? May I respond, or would that not be helpful?” He hunkers down. “Respond?” “To your points,” she says, attempting to be kind. He sighs. “Oh. Fine. Respond away.” “First of all,” she says, “as to keeping Ginny out of your surface thoughts, and therefore safe, how many minutes out of the day can you say you’ve gone this past month without thinking of her?” His face takes on the most miserable pout she’s ever seen, and a part of her wants to laugh—wants to, but fortunately doesn’t. “Second,” she continues, “as for his using Ginny against you—how well did you hide your relationship this past spring?” “Hide?” He looks insulted. “Well, you started by kissing her in front of the whole of Gryffindor. You hardly stopped touching her for the next five weeks, either in the common room, out on the grounds, in the Great Hall… If there’s a student or a teacher at the school who didn’t know that you were infatuated with her, I would be shocked.” His face pales. “Draco Malfoy and… Snape certainly knew,” she says, regretting saying it, but knowing it is true. He groans, and buries his face in her hands. “Third…” She bites her lip, then shakes her head and goes on. “Harry, I know you want to spare her, and I think it’s really… It’s very you. But no. She’s not giving up on you. She’s not…. Ginny’s warm and bright and loving and funny, and I have no doubt she’ll have people to keep her company—Neville and Luna, for a start—but she’s not going to find Mr. Right and move on from you, Harry. I’m afraid this is yet another thing you can’t spare her.” He tilts his head so that one eye peers up at her and mutters miserably, “Bugger.” “Yes, well, no doubt there’s a less obscene way of expressing yourself, but I can’t blame you for feeling as you do.” She squeezes his hand. “I’m so sorry, Harry. And yes, it’s time to talk to her.” A malicious glint flares in his single visible eye. “You’re one to talk.” Her breath catches. “I…? What do you—?” “You know what I mean, Hermione, come on. I’ve been sharing this room with the two of you and I’ll admit, you’ve been on your best behavior, both of you, but if I have to watch the two of you mooning at each other another minute I think I’m going to scream.” “Moon? I… He isn’t mooning at me.” Ron... If Ron really cared... He picks his head up, and she sees the same evil Ginny-like grin. “Perhaps you’re taking it in turns.” “Oh!” Hermione gasps. “I call that nice!” “Come on, Hermione?” Harry says, and now he is squeezing her hand. “I mean, what are you waiting for?” She leans back against the wall. She can smell him here, even though this is Harry’s room, Harry’s side of the shared bed. But Ron… “I… Things seemed to be going so well, Harry,” she mumbles. “When you and Ginny got together, and he was finally detached from Lavender, and we were laughing together and hardly fighting at all…” “Hardly,” he says, and she scowls down at him, but he doesn’t look as if he’s being sarcastic. “We were getting very… close. As if we both knew what was coming, and we didn’t want to frighten it away.” “What happened?” She has been asking herself this for the past month. “Well, he was always… deferential. He never wanted to initiate anything with me, touching or… whatever. And then Dumbledore… I don’t know what it is, Harry, but except for the memorial service, he’s barely touched me. When you’re not with us, he can barely look at me. It’s as if… As if he’s, he’s ashamed of me, or ashamed that we touched, or unhappy…” Harry does something that Hermione never anticipated—something that he’s never done on his own: he puts an arm around her shoulder and hugs her. “I don’t think he’s ashamed, Hermione. Not of you, anyway. Maybe of himself, for the whole Lavender thing, maybe?” She looks over at him—his face is as open and sincere as she has seen it all summer. “How… Catholic of him.” “Ron’s not Catholic,” he says with a frown. “All the more so,” Hermione answers, a small laugh bubbling up. Harry smiles, if only slightly. “He’ll come around.” “I hope so.” A thought worms its way out, and she can feel her own small smile dissipate. “Where do you think he went today?” He too loses his smile. “He said, didn’t he? The accountant cousin? About the lead on the—” “It’s just…” It’s just that Hermione has a sudden image of the cousin having silky hair and red lips and a mind for more than figures, and a figure… “It’s nothing.” Harry squeezes her. “He’ll come around.” “I hope so.” “Want me to beat him up?” She snorts into his shoulder. “No! No beating up Ron!” “Unless you get to do it,” he says into the top of her head and she finds herself smiling and tearing up at the same time. “You really think he…?” Hermione feels so pathetic, so twelve years old; she wonders how Ginny could have stood it for so long. Of course, Ginny was twelve years old, not seventeen. “Yeah,” Harry all but whispers into her hair. “I do. I don’t know what he’s moping on about, but he’s been... You’re his perfect woman.” Laughter to tears to laughter to tears… “Then why…?” “Because, Hermione… He’s Ron. He always feels like he’s not as good as anyone else, and he feels guilty about it and angry about it at the same time. When you asked him to Slughorn’s party last Christmas? The only reason he didn’t go—the only reason he started acting like some sort of leech around Lavender was… Well…” Even thinking about it—even now—fills Hermione with cold rage. “Because Ginny’d told him I’d kissed Viktor. I was so angry when she told me that. Three kisses! And he kissed me! And they were… disappointing, you know? Viktor’s awfully nice, but he’s really awkward and his nose kept bumping me… It’s not funny, Harry!” “Sorry,” he sniggers. “Believe me, I know about disappointing first kisses. They get better, don’t they?” “I wouldn’t know.” “You’ve never?” He pulls back to look at her; she stays as she is, shielded by her hair. “Not even this spring? I was sure—” She shivers and shakes her head. “No, Harry.” “Oh.” He pulls her close again. “Well, Ron’s nose—” “Harry!” Hermione had a particularly vivid dream about that nose last night, and once again she feels as if he must be able to see just what a silly, depraved creature she really is. His perfect woman! I don't want to be perfect... “I was just saying,” he adds, the smirk clear in his voice. “Hermione, you do need to talk with him.” She grunts. “Come on—the two of you are going to be unbearable if you don’t work this out. It’s bad enough when you’re bickering with each other, but this polite… whatever-it-is is excruciating.” “I’ll try,” she sighs. “But Ron doesn’t like it when I initiate too much—he feels, as you said, he feels inadequate or something. I’ve been waiting…” She looks over at him; his expression is still serious. “I’ll talk with him if you talk with Ginny.” He groans. “Bloody Weasleys.” “You can bloody say that again.” He gasps in mock horror. “Hermione! If Ron heard that language, he’d have a heart attack!” She pinches off a smile, and picks up the book that Harry has been leafing through for the past few weeks, Nature’s Noblility. Really, when did it start? It could just as easily have been Harry, couldn't it, or Dean, or Terry Boot or Ernie MacMillan or, well, just about anyone else? There must have been some moment... Hermione searches back, looking for the instant when she chose the path of misery and frustration that is her love life. She was already doomed before Viktor, the poor dear; she remembers the first of many moist commiserations on the gittishness of boys with Ginny in the tent at the Quidditch World Cup. Perhaps she should simply throw herself at Ron like Lavender? Or play the damsel in distress? Much as the archetype turns her stomach, it worked after a fashion for Ginny... Hermione shudders and looks at Harry, who is staring out the window as if he could peer across four counties and see her. No—it wasn't rescuing Ginny that made Harry see her, it was Ginny finally being Ginny. And Ron doesn't need to see the real Hermione. He knows her all too well. And not well enough. Not as well as she would like. She looks down at the book and sees where her unconscious skimming has brought her: WEASLEY, Arthur (1949–) Ottery St Catchpole, Devon; 1st son, Bilius Weasley and Clothilda Weasley née Prewett; Griff... Why is Mrs. Weasley not there? “Wizarding names are so odd, aren’t they?” she says, flipping backwards to the Ts. “Here you’ve got lots of Trelawneys, fifteen, eighteen entries for Toke, if you please, and a dozen for Thurkell, lots for Summerby, but only two for Smith and…” She riffles to the front, to pages that are well-worn and dog-eared. “Just… Oh, well, a few for Black after all.” “Yeah,” Harry answers almost expressionlessly. “Yeah, nine. I know the Bs by heart at this point, from looking for our friend who left the note in the bloody locket.” He starts ticking off fingers. “Sirius’s parents—they were both born Blacks—his aunt and two uncles. And his cousins—Tonks’s mum and the two mad ones. And Sirius himself, of course.” Hermione blinks, looking down at the minute entries. A thrill passes through her. “Harry… Harry, what year was this published?” When he doesn’t answer quickly enough, she opens the title page and gasps. “1960. Oh!” She looks back at the Black family entries. “That’s it!” Images cascade through her mind’s eye all at once, very much like the filmstrip that played out in her imagination last night… Ron’s nose… She shivers. A tapestry. RAB. The locket. A locket. Mundungus Fletcher. Borgin and Burkes'. Voldemort. The cup… She throws back the pages of the book, desperately turning back to the Ss. Smith. “That’s it! Harry!” “Er, Hermione?” He looks more than a bit frightened. “What’s it?” “He was born the next year, you see?” Clearly he doesn’t. She takes a breath. “I know who RAB is, Harry. And where the locket is—or at least, where it was. And I think I may know where the cup is. Or at least, who can get us more information on it.” She proceeds to lay out the whole of her discovery and of her hypotheses. While Hermione spells it out, Harry’s jaw drops. He closes it when she finishes and sits up straight. “Well, that’s…” He shakes his head and grins. “Hermione, we’ve already established that you’re not my sister. And I’m your friend and I think you’re pretty, but I don’t want you getting the wrong idea. And I have no interest in Ron—or Ginny—beating me up. Otherwise, you know what?” “No,” she laughs, shaking her head. “Hermione, if not for all of those other things, I would give you the biggest, longest, wettest, least disappointing kiss of your life.” “Oh,” Hermione says, feeling her face catch fire.
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