Following Halloween night, Hermione and Ron had gone completely mad. Harry had overheard Seamus Finnegan and Dean Thomas hypothesizing that the troll’s club had somehow knocked a few screws straight out of their heads.
“Muggles call it a lobotomy,” whispered Lavender Brown in Harry’s ear, unhelpfully, as the entirety of Gryffindor first years carefully observed Hermione and Ron, who were, just as conspiratorially as the rest of them, engaged in a whispered conversation. “A doctor cuts into the prefrontal lobe of the brain and the patient’s personality completely changes.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense at all!” Harry responded in a hushed tone, “I was with them that day and absolutely nothing happened to them!” The last bit came out slightly too loud, causing Ron and Hermione to both jerk out of their conversation and glance at him questioningly and in slight annoyance, respectively. Harry felt his face go red and he stared hard at his eggs and toasts until he heard them become completely engrossed in their completely unintelligible conversation again.
“Maybe they’ve just realized that they like each other’s company?” Offered Neville, kindly. As expected of Neville, a grounding, simple solution to an (in Harry’s opinion) incredibly complex situation.
With that, everyone nodded and moved on, though not entirely convinced. They were, after all, eleven-year-olds with an understanding of human behavior akin to most owls and attention spans far less developed.
—
Harry hadn’t known Hermione Granger very well but he and everyone else had taken note of her extreme, brown nosing behavior in every class they had with her. It was hard to ignore. She’d come into class at least five minutes early, settle down and take out a textbook and then a notebook then alternate between the two furiously for the rest of class, and, if given the chance, answer every single question a professor had with a measured confidence that signalled to everyone else that this was her terf, her homebase.
Ron, meanwhile, would stroll in, attempt to pay attention for the first thirty minutes, daydream for the rest of the period, and then settle on cracking a few jokes in Harry’s ear about the topic they were learning that day.
A few days after the troll’s little bathroom break, this changed irreversibly. Much to Harry’s chagrin.
Harry and Ron had taken their usual seats in Charms, with Ron in between both Harry and Hermione. Everything had gone normally at first with Harry tuning Flitwick fully out when Ron told a particularly well timed joke, getting ready to engage fully in an actually interesting topic of conversation instead of the fine details and mechanics of the mending charm when Hermione hissed, “Will you stop distracting him,” from Ron’s right, “you may not need to pay attention but he definitely does!”
Harry glared at her. She might as well call him stupid to his face if she was going to talk like this. Didn’t she know he could hear him too? He looked to Ron for some back up but his face had gone pale like Neville’s did when his remembrall went white.
Hermione, sensing Ron’s sheepishness, attempted to lighten the mood, “Honestly! Imagine if you distracted him like that while we were learning Expelliarmus. The world would be in tatters.” Ron sniggered and covertly whispered something that made her smile.
For the rest of the lesson, Ron and Hermione whispered to each other and chuckled while Harry sat, melancholy, and paid attention to Professor Flitwick demonstrating the formulas that had been used to bring the mending charm into the world.
He wished he could say that this new fondness for each other was the only thing that had changed in their behavior.
But the way Ron easily answered Snape's cold calls on a complex potion theory that was at least a chapter ahead of their reading homework (Harry knew this for sure because he had started to read ahead Snape’s assigned readings after his disastrous first day) was just so un-Ron like that it was hard to ignore. As was the way he barely glanced at his essays that had received ‘Outstandings’ before chucking them in the common room bin when Ron and Harry had spent an entire weekend celebrating an ‘Exceeds Expectations’ on the first Transfiguration project they had done together as partners.
Hermione, too, was just slightly… off. She’d mellowed out considerably since her and Ron’s bizarre friendship had developed. She was still brilliant, scarily so, but she was better at hiding it. She still carried most class discussions, still asked and answered questions, still did everything that made her Hermione, but never with the desperation she had displayed in Snape’s classroom that first day.
They both also spent a lot of time in class giggling about their new inside jokes that they hadn’t had days ago while Harry sat next to them, completely out of the loop. The worst had been during a lecture Professor Sprout had given on Flitterbloom’s non-sentient green, swaying tentacles and briefly mentioned its relative, Devil’s Snare and its characteristics. The look Ron had given Hermione, wide eyed and sharp, would’ve been hilarious had Harry known what had caused it. Hermione, meanwhile, had almost doubled over laughing.
Being friends with Ron and Hermione post-troll attack was incredibly hard sometimes. It was agitating, confusing, almost insulting, and occasionally alienating. But it was worth it.
Because no one else would let Harry borderline plagiarize their essays the way Ron would, nor would they basically all but tuck him into bed again on the nights when Harry’s scar had given him so much trouble he’d awaken suddenly in the middle of the night. They wouldn’t bring him down to the kitchen to have a warm glass of milk with the house elves and then not complain a single moment the next day about getting three hours of sleep. No one else would stay awake with him after Quidditch practice, long after everyone had filtered out of the common room, and help him study for the Potions exam he was sure he was going to fail the next day, nor would they actively wheedle him into eating more than just toast on days where he felt the Vernon Dursley’s phantom stare digging into his back like Hermione would. They probably wouldn’t diligently mend and shrink his clothes and re-repair his glasses over and over again after they broke in practice either as they both did from time to time.
Ron had once described having a family to be like a constant tug of war between annoyance and fondness, on one of the first weeks they’d spent at Hogwarts while sending a letter to Ginny, and though at the time, Harry had thought it was strange, he was starting to realize what he really meant.
—
Quidditch was amazing. Hermione called it boring but, then again, Hermione’s idea of fun was reading Hogwarts: A History for the fifth time in a row.
(“Seriously, don’t you get bored of reading the same book again and again? It’s not repetitive?” Ron had asked once, looking exasperated beyond his eleven years. Hermione levelled him with a flat look. “If you consider our current situation, I’m sure you’ll be able to gather that I’m fine with a little repetition.” Another one of their little inside jokes.)
His very first Quidditch game had been a success, pretty much. He’d felt a small lurch and nearly fallen off his broom but it had ceased instantly and he’d gone on to catch the snitch, winning the game! He wasn’t quite so relieved about how minor the mishap had been when Ron and Hermione rushed over to the changing rooms to check in on him, fully ignoring his half naked team member’s appalled grunts.
“Are you sure you’re okay, Harry?” Hermione asked in that patronizing tone that teenagers sometimes took with children younger than them. “I mean–you almost went flying!”
“Yeah, mate, you don’t have to be embarrassed.” Ron said, trying to awkwardly pat Harry’s head, “If you were scared, you were scared. No shame in that.”
“But I wasn’t scared!” Harry resisted the urge to stomp his feet. He heard the rest of the team (now hastily dressed) snickering behind them and felt his face go hot.
As Ron and Hermione tutted and checked Harry over for injuries, he was suddenly struck by the nauseating image of Vernon and Petunia fretting over Dudley after an accident in football.
He felt his stomach churn, but whether from longing or from the offensive resemblance itself he wasn’t sure.
—
Christmas was coming.
The weather grew colder to the point where a simple trek to Hagrid’s hut was dreadful, despite the multiple warming charms Hermione casted. Classes were even worse. Harry could almost see his breath in Snape’s cold, damp dungeon classroom. Everyone else in the classroom did their best to stay near the warmth of their boiling cauldrons.
“I do feel sorry,” said Draco Malfoy, one Potions class, “for all those people who have to stay at Hogwarts for Christmas because they’re not wanted at home.”
Hermione rolled her eyes. “I forgot he was like that.”
Ron scoffed, “Forgot? You can recite almost every book in the library from memory and that’s what you choose to forget?” Then, as if suddenly remembering Harry was still there, turned and said, “Don’t listen to him. He’s just jealous his friends don’t like him enough to stay with him for Christmas.”
Hermione and Ron were staying with Harry for Christmas. He was slightly perturbed by how that had ended up happening. Ron’s excuse made sense since his parents were visiting Charlie in Romania but he wondered how Hermione had gotten out of spending time with her family after months away at boarding school.
The Gryffindor common room, protected from drafts by McGonagall’s charmed fireplace, grew increasingly rowdy, as Christmas break leered closer and closer. The restlessness in the air affected even Hermione who’s eyes had curiously taken on a glazed look in most classes.
—
Ron was the farthest thing from studious. In fact, he rarely saw him do his homework any earlier than the day before. Hermione was a different story, of course. But even she had started to do anything but pay attention in most classes when it came to actual content. Harry knew because her notes, while still immaculate, were pre-recorded. During class, she brought large textbooks that seemed to be even more complex than the actual content they were working on and took notes on that instead. Ron, meanwhile, didn’t show up to class at all sometimes.
Somehow, the both of them were breezing through their classes all the same.
“Oh— at this rate I’m in the running for headboy!” Said Ron, wondrously gazing at his latest marks on Snape’s latest pop quiz. Hermione rolled her eyes. He leaned back in his chair, making it so that it only balanced on its last two legs and teetered suspensefully.
“I’d be worried if you didn’t find our curriculum easy at this point. Getting top marks isn’t anything to brag about in your position.”
Harry bristled. He’d started doing quite well in their schoolwork as well after Hermione’s insistence on joint study sessions but to say that their work wasn’t challenging was insulting when he actually had to put in blood, sweat, and tears to turn his needles into matchsticks.
Ron leaned back in his chair, almost tipping it over once again. “Let me enjoy this, Hermione.”
“That’s going to end badly,” Hermione warned with a disapproving look, “Don’t you remember that time you fell on your backside in front of the entire class in Potions?” She looked reproachful but Harry could hear the smug smile in her voice.
Ron’s complexion suddenly started to meld with his deep red sweater. “You promised you wouldn’t bring that up again!” He hissed.
Harry stifled a laugh.
Listening to Ron and Hermione’s bickering was almost pleasant now, though it had gravely irritated him before. He’d say nostalgic but he wasn’t sure if that was the right word. Their relationship with each other just felt well worn and aged.
He knew that he couldn’t remember seeing Ron fall on his arse during potions and he knew, for a fact, that he’d never forget an image so hilarious. He also knew that Ron and Hermione often had little discussions like this where they spoke about things that had yet to pass.
(“No, that happens after Christmas holiday, Ron.” Hermione had said once during their light night common room discussions when everyone had filtered out of the common rooms excluding the both of them. And Harry who was pretending to be dead asleep on top of Flitwick’s latest Charms paper).
Something had definitely changed from Halloween, onwards. Something big. And there were really only a few reasonable explanations for their extreme change in behavior too.
Harry sighed and gathered his books. But figuring that could be done tomorrow. Ron and Hermione had once again force-fed him into a daze after making him finish all of his break homework in one sitting. He was drowsy, tired, and extremely sated; he wanted a nap.