Thresholds

On the next morning Harry still had a hard time wrapping his head around whatever it was that had transpired the night before, and sitting in the Great Hall he was staring at his food as if the answers might be found somewhere therein. When he had woken up – for the second and final time, that is – the incident had immediately felt like a rather bizarre dream to him, and it had taken a few minutes for the realization to set in that it had in fact happened. Crookshanks and everything included. Yet even now a part of him still stubbornly doubted it and questioned his other part's memory, which irritated said part immensely.

"It just doesn't make any sense," he suddenly proclaimed to no one in particular and much to his own subsequent bafflement. When he looked up in embarrassment, he was met with expectably confused gazes.

"What doefn't?" Ron asked with his mouth full of toast. "Breakfaft?"

"Oh, uh…" Harry clumsily began, grasping for a makeshift explanation. "Just a dream I had last night."

In that moment Hermione joined them, bending down right next to Harry to reach for an apple in the fruit basket in the middle of the table, with her other hand resting lightly on his shoulder, oblivious to her unusually startling effect on him.

"I don't believe dreams are to be made much sense of," she remarked rather vivaciously. "They are but children of an idle brain, begot of nothing but vain fantasy."

She snatched the apple she liked best and proceeded to sit down next to Harry, rummaging through her school bag.

"Yef," said Ron, just a little confused. "Wha' fhe faid. If you wanna make fenfe of your dreamf, maybe you fould afk Profeffor Trelawney."

"Oh, there's a good idea," Hermione endorsed sarcastically. "Ask the one person in Hogwarts who has irreversibly taken leave of all her senses to make sense of something."

"Well, what about you then?" Ron challenged her, washing down his mouthful of whatever it was he had now taken a huge chunk out of with a gulp of juice. "You're good at making sense of stuff."

"Why, thank you, Ron," she replied with overacted delight. "Finally someone who appreciates me for who I really am."

Her attention then shifted to the silent boy sitting between them, who seemed to be as busy with his breakfast as one could possibly be without actually touching it.

"It wasn't one of those dreams, was it?" she asked, at once concerned for him. "Because I would never dismiss them as—"

"Children of an idle brain?" Harry finished her sentence, smiling weakly and barely looking up at her. "Nah, it was just some… silly… thing."

"I definitely wanna hear that one," Ron said eagerly. "Silly dreams are the best."

"Nah, it's really stupid," Harry dodged the invitation, shifting in his seat uncomfortably.

"By definition, I would say," added Hermione.

"Come on, mate," Ron nagged impatiently. "Share the fun."

"Stop it, guys. I don't want to talk about it."

There was an insistence in his voice that entailed a sudden silence.

"Oh," made Hermione, a bit taken aback.

"Oooh," made Ron knowingly. "It was one of those dreams."

"What dreams?" asked Hermione, her curiosity instantly sparked. Granted, it never took much for that to happen.

"The only kind of dream you don't wanna talk about in public spaces."

Hermione pondered that for a moment, biting her lower lip, and then haltingly queried, "Secret dreams?"

For once it was Ron's turn to roll his eyes at his female friend, rather than the usual other way around.

"Yeah, uh-huh. Sure, Hermione. The MI6 is on its way right now to extract the super secret information from Harry's top secret dream."

Hermione frowned at him with her lips pursed into a straight line, demanding a serious answer without speaking the words.

"A dirty dream, silly," he said matter-of-factly. "Harry had himself a dirty little dream."

"What?" Harry exclaimed incredulously. "I did not!"

"Relax, mate," Ron reassured him in between bites. "We all have 'em. It's just that… idle brain stuff, right? Can't take any blame for that."

"But I'm telling you," Harry insisted emphatically, "I didn't have a dirty dream. Would you just stop making up that nonsense already?"

"Oh, I get it," said Ron, hands raised in apology. "I'm sorry, mate. I get it now."

Harry looked at his friend with utter confusion on his features, while the redhead carelessly went on to help himself to another piece of toast with a generous layer of peanut butter and just about half a jar of jam on top. Hermione witnessed the epicurean disaster with her nose wrinkled up in disgust.

"What?" Harry asked, somewhat irritated. "You get what?"

Ron looked up at him with an eyebrow raised in puzzlement.

"Why you don't want to talk about it," he answered, casually licking a drop of jam from his thumb. "It's fine. I get it."

Harry waited another moment for the young Weasley to finally make any sense on his own accord. He didn't.

"I really don't get what you get, mate."

Ron looked at him with honest perplexity.

"Seriously?" he asked, even disregarding his breakfast for a moment. "You're really gonna make me spill it all out today, aren't you?"

Harry just looked at him expectantly, while Hermione merely looked back and forth between the two with both her eyebrows raised in the face of this unexpected exchange.

"Well, your dream was about someone who's here," he explained what at least to him appeared to be so obvious, "and it sure as hell wasn't me. Or Neville."

"What about me?" asked Neville, who sat across from them and had not taken any notice of their conversation up to that moment.

"I'm just saying that Harry didn't have a naughty dream about you," Ron casually told his fellow Gryffindor.

Neville looked expectably flabbergasted.

"Well, uh," he said, "that's, uh, sure good to know."

"Wait," said Harry, and then paused for a moment of contemplation. "So what exactly are you suggesting?"

Ron looked at him, then switched his eyes to Hermione for a second and then back to him. He paused, pursed his lips in frustration and then repeated the procedure once, this time also nodding his head a little so as to emphasize the point he was silently trying to communicate. It took a second or two, with two puzzled pairs of eyes following his pantomime, but eventually realization set in, and it set in hard.

Four eyes widened, four cheeks flushed crimson and two chests expanded around lungs that took in the sharpest breaths. The other two eyes, two cheeks and one chest had already gone back to breakfast.

"What? Honestly, Ron, where do you even get these ridiculous ideas?" a bewildered Harry challenged him. "I did not have any such dream about Hermione. I would never! That's disgusting!"

An uncomfortable silence ensued between them that even seemed to negate the animated chitchat and clatter of silverware from all around the hall for a moment. Next to Harry, Hermione shifted in her seat, and he was quite sure that she ended up sitting just a little further away from him, but he had a hard time looking at her at all, so he scratched the back of his head instead for a lack of alternatives. Ron possessed just sufficiently developed instincts for socially awkward situations to tactfully chew a bit slower.

"Well," Hermione began to announce just a whit too cheerfully, "I'd better be going. It's quite a walk to Professor Vector's classroom."

She hastily gathered her things, including the apple she hadn't even taken a single bite out of yet, and got up from the bench. Without looking at them she said, "I'll see you guys later in Herbology," and with that was marching off towards the great doorway.

Neither of the two remaining friends said a word for a while, and only when even Ron at long last seemed to have finished his breakfast for good did Harry speak up.

"So, what," he set out to lament, "Hermione is angry with me now for not having salacious dreams about her like... like some depraved wanker with a... a sex drive?! When did that start making sense and why did nobody tell me?"

"Well, I don't know about any of that," Ron replied hesitantly, a bit befuddled at Harry's somewhat peculiar view of the events, "but you basically just called your best female friend disgusting."

Harry thought about that for a second that stretched into another one. "I did?"

"Maybe not… what's the word? Explici… tively… ?" Ron shook his head. "Directly, I mean. Maybe not directly. But… sorta, yeah."

"But I only meant to say that it would be despicable if I were to have such dreams about her because... because decency… and... the looming collapse of polite society... you know?!" Harry looked at his demonstrably non-female friend in search of much needed agreement. To his irritation the look Ron gave him seemed more akin to pity than anything else. "She's my best friend, for Merlin's sake! It's just not right to think about your friends like that. Not even in dreams. I think."

Ron shrugged, clearly not as convinced by Harry's explanation as Harry would have hoped, which was a real shame because then at least one of them would have been convinced by it.

"Would you not be… I don't know, a little hurt, or maybe disappointed if someone, anyone really, told you straight-out that you are no material for such… thoughts or dreams?" Ron asked him while shoving his emptied plate back a few inches and standing up. "I mean, obviously there's always loads of people who don't see you like that, but you don't really need to have it shoved in your face like that, do you? Everyone likes to be… recognized, right? It's only natural. Even for Hermione, I dare say."

"I suppose, but… I don't know," Harry conceded with plain reluctance and joined his friend in standing up. "I think I could very much live with Pansy Parkinson not harboring any such thoughts or having sexual dreams about me, and she could shove it wherever she wants."

He shuddered a little even at the mere thought of it.

"Yeah, well," said Ron, shouldering his own worn school bag, "maybe you are not Pansy Parkinson for Hermione."

<3<3<3<3<3

Not quite two hours later, Harry and Ron and a mixed group of Gryffindors and Ravenclaws found themselves in front of the locked entrance to greenhouse three, waiting for Professor Sprout to arrive. Harry had spent the greater part of the time since breakfast with thinking, and then also – complementarily to that – with thinking too much. He wanted to apologize to Hermione for his admittedly poor choice of words earlier, yet it turned out to be quite hard to find a sensible way to do so.

He wasn't exactly keen on the idea of telling her that he didn't mean what he had said, because that would imply that he did in fact have sexual dreams about her, which was certainly not true. Simply telling her that he hadn't meant to say that she as a person was disgusting seemed bloody stupid as well, because how flattering could it be, really, to hear that one was not, in fact, disgusting? Like, 'Hey, you're not disgusting. Marry me?' Whatever potential dialogue he played out in his head, not one of them made an applicable impression to him.

And then, of course, there remained also the fact of the matter that even being anywhere near Hermione felt awfully awkward today. If she knew what had happened last night she'd certainly feel the same. Or if she knew without him knowing that she knew and her knowing that he knew without having the decency to tell her, she'd probably kill him. Or worse, expel him.

But he couldn't just tell her, now could he? He had virtually invaded her privacy without meaning to and without her knowing about it, the former maybe making it a little less bad, but the latter somehow making it much worse in his opinion. He felt like the wizarding equivalent to one of those creepy, despicable date rapists. Just without the actual date. And the rape, of course.

What the hell is wrong with me?

"What's wrong with you?"

Harry woke from his stray thoughts with a start and found Ron looking at him with a quizzical look on his face. Rather anxiously he asked, "Did I say any of that out loud?"

"No," Ron slowly answered, eying him suspiciously. "Should I be worried, or just glad?"

When Harry was about to say something in return, his attention instead switched to Hermione and Luna, who were approaching them just in that moment. Hermione merely pressed her lips together in what was surely supposed to be a substitute for a smile, while the moony blonde characteristically greeted them from her own parallel universe while looking up at the sky for no apparent reason. It was a beautifully clear sky, though.

Harry coughed slightly in his best suave efforts.

I should really heed the casting call for the next James Bond.

"So, how was Arithmancy?" Harry asked as casually as only the next James Bond could.

That's great, man. Small talk. Just keeping it smooth.

When Hermione threw him the quickest of glances it made him feel strangely translucent for a brief second. Or maybe naked, although that was just about the last feeling he wanted to have right now.

"Interesting", she replied curtly, appearing to be surprisingly busy with her hands.

"That cloud looks like a wheezing wolpertinger," Luna observed.

The other three simultaneously followed her gaze, and sure enough found a small formation of clouds passing by right above them. To Harry it looked very much like a small white cloud followed by a slightly larger cluster of clouds, but maybe that was just because he had never seen a wolpertinger, wheezing or not.

"It sure does," Ron assessed.

"Definitely," Harry agreed.

Hermione merely breathed a weak sigh.

Just then Professor Sprout finally arrived, greeting her lot of students with her usual, good-humored attitude. The response she received was expectably less enthusiastic. However, Pomona Sprout was not someone to be easily deterred in her naturally good mood, and so she fumbled with her keychain while happily humming some bouncy tune no one else seemed to recognize. Except for Luna, maybe, because why wouldn't she?

With the students expecting Professor Sprout to successfully open the door sometime within the school year, they all gathered around her one by one and thus made it quite impossible for anyone not to move closer to everybody else. Harry and Hermione were no exception. Standing right next to him she threw him a nervous glance, then smiled warmly when she apparently noticed something about him he himself was not aware of.

"Your shirt is all messed up," she said and immediately proceeded to straighten it out with her hands moving across his chest.

On any other day this certainly would have qualified as a perfectly normal exchange between them. Alas, this was not a normal day. In an unfamiliar reflex Harry himself cursed even while it happened, he flinched away from her touch and made an involuntary step backwards, slightly bumping into someone else, who might have said something along the elaborate lines of 'Oi!'

Her hands froze in mid-air for a second before she hastily retracted them. She looked at him with a mix of plain bewilderment and, to Harry's great dismay, more than a pinch of hurt. Before he could gather his chaotic thoughts and even begin to say anything, the crowd started moving; Professor Sprout had finally opened the door to the greenhouse.

Shaking her head dismissively, Hermione turned and quickly vanished somewhere between plants and people. When even Luna glared at him with something like her own, outlandish version of dreamy disapproval, Harry was sure of at least one thing: he really had messed up now.

Inside the humid greenhouse, with the lesson progressing uneventfully, Harry handled the plant he was supposed to extract some gooey liquid from with uncharacteristically rough motions. He spent more time throwing furtive glances in Hermione's general direction than actually looking at what exactly he was doing, but she had met his eyes only once at the beginning of the class and then not even one more time since then.

"You know, your approach to the task is really interesting," Ron told him, pausing to look at him work. "Here I am trying to use this stupidly delicate syringe to carefully extract single drops of that goo at precisely the right spots without harming the plant, while you are simply squeezing the stuff right out of the poor thing. Same results in less time, if you ask me. Although there's more goo on your hands than in your culture dish."

Harry looked at the mess he had made, the pitiful sight that was the plant and his fingers covered in sticky secretion, and he groaned in frustration.

"This is kind of an off day for me."

Ron couldn't help but chuckle at the scene. "You think?"

He watched Harry as he tried to get the viscous liquid from his fingers with a dry towel, increasingly desperate with every questionable attempt.

"Seriously, though," Ron spoke. "What's eating you today?"

Harry threw him a disgruntled look and went back to his sticky hands.

"Come on," Ron urged him encouragingly. "I'll even believe it if you're gonna insist that it's got nothing to do with a dirty dream."

His friend sighed and threw the ruffled towel back onto the wooden table. He gave Ron another reluctant look, then went to his hair with one of his hands, only to instantly regret that habit.

"Bloody hell," he cursed, now having some of the goo sticking to his black hair as well. He grunted, paused with his eyes closed and only then went on to say, "It wasn't a dream. No dream at all. Of any kind."

Ron didn't look too surprised. "Okay," he said. "I guess it would've had to be a really, really bad dream to cause… well, this."

He gestured towards Harry and the general mess that surrounded him. Harry made a face at him, which Ron took as a good sign. Where there was humor, there was hope.

"So?" Ron asked as Harry showed no clear intentions of actually coming up with any kind of explanation.

Again Harry sighed, clearly at strife with himself.

"Fine," he finally stated after a few seconds of nervously pricking a discarded glove he maybe should have used earlier with a needle for no sensible reason. "If you must know."

"I'm practically forcing you right now," Ron quipped. "We can all agree that you are not telling me by choice."

"Fine, whatever," Harry said, relenting at last. "So here it goes."

Yet nothing went anywhere. After a few seconds of silence, Ron busied himself with puffing up his cheeks and blowing out the air in noisy bursts.

"Here it goes," Harry repeated and then, much to Ron's relief, finally went on to say in a near-whisper, "Last night, I… I was… I mean, I found myself… in the girls' dorm room."

"What?" Ron exclaimed, confused but leaning in conspiratorially anyway. "That's impossible."

"One would think," said Harry. "But apparently… it's not."

"But… what?" Of all the things Ron might have expected, this had certainly not been one of them. "I don't even… why? I mean… when? Scratch that. How?"

"I don't know. It's not like I just went there."

"You didn't?"

"Why would I do that?"

Ron looked at him with round, unblinking eyes. "Are you seriously just asking me that?"

Harry stared right back, no less disbelieving. "Are you seriously telling me right now that you would just waltz into the girl's dormitories in the middle of the night if it were possible?"

Ron looked to the left, to the right and then back at Harry. "You didn't say anything about the middle of the night."

"Well, it's what I meant. I woke up there."

"What?" Ron exclaimed hoarsely. "What are you talking about? Were you getting wasted in the common room after I was gone or something?"

"What?" Harry echoed his friend. "Of course not! I went to bed as I always do. I fell asleep and then I woke up in Hermione's bed."

Ron's eyes seemed dangerously close to popping straight out of their sockets right about now.

"In Hermione's bed?" he practically shouted in a high-pitched voice, utterly incredulous.

"Ssssh," Harry made at him with his palms raised, looking around in a downright criminal fashion.

"What did you do that for?" Ron asked, his voice by now hard to hear even for dogs. Not that there were any of those around.

"Aren't you listening? I didn't do it on purpose. It just happened."

"You mean, like… bloody hell, Harry, you aren't making any sense. Did you guys have sex?"

"What? Of course not!"

Ron looked genuinely lost. "I don't get it."

"One more time, Ron. Just for you," Harry said slowly, calming himself. "I went to bed. My bed. Alone. I fell asleep. I woke up in the middle of the night. I found myself in Hermione's bed. She was there. Sleeping. I tried to leave. A furry incident with Crookshanks delayed me. I finally left, unnoticed. I hope. I went back to my bed in our dorm room. I fell asleep again. End of story."

"Crookshanks?" Ron asked, judging by his raddled looks somewhere near the edge of sanity by now.

"That's your question?"

Ron steadied himself with one hand on the table while his other hand went to his forehead. He exhaled a heavy, somewhat unsteady breath.

"So, what?" he said slowly, playing ping pong with his thoughts. "Are you saying you just… like, apparated into… there? While you were sleeping, no less?"

"I really don't know," answered Harry in all sincerity. "That's what I'm trying to tell you."

Ron kept shaking his head and rubbing his temples. It didn't seem to help much with whatever it was he tried to achieve by doing it.

"Are you sure it wasn't just a dream?"

Harry gave a nod in confirmation.

"Pity," said Ron, strangely exhausted. "I liked this better when it was just a wet dream. I would've liked to hear about that."

"It definitely would've been simpler," Harry agreed.

Professor Sprout chose that very moment to declare the class finished for the day, telling her students to safely seal their extracted secretion in their culture dishes. Harry looked at his own dish. There was some gooey stuff in there that might or might not have been the secretion in question, as well as a dead leaf, a loose thread of wool and a few dark flakes of dirt. Somehow he doubted Professor Sprout would be very happy with his results. His plant didn't look very happy, either.

"So, uh, what are you going to do?" Ron asked while they were all busy cleaning up their working spaces and putting their culture dishes into a freezer that, of course, worked entirely without electricity.

"I have no idea," Harry answered glumly, watching Hermione as she diligently put away her tools, carefully carried her plant back to its repository and neatly put her dish into the freezer as well, all the while not once looking his way. "I guess right now I'm pretty much putting my hopes on this being a one-time-only kind of thing."

"You won't even tell Hermione?"

Harry sighed. "I know I should. I have to, eventually. But… it's so crazy, even thinking about talking to her about it seems absurd."

"You can say that again," Ron concurred. "But it would still be better than not talking to her at all, wouldn't it?"

Hermione marched right past them and out through the exit with her gaze kept straight ahead and Harry's eyes following her thoughtfully.

"Yeah," he said sullenly, "and telling her about my stealthy invasion of her sphere of privacy should make for a great conversation piece."

<3<3<3<3<3

Harry hadn't done much else all day but think about how best to approach Hermione, yet late in the evening with the day nearing its end he found himself still not having done anything about it, for thinking, as many who are familiar with the concept and more who are not know, is not the same as doing.

He wasn't exactly proud of himself, but in the end he made up his mind to wait another night. If it were to happen again, he would definitely tell her the next day. And if it didn't, well, then he would probably tell her nevertheless, or maybe evaluate the possibility of waiting until his deathbed before telling her. That seemed like a reasonably appropriate moment for it.

Since Hermione had pretty much avoided him for the remainder of the day, it wasn't like he had ample opportunity to talk to her, anyway. It gave him a lot of time to make excuses, though. Suddenly he grew angry. Angry at himself. What was so difficult about this? She was his best friend. No one else had ever had so much natural sympathy and understanding and patience for him – no one.

When he saw her saying good night to a girl from first or second year, he abruptly sprang up from his armchair and strode purposefully towards Hermione, who was just turning away to ascend the stairs to the now much too familiar dorm rooms of the girls.

"Wait, please," he said, and to his relief she did indeed and, standing on the third step of the stairs, turned once more to face him. She looked just a little apprehensive.

"I, uh, I wanted to talk to you before you head off to bed," he told her, scratching first his earlobe and then his jaw-line. And then his nose a little.

Hermione looked at him expectantly, remaining silent.

"Right," Harry said, nodding to himself. "So, today really sucked. As far as days go. Which at least for me was because you weren't really part of it. Which was entirely my own fault, but… it still sucked. And I wanted… I needed to apologize to you for that. I know I behaved a little strangely today, but I didn't mean to push you away. And I certainly didn't mean to say that you are in any way, shape or form disgusting. If disgusting were the only adjective in the English language, I would still not use it to describe you, because it would be no less ridiculous.

"I really just had a bad day, and yes, there's a reason for it. But it was difficult for me to deal with it and I couldn't find a way to talk to you about it, which really happens very rarely, or more like never. But it did today, and when I'll finally tell you what all of this was about, you'll understand why I behaved so stupidly about it. It's nothing serious, you don't have to worry. It's just… ludicrous, really, and truth be told more than a little embarrassing for me.

"I know how this must sound, but all I really want to say is… I'm sorry, Hermione. And I hope we can say good night to each other like we always do, sleep this silly day off and talk about it tomorrow. I'll tell you everything, I promise. I'm even inclined to believe that we'll just have a good laugh about it, even though I spent all day going through all these worst case scenarios in my head over and over again. Only now I seem to realize that you've never been a worst case for me. You're the best."

A silence ensued that at least as far as Harry was concerned seemed rather deafening, and slowly but surely had an increasingly awkward quality about it. He was beginning to feel very self-conscious and by now his lengthy monologue seemed like one, big stream of empty blabbering to him and—

Then he was suddenly caught in the fiercest embrace he could imagine, forcing him to make a step backwards to keep his balance while also holding on to Hermione, who seemed to be entirely wrapped around him, although she was still standing on tiptoe on the third step of the stairs with her legs outstretched behind her.

"Just to avoid any misunderstanding here," said Harry when he had regained some air in his lungs, "this is not your very original way of telling me to bugger off, is it?"

She laughed against his shoulder, her breath tickling him on his neck.

"No, it's not," she said happily. "This is merely my first attempt of trying to make you understand that you just gave me one of the best apologies I was ever lucky enough to receive."

"Really?" Hearing that made Harry feel ridiculously good, and just a little bit proud.

"Really," she affirmed. "It's probably second only to defeating a mountain troll for me, which admittedly also served to save my life, but still qualified as an apology in my book."

"Well," Harry said, playfully turning from side to side and swinging Hermione with him, "There don't seem to be any trolls around right now."

She laughed again.

"I won't hold that against you, then," she granted. "But you owe me a troll."

Now it was Harry's turn to laugh.

"Would it count if I knocked out Crabbe and Goyle instead?"

He helped her back to her standing position and saw her smiling down at him, the reflections of the candle light dancing brightly in her eyes.

"There are undeniable similarities," she allowed. "But I should warn you, Harry Potter. I'm not easily deceived."

"I believe that," he replied. "Not many could differentiate the common troll from Vincent Crabbe. It takes a trained pair of eyes."

She sighed, her smile undiminished and entirely unconnected with Vincent Crabbe, or trolls for that matter.

"Thank you, Harry," she said quietly, and he reciprocated her smile.

"So, are you gonna wish me a good night now?" he asked in his most boyish demeanor.

Her smile got just a little brighter yet again.

"Yes," she said. "Good night, Harry."

"Good night, Hermione."

Slowly she turned around and went up the stairs, and Harry was somewhat surprised to find himself unable to overlook the gentle sway of her hips. Instantly feeling like the biggest pervert in human history, he turned around and made his way to his own dorm, feeling so content that it was hard to believe the day had gone the way it had. But all's well that ends well, it seemed to him, and so in his memory this day was, in the end, a good day.

It was with happiness and confidence that he lay down that night, and not even the fact that he pretty much dreaded tomorrow when he would have to tell Hermione about the incident, did much to lessen his mood. His eyelids slowly fell shut with boon rather than bane, and the smile on his lips barely faded even while he gently slipped away into the realm of dreams.

<3<3<3<3<3

The corridor was pitch black, save for some light coming from a door that stood ajar at the other end. Not even the candles were burning, and only the metallic frames of the pictures on the walls, reflecting even the faintest of lights, served to give any discernible shape to the hallway. Harry moved ahead and felt the ground change under his bare feet, from rough, cool stone to slightly warmer, soft carpet, muffling his footsteps in an otherwise dead silent environment.

The door came closer and the light grew brighter, enabling him to discern its features more clearly. He raised a hand to reach for his glasses, but found them missing. There was a sound coming from the room, he was sure. It was a constant, rushing sound, like that of running water, growing louder with every step he made. When he was just a few more meters away from the door, he noticed swathes of water vapor billowing from the gap between door and frame.

Then, all of a sudden, it was silent again and a few rapid, airy waves went through the flimsy clouds of steam. He was nearly within arm's reach of the silver door handle and able to catch a glimpse of the room beyond, all blurred in white. Tentatively he reached out and gently put his hand on the wet metal. He gave the door one careful push and it quietly swung wide open in one smooth motion, revealing what lay behind. Something seemed to have dropped to the floor, and it might have been Harry's jaw. His eyes went wide as they were directed downwards, and then slowly moved up over the sight they beheld.

There stood a young woman on white shining marble floor amidst translucent clouds of hot vapor, one bare leg slightly bent, the other straight. One hand rested lightly on her thigh, the other led a white towel over her long neck and the back of her head in slow, circular motions. Her perfectly smooth skin shimmered wetly, a thousand glinting drops of water reflecting the light from all around her while slowly giving in to gravity, running down her gentle surfaces and playing around the heavenly curves of her female form.

A single drop of water ran straight down from her neck, running its course like a dallying river in between the molds of her bare breasts, ever downwards to where her belly button lay in waiting to swallow it in rapture. Further below, one playful swathe of steam girdled her center, teasingly revealing no more than vague contours of what lay hidden beneath.

And up above, her head rested on her delicate shoulders, inclined to the side, letting the auburn waves of her long hair flow freely in the gentle currents of the steamy air, with single drops of water running their course along their lines and finally falling from the tips down onto the ground, where they vaporized in an instant with a soft, sizzling splash.

"Hermione?" he croaked in a thin voice, unable to close his mouth.

Only now taking note of him, she looked up at him, and the burning embers of her eyes reached right through him. He gulped.

"Hey, Harry," she greeted him in an unfamiliarly husky voice. "You are just a minute too late."

He blinked in incomprehension. It did not improve his presence of mind when she casually let her towel drop to the floor, swirling up the vapors encircling her.

"Well," she said, "Now that you have seen me, I believe it could only be considered fair if you were to repay me likewise."

When she went on to slowly, deliberately move towards him, with every elegant step on her slender feet rich with sensual undercurrents, Harry found himself in desperate need of another throat he could gulp with, for his own felt awfully dry and suffocating right now.

She came to a halt just an inch away from him, looking up at him with a look that made his legs feel like very long, unstable, silly things.

"What do you say," she softly said, enticingly circling over his chest with her index finger, "should we move this to the bedroom?"

Involuntarily his eyes flickered downwards, catching a glimpse of her shapely breasts that were less than an inch away from being pressed against his chest, and the sight of them made him feel very light-headed, to say the least. To his puzzlement, he noticed how there were no drops of water left on her fair skin.

"You're dry," he heard himself say like an idiot.

In response, he saw a smile playing around the corners of her mouth the likes of which he had never seen on her before. And then she gave him that look again. Standing on tiptoe she leaned further into him, and with her soft breasts brushing lightly against his chest and her lips right next to his ear – her breath tickling him most electrifyingly – she hoarsely whispered, "Not entirely."

"Hermione…" he couldn't help but rasp, succumbing to his arousal.

"Harry?" she asked, suddenly sounding strangely confused.

"Hermione?" he asked, now equally perplexed.

He opened his eyes, even though he couldn't exactly remember closing them. His vision was blurry and it seemed oddly dark around him, and not nearly as hot and humid as it had been a mere second earlier. He sat up. Wait, he had been lying? Why was that? Someone else sat up beside him, and that was strange too. He turned his head to look who it was and found a pair of dark eyes widened in blank horror staring right back at him, surrounded by a wild mane of long hair.

"HARRY?!" she practically screamed.

Within the most horrifying instant of realization, his eyes mirrored hers, and with a surprisingly strong bounce he leaped out of bed straight from his sitting position, yelling, "Bloody hell, bloody hell! I'm sorry!" more than once, noticing that, again, he had nothing but his boxers on him, trying to cover himself and then feeling silly for it, then realizing he had an entirely unwelcome condition down there and thus covering himself again, stepping on what turned out to be Crookshanks' tail, who jumped up with a violent hiss and made Harry jump in horror as well, and also yelling "Sorry!" yet again, and then making off towards the door with an apologetic look at Hermione, who sat dumbstruck in her bed with one side of her night gown hanging somewhat loosely from her shoulder, which – as Harry somehow found time to observe even while clumsily stumbling towards the exit after having bumped his foot against the much harder foot of the bed – made her look awfully adorable.

Finally having reached the door, he vehemently wrenched it open and was about to pretty much lunge outside when, instead, he managed to trip over his own, hurting foot and plunged straight to the ground, barely able to get his hands up in time to avoid landing right on his face. With the air roughly taken out of his lungs, he lay right on the threshold with his torso outside in the corridor and his legs still in the dorm room, remaining still for just a moment of respite.

"Harry?" he heard Hermione ask again, concern mixed into her undiminished confusion.

"I'm okay," he croaked."I'm just gonna go now, if it's alright."

He began to push himself up, a little at first. Then, when he was just about to bring himself back into a standing position with one last effort, he suddenly felt the most violent force pushing through his body from behind and underneath him. Before he had any time to even question what was happening, he felt himself being flung into the air with his legs suddenly above him and his torso following in a most involuntary somersault, that – sadly – was not entirely finished before he crashed into the wall on the opposite side of the hallway with his back. Upside down.

He fell hard to the ground with his shoulders, the impact sending one last cascade of pain through his body, finally leaving him with what was pretty much just an accumulation of pain everywhere. Without having much time to assess his inarguably subpar situation, he heard a familiar plop! to his left and, looking up from his twisted position, saw Professor McGonagall looking down at him with an expression that not even from his awkwardly inverted perspective could even remotely be considered amused.

"I swear," said Harry with all the innocence he could muster, "this never happened before."