Thresholds

He had long lost count of how often he had switched from one side to the other and back again, and he had lost any track of time as well. He could tell from experience that knowing the amount of time you had unsuccessfully tried to fall asleep would make it even harder to do so more often than not, knowing how much time you would have left to sleep if only you would manage to finally go to sleep right then, which rarely tended to work out that way. Instead, the earlier it got the faster morning seemed to approach, and when at some point the birds would begin to greet the world with chirpy indifference to you and your sleep-deprived misery and the first teasing light of day would come falling through the windows, you realized the futility of it all and either get up on the spot or, ironically enough, finally drift off to sleep thinking that now it didn't matter, for you wouldn't be able to get enough sleep before you had to wake up again anyway.

Giving in to his restlessness, Harry reached for the alarm clock on his bedside table and grumpily whispered 'Lumen!' to make the clock-face light up in vibrantly glowing blue. To his surprise it wasn't even half past one yet, so he had wasted his time for just about two hours and – as it was impossible not to think – he'd still have more than five hours left to sleep if only…

With a groan of frustration he roughly put the clock down again, its light fading as soon as it left his hands, and turned to lie on his back with his hands loosely entwined under his head. This was not like any other sleepless night. Normally he would at least be sure that he actually wanted to fall asleep, but not even that was a given tonight, for after all he couldn't be sure where he would end up waking. He wondered what exactly it was that had happened to him – twice – and if there could possibly be a way to control it. And, of course, why stuff like this always seemed to be happening to him.

Feeling the bracelet on his right wrist he also couldn't help but wonder what exactly it was monitoring or detecting about him, and if it was doing anything right now or if it would really only work while he was sleeping, which would mean that it hadn't done anything yet – except maybe wondering when the hell its bloody wearer would finally fall asleep so it could get to work.

After a rather uneventful sixth year Harry had dared to hope that maybe, just maybe, he would be able to finish school in a blissfully average kind of way, but there he was, barely into the third week of the term, and already teleporting into the beds of the female half of the pupils like some sleepwalking pervert with a wand. He couldn't remember reading anything about juvenile sexual predators in Hogwarts: A History, so he probably had a good chance of being mentioned therein as the first of his kind. His parents would be so proud.

Granted, this newfound predicament wasn't exactly in the same league as Basilisks, Dementors, ridiculously sadistic tournaments or the ongoing struggle against Voldemort and his cult following as far as potential mortality was concerned, but at least none of those were utterly and completely embarrassing in nature. Harry was used to deal with a lot of things, many of which were probably more than someone of his age should ever have to deal with, but this? This was just unfair. You could throw all the giant snakes, undead wraiths and power-crazed Dark Lords the world had to offer at him for all he cared, but throwing him into his best friend's bed was just plain mean.

He exhaled a long, deep breath through puffed up cheeks and thought of Hermione, hoping that she at least was able to find some rest. He hoped her tears had dried, and wondered what had caused them to fall in the first place. He wished he could have been there for her, protected her. Not that he thought of Hermione as someone in need of much protection. After all she knew more combat spells than any other current student of Hogwarts and was more adept at using them than most of them combined.

But there are things in life not even magic can protect you from, and more often than not those are the ones that hurt the most. And exactly those are the things he had such an inexplicably intense need to shield her from, as he somehow realized over and over again every time he saw her in any kind of pain. Few, if any things tugged as much at his heartstrings as Hermione's tears. It was an odd feeling.

And now she was suffering because of him, which was the worst of all possible versions of something that was, in its very essence, entirely bad to begin with. And all this stupid mess only because of a naughty dream he never had! Well, not never, as he suddenly recalled with an inconvenient succession of illicitly salacious images flashing past his mind's eye…

Oh, oh. That's not good. Don't think about that now. Don't think of the shower and the steam and the drops of water on her smooth skin and that leer she gave you and her whisper in your ear… you are doing it right now, you moron! Stop it! That's' your best friend you're picturing naked there! Stop, you loathsome piece of—

He shook himself, burying his face in his hands as if that would help keep his mind's eye shut. Where had that come from, anyway? It was all Ron's fault, obviously, with all that nonsense about dirty dreams. He had been a perfectly decent guy before all that, he was sure. For the most part, anyway. But now? Now he was having wanton dreams about his best female friend! It didn't get any more indecent than that. Oh, if she knew about any of this she would never want to talk to him again, and rightfully so. It was a good thing then that he was also waking up in her bed at night to give his inappropriate dreams some much needed context.

An exasperated groan escaped his lips, muffled by his hands he still kept his face buried in.

Oh, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have dirty dreams.

When Harry finally fell asleep not too long after that, he was already too tired to appreciate the irony of succumbing to the exhaustion of exactly that constant barrage of thoughts that had kept him awake the whole time.

<3<3<3<3<3

In his dream he wasn't alone, and though the night was cold he was not. In his dream he held his eyes shut, but he didn't have to see to know that he was not alone, for he felt it. He felt it in another's skin, lightly brushing against his own. He felt it in the warmth they shared and in the slightest fluctuations in the air, where his own breath softly mingled with another's. He felt it all around him, engulfing him like an invisible blanket, and he felt it deep within: the complete and unquestionable certainty that he was not alone in any sense of the word.

The dream faded away and he slowly opened his eyes, and he found that the dream had never been. A pair of dark, chocolate eyes were meeting his, surrounded by lovely features warmly aglow. He blinked once or twice to banish the blurry veil of sleep from his eyes. So small a distance lay between their faces that, being myopic, he could make out the finer lines of her face quite clearly. There had never been a face he knew better, remembered more easily and vividly than the one before him now.

"Hey," she greeted him, speaking softly.

"Hey yourself," he replied, a little unsurely.

For one silent moment they merely looked into each other's eyes, seeking one another's thoughts and not even finding their own.

"You aren't screaming," he observed, half in bemusement and half in jest.

"You aren't bouncing," she replied calmly.

A coy smile crept over his lips. "I won't bounce if you won't scream."

"I won't scream," she just said.

Another moment of silence passed between them.

"So, are you getting used to my nightly visits already?" he asked, more outspokenly than he had intended.

"Maybe," she answered. "But I've been awake for a while, so I had time to adjust."

"Really? What have you been doing?"

For the first time during their exchange, she averted her eyes for a mere second and shifted a little under her blanket, then looked up above them and said, "This."

He followed her gesture and looked up as well, noticing a single, small flame hovering in the air above their heads, friskily flickering away.

"Isn't that against some rule?" he asked, returning his eyes to hers.

"It's the perfect situation, then," she remarked, giving him a telling look.

"Right, yeah. About that," he said, somewhat flustered and very aware of their situation all of a sudden, "I should probably leave, right?"

Why did I just make that a question?

Hermione remained quiet, looking at him with an unreadable expression.

"I mean," Harry hastily went on, "McGonagall gave me this weird bracelet thingy here, that's supposed to monitor me in my sleep and should also have alerted her to my, uh, altered whereabouts by now."

"Oh," said Hermione. "Well, that's a good thing. But shouldn't she be here already?"

"She should, shouldn't she?" Harry concurred. "I mean, yesterday it was like I had barely finished my acrobatic routine and she was already there to judge me."

"And now she's not," she said very quietly.

"Now she's not," he echoed her.

He looked at her as if in search of something, and she looked right back.

"I guess I should… I should probably go," he said indecisively.

"Hm," made Hermione, which to Harry's great dismay could really have meant a whole lot of things, or nothing at all.

"Although… it might be risky, going out there," he said, scratching the back of his head. "I mean, Crookshanks is probably just lying in wait somewhere for a chance to make my life even more miserable. Again."

The shiest of smiles played around one corner of Hermione's lips as she said, "You don't have to go."

"I don't?" asked Harry, his relief too deep not to show at least a little. "Well, that's actually pretty convenient, since I was hoping to get a chance to finally talk to you."

"So you thought you'd just stop by in my bed for a chat?"

"Yeah, sure," he casually joined the jest, shrugging his shoulders as much as his horizontal position allowed. "I was in the area anyway, you know?"

"The area being the girls' dormitories?" Hermione dubiously asked, raising an eyebrow at him.

"Oh, stop it," said Harry in playful defiance. "It's not even half as funny as it sounds, and it doesn't even sound all that funny."

Despite it not being all that funny, they nevertheless shared a quiet ripple of laughter about it. It was a habit hard to shed to behave more quietly at night, even when behind enchanted curtains.

"So," Hermione began once they ended up looking at each other for a second too long again, "what did you want to talk to me about?"

"Oh, anything really," Harry replied. "I feel like we haven't talked in ages."

She gave him a quizzical look. "I believe I recall a rather pleasant exchange on Monday."

"Exactly," said he. "Ages."

She smiled in response and gently pinched his shoulder with her index finger.

"Seriously, though," he said, concern showing on his features. "How are you doing?"

"Right now I'm feeling quite alright," she answered sheepishly.

"Yeah, but I mean… in general. Like earlier in the common room."

She was running her fingers over the bed sheet, drawing random invisible lines and shapes on the fabric.

"It was silly, really," she said evasively.

He watched her intently. "It didn't look silly when you wept."

"Silly tears," she insisted stubbornly and Harry couldn't help but smile in spite of himself.

He resisted the urge to say something else and instead chose to quietly, patiently wait for her at that point. Eventually she spoke.

"After I left Hagrid's place I went to the library to do some studying, which truth be told ended up as reading Wuthering Heights," she began to explain, and to Harry's amusement looked positively ashamed at that. "I just wanted to relax a little, I guess. It hadn't exactly been the best day up to that point, as you can imagine. So, nerdy bookworm that I am, I sought refuge in my usual corner in the library. And for a while it was nice enough, taking my mind off of all the things that were going on yesterday.

"But," she said with a sigh, clearly uncomfortable with herself, "eventually I became aware of a… conversation, taking place in the aisle behind me. Multiple voices, hard to discern. A few seemed familiar."

Harry didn't like where this was going, but he could see she wasn't done yet, so he remained silent.

"They talked about… well, what everybody seemed to be so eager to talk about yesterday. Some pretty disturbing, even mean and insulting things had come to my ear over the course of the day, some of which could hardly be put into any kind of justified context, but… nothing like that. The things those people said about… about you and… me, mostly me, were just… utterly vile and repulsive. I feel really silly for it, but it was just too much at that point.

"Under different circumstances I might even have been able to ignore it, you know? Because who cares what Pansy Parkinson and her daft fellowship think? There isn't exactly a lot of data to analyze there, anyway. But with everything that was going on it just… it got to me. I couldn't help it. It hurt. It made me angry. Really, really angry. They were defiling what is most precious to me in the most obscene, crudest way possible. And I really despised them for it."

She fell silent for a moment, the echo of her words reverberating in Harry's heart.

"I just had to get out of there," she then said, her voice strained. "So I did. Straight back to our common room, seeking the last refuge that was left to me, where I could just close the curtains and shut the world out for a while. Apart from those people who insist on teleporting right into my refuge, of course."

Harry gave her a sheepish smile. "Sorry about that," he meekly said, and he was glad to see her smile in return.

"It's okay," she assured him warmly, then took a deep breath to gather herself. "Well, to sum it all up, I told you it was silly."

Harry sighed and gave her a telling look. "It's not, and you know it," he said emphatically. "If I had been there I would have felt the same, I'm sure. Only my temper would probably have gone through the roof."

"Mr. Filch has a hard enough time keeping up with all the holes in the roof your temper has left all over the castle as it is," Hermione quipped. "So it's a good thing you weren't there."

The smile that flashed over his lips was quickly gone.

"I would've wanted to, though," he said in dead earnest.

"I know," she whispered.

She continued to move her fingers over the soft sheets, following the motion with pensive eyes.

"It's a curious thing, isn't it?" she seemingly mused aloud. "When we were sitting in those boats on the day of our arrival, floating on the dark, calm water of the lake and looking up at the castle with the night sky above alit with a billion stars, eyes round with childish wonder, I felt like I was stepping into a fairy tale come true. I felt like Alice and like Dorothy, swept up by an unexpected storm and thrown right into the Rabbit Hole.

"And somehow I was naïve enough to believe that everything would be perfect from there on, that people would suddenly be different. I couldn't imagine that any child lucky enough to possess magical talents could be cruel in any way. Except maybe for Slytherins. I actually remember thinking how nice a school it was to have a house specifically made for the rude and vicious. But other than that I thought I would finally find friends outside of my books and poetry. People who would like me just as much as I liked them.

"Having to learn that literally everywhere where there are people there are ignorance and intolerance, spite and malice, was the most disappointing lesson I ever received. It doesn't matter if they run around in robes or jeans, carry Game Boys or wands. As long as they have tongues to speak with they are going to hurt you, and you are going to hurt them back. Within a matter of days I felt as much out of place as I had in primary school, barely able to take solace in the ridiculous excitement of learning actual magic."

As he felt his heart going out to her, Harry had a hard time keeping his vision from blurring up and, childish as it made him feel at the same time, he hoped Hermione didn't notice. If she did, she didn't let it show.

"Have I ever told you about the letter?" she asked, and when Harry curiously furled his eyebrows went on to say, "I wrote my parents a letter after about four or five weeks, asking them to take me out of Hogwarts and bring me back home, maybe get me one of those private teachers I had heard about once."

She smiled sadly, remembering her younger self writing that letter, fiercely crying tears of hurt and disappointment all throughout.

"I never sent it," she revealed, the sadness vanishing from her lopsided smile, which instead went forth to slowly conquer the opposite corner of her lips as well. "Because I didn't want to give up what still seemed to me like the greatest thing that ever happened to me. Because I didn't want to give others so much power over me and my life. But most of all because Halloween happened a few weeks later."

She gave him the warmest smile, her eyes glinting with joy, and he smiled likewise back at her.

"When I received my invitation to Hogwarts, my life changed merely on the outside," she told him. "Only when you and Ron saved me from the mountain troll that night did my life change on the inside. And I guess I'm telling you all of this because I want you to know that I haven't felt alone since then. In a way it doesn't even matter if you are physically there or not, because I know that you are… just there, you know? That you'll always be there. Both of you, really. I have ridiculous amounts of confidence about that, which isn't exactly typical for me. And, uh, just for the record, I do prefer it if you are actually, physically around as well. Somewhere. In a… in a general sense, I mean…"

She cleared her throat and averted her eyes, looking just a little flustered about where her words had unexpectedly taken her.

"I feel the same," said Harry, his voice imbued with sincerity.

She sheepishly looked back up at him. "You do? Well, that's… that's good. I'm going to be less embarrassed about it, then."

"You do that," he said amusedly.

For a while they didn't speak at all. She continued to draw shapeless pictures with her fingers on the sheets, and eventually Harry joined her, their fingers never touching, yet never far away from it.

"Aren't you cold?" Hermione eventually broke the silence.

Then, and only then, did Harry suddenly realize that not only was he lying in Hermione's bed, but that also no more than his usual pair of boxers were what stood between him and being completely starkers. In Hermione's bed. With both of them being very awake for a change.

"Nah," he answered as casually as he could, and not solely due to the sudden rise in his body temperature did he not lie. "I'm fine. I'm still expecting the whole bed to burn down eventually, anyway."

"Right," said Hermione, glancing up at her floating candle light that lacked the actual candle. "If I didn't know any better I would have to suspect that you don't have complete faith in my magical abilities."

"Now that couldn't be further from the truth," Harry insisted emphatically. "It's more physics I'm worried about right now."

She perked up both her eyebrows at him in incredulity.

"You have a cloak that makes you invisible, you fly around on a broomstick and you teleport around while sleeping, but now that you have a tiny, floating flame above your head you start worrying about physics?"

Harry made a face at her, pretending to be affronted. "Whatever."

Then, after a few seconds of their smiles slowly fading into calm expressions of contentment, Harry gave off a deep sigh.

"I'm sorry, you know?" he said to her.

Her eyes caringly wandered over his saddened features.

"Don't you think we've been sorry enough today for a long time to come?" she asked him sympathetically. "I believe at one point you even apologized for dropping your own piece of parchment."

Harry had to chuckle, remembering the scene most vividly. "Yeah, during Charms. I was actually making an annoyed face at myself while leaning down to pick it up."

She quietly echoed his chuckle, while her finger seemed to be trapped in a continuing, half-circling motion around Harry's finger tip that he kept still.

"I mean it, though," he said, serious again. "Not about the parchments and accidentally touching your hand when trying to turn a page or brutally scarring stuff like that, but… about getting you into this whole mess. I seem to have a real knack for it, and I'm really sorry about that."

Her finger stopped, lightly brushing against his. She looked at him with deepest understanding, and maybe something else that was not quite yet in Harry's reach to grasp.

"I know," she whispered. "But there is nothing to be sorry about. You weren't the one who hurt me. You rarely are, and you always seem to know. We're in this together, you and me. Eventually the whole thing will blow over, they'll find something else to gossip about and we'll remain who we are. Well, actually they'll always come back to talking about you, because let's face it, you're Harry Potter. But at least I'll be off the hook."

He frowned at her and tapped his fingers on the sheet as she giggled away, pulling her pillow up to cover her mouth.

"Yeah, yeah," he said, shaking his head even while the widest smile broke his playful frown. "You enjoy your little moment there, missy. But at some point you'll have to face the fact that you're never off the hook, because where they talk about Harry Potter, they'll also have to talk about Hermione Granger, 'cause she's never too far off."

"Oh?" she said, feigning surprise. "Is that so?"

"Well," Harry began in a very important, businesslike manner, "multiple reliable sources that prefer to remain anonymous are in agreement, stating that… she apparently digs the bloke."

She laughed. "And who might those anonymous sources be, I wonder."

"Well," said Harry, taking his time to think about that very thoroughly, then meekly said, "Me?"

She practically beamed at him, and blushing ever so slightly said, "Your sources might be on to something there."

They shared a light-hearted laugh that ended with both of them yawning, and then laughing some more about their synchronized yawning.

"Merlin, McGonagall is really overdue, isn't she?" Harry asked, only now remembering his bracelet and all that. "What time is it?"

Hermione lazily grabbed her wand from somewhere behind her pillow, flicked it over her head once and made a wispy, bodiless clock face appear above their heads that seemed to be made of gently swirling, bluely glowing smoke. Digital, no less.

It read 03:17.

"Huh", said Harry, a bit puzzled. "I'm beginning to doubt anyone's going to show up at all. And I'm also beginning to doubt this."

He raised his right arm and they both looked at the unremarkable bracelet wrapped tightly around his wrist.

"You want to clumsily stumble over the threshold and then move backwards while you are still halfway in the dorm room, so that you get flung against the wall again?" Hermione asked him flippantly. "You'd be sure to get Professor McGonagall's attention then, I reckon."

"Uh-huh," made Harry, putting his arm back down again. "No thanks. I'm fine right here."

"I see," she said, unable or unwilling to ignore the wider connotations of his statement. "You're probably too tired for the long and arduous journey back to your own bed as well."

"Definitely," Harry agreed enthusiastically, yawing again for good measure.

Their eyes locked once more, shyly and yet unabashedly, unmasked and yet still veiled.

"Do you maybe want to get some sleep?" Hermione asked tentatively.

Harry looked around, nodding slowly. "Sleep sounds nice."

She gave him a smile, looking rather tired herself by now. "You think you're going to wake up back in your bed?"

He thought about that for a moment. "I don't know. We'll just have to see about that, won't we? That way we'll at least have something new to tell McGonagall."

"Right," Hermione agreed, her eyes falling shut from time to time. "It's all in the name of science."

"Exactly," he concurred, letting his own eyelids fall and yet always fighting them up again to catch one last glimpse of Hermione.

"Lemme just…" she whispered weakly, grabbing her wand again. Harry was barely able to keep his eyes open to witness the laziest, most uncoordinated wand motion he had ever seen Hermione conduct, as she downright randomly wiped it through the air once and then let it slide from her hand when she plopped her arm back down onto the sheets in one fluent, awkward arch.

He was impressed to see that even this most pitiful of efforts was enough to achieve the desired results, for both flame and clock quickly faded into the air after that, as if blown away by some soundless gush of wind. With his eyes unadjusted to the sudden dark, it seemed nearly pitch black around him.

"Harry?" he heard Hermione ask with the softest voice.

"Yes?"

"Have you ever woken up anywhere else after that thing happened? Besides here, I mean."

For some reason the question made him smile. "No," he answered quietly.

"Huh," she breathed, somewhere near the edge of sleep by now. "That's interesting."

"It sure is," Harry agreed, no less exhausted.

No more was spoken after that, and as they slowly slipped away to sleep, their hands – at first lying a few inches apart from one another – slowly but surely, bit by bit, closed the distance between them until they finally, tenderly entwined in the very moment both Harry and Hermione were awake no more.

<3<3<3<3<3

When Harry awoke on the following morning, which, of course, was barely four hours later, he needed a moment to get his bearings, because something was really off. That he seemed to have his arms wrapped around something wasn't even the strangest of things. Far more peculiar than that was the fact that whatever he had his arms wrapped around, that very something also seemed to have its arms wrapped around him, and maybe even a leg or two. Neither pillow nor blanket, nor any combination thereof, had ever made him feel either this hopelessly tangled up, or – as he was bemused to discover – comfortable. He certainly had never felt a pillow's breath against his chest. Not even at Hogwarts, where they had pillows that huffed and puffed whenever you hugged them too tightly, was that a common phenomenon.

Oh, and that scent! The smell that so endearingly filled his nose with every breath he took was more soothing and appealing than any smell he had ever woken up to. With his eyes still closed and the most satisfied grin on his face he inclined his head ever so slightly to bury his nose in what was evidently the soft, wavy source of that blissful smell. He took one very deliberate, long and deep breath to really take in the whole spectrum of the fragrance and—

"Harry?" he heard a slightly muffled and unquestionably female voice ask him, and it seemed to be talking to his chest. "Are you awake?"

His eyes flew wide open as his consciousness finally switched to full awareness. Although no one was there to see it, Harry had an expression on his face like a kid that was just caught with his hands in the cookie jar. Oh, what he would have given to actually switch places with that kid right now, confusing as the resulting scenes might have been.

"Would you believe me if I were to say no?" he asked, poised in utter petrifaction.

Silence.

"I could try," Hermione answered, sounding quite unsure. The way she said that would probably have made Harry laugh in any other situation, but given their rather precarious entanglement he wasn't exactly in the mood just yet.

With a careful peek downwards he realized that while his left arm apparently served as a pillow for Hermione, his right hand had inexplicably come to rest on her hip. Her hip, not the blanket on her hip, because that had somehow ended up a little farther below. With her night gown not exactly being in its most orderly appearance either, his hand lay pretty much on nothing but her bare skin. Of her hip. He had a hard time forcing his eyes away from the curvature that followed just behind what is usually referred to as a hip as well.

Fearing an imminent attack of sweating, Harry cleared his throat. "So, uh, what would you say if we were to agree that we are both equally embarrassed by this, so that consequently neither of us would have to feel embarrassed at all?"

Again silence, in what seemed to be a moment of contemplation for everybody involved.

"Deal," came her answer.

For another awkward moment both of them remained unmoving. In a downright ridiculous notion Harry's right hand felt so heavy to him that he was sure for a second Hermione would have to be hurting under his touch. He was trying so hard not to move that hand so as not to draw any unnecessary attention to it that he could feel it shaking.

"So," he said, trying his best to sound nonchalant. "I guess I'll be heading off, then."

"Listen, Harry," Hermione said.

"Yes?"

"No, listen."

Harry needed a second to take her meaning, then raised his head ever so slightly and listened intently. Sure enough, there were busy shuffling sounds, footsteps and even a sporadic voice or two.

"Damn," Harry breathed.

"Exactly," Hermione agreed.

He sighed. They should have seen this coming. Then again, who could have seen any of this coming?

"Say, those things you said last night, about people talking about us and all the rumors and stuff, and more to the point, us not having to care about any of that, because we're better than that – did you mean it? Do you stand by it?"

Without even thinking Hermione answered, "Of course."

"Let them talk?"

"Let them talk."

"Then how about we give them something more to talk about?" he asked her.

She shifted slightly, leaning back a little to look up at him. He tried very hard to ignore the utterly undeniable fact that she looked absolutely endearing when woken up next to.

"Like what?" she asked, minor apprehension in the tone of her voice.

He smiled a surprisingly mischievous, lopsided smile.

"Get ready to see the next James Bond in action," he said with a daring glint in his eyes.

And before she could even begin to make sense of that statement, he had already disentangled himself from her and rolled over to his other side. When he was just about to draw aside the curtains, he turned around once more, and giving her a quick peck on the cheek said, "See you later," and only then went on to jump out of bed, with Hermione quickly leaning over to peek out through the curtains behind him.

Standing on his feet Harry was instantly aware of the abruptly changed atmosphere in the room. Mainly how time seemed to have stopped all around him. Parvati Patil stood nearly right in front of him with her pants halfway up to where they were supposed to go, looking at him with a horrified expression frozen on her features. Further away, near an opened wardrobe, stood Lavender Brown and Fay Dunbar. The former was frozen with her arms in mid-air, a shirt dangling loosely between them; the latter was at least fully clothed, bar one sock, but certainly no less petrified.

Harry inclined his head in a courteous gesture, tipping a regrettably imaginary top hat.

"Ladies," he said, and with that crossed the room most jauntily and left through the open door, very careful to do so in one fluent motion.

Three flabbergasted pairs of eyes, round as circles, turned to stare at Hermione, who seemed flustered by the sudden attention for no more than a second and quickly put on an expression of someone who by appearances couldn't possibly care less.

"Pffft," she snorted, languidly rolling her eyes. "He's such a poser sometimes."