Thresholds

Ron couldn't complain. As far as he was concerned, this had been a perfectly fine week. Classes had been okay for the most part and there was now only one more left before another weekend was safely reached. Even his homework for History, which Hermione had so adamantly refused to let him copy, had turned out to be quite alright, which was all the more surprising to him considering he had already forgotten most of what he had written. He had made tangible progress with his Quidditch practice and felt that he was back on track to being Gryffindor's number one Keeper, putting McLaggen – the only set of teeth that could be seen from outer space – back where he belonged. With only two more hours of Charms ahead and a nice party in sight to kick off the weekend, Ron was sitting down in his usual seat in the Great Hall in anticipation of a good lunch feeling altogether breezy.

Poor Ron.

With a healthy and much yearned for bite of Yorkshire pudding halfway on its way to its destination, Ron froze with his mouth hanging open when someone slumped down next to him and said something that sounded like the most depressingly drawn-out hybrid between Hi and Hey. With a longing look at his pudding and a wistful sigh, Ron dropped it back onto his plate and turned to face the pitiful figure that was his brown-haired friend.

"I would ask what's wrong," he told her, "but I'm not sure I want to."

"Don't," Hermione advised him. "For both our sakes, don't."

"That good?" he asked with a toothy grin. "You got me curious."

"Great," she scoffed. "Exactly what I wanted. Seriously, Ron. Let's just not talk about it."

"Just to make sure I know what I am not supposed to mention, you mean how you teleported into Harry's bed this time, right?"

Hermione swirled around with a shocked expression. "How do you know about that?" she asked him sharply, her ire quick to rise when she saw his barely concealed mirth.

"I think the source can be traced back to the kitchens this time," Ron explained, having a hard time keeping his lips in something that at least resembled a straight line, but trying very hard since he actually planned on surviving lunch. "So my guess is, Dobby told Winky and then five seconds later the rest of the school knew."

Hermione sighed exasperatedly. "This place is a joke," she grumbled through gritted teeth, angrily glancing around the hall. "They might as well install security cameras all over the place."

Ron observed her quietly for a moment, then he suddenly stretched his arms into the air and loudly and solemnly – in a voice that sounded more like a classic Santa Claus – exclaimed, "Happy birthday!"

Hermione rolled her eyes at him in annoyance, even though at least one twitching corner of her lips betrayed her just a little.

"Your present better be good this year," she told him in a mock warning.

"I had to settle for second best," he casually said. "But this is still me we are talking about, so don't you worry."

"Right," she replied in a drawn-out fashion. "I have a very special box in my attic back home for my collection of Ron's marvelous gifts."

"Hey, I have feelings too, you know?" he complained, pouting with some exaggeration.

Just in that moment his stomach growled rather loudly and Hermione perked an eyebrow at him.

"And you sure know how to express them."

Then, as – much to Ron's puzzlement – Hermione's demeanor changed visibly all of a sudden and she turned to look at her empty plate instead, he felt and heard someone slump down on his other side. Of course he knew who it was even before looking at him. When he turned and was just about to clap his black-haired friend on the back in a well-meant greeting, his hand froze in midair when he noticed Harry's most apparent disposition. Pressing his lips together, Ron dropped his hand and simply looked at him, waiting for something like a sign of life for a few seconds. When nothing of the kind came, he spoke up himself instead.

"So we are all in a good mood today," he tried. "Why didn't you guys tell me? I would've worn all black."

"You don't own enough black to wear all black," Harry replied flatly. "You say it makes you look pale."

"It just doesn't bring out the best in me," Ron mumbled defensively.

After that everyone fell quiet and Ron looked back and forth between his two friends a few times, wondering when last he had actually sat between them like this. Usually it was him on one side and Hermione on the other with Harry in between, sometimes Harry and Ron flanking Hermione. It had been that way for what seemed to be the entire stretch Ron's memory was able to put together, which frankly might not have meant all that much. But still, this was more than a little odd and it made him feel a whole lot less comfortable than he had intended to feel today.

"Seriously!" he ended up blurting out when he couldn't take the silence any longer, which took about three seconds. "What happened to the two of you? I know this is our special crazy week and I can't tell you how much I've been enjoying it, but this is just plain weird."

"We're really sorry this is all so very awkward for you," Harry said with more sarcasm in his voice than Ron had food on his plate.

"Hey, don't give me that passive-aggressive attitude. How can you expect me to handle a situation I know nothing about? At least give me something to work with here."

"That's actually a surprisingly good point," Hermione feebly mumbled without taking her eyes off her food.

"You might not have heard that, since you are sitting half a mile apart," Ron said to Harry while pointing into Hermione's general direction with his thumb, "but Hermione just said that I made a good point. So, since this is apparently a Friday of first times, you might as well tell me what's going on for once."

"It was just a whole lot of information to swallow, okay?" Harry snapped ill-temperedly. "We had the great pleasure of witnessing our thoughts and feelings being put under the microscope and then we had a nice chat about it with Snape and the rest of the band. Even Dumbledore joined the fun at some point. It was perfectly hilarious, Ron. It's just too bad you missed it, but I guess everyone already knows about it anyway. What is it with this bloody castle? It's an Orwellian nightmare come true."

The look Harry gave some of those around them who once more eyed him with an excessive amount of gleeful nosiness was by itself enough to make them quickly turn away again.

"But I thought you wanted to know what all of this teleportation stuff was about, too," Ron wondered, handling Harry's temper with his usual disregard, a tactic battle-tested over many years.

"Yeah, well," Harry grumbled, his ire taking a more subdued shape already, "maybe I didn't want to know quite that much."

Ron threw a quick glance to his other side to see how Hermione was faring, and he was tempted to try and spot the ten differences about her since last he had looked at her. It would have been hard enough to find two.

"So, uh," he said, looking at no one in particular, "Dumbledore was there too, you say?"

From the corner of his eye Ron saw that Harry merely shrugged his shoulders in response.

"And what did he do?" Ron asked. "Did he help?"

"He asked a favor of us."

Ron thought about what to make of that unexpected information for a moment. He didn't know what to make of it.

"A favor?"

With an unnerved sigh Harry tossed his strikingly unused napkin onto the table and looked anywhere but at Ron.

"He asked us to… communicate," he then told him, emphasizing the last word in a mocking, almost disdainful manner and shaking his head.

Ron's eyebrows went up at that and he looked at Harry with that exact expression frozen on his features for a moment before slowly turning his head to Hermione on his right side, his expression unchanged. Without her taking any perceivable notice of him he watched her for a few seconds as she absentmindedly picked around in her food with a fork, blinked, and then again slowly turned back to Harry on his left side, who vacantly stared into space.

"So how's that going for ya?" he asked them cheerfully, still unable to get his eyebrows back to where they normally belonged.

Harry winced a little as if woken from a daydream and began to stand up in irritation.

"Yeah, anyway," he said. "I'm not really hungry. See you later."

And then he just strode off with conspicuously quick steps. Even while Ron was still processing that puzzling event, a shuffling on his other side demanded his attention.

"I have to be somewhere," Hermione said, already beginning to walk away – slow enough, as Ron suspected, to not catch up with Harry. "Bye, Ron."

Two questions were most prevalent on Ron's mind in that moment, the first one being if his eyebrows would ever be able to settle back into moderate heights again and the second one being if either of the two even realized that all three of them shared the same afternoon schedule. Somehow he could already imagine the new seating order that awaited him in Professor Flitwick's classroom. Charms really promised to be a blast today.

Getting back to his food, Ron – to his increasing frustration – found himself unable to really enjoy it in any appropriate way and instead felt a plan taking shape in his head, bit by bit during bite after bite.

Sometimes a Weasley's just gotta do what a Weasley's gotta do.

<3<3<3<3<3

The sky was clearing up that afternoon, no more than a few flimsy clouds swiftly drifting about on early autumn winds with the sun once more bathing the castle and its peaceful surroundings in its rays of light, warming mostly by appearance rather than actual temperature.

Hermione had therefore chosen to put on a thick black coat before going outside, and standing on Hogwarts' long main bridge that connected the cliffs the castle was perched upon with the hills that led down into Hogsmeade, she was glad she had done so. For all the unhindered sunrays that tinged the scenery in golden light, the wind had quite a cooling quality about it, and cursing her genetically thinner female skin Hermione stood waiting with her hands buried deep in the pockets of her coat. Why of all places had he insisted on meeting her here? Then again, at least she had the inspiring view to take in.

Looking out over the valley under the bridge that gently opened up to where the lake lay neatly nestled in between the highlands, she gave an involuntary sigh. While she certainly wasn't someone who saw her own birthday as a significant event and she had a hard time grasping why people tended to make such a fuss about an arbitrary date on the calendar, she wasn't above feeling some extra self-pity for so far having a remarkably depressing eighteenth birthday either. Memorable, indeed. She would have a hard time forgetting the utter mess the week leading up to this day had been. And so far it actually seemed set to become the pitiful low point of it all. Dumbledore would surely have a lot to congratulate her for come tomorrow.

She didn't know how many minutes had passed when she noticed something out of the corner of her eye and turned to her side to see more clearly what it was. It was a person, slowly approaching her and still a few dozen steps away, and with every step he took she grew increasingly certain that he was not the one she had been led to expect, her own suspicions put aside. The hair alone was finally enough to put all doubt to rest, even before facial features became clearer. And then, when he was just a few meters away from her, he made a shrugging, half-apologetic gesture at her.

"You are not Ron," she greeted him with a keen observation, to which he responded with a tentative, lopsided smile.

"And neither are you," he said, positioning himself next to her and mirroring her in leaning onto the parapet, their elbows not quite touching.

"That scheming bastard," Hermione issued a rare expletive, shaking her head in disbelief.

Harry's smile widened. One indeed didn't hear her swear so openly very often. Only last week she had admonished a boy from first year, telling him that bastard wasn't a proper form of address. Well, the addressee was not currently present, so perhaps the rule didn't strictly apply here.

"Did you suspect anything?" he asked her.

She gave a snort. "When he told me he wanted to show me something on the bridge?" she replied sarcastically. "I didn't know if I should call the police or just panic and run away screaming. What did he tell you?"

"Just that he wanted to talk to me in private. Very casually. On this very casual bridge, apparently. So, yeah… I had a whole speech prepared, telling him that I just don't feel that way about him."

"I would've really liked to hear that one," Hermione humorously remarked.

"Well," said he, "it wasn't meant for your ears."

A silence ensued that had more than one quality about it, though a latent awkwardness certainly was or soon became part of it. And as awkwardness is wont to do, especially the silent kind, it increased with every passing second until both of them were unable to concentrate on the view any longer – inspiring as it was – and instead spent all their energy on trying to decide what to say next.

"So I guess—"

"Since we are—"

They shared a quiet, bashful laugh at that and before any kind of awkward silence could mosey right back between them, Harry was quick to ask her, "You were saying?"

"Just that… I mean, now that we're both here, anyway…"

"We might as well talk?"

She gave him a timid smile. "I suppose we would make a surprising number of people oddly happy if we did."

"Yeah, I've been noticing that trend as well," Harry commented. "We might have been nudged into that general direction by some. Although nudged is probably putting it mildly…"

"More like pushed and shoved," Hermione agreed, nodding her head. "And tricked into by our unexpectedly devious friend, to top it all off."

With a fading smile Harry let his eyes wander over the calm waters of the lake for a moment, glistening in the waning sunlight. He could see the docks of Hogsmeade on the western shore.

"It's not usually something we need any help with, though," he then pensively said. "Is it?"

"No," Hermione replied, equally thoughtful. "I don't think it ever was. But in our defense, this hasn't exactly been a usual week for us."

"Can't argue with that," Harry concurred in a low mumble.

Hermione hesitated for a moment. "So, what do you think?" she then asked him. "I mean, about all of it. About whatever happened over the last few days."

"Well," he said, "we had a perfectly normal Sunday and then I took center stage and messed everything up, I guess. It may have escaped you up to now, but I have a real knack for doing that."

She regarded him with a caring smile even while shaking her head at his unnecessary, but so familiar self-deprecation. He knew her general opinion about that, so she didn't even have to comment on it. Instead she turned her head again to look anywhere but at him, and her smile quickly vanished from her lips.

"D'you think… I mean, would you say that…" she began, then broke off and sighed in frustration over her own lack of eloquence when, as it seemed to her, it counted the most. As a last resort she finally just blurted out, "Has anything changed between us?"

Harry regarded her with an amused expression. "You mean apart from us teleporting into each other's beds and spending the nights together?"

She rolled her eyes, blushing ever so slightly. "Apart from that small detail, yes. Though not necessarily disconnected from it."

His jocular mood dwindled, leaving him thoughtful in the passing seconds leading up to his next words.

"I obviously can't speak for the both of us," he said, slowly and carefully, "but as far as I'm concerned… I suppose you could say something seems to have changed."

"Like what?"

"Like this right here? We've never had to talk about… well, about us this way. About where we stand or what's going on or whatever. To me that's a pretty clear sign that something has changed."

"And what exactly is that something?" she probed further.

Harry merely gave a shrug, yet no sign of any other kind of answer. Hermione didn't know what pushed her to be so outspoken, but after a few seconds she heard herself ask, "Do you… do you see me differently than you used to, in any way?"

"No," he answered promptly, and since he didn't look at her he couldn't see how taken aback and uncertain she looked at that, until after a pause during which she could only hear her own heartbeat drumming inside her ears he added, "At least I don't think so. What has changed, it seems to me, is the way I consciously think about it. About you."

"How do you mean?"

"Damn," he breathed. "I should've started asking the questions. Now I'm stuck being the one who has to answer them all."

"Sorry," she meekly said, smiling sheepishly back at him. "I'm sneaky like that."

"That's alright," he assured her on an exhalation, then appeared to sort out his thoughts for a moment longer. "What I mean is… if there has been any change, I don't think it's a recent thing. It's not like I suddenly, from one moment to the next, looked at you differently. It's more of a gradual process, right? It feels more like I finally became aware of how I've been looking at you for quite a while now, you know? I mean, I've practically always thought that you are pretty, for example—"

"You have?" she asked, her eyebrows raised in genuine surprise, the color on her cheeks maybe not solely caused by wind and weather.

"Of course," he unperturbedly affirmed. "And let me say two things about that: firstly, that I remember becoming aware of that for the first time during third year, when we used the Time-Turner together and you put it over my neck for the first time, so we had to stand really close together. That was my personal 'Damn, my best friend is hot!' epiphany."

"S-seriously?" she asked, thoroughly bewildered and entirely unable to keep all that bewilderment from being written so plainly on her face. "I… I had no idea."

"I didn't make a big deal out of it," he told her. "It's a normal thing, right? With us entering a certain age back then and everything."

Hermione needed a few seconds to try to wrap her head around that revelation, but when she found herself incapable of doing that to any satisfying degree she opted to pick up something else. "And secondly?"

"Well, uh," he answered reluctantly, then softly cleared his throat. "Secondly, you obviously still bowled me over and knocked the straight air out of my lungs when you appeared at the top of the stairs in that blue dress of yours at the Yule Ball back in fourth year. So, to stick to the established terminology, that was probably my 'Holy crap, my best friend is gorgeous!' epiphany."

"B-but…" Hermione began, then stumbled over her own thoughts, positively at a complete loss. "But you had a crush on Cho Chang back then?!"

"Yes," Harry concurred naturally, nodding his head. "I most definitely had. And that's really part of what I'm trying to say."

"It is?"

"I just never really thought about it, you see?" he began to explain. "About me being a boy and you being a girl and me finding you attractive. About the, uh, potential implications of that, and the possibility of anything that might arise from those. I perceived it without reflection, in a way. It just was, and I didn't get it. I mean, we already knew each other so well when our hormones really said hello for the first time. You already had such a special place in my life. One I wouldn't even know how to fill with anyone but you. It would be impossible to even try, because it's not just that you are filling that place, you are that place. It seemed to be set in stone somehow, like that's how it was supposed to be. Those were our roles in each other's lives. And anything else? Any kind of possible change? I never let it in, never opened that door."

He fell silent for a moment and left Hermione wishing that he would keep talking, for she found herself utterly unable to speak at all. And then he did.

"And that's what has changed," he said, turning his head to look at her even while she forcefully kept her gaze straight ahead, intensely aware of his eyes on her. "I opened that door, Hermione."

She could feel her heart skipping a beat or two, and her lungs felt strangely small all of a sudden. With her head feeling disturbingly hot and dizzy she tried to catch at least one of the million thoughts that raced through her mind in that moment, but found herself agonizingly incapable of catching up to them.

"I didn't even mean to," Harry then added, speaking very softly. "It just happened."

Then he paused again, probably waiting for a response from her. Anything. But her tongue felt like a knot, her brain like a mess and her heart like a double bass drum of a heavy metal band, and no matter how much she wanted to do anything but remain silent, she ended up doing exactly that.

"What about you?" he finally dared to inquire when nothing came from her.

"Me?" she blurted out, her brain now officially working against her tongue – or maybe the other way around. "I… I don't know about me."

If someone would have chosen this moment to present her with the award for saying the stupidest thing in the stupidest moment, she could not have blamed them. She would have thanked her parents, who had never prepared her for anything like this. What was going on? She wasn't usually like this at all!

"What about your door?" he asked. "Is it open… or closed?"

She exhaled a jittery breath, her lips trembling. "I… I don't know," she heard herself stammer, although she wasn't sure she was actually speaking the words because there was so much noise in her head, like London traffic during rush hour with all the honking cars being the equivalent to her innumerable conflicting thoughts. She threw him a quick glance and saw him avert his eyes abashedly, and felt the immediate need to quickly add, "I'm sorry! I just feel a little overwhelmed right now over here. I guess none of this should even come as a surprise anymore, after everything that has happened this week and all those things we heard just this morning, but… patterns, charts and waveforms are one thing. Hearing you talk about this so openly is quite another."

"I'm sorry," he echoed her, his voice subdued. "I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable."

"Don't apologize," she told him gently. "You know I appreciate your honesty and openness, and that's exactly what we have always been about, but this is… this is new. And it's strange and complicated. And… and hard to make sense of. And also a little scary, to tell you the truth."

"That doesn't sound too good," Harry said with a pained smile.

"I'm sorry," she reiterated helplessly, feeling her heart go out to him even while she found herself unable to let it reach him yet without restraint. "For once I just don't know what to say or do, but only because this is so important. I don't want to say or do the wrong thing, but I realize that I may be doing exactly that right now. I just – I… I don't know. I just don't know."

"You don't know what?" he asked her calmly. "How you feel about me?"

"Harry…"

"It's a simple question."

"It's simple to ask," she said, "but much harder to answer."

"So you are not attracted to me that way," he flatly stated.

"Were you there this morning when Professor Flitwick explained our libidinous energies to us?" Hermione asked him, giving him an incredulous look.

"Well, it wasn't entirely clear that he was talking about mutually… libidinous… stuff," Harry mumbled.

"I believe my subconscious would tend to disagree with that."

"What do you—" he began to ask in puzzlement, then his expression changed to one of comprehension within an instant. "Wait! Whoa, whoa, whoa — wait! Are you saying—"

"I'm just trying to tell you that you are being unreasonable," Hermione cut him off, just a little too hastily to appear as casual as she had hoped she would.

Harry watched her intently for a moment, his eyes narrowed in suspicion, and then he slowly asked, "Did you by any chance have a specific kind of dream about me?"

Hermione blatantly avoided looking at him and tried very hard to will her cheeks to retain their natural color, although after this week she was no longer sure just what exactly their natural color actually was. And normally, she had always insisted, she was not the typical ever-blushing cutesy girl; a self-proclaimed reputation that severely found itself in jeopardy these days.

After considering a whole lot of things she could possibly choose from a selection of very sophisticated and most dignified replies and retorts, she finally settled for the classic rhetorical masterpiece of nonchalant indifference rather than childish denial and said, accompanied by a very well executed shrug for good measure, "So?" and then, after one gloriously composed second of triumph, accusingly added, "You had one first!"

Harry snorted. "Bah, old news. Already covered that," he said, utterly unfazed. "So what about yours? Was it any good? I hope my dream-counterpart didn't disappoint."

She rolled her eyes. "Don't flatter yourself," she told him in a rebuff that was less than half-serious. "It was entirely harmless."

"Harmless?" he asked, quite disappointed himself by all appearance. "Well, that sounds boring."

"It was mostly about brooms, really," she complemented en passant, hiding her impish smile behind the collar of her coat while echoes and images of all the harmlessness flashed past her mind's eye (and ear).

"Brooms?" Harry asked, genuinely confused.

"Yeah, well, I woke up just when it got really interesting."

"I know the feeling," he said with a bemused smile. "Frustrating, isn't it?"

She sighed and looked at him with a thoughtful expression, averting her eyes as soon as he got aware of her gaze and turned to meet it. "You have been conspicuously flirtatious for a while now, you know that?"

He knitted his forehead in puzzlement and seemed well-nigh offended in light of this most preposterous of insinuations. "Flirtatious? Me?"

"Yes," she reaffirmed. "Mostly when you're getting tired, but I've been noticing it for quite some time and on various occasions."

"But… what?" he asked, his confusion not for show in the slightest. "Like, when?"

"Well, even excluding this admittedly nutty week, the last time it reached indisputable levels was Sunday evening, if you must know. Before any of this happened."

"Sunday evening?" he asked disbelievingly. "In the common room? That was flirting?"

"Uhm, yes? I might not be a seasoned luminary in the field, and I'm generally insecure — and stubborn — enough to keep myself from believing anyone would willingly flirt with me of all people, but I understand enough of the theoretical framework to assess that what we were doing back then and what we did right now most definitely falls into the general area of flirtation."

"Right now, too?" he asked, downright shocked at this impossible revelation. "Huh. I had no idea."

Hermione couldn't suppress a slight chuckle at his inimitable innocence. "The weird thing is that I actually believe that."

Still struggling with that newfound insight into the intricate interpersonal dynamics of a sexually dimorphic species, Harry shrugged his bafflement off as good as he could and instead went back to what seemed to be the matter at hand.

"And you say I have been doing that for a while now?"

"Yes," she confirmed. "I can't recall when I consciously noticed it for the first time, but I would guess it must have been sometime during sixth year. Maybe around Christmas? Or the summer before that? I'm not sure, but it has become a more frequent phenomenon rather quickly. Especially when you are tired. You get strangely… frisky. And then, of course, just when I thought I had gotten somewhat used to it, when I visited you in Privet Drive back in August and you told me my feet were sexy, I was more than a little flummoxed to say the least."

Harry immediately felt something like a thermonuclear reaction spreading over his cheeks and burning in his temples. "Yeah, uhm," he croaked, clearing his throat with questionable succes, "I, uh, I grew up in a cupboard and stuff. I was bound to come out of there a bit damaged."

"Don't beat yourself up about it," she sought to assuage him, trying and mostly managing not to laugh. "I remember going to bed with what I can only assume must have been a rather stupid smile on my face, thinking, 'I have sexy feet,' and giggling into my pillow like, well, a girl. Surprisingly."

"Always glad to entertain you," Harry said in mock indignation, not quite able to banish the furious crimson from his cheeks just yet. "So I guess that was flirting too, then?"

"Harry, I don't think it gets any more obvious than actually using the word sexy when referring to another person, or one of their body parts. Some people would even go so far as to call that an invitation."

"Right," Harry said like a little boy who just got lectured by his primary school teacher. "But… I mean, bar the occasional, awkward foot compliment, correct me if I'm wrong – and as we have now sufficiently established, I have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about when it comes to this: you cannot flirt on your own, now can you?"

"Well, there's always Malfoy and his mirror, of course, but it usually takes two, yes," Hermione conceded. "Though one can obviously refuse to partake in the exchange, as I have done on multiple occasions when Cormac McLaggen wouldn't leave me alone with his obnoxious advances. But I would never pretend that I didn't… reciprocate your very own – and very unwitting – brand of flirtations. Although I never really took it to mean anything that actually… went into that direction, you know? I just dismissed it as one of our harmless routines."

"Routine isn't a very romantic word," he said with a sly smile.

"Again," she replied, shooting him a telling look along the lines of 'You are doing it again', "I didn't see anything romantic about it. Not really."

"Because you couldn't?" he asked. "Or wouldn't?"

"I don't know. A little of both, maybe? Just like you, I guess. You said so yourself. It just wasn't like that. I was too set on what we were to give much thought to what we could be. Best friends forever, without so much as a hint of irony."

"But at the same time there was no one else, was there?" asked Harry. "In that specific sense, I mean. For either of us."

Hermione remained silent, so Harry continued his line of thought. "Now that I mention it, if there's one thing we never really talked about, it's… well, all this stuff. Relationships. Other people. Crushes. You never asked me all that much about Cho and I didn't pry a whole lot about Viktor."

"Please, Viktor hardly counts as… anything, really," Hermione insisted. "Don't get me wrong, he was a lot nicer than you give him credit for and it was flattering to have someone notice me like that, but nothing ever happened."

"Yeah, I never took much of a liking to the bloke, anyway," said Harry.

"Well, I don't remember being all that fond of Cho, either," she revealed. "Even though she's a perfectly nice girl."

Harry looked at her and waited for her to meet his eyes, and when she finally did he said, "Quite an enigma, huh?"

When she averted her eyes again with an unsteady smile, he turned to look out over the valley once more: towards the slowly setting sun, just above the top of the higher hills in the distance. Hermione was still trying to make sense of all the things that had just been said – anything, really – when she heard him exhale a long and heavy sigh, which pulled her back out of her inner turmoil.

"Let me go through this once more, Hermione," Harry began pensively, cautiously. "We have been the closest of friends for six years now. We have been around each other all this time, been through thick and thin together, stood by each other through the most challenging of times and survived what each of us alone would probably have perished in. We trust and confide in each other, we lean and rely on each other. We have proven to be a good – a great team in pretty much everything we set out to do, and it all seems to come so natural to us that it might just be considered creepy by some. You're a girl and I'm a boy and we are, I assume, both heterosexual. I hope. Uh. Neither of us really has had a real boy- or girlfriend, and neither of us has shown much interest in anyone else.

"The wizarding tabloids are writing about us in monthly columns and have, to my knowledge, slowly but surely dropped most of the other girls they used to randomly associate me with. More significantly, all our friends either make suggestive remarks or talk about us as if we already were a couple. Ron has called us an old couple on more than one occasion, though not always favorably so. I wouldn't be surprised if Fred and George were conducting bets on when we'll finally hook up. The professors keep looking at us with those wildly annoying, sage smiles of theirs. Even Snape, in his own, loathsome way, seems to know more than us about us.

"We've been having incidents of more or less intentional flirtations for quite a while now, apparently, and this week we have begun teleporting into each other's beds for some mysterious reason. We've both had suggestive dreams about each other. We have both openly stated that we find each other physically attractive. Then, just this morning, science itself informed us that there are indeed libidinous dynamics between us, and, on a side note, that there are also some crazy amounts of affinity going on between us, whatever exactly that is now. So, to sum it all up, we are basically best friends who have most wondrously discovered that they also fancy each other. And it's been scientifically proven."

He paused and looked at her in silence for a moment, searching her face for anything, for everything, while she held her gaze directed downwards. Then, his voice so soft it nearly had to be carried by the wind for half the distance to her ears, he said, "So what's the hiccup?"

Slowly she raised her head to look up at him and could barely keep herself from flinching when she found him standing so close to her. Her memory instantly took her back to Wednesday night, when they had last stood right in front of each other so closely, not unlike right now, in the locker room. Back then, of course, she had so clumsily ruined the moment with some stupid excuse she didn't even want to remember. Sure, the locker room wasn't exactly the perfect setting for her romantic cravings – even though, apparently, her subconscious tended to disagree with that – but standing on a bridge over an arcadian valley with an outlook over a placid lake shimmering rufescently in the fading light of a setting sun, that particular excuse didn't really hold up all that well.

She found herself captivated by his haunting gaze, trapped inside his strikingly green eyes: two dark emeralds boring right into the very core of her being. Perusing her. Exposing her, embracing her. Inviting and enticing her.

Kiss him. Just kiss him right now. You know you want to. And you know he wants to as well, so stop doubting it already. Why not do it? Be spontaneous. Be impulsive. Surprise him! Bewitch him! You are a witch, for Merlin's sake! Do something!

"You are still not sure, are you?" he then asked her in a near-whisper, not taking his eyes off of her even while she succumbed to her inner struggle.

"I'm so sorry," she feebly breathed, her voice so imbued with emotion and sincerity it was frail under the weight of it all, on the verge of failing her. "I… I just…"

"It's okay," he whispered soothingly, and as she felt his arms around her she looked up again, searching his face for the forgiveness she could never give herself and finding it in his weak but honest smile and the gleam of affection in his eyes.

"Gosh, this feels so surreal," her most immediate thought escaped her lips without intent, and when he looked at her in wonder she went on to explain, "All of it. Everything that happened this week, every bizarre moment we spent in a room with only one or more professors as company. Every night I fell asleep wondering if I would wake up with you right next to me again. Every minute I spent pondering what it all meant, searching myself for answers to questions I had never really dared to ask before."

She paused for a moment, her eyes flickering back and forth between his own. "And this," she exhaled. "This right here. This very moment between us. To even imagine anything like this to ever happen was beyond anything my mind deemed reasonable to do. To speak these words, to share these looks. To touch like this. You and me, after all this time. One part of me wonders if this is really us, and the other feels so deeply that this is exactly what we've always been. And both together serve to make it impossible for me as a whole to believe that any of this is really happening."

"We could pinch each other, if you want," Harry quipped, making her smile in return, short-lived as it was.

"Please know that this is not about me questioning my feelings for you," she told him affectionately, her hands resting lightly on his chest. "I believe those should be quite clear to you by now even without Professor Flitwick ogling them through that oversized eyepiece of his. This is about me being insanely unsure of… what to do about it. I mean, do you not worry at all what might become of us if we were to… to go this way and then stumble and... fail?"

Harry sighed at that and let his eyes briefly wander over the scenery. "The thought might have crossed my mind, I suppose," he finally admitted with some reluctance. "But I don't care much for it, because I wouldn't intend to fail."

"Who does, though?" she challenged him not unkindly. "And yet it always happens all around. Everyone can say I do in the naïvety of the moment, but how many hold true to that? I have, contrary to such an integral part of myself, been ridiculously certain for years now that we, as friends, would never part ways. That I would always be there for you and you for me. What could come between us? But a platonic friendship, especially one like ours, has much higher chances of permanence than relationships with entirely different dynamics involved. Dynamics we know nothing about.

"What if they were to change us for the worse? What if we were to try this only to find that we erred in thinking this was the way to go? What if these feelings are deceiving us? Professor Flitwick seems to be able to do a lot of things with that apparatus of his, but he cannot foresee the future. No more than Professor Trelawney can. What if it's just a fleeting thing? What if it burns out? And what will be left of us if it should? Do you think we could recover from that? That our friendship would be salvageable from the wreckage of our broken hearts?

"Because I don't. I think it would cut too deep, leave wounds too severe to ever heal. We are not the kind of people who can go on like nothing ever happened. We are not the kind of people who can play along and pretend. I have no doubt we would be glorious in our own wuthering heights, yet no less devastating in our fall. And no matter how much I might yearn for it by now, tempted and tormented by its vague silhouette, I am not sure our friendship is worth the risk. The one is a possibility, the other a certainty. The one I might despair not to have, yet the other I could not bear to lose."

She looked at him expectantly – just a little breathless after her most heartfelt effusion – and awaited his response as her chest went up and down in the cadence of her hopes and fears. He looked away with his head turned to the side, where the red sun was finally beginning to disappear behind the faraway hills. Then he took a very deep breath.

"Damn," he sighed. "That's a toughie."

Hermione couldn't help but eject a laugh at the way he said that and she could see his lips were curling into a smile of their own.

"So," she said after a moment's reprieve, "you don't have a solution for this conundrum either?"

"No," he answered earnestly, only then turning to face her again and at first he seemed to be all serious. Then, however, his lips turned up once more at one corner, into one of his lopsided smiles, and with that secret glint in his eyes it nearly seemed just a little mischievous. "But the day's not yet done," he said, "and you have yet to receive your presents."

So puzzled was Hermione that she couldn't do more than furrow her eyebrows, even while he broke their embrace and slowly began to step away from her, walking backwards – blatantly amused for some reason and almost too smug for her taste.

"I'll see you at the party," he said with a wink, and then he turned around and walked away with quickened steps, leaving Hermione standing rather dumbfounded in her spot.

And then, of all possible things, the first conscious thought that formed into any kind of clarity in her mind was,

Party? Oh, no…