Put the lotion in the basket, precious - Or else it gets the hose again.
(And by that, of course, I mean, Here's a halloween ficlet for your consumption.)
Happy Halloween, ya'll!
(Yeah, don't mind the subject line. I just had to put up a little Silence of the Lambs blurt on account of the holiday. ^_^)
I posted this up at the PK forums under
castledown's Halloween Fluffathon. I volunteered to do one set in the Common Room.
Yeah, so this…isn’t exactly fluffy, save for the end, even though the title may indicate otherwise. Guess it’s the day, or maybe I’m in a mood. But the humor/fluff pieces I started just were terrible (because I’m just not good at them, lol), so I started over this morning. Hope you like it. I can assure you it's at least better than what I nearly subjected you to.
Title- Better than Chocolate
Rating- PG13
Length- 1830 words (just a little shortie)
Summary- On Halloween of their seventh year, Harry and Hermione relive the night their lives began their convergent paths.
Hermione Granger was sitting the Halloween feast out this year. She had started to go down with her classmates, but at the last minute she’d told Harry and Ron to go down without her, that she’d forgotten something, and had doubled back.
She went up to the dormitory, retrieved some books, and sought the warmth and quiet of the empty Common Room with its squashy armchair by the fire. Instead of reading, at first, she sank back into the soft, yielding leather of the armchair and stared into the flames until her eyes burned.
At Halloween, Hermione was prone to moods like this, and she could never put her finger on why. Six years ago -today- had been one of the best days of her life. She had been shown friendship like she hadn’t known could exist for her, and her life had drastically altered its course. She thanked the stars for it every day.
She looked around the empty common room and felt a sort of chill.
Was it too quiet? No, it had been quiet when she’d come in not ten minutes ago and still she hadn’t felt this...unease. This dread. She shivered.
Of course, when she thought about it more, and huddled her knees to her chest, that night had been one of the worst she’d ever experienced, by the same turn. She’d tasted real fear, for the first time in her young life. She had been shown terror for which her upper-middle-class, muggle upbringing had not prepared her. Not only when the monster had towered over her, which had been bad enough. But when she’d looked beyond it to the two small boys coming into the room, she’d been paralyzed. She’d barely been able to keep her wits about her as she had looked from the troll to Ron, to Harry, and the fear was palpable.
They’d come for her. And now they might die.
When Harry had leaped onto its back, the troll spinning about and dangling Harry like a rag doll, Hermione had nearly passed out. Thinking about it now, as she did every year, her pulse thickened so that she could feel it at the base of her skull, and she had to remember to catch her breath. As many dangers as she had faced, as much nightmare material as she’d collected since, this was the one stuck to her this night. Even now she felt an irrational, but very real sense of trepidation, almost as if she were in the dungeons now.
Of course, she knew that if they came across a troll, she could deal with it without any real trouble. But that didn’t explain the fact that she could scarcely move for shaking.
Hermione was oblivious to the presence around her as she watched, mesmerized, her own breath crystallize in front of her face. She jolted as the merrily crackling flames in the fireplace guttered out.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Downstairs in the Great Hall, Harry laughed halfheartedly at the joke Seamus made and moved his Shepherd’s pie around on his plate. As he stared into space his fellow classmates tucked into their meals and played pranks on each other around, behind, and under the tables.
His mind was upstairs with Hermione. (At least, he hoped she was upstairs. Maybe it was the day, but Harry couldn’t shake an irrational fear that she was somehow down in the dungeons.) She should have come down to join them by now. He tried to retrace his moments with her today. She hadn’t seemed upset, had she? Harry liked to think he would have noticed if she were. He ran his fingers through his hair and gave up any attempt to pretend he was eating.
He turned to Ron. “I’m going to go check on Hermione.” Harry swung his long legs over the bench and left the table.
As he mounted the stairs from the Great Hall, he heard the sound of footsteps pounding from somewhere off the hallway to his left. It made him think of this time seven years ago, nearly to the hour, when he and Ron had bolted down the halls in search of Hermione. He’d never experienced quite the same feeling of blind panic since. It was a kind of dropping feeling in his stomach, like when he missed a step going down stairs. Except that helpless plunging went on and on until he felt like he would drop into an abyss so depthless he’d never find relief. When he’d found her, seen her cowering in terror, small shoulders shaking, there’d been no time to freeze, or to panic.
It had been the waiting and the worry that had nearly swallowed him whole.
Harry couldn’t say why he was reliving the feeling now, but it was quickening his breathing and propelling him faster down the suddenly drafty corridor towards Gryffindor Tower. She’s fine, he thought as he shivered. She’s probably reading, or maybe she’s taking a nap. She’s fine. That was seven years ago, and anyway, she can handle a troll by this point. She’s fine. This is crazy.
He was nearly convinced as he reached the Fat Lady, but he kept seeing her face, paralyzed in horror, the beast looming above her, as he gave the password and the portrait door swung wide. He nearly fell through it in his haste.
The first thing Harry noticed was how cold it was. Merlin, but he was freezing. Surely it hadn’t been this cold when they’d gone downstairs? Was Hermione in here, freezing like he was? The panic was back, never really faded from a few minutes ago. He entered the room more fully. He was full-on shaking, now.
His heart all but stopped as he heard her shallow breathing coming from around the fireplace.
“Hermione?”
Harry rushed over and found her, huddled so low in the big squashy chair that he hadn’t seen her, her hands over her ears, and she was shaking so hard it looked spontaneous. He reached out to touch her and found her body freezing to the ends of her hair.
What in the name of…
Harry pulled off his cloak and covered her, at the same time trying to jostle her awake as he looked around the room. He couldn’t see anything unusual, save for the absence of fire and the fact that he could see his breath. He went to the window. Was it open?
When he reached it, he stopped dead. The panes were layered with crystalline ice. Through the shard-like patterns on the glass, he barely made out the creeping black tendrils making their way across the bottom of the pane. He found himself so steeped in sorrow that he could barely see.
Dementor. Right outside the window.
Harry looked over at Hermione, still huddled, eyes screwed shut against some unnamed horror. He drew his wand.
“Expecto Patronum!” His father’s stag wisped from the tip of his wand, materializing to its near-solid appearance before charging directly through the heavy stone wall.
Wasting no time, Harry set the flames back to crackling in the fireplace on his way back to Hermione. He scooped her into his arms and held on as he tried to close out thoughts of what might have happened.
“Harry?” When Hermione opened her eyes, there were no tears, but they were pools of anguish that unsettled him even more. She pulled back her head only slightly from his chest, still shivering and seeking out his warmth.
“What happened?” she asked unsteadily.
“Dementors,” Harry murmured as he rubbed Hermione’s back, over and over, to warm her skin. “I don’t know how many- maybe just one, but it was outside the window.”
“I could have dealt with that on my own,” Hermione said, frowning and sitting up. She flushed with embarrassment as her wits returned to her. “I don’t know why I just froze that way. For some reason, I didn’t realize what it was. I should have- rogue dementors aren’t exactly uncommon, what with everything that’s happening.”
She pulled back more. Now that she was getting warmer she felt self-conscious here in his arms. “I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have had to come up here for that.”
Harry shook his head. “I didn’t come up here for that, exactly. I was looking for you. Truth is I was already worried.”
Hermione looked at him questioningly.
Harry chuckled weakly, shrugged. “The last time you missed the Halloween feast it was because you were trapped in a lavatory downstairs with a 12-foot troll. Maybe I was reluctant to let you go.”
Hermione’s hands went to his upper arms as she faced him more fully. Somewhere along the line it had stopped mattering that she was in his lap.
“Harry, when the Dementor…you know...that night was all I could think about. All those feelings and that fear came flooding back to me. I didn’t expect it to be so clear after all this time.”
“I was thinking about it too,” Harry admitted. “While I was looking for you. I guess as I got closer to the dementor I could feel it too,” he mused.
Hermione nodded. “Must have been.” She paused. “But why that memory, Harry? After everything we’ve been through, why that one?”
Harry met her eyes steadily. “That’s the most scared I think I’ve ever been in my life, Hermione.” He lifted his hands to her face, stroked his fingers across her cheeks and into her hair. “After everything, that’s it.”
Hermione’s breath caught. “Harry…”
“You’re still shaking,” Harry said quietly. “Are you cold?”
“Not so much,” Hermione said. Maybe she just needed an outlet for the pent-up emotions warring inside her for the past hour or so. Maybe she was just bloody relieved to be alright after everything that had happened.
Or maybe she just really wanted to kiss him.
And so she did. She closed the gap between them more fully, and placed her hands on his chest, drawing out the moment and relishing in his warmth. When her lips finally met his, she couldn’t help the upward curve of her lips as she felt him respond, felt his lips move more surely over hers.
Harry probably should have been surprised that his best friend of six years -today- was kissing him. But there was no time for that. He could only react. Her shy advances and the tentative pressure of her hands on his chest, not to mention the softness of her lips, were collectively draining him of all thought beyond, what have I been waiting on?
It didn’t matter. They weren’t going to wait any longer, Harry was sure. This was the happiest he’d ever felt, and it -almost- made the Dementor attack worth it. Harry felt like he could take on fifty of them.
Hermione sighed as their lips parted, and she met his gaze again. There was a promise in his eyes that mirrored her own.
She thought fleetingly that, as far as Dementor remedies went, who needed chocolate?
Andtheylivedhappilyeveraftertheend.
Thanks for reading, and Happy Halloween!
-Heather