Thirteen and a Half Years Later: Jareth
Title: Thirteen and a Half Years Later: Jareth
Author: kanedax
Spoilers: Deathly Hallows & Previous Chapters
Characters: HC Granger (OC)
Rating: PG-13 for language and mild content
Word count: 3,856 words
Summary: A secret rendezvous
Notes: I own HC Granger and these characters. The others belong to JK Rowling.
Shall We Begin? / Previous Chapters / The OBHWF Christmas Special
“You’re going out again?”
“Yeah, I am.”
“Where do you keep going?”
“I just like to go out. Get some air, you know?”
“You know you’re going to get into trouble one of these days. You keep getting dangerously close to curfew.”
“I’ll be fine. It’s not like I’m sneaking out to shag some guy, or anything.”
“Then what do you do out there? It’s fucking freezing outside.”
“Nothing. I just walk. Write in my diary.”
“You get all weird before you go out, though.”
“Look who’s talking…”
“Maybe if the housemistress comes by I can say I have no idea where you are?”
“And maybe I could tell the housemistress about the pack of fags you have in your pillowcase?”
“…”
“One hour. Tops. If you get nervous I can go run the shower, and you can tell the housemistress I’m in there. I doubt she’d check on me if she thinks I’m starkers.”
“…Alright, Alright. Go. God, I don’t know why I put up with you sometimes.”
“Because we’re roommates. Lack of options.”
Sure, it was cold. January nights in England are always that way.
But as the girl bundled her jacket close to her body, making sure to keep her “journal” tucked under her arm from falling to the snow-covered, she decided that it couldn’t have been nicer, otherwise.
Others would complain, of course. “Why does it have to be so cold? I miss summer!” But she knew better. Winter was the best season, especially on nights like this. Very little wind, just cool enough to keep her nose comfortably numb. And if you didn’t like it, she was sure that Egypt had some very nice homes available. When it was dark, and the world had quieted down a little, she could almost pretend like she was in some other place, some other time.
Almost like Narnia, she thought as she entered the sparse forest, the trees casting pale moonlight shadows across the snow.
She reached into her coat pocket, just to make sure she had remembered it. And there it was, wrapped in the napkin she could feel crinkling through her gloved fingers: the roll she had swiped from the table at dinner earlier this evening. She needed to make sure she had her payment with her, after all.
And there was the payee, perched on a stump, just as she was promised. A beautiful barn owl, it had struck both of them as perfect when he got it as a present from his godfather three summers ago. He even knew what to name it.
“Hello, Jareth,” Hermione Caroline Granger said with a warm smile. When her older sister was eight years old, her parents had given her a film about a teenage girl who was forced to rescue her baby brother from a terrible king and his goblin minions. Even then, being the type of girl who always preferred documentaries and dramas to science fiction and fantasy, Jean only watched the movie once or twice before relegating it to the back of the video cabinet.
Until her baby sister was born. Charlotte Granger pulled the dusty VHS cassette out on a day when a seven-year-old Hermione Caroline was complaining that she had already watched all of her films and wanted to see something new.
Despite it being nearly twenty years old, Labyrinth hooked Hermione completely. Being as young as she was, there were definitely some nightmare-inducing moments, but nothing like some of the other films she had been introduced to her in her need to connect to her sister’s world of amazing creatures, fantastic worlds, and, most importantly, magic.
Despite the scene with The Fire Gang, Hermione watched it religiously for years. Every time her best friend, Ted, came over, they either watched it or had it playing in the background while they played with their other toys. When she wore the videocassette out, her parents bought her the DVD of the movie, and the HD DVD after that. It was still in her current film rotation, fifteen or twenty films that she could toss in to watch when she was bored or doing homework. Sometimes when she was bored while doing homework.
At first her roommate, Danielle, complained about having to watch it (“But David Bowie’s so creepy, and look at that hair!”), but after a while found herself drawn in, and would even request it on occasion.
It didn’t escape her cruel sense of irony (Is it irony? she thought. Tough to tell sometimes) that while her older sister, she of textbooks and The History Channel, found herself in a world that Hermione only dreamed of while she, the girl who loved everything there was to love about Tolkien, Lewis, White, and Zimmer Bradley, was stuck in a decidedly non-magical girls’ boarding school in Oxford.
So now the girl who found tales of dragons and heroics dull and unrealistic was now casting magic spells for a living. Hermione’s brother in law, her niece and nephew, Jean’s friends, all witches and wizards. Even Hermione’s best friend, a magician in his own right, and the only boy who Hermione ever…
Don’t, she said to herself. Stop with the pity fest. You’re here. You’re not one of them. Live with it. As for Ted, he seems to have made his decision about you two. If there’s something in him, something with feelings for you past friendship, he won’t let it out because he doesn’t think it would work. Don’t try to talk him out of it. If you try to guilt him into something… That’s not what you want, and you know it.
“Glad to see you, Jareth,” Hermione said to the barn owl, who was named after The Goblin King himself, who could turn himself into a barn owl. It had been down to that name or Bubo, after the mechanical owl from Clash of the Titans, another of Hermione and Teddy’s favorites growing up.
“I think Jareth works better, though,” Ted had said as they walked through Diagon Alley. “Bubo was cool, but it’s the kind of name that’s too easy to make fun of.”
Hermione didn’t care in the end what the owl was named. The fact was that Jareth was the only link that she currently had to the magical world, to her Ted. They had been writing to each other through her parents for the first year or so. But after a while, as teenagers usually do, they felt like their private conversations were too… well… private to be handled by middlemen, especially middlemen like Mum and Dad.
So they still kept up the public discourse. Nothing too interesting, just banalities. Just to keep up the façade. Their real conversations occurred here, one night a week, when Ted would send Jareth directly to Headington.
If her parents knew that she was sneaking out so close to curfew, they wouldn’t be very happy. Hermione didn’t think that she would ever get into trouble with her housemistress, especially since she held enough dirt on others in her boarding house that she didn’t think they would snitch. But if someone did, or if the housemistress ever caught her… well, she would handle that if that ever came.
As for the increasingly large pile of letters that she kept in her room, letters that spoke explicitly of the world of Ted, Jean, and Hogwarts… she felt safer about those, at least. Ted had taken care of that for her last Christmas.
“Harry has a bag with the same kind of magic,” he had said as she pulled the small oak box, almost like a jewelry case, out of its wrappings. “It can’t be opened by anyone but the owner. That’s why the lock’s on the front.” At that, he pointed to a keyhole. “It doesn’t really lock, but anyone who tries to open it will just think that you’re carrying a key. Perfect cover for Muggles.”
She had wanted to kiss him then. She had wanted to kiss him a lot in the past few years, ever since that invisible line was crossed at some point in the past when Ted stopped being “Ted” and started being “TED (!!!!).” The courage to get her lips moving never came.
Jareth, recognizing that this was his intended target, flapped his wings and floated toward Hermione, who put out her arm as a perch.
“Got a letter for me, love?” she asked quietly. The owl hooted in assent, and put its leg out. She awkwardly untied the parchment from it, knowing that it would probably be easier to have Jareth continue to sit on the stump, but wanting the contact anyway.
“I have something for you, too,” she said, quickly putting the parchment in her pocket to free her hand. “Do you mind staying while I write my letter back to him?”
Jareth hooted again, fluttering his wings briefly. Hermione pulled the dinner roll out of her pocket and unwrapped the napkin.
“Sorry I don’t have any meat,” she said. “I know you’re not a fan of pork, and that’s what we had tonight. Where do you want to eat?”
Jareth pushed himself airborne, grabbed the roll with his talons before Hermione even recognized his attack, and glided over to a nearby boulder, leaving the stump free for Hermione to sit on.
“Thanks,” she said, walking to the stump. “Feel free to go do some hunting, too, I’ll be here when you get back, I promise. I hear the voles are particularly tasty around here.”
The barn owl hooted once more and went to work on the roll. Hermione pushed aside the pile of snow on the stump, and, setting herself down, pulled Ted’s letter, which appeared to be several pages long, from her pocket and began to read:
Hermione,
I hope Jareth gets to you all right. The weather’s looking a little nasty while I write this, and I’m not sure if it’s going to be letting up by the time I finish writing.
He’s strong, though; he can handle a lot. He’s got goblin blood in him, after all.
Did you get back to Headington in one piece? All of your Christmas presents made it without any problems? I don’t know about you, but I’ve had problems finding a place for all of my new junk in the Gryffindor dormitory. When you have five boys trying to take up a small amount of space it can be a little bit of a hassle.
Jack wanted me to tell you that he was really glad to meet you over holiday. He says that you’re really cool. And he also told me to tell you that he thinks you’re “right sexy,” but I don’t think that would be most appropriate thing to write in this letter.
Oh, wait…
Jenn and Gavin are telling me to give similar reports, but to omit the “sexy” part. “Nothing personal,” Jenn’s saying over my shoulder as I write this, “but I don’t go that way.”
This was the first time any of the three of them had spent any time with a Muggle, and they thought it was a really interesting experience: the cinema, the video games, the music. Gavin even asked me to get a copy of your Radiohead and your Flogging Molly, and Jenn particularly liked your Evanescence CDs. A burned CD or an iPod wouldn’t work around here, though, so they’re out of luck.
Actually… They do have record players. Do you think any of those albums are available on vinyl?
All in all, we made Carla a particularly jealous girl. She’s in Professor Bateman’s Muggle Studies class with me, and she’s starting to really get interested in what everyone around here calls “the other side.” Her parents dragged her off on a trip to Finland to visit her brother, though, so she couldn’t come. She does say hi, though, and was wondering if you might be interested in letting her borrow some things. We have to write a paper on Muggle journalism, and she was wondering if you could owl her a newspaper or two. She promises to make it worth your while, and will buy you something from Zonko’s during the next Hogsmeade weekend.
That’s for later, though…
Victoire says hi, too, and sorry that she didn’t get a chance to see you during holiday. She and her folks were in Romania visiting Charlie.
It’s amazing how well she’s doing here for her first year. Remember how when you and I were both eleven, starting the whole boarding thing, how terrible it was to find friends or something to do? Victoire’s doing gangbusters. She and her friends Christine and Sarah are already inseparable, and she’s doing well in most of her classes.
Except flying. She can’t stand flying. I’ve even let her borrow my Thunderbolt, which is a lot easier to fly than the ones the school puts out for practice, but still no go. Anything over two feet up and she starts losing her nerve. I guess she’s just going to have to live with the Floo or with riding shotgun for the rest of her life, at least till she learns to Apparate.
Harry says your sister’s the same way, though. Did you know she was afraid of heights?
Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you: we won our first Quidditch match this year! That puts us at one and one, and our points aren’t looking that bad. It was just too bad that we had to face Ravenclaw at the beginning of the season. I couldn’t get the Quaffle past Hogan to save my life.
Thankfully Slytherin didn’t do much better against them last week. Ravenclaw’s the odds-on favorite to win the Quidditch Cup, though, which is too bad. Jack tried to convince Christine, Freddy Hogan’s sister, to give him something out of the Wheezes’ Skiving Snackboxes before the match.
She didn’t go for it, though.
Oh, shite, I lost track of my train here, where was I? Oh, yeah, Victoire. Like I said, she’s doing really well, I think she’s found her place here. She absolutely loves Hagrid’s creatures, and goes down to his hut at least once a week to see what he was teaching the older students that day.
Nathaniel (that’s another Gryffindor first year) keeps trying to convince her that it’s a waste of time, since she’d be studying the same creatures for credit in two years if she decided to take Hagrid’s class. But I think Victoire doesn’t really mind if she gets a repeat. She’s doing well enough on her homework where she can afford this extra time.
She tends to ignore Nate, anyway. It’s pretty obvious that he fancies her, so she thinks that he’s just trying to keep her out of danger, or something.
Either way, I think that she’s already found her future career, and she’s not even twelve yet. Weird, huh?
Oh, I almost forgot! Guess who was in our Defense Against the Dark Arts class on Wednesday.
Harry!
I know, it’s weird. He came in to give a special class for everyone in DADA between third and seventh year. I guess he was actually asked to do it last year, but he decided in the end that he wanted to wait a year. He told me it was because he wanted to wait for me to be in his first class, but I don’t know. Neville and Uri talked to him about it the night that they had announced their engagement. I think he just had to decide if he was ready to step back into some type of spotlight again.
I suppose I could see why, though. He told us about what happened during his Hogwarts years: the Chamber of Secrets, the Triwizard Tournament, the search for the horcruxes. He glossed over a lot of stuff, obviously, I would be surprised if he didn’t. He spent a lot of time talking about the spells that he found useful, the potions and charms that had come in handy, and even mentioned your sister’s knowledge of Ancient Runes as being a great help.
But when it came to the question and answer session, it got weird. Half of the questions were real, class-related questions. What spell did you use in the graveyard, what happened with you in regards to using the Unforgivable Curses in wartime, that kind of thing.
But, unfortunately, there were a few questions from people who read a little too much of the gossip columns. A few people wanted to know about his relationship with Ginny. Or what it was like to hang out with a werewolf like my Dad, and if he had ever been afraid of being bitten. One person asked if he had ever dated Jean.
He did a good enough job handling those questions, though. Hopefully after a few years the students will realize that he and Ginny really are boring people, and they’ll stop being interested in his personal life.
I heard the older students got a wicked class, though. Harry actually taught them magic. More specifically, he talked to Professor Squall and figured out some spells that Squall wasn’t teaching, but Harry had taught when he was in charge of Dumbledore’s Army. One of the fifth years even said that they had learned how to cast a Patronus.
I can’t wait till I’m a fifth year.
Holy shite, how many pages have I written so far? You really have to start telling me when I’m rambling, Hermione. I still haven’t even gotten to the good part.
At least, I think it’s the good part.
It might be the part where I piss you off, or scare you, or something…
Okay, it’s a half-hour later. I’ve just been pacing around the dorm, trying to get up the courage to say what I want to say, and trying to figure out the right way to say it.
Here we go…
I miss you.
I miss you a lot. The last Hogsmeade weekend, right before Christmas, I kept thinking “Man, I wish Hermione were here. She would love this. We would have such a good time.”
But, being the dense thirteen-year-old that I am, I didn’t even really figure it out then.
I didn’t even figure it out during holiday, when seeing you lit me up more than anything.
Like I said, I miss you. And I’m getting all rambly. You REALLY have to tell me when to stop that.
Okay, so here we go.
Next month we have a third Hogsmeade trip. It’s the Saturday before Valentine’s Day, 12 February. I was wondering if you wanted to meet up. I don’t know what the policy is for getting out of your school on weekends. I’m guessing you need your parents’ permission, or something.
Actually, I suppose you need your parents involved one way or another, since you’d have to Floo to Hogsmeade. But I think it would be more fun if they didn’t come. If they’re nervous about that, just tell them that the level of supervision is extreme during the trip. Most of the professors come down, and they keep their eyes open for any trouble.
It will be really fun. Hogsmeade during Hogwarts trips is a blast. If you wanted to hang out with Jack and Gavin and the others, I would understand. But I’m actually hoping that it could just be the two of us.
Since it’s Valentine’s Day and all.
Am I asking you out on a date? A real, honest to God date? I think I am. This is the part where I’m trying my best not to scare you off. Like I said, I’ve missed you. I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately. For the last two and a half years most of my friends have been convinced that you and I are already dating, and, quite honestly, I like the idea.
I just don’t know where you stand on us. If you just want to be friends, I can completely understand, disregard this whole last chunk of letter and pretend that it ended with the Patronus talk. I know the long-distance thing is already a pain, and it wouldn’t be any easier if we’re dating.
Okay, that was a stupid thing to say. It’s just a date. It doesn’t even have to be a date. It can just be as friends. If you only want to be friends, I can live with that.
Oh, God, please stop me before I kill again, I’m starting to sound like Sam from the first Transformers movie. Smooth, Teddy, smooth.
If you’re interested, and available, please write back to me as soon as possible. I have a feeling you’re sitting in the middle of the woods, probably on a stump, with Jareth waiting for you while chewing on a shrew or something. So you’ll probably be writing back tonight. He’s an impatient bird.
Like I said, I hope you say yes. If you do, I’ll be happy. But if you don’t, seriously, no skin off my back. I’m just as happy with you as a friend than as something more. So don’t take my feelings into account if you’re not interested.
I hope to hear from you soon,
Ted
PS: Neville and Uri say hi.
PPS: So does Hagrid.
PPPS: Seriously, if you’re not interested, or if you think this is a bad idea, I’ll understand. I just want to know one way or another.
Hermione sat dumbfounded. One gloved hand clutching the letter, the other was held over her hanging mouth in shock.
Her lip twitched into a bewildered smile.
She had to contain herself from squealing with joy, knowing that that would be sure to attract attention from the housemistress inside.
But she didn’t have to contain herself from unabashedly kissing the letter and grinning like a five-year-old on Christmas morning.
“Jareth!” she whispered loudly. “I don’t have much to write, so get ready to head out soon.”
The barn owl, who had indeed caught a shrew (Why that boy isn’t in Divination is beyond me, she thought perkily), just hooted softly once before returning to his meal.
Hermione placed her journal on her lap, flipped it to the front page, half of the pages torn out from previous letters, clicked her ball-point pen, and responded:
You had me at “I miss you,” you big git.
I’ll talk to my parents about getting me out of here that weekend. If they let me go to Hogsmeade, then good for both of us. If they’d rather I not go, I’ll just come up with an excuse to go to Harry and Ginny’s. I’m sure they’ll let me disappear for a few hours without ratting us out.
What’s life without a little danger?
I’d write more, but I want to get this sent as quick as I can. We’ll have plenty of time to talk during Hogsmeade weekend!
Oh, and in case I wasn’t clear:
Yes. Yes. A thousand times yes.
Love always,
Hermione
PS: You’re cute when you ramble. Keep it up.
PPS: Did I happen to say YES?
Shall We Begin? / Previous Chapters / The OBHWF Christmas Special