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The halls of Hogwarts were dim and radiated a musty warmth as they often did in the winter, frost clinging to the darkened windows and obscuring the snowfall outside. December had sunk its teeth into the Scottish highlands, inviting a frigid chill in its wake. Only a day out from the solstice, the wan days were short and dreary while the nights proved long and nearly glacial. It was commonplace for a fire to be stoked in the wood stoves of each dorm and the hearth of every common room. Despite the miserable freezing weather, things seemed perfectly festive.
The smell of evergreen filled the Great Hall which emanated from its usual selection of twelve Christmas trees, each draped in a delicate balance of tinsel and baubles, lit up by charmed candles that gave the appearance of fairy lights. The enchanted ceiling maintained the steady fall of snow, large flakes disappearing just above students' heads. Garlands of holly wrapped around bannisters and pillars all about the castle. Ever-burning candles had been placed in every spare alcove and inside suits of armor to produce a soft glow at all hours. Even Peeves had set about carrying bits of mistletoe in every corridor and heckling the students below him, holding it up to his rear end and blowing raspberries. It was well and truly the Yuletide season.
Harry's shoes softly clicked against the flagstone as he navigated back towards Gryffindor Tower. He tugged his robes closer to shield himself from any icy draught that had managed to seep through the old stone bricking of the castle and continued strolling. He'd excused himself from Slughorn's Christmas party at last, uttering thin assurances of still needing to pack and wanting to get a proper night's sleep before the train to London in the morning, despite the fact that his clothes had been unceremoniously shoved into his trunk since midafternoon and he had no intention of immediately returning to his dorm, where Seamus would no doubt be snoring at unprecedented volumes due to the unfortunate cold he'd contracted or Ron waxing poetic conscious or unconscious about Lavender Brown. An evening of uncomfortably drunken professors and prodding questions from the supposedly renowned guest list could only for so long be preferable to sonorous snorts or incessant sleepy mumbles about "Lav-Lav". Perhaps, he thought to himself, he'd leaf through one of his quidditch magazines in the common room until the weight of his exhaustion forced his eyes to drift closed. He'd slept in worse places, he was reminded, and by the next morning it would hardly matter as he'd be well on his way to Devon.
Christmas was quite close now, only a few more days until home cooked meals and frumpy sweaters and bouts of laughter over Fred and George's specially charmed Christmas crackers at the Burrow. Harry had frequently excited himself at the thought of digging into Mrs. Weasley's Christmas feast; it was perhaps the only thing that carried him through to the end of term. He could imagine the spread in his mind's eye: the perfectly cooked turkey, the roast potatoes drenched in olive oil and rosemary, generously-buttered boiled peas and carrots, the gravy boat that true to its name sailed itself back and forth across the table, the doughy Yorkshire pudding, the crisp mince pies, the trifle, and the carafe of mulled wine Mr. Weasley left intentionally unattended.
"Christmas comes only once a year, Molly. It's harmless," Harry had heard Arthur whisper to Mrs. Weasley the previous year as she wore an expression that thoroughly demonstrated that she was battling off the urge to chastise her underage children for consuming so much alcohol.
It was one of his favorite things about staying with the Weasley's over the holidays, the love and care put into the meals, the way the food became in itself an emblem of the celebration. In every Christmas Harry had spent at the Dursley's, he'd never seen them put any considerable effort into their yearly dinner. Aunt Petunia would take the courageous stab at cooking a turkey but never fully paid attention while it was roasting, leaving it unevenly cooked and routinely inedible. Every side dish came from a box or can, hastily prepared by either boiling it on the stovetop or defrosting it in the microwave. The meal itself was always largely silent. Uncle Vernon would swear by his wife's cooking through mouthfuls of clumpy mashed potatoes and Dudley would simply inhale any item resembling food that was set before him. Harry's plate would always be filled with the odd bits, the slices of turkey that proved more rubbery than the rest and the charred vegetables that Dudley refused to stomach. After being considerably spoiled amongst the Weasley family, he hardly thought he'd ever want to spend another holiday with them.
Harry's arrival to the portrait of the Fat Lady spurred him out of his thoughts of the upcoming holidays. For lack of more delicate terms, he presumed that the Fat Lady was well on her way to being utterly sloshed. She barely seemed to keep herself standing in her frame, swaying from side to side with a goblet wrenched in an iron grip. The denizens of the enchanted paintings in Hogwarts always seemed to fraternize in such a raucous way right before the Christmas holidays. There was indeed a novelty to seeing the knocking of tankards between such unlikely drinking partners as a thirteenth-century monk and a revered yet deceased member of the Wizengamot. That being said, it made things wholly inconvenient when a portrait's inhabitant was incapable of doing their job.
"Baubles," Harry murmured softly.
The Fat Lady gave him a wary glance, though it could almost be masked by the glazed look on her face. "What was that, dear? Couldn't quite hear you," she slurred.
Harry resisted the urge to roll his eyes; he was far too tired for this. "Baubles!" he declared in a clearer tone
A minuscule smile slowly crept onto her features and she gave a sharp jerking nod. "Quite right!" she proclaimed in a movement that sent a good portion of the drink in her goblet sloshing over the rim. The portrait careened open, letting Harry slip inside.
Hermione was still in the common room, perched in one of the armchairs that was adjacent to the roaring blaze in the fireplace. Having long since changed out of her formal garb, she was comfortably nestled with a thick tome in her lap, occasionally scrawling a few notes on some parchment as she flipped through pages. Her gaze flickered up to Harry as he clambered through the portrait hole and she gave him a cursory smile before returning her focus to her reading.
"I thought you'd finished that Arithmancy essay," he stated as he loosened the tie from his neck, shuffling slowly across the room.
Hermione looked to Harry, a frazzled edge to her person peeking out but otherwise well-masked.
"Oh, I have. I'm just doing some supplementary reading for next term," she supplied.
Harry simply nodded, affirming such a reasonable sounding excuse. He presumed that she’d have read through all the necessary chapters for the coming term by the time New Year’s Eve arrived. Altogether she seemed nonplussed by his entrance, so he made his way in silence as he set to deconstructing the most uncomfortable bits of his formal wear. It was at the base of the staircase that he paused—his tie slack against his chest and the overcoat of his robes partially shouldered off—and turned back to face Hermione.
"Would you mind if I sit out here for a while? I'll be quiet, promise. I don't think I'm quite ready to sleep yet,” Harry expressed.
"Of course. This isn’t just my common room,” Hermione responded in her familiar matter-of-fact intonation.
Harry finished taking off his overcoat and laid it on the arm of the coach in a sort of claiming gesture, though he doubted few others, if any, would be seeking out a seat in the common room so late into the night. He then trotted up the steps and opened his door slowly, where he was immediately greeted by a loud series of snuffles from Seamus, who was sprawled wildly beneath his covers. Dean slept calmly in the bed beside him, a pair of specially enchanted earmuffs battling off the errant noises of his neighbor. Neville's bed was empty as Harry knew he was still at the party, discussing with some notable herbologist about what Harry had managed to make out as an exceedingly rare type of magical fern. Ron, while similarly asleep to his roommates, wore an uncomfortable frown. Yet, there was nary a peep to be heard of snogging nor a low lovesick babble over how he swooned for his girlfriend, so Harry was relieved on that point.
Harry made a deliberate effort to be as quiet as possible as he tugged the last of his dress robes over his head and shook down his trousers, exchanging them for a set of pajamas. He gave a cursory scan of his bedside table in the relative darkness of the room, resorting to simply grabbing the first magazine he saw from the bright gold letters reflecting SEEKER WEEKLY into the night. With his reading tucked under his arm, he slunk back out of the dorm and down to the common room, where Hermione seemed to have remained frozen in position. She noticed his reappearance and gave him an acknowledging nod, yet again resuming her studying without a word. Harry took the nonverbal assent as his invitation to plop down on one of the couches.
The issue Harry had picked up was one he'd already read, so he flipped between a couple articles he'd enjoyed on the Kenmare Kestrels and game strategy, browsing the ads for a new handle varnish. A quiet half hour passed between them. Every so often, he'd send a wayward glance toward Hermione, who seemed increasingly frustrated by her reading material. Now, Harry knew firmly that she had the highest marks in her Arithmancy class, so either she was stumped by high concept spells or she was being troubled by something else entirely. A brief look over her notes, which had devolved from proper notes to shorthand to utter gibberish, seemed to confirm his suspicions of the latter. He slowly set his magazine aside and turned to face his friend. She seemed none the wiser to his observation, still staring blankly at the page in front her with her lips screwed up in a taught frown. Harry paused for a moment, opening and closing his mouth in an inability to conjure what he wanted to say. He opted for a discreet clearing of the throat, of which Hermione took no notice. A few beats of silence passed before he mustered the right words to speak.
"You seem...distracted?" It hadn’t been meant as a question but Harry was unable to come up with a solution that made the assertion seem less prying.
Hermione lifted her head, seemingly roused from whatever daze had captured her. She gave a heaving sigh, almost melancholic in a way.
"It's nothing, really. I expect the Christmas holiday will do me some good,” she responded in an unconvincing tone of voice, her eyes not meeting Harry’s.
“I’m sure that’s the case,” Harry conceded in a similar reluctance. “But I expect something is the matter if you’ve been stuck on the same page for the past twenty minutes.”
Hermione let out a sharp breath that could almost be considered a defeated laugh. Her eyes ran over the various diagrams drawn in front of her and shallowly shook her head to herself before bringing her gaze to meet Harry’s.
“Always been a bit of a rubbish liar, haven’t I?” she admitted with an echo of relief.
Harry just shrugged. “And I’ve always been a bit too observant,” he retorted.
He hesitated a brief moment before asking, "Is this about Ron?"
Hermione seemed to prickle at that, shutting her book with a soft thud. He’d expected as much, the two had been testy toward each other for most of term and it had only worsened due to Ron’s sulking and jealousy over the Slug Club’s Christmas party and the whole ordeal concerning the “Liquid Luck”, or rather lack thereof. And with his burgeoning relationship with Lavender Brown added into the mix, it had been almost intolerable to be the mediator between them.
"I can be bothered by other things than him, Harry!" she exclaimed, her face flushing a brilliant red before she seemed to recover control of herself. “But I suppose he's part of it, yes."
The ire left Hermione almost as soon as it came and was replaced by a far more passive irritation. She removed the book and parchment from her lap in a swift motion and tugged her legs closer to her chest. She bit her lip in contemplation, her teeth digging so intensely into the skin that it turned white and threatened to crack. Eventually, she sighed and released the tight hold from which she was hugging her body.
"He makes it so difficult not to be angry with him. He won't talk to me and flaunts Lavender around whenever he can. I wish he would stop jumping to conclusions and acting like an arse because of it,” she confessed. Harry could tell she was still holding something back.
"He can be a bit— frequently pig-headed, I know. He’s a right pain when he wants to be, and the whole Lavender thing I’m not particularly thrilled about. But you haven’t made it easy for him to apologize either. The two of you can be so stubborn, both of you have the need to be correct in opposing directions and it makes you crazy,” Harry explained. His best friends were his favorite people but they were also the ones that he so intricately knew the flaws of.
Hermione seemed prepared, ready to fire back, but thought better of it and shrank into herself. “You’re right, I can be a bit unfair to him. And usually I make a show of it to irritate him but this time… I feel so bothered and I shouldn’t be, well it’s reasonable but he wouldn’t understand,” she began to trail off, once again averting her gaze from Harry’s comforting expression.
“You’re jealous, aren’t you? That’s why you’re worked up, you can’t stand the sight of him and Lavender together,” Harry filled in, hoping he hadn’t misread the situation. The two had been dancing around each other for months, it was part of why their tempers had been so high with one another. He was very familiar with the irrational behavior that came with such feelings.
Hermione sighed, satisfied enough by what he had come up with, “Something like that.”
An idea occurred to Harry in that moment, a remembrance of his past self’s cleverness. He dug into the pocket of his robes draped over the couch and pulled out a mess of crumby napkins, folding them away to reveal a couple gingerbread biscuits that had been delicately iced and shaped to resemble dragons. They bore smudges and cracks from his journey through the halls but not as much to be completely ruined.
"I nicked these from Slughorn's party, thought Ron would get a laugh out of it. But I think you need one more than he does, so I figure what he doesn't know can't hurt him,” he reasoned, handing over a biscuit that still vaguely held the image of a Swedish Shortsnout.
Hermione seemed flustered by the gesture but accepted the biscuit with a toothy smile. She bit into it with a crisp snap, attempting to catch the falling crumbs. She nodded as she chewed, attempting to show her appreciation in some way.
"Harry, that's very sweet of you," she replied once she’d swallowed her bite. "I've got nothing to give you in return, unless you want the contents of that awful cracker Slughorn sent us off with."
Every guest to the professor’s party had been given a complimentary Christmas cracker as a parting gift, one that when opened exuded a shower of red and green sparks and delivered a groan-inducing Yuletide joke before spitting out the customary crown and a miniature portrait of the host. Harry had promptly vanished his the moment he was a safe distance from the gathering, though he figured Hermione had felt a tad more guilty about disposing the party favor so flippantly.
She withdrew the neatly folded green paper crown from the neatly organized pile on the side table to her right and offered it up half-heartedly. Harry was very pleased by the gesture.
"Give it here,” he ordered, gleefully accepting the crown and unfolding it. He situated the crown lopsidedly on his head, unable to set it straight in his mess of hair and looked to Hermione expectantly. “How do I look?”
Hermione snickered. “Proper festive,” she declared.
The two ate their biscuits in relative silence, occasionally laughing when either made eye contact mid-bite. Harry got the sense that his silly gesture truly had made Hermione feel better. The anxious crease that had folded between her brows had disappeared after she gave her first smile. The Arithmancy book lay forgotten at her side, no darting glances hinting she wanted to return to reading. They finished their snacks and with a wordless wave of her wand, Hermione Vanished the crumbs that dotted their laps.
There was still a quiet between them after all had been tidied. Hermione was the one to break the awkwardness with an interjection, a sincere one at that.
"It's not Lavender I envy, Harry. It's Ron,” she admitted, at such at an unusual speed that the words would have blended together if not for her precise enunciation.
"Okay..." Harry responded, not quite understanding what she was saying in more senses than one.
Hermione took in a steeling breath and proceeded. "What I mean is, I am not jealous that Ron is dating Lavender. It's more that I'm jealous that she's dating him."
Harry still looked at her confused. He was trying to untangle the web of words in his brain, understanding she was saying something of weight but not quite grasping the concept. Perhaps, he considered, if he hadn’t been so drained from banal socializing and end of term assignments, it would have come to him faster.
Harry’s blank stare and incoherent self-resolving murmuring did nothing to soothe Hermione’s anxious nature, so she blindly cut to the chase. "Harry, I fancy—”
The pieces fell into place sharply in Harry’s head. The realization caused him to cut her off mid-statement. "—you fancy Lavender!
He looked to her, mouth agape, for confirmation.
Hermione gave a sheepish nod and squeaked, “Yes.”
Still mystified, Harry ran through it all in his head, reconsidering every interaction he’d seen from his friend.
“But I thought that you and Ron—” he was about to question, overcome quickly by a feeling of embarrassment.
“I was— I mean, I did fancy him. It’s just… Lavender sits next to me in Charms and she’s actually clever when she wants to be and I share a dorm with her and I… I suppose I didn’t quite realize how pretty she was until now,” Hermione rambled, flustered beyond measure.
Harry whistled in astonishment and leaned back against the cushions. “No wonder their whole relationship irks you, it’s the bloke you used to fancy and the girl you currently fancy being obnoxiously affectionate with one another,” he mused aloud.
Hermione elbowed Harry playfully, but there was also a defensive warning in the gesture. “It’s all right with you then? That I also fancy girls?”
She had put on a brave face in case Harry admitted the worst, but he could still see the insecure eleven year old he’d met in their first year, the girl that just wanted to be accepted. He reached out and grabbed her hand that had been shuddering against her leg, holding it softly.
“Hermione, you’re my best friend. Who you fancy does nothing to change that. It could never alter how much I care about you. I mean, without you, I probably wouldn’t be alive still. I’m not going anywhere,” he stated, meaning every word. It was clumsy, he knew that. But it was the best his increasingly addled brain could muster, he hoped she would understand.
Tears pricked at Hermione’s eyes and she pulled her hand from Harry’s grip to wipe them away. She sniffed as she pinched the bridge of her nose, a soft smile threatening to overwhelm her lips. After a moment, she leaned over and wrapped her arms around Harry in a tight hug. Harry was quick to mirror her. They sat like that for a while.
Once Hermione seemed reasonably calm, Harry felt he now had the license to tease. “I mean, Lavender? Really?”
Hermione unwrapped herself from him and looked aghast at his teasing for a moment before arching her eyebrow in an unserious look.
“Oh, you have no place to judge my taste,” she declared. “Frankly, your blanket obsession with Draco Malfoy merits some questioning.”
“I do not— Draco is not— he is…” Harry could sense he was fighting a losing battle, the rosy pink color that had come to his cheeks did very little to aid him.
He could not deny the sense of curiosity that Draco piqued in him, but he did not wish to talk about it in that moment. The prospect seemed far too mortifying. It was a shelved subject of introspection, reserved for a later date when he could analyze those feelings in a locked room with no one around.
Hermione devolved into a fit of giggles over Harry’s startled response, one that into which he followed suit. They tried desperately to keep down their volume, which only made it more difficult to contain their laughter. Eventually, their illogical chuckling petered out and they were simply looking at each other with contented smiles. At that, Hermione began to gather up her study materials in a comfortable silence. Once all had been gathered, she looked to Harry with a meaningful expression. “Thank you.”
He didn’t need to ask what for, he simply replied, “You’re welcome.”
Harry moved to lay down as Hermione walked toward the stairs when an earnest thought struck him.
"If I don't see you before we leave, happy Christmas,” he said.
Hermione looked to him with a similar earnestness. “Happy Christmas, Harry.”
Soon, her footsteps drifted up the staircase and the common room was quiet once again. Harry lowered his head onto one of the decorative pillows and cozied himself against the cushions. He didn’t stop to think who might wake him come morning, nor if he may look foolish curled up on the sofa. Harry drifted asleep to the sounds of the crackling hearth, feeling lighter than he had in many months.