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Percy made a conscious effort to keep from smiling too much while he entered the Great Hall. Most of Gryffindor was at the house table already and Oliver logically wasn’t there yet, so he didn’t have much of a choice but to sit down opposite his youngest brother and his brother’s two best friends.
Ron and Harry barely looked at him, but Hermione smiled shyly in greeting. He nodded at her, sagely and authoritative, as any good Prefect befitted, and helped himself some carrots. Vegetables were an important part of any meal, after all.
He wasn’t quite sure what had happened when Hermione suddenly went into a coughing fit. Harry thumped her back.
“Are you alright?” Percy asked, because he felt it was one of his duties to ensure the well-being of younger fellow students.
Hermione sent him a startled look. “Y- Yes,” she stammered, as soon as she could get the words out. Apropos of nothing, she let out a short, slightly hysterical giggle. “I’m fine.”
“And you try to lecture me about chewing carefully,” Ron grumbled. “I’ve never choked on my food.”
“Hi, Percy,” Oliver said, who sat down next to him at that moment. He’d arrived a few minutes after Percy, just like they had agreed.
Oliver’s arrival served as a momentary distraction from Hermione’s curious behaviour, until he noticed she was now looking at both Oliver and him with a certain glint in her eye. He frowned. “Can I help you?”
“I’m fine,” she repeated, but her gaze flickered downward for a second and she turned visibly red with the effort it took to suppress what seemed to be even more laughter.
“Hermione, what’s going on?” Harry asked, feeling left out.
“Girls - they all go mad at some point, I’m telling you,” Ron grumbled. He didn’t seem to be up to much else that day.
Hermione had the good sense to ignore him. Her eyes wandered down a bit again, to some point on Percy’s chest, but then she looked straight at him. “Your badge is a little muddy,” she said innocently, expression revealing nothing.
Displeased, Percy looked down. He polished his Head Boy badge religiously every morning and was rather proud of how shiny he kept it looking. He could hardly believe it would have gotten dirty during a few hours of class. “I don’t know what you mean, Hermione. It’s- oh. Oh! Oh, Merlin.” Percy turned a deeper shade of red than even the twins had ever been able to elicit.
“What’s wrong?” Oliver asked.
Percy shot up from his seat, holding his hand conveniently placed over his badge, preventing Harry or Ron from seeing what exactly had caused all this fuss. Hermione had burst into laughter again, although she was still polite enough to at least make a token attempt at reining herself in as well as she could.
“We need to talk, Oliver,” Percy hissed.
“What? But-” Oliver’s further protestations were cut off by Percy bodily dragging him from his seat with surprising force and pushing him towards the exit of the Hall. The badge marking Oliver as Head Boy innocently glinted on the front of his robes, as did the one singling Percy out as Gryffindor’s Quidditch Captain on Percy’s chest.