Chapter Text
The common room was empty, typical for midnight on a Monday. The fireplaces were low, casting only the barest orange glow. The room maintained its trademark cozy mess - there were still piles of books on some of the coffee tables, a green Fanged Frisbee Hermione was sure she had confiscated was tucked into the cushions of an armchair, and the vestiges of the weekend’s after-Quidditch party could still be seen in the far reaches of the room, clinging on as if resistant to being swept away by the house elves.
Hermione still felt a tightness in her chest as she remembered the events of that party in particular.
Ron and Lavender, sitting in the far armchair, snogging like the other was air-
Whatever. She had nothing to say about Ron.
Liar, accused the little voice inside her.
Whatever.
She banished the thought of Ron from her head and turned her thoughts to the note in her hand, passed to her by her other best friend during dinner.
Hermione wasn’t sure what to expect from Harry’s request to meet her in the dead of night on a weekday. She’d dressed for the cold, as she was told, but she had no clue what Harry could possibly need her for. Another exasperatingly unfounded suspicion about Malfoy perhaps, or maybe something to do with Professor Dumbledore’s lessons that he couldn’t tell her everything about when other people were around.
But, evidently, as the boy in question snuck down the stairs from the boy’s dorm with a basket and blanket in hand, perhaps something different was on his mind tonight.
Harry grinned when he saw her. “You’re here.” It was shy, his chin almost ducked into the collar of his coat.
“Did you not want me to be?” she raised an eyebrow. He had, after all, asked her to be in the common room before midnight.
“No, I’m glad. I was just worried you might not come.”
Annoyance gripped her. “Do you really think so little of me, Harry?”
He gestured his surrender. “No, not at all. It’s just… I was worried that we haven’t been very good friends to each other recently, and I thought you might brush me off.”
Hermione bristled in hurt. “I have not been a bad friend to you, Harry. I’m just trying to look out for your interests, and limiting your obsession with Malfoy is helping you out more than anything else.” If anything, Harry, with his stupid bystander policy and attempts to stay out of her issues with Ron had been worse.
Rather than snap back at her in response, Harry’s grin merely dropped and was replaced with a look Hermione could only describe as sincere. “I know, Hermione. I’m not trying to accuse you of anything. Hell, I think I’ve been pretty shite to you, if anything,” he grimaced. “I know that this year in particular, but not just this year, I’ve been awful at taking your side when I should and standing up for you against the people that hurt you. I want to be better to you, if you’ll let me.”
He ran a hand through his hair, as though stressed. “Actually, that’s why I asked you to meet me tonight, so we could just do something as friends like we used to. Take it as a peace offering?”
She blinked. It was odd, seeing Harry this direct and mature about matters of emotions and relationships, especially about the recent fragility of their own friendship.
That’s not to say that Harry was necessarily bad at navigating these sorts of things, but he was typically the type to act without thinking and ask for forgiveness later, his natural likeability working in his favour.
It hadn’t been a full apology, sure, but she wasn’t one to trod on this new change in her friend, and Hermione felt her brief flash of anger melt away to be replaced with the smallest tinge of guilt.
He had seemed off-balance to her before, but this moment felt like a shift in something fundamental.
“That sounds lovely, actually,” she said, surprising herself. It was true that she and Harry hadn’t spent much time together recently, given their fights and their separate obligations. “But what is it that you actually want to do?”
His grin returned. “Well, we’re going outside, obviously. Hope you don’t mind breaking curfew.”
“Please, you and I both know half the school breaks curfew every other night.”
(Having only four prefects and two professors patrol an entire magical castle the size of Hogwarts every evening was borderline dysfunctional, as she had quickly learned at the beginning of fifth year.)
“Good. Follow me then.”
“‘Going outside’ is not an answer, Harry.”
He gave her a casual shrug, and his eyes twinkled with a deliberate amusement. “I know, but that would be telling, wouldn’t it?”
It was cloudy out, which obscured the moonlight enough that Hermione had to watch her step as she moved alongside Harry.
He seemed to be in a rush for some reason she couldn’t discern.
She followed him all the way to the very edges of the Forbidden Forest, on the side opposite Hagrid’s hut, where the trees obscured their path and presumably their destination well enough that she was sure that no one could possibly spot them from the castle.
As she stepped over roots and around gnarled branches, she was left with the chance to consider her dark-haired friend in front of her.
Harry had been distant recently. She knew that Sirius’s death, alongside the whiplash of Wizarding Britain now treating him like some prophesied saviour, was affecting him in ways she could never comprehend.
However, she suspected that there was something personally between her and Harry; he had been avoiding her in particular, so much so that Hermione had even stopped mentioning his battered Potions book in fear that she was driving him away with her nagging.
Yet, that didn’t seem to be all of it: every time he’d looked at her over the last few months there was an apprehension that she couldn’t place, his face screwing up with something vaguely resembling guilt until he couldn’t help but turn away.
It hurt, the idea that she and Harry were drifting. It made her feel like she was six again, sitting on the playground bench with a book because no one wanted her.
Although, as she thought about the cross-shaped scar on her sternum, maybe guilt wasn’t such a strange thing for Harry to be feeling. His “saving people” complex was still in full force, after all, and she internally grimaced at the idea that she was only now coming to the conclusion that he might still be blaming himself for everything that had happened last year at the Ministry.
Suddenly, she emerged from the trees, and her thoughts were interrupted as the vision she saw stole her breath away.
They had arrived at a little clearing, but it wasn’t just a patch of grass.
It was, in a word, picturesque.
She could see the Black Lake in the distance, shimmering with the barest hints of light. The copse of trees protected them from the worst of the wind, the reaching branches wrapping around them as if hiding this little slice of peace from the rest of the world. The grass of the small meadow, rustling with the breeze, was taller than her knees, but utterly soft as she brushed her hands over the tops of the blades.
Merlin, this place felt magical.
She was disturbed from her quiet reverie by Harry’s waving hand. Whilst Hermione had been lost in wordless wonder, her friend had thrown down the blanket and secured it to the ground with what she assumed were sticking charms, creating an environment not unsuitable for a picnic, if not for the midnight timing. Although, Hermione thought, as she looked at the now open basket, stuffed with snacks and charmed warming mugs, her initial impression probably wasn’t far off the mark.
She joined him and sat down on the ground. “What is this place, Harry? It’s wonderful.”
“It is, isn’t it?” A quiet pride filled his voice; the kind of pride that came from sharing something important, and it being received with appreciation.
“How did you even find it? I swear it would be impossible to spot from a window, even from the Astronomy Tower.”
The smile on his face was wistful. “I was talking to Hagrid earlier this year about needing a place to go where my head wouldn’t get in the way, and he told me about this spot. Remember fourth year, after that Skeeter article, and we would go pounding on his door? Apparently, a lot of the time he spent here.”
Their fingers brushed as Harry passed her a charmed mug, full of warm chamomile tea – her favourite. She felt warmth pool in her spine, a quiet but loving embarrassment at being seen so thoroughly.
They sipped on their mugs quietly.
“It must be gorgeous in the day,” she murmured, her fingers tracing the rim of the mug.
“It must be,” he agreed. “But there’s a reason I asked you to meet me here, specifically tonight.”
She raised an eyebrow, though she was sure he wouldn’t be able to see her in the darkness. “What, some sort of dark ritual to corrupt young witches? You needed a test subject?” she teased.
He snorted. “No, but thanks for volunteering. Something else actually, but you’ll have to wait.”
Her curiosity only rose, but she could tell he would remain tight-lipped. “Fine.”
The silence between them stretched, becoming awkward.
Before Hermione could say something else, Harry started talking. “I want to continue my apology from earlier. You know, for kind of being shit to you, especially this whole thing with Ron.”
She frowned. “It’s fine, Harry. You’ve been dealing with a lot recently, and I’m not your responsibility. Besides, it’s not fair of me to ask you to take sides between us.”
“But it’s not fine, Hermione.” He sighed.
“Look. Ron has always been a bit of a fair-weather friend, you know? Sometimes it feels like he’ll do anything for you, like get smashed by a giant chess piece or run into the Ministry against Voldemort himself, but other times it feels like you’re walking on eggshells around him just because he’s insecure about being the youngest brother of six.”
Harry ran his hands through the grass, grabbed a handful, and then let it float away in the wind like confetti.
“But you’ve always been on my side, through thick and thin. Even when we do fight, like about that stupid broomstick, it was always because you had my interests in mind and I wanted to be an idiot instead of listening to you.”
His voice changed then. Hardened. “I see you get cursed in my nightmares, you know? I see Ron getting trapped by those brains sometimes too, just like I see Neville getting tortured and Luna breaking her ankle, but the thing I’m most scared of in my head is seeing you get hit by Dolohov’s spell, only instead of being hurt… you’re dead.”
Like Sirius.
It went unsaid.
Then, the edges of his voice melted away. “But when I wake up, you’re still here for me. You haven’t stopped caring even though I got you hurt, while Ron gives me shit for it so I might be guilted into dating Ginny. When I’m left in the middle of those two kinds of friendships, how can I possibly try to stand in the middle as if that’s the right thing to do? You deserve better from me Hermione, and I’m sorry I haven’t realized before now.”
Hermione gaped at Harry, her jaw nearly dropped open. She’d sometimes had these thoughts before, when she was at her most angry and vengeful, but she’d never truly expected Harry to abandon Ron, not when the redhead was Harry’s very first friend, when the Burrow had been the first place Harry had sort of felt at home outside of Hogwarts.
It took a special courage to abandon a bond like that.
A new kind of warm tension seemed to grow in her gut, a mix of shame and something else. “Harry, you don’t have to stop being friends with him just to make me happy,” she protested.
He shook his head. “You don’t get it Hermione – this isn’t just about me trying to make you happy or supporting you, even though that is a big part of it. It’s about choosing the people I can trust and standing beside them when they need me. I know that no matter what, I can trust you with my life and more, and- well, I can’t say the same for him, can I?”
Hermione felt her heart swell as he continued to talk.
“Regardless, it was wrong of him to treat you like that, Hermione. You’re a lovely, brilliant girl who deserves someone who will treat you right-” he cut off, much to Hermione’s amusement and, judging by his slightly pink cheeks, just barely visible in the starlight, Harry’s own embarrassment.
“Thank you, Harry.” Her own cheeks were warm – it dawned on her that here, there was someone who saw her and prioritised her. Somehow, it felt right that it was Harry, with his relentlessly big heart, who finally gave her what she’d been wanting from Ron all year.
Then, drawn by something, Harry’s eyes looked skyward, and he sucked in a breath. “It’s happening.” As if on cue, the clouds drifted away, and for a moment, the full moon shone on them.
Hermione felt something swell, and she gasped when she looked around the clearing. Everywhere in the grass, there were tiny glowing flowers, emitting an ethereal white-blue glow, as if reflecting the moonlight themselves. They swayed gently with the night breeze, and little specks of them blew away with the wind, dragging the glow skywards.
She reached for one next to her, its delicate, tiny petals almost flaking away at the brush of her finger coming up beneath it.
“They’re called myosotis selenus. Forgotten-Selenes, related to mundane forget-me-nots.” Harry’s voice was soft. “Named after the Titan of the moon who we replaced with Artemis. The books say that they only appear in the light of the full moon, but immediately discorporate into less than dust when the sunrise begins.”
She turned to him, eager to know more. Instead, she felt floored. Harry was holding a flower in his hand, and he looked at it with a tenderness she’d never known he’d possessed, a sort of gentleness that transformed his face into something that her mind seemed to stumble on.
Something she lingered on.
She swallowed. “They’re beautiful.”
His attention was drawn to her.
“They are,” he agreed, and held that softness as he turned to look at her. Hermione felt her heart stutter, and she prayed her face wasn’t as warm as it felt. She hid her face by taking another sip of her tea.
“Why do you…?” The words tripped out of her, her tongue moving faster than her thoughts.
Why do you know so much about these flowers?
Why do you look so reverently at them?
Why do you look at me like that?
Mercifully, Harry’s gaze tore off of her and back towards the blossom in his hands. “After I saw them for the first time and was absolutely mesmerized, I went to the library and did some research on them, funnily enough. They’re the flowers of the moon, but they’re also associated with tales about the fae, especially the ones that snatched away wizarding children when they were left alone.”
She smiled at the idea of Harry voluntarily looking up obscure fairy tales in the back corners of the library; she had clearly rubbed off on him a little, after all the years. “Do those stories have any truth to them?” she asked curiously.
Hermione could tell that he mentally went somewhere very, very far away. “Some. There were uncountable reports of missing children, most often by wizarding nobility in the Middle Ages, in which a child who was sickly or prone to wandering off disappeared with no explanation. These families would search high and low for them but would eventually claim that they vanished into dust – then the first Herbologist to find these flowers described his findings, and naturally the pureblood explanation was that there was some connection.” He paused. “I think that’s a load of shite, though. Those kids disappeared because they were neglected, not because some faerie stole them away. Maybe because they ran away, and the noble houses couldn’t bear the shame.”
Hermione nodded slowly. There was a pregnant tension in the air, and she felt as though she might disturb it if she even moved a hair too quickly.
She chose her words gently. “Wizards do always try to pin the blame on magic, don’t they?”
He smirked as if telling a joke to himself, his eyes not meeting hers. “Not just wizards.”
Hermione wasn’t oblivious to what that might mean: she knew that Harry’s home life with his Muggle relatives wasn’t good because they disliked wizards.
Disliked him.
She’d suspected since their first year, looking at a scrawny, obviously underfed boy who was uncomfortable with any touch, much less her hugs.
She’d known for sure in second year, since the twins had described his walrus of a cousin and uncle, whilst Harry had come back looking even thinner than before, as though he’d been starved.
But no matter how much she observed, she’d never asked. She’d put extra food on his plate at mealtimes and sized his hand-me-downs to fit him with shrinking charms, but she’d never felt brave enough to ask him outright.
Seeing Harry look so vulnerable, staring into nothing, she felt maybe that she had been wrong earlier in the night.
Maybe she hadn’t been a very good friend to him after all. Maybe being a good friend meant being brave – brave like Harry had just been with her.
So, she asked. “Tell me?”
His eyebrow slowly raised, as if confused that she would enquire here where she never had before. Then, after a moment of searching, as if assured of her sincerity, he hesitantly began to speak.
“My aunt and my uncle hate magic. They knew my parents were wizards, and they hated having to raise me after they died.” His voice was slow and uncertain, as if working through words he’d never used before.
“It was okay when I was very young, I think, but things got really bad when I started doing accidental magic. I turned my teacher’s hair blue once when he started yelling at me. Vernon beat me until I couldn’t walk before locking me in my cupboard under the stairs, so I missed a week of school. He said he wanted to smack the freak out of me.”
Hermione felt her chest cave in with horror. She hadn’t known what to expect, but whatever she had been thinking, this was worse. A cupboard?
But Harry continued, oblivious. “One time, I was running from Dudley and his crew when they were Harry Hunting, and I ended up on top of the school roof without any explanation. They didn’t hurt me that time, but they refused to give me food for a week until one of the schoolteachers noticed I had nothing in my pack lunches.
The worst part was doing chores for them. I had to cook every meal, clean the house, do all the laundry, everything. Earn my keep for being left on their doorstep as a baby, you know? My least favourite chore was gardening, though. My aunt had the ugliest looking flowers, and the rabbits would come eat the heads off every spring. Whenever it happened, Petunia pretended like it was my fault, and smacked me with a trowel while I tried to weed between whatever the rabbits had left.
One day, when she wasn’t looking, I realized I could make even the dead flowers bloom by holding my hand over the chomped off bits and holding a certain feeling in my head. When I made the tulips and the roses bloom again, my aunt looked like she’d seen someone die. She said “Lily” under her breath. I had no idea what she was talking about too – we didn’t have any lilies in the garden, and I tried to explain so she wouldn’t be so mad with me, but she still beat me and locked me away. I wasn’t allowed to use gloves in the garden after that. I remember being so confused, Hermione. She was so mad when her flowers were gone, so I made them come back.”
He drew in a shaky breath. Hermione felt as though she would never breathe again.
“Why wouldn’t she love me for that? I just wanted her to love me like a mum, I think. I think the feeling I held in my head when I made those flowers grow again was grief from not having one.”
He had grown solemn in the course of his explanation, but some twisted grin made its way onto his face as he drew to a finish. “Then, I learned from Professor Flitwick last year when we learned the bouquet charm that my mother loved to conjure flowers all the time, especially when she first got to Hogwarts – it was her first instance of accidental magic, apparently, and she must have done it all the time at home. I think that’s what my aunt saw, you know? I think all my uncle had for me was hate, but for my aunt I was all her grief and all her jealousy of my mum, wrapped up into one. She blamed it all on magic, and so she blamed it all on me. Silly, isn’t it?”
Harry finally looked at Hermione, and he looked startled to see her red-eyed, with hot tears silently streaming down her face. “Oh, fuck, Hermione. Are you okay?” His voice was filled with intense concern, which only twisted the feeling in Hermione’s gut further.
Hermione let out a sob. “Oh, Harry, how can you be asking me if I’m okay?” She set down her mug and almost launched herself at her friend, throwing her arms around him and burying her face into his chest. She could feel his almost tentative reciprocation, his arms coming around her slowly.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” she said, her voice breaking with emotion.
She could hear the confusion in his voice, and she would have smacked him for it if she was more emotionally stable. “Sorry for what, Hermione?”
“Sorry for what?” She was incredulous. “Harry- I’m- For never asking! For letting you go home to those vile, vile people every summer, and for being such- such a horrible friend to you!” she cried, the horror of it all still thrumming. Bruises, thin ribs, hollow cheeks, all of it on his frame- all of it on a lonely child, locked in a cupboard, crying for a mother that was long dead.
Alone, god, he’d been alone – how had she never seen? How had she never been there for him?
Harry gently grabbed her shoulders and held her so that she could see his face, even through the film of her tears. Her hands dropped from around him into her lap. “Hermione, you haven’t ever been a horrible friend to me. You are my best friend, remember? You’ve never given up on me, even when I was facing down a literal dragon. You’ve never turned your back on me, never let me charge into things alone even when its dangerous for you, and you’ve never done something to hurt me.”
“But-”
He sighed. “But nothing, Hermione! You couldn’t have known.”
She refused to be moved. “But I could have! I suspected all along, I could have told a teacher or Professor Dumbledore or-”
Harry cut her off again. “Dumbledore knows. He’s the one making me go back every year, remember?”
“What good are those stupid blood protections if they can’t protect you from- from your own family, Harry?”
He smiled sadly. “I don’t know.”
She refused to meet his gaze, looking down instead at her empty hands. “I just- I had this terrible feeling that all this time, something was wrong, but I still never did anything. I might as well have watched as you get hurt by them, Harry, all because I didn’t know a thing about your life outside of Hogwarts.”
Again, his voice betrayed the undeserved softness he held for her. “And that’s not your fault, Hermione. Adults failed me. You were a child.”
“So were you!”
Harry froze, but nodded nonetheless. “So was I.” He swallowed. “So was I. Anyways, you aren’t a bad friend, Hermione. You are the best I have, and the best I could ever want. Please, please, don’t blame yourself.”
Merlin, but the resentment she’d felt towards Harry as a friend in the last few weeks, or even years, suddenly felt so small.
He’d made mistakes in their friendship, as he’d acknowledged, but he always apologized or talked things out with her or tried to gently persuade her away from her own stubbornness instead of being stubborn in response.
Harry was a boy who made the mistakes that any teenager might make, let alone one constantly in life-threatening danger, but he handled the consequences with maturity and sincerity that only belied his care for her.
Caught up in her own feelings of jealousy and frustration this year and her cowardice in the years before, Hermione knew she couldn’t say the same. Shame forced its way up from deep inside her, but the way he so earnestly looked at her fought against her guilt.
It’s okay, his eyes seemed to say. We’ve hurt each other before, and we might hurt each other again, but we still fit right with each other, don’t we?
In the face of his silent urging, she struggled against the tight feeling in her throat and warbled out her thoughts. “Okay. But if you want to tell me I’ve not been a bad friend, you’re not a bad friend either, Harry. I don’t care about anything you mentioned tonight. You’ve always been my best friend too.”
It was her turn to be surprised as Harry trapped her in firm embrace, his face buried into her shoulder as if breathing her in. The warmth came back to her cheeks, mixing in with every other feeling she’d already felt under the moon.
He pulled back – reluctantly, Hermione imagined – and wiped off the tears that remained on her face. As his hand came to gently cup her cheek, she held his gaze.
She felt maybe that this moment, with the flowerlight and the moon casting his face into the most brilliant lines and his emerald eyes following her own with an almost adoring fixation, would be burned into her memory forever. Hermione traced the arch of his brows into the curve of his nose into the soft lines of his mouth.
And then the moment shattered when Harry dropped his hand and turned around, and Hermione was left to wrestle with a strangely empty disappointment resting in her sternum. At least, until he turned back towards her with a glowing flower in one hand, his other reaching down to grasp her right hand.
“Hold it right there for me.”
She obliged and watched as he delicately tied the flower around her middle finger. Every soft brush of his touch sent shivers running through her until she was left with a gorgeous little ring, the blossom facing up as if it were a gem.
“A promise, that we’ll always be good to each other,” he whispered.
That warm feeling settled in her again, and clarity struck Hermione as she felt what she had forced herself not to feel since the end of third year. This was a feeling she had denied with all her heart out of fear, and that denial had led to her fancying Ron in the first place in the summer before fifth year.
But she wasn’t able to deny it any longer. She had been feeling this confusing but comforting warmth all night, ever since the boy in front of her had confessed that he would always be on her side.
Always be hers.
Merlin help her, she might like Harry Potter.
Not the big version of him, the Boy-who-lived-and-would-fight-again, but this soft, kind, vulnerable Harry, who seemed to have somehow learned to cradle her heart in his hands.
She tried not to panic, knowing that a flush had already worked its way up her entire face.
Her emotions were high, she knew, after all the confessions and promises of the night. Rationally thinking about her new-but-old feelings for her best friend right then was only going to ever cause her to spiral, so she let instinct guide her instead.
She turned to gently pick a flower herself and gestured for him to hold up his left hand. The way his face lit up as she gave him a matching ring made Hermione’s stomach flip.
They settled back down to behold the lake, now truly shining under the bright moon, and Hermione couldn’t help but let her gaze fall in between them, where their ringed hands were mere hairs from touching each other.
She couldn’t name whatever this was, this beautiful, fragile thing she and Harry had between them right then.
What she was sure of, however, was that she wanted to hold it for as long as possible, to let it expand in her chest until it reached the very tips of her limbs, but she couldn’t help but worry that as the flowers would disintegrate with the sunrise, this would go away too.
Then, as their hands shifted slightly, such that they barely touched, Hermione was reminded that the evening hadn’t really been about the ethereal clearing under the moon, beautiful as it was.
It was about him seeing her, and her seeing him in return.
And unlike the flowers, they wouldn’t disappear when the sun rose.