Chapter Text
It was a fact that Harry Potter had once faced a Hungarian Horntail.
A real, living dragon with spikes all over its tail and flames hot enough to turn stone to caramel. He'd flown around its head three times on his Firebolt, stolen its egg, taken a gash to the shoulder, lost half his robes to fire, and still come in first. Everyone said he was brave. The Daily Prophet had run a full-page spread.
And yet, sitting in the armchair furthest from the fire in the Gryffindor common room, staring at a book that had been open on his lap for twenty minutes without him reading a single word, Harry Potter felt his stomach undergoing a crisis far more unpleasant than dragon fire.
The Yule Ball.
Professor McGonagall had announced it in her usual flat tone. Champions must have partners and lead the first dance—her eyes had landed on Harry with surgical precision at the word "lead," as if the lightning bolt scar on his forehead had suddenly turned into a target. Neville had made a small, dying sound beside him, but Harry hadn't had the time to sympathize with Neville. His own throat was doing something similar.
Besides, just because someone else was on the same sinking ship didn't mean he'd escape drowning.
Laughter erupted from the other side of the fireplace. Fred Weasley was standing on the arm of the sofa, shouting across the common room to Angelina Johnson.
"Hey, Angelina!"
Angelina looked up, the beads in her braids swinging.
"Want to go to the ball with me?"
The whole common room was watching. Fred had his hands in his pockets. Angelina sized him up for a second.
"All right."
And that was it. Fred jumped off the sofa arm with some inexplicable bow, and George applauded beside him like it was a sporting event. Fifteen seconds. That was all it had taken.
Give me another dragon, please.
Fred was the sort of person who could bribe his way past the angels on Judgement Day, so his behaviour wasn't representative of anything. Harry turned a page. Read the first sentence of the same page twice. Gave up. His gaze drifted over the top of the book to where Hermione sat across the room, next to the fire. She was writing an essay, her quill scratching across the parchment in quick, fine strokes. The firelight lit up the edges of her bushy brown hair, making it look like a cloud full of static electricity.
Her lips were moving. Silently. She was mouthing the sentences she'd written—Harry knew that habit, because he'd sat across from her for four years. Four years.
Hermione Granger. He repeated the name in his head.
The problem was Cho Chang. The problem was that he'd thought the problem was Cho Chang. For the past few weeks, every time he'd brushed past Cho in the corridor, his face had heated up, his tongue had tied itself into knots, and he'd felt like a snake that had been hit with a Petrificus Totalus. He'd talked to Ron about it. He'd talked to himself about it (lying in his four-poster, staring at the canopy). He'd even thought about what words to use when he invited her—in the shower.
But those words were all rubbish. Because every time he actually pictured himself walking up to Cho Chang and opening his mouth, his brain automatically shut down.
And there was something else. Something he'd only started noticing recently, and it was making him deeply uneasy.
Viktor Krum was watching Hermione.
Harry was famous himself—he knew what curious looks looked like. But the way Krum watched Hermione was completely different. He kept showing up in the library. Three times a week. Four. Harry wasn't counting on purpose, but he remembered, because every time he went to the library with Hermione, Krum was there. Sitting by the History section, pretending to read a book he hadn't turned more than a few pages of in two hours, looking over the spine in Hermione's direction every few minutes.
His gang of Durmstrang mates would huddle by the door, whispering and snickering. Krum himself remained expressionless, his brooding face pulled tight as drumskin. But his eyes tracked Hermione's movements—from when she stood up to find a book, to when she came back and sat down, to when she tucked her hair behind her ear and revealed that tiny mole on her neck.
He'd better just be reading.
Harry turned a page. The same page.
Fine. He wasn't reading.
Hermione seemed entirely oblivious. Or she'd chosen to be oblivious, which was entirely possible with her. Hermione could notice something and decide it wasn't worth her attention, and then she genuinely wouldn't pay it any more mind. It was a skill Harry envied fiercely.
If someone asked her first.
The thought came with a cold chill, rising from the pit of his stomach and freezing his diaphragm. He pushed it down, quickly and forcefully.
Don't be stupid. She's your best friend. You should want her to be happy. You should want everyone lining up to ask her, because she deserves it. She deserves a whole stage full of flowers—
But "should" had never been able to control Harry Potter.
He stared at Hermione. Her quill paused. She frowned, scratched out a sentence, rewrote it beside the original. Ink on her fingers—a thin black line along the side of her index finger.
I want to ask Hermione to the ball.
I want to ask Hermione to the ball, and then I want to dance with her, and then I want—
He didn't let himself finish that sentence. He closed the book and stood up.
The next afternoon, Harry stood behind one of the stone pillars at the library entrance for about five minutes. He wasn't hiding—he just happened to be standing behind a stone pillar, and happened to be facing the library doors, and happened to be catching glimpses of the interior every time the doors swung open and shut. Hermione was in her usual spot. Krum was angled sideways, facing in her direction. His book today was a different one, but the page number was just as suspicious.
Harry saw Krum push his chair back a little. He stood up.
He was going over.
Krum walked down the aisle between two bookshelves, his deep crimson fur cloak—the Durmstrang uniform was really a bit much indoors, did he really need to be so conspicuous?—brushing against the edge of the shelves. Hermione looked up, her expression caught somewhere between polite and impatient.
Harry couldn't hear what they were saying. Krum's voice was low and mumbling, thick with accent. Hermione said something. Krum nodded. Hermione said something else, faster this time. Krum nodded again. And then he smiled.
A tiny smile. On Viktor Krum's perpetually stormy face, it was the equivalent of a rainbow.
Good. Great. Fantastic.
Harry took a deep breath.
Krum turned and walked away. He passed the pillar Harry was hiding behind without looking sideways, his footsteps fading down the corridor. Hermione was still sitting in her spot. She seemed about to go back to her essay, but her quill hovered above the parchment for a moment before it touched down.
Harry stepped out from behind the pillar.
His heart was thumping in his chest like someone was playing a drum inside it as he walked into the library. His shoes squeaked on the flagstones; Madam Pince shot him a look from behind her desk, and he tried to make his footsteps lighter.
Hermione looked surprised to see him—she probably thought he'd wandered in by accident.
"Hi," Harry said. Then he sat down across from her, and the chair legs scraped loudly against the floor. An ominous cough came from Madam Pince's direction.
"Hi," Hermione said, her quill not stopping. "You're in the library."
"I'm in the library," he agreed.
Hermione's quill paused. She glanced up at him quickly, as if checking to see if he'd been hit by some bizarre curse.
"Are you all right?"
"Yeah."
"Did Ron send you to copy my Potions essay?"
"No."
"Are you sure?"
"Hermione."
She put her quill down. Completely. Folded her hands on the parchment, leaned forward slightly, and looked at him with those serious brown eyes. Harry had seen her do that to professors and books a hundred times. But when the focus was on him, the air got thinner.
"What's wrong?"
Say it. Just say it. Open your mouth, let your vocal cords vibrate, let the air come out of your lungs and turn into words. It's not hard. Fred did it. Fred did it in front of the entire common room in under fifteen seconds.
Harry looked into Hermione's eyes. They were brown. Deep brown, darker near the pupils, ringed with a lighter amber at the edges. He'd never noticed that before. Or had he noticed and ignored it? That was probably worse, because now it wasn't just that he'd noticed—it was that he couldn't stop noticing.
"The ball," he said.
"Oh." Hermione's expression shifted. "Right, the ball. Are you nervous about the opening dance? Because Professor McGonagall said she'd teach us the basic steps, you know, once you find the beat it's not that hard, and I read that waltzing is actually very mathematical if you think of it as—"
"Go with me."
Hermione's mouth stopped halfway open.
Silence.
That had sounded like a command. Merlin, had he just commanded her to go to the ball with him?
"I mean—" Harry's face was heating up like someone had poured a whole kettle of hot tea over it. "Would you—do you want—will you go to the ball with me? With—me? To the Yule Ball. As my, er. As my partner."
Harry's voice had gotten very small by the last few words. His throat had decided to contract on its own, and the tuft of hair at the back of his head was twitching in what felt like a mockery of confidence.
Hermione stared at him. Her mouth closed, opened, closed again.
"You want to go to the ball with me," she repeated. Her tone was flat.
"Yes."
"With me. Hermione." Why was she repeating it like that? Did she think he'd gotten the name wrong?
"Yes, Hermione. You, Hermione. Hermione Granger. Bushy-haired, bossy, knows-everything-right. That Hermione." Harry regretted it immediately.
"Bushy-haired" and "bossy." Excellent, Potter. Very romantic. Right up there with the Valentine's card you got in second year.
But Hermione laughed. The corner of her mouth twitched, her lips curved up to show a hint of teeth, and then the smile spread across her whole face, all the way to her brown eyes, where a warm glow lit up. Harry's stomach did a backflip, and it reminded him of diving on his Firebolt—wind in his ears, the ground rushing up, knowing he could die at any second and not wanting to stop.
"But—what about Cho?" Hermione asked. The smile was still there, but her eyes had grown a little more careful.
Cho.
"What about Cho?"
"I thought you—well, everyone's seen you—every time she walks past." Hermione made a gesture. A vague, hand-wavy thing in front of her face that roughly translated to "turn into a red-faced idiot."
Fair enough.
"I changed my mind."
Hermione stared at him.
"When?"
"What?"
"When did you change your mind?"
About the time he was standing behind a stone pillar watching a Bulgarian Seeker smile at her.
Harry decided not to say that.
"A while ago," he said. It wasn't entirely a lie. Because now that he thought about it, maybe something had been there all along—he'd just been too busy being chased by dragons, annoyed by reporters, and disliked by most of the school to take the time to see it clearly.
Hermione looked down at her essay. She wasn't reading the words, though. She was thinking. Harry knew that expression. Usually, five to ten seconds after it appeared, she'd give an answer, complete with citations and supplementary explanations.
When she looked up again, there was a faint pink flush on her cheeks. If you didn't know what colour Hermione Granger's face normally was, you might not have noticed. But Harry knew. Like he'd said—four years.
"All right."
"All right?"
"All right, I'll go to the ball with you, Harry."
Harry's chair legs scraped the floor again. This time, he didn't hear Madam Pince's cough. In fact, he didn't hear anything. There was a buzzing in his ears, like a Golden Snitch had flown into his brain.
"Brilliant," he said.
Hermione picked up her quill, but the curve of her smile was still there.
She'd said yes. She'd said yes. She'd said—
"Harry."
"Yeah?"
"You're staring."
This time, he didn't care. He picked up his book and held it up in front of his face, because he was absolutely sure he couldn't stop grinning, and if Ron saw it he'd never hear the end of it.
She'd said yes.