lomonaaeren

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Part Three—Because You’re Hermione

“Harry, make her stop!”

Ron hisses the words to Harry when Harry is still busy stepping off the bottom step of the stairs up to the boys’ dormitory, scratching his face and yawning. Salazar tried to escape from his cage again a few hours after Harry caught him the first time, and now his body aches with tiredness.

“Make her stop what?” Harry mumbles, trying not to collapse into the chair by the fire so that he can just sleep the day away.

“Make Hermione stop that!”

Ron’s voice thunders through his head and finally wakes Harry up a little. He blinks stupidly at what seems to be a map spread all over the floor of the common room, a huge piece of parchment covered with dashes of different colors and blocks of numerals and letters. Harry frowns. From where he’s standing, he can’t read anything on the map (or whatever it is), but he has a very bad feeling about this.

“This is our study schedule!” Hermione announces from where she’s sitting in a chair by the fire. One of the seventh-year students edges around the parchment, crinkling the side. Hermione gives him a dirty look and casts a charm that flattens it.

“Hermione?” Harry asks in some alarm.

“I coded every hour between now and the onset of O.W.L.S!” Hermione’s eyes are so bright that Harry thinks he could use them to light his way down a corridor. “I made sure to leave enough time for sleeping and meals and walking between classes. And I didn’t count the time that we’ll be on the Easter holidays. But otherwise, every minute is accounted for!” She glances at a watch on her wrist Harry doesn’t remember her having. “I have allowed five minutes for debate.”

“Harry,” Ron says in dangerously whiny tones.

“Hermione,” Harry says as gently as possible. “What about time for relaxation and studying for the classes we have right now and doing the homework for them?” He hopes he can appeal to Hermione’s love of all academic success to make her realize how mad this is.

“I built that in. Well, time for relaxation is built into sleeping and walking between classes.” Hermione grimaces a little. “I also built in some for Quidditch games, but I suppose I might have missed some of the hours they could take. On the other hand, you barely need to practice, Harry, and Ron is a good enough Keeper with Oliver encouraging him. So you don’t really need to attend practices. We can just invite Oliver to the school. You know he’ll come.”

Harry stares at her for a moment. Hermione looks back at him, nodding slightly, as if to say that she knows this is overwhelming but he’ll get used to it if he just thinks about it.

Harry doesn’t want to get used to it.

“I appreciate your effort, Hermione,” he says. “But we also have to make time for more relaxation than just sleeping and walking between classes. You remember what happened third year?”

“That wouldn’t happen now, Harry!” Hermione says quickly. “I’m much older and more level-headed.”

“What kind of definition of level-headed is she—”

Harry Silences Ron with a little twitch of his wand, and Ron looks at him in outrage. Harry decides he’ll apologize later, but right now, he’s aiming to prevent two kinds of explosions.

“I think it will happen, if you try to break down every hour between now and the exams this way,” he says, and starts walking along the edge of the parchment. Peering at it shows that the area near Hermione’s feet is the one leading up to the O.W.L. exams themselves, and he crouches down and studies it. Then he sighs and looks at Hermione. “Hermione, you’ve only left yourself time for four hours of sleep.”

“I wouldn’t get more than that for worrying anyway! I might as well make productive use of it.”

Harry sighs again and stands up. “Hermione, I will help you study,” he says, and waits until her face lights up before he adds gently, “But not like this. My life can’t be this regimented anyway. You know all the stupid and weird things that happen to me. If nothing else, I don’t see any room for Lord Slytherin business that might arise.”

“I built it in.” Hermione glances over the enormous wheel of parchment for a moment. “There, you see? An hour on March fifteenth.”

Harry doesn’t roll his eyes, because Hermione is his friend and this is very important to her. But he does lean forwards and say, “This is going to damage your health, Hermione? And—” how to reach her “—do you think that you’ll be at your best on the exams if you’re battling exhaustion and maybe sickness?”

Hermione sucks in a loud breath and stares at him. Then she says, “But mental health is important, too, and by doing this, I can protect my mental health!”

“But what if something happens that prevents you from completing what you need to do every hour? Is that going to be less worrying?”

“Why should something happen?”

“I mean—if you get sick. Or a professor doesn’t assign as much homework as you think they will, or they assign more. Or one of us gets detention.”

“You are not getting detention, Harry Potter.”

Right, if this is what happens when Hermione has too little sleep, I am definitely not letting her go down this path. “I’ll do my best,” Harry says evenly. “But you know that some of the professors haven’t been sympathetic to me in the past, and Hogwarts can’t do anything about them if they’re just being professors. And I don’t want to use my Lord Slytherin powers to undermine them, either.”

“You are not getting detention.”

“It might happen anyway.” Harry reaches out and puts his hands on her shoulders. “You need to leave room in your schedule for things like that, Hermione. Not every minute can be devoted to studying.”

“At least five hundred minutes a day aren’t devoted to—”

“I care about you, Hermione. I’m your friend. I don’t want to do this, and I’m not going to let you do it to yourself, either. You know that you’re going to do brilliantly on the O.W.L.S. You know it. You don’t need to do this.”

Hermione’s bottom lip quivers a bit. Then she swallows and looks at Ron. “Does Ron agree?”

Harry starts and releases Ron from the Silencing Charm. Ron gives him the kind of narrow-eyed look that tells Harry they’re going to have words later, and then turns and faces Hermione. “Yeah, I do,” he says. “Hermione, this is mental. You must see that.”

“I just—I just want to pass my O.W.L.S. And I want to make sure that you do equally well, too.”

Ron leans forwards and gives Hermione a kind smile that Harry doesn’t think he could have found in himself. “We’re not going to do as well as you, Hermione. But what matters most to you is doing well, and what matters to me is other things.”

“Like what?”

“Quidditch. Staying healthy. Being able to spend time with my friends that doesn’t just involve studying or quizzing each other.”

“Even if—do you think that you’ll be able to get a good career if you don’t have the right O.W.L.S?”

Ron shrugs. “Everything I want to do involves good N.E.W.T.S, not good O.W.L.S. And a lot of the N.E. W.T. classes do take you with an Acceptable, you know.” Hermione looks so horrified that Ron adds hastily, “I want to do better than that. But the seventh-year exams are the most important.”

Hermione looks down at the circle of parchment around her chair and bites her lip. “So this is sort of silly, what I did?”

“You’re being Hermione,” Ron says. “That’s not silly. It just means that sometimes we need to be Harry and Ron and bring you back to reality a little.”

Harry nods, glad that Ron has been able to handle this part better than Harry could. He can’t do everything. It’s a solid reminder that he needs for himself. “And we’ll continue helping you practice spells and everything, Hermione. We’ll help you. We just can’t use every minute on the O.W.L. exams.”

Hermione sighs. “You’re right. I know you’re right. I don’t know why I—why I did this.”

“You’re being Hermione, and you worry about these things,” Ron says, and takes her hand. Hermione looks at him in something like wonder.

Harry glances away, swallowing a bit. There are times that he’d really like to find someone to take to Hogsmeade, and hold hands with, and kiss in dark corridors. But he won’t date a follower—they might feel they owe him something—and he certainly won’t date someone who’s a stranger when he can’t know if they’re just impressed by his fame.

Maybe someday he’ll find someone.

*

“Help me understand this, my lord. You want to advocate for wand rights for goblins, but you don’t want violent confrontation with the Ministry about this?”

“Stop calling me your lord, Theo, you sound like a Death Eater.”

Theo breathes in sharply. He’s sitting at the library table across from Harry, but suddenly it’s as if there’s a huge void between them.

Ahalam pops his head out of the robe pocket he’s currently occupying. “Why are you angry at the clever boy? What has he done to make you angry? He does not smell angry. He smells in pain. Are you angry that he is in pain?”

“No, I made a mistake,” Harry hisses back to Ahalam, who nudges at him with his nose. He turns back to Theo. “Sorry, Theo. That was uncalled-for. I’m on edge for other reasons, ones that have nothing to do with you.”

Theo studies Harry with narrow eyes, suddenly much more like the Nott of two years ago than he’s been since. That’s fair, though. Harry was like a thoughtless git a minute ago.

“Apology accepted,” Theo says at last. “But may I suggest that you get your anger handled in some way? It’s a weakness our enemies can exploit.”

“Yeah,” Harry says. “Sorry. I will.”

“What are you angry about?”

Harry shrugs. Not even to Theo is he going to admit that he feels a little jealous of Ron and Hermione. That’s his problem, not a reflection on his friends or the position as Lord Slytherin that he chose to assume. “Things I can’t have. Problems that I’ll have because of the title and people trying to have violent confrontations with me.”

“I hope you don’t regret your title.”

Theo’s eyes are fixed on him, and Harry doesn’t think he’s imagining the fear there. He shakes his head. “No. It’s my problem. And being Lord Slytherin is still reward enough for all of that.” He leans forwards and ignores the way that Theo opens his mouth, probably to continue the argument. Harry finds his own whinging tiresome. “And I never said that I didn’t want a confrontation with the Ministry about goblin rights.”

“Then—”

“We’ll have one. It just won’t be violent.”