Author's Note: Hermione's reaction might seem a little OOC, but there is a reason to it, that becomes more obvious later on the in the story.
Ginny hardly had time to react and could already hear Harry charge downstairs. She heard a door slam. She raised a shaking finger to her lips. What the hell had just happened? She had not had any intention of letting him kiss her, but she had found herself feeling reckless as soon as he had come close to her. All she had been able to concentrate on was his lips moving closer to hers. She had never really felt a crazy attraction like that before and it worried her. More so, why the hell had he pulled away like that? He had acted like he had just got an electric shock.
She remembered the look on his face and blushed in shame. She should never have left him kiss her like that. What the hell was going on in her head?
She knew she had got over her past obsession with Harry and hadn’t even felt remotely attracted to him up to now, not even when they were working together all day yesterday. And now that he was gone from the room, she couldn’t understand where the attraction had come from as now, it seemed to have disappeared just as quickly.
Harry slammed the door of the library and leaned with his back to it gasping for air. He could feel his heart hammering against his chest as if he had run a mile, even though all he had done was run downstairs away from Ginny.
Ginny. What the hell had just come over him? It was so out of character for him that he hardly knew how to explain his actions at all. He had never initiated a kiss like that with anyone. Nor had he ever really felt that inexplicable pull of magnetism towards a girl like he had just experienced upstairs.
While it was completely and utterly out of character for him to have even considered kissing Ginny, what worried him even more was what had happened when his lips had touched hers.
Harry had experienced such a severe flashback that for a moment he was sure he was on the third floor once again staring at Sirius across the table in the library. It had shocked him so much that he had gasped and pulled away from Ginny as though she were poison.
He couldn’t think what else to do so he had run down here. What on earth was going on? Why was he suffering from such flashbacks to something that had only happened in his subconscious while he slept?
As the feeling of shock had worn off, Harry was left feeling intensely embarrassed. He had no idea what had made him kiss Ginny in the first place. He had just felt such a strong pull towards her that all his will seemed to have left him. Harry knew he had been checking Ginny out over the last few days, but had never in a lifetime planned on acting on it. He shook his head in bewilderment and wondered what punishment Ron would mete out if he knew.
Even though Ron was his best friend, Harry suspected that Ron was no longer of the opinion that he and Ginny being an item was a good idea. The happenings at the Department of Mysteries had opened his eyes to risk they were all at.
Harry knew that Ron was well aware of how the risk was multiplied ten-fold if you were a friend of the Boy-Who-Lived. Ron didn’t want to expose his sister to any more risk than she was already in. Harry had noticed Ron studying him when they were together, he knew Ron well enough to know that he was checking of any signs of attachment or interest on either his part or Ginny’s.
Harry also knew that had Ron detected anything, he wouldn’t have hesitated in pulling Harry up on it. Things had changed. They were no longer carefree teenagers and as much as Ron would do anything for Harry, letting his baby sister come to harm if he could prevent it not one of them.
Harry knew he would have to be very careful never to let slip what had happened between him and Ginny. And anyway, it had only been a moment of madness hadn’t it?
After he had calmed himself sufficiently, and talked himself out of the crazy idea that he might actually like Ginny, he made his way shakily to the kitchen, apologising to Mrs. Weasley for being late for breakfast and hastily grabbed some toast. Ron and Hermione were still at the table. Ron looked bleary and tired. He sat hunched over a cup of coffee, his hands wrapped around the steaming mug. He seemed lost in his thoughts and had hardly noticed Harry’s entrance.
Hermione on the other hand, had greeted Harry and now continued to read her book at the table while nibbling at some toast. Harry took the opportunity to study Hermione closely.
He had hardly had an opportunity to speak with her since he arrived two days earlier, yet he felt something was amiss. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it. He still hadn’t got an adequate explanation for the row that Hermione and Ron had been having.
It was then that it clicked. Why hadn’t Hermione approached him about the row? In the past, any time Ron would be acting the idiot or upsetting Hermione, she normally wasted no time in approaching Harry to vent her frustrations about Ron and his stupidity.
Harry had always provided that role to the rowing pair, listening in turns to Hermione’s irritation at Ron’s stubbornness, or Ron’s inability to understand what the hell he had said or done that was now upsetting Hermione.
Ron, bless him, was still rather clueless when it came to girls. It was the main disaster area shared by him and Harry. Neither of them were very adept at understanding girls very well at all. It meant that most of Ron and Hermione’s rows were inadvertently caused by Ron, who never failed to look bewildered in the face of a torrent of abuse issued by Hermione after he would once again, have proved himself to be a ‘prat’.
But this was different. Why hadn’t either of them attempted to talk to him about, well, anything since he had come back? Hermione, Harry would have expected to be the one to fill him in on all the happenings of the Order, not Ginny. In fact Hermione had never even mentioned the Order since he had got there.
While Harry had been dwelling on all this, the others had left the table and begun their day’s work. Harry approached Mrs Weasley as she cleaned up the remains of the breakfast. “Mrs Weasley, how long has Hermione been staying here this summer?” he asked.
Mrs Weasley paused for a moment in thought, “Let me see, I think she must of got here about two weeks prior to you Harry dear.”
“And what have she and Ron been working on in the house since then?” Harry asked.
Mrs Weasley looked at Harry in confusion. “Well, lets see, the first week, we decided to get another bedroom cleaned out on the second floor, we need the extra space now that we are all staying here for the summer. It’s a job I thought Hermione would get through rather quickly, she is such a good worker you know. But I found that when she hadn’t finished it by the end of that week, I assigned Ron to help her with it. Since then they have worked together every day. Ron was very insistent about it actually,” Mrs Weasley finished, as she continued with her cleaning and Harry gathered the utensils he had been using the day before and made his way upstairs, still deep in thought.
As he passed the portrait of Mrs Black in the hallway, he heard the disembodied whisper once again, “It has begun. The pawns are in place. The petals begin to fall as summer fades”
Once again, Harry stood stock still on the stairway, waiting for his madly beating heart to slow. His hand itched to reach out and pull back the curtain surrounding the portrait, but he steadied his will, and turning deliberately away from it, he continued up the stairs.
Much as he didn’t like to admit it, Harry was perturbed. It wasn’t so much the disembodied voice that upset him, but what it had said. Harry sensed the hidden message in the words, but no matter how often he ran over them in his mind, they still didn’t make any sense. They sounded like a warning, but of what? And how could Harry trust a warning being issued by the portrait of someone was so immersed in black magic, not to mention the fact that she was very, very dead??
His meandering mind at least allowed him to work with Ginny without feeling any further embarrassment. His mind was far too occupied to dwell on what had happened that morning anymore. After a muttered apology to Ginny when he had met her in the bedroom in which they were working, Harry lapsed into silence once again.
Ginny, on the other hand, found his presence more than a little disturbing. She had just about got over the ‘kiss’ incident this morning, and now Harry was acting like she didn’t exist. This was just too strange. If it weren’t for the fact that Ginny too, had her own share of worries that Harry didn’t know about, she might have found herself tempted to question him as to what had come over him that morning.
The day passed in a similar fashion to the previous day. Harry and Ginny, finding that they had finished their work in the bedroom by afternoon went to help Ron and Hermione.
Harry began to assist Hermione with the cabinet that she was clearing out. Some of the objects were proving themselves to be dangerous, so Hermione had to proceed slowly and carefully, using a long metal tongs to extract some of the items so that she would not get bitten or burned by some of the hardier inhabitants of the cabinet.
She and Harry talked about this and that while they worked. It cemented the idea in Harry’s mind that Hermione was not herself. While Harry hadn’t exactly been chomping at the bit when it came to talking about the Order and what they were doing, Hermione, very simply didn’t want to know.
Harry could hardly recognise her from the girl that he had known the previous summer. She seemed permanently distracted and showed little or no interest in what was being done to organise the fight against Voldemort.
Harry had gradually introduced the subject of Voldemort, the Order and their efforts into his conversation with Hermione. He wanted to gauge Hermione’s thoughts through her replies. However, Hermione was obtuse with her answers until Harry took the more direct approach and questioned her outright on her lack on interest in the Order and what they were doing. Her reply could not have been more unexpected, or unwelcome. “Look Harry, I don’t know what you are getting so worked up about,” she replied nonchalantly, “to be frank, these efforts are just a smoke screen if you ask me. When push comes to shove, a lot more of the order will end up going the way Sirius did”.
Harry, obviously, had snapped on hearing this, he reached out grabbing Hermione’s wrist and spinning her around to face him, he glared at her “ his face inches from hers. “Don’t you dare ever say anything of that nature again Hermione. DO YOU HEAR ME? I don’t know what the hell has gotten into you but I for one certainly don’t need to hear your twisted take on how the war is going,” he growled.
Harry’s fingers were digging into the soft skin on the inside of Hermione’s wrist. He grip was so tight that blood was having difficulty circulating to her fingers. Hermione winced as his grip tightened on her wrist.
Ron intervened as soon as he noticed there was a problem. He had not heard what Hermione had said, but one look at Harry and he knew that his best friend was just barely reigning in his anger. “Harry mate, easy now would you? At the very least loosen your grip on Hermione,” Ron asked in a tense voice.
He looked from one of them to the other with a look of apprehension, all the while prying at Harry’s fingers, attempting to loosen them from Hermione’s wrist.
Harry dropped Hermione’s wrist suddenly and moved away from the pair of them. He was still intensely angry and shocked at what Hermione had said. He knew if it had been Ron, that Ron would currently be nursing a black eye and a bloody nose.
He had barely held himself back from striking Hermione. He couldn’t believe what she had just said. What the hell was going through her mind?