The Lion, The Witch, and Coming Out of The Wardrobe

Poundpoundpound.

"Harry! Harry, are you in there? Unlock the bloody door. We have that paper on medieval French siege weaponry due tomorrow for History of Magic, and my trebuchet model is collapsing! Harry?"

Hermione slammed the side of her fist against the sixth-year boys' dormitory door for what felt like the thousandth time, desperately hoping to receive a more eloquent response than the silence which had previously greeted her polite inquiries. Judging by the swelling redness and the persistent stinging feeling, her hand couldn't take much more abuse. Perhaps it was time to try a different approach.

Slipping her wand surreptitiously out of the pocket of her robes, she glanced both ways down the hallway, feeling inexplicably nervous. It wasn't as if she hadn't done this, and many things worse, hundreds of times before. Yet her hands never failed to tremble and her palms never failed to sweat when obeying her illicit commands. She suspected it was some sort of ingrained reaction, possibly genetic, that she would never be able to overcome, particularly considering her parents utter lack of misbehavior. She always mouthed a silent little apology in their direction, interspersed with promises to never, ever do this again as long as she lived, just before she did whatever it was she had promised not to do the last time. It was a bit of a mania with her, this rule infringement.

Then again, she felt that the safety of her grade-point average merited a little breaking and entering. So, despite the familiar feeling of hot, dark guilt in the pit of her stomach, she raised her wand, pointed it at the door's lock, and whispered, "Alohamora." A spark flew from the tip of her wand and the door handle glowed for a moment before making a cheerful little click, and swinging forward. She pushed the door open the rest of the way, ignoring the familiar creaking noise that she supposed was the result of a charm by Dumbledore, who found such idiosyncrasies charming. The man himself, after all, was simply a massive conglomeration of idiosyncrasies.

"Harry, are you here? I couldn't find you anywhere else," she began irritably, her concern over their project returning in full force, as the unpleasant incident involving the door and her fundamental moral principles was forgotten. "We still have supplies we need to find for this model, which, as you know, is worth half our gr-- "

She stopped, mid-sentence, her lips forming the end of the word without the accompanying sound, as all of the air seemed to have been sucked out of her lungs. There was a lump on Harry's bed that was quite a bit larger than the body of a single, sixteen-year old boy. Well. This was interesting. Not something that, upon reflection, she really wanted to be involved in, but interesting nonetheless.

After the unfortunate termination of his crush on Cho Chang, Harry hated briefly dated a girl in Ravenclaw for part of their fifth year. But they had never seemed very close, and Hermione couldn't remember the girl's name, only that she had blond hair and dark grey eyes. Subsequently, his interest in girls had seemed to wane entirely, although to be fair, Harry hadn't exactly had ample time for extracurricular activities, between frantic preparation with the Resistance movement and the way he threw himself into Quidditch, became addicted to it, as it kept his mind off everything.

Hermione and Ron had talked about it, about Harry's thinness and tiredness and fatalistic behavior, but they had never come to a conclusion. Their discussions always seemed to go in circles, dancing around the truth that they knew lay in the middle: There was nothing they could do. If he needed to kill himself with Quidditch as a distraction from the looming presence of Voldemort...well, then so be it. They wouldn't interfere.

That had been the unspoken agreement, and they had obeyed it, even when he came into the common room after everyone else had gone to bed, caked with sweat from endless hours of flying, bruises that he couldn't remember acquiring, cut on his face that surprised him when he saw the blood on his fingertips, and those huge black circles that hung perpetually under his eyes, that Hermione wanted to lay her palms over, as if she could somehow suck them away with the power of her desire.

But they never said anything. Just brought him some hot chocolate, wrapped him in a blanket, asked him how the team was doing, and made sure he showered before bed. Ron would make sure Harry slept, would talk to him at night, tell him funny stories about Fred and George, or sing Harry an inappropriate ballad from his brother Bill's collection. Because when he went to sleep half-laughing, with that faint smile on his face, then the nightmares wouldn't be so bad and sometimes they wouldn't come at all.

Hermione would sift through his backpack, throw away the scraps of paper upon which he inadvertently doodled all day during class, sometimes heaps of parchment, and crack open his books, make sure his homework was complete, revise his papers and correct his spelling. He never seemed to notice that his unfinished assignments were no longer unfinished when he awoke in the morning, that his bag was cleaned of ink spills and extraneous parchment.

He never seemed to notice the strange glances that professors shot in his direction, when he turned in a brilliant paper on Sub-Saharan Magical Rituals Involving Wild Hogs after having stared out the window during the lecture the previous day. Yet they never challenged him. Even when the Anti-Cheating spells on his tests seemed altered somehow, almost undetectably, like a pencil line that had been erased an then redrawn not quite in the same place, fuzzy around the edges, they never said a word. Hermione wasn't sure what she and Ron would do when someone finally confronted them, but there was no sense in worrying about it until it happened.

And then Ron would come downstairs, assure her that Harry was asleep, they would kiss each other tiredly, and collapse into their separate beds in preparation for ushering Harry safely through another day.

Hermione's thoughts were interrupted by a hesitant inquiry from the lump on the bed.

"Is--is someone there?" the lump called out falteringly. A slow smile spread across Hermione's face, like melting honey.

"It's just me, Harry," she answered sweetly, and watched with delight the ensuing chaos. The lump began to move in some sort of massive seismic upheaval. There were several groans, an outraged yelp, a few indignant rustling sounds, and then two heads scrambled out from under the covers.

To be fair, it was really only the brown, exceptionally disheveled black-haired head, accompanied by a pair of wide green eyes, that scrambled. The blonde head, with its sharp grey eyes, the color of steel, did not scramble. Draco Malfoy, after all, would never be caught scrambling. He poured himself out of the four-poster with a languid stretching motion, and then walked out of the room, pausing only for a "Fucking hell, is your hair getting worse?" which Hermione responded to with her finger, and a pinch for Harry's backside.

After watching him amble out the door, her eyebrow raised, Hermione turned back to find Harry sitting on the trunk at the end of his bed, head in his hands, the picture of defeat. She managed to restrain her amusement, as somehow she didn't think that Harry would appreciate laughter at the moment.

"Harry?" she prodded him gently. He didn't look up. And then he began to speak, in a hushed, strained voice, as if every word was a dagger, slicing his throat as he forced it out.

"Hermione...I have something to tell you. I'm--well, I think I'm--I mean, I'm--"

"Gay?" she suggested, pulling a chair over to sit in front of him. "I gathered as much," she remarked, unable to keep a small smirk off her face. Harry gave a short, harsh laugh, pressing the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. His breathing sounded uneven, and she could hear the smallest of sniffles, as if he was trying not to cry. Her grin widened for an instant before she controlled herself.

"Harry..." she began seriously, but then stopped as he started to speak again, apparently not having heard her while gathering his courage for another try.

"This isn't how I thought it would happen...how I would tell you. I didn't think--didn't want it to happen this way..." She saw his jaw tighten as he pressed his hands harder over his eyes. She felt all the air go out of her chest again, and she wanted desperately to reach out, to take him into her arms, but she sensed that would be an unwise gesture at the present moment.

"Well," she said thoughtfully, staring at the far wall. "Do you want me to wander about the room, waving my arms, yelling? Would that help?" She didn't look at him, but she could sense Harry's movement, sense that he had raised his head to stare at her.

"Because we just did King Lear in my Muggle Drama class, so I suspect I could work up a rather impressive rant if you--"

She stopped as she felt a hand close around her wrist. Shifting her gaze, she was met with Harry's green eyes, glistening with tears. But there was a smile on his face. She grinned at him and, after a long moment, he grinned back, though it looked a little painful.

"I love you, Harry," she told him quietly, and slid her arms around his shoulders. She felt his face press into her shoulder, felt a few of the tears spill over and onto her skin.

She heard a muffled, "Thank you," and felt him kiss her neck and then her cheek and pull back to just stare at her for a minute. "Thank you," he repeated.

"Anytime," she promised, with a teasing smile as she reached up to wipe the tears off his cheeks with the sleeve of her robe. She pulled back, settling into the chair.

"I really didn't mean for it to happen like this," he said again, this time wonderingly, as if he couldn't believe that it was finally over, that he had told someone, survived, and it had turned out so well.

"Just don't take all the dishy boys," she commanded with a wink. He laughed again, and although it was still short, it sounded less forced, less harsh. Suddenly, he closed his eyes and groaned. Her eyebrows drew together in concern.

"What?"

"Ron..." he said, groaning again, putting his hands back into his palms. "What am I going to tell him? What do I say? And if he knows I told you first and he doesn't know..." Harry sounded panicked now. "Oh hell, what am I going to tell him--because there isn't anything I can tell him and he's going go absolutely berserk just like that time in--"

"Ron won't say a word," Hermione cut him off. She spoke quietly, but with steel in her words. "If this--if Draco Malfoy--makes you happy, he won't say a word."

She paused, hesitated, and then asked, "Does he? Make you happy, I mean? Is this--he--what you want?"

Harry looked up, first at her, and then his eyes drifted away, staring at the wall but not really seeing it. "I don't know. I think so, but I'm not sure what I want. This is so...different. I don't know what to do. I mean, I know Draco seems like a frigid bastard, but--well, he's not always like that. There's the things he does, little things like making sure my Quidditch gear is washed or making sure I have enough covers at night--"

He stopped suddenly, his eyes jerking back to Hermione. "I can't believe I'm telling you this. Do you really want to hear this?"

He sounded skeptical and a little embarrassed. She merely raised her eyebrows, indicating that he should, almost challenging him, to continue. His lips tightened a little, almost into a smile, and he looked away again, back toward the wall.

"He does little things like that, it's mad, I know, but he waits for me after Gryffindor practice, because he knows when we practice, when I have class, when my free periods are...and, well, I just think there's more under there."

"More than meets the eye?" Hermione asked teasingly. "I don't know if that's possible with him. There's a lot to look at..."

Unexpectedly, Harry grinned at her, his face lighting up in a way she hadn't seen for months. Her chest tightened, and she felt the prick of tears in her eyes. Harry didn't notice, because he was talking again, the words coming faster, tumbling over one another in their rush to escape.

"I don't know if I love him, or if he loves me, but I want to be with him...so much that I don't care whether or not he loves me or even gives a damn about me. I just feel so...light. Weightless, like I haven't in so long...years, even." He stopped, and his face looked less haggard, as if a subtle luminosity was shining through it. Hermione, her lips pressed together tightly, reached forward and clasped Harry's hand.

"Harry, if this is what you want, then I'm happy for you. Ron will be as well. I know he doesn't say it, has a hard time even showing it, but he loves you, so much. And if this makes all that--that other stuff, everything pressing down on you...if this, if Malfoy--Draco," she corrected herself, "if he makes it easier or better, then that's all we want."

Harry lifted her hand to his mouth and placed a kiss in the center of her palm. She smiled at him, a smile that was both sad and loving, and stood up.

Putting her hands on her hips, she raised her eyebrows and said very sternly, "I expect to see you in the library in an hour, is that clear? We still have a History of Magic project due tomorrow, and I will not allow my grade to be affected by your torrid sex life."

Harry laughed again, kissed her on the cheek and walked her to the door. As she was closing the door, she paused, leaned in the room again, and said in a quiet voice, "Harry? I'll speak with Ron, alright? Don't worry."

He looked up from his seat at the desk and smiled, nodding his thanks at her, grateful that she knew what to do without him having to ask. She pulled the door shut, took a deep breath, straightened her robes, and set off at a march in the direction of the common room, where she knew Ron was engrossed in a game of Exploding Snap with Dean and Seamus.

She had a feeling that she was going to need the entire hour.