La courbe de tes yeux

Chapter Six: The shock wave.

If there hadn't been the nightgown as an undeniable proof, Ginny would have persuaded herself that she had just dreamt the whole thing. But waking up the next morning wearing Hermione's clothes left no place for doubt. Ginny's fingers were caressing her lips before she had even remembered what she had done, and she sat up in her bed for long minutes, torn up between a grin and a desperate cry. What would happen now? What would Hermione say? Ginny was terrified to go downstairs and face her best friend. And still, a small part of her couldn't help but hope that maybe the kiss had been enough to make Hermione fall in love with her, that maybe everything would be okay and she would have the luck of kissing Hermione once more. Lots more.

She couldn't decently stay in her room all day anyway, and she finally made her way to the Common Room, fingers crossed in her pockets. There was no Hermione there, only Harry and Ron. Actually, Harry was sitting in a couch, and Ron was leaning against a wall, near the entrance hole. Ginny stopped on the last step, puzzled and forgetting for a few blessed seconds her own troubles. It must have been the first time in two months that she had seen the two boys more than one feet apart. Actually, ever since...

But she really didn't feel like speaking to anybody. She wasn't even sure she could speak, really. She'd probably open her mouth and squeal. Which was why it was obviously better if she avoided any conversation altogether for a little while.

Harry glanced at her as she passed before him but she didn't stop, just smiled at him and disappeared behind the closing portrait with a bunch of third years on their way to breakfast.

Her stomach was in knots, worse than before a nasty Charms test, and she looked at the food with a grimace, carefully sipping a cup of coffee and trying not to look at all the pancakes and pumpkin juice the people around her were engulfing in their greedy mouths.

Ron arrived almost right after she had, his cheeks anormally red. His hands were trembling when he reached for the kettle, Ginny noticed. He looked like the twins did after discovering that their mother had seen them preparing a prank. Embarrassed and scared. Ginny raised an eyebrow, but didn't question him. Her legs were trembling so much under the heavy table that she had to clamp her hands on her knees, lest they start bumping against the wooden top. Hermione would be there any second now, any second.

Harry arrived after ten minutes, looking down like he wanted to avoid everybody's gaze, even though nobody was actually looking at him, for once. He sat beside Ron but the two boys didn't exchange a glance, didn't utter a word. Ginny was sitting on Ron's side and Harry's face was hid from her view, but she didn't need to see his face to notice how his hand was just as shaky as Ron's.

She'd have to investigate.

Would Hermione be interested in solving that new mystery with her?

Ginny would have given almost anything to have that answer. Even her favourite doll, the one that her mother had sewn and bewitched for her fifth birthday. It would wrap its tiny arms around Ginny's head when the little girl was crying, patting her cheeks with its minute cotton hands. Ginny always kept it hidden under her pillow when she was in Hogwarts.

It took her by surprise when the students started leaving the Hall, Ron getting up five minutes after Harry did and throwing an inquisitive look in Ginny's direction.

Hermione hadn't come. She so didn't want to see Ginny again that she had gone as far as to skip breakfast.

So that's what the end of the world felt like, in the end. Interesting.

*~*~*

Hermione sat on her bed a very long time that morning. She got up at the usual time, showered and dressed, regrouped the books she would need for her morning lessons, scowlded playfully at Parvati's antics (Lavender had borrowed her brush and left hairs on it), but when the time came to go down those stairs, her legs seemed to fail her and she sat down on her cafully tucked-in covers, watching the other girls exiting the room without even noticing her.

Her thoughts were such a mess, an ever moving chaos, that she couldn't find the leading trail, couldn't grasp the single thread, the one she'd pull upon to unknot everything.

Ginny kissed you last night...lips as soft as Crooshanks' fur...you've been friends for...haven't known her...so long...that long...fingers were trembling...kissed you...and she left...didn't want her to...kiss you...leave...just Ron's little sister...wanted Harry...a girl...you had never thought...what?...gazed down at you and you wanted to...about that?...wanted her to stay...to say...never?...hadn't noticed...must have been terrified...all those times she ran...will have to face...she ran away because she liked you...likes you...didn't want Ron...so sweet but...would you have kissed her back had she done it...so sweet and she knows you... can't see him kissing you...but she has...

Wait wait wait! Hermione ordered her brain, feeling faint. She would never sort anything out that way, it was obvious. She scooted further up on her bed, leaning against the heardboard, and gazed down at her fingers, thinking hard.

Classification. That's what Hermione liked, that's what she relied upon. Had done so ever since she was little and had found that cleaning up her room went much faster if there was a designed place for everything. When she was four, her mother would often tell her, she would stay hours standing on her toes in front of the glass doors of her father's office, where all the moulds of teeth and palates were filed. She'd read the names and the dates and sometimes she'd watch her father look for something and point it to him, to his surprise. At four, she understood her father's classification better than he himself did.

Hermione turned a blank page in her mind and let her thoughts scribble unto it.

I - The Kiss.

Surprising. One minute Ginny is choking and the next one she's so close to you that you have to close your eyes. It was surprising, but it wasn't unpleasant. Very soft. And yet, burning, like she had wanted to do that for so long and was trying to suck the life out of you, just so that she could remember everything better. Very soft and quick. Soft as the tear that fell upon her cheek just before she kissed you. Filled with hope and completely devoid of it. But that can't be, that doesn't make sense. But it was...okay. Not unpleasant. Just...shattering.

II - Ginny.

She's Ron's little sister. The one you had never given a thought about until last year, when she suddenly seemed to turn from "little girl infatuated with Harry" to "young woman with wits and humour". She's funny, and fun to be with, and she's intelligent and she knows how to listen and she doesn't fuss and prance like Padma and Parvati and Lavender do, even though she's prettier than they are.

Hermione's eyes widened in surprise. It was the first time she thought anything like that.

Is she? ...from an objective point of view, I guess she isn't. At least...well she does have that fire-like hair and those admirable freckles, and when she laughs it's like tinkerbells, and her eyes are deep and shiny and...

Hermione felt her cheeks flush and hurriedly skipped the physical appreciations.

She doesn't whine about homework or only think about having fun, either, unlike Ron and Harry. She...makes you feel good about yourself. Lavender and the other girls always look at you as if you weren't enough, as if you shouldn't be able to walk the halls without makeup and without giggling at every handsome guy that passes. Harry and Ron make you feel like you're not a girl altogether, and like you're nice but annoying too, work-obsessed. But that's because they only talk about Quidditch and playing pranks on the Slytherins and you don't think that's actually fun. When you're with Ginny you can talk about work, about the students, even about silly things like love potions and how dumb the people sound in the Daily Prophet's "Lost Hearts" column. She makes you feel good, and she makes you feel like you fit, like you're not that different from the rest and like the things that make you different are good things. She's great.

III - How you feel about all this.

There, her brain drew a blank. Or rather, it started buzzing with answers, but she was terrified of opening the tiny door at the back of her mind, for fear of getting trampled with the thoughts and feelings rumbling and moving in there.

She didn't know how she felt about all this. She didn't want to know how she felt about it. She didn't want anything to change, really. That's what had frightened her the most with Ron, that his crush on her might change their friendship. And it had been even worse when she had told him she didn't like him that way. His eyes had grown so bitter so quickly...

She didn't want anything to change, and especially not her feelings. Ron was her friend, slightly exasperating but charming nonetheless. Harry was her friend, too strong for his own good and too important for everybody's grasp. He had to be looked after, but without him noticing. And Ginny was the only girl friend that she had. She was the one she needed to get those constant burdens (getting good grades, fighting evil, growing up) off her shoulders for a little while.

It was simple. It was square.

Maybe she had gazed at her father's classification for too long. But it was too late now to change everything she believed in, wasn't it?

*~*~*

From nine to twelve, Transfiguration. Ginny is so shaken that she almost beheads prof. Flitwick, who carefully avoids her the rest of the lesson. Instead of shutting down, her toad merely stops croaking and starts meowing. It looks just as surprised as Ginny's neighbour.

She hates you. She's so horrified at the idea of seeing you again that she's decided to avoid you from now on, so she doesn't have to lay eyes on you ever again. Maybe she even borrowed Harry's invisibility cloak. You couldn't just pretend to sleep, could you? You couldn't at least wait until she was sleeping to kiss her? No, you had to do it bold as brass, and now she's gotten time to see it through and she hates you.

Ginny makes her toad blow up and spends the twenty last minutes of class in the second floor's bathroom, trying to get the slime off her hair. Flitwick has squeaked at her that she should maybe try and practice before the next lesson, before falling off his chair.

Then lunch. Hermione has Care of Magical Creatures up till one o'clock, so this time Ginny isn't surprised to be alone at the table. It doesn't mean the skipped breakfast has stopped hurting, though. Ginny stabs her steak repeatedly and glares at her peas, but this doesn't seem to affect them in the slightest.

From one to two thirty, Muggle Studies. Ginny can't stop thinking about that night, when Hermione had looked at her so weirdly and whispered her name in such a tender voice. It had to mean something, right? Things like that shouldn't happen if they don't mean anything.

From two thirty to three thirty, nothing. Ginny goes to the library to study and bumps right into Draco Malfoy in the hallways. He looks her up and down with a very nasty smirk and goes his own way. Ginny frowns. It's a bad day and she has a mind to hex the living daylights out of him, but a little voice in her head points out that getting stuck in detention for two weeks won't make her life any happier.

She glares at the books and can't concentrate on a single line she reads. Of all the places she could have gone to, why did she have to choose the place drenched to the core with Hermione's aura? Ginny would scream if she wasn't so stupidely afraid of Madam Pince. She can stab a hole right through you with the sole force of her stare, Miss Spinster. Ginny suddenly sees Hermione fifty years older, with a bun and glasses, tapping her foot when students return a book one hour late, and she bursts out laughing. Madam Pince rushes to her seat, shuuing loudly, and Ginny takes her stuff and leaves, still giggling.

From three thirty to five, Divination. She's taken it only to see what all the fuss was about. Of course, now she dearly wishes she had listened to Hermione (and Ron) (and Harry) and taken something else instead. She gets drowsy as soon as she steps into the overheated room and curls up in a seat in a corner, ignoring the girl sitting at her table. She doesn't listen to a single word during the whole lesson. When she looks down at her parchment by the end of it, to scribble down the assignement her neighbour's just informed her about, she's faced with Hermione's name written all over the page, crisscrossing itself again and again. She torns up the parchment and throws it into the scented fire, lips trembling.

And then it's all for the day. She's free to go back to the Common Room and face her doom. If her doom has gone out of her dormitory at all today, of course.

*~*~*

"...Ron, is everything okay between you and Harry? You've been avoiding each other all day..." Hermione whispered as she packed her stuff at the end of Transfiguration.

Ron shrugged in a non-commital way, but he threw a guilty glance at Harry's solitary figure as the latter stepped out of the class without waiting for his friends. Hermione wanted to prod, but Ron spoke before she could.

"T's nothing," he mumbled, swinging his bag over his shoulder. "T'just..." There was a long pause, then he said: "Got a bit drunk last night and I think I might have said a thing or two that he didn't agree with..."

Hermione already had her mouth opened, but they caught up with Harry and she couldn't decently ask more. Still, she dutifully noted that bit of information in her mind's notebook, pointing out in the margins that Ron and Harry had only stopped talking to each other once, and it wasn't just for "a thing or two". She wondered if maybe they had fought, but there was no evidence for that.

I'll have to ask Ginny.

Then she remembered that her best friend had kissed her the previous evening and that talking about Ron and Harry's secrets might not be such a simple thing to do anymore.

It was all her fault, of course. Harry had asked her why she had skipped breakfast (he couldn't know she had also skipped her first class, he had been in Divination at the time) and she had very almost said "Because I'm stupid and heartless", but the words coming out eventually had been more along the lines of "I wasn't feeling very good".

At lunch, Ginny hadn't been there, and Hermione had been worried until she remembered that it was Friday. This in turn reminded her that the next two days would be class free and that she would usually spend all her time with Ginny.

She hadn't eaten at lunch, either. Ron and Harry didn't seem to notice.

They reached the portrait of the fat Lady much sooner than Hermione thought they should have, and she let Harry and Ron walk in before her, with half a mind to just turn around and go hide in the library till dinner time. It would only grant her half an hour of cowardly solitude, though. And her stomach was quite clear concerning its thoughts on skipping dinner. Its loud rumbling all throughout Transfiguration had been mortifying.

The fat Lady scolded at her and with a frustrated sigh, Hermione step into the room, her eyes downcast to the floor.

Count to three, take a deep breath, look up.

Ginny was there, on the couch facing the chimney, brows furrowed in concentration as she read from a big dusty book. Harry was standing in front of her and talking but she didn't look up from the book, even though her lips moved. Harry glanced at Hermione, frowned, then went away and disappeared up into the stairway. Hermione took a look around but couldn't see Ron anywhere. Her gaze fell back on Ginny and she felt her knees trembling.

"Oh, Hermione, I wanted to ask you, could you please help me with the Potion's essay we have to write for Monday, I think I've copied the instructions wrong, coz the solution doesn't make any sense, I'm pretty sure the subject shouldn't turn a sickly green, and..."

Hermione's ears closed themselves to Neville anxious babbling as Ginny instinctively looked up and away from her book, straight into Hermione's eyes.