Rating:
G
House:
Astronomy Tower
Characters:
Harry Potter Hermione Granger
Genres:
Romance Drama
Era:
Multiple Eras
Spoilers:
Philosopher's Stone Chamber of Secrets Prizoner of Azkaban Goblet of Fire Order of the Phoenix
Stats:
Published: 01/27/2004
Updated: 01/27/2004
Words: 12,430
Chapters: 4
Hits: 1,946

Forest Scene

mangum

Story Summary:
On Christmas during sixth year, Voldemort strikes again. Harry has to face up to something far scarier, though.

Chapter 04

Chapter Summary:
House-elves and something far scarier than He-who-must-not-be-named.
Posted:
01/27/2004
Hits:
331

The feast was as spectacular as ever. A dozen Christmas trees had been set on the Great Hall, adorned with the usual fanfare of everlasting icicles, live owls and real light faeries. The food was also as good as Harry could remember it; the house-elves had made their best effort preparing it even though they had another feast of their own to attend to shortly after this one was over.

Harry sat at the Gryffindor table with some of the students that had stayed at Hogwarts for the holidays. Hermione, Lavender and Parvati hadn't shown up yet, but he was done by now being irritated by this. Let them have their fun with whatever it was they were doing, he thought. Not that he couldn't use the company of a real friend, as the Creevey brothers had sat across from him and had been bombarding him with questions all along. The news of the attack hadn't took long to spread around, and everybody was talking about it.

Directing his gaze once more to the Ravenclaw table, Harry saw Luna staring at him. When their eyes made contact, she gave him an odd, lopsided grin. Earlier on, they'd talked for a minute on the Entrance Hall, and she'd let him know that Cho had left. In the aftermath of Cedric's death, she had grown quite close to his parents, and now she had gone visit Mr. Diggory at St. Mungo's.

The sight of Luna smiling at him reminded him of their little conversation the previous day. He thought of that as he made his way across the school grounds towards the edge of the Forest. He thought of the girls he knew... Luna, who seemed to be so out there and yet, as probably only he knew, had such a special outlook on life... Ginny, so strong and confident, breaking down like that the night before... Cho, the girl he had liked for so long, gone to visit the father of her dead boyfriend... Hermione, who had been close to getting herself killed just this morning and was now apparently avoiding him... Girls are so complicated, Harry told himself.

He had reached the edge of the Forest, and looked at it apprehensively. Even though it was only the mid-afternoon, it was already getting dark, the nights had gotten that much shorter. The moon, nearly full, was visible low in the sky. He walked in and started following the path he knew only too well by now, trying to avoid the low-hanging branches that treatened to rip his robes on every step.

After a while of following the path, he reached the huge white stone that Hagrid had told him would mark the approximate place where he would have to leave the path to get deeper into the woods. Sighing slightly and watching his breath come out in clouds in front of him, Harry turned and started walking among the spikey bushes that littered the tight space between the towering trees, all the while wishing he could just Apparate at the cellebration place like the house-elves did.

...

Nearly an uneventful hour after leaving the path, Harry started hearing sounds coming from ahead; it sounded like many high-pitched voices trying to sign several different songs at the same time. Light was filtering through the nearby trees, and as he kept walking, Harry turned off the tip of his wand which he had had to light up to see his way under the dark canopy of branches above him.

All of the sudden he had walked right into a wide clearing populated by what appeared to be a thousand elves that were all busy either singing and dancing or eating from very large tables covered with all kinds of dishes, some of which Harry couldn't identify for the life of him. A million tiny magical fires that didn't burn had been attached to the trunks of the trees bordering the clearing, at the height of Harry's eyes, and their shuddering light shone brightly over the heads of the cheerful elves as they went about their party.

And then some of the nearby house-elves noticed him and the singing faded for a moment as they all started squeaking "Harry Potter! Harry Potter is come here!" to each other.

Harry was soon surrounded by a sea of shiny bald heads with long floppy ears, some with tomato-like noses, some with long thin ones, all kinds really, as the house-elves scrambled around him excitedly. He noticed that something tall and red with yellow stripes that he couldn't identify was making a zig-zagging path through the tiny creatures towards him. When it got closer, he realized it was a long Gryffindor scarf wrapped around dozens of misshapen wool hats. Underneath all this was Dobby's grinning face.

"Harry Potter! Welcome to the house-elves party!"

Harry tried to say something but he never got around to it as Dobby grabbed his hands and pulled him while many small hands pushed on his back, steering him into the middle of the mass of elves who had now resumed dancing.

For the next half hour he was forced to dance around with the elves, something that, he had to admit, was rather fun. They all kept making a big deal of him being there. Finally, though, as he was getting tired of all the spastic dancing, he managed to escape to a more quiet part of the clearing where a few house-elves, having drank too much butterbeer, laid on the grass snoring loudly. Soon he was joined by Dobby.

"Is Harry Potter enjoying the party?" he asked anxiously.

"Yeah, sure" said Harry. He looked around at the elves... there just seemed to be too many of them. "So where are they all from, Dobby? Not just from Hogwarts, right?" he asked.

"Oh, no, Harry Potter. They comes from all over the country, the house-elves of most wizarding families are here. Tis a time for us to cellebrate while the masters is enjoying their presents. Also," Dobby added with a sly grin, "tis a time for house-elves to get to know each other better, if sir knows what Dobby means." The tiny creature winked up at Harry and he felt the grin spreading on his own face. He remembered something all of the sudden though.

"Say, Dobby, have you seen Hermione at all?" He'd been looking around for her since he had reached the clear, and although it was big and full of noisy elves, he was sure he'd have spotted her by now if she had been there, as she would raise a good two feet over the creatures' heads.

"No sir, Dobby hasn't seen miss..." The elf turned around on his heels, and then turned back to face Harry again, with a keen look on his eyes. "But Dobby knows who we can ask! Come with me, Harry Potter!" And he grabbed Harry's hand and led him through a zigzagging path between tables, chairs and ecstatic house-elves. Finally they got to a place where the clearing did a small turn so that a part of it was hidden from the main party-area by some heavily decorated trees. This was obviously the "kitchen" of the place, as several house-elves were busy preparing food and drinks for their peers, under the commands of an elf that was standing on a stool and wearing a white cook hat much to big for his head.

With some surprise, Harry realized that the elf was actually a female and none other than Winky, the old servant of the Crouch family. He hadn't seen her in a year and a half, yet he knew from Hermione, who has been visiting the kitchens a lot, that she had recovered somewhat from the depression she had sunk in after being thrown out by her former master. And recovered she looked indeed, as she kept issueing commands to the other elves non-stop, with a very energetical yet high-pitched voice.

"Winky! Winky! Look who is come here, Winky!" exclaimed Dobby delightedly.

"Welcome, young master Harry Potter," said Winky. "We hopes you is having fun at our party."

Harry thought she didn't sound all that sincere though. She hadn't trusted him much the last few times she had seen her, during his fourth year at Hogwarts; maybe she believed him somehow responsible for the fate of the late Crouchs?

"Harry Potter wants to know if miss Hermione Granger is here, Winky! Has you seen her?" asked Dobby.

"Oooh, yes, miss Granger was just here." Harry noticed that Winky sounded much more warmer now that she was talking about Hermione. Maybe she had taken to like her after all. "She just says Winky, 'Winky, I'm going to be over there for a while', and Winky says, 'Young miss, you is not being able to taste Winky's dessert' but she goes anyways."

"Alright, thank you, Winky," said Harry, looking at the opening in the trees Winky had pointed to. "I'll go see what she's up to, alright, Dobby? I'll be back soon," he added, seeing the somewhat dissappointed look in the house-elf's eyes.

"Be careful, Harry Potter! We is waiting you back soon!" Dobby said as Harry made his way out of the clearing and back into the dark trees beyond it.

...

Harry walked slowly, trying as best as he could to avoid the bushes, so dense now that he was out of the clearing. As the Forest blocked out the light coming from the enchanted fires the elves had put up, and their singing faded away, Harry was able to make out the distant sound of water running. He headed in that direction, wondering what in heaven's name was Hermione up to hiding in here.

The ground was rising steadily here, and soon Harry had reached the source of the noise. He was standing atop a small mound of rocks covered in moss. Water poured from within spaces in the rocks and cascaded down to a natural pond at the bottom, some twenty feet below, where it spilled over into a slim stream that slithered away, into the forest. The trees had receded here, and the moon, now bright in the sky, illuminated the melancholic scene.

And sitting in the edge of the pond Harry saw - finally - Hermione.

She hadn't noticed him. He was about to call out her name when something made him stop. There was a different sound, and it was coming from... Hermione? Was she singing? Harry stared at her in disbelief: he would have expected many odd things from his friend, but sing? That didn't sound like something she would do. So he remained silent, just watching her and listening.

He was too far to make out the words, but it was something sad and slow. Harry frowned slightly: Hermione didn't sing very well. If she liked to do this, it was really no wonder she'd kept it hidden from them. He could just picture in his mind Ron guffawing hearthily, if he had been next to him right now. For some reason, though, this didn't feel remotely funny to Harry.

He adjusted his glasses as he tried to take in the whole strange sight. Her robes, he noticed with a start, weren't her usual black ones, but deep-blue formal ones that he had never seen before and that really suited her figure. Hermione's shoulders were visible and Harry, due to his vantage position, could see way more cleavage than the designers of the dress probably intended anyone to see. He suddenly felt awkward, spying on his friend like this, but he told himself that she was the one that had been playing hide-and-seek the whole day so he was entitled to do a bit of voyeurism.

There was something on the ground next to Hermione - were those her shoes? Sure enough, her bare feet were poking from one side of her robes, as she was sitting with her legs folded undereath herself. Her socks had been folded neatly and placed on top of the shoes. With a start, Harry wondered if Hermione was about to go skinny-dipping in the pond. Then he chastized himself for being so silly: it was the middle of winter and the water would be freezing. Still, she could just magically heat up the water of perhaps make herself insensitive to the cold, but would she? She was to uptight to just go and get naked where people could accidentally see her (this would be no accident though, he told himself). Then again, hidding in the middle of the Forest to sing wasn't like her either.

And what if she was about to take her clothes off? Would Harry leave, to give her friend privacy? Would he stop her? Or would he stay and watch? Harry was surprised to realize that the last option sounded really appealing to him, and that it would probably take a lot of willpower to leave and do the "right thing" if it came up to that.

He felt his face blushing at the thought of the possible nakedness of his best friend, and it took him a few seconds to notice that she was silent now. He forced his mind away from the alluring images of her and concentrated on the real Hermione down there. He couldn't make out her face, as she seemed to be staring into the pond and her bushy hair was covering it. Her bushy hair... there was something different there as well. Harry narrowed his eyes and tried to figure out what it was. It took him a while but he finally saw that it was a lot shorter than it had been just a few days before, reaching now only to Hermione's shoulders. With some effort, he put two and two together and came up with an explanation for what had happened: Hagrid had told him she had got burned in the attack but she was okay. The Death Eaters had just got her hair. Harry told himself that this was probably why she had dissappeared with Lavender and Parvati as soon as she had arrived at Hogwarts - they must have been helping her cut it so the damage wouldn't be noticeable. They had done a good job, he thought.

And then he saw her arms moving, her hands reaching up to her face and rubbing her eyes. Was she crying? He distinctly heard her sobs, leaving no doubt about it, and decided at once that he had been spying on her for way too long. Careful not to make any noise, he climbed down from his spot atop the small waterfall and made his way around it. He purposefolly started stepping hard on the branches on the floor so that she would hear him approaching and would have time to adjust her appeareance.

When he saw her again, having just entered the small clearing, she had turned her face away from the place he was coming from and was rubbing her eyes furiously with both hands.

"Winky said you'd be here..." he said tentatively.

"Oh, hi Harry," she replied as she turned to face him.

Harry stopped dead on his tracks, staring at her. The moon was shining right above them and its reflection in the waters of the pond gave her face a pale sort of glow, the dress showed off her slim figure, and her shorter hair somehow made her appear less like a teenager and more like a woman. The whole image, he thought as he felt himself blush again, was pretty impressive: she looked like an angel...

Harry mentally slapped himself from thinking such silly things and resumed walking towards her. He sat across from Hermione, and looked at the depths of the pond. Tiny silvery fishes were swimming around the bottom, only a couple of feet deep, all going in a direction then turning around at once and reagrouping. It was quite fun to watch, but he had other things in mind.

"I... I heard about the attack," he said. She merely nodded. "So, are you, er, alright?" he asked lamely.

She sighed before answering. "Yeah, I guess... I don't know, really." She turned away from him again.

Awkwardly, he put his hand on her shoulder and said, in what he hoped was a soothing voice, "It's alright, Hermione... we'll catch them... we'll go and - "

But what they were going to go and do, he never got around to say, as she completely broke down then, throwing herself on his arms and sobbing hard against his robes. Taken aback, he couldn't think of anything to do besides putting his arms around her and patting her on the back.

"Oh, Harry! I - I thought we were all going to die!" she managed to say in between her sobbing. "I thought that was it!"

"Come on now, Hermione," he said, feeling this was a bit unreasonable for her to say. "You've been in worse situations than that... remember the end of last year? It was just the six of us against all those Death Eaters... there were a lot of help in the Ministry today, wasn't it? Think of second year, how you faced the Basilisk..." He didn't know what else to say, as he had faced a lot of dangerous situations but she had either not been there or not been really endangered then.

"I didn't gave it much thought - you know - " she said, shaking in his arms and without looking at him " - with the Basilisk. I guess I was just too young and irresponsible." She swallowed hard. "And last year... it was bad, but Harry... Harry, you were there, you see?"

For a couple of minutes there was just silence, interrupted every so often by Hermione's sobs. Then Harry spoke with a would-be-cheerful voice.

"Calm down, Hermione... it's alright, I'm here now, and - and - besides... where's that Gryffindor braveness? You can't let this affect you... we are going to win this war and you should know it... okay? Let's return to the party..."

Slowly, her crying subsided, and she pulled apart from him, her hands resting on his chest. He looked into her red, swollen eyes; tears had streamed down her cheeks and a single one was clinging from the end of her nose. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and cleaned up her face inexpertly, causing her to laugh nervously a couple of times.

"I guess you're right, Harry... we should go back there, huh? Don't want Dooby and Winky to grow all worried about us." She started pulling on her socks as she was speaking. Soon she was ready to go, having put on her shoes as well.

"You go first," he told her, "I'll be there in a minute, ok?"

"Alright, Harry, I'll see you there. And sorry about that..." She smiled sheepishly.

"It's quite alright," Harry said, and he thought he was sounding like Dumbledore. "Go, now!"

Hermione left the clearing quietly, and Harry sat there looking at the place in the trees where she had dissappeared. Then he turned to the pond again, and watched the little fishes in it, letting his gaze wander about the smooth surface of the water.

Suddenly something dropped, causing ripples in the water. It was followed by another of its kind, and then another, and Harry realized he was crying.

He didn't quite understand why he was feeling like this, not now; he'd been worried about one his best friends, but she was alright, he had just been with her and would be with her again as soon as he was able to leave the pond. But he couldn't right now, as he was feeling torn inside. It was something unlike anything he'd ever felt, and it scared him. He thought of the dreadful things he had seen in his short life; the rise of Voldemort, the death and suffery of the people around him, the horrors that lied in this very Forest, but nothing had ever terrified him the way he was now. He dropped to his knees, still staring at the place where Hermione had dissappeared, and thought of how he had liked Cho, and how he had cared about Ginny, and how he had felt so comfortable around Luna; but Hermione was so different from all that and yet somehow so much more important! She was like a thorn that had embedded itself deep into his heart, and he felt now the warmth spreading from it and the freezing cold growing around it. Because this was something he couldn't deal with, something far more difficult to do than anyhing he had ever done. He was feeling something he had never felt before, yet, somehow, he knew what this was. He simply loved Hermione Granger. She had almost died today and the thought tortured him, for he hadn't been there with her and he couldn't even begin to think of what losing her would do to him. There were many people he cared for in his life, but suddenly he realized he could probably live through the loss of any and all of them, but not of her.

Images kept running through his mind of Hermione as he had seen during all these years: she barging into his and Ron's compartment; she bossing them around to prepare for the tests; she lying on a bed in the Hospital Wing, petrified; she, next to Ron, smiling up at him after they had won the Quidditch Cup; she dancing with Krum; she holding onto him as Grawp had tried to grab her; she being hit by that spell last year at the Department of Mysteries; she looking at him with her eyes red and swollen and with something dangling from her nose; and this girl, no, this woman, he thought, was someone he couldn't live without.

It was strange, he thought, how he had slowly grown on him; how someone he had never even seen as a girl was now arousing these feelings on him; how it had taken nearly losing her to realize how she had won his heart over the years. How, far from the casual attraction of someone's looks or something imposed by society's rules and customs, this was real... there was no other word for it. This was the real thing.

He got up slowly and cleaned his own teary face as he walked back to the party, still feeling extremely warm and completely frozen at the same time, thinking about how close he had been to tell her something he could have never possibly explained to her.

But as he left the pond where the reflection of the moon was shinning calmly, he thought that he would have to tell her some day, because that was the way he really felt. Because he had wanted to tell her "Calm down, Hermione... it's alright, I'm here now... and I'll never leave you again." What would she have answered to that? What would she have said?

He made his way in silence to the party, to the girl he now knew he loved, and to the future he dreared so much now.

The End (*)

Author notes: (*) If you liked this fic, you might also like Transformation Scene, to which Forest Scene is a prequel (in other words: if you want to know what happens next, you can go and read Transformation Scene). Be aware it's rated R though! :O