Intervention
By FenrisWolf
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AUTHOR'S NOTE - I don't own anything related to Harry Potter, JK Rowling does…darn it.
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Chapter One
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She watched from the window of Ginny's room as in the distance the black-haired figure pulled away from the shorter, red-haired one and strode angrily off into the woods. For the last two weeks, ever since she'd arrived at the Burrow, Hermione had been taking turns with Harry's friends in trying to get him to open up to them, so far with no results. Today had been Ginny's turn, and from the look of things, the Quaffle had missed the hoop once again.
She fell back onto the bed that had been squeezed into the youngest Weasley's room for her use and sighed. Ever since their disastrous adventure at the Department of Mysteries Harry had been slipping away from his friends, putting up barriers around himself even higher than those he normally held around his feelings, and it was beginning to frighten her. She knew that losing Sirius would scar him, knew that he would probably blame himself for his godfather's death, but there was more than guilt working behind those eyes this time.
Over the years Hermione had become adept at reading the subtle cues to Harry's inner emotions. She'd had to learn, his awful relatives had spent too many years conditioning him not to reveal his true feelings to anyone lest they be used against him. She hadn't realized that at first, of course. It was hard to comprehend that sort of abuse when you came from a loving home, but after their second year she'd begun to, when she'd heard from Ron, Fred and George what they'd had to do to rescue Harry from the Dursleys. Hermione had never mentioned it to anyone, least of all Harry, but she'd spent a good part of her following summer in the library, reading up on the effects of emotional abuse in order to better understand him.
The stories she'd read had horrified and sickened her, but it had given her the key to comprehending her friend. It was why she refused to get mad at him when he snubbed her after she reported the arrival of his Firebolt, why she restrained herself from mothering him to death, even when the urge was overpowering. It was why she never once doubted him during the Tri-Wizard Tournament, and why she put up with all his mood swings and tempers their fifth year. There were deep wounds in Harry's psyche that it would take time and support to heal, and she knew the best thing she could do for him was just be his friend…even when she secretly wanted to be so much more.
It had taken a while for her to realize that her feelings for her best friend had been changing, but even the smartest witch of her generation could be clueless in the matters of the heart. It wasn't until she saw him in so much pain at the end of their last year that she began to finally realize it, that what she felt for Harry had become something much more than just friendship. She had spent the weeks prior to arriving at the Burrow exploring her newfound awareness, and in hindsight come to the understanding that she'd always felt something a bit more for Harry than for Ron, ever since he'd risked his life to save the bushy-haired girl crying in the bathroom. Watching a scrawny, underfed boy in baggy, ill-fitting clothes fling himself on a mountain troll ten times his size had triggered unfamiliar feelings in the eleven-year old girl, feelings it had taken five more years to understand.
She'd come to the Burrow both scared and excited by this new awareness of her emotions. She'd also known that acting on her feelings would be fraught with risk, especially since she suspected her other best friend harbored feelings for her as well. Fortunately Ron had yet to make any attempt to act on his crush, but she knew that at the very least letting him down would be a delicate matter. She'd still been trying to decide how best to handle that situation a week later when Harry arrived, and one look into his emerald eyes had driven all concern for Ronald Weasley's temper out of her head.
No matter what his upbringing dictated, there was one place where Harry's true feelings always shone through, and that was in his eyes. When he yelled at her over some trivial matter, Hermione could look in his eyes and see that his anger was a façade and forgive him. When she'd walked down the stairs for the Yule Ball, feeling like a princess in a fable in her periwinkle dress robes and with her hair for once looking like she'd always wished (and secretly despaired it ever would), she'd seen the stunned look of admiration in his eyes and floated on a cloud the whole night…at least until Ron, the prat, had thrown one of his snits. And when he'd yelled at her and tried to push her away before their ill-fated trip to the Department of Mysteries, she'd seen the fear and panic in his eyes, and understood.
Now, though, the look in his eyes terrified her. Pain she'd expected, and grief over the loss of Sirius as well. Guilt and self-flagellation she'd been braced for, knowing he would blame himself for everything that went wrong, despite all the other factors beyond his control that had contributed to the chain of events leading up to that night. What she had not expected to see was nothing at all. For the first time she could remember, Harry's eyes were flat and lifeless, devoid of feeling, of the spark that made them so memorable. It had taken a while, but she'd finally remembered where she'd seen such eyes before, in the pictures of the residents of the Nazi death camps, the eyes of people who had lost all hope. Some new burden had been added to Harry's shoulders, and a threshold had been crossed. The boy she'd grown up with, the boy who'd been there for her when no one else was, the boy she'd grown to love, was missing. In place of the Boy Who Lived was, she'd realized with sick dread, the Boy Who Was Waiting To Die.
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Hermione's gloomy thoughts were interrupted by the sounds of footsteps trudging up the stairs, followed by the opening of the bedroom door. "I guess you saw?" Ginny asked, her tone filled with unhappiness.
Her roommate nodded sadly. "Did you manage to get anything more out of him than I did? Anything at all?"
"No, nothing," the youngest Weasley admitted, running her fingers through her hair in nervous frustration. "It was just the same as all the other times we tried to get him to open up; first he insisted there was nothing bothering him, and then when I tried to pin him down, he just pulled that 'you wouldn't understand' shyte." She dropped onto her bed and pummeled her pillow, venting her anger on the eiderdown since she couldn't on a certain black-haired boy. When that wasn't enough, she buried her face in its softness and let out a muffled shriek of rage. "Ooh, he just makes me so mad!" she snarled at last.
Hermione shook her head, though she secretly agreed with her friend. Lately she alternated between wanting to mother Harry and protect him from every single thing that had ever hurt him, and wanting to slap some sense into his stubborn head. Instead she sighed and watched the forest where her perhaps-more-than-best-friend had disappeared. "I just don't…I don't know what else to try, Ginny," she admitted. "Nothing I say seems to reach him any more; once or twice I thought I was getting through to him, and then he just…switched off, just like he'd pulled a plug and turned off his feelings. Harry needs something to snap him out of this, but for the life of me, I don't know what it is!"
She felt the prickling in her eyes that signaled the arrival of another bout of tears, and was struggling to bring them under control before she lost it completely, when another voice joined the conversation. "Personally," it said in its instantly recognizable tones, "I think Harry needs to have sex."
It took a minute for the words to register, but when they did, Hermione turned around and stared, wide-eyed, at the figure standing in the doorway of the room. "Excuse me?" she asked, her voice filled with disbelief, "What did you just say?"
Luna Lovegood stepped into the room she was sharing for the summer with her schoolmates, pushing the door closed behind her, and after a moment, thoughtfully cast a silencing charm upon it. "I said," she continued at last, "I think Harry really needs to have sex, and if you stop and consider it for a moment, you'll see I'm right."
Hermione exchanged a stunned glance with Ginny, who merely shrugged. She'd grown up near the odd Ravenclaw whose perspective on the world always seemed slightly…skewed would be the polite word, though Ron was somewhat partial to the term 'barking' where she was concerned. Hermione, however, had only been indoctrinated into Luna's personal version of reality over the last year, and even though she'd learned, for Harry's sake if for no one else's, to make allowances for her peculiarities, she still found herself being taken aback on numerous occasions, the moreso since they were all staying together at the Burrow for the last month before returning to Hogwarts.
Luna's father had decided that The Quibbler was going to take a very proactive stance in the burgeoning efforts to combat Voldemort's Death Eaters, a position that had earned the paper enormous praise from some quarters, and serious threats of violence from others. That the threats were more than mere words was made absolutely clear when the Lovegoods' home was leveled in a pre-dawn attack. Only the fortunate chance that had taken father and daughter to Diagon Alley and an overnight stay at the Leaky Cauldron spared their lives, and the senior Lovegood had asked his longtime neighbors to look after his only child while he camped out at his office and cranked out more broadsides aimed at arousing public resistance to You-Know-Who's grab for power.
It had taken Hermione a few days to get used to the idea, but she finally found she rather enjoyed sharing Luna's eccentric approach to day-to-day living. She didn't think she could carry it off while actually at school, but during the summer break it was a welcome relief from her normal worries…most of the time.
Hermione sat on the edge of her bed and frowned at Luna's complacent expression. "I don't think Harry's problems are anything to be making cavalier remarks about, Luna," she started dismissively, but the girl with the dirty blond hair shook her head, for once her expression anything but dreamy.
"Hermione, I would never be cavalier where Harry is concerned," she said earnestly, perching on the foot of her own bed like some exotic bird. "I would treat anyone who is in as much pain as he is with care, but Harry deserves even more consideration from me. He is my friend, and I do not have so many friends that I can afford to be careless with any of them. That is why I have thought so hard on this, and why I decided he needs to have sex."
Ginny could see her bushy-haired friend starting to get wound up, and decided to intervene before the situation deteriorated completely. So far Hermione had avoided exploding at Luna a single time that summer, a record Ginny had decided she'd like to see her friend keep. "What made you come to the conclusion that Harry needs…that?" she asked, drawing Luna's attention to her while being circumspect in deference to her other friend's obvious distress.
"It's very simple," Luna replied to her childhood friend, her attitude now completely oblivious to the brown-haired girl directly in front of her. "Something traumatic happened to Harry just before the end of school, and whatever it was, he hasn't been able to come to terms with it."
"Sirius," Hermione muttered, but Luna shook her head.
"It was more than that," she replied. "I talked to Harry afterwards; he was in pain, and he was taking far too much blame on himself for other people's decisions, but he was still coping. The Harry I saw at the train, and the one who is out there now, is a different person. Not only is he no longer coping with what happened, but also he has become fatalistic. He is not suicidal, not yet, but he clearly thinks he is going to die, and what is more, that there is nothing anyone can do to prevent it."
No, not Harry," Hermione whispered, but Ginny was nodding her head in agreement.
"I think she's on to something, Hermione; you were kind of out of it for the first few days, so you might have missed it, but Harry did go through a change not long after we got back. It was like something in him was broken, and he didn't know how to fix it."
Looking back and for between one red head and one blond one, Hermione thought over their words and finally nodded. "All right, what you say is possible; now that I think of it, it's even likely. Harry saw Professor Dumbledore after we returned to Hogwarts, I suppose something could have happened then." She focused her gaze on the blue eyes of the Ravenclaw girl. "That still doesn't explain the comment about…about Harry…" she blushed brightly as her words trailed off.
"About Harry needing to have sex?" Luna asked, ignoring Hermione's wince at the blunt phrase. "Why, I would think that would be obvious. The only drive that humans have that is even stronger than the urge for self-preservation is the drive to procreate, and Harry is at an age where that drive is at its peak. Whatever it is that is making him think about dying, I guarantee that if he has enough sex he won't be thinking about it any more; he'll be thinking about living, so he can have even more sex."
Luna quirked a puzzled eyebrow at Hermione's blushing face. "I don't see why this comes as such a surprise to you, Hermione. Sex magic is some of the oldest and most powerful magic there is. Even Muggles recognize how powerful a force sex is, that's why the major religions all try and control it. Taliesin, Merlin, Vainonomen, all the great wizards of the past used it."
Hermione's embarrassed expression had faded, to be replaced by a stunned one. "Wait a minute, why haven't I heard anything about this in class?" she asked, somehow offended that such important knowledge, if knowledge it was, had been denied her.
Now it was Luna's turn to be puzzled. "Well you wouldn't have, would you? Sex magic isn't discussed in class until sixth term, after you've passed your O.W.L.s. The teachers aren't about to go into a subject when you're not old enough to do the practical work."
"Practical...?" Hermione started to ask, and then blushed bright red as Luna's words sunk in. "Eep," she squeaked.
Luna turned a puzzled look at Ginny. "I don't understand, why is she so surprised?"
Comprehension finally dawned on Ginny's face. "Luna, Hermione is Muggle-born. Her mother isn't a witch."
Luna's already slightly protuberant eyes widened even further. "Oh, well that explains it!" she said brightly, earning a scowl from the subject of her exchange with Ginny.
"Excuse me, but that explains what, exactly?" Hermione demanded.
"Why you don't know about sex magic," Luna said calmly, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "With wizards, we're told all about it by our parents so we don't mess about with it by accident, girls by their mothers when they start their courses, boys by their fathers when they start having those sort of dreams." She glanced over at Ginny. "How old were you when your mother gave you the talk?" she asked.
"I was twelve; it was just before I left for second year." She shivered for a moment. "Mum was so upset; she was sure if she'd just talked to me the previous summer, Tom never would have tricked me with that diary." She shook off her mood and returned her gaze to Luna. "How old were you?"
"I was an early bloomer, I had the talk just before my first year of school," Luna replied, and then looked sad for a moment. "Of course, my mother was already dead, so poor father had to do the best he could, but I think he handled it well." She turned her attention to the goggling brown-haired girl. "I suppose Muggles must do something similar; what did you mother tell you about sex?"
Hermione turned bright red. "Well, we haven't actually talked about it; she gave me some books when I started asking questions, and had me talk to the doctor when those…changes…started, but…"
Both Ginny and Luna looked scandalized. "You mean she's never said…I mean, never?" Ginny asked, her attitude one of stunned amazement. "I knew Muggles were strange, but really!"
"Then again, that would explain why there are so many of them," Luna commented introspectively. "Even if we don't learn the magical side of things, we're all taught the most common contraceptive charms right away, just in case somebody starts experimenting early." Her attention returned once more to their squirming roommate. "What do the Muggles teach about it?"
"Ummm, 'Just Say No'?" Hermione replied timidly, her worldview undergoing severe alterations.
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Before she was allowed to object or even leave the room, Hermione was given a crash course in everything a witch was normally taught as soon as her body began to mature. At least she already knew the charms that were used to regulate her menses, those she had learned from Madame Pomfrey her second year when she had received her first 'visit' and had asked the school nurse for the Wizarding version of feminine hygiene products. All the rest, however, the contraceptive charms, as well as the spells to control the powerful energies that witches and wizards released during sex, came as a complete shock to the Muggleborn girl, and the war between her embarrassment and her excitement at discovering a whole new realm of magical knowledge would have been amusing if not for the reason it all had come up-Harry.
By the time they were done, Hermione figured her ability to be embarrassed by anything her friends said had been permanently shorted out, or at the very least indefinitely exhausted. "Well, that was an eye-opener," she said at last, sitting cross-legged on her bed, while Ginny lay on her stomach on hers, and Luna perched on the windowsill, gazing out at the sunset. "I'm really glad we had this talk; it certainly answers some questions I didn't even know I had about being a witch. But that being said, we still haven't decided what to do about Harry."
"We didn't?" Luna asked, surprised. "But I thought you both agreed-"
"Yes, we agreed," Hermione said hastily, still not completely comfortable with Luna's bluntness. "Harry needs something to snap him out of the funk he's in, and…making love…sounds like it might be just the thing to do it." She shook her head, muttering under her breath, "I can't believe I just said that…" Returning to the discussion, she continued, "But even with that decided, we still need to work out who's going to…" she tapered off, at a loss how to continue with the surreal conversation.
Fortunately for Harry, Luna had no such problems. "Oh, you mean deciding who's going to have sex with Harry," she nodded, and waved her hand nonchalantly. "Well, it will have to be one of you two, obviously."
"What do you mean, 'Obviously'?" Hermione asked, her eyes narrowing.
""Well, it can't be me, I'm going to be too busy having sex with Ronald," Luna said casually, earning a splutter from Ginny and a stare from Hermione. "He doesn't know it yet, of course, but it's really for the best," the blonde girl continued. "I was going to wait and seduce him at school, but this will be better, because I can distract him while one of you helps Harry…unless you two want to share him?"
Hermione and Ginny's eyes shifted from the Ravenclaw in the window to each other as they gauged their reaction to her blunt words. Hermione found she was after all wrong about her ability to be embarrassed as she felt herself blushing under the youngest Weasleys' intent stare.
Nodding, Luna hopped down from the windowsill and headed for the door. "Why don't you two reach a decision, and after you do, let me know so we can work out a plan. In the meantime, I think I'll go see if Ronald feels like playing a game of Wizard's Chess. There's a Queen's Gambit I want to try that I don't believe he's seen before…" She left the room, quietly humming 'Weasley Is Our King' as she went, leaving the other two girls sitting silently behind her.
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