Disclaimer: Right, I realize this is a news flash and all, but if I owned Harry Potter do you think I'd be writing fanfiction right now, or off in my studio, rewriting HBP?
Author's Note: Well, here it is: the last chapter. I realize the story's a little short (only four chapters . . . definitely short for me), but you have to remember that very little plot exists!
Here it is . . . the end of the road . . . the last stop before Grand Central . . . *weeps for the bitter loss* . . .
Hehe. Just kidding. You know, me, being overdramatic.
This seriously was totally fun: I got to write, you got to review, and we both got a satisfying ending . . . it's all good, right?
Well, just cuz it's the last chapter doesn't mean you shouldn't review! Gimme love!
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The New and Improved Hermione Granger
Part Four: Operation Aero Comes to a Head
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Harry could feel something pounding against his ribcage with an unsteady thrum thrump thrum thrump, and he wasn't sure if it was his heart or his lungs. Adrenaline or not, Hermione was hardly a light load to take in a fireman's carry halfway across the school.
As he huffed down the staircase to the first floor, Harry couldn't help replaying the scene in Transfiguration over again in his mind. He'd tersely opened his mouth to snap at Hermione that dammit, he wasn't stupid, could he try to work the stubborn thing, only to see her eyes roll into the back of her head, and her to flop backwards off her chair in a dead faint.
He hadn't told her that he knew about her staying up until all hours, working on her homework and Merlin knew what else. He would come back from his midnight rounds around the fifth floor corridors to see the light seeping out from under the closed door of her bedroom, and hear her muttering to herself as she paced back and forth, the floorboards protesting with lengthy creaks. It had given him some relief to know that the real Hermione was hiding under the Pseudo-Hermione.
All he had to do was find a crack, some crevice in the make-up-ed exterior of the Pseudo-Hermione, and dig out the real one. Even if it took him an ice pick and the whole rest of the school year, he'd find her.
As he thought this to himself (wheezing pathetically all the while), her purple eyelids fluttered twice, before settling closed again, her mascara-coated eyelashes looking like lace against the skin of her cheek. Her lips, dyed pink and glossy, opened for a moment, before closing in a sigh of contentment. She burrowed against Harry, who had frozen still, the pounding in his chest no longer coming from a lack of air.
"Harry," she breathed into his chest. And then her entire body tensed and she all but flew out of his arms, scrambling backwards by pulling on thin air. "What are you doing?!" she shrieked shrilly, grabbing the stone wall behind her for purchase.
"What am I doing?" demanded Harry, descending upon her without really realizing what he was doing. Part of his brain was yelling with its dying breath WHAT WAS THAT SHE JUST DID, but the larger part was very, very, very angry.
Hermione began to move backwards down the hall, as he ranted, "What am I doing, she asks. What do you mean, what am I doing? What were you doing? You just fainted in the middle of Transfiguration." He made a grab for her arm, but his fingers brushed stone as her elbow, by far larger than a snitch, darted out from under him. "I'm taking you to the hospital wing before it happens again!"
"No you aren't!" she replied, still speaking in shrill tones. "The Head dorms are just around the corner. I'll rest for a bit, and then go to lunch. A little nap and some food will do wonders."
They made the corner and turned, Hermione still backing away furiously, Harry stalking closer with each step they both took. He could see a red haze on the side of his vision, all but clogging his spectacles as he tried to grab her arm again. "What the hell do you think that you're doing? Staying up until three o'clock in the morning? Sleeping for two hours, then trudging yourself off to class? Doing the same thing every night?"
The pair was in front of the portrait of the four founders, all watching, riveted, as their argument echoed up and down the halls. Harry managed to latch onto her arm, and she tossed the password at the portrait. Ravenclaw seriously considered not letting them in so they could be privy to the entire show, but Hufflepuff elbowed her in the stomach and swung it open on her own.
Hermione pulled Harry with her into the Head common room with pure frustration as her only strength. "I've always stayed up!" she snapped, tugging on her arm. Harry had it in a vise-like grip that she wasn't able to break, she so clenched her fists in aggravation. "You know that I'm not a morning person! That's the only thing that you've always been able to nag me on. `Come on Hermione, it's just a little morning sunlight, you're hardly a vampire'." Her mimicking skills were severely lacking, but she didn't really seem to care.
Neither noticed when the founders moved into the portrait over the fireplace from the one in the hall. Ancient-looking Galleons appeared to be being exchanged amongst the four.
"Nag you?!" hissed Harry through clenched teeth. They had arrived at the plushy couches, Harry pressed against the front of Hermione's body, their arms the only things keeping them from being flush together. He used his spare hand to push her down into the center of the middle couch. "Here I am, nagging away! Not that you listen to me." He deliberately placed his hands on the back of the couch, one on each side of her head, caging her in. "No! You're too busy shagging Ernie Macmillan in the third floor broom closet!"
With a shriek, she slapped him across the face, the tips of her fingers leaving little red grooves in the skin of his cheek. As he reared back she looked horrified with herself. "Oh, Harry!" She leapt up and tried to reach for him, to see his face, but he spun out of the way. Back hunched against her, he turned to the fireplace, and the figures in the portrait had a nice view of the angry scratches on his cheek.
He laughed a little bitterly. "I asked for that, didn't I?" He gingerly pressed a cold palm to his face, attempting to soothe the sting. "I'm sorry for saying something so heartless. You're just making me so infuriated!" He whirled back around, but in the face of his anger, her eyes had become cool and detached.
"What's going on with you?" he asked, his voice a little lost as his palm dropped from his face. "What happened to the Hermione Granger who ate cinnamon sugar quills when she revises her notes, because she can't stand the regular flavor? Who comes to every one of my quidditch practices and reads in the stands? Who sits up with me until midnight, eating nicked food from the kitchens and staring into the fire? Who didn't care what anyone else thought about her? Who absolutely hated chili peppers, but was addicted to Indian order-out curry?"
Wistfully, he brushed aside a few of her straight blonde locks, and twined some of the soft hair at the nape of her neck around his index and middle finger. "She had the most beautiful brown hair in the world."
"She didn't get what she wanted," replied Hermione softly, but Harry didn't hear her and continued on, his voice becoming harsher and harsher with the pain of the past few weeks.
"You giggle now, Hermione. It's the most disgusting sound I've ever heard. Your voice is sticky and sugary and it makes me sick to my stomach just to hear to use it around all those idiots who used to ignore you."
Hermione, fury bringing her out of her self-imposed iciness, yanked her hair out of his hand hard enough to snap the strands at the roots. It made her eyes smart, but she ignored the sensation.
"I make you sick to your stomach?!" She placed both hands on his chest and pushed him backwards, towards the chair opposite the couch, however unintentionally. "Sick! I did this all for you, you ungrateful prat!" She pushed him again. "So that you'd realize that I, Hermione Granger, am a girl, just like Ginny and Cho-Bloody-Chang, and not your androgynous, bushy-haired, walking-dictionary best friend!" She gave his chest a third, hard push, to enunciate her words. "I did it so you'd realize that I'm in love with you!"
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Anger colored her eyes, made her furious and loose with words and emotions. The unfeeling, inhuman prat! After all that she did for him, after all the time and money she spent making herself beautiful and lovely and everything that the past girls he'd dated were, he had the gall to tell her that she made him sick?
SICK?
Well, Hermione Granger was not going to stand for that. Oh no, she wasn't going to let him just categorize her as nicely as he wanted to, put all that effort in a neatly labeled little box of Hermione Granger's Stupid Idea and stow it away and let it gather dust in some lonely recess of his mind.
It was a perfectly logical assumption that he wanted a girl like the ones he'd dated previously - and Hermione was nothing if not logical. Obviously Ginny hadn't made him feel nauseous when his tongue was down her throat. So what was so different about Hermione, then?
She made him sick, eh?
Well, let's just see about that.
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Harry could feel something warm spreading across his chest. Did she just - but before that little part of his mind that had been previously yelling WASN'T SHE JUST SNUGGLING UP NEXT TO ME IN THE HALL could laugh triumphantly and claim victory, something smashed into him and knocked him into the squishy chair strategically placed behind him.
All the air whooshed out of his lungs, as he realized that the `something' was actually Hermione, and that she was sitting in his lap, and one of her hands was pressed against his chest, and the other was winding its way around his neck.
He opened his mouth to speak, to ask her to please repeat what she had said earlier, about being in love with him, and to tell her that he felt the same, and to ask why she had tackled him, and a whole jumble of other things, but he didn't have the chance.
For a girl who had been, up until four weeks ago, generally unnoticed by the male species, Hermione certainly knew how to kiss.
For a moment he wondered, a bit angrily, if either Viktor Krum or Ernie Macmillan had ever kissed his Hermione, but then she melted into him, her body falling against his in all the right places, and the taste of melon and orange and peppermint caressed the back of his tongue, and every miniscule hair on his arms and the back of his neck, where her soft fingers curled into his hair, rose with the current rushing through his body, and his nerve endings died a terribly happy death, and he decided not to think at all, especially not about Krum and . . . Krum and . . . Kr . .
When she pulled back, Harry was so stunned by this turn of events that all he could do was stare at her, gob-smacked, as she parted lips that were devoid now of lip gloss, and declared, "I make you sick, eh?"
To which the only proper response would be, in his mind, to rewind his fingers into her hair and try out this whole snogging-his-best-friend thing again. Which he did. Happily.
In the background, Slytherin and Hufflepuff triumphantly collected Galleons from their fellow founders. The pair on the chair didn't notice when all four - half cackling madly, half glowering - returned to the portrait out in the corridor.
When air, once again, became a serious issue, they parted just enough to let oxygen into their mouths unhindered. Laughing a little weakly, Harry rested his forehead against hers. "Care to repeat that bit?"
"What bit?" asked Hermione, breathing heavily. "The `I make you-"
"No," interrupted Harry. "The bit before that."
"Oh." Hermione turned bright pink. "The . . . I'm in love with you, bit?" Harry mentally noted that she looked quite charming devoid of concealer and lip gloss and mascara, and now the only thing that needed to go was the hair (well, and the pink quills, and the Witch Weekly, and the short skirts, because he didn't really want to hex every male person at Hogwarts for ogling at his girlfriend) . . . but first there was something a tad more important that had to be done.
"I love you too."
Operation Aero: Success
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The End
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Well, there it is. The end.
Oh, and yes, Hermione does ditch all the yecky, non-Hermione stuff. So rest assured that she's all Hermione-ish now.
Now, there's only one thing left to do . . . YOU = REVIEW.
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