"Hermione?" Harry said, bewildered. She glanced at him briefly and threw him a warm smile before turning her attention back to the television.
"Hullo, Harry," she replied, her mouth turning down slightly and her nose crinkling in distaste. "Can you believe the filth they put on nowadays? It's no wonder that national test averages drop yearly if this is what children are watching!"
"Um…yeah," he agreed slowly, waiting for his brain to catch up to Hermione's sudden outburst. It's way too early in the evening to hold a conversation like this, he thought wearily, but I know there's no putting Hermione off when she wants to rant… He leaned over the bed to look up at the television, and his immediate reaction was to wrinkle his own nose as Hermione had done. "Oh, it's this show," he mumbled, watching the variously colored puppets dance across the screen. He cringed as one spoke some sort of gibberish, and the rest followed suit. "I can't remember for the life of me what it's called, but it's gotten rather popular this year."
"Has it really?" Hermione said, aghast. "How terrible! What happened to the educational programming they used to have on? I remember this one show that was all about math, and I would turn off the history documentaries just to watch it…"
"They took those off when people stopped watching them," he said with a chuckle, though he wasn't really that surprised to hear that she used to watch history shows when she was young. "Seems that if kids have a choice between learning and not learning, they'd rather not learn."
Hermione snorted and folded her arms, glaring nastily up at the offending television program. This gave Harry enough time to remember that Hermione looked a bit…off-color.
"'Mione, why are you blue?"
The witch snapped back into reality, and held an arm up to her face, looking at it with a small grin on her face. "Oh yes, I had nearly forgotten about that," she stated simply, letting her arm drop as she looked up at Harry. "It's just a simple charm; I needed an excuse to come see you. I didn't want to lead anyone to your apartment or anything. What kind of secret keeper would I be if I let people find out where you were?"
After he defeated Voldemort, Harry found it impossible to escape the hordes of wizarding folk that hounded him day and night, either to congratulate him or express their sympathies. The only way to lead a normal muggle life, he decided, was if magical folk didn't know where he was. He had Hermione put the fidelius charm on him and entrusted her to keep his whereabouts a secret. His only contact with the wizarding world was through Hedwig, his snowy white owl. He had a subscription to the Daily Prophet as well as Gardening Monthly; he needed to keep tabs on new magical discoveries if he was to continue curing muggles of magical inflictions. Various anti-tracking charms on Hedwig kept her from being followed; that combined with the fidelius charm left Harry mostly secluded from all things magical. The exception, of course, was the owls of very specific wizards from whom he occasionally got ingredients and information.
"Well," Harry mused, "you wouldn't have come to me without good reason. What's going on?"
Hermione shifted herself on the bed so that her legs hung off the side, and leaned back on her hands. "You've earned quite a reputation for yourself here, Harry," she started. "You remember why we decided to situate you in this particular region, right?"
"Yeah," he said, pulling over a stool and seating himself upon it.
It wasn't much of a secret to the wizarding world that there were leaks of magical activity all around the globe. This part of England was fairly susceptible to those leaks, as a vast amount of magical plants and beasts surrounded the area. Preventive measures were taken to keep the beasts from roaming about, but plants were nearly impossible to control. The wind, insects, and ordinary beasts spread their seeds - such is the nature of a plant, after all. Therefore, magical plants of all sorts popped up all over the area, and were quite elusive to find.
Harry was placed there (with Hermione as his contact) to prevent the muggles from panicking by easily curing them of strange ailments caused by magical plants. He was well known to the muggles in his neighborhood, and news of him was slowly spreading to other towns outside of this one. The explanation for his miracle cures was that he specialized in rare and exotic plant life. He steadfastly refused to divulge his secrets and was regarded by other scientists in his field to be a fraud. Those he had cured, however, knew better, and proceeded to add to his good name.
"Well, because of your training and research, I figured that there wouldn't be many other wizards who know as much about magical plants as you do - at least not ones who would be willing to help us out and keep our situation confidential…" Hermione said slowly.
"What situation? What happened?" he asked with a hint of alarm in his voice.
"As the new headmaster of the school, Minerva decided it would be best if a team went into the Forbidden Forest and catalogued the life forms there," she replied. "Albus had it on his list of things to do, but there was always something more important to deal with, and it had never gotten done." Harry noted that Hermione had gotten used to referring to her colleagues by their first names, which ones one thing he would never get used to. Hermione now taught an alternative history class at Hogwarts - one in which the curriculum stayed far, far away from goblin revolts. She didn't want to encroach on Professor Binn's territory, after all.
"So a team of us went out with Hagrid into the forest, and Harry, it was so wondrous! We found so many plants and creatures that we hadn't even known were in there, and some of them we even had to research to find out what they were!" Harry grinned at Hermione's excitability over research, a wave of nostalgia sweeping through him. He hadn't realized how much he had missed the old days…
"Anyway, a couple members of the team found an odd-looking plant with blue leaves, and when they touched it, they got stuck together. Not in an adhesive sort of way, though. It's really hard to explain. You'd have to see it to believe it. We searched all throughout the library - including the restricted section - and we ordered all sorts of books from other places…" She sighed and threw her arms up in the air. "But Harry, we can't make heads nor tails of the situation, and we're afraid that if we don't figure this out soon, Ginny and Draco might-"
"Ginny and Draco?" Harry interrupted, raising an eyebrow.
"Come on Harry, you knew they decided to live at Hogwarts for protection. Like it or not, they both played a huge part in the fight against Voldemort, and goodness knows how many Death Eaters are around. They were bored out of their skulls and volunteered to help with the cataloguing."
"So they're an item now?" he said in disbelief.
"Well, no. That's part of the problem, you see. Since they can't be separated, we're afraid they might do something drastic before too long. Like, kill each other."
Harry didn't bother to contain his smirk. "He better watch himself then, 'cause Ginny's got a mean left hook."
"Could we not talk about that now?" Hermione sighed as she rolled her eyes. Harry had a bit of a relationship with Ginny during his last year at Hogwarts, and it was actually quite disturbing to think about it. Ginny had blossomed that year, and as it turned out, she had inherited the infamous Weasley temper along with a bit of spunk. From the rumors that flew around that year, the couple's activities were more than a bit kinky. They had parted on good terms when Harry decided to leave the wizarding world, saying their relationship was a "stress thing."
Hermione didn't believe Ginny was all right with it at first, considering the deep crush she had on Harry for years. She confronted the redhead about it, and what she got in return was a big, doofy grin and the reassurance that her crush was just a morbid fascination with the boy, and although she felt completely comfortable in a relationship with Harry she had known it would eventually end. Thus, she tossed away her inhibitions, lived up to her fantasies, bedded the famous Harry Potter, and was quite proud of herself for doing so. Hermione had blinked and stumbled away. In retrospect, she supposed that with six brothers around all her life, it would be ridiculous to think that Ginny wouldn't pick up some of their crude ways.
"Fine," Harry said, still smirking, "but you might want to talk about it with Draco, if you know what's good for him."
"Ugh!" Hermione huffed, throwing her hands up and hopping off the bed in disgust. She began to pace back in forth in front of him, intent on going on a tangent. "You are the living end! I can't believe you would take a conversation of such a serious nature and turn it into a sex-fest! You haven't changed a bit, Harry Potter, and I'm…I'm…" she stammered, trying to think of the right word to describe her ire.
"Jealous?" Harry offered helpfully, only to be glowered at by his old best friend.
"NO!" she shouted in his face, and turned her back to him just in time to miss his grin.
"If you say so," he said as he stood up so he could move the stool back away from the bed. Hermione heard him shuffling around and decided to face him again.
"What are you doing?"
"Well, this is obviously a dire emergency," Harry replied as he put the stool away. "If neither of us knows of any plants that cause people to stick together, then we need to get some samples and find out as much about it as we can. And before we experiment, we have a lot of other preparations to take care of."
His sudden change of tone left Hermione staring open-mouthed at him as he started to leave the room. She shut it quickly and hurried to catch up to him. "I wonder how they go to the bathroom," she heard him mutter. She pondered the issue for a moment, for she hadn't thought of that complication before…but then she caught herself, became upset at Harry's behavior once more, and a slap resounded in the hospital corridor.