Stormbound Hearts

The thunder had been going for an hour before I knocked.

Not the polite kind of thunder that rolls through the Highlands in summer, distant and grumbling, a sound you could mistake for a lorry on the road if you didn't know better. This was the other kind. The kind that cracked directly overhead like the sky splitting along a seam, and every time it did, the windows in Gryffindor Tower rattled in their frames, and I counted the seconds between the flash and the boom like I'd been taught as a child, and the number kept getting smaller.

Three seconds. Two. One.

I was out of bed before I'd decided to move.

The dormitory was dark and full of the small sounds of other people sleeping. Lavender's breathing, slow and even, the way it always was, as if nothing in the world could trouble her. Parvati's occasional rustle of sheets. And the rain, of course, hammering the glass in sheets, hard enough that I could hear it over everything else. I stood there in my socks with my arms wrapped around myself, and I thought about the practical things. I thought about how I was Head Girl now, which meant I was supposed to be a model of composure, a person who did not have irrational fears of weather. I thought about how if I went downstairs and someone saw me, there would be questions.

Then the sky cracked again and I didn't think about anything at all.

The common room was empty, which was a mercy. The fire had burned down to embers, orange light pulsing weakly against the stone, and the shadows in the corners were deep and shifting. I crossed to the boys' staircase without letting myself pause. The stairs didn't move for me. They never did anymore. I'd been up and down them enough times over six years that they'd given up trying to play tricks.

Harry's door was the second on the left. I knew it the way I knew the sound of his laugh across a crowded room, which is to say without having to think about it, which is to say in a way I'd spent a long time not examining.

I knocked before I could stop myself.

Nothing. The rain beat against the tower. I knocked again, harder, and I heard movement inside, a creak of bedsprings, a muffled sound that might have been my name.

The door opened.

Harry stood there in a grey t-shirt and pajama bottoms, his hair flattened on one side and sticking up on the other, his glasses slightly askew. He blinked at me. The wand in his hand was already lit, and the light caught the green of his eyes in a way that made my chest do something complicated.

"Hermione?"

"Can I come in?"

He stepped back without asking why. That was Harry. He never asked why, not with me. He just made room.

I walked past him into the room, which smelled like him, like the soap he used and something warmer underneath it, and I stood in the middle of the floor with my arms still wrapped around myself, and I realized I had no idea what to say.

The thunder saved me. It came down hard enough that the whole tower seemed to shudder, and I flinched, and Harry saw it. Of course he saw it. He saw everything about me eventually, even the things I tried to hide.

"Bad night," he said. Not a question.

"Yes."

He set his wand on the nightstand and the light settled into a steady glow, softer than the fluorescent kind, the kind that made the room feel like a held breath. He was watching me. I could feel it even though I was looking at the floor.

"The storm," I said. "It's... I don't do well with them. I never have. When I was small I used to climb into my parents' bed and my dad would tell me it was just the sky clearing its throat, and I knew that was rubbish, obviously, but it helped. And now I'm nineteen and I'm supposed to have grown out of it, and I haven't, and I can't sleep, and I didn't know where else to go."

I stopped. That last part had come out wrong. Too honest, maybe. Or not honest enough.

Harry was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "You could've gone to Ron."

There it was.

I looked up at him. He wasn't being cruel. He never was. He was standing there with his hands loose at his sides and his brow furrowed in that way it did when he was working something out, and he genuinely didn't understand. That was the worst part. He genuinely didn't understand why I was standing in his room instead of Ron's.

"Ron sleeps like the dead," I said.

"So do I."

"You don't, actually. You talk in your sleep. And you wake up if someone breathes wrong in the corridor. You've always been like that."

He almost smiled. Almost. "That's not a reason to come to me instead of your boyfriend."

I felt the word land somewhere under my ribs. Boyfriend. Such a small word for such a complicated thing.

"Ron and I," I started, and then stopped, because how do you explain six months of something that never quite worked? How do you explain that you'd said yes because he'd asked and because it made sense and because everyone expected it, and that you'd kept saying yes because saying no would have meant admitting something you weren't ready to admit, and that the whole time you were holding his hand you were thinking about someone else's?

"You and Ron what?"

"Nothing. It's fine. We're fine."

Harry's eyes narrowed. He knew I was lying. He always knew. But he didn't push, because that wasn't what he did. He just stood there in the low light, waiting, and the rain kept coming, and the thunder rolled somewhere far off now, moving away, and I realized I was shaking.

"You're cold," he said.

"I'm not."

But he was already moving, pulling the blanket off his bed and crossing the room, and he wrapped it around my shoulders without asking, and his hands brushed my arms, and I stopped breathing for a second. Just a second. Then he stepped back and the air came back into the room.

"You can have the bed," he said. "I'll take the floor."

"Don't be ridiculous."

"I'm not being ridiculous. You're the one who's scared of thunder."

"I'm not scared. I'm... unsettled."

"Right. Unsettled."

He said it with that flat tone he used when he was humoring me, and despite everything, despite the storm and the shaking and the fact that I was standing in my best friend's bedroom in the middle of the night wearing nothing but a t-shirt and socks, I laughed. It came out small and broken, but it was real.

Harry's face changed when I laughed. Softened. He looked at me the way he did sometimes, when he thought I wasn't paying attention, and I never knew what to do with that look. I still don't.

"Stay," he said. "Just... stay. I'll sleep on the floor. It's fine."

"You slept on the floor in the tent for three months. You're not doing it again."

"Then we'll share. It's a big bed."

It wasn't, particularly. But I didn't argue.

We arranged ourselves like it was nothing, like it was the most ordinary thing in the world, him on the far side with his back to the wall and me on the near side with my back to the door, a careful distance between us that was somehow both too much and not enough. The blanket was over both of us now. The rain had softened to a steady hiss. Somewhere in the castle, a portrait was probably complaining about the noise.

I stared at the ceiling and listened to him breathe.

"For what it's worth," he said, after a long time, "I don't like storms either."

"You don't."

"I don't. I just don't tell anyone."

I turned my head. He was looking at the ceiling too, his profile sharp in the dim light, his jaw set like he was bracing for something.

"Why not?"

He was quiet. The rain filled the space where his answer should have been.

"Because everyone expects me to be brave," he said finally. "And I am, mostly. But not about this. Not about things I can't fight."

I understood that. I understood it better than I wanted to.

"Harry."

"Yeah."

"I'm glad you're here."

He turned his head then, and we were looking at each other across the small distance, and the thunder rolled once more, far away now, a grumble at the edge of hearing, and I didn't flinch. I didn't even notice.

"Me too," he said.

And that was it. That was all. He closed his eyes and his breathing evened out within minutes, because he was always able to sleep when it mattered, and I lay there in the dark of his room with his blanket around me and his warmth beside me and I thought about how badly I had messed everything up.

Because Ron was my boyfriend. Ron was kind and funny and he loved me in a way that was simple and uncomplicated, and I had said yes to him because I was tired of waiting for something that was never going to happen, and because I thought maybe if I said yes to the right thing I would stop wanting the wrong one.

But here I was. In Harry's bed. Listening to Harry breathe.

And the wrong one was right there, close enough to touch, and he had no idea. He had no idea that I had been in love with him since fourth year, since the moment he'd come out of that lake with Fleur's sister and I'd realized I would have done anything, anything at all, to be the one he was trying to save. He had no idea that every time he looked at me with those green eyes I forgot how to form sentences. He had no idea that I had spent six years being his friend and pretending that was enough, and that it wasn't, and that it never had been.

He had no idea.

And I was going to keep it that way.

The storm passed sometime before dawn. I must have slept, because when I opened my eyes the room was grey with early light and Harry was still there, still asleep, one arm thrown over his head in a way that made him look younger than he was. I watched him for longer than I should have. Then I got up as quietly as I could, folded the blanket at the foot of the bed, and slipped out the door.

The common room was empty. The fire had gone out. And on the other side of the portrait hole, the castle was waking up, and somewhere in it Ron was probably just now rolling over in his bed, and I had a Charms essay due on Friday, and nothing at all had changed.

Except that something had. I could feel it, a small hard knot under my ribs, the knowledge that I had crossed a line I couldn't uncross. I had gone to him. In the dark, in the storm, I had gone to him instead of the boy I was supposed to love.

And he had let me in.

I climbed back up to my dormitory and got into my own bed and stared at the ceiling until the sun came up, and I told myself it didn't mean anything. I told myself it was just the thunder. I told myself a lot of things that morning.

None of them were true.