Next Morning.

Friday, Sept. 13

“Relax, Hermione. It was one class.”

Hermione looked at her best friend like he had lost his marbles. “One class!? One class!? Harry, we missed Astronomy! We’re going to get punished for this, maybe even expelled.”

“We’re not going to be expelled for missing a class, Hermione,” the boy argued.

“Yes, we will,” she countered, her voice getting shriller by the minute and her eyes wetter. “Don’t you see, Harry? We’re going to be expelled, and then what will we do? Our lives will be over.”

“Over?”

“Yes, over. They’ll snap our wands, Harry. We won’t be able to learn magic anymore. We’ll—”

Harry grabbed her shoulders firmly but not harshly. “Hermione,” he said, making her look at him, “you’re right, missing a class is an unforgivable offense and we should not make a habit of it, but you really need to calm down.

“We’re not going to get expelled, you know this. Maybe we’ll get detention, but that’s about it. Now, please, stop worrying.”

It wasn’t easy, but Hermione forced herself to take a breath. She wasn’t helping right now. Besides, maybe Harry was right, maybe they wouldn’t get expelled. And even if they were (oh, God, she really hoped they weren’t) her panic wasn’t helping anybody. Not herself, and certainly not Harry.

Even so. “This is the second class we’ve skipped, Harry. School hasn’t even been in session for two weeks.”

Harry frowned. “Second class? What second class?”

“Potions. Last Friday.” How could he not remember?

“What? That’s different. Snape kicked us out, remember? It’s extended circumstances.”

“Extenuating circumstances, Harry.”

“What you said. The point is, it doesn’t count. And we both know last night only happened because of all the running around we’ve been doing. Now, seriously, please, calm down, because you’re starting to worry me a little bit.”

“Okay,” Hermione said finally, and Harry let out a breath of relief.

“Good,” the boy said. “Now, you’ve been eyeing that bookshelf since last night, so why don’t you go and look through it while I make us breakfast? What do you say?”

Hermione could not have refused that offer even if she wanted to.

As the girl went to the bookshelf, walking past Hedwig, who was still fast asleep, or at least looked to be, on her plush, vibrating pillow, she tried to push away all thoughts of being labelled a truant for the rest of her natural life. Her natural, uneducated life, that is, since no school would ever take her again; she would grow up to be unemployed and a layabout, probably drinking all day while living with her parents like that boy, Rudolph, down the street.

Hermione tried harder to expel the thoughts as her eyes scanned the titles on Harry’s shelf.

To Hermione’s surprise, now that she’d gotten a clear look at the books, she found that many of them were actually works of fiction unlike she’d thought.

“Harry,” she called, “most of these are novels.”

“Hmm? Oh, yeah. I mean, I was going to be living on my own without the internet for the foreseeable future, I figured those were the next best thing.”

Oh, right. Harry had planned to run away. That’s why he’d bought all of this.

As Hermione scanned the shelf some more, her eyes caught a promising title; The Magic of the Orients, by a witch named Helen Manchester.

Curiously, she pulled it out and scanned through a few pages, and within a few minutes, she’d parked herself on the sofa with the book in hand.

It was full of fascinating information. Within just the introductory pages, Hermione had learnt that, unlike in Europe, where the use of wands had been adopted across the continent, many other parts of the world were not so unified in their practice of magic.

The book also touched lightly on the subject of geography, mentioning that, once again, unlike in Europe and North America, where it was the custom for magical societies to match the borders of their respective countries, most places, specifically Asia, Africa, and South America, didn’t even recognize muggle borders, creating their own instead.

As Hermione read, Harry put on some soulful music on a low volume. He sang along with the songs he knew (which were more than Hermione would have thought), and hummed along with the ones he didn’t.

Harry had a nice singing voice, and even though Hermione had heard him sing many times before without feeling more than a little impressed, for some reason, sitting here on this comfy sofa, in this little house, reading as he made her breakfast, made it feel... more, somehow, and before she knew it, she was watching him, the book forgotten on her lap.

At some point, Harry looked at her, maybe to check on her or maybe because he felt her eyes on him, whatever his reason for looking up, their eyes met, and he stopped singing as he looked at her in mild confusion.

“What?”

Hermione blinked. Oh, right, she was staring.

“Um, you like to cook,” she said lamely, picking the first thing that came to mind.

Harry frowned in thought. “Yeah, I guess I do,” he said, then reconsidered: “Or maybe I just like cooking for you. I definitely didn’t enjoy doing it for the Dursleys.”

“Did they make you cook a lot?” Hermione asked.

“Yeah. Every breakfast and some dinners,” Harry said.

A memory came to Hermione then, one of the ones she’d picked up from Harry’s mind in their last occlumency session; it was of him sitting at the dinner table with the Dursleys, a single piece of dry toast on his plate, as he watched the Dursleys, especially Vernon and Dudley, gorge themselves on the meal he’d spent hours preparing.

Hermione’s mood soured.

She could see that Harry’s had too, so she quickly thought of something else to talk about, and being herself, the first thing that came to mind as a diversion was a book; namely the one she’d been reading before Harry’s singing distracted her.

Fortunately, Harry didn’t mind talking about the very fascinating magical disciplines of the wizards of East Asia.

They ate together when the meal was done, Hedwig pulling herself out of her pillow to come and eat with them, and returning right after.

Hermione meanwhile, went back to her book, and though Harry joined her at first, he soon gave up and sat back quietly as she read.

It was almost an hour later, as she read a passage about a small and very reclusive magical village in Japan, where they used musical instruments to control their magic, that Harry finally spoke.

“Good thing we use wands,” he said idly.

“What?” Hermione looked at him. Had she missed something he said?

“I said ‘good thing we use wands’. I’ve never seen a musical instrument I could play in my life. Both old and new, I think.”

“You were reading along?” Hermione asked in surprise.

“Kind of. You read aloud under your breath when you get really interested in a book.”

“Oh.” She thought she’d broken that habit. “Sorry.”

“No, I like it. Reading gets tiresome sometimes. Actually, I think I prefer listening to you.”

“Oh,” Hermione said again. Very well then, if he didn’t mind.

She tried to go back to her reading, but everything was different now. Knowing that Harry was listening, she suddenly felt self-conscious. Was her voice too low? Was it too high? Did it really just waver, or was that her imagination?

With how much concentration Hermione was paying to her voice and pitch, she inevitably missed a word on the page and had to go back and reread it. Then the sentence. Then the paragraph.

Before she could finish the paragraph for the second time, Harry asked, “we skipped the last two days of occlumency practice, right?” And Hermione was only too happy to jump on that.

*****

“Legilimens,” Hermione cast, staring into Harry’s eyes.

The spell worked, a connection formed, but all the girl got were murky impressions of thought and emotion; Harry had successfully resisted the spell.

Well, more accurately, he had resisted the initial attack, now he would need to hold out as Hermione laid siege to his mind.

There are two major ways to shield a mind from a legilimen, the first is to mask the emotional pull of all of one’s memories, leaving the legilimen with nothing to connect to.

It is the most effective method, but also the hardest, and it was the one both Hermione and Harry practiced.

Hermione practiced it because she wanted to challenge herself, and because she thought that it would be safer to stick with the most effective method considering who their enemies were, Harry meanwhile, well Harry practiced the first one for the same reason too, although Hermione heavily suspected that his determination to keep her from seeing any of his memories also played a big role in the decision.

The second and easier method, is to feed trivial memories at the invading legilimen. If done right, this could suck them down a rabbit hole, pulling them away from their intended target like (Harry’s words) someone getting distracted by TikTok while trying to do internet research.

The problem with it was that while it worked well enough, it required a battle of wills between the occlumen and the person trying to invade their mind. A battle of wills that was heavily dependent on skill.

Of course, while the first method was much safer, it, as said before, requires much more skill to perform correctly; and neither of them were anywhere near that skill level yet.

Hermione sensed the vague, poorly concealed memories of Harry’s mind flow and ebb around her, but she refrained from trying to access them; patience and cunning were the keys to success in this.

Not that she was seeing as much success as she would have preferred so far.

See, at some point, Hermione couldn’t really remember when, she and Harry had turned their practice into a game and begun to keep score, and they were currently tied at 5-5. Hermione really wanted a landslide victory.

“You really should just give up now, Harry,” Hermione said, trying to sound nonchalant as she looked the boy in the eyes. “We both know I’ll win anyway.”

Harry simply gave her a confident little smirk that just about drove the girl spare. “Two minutes on the clock, Miss Granger,” he said. “Tick tock.”

For the purposes of the game, they’d decided that each of them only got two minutes to try to breach the other’s defenses.

Hermione sniffed at the boy’s words, then said imperiously: “please, Harry, two minutes is too much time to break through your pitiful defense.”

Harry’s response was a raised eyebrow. “Is that right?” he asked.

“Of course. All I need is—” and she dived him.

Harry never saw it coming.

She knocked him down, holding him down with her weight as, with mischievous glee, the tickling started. Harry broke in seconds.

Got you, Hermione thought, as Harry’s mental defenses came down like a Jenga tower.

Hermione went for the brightest memory within her metaphorical reach, not bothering to try to gauge what it might contain, and suddenly, she found herself in a room.

It’s surroundings were murky, like they were looked at through a milky fog, leaving everything from the walls, to the floor, to the bed vague. The only things in clear detail were the boy on the bed, and the woman tickling him.

The boy was Harry as Hermione knew him, laughing and struggling to escape the woman’s grasp.

The woman was beautiful, with long, red hair and Harry’s eyes. She was laughing too as she tickled him, and they both looked so happy.

The memory vanished, and Hermione blinked in slight disorientation as she suddenly found herself looking down at Harry’s face back in the tent. He looked sad.

“Was that...” she couldn’t bring herself to finish the question.

“My mom, yes.”

Hermione frowned. How could that be? Harry’s mom died when he was a baby; he looked as he did now in that memory.

“It’s from before,” Harry said, seeing her confusion. “It’s one of the few scraps of those memories I have left. But because I don’t remember anyone’s faces from that life, it’s like my brain tries to... fix things by patching them with the people I remember from this life.”

Harry sighed tiredly; he looked like he didn’t even have the energy to be sad or angry anymore.

“I’m sorry for everything you’ve gone through, Harry,” Hermione said, and the boy gave her a small smile.

“It’s not all bad,” he said, staring at her.

Neither tween was really feeling like practicing The Mind Arts after that, so they just sat and whiled away time idly for a bit.

Eventually, unable to help herself, Hermione picked The Magic of the Orients again, and this time, even though she knew Harry was listening to her read, it didn’t really bother her.

If anything, she found that she rather liked it.