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The shadow of the beech tree fell across the grass in a long, clean stripe, and within it the air was a few degrees cooler, not cold, just different, the way the world on the other side of a window always looks slightly more tolerable than the one you're in. Beyond the shadow's edge, the grounds blazed. The lake threw back the sun in fragments, and the hills that rolled away toward Hogsmeade shimmered with that particular mid-June heat that made everything at its edges look uncertain, as though the world might, if you stared long enough, gently dissolve.
Harry Potter was lying on his back with his head in Hermione Granger's lap.
He had not planned to be. He'd sat down beside her with every intention of staying upright, of being a person who sat normally in the world, and then the grass had been very soft and the sun had been very warm beyond the tree's boundary and Hermione had been right there, and at some point in the last forty minutes the calculus had simply changed. He'd slid sideways by degrees. She'd allowed it with the precise, quiet tolerance of someone who had long ago made peace with the fact that Harry Potter in a patch of sunlight was essentially a large, undignified cat.
She had a book open on her knee, or rather, beside her knee, angled at a position that was technically readable if one made certain sacrifices to comfort and ambition. She had not turned a page in some time.
Above him, through the canopy's gaps, the sky was a specific shade of blue that existed only in June and only at noon, the kind of blue that had no metaphor because it didn't need one. It simply was. Harry looked at it and felt something ease in his chest that he hadn't realized had been braced.
"What time is it?" he asked.
"I don't know."
"You always know."
"I left my watch in the dormitory deliberately," Hermione said, "because it's our day off and I decided that knowing what time it is would be a form of psychological self-sabotage."
Harry considered this. "That might be the most Hermione thing you've ever said."
"I'm choosing to take that as a compliment."
"It was one."
She looked down at him, and the light came through the canopy at an angle that caught the side of her face, the slope of her cheekbone, the soft line of her jaw, and Harry thought, not for the first time and certainly not for the last, that she was extraordinarily lovely in ways that she would dismiss if he said them aloud and that he therefore mostly kept to himself, hoarding them like something he didn't want to share with the general population of the universe.
Her hand was in his hair. He wasn't sure when that had started either.
"You're staring," she said, without looking up from her non-reading.
"I live here now," Harry said. "This is my life. This specific square foot of grass."
"McGonagall will be thrilled."
"McGonagall will understand. She has a cat form. She gets it."
Hermione's mouth twitched. She turned a page of her book, purely for show, Harry suspected, and her fingers moved idly through his hair, and the afternoon continued to exist around them with the unhurried confidence of something that had nowhere else to be.
He sat up eventually. Not because he wanted to, but because lying down for too long made him feel like he was waiting for something, and he had spent enough years of his life waiting for things. He shifted onto his side instead, propped on one elbow, and Hermione closed her book without any particular ceremony and set it in the grass, and the look she gave him was one of the looks he had learned to read over years, calm and present and slightly amused at the fact of him, the way she'd looked at him for as long as he could remember, and it meant something different now than it had before but it had always meant something, he thought, even when neither of them had the language for it.
"Hi," he said.
"You literally just sat up," Hermione said. "We didn't go anywhere."
"I'm re-establishing contact."
"That's not a thing."
"It is now. I invented it."
She was smiling properly now, the kind she didn't deploy in classrooms or libraries, the one that reached her eyes without any calculation behind it. He reached out and tucked a strand of hair back from her face, behind her ear, and her expression shifted fractionally: softer at the edges, a little more unguarded. She let him. She'd been letting him for months now, each small touch landed and acknowledged without fuss, absorbed into the texture of what they were.
He leaned in and kissed her.
It was easy, the way it always was with her, no negotiation, no performance. Her hand came up to his jaw, and she kissed him back with the focused, particular attention she gave to things she had decided were worth her time, and the grass smelled warm around them, and somewhere across the lake a bird was making an extremely self-important announcement about something, and Harry didn't think about anything at all for a moment, which was a state he reached approximately twice a year and which Hermione alone seemed able to facilitate.
When they broke apart, she rested her forehead against his. Her eyes were still closed.
"We have three more hours," she said quietly.
"I know."
"I keep thinking about the Transfiguration essay due Thursday."
"I know."
"I'm going to stop thinking about it now."
"Brilliant idea."
He kissed her again, softer this time, and she made a small sound against his mouth that he had decided was contentment though he would not have been able to prove it in a court of law. He pulled back an inch. She chased him slightly, unconsciously, and then stilled when she realized it, and he caught the faint color that rose in her face and felt absurdly, disproportionately fond.
Then he did it.
He didn't make a decision, exactly. It was more that the option presented itself to him with a sudden crystalline clarity, the way all of his worst ideas did, and the next thing that happened was that instead of kissing her, he pursed his lips and blew a short, focused puff of air directly into her open mouth.
There was a pause.
Hermione's cheeks filled.
She sat there for a beat, two full, baffled seconds, cheeks puffed out in an expression of complete involuntary bafflement, like a small, extremely intelligent fish that had found itself in unexpectedly hostile academic waters. She looked like she was holding back an argument she had not yet formulated. Her eyes had gone very wide and very betrayed.
Then the air escaped. Her expression returned to its normal configuration.
She stared at him.
Harry was already laughing, had been laughing before the thing had fully happened, was now laughing so hard that he'd dropped onto his back again and was addressing his mirth to the canopy because he couldn't look at her face without it getting worse.
"Harry James Potter," Hermione said.
He wheezed.
"You just—" She stopped. Started again. "You blew air into my mouth."
"Technically—"
"Do not say 'technically' to me right now."
"—it was more of a gentle inflation—"
"Inflation," she repeated, in a tone that suggested she was deciding something important about his character. She was not smiling. She was also absolutely about to smile. Harry could see it at the corners of her mouth, a structural failure in her composure that she was holding back through what appeared to be sheer force of academic discipline. "You inflated me. Like a... like a balloon. Like a very small, very undignified—"
"You looked exactly like a pufferfish," Harry said, delighted, and made the mistake of looking at her, and the laughter redoubled, and she pressed her lips together very firmly and said nothing, which was worse.
"I'm breaking up with you," Hermione said.
"No you're not."
A pause.
"No," she agreed, in the tone of someone forced to acknowledge a fundamental flaw in an otherwise reasonable position. "I'm not." She picked up a small piece of bark from the base of the tree and threw it at him. It bounced off his shoulder with no meaningful impact. "I want you to know," she continued, with the steady, measured delivery she usually reserved for explaining things to people who had been wrong about them, "that you are, genuinely, consistently, and with absolutely no effort on your part, the most aggravating person I have ever met."
Harry pushed himself upright again, still grinning.
"You love me."
"I love you despite you, which is entirely different—"
"But you do."
She looked at him. The composure cracked completely. The smile came through, not the controlled, classroom-adjacent one but the real one, the helpless one, the one she got when something was funny enough that she couldn't maintain a sensible opinion about it.
"Yes," she said, half-laughing and half-resigned and wholly, irretrievably honest in the way she was about things when she'd stopped fighting them. "God help me, yes, I do." She reached over and straightened his glasses, which had gone slightly crooked during his laughing fit, and left her hand against his face for a moment after, her thumb at the hinge of his jaw. "You absolute dork."
"The word 'absolute' is doing a lot of heavy lifting there."
"It's doing exactly the right amount."
He turned his face and pressed a kiss to her palm, and she let him, and the exasperation in her expression arranged itself back into something quieter and warmer, something that had given up fighting for the day. She dropped her hand to her lap and looked out at the lake, bright and splintered in the sun, and he watched her for a moment, the set of her shoulders, which had lost the semester's tension somewhere between the second hour and the third, the way the light caught the brown of her hair and found the gold in it that was only visible outside.
"If you do that again," she said conversationally, to the lake, "I will transfigure your pillow into a book of advanced mathematics."
"I'd still sleep on it."
"I know," she said. "That's why it's a threat and not a punishment." She glanced back at him, and there it was again, the look, the fond exasperated helpless real one. "Lie back down."
He did.
Her hand found his hair again, and the afternoon settled around them, warm and long and squandered gloriously, the way all the best hours are, and the lake threw its light, and the bird continued its distant proclamation, and somewhere behind the castle the rest of the world was presumably getting on with things. They were not getting on with things. They were here instead, and the difference between those two states felt, in that specific hour, like the whole of it.
The Transfiguration essay would get written. The lake would go on reflecting. The shadow of the tree would lengthen by evening and cover more of the grass and eventually swallow them whole, which was fine.
They had time.