Chapter Text
Year 5
“Class, let’s welcome Mr. Potter and Mr. Weasley, please.”
Mrs. Garcia’s lilting accent carried down the corridor, reaching Hermione where she stood in the middle of her form’s line, trying to read about Taran, Pigkeeper before she was forced out to the playground to act like the rest of the children in Year 5.
The new boys stood at the front of the opposite queue. Mrs. Garcia beamed at them, saying something that made them flush with pleased embarrassment. The tall, gangly one ducked his red head, shy in the way boys often were around the pretty teacher whose room was across the hall from Hermione’s classroom.
But the other—
The boy with black hair that looked as though it had never met a comb—grinned. Wide. Genuine. Unaffected. It lit his whole face—reached his bright green eyes where it crinkled them at the corners.
That was what made her smile, too.
She watched him laugh, head tipped back, easy and unselfconscious—unbothered by a uniform that didn’t quite fit properly or the small gap between his teeth. The red-haired boy leaned in and said something and the black-haired boy laughed again, full-bodied this time. The red-haired boy grinned, too, and Hermione could tell that he was clearly pleased with himself for making the other laugh so hard.
What did he say?
She wanted to know.
She didn’t realise she’d stopped moving until the girl behind her walked straight into her.
“Sorry,” Hermione said automatically, though she wasn’t.
She was still watching him—watching the way he tilted his head when he listened, the way his friend was already trying to make him laugh again.
She hoped he would.
—
Harry Potter was kind to younger children.
That was the next thing she noticed.
Ron Weasley—the other new boy—had a small army of siblings, all of them with the same bright red hair and freckled face. One of them, a little girl, who appeared to be brave and bold, followed the two boys after school every day. She was always just a step too slow, tripping in shoes slightly too big, trying to keep up.
Ron never seemed to notice.
Harry always did.
He stopped. Every time. Waited. Sometimes he zipped up her rucksack when she’d forgotten.
Hermione thought it was very sweet.
—
He was always drawing.
Or rather—when he wasn’t racing across the playground, scrambling up the climbing frames after Ron Weasley, or making Ron and Seamus Finnegan and Dean Thomas and the other boys double-over into laughter, red-faced and breathless—he was drawing.
A worn sketchbook— always with him.
Once or twice, Hermione managed to catch a glimpse.
The playing fields. The ornate railing on the library steps. The deputy head caught mid-sneeze. A wounded bird he’d rescued from the caretaker’s cat.
She noticed the way his eyebrows pulled together. The way he chewed on his bottom lip. The slight tilt of his head as he looked between the page and whatever he was studying.
She wondered where he had learned to pay attention like that.
It never occurred to her that he might be noticing her, too.