The Morning Work
He was on the pull-up bar on a Wednesday morning in the second week of November when Hermione walked in.
This was not supposed to happen. The Room appeared when you needed it and the door did not open for anyone who had not engaged with the wall in the correct way, which meant that Hermione had engaged with the wall in the correct way, which meant she had been here before or had worked out the mechanism from the times she had arrived in the evenings when the door was already present.
He registered the door opening in his peripheral vision and continued the set. He was mid-movement and stopping mid-movement was not something he was going to do on grounds of embarrassment, because he was not going to be embarrassed about doing physical work in a space he had specifically arranged for the purpose of doing physical work.
He finished the pull-up. He lowered himself. He turned around.
Hermione was standing in the doorway having clearly been moving with purpose until a moment ago. Her bag was over one shoulder and she was holding a textbook with the grip of someone who had forgotten they were holding it. Her eyes were doing something that he couldn't quite read but which moved through several stages in the approximately two seconds between him turning around and her registering that she had been standing there for two seconds.
Her face went, in sequence, from surprise to something else to a very specific shade of pink that started at her ears and moved efficiently inward.
Dobby, who was in the corner delivering the morning plate, looked at Hermione. Then at Ron. Then at Hermione again. Then, with the specific subtle competence of a house-elf who had been in service long enough to recognize a situation, he produced Peeves's camera from somewhere about his person and took a photograph with the quiet efficiency of someone documenting something they considered worth documenting.
The click was very small.
"I was looking for—" Hermione said.
"Morning," he said.
"I thought—" she said.
"Did you need something?" he said. He reached for the shirt folded over the rack because that seemed like the correct thing to do, not out of embarrassment but because the castle in November was cold and he had finished the set.
She was not looking at him, which was notable because Hermione looked at everything with direct and specific attention as a rule.
"I'll come back," she said, and left, in the specific way of someone implementing a decision they had made very quickly and were not going to revisit in the immediate future.
He put his shirt on. He looked at Dobby.
Dobby looked back at him with the enormous, serene, entirely innocent eyes.
"Dobby," he said.
"The sandwiches are ham today," Dobby said. "And there is also a boiled egg."
He looked at the camera.
"Dobby is very thorough," Dobby said, with the specific dignity of someone who had decided this statement was complete and did not require elaboration.
He sat down and ate the sandwich and did not think too carefully about the photograph, or about how the pink had started at Hermione's ears, or about the fact that she had clearly worked out the Room's mechanism independently and had come in the morning when she knew the evening sessions would not yet have started.
He thought about the boiled egg, which was good, and about the Ravenclaw book, which was better, and about the ritual preparation, which was proceeding on schedule.
Hermione did not speak to him directly for two days.
She spoke around him with the practiced efficiency of someone who had excellent peripheral social awareness — she answered questions that included him, she passed things in his direction at meals, she worked in the Room on Thursday evening with the focused concentration of someone who was absolutely not thinking about anything other than the work. He observed all of this with the calm of someone who had decided that the correct response was to be entirely normal and to wait.
He was entirely normal. He waited.
On Friday evening she arrived at the Room with her bag and sat down and opened her Runes textbook and said, without looking up: "I should have knocked."
"The door doesn't really work that way," he said.
"I know," she said. "I should have — announced myself. Or not come in the mornings."
"You can come in the mornings," he said. "The Room is the Room. You've always been able to use it."
She turned a page. "I didn't realise you — I didn't know that was part of your— that you did that in the mornings."
"Physical work," he said. "Since the summer. It's part of the preparation."
She turned another page. He watched her visibly decide not to say whatever the next thing was, and then decide to say a version of it. "You're quite — you've changed. Since last year. Physically." She said this with the precise diction of someone choosing words with significant care. "It's noticeable."
"The growth curve," he said. "And the work."
"Yes," she said, in the tone of someone concluding a subject. "The work."
They worked in silence for the remainder of the evening, which was comfortable in the specific way their silences usually were — full of the low hum of two people engaged in their own processes. Dobby arrived at nine with tea and the small biscuits he favoured for late Friday evenings, and he set them down and looked between the two of them with the expression of someone who was in possession of a photograph and considered this information.
Ron gave him a look.
Dobby set the biscuits down with serene composure and left.
Hermione ate a biscuit and did not look up from her book and did not say anything further, and after a while the room settled back into its usual comfortable register, warmer than it had been at the start of the evening, as though something that had been slightly tilted had found its level again.
He thought: later. Not yet. But later.
He opened his Arithmancy text and got back to work.