The first week of February passed the way the first weeks of terms passed — the re-establishment of routine, the re-finding of the rhythms that had been interrupted by Christmas, the particular quality of a school settling back into itself after absence. He went to classes. He went to the kitchens. He went to the Room. He wrote twelve pages of notes on the water-damaged journal from the hidden things mode and got approximately seventy percent of the warding theory before the script became too degraded to read confidently.
He also thought about Hermione.
This was not new. He had been thinking about Hermione since approximately the third week of September, in the specific way of someone who had noticed something and was deciding what to do about it. The noticing had been gradual — not a single moment but an accumulation of them, the way that most true things arrived. She in the library with three books open simultaneously, annotating all three with the focused efficiency of someone who did not consider this unusual. Her arguing with him about the interpretation of a Runes variant at breakfast, not the careful arguing she did with teachers but the direct arguing she did with people she considered equals, which he had come to understand was the highest register she had. Her at Christmas, putting the invitation card in her bag with the careful quality she used for things she intended to keep.
He had been thinking about asking her something since the dinner.
The obstacle was not uncertainty about whether he wanted to. The obstacle was that Hermione thought carefully about things, and he wanted to ask her in a way that gave her space to think carefully about this too — not a grand gesture, which would produce the kind of pressure that made careful thinking difficult, but something specific and honest and small enough that she could respond to it on her own terms.
He worked out the approach on Tuesday of the second week. He would ask her on Wednesday, before the Valentine's Hogsmeade weekend on Saturday. This gave her three days to decide and him three days to prepare something worth taking her to, which was the right ratio.
On Wednesday morning he caught her before breakfast, in the common room before the others had come down, which was the window of approximately seven minutes when she was always there alone with her planning notes and he was always there alone with his notebook.
'Can I ask you something?' he said.
She looked up. 'You generally do,' she said, which was Hermione's version of of course.
'The Hogsmeade weekend,' he said. 'I'd like to take you. Not as a group. As a date.'
He said it directly, which was the only way he knew how to say true things, and watched her receive it.
Her expression did the thing it did when she encountered something she had not anticipated — the brief reorganisation, the model updating, the processing that was visible at the edges before she brought it back under control. She was not good at hiding this and he had always found it one of her better qualities.
'A date,' she said.
'Yes,' he said.
'You've thought about this,' she said. It was not a question.
'Since January,' he said. 'I wanted to ask properly rather than suddenly.'
She looked at him for a moment with the expression he had come to recognise as Hermione deciding something she had, he suspected, already decided, and was now confirming.
'Yes,' she said. 'Alright. Yes.'
'Good,' he said.
They sat in the particular silence of two people who had just changed something between them and were still in the early moments of understanding what the change meant. It was not uncomfortable. It had the quality of something that had been coming for long enough that its arrival felt more like settling than surprise.
'What are you planning?' she said, after a moment, with the tone of someone who had agreed to something and now wanted the details.
'That's mine to manage,' he said.
She looked at him.
'I'll tell you what to wear,' he said. 'Warm. Comfortable shoes.'
She accepted this in the way she accepted his partial answers — with a slight compression of her expression that meant she was filing the incomplete information and would return to it later — and went back to her planning notes. He went back to his notebook.
Harry came down at seven-twelve and looked at both of them and said nothing, which meant he had read the room correctly, which was Harry.