The Anti-Heroine || A Harry Potter Fanfiction

Chapter LIII

A/N: I'm not going to make excuses for the long wait between updates– real life is my priority but I do try my best. Thank you for your patience, guys (that's not sarcasm– you're all wonderful) <3
~C.C.

CHAPTER LIII:

Hermione's POV:

Staying with Tom and Harry at the house that was theirs was a dream. Hermione wasn't the sort of girl who went for fairytales, but she almost felt like she was living in one.

The house itself was lovely; it was large inside, hushed and cool with ceilings curved high overhead in the same arches as the doorways and the windows, with their stained-glass medallions set within mullioned panes. It was decorated simply, the furniture mostly antique and carved from beautifully treated wood, with a number of paintings hanging on the walls and a handful of vases and sculptures sprinkled around in a purposefully careless manner, as if due to the obvious wealth of their owners their worth meant nothing. Her favourite room in the house– her house– was unsurprisingly the private library, with its thousands of books, gold accentuated furniture, beautiful winged armchairs and walls decorated with heavy tapestries depicting different magical creatures, both those extinct now and those that were thriving.

The countryside surrounding the house was just as beautiful as the house itself, with rolling hills that were high and vibrantly green even when dusted with snow, scattered trees and wildlife and icy blue skies filled with trailing clouds like ribbons of white and various greys that sometimes wove together to create heavy blankets that hid the brightness of the sun and coveted the blue of the sky, hailing unforgivingly down over everyone and everything that turned its face up to its might.

Like he'd warned them he might have to, Tom would occasionally disappear for an hour or two, but there was more then enough available to keep them occupied so that his absence sped by while she and Harry explored or made use of the amenities of their new house.

Other then that, though, the three of them were rarely apart. They spent every moment together that they could and so far the only source of conflict and discord between them had been the dreaded swimming lesson.

Tom, it seemed, interpreted the saying "sink or swim" very literally. On a not-so entirely unrelated note, Hermione thought Harry might actually try and murder the older boy.

"It wasn't that bad," she'd tried to console him after the, er, 'lesson' and Harry had glared furiously at her.

"I just had to thaw out my eyebrows! There was ice in them!"

"...it could have been worse?"

"How?" Harry shouted, throwing his hands in the air. "How could it possibly have been worse? He vanished all my clothes except my boxers and pushed me in! He used my body to break the ice covering the top of the lake! He threatened to transfigure some rocks into sharks and get them to chase me if I didn't stop screaming and start swimming! He made me tread water without using my arms for nearly five minutes and kept adding time on every time my head went under! He then made me swim a lap just using my arms! And have I mentioned the fucking ice? Because I feel like that deserves a second, third and fourth mention!"

"Well," she pointed out, her voice and expression very reasonable with only her eyes giving away her true amusement. "He could have vanished your boxers too."

She was actually impressed with the shade of red Harry's face had turned in response to that. "You suck," he told her, glaring fiercely, "you suck so much!"

And despite the situation, that had been an opening she hadn't been able to resist taking. "You love it when I suck," she purred, licking her lips exaggeratedly slow so her meaning was explicitly clear. This had just made Harry glare harder, visibly seething.