Harry sat at his desk, mind was reeling from what he had just learned as a new day's sun started to peek over the horizon. Hermione liked him. Hermione liked him. Hermione liked him . Hermione liked him. Hermione liked him .
It didn't seem to add up. No one had ever liked him before. Well, a couple of girls had shown concern when he had first gotten beat up by Dudley at school but when his cousin had turned on them they quickly learned it was best not to be involved. Certainly no one had ever liked him liked him.
Hermione liked him . Harry was really at a loss. How do you respond to something like that? He certainly couldn't ask the Dursleys for advice, they'd simply shout "We don't need any more freaks!" and lock him back in the cupboard under the stairs for the rest of his life.
What he really needed was someone he could talk to about it - someone, preferably, who already knew because he certainly wasn't looking forward to explaining it. Suddenly he remembered: Ron knew. Hermione had said he knew; said she had talked to him about it. Harry pulled out Ron's letters and quickly scanned them again.
It was right there, in both letters, when he was talking about Hermione: 'what do you think of her?' That Ron had asked him what he thought of Hermione rather than telling him Hermione had said she liked him struck Harry as a bit odd. 'Then again,' Harry thought, ' Hermione did ask Ron to ask him about it . Maybe what she asked was for him to find out what I thought of her?'
Ron certainly could've done it better. Harry hadn't thought he had been asking it to try and get an actual answer at all. Why else would he have put in how 'bloody mental' and 'nosy' he thought she was? It certainly looked like Ron was against the idea of getting to know Hermione any better. Heck, Ron was probably regretting knowing her as much as they already did with all his complaining about her encouraging them to do their homework.
'And of course she'd want us to do our work,' Harry reckoned. 'Hermione said she had always pushed herself; obviously she'd want anyone close to her to do well. ' Harry felt the heat rise on his face again. Of course she'd want him to do well since she 'wanted to get to know him better .'
Harry didn't know what he thought about that. Sure, he thought his History of Magic textbook had been fascinating, but that was before getting stuck in a room and bored to death by a long-dead ghost. Potions was a good deal like cooking, which he was good at and didn't mind, but it was difficult to get through the class with Snape sniping at him for simply existing.
Herbology reminded him of being forced to do all the Dursleys' gardening far too much for it to really be enjoyable. Transfiguration was interesting, but taxing. An hour of that and he was glad of any excuse to think of something else for a good long while. Charms was always good for a diversion though the less said about Astronomy the better. It was always too cold, too cloudy, and too hard to stay awake. What did knowing the names of stars have anything to do with magic anyway? And couldn't they learn all that from studying maps during the daytime?
Flying had been thrilling but you really couldn't call that a proper class. It was only held a few times - until they were sure you could mount a broom without killing yourself - and with him being tapped for the Gryffindor Quidditch team straight away he had only gone the one time. Harry wondered if Hermione had been forced to go to all four sessions or if she had simply refused to go again. She didn't seem the type to trust her life to something as wobbly as an old school broom.
Defense had been fun, even funny with Quirrell's timidness and stutter. Both of those had been lies, of course, and he couldn't really say they had learned anything important, much less how to defend themselves. Then again, having Lord Voldemort growing out of the back of the professor's head probably went a long way to explaining that. It seemed strange to him that the worst thing about Hogwarts, aside from the potential to be killed, were bad teachers that discouraged you from learning anything useful.
Harry knew he was waffling. The issue wasn't what he thought about classes, it was what he thought about her. Hermione was… well, Hermione. She was a friend. She was nice to be around. She was - then it clicked. She was someone he was comfortable with. Ron was a friend too, but with him he always felt like there was a whole host of things he was missing out on, so much he didn't know.
With Hermione, it was like they were the same. Two kids, straight from the muggle world, who didn't have a clue magic existed and now they're thrown into a completely different world and having to face things on their own. They were learning everything at the same time, it was new to them, while with Ron - with Ron it was old hat; he and his brothers had grown up knowing about trolls and goblins and giants and dragons, so how could any of that be interesting?
Harry felt his mind take a sharp left turn.
'Was that why Ron didn't care about studying?' Harry wondered. 'Had he lived in the wizarding world so long he already gets the gist of it and didn't see the need to learn anything more about it?' Looking at his own life Harry could see how the same applied to him. He had grown up in the muggle world and knew about electricity, airplanes, football, and television but couldn't begin to explain how they worked or why they worked. Moreover, he would be hard pressed to care about figuring any of that out.
He definitely needed to pay more attention to his schoolwork, Harry decided. If he was going to leave the Dursleys and the muggle world behind one day then he had to learn everything he could about the wizarding one. Treating it like it didn't matter would only leave him with the worst of both. He'd have a head full of stuff from one world that wasn't going to help him and the attitude that he didn't need to know anything about how things worked now. He might as well open his vault at Gringotts and shout "please take advantage of me!"
'Waffling again, ' Harry thought. 'This is about Hermione. '