Cold Feet

It’s ten years on from graduation and everyone’s growing up. Harry’s getting broody, Ginny’s joined a dating agency and Hermione’s scared of babies. Then, a face from Hermione’s past turns up unexpectedly, turning her life upside down and throwing her love life into turmoil. Based on the book, ‘Ready Or Not’.

What where left to do but call the wedding off?

As Hermione Granger looked at her fiancé, the famous Harry Potter, standing on her doorstep in the early hours of the morning one Sunday, she imagined she could see a dream flying away behind him. Almost twelve months of planning, three hundred RSPVs, thousands of pounds from the Potter inheritance already laid out on booking the venue, the caterers, the band… not to mention the added burden of every minute detail of the wedding, right down to the colour of the napkins, being scrutinised and discussed in excruciating detail by the Wizarding World’s media. But as she stared at him right then, she knew there was no way in hell she was going to be walking down that aisle to stand beside him.

“Hermione, I lost my key,” he slurred. “And I can’t seem to find my wand, either.”

It wasn’t the only thing he’d lost that weekend.

“Harry,” she sighed, “where are your clothes?”

*

When Hermione was in her early twenties, struggling hopefully with a series of brief, hopeless relationships, she heard all the clichés. After each uniquely painful break-up, her family and friends would rally around and share such pearls of wisdom as “Love will only come when you’re not looking for it” and “You’ll find love where you least suspect it.” She hated to hear those things. But the fact was that love did come when she wasn’t looking for it, and it certainly wasn’t where she expected to find it. And that was because it came in the form of her best friend.

“You look really, really pretty tonight, Hermione,” were the immortal words that came from her soon-to-be boyfriend’s lips that night – stammered nervously while Hermione crouched over the toilet, blind-drunk, mascara running in black streaks from her watering eyes and a little bit of vomit staining her expensive black dress.

Hermione had stared at him in that irritable way she had, then slurred, “What the hell you talkin’ about, Harry? I look like shit.”

He had been sweating, red-cheeked and flustered, shuffling restlessly as he held back her hair from her clammy face, and had mumbled, “Yeah, but, you know, I think you’re always beautiful. All the time.”

And that was how Harry Potter and Hermione Granger, best friends for countless years, platonic buddies who had stumbled home drunk, giggling like schoolgirls on many a rambunctious night on the town, got together. That fateful night, she had taken full advantage of the free bar at a work party – ha, to think the strait-laced Hermione Granger would find pleasure in getting so happily pissed, but age had mellowed her, it was true – and had carried on guzzling when she should have stopped several martinis ago. So, when the room had started spinning and her lunch threatened to introduce itself to the shiny – and rented! – floor, Hermione decided, being the sensible girl she still was (and bearing in mind her bosses were less than ten feet away) that it was time to go home.

Naturally, Apparating in her state would be have irresponsible, so ten minutes later, she was on her way home in Harry Potter's beloved car (“Don’t throw up on the upholstery!” he’d shrieked manfully when her stomach had threatened to vomit up the contents of the stomach all over his precious baby). Luckily, she had managed to wait until they got back to her house, and after Harry had taken down the wards and unlocked the door, Hermione had bolted for the bathroom as fast as a very drunken woman in ridiculously improper shoes could. She hadn’t completely made it, though, as the foul-smelling stain on her posh dress testified.

Her mind had spun as she took in his words and the hopeful yet distinctly terrified look on his boyishly handsome face. “Whu… wh-what?” she asked articulately.

He went bright red in a manner highly reminiscent of Ron Weasley. “Um… never mind. I’m sorry, just forget—”

Even when intoxicated, Hermione was a cleverer girl than most. She placed an unsteady hand on his shoulder and tried to focus on him. “Harry… Harry, what are you trying to say?”

“Well… um, well, Hermione, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about… about us, and…” He paused, looking more flustered than ever. “Well, anyway, I noticed you reading that theatre brochure the other day and I’ve got a spare ticket to go see that new musical in Diagon Alley. You know, the one about the singing Manticore…”

It would be a few months before Hermione admitted that she was only reading the theatre brochure because it had fallen from between the pages of The Daily Prophet, and even then, she’d only given it a cursory glance. It was even longer before she admitted that she hated musicals. “Harry… um, are you sure about this?” she replied, feeling more sober by the second.

“Yes, I am,” he answered, so firmly that it took her by surprise a little. “I’ve been thinking about this long and hard. And maybe I didn’t pick… quite the right moment…” he cast a dubious eye over the vomit stain on Hermione’s dress and she flushed, “…but you told me once you could see me as more than just a friend. Do you still?”

She had said that – a year ago, over a take-away curry and after a couple of glasses of wine, when her tongue had loosened. And Harry had freaked out. He’d been funny with her for a week. Had this been preying on his mind for that long?

Being Hermione, she asked him as much.

He grinned at her like a naughty schoolboy. “Pretty much.”

In hindsight, Hermione didn’t really think about it for that long, considering the vast implications it would bring on herself, her friends and, yes, even the Wizarding World itself. She just reacted like an ordinary girl who’d just been asked on a date by a good-looking guy. “Yes, I’ll come,” she told him.

After all, any man who asked her out when she was crouched over the porcelain god with vomit dribbled down her dress had to be damn good kind of guy.

*

Needless to say, their first date went wonderfully. Harry greeted her in the lobby of the theatre with a single, perfect rose. Hermione spent the entire performance sneaking glances at his impressive profile in the semi-darkness and being very pleased how handsome he actually looked when he made an effort and wore something other than scruffy T-shirts and ripped jeans. Naturally, Ron and Ginny and all their friends were thrilled and solemnly announced to all that they had seen it coming and it had only been a matter of time – which Hermione strongly thought to be a bare-faced lie, seeing as how formerly mentioned friends had dated herself and Harry in the years previously.

They followed up that theatre date with a Saturday afternoon at London Zoo, then a day at the British Wizarding Museum and, three weeks later, they spent their first whole night together – a weekend in an expensive hotel in Brighton that was as romantic as it was dirty. Almost two years after that fateful night, Harry Potter finally proposed. It was Valentine’s Day, in Paris. On the top of the Eiffel Tower. They saw four more proposals while they waited for the lift to take them down again and one of the girls actually fainted. Hermione felt pretty giddy herself.

They spent the rest of that weekend in Paris on a high, floating around like a pair of teenagers, holding hands and periodically congratulating themselves on their good fortune in having found each other in a world full of so many strangers. On their last night in France, they went up to the gardens in front of the Sacre-Couer and looked back across the city towards the sparkling Tower, where the defining moment of their lives so far had taken place.

“How did you know it was me?” she asked Harry then. “How did you know I was the one for you?”

It wasn’t the way she looked or the way she talked. It wasn’t the way her nose wrinkled up when she laughed or the way her brow furrowed when she was concentrating, like he might have said in some cheesy romantic movie (it didn’t, anyway). It wasn’t her prowess with a baking tin (she could barely handle making anything more complicated than toast), her amazing magical ability, her powerful intellect or her incredible skill in bed. It was the way she packed her suitcase.

“Your ability to travel light,” was at the top of Harry’s well-considered list of reasons he loved her. “The fact that you can get out of the house in five minutes whether we’re going to the supermarket or some black-tie ball where you know there’s going to be more reporters and photographers than guests. And the way you stomp around like a little madam when you’re having one of your temper tantrums.”

Strange as it may sound, Hermione wasn’t disappointed with that answer.

“And I love you because you always warn me when you’re going to fart in bed,” she told him.

*

They set the date for sixteen months after the proposal. Their old Gryffindor Housemates, Dean Thomas and Lavender Brown – or Lavender Thomas, as she was known these days – had moved to Canada some years ago, and Hermione and Harry were eager for them to be able to attend and make arrangements; they also wanted plenty of time to make sure their big day was a suitably fantastic expression of their love – not to mention that, this being the wedding of the Wizarding World’s hero, saviour and mighty Voldemort-slaughterer to his childhood best friend, every tiny detail of the wedding was going to be discussed at length and picked apart in every magazine and newspaper known to Wizard-kind. Before Harry asked Hermione to marry him, she would have sworn she wasn’t interested in the extravagant white wedding thing: a Muggle registry office or a cheesy Elvis chapel in Las Vegas would have been good enough for her. The only guests she needed were her parents, her old friends from school and probably a few select Muggle friends and family members who were in on “our Hermione’s little secret” as her father liked to call it. Namely, the fact she was a witch.

After the proposal, she became paranoid that Witches’ Weekly, Nymph and all those other ridiculously frivolous publications aimed at the gossip-hungry would tear her apart for failing to arrange a tasteful, suitably lavish wedding when all the Wizarding World was watching and waiting for the biggest event of the year. She told herself she was doing it for her family – she was their beloved only child, after all – but she discovered she wanted a church. She wanted a white dress. She wanted bridesmaids. She wanted small boys dressed in girly clothes. And as the date grew nearer, every spare moment seemed to be taken up with finalising details: dresses, flowers, table decorations. Food suitable for just about every allergy known to the medical profession – peanuts, dairy, tomato pips, for god’s sake. Not to mention the fact that, as both she and Harry had grown in the Muggle world, they had the added problem of both Muggles and wizards and witches attending, some of which had no idea that Hermione and Harry were anything other than an ordinary engaged couple. It was stressful beyond belief, but she thought she had every eventuality covered.

Then, with just four months left to go, Harry went and lost his trousers. And his jacket. And his T-shirt. And his boxers.

“What the hell happened to you?” Hermione asked him.

“I fell asleep,” he said. “So, they punished me.”

‘They’ being the other members of Harry’s weekend amateur Quidditch club.

That weekend, the team had Apparated from London to Bristol to play a few friendly matches there. They celebrated a weekend of wins with the traditional combination of curry, drinking games and dirty songs. Unfortunately for Harry – and for Hermione, as it turned out – that year’s captain, Richie (Healer on working days and crazy man on Saturdays), decide to introduce a new weekend-away tradition, imported from his days at his posh university. The first man to pass out through fatigue or too much alcohol forfeited his clothes. In their place, the unlucky bastard got a fine layer of sticky black treacle and eagle feathers.

Harry was the first man to pass out.

“You’re not coming in until you’ve cleaned yourself off. Wait here while I get my wand,” she snapped as he tried to step inside.

“But Hermione, I’m cold,” Harry said pathetically.

“Serves you right.” It was two degrees below outside and Hermione was in no mood to be sympathetic, still bad-tempered from an argument about table placements they’d had before Harry left on the Friday night.

Hermione grabbed her wand from their bedroom and cast a quick “Scourgify!” on her fiancé, but it did little to remove the mess. A second and third attempt were equally unsuccessful. Hermione scowled and, instead, laid a trail of old Daily Prophets from the front door to the bathroom. “Why the hell do you have to hang out with such idiots?” she asked as she surveyed the damage.

Harry’s team-mates had sensibly Apparated away at high-speed after depositing him and a plastic carrier bag of suspiciously wet clothes in her care. He was covered from ankles to ears. Harry grimaced manfully as Hermione pulled away the first handful of feathers and half his leg-hair. Thirty minutes later, they had to resort to shaving the damn treacle away with her ladies’ razor.

“I’m cancelling the wedding,” she said.

“You won’t, will you, Hermione? You know how much I love you,” Harry slurred.

“Well, I don’t love you anymore. You’re supposed to be a fucking adult. How could you let them do this to you? I’m going to call the caterers tomorrow. And the papers. And then I’m going to kill Ron for letting them do this to you. He probably joined in!”

“Hermione, please don’t do that. You’ve got to marry me. I’ve told all my friends.”

“The same friends that covered you in this mess?” She ran her hands through her hair impatiently and immediately regretted it. The treacle was getting everywhere. The newspaper hadn’t protected the carpet at all and there were three sticky handprints on the bathroom wall where Harry had reached out to steady himself. She suspected they would be as difficult to get off even with magic, as the treacle on Jack himself had been. “If any one of these idiots actually turns up to the wedding, I’ll cut his balls off with the cake knife. And that includes Ron!”

“Such a sweet, mild woman I’m marrying. It’s why I love you,” Harry told her with a belch. “I can’t wait until you’re my wife.”

“But I’m never going to marry you, Harry,” she said flatly.

It felt like she was only half-kidding.