Exploring Comfort

Author’s Notes: Thanks to Jo and Juniper for beta’ing.
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Hermione usually tries to think about it logically.

There’s a war going on in the world outside their school, while they’re stuck doing NEWTs and not allowed to help – so of course they\'d feel alone, misunderstood, and in desperate need of comfort. They’re also seventeen, so their pubescent hormones are going to double the intensity, of all those frustrated emotions, increasing their need for what she terms as ‘physical comfort’, regardless of the crude words Ron uses.

Furthermore, she’ll tell herself, calmly, childhood friendships between girls and boys are bound to develop as they become adults. Feelings and ideas will change, and in that turbulent emotional time, who can identify between platonic and romantic feelings?

Cuddles are a good form of comfort, and when the stress intensifies, so can the cuddles. After the events of fifth year, when things started to get really chaotic, Hermione had always made sure she’d be around, for Harry and for Ron, to cuddle.

She felt sort of a need to be motherly, to ruffle their hair and tuck them in at night. After a while however, she made the observation that Harry and Ron were quite capable of cuddling each other, when need be. The best of all though, she reflected, was when they all three cuddled together. Protection on all sides.

She felt better at night knowing that they were near each other. It softened the idea that she was lying alone in a dormitory full of girls who she’d never bothered becoming more than acquaintances with, people she now had even less interest in than she’d had before. They avoided her and giggled and gossiped about her when they thought she was asleep, but Hermione couldn\'t bring herself to care. She had the boys to focus on.

She could remember when they’d started to need a more intense cuddle. Harry had disappeared again – he often did that, and Hermione had no idea where he\'d gone, now that he was banned from spending lengths of time outside, including Quidditch, ‘for his own safety’ – Ron and Hermione had been left alone in the boys’ dormitory.

Wihe she summer weather, the other boys were off outside, but Ron and Hermione had drawn the curtains around Ron’s bed anyway, in case any of them returned. The boys already seemed to think Ron and Hermione were a couple, although nobody seemed suspicious of Hermione and Harry. The three of them didn’t care, however, being so wrapped up in their own little world.

She’d had her arms around Ron, like she always did, she mused, rocking him softly. After a while, she’d noticed he was crying, and moved to kiss the tears from his damp cheeks. Heads turned and lips met, and before long they had found a form of mutual comfort that seemed to work.

He still criometometimes, hot tears dripping down his nose and working their way into kisses and forming puddles on the sheets. He cried more than she’d ever seen anyone cry. They didn’t talk about it. Hermione knew there wasn’t really anything to say. He’d have stopped crying by the end, anyhow, forcing a smilsmile as a thank you.

Harry never cried. He was always quiet, with a strange look in his eyes that even Hermione and Ron couldn’t fathom, although they seldom talked about that either.

They didn’t like to talk about any of the important things. Either they would know about something instinctively, or they’d have no hope of understanding. The only way Hermione could really reach Harry now, was through physical comfort. He’d hold her close, respond obediently to her kisses, but always somehow seem as though he was far away.

Hermione wasn’t sure when Ron and Harry had started getting close, but the day after she and Ron explored the methods of comfort, she had seen them kissing, in a gap between the curtains on Ron’s bed. She’d tiptoed away, not quite sure how to go about that kind of group comfort, but lay content on her own bed in the knowledge that the boys were all right.

Her first experiences of exploring comfort with Harry had been rather different from the first time with Ron – and it still was. With Ron she felt in control, kissing him softly as she rode him, her hands squeezing his tightly. With Harry, she comforted him by being obedient, lying beneath him submissively and felt somehow in awe of him. She would have to bite her lip, if he wasn’t kissing her, to stop herself from screaming out. With Ron, she never felt like screaming, although it wasn’t due to a lack in sensation, she was merely more controlled with Ron. Both ways – Harry’s and Ron’s - made her feel comforted, herself. They were incomparable, and yet so alike.

That first time with Harry, while Ron was in detention with Snape, and they used his bed – Ron’s bed was like their den, somehow – Hermione had thought for the first time thhe uhe understood that look in Harry’s eyes, the look he wore so often. Sometimes she saw it again, in moments when he pushed into her, when he leant down to kiss her, but by that time it was all over, and she was quickly dressing while he lay back, staring intently at the embroidered ceiling of the four poster bed, she couldn’t remember quite what it was she’d seen in his expression.

She knew of course, that Ron and Harry must have their own methods of comfort, although she’d never seen them at it. And of course, they didn’t talk about it. Couldn’t talk about it. She couldn’t even picture it. How would Harry deal with Ron’s incessant tears? Would Harry take Ron, or the other way around? It didn’t matter though. As long as they were comforted.

Hermione couldn’t help but wondering, how everything would end. When the war was over, when times were back to normal... There would be a time, someday, when somebody would have to choose. They’d reach an age when they would want to settle down, raise a family, and somebody would be left out. Or maybe they could stay this way forever, sharing comfort between themselves quietly, secretly, in a way that only they understood.

She thought this way, about the future, a warless future, to hide her worst fears. Fears of separation. At the end of next year, their NEWTs would be over, and they would be off into the big wide world, full of war. They all three had plans to become Aurors, but she couldn’t help thinking that maybe Dumbledore would take Harry away from them. Somewhere ‘for his own safety’, a secret place, that even Ron and Hermione mustn’t know about. Or maybe he’d have to hunt Voldemort alone, and she and Ron would have to be hidden, to stop them following their beloved Harry. She didn’t like to think this way, and she wouldn’t do it for long. It was another of those things that couldn’t be talked about. Or thought about.

No, for now, Hermione decided, she’d concentrate on exploring comfort, and carry on providing comfort for Ron and Harry in that perfect way that allowed her comfort herself. Soothing Ron’s tears, and submitting to Harry’s inner strength. Whatever happened, at least they had each other right now.