For Barbara. Thinking of you often

The knocking was gentle but persistent enough to eventually rouse Hermione from her not so quiet sleep. Forgetting for a moment where she was, she groaned a bleary, "Who is it?"

At the same time, a hand pulled the covers up as far as Crookshanks' weight would allow, and George's voice croaked, "Come in, Ginny."

The door opened a few inches, and Ginny sidled into the room, turning to face the wall when she spotted George's bare shoulders. "Ehm, I brought you both some clean clothes, and Fred sent some Fever Fudge for Hermione. He said if she felt like taking a day off from studying, that if she ate a quarter of a square before she went down to breakfast, then that would make her look like she was maybe coming down with something but not so bad that she'd need the hospital wing, and it would give her an excuse to stay in her dorm, except since I'm the only girl left in Gryffindor and Fred's taking me to see the shop, there would be no one to tell Harry and Ron if you weren't actually in the dorm... and you could either come with us, or you could have the day to yourselves up here."

George, who had scooped his jeans off the floor while Ginny was talking and pulled them on under cover of the blankets, slid out from under the bedclothes and took the bag Ginny had been carrying from her. "Thanks," he told her. "Look, I'll grab my stuff and use the bathroom along the hall. Why don't you keep Hermione company, and I'll see my two favourite girls at breakfast?" He pulled some items of clothing from the bag, including a dark green satin padded bra complete with price tag, which he stuffed back into the bag again with a grin. Handing the rest to Hermione, he leaned in and pressed his lips to her cheek, whispering in her ear as he did so, "So I was right about the Christmas undies?"

"Smart arse," Hermione hissed back, pulling the blankets up over her head for a second before she decided to take advantage of the view of that arse as he departed.

---

"So?" Ginny demanded with a huge grin.

"So, what?" Hermione retaliated.

"So you and Georgie Porgie look to be getting pretty snuggly, there..."

Hermione's face flushed a delicate shade of pink. "We do not. I told him people would—"

"Relax!" Ginny interrupted. "No euphemisms intended. I just meant you look comfortable together."

"I— We— He's easy to be around."

Ginny grinned even brighter than before. "So you're serious about him?" she asked.

Hermione's lips pursed slightly as she gave her friend a suspicious look. "Are you asking for you? Or are you fishing for him?"

Ginny raised an eyebrow. "You can't think that he doesn't already know? The twins have their moments, like when they told Mum that she was better off without Percy, but most of the time they're spot on at reading people. I think it comes from spending all their lives working out just how far they could get away with pushing their luck. So?"

"So, yes, I'm serious. You think I'd dare not to be after the things you said when I told you he'd asked me out?" she teased.

"That was the general idea behind saying them," Ginny pointed out.

Hermione forced herself out of bed, finding the same array of toiletries that had been there the last time she had spent the night in the room, and began brushing her teeth.

"Serious enough to skip studying for a day and show him you support him about the shop?" Ginny asked.

Hermione's brushing motions stilled for several long seconds, and Ginny waited patiently as she rinsed and spat. "He knows I'd never try to stop him doing whatever he feels he has to do. The same way I know he doesn't get in the way when I need to study."

"There's a difference between not stopping him, and showing him you're behind him," the redhead insinuated. "And you know one day less isn't going to make all that much difference. You already know everything ten times better than Harry and Ron. Come with us?"

"You really think it would mean that much to him?"

Ginny gave Hermione a pointed look, as if to tell her to work it out for herself. "For the longest time, there were three things the twins cared about. Quidditch, family and that joke shop, not necessarily in that order. Now, George has four."

Hermione sighed. It would be actively helping him to leave her, but her friend was right. "Half a day," she bargained with Ginny. "Half a day for the shop. Half a day just for us."

---

"Hate to ask, but..." Fred sighed exaggeratedly.

Harry barely roused himself from the contemplation of his porridge to mumble his assent. "'Course you can. I'll get it when we go back up."

Hermione wiped the back of her hand over her forehead as she tried not to let her relief show, noting that her face felt damp and clammy. Harry might let the Marauders' Map sit at the bottom of his trunk for weeks on end, but she didn't want to chance him using it to check on her when she didn't appear for lunch. That only left one problem. Their ruse would have been far more convincing if either Harry or Ron might be the one to notice her apparent ill-health, but Harry was still firmly ensconced in his own little world, population one, and Ron had food in front of him. Much as she might once have hated to admit it, there was no competition.

"What d'you need it for anyway?" Ron asked, without first bothering to swallow the mouthful of bacon and eggs he'd been eating.

"That's for us to know, Li'l Bro," taunted George, "and you to wonder about while you're slaving over Hermione's Potions notes."

"Hah," Ron protested, "No boring old notes this morning. We're doing Defence. Slinkhard's useless and Umbridge doesn't give notes, so we might as well head for the Room of Requirement and work on the practical stuff."

Hermione winced at the thought, using her copy of The Prophet as a fan. So much for feigning illness. Hermione was beginning to feel light-headed and the idea of taking it in turns to be hexed by Harry and Ron sounded particularly unappealing.

Fred grinned. "Take a good look, George. After a morning of being hexed by the Boy Who Lived and the brightest witch of her generation, he might never be the same again."

Ron paled slightly at this remark, making his freckles stand out against his milky skin. "They wouldn— Hermione, are you alright?" Finally, Fred had managed to divert Ron's attention away from his breakfast for long enough to notice Hermione's flushed appearance.

"I don't think I am," Hermione admitted, not acting by this point.

"You better give studying a miss for today," Ginny offered. "Come on, I'll walk you back to the dorm." She helped Hermione up from the bench and, when Harry and Ron looked as if they might follow, she added in a stage whisper, "Is it cramps? They must be really bad if you're breaking out in a sweat like that..."

The boys hastily resumed their seats and pretended they hadn't heard a thing... at least until the girls had exited the Great Hall. "Just as well," Ron remarked around another mouthful of bacon and egg. "Her temper's bad enough when she's not on the rag. She probably would have turned the pair of us into slugs."

---

Hermione's coin grew warm in the palm of her hand, and she shifted it to eye-level to read the new inscription on its side, 'COMMON ROOM'. Hermione paused just long enough to acknowledge the message by returning the coin to its original state before she grabbed her jacket and her backpack and raced downstairs. Throwing herself into George's arms, she ignored the knowing smiles his siblings gave them. "What took you so long?" she demanded. "I've been waiting up there for an hour."

"Ickle Ronnie and his mate weren't exactly in a hurry to head off to the Room of Requirement," Fred explained, shaking his head as if in disappointment.

"No work ethic, either of them," George added.

"Like you two studied for your OWLs?" Hermione scoffed, pulling away from George.

"No, but that's because we were busy working on stuff for the shop. And where do you think you're going?" he asked, trying to keep a grip on her hand as she backed off.

Hermione wriggled free. "It's better if I walk alongside Ginny until we get... wherever it is, just in case we see anyone we know. And, if you don't want the whole morning to be a write-off, it's time we made a move."

"She sounds just like Mum," Fred remarked in a teasing tone as he headed for the portrait hole.

George just grinned, falling into step at his brother's side and leaving the girls to follow on. "You never hear Dad complaining."

Hermione frowned when the twins left the stairwell on the fourth floor. "Why are we going this way? It's quicker going straight down to third floor and then along."

"Only if you're planning to use the Honeyduke's passage," Fred replied.

"Which we're not," George clarified. "We're going this way." The twins had stopped in front of a huge mirror in a baroque frame and Fred was opening up the Marauders' Map.

Hermione tried to lift the mirror's edge to see if there was a passage behind it, but it refused to move even a fraction of an inch. "There's a permanent sticking charm on this or something," she argued.

Fred grinned. "Well, if just anyone could find their way in, it wouldn't be a secret passage, would it?" He gave George an almost imperceptible nod. "All clear."

George lifted his wand and pointed it at the centre of the looking glass. "Liquidus," he commanded.

Nothing changed in response to the spell as far as Hermione could see, until the twins stepped forward together, each resting one foot on the lower edge of the frame as if it were a step and then walking through the mirror as if it were a puddle of mercury that had got confused about which way was up. Hermione reached out, watching the way the surface rippled as she trailed her fingertips over it.

Ginny stepped through at her side, but Hermione would have spent longer exploring the silky-textured surface if someone hadn't tugged sharply on her fingertips. She hurried through, and as soon as she emerged into the neatly flagged and surprisingly well-lit passage, George pointed his wand at the shimmering entrance.

"Constantia," he almost whispered.

Fred held up the map and pointed as four miniscule paw-prints labelled Mrs Norris padded around a corner and into the corridor where the mirror was housed. He silently folded the map and led the way down a staircase, lit by a series of tall windows of leaded glass. Ginny fell in behind him, and George took Hermione's hand as they made their way down together.

Hermione waited until they'd descended a couple of floors before she spoke. "I thought you told Harry that this way was blocked off?"

"It was," Fred answered.

"It still is... sort of," added George. "You'll see."

"We shored up the less stable bits," Fred explained.

"And then we used that Reductor Curse that Harry taught us to clear the rubble," continued George.

"We're almost certain that it's safe now," Fred assured her as they reached ground level, and he took down one of two storm lanterns from its peg on the wall and used his wand to light it.

"As far as it goes," George qualified, taking down the second lamp of the pair and coaxing it into life.

"We decided not to clear it all the way because the other end comes out in a cave up in the hills, and there's no way of knowing whether any Death Eaters know about it," said Fred, continuing downward as walls of dressed stone gave way to the roughly hewn granite of the castle's foundation rock.

"We just cleared it far enough to get beyond the wards. Even if someone used to know the tunnel before, the chances of them knowing it well enough to be able to Apparate to the exact spot where you cross outside of the wards..." George gave an eloquent shrug.

"Either they'll be repelled by the defences," Fred explained, "or if they go six feet too far the other way, they'll come up in the middle of a pile of rubble."

"But you don't need to worry," George added, "because we've got it completely memorised."

A troubling thought crossed Hermione's mind as she realised what this meant. "Have either of you actually done a Side-Along-Apparition before?"

Fred grinned. "There's a first time for everything."

George stopped walking, turning to Hermione and looking her straight in the eye. His smile was obviously meant to be reassuring. "Trust me. It'll be just like when you learned to dance by standing on your dad's toes."

Hermione tried to tell herself that the twins had passed their Apparation tests with distinction, and they had produced all sorts of clever things for the joke shop, but she couldn't help remembering Ginny being almost flattened by runaway trunks and Sirius having to dive out of the way of flying knives. She had a strong suspicion that her answering smile was on the feeble side.

The tunnel stretched on for quite some distance, but the twins filled the time with the sort of good-natured banter that made Hermione envious of the bond the siblings shared and it seemed like no time at all before they reached a massive rockfall. Fred took position with his back as near to the barrier as he could and guided Ginny to stand just in front of him.

George did likewise, wrapping an arm around Hermione's waist. He gave Fred the smallest of nods and the other twin raised his wand arm and pointed back the way they had come. "Specialis revelio!"

The air barely three feet from Hermione's face shimmered with a reddish orange glow as if to warn of danger. "What did you do?" she asked Fred in a hushed whisper, but it was George who responded.

"Scarpin's Revelaspell," he explained. "We just thought it was better to make sure you know exactly how accurate you need to be if either of you ever try it without us."

Hermione sucked in a deep breath and considered the shimmering glow. Most people she'd seen Apparate seemed to turn into it somehow, often with their arms out. The twins had hardly left room for the slightest misstep.

The arm around her waist loosened and George took her hand. "Come on," he suggested. "We'll give these two a bit of room." They watched through the slowly fading glow as Fred made a sort of twisting side-step into nothingness with Ginny holding tight to his arm.

Then, it was their turn.

"Alone at last," George announced, taking her into his arms and ducking his head to gently brush the tip of his nose against Hermione's and then claim her lips in a lingering kiss.

Hermione slid her arms around George's back, curling her fingers over the top of his shoulders. When George lifted his head, Hermione's eyes searched his face anxiously. "You're really sure you can do this?" she asked.

"As sure as I can be without having actually done it," George assured her.

"And you know that if you splinch me I will never let you live it down?"

"If I splinch you, Fred will never let me live it down," he pointed out, giving her a tiny lopsided smile. "Just stand on my shoes like you did with Daddy and hold on tight."

Hermione shifted her feet and nuzzled her face into his chest, so that he almost didn't catch what she said as he turned into thin air. "Did I mention that my dad has two left feet?" she asked.