Hey there,
I was surprised to see you come up all of a sudden with this nice little story. I need to admit that every single piece of emotion your characters display here is very truthful, realistic, valid. It could have happened in canon.
I guess Jo had been receiving these questions as to getting H and Hr together so often that she and the filmmakers felt the urge to underline in HBP on more than one occasion that H and HR are simply FRIENDS.
It's always refreshing to read literately written stories here. Yours is one of them; no matter the nitpicking, I couldn't find any grammar errors. There were a few cases where I wasn't sure about punctuation; not being a native English speaker myself, I'll wisely keep my mouth shut :D
So, I hope you will expand it some more as I'm longing to see:
- whether they admit their feelings to themselves
- whether they admit their feelings to each other
- whether there's a chance for some subtle Weasley bashing :D
Anyway, good story and update soon. BTW, what about Yule Ball Debauchery? given up on that one? Please don't!
Author's response
Glad you liked it. I wanted it to feel as if it could have really happened at that point in the canon, so it's good to hear that you felt that way.
I agree; I think Rowling went out of her way to squash talk of H/Hr in HBP. (The result being Hermione acting rather OOC, in my opinion.)
I'd be surprised if there weren't a few grammatical/punctuation errors in there. I wrote, checked over and submitted the chapter within 24 hours of coming up with the idea, so I'm sure a few mistakes got through. Especially since I'm writing without a beta.
I think Hermione, at least, has already admitted her feelings to herself. She tries to fight it, but she's well aware that she has fallen for Harry. Harry's a bit slower on the uptake, so we'll see if he gets there on his own.
Will they admit their feelings to each other? Well, I think most of the people reading this would throw rocks at me if I didn't provide some sort of resolution by the end of the story, so make of that what you will. :)
I don't plan to go out of my way to bash the Weasleys. I don't really hate any of them, aside from maybe Percy. Ron grates on my nerves at times, but I don't actively dislike him. Ron might not be portrayed in a great light in this story, but that's not definite. I haven't really decided how he'll react to his friends' changing feelings, or if he'll even show up again in the story. We'll see.
I haven't given up on YBD, but it's pretty slow going right now. The main problem I've discovered is that I'm more interested in writing plot than smut--but I've kind of backed myself into a corner, as I think by now people expect smut in every chapter of that story. Chapter 5 is pretty well complete, aside from the smut, so hopefully it'll be posted in the not-too-distant future.