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Luna skips through the halls.
She’s humming. She grins. Sometimes, she laughs.
“Hello, Jerome,” she sings to a suit of armor.
It straightens a little as she passes. Her eyes are alight.
“Oh, Harry is going to love her.”
It’s a funny thought – like Harry wouldn’t love her. Luna’s pretty sure he’s loved her since the very start. Halloween at the latest, if she understands their timeline rightly.
She passes a stained-glass window and thinks of the prefects’ bath and mermaids. Luna laughs a little as her long, silvery-blond hair begins to escape her hairclip. It’s rainbow-colored and it reminds her of the tufflelox from Belgium. It has lovely plumage, you know.
She skips past Sue Bones and Hannah Abbot.
“Luna where are you off -”
“Gotta find Harry, Susan!”
Susan and Hannah raise four eyebrows between them. Susan shrugs, as if to say, “it’s Luna” and then they head back toward the library.
By then, Luna has made her way to the Fat Lady and the Gryffindor dorms beyond.
“Hello again, Miss Lovegood,” the painting drawls.
“Hello, Mujer Gorda,” she replies serenely.
“What did you call me?”
“Oh! I am sorry. Daddy and I are visiting a reserve of ‘Las Truflerosas’ over the summer, and I thought it might be fun to try my hand at a bit of the local language, you see.”
“So you called me ‘Fat Lady’.” She doesn’t sound impressed.
Luna nods vigorously.
“I suppose that that is a lovely endeavor, dear. What is the password?”
“Culinary Disaster,” she says with the utmost confidence.
“Try again.”
“Hmm. What about ‘Infinite Luminosity’, that’s just like Harry’s soul, you know. Forever bright, he is.”
“That is very sweet, young lady, but still very wrong.”
Luna leans in conspiratorially. She can smell the odd aroma of old paint, magically preserved. “Can I tell you a secret?”
The Fat Lady rolls her eyes. “You may, but I imagine I know the secret already,” she says drily.
Luna claps. “Oh, that is splendid. Then you already know that I do not actually -”
“ – know the password,” they finish together.
“You are rather intelligent for a Gryffindor painting,” Luna muses. “And far more fun than that ruddy riddle bird.”
“Flattery will get you -”
“Everywhere.”
Luna spins on her heels to see her target standing before her, looking mildly disheveled and highly amused. A huge grin splits her face. “Harry Potter!”
Her friend half-shrugs. “That’s the rumor.”
She’s relieved to note that, despite his dry delivery, he is smiling. It’s still a relief to see it on his face, especially after the last year.
But oh well. Best not dwell on that.
She tugs on the sleeve of his dark brown jumper. It’s the one not holding half of a ham sandwich. “Come with me, Harry.”
He looks down at her with a confused look. “Er, I was just going to eat with everyone and study with Hermione, Luna.”
Luna beams at him. “Well, that is just perfect. I’ll take you to her.”
“You’ll what? But she’s…”
“Come on, Harry,” she insists.
She hears him sigh, but her thoughts are already full of happy sea creatures and she leads him on.
Harry Potter is standing in front of the couch conjured by the Room of Requirement. His arms are crossed and his face is pinched in worry and exasperation.
“Well, this is unfortunate,” he says to nobody in particular, though Luna grins and Neville sighs. “She’s a hermit crab.”
“Ooh! How could you tell?”
Harry blinks at Luna. “Um, the shell? Her general appearance?” He glances down at Hermione the Hermit Crab before looking back up at Luna and Neville. “Not to mention,” Harry makes a clicking noise as he makes exaggerated pinching motions with his hands, “the pincers?”
His friends blink at him.
“We tried to talk her out of it, mate,” Neville says.
“Oh, I didn’t, Harry. I thought she would end up being a rather cute animal. Maybe even a Frilly-haired Rumpert. With fluffy wiggly wings and all.” She wiggles her hands at her sides for emphasis.
Harry cocks an eyebrow. Luna slips her arms back to her sides.
“I did not, of course, tell her that.”
“Ah.”
He bends down to the arm of the sofa, extending his hand. “C’mon, Hermione. Climb aboard.”
The hermit crab that is also his girlfriend seems to dip her head before crawling into the palm of his hand.
Harry is utterly speechless. He runs the pad of a finger over her…shell. Her antennae twitch and she taps the long antennae over the palm of his hand. It is strangely intimate.
“She can’t turn back, Nev?”
He sighs, gesturing lamely. “Uh, I guess not?” He mutters something that sounds a lot like “obviously not, she’s sitting right there.”
“What about McGonagall? She is literally the Transfiguration professor. She taught me how.”
“Oh, about that,” Luna explains, “Hermione asked us not to inform the Headmistress.” She suddenly looks a bit nervous. Well, about as nervous as Luna can look.
Harry sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose before staring down at his hermit crab girlfriend. “For once, Hermione Granger, I was the voice of reason. Me!” He shakes his head. The little crab tries to tuck herself back into her shell and Harry immediately feels badly. “I’m sorry, Hermione,” he says gently. “I’ll take care of you.”
The room narrows down to just Harry and Hermione the Hermit Crab. “You know,” Harry says as he stares into her big, onyx eyes, “you’re very cute like this.” He thinks that her eyes widen. But surely, he’s imagining it as she’s currently a crab. “But I prefer the human Hermione. That one’s my favorite; I’m rather fond of her, you know.” Hermione the Crab rubs then gently nips his palm with a pincer. The gesture makes him think of Hedwig. He wishes he knew what she was trying to say.
Neville clears his throat. Harry had forgotten he was there. “Uh, we’re just going to get going? It looks like you have everything under control?”
Harry smirks. “Yeah. I’ll get her back to the Head dorms in a minute.”
“And Harry,” Luna begins, “just remember that taking care of someone can sometimes mean doing precisely what they don’t want you to do.”
“Like stunning Hermione and taking her to the Headmistress before she took the animagus potion?” he retorts somewhat accusingly. “I swear, I leave you lot unattended for two hours…”
Luna shrugs. She either doesn’t notice his annoyance or doesn’t care.
All he’d wanted was to have a nice, fun little quidditch practice and a quiet night studying with Hermione, but no. He comes back to this disaster.
“Right,” he mutters. But he thinks of all the times that Hermione had looked out for him over the years in just that way. Harry looks meaningfully into Hermione’s beady little crab eyes. “Yeah, I’ll take care of her, and she can yell at me later when I go to McGonagall if she’s not back to normal in the morning.”
The halls are quiet, and so is Harry. His midnight black fur blends him easily into the shadowy halls as he sinks back to their dorms. He pads softly, occasionally trilling a soft meow whenever he feels one of Hermione’s little pincers tug gently at his fur.
She rides him like her own relatively enormous Buckbeak. If Buckbeak was a cat. And she was a crustacean.
Externally, Harry’s as serene as any feline familiar. Internally, his mind is roiling.
For once – for once – he had been the voice of reason.
“Be patient, Hermione,” he’d said. “Using the animagus potion is unpredictable,” he’d said.
But his girlfriend is often as stubborn and impatient as he is. And she probably couldn’t stand that Harry had come about his form naturally.
So, she’d obviously taken the potion. The one that she’d been warned specifically against because of its unpredictability.
And their friends had just…just let her.
(to be fair, it is widely understood that there is very little that would stop Hermione Granger once she gets an idea into her head)
And now she’s a hermit crab.
If nothing else, it’ll make for a funny story.
‘Like I’ve never done anything reckless and impulsive before,’ he thinks. He lets out a little cat huff of air.
It’s fine.
Hermione tugs on his fur again, and he feels the small weight of her press closer to the skin between his ears. Her little legs stroke through his fur. His ears twitch.
It’s fine.
Harry enters their dorm wearing Hermione as a small hat.
He sets her on the table by the sofa. “I’m gonna make tea,” he says like it’s a normal evening and he has a normal girlfriend who is not a hermit crab. He takes a step then stops, frowning. “Uh, I’m not sure that you can have that.”
He putters about the small kitchen, occasionally glancing in Hermione’s direction. Even as a hermit crab, he can tell she’s miserable. She hasn’t moved, except to make sure she’s facing him.
Eventually he returns with a small bowl of water for Hermione and a mug of tea for himself. He summons Hermione’s worn copy of ‘Hogwarts, A History’. He looks down at her to find her beady eyes focused on him. He smirks. “It feels weird to try to study without you.” He wiggles the book in front of her. “Figured we could both use a comfort book, yeah?”
Hermione slinks across the table, looking up at him. He extends his hand. She crawls into his palm and he places her on his shoulder. “I meant what I said before,” he murmurs. “You’re very cute as a little crabby-crab.”
Harry can somehow feel a little hermit crab glare.
“Right. So, how about the chapter titled ‘The Sirius Black Affair’? It’s my favorite. It’s all about a really brave girl with a time-turner who was best friends with, admittedly, a pretty lucky idiot.”
She taps a pincer against his shoulder. “Fine. Maybe I’m not an idiot, but I am very lucky.”
For the next hour, he reads to her about their somewhat glossed-over third year. He stops near the end; with a moonlit ride on a hippogriff and the arms of his favorite person wrapped around his middle.
“You’ve always been that, Hermione.” He pauses, pretending that she’d filled the silence with a coy “Been what?” He sighs into the silence, cradling Hermione in his hands before settling her on the covers of the bed they share. He heads to the bathroom to brush his teeth and take a quick shower. He returns wearing just his gray pajama bottoms. Sliding under the covers, he settles his hermit crab girlfriend onto his bare chest.
“Keep your pincers to yourself, okay Hermione?”
She answers by stroking his skin with a pincer. Harry chuckles.
“Okay, fine. But no pinching, okay love?”
She taps him twice.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
Harry awakens the next morning with something far weightier than a little crabby-crab on his chest.
He smiles when Hermione – the real, honest-to-goodness Hermione – blinks up at him. She’s gorgeous. Her caramel eyes are wide and expressive as her mouth curves into a beatific smile. He leans down to kiss her softly. She groans quietly before slipping her tongue into his mouth. Harry wants to bask in this feeling, this feeling of kissing Hermione, maybe forever. He feels her shift, lifting her arm to bring her hand to his face when –
The kissing stops immediately. Harry pulls back slightly, and both of them are staring at her hand.
Hermione’s hand is not a hand.
It’s a pincer. Hermione brings her other hand from under the covers.
It, too, is a pincer.
Harry sits up. Runs a hand through his hair. He blows out a breath.
Meanwhile, Hermione stares down at her pincers. Her cheeks turn red but the rest of her goes rather pale. She blinks owlishly once, twice. Her face falls.
“Oh dear.”
“You,” Harry says around a smirk as he cradles her human-sized crabby pincers, “are a very silly girl.”
She sighs. “I wish I was just silly. The worst part?”
“If you say it’s because I was right, I will hex you.”
She holds up her pincers miserably, pouting for good measure. “You’ll hex me even when I’m in such distress?”
“Especially when you’re in such distress.”
Hermione sighs, hunching forward. She snaps her pincers together, making strange clicking noises.
“I’m going to the hospital wing, aren’t I?”
“Yup,” he says, popping the ‘P’.
“Aaand you’re going to send a patronus to McGonagall.”
“You’re two-for-two,” he says cheerily.
“I suppose I’ve earned this, haven’t I?” She glances between her two mismatched pincers.
“Three-for-three.”
She clicks her pincers again.
“Did they have to be different sizes though?”
He lifts her to her feet. “They are anatomically correct. I expected nothing less.”
“Can we please use the cloak?” she begs.
“We can’t both fit under there.”
“Er…meow?” She looks up at him expectantly and bats her eyelashes.
Harry is not impressed. “You want to carry me under the cloak?” Harry looks intently at her not-hands and raises a brow.
Hermione sighs.
“Oh dear.”
“C’mon, you big baby. This will just be a footnote when Luna publishes ‘The Life and Times of Hermione Granger’. No one will even remember it, not when you’re so brilliant.”
“I’m a crab, Harry,” she whines.
He half-shrugs. “That you are. But I love you anyway. Now quit stalling, love.”
She wiggles out from under the covers.
“At least you’re still dressed from yesterday,” he observes. Harry slips out of bed and quickly gets dressed in jeans and a green jumper.
Hermione sighs. “I suppose.”
“Can’t believe I’m a bloody crab,” she mutters as Harry slips a large cloak around her shoulders. It’s large enough that when his arm circles around her waist, he can hold the far edge tightly enough to hide her pincers.
“Well, you are being awfully crabby right now.”
“I hate you.”
He kisses her temple. “Liar.”