The Gryffindor Common Room

She pressed her ear against the door.

Voices. Multiple people, relaxed and casual — the particular sound of students who had nowhere urgent to be. Laughing at something.

Hermione pulled back and found a gap in the door frame — a thin line where the old wood had shrunk from the stone over the years, barely wide enough to press one eye to.
She angled herself until she could see through it.

The Gryffindor Common Room.

She knew it in the same instant she saw it — the fireplace she'd sat in front of a thousand times, the particular configuration of battered armchairs and low tables, the Fat Lady's door on the far wall, the worn rug in the center of the room.

Home.

She was home.
She'd actually made it.

For one moment, something lifted in her chest that she had no adequate word for.

Then she registered the students.

Four of them, scattered around the room.
Two at a table near the window, with books and parchment between them, heads bent over their work.
Two near the fire, facing each other, talking. None of them looking toward this wall.
None of them had any reason to look toward this wall.

And there — visible through the gap, across the open floor — the girls' dormitory staircase.
The spiral stairs leading up.
Her room at the top, with her clothes, all of it twenty seconds away if the room was empty.
Which wasn't.

Hermione let out a careful breath and stepped back from the door.

She knew these people.
Not necessarily well, not all of them, but well enough — they'd have seen her at meals, in the corridors, at prefect meetings.
They would recognize her immediately.
And the state she was in — naked, filthy, her hair a disaster, wet footprints on whatever floor she crossed — there would be no explaining that.
No House Elf mishap story that made sense of this.
Just Hermione Granger, caught.

The story would be over the castle before breakfast. It would define her.

I can't. I absolutely cannot let that happen.

She forced herself to think.

Option one: go now.
They were absorbed in what they were doing — none of them watching this wall.
If she run fast enough, quiet enough—

No.
The door could creak.
Her feet could make sound on the floor.
Someone could look up, and she was not in a state others could easly ignore.
One glance would be enough.

Option two: wait.

It was probably late — well past curfew, which the prefect part of her noted with a particular irony.
Half past ten.
They should be in bed.
They couldn't stay up forever.
Students got tired.
The fire burned low and people went to sleep, and eventually this room would empty or clear enough that she could cross.

She just had to wait for it.

Hermione eased back to the door frame and looked through the gap one more time, fixing the positions of the four students in her mind. Then she stepped back, slid down to sit on the floor of the landing, and wrapped her arms around her knees.

The stone was cold against her bare skin — the backs of her thighs, her feet, the base of her spine.
Through the gap she could see the warm amber light of the common room fire, close enough that it should have felt comforting and somehow didn't.
She was separated from everything familiar by three inches of wood.

They'll leave, she told herself.
They have to leave.
Just wait.

She was very good at waiting.
She'd proven that tonight more than enough.

She waited.

(Note: This chapter was beta’d by user qwertpoint.)