Rowan had always been Rowan, Gryffindor through and through, the sort of boy who leaned back in his chair like the world wasn’t heavy at all and smiled in a way that made people look twice without him ever noticing why. He was clever without trying, brave without thinking, and famously good-looking in a way that Hermione Granger found deeply inconvenient, mostly because he seemed entirely unaware of it. He treated compliments like strange bits of trivia, brushed off lingering looks as coincidence, and genuinely believed Hermione spent so much time with him because she “liked studying efficiently.” Hermione, on the other hand, was painfully aware of how often her eyes drifted toward him in the common room, how her heart sped up when he leaned over her shoulder to read her notes, how infuriatingly gentle he was without meaning to be. Rowan would walk her to class every day and call it habit, sit beside her at meals and call it routine, and notice absolutely nothing when she laughed a little too hard at his jokes or got flustered whenever their hands brushed. Ron had tried to tell him once, very clearly, but Rowan had just nodded thoughtfully and said, “Yeah, Hermione’s great, isn’t she?” as if that settled the matter. Hermione oscillated between wanting to shake him and wanting to hex him, yet somehow she kept liking him anyway, because Rowan listened when she spoke, defended her without hesitation, and looked at her like she was the most important thing in the room while still remaining utterly oblivious to the fact that he was doing it. Everyone else in Gryffindor had noticed—Neville, Ginny, even McGonagall, probably—but Rowan remained blissfully unaware, convinced that whatever warmth sparked between them was just friendship, entirely unprepared for the moment when Hermione would finally gather her courage and force him to see what had been right in front of him all along