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Chapter Text

Hermione’s head frantically pivoted to and fro as Professor McGonagall shepherded her and her parents through Diagon Alley. Her eyes were never quite satisfied—wherever they landed, enchanting bits and bobs caught at them and seized upon her imagination—a hundred sights wanting for leisurely examination. But before her steps could falter, their wide-eyed group would hurry on to some other marvel.

Every shopfront surprised her. A massive cauldron as tall as Hermione hung outside one store, engraved: “Maria’s Specialized Cauldrons”. And in the window were curios instead of cauldrons. A stack of transparent baking sheets wriggled like a caterpillar, precariously near the edge of its display case. The ‘face’ of a tall, thin vessel that was pacing on stubby silver legs followed her as they passed, though she couldn’t find its eyes.

The most extraordinary dollhouse Hermione had ever seen beckoned to her from under the spinning and glimmering sign of Charlie’s Charming Toys. It was comfortably shielded from the warm day by a lazily drifting haze of snow and a moat of white. Beside the house, a tumbling brook completed the composition. Within, a fire was alive and breathing condensation onto the windows.

A pair of small wooden dolls, exquisitely carved and lifelike, christened every inch of their Christmas-card home with dancing feet. The fire warmed the little lady’s mane of red hair and sparkled in her emerald eyes.

The door to their sanctuary blew open, and a doll all in black stormed in, casting the charming tableau into disarray as he fired the first shots of a grand battle.

The Potters and He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named ultimate doll set! Play at house and play at war! The perfect gift for the whole family! A favorite of boys and girls alike! Must have for Boy-Who-Lived fanatics! 5 galleons! Harry Potter enrollment-year special!

“My goodness…” Professor McGonagall muttered under her breath as they breezed past.

Enchanted by the set, Hermione stared longingly as they passed by. It was all a bit exaggerated; she supposed she would hardly have room for the whole thing in her dorm room if it actually came with all that snow. But maybe just the red-haired doll? She couldn’t tear her eyes away as it danced, now in violence instead of romance, sparks flying from a toothpick wand. The crowd cut off her gaze before a victor emerged.

They were obstructed for a moment by a long line of witches and wizards queued at an ice cream shop. As they navigated around it, a girl her age skipped past with a towering ice cream cone. With a lick of her tongue it transformed into a castle tower, and then again into a spiraling and viciously hooked sword.

“Slow down, Daphne, your sister is still waiting on her cone! Please don’t run off and get lost again!” a concerned parent called out sharply.

“We have to try some,” Hermione begged her father. “We can, can’t we? Once we’ve got the last of the supplies? To celebrate?”

“Not interested in that pizza place anymore?”

“Ice cream!” she exclaimed and swung his hand happily.

Their next destination was the main event, the bookstore. “Flourish and Blotts,” a plain wooden sign informed them, and there was a simple display in the window. On one side was a grid of books, each row labeled by school year. On the other, an enlarged book cover upon which a blond wizard with the smuggest smile Hermione had ever seen was facing down a serpentine magical beast. “Read about your hero’s latest adventure! Lockhart and the Tasmanian devil serpent!” Colorful text promoted.

“The oldest shop in the alley aside from Ollivander’s,” Professor McGonagall informed them.

Her parents were stuck at the window, pondering who knew what, so Hermione hurried ahead of them. Just one step inside and the bookstore rushed to greet her with the rich smell of books old and new. She admired it fondly; in this extraordinary new world, this familiar feeling was still waiting for her. The shop was nearly empty, just an elderly woman in the used books section, and a family of four, both children a few years younger than her, at the shop counter. The section labeled “Textbooks” had to come first, but she cast a curious glance down the stacks of “Fiction” as she passed, wondering if elderly, enigmatic Muggles would feature in wizards’ fiction.

“Our Hermione can never get enough of a bookstore,” her father confided to Professor McGonagall as they trailed behind. “Perhaps we should go on ahead to the bank and let her have her fill here while we handle the boring paperwork, would you like that, dearest? If you think she would be fine here alone, Professor.”

“I’m not a child, I think I can manage sitting around in a bookstore,” Hermione muttered while pulling a book from the shelf and marking it off on her notepad.

“Blotts will keep an eye on her.” Professor McGonagall shared a nod with the old man at the shop counter. And Hermione was quickly alone with all the books and time in the world.

She gathered all the first-year textbooks that she figured had to do with real magic and wizardry—Transfiguration, Charms, Defense Against the Dark Arts—then headed over to a cozy-looking nook in the corner of the store with a huge plush armchair.

Running her fingers through the soft mat of fine threads upholstering the chair’s back, she stepped around it to settle in. Then had a bad shock. A sunny-haired boy was sitting there, lounging at complete ease, a book in one hand and his chin in the other, a thoughtful expression on his face. He was handsome. And a regular toy gentleman, with such smart clothes he looked like he belonged in a portrait, hung up in the hallway of some grand estate, with the frozen company of royalty and other dignitaries. Though the deep plushiness of the chair, which must have been as comfortable as she had imagined, did somewhat diminish his majesty. It had swallowed him right up, making him look rather childish and a bit silly. And his pretty hair had unfortunately been slicked back.

Oh, he had looked up at her from his book and was waiting for her to say something. Embarrassment heated her face. “E-Excuse me,” she whispered in a rush and spun about, retreating across the room to safer territory. Through and past another seating area, then a few bookshelves, she reached a table on the opposite wall of the store from the large plushy armchair and the blond boy. Pretty safe. Drat. Her hands ran up and down her cheeks. She really ought to be, needed to be, a bit less awkward. Relax, she repeated to herself. She was where she belonged now, not the odd one out around whom things were never as they should be.

Excuse me, excuse me, Hermione mocked to herself. Who walks up to someone like that and says excuse me and then runs away? She took a deep breath and opened the DADA textbook to the table of contents, then traced a finger down the subjects: The Fundamental Taxonomy of the Dark Arts, Jinxes and Counter-Jinxes, Basic Properties of Dark Objects, Common Household Menaces… Jinxes of course. She fingered her wand eagerly and flipped through the book. The tongue twister jinx was the first one in the book and seemed simple enough—

“Excuse me,” a lazy voice suddenly drawled out from behind her.

Hermione jumped in her seat, startled again, and turned around to find that the blond boy had abandoned his plot of prime real estate to track her down.

“Nervous little thing, aren’t you?” he teased. “Malfoy, Draco Malfoy.” He offered his hand.

“You should apologize when you startle someone,” she lectured back. “Hermione Granger.” She grasped his hand and gave it a firm shake, but as she made to let go, she found her hand trapped. He was squinting slightly at their hands, then he met her eyes.

“Granger, is it?” he said with a conscientious expression. “But isn’t it more proper like…?”

He lifted her hand to graze it with the lightest possible touch from his lips. A light blush rose to her cheeks.

“All bases covered then, I suppose,” she said, trying to sound nonchalant.

“Indeed,” he agreed, though he seemed slightly confused.

“Are you a student at Hogwarts then?”

“Of course. Well, I will be anyway, and a Slytherin too, starting this year.”

“I’m a first year too. But how does that work? I didn’t read anything about early sorting in Hogwarts: A History.”

“There’s nothing like that, but my family’s been all Slytherin for ages,” he said with pride.

“Well, I hope you’re not setting yourself up for disappointment.”

“It’ll be Ravenclaw or Gryffindor at worst anyway. Surely not Hufflepuff, I think I’d have to drop out. Wouldn’t you?”

Hermione wrinkled her nose. “That’s just being nasty, all the houses are perfectly respectable.”

“Is that what it says in Hogwarts: A History? Of course Hufflepuffs aren’t respectable.” He waved the notion away with an irreverent hand. “Now stop being a spoilsport, which are you hoping for? Ravenclaw, I suppose, since you’re getting an early start on this tedious drivel.”

He reached out and snatched her book before she could react.

“Rude,” Hermione remarked.

Draco ignored her, though he was decent enough to mark her place with his thumb; he flipped the book closed to scowl down his nose at the cover as if the perfectly innocent book had committed some terrible faux pas.

“Father’s been trying to clean up the curriculum for years. He’s on the Board of Governors, you know,” he mentioned proudly. “But it’s a losing battle with Dumbledore in charge. The author of this rubbish is another one of his pet projects.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know anything about that,” Hermione said cautiously. Great, wizarding politics.

“You wouldn’t, no one’s got anything but praise for the great saint Dumbledore, at least that’s how it is here in Britain. I suppose in France no one much cares. But you’ll see for yourself, he’s made a right mess of the faculty, of everything really.”

France? He flipped the book back open to where Hermione had been reading and smirked.

“Oh no, straight to the jinxes, is it? Better be…” He trailed off dramatically in an affected voice: “Slytherin!”

He pushed the book back towards her. “Go on then,” he said and stared at her expectantly.

“What?”

He just spread his arms and stared at her. Hermione groaned internally, just when she thought they were getting back to safe territory.

“I haven’t tried any out, you know.”

“They’re just jinxes, aren’t they? Can’t go too wrong, can they?” Draco insisted confidently.

Hermione had no idea, but she did want to try them out. And if he was the one getting jinxed and he was the one asking for it, how could she be the one to back down? She pulled out her wand and slowly drew out a spiraling pattern in the air.

“Lingua Tortium!” she enunciated forcefully, and a spinning blue light zapped across the small distance between them. Draco immediately hunched over, grabbing his jaw with both hands and groaning in pain.

“Ouer ur oughr,” he forced out incoherently and smacked at the book.

Hermione breathed in sharply, fighting to keep her calm. Just do the counter-jinx. He’s fine. Counter-jinx. She swept through the appropriate wand movement far more quickly than before and with a much less steady hand.

“Lingua Solvo!”

For a moment she was frightened that it hadn’t worked because he hardly reacted, was still clutching his jaw. But when she raised her wand again he waved her off and gave a firm thumbs up.

“I’m so sorry,” she said earnestly. Great, just great, things had been going so well too. At least, they hadn’t been going that badly. Draco seemed friendly enough—if a little sharp about the edges. She rubbed her own jaw nervously as she studied him. It was fine. Probably. The whole thing just reminded her too much of how things had played out for her again and again up to this point. But he asked for it! Hermione thought with exasperation. So he couldn’t be too upset, could he?

After a few more seconds of rubbing his jaw, he let out a low groan. “Yeah, it’s fine now, there’s just a bit of soreness left. Merlin, did you ever cast that with a vengeance though, it was like the worst cramp I’ve ever had, but in my tongue.”

Draco didn’t seem too put out, but some of the awkwardness of a boy his age—previously absent—had crept into his disposition. He studied her with a new, more serious look, then rolled his neck.

“I’m really sorry,” Hermione apologized again.

“Asked for it, didn’t I? And it wasn’t that bad actually,” he said dismissively.

“It wasn’t?” Hermione questioned.

Draco ran his fingers through his bright hair and sighed with an affected boredom. “Well, it was awful. But I’m pretty tough, a jinx like that wouldn’t really bother me.”

Hermione burst out laughing, the tension in the air releasing, and steadied herself with a hand on his shoulder.

“You weren’t acting tough at all! I mean, I would have thought you were dying if I didn’t know it was a tongue twister jinx.”

“I had to communicate non-verbally, didn’t I?” Draco replied with a smile. “It might have been getting to me a little bit,” he admitted in a lazy drawl. “I wasn’t sure you had the counter-jinx ready, you understand. If we had to ask Blotts for help, it would have been terribly humiliating.”

Hermione hummed noncommittally in reply and looked down at the DADA textbook for a few seconds before returning her attention to Draco. She twirled her wand between her fingers casually.

“Shall we go on then? It’s a tickle jinx next,” she advised him and raised her wand to his chest with a friendly smile.

“No!” Draco snatched the wand out of her hand and then set it down on the table with a grimace while Hermione laughed again quietly.

“Anyway, let me show you what the good stuff looks like.” He stood up and led her towards a nearby shelf that ran along the back wall of the store labeled “Limited Access.”

“Honestly, this stuff is probably all decent,” he informed her. “Restricted by the Ministry and with enough people interested that they bother keeping them in stock. But that”—he nodded at a book that was prominently displayed, its plain black cover facing out, enjoying a respectful amount of elbow room: The Dark Arts for Dueling by Arcturus Black— “is the genuine article, it’s what the Death Eaters all used, and Grindelwald’s followers before them. Or so they say.” He leaned back against the wall of the store with a self-satisfied expression. “We’re related on my mother’s side, of course.”

“Of course,” she agreed.

So, his mother was a Black, or maybe it was a more distant relation? Probably not, or why was it of course—and why was it of course? Hermione’s fingers were tapping and she forced her hand to still. Something about the conversation was eluding her, many things, a context not contained by the copy of Hogwarts: A History McGonagall had provided on that first visit. How discomforting, to be trapped without it, surrounded by books which must have contained it a hundred times over.

“And there aren’t too many Blacks around this generation,” he added with a confidential air. “Anyway, it’s the kind of book that may even be a bit too influential. If you know what I mean. But that, of course, makes it a must-read in its own right.”

“A can’t-read though, isn’t it?”

“Not if you’re friends with the right sort of people. But you probably wouldn’t start with it anyway, not really first-year material.”

He led the way back through “Limited Access” and towards the used books.

“All you really need, for starters, are the textbooks from before Dumbledore made a mess of everything. Those are all a safe bet. Though you’ll likely be stuck with used stuff,” Draco informed her with a grimace.

“I don’t mind used books,” Hermione replied, feeling defensive about her rather large collection of them. “They’ve got character, haven’t they?”

“Quite,” he agreed, not sounding at all like he meant it.

He pulled out Defense and Dueling: Volume 1 from a stack of three copies of it and flipped through it quickly. A disgusted look spread across his face. And he flipped the book around to show her its disfigurement by a crude battle between stick figure wizards.

“Character—no thanks, just the book will do,” he muttered quietly as he set the book down.

“I can hear you,” she muttered back.

He chuckled and pulled out another copy.

“Draco,” a cold voice spat out from behind them.

She spun around. Looming over them was an extremely tall, hard-faced man with long hair the same blond as Draco’s. One hand rested upon a thin black walking stick with a silver serpent wrapped around its head.

“Father, this is Hermione Granger, she’ll be starting at Hogwarts this year,” Draco introduced her. “She’ll be a deft hand at potions, I expect,” he added knowingly.

The expression on Draco’s father’s face reminded Hermione of how adults had looked at her whenever she had a bout of what she now knew was accidental magic. Like he’d really rather she just wasn’t there, preferably forever.

“Will she now? A pleasure, but I’m afraid we really must be going.” He placed a hand on Draco’s shoulder and steered him away.

Thrown by the abrupt encounter and exit, Hermione raised a hand in farewell to Draco, who was turning to wave at her as he was spirited away.

A deft hand at potions. What was that all about? Odd boy, but smart and likeable. Already made a friend before school even started, she congratulated herself. Though his father certainly hadn’t liked her for some reason. Malfoy. Odd French people.

She picked over the used books he had pulled out. They were cheap enough that her parents wouldn’t mind a few.

Chapter Text

On the first day of September, Hermione enjoyed her favorite breakfast: pancakes with a healthy helping of assorted berries, a treat her dentist parents rarely permitted. She’d packed everything ahead of time and they punctually departed, arrived at the station, and traversed the magical brick wall that Professor McGonagall had painstakingly explained. Very suddenly, Hermione was giving her parents a warm hug and leaving them behind.

Ever since that house call when Professor McGonagall, her industrious nature balancing out the incredible, had come bearing good news and an invitation, the faint scent of something good drifting towards her from the future had been teasing her nose. Hermione had been swelling with that news, everything it resolved and everything it promised. Fantasies about a grand destiny, from book after book, were starting to come true. Yes, something special had been waiting just for her.

And there it had been! Diagon Alley. Commensurate to her most indulgent daydreams. A visit where the new world made itself known in all its glory, during which she and her parents had oohed and aahed while chaperoned by a guide who oozed reliability. A safe sampling of the extraordinary.

But now, as Hermione stepped away from her parents’ embrace and took the first few steps towards the Hogwarts Express, something shifted. Plumes of engine smoke flooded the platform, dividing her from her parents and obscuring her thread of fate. The feeling, the one that had been building all morning, since the night before really, or perhaps from that home visit, finally realized itself: an apprehension of the new world.

It had nothing to do with the wall of bricks she had charged through, squeezing her eyes closed at the last minute despite every determination not to. Neither was it about Diagon Alley, with its magical ice cream and handsome blond boys running their mouths about this and that thing she hadn’t the faintest clue about. It had, indeed, nothing to do with magic at all.

It was about the embrace of her parents, the pancakes and berries from that morning, the flowerbed beside the steps to the front door where she and her mother had knelt this summer, and the summer before, and the summer before. Creaky stairs, her bedroom and its two tiny windows from which nothing but the red brick of the next house over could be seen, the desk she studied at to build a treasure trove of A’s from a school where she didn’t get along too much with anyone for too long a time. Where lunches were often spent alone in its drearily maintained courtyard of spotty, browned grass and half-kept shrubbery.

It was the feeling of leaving home.

She turned to give her parents a last little wave and a big uncertain smile. Then she stepped up onto the train, where the narrow steps and thin aisle grounded her. Shuffling along with her trunk, she gave each compartment a glance, weighing, based on nothing, joining the students within against heading farther down the train.

Through one of the compartment windows she spotted a comfortingly familiar head of blond hair. She slid open the door confidently.

“Hel—"

“No,” a girl with dark hair across from Draco interrupted with a bored look. The door slammed closed in her face.

Hermione reeled back with a gasp. Uncertain, embarrassed, and more than a little indignant, she glared through the door. The dark-haired girl sneered right back while Draco gazed idly out the opposing window, ignoring the episode completely.

“H-hello, you alright there? S-shall we take that one then?” a round-faced boy stuttered at her with a nod to an empty compartment at the end of the car.

“Yes. Alright,” Hermione eventually said.

They settled into the compartment across from each other.

“I’m Neville Longbottom,” the boy said with an elevated pitch.

“Hermione Granger.”

“Don’t let Malfoy and Pansy get to you, they’re like that to everyone outside of their clique. They’re just—just awful.”

“Are they…?” Hermione trailed off distractedly. “I actually ran into Draco in Diagon Alley, he was… polite.”

“You sure it was Malfoy?” Neville asked.

“He’s got a distinctive look, doesn’t he? I mean, he introduced himself, of course. Malfoy, Draco Malfoy,” she finished quietly, almost to herself, becoming aware of how unnecessary this assurance was.

Neville looked thoughtful. “I suppose you wouldn’t be related to the Dagworth-Grangers, they’re a wizarding family in France—but you’re, you’re not French. You’re a Muggle-born right, I mean your parents aren’t wizards, or are they? I don’t mean to assume. I just, you know, saw—happened to see—them on the platform. And they didn’t really look it, like wizards I mean. Not that there’s anything wrong with that of course, not being wizards, or not looking like wizards, or whatever,” he rambled.

His nervous energy restored to Hermione some of her scattered confidence.

“They aren’t wizards. If we’re related to any Dagworth-Granger it would only be distantly. I’ve never heard of them anyway, though I’m not much into genealogy.”

“W-Well that’s their clique. Rich, pureblood, the right sort of views. The lot of them will be in S-Slytherin anyway.”

“Oh.”

The window rumbled into her as she rested her head up against it. Out ahead were rolling green fields, around the next bend sweeping up and down and up into Ben Nevis.

Stray pieces from her meeting with Draco were fitting into place in the puzzle of the wizarding world that she had far more of now than back at Diagon Alley. So the Malfoys were one of those families.

Oh. She had always seen that she didn’t belong to the ‘Muggle’ world. But the naive sense of belonging that had toyed with her since that first meeting with Professor McGonagall was turning to a realization that she would even more straightforwardly be an outsider here. The magical world didn’t belong to her. It was a new world for her, but not for them. They knew each other—or didn’t. Liked each other—or didn’t. She was still a stranger, only this time it was for the other thing.

But no matter, she would be the best again, and this time, it would matter. Because this time, it was magic. A secret and a promise whispering to her. She would by magic have what eluded her by birth. Her way. The look in Draco’s eyes after she had undone the jinx, awkward against his cool poise. Respect.

“Want to meet Trevor?” Neville asked abruptly after a few minutes of silence. “He’s my pet toad, he’s nice and friendly, u-unless you don’t like toads. I get it, some people don’t like them, they aren’t too popular nowadays. They aren’t slimy though, they’re very nice to pet actually.”

“That sounds good,” Hermione said with a weak smile, despite the brooding mood she’d been indulging in and complete lack of interest in meeting a toad.

“Good. Good.” Neville smiled obliviously, slipping his bag out from under his seat. He rummaged through it eagerly until a green toad hopped out and straight into Hermione’s lap.

“CROAK!”

She jumped in her seat. The toad flew out of her lap, out of the carriage, and then—as Neville scrambled after it—leaped right through an older boy’s legs and into the next train car.

“Oh no.” Neville shrank back into the compartment with a look of abject defeat.

“This always happens, I can’t help losing him, losing anything really.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll find him,” Hermione offered.

They searched the next car over, then agreed to split up. Neville thanked her thrice for her help before taking off to begin his search from the end of the train while Hermione continued from where they were, to meet in the middle. She went from compartment to compartment, asking after the toad. Mostly there were blank stares and raised eyebrows, though she also encountered a rude remark inquiring after the current year, so Neville was clearly right about toads being out of fashion these days.

Edging around a trolley of wizarding treats and snacks, she politely declined the woman’s “Dearie?” despite eying the trees of glowing candy canes that rose into arrays of multicolored orbs, and around which tiny black snakes of what looked like licorice slithered. There were even frogs (not toads), chocolate ones, jumping about inside a set of jars. The haunted forest of her dentist parents’ nightmares. The dreamland of sweet-toothed children. Hermione gulped as sugar, fruit, and chocolate tickled her nose. She certainly didn’t have a sweet tooth, at least not one bad enough to start pigging out the moment she got out from under her parents’ noses, though it wouldn’t hurt to indulge slightly more often than her strict parents had allowed.

Through the next compartment’s door, there was a pair of boys who absolutely had started pigging out as soon as they escaped their parents’ watchful eyes. Sweets and discarded wrappers covered their laps, spilling over onto their seats and the floor. She looked them over judgmentally, though not without a healthy side of envy. A grimace couldn’t be contained when she saw that one of the boys had a rat rummaging through the pile of wrappers in his lap. Rats were on the approved pet list but… well what could you say, it was disgusting. She’d have to acclimate to the magical world’s sensibilities, hopefully rats weren’t one of the popular pets.

When two questioning faces turned to her, the light glanced off a bit of food on the nose of the boy with the rat, momentarily entrancing her.

“Have either of you seen a toad? I’m look—” Hermione started reciting from her script until she noticed the rat boy was holding his wand. “Oh, are you doing magic? Let’s see it then.”

She sat and watched his wand intently.

He swallowed and began waving his wand around uncertainly.

“Sunshine, daisies, butter mellow,

“Turn this stupid, fat rat yellow.”

The rat continued eating the candy wrappers, undisturbed and un-yellowed.

“Are you sure that’s a real spell?” Hermione asked skeptically. “Well, it’s not very good, is it? I’ve tried a few simple spells just for practice and it’s all worked for me. Hermione Granger.”

“I’m Ron Weasley,” muttered the rat boy, shooting his neighbor an exasperated glance.

“Harry Potter,” said the other boy with messy hair.

Hermione’s eyes went to his forehead, where the scar she had read about was. She thought of the toy set back in Diagon Alley, her eyes flicking back down to his, emerald green behind glasses held together by a bit of tape.

“Pleasure,” Hermione replied.

“Oculus Reparo.” She got the spell out before he could react. Though the swish and the flick were a little marred by a certain heaviness in her vinewood wand.

There was a loud crack and the piece of tape slipped off his glasses to reveal a good-as-new bridge. Harry pulled them off and stared with wide eyes while he ran his finger back and forth testingly.

Meanwhile, Ron had returned to a half-eaten chocolate frog, utterly unimpressed.

Hermione stood up. “You two better get changed.” The temptation won as she hesitated at the door. “You’ve got something on your nose by the way, just there.” She gave Ron a look, pointed at her nose, then slid the door shut.

When the train pulled into the station, a reunited Hermione and Neville (slimy toad returned to trunk) stepped out into the cool evening air, joining a growing throng of students that crowded the tiny station. A line of buildings was leaning away from the tracks to tuck itself into the trees. Above, a slivering hint of castle ramparts beckoned. They worked towards a towering giant of a man who dwarfed the crowd of students and was shouting for ‘firs’ years’.

Through the trees there was an overgrown and winding path which led to the Black Lake and the first view of Hogwarts that greeted new students. The castle had a grand, sprawling scale; anywhere you looked there was another eclectic outcropping, turrets on turrets growing from it like weeds. It was a noisy thing, but its seemingly haphazard arrangement held an undeniable allure. Its untamed comportment assuring one’s heart that the depths of each weathered peak were still ripe with the undiscovered.

The gray walls and darker gray roofs were soft in the dark blue of the clear evening sky, perched atop rocky cliffs that retreated beneath the castle into waters darker still. The waters reached in stillness across the way to murmur invitingly against a pier holding close a fleet of small boats.

Long flights of steps zagged the cliff face. And as they climbed they peered up to the castle, at its most majestic rising sheerly above them, but warm with the last dull red sundown light. They were finally led through an oak door and into a grand foyer where Professor McGonagall detailed their imminent sorting and then briskly left them alone, off to whatever pressing business seemed to forever compel her.

Hermione shifted nervously from foot to foot. Neville and Harry were equally uneasy next to her, while Ron seemed unconcerned.

She looked around and unwillingly found Malfoy, peeking out above the sea of students like a pale diminutive lighthouse. A small crowd of boys and girls gathered about to bask in his light; a hamlet, too proper and too relaxed, carefree laughs imitating and sharing in Malfoy’s immodest confidence.

Turning back to her own group, she broached the silence.

“So, what house are you all hoping for?”

“Gryffindor, ’course,” Ron said, “anything but Hufflepuff, even Slyth—”

“Y-You’re H-Harry P-P-Potter. Y-You killed He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named,” Neville burst out with an accusing awe that must have been building up inside him since he had stepped onto Hogsmeade station and seen the boy of legend.

Nearby conversations hushed, and students turned to stare curiously.

“I suppose so. Everyone says it. I was just a baby though, I don’t remember anything,” Harry replied quietly.

Neville stood there dumbly. He seemed cowed by this plain response, or perhaps his nervous energy had exhausted itself just like that.

“Still our hero though, isn’t he?” Ron slung his arm over Harry’s shoulder.

The crowd swayed and Malfoy strolled up to them in a supercilious manner.

“Well, well,” he drawled, “it’s true then. The great Harry Potter, who defeated the most powerful wizard ever, will be learning with the rest of us commoners.”

His companions snickered.

“We’re all so eager—”

“Dumbledore’s the greatest wizard ever,” Ron interrupted.

“Is that why he needed a baby to fight for him?” Malfoy retorted.

“Not Dumbledore’s fault You-Know-Who hid from him and then died anyhow.”

“Yes, well, such a shame he couldn’t handle the Dark Lord himself, or he wouldn’t have had to send our poor hero to go live amidst the Muggles. Clearly Potter’s gotten too comfortable hanging around with riffraff.” Malfoy looked up and down at Ron’s hand-me-down robes and now only slightly smudged nose. “A disgrace to wizardkind, the lot of these Weasleys. Best avoided,” he said loudly to the room at large. “What’s worse, yes he’s awfully used to the Muggles—now he’s even found himself a pet Mudblood.”

Hermione was struck by how cruel his sneering face was. Such awful words, cast with an evil determination that put to shame every other childish insult she’d experienced.

She had thought of him, smugly and nervously, about how lucky it was to immediately be befriended by the sort of self-assured and sociable person she had always wished to befriend, had always wished to be more like. It had taken half the train ride to process him into a rather dull affront to common decency. Their first friendly meeting, and every thought since, a misshapen stumble, best set out of mind as quickly as possible.

Ignoring each other completely would be manageable. But now he gleefully broke this one-sided agreement.

Why did it have to be him? Why couldn’t it have been anyone else, or no one, just not this awful boy who hated her. It felt like a cruel trick arranged in senseless opposition to her. To set her off balance and then down upon rough ground before she had even properly found her footing.

So her own decided indifference turned over into a furious disdain and dislike equal to that which he had set upon her.

“You smarmy bastard,” Ron seethed, pulling out his wand.

“Put away your wand this instant, young man,” Professor McGonagall instructed severely as she swept back into the foyer. “And don’t let me hear that word from you again, Mr. Malfoy.”

“Already fighting, heavens, they aren’t even sorted yet.” Hermione heard her add under her breath as she ushered them into the Great Hall.

A few hundred faces were partially turned to them. That and an awareness of every detail she had read about overwhelmed those unpleasant feelings. The four house flags hung high above the four long house tables that ran along the hall. Above them the twinkling night sky crouched beneath the Great Hall’s arching ceiling, hanging low candle-stars to fill the hall with yellow light.

They walked through the students and gathered before the raised table where staff and professors sat. At the center of everyone's attention was a stool topped by the Sorting Hat, a mangy old wizard’s hat whose deep-set wrinkles contorted into an ill-formed face. Names were called, and one by one they pulled on the hat and were sent off to their respective houses.

“Granger, Hermione.”

She attempted a calm stride towards the stool and pulled the hat onto her head. Wondering where she would spend the next seven years. The nervousness actually wasn’t too bad, anywhere would be fine as long as she was far far away from disgusting Draco.

“My, we do have another ambitious one here,” said a raspy whisper, faint and without sound, but still clear, “Slytherin would—”

“Oh no, not Slytherin,” Hermione immediately interrupted in a panic. “Anything but that. I’m Muggle-born, by the way,” she added, imagining with dread an impending isolation, surrounded by people who harbored an even more intense and unqualified dislike for her than she had known before.

“I know. There have been Muggle-borns—”

“Not Slytherin.”

“So be it, so be it, your trepidation isn’t unwarranted. And you truly have the thirst for knowledge of a Ravenclaw.”

But Hermione wanted to change. She didn’t want to be a bookish nerd who locked herself away in the library. Well, she didn’t want to be just that. She wanted to be a new, better version of herself.

“Ravenclaws aren’t just bookworms,” the hat commented.

“Definitely not Ravenclaw.”

“If you’re certain… In fact—yes, I understand where your heart truly lies. What you need to grow is human connection and friendship. There’s no better place for that to be found than—“

“No!” Hermione cut it off. She did want friends, but she wasn’t desperate for them. At least, she didn’t want to be. “Anything but Hufflepuff” was running around her mind wearing Malfoy and Ron’s contemptuous faces. She was not a leftover. Not that Hufflepuffs were leftovers.

“There’s nothing wrong with Hufflepuff,” the hat told her with annoyance.

“I know that,” she said guiltily.

“More Ministers of Magic have been from Hufflepuff than any other house. The current Head of Magical Law Enforcement was a Hufflepuff.”

“That’s all rather bureaucratic, I suppose they would be the best social climbers,” she couldn’t help but reply argumentatively. “Not meaning that in a bad way, not necessarily anyway.”

“There are plenty of types from Hufflepuff, even dark wizards, well, not many of those, but it’s been known to happen!”

“Gryffindor, do you think?” Hermione asked hopefully, having made up her mind.

“You’re very bossy,” the hat complained. “I’m an ancient and powerful artifact. I’ve sorted students for hundreds of years.”

“You’re very amazing,” she assured with a conciliatory tone. “I didn’t have any idea which house I wanted till we talked.”

The hat grunted. Then it announced in a loud, certain voice: “—GRYFFINDOR!”

She felt a bit of complacency as she set the hat back down, like she had breezed through a test that ended up being far easier than expected. An obligatory round of applause accompanied her as she walked happily to the Gryffindor table, feeling sure that this was the place she was meant to be.

Chapter Text

After Hermione took her seat with her new house, the other anxious first years were sorted. Harry joined Gryffindor and the table erupted. Ron arrived as well and his twin brothers, Fred and George, loudly congratulated him from a bit farther down the table. Another Weasley brother, the prefect Percy, came over and joined them to clap Ron on the back, or perhaps to fraternize with Harry. The whole Weasley family were apparently Gryffindors.

Malicious Malfoy and his clique had ended up Slytherins to a man.

The Sorting Hat was put away without having inflicted any looks of surprise or dismay. The first years all went happily to their houses. For all the dramatics of the affair, there was, all in all, not much drama, which was unavoidably a little disappointing. Still, it wasn’t possible to take offense to this approach, since it had spared her a horrifying sorting into Slytherin.

Dumbledore rose grandly and immediately had everyone’s attention. Then he looked around absently until a bit of awkwardness began to spread, muttered a few things under his breath that no one could make out, and then finished with a “…So let’s have another good year.”

The welcome feast snuck in front of them from nowhere. There were plates of roasted vegetables and fruits glowing with freshness. Also meats of every kind and in any way you could want them, a plate of deep-fried chicken next to a beef Wellington, golden-brown pastry lattice in a Hogwarts ‘H.’ Puddings and cakes and other sweet things were also there, desserts shamelessly displaying themselves before their proper hour.

Ron reached for a pudding.

“So he’s really like that then?” he asked, approximating the question on the tip of Hermione’s tongue.

“Yes—mostly, I’m never sure how much is serious and how much is taking the mickey,” Percy answered.

“Well, I think it’s charming, sort of like those wizards from Muggle children’s books,” declared a girl with a soft, harmless face, who had introduced herself as Lavender Brown.

“How’s that then? Most of us haven’t read Muggle children’s books,” asked Seamus, an Irish boy she recalled from the sorting.

“Your father’s Muggle, you could have,” another boy replied.

“You’re half-blood too, I know you didn’t read any,” Seamus countered.

“You don’t know that.”

“Did you then?”

“Well, they’re like Dumbledore anyway, that’s how,” Lavender interrupted. “He’s a perfectly Muggle-wizard like wizard.”

“Which books?” Hermione ventured.

Lavender turned a blank look on her. “Well—all of them, practically, and in their films too. That’s how they are,” she finished insistently.

“I think so too,” Hermione assured her. “I was just wondering, I mean. I do like to read. I was wondering which ones you meant. I couldn’t think of exactly which would fit, or remember the names, it was dreadfully long ago.”

“Yes. Exactly!” Lavender agreed excitedly. “It was ages ago, wasn’t it? Just whichever children's books. I must have still had one foot in the crib. I couldn’t name one to save my life.”

Lavender turned to look at the girl beside her for a moment and then turned back to Hermione.

“The Lord of the Rings, there you go, Gandalf was the same, sort of mysterious, and the look, not so much the silliness.”

“Wasn’t the silliness the main point?” Seamus complained.

“It’s a very good book,” the girl next to Lavender added.

“It’s Parvati’s favorite,” Lavender informed Hermione with a confidential air.

“I like it too.” Hermione smiled at Parvati.

“Have you had a look at our textbooks yet?” Hermione asked.

Lavender let out a cry and flung herself back in her chair. The back of her hand set limply on her forehead. Hermione struggled with a snicker, unsure if that was what she was going for.

“It’s not that time yet, is it? No, the first week is all free. We’re free yet,” she whispered dramatically.

“They ease into everything awfully slowly, or so I’ve heard,” Parvati said, with a look at Percy.

“First years are at different levels,” Percy told them, “especially for the less magical classes, so there’ll be plenty of time to adjust. But you want to get off on the right foot, so make sure to check your syllabi. Most classes have a chapter scheduled for reading before the first lesson.”

The others turned to conversation in less academic directions. But Hermione chatted with him for a while about the first-year curriculum, grading, and prefects. Though she was going to be very popular now too, she did still have to be top of her class.

“…The Cannons!” Seamus was slapping Ron on the back.

“Next year... will be their year!” the other boy—Dean, she’d caught his name now—said energetically.

Lavender leaned in towards her.

“Do you know about Quidditch?” she asked.

“Only that it’s a sport. Do you like it?” Hermione replied.

“Like it? Of course I don’t like it. It’s awful.”

“It’s not so bad,” Parvati said.

“It’s a crime,” Lavender said authoritatively. “They try to kill each other.”

“They don’t.”

“They do! It’s so barbaric, Hermione, you’ll see. They fly about and try to kill each other and then whoever catches the snitch wins, so all the dying is for nothing.”

“No one dies. It’s been decades since someone died playing Quidditch at Hogwarts,” Parvati told her.

“Every role is important,” Ron jumped into their conversation. “If the seeker only goes for the snitch, his team starts to fall behind.”

“If you’ve got a really excellent seeker then…”

“The beaters can easily…”

The discussion drifted away from Hermione, but Lavender wasn’t done.

“They die all the time,” Lavender insisted to her softly. “They’re always dying. It’s like the Romans! And if they catch the snitch they win, it’s in the rules.”

“You mean like gladiators?”

“Exactly! They hit metal balls at each other with bats, miles up in the air.”

“It does sound terrible.” Hermione felt she had no choice but to agree as Lavender’s description of the game got increasingly eclectic and amusing.

“It does, doesn’t it?” Lavender seemed pleased. “You aren’t even safe in the audience, and we have to go to every game.”

“What? Why?” Hermione had never liked sports, surely it wouldn’t be mandatory. Ugh, but maybe she was supposed to go anyway to socialize.

“We just do. It’s a Hogwarts thing, we’ve got to support our house. And it’s all boys care about.” She looked resentfully at the group of boys cheerfully chatting about Quidditch.

“Everyone does go, it’ll be fun even if you don’t care about Quidditch, we’ll hang out and cheer Gryffindor on. Don’t let Lavender spoil you on it,” Parvati said.

Definitely going then.

The feast lasted long enough that Hermione eventually gave in and helped herself to a slice of a light but rich chocolate cake coated in a layer of chocolate icing.

When the feast ended, Percy led the Gryffindor first years up flight after flight of shifting stairs. The castle’s history wasn’t hidden away in the dark. It drifted by Hermione in ghostly forms, laughing gaily or with lolling, half-connected heads. It loomed from the tops of tall portraits and crouched down in painted grass to speak with her. Unlike the deliberately friendly market in Diagon Alley, the castle was organic and capricious.

Percy came to a stop in the heights of one of the castle’s towers before a massive portrait of a fat woman sipping tea in a garden.

“Oh dearie, you all get smaller every year. Password?”

“De Astronomia.”

The portrait swung open and they entered a large round room gaudily clad in the Gryffindor colors on every possible surface. There were a few scattered seating arrangements with red chairs, the largest of which encircled a fireplace. Windows overlooked the Great Hall on one side and the Black Lake on the other; they must have been in one of the larger turrets. Percy waved his hand towards the dormitories, two archways leading out and up away from the common room into two more turrets.

Some students were hanging about in the common room. Filled with nervous energy and afraid to miss out on something, Hermione looked around for a group to attach herself to. Harry and Neville seemed manageable, but they had made for the boys’ dorm without hesitation. Parvati and Lavender were on either side of a table tucked into an alcove, leaning towards each other conspiratorially; their hair obscured them from the room and they were so close that black and brown strands were almost touching. They seemed utterly inapproachable, but finding no other resort and unwilling to go straight to sleep, Hermione made her resolve and approached them tensely.

“Hello, mind if I join you?” Hermione hesitated for a moment with her hand on the table and then sat down boldly.

They looked from her to each other and continued their conversation wordlessly for a moment before bursting out with laughter. And for a moment Hermione was terrified. But they quickly assured her of her welcome.

“You two definitely get along,” Hermione said.

“We’ve known each other forever,” Lavender informed her.

“We’re one short, my twin sister Padma is in Ravenclaw,” added Parvati.

“She betrayed us,” complained Lavender.

“I knew she would be in Ravenclaw. She’s all about studying and books, you’d like her—I bet you would have fit right in with Ravenclaw.”

“But she’s gone now.”

“She’s not dead—she’s just there in Ravenclaw, it’s a good thing really, tactically speaking,” Parvati said meaningfully.

“Oh,” Lavender mused. “Maybe. But she’s dead to me. We’re replacing her immediately. I like Hermione better, she’s a Gryffindor, like us, even if she’s a swot.”

Parvati rolled her eyes to Hermione.

“Don’t take offense, she means let’s be friends.”

“We are friends! And we’re all here together, it’s meant to be! Oh, and do you remember…”

It was like that. Hermione was thoroughly the odd one out. They went back and forth excitedly for around a minute before Parvati reached out and grabbed Lavender’s arm.

“Let off for a moment, alright? You’re always doing this, Lav, you’re making her feel put out. Let her get a word in. So, I’ve got a twin sister, Lavender's got an older brother. Got any siblings?”

“I’m an only child. My parents are dentists…” Hermione trailed off uncertainly, scrambling mentally for something interesting about herself to add.

“Oh! The teeth ones right? Muggles are so fascinating,” said Lavender.

“I guess I’m not interesting.”

“Nobody is,” Lavender commented.

“We don’t do anything,” Parvati said.

“And I am a swot. But I do want to get out of the library more.”

“That’s the right attitude. Get out of the library sometimes. Padma is the worst with that; she never wants to do anything.”

“Sure you won’t change your mind when you see the library?” asked Parvati. “It’s supposed to be the best in Europe. Padma was terribly excited about it. And I suppose for you it’s a whole—”

“Anyway,” interrupted Lavender, “let’s head up, I want to see if Hermione is with us anyway. We’ll come right back down if she isn’t.”

She pulled Hermione up and led them both up the stairs to the girls’ dorm. There was a winding staircase and sure enough eventually there was a door with the three of their names on a plaque.

“How lovely,” Lavender said excitedly, parking herself in front of the doorway. “But it’s so nice, do you think it’s real gold? And I just knew we’d get you.”

“Ugh, I want to see the room, Lav,” whined Parvati.

Lavender looked at her scornfully but opened the door for them. There were three beds and three desks, as gaudily red and gold as the common room. They gathered intimately on one of the beds.

“We’re working it all out. About…” Parvati trailed off.

“About boys,” Lavender rushed out.

“Oh no.”

Hermione shrank back against the headboard and pulled the blanket around her.

“Well, go on,” Hermione urged, “I’ll just be over here and learn from the experts.”

“Lav said it—she volunteered,” Parvati told Hermione slyly.

“Hermione was walking with Neville,” Lavender said. “It must have been love at first sight—oh he’s dreadfully sweet.”

“He’s so awkward, I could never with that stutter. Imagine him saying… well saying anything romantic at all, but then he’s just stuttering hopelessly. How awful.” Parvati shuddered.

“Don’t worry we’ll get to you,” Lavender assured with relish.

Parvati shifted uncomfortably and gave Lavender a pleading look, but her attention was focused on Hermione.

Hermione faintly hummed with her face peeking out of the blanket and played defense:

“So, he’s the boy on your mind? We talked a little, I suppose I could set you up.”

“Don’t be silly,” Lavender said, “we all know each other already, I’m the one who’ll do the setting up.”

“Ugh, do you all really?” Hermione had almost forgotten. “This isn’t fair at all.”

“We do,” Lavender bragged. “Well, not all of course, but we do know each other. Of course we don’t know people from the Muggle world, like you. Or the Boy-Who-Lived.”

Lavender gave a dramatic sigh.

“Parvati’s childhood hero—she’s read all his books. She was such a good child…” She shook her head sadly.

“Well do you like him then?” Parvati asked.

“Well, I’ve imagined it of course,” Lavender whispered with a rhythmic familiarity, as if they had all talked him over a hundred times before.

“But it’s so different in person. He’s so shy. And I mean, he doesn’t know any of it, so it’s not like some other celebrity or hero. It’s like all of it—well you don’t know either Hermione—but it’s like every part of the thing, not just the romance, is just your own one-sided fantasy.”

“I get it.” Parvati nodded thoughtfully.

“No, you don’t,” retorted Lavender, “you don’t understand it at all you awful, filthy girl. Hermione would, if she could. Maybe she does anyway.”

Her soft face and wide doe eyes opened up to Hermione.

“Lavender,” Parvati said, “do you know how annoying you’re being? Let it alone for half a second. I can’t tell you anything, and when I do you can’t even be bothered—”

“He’s got nice eyes, doesn’t he? That’s what I couldn’t stop thinking about,” Hermione suddenly interrupted, impatient with their inside back and forth about whatever Lavender was gleefully building up towards.

“Oh, that’s the spirit,” Lavender encouraged eagerly.

“She sees the real Harry,” Parvati offered.

“She really does,” Lavender enthused. “We don’t know him, but we can still set them up. We’ll fling them together, pair them up in every class, lock them into broom cupboards, that sort of thing.”

“Please don’t.”

“We will,” Lavender insisted.

“Don’t take her too seriously, she couldn’t talk to a boy to save her life,” Parvati informed Hermione. “She’s fun though, isn’t she?”

“I like her. But let’s hear who she likes.”

“She likes Ron.”

“Ron?” Hermione was horrified. “He couldn’t even keep his mouth shut while he was eating at dinner.”

“Don’t like him then! Good! More for me,” Lavender pouted.

“I think she just likes his brothers,” Parvati said. “One’s in Romania working with dragons, very cool sort, another’s a star at Gringotts, filthy rich.”

“Investing is she? Ron seems like a lump to me.”

“Let’s talk about Parvati then.”

“Lav, don’t. It’s different,” Parvati pleaded.

“You didn’t really think I’d let you off, did you? It’s your own fault. If you know how to be ashamed then stop.”

“Okay. I take it all back.”

“Hmm… no.”

“Alright alright,” Hermione complained.

“Who do you think for Parvati?” Lavender asked.

“Well—I don’t know a thing about any of them, hopefully not a teacher, is he a Slytherin?”

“Sharp, isn’t she?” Lavender paused gloatingly. “Draco Malfoy.”

Parvati buried her face in her hands and rolled over on the bed. Hermione grimaced. He was haunting her. Was Parvati on the approved list?

“You won’t hate me, will you? I know he’s awful. It’s just an idea! I wouldn’t really.”

“She definitely would.”

“Would not! I’m not in his clique either, it’s not the same as with you of course, but you know what I mean. Anyway, he’s fit and I’m not ashamed to say it.”

“He’s sickly pale,” Hermione criticized, “like a vampire. He looks like he might fall over dead at any moment.”

“Vampires are hot,” Lavender commented.

“He’s not sickly,” Parvati defended. “He plays Quidditch, he’s probably got muscles, or he will in a few years.”

Parvati glanced at Hermione shiftily.

“But I won’t defend him,” she added with a laugh. “I’d have him whipped into shape,” she bragged, bashfulness forgotten. “Only according to the idea of course, but he’d be on the straight and narrow. I’d make him apologize to you daily, twice daily if needed.”

“Oh my god stop.” Lavender shoved Parvati into the bed.

Chapter Text

Front row of the Transfiguration classroom. Hermione was on the edge of her seat, in anticipation of the first lesson, but also partly because as promised—or had they promised not to?—Parvati and Lavender had boxed her into sitting next to Harry. He couldn’t have been less intimidating to get along with, but the smirks and encouraging glances from the next desk over obliterated any possible sense of ease.

There was also Malfoy, sitting behind her with a quiet, serious-looking boy, who occasionally chuckled approvingly as Malfoy mocked Dumbledore and ‘his’ teachers. The harder she tried to shut him out the more persistently his grating voice wormed its way into her ears. A kind of taxonomical system was apparently under development. So far there were ‘freaks’ and ‘shepherds’. And Professor McGonagall was, to her credit, one of the ‘shepherds’.

“Will we be able to manage?” Harry asked for the fourth time, then added wistfully, “They’ve all been doing magic their whole lives.”

“We’ll be fine,” Hermione assured the both of them. “They start from the beginning. Percy said we won’t even do any magic on the first day. And they’ve messed with some basic stuff for the last year or so at most; kids can’t do intentional magic. We’re starting at just the right time.”

A tabby cat was sitting atop the desk in front of the classroom. And just as the hour struck, it leaped off the desk, but instead of landing, its form rapidly stretched into Professor McGonagall’s stern but familiar figure.

Hermione and Harry both gave a start.

“The crypto Muggles will be shocked by that one I expect,” Malfoy observed drolly to his companion.

“Transfiguration,” Professor McGonagall began, “is the art of change.” She floated a lamp from the desk and paced back and forth in front of the class demonstrating various transformations on it while lecturing. She changed its color, then the color of its light, then shrank it into a torch. It grew fur, morphed into a cat, and gave Hermione a friendly meow when Professor McGonagall dropped it into her lap.

Hermione turned the thing over in her hands cautiously. The fur was soft and delicate. Bones and muscles were working under the skin. It was warm. She held it up to study its face, pinched irises in a glowing field of yellow. Indistinguishable, at least to Hermione, from a real cat. A nervous Harry accepted it from her at arm’s length.

As the questions came in, Hermione’s hand was shooting up just the same as for any of her old Muggle classes. Though with a great effort she managed to moderate herself, leaving a few to stew without response in case some other student needed that encouragement to participate. But that restraint didn’t stop Malfoy from commenting in her ear:

“Awful teacher’s pet, isn’t she?”

It turned out McGonagall didn’t run her lesson plans past Percy. Spoons, destined to be turned into forks, arrived at every desk, though she told them they shouldn’t expect to succeed today.

Hermione disregarded this and determined she would certainly have a fork today, if not in class then in the library, or back in the dorm. Or she wouldn’t sleep.

But it didn’t come to that.

She laughed happily as, with a comfortable numbness running down her arm and through her wand, she felt the soft silver soften further. The idea of the spoon that the silver was holding to bent, then broke and gave way to her. She hadn’t even needed the whole first class, and looking about, she saw with triumph that she had been first. Before anyone else, she had a perfectly serviceable fork.

“Well done, Miss Granger, such smooth lines too. Ten points to Gryffindor,” praised McGonagall as she inspected it. “Get started on some other utensils.”

The familiar warmth of a teacher’s praise settled over her like a blanket.

“You’re getting there, Mr. Malfoy, focus on the image, a strong image,” McGonagall encouraged behind her.

Delicious. Sweet chocolate nectar. Once McGonagall had passed, Hermione leaned back in her chair and examined Malfoy’s fork. It was indeed pretty close, but she grimaced like it was a particularly disgusting bug.

“…a spork?” she pondered out loud and gave Malfoy a pitying look before turning to help Harry.

“These Mudbloods see the first spark from their wands and think they’re Merlin,” he grumbled to her back.

That initial success floated her through lunch with Parvati and Lavender, though they were disappointingly uninterested in it. As they started towards the dungeons for Potions, she gradually sank back down to earth, then beneath it. The dungeons were unreasonably far below ground. If her sense of direction could be trusted, they were actually under a part of the Black Lake. And there was something about the smell that convinced her nose of it completely, imposing a pressing feeling that depths of water were hanging precariously just a few feet above the ceiling. The air half submerged her already; it was unspeakably damp, chilled and heavy.

It was thicker still in the classroom, and more dimly lit. An impressive assortment of jars, bottles, and various containers filled with strange things lined the walls. In a well-lit museum they would have intrigued her. But in this atmosphere the odd skulls and half-wilted flowers and gooey somethings just added to the chill.

She was comforted by the thought that Malfoy slept down here in the Slytherin dorms with the rest of them. In the dungeons where he belonged, the only thing left to do was throw away the key.

Aside from Dumbledore, Professor Snape was the most famous and accomplished of their professors, referenced frequently in each of the modern Potions books she had skimmed. That, combined with the subject seeming very scientific and empirical, made it the class she had most anticipated outside of the core magical curriculum (Charms, Defense Against the Dark Arts, Transfiguration).

When Professor Snape arrived, he waved his wand and flushed the room with a clinically pale light. He quietly inspected their faces as Hermione squinted back at him against the light. He seemed offended, or maybe confused, as if their presence in the classroom was an imposition he could never have anticipated.

“There will be no foolish wand waving in this class…”

His voice was low, but clear, and it rose to fill the room as he began a rather philosophical lecture on the nature of Potions. Then, rather abruptly, when the lecture seemed it might yet have another few minutes of life in it, an interrogation of Harry’s Potions knowledge began.

Hermione raised her hand eagerly at each question. They were all from deep in the first-year textbook, so when he caught on that Harry didn’t know any of them and called on her, he’d be terribly impressed that she had memorized everything.

“Mr. Potter,” he began his last question pointedly with a look at Hermione that pushed her hand down. “The uses of a Bezoar?”

That one was from the first chapter, which had been the assigned reading. But again, much to the amusement of the Slytherins, Harry couldn’t answer.

Then, like with Professor McGonagall, they were immediately into a practical lesson with a basic four-ingredient itch soothing potion. Once she finished, she checked in on Malfoy and was disappointed—but not surprised, it was a terribly simple potion—to see he was also done, and his cauldron, like hers, was an exact match for the illustration in the textbook. She was watching over Harry as he finished the last step when Professor Snape drifted past their desk, completely ignoring her textbook brew.

Malfoy’s brew was swept into a vial and held up to the class. “Like so. Five points to Slytherin,” he decreed with an approving nod to Malfoy.

A burst of inspiration struck amid her annoyance at the gross smile on Malfoy’s face. She quickly sketched a rough two-panel comic. On the first panel an endearingly hideous Malfoy was stricken by tears and holding his wand limply above a spork. In the next panel over, things took a turn for the better for Malformed Malfoy, she gave him a stirring rod and a proud grin all the way up to his ears, above him a speech bubble coming from a crude Professor Snape: “No foolish wand waving.”

She looked around and found the real Professor Snape safely absorbed in eviscerating Neville on the other side of the classroom. So, hardly knowing what she was doing, she imitated all those unruly boys she so despised, folding the page into a little plane and launching it at Malfoy.

Malfoy deftly snatched it out of the air and his lips played between a chuckle and a grimace when, to her horror, Professor Snape appeared behind him like a ghost. To Malfoy’s credit, he made to flip it face down on the desk, but Professor Snape was already locked in on it. He snatched it up.

“Well,” he drawled after a moment, “it seems Mr. Potter isn’t the only one who thinks they are… too good for Potions. Twenty points from Gryffindor.”

Hermione stared blankly at her cauldron for the rest of class, wallowing in the stupidity of her impulsiveness. What had possessed her to do something so ridiculous, like some kind of class clown. She repeated to herself that it wasn’t worth the misery she was feeling, that it would all be forgotten tomorrow. But she failed to be convinced. She didn’t want to be a teacher’s pet, but this was infinitely worse. One of her professors hated her after just one day of class.

She had to gather herself when the class was dismissed. Out in the hallway she brushed past Ron and Harry with their heads together moaning about how awful Professor Snape was. “Hermione, don’t—” Harry was trying to talk to her, but she hurried past him to the library.

It was there that she managed to ease her unsettled disposition by flipping through a Potions textbook she had already memorized—one of the old ones Malfoy had recommended. It reassured rather than taught. Each page was full of familiar recipes and techniques that whispered that what Professor Snape said, and whatever he thought of her, was wrong. That she would be his best student.

What a rude, petty man he was. Ignoring her perfectly fine brew in his bias for Slytherin, harassing Harry for no reason, harassing her for that matter. So what if she wanted to trade notes with another student who was also done with the lesson? Maybe the sketch had implied Potions was inferior to ‘real’ magic, if one wanted to read it that way, but so what? And maybe he just shouldn’t have read it in the first place.

Hermione worked herself up this way until she was more indignant than anything else. And when the windows cast darkness instead of light, there wasn’t anything else to see in the old textbook—which was hardly any better than the current one, and out of date too—so she put it away and rushed to dinner.

The second week of classes was rounded out by the first flying lesson. Something fun and physical for the students who would already be mentally moving on to the weekend must have been the thought. But it filled Hermione with dread. A vision of herself slipping stupidly from the broom, everyone laughing uproariously until her head cracked open upon the ground.

Once they were out in the training grounds, she was ready to puke up all of the salad she had picked at for lunch. Perhaps that would grant her a stay of execution, delaying that terrible fate for another week. The shade of the courtyard’s grass was off today, putrid and sickly; if she indeed hurled, she imagined the contents of her stomach would match it quite well.

They were in two lines, facing each other, with brooms laid out on the grass before them. A scattered chorus of “Up” was ringing out across the courtyard. Thankfully, but also to her frustration, Hermione’s broom remained firmly on the ground in defiance of her repeated commands. Harry’s and Malfoy’s had obediently snapped up to their hands on the first try.

“Oh—nice.” Hermione smiled weakly as Lavender’s broom flew into her hand. “You’ll be our next Quidditch star.”

“Your face is green, Hermione,” Lavender said with concern. “They won’t get the Bludgers out and try to kill us, you know, it’s only flying, not Quidditch.”

“You scared her off from even flying,” Parvati accused.

There was a loud crack, and everyone’s head snapped around as one to watch Neville collapse with a red mark on his chin, nose, forehead.

Madam Hooch rushed over and scooped him off the ground.

“Out cold,” she muttered.

“Everyone keep practicing your summoning,” she called out over her shoulder as she hurried away with him. “And absolutely no flying!” she added.

“Did you see?” Malfoy laughed. “How is that even possible?”

He scooped something off the ground and held it up for everyone to see. Some small red marble.

“No way, the lump’s actually got a Remembrall. He really is an overgrown toddler. God knows why they’re letting him near a broom, or a wand for that matter.”

His cronies laughed stupidly.

“Give it here,” Harry demanded with his hand out.

“I’ll leave it somewhere safe for him, shall I?” Malfoy leaned back on his broom lazily and started to drift away into the sky.

Harry mounted his broom.

“Harry, no!” Hermione ordered. “He’ll have to give it back, he’s just getting himself in trouble with Madam Hooch.”

“So bossy,” Malfoy commented while circling around them, “not even a broom would listen to her though. I wonder if he’ll find it at the bottom of the lake?” He swung around to sit properly and flew off.

“Harry, don’t be so easily—”

He shrugged her off and flew after Malfoy.

Malfoy must have been flying as long as he could walk, and looked as comfortable on his broom as anywhere. Harry, on the other hand, looked stiff as a board but was after him like a cannonball.

There was a thin pine in the corner of the grounds, and Malfoy sped towards it, then cut back around it and past Harry who clumsily tried to turn after him. Malfoy’s laugh raced ahead of him across the training grounds towards them, and then he was flying past them. Hermione watched in horror as he leaped up to stand on his broom and showboated to the Slytherins who hooted and laughed.

Harry barreled madly through the spot of air he had just occupied and Malfoy swerved and collapsed back onto his broom cursing loudly.

It wasn’t going to be her but one of them, or both, that died. And there weren’t even metal balls flying around yet. Lavender was right about everything.

Thankfully, Malfoy came to the same conclusion.

“Go on then.” He cocked his arm and hurled the Remembrall into the distance. Then he rejoined the earthbound, tossing his broom aside with a look of complete disgust and some words about “cheap trash.”

Go Harry did. He was just as fast as before, but somehow already far less awkward. He had taken to riding with a preternatural ability she hadn’t seen from him in any of their other classes. And a certain physical cleverness in outmaneuvering the path of the small orb. He sped close to the ground and through an archway, then shot up to snatch it out of the air as it skipped over the roof of a courtyard wall. Much to the Gryffindor students’ approval.

The need for such dramatics was unclear to Hermione. Since the thing had survived a glancing blow against the terracotta, it could probably manage a soft grassy landing. Perhaps there was an implicit challenge that was lost on her which forbade him from simply plucking it up off the ground. Some incomprehensibly foolish guy thing. Or maybe Harry, galvanized by his newfound skill, was eager to do a little showboating of his own.

Swept along by the other Gryffindors’ excitement, she found herself clapping. Ron, Seamus, and Dean were particularly animated, surrounding Harry and speaking urgently about Quidditch, Snitches, Seekers, etc.

But their elation was short-lived. Madam Hooch was back, half running across the training grounds towards them, the absolutely fuming look on her face making it obvious she had seen plenty.

Chapter Text

Hermione liked Lavender and Parvati. They were nice girls, often funny. Perhaps most importantly, they seemed to like her, and so, unbidden, feelings of affection rose up in return. But she hadn’t become the third of their little pair, at least not yet. There was too much history between them, and between her and them too much difference.

And, though she had formed a resolve to reinvent herself, she now found that with the change she’d been reaching for finally near at hand, it was more foreign than ever. Because she was still herself. She would be troubled if she were asked now to describe exactly why she had been so desperate to obtain it, or indeed identify exactly what it was. The anticipation of change had been romantic and seductive in its nebulosity, but upon actually coming to pass, it turned out to be awfully concrete. As ordinary as what had come before, and inherently repulsive in its otherness. The urge to let it all drift by was overwhelming. She could feel herself straining, and to let go would require nothing at all.

The conversation over lunch was now turning towards boys.

“...She didn’t say Roger has good fashion.”

“She did! And she was serious.”

“I don’t think he even knows there’s colors other than blue and bronze…”

That first intimate talk had thrilled and left her slightly giddy. But such things were turned over and over by them. The feeling that they lingered too long on gossip, on who Padma was making friends with in Ravenclaw and such things, turned to a realization that they weren’t lingering at all—they had arrived.

The last piece of beef was just the right size for the last chunk of pastry. Onto the fork went the pastry, juices mopped up appropriately, meat skewered through. Perfect bite. Empty plate.

Hermione wished, guiltily, that she wasn’t there, that she had grabbed a sandwich on the way to the library and studied the Transfiguration dynamics of different types of metal instead of hanging over her plate chatting. Well, she wasn’t doing much of the chatting; for—it had been almost an hour now.

The end of this ill-conceived experiment was clear. There would be no great transformation. It would end in retreat. She was who she was. No, there was no feeling of dread at this realization, just a wish for it all to be behind her. Slowly, she was turning further inward and away from their chatter. Until finally, embarrassed by her silence and sentimentality, she excused herself to go wait in the Transfiguration classroom alone.

Malfoy and his serious-looking friend, Theodore Nott, were lurking in the hall together, interrupting her planned solitude.

Ignoring them, she gave the squared handle an optimistic jiggle. Unfortunately, it was indeed locked. She waited for a snide remark, but Malfoy passed on the opening.

Deciding it would be worse to leave, she walked to a safe distance and leaned up against the wall, the comforting bronze clasp of her book bag snapping in and out.

“Always here this early, you miserable friendless swot?” Malfoy shot.

In place of a reply, she squeezed up her face in the most disgusted look she could muster. He turned back to Nott.

“It doesn’t matter,” Nott said, resuming a conversation Hermione must have interrupted. “You can just fly with the Slytherin team whenever you want.”

“I don’t care about flying class. It’s the principle of the thing. Why do they even pretend to have rules around here. Nothing applies to their precious golden boy. Forget about detention for him, instead they’re letting him try out as a first year! Did you forget about that?”

“You started it,” Hermione interjected, since he had already elected not to ignore her. “And maybe he’s just better than you, he looked about twice as fast.”

“Twice as fast! The school brooms—” he started angrily and then abruptly cut himself off. “What would you know about anything? That was probably the first time you’ve seen a real broom in your life and you couldn’t even summon it.”

“First time Harry saw one too,” she retorted smugly.

“And he got lucky with his broom,” Malfoy said. “Those pieces of garbage aren’t even fit for Filch to sweep with.”

“Don’t worry, we could all see you knew what you were doing. You’re quite decent at anything that isn’t real magic.”

“As if a filthy Mudblood like you—”

“Mr. Malfoy,” called McGonagall sternly as she turned the corner, “I told you I didn’t want to hear that slur. I’ve had quite enough trouble from you. That detention will be for three weeks now.”

Hermione smiled sweetly at him and followed McGonagall into the classroom.

Most of the class was still stuck on turning their silver forks into spoons, while some, like Malfoy, had moved on to other utensils. Hermione alone was working through the exercise again with the additional challenge of changing the metal.

After class, Malfoy accosted Harry in the hallway with some of the other Slytherins in tow.

“Tonight, by the trophy room, a wizard’s duel. If you even know what that is.”

“Fine,” Harry agreed instantly.

She was sure he had no idea what a wizard’s duel was. But of course he leaped right in. That was just boys for you, some part of them always spoiling for a fight. And he clearly struggled to be sensible when it came to Malfoy.

“I’ll be his second,” Ron said.

“Theo for me.”

“What’s wrong? No faith in Crabbe and Goyle?” Ron mocked.

“They’d do well enough if their opponent tripped and dropped their wand,” Malfoy chuckled.

The comment didn’t seem to bother them. Goyle had an absent-minded grin on his face, probably far away in Malfoy’s imagined scenario, beating in the face of some clumsy young wizard. Crabbe’s fat face had the same permanent scowl it always did.

Ron sneered and walked off with Harry. Then Malfoy turned to look at her.

“You’ll be there too, Mudblood. I’ll show you what real wand waving looks like.”

Mudblood came from his mouth at such an even, casual tenor that he might have really thought it was her name.

“No, I certainly won’t.”

“You will. I’ve got some nasty jinxes for him and it’s a long way to the hospital wing. A few old favorites from Defense and Dueling, or maybe from something more serious”—he tapped his nose at her—“if I’m in the wrong mood, if you decide not to show your face.”

The somewhat intimate gesture caught her off guard and flushed her. “Fine,” she agreed. Hopefully he didn’t actually know any spells from The Dark Arts for Dueling, because she certainly didn’t know any of the counters. She suspected he was all bluster, but if she showed up she could stop the whole thing from going too far either way.

She hurried to catch up to Ron and Harry, and gave reason a chance:

“Harry, this is an awful idea. Malfoy’s been doing magic for ages. He knows loads of spells and—”

“Not for ages, you said kids couldn’t really practice magic.”

“Not for ages but for longer than you. He’s probably had private tutors this year, and clearly they weren’t teaching him Transfiguration. You won’t win.”

“Whose side are you on anyway?” Ron demanded.

Harry looked more riled up by her efforts than subdued. Boys, she groaned internally, belatedly realizing this wasn’t the right approach. She scrambled for other ideas.

“We could tip off a prefect or a teacher.” Old faithful. “Malfoy’s on thin ice with McGonagall already. Just let him sit in detention for a month or two.”

Harry seemed to be listening. But Ron immediately refused.

“No, that’s what a Slytherin coward would do!”

“Yes. Yes it is,” she agreed suggestively.

Harry frowned for a moment. “You think...?”

“Who cares?” Ron said indifferently. “We’ll do things like proper Gryffindors. If you like scheming and lying so much maybe you should have been in Slytherin.”

Harry couldn’t be swayed with Ron in his ear egging him on. She tried to offer to show him some spells. But Ron shooed her away, whisking Harry off to conduct his own crash course in dueling.

That night she paced uneasily in the common room and for the umpteenth time considered going to Percy (she had settled on him instead of a teacher). The dilemma turned over again in her head, exactly the kind of thing that stoked the deep-rooted instinct to run to an authority figure. It was a second nature she had to actively fight. So, she talked herself down again. How much Harry and Ron would despise her, how it might put the rest of the Gryffindor year off her as well, not to mention the Slytherins. How she could manage the whole thing—she had spent the evening in the library with Defense and Dueling and was feeling better about her repertoire of counters. Maybe it would even turn out to be a good thing, a small little adventure she could mostly probably keep under control. It would be nice to see a wizard’s duel. It would bring them all closer together. She chuckled at the idea of Harry, Ron, and Malfoy embracing and becoming the best of friends. Friendship comes after blows, as they say. She rubbed her hands together; God was the castle cold at night.

“Don’t tell me you’re actually coming,” moaned Ron as he and Harry came down from the boys’ dorm. “It’s against the rules, you know?”

“It’s fine,” Harry told him, “we could use the backup, who knows what Malfoy will try to pull.”

This suggestion alerted Ron’s imagination.

“Right. Right, should I grab Seamus and Dean then?”

“Shall we just bring the whole year?” Hermione asked sarcastically.

“Let’s just go,” Harry said quickly.

“She’s more likely to tattle than back anyone up,” Ron muttered.

Hermione stumbled—well she hadn’t though!

… maybe it wasn’t too late.

The first half of their walk down fell under an awkward silence inflicted by her addition. But as they closed in on the trophy room, a thrill was building in the two boys that overwhelmed her rainy presence. The war march was on. Ron was giving Harry one part tactics and two parts pep, and Harry was nodding along purposefully, occasionally giving Hermione a fright by suddenly drawing his wand and waving it aggressively this way and that. “That’s it. One two, one two. Shield Stunner, Shield Stunner,” Ron encouraged.

Just a few paces down the hall from the trophy room, a light yellow light was drizzling out from beneath a classroom’s door.

Malfoy and Nott were already waiting there, behind a large clearing of wood floorboards opened up for dueling by shoving desks and tables into high piles along the walls. Neither of them reacted to the trio’s arrival.

Hermione immediately regretted not going to Percy. Familiarity and unfamiliarity were coloring her perceptions, but Ron and Harry seemed unfavorably childish. Take just this duel, from how they had stumbled into it to Harry’s empty arsenal of spells and Ron’s simple-minded pep talk, coaching to just stun and shield. Then there was Malfoy. He was older in this classroom, wand out, impatient with confidence and practice. A step behind Malfoy on the wall was Nott, tall enough to be a third year, with his brow slightly furrowed as if he were pondering some intractable problem. He shifted forward with his eyes narrowed to tell Malfoy something in too low a voice for them to hear and Malfoy drew a tight line in the air with his wand in response, warming up as if this were just one more in a long line of duels, past and future. And perhaps it was. She had to remind herself the whole challenge originated from a childish pique of his. Because Nott had exactly the opposite effect on Malfoy from the sometimes comedic trio Crabbe and Goyle made with him. And together Malfoy and Nott were missing a few degrees of Ron and Harry’s youth.

She’d never had much hope of Harry winning, but now she was suddenly unsure where any of her own confidence had come from to manage anything. Even if she knew a few more spells than Harry, she hadn’t seen a duel before either. And Nott, like Malfoy, clearly had a grasp of such things. They were outmatched, perhaps they should have brought Dean and Seamus after all.

“Get out your wand, Potter. Start whenever you like,” Malfoy said suddenly with no greeting or preamble.

“No,” Ron refused, “there has to be a countdown.”

Malfoy laughed. “Go ahead then, Granger.”

Mouth dry, she counted slowly.

“3… 2… 1… Begin.”

They both immediately launched stunners and then started casting shields. So maybe there was something to Ron’s coaching after all.

Two red lights burst past each other in opposite directions with a whoosh.

Malfoy was faster on both counts. Harry’s shield only just came up in time and it shuddered beneath Malfoy’s stunner. On the other side of the classroom, Malfoy had enough time to casually sidestep Harry’s stunner and another red burst came from his wand, a purple line zigzagging not far behind.

The duel already seemed irrecoverable and Hermione grit her teeth as the two spells reached Harry.

He was hurrying through a second stunner, but his shielding spell was already badly weakened. After he got the stunner out his shield cracked open with a loud pop, and there was still life in the red light that struck him. He let out a yelp of pain and jumped back. But he didn’t evade the path of the purple line. The jinx hit him head-on and his legs started madly dancing.

Malfoy didn’t bother to dodge Harry’s second stunner. His shield flexed and flickered weakly, but no follow-up was on its way.

Harry was already helpless, trapped by the dance his legs were jerking out underneath him. And then he was singing foolishly along in disharmony with that dance. Next, Malfoy made his eyebrows grow into huge bushes that completely covered his eyes.

Hermione couldn’t watch any longer and pulled out her wand. “We resign!” she cried. But as soon as she got a counter-jinx off to fix Harry’s eyebrow problem, she heard Nott shout “Expelliarmus” and her wand ripped from her hand and flew to him.

“No interfering,” he said emotionlessly. “You’re not the second.”

“I’ll do your favorite!” Malfoy exclaimed in exhilaration. “Lingua Tortium!” A blue light shot from his wand.

“We resign!” Ron shouted.

The jinx forcing Harry into a jig wore off at the same time the tongue twister hit. But this new combination was much worse. Harry collapsed on the ground letting out a weak moan, his mouth fighting against itself to sing through his twisted tongue.

The classroom door flew open with a bang and a horrifically scratchy laugh drifted into the room along with the cold castle air.

Filch and his cat stood in the doorway, a pleased grin on both their faces.

Nott had somehow slipped out of sight, leaving Hermione’s wand to clatter upon the floor. Hermione rushed over to it and helped Harry. He was fine, immediately more concerned with the trouble they were in.

Whatever aura the duel had inspired in Malfoy was gone. He was less embarrassed than Ron and Harry, more uneasy frustration than outright sheepishness, but had still been reduced to a caught-out first year.

“Well, well, this is a treat,” gloated Filch. “This is good timing. I’ve got something extra special for the lot of you.”

Chapter Text

In the week after the duel, Harry was even more reserved than usual. Ron handled the episode in the opposite way, perpetually irate about every minor offense, and to Hermione in particular he was almost openly hostile. Simmering with frustration over both Harry’s ignominious defeat and the detentions Filch had lined up on the last of each month through the school year, Ron was clearly blaming everything on her to Harry—she’d overheard a few not at all discreet remarks along the lines of “Who knows if she told someone. She wanted to, so, who knows.”

While entering the Charms classroom, she caught a new one:

“Shouldn’t have interfered, should she? And it distracted me from ending it quicker.”

Halfway through the lesson, Flitwick left them alone to take care of his own miscellaneous business. Some of them kept working on levitating their feathers, while others slacked off. Ron pretended to practice while furtively wrestling with a page of a Quidditch magazine under his desk, not having taken notice of Flitwick’s departure. Hermione couldn’t resist a jeer.

“You do know we’re supposed to levitate the feather, don’t you?”

“Uh. Yeah.”

“That’s the wand movement for Lumos.”

A few more eyes turned on Ron.

“It’s not,” he denied, and under the small audience’s gaze he repeated the wand strokes for Lumos.

Malfoy laughed uproariously and a few others chuckled along.

Ron flushed furiously and glared at her.

“Maybe if you kept your textbook open in class instead of a Quidditch magazine,” Hermione told him disdainfully.

“Ooooo,” Malfoy encouraged.

“Maybe if you weren’t such an insufferable know-it-all you’d actually have friends,” he bit out loudly.

She glanced around. Harry was pretending he was completely alone.

“I’m friends with Hermione,” Parvati said quietly, and Lavender nodded along with a nervous look at Ron.

They were meek and Ron rolled over them.

“Right then. One and a half of your roommates.” He snorted. “Give it a few weeks.”

There was a moment of silence, everyone more aware of each other, feathers forgotten. A familiar feeling clawed at Hermione from the past. The moment slowly passed, the engagement was left there, and everyone returned, more quietly now, to studying.

Hermione buried herself away in the feather, but it was delicate and floaty, far from heavy enough to offer any respite. She couldn’t hear whatever Flitwick said after he returned. Up and down the goose feather went. The now familiar tingling of magic flowing down her arm, then creeping back up to her shoulder and through her core as she slowly exhausted herself. There was a unique bliss in that sensation, but it too was insufficient to deliver her. Her mind retrod worn-out ground. Sometime in primary school listening to a huddle of children talk nearby, studying the obscure and vulgar competition of escalation they were engaged in. A door slamming closed in her face. Back to the duel, Harry overwhelmed and whimpering through the combination of jinxes.

Parvati and Lavender tried to talk to her after class, but she rushed away to nowhere, brushing past Ron still hanging off Harry.

Turned randomly, went up and down, then past a long hall of study rooms. There was a long mural, half Black Lake, half sky. At its center, the Giant Squid towered from the depths to the clouds. Next to it was a portrait of a half-dressed princess in a lounger. She gave Hermione a look. “Left,” she said, waving a hand in a manner that seemed insulting.

It was a low-ceilinged runt of a bathroom, two sinks and one grubby dirt path puddle of a mirror. The stall’s uneven lock spurned her too, so after besting the crooked thing she slammed it open and shut a few more times to make sure it learned the lesson.

After using the restroom, she remembered she was probably lost and couldn’t muster the energy to leave the stall. Everyone hated her. She cried pathetically for a bit, but couldn’t manage too many tears. She slumped back, numb and tired from magical drain, sleep teasing her into its flighty embrace...

She was led up the steps to a gallows erected at the head of the Great Hall. A Hogwarts mob was gathered all for her.

“You’ve annoyed everyone. You’re a know-it-all and a teacher’s pet,” Ron declared to the crowd from beside her.

There were thoughtful nods from the crowd of students, even from some unfair students she was certain she’d never seen or interacted with before.

Then Ron added privately to her: “Your hair’s a real mess too. You really couldn’t fix it? Not even for this?”

“So you’re being executed,” he continued loudly.

Just like that? Shouldn’t there be a little more proceduralism? Maybe a few detentions first? She looked for Dumbledore at the High Table. He gave her a genial but helpless shrug.

“Any objections?” Ron asked.

Harry had found something objectionable in the table.

“We object!” shouted Parvati, with Lavender swaying unreliably beside her.

“Give it a few weeks,” Ron told them sagely and hustled Hermione towards the rope.

“All right in there!” a voice shouted from the distance, impatient and nonsensical.

“Hello!”

—Hermione jerked awake, knocked her head back into the wall. Everyone did hate her. She was going to die. Crying in the bathroom again. And her head hurt. She started sobbing uncontrollably.

After a few minutes, she started to calm down and caught fragments of a discussion outside, some older boy she didn’t know:

“Cover for… Yes, yes, of course… I told Melinda I would… I didn’t mean it like that… I know that… you’re a lifesaver.”

The restroom door swung open then slammed closed.

“You okay?” Malfoy’s voice asked, disgustingly softened and raised to an artificially soothing tone.

“Just leave me alone,” she replied drowsily.

“You?” he asked with surprise, voice releasing to something more familiar.

She didn’t answer.

“It’s you who won’t leave me alone. You’re in the dungeons, this crying spot is usually for Slytherin girls.”

His footsteps came right up to her stall.

“Ron didn’t enjoy that impromptu tutoring session much, did he?”

She could hear the mirth in his voice.

“No.”

“I thought it was funny,” he mused.

“Anything’s funny to you as long as someone’s miserable,” she muttered. “You’re loving this too, aren’t you?”

“I’m comforting you.”

“You aren’t.”

“You must have been just about done anyway. I mean, it’s been hours, hasn’t it?”

“I fell asleep,” she informed him defensively.

Having said the thing aloud her drowsy mind finally fully processed the humiliating nature of her beige boxed circumstances. She wouldn’t be able to say a word back to him for the next seven years. And he would tell, and everyone would be laughing about it for months. Everything just kept getting worse. The tears were pricking at her eyes again. Everyone hates me, she thought. Apparently out loud.

“It’s just Ron, isn’t it?”

“The rest of them don’t like me either. Give it a few weeks. He’ll turn them against me.”

“You’re being dramatic. It’s not that serious, he’s just jealous because of how incompetent he—”

Malfoy was pacing back and forth, and here his steps paused for a moment, then resumed at a more rapid pace.

“I warned you about him, didn’t I? Now you see what a disgrace of a wizard he is. That whole family.”

“You warned Harry about him. Right before you warned him about me, you said—” She didn’t want to think about or repeat what he had said or the tears would win.

“Well,” he said after a long silence, “I can promote you, I suppose. Above him, I mean. Their lot is clearly the worse.”

“Oh joy. I can be a second-class citizen now.”

“Not second-class,” he corrected, “second from the bottom.”

Hermione laughed, half outraged.

“You’re awful at this, you know.”

“Is it working?”

“I was just about done anyway.” Then she remembered and suddenly accused, “You hate me too.”

She regretted it as soon as she said it, and she could feel heat rising in her cheeks. He laughed, but then, to her surprise, he sidestepped the accusation:

“This is what’s called a rivalry. Is what I would say, but…” He chuckled. “—given…” Then burst out laughing again.

He did like to laugh. It almost made her, on a whim, say something even more ridiculous.

“All right, move along then,” she said instead, “show’s over, I’ll just clean up for a minute.”

“Right”—his steps receded—“Dinner's about half through,” he called, and the door swung shut behind him.

She sagged and groaned. How mortifying. Well, Harry and Ron hate Malfoy more than they hate me, she comforted herself. So at least she wasn’t anyone’s least favorite. Grabbing some more toilet paper, she dabbed at her eyes gently. Half over, that’s good, she could get a bite to eat and show her face, no one else would know. Assuming Malfoy wouldn’t spill to everyone. Which she chose to believe despite paltry evidence.

She stood shakily and left the stall. After washing her face in the sink until she looked as normal as one could in such a mirror, she headed for the exit.

As soon as she opened the door she came face to face with a towering green monstrosity.

Chapter Text

After the incident with the troll, Hermione became fast friends with Harry and Ron. The three of them were inseparable: in class, when studying, at meals. When they tired of studying long before her and their conversations drifted away from Potions or Transfiguration and towards Quidditch or dinner, or they just called it quits and played Gobstones or Wizard’s Chess or some other game, she would just keep at the books beside them, finding their company very easy. Though when they turned to games it was sometimes a distraction; she would watch out of the corner of her eye, pages turning less frequently. Harry invited her once or twice, but she refused, unsure of herself and finding the idea of playing somehow embarrassing, and he wouldn’t insist.

Lavender and Parvati teased her about it. And she teased them back, promising she could set them up with whichever they liked. Luckily, neither of them was bold enough to call her on her boasting. She wouldn’t have had a clue how to proceed beyond awkwardly introducing them, and they already knew Ron anyway.

Classes went smoothly. She felt confident she had the better of Malfoy in most of them, though Potions was hopeless as Professor Snape played favorites like no other and Malfoy was the favorite of favorites. All she could hope was that Professor Snape would forget all about her so she could slip by with a good enough grade not to ruin everything else. And he did seem to be tending towards ignoring her these days.

So everything was going rather well, both socially and academically. After so many doubts and changes she had somehow ended up in a nice, secure rhythm that was new and improved the exact right amount, and with that rhythm days started to flow more quickly. The only thing which sometimes bothered her was the impending special detentions that had excited Filch so much, a lingering reminder of more troubled times.

When the evening of the first special detention finally arrived, that slight apprehension, dragged out over three weeks of uncertainty, culminated into a walk through the castle with Filch. He led them out of the castle into some unhappy, dwindling light. It was a cold, wet evening, ground still damp with the morning’s rain and a thawing hard freeze.

“Just like the good old days this is,” Filch scratched out. “Didn’t use to be all delicate on you lot back then, we turned out real wizards, ones long in the thumb heh, got a bit of the right stuff for you tonight though heh, we…”

He was determined to keep up a frightening mood.

Hermione walked closely with Ron and Harry on one side of Filch, while Malfoy was on the other.

They made their way along a familiar route across the grounds which, barring any unforeseen twist, would lead them to Hagrid’s cabin. Through Harry, she’d become friends with the giant groundskeeper who had led them from the Hogwarts Express to the boats to the Great Hall. So the prospect of an evening with him didn’t live up to Filch’s fearmongering. Sounded nice actually, though it would be awkward having Malfoy hanging around.

As they neared Hagrid’s, Filch detected how relaxed the mood was. Displeased by this and eager to be the bearer of bad news, he let them in on the secret:

“You’ll be heading into the forest tonight.”

Hermione did a double take. The Forbidden Forest was the place on the grounds they had been most stringently warned away from. It was in the name! And Hagrid, nice as he was, didn’t even have a wand.

“We can’t go in there,” Malfoy said incredulously, “it’s dangerous, we’re not allowed.”

“Scared?” Ron mocked automatically.

“You’d be scared too, if you knew what was good for you,” Filch chuckled.

Then, the interest he had taken in their punishment having run its course, he abandoned them at Hagrid’s steps.

“Into the forest with the Great Oaf,” Malfoy seethed to no one, his body tilted away from them even as he shot Hermione a glance. “Dumbledore’s bringing this place to the dumps. My father will hear about this.”

“Shut it, Malfoy,” Harry told him irritably and knocked on the door.

“’Arry! Ron! ’Ermione!” Hagrid greeted them with a huge smile. “Malfoy,” he grunted, smile fading.

He hauled up a giant crossbow from behind the door and slung it over his shoulder.

“We bes’ be gettin’ on then, come along Fang,” he called, and the huge dog trotted out.

Malfoy argued and complained incessantly as they left the cabin and walked into the close-knit pines on the fringes of that dark, dense forest. Hermione had to stop herself from nodding along with Malfoy’s protestations. A steady beat of reassurances was dispensed by Hagrid as he led the way along the stomped out path, but he wasn’t listening particularly closely to the concerns that were being raised.

“Did Dumbledore approve this?”

“Won’ be goin’ deep t’night.”

“If you count carefully, there’s four of us, how are you going to protect us all if something happens?”

“I’m in ‘er every night.”

“You don’t even have a wand!”

“’Armless. Mostly.”

As they lost sight of the forest’s edge, Malfoy decided his chances of convincing Hagrid didn’t compare favorably to the risks of speaking too loudly and gave up.

“… More scared of us than we are of them, see...” The reassurances continued.

Still on the outskirts, the path took a sharp turn left through a patch of harebells. Each had just a brushstroke of glassy blue lingering in its petals; the brown of the first hard freeze was seeping out in inevitable patches. A few steps off the path, in a dried out purple-red pool that even in light so faint was stark against the fading flowers and wild weeds, a pale horse’s body was laid out on its flank, legs and underbelly facing them, breast still of breath, a matted trail of fur up to an incision on its neck.

“’Ere we are, something’s been ‘unting them, see,” Hagrid knelt down by the body and started prodding at its wound.

“Something’s been hunting unicorns. Something’s been hunting unicorns,” Malfoy repeated dumbly.

Hermione had read all about unicorns and Hogwarts’ herd after finding out they were real. Aside from their elusiveness, their most notable characteristic was their blood. If they lost even one drop they would slowly die, but while they still drew breath that blood was a panacea that could resist any illness or wound, even age. But, the books had said, those with the profound magical power required to seek them out were all too wise to, because even one drop would leave your fate broken forever.

The animals clearly had that wisdom too, as no critters or creatures had come scavenging.

Hagrid stood up and cleared his throat.

“We’ll split up. Yeh can stay on the path, seeing as yer so concerned. Scout fer any other signs of unicorns along the outskirts. ‘Ermione, you’ll pair up with Malfoy, can’ be ‘avin any more duels can we? Rest of us will ‘ead deeper.”

Split up? Surely not.

“Hermione?” Harry asked with a glance at Malfoy.

Somehow Harry was worried about Malfoy instead of the forest. The rapidly formulated argument for sticking together didn’t make it out. Malfoy and Hagrid’s back and forth was echoing in her ears, and unlike any of them, Hagrid actually knew the forest, didn’t he?

“Fine, be careful,” Hermione said.

They became a group of three after Malfoy demanded Fang, and stood around the unicorn’s corpse, watching Hagrid head deeper into the forest with Ron and Harry in tow. Malfoy was still enough that Hermione thought he had felt it too, how leaving his pale kin there with its washy horn and wilted blood and weathered fur would be unbearably irreverent, but once Hagrid was out of sight Malfoy obliviously started back out of the forest.

“Come on, let’s get out of here.”

“What? We’re just leaving?”

“We’ll scout the outskirts,” he said blandly, “the outer outskirts.”

She emitted an odd humph, hesitated for a moment, then trailed after him. There was nothing else to do, or so she rationalized, glad to escape but feeling ashamed twice over.

They’d hardly even entered the forest, so in a few minutes they were back at Hagrid’s cabin. There was a firepit surrounded by a few worn wooden chairs. Malfoy took a seat and with a wave of his wand lit a smokeless fire against the resistance of cold, wet kindling. As she made her way to a chair on the opposite side from him she experienced a brief bout of disorientation as the relief from leaving the forest faded. How had that special detention ended up like this?

He pulled out a tiny thermos-shaped trinket. It grew to full size in his hand, then he took a sip while relaxing back in his chair, making himself at home.

A few hours was a very long time to be alone here with Malfoy. But it wasn’t all bad; heat from the fire pushed the cold out from her bones, and Hagrid’s old chairs were surprisingly comfortable. A good book—maybe she would bring one next time—a companion that didn’t set her on edge, one less dead unicorn, and getting out of the castle once a month for this sort of evening could actually be an agreeable change of pace.

“So this is how they did it in the good old days,” Malfoy said with a smirk, “no wonder Filch misses them.”

“Will your father hear about this?”

God, even exchanging a few words with him took an effort and left her slightly worn out. Something was wrong with her.

He leaned forward to hand her the thermos.

Shyly, she half stood and leaned over to grab it. She rotated it conscientiously before taking a sip, which immediately lifted her mood. Delicious hot chocolate. Just right on a chilly night. Its scent filled her head, a bitter sweetness against the earth and grass that was rising up to them on moist air to mix with the tinge of spice spilling off the pine forest.

“Hot chocolate,” she said, its taste lingering on her tongue. “What a kid.”

He rolled his eyes and held out his hand. All the hostility she sent was wasted on him, could not even extract a word from him, hardly even a glance.

She took another healthy drink of that warming chocolate elixir before returning it to his waiting hand.

Presumably he didn’t respect her enough for her hostility to mean anything to him. She had always fancied herself a bitter holder of grudges, someone too proud to let go. But it turned out to work the other way around, actually, she was too proud to hold on to grudges—ha ha. She had just never been tried, and now that she had, her resentment was crumbling in response to Malfoy’s laid-back demeanor. Even that was being too generous with herself. Though she knew he thought her an inferior and that at any moment “Mudblood” might fall from his lips with that always indifferent voice, every ‘friendly’ word and meaningless gesture deceived her apparently soft and spiteless heart, rolling her impression of him further back towards those late weeks of August before she had boarded the Hogwarts Express. The lazy bastard hadn’t even saved her from a troll.

“Boo!” He lurched towards her. And enjoyed her startled jump far too much. “There’s something too satisfying about your reactions… am I making you nervous? Don’t worry, you’re safer here than out there at least. I’ve already had dinner, and as you can see I brought drinks, so I don’t need to feed on your blood like whatever’s out there.”

“Why’d you ask for Fang anyway?” Hermione asked. “Are you a dog person? I would have guessed cats.”

“I’m a humanitarian, we saved whom we could.”

She snorted, but it was an unpleasant line of thought. Imagining them finding what they were looking for, they might… well, anything might happen. And what would she do then, having slunk off to a warm fire with Malfoy while whatever happened happened? She suddenly had an impulse to run back into the forest and track them down, long gone off the beaten path though they were. Yet with the ground moist and pliable, Hagrid’s huge frame would leave deep tracks. Even she would be able to follow them, dark though the night was. A crazy idea, the kind of mad flight she had never once let free from her mind. No doubt the Sorting Hat had the right of her with Gryffindor as its last choice.

“You don’t really think anything will happen to them, do you?”

“We couldn’t help them by bungling around another part of the forest looking for dead unicorns. You’re awfully cowardly for a Gryffindor, you know that?”

Dumbfounding levels of shamelessness.

“You didn’t answer.”

He shrugged. “For all Dumbledore’s incompetence he’s somehow fumbled through without losing a student yet. They’ll be fine. I just wouldn’t bet my life on it. Or poor Fang’s.” He reached down to scratch the dog’s head.

That made her feel better. Over three decades, a solid record, even Malfoy admitted it. One way or another it was probably under control. Armed with this source of reliance she decided to put her worries out of mind as best she could. It occurred to her that Lavender must have been wrong about the dangers of Quidditch; Parvati had been right.

They passed the thermos back and forth again.

Eventually Hagrid and the boys returned looking haggard, robes scratched up, shoes muddy. Hagrid deposited his crossbow at his cabin, then escorted them back to the castle in a tired silence. When they arrived Malfoy immediately left them.

“Come visit before yer next detention ‘lright?”

“Of course,” Harry said.

They headed for the Gryffindor common room.

“Well, at least we only had to deal with the forest,” Harry remarked. “Hermione had to deal with Malfoy too.”

“Hardly had to deal with the forest,” Hermione replied, sick with guilt all over again. “We stuck to the outskirts.”

“Rather brave the forest than deal with that git,” said Ron. “Wish I had eaten more at dinner though.”

“So, you didn’t run into anything bad?” Hermione asked.

“Just the plants,” Harry said with a look at his robes.

That was a comfort.

“Heard some werewolves though,” Ron bragged.

The boys went up to their dorm. Hermione joined Lavender and Parvati in a corner of the common room and told them what the special detention ended up being about. Then she turned in herself.

With the question of the special detentions answered she slipped easily into sleep, but with only academic problems left to toy with, her mind wandered listlessly through half-formed dreams, in search of some new trouble to concern itself with.

The last night of November was blessedly warm, a light breeze sometimes struggling meagerly against the still air. Filch, not in one of his occasional chatty moods, silently led the four of them again along the way to Hagrid’s cabin. And then they set out on another foray into the forest. For Hermione and Draco, it would be a short one.

“Same as before ‘lright,” Hagrid said at the late harebell bend (now, alas, all mud and stray gray weeds) in the path.

There was an exchange of nods and the boys headed off with Hagrid.

“Same as before,” Draco repeated to her and Fang complacently.

Without waiting for a response he led the way back to Hagrid’s cabin, where they again took to two of the old chairs, beside each other this time, and started a low fire.

Hermione studied him. His feet kicked back and relaxed, a little light from the fire burning out the moon’s glow around them, reminding her of how he had looked in that chair in Flourish and Blotts, before a fire then too. Or rather, less how he had looked, but how it had felt to look at him without so many noisy associations. Yes, her resentment had mostly abandoned her now. Those troublesome things seemed far away here. Fang was curled up at his feet happily panting, stupidly slobbering. The lilac curve of his lip twitched down as the dog’s head was nudged to a safe distance from his Oxfords where it obediently slobbered into the grass. He was an awfully entitled little thing. But to her something like frustration, the scene did orient itself about him, it did let him have his way. The flames kissed up under the perpetually challenging tilt of his hollow chin, casting a bit of wandering shadow over wan cheeks. The forest hardly threatening, hardly forbidden, offered amiably, politely, a pointless bit of shade from the low stars, a little repose between the soft empty sky and the long hard earth. He was always entitled, but the fire, the forest behind him, and the night sky above them seemed entitled to him too.

“What was that thing you did in Potions with the sneezing draught that had Professor Snape so pleased?” she asked, deciding, with an unearned sense of superiority, to permit him to have his way with one more thing—to show off a little.

“When you’re preparing a crow feather, the tip of it is less pure so…”

“How does that work then, since we don’t have any extras…”

She queried him on a few things until he hit at the crux of Potions.

“It’s no use trying to get all my secrets you know. Even if you beat me at Potions, you can’t beat me at Potions.”

She grit her teeth in frustration thinking of Professor Snape’s blatant favoritism. Though in all fairness Draco was just a tiny bit better at Potions either way.

“You’re not even ashamed of it?”

“Slytherin is all about connections.” Draco hesitated, then added smugly, “Snape’s my godfather.”

Her jaw dropped and she stared at him incredulously. She smacked his shoulder and passed the thermos, this time a ginger tea with a hint of lime and honey, back to him.

“You’re terrible! How dare you call me a teacher’s pet? Professor Dumbledore really ought to do something about him.”

“Finally realizing how incompetent Dumbledore is?”

“You ought to do something about him! Get me back in his good books.”

He raised his hands helplessly. “That’s on you for goofing off in class.”

“I passed one little note!”

“You were bullying me.”

“I’ll show you bullying.” She snatched the thermos and threw it back, gulping down every drop. Then stared at him challengingly.

“So she likes the tea too… don’t worry, I brought enough for both of us this time.” He produced another thermos. “And what did you bring for us?”

She blushed. That was definitely childish and rude. She’d started spouting off madly too, like they were actually friends. It was too much of a shock that Professor Snape was his godfather, proving once and for all that it was impossible to overestimate how much they all knew each other. And now he must be looking down on her for being ill-mannered. Thinking she was an ignorant Mudblood bringing uncivilized Muggle influence into the wizarding world.

“Should I stuff my pockets? I can’t exactly bring a picnic basket. We don’t all have fancy toys for everything.”

She paused for a moment. That wasn’t going in the right direction.

“I’ll sort something for next term,” she clarified stiffly.

“Don’t take it too seriously—I already knew you had no manners.”

She glared at him, and he held out the second thermos.

“You don’t have to bother trying to sort anything, I’ve certainly got something at home, got loads of interesting stuff at home actually. Detention will be the place to be next term.”

“I’ll handle the food,” Hermione insisted, “and isn’t that enough, we’re already playing hooky, do we have to make a mockery of it?”

“I’ll make a rule breaker of you yet.” He pulled out a set of marbles, “Gobstones?”

“I’ve never played—”

“Perfect.”

The picnic basket proved itself above her level over Christmas break. She couldn’t compete with whatever had been done to Draco’s thermoses. The size of the basket had to be scaled down multiple times along with her ambition before she could even get started with the tricky magic. The thermoses held a stable magical charge that could be snapped into either polarity, expanding or contracting, with just a slight jolt of outside power. Hermione’s final picnic basket took a few minutes and a decent chunk of magic to contract, though it could easily be expanded again. And it was so small that in the end she wouldn’t have been much worse off just stuffing her pockets, especially considering the time the project took. But it was educational and fun. Her parents were very impressed.

And so was Draco when she got to show it off to him at their first ‘detention’ after break. At least until it was time to pack it back up. He had a good laugh at her expense, but she suspected he was a little relieved. Which was good. It wouldn’t do for him to get too discouraged. He was an extremely promising student—grades had been posted and he was second in his year!

He had also improved in his manners around the castle, though they remained far from cordial during those in-between days. It was an odd relationship. Outside of those nights they hardly talked—hours of companionship, then a month of distant, sour interactions before meeting again, half as strangers. She still found it difficult to see through him. She wanted to reach into his skull and hold what made him tick in her hands. Then she would know. Know if it was worth trying to hold onto him, or if she would only humiliate herself with her presumption if she extended.

In those month-long breaks between each detention, she catalogued his weak points and his strengths exhaustively, and had enough time, and self-awareness, and reason, to crunch up certain odds, ends, and whims for which it now seemed to be her season, invoked by those twilight hours and that unfortunate, undereducated, overeducated boy.

If she was shameless, then she would admit that she was just like all the Slytherins that had fallen into his clique or its periphery. More than anything else, without analysis and dissection, he had whatever that magic was that made people turn towards you. To check for his reaction, for where he was leading. It felt good to be near him, right to have him turn towards you. But besides his confidence he was cowardly, and besides his charm he was cruel.

Though she disdained such thinking, she could also see he was the useful sort of person. The sort that ambitious climbers meant when they talked about making connections. And that was Draco’s wheelhouse. The other Slytherins were probably only half thinking such things as they entered his orbit. Draco was more precocious than that though; she knew the future uses of his collection were somewhere in there. She could read at least that much in his sly eyes.

All of it was fairly conclusive. She was an honest person. And she knew at least this about Draco: he was not.

The night of their last picnic she was anxious again like on the eve of that first special detention. It would be too reticent to say they hadn’t become something like friends, but after tonight the long months of summer would stretch between them with no next rendezvous on their calendars.

Beside a cold fire, gurgling and burbling, they lay on luxurious chairs enjoying an extensive selection of drinks and a few small bites of food. Their bodyguard dog dozed. Their cabin lookout watched the dark treeline, and the million pale stars above, and the hundred amber windows in the wild and faraway castle behind them. She slipped a foot from her shoe and her sock and swept it back and forth along the ground, fiddling and pulling at the blades of grass with her toes. Her throat had dried out, leaving her voice a little roughened, so she fondled a few of the bottles before finding one that was wet with condensation.

A gust carried over to them a cackling chill from the fire. The choppy hum of bird calls broke off shyly. Rustling leaves rumpled and shifted. He was still.

Then on went the Arthurian legends she had selected for his edification that evening. And the cabin was content, and the trees were happy, and their birds, and a star above him twinkled. He was almost in line with the horizon, lying too far back for the fire’s light to clearly illuminate his expression. But there were his lashes, low. Eyes closed. There was his bare cheek, also failing to elude her, telling by way of an upward movement whenever a hapless knight was befuddled by magic that his shrouded ears were still listening closely, that he was still under her spell.

Chapter Text

Hermione met Harry and Ron with big hugs out in front of Flourish and Blotts.

Ron’s parents were lovely, though his father was a little odd. He was both curious and peculiarly clueless (given his interest and position at the Ministry) about anything she told him concerning the Muggle world. She also met Ron’s little sister Ginny for the first time, but Ginny only had eyes for Harry and acquainted herself somewhat poorly, coming across as almost belligerent in her childish affections.

Flourish and Blotts was overflowing with a large and rather female crowd. Mrs Weasley was terribly excited to have their books signed by a Mr Lockhart, who was holding such an event today. Hermione recalled the poster of Mr Lockhart that had been here a year ago. His face had advanced in the world, now dominating the storefront, while the Hogwarts book list was reduced to a single sentence off to the side suggesting that any queries be brought to the shopkeeper.

They squeezed between the doors and the book-signing line into the shop, then started navigating through the crowd to collect their books. The excitement was infectious, and from a few different sections she caught a glimpse of Mr Lockhart over the crowd by rising to her tiptoes and leaning just so. She mostly knew of his work second-hand; the chapters she had skimmed were light reading, and so she hadn’t had time for them between textbooks and working through the literary classics of a new world. His deeds, however, left nothing to be desired. On every corner of the world he had tracked down and defeated dark beasts and wizards alike.

Once all the books had been found, Mrs Weasley hurriedly gathered them and joined the long line. Hermione would have very much liked to chat with Mr Lockhart. But waiting in line for just a quick handshake seemed embarrassing when Mrs Weasley had already offered to have their books signed. Besides, up on the second floor, which the crowd had left alone, she caught sight of Draco’s unmissable white head. A serendipitous chance to maintain their friendship outside of their now concluded rendezvous.

Ginny had followed Harry and Ron to the Quidditch magazines. There was no one to care which books or boys Hermione went to find, so with some trepidation she climbed the stairs. She consciously relaxed her muscles, rolling her neck and letting out a breath, drawing herself up with a casual and indifferent confidence. Yes—first she would creep up to Draco and give him a terrible shock, then she would mess with him for a bit until she was tired of him.

He was standing over a desk, absorbed in two books that lay open side by side before him. Rapidly turning back and forth between them, he flipped through the pages of one, then the other. She sidled up next to him and gave him a jostle.

“Hey.”

To her disappointment there was no shocked jump, but his head snapped up to look at her. She noted with approval that a loose fringe had replaced the questionable slicked-back look.

“Hey,” he replied.

Eyes on her, he rested one hand across both books while the other held a page from each between different fingers.

“No need to lock yourself away up here studying,” Hermione said, “you’re second in our year, you’ve earned some Quidditch mag—”

He tore the pages free with a stomach-turning rip of sound.

“Hey!” she exclaimed with horror and grabbed at the pages in a panic.

They were in an iron grip.

“Are you mad!?” she demanded angrily. “Put them back, we can repair it.”

The pages slowly pulled up and away. She couldn’t pull the other way, or they would tear, and couldn’t let go. So she was drawn forward with them. Until, finding herself a little too close for comfort, she gave up the game.

“It’s impolite to grab things from people.”

“You tore pages from books, it’s a citizen’s arr—a citizen’s deputi—I’m stopping a crime in progress, alright?” she fumbled with a lame joke, attention locked on the pages.

“You failed,” he pointed out, “what now? Going to turn me in?”

“Yes. No. Draco, please!” Seeing the torn-out pages was physically painful.

“You won’t do anything,” he told her, “so what does that make you?”

There was a commotion down on the first floor that interrupted their scuffle. Harry was pulled out of the crowd and thrown together with Mr Lockhart, who squeezed him close. Cameras bathed them in flashing lights.

“And he’ll be lucky enough,” Mr Lockhart said, “along with the rest of his schoolmates, to get to experience the actual magical me, as I’ll be taking up the Defense Against the Dark Arts post this year at Hogwarts!”

The crowd clapped eagerly while Hermione and Draco peered down at them.

“Not a fan?” she guessed from his expression.

“Are you?”

“I suppose so. He’s a great wizard, isn’t he? Quirrell was just terrible. I mean, I feel awful about whatever was wrong with him—but he shouldn’t be teaching. Defense should be sorted out with Mr Lockhart, he knows all of it firsthand.”

“My father says he was the most incompetent wizard he’d ever seen when they were at Hogwarts together.”

“I guess even your father can’t get them all right.”

Draco snorted.

“Harry, Dumbledore, now Mr Lockhart. Any beloved male celebrity you don’t have a problem with?”

“Any that aren’t insufferable frauds. But that’s what the commoners love.”

“How are Harry and—"

He was already turning away. After a step, however, he spun back around and dropped the pages before hurrying down the stairs, leaving her with:

“You owe me one.”

Neither of the books was any sort of finicky magical codex, so the pages went right back into place with a stroke of her wand, good as new, thank God. Hermione noted the books and page numbers he had been looking at. The sound of Draco already arguing with Ron and Harry cut through the voices of the crowd. Discreetly, she headed for the opposite set of stairs.

Mr Malfoy was standing just inside the store’s doorway, watching her as she started down.

He was tall and regal enough to fill the entire store. The snake on his walking stick also watched her, its mouth hanging open ominously. There was nothing else she could possibly look at, but with an effort of will she let her eyes slide past him. She sought safety in the herd, hurrying over to where the boys, now also joined by Ginny, were arguing. The clicking of Mr Malfoy’s walking stick on the floor followed her. When she reached them, he was just a second or two behind her.

There were three of them, Ron, Harry and Ginny, yet Draco seemed to have them encircled. He’d gotten an inch ahead of Ron and Harry in height, and he was leaning forward, voice full of disdain.

“Getting uppity again since—”

Draco was cut off by the metal snake biting his shoulder. And he faded into his father’s background.

“Now, Draco. We mustn’t forget our manners. Especially in front of our young hero, Mr Potter. And… others that we need to set an example for. What a pleasure to meet you all. Lucius Malfoy.”

Mr Malfoy reached out a hand to no one in particular with a polite smile that only touched his lips. His eyes flicked from one person to another before settling on Hermione.

“Miss Granger, wasn’t it?” His outstretched hand made an insistent little movement towards her.

Completely intimidated, she tried to put together solid eye contact and a firm handshake, but she couldn’t have said how it came off, which probably said enough.

“I’ve heard all about you now, the clever little Muggle-born at the top of her year.”

His voice rose and trailed off oddly. He looked obviously over at Draco, then his eyebrows rose slightly and his eyes roamed around at the others with interest. All of them stood there stiffly with no idea how to deal with him.

Mr Malfoy extended his hand towards Harry now. And when Harry didn’t immediately accept the handshake, he suddenly stepped closer, seized Harry’s shoulder and pushed back his hair.

“Forgive me, if you don’t mind…” Mr Malfoy said, all his attention on Harry’s scar. “I have wanted to see, ever since...”

Mr Weasley stepped between Mr Malfoy and Harry, having come over from accompanying Mrs Weasley.

“Something we can help you with, Lucius?” Mr Weasley asked pointedly.

“Oh, I certainly hope not,” Mr Malfoy said with another smile around at all of them. “I merely wanted to introduce myself to all of Draco’s new school friends.”

Mr Weasley’s presence inspired a new dimension of hostility in Mr Malfoy’s demeanor. And it really seemed as if, were every earthly inconvenience out of the way, he might do anything.

“Come along now, Draco,” Mr Malfoy said.

But of course he did nothing, and for the second time she watched as Draco was steered out of Flourish and Blotts by his father.

“It’s going to hurt someone!” Harry shouted back at them urgently.

Hermione ran after Ron and Harry, already panting and out of breath after maybe twenty seconds sprinting through corridors. Completely out of shape, she jogged slower and slower, struggling to keep up.

A burning formed in the back of her throat as she turned another corner after them, somewhere between Filch’s office and where the main stairway near the Great Hall descended to the dungeons.

Hermione came upon a long hallway down to a T-intersection a few seconds behind them. An unnatural scene came into view in pieces around Harry and Ron’s motionless silhouettes as she slowed down and approached the wall of the intersection.

Red on the floor, red on the walls. Huge sloppy red letters slathered on the wall like a finger painting.

THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS HAS BEEN OPENED.

ENEMIES OF THE HEIR, BEWARE.

It was all blood, nailed to the wall was a tiny torn-up rag of skin, blood dripping from the letters, dark clumps of entrails spread everywhere, blood in shallow pools all around, seeping along crevices in the stone. The scene fit uncomfortably into reality, uncomfortably even with itself, childish letters eerie in sagging ichor.

The metal and guts in the air stoked the fire in Hermione’s throat. She turned and stumbled away from the scene, but the smell stuck to her, turned in her lungs. She sank to the ground and retched.

She ended up in Lockhart’s office with Ron, Harry, and just about every professor. It was crowded and hot. She wilted into a chair in the corner, still dizzy. They weren’t allowed to hear anything, but thankfully she only had to nod or shake her head a few times before she was ignored completely.

An hour or two later, back in the Gryffindor common room, they gathered near the fireplace where Hermione started to feel more clear-headed.

“Never seen so much blood,” said Harry, fiddling with his glasses.

“We visited Charlie in Romania over Christmas a few years ago,” Ron said. “He showed me, Fred, and George an operation they had to do on one of the dragons, removing an ingrown scale, must have been gallons of blood pouring out into the grass.”

“Ron, please,” Hermione begged, skin crawling all over again.

“Right, sorry,” Ron said. “I’ve just been thinking of that for the last hour.”

“Why the cat though?” Ron went on. “I mean, it’s awfully dramatic, but it could have just been some upper year who had it out for Filch. Covering it up with nonsense. I mean, practically all of them have it out for him.”

“A bit too grisly a retaliation for a few hours’ detention,” remarked Harry skeptically.

“Well, they add up over the years, don’t they? It’s not too grisly for a Slytherin. You know how fucked up they are. But the Chamber of Secrets, it’s ringing a bell. I’m sure I’ve heard of it before from somewhere. It was… well, I guess I only remember that it was some kind of secret chamber, but I think it was a pureblood thing?”

Hermione massaged her temples.

“There has to be something more to it than revenge for detentions,” said Hermione, “because of the voice Harry heard. And it’s so pointed, how does covering it up like that even make sense? They’re just drawing more attention to it.”

“Not really,” Ron disagreed, “as far as the voice goes, there are all sorts of weird magical abilities. He hasn’t heard the voice before, but we’re at the age when those sorts of abilities first show up. It doesn't prove there's something bigger going on. As for the heir stuff, well, they’re full on mad doing that to a cat, why wouldn’t they toss in some pureblood nonsense?”

They both turned to Harry.

“Well, at least I’m not just going insane,” Harry said, “seeing as the voice led me to something.”

“Silver linings,” Ron observed.

Hermione stood up. She couldn’t go to bed this clueless.

“I’m going to the library,” she told them. “There are a few different history books that might mention it and I want to get started tonight.”

“Tonight? It’s too late for—Curfew’s in thirty!” Ron called, making her hurry away quicker.

At the front desk a pair of older Ravenclaw boys were checking out with Madam Pince. Feeling Madam Pince’s eyes on her as she passed by, Hermione traded an apologetic smile for a tight frown. The library was an unwelcoming dark, but as she passed through the vacant stacks, clear floating orbs lit slowly in response to her intrusion.

As she neared the history section, some already lit lights and brazen voices surprised her, a last group of students carelessly overstaying their welcome.

“Filch was so weird about that cat.” Pansy’s voice.

“Not really.” Theo now? Hermione hadn’t heard him talk much. “That’s how people are with pets, and he doesn’t have any friends, so.” But he did have a distinctive, very low-pitched voice. It was Theo.

Hermione took the long way around to avoid running into them.

“Okay?” Pansy said, sounding annoyed. “That’s why he was weird about it, but he was still weird about it, you don’t have to argue about everything. I wonder if it was a magical cat.”

“It was magical,” Theo said, “always stalking around after people, giving weird looks.”

“Regular cats give weird looks too, Theo,” Pansy argued snidely.

Reaching her desired row, Hermione started a quick, skimming search for the key titles she had in mind.

“I get it,” Theo said with exasperation. “But it was obviously magical. Pretty sure that’s how Filch found us when Draco was thrashing Potter last year.”

“What do you think, Draco?” Pansy asked.

“Well, the heir killed it, so must have been a Mudblood cat,” said Draco.

Pansy and Theo snickered. Hermione paused with her finger between the red backs of Pre-Modern History: Volume 1 and Volume 2.

“Is that a thing?” Pansy asked.

“Of course,” Draco said. “Probably why it was such a bitch.”

Books and papers shuffled as they started to pack up.

“I still can’t believe you let me miss your duel with Potter,” Pansy whined. “You’ve really changed.”

“We told you it was hardly a duel, more like target practice,” Theo said.

“That’s even better.”

“Let you miss months of detention with those freaks, though Theo managed to give them the slip anyway,” Draco said. “Hagrid as well. Mutts, Mudbloods, and blood traitors. A certifiable zoo.”

“You let me miss the zoo too?!”

Some chuckling as chairs scraped back.

“You coming?” Theo asked.

“No, I’ll be a couple minutes,” Draco said, “going to finish this so I don’t have to check it out.”

“Bye Draco!”

And that was what you got for slinking around to try and avoid a little awkwardness.

She leaned back against a solid wood bookshelf, considering the infinite gentleness and sophistication and superiority of her own leather-bound friends. They were, in a word, more than reliable and reciprocal.

Abandoning the idea of researching anything tonight, she turned to leave. Draco’s hard face loomed at the end of the row.

“You know,” he said, stalking forward, “good girls don’t eavesdrop.”

In the few remaining stray lights hovering around them, the fog that had been drifting over her eyes lifted, and she could see how long the way between them was. Blocking the way and staring at her, he waited for something, so challenging, so defiant.

She stared back.

A moment passed. Then she walked past his guarded gaze, right up next to him, and pressed her lips against his cold cheek. He shrank back. She hurried past and off to her room, leaving him holding his cheek.

The next day after class, she headed back to the library to get started on the research. She picked out the books she had failed to collect yesterday, but over the day she had formed a more specific idea of where she might find answers. Hogwarts: A History, the same 7th edition she owned, with its scarce oblique remarks on the chamber, was here too. She headed to the archival floor.

Downstairs the air was more settled. There were two lines of empty carrels and a wall of even emptier study rooms sealed with heavy doors. The archive itself was behind a wall of glass; out past it there were countless rows of documents and books. You could just barely make out the opposing walls, but if you peered down the bottom was out of sight, shelves sinking below endlessly. Above, too, it might have gone on forever, the gradient of light suggesting and disguising the ceiling. Here, alone, the archives felt like another forest for her to watch over.

Camping with her parents at ten, creeping out without a thought before dawn, wandering through the trees then scrambling up a boulder to overlook her new domain. All the animals hidden away below a canopy of trees and her above it. Her trees had marched down the river valley towards a messy open line above the water and then climbed back out the other side as more subdued brush and shrubbery. And her mind was clear. It was meditative like that here.

Her parents’ panicked shouts had brought her back to life. She had an odd idea as their fright echoed into her, in harsh contradiction with her moment of freedom, that physical laws and limits applied to emotions too. Nothing could be produced, only received, borrowed, stolen, given.

On the archive log she wrote her request: “Hogwarts: A History, editions 1–6.”

Some mysterious knocking sounds from the forest replied.

Pages flipped over and tore themselves out to fly into the air and slide through the service slot. In that cleaner world, they folded themselves into intricate paper planes, each with its own character: a sleek bomber, an old two-seat Spitfire, a modern fighter jet. They sailed off together into the valleys, one after the other dipping out of sight and towards the depths of the archive. The bomber dragged a little, producing a shuffling noise.

“Hermione.”

Hermione twitched forward and bumped her head against the glass. She turned to glare at the intruder.

“I tried everything,” Draco said.

How awful it was to see him. To think again of blood and guts and him laughing with his awful friends.

“You. What are you doing here?”

“Can’t I be? I’m here all the time. You know that.”

She did.

“Not down here.”

“I followed you. Looking for something?”

“Obviously.”

“And is what you’re looking for obvious too? You should leave well enough alone.”

“Maybe you should leave well enough alone.”

The little planes flew back now, each lugging along a book beneath it. They dropped the books off into a tray, and then dove to their graves in a wicker basket. Hermione pulled the tray’s handle, and it slid to her side of the glass wall.

She handled the 3rd edition lovingly, but it hadn’t a word about the chamber. The 4th had more than her own 7th, but the clues were gone again in the 5th, before being sprinkled back into strange places throughout the 6th. There wasn’t any clear pattern to it. With all of them open side by side, the 4th edition was certainly the most useful. Setting the others aside, she read through the relevant passages carefully thrice over.

She turned to look at Draco. He had no interest in the books and was considering her instead.

“Already know all of it then?”

“Of course,” he answered with a smile.

“Pleased, are you?”

“Of course,” he repeated. “But you’re surprised,” he added.

“Shouldn’t I be? I thought…”

His eyes flashed around scornfully at her array of books, then settled back on her.

“You’re very naive,” he said.

He held up a finger with an undefinable expression.

“Sorry to disappoint, but it’s just me.”

“So that’s it then?” she asked.

“That’s what then? You can’t say I’ve been dishonest; it’s just the opposite. And it’s all just politics really.”

Draco shrugged off ‘just politics’ boredly. He gave a little start, paused for a moment, and hopped up to sit on a desk.

“There’s something different about your hair today.”

There wasn’t. She grimaced.

“Just politics? Ripping out a cat’s guts and writing a message in its blood to terrorize a school full of children?”

“It’s not art, I’ll admit. That’s politics for you, it has to be crude. Don’t act so superior, don’t pretend Muggles keep it squeaky clean, I know that’s not true. Not that it matters. And anyway, it’s probably not even politics. There are more students with grudges and… abnormal dispositions than there are heirs of Slytherin. If there are even any at all.”

This thought distracted him, and he continued more to himself than to her, conscious of her disinterest.

“It’s such a shame, all of the founders, the greatest wizards after Merlin and the Dark Lord, bloodlines all lost.”

She bypassed his ruminations on lost blood treasure.

“I never said Muggles are any better. It would be wrong no matter who does it, and it doesn’t have to be like that, it isn’t always like that, for Muggles or wizards. People have to be better than that, no matter what the politics are. They have to try to be good.

“You don’t know anything about wizarding politics,” he informed her dismissively. “You didn’t even know magic existed two years ago.”

It took discipline not to ignore everything that came after that.

“I told you about it already. They’re making everything worse, more Muggle. Every year the Ministry shuffles another batch of books, artifacts, and rituals from the restricted list to the forbidden one. And then those spots on the restricted lists are filled out by the review board. At Hogwarts material goes from the curriculum to the library to the restricted section, it’s all destined for the Ministry’s vaults if they get their way. They’ve got a pipeline, pumping all the magic out. Until the only thing that’s left will be housekeeping spells, then there won’t be any need for magic at all, we can all just become Muggles, put away our wands and use dishwashers and hit baseballs instead.”

He finished excitedly, having worked his way into a rhythm. “Dishwashers” and “baseballs” came out with a note of restrained pride and a triumphant glance, throwing her into a moment of futile contemplation on the possible significance of baseball.

“That doesn’t justify anything, Draco. Not the cruelty or the bigotry. It’s just pathetic, hundreds of years later still clinging to your lost cause and trying to keep us out of Hogwarts.”

“Lost cause,” he said with disgust. “There’s no such thing as a lost cause. We’re still here, aren’t we? Because we’re stronger, purer. We believe more. That’s why we’ll win.”

He fumbled with his bag feverishly and took out an old book with an intricate M on it. He slowed down for a second before plowing on, seeming much younger. An expansive, endless map of sharp lines and names unfolded in page after page. There was still more of it when he stopped and pointed proudly at an intersection of lines where one of the names was ‘Edith Malfoy (line of Merlin).’

“See?” He looked up at her with intense earnesty.

“It’s… interesting. Nice.” Far too short of his emotion, but she didn’t know what else to do with this abrupt detour.

Apparently it satisfied him though, and he cautiously folded it all back up.

“Purity always conquers. You don’t know them, those despicable Ministry men my father has to pretend to like, has to have dinner with and laugh about our ‘old’ pureblood ideas with. They’re corrupt and stupid and old. They’re the ones with old used-up ideas, ours are true, from Merlin and the founders, and they’ll be new again. You’ll understand it more once you’re older, you haven’t seen anything in the wizarding world outside of Hogwarts.”

“You’re 13, don’t—”

“14. October 2nd.”

“—don’t patronize me. Anyway, I’m not naive or clueless. I’ve read about all your type’s policy ideas, not that anyone should have to bother, seeing as your father and the rest of your type all supported Voldemo—”

And Draco was upon her. Leaped off the desk and clamped his hand over her mouth, muffling her partway through “Voldemort.”

“Don’t say his name.”

The low lights inside the archive stacks had gone out minutes ago. Faint blocks of shadow that had broken up the room were nowhere to be found. And even when she turned away from his eyes and cheeks, in the windows which reflected them like mirrors now, she saw how close they were, and how alone. Buried underground, everything quiet as a tomb but for their breathing. She pushed him away.

“Superstitious coward. I read a piece about it in the Prophet that Dumbledore contributed—”

“Don’t believe everything you read.”

“He’s dead, Draco.”

His face was a little blank for a moment.

“Such pathetic drivel… too late they’ve realized it was all just superstition. I wonder. Did you read any of their pieces about his impossible feats? About his particular interest, his obsession, Hermione, with life and death, with immortality. Did you read that when he died, by a strange accident of magic, he left no body. Did you read it? In the Prophet?” At this point his voice was a quiet breath. “That they whisper here and there. About the signs they’ve seen, about how his magic is clinging on, too loud to be an echo and louder every year.”

“My father,” he started loudly, “doesn’t care about anyone. No one concerns him, and he always gets his way. But when he talks about the Dark Lord, he is afraid of him.” Emphatically, urgently, as if she might not believe his father capable of fear, but also quiet again, telling her a secret again. “Not was afraid. Is.”

“And my aunt, she—” Draco struggled for a moment and glared at her.

He didn’t finish the thought.

“The Dark Lord, he’s not just—you don’t understand anything yet. Don’t say his name,” Draco repeated and repeated.

“And my father was cleared of everything,” he added. “He was under the Imperius.”

Hermione snorted at his last remark. She packed up and set aside the rest of what he had said about Voldemort, unable to properly grapple with it tonight and unwilling to believe it.

“You’d get along with him actually,” he said inanely and she ignored him.

Draco was still too close for such a large empty room. The time gave her a little tap on the shoulder. It occurred to her that curfew had somehow passed them by without Madam Pince coming to clear them out and hand over a pair of detentions. Above them the library was deserted, and but for a few patrolling prefects and professors so were the castle halls. Absent Draco, trying to camp out down here would probably have been safer compared to chancing the way back to the common room. Might still be.

The image of Madam Pince’s critical gaze upon her as she crept out of the library in the morning floated to mind. Oh God, she thought with terror as a new perspective hit her. Draco was also here. How could Madam Pince not see some connection in it? She might think anything, might already be thinking it over a late-night snack, about the two students who had slipped her mind when closing up for the night—and then if she saw them leave in the morning…

“And about your hair, I figured out what’s different: it’s a complete mess.”

Her reflection in the glass failed to contradict him; her hair was frazzled and immodestly voluminous.

“But I like it.” He reached out, as if to touch her hair, but failed to cross the distance. His fingers traced the air, still gentle, in reverence of nothing.

In every contradiction he had still followed her down here to make his excuses, and had left her just enough of a way through if she was foolish enough to take it. And apparently she was, because in spite of everything she didn’t hate his awkward flirting. Though with her head full of embarrassed thoughts about the morning after, he would have to go it alone while she stood by.

And he did. He had read more of ‘her’ Arthurian legends on his own. Had he liked them? He had, but not as much as the ones she had read to him. Was she interested in wizarding folklore? Of course she was. Well, he said, don’t get started on them without me. The stories he told her that night were the Malfoy folklore of that past summer, from the Lombardy Alps to low valleys in Lunigiana to rationales for low Muggle-born representation on the Wizengamot.

He wanted to know if she had taken on any new magical projects over the summer. Shy after his mixed reaction to the picnic basket, she refused to talk about it. He told her not to be shy. She clarified that she was, in fact, not shy at all; he was just too crass and childish to discuss such things with. Then she went ahead and told him about the improvements she had made to the basket and the other tricks of spatial magic she had been working on. Naive little boys like him who didn’t know how to protect their things were, she informed him as she plucked a plain silver ring out of the little magpie’s robes, completely at her (who better understood the plights of mistreated magical creatures) mercy. His bag foiled her. He insisted she keep the ring and she slid it on with a blush.

He settled into the more particular politics that they returned to with greater comfort than in his initial excitement, and for all his wrongness he put on a good show of it. He was admittedly better prepared than her, had carefully built up each case in his mind, accompanied by studies or statistics, some interesting, others trite and performative. Grand, sweeping nonsense about pipelines of magic and which ideas were ‘old’ and which were ‘new’ behind them, it was her turn to be the one getting heated up. He was good at backing off enough to let her fizzle out, always managing to defuse the conversation back into a safer register.

But as that wayward time stretched on, those things faded into the background for Hermione. Most of what he said or didn’t say about Muggle-borns or purebloods was, to her shame, later half-forgotten, made into lost details of the night, insignificant as the number of study room doors that had been left ajar, lost like shots of white in the black and blue waves of a storming El Greco horizon. What she remembered instead were the personal anecdotes he produced in service of those lost points, castles and green countrysides he had stamped across during that North Italian summer (yes, those crumbling vistas of elusive turquoise lakes supposedly had some profound political salience); the winding black ink and parchment that charted his heart; which passages from Hogwarts: A History they had flipped through and compared across editions; curves of his gaunt face as the waning hours pulled beneath his eyes; the cool touch of the first ring she had worn. Each of the frivolous comments that he returned to in flirtation, with a waxing boldness that inched a little closer, reached a little farther. Held back by a certain line. A shyness of their shared youth that, at least for that night, stretched between them insurmountably, but also forced them together. Another hour would drip-drip by, tap-tapping at her shoulder. They would be uncertain, but would find no way or desire to excuse themselves. Then another fragment of conversation would fall to them. An errant step would slip fortuitously back to the true path. And everything would be alchemized again into gold and immortality. That was all it later became in her mind, a discontinuous moment apart from the stream of memory, wherein lay a stirring multiplicity of possibility.

That was all it could be, an idea she ruminated on. For as suddenly as he imposed himself, he retreated to an opaque distance. In the days that followed he made of himself an idle thought that rarely took its own possession, and so was instead toyed with as she wished.

Chapter Text

An ill omen still hung over the castle as the seasons changed. A scent Hermione could almost smell if only she breathed deeply enough. Like the better part of Mrs. Norris’s blood had seeped into the stone instead of being scrubbed out. Everyone tried to hurry past it. For Hermione, Ron, and Harry, it was lingering more stubbornly. The voice haunted Harry through the school. Hermione could see it on his face, eyes distracted by corridor walls. And he disclosed those ‘sightings’ far less often than he seemed to experience them.

But those few weeks passed slowly, and so when the cold days of November marched over the grounds and through the draftier halls, a mood of normalcy started to reassert itself. The process was complete with the arrival of the first Quidditch match of the year, a grudge match between Gryffindor and Slytherin.

Ron, Seamus, and Dean crowded around Harry at the breakfast table. Eager to indirectly participate, they piled food onto his plate, mixing conflicting and nonsensical pregame consumption advice with Quidditch tactics talk. It was an intimate atmosphere. Harry relaxed around Quidditch more than anywhere else. Finally the center of attention for his own merit, he shed some of his timidity for the confidence of competence and enjoyed the admiration of his peers.

Hermione was happy for him.

After breakfast she walked down the grounds with the boys. Taking a last round of ‘good luck’s, Harry broke off from them at the Quidditch pitch and headed for the locker rooms while they climbed into the stands. Ron started for some higher seats, but Hermione had spotted Parvati and Lavender together in the very front row. Buoyed by the mood and momentum of the day, Hermione decided now was a good time to play at matchmaker. With a sharp turn, she grabbed Ron and led him over to them. Parvati smirked and Lavender smiled with a nervous giggle.

There was enthusiastic chattering all around them. A short way down the row was a group with a huge red and gold banner at the ready. Way at the top of the stands was a quartet with drums, one of whom was already sporadically riffing out a few beats. All the seventh-years seemed to be clustered together. Hermione could make out a brown bag they were passing around indiscreetly, some of them already moving with a drunken clumsiness. They happily broke out into a loud rendition of the Hogwarts anthem that indulged in a few extra vulgar thoughts on the relative merits of Slytherin and Gryffindor.

Ron looked to be casting about desperately for something to say, but evidently he couldn’t get the words started. Perhaps unsure how, or if, to shift gears from the hour of Quidditch talk with the boys he was coming off of.

“Did you know Lav’s terrified of Quidditch?” Hermione asked.

“She is? I guess I knew she didn’t like flying.”

“She is,” confirmed Parvati. “I practically had to drag her out.”

“I’m not that scared of it,” Lavender protested. “I just have loads of homework.”

“She worries about everyone’s safety,” Hermione said, “the players, the fans, everyone.”

“It used to be more dangerous, but nowadays…”

Ron went on in some detail. Hermione decided to steer in a more personal direction.

“He’s got a mind for the game, doesn’t he?” She found a moment to interrupt. “Tactics as well, that sort of thing. He’s got his eye on Keeper after Wood graduates.”

“Ah, you’ve got to have a good opening as well, I suppose,” said Parvati, “to get in as early as Harry.”

“Right,” Ron agreed excitedly, “but it really shouldn’t have even been an opening. I mean there’s never been a first-year Seeker before, you have to be a prodigy to make it even as a second year. And he hadn’t seen a broom before Hogwarts! He could make the national team in a few years!”

Hermione was impressed by his pure, untainted excitement for Harry.

“So what was that homework, Lav—Potions again?” Hermione asked.

“Is it always?” Lavender said.

“Seems to be.”

“I don’t know how you and Parvati manage that nightmare,” Lavender said with sudden emotion. “That dreadful dungeon, dreadful classroom, dreadful dreadful man.”

“And the Slytherins,” added Ron. “Of course it’s with the Slytherins.”

As they complained to each other, Parvati raised her eyebrows and hands to Hermione, silently clapping. And Hermione fancied herself a regular Cupid.

The tunnel the team entered the pitch from was just a few meters away from their seats in the front row. The Gryffindors were announced one by one and walked out to rivaling cheers and boos. Having worked themselves into the mood, Ron and Lavender were leading the charge. Parvati and Hermione shared a look of vague indulgence as they participated dutifully.

The Slytherins came out, bringing a surprise as Lee Jordan announced the Slytherin Seeker:

“DRACO MALFOY!”

One of the louder reactions from the crowd. Lavender followed Ron’s lead as his boos became personal and he vigorously gestured with two thumbs down.

“Oh no—he’s so good looking,” Parvati said quietly. “Sorry, Hermione, but he is!”

Draco glowed with the attention. He dramatically blew a kiss to the cheering Slytherins and then another to the booing Gryffindors, or—maybe—at her.

“Was he just looking this way? Was he?” Parvati asked eagerly. “Sorry, sorry,” she appended.

“MY GOD ARE THOSE NIMBUS 2001s!?” shouted Lee Jordan.

Everyone’s attention was drawn to the shiny new brooms the Slytherins were holding as the teams lined up across from each other. They were just close enough to overhear.

“A gift from Draco’s father,” Marcus Flint said with a smile as he shook Oliver Wood’s hand.

The rest of the players stared at their counterparts with their hands by their sides, except for Draco, who conspicuously extended his hand into empty space. Harry frowned in reply.

“What’s wrong, Potter?” Draco asked loud enough for the rest of the crowd to hear. “Parents didn’t teach you any manners?”

The Slytherins oohed and the Gryffindors yelled in outrage. Once they had quieted down, Hermione hung her silver-ringed hand into the pitch, shouted out:

“At least Harry didn’t have to buy his way onto the team!”

The Gryffindor stands roared with laughter and a few more scattered insults were piled on and Ron clapped her on the back like she was Harry. Draco looked at her. Hermione pulled her Gryffindor scarf off and handed it to Lavender who absentmindedly doubled up.

Both teams rose into the air to take their positions. Madam Hooch asked routinely for a nice clean match while all the players smirked.

About half a minute after the whistle blew, Katie Bell gave things an appalling kick-off. Marked by a Slytherin Chaser, she suddenly reeled back and hurled the Quaffle directly into the Slytherin girl’s face, shattering her nose and sending her toppling from her broom. What followed must have been exactly the type of violent affair Lavender associated with Quidditch. More war than art, and more waiting than game, with endless stoppages for penalties and injuries.

All this only fed the furor of the crowd, but Hermione found it profoundly unpleasant. Lavender was clearly putting on a brave face as she went along with Ron’s antics. Hermione turned her attention from the rest of the game, joining Parvati in spectating Harry and Draco instead. They were a relief in their detachment from the main ugly spectacle, soaring above the rest of play, sometimes swerving around a Bludger, during the frequent breaks still peering up at the sky in search of a flicker of gold.

“It suits him, right?” Hermione asked Parvati. “You really don’t have to mind.”

“It still feels a little wrong to go on about him. But yeah, it does. The fit is just right, even the broom is custom sized.”

Parvati clicked her tongue. “He looks like money.”

She said it a little disdainfully. Yes, that’s what it was, he looked like a princeling dressed up by a fretful old valet. Expectation peering out of his eyes, waiting to get what he wanted. A refreshing sprinkle of rain was falling to them now and Hermione chuckled into it.

“I think that’s just from him looking down his nose.”

“I’m talking to a boy in Ravenclaw, you know. I meant it back when I said I wouldn’t actually date Malfoy—you can’t take anything Lav says seriously.”

This relieved Hermione and she could feel some squeamishness coming undone, but it also gave her pause.

“You said you didn’t mind,” Parvati reminded her, “and don’t make that face, we’re only talking. I’m still allowed to think Draco’s fit.”

“Oh God”—Hermione covered her face in horror—“am I really that easy to read?”

“Like a book.”

She took Hermione into an affectionate half hug.

The crowd blew up around them.

“Look, look, they’ve found it!” She pulled Hermione’s hands and pointed. Draco and Harry were right next to each other, jostling for position and elbowing viciously. The ugliness of the game had caught up to them. Soaring up side by side, right before they went out of sight into a cloud, they apexed and swooped back down towards the ground. Arms were outstretched and then retracted to pull on jerseys and shove at faces. They leveled out and skimmed along the grass, then one of them caught on something and they were launched from their brooms as one, tumbling violently out over the field in a tangled heap of bodies.

The crowd was silent with anticipation; everyone stood to try and get a better look. Both teams flew down and landed around Draco and Harry. They were still wrestling with each other over the Snitch when Madam Hooch seized their shoulders and pulled them apart.

“Harry’s got it!” she announced.

Hermione was swept along as the Gryffindor crowd stormed the field in celebration. She caught sight of Draco furiously snapping his broom over his knee—took the two pieces over his knee again to make it four. Meanwhile, Harry was hoisted up by Fred and George like a king and carried back to the common room at the center of the mob.

That night, as they celebrated, a Prefect found the first-year Colin Creevey petrified. And in early December Justin Finch-Fletchley and Nearly Headless Nick were added to the list of victims.