Hermione Granger and The Boy-Who-Lived

Next Morning.

Friday, Sept. 13


“Relax, Hermione. It was one class.”

Hermione looked at her best friend like he had lost his marbles. “One class!? One class!? Harry, we missed Astronomy! We’re going to get punished for this, maybe even expelled.”

“We’re not going to be expelled for missing a class, Hermione,” the boy argued.

“Yes, we will,” she countered, her voice getting shriller by the minute and her eyes wetter. “Don’t you see, Harry? We’re going to be expelled, and then what will we do? Our lives will be over.”

“Over?”

“Yes, over. They’ll snap our wands, Harry. We won’t be able to learn magic anymore. We’ll—”

Harry grabbed her shoulders firmly but not harshly. “Hermione,” he said, making her look at him, “you’re right, missing a class is an unforgivable offense and we should not make a habit of it, but you really need to calm down.

“We’re not going to get expelled, you know this. Maybe we’ll get detention, but that’s about it. Now, please, stop worrying.”

It wasn’t easy, but Hermione forced herself to take a breath. She wasn’t helping right now. Besides, maybe Harry was right, maybe they wouldn’t get expelled. And even if they were (oh, God, she really hoped they weren’t) her panic wasn’t helping anybody. Not herself, and certainly not Harry.

Even so. “This is the second class we’ve skipped, Harry. School hasn’t even been in session for two weeks.”

Harry frowned. “Second class? What second class?”

“Potions. Last Friday.” How could he not remember?

“What? That’s different. Snape kicked us out, remember? It’s extended circumstances.”

“Extenuating circumstances, Harry.”

“What you said. The point is, it doesn’t count. And we both know last night only happened because of all the running around we’ve been doing. Now, seriously, please, calm down, because you’re starting to worry me a little bit.”

“Okay,” Hermione said finally, and Harry let out a breath of relief.

“Good,” the boy said. “Now, you’ve been eyeing that bookshelf since last night, so why don’t you go and look through it while I make us breakfast? What do you say?”

Hermione could not have refused that offer even if she wanted to.

As the girl went to the bookshelf, walking past Hedwig, who was still fast asleep, or at least looked to be, on her plush, vibrating pillow, she tried to push away all thoughts of being labelled a truant for the rest of her natural life. Her natural, uneducated life, that is, since no school would ever take her again; she would grow up to be unemployed and a layabout, probably drinking all day while living with her parents like that boy, Rudolph, down the street.

Hermione tried harder to expel the thoughts as her eyes scanned the titles on Harry’s shelf.

To Hermione’s surprise, now that she’d gotten a clear look at the books, she found that many of them were actually works of fiction unlike she’d thought.

“Harry,” she called, “most of these are novels.”

“Hmm? Oh, yeah. I mean, I was going to be living on my own without the internet for the foreseeable future, I figured those were the next best thing.”

Oh, right. Harry had planned to run away. That’s why he’d bought all of this.

As Hermione scanned the shelf some more, her eyes caught a promising title; The Magic of the Orients, by a witch named Helen Manchester.

Curiously, she pulled it out and scanned through a few pages, and within a few minutes, she’d parked herself on the sofa with the book in hand.

It was full of fascinating information. Within just the introductory pages, Hermione had learnt that, unlike in Europe, where the use of wands had been adopted across the continent, many other parts of the world were not so unified in their practice of magic.

The book also touched lightly on the subject of geography, mentioning that, once again, unlike in Europe and North America, where it was the custom for magical societies to match the borders of their respective countries, most places, specifically Asia, Africa, and South America, didn’t even recognize muggle borders, creating their own instead.

As Hermione read, Harry put on some soulful music on a low volume. He sang along with the songs he knew (which were more than Hermione would have thought), and hummed along with the ones he didn’t.

Harry had a nice singing voice, and even though Hermione had heard him sing many times before without feeling more than a little impressed, for some reason, sitting here on this comfy sofa, in this little house, reading as he made her breakfast, made it feel... more, somehow, and before she knew it, she was watching him, the book forgotten on her lap.

At some point, Harry looked at her, maybe to check on her or maybe because he felt her eyes on him, whatever his reason for looking up, their eyes met, and he stopped singing as he looked at her in mild confusion.

“What?”

Hermione blinked. Oh, right, she was staring.

“Um, you like to cook,” she said lamely, picking the first thing that came to mind.

Harry frowned in thought. “Yeah, I guess I do,” he said, then reconsidered: “Or maybe I just like cooking for you. I definitely didn’t enjoy doing it for the Dursleys.”

“Did they make you cook a lot?” Hermione asked.

“Yeah. Every breakfast and some dinners,” Harry said.

A memory came to Hermione then, one of the ones she’d picked up from Harry’s mind in their last occlumency session; it was of him sitting at the dinner table with the Dursleys, a single piece of dry toast on his plate, as he watched the Dursleys, especially Vernon and Dudley, gorge themselves on the meal he’d spent hours preparing.

Hermione’s mood soured.

She could see that Harry’s had too, so she quickly thought of something else to talk about, and being herself, the first thing that came to mind as a diversion was a book; namely the one she’d been reading before Harry’s singing distracted her.

Fortunately, Harry didn’t mind talking about the very fascinating magical disciplines of the wizards of East Asia.

They ate together when the meal was done, Hedwig pulling herself out of her pillow to come and eat with them, and returning right after.

Hermione meanwhile, went back to her book, and though Harry joined her at first, he soon gave up and sat back quietly as she read.

It was almost an hour later, as she read a passage about a small and very reclusive magical village in Japan, where they used musical instruments to control their magic, that Harry finally spoke.

“Good thing we use wands,” he said idly.

“What?” Hermione looked at him. Had she missed something he said?

“I said ‘good thing we use wands’. I’ve never seen a musical instrument I could play in my life. Both old and new, I think.”

“You were reading along?” Hermione asked in surprise.

“Kind of. You read aloud under your breath when you get really interested in a book.”

“Oh.” She thought she’d broken that habit. “Sorry.”

“No, I like it. Reading gets tiresome sometimes. Actually, I think I prefer listening to you.”

“Oh,” Hermione said again. Very well then, if he didn’t mind.

She tried to go back to her reading, but everything was different now. Knowing that Harry was listening, she suddenly felt self-conscious. Was her voice too low? Was it too high? Did it really just waver, or was that her imagination?

With how much concentration Hermione was paying to her voice and pitch, she inevitably missed a word on the page and had to go back and reread it. Then the sentence. Then the paragraph.

Before she could finish the paragraph for the second time, Harry asked, “we skipped the last two days of occlumency practice, right?” And Hermione was only too happy to jump on that.

★★★​

“Legilimens,” Hermione cast, staring into Harry’s eyes.

The spell worked, a connection formed, but all the girl got were murky impressions of thought and emotion; Harry had successfully resisted the spell.

Well, more accurately, he had resisted the initial attack, now he would need to hold out as Hermione laid siege to his mind.

There are two major ways to shield a mind from a legilimen, the first is to mask the emotional pull of all of one’s memories, leaving the legilimen with nothing to connect to.

It is the most effective method, but also the hardest, and it was the one both Hermione and Harry practiced.

Hermione practiced it because she wanted to challenge herself, and because she thought that it would be safer to stick with the most effective method considering who their enemies were, Harry meanwhile, well Harry practiced the first one for the same reason too, although Hermione heavily suspected that his determination to keep her from seeing any of his memories also played a big role in the decision.

The second and easier method, is to feed trivial memories at the invading legilimen. If done right, this could suck them down a rabbit hole, pulling them away from their intended target like (Harry’s words) someone getting distracted by TikTok while trying to do internet research.

The problem with it was that while it worked well enough, it required a battle of wills between the occlumen and the person trying to invade their mind. A battle of wills that was heavily dependent on skill.

Of course, while the first method was much safer, it, as said before, requires much more skill to perform correctly; and neither of them were anywhere near that skill level yet.

Hermione sensed the vague, poorly concealed memories of Harry’s mind flow and ebb around her, but she refrained from trying to access them; patience and cunning were the keys to success in this.

Not that she was seeing as much success as she would have preferred so far.

See, at some point, Hermione couldn’t really remember when, she and Harry had turned their practice into a game and begun to keep score, and they were currently tied at 5-5. Hermione really wanted a landslide victory.

“You really should just give up now, Harry,” Hermione said, trying to sound nonchalant as she looked the boy in the eyes. “We both know I’ll win anyway.”

Harry simply gave her a confident little smirk that just about drove the girl spare. “Two minutes on the clock, Miss Granger,” he said. “Tick tock.”

For the purposes of the game, they’d decided that each of them only got two minutes to try to breach the other’s defenses.

Hermione sniffed at the boy’s words, then said imperiously: “Please, Harry, two minutes is too much time to break through your pitiful defense.”

Harry’s response was a raised eyebrow. “Is that right?” he asked.

“Of course. All I need is—” and she dived him.

Harry never saw it coming.

She knocked him down, holding him down with her weight as, with mischievous glee, the tickling started. Harry broke in seconds.

Got you, Hermione thought, as Harry’s mental defenses came down like a Jenga tower.

Hermione went for the brightest memory within her metaphorical reach, not bothering to try to gauge what it might contain, and suddenly, she found herself in a room.

It’s surroundings were murky, like they were looked at through a milky fog, leaving everything from the walls, to the floor, to the bed vague. The only things in clear detail were the boy on the bed, and the woman tickling him.

The boy was Harry as Hermione knew him, laughing and struggling to escape the woman’s grasp.

The woman was beautiful, with long, red hair and Harry’s eyes. She was laughing too as she tickled him, and they both looked so happy.

The memory vanished, and Hermione blinked in slight disorientation as she suddenly found herself looking down at Harry’s face back in the tent. He looked sad.

“Was that...” she couldn’t bring herself to finish the question.

“My mom, yes.”

Hermione frowned. How could that be? Harry’s mom died when he was a baby; he looked as he did now in that memory.

“It’s from before,” Harry said, seeing her confusion. “It’s one of the few scraps of those memories I have left. But because I don’t remember anyone’s faces from that life, it’s like my brain tries to... fix things by patching them with the people I remember from this life.”

Harry sighed tiredly; he looked like he didn’t even have the energy to be sad or angry anymore.

“I’m sorry for everything you’ve gone through, Harry,” Hermione said, and the boy gave her a small smile.

“It’s not all bad,” he said, staring at her.

Neither tween was really feeling like practicing The Mind Arts after that, so they just sat and whiled away time idly for a bit.

Eventually, unable to help herself, Hermione picked The Magic of the Orients again, and this time, even though she knew Harry was listening to her read, it didn’t really bother her.

If anything, she found that she rather liked it.

 

Same Morning.

Friday, Sept. 13


Harry hadn’t been lying about his bathroom when he’d said it was kickass, and even though Hermione didn’t appreciate his language, she did have to admit that the bathroom was quite impressive. Especially when one took into account the fact that all of this was in a tiny tent sitting in The Forbidden Forest.

She enjoyed a long soak in the nearly pool-sized bathtub, then donned her magically cleaned clothes. After that, she brushed her teeth with one of Harry’s spare (unused) toothbrushes, then scowled through the required quarter-hour it took to beat her hair down from struck-by-lightning messy to just-enough-to-go-out-in-public messy, before exiting the bathroom.

Harry was waiting for her in the palour. Well, actually he was trying to convince Hedwig to get up from her pillow, but the owl didn’t seem to care very much about what Harry had to say.

“She still won’t get up?” Hermione asked in surprise. They’d both been at this since before she went into the bathroom.

“Oh, you’re done?” Harry asked, and when Hermione nodded, he said to Hedwig: “There, Hedwig, you see? Hermione’s done. Now get off that pillow or else I’ll collapse the tent with you still inside.”

The owl, completely unfazed by the threat, simply snuggled deeper into the ever vibrating pillow.

According to Harry, he’d bought that pillow for himself, but Hedwig had lain on it once and summarily claimed it as hers. It was so bad that Harry got pecked whenever he tried to touch it.

“What would happen if you collapse the tent with her in it?” Hermione asked curiously.

“Oh, nothing. She just won’t be able to leave,” Harry said, before frowning at the owl in suspicion. “But you would probably love that, wouldn’t you?”

Hermione looked at her watch, it was 11:05 a.m. Lunch was already five minutes in, and Potions class began in less than an hour.

After missing Astronomy the night before, Hermione had no intention of missing any more classes. Even if it was Potions.

Walking forward, she knelt beside Hedwig.

“Hedwig, we have to go now,” Hermione said gently, “or we might be late to Potions. And you know what Snape might do if we’re late to his class.”

Hedwig popped an eye open at Hermione’s words, and the girl felt a spark of hope.

“I know,” Hermione said excitedly, as she got an idea, “why don’t Harry and I make you something nice to put the pillow on? That way you’ll be able to use it even in the dorms if we set it up next to Harry’s bed.”

Hedwig’s other eye opened as she seemed to give that offer a long, hard think.

Right as it seemed like she was about to come to a decision, however, Harry said, “Oh, just take the offer already, you bloody diva.”

Hermione sighed, and it had been going so well too.

On the bright side, Hedwig left the pillow.

★★★​

The closer they got to the castle, the more Hermione’s worry over the inevitable punishment they would receive flared up again.

Sure, maybe she believed Harry when he said they wouldn’t get expelled, but there were many other punishments they could receive for their truancy; detention, deduction of points, even a suspension, to name a few. Heck, Prof. McGonagall might even—Hermione swallowed—even send a letter to her parents.

Harry took her hand. “Calm down, Hermione. Jesus, you’re making me nervous.”

Hermione tried to follow Harry’s advice, she really did.

When they walked into The Great Hall, it was already 11:25, meaning that most of the students and faculty who would be showing up for lunch already had. Or, in other words, the hall was already full of students.

Hermione didn’t notice any of that though, what she noticed was how Prof. McGonagall’s eyes trained on them the moment they walked in, and the witch almost immediately got up and began to approach them.

She did not look happy.

“Okay, maybe we should worry a little bit,” Harry said nervously.

Interestingly enough, now that she could see the worst coming, Hermione didn’t feel so scared anymore, she simply wanted to take her punishment, whatever it may be, and put this whole thing behind her. So, grabbing Harry’s hand, she pulled him forward resolutely, subconsciously aiming for where she could see their friends at the Gryffindor table.

Whether by design or happenstance, they and Prof. McGonagall met almost exactly where the Gryffindor first-years were seating.

Before the witch could even get a word out, Harry said, “Why professor, you’re looking lovely this morning. Say, did you do something with your hair?”

The look Prof. McGonagall gave Harry would probably make babies cry.

“Mr. Potter, Miss Granger, do you mind explaining to me why you missed dinner, Astronomy, and failed to return to your dorms last night?” the stern witch asked in a deceptively calm voice that was only belied by the storm in her eyes.

It was only after Prof. McGonagall finished her question that Hermione realised that they couldn’t tell her the truth, and neither herself nor Harry had even considered that they might need to lie about their whereabouts all this time, so, naturally, Hermione reached for the easiest lie available.

“We were studying.”

Even Harry looked at her in disbelief, and the less said about Prof. McGonagall’s reaction the better.

“You were studying?” the professor asked tightly.

Unfortunately, the lie had already been told, so they had to stick with it.

“Yes, professor,” Harry said. “in one of the empty classrooms on the sixth floor.”

“Hmm. And what were you studying that you couldn’t do in the library like everyone else?” Prof. McGonagall asked.

Hermione’s brain went into overdrive trying to find something believable, and, like a miracle, something actually came to her; something that wasn’t just believable but would also easily explain their absence.

“Stunning Spells,” Hermione said. “We were practicing Stunning Spells.”

Prof. McGonagall was so taken aback by the answer that she blinked for several seconds before she rallied. “So you expect me to believe that the both of you somehow stunned each other at the same time, and did it so well that it kept you asleep the entire night?” She still sounded disbelieving, but now less in the ‘I know you’re lying to me’ way, and more in the ‘you have to be lying to me’ way.

Harry laughed sheepishly and scratched his head. “Yeah, not our finest moment,” he said.

“We’re so sorry, professor,” Hermione apologized, not even needing to fake the sincerity of it. “We promise to be much more careful in the future.”

Prof. McGonagall’s eyes flitted from one to the other for several seconds, trying to spot a lie.

Eventually however, she gave up and said, “See that you do,” before walking back to the staff table.

Hermione almost collapsed with relief; she could hardly believe that they’d actually gotten away with that.

“Nice work,” Harry whispered as they sat down with their friends. And when their fellow first-years asked, in surprise and amusement, if they’d actually knocked themselves out overnight, well, nothing to do but die with the lie.

★★★​

“Going to get you and your girlfriend thrown out again, Potter?” Draco asked mockingly as the first-years neared the Potions lab after lunch.

His clique tittered at his joke, and Pansy said, “Maybe if we’re lucky Snape will kick out their entire house. The classroom will smell less.”

This was of course the funniest thing ever, and the Slytherins laughed even harder.

Hermione ignored them (as did Harry, to her surprise), though some of the other Gryffindors were not so pacifistic.

While Hermione ignored Draco however, his words did pull at a worry she had, causing her to ask Harry in a whisper, “You don’t think Snape will really throw us out again, do you?”

“Not if he knows what’s good for him,” Harry replied.

The boy’s words only caused Hermione’s worry to grow. “You’re not going to start a fight with him, are you?” she asked, and Harry shook his head.

“That’s the thing,” he said, “with Snape I don’t think I’ll have to.”

And the knowledge that Harry was right did not make Hermione worry any less.

★★★​

Hermione and Harry sat together in Potions, both of them nervous as they waited for Prof. Snape to come out of his office and both of them trying to hide it.

They were not the only ones who were nervous, practically everyone, including the Slytherins, were. Prof. Snape’s display last week had scared everybody.

While Hermione and Harry had been the focus of his ire, they’d at least had the dubious good fortune to be kicked out, because after that happened, Snape had stormed into his office and slammed the door behind himself. And then everyone still in the class had sat and listened tensely as the man screamed and blew stuff up in his office.

It had only been half an hour after he went quiet that the students had found the courage to leave the classroom.

And now they were all back here, waiting for that same— the door to the classroom swung shut and everyone jumped. Then the door to Snape’s office opened with a slow, loud creak and the man stepped out like Dracula himself rising from his coffin.

Prof. Snape walked into the room slowly, his cape folded around him like the wings of a giant bat. As he walked his eyes surveyed the room keenly, passing over everyone and everything.

Hermione felt her heart stop when those dark, seemingly pupilless eyes met hers, but they moved on before she even had the time to think about it.

After almost a minute of silent staring, Snape finally spoke, his voice flat almost to the point of lacking inflection: “Anyone who disrupts my class will be thrown out.”

And with that the teaching began. Well, Hermione hesitated to call it teaching, seeing as Snape simply told them to open to page 5 of their textbooks and follow the instructions within to make the Boil Removing Potion. Then he retreated to a dark corner of the class and (there was no better way to say this) perched for almost the entirety of the lesson.

Prof. Snape ended up not kicking anyone out of class that day, but that was only because, no one, not even the Slytherins, had the courage to do anything that might be considered a disruption.

By the end, Hermione was sure that she and Harry had gotten their potions right. They looked and smelled as their textbooks said they should at the very least. She would have preferred to get Prof. Snape’s opinion on them, but she just knew that calling on him for anything would be asking for trouble.

Per Snape’s instruction, Hermione and Harry set aside some of the potion they made in little vials before cleaning up the rest, and Hermione frowned as she considered for the first time, how much waste would be incurred in this one class alone.

Thirty odd students throwing out potions, week after week, and that was before one accounted for the six other years worth of students.

The girl shook her head in wonder.

By the time the last person was done, the class was only two hours through, but Prof. Snape asked them to submit their samples all the same, and for those who had done so to leave.

The students obeyed, stepping forward single file. When Hermione submitted hers, going after Harry, Prof. Snape said, “Go back to your seat, Miss Granger. I’ll see you after I’m done.”

Hermione almost asked why, but in the end, she simply muttered a “yes, sir,” and returned to her seat as asked.

Harry was not happy, but there wasn’t really anything he could do about it, a fact that seemed to frustrate him more.

In the end, he promised to wait for her outside and then sat with her until everyone else had left.

When it was just the three of them in the classroom, Prof. Snape gave Harry a dark look, it was the first time the man had even acknowledged the boy’s presence since class started.

The staredown carried on for some time, until Hermione elbowed Harry lightly.

“I’ll be fine,” she whispered.

Finally, grudgingly, Harry got up and left, and Hermione almost regretted her decision when the door closed behind the boy and she realized that she was now alone in the dim classroom with Prof. Snape.

The air felt oppressive, cloying, and in the cavernous silence of the room, Hermione heard every swish of Prof. Snape’s robes as he rose from his seat and approached her.

For a moment, Hermione’s eyes met his dark ones, and the girl quickly looked away when she remembered why she and Harry were practicing occlumency.

At her desk now Prof. Snape didn’t stand still, instead he stalked around her with smooth, silent steps, like a bird of prey does a little mouse.

Hermione swallowed, her heart beginning to pound in her chest. He wasn’t going to hurt her, was he? He wouldn’t dare. Right?

When Prof. Snape finally spoke, Hermione nearly squeaked.

“I imagine he’s told you all sorts of tales about me,” Snape began. “All sorts of lies.”

Hermione swallowed again; it didn’t do much, not with her throat feeling like it had balls of cotton wool in it.

“I—I don’t—”

“Don’t lie to me, girl,” Snape said, his voice a barely restrained snarl. “It’s what Potters do; they lie and deceive, with their big smiles and stupid jokes.

“Always the hero, always the champion.” Hermione heard the man’s teeth grind. “Always making someone else the villain.”

Snape completed another revolution around Hermione, then stopped in front of her. The girl kept her eyes down.

“But here is something Potter will never tell you; your life will not be better with him in it.

“It will only get worse, until, one day, he will get you killed. Just like Lily.”

Hermione froze, then slowly, she stood, shouldered her bag, and began to walk out of the classroom.

Snape was so confused by her actions that he was at a loss for words even as he watched her walk out.

At the door, Hermione stopped, then turned and looked the potions master in the eyes as she said, “You’re a very bad person, Professor. Please, stay away from us.”

Harry was on the other side of the door when Hermione opened it.

His worried eyes took her in as he asked, “Are you okay?”

Hermione nodded quietly.

With her well-being confirmed, Harry moved on to other matters.

“What did he want?” the boy asked, trying to peek past her into the room.

Hermione shut the door softly behind her.

“Nothing,” Hermione said, taking his hand. “Let’s go.”

Harry was reluctant and looked like he really wanted some answers, but eventually, he capitulated and let Hermione drag him along, and the farther they got from the potions classroom, the easier Hermione could breathe again.

 

Same Day. Afternoon.

Friday, Sept. 13


OPERATION ROOSTER

• Get a rooster from Hagrid (get him something nice for stealing one of his roosters).
• Keep it in a cage in one of the empty classrooms in the less frequented parts of the castle (make sure its comfortable, it gets cold and draughty in the castle at night) in the Room of Requirement.
• Make an “army of magical robot spiders” equipped with magical speakers and spread them around the castle.
• Make sure some of the spiders get into the chamber of secrets (open the chamber of secrets with a summoned snake, if that doesn’t work, try transfiguration. If that still doesn’t work... ?)

Hermione stared at the list as she and Harry sat in the library (where they’d been for the three hours since they left potions).

It wasn’t a bad plan, not really, she was quite confident in it, but even so, Hermione still had her reservations.

The entire plan rested on basilisks having a fatal weakness to a cock’s crow, and while their research so far had confirmed that this was, in fact, so, nothing they’d found had even broached the topic of whether the crow would still work if the basilisk didn’t hear it directly from the rooster’s... beak?

Whatever it was, the point remained that Hermione did not like variables, and this particular one could cost them their lives.

That one—admittedly important—bit aside however, everything else looked promising.

Doable, at the very least.

“So, how do we go about this?” Harry asked, and Hermione looked at him before glancing at her watch.

“Well, it’s five-thirty now,” she said, “if we hurry we should have enough time to do everything we need to and still make it for dinner. Or whatever’s left of it.”

They’d discussed waiting until after dinner to set up everything, but had both eventually realised that, while McGonagall may have believed their lie about why they were missing all of last night, she may very well be on the lookout for any suspicious behaviour from either of them.

Not to mention that, while the hallways would be quieter later in the night, sneaking out would be harder, seeing as the Gryffindor Tower had exactly one exit. An exit that was guarded at all times by The Fat Lady.

Harry thought about it, then shrugged. “If you say so,” he said, before frowning in thought once more and asking: “Which one of us is getting the chicken?”

They ended up playing rock, paper, scissors for it. Harry lost, even after he somehow argued Hermione into agreeing to a three out of five score.

At least, Hedwig went with him. Even if it seemed like she did it out of pity more than anything else.

★★★​

Interlude:: The Rooster


Jeremy didn’t mind the little farm he lived on very much. To be honest, he actually quite liked it, even though the big lug who ran the place had a habit of picking him up much too often.

He got good food, none of that boring corn that he’d heard some farmers served either, but really good stuff. Varied too, which was perfect because Jeremy had a much refined palette, that he did.

Another thing about this farm that Jeremy liked, even though he hadn’t thought he would at first, was that he wasn’t the only bloke there.

There were two others besides him; Matt and Jamie, and while this did mean that he had to share the birds, Jeremy had come to enjoy having guys around to hang with.

They were doing so right then, in fact; chilling in the late afternoon sun as they watched the birds mill around, shaking their tail feathers and pretending they couldn’t tell the boys were watching.

Jeremy considered putting on a display himself—his feathers did look quite lovely when the sun caught them just right—but then he reconsidered; if he did that chances were Matt and Jamie would feel the need to compete, and Jeremy just didn’t have the energy for that right now.

Right as he came to this decision, someone swooped down and perched before them.

It was an angel.

Well, to be specific, it was an owl, but it was without doubt the most beautiful owl Jeremy had ever seen, and from the others’ reactions, they thought so too.

Her feathers were as white as snow, her posture elegant. Her eyes were bewitching, terrifying and alluring in equal measure, like she could rip open your guts and suck down your intestines and still make you sing praises in her name as she did.

She was a being of power and grace and beauty descended from above to grace their little lives with her splendor.

Now here was a bird he would compete with a thousand, no, a million roosters to win even just a minute of her time.

The owl looked down upon them, her gaze appraising. She looked from the others, too reverent to even look up at her, to Jeremy, who simply could not look away.

She looked impressed.

“Crow,” she commanded him; a single word laced with authority.

Jeremy was confused. Crow? She wanted to hear him crow? Why would she—no, Jeremy thought, shaking away his questions and confusion; those were irrelevant. What mattered was that this angel wanted to hear him sing. And if she wanted it, then he would sing until he dropped dead if need be.

Jeremy rose to his feet. He dug deep within himself, then with a blast of air, he let out his most powerful cry.

It did not reverberate across the castle, did not roll down the hills to the village of Hogsmeade and shake the very earth he stood on. Not yet.

Not yet.

★★★​

Hermione was practicing the Snake Summoning Spell in the Room of Requirement when Hedwig came in through the window.

This was particularly odd because Hermione hadn’t known you could enter—or leave—the Room through anything but the door.

“Where’s Harry?” She asked the owl, and of course got no response.

Right, Hedwig was an owl; she couldn’t talk. At least, Hermione thought she couldn’t.

A few minutes later, Harry came in—through the door—shrouded in the cover of his invisibility cloak.

Before Hermione could say anything, the boy threw back the cowl of his cloak, creating the rather eerie impression of a floating, bodiless head, since the rest of him was still under the effect of the garment, and said, “Hermione, Hedwig’s starting a cult.”

The girl blinked, then looked at Hedwig who, naturally, ignored them.

Hermione looked back at Harry with an eyebrow raised. “A cult?” She asked skeptically.

I mean, sure this was Hedwig they were talking about, but, seriously, a cult?

“Yeah, a cult,” Harry said. “You should have seen it; she just swooped down and the chickens all bowed, and then this one—” at this Harry held up an oddly still rooster from within his cloak “—started crowing like a maniac for some reason. I had to petrify it just to get it to shut up.”

“You petrified the chicken?” Hermione asked.

“Of course I petrified the chicken. How else was I going to sneak a live rooster into the castle? Besides, I think you’re paying attention to the wrong thing here; Hedwig is starting a cult. We need to stop her before they summon choo-loo or something.”

“What’s choo-loo?” Hermione asked.

“You know, the Lovecraft horror thing.”

“You mean Cthulhu?”

“The pronunciation doesn’t matter. The point is they might summon an eldritch horror.”

Hermione gave in to the urge to roll her eyes. “Stop being silly, Harry. And free the poor chicken. It looks uncomfortable.”

Thankfully, Harry complied. With a lot of muttering about how letting fanatical, religious sects run unchecked was a bad idea, but he complied, and Hermione was able to go back to her practice as Harry unpetrified and caged the surprisingly placid chicken.

“Gotten the spell yet?” Harry asked when he was done.

“No,” Hermione answered, before trying again. “Serpensortia,” she incanted, and a large, green snake of an unknown—to her—species burst out of her wand, only, this time, instead of dissipating into black smoke like it always did, the snake coiled up on the ground, like a cobra waiting to strike, and stared at her quietly.

Hermione and Harry stared at each other, then back at the snake.

“Um, slither to the wall and back,” Hermione said, and the snake promptly obeyed.

“You got the spell,” Harry said happily.

Hermione nodded. “I just hope it works.”

“Meh,” Harry shrugged. “I’m sure we’ll figure something else out if it doesn’t.”

The snake returned from its trip to the wall and resumed its previous position, presumably awaiting new orders.

Harry was only too happy to oblige.

“Form an S,” the boy commanded.

Hermione was about to tell Harry that the snake wouldn’t obey him, because only its summoner, or a parselmouth, could control a summoned snake, when she got a rather devious idea.

Nonverbally, Hermione commanded the snake to obey.

Harry loved that, so, naturally, he asked it to do another letter, and Hermione made it obey again.

Of course, unnoticed by Harry, the snake had subtly set itself within easy reach of him, and when the time was just right, it struck, lunging at the boy frightfully with its powerful fangs exposed.

Harry’s voice hit notes so high that Hermione was genuinely impressed.

As she broke down in laughter, Hermione realised that Hedwig was laughing too, or at least barking in a way that sounded like she was.

This was strange, but not too much so. What was was when she realised that the chicken was laughing too.

★★★​

With the Snake Summoning Spell out of the way, Hermione and Harry moved to the next step; preparing the spiders.

It hadn’t taken them long to realise that, if they wanted to ensure that the cock’s crow reached as much of the castle as possible (seeing that they didn’t really know where the snake was), then they would need to spread the ‘speakers’ around as much as they could. That was when Harry had come up with the idea of creating “an army of magical, robot spiders” to spread it around for them.

And it was as they were creating the spiders, that Hermione realized that they could make the spiders the speakers too.

While it might sound complicated, or difficult, it was actually quite straightforward and doable in practice. First, they took a sheet of paper, then used the Origami Spell to fold it into the shape of a spider.

After that they added the Telephone Spell, a wonderful piece of magic invented in 1942 by a muggleborn witch named Mathilda Pocock.

The spell only worked one-way, and needed to be cast on two different items, one the earpiece and the other the mouthpiece, but it served their needs just fine.

Hermione and Harry had only just discovered the spell that afternoon, while searching in the library for useful spells to aid their plan. It was rather embarrassing really, if the girl was being honest with herself; to think that a spell like this was easily accessible all this time, and yet she and Harry had put so much work into The Notebooks, when, with a bit more research, they could have made portable, personal telephones instead.

Oh well, it wasn’t too late, she supposed.

After the Telephone Spell came the Sonorous Charm, to add the extra oomph that the plan relied upon, and finally, animating the paper spiders with Augur’s Animation Spell (the same spell they’d used to animate the needle spider back in Prof. McGonagall’s first class). And then, after the first spider they animated immediately made a break for freedom, they decided to save that last step until the final moment.

Making the twenty spiders they’d agreed on didn’t take too long, and as soon as they were done, they left some food and water for the rooster, then set out into the castle.

Releasing the spiders at the predetermined locations was by far the most arduous part of their plan, and that was really only because of how much walking was involved. By the time they were done and made it to their final destination, it was 7:15.

Hermione just hoped the snake plan would work; this would take a lot more time if it didn’t.

Myrtle’s bathroom was... clean. Wet, but clean. Hermione had expected to find some dust, or grime, faulty lights, at the very least, but instead, everything was in perfect order. Well, everything except for the floor, which was covered in a spreading puddle of what Hermione was quite certain was toilet water.

They entered the bathroom and locked the door behind them. Then Harry went around checking every stall to make sure Myrtle herself was absent, and, thankfully, she was.

Finding the sink with the symbol of a snake etched into it didn’t take long, but even after they did, Hermione and Harry still hesitated for several seconds.

“Well,” Harry said finally, “this is it.”

Hermione nodded in agreement.

“So, are you going to cast the spell, or...?”

She turned to him. “What if it doesn’t work?” she asked, and Harry shrugged.

“Well, we won’t know until we try.”

Right. He was right. She was just looking for reasons to hesitate. It was just... being here, about to do what she was about to do...

Hermione sucked in a deep breath, raised her wand, then cast the Snake Summoning Spell.

“Serpensortia,” she incanted, and the green snake from before (was it the snake from before, or did she summon a new lookalike every time? Hermione didn’t know; the book hadn’t said) burst out her wand unto the sink.

Here goes nothing, Hermione thought, as she ordered the snake: “Open the chamber.”

The idea here was simple; snakes—even summoned ones—are parselmouths, and the chamber could only be opened by a parselmouth. So, why not a parselmouth to open it for you?

Hermione had stumbled upon the idea while they were researching basilisks in the library earlier, and Harry had agreed with her it made sense. The only reason they were both worried it wouldn’t work was because magic had rarely ever cared about what made sense and what didn’t.

As soon as Hermione gave the order, the snake turned to the faucet with the carving of a snake on it, and hissed.

Nothing happened for a few seconds, long enough that Hermione had the time to feel the first twinges of disappointment. Then there was a click, and before her very eyes, the entire row of sinks, including the mirror and the wall they were all attached to, slid aside to reveal a huge, musty, metal pipe that descended into darkness.

“Huh,” Harry intoned, stepping forward to peer down the dark depths of the pipe, “I can’t believe that actually worked.”

Hermione joined him in peering down; she could barely believe it too.

“Well,” Harry said after a few seconds, “we’d better get started on animating those spiders, before the basilisk decides to come up and say hello.”

Hermione froze as her eyes widened.

Never in her life did Hermione animate anything as fast as she did those spiders in the moments that followed.

★★★​

Next Morning.

Saturday, Sept. 14


Hermione sat with Harry beside the rooster early the next morning with a very important piece of paper in hand. That paper was the ‘mouthpiece’ end that was connected to the twenty paper spiders currently skittering in all parts of the castle, and would be activated the moment she tapped it with her wand.

Meanwhile, while Hermione was thinking her thoughts, Harry was busy poking the irritated rooster with his wand.

“What if the rooster doesn’t crow?” He asked. “I mean, roosters don’t always crow right? So, what if it doesn’t?”

Before Hermione could even begin to worry about this new problem that she hadn’t even thought to consider until this moment, Hedwig hooted and the rooster immediately stood at attention.

...

Okay, that was bizarre, but—“I think Hedwig has got it,” Hermione said.

“Okay, Harry,” she continued, “I’m about to turn it on, so no talking, or your voice will echo across the castle and everyone will know we did it.”

Harry started to nod, before a thoughtful look stole across his face. “You know, this would be a very good way to make public announcements,” he mused.

True, it would be. But all the same. “Hush, Harry.”

“Oh, right,” the boy said, then mimed zipping his lips shut.

Okay, this was it, Hermione thought. Wait! What if they cast the spell wrong? Or what if the enchantments on the spiders had unraveled for some reason? Or what if—

Harry poked her. “It’ll work,” he mouthed.

Right. Of course it will.

It should.

Hermione set down the sheet of paper and activated it, and as soon as she did, the rooster sucked in a lungful of air, and it crowed.

And the earth shook.

★★★​

The morning of September 14th was not fun for anyone in Hogwarts. Or Hogsmeade, for that matter. Because, it turns out, when you broadcast a cock’s crow through twenty full powered Sonorous Charms simultaneously, the sound tends to travel a few miles.

As bad as it was for everyone else in the castle, however, it was worse for the Slytherins and a certain greasy professor; because someone had decided to release six of the spiders down in the dungeon area, saying: “come on, Hermione, if the basilisk was going to hide anywhere in the castle it would be down here. I mean, there are already so many snakes slithering around it would feel right at home.”

Although, in Harry’s defence, she really hadn’t tried that hard to stop him.

★★★​

Deep in the bowels of Hogwarts, in a place lost to myth and cold and dark, a centuries-old basilisk, much too old to be stunned, much less fatally affected by a rooster’s cry, was roused from its fifty year slumber.

The monster of Slytherin slithered once more.

 

Same Morning.

Saturday, Sept. 14


Everyone thought it was a prank. Which, in hindsight, made sense, Hermione supposed. After all, if she had been woken up by the crowing of a cock ringing across the entire castle on a Saturday morning, her first thought wouldn’t have been that a couple of students were trying to kill the basilisk that lived under the castle.

No, her first thought would have been that it was a prank too; and a very serious one at that, based on the cross expressions on the faces of most of the students and teachers during breakfast.

Well, that and Prof. McGonagall’s goose bump-inducing promise to find whichever students were responsible and make sure they, and everyone, learnt why such “wicked and disruptive behaviour” was unacceptable.”

The bizarre thing was, no one even seemed to consider that it might have been she and Harry who did it. In fact, from all the sour looks they were getting, the primary suspects seemed to be the Weasley twins.

Although, that was probably because they kept going on and on about how brilliant the prank was.

They were gushing so much in fact, that Hermione was starting to feel a little flattered, even as she also felt guilty for how disruptive she and Harry’s plan had ended up being.

The girl just hoped that all this trouble ended up being worth it.

As exciting as the events of that morning were however, life carried on. For the first-years, this meant heading out for their first flying lesson of the year, but for Hermione specifically, it meant going outside to engage in an activity that directly contradicted every instinct that she’d honed over a lifetime of having a very reasonable fear of falling to her death.

With every step she took towards the field, her trepidation only heightened, until halfway there, she, Hermione Granger, was beginning to wonder if she could get away with skipping a class.

Naturally, Harry tried to calm her.

“Stop worrying so much, Hermione; it’s just broomriding. I mean, seriously, what’s the worst that could happen?”

“We fall and break our necks,” Hermione answered flatly.

Harry blinked, trying to find a reply, while Neville, who Hermione had barely noticed walking with them, groaned piteously and went a little green.

Hermione would have felt bad about that, if she didn’t think that it was the appropriate reaction to have when knowing you were going to be elevated who knows how high in the air, with nothing but a stick between you and the ground.

Finally, Harry gave up on finding a witty response and sighed. “That was a rhetorical question, Hermione.”

★★★​

“These brooms look awfully old, don’t they?” Hermione asked, as she, like every other first-year, lined up on the left side of her broom at the command of Madam Hooch, the flying instructor.

“Well, you know what they say,” Harry said from where he stood to her left, “new brooms sweep clean, but old ones know the corners.”

She frowned at the boy. “What does that mean?”

Harry shrugged. “I have no idea.”

As Hermione shot her best friend a sour look, to which he responded with a toothy smile, Madam Hooch ordered: “Alright, everyone, now hold out your right hands over your brooms, and say ‘up.’”

The class obeyed.

Most got little more than a twitching broom for their first attempt, while a few—like Draco and Ron—had their brooms jump straight into their hands. Fewer still—like Hermione and Neville—didn’t even get their brooms to twitch.

Surprisingly, Harry was among the last group, and when Hermione focused on him, she realized why; the boy hadn’t ordered his broom up, instead, he had his hand held over it as he gazed at the object intensely.

Before Hermione could ask what he was doing, Harry’s broom leapt off the ground without a single word from him and straight into his grasp.

As Hermione, and a few other students who’d seen Harry, stared in amazement, the boy looked at her and smirked.

Hermione’s eye twitched.

Then Madam Hooch gave Harry five points for what she described as “impressive work” and the girl’s teeth grinded.

Three tries later, Hermione had her broom in hand too, because, (reasonable) fear of flying or not, there was no way she was letting Harry upstage her that much.

After a few more minutes, in which everyone—including Neville, who’d had more trouble than most—managed to get their brooms up magically, Madam Hooch instructed the class to mount them.

Now, Hermione had down some reading on brooms and the magic behind their flying capabilities, so she knew well enough what to expect, but even so, when she sat astride the wooden handle and felt a soft cushion on her rear instead of hard, thin wood, the girl was still pleasantly surprised.

The broom even began to levitate in place as soon as she sat on it, giving her the opportunity to set her feet on the stirrups comfortably.

Honestly, it felt more like riding a bike than anything else, and while Hermione was by no means great at that, she was decent enough that this wasn’t too difficult.

Maybe she’d worried over nothing after all.

As soon as Hermione thought that, Madam Hooch hit her with a harsh dose of reality.

“Now, everyone,” the flying instructor said, “I want you all to rise ten feet straight into the air. Remember, the broom responds to your desires, so try to stay calm at all times.”

Hermione gaped. Ten feet!?

She looked down; she was barely two feet up (a perfectly reasonable distance to be from the ground as far as she was concerned), then back up, where many of her fellow first-years were currently hovering a storey or more over her head.

Hermione’s grip on the shaft of her broom tightened like a vice; just watching the others made her feel ill.

She couldn’t do this, she realized. She simply couldn’t.

“Careful there, Hermione,” Harry’s voice cut through her spiralling thoughts, “flying so high up like that, you might crash into an aeroplane.”

For a moment, Harry’s ribbing made Hermione forget her fear, and she shot him a sour look where he hovered with his broom at her head level.

The boy just laughed, then, to her surprise, he offered her a hand.

“Come on,” he said.

Hermione looked sceptically at Harry’s hand, then at the boy himself.

Harry smiled, but there was no amusement this time; it was simply the same small, pleasant smile he often gave her.

“Do you trust me?” he asked.

In the light of the morning sun his green eyes shone brightly, and before she could think about it, Hermione freed her left hand from its death grip on her broom and took Harry’s hand.

Slowly, Harry’s broom ascended, and despite that he wasn’t pulling her along, and Hermione certainly wasn’t trying to make it do so, her broom rose in tandem with his.

As she felt the ground sink away under her, Hermione’s heart stuttered, and she began to look down.

And it was in that moment that Harry began to sing.

I can show you the world.

Shining, shimmering, splendid.

Tell me, princess, now when did you last let your heart deciiiiide.

Hermione looked at Harry, all thoughts of looking down forgotten.

“What are you doing?” She asked.

Harry smiled. “Making a joke that’ll really crack you up in a few years.”

Hermione just looked at him in confusion.

Soon, they were up with most everyone else, and Madam Hooch told them to fly around slowly while she assisted the few stragglers down below.

At that, Hermione made the mistake of looking down, and she just about passed out from terror.

Fortunately, Harry’s hand was still in hers, and she squeezed on it hard, trying to draw strength from the small bit of contact even as Harry himself flew in close beside her.

“Hermione, what kind of broom are you riding?” Harry asked, and the girl blinked at the completely random question.

“What?”

“What kind of broom are you riding?” Harry repeated.

“What does it matter?” She asked, but even as she did, she looked at her broom’s handle where it was written to confirm: “A Cleansweep Five.”

“When was it made?” Harry asked, and the information came to Hermione from the casual reading she’d done on broomsticks weeks before even starting at Hogwarts.

“It was designed in 1947 by the Ollerton brothers and released in 1948. It was actually the last broom they made before they retired and sold the company in 1951. I know what you’re trying to do, Harry.”

Harry smiled. “Do you?” He asked, and Hermione rolled her eyes.

“Yes, you’re trying to distract me. And it’s not working.”

“Well, I’ll make sure to try harder then,” Harry said, and before Hermione could say anything, asked: “How fast can the Cleansweep Five go?”

Hermione knew what he was doing. And she knew he knew she knew it. But even so, she could not stop herself from answering his question; not when she knew the answer to it.

And she knew he knew that.

“It has a recorded top speed of 75 kilometers per hour,” Hermione said, then rushed ahead before Harry could speak. “It can carry a weight of over half a tonne, fly nonstop indefinitely like all modern brooms, and is the second strongest broom ever made. In fact, they say it’s so strong that even an angry troll couldn’t break it.”

Hermione smirked. She’d like to see Harry come up with any more questions now.

Naturally, Harry found a way to surprise her.

“So, basically, what you’re saying is that the broom is perfectly safe and you have nothing to worry about?” Harry asked.

Hermione opened her mouth to disagree, thought about it, then said nothing, settling for smacking Harry on the arm instead when he smirked at her.

Annoyingly enough, Harry was right. And reminding herself of what she knew the old broomstick between her legs could do, actually went a long way to settle her nerves.

 

A/N: last for now.

---

Same Morning.

Saturday, Sept. 14


Naturally, having being given free reign to fly around, albeit gently, the first-years clumped together into little groups that was mostly segregated by House.

This, of course, saw the ten Gryffindors present as their own little group, even if they were mostly paired out within that group.

There was one Gryffindor within their group who was on his own however; Neville, and he was not doing well.

Neville was... not a good flyer, even Hermione could see that. Couple that in with his very obvious terror to be up in the air (which probably had a lot to do with why his broom kept jerking spasmodically every now and again) and Hermione was really starting to worry for the boy.

She looked around for his friend, Ron, who she would have expected to help him, only to find the redhead laughing about something or other with Dean and Seamus.

Hermione sniffed in displeasure.

Deciding to help, but understanding she wasn’t anywhere near good enough a flyer to be much use to the boy, Hermione looked to Harry.

Surprisingly, almost like he’d been reading her mind (or maybe just thinking similar thoughts), Harry said: “Neville needs help.”

After a momentary pause in surprise, Hermione nodded, and they both flew over to hover on either side of the boy.

“Hey, Nev,” Harry said easily.

So focused had Nev been on his broom, that he started when Harry spoke, and Hermione and Harry both reached out and grabbed his shoulders for fear that he might fall.

“Whoa! Relax, Nev,” Harry said, “it’s just us.”

“Oh,” Neville said, and Hermione could feel him shaking under her touch. “Hey, Harry.”

“Are you okay?” Hermione asked worriedly.

Neville swallowed and shook his head. The boy looked near tears. “I’m pants at flying,” he said. “I always fall.”

Hermione and Harry looked at each other around the boy.

“So, you’ve done this before?” Harry asked.

He sounded a little surprised. Hermione was surprised too; she’d assumed this was Neville’s first time. Like her.

Neville however, nodded. “My Uncle Algie used to make me.”

Harry made a thoughtful, humming sound.

“Well, you don’t have to worry about falling here,” Harry said. “Hermione’s here; she’ll catch you.”

Neville looked from Harry to Hermione with a healthy dose of skepticism, while Hermione was busy trying to figure out how to magically swat her best friend from a distance.

Unfortunately, she couldn’t exactly tell Neville that she would (read: could) not, in fact, catch him if he fell, so, with some quick thinking on her part, the girl went for the next best thing.

“Don’t worry, Neville,” Hermione said, trying to sound confident, “you’re not going to fall. These are Cleansweep Fives; they’re some of the safest brooms ever made.”

Then, shoring up all of her Gryffindor courage, Hermione released her grip from the shaft of her broom and held her arms out to the sides. To her credit, the broom didn’t wobble. “See?” She asked, hoping she looked as carefree as she was trying to act. “It’s perfectly safe.”

“Exactly,” Harry agreed. “Perfectly safe.” Then, as if to demonstrate his point, Harry did something decidedly unsafe; he performed a barrel roll. On a broom. Fifteen feet up in the air.

“Harry!” Hermione just barely kept herself from shrieking.

The object of her distress, of course, simply laughed. “Calm down, Hermione. I’m fine.”

“Whoa! Harry, that was rad.” Dean said, heading over with the other Gryffindors.

Apparently, they had spotted Harry’s little stunt (though thankfully, Madam Hooch hadn’t, seeing as she was currently busy keeping some Hufflepuffs on their brooms), and were now converging on the boy of the hour.

“Where’d you learn to do that, Harry?” Faye asked.

“I didn’t,” Harry said. “This is the first time I’ve ever been on a broom.”

“Liar,” Ron said. “It took me almost a week to learn to do rolls.”

Fortunately for everyone, Faye was a lot more interested in the fact that Ron could apparently do death-defying stunts too, than that he’d just openly called Harry a liar.

“You can do them too?” Faye asked.

Ron nodded, and did a roll too like Harry had done.

It was certainly impressive, and Hermione’s heart still skipped a beat watching him be so reckless, but for the others the effect had apparently been watered down by watching Harry do the same thing first.

Ron must have sensed this too (or maybe he just wanted to show off), because he said: “I can do other ones too,” before pointing his broom straight up in the air and spinning rapidly in place several times.

This definitely got a lot of oohs and aahs, and Ron, beaming proudly, said: “And my brother, Bill, taught me this one,” then he jumped off his broom.

Ron hung off his broom with both hands, then he spun with his whole body like the world’s biggest clock hand, once, and twice, before climbing back onto his broom.

The Gryffindors cheered. Well, the Gryffindors, except for Hermione and Neville who both looked very green, cheered.

“Nice moves, Weasley,” came the snobby voice of Draco Malfoy as he approached the group, accompanied as always by his bookends and a sneer. “I guess it’s true that your family has some orangutan blood mixed in after all.”

Hermione scowled. That was a very mean thing to say.

“Sod off, Malfoy,” Ron said. “And it’s your family that’s got oranguta blood, or whatever.”

Draco guffawed like he’d just heard the funniest thing ever. “You don’t even know what an orangutan is, do you?” He asked. “Well, I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised, your family probably couldn’t afford a proper education for—”

Okay, this had gone on long enough, Hermione decided.

“Draco, why do you have pick fights with us all the time?” She asked the boy, interrupting Ron’s heated comeback. “Just leave us alone.”

Draco glanced at her with visible disgust on his features. “Quiet, muggle. No one’s talking to you.”

Hermione rolled her eyes. That again.

“Actually, Draco,” Harry interjected calmly, “it’s not muggle; it’s muggleborn. Not that I would expect you to know that, of course, seeing as all that gel you put on your head has soaked into your brain by now.”

Hermione tried not to laugh. She really did. The other Gryffindors, on the other hand, were not so kind.

Draco’s cheeks went red with embarrassment. “Shut up, scarhead,” he said angrily.

Scarhead? Hermione thought. What did that even mean? Was Draco just reaching into a bag for random insults now?

Harry apparently thought so too, because he blinked. “Scarhead? That’s the best you could come up with? Draco, I have terrible hair; I never shut up; I smile like a loon; and my own pet owl hates my guts; you didn’t see any of that to use, you went with scarhead.

“I thought Slytherins were supposed to be witty and cunning? Honestly, a house elf would have come up with a better insult.”

And everyone gasped.

Well, not everyone, just Neville, Draco’s companions, Lav, Parvati, and Faye.

Most shocking of all though, was how Draco reacted like he’d been slapped.

“You take that back, Potter!” Draco snarled, going red with rage.

Harry raised his hands in surrender, looking shocked at the reaction too. “Okay, okay, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have compared you to an elf.”

Hermione just knew what he would say before he said it.

“After all, that would be an insult to the elf.”

Draco went ballistic and launched himself at Harry, but the Gryffindor was faster.

Harry spun with his broom and slammed Draco in the chest with the tail end, and the Slytherin was swept clean off his own broom into the air.

Madam Hooch must have heard the scream, and though the witch’s reflexes were amazing, she missed the falling boy by a hair’s breath.

Hermione heard the snap Draco’s bone made from fifteen feet up.

★★★​

The Slytherins tried to blame them.

Unfortunately, Crabbe and Goyle were not the most articulate, and Draco was currently... occupied.

The best part was, the Gryffindors didn’t even have to lie; Draco and his friends had come to them. Draco had also been the one who attacked Harry.

Finally, Madam Hooch had simply forbidden everyone from so much as mounting their brooms until she returned, and picked up the sniveling Draco.

“Come now, Mr. Malfoy,” the witch said. “To the matron with you.”

“My arm,” the boy moaned piteously. “My father—”

“Will hear of this, I’m sure,” Madam Hooch said, as she carried him away. “Come on now.”

Fortunately, while some sour looks were thrown back and forth, another fight didn’t break out between the Slytherins and Gryffindors.

This gave Hermione the opportunity to ask Neville a question she’d wanted to since Harry and Draco’s altercation.

“Neville, why did Draco get so angry over what Harry said?”

The boy looked a little uncomfortable, but he answered easily enough.

“It’s not really done,” he said. “Comparing a wizard to an elf is one of the worst kinds of insults in Wizarding Society.”

Hermione looked at the boy in confusion. Why would being compared to an elf be so bad? She wondered.

And then a memory came to her, of Harry telling her the day they met about house elves; little servants who wizards liked to pretend didn’t exist.

She’d made a mental note at the time to research them when they got to the castle, since she thought Harry had simply been pulling her leg.

But she’d forgotten all about it until now.

“So, house elves are real?” She asked Neville.

“Of course,” the boy answered, looking perplexed.

“And they cook and clean?”

“And other stuff too, yes.”

Oh.

...

“Does Hogwarts—” Hermione began, but Harry cut in suddenly.

“Are you guys talking about something important?”

Neville blinked. “Um, Hermione was just asking me about elves.”

“Oh,” Harry chuckled. “Yeah, if I’d known comparing people to elves was such a big deal, I would have started calling Draco an elf since weeks ago. He certainly has the ears for it.

“Anyway, Hermione, come tell Ron he’ll make a good seeker,” Harry said, pulling her over to where the rest of the Gryffindors were.

“What? Why?” Hermione asked.

“Wood’s holding the tryouts today, and Seamus told Ron he should try out, but he thinks he won’t be good at it,” Harry explained.

“You know, you should try out too, Harry,” Parvati said. “You can fly.”

“Yeah, no,” Harry said.

“Why not?” Seamus asked.

“Because I think I’d rather have my bottom impaled on a giant cactus, than play that silly game,” Harry stated blatantly.

Hermione didn’t know about the cactus part, but she agreed; quidditch was a rather silly game.

Of course, such an opinion could not be shared anywhere in Wizarding Britain without facing serious opposition.

What a bother.

★★★​

Madam Hooch’s return put an end to the swelling argument, and this time, when they resumed flying lessons, Hermione and Harry made sure the Gryffindors all stuck together so Neville would not be left behind.

 

A/N: you know, in the months that I've been writing this story, I've had well over a dozen comments describing this story as the tale of a creepy adult male (ie Harry) grooming a naive, young girl (ie Hermione).

I literally had a reader drop the story at chapter 3 just a few days ago because, according to them, a story about the grooming of a young girl was uncomfortable to read.

Within these same months, I've also had readers repeatedly mention how creepy, weird, disgusting, and a whole host of other fun little adjectives it is that Harry and Hermione are so close, and that people in universe are even contemplating that they might be romantically involved at their ages.

Now, I'm posting the story on QQ, and in the few days it's been here, I've gotten over a dozen comments mentioning (and in some cases, protesting rather rudely) that the story is much too innocent and tame to warrant being here in the NSFW section.

What have I learned? You can't win with people.

On to the chapter.

---

Same Morning.

Saturday, Sept. 14


To her great surprise, Hermione ended up enjoying the lesson, and when it was over and the brooms were returned, the first-years headed back into the castle for lunch talking about everything and nothing.

By some unspoken agreement, Hermione and Harry lagged behind the group to give themselves some measure of privacy to discuss their... extracurricular activities.

“We’ll have to go and make sure that thing is dead after lunch, won’t we?” Harry asked, sounding not at all excited about the prospect.

Hermione nodded, and they were both silent after that.

To be frank, there was little, if anything, to discuss. They’d already planned out everything the day before, and revisited it again this morning. The plan was well-worn in their minds by now.

All of this was just nerves.

Hermione took Harry’s hand. “Don’t worry, Harry. We’ll be fine. Besides, I’m sure it’s already dead.”

Neither really believed the words, but as Harry squeezed her hand and Hermione squeezed back, both hoped that they were true all the same.

★★★​

“Serpensortia,” Hermione intoned, and the familiar, green snake sprouted from her wand and landed on the sink.

She and Harry stared at each other one last time, then, without speaking, Hermione commanded her snake to open the entrance.

As soon as the pipe opened, Hedwig swooped into it, disappearing down its dark depths.

“Guess she’s going first,” Harry said, then he pointed his wand at the rooster, who was looking more serious than Hermione would have thought roosters could look, and incanted: “Wingardium leviosa.”

Harry directed the floating chicken into the pipe first, then, just before entering himself, he looked at Hermione with a strained smile and said: “See you at the bottom.”

He was gone seconds later.

Hermione swallowed, heart fluttering nervously.

Were they doing the right thing? Was there a better way? What if this didn’t work?

A thousand thoughts and doubts flitted through her brain as quickly as her pounding heart, but the girl did not hesitate, and with her wand in hand and determination in her heart, Hermione Granger walked into the dark.

★★★​

Hermione stared at the shed skin; it looked as wide as the sheets on her parent’s king-sized bed and as thick as her blanket.

It was also much, much longer than any material she’d ever seen in her young life.

And to think the snake outgrew this!

The rooster crowed again, distracting her from her thoughts, and Hermione focused back on the task at hand; namely, finding the snake’s corpse. Or, in the event that the broadcasted crow hadn’t killed it, getting close enough to the creature for the rooster’s untampered crowing to do the job.

Preferably before the snake snuck up on them and killed them with a glance.

The rooster crowed again.

Not that Hermione thought that was likely with how much crowing the chicken was doing though.

Honestly, the longer she was down here, and the more she heard the rooster’s crowing echo across the cavernous tunnels surrounding them, the safer she felt about this entire endeavour.

Maybe her worries had been misplaced after all.

They reached a dead-end then, where a slab of solid stone with snake motifs etched into it blocked their path.

This must be the true entrance to the chamber, Hermione decided.

She let the rooster crow once, then they all walked back and hid behind the last bend, before Hermione summoned her snake once again and had it open this door too with parseltongue.

The grinding of the heavy stone door as it slid open was loud in the silence, and, once again, Hedwig flew out first, quickly followed by the rooster, who was, as always, crowing his little heart out.

Hermione and Harry looked at one another.

“I’m starting to think we might not even be needed here,” Harry joked.

Hermione smiled, then the both of them walked out from their cover and entered the Chamber of Secrets.

That was when everything went wrong.

★★★​

Interlude:: The Serpent


Basilisks did not need food, they did not need water, they never fell sick, and they never aged, only grew. Essentially, basilisks were immortal unless killed. So consequently, they feared death.

A thousand years ago, Salazar Slytherin had promised a little basilisk eternal refuge within the bowels of Hogwarts from the wizards who would hunt it down, asking only in return that it assisted his descendants in their sacred mission if they were to ever call on it.

The basilisk had not wanted to die, so it had agreed, and now, a thousand years later, people called that basilisk the monster of Slytherin.

The basilisk did not particularly care for Slytherin, or his descendants. It neither understood, nor did it concern itself with their obsession over magical heritage.

To be frank, the creature barely understood the concept of heritage, seeing as basilisks had no genders and could not reproduce.

What the creature did understand however, and what it had certainly concerned itself with over the last thousand years, was its continued survival.

It had a rather comprehensive list of everything known to Wizardkind that could end its life, and of all these things, none scared it as much as the rooster’s crow; a sound that could snuff out its existence just as easily as its own gaze had snuffed out the lives of others.

It lived in dread of that sound, and its greatest solace in life was that its home protected it from such dangers.

Then that morning had happened, and that sound that was somehow familiar even though it had never heard it before had rang through its entire world, and it had shivered in terror for hours wondering why it wasn’t dead.

Just when it was beginning to calm down; beginning to wonder if maybe it had been wrong and that wasn’t the rooster’s crow it had dreaded all its life, it felt two people walk into its home blaring that sound for all the world to hear. Two people who were not of Slytherin; two people with tainted blood.

It understood now. They had found it. They wanted to kill it.

Basilisks were creatures that were eternal unless killed. Consequently, they feared death.

Consequently, they never hesitated to protect their lives.

★★★​

Hedwig knew what was coming before they did.

Hermione and Harry had both been distracted, taken by the eerie but awe-inspiring ambience of the chamber.

The rooster had been crowing; loudly, incessantly, blocking out all other sound, and no one had noticed the head of a fifty foot long snake sticking out of an artfully concealed tunnel above, poised to strike down.

Hedwig did.

The owl moved so swiftly that, by the time the snake’s pained hissing made the children look (despite how many times they’d both tried to remind themselves never to), she’d turned both of its eyes to bloody shreds.

For a split second, Hermione froze at the sight of the battle going on above their heads, Harry didn’t.

“Avada Kedavra!”

The green orb shot from Harry’s wand faster than an arrow, only to splash harmlessly against an empty tunnel as the snake managed to retract its head before it made contact.

The rooster had gone wild, crowing with every bit of its strength it had and making Hermione’s ears ring with the echoing sound.

“Shut it!” Harry screamed, and thankfully, the animal went quiet.

“It didn’t work,” Hermione was saying. “Why didn’t it work? It should have worked. The books all said it would work.”

“Hermione!” Harry’s voice broke through her rising panic.

She looked at him. His face was pale, and his green eyes looked just a bit manic, but his gaze held hers steadily.

“I really, really need you here with me right now,” the boy said.

Hedwig flew back down then and perched on the ground, her head spinning in search of the elusive snake.

Hermione swallowed, took a breath, then nodded at Harry.

To Hedwig she asked: “Did you blind it?”

The owl hooted in the affirmative.

“Okay, good,” Hermione said. “That means it can’t kill us.”

“With its eyes?” Harry asked rhetorically. “Sure. With its venom, its fangs, its huge tail, and who knows what else the fucking books failed to tell us? Let’s not make any bets just yet.”

Hermione had nothing to say to that, so she cast a spell instead. A spell that she only just realised that she really should have used before now.

“Serpenti revelio.”

It was a simple spell for finding any snakes within your vicinity that she’d come across during their basilisk research yesterday. She didn’t know if it would work with the magical snake but—a huge, red blob appeared on the wall to their right.

Hedwig was already moving.

Unfortunately, it seemed the basilisk had expected this, because as soon as its head was out, it opened its maw wide and a steaming, green fluid sprayed from its throat like water from a showerhead.

Hedwig dodged, and Hermione and Harry followed accordingly.

The Gryffindor hit the ground hard with her shoulder, but she pushed through the eye-watering pain as well as she was able to and quickly scrambled to her feet, and that was when she saw the stone floor where the snake’s venom had landed; it was boiling.

Apparently, the basilisk wasn’t just immune to the rooster’s crow, it could also shoot out acidic venom from its throat.

...

How had nobody thought to record that!?

Harry was on his feet too, but before he could do anything, both he and Hermione had to retreat as far back as they could as the basilisk sprayed out more venom, all in an attempt to catch Hedwig who was ripping into its head with her sharp, powerful claws.

They were separated now, over thirty feet apart, but this was fine; they made harder targets this way.

Harry tried to assist Hedwig, his wand already glowing a familiar green before he’d even said anything.

“Avada Kedav—” he began but never finished, because the snake was completely out of its tunnel now. And at almost sixty feet long, it was a simple matter for it to reach Harry with its tail.

There was a sharp slap! sound, and Hermione watched as Harry was sent flying into the Chamber’s far wall almost forty feet away.

Hermione did not look away as she watched Harry crumple to the floor like a ragdoll, if she had she would have noticed Hedwig get distracted by Harry’s circumstances, and pay the price for it when the snake batted her into a wall with its barrel-sized head.

In the girl’s defence though, she couldn’t really notice anything in that moment. Not with how her mind was utterly swaddled with a single thought: Harry’s dead.

A single thought that was reinforced by the image of a broken boy lying in a growing pool of his own blood.

Harry’s dead.

Knowing she was the last, the snake slithered to her; leisurely, almost lazily, before rearing up to gaze at her with its destroyed eyes.

Harry’s dead.

That thought, like a mantra, repeated over and over and over.

Harry’s dead.

The basilisk hissed, and it was like a switch had been flipped as Hermione’s gaze snapped to the snake.

In a moment of utter clarity, Hermione took in the creature, all of it; its vibrant green scales, its dagger-long fangs, its shredded face where Hedwig had torn into it.

Something hot and dark sparked to life in the girl’s chest and she raised her wand.

She knew the words, she knew the motions.

“Avada Kedavra,” Hermione said.

The green bolt flashed from her wand faster than the human eye could track, aimed dead center for the serpent’s head.

The snake dodged. And Hermione barely even had the time to process this fact before it bathed her in a jet of acidic venom.

Two things happened in that moment: first, Hermione’s world became fire and pain; then Hedwig, with a broken wing and several crushed ribs, flew after the Killing Curse the girl had cast, caught it in her talons, and threw it back down at the unsuspecting snake.

As Hermione’s consciousness thankfully faded to black, sparing her from the pain, she thought she heard screaming.

It was probably hers.

---

A/N: if you're wondering how Hedwig pulled off that trick, then keep wondering; Mama Hedwig never reveals her secrets.

 

Afternoon.

Saturday, Sept. 14


So far, Minerva McGonagall’s weekend was proving to be irritating, and it had, of course, started with Mr. Potter and Miss Granger vanishing for the whole of Thursday night and half of Friday.

It was no secret in Hogwarts that the two first-year Gryffindors (who, in her opinion, were much too precocious for any pair of eleven-year-olds to be) were practically joined at the hip. Anyone who bothered to look in their direction was likely to find them either holding hands, sharing a look, a smile, a hug, or gazing into each other’s eyes in that way that made Minerva uncomfortable the one time she witnessed it.

Honestly, if they were any older, N.E.W.T years maybe, there would likely already be a betting pool among the teachers for how soon after Hogwarts the two would tie the knot. Because of their ages however, most of the adults in the castle found themselves in this awkward position where, they were all thinking it, and they all knew they were thinking it, but nobody wanted to be the one who said it.

That was a big part of what had made Friday morning so frustrating.

Aurora Sinistra had mentioned to Minerva during breakfast that Friday morning that Harry and Hermione hadn’t been at her class the night before.

More importantly, she also said that when she’d asked the Gryffindors present why those two were absent, they’d said they didn’t know, because both had been missing since before dinner the previous day.

It was obvious what Aurora and half the faculty table—including Minerva herself—were thinking right then, but naturally, they all pretended they weren’t.

Filius even hemmed and hawed about how strange it was, because “Miss Granger doesn’t seem the sort to miss a class.”

Minerva agreed, Miss Granger certainly wasn’t the type to skip a class. Unfortunately, Miss Granger was also an almost twelve-year-old girl, and contrary to what the students thought, Minerva was that age once and very much remembered what it was like to be that age.

For her own first crush, she’d been barely eleven (just started at Hogwarts), and she had been utterly smitten with the Head Boy at the time, Silas Willows. Coming back for her second year to find him gone had been heartbreaking.

Minerva understood how much young girls like to feel grown-up, how intensely they can feel, and how much a bright-eyed boy like Harry can scramble their minds. She understood it all too well.

Not that Minerva thought that the eleven-year-olds had for sure been... you know, but it was still a possibility that was realer than she would have preferred.

Of course, the teachers had made an effort to look for the children, mostly by leaving word with some prefects and such, but no one really expected anything to come from that. Hogwarts was a huge castle, students went ‘missing’ in it all the time, especially when they didn’t have anywhere they needed to be.

As expected, the two had shown up at lunch, and the only reason Minerva had even considered believing their story about practicing The Stunning Spell was because of how... normal they’d been.

Neither had acted off or strange in any way. In fact, if she hadn’t known beforehand that they’d been together all night long, she wouldn’t have looked at them twice.

So, true or not, Minerva had decided to accept their story, and (grudgingly) dropped her plans for punishment.

Thankfully, the rest of the day had been quiet enough, but Minerva’s budding hope that the weekend would be peaceful was shattered when someone broadcasted a rooster’s crow across the castle on Saturday morning.

A rooster that they stole from Hagrid she might add.

What she would do when she found the students responsible, the older witch thought to herself. They would never forget it.

Unfortunately, for her to mete out the appropriate punishment, the students would first need to be found, and that was starting to look like a pipedream.

The simple truth was that there was no way to know who did it, or even where they did it. Not without lining up all of the students and questioning them under veritaserum anyway. And, unfortunately, that was still illegal.

Minerva sighed and stared at the third-year papers she was supposed to be grading. She really wasn’t in the right state of mind for this.

Maybe some fresh air would help clear her head, the aging professor decided, before walking out to the little balcony attached to her office.

Minerva’s office was on the sixth floor of the west tower of Hogwarts.

Being this high up, the balcony gave her a wide view of the castle grounds, covering everything from parts of The Forbidden Forest to the quidditch pitch, and she often came out here on days like today when she needed to clear her head.

As it often did whenever she came out here, her gaze immediately went to the quidditch pitch, where she could see the far-off shapes of some students practicing drills on brooms.

Those were the Gryffindors, she knew. The new captain, Wood, had booked the pitch for the whole day, both to hold the tryouts and to begin training the new seeker, whomever they may be.

Minerva hoped it was someone good; Charlie Weasley had left some big shoes to fill.

For several minutes, Minerva watched her lions practice; long enough that her building irritation from dwelling on recent events had effectively evaporated.

The witch was just beginning to consider returning to her work when she noticed something.

Now, Minerva had always had good eyesight, ever since she was a child (and contrary to what many thought, it had everything to do with good genes and nothing to do with her animagus form), and that was the only reason why she noticed a certain ghost wailing and terrifying students in a second floor hallway in an entirely different wing of the castle from hers.

On another day, when Minerva wasn’t still on edge from the tasteless prank of that morning, she might have ignored the scene, or, at the very least, gone back into her office and taken the long way around through the castle.

This was not such a day.

With a few flicks of her wand, the witch conjured a solid, stone staircase bridging her balcony with the large windows of the hallway. Windows whose glass turned to wisps of fading mist as the irate professor approached.

Maybe it was the suddenly transfigured glass that made the growing crowd of students notice her, or perhaps just the no-nonsense aura she carried, but they quickly parted, giving her room to walk through.

“Myrtle!” The professor shouted sternly at the ghost who, even now was still wailing: “They’re dead! It killed them! They’re dead!”

Minerva’s voice caught the dead girl’s attention, and the ghost turned to look at her.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said.

“What is the meaning of all this, Myrtle?” The witch questioned tersely.

The ghost smiled, it was a happy little smile that did not match the words that left her mouth next. “Oh, it’s Harry and his little girlfriend. They’re dead, you see. A giant snake killed them.”

Minerva looked at the translucent girl floating before her with growing rage.

For the fifty-odd years Myrtle Warren had haunted Hogwarts, she had made no secret of how much she envied, and maybe even hated, the living students within its walls.

This though, was going too far.

Seeing the expression on the professor’s face, the ghost harrumphed and folded her arms. “Don’t believe me, do you? Okay then, go in and see for yourself,” she said, gesturing at the bathroom that was her usual haunt.

Before Minerva could make a decision one way or the other, a student, an older Hufflepuff girl, stepped out from that very bathroom and saw her.

The girl looked taken aback by Minerva’s presence for a moment before she shook it off and said: “Professor, there’s some kind of pipe in here. It looks like it leads underground.”

Minerva blinked. What?

Rushing into the bathroom, Minerva saw that it was true; hidden behind the sinks and mirror, which had all shifted to one side, was a huge pipe that descended deep down.

Her heart squeezed in her chest as, behind her, Myrtle giggled.

“Told you,” the ghost said.

​

★★★​

Minerva froze for exactly four seconds, then the witch who had survived two wizarding wars kicked in, and she did something that she hadn’t done since the spring of 1981 when You-Know-Who was at his most powerful.

“Albus. Albus. Albus,” she said.

It took six seconds. Each one felt like a minute.

A bright, white light flashed before the witch, and as she blinked away the spots it caused in her vision, Albus Dumbledore stood there in baby pink robes blinking at her in surprise, confusion, and a little wariness.

All were warranted. What she’d just done was something they both understood was for the greatest emergencies only.

“Albus, I fear Harry and Hermione may be in danger,” Minerva said, and Albus’ gaze immediately sharpened.

“They went down there,” Minerva continued, pointing at the pipe which Albus had appeared directly in front of so hadn’t seen.

Apparently unable to keep her mouth shut, Myrtle added: “A giant snake killed them.”

Albus’ gaze snapped to the girl and then his face paled.

“Fawkes!” The old wizard called, and his phoenix instantly materialized in an explosion of red and gold flames.

“Find them! Hurry!” Albus commanded, and the firebird quickly zipped down the tube.

Holding his wand up to his throat, The Headmaster spoke, and his voice rang throughout the castle almost as powerfully as the cock’s crow had that morning.

“All students, return to your dormitories this instant. There is potentially a very dangerous magical creature loose in the castle. Know that anyone who willfully disobeys this instruction may very well die a terrible death. Prefects and faculty, please see that no one is left behind.”

Minerva was still puzzling over what she thought may be an overreaction, when Albus turned to the wide-eyed Hufflepuff girl who Minerva had forgotten was still in the bathroom with them.

“Miss Watson, you should return to your dormitory, now,” Albus said gently. “Thank you for your help.”

The girl looked surprised to be addressed, and looked like she would really rather stay and see what would happen next, but finally, she acquiesced and nodded.

“Um, okay, sir. I’ll be going now.”

Before the girl could turn however, Fawkes burst out of the pipe, carrying a blood-soaked Harry with one taloned foot and a barely clothed Hermione in his other.

Both children were unconscious, and when the phoenix set them down, they looked dead.

Minerva’s heart jumped into her throat, while Myrtle, who had been quiet all this time, suddenly wailed very loudly and flew down a toilet with an explosive splash.

The room’s occupants barely paid the odd ghost a second of attention before focusing back on the first-years.

“Are they alive?” The Headmaster asked Fawkes, kneeling next to the children, and the bird nodded. “The snake?” The old wizard asked next, and this time the bird shook his head.

Albus rose and cast his Patronus.

“Poppy, I fear Harry Potter and Miss Granger might be in dire need of your services,” the wizard said, voice strained but still maintaining some measure of calm. “Please, prepare to receive them.”

Message complete, the Patronus flew off.

“Fawkes, please get me Filius and Severus,” Albus said, and after the phoenix disappeared in its customary swirl of flames, he turned to look at the Hufflepuff who was standing still watching the Gryffindors on the floor. “Miss Watson. To your dormitory. The rest of you too.”

The girl nodded jerkily, then turned and fled, along with the several students who, instead of obeying The Headmaster’s earlier announcement, had gathered at the door of the bathroom looking in.

Rapid flapping from the pipe caught the two professor’s attention, and both already had their wands pointed at the object before they saw what it was.

It was Harry’s owl.

The bird had a bloody, obviously broken wing that it was somehow forcing itself to fly with, albeit unsteadily.

It landed between the unconscious children, then reached out to press its face into Harry’s neck, before turning and doing the same to Hermione.

Done, the owl folded it’s wings as neatly as it was able and stood guard, ignoring both adults.

Fawkes returned, perched atop the shoulder of the Potions professor.

As quick as the phoenix appeared, he was gone again, no doubt to pick up his other charge.

The potions master took in the room and its occupants quickly, but his eyes stilled on the form of the children.

“Minerva, please take Harry and Miss Granger to our matron, if you would,” Albus said. “Tell her they’ve both very likely been infected with basilisk venom, but have received phoenix tears.”

The words basilisk venom caused Minerva’s heart to still in her chest, but the witch didn’t hesitate, and in the next moment she had both children floating behind her as she hurried away.

She did not notice Severus behind her looking like a man whose heart had died; she barely even noticed Harry’s owl follow.

★★★​

Two hours later, with Mr. Potter and Miss Granger safe and asleep in the nurse’s office, all of the students locked up tight in their dormitories, and Albus confident that there were no more basilisks, the Hogwarts staff congregated in the staffroom at The Headmaster’s behest.

Albus explained everything as he understood it.

Apparently, the Chamber of Secrets was real, and Salazar Slytherin, madman that he was, had left a basilisk in the school.

It would also appear that Mr. Potter and Miss Granger had somehow learnt of the snake, and instead of alerting the staff as they should have, they’d decided to kill it themselves.

Of all the stupid, reckless things she’d ever heard, this easily took the biscuit.

Those two had better pray they never woke up, because if they did Minerva would have them in detention for so long that their children would need to finish it.

The worst part was, she knew that this hadn’t just been an unfortunate accident. They hadn’t just come across the snake by chance; if that was the case then they wouldn’t have had a rooster with them. A rooster that, interestingly enough, was the only member of the group who got off without any injuries.

A rooster that was the same one that had been stolen from Hagrid; meaning that these same Gryffindors were also the ones responsible for what everyone had assumed was a nasty prank this morning.

Oh, they had better hope they never wake up.

While Minerva fumed, and some teachers stared slack jawed at what two first-years had managed right under everyone’s noses, a certain professor trembled as his Lord raged within him.

This would not go unanswered.

 

Evening. Same Day.

Saturday, Sept. 14


The world came into focus for Hermione with sounds.

“Hermione, can you hear me?”

It sounded like Harry.

But that wasn’t possible, the girl thought as her heart clenched. Harry was dead. The snake had killed him. It had killed her too.

...

But then how was she here? She wondered.

“Hermione? Wake up, please,” Harry’s voice said again.

“Don’t rush her, Mr. Potter,” a woman said gently. “Give the potion time to work.”

Who was that woman? Hermione wondered. And what potion?

Curious for answers, the girl opened her eyes.

Harry’s face hovered over hers. His dark hair was as disheveled as ever, with wild strands sticking out every which way, his brilliant green eyes were clouded by worry, and his lips were lacking their customary smile. It was the most beautiful thing Hermione had seen in her short life.

“Harry?” She asked, almost afraid to hope.

“Yeah, it’s me,” Harry said, and then he smiled. It was small, hesitant almost, but it made Hermione reconsider her recent realisation, because this was the most beautiful thing the girl had ever seen.

“Are you okay?” Harry was asking. “You were—”

Hermione hugged him, as tight as she could. “You’re okay,” she said, tears rushing down her face. “You’re okay.”

Harry hugged her back, and his voice broke when he said: “I am.”

Through her tears and her relief, Hermione finally noticed her surroundings, as well as its other occupants.

They were in the infirmary (Hermione had never been before, but the rows of small beds with crisp, white sheets was an obvious clue), and watching she and Harry, one with worry on her face, and the other with an unreadable gaze, were Madam Pomfrey and The Headmaster, Albus Dumbledore.

Seeing her staring at them, Dumbledore said: “I’m glad to see you’re convalescing splendidly, Miss Granger, but I fear I may need to interrupt your rest; I have some questions I need you and Harry to answer, if you may.”

“Albus, must you do this now,” Madam Pomfrey asked. “The children need their rest.”

“Thank you for your time, Poppy,” Dumbledore said gently, but in clear dismissal. “If you could excuse us, please.”

The matron looked very unhappy at being dismissed, but she obeyed all the same.

Harry had let go of Hermione by now, but they still clasped hands, and he sat with her on her narrow bed and they faced Dumbledore as a united front.

From the tiny nightstand by the bed, Hedwig let her voice be heard, and Hermione looked at her in surprise; she’d forgotten all about the owl.

The bird looked fine though, so Hermione didn’t feel too guilty about her lapse.

Looking back at The Headmaster, Hermione made eye-contact with the old wizard before she remembered and quickly focused on something else. Like his pink robes, which were conspicuous enough to easily attract the young girl’s eyes.

Surprisingly, Dumbledore sighed, and it sounded genuinely sad.

But why would he be sad? Hermione thought. She expected him to be angry, after all, he was here because he’d learnt everything they’d been up to, right?

She looked to Harry to see if he had any answers; he didn’t, but he did have some information to give.

“Dumbledore told me that he had some questions to ask me,” Harry said, “but I told him that I wouldn’t talk to him unless you were awake, so he asked Madam Pomfrey to wake you.”

“That I did, Harry,” Dumbledore said. “And I’m sure you already know what my questions are, so I won’t waste any time with preamble.

“How did you know about the basilisk, Harry? How did you know about Slytherin’s chamber?”

Hermione swallowed. This was bad. They’d already decided that they didn’t want anyone to know about Harry’s future knowledge, it was why they’d gone through all the trouble to do all of this themselves.

If Dumbledore was asking questions like this now, how much longer would it be until they let something slip or he figured it out himself.

Dumbledore was supposed to be more than just a powerful wizard, after all, he was supposed to also be very intelligent.

Harry either wasn’t feeling the same worry Hermione was, or, more likely, he was great at hiding it, because he said: “How do you know it was me, though? I mean, for all you know it could have been Hermione who told me about the chamber and the snake.”

Dumbledore sighed again, and it sounded even sadder than before.

“Why don’t you trust me, Harry?” Dumbledore asked, and through his hand in hers, Hermione felt Harry still.

“Trust you?” Harry asked quietly. “Trust you? Do you have any idea what it was like growing up with the Dursleys? Oh, wait, you do. Ten years of hell, you said. Ten years of being told every day that my parents were good-for-nothing drunks who got themselves killed in a car accident. Ten years of being called a freak. Of being told I was unwanted.

“Do you know why the Dursleys stopped beating me? It was because Vernon got carried away once and broke my jaw; I had to go to hospital. They stopped because they were scared people would only believe I ran into a door so many times.”

Harry was shaking, his hand in hers squeezing so tightly. He could barely speak.

So Hermione spoke for him.

“They starved him instead,” she said, and despite knowing the risk it would expose her to, she looked Dumbledore in the eyes. Because she had to know, she had to know why Dumbledore would leave Harry with people who he knew would treat him the way the Dursleys did.

Dumbledore’s eyes held sadness and great pain, probably more pain than Hermione could ever understand, and the girl found that she liked it. She liked knowing that she was hurting the old wizard even just a fraction of how much he hurt her friend.

“They locked him in a cupboard for days with nothing but water and some bread. Like a dog. Then they would make him cook and clean, and then they would eat while he watched.

“He cried himself to sleep so many times,” Hermione said, feeling the pain like it was her own, and in a way, it was. She had seen it in Harry’s memories; lived it. Felt his anger and sadness and loneliness.

It left a bad taste in her mouth, knowing that there was a lot more—a whole decade’s worth—that Harry had had to live through alone.

“So, no, Dumbledore,” Harry said, “I don’t trust you. To be honest, I don’t even like you. And I’m sure you had reasons for doing what you did, maybe even good ones, but I still don’t trust you. And I still don’t like you.”

Dumbledore closed his eyes and took a slow, deep breath. “I understand that some of my decisions have been painful for you, Harry—”

Harry scoffed. “No shit,” he muttered.

“—and I realise now that I will have to win your trust. But you must trust me when I say, Harry, that I will always fight The Dark, whatever form it may take.

“Please,” the wizard said, his bright, blue eyes sincere, “let me help you.”

Hermione looked at Harry. The boy looked conflicted. And Hermione realized in that moment that Harry was not in the right state of mind to make any important decisions. Neither was she, to be honest.

“Can we have some time to think about it?” She asked, and Harry quickly grabbed onto that.

“Yeah. After all, the snake’s dead, right?” Harry asked, and Hermione blinked as she realized that she hadn’t even considered whether the snake was alive or dead.

She’d just assumed that it was dead. After all, Dumbledore would hardly be here talking to them, if there was a giant, enraged basilisk loose in the castle.

“Yes, Harry,” Dumbledore said. “The snake is dead.”

Harry shrugged. “Then we have time,” he said.

Dumbledore considered that for several seconds, and Hermione was beginning to worry that the wizard might push, when he acquiesced.

“Very well then,” Dumbledore said, then, after a pause, and with his eyes twinkling just a bit, added: “Unfortunately, there still remains the matter of your deaths to resolve.”

Hermione blinked. “What?” She asked, while Harry made an inarticulate “huh?” sound.

Dumbledore chuckled. “Oh, yes, if the rumours are to be believed, then, in one afternoon, the both of you have somehow managed to lose your lives to a Hungarian Horntail, a nest of acromantulas, and a gloom of dementors.

“Myself, I much prefer the version of events where Harry swooped down into the Chamber of Secrets on a phoenix and saved Miss Granger from a nest of fire-breathing basilisks.”

“Uh huh,” Harry intoned. “Did I also do it with my eyes closed and only using my bare knuckles? You know, to give them a fighting chance.”

Dumbledore laughed again. It was a nice laugh.

When the mirth subsided, Dumbledore spoke: “Alas, there is no greater defence against falsehood than the truth; which is why I would ask you to come to dinner in The Great Hall. As soon as you’ve had a change of clothes, of course.”

Hermione and Harry both looked down at the very unflattering hospital gowns they were wearing.

Oh.

“Your trunks have been brought down for you,” Dumbledore said, gesturing at the objects where they laid some distance away.

The wizard looked at them then, deeply, and for a long time, before finally, he said: “And for whatever it may be worth to you; I am very proud of what you have accomplished. Both of you.”

With that he left, and despite themselves, as the children got to dressing up, they were both left feeling a little better, a little warmer, for having received The Headmaster’s praise.

★★★​

In the two weeks Hermione had spent at Hogwarts, there had been (way too) many times when the entirety of the student body had stared unabashedly at she and Harry while in The Great Hall.

Tonight became another one of those times.

Well, no actually. It was like none of those times.

As soon as Hermione and Harry stepped into the hall, conversations petered out, and all eyes turned to them, yes. This was expected.

What wasn’t expected, was the mighty cheering that broke out a few seconds after that.

It started from the Gryffindor table, but quickly spread through the entire student body, bar Slytherin, most of who simply looked angry, wary, or annoyed.

What had started as a cheer quickly grew into a standing ovation, and it was so powerful now that even some of the teachers joined in, albeit in a much calmer fashion.

“What is happening right now?” Harry asked, needing to shout to be heard over the din.

“I don’t know,” Hermione shouted back.

Finally, the cheering died down, and Hermione and Harry were once again left standing there and being stared at by a silent hall.

Fortunately, Dumbledore came to their rescue this time.

“Be seated, everyone,” the wizard said, as he rose.

Harry tugged Hermione, and the girl quickly followed.

They made their way over to their friends, a space already set out for them, and as soon as they sat, Dumbledore continued, which, luckily, kept anyone from asking them any questions just yet.

“There have been a lot of conjecture about the events of this afternoon involving Mr. Potter and Miss Granger. In light of that, I have come to put the matter to rest by giving you the truth of the events.

“Earlier today, Harry Potter and Hermione Granger came across Salazar Slytherin’s Chamber of Secrets, and while exploring it, as children are wont to do, they came across the chamber’s protector, a thousand-year-old basilisk.

“The serpent attacked them, and the two Gryffindors fought and killed it. As we all can see, they are not dead, and whatever injuries they suffered, minimal as they were, have been promptly handled by our own Madam Pomfrey.

“A round of applause for our matron, everyone.”

There was a small smattering of clapping hands.

Dumbledore continued: “Please, do not trouble them for more details, as it is unlikely that they will have any to give you.

“Now,” and here Dumbledore smiled, “let us enjoy this bountiful feast that our kitchen staff has managed to scrounge for us on such short notice.”

And with that, The Headmaster sat down.

For several seconds after, no one seemed to know how to react.

Then the whispering started.

“Bloody hell,” Ron said, staring at Harry with wide eyes. “You really killed a giant basilisk, Harry?”

Even without looking, Hermione could tell the entirety of the Gryffindor table was straining to hear every word of Harry’s reply.

“Uh, no, actually, I didn’t,” Harry said. “The snake swiped me into a wall,” as he said that, Harry grimaced like the memory was coming back to him, much like it was for Hermione herself, at least until Harry continued, “I passed out after that. Hermione was the one who killed it.”

All eyes immediately focused on her and Hermione quickly shook her head. “I didn’t kill it, Harry. It dodged my spell.”

Harry blinked at her. “Really?”

She nodded.

“Then who killed it?” The boy asked curiously.

Hermione didn’t know. At first she’d just assumed that Dumbledore had shown up in the nick of time or something, but that was looking less and less likely now.

But then who had killed the snake? It’d been just the two of them there. Well, them and—

“Harry?” Hermione called, and when he looked at her, she led his line of sight with hers to Hedwig, who was giving them a look that virtually screamed ‘who do you think?’

Harry looked at the owl, then at Hermione, at the owl, then back at Hermione again.

Don’t do it, Harry.

He did. He really did.

“Wow, that’s crazy,” Harry said. “That chicken must have killed the basilisk.”

The look Hedwig gave Harry in that moment should, by all logic, have knocked him dead, but Harry, of course, kept living.

Hermione was starting to suspect that it might be a superpower. That, and annoying people.

“A chicken killed the snake?” Parvati asked in complete confusion.

“Hm-mhm.” Harry nodded. “Only thing that makes sense. Anyway, what’s been going on with you guys?”

It was obvious everyone was waiting for more. For some grand story, perhaps?

Hermione thought that that might be it. They wanted to hear the swashbuckling tale of how the amazing Harry Potter and his friend slew the evil basilisk.

The thought hit her; they wanted to hear a bedtime story.

Something exciting and adventurous. Something fake.

They didn’t want to hear the true story; the story of an unstoppable monster and two children who nearly died.

Hermione reached out for Harry’s hand.

He took it, and she drew strength from the contact.

Harry had the right idea, Hermione thought.

They wanted a story, then there was their story; a chicken killed the basilisk.

A monster-slaying, karate chicken. Let them enjoy that story.

Seeing that neither Harry, nor Hermione, will be giving anything more, the table around them descended into awkward silence for a bit, before Lavender said: “Oh, right, Ron made seeker.”

“You tried out?” Harry asked and Ron nodded.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Hermione asked.

“Yeah, we could have come to cheer you on,” Harry said.

“He didn’t think he’d make the team,” Dean supplied.

Ah. Ron had been rather skeptical about his chances back during Flying Lessons.

Harry scoffed and shook his head like Ron had been being silly. “Oh, well,” he said, “better late than never, I guess.” And Harry raised his cup of pumpkin juice up. “To Ron. Gryffindor’s seeker.”

Everyone cheered, even Hermione, and Ron blushed, though he looked happy.

“Wood says I still have a lot of work to do on my flying though,” Ron said.

Harry waved that away. “Pish! He’s the Captain. Training you is his job. Your job is to look cool.”

“I thought his job was catching the snitch?” Hermione asked.

“While looking cool,” Harry amended, and at her look said defensively: “Hermione, you can never overestimate the importance of looking cool.”

Hermione just rolled her eyes at him.

“Oh, yeah, Harry,” Ron said suddenly, “you remember that spell you used to find Neville’s toad back on the train?”

“Is Troy lost again?” Harry asked.

Hermione swatted him, knowing he’d gotten the name deliberately wrong. “It’s Trevor.”

“Right, sorry. Is Terror lost again?”

“No,” Ron said, ignoring their byplay, “Scabbers is. I was wondering if you could find him.”

Hermione froze.

“Scabbers is missing?” Harry confirmed.

“Yeah,” the redhead answered easily, “I haven’t seen him for hours now.”

Hermione and Harry stared at each other, then, like a lightning bolt, Hermione realized something that her mind had probably deliberately ignored all this time out of relief; Quirrel was absent from the staff table.

He was never absent.

She and Harry had the same thought right then, ‘this could not be a coincidence.’

And it was in that moment that a ghostly, silver hawk flew into The Great Hall and hovered before Dumbledore, and in a panicked, male voice, said: “Dumbledore, we need you! Death Eaters have set fiendfyre to Hogsmeade!”