A/N: Battle Arena.

Opponent: Hermione

Prompt: triangle

Hermione Granger hated primary school. If she'd had it her way, she'd have skipped the whole experience together, and she was smart enough to have done. Her parents, however, were afraid of her missing out on precious social interaction with children her own age. Children who skipped grades, her parents had explained to their eight-year-old daughter, were often outcast by other children because they were younger and didn't fit in.

As Hermione glared at the nearly-blank sheet of music in front of her—silver triangle dangling from a leather strap in one hand, and slender mallet in the other—she wondered if her parents had any bleeding idea how much of an outcast she already was. At least in year six she'd be a misfit who got to learn double-digit multiplication instead of a year-four freak who had outstripped her teacher's capacity to actually teach her anything.

Hermione set her jaw and tried to keep from grinding her teeth as she flipped a page of her sheet music without having played anything on the previous one. Year six students also no longer attended the flaming children's band practices, and Hermione so loathed the children's band. Nevermind her lack of rhythm; she'd be perfectly happy to sit in a corner and read for the entire period rather than disrupt the musical cacaphony of that most-hated thirty minutes of everyone's day. But, no.

'Everyone must participate, Miss Granger.'

'Everyone else enjoys children's band, Miss Granger.'

'I have a special part for only you, Miss Granger.'

'Miss Granger' was sick and tired of playing the blasted triangle—or not playing it, as was more accurate. A single ting at the end of every sixteenth line was Hermione's entire part. So little that no one would notice if it was played on the wrong beat, but enough that the band leader would notice if it were missing altogether.

The strength of Hermione's scowl was beginning to give her a migraine.

She tinged her triangle three beats into the seventeenth line, and the director frowned in her direction, messy red hair flouncing about in unruly curls.

I hate you, Hermione thought bitterly, staring holes into the side of his stupid, cheery face as he swished his regulation baton to the beat that hardly anyone was following well. She was gripping her mallet, holding it aloft like a weapon instead of a musical instrument. She jabbed it in his direction once he'd looked away from her.

I hate your stupid face, and your stupid baton, and your STUPID! BLOODY! HAIRCUT!

Hermione was too preoccupied with the depth of her hatred for children's band and the band instructor who had wrapped her little fingers around the triangle as he'd lied about how important it was to the "soul" of the piece that she didn't noticed the tip of her silver mallet turn bright red for the barest of seconds.

She was not, however, too preoccupied—nor were any of the other children in the room—to notice the band director's carrot top frizz out as though with static electricity and then blow away like so much dandelion fluff with a faint pfft!of air. Tufts of hair fluttered around the startled man as though he'd been hit rather hard by a down pillow full of orange feathers, and for three, whole seconds (Hermione counted), the band room was deadly silent.

Then, chaos reigned.

The classroom erupted in a combination of giggling, jeering, and screaming. Hermione stood in the middle of it all, in the eye of the storm, mouth standing open and triangle on the floor where she'd dropped it.

When the mess was sorted, the director's sudden, unexpected scalping would be explained as an extreme reaction to stress, and he would take two weeks paid leave to relax, leaving children's band lessons to be temporarily replaced by silent reading time. The children would lament the loss of their daily noise-making ritual. They would squirm and wiggle through their enforced quiet time. They would pass notes and sneak comics into their texts to liven up an otherwise dull afternoon. And Hermione Granger would eventually begin to agree that there could be no other explanation for what had happened.

But, for that moment, with children raising hell all around her, she could only stare and think dumbly to herself, I've sodding gone and wished his hair off...