i.
Proof was an irreplaceable part of life for all scholars, and Hermione Granger was at heart, if nothing else, a scholar. From the moment she tumbled through the Veil, something told her that this new world wasn't very kind to magical creatures. It wasn't until her second month there that she found proof.
The house she had found was a sorry place, and the way the temperature had a habit of fluctuating made her wish more than ever before for a warming charm. She was almost inclined to think that they hadn't had it so bad on the run, but the words tasted awfully blasphemous on her tongue. She heard the creaking of the door and found a place to hide. Lack of magic had turned her disastrously cautious, almost paranoid.
It was all over before she knew it, but it also felt like she had been under the bed for a lifetime. The men were quick, efficient. That much could be said for them, she supposed.
To be honest, the experience had been harrowing. She had heard them fight the ghost, heard it shriek at them, all the while thinking of Nearly-Headless Nick and Sir Nicholas and Moaning Myrtle and all the new ghosts who were no doubt haunting the grounds of Hogwarts, the battlefield it had become.
She hated herself for staying there while the spirit suffered. It seemed rather hell-bent on harming the people after it, but it was only natural, wasn't it? She knew how it felt to be a cornered animal. She crawled out long after the house as silent, long after the ashes in the backyard had turned cold.
Something in her, something that had been hardening since she had encountered a mountain troll in a girls lavatory, hardened just a tiny bit more.
She wouldn't stay hidden the next time.
ii.
Hermione discovered that it was much harder to learn to defend herself in a world lacking magic. Her wand, now nothing but a sentimental reminder of a better place, rested in her beaded purse while she trekked across the country (The bloody continent, that is. America was truly a foolish place to be.) in search of instructors. She read voraciously, having discovered the internet and all of the wonders it provided for a curious mind. Technological development was one thing this world had over her own, even if this facet didn't make up for all it lacked.
She found what she was looking for in Alabama.
There was this small town where there were more deaths than there should be. She could feel it, feel the wrongness in the air, and she knew enough about soldiers to recognize the 'FBI agents' for what they were.
"Hunters." They told her, after she fed them a story about demons and dead family members, cautious to keep her hand on the firearm in the waist of her jeans. She had read enough accounts of supernatural events to tell apart the ones that might be true and the ones that most certainly weren't, and it seemed like it had worked.
"Teach me." She said, and they did. Not very much, of course, no one seemed to have enough time to do anything properly here, but enough. She had an aversion to knives to match her aversion to short sleeves, but it didn't take long for her to pick up the skills related to other blades and firearms. The hunters seemed impressed, even asked if she would like to join them, but she declined their offer, claiming a thirst for vengeance against the demon who had slain her imaginary family.
She did, however, join them on a vampire hunt.
It was grisly. A warrior she may be, but Hermione was not accustomed to and did not appreciate large amount of gore. Killing curses and stunning spells suddenly seemed so much more merciful, which was really a sign of how much she was changing, which was rather horrifying.
iii.
Her first actual encounter with a demon was the first time since she crash landed in this horrible place that she actually felt she had been able to obtain some information that might help her go back home.
"You know," The thing said, looking at her through eyes it shouldn't be using. "our king would be very interested in someone like you. He knows about the other place, about what you can do." It snickered, eyes moving to her hands, which clutched nothing but iron and holy water. "Or could do."
The reasonable voice in her head told her she should play this differently, try and get to this so called king, but the exorcism was past her tongue before she could acknowledge said voice. Her magic gaped at her like an open wound in her chest, like a phantom limb that she could almost feel.
She'd just have to find another one.
Crossroads demons, she found out, were much more pleasant to converse with. Dante, as he asked to be called, gave her virtually no trouble when she requested an audience with the King of Hell.
For Merlin's sake, when had her life turned into a B-list horror film?
Crowley, in turn had been fairly affable, even though he couldn't tell her what she wanted to hear.
"I can't send you back." He told her, looking amused. "Not that I can see why you would want to return. There isn't really anything left for you to do over there."
"What can I do?" she asked, only to find that demons don't trade for free. She wasn't that desperate yet.
Most of her hated him for what he said, for dashing her hopes. Part of her had to admit that just hearing for name in a British accent had been pleasant enough. She was too bloody sentimental these days.
iv.
Hermione thought she knew what it felt like to have her world turned inside out and upside down. She thought she had experienced the most jarring change in her life when she ended up here, stranded without magic or friend or family.
She truly learned what it meant to be through the looking glass when she encountered her first 'witch'.
The word, of course grated horribly against her tongue, and she owed many thanks to whichever deity had sent the hunters she had ran into before she went after the woman.
Because she had, once again and to her great chagrin, frozen when she came face to face with the 'witch'.
"She isn't one of you." The creature had taunted even as it was on its last breath. Luckily, it hadn't had a chance to say much more, and her partners had written it off as a comment on her fear induced stage fright. Hunters, she had learned during her tenure on this earth, had to be able to kill their fear, and her inability to do so marked her as a pretender. The hunters seemed to agree with this point, but were much gentler in suggesting she find some other line of work, the subtext brimming with the phrase 'for a woman'.
In reality, it wasn't fear but revulsion that had stayed her hand. It had just been too wrong, feeling the force the thing had exuded, something that was in fact almost close to her magic, just close enough to make her ache, but something that was also so, so different. It was a travesty, a transgression of all that was right and proper and good and natural. It made her sick to feel that force touch her, to feel her own impotence against something that wielded this bastardization of her own missing power.
How the world looked through the looking glass was, perhaps, one of the hardest things Hermione had every learned.
v.
It took Hermione quite a long time to learn that angels, the holy and pure beings she had heard of during childhood Sunday school classes, were dicks.
She wasn't truly a religious person (finding out that she was considered to be an abomination according to scripture had done wonders to sap the belief out of her) but it was still hard to overwrite all the indoctrination about the mythical and marvelous beings.
Yes, she should have noticed the first signs during her first few meetings with Gabriel, even though she had been rather preoccupied first by her once-again-dashed hopes and then by her fascination. Eventually, they had become friends of a sort, and she had learned to forgive him his faults.
His brothers and their proclivity to harm her was a stronger indicator, of course. She couldn't quite understand why they wanted her to be gone so badly. Yes, she wasn't from this plane of existence, and yes, she apparently did odd things to their 'angel radio', as Gabriel called it, but still. Trying to remove her from existence all together seemed a bit out of proportion, didn't it?
After the third overt attempt on her life, the belief that angels might indeed be arseholes started to gain strength in her mind. The fact that she had started to suspect Gabriel, literally her only friend in the universe, knew more about it then he was letting on, didn't do wonders for her faith in them as a species. But the last strike against the angels had came when she met the Winchester brothers.
Or rather, when she had found her so called 'friend' torturing the brothers in an attempt to get them to jump start the apocalypse.
She had heard of the Winchesters before, Gabriel seemed to have quite an interest in the brothers, although she quickly came to the conclusion that he had been censoring the stories he told her.
She wasn't completely sure what Gabriel had been doing to them, but she had figured out enough to tell her that he deserved to be in the fiery trap they had put him in. With her help. The fact that an angel, an actual angel, had promised her (temporary) safety in return for her help in rescuing the hunters had spoken volumes.
"Really?" he shouted, righteous anger bubbling to the surface when he realized the trick. "You're going to side with them against me?" his voice turned into a whine towards the end, and something in his demeanor, paired with the fact that he wasn't blurting out her origins story, told her he knew what she did; she was helping him just as much as she was helping the humans. She would be able to ensure he lived if the hunters wanted to go any further.
"You know how I feel about you using humans as your playthings." She snapped back, her own anger as formidable as his.
"Well, I don't know if 'human' is the word I'd use. Certain habits have their repercussions, you know." The tall hunter flinched and Hermione just glared at the archangel.
"Don't try to play semantics with me, it won't work." That was the point where Gabriel started on his tirade about the looming apocalypse and how everyone must play their part. It was also the point where Hermione lost her last semblance of cool.
"You can't end the world just because you're too much of a coward to stand up to your family." She shouted even as his face hardened. "This is bigger than you and bigger than your family and bigger than your petty feuds."
"There is nothing bigger than us." Gabriel shouted back. "Just because I've been helping you or paying a smidgen of attention to you doesn't mean your life or any human life means anything." She stiffened, and turned towards the others with her chin held high.
"If you've heard quite enough, I think we might be getting on our way." She spared the angel a last passing glance as she turned around towards the warehouse door. "You'll be out of here soon enough. Don't try and find me once you are."
"As if I would." Gabriel shouted at her retreating back. "You don't even exist."
Angels were, indeed, royal arseholes.
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This is the first part in what will hopefully be a series of oneshots and a longer, much longer chapter story. At the moment I am in painful lack of a beta (which, along with the fact that it Is currently five am and that I have't slept at all, is the cause of any spelling or grammar mistakes), so if there are any volunteers to aid me in contuining this saga I would be very grateful for the helping hand. Let me know what you think, thak you for reading and beg pardon for any errors.