Written for QLFC, Tutshill Tornados, Beater 1, prompts "mew" and pillow.

Before

Hermione likes the summer. She gets to read more, for one thing. School tends to severely limit the amount of time she can spend with her nose in a book. This is because teachers for some reason get upset when she spends their entire class reading, even though she's already finished the worksheet and she knows how to do the problems.

It's nice, too, that there aren't any other kids around. Hermione doesn't think about that too much, or at least she tries not to. They don't like her, and that's all that there is to it. No use feeling sorry for herself or trying to understand why. They just don't. Because, Hermione's parents tell her, they're stupid. Because they don't appreciate Hermione for how clever and talented and wonderful she really is. Hermione thinks they might be lying. She knows that she doesn't want to hear any more about it.

There's a nice tire swing in the Grangers' backyard. Hermione goes there to escape, when she grows tired of her mother's offers to invite her friend from the clinic over, the one with the girl that's only a year younger than Hermione, she's sure they'd be great friends. Hermione's father is mostly quiet. She thinks he might understand. At least, Richard Granger doesn't bring his own colleagues over for coffee or go out for drinks as often as his wife does. He never says anything, though, and Hermione tries not to either.

It seems to make her mother sad, when Hermione insists that she's fine on her own. It makes Hermione sad, too, when she thinks about it too much, which she always, always does, since Hermione is always thinking too much, especially alone in her room at night, when she can't crack open a book and pretend that she isn't her anymore. Sometimes she feels like crying, when the fact that the only people who care whether she lives or dies are the ones who are forced to by biology.

Hermione is ten years old, and so very alone. Her pillow is soaked with tears, and her room is hot and clammy because the air conditioner's broken again. She sighs, flips the pillow over so that she won't be sleeping in her own snot, and reaches for the emergency flashlight and the emergency book she keeps in her bedside table. It's going to be a long night.

Now - Two Years, A Month, and Eight Days Later

He's perfect. Hermione's never believed in love at first sight, but he's the most beautiful cat she's ever seen, made all the more so by how utterly ugly he is. His fur is ratty and mangled, his tail looks like it's broken in at least two places, and his teeth are crooked. He looks like an absolute nightmare. Crookshanks, Hermione thinks, shall be his name.

"Mew," Crookshanks says. Then he bats his claws at her face in a gesture that she can't interpret as being either friendly or threatening. It doesn't matter either way.

Hermione grins at him. "I've tamed two preteen boys," she says. "A cat should be easy."

The cashier looks over at her, bored. "He's half-Kneazle," he says.

Hermione doesn't know what a Kneazle is. She makes sure to stop at Flourish and Blotts on her way out of the Alley, and leaves weighed down by ten pounds of books about Kneazle ancestry, anatomy, and tips on caretaking.

If nothing else, Hermione is thorough. She's going to have him trained within days.

She does not have him trained within days.

"You could have gotten an owl," Ron points out on the train as Hermione wrestles Crookshanks down from the ceiling of their compartment.

Hermione grunts, trying to persuade her cat to loosen his grip. She isn't even sure how he's holding on, since there isn't very much to grab onto.

"No, really," Ron says. He gestures to Harry, who smirks and ignores him, for support. "What's wrong with a—a rat, or something?"

Hermione pauses in her efforts for long enough to give him a sideways glance that she may or may not have practiced. "You mean like Scabbers?"

Scabbers pokes his head out of Ron's shirt pocket at the sound of his name, which proves to be sufficient incentive for Crookshanks to move from his spot in favor of falling straight down onto Ron's chest. Ron screams, Harry, who's been quiet for the length of the argument, bursts out laughing, and Hermione grins as she tugs a suddenly-malleable Crookshanks out of Ron's lap.

"Who's a good boy?" she asks, stroking his fur. "Who's a good boy?"

Ron's indignant glare makes it all worth it.

Hermione feels sorry for her pillow. She had expected its suffering to end when she got into Hogwarts, and that hadn't quite worked out, and then she'd thought it would be fine when she made friends with Harry and Ron, which was mostly true, except now it just got peed on, which is definitely a new low for the both of them.

"This is unacceptable!" Hermione says to Crookshanks as he carefully licks himself. She tries to ignore Lavender's snickering, which she assumes is Lavender's confusion because she used a word with more than one syllable.

"Mew," Crookshanks says.

Lavender smirks at her from the next bed over. "Even your pet doesn't care about what you have to say, huh?"

Hermione doesn't want to deal with this right now, but Crookshanks seems to sense that she's been insulted, because he spins, hackles already rising.

"Wait—no—" Hermione tries, but he's leaping, and Lavender screams, and Hermione would make an attempt to stop him, she really would, but apparently Crookshanks doesn't care what she has to say, so why bother?

"You don't even care!" Ron's face is red, and he's got his finger pointed at her in a fit of righteous anger. "You don't—you're such a stuck-up, insufferable—Scabbers was my rat, you know Crookshanks ate him, and you don't—"

Hermione is trying very hard not to cry. "If you've got any actual evidence, you haven't shown it to me yet, so if you think that just a bit of fur is enough to—to prove anything—"

Ron throws his hands in the air. "I'm leaving," he says in a half-yell. "I'm done!"

"As if I'd want you around," Hermione says, once she's collected herself enough to realize that here is an opportunity for her to get the last word in. "Consider us officially not friends."

"Fine!"

"Fine!"

Ron huffs, and he slams the portrait down on the way out of the Common Room.

Hermione decides that she should probably go up to her room if she doesn't want to burst out crying in front of the small crowd that's always present in the Common Room. As she stands to leave, though, she feels something curling around her leg, and when she looks down, she sees Crookshanks's tail weaving around her ankle.

He mews, and it seems to be in a questioning tone.

"I don't want you around," she tells him, and slams the door in front of him when he tries to follow her into her dormitory.

Later, her pillow is once again made to suffer. Hermione pulls the curtains more tightly around her bed and hopes that her silencing spell holds up.

"You're terrible," Hermione says.

Crookshanks purrs.

"Couldn't you have found some way to tell me that Scabbers wasn't dead? Ron hated me for months, you know."

"Mew," Crookshanks says.

"I love you too," Hermione says. "Now get off my suitcase, I need to pack."

Hermione never considered how large of a difference there was between reading by yourself in an empty house in the middle of July and reading with a cat on your lap in an empty house in the middle of July.

For one thing, Crookshanks always manages to sweep his tail in front of the sentence that she's currently trying to read. For another, his claws are digging into her thighs, which are already uncomfortably warm since he generates enough heat to power a small village. Plus his fur is getting everywhere on her clothes, and Hermione just knows it's going to take forever to pick it all off later.

Most importantly, though, Crookshanks's purring makes the house less quiet. Less lonely.

"Mew," Crookshanks says.

Hermione strokes his fur absentmindedly and smiles.