Okay, soooooo

YOU PEOPLE ARE AMAZING! The ridiculous amount of reviews that just flooded in has made me REALLY excited. So, since I'm so happy about that and have completed the first chapter of the Malfoy Manor arc and am about to work on the second, I decided, fuck it, my awesome, amazing, beautiful, wonderful readers deserve another chapter. Lol so I guess now we see first hand how well

reviews work. xD Seriously though, thank you. Not a single flame and people are saying that this is going well so far, so I'm hoping I can keep up a quick pace where people are enjoying everything but also stay ahead of the game without stalling. :) THANK YOU SO MUCH!

Also, special kudos to a very long time reader, Netag Silverstar, who has been with me for the long haul. Her review left me with *happy tears*.

Father-Daughter Bonding IV: Age Nine – Accidental or Wandless?

In which wandless magic is supposed to be hard to learn and Hermione gives zero fucks.

Hermione had exhausted Severus's supply of tutors by the time she was nine and a half and then turned back to teaching herself new things – specifically magic. The problem was that she didn't have a wand with which to take advantage of her abilities and found herself frustrated with the fact that she couldn't learn the really important stuff, the stuff that would make a difference in her goals.

Because realizing what she could have gone through with Mr. Wagner if she hadn't had her magic had given her a deep-seated hatred of Muggles, excepting only her real parents. She understood why Voldemort had done what he'd done, why he'd hated them so much – although she was pretty sure it was for a completely different reason – and she couldn't help but say she agreed with him. It didn't improve him any in her eyes, but it given her a new tack for her goal, which for the past two and a half years had been to kill him.

But she decided that it wasn't enough to just kill him. She was going to not only kill him, but she would beat him at his own game. It was a dangerous feeling, the ambition to be the greatest Dark witch of the century, and certainly of the new millennia. She would be greater than Grindelwald, greater than Voldemort; after all, she had read their histories extensively, and she could see every part where they went wrong.

She would be building off the legacy of two very powerful Dark wizards, and she would correct their mistakes and prove herself greater than them – but even though beating out Grindelwald would be good, beating out Voldemort was much more important. Given that Voldemort was more feared even in his death than Grindelwald had been in life – not even history books would say his name except in the opening paragraph – she was pretty sure she could kill two birds with one stone there.

She started with an old copy of Standard Book of Spells Grade 3. She couldn't find any copies of Grade 1 or 2, and from the state of Grade 3, it was possibly older than Severus and clearly outdated. It was the easiest spell book she could acquire, though, and so she had to begin there.

There were plenty of spells to choose from, but the most immediately useful, especially for her plan, was the Disarming Charm.

Unfortunately, she had no one to practice disarming, as she was certain that telling Severus she was going to teach herself wandless magic was a Bad Idea. So, given her restrictions, she began with the Freezing Charm, and stole a glass of water to take to her room. She wasn't supposed to have food or drink in her bedroom, but she figured that what Severus didn't know wouldn't hurt him. Or her.

So she sat there, with only the vaguest of ideas on how to do this, and tried to windlessly freeze the cup.

All she did was make her hand hurt from tensing it for so long.

Then she tried waving, twisting, and pointing, all with no effect. She knew she was saying the charm correctly, so why wasn't it working?

She figured that wandless magic was very hard otherwise wands wouldn't be so important, so she spent two hours every day, more if she could, on trying to freeze the cup.

After a week, she had made absolutely zero progress.

She considered possibly an easier spell. There was the Seize and Pull Charm and the Mending Charm, but an attempt with them was even harder. She was pretty sure at one point she actually made the tear in the rag worse, and gave up on that one lest Severus catch on to what she was doing.

Finding that Grade 3 spells were just too ambitious to start with, Hermione started watching Severus closely while he did magic. Some things he did nonverbally, which was particularly frustrating, but she kept an eye out.

After another week of useless wandless attempts and studying Severus closely, she found a spell that looked attainable: The Levitation Charm. And it was useful to boot.

She started, embarrassingly enough, with toilet paper.

And after nearly a month of trying, she thought she had done it at last – or rather, gotten it to twitch a little. Then she noticed the window was open and it was possible the breeze had made it move.

As it turned out, it had been the breeze after all.

But she dedicated her time to it, although she began to lose hope and went from practicing an average of two hours a day to one hour and eventually a half hour.

Then, on one Saturday morning, she half-heartedly waved her hand at the toilet paper leaf in what she was considering to be her last time and muttered, "Wingardium Leviosa."

It twitched.

She glanced at the window. It was shut tight.

She looked upwards to check if the ceiling fan was on, even though she knew she didn't have one. Hope was a dangerous thing.

Taking a deep breath, Hermione said as clearly as possible, "Wingardium Leviosa" and waved her hand in what she thought was the same way – after all, she hadn't really been expecting that last try to work.

The toilet paper twitched again, a little harder this time.

And with renewed vigor, Hermione practiced for days and days, until one day, it finally levitated properly, like it had when Severus did it.

She shrieked so loud that Severus came rushing to the door. It was in that moment that she realized that he was aware of her and perhaps some part did care, because if he really wasn't concerned about her being in danger, he wouldn't have come, and definitely not a quickly as he did. But she was too excited to properly examine that realization.

Severus looked rather annoyed, though, when all he saw was her smiling face.

"I did it!" she cried, and in a moment of childish excitement – what she would later consider recklessness, because she had told herself she wouldn't spill her secrets – she waved her hand and repeated the spell. The toilet paper lifted obediently into the air and hovered there.

Severus's eyes widened almost comically, but he was able to compose himself fast enough that Hermione was almost certain she had imagined it. "Where did you learn that?" he asked.

"I taught myself!" she said proudly. "And-"

"Why on earth would you-" he started, interrupting her, before apparently answering his own question mentally and rubbing his temples. He gathered himself and said, "Come."

Hermione, starting to realize that what she had done was not actually a Good Thing, followed him, a little sullenly. Why did he always have to ruin everything?

But then all he did was explain that she was not to tell anyone about this, especially not figures of authority. She was already pleasantly surprised that he wasn't telling her to stop, but at the end, he gave her a tip, which sent her over the moon.

"Twitch your hand like this," he instructed her, and Hermione copied it, trying to lift a piece of parchment containing a mail order for Veritaserum. She had seen him chuck it angrily aside and write a scathing note back, or so she assumed given his expression as he wrote it. The parchment rose, quavering just a little as it did, given the increased weight, and Hermione beamed.

Severus nodded in approval, and Hermione clapped her hands. This caused the parchment to fall down again, but she was too happy to care.

And then he told her, "Try Lumos next," but wouldn't tell her what it did.

So Hermione, feeling closer to Severus than she ever had in her life – she told herself that she wasn't happy about it, but it was necessary if she was going to keep learning wandless magic – practiced the spell until she could conjure a ball of light on her index finger. Then, just to impress him – no, she was just proving to herself that she could do it, of course that was it – but deep down, although she would never, ever admit it to herself or anybody else that maybe, just maybe it would be nice to see his eyes widen in surprise, not approval though, definitely not, and of course she still hated him – she practiced until she could manage four balls of light on the tips of each of her fingers. Her thumb just didn't want to cooperate, and she figured it was impressive enough anyway.

She showed him one evening at dinner, and he told her another spell to try. She mastered this one, although it took nearly a month – things were going more quickly now that she knew the feel of manipulating her magic – and he continued to give her spells to work on one at a time. When she asked about the restriction on magic because of her age, he told her that she was young enough that they would just think she was very emotional. Hermione wasn't sure she liked this possible assessment, but she wasn't going to give up practicing wandless magic.

And that was how dinnertime became rife with conversation as Hermione spent eight hours a day practicing, because if she mastered a spell, Severus would instruct her in a new one and sometimes they'd end up in the living room while she tried to learn everything she could about the spell.

Hermione refused to acknowledge that her hard work was spurred on by the attention from her…from Severus.

But if she was going to admit it, and she was covert enough as she watched him, she thought that maybe he was enjoying their conversations, too.

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