It was morning. A dull, grey excuse for sunlight seeped half-heartedly into the Gryffindor dormitory, about as warming as a thrown axe. For Scotland, this was an Indian summer. Hermione was already up.
"Come on, girls, we've got to wake to get moving else it'll be too warm to run properly! Don't want to overheat..."
"I don't know if you've noticed, Hermione, but these are the Highlands. The chances of us overheating here are about as high as the ankle socks of a particularly small beetle standing in a ditch. I want at least five more minutes. At least."
Hermione stared for a moment, her expression attempting arch and failing to get even close. Swish, flick, think about sunlight. "Lumos."
The light spread brighter and brighter through the room, earning a few grumbles and the odd ballistic pillow before the others got up. "It'll make you thinner!" she cried. That did it.
Lavender and the others assembled with the speed of a foxhound scenting prey. Dressed in the red and gold tracksuits their House had provided, they tramped down to the grounds and began to run. Hermione kept the pace brisk, but not so much that anyone would actually die. They were new to it, after all-
After about eight minutes and roughly a mile, according to the map, Hermione realised she was completely alone. Looking backwards, she saw a trail of crimson-clad girls wheezing on the floor, faces the same colour as their tracksuits. "Are you all alright?"
Groans, a few mumblings and the odd shaken head made up her answer. Gradually, they staggered to their feet and traipsed up to the bushy-haired girl, only slightly mutinous. "Is all this worth it, Hermione?"
"You want to get slim and stay slim? And still eat whatever you want? Then yeah, it basically is. My Dad taught me that – he eats like a horse, and he looks like someone built him out of bits of string and pencils. Come on, let's run back to where we started, and if no-one stops until we get there I'll start teaching good old-fashioned Qigong kung fu."
"What's kung foo?" asked Jessie Hoxton, who had been raised in the middle of the Norfolk Broads, a place largely deemed to be twinned with the Palaeolithic.
"Kicky-punchy-hurty stuff. Great fun for use on errant boys. Now, let's GO!" Hermione took off, and the girls ran behind her. She dared them to stop, silently, and they followed, the promise of beating up the opposite sex too strong for an eleven-year-old girl to ever resist, boys being both distasteful and basically useless after all. No-one stopped until they returned, whereupon half of them sank to the ground like they'd just been coshed and the other half threw up. Hermione sighed. This was going to take a lot of doing.
ACHTUNG! SCREEN GEBREAKEN SIE!
"Well, that's the last of the boxes. Got to say, this is quite a nice flat."
Ioan Granger dumped the crate of Shrunken furniture into the middle of the bare floor and smiled up at his wife. She'd already set up the telly, the sofa and the video player, and was now watching her battered copy of Hudson Hawk. Cora's priorities were coffee, anime, bad films and oxygen, in that order. Complete nerd. Almost friendless at university because of it. It was the same reason he loved her with all his heart.
She launched into a ten-minute impression of the psychotic man-woman from the property show. They'd been lucky to snap the property up, really; the crash had really hit prices hard, but hardworking professionals like the Grangers had been able to survive without too much in the way of hardship. Ioan proceeded to laugh like a tickled goose whilst unpacking and nearly dropped several cassettes of sci-fi shows, for which he was severely chastised. With tickling.
They settled down in front of the telly and watched proceedings on a court case. It had something to do with a priest and some kids, so they flicked over to spare their minds some fury and sat in front of a particularly good Simpsons episode for twenty minutes. After that, Ioan made tea whilst his wife unpacked the bedroom stuff and made their bed up. Then she got changed into something quite unsuitable for description in a T-rated fanfic like this one. Suffice it to say that lace was involved, but not much. Her husband was still busy making tea ten minutes later, so she jammed on a dressing gown and attempted to find him.
He wasn't in the kitchen and the tea had been put in the pot some time ago. She looked out of the window and saw him there. He was practicing.
Ioan's mood could generally be ascertained by which art's kata (or equivalent) he was going over at the time. A rule of thumb was that the slower and more regimented the art was, the more troubled he was. Right now, he was in the middle of a complex Katori Shinto-ryu iaido kata – his longsword flashed out in a blur of deceptive speed, cutting some imaginary enemy in half before removing this ghost blood and returning his blade to the saya.
"Buggeration," she muttered under her breath, and went out to talk to him with two steaming mugs of tea in her hand.
"You're thinking about Hermione, aren't you..."
Ioan spun and made to draw, but subsided. "You caught me by surprise, love."
She handed him the mug delicately and he accepted, raising it to his lips and thinking better of it when he felt one start to blister. "You didn't answer my question, Ioan. I can see something's on your mind... is it our daughter?"
"It... oh, Cora, I'm worried about her. This Pansy horror's under the same roof as our little girl, and I really don't want anyone getting hurt. Worse, Herm could really mess someone up, and considering what happened in that shop..."
"Darling, she'll be fine, though it might be worth going over multiple-opponent drills with her. Now, drink your tea and come to bed. We've got to christen the flat..." Cora Granger grinned lasciviously and drained her mug. As she sashayed back to the door, loosening her dressing gown, she heard the patter of her sprinting husband behind her.
