Hermione left the dungeons as quickly as society allowed, only the knowledge of Harry and Ron beside her stopping her from going at a dead run. She was furious that that Snape creature had the temerity to call himself a teacher. Professor McGonagall would hear about it as soon as her next lesson was finished. History of Magic promised to be rather interesting-
"Hermione, where are you going? It's Flying in the grounds now. Come on!"
The colour steadily drained from the girl's face as she rejoined her companions. It was another joint lesson with the Slytherins, joy of joys, so there was going to be some rivalry. At least it wasn't more bloody-minded bastardry from Snape, she reasoned to herself unsuccessfully.
Ron looked excited – he came from wizard stock, and he'd been flying brooms for a while. Harry and Hermione looked decidedly less so. In the case of the former, it was largely because there had been a proper old birch besom in Uncle Vernon's 'special cupboard'. In the case of the latter, it was something else entirely.
The sky was cloudless and the air brittle – it had cleared over the course of the day – and the windows of Hogwarts Castle shone like polished diamond. The sense was one of majesty, of the huge open space that the grounds had, the school the only landmark for mile upon mile upon mile. All the vastness of wild Scotland was laid out before the class.
And Hermione was scared stiff.
She could feel the crushing weight of the blue sky in the core of her bones, the sense of space and scale making her want to shut herself in a box and cry for a while. It had begun with her primary school's annual Year 2 trip to study the Norfolk Broads. The great, flat fenland went on for a damp, marshy eternity, with nary a tree or standing stone to support the iron-grey sky. It had simply overwhelmed Hermione's senses, heightened by her own magic, until she had keeled over into the peat and stopped breathing, pale as death itself and frothing at the mouth with fear.
Agoraphobia, the doctor they'd been to see had said. Hermione had lived for much of her life in London and it had affected her perception of space somehow. The conversation had devolved into psychobabble at that point, and there were long strings of German that seemed to encompass a single word despite going on for three years at a time, and it had all made Hermione's head being to hurt and she had needed a large amount of ice-cream to calm her down.
She wasn't over the shock at knowing what she did, at knowing that something was wrong in the mind she prized so much.
Knowing that hurt.
"You will command your brooms to spring into your hands. Step forward, all of you. Position your hand over your broom and say 'Up!'". There was something very jolly-hockey-sticks about Madam Hooch. She seemed free of the general games teacher notion that sports were the only thing that mattered in your entire educational career, and that being good at them gave you the right to terrify children with various punishments. Despite her athleticism, Hermione found team sports about a few orders of magnitude less comfortable than a night in a rusty iron maiden listening to Iron Maiden – one of her dad's rubbish bands.
"Up," she said, in a half-hearted manner. Nothing happened. She sagged with relief.
"Not all of you will get it first time like Messrs Potter and Weasley – three points to Gryffindor each, by the way – so just keep trying until you get it to jump." Madam Hooch's voice still had that cheery tone to it.
Hermione had now decided she hated Madam Hooch.
"Up. Up. Up. Up. Look, I don't want to do this anymore than you do. I hate school games. I hate the thought of placing my trust in the flight capabilities of what is, at heart, a large stick. So you don't actually have to move when I say up." On the last 'Up', it jumped into her hand. Hermione suddenly hated the broom as well. The knotholes were smirking at her, she knew it.
"Right then, that's everyone – oh, pick it up, Longbottom, it'll be easier – so mount your brooms and kick off from the ground when I sound my whistle."
Hermione cautiously, whilst mostly looking up at the terrifying expanse of sky above her, lifted her leg up and over the broom. As the trainer-ed foot came down onto the solid earth once more, it slipped on some wet grass and propelled her forward. This might not have been an issue, had not the broom taken this to mean 'go' – in this instance convenient shorthand for 'go absolutely berserk and shoot to hyperspace'.
The young girl rocketed screaming into mid-air at an incredible rate of knots. She didn't stop screeching until the broom lurched, about sixty feet up, and she was hurled off. At that point, she started desperately hoping that Madam Hooch would come and pick her up. I mean, she was the flying instructor, right? She had to be good on a broom. She had to look after her pupils-
The word that came immediately to mind, in the eyes of the thunderstruck Harry Potter, was 'crunch'. 'Splat' would also have sufficed, as would 'whud', 'bam', and 'crack'.
"That'll be a bit sore, eh?" Ron joked. "My brothers've had worse. They're all fine."
There was a bit of weak coughing from over by the roof that Hermione had slammed into. She stood up tremulously, realised this was a bad idea on a roof, scrabbled for purchase, slipped, and thumped into the ornamental paving around the edge of the school with a sickening thump. It was a bone-breaky thud. Hermione didn't get up. The children crowded around her, the Gryffindors to see if there was anything they could do and the Slytherins (led by Pansy Parkinson) largely to either gloat or stick the boot in surreptitiously.
Madam Hooch was stunned. Nothing like that had happened in twenty years. "Stand BACK you lot! Give her air!" She bent over the stricken girl. "I'm moving her to the hospital wing. Anyone so much as breathes on a broom before I get back will be expelled, then fed to the subject of a seventh-year Care of Magical Creatures lesson. Levicorpus."
She levitated Hermione's still, blood-spattered form in front of her and set off to the hospital wing, careful not to disturb her.
Hermione awoke in a bed with several faces hovering over her. Through the gaps she could see a roof. Good. Roofs meant no sky meant safe.
"Hermione? Are you alright?"
She looked into the eyes of Ron Weasley, who had asked – after her accident – what felt to her like the most idiotic question on Earth, wizarding or otherwise.
"Durrrr. She fell out of the damn sky from gods alone know how high up, smashed into a roof and then a pavement. Both times face first. What do you think, Ron?"
The voice wasn't hers, but Harry's. Ron gaped and looked at him in a slightly surprised way, and the Boy Who Lived quailed. "I'm sorry, Ron, I didn't mean it, please don't hit me or anything, please-"
"Hit you? Why would I hit you? What would be the point?"
"Because I was bad..."
"Er, sorry to interrupt your plot-related point, lads, but I would quite like to tend to my daughter. The short version: Get out of this ward right now." The boys ran like hell and Ioan's face joined the looming convention.
"Dad?"
"Ssshhh, my girl. It's OK. It's going to be alright."
As her father cuddled Hermione close, Cora took Madam Pomfrey to one side. "Is she going to be alright?"
"I would think so. Wizards are pretty hard to kill – something about us makes us tougher, more resistant to injury. She's in no pain, though. You should know, Madam Granger, you made the Numbing Potions up this morning. And you did a damn fine job of work, too."
Cora smiled, dabbed at her eyes, and went to join her family.
AN: Much love and many cookies to the people who reviewed Chapter 10, and indeed every other chapter as well. I adore and thank you all.
