February 9, 1993
Dear Hermione,
Don't ask why, but do you have any way of checking if there's any British pureblood families that haven't gone to Hogwarts in a couple of decades?
We can't find any decent genealogies in our library, Neville says he thinks they got banned or sent to the Restricted Section around when Dumbledore took over. So teachers couldn't discriminate between their pureblood and non-pureblood students, which is a great goal and everything but it's really not helping us right now.
Hope you had a nice winter holiday.
Ron Weasley
On Valentines' Day of 1993, Hogwarts was covered in pink paper hearts and irritated dwarf-cupids.
This was not enjoyed by any of the authority figures, other than the dubiously-authoritative Professor Lockhart. Headmaster Dumbledore, after all, was not there to look politely amused and encourage his teachers to play along. (He, in addition to technically not being allowed on the grounds, was busy trying to prevent anyone other than Lucius Malfoy from finding out that things were getting a little bit out of hand at Hogwarts. Lucius Malfoy had a somewhat terrifying ability to know what was going on in places he had no right knowing anything about, but Molly Weasley had been told Fred and George had an accident practicing Charms, and no one had any intention of telling the Finch-Fletchleys anything at all.)
Professor Snape deducted House points from no fewer than a dozen students who were stupid enough to offer him valentines, many of whom were actually in his own House. He also devoted one-third of every single one of his classes to giving a very acerbic lecture about love potions and how, contrary to Professor Lockhart's idiotic suggestion, they were not acceptable ways of earning affection. He would not teach anyone how to make them, students were not permitted to use them, and he would personally hospitalize anyone who was so unbelievably stupid as to try.
Professor McGonagall hexed at least thirty dwarves who were trying to deliver the bloody things in her classroom, and all her afternoon classes had to awkwardly congregate outside her door as she one-by-one let them through the shields she'd erected to keep out the weirdly determined letter-delivery system.
Professor Burbage had most of her classes derailed by overwrought Shakespeare.
Professor Sprout had to dedicate most of her afternoon classes to cleaning paper out of the Mandrake pots, and although no one could actually hear anything she was saying through the Necessarily Fluffy Safety Earmuffs, most of her students somewhat suspected there was profanity taking place.
Professor Sinistra was observed to show up for lunch (she usually slept through breakfast), look around in confusion and terror, and promptly turn around and go back out the doors; Professor Vector was noted to miss several of her afternoon classes and was later found sitting in the Astronomy Tower trying to convinced the apparently dwarf-phobic Astronomy Professor to open her well-barred door and eat something ("I am not coming out until those monstrosities are gone!").
Professor Flitwick's infinite patience eroded slowly over the course of the day, which mostly looked like his voice getting progressively higher-pitched and the other professors edging subtly away from him. At dinnertime he was to be found sitting at the Ravenclaw House table rather than the faculty table, glowing a rather unhealthy shade of blue and very calmly eating potatoes. A few of his prefects were sustaining a fairly powerful Silencing Sphere to a radius of about six feet from their Head of House on all sides, and giving anyone who showed signs of approaching him very sharp looks.
Professor Kettleburn tried to feed a pair of Cupids to an enormous salamander and would have lit his classroom on fire, except that his classroom had been fireproofed some number of years ago after the Fire Crab Incident.
Professor Babbling had failed to warn his students of the dangers of writing love letters in runes, and suffered a number of explosions in his classroom which was actually, for the first time in years, larger than the number in Kettleburn's.
The wizard having the worst Valentines' Day, however, was not any of the Professors of Hogwarts, nor any of its students.
Around noon on Valentines' Day of 1993, Lucius Malfoy walked into the library at Malfoy Manor, intending to look for historical references to Slytherin's Monster, and was totally distracted from that problem when he discovered it was occupied. Rather than empty tables and carefully organized shelves, the library was currently occupied by a bald wizard with severe black robes and a close-cropped white beard, a green-robed witch with white curls and tiny spectacles, and a disordered pile of what looked like every curse-breaking book the Malfoys owned. Two black cloaks were hung up neatly by the door, one with a purple half-moon pin and the other underneath a ridiculous feathered hat.
"You blithering idiot," Augusta Longbottom was saying, "there's no circle if it's anchored on a person, nothing to disrupt. Give me that."
"Hidebound old bitch," retorted Jared Nott, shoving the indicated text across the cluttered table. "I can make a circle."
Okay. So Augusta Longbottom and Jared Nott were in his library arguing about something. That was new and unexpected. Lucius had several separate reasons to be alarmed by this. First of all, the fact that Old Nott was his uncle did not actually prevent him from being terrifying, and when he was eight years old he'd watched Madam Longbottom win an exhibition duel against Alastor Moody, albeit narrowly. Second, he hadn't seen Nott since his father died, and he'd actually gone to a special effort to specifically defend the Manor against Jared Nott in particular, because the man had never liked him; and here he was anyway. Third, Lucius hadn't actually exchanged more than a handful of barely-civil words with Augusta Longbottom nee Fawcett since before the start of the War, and he was pretty sure Nott hadn't either.
And did people not think it was polite to ask?
"Oh, yes, break a curse by casting another one you'll also have to break, that's the efficient way to do things. Of course. Obviously," said Augusta, scribbling something on a piece of parchment and picking up a different book. It looked like they were simply working near one another, not actually working on the same project; their primary interaction aside from insulting each other, Lucius suspected, was stealing each others' reference books.
"You apparently don't even know what kind of curse you're trying to break," growled Jared, "so kindly keep your sarcasm to yourself."
"You do know what you're breaking," said Augusta cheerfully, "and I'm still making more progress than you."
"I hate you," said Jared, quite conversationally.
Lucius noticed that he was staring blankly at them, and that they were ignoring him utterly. He reminded himself sharply that although these were his father's contemporaries, he was Lord Malfoy and they were in his house. And besides that, he had work to do, he needed to find out what had gone wrong with that book ... his father had told him that if ten years went by without the Dark Lord returning, he was to give it to someone young, impressionable, and disposable, and, quote, the Mudbloods would be purged as they so greatly deserve, unquote, and that was ... evidently not what was happening at Hogwarts. The annoyance of dealing with this new problem on top of the previous one, after a moment's contemplation, supplied him the required aggression, and he said in what he hoped was a passably imperious tone, "What exactly is going on here?"
They both looked up.
"None of your business," said Augusta calmly.
None of his - !
"You are in my library," said Lucius.
"This is Brax's library," corrected Jared in tones of polite dismissal. "It's yours when you can defend it, and not before."
"Excuse m - "
Equally calmly, and with no change of expression, Jared said, "Out, or I'll hex you."
That he couldn't just let go by. Not in his house, or he'd lose all credibility. You couldn't just let people order you around in your own house when you were a Lord of the Wizengamot, not even people much older than you who quite possibly had more money than you did. So Lucius drew his wand from his cane. Or, he tried to, at any rate; before he could even point it at either of them, it went sailing into the air. To his credit, Lucius managed not to make any undignified yelping sounds in response. But Jared, who could move much faster than his arthritic joints should have indicated, still snatched the flying wand from the air before Lucius could make any attempt at retrieving it. Smirking, he handed it to Augusta - who apparently could draw and cast a Disarming Jinx faster than Lucius could draw - and said, "That. That is why I tolerate you."
"Oh, you tolerate me," said Augusta, rolling her eyes and sliding Lucius' wand up her sleeve along with her own. "I taught you half the hexes you know. Little Malfoy, you can have your wand back if you fetch me a cup of tea."
Lucius Malfoy did not have a pleasant Valentines' Day.
Hermione had a reasonably pleasant Valentines' Day at Durmstrang. This was largely because it was only loosely recognized as a holiday at all, being English in origin. Some of the Scandinavian students were going about giving people chocolate, and someone - possibly Adriana's brother - had managed to coordinate the appearance of a great bouquet of flowers above the Headmaster's chair, but it was altogether a relatively low-key event. The vast majority of the day, for Hermione, was spent sitting in the library with Viktor - doing homework, drinking tea, and completely ignoring the explosion that had resulted from Natasha giving Jarek a red rose and then running off bright-red and refusing to talk to him. Adriana kept wandering past the library door, snickering; Viktor suggested, amused, that she was probably playing messenger owl.
She was well past caught up, now; there were few things more effective at motivating dedicated studying than the raw terror of being assassinated by one's ostensible family members. Getting through the winter break had been almost entirely adrenaline and fear, for Hermione. She'd spent two hours every morning trying to force her hair to lie flat and black and unrecognizable, and then sat at breakfast with Theo and been lectured about proper etiquette and how to act appropriately superior. They'd gone to more gatherings of High Society than she could count, and she had to have a different dress and different shoes and different jewelry for each one. Thankfully, she did not have to break her previous personal decision not to wear any green: They didn't let her wear red, because Gryffindor, but almost everything the Notts owned was either black or purple, or occasionally dark gray. She didn't get to keep any of the ridiculously expensive jewelry, of course, but all the same she'd had to memorize what each one was made of and where it had come from ("Oh, this? Antipodean opals, of course, it belonged to my great-grandmother"), and the only bright side of this was that she now had an arsenal of totally useless information about gemstone classification. Also, she'd learned that she was absolutely terrible at walking in high heels, because despite her grades she was in fact only thirteen. She almost didn't hate Theo anymore, even though he was a self-righteous snarky git, because he had fast reflexes, and had caught her by the arm before she tripped down the stairs at Malfoy Manor.
She had not had the misfortune of having to convince Draco Malfoy that he had never met her before, because he was apparently staying at Hogwarts for the Christmas break, for reasons unexplained. All the same, it had still felt unbelievably weird to be following Theo around while he smugly showed off "My genius cousin who goes to Durmstrang," because she knew perfectly well that all the people shaking her hand and nodding and congratulating her on her grades would happily put her head on a spike if they found out who she was. Worse, she knew perfectly well that Theo and his father would be first in line, if her grades slipped or she stopped generating enough status boost to be worth the effort. So she smiled and shook hands and introduced herself "Hermione Nott, fourth-year at Durmstrang." And when Ally Runcorn made a snide comment about how she was much more interesting than the Mudblood girl of the same name who'd dropped out of Hogwarts the previous year, she laughed as offhandedly as possible and offered a pre-prepared joke about Muggles trying to sound intelligent by stealing Shakespearan names.
Easily the most terrifying part of the vacation, however, had been the reason she'd had to awkwardly write to Ron Weasley that she couldn't help him with his Heir of Slytherin problem, once she had returned and could borrow a school owl. Millicent Bulstrode, wondering why so many of the Slytherins had stayed over the break, had brought up the Chamber of Secrets. Daphne Greengrass had said something dismissive about certain people wanting to make it clear that they did not fear the Monster, and then she'd cut herself off mid-sentence as Lucius Malfoy swept down upon the gathering of young students. Lord Malfoy, teeth grinding, had threatened to have them all murdered in their sleep if they were ever so stupid as to bring up the subject again. Apparently, it was very bad practice to discuss such things with anyone, because if you were responsible you didn't want anyone to find out, and if you weren't responsible it was in your best interest to know as little as possible so as not to be blamed. Theo had asked his father about it later, and Old Nott had been if possible even more terrifying about it, and Hermione had concluded that she was probably in immediate danger if she continued to be involved in any way.
Eventually on the last day of the holiday she'd been given a stern look and shooed off to catch a Portkey, and only once back in her dorm room for several hours did her heart rate measurably decline.
By the fourteenth of February she was as relaxed as she was capable of being, which wasn't actually very much. She'd not only caught up, she'd started getting well ahead of her class again. She was seriously considering trying to figure out how to skip ahead a further year, and catch up to Viktor (or get close - he was the highest-scoring student in his year). Durmstrang students took OWLs at the end of their sixth year, not their fifth, and if she could do them next year she'd be on track for NEWTs the year after next and then she could - ... well ... - Okay, admittedly she wasn't actually sure what she'd do next, if she earned her NEWTs before she turned sixteen. She wasn't anything like stupid enough to assume that standard student qualifications, even the highest ones you could earn from Durmstrang, would be sufficient to defend herself against a century-old wizard who'd survived since Grindelwald's war. So she'd either have to continue being conspicuously useful and/or scholarly, or she'd have to run away very far. Somewhere in her copious free time she'd have to look up whether wizards had anything resembling universities ...
March 1, 1993
[enclosed: Elminster Gygax's An Intermediate Course in Abjuration, fourth edition, and Cantankerous Nott's updated The Sacred Twenty-Eight, eighty-ninth edition with birthdays and lineage charts]
Dear Ron,
Happy birthday.
(Your birthday shows up as soon as the eighty-sixth edition, 1980. Did you know some of them are self-updating?)
The Gygax book is your birthday present. I'll need the genealogy back at some point, though, sorry - I hope it helps with your mysterious project.
Hermione Granger
(It took her weeks to stop freaking out about how Hermione Genevieve Nott, September 12, 1979 - present, was actually in the self-updating geneologies, with her attendance at Durmstrang and everything, listed right across from her cousin Theodore Andreas Nott, January 29, 1980 - present and his status as a Hogwarts student. Apparently her elderly "great-uncle" knew how to meddle with whatever enchantments those ran on. Which was, frankly, terrifying.)
"How old are you again?" asked Jarek of Hermione one day, bemused, around the time her friends had collectively noticed that she was drifting pretty far forward in the curriculum. She was to the point of getting Viktor to tell her what his assignments were so that she could attempt them. Just that day she'd pulled seven out of ten fighting Natasha in Battle Magic class, which was a personal best; her cheery Russian roommate was slightly put out, but mostly impressed at the progress Hermione was making, given that she was noticeably smaller than everyone else in the class, even the tiny Korean girl. (The oh my god she's so cute had declined slightly, but ... only slightly, especially since she was failing utterly to keep her hair in check again now that she wasn't spending hours every morning trying vainly to flatten it. Adriana had started calling her minunăţie, usually with affectionate headpats, which honestly was kind of sweet and Hermione didn't mind it.)
"Thirteen," she said absently, and went back to practicing shield charms.
