5th Year Part Three: Chapter 21
"Don't judge someone based on their appearance. Looks can be deceiving."
~.O.~
Harry studied Hermione as he lounged across from her in the Black Family Library, leaning longways across the couch as he tilted his head towards her as his hands rested on his stomach. She had been quiet all morning as she sat on the faded red love seat, a forgotten book laying in her lap as she rested her chin on her palm looking out towards the window, unseeing.
"Hermione," he said, shattering the silence that had filled the room once Hermione had sat in her chair that morning. No one knew exactly what had happened with the Boggart the night before, only that they had found her after it had already been banished, and no one had been able to get her to talk about it all day. In normal circumstances on the best days Harry couldn't figure out what his best- friend was thinking, and now it was like an impenetrable bubble surrounded her. Only Snape seemed to know what she was thinking, giving her a cup of tea after preparing it just how she liked during breakfast that prompted the only tiny small she had given since the incident. Pulling himself up as she continued to look out to nothing at all, he took the short detour around the stout table to sit beside her. "Hermione," she jerked violently as he placed his hand around her wrist, the book balancing precariously on her knees falling to the ground.
Her eyes seemed to glow slightly with her sadness, tears seeming to grow the longer he looked to her. "Oh, Harry," her voice was faint as she put a hand on his cheek.
"I'm so sorry..."
Confusion simply filled him, not knowing when she ever would have cause to have so much sorrow towards him. Grabbing her, his hand curled in her hair he pulled her to him as she started sobbing. Her arms wrapped around his waist so tightly he felt as if an anvil had settled on his chest, not knowing how to make her feel better.
"What did you see, Hermione?" He asked once she calmed, but they maintained their positions.
She was quiet so long he thought she wasn't going to answer, but finally she sniffled. "If you ever find out what I have done in this war, Harry, or whatever I will do... Promise me you won't hate me?"
Her words caused a peculiar chill to go through his body, but he squeezed her tighter, not knowing anything the bookish girl could ever do to warrant the hatred he couldn't even muster up for his Aunt and Uncle who had abused him for years.
"I promise, Hermione."
~.O.~
Their mouths were hot against one another's, hands tight and roaming along the other's body. Hermione and Severus clung to each other the same as they clung to the fantasy that they could stay in this state forever, but reality crashed into them once more with a bang and a familiar shriek that would make a dog cower. Breaking apart Hermione laughed at his disgruntled look, made even more comical by his appearance that she had an influence in. Looking less than pristine or severe, her gripping hands had frizzed and tangled his hair as her lip gloss smeared all around his lower face. Laughing slightly before kissing his jaw, she swiped under her own lip to wipe away the excess gloss and doing the same to him before stepping back from him after pecking him once more on the lips.
"Look in the mirror before you apparate to Hogwarts," she told him smirking, straightening his robes slightly, "You go in looking like that and people might start thinking you're a human being with needs."
He gives her his rare rakish smirk that made him look so much younger than his still young years, quickly grabbing her hips in that certain way she had always liked. Her head filled with the memory of the first time he had grabbed her just lightly while in front of the people within Grimmauld Place. Covered by their robes, she had stood just in front of him right in an Order meeting while he waited for his turn to speak on the movements of the Dark Lord, his role as spy having finally been revealed. As Dumbledore turned towards him with a nod, Severus swiftly reached down to squeeze the place just right there in the middle of her hip, his long fingers reaching far into her pubic bone. She had gasped loud before she schooled her face, ignoring Ron's confused look out of the corner of her eye.
Scooping up Crookshanks who had been laying on Severus' bed, she escaped out the door into the hallway. Harry glancing long at her own slightly disheveled state in question as Hedwig flies above their heads to land on his shoulder.
She was coming out of Snape's room… smiling… this was happening all together too much...
~.O.~
"Keep that bloody cat away from me, 'Mione!" Ron stormed off after flinching away from Crooks' outstretched claws, his furry hands still reaching out towards the redhead's back as he hurried down the train to catch up with Harry scolds her familiar, but the effectiveness was somewhat lost with her mouth twisted into a large smile that showed off her fangs to his squashed face. As he reached up to paw at her nose, she grabbed it and kissed his heart shaped pad.
Draco came up behind her as the rest of the prefects departed from their meeting to find their friends in the other cars, "Do you have a problem being on patrol with a bloody Slytherin as Weasley calls me?" His white teeth almost dazzle her with their brightness, his time away from the stress of the Dark Lord's presence already doing wonders for his complexion.
Laughing up at him as he scratches Crookshanks under the chin, she reaches back to pat him on his pale cheek. "Oh, darling, I'm not worried. You ever do anything untoward, I'll just tell Severus. "
Leaving him to look properly horrified, she walks away whispering to her familiar as he sputters inelegantly. Exactly how a Malfoy should not act.
Lucius would get The Look if he saw his son acting in such a way…
Hermione shudders to herself as she slides open the car that houses her friends, taking a seat in between Harry and a pale blond girl with long golden hair curly as her own that looked as if she could be Draco's younger sister. She held a copy of an upside down magazine called the Quibbler in front of her face. Crookshanks squirming in her lap, Ginny introduces the girl as Luna who brings down her reading and smiles dreamily at Hermione when her familiar finally breaks free to prance right into the girls own lap.
His mistress scowls faintly, apologizing to Luna but leaves him where he is. The other girl rubbing him under his chin, smiling as he fills the car with his purrs.
..
The Thestrals pulling the carriages had a dark sort of beauty, Hermione thought as their hooves trod with soft thumps on the soft earth towards the castle, sort of like Severus. With a horse- like sense of majestic pride in the way they held their powerful bodies and heads, their delicate but strong wings were held close to their skeletal bodies to avoid the sensitive cartilage from being stepped on by unsuspecting teenagers. Harry asked across from her what the creatures were with a pale face, Luna answering before Hermione could pull herself out of her thoughts.
Hermione not too long ago told Draco that the Dark Lord would no longer use the means of torture to achieve his aims, but does not killing the son of living parents constitute torture? Although Tom had explained away Cedric's death once she expressed her disconcern, her very high level of disconcert, as the high of the moment having been resurrected, Hermione saw a brief glimpse of something within his eye.
She had closed her eyes as he kissed her forehead, and wondered at her complacent and hopeful optimism, her belief in the man's hopefully changing ways, even as he contradicted her.
A flash of green… grey eyes closed for eternity evermore… a father's screams… smile gone from the world… would it end with caramel eyes forever closed… with dark bottomless eyes staring in an unblinking gaze, never to love her with sparkling and lively mischief again?
A pair of green eyes sheltered behind round glasses…?
Feeling a small hand grab hers, Hermione looked to Luna as she slid a bottle cap charm bracelet below the silver one holding her charms onto her wrist. Smiling at the darker witch's confusion, Luna told her in explanation, "Your aura is dark, Hermione. This will help keep away the Wrackspurts from making it worse."
Hermione laughed, grateful to have been pulled from her dark thoughts, "What is a Wrackspurt, Luna?"
~.O.~
"Hello, Professor." Hermione tells Severus as she passes a portrait of a woman in a yellowed dress and cooing baby swaddled in a red blanket on her prefect rounds just days after they arrived back to the castle. Draco having left at the first sight of his godfather, he had passed him with a nod on his way back to the dungeons as he gave her a fleeting smirk just before disappearing from sight.
"Miss Granger," the tall man says to her as he naturally falls into step with her shorter stride, despite the fact that if anyone saw them together walking amicably together their jaws would drop. Anyone outside of the Order, anyway.
"Can I ask why you, Sir, seem to have been leaning as far away as you could from the Senior Undersecretary at the Opening Feast?" Remembering the all around pink woman sitting next to Severus at the Head Table, Hermione couldn't help but cover a smile as she glances down the hall they had just turned into, double checking for nosy portraits.
Severus scowling down to the smaller girl at catching a glimpse of her grin, he sneers to go along with the lines between his brows, "Well, if you insist on knowing, girl, not only does she look pink, but she smells pink as well. It seems to have a permanence upon the things close around her, I had to Incendio a perfectly good set of robes for want of getting rid of the noxious odor."
Hermione's cheeks growing red in her sudden outburst of cackling in remembrance of passing the perfumed woman, as well as catching a new whiff of it from him walking beside her, Severus' eyes twinkled at the sight of her so obvious delight. "Now that is not a very charitable thought of our new Sister, dear, everyone has to have a favorite color." A quick glance from his head to toes from her allowed a slight curling of his lips. "Although, I have to concede that her course aims are absolutely ludicrous and put together by the Ministry, she seems to be just as insufferable as we previously thought as part of the Hogwarts faculty."
Making their way back towards the direction of Gryffindor tower, Hermione grabs Severus' hand within his robes, boldly stopping them within a shadowy corner of the hall and placing it on her waist. Grasping his other and backing against the wall, her eyes were the ones to twinkle up to him now, "How would you like to smell of me now, Severus? Or would you prefer to burn another perfectly nice set of robes and frock?"
Her low laugh seemed to echo the cooing of the portrait baby around the corner as the dark man lifted her against the rough stone. Both sets of voices disappearing behind a Muffliato lest an out of bounds prefect come down their deserted hallway.
~.O.~
It was as if her entire head had gone numb to all feeling as Hermione stared down at the hand she held in her own, at the words scripted there in Harry's own scratchy and uneven writing branded into the fleshy part of his hand between his thumb and index finger.
I must not tell lies… I must not tell lies… I must not tell… lies...
While it might not have been carved into her own, the place where Umbridge's blood quill had added yet another scar to Harry's young body itched on her own pale hand as if she were the one to write the words into the flesh attached to her own body. Feeling another hand land lightly on her shoulder as Ron simply says nothing for a change while offering moral support to the wrong person, she squeezes Harry's fingers gently so as to not bother the red words before she releases him.
Smiling at him as she stood, she simply said, "I will get you some cream for it, Harry. I'll be back later."
It was only when she made her way down to the Dungeons, and standing in the open doorway to Severus' classroom, that the all- consuming rage set in at the woman who would mar the unmarked skin of children. Even as Harry's wounds were the only ones she had seen so far after a detention with Umbridge, Hermione had no doubt that the woman would not hesitate to use those horrid quills on the younger years. Some of the children who were new to the magical world as she had once been, bright- eyed at the prospect of magic and all that it could do, only to have that light dimmed by a woman who had no reason to be within Hogwarts in the first place as she dolled out a utterly barbaric punishment for any little crime. And that was a line that absolutely could not be even entertained in crossing.
Now, as Hermione silently disillusioned herself while stepping into the shadows of the classroom, she watched as that pink toad of a woman presumed to lay her pudgy pink nails on Severus' arm while simpering in her sickly sweet tone of voice. Stroking his black clad arm while he simply looked down at the woman with an expression mixed with both parts irritation and revulsion. Severus finally having had his daily dose of his new Sister, as Hermione called her once upon a time in sarcastic jest, dislodged himself from her claws to retreat behind his desk while she thanked him for whatever help he had given her in her grating voice.
Abandoning her place in leave of following the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor as she continued on towards the staircase leading back down to her own office, Hermione once again felt a familiar savage instinct settle into her bones. An instinct that she had not felt in years since a Slytherin boy who thought he was more powerful than her had taken a trip down a set of stone steps. This time though, Hermione was much more powerful and smart than that one incident, smart enough to gauge when exactly the pink woman would twist her ankle in those hideous kitten heeled shoes just as she stepped upon the very edge of the tall staircase. Casting a simultaneous tripping jinx on the woman's calf as well as a silencing spell, after all it would not have to have any professors or students running about the halls to catch the falling professor from taking her little tumble, Hermione stood at the top of the staircase in satisfaction. Basking in her diminishing rage, she made her way back to Severus with a step of delight within her walk.
She then spent the better part of the next twenty minutes purring in Severus' lap, straddling his thighs tightly as her mouth worked his neck just high enough for the edges of her mark to be shown above the high collar of his coat. Marking him as her own, even as no one who would see the mark would dare to guess as to who had put it there. Righting her clothes in satisfaction at marking the man that not half an hour ago another woman allowed herself to touch what wasn't rightfully hers, Hermione informed the Potion Master of the woman now laying at the bottom of the staircase just down the hall before taking a tin of Murtlap Essence for Harry's hand. She ignored his familiar knowing look in favor of kissing him lightly before departing before him, allowing him time to right his clothes before he undoubtedly had to levitate the pink professor in an all too familiar trek to the Hospital Wing.
Despite the fact that she could have just as easily gone down another staircase to Gryffindor Tower, Hermione retraced her steps back toward the woman who was still laid sprawled out and unconscious upon the stone floor, her left arm and leg canted at a very odd angle beneath her body as her other ankle began turning a ghastly purple. Casting a quick Finite Incantatem on the leftover silencing charm now that Severus would deal with her, Hermione gleefully went on her way after accidentally stepping on the woman's dark wooden wand that lay several feet away from her body.
Damn her words to the Dark Lord about steering clear of the revolting woman… she said nothing of leaving his mole in one piece once she left Hogwarts...