Title/Link: Just a Bug in a Jar
Team: Appleby Arrows
Position: Keeper
Season 9 Round 5
Task: Cruelty
Bonus Prompts: n/a
Summary: People who knew Hermione would say that she was 'brilliant but scary', but they would never call her cruel. Her actions were just, and she merely sought retribution against those that wronged her and her friends. After all, keeping a bug animagus in a jar for several weeks just to make a point wasn't cruel, was it?
Word Count: 2063
A/N: So for this prompt, my mind was caught between this, and Dumbledore's insistence on Harry returning to Durzkaban every summer despite its unsuitable conditions, and this thread won out. I actually tried writing out the summary for each, but then before I knew it, I had already written over a page before I had made it to my other idea, so I thought, might as well!
I don't know if you would consider Hermione ooc or not, just because she is a teenage girl who is fiercely protective of her friends, who has shown in canon that she would go to almost any length to protect her friends.
Thanks to my Captain DaughteroftheOneTrueKing, the rest of my team, and Ashleigh for reading through and beta-ing.
I hope you enjoy! :)
At first, Hermione truly hadn't meant to keep Rita trapped in her animagus form in the charmed jar for as long as she did, but it was just so easy to feed her a couple of leaves and then ignore the reporter while she had to worry about keeping Harry alive after everything that happened in the tournament.
Hermione had ensnared the pesky beetle animagus in the Hospital Wing the night of the Third Task, when she had found Rita hiding on the windowsill as the adults around Harry's bed tried to comfort him. A small burst of vindictive glee shot through her as soon as she had the reporter in her hand, and she managed not to let it show as the group turned towards her after she slammed the window shut to prevent the reporter's escape.
"Sorry," she had whispered to them, as she held the beetle tightly in her grasp. As attention went back to Harry, Hermione had produced a small unbreakable jar from her bag that she had prepared beforehand. Hermione had her suspicions, and if she were right, she had wanted to be prepared. With everything else that was going on, she knew she would run into the hidden reporter sooner rather than later. Rita had been there in one form or another for both the First and Second Tasks. Why would the Third Task be any different? Hermione would transfer the reporter to a larger jar later, but for now, she had her prize in hand.
Everything that had happened all year- the bubotuber pus letter, the hate mail, the increased animosity between the rest of Hogwarts and Harry and herself, the lies, the exaggerations, the articles that made Harry seem like an attention seeking prat-it all led up to this moment, when Rita would receive her comeuppance. The bug had been caught and captured.
This was to be her punishment, and Hermione her Jailer.
The jar had a prominent place of honor on her bedside table at Hogwarts, with the strongest silencing charms she could manage. She didn't want Rita to know that Lavender had asked about the beetle in the jar, worried about the lack of air holes, and Hermione's own satisfied smirk as she waved off the blonde's concerns. A simple air freshening charm, she had told her roommate, who had accepted that answer easily enough.
She didn't want the woman to hear the gossip her roommates shared, about Cedric's funeral, about Mr. Diggory lost in his grief. Not about Cho, who had cornered Harry in the corridor the other day to beg him for a retelling of how Cedric died to find some closure, her tears and grief clear on her face, or about Viktor's own repeated proposal to whisk her and her family away from Britain, to keep her safe. Rita didn't deserve to know any of that.
It was only a few days later, when they would be back on the Hogwarts Express to go home for the summer, and Hermione knew her silencing charms could only last long enough so she could get the jar safely to her bedroom at her parents. This ensured Rita couldn't get anything to gossip about, since she would lose her ability to listen in on conversations she had no right to know.
When someone held the jar, however, Rita would be able to hear them, but otherwise the beetle animagus was left alone with only her thoughts.
Hermione supposed it was a sort of torture, to be left with nothing to occupy the mind except your own thoughts. This revenge, however, was deserved, and Hermione couldn't rejoice about it enough. Rita made Harry's ostracization by the school worse, ruined people's lives, and planted seeds of doubt into some of the people closest to them, including Mrs. Weasley.
In regards to the Weasley matron, Hermione learned the hard way this year that her friend's mother was fickle, easily changing her opinion on people around her, depending on who she was trying to either impress or protect. In this case, she tried to protect Harry, who she seemed to see like a son despite only having him stay over for a single month amongst the few years she's known him. She turned on Hermione easily enough, despite knowing her just as long as Harry, all because of the words of a woman who made a career out of sensationalism. Hermione would never forget the feeling of disappointment and betrayal, at the disparity in sizes between her Easter Chocolate Egg and those of her friends'.
No, Rita had to learn her lesson. Her lies ruined the lives of people around her, and who better to witness her punishment than one of her victims?
Rita was as ostracized from everyone else as she had made Harry and Hermione, and the girl felt no remorse over that. For a woman who lived and breathed gossip, Hermione supposed this was torture enough, to be denied the ability to know anything new. No, the only thing Rita got to know was whatever Hermione told her, and their interactions were often brief and mocking.
At night, in the safety of her curtained bed at Hogwarts, Hermione began to hold the jar in her lap, and read one of Rita's articles back to her, never the same one twice. Sometimes the article was a small one, but others were several pages long, with Hermione putting on the most outlandish voices as she recited Rita's own words back at her. And every night, Hermione would whisper to the beetle before putting her back on her night stand, counting up the days since she had been caught.
Their conversations were low, in respect for the trauma that had happened that year. Ron had pulled Harry into a game of Wizarding Chess, which Harry wasn't particularly paying attention to, while Hermione read from a book Viktor had given her before he had left. It detailed several more nasty curses and hexes and their counterspells, and she had almost felt compelled to read it in light of what they all knew was coming up this next year.
For Harry's sake, she had to be prepared. She would no longer be a damsel, and instead, fight her own monsters, so Harry no longer had to save her. He had enough on his plate as it was, he didn't need the extra worry.
The boys' quiet conversation caught her attention, when she had heard them say the name of the reporter she currently had stuck in a jar in her trunk up on the top racks. Hermione smiled deviously as she lowered her book, catching the boys' attention.
"Oh, we won't have to worry about Rita Skeeter for a while," she said as she set her book down on the seat next to her and stood up. Crookshanks immediately shifted on the seat to sit on the book, his gaze intent on her trunk like it had been since the Hogwarts Express left Hogsmeade Station this morning. She reached up into her trunk as Harry and Ron looked at her askance.
"How can you be so sure? She might just be gathering herself for her next big scandal?" Ron asked incredulously. Harry watched her closely as she pulled the jar out of her trunk.
"It was actually your idea, Ron," Hermione explained. "She was bugging us, but not with Muggle tracking devices." Crookshank's gaze tracked the jar as Hermione sat back down. "Rita IS the bug," she said before brandishing the jar at them.
"You're kidding, right?" Ron asked incredulously. "You haven't...she's not…" He struggled for words as he stared at the bug in the jar. Harry merely stared, wide-eyed, at her.
"This is she," Hermione assured them before holding the jar higher and turning it so they could look at the beetle's face. The beetle inside was large and fat, its coloring similar to the robes Rita always wore. "Look at the markings around her antennae. They're the same as those foul rhinestone cat eye glasses she wears." She shifted the jar again.
"Why do you have her?" Harry ventured to ask, and Hermione grinned wider before standing to stow the jar away back into her dark trunk.
"I'm teaching her a lesson," Hermione replied matter of factly. "She needs to learn to hold her quill to higher standards, and to hold her tongue when she doesn't have the truth. I caught her on the windowsill in the Hospital Wing the night of the Third Task. I'm sure she was going to spin a nasty piece on what happened, from what she would have overheard when you told Professor Dumbledore what happened." Hermione huffed haughtily, in a near perfect impression of Malfoy. "After all that she's done to us this year, this is just karma in the making."
"You're scary when you're like this," Ron pointed out, glancing at her sideways. Hermione puffed up with pride.
"Rita chose this path when she decided to make an enemy out of us. She was writing about children, and didn't pull her punches, so we can do the same," she replied before trying to nudge her book out from underneath Crookshanks, who was now staring at her trunk again.
Hermione noticed that Harry had fallen silent, his gaze averted back to the chessboard set up on the compartment table, but not actually focused on it. Hermione nudged him gently in the shoulder, and offered him a small smile in comfort when he looked at her.
"We'll get you free of the Dursleys before the summer is out. Count on it," she promised, correctly guessing what was weighing on his mind, and he nodded back at her silently before turning back to the game. Probably numb from everything that has happened lately, Hermione thought. Oh, why didn't the wizarding world have a larger accessibility to mind healers? Harry probably needed one at the end of every school year, and that thought alone put a frown on her face. The Wizarding World seemed broken, and Hermione would fix it, if it was the last thing she'd do.
As the train barreled towards London, Hermione leaned over and rested her head on Harry's shoulder, her mind turning back to Rita, all alone in the dark, silent jar in her trunk. A good start would be to control the media. And she had a pocket reporter now, whom she could blackmail to get the things she wanted written.
Rita buzzed angrily in her jar, bringing Hermione back from her musings, her silencing charms having faded the day before. Hermione sat at her desk in her parent's house, a slight smile on her face as she stared down the bug in the jar.
"Oh, don't worry. You'll be let out eventually. Your punishment has an expiration date, after all," Hermione explained as she made a note in her open planner. "A day in the jar for every article you wrote that slandered me and my friends. I've kept track, you know? Twenty seven articles that ruined our lives this past year. I am, of course, not talking about the ones that had no impact. Those got thrown into the bin, not even worth the paper it was written on." Her smile turned saccharine as she stared down the jar, before shifting to grab a book off of the stack on her desk to start studying. "We've already been together for nine days so far. Over a third of the way done! And it's only the fourth day of Summer Vacation!"
Hermione knew that Rita could hear her, and upon seeing the beetle in the jar buzz angrily before deflating in what looked like defeat, Hermione couldn't help but grin widely at this victory. She really shouldn't enjoy Rita's misery this much, but with what that woman put them all through the past year, Hermione wouldn't say no to any payback that came along.
"When your stay here is up, you and I are going to have a very long talk, Ms. Skeeter. Otherwise the Ministry will find out just how much you bug people!" Laughing at her own attempt at a joke she knew only a father could approve of, Hermione pulled her biro from her pen holder to start taking notes for her latest essay.
Ah, she so missed the conveniences of Muggle life.