A/N: Thank you all for your thoughtful responses to last chapter. This one is a little more heavy, just a heads up. You can follow me over on tumblr (nauticalparamour) where I post sneak peeks, story updates and answer questions. Huge thank you to lanamarymack for alpha/beta reading this chapter!
Please let me know what you thought of chapter nine and be on the lookout for chapter ten soon!
"Hermione!"
Hermione slowed her walk into school down and looked around for the excited voice hoping to get her attention.
"Hermione!" the voice repeated.
She was finally able to see an excited Daphne Greengrass waving her hand and walking towards her, dragging an annoyed looking Pansy and Tracy behind her. Daphne looked cute in a yellow babydoll dress that would have been better suited for summer rather than late September. Hermione looked down to her own outfit — jeans and a ratty old t-shirt under one of Remus's flannels that he'd slipped in — and wondered if maybe she could use a wardrobe refresh.
"Hey Hermione!" Daphne repeated again, far too chipper for a Tuesday morning.
"Hey Daph," Hermione greeted the blonde with a shy smile.
"I missed you yesterday," Daphne answered with a grin. "I had so much fun at the party, but I totally drank too much."
Hermione's cheeks went pink. "Same," she agreed, hoping that she didn't look too lame admitting it. "I'm afraid that I overslept a bit yesterday."
"Ugh, you are so lucky that your parents let you stay home yesterday," Daphne said with a groan. "My mum was so pissed when Ades dropped me off. She didn't even care that I had a splitting headache and made me go to class anyway. She's so lame."
"That sounds awful," Hermione said with a frown. She supposed that it was pretty nice of her mum to let her sleep in, even though she was embarrassed that she'd missed class for something as trivial as a party. It really wasn't like her at all.
"Okay, we get it — Granger is a little prig who can't hold her liquor," Pansy said snidely from behind Daphne, glaring at Hermione openly. "Can we move along? I don't want people to think that I associate with her."
Hermione scoffed. "As if I would be caught dead hanging out with you, Pansy," she snapped back, unsure of where the other girl's outward hostility came from. It was true that they would never be good friends, but it wasn't as if Hermione had done something to her.
"Can you shut up for one minute, Pansy?" Daphne snapped at her friend, leveling a glare of her own. "Anyways, since you were out of class yesterday, I figured that you might want some notes from the classes we share, so I went ahead and copied mine for you yesterday."
The brunette softened, touched by Daphne's thoughtfulness. "Really? Oh, thanks, Daph," she said, thinking that it would save her the trouble of hand copying Harry's notes over lunch.
Daphne pushed her long hair over one shoulder and dug around in her book bag, before pulling out some crisp sheets of printer paper and handing them over. "Don't worry about it. You'd do the same for me. Here you go," she said, sounding pleased with herself.
Hermione wasn't sure that she would do the same for Daphne before this, although now she knew that she would. The other girl's writing was perfectly straight and legible — the complete opposite of Harry's chicken scratch — with tiny little hearts dotting the 'i's.
"So," she said with a secret smile. "I think we are going to have another party this weekend, if you wanted to come with? It will be loads of fun."
Pansy made a noise of irritation at the invitation.
Hermione nibbled her lip, unsure of what she wanted to do. "I don't know..." she said, trailing off.
"I'm sure that Theo probably already invited you," Daphne said breezily, but made no secret of studying her face to see if there was any reaction to Theo's name. Had he put her up to it? "You two seemed to have a good time with one another."
Hermione felt her cheeks go pink. "Well, he is technically my oldest friend," she revealed, unsure of what to make of her curious relationship with him at the moment. "But he hasn't mentioned it."
"Come on, Daphne, you know that she thinks she's too good for the likes of us," Pansy said with a sneer. "She wouldn't even let Theo kiss her and she doesn't want to go to Adrian's party."
Her blush deepened with the knowledge that Pansy knew about the failed kiss that she'd shared with Theo on her front steps. She certainly hadn't told anyone about it, which meant that Theo had. Her stomach sank. Just who else had he shared the private moment with?
To her surprise, it was Tracy who came to her rescue. "Good for you, Hermione. Make him work for it," the redhead said with a grin. "You don't want him to think he can just pick things up where they left off."
That wasn't entirely accurate, seeing as when they'd left things off they'd been six, but she was glad to have one person be even a little bit understanding.
Daphne grabbed her arm, just as they heard the bell ring. "Please say you'll come?" she asked with a pout.
"I'll think about it," Hermione promised, completely unsure of what to do now that she had some semblance of a social calendar that didn't involve just hanging out with Harry and Ron over a pizza on Friday nights.
Daphne squealed in delight at the tentative agreement. "Great! Well, we've got gym class, but I'll see you in history," the blond said, before leading the trio of popular girls away towards the football fields.
Hermione realized she needed to get a move on too, if she was going to be on time for her first class.
The rest of her morning passed mostly uneventfully. It was easy enough for a good student like Hermione to catch up after one day of missed classes and her teachers were all happy to give her a one day extension on the homework that she'd missed. Even if she didn't turn something in, she'd already done so much extra credit that one missed assignment wouldn't ruin her excellent marks.
But, by lunch time, she was craving a little bit of normalcy and found her feet carrying her to her regular seat with Harry and Ron and the rest of their friends.
Harry and Ron were already deep in conversation when she slipped into the seat across from them, weary and ready to tuck into her lunch. "Hey," she greeted them.
Harry gave her a cautious smile, but Ron was already glaring at her. "Hey Hermione," Harry said, fondly. "I'm glad to see you today after what happened on Sunday. Sirius wouldn't really tell me what was going on."
She gave him a sad look, not wanting him to worry too much. "That's between me and him. We just had a...a disagreement," she said, looking for the right word. Harry had nothing to do with her custody, so she knew she shouldn't take it out on him.
"I hope that you didn't miss school yesterday because of it," Harry said, looking remorseful.
Only then, Ron had to put in his two cents. "Of course she didn't," he said with a frown, sticking his spoon into his pudding. "Didn't you hear? She was out drinking with Greengrass and Parkinson and Malfoy. She was probably just hung over."
Hermione felt her cheeks go pink at being found out so quickly. God, she hated how quickly gossip traveled.
"Really?" Harry asked, incredulous. "You went to a party?"
"Yes, but I didn't miss school because of a hangover," she hissed, mostly at Ron. She didn't want to draw more attention to this than there already was. "I just...overslept and Mum let me sleep in. And then my dad took me to get some things I needed for my room, since it was still, well, you saw Harry — unicorns."
Her excuse felt hollow and it looked like her friends weren't impressed.
"Wow, you've barely been back with them a week and already you're missing class to do stupid shite," her ginger friend said with a bit of a sneer.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Hermione demanded. Even though she would have rather not skipped a day of school, spending time with her father hadn't felt like stupid shite. It had been a nice day, one of the first nice days she'd had in a while.
"I guess, it does seem a little irresponsible, Hermione," Harry explained, looking at her regretfully.
"A little irresponsible?" Ron asked with a snort. "More like totally alien! She's not even our Hermione anymore. She's already hanging out with other people and skipping and just loving her new life. She won't have time for us soon, Harry."
Hermione could feel tears prickle at the back of her eyes and wondered when her friend had grown to be so cruel. It was like Ron didn't even try to see things from her perspective at all."You know that's not true," she insisted, hotly.
"Really, Hermione, let's be honest. You're a Lestrange," Ron insisted. "I just can't believe how quickly it happened."
She wished she knew what he was seeing that led him to believe that she'd changed so much because she didn't feel like she had. She couldn't control other people taking an interest in her now and it wasn't as if she was going out of her way to talk to people like Draco and Daphne. She didn't feel like a Lestrange one bit, no matter how much everyone kept trying to insist on it.
Before she could defend herself, though, she saw Neville go white as a sheet. "Did you say...did you say Lestrange?" he stammered out, clearly very disturbed.
Hermione nibbled at her lower lip, unsure of how to answer this. "Yes, I thought you knew...Sirius petitioned for a name change for me years ago so my parents' associates wouldn't bother me," she said cautiously. "But it is the last name that I was born with."
"Hermione Lestrange?" Neville repeated, suddenly pushing his lunch away from him and standing up.
"Yes, but, I'm still Hermione Granger," she promised earnestly. "I don't want anything to do with my parents or the name."
"I'm sorry, but I can't talk to you any more," Neville said, his eyebrows drawn together and his gaze mistrustful of her.
"What? Nev, I don't understand," she said, concerned. "You've known me since Middle School. Why can't you?"
"Alright, I suppose it's not that I can't," he said, his voice a bit cold. "It's that I don't want to. Not knowing who your parents are. And what they do to people."
She wanted to argue with him more, but Neville Longbottom was stalking off. Furious, she turned to face Ron once again. "Look what you did!" she accused him. "You've gone and upset Neville and now he won't talk to me any more."
"Hey, it's not what I did. It's what your parents did to his parents," Ron countered, looking a bit smug.
That caught Hermione off-guard. She hadn't known that her parents had done anything to Neville's, but she did know that he was raised by his grandmother rather than his parents. She still didn't see why he should hold that against her now.
"Maybe just...give him a bit of space?" Harry suggested.
Hermione agreed. Of course, she wouldn't make Neville talk to her if he didn't want to. She could respect that. But she was filled with so much confusion and rising anger over the situation that she found herself in. Didn't anyone see that she hadn't asked for any of this? Didn't anyone see that she was not a reflection of her parents? Didn't anyone see how hard this situation was for her?
She went through the rest of her day feeling a bit numb and hollow inside.
When she got home from school, she was surprised to see her mum and dad hanging out in the kitchen, laughing over beers together, looking so carefree and happy. It made something inside of her snap.
"What the fuck did you do to my friend's parents?" she demanded, needing answers. "Because he won't ever look at me now that he knows my last name."
"Which friend?" her father asked, sounding casual but interested — like he enjoyed the infamy their surname brought.
"Neville Longbottom," she answered, jutting her chin out.
Her mum started to cackle gleefully. "Well, now, that is a little bit of a story. They got what was coming to them if you ask me," she said, catching her tongue between her crooked teeth. "Fucking snitches."
"Well, aren't you going to tell me?" Hermione questioned, feeling her ire and the volume of her voice rising. She wasn't sure that she wanted to know, but she had to know. "Or am I not old enough to hear it?" she added, mocking her father.
"They were a couple of undercover cops who tried to get information on the way that Tom was running things," her father said, scratching at his chin. "They joined up with Barty's crew. Do you remember Barty?"
Hermione vaguely remembered the twitchy, thin man, but didn't see how that had any relevance to the situation. "The drug dealer?" she prompted.
"Yes, that's him," her mum agreed. "Well, Barty started to get a little suspicious of them. They claimed to be heavy users, but they didn't act like them at all."
"We were suspicious, too. They were just too clean," her dad agreed, nodding his head.
"I only did what a reasonable person would do," her mum said with a grin. "We decided to have ourselves a little party — some of the good stuff you understand? And well, it would have been weird if they hadn't participated. It was free after all."
"Barty kept giving them bumps," her father said, matter of factly. "And it quickly caught up with them."
"How were we supposed to know that they would overdose?" her mum said, all innocent, even though her smirk made it clear that she didn't feel even a little bit bad. "It hardly even affected your Uncle Rab."
"Word is they never really recovered, even though they lived," her dad added.
"So that's it? You almost killed my friend's parents?" Hermione demanded, feeling her blood pressure rise at the thought.
"They should just be happy that we bothered to ring for an ambulance!" her mum argued back. "If they hadn't been dirty cops then it never would have happened! If they hadn't been...lying about who they were or what they did — trying to catch your mum and dad — they would have been perfectly fine."
"I hate you!" Hermione said hotly. "You two are the reason that no one will treat me normally any more! Because of the bullshit you do — almost killing two cops? They had a son my age who now refuses to talk to me, despite the fact that we have been friends for ten years. It's all your fault!"
"Ha! Your friends not talking to you has nothing to do with us and everything to do with your name!" her mum said, enjoying pulling the wool away from her daughter's eyes — demanding she see the real world. "You are the same person that you've always been but they will never accept you just because of your name."
"That's not true!" Hermione tried to say, though she was beginning to wonder if it was true. "It's because of your actions and how they reflect on me!"
"Oh, you don't even know!" her mum spat back. "If you don't believe me, ask Sirius — that little snake!"
"Sirius?" Hermione asked, feeling her heart beating out of control in her chest.
"When his friends were killed...the Potters," her dad said gently. "The first person that the police suspected was Sirius."
"All because of his family! Because he was a Black!" her mum shouted, standing up from her spot. "He was even a police officer, but they just assumed it must be him because of the family he came from, even though he ran away from home and lived with the Potters. Even though he was a police officer too — one of their own. He sat and rotted in a jail cell for weeks until he could get his case dismissed."
"What?" Hermione asked, feeling like the rug was being pulled out from under her. She hadn't known that story at all. How had it never come up before? Did Harry know about it?
"Oh ask him if you don't believe me," her mum insisted. "But when you do, you will need to acknowledge that they were never really your friends or they would never have dropped you the first second that they saw even a hint of your family name."
Hermione didn't want to acknowledge it, but she could feel in the pit of her stomach that her mum was right. How was it possible that they had all seemingly moved on so easily without her? And how could Sirius refuse to let her run away when he had done the exact same thing himself? Did no one want her except her parents who she didn't want in the first place?
It all hurt so much.
"I hate you," Hermione whispered, staring into her mother's grey eyes. She could feel her own eyes full of tears, but wouldn't let them see how hurt she was. She turned on her heel and stomped up the stairs to her own bedroom, slamming the door behind her, feeling the whole room shake with her fury.
This time, she wouldn't let Theo hear her crying so he could swoop in and rescue the damsel in distress. She pressed her face into her pillow and let herself cry as much as she needed, until she drifted off into a fitful sleep.