This story is rated M because I have a violent imagination.
Disclaimer: If I owned Harry Potter, it would be in the restricted section.
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Red, Yellow, Blue, Green
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It starts on the first morning back.
The world is dull and grey. Muggle articles splay mysterious accidents over its pages. Wizarding ones brandish the truth. Too little, too late, Hermione thinks. At the very least, Conelius Fudge's resignation has brought forth a more competent Minister for Magic.
It's all his fault, though. His fault that Sirius fell back in the veil, his fault for not realizing his innocence in the first place, his fault grey shadows cling underneath Harry's dull eyes and dark thoughts plague his mind. They've only spent a night at Hogwarts and Harry has already spun a new dangerous theory, and this one involves the Slytherin git across the Great Hall. That boy is nothing but trouble, and she's already heard girls in the bathrooms whisper about his mysterious, dark brooding and his contact with You-Know-Who.
As she watches her best friend brood and study Malfoy and ignore the plate of bacon and eggs she'd shoved under his nose, Hermione sighs. "The house-elves put their blood, sweat and tears into that, you know, Harry," she prompts. His lips twitch.
"Even more reason not to eat it." From beside her, Ron snorts with his half-full mouth of hash browns. Wrinkling her nose and rolling her eyes, Hermione thinks that her other friend could do with less eating.
She grabs a book from her bag and plops it onto her own empty plate. "Well, I can't say I'm not pleased you're helping out with S.P.E.W." Ron snorts again, and she whacks him with the book. The ensuing bickering is followed by several snickers across the Gryffindor table ("Go on, Hermione!" roars Seamus Finnegan from two people diagonal to them, Dean Thomas sniggering beside him, "Knock some sense into the bastard!")
Hermione does not appreciate being mocked but it makes Ron's ears go as red as his hair so she again considers it a win. She can put Seamus and Dean in their place later.
The owl post comes in and she quickly forgets to be irritated with Ron's lack of empathy towards innocent creatures. Hedwig swoops in, distracting Harry from whatever he was plotting and nibbling at his untouched bacon. Untying a copy of the Daily Prophet from her leg, Harry strokes her head affectionately and she hoots before soaring off the table and out of the Great Hall.
Hermione peers over at the article, and grimaces. "A small hamlet in Kent," Harry mutters, eyes flickering upwards towards the other end of the hall. A fire which Muggles blamed on somebody leaving their oven on, according to the article, but in actuality some nearby warlocks had witnessed a horde of Death Eaters laughing and emerging from the flames, including Ulysses Crabbe, who didn't bother to wear his mask for the occasion.
"Could be worse," she says quietly, "only five casualties."
"That's because it was a hamlet," he hisses, fists clenching and crumpling the paper. "There were only about five people there to begin with." Hermione puts her hand over one of his; she meets his eyes, and beyond the dark that has haunted the green, she sees a boy as angry as she is.
She doesn't say anything, because there is no consolation to be offered.
Instead, he nods slightly, and his rigid hand goes slack underneath hers.
That's when a school barn owl topples headfirst into Hermione's goblet of pumpkin juice, and she spots a bit of colour in this grey world. With Ron, Seamus and Dean still wheezing and even Harry betraying a chuckle, Hermione recovers from her shock to gently pull the owl's head from her goblet. It gives a feeble hoot, amber eyes looking rather dazed. "Poor thing," she coos, shooting Ron a filthy look when he falls off his chair and clutches his ribs.
There's a bright red envelope tied to its leg. Curious, Hermione unties it and is nearly startled again when it shoots off towards the exit. The red envelope is smooth beneath her fingertips.
"Well, go on then, Hermione," Dean calls from his side of the table, drawing her eyes to him. Both him and Seamus are grinning like devils. Her eyebrows draw together.
"You wouldn't know anything about this—" she waves the envelope in the air, "now would you boys?" They shake their heads. She thinks they're being too casual. The groan of the seat beside her has informed her that Ron has removed himself from the floor.
"Wass that?" he asks, earning some more snickering from the devils. She ignores him, examining the envelope.
"Welcome to the party, Ronald!" Seamus says, but suddenly goes very quiet. Hermione has two seconds to wonder why before Lavender Brown and Parvati Patil plant themselves in the gap in front of Ron, dragging her attention with them. Boys have things to say, too, but they hardly whisper it in bathrooms. She's heard Cormac McLaggen whistle at the duo of Gryffindor girls on several occasions in the past year, and she's pretty sure Michael Corner once said he'd like to bury his face in Lavender Brown's impressive knockers.
She glances over at Ron. He appears rather fascinated by said knockers, which are peeping from the buttons Lavender hadn't bothered to do up. Hermione crosses her arms.
She isn't sure how she feels about this stage of puberty, where her physical attributes mean more to boys (or starved dogs) than anything. Hermione can't silence Seamus and Dean just by her presence… they, in fact, appear to find her amusing. It's insulting, but she consoles herself that she's ten times smarter than the pair of them put together. What stings is that Ron also appears to find her just, amusing.
Not confident, terrifying and breath-catching.
Not like Lavender Brown. Said girl flicks her enviously glossy golden curls over her shoulder, and simpers. "How are we on this lovely day?"
"Great," Ron croaks, and Dean starts sniggering again. Ron glares at him.
"Good!" Lavender says, giggling and somehow willing her cheeks to blush rosily.
Beside her, Parvati starts tittering. "Never seen your hair looking finer, Ronald," she says, "my sister almost regrets how bad the Yule Ball was," and Ron goes spectacularly red. She shoots Harry a glare, and when Hermione glances beside her, her lips twitch at the sight of her best friend also squirming.
"C'mon, Parv," Dean chides, the only grinning boy in their vicinity, "that was pretty much two years ago."
Lavender gasps indignantly, while Parvati clutches her chest. Hermione rolls her eyes, which, unfortunately, does not go unnoticed. "Merlin, 'Mione, you're always such a priss," Lavender tuts, flicking her hair again. She rolls her eyes once more, but her cheeks betray her still, going as red as the envelope in her hands.
Wait.
"What's that?" Parvati asks, following her gaze.
"Oooh!" Lavender squeals. "Has a boy finally asked you out?"
Alright, that's enough. She endures Malfoy's insults with silence because she knows that's what will piss him off the most. He's that type of bully. And Hermione spent the entire six years of primary school dissecting bully characteristics. Lavender is the type who will poke and prod but doesn't like to be called out on it.
So Hermione smirks, and meets the other girl's eyes. "I've already been asked out by Viktor Krum, and he's far from a boy."
Lavender's jaw drops. In her peripheral vision, so does Ron's. Victory.
"I thought that was just for the Ball!" Parvati breathes.
"Nope." Hermione flicks her own hair rather haughtily and allows them all to stew in silence while she pretends to examine the envelope. She already had, before they were quite rudely interrupted by these daft mares. No words, no markings, no runes. Just paper.
Finally, she peels off the wax seal and pulls it open.
Nothing is inside.
Frowning, Hermione peers into the envelope.
"Empty." Lavender yawns, and whispers something probably disgusting to Ron before the pair of girls titter and flounce away.
Hermione tips the envelope up-side down when Seamus breathes out, "That girl will be the death of me."
"Did Krum actually ask you out?" Ron grumbles simultaneously, but she ignores him.
A Queen of Hearts card flies out. She catches it with her fingers, turning it over for anything out of the ordinary. Her eyes narrow in on the little message etched in silver: Erised - welcome to the game.
"Who d'you reckon sent you that?" Harry mumbles, drawing closer to her.
She shrugs, lips pursed. For once in her life, Hermione Granger is without an answer.
...-...
As September progresses, more and more people get cards.
Both Harry and her appear to be the only ones who share a concern over this. This is because, when she mentioned the message, Harry said he had no idea what she was talking about; and when she showed him her card, he couldn't see any writing. And when she'd later snuck a look at Parvati's one when she and Lavender were asleep, Hermione couldn't decipher any writing. So they watch carefully, and notice the patterns: the receivers are all Sixth Years, never on the same date, and it always goes in order of Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw and Slytherin... and for some strange reason, nobody can see anybody else's identical messages.
News of the strange playing cards have brewed a storm of rumours, from something as innocent as someone playing a prank blowing out of proportion to He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named trying to lure children out of the castle.
"It is a possibility," Harry says one night — as they work on the nasty Defence Against the Dark Arts essay Snape had assigned them — in the common room. "Voldemort—" she flinches, earning an irritable tut from Harry, "is not past kidnapping."
"To what aim, though?" She glances up from her essay, and watches him frown down at the crackling fireplace.
"I dunno, hostage situation?"
Hermione scoffs, and continues her unfinished sentence on the thirty-first step for non-verbal spells. "The message doesn't even say to leave the castle."
"How do we know they're all the same?"
"I've asked Neville, Ernie and Padma respectively. And Ginny asked Dean, too."
"But nobody from Slytherin," Harry reminds her darkly. Biting her lip, she pierces a full-stop through her parchment and looks back up. Harry's looking at her now.
She sighs deeply. "Let me guess. You think Malfoy has something to do with it?"
"He's been acting off since the start of term."
"Just because you spied on him in the Hogwarts Express—"
"And he said some incriminating things—" she laughs indignantly, but Harry continues anyway "—he basically confessed he's a Death Eater—"
"Harry—"
"C'mon, 'Mione, 'bigger and better things', 'when the Dark Lord takes over' 'it'll be about the service he was shown'—"
"Harry," she growls, making him clench his jaw shut. "Malfoy's just a boy with blue blood who has a lot of bullshit to say." This weasels a snort from her best friend, and she relaxes a little. "Besides, if Malfoy, and therefore You-Know-Who—" he scowls "—was behind this, then surely you'd be the first to get a card?"
Harry smiles grimly, and his eyes drop back to the fire. "That would be too obvious. I don't think I'll be getting a card at all."
And as it turns out, Harry's not wrong. He doesn't get a card. At the end of the twenty-second of September, nobody else has received a card. In total, there are twenty students with cards. The last person to get one was Draco Malfoy.
September rolls on without consequence, however, and soon people forget about the cards. Lavender and Parvati have already migrated back to their 'boy-hunting', where they pick the "fittest" one and corner the poor sod. They're particularly fond of doing this to the Seventh Years.
Harry's been sucked back into the clutches of that horrid graffitied copy of Advanced Potions Making, and Hermione's time with him is mostly spent keeping him from toeing the line with both Half-Blood and Slytherin Princes.
She hasn't forgotten the cards, though. Perhaps it's because she was the first to receive one. Or, more likely, the fact that she doesn't like an unanswered question. It's like leaving an Ancient Runes problem unsolved. Despicable.
Erised - welcome to the game.
It's a mantra in her head, during classes, in the library, in bed. She spins it over and over, rearranges the letters, tries to find something to read between the lines. Harry's told her about the Mirror of Erised before, so she wonders if there's a connection to that. She's left frustrated when Harry informs her Dumbledore took the mirror away in First Year and never elaborated where.
Mirrors refract light. Invert the world in front of them. Produce reflections. She knows the Mirror of Erised shows what one desires.
Desired - welcome to the game.
It doesn't strike her to rearrange the letters physically until it's Halloween eve. She's in the library, which is more quiet than usual because everyone's off attempting to drape a holiday mood over a dreary world. Hermione glares down at her half-finished potions essay, thinks about how Slughorn will laugh heartily at whatever cheated version Harry will copy from the Prince's book, then decides to indulge her theory instead.
Taking the card out of the pocket of her robes, she places it wrong way up against the desk. Erised - welcome to the game. She pulls her wand out of another one of her pockets, and places the tip of it against the sentence. Murmuring the charm, she watches as the letters that make up 'Erised' dance around each other to form 'Desired'. For a few moments, her heart sinks and her throat clenches in the way it does when her potions are out-maneuvered by the words of a long-gone graffiting student.
Then, she gasps.
Desired - the room requires you.
No sooner do the words stop rippling, Hermione is racing out of the library, abandoning her books, bag and potions essay. She darts through some hallways (past some little Second Years dressed as centaurs) and hurtles up the stairs, two steps at a time. At one point she's pretty sure she gets a glimpse of Dean snogging Ginny in a shady corner of Fifth Floor, and briefly she thinks about how pissed Ron would be. But her mind is quickly slammed back into the Room that helped Dumbledore's Army.
The one on Seventh Floor. The one opposite the tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy.
Hermione skids to a stop, breathing heavily. She stares at the blank wall, and the two First Year girls dawdling beside it. Glancing at the card in her hand, she smiles at the girls. They look absolutely petrified. "Don't worry about curfew," she juts her chin down at her prefect badge, "it's Halloween. Run along and have some fun." They blink owlishly at her. Trying a wink, she clarifies, "I never said that, though."
One of the girls suddenly screams, making Hermione jump. Then the pair of them sprint away. Mouth agape, Hermione raises her brows. The kids really do get weirder. And, although she would never admit it, Ron is right — they definitely get smaller each year.
Shaking herself towards her original agenda, Hermione looks down at the card. Back, and forth. Back and forth.
She paces, without a clue of what to say. I want to see what is desired? Tutting, she glowers down at the words on the card. Thinks of what they used to be. I want to play the game? It sounds about right.
Hermione paces thrice. I want to play the game, I want to play the game, I want to play the game.
There's a sudden pop, and she glances up to the wall, which is no longer blank. There's a door with four brightly coloured squares — red, yellow, blue, green. She is not blind to what this symbolizes.
Immediately, Hermione steps forward and reaches for the handle. Before her palm touches the metal, however, it starts rattling; alarmed, Hermione backs away. Her imagination flies into wild territory, and by the time the door flings open she's convinced she'll come face-to-face with another Fluffy.
When Draco Malfoy stumbles out, looking feral, she wonders why she thought a three-headed-dog would be able to fit through that door.
...-...
Muses are strange things. They seize you in your sleep and then one night they dive away when you can't drift off, your fingertips hovering over a keyboard.