The reviews last chapter were AWESOME! I love it when ya'll tell me what you're thinking and make predictions. Judging by how ya'll felt last chapter about this inevitable showdown, some of ya'll will like this chapter, but some of ya'll might hate it. I promise, everything in this story has a purpose. I'm trying to avoid Hermione becoming a Mary Sue where everything is just given to her. She's going to experience pain and failure on her hike to the top, but every encounter she will exit stronger than she was before. She isn't the nice girl ya'll know from JKR's amazing series. This is all of her darkest aspects given power over the things that made her a Gryffindor. Slytherin Hermione is vicious and focused, just as Gryffindor Hermione was empathic and righteous.
Some of ya'll are making some really great guesses as to her mysterious parentage. I loved the reactions to the big reveal last chapter, but there is so much more to come! Please let me know what ya'll think after this chapter, I'm anxious to get more reviews from the people who are following Hermione's journey. As always, feel free to point out grammar mistakes so I can go back and make corrections. This story doesn't have a beta, but if anyone is really experienced and wants to help a girl out, I'm not against a little extra help. Happy reading friends!
"I can't have a mudblood dirtying my common room. Thankfully, the troll can distract the teachers while I clean up the mess," Flint said, stalking closer to Hermione.
Hermione had very few options for handling the wizards before her. She was quite confident she could defeat Malfoy, but Flint had many more years of experience and a reputation for cruelty. No matter how talented Hermione may be, she still didn't have the practice older wizards could claim; and it rankled her to admit that. She wished they had picked another night; her mind was still unfocused, distracted by discovering her heritage. Marcus had the advantage.
Before she could cast a spell, Flint jerked his wand and sent her sailing across the room and into the glass wall. Hermione felt vertebrae in her back crack at the same time her arm snapped. Fire shot through every inch of her body, sending waves of black pain rushing over her head. She struggled to stay conscious, although from her fuzzy vision she was sure she had a concussion from her collision. She bit her lip to force herself to focus and not scream at the agony, hot blood filling her mouth when her teeth tore her own flesh. But she could not stop the hot tracks dripping from her cheeks. While pain wracked her system, humiliation burned.
She had been too arrogant, throwing whip-lash comments any way she wanted. She hadn't been smart, hadn't been strategic about how she treated everyone. Above all, she hadn't truly believed anyone would retaliate. She had been foolish to rely on the intimidation her intelligence garnered. Now, she was trapped, hurt and defenseless with Flint and Malfoy.
From where her face was pressed to the floor, she could watch the advance of two pairs of shiny black boots. Even as she censured herself, surprise rippled through her. She knew people at Hogwarts could be mean and vicious, but she had never expected a straightforward attack meant to seriously injure. If Flint was confident enough to go after her so viciously, then he must not fear repercussions. Her heart skipped a beat as she made the logical conclusion: Marcus Flint didn't think he would be found out. Did he mean to scare her into silence? Or would he kill her? Could another student truly get away with something like this, regardless of blood status?
"That sounded painful," Flint remarked casually, strolling to her side to survey the damage. "Malfoy! Come here." Through murky vision, Hermione could see Malfoy standing hesitantly beside Flint, wand clutched loosely in his grip. He was looking between her broken body and the older boy in growing horror. Suddenly, Hermione realized that Malfoy didn't want this to happen.
She could imagine how the blond ponce had thought it out. He had approached the older boy with a cruel streak and told him of how they should fix the problem of her filthy blood status. Hermione had wondered why none of the other Slytherins had confronted her about being muggleborn; this had been planned. They had been waiting for the perfect moment to strike.
It hadn't even struck her as too strange when everyone else had gone to their rooms so early, even on Halloween. Teachers tonight would be busy patrolling to keep students from making mischief; the troll was a happy addition. No one would come from the dorms if she called, not even Pansy. No teachers would be readily available to rush to her aid. Her house had given her to Marcus Flint for the crime of her blood. At the thought, her heart that had slowly warmed to some of the other students froze solid and shattered beneath the weight of crushing disappointment and shame. Her few housemates that had reached out to her had tricked her into believing she could have friends, for once in her life. Even Pansy and the other girls, who had sat in this very common room together just the night before to trade gossip and study, had abandoned her to blood sport.
But now Malfoy, who she had no doubt had organized the entire scheme, was having doubts. She could see it when his silver eyes flashed on her, taking in how her arm bent at a sickening angle, the blood beginning to become more obvious. Hermione coughed, and splintering pain in her side made her realize she had a broken rib, or several, also. Her tears really caught his eye; Hermione had never cried at Hogwarts, despite the teasing and snickering, and the prat knew it.
"You planned this, Malfoy. Come give her a good kick."
Malfoy was frozen in indecision. The hand holding his wand was trembling.
Hermione knew he hadn't imagined this when this scheme began to come together. He had imagined Flint scaring her into tearful submission, so that she would become the whimpering dog of the house, cowering at every footfall. Malfoy hadn't imagined her broken and bloodied, smeared on the floor like an insect.
Flint narrowed his eyes on the boy and then snorted, shaking his head. "Knew you were a bloody coward."
Hermione let loose a scream when Flint kicked her in the stomach, driving his foot straight into the cracked vertebrae. Hermione wondered in a daze if magic could fix paralysis.
"Kick her, Malfoy! Your father would have cast the first spell!"
Slowly, tears still falling unbidden from her eyes, Hermione cast her eyes to where her wand had rolled. While Flint was berating Malfoy, he didn't pay attention to the painful shifting at his feet. The witch thought quickly about how to reach her wand and what spell would be best to completely incapacitate Flint until Morgan returned with help. But her mind was fading in and out of clarity, ringing with Flint's angry voice and Malfoy's excuses.
She desperately wanted her wand, her most firm connection to her identity as a witch. Her hand felt empty without the slim length of wood. But even the thought of reaching her fingers, unbending her arm from its fetal hold on her body, sent a sob crashing through her broken ribs. With dawning despair, Hermione realized she couldn't reach her wand. Not that she wasn't trying hard enough, not that if she just strained a bit more she would succeed, like in every other task she had ever undertaken. No, she was not capable. No amount of work or struggle would shorten the distance between her fingertips and the wand.
Hermione couldn't reconcile that with what she accepted about herself. She could always succeed in whatever she set her mind to; failure was simply not an option.
But… she couldn't move. Her body was shattered.
It filled her with rage. How dare these bigoted children separate her from a heritage she had been born to just as they were? She was just as deserving! Her arrogance raised its ugly, familiar head: she deserved it more. They didn't study and research their gift as she did. They just accepted what they were taught and didn't even dream of growing themselves magically beyond their schooling or shallow hobbies.
It was her, and not them, who was ridiculed for simply existing, even though it was she who was making the most of her magic. Hermione Granger, not Marcus Flint or Draco Malfoy, was the one who had to stare through tears at the wand she simply could not reach—
She hated them. She hated Flint and Malfoy, the vicious smirk and the regretful wide eyes. She wanted them to hurt like she was hurting, to feel the emptiness of a hand without a wand, to suffer as they were making her suffer.
Don't be afraid to hurt them…
Hermione clutched at the voice whispering in her head desperately, trying to form some semblance of an urge to make one last reach for the wand just out of grasp. Before she could, Flint returned his attention to her, grinning.
"You know, I've heard you have to really mean a spell for it to work sometimes. It will only work if you truly, deeply want it to. I've been wanting to try this spell for a while now. After tonight, you won't ever look a pureblood in the eyes again. You won't try to turn us in, or someone else in the house will just join us next time. Anything you do, anytime you smile or laugh, I will be there waiting to destroy you again. I will be waiting to push your face," he spat on her cheek to punctuate his words, "back onto the floor, groveling where you belong. It will never end for you, you filthy fucking mudblood. Crucio!"
Hermione arched in a soundless scream, vertebrae grating together and shattering further, her skull colliding with the stone ground, a reverberating and fatal smack. She seized in stuttered starts, thrashing her pooling blood in wide streaks at the boys' feet.
Agony shredded her nerves into ribbons, like her skeleton was being pulled from the flesh of her body, systematically disentangled from her muscles, tendons, veins. Hermione had never before felt pain, and she never would again, not like this. Not as a vulnerable twelve-year-old curled on the stone floor, spreading her own blood in frenzied arcs as she gasped and shook.
Marcus laughed and spat on her again. The glob of spit struck the corner of her cheek and dripped into her gasping mouth, opened in a rictus of agony and impotent, consuming rage.
For one achingly clear second, Hermione could see herself from above. Bloodied, broken, pathetic, fallen at the feet of her housemates. In that moment, seeing herself weak and powerless, she felt rage like she never had before. Her previous thoughts flooded her brain, forcing the pain to share its throne within her skull. How dare these boys, shaped into racist supremacists by outdated beliefs, try to strip her of the heritage she had been born into? She deserved magic just as much as they did, more, but they would rather ignore her merits and seize upon her blood status. They towered over her, so sure of their superiority. Hermione realized that this was only a small sample of the future; magical society would always see her as less. Due to the accident of birth, her own talent would never be accepted, only scoffed at. Fury seared her retinas, surging through her veins, burning everything within her and building into a blazing inferno.
She was not some toy, some whipped dog, to lay at the feet of her tormentors in terror. Her old muggle schoolmates had discovered that she was not a girl to be trifled with. These schoolmates would learn that too, even if it burned her from the inside out.
Hermione felt magic gathering behind her sternum, building into unbearable heat, fueled by hatred and rage. Everything around her crackled, her back still arched into an impossible shape from pain. Sparks ran through her hair and along the edges of her skin. When she opened her eyes to snarl in fury at her tormenters, they blazed bright gold, her irises lit with magic and madness.
She had researched accidental magic in depth. Major outbursts were not abnormal, but certainly not common, particularly once a young witch or wizard had begun formal instruction. This sort of explosion would definitely be one her rational mind would note as an outlier. But she could consider that later, after she burned up all of her hatred and anger in a fire that could scorch souls.
Finally, when the building heat had become intolerable to contain beneath her skin, Hermione screamed, releasing the magical force within her body. She felt enchanting threads snapping at the strain, coming undone from her soul when magic surged forth. Fire exploded from her, riding the waves of her screams and forming into the shapes of serpents, dragons, chimaeras, and undefined demons. Rupturing from her broken body, the fiery monsters raced straight for the Slytherin boys in a fury of wild, untamed destruction. The conflagration swept the common room, turning furniture to char and ash, desecrating the emerald décor with gray soot. The creatures of fire wailed balefully as they wreaked havoc, a firestorm that annihilated all in its sight.
Marcus Flint yelled and ducked as a basilisk made of fire went soaring for him, turning to run from the common room as the uncontrolled magic sought his death, born from the hatred of the girl he had broken. A chimaera sank its blazing teeth into his leg, dragging him to the ground beneath its claws. His screams guttered out when the fire concealed him from view.
Blinking, the young witch watched hazily as limbs flailed and then stopped their movement so suddenly. She couldn't consider his death a loss; she had almost died at his hand. Morgan had said it herself: Don't be afraid to hurt them.
Hermione finally lost her battle to the black waves of pain just as Dumbledore arrived.