The Most Unpardonable Sin

BOOK 1: HERMIONE GRANGER AND THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE

Chapter 1: Meetings Aboard a Train

The morning of September 1 was hot and sticky, as if September was trying to prove to July and August that it was just as much a summer month as they were. Hermione Granger could feel the sweat prickling along her scalp and under her clothes as she hauled an over-large suitcase across the main concourse of King's Cross Station, looking rapidly from the signs overhead to what appeared to be a piece of thick, yellowed paper clutched in her hand. The giant clock suspended from the high ceiling showed half past ten, and while the rush of commuters had died down, that simply took the concourse from shoulder-to-shoulder packed to merely quite busy.

Hermione made her way methodically past fast food restaurants and newsstands, past intercity terminals and signs for the Tube, until she found her way to the boundary between platforms nine and ten. She carefully lined up what she believed was the entrance to the hidden train platform, and pored over her instructions yet again to make sure she hadn't missed anything. That was when Hermione spotted the wizarding family. She recognized them for what they were instantly: each member of the large family was wearing a strange assortment of clothes, looking like they'd run down somebody's washer line and thrown on whatever they found—at least the ones who weren't wearing robes—and one of them was holding an owl cage. Their steamer trunks, a style that hadn't been common in nearly a century, were stacked on the cart into a eight-foot high tower that drew eyes from all over the platform, and the woman she assumed was the mother of the four school-aged children around her was actually saying to her husband, loud enough for anyone to hear, "—packed with Muggles, of course—".

Hermione paused, broadening her view and taking in the scene the way she had been taught. The wizarding family was oblivious, but more than a few passerbyers were turning, staring, and muttering about the strange sight. Only for a moment, though, before their eyes went glassy and unfocused, and they shook their heads like they were trying to remember something before continuing towards wherever they had been going.

Suspicions raised, Hermione looked around, and sure enough, a few men who were casually leaning against benches or posts, reading their papers and muttering about the day's news were actually holding thin wands just out of view. Listening closely, Hermione could just make out that their muttering was actually a stream of Latin sounding phrases, presumably spell incantations, even as the youngest of the family of mages pointed at the hidden barrier and excitedly yelled, "Platform Nine and Three Quarters!"

Hermione narrowed her eyes as a hot wash of anger fell over her. The wizards, standing out in the middle of one of the most heavily trafficked areas of the whole country, discussing their business without a care in the world, proved one thing: she had been lied to.

Hermione took a deep breath to center herself. "First, learn," she murmured to herself. "Then, decide what to do about it."

The train was certainly impressive, she would give it that.

Hermione emerged from the hidden barrier to see a scarlet steam engine waiting next to a platform packed with people. A sign overhead said Hogwarts Express, eleven o'clock. Hermione looked behind her and saw a wrought-iron archway where the barrier had been, with the words Platform Nine and Three-Quarters on it. She allowed herself a small smile; she had done it. Rather less punctual than she might have hoped–the train was scheduled to leave in less than fifteen minutes–but given that she'd had to convince someone who barely remembered who she was that she needed to get to London, she felt simply being there at all was an accomplishment.

Smoke from the engine drifted over the heads of the chattering crowd. Hermione wondered why they needed to actually run the boiler if the train was magic, but she didn't have time to investigate. Cats of every color wound here and there between their owners' legs, while owls hooted to one another in a disgruntled sort of way over the babble and scraping of heavy trunks.

The first few carriages were already packed with students, some hanging out of the window to talk to their families, some fighting over compartments, so even though she was already uncomfortably sweaty, Hermione hauled her suitcase down the platform in search of an empty seat. She passed a round-faced boy who was saying, "Gran, I've lost my toad again."

"Oh Neville," Hermione heard the old woman sigh.

Further down the platform was a boy with dreadlocks surrounded by a small crowd.

"Give us a look, Lee, go on."

The boy lifted the box in his arms, and the people around him shrieked and yelled as something inside poked out a long, hairy leg. Hermione almost puked; whatever was inside that box absolutely stank, and she sped up to get away from it.

Hermione pressed through the crowd until she found an empty compartment near the end of the train. She dragged her suitcase first up the steps to the long, narrow corridor that ran the length of the train, and then into the compartment itself. The compartment was spacious and old-fashioned looking, with dark wood paneling on the walls, two padded leather benches facing each other, and brass latches accenting an overhead luggage compartment.

Hermione managed to lever her suitcase up and stow it away by herself, and then she sat down, satisfied with this small accomplishment, but flushed and hotter than ever. The inside of the train compartment lacked even the slight breeze of the platform.

For the moment she was alone, but as the train filled up around her with last minute arrivals, she suspected that wouldn't be true for long. Sure enough, after a few minutes a skinny boy with messy black hair and round glasses with tape wrapped around them nervously poked his head in.

"Um, do you mind if I sit in here with you?"

Hermione hesitated. She had sworn to herself that the wizards would get nothing from her but disdain, but… now that she was face-to-face with one, and moreover one who resembled a beaten puppy, she was having a hard time mustering it.

And, really, she thought, at eleven and just starting school hardly qualified as a wizard. Hermione could save her hate for the adults who deserved it.

Hermione squared this all away in her mind, satisfied that she had managed to rationalize holding on to her resolve while also not treating this kid in a way she'd be uncomfortable with. Only then did she realize that she'd taken too long–the boy was backing away from the door, clearly taking her silence for dismissal.

"Wait!" Hermione called out. "Just–come on in. Here, I can help you get your suitcase–er, trunk–stowed."

The boy tentatively shuffled into the compartment. If he'd sneered, or stomped off, Hermione might have felt better, but instead he was flinching as if he was worried she might lay into him.

"I'm sorry," Hermione started, "it's just that this is all new to me," she gestured to the platform, still full of magical families, "and it's a bit much, yeah?"

This seemed to be the right thing to say. The boy perked up, and actually spoke again. "Yeah, I know what you mean."

The two of them hoisted his trunk up on top of Hermione's suitcase, then she turned back to him to introduce herself.

"I'm Hermione, Hermione Granger."

"I'm, um, Harry Potter."

That was a name Hermione recognized from her reading. She thought, though, that she could be forgiven for failing to recognize him. The history books, after all, included his famous encounter with the Dark Lord as a baby, but nothing about Harry Potter since then.

"So, you're some sort of celebrity?"

Harry gave a small snort. "I guess so? But–well, I didn't actually know about any of that until about a month ago. And–I live with my aunt and uncle. They're muggles."

Hermione frowned. "Then why are you dressed like that?"

"Like what?"

"Like you don't know how muggles dress. A bunch of people out on the platform look like they grabbed whatever they could find in the charity bin, but I assumed it was because they're wizards and don't know any better."

At this, Harry blushed, and Hermione considered that perhaps she could have been more tactful in saying that. Or, better still, that she could have just kept her mouth shut.

"My uncle, he doesn't really like to spend money on me. So these are, you know, hand-me-downs," Harry finished in a very small voice.

"That makes sense," said Hermione matter-of-factly.

An awkward silence stretched on while Hermione frantically tried to think of a way to salvage the conversation. "And hey, look on the bright side: most of the wizards who see you dressed like this won't realize anything's off?"

Harry frowned, but after pondering that for a minute a small grin broke across his face. "Yeah, I guess you're right." Hermione tried not to show her relief at this small sign that she had not completely botched her first ever interaction with one of her classmates.

At that moment, another boy opened the compartment door to ask if he could sit with them. This boy had the same dark hair as Harry Potter, but much neater, and he wore it down to his shoulders. This led to another struggle to put a trunk in the overhead compartment, and another round of introductions, even as all three retreated to slump in opposite corners of the stifling compartment and put as much air between themselves and the next body as possible.

The new boy's name was Michael Corner. "Are you muggle-borns too, then?" he asked, looking around the compartment.

"Pardon?" asked Harry, who evidently wasn't familiar with this term.

"I assume he means your parents aren't wizards," supplied Hermione

"Oh, well, no, my parents were wizards, but I wasn't raised–I mean, they passed, and my aunt and uncle took me. So sort-of muggle-born, I guess?" With Harry having answered, he and Michael looked at Hermione for confirmation of her own status.

"Yeah, muggleborn," said Hermione.

"Me, nobody in my family's magic at all," Michael said. "It was a total shock getting the letter. I assumed it was a prank until Professor McGonagall showed up to ask why I hadn't responded." Hermione narrowed her eyes at the mention of Professor McGonagall, but Michael continued without pause. "Since then I've been trying to get ready as much as possible. I imagine that the school must have some sort of extra classes for us; they can't possibly expect that we'll be at the same level as the kids who came from magical families."

Hermione hadn't really thought about that aspect up until now; she'd been so obsessed with—other things—that it hadn't occurred to her that she'd be expected to compete in classes against students who had potentially been doing magic since they could walk. It was rather disconcerting, and she could tell from his expression that Harry felt the same. On reflection, however, she decided that Michael must be right. Surely they knew that the "muggle-borns" had been aware of the magical world for only a month or two and would adjust accordingly. That just made sense.

Eleven o'clock came, and the train started moving. It felt strange to Hermione; no rumble of an engine or whine of electric motors, just a smooth acceleration, silent beneath the murmur of conversation from the other compartments.

Michael Corner kept up a steady stream of speculation about Hogwarts, needing little input from the other two, as the train slid through London. Glass towers faded to progressively lower office buildings, shops, and then rows of houses. Hermione was pondering what enchantments along the route kept people from looking out their windows and noticing the scarlet steam engine chugging through the city. Her thoughts were interrupted when a third boy stumbled into the compartment. He was already dressed in wizard robes, and as he entered Hermione recognized him as the round-faced boy who lost his toad on the platform.

"S'mae," he muttered, shuffling into the compartment and taking a seat next to Michael Corner. Nobody said anything for a moment, and the new boy looked around at the group, seeming to realize something. "Oh, um, hello," he said. "I'm Longbottom. I mean, Neville."

Michael looked at his robes. "You're from a wizarding family then?" he asked.

"Yes," replied Neville. "The Longbottoms… yes, wizards." He spoke with an accent that Hermione couldn't place. It had a lilting, musical quality she associated with Irish, but it wasn't quite that.

Michael was excited. "That's great! We're all muggleborns," he gestured around the compartment, "but you can tell us so much more about— about— everything!"

Neville Longbottom looked rather alarmed at this expansive view of what he could provide, but Michael kept going into his first question: "So, is it mostly muggleborns at Hogwarts? Only, I've met a few people now and you're the first wizard-raised classmate."

"Oh, no, it's wizards in the main," stammered Neville. "But they're rather—well, most wizard families know each other, os they have children the same age they all group together, so that they all know each other, so… They all met up to get their own compartments, that's why you haven't seen them."

"But you're not in one of those compartments," said Hermione. Neville blushed scarlet at this observation. Mouth. Shut. Hermione. she thought to herself.

Before she could say anything to remedy her blunt observation, a loud voice from the corridor interrupted them. "Not more muggleborns! We need no more of that filth at Hogwarts." The speaker was putting a lot of effort into sounding bored with the train, its passengers, and life in general, but at the same time was talking loudly and clearly as if he wanted to make sure he was heard—particularly by the people in Hermione's compartment.

The door of their compartment opened to reveal a handsome boy with a pale, pointed face, platinum blond hair slicked back, and a thin layer of dark eyeliner. He was standing in the corridor, flanked by two thickset boys who had positioned themselves as if they were his bodyguards, and who were doing their best to look like the kind of toughs you didn't want to mess with. As the boys were all of eleven, the effect fell a bit short of the mark; and in any case, Hermione knew what actual street toughs looked like, and from the soft, smooth skin on their hands she guessed that the closest this gang had ever come to a real fight was getting the meat out of their boiled lobster.

"Look at this, boys," the pale boy said in that same, lilting accent that Neville spoke with. "A compartment full of muggleborns, and Longbottom the squib, off to where they're not wanted."

The blond boy made a fake laugh and looked to his companions, who dutifully chuckled along. If he was hoping to be intimidating, though, he was disappointed. Neville was looking at the ground, clearly hoping to avoid a confrontation, but Michael, Harry, and Hermione simply stared blankly at him, lacking any context for his insults.

This clearly wasn't the reaction he had expected, and the boy moved into the compartment, starting to look frustrated. When that still didn't get a reaction, he dramatically reached into his robes to pull out his wand, with the air of someone flipping over a royal flush in front of a full pot.

Hermione was more curious than threatened. None of the spells included in The Standard Book of Spells, Grade 1 could really cause harm–at least, not more than a fist could–but this blond boy clearly thought his wand was a threat. She wondered what fighting spells those who grew up in magical families might know.

She took in the whole scene: Neville had gone from passive avoidance to openly cringing, moving away from blondie; Michael and Harry were looking around, uncertain; the two would-be toughs were trying to both get into the compartment, which they manifestly couldn't do without bumping into their leader. Before blondie could cast a spell, however, Hermione noticed something.

"Are those… are those Doc Martins?"

The blond boy paled, which Hermioned wouldn't have thought was possible, and swelled with fury and embarrassment. "I don't know what you're talking about!" he hissed through clenched teeth.

"Oh they are!" Michael added. "Just with the tags blacked out."

"Wait," Hermione put in, "did you get those in a muggle shop?"

"I- you- bawgwaed!" the boy spat, and stormed off down the corridor.

Neville had paled at the other boy's insult, which Hermione assumed meant it must be a bad one in the wizarding world. But for the rest of the children in the compartment, it had no bite, and they listened to the blond boy continue down the corridor, making over-loud comments about the inhabitants of each compartment as he passed them, with a sense of bemusement. Michael smirked at Hermione and said, "What a wanna-be goth drama queen." Hermione smiled back, and decided that he, at least, would be alright, even if he seemed far too enthusiastic about the wizarding world.

They had been traveling north for about an hour and a half or so, and the city had faded completely to the English countryside, when there was a great clattering outside in the corridor and a smiling, dimpled woman slid back their door and said, "Anything off the trolley, dear?"

Hermione had packed a lunch, and was trying to conserve her meager supply of magical currency. Neville, however, leaned forward to take a look. "Which sweet's your favorite?" he asked the rest of the compartment.

"Oh, we don't have any of those in the muggle world," said Michael quickly, looking over Neville's shoulder.

"None of them?" asked Neville, looking even more aghast than he had at the "bawgwaed" comment from the blond boy earlier. "Well I- I-," he swallowed, and then seemed to work up his nerve to something. Turning back towards the cart, he stood up straight and announced in a loud voice, "I would like one of everything, os it please you!"

He then proceeded to empty his pockets of the strange money wizards used, and took an armful of treats from the trolley in return. As he spread them out over the empty seat, Hermione saw a number of strange things she had never seen in her life. There were Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans, Drooble's Best Blowing Gum, Chocolate Frogs, Pumpkin Pasties, Cauldron Cakes, and Licorice Wands. Shaking her head at the absurdity of it all, she sank back into his seat as Neville eagerly turned to the other boys.

"Which one do you want to start with?" asked Neville, his face shining with glee now that he had something to share with his new friends.

Michael and Harry looked at each other, shrugged, and then dug into the pasties, cakes, and candies. "You know, I weally shouldn't be woing this." said Michael, through a mouthful of particularly thick licorice wand. "My pawents awe dendists."

Neville looked confused, and Harry swallowed and tried to explain dentistry to him, while Hermione looked curiously at the next sweet in the pile, which according to the label printed on the foil wrapper, was a Chocolate Frog.

"What's this?" Hermione asked Neville, which mercifully interrupted Harry's explanation. ("But if they're experts at cleansing teeth," Neville had been asking, "why would it be a difficulty for Michael to eat candy?")

"It's not really a frog, is it?" Hermione wasn't so sure–she'd decided that nothing would surprise her.

"No," said Neville. "But they house cards—some children like to collect them."

"Cards?"

"Yes, of famous wizards, and witches. Like Agrippa, Ptolemy, even Dumbledore."

Hermione shrugged and handed the Chocolate Frog to Michael, who unwrapped it and looked at the card before passing it around the room. The frog itself leaped onto Michael's shirt, leaving smears of chocolate as it melted in the heat even as it continued to attempt to hop away. Micheal grabbed it and shoved the whole thing in his mouth before it could cause any more mess.

Hermione looked at the card he'd handed her. It showed a man's face, captured in the style of an oil painting. Underneath the picture was a name and brief biography. And, surprisingly, the name was one that even a muggle would recognize.

Merlin

Fifth Century AD; exact dates uncertain

Arguably the greatest wizard who ever lived, Merlin is widely viewed as the father of British magic. While much of what is said about his life is not credible (for example, that he was born of a demon and a mortal woman), what is certain is that Merlin combined Druidic and Roman wizardry and established Britain as a presence in the international magical community.

Hermione turned the card back over, and was unsurprised to see that Merlin had disappeared; she'd seen enough of the strange, almost living pictures that wizards created in her textbooks.

"And people… collect these?" Michael asked Neville, looking around for something to wipe the chocolate off of his hands with.

"Oh yes, children do. Little children. Younger than us."

"Weird." Hermione said, and Harry nodded in agreement, while Michael decided that his shirt was already a loss and started using it to clean his hands.

They ate in companionable silence, until the compartment door opened yet again. This time, in the corridor stood a tall boy, thin and gangling, with freckles, big hands and feet, and a long nose, on which he seemed to have smudged something.

The new boy looked around the compartment, then pointed to the stash of treats on the seat, which by now was mostly empty wrappers, with a face of outrage. "Neville!" he exclaimed, "you took all of that? There was nothing left on the trolley by the time it got to us!"

Neville continued to look at his feet, which he'd been doing since the redheaded boy had opened the door. He muttered, "never had had it before," though without additional context, Hermione suspected that this explanation meant little to the newcomer.

"Do you want some?" interrupted Harry Potter. "We've still got a bunch left."

The tall redhead looked suspiciously at Harry for a moment, before apparently deciding that this was a genuine offer and not a prank of some kind, and grabbed a couple of treats before sitting down between Hermione and Michael. Hermione shifted in her seat. They were all, of course, sweaty, but this new boy smelled like it.

"I'm Ron Weasley, by the way." The others murmured their names, except for Neville, who clearly already knew the boy. Harry, Hermione noted, declined to give his surname.

"So you three are muggleborns?" Ron Weasley asked. As heads nodded around the compartment, he continued talking. "My dad will love this! He's obsessed with muggle stuff. His life's ambition is to figure out how airplanes fly." Ron ended with a fond chuckle.

"But–why doesn't he just ask somebody?" asked Hermione. Ron looked taken aback.

"Ask… who?"

"Well he could go to basically any library–any muggle library that is–and ask for books on airplanes, even a small library would have a few. I mean," Hermione added, with a touch of asperity, "for a life's ambition, that seems pretty easy to realize."

An awkward silence descended on the compartment, as Ron was clearly unsure how to respond to that.

"So…" Michael said, after the awkwardness became unbearable, "what classes are you looking forward to?"

It was not at all subtle, but Hermione had to admit it was effective, as the group dove into textbooks and speculation on the coursework they would start the next day.

As the group traded beginner spells they each had tried, Hermione grew uneasy. The boys around her were describing the wands in their hands as warm and welcoming. Hers felt nothing like that; the prickly feeling she got from her vine wand felt more like she was holding on to the terminals of a car battery.

And the spells they tried – Ron Weasley attempted to make his pet rat turn yellow, which didn't work at all, but sparks shot out and stained the wall; Harry tried to make his light up and accidentally set it off like a camera flash. Hermione, though, had learned from practice that she either got the spell exactly right or nothing happened. There was no magic leaking out of her.

It felt rather like the time she had grabbed a bike that had been dumped behind the school to try to learn how to ride it—she had struggled for a week before one of the older neighborhood kids explained that the tires were low and the brakes needed to be adjusted. Using her wand felt like that, like she was forcing something forward that should be smoothly gliding.

Without knowing her companions better, however, she didn't dare open up about her struggles. She could have told Tiffany, she'd have an idea, but—

No! she told herself firmly. They're all out of reach now. Stay focused on what's in front of you.

Hermione lost a turn of the conversation as she struggled to rein in her emotions. When she came back to it, the rest of the group had moved on to Herbology and Potions.

"Obviously I didn't try any of these potion recipes," Michael was saying, "they seemed simple enough, but I wasn't sure if we'd get in trouble for using up our ingredients outside of class."

"Oh, actually," Hermione jumped in, but then paused, suddenly unsure if she was about to sound like a show-off. Everyone was looking at her now, though, so she pressed on. "I found some of the ingredients around my neighborhood and experimented with those."

"You did? Which plants?" asked Neville, who rather than being put off seemed to ask with genuine interest.

"Well, there was belladonna in a lot by the river," said Hermione, "and I actually found a leaping toadstool under a fallen tree in Strombury park—that's this park in Salford—and a pond had some spotted water hemlock in it, and-"

"But that's really poisonous!" exclaimed Neville, and Hermione noted that Neville knew this without looking it up.

"Yes, but it shows up in a lot of our potions recipes, and it's perfectly safe once you treat it."

"But how did you know you had treated it correctly?" Michael asked.

"I- uh- I guess I just followed the instructions? Don't worry," she added, at the look of alarm on Neville's face, "I won't try anything else until we get into classes."

Harry looked rather impressed by Hermione's daring, but Neville's face was uncertain, as if he wasn't sure what type of Herbology renegade he was sharing the compartment with.

Suddenly, though, Neville's face fell as he remembered something, and he looked around the compartment in a panic.

"Oh no," the round-faced boy cried, "I've lost Trevor again!" Trevor, it turned out, was the toad that Neville had been looking for on the platform, and which Neville's Gran had given him and tasked him severely with not losing.

"Okay, well let's check with the other students to confirm if anybody else has seen it, and then we can systematically…" Michael was beginning, but then Hermione interrupted him.

"I think we can summon it back here."

"We- you can?" asked Neville.

"I tried this out a couple of times at home, and it always worked," Hermione said, climbing up to her suitcase to pull a battered book out of it. It was one of the ones she had found at Farthingforth's, hunting around the piles of used books for the ones she'd need for school. It had caught her eye at the time because, unlike almost everything else in the pile, the title had been in English. Hermione had gotten to know it well over the past month: the contents of this book were things she could practice without using her wand.

"Okay," Hermione muttered, "we just need to draw this," she pointed to a faded diagram, "shape into the floor here–"

"Um, are we supposed to be vandalizing the train?" asked Harry.

"You can draw the diagrams however you want. They don't have to be permanent to work," replied Hermione. "I'm using pencil, we can just erase it afterwards."

Hermione finished sketching the diagram on the compartment floor, and then added the series of runes copied out of the text. She had no idea what any of them meant. She had, of course, looked them up in a syllabary but just the rune-by-rune meaning didn't tell her much, it would take more advanced study to actually understand why they were strung together in a particular order.

"Okay", she told Neville. "Now you just have to say that," she pointed to a paragraph in the text, beneath the diagram, "while picturing the toad clearly in your mind."

Harry and Neville looked alarmed. "Are we sure… we're sure this is actually safe? Using some ritual out of some dodgy book you found?"

It was Ron, who Hermione wasn't quite sure she liked, who reassured them. "None of us have enough magic to hurt ourselves badly. It probably won't work," he said, "but it won't, like, explode or anything."

Neville didn't look reassured, but he began reading off of the page anyways.

"Veradanos conjati, i endantos ellarati…"

The incantation wasn't long, four lines in total, but it felt longer as they all waited tensely for whatever was going to happen. Hermione wasn't sure—she could be simply imagining it—but she thought she felt a tingle in the air.

As Neville read the last syllable, the space in the center of the diagram seemed to shift, somehow, almost as if the floor had buckled, and yet the floor was clearly as flat as before.

Hermione didn't have much time to ponder it, though, because in a blink the space between them snapped back to normal, and Neville's toad appeared on the compartment floor.

That was definitely the toad, though Hermione with a surge of triumph.

But…

The toad was lying on its back, limbs splayed, and it was, unmistakably, dead.

"Oh." said Hermione. "Well… it might have died… wherever else it was, before we summoned it."

The three boys looked incredulously at her.

"My Gran is going to kill me…" Neville whispered, as tears gathered in the corners of his eyes.

Ron looked at the book on the seat next to Hermione. "Look, it says right there that this is 'inanimate translocation.' Doesn't that mean only for things that aren't alive?"

Hermione flushed. "But if you read the description there's no reason it shouldn't have worked for—"

"In. Animate," said Ron, in a condescending way that made Hermione want to punch him, "means not living."

"I know that!" Hermione snarled. "But the transference index is uniform so it should have—"

"Um, we're going to go now," said Harry in a soft voice. Hermione realized, in a flash of shame, that she had been shouting at Weasley while Neville had been softly crying over the death of his pet.

"Yeah, sure okay," Hermione stammered. "And, you know, I am sorry," she added to Neville. "But it really wasn't—"

"We're going," said Harry more firmly.

"Yeah," was all Hermione could say to that. And then she sat, embarrassed, as her new classmates trundled out of the compartment. A short moment later and Hermione was left alone to ponder how she had mucked things up quite so badly.