Hermione walked along the antiquated cobblestone streets of Diagon Alley, watching people rush past her in their haste to get their shopping done before noon, wishing Draco were with her. It never ceased to amaze her how much that she could actually miss him.
She passed by a new string of shops, one selling what looked like large, glass pearls with billowing clouds floating within them. Hermione stopped in front of the window for a minute, staring at the displays, trying to figure out what on earth they were for. She stood a moment longer, mesmerized by the way the cloud-like substance drifted within the glass orbs until she realized she had more shopping to finish.
Glancing down at her list, Hermione realized that she still needed about half of the things on it.
She took a turn into Madame Malkin's Robes for All Occasions to buy new Hogwarts robes, as hers were getting a little small, as well as a new set of dress robes. As she walked in, she saw that Harry, Ron and Ginny had had the same idea. She smiled toward them, but it faded from her face as Harry and Ron pretended to examine some paisley cloth on the opposite end of the store. Ginny threw them a look that Hermione couldn't see and walked over to her.
"Hello," she said, and it was obvious that she wasn't sure what to say to Hermione. Hermione could tell by how she shifted her feet and played with her fingers, something else that she had in common with her older brother, Ron.
"Hello, Ginny," Hermione said, giving her a now half-hearted smile. "I take it they still want nothing to do with me, then?" she asked unnecessarily. The two boys looked as though they didn't even recognize Hermione, which hurt.
Ginny didn't answer her right away, and when she did, Hermione wasn't sure Ginny disagreed with them. "Well," she said, drawing out the syllable to allow herself time to think of a proper response, "they are boys."
"Yes," Hermione replied quietly, wishing she could knock some sense into them. "I suppose they are." After that, the conversation didn't go much of anywhere and Ginny rejoined her brother and Harry, leaving Hermione alone once more.
As they were leaving, Mrs. Weasley accidentally caught her eye, and Hermione smiled, hoping beyond hope Ron and Harry hadn't spoken with her and given her a false impression of how things were at Hogwarts. One look at the way Mrs. Weasley regarded her told Hermione otherwise.
Letting what was left of her hope deflate from her heart, Hermione set out to make her purchases and leave as soon as possible. She didn't want to spend one moment more in a place where no one seemed to like her.
Hermione went to bed that night feeling more depressed than she could ever remember feeling, with the exception of the day her father died. She stared at the ceiling, trying to erase the way Mrs. Weasley had looked at her or how Ron and Harry ignored her completely, but found that she couldn't.
Although all of her Hogwarts purchases lay packed away in a trunk in the corner of her room, and even though she was ready, theoretically, to leave, she wasn't sure whether she wanted to return to Hogwarts this year or not. It was hard to figure whether living in the depressing environment of her home was worse than going to Hogwarts hell, or not.
She lay awake until well into the early hours of morning, contemplating whether it was worth it, and when she woke the next morning, she didn't remember having ever fell asleep.
Miles beneath the general hubhub of the wizarding community above, a strange group of creatures had gathered, each looking up at a speaker, staring in rapt attention.
The smallest of the cloaked figures stood on a raised podium, high over the sea of other creatures that shared his physical build, his voice issuing throughout the dark cavern that was lit by flickering fireflies.
His language was strange, full of clicks, air pulses and glottal stops, but one word stood out among the rest. One word that was foreign to their tongue, and immediately discernable from the rest. The one word that inspired shivers in the foreign creatures, three syllables that cost tremendous effort for the speaker to say, but reached the desired effect.
His single word that inspired fear in a race.
Voldemort.
Hermione gloomily wheeled her cart toward the barrier between platforms 9 and 10. Seeing as this was habit, she allowed her mind to wander freely as she made herself the least conspicuous as possible to muggles passing by.
Smoke, restaurant fumes and general smog polluted the air, and it was so thick that Hermione could have sword she felt it push her. There were many people dashing all about, trying to catch their trains at appropriate times. Hermione watched them for a moment, wishing that she could be a muggle, without having the added worry of magic and what was going on in two worlds resting on her mind.
She turned and made her way on to platform 9 ¾. She was proud of herself as the time stood.
So far, she had managed to avoid contact, whether by speaking or looking, with anyone that she knew, or with anyone that knew about her and Draco. She wanted to keep it that way. If her experience with Harry and Ron were telltale, she didn't want to meet anyone else, especially a Slytherin. She wasn't sure if she was in the proper mood to withstand hexes at the time.
Leaving her luggage with the rest of the school's, she boarded the Hogwarts express and found an empty car. She sat, put her things on the ground next to her, and waited.
Five minutes. . .
Ten minutes. . .
It was the first time in her five years of riding the Hogwarts Express that Hermione had ever seen a car empty, as there was usually just enough room for groups of four, five and six to stuff themselves and their things into each car. There was never an empty car. And hers was. It seemed that everyone else had managed to find somewhere else to cram themselves, rather than put themselves anywhere near her.
By the time she would normally have started catching up on some reading that she certainly hadn't gotten done during the summer holidays, Hermione was too depressed to read her book, which stayed packed away in her bag in the overhead compartment, and so she contented herself with watching the landscape flash past by her window until nightfall.
The train passed through fields, obvious muggle dwellings every few acres. She watched one small figure moving across the fields, but was unable to get a good look at it as the Hogwarts Express continued to speed through the countryside.
Further on they seemed to reach a stretch of land that no muggles lived in. There wasn't an unnatural structure in sight. Some of the biggest trees she had ever seen loomed out in the distance and she could have sworn that she had seen caves off in the distance, but the train was moving so fast, she couldn't get a look at things that weren't dozens of miles off into the land.
Sighing, Hermione turned her attention to the sky. Small clouds littered the otherwise crystalline blue color of the sky. The sun shone down on the now swaying grasses of a meadow and birds played through the tickling wind, floating on it as if they were weightless.
Hermione glanced at the time and decided it was time to patrol the corridors for troublemakers, not that she expected anyone to listen to her, at the rate things were going.
As she made her way down the hall, Hermione saw brief glimpses of the other students of Hogwarts, smiling, laughing and trading chocolate frog cards as the train sped along. Some students were showing others new charms they had looked up, others were shouting out jokes and laughing, but not one of them were behaving in a manner that would cause her to intervene.
Hermione looked in the last compartment, and her breath caught in her throat. Harry, Ron and Ginny were sitting in a compartment huddled together over something, and Luna Lovegood was reading her magazine, the Quibbler, in the corner, seeming not to even notice the other three.
Ginny was saying something, Ron laughed, Harry punched him in the shoulder, obviously amused and only pretending to punish him for something that Hermione couldn't hear. They looked like they were quite enjoying themselves, if their grins were to say anything in the least. She couldn't remember the last time she had seen a grin that big on Harry's face, nor did she ever remember having seen Ron laugh so hard that tears ran down his cheeks.
With a jolt, Hermione realized that Ginny was where she would have normally been. Ginny was laughing with her old friends. And they didn't look as if they noticed her absence. Had she been so easily replaced?
Ron turned to look out the window, and Hermione could have sworn that he caught her eye, but he turned away so fast, she couldn't be sure of anything. Perhaps she had been imagining it, and he hadn't even noticed her. The windows were hard to see through anyway. Ron said something to Harry, and Hermione made sure to be gone before Harry would have a chance to look her way.
On her way back to her compartment to finish the remainder of the journey to Hogwarts castle, which was seeming more and more like a dungeon with each click clack of the train on its rails, in silence, Hermione glanced into Draco's compartment, more out of instinct than anything else.
He was sitting surrounded by his usual crowd of idiots, Crabbe, Goyle and some other large, troll-like brutes. Draco's back was to her, and she didn't really care if anyone else saw her, she was too consumed in watching what was going on behind the window.
Pansy was very obviously flirting with Draco, and he wasn't really doing anything to stop her. She was batting her eyelashes in a sickening way, and Hermione noticed that she had done something to her hair to make it almost unnaturally straight in a way that framed her face.
Her hand went instinctively to her own very bushy clouds of hair. Although it had calmed down slightly as she aged, (when she had been in primary school it looked like someone had stuck an old feather duster with twigs in her hair and then electrocuted her) but was still what she could call a mess – she could venture to call it a disaster even. With large amounts of hair product, she could manage to get it under control, but it would never, ever be like Pansy's was now.
Pansy said something, her eyelashes still fluttering as if she had something in her eye, and Draco pet her head. Hermione tried not to fling the door open and yell, not because she was trying to be nice, but because she didn't know whom she would actually be yelling at – Draco or Pansy.
Hermione made her way into her compartment and sat down, resuming her usual activity of staring out the window, but now she wasn't so sure what was real in her life. What was going to happen to her and Draco? Was it ever going to be possible to fix her relationship with Ron and Harry? And what was going to happen at Hogwarts this year?
She closed her eyes and thought about Harry losing Sirius. Even if she was suppose to hate him, as he most certainly did her, she couldn't stop how she felt toward him. She knew how close he had been to his godfather, and losing him had to be a big blow to him. If they were friends still, maybe she could have helped him, she had certainly known what it was like to lose someone now. . .
But no, she reasoned with herself silently. No, Harry wouldn't come to her for advice or guidance or just to talk to. That was what Ron was for. His best buddy. His truest friend. She wasn't even in the same realm of comparison as Ron was. She had known – she had always known, somewhere in the back of her mind, but she had truly known - in their fourth year, when he and Ron hadn't been speaking, that she was only a temporary fill in for what he really wanted, which was his friend.
As she leaned back, eyes still closed, Hermione tried to remember a time at Hogwarts when she hadn't had Ron and Harry, but found that she couldn't. The only time she hadn't been part of their group of three had been when they were in first year, and even then, they were friends by Halloween.
She groaned and let out her breath in a long puff.
This was going to be a long year.
Hermione hadn't noticed she had drifted off to sleep until she was jerked awake by the sound of her compartment door being shoved open.
When her eyes recovered from their blurry slumber, she found them set upon Draco, flanked by Crabbe and Goyle as well as a number of other people she didn't recognize.
"Morning, Granger," Draco said, and Hermione nearly did a double take. Granger? He was calling her Granger again? "How was your nap?" he said, with a slight sneer.
Hermione didn't answer, she just sat, staring in his direction.
Why is he treating me like this? Hermione wondered. She barely had time to try to piece things together when Pansy sauntered in, and Hermione did take a double take this time.
Pansy was different. Way different than she had remembered her. The pug-nosed, annoying Slytherin girl had done some growing up over the summer, she had grown into a more mature looking person, and Hermione realized that Draco would have to be blind not to notice.
"Your muddy-blooded, tooth-loving mother doing well this summer?" he asked in a voice Hermione hadn't heard in two years. Hermione narrowed her eyes slightly.
"Shut up," she said.
"Aww, have I heard Granger's feelings now?" Draco asked, fake pouting. Hermione's temper was starting to rise. What the heck was Draco doing?
"Stuff it, Malfoy," she said, the voice that came from her mouth not one that she recognized. It was cold and angry, and Hermione found that she didn't really care at the moment.
"Tell her off, Drakie!" Pansy simpered from the back of the large trolls that accompanied Draco. Hermione wasn't sure whether she wanted to vomit or scream more at the moment.
"Drakie?" she said scathingly, giving Draco a look that she didn't recognize on her face. "Changed your name, have you?"
Pansy made her way to the front of the pack and stood next to Draco, as if her presence were going to scare Hermione into hiding.
Draco opened his mouth, obviously to say something else to her, but Hermione found that she didn't want to hear it. In fact, she didn't remember telling her legs to move or her hand to grab Draco's wrist in a death grip, but the next thing she knew, she had drug him out of the compartment, slammed the door and stood, in the hallway, glaring at him.
"What on earth are you doing?" Hermione asked incredulously, staring at him, waiting for his answer.
"Hanging out with my friends-" he said, but Hermione cut him off.
"Those are your. . . your. . . friends?" she asked.
"My friends, of which have taken me back, which is obviously more than I can say for you, now isn't it?" he asked with a strange emotion on his face as he finished speaking. Hermione didn't have an answer at the moment, so settled for staring at him in disbelief.
"What are you doing?" Hermione couldn't understand what had happened. Less than six weeks ago they had been walking down Diagon Alley, sitting in a coffee shop, talking, they had most certainly not been acting how he was now.
"I could ask you the same," he said. Hermione stared, still stunned.
"Is this some pathetic way to say we're breaking up?" Hermione asked, her face unnaturally set in a displeased expression.
"It means, Granger, get out of my bloody way." Draco pushed past her and went into the compartment. Hermione followed, shoving troll-like cronies, but to no avail. She was no match for their three ton weight.
"What are you doing, Malfoy?" she called through the mass of thick arms and legs that blocked her view, but she got no answer. As the cronies silently filed out, Hermione stared in shock.
Pansy turned to smirk at her.
"Different times, different lines, Granger."
"What are you talking about, Parkinson?"
"You can't tell me you thought he'd be gone forever." Pansy said, sneering in Hermione's direction, obviously enjoying the fact that Hermione didn't know what she was taking about.
"What?" Hermione said, waiting for some horrible insult to drip out of Pansy's lips.
"His father." Pansy said simply, and made to leave.
"What are you talking about?" Hermione demanded, and Pansy turned back, her obvious enjoyment enraging Hermione further.
"Come on, Granger, you had to know that whatever you thought you had with Draco would wear off. After all, he does have a powerful father. Think of what it could do to his future to be seen with you."
"But Mal-"
"Whatever Drakie may have told you, it's changed. Especially after his father's employer returned. Oh yes, that changed everything."
"Who, Voldemort?" Hermione asked quietly. Pansy laughed at her.
"Finally gotten over saying the name, have you?" she asked. "Oh, well done. But no, you're wrong. Oh, don't worry, I won't tell anyone."
"Then who?"
"I'm not that stupid, Granger," Pansy said, and made her way out. "I can't tell you. But, let's just say that if him and the Dark Lord were to meet, they would either ally, or the most bloody war of this world would follow." With those final parting words, Pansy left, leaving a very confused Hermione in her compartment.
Worse than the Dark Lord? Worse than Voldemort? And what was this "employer" Pansy was babbling on about Draco's father having. And why, why, why was Draco acting like a giant prat all of a sudden?
Hermione sank down on her seat and spent the remainder of the ride to Hogwarts in silence.
The ending of a chapter, one which I hope was up to the very firm length standards?
Thank you for sticking with me, I can't believe I actually took two weeks to update, instead of the one that I promised, time just flew by. Oh well, I can't change it now. Please enjoy.
R/R.
--Saquoia--