Sacrifices
1. When she was little, she kept a picture of the moon above her bed. She always thought it was so pretty. She got a little older, heard the cliché saying about shooting for the moon, and then kept it as a reminder to never land among the stars. Hogwarts came, and then the crinkled and worn picture was kept in her trunk. This time it served as a reminder that no matter what, there was one thing Muggles had done and wizards hadn't.
2. She came home from holidays and surprised her parents by watching the telly constantly. She caught reruns of Eastenders and Carnation Street, and went to the cinema as much as possible. Snuggling up to her ragged teddy bear in her old bed, she burst into tears halfway through Wizard of Oz, because it wasn't like that at all and yet it was.
3. She wandered the huge library, reading book after book, but it wasn't until she reached the dusty, dimly lighted Muggle section that she found poetry. She stayed in the library for hours, drinking in Yeats and Byron and Eliot and Shakespeare. Looking up at the pitifully small collection of novels, she began to wonder why wizards didn't write poems.
4. Her main memory of the Yule Ball was not of the dinner, or her glamorous date, or even the explosive fight that came afterwards. It was the music. Besides that brief, three-hour period, she hadn't heard a single strain of music in Hogwarts. When she was younger, she sang constantly, while she got ready, any moment she was alone, in the shower. After her first few days, she just sang in her head. By her third year, she turned the soundtrack off entirely.
5. She once tried to explain half-blood and pureblood and mudblood to her parents, but she couldn't. They just couldn't grasp the concept that their precious daughter was being discriminated against. She let the matter go, and woke up in the middle of the night knowing exactly what would have made them understand. It was like Hitler, and it was racism over skin. The thought shocked and scared her so much that she couldn't go back to sleep.
6. She returned for her sixth year with her defense against the world that was killing her friends. She figured out a way to charm her CD player, and for one blissful day, she strolled the halls of Hogwarts humming along to her favorite melodies. She endured the strange glances, survived Ron laughing at the weird things Muggles did, and by the end of the day, she slipped it into the bottom of her trunk and didn't take it out again.
7. One day, pulling her friends away from Malfoy's taunts, she whispered without thinking, "Turn the other cheek." Harry looked surprised and Ron confused. The idea that there was no religion in this world, that there were no arguments over which God was real and which was false caused her to laugh so hard she couldn't breathe. Wars would never be fought over religion, but her parentage was up for grabs. Her sides hurt.
8. In Astronomy one night, she heard Parvati whisper to Lavender as they peeked through side-by-side telescopes. "I wonder what's out there," she said. "In space. On the stars. On the moon." Hermione smiled secretively and shared a look with Harry. She was glad someone else knew.
9. She had never seen someone die before. She had seen Harry clutching Cedric's body, she had been told what happened to Sirius after she was cursed. But never before had she seen blood seep out of a still warm body and only be able to think the thought, "It's the same color as mine. It's the same color as mine."
10. Poetry, music, and the moon, that's what she had over them. It took Hermione a good year or two to stop thinking in terms of "us" and "them". After all, she was a witch now, not a Muggle. She stopped watching television in her vacations, stopped humming music, drifted slowly away from Blake and Eliot. She didn't need anything else setting her apart and declaring the fact that she was a mudblood. If she wanted to fit into this world, this glorious world she had discovered she truly did belong in, she would just have to make some sacrifices.
Her mind still played music and poetry, though, and whenever she saw the moon, she wanted to cry.