A/N: This entire thing is written for a laugh, really; there isn't any point or purpose to it, and it's staying one chapter long. Just an idea I had while eating cereal one morning. Hope you enjoy.

FROOT LOOPS

Hermione had pretty much lived her whole life thinking that she couldn't be annoyed. She could be bothered, or irritated, or even flat-out enraged, but being annoyed just wasn't something she was prone to.

Even Draco Malfoy didn't annoy her. He irritated her, sure; most of the time he made her upset or furious as well. But annoyed? Never.

Hermione had spent her whole life convincing herself of this fact. She could not be annoyed. She was...unannoyable. If there was even such a word. She made a mental note to check the dictionary. However, word or not, she really didn't think that annoyance was an emotion she was capable of.

Yet out of all of the world's annoying things, all it took was a bowl of Froot Loops to make her realize she was wrong.

Seriously. She'd had a hell of a night, what with nightmares and not being able to get comfortable. Before that, she'd had a hell of a summer, doing things for the Order which, far from banishing them, had only intensified and frequented her bad dreams. And that morning, being overtired and grumpy and not all too thrilled with the way her life was going at that moment, she'd seen a bowl of the cereal.

She didn't really even know why it bothered her so much---no, annoyed; she'd have to add the word to her vocabulary now that she knew she was capable of feeling it. It was just...they had really, truly, honestly annoyed her. It was like this: no matter how much death and fear and rage and pain there was in the world, Froot Loops retained their bright, happy colors. The brightness, the cheerfulness of Froot Loops in an ever-darkening world just really ticked her off.

Not to mention the fact that they remained the one and only food in the entire Muggle and wizarding worlds that was that particular violent shade of purple.

The green and blue didn't bother her, really; they were laid-back enough that they could blend in with the cold, dark, and mostly unpleasant thing most people liked to call reality. But a world that included the creature called Voldemort should not, by all rights, include any food that happened to be bright, sunshine yellow.

Yellow. Honestly. Whoever came up with the expression "mellow yellow" had clearly never glimpsed a bowl of Froot Loops.

And orange? Orange was hardly any better than yellow, if it came down to it. Her only comfort was that orange was the color of flames; Hermione was well known in Gryffindor Tower for her "fiery" personality. Many of them took that expression far too literally. This opinion wasn't helped, however, by the fact that she remained the only Gryffindor who could stare at the fire for hours on end without any source of entertainment whatsoever.

Yeah, okay, so she was a pyro. Get over it.

Red, despite all of her pride in her house and her fierce Gryffindor loyalty, just made her think of blood. But the red of Froot Loops just made her angry; because it was as if the creators of the cereal were mocking the color of blood.

Blood, despite what everyone said about it, was not red. It was nothing even resembling or close to red. Blood was a horrible mix of purple and brown and red and black and gold and maroon and blue, and at the same time it didn't contain any of those colors at all.

So much for the ever-descriptive English language.

She'd had this debate with Harry and Ron, the debate about how descriptive their language was. Harry and Ron had both insisted it was too descriptive, too expansive---of course, they would say that, because they'd been doing a particularly difficult crossword puzzle at the time. She'd claimed, however, that English was completely inadequate. To prove her point, she'd asked them to describe the taste of chocolate. To act as though she'd never tasted a thing in her life, and to describe it.

"Sweet," they'd said. "Smooth." And after that, they'd sat watching her, eyes blank as they tried to come up with a word to describe it. After a long, long time, Ron had insisted blankly, "It tastes...like chocolate."

She hadn't said a word, and after a while, Harry admitted she'd won.

Of course she'd won. It wasn't even cocky of her to say it, really; she always did. She always had, and likely always would. Of course, this was mainly due to the fact that everyone had basically given up on debating with her on anything at some point during first year. Harry and Ron were the only ones brave enough to try, and even they started a debate with the ever-present knowledge that they'd lose.

Bit boring, really, always winning like that.

Hermione sighed. Well, you can't have everything. She stood up from the breakfast table, her eyes drawn again to the bright bowl of cereal she'd been contemplating so seriously this morning.

Without a word of explanation, she picked up the whole bowl and emptied it, the cereal spilling all over the table. She dropped the bowl and turned defiantly to the Head table, hands on her hips.

Her eyes caught Dumbledore's; she didn't look away.

For a long moment, his face was completely blank save for his raised eyebrows. Then, slowly, he smiled. He nodded once, raising his forefinger to his brow in the barest hint of a salute, then proceeded to cheerfully eat his eggs and bacon.

It was a good day, Hermione decided. But she'd never look at Froot Loops the same way again.