It had almost been a completely good day. Hermione had brewed a "precisely nasty" Stinging Solution in Potions, according to Professor Slughorn. And Professor Dumbledore awarded twenty points to Slytherin by the end of their first lesson on metal Transfiguration thanks to her pre-reading and successful transfiguring of copper to tin. Maybe Rosemary could sense the cheerfulness, because she followed Hermione into the Slytherin quarters in an absolutely foul mood.
"Someone should really clean up in here," she called out behind Hermione when she got back to the dorm that evening before dinner. "There's mud everywhere."
She continued unpacking her books, refusing to let Rosemary deter her. But lofty ignorance was rather more tricky to keep up when something slimy and cold slid down Hermione's neck.
"We're talking to you, muggle," Rosemary said while she tipped some sort of soap over Hermione. She spun around to see Rosemary holding a hair potion bottle, Hazel Parkinson next to her, giggling away like it was the funniest joke in the world.
"G-go to hell, Rosemary," Hermione forced out, shoving her hand away.
"Oh!" Rosemary crowed, turning to look at Hazel in faux surprise. "It speaks."
Rosemary's eyes glinted as she pulled out her wand, and Hermione decided to act. She grabbed it suddenly, swiping it out of Rosemary's hands.
"Hey!" Rosemary cried. Sparks burnt in Hermione's hand where she held the end of her wand, but she did not let go.
"Dirty Mudblood!" Hazel cried. "Give Rosemary back her –"
But her demand ended in a gasp as Hermione held both ends of Rosemary's wand over her knee and slammed it down. It didn't break, Hermione realised with dismay, but the wood cracked and the wand gave off a sad trail of grey sparks which couldn't indicate anything good about its integrity.
"You – you bitch," Rosemary said blankly, and then both of them were on Hermione, scratching and kicking and yelling and crying and -
"GIRLS –" someone shouted, and then Hermione was being held up with some sort of charm, spitting hair and blood out of her mouth as she finally got free of Hazel and Rosemary.
"What in Salazar is going on here!" Professor Slughorn yelled.
"She broke my WAND, Professor!" Rosemary wailed.
"You started it –" Hermione shouted right back, but the Professor interrupted to yell at all of them for being so badly behaved.
By the end of the day, Hermione had a scolding from Slughorn, a compress damp with Swelling Solution antidote on the eye that Hazel had scratched, and a rumour that had gone around the Slytherin common room so many times it had somehow inflated their scratching into a fight to the death. Even Tom asked her about it, saying something about her threatening to stab Rosemary.
"You can't do things like that in front of a crowd, you know," he said bossily, which seemed a funny way to tell her off. Most people would say, don't threaten to stab other people, but Hermione supposed Tom wasn't like most other people. He was almost the only other person in Slytherin, aside from Professor Slughorn, who talked to Hermione with any civility. And he had a surprising amount to say about destiny, alongside study tips and how to get along in Slytherin as a Muggleborn. Most of his advice had panned out accurately, so far, with one exception.
Hermione had been searching for a magical ancestral link in the Hogwarts library every Saturday for months as Tom had instructed, boring herself to tears through births and deaths records, magical histories, and family trees. And she had found exactly nothing, like she had expected. He was right that it was pretty awful being Muggle-born in Slytherin with their horrible attitudes about blood purity, but Hermione did not think there was any point in continuing to look for something she was sure wasn't there.
She wondered what drove Tom to keep searching after years of failure. How long could someone lie to themselves? Especially someone who was as smart as him, according to her friend Cynthia Clearwater. Cynthia was in Ravenclaw, a good student, and had no issue with being friends with a student of Muggle heritage so long as they had useful notes from class to share.
"He's got the top marks of any student in fourth year," she had informed Hermione one lunchtime, and then a second year Ravenclaw called Barnabus heard academic marks being mentioned.
"Oh, top marks in each year?" he asked, leaning over his soup officiously towards Hermione and Cynthia. "It's Hester Adams in seventh year, then Michael Smith in sixth…"
They listened to Barnabus rattle off every student with good grades in the school for several minutes before Hermione could get a word in edgewise. "Yes, he's very - applied," she eventually said when Barnabus finally stopped to take a breath. "Tom's always studying."
Hermione spent most of her spare time in the library, given the common room and dorms were so dangerous, and Tom seemed to be there a lot too. Maybe he also had a hard time in the Slytherin quarters? Or he just preferred to study somewhere quiet. He did so hate to be disturbed; Hermione had tried to sit at his table in the library one day, wondering if he might be her only friend in Slytherin, and Tom had hissed at her like a cat and told her to scram. She had only sat near him after that, at her own table at least a few feet away from his.
Hermione would have found a different corner of the library entirely if Hazel hadn't figured out that Hermione spent most of her time amongst the book stacks. When her and Rosemary showed up in the library one day in December, looking gleeful until their eyes fell on Tom and they sullenly shuffled off, Hermione decided she would always sit nearby Tom if he was around. He was like a ward line, emanating an angry vibe of enforced silence that deterred nasty girls looking to pick a fight.
It didn't work on older boys, though that was a problem for Tom rather than Hermione, as they ignored her entirely. Sometimes Hermione would hear Tom grumble as his blond friend talked at him about what Avery did in Defence, or what Mrs Nott was planning to do for her annual garden gala. Other times Tom would give in to the distraction too, whispering with Rosemary's older brother or some of the other fourth and fifth year Slytherin boys in a way that made Hermione think they were doing something they weren't supposed to. But mostly it was peaceful near Tom, and Hermione had accepted quiet indifference was about as good as it was going to get in Slytherin.
Tom, however, kept sidling over, making comments on her Transfig homework and Professor Dumbledore, or telling her that she shouldn't let Rosemary Rosier get her down. It was all rather odd. After six months of these sorts of interactions in the library, Hermione's best guess was that Tom was a strange boy who needed a lot of personal space. Whether they were friends – she couldn't really say.
"How many hours?" Barnabus asked her, a rather intense look in his eye. "Is it true he got the end of year exams ahead of time last year? What about the librarian, does she –"
"I'm sure you made up that idea about the librarian yourself," Cynthia said, rolling her eyes. "No one else has - oh, hello, Nancy."
"Hello Cynthia, Barnabus," a Ravenclaw prefect said, sitting down opposite Hermione. "Hi – Nancy Lawrence, prefect."
Hermione shook her extended hand. "Nice to meet you. I'm Hermione Granger, I'm in Charms with Cynthia," she explained.
"Wait – you're friends with Tom Riddle, aren't you, Nancy?" Barnabus asked.
"Tom?" Nancy asked, but a very pretty smile curled across her face, so it wasn't much of a question. "Oh, we just check each other's translations for Runes sometimes."
Cynthia glanced at Hermione, and she knew they were both thinking the exact same thing, but Barnabus continued on his crusade for the gritty details of Tom's academics.
"So is it true the librarian gave him the warding spell so he can get in there after hours?" Barnabus asked.
"I'm sure that's not true," Nancy said, shaking her head.
"Is it true he said it was no surprise you were Sorted into Ravenclaw, because you can see 'the hidden beauty in the ancient hieroglyphs –'" Cynthia started.
"I can't believe Bridget told you about that!" Nancy interrupted, looking pink and outraged. "Oh god, if she told her little sister, the whole school probably knows…" She put her head in her hands as Cynthia cackled.
"You must be very good at translation," Hermione offered, but this was apparently too much for Nancy. She stood up and abandoned her lunch completely, glowing with embarrassment and muttering about murdering Bridget Clearwater when she next saw her.
"Good one, Hermione," Cynthia sniggered.
"I wasn't trying to make fun of her!" Hermione said unhappily. "I hope I didn't upset her too much, I don't want to have to go back to eating lunch at the Slytherin table…"
"I don't know why you weren't Sorted into Ravenclaw," Cynthia replied sympathetically. "Or any other house, really."
"Yes…" Hermione said, trailing off when she remembered Tom telling her not to tell anyone else about what the Sorting Hat had said. There must be a good reason for it; he hadn't steered her wrong yet, except into the tearfully boring Daily Prophets records. "It just said I belonged in Slytherin," she lied, using what Tom had said instead of the Hat. "What did the Sorting Hat say to you when you were sorted into Ravenclaw?" she asked.
"It said, 'oh, a Clearwater, and a clear thirst for knowledge – Ravenclaw!'," Cynthia recalled.
"The Hat told me my wit would be wasted in any other house," Barnabus said smugly.
"Talk about damning with faint praise," Cynthia commented, ducking as Barnabus flicked soup at her in retaliation.
"What about you, Hermione?" she asked, wiping red flecks of tomato off her hands. "Is that all the Hat said, that you were a good fit for Slytherin? I thought it must have said something about Sorting the first Muggleborn there!"
"I don't know that I am the first Muggleborn in Slytherin," Hermione side-stepped, grumpily thinking of Tom and his stubborn blindness to the likely truth. If Tom had acknowledged he might be Muggle-born, maybe Hermione's Sorting into Slytherin wouldn't have been such a disaster, and the blood supremacists would have been used to the idea of a Muggle-born Slytherin before she started at Hogwarts. "Just the first one who admitted it."
"Ooh, that's an interesting theory," Barnabus said, and then he and Cynthia were away, debating hypotheticals and what different historians had to say about the Sorting Hat.
"Do you think we'll get to do Blossom Charms this year?" Hermione asked Cynthia, staring out the window at a flowering tree while they waited for Professor Lewis to let them into the Charms classroom.
"Let's ask!" Cynthia asked excitedly. "Maybe if we get through the last of this light theory early this week, it's taking forever…if not, let's go to the library this weekend and find the spell ourselves."
Hermione's weekends had opened up a lot now she wasn't torturing herself crawling through every birth and death announcement she could find. "That sounds really fun," she agreed. "If it's not raining, let's issue the books and sit under this tree here, I want to compare it to the real thing so I can get the spell as realistic as possible –"
"Yes!" Cynthia said excitedly. "That's a - oh." She dropped her voice, looking at something over Hermione's shoulder. "Rosemary and Hazel are – looking at you. Looks like they're plotting something," Cynthia whispered.
Hermione stared at her shoes, trying to control her temper. "I wish they'd leave me alone already," she muttered back. "I tried ignoring them, and then I tried fighting back, but –"
"Is it true your parents called you Rosemary Rosier?" Tom's voice said loudly behind her, and Hermione turned around. He was smiling at Rosemary, happier than Hermione had ever seen him. "They must have taken one look at that face and decided a joke name was all you were worth."
Tom's blond friend burst out laughing as Rosemary and Hazel glared. "Tom, Thaddeus is going to –"
"He's going to do nothing, I helped him with his Potions homework last night –" Tom argued back, and then they were gone.
"That was ruthless," Cynthia breathed.
"That was so cool!" Hermione said, craning her neck to watch Tom swan off.
"Yeah, you don't want to get on Riddle's bad side," Philip Wood said. The Ravenclaw boy leant in to whisper closer to Cynthia and Hermione. "Didn't you hear what happened to Rufus Hastings after he called him a Mudblood?"
"Wonder what Rosemary's done?" Cynthia said. "Aside from be ugly."
"Well, he knows she's a bitch," Hermione said blithely. Cynthia looked at her, mouth open in shock.
"Hermione! You told him about her?" she asked. Philip also gave her a wary look.
"He asked me," Hermione replied. "It's so gossipy in Slytherin, I had one proper fight with Rosemary and somehow everyone thinks I was going to stab her –"
"Bloody hell, Hermione," Philip said, taking a quick step back.
"It's not what happened! This school just loves to gossip," Hermione complained. "Even if they have to make stuff up."
"Don't they say that Riddle is a Mud – a Muggleborn too?" Cynthia asked, catching herself on the slur. "I bet that's –"
"Students!" Professor Lewis shouted, running towards them and hurriedly unlocking the Charms classroom. "Thank god, I'm not late – into class, please, and turn to page 45 of Charms for Beginners – we need to finish Snell's Law today, everyone –"
They all filed into class, where Hermione tried to focus on light refraction theory. But it was hard to concentrate – all she could think of was how Tom had so cleanly wiped the calculating smirk off Rosemary and Hazel's faces, smiling as brilliantly and happily as a shark at the beach.