Without ado, here is the 4th Chapter! A little late…


Disclaimer- No, I don't own Harry Potter. Surprise.

Hermione hated summer. It was way too hot, and there were too many bugs. She smacked her head, trying to get a mosquito off of it. The sun was starting to set, so she figured she had better use the remaining light to try to get firewood for the night.

Supper had been a disaster. Hermione had filled a pot with water, and put the scarce vegetables in it after it had heated up. The result was a thin, almost inedible soup. Malfoy had said nothing, which scared her more than his violence.

A quick look at the small shack she and Malfoy would be sharing took less time to see than to describe. There was a double bed with an itchy, wool comforter in the same drab shade of brown as the cloth the old hag had left them, with a mattress almost as hard as the ground. The floor was remarkably dirty, made of graying boards. A fireplace took up about half of one of the bare walls, of the same make of the floor, save for the small window near the door.

This was Hermione's fourth trip to get firewood, which looked more like kindling than anything else. She lugged it back to the shanty, with some of the sharper branches digging into her arms. After dumping the sticks onto the floor and pushing them into some sort of order with her foot, she looked up to see Malfoy with his arms crossed, looking at her.

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"I don't suppose you bothered to look behind this outhouse." Draco drawled. Hermione looked puzzled for minute, before walking out to have a look. Typical Mudblood. She had surprised him, though. He wouldn't have known how to start a fire with just a puny little rock and some metal. Not that he was going to be admitting that anytime soon. He supposed that without Wizards, her kind would still be living in caves, eating bugs.

Draco had made an important discovery when he when he went behind the little shack to take a leak. There was a little pile of fire wood, with a chopping block and an ax stuck into it. He knew this a while before supper, and was silently laughing while watching her bring those stacks of sticks. Not very nice… but she had the nerve to serve him that… that gruel. What she had made for supper, he wouldn't feed to his least favorite house elf! That was just cruel and unusual.

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Hermione had walked back behind the house. She was… pissed. She didn't get pissed much. Sure, she got angry. But this was beyond that. Her eyes welled up. Her lower lip trembled. She sank to her knees. For the second time that day, she was crying. Sobbing uncontrollably. Bawling like a newborn baby. If she had looked up, she would have noticed Malfoy peeking around from the side of the shanty, looking thoroughly confused. He couldn't figure out, for the life of him, why she would be crying. If anything, she should be glad; this meant she had less than half the work to do!

Hermione was crying, and she was wondering the same thing. She should be happy! But she was angry. She was frustrated, tired, dirty, and hungry. The day had been too much. She could hardly believe that just that morning; she had been worried about whether she would have enough galleons left over to buy "An insider's guide to Dragons, Unicorns, Phoenixes, and other magical beasts".

Life had changed drastically. She now had to worry about getting enough food to eat, and whether Malfoy was going to hit her for speaking her mind. And her friends must be frantically searching for her! She wished she had a book to curl up with to take her mind off of things. But she didn't. Life would be her book. She would try to bear it, try to survive. Try to look at life as a story, a fairytale. Wiping her eyes, she got up, straightened her shoulders, and walked into the shack again.


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