Being in Slytherin proved to be not as terrible as Hermione had initially thought. News spread fast of her so-called blood status, and she could honestly say that it made all the difference in the world. When she was first sorted into the house, she had expected to be under constant scrutiny by the other members of her house, especially the older members, but they didn't even so much as cast a glare at her.
Even Walburga Black, who she had expected to be the worst of all, was remarkably tolerant of her.
If anyone was a problem, it was the Gryffindors, who had seemed to make it their goal to make any and all Slytherins miserable. She knew that Gryffindors were notorious for pulling pranks, but she never saw any reason to be alarmed by it… that is, until she was put in Slytherin…
They managed to pull three consecutive pranks on them within two days time. On Monday Morning, they had woken up and stumbled down to breakfast to find that someone had put slugs in their pumpkin juice. Rosaline ended up accidentally swallowing one and had to be rushed to the hospital wing.
Then came the dung bomb incident. One of the Gryffindor Prefects managed to get a hold of the password to their common room and set off a dung bomb inside. They were forced to vacate their dormitory until it could be fumigated and ended up camping out in the Great Hall.
And then, once they finally managed to actually fall asleep, lying on tables and benches, the Gryffindors sent every ghost in the castle to come and keep them company. Hermione woke up with a right fright to find Peeves floating two inches over her, who then proceeded to reach out and pretend to grab her nose.
After that, Headmaster Dippet and the other professors finally saw fit to step in and put an end to the pranking, warning them that if they attempted to pull even one more prank, they would be serving a week's long detention scrubbing the castle floors. That certainly stopped all the pranking, but it also increased the ever growing tension between the two houses.
"So, are you excited to be starting flying lessons tomorrow?" Rosaline asked as they left the potions lab.
"It's one of the classes I've been looking forward to most," Abraxas said, puffing out his chest. "Of course, I already know how to fly rather well, so I suspect it will be rather easy."
"Same here," Cygnus agreed. "My father said that it would be a disgrace to the family name if I didn't know how to fly before I started at Hogwarts."
"What about you, Tom?"
Tom shrugged. "I suppose flying is a useful skill to have."
Abraxas then turned to Hermione. "If you're nervous, I can give you a few pointers to ensure you remain upright on your broom," he offered.
After having gone through the whole Gryffindor Prank Attack, she had acquired a newfound appreciation and understanding of Slytherins. They might be a bit stuck up at times but they were generally pretty nice people. Abraxas was another one of those who wasn't as bad as she had initially thought. He was charming and polite to her, and she found it gradually easier and easier to be genuinely nice back.
"Really? That would be great. I'm afraid I'm not too keen on flying. I've always been a bit afraid of heights," Hermione said.
He smiled at her. "Sure, we can practice with a regular old broom later in the common room."
Druella and Rosaline giggled between themselves, wiggling their eyebrows at her suggestively.
Hermione just rolled her eyes at them. Even at the age of eleven, those two were what she would consider to be mildly boy crazy. They were always going on about which boy was the cutest and which ones would make suitable future husbands. She thought it was a rather foolish business. They were far too young to be thinking of such things, and she for one wanted to enjoy her second chance at the halfway normal childhood that had been stolen from her the first time around.
Moving on from that topic, they continued on their way to their next class, which just so happened to be Transfiguration.
While it had once been one of her all time favorite classes, it was now one of her least favorite. Dumbledore was an excellent professor, there was no doubt about it. His students learned a lot from him. However, she often caught him staring at her during classes. It was almost as if he was watching her, waiting for… something… She wasn't sure what it was, but it left her feeling oddly disturbed.
And now that she thought of it, she realized that he had been watching her ever since she arrived at Hogwarts. His gaze was never far away from her, and when he wasn't looking at her, he was looking at Tom, almost studying him to an extent. She had brought up her observation to Tom, who had never trusted the man to begin with, and he agreed that it was definitely suspicious. Neither of them liked it.
"Do you remember what we're supposed to be transfiguring today?" Druella asked.
Hermione nodded, "Professor Dumbledore said we would be attempting to transfigure a piece of grass into a sewing needle."
Tom rolled his eyes as he mumbled quietly, "And then we can use them to stab his eyes out."
She pretended not to have heard that. As pleasant as Tom could be most of the time, he was prone to dark moods every now and then. He liked to plot revenge on those he didn't like, even if he never went through with it. Every now and then, she had to remind him that doing such things would get him expelled. That straightened him out almost every time.
"Well, I personally think that-"
Hermione started to speak, but was cut off as she felt her foot collide into something and give way from underneath her. The next thing she knew, she had collided face first into the floor.
"Hermione, are you alright?" Rosaline asked, as her and Druella each offered a hand to help her up.
"You did that on purpose!" Abraxas exclaimed.
Turning around, she spotted a group of Gryffindors standing nearby, laughing their heads off. It didn't take long for her to realize that they had tripped her. She felt her face turn hot as she smoothed down the skirt of her dress. Would this stupid house rivalry ever end? She had thought it was bad in her own time, but that was nothing compared to how it was now.
"What's wrong? A bunch of Slytherins can't take a hit? I would have thought that you knew how to land more gracefully than that!" a messy haired boy sneered.
Abraxas and Cygnus charged up to the boy, grabbing him by the collar and holding him at wand point.
"I dare you to say that again!" Cygnus snarled.
As much as she hated it when students fought in the corridors, the fact that they were doing it in her defence softened her heart. They cared enough about her to want to stick up for her, and she couldn't help but appreciate the thought behind the gesture.
She was about to step forward to try and break it up when the messy haired boy suddenly screamed. Taken by confusion, Abraxas and Cygnus released the boy, and jumped back.
Her eyes widened when she saw it. Coiled around the boy's leg was a snake, it's fangs piercing through his pant leg. She knew in an instant what was going on. Her theory was only proved further, when she saw the iciness in Tom's eyes.
"Tom, please stop this!" she pleaded with him. "Call him off, I beg of you!"
His gaze briefly flickered back and forth between her and the snake, as if debating over what to do, before his gaze finally settled on her. Their eyes met and just like that, the iciness melted away.
By now, everyone had caught on to what was happening and stood frozen with both fear and shock, staring at them with wide eyes.
"Sssshe ssseur ssssssssssssssaai essss ssshisss," turning back towards the boy, he stretched out his hand and beckoned his pet to him.
The snake obediently uncoiled himself from the boy's leg and slithered back to his master. When he was within grasp, Tom gently took the snake in his hands and slid him back into his book bag.
"Y-You're a… Parselmouth!?" one of the Gryffindor boys shouted.
Frightened out of their wits, the boys ran off, coming back to help the messy haired boy who was crying out in pain. Two of the boys had to carry them between themselves because he couldn't walk on his own.
No one dared to speak for a while after that, as no one seemed to know quite what to say.
In Hermione's case, she was too busy worrying about the repercussions. Those Gryffindor boys were surely heading to the hospital wing to have the one's leg looked at. Being a common garter snake, she was pretty sure that it wouldn't kill the boy. The nurse would be able to heal him easily enough, but there would be questions asked as to how a snake had gotten into the school.
Things could go very wrong. If word got out that Tom was a parselmouth and that he had set a snake on the boy, he was sure to be expelled. Who knows, perhaps she would get expelled as well by affiliation. Their wands would be snapped and they would be sent back to the orphanage to live a miserable non-magical life…
As easy as it would be to just let Tom be expelled and get him away from magic, she knew that would only make him bitter, pushing him down a different dark path. No, they both needed to stay at school where they had some semblance of a happy life. Being sent back to that orphanage permanently would only reverse everything she had worked so hard to achieve.
"I'm a what?" Tom broke the silence, furrowing a brow in confusion.
"A parselmouth. That's the name for witches and wizards who can speak to snakes," Abraxas explained. "It's an extremely rare talent that only a small handful of wizards have been known to possess."
Tom's eyes lit up at that. If there was one thing she knew he liked, it was being told that he was special. And that he certainly was. He had an ability that no one else in this school, and possibly even the whole wizarding world, had. As far as she knew, he was one of the last of Salazar Slytherin's descendants. Not that he knew that, and if she had her way, he wouldn't find out for quite some time.
"Come on, we'd better get to class before we're late."
They all nodded their heads in agreement and continued on their way.
Hermione did her best to avoid Dumbledore's gaze during class, fearing that he might read her mind and see what had happened if she did. The others seemed to have the same idea as her, as they were all rather quiet and withdrawn. None of them raised their hands to answer questions.
They listened to what the professor was saying and performed the spell as best they could. Hermione and Tom were the first to complete the transfiguration, both of them getting it on the first try. They sat silently for the rest of the class, secretly writing notes to each other on a piece of two pieces of parchment that they had enchanted so that what one person wrote would appear on the other.
"Are you mad at me?" Tom wrote.
Hermione let out a quiet sigh, shaking her head at him.
"What you did wasn't right, but I'm not mad at you," she wrote back. "I'm just worried about what's going to happen to you when the professors find out what you did."
"Surely they won't expel me. It's not like I killed him or anything. I was just getting back at them for all the horrible things they've been doing to us… to you…"
That was exactly why she wasn't mad at him. She knew he had done it out of defence. And he was right. It really wasn't any worse than the pranks that the Gryffindors had been pulling on them.
Just then, an idea came to mind; an idea that just might be able to prevent news from spreading about Tom being a parselmouth.
The bell rang soon enough, announcing the end of classes for the day.
Gathering up her books and parchment, she slipped them neatly back into her bag before heading out of class. Once out in the halls, she lingered behind while the other Slytherins started off back towards the dungeons.
"Aren't you coming?" Rosaline asked.
Hermione shook her head. "I'll meet up with you a little while. I have something that I need to take care of first."
Then, without further explanation, she took off in the opposite direction, breaking out into a sprint as soon as she had disappeared around the corner.
She ran as fast as her legs could carry her, keeping her eyes peeled for professors or prefects, as she made her way across the quad and up several flights of stairs. When she came to the fourth floor, she slowed down to a more normal pace, taking a moment to steady her breathing and calm her heart rate.
Oh, she hoped that she wasn't too late.
Pulling open the door at the end of the narrow corridor, she slipped inside to find the school nurse, Madam Vervain, seated at her desk and looking through paperwork. After a moment, she looked up and noticed her.
"Oh, hello there, my dear," the kind grey haired old woman greeted her with a toothy smile. "What can I do for you? Not feeling ill, are you?"
Hermione took a deep breath before forcing a smile upon her own face. "I'm fine. I heard what happened and came to see if the boy with the bite on his leg was alright."
"Don't worry, he'll make a full recovery," the matron assured her. "I gave him a potion to help with the pain, along with a Sleeping Draught, so I'm afraid he's not awake at the moment, but the rest of his friends are currently in there with him if you want to join them."
She nodded her head and started around the desk to pass her.
"You wouldn't happen to know how it happened, would you? The boys that carried him in were rather tight lipped about it." the matron asked.
She just shook her head.
Madam Vervain couldn't have been any more different from Madam Pomfrey if she tried. She was a kind old Hufflepuff who naively believed that everyone had only the purest of intentions. While Madam Pomfrey was quite strict about the number of guests admitted to visit at a time as well as for how long, Madam Vervain didn't seem to care at all. In her mind, the more guests the merrier.
As much as she hated the idea of using the woman's naivety to her advantage, she knew that she wasn't by far the only one who had done so. The fact that there were fifteen Gryffindor's huddled around their friend's bed was proof of that. Madam Pomfrey would have thrown a fit if she had still been in charge of the place.
Sneaking into the room as quietly as she could so as not to alert the Gryffindors, she cast a silent disillusionment charm before creeping closer to hear what they were saying.
"You saw what that kid did to poor Fleamont," said one of the boys. "Only those of Salazar Slytherin's descent have been known to speak to snakes."
"What was his name again?" asked another.
"Tom... something… I don't remember his last name…"
"It doesn't matter I suppose."
"I don't know about you, but I'm not going anywhere near those snake lovers again. I'd quite like to keep my life, thank you very much."
"They didn't kill him."
"Still, we can't just sit back and let a kid like that roam freely about the school. For all we know, he could set a cobra on us next time."
"We should tell Headmaster Dippet what happened and get that menace out of here."
Hermione gritted her teeth as she slowly lifted her wand, pointing it at the whole group. The Gryffindor side of her that still remained was screaming at her to put the wand down and go, but the Slytherin side of her told her that she needed to do this.
Please, do whatever it takes to stop Tom Riddle from becoming Lord Voldemort.
That was what Dumbledore had instructed her to do, and she knew that she wouldn't be able to save him if these boys had their way. She had to stop them… whatever it took...
"Obliviate," she muttered the Memory Charm incantation.
A wave of forgetfulness washed over the group as they looked around, trying to figure out how they had gotten there.
The memory charm alone wasn't going to work, so she cast another charm. The False Memory Charm was a complex bit of magic that allowed a person to plant false memories into the brain. Ironically enough, her inspiration for learning it came from her former Defence Against the Dark Arts Professor, Mr. Gilderoy Lockhart himself. It would seem that he had taught her something useful after all.
She had only used it a couple of times before, and never on a whole group of people at once, so she wasn't entirely sure how well it would work. After a few moments of being stuck in a daze like state, they snapped out of it and went on talking as if nothing had happened.
"How did he get this bite again?" one of the boys asked.
"Don't you remember? The Slytherins got back at us for pulling all those pranks on them.
"I don't know about you, but I say we leave them alone from now on. Their revenge is brutal, mate!"
They all agreed with that, just as she had wanted them to. No one mentioned Tom or the fact that he was a parselmouth.
Hermione let out a breath of relief as she turned to leave, removing the disillusionment charm once she was back in Madam Vervain's office. The charms had worked and they were safe from the threat of expulsion. Maybe now they could actually enjoy their time at Hogwarts.
A smile had just started to tug at her lips when she left the medical wing, waving goodbye to the elderly matron. It disappeared just as quickly as it had appeared as she found herself standing face to face with the auburn-haired Albus Dumbledore, looking at her much the same way he had that day he came to Wool's Orphanage to tell them about magic.
"Miss Granger, I wonder if I might have a word with you."
