Chapter 23: Mudblood

We didn't have much time during our first week back, so when the weekend finally arrived, Harry, Ron and I decided it was time to go to visit Hagrid. We had planned on going Saturday morning, so when I awoke, I dressed to go outside, and then descended to the common room. Ron came down a few moments later with a note in his hands from Harry saying that he had to go to Quidditch practice.

Ron and I decided to go watch the practice, and then head to Hagrid's afterwards with Harry. When we arrived, the pitch was empty, so we assumed they had finished practice and were getting cleaned up.

I followed Ron into the stands, and we sat down to wait for Harry. The first-year boy, Colin Creevey, was sitting high up in the stands as well, holding his camera.

"Hey, you're Harry Potter's friends, aren't you?" Colin called down to us when he saw me looking.

I nodded and turned away, but he continued.

"Do you think Gryffindor will win this year? I think they will, especially with Harry on the team. I hear he's an amazing flier. I've never flown, I don't even have a broom," he said.

I was going to turn around and answer him. After all, that would be the polite thing to do, but that was when the Gryffindor team emerged from the changing rooms, wearing their Quidditch gear.

As it turned out, they hadn't even started practicing yet. They'd spend the entire morning thus far learning new maneuvers from their captain, Oliver Wood. I wondered how many different moves they could have learned that would have taken over an hour. Sure, Quidditch isn't exactly something I'm very familiar with, but it the theory seems simple enough; throw the Quaffle, hit the Bludgers, catch the Snitch.

Up at the top of the stands, Colin had begun taking pictures of the team practicing, which I noticed had caused a bit of a panic for Wood, thinking that he was a spy, but this was all disregarded when the actual Slytherin Quidditch team strode out onto the pitch.

Wood flew over to where they were standing and landed. The rest of the team followed. They began to argue about something, but they were too far away for me to hear.

"What do you reckon this is all about?" Ron asked, leaning forward, trying to get a better view. Then the older Slytherin players stepped aside, and Malfoy strode forward, dressed in Quidditch robes like the rest of them. I did a quick head count and realized in horror that Malfoy was the seventh member of the group, and therefore must be on the team.

When Malfoy had been revealed, Ron had stood up and began to make his way out of the stands. I quickly jumped up and tried to pull him back.

"Ron, leave it alone, this doesn't concern you," I insisted.

"It's Malfoy," Ron practically snarled.

"Yes, but this is about Quidditch," I insisted. "Leave it to the captains to argue and stay out of it."

Shockingly, Ron didn't listen to me, and instead marched right up to Malfoy and the rest of the Slytherins, demanding to know what Malfoy was doing with them.

As I suspected, Malfoy had made the Slytherin team. It also seemed that his father had purchased brooms for the entire team – a coincidence I suspected wasn't much of a coincidence at all. When Malfoy started insulting Ron and his family for their lack of money, I found myself jumping into the argument almost involuntarily.

And then, all of a sudden, there was chaos.

Fred and George lunged at Malfoy, and the Slytherin captain, Flint, had to dive in between them to stop them strangling him. Alicia was shrieking and Angelina and Katie were staring at Malfoy in shock, their eyes wide. Ron had grabbed his wand and cast a curse at Malfoy.

I found myself taking a step back in shock as I watched everything unfold. I tried to remember what had even been said. I'd made a comment about Malfoy having to but a place on the team, and then he'd made some sort of rude comment. He'd called me filthy – a filthy little Mudblood if I remembered correctly. I wasn't 100% sure what it meant, but it was clear that it wasn't complimentary.

Ron's wand was still broken from when it got smashed upon his and Harry's arrival to school, and the curse he tried to cast at Malfoy backfired and hit him square in the gut. He flew backwards and landed sprawled on the ground.

Forgetting about the rest of the Quidditch team, who were still engaging in hostilities, I ran to Ron and crouched down next to him in fear, wondering what curse he'd been attempting and how screwed up it may have gotten when it backfired.

Ron looked up at me in fear, his face going pale, and then he opened his mouth and turned to his side. Three medium-sized slugs fell out of his mouth and I had to swallow back a tiny bit of bile that started to rise in my throat at the sight.

I didn't know what to do. In addition to the spell backfiring, it seemed that it had also been miscast. Instead of the steady stream of twenty slugs that was supposed to fall from his mouth before the spell wore off, he was burping them up two or three at a time and it seemed that they weren't stopping.

I had read about this spell in the very back of The Standard Book of Spells, Grade Two, and it was supposed to be on the curriculum for the end of the year. It was a very difficult spell, almost third year material. I wondered how Ron had come across it. I had of course, encouraged him to read the textbooks before the beginning of term, but he had refused me point blank. This suggested that maybe he actually had taken my advice and read a little bit in advance. Upon realizing this, I felt a kind of warmth spread through me, but it didn't last more than a microsecond as Ron was still lying on the ground burping up slugs.

By mutual agreement, Harry and I each took a side, and together we heaved Ron up and began steering him towards Hagrid's. Not only was it closest, but Hagrid would surely know what to do. And even if he didn't, at least he was an adult.

When we got to Hagrid's, Professor Lockhart was just leaving, and Harry began to pull us into the bushes to avoid him. Harry had been trying to avoid him all week. I thought about protesting. After all, Lockhart was a teacher, he could probably help us. In the end, I hid with Harry and Ron, mostly because I knew that Ron didn't like Lockhart much either and he was the one who needed to help.

After a single look at Ron, Hagrid handed him a bucket for the slugs and sat him down in a nearby chair. It was Hagrid's opinion that we just needed to wait out the spell. I was a little unsure about this – with Ron's faulty wand there was no telling whether it would ever stop on it's own – but I decided I'd wait an hour, and if it still hadn't stopped then I'd suggest Madam Pomfrey.

After a few minutes, Hagrid's curiosity finally got the best of him and he asked how Ron had ended up in his state. From the look on Hagrid's face when Ron told him what Malfoy said, I guessed that it had been even worse than I'd thought. I looked questioningly from Hagrid to Ron, and Ron acquiesced, and between the waves of slugs he was belching up, explained the term to Harry and me.

As Ron spoke, I felt my blood run cold. Mudblood. It seemed like such a simple term. Who knew that two harmless words, stuck together, could be so vulgar? I'd known there were prejudices in the wizarding world, particularly from families like Malfoy's, about muggles and muggle-born witches and wizards. I'd known that there was a selection of the wizarding world that looked down on muggles as being less than. That had been a great deal of Voldemort's campaign back when he'd been terrorizing the wizarding world, and a lot of his followers and sympathizers were likely still around.

What I hadn't realized was how deep the hatred of muggle-born children ran. I'd thought it was a disdain from association, but it was so much more than that. It was one thing to look down on someone for not having the same abilities. Not that I agreed with it, but I could understand it. But to look down on someone for being related to them? I could do magic just as well, if not better, than Malfoy could. I had just as much power, the same potential, as any student in Hogwarts.

What it boiled down to was that Malfoy saw himself as a part of the elite, and he didn't think that I had a right to be a part of that because of my background. To Malfoy, and others of his way of thinking, I didn't have a right to my magical heritage because I'd been born into the wrong family. It was the same as saying that someone born into a poor family doesn't have the right to earn money and become rich, because he wasn't born to the right parents. It wasn't about my skill, it wasn't about my abilities, it wasn't about anything that I could change. It was about who I am, on a fundamental level, and I realized in that moment that it was something I would likely spend the rest of my life fighting against.

As Harry, Ron, and Hagrid changed the subject, I found myself watching Ron with interest. When Malfoy had insulted me, he had grabbed his wand immediately. I didn't see even a split-second's hesitation. It was truly a testament to how far I'd come in the past year, that I had friends who would react like that upon hearing someone insult me. I found myself smiling, despite the situation. It felt good, knowing I was cared about.

Harry and Ron had their detentions that night, which left me to my own devices. I got a fair bit of my homework out of the way, not that there was all that much. Seeing as how it was still the start of term, most of what we were doing in classes was review of last year. When I'd finished what needed to get done, I switched to reading Travels with Trolls for a while, but even that couldn't hold my attention.

I just couldn't get over everything that had happened today. It wasn't just that Malfoy had called me a mudblood – because while I did believe that he held that prejudice, the insult had probably been more about saying something truly insulting than about the meaning behind it. What troubled me was that there were countless others in the wizarding world who held those beliefs, and I had no idea who they were. For some reason, the idea of people disliking me for my parentage bothered me deeply.

I tried going to sleep, but I kept tossing and turning and eventually gave up on that. To avoid waking my dormmates and starting a very different kind of argument, I went back down to the common room and curled up on the couch, watching the flames dance in the fireplace.

Everything was going to be harder for me. Not here at Hogwarts, of course. In school all that matters are one's grades, and I had full confidence in that. But after school. I had long since been cured of the illusion that the world judged people solely based on their own merits. The world could be an unjust and cruel place. And when the time came for me to enter the wizarding world as an adult, I was going to have to face that.

If I was up for a job against a pure-blooded witch, all things being equal, would the pureblood get the job over me? If I was even more qualified than the pureblood, would her blood status be enough of a boost for them to pick her over me? Would being a muggle-born prevent me from getting certain promotions? How far would this go? And worst of all, how would I ever know whether I was being judged on my own merits or on the simple fact of my ancestry.

A noise startled me, and I peeked over the couch to see Harry returning from detention. I didn't really want to talk to him – he couldn't understand and didn't know much more about any of this than me anyway – so I ducked back behind the couch and let him head upstairs without knowing I was there.

It was only a few moments later that the portrait hole opened again, this time admitting Ron into the common room. Again, I ducked behind the couch to avoid being seen, but Ron must have noticed something, because he staggered over to me.

"Hermione?" he frowned. He didn't look good. He was cradling his right arm and was walking crooked. He was red from exhaustion, and he looked like he was ready to collapse.

"Hey Ron," I said, forcing a smile onto my face.

"What are you doing down here this late?" he frowned, shifting back and forth from one foot to the other.

I shrugged. "Couldn't sleep," I admitted. "It's fine, go rest, you look like you need it."

Ron glanced in the direction of the staircase that led to the boys' dormitories and then back at me.

"Why couldn't you sleep?" he asked.

I shook my head. "It's fine, we can talk about it in the morning. Just go to bed," I insisted.

But Ron apparently wasn't having it. He lifted my feet from the end of the couch and sat down, wincing as he did so, and then sinking back into the cushions slowly.

"Ron really, you look ready to pass out," I insisted. "Filch must have worked you to the bone. You need sleep."

"You're upset about what happened today," Ron declared, ignoring my words. "What Malfoy said."

"Since when are you so perceptive?" I muttered, more to myself than to Ron.

"What's bothering you, specifically?" Ron asked. "Because you really shouldn't take anything Malfoy says to heart. He's just bitter and mean and selfish. Who cares what he says?"

I smiled despite myself and pushed my body up into a seated position so as to properly face Ron.

"It's not that," I said. "Well it is, but it isn't. It's just – how many more people ascribe to his belief? How many people am I going to meet and they're going to make a snap judgment about me based on my parentage? How many opportunities am I going to lose?"

Ron was already shaking his head. "Hermione you're looking at this all wrong," he insisted. "Most people don't care about that stuff anymore. It's just the really old families, like Malfoy's, and there's not really that many of them left when it comes down to it."

"But they're the ones in the positions of most power," I pointed out. "They're the ones running the world, and they're never going to let someone like me run it with them."

"Hermione, trust me, if you wanted to run the world, you could," Ron insisted. "You could be Minister for Magic if that's what you wanted."

"You really think so?" I asked, touched that Ron thought so highly of me. I'd always thought he considered me more as his annoying female friend than anything else.

"Absolutely," Ron nodded. "You're top of the year, ridiculously smart, remarkably driven, exceptionally brave – "

"I'm not – "

"Last June," Ron interrupted, before I could interject. "When we went after Quirrell. You stayed calm even in the face of possible death."

"So did you," I pointed out.

"Yes, but we're talking about you right now," Ron reminded me. "Look, what I'm saying is, there's nothing you can't do if you put your mind to it. I'm not gonna lie, you'll probably face obstacles along the way. But all that's going to do is push you to be even stronger."

"You really think so?" I asked, hopefully.

Ron nodded. "Absolutely."

He glanced in the direction of the boys' dormitories again and I found myself rolling my eyes.

"Go to bed!" I cried, going to kick him off the couch and then stopping myself when I remembered that he was sore from the physical labor. "Thank you for talking to me. I feel much better now. But now it's my turn to be concerned about you, and you need sleep."

Ron nodded, and very slowly pushed himself off the couch and started stumbling towards the staircase.

"You should go to sleep too," he insisted just before the first stair.

"I will," I assured him. "I promise. In a few minutes."

Ron nodded. "G'night, Hermione."

"Goodnight Ron," I returned.