Fifth Year, Part 1, 1995-1996

The summer before her fifth year at Hogwarts, Hermione spent the bulk of her time at Number 12 Grimmauld Place with Sirius, the Weasleys, and other members of the newly re-created Order of the Phoenix. Sirius's presence in his family's ancestral home perplexed her. He had a safe place to stay - safe enough for Harry to stay for part of the summer as it was secret kept - and plenty of food and plenty of Order members coming and going, so why on earth had Dumbledore required that Harry return to his aunt and uncle's home?

It wasn't a secret that Harry's aunt and uncle were neglectful and did not properly care for him, yet Dumbledore had left Harry there. According to Hagrid, Dumbledore had left Harry on the Dursley's doorstep in the middle of the night, never to return. In a decade, no one checked on him at all! Fred and George and Ron had rescued Harry from his aunt and uncle's home in the summer after their first year of school, when Harry was literally locked in his room, and this had apparently been reported to Mr. and Mrs. Weasley as well, but no one did anything about it, and Harry was sent back there time and time again. She knew her best friend had hoped to live with his godfather once Sirius was freed, only to have that opportunity snatched away from him.

So why was Harry not able to live with Sirius now?

She'd attempted to ask Harry about this, but he'd shut her down when he realised she was essentially questioning Dumbledore's decisions. She loved Harry, loved him like the brother she'd always wanted, but she was frustrated by his willful refusal to see the forest for the trees. He clearly saw Dumbledore as a wise and kindly mentor, a grandfather of sorts.

Hermione was forced to admit to herself that once upon a time, she'd seen Dumbledore the same way. The entire situation with Sirius and with Harry's living arrangements just did not make sense to her, nor did the revelation that Sirius had been sentenced to Azkaban without benefit of a fair trial. Why hadn't Dumbledore intervened? It was clear though that Harry did not want to think on these things, so she kept her somewhat traitorous thoughts to herself and tried to focus on the positives of her stay at the Black family home.

It was not the first time she'd been in a wizarding home, as she'd visited the Burrow before, but this was different. This was the home of an ancient and noble family. She found herself disgusted by the troll leg umbrella stand and the house elf heads mounted on the wall, and of course the portrait of Walburga Black permanently stuck to the wall and prone to screaming about filthy mudbloods and blood traitors was also pretty bad. But the rest of the house, while dirty from years of disuse, was amazing.

She spent days holed up in the small library, surrounded by stacks of books, until even Sirius gave her a hard time about loving books more than anything else in the world. When she finally ventured out of the library, she found Sirius in an adjacent room staring pensively at an enormous tapestry that covered an entire wall.

"You run out of books to read, kid?" he asked, not taking his eyes from the wall.

"Not yet. But Mrs. Weasley said I have to come out and be sociable."

He snorted.

"What's this?" she asked, motioning to the wall.

"The illustrious family tree of the most ancient and noble house of Black," he said derisively. "Note the scorch marks."

She followed his gaze. Elaborate swirling branches connected family members, and roughly once a generation, at least one person had been blasted from the tree, leaving behind an ugly black mark on what she was sure was a very old and very magical tapestry.

"That's you?" she asked, pointing to a scorch mark near the bottom.

"Blood traitors have no place on the family tree." His voice was bitter.

She studied the names left from his generation and was stunned to see both Bellatrix Lestrange and Narcissa Malfoy.

"You're related to Bellatrix Lestrange?"

"Cousins. Not that she'd ever claim me. Or I her."

"Wow."

He shrugged. "Look around, you'll see just about every pureblood family on here. So damn inbred."

Her eyes traced the family tree and then widened in surprise.

"You're related to Harry!"

"Yes, technically. Dorea Black married Charlus Potter."

"Wow." She didn't envy Sirius his awful parents or the way they'd cast him out, but she did envy his sense of history. Despite his wrongful imprisonment, he belonged in the wizarding world. No one would try to push him out based on his birth. Harry, Ron, they all belonged. Their magical parentage meant they'd never have to claw their way to a secure place in society. What must that be like, she wondered as she studied the Black family tree.

"Malfoy too," she said in surprise, motioning to where swirling vines joined Narcissa Black with Lucius Malfoy, with a line extending down for Draco Lucius Malfoy.

"Yes."

She'd had no idea at all that the object of her affection had married into the Black family. It was like finding a brand new unread book! She tried to conceal her interest to Harry's godfather.

"Did you attend Hogwarts with them? Bellatrix and Narcissa?" she asked.

"Bellatrix graduated before I started, thank Merlin. She's always been unstable and not one I would have wanted around me for seven years at Hogwarts. 'Cissa was a few years ahead of me, Malfoy a year ahead of her, Andromeda ahead of him. Not that I saw them much. We didn't exactly have a lot in common, and when the hat put me in Gryffindor, we had even less."

"It's hard to think of them as students," she admitted. She'd seen photos of Lucius in old yearbooks found in the school library, but she couldn't help but wonder what he'd been like.

He snorted again. "Even Death Eaters have to start somewhere, I guess."

"Were they… cruel? Even then?"

"Bellatrix, yes. Sadistic, even when we were all kids. Andy - Andromeda, the middle child - was ambitious but not cruel. She's the scorch mark there. Cast out for the grievous sin of marrying a muggleborn. Her daughter's an Auror. Narcissa lived up to her namesake. She was always the perfect, proper, pureblood girl, more concerned with her appearance and marrying well than anything else."

"And Mr. Malfoy? Was he as big of a prat as his son is now?" she asked.

Sirius laughed. "Harry's complained about him quite a bit in the last year. As for his father? Snobbish. Spoiled. Walked around like he owned the place."

Hermione couldn't help but laugh at the mental picture.

"In other worse, probably just like his son, from what Harry says," Sirius said with a smirk.

They were interrupted then by Mrs. Weasley before Hermione could respond.

"What are you two doing wasting time in here? We've got cleaning to do! Harry'll be here soon!" she scolded before turning on her heel.

Hermione heaved a sigh and followed her out of the room. Behind her, she heard Sirius mutter under his breath, "Damned woman - it's MY house."

~oOo~

She enjoyed her stay at Grimmauld Place, even though Mrs. Weasley cracked the proverbial whip over Hermione, Harry, and her own children, making them clean the house from top to bottom. It was tense at times, with frequent disputes between Sirius and Mrs. Weasley. George and Fred shared some of their newly designed extendable ears, and Hermione and her friends were able to listen in on some of the meetings of the Order of the Phoenix.

Personally, she was of the opinion that at a bare minimum, Harry belonged in those meetings. He'd been the one to somehow defeat Voldemort all those years ago, and he'd been present when Voldemort regained his body. Clearly the evil wizard had decided Harry was of some sort of importance, and keeping Harry from the Order meetings struck Hermione as both unfair and absurd. Had he not proved his worth to the light already?

She knew Harry was sad about leaving Sirius to return to school, but to Hermione it was a relief to board the train and escape from hushed talk of war and the bickering between Sirius and Molly.

Their fifth year at Hogwarts was remarkable in its simplicity. No international tournament. No dementors circling the school. No magical beast slithering through the castle trying to kill muggleborns. Not that Dolores Umbridge was much better than a basilisk or a dementor. She was awful, and she seemed to go out of her way to make everyone save for her Inquisitorial Squad miserable.

Hermione had always prided herself on being the good girl, on following the rules (with a few notable exceptions). Fifth year changed that for her though. When faced with vast injustice at the hands of those in power, sometimes resistance is the only option. Breaking the rules became less a source of anxiety for her and more a source of secret delight, of burgeoning power of her own. Taking her education and her fate into her own hands through the creation of Dumbledore's Army was exhilarating.

When she looked back on her life, Hermione knew that her fifth year had blurred her very black and white world into an infinite number of shades of gray, just as she knew that the night they made the frantic journey to the Department of Mysteries to 'save' Sirius Black was the major turning point in her life. Up until that one night, she could have turned back, she could have stayed firmly in the light. She'd not ventured so far down a dark path that she couldn't turn back. Until that night.

~oOo~

I know this is a bit of a short chapter, but the next one is a lot longer. I will be traveling for work most of next week, so I'm not sure if I'll be able to update much. I plan to post two more chapters before then though, so be sure to check back soon. Thank you, as always, for your thoughts and commentary about the story. I love hearing what you think is next for Hermione!