Title: What's Wrong with Your Face?
Characters/Pairings: Hermione Granger/Marcus Flint

Forum/Challenge: HPFC FRIENDS Challenge
Prompt: Use the dialogue prompt 'What's wrong with your face?' (7.5)

Forum/Challenge: HPFC Soulmate!AU Challenge
Prompt: Your soulmate's first words tattooed on your skin.

World: Hogwarts
Word Count: 975
Rating/Warnings: T for language

"Densaugeo!"

The curse missed Harry by only a bit, hitting his best friend square in the chest. Hermione Granger could feel her front teeth start to lengthen, bit by bit. She knew, cognitively, that Madam Pomfrey could fix her right up, but really it was the principal of the thing.

She was already a buck-teeth bookworm, and now she'd been hexed to have even bigger teeth. It was like someone sending a static electricity jinx at her head. In the grand scheme of things it wasn't a big deal—magic could both cause and cure many ills—but even the smartest 14-year-old girl could have moments of insecurity.

Which is how Hermione found herself in the infirmary, quietly crying while the Madam Pomfrey tended to another patient.

She wiped her tears away with the sleeve of her robe and pushed her tongue against the back of her teeth. They had stopped growing, courtesy of the matron's quick wand, but were still long enough that she couldn't hide them by simply keeping her mouth closed.

How mortifying.

When Madam Pomfrey finished with her patient, she turned to Hermione. "I need to complete this young man's paperwork, but I'll be back in a moment. Sit tight and I'll get you all fixed up." And with that, the matron disappeared.

Hermione had barely nodded when Madam Pomfrey spoke to her. She refused to look up, hoping that not making eye contact with anyone would mitigate her embarrassment.

Honestly, could this day get any worse?

"What's wrong with your face?" a voice in the bed next to her sneered.

Her heart stopped. Those were her words. Her words. The words that had been tattooed on her arm since her first magical maturation at seven. The words she'd memorized, listened for, been simultaneously thrilled by and terrified of.

The first words her soulmate would speak to her.

Hermione searched for breath as she realized the boy in the bed next to hers—the one Madam Pomfrey had just helped, the one wearing a green and silver tie, the one who had sneered at her pain and mortification—was her soulmate.

Well that was just the limit! She looked up and glared at the boy, who was missing a front tooth and nursing a black eye that the bruise paste hadn't quite fixed yet. She should have been more conscious of her words—the first she would speak to this boy—but she was too upset and angry to care.

"That's none of your bloody business, now is it? I didn't ask you how you ended up missing a tooth and sporting a shiner. It's not like you Slytherins care about anything but hexing people and saying hateful things and being stupid, evil ferrets!"

As soon as she finished her outburst, her hand went to cover her mouth, her eyes went wide, and tears fell anew. For as sure as his first words to her were tattooed on her arm, she realized her first sentence was tattooed on his.

And like every other magical child, he had memorized those words. Words that weren't ubiquitous, like "Hi" or "Nice to meet you," where teenagers double checked to see if the words had disappeared—if they had met their soulmate—each time they met someone new.

Hermione and the boy across from here didn't have that problem. She was beet red, still covering her mouth while tears fell, and his eyes had gone wide as saucers as he looked her up and down with the most beautiful blue eyes she'd ever seen, and then he stared significantly at his right arm, where he knew the words that had been there for so long were fading away.

Because, like her, he hadn't had a vague introductions etched into his skin. No, he had a very specific phrase—one he'd been waiting to hear for almost ten years.

But before he could look back up at her, Hermione ran from the infirmary. She could live with her oversized teeth a little longer; she absolutely could not face the boy—the older, admittedly handsome, Slytherin—who destiny had chosen for her.

And she wouldn't that day. Or the next. Not for years and years—long after Voldemort had been defeated and after too many funerals and too many nightmares. Not until Ginny Weasley married Adrian Pucey, of all people, would Hermione reconnect with Marcus Flint.

"I'm sorry I didn't try to track you down," Marcus told muttered to her over canapés. "I didn't know what to say."

She shook her head and took a sip of expensive champagne. "I wouldn't have listened. You said the words, and they disappeared, but I still wouldn't have listened. Muggle-born and all, I couldn't quite comprehend what it meant. Not at fifteen."

Marcus nodded. "And now?"

She turned to the tall man. He looked much as he had in school, but there was a softness to him that hadn't been there before. Time away from the scheming Slytherin common room had helped dull the edges of severe Marcus Flint, and a life of Quidditch had kept him in shape.

He still had those same piercing blue eyes though.

She held out her hand. "Hermione Granger. Assistant Undersecretary for the Minister for Magic, former Gryffindor and Head Girl, and creature rights activist."

He took her hand in both of his—hands so big the dwarfed hers—and ran a finger along her forearm, where his first words to her would have once been.

"Marcus Flint. Former Slytherin Quidditch Captain. Current Beater for Puddlemere United. Death Eater draft dodger." Then he brought up the inside of her wrist to his mouth and kissed gently. He looked up and smiled at her blush. "And, Hermione Granger, I think you have the most beautiful face I've ever laid eyes on."