Author's Note: So. I have a presentation to give and a test to take tomorrow. So, obviously, I decided to write a chapter! 'Cause that's just how school works, I guess (yay higher education). I didn't get very many reviews for the last chapter, probably because the long delay made everyone hate me, but that's cool; I hope that you enjoyed it, just as I hope that you enjoy this one. Cheers!
Three hours and sixteen inches of essay-writing later, Hermione decided that it was time for a break
Three hours and sixteen inches of essay-writing later, Hermione decided that it was time for a break. She could have – should have – been done by now, and indeed she was finished with her first draft, but it wasn't quite perfect yet. She had always strived for excellence, but never before had she actually needed perfection. She was starting to realize, she thought, what Harry and Ron had meant about homework not always being the most desired activity.
Harry hadn't wanted to fight Lord Voldemort once, twice, countless times. But he had done so anyway, because he knew he had to. But he hadn't won, somehow – all of his dedication and loyalty and preoccupation had somehow not managed to pay off, and so now it was on her shoulders.
She wouldn't get to just fight him once or twice, however. Every single day she would be fighting, until the fight was over and there was nothing more she could do. Every single day she would be fighting against herself, against the parts of her that wanted to run home screaming, and against the parts of her that wanted to forget that she was supposed to be doing something. Every single day she would be fighting against laziness, against the urge to settle for comfortable. Every single day she would be fighting her hardest to maintain an unbelievable, perhaps even unattainable, degree of perfection.
And even worse, there was nobody she could tell about her fights. Nobody could know why the new girl worked so hard, why she was always tired and irritated and very possibly sick of doing her schoolwork; if she didn't want to spend so long writing essays and reading extra material, they would think, why didn't she just not? Nobody could know why. Nobody could know her. That was one advantage Harry would always have over her in his struggles – he had friends, people like family, that he could go to for guidance and support.
The only person she knew who she thought would even bother listening to her problems was the one person who, more than anyone else, she could not tell – at least not yet.
Her solace was that perhaps, someday, she could tell him. Her encouragement was that she knew, more or less, how to win. This battle was playing on her strengths, and she would never have to choose between her goal and the people she cared for; her goal, in an almost direct way, was to get back to those people that she cared for, and to find them safe and whole and untouched by the harm that had come to them.
Something was missing, she thought. Her thoughts, her ideas, fit together too well; she was able to look on this too positively. She had always possessed a reasonable mastery of her mind, but she knew her boundaries as well, and knew that her mind was skipping something, ignoring some fact, else this would not be resolved so well.
It bothered her, that she couldn't realize what she was forgetting. It was perhaps just the stress of the thing, making her feel like she was forgetting something. And even if she was leaving something out, she realized, it was perhaps for the best – she needed a positive outlook. She needed some glimmer of hope that she could actually do what she was meant to do, else she might as well give up just then.
So she put the thought out of her mind, hoping that it wouldn't, as forgotten things often do, come to her when she was least expecting it. Not for a while, at least.
She stood up, setting her quill aside, waiting for the ink to dry. She stretched for a moment, her back and shoulders starting to cramp from sitting for so long.
Tom Riddle walked out from his room at just the time Hermione had started to roll up her essay, intending to store it in her trunk until tomorrow, when she would have to finish it. She didn't feel like her mind could take any more for the time being, and knew better than to try; she would end up writing something even worse, she knew, and would be guaranteed to not get her perfect marks. It would just leave her with more work to do tomorrow.
She turned around, essay and quill in one hand, bottle of ink in the other, to head back into her room. She gasped, startled, upon seeing Tom Riddle standing so near to her. She nearly screamed, however, when she realized that in her startlement she had managed to dump almost her entire ink bottle on herself.
This could be a problem, she realized, as she had only brought a small amount of gold with her; it wouldn't do to spend it all on bottles of ink. This could be even more of a problem, she realized a moment later, in that though she had managed to rescue her essay from the torrent of black ink, she would need more in order to write the final draft of her essay for class on Monday. And there wasn't, as far as she knew, a Hogsmeade weekend in sight.
"Oh dear," said Tom Riddle. "I didn't mean to startle you, and I certainly didn't mean for you to ruin your bottle of ink…"
She forced herself to not start yelling at him for his inconsideration. Instead, she took in a deep breath and let it out before speaking. "It's perfectly fine, I was just being clumsy is all. Though I don't know where I'm going to get another bottle," she said regretfully.
"Of course you'll use mine until you can get a new one," he said immediately. "After all, it is my fault you…lost yours."
"Oh no, I couldn't impose like that," she said quickly.
"It's no imposition," he assured her. "We can just work together, after all."
She knew that this was either a very good idea or a very bad one; but it seemed she didn't have much of a choice. After all, she did need the ink, and she couldn't very well risk offending him either. So she smiled, as genuine a smile as she could muster. "That sounds wonderful," she said, though she wasn't at all sure if it really did.
Tom nodded at her, offering a smile in return. "Then it's settled," he said.
She looked down suddenly and groaned at the ink stain that was settling in her robes. "Curses," she muttered. Of course she had left her wand in her room. By the time she would get her wand, the stain would never come out, not even with magic. This was turning into a rather expensive afternoon.
Tom, sensing her concern, vanished the ink immediately. A chivalric male; even in Gryffindor she hadn't seen too many of those, at least not in that fashion. It was outdated in the time she grew up in, of course – but still. As sexist as it was, she had to admit that she liked being treated like a girl. It made a nice change from being overlooked for so long.
"Thank you," she said, granting him another small smile.
"Now, I've noticed you working down here for ages, and I thought that you might like to take a break," he said.
"Funny, I was just thinking the same thing." She was flirting with him. Again. She still wasn't sure if she should be or not, but decided to just go with it. After all, even if he was the future Dark Lord, every girl deserved to have a bit of fun. Not to mention that this could turn out to be just the break she needed.