Summary:
In which Hermione Granger is much less Muggleborn than first believed, and does indeed devour books. Quite literally. [creature!hermione] [drabble-series]
Disclaimer:
I don't own Harry Potter, or the cover picture.
Ronald Bilius Weasley rather despises his name, and for a good reason.
Because seriously, who the hell names their son with a middle name like 'Bilius'?
Sounded like 'bile,' or 'belligerent,' or a bunch of other words Percy kept tossing around whenever he's particularly aggrieved at something and deciding to take it out passive-aggressively on him, since Charlie and Bill are both out-of-home and older, Fred and George will get back at him twice as aggressively and not nearly as passively, and Ginny...
It isn't that Ginny is the only girl and the youngest to boot, making her automatically the favorite of both parents.
Her 'aura' of off-limits is attributed more to her devious girl mind coming up with devious girl things, and, of course, how her first fit of accidental magic appeared suspiciously like the Bat-Bogey Hex.
... wait... 'aggrieved'?
'Attributed'?
Oh, dear Merlin, Percy is rubbing off on him now.
Stupid stuck-up snot, and whywhywhy did his mother have to be so embarrassing, today of all days, cleaning his face in a public area?
Didn't she know Harry Potter is coming to Hogwarts today?
The very same bus!
The very same year!
Most definitely the very same House, because Ron is fairly certain Gryffindor ran in the blood, and, according to the twins, if he got lucky they'd even be in the same train apartment.
Then again, while the twins had reported to him, their heads stuck halfway out the windows, that they'd seen Harry Potter and had spoken to him as well, it remains entirely possible that they're lying.
He won't be the first to claim belief in everything they say, not after all the demo-pranks he suffered and will suffer through as an unwilling 'volunteer' who lives conveniently within the same house.
Demo-pranks which Percy evades through shutting himself in his room, and Ginny through pouting at Mum before running off to spend the day with that younger friend of hers, some neighbor with a name like Crescent or Star or something distinctly hippy-ish, a term he's learned through osmosis with Dad's queer Muggle obsession.
'Osmosis' being another word he absorbs around the prissy prick-who-shall-not-be-named, always flouncing around with his better hand-me-downs and better grades and less lectures from the Very Cross Indeed Mum.
... ahem, an-y-way...
All's he's thinking is, perhaps it's for the best to... y'know... make some of his own luck.
That in mind, Ron rubs the allegedly smudged nose once, huffily, then quickly ascends into and speed-walks down the long Hogwarts Express corridors, intently in search of a boy with the classic Potter hair, wild and jet-black.
He pays no mind to another family on the station, standing a few feet to the left and back of his own furiously waving (and furiously ignored) family.
.
.
.
A three-person family, two females one male, with identical heads of insanely untamed curls, in all the shades of brown there were, pale-skinned and straight-backed, clasping each other's forearms briefly with wickedly-honed fingernails, even the male.
They were dressed nicely in good-quality civilian clothes, but rather drably unremarkable, as if carefully so.
Backs to a column, angled to be mostly shrouded by cool dimness, and not of stunning height or notable classical beauty, they were a family easily dismissed, so long as you weren't close enough to feel the oddly... focused air around them, or close enough to see the strange way light glinted off their eyes (amber, or comparable to, with thinner pupils than the norm), their bones (strained to be stretched over with skin, and sharp like everything about them, that being 'sharp enough you'll cut yourself if you leaned in more than enough'), and their matching earrings (scale, tough and curiously patterned, all edges like knives).
Well, light didn't glint off their earrings, but that was only because their earrings were buried among the thick quantities of brunette curls.
Those curls...
They were something you couldn't really envision until you saw them yourself, and indeed, once you saw them, you'd forget completely the features of the face underneath, so demandingly attention-catching they were.
Wiry, bristling, constantly shifting to a constant minute movement, soft despite their harshness, and truly thick, enough to drown and suffocate in.
It lent a certain degree of fierceness, however, once you looked past the carefully drably unremarkable niceness of the family.
Once you looked past and saw what no amount of attempted averageness could smother.
"Behave yourself," said what was probably the mother, unsmiling.
"Learn lots," said what was probably the father, unsmiling.
"I will," said what was probably the daughter, unsmiling.
"Love you."
The family of three, made up of 'whats' and not 'whos' but nevertheless firmly a family, regarded one another for precisely twenty-point-three-hundred-eighty-five seconds, then smiled toothlessly and nodded in synchronized, fluent unison.
And what was probably Hermione Granger and certainly Hermione of the Grange turned away to stalk fluidly onto the scarlet steam engine, two bags of luggage carried easily with each deceptively barely-not-skeletal arm.
For a flicker of a blink, the brush and contortion of her changing shadow's proportions made it almost look like she had sprouted another curl of inkyness that could charitably be called a tail.
Almost.
.
.
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Reviews:
Shout-outs to .fisher, slytherinshadowhunter67, Forgottenlogin, einargs, Loopy Leefy, Ima. T, Guest, CatchingSnowflakes, and Lilvipar.