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Eighth year is a haunting.
The war-year students walk long halls, robes and shoes in susurrating echo. Tongues speak; silence deafens. The classes are small, and the first years outnumber them all. Some of those first years should rightfully be in their second year by now— but their eyes are just as round as their younger classmates. Rounder, perhaps. They never had a chance to learn these halls as home.
If eighth year is a haunting, Hermione is its ghost. Neither Ron or Harry elected to finish that final year of school, and Hermione is a sapling uprooted and returned.
Harry joined the Aurors. He sends letters more often than not, and when it’s ‘not’ Hermione sends Howlers.
Ron joined the joke shop. Reminding people to laugh is a fight in itself.
Hermione’s parents haven’t forgiven her. They’re still in Australia, because when you change one life for another it’s not so easy to just change back.
People whisper when Hermione passes, rumors fluttering on velvet wings.
People whisper behind Pansy, too— but it’s a broken thing, shattered waves as her heels click across the castle stones. So many students shrink small, afraid of making noise that could draw attention, but Pansy walks like she’s the most dangerous thing in any room.
(Ginny, too, has mastered that thunderclap walk. Her red hair is a banner, snapping in the wind. She makes herself big so others are permitted to be small.)
“Why did you come back?” Hermione asks Pansy, during Transfiguration. Gryffindor and Slytherin, Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw, all of the returned students have been folded into one class. The true seventh years— the ones who had been in sixth year the year before, rather than on the run or repeating an interrupted education— have their own class. Perhaps someone thought it was a kindness.
Pansy snorts without looking at her. “Why did you?”
“Education is important,” Hermione replies, the answer practiced and automatic.
“Same.”
This close, Hermione can see that Daphne and Pansy are holding hands beneath the table, fingers laced and knuckles sharp. Less like friends and more like swimmers, drowning. They’ve been inseparable since they returned to Hogwarts.
Hermione wonders how she never noticed.
. . .
“She was a prefect under the Carrows,” Ginny says, feet dangling over the edge of the parapet. She has a hot mug of butterbeer, charmed— whether by magic or personality— from some unknown place. It might have been a care package from Ron. It might have been a gift. Ginny’s always been popular, but the last year propelled her from simply ‘popular’ to mythic. Even her necklace of butterbeer caps will probably start a trend.
Hermione stays a few sensible steps back. Ginny might be used to living on edges, but Hermione prefers solid ground.
“And?”
Ginny rolls her eyes. “So she was perfectly horrible, of course. She liked punishments. When the Carrows gave out detentions— they’d make the students do it. Set the second years doing Cruciatus on the first years, that kind of thing.” Her mouth twists. “Pansy took over whenever she could.”
. . .
“Of course I did,” Pansy says, unflinching. Hermione had asked, not because Hermione loves knowledge, but because Hermione needs truth. “The thing about kids is— you need to educate them to cruelty. Why do you think the Dark L—” She hesitates, then bites the word down like something bitter. “Why do you think Voldemort wanted them young?”
“Like you needed an education?” Hermione says, flat and level.
“Ooh, so sharp you’ll cut yourself,” Pansy says, rolling her eyes. She splashes water on her face, then blots herself dry with a towel that Daphne offers. She wrinkles her nose, examining herself critically in the bathroom mirror, then shrugs and turns away. Her hand automatically finds Daphne’s.
“I mean it. Why suddenly so concerned with what the little ones learn?” Hermione asks.
Daphne speaks instead, and Hermione starts. It’s the first time she’s heard the girl speak outside of class. Her voice is cool. It carries distant echoes, like something damp and long-forgotten.
Something stirs in Hermione’s memory: ‘daphne’ is a laurel, poisonous and fragrant.
“Cruciatus is more than a matter of the right pronunciation and wandwork. You have to want to hurt someone. You have to hate them. Hatred takes practice,” Daphne says. Her eyes don’t quite meet Hermione’s, sliding sideways like rainwater off glass.
Pansy bares her teeth. “Wake up, brush your teeth, get your fifteen minutes of hate in before breakfast. Practice.” She smirks, but her grip tightens on Daphne’s hand. It turns her knuckles to peaks of ragged bone. “I wasn’t going to give them that practice.”
Pansy carries fear like a viper.
. . .
“You want change? Make connections,” Pansy challenges, leaning over Hermione’s copy of the Daily Prophet and stabbing her finger in the front page.
Hermione had been eating breakfast and drafting furious letters, her tea long gone cold and her eggs sitting in a congealed mess on buttered toast. She hadn’t even noticed Pansy walking up, still hand-in-hand with Daphne.
“Your lot may have staged a bloody coup, but it’ll still take politics to get the more radical bunch through. This war was witches and wizards, right? Want to help your Squibs, your werewolves, your house elves? Want to make us all SPEW?” She grins, teeth like jagged pearls. “Your Society was rubbish because you’re so good at being good that you forget some of us aren’t.”
“I know that very well,” Hermione says tightly. The Cruciatus still chokes her sleep, sometimes. Pain is like water, carrying the ripples of what came before. Her body remembers: in limb, in bone, in the muddy river of her blood.
Daphne speaks, this time. “You could be out doing anything. Any place, any job. You walk, doors open. You’ve earned it.” Her gaze slides into Hermione’s, as if by accident. “So why are you back in school?”
“You’re ruthless, Granger,” Pansy says. She laughs at Hermione’s involuntary expression. “That’s not a bad thing. If you want something— if you think it’s important— you do whatever’s necessary. Like that trick with Edgecombe.” She picks up her free hand, two fingers jutting. “You’re sharp, like a pair of scissors. Snip snip, you cut the world in pieces. And you’re not gentle about it.”
“So why are you back in school?” Daphne asks. She takes a deep breath, shoulders rising, then falling. “I’ll tell you why I am. I saw enough, with the Death Eaters. Pureblood doesn’t mean anything if your blood isn’t pure. There’s a blood malediction in my family.” She raises her eyes. She wears no mascara. “My ancestors were so obsessed with marrying inwards to maintain purity that it let an old curse rise up. In our blood, of course.” Her lips thin. “It’s petty and selfish and maybe I wouldn’t have thought about it if it weren’t my family, but there it is. School is for learning, right? So I’m here to try and learn— new ways of thinking.”
Pansy rolls her eyes, but slings her arm over Daphne’s shoulder. It requires letting go of Daphne’s hand, but they shuffle arms and hands until once again, they’re holding hands while Daphne shelters under Pansy.
“And I’m back because my name is mud, the family connections aren’t worth a damn since our side lost, I’m not pretty enough to be a Mrs Zabini, and if you’re not kind and soft or smart enough to show you’re worth it anyway, the world is absolutely shit to girls like us,” Pansy says.
It would be better, somehow, if there were emotion in it. Anger, sorrow, even indignation. These are facts, plain and unsalted, laid on the table.
This is a girl who loves— or once loved— unicorns.
Hermione takes a breath.
“I’m back because— I need a return to normalcy. And maybe that’s not possible—”
“Never is,” Pansy laughs, but her eyes are, if not kind, at least showing that the joke’s not on Hermione.
“— but ever since— ever since they’ve started calling us the Golden Trio, it’s been— me, Harry, Ron. I’ve been one of three for so long that I don’t rightly know if I remember how to be one anymore.”
Daphne, surprisingly, gives a choked little laugh, and Pansy presses her lips to Daphne’s forehead as she chuckles.
“What’s so funny?” Hermione asks.
Pansy gives a lopsided smile. “Circe’s tit, Granger. For someone so smart you can be so stupid. Daphne’s mad about you.”
Hermione’s heart lurches hard left, hitting her lungs with a wet splat. “What? But you’re— but she’s—”
“Pansy and I are dating, yes,” Daphne says softly. “But we saw— we saw how stupid, and selfish, and jealous it could get, and we decided— from the ground up, from the first moment we started kissing and holding hands— that we would try something new. New ways of thinking. If love is all we have, then we shouldn't hoard it.” She gives another small smile, and this time her eyes don’t shy from Hermione’s. “This is— this is not to pressure you, or anything. Just— that I like you. And this is probably not the time, or place, and you might not be interested in girls, or me, or not being exclusive, and you have a whole life that’s all yours to deal with, but…” She runs out of breath before finishing, takes a gasping heave before struggling on. “Even if we’re not dating, I’d like us to be friends. I could— I want to learn from you. About Muggles. Dentists. Arithmancy.”
“And I want Daph to be happy,” Pansy says. She says it like a challenge, still holding her girlfriend. They are like two swimmers, drowning— but they might have found land. “Not asking you to date me, Granger. Not even be friends. But we’re both classmates, and veterans,” she spits, “even if our parents don’t like us saying that last bit. We’ve got common ground.”
This is a tremor in every step, and yet—
“I’m not sure about dating, yet,” Hermione confesses. “But friends? I would— I would like that.” She’s had precious few friends, outside of Ron and Harry. They got so wrapped up in themselves, like matted vines climbing one another. They were strong, they were fierce, but—
She takes Daphne’s hand and squeezes. Daphne’s hand is cool, her nails short.
This could be the start of something new.