To Melt Down Gold

By the age of 9, Hermione Granger is a bright and talented witch. She can wield magic without a wand, and see into people’s minds with the slightest of touch. 

But she is often alone.

Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy love their son with their entire hearts. 

“My Dragon, I love you with my entire heart.”

Hermione has heard Lady Malfoy say it countless times to Draco. When Hermione hid behind doors and around corners.

Which is the only reason that she could accept that they would never love her.

How could they, when they have already given their whole hearts to their son?

Still, it was difficult to accept that no one would ever love her the same way.

Her parents would never cup her cheek and give her all of their love.

She tries not to let it bother her. Afterall, she has scraped together enough love and praise from her tutors, the house elves, and the ghosts of the manor.

Take for example, her duelling instructor.

He is an idiot. He harps on the etiquette of a duel as if anyone who attacks her will do her the courtesy of bowing first.

Still, Hermione is careful to follow each instruction.

“You should always have your wand at the ready,” he reminds her as they turn to face each other.

Except Hermione is nine, so her wand is a long stick that has been partially devoured by weevils.

“We could actually duel,” she reminds him, thinking of the magic that is sizzling beneath her skin.

Messer Figero shakes his head.

“Not until you have mastered the form.”

She rolls her eyes, glad to be far enough away that he doesn’t notice.

Nobody ever notices her really.

Except when she is doing something she isn’t meant to be doing.

“We go again,” Figero says, walking towards her.

Pushing away the desire to knock him unconscious and abscond to the library is near impossible.

But she manages it once she reminds herself what happened last time she had incapacitated a tutor. Lucius had taken his rod to her calves, leaving her limping away in humiliation.

She mirrors him and after an hour he dismisses her, neither one of them using any magic of any kind.

He tells her that she has excellent diction when practicing spells. It pours into the empty well of her heart, making her feel warm. At least temporarily.

Hermione winds her way through the manor to her room and smiles when she finds Rosabella sitting on the sill, pretending to finish her needlepoint. Pretending because she is a ghost who cannot actually do anything apart from linger.

“You shouldn’t sit in the window, Rose, you’ll get sun spots,” Hermione greets her longtime companion.

If she could, Rosabella would likely have jinxed Hermione for the impertinence.

“Surely you have higher standards for your own wit,” the ghost says instead, rising from the sil and becoming easier to see as she moves away from the streams of light.

Hermione had thought it perfectly witty. As a ghost, her friend would never have another sun spot.

However, it is something that she very likely would have concerned herself with when she was alive.

Rosabella Malfoy was afterall the Lady of the great house of Malfoy almost eight hundred years ago.

“I suppose I must be tired after wandering around the duelling room for two hours,” Hermione complains, settling onto her chaise longue and casting a charm to fill the room with a soft snowfall.

After so long, her magic needed an outlet. She doesn’t let it grow so strong that the snow sticks to any of the wooden surfaces, but she does tilt her head back and relish the cool feel of the snowflakes against her face.

“You could have merely transfigured your desk,” Rosabella huffs, though she hasn’t left so Hermione knows she is just being dramatic.

It is one of her favourite things about her ghost companion.

Being raised in the east wing away from the living Malfoys, Hermione was often lonely.

Rose and Lazarus, the two ghosts of the Manor, had made for much of her company as a child.

Of course, Lazarus had been killed in a duel only a couple hundred years earlier so he hasn’t mellowed out like Rose. He still makes comments about having a mudblood under his roof.

Though he has taught her how to survive most wizarding attacks.

The living Lucius hadn’t cared to hear that she didn’t need a duelling instructor.

Hermione hadn’t pushed the argument given how Lazarus had died.

Clearly he doesn’t know everything about surviving an attack. Though he swears that he felled his opponent before succumbing to his own wounds.

“I much prefer a weather spell. It takes more out of me,” she reminds Rose.

Rose tilts her chin up and sniffs, a bit miffed.

“The manor is always quite beautiful in the winter,” the ghost muses and Hermione wonders how difficult it must be not to be able to experience something so close.

Hermione wonders how irritated Narcissa would be to find the grounds covered in snow in the middle of May.

Closing her eyes, she remembers what it had looked like only a few months earlier. 

“Oh, you really mustn’t,” Rose scolds, not sounding particularly irritated.

Opening her eyes, she smiles.

There is a heavy snowfall outside and the fir trees just past the arched windows are already covered in white.

“It really is quite beautiful,” Hermione stands up, planning on fleeing her room so as to avoid an irate Lady Malfoy.

Unfortunately, she is terrible at avoiding Narcissa.

“What on earth do you think you are doing?” the aforementioned witch apparates into the room with a violent crack.

Hermione blinks, deciding between claiming ignorance or working on her wit.

“I’ve absolutely no idea what you could mean,” Hermione smiles sweetly.

If looks could kill…

“Undo it, immediately. Draco has friends visiting and I will not have them running home to tell their parents it snowed here today.”

Of course. Merlin forbid any of the snotfaced pureblooded children see what she is capable of.

She closes her eyes once more and allows her magic to quiet.

It is a bit like turning off a faucet.

“Just wait until Lucius hears about this,” Narcissa huffs.

Hermione grits her teeth.

Narcissa Malfoy is worse than her son when it comes to tattling.

“Shouldn’t you be in lessons?” the poised witch asks, reigning in her irritation like a professional.

Technically, no.

Her duelling lesson ended at eleven and she doesn’t have potions until half past.

Somehow Hermione doubts that no is the response that Narcissa is looking for.

“Yes, Lady Malfoy. I apologise. I just needed to purge,” she explains herself.

The elder witch sniffs and it looks so much like Rosabella, Hermione cannot help the smile that splits across her face.

“Off you go then. And I’ll expect you to have done something with that nest before dinner,” Narcissa Bloody Malfoy says, pointing at Hermione’s hair with a typical level of disdain.

Hermione leaves in a blink, not wanting to risk her mouth getting her in even more trouble.

Severus is already there, setting the cauldrons up and likely deciding on how much to gesticulate with his robes.

“Hello,” she greets, enjoying the slight startle in his frame.

“You shouldn’t apparate into a small space that changes layouts frequently,” Severus lectures.

She nods, not bothering to tell him that she saw the space before she apparated.

He may not underestimate her like everyone else does but even he fails to see the extent of her abilities sometimes.

“You are early,” he notes.

Hermione typically takes full advantage of the time between lessons, pretending as though she has any semblance of control over her life.

“I made it snow,” she explains.

Anyone else would have missed the slight smile on the sour-faced professor of potions.

“I see no sense in waiting to begin then. We’ll start with stirring,” he instructs.

Hermione steps up beside him and listens intently as he lectures quietly about the rules that guide how often to stir a potion. It should be dry and mind numbing but for some reason Hermione finds herself hanging on his every word.

When he is like this, so calm and focused, she can understand how he would be capable of love. It was as close as he ever came to looking the way he had when Hermione had looked into his mind and seen the redhead. Lily Evans. 

A mudblood, like Hermione. 

Hermione had watched them talking in school and under a tree on a hill before Severus had pushed her back far enough for her to notice. He’d told her that his love life was not intended for her entertainment.

Hermione wasn’t sure how to breach the topic, but her mind had been fixating on his words since their last lesson.

“Why did you love her?” She asks, tactlessly.

She should have asked him something less invasive. Like how they met, or what house she had been in at Hogwarts. Perhaps she could have asked about how they had become friends. Although she had seen enough of his mind to conclude several of those answers on her own. But people hated feeling like she could see into their darkest recesses. So she often pretended that she couldn’t.

“Ms. Granger. That is not an appropriate thing to ask anyone, let alone your tutor,” Severus snaps, barely turning from where he is preparing their work stations for the day.

She is properly chastised, but there is no way she is going to just forget the fact that he was friends with a muggleborn as a boy.

“I apologise. I suppose I was just intrigued by the notion that you were capable of love.”

This time, Severus does spin all the way around, glaring quite intensely.

“Enough. Or I may have to reevaluate my availability for the foreseeable future.”

That is the last thing Hermione wants. Severus is the only person who treats her like she is more than just her magic. 

“Shall I start shredding the boomslang skin?”

Hermione bites back a smile, but she can’t quite manage to squash the mischief in her eyes.

“Better,” Severus says, nodding to her station.

They work side by side, and Hermione leans into the feeling that they are working as partners, rather than tutor and pupil.

She is diligent and careful, not wanting to disappoint him.

One of the reasons why she enjoys potions so much is that they do not require her to use her magic. Yet she is still good at brewing. She is capable of having a skill beyond her magic, and that fills her with a feeling of relief.

“She was extraordinarily kind,” Severus surprises her, speaking more to his cauldron than to Hermione.

She doesn’t answer, not wanting to give him a reason to stop telling her about Lily.

“My father was an intolerant drunk. He often took out his frustrations on my mother and I. Lily knew, everyone knew. But Lily, she made sure that I felt safe and protected. She did that for every person she knew. That’s why I loved her.”

Severus’s hands are trembling, but again, Hermione pretends not to notice.

Lily was kind. And a mudblood. A muggleborn. Severus had snapped at Hermione once, for referring to herself as a mudblood. He told her that it was a foul word. Hermione had spent her entire life hearing it, so she didn’t quite understand why. Of course, then she had lain awake every night for a week until the pit of anger in her gut grew big enough to swallow her up. 

Hermione had chosen a long time ago to protect herself. To keep her feelings under lock and key.

Hermione would never be extraordinarily kind. It would require too much vulnerability.

“I’m done,” she says, leaving her cauldron to stir itself.

Hermione makes a couple of notes in her notebook, pretending as though she doesn’t care.

“I spoke with Narcissa about taking another small trip,” Severus says, sitting opposite her in the chair reserved for her tutors. “I thought we might visit Bloomsbury. See the British Muggle Museum.”

“I want to go to Hampstead Gardens,” Hermione reminds him, thinking of the sign she had stolen from Lucius’s mind so many years ago. Her home,once upon a time.

“Impossible,” Severus replies.

“Then I don’t care to go anywhere at all. I don’t see why I should care about the muggle world as I will never have a place in it.” Just as she will never truly have a place in the magic world.

Hermione will forever be in a sort of limbo. The pit rears it’s ugly head.

“Perhaps you should treat it as research. You have made it clear you don’t intend for anyone to know that the Malfoy’s are your benefactors. Thus you must try to act as a muggleborn who was also raised by muggles.”

Hermione thinks about the way Lucius’s friends leer at her. The way Narcissa scoffs in superiority and distaste.

And the way that Draco looks whenever there is half a chance that she might meet some of his friends.

“Fine. But I want to go to a bookstore as well.”

Severus nods in acquiescence.

“Severus, may I ask you something else?”

“What is it, girl?” 

“Will you teach me to cast a Patronus?” She asks. She had seen his weeks ago, a doe. 

“No.” 

He’s gone stone still. He seems angry.

She pushes anyway and asks, “Why not?”

“Because you are eight years old and incapable of such a complex spell,” he drawls, as though it is obvious.

Hermione does not respond with words. Instead, she fills the room with flames, without uttering a word. A favorite trick of hers.

Severus doesn’t even flinch.

She relents.

“What emotion did you feel just then?” He asks, sitting down in the chair all of her other tutors utilised but he had never before used.

“Anger,” she admits.

“The Patronus charm requires a happy memory. More than that it requires an extremely powerful happy memory. Which you do not have,” Severus says, his face finally relenting and letting his pity show.

Anger flares once more but she resists the urge to burn the room to the ground.

“Same time next week?” She asks, closing her potion’s text.

“Yes,” Severus stands back up, collecting his things and leaving her alone in the study.

Hermione wills herself not to let it get to her. Afterall, she could do magic far greater than a simple patronus charm.

She’d merely read about it, that’s all. It doesn’t matter.