Flash Point
The last thing Hermione expects following the troll in the bathroom is a letter summoning her to meet with Headmaster Dumbledore.
But when a particularly beautiful owl drops a small letter in front of her at breakfast the next day, that is exactly what she is faced with.
“Why do you think he wants to speak to you?” Theo asks, reading the letter for the third time.
She shrugs, though she has a good idea of the reason.
“I’m sure he just wants to make sure you are alright,” Harry says. Always so trusting.
Hermione takes the note and slips it into the pocket of her robes.
The meeting is set for after her D.A.D.A. lesson so she decides to do her best to put it from her mind.
“I wonder if he’s really got a phoenix,” Theo says aloud.
Harry asks what a phoenix is and Hermione finishes her breakfast, stomach a bit off.
Defence passes nearly completely uneventfully, apart from Hermione calling her professor a useless ant of a man and receiving detention for it.
And then she is climbing the castle stairs, winding towards the Headmaster’s office.
The password had been scribbled across the bottom of his note so with a quick Ice Mice Hermione is spiralling towards the inevitable.
When she enters his office, he isn’t there.
There are portraits filling every inch of wall space and a number of contraptions that she has never seen before. A large desk covered in parchment and quills. And a phoenix, perched beside it.
Theo will be thrilled to hear it is true.
Hermione wants to look around, poke through some of the stacks of paper, like she does in Lucius’s study.
Except the portraits here probably tattle.
Luckily, she is saved from making that particular mistake by the click of a door and the arrival of the Headmaster.
“Good afternoon, Miss. Granger,” the wizard greets, a soft smile peeking out from his full beard.
“Headmaster,” she answers.
“Won’t you take a seat,” he instructs, sitting in his own chair.
Hermione does as she is told, feeling dwarfed by the tall chair.
“I feel I have been a bit irresponsible in not having this meeting sooner.”
“Irresponsible?” She asks.
He nods, slowly. The glint in his eye is unnerving.
“Given your sorting, I should have had you up for a spot of tea much sooner.”
There is no tea.
Hermione doesn’t say anything.
“How do you feel you are adjusting to Hogwarts?”
He is trying to get something out of her, but she isn’t sure what. Or why the troll seems to have been the catalyst for this apparently overdue meeting.
Again, she doesn’t say anything.
She feels something pressing against her mind, but it isn’t like Narcissa’s attacks. It doesn’t feel like Legilimency.
“Several of the professors have expressed concerns.”
She blinks at him, not exactly surprised to hear that.
“That you struggle with attending lessons to their completion. That you experiment with dangerous magic normally reserved to much older students. And now- this reckless encounter with the troll,” he pauses, perhaps for some pointless dramatic effect.
Hermione manages not to roll her eyes. She didn’t exactly choose to be attacked in the bathroom.
“Miss. Granger?”
She bites her lip and then decides it is better to just give in and talk.
“I wasn’t expecting to be placed in Slytherin. And my benefactor- Lord Malfoy- he wasn’t exactly pleased with it.”
“Yes, I was made aware of his feelings on the matter. Of course, not even Lucius Malfoy can control the sorting hat.”
Hermione manages a weak smile at that.
“It has made things difficult for me. With the other students. Slytherins aren’t exactly welcoming of those with dirty blood.”
This at least seems to shake the wizard.
He frowns and shakes his head.
“I would ask you not to use such language, but I suppose it is not up to me how you speak about yourself. I would urge caution though, in such flippant use.”
Hermione is not the only mudblood at Hogwarts. That is what he means. She might offend others in the way she talks about herself.
That is where he takes issue with it.
This wizard, this man, doesn’t know Hermione. Doesn’t understand who she is.
“I exist in the world others have made,” she says.
Headmaster Dumbledore picks up a wrapped candy and eats it, seemingly unbothered by her condemnation.
“The world is always changing, Miss. Granger. If you commit yourself to your studies here, you could help change it for the better.”
“Or the worse.” She doesn't mean to say it. Doesn’t mean to snap at the most powerful wizard alive.
But he knows nothing of the destiny that has been foretold for her.
Of the changes she is meant to bring about. If he knew, he would kill her today. He would stop the threat. And she would understand.
“Do you think that you are incapable of goodness?”
“I think that it is the harder path.” Another lie. It would be much easier if she was able to live a life of goodness.
She could choose not to bring Tom back. She could forgive Lucius and Narcissa for the treatment she suffered in their home. She could help those whose parents are not witches and wizards.
Dumbledore is talking about the two things like they are an easy choice.
One will forever mark her soul and the other would have her betraying the only man she has ever known who has treated her as family. As his daughter.
Even if he is a dark wizard.
“I trust that you will learn in time that life is more than a single choice. It will be hundreds of them that determine whether you are good or evil.”
She is 11. He is her Headmaster. He sees that she is so much more than another student struggling to fit in.
“How am I meant to know the right choice?” She asks, suddenly unafraid of his words.
He clearly knows more about her than she thought. Clearly has concerns that go well beyond missing a few classes.
“I knew a boy who made all the wrong choices. Choices that ultimately destroyed him. I know that my advice will carry little weight with you, but I will give it anyway.”
A boy who made all the wrong choices.
Hermione knows who he means. She’d seen Tom as a boy. At Hogwarts. Even at the orphanage. He hadn’t had any choices. They were taken away from him by adults like Dumbledore.
Just like Hermione’s have been taken by Lucius.
“A choice is only a moment. But the result will be your life.”
What a cryptic arsehole.
She refuses to let him talk down to her.
So instead of nodding and promising to behave like a good good, Hermione stares into his eyes and digs.
His mind is fortified. Much like Narcissa’s. Like Severus’s. She knows how to get in.
It takes a few long seconds during which his eyes turn from mischievous to cautious to guarded.
But then she gets it.
A small trail of thoughts that he didn’t want her to see.
It is Harry holding some red stone. The mirror she’d seen her parents in.
She stops, her head growing fuzzy.
“I take it you will heed my words?” Professor Dumbledore asks, pretending they haven’t just engaged in a sort of stand off.
An 11 year old girl and the most powerful wizard alive.
She nods, not trusting her voice to be able to lie in this moment.
“Then I will let you return to your lessons. Which I am sure you will attend until their end.”
She continues nodding, a lump in her throat.
Hermione’s head of house wrote home about the troll.
She has been thinking of Severus solely as her head of house since she received another letter while eating breakfast. She has also been thinking about how to turn his robes rainbow.
Lucius summoning her to the manor again.
She feels bad for lying but she can’t let Harry and Theo know that she is leaving the castle.
Tells them that she isn’t feeling well.
She isn’t, really. Her stomach has been in knots ever since she narrowed in on Professor Quirrell.
As much as she probably should, she hasn’t made any efforts to get detention with him.
Once Hermione knows for sure that he is involved in whatever the wraith is doing in the forbidden forest, she will have to figure out what to do about it.
Living in ignorance is her preference for now.
When she arrives in the manor, she goes straight to Lucius’s study.
He ignores her, writing in long loopy letters and then charming the wax and seal to work on sealing it.
“Are you trying to get yourself killed?” He asks.
Hermione purses her lips and tries to decide what this conversation is most likely meant to achieve.
Does he want her to ask for forgiveness?
Does he want to force her into confessing her sins?
“I am not sure why everyone seems to be under the impression that I wanted to be attacked by a mountain troll. I was using the bathroom. It found me, not the other way around.”
She hates defending herself to this man.
“I know that the Potter boy came to your rescue.”
“So?” Merlin, she sounds like a petulant child. Whatever, at this point, she is.
“So, I told you that you were not to speak with him. I made it very clear. Just as it is clear to me that you have forgotten your place.”
She glares, knowing she won’t be able to avoid the punishment he feels she has earned.
“Must we do this every time?” She asks, deciding not to let him dictate how this will go. “Why don’t we skip the disappointed lecture and get straight to whatever torture you have settled on as appropriate.”
Lucius leans back, smug.
“How can you learn, if you don’t know the lesson?”
But then he opens a drawer and pulls out something that Hermione is intimately familiar with. He holds it out.
“Well that is certainly a proportional response.” She stands up and takes the quill, refraining from stabbing him in the eye with it.
“You are going to write I know my place in the world until it really sinks in,” he says, the vitriol with which he says it cutting deep into Hermione’s skin.
Hermione wonders what Lucius would look like scalped.
Or without those smug eyes.
Maybe missing a hand or an arm.
On fire.
Of course, Draco would never forgive her.
And Tom would be disappointed.
He’d tell her that she is more creative than that.
So she writes the lines, until her hand is shaking and her eyes are blurry from the tears. Blood drips onto the parchment below, mixing with her teardrops.
I know my place in the world.
I know my place in the world.
I know my place in the world.
“Enough.”
She drops the quill, pulling her hand against her stomach.
“Can I go?” She bites out.
A long moment of silence stretches out between them.
“Not yet,” he twists the knife.
Hermione needs to get out of there. Now.
“Why haven’t you retrieved the item I asked you to?”
Because I am not a dog.
“Answer me, mudblood,” he snarls.
Hermione flashes so hot she is shocked the room doesn’t catch fire.
Instead of answering him, Hermione does something she has wanted to do since she was a little girl standing in front of him with tears in her eyes and red lines across her calves.
She leaves him sitting there.
Hermione apparates back to Hogwarts and straight to her dormitory.
She wrenches the journal out of its hiding spot and lays it out on the table.
She doesn’t even write anything down before she enters Tom’s shadow world.
“Sparrow, what’s wrong?” Tom asks.
So gentle. So young. Nothing like the man Hermione has seen in Lucius’s mind. Narcissa’s. Severus’s. The man who ordered her parents dead.
Hermione doesn’t even breathe as she stomps towards him, pulling her arm back and slamming her fist into his face, hitting him square in the nose.
Even though he is nothing but a memory, it gives a satisfying crack and the swear he lets fall from his mouth echoes the empty hallway they are standing in.
“You did this to me! You are the reason I have nothing. Nothing!” She yells, shoving him as he holds a hand to his bloody face.
He lets her shove at him until his back hits the wall and then his hands come up to her shoulders and he pulls her against his chest.
Hermione is sobbing. She hadn’t realised.
Tom.
Lucius.
Dumbledore.
Every adult man Hermione knows is manipulative, scheming, and selfish.
“Sparrow,” Tom whispers.
She keeps her face pressed into his chest, trying to stop crying.
That isn’t who she is.
She is not a chess piece, a pawn, moved so easily across a board. Crying over a word that means nothing.
Hermione Granger is an immovable witch. And it is time they all start to realise as much.
Pulling from his arms, Hermione wonders if the real Tom Riddle had ever hugged anyone.
“I would apologise, but you aren’t really a corporeal being, so I’m not going to.”
“You are upset with me?” He asks, appearing almost frustrated at being faced by something he doesn’t understand. An enigma.
“Goodbye, Tom.”
She emerges from the diary and ignores the words that appear on the pages as she closes it.
Hermione takes the diary and tucks it back into its hiding spot.
She is going to retrieve the mysterious object that is hidden somewhere in the bowels of the castle. But she isn’t going to give it to Lucius. She is going to use it to lure the wraith in so that she can trap it.
And once she does, she is going to lock it into the diary with Tom.
Let them figure out what version of Lord Voldemort will emerge when she is finally ready to call him back from the veil.