a most elusive prey (Harry Potter)
She was five-years-old when she vanished; a child gone mysteriously missing in the woods, another unsolved tragedy until she emerged five years later. It was a miracle, or so the papers had said: LOST CHILD REUNITED WITH PARENTS AFTER FIVE YEARS OF GRIEF, the headline penned by one journalist went.
Hermione Granger would beg to disagree.
It was no miracle which brought her home, rather it were her own plots, plans, and ploys which had brought her safely home from a land of magic and danger. Hermione Granger had always been a smart child, and now she was as cunning and wily as she was smart.
But what the Fae take, they do not allow to be returned so easily. Hermione Granger is theirs, and they will not stop until she is safely ensconced in their courts once more.
Chapter One | The Strange Happenings of Hermione Granger
There was a golden spot on her collarbone.
If someone looked closer, they would see it in the shape of a golden leaf, whole and unwithered and above a small, long healed wound. Her fingers brushed over the skin there, trembling as she remembered what had caused it – remembered how close she had been to getting caught and probably devoured by the ones who had taken her what felt like decades ago.
Perhaps it had been decades, Hermione didn’t know. People said time flowed differently in the faery realm, and Hermione could safely say that she felt a lot older than the rest of her peers. There was a reason she had opted to be home-schooled after everything. School had been too noisy, too normal mayhap after all the unordinary things which had happened to her. There had been too many questions – the same questions her mother had said were insensitive and shouldn’t be asked, thank you very much.
“You do not yet understand, do you, little bird?” she could remember the words of the Autumn Rider, the wildest of them all. “You have been marked as Summer’s Bounty now.”
Scowling, she tried to rub at the golden leaf mark, wishing that it would come off her skin and that she could go on with a normal life. “Stupid Fae,” she muttered in a fit of petulance. “If only—”
“Hermione! Dinner!” her father called up the stairs, and she startled at that, looking up and away from her mirrored reflection and the accursed mark.
“Coming!” she called, jerking the shirt she wore back into place, hiding that golden mark from view, covering the brand they had given her, ever a taunt to say that she was theirs. Brown eyes narrowed, even as she pushed open her bedroom door, hurrying down the stairs to the dining room where her parents waited for her. She couldn’t take too long to get there, she knew, lest she want her parents to come up searching for her. They were… clingier than she remembered. Not that her memories of before were anything other than spotty.
She had been five years old when she had been spirited away by them, and five years had passed in the human realm since she had been taken before she had managed to find her way home. Time passed strangely in Faerie though, and though her body was undeniably that of a ten year old girl, she wasn’t entirely sure her mind was.
It was yet another reason she didn’t feel like going back to Primary School.
Perhaps it would have been a different story if that girl had gone to the same Primary as her, yet she didn’t, and Hermione had no way of finding the only other girl who knew even a fraction of how she felt. Hermione didn’t even know her name, what with how sharing something as a name was so very dangerous in Faerie, as was saying thank you.
“You can call me Rose,” she had said, green eyes sparkling like gems beneath the moonlit courtyard they had been sweeping together. They had both long since been careful of how they worded things in the way that all of those taken learnt the ways of survival. Otherwise they died.
Hermione thought back then, thinking on how pretty that girl had been, musing on how very beautiful Rose had been with blood red roses woven in a braided crown of locks as dark as the midnight skies. Yet roses had their thorns, and Rose had certainly shown hers. Flowers could be beautiful, and yet deadly. Maybe that was why Hermione had responded with a name of her own choice.
“Then you can call me Belladonna,” she had said, taking that as her name there. Perhaps belladonna didn’t have thorns like a rose, but it was a deadly poison. Just like she had ended up being to them. A smile curled at her lips, one with sharp teeth and dangerous edges. A smile that didn’t fit on the face of a child. Yet she had spent years in that realm, unaging and unchanging, and Hermione could only muse on the fact that she might as well have left her childhood behind.
“Hermione!” her father called again, and she shook herself out of her thoughts, heading down the stairs then. She knew if she waited too much longer her parents would come in search of her, fearful as they were of her simply vanishing again.
Not that she would, even with their pursuit behind her. She would never be stolen away again – it was why she slept with an iron poker tucked beneath her bed with a sigil drawn in blood and salt surrounding her bed. It was only fortunate that she’d long since learnt to cast a glamour and a compulsion to keep her parents from both seeing it and unknowingly ruining it.
That was what hid her – the runic sigil she had created, and the same thing she had gifted to Rose before they had parted ways and entered the human realm once more with the blood of faeries staining their hands.
Long would the pursuit follow them, Hermione knew. She had lived amongst the fae folk for what had felt like centuries. She knew all too well of their tenacity, their undying obsessions, and their love of hunting prey. There was a reason they had a thing called the Wild Hunt – and that was what pursued them.
PREMISE: Another Fae-based HP fic, featuring Hermione as the main central character, with Fem!Harry as the second. A good dose of world-building. Slytherin Hermione and Harriet.