The (Slughorn's Potions) Office

Fred is keeping a secret from Hermione. He’s probably made a mistake and is trying to keep it hidden. His movements are too frantic, too awkward, too much in general. 

“Fred.”

He looks at her. “Yes, ma’am.” Grins, but a bit wrong. Nervous. 

“Something you want to tell me?”

Fred turns the question around, eyebrows raised. “Something you want to tell me?”

She presses her lips together, annoyed, and drops it. 

She’s on coffee number four, or five, and her heart thunders inside her ribcage. Riddle keeps looking at her and it’s driving her mental. It’s so difficult staying angry at him. Infuriating. It’s not her default, their default anymore. They established a new normal between them. 

At least it felt like it. And she misses it. 

And she’s angry about it, too. 

The need to confront him gets stronger and stronger, the more caffeine she consumes. 

Ask him directly, the voice in her head repeats and repeats, but she’s scared. He makes a wuss out of me, Hermione thinks, buzzing and melancholic. 

“Was that a.. mouse?” Hermione points over Harry’s shoulder. 

“Who? Ron?” Harry gawks, perplexed, like she’s lost her marbles. He thinks she means Ron, and she’s the one who lost her marbles, of course. 

“Of course not Ron! The blur! Running on the windowsill!” 

“You were pointing at Ron!”

“Because it’s moving near him! It has limbs! That makes motion possible! It ran!”

“Why are we yelling?!” Harry screams back, frowning. 

“Because I’m angry!” Hermione shouts, before lowering her voice to a forceful, but quieter tone. “And irritated!”

“Because of a mouse??” Harry questions confused. 

“No! Yes!” She sighs. Her hair is a mess. Her hand almost catches on the garbled strands. “Partly. Mostly…”

“Mostly.. you’re angry at something else?” Harry nudges her. Grimacing. “Or someone.” Stressing the word intently. 

“Yes,” Hermione breathes out. Sounding whiny and sad. “Someone.”

“Scale from one to ten, how bad? One being, like, barely a thing, and ten, like, he’s dead to me.” Harry asks. Discreetly (he tries) throwing looks at Riddle.

“I don’t know. Depends.” She pauses. “Maybe a six? Or seven? If I had to bake cupcakes for everyone here, I would give him the worst out of the bunch.”

“Wow. That’s harsh, Mione.” 

“Did you just cough in my face?” Bellatrix shrieks. 

“I’m so so-sorry,” Lavender stutters. “I think I’m getting sick.”

“Sorry doesn’t clean my face from your germs, girl,” Bellatrix spits back. 

“Her name is Lavender, Bellatrix,” Hermione interrupts. Holding her hands up, in defense. “And she said sorry, okay? You are sorry, right, Lav?”

She nods enthusiastically. “Yes! yes, soo sorry. Really. For real. Sorry.”

Bellatrix looks thunderous. “Whatever.”

It’s stormy out and the window rattles a bit. The rain and mist make Hermione a bit tired and sleepy, even though she’s energized and jittery. Maybe it’s also the stress of Riddle’s pre-matched-up project. Maybe it makes her feel like she’s crashing a bit. 

Pre-matched-up-project. That’s what she calls it. 

The word betrayal or manipulation hurts her too much. 

Pre-matched-up-project. Ridiculous. 

Hermione hums, forlorn and sad, très triste, and makes her way to the archive room. To sit. To think. Well, to mope. In (relative) peace. 

She doesn’t expect Riddle to be there already. 

He sits on the sofa. She stands at the closed door, back to it, deer in headlights look. “Oh. Hi.” Bad. Bad. This is bad. 

“Hi. Yeah, Oh.” Tom quips, and then hesitates. Open mouth closing, wetting his lips, before seeming to think, screw it, let’s just spit it out, and goes, “You’re ignoring me.”

Hermione stays silent. Her nerves are frazzled from the coffee. Her stomach is churning from stress. Her heart hurts from disappointment. 

Tom huffs out a laugh through his nose, bitter, shaking his head. Slowly clenching his fists. He’s ruffled, but never one to shut up and take it for what it is. Not before, not now. “You barely answer when I talk to you. Barely look back at me. No smiles. No snacks or tea for me. You are ignoring me, Hermione. True or false?”

“True,” Hermione answers, immediately, because two can play that game. It’s already a very, very bad overall day. Let’s make it worse. Rip the band aid off. Who cares. 

“Why?” Tom questions. Mostly curious, but also frustrated. 

“Can you guess why?” Hermione murmurs, closer to the sofa now. Didn’t quite realize she got there. He has to look up to meet her eyes. 

It’s a bit shadowy in the stuffy room, a bit blurry, but there’s a little glass window at the other end of it, lit up from the outside weather. April weather. Gloomy out- and inside. 

Tom scrunches his forehead, and there’s no panic in his expression at all. It makes her second guess, but she saw, she saw and she heard him, him and his pre-matched-up-project. She knows, so she says it. 

“No? What about Karkaroff and a deal you made with him while you were helping out at Durmstrang? Ring any bells, Riddle?” She wants to sound wrathful, righteous, angry at least, but it’s more pitiful and teary than she wants. 

And there it is, there it comes. The panic. He straightens in apprehension and nervousness. His face shutters and Hermione thinks, confirmation. He stands up, ungraciously, facing her figure in the half-darkness. “Hermione.” His voice is weird. “It’s not what you think. Let me explain.” It triggers something in her, not what you think. 

“Did you force Karkaroff to do a project with us?” 

He grits his teeth, pained. “Yes, but–”

“Did you also force him to involve me in that mentioned project for some reason?”

“Yes, but–”

She feels carved out and empty and full of heated rage and – “Did you keep all of this from me?”

He closes his eyes. Bites his lip, and keeps at it until it splits. “Yes.” His eyes open. A trickle of blood blooms on his lower lip. “But I did it for–”

“--yourself? To force an advancement? Manipulate the situation, the project, in a way that would shower you in praises?”

“No,” Riddle says, resolute, “I know it’s easy to seem that way with what I hadn’t told you, but it wasn’t for–”

Hermione backs away. “For who else could it have possibly been?! You have all the chess pieces. All the threads laid open for you to pull on them.”

“Hermione–” Tom cuts himself off, face showing struggles. 

Hermione forces herself not to cry, cry, cry. 

“I don’t want to be friends anymore. Workplace of otherwise,” she says, despairingly, and flees out of his vicinity. 

It rains some more. Hermione drinks another cup of coffee, takes some sweets from Ron’s secret stache (with his permission), eats them, reads her emails, and answers her emails excessively - even the ones that didn’t necessarily warrant it. 

Afterwards she puts on her big, sound-canceling earphones, because Riddle keeps wanting to talk and talk again and again. She’s never had this problem with him before and it shows. She has no defense mechanisms that work particularly well. 

Harry keeps walking by, watching her, watching the situation, like he searches for a reason to interfere. 

Ron is snoring at his desk, sleeping, napping, whatever, again. 

Lavender is sniffling at the reception, drinking gallons of ginger tea. 

Neville is opening and closing the windows in a specific rhythm, ten minutes this, ten minutes that, so his plants feel the humid air without the floor getting stormed on, so he doesn’t have to mop up the rain water. 

Fred and George revise some files from former projects, making some notes in the break room, but mostly bickering and chuckling between blowing bubbles with some gum they found in there. 

Not much real work gets done. 

And Hermione, for one, lets it be. 

“Our loo is haunted, I swear to you, Mione,” Ron mutters, momentarily awake and not in dream land, and pours hot water into his tea cup. 

“Ronald. Who would haunt a loo?”

“It’s not like they choose the place they keel over!”

Hermione groans, searching the cabinet for an energy bar. “Nobody died in our bathroom, alright?”

“But the noises!” Ron wails dramatically. 

George holds Hermione back when she walks beside him to get to her desk. “Hypothetically, does the office have connections to a good lawyer?”

“Hypothetically,” she answers. “We know the Malfoys who are rich and know very good lawyers, but I also have a friend who is married to a lawyer so if push came to shove, we would have some viable options. Hypothetically.”

George nods profusely. “Splendid! Jolly good news!”

“Hypothetically,” Hermione adds, non-smiling, “I would make the person responsible deeply regret getting our workplace into trouble if it would ever come to that because of deliberate action on their part to break the rules.”

George stills, hiding from her eyes. Clears his throat. “Ha. He. He. Good that it's all pretend, eh?”

“Yes. Pretend.”

George fakes another mix between laugh and cough and speed runs away from her, whisper-shouting, “Fred! Fred, SOS. Mayday, mayday! Fred–”

Neville comes up to her desk twenty minutes later. “I think the defective toilet is getting worse, Hermione, is that possible?” He fumbles with his hands.

"Worse? We barricaded it and put a sign on the door to the defective one in the bathroom, right?”

“Right!”

“Then how can it get worse if we’re not using it? Do you think it’s a bigger problem than expected?”

Neville hesitates. “Maybe? I don’t know. It just sounds so weird. Like it’s moving, or, scratching against something. Not all the time, but it can get really loud. It’s–”

“What?”

“Kind of spooky,” Neville reveals, embarrassed. 

Hermione thinks, copying a file and pasting it into another document. “Like a ghost?” Haunted loo, Ron had said. 

Neville blushes. “N-no! Maybe? Not exactly. More like an uncomfortable noise when you accidentally scratch your fork against the plate. A metallic shriek?”

“Huh,” she exclaims. “Okay. I’m going to put it higher on the priority list so it doesn’t potentially turn into something.”

It happens an hour later. 

Lavender drinks tea, and some more tea, coughs and drinks some more tea. 

Hermione still overdoes it with the coffee, and makes herself two more cups, one of them with caramel syrup, in that time frame. 

Ron finds four packs of orange juice in the back of the fridge, sees the date before they get spoiled, and decides to drink them all before they go to waste. 

Which forces them all to the loo. 

The first two stalls are empty, so Lavender and Hermione have no trouble, but the only working loo left is already used by someone, so Ron has to make a choice. 

Hermione finds that out a minute after making her way there. 

Someone is screaming while Hermione is washing her hand at the sink. She flinches, and then flinches again when two smaller shrieks follow in reaction to the first. They are heard from the two working loos. 

“Who screams like that in the loo! If you’re getting murdered here, do it quietly!” snaps Bellatrix’s voice. 

Quickly followed by Lavender’s voice, “That sounded like Won-won. Is that you, Won-Won?”

Hermione looks to the loo with the DEFECTIVE sign, and raises her eyebrows, “Ron, that loo is out of commission for a reason. Are you alright? Ronald?” She steps closer and knocks softly. 

“I rr-ally h-had to pee,” comes a whispery and croaky whimper. “And now th-this.”

“Okayyy,” she answers. “What, exactly is the ‘this’ you’re talking about?”

The toilet inside flushes and Hermione hears him stand up and close his trousers. There’s some weird noises. 

The door opens, and a blur rushes out so fast she can’t look and track it, before Ron takes up her vision. His voice is whiny and his face pale when he replies, “I think they a-are g-oing to fea-feature in the n-nightmares, too, now.” And then he steps aside, so she can take a look. 

It’s a familiar box, with a scrawled address on the side, opened now, with a dozen little rats inside the box, another rat beside the little trash can, and two more staring at the loo, straight up. And one, one gruesome one, inside the loo. 

She shares a look with Ron, and barely hears Lavender and Bellatrix come out of the other loos, because her whole body flares up in anger, hot white red anger, “FRED WEASLEY, YOU COME HERE RIGHT NOW OR –”

“Were you or were you not supposed to bring the rats to Quirrell?”

Fred looks away. “Well, you see–”

“I did already see,” Hermione cuts in. “They are all over the loo! Neville and Ron thought their noises were a ghost! I saw at least three of them scurrying around the office and thought I had imagined it!”

He slumps in his seat, Hermione standing over him like a raging dragon. Bellatrix, Lavender and Ron stand beside her, silently judging the situation. Hermione can hear the others - Harry, George and Riddle - come closer to find out what happened, but she’s too focused to stop in her rant to explain anything first and foremost. “Do you have any idea what trouble this has caused us? We have to call someone to find all the rats, belatedly give them over to Quirrell, possibly apologize to him, find out if they damaged anything in the office, inform Slughorn of the situation and probably even postpone the next meeting for the Krum project because we are booked and busy?! Fred, why?!”

Disappointment, exhaustion and wrath crash inside her, and she goes on before he can answer her. “Seamus is out sick! Lavender is getting ill, too! We’re going to be short of staff for a few days or a week anyway, and now this!”

A hand reaches for her shoulder, a few moments before a body steps right up behind her. Warm and strong. She leans back into it without thought, most of the anger leaving her. She’s so tired. 

“Hermione,” Tom murmurs. “Breathe.”

She does. His hand moves to her waist, holding her up, and she wants to burrow into his shirt like a child, not coming out until the storm passes. 

“F.Weasley,” Tom says, “Explain. As few words as possible. Go. ”

“We got a box, but it wasn’t for us, really. Quirrell used our address. There were, um,” Fred hesitates, “rats inside. For science experiments, I guess. Hermione, um, said to give them to Quirrell,” he hesitates again, “but I didn’t. I thought, um, it was unfair? He used us. He wants to use the rats, too. So,” he hesitates for a third time, “when I saw the DEFECTIVE sign, I, um, thought it was a good hiding place for them, until I knew what to do with them. If Quirrell came here to, um, ask, I would’ve said I put the box in front of his door, knocked and used the bell and left and someone must have taken it before he got to it, right? And then I would’ve told him, such a bummer, mate, eh, maybe you should have mailed the package to your own address, hmm?”

“That was the shortest explanation you could’ve gone with?” Harry questions. 

It’s silent for a moment afterwards. Then George mutters, “Wow, Freddy, I’ve never heard you say ‘um’ this many times.”

Tom adds, “Not the absolute worst plan in theory.” His voice hardens, taking over the conversation with that tone of his, “but you made a few wrong choices in the process. Want to take a guess, F. Weasley?”

Fred gulps. “Not talking to Hermione a second time when I came up with this idea? Not properly closing the box again before I put it inside the loo?”

“And what are you going to do to make up for it? Or do you think you deserve to get fired? In theory.” Tom’s hand moves through Hermione’s hair, curling a lock around his finger absentmindedly, and her heart lightens a bit. It relaxes her, even surrounded by chaos. 

George says, “Uh-oh.”

Bellatrix cackles gleefully and Ron stutters, “Uh, em, eh –” like he wants to interfere, in support of family, but also doesn’t dare to go through with it. 

“I’m sorry,” Fred says, subdued, instead. “As it’s my first official strike, I wouldn’t fire me. But because it’s a big mistake, I deserve more than a stern talking to. A punishment. I dunno, what, but I’m sorry.” He throws a look to Hermione. “Real sorry, Hermione, boss.”

The last of her anger puffs out. “Okay, thank you for apologizing.” Hermione straightens up, but doesn’t move an inch away. “Tom and I will discuss it and tell you. Until then, please go through the address catalog to find someone to catch the rats and call them, yes?”

“Yes, boss.”

The phone at the reception desk rings suddenly, and interrupts the scene. “Oh.” Lavender rushes to her desk, coughing twice. “Hello? Slughorn’s Potions. Oh, hello! Oh, yes, I, –” She looks up. “Hermione? It’s for you.”

What now, Hermione thinks. What now?