[A/N: Happy New Year! I think it's time to get back to posting this story now that I have enough built up (probably) to see me through finishing it. Thank you to Calamity Owl, Darsynia, GaeilgeRua, GenericName404, and Liquid-Water for beta-reading this chapter! To any new readers that have stumbled across this chapter for the first time: this story is AU AF and I strongly recommend starting with the first chapter.]
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"Well, bollocks," Harry thought as he watched Hermione perform a textbook-perfect Levitation Charm on her unsuspecting ballpoint pen. "I'll have to Obliviate-"
The pen floated gently into the air.
"What the actual f-"
The TV screen exploded, peppering the room and Hermione with little shards of glass and cathode ray tube. Harry barely noticed, though, because of the wave of magic washing over him, over the whole room, and probably over the whole damned building.
Someone, somehow, had warded her. Some bastard wanted to know if Hermione ever cast a spell and hooked a Merlin-damned beacon into her core. Whoever it was, they were probably on their way right now, and a part of Harry desperately wanted to stick around, meet the person, and do some truly horrific things to them in the name of "self-defence." The better part of him knew that would involve putting an innocent woman in the crossfire, though, and nothing was worth that.
She was screaming now, more in terror than pain from the glass shards, and looking at the wand like she was holding a snake that would bite her if she let it go and strangle her if she didn't. She barely resisted when he plucked the wand from her hand, and only stopped screaming when he pulled her into a tight embrace with his free hand.
"I'm sorry," was all he could think of to say, and that was truly inadequate for what he was about to do to her.
Hermione Granger had her first side-along apparition while drunk as a judge, and as soon as they arrived at their destination, she threw up all over Harry's shoes and the floor beneath them.
* * *
Hermione was so desperate to stop the world from spinning around her that she didn't even open her eyes when she bent over to vomit. How could being drunk be this bad? She'd never even read anything about it being like this, and she'd read more descriptions of drunkenness than she could count. It was practically all the Angry Young Men ever wrote about, for crying out loud!
Between emptying her stomach and Harry's comforting embrace, the spinning in her head quickly subsided to a manageable level and she risked opening her eyes. Two things immediately jumped out at her. First, the wooden floor was no longer light-colored, but ancient walnut so dark it was almost black. Second, it was completely devoid of vomit.
While Hermione would have been the first to admit she was still quite drunk, she was equally certain that inebriation could in no way supersede the laws of nature. "Where are we?" she croaked out.
"We're safe now," Harry said soothingly as he gently lowered them both to their knees. "Please trust me. You're safe here."
"But...my pen...my television..." She ran her hands over the floorboards with drunken gentleness. "My floor..."
Pounding footsteps and shouts of, "Harry, what's wrong?" announced the arrival of new parties. Hermione turned to greet them and promptly fell back on her arse. Not so much because of the alcohol this time, but because she was clearly no longer in her apartment. The dark wooden walls of what looked like a foyer rose up around her, decorated with the heads of animals she didn't recognize and sputtering gas lamps that cast a hesitant, flickering light over the scene.
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Hermione Granger and the Theft of Magic
Fanfic(AU) Hermione's biggest worries in life are her dissertation and her rent, at least until she drunkenly takes a stick from a green-eyed stranger and breaks what she thought were the laws of physics. Now she's facing a high-stakes, impossible test, b...
