Hermione Granger and the Displaced Sorting

Chapter 12

Hermione Granger and the Displaced Sorting

Harry Potter Fanfiction

Chapter 12

A/N: This is going to be a running author's note, but if you read on fanfiction.net and enjoy this story, make sure to have my username saved in case my account is deleted. I post on AO3 and Wattpad as well under the same name.

New A/N: Between The Year Hidden From Hogwarts and now The Displaced Sorting, we've more than passed 100k words, making this my longest running story on ff.net and AO3! Thanks for all your comments that keep me going.

September 19th, 1992

Hermione was glad she'd given up on using quills after the third week of school. They were unnecessarily difficult, and she had better uses for her time than relearning penmanship because the Wizarding World was too outdated to create any new inventions since the Middle Ages.

Some of the honeymoon phase of Hogwarts had worn off, and she was seeing that magic made much of wizardkind lazy. And yes, she hadn't put in the effort to learn how to write with a quill, but it wasn't as if she whiled away the extra time she'd gained. Oftentimes, in class, students only did the bare minimum, apart from Ravenclaw—and the house of eagles came with their own problems.

She'd not seen much of Luna or Ginny outside of flying class, so she'd felt compelled to revisit her tabled plan to join up with like-minded studious students in the library. But when she'd tried to discuss some theory behind that day's charms lesson with Morag MacDougal and her friends—the sum total of the Ravenclaw girls in their year—only to discover they didn't put much thought into the how's and why's and the applications of a piece of magic, so long as they mastered the spell for their exams.

Frustrated, Hermione hadn't tried to reach out to them again, though she was wishing she had to help drown out the noise as a table of third or fourth year Hufflepuffs sat nearby and were whispering quite loudly.

"I heard—"

"—second year!"

"Hush! She might—"

"—that she—"

A gasp. "No! That can't possibly—"

"Well—"

"—ggle parents that—"

"—ut she's a Sly—"

"Exactly."

"Oh!"

Her hand clenched around the ink pen in her hand once more, making the plastic groan. Yes, she was glad she hadn't been holding a quill because surely it would've snapped in half by now.

Their whispering rose once more in volume, and Hermione flipped the large tome she'd been reading shut, making the entire table of upper-year gossips jump.

"You're not being very quiet," she hissed at them before whisking away the book and disappearing into the shelves in search of a better one.

Maybe after being called out, they'd be mortified she caught them gossiping about her and flee in shame before she returned.

Unfortunately, today was not her day—ironic, considering the date, but true. She returned to her table, dismayed to find the Hufflepuffs had grown more emboldened, holding her gaze as they spoke about her.

After thirty minutes of hearing every theory and rumor there could possibly be, from how she'd immigrated here from France after getting kicked out of another magical school called Beauxbatons—actually not that far off the mark considering her mum's French heritage—all the way to the outlandish and sickening, up to and including that she'd given out "favors" to skip a year.