Hermione Granger is scared. The nightmares are frequent and sleep is rare. Her relationship with Ron is not what she thought it was. Stuck in a circle of despair she is trying hard to regain the famed Gryffindor courage while maintaining appearance...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
~ Hermione Granger
Through the dense fumes issuing from each of the cauldrons the scattered group of advanced potions students were brewing, she could easily spot the ice-blond hair.
He didn't seem to be doing anything, her robes were stained, nail beds still carrying the dye of the Azord root she had hurriedly cut almost an hour prior. She remembered faintly the words of Severus Snape, addressing her and a group of first-years all those years ago.
"A good potions-master carries messy robes. A great potions-master has immaculate robes."
She shivered. Perhaps she would always just be a good potions master. She could remember a time when that would have bothered her, a time when she would have stayed up at night trying to perfect her technique just to prove to herself that she was great. But Hermione Granger didn't care anymore. She was too tired to try and be the best, besides what good had it done her younger self anyway? She had only landed herself into a murky cauldron.
She smiled to herself darkly. Bigotry, hatred, and misogyny didn't exist in only a house. Though Slytherin house had taken the infamous tag for centuries, she knew that everyone had darker sides, a cesspool everyone kept hidden.
They had close to two hours left in Potions. The sixth and seventh years at Hogwarts took advanced classes after their OWL's, which meant they had fewer classes but longer hours for each class so that each student could ideally delve into a career path and focus and build a foundation to be tested on in the NEWTS. While she had initially found it extremely hard to be made to decide the subjects she wished to pursue; magical education in all its facets had always fascinated her, she had finally settled for those she deemed important for a future she now only hoped she would get to see. Granted, she had been allowed to choose more than other sixth years.
A flash of thought. Her mind wondered about the classes Malfoy was taking.
Waiting for the appearance of color in her cauldron meant that she had idle time to kill. Advanced Potions was a waiting game, time playing a gargantuan role in yielding the purest strains of potions and elixirs. And maybe historically that was a large reason Gryffindor students were not known to take the class, lore saying that most Gryffindor students possessed mindsets and personalities that made it hard for them to play a waiting game, forever known and even condemned to be among those that rushed into battles and decisions.
He did seem to be in a lot of her advanced classes. Potions, Arithmancy, charms, and Defense against the Dark Arts. What was his life like outside of Hogwarts? She couldn't help herself, her mind latched onto anything new, and right now in her life, he seemed like a distraction she willingly wanted to drown in.
As if he knew she was thinking about him like they shared a mental passageway connecting their conscious together by threads of desperation both seemed to feel like second skin, she looked up to find a pair of steel grey eyes laser-focused on her face. The mist and fog of the classroom did nothing to hide her. She felt like she had been caught, like a juvenile, hand stuck in the forbidden cookie jar by her dentist parents. Awareness prickled through her body, perspiration collecting, the condensation settling on her skin, somehow he knew, she was sure of it, that her mind had conjured up images of him.
