An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
(a little excerpt to get you started)
It wasn’t jealousy.
Tom had no personal interest in Granger outside of her academic capabilities and the unspoken rivalry they’d been entangled in since Tom’s second year, when out of nowhere some scrawny, bookish, bushy-haired nuisance was suddenly being spoken of in awed, proud tones by his professors. Being a year apart hadn’t kept comparisons from being made, and so despite Tom’s resolve to keep to himself, it was almost inevitable that he should eventually have to deal with her, in the library, upon Dumbledore’s not-suggestion that Tom reach out and offer support to “another talented mind like yourself.”
(She was sitting alone at a table, barely visible behind a stack of books. She was more hair than girl, with a set of unfortunately large front teeth, and she glared at him when he approached.
“Who are you?” she asked rather rudely, imperiously, and Tom stiffened despite himself, too used to similar—albeit more hostile—comments from his housemates.
“Tom Riddle. I—”
If anything, her expression tightened. “Yes. I’ve heard about you. I don’t need your help.”)
Hermione Granger at 12 had been lacking. Dull. Piteously hindered by her blind faith in authority. Clever only in the sense that she could regurgitate anything she’d read, but not smart enough to figure anything else out for herself. Not a genius in the way Tom was. It was frankly insulting to be compared to her in any manner, and on top of that, her personality was abrasive and unpleasant. Whatever infinitesimal flicker of curiosity the rumors of her had engendered was smothered upon their first meeting.
The only blessing was that she seemed to find him just as intolerable and had no interest in whatever “guidance” Dumbledore had instructed Tom to offer her.
In the course of six years, little had changed in terms of their respective attitudes towards each other, even if Tom had come to grudgingly admit that his initial assessment was not a true representation of her abilities.
So it wasn’t jealousy, no matter what Abraxas liked to claim
“You’re staring again,” Abraxas pointed out unhelpfully, the little twist at the corner of his mouth belying his amusement. Despite being a Slytherin and the Malfoy heir, he’d never really bothered to mask his emotions around Tom. “You’re lucky their backs are to you, or else you’d have to explain to Weasley why you’re eye-fucking his girlfriend.”
Tom wrinkled his nose at the crass wording. “Not at breakfast, Abraxas.”
The blond grinned. “I should be saying that to you. It’s practically exhibitionist. I feel like I’m intruding on an intimate moment.”
“You are,” Avery growled, half hunched over his coffee cup, inhaling the steam with his eyes closed. Malfoy grimaced, opened his mouth, but Dolohov beat him to it.
“Keep your weird coffee fetish behind closed doors, please.”
Rosier’s laugh grated. “Why do you think he goes to bed so early every night?”
Stifling a sigh, Tom tuned out the rest of the useless conversation. Abraxas was probably right—not about the…the eye-fucking, for fucks sake, but about the staring—and Tom knew that Granger’s relatively new attachment with Weasley was neither concerning to his own goals or interesting enough to have captivated Tom’s attention. But.
But Weasley?
It was utterly baffling.
Aside from Weasley’s alleged genius with wizarding chess, the boy was an insipid dolt with very little natural ability and no work ethic to compensate for it. He was consistently average in class—a generous ranking, in Tom’s opinion, and one he felt sure the red-head only earned by the grace of Granger’s incessant nagging and obsession with study schedules. His quidditch playing, according to Abraxas, was nothing to write home about. He was often in detention, was completely obtuse when it came to reading people if the frequency with which Granger whacked him over the head (before they were dating, that is) was any indicator, and his eating manners were worse than atrocious. He was neither powerful, nor rich, nor influential, nor extraordinarily handsome, and Tom did not understand.
It’s not that Granger was some ephemeral creature that could have her choice of anyone—the very idea would be enough to make Tom snort out his tea, if he were the sort of person who did such things—but surely, surely, she could do better than Ronald Weasley.
rating: t
pairing: harry/hermione
tags: professor harry potter, head girl hermione granger, nothing untoward happens (i'm sorry about it too), a bit of light angst to brighten our days, unbeta'd we die like cedric
read on ao3
—
Her new Defense professor is a war hero.
Strong-jawed, slumped shoulders. He looks like he’s constantly just come in from the rain on a lightning-struck night, with his dark trenchcoat, mended many times at the hems, and the slightest tremor of cold in his fingers. His office smells of cherry tobacco, resinous and inviting and dark and sweet, ash scattered uncaringly on the floor around his desk. He catalogues their practicals with sharp eyes, like a snake waiting to strike. He never speaks more than is necessary.
And he looks tired.
Perhaps the only animated thing about him is the shock of black hair that spills over his forehead in unruly curls, too wild for a comb or even a gentle touch. Not that she is thinking about touches, gentle or otherwise.
He is, quite possibly, the youngest Defense professor they’ve ever had.
This has nothing to do with anything.
Believe her.
—
Her new Defense professor is everyone’s favourite.
Everyone flocks to him after every class, his seat during mealtimes – never fixed, one day it’s by Professor Dumbledore speaking in revered, hushed tones, another it’s between Professor Hagrid and Professor Sprout, caught in conversational topics that sound, frankly, bizarre and dangerous – always has visitors, his office hours constantly booked.
Hermione is hard-pressed to ever find an empty slot when she’s filling up the request sheet, and she’s Head Girl. Ludicrous. Surely her final year project should take more precedence than some first year’s essay on how to bottle fame or something trivial like that.
“Potter isn’t like that,” Ron shrugs in between bites of egg and sausage. His lips are shiny with oil, dark, decadent, always stretched around a spoon or a smile. “He actually cares, a strange concept when you compare him to Snape, I know.”
Hermione flicks her eyes to the Professors’ table. Professor Potter is slumped, as usual, over his coffee. Black, charmed to remain piping hot. Toast, minimal butter. An egg and a sausage and something that passes off as a respectable portion of fibre. He looks like he is badly in need of a cheroot, his preferred cancer stick.
The first time she’d seen him smoke in one of the private rooms of the library, she’d been shocked. Appalled. Unnaturally curious.
Why would you smoke? She wants to ask. You spent all those years as the boy who tried to live.
He’d glanced at her, put it out hurriedly, and apologised – that was perhaps more shocking than the actual smoking. On school premises! – and swept out of there faster than she could pick her jaw up from the ground.
“Professor—” she’d called out, but it’s lost to the wind blowing in from the open window.
—
Her new Defense professor had gifted them a world free of war, but that didn’t mean remnants of it weren’t everywhere, sombre and still, scorched brick that she suspected were left untampered on the Ministry exterior to serve as a reminder to all.
“Right,” Professor Potter announces. “Er, single file, I suppose? And remember to not wander off from your groups if you feel like poking your nose about where it shouldn’t be poking.”
He glances pointedly at Ron, who snorts but looks secretly pleased at the attention. Hermione is annoyed. She does not want to be a delinquent by proxy. But she cannot quite suppress the shiver that passes through her shoulders when she feels Professor Potter’s eyes on her.
It’s all that green. Like sunlight filtered through a bottle. The inviting dark of the Forbidden Forest, eerie even in daylight. Iron cauldron bottoms worn from years of resisting fire. The full force of his gaze can be quite disorienting despite his kind, tired eyes; she wonders if that is why he never quite looks at any of them in the eye.
“Get ready for an insightful day of educational fun,” Professor Potter mutters, more to himself than to them, as he eyes the tall, imposing doors of the Ministry of Magic. From anyone else it would have pulled a few groans, but the winter-hush air is subdued. Everyone knows the events that happened here.
“Exciting chap, isn’t he?” Ron whispers in her ear. Another shiver. It’s a very cold day.
Professor Potter raises his knuckles, thinks better of it, and reaches for the door handles.
The door parts to his touch.
—
Her new Defense professor has a corner table at the Leaky Cauldron, shadowed from the light of any windows by strategically-placed shelves. They weren’t there last year.
He drinks Newtgin, straight, one olive. He smokes the way he cannot in Hogwarts.
Hermione stumbles in with an armful of books from Grimble’s Grimoires, hastily orders a Butterbeer, and slips into her chair between Ron and Seamus. Dean is talking about football (he is always talking about football), and Ron and Seamus are pretending to care, because they’d seen Professor Potter trade trivia with Dean about West Ham United last week.
Parvati has a magazine open in front of her, but she and Lavender are openly-ogling Professor Potter. Ginny looks annoyed by this: she’d been rallying for their good professor to join their weekly Quidditch practices, but Parvati and Lav’s giggling seems an effective repellant to that.
Hermione, for some reason, is incensed as well. If she’s going to be forced to relinquish studying hours to watch Ron hit a few quaffles around with the tail-end of his broom, she might as well have some productive debate.
Not that she imagines what it would be like to debate Professor Potter. To ask him about the scars on his neck, the dark magic he’s seen, the dark magic that lived inside him for half his life. She does not have conversations with him in her head. She doesn’t.
And even if she does, it’s purely academic.
She has a healthy, curious, academic appetite for his achievements.
Believe her.
By Merlin, believe her.
—
Her new Defense professor is in the same room she is.
The alcohol-fueled chatter of Professor Slughorn’s Christmas party do not touch them here, it is dark enough to hide her tear-streaked cheeks, but not dark enough to mask the green of his coat. Because of course he is wearing that drab coat of his, still, when everyone is in their finest festive robes.
Hermione herself is in a dress that Ginny had helped choose and Parvati had helped order; her hair, magicked smooth and lustrous for once, is falling out of its elegant bun. She is beautiful, she knows that, beauty is subjective, it has taken her years to get here, shut the fuck up.
Her mind should be her deadliest weapon but in a room full of mistletoe and faerie-light she had wanted so, so, so much to be beautiful. Feel beautiful. Something. Whatever.
And Ron had looked right through her and snogged Lavender.
She is not fucking crying over Ron Weasley.
She’s crying about unfair standards of beauty she will never reach.
She’s crying about years of unintentional neglect and barbs that hit too close to home by virtue of Ron being a stupid boy.
She’s crying about the patriarchy, that too, yes, fucking believe her.
If she tells Professor Potter this, maybe he’ll believe her.
He’s looking at her like he’ll believe her.
Watching the swish of her robe sleeves as she swipes furiously at her cheeks. She pushes her hair behind her ears - she’d never been good at controlling her magic when she’s caught by her emotions, and tonight’s rather devastating events had caused her hair to spring free of its smoothing charms. She feels the tendrils of her hair tickle her jaw. Professor Potter tracks that, too.
“Sorry,” she sniffles, oddly comforted by the turn of events.
“No problem,” Professor Potter replies. There’s a cheroot between his thumb and forefinger, newly lit. This had been the ideal room to not-cry into, near enough to the party but far away enough to not have any interruptors to her whatever soliloquys she might have bursting from her chest.
Professor Potter seems to have had the same thought.
This, too, comforted her.
Oddly enough.
She stands there in the doorway. Her shadow falls over the tips of his dusty boots.
She makes no move to leave.
Neither does he.
His cheroot is still smoking between his fingers.
Put it between your lips, inhale, exhale, look away, she wills furiously. Desperately. This is her classroom too. She’s lost so much tonight, she will not lose this. Smoke your damn cheroot and look away like you always do.
Professor Potter puts it out. He does not look away.
She takes this as an invitation to close the door behind her.
He makes space for her on the table he’s perched on, and after a few seconds of making herself comfortable, they stare out the window together, pretending they see things moving in the black night.
—
Her new Defense professor does not cover her hand with his.
Not even when she starts sniffling.
Not even when her shoulders start wracking with sobs.
He sits by her, not asking any questions, because she suspects he knows a thing or two about not being able to have all the answers to this frightening, damning world they live in.
She thinks he knows what it’s like to be so sad and not know what to do with it.
He sits by her, letting her cry, smelling like cherry tobacco. Sweet and dark and tempting and utterly forbidden to her, something her parents have warned her about, but she can’t remember for the life of her.
It would be nice, she thinks, to put something between your lips and swallow some sin. Forget about the world for a while. Grow old together by this stupid window, but Professor Potter does not touch her, and she does not wonder.
And he does not leave her there, either.
He walks her to the Head dorms and leaves with a sweep of his coat.
She is not disappointed in his excellent show of professionalism and morals. She is not disappointed by him.
Daring war hero, the stories said. Brave, brilliant, bold boy. Myopic, magnificent man.
He would never, she would never.
Believe her.
By Merlin and all the Muggle Gods just fucking believe her.
Hermione hasn’t seen Tom since he disappeared from Wool’s Orphanage eight years ago, taking her heart with him. But now, he’s returned, a string of bodies at his feet and a league of assassins at his back. British Intelligence Officer Harry Potter leads the investigation to catch a highly skilled killer wreaking havoc across Europe, while Hermione struggles between what is right and the man she wants.
It physically pains me to see people post awesome fanfiction to tumblr and nowhere else. Tumblr moves so fast! By tomorrow people who didn’t look in a tag at the right moment won’t know it existed. By next week even people who did read it won’t be able to find it back to reread. Finding anything on tumblr via search function is practically a fluke. For all intents and purposes, your hard work has a halflife of about a week at most.
PUT YOUR WORK ON AO3 WHERE IT CAN LIVE ETERNALLY, I BEG YOU
People who come into that fandom in a month, a year, even a decade will be able to find your work!
People can bookmark it!
People can rec it to others!
People can reread it into infinity! (and people like me can do that and comment every time!)
You can get comments & kudos until the endtimes because people will keep finding your work! (seriously I still sometimes get new people finding and loving my work from ~2013)
And best of all, people can SUBSCRIBE to your work so they will get email about new chapters and stories! (I’m seeing people do manual ‘Tag you in the next chapter’ lists and seriously, physical pain, this wheel has already been invented and it is rolling beautifully)
PLEASE LET ME BOOKMARK YOUR FIC I BEG YOU
“But I need an invite for AO3!”
Yes, and the waiting list is currently 2-3 days. That’s hardly worth not doing this for, right?
“But I only read fic, I don’t post it”
here is a post on why having an account just to read fic is also very worth it!
Lately I’ve been the tumblr person who jumps onto people who post cool fic to tumblr and going HEY HAVE YOU POSTED THIS TO AO3, YOU REALLY SHOULD, HIT ME UP FOR AN INVITE CODE and I hereby invite all you fellow fic readers and posters to join me into spreading the good word.
Please reblog this and tag your favourite fandoms and pairings! Spread this post to the people who need to see it! Save great fic from the tumblr void!
Students of a 12 day course at the Melbourne School of Design were not sorted into houses, but they were assigned Gringotts Bank, Grimmauld Place, the Shrieking Shack and other fan favorites in the Harry Potter universe. their Harry Potter architecture models were laser cut from cardboard (ten house points), hand-modeled (forty house points), constructed in very little time (fifty points), and remind us of the truest magic of all (teamwork).
Students at the Melbourne School of Design had very few spells to work with in order to cast these gorgeously film-accurate 3D models. Students were given 1.0 mm and 0.6 mm boxboard to create their models from. They used trace paper — for windows and diffused lights — and LED lights and motors connected to Arduinos.
She corners Potter again a few days after the celebration. He’s been visiting the groundskeeper. She puts her wand at his throat - again. He is so exuberantly happy he doesn’t bother drawing his this time.
In the soft golden light of the summer evening his eyes are very green. She says if he ever lets anyone know she told him about the basilisk she’ll find one to set on him. She lists a complicated and well-rehearsed range of other threats including detailing just how easy it would be to make him confess his undying love to Malfoy in the middle of the next Quidditch match before setting his own broomstick on fire.
“I won’t tell anyone, Granger. But aren’t you glad it’s all over?” Potter asks, curiously.
“I wish they’d closed this horrible school,” she says. “Maybe they would have if that girl had died.”
She doesn’t mean that, not really, but it’s satisfying to see the joy bleed out of his face anyway.
