Eight and Eighth--Chapter 5
Title: Eight and Eighth
Author: Marmalade Fever
Characters: Draco Malfoy, Hermione Granger, and more.
Genres: Romance, Drama, weird combo of in-Hogwarts and post-Hogwarts
Spoilers: DH (though no epilogue)
Overall Rating: PG-13
Summary: Up from the ashes of seventh year grow the roses of the eighth. Eight students return for their final year at Hogwarts, and Hermione Granger would never have thought Draco Malfoy would or could be one of those roses.
8 & 8th-Chapter 5-Unlikely Prophecy
By Marmalade Fever
Hermione grabbed Draco by the hand and kissed him, and they professed their undying love for one another, had six children all named Darryl (except for Larry,) and they all lived happily ever after. The End. Er, APRIL FOOLS!
O
Draco had a vivid mental picture of Professor Sybil Trelawney staring up at Granger through her thick glasses, her eyes magnified to twice their normal size, at least. “Clearly, you do not understand the delicate balance a Seer must employ in choosing which prophecies to keep in the foreground of the mind and which to send to the back.”
“Oh, so you forgot. I see,” Granger replied snidely. For some reason, Draco had always imagined that the Gryffindor girl was only ever impolite to Slytherins and acidic Daily Prophet reporters. It appeared he was wrong.
“No, my dear girl, the problem is that you cannot see,” the woman corrected, sniffing. “And I did not forget. It is merely a matter of choosing which prophecies are best to, shall we say, allow others to realize I have made? I find that the blind, such as yourself, are often unresponsive to having their lives predetermined, and so I choose not to alarm them by knowing too much, too soon.”
“So you were shielding me by pretending that you didn’t know why I was here?” Granger translated.
“It is far more complicated than that, but in a nutshell, yes.”
“So then you should have no reason to be concerned with our being out of class.”
“Our?” Trelawney questioned. “Oh.” It appeared Draco had been noticed at last. He was still rubbing the back of his head, seeing stars despite his blindness.
“Do you mean to say that you pushed his presence to the back of your mind as well?” Granger queried.
“The Eye sees as the Eye sees,” Trelawney said loftily.
Granger was silent for a moment, but from a certain dull thudding sound near his right ear, he had a feeling she was tapping her foot. “Well, I think you should prove it,” she said at last.
“Prove?” Trelawney asked.
Draco grunted, sitting up slowly and rubbing at his head. This whole blind thing was starting to get a bit old.
“Make a prediction,” Granger elaborated, “and we’ll see if it comes true.” Was it his imagination, or did Granger sound just a trifle evil?
Trelawney stuttered at first before she inhaled deeply. “If you insist,” she said. Her voice took on a dreamy quality that sounded more showy than anything else. “Before this year ends,” the woman said, very slowly, “you and Mr. Malfoy here will discover what the heart seeks but the mind avoids.”
Draco’s head had whipped in the direction of Trelawney’s voice as soon as his name had been mentioned. “What in the name of Merlin is that supposed to mean?” he asked, half-yelling.
He heard another sniff from Trelawney’s direction. “It means, Mr. Malfoy, that you and Miss Granger will be falling in love, whether you like it or not.”
Draco’s cheeks briefly puffed up with air before he burst into all-out laughter. “What! You really are a fraud!” From above him, Granger had started laughing too.
“That’s… that’s… couldn’t you have come up with something a little more believable?” she asked between gasps for air.
“I am not coming up with anything, Miss Granger!” Trelawney insisted. “You, dear girl, are completely blind to the Inner Eye, and your mind is already avoiding the inevitable. Besides, what other prophecy would have been able to convince you, hmm? Had I predicted that you would receive an O on your Potions Essay, which you will, you would have attributed it to coincidence, would you not?”
Granger snorted. “I suppose that’s true enough.” There was a brief pause. “Oh, no! Come on, Malfoy, we’ve got to get back to class.” To his great surprise, she actually grabbed his hand and helped pull him to his feet before she latched onto his sleeve again and pulled him up the stairs, this time at a much more acceptable pace.
“Well, that was interesting,” he drawled, as they turned a corner and set out at a brisk rate along an expanse of flat hallway. Interesting, why did he keep using that word? It was a safe word, he decided. It could be interpreted in multiple ways. “I had no idea you had such a strained relationship with her. Here I was under the impression that you licked the shoes of schoolmarms everywhere.”
“Newsflash, Malfoy,” she said, echoing his words from earlier, “I only respect those who deserve it.”
“Ah, and how did that almighty Seer lose your respect, hmm?”
“I’d rather not talk about it,” she grumbled. “Though you may be interested in knowing that she was one of the stress factors that helped build up to that slap I gave you third year.”
“And here’s another newsflash for you. If you want to pass this class, you might want to rethink reminding me of reasons to hate you.” He sneered.
“Did a poor, defenseless girl hurt you, Malfoy?” she asked.
“Defenseless, my foot,” he muttered. He stopped in his tracks, being careful not to pull so hard that she smacked into him this time. “One more thing before we get back,” he said slowly. He bared his teeth slightly. “If you ever make mention of what that bat just prophesied, I will find a way to get back at you so badly you’ll wish you’d never gotten your Hogwarts letter in the first place.”
She sniffed. “Like I’d want to tell anyone that Trelawney thinks we’re going to fall in love. I don’t think you’ll have to worry about that much. I have a reputation to maintain too, you know.” She tugged on his sleeve, and just moments later he made out the sounds of other Eighth Year voices.
“Here you are, finite incantatum,” Amorell said, and Draco blinked in the light, relief washing over him. He yanked his sleeve out of Granger’s grip, his manacle flopping about as he did so.
“Now,” Amorell continued, “everyone, here’s a sign-up sheet for grief counseling. There are a lot of spots filled up already from the other years I’ve already taught this morning, just to warn you. Also, I want you all to read the introduction and chapters one and two of Grieving for the Soul. Everyone got that? Good.” The woman nodded and set the sign-up sheet on her desk. Draco groaned. Grief counseling? With this woman? That would be a barrel of fun….
Granger pushed past him on her way up to the desk, and he frowned. What on earth was that Divination teacher thinking? He and Granger? In love? That was the most farfetched, ludicrous, all-out stupid idea he had ever heard.
Granger bent down over the desk to scrawl her signature on the paper, her wild hair falling down over her shoulders, a tiny piece of peach neck peeking out from over her collar. Draco bit his lip before moving to get in the queue as well. By the time he’d made it to the front, it looked as if almost all of the spots towards the end of the sign-up period were taken already. Granger, dutifully it seemed, had chosen a time during this week. Draco chose a date at random: September 19th.
O
Potions class was exceedingly different from either Snape’s or Slughorn’s approaches. Professor Candanver-who, Draco noted, needed only to take the N’s out of him name to spell Cadaver-was an extremely lazy sort of fellow. His exact instructions to them were, “Just find something in your textbooks and keep busy. Make any trouble and it’s detention for the lot of you. I’m taking a nap.” With that, he set his balding head on his arms and started snoring within five minutes.
Potter and the Weasley girl were talking in hushed voices in the back. She’d just whispered something that had made The Boy Who Got Too Much Glory blush. Granger and the Weasel were slightly better. She refused to relax during class time and was furiously brewing what looked to be the very last potion in the entire book, which, luckily, only took one hour and forty-three point six seconds. It was the point six that amused Draco, as he flipped boredly through his text book.
The three other Slytherins in the class were mostly unknown entities to him. There was a girl named Una Maroo, who had blonde hair down to her mid-thigh, horrible bangs, and an overbite. There was a boy named Gavin Woolsey and his twin sister, Margaret. The two of them kept almost entirely to themselves. In fact, he wasn’t sure he’d ever seen them apart other than in the boys’ dormitory and bathroom, now that he thought of it. They were a very affectionate brother and sister. He kept squeezing her hand every other minute, and there was something in the way she passed him the frogspawn that made Draco want to retch into his cauldron.
As the minutes ticked by and he got more and more bored, he actually started a potion, just to give himself something to do. It was an agility potion, supposedly good for mixing into broom polish. He might as well get something useful out of being stuck in here.
“Ron!” Draco’s head whipped around to where his supposed future love had her eyes very wide and her wooden spoon half-raised, dripping chunky apricot fluid back into the cauldron. She lowered her voice. “Not while I’m brewing! And certainly not in class!”
Weasley frowned. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “It was just a peck on the cheek. Don’t have kittens.” The red-head turned. “What’re you looking at, Malfoy?”
“Nothing much, apparently,” he spat back. “Oh, and Granger, your potion’s turning sulfur. You might want to take care of that.” He pinched his nose for effect. Granger immediately shrieked and threw in two bay leaves, stirring furiously.
Up front, Candanver grumbled something in his sleep that sounded suspiciously like, “Dirty, rotten ragamuffins.”
As Draco turned back to his own potion, still hearing Granger hissing and chopping up ingredients, an idea occurred to him, a potentially impossible idea.
There was one way that he could win himself some respect based entirely on his own efforts, and because it was still the first day of school, it wasn’t too late to begin.
Draco was going to try to out-do Granger.
He had the smarts, though he didn’t always bother to put them to use. It would mean hours upon hours of studying, but it wasn’t as if he were about to spend much of his time socially this coming year anyway. He would need something to keep him occupied.
If he could just manage to do at least as well or better than the Gryffindor Bookworm on the NEWTs, then he’d have something to prove his merit once and for all.
As Candanver finally got up to inspect the class, he awarded five points to Slytherin for Draco’s agility potion and six to Gryffindor for Granger’s agoraphobia potion.
It seemed he was on his way to success. Or disaster.
O
At dinner, Hermione ate quietly, looking out over the mass of students. It sent a chill up her spine to see so many empty spaces among the tables. Several students had died during the battle or had moved to safety with their families.
Neville, Lavender, Seamus, and various others from her year had already left school after attending the previous year, though she couldn’t imagine that they had gotten a very decent education.
A few others, mainly Slytherins, were now in Azkaban, Pansy Parkinson included. Even she had trouble smiling when The Prophet had informed of that. She may have never gotten along with Pansy, but she was still only a girl.
The House Elves had made a special dinner-fondue. It was messy, and Ron had cheese all up and down his robes.
She handed him a napkin, and he grunted his thanks between bites.
At the next table over, August stuck her tongue out and shivered, and Hermione nodded her agreement.
Hermione’s eyes strayed to the Slytherin table, where Malfoy was eating his fondue with a knife and fork. Between him and Ron, she wasn’t sure which one looked more ridiculous.
“So,” Harry said, across the table, “you’ll never guess what McGonagall told me after Transfiguration.”
Hermione looked up at him. “What?”
“Well, first off, it sounds as if the Grief Counseling, et cetera class is only temporary. The School Board ordered it for this year. They might have kept on Defense Against the Dark Arts, except that there’s a major shortage of people willing to take on the jinxed position. Anyway, McGonagall wanted to know if I’d like to,” he snorted, “be the new teacher next year.”
Hermione’s mouth dropped open. “Oh, Harry! That’s wonderful!”
“Wow, ‘arry, ‘at’s ‘reat!” Ron said between bites.
Harry frowned. “It might be fun, I suppose. Kind of like the D.A. again, but… you know how nervous I get in front of people.”
Ginny opened her mouth and promptly closed it again, looking thoughtful. Her eyes strayed up to the staff table. “Have you ever noticed,” she mumbled, “that none of the staff are married?” Her cheeks turned pink.
Harry froze and tugged at his collar. “And that’s a good point, too. I don’t think I’d be able to visit you all very much, except on weekends and during the holidays.”
“Well, I’m sure you could work something out,” Hermione said. She wasn’t about to let him turn down the chance at being a Professor!
“Well,” Ron said, after he’d swallowed, “McGonagall did say she’d be looking for someone to take over Transfiguration for her next year. How’s your ability to turn a mouse into a cabbage, Gin?”
Ginny rolled her eyes. “Better than yours but probably not quite up to par.” She rubbed her thumb over her Head Girl badge. “How I got this is beyond me. Speaking of which, I need to go discuss something with Woozy Wilkes. See you all later!”
Hermione grabbed herself a chunk of bread and speared it before twirling it in the cheese mixture.
There was a small part of her that was jealous of Harry.
O
A.N.: Sorry about the wait, everyone! I think I just borrowed an old plot idea from one of my really old fan fics, in which Harry becomes the DADA professor and Hermione becomes the Transfiguration professor. Hopefully this chapter helped clear up some of the very valid questions I got in reviews. Feedback appreciated, as always!
Click the tag for previous chapters.
<< >>
Author: Marmalade Fever
Characters: Draco Malfoy, Hermione Granger, and more.
Genres: Romance, Drama, weird combo of in-Hogwarts and post-Hogwarts
Spoilers: DH (though no epilogue)
Overall Rating: PG-13
Summary: Up from the ashes of seventh year grow the roses of the eighth. Eight students return for their final year at Hogwarts, and Hermione Granger would never have thought Draco Malfoy would or could be one of those roses.
8 & 8th-Chapter 5-Unlikely Prophecy
By Marmalade Fever
Hermione grabbed Draco by the hand and kissed him, and they professed their undying love for one another, had six children all named Darryl (except for Larry,) and they all lived happily ever after. The End. Er, APRIL FOOLS!
O
Draco had a vivid mental picture of Professor Sybil Trelawney staring up at Granger through her thick glasses, her eyes magnified to twice their normal size, at least. “Clearly, you do not understand the delicate balance a Seer must employ in choosing which prophecies to keep in the foreground of the mind and which to send to the back.”
“Oh, so you forgot. I see,” Granger replied snidely. For some reason, Draco had always imagined that the Gryffindor girl was only ever impolite to Slytherins and acidic Daily Prophet reporters. It appeared he was wrong.
“No, my dear girl, the problem is that you cannot see,” the woman corrected, sniffing. “And I did not forget. It is merely a matter of choosing which prophecies are best to, shall we say, allow others to realize I have made? I find that the blind, such as yourself, are often unresponsive to having their lives predetermined, and so I choose not to alarm them by knowing too much, too soon.”
“So you were shielding me by pretending that you didn’t know why I was here?” Granger translated.
“It is far more complicated than that, but in a nutshell, yes.”
“So then you should have no reason to be concerned with our being out of class.”
“Our?” Trelawney questioned. “Oh.” It appeared Draco had been noticed at last. He was still rubbing the back of his head, seeing stars despite his blindness.
“Do you mean to say that you pushed his presence to the back of your mind as well?” Granger queried.
“The Eye sees as the Eye sees,” Trelawney said loftily.
Granger was silent for a moment, but from a certain dull thudding sound near his right ear, he had a feeling she was tapping her foot. “Well, I think you should prove it,” she said at last.
“Prove?” Trelawney asked.
Draco grunted, sitting up slowly and rubbing at his head. This whole blind thing was starting to get a bit old.
“Make a prediction,” Granger elaborated, “and we’ll see if it comes true.” Was it his imagination, or did Granger sound just a trifle evil?
Trelawney stuttered at first before she inhaled deeply. “If you insist,” she said. Her voice took on a dreamy quality that sounded more showy than anything else. “Before this year ends,” the woman said, very slowly, “you and Mr. Malfoy here will discover what the heart seeks but the mind avoids.”
Draco’s head had whipped in the direction of Trelawney’s voice as soon as his name had been mentioned. “What in the name of Merlin is that supposed to mean?” he asked, half-yelling.
He heard another sniff from Trelawney’s direction. “It means, Mr. Malfoy, that you and Miss Granger will be falling in love, whether you like it or not.”
Draco’s cheeks briefly puffed up with air before he burst into all-out laughter. “What! You really are a fraud!” From above him, Granger had started laughing too.
“That’s… that’s… couldn’t you have come up with something a little more believable?” she asked between gasps for air.
“I am not coming up with anything, Miss Granger!” Trelawney insisted. “You, dear girl, are completely blind to the Inner Eye, and your mind is already avoiding the inevitable. Besides, what other prophecy would have been able to convince you, hmm? Had I predicted that you would receive an O on your Potions Essay, which you will, you would have attributed it to coincidence, would you not?”
Granger snorted. “I suppose that’s true enough.” There was a brief pause. “Oh, no! Come on, Malfoy, we’ve got to get back to class.” To his great surprise, she actually grabbed his hand and helped pull him to his feet before she latched onto his sleeve again and pulled him up the stairs, this time at a much more acceptable pace.
“Well, that was interesting,” he drawled, as they turned a corner and set out at a brisk rate along an expanse of flat hallway. Interesting, why did he keep using that word? It was a safe word, he decided. It could be interpreted in multiple ways. “I had no idea you had such a strained relationship with her. Here I was under the impression that you licked the shoes of schoolmarms everywhere.”
“Newsflash, Malfoy,” she said, echoing his words from earlier, “I only respect those who deserve it.”
“Ah, and how did that almighty Seer lose your respect, hmm?”
“I’d rather not talk about it,” she grumbled. “Though you may be interested in knowing that she was one of the stress factors that helped build up to that slap I gave you third year.”
“And here’s another newsflash for you. If you want to pass this class, you might want to rethink reminding me of reasons to hate you.” He sneered.
“Did a poor, defenseless girl hurt you, Malfoy?” she asked.
“Defenseless, my foot,” he muttered. He stopped in his tracks, being careful not to pull so hard that she smacked into him this time. “One more thing before we get back,” he said slowly. He bared his teeth slightly. “If you ever make mention of what that bat just prophesied, I will find a way to get back at you so badly you’ll wish you’d never gotten your Hogwarts letter in the first place.”
She sniffed. “Like I’d want to tell anyone that Trelawney thinks we’re going to fall in love. I don’t think you’ll have to worry about that much. I have a reputation to maintain too, you know.” She tugged on his sleeve, and just moments later he made out the sounds of other Eighth Year voices.
“Here you are, finite incantatum,” Amorell said, and Draco blinked in the light, relief washing over him. He yanked his sleeve out of Granger’s grip, his manacle flopping about as he did so.
“Now,” Amorell continued, “everyone, here’s a sign-up sheet for grief counseling. There are a lot of spots filled up already from the other years I’ve already taught this morning, just to warn you. Also, I want you all to read the introduction and chapters one and two of Grieving for the Soul. Everyone got that? Good.” The woman nodded and set the sign-up sheet on her desk. Draco groaned. Grief counseling? With this woman? That would be a barrel of fun….
Granger pushed past him on her way up to the desk, and he frowned. What on earth was that Divination teacher thinking? He and Granger? In love? That was the most farfetched, ludicrous, all-out stupid idea he had ever heard.
Granger bent down over the desk to scrawl her signature on the paper, her wild hair falling down over her shoulders, a tiny piece of peach neck peeking out from over her collar. Draco bit his lip before moving to get in the queue as well. By the time he’d made it to the front, it looked as if almost all of the spots towards the end of the sign-up period were taken already. Granger, dutifully it seemed, had chosen a time during this week. Draco chose a date at random: September 19th.
O
Potions class was exceedingly different from either Snape’s or Slughorn’s approaches. Professor Candanver-who, Draco noted, needed only to take the N’s out of him name to spell Cadaver-was an extremely lazy sort of fellow. His exact instructions to them were, “Just find something in your textbooks and keep busy. Make any trouble and it’s detention for the lot of you. I’m taking a nap.” With that, he set his balding head on his arms and started snoring within five minutes.
Potter and the Weasley girl were talking in hushed voices in the back. She’d just whispered something that had made The Boy Who Got Too Much Glory blush. Granger and the Weasel were slightly better. She refused to relax during class time and was furiously brewing what looked to be the very last potion in the entire book, which, luckily, only took one hour and forty-three point six seconds. It was the point six that amused Draco, as he flipped boredly through his text book.
The three other Slytherins in the class were mostly unknown entities to him. There was a girl named Una Maroo, who had blonde hair down to her mid-thigh, horrible bangs, and an overbite. There was a boy named Gavin Woolsey and his twin sister, Margaret. The two of them kept almost entirely to themselves. In fact, he wasn’t sure he’d ever seen them apart other than in the boys’ dormitory and bathroom, now that he thought of it. They were a very affectionate brother and sister. He kept squeezing her hand every other minute, and there was something in the way she passed him the frogspawn that made Draco want to retch into his cauldron.
As the minutes ticked by and he got more and more bored, he actually started a potion, just to give himself something to do. It was an agility potion, supposedly good for mixing into broom polish. He might as well get something useful out of being stuck in here.
“Ron!” Draco’s head whipped around to where his supposed future love had her eyes very wide and her wooden spoon half-raised, dripping chunky apricot fluid back into the cauldron. She lowered her voice. “Not while I’m brewing! And certainly not in class!”
Weasley frowned. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “It was just a peck on the cheek. Don’t have kittens.” The red-head turned. “What’re you looking at, Malfoy?”
“Nothing much, apparently,” he spat back. “Oh, and Granger, your potion’s turning sulfur. You might want to take care of that.” He pinched his nose for effect. Granger immediately shrieked and threw in two bay leaves, stirring furiously.
Up front, Candanver grumbled something in his sleep that sounded suspiciously like, “Dirty, rotten ragamuffins.”
As Draco turned back to his own potion, still hearing Granger hissing and chopping up ingredients, an idea occurred to him, a potentially impossible idea.
There was one way that he could win himself some respect based entirely on his own efforts, and because it was still the first day of school, it wasn’t too late to begin.
Draco was going to try to out-do Granger.
He had the smarts, though he didn’t always bother to put them to use. It would mean hours upon hours of studying, but it wasn’t as if he were about to spend much of his time socially this coming year anyway. He would need something to keep him occupied.
If he could just manage to do at least as well or better than the Gryffindor Bookworm on the NEWTs, then he’d have something to prove his merit once and for all.
As Candanver finally got up to inspect the class, he awarded five points to Slytherin for Draco’s agility potion and six to Gryffindor for Granger’s agoraphobia potion.
It seemed he was on his way to success. Or disaster.
O
At dinner, Hermione ate quietly, looking out over the mass of students. It sent a chill up her spine to see so many empty spaces among the tables. Several students had died during the battle or had moved to safety with their families.
Neville, Lavender, Seamus, and various others from her year had already left school after attending the previous year, though she couldn’t imagine that they had gotten a very decent education.
A few others, mainly Slytherins, were now in Azkaban, Pansy Parkinson included. Even she had trouble smiling when The Prophet had informed of that. She may have never gotten along with Pansy, but she was still only a girl.
The House Elves had made a special dinner-fondue. It was messy, and Ron had cheese all up and down his robes.
She handed him a napkin, and he grunted his thanks between bites.
At the next table over, August stuck her tongue out and shivered, and Hermione nodded her agreement.
Hermione’s eyes strayed to the Slytherin table, where Malfoy was eating his fondue with a knife and fork. Between him and Ron, she wasn’t sure which one looked more ridiculous.
“So,” Harry said, across the table, “you’ll never guess what McGonagall told me after Transfiguration.”
Hermione looked up at him. “What?”
“Well, first off, it sounds as if the Grief Counseling, et cetera class is only temporary. The School Board ordered it for this year. They might have kept on Defense Against the Dark Arts, except that there’s a major shortage of people willing to take on the jinxed position. Anyway, McGonagall wanted to know if I’d like to,” he snorted, “be the new teacher next year.”
Hermione’s mouth dropped open. “Oh, Harry! That’s wonderful!”
“Wow, ‘arry, ‘at’s ‘reat!” Ron said between bites.
Harry frowned. “It might be fun, I suppose. Kind of like the D.A. again, but… you know how nervous I get in front of people.”
Ginny opened her mouth and promptly closed it again, looking thoughtful. Her eyes strayed up to the staff table. “Have you ever noticed,” she mumbled, “that none of the staff are married?” Her cheeks turned pink.
Harry froze and tugged at his collar. “And that’s a good point, too. I don’t think I’d be able to visit you all very much, except on weekends and during the holidays.”
“Well, I’m sure you could work something out,” Hermione said. She wasn’t about to let him turn down the chance at being a Professor!
“Well,” Ron said, after he’d swallowed, “McGonagall did say she’d be looking for someone to take over Transfiguration for her next year. How’s your ability to turn a mouse into a cabbage, Gin?”
Ginny rolled her eyes. “Better than yours but probably not quite up to par.” She rubbed her thumb over her Head Girl badge. “How I got this is beyond me. Speaking of which, I need to go discuss something with Woozy Wilkes. See you all later!”
Hermione grabbed herself a chunk of bread and speared it before twirling it in the cheese mixture.
There was a small part of her that was jealous of Harry.
O
A.N.: Sorry about the wait, everyone! I think I just borrowed an old plot idea from one of my really old fan fics, in which Harry becomes the DADA professor and Hermione becomes the Transfiguration professor. Hopefully this chapter helped clear up some of the very valid questions I got in reviews. Feedback appreciated, as always!
Click the tag for previous chapters.
<< >>