Hermione thought it worked out reasonably well that most of the people with whom she normally met each week were unavailable between Boxing Day and the New Year, since she didn't really feel like seeing anyone, either. The only exceptions were Neville, Sirius, and Remus, all of whom were missing someone just like she was and seemed to instinctively understand that she wasn't feeling particularly jolly that year. As Harry's absence stretched into a second week, though, she had to owl her apologies to the various professors and ask to skip that week. They all replied with polite letters indicating they understood and hoped Harry returned soon, and so the silence Hermione had worked in her whole life settled in around her.
She hated it. She loathed it.
Silence was fine for her studio flat or her dorm room before that. She'd valued silence then, stolen it away from too-loud neighbours and fellow students whom she recognized in retrospect were reaching out to her but at the time she saw only as nuisances. This house, Harry's house, was unfit for such silence. It deserved his soft breaths, the turning of pages in his Quidditch magazine or that DADA monograph of which he'd commissioned a translation, or the creak of his chair as he got up to make them a delicious dinner.
It deserved him.
She mentally berated the silence for its mere existence for a solid five minutes before she discovered there was something worse: the floo bursting to life with the sound of an unfamiliar voice saying, "Hullo? Is anyone home?"
Hermione clutched her wand so tightly she worried it might break but otherwise made no sound, no response. She didn't even breathe.
After a moment, the voice spoke out again. "Wronski!"
The flame cut off, only to return again a moment later.
"No? Hmmm...seven?"
The same thing happened to the flame and the voice made a little noise of irritation.
"Phooey. He must've changed the theme of his floo passwords. I suppose that's only fair. His life has changed a lot since he bought this house. Something else must be more important to him."
She paused for a moment, then said, "Family."
The flame cut away, then flared back. "No?" she asked. "But I was so...hmmm...I know. Godric's Hollow."
The flame once again cut away and returned. "Only one more guess this hour," the voice said. "What else changed? Oh, of course! It's so simple. Winter."
Terror gripped Hermione as a young blonde woman tumbled out of the floo and landed in a seated position. "Hullo," she said, staring calmly down the length of Hermione's wand from the next room over. "I'm afraid you have quite the wrackspurt infestation."
"You...you need to go," Hermione said. "I won't let anyone in here without Harry's approval. I'll call the pol...Aurors if I have to."
"Harry has never disapproved of me visiting before," the woman said. She was still sitting on the floor and made no effort to rise to her feet or draw the wand that was currently holding her wavy blonde hair in a messy bun.
"I'm not really in a position to evaluate the truthfulness of that statement," Hermione said, trying to sound calmer than she was.
The woman stared at her for a moment with her slightly protruding grey eyes. "Yes," she finally said, "definitely wrackspurts. You used to have quite the infestation, didn't you, and it's coming back?"
"I...I'm sorry, but what on Earth is a wrackspurt?" Hermione asked.
The other woman cocked her head at Hermione and stared at her for a solid twenty seconds.
YOU ARE READING
Hermione Granger and the Theft of Magic
Fanfiction(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...
