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It began with a crocodile heart.
It was strange, really, that it would be so. It was not at all what she had imagined, as a little girl, entranced by fairytales and sweeping romances, and even now, as a young woman of fourteen, she remained in stubborn denial about what it exactly was.
The crocodilian heart has four chambers and two ventricles, an unusual trait among extant reptiles, which, when the creature is submerged, slows to just one or two beats per minute. This, Hermione knew, was what made the large, complex muscle, such a powerful potions ingredient, worth its weight in gold, and certainly a remarkable thing to behold.
Ron was gagging. ‘It stinks.’
‘It does not stink,’ she lied testily. ‘It’s amazing - I wish we could have one each.’
‘Yeah? What would you do with yours? Turn it into perfume?’
‘I only meant - oh, never mind. Shut up.’ She looked over at Harry, still grinding the pestle and mortar. ‘Are you finished with the bicorn horn yet? It needs to be rubbed into the heart before-’
‘Not yet, it’s really hard to-’
‘Whooooooo! WhoooOOOoooo!’
They turned to see Malfoy, with his cloak over his head like a terrible shawl and a nasty grin plastered over his rodent-y face, wiggling his fingers at them. Hermione was just about to loudly ask him what on earth he was doing, when Ron muttered darkly, ‘just ignore him, Harry.’
She looked back at Harry to see the familiar tension around his jaw when he was upset; all other emotion seemed to drop from his face. He ground the grey horn shards a little harder as Malfoy made a strange, rattling sort of breath.
‘They’re coming to get you, Potter,’ Malfoy called across the room darkly. ‘The Dementors… watch out… they’ll suck your soul out… closest you’re ever going to get to getting sucked off, I expect...’
Revolted and outraged, Hermione looked over at Professor Snape, who could surely hear Malfoy, but he showed no indication of lifting his nose from his mountain of marking on his desk.
‘Dickhead,’ Ron muttered.
‘Careful, Potter… the Dementors are going to get you…’
Harry was usually very quick to come back with a retort to Malfoy, but he remained bizarrely stoic, his eyes fixed firmly on the pestle and mortar, his shoulders tense; Hermione could see the whites of his knuckles around the pestle. His fear, unlike any Hermione had ever seen in him, of the Dementors was clearly a sore spot.
‘They’ll make you swoon, Potter… Oh, how you’ve dreamt of getting sucked off by a Dementor…’
‘He’s revolting,’ Hermione hissed, as Crabbe, Goyle and Pansy Parkinson’s laughs echoed through the dungeon. ‘Really immature - don’t rise to it, Harry.’
‘Potter, if you spot a Dementor, will you wait until you get a Kiss before you fall unconscious?’
‘I’ll tell him to fuck off,’ said Ron, through gritted teeth. ‘Absolute-’
Malfoy was doing the rattling, shaking breath again, and through the sucking breaths was saying, ‘Potter… Potter… don’t swoon, Potter…’
She saw a slight twitch in Harry’s lips before he pressed them further together, his face otherwise utterly blank, but even in the dim light of the dungeon she could see the pink rushing along his cheekbones.
‘Never had you down for a fainter, Potter - what are you going to do if there’s more than one? Heart attack?’
‘I think this is done now,’ Harry said, pushing the mortar clumsily towards her. ‘How do we-?’
‘If only You-Know-Who could have known that all he needed to do was put his hood up and you’d drop down dead of fright-’
Before Hermione could react, Ron had seized the crocodile heart and flung it, hard, across the room. It hit Malfoy directly in the face with a satisfying splat, seeming to hang there for a moment before rebounding, wobbling, onto the floor. Malfoy’s stunned face was left smeared with the unpleasant smelling blood residue.
‘WEASLEY!’ roared Professor Snape.
Ron, his fists clenched and still staring at Malfoy with unrestrained fury, looked as though he might be about to shout, ‘what?’ back at Snape, but thankfully settled for a resentful glare.
‘How dare you? Fifty points from Gryffindor for that atrocious-’
‘He said-!’
‘Only pathetic children resort to such acts! Pick it up and clean it off - it may still be salvageable.’
Ron gave the crocodile heart a half-hearted rinse under the nearest tap, and returned with a face like thunder.
‘Good shot,’ said Harry, whose eyebrows had remained raised.
‘Foul git,’ Ron muttered venomously. He looked warily at Hermione. ‘I got all the big bits off but it’s still got little bits stuck to it, the floor’s filthy in here. Sorry.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ she said smoothly, dabbing the heart with a cleaning cloth she grabbed from the nearest scorched workbench. All the little bits of grime - tiny pieces of parchment or strands of quill feathers or strands of hair - remained stubbornly stuck to the sinew.
She had been looking forward to using the crocodile heart - Professor Snape had mentioned that he had ordered them in from a specialist shop in Egypt - for a few weeks, and now with so many contaminants, it was unlikely to work properly in their potion. Their buoyancy brew was now unlikely to make anyone float.
She glanced at Harry. He seemed calmer. His shoulders were less rigid, there was some personality back in his face.
‘No harm done,’ she said to Ron.
‘Yeah there is,’ he said gloomily. ‘Fifty points.’
‘Thanks,’ said Harry quietly. ‘He’s shut up now, hasn’t he?’
They all unsubtly turned to look at Malfoy, still scrubbing his face at a sink, making retching noises. Ron snorted, then hurriedly looked busy picking lint off the heart again as Snape looked at them.
‘Too right,’ said Ron. ‘That’ll teach him.’
‘Worth it,’ said Harry.
Something strange was happening to Hermione. The boys were still muttering venomously about Malfoy, but she was trying to wipe dirt off the crocodile’s extra valve. Valves flutter as the heart beats, didn’t they? Hers certainly felt as though it were fluttering madly.
As the lesson continued and their potion failed miserably, Hermione’s thoughts drifted to the way Ron’s arm had pulled back, how powerfully he had thrown it, and the look of protective rage across his freckled face.
‘Mark my words, Weasley,’ said Snape snidely as they packed their bags at the end of the lesson, ‘you are on incredibly thin ice.’
They headed to lunch, and over the cheesy pasta bake they loaded onto their plates, she could hear Ron continuing to roundly abuse Malfoy and Snape, as well as strongly emphasising how foul Dementors were. ‘It’s not like he’s chirpy around them, is it?’ he said furiously.
‘Yeah,’ said Harry fervently.
‘I mean who would be?’ Ron continued, helping himself to another hefty portion.
That was what she liked most about Ron, she thought vaguely. He was very good at being suitably outraged on your behalf. For Harry, for her, for Neville. That sort of thing mattered, when you were hurt or embarrassed or wronged in some way. You needed to have someone else on your side, to be as emotional as you felt, maybe even more so, so that you might feel a bit more normal. It was very decent of him, and she was not sure he realised he did it.
She did not even mind when Ron threatened to skip Defence Against the Dark Arts after lunch - dreading, as she was, being taught by Snape twice - and peered around the door for him.
Had it been Snape, she realised, as they settled happily into the lesson with Professor Lupin, she would have gladly skipped the lesson with him. The realisation of it hit her like a bolt from the blue. It wouldn’t have occurred to her to play truant - such thoughts did not come naturally to her - but at his suggestion of it she had felt a surge of… something like inspiration. An adamant ‘yes, that’s right, actually’ sort of feeling. That fierceness of feeling that she so adored in him - it was catching. She had a very strange feeling. Swooping, almost.
That evening, Harry was dragged away by Oliver Wood to discuss brooms, and Hermione persuaded Ron to sit with her at one of the tables and work on their charms essay. The sunset had been a vivid pink and swift, and now the windows were so dark that she could see Ron’s pale reflection, dotted with freckles, as he stared determinedly out of it.
‘Ron?’ she prompted. ‘What do you think about Faubourg’s Continu - are you listening?’
‘Nah, I’m knackered - I’ll do it tomorrow.’
‘No, you won’t.’
‘Nah, I won’t, but I’m still going to bed now,’ he said. ‘My brain’s melting.’
She tutted, but could see that she wasn’t going to get anymore focus out of him, and in all honesty she was still so quietly pleased with him. ‘All right. We’ll do it when Harry’s with us.’
‘Thanks for not having a go about the heart thing earlier,’ said Ron, yawning lazily. ‘I just know I’m going to have some annoying twerp come and nag about the points and - well - I’m glad it wasn’t you.’
‘No, I…’ She hesitated. There was that funny feeling back again. ‘I’m glad you did it, actually.’
He looked astonished. ‘You feeling all right?’
‘Well - I just - I was really losing my temper too, and I could see that Harry was trying not to rise to it-’
‘Trying not to give him the satisfaction, I think,’ said Ron sagely.
‘Well, exactly-’
‘Which I did-’
‘But it wasn’t Harry! He got what he deserved, if you ask me, and it wasn’t like he’d managed to get under Harry’s skin.’
‘He did get what he deserved, didn’t he?’ said Ron stubbornly. ‘He absolutely deserves a big hunk of slimy, stinking, raw meat straight in the face. Thanks, Hermione.’
‘And it was a really good shot,’ said Hermione, and for reasons she couldn’t quite understand, her cheeks felt hot. ‘Harry was right.’
‘He just shouldn’t…’ Ron shrugged, and she saw a slight bulge in his cheek where he was irritably chewing on his tongue. ‘Talk like that. Shouldn’t get away with it. I hate it when he talks to Harry like that, I hate it when he talks to you like that, I hate the way he just goes round chatting shit and then snivelling and playing the victim when someone fights back.’
‘Quite right.’
‘I thought you’d be furious.’
'Why?'
'Dunno. Childish. Ruined your potion.'
'I told you. He deserved it. And I’m glad you stuck up for Harry. I think he appreciated it.'
He nodded, and they stared at one another for a moment, brown eyes meeting blue.
'Well… good night,' he said eventually.
'Good night,' she said. She watched him head up to the boys dormitories, and then gathered up her essay and headed up to bed herself.
She looked up at the slightly faded red canopy of her four poster bed, and thought about how ready Ron was to stand up for his friends, to protect them. Inside her chest, her heart, surely as large as a crocodile's, fluttered.