Chapter Text
One Year Later
Hermione double checked the number in front of her with the letter clutched in her hand, took a deep breath, then rapped her knuckles three times on the door. A cocktail of nerves and excitement mixed in her stomach. She buzzed, borderline vibrated, as she waited for the door to open.
Shuffling footsteps, then the creak of the door as it opened slightly, revealing a single brown eye staring at her through the small crack.
“Uh, hi!” said Hermione brightly, speaking to the floating, cycloptic entity. “I’m Hermione,” she waved. “I believe we’ll be sharing this set, this year.”
The eye blinked at her blankly. Then, a moment later the door opened fully and the Cyclops turned into a girl with two eyes and a mousy ponytail who stared at Hermione with a blank, impassive expression.
“I’m June,” said the girl then extended her hand – a jerky movement that came slightly too late after her introduction, as if she had just remembered that this was, allegedly, the thing to do when meeting someone new.
“Nice to meet you,” Hermione smiled, undeterred by her new housemate’s less than warm welcome. She had just barely opened her mouth to ask whether any of the others had arrived yet when June, seeing this as a segue into more social interaction, scurried off, leaving Hermione alone at the entryway.
“Right,” Hermione muttered to herself, then shook her head. This was a good day, she told herself. This was going to be a great day.
Hermione stepped into the apartment that she was to be sharing with 3 other girls this year, June included. Her eyes swept over the living room – plain, sparsely furnished – on her way to her assigned room. She again took a deep breath before slotting her key into the keyhole and opening the door.
As soon as she stepped into the room, she felt a miniscule shift, as though the cells and atoms in her body had, ever so slightly, rearranged themselves.
The room was bright and spacious – more spacious than she could have hoped for. She immediately loved everything about it, from its worn furniture to its faded green-blue carpet. She loved how empty and clean and fresh it was, its walls and bed and bookshelf stripped bare, ready for her to decorate them and make them her own. The bare room went hand in hand with the weightlessness she now felt, having shed a little something of herself on the other side of the door.
Already, she had visions of herself studying late into the night on the little white desk next to the bed, her desk-lamp turned on, casting its light on her readings. She imagined herself stumbling into bed afterwards, her head buzzing with all that she had learned. The next morning, she would be woken up by the sun streaming in through the double windows, because, in her tiredness, she had forgotten to close her curtains the night before. She would get up to close the curtains, and in doing so would look outside and see students already milling about on the quad below, see the sun making its way over the Oxford skyline.
She put down her suitcase and plopped herself down onto the bed. The fact that it was used by dozens of other students before her didn’t gross her out; instead, it made her feel initiated. Here was proof that she too, finally, was an Oxford student, laying where countless others had lain before, staring up at the same ceiling, watching dust mites float in the mid-morning light, listening to the sound of chatter outside and on the green below.
—————— • ● ⚜︎ ● • ——————
As she stood in line, which stretched nearly all the way to the door and had not moved an inch in the past 10 minutes, Hermione rued her decision to collect her student card during what looked to be peak hour at the student administrative office.
She stifled a groan. Stuck in line with nothing to distract herself, she decided to play a game. She picked out a random person in the room – lined up like she was, or else sitting on the plastic chairs dotting the sides of the office – and tried to guess what faculty they had been accepted into, what their majors were.
She found that this game made the time go by surprisingly quickly.
The painfully skinny boy with shaggy hair, button up shirt and vest, and glasses that gave him a curious, owl-like stare was obviously in Mathematics. The girl with the severe bun and beige, knee length skirt probably studied Education. The honey-blonde girl in the oversized sweater who was standing at the very front of the line was harder to pin down – she seemed like the type to study Arts, but Hermione had trouble pinning down her exact major. Perhaps a language, or maybe linguistics? Or maybe even literature – Hermione wouldn’t be surprised if she saw the girl again in one of her own lectures or tutorials.
The platinum blonde boy who stood behind the girl, his hair so blonde that it was almost pure white…
Hermione did a double-take, then gasped. There was a second’s delay between her brain registering exactly what, or rather who, she was looking at, and that knowledge then making its way to her heart, which promptly skipped a beat.
In the miniscule moment during which her heart was still, Hermione floated and fell all at once. Then the stupid organ resumed its beating once more, at triple speed.
The people closest to her turned around to look at her but she paid them no mind. The boy turned his head – a slight tilt as he reached for something in the pocket of his trousers – and Hermione’s worst suspicions were confirmed. That sharp, aristocratic profile. His long, straight nose. Wispy lashes, lips which she had always thought were too full, too pretty to belong to a boy.
It was him.
She mouthed a profanity and slunk back into line, grateful that she could hide behind the big, broad back of the man standing in front of her.
It was him, there was no doubt about it. She would recognise that profile, that shade of blonde, anywhere. She would recognise him at any place, at any time. She would recognise him at the end of the world.
She watched him over the shoulders of the students in front of her, observant as a hawk, while her heart pounded.
Hermione fidgeted while the line crawled by at a snail’s pace. She couldn’t be spotted; he couldn’t see her. The office was stuffy, crammed full of young, restless bodies generating heat. She felt a line sheen of sweat break out over her entire body and tried to inconspicuously wipe her brow. She took a deep breath, tried to manually slow her heart down, but it was no use – the sweat broke out over skin just as soon as she had cleared it; her lungs refused to expand all the way.
Panic started to overtake her mind, like ivy taking over an abandoned building, slowly creeping into the crevices in her brain. She squeezed her eyes shut, forced her breathing to slow down with a level of effort that would have been more commensurate with pushing a boulder up a mountain.
When it was his turn at the front of the line, Hermione’s ears strained to catch his voice, to hear him speak. She was too far away, however, and whatever he said to the office clerk behind the glass barrier at the front desk was drowned out by the chatter all around her. Her head was full of bees.
“Are you okay?”
She jumped, startled by the voice. She opened her eyes and found that there was a hand on her shoulder, and that that hand belonged to the Mathematics major. A look of concern was magnified in his owl-like eyes, made that much more pronounced by his massive glasses.
Hermione nodded, not trusting herself to speak. The boy rummaged around in his bag then pulled out a water bottle, offering it to Hermione. She took it with a nod of thanks, properly thanking him when the water had quenched her parched throat.
“You’re welcome,” he smiled. “It gets so hot in these old buildings, sometimes. There’s no aircon,” he said by way of explanation. “Learned that the hard way, my first semester here.”
“Are you in your second year?” she asked, for a moment distracted by the kind stranger.
The boy nodded. “I’m taking some first year electives this semester, but otherwise yes. Second Year.”
Hermione seized onto him like a lifeline. “What electives?” she asked, taking another sip.
“Intro to English language and literature. I’m a Maths major though.”
“Aha!” she burst out. The people closest to them turned and gave her a dirty look. She hoped she didn’t have to share any classes with them, anytime soon.
The boy gave her a curious look, tilting his head. She found this gesture, which was almost comical, unspeakably endearing.
“Sorry,” she muttered. “I was playing a game earlier, to pass the time – trying to guess what everyone was studying. I guessed yours. Correctly," she added.
He grinned. “That’s fun. Can I do you?”
Hermione sputtered on her water before shaking any unwelcome thoughts from her head and muttering, go ahead.
He tilted his head again in a show of thought. “Is it…Modern Languages?”
“Close,” Hermione grinned. “Classics and English.”
“Oh! You might be in my lit class this term.”
“Maybe.”
He smiled and extended his hand. “I’m Peter Murdoch, by the way. Lovely to meet you.”
“Hermione Granger.”
Hermione watched out of the corner of her eye as he collected his things and made his way to the exit. Peter was saying something, but she couldn’t focus on exactly what because for a painful, agonising second, just as Draco Malfoy paused to open the door, it seemed as though he might turn around.
However, in the next moment whatever thought held him at the door seemed to have abated and he pushed it open and left the office, taking Hermione’s anxiety with him. Hermione heaved a sigh of relief, feeling as though two tonnes of bricks had fallen from her body, one from each shoulder.
Peter was staring at her curiously. She realised that she had ignored his question.
“I’m sorry, what did you say?”
“I said, are you staying far from here?”
—————— • ● ⚜︎ ● • ——————
Later that day Hermione went for a long walk and tried to familiarise herself with the sprawling campus, buzzing with students before the start of the new semester.
Oxford was a dream, and one which was all the sweeter for all the trouble that it took for her to enter its hallowed ground. She soaked in the sights and the sounds of the university, its inhabitants. She felt as though she were a tourist, or a nature documentarian, observing the university through an outsider’s lens.
The anxiety that she had experienced at the admin office was, like a stubborn poison lingering in her bloodstream, slow to leave her system. But even so, she couldn’t help herself from smiling at anyone who happened to catch her eye as she walked; couldn’t help the borderline euphoria that she felt walking through the campus of her dreams. She was well aware she might have looked insane, walking alone, her face split into a wide grin, but she didn’t care.
She was here, finally. She had made it. Nothing else mattered, not even the other students on campus.
One student in particular.
She tried to imagine running into him, seeing him after her disappearing act, and she cringed at the thought.
Even now, more than a year later, Hermione still had trouble recalling their final conversation. The memory scraped the inside of her mind – a painful recollection that made her wince every time it came to her, seemingly at random and during parts of her day that should not have, ordinarily, brought forth memories of Draco.
Her reply was so small, she wasn’t sure if he would hear her. “Did you know?”
“I–” he sounded strangled. “I didn’t know it would be that soon. I thought–”
Hermione knew that she couldn’t go on. She couldn’t follow the same patterns, couldn’t keep doing the same thing that she had always done. She couldn’t keep running on that treadmill of overwork and exhaustion; she couldn’t maintain her pace without injuring herself. Without hurting something vital.
Besides, what had her hard work ever gotten her? She had been so sure that she wouldn’t get into Oxford – that she didn’t have enough going for her to distinguish herself from the thousands of applicants from all over the world, with their perfect grades and humanitarian endeavours – that she didn’t even try to apply. If her competition was unbeatable, then she had nothing to lose by not even trying to get in. There was simply no point, she told herself, in running a race which she was sure to lose.
And so, one morning she had simply packed her bags and left, before the roosters had started crowing and long before anyone else at the Burrow had woken up. She quelled that part of herself that screamed coward, the part that wanted to stay and make Oxford tell her exactly why she was unfit as a candidate.
The part of her that wanted to trek all the way to Malfoy Manor and demand an explanation from the one person that she had been so sure would not lie to her.
She couldn’t face the thought of saying goodbye to the Weasleys and to Pansy, and being faced with a million persuasive reasons to stay. Or worse, a million questions as to where she was going and what she planned on doing, neither of which she had adequate answers to.
She had no plan, no real family to rely on. She only had her meagre savings from sporadic weekend shifts at the pub and the knowledge that she couldn’t, wouldn’t, remain in England.
With England off-limits, the rest of Europe opened itself up to her. The same day that she left the Burrow she took the train to Paris, where she stayed for two weeks in a dodgy hostel and put her French to good use. From there, she travelled to the South of France, then Spain, then Portugal, following a trail down south. From Portugal she travelled to Italy, then Austria, then Germany. She stayed in the cheapest accommodation that she could find and ate food from the supermarket, and woke up every day with no plan, nothing at all on her agenda.
She walked every inch of every new city until her feet hurt. She went to museums and art galleries. When she got lonely, she sat in cafes and bars and soaked up the conversations happening all around her, never joining in but always listening.
It was easy to forget what she was running from, even if she didn’t want to admit to herself that she was running. Being in new surroundings had that effect – new countries and new cities erased your past and tricked you into thinking that your future was limitless. You existed solely in the here and now, and who you were that hour, that day.
It took a grand amount of effort, at first, to get rid of all her old habits, to undo the routine that she had set for herself and had followed to a fault since she had entered high school. No more waking up before dawn, no more studying until her eyes strained to read the words on the page. No more chasing perfection, and beating herself up when she inevitably came up short. She was done. And at first, it felt wonderful to be free, to be unburdened by all the things that people with homes and families and friends and responsibilities were burdened by. Hermione loved the feeling of being groundless, of living out of her suitcase. She could do whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted. She had to answer to no one.
After a couple of months, however, the feeling of being untethered quickly became old. Like a helium balloon that floats up and grazes the clouds, she eventually came down, deflated and bored of her purposeless existence. Without anything to focus on or a routine to keep her grounded, she crumbled - a skeleton with its spine removed.
The old need for routine drove her to volunteer for a few months, teaching French and English, but the need for a steady – or, at the very least, some – income drove her to return to the UK where she found a job working in a tiny bookstore in Edinburgh, the closest to England that she could bear returning.
Surrounded by the smell of old pages and disintegrating binding glue, safe amid the towering shelves in that tiny maze of a shop, Hermione had felt a calm like she had never experienced in her life before. She found that she was in her element stacking books and giving recommendations, chatting to anyone that she stepped foot in the shop, whether it was a new customer or a regular.
She couldn’t imagine a better, more stress-free existence. Wasn’t this the life? Wasn’t this leaps and bounds better than her old one, which had consisted of waking up before dawn and burying her nose in a textbook even before she had brushed her teeth? Wasn’t this what everyone wanted, to be surrounded by old books and to, for the most part, be left alone?
Before long, however, the safety of the shop too became stale. The bookstore became claustrophobic and she began to feel trapped instead of cozy. The city too, ceased to have its antidepressant effect once she had familiarised herself with it. Once Edinburgh started to feel like home, the memories and all that she had been trying to escape came flooding back. Without new stimuli, new sights and sounds and smells, a new city every week, her mind couldn’t distract itself. It landed on the things that she had been trying to avoid – it bit and worried at them like a dog bites and worries a beloved chew toy.
Draco.
She couldn’t escape the thought of him, the memory of their last time seeing each other, on the night of the ball. The memory of the cottage – something that had, in the moment, felt like something sacred – was now tainted by their last telephone call and all the things that she had never given them the chance to resolve.
Hermione also longed to feel challenged again. Occasionally, to prevent atrophy, she read a textbook on whatever topic interested her from the bookstore’s non-fiction section. Her brain welcomed the strain of learning, the push that came with tackling a difficult concept or theory. Burnout aside, she had missed that part of being in school.
The years seemed to stretch on before her. Was this it? Working in a shabby little bookstore in a tiny, cold city, away from the closest thing she had to family? Away from her friends?
Edinburgh had effectively wiped away her past, but she couldn’t remain there knowing that it promised no future, either. Eventually, the pain of remaining stagnant overshadowed the pain of coming back and so, almost a year after she had left England, she returned and applied to Oxford.
And got in.