"A December Day In The Hogwarts Hair Salon, Year Five." (Harry Potter) G
Title: A December Day In The Hogwarts Hair Salon, Year Five. (On Archive Of Our Own)
Author:
lannamichaels
Fandom: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Series: Part 3 of Snakeskin
Rating: G
A/N: I would love to call this a flashfic, except I reused too much of the previous stuff in the flash re-write today. :( Anyway, I write to tell you that as I was posting this and trying to come up with a great cut tag for Dreamwidth, I went to back to Give 'Em Hell, Kid by My Chemical Romance to find a good continuing lyric to "this is how we like to do it in the murder scene" and discovered the line "your dreams and your hopeless hair" and that is now the secondary title for this fic. Happy December and soon-a-happy-new-year to all us hopeless hair people, whether or not you let yourself be recruited by a bodyswapped Voldemort.
Summary: Things to do in Hogwarts when you have unmanageable hair.
In fifth year, Hermione Granger unexpectedly bonded with Harry Potter over having unmanageable hair.
Once she started being able to go to Hogsmeade, there was no real reason for Hermione to keep going to the school hair salon that popped up every Sunday in the Astronomy Tower. But it was free to students and, since her hair was so awful anyway, why should she waste good money on a bad haircut when instead she could waste no money on a bad haircut? And magical haircuts are at least quick. There was no hair stylist sighing over her or telling her about layers or unexpectedly shoving orange-scented product into her hair. Hermione Granger had terrible hair. The most she could ask from it was to not get into her face all the time. Looking pretty was beyond it and always would be.
Harry Potter also had unmanageable hair. He kept it short, too, so he was at the Hogwarts salon every two weeks, without fail, getting it shorn down.
"Draco tells me that if I let it get longer, it'll get easier," Harry said to Hermione one December day in the Hogwarts Hair Salon after ignoring her for five years. "I just have to look at you to know that's not true." And... that was why Hermione, overall, had been pretty happy to have Harry ignore her for five years.
During her first few months at Hogwarts, when Hermione had been desperate to find someone who would talk to her and not be mean about it, she'd gone up to Harry in the library, working off the theory that, even if he were a Slytherin boy, he was as smart as she was, did better in class than she did, and was the only other first year to spend as much time in the library as she did. He even had a pass to the restricted section. Wasn't that what friendships were supposed to be made of?
He'd snubbed her completely. It'd stung but eventually she started being glad he'd done it, all things considered. Yes, he was smart, yes, he was great at magic, but he was also the ringleader of the worst gang in the school. He didn't even seem to do much with them intentionally, but he was definitely the one in charge. He seemed amused by them, superior and above it all, but his eyes glinted when they went after other students. And all the teachers, somehow, really liked Harry. It wasn't only Professor Snape who Harry could get to ignore the fact that Draco Malfoy was standing over a crying, bleeding classmate.
Draco Malfoy really had it out for Ron. Everyone told her that the Slytherins and Gryffindors were mortal enemies, but often, Hermione wondered what it would take for a teacher to put a stop to it.
She'd written home about it and her parents had told her to keep her head down, learn everything she could, and stay away from boys fighting in the hallways. But there were girls in Harry's gang, too.
But mostly they did leave her alone, at least compared to everyone else in their year. Hermione knew that wasn't because they liked her or anything. It was because Hermione spent most of her time in the library, and Harry's gang never targeted anyone in the library. Hermione didn't know if Madam Pince was somehow the only adult in the school that Harry respected, or if it was just that Harry also appreciated some peace and quiet some of the time. He was in the library a lot, too. He had his own table that might as well have a Property Of Harry Potter plaque on it now for the way that no one else would even touch it. It didn't matter if all the other tables were being used. You sat on the floor before you took a chance that Harry Potter would have to evict you from his table. Everything Hermione had learned about practical defense, she'd learned because of Millicent Bulstrode and Pansy Parkinson, but she didn't much rate her chances against Harry Potter.
But he'd ignored her and that'd been-- well, it'd been fine. She didn't want to be his friend anyway. Sometimes she wanted to read his notebooks and see what was going on inside his head, but that was just for research. He had a completely different way of looking at magic than anyone else their age. He seemed to come at it like an expert, not like a student, but he didn't make stupid mistakes. He didn't seem to make any mistakes.
Hermione had sternly told herself for years that Harry Potter was never going to coauthor a research paper with her and that was okay. That the best she should hope for from Harry Potter was that maybe, one day, he'd tell his gang to stop bothering her.
Why was he now talking about hair with her? Hers was bushy, his was just wild, one of them was popular, the other one was Hermione Granger.
"One day, I'm going to shave it all off," Hermione said in the interests of small talk.
"Why not do it now?" Harry asked.
"I don't need more reasons for your Slytherins to call me names," Hermione said, because he was the one who'd started talking to her.
Harry looked confused. "Why would that bother you? You're the smartest witch in the year. You know you're better than them."
"What, does that work for you?" Hermione asked. "No one else's opinion matters, because you're the superior wizard?"
"Yes," Harry Potter said.
"What kind of spell do you need for that?" Hermione asked, and she wasn't joking. If there was some kind of self-confidence spell he'd invented, she wanted to try it out. Her life would be so much better if people liked her, but her life would also be so much better if she stopped caring that they didn't. She sort-of got along with most of the girls in Gryffindor, and Neville Longbottom wasn't too bad if you were willing to ignore how boring he was, but Hermione's goals at Hogwarts were to learn as much as she could and wait to make friends once she was out of there. Once she was around people who didn't care so much about Quidditch and divination and dating, then she'd meet people who liked her. Right? They could really meld on an intellectual level, once she could meet people who could keep up and who also weren't huge bullies. Unfortunately, Hermione didn't know anyone like that right now.
"Any spell that they can't counter fast enough is usually enough to assert dominance in the Slytherin dorms," Harry said. "In Gryffindor, do you sort yourselves by sporting ability? Or physical appearance?"
Hermione sighed. "Yes, unfortunately." She should have been Ravenclaw, but Hat had thought her bravery was something to develop and encourage. But it turned out that all she was brave enough to do was talk to a bully like she wasn't scared of him.
"Try hexing them," Harry advised. "The Weasley in our year is very scared of all Class P charms. Try one on him the next time he talks about your teeth."
Harry Potter paid attention to what Ron Weasley said about Hermione's teeth?
Oh, right, Ron had shouted about it in the library on Friday. Hermione sighed again.
"I'll just get trounced by all his friends and get detention," Hermione said. "It's not worth it."
"It's one thing to be smart enough to pick your battles," Harry said. "It's another thing to be too smart to fight any of them."
Hermione winced. Okay, that one was true.
"Let's make a deal," Harry said.
Oh. Oh, no.
"You're smart, but you don't do anything with it," Harry started.
Bully or not, most powerful wizard in the school or not, someone who had clearly set all this up to manipulate her or not, Hermione wasn't going to put up with that. "Excuse me?"
"I've watched you. All you do is memorize your textbooks. You're so rule-bound, you never try anything. You never create anything. You might as well be a talking parrot," Harry said. "You don't take any risks. But I can help."
Hermione crossed her arms. "You're creating a problem and presenting a solution to it that you benefit from."
"We both benefit," Harry said. "You get opportunities to really use your genius, to experiment, to try new things. I get the satisfaction of knowing that I'm helping a fellow muggleborn."
"You're not a muggleborn!" Hermione couldn't help herself. "Stop saying that, everyone knows you're not."
"I'm as good as," Harry said, unperturbed. "What happened before I can remember isn't anything I can remember, so it doesn't matter. Everyone who ever raised me since I stopped being a useless lump of a toddler was a muggle. That matters more to me than genetics."
Oh, right, a useless lump of a toddler that defeated You-Know-Who! Hermione couldn't believe she was listening to this. Hermione couldn't believe she was thinking about this. "Do all your precious Slytherins know you're talking to me?"
Harry smiled at her. "As we've discussed, I don't care what they think."
"So you can add people to your gang without their consent?" Hermione asked.
"It is my gang," Harry said sensibly. "If they don't like my recruitment policies, they can leave."
Yes, that was what budding dark lords in Slytherin had always been known for: letting people leave. "I'm not interested," Hermione said.
"What do you do in the summers?" Harry asked.
"Uh-- what?" Hermione said.
"The summers," Harry repeated. "Do you have any access to the magical world at all? Or are you shoved back into the muggle world to fend for yourself, do homework by yourself, no one to talk to, no social ties back here? Do you just go home and watch movies and talk to your friends at home about how you have no friends at school?"
Assuming she had any friends at home, yes. Well, there was Francine down the block whose mother was a squib and so she knew about Hogwarts, but that only counted in the way that Hermione was pretty sure Francine didn't secretly loathe her and was just putting up with the whole thing because Hermione's mother bought the best scones. "What's wrong with that?" Hermione asked.
"I've been thinking we need a muggleborn club," Harry said. "It doesn't make sense that there isn't a group for all of us, the ones who didn't grow up with magic. We're supposed to fit in like we were born on broomsticks, but none of us were. Some people in Slytherin even wanted me to be ashamed of it, as if I'd ever be ashamed of where I came from. My family made me who I am today."
That said a lot of things about Harry's family, none of them good. And he still wasn't a muggleborn! The family who made him who he was today definitely put him on a broomstick as a baby; there were photos in the Prophet. Harry Potter wasn't a muggleborn. Pretty famously, Harry Potter wasn't a muggleborn. If anyone knew anything about Harry Potter, they knew that. Why was he trying to make it sound like he had anything in common with Hermione?
Oh, right, because he was trying to recruit her for some reason.
"There's a Hogwarts parents group," Hermione said, because her parents were very active in it. Her parents, if not Hermione, at least got a social group out of this whole thing.
"Which doesn't help us very much with homework questions over the summer. We should have each other to rely on, since we can't rely on the magical world to help us. They assign us homework and tell us to go do it, but how are we supposed to do it when we live in the muggle world and are subject to secrecy laws? I can't very well do my homework where the neighbors could see, or mention it at all when my cousin has his friends over."
Harry Potter could swan up to the Malfoys any time he wanted and put his feet up on the dining room table and all they'd ask him was what he wanted for dinner. "So what? You have tons of friends."
"Exactly," Harry agreed with her. "I got lucky that I made friends with students whose parents were glad to help me out. Professor Snape even gives me private tutoring. But I know how lucky I got. We shouldn't have to just get lucky. We should be helping each other."
"And so you want me to join your gang?" Hermione asked. "So you can help me with my homework?"
"I was thinking more of a decentralized pen pal system," Harry said. "We could keep a record of what everyone's biggest strengths are and our telephone numbers, and then, over the summer, we know who to ask if we have questions. Owls take so long, you know? And none of my roommates even know what a phone is. I can't call them up if I don't understand Arithmancy."
"Since when don't you understand Arithmancy?" Hermione asked.
Harry waved his hand. "It's an example, Hermione," he said. "But I don't know everything. Even I have to study. What do you think I'm doing in the library all the time, plotting world domination?"
"Yes," Hermione told him.
Harry shrugged it off. "So what do you say? You can organize the muggleborns for me since, as you say, they're not going to believe that I really consider myself one of them, and I'll help you really explore your magic. I know you could be so creative, if you stopped being so scared of the Gryffindors hating you. They already hate you."
So that was his sales pitch. Responsibility and friends and magic.
If only she wasn't really really really sure that he was probably going to become a Dark Lord someday and she'd never be able to leave...
"Would I get any research papers out of it?" Hermione asked.
"Loads," Harry did not hesitate to promise her.
"I'll think about it," Hermione said.
This entry was originally posted at https://lannamichaels.dreamwidth.org/1231328.html.