Fire

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Fire

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Flint and steel and the hands that hold us. Steel and flint to strike the spark, and hands to guide the flame and give it life. Flint chipped knife-keen, steel honed razor sharp, and hands to wield us against the darkness.

Ron is the flint, sharp, strong, solid -- and all too easy to fracture if you hit his weak points. I'm the steel, cold and tempered, but I shake like a bell if you startle me. And Harry's the one who will use us. We're his weapons in this war.

I wouldn't ever tell them this, of course. It's too depressing, too abstract, and I try not to talk to them about our friendship anyway -- not since it really hit me that I'm a girl and they're both boys, and particularly not since Ron's fits of... I'd call it jealousy, except that would mean he actually fancies me, and I don't really think he does. He just thinks he ought to, since he's a boy and I'm a girl. There are times I'm glad Harry's so clueless about these things that even after the Yule Ball, he still treats me as if I haven't any real gender.

There are other times that drives me up the wall, but it's hard to stay angry with Harry.

I owe everything to Harry. Well, that's an exaggeration, but without him, I don't think I would've found friends at Hogwarts. Not Ron, not Ginny, not even Neville -- I'd have buried myself even deeper in "Miss Bossy Know-It-All" and driven everyone away. I knew nobody liked me. I knew, after the first few weeks, that magic couldn't make me popular, give me friends, solve all my problems. I wasn't stupid enough to believe in fairy tale stories like that.

But then Harry -- Harry and his saving-people-thing, dragging Ron off to warn me about the troll that first Halloween -- Harry pulled me out of myself. Harry gave me friends. Harry gave me a purpose.

Harry pulls out the best in me -- in all his friends -- without ever asking, because we can't help wanting to live up to him, to make him proud, to make him smile, to keep him safe.

He makes me want to believe in stories.

There are times I look at my life and wonder how on earth I got here, got to have friends I'd die for and who'd die for me. You see, I've never got on very well with most people. As far back as I can remember, I knew I was different. I wanted to learn, to know, to answer questions and force the world to make sense. Anyone who couldn't be logical, who was always going on about sports or make-believe, was an idiot in my book. And that sort of attitude doesn't go over very well with other kids.

"Barmy Harmy," they used to call me, "that stuck-up cow, always has her nose in a book."

They didn't like me. Well, I didn't like them either.

I read everything I could put my hands on -- stories, poetry, history, newspapers, my parents' medical journals -- and I built myself walls of words, good words to keep the taunting words out. I even read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica when I was seven, with the occasional help of my dad's dictionary, only to suffer through taunts of "walking encyclopaedia."

I spent so much time in my own world, in fact, that I lost track of the one everyone else lived in. My classmates noticed this, of course, and gave me hell.

"Tell us about the Beatles, Hermione!" So I told them about entomology. They laughed.

"Tell us about Uranus, Hermione!" It's a fascinating planet, tilted sideways on its axis, between Saturn and Neptune... Nobody listened to me.

"Are you a homo, Hermione?"

I remember that one particularly well. I'd just finished a book on paleoanthropology -- extra reading for the science lesson on evolution Miss Wilkins had planned for next week -- so I explained that since the scientific classification of humans was homo sapiens, of course I was a homo. So was everyone else in the room.

They laughed, of course. "Hermione's a homo! Hermione wants to kiss Miss Wilkins! Hey, did you hear? Barmy Harmy likes girls!"

That evening, I asked my dad what they'd meant. He explained homosexuality, my mum held me while I cried over the way people always twisted my words, and they told me I had to go back to school the next day.

"Don't let them see how much they hurt you," my dad told me. "You're better than they are -- you know how things really are. Even if you do end up liking girls, there's nothing wrong with that; you know that, even if they're too ignorant to understand. No kid at that school is a patch on you, Hermione."

I went back to school. I didn't show anyone how much they hurt me. I refused to cry in public. I reminded myself that I was better than the other kids, that I knew how the world really worked. And I stopped reading stories.

Stories lied. They talked about a world where people like me -- smart people, different people -- could fit in and have friends, could go on adventures, could maybe even fall in love someday. Stories made me want what I couldn't have. History and science were safer. Numbers, names, dates, and scientific proofs didn't lie. Well, sometimes historians lied, but those lies were easy to figure out and easy to ignore. Books didn't jeer in my face and steal my bags. Books didn't mock my hair, or point at my front teeth and call me rabbit-face.

David Jones finally helped end the teasing, though I'm sure he didn't mean to. We were ten years old, walking home after school, and he dashed up from behind and yanked my ever-present book from my hands.

"Whatcha reading, Hermione?"

"It's an ethnological study of Gypsies in the British Isles. Give it back."

"You want to be a Gypsy, Hermione? Gonna tell fortunes? Gonna steal babies? Hey, Barmy Harmy wants to be a Gypsy!"

The others laughed; one girl fluttered her hands near her eyes and made spooky noises.

"I don't want to be a Gypsy! I just think they're interesting. And give that back!" I lunged for the book -- which was a library book, and if he tore the pages I'd have to pay a fine.

David held the book over his head, just out of my reach. "Make me."

I glared, refusing to cry, and wished that I'd taken sports or knew how to fight. I wanted to slap him, throw rocks at him, push him to the pavement and stomp on him with heavy boots. I don't think I'd ever hated him quite so much as I did at that moment.

And my book -- a heavy, hardbound book -- tore itself from his hands, slammed down on his head, and shot into my hands hard enough to knock me back a step.

We all stared for a few seconds.

To this day, I'm not sure what the others thought about that -- mostly because I didn't wait around for them to decide. I snapped back to myself and ran. Glee over David's comeuppance, and hysterics over broken laws of science, could wait until I got home and could think properly again.

A cup of hot cocoa -- one of the few sweet things my parents didn't mind having in the house -- did wonders for calming me down. Then I tried to figure out what had happened.

Point the first: a book had moved on its own, which was scientifically impossible. Point the second: that movement had two parts -- attacking David, and returning to me. Point the third: I'd wanted to hurt David and get my book back.

Hypothesis: I'd made the book move, which meant that either science was loopy or magic was real.

Science wasn't loopy.

Therefore, I could do magic.

I thought about that. It didn't make any sense -- wasn't logical at all -- yet I couldn't think of any other logical explanation. And magic might account for some other peculiar things that had happened over the years, like the time my mum had bought me a pink dress. I hated pink back then; it felt demeaning, as if people expected me to be sweet and silly instead of intelligent. The first time I put it on, that dress had changed from pink to sky-blue -- still a cheerful colour, but not nearly as irritating to me. Everyone had been baffled by the mysterious change.

With the dress and the book, I'd wanted something to happen, wanted it very badly, and somehow it had happened -- like magic.

I couldn't bring myself to feel guilty over David, who was, after all, a snot-nosed little git. Instead, I was almost dancing in excitement. I had magic! It ran totally contrary to everything I'd learned, to everything I knew about the world, and yet... who doesn't dream of magic?

Maybe not all stories lied.

I didn't tell my parents, and I wasn't able to make the magic work very often, but I did manage to repair a broken wine glass and to accidentally set my hair on fire. And I got quite skilled at pulling my books back when people tried to snatch them away.

As a side benefit, whatever the other kids thought about the incident with David and my book, after that day they stopped teasing me so openly. They still whispered and laughed at my enthusiasm during lessons, but when a new girl moved to town that winter, they introduced me as "Hermione Granger, she's awfully smart," instead of the old, "That's Barmy Harmy, she's a stuck-up cow."

They still didn't like me and I still didn't like them, but we had a truce. And it's far better to be ignored than to be bullied, as I'm sure Harry would agree.

When I received my Hogwarts letter that summer, I wasn't surprised to learn I was a witch. That I'd already figured out. But there was a whole magical world, hidden alongside the regular world -- a whole world of people, people who could teach me spells and not make excuses when strange things happened around me. And they wanted me!

My parents didn't believe it at first, but the Ministry representative who visited us and guided us through Diagon Alley, changed their minds quickly enough. I did have to promise to keep up with my maths and other normal subjects over holidays, though -- not that I minded.

I studied my new books as thoroughly as possible and practiced simple charms until I could produce light, levitate small objects, and make my dad sneeze or sing or laugh just by pointing my new wand, saying a few words, and thinking hard. It was fabulous.

There were hints in some of the history books I'd bought that people from non-magical, or Muggle, backgrounds, were looked down on in the magical world. Well, I wouldn't let that hold me back. I'd finally found a story that didn't lie -- or so I thought -- and nothing was going to get in my way.

But stories do lie. Hogwarts was marvellous, and magic was everything I'd dreamed of, but I still had no friends. I was still the teacher's pet. I was still the odd girl who read too much, tried too hard, and put everyone off. I'd forgotten that you can't shed your personality and habits just because you're in a different place. You have to work at that.

The last straw was when, after I honestly tried to help him in Charms, I heard Ron telling Harry I was a nightmare. Nothing had changed. It was just like primary school, just like every other time I'd tried to reach out to people.

I wasn't going to let him see he'd got to me. I was better than he was; he wasn't a patch on me. But there are some things that you can't just let slide, and the death of your dreams is one of them. I found a bathroom, shut myself in a stall, and cried.

When the troll smashed in a few hours later, I froze. I wasn't a bit of help to Harry and Ron that time -- except that Ron knocked out the troll using the charm I'd tried to teach him earlier that day. And I got them out of trouble afterward, by lying to Professor McGonagall.

It was a strange feeling, lying to a teacher. It was even stranger to see Harry and Ron in the common room after that. We'd had an adventure together. I'd never had an adventure before at all, let alone shared one with somebody.

Maybe I could change.

The boys were patient -- for eleven year old boys -- while I tried to loosen up, tried to find who Hermione was under the layers of touchiness and behind the walls of words. They offered me friendship, and they took mine in return.

For Ron and for me, that was more or less that. We drive each other mad some days, and there are things we'll never understand about each other, but when we're friends, we're friends.

Harry, though, still seems surprised every time we return his friendship, every time we stand by him. It's as though he only expects our lapses -- the way I went behind his back to tell Professor McGonagall about the Firebolt, the way Ron didn't believe he hadn't put his own name in the Goblet of Fire -- even after all the times we haven't let him down.

I wonder, sometimes, if he understands that we love him and we'll never leave him, not when it really counts. We'd die to save him. He isn't used to that kind of love -- he still thinks he isn't important -- and I know he'd rather die to save us.

I suppose that's fair, as Ron and I would also die to save each other, but we have an unspoken understanding that we're expendable. Harry isn't. Harry's the one Voldemort hates, the one Voldemort fears. If I had a choice of which to save, I'd choose Harry over Ron, and I trust that Ron would choose Harry over me.

Once Voldemort is dead that automatic calculation may change, but until then we're only the weapons in Harry's hands -- flint and steel to strike the fire. Tools can be replaced. Harry can't.

That shook me up for weeks, realizing my expendability. My dad said none of the kids at my school were a patch on me. Well, I'm not a patch on Harry, not while the world's at war and my best friend is both the chief target and the chief weapon in that battle. Harry's our hope for peace; all Ron and I can do is support him.

Harry doesn't understand that, I think, not with the way he's always worrying about people and letting Voldemort push him around with his saving-people-thing. He shouldn't have gone after Sirius the way he did. I knew that, but I couldn't stop him -- all I could do was go along and try to keep him from getting killed. He lived, but I failed him when I forgot that powerful wizards can still cast magic without voicing their spells.

So Sirius died, and Harry... well, Harry spent weeks wavering between rage and denial. But he's still alive. He's still with us.

However, judging by his reaction to Sirius's death, and from how Neville told me he reacted after Dolohov cursed me, I'm afraid that if we died, Ron and I, Harry might shut down. In other circumstances I'd be flattered he cares so much, but we're at war. Harry can't afford to mourn us. He can't afford to protect us. We protect him.

I've moved from having no friends and no place in life, to having friends closer than I'd ever dreamed, and a purpose worth dying for. And I may die for it. I may lose my friends. Even if we survive, Harry may never forgive me for what I'll do to keep him alive.

And yet, I wouldn't give this life up for anything in the world. I wouldn't ever go back.

I've found my place. I've found my purpose. I've found my friends. Sometimes, stories do tell the truth: there are goals worth fighting for, and people worth fighting beside. And victory comes with a price. There's always a price. All you have to decide is whether the goal is worth the payment.

Ron is flint. I'm steel. Voldemort is the darkness, and we will burn him to ashes.

Harry -- and freedom -- and love -- are worth any price.

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End of story