To Mudden a Serpent's Heart

It has been fifteen long years since Mrs. Granger opened the door to find her little baby lying on the porch. The little girl had now grown hair and a complete set of teeth, both of which came in rather large amounts. This girl, whom the Grangers had named Hermione, grew up to discover herself a muggleborn witch. She was now in her fifth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft of Wizardry, where she had her two bestfriends, Harry Potter and Ronald Weasley.

The Malfoys' son was also no longer in diapers anymore. Draco Malfoy had grown into a handsome, blond, fifteen-year-old, with silvery eyes and a seemingly permanent sneer that hardly left his stuck-up face.

"Hermione..." Neville pleaded during Potions class. "My Gargouille tooth just broke..."

Hermione sighed and whispered a spell with a simultaneous swish of her wand. "Oh, Neville... Re--"

"Five points from Gryffindor, Miss Granger," Snape snapped suddenly. He always seemed to have a very odd ability to find something wrong to blame students on. "It seems obvious that that oversized brain of yours cannot take in the fact that I do not tolerate an abusive amount of dependence in this class. Let the idiot boy do things on his own!"

Hermione felt her face redden as she placed her wand back carefully into her pocket. At the corner of her eye, she spotted a few Slytherins snickering, one of which included Lucius Malfoy's son, Draco.

“Mudblood,” muttered under his breath, looking at Hermione. Harry and Ron had evidently heard this, as they exchanged dark looks with him for a few seconds. It was a relief for Hermione not to see Ron losing his temper before Malfoy again, as he had gotten himself into trouble the last time he did this.

Quite unfortunately for her, however, Hermione saw Harry whisper something to Ron afterwards.

Uh-oh.., she thought, steering her gaze away from the mixture in her cauldron for a while. This doesn’t look very good. Hermione knew just how far this rivalry could go.

“Stop being a bunch of dunderheads and stir your potions right!” Snape spat out suddenly, particularly to one student at the front of the class who accidentally melted her own hair into a sticky mass on her head. “I have not been placed here to give you free shampoos---”

Snape’s slightly longish sermon had been cut off as something came flying off into the air. It was a semi-solidifying sploosh of bogey green, and it soared over various heads--- and landed with a disgusting sqwishh! onto Draco Malfoy’s gelled-up hair.

“Agh!! Damn it!!” he cussed, feeling the sticky mixture on his head. Little by little, Draco felt a horribly swampy and slightly hot sensation on his head. He soon discovered that the mixture on his head was slowly sliding towards his forehead, now colored yellow-green with his blonde hair.

Snape was furious. “Who did this?”

The whole room fell silent. Only the bubbling mixtures in some of the cauldrons made traces of noise.

“Get to the hospital wing, boy!” Snape said, pointing Draco to the dungeon doors.

Once Draco had nodded and walked from his seat, Snape’s eyes glinted maliciously once more at the rest of the class.

“I see the culprit does not wish to present himself,” he said, sneering. “May I just remind you that the Gargouille Potion is fatal to your hair, but it won’t have so much as a bitter taste when taken in.”

Snape paused for a while and let his cold, gray eyes search over the students’ faces. “The special mixture of a Gargouille tooth and Augurey feather can sense guilt in less than 30 seconds.” He sneered so well that he could’ve been easily mistaken for Draco’s father. “I will ask each one of you to take a spoon of this potion and drink it, and anyone who turns a shade of magenta will be receiving his punishment at the end of the day.”

There was a groan from the entire class. The bogey-colored liquid that bubbled in their pewter cauldrons was not exactly pretty.

But Snape wasn’t any prettier, either. And so, every single one of them took a spoon and dipped it into the bogey pit, with several students pinching their noses tightly and shutting their eyes. Hermione simply took the spoon in her mouth, but she was in tears once she had tasted it.

“Aww… yuck!”

Some of them were vomiting, others like Hermione had tears forming in their eyes, while the more allergy-prone ones like Neville had grown little rashes on their arms. After a little mayhem inside the classroom, a bright light suddenly glowed somewhere at the back. It was a very bright shade of magenta.

Heads turned towards the origin of the light. Snape’s lips curled into a fatal smile, as he saw the one who was emitting the glow.

“Come forward, Weasley!” Snape cried, making Hermione jump a little.

Ron walked in humiliation towards the front. If he wasn’t already glowing a pinkish color, his face would’ve have matched the dark scarlet of Harry’s Quidditch robes. Snape was about to tell Ron something when Hermione stood up from her seat and tried to defend him.

“Sir, he didn’t mean to do it…. Malfoy was using dirty words against me and---”

“Ten points from Gryffindor! Now take your seat!” Snape shouted at her.

Hermione looked at him disbelievingly. “But it’s true! I just--”

“You’ll get another five points off if you do not take your seat, Miss Granger! Speaking bad of others is one, but contradicting a teacher…. This insufferable boy”---he aligned Ron’s arm with his shoulder—“must’ve given you quite a bad influence.”

He gave Hermione a piercing look, while several Slytherins did not even bother to stifle their snickers. Hermione flushed, and the day’s last subject ended with Ron remaining magenta until dinnertime. His punishment?

“The git said everything I took in within two days of this would taste like the potion!” Ron exclaimed at the Gryffindor table in the Great Hall during dinner. “Can you believe that?”

Harry snickered. “Want a treacle fudge, Ron?” he teased.

“Oh, shut up, Harry,” Ron replied, annoyed with his current situation. “You were the one who thought of it…. Go glow magenta or something!”

“Quit fighting, you two, another git’s approaching.” Hermione directed her eyes behind them, where a blond-haired someone was walking towards their table.

“Thought what you did was funny, didn’t you?” Draco said, arms crossed on his chest. Crabbe and Goyle were on either of his sides as usual. “I heard you glowed really nicely, Weasley.”

Ron looked up angrily at Draco’s head. It was now void of any hair gel, which was perhaps discouraged after the school nurse saw how his hair had melted.

“I see Madame Pomfrey’s gotten rid of your hard hair, Malfoy,” Ron replied smugly. “Must’ve thought it would have too much of an effect on your equally hard and hollow skull.”

Draco sneered at him. “I’ll have you know, Weasley, father’s arriving here to check on the school next week. The new school governor’s an old friend of his,” he said, smirking. “and they can eliminate any of the flaws this school currently has--- like those who can’t afford anything”—he raised his eyebrows at Ron—“filthy orphans,”—he looked at Harry---“and disgraceful Mudbloods.” He ended with a final look at Hermione.

Ron clenched both his jaws and hands tightly as Draco walked away with his goons.

The week ended quickly, and soon, Dumbledore was making another announcement during lunchtime.

“My dear students and faculty, I would like to let you all know that the newly-appointed school governor, Vergerate Pogrebin, will be observing the school today, along with his good friend, Lucius Malfoy.”

Draco smirked.

“I must ask all of you to be at your best behaviour during their stay, as the performance of our beloved school will remain on the ministry’s record. That is all, you may now make use of your dinner things!”

Harry shook his head. “Why can’t Mr. Malfoy just accept that he’d lost the position?” he said in annoyance.

“Probably thinks he’ll get it back once he disposes of that—that German Goblin friend of his.” Ron replied.

“It’s Vergerate Pogrebin,” Hermione added a matter-of-factly. “And basing on several articles I’ve read from the Daily Prophet, he doesn’t really have much of a good reputation with a portion of the ministry. Seems to have taken Lucius’ side when he got sacked three years ago.”

The two of them looked at her in disbelief. “I can’t believe you can take reading those opinionated articles in the Daily Prophet,” Harry told her.

“You read too much, Hermione.” Ron said.

At their potions class that afternoon, a rather big man with little hair appeared at the back of the classroom. Harry, Ron and Hermione assumed that the silvery-blonde, longhaired man beside him was none other than Draco’s father, Lucius Malfoy.

The lesson proceeded on like any other, until Dumbledore acknowledged Snape to tour Pogrebin, who was an old friend of Snape’s as well, around the school. Lucius was left to observe how the students were taught by teaching them himself.

Draco exchanged grins with his father as he took center stage.

“I see Severus has recently lectured you on the properties of a Gargouille tooth. Shallow,” Lucius scoffed lazily. He spoke in a very intimidating voice, which annoyed many of the Gryffindors. “Now, I would like to call my son up here to demonstrate a potion more suitable for your level.”

Ron muttered something to Harry about how oddly similar they looked once Draco had stood beside him. Hermione found this funny, and she let out a snort loud enough for the class to hear.

Lucius raised an eyebrow at her. “You, girl, come up here,” he called. Hermione, though embarrassed, went up as Lucius had said. “I presume you think this class funny?”

“But sir, I didn’t mean to--”

“Do not think you can get away with things just because of your exceptional intelligence… for a filthy mudblood,” Lucius spat coldly. “It’s absolutely disgusting how your kind needs to get mixed with ours in this school. Just like that disgracefully knutless pureblood you have as your friend.”

Hermione had enough. She felt tears form in her eyes at seeing innumerable pairs of eyes switch back and fro at her and Lucius. Her face was reddening, and she felt the great urge to fight back.

“You seem so brave just because no one else is around to sack you!” Hermione burst out in anger. “You don’t need to keep it from us, Mr. Malfoy, everyone knows you have the great tendency to pay people around just to get what you can’t with the little you can do!”

Lucius grabbed her arm in rage. “You had better learn to clean that nasty little mouth of yours, girl!” He was speaking in a whisper now. “I will make sure this will---”

But Lucius wasn’t able to say anything else as his eyes shifted from Hermione’s face to her arm. His eyes widened as he saw it--- a birthmark in the inside of her arm, shaped like a Grim’s paw.