Dances With Werewolves

Chapter One:

Hermione Granger woke up in her parent's home for the last time until next June. She rolled over to check the alarm clock; it was six o'clock in the morning. After another half-hour of tossing and turning she finally decided to get out of bed and prepare for a sixth year at Hogwarts. Grabbing her new glasses (apparently her passion for reading had strained them, although Hermione blamed the curse she'd suffered in June), Hermione rolled out of bed and grabbed her check-list off of the desk she used mainly to keep some of her piles of books on. She had all of her books, along with any other supplies she'd need for the year. Hermione sorted everything by section and size and placed everything into her trunk.

Realizing that she still had over an hour to kill, Hermione reached for the piles of letters from all of her friends. As much as Hermione wanted to see all of them, she didn't especially want to see Harry again. He'd been so distant at Sirius' funeral and became more depressed in each latter. He had recounted the 'final battle' to Hermione in such detail that Hermione felt as though she'd been there to see Sirius fall through the curtain. When Remus had recounted the events at the funeral, Hermione had cried hardest of anyone there. She'd felt the strange looks that everyone gave her and didn't care; it was the look of sympathy and understanding in Remus' eyes that had made her cry even harder.

Pushing that memory out of her head, Hermione decided to skip Harry's letters. "There's no point in being depressed for the first day, no, is there?" she asked herself.

"That's the spirit, dear," the mirror hanging on her wall told her, giving Hermione quite a fright. She still wasn't used to the talking mirror she'd gotten from her parents as a reward for perfect scores on her O.W.L.'s. Hermione flipped through the rest of the letters in which: Ron worried about Harry, Ginny worried about Ron (and how to impress Dean), Neville worried about everything, and Luna was, well, Luna. In the hundreds of lines Hermione'd collected over the summer, nobody had ever asked Hermione how she was. Instead, all of them pressed their worries onto Hermione, all leaning on her, and it was getting to be too much to handle.

Hermione was pushed out of her self-pity by her mother yelling "Hermione! We have to leave in fifty minutes! Come and get something to eat!" up the stairs at her. Hermione gave a final glance around her room, checked for the hundredth time to make sure she had all of her homework, stuffed the mirror into her trunk, shoved Crookshanks into his cage, and went downstairs to her final Muggle meal for what at the moment seemed to be an eternity.