Chapter Text
Hermione Granger glanced at the clock as she entered the English classroom and was horrified to learn it was only twenty-five past three. She had been hoping to arrive at least five minutes late so she could wind up Justin, but it appeared she was the furthest thing away from late. She was five minutes early. It made her look punctual and keen, everything she always wanted to be for every other school endeavour, apart from this one.
Hermione wasn’t an after school club person. One of her earliest school reports, when she had been little more than five, had declared that she was ‘not a joiner’. Hermione had wholeheartedly agreed, and she had been perplexed and a little offended when her teacher at the time had patiently pointed out that she hadn’t meant it as a compliment.
Hermione looked up at the board, and her disdainful gaze lingered on the jaunty chalk lettering declaring she was in the right place for a meeting of the ‘Student Paper’. As if anyone could have forgotten why they had come to the English classroom after school on a Tuesday. The quip sounded good in her mind; it had been less successful two weeks before when she had dared to say it out loud after Justin had arrived. Blaise Zabini had sneered that it wasn’t as if she had anywhere better to be and Pansy Parkinson and Daphne Greengrass had tittered and flicked their hair as they shot her scornful looks. Hermione hadn’t responded, mainly because he’d been right. All that had been waiting for her was a microwave lasagne for one. Her parent’s operated extended hours at their practice on a Tuesday and Thursday. Hermione had flipped Blaise off though, her being largely unpopular was not an excuse for him to behave like a dick.
Ten minutes after her entry, Zabini sauntered into the room, wearing his school blazer inside out and nodding in greeting to everyone he cared about. Hermione hated him for arriving at the time she had wanted to.
Hermione would never understand why guys like Zabini did shit like the student paper; it wasn’t as if he needed the credit. From what she had heard, Blaise’s mum had had a fair go at fucking her way through most of the movers and shakers in town. He was hardly going to struggle for work opportunities when he left school. But apparently, the paper needed a style section - even though everyone wore a uniform when they needed to and donned jeans when they didn’t - and as there was only one person that had anything approaching a sartorial eye, it required Blaise Zabini.
After fidgeting in annoyance - mainly at herself - Hermione eventually jumped up onto one of the graffitied to all hell desks and let her feet dangle beneath her. Some of the boys in her year thought it was hilarious that her feet didn’t touch the ground when she did this. From Hermione’s point of view she couldn’t have cared less, and, in any case, if her legs had been long and elegant that would mean she couldn’t pedal them back and forth like she was doing now, and that would have been a real shame. It was a great way to get rid of waste energy.
As more people started to filter in, resplendent in their effortless lateness, Hermione pulled her bag off her shoulder and dropped it onto the desk next to her so she could get out a notebook. She needed something to take notes with, but if she was honest, she could have gotten it out later. Making a show of searching through her bag prevented anyone else from sitting there.
To keep up pretences, Hermione pulled out her leather-bound notebook and then put her hand in the bag almost up to her elbow - looking like a seasoned magician - before she wrapped her fingers around a pen. She pulled on the notebooks elastic and stretched it off the first page, then flicked through to where she was after she had finished the last assignment. The brief report on the inter-school, regional chess club final looked dull even in draft form.
Sadly, print had not elevated it to the dizzying heights of rousing journalism.
Hermione’s fingers idly traced the embossed lettering of her initials on the front cover as she bit her lip and watched the clock tick down to showtime.
Her dad had brought Hermione the notebook as a special gift when she had told him she was joining the paper. While Hermione usually preferred the bog-standard ruled pads she could get for three for a fiver in the village she had taken to bringing the fancy one with her to meetings and using it for all of her story notes.
David Granger had been something of a dreamer back in his day, though you wouldn’t know to look at him now, with his tame hair, neatly ordered clothes, expected suburban home and dental practise to his name. When he’d been at school he’d had a passion for journalism that had caused Grandad Granger a ‘great deal of worry’, but it hadn’t lasted long once he emerged into the ‘real world’. While still in education, her dad had been the Editor of his school newspaper, and if the ample scrapbooks he had of back then were any indication, he still looked back on the time with great fondness.
Reporting for the school paper did not foster anything approaching the same feelings in Hermione. She liked words of course, but she’d always been a bit sniffy about journalism and especially of the ilk that was produced by the paper. But, if she wanted a government job in the future, she needed a resume that was bursting with detail to get into a top tier University.
Not being remotely sporty limited her options considerably. While Hermione enjoyed the science club she had joined almost from the first day of school, they only met once a month due to the chronically understaffed department.
It had made her dad so happy when she had mentioned she might apply that Hermione knew she couldn’t back out now. She had to suck it up, even if the Editor was the most undeservedly self-important idiot she’d ever had the misfortune of meeting. Considering she knew Draco Malfoy, that was saying something.
Justin Finch-Fletchly was just the sort of overly entitled windbag that Hermione had come to expect to be at her school. Hogwarts, though mainly known for creative arts and sports, had become something of a flagship for the aristocratic offspring of societies people-you-must-have-heard-of. The people that were always spoken of at parties like ‘well you simply must know Bunty, her second husband sailed around the world. What a poor chap, all that way and nary a crewman insight. I’m all for sporting achievement, but I can’t imagine going anywhere I couldn’t get a decent poached egg and bloody newspaper in the morning, what what!’
Justin Finch-Fletchly, or ‘double F’ as Ron had christened him in their second year, walked around as if his double-barrelled surname somehow made him taller than his rather diminutive stature, and he ruled the school paper with an iron fist. A limp-wristed iron fist, but an iron fist all the same.
Hermione had been in classes with him for her entire school career, and they had clashed on just about every conceivable point. Justin was very firmly in the camp that felt that Hermione should mind her middle-class tongue when she was speaking to her betters. Sadly for him, the progressive, left-wing schtick that he was trying to sell as a cobbled-together personality didn’t allow him to say so out loud, which resulted in tension. Hermione had never cared much about it until she joined the paper and therefore had to be under his thumb. With fewer people watching, Justin was far less able to keep his mouth shut around her. Which was probably for the best, Hermione wouldn’t have been able to stop goading him if her life depended on it.
Hermione pulled out her homework planner and spent the next five minutes rather happily adding in the requirements she had picked up for that day. It wasn’t to last.
Justin barrelled into the classroom with all the barely suppressed pomp Hermione had come to expect of him. He forced the door open and greeted the room with a shrill shout and tossed one of the tails of his over-long scarf over his shoulder. He eyed Hermione, sat on the top of the desk at the back while everyone else was in chairs and he huffed out a little snort but otherwise, he said nothing. Justin had long since ceased his usual game of good-naturedly bullying her into compliance, and now he opted to ignore her and her doings until they expressly needed to speak.
Justin sat behind Mr Geddes desk with all the gravity of Caesar sitting before his subjects and pulled out a stack of paper with a typical flourish.
“So boss - what’s on the docket this week?” Colin Creevey asked enthusiastically from his corner of the room. His ever-present camera was perched up on the desk in front of him as if he could be sent dashing off on a photographic emergency at any moment. Justin smiled at Colin in the way most people would look at a labrador puppy.
“Not much, not much,” Justin replied, leafing through his stack as the rest of the room jostled forward.
“I’m thinking about doing a section on winter whites,” Blaise said, as he sauntered in his chair as if he was being shot for GQ.
Justin put a hand on his chest, fingers splayed, and looked at Blaise as if he hung the moon. “Thank you, Blaise, I can always rely on you.”
There was some general chatter about what they called the stationery list, things that needed to appear every week. Pansy Parkinson handled the horoscope, and there had been complaints it had been less than complimentary to Gemini’s for the last few weeks. Or, to put it less softly, it had been brutal. Hermione wondered who had pissed Pansy off. While she didn’t like the girl even the smallest bit, she admired her work. Writing poisonous horoscopes very pointedly at one person on campus had a certain flair.
Mariette Edgecomb ran through the events calendar, and Cho Chang talked about the general announcements that had to run that week before Justin assigned all of the stories he currently had on the list. There were depressingly few. Certainly not enough to convincingly fill the paper.
“Come on people we need ideas,” Justin shouted as he banged his hand on the desk, hard enough to wake up Greg Goyle who only turned up each week to get participation credit. “We need something big, something salacious. So far we have the debate team getting to the regional finals of a competition no one cares about and Mr Powell’s retirement. There has to be more going on than that.”
“Cafe serving horse meat in the lasagne?” Daphne asked, and Justin narrowed his gaze.
“Bigger,” he insisted, sitting forward and steepling his fingers on the desk.
“Janitorial team selling weed?” Lee Jordan suggested with a smirk and Justin tsked. It had been a story that had been around probably as long as the school existed. There was hardly likely to be any truth in it. It was some kind of urban legend. But doubtful providence aside, it didn’t stop Lee asking if he could cover it every week.
“Bigger,” Justin said again, and Hermione rolled her eyes.
“Student newspapers not that big of a deal?” Hermione muttered under her breath, and Justin’s head snapped in her direction.
“Something to share with the rest of the class, Granger?” he simpered, and Hermione nearly acted on her burning desire to tell him to go fuck himself.
“Nothing,” she managed to reply, and he nodded.
“As I thought.”
After a few more increasingly random story ideas, Justin slumped back in his chair. “It’s like you guys don’t even care about this,” he sighed dramatically before sweeping the room with his gaze. “We are supposed to be a team. I can’t carry the weight of you all on my back. Some of you need to start taking some of the strain.”
Hermione managed not to stick her fingers in her mouth to mimic choking. But it was a close won thing. She couldn’t help but feel that the sentiment Justin was attempting to invoke would have been more convincing if everyone in the room wasn’t painfully aware that he would have sold his own grandmother for a chance at the big time.
When no response was forthcoming, Justin rubbed a hand over his face before reaching into his bag. “Well, it’s a good job I am thinking of what to do next; otherwise we wouldn’t have a paper at all.”
After less than five seconds of shuffling, he produced a second piece of paper and waved it harshly in the air till it made a muffled crackling sound. It would probably have been more dramatic if he hadn’t done a very similar thing, last week and the week before. When you joined the paper, you quickly learnt that Justin didn’t really want ideas. He wanted to be in control of everything and admonish you for letting him.
“Right, assignments,” he said as he looked down the list. “The Maths Club has had a rebrand now they’ve finally had a girl join their ranks. They are changing from the Algebros to the Number Ninjas. Goldstein, interview the Captain.”
Hermione snickered to herself and began doodling on the corner of her open page. What would it be for her this week? A chat to the groundsmen about lawn maintenance? A two-line single review? Maybe she wasn’t required for anything at all and turning up this afternoon had been a colossal waste of her time.
“Flooding again in the ladies loos on the second floor. Daphne, my love, go and speak to maintenance and find out what is going on. The faculty are keen for us to dissuade some of the more outlandish conspiracy theories doing the rounds.”
Some third years had gotten it into their heads that there was a ghost in the ladies by the modern textiles section of the art department. Supposedly, the spirit kept flooding the toilets because she was unhappy her crush had left her for an exchange student. Well, at the least the girls had an imagination.
“And finally, this week’s sports focus is our very own campus hero, Cedric Diggory!” There was a flurry of overlapping ahhs and giggles, and Hermione rolled her eyes. “Granger you’re up.”
“Me?” Hermione squeaked.
“Yes, you.”
“But I don’t know anything about football,” Hermione protested, and she wasn’t being hyperbolic. She did her very best to keep as far away from all of that noise as possible, and considering her two best friends - or three, if you counted Ginny - were all affiliated with the school team, it took some doing.
“I suggest you learn,” Justin insisted dismissively, and Hermione realised why he had given her such a wide berth over the last few weeks. He had been planning this. He was going to throw her into something she had no idea about and let her fuck it up and watch everyone turn on her. People loved Cedric Diggory, and any slight against him would not be taken lightly. Hermione wanted to scream.
“Justin, really, wouldn’t it be better if-”
“Are you questioning my authority?” Justin bit out shrilly, “Because this isn’t a democracy, Granger, you don’t want to do the assignment, you can walk out of the door.”
Hermione’s fingers bit into the soft leather of the notebook still in her grasp. It was the only thing stopping her from grabbing her bag and leaving never to return. But she remembered her dad’s enthusiastic responses to everything she had written, and so far all she’d had to show for her term was a few short paragraphs here and there about nothing.
This would be a full article, maybe even a front-page given how Hogwarts treated its little sporting Gods. It wouldn’t be about anything she cared about, but it would be there. Hermione would also get a byline and her name in the paper, properly under her work, not just on the back page where it listed all the contributors. She was typically listed underneath Ron’s mum Molly who helped run off the photocopies.
“Fine,” she managed to hiss out through gritted teeth.
“Adda girl,” Justin said, and Hermione knew if she’d been standing closer, he would have patted her on the head.
Die in a ditch you pedantic arsehole, she retorted in her mind as he smiled down at his paper. He really thought he had won.
Once the rest of the assignments were doled out, Hermione jumped down from the bench and stuffed her papers into her bag. She tried to make it to the door before the rest, but she was stopped in her tracks by Blaise Zabini watching her with amusement.
“Good luck, Granger,” he said without any shred of sincerity. “Don’t fuck it up, will you?”
Hermione pushed past him and was soon out in the corridor. In the five seconds before the door slammed, she heard them all giggling in the classroom.
Hermione bit her lip. Whatever happened, she wasn’t going to let those bastards win.