Chapter Text
From her very first memory, Hermione had been lonely.
Of course, she had her parents, who filled her life with so much love and joy that she often insisted when she was younger that she didn’t need anyone else, despite a yearning for friends that was never sated. But every time she pouted and whined in reluctance as four-year-olds often do, her parents would explain to her that everyone has a soulmate, and a heartsong to find them, so she would someday have someone to love forever. She could remember every conversation word for word: “Yes, Hermione. Even you have a heartsong. You just don’t know what it is yet.”
Hermione rolled her little eyes said: “No way!”
But a year and a half later, Hermione’s mother walked into her daughter’s bedroom to put away her laundry, and found the young girl twirling in front of her mirror, dressed as a fairy, humming. Hermione’s mother knew, both from the unique tune her daughter was singing, and the maternal pulse in her heart, that her little girl was singing the first known pieces of her heartsong.
Putting aside the laundry basket she had been carrying, Hermione’s mother sat the giggling girl down on her bed and asked her what she had been singing, knowing that she wouldn’t receive a direct answer.
“I don’t know, Mummy. It just popped into my head and it was so pretty, I couldn’t help but sing it!” Hermione responded excitedly, despite the slight blush on her cheeks from being caught singing.
Her mother beamed. “That was your first glimpse at your heartsong, ‘Mione! I’m so proud of you!”
As her mother pulled her into a hug, Hermione felt a pull of anxiety in her stomach that her young mind couldn’t recognize.
Months later, Hermione was sent off to her first year of real school. Always a curious child, she was excited as she was dropped off, but when she was picked up later that day, she ran into her parents’ arms and started to cry.
Her parents quickly moved to comfort her and ask what had upset her, and Hermione gave broken answers through her bawling.
”They... hate... me!...” she cried with such misery that her parents felt moved to do whatever it took to make their daughter smile again (they all learned later that it was the first signs of Hermione’s magic that caused their powerful reactions).
Hermione sat in the back of the car, buckled into her car seat, tears rolling down her small cheeks and rambling through her sobs that the other students at school had made fun of her because she was ahead of them in their studies and she could read while they couldn’t; because during recess, she had chosen to sit at a bench and read a book on geodes, instead of play in the sandbox; because she raised her hand to answer every question, her classmates had called her a ‘know-it-all,’ a phrase Hermione had never heard before. Her parents, overwhelmed with concern and pity, took her to get ice cream before going home.
For the first 10 years of her life, without a sibling or friend in sight, Hermione grew more and more lonely as each day passed. With her sadness, her heartsong grew as well, loose melodies and scattered words stitching together into a blanket of music that warmed her wounded heart.
Like everyone who was yet to find their soulmate, Hermione didn’t know her whole heartsong yet. She had full lyrics and tunes, a chorus and a melody, but part of it was missing, and she knew what that part was.
A little voice in the back of her mind still denied it, insisting that she was one of the extremely rare kind without a soulmate, and that she would live alone with an incomplete heartsong until the end of her days.
Hermione always pushed those thoughts to the back of her mind. She needed to have hope. Her parents taught her that.
On the day of her 11th birthday, Hermione received her acceptance letter to Hogwarts. She was enthralled, her hope had blossomed into confidence that was supported by her intelligence and she begged and pleaded for her parents to allow her to attend this magic school.
After a meeting with a woman Hermione learned to be named Professor McGonegall (who explained to her that it’s important to meet with parents of “Muggleborns” face-to-face as they have many questions, being new to the wizarding world), Hermione’s parents agreed to send her to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
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Three years into her magical education, Hermione’s loneliness had quieted down but at the same time, tripled. Her hope wasn’t enough to stop her classmates from abusing her, and now not only for her intellect and interests, but for her blood status, something she had never expected to be ridiculed for and compared her to that of a shelter mutt.
Through her torment, Hermione was glad that throughout her short but unusual time at Hogwarts, she had made some great friends and met some fantastic teachers who were all very kind and supportive. She greatly appreciated them, especially her first best friends, Ron and Harry (despite all the trouble they run into).
But, despite the love she feels for her friends and the love she feels from them in reciprocation, Hermione still feels, in her heart, lonely. That even her dearest friends don’t understand her. That even her parents don’t understand her. A loneliness fueled not by a lack of love, but a lack of someone to relate to.
Hermione knew that these feelings weren’t new, but thought briefly that they were being exaggerated by her teenage mind. Angst and hormones are something she knew to expect as she trudged through her teen years, but it felt so real to her that even if it was just hormones, she couldn’t ignore the ache in her heart.
But Hermione also knew that feeling lonely before finding your soulmate and completing your heartsong is something everyone experienced. Not at her level, she was sure, but her parents explained that longing is to be expected until the right moment.
So for what felt like the one thousandth time during her 14 years on this planet, Hermione reminded herself to have hope.
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Defense Against the Dark Arts was not Hermione’s favorite class, but it was a class she enjoyed enough to appreciate its necessity. This year’s professor, Lupin, was sillier than she preferred in an educator, but fun enough to grab her fellow students’ attention.
Their class today was focused on creatures called Boggarts, according to Lupin: creatures that took the form of people’s greatest fears. Their professor said that they were going to learn how to disarm them by making them ‘too silly to be scary,’ as they're often used as tools of cruelty.
Most of that class was a blur to Hermione, with two exceptions. One moment was her own turn facing the Boggart, because of the fear she felt and the ridicule from her classmates at how different her fear was from theirs. The other moment was, strangely, Neville’s turn facing the Boggart.
While Hermione’s greatest fear had been portrayed by Professor McGonegall sternly telling her that she had flunked out of Hogwarts, that she'd lost the few people to ever be accepted by, Neville’s fear was a person, it seemed.
With a swirl of smoke, the Boggart at the front of the classroom transformed from its last defeated fear to a woman who had an aura of pure darkness. Black clothing, dark curls that reached from her head like tendrils, and most noticeably, dark eyes, fully dilated.
Hermione was, for a lack of a better word, absolutely dumbstruck the second the Boggart took form. Her classmates flinched when the woman’s playful but malicious cackle echoed throughout the room, but Hermione didn’t, her eyes widened instead.
Hermione found that she couldn’t take her eyes off the woman in front of her. As a terrified Neville pointed his trembling wand at the woman’s mysterious figure, Hermione felt a pull in her chest like she had never felt before. She wanted to talk, to scream, to cry, to let out every emotion she ever had and ever will feel, but most of all, she wanted to sing.
Sing.
Sing.
Sing.
Her heart pulsed in her chest, her conscious chanted in her head. The only other words forming in her brilliant brain were the lyrics to her heartsong. They were right there, behind her eyes, aching to come out and be shared with this woman in front of her, the words were right there on the tip of her tongue and then-
The class breathed a collective sigh of relief, and Neville’s Boggart was defeated. The woman was gone.
And Hermione had never felt so hollow.