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That stupid lopsided smile. Hermione hated it with a burning passion but here he was, holding her favourite doll by one foot while he stood in the middle of her room. It was enough that Zabini had the audacity to even attend this school, let alone be there in her space touching her things.
"What are you doing here?" She asked slowly as she eyed the ex-Slytherin up. It wasn't his house that she didn't trust but more the fact that he had been friends with proven Death Eaters and she had lost far too many people she loved to not be at least a little bit distrusting of him.
"I could ask you the very same thing." He raised an eyebrow before throwing the doll at her. "I take it that thing is yours?"
Hermione caught the doll and all but resisted cradling it in her arms. She'd had it since she was six and it had come everywhere with her, other than the year before when she'd been on the run. "What do you mean?" She asked, decidedly ignoring his question about her doll. "This is my room."
"Nu-uh." Blaise closed the distance between them and held up a piece of paper so that she could read it. "See? This is my room."
Hermione snatched the parchment from him and read it over. It was identical to the one that she had received a few weeks before, down to the room number listed. Blaise Zabini was assigned to this room.
"This can't be right." She muttered as she read it over several times and even grabbed her own letter from the side pocket of her bag to compare them. The letters were identical, except for the names on them. "We've been assigned the same room." She told him as she turned on her heel to find someone who was in charge here.
She couldn't help but be annoyed. This was the one thing that was meant to be hers after putting her life on the line to help Harry. She'd spent the last year back at Hogwarts working on making sure she got the grades in order to make a difference at the Ministry before she was contacted by this school. She was a little confused about what she was even doing here, even more so now that Zabini was here too, but her contact had told her that it was a school for gifted adolescents, and her ego had enjoyed that far too much.
"Where are you going?" Blaise asked, jogging to catch up with Hermione as she took great long strides down the hallway.
"I'm going to get to the bottom of this. We can't both have that room." She said matter-of-factly as she found the room advisor's door and knocked. She waited with her hands on her hips and a quiet rage in her chest. This was some way to start her new life off.
The door eventually opened and a man not that much older than the pair stood in the doorway. "Y'ello? Can I help you?"
Hermione all but thrust the letters at him. "Someone's put us in the same room. You need to fix this."
The room advisor read the letters over, and gave a chuckle which was really not at all comforting to the brunette, but she made herself take a breath before he looked up at her. "It looks like there has been a mix up, but I'm afraid there's not anything I can do. All the other rooms are occupied."
Hermione stared at him, waiting for him to tell her that this was all some elaborate practical joke, maybe even one orchestrated by Ron, but no such punchline came. "You have got to be kidding me!" She turned on her heel again and stormed back to the room. This was just great. A new school and she had to share a room with someone who had bullied her for pretty much half her life.
"Look, Granger." Blaise had followed her and was now standing in the doorway. "We'll speak to someone tomorrow and figure all this out but there's no point getting all wound up about it."
"And what do you propose that we do until then? Share a bed?" Hermione snapped as she turned to face him. She wanted to slap that stupid lopsided smile off of his face but she restrained herself, for now.
"Well, yeah. I'm not sleeping on the floor and there's not enough room in here for a second bed. Unless you have a better idea?" Blaise sounded far too amused and Hermione kind of hated him for it.
She could only give an exasperated "ugh" in reply before deciding that she needed to get out of there and that her best bet was to get some air.
Hermione walked for a while, letting the cool air help to calm her rising temper. She found some birds which she could feed the remainder of a rock cake that Hagrid had given her for luck to and tried to keep in mind that Blaise couldn't help this sucky situation anymore than she could. It seemed to work anyway and when she returned to the room, she no longer wanted to kick Blaise's ass into tomorrow.
"Cappuccino?" He asked as she pushed the door open. He was sat on the bed, one ankle crossed over the other and grinning at her.
Two questions popped into her mind just then: 1) where did he get the coffee from?, and 2) why was he always so chill? But she tried to give him the benefit of the doubt as she stepped into the room and took the coffee. All the same, she studied his face as she sat down, checking to see if that lopsided smile of his might just deceive him, but she had no such luck. And now she was going to have to share a bed with him for the night.