Work Text:
Submitted for The Houses Competition Forum - Round 1, Year 12
House: Ravenclaw
Subject: Potions
Standard
PROMPTS: [Theme] Pretending to be something you’re not, [Quote] "If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles." — Sun Tzu
BONUS PROMPT: [AU] mythology
Note : Though this isn’t a story set in a mythological time/era, this story is very loosely based on the story of Shikhandi from Mahabharata.
Shortest version of the story: A warrior kidnaps a princess from her pretty public ritual of choosing a groom for herself. She tells him she loves someone else, but when she goes to her beloved, he rejects her, saying that because the warrior took her, she belongs to him. When she asks the warrior to marry her, he refuses because he’s celibate. Furious, she vows to be reborn and be the cause of his death. In her next life, she is reincarnated a female but raised as male to fulfill this destiny.
Word Count is: 2720
In the ancient halls beneath the Ministry of Magic, magic breathed through stone like a sleeping beast. Centuries-old enchantments were threaded through the gilded columns, while runes glowed faintly underfoot. The air hung heavy with incense, murmurs, and the polished pride of the pureblood elite.
Each year, witches of distinction—those with remarkable lineage, magical strength, or political favour—were summoned to be “presented.” Not to choose , but to be chosen . Their pairings were curated by the Ministry’s magical metric—intelligence, power, blood status, political affiliation. It was all for “the stability of the wizarding world,” the matchmakers said giddily.
This time, Hermione Granger stood at the center of the domed chamber, flanked by Ministry officials in ceremonial black and silver robes. Her own robes were threaded with compulsory enchantments—woven charms that shimmered with tracking spells and modesty wards. Despite it all, she stood tall, though her jaw ached from how tightly she had clenched it.
She had faced Death Eaters, hunted Horcruxes, and played master with Time itself.
But this?
This felt like a funeral with silk gloves.
Her name had been entered “for the good of magical society.” Without consent. Without appeal. Though she was lauded as the “Brightest Witch of her Age,” what good had that done?
“Your magical strength requires an equally strong match,” they’d told her in the only meeting she had been granted.
What they meant was: Ron Weasley was never an option.
Too poor. Too politically inconsistent. Too magically unreliable. Too normal.
Hermione scanned the chamber lined with seated dignitaries, the empty thrones where “eligible” men would soon be invited in like guests to a feast.
And then—
A shift.
The magic in the air curled suddenly cold.
Before she could react, there was a flash of black fabric, the grip of a gloved hand on her wrist, and a snap of Apparition that tore the floor from under her.
The world twisted, screamed, and vanished.
She hit the stone floor hard, coughing, her wrist already bruised. Her hair came loose, her Ministry-required robes gone in the blink of an eye. The room was dim—stone walls, no windows, lit by flickering torchlight.
It smelled of cold magic and old secrets.
Theodore Nott stood by the door. Calm. Watching.
“You—” She stumbled upright. “ You —kidnapped me?”
Her voice was no longer cool. It rang through the chamber, sharp and shaking.
Nott didn’t move. “Technically, I brought you to freedom.”
She demanded, “From what? The Ministry? A life I didn’t choose? Or just a ceremony I hadn’t even seen through?”
He said nothing.
And suddenly, she was back in the old safehouse.
It had been raining. The stone walls leaked, the fireplace cold. Near Tinworth, hidden by Dumbledore’s wards long before the final battle. She’d arrived bloodied and exhausted; he was already there, sleeves rolled, eyes red, maps spread like war prayers.
They hadn’t spoken much.
He passed her a healing draught. Lit the fire with a word.
No questions. No promises.
Just a folded scrap of parchment slid across the table with runes for a vanishing spell and one line in his neat, spidery handwriting:
In case you ever need to disappear.
He was gone before dawn.
And now he stood before her again, five years later, as if no silence stretched between.
She advanced on him, hands trembling. “Who are you working for? Who wanted this?”
There was a pause.
He met her gaze without blinking, his eyes a deep brown shade. “The official reason is that I took you for someone else.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Who?”
He hesitated. “That doesn’t matter.”
Hermione’s eyes burned. “Tell me.”
“…No one who was ever going to marry you.”
The words landed heavy. Her face twisted. “So I’m just a pawn. Passed from one hand to another. Did you even ask him?”
Nott’s mouth tightened. “He didn’t care. That was the point. This was all a performance.”
Hermione backed away, furious. “You bastard. You thought I’d be grateful? That I’d thank you for dragging me off like I’m your prize?”
“No,” Nott said quietly. “I knew you’d hate me. But I also thought… you wanted out.”
“I wanted a choice!” Her voice cracked on the last word.
Then she turned on her heel and stormed toward the door. It was locked—warded, humming faintly. She cast spell after spell, snarling, wand flashing—but the door held. She spat out, “You’ll regret this.”
“I already do,” Nott murmured.
She escaped before sunrise. A clever Disillusionment Charm and a broken window outside her cell—she refused to call it a room—led her down the cliffs. She Apparated blind, magic wild, until she landed just outside Ottery St. Catchpole, soaked in dew and rage.
Ron was there, a Ministry scroll in his hands. The gold seal trembled between his fingers. His eyes went wide when he saw her. “Hermione—bloody hell, where were you?”
“I ran,” she said. Her voice was hoarse. “I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to belong to any of them.”
Ron swallowed. “I—I’m not allowed to interfere. I’m not… I wasn’t even on the list, Hermione. I don’t… I don’t meet their requirements. They’d—send me, the family, to Azkaban—I can’t…”
His words stopped her in her tracks. “Oh.”
What else could she say? That she’d hoped he’d accept her and they’d go frolicking off into the sunset?
Ron whispered, “I’m sorry.”
Her heart cracked.
Not enough.
“You will marry me.”
The words cracked like thunder. She stood in his foyer like vengeance itself — hair wild, magic snapping in the air.
Theo blinked. “What—?”
“I fled your trap, Apparated halfway across the country, begged a man who once loved me to stand by me—and he couldn’t. Not even Ron.”
He flinched. “Ron Weasley was never—”
"He was hope." She turned to face him fully. "And now I have none left."
Theo swallowed.
“So I’m asking you. Marry me. Not for love. Not for redemption. Just to keep me from being devoured by this… system.”
Theo looked torn open. “Hermione—if I do this… it won’t matter. I’m ranked beneath Malfoy. If I defy the ceremony, the Ministry will annul it. And you’ll belong to them again.”
Malfoy… It was him she’d been kidnapped for. And he hadn’t even cared enough to marry her.
Her hands trembled and she clenched them, her nails digging into her palms hard enough to leave deep imprints. “Then you’re saying I don’t count.”
He stepped forward, voice low. “No. I’m saying you deserve better than to be erased by a law written in someone else’s ink.”
She stared at him, shaking. “So that’s it? I’m too much for one, not enough for another. Still unable to choose myself?”
Her voice cracked like dry earth.
Theo reached for her, instinctive.
But she stepped back, a half-laugh escaping her lips like a curse. She turned without waiting.
And the door slammed shut behind her with a gust that scattered years of dust and silence.
The Forbidden Forest did not welcome all souls — only those who had nothing left to lose.
Despite her instincts telling her it was dangerous, too terrible to enter without her magic, Hermione entered without a wand.
The trees whispered as she passed, their branches heavy with watching.
She walked for hours. Or days. Time blurred. Hunger gnawed at her ribs. Her feet bled. Her magic sizzled beneath her skin, restless, unshaped.
At last, she reached the clearing that hadn’t ever been marked on a map. A place where the ground pulsed, and the air was thick with breath.
Something ancient waited there.
Not a creature. Not a god. A presence.
“Why have you come?” it asked. The voice sounded like crackling leaves and deep water.
“I want to become what the world listens to,” she said. “I want power that doesn’t ask permission.”
“You want to be feared.”
“I want to be heard. ”
The silence tightened like a snare.
And then the forest moved. A thousand roots lifted from the ground, weaving a circle around her. The air turned silver, then black. Something burned — not skin, but self.
Memories cracked. Names unspooled.
She knelt.
Magic surged.
A man emerged from the whispering edge of the Forbidden Forest, cloaked in wind and old magic.
The papers called him a scholar, a revolutionary, a problem. The whispers called him something stranger—untouched by time, shaped by storm and shadow, born of the wild places the Ministry dared not map.
He called himself Heron Vale.
He wore no family crest. Claimed no ancestry. His wand was carved from petrified ash and rune-etched like something unearthed, not made. His magic was older than textbooks, steeped in languages even the Unspeakables no longer translated aloud.
He moved through wizarding society like a disruption incarnate—elegant, cold, brilliant.
Tall and graceful, he dressed like he didn’t need approval and spoke like he'd invented defiance. His voice could flay with a phrase or soothe like honeyed fire. And when he entered a room, even the aristocrats who scoffed at him quieted.
In under two years, he’d rewritten three bloodline clauses, obliterated four marriage traditions, and made it legally impossible to bind a witch to a magical contract without her explicit verbal consent. He debated Wizengamot elders without blinking. He dueled policy, not people—his quill sharper than any hex.
And Theodore Nott fell in love with him.
It wasn’t obvious at first.
Theo had been watching Heron since his name began spreading like storm clouds through old manor halls—first as a rumor, then as a scandal, then as an undeniable force. He watched from the gallery rows of courtrooms, from the sidelines of reinvented rituals, from the corners of society where men like Theo were allowed to be interesting but never loud.
And then, one winter evening, they were seated across from each other at a private salon—a place where political thinkers drank too much and spoke too openly.
They met over firewhisky and debate.
"Why are you doing this?" Theo asked, leaning forward. It was late. The fire had burned low to coals. Heron had just undone another outdated law with the flick of a quill and a few sharp words about autonomy and worth.
Heron turned his gaze to him—dark, clear, and oddly familiar. He didn’t smile. “Because no one should be born to belong.”
The air crackled. Theo stared, heart slow and too loud at once.
“You remind me of someone,” he said, before he could stop himself.
Heron’s expression flickered—barely, but there. He murmured, “So do you.”
It was nothing. Just a moment. Just a glance.
But something shifted beneath Theo’s ribs.
He didn’t know what it was, not yet.
Only that it wasn’t nothing at all.
Under the soft moonlight on the stone balcony of Theo’s manor, the air seasoned with lavender and ash. The night was unseasonably warm for early October, and yet a chill sat between them like a ghost neither dared name.
They stood side by side but worlds apart. Below them, the forest whispered with restless wind. Above them, stars blinked like the blinking eyes of long-dead gods.
Theo nursed a glass of firewhiskey, its rim untouched.
Heron’s arms were folded behind his back, shoulders tense beneath his tailored robes. His voice, when it came, was a question barely breathed.
“If I’d been a woman,” Heron said, not looking at him, “would you have loved me still?”
Theo didn’t flinch. “I loved a woman once. I lost her.”
There was a hitch in the silence. Barely perceptible. Like the moment before a dam cracks.
Heron turned his face toward him at last, shadow cutting a sharp angle along his cheekbone. “What if she’s still out there?”
Theo didn’t answer at first. He set down the glass, walked to the edge of the balcony. The light hit his profile—worn down by grief, sharpened by longing. Finally, he said, voice low, “Then I’d tell her I’ve loved her twice now. And lost her twice over.”
The silence after that was thick. Alive.
Heron’s hand trembled once. Then he turned.
“There’s a reason I never feared coming back to the Ministry,” he said. “Or rewriting their laws. Or standing in front of wizards who would burn people like me for sport.”
Theo glanced at him. “Because you’re stronger than them.”
Heron’s voice dropped. “No. Because I know them. And I know myself… If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles.”
Frowning, Theo asked, “Muggle?”
Heron nodded. “Sun Tzu.”
He stepped forward then—just once chose himself. His eyes met Theo’s. And for the first time, the storm in them didn’t hide.
And then Heron reached up to the collar of his robes, pressed two fingers to a rune etched just below his throat.
There was no flash. No smoke. No spectacle.
Just the slow unraveling of illusion—cloth smoothing into curves, bone shifting, magic retreating like tide from sand.
Hermione Granger stood in his place.
Her curls were tied back messily. Her face was tired, older, lined with the weight of surviving too many things alone. Her eyes—still her eyes—were full of all the wars she’d fought. And all the ones she was still fighting.
Theo’s breath left him like he’d been struck. “You?”
She nodded once. “Me.”
He stared at her like she was a miracle, his hands trembling as he raised them to cover his face. “You disappeared. You were gone. You let us think you were dead.”
“I was,” she said.
“Why… why come back like this?” He breathed out the words in a quiet whisper.
She hadn’t dropped the glamour because it was strategic. She dropped it because she was tired—of hiding, of winning battles only to lose herself, of loving him and being afraid of what it meant.
Heron had been able to challenge the old regime, bend pureblood laws, and shake the Ministry to its core—not just because of the ancient magic he wielded, but because of the man they believed him to be. Powerful. Elusive. Unknowable. That mystery had protected him in ways Hermione Granger never could have been.
She had become Heron to fight a war the world never wanted her to win as herself. But here, in the hush between one breath and the next, she chose to stop running. Not for justice. Not even for revenge. Just to be known—by him.
She laughed, short and joyless. The sound echoed in the stillness around them. “Because the girl you all knew wasn’t enough. Not strong enough, not high enough, not Pure enough, not worthy enough for the Ministry to let her choose her own damn life.”
“Hermione…” Theo whispered.
“I could have done so much for the world, but no… they didn’t let me.” Her voice cracked as the words poured from her like blood from a wound. “And when I finally chose to give myself to you, you couldn’t choose me because you said Malfoy outranked you. Because the law wouldn’t allow it. Because the world wouldn’t let you.”
He didn’t interrupt.
“And Ron— Ron wasn’t even considered an option. Not powerful enough. Not eligible. The system told me I could only belong to the highest bidder. So I stopped trying to belong.”
She stepped forward, now inches away. Her voice lowered.
“I became what they would listen to. I became what they feared. I became what you said could never be enough but in a socially more acceptable form.”
Theo’s eyes flickered. Regret pooled in them, hot and quiet. “And I…” he whispered. “I fell in love with him.”
Hermione blinked. Her throat worked around something sharp.
“I know,” she said, too softly.
Theo flinched. “I didn’t fall in love with Heron because he was a man.”
Hermione turned away, arms folded tight across her chest. She couldn’t bear to hear this.
“I fell in love with him,” Theo continued, “because he was you .”
“I don’t know who I am now,” she whispered. “Heron or Hermione… Or both. Or something else. Something new.”
Theo’s voice was a murmur now, barely audible above the rustling trees. “Then just let me love whoever you are.”
She turned to him—eyes shining, fury fading—and for the first time in years, let herself believe he meant it.
They stood there as the night turned gray and the horizon cracked open in a thin blush of pink.