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'Undead, undead, undead, undead, undead undead. Oh Bela, Bela's undead.'
Voldemort, that wannabe, ceases to be a problem when you're goth. A lot of things cease to be a problem when you're goth. Things like grades, popularity, the opinion of non-goth teachers, work, blood status, and most teen drama. Even Hermione's crippling need to prove herself a worthy witch becomes less of a bother when her chief concern is making sure her blacks match. As a Victorian Goth, reading late at night becomes an aesthetic, not merely useful. As a Victorian Goth, buck teeth become period appropriate. As a Victorian Goth, dying young is desirable. As a Victorian Goth, frizzy hair is a natural advantage in the Crimp & Hairspray Wars. Being tortured by, and receiving a bloody brand from a goth queen is an honour of the highest order.
As an uber feminine Victorian Goth, suddenly Draco Malfoy and Severus Snape - Military and Vampire Goth respectively - are cursing each other to gain your attention and favour. Them and every other Slytherin boy. And also many of the Ravenclaws. Naturally, Snape is destined to win, being an Elder goth.
“Hey, Granger, what are you doing?” Draco Malfoy, clad head to toe in shiny black leather, adjusts his peaked cap after coming to a stop beside Hermione's table in the Hog’s Head Inn, the gothest pub in Hogsmeade.
Hermione lifts her thick purple and black book of poetry so that he's able to read the cover. “Reading, Malfoy.”
“Yeah? Shelley? ‘Music, when soft voices die’, and all that? Or are you a Poe girlie? Personally, I prefer Lovecraft and getting my shit wrecked cosmically.”
“Malfoy, you're impossible.” says Hermione, a doom laden smirk all in black crossing her tomb-white face.
“Maybe, but look what I dug out of an open grave.” As graceful as graceful can be, Draco flips a pair of cream lace concert tickets onto the black oak table. A black oak table deeply scored with mysteriously supernatural claw marks. “Tickets to the Weird Sisters, playing at York. I'm thinking you and I rustle up a couple thestrals, dance a bit, and then chill at a graveyard afterwards. What do you think?”
Thinking hard, Hermione stirs her absinthe with a silver spoon, releasing a crowd of green fairies into the air, and several dead artists. “I can't go anywhere without Harry and Ron, you know that.”
“Luckily for me, I'm rich, Granger. And tolerant. I’ll have my father (who by the way, is extremely goth) acquire some extra tickets. He knows the band, personally.”
It's that easy to score a date with the most popular boy in school. However, hanging out with Draco threatens her serious demeanour, so Hermione leaves the pub to find her friends and tell them the sorrowful news. Being goth means they stand out from the crowds of poseurs and normies, wherever they might be. Indeed, it doesn’t take her long to happen upon them, assisted by the village consisting only of one street, Her best friends swagger down the main street of Hogsmeade, Harry the Trad Goth with his immense pile of backcombed hair (lucky him, he was born with black hair!) and Ron, some sort of Metalhead. Sadly, the latter's picked up a girl out of some skip, a Slytherin, and worse, an emo in very little clothing, a sight which makes Hermione seethe darkly. Ever since he dyed part of his long hair black and took to wearing black skinny jeans with ripped knees the females have been flocking around him like rabid bats, but even more sadly he is unable to tell wannabes apart from real goths.
“Aren't you going to introduce us to your friend, Ronald?” Hermione says tersely, after exchanging glances with a silent, mopey Harry.
“This is Ebony Darkness Dementia Raven Way. She just transferred here from somewhere, and really likes that guy from that Muggle band. Don't you reckon she looks like Amy Lee?” Ron says, grinning so that his lip piercings glitter.
Said girl is not paying any attention to the trio, instead her eyes shift about the town and the desolate Scottish landscape beyond. “Have you guys, like, seen Draco Malfoy anywhere? I need to, like, talk to him about Stan.”
“He was just lurking in the Hog’s Head.”
“The where?”
“The pub full of pig’s heads.”
“Oh, sweet.”
Thankfully, before she can be exposed for being a faker, she removes herself from the presence of the goths by running away in an aggressively ridiculous way thanks to her platform boots and skirt the width of a boho belt.
🖤🩸🖤
Due to the presence of a pair of third wheels, Draco abandons the badass thestral idea in favour of a badass flying black Mercedes Benz coffin car he borrows from his father, condemning Harry and Ron to the back seats, from where Harry keeps up a steady monotone monologue.
“Just yesterday I adopted my third bat. I called him ‘Serious’, after my beautifully tragically dead godfather. Did I ever tell you how he died? He fell through some mist.”
“That's metal, Harry. Also, we were there.” says Ron, head banging to the mournful rhythm of the engine.
Although Ron’s hair keeps hitting him in the face and also summons a tornado every few seconds, Harry, as Chosen One, manages to apply yet another layer of eyeliner, looking into his mirror made of a kraken eye lens. “Yeah.” he drones.
In the driver's seat, where he utilizes the baby wheel Lucius installed so he could pretend to drive like a pleb, Draco makes a statement. “I can't remember why I hated you, Potter.”
“Same, Malfoy. I can't remember why you hated me either. Maybe you thought I was a poseur.”
“That was probably it. But then you got possessed, proving you weren't.”
“I got possessed a few times “
“Metaaal!”
The concert is taking place in the medieval torture dungeons at Jorvik, or York, as the hopelessly deluded normies call it. Hermione has crimped the hell out of her hair, which automatically makes her the most attractive female in the place, just as Harry with his three foot high backcombed bat's nest and TB-esque pale as death thinness is the most attractive male.
“If a Weird Sister hits on you, I might throw myself onto Byron's grave and lament my woeful fate.” drawls Draco through the ocean of cigarette smoke which he and the Golden Trio bathe in.
Hermione and Harry look up appreciatively from the shoes they'd been contemplating whilst shuffling from side to side, back and forth in the Gothic Two-Step. To their left, Ron continues windmilling his hair round and round and round and round and rou-
“I didn't know you were so sensitive, Draco.” smiles Hermione, her lipstick black as night, her cigarette black as depression and sweetly pungent with cloves. Sweet as rot.
“Granger, did you not hear how I told a tragic ghost all my woes, crying into a snake themed sink, just before Potter slashed me almost to death and my blood made a beautiful contrast with the white tiles?”
“I did, but I didn't know you were crying before Harry used Sectumsempra. I thought that came after, when Professor Snape hoovered your blood up and saved your life.”
“Yeah I was. Sobbing my heart out about either killing someone or dooming my family. By the way, I'm the last of my bloodline, and if I perish, my family perishes with me. To be fair, my blood is probably too insipid to produce offspring.”
“That's so goth, Draco.”
“I know right. I'm thinking me, Pansy, and Blaise are the Obsidian Trio.”
“That's so goth, Draco!”
Despite being so goth, Draco's dark supremacy is imperiled when The Half Blood Prince & the Bats come out on the stage as an opening act. Severus Snape in leather trousers is a threat to the entire world, and in some hovel somewhere Voldemort and his horcruxes set on fire and die. The man in black steps forward, and begins a funeral dirge lamenting that not all his enemies are dead, but taking grim solace in the fact that his best one is.
“Look, Granger, uh, I mean, Hermione-” Draco begins over a cranberry and vodka cocktail contained in a legit medieval silver goblet. “-I know you, like all women, prefer older men, but consider this one thing. I'm rich.”
“But what do you use your wealth on? Professor Snape lives in a Victorian hovel in a Victorian factory town full of Victorian chavs. Can you beat that level of Victorian despair?”
“My dad breeds albino peacocks and grows hedge mazes.”
Hermione stares on, her black and pointed nails clinking against her own medieval goblet full of wine so red it’s blood. Beside her, Harry continues on with his gloomy dance, and Ron begins a one man mosh pit, knocking Seamus Finnigan into a Roman wall.
“Ah…One of my relatives saw Bram Stoker once.”
Hermione begins staring at Severus Snape, her body getting back into the goth shuffle.
“Um, I intend to purchase a ruined castle in Ireland when I reach the age of majority and Daddy increases my allowance. Once there, I intend to crush a few peasants with boulders, and then erect a ruined gothic cathedral, where I shall pen poetry using the tattered remnants of my soul as parchment, and my tears as ink. Please love me. Darkly.”
Hermione turns back to him.
'Undead, undead, undead, undead, undead undead. Oh Bela, Bela's undead.'