Summary:

In which Hermione Granger is much less Muggleborn than first believed, and does indeed devour books. Quite literally. [creature!hermione] [drabble-series]

Disclaimer:

I don't own Harry Potter, or the cover picture.

Watching Viktor Krum, stoic and stolid and utterly stone-faced foreign Quidditch star, trying to court Hermione Granger, self-assured and severe and utterly secretive focused top student, was equivalent to watching a duck slam headfirst into a rock wall.

Repeatedly.

That is to say, mystifying, awkward through secondhand embarrassment, and fascinating in it's unacknowledged futility.

The logic of such an action is, on one hand, not completely nonexistent.

Hermione is smart; clever, really, with enough long-term awareness and encyclopedic information to be wise, as well, insofar as a mere child, really, can be 'wise'.

She doesn't entirely lack the physical appeal that is beginning to bloom from the other girls of her general age range, neither, brought out by the awkward transitioning period of adolescence bemoaned by so many.

If one preferred slim, straight figures, anyway, and didn't mind the obvious near-skeletal and sheer sharpness that enveloped her, nor the omnipresent feeling of apathy on an undeniably predatory level.

Her distance and self-imposed separation from the rest of the milling crowds could be, with a bit of carefully liberal, creative license, construed to be 'mysterious,' something often sagely noted to be an element that never failed to appear in the latest popular romance novel.

On the other hand, she is Hermione Granger.

Ron and Harry share silently screaming glances at the Bulgarian wizard's latest tentative overture: a flower formed from the folded pages of a book, the ink faded and faint.

Their friend (whose only friends seemed to be them, actually), smiles (at the flower, not at Krum), and accepts it.

"It looks delicious," she comments, then lays it on top of the stack of library books at the table they are sharing, while they studied together for Ancient Runes, an effort proposed by the hopeful Krum to interest her academic side.

(A side which often appears to be her only side.)

Belatedly, she adds, "thank you," before pointing out an incorrectly cited source on his incompleted essay.

Krum blinks, somewhat dazedly, and then quickly scrambles to to fix it.

H is rewarded by an approving, absent-minded nod, Hermione's attention long-since diverted once more to her own composition.

Harry and Ron share another glance, more despairing this time, from where they are spying on the duo from behind a bookcase.

(And, of course, under the ever-so-handy invisibility cloak.)

They aren't quite sure who (or what) they are despairing of (or for), only that they're definitely despairing with good reason.

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