Work Text:
“I hope you’re pleased with yourselves. We could all have been killed - or worse, expelled. Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to bed.”
Unfortunately, sweeping up the stairs in her slippers was not as satisfying as Hermione had hoped, especially since she could still hear Ron muttering to Harry, “You’d think we dragged her along, wouldn’t you.” Obviously neither boy understood what kind of consequences they’d just escaped, the three-headed dog aside. Harry and Ron might not have read Hogwarts: A History, but she had.
Hermione knew the results of expulsion: no chance for a hearing, no legal recourse, just a wand snapped in half and a train ride home. Bathilda Bagshot described a particular troublemaker’s dismissal in most dispassionate terms, which rather heightened the horror of it all; Hermione had only had her wand for a month on reading the passage, and already the thought of splintered vine wood and split dragon heartstring made her clutch the wand to her chest.
She was only eleven, but Hermione could extrapolate. Had she stayed in the Muggle world, gone to Henrietta Barnett, and been sent down for some reason – unimaginable though that was, in a school with no Harry Potter or Ron Weasley in it – she would probably have gone on to Dartford or Altrincham and acquitted herself quite well.
A trip home from Hogwarts wouldn’t be like that. She couldn’t just write an essay, look mildly penitent, and get accepted to Beauxbatons or Salem or wherever else. She’d be trapped in the Muggle world forever, stuck with the vaguest inkling of what might have been, without anything like a polished, sparking wand to tell her You belong here.
There’d be no way to learn, no way to find out anything: what wizards had done in the past, what they were capable of in future, what she was capable of doing. How dangerous it might be, to herself and others, if she didn’t learn to control the magic inside her.
In short, expulsion was the first step of a quick trip to madness.
Possibly even death.
Hermione hadn’t (yet) read of anyone who died out of sheer suspense, but she was familiar with her own mind. She knew how many trips to the library her parents had permitted her once she’d turned 6, and how feverishly she’d looked things up in the time allotted. She knew how many nights she had lain awake reading after her lights were meant to be out (enough to burn out the lone battery in her torch after a few years; since Professor McGonagall’s visit to her parents, she suspected unintentional magic doubled its longevity). She knew how gaps in her knowledge flared and twinged like a loose tooth until she could discover exactly what it was she didn’t know.
A very, very tiny corner of her brain, the troublesome bit that demanded empirical evidence instead of elegantly simple logic, whispered that she couldn’t really know anything about expulsion without being expelled first. She ruthlessly shoved it back as she drew the curtains on her bed and opened Advancements in Alchemye. Exile from the magical world didn’t bear thinking about.
Getting chewed up by a three-headed dog would be painless by comparison.