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The Forbidden Ship	By : Nerys Category: Harry Potter > Het - Male/Female > Hermione/Voldemort Views: 18082 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own the Harry Potter series nor any of the characters from the books/movies. I don't make money from writing this fanfiction.

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A/N: Another NoSex. Sorry.

Reviews, as always, are much appreciated, and replies can be found at: http://www2.adult-fanfiction.org/forum/index.php/topic/15639-review-replies/page-1

Prompt: Alphabet

"It's not a part of the alphabet," Hermione stated, her arms crossed in front of her chest as she glared at the person who dared to disagree with her and had taken it upon himself to do all the writing in their allegedly co-project.

Improving relations between Hogwarts Houses, whose idiotic idea had that been again?

Her hair fluffed in every direction, nearly standing up straight like someone had electrified it. She was itching to draw her wand and curse him into oblivion. Her eyes narrowed to tiny stripes since she was pretty certain she was looking at the culprit who'd convinced Professor Miya to do this and then ... got her stuck with him.

"Tom, why don't you form a pair with our new student?"

"It'll be my pleasure, Professor."

Conniving sneaky snake.

"Of course it is, Granger," Tom replied lightly, continuing to write on the parchment as if there weren't an angry witch with exploded hair standing next to him. "I daresay it doesn't surprise me that a silly Gryffindor wouldn't be able to—"

"It's an umlaut," Hermione snapped, slapping her hands on the table in fury.

Tom looked up, arching a single eyebrow, unperturbed.

It infuriated her beyond belief that that that that—

"It's not a letter," she hissed.

"It is," was the calm reply she got, and then, he continued writing on THEIR essay again, completely disregarding her very valid point.

"Whenever you want to use some actual interpunction in that sentence, I'm sure the reader would be extremely appreciative," she sassed, finally succeeding in snatching the parchment away triumphantly with the momentarily distraction that comment caused.

"Granger," Tom replied quietly as he got out of his chair and slid around the table in what almost appeared as a single, lithe move.

Hermione briefly swallowed when he halted right in front of her, basically demanding that parchment back with his mere presence. However, she was not one of his sissy followers; so he could try to be as intimidating as he possibly could, her opinions were not to be ignored. Quickly, she put her hand with the parchment behind her back, causing him to smirk at her mockingly.

"This is supposed to be a JOINED assignment," Hermione emphasised. "You know ... when people have to work TOGETHER ... as friends," she sneered, "which ..." she paused, smirking evilly back at him when the idea struck her, "will improve upon those bad House relations so much, Professor," she mimicked in that god-awful, sucking-up tone of voice HE always used around the teachers.

He merely blinked at her perfect imitation and then calmly replied, "I'm not letting you destroy my perfect, full O-score in Magical Languages, just because you want to be friends with me, Granger."

Now it was Hermione's turn to blink and splutter in indignation. She had no intentions to be friends with HIM. That wasn't what she’d meant to say and he knew it. She could tell by the amused glint in his eyes as she was about to open her mouth and pound on him. Audibly, she snapped it shut, determined now to crush him with academic arguments.

"It's not just the umlaut you're using wrongly either. 'A diacritic, also known as diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign from ancient Greek, is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The main use of diacritics in the Latin alphabet is to change the sound value of the letter to which they are added, or distinguish between homonyms.' They're not singular letters; page 301, chapter 25. Construction of Languages by Anony Pedia Wiki," she lectured.

For a moment, he just stood there and she felt absolute and utter triumph.

Tom sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Why do I always have to work with morons who don't read the entire book?"

"I read the entire book, thrice."

"Then how come you missed this part of chapter 55?" Before she had time to respond, he rapidly quoted: "'In orthography and collation, a letter modified by a diacritic may be treated either as a new, distinct letter or as a letter–diacritic combination. This varies from language to language, and may vary from case to case within a language'."

"My point exactly, it varies from language to language. So you have to add in the notion of it being an umlaut and not a letter. You can't simply state it's a letter when we don't know what text we're going to be given."

"Who says I don't know what text we've been assigned to study?" Tom asked, leaning in towards her ear. She felt his hand curve around her shoulder before travelling down her arm to her hand, but she was distracted by the way his breath brushed her earlobe as he softly whispered: "The text we're getting is in Swedish. Since they do not mark grammatical variation, as the umlaut does in the German alphabet, or separate syllables, as does the diaeresis, it is not correct to call these letters umlauts, despite the lack of a better term in English," he concluded victoriously, grabbing the parchment from her hand, swirling away and sliding back into his seat.

"We're not supposed to know in advance what text we'll be given," Hermione reprimanded when she broke out of her stupor, wanting to counter something at least.

Tom snorted. "I'm not doing any more work on this nonsense than necessary."

"It's unfair to the other students."

"Aww ... poor them," he mocked.

"Anyone can get high marks when they cheat. I always knew your intelligence was overrated."

That caught his attention. She noticed the flash of redness in his eyes and knew she'd gone too far, but she just didn't care. It was true. If he'd manipulated the professor into letting him know what text they'd be getting, that meant their workload was sufficiently less than others, which made their eventual grade incomparable to the others either.

Determined, she watched how he pulled the professor's assignment out of his bag and placed it on the table, facing her.

"If you can't tell which language the text we'll get is in by the way she worded the assignment, Granger, I have seriously overestimated YOUR intelligence," he said coldly.

Then he began writing on their essay again.

Confused, Hermione wasn't sure what to do first: stop him from writing on or find out what the hell he was talking about. She decided on the latter and picked up the parchment. It took her several read-throughs of the entire text before she noticed the clue. How could she have missed that? It was so obvious. A groan left her lips when she realised Riddle had been right all along.

This was going to be more painful than a round of Cruciatuses, she thought.

"Apology accepted," the snake said, sniggering gleefully.

"I haven't apologised," she retorted in reflex, scrunching up her face when she realised her mistake as he casually leaned back in his seat, now waiting expectantly.

"Well, then?" he asked tauntingly after a long silence.

"I'll apologise if you do it first."

"Why should I apologise? I didn't call an innocent person a cheat."

"Innocent," she huffed.

Some emotion flickered through his blank expression. Yet, it was gone too fast for her to determine what it had been. Why did she keep letting these things slip around him? He was just too aggravating!

"You should apologise for not communicating with me about this assignment that we are supposed to make together."

"Touché," Tom said. "Very well. I apologise."

He said it with such charm, ease and elegance that she wished there weren't any witnesses nearby so she could pummel him to death with her heavy schoolbag freely, without getting charged with anything.

"Your turn," he added, amused.

Hermione gritted her teeth. "Sorry," she said quickly, sitting down in her seat so she didn't have to look at that obnoxiously handsome face whilst she said her barely audible apology.

Tom snorted. "And I thought Gryffindors were supposed to be bold and da—"

"Just shut up and let me do something," Hermione interrupted, glaring at him.

That dark gaze flickered over her; then, he pushed the parchment towards her as a perfect gentleman. When she picked up her quill and started writing, however, he said:

"Don't forget to write how it is a letter and part of their alphabet."

Promptly, she pushed through the parchment and broke the tip of her quill in anger. This House-Unity thing was going to mean the death of someone before this evening was over.

xxx
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The Forbidden Ship