sentient?"
There was a pregnant silence from beside him, as Harry's eyes went down the table of contents. There was indeed a chapter on Plant Language, causing Harry's heart to skip a beat; and then his hands began to rapidly turn the pages, heading for the appropriate page number.
"There are days," said Hermione Granger, "when I really, truly, have absolutely no idea what goes on inside that head of yours."
"Look, it's a question of multiplication, okay? There's a lot of plants in the world, if they're not sentient then they're not important, but if plants are people then they've got more moral weight than all the human beings in the world put together. Now, of course your brain doesn't realize that on an intuitive level, but that's because the brain can't multiply. Like if you ask three separate groups of Canadian households how much they'll pay to save two thousand, twenty thousand, or two hundred thousand birds from dying in oil ponds, the three groups will respectively state that they're willing to pay seventy-eight, eighty-eight, and eighty dollars. No difference, in other words. It's called scope insensitivity. Your brain imagines a single bird struggling in an oil pond, and that image creates some amount of emotion that determines your willingness to pay. But no one can visualize even two thousand of anything, so the quantity just gets thrown straight out the window. Now try to correct that bias with respect to a hundred trillion sentient blades of grass, and you'll realize that this could be thousands of times more important than we used to think the whole human species was... oh thank Azathoth, this says it's just a few magical plants that can talk and they speak regular human language out loud, not that there's a spell you can use to talk with any plant -"
"Ron came to me at breakfast yesterday morning," Hermione said. Now her voice sounded a little quiet, a little sad, maybe even a little scared. "He said he'd been dreadfully shocked to see me kiss you. That what you said while you were Demented should've shown me how much evil you were hiding inside. And that if I was going to be a follower of a Dark Wizard, then he wasn't sure he wanted to be in my army anymore."
Harry's hands had stopped turning pages. It seemed that Harry's brain, for all its abstract knowledge, was still incapable of appreciating scope on any real emotional level, because it had just forcibly redirected his attention away from trillions of possibly-sentient blades of grass who might be suffering or dying even as they spoke, and toward the life of a single human being who happened to be nearer and dearer.
"Ron is the world's most gigantic prat," Harry said. "They won't be printing that in the newspaper anytime soon, because it's not news. So after you fired him, how many of his arms and legs did you break?"
"I tried to tell him it wasn't like that," Hermione went on in the same quiet voice. "I tried to tell him you weren't like that, and that it wasn't like that between the two of us, but it just seemed to make him even more... more like he was."
"Well, yes," Harry said. He was surprised that he wasn't feeling angrier at Captain Weasley, but his concern for Hermione seemed to be overriding that, for now. "The more you try to justify yourself to people like that, the more it acknowledges that they have the right to question you. It shows you think they get to be your inquisitor, and once you grant someone that sort of power over you, they just push more and more." This was one of Draco Malfoy's lessons which Harry had thought was actually pretty smart: people who tried to defend themselves got questioned over every little point and could never satisfy their interrogators; but if you made it clear from the start that you were a celebrity and above social conventions, people's minds wouldn't bother tracking most violations. "That's why when Ron came over to me as I was sitting down at the Ravenclaw table, and told me to stay away from you, I held my hand out over the floor and said, 'You see how high I'm holding my hand? Your intelligence has to be at least this high to talk to me.' Then he accused me of, quote, sucking you into the darkness, unquote, so I pursed my lips and went schluuuuurp, and after that his mouth was still making those talking noises so I put up a Quieting Charm. I don't think he'll be trying his lectures on me again."
"I understand why you did that," Hermione said, her voice tight, "I wanted to tell him off too, but I really wish you hadn't, it will make things harder for me, Harry!"
Harry looked up from Vegetable Cunning again, he wasn't getting any reading done at this rate; and he saw that Hermione was still reading whatever book she had, not looking up at him. Her hands turned another page even as he watched.
"I think you're taking the wrong approach by trying to defend yourself at all," Harry said. "I really do think that. You are who you are. You're friends with whoever you choose. Tell anyone who questions you to shove it."
Hermione just shook her head, and turned another page.
"Option two," Harry said. "Go to Fred and George and tell them to have a little talk with their wayward brother, those two are genuine good guys -"
"It's not just Ron," Hermione said in almost a whisper. "Lots of people are saying it, Harry. Even Mandy is giving me worried looks when she thinks I'm not looking. Isn't it funny? I keep worrying that Professor Quirrell is sucking you into the darkness, and now people are warning me just the same way I try to warn you."
"Well, yeah," said Harry. "Doesn't that reassure you a bit about me and Professor Quirrell?"
"In a word," said Hermione, "no."
There was a silence that lasted long enough for Hermione to turn another page, and then her voice, in a real whisper this time, "And, and Padma is going around telling everyone that, that since I couldn't cast the P-Patronus Charm, I must only be p-pretending to be n-nice..."
"Padma didn't even try herself!" Harry said indignantly. "If you were a Dark Witch who was just pretending, you wouldn't have tried in front of everyone, do they think you're stupid?"
Hermione smiled a little, and blinked a few times.
"Hey, I have to worry about actually going evil. Here the worst case scenario is that people think you're more evil than you really are. Is that going to kill you? I mean, is it all that bad?"
The young girl nodded, her face screwed up tight.
"Look, Hermione... if you worry that much about what other people think, if you're unhappy whenever other people don't picture you exactly the same way you picture yourself, that's already
