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Hermione gasped when the Goblet of Fire spit out Harry's name after all the champions were already chosen. The nagging feeling of unease that had curled in the pit of her stomach after seeing The Dark Mark unfurled, blossoming into a full-blown anxiety. Things were much worse than she'd imagined, and her friends were going to need her.
The next day, she took her mobile phone, transfigured to look like a compact mirror, down to Hagrid's hut. He was busy wrestling with some gnomes, but he gave her a friendly wave. He'd been letting her borrow his hut to ring her parents for years, and they'd both managed to keep it a secret from everyone. Hermione felt strange about her phone, but her parents had insisted.
“Hermy! What a pleasant surprise. We didn't expect to hear from you so soon.” Her mother answered on the first ring, and Hermione could picture her standing in the kitchen, looking out the window at their small back garden.
“I guess I just missed you both.” Hermione was surprised to find that the words were truer than she'd realized. She slumped into one of Hagrid's chairs and tucked the phone between her ear and shoulder.
“We miss you too, love. But it'll only be a few months until Christmas.”
“About that...” Hermione took a deep breath as she sorted out what information was safe to share. “There's a big exciting thing going on. A championship tournament. Everyone's staying for Christmas. I want to stay too.”
“I don't know about that now. You know our deal. And really, Hermione, we didn't have a child so we could send her off hundreds of miles and never see her.”
The deal. The blasted deal to come home for every break. She'd made that blasted deal before she'd even known what she was really agreeing to.
“Mum, I know. I just...” She let the words trail off, knowing that her mother would fill in the blanks and that whatever her mother thought she meant would serve her best. No need to go complicating things. Hermione waited, resisted the urge to fill the silence with words. She saw a bright blue many-legged insect scuttle across the floor, and she lifted her wand and silently cast a spell to trap it under a pint glass.
“Listen, leave it with me. I'll talk to your father and text you later. Are you eating enough?”
Hermione smiled. “Yes, of course, I am. I love you both.”
“And we love you, Hermy.”
The text came later that evening. “You may stay at school for the school year but you will be home for all of the summer hols. We'll go somewhere fun – Porto maybe?”
Hermione knew it was going to take more than wheedling and bargaining to get her parents to change their mind. It was going to take a bit of magic, and getting around the prohibition on underage magic was going to be tricky. But she had an entire school year to conquer the challenge. And she was nothing if not equal to a tricky mental challenge.
*** *** ***
Hermione's first stop the next morning was the library. Madam Pince looked none to happy to see her, but then that's how the librarian always looked, pinched and suspicious. Hermione would've thought the woman would have seen her love of books by now and grown to trust her, but Hermione doubted the the librarian even fully trusted her beloved books to Dumbledore or Professor McGonigal.
Hermione grabbed a collection of potions books and went through the arduous process of checking them out. She kept her face neutral and endured Madam Pince's withering looks and pointed questions, then carried the tottering pile back up to the common room. She collapsed at a table and dove headfirst into Magical Drafts and Potions.
The other students were just starting to wake up and filter into the common room. Ginny Weasely yawned and took the seat across from her.
“Looking for something to help Harry?”
Hermione looked up from the page about the Confusing Concoction and pushed aside her mental questions about whether she could confuse her parents into accepting a new agreement. Ginny looked tired and frightened.
“In a way, yes. Although we don't know what's in store for him yet. Never hurts to be aware of what's available.”
“Maybe you could make me a restfulness potion. I know I fell asleep last night, but I don't feel like I actually slept at all.” Ginny put her head down on the table and closed her eyes.
Hermione returned her attention to the book. The Forgetfulness Potion looked tempting. Its ingredients were freely available, and it was the perfect spell for a beginner, so she could probably do it in her sleep. But even a strong dose would wear off eventually, and how angry would her parents be to know that she'd broken their agreement? Even if they forgot, she'd have no such excuse.
Hermione sighed and flipped through the pages of the book. Potions were tricky magic. More an art than a science. She only had to remember her mishap with the Polyjouice Potion to know that potions were too fraught to be reliable.
*** *** ***
Hermione held on to the potion books for a week to avoid arousing Madam Pince's suspicions. Or at least to avoid arousing them any more than they normally were aroused. She returned the books and then wandered the shelves, waiting for inspiration to strike. She felt at home in the stacks, breathing in parchment and dust.
She ran her finger absentmindedly over the spines of the books and let her mind wander. She needed something that was wandless, wordless, and untraceable. She needed a miracle. She needed magic. She needed to do the impossible – to change her mother's mind.
She stopped abruptly to avoid crashing into Luna Lovegood, who was dreamily floating through the stacks, her eyes tracking something on the ceiling. Hermione didn't bother to check what Luna was looking at or to protest. She gave the apologetic girl a tight smile and turned away. As she did, a book caught her attention: Muggle Myths and Magical Maxims.
Hermione couldn't remember seeing the book before, and something about it called out to her. She took it off the shelf and headed to the desk to check out the book.
At breakfast the next morning, Hermione read the book, interrupted only once by Ron who rolled his eyes and made a lame jab about doing extra reading. She ignored him and kept reading, because the book was fascinating in itself, even through she was despairing of finding a solution to her problem. Until she found the chapter on hypnosis.
The Muggle world has long been fascinated by the idea of hypnosis. The roots of hypnosis are long and deep, snaking back into mesmerism and other suggestive arts. Although the practice has long since fallen out of a favour, many a wizard or witch has tried to plant a suggestion inside the mind of another, whether for good or ill, and always with varying results. In fact, it's the unpredictability and poor reliability of mesmerism that led to its abandonment in the magical world, although some Muggles bravely soldier on.
Hermione felt like a swimmer out of her depth who had just been thrown a life buoy. Sure, it wasn't perfect, but it was the best idea she had. And she had plenty of time to research and think about how best to shape her plan.
*** *** ***
Hermione found Neville in the greenhouse, feeding carrots to a chomping cabbage.
“Hi Neville.”
“Hi Hermione.” He looked away from the cabbage to smile at her, then yelped and pulled his fingers back.
“I'm sorry, I shouldn't have distracted you. Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I'm fine. It's just a nip and it was my own fault, really.” He picked up another carrot and kept his eyes on the cabbage and his fingers well out of the way.
Hermione picked up a carrot and handed it to Neville. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course you can, but I should probably stop doing this while you ask.” Neville stepped away from the cabbage, and they both walked over to where the flowers twisted and climbed up toward the glassy roof.
“Is there a plant that can help someone change their mind about something?”
Neville scrunched up his face as he thought. “I don't think so. There are a couple of plants that make a person a bit less inhibited, a bit more open to suggestion. Acquiessence root is probably the most common and easiest to find of those.”
“I see,” said Hermione, aiming for casual and missing by a couple of miles. “And Neville, if someone wanted to get some acquiessence root, where would be a good place to look.”
A blush rose on Neville's cheeks and he started to stammer. “I mean, it would depend on whether the person wanted it for good reasons.”
Hermione sighed as she tried to figure out how much to share, but then decided that total transparency was the best policy in this case.
“Can we go outside?” Hermione was suddenly aware that the Gossiping Grapevines were wending their way across the greenhouse.
Neville nodded and Hermione led them to a spot along a stone wall. She hauled herself up with minimal effort then waited for Neville to scramble up next to her.
“A few years ago, my parents and I were trying to find the best school for me to attend. They had one hard-and-fast rule: no boarding schools. My dad always said that childhood passed altogether too quickly and that the pack stays together. And I was fine with that. I'd gotten into some of the best schools in London, and it was just a matter of picking one.”
Hermione paused and looked around, still awed by where she'd ended up. “Then, one day, a very strange man appeared, nearly out of nowhere, at our front door.”
“Dumbledore?” guessed Neville.
“Indeed. And he came in and explained Hogwarts and magic and my parents...” She paused smiled at the memory. “My parents were convinced that they'd somehow ended up on one of those prank television shows. I don't expect you've ever seen one, but they really thought a joke was being played on them. And then Dumbledore took out his wand and transfigured my mother's favourite teapot into a sloth.”
“A sloth?” Neville laughed.
“My mother's eyes nearly fell out of her head. Then Dumbledore winked at me, gave him his wand, and told me how to change it back.”
“And did you? Change it back?”
“I did. The spout wasn't exactly in the right place and the lid never fit exactly right again, but at least I didn't leave it a hairy mess. First transfigurations can go so badly wrong.”
“Tell me about it.”
“So my parents were convinced about magic, but the idea of a boarding school. It really made them so sad. But my mother, she said that she felt they had a duty to let me go, but that I had a duty to come back every break. And that was our deal – I could only go to boarding school if I promised to come home.”
“And now? What's changed?”
“Everything, Neville. Everything's changed. Ron and Harry need me, way more than my parents do. And I wonder how safe it even is for me to go home. My parents are safe, anonymous Muggle dentists. They've no enemies. The only thing that can draw Dark Arts onto them is me.” Hermione shivered even though the sun warmed the air enough that they didn't need jackets.
Neville scrambled off the wall. “Acquiessence root grows best in the shade, so I bet we'll find some near the edge of the Forbidden Forest.”
Hermione smiled her thanks and followed him to the edge of the forest.
*** *** ***
Hermione spent the first two weeks of the summer holiday in Alicante with her parents. They got sunburned at the waterpark, swam with dolphins, and sunned themselves on many beautiful beaches. The sun was so warm and cleansing, Hermione could nearly forget that there was evil loose in the world.
But then they returned back home to London and Hermione started receiving messages from Ron about the new attempt to fight Voldemort. And she knew that she had to be part of it. So she started repeating a phrase to her parents “It's time.” She spent two weeks laying the ground work, even creeping into their room while the slept and whispering it into their ears.
She took the acquiessence root out of her trunk and carefully diced it up. Neville had told her that it was rather like rhubarb, so she baked it into a rhuburb pie that she made while her parents were at work.
After dinner that evening, she announced that she had made dessert.
“Hermy! How good of you to take some time away from your studies,” her mother said.
“Well, don't thank me yet til you've tried it. I've never actually baked a rhubarb pie before.”
“How'd you know it's my favorite?” asked her father.
Hermione went into the kitchen and got the pie and the cream. She took her time cutting the pie and nearly held her breath while they tried the first bite. She accepted their compliments, then put her plan into action.
“It's time. It's time. We need a new deal. A new agreement.”
“A new deal?” asked her mother, her voice slower and lower than usual. Her eyes looked a bit dazed, like she'd stepped out of a dark cinema into a sunny afternoon. Hermione felt a shot of excitement, like adrenalin in her veins.
“Yes, you need to let me stay with my friends. They need me more than you do. I need to be in the magical world. You need to let me go.”
“We need to let you go,” said her father.
“But Hermy-”
“Mum, it's time, you need to let me go.” Hermione felt an unexpected sadness, as she realized that without the deal, she didn't know when she'd next see her parents. But she knew it had to be done, so she pressed on. “It's time. It's time.”
“You know, dear, I think it's time,” said her mother.
“I agree. It is time,” said her father. And Hermione knew her plan had been successful. She didn't know what the future held, but she knew she was taking a bold step into a different phase of her life.