Chapter Text
“They’ve changed too much.”
That’s what McGonagall tells her, when she asks why she can’t reverse the spell on her parents’ memories. If she’d gone back quickly, it might have been doable. If she’d found them in their first days in Australia, when they’d been the same people in a different place, there would have been a chance.
But by the time Hermione goes back, by the time she’s sure it’s safe, they’ve changed too much. They have twins, a boy and a girl, six months old, and watching her parents fawn over them is enough to make her shatter.
Somehow, Hermione never imagined her parents moving on. She pictured them stuck in time, exactly as they’d been, just waiting for her to come back home. During the worst times, she held tight to the promise that one day, she could go home and have her parents hold her again. The promise that she would still have a home.
But she’s too late. The people who coo at babies in the nursery...they aren’t her parents, not anymore. She’s an orphan, and the word feels heavy. No one else would feel it, not the way she does. People would feel sorry for her, of course, in the abstract, generic way they feel sorry for everyone who lost their parents to the war. But Hermione didn’t lose anything; she threw her family away, and now she has to live with the consequences.
Maybe no one would pity her after all. She wouldn’t deserve it anyway.
She can visit after graduation, maybe, when the pain has softened a bit. She can claim to be a distant cousin, and she can watch her siblings grow up as strangers. She wonders if they’ll have magic.
She hopes they do.
She hopes they don’t.
Their names are Abigail and George. Hermione wonders if they’ll have curly hair like hers, or if it will be straight and even and manageable. What their teeth will look like. If they’ll need braces. She hopes the bullies will leave them alone. She hopes no one calls them Mudblood.
“You said your name is Hermione?”
She couldn’t force herself to go right after graduation. She made excuses, settling in at the Department of Mysteries and getting drinks with Ron and Harry every week, keeping busy and ignoring the questions about when she’d get a job in politics. A job where she could fight for the people who need her most. A part of her still wonders and wants for it, but mostly, she’s tired of fighting. Someone else can do the fighting now.
Besides, the mysteries are soothing.
At almost five years old, her brother and sister will have personalities. They’ll have friends. She’ll be able to see if their hair is curly like hers. They’ll be old enough to hold a conversation.
Hermione is looking forward to it; she’s dreading it more than anything.
She almost walks away, just from the sound of her mother saying her name. Not with familiarity, not with love, just a question. Curious and impersonal, and it breaks her.
But no, she’s lost too much already. She refuses to lose her parents all over again, not when her mother is right here, saying her name. Not when there’s still a chance to love them, even if they’ll never love her back.
“Yeah. I’m— do you know your great-grandfather, George? He’s my great-great-grandfather, and I was in the area, and my uncle said you live here.” It comes out too fast, all in one breath, but Hermione can’t handle more. She might run. She might cry. She might say that she is not a distant cousin.
“We almost named our daughter Hermione,” her mother says, fondly this time.
“Your daughter?”
“Yes, Abigail. Do you have children?”
No, she can’t imagine it. Harry already has one, with Ginny, and Ron is still looking for someone to settle down, but Hermione doesn’t know how they do it. Something in her shriveled up during the war, and she doesn’t know how to raise a child; she doesn’t know how to be a child.
She shakes her head and remembers the twisted form of a second year with curly brown hair. His leg several feet from his body, blue eyes wide and dead, the pool of blood, the red tie.
Her breakfast threatens to come back up.
“Well, come in. I’ll make tea.” Hermione steps inside. This house is different from the one she grew up in. The couch is larger, and there are toys on the floor.
Her mother looks different too. Threads of grey peak through at her roots, where the dye hasn’t covered. The last time Hermione saw her, there was no grey in her hair, and the frames of her glasses were blue. Now, they’re a simple black.
Her chest aches, but she follows her mother into the kitchen. “The kids are out right now, with my husband. But please, make yourself at home.” Home. This isn’t her home; she doesn’t belong here.
She sits.
“What do you do, Hermione?”
“I work in a lab. Government work, in London.” It’s the closest she can get to the word confidential, and she needs that word because needs to give her mother something true. Her work is confidential, even to her friends; to her parents, she knows, it would be incomprehensible. Her chest aches again.
“We used to live in London,” her mother says fondly, setting the tea on the table.
“Why did you move?”
“It was time for a change. Time to escape the rain,” she laughs, but it’s uneasy, like something is pulling at her memories. Guilt clenches in Hermione’s gut. She should leave.
She stays. The tea tastes like home.
“What brings you to Australia?”
“Just on vacation,” she lies, like she hasn’t been taking Portkeys back and forth since the day she got her first paycheck.
Her mother nods, completely unsuspecting. After all, what is there to suspect?
She hears the front door open. “That must be Wendell and the kids.” Hermione doesn’t touch her tea again; she doesn’t want her hands to shake. The twins run into the room, giggling at something only they understand, and Hermione can’t look away. “Abby, George, this is your cousin Hermione.”
Hermione smiles, and tries not to cry. “Hi.” She crouches down to their level. “How old are you?”
“Four,” George says proudly. His hair is brown and curly and exactly like hers.
“And a half,” Abigail — Abby — adds, so close to Hermione’s young self that she almost laughs. It would come out choked, halfway to a sob, so she holds it down. Abby doesn’t look quite like her — her hair is darker and just a little straighter — but she chooses the same words Hermione would have used.
There’s no denying it — George is her little brother, and Abby is her little sister. Hermione can’t breathe.
“Do you want to play dentist with us?” George asks, bouncing up onto his toes. “Our parents are dentists.”
“Those are doctors who work on teeth.”
“That’s what I said.”
“Well, maybe Herminny doesn’t know what dentists are.” Hermione doesn’t correct the way her sister says her name. Herminny Granger. Abby and George Wilkins. Her chest aches, and she wonders if it will ever stop.
Hermione looks up at her mother. Their mother, the one they share. “Is it safe?”
“Perfectly safe,” she assures her with a smile.
So she lets the twins drag her out of the room and force her onto her back so they can look at her teeth. She ignores the bad memories when they say she needs braces, and she listens to her mother tell her father about who she is and why she’s there and what she does for work. Her father asks if they should invite her to stay for dinner.
She thinks about how easily her mother welcomed her into their home. How quickly she introduced her to their children. Her parents have always been a little too kind, a little too trusting.
The war would have eaten them alive.
“We need someone to teach Arithmancy.”
The letter comes by owl. It has McGonagall’s signature and a Hogwarts seal, and it starts with ‘Dear Ms. Granger.’ It hopes she’s doing well, and she knows McGonagall means it, but the Headmistress has never been one for small talk. The letter doesn’t ask a question, not directly, but Hermione sees the offer anyway.
She plans to say no. She has a job, one where she digs into problems that lend themselves more to questions than answers, one where she can know unknowable things. She doesn’t want to go back to Hogwarts, not when she can still see the dead bodies.
On George and Abby’s seventh birthday, she takes a Portkey to Australia and watches the party. Her father looks so happy. She goes home and owls McGonagall that she can do the job for one year. She needs a break from sitting in an office alone, and she needs to see children who don’t share her face.
Two weeks in, she learns that Professor Parkinson started teaching Herbology two years after the war and never left. All the students love her.
Hermione hopes no one ever speaks to George and Abby the way Pansy spoke to her. She hates herself for being so protective of children she’s met once in their entire lives. She hates herself for not hating Pansy.
“It’s soothing,” Pansy admits one day, tucked into a booth at the Three Broomsticks. It’s the first time they’ve said a word at all, but they both came by to make sure all the students made it back to Hogwarts, and Pansy offered a drink and some conversation. “Working with the plants, I mean.”
They’re strangers, but Pansy talks like this is a safe space. She talks like a new flower has the same weight as an unsolved mystery. Hermione wonders if Pansy also became an orphan during the war, if Pansy’s parents are in Azkaban, if she has a Dark Mark on her arm.
“I don’t remember you liking academics as a student,” Hermione says, not accusatory, just a fact.
“I doubt you would remember much about me.” Also not an accusation.
“I remember enough,” Hermione says softly, thinking about her teeth and hair and blood. Pansy’s voice echoes in her ears. But he’s there! Potter’s there. Someone grab him! The scars on her arm burn, but she doesn’t leave.
“Me too.” Pansy’s voice is just as soft. “I’m sorry, Granger. I— it’s not an excuse, but it’s all I knew. It’s what I was raised on.”
“And during the battle?”
Pansy blinks, and Hermione sees the flicker of tears catching in her eyelashes. “She was in first year. My sister. They were all supposed to leave, but she…she was waiting for me. She didn’t die, but…” She shakes her head, lips pressed together like she’s trying not to cry. “They couldn’t wake her for three months.”
Hermione should judge her, but she can’t. Pansy didn’t try to hand Harry over out of hate; she did it out of love. A life for a life, Hermione’s best friend for Pansy eleven-year-old sister. Hermione doesn’t know if she would have traded a first year to save Harry, but she might have traded Draco to save the school. She imagines seventeen-year-old Pansy watching over an eleven-year-old who couldn’t wake up, and she softens. “What’s her name?”
“Rose. She’s a Seeker.” The math is quick and easy; Pansy’s sister is already out of Hogwarts. A professional Seeker, then. Something about that makes her smile. “Do you have siblings, Granger?”
“It’s complicated.” Pansy doesn’t laugh, doesn’t ask how that question could possibly be anything but a yes or no. “I Obliviated my parents before the war. By the time I went back, they had new kids. They’re seven.”
Pansy nods. She gets another round of firewhisky. She doesn’t ask about Abby and George and their straight teeth and the lack of magic in their hands, and Hermione doesn’t offer.
“You know, McGonagall still hasn’t found an Arithmancy professor for next year.”
Pansy says it causally, leaning against the doorframe of Hermione’s classroom. They haven’t spoken since that conversation at the Three Broomsticks, just one month into the school year. Now, they’re two weeks from the end.
“She knows I’m only here for the year.”
“Ready to go back to unravelling mysteries?” Pansy’s tone is light, and Hermione isn’t sure if it’s sincere or sarcastic.
“I’m looking forward to it.”
Pansy raises an eyebrow. “Are you?”
“Yes.” She wishes she could be more sure. She thinks about her office, empty, collecting dust. She imagines someone else sitting in her chair, studying her mysteries. Maybe she’ll go back and be assigned a new office. Or maybe she won’t be needed at all; maybe her boss has already found someone better.
She remembers sitting in her parents’ kitchen, drinking tea that tasted like home. Part of her is glad her parents found happiness again, but part of her hates that she’s been replaced.
At work, in her family, at Hogwarts, there’s always someone to take her place. She wonders, almost absently, if being replaceable counts as a personality trait.
“You could stay another year.”
She shakes her head. “I can’t.” It’s a lie; she could stay, but only once. This year has been nice. Relaxing. But when she tries to imagine doing it for ten more years, she feels suffocated. She lives for new challenges, and she couldn’t teach the same thing, over and over, year after year. Staying here would drive her mad.
Not because on the dead bodies, though. Not anymore. She already walked to the spot where she found the second year, one leg torn off. Dead, so dead. But standing there doesn’t make her sick now, and being in this building doesn’t hurt. “Besides, I faced everything I needed to.”
“Including me?”
Hermione laughs. “Obviously, Parkinson. You were at the top of the list.” Pansy laughs too, like she can also see the dead bodies. Like she also visited the thestrals, just to know they’re real. “Why do you care if I stay?” They haven’t spoken in months, except for an occasional ‘Hello’ in the corridor. There’s no reason for Pansy to be here, asking Hermione to stay. There’s no reason for Hermione to care that Pansy wants her to stay.
“I don’t.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t be a stranger,” Pansy says, like they haven’t been strangers for the whole year, like they actually know something about each other. Hermione remembers that quiet conversation in the bar, and she speaks before she can stop herself.
“What house was Rose in?”
“Hufflepuff.” Hermione imagines Pansy watching over an eleven-year-old Hufflepuff. It’s impossible to hate her. “What are your siblings’ names?”
“Abby and George. My parents almost named her Hermione.” She closes her eyes. “Abby and George Wilkins.” It still sends a sharp burst of pain through her chest, but when she opens her eyes, there’s a sadness mirrored in Pansy’s face.
“Rose changed her last name to Park.” Hermione nods; it would be hard for a professional Quidditch player to have the name Parkinson. She knows that Pansy understands, and she knows that it doesn’t dull the pain.
Abby Wilkins. George Wilkins. Hermione Granger.
Rose Park. Pansy Parkinson.
Hermione’s choices gave her siblings a different name. Pansy’s sister chose to change her own name. Hermione wonders which is more painful. She wonders if Pansy tried to convince Rose not to do it; she wonders why Pansy didn’t do it too.
“Have a good summer, Parkinson.” She wants to know if Pansy hates that Hermione just used her last name, if she finds it hard to breathe when she sees a Quidditch jersey with her sister’s name on it. Right now, Pansy doesn’t feel like a stranger.
It scares her.
“Good luck at work, Granger.”
Three weeks later, she walks into the Department of Mysteries. Her boss doesn’t look up. “I left a case in your office.” She thanks him and leaves, feeling empty. The corridor is silent, just floor-to-ceiling locked doors.
Hermione’s office is unchanged, except for the dust and a single folder on her desk. She murmurs a set of cleaning spells that she learned from Molly and looks around. The office is exactly how she left it — nothing changed and no one missed her. Well, at least she hasn’t been replaced.
Don’t be a stranger.
Hermione touches the folder and whispers a few words, and it responds to her touch, to her magic. It’s keyed to respond to her. It’s hers. She sits down at her desk.
Time to get to work.