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It takes her mother a long time to forgive her. Her father comes around in a week, but her mother’s letters are short and pained for a year, and visits are awkward, Hermione swallowing tears and brightly telling her father about House Elf laws while her mother fidgets and fidgets with her tea.
“I know you felt that you had to do it,” she tells Hermione at last. They’re in the kitchen, cooking together for the first time in months, and Hermione watches her mother’s knuckles whiten on the counter. “I know you wanted to keep us safe. I just wish you had done it another way.”
“There wasn’t another way, Mum,” Hermione says, voice small. “I didn’t want you to die.”
Her mother is silent for a long while. Then: “You could have asked us first. It’s the only time I’ve ever been afraid of you—” words wavering— “thinking that you could do the same things as those evil wizards you used to tell us about.”
That hits her sharply in the chest. “Mum,” she gasps, “I would never!”
“But you could. If you wanted to.”
-
She loves Ron, she really does, but there are some things he just can’t understand. He grew up in the middle of it, bangs and whizzes and firework-bright flashes. Harry doesn’t understand either, bless him—he only had the Dursleys to leave behind.
Hermione had her whole world.
-
Sometimes she truly wants to walk away and never look back. The way people talk about Muggleborns, let alone Muggles, makes her stomach sick with rage, her throat ache. All her friends are here, though, her work—her whole life. And home isn’t home anymore.
-
Magic has never been easy or natural for her. She’s just worked very hard to make it seem that way.