Chapter Text
My eyes fluttered open, assaulted by an obnoxiously bright light bleeding into the room. I groaned, throwing an arm over my face. Brilliant. I must have forgotten to close the curtains again.
Except… when did I get home last night?
My stomach growled a deep, hollow ache that told me I hadn’t eaten in a while. But for the life of me, I couldn’t remember anything after leaving the café. I rubbed at my temples. My memory was a foggy mess, like someone had wiped the last few hours with a damp cloth.
As my eyes adjusted, I realized something was off. The ceiling above me wasn’t the cracked white plaster I knew—it was blue. Blue, with swirling, hand-painted clouds drifting lazily across it. Like a child’s daydream. My bedroom didn’t have a sky-painted ceiling. Or clouds. Or… whatever this was.
Sitting up slowly, I scanned the room. A large oak wardrobe stood in the corner, its doors slightly ajar to reveal a row of perfectly pressed uniforms. Next to it, a sturdy desk cluttered with parchment, quills, and ink bottles. Books—hundreds of them—were stacked in teetering piles all around, covering every available surface, including the floor and even part of the bed.
I winced as I stepped on a few, muttering an apology to no one in particular. My eyes caught on one near the pillow: an old red volume with golden edges. The Tales of Beedle the Bard.
Wait. What? That’s… from Harry Potter.
A nervous laugh bubbled out of me. “Right. Okay. Someone’s got jokes.”
I looked around again, slower this time. Everything was too real—the faint smell of ink and parchment, the soft ticking of a brass clock, the creak of the wooden floorboards under my bare feet. I’d never been this deep into any cosplay scenario. And I definitely didn’t own furniture that looked like it came out of the 1800s.
That’s when it hit me.
This wasn’t my room. It wasn’t a room I recognized.
Panic began to rise in my chest.
Had I… been kidnapped? By who? Some deranged Potterhead with a taste for realism? I mean, sure, I’d returned a few library books late, but this seemed like an extreme response.
Before I could spiral further, a woman’s voice rang out from downstairs:
“HERMIONE GRANGER, WAKE UP!”
My stomach dropped.
“Ha,” I muttered to myself. “That’s… that’s funny. Real original.”
I turned toward the door, intending to laugh off my nerves, but froze when I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror hanging from it.
Staring back at me wasn’t my own face.
It was a small, frizzy-haired girl with wide brown eyes and a look of confused terror that mirrored my own. She was—there was no mistaking it—Hermione Granger.
I blinked. She blinked.
I reached up to touch my hair, and so did she.
“Oh, no,” I whispered. “Oh no no no no aw shit .”
The voice downstairs came again, louder this time:
“HERMIONE, DON’T MAKE ME COME UP THERE!”
I jumped. That sounded exactly like Mrs. Granger’s voice from the movies—or rather, what I imagined it would sound like if she existed outside of fiction.
My brain scrambled for logic. Dream? Coma? Psychotic break? Maybe I’d been hit by a bus and my mind had decided to spend its last conscious seconds living in fanfiction.
But the floor felt real beneath my feet. The air smelled like toast and tea. Somewhere downstairs, a kettle whistled.
And then I realized—I could feel everything. The tickle of the carpet. The slight draft from the open window. The warmth of sunlight on my arm.
This wasn’t a dream.
“Oh God,” I breathed. “I’m Hermione Granger.”
No time to think. I bolted for the door, feet slipping over the polished floorboards as I sprinted down the hall and toward the stairs.
Every creak echoed too loudly, my heart thudding in my ears.
“Maybe they’re just cosplayers,” I whispered to myself. “Really, really committed cosplayers.”
But as I rounded the corner, the scent of buttered toast hit me like a wall—and there, in the kitchen, stood two adults who looked exactly like Mr. and Mrs. Granger from every fan drawing I’d ever seen.
“Oh, the joys,” I muttered weakly, clutching the doorframe for balance. “Of waking up in an unfamiliar house… with unfamiliar people… who think I’m their daughter .”
And just like that, my morning went from mildly confusing to full-blown magical identity crisis