this swarming sea is endless; the artist alone is sparing
and every man his mother and his father
//
by sezzie_dee
Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: pg13
Summary: "She dreams of betrayal and an all-consuming darkness; of cold, black water that snatches at her ankles and drags her down into its depths with invisible icy talons, enveloping her and swallowing her whole." Hermione gen, with hints of R/Hr.
Post-Deathly Hallows, and thus: spoilers.
The only HP fic I’ve ever written has been MWPP-era, and even then it was long before there was any sort of reliable canon for them. I probably have no Hermione voice whatsoever, so bear with me.
I remember locked figures in the streets
Duel or embrace, I do not know
The impetuous gestures of our guide
as we came to that place where the river meets
rock, the savage boldness of the flood.
A voice saying freedom! in a tongue
I have forgotten. The wet red sandstone.
My lifelong terror of blood.
I remember the ocean licking at the lonely piers,
and the scavenged food.
I cannot remember the faces
of my father, my mother, my sister; only the places
that were not home, and the tears.
-- Gwen Harwood
*
She has exactly one magical photo of her parents.
She took it the day before she bewitched them; stole their memories, altered them, transformed the Grangers into the Wilkins and in doing so neatly bundled up and hid, protected, or so she hoped, the one part of the world she couldn’t bear to leave behind. It wasn’t something she’d consciously planned to do (though perhaps subconsciously, she had; the camera was quivering in her hands, even if only slightly) but it had felt right, prudent even, at the time.
They’re smiling in the picture, just as they ought to, with their perfect dentists’ smiles - occasionally they laugh and exchange weighty glances but the mood remains the same. They look happy, she thinks, and wonders if it has anything to do with her not being in it.
She never showed it to them, once she’d taken it, but hid it under her pillow as she contemplated an act so dreadful she wasn’t sure she’d be able to bring herself to do it, had kept it with her in her darkest moments since. She tells herself she’d thought maybe they wouldn’t care or have the time, or that the concept of living pictures of the literal sense would be rather too much for them to handle, but she knows it isn’t true, not exactly. The photo feels like a secret, a piece taken from their lives when they weren’t looking and in it was captured and preserved a moment that was real, and genuine, and just the way she wants to remember them.
They would have liked the photo, she thinks.
*
It’s far easier than she thinks it should be.
“They don’t know they have a daughter, you see.”
Her voice barely trembles when she tells them what she’s done; all too calmly takes in Ron’s quiet admiration and something reflected back at her in Harry’s startling green eyes, soaked in stars and what might be pity, if only she didn’t know him better.
“They’re safe. It’s what matters,” she says, firmly, and this is how she sleeps at night.
She wishes she were as sure of it as she was able to make herself sound.
*
She remembers all too guiltily, sometimes, the holidays spent at Hogwarts that she should have spent at home. How at first, she’d thought it just like any other place she’d been, and yet; the feeling of belonging, for the first time in her life, of friends that actually meant something, and of people that actually valued her worth far more than all she knew. How piece by bittersweetly sung piece, a school of witchcraft and wizardry, of everything her parents never were and never could be, had become her home, had raised her, had made her who she was today. How she’d never realised how disconnected it had made her from everything that should have mattered; of somehow, the very thing they were fighting for.
I’m terribly sorry, but I won’t be coming home for Christmas this year -
“An otter, Hermione?” Ron asks in amazement.
Her wand feels warm in her hand.
She ducks to avoid a swooping silver kestrel only to narrowly miss bumping into Fred and George, staring at each other in wonder at the seal and dolphin erupting out of their respective wands.
“By George --”
“-- you’re wrong, I’m Fred -“
“Who’d have thought -“
“-I can hardly believe it -“
“Marine life,” they grin in unison. “There’s something fishy going on here.”
Her Patronus glides in lazy circles around her, eliciting a delighted laugh from its conjuror and Hermione feels strangely light-hearted.
“A terrier, Ronald?” she mocks, and he offers her a lopsided smile.
“Crazy smart, are they then, otters? Bossy, too?”
“Actually, the European otter is nowhere as common as it used to be. Its habitat has been destroyed by the use of chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides, and since they’re poached for their lovely pelts --”
“Rare and magnificent, then,” Ron concedes, his eyes back on the dog bounding through the air.
She beams. A silver hare skims past her ear.
All my love,
Hermione.
*
She brushes her teeth when she’s upset.
It never occurs to her that this is illogical, or unusual, and when she sees how the room starts spinning for him she’s at the bathroom in an instant, hesitant and hovering at the door.
“Do you want your toothbrush, Harry?” she asks softly, and it’s only as the words leave her mouth that she realises how absurd they sound.
Her father had told her once that there was little brushing couldn’t do - it helped with toothache, bad breath and preventing a whole range of nasty diseases. She sometimes wishes saving the world were as easy as toothpaste, rinse and repeat.
She watches herself in the mirror, when Ron leaves - eyes red and puffy, her wrist aching and gums sore from her rigorous brushing, hoping to scrub away some of the hopelessness and how empty she feels inside. Spits into the makeshift sink she’s conjured and collapses, sobbing, into her arms, toothbrush lying on the floor, forgotten.
Harry says her name quietly when he finds her, anger evaporating as he wraps an arm around her shoulders. As he would do anyone else in her position. As he would do a sister.
“He’ll be back, Hermione. You know he will,” he says, and she wants so much to believe it’s true.
He picks up her toothbrush and brushes the dirt off it. Rinses it in cold water and hands it back to her.
“I think you’ll be needing this later,” he says.
She nods, and runs her thumb across the tip. The bristles prickle against her skin.
*
The fire was still glowing warm into the night, the atmosphere all too familiar in the light of a dreadful aftermath, bittersweet victory echoing from every rafter of the school’s still-standing walls.
Ron, wearily congratulating Neville on his brilliant, loping bear Patronus and struggling to piece together a witty remark about courage and hibernation, claps a hand on his shoulder before making his way over to the couch she’s sitting on and drops, exhausted, down beside her.
“Of course, Toby was brilliant, too,” he offers, and her eyes fly to him in alarm. “I’ve heard you say it once or twice,” he admits, and she can feel her cheeks flush pink.
“I know it’s silly of me -“
“I’ve been thinking of calling mine Fred,” he interrupts. “It’d drive him mad, if he knew.”
There’s a pause, and then her face is breaking out in a radiant smile and she’s surprising them both by kissing him hurriedly on the side of his mouth.
“Er, you don’t think it’s too sentimental, then?” he asks, slightly flustered.
She shakes her head.
“Fred is perfect, Ron. Just... perfect.”
*
When she finally falls asleep it’s from pure exhaustion; lying on a couch in the Common Room with Ron wrapped protectively around her, her eyes drooping in fatigue.
In her dreams she sees herself in Harry’s shoes - walks, terrified, forward; feels the stone, cool and smooth against her palm. Turns it. Once, twice. Three times. Like the time-turner, she thinks, if only, and her head spins with the gravity of it all.
Their faces don’t bring her comfort. She writhes, horrified, at the sight of Ron’s translucent lanky form, his lopsided grin and shining eyes.
A couple, so familiar and yet not, haunting her with their empty gazes and hollow smiles that do not touch her but pass right on through.
Sees Crookshanks, rubbing against her legs, but feels no fur.
“No,” she hisses, “you’re not dead, you’re not...”
Her eyes fly open when she realises with a sickening lurch that even in death, they have no idea who she is.
“It’s okay,” Ron mumbles sleepily into her hair when she shudders violently enough to wake him. “It’s all going to be okay.”
Their hands unfurl. She doesn’t sleep again for days.
*
She puts it off for weeks. Ron doesn’t understand and she doesn’t expect him to; Harry might, though, and his gaze is all too knowing and sympathetic when it meets her own.
“I’ll go with you, if you like,” he tells her. “Or Ron. You know he will, if you ask him, Hermione - he’ll say yes in a second.”
“I’ve told him I’m waiting,” she says. “To be sure. To be completely certain that it’s safe.”
“You’re not, though,” he says, and when she looks away he thinks he might’ve seen tears in her eyes.
“Oh, Harry,” she whispers. “I’m just so scared. I feel just awful, like something bad has happened and I can’t put my finger on it. And I can’t help wondering if something’s gone dreadfully wrong, if maybe my idea was a stupid one after all --”
What if the spell didn’t work? What if they never remember me?
“Hermione, they’re your family.”
She turns away; his words make too much sense.
*
“The Horcrux -”
“-I’m fine,” she says. “Really.”
He nods, and knows well enough to leave it alone.
Though truth in truth that was a completely different matter; weeks later and she’s only lying to herself in pretending she can’t still hear its nasty whispers in her ear, cruel and sharp and jabbing into all the right places, worse than any Dementor has ever made her feel.
They’re dead, the both of them. You killed them, and now they don’t even know who you are. Wouldn’t have remembered you anyway, nasty, horrid, ungrateful girl. Happiest they’ve ever been, other side of the world.
They always were better off without y --
She turns her head sharply, and he knows she isn’t really.
They don’t know they have a daughter.
His hand closes gently around her own, and she is grateful.
*
It’s days later when she wakes, cold beneath the sheets, and presses herself against Ron, presses her lips urgently against his until there’s nothing left between them. She trembles, and his hands find hers in the dark.
“Hermione --”
Alarm; what’s gotten into you?
“Ssh,” she hushes him, eyes burning into his imploringly.
He nods, and her mouth, her hands, her skin are hot against his own.
*
The owl is charcoal grey, when it arrives, and not at all snowy like it should be; its doleful eyes bore into Harry and even still he cannot bring himself to move. Its claws leave the ghost of a scratch on her fingers as she breaks the orange wax of the Ministry’s seal.
“Order of Merlin, First Class,” she says, quietly, the parchment dry in her hands, but she knows his response before he can formulate it.
“-there are others more deserving.”
Their scars, both physical and otherwise, pulse painfully in memoriam.
HERE LIES SEVERUS SNAPE,
WHOSE COURAGE WAS SURPASSED ONLY BY HIS CAPACITY FOR LOVE,
AND THE BEST OF WHOM MANY NEVER KNEW.
*
The wind is slow and eerie, but lacks ice, and Hermione sheds her scarf and coat as she trudges wearily up the hill.
There’s an explosion of light and the faintest of rustling sounds and suddenly, she’s caught in a cloud of luminous swallowtail butterflies, swarming around her and lilting in her ear in Fleur’s throaty, accented voice. She swats at them in agitation, her fingers threading through the wisps of nothingness and her eyes roll at Ron’s obvious wonderment at the tiny, flitting creatures of their own accord.
Sacrifice, rings the reminder. We didn’t get here on our own.
Bill’s smile is calm and easy when they find him, his hands as rough and careworn as his kind features, illuminated by the flattering silvery glow. She can see Harry in the distance; Snape’s tomb stands proud and regal against the sunrise, the white marble cold beneath fleeting fingertips that whisper of death and so many regrets, of the single stemmed flower carved into the unforgiving surface.
“Australia,” she murmurs, not having to turn, but sensing Ron’s presence beside her. “I’ve heard it’s nice, this time of year.”
One year, she thinks. Perhaps it’s time.
*
She finds them in Sydney, on the outskirts of the city where the traffic isn’t nearly as horrid; their hair is greyer than she remembers, faces more wrinkled than she can recall. Her breath catches like broken glass in her throat when she hears, at last, the voices that have haunted her dreams - singed around the edges with the hint of a new accent, as if the charm made them susceptible to picking it up somehow, and yet still inanely familiar, but their eyes --
“They’re not the same,” she says, and the words end there.
*
Somehow, the thought of tearing them away from this strange and wonderful new life in which they appeared to be thriving seemed even more awful than pushing them into it in the first place.
(Surely they’d never forgive her. She could barely forgive herself.)
“Look at them. I’ve never seen them like this. They’re - they’re happy.”
They don’t know they have a daughter, you see.
Ron’s hand tightly squeezes her own, and she wills the tears not to fall.
*
Her house is empty, when she finds it - the place she used to call home, boarded up and wasting away, flowers still blossoming and running up the walls, shedding their petals as if on an unmarked and untended grave.
“Expecto patronum,” she whispers.
She wonders if it’s silly, to feel an odd sort of attachment to the ghostly creature that was so much a part of her and to which she owed so much; to almost love it like a friend and to want to name it in her head like a pet, like Crookshanks was to her, like Hedwig was to Harry if she could bring herself to think of it.
She finds herself calling upon him when she’s alone, or feeling lonely, his name echoing around the recesses of her mind and her fingers wrapping absently around her wand, so tempting beside her.
She slides against the door. The otter curls softly around her feet, and it’s almost like she never left.
*
She hadn’t been a planned child.
Her parents had told her this not out of spite, but rather conversationally, with kind eyes and warm hearts and the reassurance that she had never been a regret of theirs, per se, and Hermione has never felt resented, or unwanted in any way.
There are notches, on the door frame; the only markings in an otherwise pristine house, neat and modest but tastefully furnished, that mark the months and how she’s grown, from taking her first bold steps to a begrudging moment before she first left for Kings Cross Station all those years ago.
And it’s funny, she thinks, how the strangest things can be so defining, and the errant shopping list she finds in her hands is everything she loved and hated most about them.
Bread
Avocado
Shampoo (Mione)
It’s at this she almost weeps, for being so fussy with foods, and for her mother for being so understanding when it came to her head of unruly hair. For toothpaste and braces and the shortening of her teeth, and her fingers press against the ridge of her no longer oversized incisors with guilt.
She turns the list over in her hands to find another, tracing the scratching of her father’s humdrum doctor’s handwriting in the paper, a collection of titles with all but the last crossed off. He’d kept at it, she realises, heart swelling in her chest, when suddenly, she recognises the final item.
You deserve this far more than I, the letter had read. Keep it, I’ll read it when I see you at Christmas.
She tears her room apart looking for the tome but finds it, buried beneath dust-laden spell books and assorted potions ingredients, the metallic glint of the bookmark winking at her from its near-final pages.
It falls, gently open, in her lap.
Such a heart Madame Defarge carried under her rough robe. Carelessly worn, it was a becoming robe enough, in a certain weird way, and her dark hair looked rich under her coarse red cap. Lying hidden in her bosom was a loaded pistol. Lying, hidden at her waist, was a sharpened dagger. Thus accoutred, and walking with the confident tread of such a character, and with the supple freedom of a woman who had habitually walked in her girlhood, bare-foot and bare-legged, on the brown sea-sand, Madame Defarge took her way along the streets.
She doesn’t even notice the tears are falling until the printed black words blur beneath them.
*
She goes often with Harry to visit his parents’ graves; her and Ron each to their separate ways, and he with Ginny and their mother. Their hands clasp with the ease of old friends who have fought and lived out their lives side by side, and she feels as if she knows the flesh there, in both moments of warmth and clamminess, as if it were her own.
They lay their wreaths, offer their prayers.
There’d been no body to bury when Sirius had died, but a statue has since been erected and it is here that they pause for a minute or so in silent respect.
Those nights Harry dreams of a stag and a doe running free; of a bounding black dog and a wolf at their side and a moon that never grows full.
Hermione dreams of betrayal and an all-consuming darkness; of cold, black water that snatches at her ankles and drags her down into its depths with invisible icy talons, enveloping her and swallowing her whole.
Those nights, she barely sleeps at all.
*
She still remembers her very first trip to the library.
She’d hesitated a little, her tiny hand clasped in her father’s larger one and an overwhelming feeling of awe as she gazed up at shelves upon shelves of what had to be more books than there’d ever been stars.
“Can I read one?” she’d asked.
“You can read as many as you’d like.”
“I want to read all of them,” she’d announced determinedly, and her father had laughed.
“All of them? It’d take you an awful long time to read all of them, don’t you think, Hermione?”
She recalls pausing at this, perhaps her lip twisting in contemplation, her hair definitely in two thick fly-away braids.
“Not for us,” she’d quickly decided. “We’ll read them together.”
Childish dreams, she thinks.
She develops the film the Muggle way, surprised her hands still know their way around the dark room.
The chemicals burn at her lungs, and it’s almost like breathing fresh air again.
*
A river, she dreams, dark and tumid, death and ice seeping into her very pores. The feeling of suffocation, of drowning, of pockets of air screaming for release and lungs that are about to explode and writhing, hopelessly, no way to tell which is up, and then --
A flash, and a brush of the dampened fur, sleek and streamlined through the water like lightning, like quicksilver, and she’s struggling up, up, up until a hand wraps rigid around her own. Being pulled, waterlogged, from the blackened depths and huddling on the riverbank, eyes frantic but heavy lidded as they search for the animal they so strongly believe saved a life.
So sad, so graceful...
Her eyes fly open in the dark.
*
A different darkness, now: a seemingly bottomless lake, eyes clamped tightly shut.
She struggles within herself.
(The movement in her limbs is gone.)
*
Harry marries Ginny on a warm day in May; Hermione plays the bridesmaid in a dress of powdered blue, and Harry’s cousin Dudley comes and hovers awkwardly in the back. Ron’s the best man, of course, and they can all hear in his voice that he’s not entirely joking when he light heartedly warns Harry he’ll hex his eyebrows off if he ever hurts his little sister.
Molly sobs and dabs at her eyes through the entire ceremony and nobody’s entirely surprised when a few months later, Ginny announces she’s pregnant. Harry looks pale and nervous but giddily happy and Hermione squeezes his hand comfortingly, is still curt but civil to Ron in the weeks that follow until he can barely take it anymore.
“Hermione,” he bellows down the table at her one evening, his tone exasperated but hesitant, “marry me, would you?”
She blinks at him, drinks in the shocked expressions of those around her who are waiting for the explosion and sets her fork calmly down upon the table, taking a rather large sip from her goblet.
“Oh, alright then,” she concedes. “If you insist.”
Ron nearly slides from his chair in relief.
(She bites her lip to hide the smile.)
*
Ginny gives birth to a baby girl in the third week of April. It’s her idea, and not Harry’s, to name her Lily, and Hermione watches with a smile at his awe as her tiny hand wraps around his index finger.
She and Ron are named godparents, of course, and when just over a year later James is born, Neville and Luna join their mismatched family as godfather and godmother respectively and the six of them meet for coffee in a cosy place in London after the ceremony.
“When are you due?” Luna beams at Hermione when they have a quiet moment; Ginny and the boys are giving a terrible rendition of Hoggy Warty Hogwarts in light of Neville’s new teaching post and Hermione almost drops her ceramic mug in shock.
“Excuse me?”
“Your little one. I suppose you’ve still got awhile now, but I can tell by the cloud of Kindledrones you’ve got fluttering by your left shoulder, you see.”
She opens her mouth to point out that there’s most likely no such thing as Kindledrones when without warning, she is overwhelmed with the insistent conviction that Luna is completely, incorrigibly and undeniably right. She checks her left shoulder before she can stop herself - there is, of course, nothing there.
“Oh,” she says weakly, and sets the cup down.
(Well. This complicates things, she thinks.)
*
It was the principle of it all, she realises eventually, with the dread growing in her stomach like an infectious ulcer, seeping with acid burning her up from the inside out. She’d taken away their choices; denied them her own faith and in essence disowned them, denied herself the right to know them any further.
“It’s all very well for you to say, Ron,” she tells him shrilly when he pushes it, “but you’re not the one who has to piece things back together: you can’t finite incantatem away the fallout, you know.”
She wishes he’d snap back at her the way he used to, back before his gaze became so sympathetic and understanding, putting everything down to hormones, before the world turned upside down on its axis and spun impossibly fast around her, back when things had made sense.
She thinks of the time turner, still hidden away, somewhere, if it’s survived everything the way she’s managed to and isn’t lying in pieces, sand falling between shards of unshattering glass. She could go back, if she wanted to, but she knows she can’t, knows they’ve already come too far to try to change it all. Knows she risks undoing everything they’ve accomplished if she sets one foot wrong.
Victories, Dumbledore sagely informs her, are far too often hollow.
She hates that for all the rotten awful things he’s done, the late headmaster remains the voice of reason in so many of their heads.
*
It’s a year later when she can’t help but go back, seek them out and see how they’re doing away from it all, away from her, away from the thorn she believed she’d been in their side and the daughter they no longer knew. She starts, though; drops her wicker basket in alarm and a thousand tiny, insignificant items scatter at her feet.
Of course, she’d never meant for them to see her --
“Is she yours?” Monica Wilkins asks, smiling kindly at the photo that had landed at her feet, bending to assist in gathering up the spilt belongings, and Hermione is flustered like she’s never been.
It isn’t her, a fierce voice in her head whispers, and she shakes it distractedly, as if to rid herself of the thoughts.
Not anymore.
“I mean yes, she is. Mine. My daughter. Rose,” she stumbles, aware that her voice sounds strangled, and nothing like her own. “Her name is Rose.”
You, she thinks, I named her for you.
“She’s lovely. My husband and I never had children. We’re just we’re so busy; we’re both dentists, you know, and we never really had the time.” There’s a wistful air to her, and a sombre pause before she glances up, as if snapping out of a trance, handing the photo back. “Lovely,” she repeats. “You’re a very lucky young lady. I’ll bet she has your smile.”
Hermione blinks, presses the photo absently to her chest as Monica rests a fleeting hand on her shoulder; feels her heart swell almost painfully in bittersweet joy, the pure torture of being so close and yet so far away.
“You really do have beautiful teeth,” Monica murmurs as she continues down the sidewalk, and there’s nothing Hermione can do to stop the hot flood of tears streaming down her face.
This time, she doesn’t even try.
*
“I always knew there’d be a day when I wouldn’t want to go back,” she says, quietly. “And I really didn’t think it would matter. I suppose I always took it for granted that they’d be there, in the background.
I think it hurt them, seeing me so happy there. Like Hogwarts was giving me something they never could, and that I resented them for being so normal.”
(“Just how much of what’s been going on did your parents actually know about, Hermione?”)
“It’s not abandoning them, this way. They don’t even know I’m gone.”
(They don’t know they have a daughter, you see.)
*
“I’m sorry, the time, I didn’t think --”
(Ron’s away on Ministry business again, Rose seven months old and crying at her mother’s breast, sleeping fitfully and twisting in distress in her waking hours - she doesn’t know what else she can do --)
“My daughter,” Hermione continues on, “Rose - you probably don’t remember but you saw a picture of her, once - she’s teething, you see. Just two, the lower central incisors -” she almost chokes on the terminology, the only words that seem to be left between them, “- and she’s experiencing a little discomfort, of course, nothing unusual, but... last week there was nothing but gums and today I woke up and there they were, these two, perfect white teeth. Perfect,” she whispers. “And I just... I just wanted to tell somebody. Somebody that would understand.”
She doesn’t register at first how her hands are trembling, how her lip is about to and her eyes are very near to glistening with tears. But Rose is stirring in her arms, almost as if she senses something’s changed and her voice catches hot in her throat.
There’s several seconds’ silence on the other end, and she’s ready to hang up, realising her own stupidity and apologising profusely for her silliness.
“Brushing,” comes a quiet reply before she can disconnect, and Hermione almost believes for a second that it really is her mother she’s speaking to, a Rosemary Granger and not a Monica Wilkins because her voice is soft and ohso maternal, and she imagines she can hear it almost wavering with emotion. “You should start brushing them, right away. It’s never too early. And avoid fluoride while she’s still young - it can cause...” - and here her voice really does falter; she knows she’s not imagining it. She swallows -- “it can cause discolouration.”
She lets out a breath that sounds halfway between a laugh and a sigh.
“Thank you,” she murmurs into the phone. “You don’t understand what this... thank you, so much.”
*
Photo albums from a summer so long ago keep her company in the cold winter months; with her second pregnancy she craves not fine foods but the taste of France, of the sights and the smells and the endless countryside. She crosses Les Misérables from her list and when her son is born they name him Hugo meaning bright in mind and spirit. Harry and Ron shake hands while Ginny coos, Hugo’s eyes blue and wide with wonder.
She’s quiet in her maternal affection, oddly withdrawn and often silent and she can sense all the questions Harry wants to ask her before he has a chance to string together words.
“I understand, now,” she says from her place by the window. “I took their choice away and I shouldn’t have. It was my mistake all a long, you see; I always told myself they wouldn’t understand.”
“You saved their lives, Hermione. You did what was right at the time.”
“No, I did what was easy. Dumbledore was right - there’s a difference.”
She’s pacing, now, distraught, and when she finally turns to face him he can sense she’s fighting tears.
“I’d die for them. Give my life in an instant and there wouldn’t be any hesitation because there’s no question to it. You’d do it too - any of us would. It’s burned into us, and not just by what your parents did, Harry. It goes deeper than that, and I took that away from them.”
He understands, now, she can see it in his eyes.
(The understanding; yes, this the most painful of all.)
“I... I just... I’m sorry, Harry, but I think I’d like to be alone, if you don’t mind.”
He nods and leaves; Hermione’s sobs echo down the hallway after him.
*
Rose makes Prefect in her fifth year at Hogwarts, and on the first of September Wendell and Monica Wilkins receive a package in the post with no return address, the handwritten street name and numbers on its front impossibly scrupulous and neat. The leather-bound cover of A Tale of Two Cities emerges from the brown paper, its gold-leaf title glinting in the early morning sunlight.
(It’s something they understand, you see.)
They stare for a moment at the book, at the unmoving (for why on earth would not be, they think) photograph pressed in its opening pages, of themselves and a scene they cannot remember and yet know in their hearts.
“Dickens,” Monica murmurs eventually. “Have you read it?”
“No,” Wendell replies, “though I’m sure I’ve always meant to.”
The pages turn easily in his large hands as he sits by the hearth and opens it to its first, the golden glow of the firelight flickering across his aging features.
*
“Rose, you mustn’t glare at your father like that; Hugo, you’ve got dirt on your nose, come here. And don’t let anybody tell you that you aren’t good enough, will you, and of course we want you to try hard and do well, but you know we’ll love you no matter what - you don’t have to be brilliant, your father’s only joking, of course - he wasn’t as clever as he always makes out, you know.”
“Mum,” Hugo hisses, dragging his trolley along in sharp tugs of annoyance, “stop it. Stop being so overprotective.”
“Stop being a git,” Ron supplies, cuffing him upside the head.
“I’m your mother,” she tells him, hand pressed to his cheek where he allows it to linger for a few seconds before swatting it away. “It’s my job to protect you.”
*
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
*
“-and remember to come home for Christmas.”
It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.
The book closes, and she smiles.
*
fin.
//
by sezzie_dee
Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: pg13
Summary: "She dreams of betrayal and an all-consuming darkness; of cold, black water that snatches at her ankles and drags her down into its depths with invisible icy talons, enveloping her and swallowing her whole." Hermione gen, with hints of R/Hr.
Post-Deathly Hallows, and thus: spoilers.
The only HP fic I’ve ever written has been MWPP-era, and even then it was long before there was any sort of reliable canon for them. I probably have no Hermione voice whatsoever, so bear with me.
I remember locked figures in the streets
Duel or embrace, I do not know
The impetuous gestures of our guide
as we came to that place where the river meets
rock, the savage boldness of the flood.
A voice saying freedom! in a tongue
I have forgotten. The wet red sandstone.
My lifelong terror of blood.
I remember the ocean licking at the lonely piers,
and the scavenged food.
I cannot remember the faces
of my father, my mother, my sister; only the places
that were not home, and the tears.
-- Gwen Harwood
*
She has exactly one magical photo of her parents.
She took it the day before she bewitched them; stole their memories, altered them, transformed the Grangers into the Wilkins and in doing so neatly bundled up and hid, protected, or so she hoped, the one part of the world she couldn’t bear to leave behind. It wasn’t something she’d consciously planned to do (though perhaps subconsciously, she had; the camera was quivering in her hands, even if only slightly) but it had felt right, prudent even, at the time.
They’re smiling in the picture, just as they ought to, with their perfect dentists’ smiles - occasionally they laugh and exchange weighty glances but the mood remains the same. They look happy, she thinks, and wonders if it has anything to do with her not being in it.
She never showed it to them, once she’d taken it, but hid it under her pillow as she contemplated an act so dreadful she wasn’t sure she’d be able to bring herself to do it, had kept it with her in her darkest moments since. She tells herself she’d thought maybe they wouldn’t care or have the time, or that the concept of living pictures of the literal sense would be rather too much for them to handle, but she knows it isn’t true, not exactly. The photo feels like a secret, a piece taken from their lives when they weren’t looking and in it was captured and preserved a moment that was real, and genuine, and just the way she wants to remember them.
They would have liked the photo, she thinks.
*
It’s far easier than she thinks it should be.
“They don’t know they have a daughter, you see.”
Her voice barely trembles when she tells them what she’s done; all too calmly takes in Ron’s quiet admiration and something reflected back at her in Harry’s startling green eyes, soaked in stars and what might be pity, if only she didn’t know him better.
“They’re safe. It’s what matters,” she says, firmly, and this is how she sleeps at night.
She wishes she were as sure of it as she was able to make herself sound.
*
She remembers all too guiltily, sometimes, the holidays spent at Hogwarts that she should have spent at home. How at first, she’d thought it just like any other place she’d been, and yet; the feeling of belonging, for the first time in her life, of friends that actually meant something, and of people that actually valued her worth far more than all she knew. How piece by bittersweetly sung piece, a school of witchcraft and wizardry, of everything her parents never were and never could be, had become her home, had raised her, had made her who she was today. How she’d never realised how disconnected it had made her from everything that should have mattered; of somehow, the very thing they were fighting for.
I’m terribly sorry, but I won’t be coming home for Christmas this year -
“An otter, Hermione?” Ron asks in amazement.
Her wand feels warm in her hand.
She ducks to avoid a swooping silver kestrel only to narrowly miss bumping into Fred and George, staring at each other in wonder at the seal and dolphin erupting out of their respective wands.
“By George --”
“-- you’re wrong, I’m Fred -“
“Who’d have thought -“
“-I can hardly believe it -“
“Marine life,” they grin in unison. “There’s something fishy going on here.”
Her Patronus glides in lazy circles around her, eliciting a delighted laugh from its conjuror and Hermione feels strangely light-hearted.
“A terrier, Ronald?” she mocks, and he offers her a lopsided smile.
“Crazy smart, are they then, otters? Bossy, too?”
“Actually, the European otter is nowhere as common as it used to be. Its habitat has been destroyed by the use of chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides, and since they’re poached for their lovely pelts --”
“Rare and magnificent, then,” Ron concedes, his eyes back on the dog bounding through the air.
She beams. A silver hare skims past her ear.
All my love,
Hermione.
*
She brushes her teeth when she’s upset.
It never occurs to her that this is illogical, or unusual, and when she sees how the room starts spinning for him she’s at the bathroom in an instant, hesitant and hovering at the door.
“Do you want your toothbrush, Harry?” she asks softly, and it’s only as the words leave her mouth that she realises how absurd they sound.
Her father had told her once that there was little brushing couldn’t do - it helped with toothache, bad breath and preventing a whole range of nasty diseases. She sometimes wishes saving the world were as easy as toothpaste, rinse and repeat.
She watches herself in the mirror, when Ron leaves - eyes red and puffy, her wrist aching and gums sore from her rigorous brushing, hoping to scrub away some of the hopelessness and how empty she feels inside. Spits into the makeshift sink she’s conjured and collapses, sobbing, into her arms, toothbrush lying on the floor, forgotten.
Harry says her name quietly when he finds her, anger evaporating as he wraps an arm around her shoulders. As he would do anyone else in her position. As he would do a sister.
“He’ll be back, Hermione. You know he will,” he says, and she wants so much to believe it’s true.
He picks up her toothbrush and brushes the dirt off it. Rinses it in cold water and hands it back to her.
“I think you’ll be needing this later,” he says.
She nods, and runs her thumb across the tip. The bristles prickle against her skin.
*
The fire was still glowing warm into the night, the atmosphere all too familiar in the light of a dreadful aftermath, bittersweet victory echoing from every rafter of the school’s still-standing walls.
Ron, wearily congratulating Neville on his brilliant, loping bear Patronus and struggling to piece together a witty remark about courage and hibernation, claps a hand on his shoulder before making his way over to the couch she’s sitting on and drops, exhausted, down beside her.
“Of course, Toby was brilliant, too,” he offers, and her eyes fly to him in alarm. “I’ve heard you say it once or twice,” he admits, and she can feel her cheeks flush pink.
“I know it’s silly of me -“
“I’ve been thinking of calling mine Fred,” he interrupts. “It’d drive him mad, if he knew.”
There’s a pause, and then her face is breaking out in a radiant smile and she’s surprising them both by kissing him hurriedly on the side of his mouth.
“Er, you don’t think it’s too sentimental, then?” he asks, slightly flustered.
She shakes her head.
“Fred is perfect, Ron. Just... perfect.”
*
When she finally falls asleep it’s from pure exhaustion; lying on a couch in the Common Room with Ron wrapped protectively around her, her eyes drooping in fatigue.
In her dreams she sees herself in Harry’s shoes - walks, terrified, forward; feels the stone, cool and smooth against her palm. Turns it. Once, twice. Three times. Like the time-turner, she thinks, if only, and her head spins with the gravity of it all.
Their faces don’t bring her comfort. She writhes, horrified, at the sight of Ron’s translucent lanky form, his lopsided grin and shining eyes.
A couple, so familiar and yet not, haunting her with their empty gazes and hollow smiles that do not touch her but pass right on through.
Sees Crookshanks, rubbing against her legs, but feels no fur.
“No,” she hisses, “you’re not dead, you’re not...”
Her eyes fly open when she realises with a sickening lurch that even in death, they have no idea who she is.
“It’s okay,” Ron mumbles sleepily into her hair when she shudders violently enough to wake him. “It’s all going to be okay.”
Their hands unfurl. She doesn’t sleep again for days.
*
She puts it off for weeks. Ron doesn’t understand and she doesn’t expect him to; Harry might, though, and his gaze is all too knowing and sympathetic when it meets her own.
“I’ll go with you, if you like,” he tells her. “Or Ron. You know he will, if you ask him, Hermione - he’ll say yes in a second.”
“I’ve told him I’m waiting,” she says. “To be sure. To be completely certain that it’s safe.”
“You’re not, though,” he says, and when she looks away he thinks he might’ve seen tears in her eyes.
“Oh, Harry,” she whispers. “I’m just so scared. I feel just awful, like something bad has happened and I can’t put my finger on it. And I can’t help wondering if something’s gone dreadfully wrong, if maybe my idea was a stupid one after all --”
What if the spell didn’t work? What if they never remember me?
“Hermione, they’re your family.”
She turns away; his words make too much sense.
*
“The Horcrux -”
“-I’m fine,” she says. “Really.”
He nods, and knows well enough to leave it alone.
Though truth in truth that was a completely different matter; weeks later and she’s only lying to herself in pretending she can’t still hear its nasty whispers in her ear, cruel and sharp and jabbing into all the right places, worse than any Dementor has ever made her feel.
They’re dead, the both of them. You killed them, and now they don’t even know who you are. Wouldn’t have remembered you anyway, nasty, horrid, ungrateful girl. Happiest they’ve ever been, other side of the world.
They always were better off without y --
She turns her head sharply, and he knows she isn’t really.
They don’t know they have a daughter.
His hand closes gently around her own, and she is grateful.
*
It’s days later when she wakes, cold beneath the sheets, and presses herself against Ron, presses her lips urgently against his until there’s nothing left between them. She trembles, and his hands find hers in the dark.
“Hermione --”
Alarm; what’s gotten into you?
“Ssh,” she hushes him, eyes burning into his imploringly.
He nods, and her mouth, her hands, her skin are hot against his own.
*
The owl is charcoal grey, when it arrives, and not at all snowy like it should be; its doleful eyes bore into Harry and even still he cannot bring himself to move. Its claws leave the ghost of a scratch on her fingers as she breaks the orange wax of the Ministry’s seal.
“Order of Merlin, First Class,” she says, quietly, the parchment dry in her hands, but she knows his response before he can formulate it.
“-there are others more deserving.”
Their scars, both physical and otherwise, pulse painfully in memoriam.
HERE LIES SEVERUS SNAPE,
WHOSE COURAGE WAS SURPASSED ONLY BY HIS CAPACITY FOR LOVE,
AND THE BEST OF WHOM MANY NEVER KNEW.
*
The wind is slow and eerie, but lacks ice, and Hermione sheds her scarf and coat as she trudges wearily up the hill.
There’s an explosion of light and the faintest of rustling sounds and suddenly, she’s caught in a cloud of luminous swallowtail butterflies, swarming around her and lilting in her ear in Fleur’s throaty, accented voice. She swats at them in agitation, her fingers threading through the wisps of nothingness and her eyes roll at Ron’s obvious wonderment at the tiny, flitting creatures of their own accord.
Sacrifice, rings the reminder. We didn’t get here on our own.
Bill’s smile is calm and easy when they find him, his hands as rough and careworn as his kind features, illuminated by the flattering silvery glow. She can see Harry in the distance; Snape’s tomb stands proud and regal against the sunrise, the white marble cold beneath fleeting fingertips that whisper of death and so many regrets, of the single stemmed flower carved into the unforgiving surface.
“Australia,” she murmurs, not having to turn, but sensing Ron’s presence beside her. “I’ve heard it’s nice, this time of year.”
One year, she thinks. Perhaps it’s time.
*
She finds them in Sydney, on the outskirts of the city where the traffic isn’t nearly as horrid; their hair is greyer than she remembers, faces more wrinkled than she can recall. Her breath catches like broken glass in her throat when she hears, at last, the voices that have haunted her dreams - singed around the edges with the hint of a new accent, as if the charm made them susceptible to picking it up somehow, and yet still inanely familiar, but their eyes --
“They’re not the same,” she says, and the words end there.
*
Somehow, the thought of tearing them away from this strange and wonderful new life in which they appeared to be thriving seemed even more awful than pushing them into it in the first place.
(Surely they’d never forgive her. She could barely forgive herself.)
“Look at them. I’ve never seen them like this. They’re - they’re happy.”
They don’t know they have a daughter, you see.
Ron’s hand tightly squeezes her own, and she wills the tears not to fall.
*
Her house is empty, when she finds it - the place she used to call home, boarded up and wasting away, flowers still blossoming and running up the walls, shedding their petals as if on an unmarked and untended grave.
“Expecto patronum,” she whispers.
She wonders if it’s silly, to feel an odd sort of attachment to the ghostly creature that was so much a part of her and to which she owed so much; to almost love it like a friend and to want to name it in her head like a pet, like Crookshanks was to her, like Hedwig was to Harry if she could bring herself to think of it.
She finds herself calling upon him when she’s alone, or feeling lonely, his name echoing around the recesses of her mind and her fingers wrapping absently around her wand, so tempting beside her.
She slides against the door. The otter curls softly around her feet, and it’s almost like she never left.
*
She hadn’t been a planned child.
Her parents had told her this not out of spite, but rather conversationally, with kind eyes and warm hearts and the reassurance that she had never been a regret of theirs, per se, and Hermione has never felt resented, or unwanted in any way.
There are notches, on the door frame; the only markings in an otherwise pristine house, neat and modest but tastefully furnished, that mark the months and how she’s grown, from taking her first bold steps to a begrudging moment before she first left for Kings Cross Station all those years ago.
And it’s funny, she thinks, how the strangest things can be so defining, and the errant shopping list she finds in her hands is everything she loved and hated most about them.
Bread
Avocado
Shampoo (Mione)
It’s at this she almost weeps, for being so fussy with foods, and for her mother for being so understanding when it came to her head of unruly hair. For toothpaste and braces and the shortening of her teeth, and her fingers press against the ridge of her no longer oversized incisors with guilt.
She turns the list over in her hands to find another, tracing the scratching of her father’s humdrum doctor’s handwriting in the paper, a collection of titles with all but the last crossed off. He’d kept at it, she realises, heart swelling in her chest, when suddenly, she recognises the final item.
You deserve this far more than I, the letter had read. Keep it, I’ll read it when I see you at Christmas.
She tears her room apart looking for the tome but finds it, buried beneath dust-laden spell books and assorted potions ingredients, the metallic glint of the bookmark winking at her from its near-final pages.
It falls, gently open, in her lap.
Such a heart Madame Defarge carried under her rough robe. Carelessly worn, it was a becoming robe enough, in a certain weird way, and her dark hair looked rich under her coarse red cap. Lying hidden in her bosom was a loaded pistol. Lying, hidden at her waist, was a sharpened dagger. Thus accoutred, and walking with the confident tread of such a character, and with the supple freedom of a woman who had habitually walked in her girlhood, bare-foot and bare-legged, on the brown sea-sand, Madame Defarge took her way along the streets.
She doesn’t even notice the tears are falling until the printed black words blur beneath them.
*
She goes often with Harry to visit his parents’ graves; her and Ron each to their separate ways, and he with Ginny and their mother. Their hands clasp with the ease of old friends who have fought and lived out their lives side by side, and she feels as if she knows the flesh there, in both moments of warmth and clamminess, as if it were her own.
They lay their wreaths, offer their prayers.
There’d been no body to bury when Sirius had died, but a statue has since been erected and it is here that they pause for a minute or so in silent respect.
Those nights Harry dreams of a stag and a doe running free; of a bounding black dog and a wolf at their side and a moon that never grows full.
Hermione dreams of betrayal and an all-consuming darkness; of cold, black water that snatches at her ankles and drags her down into its depths with invisible icy talons, enveloping her and swallowing her whole.
Those nights, she barely sleeps at all.
*
She still remembers her very first trip to the library.
She’d hesitated a little, her tiny hand clasped in her father’s larger one and an overwhelming feeling of awe as she gazed up at shelves upon shelves of what had to be more books than there’d ever been stars.
“Can I read one?” she’d asked.
“You can read as many as you’d like.”
“I want to read all of them,” she’d announced determinedly, and her father had laughed.
“All of them? It’d take you an awful long time to read all of them, don’t you think, Hermione?”
She recalls pausing at this, perhaps her lip twisting in contemplation, her hair definitely in two thick fly-away braids.
“Not for us,” she’d quickly decided. “We’ll read them together.”
Childish dreams, she thinks.
She develops the film the Muggle way, surprised her hands still know their way around the dark room.
The chemicals burn at her lungs, and it’s almost like breathing fresh air again.
*
A river, she dreams, dark and tumid, death and ice seeping into her very pores. The feeling of suffocation, of drowning, of pockets of air screaming for release and lungs that are about to explode and writhing, hopelessly, no way to tell which is up, and then --
A flash, and a brush of the dampened fur, sleek and streamlined through the water like lightning, like quicksilver, and she’s struggling up, up, up until a hand wraps rigid around her own. Being pulled, waterlogged, from the blackened depths and huddling on the riverbank, eyes frantic but heavy lidded as they search for the animal they so strongly believe saved a life.
So sad, so graceful...
Her eyes fly open in the dark.
*
A different darkness, now: a seemingly bottomless lake, eyes clamped tightly shut.
She struggles within herself.
(The movement in her limbs is gone.)
*
Harry marries Ginny on a warm day in May; Hermione plays the bridesmaid in a dress of powdered blue, and Harry’s cousin Dudley comes and hovers awkwardly in the back. Ron’s the best man, of course, and they can all hear in his voice that he’s not entirely joking when he light heartedly warns Harry he’ll hex his eyebrows off if he ever hurts his little sister.
Molly sobs and dabs at her eyes through the entire ceremony and nobody’s entirely surprised when a few months later, Ginny announces she’s pregnant. Harry looks pale and nervous but giddily happy and Hermione squeezes his hand comfortingly, is still curt but civil to Ron in the weeks that follow until he can barely take it anymore.
“Hermione,” he bellows down the table at her one evening, his tone exasperated but hesitant, “marry me, would you?”
She blinks at him, drinks in the shocked expressions of those around her who are waiting for the explosion and sets her fork calmly down upon the table, taking a rather large sip from her goblet.
“Oh, alright then,” she concedes. “If you insist.”
Ron nearly slides from his chair in relief.
(She bites her lip to hide the smile.)
*
Ginny gives birth to a baby girl in the third week of April. It’s her idea, and not Harry’s, to name her Lily, and Hermione watches with a smile at his awe as her tiny hand wraps around his index finger.
She and Ron are named godparents, of course, and when just over a year later James is born, Neville and Luna join their mismatched family as godfather and godmother respectively and the six of them meet for coffee in a cosy place in London after the ceremony.
“When are you due?” Luna beams at Hermione when they have a quiet moment; Ginny and the boys are giving a terrible rendition of Hoggy Warty Hogwarts in light of Neville’s new teaching post and Hermione almost drops her ceramic mug in shock.
“Excuse me?”
“Your little one. I suppose you’ve still got awhile now, but I can tell by the cloud of Kindledrones you’ve got fluttering by your left shoulder, you see.”
She opens her mouth to point out that there’s most likely no such thing as Kindledrones when without warning, she is overwhelmed with the insistent conviction that Luna is completely, incorrigibly and undeniably right. She checks her left shoulder before she can stop herself - there is, of course, nothing there.
“Oh,” she says weakly, and sets the cup down.
(Well. This complicates things, she thinks.)
*
It was the principle of it all, she realises eventually, with the dread growing in her stomach like an infectious ulcer, seeping with acid burning her up from the inside out. She’d taken away their choices; denied them her own faith and in essence disowned them, denied herself the right to know them any further.
“It’s all very well for you to say, Ron,” she tells him shrilly when he pushes it, “but you’re not the one who has to piece things back together: you can’t finite incantatem away the fallout, you know.”
She wishes he’d snap back at her the way he used to, back before his gaze became so sympathetic and understanding, putting everything down to hormones, before the world turned upside down on its axis and spun impossibly fast around her, back when things had made sense.
She thinks of the time turner, still hidden away, somewhere, if it’s survived everything the way she’s managed to and isn’t lying in pieces, sand falling between shards of unshattering glass. She could go back, if she wanted to, but she knows she can’t, knows they’ve already come too far to try to change it all. Knows she risks undoing everything they’ve accomplished if she sets one foot wrong.
Victories, Dumbledore sagely informs her, are far too often hollow.
She hates that for all the rotten awful things he’s done, the late headmaster remains the voice of reason in so many of their heads.
*
It’s a year later when she can’t help but go back, seek them out and see how they’re doing away from it all, away from her, away from the thorn she believed she’d been in their side and the daughter they no longer knew. She starts, though; drops her wicker basket in alarm and a thousand tiny, insignificant items scatter at her feet.
Of course, she’d never meant for them to see her --
“Is she yours?” Monica Wilkins asks, smiling kindly at the photo that had landed at her feet, bending to assist in gathering up the spilt belongings, and Hermione is flustered like she’s never been.
It isn’t her, a fierce voice in her head whispers, and she shakes it distractedly, as if to rid herself of the thoughts.
Not anymore.
“I mean yes, she is. Mine. My daughter. Rose,” she stumbles, aware that her voice sounds strangled, and nothing like her own. “Her name is Rose.”
You, she thinks, I named her for you.
“She’s lovely. My husband and I never had children. We’re just we’re so busy; we’re both dentists, you know, and we never really had the time.” There’s a wistful air to her, and a sombre pause before she glances up, as if snapping out of a trance, handing the photo back. “Lovely,” she repeats. “You’re a very lucky young lady. I’ll bet she has your smile.”
Hermione blinks, presses the photo absently to her chest as Monica rests a fleeting hand on her shoulder; feels her heart swell almost painfully in bittersweet joy, the pure torture of being so close and yet so far away.
“You really do have beautiful teeth,” Monica murmurs as she continues down the sidewalk, and there’s nothing Hermione can do to stop the hot flood of tears streaming down her face.
This time, she doesn’t even try.
*
“I always knew there’d be a day when I wouldn’t want to go back,” she says, quietly. “And I really didn’t think it would matter. I suppose I always took it for granted that they’d be there, in the background.
I think it hurt them, seeing me so happy there. Like Hogwarts was giving me something they never could, and that I resented them for being so normal.”
(“Just how much of what’s been going on did your parents actually know about, Hermione?”)
“It’s not abandoning them, this way. They don’t even know I’m gone.”
(They don’t know they have a daughter, you see.)
*
“I’m sorry, the time, I didn’t think --”
(Ron’s away on Ministry business again, Rose seven months old and crying at her mother’s breast, sleeping fitfully and twisting in distress in her waking hours - she doesn’t know what else she can do --)
“My daughter,” Hermione continues on, “Rose - you probably don’t remember but you saw a picture of her, once - she’s teething, you see. Just two, the lower central incisors -” she almost chokes on the terminology, the only words that seem to be left between them, “- and she’s experiencing a little discomfort, of course, nothing unusual, but... last week there was nothing but gums and today I woke up and there they were, these two, perfect white teeth. Perfect,” she whispers. “And I just... I just wanted to tell somebody. Somebody that would understand.”
She doesn’t register at first how her hands are trembling, how her lip is about to and her eyes are very near to glistening with tears. But Rose is stirring in her arms, almost as if she senses something’s changed and her voice catches hot in her throat.
There’s several seconds’ silence on the other end, and she’s ready to hang up, realising her own stupidity and apologising profusely for her silliness.
“Brushing,” comes a quiet reply before she can disconnect, and Hermione almost believes for a second that it really is her mother she’s speaking to, a Rosemary Granger and not a Monica Wilkins because her voice is soft and ohso maternal, and she imagines she can hear it almost wavering with emotion. “You should start brushing them, right away. It’s never too early. And avoid fluoride while she’s still young - it can cause...” - and here her voice really does falter; she knows she’s not imagining it. She swallows -- “it can cause discolouration.”
She lets out a breath that sounds halfway between a laugh and a sigh.
“Thank you,” she murmurs into the phone. “You don’t understand what this... thank you, so much.”
*
Photo albums from a summer so long ago keep her company in the cold winter months; with her second pregnancy she craves not fine foods but the taste of France, of the sights and the smells and the endless countryside. She crosses Les Misérables from her list and when her son is born they name him Hugo meaning bright in mind and spirit. Harry and Ron shake hands while Ginny coos, Hugo’s eyes blue and wide with wonder.
She’s quiet in her maternal affection, oddly withdrawn and often silent and she can sense all the questions Harry wants to ask her before he has a chance to string together words.
“I understand, now,” she says from her place by the window. “I took their choice away and I shouldn’t have. It was my mistake all a long, you see; I always told myself they wouldn’t understand.”
“You saved their lives, Hermione. You did what was right at the time.”
“No, I did what was easy. Dumbledore was right - there’s a difference.”
She’s pacing, now, distraught, and when she finally turns to face him he can sense she’s fighting tears.
“I’d die for them. Give my life in an instant and there wouldn’t be any hesitation because there’s no question to it. You’d do it too - any of us would. It’s burned into us, and not just by what your parents did, Harry. It goes deeper than that, and I took that away from them.”
He understands, now, she can see it in his eyes.
(The understanding; yes, this the most painful of all.)
“I... I just... I’m sorry, Harry, but I think I’d like to be alone, if you don’t mind.”
He nods and leaves; Hermione’s sobs echo down the hallway after him.
*
Rose makes Prefect in her fifth year at Hogwarts, and on the first of September Wendell and Monica Wilkins receive a package in the post with no return address, the handwritten street name and numbers on its front impossibly scrupulous and neat. The leather-bound cover of A Tale of Two Cities emerges from the brown paper, its gold-leaf title glinting in the early morning sunlight.
(It’s something they understand, you see.)
They stare for a moment at the book, at the unmoving (for why on earth would not be, they think) photograph pressed in its opening pages, of themselves and a scene they cannot remember and yet know in their hearts.
“Dickens,” Monica murmurs eventually. “Have you read it?”
“No,” Wendell replies, “though I’m sure I’ve always meant to.”
The pages turn easily in his large hands as he sits by the hearth and opens it to its first, the golden glow of the firelight flickering across his aging features.
*
“Rose, you mustn’t glare at your father like that; Hugo, you’ve got dirt on your nose, come here. And don’t let anybody tell you that you aren’t good enough, will you, and of course we want you to try hard and do well, but you know we’ll love you no matter what - you don’t have to be brilliant, your father’s only joking, of course - he wasn’t as clever as he always makes out, you know.”
“Mum,” Hugo hisses, dragging his trolley along in sharp tugs of annoyance, “stop it. Stop being so overprotective.”
“Stop being a git,” Ron supplies, cuffing him upside the head.
“I’m your mother,” she tells him, hand pressed to his cheek where he allows it to linger for a few seconds before swatting it away. “It’s my job to protect you.”
*
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
*
“-and remember to come home for Christmas.”
It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.
The book closes, and she smiles.
*
fin.