Summer I - Tearful Mundanities
Her fingers were tracing the scar from the Ministry on her torso, still raised and slightly red, as her mum knocked on her door. “Hermione?”
She kept her gaze locked on the ceiling. Madame Pomfrey told her that the swelling would go down with time. Magical wounds always turned flat, and silvery, when they healed. But a magical scar couldn’t leave the body, she’d explained, tucking a flyaway curl behind Hermione’s cheek, unless the countermagic had properly been performed, and the spell had been silent. Hermione remembered the flash of purple light, her gasping, “Oh,” as her vision flickered, and suddenly she was floating above her body, and no one could hear her scream.
“Hermione?”
She closed her eyes.
“Hermione?”
She heard a shuffle and a creak, as if someone was walking away, and her eyes opened. But her mum switched languages, persistently. “Hyejin-a? Hyejin?”
She closed them again.
“Kwenchana?”
She sighed. “I’m fine, Mum. Kwenchana.” She winced at how hostile she sounded. She hadn’t meant to. It wasn’t her mum’s fault. Her mum didn’t know. She wondered if Ron’s mum was doing the same dance. Probably not. His mum knew when to back off. She’d lived through the war. Her mum hadn’t.
That was unkind to think. Her mum lived through a different war. She never talked about it. The most she would say is that she played in one of the rubble-strewn fields with her sisters and she’d learnt enough English to beg for chocolate from the American soldiers. Her eldest brother had died from the flu because they couldn’t pay for a doctor. Hermione knew this because when she ran a really high fever, her mother couldn’t look at her. The endless stream of WWII memorials, especially as the veterans aged, bothered her.
It wasn’t the only war, she would say.
It was a world war, her dad would say.
Hermione’s paternal grandfather had enlisted as a mechanic (following the footsteps of his father, who was so impassioned by the war to end all wars he’d traded the hot Georgia sun for the trenches of France, where he met a lovely British nurse), and her paternal grandmother had left Jamaica to enlist as a nurse (her parents thought she was crazy, but they came around). If her mum was feeling okay, she’d back off. But if she’d been drinking, and they were coming home after hearing about how during the Great Blitz Hermione’s grandmother checked out of her shift, walked up to the labor unit to give birth to Hermione’s dad, and was right back at her post the next shift again, and about Hermione’s grandfather’s close scrapes, and about the death of his war buddy, Shrimp.
Her mum would let her dad’s statement settle, and then she would say, My war was a world war, your people just didn’t want to see it that way, and Hermione’s dad would sigh.
“Hermione? Can I come in?”
“No.”
The door creaked right at the rusty hinge. “Tea? Kettle’s on.”
As if a cup of tea would help.
“No.”
“Mrs. Lydgate made her chocolate biscotti with almonds.” Her mum’s voice sounded so hopeful it made her bite her lip to not scream. She tried not to feel like an insane failure. Every time Mrs. Weasley offered Ron something he rejected—an extra biscuit, a cup of tea—she saw how Harry would stiffen for just a minute. His aunt had never so much as sent him a kind glance. If Harry were here, he’d be a better son to her mother than she was a daughter. “They don’t make biscotti at Hogwarts, do they?”
She should not have said Hogwarts. Hermione’s stomach rolled.
“Umma. Pegopeuji anah.” She made each syllable as bitchy as possible. It sounded better than in English that way. She bit back naga.
Her mum sounded a little bit baffled, and just a touch hurt. “Hyejin-ah, come downstairs.”
“Okay, soon, Mum.”
Would her mum understand? Probably not. She was just six when her war started and ten when most of the tanks rolled away. She knew the aftermath; it drove her, as soon as she could, to West Germany; now, she didn’t so much as mention 25 June or 15 August, hadn’t sent Hermione to a Korean church. Her mum, if she knew, would just tell Hermione to run. Her dad might understand, but he wouldn’t approve. He’d tell her that the war was for her grandparents’ generation and not hers. Her parents understood her witchcraft as a schoolyard identity, a way for her to express her teenage brilliance, for her adult brilliance would be burnished by her degree, and they were very good at not telling her that they expected Oxford, but she could feel its coming weight.
Her dad wouldn’t tell her to run. He’d tell her to leave. He liked separating the world into smaller worlds. He believed, strongly, that you could pick where you stood and that it was in your hands.
“Look at me,” he’d say. “I chose the English world. My brother didn’t know which one, and now he’s stuck.” He meant Uncle Hector, who’d moved to America to start a business, and was now so successful he never came back, only sent gifts. Hermione knew his wife better—aunt Alice. She spent part of the year in Reading so Hermione’s son, Marc, could know how “British family.” Uncle Hector insisted that Marc go to Andover, so Marc went to Andover; and then on, although he did not quite say this out loud, to study history or economics at Yale, or Brown, or some other place where the name Granger could eventually be inscribed over the top of a gleaming stone hall.
Her dad was also good about not pressing her, but she felt his eyes on her when he thought she wasn’t looking. He hadn’t fully believed when she’d backed out of skiing in order to check on Ron’s dad post-attack—she’d begged hard, every year since eleven, for a Christmas ski trip—but hadn’t known how to push back. It wasn’t that she was lying. No. Well. She was. It started in earnest in her third year.
“Let me get this right,” her dad had said. “The Ministry of Magic, which makes all of the important decisions, let a highly illegal and regulated form of magicbe used so a thirteen-year-old could double her course load?”
Her mum had frowned. “They let these…dementoids…into the school? And let them stay, after they tried to kill Harry twice, while failing to catch Sirius twice?”
“Why can’t he clear his name? Can’t they do magic?”
More questions, too. Questions Hermione herself had wondered, but couldn’t bring herself to wonder fully, because, well. What would that mean. So she hadn’t told them about the end of the Triwizard Tournament—the Voldemort part. She’d just said that Cedric had died, and that alone was almost enough for her mum to say, I think you need to leave the school. She had been able to convince them it was a freak accident. It worked out to a basic refrain: “Can’t they do magic?” “Magic isn’t everything, Mum.” “There are rules about magic, Dad.” That would make her mum’s lips tighten, and her dad would say, “The point of magic is that it’s magic.”
She didn’t tell them about the Order of the Phoenix. It was better that way.
Hermione pretended to be asleep when dinner—spaghetti bolognese, another one of her favorites—was ready, and when her dad tiptoed upstairs and whispered that they could go to Gran’s house for her curry goat, Hermione pretended to be asleep. Going to Gran’s house meant putting on proper slacks and telling half-truths to Gran and Papa and an auntie she really wouldn’t want there and listening to Gran recount all of the comings and goings of her cousins she could just not bother to listen to, especially the ones her age, and having to come up with excuses as to why, once again, she would missing Notting Hill Carnival, which would be great fun and maybe there’d be a nice Jamaican boy who liked flirting by letter—a Bulgarian boyfriend, really? Strange, strange types at Hogwarts, no?—when her school didn’t start until 1 September.
She lay flat on her back and watched the sun inch towards the horizon, throwing a square of amber light over the ceiling, and then fading out into nothing, and listened to the gentle buzzing and burbling of nightfall in Reading. A distant train. Chirping and hooting. A child’s voice, then its parents.
If she could do magic, she’d spell herself to sleep. She would charm her dreams, too. Right now her dreams were awful, because they were nightmares, and terrible, because Hermione knew all of them were true. She dreamt about dying in the Ministry. Sometimes she died, sometimes Luna died, sometimes Ron or Neville died, and sometimes everyone survived and one of them killed themselves two weeks later. She would wake up with a pit in her stomach and her anxiety would peak when she saw the morning owl come with her paper, deathly afraid another was behind, bearing a handwritten note, ink blotchy and paper riddled with tears.
When Harry died, in her dreams it was Bellatrix who killed him, or Voldemort, and sometimes Sirius was still alive to see it, which Hermione thought doubly awful, because if—and it was a great if—no one would be able to cradle his body like Sirius could, paternal and protective like any adult to a child, but uniquely avuncular, with the intimacy that only came with loving that child’s parents as well. Sirius had been the last. Well, maybe Lupin, but he wasn’t Harry’s godfather; Hermione could not tell if they had been friends, after school. And that didn’t matter. Lupin was never in her dreams.
After those dreams she would wake up with an odd sense of calm. Her heart was heavy, and sometimes she found herself reaching for her mascara and her black dress robes, as if heading for an important wizarding funeral. If Harry died—he would die, eventually, Hermione supposed—his funeral would be held somewhere very grand, and everyone at Hogwarts would pretend they knew how much vinegar Harry liked with his chips, while sniggering about Hermione and Ron behind cupped hands. Dumbledore would give a speech, and his eyes would twinkle and pierce less than usual, and his beard would droop. There would be sandwiches. The girls in her year would try to flirt with Ron.
Because when she thought about Harry dying, Hermione had a horrible sense of calm. Part of it was surely because Harry almost died nearly every year. Looking down at his closed eyes and unconscious face in the honey-scented hospital wing, Hermione would have a brief spell of what if and then those bright green eyes would snap open. But the other part….well. The truth was, if Harry died, then at least it would all be over, and Hermione could think beyond the coming fall, beyond next year. Beyond Hogwarts, honestly. Admitting that, even to herself, made Hermione’s skin flush hot with shame.
The previous November Hermione had gone to Madame Pomfrey for a burning, wicked pain in her stomach that wouldn’t go away; Madame Pomfrey diagnosed the ulcer, which got rid of the burning feeling, but the next time she saw Harry she felt the wicked stabs again. The wicked stabs were part tension, the clenching of her muscles, and part stiffness, that sometimes made her neck hurt and hurt at night. It boiled her appetite and focus away; she’d received the first ‘Acceptable’ of her academic career that year, in History of Magic, distracted by the way his hands twitched during the lessons. Even in her grueling third year she never managed any worse than ‘Exceeds Expectations.’
Ron told her that Harry spoke Parseltongue in his dreams. He was at detention, because he was always at detention. Hermione rubbed her hand just thinking about it.
Right weird, Ron said. It was after Christmas, but enough after so Ron could talk about those sort of things again. Neville had started sitting with them at night, and Hermione was searching for a way to ask him about his parents and coming up short.
It’s just Seamus, you know? Neville added. He was playing with a piece of string between her fingers, nervous. He has enough to go on about Harry already.
I know, Hermione had said. She reached around in her bag and found an old button that she didn’t care much for anymore and cast a Silencing Charm. She told Neville to stick it in between the mattress and the frame. That stopped the screaming, and the Parseltongue, but when he showed up to breakfast rumpled and pale, everyone still knew.
Fifth-year Harry was moody, foul, uncertain, desperate, unsure. Hermione was reassuring, acerbic, encouraging, planning. Even when she wasn’t around him she was talking about him: to Ginny, whom Hermione was not quite sure was over her crush, even if she herself didn’t know it; to Ron, who was alternately supportive and irate; to McGonagall, covertly asking after him, a proxy for the other professors who were just a little bit on his side. More than ever she felt like she didn’t have a life outside him. She tried to harness the stress and pressure about her schoolwork, and soon enough she was having nightmares about failing Transfiguration. Ron claimed to be fine, but he started bunking off with the boys in their spring on Friday nights, where they would sit on the roof and drink buckets. Sometimes she’d look up from her Charms notes to see him lurching towards the window, heaving his torso half outside.
If Hermione died, who would come to her funeral? Did the Statute of Secrecy allow her family at her funeral, or would there be two? The Weasleys and Harry at one? What would her grandparents think? How would her mum and dad live with it?
She was starting to hate the look of Harry Potter and Chosen One splashed all over the Daily Prophet. She thought at first that she was just angry for him—a year prior, the DP was nonstop slander. But that wasn’t all. Somewhere deep down she was starting to get angry at him. Harry was one of her dearest friends and she couldn’t imagine Hogwarts without him. She’d led the D.A. with him. Helped him plan almost every move he’d made since he’d stepped foot in the school. She’d caught Rita for him. Turned back time for him. Brewed a potion too advanced for anyone their age to learn for him. But she didn’t know if she could do another year by his side.
* * *
She lied and told her parents she had done poorly on the exams and so she was upset. She said that Malfoy—“The racist one, Mum”—came in first for the year, and sent her a nasty owl about it. She said that Harry was upset because he’d failed his History exam, knowing full well that Harry, due to his fainting spell, had probably failed, but that he definitely didn’t care. She didn’t care if they believed her or not. Every morning after a surly breakfast she went to her room and tried to do her homework, but all of the essays turned to mush. She couldn’t stop replaying the Ministry over and over. The chase through the prophecy room, full of shadows. The Death Eater that grabbed her and wrestled her to the ground, gloved hands on her thin neck, pressing, pressing, pressing, and her vision popped and fizzed.
She kept seeing Sirius fall.
He’d been hard for her to understand at first. He was free, and he was reckless. Hermione agreed with Mrs. Weasley’s assessment of his character, but she was smart enough to not say it out loud. Then she’d found Walburga’s diary right after Christmas, while snooping for a book they might be able to use for the D.A. Nothing was wrong with the Room of Requirement, but it was always nice to have a second source.
The diary had no protective or Dark enchantments, and she’d flicked through it, curious to know a little more about the woman behind the portrait that screamed obscenities downstairs, and put it aside, accidentally setting in the stack she was taking with her to Hogwarts. She didn’t know what she was expecting—A laundry list of anti-Muggle slurs, recipes with banned ingredients, extended account of dinner parties—and the first paragraph struck her like a whip:
It has been ten days since Hyperion died; every morning, my mother comes in with a silver tray bearing a cup of arsenic and a ring. ‘Pick,’ she says, ‘or we shall pick for you.’ ‘But I don’t love him,’ I said today. ‘Stupid girl,’ my mother said. ‘Toujours purs.’ She’s been working on a new spell and tried it today. ‘Lacero! Lacero!’
Walburga recounted growing up in a house that seemed almost as joyless as the one she’d create; a few years at Hogwarts, until she was pulled out for kissing a boy of half-blood status; her hasty marriage, at sixteen, to a cousin she didn’t like much; ten years of miscarriages in which her aunt-mother-in-law insisted she not leave the house at all for fear of “Muggle breath” polluting her fertility. Two sons whom she treasured as much as she could risk treasuring anything until the oldest one began to talk back and stir up her relatives, painted, ghostly, living.
The punishments made Hermione queasy. Walburga seemed to hate them as much as she loved them, at first, remembering the beatings and slicings and enchanted whippings she herself endured, but then Hermione skipped over the late sixties and landed on 27 December 1970. Sirius’ first Christmas back home. She read:
Disciplined immediately upon his arrival for choosing the wrong House. I did the arms without any assistance, but Orion held his legs down for me. He cried and thrashed like he used to as a baby boy. What a weak constitution this school has instilled in him! Oh, the shame of it all, how I have failed my family and my House. He does not know his luck; in my day, they used the flame and the whip. A week in the cellar for him follows, although he shall be permitted to attend Christmas dinner.
The family’s Christmas photo was attached to the entry. Sirius, arm-in-arm with Regulus, his brother, unsmiling. No one in the family phone moved, even if she poked them. She could see it was a magical photo.
She’d always considered Sirius a little immature, rash in a stiff family, rebelling because the rigidity of his house was too ripe to ignore. If the portrait of his mother was anything like his real mother, then she was one of those bigoted types, who read the paper just so she could fume, or plan a picnic during a storm just so she could complain about getting wet from rain. She hadn’t considered abuse. That changed things. It meant Sirius saw everything through a prism of punishment. How far could he bend the rules before his mother carved lines in his legs? How many detentions at Hogwarts could he rack up, and for what? How many Death Eaters could he kill, before he succumbed?
So she cried for him, and Harry, and for everything else. Like nearly dying. That awful, awful look on Ron’s face she feared she would see again. The Weasleys were too big and bold of a family. She cried, and she cried, and her parents stopped believing her when she said it was the stress of exams, so she tried to walk around with a smile on her face and only cry at night, when she thought they wouldn’t hear, but three days into the summer holidays they told her that she could transfer to an A-levels program closer to home.
“No, I want to go back to Hogwarts,” Hermione said, and before she knew it she was sobbing into her cereal. She realized with a shock she was telling the truth. She wanted to go back to Hogwarts. She loved her parents and had no problems with non-magic England. But the Wizarding world, while not the one she knew, somehow fit her better than the non-magical one ever did. It felt right. It felt like she could be herself. It felt like she didn’t have to pretend what she did and didn’t know. It felt natural. That much her parents understood, even if it pained them.
“Your cousins go to that state school, and they do alright,” her mum said, gently.
Her dad said, “You can go private or public too if you’d like. No boarding school though—not unless you can spell us some gold to pay for it.” He grinned, cheekily. “Dreamt up them lottery numbers yet?”
Hermione had made the mistake of telling them about Divination, and ever since then her dad had been liable to try and wheedle out a number ‘prediction’ from her.
“Papa says it’s up a whole ten mil.”
Her mum smacked her dad’s hand lightly. “No gambling!”
“Oh, Lena,” he said, and leaned in to kiss her on the cheek, which she only pretended to resist for a second. She kissed him back. Hermione’s parents had always been affectionate, and she hadn’t thought it unusual until Marc came over for a sleepover when they were both ten and observed, Your parents kiss and hug a lot and Hermione had shrugged and he said I don’t think I’ve ever seen my parents kiss and then the next Christmas Hermione had noticed how her aunt Alice and uncle Hector stood a little apart, while Hermione’s dad had an arm wrapped around Hermione’s mum’s waist, and used his other to pull Hermione into a hug or ruffle her hair or delicately flick her nose or pull his brother into a one-armed hug. Mr. and Mrs. Weasley were like her parents in that way. It made the Burrow feel more like home and less like home at the same time.
Then her mother gazed at Hermione sternly to remind her that she hadn’t lost track of the conversation. “Mrs. Lydgate says the schools are very good. Transferring very easy.”
“Gran could finally have you round on Sundays,” her dad added. “Don’t go Saturdays unless you want to do the cleaning.”
She knew they were half-serious and half-silly. Her mum met her dad in Munich. They were both in the emergency room: one of her patients at the mine needed more than her clinic could provide, and he’d chipped a tooth. They couldn’t stop talking to each other even though she didn’t really know English at the time and he didn’t really know German and definitely could not speak Korean. They were married within two months and considered Germany, at first, then lived in Paris, and only settled in Reading when her great-aunt needed them, but talked of retiring somewhere abroad, somewhere new, and learning a language when they were old and gray. They of all people understood that home wasn’t just family, it was something far more, that sometimes your people look nothing like you and sound nothing like you and are from nowhere near your home anyways.
“I have to go to Hogwarts!”
“Okay, Hermione,” her dad said. “Calm down, it’s okay. No need to be loud.” She hadn’t realized she’d been shouting.
“You’re sure that the unis will accept your NEWTs as A-levels?” her mum asked, spooning more jam on her toast. They wanted her to attend university after Hogwarts. She had too much brains to stop her schooling at eighteen, they thought, and Hermione wasn’t sure she disagreed.
She kept up with regular school easily enough. Literature was devoured at mealtimes and teatimes when Ron and Harry were at Quidditch or too sleepy or surly; math went well with arithmancy, and Wizarding history had surprising parallels to Muggle history. Her parents sent her a biweekly letter about the natural sciences. Her dad called it the Granger Medical Journal and was always threatening to turn it into a textbook series.
“Newts as A-Levels,” her dad said, slapping the paper down on the table, satisfied with the articles he’d skimmed. Hermione felt her gaze pass over the headlines, and forced herself to look at her toast. “Now that sounds like a potion.”
“It’ll be fine, Mum,” Hermione said. She’d asked Dumbledore, and he said that she could cast a glamor over her transcript. He approved of her going to university, even if, as a witch, it was a highly unorthodox move. He promised that a letter of recommendation would be waiting for her when she left, and he would open all the doors she wanted if she pursued the Ministry later, or, if she wanted to set her sights on something larger, the International Confederation, or MACUSA.
“Nothing to worry about, then,” her mum said, and smiled. Hermione tried to smile back, but parting her lips was like convincing dried flowers to bloom. Stiff, unyielding. If applied too much pressure, she was sure they would crack and fall apart and her teeth would clatter one-by-one to the floor—plink! plink! plink!—and her parents would scream, first, and then take her to her dad’s office, second, and make her withdraw from Hogwarts, third. No. It was just hard. But Hermione did it, because she liked it when her parents were happy, and she missed seeing them when she was at school. She wished she could take a magical photo of them because regular photos weren’t enough.
There was so much to worry about. She was almost grateful that she was home for under two weeks. She’d be leaving on the tenth for Ron’s house, and her parents were leaving on the eleventh for a long-awaited trip to America to reunite with some of her dad’s relatives, and Marc’s paternal family, and attended some sort of extended dental convention in August. They were very excited about it. Some large name in dentistry—a Dr. Robert Galbraith, or something—was supposedly delivering the keynote.
It made every single day she spent with them extremely bittersweet. She got up to eat breakfast with them, and packed their lunches, and helped, every night, with dinner. Her mother was a little bemused that she was suddenly so into learning how to cook.
“You couldn’t care any less just last year,” she said, laughing quietly, as she showed Hermione how she folded mandu.
“I’m different now,” Hermione said, and her mum just smiled.
Muggle attacks didn’t always make the front page of the Prophet, but the Brockdale Bridge disaster did. She’d flick on the TV and her heart would start pumping if she saw the words mysterious, unconfirmed, suspicious about break-ins, fogs, death. In one of the Prime Minister’s press conferences about the hurricane, she saw Kingsley Shacklebolt standing in the very back.
She stopped reading the Prophet and watching TV. She put up a calendar marking the days to when she’d go back to the Weasleys’. At first, they’d wanted her to go to her grandparents,’ but she convinced them that if she had to hide her magic, she wouldn’t be able to complete her homework properly, and her grandparents were nosey enough besides.
She started sitting with her mum in the kitchen, garden, and living room, and even joined her making mandu, a task she used to hate. Hermione’s mum was always making a ton. This time it was for aunt Alice, who was trying to care for her dad, who had dementia. Her dad, who could never get the hang of the fold, scooped the meat into perfect little round balls and set them on the tray.
“At your age I was chafing to get out of the house,” her dad said. “Do the Weaselleys let you into town?”
“‘Weasleys,’ Dad, and there isn’t much of a town. The only barkeep would definitely throw us out.” She folded another mandu. “But Ron has older brothers who get up to all sorts of trouble.”
“Trouble, my favorite,” her dad said. He grinned widely, like he had also been at Hogwarts. Hermione had told him about some of Fred and George’s greatest hits, which made him laugh and laugh, and she realized then that she had not told him about their great exit from Hogwarts, she had not been telling them much of anything in the spring.
Her mum pursed her lips. “No trouble. Not you.”
“Aw, leave her, she’s a prefect and everything,” her dad said, and winked at Hermione and changed the subject. “Packed up your suitcase yet, dear?” It was a small and mostly fictional point of contention between her parents that Hermione’s mother loved to pack in advance. She insisted on packing Hermione’s suitcase a full three weeks before she actually was slated to leave anywhere. Her dad preferred to wait until the night before, or, better yet, half an hour before they needed to leave. (“That’s how you know you’ve got the essentials,” he would say.)
Her mum’s scowl softened. She didn't mind when Hermione’s dad pulled her leg like this, but she tried to pretend to, because it made Hermione’s dad laugh.
Her dad laughed infectiously. He had the best laugh in the world. It started deep in his chest and boomed out of his mouth and racked his shoulders, and if he laughed hard enough, he’d wheeze and slap his knee and slump, and by the time he was wiping tears out of his eyes you’d also be doubled over.
But instead of joining Hermione was struck by a big fat wave of regret that her parents were leaving. The next time she would see them, providing a crisis didn’t happen, would be Christmas, and who knew what would be happening then.
“Do you have to go?” She tried to hide her sadness with a tinge of a whine. “What are you even doing in America?” Her parents had been vague on the details, but they always were in letters.
“Mostly dental work and lectures and boring things,” her mum said, a small crease of a frown emerging as she tried to focus on finishing her mandu right. The fold was perfect. “Maybe next summer you’ll go.”
“Don’t call my relatives boring,” her dad said, and snagged a wrapper.
“Don’t worry, darling,” her mum said, and pecked him on the cheek. “I save that label just for you.”
He kissed her back. “Aren’t you special,” he said. Her mum blushed a little, and giggled. The two of them shared one of their private smiles they weren’t afraid to use in front of other people, and then went back to the mandu.
Hermione watched them, and wished her heart didn’t hurt.
* * *
There were three days before she left for the Weasleys’ and Hermione had just shut off her lights and gotten into bed at a little past ten. The last of dusk was fading. Her mum pretended like she didn’t need clonazepam and often refused to take it for weeks at a time, so Hermione had been taking one every night before she went to sleep, which sometimes worked, and sometimes dialed up her nightmares to a terrifying degree, and had the pill under her tongue when she heard a soft tap-tap-tap on the window:
Dear Hermione,
I arrived early to England for my August training programme with the Chudley Cannons. Would you like to see me? I don’t mean to be rude but I followed the owl—I didn’t want to startle you. Open your window if yes and send Leila back to me.
Regards,
Viktor
She read it over twice. Viktor. She’d known he was coming to England, but they weren’t going to overlap. She didn’t want him at the Burrow and have to deal with Ron for the days after.
“Leila?” she asked the owl, who cocked its head and cooed. Taking a pen from her desk, she hastily wrote, Yes! and affixed the scroll to the owl’s leg.
“Alright,” she said. She opened her window again. “Tell him he can come.”
Two minutes later, Viktor let himself in. He looked like himself, but tired. His hair was still shaggy—he hated nothing more than a freshly shorn head on a broom, even though it was his signature look. He wore a burgundy traveling cloak and traveling tunic, with soft-looking brown leggings and extremely dirty boots.
He saw her staring. “Sorry about your floor.”
That made her laugh, and she hugged him. He smelled like he always smelled: cedar and pine, which were the scents he used in his aftershave, and the fragrances his grandmother used when washing his clothes. The hug lasted a long time, and when Hermione finally broke away, he shifted his grip to her forearms, which remained focused and fierce.
“How is it?” Viktor had a way of speaking that let the interlocutor know he wanted the truth, and nothing but the truth, so help him God. It attracted her to him. After the Yule ball, when they were sitting on the highest tower roof in all of Hogwarts, he said, “I like you, and I want to kiss you,” and Hermione kissed him first.
“Bad,” she said. She had missed him. She didn’t want him at Hogwarts last year, but she had missed him all the same. What a funny feeling to have had.
“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked. She loved the way his accent pulled out the consonants: his os deeper, his as richer.
“I don’t really know.”
They sat on Hermione’s bed and listened to Radiohead—Viktor was fascinated by Muggle music, and particularly loved rock—on her CD player. Viktor arranged the pillows so they could sit on it like a couch, cushioned against the wall, and Hermione laid her head on his torso while he stroked her hair. He hummed to himself. Hermione listened to the workings of his abdomen while Pablo Honey played, and then he skipped to listen to all “Creep,” and then hit rewind and listened to it again. Then he shut the CD player off.
“Lord Voldemort is well and truly back.” He said it the French way, properly. Bulgarian was closer to French than English, anyways. “Spotted at the British Ministry.”
“I was there.”
“You saw him?”
“I saw the Death Eaters.” She tried to take a breath, but it came out like a shudder, and she felt his hand rest on the small of her back. “They killed Sirius.”
Her eyes shut and they were in the atrium with the veil. That horrible spinning door, that horrible veil, the rotten Department of Mysteries, Neville’s hand in Hermione’s hand, dirty and bloodstained and frightened. They should have never gone to the Ministry. Where was Dumbledore? Horrible things always happened when Harry couldn’t speak to Dumbledore. And now Sirius. Horrible things happened when he was worried about Sirius. Or Dumbledore. Horrible things happened when the two men who could placate him weren't there. They weren't there. Where were they? Where did they go? Sirius wasn't in the Ministry. As they crept through the shelves, Hermione began to have a clenching feeling in the pit of her stomach. Harry had never given his Occlumency lessons any sort of importance, consumed as he was by his hatred of Professor Snape, who was all too happy to reciprocrate. (Why had Dumbledore chosen that?) The thought began to form. What if...what if...Voldemort had begun to catch on? To what Harry could do?
When were in the atrium, Hermione realized with a chilling clarity that they were going to die. She was a brilliant witch but average in combat magic, and they were facing down felons, wizards who had gone to Azkaban for cruel and unusual use of magic Hermione had not even begun to study. She'd just barely survived a shot to the chest. Her heart hurt, and her lungs felt like they'd been scrubbed with coals. And then the door burst open and the Order walked in.
“You’ve done beautifully,” Sirius told Harry. “Now let me take it from here,” and the two of them flung curses at Malfoy and Bellatrix. Lucius fell, and Harry had launched a jinx at Bellatrix that sent her stumbling.
“Nice one, James!” Sirius called out, and flashed a smile, that Black trademark smile, and Hermione hadn’t missed James and was thinking of Mrs. Weasley’s admonishment—he isn’t James! This isn’t school!—when Bellatrix had roared, and a jet of light hit him and he stumbled back. Into the veil. Then he was gone.
Hermione hadn’t realized Harry was screaming. “I’ve never heard him scream like that,” Ginny confessed, while they were in the hospital wing, “and I dream about him still, in the Chamber of Secrets, if the basilisk had won.”
In Hermione’s memory, after Sirius fell, the darkness in the room multiplied by ten, but Harry remained oddly highlighted, like the veil was a soft spotlight, and Lupin grabbed him before he could launch himself at the veil or at Bellatrix while he kicked and flailed, and the only thing that broke through the unnatural hush was Lupin’s broken voice saying, “Oh, Sirius, no,” and then she felt the darkness swell in a great big eyeless smile, and a freezing tendril wrapped itself around Hermione and yanked her back to meet a half-masked Death Eater, already casting a curse, and then her vision was filled with red starry rockets of pain.
Viktor’s hand retreated from her back. She opened her eyes and sat up. He was looking at her with an odd expression she’d never seen before. She wondered if she had said anything out loud.
But he didn’t acknowledge it. He shifted in the bed and said, “Most of the old families in Europe think this is a British war. Both the villain and the hero are English. But the Lord Voldemort has been making a case abroad, searching for recruits, and they are very worried at Durmstrang. If any student is caught making the Dark Mark, they are put in the dungeon.”
“He did that last time.”
“Yes.” Viktor wrapped an arm around her. “They did.”
“Who’s the new head now?”
“Hirvisaari.” She waited for Viktor to accept the topic change to safer waters and tell her about Hirvisaari, especially if he had been a Quidditch player or not, but he said instead, “Will you write to me this year? I worry about you.”
“Okay.”
“How’s Harry?”
“Okay.”
“I think not that okay.”
“Not that okay, then.”
Viktor threw his hands in the air. “What’s with you?”
“Do we have to talk about Harry?” Hermione didn’t know where the words were coming from. “Can’t we talk about something else? Quidditch, or something?”
“You don’t care about Quidditch,” Viktor reminded her. “And something’s wrong about you and Harry, but you won’t tell me.” Sometimes Hermione hated how much Viktor loved the truth.
“Everything is fine,” she lied, just to spite him. He sighed, deep and rumbly, and Hermione felt him retreat.
“He is the Prophesied One.”
Was that how chosen was translated into Bulgarian? Hermione snorted. “Don’t think I don’t know.”
Viktor shot her a funny look. “I mean him. Lord Voldemort. We don’t like his name much.”
“‘Prophesied?’”
“It’s not a good translation,” he admitted, and scratched his neck. Then he looked her in the eyes. “My grandfather had three siblings. The littlest, Anna had a boyfriend who hated Grindelwald, was part of the resistance against him. They never did much, you know? This little village in the northwest of Bulgaria, just cows and chickens and small bits of magic. No matter. Grindelwald found him. When he was done, he went to my grandfather’s father’s house, where his father and mother and their siblings and children lived, everyone lived together at the time. My grandmother survived because she was in Romania, visiting a sister, when an uncle told her.”
Hermione didn’t know what to say. “Viktor….”
“You have not had fascism for too long in your country. So you don’t know. You think it’s only a matter of staying loyal to your friend as people taunt him in school.”
“I know it’s more than that.”
“Do you?” he challenged. “Everyone was mocking him when I was there. You sometimes turned your back.”
A blush flooded her face. “That was different.”
“That was the same.” He looked like he was going to say more but he shook his head. “Loyalty is—”
“Viktor.” Hermione sat up and withdrew. “I think you should go.”
Hermione didn’t move as he stood up and sent her back down.
He got to the window and looked back. “Hermione….”
“Safe trip,” she said, and he shut it behind him.
* * *
The day before she left, her mother came into her room to tuck her in and pet Crookshanks. She sat on Hermione’s left side and flicked off the lamp. They stared up at the ceiling together. When she was nine, Hermione had begged for the glow-in-the-dark plastic stickies shaped like the night sky, thought it was nothing short of magical, and her parents finally relented on the condition she shape them like real constellations. Hermione hadn’t told anyone at Hogwarts this, but sometimes during Astronomy, she would look up at Orion and imagine her mother sitting next to her, voice soft and soothing in her ear. She read The Hobbit to Hermione, chapter by chapter. They quoted the riddles to each other for a full eight months.
“Hyejin-ah,” her mother murmured, stroking her hair. Hermione’s legal middle name was Jean, because her dad couldn’t remember how to spell Hyejin. She sat there for a long time, until Crookshanks started to snore and Hermione herself felt sleep begin to pull at her eyes. Softly, her mum began to sing the nonsense song Hermione liked, when she was younger. Hermione was never very good at speaking Korean back, but when her mum talked, she understood every single word.
“An apple is delicious,” she began, her hands slowly massaging Hermione’s head, right above her neck, her favorite place, “but a banana is tastier. A banana is long, but a train is longer. A train is fast, but a plane is faster. A plane is high, but heaven is higher. Heaven is blue, so is the sea. The sea is wide, but a mother’s heart is always wider.”
She kissed Hermione on the cheek and turned off the lamp. “Crookshanks, idi-wa,” she ordered, but Crookshanks refused, so she left the door ajar, and Hermione stared up at her constellation-filled ceiling, glow dulled by a shaft of light from the hall, wondering what evil her next year at Hogwarts would bring.