Chapter 7
Hermione and Draco spent the evening in the library, searching for anything related to Japan or the Japanese language that could serve as a name.
In the end, they each had a far too long list of notes.
“Some of these are awfully long and hard to pronounce.” Draco grinned at her. “We can’t carry around a note with his name, just so we don’t forget it.”
Shaking her head, she leaned back. “So which one do you like?”
“How about Shi?”
“I’m not calling him Death. Besides, it’s already in the name of the species. How about Doku?”
Draco looked at her notes to see the meaning. “Venom? That’s creative.”
She rolled her eyes. “How is Shi any better?”
“Ok, how about …”
“Have you still not found a name?”
Hermione looked up at Lucius, who was standing in the doorframe. “It’s not that easy!”
“It could be. Just call him Noodles,” Draco joked.
“Oh yes, that will be in my first letter to Lord Riddle. ‘Oh, and by the way, the rare, beautiful snake you gifted me is now called Noodles.’”
The Shinohebi, who had been loosely wrapped around Hermione’s shoulder all day, snoozing for the past two hours or so, lifted his head. “Did you find something?”
Before she could say anything, Draco leaned forward. “Do you like Noodles?”
The Shinohebi looked at him. He had told Hermione that he was able to learn to understand human language, but since he had lived in Japan before he had been owled to England and even then never among humans, he only knew very few Japanese words he had picked up on and no English at all. “What did he say?”
“He asked, if you want to be called Noodles.” She was sure he’d find it funny, but he actually thought about it for a while and then slithered over the table to Draco, who gently stroke the scales with the tips of his finger. Thankfully, Lucius seemed to have gotten used to him by now and didn’t feel the need to rescue his heir.
“I like it.”
Hermione groaned.
Draco looked at her. “What?”
“He likes it.”
Draco grinned broadly. “He likes Noodles?”
“Yes.” Her voice sounded muffled because her face was now covered with her hands.
Even Lucius had to chuckle. “Contrary to popular belief, Tom does have a sense of humour. And when in doubt, you can always blame Draco.”
Draco, still petting the Shinohebi … Noodles … shrugged. “You can. He wasn’t even mad at me when I borrowed Nagini for a whole day.”
“You borrowed Nagini?” She asked in disbelief.
“Yes, we went exploring.” He grinned at her. “We met up with Tom on some Caribbean island because mother wanted a relaxing holiday with nice weather for once.”
“That worked out well,” Lucius said dryly.
“The weather was nice. Anyway, it was the second day already,” Draco continued, “and they still made no attempt to actually explore the island. It probably wasn’t all that big, but I was five and there was a forest area and cliffs … So I ran away when they weren’t looking and Nagini came along.”
“Yes, we were searching for them for almost the entire day and the same man who sent us the most venomous creature he could find kept telling us to calm down and that Nagini would never let anything happen to him. We did find them eventually. Draco had eaten too many fruits, got tired and fell asleep on the beach on the other side of the island, with Nagini wrapped around him.”
Hermione laughed. “What kind of snake is Nagini?”
“A big one,” Draco said with a shrug. “Like four metres or so, but she does have venom. I saw her hunt once. You’d think a snake that size is a constrictor, but nope.”
“She’s a Maledictus,” Lucius explained and Draco frowned.
“I never heard of that.”
Hermione hadn’t either.
“A Maledictus is a woman who, due to a blood curse, can turn into an animal and with time she loses control over the transformations and then the animal form becomes permanent and she eventually forgets that she was ever human at all. When Tom found her, Nagini barely remembered and I doubt she does now.”
“That’s awful,” Hermione said quietly.
“Initially, sure. As long as they still remember. I doubt Nagini would say it’s awful now. Fortunately, Maledicti are very rare.”
Noodles, who was, unfortunately, very set on his new name, slept in her bed that night and he and Hermione talked until she eventually fell asleep.
When she woke up the next morning, he was coiled up on the pillow next to her and she smiled. It was nice to have a constant companion. She briefly wondered how it would work out at Hogwarts, but it was still the beginning of the holidays and a problem for another day.
Today, she would find out who her parents were and who she had the ability to speak to snakes from.
She got up, allowing Noodles to sleep a little longer. Merlin, she was already getting used to that name! When she came out of the bathroom, dressed and ready for breakfast, he was waiting for her and slithered up her arm and took his now usual place around her shoulders and neck.
After breakfast, Draco asked again, if he could come and before he could sulk about Lucius’ ‘No’, Hermione handed him Noodles. “You can snakesit. I need to expand a bag that is more suitable for carrying him around outside school.”
Draco brightened up considerably.
“Be nice to him.”
Could a snake look offended? “Of course I’ll be nice to him. He found me a name. I like him.”
Hermione supressed an eyeroll. Noodles obviously loved his name and she didn’t want him to feel bad about it.
She had been to Gringotts before. First, with Professor McGonagall, who had exchanged the money her parents had given her for school supplies, and twice with the Malfoys. The latter had let her come to the vaults with them.
Today, they wouldn’t go to the vaults. Lucius explained to one of the Goblins why they were here and he led them into an office, where they sat down, Hermione’s heart beating fast now. She was still coming to terms with the fact that the two people she had been forced to grow up with were not her parents. Would she now find out who they were? And did she want to get to know them? They had left her with people who hadn’t cared about her, after all.
But she was getting ahead of herself. They had to know who they were to decide whether they should be contacted.
The whole Ancestry Retrace was quite unspectacular and quick.
Hermione had to perform an easy spell on a piece of parchment, which the Goblin took to a desk and she couldn’t quite see what he was doing. But when he handed it to Lucius, there was writing on it.
She watched him look through what would be the names of her ancestors and when he got to the bottom, he frowned. Instead of at Hermione, he looked at Narcissa. “You suspected this, don’t tell me otherwise. That’s why you wanted to use Legilimency on her supposed parents.”
Narcissa didn’t deign to ask what she had supposedly suspected, apparently her husband’s reaction was enough confirmation for her, and just nodded.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you and Severus would have said I was delusional.”
He huffed, then looked at Hermione. Then back at his wife.
Was it so bad?
“Lucius?” She asked quietly.
He took a deep breath and sat back down. “You are indeed a descendant of Salazar Slytherin. Direct line.” Again, he looked at the parchment, as if to convince himself.
“Your mother was related to Theodore. Cyrelia Nott. His father’s sister. She was a very good friend of Narcissa. She died right after the war ended. I’m sorry.”
Theo was her cousin? That was … unexpected … but hardly reason for such a reaction. She wouldn’t meet her mother, though, she had died not long after giving birth to her. Maybe she had been in some kind of danger after all and had had to give her away with no time to check whether these people were actually good people. “And my father?” She finally asked and Lucius looked at her for a long time before speaking.
“Tom Riddle.”
She didn’t remember much of the way home, only that when they arrived, Draco asked what was wrong and Noodles slithered towards her, up her shoulders and nuzzled her cheek.
Narcissa asked Bimsy to brings some tea and they all went to the sun room.
All of this felt unreal. Her mother, Theo’s aunt, was dead and her father … Did he know? Was that why he sent her the Shinohebi? But if he knew, why had he never tried to find her or made one of his followers and friends check on her? Did he not care?
When she felt Narcissa’s hand on hers, she looked up.
“How did you guess?” Of all the many questions, this was the easiest to grasp right now.
“When I first saw you, I thought you looked like Cyrelia.” She smiled sadly. “I have some photos of her, I’ll find them for you later, most of them from when we were at school. The Notts will have more. Anyway, I dismissed the thought. I still thought you were Muggle-born and that it was simply a coincidence. But Cyrelia was … close to Tom. They weren’t a couple, but it was an open secret that they had relations every now and again. Then we found out that you are a Parselmouth. By then I also knew that you were born a little more than a month before she died. I still thought it was stretch, but to be safe, I proposed to use Legilimency on your parents to see, if there was any possibility that you are not really their daughter.”
“Wait!” Draco interrupted after taking his mother’s words in. “Cyrelia Nott was her mother?” Narcissa nodded. “And Tom …”
“He’s her father,” Lucius confirmed.
That at least shocked Draco into silence.
Hermione took a sip of her tea. “Do you think he knows?”
Narcissa immediately shook her head. “No, I’m rather sure he doesn’t. Cyrelia was quite dedicated to our cause. But then, in February or March of 1979, she told Tom and her brother that she couldn’t do it anymore. That the constant fighting was too much and she would leave. I tried to talk to her, but she wouldn’t tell me what this sudden change of heart was about. And then, without further warning, she just left one day.”
“She was pregnant,” Hermione whispered.
“Yes, that must have been the reason.” When she smiled at Hermione, there were unshed tears in her eyes. “She was probably trying to keep you safe. She left and not even the Notts knew where she was. Tom tried to find her. He thought she would have been safer here, even if she didn’t want to participate in the war anymore. Which was true. Due to a thousand years worth of wards, even Curse-Breakers could probably not get in without permission. But there was no trace of her. After the war was over the following year, there were three more victims. They were killed by Aurors, supposedly because they tortured two of their own into madness. Neville Longbottom’s parents, they were both Aurors and members of the Order of the Phoenix. When the other Aurors found Alice and Frank Longbottom, it was too late, they never recovered. They fought the Death Eaters they found there and all three of them were killed, supposedly because that was the only way to overpower them.” Her voice sounded bitter at that. She didn’t believe it, neither did Hermione. “Your mother, my sister Bellatrix Lestrange and her husband Rudolphus Lestrange.” She wiped away a tear that fell against her will. Hermione squeezed her hand that still lay on hers. Narcissa returned the gesture with a small smile. “I assure you, none of them would have done that. We don’t know how Bella and Rudolphus found Cyrelia and why they ended up where they died. We do, however, know that Cyrelia left you with the Muggles earlier the same night. She was a competent witch. Not the most powerful maybe, which she made up for with working hard on herself at school. The sloppy way the Muggles were obliviated tells me for sure that someone was after her or she felt otherwise at risk and she had to leave you somewhere, where you would be safe and there was no time to do better.”
Hermione was close to crying now. So she had had a mother who had loved her. A mother who had, even when she herself had been at great risk, tried to make sure that her daughter was safe. She couldn’t have known what kind of people she had left her with.
“I agree with Narcissa,” Lucius said quietly after a while. “I don’t believe Tom knows. He was as bewildered as all of us when she suddenly left. We later heard that she supposedly stayed in Spain for a while and if that is true, she must have come back with you when she heard that the war was over and Tom supposedly dead.”
“We have to tell him,” Draco said, uncharacteristically quiet himself.
“Yes. With your permission, Hermione, I’ll write to him and send him the results of the Ancestry Retrace. I’ll copy it for you, so you can have a look at your family tree later, when you feel like it.”
She nodded “Thank you, Lucius.”
After that, she had gone to her room, to be alone for bit, to quiet the storm in her mind. She told Noodles everything, not just what they had found out today, but everything she knew about the war and her parents, her real parents, while she was curled up on the sofa of her sitting room, staring at the copy of her family tree the Goblin had somehow been able to produce with the slightest hint of her magic and which Lucius had copied with a quick non-verbal spell, so that he could send the original to Lord Riddle. Her father.
The Nott family was old, going back several hundred years, until there was Theodore, her cousin, and his parents, Cassius and Maeve. And then there was Tom Riddle, also coming from a long line of wizards and witches, with the exception of his father, who had been a Muggle. There were side branches, of course, but Hermione focused on the main line, which went back 1000 years, over Gaunts and Slytherins, right until Salazar Slytherin himself.
She didn’t know how long she’d been sitting there, but eventually someone knocked on the door.
It was Draco, who sat down next to her. “Alright, Riddle?” He asked with a tentative smile and Hermione let out a huffed laugh. He didn’t seem to really expect an answer. “Are you coming out for lunch?”
“Is it lunch time already?”
“Yes.”
She took a deep breath and nodded. “I’m coming.”
“Fair warning: Severus is here.”
That didn’t come as a surprise, he had known about their plans for today, after all.
When they entered the sun room once more, Draco performed an elaborate bow. “Professor Snape, I present to you Miss Hermione Riddle.”
“Don’t call her that,” Lucius said in a firm voice that made Draco pause. “Don’t make a habit of that now. If it slips out at Hogwarts or in public, she could be at serious risk. For the foreseeable future, she’s still Hermione Granger. Except for us here and your friends and their parents, no one must know.”
“Couldn’t she become a Nott?” Draco frowned.
“No. The question about the father will arise when it’s revealed who her mother was. At the moment, it is safest for her, if everyone believes she’s a Muggle-born.” He looked at Hermione, who had joined them at the table. “I understand that you may wish to get rid of the name of the Muggles who mistreated you. But right now, I don’t think it would be safe.”
“It’s alright.” She shrugged with a small smile. “I’m used to it. Did you write him?”
“Yes, but since he’s either still in Japan or at least likely in Asia, it will take a few days until we get an answer. If we’re lucky, we get it before you go back to school.”
They ate in silence for a while, until Snape spoke up in his usual dry tone. “Lucius, do you think I’ll be in trouble, if she tells her father I was mean to her in class?”
After lunch, they all went through the floo, including Snape and Noodles. Lucius had insisted that it was perfectly fine to take the Shinohebi and Hermione suspected strongly that he just wanted to see the look on Cassius’ and Maeve’s faces.
Severus, although regularly complaining about always being wrapped up in everyone’s drama, strangely never seemed to actively avoid it. He could have gone back to Hogwarts instead, but no, he stepped into the fireplace before Hermione and stood waiting in the entrance hall of Nott Manor when she arrived.
“That was weird,” Noodles commented after his first time of using the Floo Network. She gave him a quick pet on the head.
“You’ll get used to it.”
A house elf appeared and Lucius asked whether the Notts were home. The elf apparated away and soon after, Cassius came to greet them. When he stood before Hermione, he hesitated, then laughed. “I see, someone sent you an early Christmas gift. Do you know who it is from?” He asked carefully, obviously wanting to make sure that she was already informed about their shared secret.
She smiled at the man, her uncle, although he didn’t know it yet. She had his eyes, she noticed. Theo came after his mother with his black hair and hazel brown eyes, but Cassius Nott had amber eyes like her and his hair was only slightly darker than Hermione’s. “Yes, I do. It was very kind of Lord Riddle.”
“Hmm … is that a Shinohebi?”
“Yes,” Lucius answered, before Hermione could say anything. “Imagine my surprise when I opened the package.”
Cassius laughed again, then winked at Hermione. “Lucius isn’t too fond of snakes, especially since Nagini accidentally ate one of his peacocks.”
“How does one accidentally eat a peacock?” Lucius drawled. Draco and Hermione exchanged a grin.
“How could she have known they weren’t there for food? It was the first time Tom let her out to hunt while at Malfoy Manor, she probably thought how nice it was of you to provide an easy meal.” At this the children burst out laughing. “You sure know how to hold a grudge.”
Lucius didn’t deign that with an answer. “We have new information. Information that concerns you, Maeve and Theodore, too.”
Lord Nott looked at his friend questioningly, but when nothing more was forthcoming for now, he nodded. “Sure, they’re upstairs. Theo is going to love your new friend.” He led them up the stairs. Nott Manor wasn’t as big as Malfoy Manor, but it was still a grand old place. “What did you name him?”
Hermione cringed inwardly. “His name is Noodles. It was Draco’s idea,” she was quick to add. “And Noodles liked it very much.”
“I heard my name twice now.”
“Yes, I told him that Draco found a name for you.”
“Yes, that was nice of him.”
Hermione rolled her eyes.
Cassius had watched the exchange. “That brings back memories. It’s been a while since someone has spoken Parsel here. We need to visit him more often, but since you children are at Hogwarts, there’s limited time for that. Especially since Theo will have a fit if he hears that we went without him.”
They arrived in a sitting room Hermione was already familiar with and Maeve greeted them, her reaction to Noodles was very similar to her husband’s.
They called for Theo and when he got there, he grinned ridiculously widely. “That’s awesome! Do you think we all get snakes for Christmas?”
Narcissa laughed at the look on her husband’s face.
“You wish. Father already wrote to him that he’s not to send me one, no matter how much I beg.”
“She received the snake because she can talk to them. Can either of you talk to snakes?” Snape raised an eyebrow at the two boys, who just gave him an annoyed look.
Hermione noticed that Noodles listened attentively while the humans spoke. She wondered how long it would take him to pick up on the language.
“Since we’re all here now, what is it you wanted to tell us, Lucius?”
Wordlessly, he pulled another copy of the Ancestry Retrace result out of his pocked, unfolded it neatly and handed it to Cassius Nott.
Hermione watched nervously as he studied the family tree. She could see that he wanted to say something, probably a comment on Salazar Slytherin, but then his eyes fell on Hermione’s parents and he closed his mouth again, growing slightly pale.
Maeve and Theo looked at him, waiting. “Father?” Theo asked after a while.
Cassius ignored him for now and looked at Hermione instead. His voice was quiet when he spoke. “You look like her. That’s the first thing I thought when I first saw you.” His voice was tight. “She looked almost exactly like you when she was your age.”
And then he pulled her into a strong hug, causing Noodles to leave his place on her shoulders and move over to Draco. Hermione, who had never been subject to any affection to speak of growing up, not until she had moved in with the Malfoys, clung to him, feeling tears in her eyes. When they parted, his hands remained on her shoulders and he looked down at her. “I’m sorry. If I had known about you, I would never have let you grow up with people like that. And I don’t think your father would have either.”
She quickly wiped away a few tears and managed a smile. “Narcissa told me what happened. You couldn’t have known.”
Maeve managed to get hold of the parchment her husband was still holding and her eyes, too, widened.
“Is anyone going to tell me what’s going on?” Theo asked.
“Your aunt Cyrelia was Hermione’s mother,” Maeve explained quietly. “And Tom is her father.”
Theo stared at her. “We’re cousins?”
~tbc~