Forgiveness and Forgetfulness

January 1st 1992

Hermione was grateful when she woke up cold.

With wide eyes she sat up quickly. The dim, icy woods gradually came into focus. She had fallen asleep around noon, and now the sun was setting. If she had slept through the night she would’ve frozen to death, probably. The biting cold came as a relief at first—it had woken her from her nightmares. 

Hermione felt like every part of her body ached, covered in scratches and bruises she couldn’t remember how she got. Her ankle was a concerning purple-grey colour. She reached up and touched her head to feel a bump. She didn't remember hitting her head either, but she had been knocked around quite a bit the night before. Her previously damp dress had frozen stiff. She was lucky to be awake. She was lucky to be alive.

Hermione took stock of her surroundings. Her stolen wand lay a few metres away, nestled into the snow. She must have dropped it as she slept. Her shoes lay nearby, soaking wet and coated in the beginnings of the ice that covered the rest of the landscape. 

As she began to resign herself to walking in half frozen shoes all night, she saw small, dainty paw prints leading away from her in the snow.

Her stomach dropped.

She struggled to her feet, and her ankle ached. She ignored it and pushed branches aside as she followed the paw prints, leaving behind her shoes and wand. 'Kitty?' How could she have forgotten about him? He should have been the first thing she looked for. 

Surely he was just around the corner. The paw prints led into the underbrush where Hermione couldn't follow. The cat was probably fine. Probably just hunting. Except had he recovered enough to hunt? It was just yesterday he had been hit by a car. 

'Kitty! Where are you?' Hermione called weakly. Hermione wished she had picked a name for him now, instead of just calling him 'Kitty.' Hermione wondered what she would do. She had two options, either turn back, the thought of which made her stomach twist with dread, or wait here for the cat to return and get colder and hungrier. She resigned herself to waiting. Honestly, if she abandoned this cat, what was the point of it all? The idea of being completely alone was too much to bear.

Hermione was parched. She hadn’t had anything to drink since eggnog the night before. She heard running water nearby and saw she was only thirty metres away from a small stream. She knew she could get ill from drinking possibly contaminated water, but she couldn’t be bothered to worry about that, thirsty as she was. So, she drank freezing water out of the palms of her hands.

She was trying not to think about the night before, but it all came back in a dark, painful flash. She had thought it was going to be a good night. Her parents even let her have pudding, since it was New Year’s Eve. But then she had found that injured cat, and the police had shown up, and everything had gone wrong. And now it was like she was living in some alternate reality where she had never been born. She supposed she would have to find her school and ask a teacher for help. If her teachers even remembered her. It wasn't in walking distance, and she didn't have a bike, or even know how to bike. And teachers would want to call the police. Hermione couldn't think of one person she could ask for help. Not one person would trust her and listen to her. Everyone would think she was insane, or worse, a criminal and making the whole thing up.

Hermione was suddenly hit with a pang of hunger. She was starving. And freezing. Obviously, she needed to prioritise. Her brain was fuzzy, thoughts kept slipping out of it. She might have a concussion. She had never done her healing magic on her own head, but maybe she would have to. Her mind was her superpower, if she lost that she would have nothing. She felt an urge to make a list. But she didn't have any paper. She spoke out loud, instead of writing her thoughts down, to the empty, cold woods.

'I need food. I need warmth. I need to heal my injuries.’ 

Hermione decided she wasn’t going to get anywhere if she passed out trying to heal herself. She had managed to heal herself of a small cut and some small bruises in the past, but the biggest magical thing she had ever done was healing the cat, and that had almost completely depleted her. She barely had any energy to spare, now. Her ankle was walkable, and her head was fuzzy, but not useless.

‘I need to find the cat. I need to figure out if other people remember me. I need to avoid the police. I need to get better at magic. I need to help my parents,' she said. It was the best to-do list she could have hoped for right then. She kept thinking. She wished she could write things down.

'I can't forget what happened. I can't let the details get confused. What happened?' The woods had no response.

‘MrewRemeEOWrpoworEEEeworemeow.’

Hermione looked behind her. The cat! He was back! And was seemingly looking around for Hermione. When the cat saw Hermione coming he dropped something he was holding in his mouth, a rather large thing, and let out a happy trill. Hermione approached the thing to see what it was. On the ground lay a dead common pheasant. Hermione was reminded of her desperation for food.

‘You've caught dinner! You good cat. And that's a large bird too, I'm quite impressed.’

The cat meowed proudly and puffed up his chest. Snowflakes were caught on his whiskers and the tips of his ears. Hermione noted that this cat was one of the largest cats she had ever seen. Her dad had made the same comment when she brought it back to the house. He sure had made a quick recovery, Hermione didn't realise her healing powers were so effective, it was on the brink of death when she had found it.

Hermione was dead on her feet as she gathered dry-ish sticks. She had used her magic to light candles before, hopefully campfires would be the same. She held her hand close to the centre of the pile of wood and felt the strange, bubbling feeling in her chest travel through her and bring a spark to the tinder. She had to lay down afterwards to rest.

She supposed wands were meant to make magic less exhausting? But she didn't know how to use one, and was wary of them. She imagined accidentally lighting the forest on fire, with the power of a wand. Eventually, she managed to stand up and ‘butcher’ the pheasant. She stood on the wings of the bird and slowly pulled from the legs to remove them and the entrails from the bird, which she passed back to the cat. She broke off the wings, and set up the remainder of the pheasant to roast over the fire.

As the pheasant roasted she set her shoes to dry by the fire, and let the cat lick her bloody hands clean. What a good cat this was. Saving her from the policeman, then from starvation, and then kindly cleaning her hands. And he was so beautiful. A gorgeous, giant black tomcat, with long whiskers and huge ears.

‘I really ought to give you a name.’

‘Mrrp?’ the cat said, and then went back to snacking on his pheasant guts.

Hermione thought for a moment. Black cats were meant to bring bad luck. But this cat had only helped her. If it weren’t for this cat, she probably wouldn’t have gotten away, and she wouldn’t have this dinner roasting either. ‘What about Lucky?’

The cat looked up, and meowed curiously.

‘Lucky it is!’ 

‘Well, Lucky. Normally I write important things down, but for now I’ll just tell you what happened, even if you were there for all of it.’ Hermione began retelling the important parts of what she remembered last night.

'I came home with you, after I healed you out on the street. Just as we were feeding you, the police arrived. Two policemen.' Hermione shivered as she remembered the look in the eyes of one of the policemen. It was like staring into a void. No feelings, no empathy. Hermione felt confident he was the leader of the two. He just radiated evil, pure evil.

'The men, they told my parents they were here to see me. They said I was in trouble. My parents let them in. And then they took out their…’ Hermione hesitated. ‘Wands.' Hermione decided wands was the only appropriate word for what the men had. Short sticks that they shot light out of? Clearly, the police could do magic. She wasn't the only person in the world who could betray the laws of physics. Hermione reached towards where her stolen wand lay on the snow, and clutched it tightly. The wood was polished and smooth, it was clearly something that had been made with care. To Hermione, holding it felt like hate.

'They yelled things.' Hermione tried to remember what they yelled, but couldn't. It sounded like Latin, but she didn't know much Latin. They were yelling a lot of words. She remembered the word ‘stupefy’, yelled like a command, but nothing else. 'And a red light hit Mum. She collapsed. And they tried to hit me and Dad. But we ran upstairs.' Hermione paused as she struggled to remember. 

'And then Dad grabbed a shotgun, and shot one of them. And then...' Hermione hesitated. Had she hallucinated? Was she really mad? She certainly wasn't mad in the way her parents thought she was, but it was hard to believe what she saw was real. What she saw, what she remembered seeing, was the shotgun in her father’s hand seamlessly turning into a snake. It was horrifying. The snake twisted around her father's arm, and while he was distracted someone shouted out a phrase. Hermione couldn’t quite make it out, but It sounded like ‘crucify’ Her father screamed and writhed like he was on fire, and Hermione didn’t know what to do, and then all of a sudden he was hit with a blast of red light and collapsed. Hermione didn't realise magic could be so... evil. When Hermione did magic, it didn’t feel like it could have been used to hurt someone. Magic always felt pure and good.

'Dad's shotgun turned into a snake, and he was hit by a red light, and collapsed,' Hermione admitted. She felt self-conscious talking about magic out loud, like Lucky was actually listening to her words and thinking she was mad. 'The other policeman showed up then, and I tried to run past him and ended up tripping down the stairs.' Hermione remembered briefly blacking out. 'That must have been when I hit my head. I woke up to you attacking the shorter policeman, you good cat. And he dropped his wand and I grabbed it.' Lucky had finished eating, and walked over to her, purring. He rubbed his head up against her leg and she gently ran her fingers through his fur. She noticed her hands were shaking.

'I ran into the forest and hid.' Hermione remembered crouching in the bushes with her cat, trying to quiet her laboured breathing. She had heard one of them pointing out her tracks in the snow, but the other one insisted she had gone the opposite direction. She sat there, awake, freezing, still in her New Year’s dress from the night before, until dawn. Just that alone would have made it the worst day of Hermione's life, if it weren't for what happened next.

'We waited all night. In the morning we went back to the house.' This was the hard part. This was the part where she started to feel mad. The house was pristine. Nothing broken. Nothing torn. She had stepped into the clean house in the daylight and remembered vases falling on the floor and walls being blasted into by magic. 'The house was... repaired.'

She remembered meeting her mum's confused gaze as she walked in the house. She thought the source of her confusion was the same as her own, how was the house perfect? Like nothing happened last night? Right up until her mum opened her mouth.

Reflecting on it, she couldn’t have gone mad. She couldn't say what happened out loud though. She didn't need to. She wasn't at risk of forgetting.

Hermione stood to rotate the roasting pheasant. Just then, she saw a rush of movement in the corner of her eye, and spun around. Two black monsters were flying towards her, from the direction of the creek. Hermione shrieked. Lucky sprinted into the icy woods, and Hermione followed, her stolen wand still in hand. Glancing behind her, she barely had time to think of her shoes, still drying by the fire, or her uneaten dinner. All she could see were the terrifying faces of the beasts barrelling after her.