Chapter Text
October 17 th , 1998
Dear Fleur Delacour,
I hope you have been doing well.
I had heard of your recent travels to Egypt. How is that going? Are you enjoying your time there? I remember Bill's stories of his life in the deserts. How fascinating it had all seemed. I know he considered the area as much of a home as the Burrow, I hope you are finding it treating you much the same.
Though to be blunt, as I am sure you of all people will appreciate, I am writing to you of self interest. I am looking for some help in answering a few questions.
Well.. more than a few.
I am afraid you are the only person I feel comfortable asking, but even more so, the only person who might have any semblance of answers.
I hope to hear from you soon.
With love,
Hermione J. Granger.
November 5th, 1998, Hour 1
Long ago there was a time when Hermione Jean Granger had held an inexplicable fascination for fairy tales.
She adored any story that had a whisper of adventure or discovery. She would cry out while reading of fabled lands, wondrous creatures and unimaginable sights. The ones that were all created- breathed to life from the simple matter of the human mind.
Her favourites were plenty. The tales of beautiful Mer people who braved first steps on land, the ones of magical nymphs who rescued princely young men from drowning and the fairies whose dust would float children to mythical lands, far away, where they may or may not ever return again.
Hermione was entranced by rulers and kingdoms, the ones with both vanquishers and destroyers. She admired them. Both the heroes and villains alike with all the blurred lines drawn between. She could not get enough, memorising so many way’s such unfathomably odds could be overcome. With acts of true bravery. True sacrifice. True love.
She thinks back, reminiscing about her mother’s favourite. The woman’s soft voice circling in her mind.
“The young prince’s story became legend in the kingdom” Her mother would finish. “Their oath of unworldly devotion had changed everything, and still- they were victorious. Their bravery travelled the nation in storms.” Her eye’s would twinkle in awe. “The feathered woman who’s eyes homed the stars was etched into the walls of the grand castle doors, into the tales spoken amongst the hills, the fables told to children.…”
Her mother would recite the ending on a whispered breath. Hermione’s heavy lids losing the fight against the current dragging her to slumber gates.
“At dawn near the river's edge, the two were bonded in matrimony holier than words. A connection bidden in their very souls. They became one breath. One being. No longer tied by destiny alone but becoming a fabric of that very fate themselves…bonded back together. Where they belonged.”
Hermione would hum drowsily. Young and new to revelation, yet just as contemplative all the same.
“If it was fate..then-“ She yawned, swiping at her drooping eyes. “Then they had no choice but to be together, right?”
Her mother’s honey sweet smile would lift as she stroked back Hermione’s curls.
“They’re love was different, my dove. Special. It was like a string was tied between them, sewn into the makeup of their bones. They wanted..”She shook her head. “needed, “ She corrected” to be together.”
“But what if the lady didn’t really like him,” Hermione’s eye’s drifted shut as her mother placed a chaste kiss on her cheek. “What if she wanted to love someone else?”
“My little bird.” Her mother would hum. “She will always love the prince…no matter… made for...”
Hermione would doze off, her mother’s soft voice floating in and out of her dreamscape.
“Hermione…do remember…”
Her bed would dip, feeling as though she were rocking aboard a ship. She would feel the blanket tucked under her chin, the warmth setting her sail free. And as the images of this blurry feathered woman would construct behind her eye’s, as she’d hold out her hand to pull Hermione fully into sleep- her mother would always recite.
“Gold will rust, little bird. Don’t let it.”
November 5 th , 1998, Hour 4
As Hermione stares out the window, her eye’s trailing the snow-covered bumps and ridges between the Scottish mountains, she ponders over the memory of her mother. Of her stories.
Stories..
It is often difficult for Hermione to think about her mother. Most day’s the task feels almost unbearable. Like a boulder sitting upon her chest, threatening to split her in two if she so much as tries to picture her mothers face. To recall the sound of her voice.
And yet sometimes- Hermione can’t help it.
As innocent as a breeze blown through valleys, yet as destructive as hurricanes rippling through happy homes, the memories would glide into the forefront of her mind.
And these memories, these storms, how they loved to destroy.
The thoughts would keep Hermione in bed for day’s. Sometimes weeks. She would lay there, as if glued to the sheets, staring at everything and nothing- all at once. Her happiest moments darkened and cracking behind her eye’s. Spoiling into nothing but inky painful dots. Making even the good memories, the best of memories, come to haunt her too.
Hermione had eventually adapted to burying them. Keeping that past version of her life tucked far from reach in her mind so that even on those dim and lonely nights, the one’s where she sometimes struggled to recall anything at all- they would remain at bay.
The good memories. The best of memories.
Her most painful regrets.
But that story..
That one story.
Hermione can’t get it out of her head.
And it had been nothing but a fairy tale her mother had kept to usher a turbulent young daughter to bed on sporadic, energetic nights. Something she may have read within an old children’s book, perhaps a yarn tale, tumbling through generations of their family like an old ring. Or perhaps she had just made it up. Hermione has no idea.
She cannot even remember most of it.
She wishes she could at least remember how it began. To know what glorious deed was completed to achieve such honour in that faraway land. What nobility line tested. What beautiful princess rescued. What a handsome prince honoured. At what cost.
But never had Hermione considered the story to be anything but just that. A story.
Then it had been her ninetieth birthday.
And when Hermione had woken up- she never quite returned.
September 19th, 1998
In a prison of flesh and bone, she had been doused in gasoline. A match licked at every one of her cells as she woke with a scream.
The pain was incorrigible, feeling as if her blood had become a molten thing- trying to burn itself from her skin. Her limbs felt on the verge of corrosion, liquefying into malleable waste. She imagined it was a similar sensation to being strapped onto a torture rack, unable to escape the shackles that encased her ankles and wrists as the executioner began to pull the lever. Began to stretch her hips, knees, and elbows to ungodly angles until they popped and bent and tried to peel from her core like a freshly carved pelt.
Stretch. Stretch. Stretch.
Bend. Bend. Bend.
Hermione could do nothing but cry out. Shake and scream and just- cry.
Time mended, evading her as she managed to slip from her sweat-soaked sheets, crawling on the ground like a contortionist that had been twisted in one too many knots as she pushed to the bathroom.
The bathtub began to fill with water below hyperthermic, and she was not quite sure how. Her wand was nowhere in sight as she hurled herself inside. But all of her concerns fled with the crackle and steam that rolled off her skin in thick streams of smoke that clouded the room in seconds.
And it was suffocating. Like a clog in her throat, the smog invading her lungs.
Hermione plunged her head under the water.
And she stayed there. Lavishing in the reprieve the water blessed her blistering skin. The release of its wintry touch memorising. So much that Hermione wanted to stay there. Forever. And so she did. Hermione rested at the base of the bath so long she began to count as a means to pass the time. The seconds within minutes. The minutes within hours. The hours within a week.
It had only been a strange, long lost fear of her inability to feel any lack of oxygen that had busted her from the surface, gasping in confused, unnecessary breaths.
When she opened her eye’s, the water around her had been transformed. Not water at all, but something travelled from one of those faraway lands.
The bath was encapsulated in rays of light. A galaxy of tiny little strobes that felt as though they were an extension of sunlight itself. The vibrancy like staring straight into an Estrella cave. Hermione ran her hands through the curls of it, starstruck by its sheen and velocity. The lucidity of its touch felt spellbinding. Entrancing as it rolled around her like gentle kisses of sand. But it lingered on her as she lifted her hand from the water, falling between her fingertips like the most delicate strings.
And as she pulled herself from the gleaming water, as the vibrant light flowed behind her- Hermione felt it.
Something.
Without even having to see it. She knew. Deep down- she had always known.
On wobbly feet, Hermione pulled herself from the tub, slipping in puddles pooling beneath her feet, gold strings slipping through wet footprints. The material tangled around her ankles, slithered against her arms and back, hanging thickly against her spine like overcut drapes.
She planted her fingers around the porcelain basin, blinking slowly at the slender hands that mimicked her movements. Two delicate hands with thin, unmarked fingers. Long clear nails sharpened into almond points, smooth ivory skin without flaw. A pair of hands- that were obnoxiously not her own.
But as Hermione raised her head, peering at the person reflected in the still silver mirror, she quickly realised that none of it was.
A tall girl with slim shoulders that led to willowy- bird-like arms stared at her. Her waist a trimmed wasp-like shape with a svelte indent of creamy skin beneath her ribcage. Her chest was full, a contrast to the frailty of the rest of her body. And yet her features were sharp, delicately smoothed out into avian high arches with skin that held no markings, not a single blemish or scar. No tracks that mapped out childhood, no burdensome stretches of adolescence. No inkling of chips or cracks or ruined forearms.
As if nothing had ever happened at all. As if this woman were new. Reborn.
The women’s eyes were piercing, sheathed behind piles and piles of flowing – glowing –golden hair. But it was her eye’s, shining more vibrantly than anything she had ever seen that captured her attention. The most striking ring of blue flames encompassed her pupils in a way that seemed seconds from slicing into the glass. Raining shards into the room.
And that woman- she was not a creature of earth.
She couldn’t be.
She was a celestial thing, a creation that could have been formulated from shards of the Hope Diamond itself. A being that could have been indented into priceless canvases, carved into unstained marble and locked behind bars in mausoleums. And everything about her was too much. Too bright. Too imposing.
And it was not..it was not Hermione Granger.
None of the women that stood before her was Hermione Granger.
But as she stood, staring and watching, gaze lingering on the ethereality of it all. Of this being that seemed angelically wrought. Beautifully strange. Pieces began to fit in her mind, cataloguing places where she had known her from. Or- a version of her at least.
As though a stopper had come loose in Hermione’s mind, a memory of a woman -so similar- flashed in her mind like cracking coals. Because Hermione had seen this person. Once. Maybe twice. She had visited her family, stopping by after opening a gift from her father. Occasionally, she would slip in while greeting him at the door. And this woman, Hermione was sure, was pictured in the background of stilled wedding photographs somewhere. Weaved between honeymoons and celebrations. A woman Hermione had no recollection of ever seeing until that very moment, until dazedly blinking at the reflection of her.
Her mother.
Hermione Jean Granger had fainted.
It was one thing she had been grateful for.
To have had a reason to miss her nineteenth birthday.
November 5th, 1998, Hour 1.
A story.
A fable.
A fairy tale.
A load of fucking bullocks.