Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter or anything afiliated
Sunflowers in the Entryway
Prologue
Perhaps their home was too formal but their family had grown comfortable with granite edges, white walls, and breakable glass. If you looked close enough there was comfort in it, there was use. And there were touches of each of them there too; sunflowers in the front entryway from mum; old patterned ties left about from dad; and from the two girls, hints of magic that none of their neighbors would understand.
The family was proud of their magic despite their quietness about it. The parents, two dentists, had never imagined anything beyond their world of mundane teeth brushing and plaque scraping. The most interesting stories they had to share at the dinner table after work were if a particularly ornery patient decided to bite at their fingers. That is, until the owl came.
The Granger family had never seen an owl carrying a letter before, though the site of it caused their father to launch into a story of carrier pigeons and how they were once used as messengers. Even more surprising was that the owl had landed on their windowsill and seemingly sat waiting as patiently as an owl could for the window to be answered. Penelope had always been the most daring without cause and so she was the one to leap forward from the breakfast table, toast and jam covered butter knife in hand, and throw open the window as naturally as one would greet a house guest at their door.
After that, breakfast had become a rather confusing affair and while the family laughed off the strange parchment letter as nonsense none of the four could deny that they silently, and without a word to any of the others, recalled strange things happening around the eldest Granger girl, Penelope. But magic wasn't real was it? The Granger's supposed not, they believed, at the point, only in mere coincidences and tricks of the mind.
Of course, they discovered just how wrong they were when hours later a man was standing breathlessly upon their door step. He was strange, perhaps almost stranger even than the owl with the letter. He stood with a curly top of blonde hair and a shock of a neon green—bathrobe? —tied over a dark purple dress with all sorts of obnoxious frills lining its edges. "So sorry!" the man wheezed through his breaths, "meant to get here before that damned owl. I'm sure you all are quite confused, yes?"
The man came from the Department of Education, which was discovered to be, only half surprisingly at this point, a subheading within the Ministry of Magic. At the time, the Granger girls had been enthralled with the idea of an entire Magical Government running right out of sight in their London. They know now, after discoveries and newspaper clipping after newspaper clipping that this Ministry was not one to be delighted with. Though despite the ugly truth of hindsight, this man and the magical government he worked for introduced them to a world they had not yet known to been theirs.
Even so, the family was confused even after all of the man's explaining. For days after Penelope Granger awoke each morning to the fright that the entire event had been a dream. But Hermione would always bound across the hall from her bedroom each time she rose to whisper quietly into her sister's bead-head, "I can't believe you're a witch Penelope. Do you think I could be one too?"
And to that Penelope always said: "Of course you are Hermione. You're as magical as I am and twice as brilliant. There's no way that you aren't." Their time before breakfast was always then spent discussing the odd things that they could do but never once knew the reasons for until then.