Turnabout isn't always fair Play
Part 2 of the Not a Mudblood Series
A/N: My muse is simple girl. All she likes are plot bunnies and reviews. So be kind to Maggie and feed her review cookies please. Big thanks to my beta Lbandoly for her hard work.
No copyright infringement intended. All characters are the property of JKR, Scholastic, and any number of other companies with more money than I've ever dreamed of seeing. I didn't make any money off of this, so please don't sue.
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She swiped the tears from her face with the back of her hands. Twenty-one years, countless near death experiences, hundreds of hours spent studying, two best friends lost to a war, and one lie that would ultimately change her more than anything else in her life had. Hermione hung her head and watched the ground as she walked aimlessly through Hogsmeade village.
Everything she trusted in ripped from her. Her very soul felt like it was broken, lying in millions of pieces like a shattered mirror on the dressing room floor. Her heart lay next to it, broken and bleeding; bleeding blood that had always been hers but that she wasn't at all familiar with.
She had grown up the odd but studious one. Then one fateful day she had become the studious witch in knee-high socks and a wool skirt going to that hidden school so far away from her dear parents.
Parents that weren't even hers... It just seemed so wrong, so bloody wrong. How could they not be hers? Her first memory was bouncing on her father's knee pretending to "ride the horse". She had her mother's eyes and her father's impossible brown hair. How? How could they not be her family, her blood?
HOW?
Why now, after all those years of tearful letters home about "mudblood" insults. Why didn't they tell her then? She would have understood. Really she would. Harry had been an orphan; she could have dealt with the same fate. So why, why had they not just told her the truth then? Why had they waited till the war was past, till she had grown up and begun a life of her own to admit their deception?
Why in sodding Hades did they pick now to tell her that she was not their child? Her blood was no more mud than Draco's or Pansy's. No, they knew who and what she was all along. The misfit daughter of dead Deatheaters with blood so pure she should have been sorted into Slytherin for that alone.
They had known… They had knows she was a witch from the moment they took her in, but they never once bothered to tell her that she wasn't their child and that she wasn't the "little stuck-up mudblood" she was always called.
So where did that leave her now? Did it really matter that they had lied? The past couldn't be changed now. It was simply too far in the past. No time turner could repair the damage of years of insults and slurs.
But now, did the difference in her really mean anything. Pureblood verses Mudblood, witch verses muggle. Did it honestly matter now?
She couldn't answer that question. She knew she would be looked at differently by a certain group if they knew who she really was. But would the people that she had grown to love first as friends and later as a family of sorts would they look at her differently? Would they suddenly shun her for her parents she never knew? For a future that never could come to fruition? Would they shun her because in another life she may well have grown into a Deatheater following in her birth parents footsteps or would they pay no mind to the change and continue to love her as they always had?
She just didn't know the answers. She didn't know the answers to anything anymore. The one with all the smarts, the answer for every question had no answers for anything anymore.
One lie had turned her life upside down. Mudblood to pureblood in the space of a moment and she didn't even know if it mattered. A lifetime ago it would have made a world of difference, but now it just left her confused and lost.