Disclaimer: I do not own Once Upon a Time or Harry Potter. All the copyrights associated with both fandoms belong to their rightful owner. Only the ideas contained within this story are the property of the author. No profit is being earned by the writer of this story.
AN: I'm not sure about this. This layout is something I've never tried to do before and am not sure about the outcome. I'll probably come back and rewrite it again sometime, but for now I gift it to you. On another note, I'm wondering about expanding on this idea, I'll probably wait until the new season starts but I think a longer crossover in this vein could be fun.
Wendy Darling is ten years old and already restless - tired of the life she's been given. She's forced to turn to stories and fantasy to sate her need for excitement.
She is ten years old and had made her first real friend: a boy she caught stealing from them in their drawing room. She's naïve and innocent and enchanted with the mysterious shadow that comes to their window at night promising excitement and adventure. Magic is wonderful and gives her something she could never find on her own.
But it also gave her fear and horror in the cries of the Lost Boys, in the fact that her brothers would join them. Bae saved her brothers - saved her entire family. But she lost her best friend.
She's ten years old and starting to learn that magic is never what it seems.
She's eleven now and learning that magic was always a part of her life - a part of her. After the letter came she spent days in her room, crying. She had magic and was to be sent away to school.
She's eleven years old and already she's learning that the world is not always as black and white as it was in her stories. Magic took away her best friend and ruined his family, but not all magic was bad. Maybe it was the way it was used that determined whether it would destroy or build.
She's eleven and already wise beyond her years.
She's fifteen and magic has become normal, mundane. There's no adventure in such an impossible thing anymore. The restless feeling has come back so she's already looking elsewhere for excitement. This world has nothing new to offer her, nothing challenges her anymore. Perhaps she just needs to look elsewhere.
She seventeen years old and an Unspeakable. Working in the bowels of the Ministry with a new name, she finds a new kind of excitement. She's never really been one for rules and being given the opportunity to bend the laws of magic is a new kind of wonderful. There's terrible risk involved but "that's the point, Mama". It wouldn't be fun otherwise.
She's twenty-five years old and she's finally, finally managed to develop a way to travel between worlds. The restless feeling has been growing increasingly insistent over the years and it's now almost painful. Only the thought of soon, soon, opening a portal and jumping into the unknown makes it bearable.
She tries to tell her doting, loving parents but the knowledge that she most probably will never be able to return causes her to alter their memories instead. It's much less painful for them all this way. She's not a coward.
(She is)
She's twenty five years old and free of all ties to a world that had never been enough. She'll find a world that is and make it her own.
The portal leaves her in the middle of an ocean. Armed with only a wand and her wits, she panics slightly. You can only Apparate if you have somewhere to go to and she knows nothing of this world. For the very first time she is both literally and metaphorically out of her depth.
She's never felt more alive.
She was pulled aboard a ship only minutes after she landed in the water. After laying eyes on the handsome dark-haired, blue eyed Captain, she discovers a very new kind of excitement indeed.
He interrogates her on how she managed to get in the middle of the ocean with no wreak for hundreds of miles and land even further away. She deflected all his questions until he seemed to give up before asking her name.
She thought about it. Wendy Darling was what she had been called all her life. But Wendy Darling was a ten year old girl filled with innocence and naivety. She was a fifteen year old witch already bored with what life had to offer her. She would be Wendy no longer. So she smiled and gave the captain her Department of Mysteries name.
"I'm Hermione. Hermione Granger"
Life on a pirate ship was difficult. The work was gritty and dirty, the food in short supply and hammocks were far more difficult to sleep in than soft, feather beds. She loved every minute of it. She was a girl who was born with a silver spoon in her mouth and everything handed to her on a whim. She never had to work for anything: grades, money, respect. She was born with it all.
Not on the Jolly Roger. Here, she had to fight for anything she wanted, everything she had. If not for her magic her place among the crew would be worthless, with it she was invaluable. She made a point to only use it when she absolutely needed to though, otherwise the crew would never respect her. She mended her clothes with needle and thread, cooked her food over the brazier and cleaned on her hands and knees with a scrubbing brush alongside the rest of the crew. But during storms her magic was the only thing that prevented lives being lost and the ship being damaged. And she was well able to hold her own during fights - with a simple flick of her wrist any threat was easily disposed of.
She made Hook teach her how to fight with a sword.
The months she spent on the ship turned into years as time blurred together. She was more at home on the ship than she had ever felt back in her family's townhouse or Hogwarts. More content and at peace with herself than ever before. But it still almost bothers her that she can't quite remember her brother's names.
(Almost)
She spends her days with the crew and her nights in the captain's bed. She can wield a sword as though she's been doing it for centuries.
(She has)
She knows how to handle a crew and man a ship and make love to a pirate. All things she would never have had the chance to think about doing in her own world.
She's content, but content has never been enough for her and after two centuries even life on the Jolly Roger can become routine. But she would not say goodbye to pirate life and the sea was where she belonged. She just wanted a change.
She went to Hook with her plea and together they devised a plan.
Within a year they'd taken the Queen Anne's Revenge and Hermione herself had taken Blackbeard's head.
Life as a pirate captain was different to life as the trusted confident of a pirate captain and crew member. She was harsh in the beginning and enforced her rules and code with a strict and decisive arm. Slowly the crew grew accustomed to her rule and learned to respect her - not only as their captain - but as a person in her own right.
She remained very good friends with Hook and his crew and they often sailed together over the years. The duo of the Jolly Roger and the Revenge were a fearsome sight and inspired great terror in passing merchant ships. Her status as a female pirate captain and the name of the ship she had taken coupled together started the stories of The Pirate Queen.