The Forgotten Summer
Hermione sat on her trunk in a deserted corner of Platform 9 ¾, nervously crossing and uncrossing her ankles. She tried to pretend she wasn't carrying twenty-three books stolen from her dead headmaster's office. Of these hypothetical books, none of them were deemed to contain "dangerous, illicit, and potentially Dark information" by the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, carrying heavy fines for possession alone.
Especially not the ones hidden under the lining in the very bottom of the trunk.
Harry and Ron had gone through the barrier already, and the platform was emptying much more quickly than usual. Nervous parents bustled their children away with skittery glances at anyone they didn't recognize. A few grim-faced Aurors paced back and forth along the edge of the tracks; she, acutely aware of her illegal cargo, avoided eye contact.
Hermione checked her watch again. Six o'clock, on the dot-it was time to go. She picked up Crookshanks' basket in one hand and took one handle of her trunk with the other. Shutting her eyes, she turned on her heel, hanging on tightly as oppressive darkness squeezed in from all sides for a few long moments.
Crunch.
"Goodness!" came her mother's voice.
Hermione opened her eyes and immediately wished she hadn't as the room spun. Crookshanks yowled loudly in his basket, and splinters of wood and broken glass covered the floor. Hermione looked down and found that she had Apparated her trunk right through the coffee table, which was three feet to the left of where it had been at Christmas. "Mum, you can't just rearrange the furniture and not tell me!" she cried. Tears of frustration beaded in her eyes as the exhaustion and stress from the past few days finally caught up to her. "I told you we had to be careful back when I passed my Apparition test! It's dangerous! That could have been me going through the table!"
Her mother's eyes widened. "Are you all right?"
Hermione nodded as she wiped her cheeks dry.
"I'm sorry, dear. At Christmas we'll pick you up from the station, there's no need for tears." Mrs. Granger stepped tentatively through the debris of table and took the cat carrier from Hermione, studying her face with concern. "Is anything else wrong, Hermione?"
The lying was Hermione's least favorite part of returning home each year. She'd realized that in her first year, after her parents' furious letter to the school about the 'troll incident.' If she wanted to go back to Hogwarts, it was best to keep her parents in the dark about certain things. Everything's fine at school, Mum. Definitely no dragons or soul-sucking monsters or students dying. No evil wizards that want to subjugate and murder everyone I care about, either. But her parents knew Dumbledore, or they'd had him for tea, anyway, one life-changing afternoon six years ago. She owed it to them to tell them.
"Mum… Professor Dumbledore passed away just a few days ago. The funeral was yesterday."
Her mother's face fell. "You should have written us! I'm so sorry, he seemed like a nice man when he came to visit-but he was getting on in years. I'm sure he lived a full life." Hermione allowed herself to be gathered into a tight embrace.
"Yes, I suppose he did," she said, the familiar guilt of deception curling in her stomach, and suddenly Hermione wanted to be left alone. "I'll go unpack," she said, gently disengaging herself and retrieving her wand. "Locomotor trunk!" It floated up the stairs. "And sorry about the table. Reparo!"
The shards flew together as she turned away from her mother, wishing her other problems were just as easy to fix.
If she had the time, Hermione reflected, she'd look upon the teetering stack of books on top of her already-overstuffed bookshelf with excitement, but right now there was too much material and too little time. Stealth Protection for your Muggle Neighbors had appeared promising at first but had proved to be more anecdotal than instructional. A couple of bookmarks stuck out from Practical Home Security for Mixed-Magic Households, but she doubted that the low-grade security spells would hold up against a Death Eater attack. She considered a Fidelius charm to hide her parents entirely, but it would effectively put them under house arrest and, she reflected with a pang of sadness, wasn't foolproof. In desperation, she peeked into an ancient copy of Bloode Magick, which was covered in brownish stains she tried not to think too much about and whose author seemed to take great pleasure in describing the gory consequences of an improperly performed blood ward ritual. The pile of discarded books grew larger and larger, Crookshanks glaring at her from the top of it-he still hadn't forgiven her for the trip from King's Cross.
And then all that was left was the one option that had echoed around her head as she lay awake the night after the funeral, the option that she had persistently pushed away as she searched for wards and notice-me-not spells and the rest. My parents would be safer if I wasn't a part of their lives. She pulled The Auror's Guide to Memory Modification and Removal from the bottom of the trunk and began to read.
"How was your day, dear?" asked her mother as they sat down to dinner. That morning, Hermione had nearly blown out the living room windows (not to mention her eardrums) while practicing defensive spells that day while they were at work.
"Fine," Hermione said, forcing a smile as she picked at her beans.
"Just another quiet day in, reading, I expect?" Her father passed the bread basket.
"Mmhm." Please, don't ask any more questions.
Her parents exchanged a look.
"Hermione, we love that you're so invested in your studies, but your mother and I have talked and we think it would be healthier if you spent more time outside the house, having fun with people your own age."
"Dad…" Hermione sighed. "I live with other teenagers all year at school. Why?"
"You've been so serious the whole time you've been home, and you haven't talked about your friends a bit! Is something wrong?"
Merlin, what isn't wrong? I'm dropping out of school and anything else I tell you will only make things worse.
"No! Everything's fine!" she said, louder than she intended. "Really," she added, more softly, as her mother's eyes widened with concern.
"We're only trying to help. We want you to be happy." Her mother reached out and squeezed Hermione's hand.
Hermione dried dishes with a stream of hot air from her wand as her father washed and her mother put away the leftovers. There was a sharp tapping on the kitchen window, and a large pair of amber eyes peered through the glass.
"I'll never get used to that," her father said conversationally as Hermione pushed up the sill. The screech owl outside hopped through, sticking out its leg so that she could remove the envelope attached to it, then launching itself back out into the night.
The envelope was blank on both sides. Hermione prodded it warily with her wand. It certainly wasn't from Hogwarts, Viktor hadn't written in ages, and Harry and Ron usually at least scrawled her name before sending Hedwig and Pigwidgeon on their way.
"Don't wizards use addresses?" asked her mother, peering over her shoulder. "Seems a bit rude, just sending a blank envelope like that."
"Makes it easy to track!" barked a familiar male voice. Mr. Granger jumped nastily and nearly broke a plate. "What the—"
"CONSTANT VIGILANCE!" the letter shouted gruffly. Hermione's stomach sank: Alastor Moody was rarely a bearer of good news, and her parents would definitely have questions about this peculiar message.
"It's—it's probably from the Weasley twins—you remember them, always pulling pranks—I better go, um, take care of it—before it, you know, does something-?" Hermione was babbling; she knew was a terrible liar when put on the spot. What if they ask to read it?
Mrs. Granger looked surprisingly calm, given the circumstances. "All right, you go take care of that and we'll finish up the dishes." Her eyes followed curiously as Hermione fled the kitchen.
"Will you shut up?" Hermione hissed at the parchment as she sprinted up the stairs to her bedroom.
"No! This is for identification purposes, it's absolutely vital," barked the letter.
"You sent it to my house!"
Hermione could practically see Moody shaking his head in disgust. "And that worked out just perfect three years ago, dinnit? All the mail sent to MY house? The Ministry's snatching owls left and right these days, I thought you were brighter than that…"
"Can I please just read the letter? What's happened?"
"Identification first! Where were you on the night of October the 31st, 1991?"
"Nearly getting clubbed to death by a troll," Hermione sighed, and the envelope vanished in a puff of smoke, leaving the folded parchment inside.
Dear Hermione,
We are delighted to invite you to attend the wedding of William Arthur Weasley and Fleur Isabelle Delacour on August 1, 1997 at the Burrow, Ottery-Saint-Catchpole.
Love, Molly
Here, the squat, tidy cursive became jagged and spiky:
Come on the 26th—we need your help retrieving Potter. More details when you arrive, hope you don't mind flying. –Moody
At least there was no terrible news (though flying very nearly qualified); the wedding would be pleasant, and she'd get to see Harry and Ron even earlier than she expected—how many days was that? She ticked off the days on her fingers. Two weeks.
Abruptly, Hermione sat down her bed. Two weeks from now, two weeks to erase herself entirely and invent a new life for her parents. It was all happening so fast. Loneliness and desperation swelled, and she was so alone, with no one to point out that maybe all of this was a terrible mistake and that there was perhaps some other way…
Hermione crushed the letter into a ball and tossed it across the room. She was hardly surprised as it flared brightly and crumbled to ash.
Hermione thought the business of disappearing was like handling a Blast-Ended Skrewt: the process was off-putting, and she had to do it very carefully, or sooner or later the whole thing would blow up on her. Each day, she waited until her parents left for the office and Apparated out into the city. Even with magic, closing her bank account was a hassle, and changing the names on her parents' accounts and the mortgage required hexing two clerks and a bank executive. After that, the tax office and the insurance agency were surprisingly easy, though she felt pangs of guilt for the secretaries that she'd left glassy-eyed and confused with a whispered "Obliviate." The milkman was relatively easy, but it had taken almost an entire morning to catch her mother's hairdresser on a smoke break. It became almost routine: find everyone who had repeated contact with her parents, modify their memories, and erase everything pertaining to herself.
Hermione gripped her wand tightly to keep it from shaking.
This is it, I have to do it NOW. It was late on the twenty-fifth, barely eight hours before she had to leave; if she hesitated any longer she'd be late, or worse, have to rush the enchantment.
She slipped down the stairs, bare feet landing softly in the carpet. Quiet voices came from the living room. She almost lost her resolve at the sound of her father's laugh.
She wouldn't be able to do it if she saw their faces…
Hermione had reached the doorway and could see her parents sitting close on the sofa, heads together as they worked on the crossword in the warm lamplight. She raised her wand.
"Stupefy."
They slumped one after the other, and Hermione got to work, her heart breaking as she erased younger versions of herself from the portraits on the walls.
There were more photo albums than she'd bargained for and it didn't get any easier to flip through page after page, tapping each one and seeing birthday parties and Christmases disappear. Next came the legal documents, as she Vanished everything with her name on it and changed her parents' names on the rest. Then came the odds and ends: the receipts in her mother's finance folder, the monogrammed towels, their business cards (she Vanished them; too much trouble) and diplomas. She tried to salvage her mother's diary, but after seeing how much blank space was left when she removed mentions of herself, she gave up and Vanished that too. Moving methodically, she cleared out all her storybooks, the stuffed animals and dolls from her childhood, removed the lumpy clay pot she'd made when she was seven from the mantel. She made her bed, tossed all the books and clothes she wanted to keep into her trunk, and looked around her room.
It looked like the guest bedroom: pleasant, but impersonal.
She levitated the trunk downstairs and carried Crookshanks' basket to the living room, where her parents still lay slouched against one another.
Hermione popped open her mother's locket, tapped it, and the picture of the pigtailed girl inside faded.
"Confundo." A grey mist flowed from her wand tip and settled on her parents' faces before sinking into their skin.
She glanced at the Auror's Guide, scanning the pages she'd pored over for days.
The target of the spell will enter a temporary state of strong suggestibility during which the spellcaster's modifications can be implemented. Experienced Memory Modifiers may convey he desired changes nonverbally. Aurors in training are strongly recommended to verbally convey the replacement memories in a calm, clear manner. Placing a complete, plausible replacement memory is essential to ensuring total reversibility of the spell.
"Ennervate." They opened their eyes, looking serene and yet terrifyingly blank.
Hermione swallowed hard and began the speech she had rehearsed for the past week.
"Your names are Wendell and Monica Wilkins. You are dentists, but you are going to quit your jobs so that you can move to Australia, which has been a lifelong dream for both of you." She swallowed hard. "You have no children."
Her mother—Monica, she corrected herself—nodded, but she looked puzzled. "Do I know you?" she asked. "You look familiar."
Hermione nearly cried. "No. No, you don't. I was just leaving, actually," she said as she went to pick up her trunk, casting a quick nonverbal lightening charm on it. "You two should get some sleep, it's quite early in the morning. When you wake up later you will remember this conversation as a dream."
Wendell gave an obedient nod, yawned, and stood up from the sofa. "I'm going to bed, dear," he informed his wife. "Goodbye," he added politely to Hermione.
Monica walked Hermione to the door and even helped with Crookshanks' basket.
"Are you sure we don't know each other?" she asked again. "You look just like someone, but I can't put my finger on it. Ah well." She shook her head. "She was such a pretty girl, too. Pity I can't remember. Have a nice day, now." She smiled kindly, gave a little wave, and shut the front door. The key clicked in the lock, then the stairs creaked as Monica Wilkins went up to bed.
It was quiet, the slightest pink beginning to show on the horizon but the streetlamps still glowing. Hermione picked up the cat carrier and held firmly onto the handle of her trunk, visualizing the clearing next to the Burrow.
The door to the carrier sprang open and Crookshanks shot out toward the street, mewling loudly. Hermione jumped down the steps, reaching to grab him—
A violently purple bus swerved onto the curb from out of thin air, the doors swinging open with a clang. An elderly man leaned out from the driver's seat.
"Welcome to the Knight Bus, emergency transport for the stranded witch or wizard, just stick out your wand arm and we'll take you anywhere you want to go. I'm Ernie, your driver for this morning. Where you headed, miss?" he wheezed.
Crookshanks meowed smugly from a nearby flowerbed.
Hermione rolled her eyes at the cat. "Ottery St Catchpole, please."
"Right away."
7
The bus rattled into motion as Hermione settled herself one of the rickety chairs, the cat carrier on her lap. She peered out the window at her house-the house- shrinking away down the street, and whispered, "I'll come back."