Author's Note: This is part of my (as of yet unpublished) Chain Reactions Verse. This fic also includes a cameo by Rodney McKay, of Stargate Atlantis, and a reference to Victoria Argent of Teen Wolf.
George Donovan and his wife Jean separated when their children were infants, and divorced officially when the twins were three. They agreed to keep in contact for the sake of their children, but as time passed what little semblance they managed to keep deteriorated.
By the time the twins were five, they'd been separated for long enough that the twins weren't aware they were missing a sibling at all.
-x-
George remarried first, and settled into the states with a beautiful woman who immediately fell in love with little four year old Zane.
-x-
Jane, too, remarried. Frank Granger was a fellow dentist, and he loved Hermione well enough to officially adopt her when she was seven.
-x-
George Donovan died of a heart attack when Zane was seven, and Zane's stepmother and two younger half siblings moved into a little house in Oregon where his stepmother later married again.
Zane liked his siblings well enough, but they never truly bonded. By the time Zane's youngest sibling was born, he was thirteen and nearly done with high school.
He was smarter than the lot of them, and his stepfather didn't much care for his attitude. Oh, his mother loved him dearly, and he loved her. But they both knew she wasn't his, and the fact that he wasn't did nothing but harm his relationship with his rich step-father.
-x-
Hermione loved her parents dearly, and her decision to wipe the slate clean and give them a fighting chance was one not made lightly.
They never recovered the memories she stripped from them, and Hermione never knew of her twin.
-x-
But Zane learned of her.
Jo had told him, ironically enough. She seemed honestly baffled that he hadn't known he had a twin sister when she mentioned it, because in her timeline they had known of each other. They hadn't been close, she said, but they were getting there.
Years later, after they've settled into married life together in Eureka, Zane searches her out. His stepmother helps-she sends him the paperwork she'd found in his father's old files brought over from their safe deposit box in New York and stuffed in her new one after the long ago move.
He finds her name, Hermione Jean Donovan. He finds her name and his mother's name and a picture of them as tiny fat cheeked babies playing together.
And he wants. He wants to know her, wants to know if she's that little missing piece in his chest that his half and step-siblings never managed to fill.
So he searches. He searches and a few months later he finally finds the right one.
Her official adoption record, Hermione Jean Donovan became Hermione Jean Granger on December 17th, 1986, daughter of Jane Donovan Granger and Frank Granger.
He follows her through her school records. She's bright-perhaps as much as he is. And then she turns eleven, and her record starts to slide.
And then she turns twelve, and there isn't any.
There's a notice in a paper dated the summer of 1998. Jane and Frank Granger, missing for over a year, pronounced dead.
Survived by their daughter, Hermione.
He finds records of her receiving her masters in astrophysics and mechanical engineering a few years after that, but nothing else.
It feels like a dead end.
Until he gets a notice in his email a few weeks later, after a few creative hacks to keep an eye on her identity.
Hermione Granger booked a flight into the United States.
Zane follows the dots of her tickets to an airport in San Francisco, and he doesn't see any academia in the nearby that would lead her there.
-x-
He doesn't make it to San Francisco in time to wait for her plane because he lives in Eureka and Eureka is special.
He hacks into the car rental company though, and finds the GPS data in her car parked in a parking lot in Beacon Hills, California.
He finds a funeral notice, the only thing that seems a remote possibility as a reason for her to be there.
Victoria Argent. Zane doesn't recognize the name.
During the drive to Beacon Hills, Zane researches. Zane researches and Jo drives and the baby sleeps in the backseat.
Victoria Argent was one of three sisters born to Harriet and Meredith Ingram and she lived longer than all of them. The oldest was Perdita, who married a man named Royson McKay and had two children, Meredith and Jeannie in the decade before Zane was born. The middle child was Jean, who married George Donovan and divorced him four years later.
Victoria was the youngest child, who waited the longest to have children, who was survived by a husband a few years younger and a daughter who was only seventeen.
His aunt.
They get into Beacon Hills too late for the funeral, but they get a room in the same hotel as his sister. They're lucky, because the hotel is packed and every person they see seems to be in shades of gray and black and he thinks that maybe they'd gone to the funeral themselves.
That maybe they'd known his family, maybe they were his family.
Somehow.
He doesn't try to find her, not then.
-x-
Jo falls asleep after dinner, and when the baby starts to scream, he bundles her up and takes her outside where she's less likely to wake her mother or anyone their room shares a wall with.
He's standing there in the parking lot, bouncing his little girl on his hip when he meets his sister for the first time in more than thirty years.
She's laughing when she climbs out of the passenger seat of someone's car, a hint of a blush across her cheeks. Her hair, pulled back into a messy ponytail, is a few shades lighter than his.
She looks so much like their father that it almost hurts.
"Oh, great, a baby-" the man who had been driving says under his breath, and Zane wonders who he is.
"She's beautiful," his sister says, and there's a sparkle in her eyes that Zane recognizes.
"I've been looking for you," Zane blurts out, when all he means to say is his daughter's name.
"What?" His sister's eyes narrow and there's something dark in that stare.
Her companion steps a little in front of her, protectively.
"Are you stalking my cousin? Creep-" the man starts.
"No! I'm sorry, I didn't... My wife and I, we were looking for my sister." Zane puts a hand in his pocket, reaching for the car keys. He doesn't miss the strange way his sister's hand twitches, or the way his apparent cousin reaches for a holster that's not there.
He unlocks the car beside him, and something in the man's shoulders relaxes.
His sister stays tense and wary.
He pulls out the folder he'd left in the passenger seat. Most of his research was still on his tablet, but the basics he had printed when he first started searching are inside the folder.
He hands it over, watches as she pages through the copies of their birth certificates-copies of her original one, of his-and the other various details of her life.
And then the basic details of his.
"My mum never said..."
"To be far, my dad never did either. I found out about a year ago. You've been hard to find."
"Tests. We'll need to prove... It's not that I don't..."
"I understand. We can set up an appointment at the local hospital," he tells her, even though something in him burns to just bring her to Eureka where Blake can run the tests herself.
"What's your name, anyway?" His cousin asks.
"Zane Donovan, and this is my daughter Sera."
"From Eureka?" his cousin asks, and Zane freezes.
"That's classified," Jo interrupts and Zane is glad for her timing. She picks Sera up from his arms and settles her into her car seat.
"What's going on, Jojo?"
"Sheriff Carter called. We need to get back home, pronto. There's a helo waiting for us at the airstrip just outside of town."
"Seriously?" Zane groans before looking back at his sister and their cousin.
"I have full clearance for Eureka-" his cousin starts, but his sister interrupts him.
"But I don't, Rodney. Here's my number," Hermione says, handing over a glossy business card, "why don't you call me when you get a chance and we'll get those tests done close to where you are. I'm... on sabbatical... from work, so I'm available for a while."
"Thanks... and, Hermione?" Zane says, with a little smile, "it's nice to finally meet you."
"You too, Zane." She says softly.
"I'm going to pack your bag back up. Why don't you stay with them a few more minutes, Zane?" Jo says. He nods gratefully at her.
"So, who are you?" He asks the other man.
"Dr. Rodney McKay-"
"Awesome, I read your paper on..."
-x-
Sera cries most of the ride back home, and Zane doesn't blame her.
He calls Hermione a few days later, after they're given the all clear from the outside contact blackout. Jo is tied up in meetings and phone calls herself.
The entire city has been read into the Stargate Program after the incident that recalled them home, and Zane feigns ignorance about having already known some of the details via creative hacking and too many bored nights.
He also gets official permission to read reports written by the science staff. When he finds Dr. Rodney McKay written on the top of one of them, he grins.
"Hello?"
"Hermione? This is Zane..."
-x-
They use the hospital a few towns away from Eureka, though Blake does the tests herself. Hermione gets a room in a hotel in a town a little closer, and they wait.
Hermione signs an NDA, and Zane brings her into Eureka three days later for the results.
"It's a match."
-x-
"Do you believe in destiny, Zane?" Hermione asks later that night, curled up on his couch with a glass of wine in her hand.
"Destiny? Hah. I don't know..." He says, thinking about Jo, about alternate timelines, about two rings and a first kiss that didn't feel like a first kiss, "Maybe."
"There's... a quirk. In my DNA, I suppose. Should be in yours too. Maybe... Maybe it is, and you never found out."
He doesn't know what she's talking about, but her eyes are somewhere else. Somewhere far off.
"What do you mean?"
"Do you believe in magic? In something more than human?"
He thinks about the Stargate program, about her first question, about the look in her eyes.
"Magic is science that hasn't-"
"Been explained yet. I've heard that too, funnily enough. It's just..." She fidgets a little, sets her glass down on the coffee table.
"Just what?"
"Please don't freak out," she answers, with a hesitant lift of her lips.
Hermione slides a stick out of her sleeve, a long polished piece of wood embossed with vines. She bites her lip, waves the stick around, and then three butter yellow canaries are suddenly flying through the air of his living room.
"Holy shit."
-x-
She tells him about growing up with their mother and stepfather, about feeling so alone as a child, about going to Hogwarts.
She shows him spells, talks about the conservation of magic and how there had to be balance, talks about her thirst for knowledge.
And then Hermione talks about how it wasn't all happy. She pulls the sleeve of her shirt up and shows him the raised letters scarred across the skin of her arm, tells him about war.
She tells him about the little house in Australia where their mother lives, completely and totally unable to recall a thing about them.
"After every visit, they both forget me entirely. I brought in experts, but... there's nothing anyone can do. It's essentially advanced brain damage."
-x-
At the end of the week, Hermione leaves. She hugs them both before she does, kisses Sera's forehead.
"We'll stay in touch, I promise," she says when she's walking out the door.
"You better," Zane says with a grin. She nods with a matching grin of her own.
-x-
And she does.