Title: Magically Scientific
Summary: Hermione Granger was seven years old when she had her first crisis of faith.
Disclaimer: Oh yeah, JK Rowling decided to give me the rights to Harry Potter as a stocking filler. And then I woke up. I own nothing in this fic, including all the brand names.
A/N: Not entirely sure where this fic came from and it may possibly offend some people but the plot bunny been nipping at my heels for months, with pieces of it been written for months too. Okay so no offence is meant and I hope none is taken. Read on and remember reviwes make the world go round.
Ever since she was a little girl Hermione liked to know things. She was one of those children that questioned everything. Why is the sky blue? How do planes fly? Even mundane tasks didn't escape Hermione's curiosity. How does the freezer stay cold? Why does broccoli taste so bad? What is that creature on the Shreddies box? She barely paused for breath between the questions. In fact, Hermione's quest for knowledge meant that she barely paused for the answers.
After a while even the most loving of parent may have given up trying to keep pace with Hermione's incessant questioning but Hermione was lucky. Her parents envisioned a future in which their daughter was a doctor, lawyer or even a dentist. This meant that they practically encouraged her curiosity, by filling her room with books they hoped she'd learn so much that she might not even need to ask so many questions.
Through these books Hermione found her answers. Newton's gravity explained how her cousin had broken his arm climbing a perfectly safe looking tree and it also, she hastened to believe, explained why she could never do a decent cartwheel. Explanations of the lunar cycle were quickly memorised by an eager Hermione and she scoffed at her play friends' tales of men in the moon and irrefutably proclaimed in front of her year one teacher that there was no way the cow could have achieved enough velocity to jump over the moon. Newton and Galileo just wouldn't have had it. Also, she'd sniffed, there was no way that a dish could run away with a spoon. The spoon would have been far too top heavy to run along.
Science diminished Hermione's rampant questioning somewhat but she was finding herself with a whole new problem. Because at the tender age of seven Hermione Granger was a facing a crisis of faith.
While Hermione's room at that age resembled an explosion of the Dillon's science section there was, amongst the clutter of microscopes and stuffed animals, a very worn copy of the Bible. Hermione, being as Hermione is with a book in her hand, had devoured both testaments with her mother's helping hints within days.
Sunday morning was church time and Hermione knew this as well as she knew that the purple dress was her Church Dress. Always proclaimed with capital letters so that she'd remember to keep it clean. Hermione liked church time. Though normally she avoided spending a lot of time on her appearance she found that she enjoyed the time on Sundays when her mother would treat her like a little girl and she'd find her hair covered in a dozen lilac bows. She even enjoyed the sermons, quietly revelling in the fact that she was a big enough girl to avoid the claustrophobic small room where Sunday school had always been held. Hermione had never been one to find enjoyment in making crepe paper Easter bonnets, she much preferred listening to the Vicar whose droning tones that others found numbing merely made Hermione perch on the edge of her pew in rapt attention.
These sermons kept Hermione occupied for the rest of the weekend, plying her parents with questions and then trudging through the family bible to back up the answer with quotes. There came a point though on a perfectly lovely August Sunday that Hermione found her questions just didn't have any answers that properly satisfied her curiosity.
She'd been thrilled to hear the story of Jesus handing out loaves of bread and fish to the crowd but however hard she tried Hermione couldn't work out he had done it. She annoyed her parents for days, asking the same questions that had annoyed her as she'd watched Mary Poppins. She just couldn't see how you could get so much out of something so small. After sifting through all her science books and her Bible Hermione finally gave up and accepted her mother's explanation of it being a miracle.
So at the age of seven Hermione found that not everything in the world had an answer. She believed in miracles because how else could you explain the Bible? And she absolutely believed in her scientists so they couldn't be at fault. Hermione had found both her faith in science and her faith in religion put to the test. But Hermione in her eminently practical seven year old mind had managed to combine the two and was perfectly happy with the result.
As she got older, Hermione found that there were other things that didn't make sense. Like the time that her teacup sprouted legs and ran off the table. She knew that couldn't be explained by science and it really did seem too minor a thing to deem it a miracle. Though after that event Hermione had conceded that maybe the spoon had run away with the teacup rather than the dish.
Hermione grew up with the same morals and the same thirst for knowledge that she had always had. The times-tables were memorised by Hermione within days, much to the chagrin of her classmates. In fact the only lesson that Hermione didn't excel in was PE and even then she would spend her time mentally calculating how fast the ball would have to be moving to hit Emily Johnson, a girl she had decided she disliked immensely the moment she had seen her perfect blonde head. Because, in Hermione's mind, even if you couldn't succeed at a certain aspect of something you were sure to succeed at the other, and in the case of PE that meant the technical matters concerning the game of rounders were open for discussion.
Though Hermione's faith in science had been tested some years previously it was still her favourite subject. She loved deciphering the chemical equations that her teachers kept insisting were too advanced for her and it was a rare afternoon that Hermione wasn't seen sitting next to the teacher's desk, peppering them with questions.
Science was Hermione's escape, her way of explaining the world and by the age of eleven she had already decided that the perfect career for her was something in science, perhaps biochemistry, a word she had spent a great deal of time memorising how to spell. Hermione's scientific passion may have continued unabated if it wasn't for the letter she received.
Everyone was shocked by the contents of said letter. Hermione's father had declared it all a hoax whilst her mother had just turned an alarming shade of white. Hermione, herself, had done what she always did when faced with something she didn't understand, she immersed herself in it. She had read the letter a few hundred times, performed numerous library searches for her recommended reading lists and had even identified the type of paper that her letter had been made out of.
Eventually even her father, an extraordinarily sensible man, realised that the letter was not a fake. And so it was that Hermione Granger, young science whiz-kid, was packed off to Hogwarts, school of witchcraft and wizardry where she found herself facing anther crisis of faith, this time her faith in science.
Hermione hadn't particularly enjoyed the sensation of running through the solid brick wall onto the platform where the looming train was going to take her away to school. Though really her dislike of it had more to do with the fact that she wasn't perfectly happy disregarding everything she had ever learnt. There really was no way that she could explain in her much revered scientific terms how people were able to walk through solid matter.
When she'd first received her school books Hermione had spent hours comparing them to her favourite battered science books, trying to see if the two subjects could be reconciled. Unfortunately when Hermione saw the spell for levitation she realised that her entire belief system had just been demolished. It wasn't a very pleasant feeling.
Her lessons were all taught in the same eminently practical way that she was used to and she practically revelled in potions, if only for it's resemblance to her science lessons of old. Even when faced with so much evidence of magic Hermione was still loathe to abandon all her scientific knowledge. She tried valiantly to apply it to her lessons and soon Hermione found herself being able to place the two together.
Though levitation was possible it didn't mean the troll wasn't going to fall to the bathroom floor. Just because Buckbeak had wings didn't mean that if she let go she wouldn't crash to the earth. It didn't mean that cycle of the planets didn't exist, even if she was now able to apply philosophical definitions to their movements. Just because she was able to turn into someone else didn't mean that the ingredients didn't have to be exact.
And though electricity didn't work in Hogwarts it didn't mean that sometimes Hermione didn't miss the reassuring glow from a light bulb in a bedside lamp. It didn't mean she didn't miss microwave meals. It didn't mean that she didn't sometimes get annoyed with writing with a quill and parchment and long for a biro and her laptop. All things that science had mastered and the magical world felt strangely bereft without.
And so Hermione Granger recovered from both her crisis' of faith and nestled at the bottom of her trunk, next to her worn copy of the Holy Bible, lay the Dorling Kindersley's Illustrated Encyclopaedia, always there is case there was an event that she couldn't explain with magic.
And as she sat on the grass under the shining sun, the looming castle of Hogwarts in the background and Harry and Ron's inane chatter surrounding her, Hermione Granger found herself idly wondering if she could do a cartwheel. And if the spoon had enjoyed a secure financial lifestyle.