Spending Time With the Grangers
Mr. and Mrs. Granger wondered what their daughter wanted to talk to them about. She had told them to meet her in the kitchen of their flat and that she had something to talk to them about. For her part, Hermione was in her room and had kept her parents waiting for quite some time. But they would wait, they always did for their daughter.
Being an only child, Hermione had always been the center of attention for her parents. The two of them working as fairly successful dentists could have sent her to any number of schools, many of which would have been more than willing to take her. But then she had always been a peculiar child.
It wasn't that she was bad or strange, she was just so voracious. She needed to devour every ounce of knowledge that passed within her range. By the time she was seven, it was like talking to a miniature adult. This meant that there were problems, as there always is for people who know far too much than is good for them. She had a hard time fitting in with the other children that she went to school with. Many of them thought that she was a teacher's pet, that she sucked up and ostracized her for her trouble. The problematic part of that was that in the pound that is a classroom, she was just the most attractive kitten out of all the litter. She didn't have to suck up to the teachers, the teachers adored her no matter what. She was the type of child that teachers wanted to teach all their lives and for the most part, because she only spent a brief tenure in each of their classrooms, they wanted to make the most of their time with the young prodigy.
But if there was something wrong with their daughter, she never showed it. She was always a happy child, despite the fact that her birthday parties were rarely attended and she spent most of her time with her books. It was only in a few brief moments of weakness that they could ever perceive any kind of sadness within their daughter's eyes.
Of course, one couldn't discount the other strange occurences that took place around her, the day a dog was nearly run over after she had screamed, Mrs. Granger remembered the dog blurring while her child yelled. Then the dog was on the other side of the road and Hermione was smiling. Mrs. Granger, being a responsible and reasonable woman, thought no more of it and didn't mention it to her father. They were atheists as well so the idea that it was the hand of God didn't hold much water with her either.
It was only upon the receipt of the letter from Hogwarts that Mrs. Granger realized the importance of that incident.
In the fall of 1991, she sent her daughter off to Hogwarts on that bright red train. Her feelings could only be described as mixed because of the idea that her daughter was a "witch" something that for her entire life had been an idea that went up in the flames of history's actions. Hermione though had been so excited about the idea, the challenge of it, the idea that there was an entire world of knowledge that was now open to her. She wanted to go so badly.
Her mother hoped that she would do well.
Her father hoped that she would finally make some friends.
And she did both, from what she had told them, she had become something of a hero and they had accepted the knowledge with the heart pounding experiences of parents everywhere whose children have decided to take up arms in defense of their homeland. She told them about the poison, about the dark wizard and the three headed dog. Breathlessly she had recited the whole tale. Then she told them about her two best friends, Ron and Harry. They were happy and worried. They were also overwhelmingly proud of their daughter. But worried, oh, so worried, every ounce of them worried for their daughter and in some way hated Harry Potter for the danger he got her in. They were good parents for this reason.
After that, they began to go with her to Diagon Alley and saw the wizarding world first hand. It was both wonderful and terrifying, the idea of those spells that could kill you without leaving a mark. The owls, trolls, ogres, dragons, oh my.
Hermione went on through another five years, she told them about all of it. The giant snake that nearly killed her. The werewolf and serial killer. The return of the dark wizard. The battle at the ministry of magic and finally the death of the greatest wizard of all time, Dumbledore. The name was almost meaningless to the Grangers except for the fact that he was the only thing that that dark wizard feared. And now he was gone. And their daughter was part of his most wanted and murdered list. The world was standing open for this dark wizard's plundering.
They sipped their tea and Hermione emerged from her room. Like all parents, they silently looked their daughter over to see what kind of state her mind was in. They saw her puffy red eyes and the salt trails running down her cheeks. Crookshanks was in her arms. She placed him on the table and he sat patiently waiting for her to speak.
"Mum, dad, I need to cast a spell," she said.
"Hermione, why're you upset?" Mrs. Granger asked.
"Because I don't know if I'm going to see you again."
"What?" her father said.
"Please, let me explain," Hermione said and put her hand on her chest. "Harry and Ron and I aren't going back to school. We're setting out to defeat the dark wizard once and for all. I don't know if I'm going to survive or not. So, I want you guys to be safe. I'm going to have you guys leave England. You're going to go somewhere, where I don't think there's any chance of you being in danger."
"What spell are you going to cast?"
"I'm going to cast a memory spell on you. See, I can't let anyone find you and if they do, I can't let there be a flicker of recollection on your faces or else they'll know. So..."
"Wait, Hermione, no!" her mother started to say.
"Obliviate!" Hermione said and the light washed over their three faces.
Her parents stared at her blankly while Crookshanks reared back and hissed at the stranger. She knew she had some time to give them their new identities. But she looked at the upside to all of it.
"Now, if I die, you won't know that you had a daughter, it won't hurt," Hermione sniffled. "That's good."