"I don't care about whose DNA has recombined with whose. When everything goes to hell, the people who stand by you without flinching - they are your family." - Jim Butcher, Proven Guilty


Amelia Granger had spent her youth with her head in the clouds - of course, back then she had still been Amelia Hotchner. She had been quite young when she fell in love with Colin Granger, a British expat with a daring accent and the same career. She'd been completing her dentistry residency at Johns Hopkins when he had come along, a postgrad from a university she'd never heard of, and swept her off her feet.

Her younger brother, Aaron, had still been in undergrad when she'd run away to England. She didn't think she could have brought herself to leave if he had still been living at home. Since then she had visited once or twice a year, always bringing Colin and, once she was born, little Hermione. It had been hard to keep Hermione's secret from him, although it did get easier after her first year of school, when she could control it. She was always surprised that Aaron had never noticed something… off, about her family. He was a profiler for the FBI, for god's sake. She assumed if they had been in the country more often, it would have been more of a problem.

The Grangers were on their first visit of the year with the Hotchners; she could never believe how beautiful Haley was, all grown up, and how much cuter little Jack was getting every day! Hermione had missed the last two summers' visits, but she'd surprised her parents by asking them to book a seat on the flight for her as well. She missed Aaron and Haley, she'd said, and hadn't even met her baby cousin.

The three had spent the last six days recovering from jet lag, sight-seeing, and generally catching up with the Hotchners. Aaron had been away for work for the first three, but as soon as he returned from his case in California, he fell right back into the familiar routine of the Grangers' visits: deciphering British slang, pouring extra glasses of wine at dinner, and leaving the door to his study open so that Hermione could peruse his bookshelves like she had as a little girl.

Except, well, Hermione wasn't perusing the bookshelves. She wasn't reading at all, and certainly not into the early morning hours that she used to. That morning at about three, Amelia crept past Hermione's delegated pull-out sofa bed in their little hotel suite, trying her best not to wake her daughter on her way to the bathroom, only to find her lying awake, just staring at the ceiling. She'd been doing that a lot lately. Amelia resolved to ask her about it before she left home to be with her friends for the summer.

Much too soon, their last dinner at the Hotchner household arrived. They were going to make an early night of it, then get to the hotel and pack so that the morning could pass smoothly. (Amelia hated international flights with a passion, particularly ones at seven in the morning. Honestly, the things she did for family.)

Aaron and Haley kept glancing sidelong at Hermione throughout dinner. She was convincing Jack to eat his mashed vegetables, but it was hard not to notice the way her grip was white-tight on the spoon she was offering him. Through the entire dinner, she looked like she was trying to do a particularly difficult arithmetic problem in her head. It was while Haley was plating cake for dessert that Aaron finally spoke up.

"Hermione, are you feeling okay?"

Her daughter's face contorted into what she must have hoped would constitute a smile. She nodded. Amelia frowned.

"Let's go to the kitchen, dear," she said quietly. "We'll get you a glass of water." Hermione opened her mouth as if to argue, but shut it again at the look Amelia was giving her.

Once in the kitchen, Amelia whispered, "I want you to tell them."

"What?" Hermione's eyes were almost comically wide.

"They're your godparents. Your father and I have been reading the papers, and we know it's dangerous; if something happens to us, they need to know the full extent of it. If you or your dad or I are hurt or- or worse, they need to know to be safe." She almost choked on the last word.

"They won't know how to be safe," Hermione argued, "and I don't even have a wand permit for here."

"Aaron's in the FBI, he could find someone to help them. Didn't you say that your Minister works with the Muggle one? It must be the same here," she reasoned.

"Mum, I have a plan, and it doesn't involve putting anyone extra at risk," Hermione said briskly.

"There's got to be some kind of magical government here, maybe Congress or a Department, something that Aaron could ask for help." Amelia wasn't going to back down without a fight. "I don't want to lose any part of my family in this because of a lack in communication."

The argument continued in low hisses, but after liberal guilt-tripping and (mostly) sound arguments, Amelia won out. Hermione sighed, resigned, before stepping back into the dining room with a small ahem.

"Amelia," Aaron said before Hermione could get a word in edgewise, "Haley and I want you to stay with us." He was deadly calm, and next to him Haley sat silently with pursed lips and a knit brow.

Hermione's eyes narrowed. "Why?"

His gaze shifted smoothly to his niece. "Do they know the extent of your involvement, politically?"

Amelia didn't know what he was talking about, but it seemed that Hermione did from the way that she slipped her hand into the back of her waistband and gripped her wand. "What do you mean?" Amelia demanded.

"There was a terrorist attack at her school," Aaron explained, eyes still on Hermione. "Targeting people like her. People died."

Amelia froze, processing, but Colin was immediately furious, as he usually was when it came to safety incidents at Hogwarts. "I knew we should have taken you out after the troll!"

"Dad, I-"

"And the snake!" Colin continued, oblivious to the confusion painted on Aaron and Haley's faces. "The tournament with the dead kid, and the bloody Department of Mysteries, whatever that is, and-"

"How do you know what happened?" Hermione demanded of Aaron. She looked to Haley and repeated herself: "How do you know?"

"My brother is a wizard," Haley explained, more to Amelia than to Colin. "He's the only one in our family, all no-Majes but him. Since you moved to England, he started paying more attention to the news coming from over there. It started off as a passing interest, you know, with his brother-in-law's family being there." Here, she looked meaningfully at Hermione. "Then things got scarier. We didn't realize you were even at Hogwarts until that big tournament. The one with the dead kid," she added, glancing at Colin. "They did a profile on Harry Potter afterwards, and Hermione was mentioned a lot. Turns out she was in the papers through that whole year, mostly the gossip columns apparently." She rolled her eyes. "Matt says he'd have found out sooner if he'd put his pride aside and read gossip rags."

"None of what they published about me was true," Hermione said sharply, bringing the tension back into the room. "Ms. Skeeter has since stopped publishing, in case you haven't heard."

"I'm sure she had a sudden change of heart," Aaron said, cocking a brow. Hermione looked pointedly away, and Amelia wondered what the whole story was.

"They can't stay with you," Hermione said bluntly. She took her seat back at the table and interlaced her fingers, then looked up at Aaron with an unfamiliar (to Amelia) glint in her eyes. "I already have a plan for them."

"And what is that?" she heard herself demand.

Hermione looked at her mother and chewed her lower lip for a brief moment. "I was going to send you to Australia." The air felt heavier. "You've always wanted to go to Australia."

"We don't want to live there, Hermione!" Colin exclaimed. She whipped around as if she'd forgotten he was in the room, and neither Amelia nor Aaron missed the slight twitch of her hand toward her wand at the sudden noise. "We like kangaroos, not emigration!"

"You may not want to live there, but you do want to live, right?" Hermione spat angrily. "You don't have much of a choice here, I'm afraid."

"You'll have to emigrate somewhere," Aaron said, and both older Grangers turned and stared. He grimaced, while Hermione's livid expression tempered slightly. "Hermione's just confirmed that Matt's information was right. She's closer to the situation than we are, and she came to the same decision."

"Matt drove home how dangerous it is there right now," Haley said quietly. "He also guessed that Hermione wouldn't want to stay away from it."

Colin's eyes slid over Hermione's guilty face, and he sighed deeply. "You were going to send us to Australia," he murmured. "You weren't going to come with us to Australia."

"I am Harry Potter's best friend," Hermione said, voice like ice. "They would find me anywhere. They would find you anywhere."

"Do you want to stay with them instead?" she asked, and on a deep level it burned Amelia to see her daughter like this, tired and on-edge and feeling like she had to make these choices for them, for the people who were meant to take care of her. "I already have a set of travel documents forged, but the identification should work anywhere, and I'm sure Uncle Aaron could help with getting you into the country."

"I'd be glad to," Aaron confirmed. He paused, mouth hanging open a half inch while he searched for the right words, and then said, "I want you to be safe. All three of you."

Hermione remained expressionless, unnaturally so, and Amelia knew instinctively that her daughter was doing her best not to show any emotion. It didn't come easily to Hermione. Since she was a little girl, Hermione had been one to wear her heart on her sleeve; god knew how many days she'd come home from primary school bawling her eyes out or shaking in anger, or how many letters Amelia had gotten detailing why she wasn't speaking to Harry or Ron at any given moment.

"If the situation is really this delicate," Colin said, "I'm not sure I want to stay near you at all." When Haley started to argue, he talked over her: "You have a child. If these Death people looked for us and found us anywhere near you, it doesn't sound like they would hurt just us. Hermione, what do you think?"

Hermione bit her lip but otherwise continued not to show any sign of stress. "Uncle Aaron should still help. He's a valuable resource, after all." Her brows knit together briefly, then relaxed. "Australia has a limited magical government, and since gaining its independence, it's secluded itself. I'll work with some of my Ministry connections to find a place with strong ties to the United States that's still actively denouncing the direction Britain is going." She looked to Aaron. "In a few days, if I give you a name in the MACUSA - sorry, their Magical Congress -" she explained to Amelia and Colin - "maybe an employee handling witness protection, between you and Matt, could you stay in contact with that person? We could have a network all communicating with one another."

"We stay in contact with the embassy," said Amelia, "and through them, Aaron. But what about you? I have a feeling you won't be regularly visiting embassies."

Hermione's eyes widened, bright for the first time since before she'd gone off to sixth year. "I have an idea."

She asked Amelia for four two-Euro coins, which she fished out of her coin purse, then pulled a large magical coin - a Galleon, Amelia remembered - from her own bag. She explained that a group of students had used a coin-based method of passing messages to one another under a more oppressive Headmistress, but that she needed to experiment for a few minutes to make the coins function in Muggle hands. Amelia wasn't sure how it worked, but she was fascinated by the enchanting process. She dimly wished she had a better understanding of Latin; as it was, she could decipher voice and hand, and that was about it.

"I don't want you to worry more than necessary while I'm out there," she said, returning to English. "You'll each have one of these. If the coin is squeezed, and you whisper a phrase at the hand gripping it, that phrase will appear on the outer rim of the other coins, along with initials designating who whispered it: AH, HH, HG, AG, or CG," she said.

When the final questions had been answered and a full round of tests had been done on the coins, it was time for goodbye. The Grangers would be returning to their hotel room for what might shape up to be a restless night before their flight home.

Amelia hugged Aaron tight and reassured each other they would keep in daily contact until the Grangers' arrival in their new country. Her hug with Haley was equally warm, and she promised to call and talk to her about being a Muggle ("No-maj? Really?") with magical family. When it was her turn to hug Jack, she picked him up and squeezed him tightly to her bosom. "I love you, Jackie," she whispered in his ear. (He gurgled in reply.)

With a magical uncle and a magical cousin, each on a different side of the family, the odds were stacked in favor of Jack having magical abilities as well. She could only hope that Jack would grow up to live in a world where he was less discriminated against than Hermione - or that he could grow up at all, really.

After depositing Jack in his mother's arms, Amelia glanced around the living room, her own child conspicuously absent, along with her brother. Not a full minute later, she followed a stone-faced Aaron out of the kitchen. They had a hug that was more forceful than warm, and she heard her brother whisper, "Stay safe out there." Her daughter's reply was muffled by her uncle's shirt, but it could have been, "You, too."


A/N: The Harry Potter timeline is moved forward in time rather than the Criminal Minds timeline being moved backward in time. HP events of summer 1997 are moved forward to summer 2007. This is absolutely a multi-chapter story. Stay tuned.