A/N: Gah, I'm obsessed with Hermione's relationship with her parents.
Connie Granger had graduated with honors from two of the best universities in the country. She had practiced dental medicine for two decades.
But she couldn't understand a seventeen-year-old girl.
Most parents probably felt this way, as if their teenagers were citizens of a foreign land from which the parents themselves have long since emigrated. But most parents can find comfort in the fact that their children will themselves emigrate one day, and join their parents in the thoroughly mundane land of adulthood. This was the comfort of Connie's contemporaries, her dentist colleagues, her elder sister, and her college friends. Their children might break a rule or miss a curfew but within a decade, most of those teenagers would find themselves driving their expensive car to a university-caliber career or a comfortable house. They were bright teenagers, destined for lives of comfort and easy banality.
Hermione was bright. Far brighter than Connie's friends' children. Hermione was destined for something too, but it was far from the realm of university or even cars. She was too special for such trivialities. Connie's friend's had babbled on about league tables and test prep tutors, but Hermione had side-stepped all of those normal rites of passage. She glided into a world Connie could neither understand nor control.
Oh, Connie had tried to understand the wizarding world. Hermione had tried too. After her first year, Hermione had sat down at the kitchen table and patiently explained each school subject. But those days were gone now. Hermione's explanations, if they came at all, were halting and brusque. It seemed to Connie that Hermione believed it was easier to avoid the subject all together than to explain once again what "Defense Against the Dark Arts" entailed.
The coming year would be Hermione's last at her magical school, and Connie had no doubt that her daughter would earn an astronomical number of perfect A-Levels.
It had come as an unpleasant shock to Connie that her daughter had only one year left of school rather than two. Hogwarts, for all of its dangers and strange classes, had at least done the Grangers the kindness of structured holidays like Christmas and summer, during which they could reclaim their daughter for a few weeks. When there was no Hogwarts and no summer holidays, Hermione would claim a permanent place in her abstract world, returning only to make obligatory visits and stilted conversation.
But she had come home this summer. Hermione was not malicious or cruel, but Connie could not suppress the feeling that this was a horrible practical joke. Hermione was spending the entire summer with her parents. After years of letters and increasingly quick returns to a house in Devon where someone else's mother made Connie's daughter's dinner, Hermione was home. The female Dr. Granger's analytical mind had spent May waiting detachedly for a letter with a rushed apology and unconvincing promises. But it had never come. Hermione's last letter had bubbled with excitement, and even the most cynical of mothers was pleased.
Connie suspected that sixth year had been somewhat trying for Hermione. Whether it was romance, dormitory mates, or schoolwork Connie didn't know. Her limited contact with her daughter did not completely negate her ability to read her. The cracks in Hermione's resolutely lovely school term were showing ever so slightly.
And Connie knew she needed to speak to Hermione about it. But at he moment Hermione's return for an entire summer seemed too perfect to ruin with mundane facts or silly suspicions. Connie's daughter was uncharacteristically enthusiastic about any family bonding, no matter how silly. For the first time in years, she reciprocated her parent's attentions. She smiled often, though Connie did not fail to notice that her daughter never laughed.
It was the second week of July when Connie ascended the stairs with a large pile of laundry. She knocked on her daughter's door and pushed it open without waiting for a response.
Hermione's room looked the same as it had when she had received her Hogwarts letter. Big and painted pale blue. The walls were decorated with the colour-coordinated prints the decorator had selected when Hermione was nine. Pastel curtains languished over the closed windows. The immaculate carpet showed no sign that a teenager lived there, much less a witch. The only part of the room that showed any change was the bookcase, with was overstuffed with thick magical books and held a place of honor within the room. Connie had always meant to peruse Hermione's eclectic collection of wizarding books while the latter was at school, but there always seemed to be something urgent and important to do at that exact moment. She didn't know why she hadn't ever done it.
Connie's daughter was sitting up in her bed, her eyes closed and her brown head resting against the headboard. There was a book open across her knees and another lay abandoned near her ankles.
When Hermione had been in primary school, Connie would find books wedged under the covers when she changed the sheets. And Connie's nighttime ritual had not been complete without a nocturnal visit to her sleeping daughter's room, to turn off the reading lamp and move that night's reading material from her daughter's bed to the pastel bookcase.
These books were thicker than the series books Hermione had enjoyed in primary, and they looked a good deal less fictitious. The one on the nightstand was titled, Modification: An Advanced Study of Modern Cognitive Charms and their Implications. Connie turned to the first page to find a table of contents with incomprehensible magical spells and mind-numbingly small print.
She made to pluck the other book from her daughter's duvet, but she brushed Hermione's leg and both women started. Hermione's right hand shot to the nightstand and she was suddenly brandishing her wand. A moment later, her wand hand fell back to the bed and she turned a little pink. The sudden appearance of a stick in her face made Connie jump back reflectively, clutching Modification to her chest.
"Mum?" she peered up at her mother, her voice not the least bit bleary. Even as her pupils shrank from the sudden influx of light, they darted around the room. Her gaze caught on the book in her mother's hand, and then fell to the second book in her own lap. Her face hardened a little.
"Sorry, dear," said Connie tremulously. "I was putting your laundry in your room. I thought you were asleep."
Hermione's voice was empty. "Oh. No. Sorry, Mum. I didn't mean to scare you."
Connie nodded softly and avoided her daughter's gaze. Her eyes landed on the book in the bed. It was black and looked very old and worn. The title was printed in gaudy gold, but it had cracked with age and the letters were full of embellishments and written in Olde English. Connie didn't have a hope of reading the title upside down.
Hermione pushed the book under her duvet and a pinked-cheeked Connie looked back up at her daughter. "Are you alright?"
Hermione looked perfectly cool and collected, but her eyes were red-rimmed and her nose was a bit pink.
"I'm fine, Mum. Just tired."
"Would you rather we stay in tonight then? We can go to that new restaurant another night."
Hermione waited a long time before answering. She cast a small look at the Modification book before speaking a little too loudly. "That would be great, Mum."
The pair stood in silence for a moment, and Hermione appeared to be hovering on the edge of something. Her eyes traced Connie's face, lingering on the features that pronounced them mother and daughter. The small nose, the curly brown hair. Connie stared back, a strange and unprovoked sense of foreboding welling up inside her. They stood like that for several seconds before Connie retreated downstairs to her home office and Hermione found the place she marked in Magicik Moste Evile.
Hermione claimed to be ill at dinner that night, but Edward had called up the stairs for her to come and see the eight o'clock news' piece on Australian Wildlife. Connie could not remember hearing Hermione padding down the stairs, but she must have, because the whisper of breath in the doorway of the sitting room made her turn to invite Hermione to sit.
Hermione's face was impassive, and Connie was not conscious of the wand in her daughter's hand until it was pointed directly at herself and Edward.
Hermione whispered an odd word, and her mind felt like it was running backwards. It was like rewinding one of Hermione's baby videos on the VCR. The words and faces and places blurred and flashed, and then there was only a screen of grey and black lines, the discordant sounds of which forced Connie's eyes closed.
A/N: Reviews make me a better writer. So help me out.