Rose watched her mother check the fit of her skirt in the mirror. As the daughter of a muggle-born witch, she understood how important her mother thought this meeting was, even though she didn't feel quite so excited or nervous as her mother did. For Rose, the past few years at Hogwarts had more firmly entrenched the view she picked up almost by osmosis from her Weasley relatives that the Muggle world was interesting, but mostly as a quaint curiosity. Even regular visits to her Granny Granger had never quite allowed her to feel comfortable with the Muggle side of her history.

"Mother," Rose reminded, "it'll be fine. You look wonderful. Very professional. Very Muggle-appropriate"

"Thank you, darling," Hermione replied briskly. "You know, though, this is the first new Prime Minister of Britain since I've been Minister for Magic." She turned and looked over her shoulder to see how the jacket from a new angle.

"Yes, Mother, but…"

"And I think presenting an image that she can more readily relate to is important, darling. Learning about the Magical community in Great Britain will be difficult enough if she also has to deal with someone who looks so completely different."

"Yes, Mother…."

"So, I just want to make sure that this suit is the best option for presenting that image. That I'm trustworthy. Or even just sane."

"Yes, Mother, but…"

Ron stuck his head in the room and heard the last sentence. He looked at his daughter and long-loved wife with a fond smile. "No use, Rose. When she's wound up, best to just let her find her own way through."

Hermione may have been Minister for Magic, but it didn't prevent her from screwing up her face and sticking her tongue out at her husband. "Ronald, I must say that 94% of the time I've been wound up has been largely your fault, so I suppose you would know the best solution." Her light laugh took the sting out of the words and he wandered off to find Hugo. Or cake. Either one seemed like it would be quite agreeable to him.

Rose watched Hermione turn in front of the mirror again and noticed a scar just below the hem of her skirt. It was shorter than Rose was used to seeing on her mother, probably because Rose didn't much keep up with Muggle fashion trends, and the robes her mother wore to the Ministry were always cut fuller and longer. Although Rose never thought of Hermione as being overly interested in clothing, she was apparently up to date enough to recognize what would be appropriate for her first appointment with the Prime Minister.

"Mother," Rose asked, "what have you done to your leg? There's a scar on your left knee."

"Hmm?"

Hermione drew her attention away from holding another skirt up in front of her and studying her reflection in the mirror to glance down at her leg, almost as if she expected to see a fresh scrape. "Oh, that's just where I fell when I was walking Granny Granger's dog when I was a little girl. I didn't even know I was a witch then, so all I used to treat it was a plaster and some ointment. That's where that one came from."

"I never knew Granny Granger had a dog! What kind was it?"

Hermione smiled. "Yes, you wouldn't have guessed it, would you? I know they always seemed so proper to you in comparison to your Weasley grandparents. We actually had a big white Great Pyrenees we named Daisy. She was massive and fluffy, and once she got it in her head that there might be something of interest around the corner, she was off."

Rose returned Hermione's smile, hoping for more of the story. She knew her mother as one of the "Golden Trio" and grown up on stories told around the dinner table when Uncle Harry and Aunt Ginny came for dinner. She'd heard them so often that she and James had taken to mouthing the punchlines behind their parents' backs. But she barely remembered hearing anything about what it was like for her mother before Hogwarts. It was almost as if that part of her life didn't exist, and now that she herself was in Hogwarts, she wondered sometimes what it had been like for her mother, a Muggle-born witch, to come into her power without any sense of what was happening, with no idea of the rules of the new culture she was joining. Rose sometimes wondered if she'd understand herself better if she knew more of where she had come from, but Mother always seemed reluctant to talk about her early life.

Hermione turned from the mirror and moved to sit next to Rose on the bed. "Daisy had decided there was something in the hedge between our house and our neighbors'." She shoved at the pile of shirts to clear space for herself. "We could never see it. Grandad Granger used to say she was chasing Hobbin-snakens. He just made that word up because Daisy was convinced there was something to follow."

Rose giggled, thinking it sounded like something Aunt Luna would try to get funding to study in the wild.

Hermione continued, "I had Daisy on a lead and we were coming back from a short walk around our neighborhood. I was probably too young to have taken her out by myself, but I was convinced that my 8-year-old self could walk her. Unfortunately, Daisy took it in her head that there was a Hobbin-snaken next door and decided the best way to get to it was to go through the hedge, with me still holding onto the lead. I was so surprised that I forgot to drop it and got dragged along behind."

Hermione looked down at her knee, remembering more than she told, remembering the boy who'd watched the whole thing and laughed and crowed about how Granger "thought she was smart, but couldn't even be trusted to walk a dog properly." Hermione-now bristled at the memory of how Hermione-then had felt crushed by the stupid boy's hateful comments. She had always abhorred being made to feel small or silly. And Reggie, who lived down the lane, had tried to do so frequently. As Hermione had stood on one side of the hedge, holding so tightly to a leash attached to a still-barking Daisy on the other side of the hedge that her arm disappeared into the hedge up to her elbow, she had started to wilt. And then, she hadn't. She had turned her brown eyes toward him, drawn herself up and said clearly, "Reginald Davies, I would rather hold on to my dog's leash and get scraped up a bit, than leave her to run wild and get injured. But I'm guessing you know very little about what it means to care for something."

Reginald had drawn his head back and narrowed his eyes. Had she heard him asking his parents yet again for a dog? How did she know he'd had his heart set on a puppy?

Hermione didn't stop there. "If you actually did care, for instance, you'd go around to Mrs. Willis's side of the hedge and grab Daisy's collar. If you had one iota of sense, you'd have tried to help me keep Daisy safe rather than mock me. In fact…"

She didn't need to say more, because he'd already run to do her bidding. He called out when he had the collar and she released her end of the leash, ran around the end of the hedge and went through Mrs. Willis's gate. She held her hand out for the leash that Reggie was gripping, her eyes still angry. As he handed the leash back, she softened. After all, he had helped her with Daisy, even if he hadn't wanted to originally.

She thoughtfully returned from her memories to her current bedroom, with her daughter sprawled across her bed surrounded by the piles of clothes she had pulled out of the wardrobe to try to impress the Prime Minister. With one more firm look in the mirror, she reminded herself that long before she had known she was a witch she had been able to control the situations around her. Although she had been an awkward child, at her core she knew she was someone who understood people and could convince them to act as they needed to. The scar on her knee was a talisman to remind her of that. The Prime Minister would be no different than Reggie Davies. She would do what Hermione needed done in the end.

With one last tug at the jacket she was wearing, she turned from the mirror. "Thank you for your help, Rosie-mine. I think this suit is the right one. I believe it all will be just fine."