Expect a chapter about once a week from now on.

Chapter 4

Hermione let out a sigh as she absently fiddled with a pencil and paper. She was so worried about Ron and Harry, but unfortunately there was nothing she could do for either of her boys. Dimensional travel was considered taboo for good reason and the Order of the Phoenix would shun her, if not worse for breaking that unspoken law just as easily as the Death Eaters would murder her for being Muggle-Born. Even if she could recreate the method of dimensional travel she'd used-which was a big if-there was no way to guarantee she would be able to control it enough to find her way back to her native dimension. Not to mention the possible apocalypse. She had to help her brothers. Family came first. Her boys were on their own now.

Pretending to be eight wasn't exactly fun, but she didn't know this John Winchester. She had no idea what sort of man he was or how hunting had affected him. Some people were driven crazy by that sort of knowledge. Until she knew, there was no way she'd willingly reveal her true age or intellect. Even uttering one little hint about how she was really related to them would probably cause a rather… adverse reaction. She didn't want to think about how they'd react if she brought up Mary.

She might have told the truth if not for the fact that by this point she was sure that she was stuck this way. Aging and deaging potions tended to wear off within a week. While permanent transfiguration could be use on Muggles, a witch or wizard's magical core would eventually break down and reverse the spells. If a person had goo enough control over their magical core, they could even speed up the process. Hermione had already checked, and this was not some sort of permanent transfiguration. That meant that either it was a curse or some odd form of magical interaction, neither of which could be reversed without risking her own life, at the very least. It just wasn't worth it.

At least she'd managed to think up a workable cover story. In all honesty, she didn't even need to lie all that much, other than to remember that she was now a Gordon and Mary was Joan Gordon. Everything else could easily be filled in with her real memories and experiences growing up. It was a lot simpler than pretending she was an ordinary witch, the daughter of rather boring dentists. Half the time she'd been at a loss of what to say to the boys, leading them to believe she was a rather bad liar when she was young.

Although given the way she'd managed to get Umbridge to practically hand herself over to the centaurs, she didn't know how they still believed that. Then again… her little Defense Association had not exactly been all that well thought out. It had never occurred to her that while she might have been used to meeting at seedy taverns to go over hunts with her mother and Uncle Mark and occasionally other hunters, that it was suspicious for nice upstanding students to do so and that it would come to Umbridge's attention. Not that she had really expected the group to last all that long before somebody-like Marietta-broke under the pressure and spilled to somebody, hence the relatively mild penalty. Among hunters, betrayal often resulted in death.

It was a little after nine when John returned, two teenage boys trailing behind him. It was odd, so odd seeing her civilian father as a hunter. He escorted them into her little cubicle and closed the curtains, glancing up at the devil's trap which took up almost the entirety of the ceiling above the cubicle and carefully drawn protective sigils around the perimeter approvingly.

"Good morning," she said, putting down her pencil. "Sam and Dean, right?"

"Yup," said the older boy, currently sporting a buzz cut.

"I'm Hermione." She took in the pink hair on the younger one. "So what happened to you two?"

"Prank war," said John, with a roll of his eyes. "I'm gonna leave these two with you while I talk to the police. I have an appointment with CPS-that's Child Protective Services-afterward. I'll come by after I'm done with the bureaucracy." Presumably he'd translated the title into words for her because in the U.K., it was called something else.

"Bye," said Hermione.

Dean waited until after John left to speak. "So… sister, huh?"

"Yeah," said Hermione.

"You're a hunter, too?" interjected Sam.

"No. Mom said I'm not allowed to hunt until I'm eleven or twelve. Other than the hunts I ended up in by accident. I guess now when I start hunting is up to Dad."

"By accident?" echoed Dean.

"Most of the time Mom and Uncle Mark took me along to hunts and left me in an apartment or motel room or library or something," said Hermione. After claiming her parents were dentists throughout Hogwarts, it was odd to speak the truth so easily. "I've had monsters go after me more than once while they were out hunting."

"Who's Uncle Mark?" asked Sam.

"Mom's hunting partner. Well, he was Mom's hunting partner."

"So, how is he related you?" asked Dean.

"He's not related to me at all. Mom met him on a hunt back when they were teenagers. He was in the country on vacation and got caught up in something he really shouldn't have. Ended up becoming a hunter. Mom got him an apprenticeship with somebody in the family. Our second cousin once removed, I think."

"So your mom's been training you as a hunter?"

"Yeah."

"What was your training like?" asked Sam.

"Training isn't so bad. Our-my cousins had it way worse. Mom was pretty mellow. She let me go to school and everything. Most of the rest of the family were home schooled." Hermione shrugged, doing her best to gloss over her little slip of the tongue and play it off as a simple mistake. "She said I could go to high school too. Most of my cousins never got more than the American equivalent of a tenth grade education at all."

"What?" said Sam, clearly horrified by the very thought. She could understand that. Education had always been very important to her.

Hermione nodded. "They… they think hunting is the be all and end all, you know? And most of them survive the way other hunters do-lying, cheating, and stealing, which isn't a bad thing (it's really the most practical way to support ourselves most of the time) but it's not a civilian job either-and they think that there's no point in getting too much education. Most hunting families are like that. Dad said your mom was a Campbell. Didn't you know that? I've met some Campbells who stayed behind in Scotland and they're really, really strict. In my family, most of the ones doing the home schooling left school once they were sixteen or were taught by somebody who did the same and they don't bother bringing in tutors for anything more advanced."

"Oh," said Sam, an oddly disturbed look on his face. "But you went to normal school, right?"

"I just finished fifth grade."

"Shouldn't you be going into fourth?" said Sam.

"I should," she shrugged. "Mom had me start a year early so she could get back into hunting sooner. I skipped from first to second grade and then third to fourth but I had to pretend to be two years older than I really was and a normal student after Azazel's psychotic little minion tried to kill me, so I ended up going through fifth twice."

"Azazel?" said Dean.

"He's the demon that killed my sister Rosie and offered to bring Mom back to life for me last month," she stated starkly. She didn't much like talking about him, but in this situation, Sam and Dean would need all the information she could give them.

"Does Dad know?" demanded Dean.

"I told him everything I know about him and the deal he offered."

Dean gave a short, tight nod. "Good." He slumped into a chair. "So… do you play poker?"

"Do I play poker?" said Hermione. Poker was only the international hunter pastime and favorite method of scamming people out of money. "Of course I play."

Even if she hadn't learned to cheat at cards and hustle poker-along with pool and darts-from her mother, she would have learned just to survive playing against Fred and George during the near monthly tournaments the twins threw in Gryffindor Tower. Those two knew some tricks that not even her cousin Gwen-the Campbell family card shark-was familiar with.

They were in their third game, playing for nickels and dimes when the curtain was pulled back. A woman in a suit paused at the sight of the group.

"Hermione Cooper?" said the woman.

"Yeah," said Hermione.

"What do you want with our sister?" demanded Dean, instinctively claiming Hermione as a member of his family.

She was a little surprised that he'd taken to her so quickly. He had been raised as a hunter, after all, and hunters almost never took well to strangers, even their fellow hunters. Although the DNA test had confirmed that she was his sister. Perhaps they followed the idea that family came before all else, just as Mary had. She'd likely told John her opinions on family, even if not the context it had come from. It would have fit well with the training John had gone through as a marine-"semper fidelis," or "always faithful," the marine motto was something they all understood-and along with his time in Vietnam… she could see how Dean and Sam might have been taught Mary's views on family by John.

"You are?" asked the woman.

"I'm Dean Winchester, that's my brother Sam," he explained.

"I'm Sarah Johnson, with CPS, Hermione's case worker," she explained. "Your father is John Winchester?"

Both boys nodded.

"And he is…"

"He's talking to the cops about Hermione," said Dean. "I think he's going to see CPS afterward."

"What are you two doing here?"

"Visiting."

"Right," she said, giving them this look like they were criminals. They were hunters in training, being raised by another hunter; they likely already had criminal records. "Why don't you two go get lunch while Hermione and I talk."

"Bring me back real people food," said Hermione. "And M&Ms, with peanuts!" At least now she wouldn't have to pretend her parents were obsessed with clean, healthy teeth and did not permit her to eat sugar except on rare occasion.

"Right," said Sam, grinning slightly at her request before glancing at the social worker and getting up to leave.

It was nearly three weeks after John and the boy's arrival that the police set her case to the side and a judge gave John custody of Hermione. Her cast had not yet come off, but her collarbone was healed and the stitches out, at least. After a tricky infection and some odd readings-that he was rather sure Hermione had accidentally caused with her powers in her panic about the idea of being put in foster care while custody was being decided-the hospital had decided to keep her much longer than they would have ordinarily.

John brought her a set of clothing from a thrift store and left her to change for a couple minutes. Once she was clad in the blue sundress-it was good for the weather and made it easier for her to dress with her cast-he helped her into a pair of socks and sneakers and tied her hair back in a messy ponytail. It wasn't exactly appropriate for hunting or even a relatively active child, but she'd be able to get proper trousers and shirts at a later date.

Hermione was sat down in a wheelchair and taken down to the entrance. Once out of the hospital, John took her hand to make sure she didn't wander off and took her to the car, carefully ignoring the way she'd flinched. As soon as he discovered who had attacked her, they were dead. John set her down next in the back passenger seat and went around to the driver's seat.

"We're here," said John, pulling up to a motel at the edge of town a couple minutes later. "I'll take you shopping for the basics this afternoon. Don't get too attached, we're heading out in the morning."

"Alright," said Hermione.

She was taken to their room, which was actually two rooms with a door between. There was a single with a large bed and a kitchenette, a table, and a couple chairs, connected by a door to a double, presumably being hers and the boys' room.

"Hi," said Hermione.

"Hey," said Sam, looking up from his book. John had threatened to shave Sam's head a week earlier and Sam had ended up dyeing his hair brown again rather than risk him going through with his threat. The shade was a little off, making it obvious to those who knew about the pranks that Sam's hair had been dyed, but it wasn't too bad.

"Thank God," said Dean. "I never want to see another social worker again."

"Were they that bad?" said Hermione.

"I think they might be in the need of some hunting."

Hermione giggled. "I'm sure they're not actually that evil."

"Yes, they are," insisted Dean. "If I ever see that bitch again, I'm gonna gank her."

"Come on," said John. "We need to get Hermione the basics. Might as well get you two clothing for the next year while we're at it."

"Yes, sir," chorused the boys.

They ended up going to the Salvation Army first followed by two further thrift shops. Hermione was loosed on the children's section of each with orders to find seven each of pajamas, trousers or some other form of leg wear, t-shirts, long sleeved shirts, and six dresses along with two sets of long underwear, two sweaters, and a pair of sweat pants and a shirt appropriate for gym class. Hermione had never been particularly interested in wearing trousers, having embraced Wizarding fashion with its flowing robes and long dresses. Mary had permitted her to wear skirts even on hunts so long as they were roomy enough for her to move in without her tripping over hems, claiming that both she and her grandmother-Deanna-along with most other female hunters throughout history had done the same before fashions had changed enough for them to wear jeans and other trousers without looking out of place.

With that in mind, she took John's instructions as guidelines, rather than rules, using Mary's standards for proper clothing. She found seven skirts, most somewhere between knee and ankle length in thick wool and comfortable cotton, although she picked up a denim mini-skirt. For her gym clothing, she found a pair of shorts for modesty, a jumper dress and a t-shirt for underneath. For the long sleeved shirts, she picked out sturdy, oversized flannel shirts in plaids that wouldn't clash too badly. The dresses were a bit more difficult, but she found appropriate and easy to care for wool and cotton dresses, along with one dress in jersey for Sunday mass and other special occasions.

While she was doing that, John found her a winter coat and a denim jacket. Within an hour everything was bought and they went to a chain store where Hermione found two packs each of underwear and socks, a couple sets of tights, leggings, slips, undershirts and a set of combat boots and a set of rain boots. She picked out a tooth brush, toothpaste, shampoo, soap, conditioner, a hairbrush, a comb, hair ties, barrettes and bobby pins while John watched, looking completely mystified by the necessities of female grooming habits.

Everything was put into a duffle bag John had gotten from somewhere and placed in the motel room. John, it seemed, either hadn't kept track of what she was getting, beyond making sure that it fit and wasn't too worn or perhaps didn't care. She had noticed that Dean had been the one tasked with supervising his own and Sam's shopping, so perhaps she would have been left to Dean's care if not for the fact that she literally had nothing and they'd never taken her shopping before. For lack of anything better to do, she and Sam watched a movie as she couldn't go in the pool with her cast and some of her stitches hadn't come out yet.

She pushed back a strand of too long hair before letting out an angry huff. Her hair was still ridiculously long. It might have been hip length on her seventeen year old body, but now it was nearly knee length. Hermione bit her lip and then pulled out a pair of scissors from where it was kept next to the sink.

"Dean, could you cut my hair? It's too long," she said.

"Alright," sighed the boy in a way which made it clear he was doing so under protest, "How much do you want off?"

"To here." She motioned to her hips.

He carefully brushed her hair out and then gathered it in a handful and cut it a little above her hips. "Let me just toss this."

She shook her head. "Burn it, don't throw it out. Do you know what a witch can do with a person's hair?"

In this world, those who bargained with demons for power were called witches, in her own, they were called sorcerers. She wasn't sure exactly where their history had split, but she was relatively sure it happened long before Mary's miscarriage. She thought it might have had something to do with Samhain, who even after being trapped had been responsible for the centuries of antagonism between the Wizarding and the Goblins. It had been a close call and though the Wizarding had survived Samhain, perhaps in this world they had not been so lucky. Obviously magic was still in the blood, as both Mary and John had existed in both worlds, but if there was no organized Wizarding culture or society, it would have been very easy for demons to pick them off.

"Didn't think of that," acknowledged Dean. "Right, let me get your cast covered and then you need to take a shower."

"Oh…" She glanced down. "I don't think I can…"

"Which one of us do you want to help you wash?" asked Dean.

She thought about John for a minute before dismissing the idea. That was not happening. "Can you help me?"

"Yeah. Might as well get this over with."

Dean grabbed her soaps, underwear, a nightgown, a hair tie, and a garbage bag and some tape. He taped the garbage bag over her cast to keep her arm protected before turning on the water and then helping her undress.

"Where did you get those scars?" said Dean, his voice deathly calm.

"Which one?" she asked.

"I don't know, all of them?"

"Oh, well this one is from when a witch cursed me," she said, pointing to the one from Dolohov. The stories were heavily edited, but would hopefully work well enough. "Mom sewed me up because we couldn't go to the hospital. This one is from a werewolf-I only got scratched, not bitten, so I'm alright. He was my gym teacher. That was about three years back-I was still going to the public school Marcus and Adrian went to back then. That's what private schools are called in the U.K." Gym was close enough to Defense Against the Dark Arts, she supposed. It was from Professor Lupin, the night she'd almost been eaten by a dementor and had broken Sirius out from jail. It had taken a while to heal, as all werewolf caused injuries did, but it hadn't interfered with her and Harry's rescue of Sirius and Buckbeak. "The rest of these are just from training."

"Your gym teacher was a werewolf," said Dean, seemingly stunned.

Hermione nodded rapidly. "Yes. He's really nice most of the time and he always locks himself up. He's been a werewolf since he was six. His father was a hunter and angered this other werewolf and that werewolf attacked and infected him in revenge. He became a hunter as well. Mom and Uncle Mark threatened him with guns and said that if he ever got loose while he was transformed again, they'd hunt him down and kill him."

"Oh. If he always locks himself up, how did he get out?" asked Dean, obviously keen enough to pick up the holes in her story.

"Ron and Harry and I got kidnapped by a man from a family of witches that he used to know and he came to rescue us." She tried to be careful to keep names out of it in case Dean wanted to send somebody to hunt Professor Lupin down, although Harry and Ron's names managed to slip out before she could stop herself.

Almost mechanically, Dean turned on the shower and fiddled with the temperature until it felt right. Remus Lupin was the only one of her teachers at Hogwarts who'd ever learned that her mother and "father" were hunters, not dentists, although he'd never been informed of their real names or anything else that could be used against them.

Dean had to get extra shampoo and conditioner as he'd underestimated how much her long hair required, but otherwise helped her bathe in silence. He toweled her dry and turned away while she dressed before sitting down, rubbing her hair with a towel and then brushing out her hair with the comb.

"Can you braid my hair?" asked Hermione.

"Uh… no."

"Alright," sighed Hermione. "Guess I have to wait until my arm's out of the cast."

"What's braiding matter?"

"It keeps my hair from tangling while I sleep."

Dean called down for an extra bed for the night before settling Hermione into the bed farther away from the door. When the bed was rolled in, it was set up in front of the door. Dean took that bed and told Sam he had the other one, in between himself and Hermione. He was taking the most vulnerable position, Hermione realized. He was trying to protect his younger siblings.

In the morning, Dean bundled up all of Hermione's things after she dressed before doing a last check of the room to make sure that nothing had been forgotten. He carried his own and Hermione's bags out to the car-a 1967 Impala Hermione was relatively sure had belonged to John in her own dimension as well, although Mary had left it behind when she'd gone to Scotland-putting them into the trunk before offering Hermione a piggyback ride to the car. Apparently the four of them were going to drive for an hour or two before stopping for breakfast, as John had found a hunt and wanted to complete it before the children were supposed to start school in the fall.

Hermione might be able to sleep anywhere, but she simply wasn't comfortable sleeping in the same room with unfamiliar people. It had taken her about seven months to warm up to her roommates at Hogwarts and she had never quite been able to get more than short catnaps when staying in Ginny's room when visiting the Weasleys' home. Other than when she'd been drugged, she hadn't managed to get a good night's sleep at the hospital at all. There were too many people in the room and too many people coming in an out regularly for her to be comfortable. She ended up turning Sam's arm into a pillow and falling asleep less than five minutes after the car started up.

"Get up," said Sam, while shaking her awake what felt like a minute later.

"Where are we?" she mumbled.

"Time for breakfast," explained Sam.

They were at a truck stop diner, one of the few cars in the parking lot. Mary had generally avoided places like this when Hermione had been a child, but she supposed that as the father of boys, John was not used to thinking about that sort of thing.

Hermione scrambled out of the car and stretched before taking Sam's hand and following him into the restaurant. It was incredibly demeaning, but she'd rather hold one of her brothers' hands than to risk some predator trying to grab her.

They were seated in a booth, Hermione squished on the inside next to John with Sam and Dean across from them. She read her menu happily enough, contemplating what to eat while Sam and Dean got into some sort of pushing fight.

"Boys, cut it out," said John.

"Are you folks ready to order?" said the waitress.

"Yeah," said John.

"Can I have a bacon and American cheese omelet with the French fries well done?" asked Hermione, before John could order for her. There was no way she'd let somebody else order for her when she could still speak. "Oh, and whole wheat toast, buttered."

"That comes with orange juice or milk, honey," she said.

"She'll have the orange juice," said John.

"Thank you," said Hermione, remembering her manners.

She yawned again before looking at the songs available in the small jukebox connected to their booth and all the other booths. Once everybody had ordered, John pulled out a folder and opened it, revealing a couple articles and what looked like faxes.

"What's the hunt?" asked Dean.

"Four people have gone missing in Heckscher State Park-that's on Long Island," explained John. "They left their cars, their possessions behind. It's tourist season and the park was full of people going to the beach, barbequing, but none of them saw anything useful. Each of them was either last seen taking one of the paths next to the beach, or, in the case of Jason Mitchell, he told his friends that was where he was going but was not seen on the path."

Author's Notes: I don't intend to do time skips, however as you can see I will be skimming over weeks at a time. I originally had about six chapters written, but I decided to change things around a little, so expect Cassie Fraser and some Stargate characters to show up by around chapter ten or so.