Disclaimer: I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).
***
The first time she visits the Burrow since her exile, it's by invitation of Dean Thomas, which is already odd enough. There's some matter that's disturbing him; he asks if she's received any letters—specifically, from the Department of Magical Law Enforcement.
She shakes her head in puzzlement; no, she hasn't. He looks at her, or maybe at something in the middle distance that just happens to coincide with her. Something is not right, and it's equally clear that whatever it is, he doesn't want to raise it just yet.
They're sitting in the yard at the Burrow, and she's brought a book about database security, because she's always reading now. Crookshanks stalks gnomes through the vegetable garden, happy to be released from his imprisonment at Grimmauld Place. Harry, Ron, George and Ginny are playing two-to-a-side Quidditch. She isn't clear if Dean invited her here just to ask that question, whose answer appears to have unsettled him. It would be awkward to leave, and just as awkward to stay, but inertia keeps her in place. She'd forgotten already how pleasant this place is.
Dean has made a similar decision, for he's sitting across from Hermione, drawing, as the Quidditch game progresses. It's not likely she'll be spotted, and she knows that those games can go on all afternoon. (Yes, and she read Quidditch Through the Ages, so she knows just how ridiculous an official game can get.) She takes a last look at Crookshanks, who looks back at her as if to say, "Don't you have something to be doing?" Thus reproached, she opens her book and succumbs to the usual enchantment.
***
Dean looks up from his drawing and stretches his arms. "So what are you reading?" he asks. She holds up her book.
"Muggle stuff?"
"I'm keeping my options open," she says. "So what are you drawing?"
"Come look." She marks her place in the book and walks over. Dean has been sketching the Quidditch players; there's a really nice composition with Ginny silhouetted against the summer clouds as she dives for the Snitch, and another one with Harry just clearing the hedgerow, mirrored by his shadow on the ground and Ron in hot pursuit.
She remembers him drawing from their first year, but she had no idea he'd gotten that good. "Dean, these are excellent! You should think about selling them."
"I've sold a few, but mostly witches and wizards like pictures that move. That's the thing they keep saying, 'That's a great Quidditch picture, but why is it just frozen like that?'"
He lowers his voice. "I've sold a whole lot more of them to Muggles."
A year ago she would have been scandalized. Now she's just curious. "Isn't there a problem with the Statute of Secrecy?"
"Oh no. I sell them as fantasy art."
She giggles. "Dean, that's brilliant. So which ones do the Muggles like?"
"Want to see the portfolio?"
"Of course, unless you're asking me upstairs to see your etchings."
"No need to go upstairs. I have it here." He takes out the portfolio and opens it across their laps. It's quite extensive. She recognizes scenes from the Great Hall at Hogwarts: Dumbledore and McGonagall and Snape at the high table, Harry receiving an owl, Lavender and Parvati laughing together at something that's out of the picture. Lots of drawings of Ginny: in the common room, curled up with a book; out on the Quidditch pitch in full gear; in dueling stance with intense hawklike concentration. Various quick sketches of other Quidditch players, including Cho, Angelina, Harry, Oliver Wood, even an old sketch of Cedric. Dean turns that one over quickly and Hermione is just as glad he did. A whole collection of studies of the Slytherin table, obviously done on the sly: Draco and Pansy laughing at something, Draco looking daggers at the Gryffindors, flanked by Crabbe and Goyle, Blaise Zabini looking disdainful. Last of all are scary, atmospheric watercolors of battle, and she's surprised at the faces she sees: Bellatrix, Lucius, various other Death Eaters.
"Done from memory, obviously," Dean adds. "I started doing those to get the pictures out of my head, and it would be my luck that they're the big favorites with the Muggles. I actually had a professional illustrator come up to me at a fantasy convention and tell me that I had an amazing visual imagination." He laughs ruefully. "Would that it were imagination."
She realizes that she's never asked Dean what he did with his summers or holidays, and it appears that this is part of the answer. She's intrigued at the idea of the wizarding world as a fictional universe. "So who are their favorite characters?"
"The blokes love Bellatrix. I can't sell enough of her. The illustrator said she was edgy, a real femme fatale. Wish he weren't so right. Lucius is a close second, but I think it's less his air of menace than his clothes."
Hermione bursts out laughing. "Oh my god, Lucius Malfoy as a fashion plate. Tell me more."
"They like Snape. I have to agree. He was an ugly bastard but really fascinating to draw. Dumbledore, of course, because he looks like everybody's idea of a benevolent wizard, and he did love those purple robes with the sparkles. He's loads of fun to do in color. Sprout and Flitwick, but usually in the background, for whimsy. McGonagall looks like a witch out of central casting, the illustrator told me, but she doesn't have that je ne sais quoi. No sex appeal." Hermione giggles again; she's never put McGonagall in the category of people who can or should be assessed for sex appeal.
"So have you sold any pictures of us, I mean the students?"
"Some. Mostly it's the Slytherins. Blaise and Draco are the most popular. They went for traditional dress and that translates as 'real wizard.' There's one of the two of them playing chess that I've actually sold as an editioned print. I think it's the contrast; Blaise had that whole Renaissance-prince look and he's so dark, and Draco is so fair."
He pulls out the drawing. The background is an interesting shade of slate blue that sets off both boys' complexions, and she notices that Draco is playing the black pieces and Blaise the white ones. "Oh, this is beautiful," she said. "They're both so … alien. Not of this world. Alluring."
He takes out another picture. "Though somebody told me this one of Draco with his goons makes him look like a merchant banker playing Mafioso." Hermione looks at this one.
"I'd agree. He looks just like those public-school twits I'm meeting lately…"
Dean looks at her quizzically.
"Well, why did you think I was reading computer science? I'm doing computer security for banks. Keeping my options open."
"Are you thinking about leaving? I mean, crossing back over and passing as a Muggle?"
"Just about daily. It's really ugly here. The war isn't over; it's just on a slow boil. Not much better among the Muggles, actually, but those are different wars. I pass, though. They expect programmers to be eccentric. I wear jeans and Tonks' old T-shirts and they don't even ask me who the Weird Sisters are. I'm good at it, and it pays well."
She takes a breath. "I get the occasional lewd remark, but nobody ever calls me Mudblood."
Dean shrugs. "Well, I get it in both worlds. Just a matter of the M-word or the N-word. It doesn't feel very different."
Hermione nods. "It's all where they make the cuts. I remember the first couple of years at Hogwarts I noticed people's color, but after a while the Pureblood-Halfblood-Muggleborn thing seemed to take over. So Blaise might have been black out in Muggle London, but at Hogwarts he was Pureblood and I was beneath his notice. Draco was the one who'd creep me out, though. He was always on about my bushy hair and my teeth, as if he spent a lot of time staring at me looking for things to pick on. I didn't let on, but he really made me feel like a dirty exotic foreigner."
She pauses.
"I remember when Lavender and Parvati first started getting silly over boys. They made up this running list of Most Fanciable for the boys in all of the houses. They had Blaise and Draco listed for Slytherin, and that made my skin crawl, the idea of even thinking of them that way. Not just nasty dispositions. Not my kind, dangerous, the enemy, not human. That's the day I knew I had assimilated."
Dean looks mischievous. "So do you ever think about dating Muggles?"
"I haven't thought about it. One of the merchant bankers asked me out last week, and I turned him down without thinking about it. Just too pleased with himself." She adds, "And he looked too much like Draco. I might have slipped and hexed him when he said something stupid. And he was looking at me like I was an interesting exotic, you know, the scary girl genius who does magic with computers. I can live without that."
She turns to him, "So you're making money in the Muggle world, too… do you think about crossing over?"
"Only for business. I'd like to go to art school, actually… but the Hogwarts school-leaving certificate doesn't qualify me, and I didn't finish my NEWTs."
"If it's a matter of documentation, that's not a problem," she says, and doesn't realize it's a dangerous thought until it's already out of her mouth.
From the journal of Hermione Granger
(undated – probably early July 1998)
And how did I get my job?
Hermione Granger exists in the Muggle world, and there are seven missing years in her official biography. Those seven years were my canvas for the novel of my alternate life, what would have happened had I not gotten the Hogwarts letter. I made her mark in the world: I wrote the story in the databases and memory-charmed the personal references. Perfectly ethical, by my lights: what teacher doesn't want to have the memory of an outstanding student?
Like any good novelist, I resisted the siren song of personal vanity and restrained myself from making her a precocious Oxbridge student or any such. I don't need to be conspicuously brilliant, only plausible.
I'd done my costume research, too, so I sat in the interview in a crisp suit Transfigured from my everyday clothes into the very thing that serious young women in the City are wearing this year. I'd got it wrong, of course; I came in dressed like an aspiring stockbroker or merchant banker. But I got the job anyway.
I did a wee bit of wandless nonverbal magic, the baby sister of the Imperius Curse. You really want to hire me, because I am amazing beyond your wildest dreams. The difference is that Imperius is one of the Unforgivables, and what I did they forgive all the time. They call it charisma. Personal presence. Positive mental attitude. Sex appeal, though I very carefully kept sex out of it.
***
Grimmauld Place is nowhere you would want to sleep alone. It wouldn't be so bad if Andromeda and Teddy were there, but in the postwar emergency the Ministry is warning parents with young children to live in well-defended enclaves. Greyback's werewolves are still at large, and Andromeda knows better than anyone that places that were safe before are no longer.
And Hermione suspects that even if that weren't the case, Andromeda doesn't like revisiting Grimmauld Place because it reminds her too much of the lost: her daughter, her son-in-law, her favorite cousin Sirius Black. She herself doesn't like walking the halls after dark; the house itself feels inimical, even with the doxy infestations and the Dark artifacts summarily dealt with by the redoubtable Molly Weasley, and the old house-elf Kreacher in residence at Hogwarts.
The room at Grimmauld Place with the fondest associations is the kitchen, where Molly Weasley and Remus Lupin organized meals for the Order of the Pheonix and the long table seated the motley assembly. She remembers Sirius Black and Severus Snape glowering at each other from opposite ends of the table, and Remus hovering in the background and Tonks making faces to entertain her and Ginny, as if they were small children. Making faces, literally—shifting her features from the whimsical to the grotesque, including the array of funny noses (the pig snout was a great favorite).
And all four of them—Snape, Black, Lupin, and Tonks—are dead now. Molly marches on, having avenged three of the four of them when she dispatched Bellatrix in the battle of Hogwarts. Much as she dislikes Molly, she has to admire the woman's unsinkable vitality.
Three years ago. She remembers one morning at Grimmauld Place, at that long kitchen table, she was sitting across from Tonks as she laughed and changed her faces—colors flashing by, features changing, and she wondered: "Did anyone ever ask you to look a certain way? I mean a lover? Because to me your constant change is sexy, you're a kaleidoscope." She was fifteen, and didn't know Tonks well enough to ask that question. Tonks was twenty-two, a full adult and newly minted Auror, glamorous because she stood just on the other side of the magical gateway to real life in the wizarding world.
She remembers looking at the muscles in Tonks' arms and the way her hands wrapped around her coffee mug and something twinged in her chest. This is a real warrior, she remembers thinking, even if she's clowning for us, but those hands---and the way Tonks would laugh at scary old Moody, and he was scary with that spinning blue glass eye—well, Hermione was fifteen at the time so she didn't know what that feeling was exactly. She just knew that Tonks was the face her eyes found at that table. Well, the face she found second, after Ron. But she'd wanted Ron since she was twelve years old.
She sits on the long bench in the place where Tonks once sat, and stares into the empty fireplace. She comes down here to Floo to the Ministry, and to cook her solitary meals. She's not sure of the defenses of the place, and she's spending some of her time setting up defenses of which she is sure at her parents' empty house in the London suburbs, which is her base of operations for her contract programming. (None of her electronics work at Grimmauld Place.) She spent the last of the money that's in her name buying herself a laptop, and now she's splitting her time between two jobs and two houses. And the thing of which she is chronically short these days is time… time, of which there's only so much. And time really is money now.
And she isn't sure that she wants to stay in the wizarding world. If they consigned her to non-existence as a racial inferior once, they can do it again—to her, or to any children she might bear. That makes her faithful with the vile purple potion that holds off the possibility. Even if she sleeps alone now, she's superstitious. She escaped the fate of the wandless muggle-born refugees in Diagon Alley, but that could happen on another turn of the wheel. No hostages to fortune, she thinks, nor to the Goblins either.
Keeping her options open means building a full-time identity in the world of her birth, which means making up for lots of lost time and the secondary-school diploma she doesn't have. Dean put the idea in her head, if she hadn't already been thinking about it. Crossing over. Crossing back. But there's not enough time.
Once upon a time, she had the luxury of time… extra time, whenever she needed more. Time to double back, time to do it over…time to sleep.
Aha.
Third year. The time-turner.
She goes to the fireplace, lights it, throws in a handful of Floo powder, fire-calls Minerva McGonagall at Hogwarts. Time to call in some of her war-hero favors while it's yet remembered what she did.
McGonagall is in, tells her to Floo directly to her office in fifteen minutes. This will be convenient because she has some matters she'd like to discuss as well.
Hermione runs upstairs, throws on her school robes over her jeans and sweatshirt, tucks her infinitely expandable beaded bag in the pocket of her robes… takes one last look over her desk. There's that hank of blond hair in the onyx and silver clasp, that she's three times forgotten to turn in to the authorities. She's sick of looking at that nasty souvenir every time she sits down to work… well, she can hand it over to McGonagall and have done with it.
Out of ancient habit, she detaches a small lock of the hair and some of the dried blood and files them in an envelope. You have the instincts of a Dark magician, her conscience says. But it doesn't stop her filing the envelope in her beaded bag before she puts the rest of the queue in her pocket.
***
On stepping out of the fireplace in the Headmistress's Office, the very first thing she does is to drop the bundle of Draco's hair on McGonagall's desk. "I forgot to turn this in," she says.
McGonagall picks it up and looks at it in puzzlement.
"From the attack. Neville told me to make sure nobody got hold of loose hair… for Polyjuice," she says. McGonagall frowns. She clarifies. "When they attacked Malfoy, they cut this off," she says. McGonagall nods.
"But surely this wasn't your sole reason for coming here."
"No. I wanted to ask you for a favor. With the Ministry. Since you did it last time… and I'm short on time…" She's not making sense and knows it. "You know I'm working at the Ministry now. Paying off the compensation to Gringotts for the war damage. And they're taking everything I make, so I don't have any money here. And there's the other world, and my parents—I have to save for their ticket home, and take care of their house."
"Gringotts does currency exchange," McGonagall says.
"Not for me," Hermione replies. "The Goblins are implacable. When they say I'm paying compensation, they mean every knut. I already made the mistake of bringing muggle money over for exchange, and they took it for the debt. So I need to work in the other world. More or less full time. While I'm working for the Ministry, also more or less full time…"
"I see," McGonagall says. "You know that the Ministry's stock of time-turners was mostly destroyed…"
"Mostly," Hermione says. "And I thought that Dumbledore might have salted something away."
McGonagall smiles, a shrewd expression in which her eyes are only half involved. "I'll see what I can do. And meanwhile, you're staying at the Burrow?"
"No, at Grimmauld Place. The arrangement at the Burrow… fell through." She really doesn't want to elaborate and figures that McGonagall will have seen Rita Skeeter's tasteless article in the Daily Prophet. "And I need to be on the Floo network for work at the Ministry."
"It's not wise to be staying there alone," McGonagall says. She adds dryly, "As a member of the Order, I can tell you that the Ministry directives on the post-war situation are understating the dangers. If you like, I can talk to Molly Weasley…"
"I would really rather you didn't," Hermione says, acutely uncomfortable at the notion of spelling out her differences with Molly to the Headmistress. "It's personal… to do with Ron…"
McGonagall nods, with an expression of distaste. "Yes, I saw the article in the Prophet. I had rather hoped it was Ms. Skeeter spinning rumors… I suppose it best then that we find you other accommodation." She pauses. "Were you to be given a time-turner, I would expect you to be using it under supervision, as before. Which means that you will be reporting to me, weekly. And for that purpose it would be most convenient to arrange a room for you at Hogwarts."
Hermione says that she won't need more than a place to sleep and a desk, just as when she was a student; a spot in the dormitories would suffice. McGonagall tells her that the dormitories are currently serving for the war orphans, so she'll arrange accommodations on the apprentices' corridor that's been hastily organized from disused classrooms.
"So you and Mr. Longbottom will be neighbors again," she says. "Speaking of which, I would like to commend you for your quick thinking in the late unpleasantness with Mr. Malfoy. Madam Pomfrey was most impressed with you and Mr. Longbottom."
Hermione says, "Neville did most of the work. I just helped."
McGonagall says, "Your help was crucial. He could not have taken the patient to the hospital wing had you not provided defensive cover, not to mention aid in breaking up the original disturbance." She looks appraisingly at Hermione. "Mr. Malfoy remains in the hospital wing for the foreseeable future. He has been having serious difficulties with ordinary magic and is unable to defend himself."
Hermione says, "But Neville said we got there before they could do him much harm…"
McGonagall cut her off. "Mr. Malfoy's difficulties predate the attack. He had not seen fit to mention them before." Hermione remembers Neville's puzzlement that a pack of second- and third-year students had succeeded in disarming a seventh-year student by hand. Now she understands. "I need not remind you that I am telling you this in confidence. Nor can I sufficiently express my appreciation for your efforts on behalf of a fellow student with whom you have had differences in the past."
Hermione doesn't tell McGonagall that those differences involved Malfoy looking on while his aunt tortured her, nor that she almost killed him in the hospital wing. Instead she asks, "So he can't do any magic?"
"He cannot predictably cast ordinary spells. Mr. Longbottom has been helping him to learn alternative methods for tasks of daily living." She adds, "He insists that he is having no problems with flying, but Madam Pomfrey is not willing to let him attempt it just yet."
There's a long pause in which Hermione considers the implications. Neville Longbottom is helping Draco Malfoy to adjust to life without magic, she thinks. Funny how things turn out.
Finally she asks, "Is it permanent damage?"
McGonagall sighs. "It's a common side effect of severe emotional distress. For Mr. Malfoy's sake, I certainly hope it is not permanent."
Hermione remembers her conversation with Neville about how pureblood families deal with squibs, and how they both guessed that the Malfoys quietly disappeared theirs.
McGonagall adds, "When you are resident here, I will expect you to help Mr. Longbottom when he requires it." She pauses and gives Hermione a speaking look. "And to exercise the necessary discretion regarding Mr. Malfoy's condition."
Hermione nods. More secrets, she thinks. My whole life here is bounded with secrets and oaths of silence.
McGonagall continues, "For both political and humanitarian reasons, it is critical that Mr. Malfoy come to no harm during his stay at Hogwarts. You are no doubt aware that his parents have been removed from Azkaban to house arrest at the Manor. Their good behavior is being secured by their son's presence at Hogwarts."
Hermione doesn't ask the question, but apparently her facial expression does, because McGonagall replies, "Should the Malfoys violate the conditions of their house arrest, their son will be removed to a more secure location."
Hermione says, "You mean Azkaban." McGonagall nods.
***
Author's notes: Duinn Fionn (on skyehawke (dot) com) aka Geoviki (on LiveJournal) for the initial germ of Dean's analysis on race in the wizarding vs Muggle worlds (chapter 4 of A Thousand Beautiful Things) as well as the idea of him pursuing a career as an artist on the other side of the border. His interest in drawing is canon, as is his passionate interest in sport.
