As always, thanks to MysticDew!

Chapter 20

The Past Is A Foreign Country

-oOo-

4PM, the 31st of March 2007 – 207 Forrest Street, Palmyra, Western Australia

The Granger residence was a comfortable-looking bungalow surrounded by palm trees; it exuded a quiet confidence and seemed to be leaning back from the street as it sat elevated above the pavement where Draco was standing.

The British Ministry of Magic must have given up surveillance on this place years ago, but he quickly established that Hermione hadn't. He had quite some work to do in order to neutralize her wards. She must have made arrangements with someone locally to alert her if they were breached, but other than that he doubted very much that anyone outside the Australian Ministry were aware that the Wilkins were anything other than an average British ex-pat couple.

Despite this, Draco had no wish to advertise his presence; he was Polyjuiced as a slightly overweight, ginger-haired office jockey in his late thirties who happened to have been standing next to Draco in a queue at Harrods before he left London. The unaccustomed humidity and unrelenting sunshine made perspiration roll down his forehead; he wiped it away with an impatient gesture. He had better get this over with so he could return to the hotel and come up with a plan.

Theoretically it was possible to Apparate to the other side of the world, if you weren't too fussy about arriving in one piece. Fortunately, there was little in this world Malfoy money couldn't buy; illegal international Portkeys were eminently obtainable if you didn't mind spending the average annual Ministry salary on one. Or two, if you wanted to come back. Draco had a return Portkey in three days, and by then he needed to collect as much information as possible. There was no time for procrastination.

It took Draco a minute to figure out how to use the doorbell. Muggles really had the strangest contraptions to replace what was perfectly straightforward when done by magic. It turned out to be even easier than he had expected to be admitted into the house.

"Of course we'd be happy to donate. Please come in and sit down, and I'll get my wallet," Mrs Granger said immediately; he didn't even need to use a mild Compulsion charm. She was perfectly willing to hand over her money to a stranger with a British accent saying he was collecting for cancer research. Draco had picked the charity from Hermione's pile of mail in Bermondsey Street. Clearly, SPEW and other well-meaning, if sometimes misguided, attempts by his wife to make the world a better place had been inspired by her parents' example. "I'll get you a glass of water too. You look like you need one," she offered.

"Thank you," he replied, his gratitude sincere for once. As much as he hated to admit that he wasn't impervious to the elements, he was parched. Mrs Granger disappeared into the kitchen, and Draco was left alone in a room filled with bookshelves, wide couches beckoning to his tired legs. It felt as if he had been here before; he had expected to be on edge, as he normally was when he had to visit the Muggle world, but in the Grangers' bright sitting room he was oddly at ease.

Much later, the similarities between Hermione's flat and the Grangers' sunny Australian abode would strike him. There was something in the way they choose to arrange their living space that connected the two, even to someone as unfamiliar with Muggle furnishings as he was.

"Here you go." Mrs Granger returned, with a blessedly cool glass of water and her handbag. "Do sit down, you must be tired. The heat still gets to me, even after all those years. When did you get to Australia?"

"Oh, only recently," he drawled.

"I wish I could tell you it gets easier, but I'm afraid that wouldn't be true."

Draco couldn't stop looking at her, now that she had sat down next to him. The shape of her face: the cheekbones and the firmly rounded chin, just one shade short of being forbidding, all was pure Hermione. The glint in her eyes told him that he had better keep his guard up. It had come as a shock to find grey hairs liberally sprinkled through her red-brown mane and wrinkles around Mrs Granger's eyes. His own mother looked twenty years younger, even though he knew they were around the same age, and Narcissa had born her share of worries and lived through two wars. Of course, Mrs Granger had no idea she even had a daughter, so she could hardly have been concerned about her well-being.

"Now, did you have a form you wanted me to fill out?" she asked. Draco admonished himself to concentrate at the task at hand and pulled out his clipboard; he could look at Hermione's mother in a Pensieve later, if he absolutely had to.

"Now, if you would sign here, and here, please… and fill out this part too-" While Mrs Granger was busy filling in her details, he cast some covert diagnostic charms.

"Will I sign here?"

This was no good. She was very quick, and the readings he was getting weren't making sense. He needed more time.

"Yes, please," he muttered, and concentrated. She stopped in the middle of scribbling her signature (he wasn't surprised that her handwriting, too, was reminiscent of Hermione's), and vacuously stared into thin air, a half-smile on her lips. Draco had used a mild anesthetic charm he had picked up from a book on Healing techniques, and he should be able to stage a Quidditch match in the sitting room without her noticing anything amiss. In the middle of scribbling notes on a parchment, it took him a second or two to register the sound of the front door opening (did they not even lock their door?), and he barely had time to hide his wand under the table before Mr Granger came looking for his wife.

"Darling, are you home?" he called out, and when no one answered he continued in and spotted Draco. "Who are you?" he asked sharply, when he noticed his wife's vacant expression and the stranger sitting next to her and her open handbag.

"I'm collecting for the Australian Cancer Research Foundation, and your wife invited me in. She seemed a bit dizzy just now, but she was fine just a second ago," Draco attempted to explain, frowning in mock-concern; all he wanted was for Alan Granger to move close enough to one of the armchairs so he would land comfortably when Draco used his wand.

Finally, the older man moved, and Draco sat him down with a thud in the leather armchair. All this would have been so much easier if he could have Obliviated them, but the specialist he had consulted considered further memory-related charms a most unwise venture until they knew exactly what Hermione had done. Even when they were still on speaking terms, her parents had been a touchy subject; appealing to Hermione for information now would forfeit the whole purpose of this jaunt to Australia, and probably be fruitless.

Draco cast several charms, filling a whole roll of parchment with observations before he was done, and then surreptitiously removed the charms. Once Alan could see that Helen was fine and had invited the stranger in by her own accord, he became markedly friendlier and even walked Draco out, chatting amiably.

A week later, Draco was back in Australia with his expert for hire, Lars Schledinger, who set to work examining the data retrieved from the Grangers. Draco was left kicking his heels in their hotel suite; exploring the mini bar kept him entertained for a few minutes, then he returned to irritably flicking through some of the books salvaged from the family library that he had thought could be useful. Since he wasn't even permitted into Schledinger's room, they were about as much use as a chocolate wand.

After more than a day had elapsed and Draco was ready to pull his hair out, Schledinger finally emerged. He would not tell his impatient employer what he had discovered; he only insisted that he now would have to meet the subjects.

"That'll be difficult," Draco said, lips compressed to a thin line.

"I must see them myself, or I will not be able to help you."

"Can you guarantee that you can restore their memories if you see them?"

"I cannot guarantee anything, at least not before I meet the subjects and carry out my own diagnostic spells."

"You know very well that they're Muggles. I can't just walk up to their house and explain that a wizard would like to check their memories, thank you very much."

"Then I cannot fulfill my commission, and will return home."

Draco closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

"I'll see what I can arrange."

Compared to the many glorious deeds performed by Malfoys through the centuries, surely coming up with a way of sneaking two wizards into the Grangers' house couldn't be that difficult?

Schledinger was complaining about the heat again. Since they left the hotel he had been complaining about the heat, using Muggle transportation, having to wear a boiler suit instead of robes, the heat, the fact that he was Polyjuiced to look like a spotty teenager and not the head technician, the weight of the toolbox he was carrying, and the heat. Draco testily dealt with one of the complaints, asking Schledinger if he would prefer to do the talking instead, and mostly ignored the rest. As they walked up Forrest Street, the bleating was really getting to him.

"– and I do not see why we could not Apparate in, clean and nice like wizards, instead of Muggle trains and this infernal walking." Draco caught the tail end of Schledinger's latest litany, and he couldn't help himself for all the gold in Gringotts.

"Because you said yourself, in your infinite wisdom, that we couldn't do any more memory charms. What do you want me to do, Apparate in and hope they don't notice?"

They both knew there was no alternative, and that was why Schledinger was dragging his gangly legs in the dust, climbing the slight hill. The exorbitant fee Draco paid for his services had ensured both his silence and his cooperation, even to the extent of impersonating a worker for the Perth division of the Water Corporation. It was an unfortunate oversight on Draco's part that there was nothing in their contract stipulating that Schledinger had to pretend to be happy about it.

"Oh, the Water Corporation? I really didn't think we were using that much water. Wendell?" Mrs Granger was ruffled by the suggestion that their water usage was considerably in excess of the norm, and drafted in her husband to weigh in on the matter.

"I guess the sprinklers do use a bit of water, but I'm pretty sure I've only used them on our watering days. I've forgotten about them some days, though…" he said, looking sheepish. Draco stepped in, thankful that he had done his research; otherwise he wouldn't have had a clue what a watering day was.

"Well, Mr– Wilkins, is it?" he said, pretending to inspect his clipboard (Schledinger was stuck resentfully holding the toolbox).

"Yes, Wendell Wilkins."

"Well, it could just be a leak. If you let me and Adrian here in to have a look, she'll be right in no time!" Draco's Australian accent was unlikely to deceive the natives, but the Grangers didn't appear to detect anything amiss.

"Of course, please come in. This way, I believe – we don't really look at the water meter much…" Mrs Granger led the way and they all followed; Schledinger made sure to trail after Mr Granger, casting some surreptitious spells as they moved through the house. Once they reached the utility room at the back, Draco positioned himself to obscure the Grangers' view while keeping them busy talking, so Schledinger could continue while pretending to rummage through his toolbox.

"Well?"

They were alone; Draco had finally stopped lecturing Mr Granger on the importance of turning off his sprinklers. As he wasn't quite sure what a sprinkler was it had been somewhat lacking in detail, but he had made up for it by laying on the guilt.

"I see now what has happened," Schledinger said, as he examined a wrench with a puzzled expression.

"What happened? Can you retrieve the memories?"

"Your Miss Granger," despite his misgivings, Draco had had to tell him how the Grangers had ended up as the Wilkins, "she was mostly clever about sending them away from England to hide. The charms themselves are not so complicated, for those who know what they are doing."

"But can you lift them?" The wrench was starting to look like a better and better tool for getting Schledinger to answer the damned question.

"I can, yes. A better question is if I can restore their memories."

"And can you?"

"Maybe, I do not know yet."

Belatedly, Draco recalled that Hermione apparently cared about her parents a great deal, whether they remembered her or not. It would perhaps be wise to leave them in the same condition as he found them, and not as gibbering wrecks.

"And how will it affect them if you lift the charms but can't restore their memories?" he asked.

"A much better question." Schledinger beamed at him as if he was his star pupil. "I will contrive. I will contrive."

Draco couldn't wring anything more reassuring out of him, and had to contend himself with dire thoughts of retribution if it failed and the comfort of knowing that Schledinger was one of the five leading world authorities on Memory Charms. He dwelt less on the fact that Schledinger was the only one of the five willing to undertake a commission he had to swear an Unbreakable Vow to keep secret.

It took Schledinger most of the afternoon to do his work; he had abandoned all pretense and compelled the Grangers to sit down on their couch. He proceeded to mutter to himself in German, prod them with his wand, scribble furious Arithmantic calculations on the hotel notepad he had brought with him, and complain about the heat. Neither of the wizards knew how to turn on the air conditioning, so after the first twenty minutes Draco was sweating in his boiler suit. Once the Polyjuice wore off, they transfigured the material back into their original robes and both men looked somewhat more comfortable.

Draco spent the interminable hours drifting around the house, flicking through books and looking curiously at the computer in the study, not quite daring to switch it on. He rooted through the cupboards in the kitchen and triumphantly bore the bottles of cold water he found in the fridge out into the living room. Despite Schledinger's objections, he pried him away from the Grangers for a few minutes so they could be coaxed to drink as well; they were no use if they passed out from dehydration.

Eventually Draco had ended up in the living room, engrossed despite himself in A Short History Of Everything. Schledinger's cough recalled him to the present.

"I believe I have now done everything I can to ensure the desired outcome."

"And now?" Draco's voice was loud in the quiet room.

"Now we see if I have succeeded." He flicked his wand in the suddenly unbearable silence, releasing the Grangers from their unnatural stillness. They both jerked, as if jostled awake by a sudden noise. Draco hastily shrugged down the sleeves of his robes. He had rolled them up to alleviate the heat somewhat, but decided that the first thing the Grangers saw from the wizarding world had better not be the faded Dark Mark on his left arm.

"What?" Mrs Granger looked around with a pinched expression on her face, which hadn't been there when she still was Monica Wilkins. Her husband was grabbing onto her hand, like a man drowning.

"Darling? What's going on?"

"Don't be alarmed. You have just been through a harrowing experience, and it is natural to be disorientated." Schledinger stepped in to reassure them, and Draco could finally admit that he was worth every Knut of his rather exorbitant fees.

"Now please tell me what is your surname?" he commanded.

"Wilkins, of course–" Mr Granger said at the same time as his wife responded with "Granger" They looked at each other, comprehension visibly dawning on Mr Granger's face along with fear.

"I believe this is where you return to the hotel, Herr Schledinger." Draco entered the conversation for the first time. He had no desire to make Schledinger privy to more information than strictly necessary, and it appeared that he had completed his commission. "And may I congratulate you on your achievement?"

After he got rid of Schledinger, who with a quick nod confirmed to Draco that no loose threads remained from his side, it was time to deal with the Grangers. They were huddled together and Draco took care to put his wand aside (while still making sure he could grab it quickly, should he need it), showing his empty hands in the universal gesture of peace.

Hopefully, Hermione had never got around to telling them about wandless magic.

"I don't mean you any harm," Draco started, hoping they would believe him and that they hadn't noticed his faded Dark Mark before. Mrs Granger's face was still unnaturally rigid, and he was desperately trying to come up with some other way of reassuring them when she blurted out:

"Hermione?" She drew a deep breath and expanded: "Is Hermione- was Hermione killed, since she didn't come back to get us?" Oh, was that it? Draco had to admit it was a logical conclusion under the circumstances.

"No, no, she is alive and well." At least he assumed she was well; the last thing he heard was that she was exposing the shoddy adherence to arrest procedures in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement.

"Oh, thank God!" she sobbed and hugged Mr Granger, who had closed his eyes and muttered something inaudible at the news. "Then why isn't she here?" Mrs Granger asked sharply once she had composed herself, looking rather fierce.

Ah. Draco would have bet the remainder of his fortune that St. Granger hadn't given them a choice before modifying their memories.

"And who are you?" Mr Granger added, looking at him suspiciously. "I don't recall ever seeing you before."

"I'm a cousin of Ronald Weasley," Draco glibly answered the second question, neatly dodging all the other things he was for the moment. He had better distract them with answering the first question before they asked him why he didn't have red hair. "May I sit down? It's a rather long story."

Draco told them what he had learnt after the war; how Granger, Weasley and Potter had gone looking for Horcruxes, hunted by the Ministry which had been taken over by Voldemort. When he saw the expression on Hermione's mother's face when she found out what happened to Ted Tonks, he realized how high the stakes were. He had to do this right, or he would do more harm than good.

"I don't know what Hermione said to you, but the truth was probably worse than she could imagine." Preferably, they wouldn't ask how he knew that.

"She tried to explain– she was very upset, I remember," Mr Granger said. "It seemed preposterous. She was going to leave school to go off with her friends, and she wouldn't say where…"

"She's– was only seventeen," his wife continued, "and she'd never told us about a war before, only that there was trouble…"

Draco could see why Hermione would have kept the truth from her obviously loving parents. They still didn't quite seem to grasp how brutal and short their lives could have been if Hermione hadn't sent them out of the way.

"Over a thousand wizards and witches died in the war, almost one out of every fifty in Britain. That's not counting the Muggles–no one knows how many of you were killed. Thousands, at least. Wea– Ron's father and brother were killed in the final battle."

They looked shocked; Draco wondered if he had finally got through to them. They must have met Arthur Weasley, given how close his son had been to Granger all through Hogwarts.

"There was no way Hermione could have protected you if you had stayed in Britain. You would most definitely have been a target." Draco looked grim, the shadows of the war weighing him down.

"Then she should have explained that! It was unforgivable to take our free will from us like that–" Mrs Granger's anger abated in the face of Draco's snarling:

"You have no idea what unforgivable means!" He visibly calmed himself down, donning the impenetrable Malfoy mask again. "What she did, she did out of love. Trust me, she did the best she could."

"So are you saying that she was right to use her magic to make us do what she wanted? You're starting to sound like what she was fighting against, young man," Mr Granger added, the irony quite unintentional.

"Would you have let her do it, if she'd explained that you were facing almost certain death?" They both looked uncertain. "And that you would have been used against her? She would have turned herself in to save you, and then you'd all have died. Very slowly."

The Grangers had clearly failed to consider that angle before. Perhaps Hermione had been too much of a Gryffindor to realise, but Draco strongly suspected that she had shown her usual ruthless practicality and grasped the full implications of how her parents could have been used as a weapon against her and Potter.

"It should still have been our decision!" Mrs Granger still had some fire left in her.

"What about the rest of us, then?" Draco asked. Their faces were blank, not comprehending where he was going. "I went to school with all three of them. You should be very clear about this: if Hermione hadn't gone with Harry Potter on the Horcrux hunt, the Dark Lord would be ruling the wizarding world right now. Probably the Muggle one, too. He left them a moment to ponder that. "Sometimes, the end has to justify the means, and you can bemoan that as much as you like afterwards. At least there is an afterwards."

Mrs Granger got them some tea and Mr Granger turned on the air conditioning before they continued; they all needed a little time to compose themselves after that.

"What happened then, did they find all the Hor-things?" Mr Ganger asked when they were seated again. Draco found unexpected comfort in his tea; it helped dissolving the chill in his bones that had nothing to do with the sunny Australian day outside.

"Yes, they did. Eventually the Dark Lord realized what they were up to and there was a battle at Hogwarts–"

"At Hogwarts?" Mrs Granger broke in, incredulously. "A battle at the school?"

"Yes," Draco answered and managed to avoid rolling his eyes; what had he said to give her the impression the Dark Lord was playing by any set of rules except his own? "They managed to evacuate most of the students first, though," he added. "There were heavy casualties on both sides, but Potter did defeat the Dark Lord."

He decided against bringing up the prophecy; it wasn't necessary right now.

"Unfortunately, it turned out that the last Horcrux was in Harry Potter's scar." The clean horror of it struck him again as the significance of what he was saying dawned on the Grangers; they must have known him a little then, the boy with the strange scar and wild black hair.

"But then–" Mr Granger had obviously figured it out, and Draco felt unwilling admiration for his quick inference.

"Yes. For the Dark Lord to be defeated, Potter had to die. He knew that before the battle started and – and made arrangements."

The Grangers knew both Hermione and Ron, and it didn't take much for them to put the pieces together. Mr Granger bolted from the couch and ran out of Draco's sight; he could hear the man retching in another room, out of sight.

Mrs Granger seemed to be made of sterner stuff, but as he was watching her she broke down in thick sobs that seemed to shake her whole body. Draco was at a loss, but somehow his body moved to the couch on its own accord and he found himself patting her back awkwardly. She clung on to him, rather like Hermione might have done when she forgot that he wasn't Weasley or Potter. Draco wished for a brief moment his own mother could have cried like this, just once.

Maybe the Muggles were right and it was healthier to let it all out.

Momentarily, Mr Granger returned, and attended to his wife rather more expertly than Draco. By unspoken agreement, there was another round of tea. They were more subdued this time.

Draco told them, very concisely, of Hermione's trial and banishment, and of Weasley's recent return amongst the living. He would rather they didn't find him in a lie, so he glossed over how he got together with Hermione and their current living arrangements; he had no idea how much she would tell her parents eventually, so for the moment he stuck to the bare bones of the story without elaborating.

"All that time, she was just in London…" Mrs Granger mused. "In the same world as us. We could have checked into her hotel."

"Did she ever consider having someone else er-remove the memory charms?" Mr Granger asked with studied nonchalance. It didn't come naturally to him. Draco would have done better as a five-year-old.

"She was told it wasn't possible. By an expert, someone she trusted." Draco replied in tones that left them no strangers to his opinion about the so-called expert; they may not have caught his implication that Hermione had been deliberately deceived, however. "She came here to check on you after she got her magic back, to make sure you were all right."

"Do you have a photo of her?" Mrs Granger asked suddenly. "We might have seen her, only we didn't recognize her-" Draco produced a relatively recent photo of Hermione that he mysteriously happened to be carrying in his pocket. It must have ended up there when she was missing, in case he had to contact the Aurors.

"Here," he proffered. They were taken by surprise when the picture moved, and their daughter's familiar smile shone back at them. The photo had been taken by Angelina Weasley at some birthday party or other at the Burrow this summer; Hermione was shading her eyes against the sunlight and had freckles on her nose. The Grangers silently traced the contours of her face, and the miniature Hermione patiently submitted to their scrutiny.

"When can we see her?" Mr Granger asked abruptly.

"That depends."

"Depends on what? You can't stop us from seeing our own daughter!" Mrs Granger's voice sounded noticeably shrill.

"Hermione doesn't need you to find fault with what she did in the war. Believe me, she's hard enough on herself as it is." There was no way Draco would let them anywhere near Hermione before they were ready to embrace their long-lost daughter without any recriminations; he hadn't done this to upset her even further. "You don't even know how to find her without me, so I believe I am quite capable of keeping you from seeing her until I deem it appropriate." For good measure, he added: "And you would do well to remember that I figured out how to return you to yourselves, so how about some gratitude?"

The last thing he expected was for Mr Granger to burst out laughing.

"Well, I can see how the two of you would get on like a house on fire!"

That was one way of putting it, Draco thought grimly. Now, all he had to do was to make Hermione agree to be in the same room as him without an audience, once he had come up with a way of reuniting her with her parents that showed him in the best possible light.

Oh, and he would have to figure out how to tell the Grangers which side he had been fighting on in the war, while keeping them convinced that he was the greatest thing since Gethin Geonor found a way to juice leeches without getting your hands slimy.