Hermione clicked the 'new email' button and carefully typed the unfamiliar address. She had spent quite some time wondering what to say in her first approach to the woman she so desperately wanted to meet, and had decided that something polite, friendly and to the point was probably best.
"Dear Lauren," she typed, speaking out loud as she did. "Or dear Dr Bennett? No, Dear Lauren, I think. From the way Charlie talks about her, she's not that formal. Right, Dear Lauren…"
"You don't know me, but my second favourite brother-in-law really loves you…" said her husband in an impersonation of her voice as he walked out of the bathroom, running his fingers through his damp hair to arrange it the way he wanted before he used a drying charm.
"Fred!" she reprimanded.
"What?" he asked innocently. "It's true!"
"Which bit?" Hermione tipped her head to one side. "Because I don't remember ranking your brothers…"
"Ah! So he does really love her then? You didn't challenge that!" Fred looked pleased with himself.
Hermione narrowed her eyes. "That's for him to say, not me. And I wouldn't have told you about it if I thought you would tease him."
"Seriously?" Her husband looked surprised and extended his right hand towards her. "Hi. I'm Fred Granger-Weasley. Teasing is my middle name."
Hermione snorted and ignored the proffered hand.
"Well Fred Teasing Granger-Weasley, why don't you make yourself useful and put the kettle on while I decide what to write next? Or put some clothes on, though I have to say I quite like you in that..."
"Just be your usual lovely direct self," Fred called over his shoulder as he headed toward the kitchen.
Hermione watched him admiringly. He had left the shower with just a towel wrapped around his waist and it didn't leave much to her imagination. Since they had got together and got married (all within about 36 hours, so she was aware their relationship hadn't had a normal progression, whatever that might look like), they had made love almost every day, often into the night and sometimes again when they woke. Over the past few days, she had started to become more adventurous as well. No longer feeling that they needed to be in bed, Hermione was reaping the benefits of Fred's creative imagination when it came to lovemaking and also trying out some of Charlie's advice about taking the lead.
It had begun with her realising that she enjoyed the excitement of exploring other locations within the flat (when George wasn't around, of course) and, lately, she was getting turned on by joining Fred in making a list of other places in which they would like to surprise each other. She had also tried what Charlie had described as 'the bossy approach' once she and Fred were alone after their lasagne dinner the previous evening, and it couldn't have gone better. The bond between them was strong, and it was at its peak. But bond or no bond, Hermione didn't think she would ever grow tired of being with Fred in that way. Especially when he looked that good straight out of the shower.
She shook her head to clear her thoughts and went back to tapping away on the keyboard, pausing now and again to consider her next sentence. Hermione's mini laptop was her one big muggle indulgence. Unless you counted good dark chocolate, which she didn't. Since discovering solar chargers, Hermione had been delighted at how simple it was to keep a metaphorical foot in the muggle world. Her clever little machine meant that she could learn, read and play without having to rely on electricity or other aspects of non-magical life that weren't easily available in Diagon Alley, and she was glad that she had collected it for her research.
"Hmmmm," Hermione addressed Graham, a pygmy puff who had been brought upstairs by Fred because his constant sneezing had made Fred wonder if he might have a bit of a cold but who was, if you asked George, just a bit emotionally needy. "I'm not going to mention Charlie til we meet. Well, if we meet. Don't want to freak her out if she's moved on and is with someone else, and it would be a bugger if she refused to meet me because she's sore with him or thinks he deliberately ignored her."
She had already found out what she could about Charlie's favourite lecturer from the woman's public profile and publications, and focused her email around their shared interests, thanking her lucky stars both that Lauren's new university had a profile page for each staff member and that she and Lauren had some common academic ground. "I don't want to be a weird stalker, Graham, but if there's a chance she feels the same way about Charlie, well we have to at least try…" The pygmy puff gazed adoringly at her in response and leaned his cheek towards Hermione's hand; happy to have the attention.
Ten minutes later, the email was written and she asked Fred to read it for her before she clicked the send button.
"It looks good to me, love," he said, when he had finished peering at the screen. Hermione wondered, not for the first time, whether he was going to need reading glasses soon, and made a mental note to ask Molly how that worked for witches and wizards. Harry had acquired his iconic glasses before he knew he was a wizard, so there might be magical means that Fred could use to improve his eyesight if he preferred, she thought.
"I just hope it works." She clicked the send button, closed the lid and pushed her chair back. "There. It's gone. And in the meantime, I am off. Have fun in the shop; I have a new area to research." She beamed at her husband and raised herself up on her toes to give him a long kiss goodbye.
"The Statute of Secrecy?" he asked when they broke apart.
"Yes." She continued to hold onto Fred's waist, not really wanting to part from him, but knowing he needed to relieve George downstairs so that his brother could go and watch Angelina's Saturday afternoon quidditch match. He was equally drawn to Hermione and he moved his right hand to cup her bottom and pull her pelvis towards his as she continued. Hermione's eyes grew wider. "By the end of today I am going to know all the ins and outs of the secrecy law and its implications for romance." She stroked Fred's back. "I'm planning ahead. If Lauren agrees to meet me and turns out to be single, then I need to know what I can tell her. Because if there's any way she's open to seeing Charlie and I can help them to be together, I'm going to do it."
"I don't doubt you will, love; you're a veritable Cupid. It's a good job I married you first; Charlie might have scooped you up in gratitude otherwise!" He nuzzled her neck in response to the stroking.
"No chance," said Hermione, leaning further into his touch. "You should have seen him, love. He's completely taken with this woman. Even though it was nearly three years ago. You know we've been thinking he was with a different witch every week?"
Fred murmured in agreement. Now he was licking her neck with catlike strokes of his tongue, and Hermione felt herself melting.
"Well I don't know for sure, but I don't think he's been with any. I think he's been pining for Lauren and just allowed people to carry on assuming he's still behaving as he did when he was younger. That's what Bill says, too."
"Why do you think he never told us before?" Fred asked, kissing up her jawline as he moved one of his hands higher and slid it up Hermione's side.
"I don't know. He seemed a bit overcome by the romance of our speedy wedding. Maybe that and the beer and the heat of the day just brought it all out." She sighed at Fred's touch. "I'm glad it did, though. And just imagine how much leverage we'll have with your mum if we can be instrumental in getting Charlie settled down."
"Godric, you're right, love" said Fred, pulling away slightly. "Fuck, I should stop this … if I carry you back to bed and end up being late, George will skin me."
"Here…" Hermione led him to a drawer which opened to reveal a stash of dark chocolate-covered cherry liqueurs, put there for just this sort of occasion. "Open wide…" He did, and Hermione fed him two chocolates and popped another couple into her own mouth. It helped dampen their ardour enough for Fred to pull back slightly and refocus on the conversation.
"Thanks, love. What's your first step then?"
Hermione took a deep breath, composing herself. "Actually, I'm going to floo up and meet Minerva at the school. She knows loads more about this than I do. It was her who came to see my parents and I when it was time for me to know I was a witch and find out about going to Hogwarts, and she's had her own run-ins with the secrecy law as well, you know?"
"Yeah, didn't she fall in love with a muggle or something?"
Hermione nodded. "And not that I want to drag that all up for her, but she said she didn't mind talking about it. I know it'll be different because Lauren's an adult, not a child, but I'm sure Minerva will be able to tell me what I need to know. And she knows Charlie well from his Gryffindor quidditch seeker and captain days, so that'll help her set me on the right path. Anyway, I'd better go, sweetheart, else I'll be late."
Reluctantly, Hermione let go of her husband after one more deep kiss and walked towards the flat's fireplace. She picked up her bag in one hand, took a handful of floo powder in the other and blew Fred a kiss before throwing it down and saying 'Headmistress' Office' in a clear voice.
"Give Minnie my love!" He winked as she disappeared.
When Hermione arrived in Minerva McGonagall's office, she stepped out of the fireplace to find her former professor chatting happily to a portrait of Albus Dumbledore.
"Hermione!" she greeted the younger witch with a friendly hug. "I was just telling the Headmaster here that you were on your way. He loved hearing about your wedding. Hasn't stopped chuckling since he heard you took on one of the Weasley twins."
Hermione smiled and waved to the portrait of her former headmaster, who gave her a friendly wave back. "Love," she told him from across the room. "It's a funny old thing!"
"Indeed it is, Ms Granger-Weasley," the portrait Dumbledore said. "Indeed it is."
"Now," said Minerva, indicating that Hermione should make herself comfortable in a chair and summoning a tray of tea from the sideboard. "How can I help you?"
An hour later, Hermione was both better and worse off. Better in that she was now an expert on the ins and outs of the Statute of Secrecy, but also rather despondent that the situation was a little more complex than she had hoped. And for 'complex', read, 'emotionally fraught with the one sensible option totally and utterly comprised of bureaucratic minutiae and wound around with a mile of needless red tape'.
In cases like Hermione's, the Headmistress had explained, it was simple and easy. A Hogwarts professor would travel to meet the family of a muggle-born witch or wizard and fully explain the situation. Nine times out of ten, this happened in the spring or summer before their first year at the school but, in cases where accidental magic was getting out of hand, flexibility and an earlier approach were entirely possible and it was in fact acceptable for any member of the wizarding community to offer information and support to parents of magical children. The UK was much more laid-back and open-minded than the US in this regard. Many muggle-born people came to know about the wizarding world through their sons and daughters, and the Statute allowed for this. There were mechanisms for muggles like Hermione's parents to access the wizarding world, for instance to shop in Diagon Alley or to take their offspring to get the Hogwarts Express.
Interesting as she found it, none of that helped Hermione though. When an adult witch or wizard wanted to date, live with or marry an adult non-magical person, things were a bit more complex. It wasn't that a witch or wizard couldn't tell a muggle about the wizarding world; it was that they had to be one hundred per cent certain that the information wouldn't go any further and that secrecy would be maintained. A witch or wizard who endangered the secrecy of the wizarding world could be punished, and that fact made confession a calculated risk.
Generally, Minerva explained, one would need to build a trusting relationship with someone before feeling able to tell them, but then the very act of dropping such an enormous information bombshell was almost guaranteed to shatter whatever trust that the couple had built up in their relationship to date. The fallout was often disastrous and more often than not involved emergency memory modification spells and the end of the relationship.
Because of this, a good many witches and wizards, Minerva told Hermione with a good deal of apologetic face-pulling, either decided to end the relationship or kept their real identity and nature a secret from their beloved unless and until they had a child together who turned out to be magical. But accidental magic showed up at different times for different children, and this path also often led to marital strife when the non-magical partner discovered not only that their other half had lied for years but that their child wasn't who they thought they were either. Not a great recipe for a marriage and Hermione couldn't see Charlie going for that. He was far too straightforward and honest.
A good few magical folk, Hermione learned, had decided to relinquish their wands and put magic behind them in order to maintain a relationship with a non-magical person, but it could be difficult to maintain contact with one's family in this situation. Apart from any other consideration, such as how on earth one would hide the magical movement of Molly's serving plates at the Weasley Sunday dinner from a muggle partner, many magical households were only accessible by floo or apparition. Neither of those was possible without a wand or access to a magical fireplace. This wasn't so much of a concern at The Burrow, which was accessible by road as long as you didn't mind driving for an hour through the narrow, hedge-lined Devon roads, but there were still a few potential pitfalls that would need to be considered. Hermione filed this knowledge away, thinking that perhaps this option might be possible under certain circumstances, especially as she now had the combined brains and considerable magical talents of the Weasley twins at her disposal as well as Ron and Harry's fast-developing auror expertise, but she knew that Charlie's family was the one thing he wouldn't give up.
The final option entailed petitioning the Wizengamot for a special licence, which would allow the magical partner to inform his or her partner of the situation in a more managed way and before the relationship had progressed too far. It still meant that the non-magical person had to deal with knowing that their boyfriend or girlfriend hadn't been entirely truthful up until that point, but Hermione figured it was more palatable than living a lie for months or years.
As far as Minerva knew, the information was shared with the non-magical person in a controlled environment by a pair of aurors who were trained to be able to assess how the non-magical person had taken the information. They would then decide whether they would be allowed to retain the information or whether they would need to be obliviated and never see the potential partner again. The upside was that the magical person wouldn't face a trial if things didn't go to plan. The downside was that no-one had successfully petitioned since 1927, and the current membership of the Wizengamot weren't known for their progressiveness, however hard Kingsley was working to change that.
Hermione sighed. She felt a pang of pain at the realisation that, had she lived through the war, Charlie's old school friend Tonks might have been able to use her auror training to step in and help with this. She would probably have loved getting involved in setting Charlie up with the woman of his dreams, too, and Hermione found herself wondering if Charlie had confided in Tonks before she died. She sighed again, causing Minerva to pat her arm and offer some reassurance that things would work out eventually. Hermione nodded and gave her old professor a smile. It wasn't that she had thought this was going to be easy, she explained. It's just that she had hoped that there might be at least one pathway which offered a straightforward and reasonable way forward for Charlie.
After thanking Minerva and catching her up on the news from Diagon Alley, Hermione flooed to Hogsmeade and spent a happy hour pottering around the shops and enjoying afternoon tea at a new café which had sprung up in the short weeks since the war ended. She used the café's fireplace to floo home to the flat and, happy to be back home again, sat on the sofa to remove her sandals.
"Where's Fred then?" she asked Graham, who had settled on her lap almost as soon as she had sat down. "I guess he must be down in the shop still. Well, I think I'll check my email."
Hermione had hoped to find a response from Lauren, but there was none. Rather than put her feet up and worry about the Charlie problem further, she decided to go down, help Fred close up the shop and make his evening by taking him to The Leaky Cauldron for fish and chips and a few butterbeers. In preparation, and because she so enjoyed playing with their bond, she thought hard about fish and chips and was rewarded by feeling him fill with delight.
A couple of seconds later, she felt George fill with delight as well. Hermione smiled to herself and put her sandals back on. She couldn't tell whether George was back in the shop or still at Angie's, but either way she figured it had to have been a short quidditch match for him to be able to contemplate dinner before the shop had even closed. She vowed, not for the first time that week, to put some time aside to work on how to better direct her communications just to Fred and not automatically 'cc' George in as well.
Hermione opened the door which led from the flat down to the shop. "OK then," she called as she descended the stairs. "I'm coming down to help close up and then we can go, but I've spent all my cash restocking our chocolate supply at Honeydukes so you two are paying!"
OoOoOoOoOoOoO Reviews and comments are as welcome as ever :-) Thank you so much to everyone who has left a comment or review; I do read and value them all though it's really fiddly to reply in here, so I tend to focus my time on updating instead :-) Also, I will be posting the first installment of 'Hermione's Christmas Cracker' in a couple of days, and it will then be updated every 2-3 days until the finale on Christmas Eve (and I'm in the same time zone as The Burrow). It's a fun and fluffy Fremione holiday fic designed to 'open' like an advent calendar and if you're reading this in real time and would like to follow along and get updates, you know what to do :-)
