Happy 2020 everyone! I'm excited to be back in the New Year, a new perspective, after a much needed few weeks off.
New stats for this story: Since I last updated, we have reached almost 500 reviews, 625 favs, and over 1225 followers. Thank you so much! It means a lot to me that this community is still here for this story after such a long time.
Lots of love
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter.
"No, Remus. Morganna."
The wide-eyed looks that followed her statement bore into her soul. Perhaps it was Moody's electric blue-eye, seeing through her as it always did, but the admission of her new-found lineage felt as if she was bearing herself before these three men, all of whom she had known for years.
Who she had known since she was Hermione Granger.
"Hermione," Kingsley said, his low voice shaking slightly. "Are you…are you implying that Celia Nott is your mother?"
"I'm not implying it," she said, shaking her head. "I am telling you that I am a Nott."
"But she died," Remus said quickly, wracking his hand nervously through his pepper hair. "Moody would know! He was the damn auror in charge of the case."
She turned to look at the other man. "You were? Back during the first war?"
Moody appraised her, his eye spinning wildly, before nodding. "Bloody business, the Notts' murder was. It was near the end of the war, about a month before Potter worked his magic. By the time aurors were summoned, all that was left of Tiberius was a bloody pulp on the manor lawn. The manor was burned to ashes. Celia died in the fire. Celia and their…"
Moody trailed off. He frowned slightly, and then both eyes were fixed on her.
"Celia and their what?" Hermione prompted.
"Celia and their baby daughter."
Remus turned to look at Moody so quickly that she swore his neck cracked.
"His daughter?" Remus said, shocked. "Nott and Celia had a daughter?"
Moody nodded. "They were pretty quiet about it. The only reason we know is that the other Nott Sr demanded all three bodies for a funeral."
"Did you hand them over?" Kingsley asked.
Moody shook his head. "No. We handed over Tiberius. But not Celia or the girl."
"Why not?" Hermione asked.
Moody looked back at her. Hermione couldn't recall a time in her life when she had seen this expression on the auror's face. Usually tough, the grizzled warrior, screaming CONSTANT VENGILENCE at them, now looked…nervous? It couldn't be.
"We couldn't find the bodies," he replied. "Figured they had burned to ash in the house fire. And then, when the war ended a month later, the case was never reexamined."
Remus stood up very suddenly from his chair and began fidgeting. His eyes seemed to grow wilder by the moment.
Blaise spoke then. Hermione had almost forgotten that he was flanking her.
"You didn't find the bodies because they got out, Moody. Celia and the baby girl…Hermione…survived."
Remus was now pacing actively around the kitchen, clutching his hands nervously, eyes dancing from her to Blaise and back again.
"How in the bloody hell do you know that, Zabini?"
If Blaise was offended by Remus's sudden aggressiveness, he didn't show it. For a man about to be thrown to the lions, he seemed rather cheerful.
"I knew about Hermione's mother," he replied. "I'm sorry that I didn't tell you earlier, but I've known about Hermione's identity since I arrived."
"Known what about Hermione's identity?"
If there was a voice she wanted to hear less in that moment, she couldn't name it. The blood in her veins froze as Seamus entered the kitchen. He seemed to have calmed down from his earlier outburst over rescuing Draco, but she had no reason to believe his calmer expression had to do with him finding True North on his moral compass.
No. His face, now mixed between curious and worry, reflected something else entirely.
Fixation.
The three older men stared at their younger compatriot for a moment before Remus spoke again, apparently deciding to ignore Seamus's entrance. His anger at Blaise did not seemed to have waned due to the interruption, but rather, it had amplified.
"Zabini," he nearly growled, his lycanthropic tendencies overriding the kind, reasonable man she knew so well. "We offered you asylum in this building. We saved your life, when you know we didn't have to. You've been upgraded to full order member, for fucks' sake! And you…what? Didn't find it…bloody fucking agreeable to you to shine a light on the mystery that has overrun this organization since you arrived?"
"He was trying to protect me," Hermione interrupted, feeling slightly irritated at Remus's outburst. Sure, Blaise had kept it from them, but with good reason. With her life on the line, and the spotlight she had been feeling since her 20th birthday, she understood his rational.
"Protect you from what?" Seamus interrupted, anxiety creeping into his voice.
"Maybe he was protecting you, Hermione," Remus snapped, as his body started to shake more and more violently. "But he withheld a vital piece of information that if he had shared at the end of fucking September…"
Suddenly, Remus picked up a mug on the table and threw is at the opposite wall. "STUPID!" He screamed as the ceramic shattered into pieces on impact.
Hermione took a frightful step backwards. She had never seen Remus like this. Not after the failed mission in August. Not after Tonks' had lost their baby after going into battle at three months. Not…not ever.
As she stepped back, she stepped into her former lover. As she stumbled slightly, he reached out and held the small of her back, preventing her from falling.
Doing what she had wanted from him for over a year.
Seamus's hand on her back felt familiar, but distant. It was as if she was reliving a dream from years prior.
A memory from a past life.
She shot him a quick grateful look before straightening herself to face Remus dead on. Even Kingsley and Moody seemed concerned. She watched the two aurors' reach for their wands, in case of having to intervene against Remus's sudden loss of reason.
"Remus," she said calmly, hoping the power of suggestion would override his anger. "What is going on here?"
He pointed a shaking finger at Blaise. "If he had told us about Celia Nott, I could have bloody well explained the rest."
Her stomach dropped. "What?"
"I knew Celia in school," Remus said, bitterness creeping into his voice "Had a crush on her in my earlier years. Damn it, how could I have not seen it before? You look like she did at our age. Your hair, it's a dead giveaway. I didn't recognize her right away in the damn picture because I had…I had never seen her that old. I thought she had died. She aged. Life does that."
"It's been twenty-five years, Remus," Kingsley said, his voice back to its low calm, now clutching his wand fully. "Why would you remember exactly what she looked like the last time you saw her?"
"It's been twenty-two years," Remus spat out. "The last time I saw Celia was right before she married Tiberius. It was my final year at Hogwarts, and she had come back to visit a few professors. She was Head Girl, you must understand."
Even in the heat of the moment, Hermione felt her heart swell at the knowledge. Her mum. Head Girl.
"We ran into each other in the hall," Remus murmured, his voice suddenly soft. Lost in memory. He took up his pacing again. "Had a brief chat. The whole encounter had to have been less than three minutes. But she was wearing a short sleeve shirt. And on her wrist was that mark. The willow tree."
He pointed at Hermione's arm. She hadn't realized she was clutching her marked forearm. She let go, and blood returned to where her fingerprints had left white marks.
Remus chuckled darkly. "I asked her if she had gotten a damn tattoo. She laughed and said 'something like that.' Then she left.
"That's why the mark seemed familiar when you first showed it to me. I had seen it before. Over twenty years ago, on the wrist of a woman I thought died decades back. But now that you say it, how could I not have seen it before? You look just bloody like her, Hermione. It's uncanny."
"But I never made the connection…merlin, I never even considered the connection…because I thought you were muggleborn."
Only the sound of Remus's haggard breathing following his breakdown. For a few moments, as her former professor's breathing slowed, and the tension in the room began to dissipate, they all stood in silence.
Hermione's heart was pounding as the implications of his words planted themselves in her brain.
A fleeting moment, two decades ago. How could she expect Remus to have remembered? A three minute conversation, an assumed tattoo, of a woman who he hadn't even known had a daughter.
But she was her mother's daughter. And now, twenty years later, she stood before Remus and watched as the final puzzle of a two decade, three-thousand-piece abstract puzzle, finally fell into place.
He turned to face her fully, the anger seemingly gone.
Instead, complete comprehension dominated.
"You're Celia's daughter," he whispered. "Which means, you're her only surviving kin. Female kin."
Remus took a deep breath.
"That's the Mark of Morganna, isn't it?"
Hermione, too stunned to do anything else, merely nodded.
At her affirmation, Remus fell into his chair, head in his hands. The energy he had spent screaming had disappeared, replaced by total collapse.
"Should've known…should've bloody well known," he muttered to himself.
The rest of the Order Members stared blankly at her former DADA as he muttered into his hands, his words growing more incomprehensible by the second.
"Remus," Moody said gruffly. "Snap out of it. None of us knew. How could we have? Granger…well…Nott was muggleborn ten minutes ago."
"Wait," Seamus interrupted. "Hermione's not muggleborn?"
If she ever needed reassurance that perhaps Seamus hadn't been for her, the amount of time it took him to bloody catch on did the trick.
"The Mark of Morganna," Kingsley mused. "But that's…that's legend."
"Apparently not," Moody said.
"What one bloody second," Hermione said, frowning. "You all know about the Mark? And it took us this long to figure out what was going on?"
"It's…it's myth, Hermione," Kingsley explained. "Yes, the original witch was known for willow trees, but the mark has been masked in secrecy for over a millennium. We didn't know where on the body it appeared or what symbol it took, or even what powers it held."
"They could've bloody well painted one on the walls of the Ministry and no one would have been the wiser," Moody said. "At least, none of us would have been."
"Could someone explain what is happening?" Seamus interrupted. "What on earth is the Mark of Morganna?"
Remus sighed, finally looking up. "The Mark of Morganna is a symbol that appears on the body of direct descendants of Morganna Le Fay."
Seamus' eyebrows furrowed. "And Hermione's willow tree is the mark?"
Remus nodded, eyes turning back to her.
She was watching him. As their eyes met, she saw something flash behind his eyes. It was brief, momentary, and fleeting.
But she knew that look. It was the look Remus wore when she had told him the list of the dead after the Battle of Diagon Alley. It was the look he had worn as Tonks' recovered from her miscarriage.
It was sadness. It was grief. It was mourning for the dead.
"Why are you looking at me like that?" she asked, her voice shaking. He was looking at her like she was a corpse.
"Because your world just became much more dangerous," Remus answered. "Nott and his wife were killed over that mark."
"But she wasn't killed."
"But the Dark Lord meant for her to be," Remus retorted. "He went to their home that night for Celia. She was the prize. Nott was collateral damage."
"How do you all this, Remus?" she cried out, finally feeling frustrated. "You told me you didn't know what this mark was. Remember? I came to you first on the morning of my birthday. And you said you had no idea. How is it possible that you've known everything, the whole time, and we are only having this conversation now?"
Remus looked up at her then, regret in his eyes. "Like I said, I was a bit found of Celia…a bit fonder than I should have been for a married woman. After the war…years later… I asked Dumbledore why she had been killed. Tiberius and Celia were Death Eaters…"
Her heart stopped and blood ran cold. "My parents were Death Eaters?"
"At least now you and Draco have something in common," Blaise muttered, chuckling darkly.
"Tiberius was," Remus clarified. "Celia, she was more of a Death Eater's wife. Think of Narcissa Malfoy. She preferred to be in the background. She was wonderfully kind when I knew her, so I never really believed she was on the dark side. After the war, when the lists came out of all known Death Eaters, dead or alive, Tiberius's name was on them. Celia's was not."
"Which made their murder so much stranger. Moody can testify that the Nott family murders, as they were known, were brutal. Voldemort killed them himself, which meant one of two things. One, they had defected, and were a lot closer to the top than I had known. Or two, they had something he wanted, and they refused to give it up."
"I wanted to know which it had been. I had really hoped they had defected. I was not terribly against Tiberius either. His older brother was a tyrant, but Tiberius was nice enough, for a Slytherin. Like Regulus. So I asked Dumbledore. If anyone would have known, it would have been him."
Remus took a deep breath.
"And Dumbledore…merlin, I remember it like it was yesterday. I was in his old Headmaster's office, with him sitting in that giant chair. He clasped his hands, pursed his lips at me, and just said 'Celia Nott was the last known descendent of Morganna Le Fay. She wouldn't submit to the Dark Lord, so they were killed."
"Dumbledore knew?" Hermione said, remembering her now dead headmaster. "He knew who my mother was?"
"He did," Remus replied. "And I think he might have known about you too, Hermione, looking back. He said 'last-known', not last. Nothing slipped past that man. He ended the conversation there and we never spoke of it again."
Remus sighed, having finally calmed himself down. "It was all there, in my head. Every answer was right there. But they were separated. I knew Celia was a Le Fay. I didn't know the symbol on her wrist was the Mark of Morganna. I didn't…I couldn't have known that you were her daughter, Hermione. You were muggleborn. I'm so sorry, I should have remembered. I should have put it together. I should have helped you. Voldemort obviously knows now, otherwise he wouldn't have risked the Summer House Mission the way that he did. I'm sorry. I should have protected you, the way that someone should have protected Celia."
Hermione looked at the man before her, decades her senior, with soft pity in her eyes. She watched as guilt wracked his body, his mind blaming itself for not seeing the clues, for not understanding that they were all part of the same picture. And now, Remus was blaming himself for the danger Hermione was in.
She felt no anger. No malice. No more frustration. Only pity.
How could she have expected him to have figured it out? Two brief interactions, twenty years ago, and her unknown family tree. Remus was not a God. These were little moments to him, in competition with every instance from his long life. He would not have seen them as consequential enough to link, to form the connections between them that would have led him to the answer that was in front of them now.
It reminded her of the muggle train station. If she left a Remus at a station, and transferred trains twice, how would he be expected to know where she had ended up? He didn't have access to her mind, to the map, to intention.
Two train connections over twenty years. How on earth would he know what the destination was?
"Remus," Hermione said softly. "I'm not mad. We didn't know. No one knew."
"Except Blaise."
"Blaise did what he thought was best," Hermione continued, almost feeling the Slytherin roll his eyes behind her. "But I don't need you all protecting me. I can do that myself."
"That's what your mother probably thought too."
"And my mother lived," Hermione reminded him. "Maybe not as a witch, but she lived. She remarried, she raised me. She only died a few years ago, nearly twenty years after her official death in the Wizarding World."
"She made her own life and she protected herself. I intend to do the same."
Remus watched her for a moment, before taking a deep breath, pulling himself together and nodding. He cracked a small smile.
"You remind me of her, you know. Celia. She was…she was fireproof."
Hermione smiled sadly at the word choice. "She was fireproof. At least the first time. But the second time, the fire won."
Remus shook his head. "She may have died in the second fire at your muggle home, Hermione, but she will always be fireproof to me. It comes for all of us in the end. But you're right, she gave herself twenty more years. And she gave us all you."
Hermione thought about Remus's words for a moment as she considered something. A new idea, slipping through her mind, like a water droplet down a window in the rain.
It comes for all of us in the end.
Had she known?
When Hermione had imagined her parents' death, she had imagined screaming and chaos as they fought against a power that they had no tools to combat. She imagined them burning to death in her childhood home, crying for her to save them, when she couldn't. When she hadn't.
But now she imagined it differently.
She imagined her mother staring death in the face, calmly accepting her fate as the Death Eaters trapped her and her husband in the house. She imagined her mother waving her hand, finding a power within herself that she hadn't used for years. She imagined her mother and father holding each other, a cooling charm protecting them from the pain, as they spent their last moments together. Her mother would not have tried to save them. Hermione felt certain, that for her it would have been a long time coming. It would have been a new adventure. It would have been an opportunity to see her first husband after decades, to spend eternity with both of her loves, for Hermione was positive that Celia Nott had loved Richard Granger as well. It was a chance to live as herself again, if only in death.
It comes for all of us in the end.
The puzzle pieces fell into place. Her mind made its tight train connection.
And for the first time since her parents' death, Hermione felt complete and utter peace.
Review :)
