Five year old Hermione sat quietly on the bed beside her grandmother, lightly holding her pale hand within her smaller one. Her dress was getting wrinkled where she had her legs folded underneath her, but as Shelia Granger sat on the other side of her own mother's deathbed she didn't care much at the moment under present circumstances.

"Shelia," Marie's called her daughter's attention to her with her soft weakened voice still holding traces of her old French accent, although a note of her former strength held true beneath the pain that came with every breath she took. "I am so sorry."

Shelia's eyes were wet with the same tears that streamed down her cheeks, but contrary to any other daughter seeing her mother slowly die in front of her, she was not sobbing. At least for the moment. She had had many years before this time to prepare herself, her mother's 51st birthday bringing with it more than simply another wrinkle upon her fair face. Nonetheless, it was too soon. Much too soon to be preparing for the burial of her loving mother. In the hand that did not cling to the other woman, she gripped a glass morphine bottle with red tipped fingernails to match the only other color that graced Marie's white clad body.

Marie's hand shook as she brought it up to her daughter's cheek, "You weren't supposed to be the one to take on this burden. I never expected to outlive your father."

A broken sob finally escaped from Hermione's mother, her hand slipping out of the weak grip to cover her mouth. Marie turned her head slowly to her granddaughter's sad face, then put her own red nails upon her small cheek, her smile still as strong as it always had been only seemingly a more bit tired.

"Do you understand what is happening, my love?"

Hermione nodded her head somberly, tilting it into the hand still holding her cheek. "You are dying, Grand- mere."

"Do you understand why?"

Hermione shook her head, "I know your Maman was sick and you held her hand while she passed onto her next life. I know that I will have to hold Mama's while she dies, but I don't understand why you have to go so soon."

Shelia shrieked shrilly through the sudden loud sobs that she could no longer hold back, standing and walking fast out of the room into her husband's waiting arms. She could not let her daughter see her this way.

Marie sighed wearily, but still smiled at her granddaughter as her hand reached behind her curls shot through with just a single thick stripe of gray so much like her kin's and unclasped the necklace that had remained around her neck since her own mother had died just a decade ago. Such a short time between then and now, the years were getting shorter and shorter for them.

She held it out to Hermione who clasped the pendent tightly. She had always loved the delicate silver necklace that had lain flat between her grandmother's collarbones, the black tourmaline stones that stood for the eyes of the tiger always glowing at her in recognition. Sometimes when you weren't looking directly at it she believed the jungle cat's likeness to follow her form around the room with it's wise eyes, as much as stone eyes could follow you, but it always returned to normal once you looked right back at it. The twitching whiskers falling back into stillness.

"Give that to your mother once I am gone, mon amour. It has been within our family for centuries, passed down to our daughters on our deathbed." Her fingers mimic Hermione's in brushing over her old friend's eyes, "Tell me our words, Hermione."

"Protege la strie, Protect the Streak."

The older woman was silent for a moment, appraising the small girl as if contemplating something a moment before speaking once more.

"There is power in our family, my love. In our blood. There is power in words as well, and as long as you remember that you will always be safe." She briefly looked back towards the doorway where her daughter disappeared, her eyes suddenly wet where they hadn't been ever since she first knew the disease was beginning. She mets Hermione's eyes with a slightly glazed look as if it wasn't really her she was seeing but her own daughter, "Your child is a blessing, my dear. Even when you know you are sentencing them to death, they will live on long enough to experience what it is like to have the warmth of their own child within their womb. Or laying on your chest furthering this bloodline of ours. Maybe one day we will live long enough to overcome this curse of ours." She grabbed Hermione's wrist tightly with clear eyes once more, making the small girl wince but say nothing in protest. "Promise me our line will continue, my girl. You have a power your mother does not to fine a way for your child and your child's children not to suffer this curse that has been inflicted upon us."

Hermione finally felt tears prick at the corner of her eyes as she kissed her cheek knowing it would be the last time, "I promise grand- mere."

It was just months before Hermione would be off to Hogwarts for her first year when her mother became rapidly sick, the sickness even faster and stronger than she remembered with her grandmother. This was only weeks before a tall austere woman showed up on their doorstep beside an even taller man with a long white beard, this just a few years after she had last seen her grandmother's smile. Just a few years after her then seven year old self had promised her grandmother an impossibly possible thing.

Her father had answered the door while Hermione sat beside her mother's sickbed, holding her hand while she painted her long nails the same shade of red she had matched with Grandmere Marie just years ago. Her mother's bleeds had started suddenly without warning, the sight of the bright red drops of blood slowly leaking out of her nose and ears such an unwelcome and much too soon thing that the two Granger women had simply stared at each other the first time they had come along. They were supposed to have more time, years. Hermione was supposed to have more years with the woman who birthed her. The rate at which she deteriorated and became bedridden brought on anguish upon both her and her father who loved his wife so.

Expected and yet not, Daniel Granger had known this time was to come as well, but his mother in law had even had years before this point. Sheila was down to months. It was too soon.

Too soon…

Once Hermione saw her mother's eyes close and she painted the final stroke on her long pinky nail, she made her way to the living room where her father's sharp tone of voice had died down into silence. She rounded the corner to see his head being held in his large hands as the two strangers in their living room looked to where she stood, the woman smiling kindly in a way that looked as if her lips were not used to the action while the man simply studied her from head to toe. The man even going so far as to look as if he were studying the general airs around her, as if he were seeing something they could not.

"Papa," Hermione caught her father's attention as she sat next to him, keeping her language within the comforting lilt of French as she had done since her mother caught the sickness. "Why are you upset?"

He had looked up to his daughter with tears in his eyes, of happiness or further sorrow she did not know, but both seemed to war within them as he caught his words and began to tell her of her future that the strangely dressed people had brought to him.

She was magic.

Magic could cure everything.

She could save her mother.

She could keep her promise to her grandmother who was even more right about the power within her blood than she had known.

In the end, she looked to them with shining hope in her eyes. "Can you heal my Mama?"

They promised they would look into the matter her father had explained to them, although she would severely overestimate their magical capabilities in the years coming. As well as their willingness to tell the truth to the daughter of a dying woman, their willingness to give false hope to a daughter who trusted their all powerful selves to save her and her mother from their fates. As her mother died within Hermione's third year of Hogwarts with no results to be shown from her professors who had promised a little girl something they knew very well could not be cured as she would find out much later, she held her father around the shoulders once he came to bare the news to her. The news of the death of a parents allowing a non-magical parent to enter the normally sealed walls of Hogwarts.

While he keeled defeated on the ground in front of her with his arms around her still tiny waist tightly as if she were his last lifeline on this earth, to which she was in fact, she ignored Harry and Ron looking to her worriedly as they knew nothing of her family's affliction. She ignored everything except the man breathing heavily into her shirt and the expressions of the three professors who had brought the man to her.

Headmaster Dumbledore looked to her somberly, the twinkle in his eye absent as he observed the air around her once more in a similar way as their first meeting. Hermione had long since had suspicions that the wizard in front of her could see the colors of auras around his student's bodies, a manifestation of the power he held within his own allowing him to see something of her soul that he had not seen fit to share with her. She was fairly certain the man knew exactly what curse her lineage had been afflicted with for years and years even though she herself had scoured the library as well as Madame Pomfrey's extensive magical medical knowledge to no avail. Regardless, she still had yet to come up with even a semblance of an idea as to why he would keep the truth of it from her.

Beside him stood Professor McGonagall who stood with a suspicious tear in her eye as she watched the young girl hold her grieving father rather than the other way around.

Then there was Severus Snape.

Leaning against the castle's bumpy stone wall, he also observed the girl although his stoic face left nothing of any sort of emotion to slip through even his eyes. His thoughts though, those were left swirling rapidly behind his mind shields, contemplating as to why the girl simply stood clutching a tiger pendant within her tight fist behind her father's neck instead of hiding her own face within his hair like a normal girl her age would do when faced with the loss of a parent. Potter and Wealsy stood simply hovering behind the only girl within their trio, oblivious and baffled as to the true reality of the situation other than their third member simply losing her mother. To be fair though, he himself did not know the extent of how this news would change the girl, or even the course of the cold war Britain's magical community had been involved with these past thirteen years.

After that day, the Potions Master took the obviously more subdued child under the black wing of his snake button studded robes and swore to find a way to save her brilliant mind from the same fate as countless mothers before her had succumbed to. Despite the war with the Dark Lord just upon the horizon, he would find a way to remove the curse from the girl he would come to admire for the sheer amount of care and warmth she would bestow upon him with no expectation of reciprocation.

Protege la strie indeed. He would protect the streak to his dying breath.