Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
- T.S. Eliot
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After that, after Hermione had planted the seed of a world she dreamed to create, she left again.
Another Hermione now lived in magical Britain and she could not share her space, could not bear to live so close to the unfolding tale of her own childhood and the tragic one of the person she'd loved most. So she left again. It was easy enough: she had things to do.
Besides, it was time for the world to forget her for a while. It was time for her to continue to sow what she had planted on Samhain in 1981.
But every year on October 31st, Hermione went to her island to check on its growth, and every year she sacrificed something new. On the third year she took a phoenix she'd told the tale to, a tale of ambitious hope beyond that of any magician in written history. Phoenixes are hard to kill, but they can choose not to resurrect and so that year it was not her sacrifice but his. On the seventh year the land was miles across, roiling with magic, and she built a great pyre of wood from wand-trees from across the world. The next year year Hermione went deep into the newly growing forest and burned magical herbs from every continent and ground their ashes into the nascent earth. Over the years she fed it with the ashes of all manner of supernatural beasts, creatures, and flora - and she watched it grow.
Avalon had been known as the Isle of Apples and so was this: a new Avalon rising from the sea. An Avalon fed with her blood and her magic and her sacrifice and, most of all, with the last apple from a myth many had come to disbelieve had ever been real.
Rowena Ravenclaw had sealed off that ancient utopia, but Hermione Dearborn was not so easily cowed. As cities mushroomed and technology grew more advanced, she had seen that magic and muggles could no longer co-exist easily, and so she'd dreamed a place where it would no longer have to hide.
An entire island fifty miles long, grown from a barren rock.
It grew and grew and mountains pushed their way up along the east and the earth split for rivers and streams and lakes, and it became a wild, wonderous place.
A place that might give them all a chance.
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Finally, after Lord Voldemort had come and gone again, more maddened than he'd ever been, she stepped into the place where the footprints of one of her lives had stopped and picked up their journey.
This was the beginning of the third era of her life: a time when she could bear both her names.
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In the eighteen years between waking up on a deserted rock and becoming Hermione Granger-Dearborn, Albus Dumbledore found the key to sending her other self back to a past that she now knew she wouldn't wish to save herself from.
Those last years with her mentor and friend were by turn fraught and loving. The lessons she'd learned from him over the years had not always been the ones he'd wished to impart but one was undeniable, and this was the one that kept her tongue in check as he raised a lamb of a boy to slaughter: that the world is bigger than one life. She'd given up so much of her own to be able to become the person who, she hoped, would lead magic into a new era. That would be worth it, if it worked, however miserable it had been. It hadn't been her younger self's choice, but as she read the letter he'd sent her at the table of her beautiful house on the mighty Pacific coast of Northern California, she knew she had chosen it, just as at the last Harry chose the sacrifice he'd been prepared for.
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Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry
June 1992
Dear Hermione,
I hope this finds you well and that your salon of researchers there is thriving as merrily as it was when I last visited. A haven in a dark world, as I fear a second war begins to loom. It is as you once hinted and the terrible events of this year were a sign I cannot ignore. The light you are creating there will have to burn brightly indeed.
I believe I have at last found the answer to the question you asked me the first night we met.
Amusingly enough, the time we spent searching was rather in vain – although perhaps I would not have recognised this for what it is had we not dedicated those years to furthering our expertise on the subject. I stumbled across a passage in a Muggle book, of all places, confiscated from a student who was reading it during a Transfiguration lesson when I was filling in for Minerva. She was busy overseeing the reawakening of several petrified students. The cover looked entertaining and so I borrowed it from the young man when it was returned to him, and in those jolly pages lay my inspiration.
I await your arrival at Hogwarts to explain further, though I think it is best if I keep the finer details to myself. This is for your own protection.
I will take care of the whole of it.
Yours, as ever,
Albus
PS: had you had exams this year, I remain convinced you would have had top marks despite not attending many classes...
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"Can I see the Chamber?" she asked, after Albus had finished explaining why it was better she didn't learn the defining mystery of her entire life. "I'd like to take some of the basilisk's parts for potions ingredients if that's alright. I think I'll be able to get in."
He was a great man, but like all great men he was flawed and one of his greatest was one Tom Riddle had shown her many years before: he was a wizard who like to hoard knowledge rather than share it.
But he was also a great man who trusted her, and so he nodded and waved her off fondly to explore those familiar, though he did not know that, depths alone.
Hermione loved visiting Hogwarts during the holidays. In term-time it would have been unbearable, and dangerous with her younger self there. But in the long summer vacation she was free to roam those empty halls once again, and Hogwarts often had new secrets to share or to hide.
She knew the way in and out of the Chamber of Secrets better than anyone alive: this had been her and Tom's shared space, a space of many happy memories and of great power, and so though she did fill her satchel with ingredients harvested from the unpleasantly rotting carcass, she left something of her own behind.
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;)
