Sorry if anyone was waiting for this update but… well… tough. I've been quite enjoying reading the old, and not so old, stories from other writers who seem to agree with me on how the HP world could have been made better. It was amusing to be reminded again that great minds think alike/there's nothing new/insert favourite adage here when I take a break to read others' stories and find that they're coming out with the same ideas as I'm working on in my own stories. Getting lost in the story is my addiction so I tend to disappear down the rabbit hole for days on end as I go through the stories of a writer I appreciate, read 2-3 million words of one guy's work, and enjoyed nearly every story. Anyway, never fear, I is back! ;^)
Usual disclaimers, no rights to any characters portrayed and this is neither the real world nor a Disney Princess tale. There will provably be changes in the first hour or so as I find things that didn't come out the way I wanted.
While Aragog, his mate and their descendants were a very real threat to everyone at Hogwarts, and beyond its borders as well, in Harry's opinion Salazar's basilisk was a far bigger one. The basilisk was quite insane (as in Bellatrix Lestrange psychotic) after being possessed by Tom Riddle then left to deal with his insanity for fifty years while it was locked in the chamber, so it had to go! The family and the Goblin Nation's research led them to believe that the fantastical notion that a crowing rooster could kill a basilisk was actually true, and as fate may have it, the Marauders had created a spell that conjured a very loud crowing rooster any time, anywhere, day or night (the original intention had been to conjure it in people's dorm rooms in the middle of the night and by Marauder standards it was a surprisingly tame and safe prank for people, so Harry and the others gave Sirius and Remus a pass on the Cockadoodledo spell, on the understanding that it would never be used on or around any of them).
As he still wasn't about to trust the whole 'rooster's crow is fatal to it' thing blindly, and he remembered what happened to him the last time he stuck his arm into the basilisk's mouth to kill it, Harry asked Gringott whether the Goblin Nation might have any better tools to kill the creature. The fact that they went past the Potter, Peverell, Le Fay and Emrys vaults (which were among the oldest Houses and therefore had some of the earliest vaults) and went even deeper said that they were going somewhere very old and venerated by the Goblin Nation. Then they were escorted into the vault in question they realised what Gringott had in mind, because it was filled with magical weapons and armour that was quite literally the stuff of legend. What Gringott had actually brought Harry down for was to determine whether the Spear of Lugh would accept him or not. The Spear of Lugh accepted him alright, but they also collected some of the other magical weapons and suits of enchanted goblin silver (or mithril, as it was called in those children's stories which became so popular in the Muggle world) chain mail because they were planning on everyone who went after the basilisk coming back alive. They also created sets of wrap around mirror goggles for everyone who was going, with communications mirrors both on the outside, and the inside to let them see what was going on. Hopefully, these should totally negate any and all dangers of the basilisk's deadly gaze, but at worst they should only be petrified like those who saw the basilisk's eyes in a reflection.
They arranged to take some real roosters as a backup for using the Cockadoodledo charm to conjure crowing roosters, and confirmed that Fawkes could use Harry's memories to appear within the Chamber of Secrets. The reasons for this last were threefold, first was to confirm that they could reach the chamber without taking a chance on that unstable tunnel, the second was the fact that phoenixes appeared to be immune to the effects of the basilisk's gaze, and the third was to ensure that they didn't arrive in front of an active basilisk. When Fawkes gave the all clear, she took those who were going into the chamber and as soon as they were all ready, Harry called the basilisk the way Riddle had in the other timeline.
After the death defying battle in the other timeline, the basilisk's demise was rather anti-climactic this time, as soon as it was it had come out onto the floor of the Chamber, everyone who could cast the Cockadoodledo charm did so. That was enough to have the basilisk thrashing about in its death throes, and as soon as they died down, Harry moved in and thrust the Spear of Lugh through the roof of its open mouth into its brain, then they confirmed that it was dead by using detection scans cast into its mouth to get past the basilisk skin's legendary magic resistance.
Once the basilisk was dead, they brought in the teams to harvest the carcass and skins and remove the goblin silver doors from Gringotts. No-one else knew where the chamber was, and the value of a magically maintained chamber that size was too much to ignore, so they walled up the entrance once the doors were removed and warded the chamber to only allow goblin, elf or phoenix apparation, port keys and floos. The teams spent weeks down there, and as they cleared out the cast off skins and debris they discovered vaults that held far greater treasures than the Slytherin vaults at Gringotts, and a staircase leading up to Salazar's chambers with even more treasures in the form of Salazar's library and journals. Gringotts paid a fortune for the basilisk's enchanted ever-filling food and water bowls, because this saved them incredible amounts of money and effort when it came to feeding and watering the vault dragons in Gringotts.
The next couple of months went fairly quietly for them, Albus Jones kept his head down and by the Christmas break they had all passed their Second Year end of year exams so they had until June next year to finish their Third Year subjects, which included five electives for Harry and Hermione (Care of Magical Creatures, Magical Culture, Muggle Culture, Ancient Runes and Arithmancy). They were also progressing their non-magical education, which meant that they were rather busy. Hermione had another quandary to deal with though, her parents.
Coming from humble backgrounds, Hermione's father was very conscious of his family's image, requiring that his and her mother Jean's titles of 'Doctor' be used by everyone but close family and friends (and by them too in formal settings for that matter), and Jean had trouble breaking the shackles of the emotional blackmail he'd used to control her since they got together. It was Nigel (Hermione's father) who had decided that her name would be from Shakespeare….. but Ophelia, Cordelia, Juliet, or even Desdemona weren't distinctive enough for his daughter…. oh no, she had to be Hermione.
For the most part, life for the Granger family was pretty much as Nigel wished, he and his wife were respected both professionally and in the community, and they had a delightfully precocious daughter who enchanted their friends and associates with her wise beyond her years comments and responses and sharp mind.… there were those occasional odd occurrences which were worrying, but hopefully she'd grow out of them…. Jean had mentioned that Hermione had become more and more withdrawn since she started school and never talked about friends, but her teachers always gave her such glowing reports, and there was still too much work to be done to establish the Granger family's image to waste time on anything that obviously wasn't a problem.
His satisfaction with their family's position in the world was shattered on Hermione's eleventh Birthday though when that severe looking woman who appeared to have stepped out of a Dickensian novel appeared on their doorstep and informed them that their daughter was a witch! She gave them enough demonstrations to quell any doubts that magic was real, and drew them out on all those odd occurrences that they hadn't been able to explain when Hermione was younger, so they had to accept that what she said was true, their little Hermione was a witch.
Nigel drew some comfort from the story that this Professor McGonagall gave them to explain to people about where Hermione was, that she had been accepted into a school for the gifted in Scotland, and even more from the fact that she told Hermione that she couldn't practice magic at home because children were not allowed to practice magic away from school, and that the International Statute of Secrecy decreed that magic had to be hidden from anyone who didn't know about it. This meant that their hard won image would remain intact, and it may even be enhanced by the fact that their daughter had been accepted into an exclusive school for the gifted, but while this worked quite well for Nigel, it did not work for Hermione.
Hermione wasn't the little girl that her parents, especially her father, wanted her to be any more, the one who was expected to keep quiet about the strange subjects she was learning about and continue being their delightfully precocious daughter that their friends and associates loved to discuss important matters with though. On the inside she was a nineteen year old woman with over seven years of memories of magic, violence, love, politics, abuse and sex, she'd gotten married, had a baby and been murdered by her Husband, Mother-in-Law and Sister-in-Law! After seven bloody years of having her will and memories taken away from her, she was finally free to be with her soul mate and they were bonded by magic, their bonds were far closer than any non-magical bond could ever be…. Shit, even on the outside she looked like a well developed young woman in her mid teens now, so to fit into her parents' world (she didn't consider that to be her world any more) she'd have to wear heavy glamours and avoid physical contact with anyone….. That just wasn't practical, even if she wanted to do it, which she didn't!
That was why Ted had prepared all the necessary paperwork for Nigel and Jean Granger to renounce any and all claims to their daughter Hermione Jean Granger, so that she could then be formally adopted as Hermione Jean Bodhmall by Baron Alastor Dougal Moody in Non-Magical Britain as well as Magical Britain. No-one thought for a moment that Nigel and Jean would give up their rights to their daughter easily, but Hermione was planning on greeting them in her natural form, as there was no logical way that they could ever explain to any of their friends that this was their twelve year old daughter who had looked four or five years younger just four months ago.
Introducing her father to his Uncle Alastor when her grandmother had told everyone that she was an only child and an orphan was another step she was prepared to take to take to get this done, and if all else failed, she would introduce her parents to her husband, the eleven year old Duke Henry James Potter-Peverell who looked like a tall, strapping lad in his mid teens, if that wasn't enough to convince them that she lived in another world now, nothing would! She would like to keep in contact with them as they were her parents after all, even if they had been a little more distant and 'proper' than she would have liked as a little girl, but she couldn't be Hermione Granger or live in their world any more. If they agreed to release her from that, Hermione Granger would officially die in an accident in Scotland and be cremated, but they would be able to keep in touch and see her from time to time as Jean's French second cousin's teenage daughter who'd come to England to study at Cambridge.
It went about as well as they expected at Kings Cross when the Hogwarts Express arrived, they gave the majority of students a chance to disperse and then approached Hermione's parents. Nigel and Jean noted the attractive and well dressed teenage couple who were walking in their direction, but didn't pay much attention to them until the girl said "Mum, Dad, this is Harry", because even though the voice was older, that was their daughter's voice! Nigel was too stunned to move, so it was Harry who had to leap forward to catch Jean as she fainted. They quickly looked around to confirm that no-one was looking in their direction, then Hermione grabbed her father's arm and they popped them into Ted's law offices.
After Jean had been revived, they spent nearly an hour trying to explain to them that this was what Professor McGonagall had been referring to when she said that magic could push girls, and boys, through puberty far more quickly than it normally happened in the Non-Magical world. Nigel and Jean had a hard enough time believing that this was their little girl, so there was no way they were prepared to believe that the strapping young man she had introduced to them as Harry was nearly a year younger than her. Hermione was getting frustrated that they were refusing to accept the situation, so she used her link with Harry to call in him, Uncle Alastor, Efa, Emyr, Ulfr and Snorri in.
While he blanched at the sight of Alastor, Efa, Emyr, Ulfr and Snorri, Nigel blustered and told them to get out because this was a family discussion, but he was shocked into silence when Hermione stepped up beside Alastor and shouted over him. "They are family Dad, this is your Uncle Alastor!" The silence in the room at that made it possible for her to continue in a normal voice. "Grandma lied! She wasn't an only child, or an orphan, she was what was known in the Magical world as a Squib, someone non-magical who is born into a magical family. Squibs aren't often treated well by the old families but in this case it was her choice to change her name and cut off all contact with her family when her younger brother Alastor got everything because he was magical and she wasn't! Maybe if she hadn't hidden the fact that she was from a magical family and you hadn't hidden the fact that I was showing magic because you were ashamed of my being different, things may not have gotten to this point, but you both did, so here we are! As you can see, there's obviously no way you can tell people that I'm the same girl who went off to school in September without explaining things that the Statute of Secrecy won't allow, and I refuse to live in your world, hidden away like some dirty little secret, so I want you to sign custody of me over to Uncle Alastor, we'll put everything in place to show that I died in an accident on the way home for Christmas, we can keep in touch and you can see me sometimes as a relative from France who's just come over to study at Cambridge. Otherwise…. I'll do what Grandma did, we'll go with the accident story but you'll never hear from me again!"
Her father was building up to a rant but her mother could see the family resemblance to Nigel in the man's ravaged visage. She was trying to understand and asked. "You have implied that these people are all family Hermione…. you've explained about…. Uncle Alastor but could you tell us how Harry or the others fit in?"
Hermione smiled and reached out to take Harry's hand. "I know that you know the concept of soul mates from your romance novels Mum?" Jean nodded dubiously, wondering where this was going. "Well in the magical world, they're a real thing…. quite rare, but real. When I met Harry, we felt a link between us and our magic bonded to make that link real, and that is magically accepted as a marriage, so Harry is your Son-in-Law Mum…."
Nigel exploded, shouting as he moved to get this boy away from his daughter, but Alastor just silenced him and put him in a body bind, as he was interested to see how Jean would take this.
Jean was obviously stunned, but she didn't faint this time. "Married….. You're married by magic, at twelve? How is that possible Hermione?"
"As I said Mum, our magic bonded, that's all that's required in our world. Hopefully you at least are able to recognise that I didn't just mature physically, I'm older mentally as well…. neither of us expected or planned for this to happen Mum, but I'm happy, and I'm hoping that you will be happy for me… for us, too."
"I can see that Sweetie, and I am happy to see you so happy, but you must understand that this is quite a shock… my baby girl is all grown up and married at twelve…. What does Harry's family think about this?"
Hermione looked at Harry and he nodded for her to continue, as they weren't ready for her parents to know that they could talk over their link. "Harry's an orphan Mum, his parents were murdered by a terrorist when he was just fifteen months old. Someone went against his parents' wishes at the time and left him with his mother's non-magical sister, who resented the fact that her sister was the one who got the magic in her family so she and her husband and son treated Harry horribly for ten years, but they all died in an accident earlier this year. His godparents, who he should have gone to in the first place, are his guardians now."
Alastor nodded approvingly when Jean rushed to hug Harry at that, upset at what he'd gone through. He didn't release his nephew though because he was obviously still furious.
Jean gave Harry another squeeze and stepped back, speaking to Hermione. "All right, you've explained how Uncle Alastor and your handsome husband are family Sweetie, but you still haven't explained these other… people?" No-one took offence at that, because it was said in confusion rather than to offer offence, and Efa, Emyr, Ulfr and Snorri obviously weren't human.
Hermione drew a breath, as this was likely to be harder to take than the previous news. "I think I need to explain about Harry's family first Mum, you see it's been one of the guiding families of the magical people of Britain for over two thousand years now, and they've been recognised as nobility by the non-magical rulers of Britain for nearly three quarters of that time. Harry is actually Duke Henry James Potter, Duke of Cumbria, but the thing is, Harry isn't entirely human, and neither am I, nor are you and Dad for that matter. Over a thousand years ago the aes sídhe lived alongside men, and they mixed their bloodlines with the more powerful Druid families. You may know the aes sídhe as the Fae, but anyway they are made up of the Tuath Dé, the high elves, and the Fomoiri, the high goblins. The ancient guiding families like Harry's, and the ones that I'm descended from, all have aes sídhe blood, and that's part of the reason we're so powerful magically…." She waved to Efa, Emyr, Ulfr and Snorri as she introduced them. "Efa and Emyr are Elf Nobles who are part of Harry's family because they have been bonded to them magically for over a thousand years, and Ulfr and Snorri are Goblin Nobles, they are related to Harry because their Uncle Gringott blood adopted Harry into the Gringott family. And as I am Harry's soul bonded wife, they are now related to me as well."
Jean was staring at her, shocked, but she still hadn't fainted yet, which they took as a good sign. When she had composed herself a little she said. "So you're telling me that you're not only married at twelve, you are now Duchess Potter?" Hermione nodded. "Okay... Can you explain what you meant about your father and I having this…..aes sídhe blood?"
Hermione nodded again. "As I said, the aes sídhe were mingling their bloodlines with the most powerful Druid families for over a thousand years up until about a thousand years ago, at which point they retreated from this realm because it was getting too violent. Their kin had been mingling with magical humans around the world for thousands of years before that. There are currently around five thousand magical bloodlines known in Magical Britain, I don't know how many there are elsewhere in the world. As you know people in the same family can be genetically quite different..." It was Jean's turn to nod.
"That was why Grandma Granger was born without enough magic to be a witch, but Uncle Alastor is a powerful wizard. Now in Magical Britain, witches and wizards like me who are born to non-magical parents are known as Muggleborn…. they call non-magical people Muggles in Magical Britain…. Harry's Mum was also known as Muggleborn, so Harry is what they call a Half-blood, someone with one parent from a Magical family and one from a non-magical or recently magical family, Harry's father was what they call a Pureblood, someone who's bloodlines have all been Magical for several generations. The thing is, as Professor McGonagall, who's now the Headmistress of Hogwarts by the way, tried to explain to the students when she became Headmistress, it's only one in several million so called Muggleborns who don't come from the known magical bloodlines. Their magical genes can be dormant for generations, but they become active when they're combined with other dormant magical bloodlines. That's what happened with me, I inherited a few ancient magical bloodlines from Dad, and a few more from you, and that was how I became a witch. One of the original druid guiding families, the House of Bodhmall, has been dormant for centuries but it was reactivated in me and I'm taking on that name. We are removing any and all references to the name of Granger in Magical Britain to protect you and Dad from the anti-Muggleborn radicals who believe that magic should be restricted to no-one but the ones from the established Magical families, like the ones who murdered Harry's parents. They killed thousands of people in what was known as the First Wizarding War, which only finished when Harry's parents were murdered, and many of those targeted in the war were the non-magical families of Muggleborn Witches and Wizards. We don't want anything to happen to you so we're taking measures to ensure that the name Granger is forgotten in that world."
Harry and the others could see that Hermione got her brilliance and logic more from her mother, because Jean was processing this and putting it all together while Nigel was obviously only thinking of what he would or wouldn't allow. This was made abundantly clear when Jean spoke again.
"So, aside from the obvious issue of not being able to explain exactly how you've suddenly gotten a few years older, your being magically married to Duke Potter has made us a target to the ones who murdered Harry's parents, so you are distancing yourself from us to protect us."
Hermione nodded. "That's not the whole reason, but yes, that's a large part of it Mum."
Jean reached out to squeeze her hand as she nodded and looked at Nigel. "Are you ready to discuss this like a grown up now Nigel?"
She got enough from what his eyes were saying to ask Alastor to let him speak. Alastor nodded, but spoke to his nephew first. "Make no mistake Boyo, if you can't discuss this like a grown up, you will be silenced again immediately, and then you'll have any memories you have of magic wiped out. All you'll know about your daughter when you leave here is that she died in an accident on the way home from school for Christmas!" He looked at Jean. "You will have to make a choice if that happens Missus Granger, we can either wipe out your memories of your daughter as well, or you can keep your memories of her and maintain contact with her as a French relation who's studying here as she said, if you choose that we will give my nephew the necessary memory framework to support that story."
Jean's eyes went wide at that, but she had no doubt that Nigel's frightening Uncle could do as he said and nodded. Hopefully it wouldn't come to that but if Nigel chose his pride over his daughter, he would be the only one who lost her! Alastor smiled as he read her decision on her face and removed the silencing spell from her husband.
Nigel's first words were "You have no right!..." and Alastor was about to silence him again but Jean put her hand up to ask him to hold. "What doesn't your Uncle have the right to do Nigel? Shut you up to give our daughter a chance to try and explain what was going on? Did you pay attention to the fact that Hermione and her husband are doing this largely to protect us…. or were you ignoring her because you were only focussed on the fact that you were stopped from riding roughshod over her yet again? Did you even hear what Hermione was explaining?"
He waved that off. "Fae, ancient families that go back thousands of years, her boyfriend is a Duke? It's all bloody ridiculous! He's obviously created some fantastic story in an attempt to impress her because he wants to have his way with my daughter and I won't have it! For that matter I don't believe he's eleven either! He's just pretending to be the same age as her to gain her confidence."
Hermione went to shout back at him (because she'd inherited his temper), but Jean stopped her with a raised hand as she responded. "Ridiculous is it? Like the existence of magic you mean? I don't know about you Nigel Granger but I've always respected my daughter's intelligence and maturity and I know for a fact that she will have looked carefully into anything she was told rather than swallowing a line from the first boy who wants to get into her pants as you have apparently chosen to believe! What Hermione just described about how the magical bloodlines were going dormant and reactivating when they're combined is quite easy to accept for anyone who's looked into genetics at all, and how can you question the Fae when these people are right here in the room, any fool can see that they're not human!"
She gave Efa, Emyr, Ulfr and Snorri an apologetic look at that but they waved it away, because they at least could see the point she was making, that trying to deny that the Fae existed with elves and goblins in the room was just ridiculous.
"Maybe you're blind as well as stubborn, because you also appear to be refusing to accept that your own mother lied to you about not having any relations, when the family resemblance between you and your Uncle here is quite obvious to everyone else. As for the validity of Harry's title as the Duke of Cumbria, from what Hermione said that it was granted by the rulers of Britain, so presumably it should exist in the non-magical world as well as your world?"
Harry nodded and spoke for the first time. "Yes Missus Granger, I believe that the titles for what we call the Most Ancient and Ancient Noble Houses at least are maintained in the official archives, but the records may be two or three generations out of date for my family, because as far as I know my father at least never officially took up the title, so I expect that the last Duke of Cumbria recorded would probably be my Grandfather, Charlus Henry Potter, or perhaps even my Great-Grandfather, Henry Ralston Potter. For that matter Uncle Alastor is likely to be listed in there as the Baron of Doon as well."
Jean nodded. "Thank you Harry, but if I'm your Mother-in-Law, don't you think you can call me Jean, or maybe even Mum?"
He gave her a shy smile that tugged at her heart strings. "Yes… Mum."
She have him a warm smile at that, which faded as she turned back to her husband. "And where's the logic in questioning that Harry can look years older than he is when you can clearly see that our own daughter is apparently years older than when we last saw her less than four months ago?"
"I thought I married an intelligent man Nigel Granger, but I'm not seeing that here, I'm seeing a petulant child who's stamping his feet and refusing to see anything that doesn't fit into his pre-conceived notions of the world, even though is was proven to us that magic exists and our daughter is a witch over a year ago!"
She turned back to Hermione and Harry. "I'm sorry Sweetie, I've let your father try to force you into the mould of what he expected his daughter to be to keep the peace in the family but that ends here! I love you for who you are and want you to know that I will support you, whatever you want to be. I must admit that it's hard to accept that my baby girl is married at twelve, and I'm trying to get my head around the fact that this, and your rapid changes, are all part of your being a witch, but please believe that I'm ever so happy that you've found such a fine young man as Harry."
They were both in tears as Hermione hugged her, and when they'd settled down, they turned to look at Nigel expectantly. He just looked back at them mulishly, refusing to say a word and Jean sighed as she turned to Ted. "Will my signature alone be sufficient to legally relinquish custody of Hermione to Uncle Alastor Mister Tonks?"
He nodded. "It's just a formality Missus Granger, so yes, but you do understand that if we are forced to do it this way your husband will lose all memories of your daughter being anything other than a bright girl who was killed in an accident on the way home for Christmas?"
She sighed again. "Yes, I understand that Mister Tonks, but apparently my husband has chosen to give our daughter up, just so he can stand his ground and be in the right in his eyes."
Nigel spoke up then. "What are you doing Jean? You can't be agreeing to let them do this to me? You can't let them take our daughter away from us like this!"
"No Nigel, Hermione's path has been different from our's ever since we discovered that she is a witch, it's obvious to me that we can't pretend that she's the same little girl any more but you have apparently chosen to reject her path and her choices because they don't match whatever you have decided her life was going to be, without any input from me either by the way! I am prepared to do whatever I have to to remain a part of my daughter's life…. if you refuse to do the same, then you will lose her, the choice is your's."
"I won't let you get away with this…."
Alastor silenced him again and looked at Harry, as he knew that Harry had a lighter touch with Mind Magic. Harry went in and removed any and all memories to do with magic and inserted memories of how proud he'd been when Hermione was selected to go to an exclusive school for the gifted in Scotland, and sad memories of hearing the news that she'd died in a car crash when she was getting a lift back to London for Christmas with one of her school friends. He also inserted memories that Jean had chosen the name Hermione because one of her cousins in France had named her daughter Hermione Jeanne, and that cousin's daughter had been just accepted to Cambridge so Jean was keeping in contact with her so that she didn't feel lonely away from her family, and to help get over the loss of the daughter she'd named after her.
Finally, he removed any memory of being in Ted's offices and stunned Nigel before he was popped back to their home in Crawley. He and Hermione went with Jean when she drove home from Kings Cross station, and along the way they filled her in on the details of all the memory modifications Harry had made. With Jean's permission Harry gave her copies of the memories he'd provided Nigel with and put a compulsion on her never to mention anything about magic to anyone other than them.
Efa and Emyr had removed any and all references to magic, Harry or Hogwarts from the house while they were waiting for Jean to arrive with Hermione and Harry, and they revived Nigel just before they popped away.
When they got back to the Black Townhouse, Harry held Hermione as she cried herself out, because they knew that there was little chance that her parents' marriage would survive this. Jean had been getting things off her chest as she drove, and it was obvious that Hermione was pretty much the only reason she was still with Nigel.
The story that came out was that Jean had fallen for Nigel when she started at University, and she'd changed her plans from medical research to Dentistry under pressure from him, because she'd gone along with anything he said at the time and he'd browbeaten her into agreeing that that Dentistry was a more sensible choice. When they'd finished university they started practising together and paying back the loans they got to go to university. Nigel had argued that they couldn't afford to have children until they were properly established, so Jean was in her late twenties before a mistake with the contraception meant that Hermione was conceived. She was quite angry when she told them how hard he'd tried to convince her terminate the pregnancy, just because having a child would put a strain on their finances.
Apparently, once he lost the argument to terminate the pregnancy, he then started planning how to make the child enhance their image among their peers. Jean admitted that she had actually suggested Juliet and Hermione, because she'd been a fan of both Romeo and Juliet and a Winter's Tale, but she'd given in to Nigel when he decided that Hermione would be her name because it was more distinctive. She also admitted that she'd given in again when she let her be put in child care when she was three because Nigel had insisted that they couldn't afford to have someone else working with him while she stayed home with their daughter.
As they got closer to Crawley, Jean sighed as she said that part of the reason she'd wanted to stay at home and raise Hermione was that working and living with Nigel had by then become so excruciatingly boring that the only thing she had to look forward to was spending time with her daughter. She had regretted changing her studies to dentistry years before Hermione was conceived, and she'd been thinking about getting a divorce and starting over until she became pregnant. The obvious implication from this was that if Hermione was out of the equation in the Granger family, there would be no Granger family.
They received help from an expected quarter in talking through this, because after Draco was put through the Veil of Death and they discovered that Narcissa had in fact been raped by Abraxus Malfoy to force her marriage with Lucius before she'd even left school, Sirius had reinstated her into the House of Black and had her move into the Black Townhouse to start over. Cissa's situation wasn't that different from Jean's, in that she'd stayed with her ex-husband because her desire to look after her son, so she could offer some insights into how Jean was looking at the situation.
When she first joined them, Cissa had dropped all of her mind defences and allowed them to look at all her memories to prove herself to them, and the life she was forced to live had been a nightmare from the day she was raped by her prospective Father-in-Law. When they reviewed their memories of her from the other timeline without the expectation that she was nothing but an unmarked Death Eater, Harry and Hermione realised that everything they recalled their matched what they saw in Narcissa's memories, she had only been acting as she was required to in public, she hadn't actually done Riddle's bidding at any point. Even what Harry had seen of her and Bellatrix forcing Snape to make the unbreakable vow to help Draco complete his task was only a woman desperately trying to save her son. Bellatrix may have been demented enough to serve Riddle, but Narcissa wasn't.
This presented quite an opportunity for the Wizards Council Alliance, because as a true daughter of House Black, Cissa had been better educated in the politics of Magical Britain than most, and spending eleven years as the wife of the Dark Houses' power broker and the Minister for Magic's puppet master meant that she knew more about the politics of Magical Britain over the past ten years than anyone else they had other than Augusta, so she became the Steward for Harry's Houses, except for the House of Flamel which remained with John de Greystoke. With Augusta teaching Magical History and Culture at Hogwarts, they reorganised their group to make the best use of the Black sisters' skills, so Stewardship and voting proxies for most of the Houses of the Wizards Council Alliance was shared between Cissa and Andi, while Augusta and the rest of them could be contacted via the communications mirrors because nothing had been found to block them yet, and they had started making headway on some of the worst of the anti-creature and anti-muggle laws that had been put through in the last century or so.
As they'd noted, Hermione had inherited her driving need to research everything from Jean, so while she wasn't questioning Harry's word, she used some of her old university contacts to dig up the information about Harry's title out of the official archives. She wasn't expecting to hear that the last Duke of Cumbria was in fact Duke Charlus Henry Potter-Peverell, who was also the Duke of Mercia, and he also held four Earldoms and seven Baronies, one Earldom and two Baronies more than his father Duke Henry Ralston Potter-Peverell had held. Jean had no doubt that Hermione knew about these other titles, and resolved to discuss this with her daughter and Son-In-Law when they could do so in private. She also got the confirmation that Baron Alastor Dougal Moody was the Baron of Doon, as Harry had said.
The recovery of Lord and Lady Longbottom soon after they had been removed from St Mungo's opened a lot of people's eyes to what had been going on there, because too many of the senior healers and members of the St Mungo's board had ended up in Azkaban for deliberately preventing the recovery of patients of St Mungo's who opposed the plans of their sponsors to keep it quiet. The Longbottoms' Yule Ball was the most monumental event in over twenty years, because Frank and Alice Longbottom weren't the only ones who'd made miraculous recoveries once the corruption in St Mungo's had been uncovered and their treatment was adjusted appropriately, and it was effectively Harry and others' 'coming out' party as well.
For all the stories they'd heard from their children and the Daily Prohet, most of the society circles of Magical Britain's exposure to any of this new force of change in their world had been restricted to seeing Harry's performances in the Wizengamot, so for the most part they were seeing the young Heads and Heirs of the Most Ancient Houses for the first time, and the poise and political acumen they showed belied their youth. Anyone who was anyone was at the Longbottoms' Ball, which made the positions in their society of anyone who wasn't invited (such as Albus Jones) quite clear. They'd reluctantly agreed that, as the Minister for Magic, they had to invite Cornelius Fudge, which of course meant that they also had to invite his wife and children as well. While for the most part lacking in beauty and charm, Millicent was a competent, sensible and reasonably intelligent witch who had been educated in the ways of their world, so she greeted Harry and the others appropriately and spent a while making the required small talk with them. Ronald, on the other hand, broke into Harry's conversations and accused him of destroying his entire family for no good reason, the fact that Arthur, Bill, Charlie, Fred, George and Ginny were all right there and had been enjoying themselves up until his and his father's arrival was apparently immaterial to him. To add insult to injury, he then proceeded to leer at the girls and make rather crude suggestions to them. This in turn led to him being blasted across the room by an infuriated Hermione, he hit the wall hard and fell in a broken heap on the floor and had to be sent off to St Mungo's for an extended stay to recover, because he no longer had the magic to heal himself.
Even though other families were rejoicing because their loved ones had been restored to them though, the House of Longbottom was the most notable, because Frank and Alice's baby boy was now a young man, Neville had his parents at last and Augusta was no longer struggling to hold their Houses together and raise a young boy with no-one to help her... Mind you she'd been struggling rather less since they'd all been tested and cleared of charms, bindings and potions the day that they were called in for James and Lily's will readings. Frank and Alice were currently completing an Aurors' refresher course, with Amelia's promise that they would be considered for reinstatement as Aurors when they were ready.
They discovered something else of great significance on the Winter Solstice, because Xeno suddenly remembered the powerful ancient protection ritual that Lily and Pandora had uncovered in their research for the Department of Mysteries, which both the Potters and the Lovegoods had enacted on the Winter Solstice of Nineteen Eighty. In this ritual, the parents willingly sacrificed their most precious magic on the Winter Solstice to bind the gods' protection to their children. James had given up his Animagus ability and Lily had given up her talent for Alchemy to Harry, while Xeno had given up his ability to be a Seer and Pandora had given up the most arcane and powerful of her Ancient Runes talents to Luna.
It was this protection which retaliated against Riddle's curse and totally destroyed his body when he tried to kill Harry. What wasn't expected was that what soul Riddle had left at that point had split (possibly because he had already begun the ritual to create a sixth horcrux after he murdered the Potters), and half of it had been passed over the momentary link created by the curse being cast and responded to, searing one of protection runes into Harry's skin on the very spot on his forehead where Riddle's curse had hit him when it lodged in him, while the other half departed as Voldemort's shade. The protection given by his parents' sacrifices was enough to prevent Riddle's soul fragment from taking over Harry's infant psyche because it largely encapsulated the horcrux within the mark on his forehead. (This, in turn, showed just how weak Quirrell's mind had been, if the one sixty fourth of Voldemort's soul that was left after it had been halved six times was still enough to possess him, because while a barely fifteen month old infant's mind would be understandably easy to take over, a supposedly adult wizard should have been far harder to take over!)
Hermione and Jean actually found that cutting Nigel out of her life lifted a great weight from both of them. Jean told him that she was going out to have lunch with her cousin's daughter on Christmas Eve and his only response was to ask when she would be home to make his dinner. She was having such a good time with Hermione and the others at the Black Townhouse that is was nearly six before she realised how late it was and called him to say that they had gotten tied up talking about the family and she wouldn't be able to make it back in time, so he'd have to make himself something or order in. Nigel wasn't at all happy about that, but Jean was becoming more and more comfortable with the fact that she didn't care at all whether he was happy or not.
Spending that time with them on Christmas Eve opened Jean's eyes to quite a few things... seeing how happy Hermione was with Harry wasn't exactly a surprise, but seeing Crookshanks change into his mngwa form for the first time just about made her wet herself, though she could certainly see how a pet who could change into a fearsome protector would be a very useful thing to have. She also got an inkling of how powerful this family was in Magical Britain, especially Hermione's unassuming young husband, from the way they were casually discussing changing laws and the like.
Jean questioning Hermione about the rest of Duke Potter-Peverell's titles gave her the opportunity to come clean with her mother about the other betrothals (luckily the fact that it was Christmas made it easy to explain why the girls and their parents were there), Nigel would never have understood or accepted the situation but Jean could understand the other girls' need to be protected by their betrothal contracts (Hermione was glad that she could honestly explain that these betrothal contracts all had escape clauses which the girls could use whenever they found a better option which would give them enough protection, because it was too soon to try and explain that they'd almost certainly all be in a plural marriage in a few years). In the end, Jean was quite happy when they popped her back to Crawley at eight thirty that night, and she had enough of a buzz from the drinks that she pretty much floated past Nigel on the way to bed.
While the still growing Wizards Council Alliance was quite happy with the developments since Harry Potter came back to their world though, the ones who had been holding the reins of Magical Britain up until the return of Dukes Potter and Black and Wizards Council Law were quite disgruntled about the changes that they had made to their world in the last five months, so many plans were being made behind closed doors to get rid of these usurpers as soon as possible so that things could go back to the way they were.