DISCLAIMER: If you recognize 'em, I don't own 'em, Kapische?
Bene.
And now to the next chapter…
To the Moon and Back—Chapter 4
And so the next week was a scramble to wash clothes and gather up cherished possessions to pack them for the journey overseas. When she was free from work, Hermione packed her own things up; since she'd be living and working in England, she needed to pack slightly more than her children.
Lily and James were so eager for the excursion that their own things were packed by Monday evening, so their mother conjured dozens of empty cardboard boxes and old newspapers and set them the task of packing up the rest of the items in the house.
"We might as well get a jump start on it," Hermione had told them to qualm the protests.
"But mom," James said in a slow, calm voice, as if speaking to a slightly challenged person, "how're we going to fit all of these boxes onto the plane with us? We're only allowed two suitcases and a carry-on each."
"Not only that, but our trunks alone are going to be over the weight limit as it is," Lily chimed in. Hermione marveled inwardly at what the two of them had researched on the internet about airline policies and procedures; neither of them had ever traveled by airplane before. They took vacations occasionally, true, but they always drove wherever they had to go.
"You both have good points," she began. "However, you won't be carrying your trunks with you."
"What?"
"How will we get them there, then?"
"They've been packed for ages!"
"I know that," she said calmly, opening the closet door and dragging out three large burgundy roller suitcases. "We'll shrink them a bit and fit them into these. We might look conspicuous carrying large trunks; people here don't use them, and even in England not too many bother with them. These will be easier to carry. Just get those boxes all packed up and leave your trunks to me." Raising their eyebrows at each other, the twins thought better than to question her.
At last Friday came, much to Lily's and James' delight, and it would soon be time to leave for England. The two of them had slept head-to-toe on the couch in the living room—the last bit of furniture remaining in the house aside from Hermione's bed, as their beds had been removed from their bedrooms—and were very much looking forward to when they could sleep normally again.
They spent much of the day out at the local park, running and playing games, capping it with a last walk around the neighborhood to visit and bid farewell to their friends, from whom they gathered addresses and telephone numbers and exchanged promises to keep in touch. When they returned to the house at late in the afternoon, they found a surprise.
Not only was Hermione home from work early, sitting and reading a book in a plush armchair that Lily was sure she'd never seen before, but in the hall were the three large suitcases from before, neatly lined up by the front door. Each bore a luggage tag bearing each of their names and an address that was strange to them. Hermione looked up from her book when they entered the room.
"Hey, guys, how was your day?"
"Good, we went to the park and said good-bye to a few people. You?"
"Packed up my office, came back here and…um…consolidated the rest of the luggage." She smiled as she said this.
"Consolidated?" James asked with both amazement and skepticism. "Does that mean that the entire contents of this house are now in those three suitcases?"
"Yes."
"How?" Lily burst out in confusion. "There's no way—"
"Darling, how many times do I have to tell you that it is both possible and true?" Hermione asked calmly. "A few simple spells and that's the lot of what we're taking with us."
"But what if they go through the bags in customs?" Hermione gave a shrug and a small smile.
"The stuff in there's all bewitched to look like normal clothes and things to anyone but us," she said, then quickly added, "are you guys hungry? We should go out to eat tonight, as we don't have any plates or utensils to eat with." Lily and James, looking at each other, nodded warily.
They each retrieved the backpack that they'd be taking onto the plane with them and met back by the front door, after having taken one last look around the house in which they had grown up. Stepping into the summer sunlight, James looked around.
"Mom," he said warily, "You haven't shrunken the car too, have you?"
"Of course not," she said, "I sold it."
"What?" Lily and James both nearly shouted.
"Well, there's really no way to get it onto the airplane, is there? So I've sold it and bought another car, which is already in England."
"How are we going to get to the airport, then?"
"Oh, I don't know if you all remember Dr. Reddinger? Well, he was particularly upset about my resignation, so he's going to swing by and take us to the airport. We'll check in and get something to eat before we leave," she explained.
Several hours later, Lily and James were still buzzing with excitement about the plane and England. Hermione, who sat next to Lily, sat reading quietly, while the twins were busy playing video games that were in the backs of the seats in front of them and watching movies. It probably hadn't been a good idea to buy them bubblegum, she reflected; she should have gone with something without sugar. Or sneaked valium into their drinks, that would have worked too.
"You two should probably get some sleep," Hermione warned them, setting her book down. "When we get there, it'll be the afternoon, and you won't get to sleep until later."
"Don't worry about us, mom," James said, trying to annihilate the aliens on the screen in front of him.
"We'll be fine," Lily told her, pushing buttons energetically on the controller in her hand. "Hey," she said, turning to James. "I wonder if there's a way for us to play against each other on these things…"
And as she had predicted, her children had gotten very little sleep on the airplane and she'd had to practically drag the two bleary-eyed and pale children through customs. To Lily's amazement, the man who went through their suitcases swept his eyes over dozens of tiny cardboard boxes and pieces of furniture without even blinking. She looked over at James to see if he'd noticed it, too, but he was too busy almost falling asleep leaning against Hermione to notice.
In fact, sorting out their study and employment visas, passports, and travel papers took so long that Lily and James slept for a good while before Hermione finally woke them to drag their luggage to the taxi stop to hail a cab to Surrey, not far from London, where they would be living. Lily quickly wished that she'd slept on the plane more so she would be able to take in everything new she was seeing. They had hardly buckled their seatbelts before both children were fast asleep, heads drooping onto their shoulders.
The next day or so was a blur to Lily and James, who slept most of the time curled up in plush sleeping bags that Hermione had conjured out of nowhere, emerging only to eat and fall back asleep again. She had refused to sleep until it was a decent hour, determined to avoid being terribly jet-lagged.
She unpacked all three of the suitcases before her children regained consciousness two mornings after they had arrived. Lily was the first to emerge bright-eyed from her sleeping bag. Rubbing her eyes and taking a moment to wonder why she was half-wrapped up in a sleeping bag on the floor of a room she'd never seen before, she shook her brother awake.
"Whassamatter?" he asked groggily before rolling out of the sleeping bag. He sat up suddenly, quite awake. Lily grinned at him.
"We're not in Boston anymore!" she said excitedly.
"Which would explain why I woke up in a sleeping bag in someone else's living room."
"This is our new house, you dolt!" she said. Their eyes met for a moment, then stood up quickly.
"I get the big room!" James shouted, stampeding up the wooden staircase with Lily at his side.
"I've got dibs if one has a bay window or a walk-in closet!"
It turned out that the house had three bedrooms aside from the master one, so agreeing on who got which bedroom was simpler than Hermione had thought. Of course, she'd been slightly annoyed when she woke up to their shouts that day, but it hadn't mattered to her too much.
They spent that day doing a walking tour of the major London sights; Lily had loved looking at all of the different things, especially the palace where the queen lived. James had been more entertained trying to get the palace guards to crack a smile, but had no luck.
Growing up in Boston, the twins had no inhibitions when it came to a big, bustling city like London. What they were unfamiliar with was the language. Though the passersby undoubtedly spoke English, they all spoke in an accent like Hermione's, though some were so thick that it was hard to understand the speaker at all. James had been especially annoyed when a man in the café where they'd eaten lunch called him a "little foreigner, accent an' all."
"Well," Lily said fairly when they emerged onto a crowded, busy street from a broken-down escalator leading from the Underground. "We are foreigners here. Except for Mom," she added as an afterthought.
"I haven't been here for so long that I'm beginning to feel foreign my—oh, my!" she exclaimed.
"What?" both children asked at once. They saw that they had stopped abruptly in front of a run down, shabby-looking little pub. Lily and James pulled Hermione from the sidewalk into the eaves of the place to stop her being trampled by the people on the street.
"You can't just stop like that, you could get squashed," Lily told her.
"Yeah, besides, this is just a grimy-looking little pub. Nobody else is having this reaction," James said from Hermione's other side.Lily looked around to see that this was very true. The commoners on the sidewalk weren't paying the tavern one bit of attention. In fact, she saw, frowning, their eyes seemed to be slipping right from the record shop on one side to the bookstore on the other without even glancing at the pub.
Hermione simply shook her head, looking dazed. It was the Leaky Cauldron, the entrance into the magical world from the muggle one. Quickly, she grabbed her children by the back of the shirt and ushered them into the pub.
It was exactly as she'd remembered it. The scrubbed wooden tables, the bar, even Tom, the old bartender. A woman hidden by a balaclava was drinking a tiny glass of sherry and muttering to herself in the corner. A man reading The Daily Prophet was stirring his teaspoon by waving his finger over it in circles, and a group of older witches in long robes were discussing the latest article in Herbology Weekly over tea and scones. A bell over the door tinkled jauntily as the three of them entered.
"Afternoon, Miss," Tom said, looking up. His eyes lingered on her for a moment, then swept to her children. "Diagon Alley?"
"Yes, thank you," she said, leading Lily and James quickly through the pub, which held a handful of customers, to the back door. They stepped out into a short, narrow alleyway with a metal trashbin at the end.
"What was that place?" Lily asked, interested.
"It was the Leaky Cauldron," Hermione replied, drawing her wand and counting the bricks above the trash can. "This is a part of London that nonmagical people don't know anything about. Are you ready to see Diagon Alley?" Before waiting for an answer, Hermione gave the key brick a tap with her wand.
James watched the bricks slide this way and that, forming a hole in the wall which became larger and larger until there was a sort of archway leading onto another busy-looking street lined with shops. Only on this street, all of the people were wearing different-colored robes and running about from shop to shop carrying large cauldrons. He felt that they were out of place there, in jeans and t-shirts (Hermione wore a sweater), but in sweeping the crowd he noticed that there were plenty of people dressed like them who must have come from non-magic London.
Stepping into Diagon Alley, Lily and James both wished they had another pair of eyes, and kept tilting their heads and craning their necks in all directions in a vain attempt to see everything at once. There were shops with signs in the windows advertising that cauldron prices had been marked down, ones that held dozens of cages containing a wide variety of hooting owls, others holding moving mannequins modeling the latest in robe styles, and James spotted a sweetshop that contained the largest stack of chocolate frogs he could have imagined, towering to the ceiling and no doubt held together by magic. Hermione led them down the street to a large, snow-white building that appeared to have been made entirely of marble.
"Before we buy anything," Hermione told them. "We have to exchange our money for wizard's money—coins called galleons, sickles, and knuts. This is Gringotts, the wizard bank. It's run by goblins, and they can be tricky and intimidating, so if you want you can wait out here until I get back."
"No way!" James exclaimed. "I want to see the bank!"
"Me, too," Lily said. They gave each other looks that said quite clearly that they wanted to see as much as they possibly could of this new place, though they did walk very closely at Hermione's sides as a precaution.
Several minutes and a pleasant goblin encounter later, they stood blinking in the sunlight back on the marble steps trying to decide where to go first. Hermione knew from experience that if they bought all of their school supplies in one go, they wouldn't be able to carry everything back into London easily; she didn't want to risk shrinking the books or any magical animal that they might want to purchase.
"Okay, so here's the plan," she told them, ushering them to one side of the staircase so that they wouldn't be blocking anyone's way. "We are going to buy your schoolbooks first, and if you'd like we can stop in at the Magical Menagerie or Eyelops Owl Emporium (they're like pet shops) and choose an animal to take with you to school." Lily flashed James a grin, and he grinned back. It was all so new and exciting, and they couldn't wait to start actually exploring Diagon Alley.
"Great!" Lily said happily, "Where's the bookstore?"
"It's down this way a bit," Hermione said, smiling in spite of herself. She hadn't been inside of Flourish and Blotts in the longest time, and was looking forward to going back. She led them down the alley and into the bookstore.
While Hermione was receiving help with the twins' booklist from the clerk dressed in slate grey robes, Lily and James slipped from their mother's view and wandered among the dusty bookshelves, examining the books themselves. There were books stacked floor to ceiling: books the size of small boulders, ones no bigger than postage stamps, and even a few spaces in the shelves that they found held books that were invisible. They were bound in everything from fine gold to silk to leather and burlap, and the two of them couldn't take their eyes off of the covers.
There were books filled with words in other languages, one held strange-looking symbols that neither of them had ever seen before, and a few that seemed to have nothing in them at all. Lily had to drag James away from a book called 1001 Ways to Get Revenge by Professor Vindictus Veridian ("We don't even have wands yet!"), and both of them sat for a long time with an open book through which they were watching an entire quidditch match (World Cup Match 1845, Scotland vs. Latvia). Too long, perhaps, because an exasperated-looking Hermione, carrying two bags crammed with books, found them and nearly cried.
"Sorry mom," Lily apologized quickly, allowing Hermione to lecture them about leaving her sight.
"We're fine mom," James said, setting the quidditch book rather reluctantly back on the shelf. "We've seen loads of really cool books, though. Are those are schoolbooks?" Hermione nodded.
"Awesome!"
"Yeah, awesome. Let's go, okay? We can hit the pet shops next, then, and you can choose your animals," she said, leading them through the twisted stacks out into the sunlight as if she'd done it a hundred times before. "Have you given any more thought to which you'd like?"
"An owl," James replied immediately.
"Lily?"
"I don't know, either an owl or a cat, I think, but I have to see them first." They made their way through the curving alleyway, Hermione leading the way until something caught James' eye and he practically hurled himself into the glass shopfront window.
"Wait!" she heard Lily cry, joining James at the window. Hermione turned and saw them at the window of Quality Quidditch Supplies, where James and Lily were staring in with interest at the newest model broomstick, something called the Phoenix, and at the dozens of beater's bats, seeker's gloves, and quidditch robes in the shop windows.
After much protesting, Hermione had allowed them into the shop before dragging them out again, reminding them of the Magical Menagerie, though they still had not completely forgotten the wonders of Quality Quidditch Supplies.
They must have inherited the interest in quidditch from Harry, Hermione thought as she led them to the pet shop, because the only reason she'd really gone to those matches (aside from the World Cup) was that Harry, Ron and Ginny were on the team. She definitely preferred to keep her feet firmly on the ground, thank you very much.
They soon found the Menagerie and after several minutes emerged again, James clutching a cage which housed a handsome chocolate owl with glittering black eyes, and Lily held the cage of a cream-colored owl with rather interesting blue-green eyes, which were not visible at the moment because it was asleep with its head under its wing.
Lily and James were thanking Hermione to the point of actually stuttering the whole time they made their way back to the gateway into the Leaky Cauldron. Hermione, carrying their schoolbooks, stopped when they arrived at the stretch of brick wall.
"I know," she told them. "Don't worry, it's just a belated birth—" but her sentence was prematurely punctuated by somebody gasping loudly in their direction. Lily and James turned their heads to find the cause of the noise.
A slim, pretty woman with warm brown eyes and a sheet of brilliantly red hair that fell down her back was holding one hand over her mouth and clutching the other to her chest in shock. Her expression was frozen in shock on her face, her mouth gaping half-open in a mix between disbelief, confusion and horror. Her eyes were fixed on Hermione's face.
But not for long, because she promptly fainted.
Lily and James stood staring, frozen to the spot. Lily was first to dart from the spot and over to the woman whom she'd never met in her life.
"Mom!" she called, turning the woman onto her back with some difficulty, looking frightened. Hermione turned to face her, did a double take, and recognized her old friend immediately.
"Oh, God, Ginny!" she exclaimed, rushing to her side. She pulled a handkerchief from her purse and doused it with a spurt of cold water from her wand and put it across Ginny's forehead. After a minute, her eyes flickered open and she sat up slowly, trembling.
"Hermione?" she asked, her voice weak and quivering. Hermione, giving a small smile, nodded, and the next instant Ginny threw her arms around her tightly and the two women were sobbing in each others' arms.
Lily and James, recognizing that this was not a scene that they wanted to take part in, shrunk back against into a corner, still clutching their owl cages. Lily gave James a wide-eyed look, realizing that this must be the Ginny Weasley they'd heard so many stories about, seen so many pictures of. James nodded, understanding her.
The two women sat on the ground embracing for a long time, and Ginny sobbed with a combination of happiness and immense relief. After what seemed like hours, they stood up and Hermione dried the handkerchief, offering it to her though her own eyes shone with tears.
"We thought—we were sure—you were—you were—" she couldn't bring herself to utter the word, "dead." Hermione shook her head.
"I left after—the final battle—when—" her own eyes began to tear. "Oh, this is stupid," she said, wiping her eyes and turning to the twins, who were slumped in the corner, astonished. She motioned them to come over to where she was standing, but they hesitated.
"Ginny Weasley," she said, "this is James and Lily," she paused. "My children." Ginny's hand flew to her mouth again, which gave the kids a chance to talk.
"It's good to meet you," James said quietly, turning to Lily expectantly, willing her silently to speak so that he wouldn't feel so awkward.
"Yes, we've heard so much about you."
"Hermione?" Ginny asked in a still-faint voice, glancing from one child to another.
"I think we need to go somewhere quiet to explain," Hermione said calmly, though her voice wavered slightly as she spoke.
Okay, dumb chapter, I know, the next should be up in a day or so. I'm glad that you've stuck with it for this long, and the next chapter will provide an update as to what everyone has been up to for eleven years, who has kids, who's died, etcetera.
To my reviewers:
bexxy: thank you! I'm glad that you've been sticking with my story (even the pathetic first chapter…lol), and I appreciate your reviews.
Lilah lee: I will! I will! Lol…thanks for the review!
james'nsiriusfan: I'm really glad that you like it…it does get better. Thanks a lot!
Monk of the Neko: Sweet review…lol…I'll definitely keep going. Thanks so much for reviewing more than once! I love it!
Keman: definitely! Of course I'll finish it—I hate it too much when people abandon stories in the middle to do that myself.
Thanks a bunch, guys, even if you don't review I'm glad that you're reading. It makes me want to write more…haha.
Later, alligators!
Callista Rose