It was a familiar frustration, surrounded by books, none of which contained any answers to her questions. She remembered being a little girl and believing that books held all the knowledge in the world, just waiting for her to seek it out. Fred and George had been supportive, if not particularly helpful.
"We looked for years 'Mione, to see if we could figure out..." Fred gestured vaguely between himself and his brother.
"This," George finished.
"It's just, gifts like these were generally well kept secrets."
"They made families powerful, and they made them targets too," George shrugged. "We heard about a few rumors, but nothing concrete or well recorded."
"We learned that the Weasleys tended to have a lot of twins, and we think that a lot of them were probably like us, but... not much more than that. We eventually gave up..." Fred's voice trailed away with some noncommittal gestures.
Silence stretched between the three of them for a long time, before George spoke, his voice strangely hollow. "The magics the govern life and death are older than we can imagine, and their effects are unpredictable." The look on Fred's face had been unreadable as he'd studied her, stoic as he spoke.
"When you saved me, something changed within us both."
Eventually she had laid her useless books to rest, and abandoned her fruitless quest to understand the connection that linked her two the two men who now monopolized her time. Eventually she allowed herself to slip back into the rhythm of inventing and producing and preserving with the two of them. She let the ease of it slough off the shadows that had been clinging to her, dragging her into the earth. She even came to sleep through an entire night without nightmares, more than once, and to wake without her muscles rigid from fear felt like a victory.
The person that she was returning to, rediscovering underneath the scar tissue of the trauma of the war, wasn't the same Hermione. She wasn't as pristine, or as rigid. To discover that you weren't as you remembered wasn't as terrifying as she might have imagined once. She was passing a shop window one day, returning from making a deposit at Gringotts, and the girl who stared back at her wasn't her anymore. Before she could think about it for a second longer, she walked into a salon, metamorphosis on her mind.
The witch there tsked at her limp locks, the tangled mess of which she hadn't touched with wand or brush for ages, but once her scolding look subsided, she brandished a pair of Ever Sharp Scissors and got to work. The weight of the dense curls falling away with every cut of the scissors brought tears to her closed eyes, bittersweet. When the witch was done, Hermione opened her eyes and saw a frail girl in the mirror, too thin and too pale, with fading dark circles under her eyes and tear tracks on her cheeks. But she saw someone strong too, with eyes flashing and a grin just sharp enough to cut.
Her hair was short, shorter than she had ever worn it before, trimmed almost to the skin on the sides, but left a bit longer on top. Nothing could tame her curls completely, but the length had relegated them to wild waves and a few stray ringlets that she might even dare to call elegant. The witch was beaming, and sternly coerced Hermione to promise to put a few potions on her hair, and use a few charms to contain her curls in the frequent Scottish rain. Hermione left, feeling lighter than she could remember feeling in years.
When she walked into the shop Fred and George were chatting over the counter, taking notes on a list and passing it seamlessly between them as they talked. George caught sight of her first and stilled suddenly, causing Fred to turn and catch her eye. They both took a moment to appraise her, but she missed the way George's eyes flashed between her face and Fred's. Fred, who was standing on her side of the counter, approached her haltingly, like he was approaching an animal ready to dart away. And perhaps she was. He reached her, and his hand rose to the side of her face, his fingers brushing the softness of an errant ringlet and then falling to her collarbone. His fingertips sent a now-familiar electric thrill across her skin.
"Cor Hermione... you look..." the warmth in his eyes brought heat to her cheeks.
"You look like yourself," George supplied, and she felt her own face stretch into a grin to match theirs. The ache of it felt like victory.
They opened the shop just a few nights later on April 1st (the twins shrugged off all notion of a birthday party, despite her best efforts) to an enthusiastic, if slightly smaller than expected, crowd. The whole Weasley clan, even Percy, had been in attendance, Ginny pulling Harry in tow. Ron had managed to smile at her, and she had been happy to smile and wave, and gratified to see him blushing with a pretty blonde she didn't recognize.
Ginny had been glowing, saying nothing, but a simple silver band had been wrapped around her left ring finger. Molly had been furious, a ball of worry and frustration and fear too, fear for losing her children to their adult lives. Arthur had shushed her, quietly reminding her that they had been married at that age, which had mollified her. Still she had fretted for the rest of the night, smoothing the flaming hair of any child she could reach.
Ginny had pulled Hermione aside, laughter sparkling in her brown eyes.
"Don't tell mum, because I think she might have a cow, but that's not our only life-altering news." Ginny placed a delicate hand on her still-flat stomach, and winked in a manner that reminded Hermione exactly of the twins. Hermione wrapped her in a hug, thinking of red-headed children and the breakneck pace with which life was barreling on past her. And if some of the red-headed children happened to have blue eyes, well, she didn't consider it for too long.
The Weasley clan had been the last to leave, well after midnight, and only after Ron and Percy managed to convince their mother that she didn't have to clean every inch of the store herself. Hermione brought three mugs of tea, and she and Fred and George sat on the floor of the shop to drink them and unwind. She placed herself on the floor between them, leaning against a stack of boxes, letting each ankle rest against the nearest twin. It was still a distinctly unfamiliar feeling, to be so startlingly aware of her own magic, of the swirling energies of the two men, George's an echo through the connection he had shared with his brother from birth. She could draw on their magic if she wanted to, cast spells with the added strength of the talented wizards.
Their minds could mingle like that too, sometimes strongly enough that the phantom sensations of their bodies in space made it difficult to tell where she began and where they ended. Now, she could barely feel them, their minds occupied, racing with excitement but blurred with exhaustion, humming just on the edge of her consciousness. Together they could dream up solutions to problems that none would have considered alone.
Since they had begun testing the connection in earnest, they had completed the Giggling Gumdrops, and had perfected a charm that could cause otherwise inert objects to move, an inch at a time, whenever they were not being observed. It was a complex piece of spellwork, layering charms on top of one another, that (though she was loathe to admit it) she never could have completed alone.
She hadn't felt alone for a single moment in the last few weeks, and she was surprised to find that she didn't mind it. She had been alone for long enough.
There were drawbacks, of course. It was difficult to tell which thoughts were hers and which were influenced by one of the boys. She couldn't read their minds, but she did get sudden thoughts or sensations that weren't quite her own. She had woken in the middle of the night a few days prior, not from nightmares, but from the strongest craving for chips she'd ever had in her life. She'd stumbled into the kitchen to discover Fred snacking on leftovers from dinner at a pub.
She pulled herself from her thoughts and dragged the two twins, who were still chattering in barely formed sentences that only the two of them (and now sometimes herself) could understand, up the stairs to their flat and shoved them towards bed. She felt their thoughts calm as she washed their dishes, and then finally fall to silence. When her head hit the pillow she was asleep.