Author's Note: I own nothing (not Harry Potter, not Sappho, nor her writings).

Hogwarts' Children

First Year

Hermione is eleven, almost twelve, when the woman in the funny hat and tartan arrives. It was a month since Hermione's letter—her Hogwarts letter, she crows silently—and Hermione knows that this will be her black hole solution; this will be her antidote to the poison in her dreams. So when the woman in the funny hat and tartan sits primly across from her parents on their paisley-patterned sofa, and says that magic is Hermione's magnum opus, Hermione takes her at her full word.

Hermione weaves her knees over and under each other anxiously while Daddy offers a cup of tea and Mama smooths her skirt.

The hat-and-tartan woman—McGonagall, Hermione of course remembers, Professor McGonagall, but there's something so delicious about defining this woman and her tightlacedness by a pointy hat and tartan that's punchy to look upon—the hat-and-tartan woman accepts a cup of tea archly. She takes a sip while surveying the room—the antique World War II-era clock on the mantel, the framed photographs of Hermione missing her two front teeth, the lines of the lamps free of dust. Everything here, Hermione knows, down to the guns hidden underneath Daddy's embroidered pillow, speaks of warmth underlined by military precision.

"So, Mr. and Mrs. Granger—you're both dentists?" Professor McGonagall asks, and Hermione supposes she should get used to calling hat-and-tartan woman Professor McGonagall, because what if she was called on in class and answered, Yes, Hat-and-Tartan Woman?

Daddy and Mama don't miss a beat, linking hands in unison. "Yes," they both answer at the same, Daddy looking bashful and Mama looking amused. Distantly, Hermione is always in awe of their performance—yes, I'm a dentist; yes, call us Anna and Edwin, please; and (Hermione's favorite) yes, we do move around, don't we?

Though perhaps this is less performance, Hermione realizes with a jolt, watching Mama smile at McGonagall over her cup of tea, the light catching her frizzy dyed-brown strands. Even Daddy looks relaxed, at ease. Or, at as much ease as one can be with a professed witch in the room.

Perhaps, Hermione thinks, watching the casual gesture, the ease to which they answer Professor McGonagall's questions, how quickly and instinctively their heads looked up at "Mr. and Mrs. Granger." Perhaps this isn't pantomime, this isn't show anymore. Maybe they finally fit into this world.

Hermione's black hole crackles; jealousy streams from her pores so quickly that the light flickers and Hermione has to clench her fists.

The adults in the room look over to her concernedly. Hermione breathes deep, smooths her palm over her knees, gives Mama and Daddy a reassuring smile. She shouldn't be jealous. She shouldn't be jealous that the people she loves most in the world, the people who love her most in the world, have found some peace in the life they hodgepodged together (for her sake, her always-reliable memory whispers). Even if Hermione, outside of this hodgepodge family, still feels like a cuckoo bird awash in a nest not her own.

Satisfied that the flicker of light was not of importance, Professor McGonagall turns her attention back to Hermione's parents. "You're taking this rather well," she says, taking a sip. "Not many muggle parents do."

Muggle. Hermione latches onto this word, files it away for further review.

Mama and Daddy exchange a look. "Well, not much surprises us anymore," Daddy hedges, and both their gazes turn far away. Instantly, Hermione is even more ashamed of her jealous burst because she knows their minds have gone to GI pinup queens and Since You Went Away and victories celebrated in the town square.

"I see," Professor McGonagall says, and settles her teacup into its saucer with a finality that suggests that the conversation is over. "Now," she smiles, turning to Hermione, "Contact me with any questions, and be on that train in September."

She leaves, and the quasi-Jarvis-Grangers lapse into silence: her parents with their minds to the past, Hermione with her mind to the future.

September arrives, and the first thought in Hermione's mind is, what a lovely train. Sleek black and metal-fleshy, not skeletal at all. Its rims are red, it's light golden. This is a train one would take on a Narnia journey, Hermione thinks, and even as Mama's and Daddy's arms lock around her, so tightly Hermione is not even sure whose chest her nose is pressing into, Hermione thinks this will be her Narnia train.

She's right: on the train she meets a boy, Ron, and a boy, Harry.

There's something about Harry that arrests her immediately. Maybe she sees the darkness of Howard Stark's coloring in the jet of Harry's hair, but it's almost a prescient feeling, a connection where she looks in Harry's face and sees someone else.

They hate her, of course.

Cuckoobird out of the cuckoobird nest.

Hermione hears Ron Weasley's comment and hides away in the bathroom, bawling. She thought Hogwarts would be different. Why would she think that?

She pulls through her files of memory of every bully in every primary school, sniffling at each one, before finally settling on a memory of Mama and Daddy reading her Peter Pan. She thinks of the line on fairies and magic being born from laughter and wishes for something so bright. She wants to go home to Mama and Daddy where she's still a cuckoobird but they're okay with it, they'll still love her, she'll never have to leave home ever again.

She cries in a bathroom stall for hours until a troll comes crashing through.

Later, Hermione pens a new proverb: one can always count on a troll to put things in perspective.

When the troll is beaten, the boys covered in water and porcelain dust, and Hermione wearing the biggest stupid grin of her life, she has an epiphany: she has found her nest.

It's a nest of cuckoobirds, too: neglected Ron whose mother missed the dirt on his nose and thin, and malnourished Harry who is so grateful for a Christmas present of sugarfree candy that Hermione almost cries.

She protects this nest through Snape and Fluffy and Nicholas Flamel, through chess pieces and poisons and great wheels of fire. Harry fights Voldemort, and when they all coalesce in the hospital wing, they choose to all share Harry's hospital bed though they each have their own. Ron on one side, Hermione on the other, Harry incandescent in the middle: Hermione leans in tight and squeezes, and her arms almost go around them both.

Second Year

She's read the texts, heard the rumors. She knows what mudblood means. No one had to explain it to her. What would that be like, she wonders, looking at Harry, who has the same access to the materials she's had and here is she is, explaining how here she will always be other, she will always be cuckoobird.

It only helps that Harry is a cuckoobird, too. The scar on his forehead stains him as much her "dirty blood."

(Though funnily enough, this helps her feel closer to Daddy and Mama and Howard Stark and Peggy Carter. They fought a war against blood purists, they bled and suffered and killed against those beliefs.

Now muggleborns are being attacked and Hermione sees in the Slytherin's apathy concentration camps and barbed wire and she thinks, fight, fight, fight!.

So in a way, a weird twisted way that Hermione knows she can never tell therapists, perhaps never tell Daddy or Mama neither, Hermione appreciates—is even thankful for—stupid Draco Malfoy and his big bigot head.)

Hermione thinks it's this what causes her to pore so long in the library until she reads the words basilisk and petrify and kill. She's solved it.

She is grasping the book in elation when she hears a scuffle, no, a slither—a weight grating seamlessly against stone.

It's here; it's here for her.

Hermione rips the page, crumples it in her hand, closes her eyes, run. She collides with something more bodily than table, and her first thought is that it will eat her. But no—it's another girl, an older girl, and Hermione grabs her, tells her in garbled gibberish that there is a basilisk, it will kill them or poison them or eat them—and all through this Hermione's stupid, unforgiving, fantastic memory is filing through scenes of Jaws for some reason, and this frightens so much she stutters into silence—but the girl is smart and brave and understands immediately. She grabs Hermione's hand, squeezes.

They hold each other and stumble together blindly until they can scrounge a pocketmirror from the girl's satchel. And Hermione grasps the girl's hand and the girl grasps back and they angle the mirror around a bookcase—they are so close to the exit—and then yellow eyes like iridescent lanterns—

Hermione dreams when she's petrified. Later, she knows that she read that petrification victims don't dream, but she did.

It's a formless dream, shadowfilled and watercolored, more sound than sight, but she thinks she hears a lullaby. Something soft. Something soothing. Maybe it's a heartbeat.

It could be male, could be female, could be personless.

But she hopes this dream belongs to Howard Stark and Peggy Carter.

When she wakes, Ron regales her with tales of their bravery. Her black hole flares up barely, just enough to static her hair, because Ron is sweet in his enthusiasm and too-loud voice. She wants to remind him that she was petrified, not deaf, when he tells her all about Tom Riddle and his diary.

Tom Riddle sounds like a young Hitler in the making, if you ask her. She knows a lot about Hitler. Mama made sure of that. Nazis killed Mama's family. Almost killed Mama, too.

Tom Riddle as Adolf scares her more than the basilisk. A basilisk is just a beast; it was following orders. And in this world it took Harry and Ron—children—to defeat the evil encroaching on the world. There were no Allied troops, no supporting war bonds. It took two twelve year olds to win the day while the adults focused their attentions elsewhere.

Hermione files this to memory. Another thing she files: the older girl, who let her cling to her hand in the sweating dark, is named Penelope Clearwater.

That's important to Hermione. Harry and Ron get the house points, but Penelope—Penelope should win the House Cup.

When Hermione goes home, she hugs her parents so fiercely that her knees give way and they follow her, flopping, to their knees. During their family council, Mama asks if everything was okay—there were long spaces without letters, why didn't you write?

This is a moment Hermione knows she will be so ashamed of in her memory shuffle, a moment entirely coated with selfishness and shame. She looks at her sweet, brave Mama and lies: "Of course; I'm so sorry—I just got carried away with Ron and Harry and exams."

Because at the forefront of her mind is Penelope Clearwater, half-blood, who saved her when Penelope could have saved herself. And if she mentions Voldemort and possession and basilisks or even three-headed dogs, Mama and Daddy will lock out all access to Hogwarts.

And one day, just one day, Hermione wants to be someone's Penelope Clearwater.

Third Year

When Hermione is just turned-fourteen, Professor McGonagall gives Hermione a time-turner that will break her heart.

The gold dust in her hourglass—not even a thimbleful, definitely not enough to go back to that day in 1990 with that blue portal wormholing through time, space, dimension; not enough to go back to that day where she first popped into this world; so not enough to find that portal and circle through to the other side, to that post-war world with a Peggy Carter and a Howard Stark and silver Ferris wheels and red-lipped women and carefully-hatted men, all dripping with swagger that comes from world-weary exhaustion. She twirls it, forefinger over thumb over forefinger, and thinks that if she could take the chance to jump through that portal, she would. She would even leave everything behind—her classes, even Arithmancy and Charms and Ancient Runes; even Hogwarts, where she's never felt more at home; even Daddy and Mama, who she loves; even Ron and Harry, who—and her heart quakes at this confession—she loves even more. Even them, her blue-and-green-eyed Gryffindor brothers, she would leave behind, to their Quidditch and tests and end-of-year trains, for just the mere hope of finding her parents.

Harry would understand this, she thinks.

Hermione thinks on this possibility all year. Even with pressing matters like dementors on the grounds and punching Draco Malfoy so hard her hand cracks and the rush is electric, even with the criminal Sirius Black escaped from Azkaban, the idea to leave stays on her mind.

But then—

Then there is a Grimm and a willow and Scabbers twitches into a bald-scalped buck-toothed man, Peter Pettigrew, and all is chaos—there is Sirius Black and Professor Lupin and Professor Snape and Ron, her poor Ron, with his leg all busted, and Sirius Black is pointing his wand straight at Harry—Hermione dives in front of Harry, doesn't think, shields him with chest and arm and hair and she finds herself saying, "If you want to kill Harry, you'll have to kill us, too!"

And later, shivering after the last Time-Turner's spin-thimble-spinning-spin-spin-thimblefuls-spinblefuls of sand have settled into place, with Ron in the hospital bed to the right and Harry in the hospital bed to the left, and her brain too tired to even think of anything beside abstract shudders of werewolves and dementors and kisses and hippogriffs, she realizes what she had said: "you'll have to kill us, too."And she knows that although Voldemort may be gone—but then she remembers the Voldemort wraiths of first and second year and guesses that evil will reverberate into the years to come—there is still that man Wormtail, and the Death Eaters in Azkaban, and men like Lucius Malfoy. Evil still threatens Harry.

This realization wafts over her, settles softly like a filmy curtain floating down: Hermione decides that she will never leave Ron and Harry alone to this danger, not even for the dream of Howard Stark and Peggy Carter.

Fourth Year

With this realization, her nightmares of wormholes, blue as oysters, vanish.

Instead, they are replaced with nightmares of rats and teeth and green light hitting her red- and black-haired boys. Ron, spread-eagled, freckles sharp against his skin. Harry, face-down—in her dreams he is always face down; she guesses it is because she cannot bear to think of those green eyes unseeing and glassy—and too still to be breathing.

The only silver lining is that Draco Malfoy is terrified of her. For the rest of the school year, his hand twitches to his face when she walks by.

In the summer, Daddy and Mama shared worried looks at their family council when she lies and tells them her dreams are about the wormhole. The pangs of guilt she feels at lying are greater now; perhaps because the consequences are greater now, too. If she can't go to Hogwarts, she can't help Harry and Ron. If she can't help Harry and Ron…here her mind stutters into her nightmares of scarecrow Ron and Harry spread-eagled and facedown, straw and blood spilling from their bodies. So she lies.

And when Ron pulls her aside at the Quidditch World Cup, his hand at her elbow, she knows she needs to be a better liar.

"Hermione," he fidgets, his hand unconsciously flexing at her elbow. "Are you alright? You look peaky."

A better liar then, and practice makes perfect.

"Fine," she shoots back, and there is a little wedge of her heart capsizing from gravity and grief at the fact that Ron noticed, Ron who never notices anything—and so she points vaguely at a Quidditch Flag and asks, "What's this, Puddlemere then?" Which starts Ron on a tirade about the diversity of Quidditch and how she needs to respect the culture and there are loyalties and divisions and as he prattles on the difference between Puddlemere United and Chudley Cannons, Hermione finds herself grinning like a loon at the way his skin flushes at the ear tips and dimples, and she finds she wants to see if the rest of him flushes, too.

It's a startling thought. This is Ron, Ron who never notices anything, teaspoon Ron, loyal Ron, heart-of-a-lion Ronald Bilius Weasley.

She likes him. Like like likes him. And then there's Harry, and she loves Harry. It's a deep-abiding love, a love that says In this life, I'll go, too, and she knows she will joined with him forever. And Hermione is old enough—fifteen—to know that she is a sexual being (Lockhart at least taught her that), but she doesn't know if what she feels for Harry is romantic, sexual, familial…

(If she's honest, she thinks there are threads of all three. He is the brother she never had, the soul with all her devotion, a green-eyed pantherboy with broken glasses.)

This is what she thinks on when she and the boys are in their Quidditch box and Harry is fiddling with his omnioculars and Ron is jostling for a peek, and then the Bulgarian mascots come out, and oh—

Oh. Veela. Hermione remembers reading about Veela, golden and silvery, ivory and iron. But when they prance through the field, Hermione recalls Sappho—my tongue is struck silent, a delicate fire suddenly races through my skin—

She breaks through her haze to see that Ron is over the railing and Harry has a leg already slung over. The veela then sprout beaks and claws, but Hermione doesn't lose her vision of beauty in hair tossed like ribbons. When the Irish mascot comes out and gold dissolves from the sky, she still thinks on this. And when Krum catches the Snitch, she still thinks on this.

Hermione likes Ron and loves Harry and likes Veela and liked Lockhart, and thinking of them (sans Lockhart), her heart warms and her toes curl. She thinks of Peggy Carter, with her razor-sharp lipstick, and it's just a feeling, a feeling with nothing to base it on but an old faded photograph, where the gaze is loose, the smile inviting, the heart open: Peggy Carter is a woman who is unashamed of what she wants.

So later, after the Goblet and the First Task, with Victor Krum hovering around her like flies on sticky fruit, Hermione channels Peggy Carter, her mother of blood. Victor asks her to the Yule Ball, and Hermione finds she likes the bulk of him, too, the shadowy mountain of chest and chin hair (but if Ron or Fleur Delacour had asked, she would have said yes, yes to each, yes to both), so she accepts. Mama had helped Hermione pick out her dress robes that summer, ruffled like geranium petals or lily folds. They had gotten ice cream and Hermione had gotten strawberry then, and her ruffled dress then, and at the time it felt right—but looking at the dress now, she doesn't feel like that Hermione. She feels like a Hermione who would get mocha fudge ripple or cookie dough or balsamic pear or guava citrus; a Hermione who would trade in these dress robes for something darker, tighter, slinkier.

Her sweet pink dress robes are set aside on the bed, her sensible shoes in the corner, but she hesitates.

Her hand reaches instead for Parvati's forgotten lipstick.

Parvarti is gone, the room is quiet, save for Hermione and the quietly grumbling mirror. "That's not yours," the mirror sneers.

"Hush," Hermione reprimands, transfixed on the color, more crimson than berry. It's shaped like a bullet, and the silver casing catches the light like a cold revolver.

Hermione wets her lip with her tongue, layers it with smears of red. Her mouth unfolds like a rose, plush, inviting, the bow of her lip tight like a petal's edge. Her eyes and hair are still light, but she looks more like Peggy now. Same nose and now same mouth.

—In this moment of longing, she yearns for Mama, too. What is she doing? This feels like a betrayal to Mama, almost, but maybe Mama wouldn't see it as a betrayal—certainly not Mama who loved Daddy who loved Howard-and-Peggy enough to raise their daughter, certainly not Mama who loves Hermione enough to dye her hair through years of burning permanents.

Mama would approve, maybe.

Hermione fingers the jar of Sleekeazy. She was just going to slick her hair with it, knot it up in a bun, but then she remembers Peggy's pincurl waves. She grabs the Sleekeazy, some hair pins. It takes hours, and Hermione's head aches, but her bushy hair is falling in sensuous, purposeful waves.

"Much better!" the mirror croons. "Daaaaaarling, you should wear this all the time."

Hermione looks at her reflection and blinks away tears; she looks like she could have been Peggy's coworker, or friend. A contemporary. Redlipped and sharp.

This makes her feels odd, shaken almost; it feels wrong like this, a poor masquerade, and Hermione knows that if she had kept up with therapy, this would make for a whopper of a session.

Because the saddest truth Hermione has to tell is that this is the closest she has ever felt to the woman who birthed her: a poor mirror image.

She charms the sleeves and layers off the dress, then inks it black.

Gold-haired and dripping in darkness, she feels like a black hole when she takes Victor's arm: a black hole of adrenaline and hormones and a buzzing in the base of her skull that thrums to the music and whenever Victor brushes against her hand.

She dances with him, spinning, and she sees Ron in his horrible fringed robes and Harry awkwardly shuffling, and in this rush, overwhelmed with the lights and the music and the beauty, she wishes that this year they will all be safe.

Of course, it all goes to hell.

Author's note: Thank you for reviewing—I so appreciate it! Next chapter things go from frying pan to fire. To those who wondered when the Marvel Cinematic Universe would be appearing, never fear…soon.