Disclaimer: I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).
***
It's four o'clock in the morning, and the windows are open to the spring darkness, with its seductive scent of flowering trees, the ones that Hermione's mother planted in the garden when they first bought the house. The Granger house is the only one in this suburban neighborhood whose windows are lit at this hour, and the only one whose front room is full of conversation.
They are all jet-lagged and giddy with relief and this has been the state of things for some days. No one is sure what is going to happen next, but the Drs. Granger are on holiday from their Australian home and their British expatriate identities as Monica and Wendell Wilkins. Once more, Hermione's parents are savoring the subtle seductions of an English spring.
It all turned out well, and they're back.
Hermione can scarcely believe it, even now. The memory that most worried her, the recollection of all the preparation and her parents' repeated consent, was restored along with all the rest, so there isn't the storm of recrimination that she had feared.
She doesn't even want to think about the number of things she had feared; they come tumbling in on her, now, each night (or morning) as she falls asleep, the things she hadn't dared to think about at the time, because she didn't have a choice about doing this, the way you have no choice in a field hospital with incoming wounded.
***
Rather than Apparating by stages, they had flown to Australia, Muggle-style, Hermione and the distinguished specialist in Spell Damage, Boudicca Derwent. In their initial consult at St. Mungo's, Derwent had read her the riot act about attempting that memory charm unassisted—apparently in practice it's done by two spellcasters in tandem, for redundancy and safety—indeed, for attempting it at all. The nearest Muggle equivalent, she's learned, is advanced neurosurgery, of the kind done by teams of surgeons in ten-hour marathons.
She and Derwent undid the charm in tandem, since she was the original spellcaster, and it took seven hours over the course of an autumn evening in Australia; as they crossed midnight, the sweat broke out on her brow, and she had to remember to breathe, to relax while concentrating utterly…
When the final layer unwound, and her parents recognized her...
When Derwent did the last diagnostic spells to be sure that everything was in place…
After the initial tearful reunion, Derwent took her aside, cast Muffliato and gave her a dressing-down that if possible matched the acerbity of the first one, with a full enumeration of everything that could have gone wrong, but hadn't.
But hadn't, Hermione repeated to herself silently, tears running down her face and her wand hand trembling uncontrollably, because now it could, now that she didn't have to hold steady.
Once the roll call of counterfactual catastrophe had been read, Boudicca Derwent drew herself to her full height and offered Hermione an apprenticeship at St. Mungo's on the strength of what she'd just done, unassisted and out of books.
When Hermione protested that she didn't have her NEWTs, Derwent told her that the NEWTs would be pro forma in her case, as her conjecture as to correct procedure had in more than one point been an innovation. What wasn't written down, the actual tradecraft, was actually quite different from Hermione's guess. Those are the places that could have led to disaster, and which Hermione bridged without realizing she was traversing the abyss.
Three days after their arrival at Heathrow, she's still giddy. And she just got a promotion at her computer programming job at the bank, too. And there's yet another offer, which she'll describe to her parents, eventually, as soon as there's a logical place for it in their colloquy, which has been running all night.
***
The Drs. Granger, it turns out, have a similar choice of blessings. Their dental practice in Australia is booming, and they love the seacoast town in which they are living. Elizabeth and William had entertained that fantasy for years, of chucking it all and running off to Australia together. When Hermione asked them where they'd prefer for sanctuary, her mother had said, "Australia. We could run off to Australia," and her father had started laughing, even though the situation was far from funny.
They could come back to England, as well. Elizabeth Granger confesses herself tempted, because the smell of those flowering trees, and the English spring; those mellow skies, and tea in the back garden at midsummer, all tempt irresistibly. Tonight reminds her of the idyllic early years, when Hermione was small… before everything became irrevocably complicated, when their most ambitious fantasy for their small daughter had been admission to Oxford or Cambridge.
Hermione's mother is just coming around to girl talk, now, asking her if she's still seeing the boy she was interested in at school. Not the nice Bulgarian one, of course; though Viktor was a perfect gentleman, Elizabeth had always had the sense that wasn't going to work out. No, she means the red-headed one whose parents they'd met.
No, Hermione tells her mother, she and Ron stopped seeing each other quite a while ago. It was pretty unpleasant going through the breakup, because the press got involved, but in the post-war relief work, they've crossed paths occasionally and it's better, and she's had some working contacts with Ron's father Arthur, who really is a good fellow.
"So," Elizabeth presses, "are you seeing anyone?"
"Yes, she says. You remember the couple I told you about, who were tortured?"
Elizabeth nods. "Alice and Frank Longbottom."
"I'm dating their son, Neville." She adds that this has led to yet another happy choice.
"He's proposed?"
"Oh, no. We're both too young to get married, and he's just started his apprenticeship. It was quite an honor, too, because he doesn't have his NEWTs yet. He's working with the war orphans at Hogwarts and studying Herbology. He'll be a Professor when Sprout retires."
She catches her breath, realizing that she's just given Neville's CV at a dead run, and that she sounds both stuffy and absurdly young.
"Once Mrs L realized my intentions were honorable, she offered me an apprenticeship. Whether or not I married into the family, but with incentives if I did: full partnership and half the income from the patents and the Floo powder concession. She's working on hybrid technology, and it's really quite exciting."
In the north, she says, it's really more the Statute of Discretion, and the Ministry of Magic is commonly referred to in the collective as "those spineless southern buggers." The resistance in Lancashire had used cell phones to communicate, and the movement was mixed Muggle-and-wizard both in personnel and in techniques. Neville's Gran had developed some techniques for using Muggle electronics and magical technology without one interfering with the other. Thaumaturgical shielding, she calls it.
Elizabeth smiles. "So that's how you were able to do all that wand-work to prepare dinner without worrying about your computers upstairs."
Hermione smiles. Her mother has always been distinguished by her ability to get it in one or less.
That's the point at which the doorbell rings.
"Who can that be?" her father says. "It's four o'clock in the morning."
Hermione does a quick check of the foe-glass, sighs, and goes to open the front door. In a pool of light, sharply distinguished from the surrounding spring darkness, Draco Malfoy is standing on the front step. This time he's wearing wizard's robes with a dressing gown thrown over them, and he's holding a bundle that can only be a baby.
"Granger," he says. "I saw the lights and thought you'd be up."
Hermione's father says to her, "Is there something you didn't tell us about what you did in the war?" She recognizes the tone as joking, and then realizes how it looks: there's a boy, holding a baby, standing in their doorway.
She sighs. "No, dad, it's his sister."
Draco says, "I was walking the baby, because Mother needed to sleep." He explains further: Hypatia is soothed by being walked, and she also likes the tube and the commuter trains. Frequently he Floos to the Leaky Cauldron and thence walks to King's Cross; if the walk doesn't calm her, then he looks for a train.
Which doesn't really explain why he's shown up once more on her doorstep at four o'clock in the morning, this time with his baby sister, but Hermione has long since stopped expecting Malfoy to make sense.