(Text conversations)

Sherlock: Granger

Sherlock: Granger

Sherlock: Are you dead?

…

Sherlock: Where is Granger?

Mycroft: She lives with you. Why don't you know?

Sherlock: I wasn't paying attention when she said where she was going.

Sherlock: She might be dead.

Mycroft: Australia.

Sherlock: I don't suppose you would send Anthea over with milk?

Mycroft: You are thirty-three years old, Sherlock. You can get your own milk.

Sherlock: When is Granger coming back?

Mycroft: Saturday

Sherlock: What's today?

Mycroft: Stupid question

Sherlock: I'll wait

…

Mycroft: Sherlock has run out of milk.

Hermione: What do you want me to do about it? I'm in Australia. And off the hook, as he apparently thinks I'm dead.

Mycroft: Oh, nothing. I just thought you might find it amusing that he has decided to wait until you return rather than go fetch it himself.

Hermione: …You did tell him I won't be back for three weeks, right?

Mycroft: I told him you'd be back on Saturday.

Hermione: Yes, three Saturdays from now. If I come back to find a dead Sherlock stinking up my apartment, I'm dumping him in your favorite chair at the Diogenes.

Mycroft: You wouldn't.

Hermione: It's not like they'd mind. ...He wouldn't be talking, at least.

Mycroft: Fine! I'll send someone over to check on him periodically.

Hermione: Tell Anthea to tell him he has no one to blame but himself, as he's the one who drew attention to the fact that he was incapable of buying milk.

…

Hermione: I've changed my flight. I'm coming back early.

Sherlock: I thought you were coming back yesterday.

Hermione: No, I was supposed to stay until the 23rd. I'll be back tomorrow though.

Sherlock: No rush, Anthea brought milk.

Hermione: Not everything is about you, Sherlock

Sherlock: Don't be daft.

Sherlock: Why are you coming back early?

Sherlock: Since it's not to fetch the milk.

Hermione: I'll explain everything when I get back.

Sherlock: If you stop at the market, we're out of bread.

…

Hermione let herself into the flat she shared with Sherlock carrying her single small roll-aboard bag (no bread), eyes red from crying, to find Sherlock sitting in their only armchair, which he had pulled around to face the door directly.

"You said you would explain everything," he said when she gave him a confused look.

"Yes, yes, fine. Whatever. Fuck the laws, and fuck the game," she dropped her bag and grabbed a sheet of paper off the desk, scribbling out several lines before she handed it to Sherlock. "Here, when I nod at you, say this."

She pulled a long, thin piece of wood from her left sleeve. It was, Sherlock noted, far too long to have been concealed against her forearm. It was straight and polished, the grip worn from long use, with a grain that wrapped around its length. Some kind of vine, perhaps. She cuffed back her sleeve, revealing a nasty series of scars he'd never seen before – letters? O-D? – and grabbed his right hand in her left, tangling their fingers together. She turned their wrists so the undersides were exposed, and dragged the tip of the stick down her own arm, then his, opening twin cuts, though there was no way the stick, with its rounded tip, should have done so.

"I hope you don't have AIDS," she muttered.

"Of course I don't! What are you doing? How did you do that?"

"Two seconds, Sherlock, Merlin!"

"Merlin?"

"Shut up, until I give you the signal."

He considered saying 'yes, ma'am' but decided against it when he saw the look on her face. He nodded. Contrary to popular belief, he was capable of being patient if he believed it would get him answers, and he was very curious about Hermione.

She flipped their arms over and took a step closer to him, forcing the cuts together, and touched their entwined fingers with the stick. It was quite the most barbaric thing Sherlock had ever done, and he had spent nearly fifteen years floating around the seedy underbelly of London.

"I declare by my magic, by my blood, and my will: William Sherlock Scott Holmes is my brother, bound by more than blood alone, by affection and loyalty, by magic, in truth." She nodded.

"I declare by my mind," Sherlock read off the paper, "by my blood and my will: Hermione Jean Granger is my sister, bound by more than blood alone, by affection and loyalty, by magic, in truth." Mad. His cousin had left for Australia and returned emotionally compromised and babbling about magic. Completely mad. But interesting.

"In the eyes of the Powers and Magic Itself, called upon to witness this ritual, I declare William Sherlock Scott Holmes brother and heir of the Head of House Granger, bound by magic, blood and will, on this day and forevermore, until death and beyond. So mote it be."

A wave of cold washed over Sherlock, stemming from his hand, still clutched in Hermione's, racing through his blood, to his heart and head, wrapping around him and then… it was gone. She dropped his hand, looking at the thin, flat, healed scar which had formed in place of the cut on her wrist. There was one on his own wrist, as well. Impossible, really. With that degree of bloodflow it ought to have taken weeks for the cut to heal.

"What the fucking hell was that?"

"Magic, Sherlock." Hermione dropped onto the couch.

"What? Don't be daft. There's no such thing as magic."

"Impossible trunk, remember? I told you you'd need to consider a paradigm shift."

"But… but… fine." New hypothesis: Magic is real and can explain all the "impossible" things that happen in this flat… Experiment: …? ... Test for consistency in explanation?

Now it was Hermione's turn to say, "What?"

"Oh, I have questions. I just need to figure out which one to ask first."

"Of course." She sat, watching him, resigned expression firmly in place.

"Assuming magic is real, and leaving that alone for the time being, given the evidence of the impossible trunk," Hermione nodded "Why did you just declare us siblings?"

"Because it's against the laws of Magical Britain to tell a non-magical person about magic, except in very specific circumstances. One of those is if they have a muggleborn sibling. We are now legally considered brother and sister by the laws of Magical Britain… at least… I think the technicality ought to hold up if I'm called on it…" she trailed off, perhaps considering all the potential ramifications of that little ceremony. "The government would modify your memory and slap me with a major fine and possibly gaol time for saying anything, otherwise. Anyway, you now fall under section twelve-C, paragraph 2, subsection alpha of the International Statute of Secrecy. More or less."

"Okay… leaving aside the impossibility of magic and the 'legal' bits and the very concept of a 'Magical Britain,' which you talk about like its own country," "Semi-autonomous political entity," Hermione interjected. "Right… why now? It's been two years, ten months, and four days since I admitted your trunk was impossible."

Hermione sighed. "One of the other ways I could have legally told you about magic would have been if you figured out that I was a witch despite my taking reasonable precautions against it and then asked me about it. I was hoping you'd get it. You never like it when people just give you the answers. But you were taking too long. You demanded I explain everything, and I'm sick of hiding it, even though I'm really not trying that hard. Honestly, you don't think I clean the flat by hand, do you? And I did something ten years ago that involves magic, and had to follow up on it recently, and I'm second-guessing my more recent decision, and I want to tell you about it and have you tell me I made the right choice, and just not judge me over it, because you're honestly about the only person I know who would probably do the same thing."

Hmmm… "Does this have something to do with your parents in Australia?"

"Oh, I didn't think you were paying attention. Didn't you say you thought I was dead?"

"Well, not really, I just didn't want to deal with the crowd at the market, and no, I wasn't, but after Mycroft said you were in Australia, I did manage to put two and two together."

"Of course. Because it was inconvenient for you. Narcissist."

"Psychopath."

"I'm not, you know," Hermione said, tears in her eyes. "This would be a lot easier if I was."

"What?" Sherlock was terribly curious now.

"Well, skipping a lot of back-story that I'm sure I'll tell you later, in 1997, when I was nineteen, or, well seventeen, legally – side effect of time-travel" TIME TRAVEL? "– please don't ask right now – I was involved in a war. It was a small scale thing, because it's a small scale society, Magical Britain. And diffuse, because distance doesn't really matter if you have magic to keep in touch. I suppose for the most part it resembled gang warfare, more than anything else. From June of 1995 until July of 1996, it was a sort of underground, cold-war situation. There were still casualties on both sides, of course, but it wasn't until the summer of 1997 that things really started to disintegrate into all out attacks. Guerilla tactics on both sides. One of my friends, Harry, he was what you might call a strategic asset, I'll explain why later. But I was in danger because I was muggleborn – that's a witch born to non-magical parents – and his friend, so I went on the run with him and another friend from school. We avoided society as much as possible from June of 1997 until May of 1998, when we managed to win a decisive victory."

"So what does this have to do with your parents in Australia?"

"I… I obliviated them. In 1997, before we went on the run. Locked away their memories. I… I gave them a back-story, cover-identities, and sent them to Australia. I decided to wait ten years, until the last supporters of the Dark side's network could be rounded up, and then I'd bring them back… but I never told them. They would never have agreed to go."

"So… you just erased their memories? Everything they ever knew?" Sherlock was appalled. He didn't tend to think of things in terms of right and wrong, but that was just wrong.

"No, not everything. But the most important things. Their identities. The fact that they had a daughter. Their personalities changed too, a bit, but that was just because they were much more relaxed in Australia, I think. And it wasn't all gone, as I said, just… locked away. I always meant to bring them back."

"You can do that?" She better not have ever done it to him.

"Well, to most people. Not everyone. Most witches and wizards train their minds to resist things like that, and your mind, for instance, is far too organized. You'd realize something was wrong and drive yourself nuts until you found a way to revive the old memories. That's part of the reason I didn't want to just tell you, you know. You'd have been obliviated, and clumsily, too. The Ministry squad's not as good as I am."

"How do you know what my mind looks like?"

"There's a spell, legilimens, that lets you get inside another person's mind. I used it on you once, back when I first moved in. Just to make sure you weren't actually going to try to murder me in my sleep, after I re-organized all your things. Protip: never get in a staring contest with a witch." Sherlock nodded warily.

"So did you go get your parents then, and beg forgiveness for playing around with their heads?"

"No. I went, but then… they were happy there, Sherlock. So much happier than I ever saw them when I was a kid. I talked to them for a bit. And… they said they never wanted children. That they would have resented a child in their lives… so… I left them. I left early, and came home. Because I couldn't stand to give them their real lives back and make them miserable. So am I a terrible person?"

Sherlock thought about it for a long moment. If it had been him, he would never have forgiven her. His mind was his fortress and his refuge. It was the thing he valued most about himself. It was what made him Sherlock, and not some other, normal, boring idiot. But if all memories of her were gone, he'd never know to not forgive her in the first place. In Sherlock's world, the mind was the self and the self was the mind. But if one mind, one self was gone, changed, into a different potential self, with all the same abilities, but in a different place and time, with different experiences… was that really so terrible? But that wasn't the question, was it?

She was just sitting there, tears in her eyes, watching him think. "If it helps, think of it like one of those silly abstract ethics problems," she suggested.

He sneered at her. "You don't want an ethical answer. You already know that."

"No, I want you to tell me what your answer would be, if it were an abstract problem."

"Who says it's not?"

"And you call me a psychopath." Sherlock supposed that was supposed to be a joke, but it wasn't really funny.

"Well you did kill your parents," he said coldly. She flinched back as though she'd been struck. "You destroyed them, their identities, what made them themselves, and replaced them with… whoever they think they are now. Dan and Emma Granger are gone. Even if you brought them back now, they'd have lost ten years of their lives, like waking up from a coma or something – it wouldn't be the same as if they'd never left, and then you'd be killing off the potential selves they've developed over the past ten years, wouldn't you? No, you've done enough damage. In answer to your "abstract" question: It was the right choice, leaving them alone."

Some strong emotion flashed across Hermione's features, but then the tears vanished. Her eyes went blank, her expression hard. It was a look he had only seen before on professional killers. He hid a shudder at the thought of what his little cousin must have done in her war to have a face like that. "It was a necessary evil," she said, completely emotionlessly. "They knew too much. If they had been caught and tortured or legilimized… It could have compromised my mission. It was, and I do not say this lightly, a matter of National Security. I don't even know if Mycroft knew what was really going on."

Sherlock raised a skeptical eyebrow at this statement. "They sent a bunch of seventeen-year-old schoolchildren on a mission which could have compromised national security?"

"Oh, no. They sent a bunch of teenagers to kill an immortal, sadistic, psychopathic wizard who was trying to take over Magical Britain, enslave muggleborn witches and wizards like myself, and from there, take over muggle Britain, and presumably the rest of the UK. National security was already compromised. We were just doing damage control. A last-ditch effort, really."

"And in order to kill this 'immortal' wizard, you had to erase yourself from your parents' lives? It's like the plot of some stupid, terribly written novel."

Hermione shrugged. "Wizards, on the whole, are not known for their common sense, and unfortunately I was young and stupid enough to do as I was told I had to do by people I trusted to know better than myself. I did the arithmancy, and the odds of our success after our leader was assassinated in 1997 were something like one in twenty-five hundred thousand. Obliviating my parents brought it up to one in a million. Harry, Ron and I were on the run, mostly hiding out in forests I had visited as a child. I had no way of knowing what details of my childhood the Death Eaters might have been able to use to track us down. It would have been impossible for my parents to hide any information from the kind of interrogation they would have used. It was safer if they forgot I had ever existed. I sent them to Australia for their own safety, but revising their memories was a necessary precaution."

"Well I suppose you can rest easy, now, knowing that your mission was a success, the people they were died a quick death, and the people they are now are happy," and he went to his room, leaving his cousin on the sofa, staring into space with dead eyes. He needed to think about all of this.

…

Hermione felt as though she were moving slowly, underwater, for the rest of the week. Sherlock thought she had killed her parents. Sherlock thought that she had as good as murdered them, by taking away their memories. He was so appalled that he hadn't even asked the thousand and one questions she knew he must have about the magical world. He had just gone into his room and played the violin for hours and hours.

She didn't know what she had expected.

No, that was a lie. She had expected him to tell her that it was okay, that it didn't matter. This was the man who jumped up and down like a giddy schoolgirl when there was a new serial killer reported in the papers, who had once robbed a mortuary to acquire a pre-embalming human eyeball. He had no concept of the value of a human life. She had expected him to understand that sometimes it's necessary to do terrible things to one or two people to save thousands. But maybe she hadn't made that clear.

Or maybe she had just underestimated the extent to which he valued the human mind. Even the minds of stupid, normal people, who weren't in the exclusive club of people he deemed worthy of talking to (Himself, Mycroft, and until Monday, Hermione) apparently had value.

She skipped classes for the rest of the week, since she wasn't expected to be back yet, anyway, and laid in her room for an entire day, crying for the stupidity of her younger self, and the loss of the parents she hadn't really known, who hadn't really known her, since she was eleven, and went off to Hogwarts for the first time.

On the Friday after she returned, she was drinking tea and staring at nothing, when Sherlock re-joined her on the couch.

"Why did you want my opinion, Hermione?" he asked quietly.

Because I thought you would understand, she thought, but she answered with another truth: "Because… you're the closest thing I have to family, anymore, I suppose. And I wanted someone important to me to tell me that even though it felt like I did the wrong thing, leaving them there, I really didn't. And I hoped you wouldn't care. I mean, you never knew them. Only met them once, right, twenty-five years ago? Why should it matter to you that Dan and Emma Granger are gone and never coming back?"

"So you thought that because I don't care about them, and you're right, I don't, I wouldn't still see the act of destroying a mind as a terrible thing?" Sherlock looked offended.

"Not destroying a mind, giving them a new past, and a different future," Hermione explained in halting phrases. "A world where they never had a daughter they didn't want and had hardly spoken to for six years, never had to know about magic, weren't in danger from a war they had no business knowing about. They can still think and love and reason and do anything they want to do, just… without me in their lives. They remember their parents, and friends, and the places they used to live, but with different names. My mum still remembers that she had an older brother and they had a fight about something stupid twenty-five years ago, and they haven't seen each other since. She would never have called him up, again, anyway. My dad still remembers his first job as a dental assistant. They just think they just grew bored of life in the suburbs and decided to leave and do something else with their lives."

Sherlock weighed this additional information for some time. "If you had said that in the first place, I might have talked to you on Tuesday."

Hermione smiled weakly. "Dad's taken up surfing, and mum's painting now, and they bought a pub and they're happy. If they had never had me, they could have done all of this ten, fifteen years earlier. I don't know that they would have, of course, but… it's a possibility. And they still have all the potential they ever did, and all the intelligence, and wit. But my dad's not all bitter and sarcastic, and my mum doesn't snap like she always did when I was little, and they act like they're in love, like I never got to see them…"

"That doesn't matter," Sherlock pointed out. "It shouldn't matter, that they're happy now, or not. You couldn't have known, when you did it, that they would be happier after."

"I know that. I know that it was objectively wrong, to take their choices away, especially without talking to them about it and that's why that spell is considered Dark Arts. If I'm honest, I knew it, then. I just… didn't think of the consequences. And I should have. I've learned better ways of making people disappear now. I could have faked their deaths or something, I suppose. Sneaked them into Witness Protection in the States or something. I should have realized back then that the mind-wipe wouldn't work as a long-term solution. But… as I said, I thought it was necessary, and now, knowing how it turned out? I… wouldn't change it. Obviously. I didn't. I couldn't. I honestly do think they're better off now, and if Dan and Emma Granger could meet Wendell and Monica Wilkins, I think they'd say the same. And, well… that's what I wanted your opinion on. I was just really upset about the fact that they never wanted me, and didn't explain it very well, I think."

"But you've clearly already made up your mind. So why bother asking?"

"Affirmation," she shrugged. "Sometimes I doubt myself. Shocking, I know. Not for long, but enough to feel guilt."

"Well, fine, then. I think you were right not to do anything else to them. Another bad choice wouldn't make the first one better."

"Thank you," Hermione said quietly, a tension she hadn't realized she had been carrying seeping out of her shoulders.

There was a long moment of silence before Sherlock asked, "Is that why you've spent three days moping around? Because you've been feeling guilty?"

"Well, no… I made my peace with not asking their permission ages ago. It has been ten years, and believe it or not, you're not the only person who thinks that the mind ought to be sacred and I was absolutely wrong to mess with their memories in the first place. I was… quite thoroughly shunned, that first month on the run, when I told Harry and Ron what I'd done. I mean, they were terribly impressed, but really, really horrified. 'Brilliant but scary,' they put it…

"No, I was… mourning, I suppose. Because until I came back, I still had some vague idea that I'd see them again, you know? That everything could go back to the way it was. And then I decided that it shouldn't. But that meant they were gone forever. So, yes. I effectively killed my parents. It was kind of an accident. The action was premeditated, but the full extent of the consequences was not anticipated. Thank you for putting it so baldly. No one else would have. But now I've had time to think about it, and even when you put it like that, I don't regret it. They weren't tortured to death, or used against me, and they definitely would have been, if they'd stuck around. I'm sorry they're gone, and I'm sorry I didn't know them very well after I moved out at eleven, and I'm sorry I didn't tell them more about my life at Hogwarts and the war and all kinds of things, but I believe I made the best choices I could at every step along the way, and I'm not sorry I'm letting them go."

"You don't need to justify yourself to me," Sherlock said in a bored tone. Hermione smiled, and he added, "But you're definitely a psychopath."

She threw a decorative couch pillow at him. "I am not, jackass."

"So tell me about Magical Britain."

"Oh, we're going to need more tea for this… In the summer of 1991, when I was eleven years old, I got a letter from a school called Hogwarts. It was delivered by one of the people I later came to respect most in the world, Minerva McGonagall…"