A/N: Trigger warning for the second to last section of the chapter (toward the end). For those who are bothered by snakes or prefer to not read gory descriptions centered on Nagini, maybe skim over this part. You'll recognize it when you hit it because it's in all italics. Those with angst allergies may want to avoid it, too. When the italics stop, you're all good again!
The morning after tapas with Ginny, Hermione was buoyant as she got ready for the day. Just when she was about to leave for work, her Fatemark began to itch and her mouth began to tingle. She was getting a response via her Sense! Her heart surged with anticipation.
If she was not mistaken, she actually recognized what her soulmate was eating this time: beef. Really good beef that tasted like it had been roasted over a fire. Is that… barbecue?
Distractedly scratching at her Fatemark, she grinned with delight as she enjoyed the smoky flavor and crispy texture. Not only was her soulmate's response meal delicious, but it was accompanied by feelings of contrite peacefulness. She was still smiling when she arrived at work.
Some time later, just before lunch, her Fatemark began to itch intensely again. She happened to be alone at her desk when the Sense came, so she closed her eyes to focus on what was being conveyed. Whatever her soulmate was eating this time tasted crispy, greasy in the best way, and was filled with crunchy vegetables; a sweet, possibly alcoholic drink was paired with it. The best part of experiencing this Sense however, was when she concentrated on it, she could feel a thrum of excitement running like an undercurrent through him as he ate. Somehow she could tell that somewhere in the world, her soulmate was celebrating something.
She could not say how she knew all that, but the impression was plain as day, as if it were happening right in front of her. It felt so real that when she reopened her eyes to behold her scuffed work desk laden down with parchments in an office littered with neat piles of textbooks and legal volumes, she had to reorient herself.
Looking at the calendar, Hermione noted the date. June 5. It did not mean anything to her, but she stored the information away in her memory nonetheless.
A knock on the door signalled the arrival of Imelda, who entered with an armful of parchments to add to the stacks. Hermione did her best not to appear as if she had been daydreaming, even as she remembered her conversation with Ginny from the night before: It's better to have a plan in place ahead of time so you can control the information, instead of it controlling you. Whoever he is, he probably isn't used to the same kind of attention you are.
Hermione's assistant was tidying the stack she had walked in with and was preparing to launch into her daily midday recap, plus an itinerary of what Hermione had for the rest of the day. But as the older witch's mouth opened to begin, Hermione said, "Imelda."
She paused. "Yes?"
"Will you please shut the door? I have something confidential I need to discuss with you."
In true Imelda fashion, the tall, thin reed of a woman did not even bat an eyelash at this. She simply went to the door, closed it, cast a muffling charm, then sat in the chair in front of Hermione's desk and waited, ready.
"What I am about to tell you is extremely private," she began, feeling nervous. "But I need to prepare. To do that, I'm going to need your help."
Imelda's gray eyebrows raised toward her hairline and she reached for the monocle which hung on a chain from her waistcoat. Positioning the glass up against her eye, she studied Hermione. "You've certainly piqued my interest."
Hermione took a deep breath. "I'm Fatemarked. For the past few weeks now, I've been getting a Sense. I think my time is getting closer, and though I haven't met my soulmate yet, whoever he is, I think it would be prudent to have a plan in place for when this inevitably leaks to the media."
"Well," her assistant replied, leaning back in her seat. "I'm not sure what I expected you to say, but it wasn't that. A Fatemark just seems so… frivolous for you."
Staring incredulously at Imelda for a moment, it was only when the older witch began to smirk a little that Hermione burst into laughter. "Frivolous. Well. Thank you for that." She giggled.
A smile was spreading fully across Imelda's face now. "What kind of media plan are you thinking?"
"Well, I'm thinking it'll be best if we don't mention I have a soulmate. I'd like to just say that I have a boyfriend."
"If it's a man at all."
"It's a man alright," she confirmed. "A very foolish man with a strange palate."
"Your Sense is taste?"
Hermione nodded.
Taking it all in stride, Imelda waved this away. "Even if it's not ideal, you'll still want a plan in case it does get out that you're Fatemarked. We should be prepared for many different scenarios." She looked thoughtful for a moment, then stood to head back toward the door. "I'll go write something up right now. Given your notoriety and current position, it'll be far better to be ahead of this."
"Thank you, I think so, too."
She paused at the door. "But, Hermione?"
"Hm?"
"I think I'm most excited to see you in love with someone." Her assistant's eyes sparkled as she released the spell on the door and left to work on her new project.
She didn't even give me my daily debriefing, Hermione marveled, feeling pleasantly adrift now that an official plan had been set into motion.
That afternoon, she missed an important meeting with two chairpersons from the Department of International Magical Cooperation.
.
.
Ginny had arranged Hermione's first cooking lesson for that very evening, but when Hermione arrived, it was to chaos. Jamie, who had been a menace ever since he learned to stand up, had apparently been zooming around on his toy broomstick when he knocked into the large enchanted cabinet in the main corridor of Grimmauld Place. The doors of the wardrobe had flung open and Mrs Black's portrait—which the furniture had been built around in order to hide—began screaming obscenities.
"TRAITORS AND SCUM!"
Ginny was trying both to comfort a screaming infant and a possibly-injured toddler, all while the portrait of the mad, old woman continued to wail.
"CHILDREN OF FILTH!"
Hermione raced over to the big cabinet and swiftly reapplied the wards, a Colloportus, and finally, a powerful Silencing charm. Mrs Black's wailing finally under control, she was assaulted by Jamie's two-year-old body hurtling into her at full speed. Apparently having sensed that his mother's attention was divided, he began demanding comfort from his godmother.
The little boy turned out to have bumped his head and had a cut just above his eye. Harry was not due to arrive home from work for another hour. Ginny had just decided to firecall her mother, and ask her to come have a look at the graze, when Hermione decided it would be best if she took her leave. Clearly, no cooking lesson was happening tonight, and she was just going to be in the way.
"Tomorrow, Hermione?" Ginny queried sincerely, if a bit frantically.
She nodded. "Just take care of Jamie, tomorrow is fine."
"Tomorrow, though," Ginny repeated firmly, looking upset with herself for not having been able to follow through, on top of everything else. "I promise."
.
.
The next evening, Hermione arrived to quiet at Number 12 Grimmauld Place. Ginny smiled, offered her tea, and apologized, "I'm really sorry about yesterday. Jamie ended up being fine. Even so, Mum has both the boys for me tonight."
"It happens, Gin. I understand. I'm glad he's okay." Hermione squeezed her friend's hand. Then, eagerly she inquired, "What are we making tonight?"
"Shepherd's pie. A classic English dish."
Her friend's words gave her an epiphany: "I should be eating English foods. My soulmate… he could be anywhere in the world. This could be how to let him know my general location."
"I figured so as well, but I don't think you should let it limit you either."
So, Hermione learned how to cook, mash, and spice potatoes, sauté meat and vegetables over the stove, then assemble them all in a pan. The end result went into the oven for a short time before it emerged, smelling divine.
It tasted even better. The mashed potatoes were thick and buttery, while the flavorful gravy clung satisfyingly to the soft vegetables and tender lamb.
Harry arrived just in time for dinner to be ready. He hugged Hermione hello, kissed his wife, and tucked in with the both of them. Once they were all stuffed to the brim, he proposed, "If you want, Hermione, I can teach you how to make an omelette tomorrow night."
.
.
"Okay, so we are going to turn this on medium heat and let some butter melt in the bottom of the pan. While that's getting ready, you can crack three eggs into that bowl over there."
At Harry's instruction, Hermione gently tapped the eggs against the edge of the bowl, cracking them open one by one.
"Add a little water and whisk them."
She paused. "Not milk?"
Her friend shook his head. "The water makes it fluffier. Milk makes it flat."
Nodding along, Hermione absorbed the information.
"Now add some salt and pepper and whisk again. You want it nice and fluffy."
Hermione had a few memories of going through similar motions with cookie batter for her mother when she was a child, so this part of cooking was familiar to her. "Thanks for helping teach me, Harry."
"Hey, I'm glad to help." Here, he stopped and admitted, "You should know, I've actually known about your Fatemark for years now."
She hesitated, then frowned. "I don't remember telling you."
Looking guilty, he confessed, "You didn't, Ron did."
"Ah." She supposed she should have known.
"As far as I know, he never told anyone else besides me. I think he had to get the real reason the two of you broke up off his chest." Harry paused, looking shifty. "It took him a long time to get over you, you know."
Hermione did know, because the feeling had been mutual. Her lingering crush had lasted an embarrassing amount of time, until after Ron had been dating Susan Bones for nearly a year. Even still, the two of them had not been able to really be friends with one another again for another year after that. To this day, the relationship had never truly recovered, and he had still managed never to be alone with her.
"It took me a long time to get over him, too."
Harry nodded. "I'm glad I knew about your Fatemark, because I would never have understood it otherwise, when you two split. You were both miserable."
"Why didn't you ever say that you knew?"
"Well, it was still your secret to divulge, or not."
The feelings Hermione had for Harry centered on all the fondness that came with the closest friendships. She felt a swell of affection for him now. "I'm sorry. I should have told you."
"No." He shook his head. "Not until you were ready. But I'm glad you're ready now. I don't think you've been happy for a long time."
It was a beautiful thought that she might be ready—finally ready—for love in her life. Harry was right: though she had been thriving in many aspects for years—personally, powerfully, politically—that did not mean she was happy. She felt a tear spring to her eye, but pushed it down.
He politely pretended he had not seen, and instead checked the heat of the frying pan. "The pan is hot enough. Are you ready to make your omelette?"
"Yes," she said stoutly.
"Pour the eggs in then." Handing her a spatula, he instructed, "You're going to want to move them around gently, so the uncooked egg can reach the bottom of the pan." He showed her how to tilt the pan to move the egg around. "Now, see how the edges are coming free from the sides? Move the spatula around underneath it to free it from the bottom."
He's a great teacher. It was something she had known a long time, since planting the idea of Dumbledore's Army into Harry's head back in fifth year. Her friend had completed six weeks of Auror training before recognizing that the vocation was not for him. He had spent the intervening years teaching Defense Against the Dark Arts at Hogwarts, with booming success—something Hermione was not in the least surprised by.
"Okay, it looks like you've cooked it all. You can take your toppings and spread them all out alongside one half of it."
She had picked tomato, bacon pieces, and some Gruyère cheese from amongst everything Harry had suggested.
"Now fold this part in half with your turner." Harry pushed his slipping glasses back up the bridge of his nose. After a minute or two of cooking, he prompted, "Okay, Hermione. You're going to flip this onto the plate. Are you ready?"
She had not been confident enough in her first attempt, so the whole thing fell apart as it tumbled onto the plate. It had to be reassembled by hand.
"Not to worry," he assured her. "Try a second time. Let's do spinach and ham for this one. That was Ginny's request."
By the time they were finished, they had three omelettes. Both Hermione's second and third attempts—the last, a Swiss cheese and mushroom one—had come out perfectly.
Jamie, who had been excited at the concept of breakfast for dinner, ended up eating nothing but toast in the end. But when Hermione took her first bite, she smiled around the creamy omelette and crispy bacon, and felt proud of herself.
I didn't do so bad, she decided. Thinking of her soulmate, she playfully thought, Wouldn't you agree?
.
.
The next evening, she was treated to something absolutely divine. Thick, steaming-hot sauce comprised of a rich meat and a hint of tomato flavor, coupled with something that had to be perfectly cooked pasta, somewhat al dente.
Interestingly, her soulmate ate it right around when she was getting ready to enjoy her own dinner of Indian takeaway she had picked up from a well-regarded restaurant in East London. Even excited as she was at getting a Sense, the time change of her soulmate's dinner was noteworthy.
So began three weeks of Hermione finding her footing in a new—and far more delicious—exchange of taste.
Four nights a week, Ginny taught her to cook a new dish. After starting with shepherd's pie, they had moved on to Yorkshire pudding, chicken and leek pie, Scotch eggs, and more. For the most part, these recipes comprised a repertoire of Molly Weasley's cooking. The meals were built around basic, fresh ingredients, with inexact measurements judged by taste. Molly had handed them down verbally to her daughter, so there were often not written recipes to follow at all. Hermione took meticulous notes, and after only two sessions of this, Ginny gifted her a blank recipe book for the purpose.
Whoever was on the other end of her Fatemark seemed grateful for this change in diet. He had stopped using food as a means of attack, but though Hermione now spent a lot of time eating delicious things via her Sense, she rarely knew what those things were. Her limited knowledge base was beyond frustrating.
"Like right now," she complained to Ginny one hot, sticky evening in late June as the two of them made homemade strawberry ice cream. "He's eating something, but I have no idea what it is."
"What does it taste like?"
"Cheese, definitely. Maybe in sandwich form, because I think there's bread of some kind. Some vegetables, and—" Hermione paused to concentrate, rolling her tongue along the backs of her teeth and swallowing a couple of times for the phantom flavor. "Something crunchy… and salty. There are sauces, I think."
Ginny looked thoughtful as she twirled her wand through the air in front of her, churning the strawberries and cream with magic. "Cheese toasties, all dressed up?" she suggested.
"Maybe. He has a really varied diet."
"How do you think he liked last night's?" Cancelling her churning spell, Ginny gestured to Hermione at the large crock on the table, indicating that it was now her turn again.
Hermione had earlier pointed out that Muggles had a machine to do this for them. A doubtful grimace from an unamused Ginny had brokered no arguments about the churning method.
"He definitely fancied the kedgeree." With a smile, she added, "I get these vague feelings sometimes whenever one of us is eating. Nothing too concrete—and I'm still not sure how we're supposed to find one another—but sometimes I'll eat something, and I can feel that he's enjoying me eating it."
Ginny tilted her head quizzically..
"It's nice," she admitted, feeling uncomfortably vulnerable at saying it out loud. "It's like he's there with me when I'm eating it, having some of the same, and we've just shared a laugh or something."
"Aww," Ginny cooed.
"Ugh," Hermione effused, cancelling her churning spell to pass the effort back to Ginny. "Don't go soft on me, I already feel like a loser."
"Why?" her friend asked, approaching the frozen crock to peer under the towel that covered it.
"Because I have a soulmate. Do you know how frivolous that feels?"
"Hermione, no," Ginny replied quickly, dropping a spoon down into the mixture inside of the crock to give it a few manual stirs. "I think it's amazing. You're the most practical person I've ever met, but you've been given this truly soft thing that only a select few get to experience. Don't you feel how lucky you are?"
Hermione had nothing to say to that, but it was okay because Ginny knew her well enough not to expect an answer.
"This is ready, look" Ginny shortly announced, pointing to the resulting strawberry ice cream. "Grab a couple of spoons."
On three other occasions, when Ginny was unavailable to teach or did not feel like cooking, Harry taught her. For the most part, he preferred to invent his dishes, but was happy to let Hermione help him do so. In the end, he probably taught Hermione more about which flavors went with others than her other friends, because the experiments were always delicious and he explained his thinking as he went along. Harry really knew what he was doing.
"When did you learn to cook so well?" she asked him curiously one evening, when he was teaching her how to assemble enchiladas.
"My Aunt Petunia taught me."
She gaped at him. Harry rarely spoke of his life with the Dursleys, and even more seldom with any kind of fondness.
"She might not have ever loved me, but she loved my Mum enough to raise me anyway." Harry paused. "The pie crust recipe she uses is the one my grandmother taught her. I like to think my Mum used it too."
It was a touching thought. "There's memory in tradition sometimes."
Smiling, Harry agreed, "Yes."
But Hermione could not bring herself to trespass on the kindness of her friends every night. In the second week, she got an owl from Andromeda inviting her over for supper and a cooking lesson, if she did not mind that Teddy helped.
Hermione certainly did not mind, so she, Andromeda, and Teddy all learned how to cook a dish from a Muggle cookbook. This method was a serious departure from how Harry and Ginny cooked, and since it was a Greek cookbook, it was something different as well.
"Neither of my parents cooked—they considered it beneath them. We always had house elves for that," the older witch explained. "I never learned until I was an adult. For the first year or so of our marriage, Ted did most of the cooking."
When she took her first bite of the spanakopita they had put together, Hermione was surprised how much she enjoyed the rich combination of spinach, cheese, and herbs enfolded in crispy, flaky phyllo dough. It gave her an idea, and the next day she ran errands after work to three different bookshops—two magical, one Muggle—and bought a total of twelve new cookbooks. On the nights when she was left to her own devices, she followed her own curiosities and taught herself how to cook a few easy recipes. In such a manner, she learned how to make ratatouille, fried fish, roasted potatoes, and a variety of excellent salads that put the kinds she had previously been bringing for lunch to shame.
At the end of the month, Hermione realized she had officially gone up a trouser size. While she would not consider herself a vain person necessarily, her daily Nutri-Wafer diet, now abandoned, had always made it easy for her to look good. With dismay, she concluded that if she wanted to keep up her new lifestyle, she was also going to need to begin exercising in the mornings before work.
The curse of eating well, she lamented as she used some careful wandwork to let out the waistband of the trousers she wanted to wear.
.
.
She was passing at night through a row of neat cottages, their roofs burdened with snow. As Hermione approached the town square, the darkness and silence suddenly became deep, punctuated only by some brief snatches of a Christmas carol being sung in the nearby pub.
A figure was hobbling up the lane toward them, and stopped several feet away. A feeling of wrongness settled into her stomach. With a gnarled, mottled hand, the figure beckoned for her to follow it. She looked to her left, expecting to see Harry—but he was not there.
Despite not ever having moved her feet, she was suddenly in front of an overgrown garden, which had gone so long-unchecked that it had invaded the fencing meant to contain it, as well as the front door of the house.
A second later, and again without ever moving, Hermione was in the house. It was the last place she wanted to be, because she knew what was coming. Nevertheless, it could not stop the smell of the old woman from reaching her nostrils: the odor of old age, dust, unwashed clothes, and stale food...
The smell of long-expired meat, left out to sit. Feeling helpless, Hermione stood in the middle of that room and hugged herself.
The old woman entered, her whole face covered in burst blood vessels and liver spots, while her eyes were thick with cataracts and sunken deep into the folds of transparent skin. Darkness and foul odor closed in on Hermione from all sides…
She was racing up the stairs…
She was stepping over the body of the old woman…
The body was—
Hermione leapt aside as she got an eyeful of what was left. On the hump of the old woman's back, at the base of her neck, was a gaping hole… and from within, rose the shape of a snake, huge and powerful, and covered in the entrails of the long-dead Bathilda Bagshot. The smell of perforated intestines filled the room. Broken china and shattered wooden planks rained down from the ceiling.
She was being buried...
Except in the next moment, she was standing in the middle of the Hogwarts main courtyard. Harry was there, too—not her teenage friend, but the man he had become since—covered in blood, and bits of what looked like Bathilda's rotting flesh. Before she could say anything, he dropped to the ground and began writhing, hissing, and spitting Parseltongue. Between the bits of snake language, he was screaming and clutching at his scar.
The clanging of bells was ringing in Christmas Day.
The snake was back. It lunged before disappearing again into smoke, which filled the courtyard. She was surrounded by smoke. She was—
Her hands were shaking.
She had to cut the locket away from Harry's bare chest, and her hands were so unsteady, and there was so much blood blossoming out under her severing spell. All she could seem to do was fumble uselessly with the bottle of dittany—
"Wake up!"
Hermione shot up in bed, the taste of blood and the fetid air from Bathilda's house still on her tongue. The nightmare was all around her, lurking in the darkness of her bedroom and also bursting from her heart, attacking her both from without and within. Despite the July heat, she was cold with fear. Shivering, she pulled the covers up closer around her.
She was not sure exactly how long she was lying there in misery when the Sense came. Slowly, she recognized the flavor of chocolate, thick and creamy, the rich warmth of it nestling in her stomach.
Hot chocolate. Somehow, her soulmate had sensed that she was reliving some of her most traumatic memories through her worst recurring nightmare, and had come for her with chocolate and kindness.
She felt soothed. Dare she even say loved? She was too exhausted to decide, but the connection was intense, as if he was directly beside her, comforting her. Trying to hold on to the last threads of the bond she was experiencing in her state of half-dreaming, she focused as hard as her waning consciousness allowed, and said, "Thank you."
She was just on the cusp of sleep when a low voice whispered back, "You're welcome."
.
.
The next morning, Hermione awoke and blinked at her ceiling, the events of the night flooding into the forefront of her mind. She tried to focus on her Fatemark and find the connection she had felt in the twilight hours, but found it beyond her reach. Disappointment settled heavily within her chest. Had she dreamt it all up?
She had never wanted to know the identity of her soulmate any more than she did then. It was a yearning so strong, it almost felt like a foreign emotion to her.
"Please, I need to know who you are," she said, pressing her hand flat against her Fatemark. I know you're out there.
Not only was there no answer, but she could not feel the connection the way she had the previous night. Remembering how real it had felt, she concentrated on the ragged threads of memory.
Determined, she concluded that whether the enhanced connection had been real or not, it was time to do more. Her life up to now had prepared her to do one thing quite well—she was ready to have to do the rest of the work herself. "I'm going to find you."
There was no reply.
A/N: The research for this chapter was tasty and hilarious. I learned how to make a great omelette thanks to the YouTube channel You Can Cuisine. I always love hearing what you guys have to say about the food in this story. That being said, I know I have been exploring a variety of cultural foods as well, and I can't tell you how much it means to me that people have been kind about this. I just love food (hence this story) and I have the wanderlust real bad (I blame that global pandemic we are having), so this is my coping mechanism. If you happen to notice I've made any cultural mistakes, please let me know—I want to fix them!
Sarenia alpha-read this for me because she's amazing. Please accept a bouquet of chocolate cake for your troubles.
My beta was the incredibly talented iwasbotwp, who is a Magical Being Of Amazingness (MBOA), and managed to reign in my rambling. Thank you.
Lastly, I appreciate you, the reader, too. All the pink, floaty hearts.