A/N: Sorry for any canon errors. I haven't read the books in a while and I was too lazy to hunt for every time Hermione mentions seeing her parents. Hopefully there's nothing too jarringly non-canon compliant.
And I'm sure this has been done a million times, but I've never come across it so…
There is a bond between mothers and daughters, they say. It's a bond that can never be broken. It is unconditional, and can withstand anything. But there is an exception to every rule.
My Hermione was always brilliant. Before she was two years old she could speak in full, grammatically correct sentences. She could read by four and had read every book in my rather large library by seven. She astounded me with her intelligence. When she spoke, it was as though she herself were a book. I was so proud of my little genius, but there was a distance growing between us, even then.
Her father and I used to try to take her to do little girl things. We enrolled her in ballet classes, and bought her little girl dresses. She never said she didn't enjoy these things—that would have been almost easier. But we could tell that she was trying to humor us. She pretended to enjoy these things because she didn't want to disappoint us. Eventually we stopped.
I worried about her, back then. She didn't have any friends. The other children at school called her a know-it-all and a show off. Hermione never complained, and she never changed. She just kept reading, with her head held high, but I worried about her. I knew my Hermione was different, and so did her schoolmates, but none of us knew exactly how different.
A knock on the door one summer afternoon changed everything. A tall, stern looking woman, who looked far too serious to be wearing such silly clothes, calmly informed us that Hermione was a witch. There was, according to this woman, and entire hidden community of Magical people, complete with a governing body, whole wizarding towns, and a school. Hermione was being asked to join this world.
We didn't believe it at first. We thought it was some kind of joke, but it didn't take very long to convince us. We knew Hermione was special, and though we never could have guessed this, it wasn't too far out of our realm of belief.
Hermione was thrilled. I think a part of her thought that this explained everything. It explained why she was so different, and why none of the other kids liked her. I think she thought she'd go away to this school and find that all witches and wizards were just like her. I think she thought she would finally have friends.
She was positively bursting with excitement the first time we visited Diagon Alley. Her eyes were wide as we walked through the street, struggling to find the items she needed. Her father and I were amazed as well, but the enormity of this decision became real to us that day and we began to have second thoughts.
What would Hermione do with a magical education? She was so brilliant, and could be anything in the regular world: would attending this school be a waste? Did they even teach science at Hogwarts?
That evening, we spoke with her, and tried to convince her that joining that world might not be the best option. Her eyes, which had been alit with joy that I had never seen there before deadened. She thought we were trying to take this away from her. She would go.
We received a lot of letters from her at first. As her first term began, the letters were long and frequent as she told us all about her school and lessons. We could tell that she was feeling lonely. She didn't speak of any friends she had made.
Over time, the letters she sent became shorter, and they came less often. She had made two friends, she said. They were boys named Ron and Harry. Her father and I were worried that they were just using her to copy her homework. We wrote a letter warning her. She didn't write back for two months.
She came home that summer a different person. She was far more confident, and seemed happier than I had ever seen her, but something was still off. She told us that all end of term exams had been cancelled, but just gave us some vague answer about celebrating when we asked her why.
We tried to become more involved, but she just sat up in her room most days, reading books that we could never understand. We tried to talk to her about her new life, and sometimes she told us a bit about it, but we barely understood a word she said.
We took her to Diagon Alley again before her second year started, and we met her friends. It was scary being there, so much out of our element, and that weird man with all his questions about toasters didn't help, but we tried. And then there was a fight in the book store. It started out between Hermione's little friend Harry and another boy, but soon the adults were fighting as well. Was this how wizards were? Did they just break into fights in public places regularly?
And the blonde man (who I must say was pretty creepy) seemed upset that we were there because we were "Muggles." I asked Hermione about it later, and she said that there were a couple of old families in her world who were too proud to share magic. She said that there were only a couple of them, and that she never had any problems like that at school. We believed her.
The summers wore on and Hermione drew further and further away from us. We only received a few letters from her during each school year, and she rarely came out of her room during break. The summer after her third year, she left halfway through to go to some sporting event. I didn't even know she liked sports. We didn't want to let her go—we saw her so little as it was, but she was determined. Finally, we agreed. We didn't take her to Diagon Alley that year.
We picked her up from King's Cross after her fourth year and could tell something was wrong. The group that greeted her from the train looked morose and worried, and Hermione looked the same. She didn't speak the whole ride home. She informed us that evening that she would only be staying with us for a week, and would then be going to stay with her friend Ron's family. She didn't even ask, she just told us. We didn't know how to argue.
We tried to argue when she did the same thing over Christmas break her fifth year. We had planned a special ski trip. We knew how much she loved skiing and were hoping to spend some time with her, and to maybe reconnect with the daughter we could feel slipping from our grasp. She said she was going back to stay with Ron and we forbid her.
We woke in the morning to find her things gone, and a note saying she was sorry but she had to be with her friends. They needed her, she said, but she didn't say why.
The next summer, she only came home for a few weeks. She looked awful, like she had been injured, and she looked exhausted. There was worry on her face that I knew was more than just nerves about exams. It was something more. On the platform at King's Cross, I saw the same look in the eyes of her friends. It was a look that shouldn't have been in the eyes of children. It was haunted, it was scared, and it was old.
She told us she was leaving again and we said no. I told her I knew something was going on and that she wasn't leaving until she told us what. I told her she was still a child, and that if she didn't tell us, we would take her out of that school. I told her she was still our daughter, even if she did like that other family better, and we were not going to let her continue to pull away from us like this.
She cried. It was the first time I saw her cry since she was a baby. I didn't know what to do. I was her mother, but I just stood there, across from her in the kitchen, rooted to the spot, while she put her head down on the table and cried.
Finally she told us. She said she was going to tell us everything, and we believed her.
Poor Harry, she said. He was an orphan. His parents died when he was a baby and he never had any family. Finally, a few years before, he learned that he had a Godfather he never knew about. This man, Serious she said his name was, became like a father to Harry. And then, just a week before, the man had died in an accident. Harry wasn't doing well, and everyone was really worried about him. She needed to be there for him.
I didn't want to let her go, but I knew if I didn't she'd just leave again without telling us. I could take her out of the school, but then what? She would just resent us for it, and it wasn't as if we could put her into a Muggle school now. She was sixteen, only months away from seventeen. She hadn't had a math lesson since she was eleven. How could she ever graduate on time?
So we let her go. Against our better judgment, we let her go.
A letter was sent home at the end of the year telling us that the Headmaster had been killed by one of the Professors. The Professor, apparently, had been working as a spy for someone called Lord Voldemort. The school was doing everything they could to ensure the students' safety, and was debating whether or not to reopen in the fall. Students would be sent home immediately following the funeral. Parents wishing to collect their children earlier could do so at Hogwarts.
Who the hell was Lord Voldemort? Hermione had some explaining to do. I didn't care if I would have to take away her wand and lock her in her bedroom: She was not going back to a school where the Headmaster had been murdered by a Professor. We would get her tutors and she would live as one of us. It was not too late to bring her back into our world. That's what I told myself anyway.
She wrote and told us not to bother picking her up at the station. She was seventeen now and had gotten her Apparition license. She spoke as though I knew what that meant.
I learned what it meant when she appeared from thin air in the kitchen the next day. I had never seen her do magic before. It was terrifying.
I collected myself and told her she was not going back to that school. I told her we knew about her Headmaster. I told her I knew she had been keeping things from us. I told her it was over.
She said I was right, she wasn't going back to school, but that she wasn't going to be a dentist either. And no, it wasn't over.
She sighed and asked us to sit down. She didn't cry. She looked like she was past the point of crying. She was thin, her face was pale and drawn, and she had circles under her eyes darker than I had ever seen there before. What had happened to my little girl?
She spoke to us in a detached voice. Her tone was flat, and her eyes never left the table. She told us there was a war going on, and that it was now seeping into the regular world. She told us it had been going on for a while, and that her world had been struggling against it, but that things were beginning to spiral out of control. As she spoke of such terrible things in such a calm, determined voice, I became aware that our daughter had grown into a different person. She had become someone I didn't know. She had grown up in the shadow of horrors I could barely understand, and all the while, I had remained nearly oblivious.
She told us she had to fight. She said she was sorry. She said she never wanted to be so different, but it was who she was. She said she loved us very much, and that she wished things could have been different between us. She told us she had things she had to do, and that we might be in danger. There were tears in her eyes now. She told us we'd be happy. She told us we wouldn't have to worry about her anymore. She seemed to be trying to convince herself rather than us. And then she raised her wand.
And then she was sitting across from us in a small house in Australia, looking as though years had passed. She was wearing different clothes and her hair was longer. Her wand was still raised and she was crying. "I'm so sorry," she sobbed. "Please forgive me."
For the second time, I saw my daughter lay her head on the table and cry. My mind seemed disconnected, and I was vaguely aware that time had passed, and that I had been living as someone else for a while. I was vaguely aware that my daughter had done something to me that I wasn't quite sure I could forgive.
There is a bond between mothers and daughters, they say. It's a bond that can never be broken. There is an exception to every rule, but my daughter was crying and this time I didn't stand helpless on the other side of the room. I only knew one thing: My daughter needed her mother. That was all I needed to know. I held her as she wept for losses I will never understand and I realized that my daughter is not that exception.