DPASW: Revenge is Best Served Raw

Interlude - Hermione Goes Shopping

[Earlier in the summer of 1991]

She couldn't find them.

It was time. Today was the day that she, Hermione Granger, was going to irrevocably bind herself to Harry's cause. She thought about everything she'd learnt from him, and all the revelations and shocks she'd gone through. She thought about the mission Harry had brought back in time with him, to defeat a dark lord, and recreate the Wizarding World. But most of all, she thought about her best friend, her confidant, the one person who she knew she could count on. And after today, he would be even more than that. He would be her magical guardian, her protector, her Lord. But right now, she couldn't find them.

Hermione ducked around the smoked-glass door to the garden, and looked across the wide lawn. They weren't here either. They weren't in the kitchen. They weren't in the living room. They weren't in their bedroom, and they weren't in either of the bathrooms, or the study, or the garage. That only left one place.

She sighed, stomped up the stairs, slammed open her bedroom door, marched to her trunk, threw open the lid, and poked her head in the space beyond. There, sat her parents, looking as guilty as the kid in the biscuit tin, each holding an open book with another large pile sat beside them.

"Mum! Dad! We're going to be late! And you know how goblins don't like to be kept waiting."

"Ah," said Daniel Granger, "is it that late already?"

"It's been that late for a full ten minutes, Dad."

"Right." Emma Granger stood and slammed her book shut. "Enough reading!" She raised her hand theatrically in the air. "Time to hit this mystical world! Through the looking glass, into the wardrobe, past the second star to the right, and straight on till morning!"

"Orrrr," Dan interjected, grinning, "just on Charing Cross Road off Tottenham Court Road."

"Yeah, or that."

Hermione pursed her lips. "Your clothes are in the bedroom in the bags. Can we ple-e-e-ease go now?"

"Of course dear, we're just getting in the right mood." Her mother smiled.

Hermione shook her head. She'd no idea what she'd been worried about before. Her parents had eventually reacted to the news of magic's existence like any self-respecting intellectually curious person would react, with awe and the enthusiasm of true fantasy geeks, which they were.

Harry had helped. So had Lord Slytherin. And seeing them both on her doorstep at the same time, warm plum pie in hand, had certainly thrown her, but only for about as long as it took to say 'would you like polyjuice with that'.

She'd felt strange, watching the two of them play off each other, knowing one of them wasn't Harry. Figuring out which one was the real one hadn't been easy. After a few hours of intense discussion about the political and social realities of the magical world—during which her parents had run the emotional gauntlet from mildly horrified to mildly angry to mildly depressed to resigned, to hopeful and grateful, before finally returning to their previous state of mild enthusiasm—'Harry' had come back from the kitchen, and sat back down on the living-room sofa, legs firmly together and bent slightly to one side, hands placed on 'his' knees, one on top of the other, back perfectly straight, head angled slightly downwards... the perfect poise of a pureblood princess.

Hermione had raised an eyebrow, and the girl wearing Harry's body immediately realised her mistake, blushed slightly, and shifted into Harry's more signature 'take-up-as-much-space-as-possible' sitting position.

She'd later learned that, yes, it had been the Greengrass heiress under there.

Since then, her Mum and Dad had spent most of their free time sneaking into her trunk, and devouring everything they could. Her mum was particularly interested in magical theory, which gelled with her dabbling in theoretical physics in uni, while her dad had called dibs on all the books on ancient runes, in keeping with his interest in engineering.