I Have No Daughter, Mrs. Granger and Hermione, G
Title: I Have No Daughter
Author: a_t_rain
Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: G
Warnings: Spoilers for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Prompt: 76: "It requires philosophy and heroism to rise up above the opinion of wise men of all nations and races" - Elizabeth Cady Stanton. (Prompt not used.)
Summary and Notes: Hermione's mother is furious about the measures her daughter took to ensure her parents' safety during the war.
This is the first in what will probably be a series of interlinked fics set in the year after Deathly Hallows. I liked about three-quarters of the book, but I wasn't terribly happy about how things got resolved in the end, and in particular how a lot of the big ethical and political issues in the wizarding world seemed to get elided. Besides, JKR left us plenty of stories to tell, and that's how it should be.
It started off as an ordinary day. Monica Wilkins got up early, showered, and had breakfast with Wendell on the terrace. She lingered over her coffee, enjoying the view of the gum trees and the raucous laughter of the kookaburras. It had been a good decision to move here - more space than they’d had in England, and much better weather. She couldn’t think why they hadn’t done it years ago.
She cleared away the breakfast things, brushed and flossed very carefully, and drove to the dental surgery with Wendell.
There were already half a dozen patients in the waiting room: an old lady who was one of their regular clients, a family with two children, and a girl of about eighteen with thick, curly brown hair. Monica thought for a fleeting moment that she’d seen the girl before, but when she looked again, the impression was gone.
The children first, she thought. They were already fidgeting, despite the distraction of a large tank of tropical fish, and the parents would need to go to work. She checked and cleaned the little girl’s teeth while Wendell went to work on the father. After she had finished with the girl, the mother came in with the little boy and sat beside him while Monica worked; it seemed to be his first visit to the dentist. Afterward, she handed out stickers and new toothbrushes to the children.
Monica liked children. It was a shame she and Wendell had never had any of their own. She didn’t remember why they’d decided against it. Something to do with both of them having careers, she supposed, but of course that was silly - there were lots of families where both parents worked. Well, it was too late now. She put the thought out of her mind and told her hygienist to call the next patient.
The girl with brown hair came in. “Good morning,” she said. It was an English voice. A backpacker, Monica thought, or perhaps an exchange student at the local uni. Whoever she was, she didn’t look very happy.
“Here for a cleaning?” Monica asked. “Don’t worry, it won’t hurt a bit. Sit down and open your mouth.”
She was halfway through when she noticed that the girl was trying not to cry, and not succeeding very well. Tears trickled out of the corners of her eyes and disappeared among her masses of hair.
Monica took her instruments out of the girl’s mouth. “What’s the matter, dear?”
The girl sat up. “Don’t you know me at all?”
“I’m sorry, I might have known you in England, but I don’t remember. What’s your name?” She supposed the receptionist had told her when the girl came in, but she had no recollection of it at all.
“Hermione Granger.”
The name had barely registered in Monica’s mind when it disappeared again. “I’m sorry - that doesn’t sound familiar - could you say it again?”
“Hermione Granger. I’m your daughter.”
“That’s impossible,” said Monica. “I have no daughter.”
Hermione blinked away more tears. “Maybe this will help,” she said, and drew a stick of wood from her shoulder bag. She tapped Monica with it on the side of the head, and said, “Mnemnisco.”
~ ~ ~
“Hermione!” cried Helen. She blinked, dazed. What had happened? Where had her daughter been? Was she still at school? Grasping for solid facts, she noted that the calendar on the wall said that it was August of 1998, which made Hermione nearly nineteen, and the person sitting in the dental chair was a grown woman.
Whatever had happened, they had lost time, apparently. Lost the schoolgirl Monica had last seen in London, more than a year ago.
“Shh, Mum. It’s all right. I’ll explain.”
Wendell - no, Paul - walked into the room. “What’s going on, Monica? Who is this young lady?”
Hermione tapped him with her wand and said “Mnemnisco” again. Paul’s eyes slid out of focus - for a horrible moment he looked completely vacant - and then he was himself again. He caught their daughter in a great bear hug. “Why, Hermione! How did you get here?”
“Flew,” said Hermione. She seemed entirely self-possessed once again.
“On a broomstick?” Helen asked. They were ... they were in Australia, weren’t they? It seemed incredible that they could have moved there without thinking about Hermione, but as far as she could remember, that was exactly how it had happened.
“No, on Qantas.”
“Oh.” Paul still seemed vague and confused. He didn’t ask any of the questions one would normally ask of a daughter who had suddenly turned up after a year of absence.
An awful suspicion began to form in Helen’s mind. “Hermione - did someone - do something to our memories? I remember Professor McGonagall told us that might happen if you talked about your school to the wrong people.”
“Yes,” Hermione said reluctantly.
“But - but we’re the right people, aren’t we? We’re your parents!”
“Yes,” Hermione almost whispered. “That was why I had to do it.”
“YOU did this?” shouted Helen.
“I had to! We were at war, and they were making all the Muggle-born wizards register - and killing their families - we had to go underground, and you wouldn’t have been safe in England - oh, it was awful!” Hermione burst into tears.
Helen took her daughter in her arms and felt, for a moment, like a mother again.
* * *
The moment passed. After several hours of discussion, Helen and Paul decided to return to England. Hermione said she was going back, with an air of authority and decision that took the wind out of her parents’ plans to persuade her to stay, and Helen didn’t want to be separated from her daughter again.
But as they boarded the plane, she began to wonder if the journey was a mistake. Hermione seemed almost a stranger to them. As far as Helen could remember, she had seen Hermione only very briefly at Christmas, and for a week or two in the summer, for the past three years. There had been that trip to Bulgaria, and then she’d gone to stay with her friends Ron and Ginny, and she’d begged off of a skiing vacation that year because her friends’ father was in hospital...
If Helen could trust her memory, of course. Right now, she wasn’t sure what she could trust. She had only Hermione’s word for everything that had happened, and Hermione could change memories at will.
She tried to put these thoughts aside and make small talk on the flight back to England. “Have you thought at all about going to uni?” she asked Hermione.
“No, I’d like to someday, but right now I’m going to work for the Reconstruction Committee, it’s a new group that’s getting started. The first thing we have to do is repair the damage at Hogwarts and get some new walls up, so the school can open on September first as usual.”
“You’re leaving for Scotland right away?” demanded Helen.
“I’ll be back in a couple of weeks, I promise. The committee’s headquarters is in London, and there’s lots to do there.”
“And you’re going to be a - a stonemason?” asked Paul.
“Among other things,” said Hermione. “I like to think of myself as more of an activist, actually. There’s a lot of political work to be done - Griselda Marchbanks has been acting as Interim Minister for Magic, but she’s a hundred and sixty-three, so they’ll need to select somebody younger -”
Something tugged at Helen’s mind. “Wait, I thought you weren’t supposed to talk about magic in front of - of these people.”
“It’s all right. I cast Muffliato on the people sitting near us.”
“I don’t like the idea of your casting spells on people without their permission.”
“Sometimes it’s necessary,” said Hermione, “and I do want you to understand that, but this time it isn’t, so I’ll lift the spell on them if you like.”
For the rest of the flight they talked only about the film and the weather.
* * *
Before she left for Scotland, Hermione introduced them to a friend of hers named Dean Thomas. She didn’t say why she wanted them to meet him, but after an hour or two of conversation, Helen knew. Dean had been in hiding for most of the year, and, with only a little prompting from Hermione, he told them what the war had been like for Muggle-born wizards and their families. It was all part of Hermione’s attempt to explain to her parents why she had altered their memories.
The trouble was that Helen didn’t want or care about explanations. She wanted - well, her little girl back, of course, but also an assurance that the memories she had now were really hers, and an assurance that it wouldn’t happen again. She wanted to trust Hermione, and she didn’t. Oh, Hermione thought she was acting for her parents’ good, but she hadn’t consulted Helen and Paul about it, and - was it so much to ask that your daughter treat you as her mother and not her child? She could accept that Hermione had powers that she and Paul didn’t share, and perhaps she was even more intelligent than her parents, but as far as Helen could tell, that still didn’t give her the right to make choices for them, or make Helen and Paul any less capable of thinking and choosing for themselves.
Hermione returned from Scotland on the third of September, having stayed long enough to see the new students settled, and immediately started talking about her new projects. Apparently she was trying to get a grant from the committee to start an evening grammar class for house-elves - whatever those were - and she was planning a guest appearance on an underground radio show to talk about her experiences, and meeting with some of the other committee members to draft new legislation for the Wizengamot to approve. The wizarding world was changing, she said, and there had to be new laws. On top of that, she had started going out with Ron, and he was forever dragging her off to Diagon Alley for a drink or to his family’s home for dinner. When Hermione announced her plans to spend her birthday at the Burrow instead of at home, Helen finally put her foot down.
“We never see you!” she said. This was perhaps the least of the things that were bothering her, but at least it was easy to explain and to prove.
“You see me all the time, Mum. I live here.”
Helen wondered how long that would last until Hermione decided she wanted a flat of her own in the wizarding district, or moved in with Ron.
“Look,” Hermione went on with an air of amused tolerance, “I see what you’re saying, and I promise it will get better as things go back to normal, but all right, why don’t we go out to dinner and a film or something on my birthday, and I’ll catch up with the Weasleys the next day.”
“Fine,” said Helen, but it wasn’t fine. In her more embittered moments, she wondered if Hermione had chosen a film in order to avoid making conversation with her parents. Still, at least it was a concession, and that seemed to be all that Helen could expect from this stranger.
* * *
To fill the silence at mealtimes, she asked about the new legislation Hermione and her colleagues were drafting. Apparently it included a Code for Responsible House-Elf Ownership, a bill outlawing discrimination on the basis of blood status, a repeal of the 1995 Statute on Werewolf Employment which also provided for the free distribution of the Wolfsbane potion at St. Mungo’s, and a set of rules outlining the proper procedures for trying prisoners in front of the Wizengamot. In fact, Hermione seemed to be involved in protecting everybody’s rights - except those of people like Helen and Paul.
One night, exhausted from biting her tongue and trying to smile, Helen pointed this out.
“You’re right, Mum,” said Hermione, much to her surprise. “Where do you suggest we start?”
And she took out a spiral-bound notebook and began to take notes while Helen ranted about the unfairness of the Statute of Secrecy, the impossibility of having a child at Hogwarts without becoming entangled in a web of lies, the terror she’d felt in Hermione’s second year when they had heard nothing from her for weeks except the occasional note from the school nurse...
At that point, thank God, Hermione put aside her notebook and listened.
Finally, Helen came to what she regarded as the ultimate betrayal - the way her daughter had calmly walked into the house on the first day of the summer holidays, tampered with their memories and desires and even their names, until their very sense of self was gone. And then vanished.
Tears were welling up in Hermione’s eyes. “I’m sorry, Mum, but I swear I wouldn’t have done it if there had been any other way.”
“There was another way,” said Helen. “You could have told us.”
“You wouldn’t have let me go and help Harry, and you certainly wouldn’t have changed your names and moved to Australia.”
Helen gritted her teeth. “That’s exactly my point. We wouldn't have chosen the way you chose for us.”
“You might have died!”
“So might you,” said Helen quietly. “What makes our choices worth so much less than yours?”
She saw that at last she had struck home. “I’m sorry,” said Hermione again, and this time there was no but.
“What are you going to do about it?” Helen asked.
Hermione picked up her notebook again. “What new laws would you like to see?” she asked. “Bear in mind that there have to be some compromises, because we do have to keep this world secret from most Muggles - it’s international law. But I want to know what you think before we write a new bill.”
They talked almost all night, as Hermione filled the pages with notes. “I can’t promise it’ll all become law,” she said. “I want to talk with some more people - Dean’s family, and the Creeveys, and maybe some others - and it’ll need to go through the committee and then be approved by the Wizengamot, but I think we can make some things better.”
“Thanks,” said Helen. “I’m glad you’re trying.” To herself she thought that Hermione was very young, and very much an idealist, and she wondered if one-tenth of the changes would ever take effect. Perhaps that didn’t matter. It mattered that Hermione had finally said I want to know what you think.
“Anything else?” Hermione asked at last.
“Well, you might invite Ron or Harry to visit us sometime.”
Hermione smiled. “I’m afraid I can’t turn that into wizarding law, Mum, but I think I might be able to manage it.”
Author: a_t_rain
Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: G
Warnings: Spoilers for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Prompt: 76: "It requires philosophy and heroism to rise up above the opinion of wise men of all nations and races" - Elizabeth Cady Stanton. (Prompt not used.)
Summary and Notes: Hermione's mother is furious about the measures her daughter took to ensure her parents' safety during the war.
This is the first in what will probably be a series of interlinked fics set in the year after Deathly Hallows. I liked about three-quarters of the book, but I wasn't terribly happy about how things got resolved in the end, and in particular how a lot of the big ethical and political issues in the wizarding world seemed to get elided. Besides, JKR left us plenty of stories to tell, and that's how it should be.
It started off as an ordinary day. Monica Wilkins got up early, showered, and had breakfast with Wendell on the terrace. She lingered over her coffee, enjoying the view of the gum trees and the raucous laughter of the kookaburras. It had been a good decision to move here - more space than they’d had in England, and much better weather. She couldn’t think why they hadn’t done it years ago.
She cleared away the breakfast things, brushed and flossed very carefully, and drove to the dental surgery with Wendell.
There were already half a dozen patients in the waiting room: an old lady who was one of their regular clients, a family with two children, and a girl of about eighteen with thick, curly brown hair. Monica thought for a fleeting moment that she’d seen the girl before, but when she looked again, the impression was gone.
The children first, she thought. They were already fidgeting, despite the distraction of a large tank of tropical fish, and the parents would need to go to work. She checked and cleaned the little girl’s teeth while Wendell went to work on the father. After she had finished with the girl, the mother came in with the little boy and sat beside him while Monica worked; it seemed to be his first visit to the dentist. Afterward, she handed out stickers and new toothbrushes to the children.
Monica liked children. It was a shame she and Wendell had never had any of their own. She didn’t remember why they’d decided against it. Something to do with both of them having careers, she supposed, but of course that was silly - there were lots of families where both parents worked. Well, it was too late now. She put the thought out of her mind and told her hygienist to call the next patient.
The girl with brown hair came in. “Good morning,” she said. It was an English voice. A backpacker, Monica thought, or perhaps an exchange student at the local uni. Whoever she was, she didn’t look very happy.
“Here for a cleaning?” Monica asked. “Don’t worry, it won’t hurt a bit. Sit down and open your mouth.”
She was halfway through when she noticed that the girl was trying not to cry, and not succeeding very well. Tears trickled out of the corners of her eyes and disappeared among her masses of hair.
Monica took her instruments out of the girl’s mouth. “What’s the matter, dear?”
The girl sat up. “Don’t you know me at all?”
“I’m sorry, I might have known you in England, but I don’t remember. What’s your name?” She supposed the receptionist had told her when the girl came in, but she had no recollection of it at all.
“Hermione Granger.”
The name had barely registered in Monica’s mind when it disappeared again. “I’m sorry - that doesn’t sound familiar - could you say it again?”
“Hermione Granger. I’m your daughter.”
“That’s impossible,” said Monica. “I have no daughter.”
Hermione blinked away more tears. “Maybe this will help,” she said, and drew a stick of wood from her shoulder bag. She tapped Monica with it on the side of the head, and said, “Mnemnisco.”
~ ~ ~
“Hermione!” cried Helen. She blinked, dazed. What had happened? Where had her daughter been? Was she still at school? Grasping for solid facts, she noted that the calendar on the wall said that it was August of 1998, which made Hermione nearly nineteen, and the person sitting in the dental chair was a grown woman.
Whatever had happened, they had lost time, apparently. Lost the schoolgirl Monica had last seen in London, more than a year ago.
“Shh, Mum. It’s all right. I’ll explain.”
Wendell - no, Paul - walked into the room. “What’s going on, Monica? Who is this young lady?”
Hermione tapped him with her wand and said “Mnemnisco” again. Paul’s eyes slid out of focus - for a horrible moment he looked completely vacant - and then he was himself again. He caught their daughter in a great bear hug. “Why, Hermione! How did you get here?”
“Flew,” said Hermione. She seemed entirely self-possessed once again.
“On a broomstick?” Helen asked. They were ... they were in Australia, weren’t they? It seemed incredible that they could have moved there without thinking about Hermione, but as far as she could remember, that was exactly how it had happened.
“No, on Qantas.”
“Oh.” Paul still seemed vague and confused. He didn’t ask any of the questions one would normally ask of a daughter who had suddenly turned up after a year of absence.
An awful suspicion began to form in Helen’s mind. “Hermione - did someone - do something to our memories? I remember Professor McGonagall told us that might happen if you talked about your school to the wrong people.”
“Yes,” Hermione said reluctantly.
“But - but we’re the right people, aren’t we? We’re your parents!”
“Yes,” Hermione almost whispered. “That was why I had to do it.”
“YOU did this?” shouted Helen.
“I had to! We were at war, and they were making all the Muggle-born wizards register - and killing their families - we had to go underground, and you wouldn’t have been safe in England - oh, it was awful!” Hermione burst into tears.
Helen took her daughter in her arms and felt, for a moment, like a mother again.
* * *
The moment passed. After several hours of discussion, Helen and Paul decided to return to England. Hermione said she was going back, with an air of authority and decision that took the wind out of her parents’ plans to persuade her to stay, and Helen didn’t want to be separated from her daughter again.
But as they boarded the plane, she began to wonder if the journey was a mistake. Hermione seemed almost a stranger to them. As far as Helen could remember, she had seen Hermione only very briefly at Christmas, and for a week or two in the summer, for the past three years. There had been that trip to Bulgaria, and then she’d gone to stay with her friends Ron and Ginny, and she’d begged off of a skiing vacation that year because her friends’ father was in hospital...
If Helen could trust her memory, of course. Right now, she wasn’t sure what she could trust. She had only Hermione’s word for everything that had happened, and Hermione could change memories at will.
She tried to put these thoughts aside and make small talk on the flight back to England. “Have you thought at all about going to uni?” she asked Hermione.
“No, I’d like to someday, but right now I’m going to work for the Reconstruction Committee, it’s a new group that’s getting started. The first thing we have to do is repair the damage at Hogwarts and get some new walls up, so the school can open on September first as usual.”
“You’re leaving for Scotland right away?” demanded Helen.
“I’ll be back in a couple of weeks, I promise. The committee’s headquarters is in London, and there’s lots to do there.”
“And you’re going to be a - a stonemason?” asked Paul.
“Among other things,” said Hermione. “I like to think of myself as more of an activist, actually. There’s a lot of political work to be done - Griselda Marchbanks has been acting as Interim Minister for Magic, but she’s a hundred and sixty-three, so they’ll need to select somebody younger -”
Something tugged at Helen’s mind. “Wait, I thought you weren’t supposed to talk about magic in front of - of these people.”
“It’s all right. I cast Muffliato on the people sitting near us.”
“I don’t like the idea of your casting spells on people without their permission.”
“Sometimes it’s necessary,” said Hermione, “and I do want you to understand that, but this time it isn’t, so I’ll lift the spell on them if you like.”
For the rest of the flight they talked only about the film and the weather.
* * *
Before she left for Scotland, Hermione introduced them to a friend of hers named Dean Thomas. She didn’t say why she wanted them to meet him, but after an hour or two of conversation, Helen knew. Dean had been in hiding for most of the year, and, with only a little prompting from Hermione, he told them what the war had been like for Muggle-born wizards and their families. It was all part of Hermione’s attempt to explain to her parents why she had altered their memories.
The trouble was that Helen didn’t want or care about explanations. She wanted - well, her little girl back, of course, but also an assurance that the memories she had now were really hers, and an assurance that it wouldn’t happen again. She wanted to trust Hermione, and she didn’t. Oh, Hermione thought she was acting for her parents’ good, but she hadn’t consulted Helen and Paul about it, and - was it so much to ask that your daughter treat you as her mother and not her child? She could accept that Hermione had powers that she and Paul didn’t share, and perhaps she was even more intelligent than her parents, but as far as Helen could tell, that still didn’t give her the right to make choices for them, or make Helen and Paul any less capable of thinking and choosing for themselves.
Hermione returned from Scotland on the third of September, having stayed long enough to see the new students settled, and immediately started talking about her new projects. Apparently she was trying to get a grant from the committee to start an evening grammar class for house-elves - whatever those were - and she was planning a guest appearance on an underground radio show to talk about her experiences, and meeting with some of the other committee members to draft new legislation for the Wizengamot to approve. The wizarding world was changing, she said, and there had to be new laws. On top of that, she had started going out with Ron, and he was forever dragging her off to Diagon Alley for a drink or to his family’s home for dinner. When Hermione announced her plans to spend her birthday at the Burrow instead of at home, Helen finally put her foot down.
“We never see you!” she said. This was perhaps the least of the things that were bothering her, but at least it was easy to explain and to prove.
“You see me all the time, Mum. I live here.”
Helen wondered how long that would last until Hermione decided she wanted a flat of her own in the wizarding district, or moved in with Ron.
“Look,” Hermione went on with an air of amused tolerance, “I see what you’re saying, and I promise it will get better as things go back to normal, but all right, why don’t we go out to dinner and a film or something on my birthday, and I’ll catch up with the Weasleys the next day.”
“Fine,” said Helen, but it wasn’t fine. In her more embittered moments, she wondered if Hermione had chosen a film in order to avoid making conversation with her parents. Still, at least it was a concession, and that seemed to be all that Helen could expect from this stranger.
* * *
To fill the silence at mealtimes, she asked about the new legislation Hermione and her colleagues were drafting. Apparently it included a Code for Responsible House-Elf Ownership, a bill outlawing discrimination on the basis of blood status, a repeal of the 1995 Statute on Werewolf Employment which also provided for the free distribution of the Wolfsbane potion at St. Mungo’s, and a set of rules outlining the proper procedures for trying prisoners in front of the Wizengamot. In fact, Hermione seemed to be involved in protecting everybody’s rights - except those of people like Helen and Paul.
One night, exhausted from biting her tongue and trying to smile, Helen pointed this out.
“You’re right, Mum,” said Hermione, much to her surprise. “Where do you suggest we start?”
And she took out a spiral-bound notebook and began to take notes while Helen ranted about the unfairness of the Statute of Secrecy, the impossibility of having a child at Hogwarts without becoming entangled in a web of lies, the terror she’d felt in Hermione’s second year when they had heard nothing from her for weeks except the occasional note from the school nurse...
At that point, thank God, Hermione put aside her notebook and listened.
Finally, Helen came to what she regarded as the ultimate betrayal - the way her daughter had calmly walked into the house on the first day of the summer holidays, tampered with their memories and desires and even their names, until their very sense of self was gone. And then vanished.
Tears were welling up in Hermione’s eyes. “I’m sorry, Mum, but I swear I wouldn’t have done it if there had been any other way.”
“There was another way,” said Helen. “You could have told us.”
“You wouldn’t have let me go and help Harry, and you certainly wouldn’t have changed your names and moved to Australia.”
Helen gritted her teeth. “That’s exactly my point. We wouldn't have chosen the way you chose for us.”
“You might have died!”
“So might you,” said Helen quietly. “What makes our choices worth so much less than yours?”
She saw that at last she had struck home. “I’m sorry,” said Hermione again, and this time there was no but.
“What are you going to do about it?” Helen asked.
Hermione picked up her notebook again. “What new laws would you like to see?” she asked. “Bear in mind that there have to be some compromises, because we do have to keep this world secret from most Muggles - it’s international law. But I want to know what you think before we write a new bill.”
They talked almost all night, as Hermione filled the pages with notes. “I can’t promise it’ll all become law,” she said. “I want to talk with some more people - Dean’s family, and the Creeveys, and maybe some others - and it’ll need to go through the committee and then be approved by the Wizengamot, but I think we can make some things better.”
“Thanks,” said Helen. “I’m glad you’re trying.” To herself she thought that Hermione was very young, and very much an idealist, and she wondered if one-tenth of the changes would ever take effect. Perhaps that didn’t matter. It mattered that Hermione had finally said I want to know what you think.
“Anything else?” Hermione asked at last.
“Well, you might invite Ron or Harry to visit us sometime.”
Hermione smiled. “I’m afraid I can’t turn that into wizarding law, Mum, but I think I might be able to manage it.”