Fic: The Unusual, Exceptional, and Statistically Remarkable Hermione Granger, Age 21
Title: The Unusual, Exceptional, and Statistically Remarkable Hermione Granger, Age 21
Summary: Hermione assesses her life on the morning of her twenty-first birthday.
Characters: Hermione-centric gen, background Hermione/Pansy
Word count: 3,000
Rating: PG
Notes: Belated birthday fic for the lovely liseuse, loosely based on her fictional universe. Give her credit for the pairing and the themes, and blame me for the unfunny bits, the typos, and any inadvertent Americanisms.
Three a.m., that dark hour of the soul, was not one Hermione Granger saw very often. Hermione rarely said she liked getting a good night's sleep, at least not out loud, since she had no desire to be hexed by every other twenty-year-old of her acquaintance, but she had the peculiar habit of rising early to do a little work before breakfast, and she was not fond of parties that began too long after dinner.
Tonight, however, she was still up at 3:07 a.m., curled up at the kitchen table, a cup of milky tea within easy reach, wearing a jumper pulled over her pajamas and a pair of wool socks with threadbare heels. Despite the hour, Hermione was wide awake. This would have been a source of distress had it not also been the morning of September 19 and her twenty-first birthday. Hermione had a very special project to work on.
Every year on her birthday Hermione made a note of the single most important thing she had accomplished in the previous year and the single most important thing she wanted to do in the next. Both Goals and Greatest Accomplishments were written down in a dog-eared A4 notebook she had purchased from WH Smith's long before she had ever heard of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. She had continued this tradition even after going away to school, though Lavender and Parvati had laughed at her and mocked her Muggle-style blue ballpoint pen and notebook (Notebook #1, Notes to Self, Goals and Accomplishments Through the Years, As Recorded Annually on September 19.) mercilessly. Eventually, she'd been forced to hide both. She comforted herself with the thought that neither Lavender nor Parvati could write "Greatest Accomplishment 1992-1993: Polyjuice Potion successfully brewed" or "Greatest Accomplishment 1993-1994: 1) use of Time-Turner to save lives of innocent Azkaban escapee and hippogriff and 2) use of Time-Turner to attend extra classes, still achieving highest marks in each (tie)."
Later, when she had left school and the war was over and she had lived with Harry, she made no secret of her birthday notebook. Privately, she hoped that one day she would be out of the flat and he would run across it and take a look. Harry could do some thinking about Goals and Accomplishments of his own, now that Voldemort was gone. Hanging around the flat and moping was not a good long-term plan. And the moping was rather distressing. She left a bookmark on September 19, 1998, just in case Harry took a look: Greatest Accomplishment 1997-1998: advanced research leading to the discovery of the location of three Horcruxes, instrumental in defeat of Lord Voldemort. Goal for 1998-1999: see Muggle counselor to talk about Ron's death. Next to the last line, in a careful hand, for Harry's benefit, she wrote done.
She had not, thus far, mentioned Pansy Parkinson in any of her entries, though they had been seeing each other for several years now and had recently moved in together. There were all kinds of reasons for this at first: fear that she was using Pansy to get over Ron, too much to mention with regards to her job at the Ministry, a vague feeling that no ambitious, career-oriented woman would mention lots of cuddling, lots of sex as her greatest accomplishment of the year.
Ultimately, however, there was also the queer business of, well, being queer. Prior to getting together with Pansy, Hermione had fancied herself in love with Ron, which meant that the sexuality issue had never really come up. But while Pansy was careful never to talk about her relationship with Ron, she had asked a much more disturbing question one hazy summer evening shortly after the war ended, when they had spent a long, lovely day picnicking by the sea. Pansy, giddy from laughing so much, had tried to kiss Hermione for the first time, and Hermione had pulled away.
"Why not?" Pansy had asked quietly, suddenly sober.
"I don't know," Hermione had replied.
They sat in silence for what seemed like an hour, listening to the faint buzz of insects at dusk, until finally Pansy spoke again. "Apart from Ron, who have you fancied?"
"No one," Hermione said honestly. It was unusual for someone of her age but true.
"No one?" Pansy had asked with a doubtful look. "What about that Durmstrang champion fourth year, the one who used to follow you around like a puppy?"
Hermione shook her head. "We got along, but I don't think I fancied him. He, er, might have fancied me. A bit."
Pansy thought about this and then fixed Hermione with a very serious look. "Well, then, if you were going to trapped out here in the middle of nowhere with only one person, and if you had to spend the rest of your life with that one person, and you'd never see anyone else except your friends who might Floo in, who would that be?" she asked.
Hermione frowned.
"Not me," Pansy added. "It would be terribly rude of you to say you didn't want to spend the rest of your life with me. Not Harry or Ginny or Neville or Luna. Someone else. Someone else you'd be excited to spend your time with."
Hermione thought for a moment. "Bridget Wenlock," she said. "The Arithmancer. A really brilliant witch."
Pansy looked at her suspiciously. "Was she born in this century?"
Hermione had to admit that she'd died some seven hundred years earlier.
"Someone you've actually met, Hermione," Pansy said. "Someone you'd want to kiss good night. Eventually even you will tire of talking about arithmancy."
Hermione thought about this for a long time. Finally, she sighed. "Gwenog Jones, perhaps? From the Holyhead Harpies? She seems nice. And she made a donation to S.P.E.W. once, when I wrote to her. She's awfully fit, as well."
Pansy nodded. "She is. Beautiful, too. But let's say she's already taken. Who's your second choice?"
"This is a silly game," Hermione said.
Pansy raised an eyebrow.
"Alright," Hermione said. "Maybe Penelope Clearwater? The Ravenclaw?"
Pansy winced. "Good thing this is only hypothetical. Do you really like her?"
Hermione blushed. "Why are you asking if you don't want to know?" she retorted.
Pansy looked at her. "Why am I asking, indeed."
Hermione sighed and started to gather their things. "Look, it's almost dark. It's time to go home."
Pansy didn't move. "How far down that list would you have to go before you encounter a boy?" she asked. "I know Ron was at the top of the list, but I think I'm next, and if you're going to skip over me because there's a boy at number twenty or thirty or a hundred, that's stupid."
Hermione was not well-versed in affairs of the heart, but she was not stupid, either, and this conversation with Pansy had led her into uncharted territory. The fact of the matter was that Ron wasn't here any longer, and Hermione couldn't think of a single boy she'd put on her list.
The best way to deal with the unknown, Hermione believed, was to do research, and falling in love with Pansy Parkinson was no different from any other situation. Unfortunately, however, neither the Hogwarts library nor Flourish & Blotts had anything more relevant than an eighteenth century tract on witches living in covens. The next weekend, when she was at her parents' house, Hermione crept into the living room after her parents had gone to bed and looked up "lesbian" in the encyclopedia. The article was astonishingly short and unhelpful. Even more disturbingly, it stated that only an estimated 1.2% of the British population was homosexual (female), which meant that the chances of her being a lesbian were quite small.
This gave her pause for quite some time. She spent a week ignoring Pansy's Floo calls and thinking things through as logically as she could. Finally, late one night, she remembered that the year before she went to Hogwarts, her favorite teacher had pulled her aside and said that Hermione was the best student she had had in seventeen years of teaching, which, if one really thought about it, meant that Hermione was one in 306 (an average of eighteen students in each class, multiplied by seventeen years of teaching), or in the top .35% of the primary school student population in her part of greater London. Not bad, that. Her chances of being born a witch into a Muggle family had been even smaller. (Perhaps one in ten thousand? She needed to estimate here.) And how many wizards or witches had survived an encounter with Lord Voldemort? Perhaps she shouldn't pay too much attention to what the encyclopedia had to say. She was statistically remarkable. In her experience, unusual was good.
Actually, she decided, she preferred the term "exceptional."
The next morning she returned Pansy's owl with a hasty apology and suggested a place for dinner that night. Before she knew it, she could hardly remember a time when she and Pansy hadn't been together. Harry thought she was moving too quickly, and Neville clearly wanted to ask about Ron but was too embarrassed to do so. Draco, who at that time was spending every night in a new club, mocked them for their domesticity, but Hermione didn't care. Some things worked, and she and Pansy were one of those things.
Eventually she had to tell her parents, which she did over the telephone, because she figured she had shown so much courage in the last battle with Voldemort that she was entitled to take the easy way out for a few years. ("Gryffindor" being a description of someone's bravery over a lifetime and not necessarily a challenge to do foolhardy things at every opportunity.)
"With Pansy Parkinson?" Mum had said, sounding bemused. "But I thought she was the girlfriend of your nemesis Draco Malfoy?"
The very fact that they knew that Pansy had once been the girlfriend of Draco Malfoy probably should have alerted to Hermione to the fact that she told her parents too much. Nevertheless, Herminone was nothing if not thorough. She spent the next few minutes explaining the complicated and rather drama-filled process by which Draco/Pansy was becoming Draco/Neville and Pansy/Hermione.
"We understand, dear," Mum had said at last, but in the background Dad's voice was audible. "What does she mean, she's a lesbian now? Is this some kind of witch-type thing?"
"Bill, Hermione can love whomever she'd like," Mum said, but Dad was still grumbling.
"Hold on for a moment, Hermione?" Mum said.
"Of course," Hermione said. This was not going as badly as she'd expected.
"You remember 1978," Mum had said to Dad and then, putting a hand over the receiver, prompted fuzzily, "The Simpsons, next door?"
In the background Dad had coughed violently and muttered something that sounded like "that was the seventies" and "we never paired off that way," and Mum had laughed and asked if he hadn't at least thought about it, and finally Hermione had to break in and remind them she was still on the line.
"Sorry, Hermione," Mum had said. "I was just trying to explain to your father that we remember what it's like to be young and sexually adventurous. You remember the Simpsons, next door?"
"Mum!" Hermione had said, a little scandalized and distinctly disinclined to hear the rest of the story.
"Never mind, then. We just want to make sure that you know what you're doing, dear," Mum continued. "It's fine to experiment and perhaps you'll find you like women, but you're so young, and to settle down in this way, before you know what sex with a boy might be like..."
Blushing furiously, Hermione held the telephone a good two feet away from her ear. "I'm hanging up now," she said loudly, because even in a crisis situation like this she believed in fair play.
"Hermione--" her mother began, but Hermione was already gone.
She was cross about this conversation for days, but there was no one to tell about her awful parents; Harry's aunt and uncle were so cruel that Hermione had been tempted to call Child Services when Harry first told her about them. Neville's were incapacitated. Pansy's were emotionally distant--"bastards, the both of them," Pansy said. Draco's father was dead and his mother was in Azkaban. Ginny's parents were still mourning the deaths of two sons. (Funny how easy it was to say that these days, "the deaths of two sons," as if those two sons didn't have names and they weren't talking about Ron and Percy.) It seemed rather churlish to complain about this latest episode. So Hermione kept her own counsel and resolved 1) never to have opinions about her children's sex lives and 2) never, ever to tell them about any aspect of her own. (Notebook #3, Notes to Self, Critical Points to Remember for Future Reference.)
After writing that, she felt much better. Her parents continued to call on Sundays, which was fine, and to send money occasionally, which was rather nice, and to send her boxes of sugarless sweets, which was absolutely essential, because statistically remarkable though she may be, eventually the various tempting products at Honeydukes would give anyone cavities, even her.
A few months after she came out to her parents, Hermione moved in with Pansy, and a few months after she moved in with Pansy, she found herself sitting at the kitchen table at 3:07 a.m., on Friday, September 19, with her notebook open in front of her, her blue ballpoint pen poised above the page.
For the first time ever, she wasn't sure that she had a Goal for the upcoming year. Last year's Greatest Accomplishment was easy; even the Minister herself had congratulated Hermione on the Decree Concerning Housing Allowances for Freed House Elves. But as for Goals for 2000-2001? The sad fact of the matter, she had to admit, was that although she was continuing to work hard at the Ministry, she was devoting all of her time and attention to couplehood these days. When she had a few spare minutes to herself at home--when really she should be catching up on work--she found herself charming Muggle sex toys to work without electricity or reading up on the history of lesbianism, still being uncertain whether she was, as Pansy asserted, a member of that very exceptional tribe. Neither of these activities seemed to merit mention in the notebook. Lately, she was quite engaged in enjoying herself, and she didn't see things changing any time soon.
Hermione was so deep in thought she did not hear a vexed sigh and the soft sound of their best duvet being dragged across the floor.
When she looked up Pansy was standing there, hair sticking straight up, eyes blinking rapidly, the duvet wrapped around her shoulders.
"What in the name of Aberforth Dumbledore's favorite goat are you doing?" Pansy asked. "Do you know what time it is?"
Hermione had a moment of weakness, when her mouth opened to protest that Pansy quite liked 3:00 a.m. when they were out in London, but even she could see that this was not quite the right time for a logical retort. She closed her mouth just in time.
"Coming, dear," she said. "Just writing a bit before I go back to sleep."
"Dear" sounded awful, more like her mother than she cared to admit, but lately Neville had taken to calling Draco "pansy," which even Hermione had to admit was a little amusing, and in the resulting confusion she had abandoned using Pansy's given name in conversation altogether.
Pansy crossed her arms across her chest.
"Is that a list of things I have to do for you?" she said suspiciously. Pansy was learning quickly to be suspicious of lists Hermione made in her free time.
Hermione smiled. "Occasionally I manage to think about something other than you," she said dryly.
Pansy considered this for a moment. The relief of no list clearly won out of the suggestion that Hermione spent time thinking about anything other than her.
"Okay." Pansy grunted, turned around, and headed back into the bedroom, duvet trailing behind her on the floor.
Hermione turned her attention back to the task at hand.
Hermione sighed. Really, she reassured herself, it wasn't that she wasn't making excellent progress at Ministry; the Minister had told her she had a good chance of becoming the youngest Junior Undersecretary ever. It was just that she didn't have any special goals for herself at work this year. Would it be a terrible thing to list a personal Goal? She took a deep breath and wrote:
Goal for 2000-2001: Gather more empirical data for the Hermione Granger Longitudinal Sexuality Experiment.
Everything looked better with a proper name, really.
"Hermione!" Pansy called from the bedroom, the warning note evident in her voice despite the fact that it was muffled by the covers. "You know I get spots when I don't sleep well."
"Coming!" Hermione said. She wasn't too concerned, actually, since both Draco and Pansy currently had identical spots on their chins that they insinuated were due to long nights spent shagging instead of sleeping. Secretly Hermione believed they would both be horrified to find they had clear skin.
The flat was silent for a moment, but then Pansy's voice came again. "And if I'm cranky tomorrow because I couldn't sleep in a cold and lonely bed, you shall be very, very sorry."
This was a much more convincing threat. "I said, I'm coming!" Hermione called out.
She turned her attention back to her notebook. Was this really a worthy goal for the next year? It seemed to pale in comparison with last year's. (Goal for 1999-2000: Bring House Elf Drinking Crisis to the attention of the Undersecretary of the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures. Accomplished in style, if Hermione did say so herself.)
Hermione squeezed her eyes shut in thought, sucked hard on the tip of her pen, and made one small but significant change. Goal for 2000-2001: Gather more empirical data for the Hermione Granger Longitudinal Sexuality Life Experiment.
Much better, Hermione thought with a nod of satisfaction, closing the notebook and placing her ballpoint pen back on the table.
"'appy 'irth 'ay," Pansy muttered when Hermione finally crawled under the dusty duvet. Pansy's face was buried in the pillow, and Hermione wasn't entirely sure she was fully conscious.
"Thanks," she whispered. "Are you awake?" Pansy did not respond. After a moment, she snuggled down next to Pansy and laced their fingers together. "All in the name of further research," she said quietly before falling asleep herself.
Summary: Hermione assesses her life on the morning of her twenty-first birthday.
Characters: Hermione-centric gen, background Hermione/Pansy
Word count: 3,000
Rating: PG
Notes: Belated birthday fic for the lovely liseuse, loosely based on her fictional universe. Give her credit for the pairing and the themes, and blame me for the unfunny bits, the typos, and any inadvertent Americanisms.
Three a.m., that dark hour of the soul, was not one Hermione Granger saw very often. Hermione rarely said she liked getting a good night's sleep, at least not out loud, since she had no desire to be hexed by every other twenty-year-old of her acquaintance, but she had the peculiar habit of rising early to do a little work before breakfast, and she was not fond of parties that began too long after dinner.
Tonight, however, she was still up at 3:07 a.m., curled up at the kitchen table, a cup of milky tea within easy reach, wearing a jumper pulled over her pajamas and a pair of wool socks with threadbare heels. Despite the hour, Hermione was wide awake. This would have been a source of distress had it not also been the morning of September 19 and her twenty-first birthday. Hermione had a very special project to work on.
Every year on her birthday Hermione made a note of the single most important thing she had accomplished in the previous year and the single most important thing she wanted to do in the next. Both Goals and Greatest Accomplishments were written down in a dog-eared A4 notebook she had purchased from WH Smith's long before she had ever heard of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. She had continued this tradition even after going away to school, though Lavender and Parvati had laughed at her and mocked her Muggle-style blue ballpoint pen and notebook (Notebook #1, Notes to Self, Goals and Accomplishments Through the Years, As Recorded Annually on September 19.) mercilessly. Eventually, she'd been forced to hide both. She comforted herself with the thought that neither Lavender nor Parvati could write "Greatest Accomplishment 1992-1993: Polyjuice Potion successfully brewed" or "Greatest Accomplishment 1993-1994: 1) use of Time-Turner to save lives of innocent Azkaban escapee and hippogriff and 2) use of Time-Turner to attend extra classes, still achieving highest marks in each (tie)."
Later, when she had left school and the war was over and she had lived with Harry, she made no secret of her birthday notebook. Privately, she hoped that one day she would be out of the flat and he would run across it and take a look. Harry could do some thinking about Goals and Accomplishments of his own, now that Voldemort was gone. Hanging around the flat and moping was not a good long-term plan. And the moping was rather distressing. She left a bookmark on September 19, 1998, just in case Harry took a look: Greatest Accomplishment 1997-1998: advanced research leading to the discovery of the location of three Horcruxes, instrumental in defeat of Lord Voldemort. Goal for 1998-1999: see Muggle counselor to talk about Ron's death. Next to the last line, in a careful hand, for Harry's benefit, she wrote done.
She had not, thus far, mentioned Pansy Parkinson in any of her entries, though they had been seeing each other for several years now and had recently moved in together. There were all kinds of reasons for this at first: fear that she was using Pansy to get over Ron, too much to mention with regards to her job at the Ministry, a vague feeling that no ambitious, career-oriented woman would mention lots of cuddling, lots of sex as her greatest accomplishment of the year.
Ultimately, however, there was also the queer business of, well, being queer. Prior to getting together with Pansy, Hermione had fancied herself in love with Ron, which meant that the sexuality issue had never really come up. But while Pansy was careful never to talk about her relationship with Ron, she had asked a much more disturbing question one hazy summer evening shortly after the war ended, when they had spent a long, lovely day picnicking by the sea. Pansy, giddy from laughing so much, had tried to kiss Hermione for the first time, and Hermione had pulled away.
"Why not?" Pansy had asked quietly, suddenly sober.
"I don't know," Hermione had replied.
They sat in silence for what seemed like an hour, listening to the faint buzz of insects at dusk, until finally Pansy spoke again. "Apart from Ron, who have you fancied?"
"No one," Hermione said honestly. It was unusual for someone of her age but true.
"No one?" Pansy had asked with a doubtful look. "What about that Durmstrang champion fourth year, the one who used to follow you around like a puppy?"
Hermione shook her head. "We got along, but I don't think I fancied him. He, er, might have fancied me. A bit."
Pansy thought about this and then fixed Hermione with a very serious look. "Well, then, if you were going to trapped out here in the middle of nowhere with only one person, and if you had to spend the rest of your life with that one person, and you'd never see anyone else except your friends who might Floo in, who would that be?" she asked.
Hermione frowned.
"Not me," Pansy added. "It would be terribly rude of you to say you didn't want to spend the rest of your life with me. Not Harry or Ginny or Neville or Luna. Someone else. Someone else you'd be excited to spend your time with."
Hermione thought for a moment. "Bridget Wenlock," she said. "The Arithmancer. A really brilliant witch."
Pansy looked at her suspiciously. "Was she born in this century?"
Hermione had to admit that she'd died some seven hundred years earlier.
"Someone you've actually met, Hermione," Pansy said. "Someone you'd want to kiss good night. Eventually even you will tire of talking about arithmancy."
Hermione thought about this for a long time. Finally, she sighed. "Gwenog Jones, perhaps? From the Holyhead Harpies? She seems nice. And she made a donation to S.P.E.W. once, when I wrote to her. She's awfully fit, as well."
Pansy nodded. "She is. Beautiful, too. But let's say she's already taken. Who's your second choice?"
"This is a silly game," Hermione said.
Pansy raised an eyebrow.
"Alright," Hermione said. "Maybe Penelope Clearwater? The Ravenclaw?"
Pansy winced. "Good thing this is only hypothetical. Do you really like her?"
Hermione blushed. "Why are you asking if you don't want to know?" she retorted.
Pansy looked at her. "Why am I asking, indeed."
Hermione sighed and started to gather their things. "Look, it's almost dark. It's time to go home."
Pansy didn't move. "How far down that list would you have to go before you encounter a boy?" she asked. "I know Ron was at the top of the list, but I think I'm next, and if you're going to skip over me because there's a boy at number twenty or thirty or a hundred, that's stupid."
Hermione was not well-versed in affairs of the heart, but she was not stupid, either, and this conversation with Pansy had led her into uncharted territory. The fact of the matter was that Ron wasn't here any longer, and Hermione couldn't think of a single boy she'd put on her list.
The best way to deal with the unknown, Hermione believed, was to do research, and falling in love with Pansy Parkinson was no different from any other situation. Unfortunately, however, neither the Hogwarts library nor Flourish & Blotts had anything more relevant than an eighteenth century tract on witches living in covens. The next weekend, when she was at her parents' house, Hermione crept into the living room after her parents had gone to bed and looked up "lesbian" in the encyclopedia. The article was astonishingly short and unhelpful. Even more disturbingly, it stated that only an estimated 1.2% of the British population was homosexual (female), which meant that the chances of her being a lesbian were quite small.
This gave her pause for quite some time. She spent a week ignoring Pansy's Floo calls and thinking things through as logically as she could. Finally, late one night, she remembered that the year before she went to Hogwarts, her favorite teacher had pulled her aside and said that Hermione was the best student she had had in seventeen years of teaching, which, if one really thought about it, meant that Hermione was one in 306 (an average of eighteen students in each class, multiplied by seventeen years of teaching), or in the top .35% of the primary school student population in her part of greater London. Not bad, that. Her chances of being born a witch into a Muggle family had been even smaller. (Perhaps one in ten thousand? She needed to estimate here.) And how many wizards or witches had survived an encounter with Lord Voldemort? Perhaps she shouldn't pay too much attention to what the encyclopedia had to say. She was statistically remarkable. In her experience, unusual was good.
Actually, she decided, she preferred the term "exceptional."
The next morning she returned Pansy's owl with a hasty apology and suggested a place for dinner that night. Before she knew it, she could hardly remember a time when she and Pansy hadn't been together. Harry thought she was moving too quickly, and Neville clearly wanted to ask about Ron but was too embarrassed to do so. Draco, who at that time was spending every night in a new club, mocked them for their domesticity, but Hermione didn't care. Some things worked, and she and Pansy were one of those things.
Eventually she had to tell her parents, which she did over the telephone, because she figured she had shown so much courage in the last battle with Voldemort that she was entitled to take the easy way out for a few years. ("Gryffindor" being a description of someone's bravery over a lifetime and not necessarily a challenge to do foolhardy things at every opportunity.)
"With Pansy Parkinson?" Mum had said, sounding bemused. "But I thought she was the girlfriend of your nemesis Draco Malfoy?"
The very fact that they knew that Pansy had once been the girlfriend of Draco Malfoy probably should have alerted to Hermione to the fact that she told her parents too much. Nevertheless, Herminone was nothing if not thorough. She spent the next few minutes explaining the complicated and rather drama-filled process by which Draco/Pansy was becoming Draco/Neville and Pansy/Hermione.
"We understand, dear," Mum had said at last, but in the background Dad's voice was audible. "What does she mean, she's a lesbian now? Is this some kind of witch-type thing?"
"Bill, Hermione can love whomever she'd like," Mum said, but Dad was still grumbling.
"Hold on for a moment, Hermione?" Mum said.
"Of course," Hermione said. This was not going as badly as she'd expected.
"You remember 1978," Mum had said to Dad and then, putting a hand over the receiver, prompted fuzzily, "The Simpsons, next door?"
In the background Dad had coughed violently and muttered something that sounded like "that was the seventies" and "we never paired off that way," and Mum had laughed and asked if he hadn't at least thought about it, and finally Hermione had to break in and remind them she was still on the line.
"Sorry, Hermione," Mum had said. "I was just trying to explain to your father that we remember what it's like to be young and sexually adventurous. You remember the Simpsons, next door?"
"Mum!" Hermione had said, a little scandalized and distinctly disinclined to hear the rest of the story.
"Never mind, then. We just want to make sure that you know what you're doing, dear," Mum continued. "It's fine to experiment and perhaps you'll find you like women, but you're so young, and to settle down in this way, before you know what sex with a boy might be like..."
Blushing furiously, Hermione held the telephone a good two feet away from her ear. "I'm hanging up now," she said loudly, because even in a crisis situation like this she believed in fair play.
"Hermione--" her mother began, but Hermione was already gone.
She was cross about this conversation for days, but there was no one to tell about her awful parents; Harry's aunt and uncle were so cruel that Hermione had been tempted to call Child Services when Harry first told her about them. Neville's were incapacitated. Pansy's were emotionally distant--"bastards, the both of them," Pansy said. Draco's father was dead and his mother was in Azkaban. Ginny's parents were still mourning the deaths of two sons. (Funny how easy it was to say that these days, "the deaths of two sons," as if those two sons didn't have names and they weren't talking about Ron and Percy.) It seemed rather churlish to complain about this latest episode. So Hermione kept her own counsel and resolved 1) never to have opinions about her children's sex lives and 2) never, ever to tell them about any aspect of her own. (Notebook #3, Notes to Self, Critical Points to Remember for Future Reference.)
After writing that, she felt much better. Her parents continued to call on Sundays, which was fine, and to send money occasionally, which was rather nice, and to send her boxes of sugarless sweets, which was absolutely essential, because statistically remarkable though she may be, eventually the various tempting products at Honeydukes would give anyone cavities, even her.
A few months after she came out to her parents, Hermione moved in with Pansy, and a few months after she moved in with Pansy, she found herself sitting at the kitchen table at 3:07 a.m., on Friday, September 19, with her notebook open in front of her, her blue ballpoint pen poised above the page.
For the first time ever, she wasn't sure that she had a Goal for the upcoming year. Last year's Greatest Accomplishment was easy; even the Minister herself had congratulated Hermione on the Decree Concerning Housing Allowances for Freed House Elves. But as for Goals for 2000-2001? The sad fact of the matter, she had to admit, was that although she was continuing to work hard at the Ministry, she was devoting all of her time and attention to couplehood these days. When she had a few spare minutes to herself at home--when really she should be catching up on work--she found herself charming Muggle sex toys to work without electricity or reading up on the history of lesbianism, still being uncertain whether she was, as Pansy asserted, a member of that very exceptional tribe. Neither of these activities seemed to merit mention in the notebook. Lately, she was quite engaged in enjoying herself, and she didn't see things changing any time soon.
Hermione was so deep in thought she did not hear a vexed sigh and the soft sound of their best duvet being dragged across the floor.
When she looked up Pansy was standing there, hair sticking straight up, eyes blinking rapidly, the duvet wrapped around her shoulders.
"What in the name of Aberforth Dumbledore's favorite goat are you doing?" Pansy asked. "Do you know what time it is?"
Hermione had a moment of weakness, when her mouth opened to protest that Pansy quite liked 3:00 a.m. when they were out in London, but even she could see that this was not quite the right time for a logical retort. She closed her mouth just in time.
"Coming, dear," she said. "Just writing a bit before I go back to sleep."
"Dear" sounded awful, more like her mother than she cared to admit, but lately Neville had taken to calling Draco "pansy," which even Hermione had to admit was a little amusing, and in the resulting confusion she had abandoned using Pansy's given name in conversation altogether.
Pansy crossed her arms across her chest.
"Is that a list of things I have to do for you?" she said suspiciously. Pansy was learning quickly to be suspicious of lists Hermione made in her free time.
Hermione smiled. "Occasionally I manage to think about something other than you," she said dryly.
Pansy considered this for a moment. The relief of no list clearly won out of the suggestion that Hermione spent time thinking about anything other than her.
"Okay." Pansy grunted, turned around, and headed back into the bedroom, duvet trailing behind her on the floor.
Hermione turned her attention back to the task at hand.
Hermione sighed. Really, she reassured herself, it wasn't that she wasn't making excellent progress at Ministry; the Minister had told her she had a good chance of becoming the youngest Junior Undersecretary ever. It was just that she didn't have any special goals for herself at work this year. Would it be a terrible thing to list a personal Goal? She took a deep breath and wrote:
Goal for 2000-2001: Gather more empirical data for the Hermione Granger Longitudinal Sexuality Experiment.
Everything looked better with a proper name, really.
"Hermione!" Pansy called from the bedroom, the warning note evident in her voice despite the fact that it was muffled by the covers. "You know I get spots when I don't sleep well."
"Coming!" Hermione said. She wasn't too concerned, actually, since both Draco and Pansy currently had identical spots on their chins that they insinuated were due to long nights spent shagging instead of sleeping. Secretly Hermione believed they would both be horrified to find they had clear skin.
The flat was silent for a moment, but then Pansy's voice came again. "And if I'm cranky tomorrow because I couldn't sleep in a cold and lonely bed, you shall be very, very sorry."
This was a much more convincing threat. "I said, I'm coming!" Hermione called out.
She turned her attention back to her notebook. Was this really a worthy goal for the next year? It seemed to pale in comparison with last year's. (Goal for 1999-2000: Bring House Elf Drinking Crisis to the attention of the Undersecretary of the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures. Accomplished in style, if Hermione did say so herself.)
Hermione squeezed her eyes shut in thought, sucked hard on the tip of her pen, and made one small but significant change. Goal for 2000-2001: Gather more empirical data for the Hermione Granger Longitudinal Sexuality Life Experiment.
Much better, Hermione thought with a nod of satisfaction, closing the notebook and placing her ballpoint pen back on the table.
"'appy 'irth 'ay," Pansy muttered when Hermione finally crawled under the dusty duvet. Pansy's face was buried in the pillow, and Hermione wasn't entirely sure she was fully conscious.
"Thanks," she whispered. "Are you awake?" Pansy did not respond. After a moment, she snuggled down next to Pansy and laced their fingers together. "All in the name of further research," she said quietly before falling asleep herself.