Chapter Text
Part I
It was dead summer in Hampstead Garden and Hermione had never wished more ardently for the ability to do magic outside of school. August had brought a thick heat wave that swallowed Greater London, leaving its citizens laid out in front of fans in as little clothing as possible. She was getting to the point where breaking the Statute of Secrecy seemed reasonable, so long as it allowed her to perform a cooling charm. Honestly, she would turn seventeen in nearly a month. Couldn’t the Ministry forgive her for casting a little glacius?
She rested prone at the window of her childhood bedroom, turning her face towards the box fan she’d propped on the sill and marveling at how the temperature seemed to magnify in the face of boredom. More and more she was finding that she had few activities and even fewer acquaintances to occupy herself with while back in Muggle London, as if the months she spent away at school were unraveling her connections to her home, leaving her heart a mess of tangled threads. As isolating as she found the wizarding world to be, coming home could feel just as lonely.
Lately, the crack between worlds felt more like a chasm. Her interactions hinged on mistruths and carefully skirted details. She could only reveal a shadow of herself, never entirely up to date of pop culture or news, which stilted her conversations. It gave her the same prickly feeling as her first weeks at Hogwarts, where every missed reference was met with derision. Perhaps being a muggleborn witch meant that she’d never belong in one place or the other. That she would always have one foot on either side of a divide that was growing more vast with every year, threatening a spectacular fall onto the rocks below.
Outside her window, a gaggle of boys riding bicycles whooped loudly, reminding her wistfully of Harry and Ron. She’d gotten used to their constant chatter and rowdy mealtime antics, gotten used to the raucous nights in the Gryffindor common room. Even her irritatingly chatty roommates. Really, she missed having company.
Most days, her parents drove to their dental practice in the mornings, leaving their daughter to entertain herself. Her mother encouraged Hermione to see old friends, but she had lost touch with most of her non-magical classmates since turning eleven, and even prior to that, she had never exactly been a social butterfly. The only other person her age that she'd spoken to as of late was Melissa, their neighbors' daughter with whom Hermione went to primary school. The girls sometimes exchanged greetings over the Grangers’ garden gate. Just pleasantries, inquiring over each other's families or how school was going (Melissa lamented her recent A levels; Hermione lied through her teeth about her O.W.L. exam results). She was a nice, chipper sort of girl, always inviting Hermione along to parties or gatherings when they bumped into each other. Hermione never went, understanding the invitations were only made out of politeness, but felt privately grateful for the offers nonetheless.
Left to her own devices, she listlessly puttered around the house, reorganizing her books and drinking endless glasses of weak iced tea, painting her nails an awful shade of mauve from a polish she found under her mother’s sink. She spent the day as she'd spent the summer: hot, lonely, and bored.
She was listlessly checking the mail when Melissa, called over from the footpath, greeting her with a wave. She was dressed for the weather: a sleeveless crocheted dress that was sheer enough to reveal the bright pink of her bikini. There was a dab of unblended sun cream on her nose and her fringe was damp with sweat.
“Today's an absolute scorcher. I'm off to the pond for a dip before I lose my mind.” She fanned herself, giving Hermione a look of commiseration. “I‘m all but melting in this heat. Mum’s convinced it’s that global warming they’re always harping about on the BBC, but I think she’s just looking for a way to blame the weather on the Tories again. Want to come along?”
Hermione blinked at the girl’s rapid fire monologue. She hesitated over the offer, but found that she was so desperate for relief from both temperature and boredom that she found herself agreeing.
“Alright then,” she called back, only a sounding a little hesitant. “Only if you’re certain that I wouldn’t be intruding?”
“Don’t be silly. Go on and get changed then,” Melissa said, nodding towards the Grangers’ house. “I’ll wait.”
“It’ll only be a minute,” Hermione promised, then hesitated, remembering the state of her muggle wardrobe. “My bathing costume is from when I was thirteen. I’ll look like a split sausage.”
“It’ll scandalize the old codgers a bit.” Melissa grinned with a mischievousness that reminded her terribly of Ginny. “Good for them to get their heart rates up.”
Hermione took the stairs two at a time, not wanting to keep Melissa waiting. This isn’t a pity invitation, she told herself sternly. This is what normal girls do during summer. Ah yes, normalcy. A mask Hermione had never worn with any particular confidence. She pulled on a faded blue one piece that was once considered practical, if not conservative, for a young girl; now, it bordered on inappropriate. It's fine, she told herself. It's not like Rita Skeeter will be afoot at the Hampstead Garden community pond. After throwing on one of her father’s T-shirts, she grabbed some sun cream, snagged her copy of Encountering Counterjinxes, and— just in case, you know, constant vigilance— her wand off her nightstand, before setting off.
Hermione needn’t have worried about making small talk; Melissa chattered on animatedly about her failed romantic endeavors the whole walk to the pond, punctuating her sentences with the smack of her flip-flops against the pavement.
“— so, after I caught him with Krista, I resolved myself to be free of the tosser once and for all. Once a cheat, always a cheat. That’s what Mum says.”
“That seems sensible,” Hermione replied uncertainly. She didn’t exactly have these conversations with Harry and Ron, and it was the kind of thing Lavender and Parvati would draw the four poster curtains to discuss.
“If only I were the sensible type,” Melissa replied, wry.
“You, er, took him back?”
“Not yet.” Melissa said. “But unfortunately I’ve been known to be rather silly when it comes to good looking boys. So if we see him having a swim, remind me that it doesn’t matter how fit he looks with his shirt off.”
She held the pond gate for Hermione, leading her towards a patch of empty grass. The pond was occupied with what felt like half of suburban London; small children splashing in the shallows, boys tossing a ball, girls rolling up their already small swimwear in order to improve their tan lines.
“He’s a lad’s lad, Hermione,” Melissa continued darkly, laying out her towel on a bit of flattened grass. “That’s what we’re dealing with here. Are the blokes like this at your boarding school?”
Hermione contemplated this with a smirk, drawing up memories of Ron shouting that she was fraternizing with the enemy after a dance with Viktor Krum.
“I imagine boys are the same everywhere.”
She spread out her towel next to Melissa, who began to page through a glossy magazine advertising different hair styles using butterfly clips. She considered cracking open her book, but if Melissa saw the title, what would her explanation be? She was studying Wicca? Amateur magician? Dabbling in occultism?
“Shall we swim?” She suggested instead.
“Give us a minute,” Melissa responded, smoothing tanning oil on her stomach. “I want to get a bit of color before term starts and I go all pasty again.”
Hermione tried not to look too longingly at the water.
“You’re dying, aren’t you?” Melissa waved her forward, gesturing at the pond. "Go on, I’ll join in a bit."
Hermione stripped bare of her clothing— too drenched from the perspiration of their walk over to feel self conscious — and waded in.
Finally, relief.
She submerged herself to her shoulders, tipping her head back so the water could soak her curls. Sighing in pleasure at the cooler temperature against her scalp, she kicked up her feet and floated on her back so she could study the clouds. Even though the pond was crowded— teenagers chatting, some elderly women flapping paper fans, children roughhousing and giggling— it felt like the first time that summer Hermione had been at peace.
She hadn’t been sleeping well, since the night in the Department of Mysteries.
Several months prior, she’d woken up from their failed rescue mission in St. Mungo’s, having been treated for Dark Magic exposure. The residue of the purple curse that almost snuffed out her life. She was lucky, so unbelievably lucky that Dolohov’s spell had been silenced. Even so, the encounter had left a jagged purple scar down her chest, high enough that it peeked out from the neckline of her swimsuit. It didn’t bother her out of vanity; she wasn’t as concerned about the aesthetic effect as she was with the possibility of residual Dark magic. The stuttering unease that she hadn't been able to shake, a sharpness that seemed to originate somewhere behind her ribs.
She’d read everything she could find on cursed scars, but since Dolohov’s spell had been wordless, the point of origin was based on light and wand movement alone, making it exceedingly difficult to pinpoint. If she had a remnant of dark magic stuck inside like a piece of shrapnel, could it affect her? She only knew of one other person with a cursed scar, and if last year was any indication, Harry had a terrible time with it.
A soft splash behind her interrupted her thoughts.
“Oh, this is lovely,” Melissa groaned, swimming circles around Hermione. “I’ve decided. I’m going to spend the rest of this bloody heat wave underwater. They can drag me out when courses start.”
Hermione righted herself, turning to face the bank. She meant to be polite, inquire what Melissa was interested in studying at university the following year, but her voice caught in her throat when she saw a flash of platinum blonde in her peripheral vision, bright as a honing beacon.
There was only one person she’d ever met with hair that light, a complete absence of color. But that hair didn’t belong here. In this world, her world. Its place was firmly enmeshed amongst castle ramparts and cauldron steam.
She blinked and shook her head, wondering if she’d finally cracked.
“Oi,” Melissa asked, picking up on Hermione’s spiked anxiety. “You all right? What’s got your knickers in a twist?”
Hermione opened her mouth and closed it again.
“Hermione?”
“Do you see that boy,” she asked softly, and Melissa whipped her head around. “No, don’t turn! Just look over towards the gate where all those shrubs are. Subtly.”
“Well, he’s fit, but he’s not my type,” Melissa smirked, shielding her eyes from the sun. “I’m not one for blondes. Dressed rather oddly, isn’t he? It’s a bit hot for all that.”
“You see him too?”
“Hermione, are you alright? Do you know him?”
Hermione's heart tightened like a fist. She was not alright, because Draco bloody Malfoy was standing in the muggle suburb of Hampstead Garden, staring at her with an awful expression on his face. A terror so stark, it made him almost unrecognizable.
The scar on her chest began to throb: a dull, violent pain that echoed into her extremities.
“Yes,” she said grimly, already pulling herself from the water. Whatever separation of selves she’d previously managed crumbled. Now, she was just Hermione, childlike and whole in her dread. “I know him.”