What if Hermione Was Reborn With All Her Memories and Abilities
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Voice Acting & Narration: Steven Waters @bobablackfly602
Writing: Myself, @nicholasmartin6526, @khuz377 , @WatashiNoKuraiTenshi, and @PathofDragonsRadio
The Department of Mysteries is silent at three in the morning. Minister Hermione Granger stands inside the Time Chamber, robes the colour of midnight ink, hair greyed at the temples. Decades have settled into her face. A junior Unspeakable trembles beside her, holding a fractured Time-Turner that hums with a wrong, sour note.
Unspeakable George Osric(panicked): Minister, the casing has split. The sand is moving on its own.
Hermione(calm): Step back. Slowly.
She raises her wand. Sand spirals out of the device in a thin golden helix. The helix widens. It reaches for her like a curious hand.
Hermione(steady): Tell Ronald I love him. Tell the children...
The chamber implodes into light.
Then she is small. Her hands are small. Her wrists are thin and freckled and unscarred. The smell of her mother's lavender soap hangs in the air, and a tall woman in emerald robes sits across from her at the kitchen table. A letter lies between them on yellowed parchment.
Professor McGonagall(warmly): Miss Granger, I understand this comes as a surprise. But yes. You are a witch.
Hermione is eleven years old. Hermione is forty-eight years old. Both are true at once, and the collision is loud enough to drown out the kettle.
She manages a smile. She manages a question about wand-wood. She manages, somehow, to thank her mother for the tea.
That night she lies in a bed thirty-seven years strange to her and stares at a ceiling she remembers like a face from a funeral.
Hermione(whispered, to herself): Real. This is real.
Six weeks pass before she stops checking her own pulse for signs of dreaming. Six weeks of tasting toast and finding it solid, of pinching her arm until it bruises, of writing the date on parchment and watching her own hand tremble as it forms the year. The body she lives in is a child's body. The mind inside it has buried two parents, drafted seven major pieces of legislation, and held her husband's hand through the worst night of their lives.
She sits at her writing desk on a grey afternoon and forces herself to think clearly. The shock has had its turn. Now she requires a plan.
A second chance. That is what this is. A second chance, given without ceremony or instruction, dropped into her lap like a Howler from a stranger.
She knows who lives. She knows who dies. She knows where every Horcrux is hidden and how each one is destroyed. She knows which deaths along the way were preventable, if anyone, anyone at all, had moved a single step sooner.
Cedric. Sirius. Fred. Tonks. Remus. Lavender. Colin. The names line up in her head like headstones.
She makes herself a rule. The rule is the only thing standing between her and a dozen catastrophic mistakes.
The rule is this. Knowledge of the future is her single greatest advantage. Every change she makes risks blinding her. Therefore, she will allow events to play out as she remembers them, and she will only intervene when the cost of allowing is greater than the cost of acting.
She writes the rule down. She burns the parchment in the fire and watches the ashes curl.
Then she goes to Diagon Alley with her parents.
The Leaky Cauldron is louder than she remembers. The cobbles are smaller. Tom the barman taps the bricks, and the wall folds open, and there it is, the street she has walked a thousand times in a body that grew into it. Her mother fusses over her robes at Madam Malkin's. Her father, baffled and delighted, holds a bag of Galleons and tries to count them like pence. Hermione lets him. She tries on the robes. She picks her wand at Ollivander's and feels the familiar shock of recognition when the vine and dragon-heartstring greets her palm like an old friend, and she manages, somehow, to gasp at it as if for the first time.
She buys her books. She buys her cauldron. She sees a cat in a shop window and forces herself to walk away. Not yet.
She pretends, for the first time in a very long time, to be a child.
The first year is the hardest, and in some ways, the easiest.
Hardest because she must perform as a girl. She must raise her hand too eagerly. She must pronounce Wingardium Leviosa obnoxiously whenever Ron needs correcting with theatrical satisfaction. She must be insufferable in precisely the way she remembers being insufferable, because to be otherwise is to flag herself as something she is not.